02.14.15
Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day and a lot of Open Source is feeling mushy. The Free Software Foundation began a campaign to show all the hard-working developers, managers, and support staff appreciate and has dubbed February 14 I love Free Software Day. openSUSE and the Document Foundation are in the act as well. Elsewhere, the Mageia project has announced their Valentine’s gift – Mageia 5 Beta 3.
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Desktop
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Google is planning to push 2-in-1 devices in 2015, according Digitimes Research’s inquiries within the upstream supply chain. Google’s 2-in-1 Chromebook designed by Quanta Computer is expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter.
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So I think it a good idea for Linux gamers and gamers in general to try to be patient while Valve does its work. The worst thing that could happen is for Valve to prematurely release SteamOS or the Steam Machines before they are ready for prime time. A buggy, slow version of SteamOS would cause many gamers to think twice about using it. And a badly designed controller or other hardware screw up would also damage the entire SteamOS platform.
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Cutegram is one of those new apps that you fall in love with them instantly, especially if they provide overwhelming features. It is a Telegram client for GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X systems, written in Qt5/QML and designed to blend perfectly into the KDE Plasma graphical desktop environment and dubbed by its developers “Best Telegram Client Ever.”
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Server
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… is the new hype these days. Everyone seems to want to be part of it; even Microsoft wants to allow Docker to run on its platform. How they visualise that is slightly beyond me, seen as how Docker is mostly a case of “run a bunch of LXC instances”, which by their definition can’t happen on Windows. Presumably they’ll just run a lot more VMs, then, which is a possible workaround.
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Kernel Space
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Nearly one year after the release of PulseAudio 5.0, the release of PulseAudio 6.0 is finally here with many changes.
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F2FS remains a very promising open-source file-system for targeting flash-based storage on Linux, though for Linux 3.20 the changes aren’t too exciting.
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Back in 2013 Torvalds talked of renaming Linux 3.20 to Linux 4.0 when the time came, but as talked about in several articles since then, there hasn’t been much communication whether the in-development Linux 3.20 will be re-branded as Linux 4.0. Like with the move from Linux 2.6.x to Linux 3.0, Torvalds wanted to move to v4.0 simply since the minor point release numbers were getting high.
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Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM pull request for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some interesting changes and features for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
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Beyond the big set of AMD Radeon changes for Linux 3.20, Alex Deucher of AMD mailed in some important Radeon DRM driver fixes today that are a big deal for some R9 290 “Hawaii” users of the open-source driver.
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Graphics Stack
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While we’re only in the middle of the Linux 3.20 kernel, for what might still be called Linux 4.0, Intel already has updated DRM driver code for testing that will not be merged until Linux 3.21 (or what might also be known as Linux 4.1).
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While Intel’s official Mesa DRI driver has supported “Gen8″ Broadwell graphics for many months, today the support for these latest-generation HD/Iris Graphics processors landed within the unofficial ILO Gallium3D driver.
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While the X.Org Foundation is voting on joining SPI and the SPI already represents a range of open-source projects from PostgreSQL to Debian, this organization is being criticized this week over how they negatively interacted with the Elementary OS project.
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Wayland 1.7.0 along with the reference Weston 1.7 compositor were released in the early hours of the morning as a great Valentine’s Day gift to open-source users wishing to run the next-generation Linux display stack. The Wayland/Weston 1.7 release continues polishing up the stack as an alternative to the security-ridden X.Org Server.
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Applications
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It’s been almost two and a half years since the last official release to the open-source OpenShot video editing software. OpenShot 2.0 has been talked about for much of this time but this major update to the once very promising non-linear video editor has yet to materialize.
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Jonathan Thomas posted an update on OpenShot and the new features its gained recently in the lead-up to OpenShot 2.0. Among the progress shared in the “OpenShot Valentines Weekend Update” is read/write animated GIF support, major video playback improvements, cross-platform improvements, a new icon and branding, and libOpenShot 0.0.4 has been released. Jonathan has also made good progress on the Qt user-interface to OpenShot.
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Frederik Gladhorn created the QtTextToSpeech module a while ago as a test to see how feasible it would be to wrap all the platforms Qt is supported on’s TTS APIs in one easy to use Qt API. This turned out to be a great idea in my opinion. The predecessor to QtSpeech in KDE applications was Jovie, formerly known as kttsd. While it worked for the most part it required a daemon to be running which spoke with different synthesizers (originally) then was modified to use speech-dispatcher directly instead (when it was renamed to Jovie). QtSpeech on the other hand is a library. If you want to use it, you link to it in your application, create a QTextToSpeech object, and pass any text to speak to it’s “say” method. No D-Bus connection required, no daemon required, just a small, light library that wraps the native platform TTS API directly.
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Tonido is a cross platform, free application that allows you to access all files on your computer from a web browser, smartphone, tablet or even DLNA enabled devices. You can access your files from anywhere, and ofcourse you can share them to your friends, family, and colleagues as well. Additionally, you can create a secure private share that only authorized people are allowed to access them. As you’re the only person to access or share your files to others, you have a private and secure Cloud on your hand.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Alright, so Colossal Order thinks they can mend our broken city builder hearts with Cities: Skylines next month, March 10th. What demands are they going to make of our Mayoral PCs to achieve this?
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Artifex Mundi has had a strong presence on Steam for Linux since they got through Steam Greenlight last year. Last month they published their 14th game on the digital store, and as usual it was a same-day release for Linux on Steam.
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I know some of you are wanting this badly, so the good news is that Age Of Wonders III will be officially released on Linux in beta form soon.
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The developers working on the Linux versions of Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux have released a long-awaited new patch release.
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Linux gamers still seem to be unable to play co-up, the motion blur when running is still there when turned off (not as bad as it was), and performance is still utterly abysmal. I have relayed my feedback to Techland as usual in the hopes they fix it up.
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New Releases
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The Parsix GNU/Linux Project proudly announced a few minutes ago, February 14, that the first maintenance release of the Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 (codename Nestor) computer operating system based on the Debian 7 Wheezy distribution has been officially released and is now available for download from its website or as an upgrade to existing Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 users.
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Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 (code name Nestor) brings the latest stable GNOME desktop environment, a brand new kernel built using or modernized kernel build system, updated installer and support for UEFI based systems. This version has been synchronized with Debian Wheezy repositories as of February 6, 2015. Parsix Nestor ships with GNOME 3.12 and LibreOffice productivity suit by default. Highlights: GNOME Shell 3.12.2, X.Org 1.14.7, GRUB 2, GNU Iceweasel (Firefox) 35.0.1, GParted 0.12.1, Empathy 3.12.7, LibreOffice 3.5.4, VirtualBox 4.3.18 and a brand new kernel based on Linux 3.14.32 with TuxOnIce 3.3, BFS and other extra patches. Live DVD has been compressed using SquashFS and XZ.
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We’re proud to announce the release of Rebellin Linux v2.5! Plenty of great news from the Rebellin Project!
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Arne Exton, the creator of numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, including the untroublesome and fast Exton|OS, had the pleasure of informing us today, February 14, about a new build for its MeX Linux computer operating system based on Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Debian 8 Jessie, and Linux Mint 17.1 (Rebecca).
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The third Beta of the forthcoming Mageia 5 Linux kernel-based operating system has been officially announced via Mageia’s blog on February 13, as a gift for Valentine’s Day “The release date was a close call between Friday, the 13th and Valentine’s day… but finally, Mageia 5 beta 3 is available for tests.”
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The release date was a close call between Friday, the 13th and Valentine’s day… but finally, Mageia 5 beta 3 is available for tests. You will find more information about it on the Release Notes page.
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The third beta to the much delayed Mageia 5 is now available for some Valentine’s weekend testing.
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Red Hat Family
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There’s a new trend called “devops” that is sweeping the enterprise IT world and its become a life-or-death career situation for many IT departments.
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Fedora
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At the DevConf.cz conference last weekend, I was given the okay to let it slip that Remy DeCausemaker will be joining Red Hat to work full-time on Fedora Community Action and Impact. Remy has been around Fedora a long time, and from his previous position at the Rochester Institute of Technology, was instrumental in launching the first minor in Free and Open Source Software. Remy will join the Fedora Council and lead initiatives for even greater Fedora community success and growth.
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DevConf.cz 2015 took place last week in Brno, Czech Republic as the annual Red Hat / Fedora focused open-source Linux event. For those interested, the videos of the sessions are up online.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The sale of the first ever Ubuntu phone through a European flash sale was evidently a success. Of course, we wouldn’t know as the phone isn’t available yet to those of us who live on this side of the pond, so it hasn’t been getting much press over here. However, EU sites are all atwitter with headlines like “Ubuntu Sells Out!”
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Version 0.11 of the Mir Display Server was released this week for Ubuntu.
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Flavours and Variants
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A recent post on the elementary blog about how they ask for payment on download created a bit of a stir this week. One particular sentence struck a nerve (it has since been removed from the post): “We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software.”
No, they aren’t. I understand that people want to get paid for their work. It’s only natural. Especially when you’d really like that work to be what puts food on the table and not something you do after you work a full week for someone else. I certainly don’t begrudge developers asking for money. I don’t even begrudge requiring payment before being able to download the software. The developers are absolutely right when they say “elementary is under no obligation to release our compiled operating system for free download.”
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Phones
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Android
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Taking a look back at the week’s news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit highlights a number of stories including all of Samsung’s leaks around the Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge, the Sony Xperia Z4, phablets fight it out, Android’s crash rate beating iOS, Microsoft and Samsung team up, who’s using Android Wear, the dates for I/O 2015, and OnePlus loves Tuesdays.
Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android over the last seven days (and you can read the weekly Apple news digest here).
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Yesterday, I linked to a page on Amazon that offered $140 of free Android apps for a limited time. But I goofed because there’s also another page that includes an ongoing list of the one hundred top free Android apps in Amazon’s store, and I forgot to include it. The list includes free games as well as free apps, and it’s updated hourly.
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Paul Ford, once again, has written up something fascinating. He discusses something I had no idea happened: when an iPhone user texts with another iPhone user using iMessage, the outgoing texts appear in calm blue bubbles. When an iPhone user texts with a non-iPhone user (or an iPhone user using something other than iMessage — meaning mainly Android users, obviously), those outgoing texts are in a harsh green. Here are the two examples Paul shows, starting with the iPhone to iPhone:
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Google is testing a way to make its super-cheap Android One smartphones more useful and accessible to people in emerging markets.
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Google’s latest ad spot centered around their new motto — “Be Together, Not the Same” — hit the net late last night. The video doesn’t feature a slew of Canadian Androids or thousands of Android devices singing in unison. None of that. It’s rather simple, showing a variety of videos from around the net in which people are engaged in their own, unique, sometimes complex handshakes. That’s about it.
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The popular Xposed Framework, which adds tons of customization options to Android, is now available as an alpha build for Android 5.0 Lollipop. Just the other day, developer rovo89 posted a teaser on XDA hinting that Xposed for Android 5.0 would be available ‘soon’. That day has finally come, so if you’re rooted and running Lollipop, get to it!
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Samsung’s products include the Galaxy S4/S5, Galaxy S5 with KNOX, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition, Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition with KNOX 2, Galaxy Note Edge with KNOX 2, Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and 10.5 LTE with KNOX 2, and the Galaxy Alpha with KNOX 2. For Samsung, Knox provides the added security features key to making the grade in the CSfC program.
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However, never say never: Xiaomi revealed last year that it plans to invest $1 billion in online video content, which could eventually pave the way to target Chinese expats, or even wider audiences, outside of China as well. With that in mind, it’s worth taking a closer look at Xiaomi’s Mi TV, the company’s 47-inch smart TV, which was on display at the press event as well.
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With many organizations incorporating open source code into their software, business managers should have a basic understanding of what open source is all about. After all, Gartner and Accenture report open source adoption rates nearing 100% so it’s likely that your development team is already incorporating open source code into their projects.
So, what is open source? When a developer chooses to make his or her project open source, it gives third party developers the right to tinker and innovate with it. Check out this comprehensive video for an in depth explanation.
Developers incorporate open source into their projects to accelerate development time, thus reducing costs for the organization overall. Most of the time, the code is open to the public; but it is imperative that collaborators refer to a set of chief regulations and terms involved in open source software license management and dispersal.
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Google has announced the launch of PerfKit, an open source cloud benchmarking tool aimed at aiding developers evaluating performance features.
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Events
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In less than a week, SCALE13x kicks off in Los Angeles! The hotel it takes place in is full so it promises to be busy – of course, there are more hotels around.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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My blog post on the Oracle/Sun merger got quite a bit of attention, and a few folks from Oracle took exception to my portrayal of Sparc dying on the vine and a thin roadmap. After a few conversations, I have a better picture of things, and I was wrong.
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CMS
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But before Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, was on the path to being a billion-dollar company, Mullenweg was simply an eager coder with a healthy attitude for self-experimentation.
In conversation with author Tim Ferriss this week, Mullenweg elaborated on some of his productivity hacks, including his now-famous stint with the “Uberman” polyphasic sleep schedule. Polyphasic sleep simply means more than one sleep period per day; many of our friends in Spain are on a polyphasic sleep cycle with their luxurious afternoon siestas.
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Healthcare
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The OpenEMR community has released version 4.2.0. This new version will be 2014 ONC Certified as a Modular EHR.
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Funding
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What’s big data analytics worth in monetary terms? Hitachi gave a clue this week with news that it intends to acquire business intelligence company Pentaho for a sum rumored to range between $500 million and $600 million.
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BSD
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We hope to continue rolling these –CURRENT images as a way for testers and developers to tryout both FreeBSD and PC-BSD bleeding edge features, often months before a planned release. These images include a full PKG repository compiled for that months image. Users of this system will also be able to “upgrade” when the next monthly image is published.
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The PC-BSD camp has started spinning development images of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0 in the present 11.0-CURRENT state that is still far out from being officially released.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Valentine’s Day traditionally is a day to show and celebrate love. So why do not take this as a chance to show your love for Free Software this year?
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Every year on 14th February, the Free Software Foundation Europe asks all Free Software users to think about the hard-working people in the Free Software community and to show them their appreciation individually on this “I love Free Software”-Day.
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Today the Free Software Foundation Europe reminds us to thank and celebrate all those in Free Software we love and whose work we enjoy and built upon. In KDE, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Everything we do in some way depends on Free Software written by many other people – the huge ecosystem around us.
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A picture is worth thousand words and describing love with letters is much more harder than with images. On this page we collect some examples of people from all over the world expressing their enthusiasm for freedom in both software and society with photos.
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Openness/Sharing
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Last night I had a crazy realization: I could probably replace the majority of what my team hopes to accomplish with standup meetings, design documents, project management apps, and social code sharing features with a single tool.
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Health/Nutrition
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Jennifer White’s painful family story is convincing hundreds of vaccine-hesitant parents around the world to rethink their actions.
On Tuesday, White wrote a Facebook post about her newborn baby’s possible exposure to measles in a Markham doctor’s office waiting room in late January. In it, she slammed anti-vaxxers and their refusal to protect their children, and hers.
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Virginia could keep the suppliers of the drugs used in executions secret, as well as all the components they mix to make the drug cocktail used in lethal injections under a bill the state Senate approved Tuesday.
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Security
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The internet has connected millions across the globe, rooting itself into the day-to-day activities. If something happens to it, it’s not just the end of kitty pictures – the whole world’s economy would collapse. What would the fallout be? How much harm can be done online? What does it mean to be a hacker these days? We ask professor at the University of Sussex and author of a book about hacking communities, Tim Jordan, on Sophie&Co.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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President Obama says he has not yet decided whether to send arms to the Ukrainian military to fight Russian-backed rebels. Obama criticized Russia’s role in the conflict during a joint news conference at the White House with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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The emotional weight a photojournalist endures in covering conflict can be suppressed, but it can never be understated. And the commitment to highlighting the spirit of survival in the victims of the conflict can never be overstated. For American photojournalist Heidi Levine, that emotional toll has been severely challenged over her nearly 30 years documenting the Palestinian-Israel conflict. In the past year, she has done her work while also facing the almost simultaneous passing of two family members–her grandmother and father–while on assignment nearly 8,000 miles away from home.
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The news that President Obama has formally asked US Congress to authorize military force against ISIS is not surprising. What may come as a shock to Americans oblivious to these developments is that the administration has de facto declared war on Syria.
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The U.N. envoy to Yemen has returned to Sanaa and resumed contacts with major political players to find a way out of a deepening crisis caused by a Shiite rebel takeover, participants in the talks said Sunday.
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‘The devastating and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us that when we give military authority to the executive, it should not be a blank check,’ says Congressional Progressive Caucus
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What is not silly is that we still have local employees at Embassy Sana’a. They, typically, are not evacuated when post suspends operations. In 2003, Ghulam Sakhi Ahmadzai, the building maintenance supervisor at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was the Foreign Service National Employee of the Year. He was recognized for his exceptional efforts in Afghanistan during the 13-year absence of American employees and following the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001. His loyalty to the U.S. government and to maintaining the integrity of the embassy during that absence, despite personal risk, could not be repaid by that one award. No doubt there are other Ghulams in Tripoli and Sana’a and in other posts where we have suspended operations in the past. Please keep them in your thoughts.
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The arson attack was the third incident of Islamaphobic violence this week.
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An early morning fire Friday at an Islamic center in southeast Houston left the facility’s faithful wondering if what appears to be an intentionally set fire was tied to their religion.
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Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday criticized President Obama for his silence following the killings of three young Muslims in North Carolina this week, the latest sign relations between the two leaders have become strained.
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Mohammad Na’us was one of the most respected men in al Bab. He was the undertaker who washed the bodies of the dead prior to burial, a pious Quranic scholar who issued the sundown call to prayer in the Syrian town near the Turkish border, and for the past year, a seller of bread in his neighborhood.
But on Dec. 28, the bakery’s delivery was late and he missed the prayers at sundown. Religious police arrested Na’us, a father of five in his 50s, and ordered him to spend one night in prison.
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If American mass media seemed reluctant to cover the murder of three Muslims students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill as a hate crime, the same was not true in the Middle East, where strong opinions were aroused.
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan criticized President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for not speaking out on the issue (which is under investigation by local police and the FBI).
Erdogan said, “If you stay silent when faced with an incident like this, and don’t make a statement, the world will stay silent towards you . . . As politicians, we are responsible for everything that happens in our countries and we have to show our positions.”
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The good folks at NBC send over a partisan breakdown. Fifty two percent of Republicans support Obama’s authorization request, as do 51 percent of independents and 60 percent of Democrats.
A few points about this. First, Republican voters appear at odds with GOP lawmakers on this topic. The latter have been arguing that, if anything, Obama’s request is too limiting. As Marco Rubio put it so felicitously, Congress should give Obama an authorization that says nothing more than we “authorize the president to take whatever steps are necessary to defeat ISIS. Period.” But a bare majority of Republicans supports the limits in the authorization Obama proposed, such as they are.
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President François Hollande of France on Thursday announced the sale of nearly $6 billion worth of military hardware to Egypt, including two dozen Rafale fighter jets and a naval frigate.
The contract represents the first foreign sale of the Rafale for its manufacturer, Dassault Aviation, which has been under intense pressure to find export customers for the warplane as France scales back its orders as part of government spending cuts.
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The four-star general in charge of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan told senators today that he has given the Pentagon different options for slowing the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
There are now roughly 13,000 international troops in Afghanistan, 9,800 of them Americans, Campbell said. President Obama’s current plan would have reduced that to 5,500 soldiers, mostly centered in Kabul, by the end of this year. Army Gen. Cambell said that the Afghan government under its new president, Ashraf Ghani, did not want the U.S. to pull back so quickly.
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FBI Director James Comey repeatedly defended the police in a speech intended to address race relations after a series of high-profile killings by law enforcement officers.
Speaking at Georgetown University this morning, Comey said citizens need to have more empathy for police, that police response time is not influenced by race, and that “law enforcement is not the root cause of problems in our hardest-hit neighborhoods.”
Comey also cited and quoted from the song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from the Broadway play “Avenue Q,” adding that while everyone has a duty to try and overcome bias, “racial bias isn’t epidemic in those who join law enforcement any more than it is epidemic in academia or the arts.” And yet “after years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel” and begin viewing black citizens differently.
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Dr. Suzanne Barakat, sister of one of the Chapel Hill shooting victims, appeared on Morning Joe Friday morning to strongly dispute the early police theory that her brother, his wife, and sister-in-law were shot by Craig Stephens Hicks over a “parking dispute.” That all three victims were Muslim, and that Hicks had loudly proclaimed anti-religious sentiment, has led many to label the triple murder a hate crime.
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Three years before 9/11, Ash Carter was already talking catastrophe.
Carter, confirmed Thursday as Obama’s new Secretary of Defense, vividly predicted in 1998 a near-future terrorist attack that would have long-lasting consequences beyond the immediate loss of thousands of lives.
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Mohammed Saleh Tauiman was just 13 years old in 2014 when the Guardian newspaper gave him a camera so he could record life under the drones that flew over Marib province, Yemen.
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One of more than 150 religious leaders who drafted a statement opposing the use of lethal drones by the United States military said Feb. 11 it’s an issue that more Baptists should care about.
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After readings from the Bible and the Qur’an the worshippers dedicated themselves to peace and shouted out “Stop the drones!” and “Drones kill”. Most of the protestors were men and women training for ordained ministry in the Church of England and the Methodist Church. Bishop Edward Musonda from the Anglican Church in Zambia said: “It is a pleasure to take part in this act of Christian witness against this savage military weaponry.”
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A US drone strike which killed a senior al-Shabaab leader in Somalia a week ago appears to have been part of a change of tactics by the Americans since they started targeting the militant group in 2007. It was the fifth consecutive such strike against al-Shabaab’s leadership, with drones now appearing to have superseded other, manned aircraft and cruise missiles in the seven years since attacks began in Somalia.
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Morality is missing in action as innocent people die in the strikes, fueling anger around the globe.
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For years, the US has relied on drones to prevent Yemen from collapsing. The strategy hasn’t worked.
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Sen. Rand Paul is joining three Democrats in urging a federal court to release secret documents about the government’s use of drones to kill three Americans.
Along with Sens. Ron Wyden (Ore.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (N.M.), the Kentucky Republican filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Wednesday supporting a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and The New York Times.
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Saying the government cites “national security” too often to shield information from scrutiny, four U.S. senators urged a federal appeals court Wednesday to divulge more about rules it follows when it makes U.S. citizens the target of anti-terror drone strikes.
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While deployed, I concluded our drone strikes disproportionately kill innocent people. As a military chaplain, I preached a sermon questioning the morality of such warfare. After my commander read it, he said “the message does not support the mission” and had me investigated, officially reprimanded and released from active duty for “retraining.”
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No military technology is perhaps more viscerally upsetting than the idea of a machine, armed with a gun, making the decision on its own to kill people. It’s a theme throughout dystopian fiction and films, and it animates protests against drones, despite the fact that military drones still have humans at the controls. Autonomy for weapons–where a gun turret or future machine will be programmed to press the trigger on its own–is a definite possibility in future wars. A new report from the Center for New American Security, a Washington D.C. think tank, wants to guide us calmly into understanding this future of armed thinking machines.
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The peace movement is dead, the media are mute, and, in all likelihood, we will soon be engulfed in an electoral season in which the plain fact that Democrats and Republicans know not what they do will hardly even come up.
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Well, not exactly. New James Bond novels and movies pop up all the time, but Gérard de Villiers (who died in 2013) wrote either 100 or 200 novels about an Austrian (and freelance CIA operative), named Malko Linge, that have sold millions of copies in France and made him “the most popular writer of spy thrillers in French history.” The discrepancy with the numbers (100 or 200) hardly matters, though those figures are cited in the biographical information about the writer at the beginning of the two novels discussed here: Chaos in Kabul and The Madmen of Benghazi, both originally published in France in 2013. Clearly, the guy was prolific—much more than Ian Fleming. His expertise was the Middle East, which made his stories not only current but, often, prescient.
[...]
At the beginning of Chaos in Kabul, Linge is hired to eliminate Hamid Karzai. Yes, you read that correctly. So Linge is flown into Afghanistan after responding to his CIA agent, “This mission is impossible. The Agency has everything it needs in Afghanistan. You operate a fleet of drones that can hit anything. What can you expect from one man against the Karzai machine? Besides, you know I’m not a killer.” And the answer to his response? It can’t be obvious that Americans caused Karzai’s death. So, Linge agrees, but first he’s got to find an accomplice who will do the actual killing. That guy is a South African thug, and the plan is that Karzai will be shot when he’s riding in his motorcade.
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Even Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, the author of numerous books and a legal expert for Fox News, in an otherwise excellent history of the usurpation of unique American civil liberties at the expense of ever expanding executive power (see Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty) focuses too much on President Barack Obama’s killing of American citizens without due process – for example, Anwar al Alawki in Yemen in 2011. Napolitano correctly argues that an American president is essentially claiming the right to murder his own citizens without prior legal niceties, but he focuses too much on the use of exotic drone technology to do so and not enough on a larger and more important problem. If anyone – U.S. citizen or not – is attempting to attack the United States, the president should have a right to take them out, provided the Congress has authorized military action or declared war. Even then, according to the founders’ original constitutional vision, if the country is under imminent threat of attack, the president can take appropriate action and get congressional authorization at the earliest possible time. If the president doesn’t have such legislative approval or a legitimate “imminent attack” rationale, he is essentially murdering people – U.S. citizens or not.
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In light of the threat posed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, President Obama wants Congress to authorize military force against the Islamist group in the Middle East. Although the president believes a 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) gives him the legal grounds to go to war on his own, he has sent Congress a draft authorization for their approval.
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If you already understand U.S. imperialism’s crimes in Iraq, that’s what you might take away from the movie, “American Sniper.” But many viewers, unaware of the truth behind the war, receive a distorted message. Directed by Clint Eastwood, the film looks at the events only through U.S. eyes. It twists the truth, falsifying historical context while adding poisonous anti-Arab bigotry.
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I didn’t think much of this until hours ago when I read a banner story of the Manila Times written by its chairman emeritus Dr. Dante Ang. The burden of the piece is that in the Mamasapano raid, codenamed Operation Wolverine, the main protagonists were American agents out to get the Malaysian terrorist Marwan and the BIFF leader Abdulbasit Usman. The PNP-SAF commandos were only security escorts to the agents.
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This was revealed by its commander then, now relieved Police Director Getulio Napeñas, during a hearing Monday, February 9, on the operation in Mamasapano, Maguindanao, that claimed the lives of at least 68 individuals, including 44 elite SAF troopers.
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Lives: A total of 66 lives, not including Marwan’s, were lost – 44 SAF, 18 MILF and four civilians. The SAF casualties were nine of the 42 members of the 84th SAF Company dispatched to Pidsandawan to get Marwan and 35 of the 36 members of the 55th deployed in Tukanalipao – the lone survivor PO3 Robert Lalang.
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Like many children, 13-year-old Mohammed Tuaiman suffered from nightmares. In his dreams, he would see flying “death machines” that turned family and friends into burning charcoal. No one could stop them, and they struck any place, at any time.
Unlike most children, Mohammed’s nightmares killed him.
Three weeks ago, a CIA drone operating over Yemen fired a missile at a car carrying the teenager, and two others. They were all incinerated. Nor was Mohammed the first in his family to be targeted: drones had already killed his father and brother.
Since president Barack Obama took office in 2009, the US has killed at least 2,464 people through drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones. The figure is courtesy of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which says that at least 314 of the dead, one in seven, were civilians.
Recall that for Obama, as The New York Times reported in May 2012, “all military-age males in a strike zone” are counted “as combatants” – unless “there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent”.
It sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
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Transparency Reporting
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Far too many politicians and legislators aren’t happy with the fact that their emails are subject to public records requests. Some attempt to dodge this layer of accountability by using personal email accounts to handle official business. Oregon governor John Kitzhaber is one such politician.
Unfortunately for Kitzhaber and many others just like him, public records laws anticipate this endaround. In many states, personal email accounts are also FOIA-able if the emails discuss official (read: public) business. Kitzhaber, however, believed he could outbludgeon the system.
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At the end of an hour-long panel discussion on the film Citizenfour on Thursday night that he was moderating, David Carr sat back in his chair and in his distinctive, weather-worn voice asked Edward Snowden, the NSA exile, a final question via video link. “I’ve got to channel all the moms in the audience for just a sec,” he said. “You’re in Russia. So are you getting enough to eat? Is the food good?” It was classic David Carr. Unexpected, empathetic, funny. It raised a robust laugh from the packed crowd.
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On Twitter Thursday night, I tried to fight the rumor that beloved New York Times media columnist David Carr died the same evening. I’d seen him less than three hours earlier, interviewing Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden (via satellite) at a sold out “Times Talk.” He was sharp and funny; he seemed happy; he had a bad cough. But he could not possibly be dead.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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We still haven’t reached peak oil. But peak milk happened in 2004, peak soybeans in 2009, and peak chicken in 2006. Rice peaked in 1988.
A new study published in Ecology and Society explains that 21 key resources that humans rely on—mostly food—have already passed their peak rate of production.
“Peak,” in this case, doesn’t mean that we’re actually producing fewer chickens or less milk yet. Instead, the researchers looked at the fact that the rate of production has plateaued, at the same time that population is increasing.
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So it turns out that building your own regional water system is costly, time-consuming and difficult. Who knew?
Apparently not officials in Genesee, Lapeer and Sanilac counties, which unhooked from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to build their own system, the unpronounceable Karegnondi Water Authority, helmed by Genesee County Drain Commissioner Jeff Wright.
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Since the turn of this century, the US south-west has spent more than a decade in drought. Last year was the warmest on record in California, which is in the middle of its driest spell for more than 400 years. But according to a new scientific study, that’s nothing compared to what comes next.
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Finance
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But Alderman got the primary surplus back to front. The definition should actually be before interest payments–the primary surplus being a measure of whether a government would be spending more than it takes in if it weren’t paying back past borrowing. Could it be the Times reporter does not understand the magnitude of Greece’s financial challenges?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The prosecutor leading the probe into possible coordination between Governor Scott Walker’s campaign and outside groups has asked some Wisconsin Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from hearing a challenge to the investigation.
A notation in court records titled “Motion for Recusal and Notice of Ethical Concerns” indicates that on February 12, Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz filed a sealed motion for one or more of the Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from the case. Schmitz was previously on George W. Bush’s shortlist for U.S. Attorney and said that he voted for Walker.
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Scott WalkerAlso on the show: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it was just a “drafting error” that led to his proposed budget calling for the evisceration of the central philosophy guiding the state’s university system, along with $300 million in cuts. Reporters and activists showed that to be a falsehood, and Walker’s proposed changes look like a revealing peak at the agenda of the man who wants to be the next president. We’ll hear from a key player in that story, Mary Bottari from the Center for Media and Democracy.
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Sun News Network, the right-wing Canadian news network described as “Fox News North,” is shutting down.
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It was the NYPD’s very own “Hot Coffee” case–a sign of a supposedly hyper-litigious system spiraling out of control. A “machete-wielding mad man” attacks the cops, gets shot in the leg, and then sues the NYPD for damages.
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We first spotted a version of this quote in a Bloomberg column by David Weigel, and then checked the quotes with our colleague Jose DelReal, who had attended the conference.
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Hillary Clinton has everything she needs to run for president: money, name recognition, staff, organization. Everything except ideas.
The 2016 presidential campaign will begin in earnest in late summer. This hasn’t snuck up on her; she has known this was coming since at least 2008. Yet here she is, six months before the unofficial start of her run, starting to figure out what she’ll do if she wins.
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Censorship
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François Zimeray, the French ambassador to Denmark who was also at the event, tweeted that he was “still alive.”
Vilks, a 68-year-old Swedish artist, has faced several attempted attacks and death threats after he depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a dog in 2007.
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Privacy
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The BBC could be given new powers to access to people’s private and public data as part of a raft of new measures to tackle licence-fee evasion.
An independent consultation suggested that the corporation could be given access to “new data sources” to help make collection of the charge more efficient.
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It is also striking that the codes of conduct were released on the same day that the UK’s secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that British intelligence services had broken the law, but that they were now in compliance because previously unknown policies had been made public. As Nyst speculates, it could be that the UK government is releasing more details of its spying in the form of these consultation documents in an attempt to head off future losses in the courts.
Whether or not that is the case, it certainly seems that the attempts by civil liberties groups to end or at least limit mass surveillance are already having an effect on the UK government, and forcing it to provide basic details of its hitherto completely-secret activities. That success is a strong incentive to continue fighting for more proportionality and meaningful oversight here.
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You might not think Canada’s digital spies are on par with those in the US and UK—but rest assured, America’s northern neighbour is just as capable of perpetuating mass surveillance on a global scale. Case in point: at over 200 locations around the world, spies from Canada’s cyberintelligence agency have been monitoring huge volumes of global internet traffic travelling across the internet’s core.
From these locations, Communications Security Establishment (CSE) can track who is accessing websites and files of interest. Its analysts can also log email addresses, phone numbers and even the content of unencrypted communications—and retain encrypted communication for later study, too—as well as intercept passwords and login details for later access to remote servers and websites.
But perhaps more importantly, tapping into global internet traffic is a means for CSE to monitor, and also exploit, an ever growing list of digital threats, such as vulnerabilities in networks and computers and the spread of malware as well as botnets and the computers under their control. In the process, analysts can keep tabs on both friendly and foreign governments conducting covert cyber attacks and infiltration of their own.
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The National Security Agency, still reeling from massive leaks caused by Edward Snowden, is preparing to be hit with another major loss of secrets, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
The leaks are expected to be published in the near future by a news outlet that was not further identified by the officials familiar with details of the compromise. The NSA is aware of the news outlet’s forthcoming disclosures and is taking steps to try and minimize any damage they will cause.
According to the officials, the latest NSA disclosure of secrets is not the result of an insider stealing documents, as occurred in the case of fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Instead, the leaks will reveal certain NSA technical cyber intelligence gathering capabilities. The officials did not provide details about the leaks.
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For most Oscar nominees, the weeks before the February 22 ceremony are a whirlpool of stress.
But Laura Poitras, up for best documentary for “Citizenfour,” insists it is like going for a healthy walk — compared to what she went through to get here.
When former National Security Agency (NSA) consultant Edward Snowden, who revealed the massive scope of US intelligence surveillance, contacted the filmmaker, she found her life turned into a spy novel.
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The top executives of Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Facebook Inc. won’t attend President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity summit on Friday, at a time when relations between the White House and Silicon Valley have frayed over privacy issues.
Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt all were invited but won’t attend the public conference at Stanford University, according to the companies. Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook is planning to be at the event, where Obama is scheduled to give the keynote speech and have a private lunch with a select group of attendees.
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President Obama has signed an executive order that will attempt to protect America’s crucial computer networks by sharing knowhow between g-men and techies.
The new order instructs federal agencies to set up a clearing house of real-time, up-to-the-minute information on what’s menacing US infrastructure. Companies running those networks and systems will be able to look into the intelligence stream, get an idea of what’s about to hit them, and beef up their defenses accordingly. This is assuming the system works as described.
This sharing of information is supposed to go two ways: businesses can use the clearing house to tip off the Feds about threats that everyone ought to know about, we’re told.
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President Obama called for companies to voluntarily share more cyber attack information with federal agencies during a first-ever White House summit on cyber security issues, signing an executive action to help pave the way for such sharing.
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The Obama administration is expected to take executive action Friday, sweeping aside two years of congressional negotiations and bickering in an effort to bolster the country’s cyber-defenses.
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A California court has once again upheld the legality of the US National Security Agency’s Bush-era mass telephone surveillance program, but has withheld its reasoning on grounds of national security.
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A US JUDGE HAS ruled in favour of the National Security Agency (NSA) in a personal privacy case, despite the protests of rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Jewel vs the NSA was ruled on by judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California, who told plaintiffs that they had failed to prove that the government violated a long established hope that ‘a man’s home is his castle’, or rather the Fourth Amendment.
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An entire ballroom of more than 1,000 stood to applaud Edward Snowden as he was introduced at the Students for Liberty convention in Washington, and again after Snowden challenged them to “win” against the government’s attempt to expand its own power.
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An NSA document newly published today suggests two interesting facts that haven’t previously been reported.
The Intercept, which published the document, highlighted that in it the NSA expresses fear that it may be teaching Iran how to hack, but there are two other points in the document that merit attention.
One concerns the spy tool known as Flame; the other refers to concerns the NSA had about partnering with the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters and Israeli intelligence in surveillance operations.
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The document suggests that such attacks don’t just invite counterattacks but also school adversaries on new techniques and tools to use in their counterattacks, allowing them to increase the sophistication of these assaults. Iran, the document states, ‘has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others.’”
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A federal judge ruled in favor of the National Security Agency in a key surveillance case on Tuesday, dismissing a challenge which claimed the government’s spying operations were groundless and unconstitutional.
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This week, a US District Court judge ruled in favor of the NSA in a case challenging its tactics of intercepting messages on the internet without a warrant. California District Judge Jeffrey White said that the plaintiffs in Jewel vs. NSA didn’t establish the legal standing needed to pursue claims that the US government violated their Fourth Amendment rights. White ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence presented by the plaintiffs, and that the risk of revealing of state secrets would prevent the case from going forward even if they had. The group, who are all AT&T customers being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), still has a case against the wider telephone record collection and other forms of mass surveillance employed by the National Security Agency. Jewel vs. NSA was filed in 2008 and is one of the earliest lawsuits brought against the federal government over its monitoring practices, preceding the whistleblowing work of Edward Snowden.
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On Wednesday, Tennessee legislators filed bills to directly take on NSA spying by withholding vital state resources and material support from any federal agency engaged in warrantless surveillance.
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The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruling that GCHQ’s access to information intercepted by the NSA breached human rights laws is feeding a growing and increasingly heated global debate regarding the whole issue of digital privacy.
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U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday that revelations of U.S. surveillance on German Chancellor Angela Merkel “damaged impressions” Germans hold of the U.S. government.
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Though Snowden beamed in remotely, conversation hosted by New York Times brings together trio that revealed vast secretive surveillance network to global public.
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President Barack Obama has called for the German people, and by extension Europe, to trust that the US is not infringing on their privacy, despite the Snowden leaks.
Obama issued the call for “trust” about the PRISM leaks during a joint press conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel when asked how the leaks have affected the two nations’ relationship.
“There’s no doubt that the Snowden revelations damaged the impressions of Germans with respect to the US government and our intelligence cooperation,” he said.
“What I would ask would be that the German people recognise that the US has always been at the forefront of trying to promote civil liberties, and that we have traditions of due process that we respect.
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Talks in Washington on Monday focused on the conflict in Ukraine, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Barack Obama also touched on issues including NSA espionage and nuclear negotiations with Iran.
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President Barack Obama is asking Germans to give the United States “the benefit of the doubt” on National Security Agency surveillance, given U.S. history.
Obama says “there’s no doubt” that NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations about the U.S. spying programs damaged the impression of U.S. intelligence operations among Germans. He says that’s understandable, given Germany’s history.
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It’s been a lousy week so far for opponents of U.S. spy tactics: a federal judge shut down a long-running challenge to the NSA’s mass collection of customer internet data, while President Obama brushed off a call to do something about the sprawl of government surveillance.
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One year ago, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) reviewed the National Security Agency’s bulk telephony metadata program and concluded the program was both illegal and imprudent as a policy matter. Under this program conducted pursuant to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the NSA on a daily basis indiscriminately collects Americans’ calling records from telephone companies, including each call’s date and time, duration, and participating telephone numbers. This “metadata” does not include the contents of telephone conversations. The program is intended to enable the government to identify communications among known and unknown terrorism suspects. PCLOB recommended that the program be discontinued and that the government instead seek telephone call records directly from phone companies on a case-by-case basis where there is evidence of potential terrorist activity.
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A bill filed in Montana yesterday would not only support efforts to turn off NSA’s water in Utah, but would have practical effects on federal surveillance programs if passed.
Montana Rep. Daniel Zolnikov (R-45) introduced HB443, a bill that would ban “material support or resources” from the state to warrantless federal spy programs, making it the 10th state to introduce legislation similar to a bill up for consideration in Utah this year.
“The best thing about privacy is that it is not a partisan issue,” said Zolnikov. “Groups like the ACLU and the Tea Party can work together to protect the rights of Montanans.”
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ORG’s Executive Director Jim Killock will talk about mass surveillance, liberty and activism. He’ll say why mass surveillance is a danger to democracy and how we can work together to curb it.
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MPs wants guarantees from the government that the decision to give the security services wider powers to tap phones and internet traffic will not be abused, website nu.nl reports on Tuesday. Home affairs minister Ronald Plasterk and defence minister Jeanine Hennis are due to present their draft legislation for expanding the security services’ intelligence-gathering powers shortly. Nu.nl questioned various party representatives about their position.
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VVD Parliamentarian Klaas Dijkhoff denounced the phantom images raised by opponents that large scale data trawls will soon be conducted in the Netherlands, just like the NSA does in the United states, NU. reports. “The fear exists and people like to call up that feeling, but there is not country in the world where information is dealt with more carefully.” he said. But the Tweede Kamer (lower house of parliament) still wants guarantees that the expansion of the intelligence services’ surveillance capabilities will not lead to NSA practices.
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President Obama won’t end the government’s controversial collection of data about millions of Americans on his own, because he’d rather the matter be dealt with by Congress.
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Oklahoma HB1738 would deny much-needed material support or resources to warrantless federal spying programs. And SB444 would ban the state from participating in an unconstitutional federal-state information program. HB1738 must pass out of the House State and Federal Relations Committee while SB444 must pass out of the Senate Judiciary Committee before the bills can receive full votes in their respective chambers.
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As we continue to read through documents released on February 3 that collectively detail the intelligence community’s efforts to implement Presidential Policy Directive-28, (PPD-28), we thought it would be helpful to overview briefly, and to compare. implementing documents issued by three agencies in particular: NSA, CIA, and FBI.
Overall, there is a great deal of overlap between the three agencies’ implementation policies. But they differ from each other in interesting ways, both with regard to retention and dissemination of information, and with regard to permitted departures from general rules contemplated by the policies themselves.
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To drive the point home, he signed an executive order to this effect, in the hopes of inspiring collaboration between companies and government security agencies.
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Twitter said today that the U.S. government has filed a highly redacted version of the company’s draft national security transparency report, a step that shows for the first time information about data requests Twitter has gotten from the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
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Mass surveillance of the internet by GCHQ prior to December was unlawful, according to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
It said that the “intelligence sharing” process did not comply with human rights law, and there was a lack of transparency.
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In the end – and maybe this is the biggest change of all – we all have to accept that perfect safety is illusory. Doing so would make society will be a little more open, a little more liberal, a little more scary, and perhaps a little more dangerous. But I think any democracy worthy of the name can live with that, because it’s the price of freedom.
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A new US government “cyber threat” agency will take information on computer security breaches at private companies, pair it with classified intelligence – and put it back out to businesses so they can learn how to beef up their defences.
That’s the dream, anyway, according to President Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism advisor Lisa Monaco, who launched the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC) on Tuesday in Washington DC.
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Next time Brian Williams or his carefully-coiffed successor assigns blame to some foreign actor for a cyberoutrage, I expect the “Cyber Threats Intelligence Integration Center” to figure prominently in the coverage.
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We live in privacy obsessed times, which is rather ironic. After all, many of those who complained most vociferously about the alleged snooping of the NSA on our personal emails failed to realise that by posting every conceivable piece of personal information on social media, the average spook merely needs to follow you on Twitter to find out everything they need to know.
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It’s a bad week for Samsung. After the firm addressed privacy concerns, some of its Smart TVs began displaying annoying pop-up ads. Meanwhile, the White House plans to form a cybersecurity agency, and smartphone thefts decline thanks to kill switches.
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Our smartphones and computers, of course, listen to us when we’re making audio and video calls. But the microphones are always there, and there are ways a hacker, government, or clever company can turn those microphones on without our knowledge. Sometimes we turn them on ourselves. If we have an iPhone, the voice-processing system Siri listens to us, but only when we push the iPhone’s button. Like Samsung, iPhones with the “Hey Siri” feature enabled listen all the time. So do Android devices with the “OK Google” feature enabled, and so does an Amazon voice-activated system called Echo. Facebook has the ability to turn your smartphone’s microphone on when you’re using the app.
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If there’s one thing we can thank this whole Samsung privacy brouhaha for, it’s casting data retention debates in a whole new light.
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The head of a federal privacy board is reiterating his call to end the government’s bulk collection and storage of Americans’ phone records.
David Medine, the chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, called for either President Obama or Congress to shut down the National Security Agency program. Obama has deferred to Congress to make the change.
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While some citizens fight back against more encroachments on privacy, the NSA and its backers in the White House, Congress and the Courts are expanding their own reach, now monitoring literally trillions of messages. While legislators have been unable to restrain the NSA, corporations and enterprising journalists are using encryption. Even as intelligence agencies in the US and abroad are escalating their cyber war capacities, private companies are commercializing their technology. All of these issues concern whistleblowers, who say they fear the emergence of a police state if the mass surveillance is not curtailed or stopped.
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Those days of calling your bank to let them know that, yes, you really are in Thailand, and yes, you really did use your credit card to buy $200 in sarongs, may be coming to an end.
The payment processing company Visa will roll out a new feature this spring that will allow its cardholders to inform their banks where they are automatically, using the location function found in nearly every smartphone.
Having your bank and Visa know where you are at all times may sound a little like “Big Brother.” But privacy experts are actually applauding the feature, saying that, if used correctly, it could protect cardholders and cut down on credit card fraud.
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Look, his net neutrality proposal was great. It’s clear that Obama has a deeper understanding of how the internet works than at least a shitload of other politicians. But this cybersecurity order looks potentially milquetoast on the threat-prevention front and straight-up worrisome on the government-slurping-all-our-data horizon.
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Not only were Yahoo, Facebook, and Google among the original “PRISM” companies revealed by Edward Snowden to have been forced into turning over information about their customers to the NSA, but France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Germany were among nations the NSA is accused of spying on as part of related programs. Perhaps today is a bit late to ask for a more open policy of sharing information.
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What we’re witnessing is Reform Theater. A sort of kabuki act which is intended to provide the impression that, in the wake of Ed blundenSnowden’s revelations, something is being done. Officials create the perception of action by occupying themselves with narrow aspects of mass interception and this is intentional. They wouldn’t dare do anything substantial that would threaten the gears of the surveillance state. Instead they’ll leave Big Brother’s infrastructure in place and dither around the edges.
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The Sun was an unlikely advocate for privacy in its special investigation piece early this week on the snooping Samsung telly. Forget phone hacking, it’s the technology companies you need to watch out for. The Sun’s outrage was not confined to Samsung: a neighbouring article reminded us of recent privacy complaints against Facebook and Google.
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After the bruising recriminations between the White House and the technology industry over the National Security Agency, Barack Obama will travel to the Bay Area on Friday to enlist Silicon Valley’s support for his post-Snowden push for cyber security legislation.
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Facebook is teaming up with other big names on the interwebs to create a security information sharing portal, dubbed ThreatExchange*, which went live on Wednesday.
ThreatExchange is billed as a platform that enables security professionals to “share threat information more easily, learn from each other’s discoveries, and make their own systems safer”.
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If we are to end our post-9/11 national security state, the congressional leadership must come to believe that blocking efforts to restore the Bill of Rights will result in real political consequences. If, however, they continue to see no political consequences, Americans’ rights to privacy and due process will continue to diminish into artifacts of a bygone era.
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President announces executive order ahead of summit to spur development of go-between for technology sector and government to share information
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The top executives of Google Inc, Yahoo! Inc and Facebook Inc won’t attend President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity summit on Friday, at a time when relations between the White House and Silicon Valley have frayed over privacy issues.
Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt were all invited but won’t attend the public conference at Stanford University, according to the companies. Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook is planning to show to the event, where Obama is scheduled to give the keynote speech and have a private lunch with a select group of attendees.
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President Obama will meet here on Friday with the nation’s top technologists on a host of cybersecurity issues and the threats posed by increasingly sophisticated hackers. But nowhere on the agenda is the real issue for the chief executives and tech company officials who will gather on the Stanford campus: the deepening estrangement between Silicon Valley and the government.
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President Obama will announce a new executive order on the sharing of cybersecurity threats and information at Friday’s cybersecurity summit at Stanford University, the White House said.
Most importantly to Silicon Valley, the president’s proposal is expected to cement the role of the Department of Homeland Security, rather than the National Security Agency, as the government lead for information-sharing with the private sector.
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President Obama will announce a new executive order on the sharing of cybersecurity threats and information at Friday’s cybersecurity summit at Stanford University, the White House said.
Most importantly to Silicon Valley, the president’s proposal is expected to cement the role of the Department of Homeland Security, rather than the National Security Agency, as the government lead for information-sharing with the private sector.
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On Friday, the White House convened a “cyber summit” at Stanford’s campus in Palo Alto so that business and government leaders could get together and talk, essentially, about how scary hackers are.
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President Barack Obama took the hot seat with Re/code’s Kara Swisher Friday as the two talked about a range of tech-focused topics, including cyber warfare, the White House’s relationship with Silicon Valley tech giants and the Apple Watch.
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President Barack Obama said Friday that he probably leans more toward strong computer data encryption than many in law enforcement, but added that he understands investigators’ concerns over the matter because of their need to protect people from attacks.
He suggested having a “public conversation” about the issue because “the first time that attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn’t follow up on it, the public’s going to demand answers.”
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In fact, it seems noteworthy that this whole issue of increasing encryption by the tech companies to keep everyone out has been left off the official summit schedule. As the NY Times notes (in the link above), Silicon Valley seems to be pretty much completely fed up with the intelligence community after multiple Snowden revelations revealed just how far the NSA had gone in trying to “collect it all” — including hacking into the foreign data centers of Google and Yahoo.
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Last week, the Obama Administration released a report and documents cataloging progress toward signals intelligence (SIGINT) reform goals set a year ago by the President in a document known as PPD-28. PPD-28 promises foreigners some of the same privacy protections given to US citizens and residents. But it turns out that those protections, even for citizens, are fairly meager, in ways that have not yet fully entered the public conversation about surveillance. US citizens and residents have been — and remain — exposed to suspicionless electronic surveillance. Implementation of PPD-28 will do little to change that.
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This week the Obama administration is releasing its second Executive Order in as many years on computer (“cyber”) security, which reports are saying will create a new department in the intelligence community to handle computer security threat information sharing. Officials are hailing the center as “new” and unprecedented.
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Civil Rights
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Larry Harvey, 71, thought he was doing everything right growing medical marijuana for his personal use. His home state of Washington legalized medical cannabis in 1998, and Harvey says his cultivation of plants with his wife, other family members and a close friend complied with the law.
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Why was it again that, as President Obama said, “we tortured some folks” after the 9/11 attacks? Oh, right, because we were terrified. Because everyone knows that being afraid gives you moral license to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe. That’s why we don’t shame or punish those who were too scared to imagine doing anything else. We honor and revere them.
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The US Senate Committee on Intelligence has issued a significant correction to an appendix to its report on CIA torture after mistakes were highlighted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
A “notice of errata” was published earlier this month showing amendments for almost half of the 119 prisoners held in the CIA’s rendition and enhanced interrogation programme.
The mistakes, which have been put down to a “technical error”, relate to the number of days the detainees were held by the CIA during the programme.
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Random American Citizen Roger Vanderklok (aka “Josef K.“) had the misfortune of going through TSA Supervisor Charles Kieser’s security-screening area. Vanderklok, 57, pictured with his wife, is a Philadelphia architect who runs half-marathons. He flies around the country for weekend races.
The TSA said it was concerned about the gear in his carry-on bag, and pulled him out of line. The items of concern turned out to be only a running watch and some Power Bars, wrapped in a small PVC pipe for protection against crushing. Nonetheless, for the next 30 minutes, screeners checked and rechecked the bag. They found nothing dangerous. Vanderklok protested that he was no threat, and that the items were of no danger to anyone, and insisted on making a complaint.
Electronics and “organic mass” can be used to make bombs, TSA Supervisor Charles Kieser said in response to Vanderlok’s complaint. “The passenger made a bomb threat to me,” Kieser testified later according to a court transcript. “He said ‘I’ll bring a bomb through here any day that I want… and you’ll never find it.’”
- See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2015/02/13/man-held-20-hours-for-asking-to-file-tsa-complaint/#sthash.3S4vcvuH.dpuf
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The world needs its whistleblowers. They are indispensable to a healthy society. The employee who, in the public interest, has the independence of judgment and the personal courage to challenge malpractice or illegality is a kind of public hero. Yet, as Sir Robert Francis reported on Wednesday , in the NHS as in any large and bureaucratic organisation, whistleblowers are far more likely to be resented than respected, as Helene Donnelly, the nurse who protested about the failings in care at Mid Staffs, found out. Far from having their names embossed on a roll of honour, Francis found that the doctors and nurses and other NHS staff who reported their anxieties about failings in patient care had been shunned, suspended or even sacked by hospital bosses. Many were left struggling to find a new job. Some have been driven to contemplate suicide.
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Reporters Without Borders released its annual World Press Freedom Index Thursday and revealed the U.S. has received its lowest score since 2006.
The U.S. is ranked 49th in the world — dropping from 46th — right behind Malta, Niger, Burkina Faso and El Salvador.
In comparison, our northern neighbor Canada was ranked eighth this year. Mexico, on the other hand, is 148th.
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Imprisoned former Chicago-area police sergeant Drew Peterson was charged today with hiring a hitman to kill the prosecutor who sent him to prison for 38 years.
Dressed in his prison uniform, Peterson asked for a public defender after hearing the charges against him. Peterson has been in jail since 2012, when he was found guilty of the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio.
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We fire missiles from the sky that incinerate families huddled in their houses. They incinerate a pilot cowering in a cage. We torture hostages in our black sites and choke them to death by stuffing rags down their throats. They torture hostages in squalid hovels and behead them. We organize Shiite death squads to kill Sunnis. They organize Sunni death squads to kill Shiites. We produce high-budget films such as “American Sniper” to glorify our war crimes. They produce inspirational videos to glorify their twisted version of jihad.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Twenty-five years on from the web’s inception, its creator has urged the public to re-engage with its original design: a decentralised internet that at its very core, remains open to all.
Speaking with Wired editor David Rowan at an event launching the magazine’s March issue, Tim Berners-Lee said that although part of this is about keeping an eye on for-profit internet monopolies such as search engines and social networks, the greatest danger is the emergence of a balkanised web.
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Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete – just like what happens in a museum – but in digital form, in servers in the cloud.
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I’ve written before about the GOP’s peculiarly uncompromising stance on net neutrality. At its core, net neutrality has always been a battle between two huge industry groups and therefore never really presented an obvious reason for Republicans to feel strongly about one side or the other. But they’ve taken sides anyway, energetically supporting the anti-neutrality broadband industry against the pro-neutrality tech industry. Today an LA Times article dives more deeply into the problems this is causing:
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In May 2013 I engaged in an hour long web chat with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, a think tank that describes itself as “dedicated to understanding global challenges by applying technological solutions.”
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DRM
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New submitter Dharkfiber sends an article about the Hardened Anti-Reverse Engineering System (HARES), which is an encryption tool for software that doesn’t allow the code to be decrypted until the last possible moment before it’s executed. The purpose is to make applications as opaque as possible to malicious hackers trying to find vulnerabilities to exploit. It’s likely to find work as an anti-piracy tool as well.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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So the saga of the Left Shark and Katy Perry’s lawyers keeps getting more and more strange. We’ve already covered the legal threat from Perry’s lawyers to the guy who was offering a 3D printed figurine of the Left Shark, followed by the response explaining to Perry’s lawyers that there is no copyright in left shark, leading to Perry’s lawyers to issue a uh huh there is… while also using the figurine maker’s own photo of his 3D printed shark in their (now abandoned) trademark application.
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Andrus Nomm, one of the Megaupload employees indicted by the United States, has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to a year in prison. Nomm signed a plea deal and admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from Mega’s sites.
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A few days ago, it came out that programmer Andrus Nomm had flown to Virginia to be arrested. Nomm had worked for Megaupload in Europe and had been listed in the criminal case against Megaupload and its various employees. His name had mostly fallen off the radar, since he wasn’t down in New Zealand with most of the rest of them. It was obvious in his move to come to the US and be arrested that he must have worked out a plea deal with the feds, and that’s confirmed today with him pleading “guilty” to criminal copyright infringement with prosecutors asking for a year and a day in prison, which the court granted. Kim Dotcom noted that he has “nothing but compassion and understanding for Andrus Nomm.”
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States’ excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. It contains DRM anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own. The TPP will encourage ISPs to monitor and police their users, likely leading to more censorship measures such as the blockage and filtering of content online in the name of copyright enforcement. And in the most recent leak of the TPP’s Intellectual Property chapter, we found an even more alarming provision on trade secrets that could be used to crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers who report on corporate wrongdoing.
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The text from the TPP reads “penalties that include sentences of imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement, consistently with the level of penalties applied for crimes of corresponding gravity.” The EFF suggest that countries who do not have “sufficiently high” fines could be subject to pressure from the US Trade Representative to impose fines the US deems suitable.
It doesn’t stop there though, TPP’s current copyright provisions enable judges to order the seizure, destruction or forfeiture of anything that can be “traceable to infringing activity”, used in the “creation of pirated copyright goods” or is “documentary evidence relevant to the alleged offence”. I find the last quote the most troubling, ‘documentary evidence’ could include the machine on which the content was created, servers it’s hosted on and could, at a stretch, include seizure of another persons machine based on chat logs if the activity was being discussed with a friend.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 5:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft’s ‘free lunch’
Summary: Parasitical plot and subversive acts that strive to make people inadvertently dependent on proprietary software/spyware from Microsoft are now piggybacking taxpayers-funded institutions and Free software
SEVERAL YEARS ago many in the UK were up in arms over the BBC’s exclusion of GNU/Linux and promotion of Microsoft lock-in. It happened after many employees from Microsoft UK had occupied key positions in the BBC.
According to this new report from the British media: “The BBC’s Audio Factory goes live today, bringing with it the end of streaming audio over Windows Media.
“The broadcaster flagged the demise of Windows Media last year, when it also announced Audio Factory, a streaming tool delivering audio in the AAC codec over http. Audio Factory aims to standardise Auntie’s audio delivery practices and infrastructure.
“As of today, the Beeb says Audio Factory will carry “11 national services, six Nations services and 40 local radio stations”.”
Citing our analysis of Microsoft entryism in the BBC, Soylent News wrote: “As Roy Schestowitz has pointed out repeatedly at TechRights, there has been an incestuous revolving door thing going on between the Beeb and Microsoft, so this is a noteworthy step.”
But there is also some bad news. It turns out that in the mean time Microsoft lock-in infects national records in the US. As Mr. Updegrove put it, “Library of Congress “Opens Up” with (wait for it…) OOXML”. Talk about making data obsolete!
Last week, the Library of Congress announced that it will “open up with OOXML.” Nine new OOXML format descriptions will be added to the LoC Format Sustainability Website.
Last July, the U.K. Cabinet Office formally adopted ODF, the OpenDocument Format developed by OASIS and adopted by ISO/IEC, as an approved open format for editable public documents. It did not give the same approval to OOXML, another XML-based document format that was based on a contribution from Microsoft to ECMA, another standards organization. OOXML was also in due course adopted by ISO/IEC. The Cabinet Office decision came ten years after the largest standards war of the decade was launched by a similar, but later reversed, decision by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
As that war heated up, both sides (ODF was supported by IBM, Oracle, Motorola, Google and others) recruited as many allies as they could. One of those recruited by Microsoft was the U.S. Library of Congress.
Not too long ago Microsoft was trying to get people ‘hooked’ on Microsoft surveillance search, but this surely failed. As a new report puts it, “Microsoft is effectively killing off the Windows with Bing notebook market less than a year after it was created.”
It sure looks like Microsoft is now relying on sticking its lock-in right inside Android, but it’s likely to be done via Samsung, Cyanogen, Nokia, Facebook, or even Amazon (where many Microsoft executives moved to). Microsoft also tries to make Free software dependent or tied to OOXML.
Microsoft has not changed. If may have only morphed into more of a mole, embedded itself more deeply into the fabric of its competition. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft at 5:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Entryism (also referred to as entrism, occasionally as enterism) is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger organisation in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. In situations where the organization being “entered” is hostile to entrism, the entrists may engage in a degree of subterfuge to hide the fact that they are an organisation in their own right.” ~Wikipedia
Summary: The most infamous Microsoft mole inside Free/Open Source software (FOSS) lands right inside the Linux Foundation
Microsoft is actively attacking Linux (example from the past hour), but some in the Linux Foundation are willfully blind to it. They also ignore, at their own peril, Microsoft’s track record of entryism.
We were extremely disappointed to learn that the Linux Foundation-linked Cloud Foundry Foundation had put a Microsoft mole in charge, repeating a similar mistake from last year. This one is actually a lot worse because Nicolas (Neela) Jacques did not work as a mole/infiltrator for Microsoft but as actual staff.
“This enables Microsoft to exercise influence in the Linux Foundation and also makes it hard for the Foundation to openly criticise Microsoft.”Several press release copies were thrown at the wires for propaganda’s sake to announce this mole’s appointment and Microsoft fan sites, in addition to Microsoft boosters like Gavin Clarke, took advantage of it to openwash Microsoft and portray Microsoft as a friend of Linux. How sick is that?
Other coverage we have come across was rather shallow as it did nothing to highlight criticism, which was widespread when the mole (Ramji) worked for Microsoft. We wrote several dozens of articles about it.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has disappointedly enough been grooming this Microsoft mole and didn’t know him well enough to spell his name correctly (misspelled in 4 places). If he cannot even spell a 5-letter surname, then we doubt he knows to what extent the mole has been damaging FOSS. Vaughan-Nichols, moreover, still gives too much credit to Microsoft for pretending to be Open Source while it’s actually attacking FOSS. From his article:
The Cloud Foundry Foundation was created a year ago to form an open-source industry consortium to back Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) project written in Ruby and Go. It was then reorganized in December as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. It operates under a system of open governance by open-source experts from founding Platinum Members EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP, and VMware.
If the Linux Foundation can trust people from a criminal company (Microsoft) and a weapons company (BEA Systems), then we truly worry about its judgment. This enables Microsoft to exercise influence in the Linux Foundation and also makes it hard for the Foundation to openly criticise Microsoft. Zemlin blesses this choice of Ramji, which makes him not just an observer of this worrisome move. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Samsung at 4:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Samsung at risk of climbing back into Microsoft’s bed
Summary: Microsoft is reportedly pressuring Samsung, by means of expensive patent lawsuits, to turn Android into “Microsoft Android” (Microsoft spyware installed by default)
THE clown called Microsoft, which claims to “love Linux”, is still attacking Linux in a big way. Usually this is done more or less covertly, so enough “useful idiots” won’t see it and even defend Microsoft.
The other day we saw Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols addressing Microsoft's attack on Android through Cyanogen. Microsoft wants the world to believe that it ‘owns’ part of Android as it even claims to be ‘licensing’ Android, despite having nothing to do with Android development. Microsoft actively attacks Android from multiple directions and as Vaughan-Nichols put it:
The only thing that makes me take Cyanogen’s plans seriously is that Amazon and Microsoft appear to be looking into investing in Cyanogen to help create an Android software eco-system that’s not under Google’s control. But, honestly, even if Amazon and Microsoft backed Cyanogen to the hilt, would that really matter?
Both companies have tried, and failed, to produce a popular smartphone. Indeed, Amazon’s Fire smartphone lost approximately $170 million.
As for Cyanogen, its most well-known efforts to contract with phone vendors ended up with Indian phone giant Micromax and Chinese company Shenzhen OnePlus Technology locked in a lawsuit in the Indian courts. McMaster also made no friends for Cyanogen when he declared that “Samsung couldn’t build a good OS if they tried.” Since Samsung is the world’s number one Android phone vendor and Kondik’s former employer, this doesn’t strike me as a way to win sales partners and influence carriers.
[...]
Only Microsoft with Windows Phone has seen even 2 percent of the mobile market. That’s not enough. Even Windows Phone fans, given the lack of support for the platform from carriers like Verizon, have given up on Windows Phone. Major companies, including Chase and Bank of America, are also no longer supporting Windows Phone.
Cyanogen will fail just like similar attempts at disrupting Android at Microsoft’s behalf. But it doesn’t make the above any less harmful.
Samsung, based on some sources, is again leaning to Microsoft, which may blackmailing the Android leader (in terms of market share) into the agenda of “Microsoft Android” (extortion by Microsoft so as to get its way, as usual).
Engadget, for instance, wrote that “[q]uite a few smartphone fans will tell you that a Samsung phone’s Achilles’ heel is its software — you’ll find a ton of (frequently unwanted) apps and features that do little besides chew up space and slow things down. You may get to wave goodbye to that cruft when the Galaxy S6 shows up, however. A SamMobile source claims that Samsung is yanking a lot of its usual pre-installed bloatware, making the GS6 “amazingly fast” compared to a weighed-down phone like the Galaxy Note 4. The titles wouldn’t go away forever, but you’d have to download in-house apps if you did want them. Instead, the focus would be on a host of included Microsoft apps: Office, OneDrive, OneNote and Skype would give you some solid productivity out of the box. It’s not clear if the Microsoft deal has any connection to a recent truce with Samsung over patent royalties, although it wouldn’t be surprising.”
Samsung was the first devices company that publicly subscribed/signed up for Microsoft’s patent attack on Linux in 2007, so we wouldn’t be shocked if Samsung indeed decided to play ball for Microsoft, much as Nokia and Facebook had attempted (both Microsoft-owned, at least in part). █
Update: Mary Jo Foley is Distorting or Making Up ‘Facts’ About Microsoft’s Patent Attack on Android/Linux
An article by Paul Hill, linking to this widely-cited article, says that Microsoft is trying to hijack Android. He writes the following: “It looks like the two companies settled under the condition that Samsung will pre-load Microsoft’s apps on their Android devices.
“It’s likely that the next Samsung flagship smartphone will squarely try to appeal to corporate users as Samsung is already extremely popular with casual users. The device is expected to be launched on March 1st at Samsung’s annual ‘Unpacked’ event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona alongside the Galaxy S Edge, an offering with curved edges that look as though they may give quick access to apps, but for obvious reasons, this isn’t clear.”
It has been clear that Microsoft would try hard to make Android users dependent on OOXML and other Microsoft traps, but ZDNet, which is owned by CBS, continues to distort some facts and we must respond to that. The company’s Microsoft booster (one of many) Mary Jo Foley promotes the infiltration by saying that “SamMobile claims the Galaxy S6 will remove pre-installed Samsung apps like S Voice, S Health, S Note and Scrapbook. These will be replaced by Microsoft apps like OneDrive, OneNote, the new standalone Office mobile apps and Skype.”
Putting aside the crucial observation that this is not yet confirmed (see context above and bear in mind that SamMobile is scarcely known and hasn’t acquired reputation), she adds some nonsense to it all by not introducing the full history of Microsoft and Samsung, including that old patent deal which apparently was more to do with FAT than anything else. ZDNet posts a summary [1] linking to the booster’s [2] biased claims that add to the unsubstantiated smear, repeating the lie that has Microsoft portrayed as making billions out of Android, despite there being no concrete evidence (it’s most likely that scaring OEMs is the goal). Given the patterns of Microsoft propaganda in ZDNet, we are not too shocked to see this. We do need to respond to these perceptions that are propagated to damage Android/Linux. These perceptions are mostly created and spread by sources that are aligned with Microsoft, as we’ve demonstrated in past years.
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The suit against Samsung over royalty payments for Microsoft’s patents has been settled. It involved payments to Microsoft that Samsung had stopped paying due to claims that the former’s purchase of Nokia’s handset business was a breach of the royalty agreement.
Neither company disclosed terms of the settlement.
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Samsung is one of about two dozen companies selling Android, Chrome OS and/or Linux devices that are paying patent-royalty licensing fees to Microsoft.
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Posted in America, Law, Patents at 4:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
No Constitutional rights to patent
Summary: Court cases which serve to highlight the end of an era of software patents to all
Software patents are a terrifying concept. One can become an infringer and very quickly get sued (in bulk even) for merely typing one’s own ideas on a keyboard. When it comes to the United States, things are at least improving. This lawyers’ site has just shared the outcome of another case involving software patents where the patents lost in a big way. Moreover, it’s the most zealous pro-software patents court that ruled against software patents. As the site puts it, “The Federal Circuit on Monday rejected software company E-Lynxx Corp.’s bid to revive claims in a $50 million lawsuit accusing InnerWorkings Inc., Cirqit.com Inc. and others of infringing patents for products that help choose the lowest bidder from a variety of vendors.”
In other uplifting news: “As patent reform moved into the political spotlight during the last Congress, one patent that kept coming up was the “online shopping cart.” It seemed to resonate as a technology that clearly shouldn’t have been patented.
“By the time it started being brought up in Congressional hearings, though, the shopping cart patent was dead. Its owner, Soverain Software, was beaten when computer retailer Newegg won an appellate ruling invalidating its patents and throwing out the $2.5 million jury verdict against it.”
Excellent! It’s a step in the right direction and by precedence it will pave the way for similar rulings to come. This isn’t about patent trolls; rather, it is about patent scope.
TechDirt just covered a study which claims to have busted the myth about hoarding ideas. Remember that patents were (way back in the days) a very different animal. There was a different rationale well before computers even existed. Patents were in some sense about increase in sharing and collaboration. That’s what patents were about all at first, at the very beginning. It was about dissemination of knowledge (publication) in exchange for a temporary monopoly, ensuring knowledge is not completely lost in the interest of profit/protectionism by secrecy. Another myth is being addressed at Patent Progress these days, tackling the misconception about Constitutional rights to patents:
Congress was granted the power to promote progress of “science and useful arts” in a particular way. While Congress has the power to grant patents, it has no obligation to do so, which means that there is no constitutional right to a patent.
Patents should be granted (if ever at all) when there is empirical evidence that doing so would be collectively beneficial. All that software patents seem to have brought about is a circus of patent trolls, patent blackmail, removal of key features from programs, and retardation of startups. Many studies have been showing that the net outcome of software patents is overwhelmingly negative and US policy will hopefully be evidence-based as opposed to lawyers-driven and monopolies-steered. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Security at 4:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Discussions revolve around brands, not objectivity
Summary: The bogus ‘debate’ about bugs, where built-in bugs (like wiretapping, bugging, and back doors in proprietary software) are conveniently overlooked
DESPITE acknowledging that Free software is more secure than proprietary software, Veracode recently turned opportunistic. It was using bugs with "branding" to promote itself and it wasn’t alone.
“FOSS has some bugs, whereas proprietary software is a bug.”Several opportunistic firms, including Black Duck, are appearing in the press again, exploiting “branding” of few bugs in FOSS to sell proprietary stuff. Veracode is again doing it and Black Duck’s latest FUD piece is resurfacing yet again, as very recently noted by us after its placement had been pushed by IDG — an extensive network which gives this proprietary firm a platform as author on FOSS matters. “Black Duck Software presents 5 tips for a secure enterprise relationship with open source,” says IDG, but since when is Black Duck an authority in the area? It’s a proprietary software firm.
FOSS has some bugs, whereas proprietary software is a bug. It’s bugging. We recently wrote about Outlook being ousted as a surveillance platform and amid revelations about the NSA’s spying on EU Parliament Outlook (the ‘app’) is reportedly banned. To quote a British report: “The EU Parliament has blocked politicians from using the Microsoft mobile Outlook app in the wake of security and privacy concerns centred on the siphoning of corporate credentials to a third party, according to reports.
“The Parliament’s IT department, DG ITEC, has reportedly told staff to delete the app and reset corporate email passwords if it was used.”
Nevertheless, the jingoistic Microsoft Peter (Peter Bright) tries to paint Microsoft as “cool” while it is “shutting down a[nother] competitor” as a source put it to us, citing this article:
Microsoft on Wednesday confirmed its purchase of mobile calendar app Sunrise.
This will immediately become a PRISM-included surveillance app. Reading reports about it helps show that the security issue is proprietary software, especially Microsoft’s (the NSA’s top ally). It oughtn’t be so shocking that Black Duck, which is strongly connected to Microsoft, would hastily and repeatedly overlook Microsoft’s ill effect on software, turning software into bugs, wiretapping everyone. █
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02.13.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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A new version of Dell’s Kace K1000 Systems Management Appliance adds support for a wider array of devices, including Chromebooks, so enterprises and other organizations can better control these Chrome OS computers.
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Chromebooks are laptops running Chrome OS that are good fits for many situations. The light OS doesn’t require heavy hardware, and that makes them cheaper than many laptops. Those on a tight budget can find a couple of good Chromebooks from Acer for just $199.
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Server
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To learn more about Rocket, and the Application Container spec which underlies is, we caught up with Jonathan Boulle. Boulle is an engineer at CoreOS who is leading the development of Rocket and doing a lot of the coordination work around the App Container spec. Before working at CoreOS, Boulle worked on a similar project at Twitter that never quite saw the light of day, but was able to apply some of the ideas and experiences to his current work on Rocket.
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The company’s new tool is itself a Docker container. Using Docker’s Stats API, the software collects and logs data on the Docker environment, as well as specific containers. It can keep track of things like how much CPU time, memory and network bandwidth a Docker app is using.
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There has been a lot of action on the container front recently. Version 1.5 of Docker rolled out with new features and upgrades. Survey results from StackEngine also arrived, shown in a detailed infographic, that describe some of the major trends going on in the container space, including Docker trends. And Rocket, a competitor to Docker that we’ve covered, reached new milestones.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds, the father of the Linux kernel, posted a message on Google+ asking users to vote if they want the version numbering scheme of Linux kernel to change from 3.xx to 4.x. This is a very good opportunity for those of you who want the Linux kernel 4.0 to happen sooner to speak your mind.
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While Coreboot has been ported to a number of older ThinkPads and other outdated Intel motherboards and laptops, you don’t see many modern Intel systems supporting Coreboot. The reason for the lack of Coreboot support is due to a “feature” introduced with Haswell.
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OverlayFS was added to the Linux 3.18 kernel and for Linux 3.19 this file-system popular to live Linux distributions gained multi-layer support. For Linux 3.20 this file-system is now having support for multiple read-only layers.
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PulseAudio, the powerful and controversial sound system used in numerous GNU/Linux and UNIX-like computer and mobile operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD), reached version 6.0, a release that introduces several new features and fixes numerous annoying bugs reported by users from previous versions.
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Live patching is the hottest trend when we’re talking about Linux kernel-based operating systems. It was created by SUSE, based on KGraft, and distributed in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distribution at the end of 2014. Everyone knows that Linux systems don’t require a reboot every time some packages have been updated, except for the kernel. Well, this is not the case anymore with live patching.
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When Microsoft launched Windows 10 Technical Preview, the name came as something of a surprise; everyone had been, understandably, expecting Windows 9. Over in the world of Linux, as we know, things work a little differently.
The world of Linux-based operating systems is a fragmented one, but Linus Torvalds — whose loins were partly responsible for giving birth to Linux — is asking the community how version numbering should be handled moving forward. Should things be kept simple, or should version numbers just keep getting longer, and longer, and longer, and longer?
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Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM pull request for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some interesting changes and features for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
Highlights of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates for Linux 3.20 include:
- A new optional feature to add a small amount of polling on each executed HLT instruction in the guest, for improving latency by up to 50% for some scenarios. Right now this is a feature that needs to be manually toggled but in the future could be auto-tuned.
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Graphics Stack
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With Wayland’s Weston compositor having the presentation feedback support, Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has written about Weston’s repaint scheduling.
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Back in 2012 there was a call for deprecating FBDEV within the Linux kernel considering that DRM and V4L2 drivers are much better options. Sadly there hasn’t been any formal deprecation of FBDEV in the mainline kernel yet, but its still receiving a few changes each kernel cycle.
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Benchmarks
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While I don’t yet have my hands on a quad-core Cortex-A7 Raspberry Pi 2 board, there’s already many running benchmarks with it using our open-source automated testing software. Some of the shared RPi2 benchmarks done by the community include:
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Applications
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As of today my ePad source is nearing a 1.0.0 release and the goal of this post is to let folks outside of Bodhi know it exists and that it is ready for them to give it a try. ePad in its current form supports most all of the features you would expect from a text editor: Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, Find, Replace, and displaying Line Numbers. On top of these it also supports opening multiple files in the same application window.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Data is the crucial bit in our personal and professional existence. Without data we would be lost in a vast expanse of nothingness. Spreadsheets, email, documents, contacts, databases, files, folders … the list goes on and on. In a perfect world, every byte of local storage would be backed up to an external hard drive or cloud storage service.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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We’re getting so close to the release now! (Check the count-down counter on krita.org!) Sure, there are still a bunch of bugs to fix, but we’re down to very nearly no release blockers now. And we fixed an awful lot of bugs since the last beta release, too!
The 2.9.0 release is scheduled for February 26th, with monthly bug fix releases planned until we release Krita 3.1.
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We’re pleased to announce the last Calligra 2.9 beta release for you to test. We are as good at fixing issues as your reports are so please keep up the good work.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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New APIs must be fully documented
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With GNOME 3.16 the developers are working hard at making their native Wayland support be rock-solid and reliable for day-to-day use for those wishing to abandon running their GNOME desktop on an X.Org Server. An important feature has finally landed for GTK+ applications in the Wayland world: the ability to minimize windows.
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…and while I was playing with GNOME’s new Bugzilla instance trying to get rid of some upstream feature bloat, I looked at upstream’s Bugzilla front page and spend the next hours wondering where to add eight more Search buttons/links/forms so it’ll become a full dozen.
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Utkarsh Sevekar has announced today, February 13, that his Debian-based Rebellin Linux 2.5 computer operating system is available for download for free. The distribution was previously only available for purchase for the sum of $9.99 (€8.8).
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Arch Family
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Manjaro Linux Cinnamon 0.8.12 is the second Community Edition of Manjaro that gets a new stable release after the announcement of the Arch Linux-based Manjaro Linux 0.8.12, a point release that introduced out-of-the-box support for Microsoft’s exFAT file system, as well as the Pacman 4.2 package manager.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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February 14 is a day to express your love for others and in keeping with that theme, openSUSE extends its gratitude toward the organizations and people who make Free and Open Source Software a reality.
Every year, the Free Software Foundation Europe asks all FOSS users to think about the hard-working people in the Free Software community and to show them their appreciation individually on this “I love Free Software”-Day.
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Red Hat Family
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It took a long time after Red Hat’s IPO in 1999 to see other significant open source exits. But things have been accelerating lately, with large funding rounds, acquisitions, and an IPO. Open source vendors are maturing, and making a deeper and deeper impact
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The good news is that both options — industrial exit or IPO — open new possibilities for open source vendors. Gone are the days where the only possible outcome would be to get picked up by a proprietary competitor, annoyed by the market shares lost to this alternative. Competitors don’t spend hundreds of millions to remove an option from the market — but they do so to acquire a mature technology, a large installed base, and a synergy with their existing product portfolio. Jaspersoft’s acquisition by TIBCO is a great example — there was little overlap between Jaspersoft’s products and TIBCO Spotfire, and their successful cloud innovations and expertise have been beneficial to TIBCO’s entire BI offerings. We will have to see how Pentaho gets rolled into Hitachi’s “Social Innovation” group once the acquisition is completed but I am pretty sure this will be a tremendous value creator.
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Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 delivers standardised services for mission critical workloads, and offers IT organisations greater visibility into provisioning, configuring and monitoring of their virtualisation infrastructure, all based on open standards.
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Debian Family
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The first Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming Tails 1.3 amnesic incognito live system has been officially released for testing, bringing three major new features and four minor improvements that are described for your reading pleasure in the next paragraphs.
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VLANd is a simple (hah!) python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together.
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After the OpenTAC session at Linaro Connect, we do now have a mailing list to support any and all discussions related to OpenTAC. Thanks to Daniel Silverstone for the list.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical seems to be set to release a smartphone that is based on Ubuntu OS platform in partnership with BQ of Spain, which is renowned for making tablets, smartphones and ebook readers in Europe. The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition was launched in Europe on Feb 9.
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Ubuntu 15.04 is using the Linux 3.18 kernel right now but with Linux 3.19 having just been released and it bringing new features and improvements, the Vivid Vervet archive will soon land Linux 3.19. As Ubuntu 15.04 is shipping in April, it will almost definitely finalize on Linux 3.19 given that Linux 3.20 would be too close of a call for shipping in time.
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Erle Robotics, a Spanish company that creates all sorts of Linux-powered robots, such as Erle-brain, an open hardware Linux kernel-based autopilot for drones, Erle-plane, a Linux-based plane, and Erle-rover, a Linux-based rover, has announced Erle-copter, the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone, which can be used to capture amazing scenes (if you have a great camera).
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On Kickstarter, Zyro is pitching a “DroneBall” quadcopter that runs Linux on Gumstix COMs and acts like a smart aerial ball for multi-player games.
The Zyro DroneBall doesn’t look like a ball — nor does it act like any ball you’ve ever seen that isn’t made of Flubber. The quadcopter can hover, zig, and zag within a virtual aerial arena, mimicking a hockey puck, soccer ball, or an Ultimate Frisbee disc, says Zyro. It can even take the role of an extra player on the field interacting with another DroneBall.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Samsung Z1 was the first Tizen phone to be released with Spreadtrum’s SC7727S WCDMA chipsets running with the Tizen 2.3 Operating System. Today Spreadtrum Communications, a fabless semiconductor company based in China, have announced the successfully completion of the integration of the Tizen operating system (OS) with their WCDMA power-efficient chipsets.
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Android
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Obsessed with mobile growth? Join us February 23-24 when we reveal the best technologies and strategies to help your company grow on mobile. It all takes place at our 5th annual Mobile Summit at the scenic Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, CA. See if you qualify here.
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Using an Android device comes with a number of quirks and feelings that only Android users can understand. iPhone users lead a boring existence where everything is sliver and has perfectly rounded corners. Our world is full of color and unique shapes and sizes, but it’s not without #AndroidProblems. That’s exactly what makes Android users different, and why we can safely say no one else understands what it’s like.
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“Be Together. Not the Same.” Android’s new motto is pretty much perfect. It describes the dual nature of Android and it’s a great reminder that, at the end of the day, we’re all just tech fans no matter the brands or models we prefer.
Google’s last Android ad had cute animals, lots of them. But for this newest project, Google’s getting back to the funky Androidified characters first introduced in the days before Lollipop’s arrival.
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Google today launched the Android WebView beta channel. To participate, developers are asked to join the Google+ community and sign up for the testing program before they can download the beta from Google Play.
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Are you a techie but also have a soft spot for classical music? Then you’ll probably love this video we’re about to share with you.
Google Japan has just posted a video showing an Android orchestra made up of 300 phones and tablets that sync together to play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” sonata.
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OnePlus will launch its custom Android ROM OxygenOS next month – with a little help from the developers of Paranoid Android.
OnePlus is saying goodbye to CyanogenMod, the Android ROM that it had previously using for its OnePlus One devices globally, and is preparing to release a new alternative, OxygenOS, that it’s developed in-house.
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iOS 8 and Lollipop are the best versions to date of Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems, yet that doesn’t mean either one is free of flaws. Both iOS 8 and Android 5.0 crash, and a new study from Crittercism reveals that it’s Google’s OS that is more stable than Apple’s.
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Google’s new Android 5.0 Lollipop update is slowly but surely making its way to more and more devices from the Moto X and Moto E, to the Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8, and now today we have more good news for Motorola smartphone owners.
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OnePlus One will receive a major CyanogenMod 11S system update (O5Q release) for Android 4.4.4 KitKat. The latest over-the-air (OTA) update is designed to offer a number of major fixes for the “Flagship Killer” smartphone.
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With the arrival of products such as Motorola’s hotly anticipated Moto 360, the smartwatch market was expected to take off. But the data from market research company Canalys shows that consumers are still far from convinced that they need buy one.
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Tourists who visit my home country of Croatia soon notice that a hallmark (besides beautiful beaches, fortified cities and wondrous sites of ancient Roman architecture) is how widespread smartphone use is. According to the Legatum Prosperity Index data for 2013, there were 114.5 mobile phones for every 100 Croatians — that’s a lot of phones!
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One of the tasks of a digital team in any major news organisation is to make the newsroom more efficient. We leverage new technologies in ways that haven’t been done before, and at a pace that’s challenging to keep up with. At The Times and Sunday Times, our team is constantly on the lookout for ways of improving our editorial workflow, and ensuring we get the very best from our great quality journalism.
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A foundation can do a lot for an open source project. Just look at The OpenStack Foundation or The Linux Foundation. This week, Node.js, the very popular server-side JavaScript framework that is used for building and running websites and online applications, got its own foundation. Among other things, that means that Joyent will no longer solely govern Node.js. The foundation should help the project gain more contributions and develop more quickly.
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The economy is looking up mean that business budgets will likely see healthy growth in the new year. Forrester is predicting 4 to 6 percent growth for 2015 global IT budgets, reaching $620 billion. Much of the growth in spending will go towards technology like analytics, mobile, as-a-service, and enterprise applications like ERP and CRM. The US will lead IT spending, followed by India and the UK.
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Free software is particularly well-suite to Greece because it is a small market compared to those for the anglophone or francophone worlds, say. That means software is unlikely to be produced in regional versions as a priority. Open source, of course, can be modified by anyone, allowing localised versions of existing free software to be produced easily. All of these considerations apply elsewhere, especially among smaller countries, and it has always been something of a mystery to me why they don’t embrace open source more readily.
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What he means is that companies will no longer have to run Hadoop on one set of resources, while running the web servers, Spark and any other number of workloads on other resources managed by Mesos. Essentially, all of these things will now be available as data center services residing on the same set of machines. Mesos has always supported Hadoop as a workload type — and companies including Twitter and Airbnb have taken advantage of this — but YARN has appeal as the default resource manager for newer distributions of Hadoop because it’s designed specifically for that platform and, well, is one of the foundations of those newer distributions.
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MapR and Mesosphere are announcing a new open source big data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacentres.
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The Open Networking Forum (ONF), a non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), has announced the appointment of Saurav Das as principal system architect, and the establishment of a new project to build upon the OpenFlow Configuration and Management Protocol (OF-CONFIG) to support Open vSwitch (OVS). Saurav’s contributions to ONF and the announcement of this project build on the organisation’s open-source software efforts that began with the OpenFlow Driver competition, followed by ONF SampleTap and the Segment Routing project SPRING-OPEN, all of which were completed in 2014. Open-source software is a key route to developing de factor standards and fostering interoperability, both of which are ONF goals.
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This week Google announced it would provide a cloud computing performance evaluator called PerKit Benchmarker. The evaluation tool is hosted on the open-source collaboration site Github, and will allow users of the Google Cloud Platform, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure to measure their current provider’s performance against industry-established benchmarks.
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Node.js, the popular open-source, server-side JavaScript runtime project, will soon be governed by an independent foundation, its chief commercial sponsor announced this week.
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SaaS/Big Data
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HDS will offer open-source data muncher Hadoop to the enterprise after doing a deal with Hortonworks.
Hadoop distributor Hortonworks has signed an agreement with HDS to jointly promote and support the software. HDS can now deliver Hortonworks’ Data Platform (HDP), Hadoop in other words, to its enterprise customers.
Hortonworks strategic marketing veep John Kreisa offered this canned quote: “The strategic agreement also provides a joint engineering commitment for the two companies on current and future projects that will help make Hadoop enterprise-ready.”
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Databases
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Hadoop has made lots of big data headlines by now. But in a reminder that it is only part of the open source big data story, Sisense and Simba partnered this week to deliver data analytics via MongoDB, the open source NoSQL platform, which is increasingly importance in production big data use.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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That was pretty fast! It looks like Oracle knows what it is doing and just updated its awesome VirtualBox virtualization software, which we have to admit that we use every day here on Softpedia to test all sorts of distributions of GNU/Linux and many other Linux-related applications, to version 4.3.22, bringing initial support for the recently released Linux kernel 3.19.
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Funding
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Hitachi is making a major play for the big data and Internet of Things markets with the acquisition, which is expected to close in June
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Public Services/Government
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Amid the well-deserved hype around the impact of cloud technology and big data analytics, it is possible that casual industry watchers may have missed the real story behind the recent wave of IT re-architecting.
Enabling many of these recent, powerful trends is a newly validated embrace of open source software technology. The movement to OSS solutions is empowering system designers and solution architects to re-examine methodologies that evolved out of the legacy proprietary, closed source software license model. Put simply, OSS allows developers of IT systems to create better results and cut costs.
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Licensing
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The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licenses are now on our list of free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.
We have updated our list of Various Licenses and Comments about Them to include the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Both of these licenses are free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.
CC BY 4.0 is a noncopyleft license that is compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3), meaning you can combine a CC BY 4.0 licensed work with a GPLv3 licensed work a larger work that is then released under the terms of GPLv3.
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Openness/Sharing
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Facebook isn’t likely making many new friends among the big established networking vendors with its announcement today of the new 6-pack open hardware modular switch. The new 6-pack modular switch builds on Facebook’s existing top-of-rack Wedge switch and its Linux-based network operating system FBOSS.
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Open Hardware
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OSVR announced its creation at CES this year, and as a direct result 12 members have signed up their support, which includes Jaunt, a pioneering company in cinematic VR.
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An open source virtual reality platform reports 13 new partners. This is the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem, envisioned as the platform that can bring together companies doing work in a number of areas of virtual reality. OSVR aims to set an open standard for virtual reality input devices, games and output. Its framework offers the potential to unite developers and gamers under a single platform.
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The white Fiat drove on to the line at Baguley this afternoon, causing delays to services between Cornbrook and Manchester Airport.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In response to Matthews’ call for “bombing the hell out of them,” Sheehan does make an important point about ISIS’s well-publicized display of violence, which is “they did this for a purpose.” The purpose he proposes–”They’re doing this to try to intimidate us so that we go home”–is implausible, since ISIS surely knows that the United States, like most countries, generally responds to violence with more violence. It’s much more likely that ISIS, like the Al-Qaeda movement it springs from, believes spectacular acts of terror will draw a military response from the United States that will help it to build its movement (Extra!, 7/11). But at least Sheehan is thinking of violence as being part of a political strategy rather than as a form of emotional release, as Matthews seems to see it:
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Questions persist over the true role of the United States in the events leading up to the deadly encounter in Mamasapano and in the immediate aftermath.
Did the US provide all or part of the intelligence that formed the basis for the ill-fated Special Action Force operation?
Were its operatives involved in the planning of the mission and in its execution?
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“The blood debt of the US which include the genocide of 1.5 million Filipinos in the Filipino-American war remain unpaid and their atrocities continue to spiral up. They’re even using Filipino troops as pawns in their interventionist terror war such as what happened the covert SAF operation Mamasapano,” said Charisse Bañez, national spokesperson of the League of Filipino Students.
Vencer Crisostomo, Anakbayan National Chair, said that Aquino “sacrificed his own troops in the name of the US war on terror.”
“This disastrous collaboration between Aquino and the US is a disrespect to all the victims of the Filipino genocide during Filipino-American War,” said Crisostomo.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Common sense tells you, of course, that when people say someone is “in another world,” they don’t generally mean that they are actually psychotic. For what it’s worth, Merkel’s office said she hadn’t meant to imply any such thing, clarifying that her point was that “Putin has a different perception on Crimea.”
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Rush Limbaugh: If Young People Listen To Liberal Professors “It Stands To Reason People Are Going To Sign Up With ISIS”
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Privacy
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Recent Paris attacks have triggered a wave of securitarian discourse and dangerous upcoming legislative measures that are spreading way beyond France. Increased control of communications online, surveillance, attacks against anonymous speech and encryption are already on the table, under the pretence of fighting an invisible enemy in a perpetual war.
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Fahwad Al-Khadoumi (nsnbc) : Facebook teamed up with several corporate “friends” to adapt Facebook’s in-house software to identify cyber threats and their source with other corporations. Countering cyber threats sounds positive while there are serious questions about transparency when smaller, independent media fall victim to major corporation’s unwillingness to reveal the source of attacks resulted in websites being closed for hours or days. Transparency, yes, but for whom?
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The challenge against the controversial Upstream program was tossed out because additional defense from the government would have required “impermissible disclosure of state secret information,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his decision.
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David Carr, the 58-year-old media columnist for the New York Times, collapsed suddenly at the newspaper’s office this evening and died after being rushed to the hospital.
Carr was previously the editor-in-chief of Washington City Paper and the author of a memoir, Year of the Gun, about his recovery from drug addiction and cancer while raising two young daughters.
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Technology companies can enact all sorts of political agendas, and right now the dominant agendas enforce neoliberalism and austerity, using centralized data to identify immigrants to be deported, or poor people likely to default on their debts. Yet I believe there is a huge positive potential in the accumulation of more data, in a good institutional—and by that I mean political—setup. Once you monitor one part of my activity and offer me some proposals or predictions about it, it’s reasonable to suppose your service would be better if you also monitored my other activities. The fact that Google monitors my Web searches, my email, my location, makes its predictions in each of these categories much more accurate than if it were to monitor only one of them. If you take this logic to its ultimate conclusion, it becomes clear you don’t want two hundred different providers of information services—you want just one, because the scale-effects make things much easier for users. The big question, of course, is whether that player has to be a private capitalist corporation, or some federated, publicly-run set of services that could reach a data-sharing agreement free of monitoring by intelligence agencies.
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New York Times columnist David Carr, one of the most incisive and influential writers on the media business, died Thursday night after collapsing in the paper’s midtown Manhattan newsroom. He was 58.
Times executive editor Dean Baquet informed staff of the death of their “wonderful, esteemed colleague” in a newsroom memo.
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Earlier Thursday, Carr moderated a TimesTalk on the National Security Agency leaks with Edward Snowden, and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Within hours, he was dead.
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Civil Rights
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This is the second article (Part 1) in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how public ambivalence toward an expansion of the legal system has been capitalized upon by the prison industrial complex.
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Rush: “It Seems Like Any Man That Goes To College Could Randomly Be Accused Of Committing Rape”
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DRM
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Who would’ve thought it possible that digital rights management (DRM) would come to the coffee business? Well, it has. Believe it or not, Keurig now includes DRM on their coffee makers. Why? To keep users from using anything but Keurig coffee pods on their machines, of course. You know, just like the DRM used by some printer manufacturers to keep you coming back (and coming back) for their branded replacement ink cartridges instead of opting for the much cheaper store brand.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Despite its extensive implications, TTIP has generated relatively little coverage, not least because negotiations are shrouded in secrecy and conducted primarily with corporate lobbyists, who have minimal obligations to the public interest. So clandestine are the talks that the few MEPs that are granted access can only view the plans in their original documentation, in a secure location, with the threat of espionage charges if they try to make copies or share the details with the public.
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Send this to a friend
02.12.15
Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I’ve looked at specialty distributions that were created for engineers and biologists in previous articles, but these aren’t the only scientific disciplines that have their own distributions. So in this article, I introduce a distribution created specifically for astronomers, called Distro Astro. This distribution bundles together astronomy software to help users with tasks like running observatories or planetariums, doing professional research or outreach.
From the very first moment of booting up Distro Astro, you will notice that this distribution is aimed at astronomers. The look and feel of items, from the boot splash screen to wallpapers and screensavers, have all been given an astronomical theme. Even the default
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Desktop
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Dell’s education-focused Chromebook 11 was surprisingly one of the best Chromebooks we’ve ever used, even though it was notoriously difficult to actually purchase for much of last year. Now, Dell is taking what it learned from last year’s launch and releasing a new, upgraded Chromebook 11 that feels just as solid as last year’s model at first glance. The first Chromebook Dell produced was a well-built, well-rounded machine with no glaring defects — and it appears the new model offers the same solid combo.
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Server
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The open-source Docker application virtualization container project has become a defacto standard for applications containers over the course of the last year. But it’s a defacto standard that isn’t a real specification and is one that is being challenged by Linux distribution vendor CoreOS.
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The first major milestone release from the open-source Docker project in 2015 debuts with new features that will pave the way for the year ahead.
The open-source Docker project rolled out its 1.5 release on Feb. 10, providing users of the application virtualization container technology with new networking and visibility capabilities.
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Kernel Space
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Linux Kernel 3.18 is still used in numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, despite that fact that Linus Torvalds announced the final release of Linux 3.19 kernel on February 8, 2015, so it is time to update it to version 3.18.7, which was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman a few hours ago, on February 11.
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The PowerPC architecture updates for the Linux 3.20 kernel, including some improvements for the Sony PlayStation 3 game console.
While Sony long ago removed the “Other OS” functionality from the PlayStation 3, it seems some open-source developers are still working on the PS3 support for Linux.
Geoff Levand landed a few PS3 kernel patches for mainline Linux kernel integration via the 3.20 POWER pull request.
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Over the last year SUSE and Red Hat have released live kernel patching solutions named kGraft and Kpatch respectively. Although the two companies didn’t realise it, they were actually developing the software at the same time, after they were both released they decided to work together to bring a combined system to the upstream Linux Kernel, now it’s foundations will be released in the Linux 3.20 kernel.
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Linux 3.19 was just released and my usual overview of what the next merge window will bring is more than overdue. The big thing overall is certainly all the work around atomic display updates, but read on for what else all has been done.
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Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car, today announced that Eureka Inc., Mcloudware, Microchip, Moscow Design Bureau and Wind River are joining The Linux Foundation and AGL to advance the creation of an open source reference platform to help the industry rapidly innovate and build the cars of the future.
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Following yesterday’s release of the Linux 3.19 kernel is the newest version of the GNU Linux-libre kernel that strips out kernel functionality dependent on binary-only microcode/firmware images.
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Originally, there was kSplice as a standalone project that implemented stop_machine()-based patching for the linux kernel. This project got later acquired, and the current owner is providing live patching as a proprietary service, without any intentions to have their implementation merged.
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The XFS changes targeting the Linux 3.20 kernel have been published, but this time around the file-system work isn’t particularly exciting.
The changes queued by Dave Chinner for the XFS file-system in Linux 3.20 include…
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Last month IBM announced the z13 micro-processor for their z13 mainframe computers. IBM claims the z13 is the “world’s fastest microprocessor” and now with Linux 3.20 there’s full support.
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There’s new input drivers for Linux 3.20 and improvements to the existing input drivers with this next kernel version.
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As usual, the next version of the Linux kernel will bring a number of prominent changes to Intel’s open-source DRM graphics driver.
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Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) is to be supported by the Linux 3.20 kernel.
While many Linux users and free software advocates are opposed to TPM, TPM 2.0 is going to be supported by the next version of the mainline Linux kernel. Trusted Platform Module technology has already been supported by the mainline Linux kernel but TPM 2.0 breaks backward compatibility with TPM 1.2. TPM 2.0 supports many more alogirhtms, crypto primitives, root keys, and authorization differences. For those learning about TPM for the first time or are just unfamiliar with the differences to TPM 2.0, see the Wikipedia page for a basic overview and the Trusted Computing Group’s TPM 2.0 FAQs.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa Git master was branched into Mesa 10.5 this weekend and the latest Git code then bumped to Mesa 10.6-devel. While Mesa 10.5 is a step closer to being released, officially it still only supports OpenGL 3.3.
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X.Org and Mesa developers have begun thinking about interesting projects for student developers to get involved in for this year’s Google Summer of Code while prospective students should also begin to think about getting involved with X.Org/Mesa development.
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Days after branching Mesa 10.5, Emil Velikov went ahead today and put out the first release candidate for the upcoming Mesa 10.5.
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NVIDIA today finally mainlined their Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) support for handling video decode of H.265 / HEVC.
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X.Org members will soon be voting on whether the X.Org Foundation should dissolve its 501(c)3 state and become a project of SPI.
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Applications
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A couple of days ago, we found some detailed information regarding the new features and improvements that will be implemented into the forthcoming VLC Media Player 3.0.0 release while we were digging through the Internet, and decided to share it with you on this space, so that you have an idea on what to expect from the upcoming release of VLC.
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For those not closely following the development of the VLC open-source, cross-platform media player, the VLC 2.2.0 release is coming soon while further out is VLC 3.0 and it will be even more magical.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Containers are the hottest topic in the data center. Here are the essentials that every well-informed IT pro should know and be able to explain.
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I’m not too fond of terminals. This guide is for new GNOME contributors like me whose brain capacity for terminal commands is only so-so big. I will introduce you to 8 git commands worth remembering. I assume only vague familiarity with git: pulling, pushing and committing.
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Games
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Albino Lullaby is a really freaky looking horror adventure that should be coming to Linux, and it’s using Unreal Engine 4.
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Nightside is a recent discovery on Steam Greenlight that immediately attracted my attention, and the developers replies to me have been very encouraging.
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Apotheon is a heroic action game set within the vibrant world of Ancient Greek Mythology. Ascend Mount Olympus, wrestle the divine powers from the Pantheon of Gods, and save mankind.
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Feral Interactive have been great for Linux with their ports, and it’s time we took a proper look at XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This has been played through with the expansion Enemy Within which I feel is an essential extra.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDAB has been working very hard on Qt3D after it fell apart for Qt 5.0 back in the day during Nokia’s Qt shafting. The new version of the Qt3D module is nearly ready but not fully-baked, which is why Sean Harmer of KDAB proposed today that this be a “tech preview” feature of the next Qt tool-kit update.
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Last night was a sleepless night in all the good ways; I’m excited for the upcoming Plasma Sprint, and knowing I’ll be packing myself into a cigar tube and flinging myself across the North Atlantic Ocean is too much for me to sleep over. I had promised a commenter (too long ago) I would make green cursors, so I decided to make good on my word. After it took 5 minutes I needed more; and the wafting smell of my bread maker inspired me to make a Bread cursor theme. Once that was done, sufficiently delirious, I sent my weird bready message to the VDG. They appear to have ignored it – a wise decision. They’re busy people doing actual work.
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The Akonadi-Qt5 release isn’t quite ready now. So we’re directly creating our own IMAP connection. This is not ideal, as writing an IMAP client is not trivial, but as a starting point, this seems to work well.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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We can bet that many of you are eagerly awaiting for the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 open-source graphical desktop environment, which is used with great success on numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems, including Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu GNOME.
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After finding plenty of top 5 to top 50 distro lists, one name really stuck out. Just the name. Zorin OS. Its was a freaky cool name. I installed it quick and… Updates. I was dealing done with Windows updates so I won’t lie that I was erked. Then I found out what the 500MB of downloads were for. All of the preloaded software and I flipped.
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After releasing the first GNU/Linux distribution with Linux 3.18 kernel a couple of days after its launch back in December 2014, Arne Exton did it again, as he just announced today on Twitter that the his Exton|OS with MATE has been updated to version 150211 and includes a custom 3.19.0-5-exton kernel package based on the upstream Linux kernel 3.19.
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The Robolinux developers had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of a brand-new edition of their open-source computer operating system, this time built around the modern and beautiful KDE Software Compilation graphical desktop environment. It is a distro where the main emphasis is on running Windows applications natively.
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Dejan Petrovic, the developer of the recently introduced ChaletOS computer operating system informed us today, February 12, that he just pushed a February 2015 release on his servers, urging users to update to it as soon as possible. The new ISO images are available for download right now (see link at the end of the article) for 32 and 64-bit PCs, bringing assorted bugfixes and improvements.
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Screenshots
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Slackware Family
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Rather than writing blog articles and helping people, I decided to wind down during the evenings by baking bread. The kneading process relaxes the mind while it exercises the muscles (and relieves back pains). My son does not mind… he eats all I bake anyway. Sourdough in the weekend and regular yeasted breads during the working week. The aromas coming from the oven right now are making me feel hungry again at 10:30 PM.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers the ideal platform for both traditional and cloud-enabled workloads
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Red Hat Inc. continues to form partnerships to position its OpenStack cloud platform as a leading contender in the new era of software-defined networking and network functions virtualization.
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Fedora
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One of the planned Changes in Fedora 22 is to make DNF the default console package manager, instead of yum. As part of this, we have been converting Anaconda, the Fedora installer, to use DNF rather than yum. At present, in Fedora 22 images, anaconda will use DNF by default but the yum code is still present and switchable with a kernel parameter (inst.nodnf).
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I met Matthew at LinuxCon 2013 and have been hounding him for an interview ever since then. He’s worth the wait, though. He really gets under the hood of his GNOME setup and he has some great things to say about the power of open source software. Also, I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating: Fedora has been great for me lately. I know there have always been Fedora fans, but my experience with it was always that there were one or two annoyingly broken things in each release. But 21 is solid. Like Ubuntu solid. And that’s thanks to the work of people like Matthew.
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Fedora 22 will ship with GCC 5, which brings a whole host of enhancements, among which is a new default C++ ABI. In this article, we’ll cover how that ABI transition will work in Fedora.
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While Fedora 21 has been officially released on December 9, 2014, and users worldwide still enjoy the powerful operating system on their desktop or server computers, the time has come to look at the future and see what the forthcoming Fedora 22 release has prepared for its dedicated users.
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While Fedora 22 isn’t being released for several more months, so far it’s running quite well.
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For something about 15 years I was using Debian distribution and ones which derived from it (like Ubuntu). Basically whole time I used development versions of them and amount of issues was nearly not existing. Now I run Rawhide…
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Debian Family
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I recently acquired a vServer hosted by Server4You and decided to install a Debian Wheezy image. Usually I boot any device in backup mode and first install a fresh Debian copy using debootstrap over the provided image, to have a clean system. In this case I did not and I came across a few glitches I want to talk about. So hopefully, if you are running the same system image, it saves you some time to figure out, why the h*ll some things don’t work as expected 
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The best software, whether it’s operating systems or anything else, is predictable. You read the documentation, or explore the interface, and you can make a logical prediction that “when I do action X, the result will be Y.” grep and cat are perfect examples of this.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We’ve been hearing rumors about a Meizu MX4 handset with Ubuntu Phone for quite a while now, yet there’s been no official word on the matter yet – not for the MX4, nor for the MX4 Pro.
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Carbonado Intermedia and are two digital media companies owned by Nestle Snipes (typically referred to as Nes Snipes). Carbonado produces animated sitcoms such as Budz, while Auteuristic is a traditional digital video production company focused on live series, including the Times Square Chronicles’ video version of their newspaper, Times Square Beat. Budz and the Time Square Beat are being leveraged by properties such as Verizon and Dish Network.
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Linux 3.20 To Fully Support The IBM z13 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-3.20-s390-IBM-z13
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96Boards, the open hardware specification for ARM boards out of the Linaro Community Board Group, has out their first ARM board certified against their consumer edition standard.
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Aaeon’s “EPIC-BDU7″ SBC uses Intel’s 5th Gen Core processors, and offers multiple graphics, GbE, USB, and SATA ports, plus mini-PCIe and PCI-104 expansion.
Aaeon’s EPIC-BDU7 single board computer uses the same old-school EPIC form factor adopted by its Atom-based EPC-CV1 board, but instead loads up with Intel’s brand new 5th Generation Core processors using the 14nm “Broadwell” architecture. Aaeon typically supports Linux on its SBCs, and although no OS support was listed, Linux should run on this board with no problem.
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Phones
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Android
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Google’s team in Japan connected 300 smartphones and tablets with different animated characters “singing” through the devices’ speakers for your listening pleasure.
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Android 5.0 Lollipop may not feel like the most stable operating system Google has ever put out, though a new report seems to claim otherwise. According to data from mobile application performance management solution Crittercism, application crash rates are .2% lower on devices running Lollipop than devices running iOS 8.
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While Apple may have beaten Android when it comes to sales, when it comes to stability the new Android 5.0 Lollipop beats Apple’s iOS 8.
According to data from mobile application performance management specialists Crittercism, app crash rates for the Lollipop are 0.2 percentage points lower than for iOS 8.
Android Lollipop: 2.0% crash rate
iOS 8: 2.2% crash rate
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AOpen’s rugged “MEP320″ media player and signage device runs Android 4.2.2 on a 1GHz Freescale i.MX Quad, and offers a thin profile and dual HDMI ports.
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This week the LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update finally arrived for users in the United States. A few weeks ago LG started teasing that it was “coming soon” for all users, and as of February 10th the LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update is officially rolling out in the U.S. starting with AT&T.
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The LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update is finally here and delivering tons of new features and changes to LG’s flagship smartphone, but the Android 5.0 Lollipop update is also causing problems for many. The update initially started outside of the US, and then this week the AT&T LG G3 finally received Android 5.0 Lollipop, and we’re hearing Sprint is up next.
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Quantified-self enthusiasts – those who are somewhat obsessed with using technology to better understand themselves, their daily habits and personal trends – have been fortunate to have a wide variety of niche apps to choose from for measuring everything from athletic activity, to travel time, and even time you’ve spent using your smartphone on a given day. But for the most part, you would have to download a handful of apps in order to log this data. Newly launched Instant 2.0, now available on Android, instead is offering a single destination for tracking nearly everything you want to record, including phone usage, app usage, fitness activity and traveling.
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OnePlus kind of let us believe it would show us at least a preview of its new OxygenOS today, but instead we’ve got news on who is going to develop the new OS – some of the leading figures behind Paranoid Android.
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You might have heard OnePlus has formed a dev team to build its OxygenOS ROM. They even did an AMA on the /r/Android subreddit today. Among the bits of info revealed by the team is the fact that OxygenOS won’t be open source. Instead it will be a “real OS.” Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik couldn’t resist poking fun at that.
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One Plus has been teasing their OxygenOS (replacing CyanogenMod) and fans have been waiting for an announcement as to when they would see this custom Android ROM on their One devices. Today One Plus made an OxygenOS announcement – but not about the ROM itself. Instead they introduced the team that is developing the ROM, and that very team includes developers from the popular ROM Paranoid Android.
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Most Moto G devices around the world have already received Android 5.0 Lollipop, but while Android One devices are already running on Android 5.1 Lollipop, we are expecting the new software update to roll out to other devices, too. A Moto G was spotted running Android 5.1 Lollipop, which leads us to believe that a soak test might have begun for the new OTA update.
According to Tech Droider, one of their readers sent in a photo of a Moto G 2014 running on Android 5.1 Lollipop, build number LXY22E, supposedly received on February 2. It’s a bit odd that the image hasn’t surfaced online if the update had rolled out to this particular user more than a week ago, so take this rumor with a grain of salt. Even though a soak test for the Moto G Android 5.1 Lollipop update is the most likely scenario, we can’t be sure that the photo wasn’t faked or manipulated.
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Traditionally thought of as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), or kinetic action platforms, unmanned systems are now filling roles such as command and control communications, meteorological survey, and resupply, and explosive ordnance disposal platforms. Historically, these platforms have been developed and fielded as standalone systems built by different vendors with unique and often proprietary payloads, control mechanisms and data formats. But this process has created limitations on interoperability and increased costs, leading the DoD to look at other, more viable options, including commercially supported open source middleware.
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The shockwaves generated by Edward Snowden’s revelations of the close collaboration between US tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple and the NSA are still reverberating through the industry. Those disclosures, together with related ones such as the involvement of the NSA in industrial espionage, as well as the asymmetric nature of US law when it comes to gathering data from foreign individuals, present something of an open goal for non-US technology companies – or so one might have thought.
On the face of it, then, it is surprising that non-US technology firms and others that can distance themselves from the US law are not proclaiming this fact more loudly. After all, there must be a considerable number of organisations that would dearly love to locate their data as far away from the attentions of the NSA as possible.
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When you choose not to work in the open, what are your reasons? Are they Good, Bad or Ugly? What are your suggestions for how those of us who want to work more in the open can all do better?
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The popular, open source Node.js JavaScript runtime engine is getting a new foundation to manage its development, in a move that could help mend the recent schism in the project’s community.
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Google’s latest foray into the open-source realm is a framework it’s calling “PerfKit,” which is designed to measure application performance in the cloud, the company announced Wednesday.
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The Apache Software Foundation has, since those early days, been at the forefront of challenging problems. Within the context of this article, the ASF has both fostered, and continues to host keynote scientific projects such as Apache OODT (a Top Level Project at the ASF which originally came from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory), to recently incubating projects such as Singa (an efficient, scalable and easy-to-use distributed platform for training deep learning models used currently within Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Deep Belief Network as examples).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Corporations that seek to control the Web, massive government and corporate surveillance, chilling effects on free expression — all of these issues will be harder to address if the next billions coming online think that the Internet exists solely within the walled gardens of platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. The greatest danger is people relinquishing their control to gatekeepers that get to decide the rules about what we see and what we create.
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When I first heard of Mozilla Open Badges, my heart skipped a beat. Wisely implemented, digital badges can help individuals and communities focus their energies on worthy goals.
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SaaS/Big Data
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“Warehouse-grade” automation is the key to the future of big data and distributed computing. So says infrastructure provider StackIQ, which today has rebranded its products and unveiled new automation features for Docker and other technologies that it believes will be crucial to next-generation enterprise data centers.
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The open-source OpenStack Foundation grew its’ revenue based by 52 percent in 2014 over 2013. OpenStack Foundation 2014 revenue came in at $17.5 million.
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As 2015 began, Blue Box, which offers private cloud services based on OpenStack to big companies including Viacom, announced a new round of $4 million in funding on top of the $10 million the company raised late last year. The fruits of that funding appear to thriving, as the company has now, with Alliance Technology Group, announced a joint development program that will deliver an on-premise version of Blue Box Cloud in the second quarter of 2015.
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MapR and Mesosphere are announcing a new open source big data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacentres.
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Databases
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The open source cross-platform document-oriented database company MongoDB has reached version 3.0 this month.
The new iteration sees significant changes in its storage layer performance and scalability.
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Healthcare
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Creating an artificial pancreas is now open source, reported Boing Boing.
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Funding
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You’d be forgiven for thinking that the tech world is a loathsome hotbed of rapacious venture capitalists, airheaded trend-riders, and publicity hounds. That’s the image presented by much of the tech press, which prizes stories about the Montgomery Burnses of the tech world over ones about its more idealistic denizens.
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With the new website, we’ve decided to revise how we promote and handle payments. We understand that this has rubbed some people the wrong way, and in the spirit of addressing concerns, we’ve decided to write this post. Keep in mind that this was a really difficult post to right. It covers sensitive territory, and it becomes difficult to choose the right words without offending anyone. That said, here’s our best explanation:
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Elementary OS has attracted a lot of attention lately. But a controversy is brewing over how the distro developers are setting up their new site for payments by users. The Elementary OS site is being redesigned to encourage users to pay for the distro. But should the Elementary OS developers expect a payment in the first place?
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Jahia is getting a $22.5 million cash infusion from Invus, a New York City-based investment firm, the Geneva, Switzerland-based open source content management system (CMS) vendor announced today.
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BSD
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EdgeBSD remains one of the newer BSD distributions that is a fork of NetBSD but switches from CVS to Git for source code management.
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Everybody’s favourite audio hacker Alexandre Ratchov (ratchov@) is inviting you to a concert in Grenoble (France).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Valentine’s day is this Saturday and, if you’re like us, you’re either trying to pick the right gift or wishing you had someone to exchange gifts with. We wish you luck with that. But there’s something important that you can do regardless of your relationship status:
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Project Releases
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Now that Cutelyst is allowing me to write web applications with the tools I like, I can use it to build the kind of web applications I need but am not fine with using the existing ones…
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Cutelyst, the Qt/C++ web framework just got another step into API stabilization.
Since 0.3.0 I’ve been trying to take the most request per second out of it, and because of that I decided to replace most QStrings with QByteArrays, the allocation call is indeed simpler in QByteArray but since most of Qt use QString for strings it started to create a problem rather than solving one. Grantlee didn’t play nice with QByteArray breaking ifequal and in the end some implicit conversions from UTF-8 were triggered.
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Public Services/Government
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The Defense Information Systems Agency is launching a web-based, open source collaboration tool for the Defense Department that provides webconferencing, chat and instant messaging functions for employees based in the U.S. and abroad.
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Licensing
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This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.
In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Rainey Reitman, Activism Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about their new EFF Alerts mobile app.
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Openness/Sharing
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Running communities around projects is all about getting the job done, and getting it done well. If you don’t nurture a community, it won’t grow and produce. Then, if you get that right but fail to maintain and organize things so that the people involved, your community, can continue to succeed and feel happy doing it, your project’s growth and success won’t last long.
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Facebook is taking its crusade for open networking to a broader battlefield, using its 16-port “Wedge” switch design as the basis of a new modular platform that can link together racks of servers across a data center.
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Part of it has to do with most farmers being, at a fundamental level, DIY enthusiasts. The prospect of a tractor that can automatically collect data to track crop growth and offer suggestions on how to make growth more efficient sounds useful to most farmers—and it is. Of course, as most farmers are DIY and handymen types to begin with, they tend to tinker with any device, whether it’s making a knife sharper, or trying to expand the capabilities of a complex high-tech machine.
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Open Access/Content
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It’s good to see more government agencies moving in this direction. It would be even nicer to see shorter time frames for the embargo, and even further commitment to releasing the data beyond just “exploring,” but this is good for science, data, learning and innovation.
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Open Hardware
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That sentence was taken directly from Open Source Hardware Statement of Principles 1.0, a preamble of sorts located in the definition section of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) website. Part blog, part doctrine, the site serves as a hub for this ever-growing community of creators.
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One thing that’s been endlessly fascinating about the fledgling virtual reality industry is the amount of collaboration and cooperation going on between disparate companies. First you had Valve providing its research to Oculus, then Oculus and Samsung partnered up for GearVR.
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Razer today announced that support for the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem has grown to 38 members with the recent addition of 13 new partner companies. OSVR claims to be building from the ground up “the best Virtual Reality gaming experience,” and offers a unified – but innovative – approach to input devices, games, and output.
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Programming
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Joining in on the heated discussion that originated over Richard Stallman voicing concerns over adding LLVM’s LLDB debugger support to Emacs, Eric S Raymond has come out to once again voice his support in favor of LLVM/Clang and express his feelings that GCC’s leading days are over.
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Despite criticisms such as it having a “cryptic syntax,” the Perl language has remained prominent in language popularity assessments, even if popularity has declined and a planned upgrade has been slow to appear. Designed by Larry Wall, the scripting language is suited for tasks ranging from quick prototyping to Web programming and system management tasks, and it’s part of the prominent LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/PHP/Python) open source stack. At the recent FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Wall revealed intentions to have the long-awaited Perl 6 release out in a beta version in September and generally available by December. Wall answered some questions from InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill via email about what’s planned for the language and responded to criticisms.
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Get started using the open source R programming language to do statistical computing and graphics on large data sets
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Your daughter comes home from school with a report card studded with A’s. You (1) give her a hug and raise her allowance or (2) ground her and tell her you know she’ll never do this well again.
Perversely enough, too many pundits and academics have chosen option No. 2 since Apple CEO Tim Cook presented investors the company’s most recent financial report card — a fourth-quarter earnings story that featured record sales at Apple, rapid growth, and (most important) a quarterly profit that is the largest ever recorded by a publicly traded company.
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A young Russian woman has died after her charging iPhone fell into the bathtub in her Moscow flat.
Yevgenia Sviridenko, 24, who was originally from Omsk, more than 2,000 miles from the Russian capital, was discovered by her flatmate in the bath on Monday evening, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported according to The Moscow Times.
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Security
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The Apache Software Foundation is out this week with patches for its Tomcat Java middleware server. What interested me most about the update was that it was for flaws first reported in 2014.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The US destruction of Fallujah in 2004 was a prime motivation for the growth of ISIS.
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The Senate on Thursday confirmed Ashton Carter as President Obama’s new secretary of Defense in a 93-5 vote.
Carter, 60, will be the 25th secretary of Defense and Obama’s fourth. He is expected to be sworn into office next week
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As the U.S. continues to bomb the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, President Obama asked Congress today to approve a new legal framework for the ongoing military campaign.
The administration’s draft law “would not authorize long-term, large-scale ground combat operations” like Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama wrote in a letter accompanying the proposal. The draft’s actual language is vague, allowing for ground troops in what Obama described as “limited circumstances,” like special operations and rescue missions.
The authorization would have no geographic limitations and allow action against “associated persons or forces” of the Islamic State. It would expire in three years.
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Ukraine’s security service arrested a journalist on treason charges Sunday after he posted a video online urging people to dodge the country’s new military draft, his wife and officials said.
Ruslan Kotsaba — a television journalist from the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk — was ordered held in custody for 60 days pending investigations, his wife, Uliana, wrote on Facebook.
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Just weeks after a coup that ousted Yemen’s Western-backed government, the capital of Yemen is a city painted in green, mostly with spray paint.
Green tree trunks, green sidewalks, green walls and even a green Ford F-350 bearing the Houthi slogan, which includes the words “Death to America,” on each side of the iconic American truck, about 340 of which the Pentagon shipped to Yemen over the past few years.
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President Obama has sent Congress a formal request to authorize military force against the Islamic State six months after the U.S. began bombing Iraq and Syria. The resolution imposes a three-year limit on U.S. operations, but does not put any geographic constraints. It also opens the door for ground combat operations in limited circumstances. The resolution’s broad language covers military action against the Islamic State as well as “individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside [ISIS] or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” The resolution also leaves in place the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force Congress enacted one week after the Sept. 11, 2001, which has been used to justify U.S. action in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and beyond, and which Obama had previously called for repealing. We speak with Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of many books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”
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PRESIDENT OBAMA is going before Congress to request authorization for the limited use of military force in a battle of up to three years against the Islamic State. On the surface, this looks like a welcome recognition of Congress’s ultimate authority in matters of war and peace. But unless the resolution put forward by the White House is amended, it will have the opposite effect. Congressional support will amount to the ringing endorsement of unlimited presidential war making.
Whatever else they decide, the House and Senate should revise the White House initiative to guarantee that it won’t have this tragic result. First do no harm; before proceeding with a debate over the limits of our continuing military engagement, Congress should make it impossible for future presidents to evade its final decision.
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He is a liar of course, someone who did not tell the truth no matter the reason or excuse, a bad trait for a journalist. Williams lied about being RPG’ed in a helicopter over Iraq; he did not see any variant of what you can see in the photo above. And that’s not a hard thing to “misremember.”
But if there is any reason to forgive Williams, it was that he was seduced by both his own conflation of his sad little life as a talking head and the “brave troops,” and, more clearly, by the process of embedding with the military. I know. I saw it.
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As Washington is not a partner to the Minsk peace deal, how can there be peace when Washington has made policy decisions to escalate the conflict and to use the conflict as a proxy war between the US and Russia?
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A New York City police officer was indicted Tuesday in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in a Brooklyn public housing complex stairwell in November, several people familiar with the grand jury’s decision said.
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The Obama administration has informed lawmakers that the president will seek a formal authorization to fight the Islamic State that would prohibit the use of “enduring offensive ground forces” and limit engagement to three years. The approach offers what the White House hopes is a middle way on Capitol Hill for those on the right and left who remain deeply skeptical of its plans to thwart extremist groups.
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Transparency Reporting
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Public docketing and confirmations to the clerks in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia by the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, who was responsible for filing all three search warrants for WikiLeaks staffer’s email content in March 2012, reveal that Google waited six months to disclose the existence of the search warrants by the U.S. Department of Justice, despite a May 15, 2014 ruling by Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson to unseal the search warrants for the limited purpose of informing the three WikiLeaks staffers.
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Google is facing renewed questions about its handling of subscribers’ private information following the revelation that it waited six months after the lifting of a gagging order to alert WikiLeaks that emails and other data belonging to its employees had been passed to the FBI.
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U.K. taxpayers have now forked out US$15 million on a two-year-old siege of the Ecuadorean embassy.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It turns out that oil companies in California didn’t inject wastewater into of usable aquifers, with the state’s permission, hundreds of times — it was more like thousands.
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Privacy
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Samsung has been doing a great job this week illustrating why consumers should want their televisions to be as dumb as technologically possible. The company took heat for much of the week after its privacy policy revealed Samsung smart TVs have been collecting and analyzing user living room conversations in order to improve voice recognition technology. While that’s fairly common for voice recognition tech, the idea of living room gear that spies on you has been something cable operators have been patenting for years. And while Samsung has changed its privacy policy language to more clearly illustrate what it’s doing, the fact that smart TV security is relatively awful has many people quite justly concerned about smart TVs becoming another poorly-guarded repository for consumer data.
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About 20 minutes into this electrifying, often terrifying documentary, the film-maker shows for the first time the man we have come to know as Edward Snowden. The ex-NSA employee who blew the whistle on the US Government’s spying on its citizens is a familiar face only because of 24 hours of interviews this film’s maker compiled over eight days in a Hong Kong hotel room. But when he first appears, he’s talking to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald about how they will deal with what Greenwald calls “the ‘you’ story”.
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A federal court in San Francisco sided with the U.S. Department of Justice, ruling that the plaintiffs could not win a significant portion of the case—a Fourth Amendment challenge to the NSA’s tapping of the Internet backbone—without disclosure of classified information that would harm national security. In other words, Judge Jeffrey White found that “state secrets” can trump the judicial process and held that EFF’s clients could not prove they have standing.
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Advocates for less government snooping suffered a blow Tuesday when a federal judge in California ruled that a group of citizens can not sue the National Security Agency to stop the “upstream” collection of their data.
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Civil Rights
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The most half-baked “weapon” in any policeman’s arsenal should never be raised to the level of a felony. “Resisting arrest” is the charge brought when bad cops run out of better ideas. This truism runs through nearly every law enforcement agency in the country. When you take a look at videographers and photographers who have been arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights (and backed by a DOJ statement), you’ll see plenty of “resisting arrest” charges.
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A 37-year-old woman has died after deputies in northern Virginia used a Taser stun gun on her while she was in custody.
Natasha McKenna of Alexandria was taken off life support Sunday, five days after she was stunned at the Fairfax County jail, the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.
McKenna was in the process of being transported from the Fairfax County jail to the Alexandria city jail Tuesday when deputies say she failed to comply with their commands and resisted them. A deputy then used a Taser to restrain her, sheriff’s Lt. Steve Elbert said Monday.
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In the South Carolina prison system, accessing Facebook is an offense on par with murder, rape, rioting, escape and hostage-taking.
Back in 2012, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) made “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site” a Level 1 offense [PDF], a category reserved for the most violent violations of prison conduct policies. It’s one of the most common Level 1 offense charges brought against inmates, many of whom, like most social network users, want to remain in contact with friends and family in the outside world and keep up on current events. Some inmates ask their families to access their online accounts for them, while many access the Internet themselves through a contraband cell phone (possession of which is yet another Level 1 offense).
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With just 59,000 residents, the Pasco police department in Washington state have shot and killed four people in the past six months—more than police in the entire United Kingdom, which has over 80,000,000 citizens, in the past three years combined. In fact, Pasco police are on pace to have more police shootings than Germany, also with 80,000,000 citizens, over the current 12 month period.
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Each year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group’s 2015 ranking was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th.
That is the lowest ranking ever during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S. was ranked 53rd). The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Salvador, Tonga, Chile and Botswana.
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Media freedom has suffered a ‘drastic decline’ worldwide last year in part because of extremist groups such as Islamic State and Boko Haram, the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders says. – See more at: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/europe/2015/02/12/-drastic-decline–in-world-media-freedom.html#sthash.dLBZAYMJ.dpuf
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I didn’t know Yusor Mohammad, Deah Shaddy Barakat or Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha — the victims of Craig Stephen Hicks’ shooting spree in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – but I recognize them. Anyone who has spent time in American Muslim communities would, and that’s partly why this horrible crime is so painful. I realize I’m making assumptions and maybe getting sentimental in the process, but I can’t help it. The personalities that come through from the testimonies of friends and family, the record of the efforts and achievements of these young people, and the photographs that radiate such joy and life are all too familiar to miss.
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Not all conservatives used the death of American hostage Kayla Mueller to highlight the brutality of the Islamic State — some decided to focus their disgust on the 26-year-old’s humanitarian work for Palestinians.
“No tears for the newly-departed Kayla Mueller, the ISIS hostage whose parents confirmed today that she is dead,” conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote on Tuesday, under the headline, “Kayla Mueller: Dead ISIS Hostage Was Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel Bitch.”
“Mueller was a Jew-hating, anti-Israel piece of crap who worked with HAMAS and helped Palestinians harass Israeli soldiers and block them from doing their job of keeping Islamic terrorists out of Israel,” she wrote.
Schlussel condemned Mueller’s humanitarian work in the “so-called ‘West Bank’” to prevent the demolition of “terrorists’ ‘houses.’”
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A press freedom advocate — and husband of an American servicewoman — went to the U.S. embassy in Azerbaijan, fearing for his life. But he was turned away.
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Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hikmet Hajiyev said in this regard that the investigation carried out under the court verdict discovered that chairman of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety Emin Huseynov has engaged in illegal business over unregistered grant contracts, making a great deal of money – AZN 1,575,956 – but evading from taxes AZN 247,551 tax to be paid to the state budget.
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Caracas, February 11th, 2015. (Venezuelanalysis)- The German Embassy in Caracas has alarmed political observers in Venezuela by publishing what the press has described as an “alarming” official declaration to its citizens in the South American country.
Published on February 5th, the declaration is written and signed by the Chargé d’Affaires at the German Embassy, Dr. Jörg Polster. It began to make the rounds on social media networks over the last two days.
In the statement, German diplomat Polster informs readers that the embassy is extremely “worried” about the current situation in the country and advises German residents to take a number of “precautions in the face of the crisis”.
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Bipartisan lawmakers aim to make renunciation of Israel boycott efforts in Europe a key negotiating point in largest free trade deal in history
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President George W. Bush was fond of saying that “9/11 changed everything.” He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts.
During his presidency, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This legislation permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when those warrants are served on custodians of records — like doctors, lawyers, telecoms, computer servers, banks and even the Post Office.
Such purported statutory authority directly violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to privacy in our “persons, houses, papers and effects.” That includes just about everything held by the custodians of our records. Privacy is not only a constitutional right protected by the document; it is also a natural right. We possess the right to privacy by virtue of our humanity. Our rights come from within us — whether you believe we are the highest progression of biological forces or the intended creations of an Almighty God — they do not come from the government.
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Nationalists and anti-imperialists marched to commemorate the 116th year of the Philippine-American War on Feb. 4, with a call to make President Aquino, suspended Police chief Alan Purisima, and the US government accountable for the recent Mamasapano deaths.
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An Egyptian court on Thursday ordered the release of two journalists jailed for more than a year on charges of broadcasting false news in a conspiracy with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The release followed the publication this week of a previously undisclosed opinion by Egypt’s highest appeals court condemning the journalists’ conviction as baseless when it ordered a retrial at the beginning of this year. The release also comes at a time when the Egyptian government appears to be trying to allay some of the international criticism it has received after a series of harsh and hasty criminal convictions issued during a crackdown on dissent after the military takeover in July 2013.
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On Monday, February 9th, Matt DeHart’s parents, Paul and Leann, received notice by mail from the Refugee Protection Division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board that the family’s claim for Refugee Protection had been denied. The family fled the United States after Matt was interrogated and tortured during an FBI espionage investigation in which child pornography charges were hastily filed after Matt was detained at the Canadian border, an action which was triggered by an espionage alert.
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Matt DeHart claims that all his troubles stem from a file uploaded, twice, to a Tor server he ran out of a closet in his parent’s home. An FBI investigation into something the CIA might have done.
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Mr. DeHart testified the pornography charges are a ruse to investigate an espionage and national security probe tied to his involvement in Anonymous and his operation of a “hidden” Internet server used to leak a classified U.S. government document, likely destined to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing organization.
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Jails across the country have become vast warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to post bail or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves, according to a report issued Wednesday.
The study, “Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America,” found that the majority of those incarcerated in local and county jails are there for minor violations, including driving with suspended licenses, shoplifting or evading subway fares, and have been jailed for longer periods of time over the past 30 years because they are unable to pay court-imposed costs.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Google has long been behind the SPDY networking protocol as a faster alternative to HTTP 1.1. With the HTTP/2 draft standard being based on SPDY, Google is preparing to sunset the SPDY protocol support within the Chrome/Chromium web-browser.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups keep hammering on Canada for its lacking anti-piracy enforcement. The groups label Canada a “safe haven” for both file-sharers and online pirate sites, and ask the U.S. Government to intervene.
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In a fuming blog article, David Newhoff claims that non-infringing, legal uses of copyrighted works – that is, of people’s own property – are like “aggravated rape” when made without unneeded consent of the monopoly holder. Newhoff tries to scold the crucial concept of “fair use” in copyright monopoly doctrine, the concept which explicitly says that some usages are not covered by the monopoly and therefore not up to the monopoly holder, and ends saying that if you don’t grant permission and can’t set limits, it’s “aggravated rape”. Just when you think copyright monopoly zealots can’t sink any lower, they surprise you with one of the few creativities they’ve ever shown.
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YouTube’s automated takedown tool is known for its flaws, but this week it crossed a line by attacking a purring cat. According to YouTube’s Content-ID system both EMI Publishing and PRS own the rights to a 12 second purring loop. The cat in question, Phantom, has filed a dispute and hopes to reclaim his rights.
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Mocking the ridiculous “Special 301 report” from the US Trade Representative has become something of an annual sport around these parts. As we’ve explained, the whole concept of the report is something of a joke: copyright, patent and trademark maximalists send in reports to the USTR, claiming which countries don’t do enough to respect US intellectual property, and the USTR — via no systematic or objective process — rewrites those complaints into a report that declares certain countries “naughty” for their practices. The whole thing is such a joke that even those in the government will openly mock it. As I’ve said in the past, I once saw the head of the US Copyright Office openly joke about the purely arbitrary nature of the 301 report at a conference. Countries like Canada — which are regularly named to the report, despite having copyright laws that are, in many areas, more stringent than the US’s — have openly declared that they do not find the Special 301 process to be legitimate, and thus do not pay any attention to it. A couple of years ago, Chile also made it clear that it felt the 301 process was illegitimate.
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Empornium, one of the leading private torrent trackers for adult content, says it believes a copyright troll gained access to a staff moderation account and is now using obtained data to threaten its users. The revelations may shine light on why some Empornium users have received settlement threats with no lawsuit filed and no notice from their ISPs.
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The move might be an effort to appear more legitimate to advertisers and others within entertainment content distribution circles. The BitTorrent file-sharing protocol is often linked with users of the downloading software exchanging content in violation of intellectual property laws. The first project under this original video distribution agreement is the movie Children of the Machine.
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