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12.13.14

Links 13/12/2014: Android Wear “Lollipop”, European Commission and FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 6:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Marking HTTP As Non-Secure

        We, the Chrome Security Team, propose that user agents (UAs) gradually change their UX to display non-secure origins as affirmatively non-secure. We intend to devise and begin deploying a transition plan for Chrome in 2015.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.2.8 and Other Must-have Apps

      The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.2.8, the final update to the 4.2 branch. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols brags on his favorite Linux applications and Chema Martin says “Fedora 21 absolutely rocks.” And finally today, Chris Hoffman said “2014 shattered the myth of Linux impenetrability.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Introductory tasks for new GNUnet hackers

      We sometimes get requests for easy tasks to get started and join the GNUnet hacker community. However, it is often difficult for potential new contributors which areas they might be able to contribute to, especially as not all tasks are suitable for people that are just starting to work with GNUnet.

    • GCC Has Been Ported To The Visium Architecture

      Never heard of Visium before? Neither have we, but it’s yet another platform where GCC can serve as the code compiler. Eric Botcazou of AdaCore explained Visium as “a 32-bit RISC architecture with an Extended Arithmetic Module implementing some 64-bit operations and an FPU designed for embedded systems…The Visium is a classic 32-bit RISC architecture whose branches have a delay slot and whose arithmetic and logical instructions all set the flags, and they comprise the moves between GP registers (which are inclusive ORs under the hood in the traditional RISC fashion).”

  • Public Services/Government

    • The European Commission Is Looking to Update Its Open Source Policy

      The European Commission is working to upgrade open source policy so that developers have a much easier time to contribute to upstream projects, by removing some of the current constraints.

    • European Commission Finally Engaging with Open Source?

      Earlier this year, I wrote about the European Commission’s stunning incompetence in procuring desktop software: it actually admitted that it was in a state of “effective captivity with Microsoft”, and that it wasn’t really going to try to do anything about it. Fortunately, a recent article on the Commission’s “Joinup” site, by Gijs Hillenius, paints a rather brighter picture as far as the server side is concerned:

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • QEMU, FFMPEG guru unleashes JPEG-slaying graphics compressor

      Bellard – who is known for creating the QEMU virtualization hypervisor and the FFMPEG multimedia libraries, among other achievements – says the new format, called Better Portable Graphics (BPG), is designed to replace JPEG “when quality or file size is an issue.”

Leftovers

  • Security

    • DDoS of unprecedented scale ‘stops Sweden working’. The target? A gaming site

      Much of Sweden’s fixed-line broadband became collateral damage as a result of a DDoS attack on a mystery gaming site this week.

      While DDoS attacks are par for the course for most online businesses these days, the vast majority of these attacks don’t go on to affect the broadband connections of an entire country. But that’s what happened to customers of Telia, Sweden’s largest ISP, for 45 minutes on Tuesday night and then again intermittently throughout Wednesday afternoon and evening.

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Now at the Sands Casino: An Iranian Hacker in Every Server

      Most gamblers were still asleep, and the gondoliers had yet to pole their way down the ersatz canal in front of the Venetian casino on the Las Vegas Strip. But early on the chilly morning of Feb. 10, just above the casino floor, the offices of the world’s largest gaming company were gripped by chaos. Computers were flatlining, e-mail was down, most phones didn’t work, and several of the technology systems that help run the $14 billion operation had sputtered to a halt.

    • Iranian hackers used Visual Basic malware to wipe Vegas casino’s network

      Stop us if this sounds familiar: a company executive does something that makes a foreign government’s leadership upset. A few months later, hackers break into the company’s network through a persistent cyber attack and plant malware that erases the contents of hard drives, shuts down e-mail servers and phone systems, and brings operations to a screeching halt.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • BBC writer Thom Phipps advocates the murder of Julian Assange

      Public executions exist in Saudia Arabia, as do police death squads in Kenya. Public executions and death squads are part of this country’s past too. Most of us are happy to keep such barbaric behaviours squarely in the past and through history many have given their lives for the recognition of human rights and the improvement of the human condition. Presumption of Innocence, Rule of Law, Protection of Life and Freedom we all value and take for granted.

      You would not therefore expect the British Broadcasting Corporation to employ Mr Phipps in writing a comedy about Julian Assange when the former has publicly advocated for the public extrajudicial assassination of the latter.

    • Ben Miller to star in BBC4 Assange-inspired comedy Asylum

      Written by Thom Phipps and Peter Bowden, the comedy is part of a BBC season next year called Taking Liberties, celebrating 800 years of Magna Carta and exploring democracy in the run-up to the general election.

    • Hayden: No One Ever Warned Us Against Overreacting to 9/11

      A damning admission from a former head of the CIA and NSA

    • Anti-NSA protesters barge into Peter Thiel speech

      Protesters angry about the NSA spying programs and recent controversial police shootings interrupted a speech given by PayPal founder Peter Thiel at UC Berkeley on Wednesday.

    • Dear Peter Thiel: This is what disruption looks like

      A speech by the PayPal co-founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel at University of California Berkeley ended abruptly Wednesday night when a crowd protesting the recent deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police entered the lecture hall and overran the stage.

    • BERKELEY PROTESTS SHUT DOWN PETER THIEL SPEECH

  • Transparency Reporting

    • John Cusack visits Assange

      Hollywood actor John Cusack is the latest supporter to visit WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in his continued stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy.

      The American star joined US activist Daniel Ellsberg and Indian-born author and activist Arundhati Roy for a meeting inside the embassy in London.

      WikiLeaks said the three were marking the fourth anniversary of Assange being in “detention” without charge, as well as commenting on the round-the-clock police presence outside the embassy.

    • John Cusack visits Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in his Ecuadorian Embassy bolthole
    • ‘Assange case – a witch-hunt by Swedish govt pressed by US’

      The US, the UK, and Sweden feel threatened by the WikiLeaks data release in 2010, so they work in tandem to keep Julian Assange locked up in London in fear of being sent to the US to face a grand jury, social campaigner Clark Stoeckley told RT.

      It is four years since WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was accused of rape and sexual assault and two years since he fled into Ecuador’s embassy in London.

    • British Journalist Launches Kickstarter Campaign To Raise Funds For Assange, Snowden, & Manning Statues
    • ‘They’ll try to shut you down’: Meeting Assange & the non-stop ‘War on RT”They’ll try to shut you down’: Meeting Assange & the non-stop ‘War on RT’

      Assange shared an enlightening story about a Kurdish TV station that had been shut down in Denmark. The story, like so many others – from diplomatic cables with undiplomatic comments to hundreds of uninvestigated war crimes in Iraq – came to his attention through a leaked cryptogram.

    • Credit Cards Sued in VA for Wikileaks Blockade
    • Visa, MasterCard sued for blocking donations to WikiLeaks

      On Monday this week, American attorneys for Icelandic hosting provider DataCell ehf filed suit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in hopes of having a federal judge award the company upwards of $5 million for what it claims was a coordinated attempt between Visa and MasterCard to restrict funding to WikiLeaks after the secret-spilling organization started publishing classified US State Department cables over four years ago.

    • Former Swiss Banker Collapses During WikiLeaks Trial

      Rudolf Elmer has been under investigation since 2011 for allegedly giving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange two compact discs during a news conference in London; although he denies the charges, the trial was disrupted when the former banker fainted.Rudolf Elmer has been under investigation since 2011 for allegedly giving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange two compact discs during a news conference in London; although he denies the charges, the trial was disrupted when the former banker fainted.

    • Former Swiss banker collapses at start of WikiLeaks trial
    • Snowden Living ‘Ordinary’ Life in Moscow

      Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden said on Wednesday that he was leading an ordinary life in Moscow, where he has lived for over a year.

      Snowden caused an international uproar in 2013 when he disclosed details of the extent of surveillance and electronic monitoring by the NSA and its British equivalent, the General Communications Headquarters.

    • WikiLeaks exposes gov’t lies, shifts on India uranium deal

      Prime Minister Tony Abbott signed an agreement in September to allow sales of Australian uranium to India for the first time. Uranium sales were initially approved by then-Coalition PM John Howard in August 2007 but Howard’s successor, Kevin Rudd, reinstated the ban.

      Rudd’s action was in accordance with long-standing Labor Party policy that uranium should only be sold to countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). A 2008 Lowy Institute poll found that 88% of Australians supported this policy.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance and Politics

    • The Speech That Could Make Elizabeth Warren the Next President of the United States

      Early Friday evening Sen. Elizabeth Warren took to the Senate floor and gave a plain-spoken, barn-burning speech that could make history and put her into serious contention to be the next President of the United States.

      There are only a handful of political speeches that have such historic impact. Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention comes readily to mind. It’s what catapulted an obscure Illinois state Senator into the national limelight and put him on the path to becoming President.

      Warren’s Senate speech was different, but just as electrifying.

    • Levin highlights bipartisanship in farewell address

      “I watched and observed — I didn’t say a whole lot at first because junior members aren’t supposed to. I watched, and I learned,” Manchin said. “And I saw the system the way I imagined it probably was twenty, thirty, forty years ago, when it did work. I saw the Senate. And I’m thinking, why can’t the rest of the Senate work the way the Armed Services Committee works? And there’s one reason — we don’t have enough Carl Levin’s.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Refusing to Take Sides, NPR Takes Sides With Torture Deniers

      NPR correspondent Tamara Keith went on to refer to Sen. Dianne Feinstein discussing “a CIA program that used techniques she says amounted to torture.” In her own words, Keith reports that “the CIA program of secret overseas detentions and so-called enhanced interrogation methods began shortly after the September 11 attacks.”

    • FAIR TV: US Victimology, Equal Time for Torturers and Hypocritical Factchecking Lectures

      This week: ABC World News prepared viewers for the Senate report on CIA torture…by warning that its publication could harm Americans. Plus TV news covers the torture report by giving a platform to torture advocates. And a pundit who was dead wrong about the Iraq War shares his thoughts about the need for Rolling Stone to do better factchecking.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • No proof so far that NSA bugged Merkel’s phone: prosecutor
    • German investigation says the NSA probably didn’t tap Merkel’s phone after all

      Over a year after an unidentified source released a document he said proved the NSA had tapped the personal cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, an investigation by Germany’s top prosecutor has found no evidence that the tapping ever occurred. He says he also believes that the document may not even be authentic.

    • No proof of Snowden allegation that NSA tapped phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel says prosecutor
    • Former NSA Guys Just Launched This Startup To Stop Hackers’ Favorite Trick

      Area 1 Security, a two-year old Valley startup not yet out of stealth, just raised $8 million for a product that is meant to stop the most impossible hacker attacks, something called “social engineering.”

    • Can three ex-NSA snoops stop the worst hacks before they start
    • Ex-NSA Agents’ Security Startup Lands $8 Million In Funding
    • Ex-NSA Agents’ Start-Up Locks in $8m in Funding
    • Verizon’s New, Encrypted Calling App Plays Nice With the NSA

      Verizon is the latest big company to enter the post-Snowden market for secure communication, and it’s doing so with an encryption standard that comes with a way for law enforcement to access ostensibly secure phone conversations.

      Verizon Voice Cypher, the product introduced on Thursday with the encryption company Cellcrypt, offers business and government customers end-to-end encryption for voice calls on iOS, Android, or BlackBerry devices equipped with a special app. The encryption software provides secure communications for people speaking on devices with the app, regardless of their wireless carrier, and it can also connect to an organization’s secure phone system.

    • Google: We don’t spy on you
    • Schmidt: NSA revelations forced Google to lock down data
    • Your telltale video camera shake can identify you

      HERE’s a way to shake off anonymity – literally. Footage from wearable cameras contains a “motion signature” unique to you. The discovery could identify police wearing body cameras, but also let authorities single out protesters uploading footage, say.

    • How Congress Secretly Just Legitimized Questionable NSA Mass Surveillance Tool

      We recently noted that, despite it passing overwhelmingly, Congress quietly deleted a key bit of NSA reform that would have blocked the agency from using backdoors for surveillance. But this week something even more nefarious happened, and it likely would have gone almost entirely unnoticed if Rep. Justin Amash’s staffers hadn’t caught the details of a new provision quietly slipped into the Intelligence Authorization Act, which effectively “legitimized” the way the NSA conducts most of its mass surveillance.

    • Congress quietly expands NSA powers for spying on Americans

      The campaign to rein in the surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA) has become even more difficult. Instead, Congress has used a set of provisions to expand the agency’s data-gathering power.

    • Rep. Justin Amash Rips Expanded NSA Spying OK’d by Congress

      In the middle of this week’s all-consuming deadline budget negotiations, Congress quietly passed a separate bill granting the National Security Agency broad new powers to collect Americans’ phone and email communications without warrants, share the data with the FBI and foreign governments, and, in some instances, retain the records indefinitely, according to reports.

    • Spy panel chairman confident NSA programs won’t die

      Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who is retiring from Congress after more than a decade, told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor on Friday that “adults” would ensure that the bill goes through, despite opposition from the spy agency’s critics.

    • Forget North Korea – the real rogue cyber operator lies much closer to home

      A cyber-attack on Sony Pictures distracted attention from a more worrying story about a piece of malware used by GCHQ

    • RON PAUL: ABOLISH CIA & NSA, REMOVE ALL TROOPS STATIONED OVERSEAS

      In the wake of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture memo release, former Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) has suggested that America should get rid of its premier intelligence agencies and bring all of our troops back home.

    • “NSA-Proof” Blackphone to Get its Own Secured App Store

      Blackphone, the privacy-and-security-obsessed smartphone, will be getting its very own privacy-and-security-obsessed app store full of vetted software in an attempt to increase the phone’s protection, the firm has confirmed.

    • How The Supreme Court Could Decide The Fate Of NSA Surveillance

      An Idaho nurse is leading the latest charge against the Obama administration for the U.S. National Security Agency’s dragnet phone data surveillance program.

      With legal help from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, neonatal intensive care nurse Anna Smith contested the government’s spy programs Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

    • Judges hear arguments over NSA surveillance

      A federal appeals court heard arguments Monday in an Idaho woman’s challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records — the third time in recent months that appeals courts around the country have considered the controversial counterterrorism program.

    • Appeals Judges to Hear Idaho Woman’s NSA Phone Data Case
    • NSA, CIA reform efforts doomed by GOP leadership of Senate Intel Committee

      The Republican takeover of the Senate after the midterm elections threatens to stall attempts to reform the nation’s surveillance laws and avoid transparency about the CIA’s controversial interrogation program, experts and civil liberties campaigners believe.

    • Europe: The NSA’s snooping habit is good and bad for business
    • NSA’s surveillance a ‘trade barrier’ for EU companies

      The US National Security Agency’s mass surveillance is a trade barrier for European Internet companies trying to provide services in the United States, a top EU official said yesterday (8 December).

    • EU Worried NSA Snooping Will Hurt International Trade
    • DOJ Misleads Court About Medical And Financial Records In Appeals Over NSA Surveillance

      Earlier this week, the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments in a challenge to the NSA’s phone metadata program. While watching, I noticed some quite misleading legal claims by the government’s counsel. I then reviewed last month’s oral arguments in the D.C. Circuit, and I spotted a similar assertion.

      In both cases, the government attorney waved away constitutional concerns about medical and financial records. Congress, he suggested, has already stepped in to protect those files.

      With respect to ordinary law enforcement investigations, that’s only slightly true. And with respect to national security investigations, that’s really not right.

    • OffNow Gets Recognition from Major NSA Whistleblower

      On Monday, William Binney was a guest on the Alex Jones Show. Since he’s a major whistleblower and the former chief technical director of the NSA, I thought it would be good to call in to talk about the OffNow plan to deny the spying giant the water it needs to perpetually violate the 4th Amendment.

    • Caricature Friday- former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden

      Former CIA director Michael Hayden claims during a CNN interview that rectal hydration is a legitimate medical procedure. Erik Wemple has the story here.

    • This Week, Judges in Seattle Heard the NSA Surveillance Case That Could Go to the Supreme Court

      Earlier this week, a real estate attorney from Coeur d’Alene stood up in front of a three-judge panel in Seattle’s Ninth Circuit courthouse to argue Smith vs. Obama—a case challenging NSA surveillance that began back in Idaho, and could be the one that ends up before the US Supreme Court.

    • U.S. Relations with South America Slow to Heal after NSA Spying

      Last week, in the aftermath of both Brazil and Uruguay’s presidential elections, the two countries switched to handling bilateral trade in their local currencies, rather than the previous policy of utilizing the U.S. dollar in their economic relationship. The change is being hailed as a “step forward” in Latin American economic independence and Mercosur is exploring the expansion of this policy to Paraguay, Bolivia, and Venezuela as a way for the region to move beyond economic regulations that have traditionally been dictated by the United States.

    • Laura Poitras on the NSA’s Most Disturbing Practice

      Poitras explains that the most disturbing NSA practice is the bulk collection of data from people who are not suspected of any crime. By collecting so much data, the organization is saturated with information and unable to accurately track real threats.

    • Judge Posner says the NSA should have unfettered access to your data
    • Federal Judge Gives Glimpse Into Authoritarian Mindset Behind NSA
    • Judge Posner: it should be illegal to make phones the government can’t search

      Speaking at a Georgetown law cybercrime conference, 7th circuit judge Richard Posner made a series of conscience-shocking, technologically illiterate statements about privacy that baffle and infuriate, starting with: “if the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine.”

    • Congress just enshrined into law a Reagan-era rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans

      Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on much these days, but members of Congress recently joined hands to codify a very worrisome national-security executive order into law.

      The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill authorizing funding for the intelligence community with large bipartisan support. The vote was 325-100. All tallied, 55 Democrats and 45 Republicans voted against it. The same bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent, meaning that the only thing standing in its way is a signature from President Barack Obama.

    • “Information Sharing” Should Include the Public

      It’s hard to think of a legitimate reason to keep this information secret. Everybody knows that this malware was used to attack Sony Pictures. And it must be obvious to the attackers that the postmortem at Sony will reveal the workings of the malware to Sony, its consultants, and the U.S. government. These facts are not secrets, let alone secrets that are worth protecting at the cost of putting the public at risk.

      The secrecy is probably designed to protect somebody from embarrassment. If that somebody is Sony, it’s not working—the Sony attack is well known at this point. Perhaps the goal is to keep from embarrassing somebody in the government. One effect of the secrecy is to make it harder for citizens to hold the government accountable for the consequences of its cybersecurity policy.

    • Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to parents: Don’t ban Facebook
    • Ninth Circuit hears NSA program challenge

      On Monday, the Ninth Circuit held oral argument in Smith v. Obama, a Fourth Amendment challenge to the Section 215 telephony metadata program. You can watch a video of the argument here. The panel consisted of Judges Hawkins, McKeown, and Tallman. This was the third argument by a federal circuit involving a challenge to the telephony metadata program. The others are the Second Circuit and the DC Circuit, neither of which has handed down a ruling yet.

    • Judges hear arguments over NSA surveillance
    • NSA’s phone spying program extended 90 days
    • EX-KGB AGENT CLAIMS RUSSIA TOLD ANNA CHAPMAN TO SEDUCE EDWARD SNOWDEN IN MOSCOW
    • Report: Russian Spy Anna Chapman Tried to Seduce Edward Snowden

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was targeted by flame-haired former spy Anna Chapman, The Sunday People reports.

      According to the British newspaper, former KGB agent Boris Karpichkov, who has defected to the West, says the Kremlin laid out a plan for Chapman, 32, to lure Snowden, 31, into staying in the country so Russian intelligence officials could try to talk to him about American security secrets.

    • Russian Spy ‘Tried To Seduce’ NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden Into Spilling U.S. Security Secrets, Former Agent Reveals

      The flame-haired 32-year-old was reportedly hired by the Kremlin to lure 31-year-old Snowden into staying in the country so that Russian intelligence officials could continue to question him about U.S. security secrets, The Sunday People reported.

    • Edward Snowden: Russian sex bomb spy Anna Chapman ordered to seduce US whistleblower, defector reveals

      Anna, 32, even proposed marriage to Snowden, 31, on the orders of Russian ­intelligence high command.

    • Udall will be missed on critical issues such as CIA torture, NSA spying

      Coincidence? Maybe. My sites haven’t crashed for months; then all of a sudden, I post a story on CIA torture and … poof. Offline for 12-plus hours. Then a black helicopter started circling my house and … JK on that last part.

      [...]

      If you voted for Gardner, you can expect that lack of public discourse and transparency for the next six years. Congratulations. Gardner doesn’t even bother to have his people email or call reporters back, especially if they have tough questions.

      And if you’re a Democrat who didn’t bother to get out and vote for Udall, you get the government you deserve, and clearly you’re OK with the CIA and the NSA watching your every move, torturing terrorism suspects without filing charges and executing U.S. citizens anywhere they want with illegal drone strikes.

    • NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to address French public

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is to address the French public for the first time on Wednesday.

    • Bill to Halt NSA Warrantless Surveillance, Passed by House, Quietly Dropped before Going to Senate

      The do-nothing House of Representatives almost slipped up and did something to protect Americans’ privacy.

      The House passed a government funding bill that included an amendment that would have ended the ability of the National Security Agency to conduct “backdoor” warrantless surveillance of the content of Americans’ electronic communications under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The provisions also would have stopped a mandate for technology providers to give law enforcement and other agencies an easy way to tap citizens’ communications.

    • Backroom Move Strips ‘Backdoor’ NSA Spying Ban From Spending Bill

      Congressional leaders have quietly deleted a measure meant to stop the National Security Agency’s “backdoor” surveillance of American communications from a major spending bill.

      The House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted in June to ban the NSA from searching for Americans’ communications in surveillance collected while targeting foreigners. But the omnibus spending package unveiled Tuesday night — a piece of legislation that must pass to avoid a government showdown — chucks that NSA safeguard.

    • Wickr – A Top Secret Messenger App For Linux, Windows, Android, And iOS

      Wickr is free, peer-to-peer encrypted messaging application for Linux, Windows, iOS, and Android. It was founded by a group of security experts in San Francisco for private communication. They define Wicker as a top secret messenger which means that nobody can track down the wickr users activities. You can send text messages, documents, audio/video, and pictures to a single or group of users. Also, you can retain the ownership of your own messages or media you share with your group. It allows you to set the expiration time to your messages, so the messages will be completely wiped out after a particular period of time. Wickr team assures that no conversions can be tracked or monitored by anyone, even by the Wickr team themselves.

    • Drone footage of former NSA spy station in Germany

      Ruptly’s drone soared over a derelict site, once home to one of the NSA’s largest listening stations, located in the north of Berlin’s Grunewald Forest.

      The US National Security Agency (NSA) built one of its biggest listening stations on top of a hill, and began surveillance operations from there in 1961, while construction of a permanent facility, known as USM 620 Kilo, began in 1963. Giant 12-meter (39 ft) satellite dishes on the site’s two towers enabled the NSA to intercept satellite signals, radio waves, and other transmissions, before interpreting and analyzing their findings. As the hill was located in the British sector of Berlin, the British and Americans co-operated on spying progams as part of the worldwide ECHELON spy network.

    • Hidden Electronic Eavesdropping Equipment Discovered in Downtown Oslo, Norway

      Spy equipment that can be used to eavesdrop on the mobile phones of politicians and ordinary Norwegians has been discovered in several places in the Oslo area, including close to the country’s parliament, newspaper Aftenposten has revealed.

      The equipment, hidden in fake mobile base stations, can be used to monitor all mobile activity in the vicinity. The paper conducted tests close important buildings in central Oslo and discovered a number of the devices, including close to the prime minister’s residence on Parkveien and close to the government offices.

      The purpose of the equipment appears to have been to find out who was entering and passing parliament, the government offices and other buildings in the area. It could also be used to listen to phone calls and monitor data traffic of selected people in the area, the paper says.

  • Civil Rights

    • Amid Details on Torture, Data on 26 Who Were Held in Error
    • CIA torture: How do we stop the torture next time?

      After America was forced to face the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11 by the US Senate torture report, Peter Foster in Washington asks if enough has been done to prevent it ever happening again.

    • British Intelligence Agencies Come Under Scrutiny After CIA Report Released
    • UK denies ‘unlawful’ activity claims were hidden in CIA report
    • Britain convulsed by its dirty secret in wake of CIA torture report
    • CIA revelations put UK spies under scrutiny
    • CIA report: UK defends actions over interrogation claims

      None of the redactions from a CIA report on interrogation related to British involvement in the mistreatment of prisoners, Number 10 has said.

    • Jim Murphy, Torture Apologist
    • CIA Torture Report: Obama administration continues to torture Guantanamo Bay detainees, says Reprieve
    • CIA on the Couch

      Why there would have been no torture without the psychologists.

    • What happened to the CIA torture report’s cast of characters

      The report examines how agents brutally interrogated prisoners at black sites around the world in the aftermath of 9/11, and is a revealing look at the government officials who created the secret program and those who carried it out.

    • CIA torture report: Prosecute US officials, says UN chief

      Senior US officials found to have sanctioned the use of torture by the CIA should face the “gravest penalties”, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism said.

    • CIA torture report sparks renewed calls to prosecute senior US officials

      A UN expert on human rights has repeated his call for the US to live up to its international legal obligations and prosecute senior officials who authorised the use of torture.

      Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, said Eric Holder, the US attorney general, is under an international obligation to reopen inquiries into senior officials alleged to have breached human rights.

    • I interrogated the top terrorist in US custody. Then the CIA came to town

      The Senate report exposed an orchestrated campaign of deception and lies while I was an FBI agent. But here’s the worst part: the lies haven’t stopped

      [...]

      One of the hardest things we struggled to make sense of, back then, was why US officials were authorizing harsh techniques when our interrogations were working and their harsh techniques weren’t. The answer, as the long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee report now makes clear, is that the architects of the program were taking credit for our success, from the unmasking of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of 9/11 to the uncovering of the “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla. The claims made by government officials for years about the efficacy of “enhanced interrogation”, in secret memos and in public, are false. “Enhanced interrogation” doesn’t work.

    • President George W Bush ‘knew everything’ about CIA interrogation

      Former US President George W Bush was “fully informed” about CIA interrogation techniques condemned in a Senate report, his vice-president says.

    • Cheney: George W. Bush Was Fully Aware Of The CIA Torture Program

      President George W Bush was fully aware and an “integral part” of the CIA’s torture of terror suspects, his vice-president Dick Cheney said Wednesday.

    • CIA Torture Made Latin America Safe for China

      If you want to see how the use of torture has undermined U.S. influence and power, look at Latin America. From San Salvador to Santiago, the continent’s citizens are all too familiar with the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation techniques. Some still have the mental and physical scars to prove it.

    • Rectal rehydration and waterboarding: the CIA torture report’s grisliest findings
    • CIA ‘violated human rights’ – Afghan president

      Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has said the CIA’s brutal interrogation programme “violated all accepted norms of human rights in the world”.

      He is among many world leaders condemning how the agency imprisoned and questioned al-Qaeda suspects.

      A US Senate report on the programme has said the harsh methods did not lead to unique intelligence that foiled plots.

    • Why Dick Cheney and the CIA don’t need to worry about international criminal charges

      The release of portions of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s interrogation techniques added fine touches to a picture we already knew in broad strokes. The agency’s “enhanced interrogation” included physical abuse, sleep deprivation, waterboarding and something called “rectal feeding.”

      Though much of this was known, at least in the abstract, the added level of detail evoked a predictable international response. The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on counter terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, released a statement that presented the end game: criminal charges, not only for the CIA agents involved, but also for “former Bush Administration officials who have admitted their involvement in the programme.”

      [...]

      The International Criminal Court is the only international venue that could try an American for his or her actions in the CIA’s interrogation program. There are territorial and temporary courts — the tribunals dealing with Yugoslavia or Rwanda, for example — but only the ICC is poised to take action if an individual country won’t. That’s key: The ICC has “complementary” jurisdiction, meaning that it will step in only if a local or national court is unable or unwilling to do so.

    • Why won’t Barack Obama prosecute CIA torturers?

      The graphic and unsparing report released this week on the CIA’s use of torture has prompted widespread calls for criminal charges to be brought against American spies involved in the agency’s detention programme.

      But while the White House has said it condemns the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” it is steadfastly refusing to prosecute those who ordered the torture or carried it out.

    • Police union: Miami chief’s statements on Eric Garner’s death ‘do not reflect the views’ of local officers

      Miami Police Chief Manuel Orosa appeared on South Florida’s ABC affiliate over the weekend for a discussion about law enforcement in America. During the WPLG show, Orosa noted that he had watched video of Eric Garner’s deadly encounter with a New York police officer.

    • Miami Police Union Slams Chief For Defending Eric Garner

      In the wake of this weekend’s boisterous protests that twice shut down 195 and clogged streets from Wynwood to Midtown, Miami Police Chief Manuel Orosa sat down with Michael Putney on Channel 10 last night. Orosa was surprisingly blunt about the Eric Garner case in New York, telling Putney that he believes the NYC cops who put Garner in a chokehold before his death will be indicted for federal civil rights violations.

    • Cops use taser on woman while she recorded arrest of another man

      Video of the March 30 melee surfaced online this week. Police erased the 135-second recording from the woman’s phone, but it was recovered from her cloud account, according to the Circuit Court for Baltimore City lawsuit (PDF), which seeks $7 million.

      [...]

      Mwamba was arrested on charges of assault for allegedly trying to run over two officers. Charges were dropped, and she suffered cuts and bruises.

    • Silk Road Judge: I Won’t Reveal Witnesses Because Ulbricht Could Have Them Killed

      When alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht’s trial begins in less than a month, he’ll face charges of narcotics conspiracy, money laundering, and computer fraud—not murder. But the specter of violence is creeping into Ulbricht’s trial nonetheless. The prosecution and judge in his case have now refused to let him know which witnesses will be testifying against him for fear that he might orchestrate their killing from his jail cell.

    • I Was There When an Undercover Cop Pulled a Gun on Unarmed Protesters in Oakland. Here’s How It Happened.

      Over the past 24 hours, photos showing a plainclothes police officer pulling a gun on unarmed protesters in Oakland have gone viral. Tens of thousands of people, and news outlets like Gawker, Buzzfeed, The Guardian, and NBC have shared them, often including outraged comments. But there have been few accounts of what exactly happened, and how the incident came to pass.

    • Attorney General Won’t Force New York Times Reporter to Reveal Source

      Attorney General Eric Holder has decided against forcing a reporter for the New York Times to reveal the identity of a confidential source, according to a senior Justice Department official.

      The reporter, James Risen, has been battling for years to stop prosecutors from forcing him to name his source for a book that revealed a CIA effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

      The government wanted Risen’s testimony in the trial of a former CIA official, Jeffrey Sterling, accused of leaking classified information.

    • CIA’s Brennan: I Think We’ve Had Enough Transparency For The Time Being

      The CIA’s Director John Brennan spoke out about this week’s release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA Torture Report — and to say he wasn’t pleased about the report would be an understatement. Rather amazingly, in real-time as Brennan spoke, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s staffers did a real time rebuttal/fact-check to his speech via Twitter, with each statement punctuated with the hashtag #ReadTheReport. Brennan’s tap dancing concerning the report included a number of jaw dropping statements, but I wanted to focus on two specific ones.

    • CIA’s Brennan has had enough torture talk, wants to move on

  • DRM

    • Telling people how to remove DRM isn’t illegal

      We all know that it’s against the law to sell copyrighted material, but is it also illegal to tell people about software that can strip DRM off e-books without the intention to distribute? New York Judge Denise Cote has recently ruled that it’s not. The lawsuit in question, which was never cut and dry to begin with, was filed by Penguin and Simon & Schuster against Abbey House Media, a company that used to sell e-books for them. Abbey House was bound by law to protect those files with DRM, but when it was a month away from shutting down its digital bookstore in 2013, someone in the company felt compelled to help customers gain control of the e-books they already bought.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Launching CollabMark Project to Hack Trademarks for Free Culture.

        oday, we launched CollabMark — a project to provide information about how open source and free culture communities can use trademarks.

        A project’s identity is important. Trademarks empower communities to protect their identity and build a strong reputation to recruit new members and distribute their work. But trademarks also impose some restrictions that are challenging for groups that thrive on freedom and decentralization. With CollabMark seeks to offer some strategies to collaborative communities, including a Collaborative Mark Policy that they can adopt to protect their name and logo in an open way.

    • Copyrights

      • Leak Exposes Hollywood’s Global Anti-Piracy Strategy

        Leaked documents reveal in detail how Hollywood plans to take on piracy in the years to come. One of the top priorities for the MPAA are cyberlockers and illegal streaming sites, with lawsuits planned in the UK, Germany and Canada. Torrent sites are a medium priority, which the MPAA hopes to fight with criminal prosecutions, domain seizures and site blocking.

      • Important “Innocence of Muslims” Copyright Case To Be Re-Argued Monday

        A panel of eleven Ninth Circuit federal judges will hear oral arguments Monday in a rehearing of Garcia v. Google, a copyright case arising from the notorious “Innocence of Muslims” video that was associated with violent protests around the world. The appellant, Cindy Lee Garcia, argues that she holds a copyright in her five-second performance in the video, and because she was tricked into participating, that the video uses that performance without permission. EFF and many other public interest groups have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case, noting (among other concerns) that it is a matter of firmly established law that actors generally do not have a copyright in their performances.

      • Project Goliath: Inside Hollywood’s secret war against Google

        What is “Goliath” and why are Hollywood’s most powerful lawyers working to kill it?

        In dozens of recently leaked emails from the Sony hack, lawyers from the MPAA and six major studios talk about “Goliath” as their most powerful and politically relevant adversary in the fight against online piracy. They speak of “the problems created by Goliath,” and worry “what Goliath could do if it went on the attack.” Together they mount a multi-year effort to “respond to / rebut Goliath’s public advocacy” and “amplify negative Goliath news.” And while it’s hard to say for sure, significant evidence suggests that the studio efforts may be directed against Google.

      • Furious Google Ended MPAA Anti-Piracy Cooperation

        After delivering a major blow to torrent sites during October, Google must’ve thought the MPAA would be pleased. Instead, however, the MPAA issued a ‘snarky’ press release. According to a leaked email, the press release so infuriated Google’s top brass that the company ended cooperation with the MPAA.

        Each week Google removes millions of ‘infringing’ links from search engine results at rightsholders’ request, 9.1m during the last documented week alone. In the main Google removes these links within hours of receiving a complaint, a record few other large sites can match.

        But no matter what Google does, no matter how it tweaks its search algorithms, it’s never been enough for the MPAA. For years the movie group has been piling on the pressure and whenever Google announces a new change, the MPAA (and often RIAA) tell the press that more can be done.

      • Surprise: Spanish Newspapers Beg Government And EU To Stop Google News Shutting Down

        What makes this situation even more ridiculous is that, according to the ABC.es newspaper, German publishers are now asking Angela Merkel to change the manifestly broken German approach to using news snippets online, by copying the even more backward-looking Spanish law (original in Spanish.) Once again, it seems that an obsession with “protecting” copyright from imaginary harm causes otherwise rational people to lose the ability to think properly.

12.12.14

Links 12/12/2014: Linux++, KDE Frameworks 5.5.0, Calligra 2.8.7

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Best Terminal Emulators for Linux

    If you’re a fan of Linux, you know the exact reason why it’s awesome – the command line. Though many outsiders view it as only a “hacker tool,” it’s actually one of the best tools available for any operating system. The Linux shell has the ability to install software, manage your operating system and basically everything else.

    To interact with the command line, you’ll need a terminal emulator. There are many terminal emulators available – perhaps too many. There are a lot of good ones and a lot of bad ones out there. It is because of this reason we’ve decided to create a list of five great terminal emulators available on Linux.

  • Why I rarely file bug reports

    “Any chance of a bug report?” a developer asked when I mentioned a problem with an application on social media. As a free software supporter, I felt an obligation to oblige, but in practice, the chance was slim. For those of us who don’t regularly file bugs, the process is usually too demanding, and too dependent on bureaucratic whim to seem worth the effort.

  • HP’s Big Slap-In-The-Face To Microsoft Will Show Up Next Year

    The operating system is called Linux++, and is part of HP’s ambitious project to reinvent the computer, reports MIT Technology Review’s Tom Simonite.

    Ultimately, HP hopes to replace Linux++ with something even more radical and homegrown, an operating system called Carbon, though it hasn’t talked about a timeline for that yet.

  • Has The Russian Government Moved To GNU/Linux As Planned?

    There is another plan which almost certainly will involve replacing Wintel PCs with GNU/Linux PCs gradually, by a million units per annum, the move to Baikal processors, a derivative of ARM. Recently, in response to sanctions over Ukraine, Russia will officially prefer home-grown “solutions” for IT. There are signs of a digital “cold” war emerging and the world’s IT is dependent on several components originating in Russia. Such pressures will surely accelerate migration to GNU/Linux in Russia. It’s a short cut to independence.

  • Linux Continues to Grow in the Cloud Computing and Implementation of Enterprise Applications

    The operating system of most famous open source is gaining ground in business particularly in cloud computing, according to a report from the Linux Foundation and Yeoman Technology Group.

    The Linux Foundation has published a study called “2014 Enterprise End User Trends Report” that shows the steady growth of Linux in the market for large companies, especially in recent years driven by factors such as the growth of cloud computing, in addition to its known qualities in terms of safety, capacity deployment, costs or virtualization.

  • Desktop

    • Must-have Linux desktop apps (Six Clicks)

      There’s nothing I can’t do on my Linux PCs that requires Windows. It’s really that simple.

      On my Linux Mint 17.1 desktop, I can run Windows games, thanks to Crossover, and run thousands of native games including many Steam-powered games. In addition, I don’t need to worry about anti-virus software since, despite all the FUD, there still hasn’t been a successful desktop Linux virus.

      Let’s get down to business: Here are the six applications I use every day to get my work done and keep in touch with my friends. Unless you have some particular program that’s Windows only, I think you’ll find these six programs may answer for all your daily needs as well.

  • Server

    • Containers, microservices, and orchestrating the whole symphony

      The microservices architecture is far from a new trend; it’s generally accepted as a better way to build apps these days. The common way to build apps was, until a few years ago, the monolithic approach—which was, if you look at it from a functional perspective, basically one deployment unit that does everything. Monolithic apps are good for small scale teams and projects, but when you need something that has a larger scale and involves many teams, it starts to become problematic. It’s much harder to make changes, as the code base becomes bigger and more people make changes to it.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux leader: Dependency on a platform is good for the platform

      Zemlin’s statement preceded the announcement Tuesday that the Cloud Foundry Foundation, representing the financial backing for open source projects, has been successfully spun off into an agency unto itself. It will remain intertwined with the Linux Foundation, however, in that Linux will become a contracting service provider to Cloud Foundry.

    • diff -u: What’s New in Kernel Development

      Containers are very tricky to implement. Trying to isolate sets of resources from each other completely, so that they resemble a discrete system, and doing it in a secure way, has to be addressed on a feature-by-feature basis, with many caveats and uncertainties. Over time, this makes the core kernel code more secure and robust, but each individual feature may have surprising issues.

      The whole namespace idea—corralling subsets of system resources like user IDs and group IDs, and performing on-the-fly translations between the resource names within the container and the corresponding names in the outer system—is tough to manage.

      Recently, Marian Marinov noticed that process counters in the outer system counted processes as being owned by the same user if his or her UIDs (user IDs) were the same inside two separate containers. The same was true for GIDs (group IDs). He didn’t like this, because the two containers represented two logically isolated systems, and in that context, the same UIDs could refer to different users entirely. They shouldn’t be counted together.

    • Linux 3.19 To Have Full Multi-Touch For More Logitech Devices

      Jiri Kosina has lined up his HID subsystem changes for the Linux 3.19 kernel that include more multi-touch device work and other input improvements.

    • XFS Has Improvements To Look Forward To With Linux 3.19

      One of the latest pull requests for the Linux 3.19 kernel is the XFS file-system changes.

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Frameworks 5.5.0 Released
      • Release of KDE Frameworks 5.5.0

        This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

      • Calligra 2.8.7 is Out

        Packages for the release of KDE’s document suite Calligra 2.8.7 are available for Kubuntu 14.10. You can get it from the Kubuntu Updates PPA. They are also in our development version Vivid.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • 4MLinux Is So Lightweight It’s Anemic

        I worked with the all-in-one version of 4MLinux for several days, and I had a very frustrating experience trying to deal with the little distro that could not. The separate mini distros had a few usability issues too. I was disappointed by the minimalistic software inventory. Unless you install them to the hard drive, very few of the included apps actually run.

    • Screenshots

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Monthly Newsletter: November 2014

        The Gentoo Council addressed a few miscellaneous matters this month.

        The first concerned tinderbox reports to bugs. There was a bit of a back-and-forth in bugzilla with a dispute over whether bugs generated from tinderbox runs that contained logs attached as URLs instead of as files could be closed as INVALID. Normally the use of URLs is discouraged to improve the long-term usability of the bugs. Since efforts were already underway to try to automatically convert linked logs into attached logs it was felt that closing bugs as INVALID was counterproductive.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta is here

        Time, and operating system developments wait on no one. Only a few months ago Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 and now the RHEL 7.1 beta has landed on our doorsteps.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 21 Raves & DRM Happiness

          But the real reason behind Fedora 21’s success? It’s an odd-numbered release. Historically, the odd-numbered releases have always been better than the even-numbered ones. Don’t ask me why. There’s no documentation or detailed research to prove why it happens this way. It’s just a physical law of the universe.

        • Red Hat 7.1 Beta, Malware History, and Bug Reports

          In the Linux feeds this evening was the announcement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta. In other news, Jon Gold takes us down Linux malware memory lane and Derrik Diener looks at some terminal emulators – one that was new to me. Elsewhere Bruce Byfield discusses why he don’t file bug reports and Jack Germain says 4MLinux is so lightweight it’s anemic.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google releases Cardboard VR viewer specs and SDKs

          The Android SDK enables applications with features including lens distortion correction, head tracking, 3D calibration, and side-by-side rendering. Other features include stereo geometry configuration and user input event handling.

        • Sharing with Qt on Android

          We just release a new version of GiraffPanic – a logic mobile game written with Qt and QML. In the new version we give the users the possibility to share unlock codes with each other to unlock new levels. So we wanted to have a nice way to share the code between devices without any need to copy paste them (codes) into another application. After trying a lot of different approaches (that did not work), we found it is possible to invoke the native Android share menu from within our application. Using this method keeps our own code quite tidy and supports all the ways of sharing provided by the host device.

        • Game of Thrones adventure released for Android

          I’m a huge fan of the and . I’ve read through the books a number of times, and watched the show even more. There’s always some little angle or juicy tidbit to find in the books, you just can’t read them once to take it all in. No matter how attentive a reader you are, you’ll definitely miss things as George R.R. Martin puts little hints and foreshadowings all over the place.

        • BlueZ 5.26 Taks Aim At Bluetooth 4.2 & Android 5.0

          BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth stack, boasts more features with today’s release of version 5.26.

          BlueZ 5.26 most notably adds support for Android 5.0 Bluetooth features and support for Bluetooth 4.2 commands and events. BlueZ 5.26 also supports the Low-Energy Secure Connections feature of Bluetooth, HID over GATT get and set report handling, and version 1.2 of the Phonebook Access Profile. BlueZ 5.26 also packs various fixes.

Free Software/Open Source

  • HubSpot Is Now Aiming to Solve DevOps with New Tool

    The company, traditionally focused on marketing software, is to eventually aiming to make the new product open source.

  • Cisco Announces Plan to Reinvent Snort 3 IPS

    The user friendliness is being enabled in part by way of a new command line shell that leverages the open-source Lua language.

    There is also a plan to have a simpler language for Snort rules. Roesch explained that the new rules language will be more streamlined than the existing language. The goal for the new rules language is for both humans and machines to be able to more easily read and write Snort policies.

    The most current stable open-source Snort release is version 2.9.7.0, but that doesn’t imply that the new Snort 3.0 release will be coming within the next three regular Snort release update cycles. Roesch said he doesn’t mind having a Snort 2.10.0 or an even higher number, emphasizing that the development of Snort 3 will take its due and proper course.

  • Events

    • How many LibrePlanet scholarships will we give?

      We’re excited to announce our first keynote speaker for LibrePlanet 2015: Karen Sandler, executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy and co-host of the “Free as in Freedom” podcast. Ms. Sandler’s closing keynotes have been a highlight at LibrePlanet, and we’re so excited to have her back. In other words, LibrePlanet 2015 is shaping up to be a really great event.

    • AnDevCon Highlights Embedded, Open-Source

      Application performance management tools, speakers, and giant green Android mascots abounded at the Android Developer Conference San Francisco Bay Area, held November 18 through 21 in Burlingame, Calif. The event, in its eighth year, was sponsored by Intel, Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Twitter, Sony, Epson, and Amazon, among others.

    • Call for Papers is open for the Embedded Linux Conference 2015

      Are you involved in Embedded Linux? Well there is a Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) taking place in San Jose, CA, March 23 – 25, 2015. This is the “premier vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using Linux in embedded products”.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Dell Adds Midokura Open Network Virtualization Option for OpenStack

      Dell Computer is deepening its focus on the open cloud and OpenStack in particular. The company announced an expansion of its Open Networking initiative to include Midokura, a company focused on network virtualization, to complement Dell’s networking and server infrastructure. Their agreement includes a joint go-to-market program, validated reference architecture and global reseller agreement.

    • How to Easily Get Very In-Demand OpenStack Cloud Skills

      How in demand are cloud computing skills in the job market? Consider these notes from Forbes, based on a report from WANTED Analytics: “There are 3.9 million jobs in the U.S. affiliated with cloud computing today with 384,478 in IT alone. The median salary for IT professionals with cloud computing experience is $90,950 and the median salary for positions that pay over $100,000 a year is $116,950.”

    • OpenStack Is Huge In The Open-Source Cloud—But Maybe Not Huge Enough

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • IT should listen to users not just managers, says SugarCRM CEO

        Deliver the software users want and need (not just what management thinks is required), look for deployment flexibility, and beware of API charges. They are the messages from SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin.

        The proliferation of BYOA – bring your own applications – is putting pressure on IT departments to provide better tools, and to regard users as “constituents” rather than simply listening to management.

  • Public Services/Government

    • European Commission updates its open source policy

      The European Commission (EC) wants to make it easier for its software developers to submit patches and add new functionalities to open source projects. Contributing to open source communities will be made central to the EC’s new open source policy, expects Pierre Damas, Head of Sector at the Directorate General for IT (DIGIT). “We use a lot of open source components that we adapt and integrate, and it is time that we contribute back.”

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Security

    • A brief history of Linux malware
    • The Password? You Changed It, Right?

      As my Twitter followers may be aware, I spent the first part of this week at the Passwords14 conference in Trondheim, Norway. More about that later, suffice for now to say that the conference was an excellent one, and my own refreshed Hail Mary Cloud plus more recent history talk was fairly well received.

      [...]

      By this afternoon (2014-12-11), it seems that all told a little more than 700 machines have come looking for mostly what looks like various manufacturers’ names and a few other usual suspects. The data can be found here, with roughly the same file names as in earlier episodes. Full list of attempts on both hosts here, with the rather tedious root only sequences removed here, hosts sorted by number of attempts here, users sorted by number of attempts here, a CSV file with hosts by number of attempts with first seen and last seen dates and times, and finally hosts by number of attempts with listing of each host’s attempts. Expect updates to all of these at quasi-random intervals.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • ‘Excited Delirium’ and the Suspicious Death of Kenwin Garcia

      Kenwin Garcia was a 25-year-old African American man from Newark who died in 2008 on the side of a highway, after an altercation with state police. Christopher Baxter from NJ Advanced Media states that his death was claimed to be a result of “excited delirium.” The term is used to describe a lethal overdose of adrenaline that leads to heart or respiratory failure. But there is little medical evidence to support this official judgment in Garcia’s case, and there is wider controversy surrounding the interpretation of the symptoms that constitute the syndrome. In Garcia’s case specifically, an autopsy found he suffered severe internal injuries, including a broken breastbone and ribs, a torn kidney and extensive bleeding.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The New York Times Downplays The Influence Of Money In Politics

      The New York Times downplayed the impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and dismissed the influence of money in politics by ignoring record-breaking spending of outside groups, the role of large donor political contributions, and dark money in the 2014 midterm election.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Solidarity against online harassment

      One of our colleagues has been the target of a sustained campaign of harassment for the past several months. We have decided to publish this statement to publicly declare our support for her, for every member of our organization, and for every member of our community who experiences this harassment. She is not alone and her experience has catalyzed us to action. This statement is a start.

    • GOP rep attempted late bid to kill spy bill

      One of the biggest thorns in the side of the country’s intelligence agencies attempted to mount an eleventh hour bid to kill the spy agencies’ funding bill on Wednesday.

      Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) wrote on Facebook that the intelligence authorization bill that easily passed through the House contained “one of the most egregious sections of law I’ve encountered during my time as a representative.”

      “It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American,” explained Amash, who has a record of skepticism toward the National Security Agency and other agencies. Last year, he nearly succeeded in an attempt to end the NSA’s controversial phone records program.

    • Police can search cellphones in arrests without warrant, Supreme Court rules

      In a crime ruling that earned it rare praise from the federal government, the Supreme Court of Canada said police may search cellphones without a warrant when they make an arrest.

      Cellphones are the bread and butter of the drug trade, the majority said in a 4-3 ruling. It said police have been given the “extraordinary power” to do warrantless searches during an arrest, under common-law rules developed by judges over centuries, because of the importance of prompt police investigations. Until now, those searches typically included purses and briefcases. Civil liberties groups had urged the court to exempt cellphones.

    • European Commissioner For Human Rights And Key EU Privacy Committee Strongly Condemn Mass Surveillance And Bulk Data Retention

      As we wrote recently, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that GCHQ surveillance doesn’t violate human rights. That’s hardly surprising, given IPT’s track record in approving pretty much everything that GCHQ does. But the global reach of the spying carried out by GCHQ and the NSA means that there are plenty of other bodies that are prepared to condemn what they have been doing. Here, for example, is an important report from the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, entitled “The Rule of Law on the Internet in the Wider Digital World”. It’s an extremely thorough exploration of this complex area, touching on key issues that have often been discussed here on Techdirt: privatized law enforcement, suspicionless mass data retention, cross-border exchange of data by law enforcement agencies, and global surveillance by national security agencies.

    • the long tail of MD5

      Everybody knows that MD5 is as terribly useless as ROT13 and you should have switched to SHA3-512 like twenty years ago. But lots of usage sticks around, and will continue to stick around for a long time to come, leading to the long tail of MD5. Why not simply convert to a better hash function? Maybe it’s not so simple.

    • Edward Snowden’s lawyer calls on Europeans to prosecute US torture architects

      A leading German human rights lawyer has called on prosecutors across Europe to “get active” and prepare to seize any CIA agents and US officials involved in torture who enter their territories.

  • Civil Rights

    • Stephen Colbert Mocks Fox News’ Raucous Support Of Torture
    • Mark Udall Wants To Release CIA Internal Review Of Torture Program

      Outgoing Senator Mark Udall has been a key player in trying to hold the intelligence community’s feet to the fire concerning their unconstitutional and illegal activities — and that includes both the NSA and CIA. He was a key player in making sure that the CIA torture report was actually released — and there was pressure on him, if the report wasn’t released, to read it into the record to force it out. Even with the release on Tuesday, some were asking for Udall to at least release an unredacted version or even more sections from the full ~7,000 page report, rather than just the 500 page exec summary. In fact, in Udall’s final floor speech on Wednesday (link to a video that is about 50 minutes), the Senator instead chose to reveal more information related to the so-called “Panetta Review” on the CIA’s torture program.

      [...]

      The CIA has done everything it can to try to bury the Panetta Report. But Udall actually discussed it in depth. A big chunk of his speech is actually discussing some of the details in the Panetta Review, going beyond the CIA torture report. Following his speech, Senator Richard Burr — who is a known buddy of the intelligence community, and soon to take over the Senate Intelligence Committee — ridiculously claimed that Udall disclosed a bunch of “very classified” material. What it actually shows, however is that the CIA’s response to the torture report is simply more lies from the CIA. As Udall noted in his speech, since the Panetta Review was supposed to be internal, it was a lot more open and honest, and it agreed with the Senate staffers. He first points out that the official CIA response to the terror report, from current Director John Brennan, shows the CIA’s “flippant” attitude towards oversight and the fact that it knows the Obama administration will let the CIA get away with anything. However, the Panetta Review shows the true story.

    • Stun Guns Used by Police 13 Times Causes Death

      The policy states that officers should not stun any handcuffed suspect.

    • How The CIA Got Conservative Author Ronald Kessler To Spin For Them On Torture

      The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture reveals that conservative author Ronald Kessler was “blessed” by the CIA, receiving background information from the agency which he used to push false claims about the effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and publishing classified information without triggering a leak investigation.

    • Scalia: Constitution silent on torture

      Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is joining the debate over the Senate’s torture report by saying it’s hard to rule out the use of extreme measures to extract information if millions of lives were threatened.

      Scalia told a Swiss broadcast network that American and European liberals who say such tactics may never be used are being self-righteous.

    • Metaphysics

      Listening to the BBC and Sky, and reading The Guardian, all on the subject of whether the UK establishment knew about CIA torture or not, the realisation dawned on me that I had imagined my entire life story and in fact I had never actually existed. For a little while it was like being in a particularly scary Japanese film.

    • Rectal feeding is rape – but don’t expect the CIA to admit it

      Of all the revelations made about the “enhanced interrogation methods” used by the CIA on detainees in the aftermath of 9/11, the use of waterboarding and rectal feeding have garnered the most attention. In the case of the latter in particular, this was the first time many people had even heard of such a thing.

      Initially used in response to prisoner hunger strikes, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found this allegedly “necessary” and “legitimate” medical practice – also referred to as a “nutrient enema” – was also used by the CIA as a form of torture and control.

    • Guess Who Else Tortured People Like the CIA Did — Soviets and Nazis

      The Soviet Union was good at torture.

      But the Soviets excelled at torture because they understood its usefulness. “Our task is not only to destroy you physically,” a Stalinist interrogator explained to a prisoner in 1948. “But also to smash you morally before the eyes of the society.”

      History’s great agents of pain knew what the CIA pretends not to.

    • These American World War II Re-Enacters Dress Up Like Nazis for Fun

      That’s part of what drew her, as well as her friend and fellow photographer Marisha Camp, to photograph American re-enactors of Germans in World War II for her series “Targets Unknown.” Half out of necessity—those who attend the re-enactments are required to dress for the occasion—and half out of a desire to test the boundaries between subject and artist, Kranitz became an active member in the events she photographed.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • IsoHunt unofficially resurrects The Pirate Bay

        Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected The Pirate Bay at oldpiratebay.org. At first glance, The Old Pirate Bay seems to be just a commemorative site for The Pirate Bay, which went down this week after police raided its data center in Sweden. Upon further inspection, however, it turns out the site is serving new content.

        Various mirror sites of The Pirate Bay have sprung up since the site’s disappearance, but this one is different. Some alternatives simply provide a copy of The Pirate Bay with no new content (many proxy sites have been doing this for years). Others, like thepiratebay.cr, go further and even provide fake content as if it was new and even attempt to charge users.

      • What chance a piracy consensus?

        The Government says rights holders and ISPs must develop an anti-piracy regimen themselves, or have one imposed on them. Early signs show this approach is working.

        The Government’s ultimatum to ISPs and content owners and distributors that they have three months to come up with a system for identifying and taking action against copyright infringers already appears to be bearing fruit.

      • MPAA Prepares to Bring Pirate Site Blocking to the U.S.

        The MPAA is in discussions with the major movie studios over ways to introduce site blocking to the United States. TorrentFreak has learned that the studios will try to achieve website blockades using principles available under existing law. Avoiding another SOPA-style backlash is high on the agenda.

      • Thanks To All Heroes Of Freedom Who Have Kept The Pirate Bay Running

        The file-sharing site The Pirate Bay is down following a raid by Swedish Police. The organization Rights Alliance, previously named the Anti-Pirate Bureau and representing the giant movie and record corporations, is behind the raid. It’s a dark day for freedoms online.

12.11.14

Links 11/12/2014: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta, Firefox 35 Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • How Linux Works Is an OS Mechanic’s Mainstay
  • Linux Ruled 2014, Codenames, and Steam Linux Sales

    There were lots of interesting tidbits in today’s Linux feeds. Silviu Stahie wonders if Linux’s advancements in 2014 were enough to finally declare it the “year of Linux.” Elsewhere, Larry Cafiero laments Fedora’s decision to forgo codenames and Kevin Fenzi explains what happened to Fedora servers yesterday after release. Jack M. Germain reviews How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know and GOL explains how Steam computes Linux sales.

  • Joyent Offers Linux Branded Zones, Extends Docker Engine as Container Service

    Joyent, Inc., which has billed itself in several different ways over the years is now billing itself as “the container infrastructure company.” The company is actually making a lot of smart moves. In November I reported on how Joyent has announced that it is open sourcing its core technology. Joyent’s platform can compete with OpenStack and other cloud offerings, and facilitates efficienet use of container technologies like Docker.

  • About Linux Weekly News – 8th December 2014
  • Users Want Windows 10 Features That Are Already Available in Linux Systems

    Windows 10 brought some new features for its fans, but it’s still under development. Its users already have a list of features they would like implemented, but it’s funny to see how most of those features are already present in Linux installations.

  • Desktop

    • Was 2014 “The Year of Linux Desktop”?

      Linux has seen a lot of changes during 2014 and many users are saying that this was finally the year that really showed some real progress, but has it been enough to call it “the year of Linux desktop”?

    • Linux Mint 17.1 and the question of the “best” Linux desktop
    • Is Linux Mint 17.1 really the best desktop of 2014?

      Wow, that’s some high praise there for Linux Mint 17.1. I agree that the Linux Mint developers did a great job on it, but I’m not sure I’d call it the best available desktop today for the simple reason that no matter how good a distribution or desktop is, there are bound to be people out there who need something different. Linux Mint is a fine choice for many or even most desktop Linux users, but it’s not right for everybody.

      I’m not even sure there is a “best desktop” since the whole notion is so extremely subjective. I suppose you could say that there’s a “most popular” desktop if there is a huge majority of people using it that dwarfs all other desktops. But “best” implies that it is better than everything else and, as much as I like Linux Mint, I cannot say that it’s better than every other distribution or that Cinnamon or MATE beat out every other desktop environment.

      I suppose it’s the old “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” thing. If Linux Mint 17.1 meets all of your needs, and you can use Cinnamon or MATE then it may very well be the best desktop distribution for you. But there are far too many different Linux users to generalize and give it the crown of best desktop of 2014, particularly given all the other choices out there.

    • My Favorite Linux Applications and Desktops

      My main desktop remains KDE, although Cinammon, GNOME, Mate, and LXDE are also ready to run. However, my main environment remains KDE because of the work tools it provides, such as a multi-item clipboard, and the ability to group the applications I’m working with into a single tabbed window.

  • Server

    • Trusty Old Router

      In the past years, the device has been running OpenWRT, which is a really nice and very powerful little Linux distribution specifically for this kind of routers.

    • Parallels adopts Docker in next Cloud Server release

      Long, long before Docker made containers the cool server application virtualization tool, Parallels was making container technology work for enterprises with the commercial Virtiozzo and the open-source OpenVZ project. Now Parallels will be adding native support for Docker as well to the next version of its Parallels Cloud Server.

  • Kernel Space

    • OpenDaylight Member Spotlight: Intel

      Intel was a founding member of the OpenDaylight Project and recently increased its membership to Platinum, the highest tier. We had a conversation with Uri Elzur, Intel’s director of SDN architecture, to understand what drove the company’s decision and what we can expect to see from them in 2015 and beyond.

    • VirtIO & Xen Changes For Linux 3.19 Kernel

      The VirtIO changes for Linux 3.19 include infrastructure changes for providing VirtIO 1.0 support. There’s also bug-fixes and other improvements with the VirtIO code for Linux 3.19. The VirtIO changes for Linux 3.19 can be found via this pull request.

    • EXT4 In Linux 3.19 Brings Lots Of Bug Fixes

      Ted Ts’o has sent in the EXT4 file-system changes for the Linux 3.19 kernel merge window.

      EXT4 changes for Linux 3.19 include “lots of bug fixes”, including changes that should improve CPU utilization and potential soft lock-ups when under heavy memory pressure. There’s also a random assortment of other changes with just around 500 lines of EXT4 file-system code being touched by 26 changes for this merge window.

    • Linux Foundation IoT standardisation effort AllSeen Alliance grows to more than 100 companies

      For those wo are not following IoT news all the time: you may have lost the foundation of this interesting alliance project that aims at fostering interoperability of IoT.

      This project is led and started by Linux Foundation and this is a great guarantee of openness and real community driven innovation. We all look forward to see where AllSeen will lead!

    • Many Sound Updates Queued For Linux 3.19 Kernel

      Takashi Iwai classifies the sound updates for Linux 3.19 as a fairly large pull request. There’s ASoC improvements, new USB audio support improvements, a new OXFW Firewire audio driver for the FW970/971 chipset, support for new Intel x86 SoCs, and various other changes. The new Intel SoC support work is for some Cherry Trail and Braswell hardware.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Interview with Sylvia Ritter

        A friend mentioned Krita in 2010, claiming that it was the best open source alternative to Photoshop. Had to try it and never stopped working with it. On a sidenode I’ve never worked with commercial art software before, but I’m not eager to either.

      • GCompris Joins the KDE incubator and Launches a Fundraiser

        GCompris has joined the KDE incubator. GCompris is the high quality educational software suite comprising numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10, and well known by parents and teachers all over the world.

        GCompris was started in 2000 by Bruno Coudoin as a Free Software project. Originally written in GTK+, the project developers decided in early 2014 to make a radical change and rewrite it in Qt Quick. The main motivation is the ability of the Qt platform to address the desktop and the tablet market from a single code base.

      • digiKam: Season of KDE Update

        To put it briefly, the gradient of the image patch gives us the differences in pixels. We then decompose the covariance matrix to get eigen values whose values represent the strength of the image patch. Specifically, the larger the maximum eigen value, the richer the texture is, in the dominant direction.

        I came across an OpenCV function which handles all of this and returns the eigen values (and vectors).

  • Distributions

    • Create a live system ISO for your Ubuntu-based Linux machines using Systemback

      You have that Linux desktop or server precisely how you want it and are interested in either creating a spot-on backup or a live ISO that you can then install on other (similar) hardware. How do you do it? You could go through the process of learning a number of commands to take care of the process, or you could install and use a handy tool called Systemback.

    • Reviews

      • An Everyday Linux User Review Of Puppy Linux Tahr 6.0 CE

        Puppy Linux continues to be a tremendous distribution. The performance is incredible and the amount of quality applications that are provided in such a small download is breathtaking.

        The default applications won’t appeal to everyone and they are built for functionality over style but the Quickpet application makes it possible to install old favourites like LibreOffice and GIMP.

        It would be good if Puppy could get around booting on UEFI based machines but modern machines probably aren’t the target market at the moment.

        I would definitely recommend Puppy Linux for netbooks, older laptops and for computers that have no hard drives. It proves once and for all that you can teach an old dog (of a computer) new tricks.

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

    • Arch Family

    • Slackware Family

      • New chromium and chromium-dev packages

        For the curious among you, I have additionally refreshed my chromium-dev packages. Chromium-dev is the development release of the browser (there’s also a “beta” channel but I don’t care about that too much). By play-testing the development release from time to time, I am prepared and do not get nasty surprises when the stable channel jumps to a higher major release (the jump from 38 to 39 was quite intrusive in terms of SlackBuild script).

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat secure, open source solutions
      • Red Hat secure, open source solutions overview

        For agencies and programs across government, open source solutions from Red Hat are delivering security as good as or better than proprietary solutions.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta Now Available

        In June, we announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, effectively raising the bar for enterprise IT infrastructure and pushing the operating system into the role of being a critical infrastructure platform for the enterprise. Featuring a broad spectrum of significant new features and enhancements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to not only meet the demands of today’s modern datacenter but to tackle the next-generation IT requirements of tomorrow. From accelerating application delivery through containerization – to laying a stable foundation for the open hybrid cloud – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 continues to redefine the enterprise operating system.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Now In Beta
      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Enters Public Beta

        RHEL 7.1 is now available in beta. Improved security is a key focus in the new beta of Red Hat’s flagship Linux platform.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.1 Beta available now!

        Fans of Linux-based operating systems have been experiencing a deluge of quality releases in the last quarter of 2014 — Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora to name a few. While I still think there are too many distros nowadays, the lesser-quality releases can be tuned-out as noise.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Infrastructure release day retrospective

          Here’s what happened: For the last few weeks we had been seeing sporadic slowdowns in the bodhi application, but had been unable to isolate what was causing them. This last week was the Fedora Infrastructure Mirrormanager 2 / Ansible FAD, and there we added some more debugging in, but still couldn’t see where the problem was. It wasn’t in bodhi itself, but somewhere in it’s integration with the authentication system and getting to that via proxy01 (our main datacenter proxy). Proxy01 seemed busier than usual, but it gets a lot of traffic anyhow. We bumped memory up on it to make sure it could better cope with release day.

        • ​Say hi to Linux’s future: Fedora 21 is here

          I’ve only started playing with Fedora so I don’t have a firm opinion about it yet. I will say that while the Desktop, with its default GNOME 3.15.2 interface, works well, I still don’t care for GNOME. Fortunately, Fedora comes with a wide variety of “spins,” so you can run with KDE, Xfce, LXDE, or, my own favorite of the official Fedora variations, MATE.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Hackable Roomba integrates Raspberry Pi

      iRobot’s hackable $200 “Create 2″ version of its Roomba robot for STEM education can be programmed with a laptop, or via an onboard Arduino or Raspberry Pi.

      iRobot’s Roomba was the first — and still one of the few — major successes in consumer robots. Unlike more advanced iRobot designs, such as the Linux-based Ava 500 telepresence robot, the modest, vacuuming Roomba runs on a simple Motorola HC12 microcontroller. Now, iRobot has released a $200, non-vacuuming hacker version of the Roomba 600 called the Create 2 designed for K12 and college-level STEM education.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why your organisation will thank you for going open source

    With all the information available on the internet and on websites like FutureGov, it’s no longer difficult to know the merits of open source and how other government agencies have been benefiting from it. The bigger challenge would be how to convince your finance department to believe in these merits enough that they would reallocate their budget to back it.

  • VMware is nuts for clusters (and containers)

    VMware has announced a batch of integrations with a number of technology entities as it strives to create a common platform for building and operating applications at scale.

  • TYPO3 Updates Open Source Web CMS Neos

    Open source web content management (WCM) provider TYPO3 released a new version of Neos that officials there say improves the user experience for digital marketers in a “smoother” and more “time-saving” way.

  • Five open source PaaS options you should know

    An open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) allows developers and users to contribute and share source code and extensions. The PaaS is either vendor-driven or standard-based.

    A vendor-driven open source PaaS locks the developers and users to a vendor. The developers have limited controls over transferring applications from a vendor-driven open source platform to another one.

    The standard-based open platform is vendor-agnostic and is more flexible; it aims to standardize the orchestration of automatic processes of life cycle management. Developers can transfer applications across the cloud.

  • UPDATE: XRDPConfigurator Is Now Open Source!

    I have just released XRDPConfigurator – a GUI application to configure your Xrdp server – as Open Source, under the Apache License version 2.0.

    I had originally intended for it to be a commercial product whereby a user would have to purchase a license in order to use it.

  • SOS Open Source is Now Open Source!

    We are glad to inform you that the European funded initiative PROSE eventually enhanced the SOS Open Source methodology, re-engineering the tools and making them available to the general public as open source. Now everyone can run an educated open source software procurement process by using SOS Open Source tools and methodology.

  • ARTIST Open Source Software Release

    If you belong to an open source community or are a passionate developer check out our ARTIST OS package to test it now! Our source code is available for modification or enhancement by anyone.

  • Intel and SwiftKey Update, Will Open Source, Stephen Hawking’s Speech Program
  • OPNFV Adds New Members to Open Source SDN/NFV Project

    The Linux Foundation has announced that four new industry partners—Array Networks, Midokura, Ooredoo and Sonus Networks—are backing OPNFV, the open source software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) platform.

  • Events

    • Open Hardware Summit 2014 – Rome #OSHW
    • Web Engines Hackfest 2014

      During the last days I attended the Web Engines Hackfest 2014 in A Coruña, which was kindly hosted by Igalia in their office. This gave me some time to work again on WebKit, and especially improve and clean up its GStreamer media backend, and even more important of course an opportunity to meet again all the great people working on it.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • What OpenStack women are saying about the community

      It’s a problem that the tech industry struggles with in general, and OpenStack is no different: How do we create an environment that is open, inviting, and friendly to women, and how do we get more women involved?

    • Landing In The Cloud – The Open Source Arena

      Open source by its very nature is more free-flowing and open to others, making it that much more affordable, especially when it’s free. Since open source software usually isn’t a product made by a large corporation or eager upstart, the cost to use it is usually quite low. That means a low barrier of entry for businesses to adopt it for their operations. The low monetary barrier makes it so small businesses with limited budgets that might have shied away from more expensive cloud solutions before can actually use the technology and embrace the benefits that come with it.

    • OpenStack Leverages Its Higher Profile To Lead Open Source Cloud Survey

      There’s a strange situation within the open source cloud sector. CloudStack, the initiative that is now supported from within Citrix has a far longer history, and more early customer success than OpenStack. However OpenStack, with its huge following by large vendors (including Rackspace, HP, IBM and Oracle ) has taken the lion’s share of attention.

    • Big Data Source Code: Getting Better All The Time

  • Databases

    • MongoDB gets its first native analytics tool

      Most companies realize they need to become more data driven in order to make better decisions and identify new opportunities. Many also recognize the need for new tools to analyze their data, much of it stored in operational systems.

      At the same time, for their operational systems, a growing number of companies have adopted NoSQL databases, the most popular of which is the document database MongoDB. Unfortunately, document databases are nobody’s first choice for analytics, so people end up using ETL to move data from MongoDB to an RDBMS or Hadoop for analysis. ETL processing adds latency, however — perhaps too much latency if you want your business to be “data driven.”

    • How do you solve a web-scale deployment problem with MariaDB?

      MariaDB Corporation (the artist formerly known as SkySQL) is polishing up its open source database products this month.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

    • Zimbra releases new report highlighting greater trust in open source among IT professionals than proprietary software

      The report findings confirm a changing perception of open source, to a platform for the development of quality software that enhances privacy and security. Findings from the survey, which was conducted in 18 countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa as well as the United States, show that 66% of EMEA respondents agreed that commercial backing and code transparency reduces applications’ privacy risks, and 67% agree these improve application security.

    • 6 of the Best Open Source Holiday Gifts for SMBs

      ‘Tis the season to look beyond the usual humdrum small business gear and give your favorite small business owner something new and unusual. In this roundup we’ll look at a little flying and rolling camera drone, a mobile library and Webserver, a new-generation 3D printer, a clever customizable key organizer that you can print with the 3D printer, a cutting-edge programmable LED flashlight, and an Android smartwatch.

      Some of these picks should be useful for your small business, and they all make superior gifts for employees and customers. Forget the Christmas hams—give cool gadgets instead.

  • Funding

    • Hachicorp Raises $10M to Advance Open Source DevOps Vision

      HashiCorp today announced that it has secured a $10 million Series A round of funding. The company will use the money to continue to evolve its application development and deployment technology, including the development of a new commercial service known as Atlas.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Build and Share Your Own 3D Printer with Open-Sourced ‘Bolt’ by Edu3d.Org

      It’s often the case that we set out to inspire our kids, teach them, and encourage them to do things in the world, but when we give them the tools to work independently, they end up turning the tables and inspiring the older generations with new ideas that can be very surprising, and even startling with innovation and relevance. Kids’ brains are still new, much more open, and not yet quite so worried about what an academic or peer set will think of a ‘crazy new idea’ for something that just might work — or change the world altogether.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source Hardware Companies Blend Altruism With Bottom Line

        It’s very easy for open source users around the world to collaboratively share data and files to modify software. Everyday examples include products like Mozilla Firefox and Chromium which allow users to modify, study, deconstruct and even distribute the programs in a collaborative way with no worry of patent or warranty infringement.

  • Programming

    • Go 1.4 is released

      Today we announce Go 1.4, the fifth major stable release of Go, arriving six months after our previous major release Go 1.3. It contains a small language change, support for more operating systems and processor architectures, and improvements to the tool chain and libraries. As always, Go 1.4 keeps the promise of compatibility, and almost everything will continue to compile and run without change when moved to 1.4. For the full details, see the Go 1.4 release notes.

    • Google’s Go 1.4 Officially Released

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Cabinet office Plugfest builds momentum for ODF

      On Monday and Tuesday, 8th-9th December, a group of technologists, SMEs, corporations, individuals, and representatives of Governments gathered in Bloomsbury, London over two days to collectively improve the implementation of Open Document Format (ODF).

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Linux Turla Malware Infection? Not Going to Happen.

      This code simply isn’t in any Linux repository.

      That means one must intentionally deviate and go outside of the keyring-protected repo of applications ‘into the wild’ to obtain this rogue software.

      By definition, a trojan, requires one to install the application and then explicitly run it to have its ‘payload’ execute.

    • Multiple X.Org Vulnerabilities Found, One Is from 1987

      One of the most important features of the open source development community is its ability to self-correct, even if it takes a very long time. A number of issues in X servers have been corrected recently, and some of them were actually very old. The record holder is a bug introduced back in 1987.

    • Security updates for Thursday

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Another Perspective on the US, China, and Containment

      Writing on the occasion of President Obama’s November 2014 trip to Beijing for the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, John V. Walsh asks whether China might contain the United States. Walsh inverts the conventional question—Can the U.S. contain China?—and observes that, as far as East Asia is concerned, “History tells us that the West with its missionaries and soldiers, Obama’s predecessors, bathed the region in suffering and bloodshed.” In that expanded context, Walsh considers whether China might “restrain the U.S. from doing more damage in East Asia” and elsewhere in the developing world. Due to its economic and military powers, Walsh writes, “China should be able to provide to the world alternatives to the diktats of the West.”

    • U.S. Troops Out, Private Contractors Stay in Afghanistan

      In May 2014, President Obama announced a plan to keep at least 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 2016. He neglected to inform the country about the massive army of private contractors that will also remain deployed in Afghanistan. A PowerPoint document obtained by Salon from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), one of the country’s biggest military and intelligence contractors, spells out the contractor’s ongoing role in Afghanistan, which dates back to 2009. The document also shows the company’s $400 million contract with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, which is on a five-year plan.

    • Top Gun Violence Researchers Criticize Pew’s “Outlier” Gun Rights Survey Result

      Media outlets are heavily touting a poll from Pew Research Center supposedly showing “growing public support for gun rights,” but Pew’s polling question is flawed because it presents a false choice between regulating gun ownership and protecting gun rights. In response to the Pew poll, a prominent gun violence researcher said, “I could not think of a worse way to ask questions about public opinions about gun policies.”

      [...]

      According to experts, the question is flawed because respondents have to pick between support for gun regulation or gun rights, as if those premises were mutually exclusive.

    • US drone strikes kill 13 alleged militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan

      A suspected US drone strike on a Pakistani Taliban compound in North Waziristan tribal region killed at least four alleged militants on Sunday, officials said.

    • US drones kill 13 ‘militants’

      A suspected US drone strike on a Pakistani Taliban compound in North Waziristan tribal region killed at least four alleged militants on Sunday, reports The Guardian quoting officials.

      [...]

      The officials said Pakistani Taliban linked to commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur used the compound, but it wasn’t immediately known whether Bahadur was there at the time of the strike.

    • Scarborough: I Can’t Wait for the Report on Obama’s Drone Strikes

      Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough diverted a discussion about the CIA torture report with drones on Tuesday, took a day off, then reprised his act Thursday, simultaneously dismissing the Senate Intelligence Report on the CIA’s terror funplex enhanced interrogation techniques while salivating for the details of some future report on President Barack Obama’s drone program.

    • Torture “Architect” Mistaken in Claim Nobody’s Punished for Drone Murders

      A psychologist who played a key role in a U.S. torture program said on a video yesterday that torture was excusable because blowing up families with a drone is worse (and nobody’s punished for that). Well, of course the existence of something worse is no excuse for torture. And he’s wrong that no one is punished for drone murders. The protesters are. Latest example:

    • Drone operator made long-distance war from close to home
    • LETTER: People that are retired still contribute to society in Derbyshire

      I object to my taxes being used to buy bombs and drones to kill Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian children, and for adventures in Afghanistan and Libya and subsidising bankers who’ve robbed us but still get their bonuses, and life long silver spoons for royal offspring, but as a taxpaying pensioner I don’t get the chance to opt out.

    • Planet Politics: America’s Bloody Conscience

      America can be a brutal superpower, especially when — as rarely happens — it is attacked. Yet it likes to think of itself as a country with more lofty rules of combat and behavior than the run of imperia that have come before it.

    • America Trades Torture for Drones

      The release Tuesday of the executive summary of a report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which reviews the CIA’s detention and interrogation practices between 2001 and 2009, was for all its gruesome detail greeted in some official quarters as a kind of catharsis. “This,” said Secretary of State John Kerry in a statement, “marks a coda to a chapter in our history”—a chapter, he went on, that is now “more than five years behind us,” since President Obama ended the CIA’s detention program during his first week in office. Obama, for his part, acknowledged that “some of the actions that were taken were contrary to our values” but expressed hope that “today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong—in the past.”

    • Question use of lethal drones

      The age of innocence is long gone. We’re far beyond the nonthreatening play of remote-controlled model planes, or even Cold War spying. By beginning this conversation in the religious community, we hope to take a long and hard look at the use of lethal drones and then make policy recommendations to the U.S. government. We will seek to determine what the religious community can do about lethal drones at every level: congregations, regional bodies, ecumenical and interfaith bodies, and nationwide coalitions.

    • Editorial: U.S. must defend itself, but torture is not the way

      The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report released Tuesday details the depths to which the Central Intelligence Agency reached in its efforts to coerce terror suspects to reveal secrets and potential plots against the United States in the wake of the 911 attacks.

      And Obama is correct: That’s not what America is.

      Indeed, the shocking report discloses what will certainly go down as a dark and hidden period in U.S. history. It gives the U.S. a black eye in the world community and our enemies ammunition for retaliation – not that they ever seem to need any reasons.

      Interrogation tactics such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and tight confinement were authorized by the Justice Department in 2002. But, the report says, CIA tactics went beyond what was approved by former President George W. Bush. It says the CIA misled top U.S. officials and Congress about the full extent of its treatment of detainees and the effectiveness of the program. The CIA did not brief Bush with details until 2006, the report says.

      Some Republicans and current and former CIA directors say the tactics did help stop attacks here and abroad, capture terrorists and save American lives.

      But that raises the troubling question posed by the debate: Does success derived from immoral acts make those acts moral? The answer is no, which is why Americans should find them revolting. Which is why they are not who we are. Or at least not who we aspire to be.

    • For We Know Not What We Do

      While we’re on the subject of knowledge gaps, Micah Zenko of the Council of Foreign Relations notes that the CIA never measured the effectiveness of their covert programs. Take interrogation. A memorandum by the CIA dated June 27, 2013 — but only released today — responds to “the SSCI’s conclusion that the ‘CIA never conducted its own comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques’”.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Congress to Reinstate Taxpayer Subsidies for Reckless Derivatives Trading

      The New York Times called it “a textbook Washington play: use a must-pass bill, on the eve of the holidays, as a vehicle for changing unrelated policies.”

      The liberal Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, called it “the worst of government for the rich and powerful.”

      The conservative Senator from Lousiana, Dave Vitter, called it “a Christmas presents to the megabanks and Wall Street.”

      Firebrand Florida Representative Alan Grayson told the Huffington Post’s Zach Cater who broke the story, that it was “a good example of capitalism’s death wish.”

    • Democrats Revolt Against ‘Wall Street Giveaway’ In Deal To Prevent Government Shutdown

      Democrats on Wednesday raged against a government funding bill that would provide taxpayer subsidies to risky Wall Street derivatives trading.

      “The House of Representatives is about to show us the worst of government for the rich and powerful,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on the Senate floor. She urged her colleagues not to support a “deal negotiated behind closed doors that slips in a provision that would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.”

      News of the deal, first reported by HuffPost on Monday, has prompted a bitter bicameral feud. The dispute highlights a major divide among Democrats leading up to the 2016 elections over Wall Street’s role in the party platform.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Investigative Reporting = Working With Ad Partners to Monetize the Audience
    • As US media awake to a ‘nightmare’ Israel, NYT brings Blumenthal in from the cold

      We’re in the midst of a sea change in the American mainstream’s treatment of the conflict. US media are beginning to reflect the awareness that the two-state solution is over and that violence around Jerusalem and the West Bank is caused by occupation and fostered by rightwing intolerance inside Israeli political culture– the “nightmare” of greater Israel. There are countless examples of the shift. Last night on MSNBC Richard Engel said many people are angry at the US because of torture and drones, but also “because of Israel/Palestine, and Gaza.” When Israeli finance minister Naftali Bennett was confronted by Khaled Elgindy at the Brookings Institution last Saturday to explain why Palestinians are “the only group of humans in the world that do not have the right to self-determination,” the Beltway audience was evidently on Elgindy’s side. Leon (AIPAC) Wieseltier is gone from the New Republic. The New York Times is publishing Max Blumenthal. And the New Yorker‘s David Remnick is staying in East Jerusalem.

      [...]

      The Times gave Max Blumenthal a platform to explain that Israel has always been rightwing…

  • Censorship

    • IFC Center Rejects MPAA’s ‘R’ Rating On Snowden Documentary, Says It Should Be ‘Essential Viewing’

      Many people still have no idea that the MPAA “rating system” for movies is a totally voluntary system. Any official system like that would be unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment (which is why a legal attempt to rate video games got killed by the Supreme Court). It’s pretty rare for theaters to ignore MPAA ratings — though it does very rarely happen. Back in 2012, we noted that AMC theaters defied the MPAA by letting students see the documentary Bully, even though the MPAA wanted to rate it as “R” (which restricts anyone 17 and under from seeing the film without an adult).

    • GCHQ to help tackle ‘dark net’ child abuse images

      Intelligence experts and organised crime specialists will join forces to tackle child abuse images on the “dark net”, David Cameron has said.

    • Web Index: 4.3B People Offline Globally, 1.8B Face Internet Privacy Challenges

      Later today, Tim Berners-Lee will be making an appearance in London to talk about how well the world is doing at making the Internet accessible to everyone and a place safe from commercial and political interference, themes that have been strong for the inventor of the World Wide Web. Ahead of that, the World Wide Web Foundation — an organisation started by Berners-Lee — has released its Web Index annual report, a global pulse check on these issues over the past year.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • President George W Bush ‘knew everything’ about CIA interrogation

      Former US President George W Bush was “fully informed” about CIA interrogation techniques condemned in a Senate report, his vice-president says.

    • Cheney on torture report: ‘Full of crap’

      “The report’s full of crap, excuse me,” Cheney said in an interview with Fox News after calling the report a “terrible piece of work” and “deeply flawed.”

    • ABC Makes US the Victim in CIA Torture Report Story

      There’s an unfortunate impulse, when you or someone you’re close to does something wrong, to turn the situation around so that you can seem like the victim. That ugly human defense mechanism was on display on ABC’s nightly newscast for two days running as the network previewed the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program.

    • Are Rush Limbaugh And Fox News Still Laughing About Torture?

      Last spring, Palin appeared before an NRA convention crowd and laughed about how liberals supposedly coddle America’s mortal adversaries. “Oh, but you can’t offend them, can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen,” said Palin. “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists,” The NRA audience roared with approval, but even some conservative commentators who saw the tape of Palin’s wisecrack took offense, upset that she had linked bodily torture with a Christian sacrament. (“It’s disgusting.”)

      [...]

      “If you look at what we are calling torture, you have to laugh,” Rush Limbaugh once announced, and claimed “if somebody can be water-tortured six times a day, then it isn’t torture.” At the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Limbaugh routinely mocked the claims of prisoner abuse, which were confirmed by horrific photographs: “Here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography, the Britney Spears or Madonna concerts or whatever.” Limbaugh dismissed the prison torture as a “fraternity prank,” suggesting “Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured.”

    • Right-Wing Media Evokes Controversial Rolling Stone Story To Discredit Senate Torture Report
    • Creative writing teacher resigns after student writes about Jesus, pot

      The assignment was to take a fairy tale or legend and rewrite it in modern times. One student changed the biblical story about Jesus handing out bread and fish to the poor to Jesus handing out marijuana to the sick.

    • C.I.A. First Planned Jails Abiding by U.S. Standards

      Just six days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush signed a secret order that gave the Central Intelligence Agency the power to capture and imprison terrorists with Al Qaeda. But the order said nothing about where they should be held or how the agency should go about the business of questioning them.

      For the next few weeks, as the rubble at ground zero smoldered and the United States launched a military operation in Afghanistan, C.I.A. officials scrambled to fill in the blanks left by the president’s order. Initially, agency officials considered a path very different from the one they ultimately followed, according to the newly released Senate Intelligence Committee report on the C.I.A.’s harsh interrogation program.

    • Dick Cheney Says CIA Torture Report Is ‘Full Of Crap’ — Then Admits He Hasn’t Read It

      It’s no secret that those most closely responsible for the CIA’s torture program are pulling out all the stops to attack the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the program, trying out a variety of defenses from “it actually saved lives” to “it’s just a partisan hack job.” So it should come as no surprise that former Vice President Dick Cheney has been making the cable TV news appearances to help attack the report. After all, many have argued that the real person behind the torture program was Cheney and his staff — and to date, Cheney has insisted that everything that was done was perfectly reasonable and he’d do it again. Thus there’s no surprise when Cheney appears on Fox News (because, of course), to claim that the report is “a bunch of hooey” and “full of crap” and “deeply flawed” only to then admit ” I haven’t read the report.”

    • Architects of brutal methods had little experience

      When the CIA set out to design a program to elicit intelligence from captured terrorists, it turned to two former Air Force psychologists with no practical interrogation experience and no specialized knowledge of al-Qaida, according to a Senate investigation released this week.

    • Pay and Suffering: Psychologists Made $80M From CIA Interrogation Program

      The two psychologists contracted by the CIA to design the enhanced interrogation techniques used against al Qaeda suspects were paid more than $80 million, even though they were never themselves interrogators, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture report,” released today — a report that one of the psychologists told ABC News was “bulls**t.”

    • The Architect

      The Senate Intelligence Committee has released a blistering, 500-page report on the CIA’s controversial detention and interrogation program, a document that committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said represents the most significant oversight effort in the history of the US Senate.

    • Mormon church appointee aided CIA on terror

      A Spokane psychologist who helped develop controversial interrogation methods, which some human rights groups say amount to torture, became the new spiritual leader of a Mormon congregation on the South Hill this week.

      Bruce Jessen was proposed by Spokane Stake President James Lee, or “called” in the terminology of the Mormon faith, to be the bishop of Spokane’s 6th Ward, approved by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hierarchy in Salt Lake City and presented to the congregation on Sunday. He was unanimously accepted by some 200 in attendance, Lee said.

    • CIA torture report: The doctors who were the unlikely architects of the CIA’s programme

      They are the most unlikely architects of the CIA’s programme of torture. Two psychologists who swore to heal not harm.

      Now it has been revealed that two doctors, identified by the pseudonyms Dr Grayson Swigert and Dr Hammond Dunbar, were paid $81 million by the CIA to help develop and implement a seven-year programme that included “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding, placing detainees in stress positions and sleep deprivation.

      Until now, little was known about the pair, who the New York Times has named as James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

      According to the declassifed documents, they created the programme in 2002 when the CIA took custody of Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi arrested in Pakistan and suspected of being an al-Qaeda lieutenant.

    • Meet the Psychologists Who Helped the CIA Torture

      So how did these two men come to play such an outsized role in developing and enacting the CIA’s torture program? Much of the story is captured in a 2009 Times article by Scott Shane. Shane writes that Mitchell, who after retirement “had started a training company called Knowledge Works” to supplement his income, realized that the post-9/11 military would provide business opportunities for those with his kind of experience and started networking with his contacts to seek them out.

    • The American Mengeles: Drs. Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell

      We like to think of evildoers as easily recognizable cartoon characters. We want them to be different from us to reassure ourselves they aren’t anything like us. But when you consider the man pictured here, and the truly bestial things he did, you have to accept the fact the face of evil is a lot like our own. If that makes you uncomfortable, don’t worry. It should bother you. If it didn’t, there would be something wrong with you.

      The man in the old photo is tidy, professional, and clearly in control. Even without a stethoscope slung around his neck, you know the man in the white coat is a cultured, educated, intellectual man of science.

      You may not recognize him, but you certainly know his name. He’s (in)famous for his experiments. In fact, he’s so extraordinary I think he deserves a medal. I don’t mean he should get one; he should get one named after him. I think Dr. Jessen and Dr. Mitchell deserve to be the first to get this medal.

    • Psychologist defends harsh CIA tactics he designed

      But Mitchell declined to detail his experience, other than to point out he spent 30 years with the Air Force and other government organizations.

    • Battle Rages Over Senate Report on CIA Interrogation Techniques

      One day after a Senate panel’s report on interrogation tactics employed by American spies, a furor erupted at home and abroad as top Central Intelligence Agency officials prepared a detailed public response.

      Democratic senators issued fresh denunciations from the chamber floor Wednesday, Poland’s former president said the CIA misled him, and Afghanistan’s new leader demanded accountability for any mistreatment of detainees there.

      Meanwhile, a group of former CIA officials and GOP senators on the panel fiercely defended the agency against what they called a one-sided report, saying the interrogation program was legal and effective.

    • Spokane psychologists helped craft CIA’s harsh interrogation tactics

      From their office in Spokane, two psychologists who once worked with an Air Force survival school there launched an extraordinary covert business that, after the 2001 terror attacks, offered one-stop shopping for a CIA wanting to use harsh interrogation tactics.

    • Senate Report Put Obama at Odds With Brennan, Longtime Security Adviser

      Tuesday’s release of the report criticizing the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-Sept. 11 detention and interrogation program puts an unusual public strain on the close relationship between the president and his CIA director.

    • The CIA chained him to the floor and froze him to death. But who was Gul Ruhman?

      It wasn’t that bad, we’ve been told, over and over again, for more than a decade. “We only waterboarded three people” goes the line American officials have been force-feeding the world for years.

      “We tortured some folks,” Barack Obama admitted recently, still downplaying war crimes committed in America’s name. But we now know those statements do not even begin to do justice to the horrific activities carried out by the CIA for years – atrocities that now have been exposed by the US Senate’s historic report on the CIA’s torture program, finally released on Tuesday after years of delay.

      There are stories in the CIA torture report of “rectal rehydration as a means of behavior control”, threats to murder and “threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee” – or cut a mother’s throat. There are details about detainees with broken bones forced to stand for days on end, detainees blindfolded, dragged down hallways while they were beaten. There were even torture sessions that ended in death. The list goes on and on, and on and on.

    • The 10 most harrowing excerpts from the CIA interrogation report

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Piracy is a crime – really!

        The Australian government has today confirmed that it will not tolerate online content piracy – site blocking and a graduated response scheme backed by legal action is soon to be legislated.

      • Develop anti-piracy scheme or we’ll do it for you

        The Government has issued an ultimatum to ISPs to work with content owners and distributors to develop a code that will enable digital pirates to be prosecuted.

        Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Attorney General George Brandis have written to ISPs, telcos, copyright owners and content distributors telling them to develop an anti-piracy code or have one forced upon them.

        The letter is published here. It tells all parties they have until 8 April 2015 to develop a code that will enable the enforcement of sanctions against people who infringe copyright by downloading content from illegal sources.

      • Google Pulls Out The Nuclear Option: Shuts Down Google News In Spain Over Ridiculous Copyright Law

        Back in October, we noted that Spain had passed a ridiculously bad Google News tax, in which it required any news aggregator to pay for snippets and actually went so far as to make it an “inalienable right” to be paid for snippets — meaning that no one could choose to let any aggregator post snippets for free. Publishers have to charge any aggregator. This is ridiculous and dangerous on many levels. As we noted, it would be deathly for digital commons projects or any sort of open access project, which thrive on making content reusable and encouraging the widespread sharing of such content.

Links 11/12/2014: systemd 218, Empire Total War

Posted in News Roundup at 12:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Review: 6 business-class Chromebooks test their mettle

      I’ve spent the last three weeks taking six business-oriented Chromebooks through their paces. I started out as a skeptical Windows-rules-them-all kind of guy: I’ve been using Windows since the early days, and I’ve rarely strayed from the ghosts of my Windows masters. By the end of my Chromebook experiment, however, my old biases were shaken.

  • Kernel Space

    • F2FS On Linux 3.19 To Support Faster Boot Times

      The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) will see another round of improvements with the now in-development Linux 3.19 kernel.

      The F2FS file-system this time around features several bug-fixes and other changes. The noteworthy work for this kernel cycle is less than previous cycles but includes better memory and I/O control when under memory pressure, support for the dirsync mount option, and a fastboot mount option to yield reduced boot times.

    • AMDKFD — AMD HSA On Linux — Will Not Support 32-Bit Linux

      This really shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, but AMD won’t support HSA on 32-bit Linux.

    • Hardkernel Launches $35 Development Board That Can Smash The RPi

      Hardkernel has announced the latest ODROID ARM development board. The ODROID-C1 is a $35 single-board computer that is similar in size to the Raspberry Pi but with much greater hardware specifications.

    • systemd 218 Released With More Additions

      The latest Linux excitement of today, which earlier seemed like an early Christmas, is the release of systemd 218.

    • Multi-Layer Support Coming To OverlayFS In Linux 3.19

      OverlayFS was finally merged in Linux 3.18 and now for the Linux 3.19 merge window it’s picking up another feature.

    • Linux 3.19 Kernel Adds Intel MPX Support For Skylake

      We’ve been talking about Intel MPX support in the kernel for one year and with the upcoming Linux 3.19 kernel that support is finally being realized.

    • Optimizations & Performance Improvements For DM In Linux 3.19

      Another one of the interesting early pull requests for the Linux 3.19 kernel is the Device Mapper changes.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • 6-Way Winter 2014 Linux Distribution Comparison

        With this week’s launch of Fedora 21, here’s a performance comparison of the new Fedora Linux release compared to the Arch-based Antergos rolling-release distribution, Debian GNU/Linux Jessie, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CentOS Linux 7, and Ubuntu 14.10.

        These six Linux distributions were all tested with the same hardware that came down to an MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard with Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 ten-core processor plus Hyper Threading. The system also had 16GB of quad-channel DDR4 memory, 80GB Intel SSD, and Radeon HD 7850 graphics.

        All six Linux distributions were tested with their default installation settings and packages.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt 5.4 released

        I am happy to announce that Qt 5.4 has been released today and is available for download from qt.io. Together with Qt 5.4, we have also released Qt Creator 3.3 and an update to Qt for device creation on embedded Linux and embedded Android.

        But let’s start with Qt 5.4. One of the main focus areas of this Qt release has been around Web technologies and we have a lot of cool new things to offer there.

      • Qt 5.4 Officially Released
      • Meeting C++ and fantastic people

        I got back from Meeting C++ and I must say I loved every second of it. At first, it was a bit strange – I’m accustomed to KDE/Qt conferences where I know a lot of people. Here, it was not the case. It is a bit sad to see that barely anyone from the Qt community was there (apart from a few KDAB people), but that is a separate topic.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Linux Distros: What’s in a Name?

      Yesterday, the Fedora Project released Fedora 21, and with it the tech media got on its proverbial horse and started reports and reviews of the latest release. While it’s a good release and we won’t be reviewing it here — I already gave it a shakedown during the alpha and found it to be fantastic and completely worth the wait — there’s one thing that’s missing from Fedora 21 that I find rather disheartening.

    • New Releases

      • Alpine 3.1.0 released

        We are pleased to announce Alpine Linux 3.1.0, the first release in v3.1 stable series.

        This release is built with musl libc and is not compatible with v2.x and earlier, so special care needs to be taken when upgrading.

      • OpenELEC 5.0 RC2 Is Out, It’s an Awesome OS for Embedded Devices Already

        The embedded operating system built specifically to run the famous KODI (XBMC) media player solution, OpenELEC, has been upgraded to version 5.0 RC2 and a new image is now ready for testing and download.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Lamborghini Tauri 88: The $6,000 Android phone

        Times are tough for a lot of us but apparently not for everybody according to Android Authority. They reported today on a new Android phone called the Lamborghini Tauri 88 that will be made by…you guessed it…the same folks that make Lamborghini cars. And it will sell for a measly $6000!

    • Red Hat Family

      • Analysis of the CVE-2013-6435 Flaw in RPM

        The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command-line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating software packages. RPM was originally written in 1997 by Erik Troan and Marc Ewing. Since then RPM has been successfully used in all versions of Red Hat Linux and currently in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

      • Breaking down the Red Hat QA process

        Quality assurance (QA) is a critical aspect of software development, and Red Hat shares its best practices for testing Linux, KVM and OpenShift.

      • Fedora

        • Upgrading to Fedora 21 Workstation from Fedora 20

          Fedora 21 was released yesterday, and if you are running Fedora 20 as a desktop, you will probably want to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Fedora. Luckily, there is a tool called FedUp that is the most simple way to upgrade to Fedora 21 Workstation.

        • Cubietruck: QEMU, KVM and Fedora

          Rich Jones previoulsy wrote here on how he got KVM working on Cubietruck — it was Fedora-19 timeframe. It wasn’t quite straight forwad then: you had to build a custom Kernel, custom U-Boot (Universal-Boot), etc.

        • Fedora 21 released…and websites too!
        • A Big Fedora Server SIG Welcome

          At today’s Fedora Server SIG Meeting, the present Fedora Server Working Group members elected to fill the seat recently-vacated by David Strauss. As of today, Dan Mossor (danofsatx on IRC) becomes a full member of the Fedora Server Working Group.

        • 11 Things to Do After You Install Fedora 21

          Fedora 21 was announced yesterday and it turned out to be a great release. Fedora comes pre-installed with a lot of applications. Users can start working as soon as they boot into Fedora. However, like most operating systems Fedora also needs some work to prepare it to handle your workload.

        • Fedora 21 KDE Screenshot Tour
        • Fedora 21 LXDE Screenshot Tour
        • Fedora Infrastructure release day retrospective

          Then, release day: proxy02 (a server in england) started being unable to cope with load and we removed it from DNS. Then, proxy01 started having problems. Since most services were slow in any case, we updated our status page that it was release day and to expect slowdowns. Most services (aside bodhi) were actually up and fine, just slower than normal. Some folks took this to mean we were completely down, but this was not the case. Next release we probibly will make a special banner telling people it’s release day and to expect things to be slow, but up and all working.

        • Fedora 21 MATE Screenshot Tour
        • Fedora 21 Linux Distro Tuned for Desktop, Server, Cloud

          The open-source Fedora 21 Linux distribution, launched Dec. 9, provides the first new edition of Red Hat’s community Linux distribution since the release of Fedora 20 in December 2013. Much has happened in the Fedora Linux community in the past year, and the Fedora 21 release marks a departure for the project from the way releases were built over the past decade. Instead of a single monolithic release that can be tailored for multiple use cases, Fedora 21 offers three distinct products intended for specific deployments. A Fedora Workstation release, intended for use as a desktop, includes a new set of tools to help developers use Fedora to build applications.

        • Fedora 21 greatest hits: non-Server non-live installs, fedup product behaviour

          So here’s a couple of things I’ve seen popping up multiple times with the Fedora 21 release. I thought I’d note them down here for my readers, Planet Fedora, and also as a handy link target for answering them in future.

        • Fedora 21 has Been Released!

          Here is the good news for you. The most anticipated Fedora 21 final is now made available for download.

        • Congratulations to the Fedora community on F21.

          This release has been a long time coming. It has been about a year since F20 release, and the pause we took as a community to embark upon the first steps of Fedora.next. I know many people have been anxious for the pause to be over. Finally the day has come and gone, and the release seems to be hitting on all cylinders!

        • Want to give BPG / libbpg a try? Here’s a repo for you.

          By now, most people will have heard about libbpg. Or maybe rather about the new BPG (better portable graphics) image format that was created by Fabrice Bellard, creator of qemu and ffmpeg, to possibly hopefully replace JPEG (and maybe even PNG) image formats one day.

        • Fedora 21 is here — Linux fans get an early Christmas gift

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Core to bring Snappy and transactional updates to the Cloud

            Mark Shuttleworth has announced a beta release of Ubuntu Core, a version of Ubuntu server for the Cloud that does not use debs or apt-get for system and software management.

          • Ubuntu Core Targets Container Deployment
          • Ubuntu Wants To Run Containers, Too

            Snappy, a lean Linux Ubuntu optimized for container operation, promises stronger security for Linux containers.

          • Ubuntu Team Launches Snappy Ubuntu Core for Container, Cloud Deployments

            The team at Canonical is even going so far as to call Snappy the “biggest revolution in Ubuntu since we launched our mobile initiative.” You can try the snappy Ubuntu Core alpha today, first on the Microsoft Azure cloud. Linux users can also try the snappy Ubuntu Core locally with KVM.

          • Can your computer run Ubuntu Core?

            Ubuntu Core beta, a version of Ubuntu for Cloud deployment that comes with snappy a system and application management utility with support for transaction updates, was released just a few hours ago.

            Though it was made available for testing on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform, Mark Shuttleworth said in a blog post that you can download a KVM image of Ubuntu Core that “you can run on any Linux machine.”

          • This Modular Smartphone Wants to Offer Ubuntu, SailfishOS

            Google’s Project Ara may soon have some competition in the modular smartphone stakes, with a Finnish startup — co-founded by a former Nokia Android X employee — pitching in.

          • Future Modular Phone Might Be Powered by Ubuntu Touch

            Everyone is talking about Ubuntu Touch on Meizu phones and that will happen in the next few months, but other less conventional hardware makers might be interested in the Ubuntu experience. At least, this is what the newly formed company Vsenn says it wants.

          • Ubuntu says it will make cloud server updates as simple as phone updates

            Canonical yesterday unveiled a new version of Ubuntu that’s designed for the cloud, saying it ditches the traditional apt-get system in favor of “transactional updates” that mimic the simplicity of phone updates.

            Ubuntu Core, the new version, “is a minimal server image with the same libraries as today’s Ubuntu, but applications are provided through a simpler mechanism,” Canonical said. Applications are more secure because they’re isolated from each other within containers, the company explained. Ubuntu Core is in beta on Microsoft Azure and can be run locally on the KVM hypervisor. It’s optimized to run in conjunction with Docker, software that automates the deployment of applications within containers.

          • Canonical Announces Snappy Ubuntu Core, A Transactionally Updated Flavor For The Cloud
          • Ubuntu 15.04 Gets Linux Kernel 3.18

            Ubuntu 15.04 (Vidid Vervet) is now under development and this is a time when new features and components are added to the distribution. The same is true for the Linux kernel, which has been updated to version 3.18.

          • Ubuntu 15.04 To Soon Land The Linux 3.18 Kernel

            Now that the Linux 3.18 kernel has been officially released, the Ubuntu kernel team will soon be landing the update inside the Ubuntu 15.04 archive.

          • Ubuntu Developer Tools Center Gets Renamed To Ubuntu Make

            Ubuntu Developer Tools Center / Ubuntu Make is a way to easily setup common developer tools on an Ubuntu Linux desktop installation. Right now this utility is just designed about easing Android application development but Ubuntu developers have plans for allowing Ubuntu Make to provide the tooling for other languages and environments.

          • Snappy Ubuntu Core Announced

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Top 10 Semi-Autonomous Robots That Run Linux
    • Top 10 Semi-Autonomous Robots That Run Linux (With Slideshow)

      many Linux-based robots for under $1,000, except for a handful of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), but we’re definitely heading in that direction. Like last year’s robot slide show, this year’s top 10 list is not a definitive compendium or a shopping guide. However, it may help show how Linux is enabling new capabilities in terrestrial robots, as well UAVs and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which are essentially robots that fly or swim. (Click on Gallery to see the robot slide show.)

    • Intel extends its Internet-of-Things ecosystem

      Intel introduced a new IoT “end-to-end reference model” that includes a Linux-ready edge management platform, security, services, and ecosystem partners.

      The new reference platform, called the “Intel IoT Platform,” helps fill in the gaps in Intel’s growing ecosystem of Internet of Things gateways, cloud-based services, and endpoint devices like the Linux-based Intel Galileo SBC and Intel Edison module.

    • ODROID-C1 is a $35 quad-core, single-board Android/Linux PC

      When the Raspberry Pi team launched a tiny, low power computer priced at just $35, it was pretty remarkable. But that was 2 years ago, and while the Raspberry Pi has seen a few updates in that time, it’s still powered by the same single-core 700 MHz Broadcomm BCM2835 ARM11 processor.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • GENIVI Lifecycle Subsystem – Webinar Session 2 @ 9AM PST

          The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a collaborative open source project developing a common Linux-based software stack for the connected car. GENIVI Alliance is a non-profit industry alliance committed to driving the broad adoption of an In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) open-source development platform. If you are interested in these two organisations work then there is a webinar on the GENIVI Lifecycle Subsystem, taking place at 9am PST.

        • MinnowBoard MAX Unboxing and Booting of Tizen:Common

          MinnowBoard MAX is an excellent open source embedded hardware platform based on Intel Atom E38xx 64-Bit Bay Trail System on Chips (SoC), which is quite versatile to our Tizen developer community. Our friend Leon Anavi got a MinnowBoard MAX board during the recent Tizen Developer Summit in Shanghai earlier this year and the first thing he did was port Tizen over to it !!!!

        • Tizen OS For Smart Life, Carsten Heitzler, Samsung #Slush2014

          Carsten Heitzler, who is the Principal Engineer at Samsung was onstage at Slush 2014 presenting Tizen OS for Smart Life. Slush is one of the biggest startup events of the year with over 13,000 attendees. Carsten discusses what is an Operating System and how Tizen is similar to other Linux distributions that are typically designed for server or the desktop environment, but in the case of Tizen it is much much more, with having the flexibility of being able to be used in things like Smart watches, Smart Cameras, TVs, Mobile Phones, Cars, IoT and anything that you can or want to fit an Operating System into, we have Tizen.

        • No release for the Tizen Samsung Z1 today, but over $1.7m worth of SM-Z130H parts imported to India

          All eyes have been looking towards the east for Samsung to launch the first Tizen based Smartphone, the Samsung Z1 (SM-Z130H), but the Smartphone failed to materialise. We are disappointed and saddened that their is an Information vacuum that will now be filled with speculation. Insiders close to the situation still feel there should be a release soon, but can not stipulate when that exactly could be.

        • Application Big Neon Clock for Samsung Gear 2 and Gear Neo

      • Android

        • A first look at Google’s Android Studio 1.0: Climbing out of the Eclipse kitchen sink

          Google has released version 1.0 of Android Studio, now the official IDE for Android.

          The development tool has been in preview since its announcement at the Google I/O conference in May 2013, and in beta since June this year. There are a variety of Android development tools available, but until now the official bundle has been based on the open source Eclipse project.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source for sensitive email

    We often discuss the many benefits of open source software. The single most important factor, the one that all benefits emerge from, is open. This is actually at the heart of what the software is, a community-driven software package with full transparency into the code base. Governments care about open source because it provides three powerful benefits: monetary savings, improved quality, and better security and privacy. This last benefit is often less-than-obvious, but equally important.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla and Telenor Announce WebRTC Competency Center to Advance WebRTC and Help Standardization

        Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) is changing the way people communicate over the Web by enabling developers to more easily integrate real-time communications on websites, mobile Web apps or video conferencing systems. WebRTC makes complex real-time communications technology available to everyone, driving a wave of new communications services that significantly improves user choice.

      • Mozilla Developer Experimenting With Firefox UI In HTML

        Paul Rouget of Mozilla has gone public with his experimental, proof-of-concept work to rebuild the Firefox user-interface within HTML.

        Rouget is hoping to one day replace the Firefox UI currently written in XUL with an HTML implementation. However, first the HTML needs to be made faster and enriched for constructing the entire Firefox UI. This would also allow for the Firefox UI to be eventually rendered by their next-generation Servo Engine rather than Gecko.

      • Firefox 35 Beta Arrives with Conference Call Features for Hello

        Mozilla has just released the Beta branch of the upcoming Firefox 35.x and it looks that they don’t plan anything out of the ordinary for it, although there are some improvements and various other changes ready.

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD Laptop

      I have been meaning to give OpenBSD a try for a while now. What has been attracting me to this operating system was: the big emphasis on security while still being functional, the urge to try another unix-like operating system that is not Linux, and of course Puffy. Here I will be going through the steps I took towards learning about OpenBSD and getting it running on my laptop. I hope that you can take bits and pieces out of this post to help you with your learning experience when you decide it is your time to venture off into the BSD world.

  • Project Releases

    • QEMU 2.2 Released With Its Many Changes

      Today is certainly a very exciting day for nearly all Linux users as covered in the Phoronix articles today. The latest good news is for server and virtualization users with the release of the slightly delayed QEMU 2.2.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Europe Softens on GM Crops

      A new agreement in the European Union allows genetically engineered crops to be approved without member-state votes, likely allowing several GMO foods to enter the market.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Magical thinking on terrorism

      But who’s doing the sloppy thinking here? Where is the evidence that more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan has brought us any closer to political solutions that can be sustained beyond the departure of U.S. forces? After spending over $1 trillion and deploying over 100,000 troops, are we any safer now?

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • Web founder: Europe’s ‘right to be forgotten’ rule is dangerous

      Tim Berners-Lee thinks scrubbing false information off the Web is fine, but the truth should be preserved for reasons of free speech and history. Also: the robots are already here.

    • Russia’s Creeping Descent Into Internet Censorship

      When staffers at GitHub first saw the email from a Russian agency claiming dominion over the internet last month, they didn’t take it seriously. GitHub operates an enormously popular site where computer programmers share and collaborate on code, and to the Silicon Valley startup, an email requesting the removal of a list of suicide techniques from the site just didn’t seem believable.

  • Privacy

    • Let’s Encrypt – and Fix HTTPS While We’re At It

      A few weeks ago I wrote about the need for encryption – and the growing attacks against it by surveillance agencies worried about its efficacity. But how exactly can we implement that?

      One way is to adopt it at a personal level. That means using things likes PGP with Thunderbird, say. There are also a range of new email services that are aiming to offer easy-to-use encrypted email – something that cannot, alas, be claimed for the PGP+Thunderbird combo.

    • GCHQ Follows NSA Into Paranoia — Just As Julian Assange Predicted

      One of the knock-on effects of Snowden’s leaks is that the NSA is terrified there might be more whistleblowers, and has taken extreme action in an attempt to reduce the risk of that happening by stripping 100,000 people of their security clearances.

    • GCHQ sponsors ways to catch disgruntled ‘insiders about to go rogue’

      GCHQ is sponsoring ways of identifying disgruntled employees and those who might go on to be a security threat through their use of language in things like office emails.

      The Signals Intelligence organisation based on the outskirts of Cheltenham is financing a PhD research post, to the tune of £22,000 a year, at Lancaster University.

    • Facebook’s ‘emotional experiment’ is most shared academic research

      A paper revealing Facebook’s secret experiments on users received more online attention than any other scientific paper published this year, a new study finds.

    • Facebook is making employees read Chinese propaganda to impress Beijing

      To say Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is on a China charm offensive would be a bit of an understatement. After speaking decent Mandarin during a thirty-minute Q&A in October and opening an office in Beijing (despite being blocked in China) in May, Zuckerberg is not only reading president Xi Jinping’s recently-released book, “The Governance of China,” he is reportedly buying it for Facebook employees.

    • Ho ho no! While you shop this season, beacons will spam you

      Marketers have found a new channel to abuse, but it doesn’t have to be this way

    • NSA Hacking of Cell Phone Networks

      For example, the US company Verint sells cell phone tracking systems to both corporations and governments worldwide. The company’s website says that it’s “a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions for customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance,” with clients in “more than 10,000 organizations in over 180 countries.” The UK company Cobham sells a system that allows someone to send a “blind” call to a phone — one that doesn’t ring, and isn’t detectable. The blind call forces the phone to transmit on a certain frequency, allowing the sender to track that phone to within one meter. The company boasts government customers in Algeria, Brunei, Ghana, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the United States. Defentek, a company mysteriously registered in Panama, sells a system that can “locate and track any phone number in the world…undetected and unknown by the network, carrier, or the target.” It’s not an idle boast; telecommunications researcher Tobias Engel demonstrated the same capability at a hacker conference in 2008. Criminals can purchase illicit products to let them do the same today.

    • No One Has Privacy Now, Thanks to Super Cookies

      Our private information is being catalogued and used by government and private industry, both with and without our knowledge. There was no consequence, fine or penalty, for example, following the revelation late in 2011 that Carrier IQ collected massive amounts of data from millions of cell users. Why? Probably because cell users allowed that information to be collected.

  • Civil Rights

    • Savaged By Rotting Sheep

      It is quite a feat by the Scotsman, on the day when CIA torture is the headline news of the entire world, that the Scotsman runs a story about me that leaves out the fact I was sacked as Ambassador for being the first whistleblower on CIA torture and extraordinary rendition. Particularly given that I pointed that out to them when they called me.

    • Ex-ambassador Craig Murray to be SNP candidate

      Craig Murray was withdrawn as UK ambassador to Uzbekistan after the Foreign Office lost patience with his criticism of human rights abuses.

      [...]

      He was withdrawn as the UK ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2004 after the Foreign Office became frustrated with his vociferous criticism of human rights abuses in the former Soviet country.

    • Jack Straw – The Guilty Man Lies

      …Jack Straw is lying about his personal complicity in torture.

    • Equal Time for Torturers?

      But then NBC aired a long interview–nearly as long as the report on the Senate’s findings–with former CIA (and NSA) director Michael Hayden, who even disputes that the tactics in the report were torture. Anchor Brian Williams told viewers that Hayden was “accused in today’s report of providing misleading information in the past.”

      That’s a mild characterization; in fact, as the Washington Post (12/9/14) showed, Hayden’s 2007 Senate testimony about CIA torture was revealed to be full of distortions and evasions–from the number of prisoners held by the CIA to his claims that “punches and kicks…have never been employed” and that the “most serious injury” was bruising.

    • The man who did the most to fight CIA torture is still in prison

      The Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on CIA torture today, and the news is as bad as it could be. Of the 119 prisoners detained by the CIA, more than one in five were wrongfully imprisoned, while CIA interrogators ran through a host of barbaric tactics including Russian roulette, shoving hummus up a detainee’s rectum, and simply leaving targets to freeze to death in an unheated cell. And while all of it was happening, many officials within the agency harbored real doubts about whether the program was working at all.

    • How the CIA tortured its detainees

      A detainee at Guantanamo Bay in 2009. A detainee at Guantanamo Bay in 2009. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

      The CIA, and the Senate intelligence committee, would rather avoid the word “torture,” preferring euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “rendition, detention and interrogation program”. Many of the techniques employed by the CIA after capturing high-value targets have been documented in CIA memos released by the Obama administration, and in numerous leaks, including a report written by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

    • CIA Program Tortured Dozens To Produce Nearly Nothing In The Way Of Useful Intelligence

      Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the Torture Report [pdf link] is the fact that the CIA clearly knew the methods weren’t producing usable intelligence but continued to use them anyway, all the while hiding the extent of its abuses from the rest of the goverment.

    • 5 Telling Dick Cheney Appearances in the CIA Torture Report

      It may come as little surprise that former Vice President Dick Cheney’s name crops up 41 times in the Senate report on the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation.”

    • Broken Windows And Broken Lives

      Apparently we’ve decided that we won’t tolerate broken windows any more. But we haven’t found the fortitude to do something about broken people. To put it plainly: just as neighborhood thugs could once break windows with impunity, police officers can generally kill with impunity. They can shoot unarmed men and lie about it. They can roll up and execute a child with a toy as casually as one might in Grand Theft Auto. They can bumble around opening doors with their gun hand and kill bystanders, like a character in a dark farce, with little fear of serious consequences. They can choke you to death for getting a little mouthy about selling loose cigarettes. They can shoot you because they aren’t clear on who the bad guy is, and they can shoot you because they’re terrible shots, and they can shoot you because they saw something that might be a weapon in your hand — something that can be, frankly, any fucking thing at all, including nothing.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • The Broadband Industry Pretends To Be Worried About Your Soaring Bill In Attempt To Undermine Net Neutrality

      On the heels of Obama’s surprise support of Title II-based net neutrality rules last month, we noted that the broadband industry’s anti-Title II talking points (primarily that it will kill network investment and sector innovation) not only were just plain wrong, they were getting more than a little stale. That’s a problem for the industry given the increasingly bi-partisan support of real net neutrality rules and the groundswell of SOPA-esque activism in support of Title II. As such, the industry’s vast think tank apparatus quickly got to work on new talking points to combat net neutrality rules that actually might do something.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

12.10.14

Links 10/12/2014: Fedora 21, Ubuntu Core

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Databases

    • MariaDB Enterprise adds Suse Linux and IBM Power8 support

      MARIADB LAUNCHED the latest release of MariaDB Enterprise on Tuesday with support for tailored software configuration notifications and IBM Power8 hardware systems as well as Suse Linux distributions.

      “MariaDB Enterprise’s new Notification Service means that crawling through lengthy change logs and wondering if the latest security vulnerability will affect database performance are in the past,” the firm said.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Making good and solid templates

      Well this is exactly one of the most common mistakes. Making templates for Writer is NOT converting Word templates. Its building new templates from scratch using the best tool for it: LibreOffice. If you choose the short cut and converts Word templates to LibreOffice templates, you will get into trouble. Big trouble.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Taking A Stick To Flouters of EU Procurement Policies

      he EU has pretty strongly emphasized that government procurement should not prop up monopoly, yet the practice continues.

    • Report: 15 percent of IT tenders ask for brand instead of solution

      Each year 15 per cent of public administrations flout procurement rules by requesting specific brands and trademarks that prevent competition, shows a European study into 12.808 ICT procurement requests published over the past five years. Nearly a quarter of all awarded ICT requests got one single offer, also indicating there is a lack of competition when it comes to government ICT solutions.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The New York Times R&D Lab releases Hive, an open-source crowdsourcing tool

      Today the R&D Lab is opening up the platform that powers the whole thing. Hive is an open-source framework that lets anyone build their own crowdsourcing project. The code responsible for Hive is now available on GitHub. With Hive, a developer can create assignments for users, define what they need to do, and keep track of their progress in helping to solve problems.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Congress relaxes whole grain standards for schools

      Congress is taking some whole grains off the school lunch line.

      A massive year-end spending bill released Tuesday doesn’t allow schools to opt out of healthier school meal standards championed by first lady Michelle Obama, as House Republicans had sought. But it would ease standards that require more whole grains in school foods.

      The bill also would put off rules to lower sodium in school meals. Those rules were supposed to kick in by 2017.

  • Security

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • Using IT Shouldn’t Be Like Hand-carrying Bags Of Money Through Gang-territory But It Is Thanks To M$ And Adobe

      “bugs that allow hackers to hijack PCs via Internet Explorer, Word and Excel files, and Visual Basic scripts.

      Everyone is urged to install the fixes, as well as a batch of updates from Adobe: a flaw in the Flash plugin is already being exploited by hackers to take over victims’ computers via the web.” It would be tedious if it weren’t terrifying but just about every month we learn what the malware-industry already knows, non-FREE software stinks. Just using it to do ordinary things the way they were intended to be used exposes one’s IT to all kinds of criminals. Don’t blame the victims. Blame the purveyors of this garbage, M$ and Adobe, who force the world to use their stuff only to be victimized.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • World Oil Politics

      If you wish to see a target of Saudi inaction, it is the United States, not Russia.

  • Finance

    • The Wages of Global Capitalism

      In the “developed world” wage growth in 2012 was 0.1 percent, and in 2013 it was 0.2 percent. Far from portending any economic “recovery,” that level of wage “growth” is rather called “wage stagnation.” In stunning contrast, wage growth in the major emerging growth economies was much better: 6.7 percent in 2012 and 5.9 percent in 2013.

    • Professor Wolff on The Real News Network: “The State of Workers’ Wages around the World”

      Economist Richard Wolff compares the stagnation of wages in the U.S. for the past 30 years to the increase in wages in emerging markets and explains why capital left America.

  • Civil Rights

    • “Rectal Feeding,” Threats to Children, and More: 16 Awful Abuses From the CIA Torture Report

      On Tuesday morning, the Senate intelligence committee released an executive summary of its years-long investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. President George W. Bush authorized the so-called “enhanced interrogation” program after the 9/11 attacks. The United States government this week has warned personnel in facilities abroad, including US embassies, to be ready in case protests erupt in response.

    • The Bush Administration Homicides

      The Justice Department may not be prosecuting the torture-memo writers, but John Sifton asks, what about those who killed an estimated 100 detainees during interrogations?

    • Hayden’s testimony vs. the Senate report

      A look at then-CIA Director Michael V. Hayden’s testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on April 12, 2007, compared with the extensive summary on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program, released on Tuesday.

    • Senate Report on Torture

      Can I just say how pleasant it is to be vindicated ten years after being sacked by Jack Straw for opposing the torture and extraordinary rendition programme – which Blair and Straw claimed I was inventing.

    • Washington Post Does Not Call It Torture When We Torture

      The early report at the Washington Post website about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of CIA torture is gripping, well-documented and sickening. But one thing jumps out: The paper doesn’t use the word “torture” to describe the CIA’s torture program. And that’s not an accident.

    • Conservative Media’s Celebration Of Torture

      Conservative media celebrated the effectiveness of torture in response to news that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee would release its report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) detention and interrogation program, attacking the Senate for releasing the report and disputing the report’s findings. Military and interrogation experts have emphasized that torture is an ineffective interrogation technique, and human rights groups support the release of the report.

    • Inside the CIA’s Sadistic Dungeon

      The CIA was alerted of allegations that anal exams at Cobalt were conducted with “excessive force.” An attorney was asked to follow up, but no records indicate what happened next. Agency records said that one of the detainees housed at Cobalt, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, was later diagnosed with chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse.

    • David Hicks heckles George Brandis and claims government knew about his torture

      Former Australian detainee at Guantanamo Bay makes claims after damning report into CIA torture methods revealed

    • Architects Of CIA Torture Program Raked In $81 Million, Report Reveals

      Two psychologists were paid $81 million by the CIA to advise on and help implement its brutal interrogation program targeting detainees in the war on terror, according to the Senate torture report summary released Tuesday.

      The contract psychologists are identified with pseudonyms — Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar — like most of the individuals named in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA program. Published reports dating back to 2007, however, identify the two men as James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, both former members of the military.

    • 17 Disgraceful Facts Buried In The Senate’s 600 Page Torture Report

      “In 2006, the value of the CIA’s base contract with the company formed by the psychologists with all options exercised was in excess of $180 million; the contractors received $81 million prior to the contract’s termination in 2009. In 2007, the CIA provided a multi-year indemnification agreement to protect the company and its employees from legal liability arising out of the program. The CIA has since paid out more than $1 million pursuant to the agreement.” [Page 11]

    • CIA torture: Fox News says ‘the US is awesome’ – and torture report is just ‘one last shot at Bush’

      Fox News has condemned the release of a damning report into the CIA’s use of torture as a political manoeuvre designed to show Americans “how we’re not awesome”.

      The broadcaster’s National Security Analyst K.T. McFarland argued that the techniques were both “legal and justified” by the 9/11 terror attacks.

      And she denounced the publication of the Senate Intelligence Committee report as a move made by Democrats to “do harm” to the country by angering terrorists.

12.09.14

Links 9/12/2014: Fedora 21 and Torture Report Are Out

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Xojo: A Linux development suite that doesn’t really support Linux

    If a company is going to support Linux… it needs to actually freaking support Linux.

    In one of my past lives, I was a software developer. And even though I no longer code for a living, I still find tinkering with various languages, IDEs, and frameworks more fun than I probably should. Truth be told, I consider playing with a new development environment to be a bit of a hoot. (Yes. I just wrote “bit of a hoot.” That’s how confident I am in my own masculinity.)

    I’m also not the kind of guy to be prejudiced for – or against – any particular language. Python? Awesome. C++? Tons of fun (in an “I-like-to-hurt-myself” kind of way). Pascal, BASIC, Smalltalk and JavaScript? All delightful. I like ‘em all… for the most part.

  • Do you need programming skills to learn Linux?

    A few months ago I took the Introduction to Linux course offered through edX. It’s an 18 chapter course with lots of reading, some videos, and a casual level of testing your knowledge. I wrote about the first six chapters and how the course works in, What happens when a non-coder tries to learn Linux.

    My main goal in taking the course was to get a better, high level understanding of Linux. I didn’t have to install Linux but wanted to, so before I started chapter 7, I did. I wanted to test out some of the things I was learning, and ‘learning is doing’ to a large extent.

  • New Linux Trojan Found, Part of Turla

    The top story today is the discovery of a new Linux trojan that experts say could have been in place for years. Kaspersky Lab is saying this newly discovered Linux malware is part of the Turla campaign indicating that the culprits aren’t limiting themselves to Windows. And that’s not all that’s unusual about this code.

  • The ‘Penquin’ Turla
  • Breaking: Stealth “Turla” Malware Infects Unknown Number of Linux Systems

    The Linux Turla is a new piece of malware designed to infect only Linux computers, which has managed to remain relatively hidden until now and has the potential of doing a lot of harm. Unfortunately, very little is known about it or how to fix it.

  • Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

  • Server

    • Intel Becomes Newest OpenDaylight SDN/NFV Project Member
    • Intel Ups Investment in OpenDaylight SDN, NFV Effort

      The chip maker, which sees SDN and NFV as growth areas in the data center, is now a Platinum member of the vendor-based consortium it helped found.
      Intel, one of the founding members of the OpenDaylight Project, is increasing its commitment to the software-defined networking standards body.

      Intel is joining such tech vendors as IBM, Cisco Systems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks as a Platinum member of OpenDaylight, a move that increases the chip maker’s financial backing of the group and includes the adding of an Intel official on the board of directors.

    • Rocket vs Docker and The Myth of the “Simple, Lightweight Enterprise Platform”

      With seemingly everyone who’s ever written an app or booted a VM jumping on the cargo ship at the moment, it’s hardly surprising to see the launch this week of Rocket; a credible challenger to Docker in the container space.

    • New data center OS allows single-source command for Linux servers

      Mesosphere, a startup that provides commercial support for the Apache Mesos cluster management system, has debuted a “data center operating system.”

      Mesosphere DCOS uses the Mesos project to gang together machines running Linux, whether hosted in any number of clouds (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) or running on nearly any kind of infrastructure (bare metal, OpenStack, VMware).

      Widely deployed at scale by companies like Twitter and Airbnb, Mesos has a proven track record. However, Mesosphere DCOS is designed to manage not only the applications but also the systems they run on.

    • Mesosphere Raises $36M for Application Data Center OS

      Lead commercial sponsor behind Apache Mesos project announces new commercial effort that leverages open source components as well as its own ‘secret sauce.’

    • Mesosphere Grabs $36M in Funding for Data Center OS Built on Apache Mesos

      The B round brings Mesosphere’s total funding to approximately $50 million and the company says it plans to accelerate investment in global growth.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • The Pillars of KDE “Now”

        Oxygen, Sonnet (remember that?), Solid, Plasma, Akonadi and Decibel… This list in one way or another might be wrong. Not so cool. But you know what is cool? People remembered the Pillars of KDE 4 existed and the effect they had.

  • Distributions

    • Ask Slashdot: Paying For Linux Support vs. Rolling Your Own?

    • Reviews

      • Linux Mint 17.1 review—less change is good change

        While most of what’s new in Mint 17.1 will be seen in the updated desktops, there are some common components to both Cinnamon and MATE. While accessing some of these new tools varies slightly by desktop, the results are the same in both. Right away, you’ll notice the login screen is among these new and improved elements.

      • ​Best Linux Desktop of 2014: Linux Mint 17.1

        Personally, I prefer Cinnamon — so that is what I used. With Cinnamon 2.4, you get a few minor new features. For instance, you can set directories to different colors to make them more visible in Nemo, the Cinnamon file manager. Cinnamon has also been tightened and cleaned up. The result is a faster, more memory efficient desktop. The one bug I’ve seen to date is that some desktop icons, such as the computer, can’t have their names changed. So, for example, I can’t rename “Computer” to “Blitz,” my Dell desktop’s real name.

        Over all, though, that’s like complaining about a scratch on a 1955 Mercedes 300 SLR Racer: Mint’s still the best available desktop today.

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 21 Release Review: An Impressive Developer Workstation

          Fedora is among the most respected Linux-based distributions. Known as a bleeding edge operating system it offers the latest technologies at the earliest stages. It’s also known for working with upstream projects instead of patching things downstream.

          Fedora displays both qualities due to the fact that Fedora/Red Hat developers are among the leading contributors to many major open source projects, including the Linux kernel; they work for everyone and not just for their own distribution.

          Fedora 21 has just been released and I have been playing with the beta for a while. There are now three editions of Fedora: server, workstation and cloud. Since I am using it for my desktop I downloaded and installed the Workstation.

        • Fedora 21 Officially Released

          One year after the introduction of Fedora 20 and going through many changes this year with the Fedora.Next initiative (and going through multiple delays in delivering F21), Fedora 21 finally greets the world today. Fedora 21 features all of the latest GNOME 3.14 software, is powered by the Linux 3.17 kernel, and has a ton of other improvements and changes as noted in dozens of Phoronix articles. Fedora 21 Server users also have Docker improvements, cloud computing enhancements, and the new Cockpit console.

        • Announcing Fedora 21!
        • Fedora 21 Now Available, Delivers the Flexibility of Fedora.next

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Developer Tools Center Renamed To Ubuntu Make, Sees New Release

            Ubuntu Developer Tools Center, a project to allow easy installation of common developer tools, has reached version 0.2. With this release, the project was renamed to Ubuntu Make, based on name proposals from the community.

          • Ubuntu Core Changes The Game For Container Operating Systems

            This last couple of weeks has seen some tension within the Linux Container world as CoreOS launched its Rocket container and questioned Docker’s longer term motives. Adding fuel to the fire today comes Canonical with its new “snappy” Ubuntu core. The new rendition of of Ubuntu is a minimal server image that shares the same libraries as today’s Ubuntu but via a simpler mechanism. Most importantly, the snappy approach allows Ubuntu to provide stronger security guarantees for applications. Snappy apps and Ubuntu Core itself can be upgraded atomically and rolled back if needed – an approach to systems management that lends itself to container deployments.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • TI expands IoT cloud ecosystem and simplifies code development with open-source Energia support

      DALLAS, Dec. 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Texas Instruments (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) is expanding its third party ecosystem of Internet of Things (IoT) cloud service providers. With 10 new members since launching in April 2014, the TI IoT cloud ecosystem supports multiple cloud options with a total of 18 companies. Ecosystem members deliver solutions to help customers get their TI-based IoT solutions connected to the cloud quickly. The new members include Intamac/Kynesim, Keen IO/Technical Machine, Micrium, Octoblu, PTC, PubNub, Temboo and Weaved.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • To Leak or Not to Leak? That is the Question ….. Samsung Z1 Tizen SM-Z130H

          The reasoning of no reveal is that Samsung’s launch strategy is secret, like many companies, but it looks like they will do a “soft launch” ie a press event and a URL to where you can buy this product in India, and I don’t know how the Samsung marketing machine will position the Tizen phone and how they will convey some of the Information in our possession, so in an effort to not damage the Samsung marketing strategy for Tizen we have chosen NOT to reveal anything. It is hoped that Samsung appreciate this move.

      • Android

        • Google pushes ‘go’ on Android Studio

          Worried Oompa-Loompas are questioning security guards and combing the wilds of Mountain View after it was discovered that Google has allowed a product, the Android Studio IDE, to escape from the Chocolate Factory’s near-impenetrable Beta compound.

        • Google Launches Android Studio 1.0, Offers Migration Path from Eclipse

          At the 2013 Google I/O conference, the company announced Android Studio, and characterized it as a new development environment that would make it much easier for Android developers to build apps. Today, Google has announced the official version of Android Studio 1.0. It’s available now for download as a stable release on the Android Developer site. Here are more details on how this will provide big benefits for developers.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source all over the world

    Phil Shapiro. “I administrate 28 Linux work stations at a small library in D.C. I consider these folks my coworkers and colleagues. And it’s wonderful to know that we can all feed into the energy and share ideas. My main interests are how FOSS intersects with dignity, and enhancing dignity.

  • A look back at open source in 2014

    The year 2014 will be marked as one where open source changed for me. It didn’t change overnight or even very rapidly, but in July I noticed that the open source of today was not what I imagined it would be.

    And this can be a good thing.

    When I starting working full time with open source, back in 2001, the idea was to build a lot of free software. It reminded me of when I got my first computer back in 1978 (a TRS-80) and the environment encouraged a lot of code sharing. In those days, it was easy to differentiate open source from commercial software, and the thought was to replace the expensive walled gardens of proprietary code with better, freer, alternatives. But from a business perspective we were still in search of a business model.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Bill Rowan, VMware’s New US Federal Lead, on Open Source’s Evolution and Data Analytics Collaborations

      There is a great place for the OpenStack solutions, even though it may not be a fit for everybody. In my opinion, the item for greater consideration is that the government will need to acquire and retain talent who can help them with the programming aspects of OpenStack. But we will continue to contribute to the OpenStack initiatives as we have in the past and allow customers to leverage our solutions inside those OpenStack environments.

  • Funding

    • Nginx gets $20M, because an open-source web server is just the beginning

      Developers know Nginx as a popular open-source web server they can use to run websites. But some of the people behind Nginx, at the startup by the same name, aren’t content with that achievement on its own. They want to build a big company around the technology.

      Which is why investors are now giving the startup $20 million, Nginx announced in a statement today.

  • BSD

    • FreeNAS 9.3 Released

      Here’s an early Christmas present for you all: FreeNAS 9.3!

      This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases, featuring a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 clustering, better VMWare integration, including VAAI support, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. We’re quite proud of it and excited to make it publicly available.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Home Office Locked Into £330m Oracle Contract

      The Home Office is obliged to continue paying Oracle for ERP services until 2016, even as it signs a cost-cutting shared services ERP deal

      The Home Office has disclosed that it is locked into a £330 million contract with Oracle for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which may conflict with government efforts to cut back-office IT costs by shifting to shared services centres.

      The contract, signed in 2009 under the previous Labour government, provides 29, 518 users with access to Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), and is set to expire in January 2016, according to a statement published in response to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Is Google coming back to the open community on document formats?

      At the ODF Plugfest in London, Google’s head of open source told the audience that work once once again in progress extending OpenDocument support in Google’s products.

      At the opening of the event, Magnus Falk, deputy CTO for HM Government, told the audience that the decision to adopt ODF (alongside HTML and PDF) as the government’s required document format is now well in hand. When asked by an audience member about various government agencies that currently require submissions from the public in Microsoft-only formats, Falk said that all such departments must make a migration plan now for how they will achieve use of the required formats.

Leftovers

  • Video-game pioneer Ralph Baer dies

    Video-game pioneer Ralph Baer has died at the age of 92.

    Mr Baer is widely seen as the “father of video games” for his pioneering work that led to the creation of the Odyssey games console.

    The Odyssey, licensed to TV-maker Magnavox, went on sale in 1972 and inspired many other firms to make their own consoles.

  • Atari’s Co-Founder Explains Why Pong’s Ball Wasn’t Round

    I really have some concerns, though, about privacy. Every kid has the right to have their teenage years forgotten. And I think we’re losing that. I can honestly say that I’m glad that my teenage years are mostly forgotten.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • “Dead bodies and wasted money”: How I learned firsthand the worst lesson of war

      Westerners like to dignify war as we can with the resources that we have, to make it sound like a chess game or science project with ascertainable goals, well-delineated procedures and verifiable conclusions. We actually have war colleges and war diplomas. People study military science and take war-leadership classes. Yet what a country actually does while at war – whether that country is an advanced nation or medieval relic – is try to survive; and if the war is truly about survival they throw everything in their possession at the enemy, flailing arms desperately, chucking money, bullets, grenades and prayers in the hope that they hit something. And you know what? Sometimes they do. But it takes a peculiar leap of faith to take this for knowledge or expertise. It takes an even more precious naiveté to pay people for the wisdom derived from collective stupidity.

    • Wrong-on-Iraq Pundit Gives Lessons in Media Accountability

      It’s helpful that Lowry brought up white male privilege on ABC. It’s hard to know what else you might call a system that enables people like Lowry to continue to appear on television as some sort of expert. Not everyone gets to be so lucky.

    • Establishment Media’s Illusion of Debate Supports US Strikes against Islamic State

      A new study authored by Peter Hart at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that in the lead up to the decision to increase military action against ISIL, there were very few anti-war voices in the television and the media in general. The FAIR study found that during a crucial two-week period in September 2014, only six out of the 205 interviewed sources opposed the U.S. intervening to stop the advance of ISIL. On well-known Sunday talk shows only 1 out of 89 guests was against the US going to war to stop ISIL. On television, there were many debates involving the advance of ISIL and the position of the United States. All of the debates revolved around the mechanics of the war, such as drone strikes and how many troops to send, not specifically that the war should not be happening. In defense of the media, after several beheadings, public opinion turned positive toward US involvement.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • North Carolina Newspapers Mostly Silent As ALEC And Koch Brothers Rewrite History

      North Carolina newspapers have largely missed the connection between a Koch-funded education non-profit organization contracted to help shape new statewide history curriculum materials, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative model legislation mill that wrote the bill mandating the new course work.

      In 2011, the North Carolina legislature passed a bill known as the “Founding Principles Act,” which would require high school students to pass a course on “Founding Philosophy and the Founding Principles of government for a free people.” The bill was generated as a piece of model legislation by ALEC, a conservative group that brings corporations and politicians together to vote on and construct bills to be used in multiple states. According to the Huffington Post, North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction, which has been tasked with drawing up the curriculum required by the Founding Principles Act, proposed on December 3 to “‘highly recommend’ social studies material from the Bill of Rights Institute,” an organization which “receives funding from the billionaire Koch brothers.”

  • Privacy

    • Press release: Permission granted for judicial review of DRIPA

      A judicial review of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) has been granted permission by Mr Justice Lewis in the High Court today. Open Rights Group (ORG) and Privacy International (PI) intervened in the case, which was brought by Tom Watson MP and David Davis MP, represented by Liberty. ORG and PI have now been given permission to make further submissions in advance of the next hearing.

  • Civil Rights

    • The victim-blaming hypocrisy of Rep. Peter King

      In case you have been living under a rock this week, a grand jury in New York City borough of Staten Island declined to return an indictment this week against a police officer who put a chokehold on a man who was allegedly committing the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes. This chokehold resulted in the man’s death. The man’s name was Eric Garner, and the chokehold and subsequent application of pressure to his head and neck by the same officer directly led to Garner’s death.

      There is full video of the incident. None of the facts are in dispute. The officer in question had three colleagues with him. Garner was unarmed. Unlike the case in Ferguson where officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown with no indictment, there is no way that Daniel Pantaleo, the New York City police officer in question, could have claimed that he felt his life was in danger. The chokehold he used was banned as a tactic by the NYPD. Even worse, Garner complained no fewer than 11 times that he was unable to breathe because of Pantaleo’s actions. And yet no indictment was returned against the officer who committed an unequivocal homicide.

    • And Now, to Discuss Police Killings: Rush Limbaugh?
    • Torture Enablers Spin Unreleased Senate Report

      The fact that former CIA officials might object to a report critical of the CIA isn’t that surprising. But these accounts, along with the stories stoking fears about attacks on US facilities as payback for the Senate report, serve to obscure the more important findings about CIA torture and deception: As Marcy Wheeler (Emptywheel, 4/2/14) has noted, there is plenty of evidence of the CIA lying to Congress about torture. Wheeler (2/22/10) has also shown that Michael Hayden has lied to Congress too, which is something to keep in mind as journalists bring him on television to discuss whether or not the agency ever misled anyone.

    • The Most Gruesome Moments in the CIA ‘Torture Report’

      Interrogations that lasted for days on end. Detainees forced to stand on broken legs, or go 180 hours in a row without sleep. A prison so cold, one suspect essentially froze to death. The Senate Intelligence Committee is finally releasing its review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs. And it is brutal.

    • Here are the names of the 119 prisoners who were detained in the CIA’s secret prisons program

      The Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program for the first time released the names of all the prisoners who were detained in secret prisons around the world. Of the 119, 20 names were previously unknown.

    • The Debate about Torture We’re Not Having: Exploitation

      Partly by design, the debate about torture that has already started in advance of tomorrow’s Torture Report release is focused on efficacy, with efficacy defined as obtaining valuable intelligence. Torture apologists say torture provided intelligence that helped to find Osama bin Laden. Torture critics refute this, noting that any intelligence CIA got from those who were tortured either preceded or long post-dated the torture.

      Even setting aside my belief that, even if torture “worked” to elicit valuable intelligence, it still wouldn’t justify it, there’s a big problem with pitching the debate in those terms.

    • Senate report: CIA misled public on torture
    • Live Coverage of the Senate Torture Report

      One of the worst myths official Washington and its establishment media have told itself about the torture debate is that the controversy is limited to three cases of waterboarding at Guantánamo and a handful of bad Republican actors. In fact, a wide array of torture techniques were approved at the highest levels of the U.S. Government and then systematically employed in lawless US prisons around the world – at Bagram (including during the Obama presidency), CIA black sites, even to US citizens on US soil. So systematic was the torture regime that a 2008 Senate report concluded that the criminal abuses at Abu Ghraib were the direct result of the torture mentality imposed by official Washington.

    • CIA torture report released: latest news

      • CIA lied to Senate and White House on torture methods: report

    • Obama Would Not — Cannot — Deem Any Activities Authorized by Gloves Come Off Finding Illegal

      Just 3 days after he assumed the Presidency, a drone strike Obama authorized killed as many as 11 civilians, including one child, and gravely injured a 14 year old boy, Farim Qureshi. And several years into his Administration, Obama ordered the CIA to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with no due process. As far as we know, both of those things were done using that very same Finding, the Finding that Romero would like Obama to declare authorized war crimes.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • We’re Back at the World Intellectual Property Organization to Fight For Users’ Rights at the UN

      EFF is in Geneva this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), where the organization’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is gathered to debate proposals for a treaty to give new legal rights to broadcasters, and for instruments that would standardize copyright limitations and exceptions for libraries, archives, educators and researchers.

    • The True Cost Of Corporate Sovereignty For The EU: €3.5bn Already Paid, €30bn Demanded – Even Before TAFTA/TTIP

      While the debate about the inclusion of a corporate sovereignty chapter in TAFTA/TTIP continues to rage in the EU, the European Commission insists there’s nothing to worry about here. In a recent article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (original in German), the new European Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmström, wrote that EU member states have signed 1400 agreements with other nations that included corporate sovereignty provisions — implying that such investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) elements are perfectly normal, don’t cause problems, and won’t cause problems.

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Hub Goes Public: Where’s the Public Domain?

        It’s certainly hugely welcome that the technology behind the Hub will be open sourced. Unfortunately, that’s about the most open part of the new site: the rest of it is all about asking “permission”, a word that figures frequently throughout the site. Of course, given that this is a copyright hub, and that it has been funded by the creative industries, that’s perhaps understandable. But it is also rather retrogressive – unlike the open-sourcing of the code – and unbalanced.

        One of the most important shifts in the creative world in recent years has been to open licensing, encouraging a *permissionless* approach to building on the work of others, which of course is what has taken place for most of human history. Indeed, the Copyright Hub tends to treat copyright as if it were the eternal background of creativity, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. For most of human history (and prehistory), nothing like copyright existed or was felt necessary. Copyright is not natural, but a modern aberration when viewed in the larger historical context.

        This skewed view of the world makes itself felt throughout the site. For example, in the Discover section, where we “find out all about copyright”, there is not a single mention of the fact that copyright is temporary, or that the ultimate state of creativity is as part of the great commons known as the public domain. Indeed, I couldn’t find any reference to the public domain anywhere in my quick look through most of the Web pages.

      • UK Users Need 27 Services to Get Most Popular Films, Report Finds

        If UK Internet users want access to most recent popular film content they’ll need to remember a lot of passwords. A new survey from KPMG has found that while overall availability is good, users wanting the best will have to use a patience-challenging 27 services.

12.08.14

Links 9/12/2014: Greg Kroah-Hartman Interview, Fedora 21 Imminent

Posted in News Roundup at 10:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Marines ask Northrop Grumman to switch G/ATOR radar computers from Windows to Linux software

    U.S. Marine Corps leaders are ready to switch software operating systems in a radar system designed to protect Marines on attack beaches from rockets, artillery, mortars, cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other low observables.

  • Linux Mobile-Desktop Convergence

    Over the past couple of years there has been talk of mobile-desktop convergence from various mobile and desktop OS providers. As a general concept, this sounds fantastic! Unfortunately once we dive into things a bit deeper, it appears this is easier said than done.

  • Server

    • Docker: Here, take the wheel – now YOU can run your own containers

      Docker is all the rage among hip startups and early adopters, but Docker the company would like to get its tech into enterprises, too – which is why it’s working on adapting its hosted Docker Hub service into a product specifically targeting large business customers.

    • Docker Founder Must Right His Ship

      Success can build a feedback loop that sustains its own momentum, making those who are successful certain they are doing the right thing. I don’t want to charge Docker with such hubris, but recent events illustrate why open source code projects function the way they do.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Randa Meetings 2014 – Another Great Success

        It’s been quite some time since the Randa Meetings 2014 and even this year’s edition of the KDE Community Summit called Akademy has already happened, but it’s still nice to look back and see what was accomplished at this KDE Tech Summit in the middle of the Swiss Alps.

      • On porting Fcitx KCM module to KF5

        Porting Fcitx KCM to KF5 is not that easy. It’s not only about porting kcm itself, but also porting missing part of fcitx-qt5 to Qt5 (mostly widgets). The old pkgconfig file is quite messed up, so I decided to experiment with extra-cmake-modules (ECM) a bit.

      • Dolphin Overlay Icons for ownCloud Sync Client

        Our recent ownCloud Client 1.7.0 release contains the new feature of overlay icons in GNOME nautilus, MacOSX and Windows. That is nice, but that makes us as old KDE guys sad as Dolphin was missing on the list.

      • Why do(n’t) you use Activities?

        On our quest for improving the concept of Virtual Desktops and Activities on the KDE Desktop, we once again ask you to share your experiences.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Ultimate Edition 4.3

        What is Ultimate Edition 4.3? Ultimate Edition 4.3 was built from the ground up debootstrapped from the Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Thar tree using Tmosb (TheeMahn’s Operating System Builder) which is also included in this release. This release is a Long Term Supported (LTS) release, supported until the year 2019. This release is most certainly worthy of the Ultimate Edition title. I personally hate KDE, and found it very visually attractive in all its “Wobbly Windowness” that I miss from the Mate desktop environment. I must admit I do miss the eyecandy that it provides off the rip. I have included many, many tools I am constructing that reside under the hood of virtually all Ultimate Edition releases, most newer and upgraded.

      • SparkyLinux 3.6 LXDE, MATE, Razor-Qt & Xfce

        I am happy to announce the fourth and the last this year iso images of SparkyLinux 3.6 “Annagerman” LXDE, MATE, Razor-Qt and Xfce. At the beginning, I’d like to thank to all of our small but strong community members for their help with searching and solving bugs and problems.

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Devuan: Unto Us a Fork Is Born

          We knew it was possible; the signs were all there. The Systemd Inferno, after all, had been raging for far too long.

          But more than a few of us were still holding out hope. “Things will surely get better,” we thought.

          Then the news came. The rumored Debian fork has now become real, and its name is “Devuan.”

        • MX-14.3 Is an OS Based on Debian That Can Bring Old Computers Back to Life

          MX-14, a fast, lightweight, and easy-to-install Linux Live CD distribution based on Debian stable, for Intel-AMD x86-compatible systems, has been upgraded to version 14.3 and is now available for download.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 15.04 to Get GTK+ 3.14 and Updated GNOME Packages

            The Ubuntu devs are considering upgrading the GTK+ packages to the latest 3.14 version, which was made available just a couple of months ago, a decision that would really help a number of other Ubuntu flavors as well.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.1 Freshens Up Linux Desktop

              Linux Mint 17.1, which was officially released on Nov. 29, provides users of the popular Linux desktop with an incremental update and some additional polish. Code-named Rebecca, Linux Mint 17.1 offers a choice of desktop user interfaces, the two primary ones being MATE and Cinnamon. The MATE desktop is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop environment. The GNOME Linux desktop community moved to the GNOME 3 desktop in 2011, a move that some desktop users did not embrace. In the Linux Mint 17.1 MATE edition, support has been added for the Compiz window manager, which can enable a desktop with multiple special effects for window transitions and events. The Cinnamon desktop, which was created by Linux Mint creator Celement Lefebvre, provides users with a familiar GNOME 2 look but also adds some of the advanced capabilities of newer GNOME releases. Linux Mint 17.1 builds on the innovations that first debuted in Linux Mint 17 earlier this year, with usability, interface and performance gains in several areas. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the improvements in the Linux Mint 17.1 release.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • How to get the most out of a Raspberry Pi? Your tech questions answered

      From robotics kits and ultrasound sensors to Arduino-based accessories and Lego Mindstorms

    • Tinkering with the Raspberry Pi A+

      The Raspberry Pi team is on fire (in a good way), making new Raspberry Pi models faster than we can review them.

    • $6 quad core SoC targets low cost 4K set-top boxes

      Allwinner unveiled a $6 “H3″ SoC targeting $35 to $50 OTT STBs, featuring four Cortex-A7 cores, a Mali-400 GPU, 4K HDMI output, and 5MP camera support.

      [...]

      Android and Linux are the most likely platforms here.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Samsung’s Gear VR headset is on sale now for $199

          The Gear VR, Samsung’s virtual reality headset, is now on sale through AT&T and Samsung’s US sites. The $199 headset fits around a Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, turning it into a mobile VR display. It was originally announced in September, but it’s so far only been slated for a vague early December launch, though it’s been available to try at a handful of malls around the country. The Gear VR was built in partnership with Oculus, and it incorporates a tracking sensor from the first Oculus Rift development kit, as well as a custom “Oculus Home” interface app. Unlike the Rift, though, it’s wireless and fairly light, and if you’ve already got a Note 4, it’s somewhat cheaper (if you don’t, you’ll have to add an extra $800 to the price above.) While it’s more polished than the current version of the Oculus Rift, however, it’s still an “Innovator Edition,” so be warned that you’re still essentially participating in a mass beta test of virtual reality.

        • Tizen DevLab and portathon coming to London 13 December

      • Android

        • A hacker’s journey: freeing a phone from the ground up, first part

          Every once in a while, an unexpected combination of circumstances ends up enabling us to do something pretty awesome. This is the story of one of those times. About a year ago, a member of the Replicant community started evaluating a few targets from CyanogenMod and noticed some interesting ones. After some early research, he picked a device: the LG Optimus Black (P970), bought one and started porting Replicant to it. After a few encouraging results, he was left facing issues he couldn’t overcome and decided to give up with the port. As the device could still be an interesting target for Replicant, we decided to buy the phone from him so that I could pick up the work where he stalled.

        • Commercials for Amazon’s crappy phone in Amazon Prime videos?

          If you want your phone to sell, make it better. If it’s as good as other Android-based phones or as good as the iPhone then people will buy it. But you DO NOT disrupt someone’s TV show to peddle your second-rate phone or any of your other products.

          I canceled Amazon Prime tonight. If you want my business back, Amazon, then make sure you remove all commercial interruptions from Prime programming. Otherwise, I’ll be using Netflix exclusively. If I wanted commercials, I’d watch network TV or cable.

        • The best Android phones for the holiday season

          There are lots of Android phones out there, but sometimes it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Fortunately, Android Central has a holiday guide to help you complete your Android shopping list.

        • The best Android phones

          These are the best Android smartphones that are currently available. Price listed is for each carrier’s monthly payment over 24 months. Up-front, on-contract pricing will be higher, usually between $100 and $300, depending on the phone. Click through to each carrier’s listing for off-contract costs.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Channel 4 chose open-source MuleSoft over ‘prohibitively expensive’ Oracle and Microsoft

    Channel 4 is using MuleSoft open-source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in order to more efficiently share information on application program interfaces (API) with businesses outside the broadcaster.

  • SK Telecom develops open-source oneM2M IoT platform

    SK Telecom has completed the development of an open-source Internet of Things platform based on OneM2M, the M2M and IoT standards partnership, Business Korea reports. SK Telecom launched an M2M platform in 2008. The operator has also participated in the development of open-source platform Mobius from late 2011 as a national project, together with the Korea Electronics Technology Institute and Ntels. As oneM2M announced a candidate for an IoT/M2M standard in August of this year, SK Telecom implemented the standard with the Mobius, finishing the development of a commercialization-ready platform.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Leverage Strong Development Tools from Your Browser

        There continues to be very strong demand for web and application development skills in the job market, and there is especially demand for people familiar with open development tools. One of the biggest trends going among developers is leveraging browser extensions focused on developers.

      • Mozilla Joins Hour of Code

        This campaign launched in 2013, to align with Computer Science Education Week, and to demystify code and show that anyone can learn the basics. While we’re surrounded by technology and the web in our daily lives, few people understand how it all works. In our mission to protect the open web as a global resource for all, we must educate others about how and why the web exists, but also how the web is a creative platform with endless possibilities and opportunities now and for our future.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Funding

    • Errplane Snags $8.1M To Continue Building Open Source InfluxDB Time Series Database

      Errplane founders Paul Dix and Todd Persen had an idea for a company last year around anomaly detection in data center monitoring, but they soon realized that field was crowded and it would take a long time to build out the infrastructure for the company. At the same, time they heard from customers they were more interested in the underlying infrastructure than the service they were offering, and they did something brave. They decided to pivot and build an open source product that would meet the needs of the entire market, rather than try to compete directly.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • European Commission to update its open source policy

      The European Commission wants to make it easier for its software developers to submit patches and add new functionalities to open source projects. Contributing to open source communities will be made central to the EC’s new open source policy, expects Pierre Damas, Head of Sector at the Directorate General for IT (DIGIT). “We use a lot of open source components that we adapt and integrate, and it is time that we contribute back.”

  • Openness/Sharing

    • OpenMotics improves home automation

      OpenMotics is an open source home automation hardware and software system that offers features like switching lights and outputs, multi-zone heating and cooling, power measurements, and automated actions. The system encompases both open source software and hardware. For interoperability with other systems, the OpenMotics Gateway provides an API through which various actions can be executed.

    • Wanted: a tinkerer’s charter

      Users should be allowed to fiddle with the way consumer products work without suffering penalties from governments or sanctions from manufacturers

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Lithuania e-government cloud gets document management tools

      “Out of 3500 public administrations and government institutions in the country, 2500 do not yet have a DMS”, says Arelija Orlova, a specialist working for Lithuania’s Information Society Development Committee. “By including this in SIRIP, we expect an increase in the use of e-documents, boosting electronic government services.”

Leftovers

  • More than a billion dollars a week in lost data

    Australian businesses lose over $65 billion a year from data loss and downtime per year, according to major new global study.

    Storage vendor EMC has published its annual global Data Protection Index, which includes data specifically on Australia.

    It found that more than three quarters (78%) of Australian IT professionals are not fully confident in their ability to recover information following an incident, and that 58% of organisations in Australia still lack a disaster recovery plan for emerging workloads, and just 7% have plans for big data, hybrid cloud and mobile.

  • Science

    • Germany: ‘International competitiveness depends on ICT’

      Germany’s international industrial position will rely on its increasing use of ICT, the Digital Economy Working Group writes in a report prepared for an IT summit in Hamburg last October. In all classic industries, innovation will rely on the use of ICT, the working group reports: “The digital economy is crucial for the future of Germany.”

  • Security

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Why aren’t more news outlets covering Sen. Rockefeller’s shameful attempt to kill FOIA reform?

      An uncontroverisal, mild Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reform bill may die on Monday, despite passing 410-0 in the House earlier this year, and with a similar bipartisan vote expected in the Senate. The bill had already been stripped of its most substantive provisions that government agencies objected to, but on Thursday, Democractic Senator Jay Rockefeller—who is set to retire at the end of the year—unilaterally placed a hold on the bill, apparently doing the bidding of federal agencies who don’t want any more of their communications subject to public scrutiny. (Senate rules allow a single Senator to hold up votes on bills in certain situations.)

    • Julian Assange clocks up four years at the Ecuadorian embassy

      WIKILEAKER Julian Assange is entering his fifth year as a man with a travel toothbrush and the heavy weight of legal charges over his head.

      Assange is languishing in luxury or spending his time between chair and treadmill, depending on who you listen to. He most certainly is not at liberty, however, and has been living in a room at the Ecuadorian embassy.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Chicken farmer who spoke out about factory farm abuses immediately audited by Perdue

      Almost immediately after the animal welfare group Compassion in World Farming released a video exposing the “humane” (read: atrocious) conditions for chickens raised on a factory farm for Perdue, the poultry giant audited the farmer who opened his doors to the cameras.

    • The Pentagon — the climate elephant: Expose the Pentagon, the world’s largest & most dangerous climate criminal!

      There is an elephant in the climate debate that by U.S. demand cannot be discussed or even seen. This agreement to ignore the elephant is now the accepted basis of all international negotiations on climate change.

      It is well understood by every possible measurement that the Pentagon, the U.S. military machine, is the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products and the world’s worst polluter of greenhouse gas emissions and many other toxic pollutants. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.

      Ever since the Kyoto Accords or Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1998, in an effort to gain U.S. compliance, all U.S. military operations worldwide and within the U.S. are exempt from measurement or agreements on reduction. The U.S. Congress passed an explicit provision guaranteeing U.S. military exemptions. (Interpress Service, May 20, 1998)

  • Finance

  • Privacy

    • Response to the HASC report on RIPA

      “When a senior Parliamentary Committee says that the current legislation is not fit for purpose, then this simply cannot be ignored. It is now abundantly clear that the law is out of date, the oversight is weak and the recording of how the powers are used is patchy at best. The public is right to expect better.

      “The conclusion of the Committee that the level of secrecy surrounding the use of these powers is permitting investigations that are deemed ”unacceptable in a democracy”, should make the defenders of these powers sit up and take notice. At present, the inadequacy and inconsistency of the records being kept by public authorities regarding the use of these powers is woefully inadequate. New laws would not be required to correct this.

    • HASC concludes that surveillance legislation is “not fit for purpose”.

      The Home Affairs Select Committee has published a report today into the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, concluding that the legislation “is not fit for purpose” and “needs a complete overhaul”.

    • A shadowy consortium opposes your Internet privacy

      It should be obvious why we need SPDY. Ever since Edward Snowden demonstrated that Internet paranoia is justified, a stream of discoveries has made always-on, end-to-end encryption even more desirable. The recent move by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, and others, who announced they will back a new nonprofit to promote and enable secure communications on the Internet, was welcome – by most of us.

    • Secretive UK Court That Approves Of GCHQ Surveillance Says That GCHQ Surveillance Doesn’t Violate Human Rights

      For a while now, we’ve been covering various legal challenges in Europe related to the GCHQ’s surveillance activities. One of the main cases, brought by Amnesty International and Privacy International, argued that the surveillance violated the European Convention on Human Rights (specifically article 8, on right to privacy, and article 10, on freedom of expression). While it was always expected that the case would eventually go to the European Court of Human Rights, the first step was the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in the UK — a secretive court that reviews complaints about surveillance, but (as with nearly all “secretive courts” charged with “oversight” on the intelligence community) almost always sides with the intelligence community. Between 2000 and 2012 the IPT only sided against the intelligence community 10 times out of 1468 cases brought (about half of one percent of all cases). In other words, this is a court that (in secret) regularly okays GCHQ’s surveillance efforts on UK citizens.

    • Court finds that GCHQ’s Tempora is fine and dandy

      THE UK COURTS have found that GCHQ’s Tempora system is legal in principle under the inglorious Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

      Pressure group Privacy International challenged Tempora in the courts, and this weekend it got its answer. It did not like it.

    • The beginning of the end of the private mail server

      Thanks to overzealous filtering by mail relays, the small mail server is becoming an endangered species

    • NSA warrantless bulk phone metadata spying continues unabated

      The NSA’s bulk phone metadata spying program was renewed for another 90 days, the fourth time the warrantless snooping has been reauthorized following President Barack Obama promising reform last January, the government said Monday.

  • Civil Rights

    • New York City Officer Cleared In Chokehold Death Was Sued By Other Black Men

      The white New York City police officer who put unarmed black Staten Island resident Eric Garner in a chokehold moments before his death has been accused by other black men of violating their civil rights while he was on patrol.

      A grand jury’s decision on Wednesday not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for his role in the videotaped confrontation that left 43-year-old Garner dead has sparked days of protests by groups claiming U.S. law enforcement unfairly targets African-Americans and other minorities.

    • Farage blames immigration for traffic on M4 after no-show at Ukip reception

      The Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, has blamed his late arrival at an event on immigration. He was due to appear at a “meet the leader” drinks reception as Ukip prepared to host its first Welsh conference. But he was running more than two hours late and failed to show.

    • No felony charges for SPD cop’s bone-breaking punch of handcuffed woman

      Federal prosecutors say they will review an incident in which a Seattle police officer punched and seriously injured a handcuffed, intoxicated woman, after King County prosecutors said Friday they won’t charge the officer.

    • Another Batch Of Baggage Handlers Accused Of Stealing From Luggage; Because Airport ‘Security’ Isn’t

      Now, if this were a one time thing, it might not even be that noteworthy. But this seems like fairly common practice at airports. A few years ago, we wrote about TSA agents stealing iPads and stories of TSA agents and baggage handlers stealing stuff from luggage are not at all hard to find. In fact, reports from a few years ago noted that over 400 TSA employees have been fired for stealing from passnegers in the past decade.

    • Kennedy Airport bag handlers accused of stealing from passengers’ luggage

      Seven bag handlers at Kennedy Airport have been charged with stealing electronics, jewelry and other items worth more than $20,000 from checked luggage, Queens prosecutors said Wednesday.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Piracy ≠ Theft? Movie Industry Workers Speak Out

        The mantra often heard from Hollywood’s leaders is that pirates are thieves. However, not all people in the industry feel that way. Today we present the views of four regular filmmakers on this controversial topic, what the impact is on the industry, and what can be done in response.

      • Concern Over Russian “Piracy Buster” Internet Tax

        Russian officials have expressed caution over proposals to introduce an Internet tax to compensate copyright holders for online piracy. The proposals, which were put forward by the Russian Union of Rightsholders, are said to be worth around $860m a year to creators.

12.07.14

Links 7/12/2014: New Linux Release, Marines and Prisoners on GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 9:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • November 2014 OSI Newsletter

    The OSI Board met in San Francisco, CA USA on November 11th and 12th, 2014 with a focus on strengthening the organization’s current outreach efforts and building new bridges between open source communities. The Board was excited to review five new applications for Affiliate Membership as well as implement several new initiatives to help drive Individual Membership through the recognition of various roles and levels of access among our community. This included new Individual Membership discounts for students, volunteers working on OSI supported activities, those already members of OSI Affiliate organizations, members of Free Software Foundation and complimentary memberships based on need.

  • Pydio: open source alternative to Dropbox & Box

    Pydio 6.0 an open source file sharing solution that is said to offer “tight control of information” on the scale demanded by enterprises and service providers.

  • Open Source Continues its March into the Enterprise

    These include LibreOffice and OpenOffice for front-office productivity tools, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Ingres for databases, Pentaho for decision support, SugarCRM and Hipergate for customer relationship management, Apache Lucene, Opentext, Filenet, and Documentum for content management, and RedHat JBoss as an application server.

    While open source applications specifically for the core functions of the insurance industry are still few and far between, there are a few options, such as OpenUnderwriter.

    The main issue with open source is that while the software provides all the components needed for IT operations, expertise is needed to pull it all together for the business. But there’s always a good case to be made for open source, and often, this comes right from commercial IT vendors themselves. Prashant Parikh of CA Technologies, for instance, recently posted the reasons why open source makes sense.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Hotspots: My Firefox OS phone saved the day

        However, and as paradoxical as it may be, I own a ZTE Open Firefox OS phone, which I use basically to check my email and calendar on the go, quickly browse a web page, and receive messages from family members.

        I practically never use the function that gives the device its name (telephone), that, is, making calls. I see my phone as a tiny tablet thingie and use it as such.

        But today, I had to take care of my 4-year-old daughter. It was raining and she is recovering from a bad flu, so going out was out of the question. The cable was not working, so no TV for her… which she did not really mind. But she wanted to use her computer to see her favorite videos online and we had no connection.

        What to do? I used the phone as a hotspot to share its Internet connection with my laptop.

      • Mozilla All Hands: They can’t hold us!

        I also spent some time talking to folks about Firefox in Ubuntu and rebranding Iceweasel to Firefox in Debian (fingers crossed something will happen here in 2015). Also it was great to participate in discussions around making all of the Firefox channels offer more stability and quality to our users.

      • Mozilla will finally bring Firefox to iOS

        I used to be a big fan of Firefox, and I still use it for certain things. But it just doesn’t have the mindshare that it used to have back when it’s big claim to fame was being the alternative to Internet Explorer. Mobile has been where the growth is, and many mobile users have gravitated to Safari, Chrome and other browsers on their phones and tablets.

      • Mozilla wants to put Firefox on iOS

        Mozilla has been staunchly opposed to an iOS version of its Firefox browser for a while. It wants to use its own web engine, but Apple will only let companies use its in-house code in the name of security. However, the organization is clearly having a change of heart — VP Jonathan Nightingale has revealed that Mozilla wants to bring Firefox to iOS. He didn’t say how it would happen, but it’s most likely that the company will use Apple’s engine and layer a custom interface on top, like Google does with Chrome. We’ve reached out to Mozilla and will let you know if it can say more.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Long Time No See – DevAssistant 0.10 is Here

      DevAssistant 0.10.0 is sort of pre-1.0.0, so for next release, we’re planning to go from Beta to Stable. That’s a big promise, but I think at this point DevAssistant can afford that. There will be some backwards incompatible changes between 0.10.0 and 1.0.0, but after that we’ll keep things stable until 2.0.0. In addition to that, we’re planning a major GUI overhaul – basically we’ll rewrite it from scratch, since we want it to look completely different. We’re working with Mo Duffy on the design and while it’s not finished yet, some preliminary sketches can be found at Mo’s fedorapeople page.

    • Weblate 2.1

      Weblate 2.1 has been released today.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Pesticides May Contribute to Farmers’ Depression and Suicides

      According to Bienkowski’s report, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson, Cathy Milbourn, writes that of the seven pesticides examined, “only aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are still registered and in use.” The EPA cancelled the registrations of ethylene dibromide, 2,4,5-T, dieldrin, and parathion, Milbourn said. Aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are undergoing EPA review.

    • China looking to curb fertilizer, pesticide use

      China, the world’s top producer of rice and wheat, is seeking to cap the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that have helped to contaminate large swathes of its arable land and threaten its ability to keep up with domestic food demand.

      More than 19 percent of soil samples taken from Chinese farmland have been found to contain excessive levels of heavy metals or chemical waste. In central Hunan province, more than three quarters of the ricefields have been contaminated, government research has shown.

    • Delay in law on plain packs for cigarettes angers MPs

      Failure to push through law in time for general election would be seen as ‘victory’ for big tobacco and lobbyists

    • Please Write to Your MP about Plain Packaging for Cigarettes

      I was disturbed to read in the Guardian that the UK government may be wavering on introducing plain packs for cigarettes. Failing to do so before the General Election would be seen as a huge victory for the tobacco companies, and have knock-on effects around the world.

      [...]

      As you know, what is particularly interesting about these cases is that they use the highly controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process in order to claim an indirect expropriation of property. Since the company is doing this through subsidiaries – one in Switzerland, the other in Hong Kong – it is not even clear whether those cases can proceed. However, it is evident that one of the main reasons Philip Morris is taking this route is to intimidate other countries thinking about bringing in plain packs measures. Indeed, New Zealand has put its own plans on hold pending the result of the Australian case, which shows that strategy is having its effect.

  • Security

    • North Korea calls claims of its Sony Pictures hacking ‘false rumor’

      North Korea on Sunday denied claims that it had hacked into Sony Pictures, calling the allegations a “false rumor” spread by South Korea.

      The U.S. film company had come under cyber attack late last month after a series of threats from North Korea for its comedy movie “The Interview,” in which the CIA plots to assassinate the country’s young leader Kim Jong-un.

    • U.S. movie about killing N.K. leader will likely be ‘blockbuster’

      A soon-to-be-released comedy film about a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will likely be a “blockbuster” thanks to the strong protests Pyongyang has raised about it, the U.S. human rights envoy said Friday.

    • OpEdNews Hacked, I Meet With an FBI Agent

      On Tuesday, it appears that OEN was hacked. An article that was not submitted by an editor, not submitted through the queue and not submitted by a trusted author, was published by someone who signed up the same day. The article reported that a hacker group, Cyberberkut, had hacked the phone of a member of Joe Biden’s diplomatic entourage to Ukraine.

      The anomaly– an article published outside the usual routes– led me to investigate and discover that one of the IP addresses the submitter used was associated with malware– SQL insertion, spam, even blackmail.

      I checked the name of the purported author and found someone in Ukraine with that name. But the photo used in the author ID did not match. I did a reverse image search using tineye.com and there were no other copies anywhere. I hid the article and checked google Webmaster tools, which is my first go-to place to check for malware on the site. Our webmaster also checked his tracking system. No malware was detected. I had already removed one image from Reuters because it violated copyrights. Vidya removed another image that had been included and a link, because they are higher risk for SQL insertion of malware.

    • FBI investigates threatening emails sent to Sony employees at Culver City studio

      The company has been scrambling to repair the damage to its computer system after a hack by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace.

    • Hacking at Sony has similarities with earlier attacks in Middle East and South Korea

      In 2012, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company and Qatar’s RasGas were hit by a virus known as Shamoon that damaged tens of thousands of computers. In 2013, more than 30,000 PCs at South Korean banks and broadcasting companies were hit by a similar attack by a virus dubbed DarkSeoul malware.

    • Friday’s security updates

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Suspension of Zoabi from Knesset Raises Questions about Israeli Democracy

      In July 2014 Haneen Zoabi, the first Arab Israeli woman to be elected to the Israeli legislative body, the Knesset, was banned by the Knesset Ethics Committee from all Knesset activities. As Lahav Harkov reported in October 2014, this was a direct response to her declaration that the June kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers (later found murdered) was not an act of terrorism.

      [...]

      They covered Zoabi’s initial suspension and followed her story of failed appeals to the Knesset and the High Court. Corporate news sources such as CNN and the New York Times, on the other hand, have not reported on any aspect of the matter, while Al-Jazeera America briefly mentions Zoabi’s suspension at the end of an article about Hamas’ terms for a ceasefire.

    • ​Watching the watchmen: US shield to protect drones from ‘spoofing’ cyber-attacks
    • Chile’s Neoliberal Flip Flop

      The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with help from classified CIA support as well as cloak-and-dagger cheerleading from distant corners of the world, Milton Friedman in Chicago and Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C.

    • Prefer cautious presidents

      I prefer a cautious president to a reckless one. Invading Iraq was reckless, doubling down on that is foolish.

    • Ukraine: Lethal Aid And Weapons Authorized By U.S. House Resolution 758, Will Obama Take On Vladimir Putin?

      Lethal aid to Ukraine has been authorized by recently passed United States House Resolution 758, which calls for President Barack Obama to send both lethal and non-lethal aid to the Ukrainian military. If the U.S. Senate passes similar legislation, it’s possible Obama may choose to escalate the confrontation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

    • Better for the US to stop costly wars, nuke upgrade

      The American people ought to realize — and critically respond to — the dangers involved in two directions of national-security policy that their government is pursuing:

      1) It is escalating the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (while extending its war in Afghanistan), and 2) discarding a previously espoused disarmament agenda in order to push a “massive modernization of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines,” to cost beyond $1 trillion over 30 years.

      These are concerns not only of Americans. They also affect the rest of the world’s peoples.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • The C.I.A.’s Power to Purge

      Not only that, Mr. Aftergood found out the National Archives and Records Administration had already offered tentative approval in August of the plan to — as a spy might put it — disappear the email of every worker but the C.I.A.’s top 22 managers, three years after they left the agency.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • U-S Petro Dollar Hegemony and Global Imperialism
    • Why Shell could buy BP for just £5 a share

      One of Britain’s oldest oil companies BP could be about to be sold to its biggest rival for a fiver per share.

      The rumoured deal, if realised, would complete one of the most ignominious falls for the once great Persian Oil company that powered Britain’s Navy to victory during the First World War.

    • Fracking Footprint Visible from Space

      Methane gas, a main component linked to damaging climate change, is being released in record amounts in the Four Corners region where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. The Four Corners regions is one of the prime location for fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock layers deep within the earth. A joint study by researchers at the University of Michigan and NASA finds that the environmental impacts of fracking are more significant than previously documented. With the help of a new satellite instrument — the European Space Agency’s SCIAMACHY — a team at University of Michigan has been able to get regional methane measurements over the entire United States back in 2009. Using this tool, they were able to identify the hotspot at the Four Corners. The footprint is so large it is visible from space.

  • Finance

    • Supplemental Poverty Measure Provides More Accurate Measure of U.S. Poverty

      Currently the official government measure of poverty under-represents the number of poor in the United States. The seemingly simple formula, created in the 1960s, has set the national poverty threshold for decades. Last year the official poverty threshold was about $23,600 for a family of two adults and two children. Yet our official poverty yardstick fails to recognize the difference in standards of living across the United States. Whether a family lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming or San Francisco, California, where the average housing costs are 225% higher than Cheyenne, the government standard makes no adjustment for regional variations in cost of living.

    • California, the Golden State, Is Actually the Poorest of All

      It has the Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Napa Valley wineries. It has something else, according to the Census Bureau. It’s the poorest state in the world’s largest economy.

    • Does China Really Have The Most Powerful Economy In The World?

      Market Watch columnist Brett Arends wrote that China has surpassed America as the number one economy, a move he claims may lead to a collapse of U.S. political and military hegemony. But does China truly have the strongest economy in the world?

      [...]

      We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A.

    • Costs of Global Capitalism

      The ILO report’s key chart below summarizes the key wage results of global capitalism over the last decade. Economic growth, rising real wages, and rising standards of living are the economic reality of China. Economic crisis, stagnant wages, and deepening inequalities of income and wealth are the economic realities for western Europe, the US, and Japan.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • 5 Most Insidious Conspiracy Theories of 2014

      I’ve found that the conspiracy theories spread most widely — and the ones that seem plausible to many, unfortunately — are those based on current headlines and often propagated by public figures such as politicians, celebrities and media figures. They travel by word-of-mouth at light speed and become “a known fact.” These theories are often believed by those who assume there must be a coherence behind world events and occurrences don’t just happen randomly. Using that as our criteria, here are the most insidious conspiracy theories of 2014.

  • Censorship

    • No female ejaculation, please, we’re British

      Though this compendium is strangely lacking in frogs or any other animals (perhaps they’re catalogued elsewhere), it is a list of the new pornography restrictions that the UK government—through the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014, something I’d never heard of before today—introduced on 1 December to ‘safeguard children.’ Which is the same reason five major UK Internet service providers (ISPs) gave for blocking my own website, even though it’s more about literature, publishing, and current affairs than it is about pornography. (Most of these ISPs unblocked the site when I told them that there were no words on it that could be ‘deemed sensitive to a young audience.’)

    • New world for Britain’s online smut: censorship
    • British Censors Ban Spanking, Female Ejaculation And Other Sex Acts From Online Porn

      Lawmakers in the United Kingdom have deemed face-sitting to be a “life-endangering” act worthy of censorship, the Independent reports.

    • U.K. Censors Online Porn; Spanking, Rough Sex, Other Assorted Kink Banned

      Continuing on its recent censorship-happy path, the U.K. government amended regulations this week to prohibit online porn from depicting a variety of erotic activities. Now-illicit acts range from the very specific (female ejaculation; “spanking, caning, and whipping beyond a gentle level”) to the incredibly broad (“verbal abuse”). But basically, the U.K. has banned BDSM and certain forms of fetish porn—or at least, charging money for that sort of porn.

    • The UK’s sexist new pornography restrictions aren’t just an act of state censorship, but could be the first step towards something even worse

      As you might have already heard, an act of state censorship has been declared against British pornography in the guise of innocuous regulation. But what you might not know is that it has also marked the first stage in a campaign to impose global trade sanctions. Strangely, this proposition has received less coverage.

    • The Spectator at war: Censorship and mystification

      Let us say that we have not ourselves suffered from the Censorship at all. We have never submitted, and have never been asked to submit, any article to the Press Bureau. Such censorship as has been exercised in our columns has been the purely voluntary censorship which is exercised at all times, whether in war or in peace, by every editor who has any sense of public duty, and that remark, we believe, applies to the whole British Press, daily and weekly. We have, of course, constantly asked ourselves whether it would be wise on general grounds to make this or that comment, or whether we ought to refrain from comment which we thought sound in itself because we knew or believed it to run counter to the Government view, and to be likely to interfere with their action and policy. Our feeling was that, as the Government and not we were responsible for the conduct of the war, it was our business as good citizens to support their action, even when we did not think it wise. There can be only one driver of a coach, and as long as he is on the box he must be trusted, and no effort must be made to jog his elbow or snatch at the reins. For example, there are certain things which we believe it would be to the public interest to say about foreign States, and which it would be practically impossible for the Government to suppress even under the most exaggerated interpretation of the rights of the Censor ; but these comments we have not made on the ground just given—that it is the Government who are responsible for foreign affairs, and we must not do anything which in their opinion, whether right or wrong is no matter, would injure or weaken them in the difficult task before them.

    • Russia and Turkey Lead on Internet Censorship Growth, Survey Shows

      Internet users in Russia and Turkey have been subjected to the greatest increase in web censorship over the past year, according to the latest Freedom on the Net survey.

    • Pakistan, China among top 10 worst countries for Internet freedom

      Majority among the top ten worst countries are from Asia, including Iran, Syria, China, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

    • Copyright Law as a Tool for State Censorship of the Internet

      When state officials seek to censor online speech, they’re going to use the quickest and easiest method available. For many, copyright takedown notices do the trick. After years of lobbying and increasing pressure from content industries on policymakers and tech companies, sending copyright notices to take media offline is easier than ever.

    • Independent news portals now popular due to government’s censorship

      The government crackdown on the media during the anti-government protest and corruption scandals of last year and the two elections this year have led to the growth of a number of independent news portals as an alternative source of information for many in Turkey.

  • Civil Rights

    • Sean Hannity Finds A Way To Make Eric Garner’s Death About Benghazi

      Hannity Indignant Over Boehner’s Calls For Congressional Hearings On Garner’s Death Rather Than Benghazi

    • You Can’t Live With Us: 53 Britons Stripped of Citizenship

      The issue of UK citizens being stripped of their nationality has not been well covered, especially in major US news outlets. For example, since 2003 the New York Times has published only three stories on the topic, while the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today have published just one story each, for a total of just six stories over the course of eleven years in major US newspapers. Instead, significant coverage of this issue comes from the independent sources, such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which maintains an ongoing series of reports under the title, “Citizenship Revoked.”

    • An MRAP Is Not a Blanket

      Americans watched in horror as the police descended on peaceful protesters in Ferguson…

    • Long-awaited CIA torture report could pose risks to hostages: State Department

      Secretary of state John Kerry has asked Senator Dianne Feinstein to “consider” the timing of the expected release of a long-awaited report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques.

    • Kerry asks Feinstein to consider CIA report timing
    • CIA Won’t Defend Its One-Time Torturers
    • Kerry to Feinstein: Consider timing of CIA report
    • WHITE HOUSE GETTING COLD FEET OVER EXPOSING CIA’S TORTURE SECRETS
    • Inside the Battle Over the CIA Torture Report
    • John Kerry asks to delay CIA torture report
    • Lawmakers Insist On Release Of CIA Torture Report, Despite Administration’s Objections
    • As CIA, senators settle feuds, long-awaited ‘torture’ report imminent
    • New Obstacle Arises to Release of CIA Torture Report
    • MARK UDALL PROMISES AMERICA WILL “BE DISGUSTED” AT CIA TORTURE REPORT

      The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Dianne Feinstein of California, is soon expected to release its summary of the so-called CIA Torture Report, the committee’s four-year-long investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era torture practices. Release of the summary is the result of months of wrangling and negotiating with the White House on what would be released to the public and when—and it will likely be heavily redacted. During an interview conducted on Friday, November 21, by Esquire writer at large Scott Raab, outgoing senator Mark Udall of Colorado, who lost his reelection race on November 4, once again said that if the report is not released in a way he deems transparent, he would consider all options to make it public. In this excerpt from the interview, Raab asks Udall if he will read the document into the record on the floor of the Senate before he leaves in January, an act for which he cannot be prosecuted.

    • ARE YOU THERE, CIA? IT’S ME, SIOBHAN.

      These are boom times for national security reporters, with government surveillance becoming a major topic after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of NSA documents, but one of the most well-known journalists on the intelligence beat, Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal, has decided to throw in the towel and join the Dark Side—in Gorman’s case, a global communications company called Brunswick, where she will reportedly focus on privacy and data security.

      Gorman has done very solid reporting for the Journal and her previous employer, The Baltimore Sun. She has been prolific–and not just on the printed page. It turns out that she has had a lot of correspondence with the Central Intelligency Agency’s public affairs office, 246 pages of which were provided to us under a Freedom of Information Act request. We published the emails without comment earlier this year, as part of a story about reporter Ken Dilanian’s eyebrow-raising interchanges with the CIA, but in the event Gorman or her employers need a copy of her correspondence with our spymasters (perhaps the Journal has already revoked her access to its computers), we are re-upping them.

      It’s colorful reading—Gorman shows a lot of interest in learning about the CIA’s gym facilities (“I was just told that the facilities at the black sites were better than the ones at CIA”), and a year to the day after the killing of Osama bin Laden she cheerily began an email to the agency by asking, “So do I wish you a ‘happy anniversary’ today’?” There’s also this mysterious missive she sent the CIA about an apparent meeting she had with an agency official: “What prompted my guest to leave so suddenly? Bat phone rang twice, and then he excused himself?” And a word of warning to her next boss at Brunswick—watch what you say, because Gorman, when asking the agency for guidance on a rumor that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had been killed, explained to the CIA that the info came from the editor of her paper “but his tips aren’t always accurate.”

    • US: Release Torture Report

      The US Senate’s intelligence committee should release as planned its report summary on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s detention and interrogation program, Human Rights Watch said today. The White House’s expressed support for the release has been undermined by statements from the State Department raising concerns over the timing of the release and possible foreign policy implications.

    • Udall plays with a loaded deck

      Udall can wield a lot of power, forcing even classified portions of the report into the spotlight.

    • Rand Paul — from ophthalmologist to US Constitution guardian

      The 51-year-old doctor was sent to Washington by voters furious with a system that kept swelling the national debt, and anxious over what Paul sees as government zeal for war and encroachment on American civil liberties.

    • Feinstein fights to release torture report before GOP takeover

      The full report runs 6,700 pages, covering the committee’s review of 6.2 million pages of documents from the CIA and the Defense Department. Feinstein met fierce resistance from the CIA during the entire investigation, and now with less than a week before she hands the Intelligence Committee gavel to North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, she is battling the White House over its refusal to declassify the report.

    • Anger against police tops Sunday talk shows
    • Police violence in US UN documents torture

      The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.

    • Top police officer: many viewing child abuse images should be treated on NHS

      Norfolk chief constable Simon Bailey believes thousands on police database ‘pose no threat’ and don’t belong in prison

    • New York’s Next Killer-Cop Grand Jury

      Mass protests in New York were stretching into their third day when a new grand jury was announced on Friday. Not for the case of Eric Garner—a previous grand jury’s decision earlier this week not to indict the officer seen choking him on film before he died sparked the current protests. The latest grand jury will investigate the death of Akai Gurley, another unarmed black man who was killed by a police officer months after Garner’s death, in what the department says was an accidental shooting.

    • Abject failure of US to come clean on torture

      Now, more than ever, it is vital to show the world that real democracies are not like terrorist groups because they demand real accountability

    • Why Hosting Rudy Giuliani To Talk About Race Is A Bad Idea
    • Reporting the News Like Black Lives Don’t Matter

      “Black lives matter” is the rallying cry of the burgeoning nationwide movement against police killings. The Associated Press (12/5/14), covering that movement, has produced a perfect example of what journalism looks like when black lives don’t matter.

      [...]

      Or even to make the basic medical point that being able to talk is a sign that you don’t need the Heimlich maneuver–not that you don’t need a cop to stop administering a notoriously lethal chokehold.

      You don’t get any of those points in the article, because AP didn’t feel any need to quote (or, seemingly, talk to) anyone who thought that the life of Eric Garner was more important than the feelings of New York Police Department officers. Because, one has to assume, to AP black lives don’t matter.

  • DRM

    • Why Marvin has become my favorite ebook app

      Oh, and if you need to you can move your Kindle books over to Marvin via Calibre by removing the DRM. I, of course, do not advise you to do this one way or the other. It’s entirely your choice and may be affected by whatever the relevant laws are for that sort of thing. ;)

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