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10.11.15

Links 11/10/2015: Kate/KDevelop Sprint, Blender 2.76

Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Report: Twitter prepping for “company-wide layoffs” next week

    Following the news that Twitter interim CEO Jack Dorsey was fully hired to the post on Monday, the company has been linked to a series of what Re/code has described as “company-wide layoffs” next week.

    A Friday report from Re/code cited “multiple sources” in saying that most of Twitter’s departments will be hit with layoffs starting next week. Those sources did not specify numbers or percentages of staff, but they did point to Twitter’s plans to “restructure” its engineering staff, which may affect how the alleged firings play out in all. When asked to comment on the report, a Twitter representative told Ars that “we’re not commenting on rumor and speculation.”

  • Hardware

    • Smartmobe brain maker Qualcomm teases 64-bit ARM server chip secrets

      Qualcomm, the maker of processors for Nexus smartphones and other mobes and tablets, has revealed early specifications for its upcoming server chips.

      The California company is best known for designing the brains in handheld devices, networking kit, and other embedded gear.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto’s Stock Is Tanking. Is the Company’s Own Excitement About GMOs Backfiring?

      Pity Monsanto, the genetically modified seed and agrichemical giant. Its share price has plunged 25 percent since the spring. Market prices for corn and soybeans are in the dumps, meaning Monsanto’s main customers—farmers who specialize in those crops—have less money to spend on its pricey seeds and flagship herbicide (which recently got named a “probable carcinogen” by the World Health organization, spurring lawsuits).

    • Study: Fracking Industry Wells Associated With Premature Birth

      Expectant mothers who live near active natural gas wells operated by the fracking industry in Pennsylvania are at an increased risk of giving birth prematurely and for having high-risk pregnancies, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.

      The findings, published online last week in the journal Epidemiology, shed light on some of the possible adverse health outcomes associated with the fracking industry, which has been booming in the decade since the first wells were drilled. Health officials have been concerned about the effect of this type of drilling on air and water quality, as well as the stress of living near a well where just developing the site of the well can require 1,000 truck trips on once-quiet roads.

  • Security

    • Amazon, Google Boost Cloud Security Efforts

      Not to be outdone, Google introduced its Google Cloud Security Scanner the same day of the Amazon Inspector announcement. Unlike Inspector, Google’s product is already generally available.

    • CryptoLocker Ransomware Springs on Scandinavians [Ed: Windows]

      The screenshot, as gained by Heimdal Security, shows the link within the email that, when clicked, will redirect unsuspecting users to a website that will download the file ‘forsendelse.zip’, containing the executable file, forsendelse.exe.

    • iOS 9 Lock-Screen Bug Grants Access to Contacts, Photos

      A clever iPhone user uncovered a new exploit in iOS 9 (and 9.0.1) that allows a person—presumably with a list of handwritten steps—to bypass the device’s passcode and get into the Contacts and Photos apps.

      So unless you have a bunch of selfies you don’t want anyone to see, or you use an alphanumeric instead of a four-digit passcode, you probably don’t have much to worry about. You can also cripple the exploit by disabling Siri on your lock screen, though you’ll lose convenience in the process.

    • Malware that hit Apple similar to that developed by CIA: report

      The techniques used by XcodeGhost, the infected version of Apple’s Xcode compiler that has caused an eruption of malware on the Apple China app store, are similar to those developed and demonstrated by America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

      A report in The Intercept, a website run by Glenn Greenwald who is well-known for having been the first to report on the NSA spying disclosures made by the former US defence contractor Edward Snowden, claims the CIA detailed the techniques at its annual top-secret Jamboree conference in 2012.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Media Reports ISIS Nuclear Plot That Never Actually Involved ISIS

      There was only one problem: At no point do the multiple iterations of the AP‘s reporting show that anyone involved in the FBI sting were members of or have any connection to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (aka ISIL or Daesh). While one of several smuggling attempts discussed in AP‘s reporting involved an actual potential buyer–an otherwise unknown Sudanese doctor who four years ago “suggested that he was interested” in obtaining uranium–the “terrorists” otherwise involved in the cases were FBI and other law enforcement agents posing as such.

    • Phyllis Bennis on US Bombing of Afghan Hospital

      This week on CounterSpin: The Pentagon has declared the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, a “mistake.” But it will investigate itself to determine how US bombs came to destroy the Doctors Without Borders facility, killing at least 22 people. Doctors Without Borders is calling for an independent investigation—and you would think journalists would, too, since who knows better than they the administration’s history of changing its story?

    • Self-censorship

      It is well enough to condemn the US for bombing a hospital and killing Muslims in Kunduz but what about the Muslim members of a wedding party who were bombed into extinction in a formerly friendly country by the air force of an extremely friendly country?

    • Turkish police use tear gas to stop mourners laying carnations at the site of bombings in Ankara that killed 97 people as officials say ‘initial signs point to ISIS responsibility’

      Turkish police fired tear gas to disperse mourners who were laying flowers at the site of Turkey’s deadliest ever terror attack this morning.

      Two Turkish security sources said ‘initial signs’ suggest ISIS were behind the two explosions which killed at least 97 and wounded 247 more at a peace rally in Ankara yesterday.

      Protesters clashed with riot police in Istanbul last night as they took to the streets to denounce the attacks. And today, police clashed with demonstrators and pro-Kurdish officials at the scene of the disaster near Ankara’s main train station.

      They held back the mourners, including the pro-Kurdish party’s leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, insisting that investigators were still working at the site.

    • The day I met the other victims of extremism: boys brainwashed to kill

      In the mountains of Pakistan I met young men who would have killed me. They would have slit my throat, put a bullet in my brain, caved in my skull with a rock. After I was dead they would have severed my head from my body and displayed it as a warning to all.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Wikileaks Releases Final Intellectual Property Chapter Of TPP Before Official Release

      Last weekend, negotiators finally completed negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. However, as we noted, there was no timetable for the release of the text (though some are now saying it may come out next week). Once again, it was ridiculous that the negotiating positions of the various countries was secret all along, and that the whole thing had been done behind closed doors. And to have them not be ready to release the text after completion of the negotiations was even more of a travesty. Wikileaks, however, got hold of the Intellectual Property Chapter and has released it online.

    • The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared

      Today’s release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn’t survive to the end of the negotiations.

      Since we now have the agreed text, we’ll be including some paragraph references that you can cross-reference for yourself—but be aware that some of them contain placeholders like “x” that may change in the cleaned-up text. Also, our analysis here is limited to the copyright and Internet-related provisions of the chapter, but analyses of the impacts of other parts of the chapter have been published by Wikileaks and others.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Elon Musk Says Climate Change Will Bring Even Worse Refugee Crisis

      Tech visionary warns that countries must do more to combat climate change

      Climate change could create a refugee crisis far worse than the one currently unfolding in Europe, Elon Musk warned Thursday.

      The Tesla CEO gave a speech in Berlin in which he said changes in Earth’s temperature could lead to depleted water and food supplies, thus forcing millions of people to leave their homes in search of resources, the Huffington Post reports.

    • ‘Polluter Interests Have Been Spending Millions on Disinformation Campaigns’

      Janine Jackson: “New Regulations on Smog Remain as Divisive as Ever.” That was the headline on a September 30 New York Times story which balanced what it called “concerns of lung doctors” that smog, or ozone, is a public health threat with industry claims that installing new equipment, in the reporter’s words, “could kneecap American manufacturing and threaten jobs across the country.” Three different industry sources were counterposed with a single representative of the American Lung Association.

      But if the topic is harmful pollution, is the public really served by coverage that centers the views of the polluters? What’s a different way to talk about it? David Baron is managing attorney in the DC office of the group Earthjustice. His article “Smog Kills” appeared recently in Politico. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC; welcome to CounterSpin, David Baron.

    • On Climate Change, Listen to Pope Francis, Not Jeb Bush

      The politician says we should disregard the pope because “he’s not a scientist.” But the pope’s background is in chemistry and his counselors are top scientists.

    • The collapse of Saudi Arabia is inevitable

      On Tuesday 22 September, Middle East Eye broke the story of a senior member of the Saudi royal family calling for a “change” in leadership to fend off the kingdom’s collapse.

      In a letter circulated among Saudi princes, its author, a grandson of the late King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, blamed incumbent King Salman for creating unprecedented problems that endangered the monarchy’s continued survival.

      “We will not be able to stop the draining of money, the political adolescence, and the military risks unless we change the methods of decision making, even if that implied changing the king himself,” warned the letter.

      Whether or not an internal royal coup is round the corner – and informed observers think such a prospect “fanciful” – the letter’s analysis of Saudi Arabia’s dire predicament is startlingly accurate.

      Like many countries in the region before it, Saudi Arabia is on the brink of a perfect storm of interconnected challenges that, if history is anything to judge by, will be the monarchy’s undoing well within the next decade.

    • Report: VW was warned about cheating emissions in 2007

      The Volkswagen scandal—selling 11 million diesel-engined cars designed to fool US emissions regulations—is moving into the “who knew what, and when” phase. Newspapers in Germany are reporting that Bosch (the company that supplies electronics to the auto industry) warned VW only to use the cheat mode internally back in 2007, and that a These findings both emerged from an internal audit at VW in response to the scandal.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Major Papers Reject the Opt-Out Option

      All three papers offered arguments that closely align with the rhetoric of corporate education reform, focusing on the plight of low-income students of color while ignoring the realities of how testing affects such populations.

    • New Yorker Calls Corbyn ‘Childlike’–but Who Are They Kidding?

      The landslide victory of left-wing candidate Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Party leader in the United Kingdom has many establishment types bent out of shape. The Blair wing of the party was literally obliterated, with Corbyn drawing more than four times the votes of his nearest competitor. After giving the country the war in Iraq, and the housing bubble whose collapse led to the 2008-2009 recession and financial crisis, the discontent of the Labour Party’s rank and file is understandable.

    • CBS Analyst Pushes Paul Ryan For Speaker Without Disclosing Ryan Paid Him Over $100K

      CBS News analyst Frank Luntz pushed Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for House Speaker, claiming “he’s got a brain for policy, which is what we need in Washington right now,” adding, “if Paul Ryan says no, God help us.” CBS News and Luntz did not disclose that Ryan has paid Luntz’s company over $100,000 in consulting fees in recent years.

    • CNN is basically begging Joe Biden to join its Democratic debate

      This is quite unlike the rules CNN set for its Republican presidential debate earlier this month. In addition to reaching a poll threshold, candidates had to officially file with the FEC and say they were running three weeks before the debate. They also had to have a paid campaign aide working in at least two of the four early voting states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada). And they had to have visited two of those states at least once.

      Those Republican rules were designed to keep many candidates in the large field offstage. But CNN’s starkly different Democratic rules have seemingly been deliberately designed in hopes of coaxing one potential candidate in particular — Biden — onstage.

    • Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders can’t save America

      Throughout his illustrious career, one of Noam Chomsky’s chief preoccupations has been questioning — and urging us to question — the assumptions and norms that govern our society.

      Following a talk on power, ideology, and US foreign policy last weekend at the New School in New York City, freelance Italian journalist Tommaso Segantini sat down with the eighty-six-year-old to discuss some of the same themes, including how they relate to processes of social change.

      For radicals, progress requires puncturing the bubble of inevitability: austerity, for instance, “is a policy decision undertaken by the designers for their own purposes.” It is not implemented, Chomsky says, “because of any economic laws.” American capitalism also benefits from ideological obfuscation: despite its association with free markets, capitalism is shot through with subsidies for some of the most powerful private actors. This bubble needs popping too.

    • Fox News Doc Defends Ben Carson By Criticizing German Jews For Failing To Resist The Nazis

      Fox News contributor Dr. Keith Ablow is defending Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s controversial remarks that fewer people would have been killed in the Holocaust had they been armed by criticizing German Jews for not having “more actively resisted” the Nazis.

      Carson sparked an outcry after he claimed the outcome of the Holocaust “would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.” Carson has stood by his comments. The Anti-Defamation League called Carson’s remarks “historically inaccurate.”

      In an October 9 FoxNews.com piece, Ablow defended Carson’s comments by asserting, “If Jews in Germany had more actively resisted the Nazi party or the Nazi regime and had diagnosed it as a malignant and deadly cancer from the start, there would, indeed, have been a chance for the people of that country and the world to be moved to action by their bold refusal to be enslaved.”

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Snooper Charter Strikes Back event success

      Earlier in the week we had the pleasure of entraining Jim Killock, ORG’s executive director, ahead of a workshop on talking you MP about intrusive surveillance.

      Jim bought us entertainingly up to date with the current thinking around the still-under-wraps government plans for wide-ranging updates to their subservience powers. Happy to take questions, Jim elaborated a number of points with us, including explaining a bit about what ORG’s plans are, which led neatly into the other half of the evening, but not before everyone had a well deserved tea break.

    • Everything You Need to Know About AOL’s Zombie Apocalypse

      America Online (AOL) will be resurrecting Verizon’s zombie cookies because they are fabulous data-trackers that cannot be “killed”.

    • Obama administration opts not to force firms to decrypt data — for now

      After months of deliberation, the Obama administration has made a long-awaited decision on the thorny issue of how to deal with encrypted communications: It will not — for now — call for legislation requiring companies to decode messages for law enforcement.

    • Turnbull: Don’t assume government email is more secure than private email

      Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull responded to concerns over the use of his own private email server by saying politicians use insecure communication all the time.

    • Chinese Credit Scoring System Smacks Of Censorship

      Rogier Creemers, a China-specialist with Oxford University, told ComputerWorld, “With the help of the latest internet technologies the government wants to exercise individual surveillance. Government and big internet companies in China can exploit ‘Big Data’ together in a way that is unimaginable in the West.”

    • China’s new credit reports are the government’s latest censorship tool

      Chinese Internet users now have one more reason to look over their digital shoulders at the government’s nearly inescapable surveillance and censorship regime.

    • ACLU: Orwellian Citizen Score, China’s credit score system, is a warning for Americans

      Gamer? Strike. Bad-mouthed the government in comments on social media? Strike. Even if you don’t buy video games and you don’t post political comments online “without prior permission,” but any of your online friends do….strike. The strikes are actually more like dings, dings to your falling credit score that is.

      Thanks to a new terrifying use of big data, a credit score can be adversely affected by your hobbies, shopping habits, lifestyles, what you read online, what you post online, your political opinions as well as what your social connections do, say, read, buy or post. While you might never imagine such a credit-rating system in America, it is happening in China and the ACLU said it serves as a warning for Americans.

    • White House Takes The Cowardly Option: Refuses To Say No To Encryption Backdoors, Will Quietly Ask Companies

      Last month, we wrote about a document leaked to the Washington Post that showed the three “options” that the White House was considering for responding to the debate about backdooring encryption. The document made it clear that the White House knew that there was zero chance that any legislation mandating encryption backdoors would pass. But the question then was what to do about it: take a strong stand on the importance of freedom and privacy, and make it clear that the US would not mandate backdoors… or take the sleazy way out and say “no new legislation for now.” As we said at the time, option 1 was the only real option. You take a stand. You talk about the importance of encryption in protecting the public.

    • European Supreme Court: Because of NSA, U.S. Corporations Have No Self-Agency To Agree To Privacy Obligations

      This week, the European Court of Justice – the highest court in the European Union – declared that US companies may not transmit private sensitive personal data out of Europe to the United States for processing as they have up until now. It was a cancellation of the so-called Safe Harbor agreement, where U.S. companies self-declare that they meet certain European privacy standards. But the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) reason for declaring Safe Harbor null and void goes far beyond the cancellation as such – it says that U.S. companies don’t have agency to make any such promises of any kind in the first place, contractual or unilateral, not now, not ever, as long as the NSA operates.

    • Tech companies like Facebook not above the law, says Max Schrems

      The EU’s safe harbour ruling is a “puzzle piece in the fight against mass surveillance, and a huge blow to tech companies who think they can act in total ignorance of the law,” says Max Schrems, the man who brought the case.

      “US companies are realising that European laws are getting more and more enforced. But still, people don’t believe that a court would order Google or Facebook to do something – they wouldn’t dare. Well, yes, they fucking would,” he said, speaking in Vienna.

    • How much money do you make for Facebook?

      How much do you estimate you’re worth to Facebook? If you live in America, it’s a lot more than if you’re a resident of the UK or other countries.

      US Facebook users generate the site on average four times more advertising revenue than users outside of the country, making around $48.76 per year per user as opposed to $7.71, according to market research firm eMarketer.

      The firm predicts revenue is set to rise to $61.06 in 2016 before reaching $73.29 the following year. Non-US users meanwhile, are expected to rise to $9.26 and $10.79 respectively.

    • The node pole: inside Facebook’s Swedish hub near the Arctic Circle

      From the outside, it looks like an enormous grey warehouse. Inside, there is a hint of the movie Bladerunner: long cavernous corridors, spinning computer servers with flashing blue lights and the hum of giant fans. There is also a long perimeter fence. Is its job to thwart corporate spies? No – it keeps out the moose.

    • EU-US Safe Harbour For Personal Data Eliminated

      The European Court of Justice (CJEU) handed down a decision declaring EU-US safe harbour for personal data invalid this morning. It has far-reaching implications for cloud services in particular and may presage increased opportunity for open source solutions from non-US suppliers. Looks like a real gift to companies like Kolab.

    • Facebook: I want out

      Two weeks ago, on my birthday, I decided to check Facebook for birthday wishes because I was having a crappy birthday. It became much worse when Facebook did two things. First, it informed me it had removed an image posted to my timeline based on violating its nudity/obscenity policy — though I had not posted an image, only a link to a post in which I wrote about a new documentary on identity and the gender binary (my link was posted with an NSFW warning). No image. I’ve been around the internet a long time, and I’ve been censored — mostly under inaccurate circumstances — by everyone from the government of Libya to Flickr, feminists and Christian conservatives alike, and Facebook too, when a religious organization campaigned to (successfully) get one of my pages removed on false pretenses.

    • Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads. Hasn’t worked out that way.

      Fake traffic has become a commodity. There’s malware for generating it and brokers who sell it. Some companies pay for it intentionally, some accidentally, and some prefer not to ask where their traffic comes from. It’s given rise to an industry of countermeasures, which inspire counter-countermeasures. “It’s like a game of whack-a-mole,” says Fernando Arriola, vice president for media and integration at ConAgra Foods. Consumers, meanwhile, to the extent they pay attention to targeted ads at all, hate them: The top paid iPhone app on Apple’s App Store is an ad blocker.

    • Stealing fingerprints

      The news from the Office of Personnel Management hack keeps getting worse. In addition to the personal records of over 20 million US government employees, we’ve now learned that the hackers stole fingerprint files for 5.6 million of them.

    • GCHQ tried to track Web visits of “every visible user on Internet”
    • GCHQ’s Karma Police: Tracking And Profiling Every Web User, Every Website

      As of 2012, GCHQ was storing about 50 billion metadata records about online communications and Web browsing activity every day, with plans in place to boost capacity to 100 billion daily by the end of that year. The agency, under cover of secrecy, was working to create what it said would soon be the biggest government surveillance system anywhere in the world.

      That’s around 36 trillion metadata records gathered in 2012 alone — and it’s probably even higher now. As Techdirt has covered previously, intelligence agencies like to say this is “just” metadata — skating over the fact that metadata is actually much more revealing than traditional content because it is much easier to combine and analyze. An important document released by The Intercept with this story tells us exactly what GCHQ considers to be metadata, and what it says is content. It’s called the “Content-Metadata Matrix,” and reveals that as far as GCHQ is concerned, “authentication data to a communcations service: login ID, userid, password” are all considered to be metadata, which means GCHQ believes it can legally swipe and store them. Of course, intercepting your login credentials is a good example of why GCHQ’s line that it’s “only metadata” is ridiculous: doing so gives them access to everything you have and do on that service.

    • Facebook Ads Are All-Knowing, Unblockable, and in Everyone’s Phone

      Sheryl Sandberg’s top concern as she prepares for New York’s largest annual gathering of advertising and media executives this week has nothing to do with ad-blocking software or click fraud. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, can brag to Advertising Week attendees about how the world’s largest social network is largely immune to forces that have sent Internet and publishing companies into a panic. But Sandberg is losing her voice, so her pitch will need to be succinct.

      Between sips of strawberry water at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, Sandberg explains how Facebook has avoided controversies around online advertising with its emphasis on a single account tied to a user’s real-world identity and subtle ads that can be easily scrolled past if the user isn’t interested. What advertisers want, according to a raspy-voiced Sandberg, is “to reach people in a way that feels good, that’s not intrusive.” The argument ignores that Facebook trackers are just about everywhere on the Internet. But because most of Facebook’s 1.49 billion users routinely access the service through an app, the ads cannot be hidden using one of the many blocker tools now topping the download charts on Apple’s App Store.

    • CityNews investigation: Prison cellphone surveillance may have hit nearby homes

      A CityNews investigation reveals Correctional Services Canada (CSC) introduced super surveillance technology in at least one federal institution this winter; capturing calls and texts made from inside the jail, the visitor parking lot and, potentially, passing drivers and residents who live in close proximity to the institution.

      “We understand and believe there’s really been a breach of privacy. These were personal cell phones and personal calls. We’re looking at it from a legal aspect,” the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers’ Jason Godin told CityNews.

      A confidential Sept. 17, 2015 email sent by Warkworth Institution’s warden Scott Thompson to staff at the Campbellford-area prison, and obtained by CityNews, details how the technology captures these conversations.

    • How I hacked my IP camera, and found this backdoor account

      The time has come. I bought my second IoT device – in the form of a cheap IP camera. As it was the cheapest among all others, my expectations regarding security was low. But this camera was still able to surprise me.

      Maybe I will disclose the camera model used in my hack in this blog later, but first I will try to contact someone regarding these issues. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of different cameras have this problem, because they share being developed on the same SDK. Again, my expectations are low on this.

    • “Snowden Treaty” proposed to curtail mass surveillance and protect whistleblowers

      A “Snowden Treaty” designed to counter mass surveillance and protect whistleblowers around the world has been proposed by Edward Snowden, and three of the people most closely associated with his leaks: the documentary film-maker Laura Poitras; David Miranda, who was detained at Heathrow airport, and is the Brazilian coordinator of the campaign to give asylum to Snowden in Brazil; and his partner, the journalist Glenn Greenwald. The “International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers,” to give it its full title, was launched yesterday in New York by Miranda, with Snowden and Greenwald speaking via video.

  • Civil Rights

    • NRA’s Ted Nugent Calls Unarmed Victims Of Gun Violence “Losers”

      National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent said “losers” who don’t carry a gun “get cut down by murderous maniacs like blind sheep to slaughter” in a column for WND, becoming the latest public conservative figure to blame victims of gun violence who are unarmed.

    • Locked Out Of The Sixth Amendment By Proprietary Forensic Software

      Everything tied to securing convictions seems to suffer from pervasive flaws compounded by confirmation bias. For four decades, the DOJ presented hair analysis as an unique identifier on par with fingerprints or DNA when it wasn’t. A 2014 Inspector General’s report found the FBI still hadn’t gotten around to correcting forensic lab issues it had pointed out nearly 20 years earlier. This contributed to two decades of “experts” providing testimony that greatly overstated the results of hair analysis. All of this happened in the FBI’s closed system, a place outsiders aren’t allowed to examine firsthand.

      That’s the IRL version. The software version is just as suspect. Computers aren’t infallible and the people running them definitely aren’t. If the software cannot be inspected, the statements of expert witnesses should be considered highly dubious. After all, most expert witnesses representing the government have a vested interest in portraying forensic evidence as bulletproof. Without access to forensic software code, no one will ever be able to prove them wrong.

    • Saudi Arabia’s troubling death sentence

      On September 14, local media reported that an appeals court and Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence of Ali al-Nimr for participating in protests four years ago. He was 16 at the time. Today, he awaits the execution of his sentence, which stipulates that al-Nimr should be beheaded and that his headless body should be strung up for public display.

    • Saudi employer chops off Indian woman’s hand, Delhi seeks action

      Kasturi, 50, is currently undergoing treatment at a hospital in Riyadh, her sister Vijayakumari told The Indian Express from their home in Vellore district.

    • India woman’s arm ‘cut off by employer’ in Saudi Arabia

      India’s foreign ministry has complained to the Saudi Arabian authorities following an alleged “brutal” attack on a 58-year-old Indian woman in Riyadh.

      Kasturi Munirathinam’s right arm was chopped off, allegedly by her employer, when she tried to escape from their house last week, reports say.

    • UK and Saudi Arabia ‘in secret deal’ over human rights council place

      Leaked documents suggest vote-trading deal was conducted to enable nations to secure a seat at UN’s influential body

    • ‘UK did secret Saudi deal on human rights’: Cables allege Britain approached Gulf State about vote trade to support each other’s election to UN council

      Britain has been accused of backing Saudi Arabia’s election to the United Nations top human right’s body as part of a vote trading deal – despite the Gulf State’s appalling abuse record.

      Secret cables reportedly show that Britain approached Saudi Arabia about the trade ahead of the 2013 election for membership of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

      The Saudi regime has shameful record on human rights and has executed 135 people since January on charges ranging from murder to witchcraft.

    • Matthew Keys’ Hacking Conviction May Not Survive an Appeal

      The conviction of former Reuters employee Matthew Keys on hacking charges this week has renewed focus on a controversial federal law that many say prosecutors are using incorrectly and too broadly to inflate cases and trump up charges.

      The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, is a federal law that was designed to target malicious hackers who obtain unauthorized access to protected computers. But judges have used it in a number of controversial cases to, for example, prosecute and convict a woman for violating MySpace’s user agreement, and to convict a former Korn/Ferry International employee for violating his employer’s computer use policy. It was also used to indict internet activist Aaron Swartz for downloading scholarly articles that he was authorized to access.

    • In The Post-Ferguson World, Cops Are Now Victims And It’s The Public That’s Going To Pay The Price

      There’s a new narrative out there — one that’s being repeated by campaigning politicians and buttressed by fearful news reports. Apparently, the public has declared war on law enforcement. Each shooting of a police officer is presented as evidence that it’s open season on cops. Officers aren’t simply killed. They’re “targeted.” The problem is, the stats don’t back this up.

    • 71% Of Americans Oppose Civil Asset Forfeiture. Too Bad Their Representatives Don’t Care.

      Most Americans haven’t even heard of civil asset forfeiture. This is why the programs have run unchallenged for so many years. An uninformed electorate isn’t a vehicle for change. This issue is still a long way away from critical mass.

      Without critical mass, there’s little chance those who profit from it will lose their power over state and federal legislatures. Forfeiture programs are under more scrutiny these days, but attempts to roll back these powers, or introduce conviction requirements, have been met with resistance from law enforcement agencies and police unions — entities whose opinions are generally respected far more than the public’s.

      California’s attempt to institute a conviction requirement met with pushback from a unified front of law enforcement groups. Despite nearly unanimous support by legislators, the bill didn’t survive the law enforcement lobby’s last-minute blitz. They also had assistance from the Department of Justice, which pointed out how much money agencies would be giving up by effectively cutting off their connection with federal agencies if the bill was passed.

    • H&M features its first Muslim model in a hijab

      Twenty-three year old Mariah Idrissi is the first Muslim woman in a hijab to be featured by world’s second largest fashion store

    • America’s most secretive court invites its first outsider

      A well-known Washington, DC lawyer has been appointed to be the first of a total of five amici curae—friends of the court—who will act as a sort of ombudsman or public advocate at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

      The move was one of the provisions in the USA Freedom Act, which passed in June 2015 as a package of modest reforms to the national security system.

      The attorney, Preston Burton, was named to the post by the FISC earlier this month, which was not widely reported until The Intercept noticed it on Friday.

      Burton was likely selected because he has dealt with many security-related cases in the past, including former CIA intelligence agent Aldrich H. Ames, and former FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen. In addition, according to his own biography, he “has held a Top Secret/SCI level security clearance at numerous points in his career,” which he will likely need again.

    • Facebook ‘unfriending’ can constitute workplace bullying, Australian tribunal finds

      Australia’s workplace tribunal ruled that a woman was bullied after she was unfriended on Facebook following work dispute

    • Absolutely Egregious: Man Jailed For Unpaid Traffic Ticket Gets Ignored Until He Dies In Custody

      This is so terrible. The guy — from a Detroit area suburb — is off his addiction-treatment meds and in withdrawal, and, at one point, lies under his bed, clawing up at it. What kind of person looks at a human being in this condition and just leaves them in their cage?

      During his 17 days in jail, in the final days the horror of his withdrawal, he laid there on the floor for 48 hours, waiting to die — in a cell that was supposed to be specially monitored.

      This guy was not a violent criminal. He lost 50 pounds in 17 days while jailed for an unpaid ticket.

    • Selling Out and the Death of Hacker Culture

      We’ve sold each other for profit and lost what makes us happy.

    • The Jocks of Computer Code Do It for the Job Offers

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Tennessee Voraciously Defends Its Right To Let AT&T Write Awful State Broadband Laws

      After fifteen years in an apparent coma, earlier this year the FCC woke up to the fact that ISPs were effectively paying states to pass laws focused entirely on protecting uncompetitive, regional broadband duopolies. More specifically, they’ve been pushing legislation that prohibits towns and cities from improving their own broadband infrastructure — or in some cases partnering with utilities or private companies — even in areas local incumbents refused to upgrade. It’s pure protectionism, and roughly twenty states have passed such ISP-written laws nationwide.

    • Facebook Hopes Renaming Internet.org App Will Shut Net Neutrality Critics Up

      Facebook is trying its best to defuse worries that the company is trying to impose a bizarre, walled-garden vision of the Internet upon the developing world. As we’ve been discussing, Facebook’s Internet.org initiative has been under fire of late in India, where the government has been trying to not only define net neutrality, but craft useful rules. Early policy guidelines have declared Internet.org to be little more than glorified collusion, since while it does offer limited access to some free services, it involves Facebook determining which services users will be able to access (and encrypted content wasn’t on the Facebook approval list).

    • Mark Zuckerberg tells the UN: ‘the internet belongs to everyone’

      Zuck was presenting a document signed by himself as well as Bill and Melinda Gates, stating: “The internet belongs to everyone. It should be accessible by everyone.”

      [...]

      Google too has been involved in looking for ways to improve coverage in remote areas. The firm’s Project Loon works to provide internet access using weather balloons. Bill Gates slammed this project stating that it won’t uplift the poor. Something has clearly changed his mind.

    • Facebook founder calls for universal Internet to help cure global ills

      Signing on to the connectivity campaign were U2 star Bono, co-founder of One, a group that fights extreme poverty; actress Charlize Theron, founder of Africa Outreach Project; philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates; British entrepreneur Richard Branson; Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington; Colombian singer Shakira, actor and activist George Takei and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

    • Where the candidates stand on Net neutrality

      What is it about Net neutrality that invites such political posturing over a principal that enjoys huge bipartisan support among voters? While 85 percent of Republican voters oppose the creation of Internet fast lanes, presidential candidate Jeb Bush made headlines this week saying that if elected he would roll back Net neutrality rules passed under the Obama administration.

      The Open Internet regulations still face legal challenges, but the biggest threat could come in 2016. President Obama has been a firm supporter of Net neutrality rules enacted by the FCC and a sure vetoer of any attempts by Congress to undo them. But what happens with the next president — and the next FCC? The agency is directed by five commissioners appointed to five-year terms by the president, but only three commissioners may be from the same political party. The FCC approved the current rules along party lines, with a 3-2 vote, but in 2017 the next president will be in a position to appoint a new commissioner who could reverse that vote.

  • DRM

    • Librarian of Congress who made phone unlocking illegal retires today

      The Librarian of Congress wields a surprising amount of power over the mobile devices we use every day. Once every three years, the head of the US Library of Congress is responsible for handing out exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

    • How the DMCA may have let carmakers cheat clean air standards

      It was by sheer chance that the software “defeat device” that allowed Volkswagen to thwart emission tests on its diesel vehicles was discovered last year. The discovery came after a few university researchers tested a group of European cars made for the U.S. market.

      The West Virginia University researchers drove the vehicles for thousands of miles, testing the emissions as they went along. They weren’t expecting to discover what they did: Nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions rates 20 times the baseline set by the Environment Protection Agency (EPA).

      The university researchers reported their findings to the California Air Resources Board, which then further investigated. That ultimately led to the charges by the EPA.

    • RIAA chief says DMCA is “largely useless” to combat music piracy

      Cary Sherman, the chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, has some choice words about the current state of US copyright law. He says that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, rightsholders must play a game of whack-a-mole with Internet companies to get them to remove infringing content.

      But that “never-ending game” has allowed piracy to run amok and has cheapened the legal demand for music. Sure, many Internet companies remove links under the DMCA’s “notice-and-takedown” regime. But the DMCA grants these companies, such as Google, a so-called “safe harbor”—meaning companies only have to remove infringing content upon notice from rightsholders.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Do you need permission to link? Here’s my table attempting a summary of recent CJEU case law

      Earlier this week this blog reported on the latest reference for a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on hyperlinking and copyright.

    • Copyrights

      • Norway’s Pirate Bay Block Rendered Useless by ‘Mistake’

        Copyright holders celebrated a landmark victory early September when a Norwegian court ordered local ISPs to block the Pirate Bay. A breakthrough verdict perhaps, but one with a major flaw as the rightsholder forgot to list one of the site’s main domain names.

      • Pirate Party Runs Privacy Campaign Ads on YouPorn

        The Austrian Pirate Party is running a rather unusual advertising campaign on one of the largest Internet porn sites. Using an image of the Minister of the Interior the Pirates warn unsuspecting visitors that they might soon be being watched, a reference to a new mass surveillance proposal in Austria.

      • Piracy Isn’t Worth The Risk of Prison, Freed Cammer Says

        That urge to be first was what put Danks on the radars of FACT and then the police. After his arrest and subsequent conviction Danks was initially sent to HMP Hewell, a Category B prison in Worcestershire, later being transferred to the low-to-medium risk HMP Oakwood. But despite committing only white-collar crime, Danks was placed alongside those with a thirst for violence.

        “I was locked up with all sorts of people, including murderers, bank robbers etc. I remember one guy who I worked with in the kitchens who had been sentenced to 18 years for killing someone. He got out and within six hours was arrested again for killing his victim’s friend,” Danks explains.

      • Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg—aka Anakata—exits prison

        Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was released from a Swedish prison Saturday, three years after he began serving time for a Danish hacking conspiracy and for Swedish copyright offenses connected to the file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay.

        Warg hasn’t made any public comments following his release from Skanninge Prison in Sweden.

        But his mother chimed in on Twitter. “Yes, #anakata is free now. No more need to call for #freeanakata. Thank you everyone for your important support during these three years!”

      • Aurous Dev Fires Back at “Fearmongering, Babbling” Rightscorp

        Aurous, the music equivalent of Popcorn Time, is just two weeks away from alpha release but anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is already touting a ‘solution’ to deal with the software. Biting back, Aurous’ developer Andrew Sampson says that Rightscorp has no idea how his technology works and accuses the company of fear mongering in an attempt to get more clients.

      • Rightscorp Retains Dallas Buyers Club Copyright Troll Lawyer

        Anti-piracy monetization firm Rightscorp says it has retained a lawyer known for his work with infamous copyright troll Dallas Buyers Club. Carl Crowell, who recently claimed that it’s impossible to be anonymous using BitTorrent, will help “educate” people about the effects of piracy while suing “persistent and egregious infringers.”

      • MPAA and RIAA’s Megaupload Lawsuits Delayed Until 2016

        Megaupload has asked a federal court in Virginia to postpone its legal battles with the MPAA and RIAA while the criminal proceedings remain pending. The movie studios and recording labels haven’t objected to the request which means that it will take at least six more months before the civil cases begin.

10.10.15

Links 10/10/2015: IBM’s Linux-based LC Family, KDE Frameworks 5.15

Posted in News Roundup at 11:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Using open source principles to build better engineering teams

    We become better software developers by observing how some of the best software in the world is being written. Open source has changed and will continue to change the way the world builds software, not only by creating high-quality reusable components, but by giving us a model for how to produce better software. Open source gives us complete transparency into that process.

  • Examining the KNIME open source data analytics platform

    KNIME is an open source data analytics, reporting and integration platform developed and supported by KNIME.com AG. Through the use of a graphical interface, KNIME enables users to create data flows, execute selected analysis steps and review the results, models and interactive views.

  • Events

    • What to expect from PentahoWorld 2015

      This time last year the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog reported on the inaugural PentahoWorld 2014 conference and exhibition.

    • Day 1 of PyCon India 2015

      Day one is the first day of main event. I was late to wake up, but somehow managed to reach the venue around 8:30am. Had a quick breakfast, and then moved into the Red Hat booth. Sankarshan, Alfred, Soni were already there. I don’t know the exact reason, but the booth managed to grab the attention of all the people in the venue. It was over crowded :) While the students were much more interested in stickers, and other goodies, many came forward to ask about internship options, and future job opportunities. Alfred did an excellent job in explaining the details to the participants. The crowd was in booth even though the keynote of day one had started. I missed most of keynote as many people kept coming in the booth, and they had various questions.

  • Web Browsers

    • Subresource Integrity Support Ready For Firefox 43, Chrome 45

      With the upcoming releases of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web-browsers is support for the W3C Subresource Integrity (SRI) specification.

      The Subresource Integrity feature allows web developers to ensure that externally-loaded scripts/assets from third-party sources (e.g. a CDN) haven’t been altered. The SRI specification adds a new “integrity” HTML attribute when loading such assets where you can specify a hash of the file source expected — the loaded resource must then match the hash for it to be loaded.

    • Windows 10: Microsoft’s new browser is a FAILURE – find out why

      Microsoft tried to move users from its infamous Internet Explorer browser to a minimalist new web browser dubbed Edge following the launch of Windows 10.

      But new data has revealed that Windows 10 users are reluctant to make the transition.

    • Chrome

      • Google open source project aims to speed up web
      • Google Seeks to Speed Up Mobile Web Browsing

        Google has announced a new project that could make a difference for mobile browsing. The company has launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP), a fully open source initiative, with the underlying code available on GitHub.

      • Google wants to speed up the mobile web with AMP project

        Google has a plan to speed up mobile Web browsing. The recently unveiled AMP—Accelerated Mobile Pages—project is an open source initiative that restricts certain elements of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to produce leaner Web pages “that are optimised to load instantly on mobile devices.” How much quicker is “instantly”? According to Google, early testing with with a simulated 3G connection and a simulated Nexus 5 showed improvements of between 15 to 85 percent.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Continues Moving Away From NPAPI Plugins

        Firefox continues making progress on loosening web developers’ and users’ dependence on NPAPI plug-ins with a goal still in place to remove support for most NPAPI plugins by the end of 2016.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • At the Heart of OpenStack Evolution

      As it matures, OpenStack’s parallel to Linux is clearer. Linux emerged 20 years ago as a somewhat exotic challenger to proprietary operating systems. Today, it is one of the most popular and widely used OSes. However, Linux still exists in a market of mixed use. It’s likely that OpenStack will be subject to the same effect, becoming a viable option among a number of cloud infrastructures.

  • CMS

    • What’s New This October in Open Source CMS

      A little love, please, for Miami-based dotCMS, maker of Java open source content management system (CMS) software. Just yesterday, it was chosen as one of the 20 Most Promising Open Source Software Solution Providers by CIO Review.

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuCash 2.6.9 Free Accounting Software Patches Serious Bug on Windows OSes

      The GnuCash Project has announced the immediate availability for download of the ninth point release for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

    • CC BY-SA 4.0 now one-way compatible with GPLv3

      Put simply this means you now have permission to adapt another licensor’s work under CC BY-SA 4.0 and release your contributions to the adaptation under GPLv3 (while the adaptation relies on both licenses, a reuser of the combined and remixed work need only look to the conditions of GPLv3 to satisfy the attribution and ShareAlike conditions of BY-SA 4.0).

    • The party is over… but the fight for freedom is ready for another thirty years

      Last Saturday, we celebrated the Free Software Foundation’s thirtieth birthday with a party to remember.

    • FSF’s Nerdy 30
    • VimSpellcheckery

      While I was mass editing the transcripts I used to create the FSF30 wordclouds, I realized I was doing too much manual movery to get to the next misspelled word. In a moment of clarity, I was like “hey, I bet vim has a way to properly do this!” And of course it did!

    • Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 declared one-way compatible with GNU GPL version 3

      Compatibility means that a person can now take a work they received under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0 and then distribute adaptations of that work under the terms of GPLv3.

    • Guix-Tox talk at PyConFR, October 17th

      Guix-Tox is a young variant of the Tox “virtualenv” management tool for Python that uses guix environment as its back-end. In essence, while Tox restricts itself to building pure Python environments, Guix-Tox takes advantages of Guix to build complete environments, including dependencies that are outside Tox’s control, thereby improving environment reproducibility. Cyril will demonstrate practical use cases with OpenStack.

  • Project Releases

    • New Version Of JPEG-Turbo Quietly Released

      While the Internet has been buzzing recently about the new FLIF image format, libjpeg-turbo developers released a new version of their JPEG library.

      Libjpeg-turbo 1.4.2 is the new release and it quietly made it out at the end of September. Libjpeg-Turbo 1.4.2 features at least five known bug fixes resulting in crashes and other problems.

  • Public Services/Government

    • U.S. report highlights positive elements of government open source adoption

      The report released by DHS is definitely worth a read. While focused on real problems and challenges facing use of OSS by the USG, it has very useful insights for governments around the world. It confirms my growing view, as I’ve written previously, that we are past some of the old debates about OSS. Instead, many governments are today increasingly focused on the “how tos” of open source choices; not “whether” to use it.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Open data Incubator: ODINE selected its first round of start-ups

        Seven start-ups from UK, Italy, France, Estonia and Austria were selected to be part of the first round of companies benefiting from the Open Data Incubator for Europe (ODINE). This two-year programme awarded EUR 650 000 in total to the companies, which can receive up to EUR 100 000 each.

    • Open Hardware

      • Eleven Open Source 3D Printer Hits Kickstarter (video)

        ISG3D has taken to Kickstarter this month to raise $11,000 to help take their open source 3D printer design into production.

        The Eleven 3D printer has been specifically designed to provide users with an affordable machine but offers an impressive 22 x 40 x 40 cm build area and is completely open source allowing for modifications and enhancements to be created.

  • Programming

    • Perl 6 is coming soon: What it will bring

      Perl 6, a long-awaited upgrade to the well-known scripting language, has gone into beta, with the general release planned for Christmastime.

      The upgrade went to beta late last month, Perl designer Larry Wall told InfoWorld on Wednesday, and the October monthly release will feature the first of two beta releases of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. There been having monthly compiler releases for years, but the language definition has now stabilized. Wall added, “At this point we’re optimizing, fixing bugs, and documenting, and I feel comfortable saying we can take a snapshot of whatever we have in December and call it the first production release.”

    • PEAR 1.10 Released With PHP 7 Support
    • Couchbase Server 4.0 introduces SQL-based query language N1QL (Nickel)

      Couchbase Server 4.0 is designed to give software application development pros a route to building more apps on Couchbase.

Leftovers

10.08.15

Links 8/10/2015: Manjaro Linux Releases, Linksys WRT1900ACS, FOSS at NHS

Posted in News Roundup at 9:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Developer creates an open source glucose monitoring and tracking app he can trust

    According to Diabetes.org, in 2012 over 29.1 million Americans (that’s 9.3% of the population) had diabetes. Chances are, you know someone who has diabetes and you can help them by supporting an open source project that they can trust. If you are a developer, contribute to improve the code; you can help with documentation, or language so it can be translated.

    That’s the only way any open source project succeeds – through collaboration and contribution; through people.

  • Open Source for Log Analytics – Let’s get serious

    “Making machine data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone” was the main theme at the Splunk .conf2015 last month in Las Vegas. The thousands attending this event are a clear proof of the growing importance and interest in collecting, analyzing and gaining insights from machine data. This interest started years ago mostly with IT related logs but will spread to cover all types of machine generated data. The growing IoT space will make today’s pile of machine data dwarf compared to what else is coming our way in the form of logs and other data generated by machines and sensors.

  • Fears Grow For Safety of Imprisoned Syrian Open Source Developer, Bassel Khartabil

    Bassel sent his letters from Adra prison, a civilian jail in the northeast outskirts of Damascus. Even representatives of the Assad government admit that conditions in Adra are overcrowded and inhumane. The prison was designed for 2,500 and now houses 9-11,000 prisoners. Single rooms hold fifty to a hundred cellmates. Food rations are minimal and prisoners must often pay bribes for sleeping materials. Nearby, according to reports, anti-regime forces attempted to seize the compound.

  • SYRIA: Disclose Whereabouts of Detained Freedom of Expression Advocate Bassel Khartabil
  • Syria: Disclose Whereabouts of Detained Freedom of Expression Advocate

    EFF has joined with organizations around the world in calling for Syria to reveal the whereabouts of detained technologist Bassel Khartabil. Khartabil’s arbitrary detention and treatment by the Syrian authorities have been cause for concern since his initial arrest three and a half years ago. Fears have grown for his safety after he was taken from civil prison to an unknown destination on Saturday. He is one of the five current cases that EFF tracks in our Offline campaign to protect unjustly imprisoned technologists and bloggers.

  • Google AMP: “Instant Articles”-style mobile news plans unveiled – an open source standard for publishers’ content to be immediately in search
  • Google (GOOG) Releases Faster Mobile Web Browsing In New Open-Source Initiative With Twitter And 38 News Organizations

    We’re increasingly living in a mobile world, and Google wants to make it a better experience. The search giant on Wednesday announced an initiative called “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) that makes viewing news articles on a smartphone even faster, the company said at a New York City event.

  • VoiceNation Releases Revolutionary Open Source Live Answering Software. Georgia CALLS is an Early Adopter

    OpenAnswer is built on familiar open source technology like Asterisk, FreePBX, Apache, Linux, PF Sense, SIP and more.

  • Open Source Needs Enterprise Developers

    Open source projects have risen in prominence over the past few years and are becoming important assets to enterprises. A recent report indicates that some 78 percent of enterprises use open source, and two-thirds build software for their customers that is based on open source software.

  • Making B2B Open To Open Source

    The eCommerce software space is a crowded one, with vendors offering any number of ways to track product data. B2C may grab the spotlight with innovation and omnichannel initiatives, and B2B has some catching up to do. But as small businesses recognize the need to adapt quickly to satisfy both their customers and suppliers, flexible software can make all the difference, according to Yoav Kutner.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Proposed Principles for Content Blocking

        Content is not inherently good or bad – with some notable exceptions, such as malware. So these principles aren’t about what content is OK to block and what isn’t. They speak to how and why content can be blocked, and how the user can be maintained at the center through that process.

        At Mozilla, our mission is to ensure a Web that is open and trusted and that puts our users in control. For content blocking, here is what we think that means.

      • Thunderbird 38.3.0 Lands in All Ubuntu OSes

        Details about a number of Thunderbird vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been revealed by Canonical in a short security notice.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Industry Outlook: Open-Source Databases and IoT

      This week, Industry Outlook talks with Pierre Fricke about open-source databases and their role in the Internet of Things (IoT). Pierre has a long history in open-source software. He spent 10 years as director of product marketing for JBoss Middleware. He had joined JBoss Inc. just over a year before its acquisition by Red Hat in 2006 and stayed on until he joined EDB. Pierre first became involved in open-source software in 1998 during his 17 years at IBM. He played a critical role in establishing IBM’s Linux and open-source strategy, being one of seven team leaders whose contributions are still used today. He also spent five years as an industry analyst with an emphasis on Java and Microsoft application development and integration software.

      [...]

      PF: No. “Open source” does not equate to “less secure.” Enterprise open-source solutions such as EDB Postgres boast the same level of security as traditional solutions, including enhanced auditing, row-level security, SQL-injection-attack guard and other capabilities. In addition, better-managed open-source solutions also have fewer vulnerabilities than commercial products owing to the strict reviews and testing process that these types of systems must undergo. Furthermore, the inherent nature of open source—in which the code kernel is available to a large community of developers—means more individuals are looking for potential bugs and problems (an open process that is often prohibited in propriety systems).

  • Healthcare

  • Business

  • BSD

    • NetBSD 7.0 Released With New ARM Board Support, Lua Kernel Scripting

      NetBSD 7.0 was quietly released at the end of September.

      NetBSD 7.0 is a big release for this BSD operating system and it features Lua kernel scripting support, GCC 4.8.4 is the default compiler, DRM/KMS graphics support, multi-core support for ARM, Raspberry Pi 2 with SMP support, NPF improvements, and a variety of other enhancements.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • EU digital policy moves into public comment phase

      The normal procedural step that the Commission takes after the introduction of such a strategy is to seek specific input and feedback—via a public consultation process—for the general ideas and proposals that they are presenting. A public consultation, as the phrase implies, is an invitation to answer a long list of wide ranging questions on these issues. Although procedural, the information gleaned from the consultation will help shape any formal legislation or other actions and regulations that the Commission deems necessary to achieve the goals of the DSM.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Malware Peddling Vigilantes behind Linux.Wifatch Speak Up

      The group also add that Linux.Wifatch was never intended to be secretive and added that to be “truly ethical, it needs to have a free license.” However, the developers did not go out of their way to make the Wifatch’s presence known in the wider community, to avoid detection by other malware authors.

      The group haven’t revealed their identity and contend that they are “nobody important,” while adding that although they can be trusted not to do “evil things” with users’ devices anybody could steal the key (speaking figuratively), no matter how well the group protects it.

    • Government Accountability Offices Finds Government Still Mostly Terrible When It Comes To Cybersecurity

      The government has done a spectacularly terrible job at protecting sensitive personal information over the past couple of years. Since 2013, the FDA, US Postal Service, Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the IRS and the Office of Personnel Management have all given up personal information. So, it’s no surprise the Government Accountability Office’s latest report on information security contains little in the way of properly-secured information.

    • This New ‘Secure’ App for Journalists May Not Be Secure At All

      When I started working as a journalist in Colombia in 2006, “What do I do if I get kidnapped?” was a common topic at parties. In fact in 2007, my brother (not a journalist) got kidnapped in a small town outside of Medellín. The Colombian anti-kidnapping squad (GAULA) rescued him.

      So let’s just say I take an interest in journalist security tools. New apps have the potential to help journalists do their jobs, and stay safe while doing so.

      Unfortunately, Reporta, a new app from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) billed as “the only comprehensive security app available worldwide created specifically for journalists,” sounds like it may put journalists in danger.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • NYT Plays Up Risks to Bomber Pilots, Downplays the Civilians They Kill

      Cooper does her best nevertheless to make the reader empathize with the risks faced by bomber pilots, despite a former flyer’s admission that “if you stay above 10,000 feet, you’re not going to be hit.” Though the mechanical difficulties faced by Yip Yip dominate the story, Cooper asserts that “engine troubles are not the only risk at 25,000 feet.” What else is there? Well, there’s acceleration: “The F/A-18s today require more G-forces than the planes of the Top Gun era, and pilots today pull nine Gs instead of four and five Gs”—so pilots have to make sure they are “not dehydrated or hungover from drinking and crooning the Righteous Brothers to Kelly McGillis at a bar the night before.”

      For comparison purposes, riders on the Shock Wave roller coaster at Six Flags Over Texas experience six Gs–placing the amusement park-goers somewhere between Maverick and Bones on the toughness scale.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • What’s in a Boarding Pass Barcode? A Lot

      The next time you’re thinking of throwing away a used boarding pass with a barcode on it, consider tossing the boarding pass into a document shredder instead. Two-dimensional barcodes and QR codes can hold a great deal of information, and the codes printed on airline boarding passes may allow someone to discover more about you, your future travel plans, and your frequent flyer account.

    • US Secret Service Violated Privacy Policy to Embarrass Congressman

      The Secret Service thought we all needed a reminder that databases of personal information will be exploited for political gain. The chair of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, was leading the investigation into one of the recent cases of Secret Service misconduct. Agents within the service accessed records concerning Chaffetz’ application to the Secret Service (which was not acted upon) and then disseminated that information within the agency and talked to the press about it.

    • Anti-Piracy Activities Get VPNs Banned at Torrent Sites

      This week users of popular torrent sites found that they could no longer access them using their VPN. Speaking with TorrentFreak the operator of one of the affected sites revealed that the IP ranges of a popular VPN provider had been banned after they were used for massive anti-piracy activities. Using a VPN for copyright enforcement is apparently quite common.

    • In China, Your Credit Score Is Now Affected By Your Political Opinions – And Your Friends’ Political Opinions

      China just introduced a universal credit score, where everybody is measured as a number between 350 and 950. But this credit score isn’t just affected by how well you manage credit – it also reflects how well your political opinions are in line with Chinese official opinions, and whether your friends’ are, too.

    • Rise of ad-blockers shows advertising does not understand mobile, say experts

      Apple has made ad-blocking mainstream, prompting fears in the $31.9bn mobile ad market. But those grappling with the problem say the user must come first

  • Civil Rights

    • Rupert Murdoch hints that Barack Obama isn’t ‘real black president’

      Murdoch was praising Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson and his wife on Twitter Wednesday evening when he wrote: “Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide?”

    • Saudi husband is caught groping and forcing himself on his maid after his suspicious wife set up a hidden camera… but now SHE faces going to jail

      A Saudi woman may face going to jail after she caught her husband cheating with the family maid and posted it on social media.

      The woman used a hidden camera to catch her husband in the act, but despite his proven infidelity, she may be the one who ends up being punished.

      The video, which she uploaded to YouTube, shows the man forcing himself on one of the family’s members of staff, while the maid appears to attempt to resist his advances.

    • Tacoma Police Sued Over Heavily-Redacted Stingray Non-Disclosure Agreement

      Despite there being multiple copies of nearly-identical FBI/Stingray non-disclosure agreements in the public domain at this point, the Tacoma (WA) Police Department still refuses to provide FOIA requesters with an unredacted version of its own NDA.

      In late 2014, the Tacoma Police Dept. handed Seattle’s Phil Mocek a copy of its NDA, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to disclose much about the non-disclosure agreement. The only things left unredacted were the two opening paragraphs of the agreement and the signatures at the end of it. In the middle was a solid wall of black ink.

    • Sweden is shifting to a 6-hour work day

      Despite research telling us it’s a really bad idea, many of us end up working 50-hour weeks or more because we think we’ll get more done and reap the benefits later. And according to a study published last month involving 600,000 people, those of us who clock up a 55-hour week will have a 33 percent greater risk of having a stroke than those who maintain a 35- to 40-hour week.

      With this in mind, Sweden is moving towards a standard 6-hour work day, with businesses across the country having already implemented the change, and a retirement home embarking on a year-long experiment to compare the costs and benefits of a shorter working day.

  • DRM

    • TPP Also Locks In Broken Anti-Circumvention Rules That Destroy Your Freedoms

      We already wrote about how New Zealand has released some of the details about the finalized TPP agreement before the official text is released. The one we discussed is forcing participants into a “life plus 70 years” copyright term, even as the US had been exploring going back towards a life plus 50 regime like much of the rest of the world. That won’t be possible any more.

    • [Apple] What is the “rootless” feature in El Capitan, really?

      I have just learned about the “Rootless” feature in El Capitan, and I am hearing things like “There is no root user”, “Nothing can modify /System” and “The world will end because we can’t get root”.

      What is the “Rootless” feature of El Capitan at a technical level? What does it actually mean for the user experience and the developer experience? Will sudo -s still work, and, if so, how will the experience of using a shell as root change?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

10.07.15

Links 8/10/2015: KDE Plasma 5.4.2 Released, Linux Drama Queens

Posted in News Roundup at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • 5 Popular Safety Measures That Don’t Make You Any Safer

    Thus the no fly list was established. It is estimated to have around 1 million names but nobody knows for sure. Keeping the list secret is a matter of national security, so the only way to find out if you’re on it is to be detained in the airport. Or in the air. For instance, in 2005 a 747 flight from Amsterdam to Mexico was turned back before it could reach its destination. The reason? Two of the plane’s passengers were on the no fly list and the flight crossed over US airspace. Well, better safe than sorry, right?

  • Stephen King’s practical advice for tech writers

    Even if you don’t enjoy writing and have no intentions of becoming a professional tech writer, chances are you’ll have to draft reports, mailing list updates, or technical articles at some point in your career. With a few practical tips in mind—along with solid writing advice from Stephen King—you can improve your writing before you start writing. And, with proper planning, you can easily repurpose your content for multiple audiences.

  • Avoiding tap water has become a way of life in Flint

    Outside a taco shop on Flint’s Fifth Street, Estella Walker balances a gallon jug of water on top of the stroller that holds her 3-month-old son, DeWayne. She’s mixing bottles of formula for DeWayne and his 19-month-old sister Vanessa.

    Nadene Strickland sits outside her home on the city’s north side, watching her grandsons play basketball. She still drinks the water. She can’t afford bottled.

    Shopping at the local farmers market with five of her seven children, Tena Fransioli says she hasn’t used tap water in a long time.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • LinuxCon 2015 Report: Shrinking the Security Holes in OSS

      Dublin native James Joyce famously wrote that “mistakes are the portals of discovery.” LinuxCon 2015 keynote speaker Leigh Honeywell grabbed hold of the same theme here in Dublin, reminding hundreds of open source professionals that “you’re going to make mistakes; you’re going to introduce security bugs.” The goal, said Honeywell, who works as a senior security engineer at Slack Technologies, shouldn’t be the all-out elimination of these mistakes. Instead, security engineers should strive to make different mistakes next time around.

    • The perils of free digital certificates

      The current certificate is not cross-signed, so loading the page over HTTPS will give visitors an untrusted warning. The warning goes away once the ISRG root is added to the trust store. ISRG expects the certificate to be cross-signed by IdenTrusts’s root in about a month, at which point the certificates will work nearly anywhere. The project also submitted initial applications to the root programs for Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple so that Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari would recognize Let’s Encrypt certificates.

    • Get Simplified Web Encrytion For Your Website With Let’s Encrypt
    • InvizBox Go Offers Open Source Online Privacy And Security (video)

      Team InvizBox have unveiled a new pocket sized device which has been created to provide an open source solution to online privacy and security.

      The small InvizBox box is capable of offering users a broad range of privacy options, allowing secure connectivity to the Internet from both desktop and mobile devices.

    • New programmer pow-wow for coders paranoid about Android

      DevSecCon is a newly formed, non-profit conference for DevOps and SecOps practitioners, run by practitioners. By creating a neutral platform, it will exchange and create new ideas on how to leverage the best of both worlds and adopt a new mind-set of inclusiveness and collaboration.

    • Cisco disrupts $30 million browser plug-in hacking operation
    • ​Cisco: notorious hackers using Linux cloak earn $30m a year

      Cisco notes that Linux servers were being managed remotely via SSH using root, adding that they were likely compromised systems in Europe and Asia.

    • Linux.Wifatch: The Wireless Router Malware that Increases IoT Security
    • Vigilante Malware
    • Creators of the Benevolent Linux.Wifatch Malware Reveal Themselves

      The Linux.Wifatch malware, also dubbed as the “vigilante malware” has been going around the Internet, infecting IoT devices, cleaning out malware infections, and boosting the devices’ security.

    • Linux.Wifatch Is Protecting Unpatched Routers, Devices

      Today’s topics include how vigilante malware is protecting unpatched routers, HP launches its Open-Source Network OS, Twitter locks in Jack Dorsey as its permanent CEO, and Cisco is driving its investments in network chip startup Aquantia.

      Countless numbers of routers and Internet-connected devices around the world are not properly updated, leaving the devices, their owners and the Internet at large at risk. A new code infection, however, dubbed Linux.Wifatch, is taking unpatched routers and devices a different route, protecting them, rather than exploiting them.

    • Microsoft OWA falls victim to password-pinching APT attack

      SECURITY RESEARCHERS FROM Cybereason have sounded a klaxon over a problem with the Microsoft Outlook Web Application (OWA) that could let attackers swoop in and tag and bag data and documents through the use of APT techniques.

      Cybereason discovered the bug when a customer with some 19,000 endpoints suspected that it was the victim of infection.

    • New Outlook mailserver attack steals massive number of passwords

      Backdoor in Outlook Web Application operates inside target’s firewall.

    • Vint Cerf: The Headline I Fear Is ’100,000 Fridges Hack Bank of America’

      When the ILOVEYOU worm struck on May 4, 2000, it thrust the reality of computer vulnerabilities into the public consciousness in a very big way.

      Sure, computer worms had spread before, but some estimates pegged this particular worm as causing billions of dollars in damage. Entire government departments were crippled. The nature of its spread was unprecedented in scale.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • US Denies WikiLeaks Claims of Plot To Topple Bolivian President

      Bolivia says it is launching a thorough investigation into revelations made public by a WikiLeaks report.

      The U.S. has refuted reports that it planned to topple the government of Bolivia.

      The controversy started after a report surfaced on WikiLeaks that the U.S. government had plotted an assassination attempt against President Evo Morales in 2008.

      A representative described the WikiLeaks accusations as “absolutely false and absurd.”

    • NYT Continues to Obscure Responsibility in US’s Bombing of Hospital

      The New York Times followed up its euphemistic and equivocal coverage (FAIR Blog, 10/5/15) of the US bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, with an article (10/6/15) that continued to downplay the US’s responsibility for the deaths of 12 hospital staffers and 10 patients.

    • Down the Memory Hole: NYT Erases CIA’s Efforts to Overthrow Syria’s Government

      FAIR has noted before how America’s well-documented clandestine activities in Syria have been routinely ignored when the corporate media discuss the Obama administration’s “hands-off” approach to the four-and-a-half-year-long conflict. This past week, two pieces—one in the New York Times detailing the “finger pointing” over Obama’s “failed” Syria policy, and a Vox “explainer” of the Syrian civil war—did one better: They didn’t just omit the fact that the CIA has been arming, training and funding rebels since 2012, they heavily implied they had never done so.

      First, let’s establish what we do know. Based on multiple reports over the past three-and-a-half years, we know that the Central Intelligence Agency set up a secret program of arming, funding and training anti-Assad forces. This has been reported by major outlets, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and, most recently, the Washington Post, which—partly thanks to the Snowden revelations—detailed a program that trained approximately 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year, or roughly 1/15th of the CIA’s official annual budget.

    • ‘Military Intervention in the Middle East Started This Crisis in the First Place’ – CounterSpin interview with Raed Jarrar on the refugee crisis

      Janine Jackson: A recent CNN report said that the worsening Syrian refugee crisis highlights the differences among countries that welcome what they called “desperate migrants” and those that don’t; but if US audiences think that the crisis, some 11 million people now displaced, reflects only on the action or inaction of countries “over there,” they’re misunderstanding the situation. What more do we need to know about this crisis, its roots and possible ways forward? Raed Jarrar is government relations manager at the American Friends Service Committee. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Raed Jarrar.

    • 9/11 and the Rise of Neoconservative Foreign Policy

      9/11 and the Rise of Neoconservative Foreign Policy. For this 14th anniversary 9/11 special program, co-hosts Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips speak with Media Roots journalist and filmmaker Robbie Martin about his new film “A Very Heavy Agenda.” The film looks in depth at the Kagan family and the rise of neoconservative foreign policy prior to and since the events of 9/11. Tune in for a detailed discussion about the development of the US policy driving American Empire.

  • Finance

    • TPP Negotiations Conclude: What Next for the Trade Deal Without a Public Text?

      The Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations concluded early this morning in Atlanta with the 12 countries reaching agreement on the remaining outstanding issues. The U.S. quickly posted a summary of the TPP and the Canadian government has followed with its own package on the deal. At a just-concluded ministerial press conference, the ministers noted that this is one step in a longer process. The text itself must still be finalized and then each country will have its own rules before signing onto it. In the U.S., there is a review period with the full text, so this will be a 2016 issue. In Canada, new treaties must be tabled for review in the House of Commons, so there will be a Parliamentary review.

    • 12 countries strike Pacific Rim trade accord

      Trade ministers from the Asia-Pacific region have reached a deal on the Pacific trade pact that is intended to cut trade barriers and establish common standards for 12 countries, This is the largest trade pact in 20 years and has been a long-term goal of the Obama administration.

    • Users Have Been Betrayed in the Final TPP Deal—Help Us Tell Washington How You Feel

      Trade negotiators from the U.S. and its 11 Pacific Rim partners announced their agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) today, concluding the final round of closed negotiations in Atlanta and marking the culmination of seven years of secrecy. Throughout all that time, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has acted as a de facto representative of the Hollywood big media lobbies in pushing other countries to adopt the most punitive aspects of U.S. copyright policies—such as our over-the-top civil and criminal penalties—while at best giving lip service to pro-user aspects such as fair use.

    • ‘Massive’ Media Hype for TPP

      It is amazing how the elite media can be dragged along by their noses into accepting that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) can have a big impact on trade and growth. If I had a dollar for every time the deal was described as “massive,” or that we were told what share of world trade will be covered by the TPP, I would be richer than Bill Gates.

    • A Solution To Bitcoin’s Governance Problem

      A key aspect of Bitcoin’s value proposition is that it’s an open source protocol independent of any particular corporation or government.

      Similar to other open source initiatives, the software that runs the Bitcoin network is managed and improved upon by a group of volunteer developers.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • State Court Says University Can’t Punish Student For Off-Campus Tweets

      The Appeals Court of Kansas has upheld a lower court’s decision finding it beyond the reach of a university to expel a student for off-campus behavior.

      Beneath this logical conclusion are some not-so-pretty facts. The origin of the lawsuit is a “bad breakup” that resulted in criminal charges for the former boyfriend, Navid Yeasin.

    • Motherboard’s Version Of ‘Valuing Discussion’ Involves No Longer Letting You Comment

      Add Motherboard to the quickly growing list of news websites killing their comment section because they’re so breathlessly in love with reader interaction and visitor conversation. Like The Verge, Recode, Popular Science, The Daily Beast and numerous other websites before it, Motherboard has decided that there’s simply no value whatsoever to having a healthy, on-site local community.

    • Why are students now cheering about the massacre at Charlie Hebdo?

      I witnessed something genuinely disturbing at Trinity College Dublin last night: trendy, middle-class, liberal students cheering and whooping a man who had just given the closest thing I have yet heard to a justification for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.

      It was as part of a debate on the right to offend. I was on the side of people having the right to say whatever the hell they want, no matter whose panties it bunches. The man on the other side who implied that Charlie Hebdo got what it deserved, and that the right to offend is a poisonous, dangerous notion, was one Asghar Bukhari of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee.

    • Scholarship, Security, and ‘Spillage’ on Campus

      On September 24 I gave a keynote presentation at Purdue University about the NSA, Edward Snowden, and national security journalism in the age of surveillance. It was part of the excellent Dawn or Doom colloquium, which I greatly enjoyed. The organizers live-streamed my talk and promised to provide me with a permalink to share.

      After unexplained delays, I received a terse email from the university last week. Upon advice of counsel, it said, Purdue “will not be able to publish your particular video” and will not be sending me a copy. The conference hosts, once warm and hospitable, stopped replying to my emails and telephone calls. I don’t hold it against them. Very likely they are under lockdown by spokesmen and lawyers.

  • Privacy

    • Landmark EU ruling says US privacy protections are inadequate

      Europe’s highest court today ruled that Facebook cannot send personal information on European users to data centers in the US, invalidating a 15-year trans-Atlantic data transfer agreement. In a decision that could have far-reaching implications for many US tech companies, the European Court of Justice said that the EU’s Safe Harbor agreement with the US is “invalid” because the country does not guarantee adequate privacy protections. The agreement allows technology companies to transfer data from Europe to the US, provided that certain privacy requirements are met. According to The Wall Street Journal, today’s ruling could impact around 4,500 companies that currently rely on the laws to transfer data to the US.

    • EU-US Safe Harbour For Personal Data Eliminated

      The European Court of Justice (CJEU) handed down a decision declaring EU-US safe harbour for personal data invalid this morning. It has far-reaching implications for cloud services in particular and may presage increased opportunity for open source solutions from non-US suppliers. Looks like a real gift to companies like Kolab.

    • Interview with Kirsten Johnson, Director of “The Above”

      Kirsten Johnson talks with Eric Hynes about her new film, which documents a military surveillance blimp over Kabul and its impact on the Afghans living beneath it.

    • Adblock Plus to appoint whitelist watchdog

      The company behind the internet’s most popular advert-blocking plug-in has pledged to open up its controversial “whitelist” to outside scrutiny.

    • Data Transfer Pact Between U.S. and Europe Is Ruled Invalid
    • Verizon’s Sneaky Zombie Cookies Now Being Used Across The Entire AOL Ad Empire

      Poor Verizon. Telco executives for years have sat in their board rooms bored by the billions to be made on telecom and transit, jealously eyeing Facebook and Google ad revenue, and desperately dreaming of being seen as more than just a dull old phone company. That’s why the telecom giant recently paid $4.4 billion to acquire AOL, and is now throwing tens of millions at a new Internet video service aimed squarely at Millennials (hey kids, why get Internet video right from the source or a disruptive content company when you can get it from the phone company?).

    • Facebook can be blocked from passing data to US after treaty ruled invalid

      Facebook, Google and thousands of other US companies can be barred from transferring private information about European citizens across the Atlantic after Europe’s highest court struck down a 15-year-old data sharing treaty.

      The European Court of Justice has declared that the “Safe Harbour” agreement, which gives more than 4,400 US businesses free reign to send data about Europeans to American servers, is invalid.

    • Ireland, Facebook’s European base, pushed to act on ‘safe harbour’ ruling

      Ireland has said it plans to investigate the transfer of data on Facebook users in Europe to the United States after an EU court invalidated the “safe harbour” provisions under which it took place.

      It follows a request by Austrian citizen Max Schrems to the Irish data protection commissioner to investigate if there was adequate protection of his data transferred to the US by Facebook, which has its European headquarters in Dublin.

    • EU ruling means Facebook and Google can’t send data to the US

      If you live in Europe, your online life changed this morning. The European Union’s highest court, the EU Court of Justice, has invalidated the legal agreement by which personal data can be moved from the EU to the US for processing.

      The ruling against the 15-year-old law, known as Safe Harbour, threatens the business models of more than 3000 companies that use it to ship data to the US, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.

    • No Safe Harbor: How NSA Spying Undermined U.S. Tech and Europeans’ Privacy
    • Microsoft sites expose visitors’ profile info in plain text

      If you think using secure HTTP would be enough to protect your privacy when checking webmail, think again. When users connect to their Microsoft user account page, Outlook.com, or OneDrive.com even when using HTTPS, the connection leaks a unique identifier that can be used to retrieve their name and profile photo in plaintext.

      A unique identifier called a CID is exposed because it’s sent as part of a Domain Name Service lookup for the address of the storage server containing profile data and as part of the initiation of an encrypted connection. As a result, it could be used to track users when they connect to services from both computers and mobile devices, possibly even identifying users as their requests leave the Tor anonymizing network.

    • EFF joins Nameless Coalition and demands that Facebook kills its real names policy

      Facebook has come under heavy criticism for its real names (or ‘authentic identities’ as they are known to the social network) policy. Over the last year, all manner of rights groups and advocates have tried to convince Facebook to allow users to drop their real name in favor of a pseudonym if they want.

      Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation is part of the 74-member strong Nameless Coalition and has written to Facebook demanding a rethink on the ground of safety, privacy, and equality. This is far from being the first time Facebook has been called on to allow the use of ‘fake names’, and the latest letter is signed by LGBT groups, freedom advocates, privacy supporters, and feminist organizations.

    • Thousands of “Spies” Are Watching Trackerless Torrents

      BitTorrent is a very efficient way to share large files, but not a very private one. It’s commonly known that anti-piracy outfits monitor users through public trackers. However, new research reveals that BitTorrent’s DHT is also full of “spies” who actively harvest IP-addresses.

      [...]

      Through DHT, BitTorrent users share IP-addresses with other peers. Thus far, little was known about the volume of monitoring through DHT, but research from Peersm’s Aymeric Vitte shows that it’s rampant.

      Through various experiments Vitte consistently ran into hundreds of thousands of IP-addresses that show clear signs of spying behavior.

      The spies are not hard to find and many monitor pretty much all torrents hashes they can find. Blocking them is not straightforward though, as they frequently rotate IP-addresses and pollute swarms.

    • Open Rights Group welcomes CJEU Safe Harbor ruling

      Open Rights Group welcomes today’s decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that the Safe Harbor agreement is invalid.

    • Why the CJEU ruling on #SafeHarbor is a landmark victory for privacy rights

      In 2013, Austrian law student, Max Schrems brought a case against Facebook in Ireland, where the company has its European headquarters. He argued that revelations by NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, showed that the NSA were accessing data held by companies like Facebook. As US law did not offer enough protection against this surveillance, his privacy was being violated.

      The Irish Data Protection Commissioner rejected Schrems’ case because the Safe Harbor agreement governed the transfer of data. The case was then referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

      [...]

      The ruling places greater obligations on data protection authorities – such as the UK’s Information Commissioner – as it says that they must ensure that fundamental rights are respected in data transfer arrangements to the US by private companies. It also limits the ability of the Commission to claim everything is OK and persuade European regulators to look away.

    • Safe harbor: abusive data collection and mass surveillance repealed by the European Court of Justice!

      By a decision published this morning, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the highest European jurisdiction, repealed the Safe Harbor agreement. This agreement in effect since 2000, allows data transfers between Europe and the United States under different versions, authorised the processing of European citizens’ data by US companies, with fewer guarantees than those existing in Europe. Max Schrems, an Austrian citizen, has put Facebook on trial since the monitoring by the NSA of his data hosted by Facebook had an impact on his freedom and privacy. The CJEU today confirmed his viewpoint by invalidating the Safe Harbor and held that the European Commission abused its power by approving it. The CJEU also affirmed that a local data protection authority may dissent a European agreement if guarantees granted to citizens were modified.

  • Civil Rights

    • Valencia Woman Files Suit Alleging She Was Punched By Police In Front Of Her Kids

      A Valencia woman has sued the city of Carlsbad and several of its officers over allegations that she was pinned to the ground and punched by police in 2013.

      Cindy Hahn said the incident on July 31 – a day she calls the worst one of her life – was caught on cellphone video.

    • Google drops ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra as it becomes Alphabet

      EVIL-DOING HAS HAD A BOOST. Google is no longer opposing it in its official company code of conduct for new and improved big brother company Alphabet, where employees will be expected to ‘do the right thing’.

    • Second Saudi Juvenile Faces Beheading As Cameron Tries To Justify “Squalid” Deal

      According to the campaign group Reprieve, “Dawoud al-Marhoon was 17 when he was arrested without a warrant by Saudi security forces in May 2012, at the height of protests in the country’s Eastern Province.”

      The campaign group claims that al-Marhoon signed a “confession”, which was used to convict him, after he was tortured. In a press release the group said: “He has been held in solitary confinement, and has been barred from speaking to his lawyer.

    • David Cameron attacks Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology’ – live [Ed: opposition compared to terrorism]
    • Leon Brittan vs Julian Assange

      Indeed, the BBC has decided that, given the accusations against Assange are so risible, it would be wrong for any detail at all of the accusations to be given out. Therefore the BBC has never reported the fact that the allegation they describe as “rape” is that, during the act of consensual sex, Assange allegedly tore a condom with his fingers whilst wearing it (of which I doubt the physical possibility). The second sexual molestation accusation is that again consensual sex took place, but after they fell asleep in each others arms, Assange awoke and initiated a repeat of the sex act without requesting permission again.

      Despite the fact that Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen have given press conferences in Sweden promoting their allegations, the BBC has made no attempt to interview them. The BBC has not reported that, the day after the condom splitting “rape”, Anna Ardin hosted a crayfish party for Assange and tweeted her friends from it that she was with the coolest man in the world. The BBC has not reported that Anna Ardin had invited Assange to share her flat and her bed. The BBC has not reported that Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen only made accusations after the two of them got together and cooked up the story. The BBC has not reported that Stockholm’s chief prosecutor dismissed it as no case to answer, and that Ardin then took it, as Swedish law allows, to another prosecutor, Marianne Ny who has a campaigning feminist agenda.

      The BBC has not reported any of that because it would be quite wrong to doubt the word of victims of sexual abuse. It would be wrong to put them under pressure, or look sceptically at the evidence for their stories, both direct and circumstantial. It would be quite wrong to prejudice possible legal proceedings.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Hey, Remember How Net Neutrality Was Supposed To Destroy The Internet?

      Before and after the FCC imposed new net neutrality rules, you’ll recall there was no limit of hand-wringing from major ISPs and net neutrality opponents about how these “draconian regulations from a bygone era” would utterly decimate the Internet. We were told investment would freeze, innovation would dry up like dehydrated jerky, and in no time at all net neutrality would have us all collectively crying over our busted, congested, tubes.

      And, of course, shockingly, absolutely none of that is happening. Because what the ISPs feared about net neutrality rules wasn’t that it would senselessly hurt their ability to invest, but that it would harm their ability to take aggressive and punitive advantage of the lack of competition in last mile broadband networks. Obviously ISPs can’t just come out and admit that, so what we get instead is oodles of nonsense, including bogus claims that net neutrality violates ISPs’ First Amendment rights.

    • Facebook Will Beam the Internet to Africa Using this Satellite [iophk: "zero-rating"]

      Africa’s current state of Internet access is stark: the lowest levels of broadband connectivity, according to the United Nation’s State of Broadband report, are mostly found in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the UN, Internet availability reaches less than 2% of the populations in Guinea, Somalia, Burundi and Eritrea.

  • DRM

    • FCC clarifies third-party router firmware is allowed — but with restrictions

      A few weeks ago, we covered news that the FCC was considering rules that could ban the use of third-party router firmware. The FCC has issued new draft rules that would prevent customers from making changes to certain radio settings that would allow for operation outside of certain parameters. Typically these restrictions are designed to prevent multiple devices in the same geographical area from overlapping and conflicting with each other.

      The FCC has now revealed more details on these new policies, which could theoretically be read to prevent the installation of all third-party router firmware. The FCC’s initial order specifies, for example, that programs like DD-WRT should not be allowed, which is part of why people have been concerned about new restrictions in the first place. According to the FCC, manufacturers don’t need to lock out third-party firmware — they just need to prevent the third party firmware from changing settings the FCC doesn’t allow consumers to modify.

    • The Stagnation Of eBooks Due To Closed Platforms And DRM

      Craig Mod has a fascinating article for Aeon, talking about the unfortunate stagnation in digital books. He spent years reading books almost exclusively in ebook form, but has gradually moved back to physical books, and the article is a long and detailed exploration into the limits of ebooks today — nearly all of which are not due to actual limitations of the medium, but deliberate choices by the platform providers (mainly Amazon, obviously) to create closed, limited, DRM-laden platforms for ebooks.

    • Sorry, Unix fans: OS X El Capitan kills root

      If you haven’t heard, Apple has locked out root from various file system paths and core functions in Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The new sheriff here is System Integrity Protection (SIP), which reduces root privileges in an attempt to increase security.

      The gist is that no user — not even root — can write to /usr, /bin, /System, and /sbin or debug protected processes. Apple has also removed the ability to use unsigned kernel extensions through boot-time flags. It’s important to note that SIP can be disabled, through the recovery partition, but this will typically be done only for development and testing purposes.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Megaupload prosecutor wraps up arguments to extradite Kim Dotcom to the US

        For two weeks, Kim Dotcom and three other former Megaupload staffers accused of criminal copyright infringement were bombarded by accusations from New Zealand prosecutors.

        To hear prosecutors tell it, Dotcom is the Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman of illegal file sharing. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that the defendants operated Megaupload as a criminal enterprise designed to profit from the illegal swapping of movies, music and software by users. A hearing is underway to determine whether New Zealand will extradite Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk, and Finn Batato to the US. Much is at stake for the four, who may eventually face lengthy prison sentences.

      • Megaupload Accuses U.S. of Unfair Tactics, Seeks Stay

        After the United States were given several days to state their case against Kim Dotcom and his former business associates, this morning lawyers for the Megaupload four stated why their clients should not be extradited to the United States. The U.S. has used unfair tactics to gain an advantage so the hearing should be brought to an end, the Court heard.

      • Google Must Expose eBook Pirate, Court Rules

        Google has to hand over the personal details of a user who published pirated eBooks online, a Dutch court has ruled. The information was requested by anti-piracy group BREIN, working on behalf of a local book publishers’ organization.

      • Happy Birthday And The Problem With The Copyright Office’s ‘Orphan Works’ Plan

        A few weeks ago, we wrote about the big ruling by Judge George King in a district court in California that Warner/Chappell does not hold a valid copyright in the song “Happy Birthday.” The press ran with the story, with nearly all of the coverage falsely stating that the judge had declared Happy Birthday to be in the public domain. As we noted in our post, however, that was not the case. While the plaintiffs had urged just such a finding, Judge King noted that there were issues related to this that a jury would need to answer, and he would not go that far. Instead, he merely stated that Warner did not hold a valid copyright. Many people assume that this is good enough. The likelihood of some third party magically showing up after all of these years and not just claiming the copyright, but having enough evidence to prove it seems very slim. Glenn Fleishman has done a nice job writing up a detailed explanation of this copyright mess for Fast Company, in which he notes the “uncertainty is maddening.”

      • Bat-tastic – Batmobile Protected by Copyright in the US

        Amongst the very old school and traditionalist judgments here in the UK, it is always refreshing to read ones that step outside of that dusty judicial demeanor, and often our friends across the pond in the US show us that even judges remember their youth with fondness.

        [...]

        In applying the test judge Ikuta quickly saw that, as the Batmobile has appeared in many renditions in a variety of forms, it has conceptual and physical qualities. The vehicle has also maintained a sufficient amount of distinct features over the years, even with minor (or more major) difference in some iterations, along with its specific characteristics and features in equipment and technology, making it sufficiently delineated to be recognizable as the same vehicle. Finally, judge Ikuta saw that the vehicle was especially distinctive, containing unique elements of expression through its status as a key part of Batman’s crime-fighting repertoire, along with its very distinctive name. The Batmobile therefore was deemed to be protectable under copyright.

10.06.15

Links 6/10/2015: Linux 4.3 RC4, HP OpenSwitch, Wind River Linux 8

Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Spider scare causes bus crash

    A child was transported to a hospital with minor head injuries after a shock from spider caused a crash involving a school bus and a “driverless” car, according to the Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Department.

    Around 4:15 p.m. Friday, deputies, along with Syracuse Police and Fire Units, responded to the area of 5571 E CR 1400 N on reports of a vehicle striking a school bus.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Adobe Fixes 18 Critical Flaws in Latest Flash Player 19.0.0.185 Release: Update Now

      This is a very tiny application that usually does its thing behind the scenes, without interfering with the normal functioning of a phone, tablet or PC.

    • Incompetence, not Linux, is behind the XOR DDoS botnet

      First, no operating system or program is secure. Some are more secure than others. So sure, Linux is inherently more secure than Windows. But a badly managed Linux server will still be more insecure than a well-administered Windows system.

    • Linux.Wifatch ‘malware’ is actually making routers more secure

      We seem to have a vigilante white hat hacker on our hands, as newly discovered ‘malware’ aimed at Internet of Things devices and certain routers appears to be making these devices more secure. The Linux.Wifatch virus is doing the exact opposite of what most viruses would, rather than stealing user information or holding systems for ransom, it is actually improving security.

    • Linux vigilante fixes your router

      A new form of “malware” appears to have been set up by a Linux vigilante who wants to improve your security.

      Software called Linux.Wifatch compromises routers and other Internet of Things devices and appears to try and improve infected devices’ security.

    • Linux routers under attack — for their own good

      Symantec reports on an unusual “Linux.Wifatch” threat that improves the security of old Linux routers. Meanwhile, a new XOR botnet poses a deadlier threat.

      Linux may still be the most secure general-purpose OS in existence, but as its presence grows in the embedded and Internet of Things (IoT) market, it’s increasingly being targeted by malware. Linux-based routers with outdated firmware (see farther below) and wireless enabled home automaton devices seem particularly vulnerable.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The US decision to send weapons to Syria repeats a historical mistake

      Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East, make things even more chaotic than they were before and expect better results the next time?

      As pretty much everyone who was paying attention predicted, the $500m program to train and arm “moderate” Syrian rebels is an unmitigated, Bay of Pigs-style disaster, with the head of US central command admitting to Congress this week that the year-old program now only has “four or five” rebels fighting inside Syria, with dozens more killed or captured.

      Even more bizarre, the White House is claiming little to do with it. White House spokesman Josh Earnest attempted to distance Obama from the program, claiming that it was actually the president’s “critics” who “were wrong.” The New York Times reported, “In effect, Mr Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment.”

    • Russia’s False Hopes — Paul Craig Roberts

      Russia miscalculated that diplomacy could solve the crisis that Washington created in Ukraine and placed its hopes on the Minsk Agreement, which has no Western support whatsoever, neither in Kiev nor in Washington, London, and NATO.

      Russia can end the Ukraine crisis by simply accepting the requests of the former Russian territories to reunite with Russia. Once the breakaway republics are again part of Russia, the crisis is over. Ukraine is not going to attack Russia.

      Russia doesn’t end the crisis, because Russia thinks it would be provocative and upset Europe. Actually, that is what Russia needs to do—upset Europe. Russia needs to make Europe aware that being Washington’s tool against Russia is risky and has costs for Europe.

    • Media Are Blamed as US Bombing of Afghan Hospital Is Covered Up

      A US-led NATO military coalition bombed a hospital run by international humanitarian aid organization Doctors Without Borders (known internationally as Medecins Sans Frontières, MSF) in Afghanistan, killing at least 22 people—12 staff members and 10 patients, including three children—and wounding 37 more.

  • Finance

    • Prof. Wolff on TRNN: 38% of American Workforce Still Jobless.

      Prof. Wolff discusses discusses why labor force participation is the lowest since 1977 and what’s really needed to stimulate the economy.

    • Why Debates Over the Fed’s Interest Rate Miss the Point

      Sometimes public debates focus on important social issues; at other times, debates distract from them. Disputes over whether the Federal Reserve System should raise interest rates illustrate that second sort. Yes, “serious people” take strong positions for or against interest rate hikes. They sharply question one another’s motives to spice up what passes for mainstream media economic news. But it is not the debate we could and should have, not even close.

      Both sides of that debate celebrate capitalism. They differ only on how best to have government serve the reproduction of capitalism: by leaving it alone, by intervening intensely or somewhere in between. These days they hassle over raising, lowering or leaving interest rates unchanged. The possibility that capitalism – rather than the Fed or interest rates – might be the problem troubles none of these folks. It does not occur to them. Nor is that surprising given the monotonous mantra of academic economics departments and the journalists and politicians trained by them.

    • Developing Countries Especially Vulnerable to TPP Deal – Trade Union

      Developing countries are most likely to suffer from the effects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, Daniel Bertossa, director of policy and governance at the Public Services International (PSI) global trade union, told Sputnik Monday.

      Earlier on Monday, 12 Pacific Rim countries, including the United States, reached a consensus on the wording and subject matter of the TPP free trade agreement.

    • Canada’s auto industry could lose 20,000 jobs because of TPP trade deal, union says

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal could have major ramifications for Canada’s already struggling auto industry, resulting in cheaper vehicles for consumers, but a more competitive landscape for Canadian manufacturers.

      Unifor, the union that represents Canadian workers at the Detroit Three, said the deal would put an estimated 20,000 auto jobs at risk by eliminating tariffs and significantly reducing content rules for vehicles and auto parts.

      Under the TPP agreement, Canada will phase out its existing 6.1 per cent tariff on imported passenger vehicles over the next five years — a move that is expected to lower the cost of Japanese-made vehicles for Canadian consumers.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • How Larry Lessig’s one-year presidency platform is winning over Silicon Valley

      He’s the only presidential candidate that’s been called a freedom fighter and a geek guru.

      In Silicon Valley, Harvard professor Larry Lessig’s following goes back almost two decades and is rooted in his devotion to a free and open internet.

      As Lessig struggles to be included in the national presidential polls and win a spot in the upcoming democratic debates, he’s banking on his loyal high-tech followers to step out from behind their computers and rally around his election and campaign finance reform platform.

    • 5 Ways Donald Trump Perfectly Mirrors Hitler’s Rise To Power

      … where I’m joined by my Cracked co-worker Randol Maynard and comic/activist/word doctor Genevieve Mueller. Specifically, we talk about all of the terrifyingly real ways that, no matter how crazy it sounds, Donald Trump is the closest the United States has ever come to producing our very own version of Adolf Hitler. Here are a few reasons why.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • How a Canadian scientist became the voice of the anti-Harper movement

      As protest songs go, it wasn’t exactly Pussy Riot. Harperman is a jaunty folk song with acoustic guitars, an amateur choir, and a chorus politely telling Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper, “It’s time for you to go.”

      But the five-minute protest song became a viral hit, got its mild-mannered creator suspended from his job at the country’s environment department – and gave voice to the pent-up frustrations of Canada’s public servants who say they have found themselves at the receiving end of Harper’s policies.

    • Social media post leads to 2 arrests, drug bust, seizure of guns

      The Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Office arrested two people Friday after one of the suspects posted video of himself committing a crime to social media, according to the sheriff’s office.

      On Thursday night, the sheriff’s office says road signs were shot on the west end of the bridge on CR 400 N, east of US 31.

    • White kid builds nuclear reactor and Homeland Security offers help

      Wilson, now 21 years old, later won $50,000 at a science fair for an anti-terrorism device he invented that can detect nuclear materials in cargo containers.

    • How Hungary’s Prime Minister Turned From Young Liberal Into Refugee-Bashing Autocrat

      Unshaven, without a tie, the young dissident surveyed the crowd before him. It was June 16, 1989, and 250,000 people had gathered in Heroes’ Square for the reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the failed 1956 revolution. Viktor Orban demanded that Soviet troops leave Hungary. Soon afterward, they did.

      “It proved to be the right sentence, because it was true and came from the people’s hearts,” Orban told me a decade later.

    • Hungary: New Border Regime Threatens Asylum Seekers

      Hungary’s new border regime denies access to asylum and exposes vulnerable people to violence and prosecution, Human Rights Watch said today.

    • British State Viciously Abuses Child Fantasist

      The sentencing of a 15 year old Blackburn boy – 14 at the time he committed his thought crimes – to life imprisonment is grossly inhuman. It is not quite as evil as the decision of the appalling Saudi regime to crucify and behead a child dissident, but it is recognisably a product of the same world view. History books will look back on this era as one of astonishing state cruelty.

    • Racism Works In the Tories

      That is why Theresa May is going today to give a bloodcurdling speech attempting to stir up racism against immigrants by saying they are making us poor and making our society less cohesive. She will even pander to the ludicrous notion that an economy is of a fixed size no matter how many people are in it, with a fixed number of jobs, so “they” are taking “our” jobs. Doubtless she will also outline yet more definitions of thought crime and new reasons to lock up young Muslims.

    • Hillary Clinton wants gun firms liable for shootings

      She proposes abolishing legislation that protects gun makers and dealers from being sued by shooting victims.

    • Rush Limbaugh Falsely Claims That 92 Percent Of Mass Shootings Since 2009 Have Occurred In Gun-Free Zones

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Company hikes price 5,000% for drug that fights complication of AIDS, cancer

      A drug treating a common parasite that attacks people with weakened immune systems increased in cost 5,000% to $750 per pill.

      At a time of heightened attention to the rising cost of prescription drugs, doctors who treat patients with AIDS and cancer are denouncing the new cost to treat a condition that can be life-threatening.

    • Copyrights

      • Greek court says that it doesn’t matter whether the content you link to is lawful or unlawful

        Did you think that the story with hyperlinks and copyright was over?

        Of course it’s not.

        On the one hand, there is a new case currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union(CJEU): GS Media v Sanoma, C-160/15). This Dutch reference is seeking clarification as to how linking to content (leaked Playboy photographs in this case) freely accessible online, but which is communicated to the public without the consent of the copyright holder, should be qualified.

      • Intellectual Property? Why Words Matter In The Copyright Debate

        Language matters. Whether we get to keep our liberties or not depends on whether those liberties are generally named in positive words. The same thing goes for the privileges of corporations.

10.04.15

Links 4/10/2015: Linux 4.2.3 , 4.1.10; MPlayer 1.2 released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Curious about Linux? Try Linux Desktop on the Cloud

      Linux maintains a very small market share as a desktop operating system. Current surveys estimate its share to be a mere 2%; contrast that with the various strains (no pun intended) of Windows which total nearly 90% of the desktop market. For Linux to challenge Microsoft’s monopoly on the desktop, there needs to be a simple way of learning about this different operating system. And it would be naive to believe a typical Windows user is going to buy a second machine, tinker with partitioning a hard disk to set up a multi-boot system, or just jump ship to Linux without an easy way back.

  • Server

    • A gentle introduction to microservices

      What are microservices? Have you heard the phrase “microservices” used in a discussion of modern application development and wondered what it’s all about?

  • Kernel Space

    • The Art of Communicating with LKML

      For most users of distros, the distro bug system is the first line of interaction when something kernel related breaks on their system. This makes sense: the kernel most users are using is packaged by a distro so the maintainers should be the first ones to take a look at the problem. Inevitably though, something will arise such that the solution cannot come from the distro maintainers and must come from the greater kernel community. Sometimes the distro maintainers can do the follow up but there may be a request for the bug reporter or reproducer to contact the kernel mailing list directly. Now everything depends on how successful the person is in communicating with LKML.

    • Linux 4.2.3
    • Linux 4.1.10
    • There’s A Lot Of Exciting AMDGPU DRM Code Brewing For Eventual Catalyst Support

      One of the big items still in the works as part of AMD’s unified Linux driver strategy is that the Catalyst proprietary driver will be isolated to user-space and make use of the AMDGPU kernel DRM driver. Being publicly now in development in a few code branches are changes to the AMD DRM code for beginning to suit more of it to Catalyst’s driver design.

    • Linux Kernel 4.2.3 Is Out with Open vSwitch and IPv6 Fixes, Updated Networking Drivers

      After only 4 days from the release of the second maintenance version of the Linux 4.2 kernel series, Greg Kroah-Hartman comes today, October 3, with news about the release of Linux kernel 4.2.3.

    • Linux Foundation Says Open Source Code Worth $5 Billion

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Ships Plasma 5.4.2, bugfix Release for October

        Tuesday, 06 October 2015. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.4.2. Plasma 5.4 was released in August with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

      • KDE Plasma 5.4.2, bugfix Release for October, is already landing in Kubuntu Wily
      • Kubuntu 15.10 Will Have KDE Plasma 5.4.2

        Kubuntu 15.10 “Wily Werewolf” is being released later this month and it will feature the very latest KDE Plasma 5.4 point release.

        Plasma 5.4.2 isn’t being released until next week but the Kubuntu crew is pushing it early into 15.10 Wily now to ensure it arrives with the 15.10 debut.

      • Randa Meetings update

        I am really not a person who blogs much and its bit late, please bare with me in case if anyone does not like the way article is written or how it is formatted. I really feel good being KDE user since 2005. Officially I started coding / contributing to minor stuff in KDE in 2010. Switzerland is an awesome place and I really liked Randa. Speaking of Switzerland, for me those trains are art of engineering. I would like to thank KDE e.v. and other sponsors for making this event happen.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME’s 2014 Annual Report Published

        For those wondering about the state of GNOME, their annual report is now available.

        The GNOME Foundation 2014 annual report covers their financial situation, their trademark battle with GroupOn, their temporary financial shortfall due to the OPW project, the hack/developer events engaged in, and much more.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Nest Labs advances its Weave home automation ecosystem

      Google’s Nest Labs subsidiary announced more details about the Weave peer-to-peer networking protocol for home automation devices. Nest, which sells the popular Nest Learning Thermostat and other Linux-based home automation products, says it has added Weave to its Works with Nest connected ecosystem program. It also announced the vendors that will support Weave when it is released in 2016, starting with Yale and its “Linus” smart lock (see farther below).

    • Headless box-PC has six GbE ports, runs Linux on G-Series

      Acrosser’s “AND-G420N1” compact headless networking appliance runs Linux on a quad-core 2GHz AMD G-Series SoC, and offers SATA-II storage and six GbE ports.

      Acrosser refers to the AND-G420N1 as a desktop networking microbox, as well as a “cost-effective niche solution.” The networking appliance runs Ubuntu or Fedora Linux on an AMD G-Series GX-420MC SoC

    • OpenDerby Update

      Last year I built a new derby track for my son’s royal rangers group. I used a RaspberryPi with Pidora on it to run the timing system.

    • Phones

      • Five things that doomed the big and brilliant BlackBerry 10

        And being late matters. In a globalised technology industry, hundreds of smaller industries, and their own supply chains, all line themselves up alongside the winners. Being late and going it alone is suicidal. Ask Nokia: it envisaged a ‘computer first, phone second world’ as far back as 2002, when it started Linux development, and devoted billions to being sure it would be competitive when this world came about. But consumers and industry had already anointed a second platform.

      • Tizen

        • [Wallpapers] Tizen Themed Samsung Gear S2 Backgrounds – Vol 1

          Following the release of the Samsung Gear S2 in the US, Korea, Singapore and Germany makets, Tizen Experts present you with custom Gear S2 wallpapers / backgrounds. To celebrate the Smartwatches history, these first batch of wallpapers will have a Tizen theme to them, after all the Gear S2 runs the Tizen Operating System. You can download them directly from our site either using your computer or your mobile device, and then easily transfer them to your Gear S2 Smartwatch.

      • Android

        • Blackphone: privacy-obsessed smartphone aims to broaden its appeal

          Can you hear me now? Not if you’re eavesdropping on a Blackphone. Privacy company Silent Circle has released a second version of its signature handheld, a smartphone designed to quell the data scraping and web tracking that’s become such an integral part of the digital economy in the last few years (and whose results might well end up with the NSA, if the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passes).

        • Blackphone 2: NSA-thwarting Android smartphone goes on sale

          The handset runs a new version of the firm’s Android-based SilentOS, and comes with features including Silent Circle’s Silent Phone app, which offers encrypted voice calls, messaging and file transfers.

        • Android fans have yet another reason to cheer Motorola

          Android fans have a lot of good reasons to root for Motorola these days and the company gave them a brand-new one on Friday. Motorola not only announced which of its phones would be getting upgraded to Android but it also announced that it would actually be deleting two pieces of its own software from those devices to make the upgrade process go even faster.

        • Data indicates that Android picked up global market share from iOS last month

          Tracking mobile web traffic, NetMarketShare computes the market share for mobile operating systems. Based on the data from last month, Android was able to widen its gap over iOS globally. Considering that the Apple iPhone 6s and Apple iPhone 6s Plus weren’t launched until September 25th, the recently released phones accounted for a miniscule part of the data. The new models won’t have a major effect on the results until the figures for this month are released.

        • Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 review: One of the best Android tablets available out there

          Reasonably priced in comparison to its rivals, the Tab S2 with its powerful display and fast processor could be the best Android tablet available in the market today.

        • Nvidia Shield Android TV review

          Overall, Nvidia, Apple and Amazon have a clear strategy here. They want to revolutionise the way we interact with television, and they want to provide ‘capable enough’ games machines that appeal to the mainstream too. Nvidia is going one step further – it’s looking to attract core gamers on top of that with its Shield platform and GeForce functionality. But without all of the required media options properly in place and completely integrated into the highly promising interface, what we’re left with is an enthusiasts’ machine where only the core can really put the excellent hardware through its paces.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Three students jump into open source with OpenMRS and Sahana Eden

    We are three students in the Bachelor of Computer Science second degree program at the University of British Columbia (UBC). As we each have cooperative education experience, our technical ability and contributions have increasingly become a point of focus as we approach graduation. Our past couple of years at UBC have allowed us to produce some great technical content, but we all found ourselves with one component noticeably absent from our resumes: an open source contribution. While the reasons for this are varied, they all stem from the fact that making a contribution involves a set of skills that goes far beyond anything taught in the classroom or even learned during an internship. It requires a person to be outgoing with complete strangers, to be proactive in seeking out problems to solve, and to have effective written communication.

  • Your field’s talent is expecting openness

    Open source social and cultural history is the antithesis of traditional organizational management structures, and, unfortunately, it’s younger. Emotion is influenced by surroundings and norms, and what we learned about hierarchy when we were growing up influences how we participate in business today.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • BSD

    • Call for Testing: tame userland diff

      The full diff follows in the original mail, but it’s probably simpler to just use a snapshot. For those of you who’ve been looking forward to seeing how it handles, now’s the time to find out.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Pipe dream – Debian GNU/Hurd 8 Review

      GNU Hurd – microkernel and part of GNU Project. Hurd means “Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons”, Hird – “Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth. Total recursion! Development started in 1990 (before Linux kernel) as part of plans to create fully free and open source operation system. Unlike the Linux kernel Hurd have a lot of system daemons (you can see it on video) run by GNU Mach microkernel and some specific system protocols. Popularity of Linux lowered Hurd’s priority, but project progress all this 25+ years.

    • Software that liberates people: feels about FSF@30 and OSFeels@1

      tl;dr: I want to liberate people; software is a (critical) tool to that end. There is a conference this weekend that understands that, but I worry it isn’t FSF’s.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Teach, Don’t Tell

      This post is about writing technical documentation. More specifically: it’s about writing documentation for programming languages and libraries.

      [...]

      Let’s get started. The first thing to nail down is why we’re documenting a programming language or library in the first place.

    • Remote-First vs. Remote-Friendly

      A lot of companies are using tools like Slack, Hangouts, and GitLab…

Leftovers

10.02.15

Links 2/10/2015: Qubes 3.0, Linux.Wifatch

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Why your Linux PC isn’t vulnerable to the devastating XOR DDoS malware

      Linux isn’t perfectly secure, but there’s no big Linux exploit story here. The real problem is how many poorly configured Linux systems exist in the real world. Linux isn’t a magic bullet that will make a system secure—it has to be locked down properly, too.

    • Google Chromebooks: The most popular classroom computing device

      In Apple’s place, Google with its Chromebooks have stepped in. Chromebooks are cheaper, easier to manage, and easy to share between students. The low upfront price is a big factor, but there’s far more.

      For example, Google offers programs just for schools, Google Apps for Education Suite; class-specific ChromeOS and Android apps, and Google Play for Education. Chromebooks that come with Google Play for Education range at prices from $199 to $227.

    • Kali Linux: Why Aren’t We Arguing More about Mr Robot?

      In episode 0 of Mr Robot, we’re introduced to our hiro protagonist [Elliot], played by [Rami Malek], a tech at the security firm AllSafe. We are also introduced to the show’s Macbeth, [Tyrell Wellick], played by Martin Wallström]. When these characters are introduced to each other, [Tyrell] notices [Elliot] is using the Gnome desktop on his work computer while [Tyrell] says he’s, “actually on KDE myself. I know [Gnome] is supposed to be better, but you know what they say, old habits, they die hard.”

  • Server

    • Google and NASA are getting a new quantum computer

      The famous Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab is getting some powerful new hardware. A joint project between Google, NASA, and the Universities Space Research Association, the Quantum AI Lab today announced a multiyear agreement to install a D-Wave 2X, a state-of-the-art quantum processor released earlier this year. With over 1,000 qubits, the machine is the most powerful computer of its kind, and will be put to work tackling difficult optimization problems for both Google and NASA.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Kubuntu: Plasma 5.4.2 Ready testing! Come join the fun.

        Today we have the latest Plasma 5.4.2 ready for Wily (backports will not be made until this one has been tested and released)

      • The Future of Kontact

        Supplemental to what we reported previously about the work in Randa [1, 2] there was a session on the future of Kontact, KDE’s personal information manager (PIM). Over the years this tool has evolved into a monster making both development as well as usage sometimes tricky. It’s time to cut hydra’s arms.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Compact, low power IoT gateway runs Linux on i.MX6

      VIA’s 30mm tall “Artigo A820” IoT gateway runs Linux on an i.MX6 DualLite, and offers optional WiFi and 3G in addition to Fast and GbE Ethernet ports.

      Like last year’s Artigo A900 mini-PC, the Artigo A820 runs Linux on a dual-core, 1GHz Cortex-A9 SoC. This time, however, VIA Technologies has turned to Freescale’s i.MX6 DualLite SoC instead of its own Via Elite E1000.

    • Phones

      • Fairphone launches v2 of it conflict-free, upgradeable smartphone

        There’s a company offering a repairable and upgradable smartphone out there and Jack Wallen believe it is just what the world needs. Read on to see if you agree.

      • Android

        • Facebook gives Android a kick in the byte code

          To improve the mobile performance of its social network, Facebook is enhancing Java bytecode on the Android platform with its Redex project, providing a pipeline for optimizing Android DEX (Dalvik Executable) files.

        • 13 of the best Android apps from September

          Coming off the back of the summer holidays always make September a busy month and this year it was no different.

          From useful spam fighting options arriving for Gmail to movie tracking and the launch of a huge repository of online tutorials across a range of subjects.

          We’ve sorted the wheat from the chaff and what follows is the best new and updated apps from September.

          All you need to do is clear a few minutes in your schedule and click your way through the list.

        • Google reveals new Chromecast and Chromecast Audio devices

          Google’s Chromecast streaming media player has proven to be a popular item on Amazon, getting four star ratings and lots of positive comments from Amazon customers. Now Google has announced a brand new Chromecast, and also the new Chromecast Audio device.

        • Hands on: Google Pixel C convertible tablet

          It’s difficult to tell if the new Google Pixel C is a great idea, or an awful one. It feels like a greatest hits list of Windows 8 convertible failures. It’s a clamshell, and the tablet is connected to the keyboard via magnets. But to open it or close it, you have to pull it apart and reconnect it. You can also flip the tablet upright and stick the keyboard to the back of it, though it makes the tablet thicker and heavier than you may like. The entire converting process is messy. Google tries to cover it all up with a beautiful aluminum design and smooth hinges that adjust angle easily. But will it be fun to use every day? I’m not so sure.

        • Google announces the LG Nexus 5X and Huawei Nexus 6P; pre-orders start today

          Google has officially taken the wraps off its new flagship smartphone lineup. In keeping with the current smartphone release trends, Google is announcing two devices today: the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P. The 5X is made by LG, and the 6P is made by Huawei. The Nexus 5X starts at $379, and the 6P starts at $499, and both phones will ship later this month. Pricing for other territories is starting to dribble in—the Nexus 5X and 6P will begin at £339 and £449 respectively in the UK—but we’ll update the article with more complete information as it’s made available.

        • Google announces the new Chromecast and Chromecast Audio

          The new Chromecast has a disk-like design, a departure from the original’s dongle construction. Its improved internals should also make streaming easier and faster. Now featuring three antennas, it supports 5GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi for faster connectivity and heavier formats like 1080p. While the new Chromecast handles video and game streaming, the Chromecast Audio device will handle streaming music or podcasts. The new Chromecast plugs into a device with HDMI; Audio uses both optical and headphone jacks to plug into speakers.

        • Huawei’s first Android Wear watch is a beautiful yet basic timepiece

          Huawei isn’t exactly the first company that comes to mind when you think of stylish connected devices. The Chinese manufacturer has delved into wearables with its TalkBand series, but those were slow to come to the US and their fitness tracker-meets-Bluetooth-headset capabilities were peculiar. Now Huawei wants to test the waters of Google’s wearable OS with its new smartwatch, simply dubbed the Huawei Watch, and it’s a solid first attempt at Android Wear.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Apache Foundation retains informal vibe to manage $1m of open-source projects

    The Apache open-source community gathered at its annual conference in Europe this week to collaborate on new projects to drive the future of the web and cloud ecosystems, with a handful of new projects under incubation.

  • Seize the opportunity to explain open source

    Kids have an insatiable appetite for knowledge. I would estimate that all of us with children have had them go through a phase of asking “Why?” constantly. In truth, it often comes at the most inconvenient moment for a parent; like when the world is literally going to explode unless your child puts down the green marker pen, and instead of doing it, they just look up at you and ask “Why?” I was no different. I went through the “Why?” phase. My daughter has been through it and my nephew is going through it right now.

  • AWS launches a managed Elasticsearch service
  • Amazon launches managed Elasticsearch service
  • AWS debuts Elasticsearch Search, its distributed search and analytics engine
  • Amazon flings open source Elasticsearch at Big Data’s cloud
  • New Amazon Elasticsearch service eases setup, with exceptions
  • Amazon Adds Open Source Elasticsearch Platform to AWS Cloud

    Elasticsearch is a Java-based open source framework for searching textual documents on a massive scale. It is designed to be highly scalable and compatible with cluster-based distributed-computing infrastructure.

  • IBM and EMC team up: There’s no “I” in open source

    Sometimes when you are distracting the signal from the noise, you get an exclusive. Today theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, got the full story on the EMC and IBM partnership to work in an open-source environment to make Hadoop more accessible to the enterprise.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Is Much Better than Any Other Browser and Here’s Why

        We often read about comparative tests between browsers and we see that Google Chrome or Opera are extremely fast, or that some other browser gets really good scores in rendering, and so on. The truth is that none of that really matters when you are using browsers in the real world, and in the real world Firefox shines and it’s head and shoulders above everything else.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • The return of TryStack, life as a PTL, and more OpenStack news

      Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud?

    • A Brief Comparison of Mesos and Kubernetes

      The recent announcement of Mesos on Windows means developers and organizations that work between Linux and Windows platforms may use their own tools without requiring heavy resource management. Those working with the Google Cloud Engine may prefer working with Kubernetes, while people accustomed to Microsoft Azure may enjoy the Mesosphere workflow pipeline. Each has their own strengths and shortcomings, though the gap between stack management services lessens as more technology is brought to other platforms.

    • MapR Technologies Unveils In-Hadoop Document Database

      MapR integrates Web-scale enterprise storage and real-time database management and adds native JSON support to MapR-DB, its NoSQL database.

  • Databases

    • Pivotal Aims at Oracle Database Business with Open Source Tech

      Software company Pivotal is taking on Oracle’s traditional database business with its latest effort to advance open source. The company is contributing both HAWQ advanced SQL on Hortonworks’ Hadoop analytics and MADlib machine learning technologies to The Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • If Drupal were a band it would be Rush

      Getting my clients’ developers and sysadmins to stick to all of the documented processes I’ve set up for them.

      I have years of experience implementing Drupal-based solutions, so I have a rather solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t. But some folks without any experience with Drupal try to shoehorn it into incompatible environments. I do my best to explain all of this and why to ensure that, when I’m gone, folks can take all of my wiki documentation and run with it (use it and update it as necessary).

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • What do you have to say? Share it at LibrePlanet 2016

      LibrePlanet 2016 is coming! Next year’s conference will be held **March 19-20, 2016 in the Boston area**. The call for proposals is open now, until November 16th. General registration and exhibitor registration will open later in October.

    • Chicago GNU/Linux talk on Guix retrospective

      Friends… friends! I gave a talk on Guix last night in Chicago, and it went amazingly well. That feels like an undersell actually; it went remarkably well. There were 25 people, and apparently there was quite the waitlist, but I was really happy with the set of people who were in the room. I haven’t talked about Guix in front of an audience before and I was afraid it would be a dud, but it’s hard to explain the reaction I got. It felt like there was a general consensus in the room: Guix is taking the right approach to things.

  • Public Services/Government

    • EC to increase open source for software development

      The European Commission aims to primarily use open source tools for developing software that is distributed publicly, shows an overview on open source adoption that was presented last week by the EC’s Directorate General of Informatics (DIGIT) at a conference in Tampere (Finland). Already much of the EC’s own software is developed using open source. However, over the next 3 years, DIGIT will push to make ‘open source first’ the target for all the new EC software development projects.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Most Popular Programming Languages In The IT industry

      Programmers are always in high demand these days for jobs, especially if they have fluency in coding language. Learning programming in various languages for engineers is a no-brainer, but some basic understanding of the languages can be invaluable to anyone, even if you’re not looking forward to becoming a master coder.

    • PHPUnit 5.0
    • PHP version 5.5.30 and 5.6.14

      RPM of PHP version 5.6.14 are available in remi repository for Fedora ≥ 21 and remi-php56 repository for Fedora ≤ 20 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).

Leftovers

10.01.15

Links 1/10/2015: LFS 7.8, Calculate Linux 15 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Type of Documentation Open Source Needs

    I used to write manuals, so no doubt I consider documentation more important than most users. But whatever the reason, I am increasingly convinced that if desktop Linux applications are ever going to receive the attention they deserve, they need not only to have documentation, but to have the right sort as well.

  • Transparency with Open Source

    In a recent survey I conducted of government departments’ use and understanding of FOSS, I found that most officers are aware of open source. However, I also found that officers have a limited appreciation of the principles of transparency that open source software is based on. They are aware that FOSS is a low-cost, basically free, alternative to proprietary software, but are unaware of the strong intangible benefits it provides, such as those of process transparency.

  • How open source found me

    So open source chose me. It was the right fit for science and discovery, and so it just happened. I can’t take credit for any of that. But it’s not the reason why I decided to work in open source.

  • Yahoo’s Open Source Omid Project Brings Scalable Transaction Processing To HBase

    For Yahoo, the main benefit of open sourcing a project like Omid is that many of the community’s improvements will directly help it improve its own service. That’s something that held true for Hadoop, and the company hopes to replicate this success with projects like Omid.

  • Teradata Accelerates Roadmap for Open Source Presto
  • Teradata’s open source connect
  • Facebook and Teradata on Apache Presto and the disruption of open source

    In the nearly two years since going open source, Presto has grown from an internal Facebook project into a platform that’s used by likes of Airbnb, Dropbox and Netflix to process data more rapidly.

  • Should research on vehicle software be hidden from the public?

    The US Department of Transportation (DOT) says security researchers tinkering with vehicle software shouldn’t be allowed to go public with their findings. The agency “is concerned that there may be circumstances in which security researchers may not fully appreciate the potential safety ramifications” if their findings are released in the wild.

  • DHS Funds Project For Open Source ‘Invisible Clouds’

    Cloud Security Alliance and Waverley Labs to build software-defined perimeter (SDP) to protect cloud and critical infrastructure from DDoS attacks.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Mirantis 7 Fuels OpenStack Kilo With Liberty

      Mirantis has emerged in recent years as one of the leading vendors and contributors to the open-source OpenStack cloud platform. Today Mirantis is releasing its OpenStack 7.0 distribution, which bundles its Fuel toolkit for cloud deployment and management alongside common OpenStack components.

    • Transwarp Technologies uses open source and non-proprietary Hadoop core

      Transwarp offers several proprietary products that are built upon a Hadoop core. What’s unique about this Hadoop core is that it is open source and non-proprietary. Transwarp Data Hub is the number one Hadoop distribution available in China; it’s specific to customer demands. This distribution makes it easy for the company’s customers to transition their legacy applications from old infrastructure to new infrastructure. This is done by a single engine layer on top of a Hadoop core.

    • One-click installs: Moving to simplicity with Hadoop

      EMC Cloud Solutions always seems to be on the horizon of producing easy solutions. In a smart partnership with BlueData, Inc., it has been able to combine its abilities to deliver customers one-click solutions to Hadoop.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Brno will host LibreOffice Conference 2016!

      So I can finally share publicly that Brno will host LibreOffice Conference 2016. After GUADEC 2013 and Akademy 2014, it’s the third major desktop conference that will take place in Brno. The venue will be the campus of Faculty of Information Technologies of Brno University of Technology which is one of the major computer science universities in the country with a lot of open source participation. That’s also where GUADEC 2013 and DevConf.cz 2015 took place.

    • LibreOffice Conference 2015
    • LibreOffice Online – LibreOffice Conference 2015
    • Apache OpenOffice: Not Dead Yet

      It’s taken a year, but Apache OpenOffice finally seems to be moving forward. However, whether the progress will be enough to make the project a success remains impossible to predict.

    • OpenOffice 4.1.2 Teased, LibO Conference Wrap-up

      Apache OpenOffice has been practically declared dead by many while others suggest folding back into LibreOffice. It’s true the last release was a year ago, but release manager Andrea Pescetti recently blogged OpenOffice 4.1.2 is right around the corner. The LibreOffice Conference wrapped up Monday and a couple of attendees blogged of their experiences. Elsewhere, Jesse Smith summarized the current state of Linux touch desktops and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols said there will never be a year of the Linux desktop.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • FSF, Conservancy publish principles for community-oriented GPL enforcement

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced publication of “The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement,” co-authored with the Software Freedom Conservancy. The document lays out the principles that both organizations follow when they receive reports that a company is violating copyleft terms like the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Open data initiatives: create your own success

        Open data initiatives should actively create their own successes. Instead of publishing everything they can, Cities should investigate which data can actually be used to solve a problem, Albert Meijer, Professor of Public Innovation at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said in an interview with the Dutch centre of expertise Open Overheid.

  • Programming

    • Dennis M.Ritchie – The father of the “C” programming language

      Dennis is a key developer of the UNIX operating system, and co-author of the book “The C Programming Language”. He worked along with Ken Thompson (A scientist who wrote the original UNIX). Later he developed a collaboration on the C programming language with Brian Kernighan and they were known together as K&R (Kernighan & Ritchie). Dennis Ritchie had an important contribution to UNIX which was that UNIX ported to different machines and platforms. His ideas still live on, at the center of modern operating systems design, in almost all new programming languages, and in every bit of open systems.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • The Global Innovation Index 2015

      The report, which looks like it was a lot of work (over 450 pages and 79 variables), is a comprehensive indexing exercise. The UK ranks second, having risen from tenth in 2011; Switzerland again is number one.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • MSNBC’s Chris Hayes And Al Gore Debunk Latest Defeatist Arguments Against Climate Action

      AL GORE: Of course, there are at least two big flaws in that argument. First of all, we can create jobs by taking on this challenge. And we can create jobs that cannot be outsourced, jobs like refurbishing buildings to make them energy efficient, installing solar panels on rooftops so individuals can have lower electricity bills. There are tens of millions of jobs in this, and it’s one of the few areas in our economy where the jobs are growing in number fairly rapidly. Eighty-eight percent growth in green jobs year over year over the past year. And secondly, since when did the United States abandon its traditional world leadership role? Especially at a time when just this past week the president of China says “Okay, we’re going to adopt a cap and trade program and we’re reducing our CO2 emissions and we want to create jobs in solar and wind and efficiency.” So the rest of the world still does look to the United States for leadership. This is the most serious global challenge we’ve ever faced. No other country can play the role that the U.S. can play.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Rifkind and Straw: Guilty as Hell but Broke No Rules

      It is evidence of what a sewer Westminster is, that the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner has ruled that Straw and Rifkind broke no rules. The BBC and Sky are full of smug reporters telling us the two are “vindicated”.

      They are not vindicated, they are disgusting.

      What is revealed is that it is absolutely the norm for Tory and Blairite MPs to be firmly in the pockets of corporations, looking after corporate interests and receiving huge slabs of cash. Straw and Rifkind were just behaving like greedy grasping unprincipled bastards within the rules. How is that a vindication?

    • How SPN “Think Tanks” Will Spin ALEC’s 2016 Agenda

      This week, a shadowy network of state-based, right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups will convene with Koch operatives and other big donors in Grand Rapids, Michigan to coordinate their 2016 agenda for all 50 states.

      The State Policy Network (SPN) is a network of state-branded groups, like the Civitas Institute in North Carolina and the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, which appear to be independent yet actually are operating from the same national playbook. SPN plays a key role in driving the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) agenda, particularly by providing academic-like cover for ALEC’s corporate-friendly policies.

    • Marginalizing the Momentum of the BDS Movement

      …New York Times virtually ignores the movement’s momentum.

    • Corbyn Kneeling Story A Media Invention

      If Jeremy Corbyn sticks to his guns, and just goes along and shows normal respect, I have no doubt at all the Queen will carry on completely unfazed. She is not stupid, is very well aware that a significant number of British people are republicans, and is not interested in making people uncomfortable. She will expect so long as she is monarch, Jeremy Corbyn to work as prescribed within the forms of government – just as I organised State Visits to the very best of my ability. But personal displays of obsequiousness are not of importance to the Queen; they are rather the obsession of the pathetically servile Guardian and other media.

  • Privacy

    • Update for VeraCrypt, new flaws in TrueCrypt

      Recently TrueCrypt has been in the news again, because of a couple of new critical security issues that were found for its Windows version. You can read more in these articles at Engadget, Threatpost and Extremetech. Windows computers with TrueCrypt installed can be taken over completely by a non-privileged user, and the computer does not even have to have mounted any TrueCrypt container.

  • Civil Rights

    • More Truth About British Torture

      We cannot undo the physical and mental damage of all the torture.

      [...]

      The reason Shaker has been detained longer than any other British resident is that he was tortured with MI6 personnel directly in the room, as opposed to waiting outside. If the British establishment were not totally corrupt, his return to the UK would finally make it impossible to avoid prosecutions over torture, up to and including Dearlove, Straw and Blair.

    • Dadri: Mob kills man, injures son over ‘rumours’ that they ate beef

      A 50-year-old man, Mohammad Akhlaq, was beaten to death and his 22-year-old son severely injured on Monday night in UP’s Dadri, allegedly by residents of Bisara village, after rumours spread in the area about the family storing and consuming beef, police said.

    • The revolutionary act of telling the truth

      George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

      These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatised and illusion legitimised. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.

      Wondrous technology has become both our friend and our enemy. Every time we turn on a computer or pick up a digital device – our secular rosary beads – we are subjected to control: to surveillance of our habits and routines, and to lies and manipulation.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Can the State automatically acquire ownership of your copyright? In South Africa this may become the case

        Have you ever come across a copyright law that provides that the State automatically acquires ownership of copyright in a certain work upon death of the relevant owner?

      • It could only happen in America: PETA litigates over macaque selfie

        Conferring legal personality to animals gives rise to a number of problematic issues. For example, should animals also have criminal responsibility? As regards ownership of property, there are obvious problems with how that ownership can be balanced with third party interests; how to decide which charity or other body would manage the animal’s ownership on its behalf and in what way? Perhaps these problems can be overcome if one considers how common interests can be represented before the Courts by unincorporated associations, how children’s property can be managed by trusts or how a concept of guardianship might be deployed.

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