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08.29.15

Links 29/8/2015: NetworkManager 1.0.6, Systemd Merges “su” Command Replacement

Posted in News Roundup at 7:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • The 20 toughest job interview questions in the world

    Impossible to prepare for; unrelated to the job: jobseekers are facing tougher and weirder questions than ever in job interviews.

    Employers are turning to tricky questions to quickly sort through high numbers of candidates, so that only the very best shine through, according to Joe Wiggins, spokesman for Glassdoor in the UK.

    “Often it is to see how you react under pressure,” Wiggins said. “It’s to see what happens when the rug is pulled from under you – how do you prepare for the completely unexpected?”

  • Science

  • Hardware

    • LG’s new Rolly wireless keyboard turns into a pocket stick

      LG just announced the “Rolly,” a Bluetooth keyboard that folds up along the four rows of keys to create a wand-like device that can be tossed in a purse or pocket. LG is hardly the first electronics company to introduce a foldable, ultra-portable wireless keyboard — or even the first to introduce a gadget called the Rolly — but it might be the first to market either as a stick for your pocket.

  • Security

    • London Calling: Two-Factor Authentication Phishing From Iran

      This report describes an elaborate phishing campaign against targets in Iran’s diaspora, and at least one Western activist. The ongoing attacks attempt to circumvent the extra protections conferred by two-factor authentication in Gmail, and rely heavily on phone-call based phishing and “real time” login attempts by the attackers. Most of the attacks begin with a phone call from a UK phone number, with attackers speaking in either English or Farsi.

      The attacks point to extensive knowledge of the targets’ activities, and share infrastructure and tactics with campaigns previously linked to Iranian threat actors. We have documented a growing number of these attacks, and have received reports that we cannot confirm of targets and victims of highly similar attacks, including in Iran. The report includes extra detail to help potential targets recognize similar attacks. The report closes with some security suggestions, highlighting the importance of two-factor authentication.

    • Ins0mnia: Unlimited Background Time and Covert Execution on Non-Jailbroken iOS Devices

      FireEye mobile researchers discovered a security vulnerability that allowed an iOS application to continue to run, for an unlimited amount of time, even if the application was terminated by the user and not visible in the task switcher. This flaw allowed any iOS application to bypass Apple background restrictions. We call this vulnerability Ins0mnia.

    • Why is the smart home insecure? Because almost nobody cares

      It’s easy to laugh-and-point at Samsung over its latest smart-thing disaster: after all, it should have already learned its lesson from the Smart TV debacle, right?

      Except, of course, that wherever you see “Smart Home”, “Internet of Things”, “cloud” and “connected” in the same press release, there’s a security debacle coming. It might be Nest, WeMo, security systems, or home gateways – but it’s all the same.

    • Critical PayPal XSS vulnerability left accounts open to attack

      PayPal has patched a security vulnerability which could have been used by hackers to steal users’ login details, as well as to access unencrypted credit card information. A cross site scripting bug was discovered by Egyptian ‘vulnerabilities hunter’ Ebrahim Hegazy — ironically on PayPal’s Secure Payments subdomain.

    • Important Notice Regarding Public Availability of Stable Patches

      Grsecurity has existed for over 14 years now. During this time it has been the premier solution for hardening Linux against security exploits and served as a role model for many mainstream commercial applications elsewhere. All modern OSes took our lead and implemented to varying degrees a number of security defenses we pioneered; some have even been burned into silicon in newer processors. Over the past decade, these defenses (a small portion of those we’ve created and have yet to release) have single-handedly caused the greatest increase in security for users worldwide.

    • Finland detains Russian accused of U.S. malware crimes

      Finland confirmed on Thursday it has detained a Russian citizen, Maxim Senakh, at the request of U.S. federal authorities on computer fraud charges, in a move that Russia calls illegal.

    • Finland confirms arrest of Russian citizen accused of crimes in the US

      Finnish authorities have confirmed the detention of Maxim Senakh, a Russian citizen accused of committing malware crimes in the US. The Russian Foreign Ministry has expressed concern and called on Finland to respect international law.

    • More than 80% of healthcare IT leaders say their systems have been compromised

      Eighty-one percent of healthcare executives say their organizations have been compromised by at least one malware, botnet or other kind of cyberattack during the past two years, according to a survey by KPMG.

      The KPMG report also states that only half of those executives feel that they are adequately prepared to prevent future attacks. The attacks place sensitive patient data at risk of exposure, KPMG said.

      The 2015 KPMG Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey polled 223 CIOs, CTOs, chief security officers and chief compliance officers at healthcare providers and health plans.

    • Removal of SSLv3 from LibreSSL
    • Kansas seeks to block release of voting machine paper tapes

      The top election official in Kansas has asked a Sedgwick County judge to block the release of voting machine tapes sought by a Wichita mathematician who is researching statistical anomalies favoring Republicans in counts coming from large precincts in the November 2014 general election.

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Security updates for Thursday
    • nsenter gains SELinux support

      nsenter is a program that allows you to run program with namespaces of other processes

    • Iceland boosts ICT security measures, shares policy

      Iceland aims to shore up the security of its ICT infrastructure by raising awareness and increasing resilience. And next to updating its legislation, Iceland will also bolster the police’s capabilities to tackle cybercrime.

    • A Project to Guarantee Better Security for Open-Source Projects

      Open-source developers, however, can take steps to help catch these vulnerabilities before software is released. Secure development practices can catch many issues before they become full-blown problems. But, how can you tell which open-source projects are following these practices? The Core Infrastructure Initiative has launched a new “Best Practice Badge Program” this week to provide a solution by awarding digital badges to open-source projects that are developed using secure development practices.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Declassified CIA documents reveal how disastrous America’s post-9/11 plans really were

      First, the disastrous failures of US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq have led to an unprecedented programme of declassification of documents (some with significant redactions) as part of the cathartic process of trying to understand how so many mistakes were made before and after 9/11.

      Second, the cache of cables dumped by WikiLeaks, coupled with further revelations from material leaked by Edward Snowden, has provided an exceptional level of insight into the workings of the intelligence agencies over the past three decades, together with priceless new information about the decision-making processes and about operational activities.

      And third, there has been a cache of materials found locally following the military interventions of the past 12 years – such as audio tapes recovered from the presidential palace in Baghdad in 2003 that recorded thousands of hours of meetings, discussions and even phone calls made by Saddam Hussein and his inner circle, or boxes of cassettes that belonged to Osama bin Laden that were retrieved from a compound in Kandahar two year earlier.

      This treasure trove allows us to understand the failures, incompetence and poor planning that accompanied the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in astonishing detail, but also to frame these within the context of a wider region – and a wider period. These two countries form part of a belt that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas, linking East and West, and that for millennia has served as the world’s central nervous system. Trade, commodities, people, even disease, spread through the webs of networks that connect these locations to each other and ultimately connect the Atlantic coasts of Europe and North Africa to the Pacific coast of China and South-east Asia.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Sweden and Ecuador to begin Julian Assange talks next week

      Sweden will begin talks with Ecuador about Julian Assange on Monday, after Stockholm moved to break the deadlock over five-year-old rape allegations against him.

      Sweden initially rejected a demand by Ecuador that the two countries establish a formal agreement on judicial cooperation before Swedish prosecutors could interrogate the WikiLeaks founder in Ecuador’s embassy in London, saying it did not negotiate bilateral treaties.

    • Exclusive: Read Julian Assange’s Introduction to The Wikileaks Files

      One day, a monk and two novices found a heavy stone in their path. “We will throw it away,” said the novices. But before they could do so, the monk took his ax and cleaved the stone in half. After seeking his approval, the novices then threw the halves away. “Why did you cleave the stone only to have us throw it away?” they asked. The monk pointed to the distance the half stones had traveled. Growing excited, one of the novices took the monk’s ax and rushed to where one half of the stone had landed. Cleaving it, he threw the quarter, whereupon the other novice grabbed the ax from him and rushed after it. He too cleaved the stone fragment and threw it afield. The novices continued on in this fashion, laughing and gasping, until the halves were so small they traveled not at all and drifted into their eyes like dust. The novices blinked in bewilderment. “Every stone has its size,” said the monk.

      At the time of writing, WikiLeaks has published 2,325,961 diplomatic cables and other US State Department records, comprising some two billion words. This stupendous and seemingly insurmountable body of internal state literature, which if printed would amount to some 30,000 volumes, represents something new. Like the State Department, it cannot be grasped without breaking it open and considering its parts. But to randomly pick up isolated diplomatic records that intersect with known entities and disputes, as some daily newspapers have done, is to miss “the empire” for its cables.

    • Assange: What Wikileaks Teaches Us About How the U.S. Operates

      At the time of writing, WikiLeaks has published 2,325,961 diplomatic cables and other US State Department records, comprising some two billion words. This stupendous and seemingly insurmountable body of internal state literature, which if printed would amount to some 30,000 volumes, represents something new.

      Like the State Department, it cannot be grasped without breaking it open and considering its parts. But to randomly pick up isolated diplomatic records that intersect with known entities and disputes, as some daily newspapers have done, is to miss “the empire” for its cables.

      Each corpus has its size.

      To obtain the right level of abstraction, one which considers the relationships between most of the cables for a region or country rather than considering cables in isolation, a more scholarly approach is needed. This approach is so natural that it seems odd that it has not been tried before.

      The study of empires has long been the study of their communications. Carved into stone or inked into parchment, empires from Babylon to the Ming dynasty left records of the organizational center communicating with its peripheries.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Naomi Klein on climate change: ‘I thought it best to write about my own raw terror’

      Naomi Klein, the Canadian author, film-maker and social activist, will arrive in Australia this month for a series of events.

    • WTO Ruling Against India’s Solar Push Threatens Climate, Clean Energy

      The World Trade Organization (WTO) on Wednesday ruled against India over its national solar energy program in a case brought by the U.S. government, sparking outrage from labor and environmental advocates.

      As power demands grow in India, the country’s government put forth a plan to create 100,000 megawatts of energy from solar cells and modules, and included incentives to domestic manufacturers to use locally-developed equipment.

    • SeaWorld criticism surges online after Harry Styles speaks out, analysts report

      It’s hard to imagine Wall Street bankers worrying about what One Direction heartthrob Harry Styles thinks. But, it turns out at least some of them do.

      Bankers at Credit Suisse on Thursday warned that Styles had sparked a surge in negative sentiment towards SeaWorld, the controversial aquatic theme park, which is already suffering a collapse in profits.

      “Does anybody like dolphins?” Styles asked his fans during a concert in San Diego, home to one of SeaWorld’s biggest parks, last month. Following a roar from the crowd, he told them: “Don’t go to SeaWorld.” Styles’s comments were captured by hundreds of people, including Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams, and spread across social media.

  • Finance

    • More Than 4,000 Died Within Six Weeks Of Being Deemed ‘Fit For Work’, Reveal Government

      More than 4,000 people died within six weeks of being found “fit for work”, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has revealed.

      Figures released today show that between December 2011 to February 2014, 4,010 people died after being told they should find work following a “Work Capability Assessment”.

      Of that figure, 1,360 died after losing an appeal against the decision.

      Labour branded the figures a “wake-up call” for the Government, who has faced criticism for the way the assessment tests are carried out.

    • TTIP deal: Business lobbyists dominate talks at expense of trade unions and NGOs

      European Commission officials have held hundreds of meetings with lobbyists to discuss the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) treaty – yet only around one in ten is with public interest groups.

      The world’s biggest companies in finance, technology, pharma, tobacco and telecoms are dominating discussions with the EU executive body’s trade department responsible for the proposed EU-US free trade treaty, which could become the biggest such deal ever made.

    • Jeb Bush Hits Up Hedge Funds in the Hamptons

      Jeb Bush is visiting the Hamptons today on a lucrative fundraising tour, hitting up multi-billionaires like hedge fund manager Julian Robertson to support his 2016 campaign.

      According to invitations obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, the events over the next few days include a coffee reception in the morning, and a brunch at 11, and an evening reception. The fundraisers in the wealthy New York beach community are officially organized by Bush’s 2016 campaign–even though many of the hosts and attendees have already reached the legal maximum on contributions to Bush’s primary election effort.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Phone hacking: CPS may bring corporate charges against Murdoch publisher

      The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is considering bringing corporate charges against Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper publisher over phone hacking, it has emerged.

      The Metropolitan police handed over a file of evidence on News International – now renamed News UK – to the CPS for consideration after an investigation that stretches back to 2011, when the News of the World was closed at the height of the scandal.

      “We have received a full file of evidence for consideration of corporate liability charges relating to the Operation Weeting phone-hacking investigation,” a spokeswoman confirmed.

      The file was transferred on 23 July and reignites the controversy for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, News UK’s parent company, which believed it had been through the worst and come out the other side after an eight-month trial of former News of the World journalists that concluded in June 2014.

    • On Fox, Rudy Giuliani Claims VA Shooter’s Suspected Mental Health Issues Went Unreported Because Of Equal Employment Regulations
    • Felicia Kornbluh on ‘Welfare Reform’ Anniversary

      Would that even that degree of critical consideration would be granted to the anniversary of another disaster for low-income communities of color: the move to “end welfare as we know it,” signed into law in August 1996 by Bill Clinton. If you don’t remember the media stampede — Black women having babies for government checks! Pregnant teenagers draining public resources! — that’s partly because elite media, having championed hard for the dismantling of the safety net, were markedly less interested in tracking the human fallout.

  • Censorship

    • United In Flight WiFi Blocks Popular News Sites

      So, just last month, we wrote about United Airlines idiotic inflight video system that forces you to install DRM on your own devices to watch a movie. And, now, it appears that the company is filtering out all sorts of news sites. The EFF’s Nate Cardozo was on a flight yesterday when he started noticing that he couldn’t get to certain tech websites, including Ars Technica and The Verge — instead receiving messages they were blocked due to United’s “access policy.” The same was true for political news site Daily Kos. Eventually he even realized that United also blocks the NY Times (via his phone after the laptop battery ran out).

    • Kimmel spices up the 2016 campaign with some creative censorship

      In this week’s installment of “Unnecessary Censorship,” Jimmy Kimmel Live uses its well-placed [bleeps] to make Trump’s bragging, Ted Cruz’s thoughts on political correctness, the Jeb Bush campaign’s plans, and a fan of President Obama all sound more vulgar than they were. In this week’s installment of “Unnecessary Censorship,” Jimmy Kimmel Live uses its well-placed [bleeps] to make Trump’s bragging, Ted Cruz’s thoughts on political correctness, the Jeb Bush campaign’s plans, and a fan of President Obama all sound more vulgar than they were.

    • Jimmy Kimmel censors Donald Trump on ‘This Week in Unnecessary Censorship’

      In the clip, the presidential candidate speaks to a crowd of his supporters, bragging about having a huge … something. Being bleeped twice makes whatever Trump is saying sound worse, and yet, oddly believable!

    • Tool Makes It Easier to Evade Online Censors

      He’s already talked with Tor developers about Marionette’s open-source code.

    • US bioethicist quits over censorship row at Northwestern University

      The edition had sparked controversy as it included a salacious account of a consensual sexual encounter between Syracuse University professor William J. Peace with a nurse in the 1970s, when he was an 18-year-old hospital patient.

    • Northwestern University bioethics professor resigns over censorship claim

      A Northwestern University professor has resigned her position at the Feinberg School of Medicine after, she said, her complaints of academic censorship were ignored.

      Alice Dreger, who worked part time as a clinical medical humanities and bioethics professor, initially complained in 2014 that the school dean removed a risque article from a website for the bioethics journal Atrium because of fear it would harm the school’s image.

    • Japan’s censorship of PlayStation 4 horror game Until Dawn is spectacularly bad 【Video】

      …Japan’s method of handling violent video game content can be quite perplexing at times.

    • How censors are keeping Chinese citizens in the dark about “Black Monday”

      …mentions of the country’s economic weakness were pretty much absent from major Chinese media reports.

    • VPN down: China goes after Astrill, other anti-censorship apps in run up to WW2 anniversary parade

      A number of services used to get around Chinese internet restrictions have been taken down or disrupted in the run up to a major parade in Beijing next week to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war.

      Popular virtual private network (VPN) provider Astrill warned users on Wednesday that they may suffer service outages between now and the parade on September 3.

      VPNs allow users to tunnel their internet traffic through an uncensored server, bypassing the so-called Great Firewall (GFW).

    • Besieged Malaysian PM Doubles Down on Online Censorship Ahead of Anti-Corruption Rally

      Last month we reported that the Malaysian government had censored the website of the Sarawak Report, which first broke news of the corruption allegations. A few days later, the government also suspended the publication licenses of two print publications that ran the same exposé.

    • Giving lip: censorship, subversion and the enduring power of the screen kiss

      The humble kiss has figured in its fair share of censorship debates over time. These debates have usually centred on whether the kiss should be represented at all, as well as a monitoring of the content and duration of the amorous scene.

    • North-South tension causes internet censorship in Korea: Is it justified?

      South Korea has the world’s fastest internet with connectivity clocked at 25.3MBps by Akamai Technologies last year. That’s over two times better than the 11.5MBps measured in the United States. Such a wired environment, coupled with wide internet use, seem optimal grounds to foster free, creative discussions among peers in a democracy.

    • DDoS attack hits GitHub after Chinese police force developer to remove code

      GitHub has fallen prey to a DDoS attack this week, allegedly perpetrated by Chinese actors, in response to tools available on the site that would help users circumvent censorship.

      On Tuesday the site found that it was under attack from malicious sources, following a similar tirade against the site in March of this year. This time, though, the attacks have been much more intense.

    • How censorship divides us

      Political correctness has made us more wary of one another.

    • Istanbul fest director steps down after censorship scandal

      Azize Tan has stepped down after nine years following protests over censorship at the latest edition in April, which led to the cancellation of the festival’s competitions and closing ceremony.

    • Egypt interferes with printing of three newspapers

      The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a recent wave of newspaper censorship in Egypt. Three privately owned newspapers were prevented from going to print or into circulation because of content critical of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, according to news reports.

    • CPJ denounces recent wave of newspaper censorship

      The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned Tuesday the recent wave of newspaper censorship in Egypt, citing the new anti-terrorism law as the pretext for this phenomenon.

      Over the past two weeks, three newspapers were subjected to censorship, due to the presence of content critical of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.

      A Sout Al-Omma newspaper issue was confiscated on 14 August for containing reports on the health condition of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s mother, as well as reports on a corrupt network of Mubarak-era figures.

    • A curious incident of censorship

      The book shows that differing opinions — and even vastly differing ways of thinking — exist and should be considered.

    • Trigger Warning Advocates Say They’re Not For Censorship

      Many of the responses to the article focus on the authors’ status as “rich, white-skinned and well-established men, who work at the moment in business-type jobs,” (though a lawyer working at a non-profit and a career academic might take issue with a few of those descriptors). Some accuse Lukianoff and Haidt of “hysteria,” “scaremongering,” and wanting to “silence discussions.” Others offered some nuance by conceding that trigger warnings “run the risk of students avoiding or disengaging the material out of fear of being triggered,” but think the threat to free expression in higher education is over-hyped.

    • Researchers create P2P Alibi Routing to avoid censorship and government surveillance

      University of Maryland researchers developed P2P Alibi Routing to allows users to choose where they do NOT want their packets to go, thereby avoiding ‘censorship of Internet traffic and suspicious boomerang routing.’

    • Takedown Resistant ‘Hydra Proxy’ Launches to Beat Censorship

      One year ago UK police noisily took down Immunicity, a site dedicated to providing access to blocked websites. To mark this anniversary a new platform titled Hydra Proxy has launched with the aim of providing a takedown resistant service for all. TorrentFreak caught up with its founder to learn more.

    • Censorship in Ridgefield

      Censorship often occurs because of power abuse, personal prejudice and ideological differences.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Associated Press sues FBI over fake news story

      The Associated Press filed a lawsuit (PDF) this morning, demanding the FBI hand over information about its use of fake news stories. The case stems from a 2007 incident regarding a bomb threat at a school. The FBI created a fake news story with an Associated Press byline, then e-mailed it to a suspect to plant malware on his computer.

      The AP sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI last year seeking documents related to the 2014 sting. It also seeks to know how many times the FBI has used such a ruse since 2000. The FBI responded to the AP saying it could take two years or more to gather the information requested. Unsatisfied with the response, the Associated Press has taken the matter to court.

    • AP Sues FBI Over Impersonating An AP Reporter With A Fake AP Story

      Last fall, we wrote about how the FBI had set up a fake AP news story in order to implant malware during an investigation. This came out deep in a document that had been released via a FOIA request by EFF, and first noticed by Chris Soghoian of the ACLU. The documents showed the FBI discussing how to install some malware, called a CIPAV (for Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier) by creating a fake news story…

    • Fox Host Complains That NYPD Officers Have To Justify Their Stop-And-Frisks
    • How a Gun in a Suitcase Became a Permanent Ball and Chain

      For carriage of the gun, she was delivered to Rikers Island and charged with attempted criminal possession of a weapon and eventually posted a bail bond of $10,000. Appearing in court in Queens, she was told by a judge, she said, “‘This ain’t Texas; we don’t carry guns here.’”

    • Online identity theft to become a crime

      As of September 4, online identity theft will be illegal in Finland. Many people may soon find that even creating a fake social media profile can be considered a misdemeanour.

    • First State Legalizes Taser Drones for Cops, Thanks to a Lobbyist

      North Dakota police will be free to fire ‘less than lethal’ weapons from the air thanks to the influence of Big Drone.

      It is now legal for law enforcement in North Dakota to fly drones armed with everything from Tasers to tear gas thanks to a last-minute push by a pro-police lobbyist.

      With all the concern over the militarization of police in the past year, no one noticed that the state became the first in the union to allow police to equip drones with “less than lethal” weapons. House Bill 1328 wasn’t drafted that way, but then a lobbyist representing law enforcement—tight with a booming drone industry—got his hands on it.

      The bill’s stated intent was to require police to obtain a search warrant from a judge in order to use a drone to search for criminal evidence. In fact, the original draft of Representative Rick Becker’s bill would have banned all weapons on police drones.

    • Here’s What Actually Gets Terrorists To Tell The Truth — And It’s Not Torture

      Hollywood has a lot to answer for. Thanks to the hit TV show 24 and movies like Zero Dark Thirty, we think we know what terrorist interrogations look like: After being roughed up and threatened, the suspect breaks down and reveals all. Mass murder is thwarted. Osama Bin Laden is shot.

      The end, we tell ourselves, justifies the ugly means.

      Even after the abuses committed at CIA “black sites” were laid bare last year by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, most Americans stuck to this view. Some 59% believed the CIA’s harsh interrogation methods were justified, in a December 2014 poll run for the Washington Post and ABC News.

    • The UK Hits Moral Rock Bottom

      The conduct of the political class is utterly shameless. Meantime they indulge their fantasies of stripping workers of all protection and of stopping aid to the needy, and while the politicians gorge and gorge, the poor are quietly being slipped away to die.

    • Beware of Chilcot

      I am worried that the continued delay in the publication of Chilcot’s report is giving rise to expectations that it will be forthright and damning of Blair and his supporters. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even though Blair plunged us into an illegal war with dreadful long-term consequences, the report has always been designed to be a typical Whitehall fudge. Mistakes made – errors of judgement – all in good faith – lessons learned. You don’t have to wait for it, that is it.

      The Chilcot team was handpicked by Gordon Brown – himself up to his neck in guilt for the illegal invasion – and three of the five had been aggressive proponents of the war. The remaining two, Chilcot and Baroness Prasad, are “sound” for the Establishment. Let me remind you of my analysis of the committee members in 2009. Sir Lawrence Freedman was an active propagandist for the invasion while Sir Martin Gilbert (died while contributing to the committee) was so enamoured of the invasion he compared Bush and Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill. Rod Lyne was actively involved in selling the WMD lies and arguably in danger of war crime accusation himself.

    • Katrina’s ‘Golden Opportunity’: 10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster

      Americans love, above all, a narrative. Preferably a moral one, marked by a clear good and evil. For many so-called “school reformers,” the tragedy of Katrina, which marks its ten-year anniversary today, provided that narrative. Its stark before-and-after provided a clear A/B test as to the righteousness of their cause. Before was a “broken school system,” and after is a glossy, privatized education system.

      We’ll set aside the fact that this is largely a fantasy. Torture the data enough, and the “New Orleans miracle” can be teased out if one wants it enough. Despite studies and reporting showing otherwise, for the sake of this piece it doesn’t actually matter if radical post-Katrina New Orleans school reform was a “success,” a failure or somewhere in between. What is important is that so many corporatists think this “miracle” was not just an incidental positive but was, all things considered, worth it. Worth the 1,800 people killed and the 100,000 African-Americans permanently ejected from the city.

      The most popular examination of this pathology is, of course, from Naomi Klein, who coined the idea of the ”shock doctrine” in her 2007 book of the same name. In it, she explores how Katrina and other manmade and non-manmade disasters are exploited to rush through a radical right wing corporate agenda.

    • 10 Years After Hurricane Katrina, Media Need To See The Link Between Climate Change And Social Justice

      Ten years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, environmental justice advocates feel the time is long overdue for the media to start connecting the dots between climate change and social justice.

      There may be no clearer example of this intersection than in the impact and aftermath of 2005′s Hurricane Katrina. Between the devastating effects of the storm itself, and the decade-long effort to restore destroyed communities afterwards, the region’s African-American population has demonstrably suffered the most.

    • 13 Simple But Exciting Ways To Lose Your Citizenship In Tony Abbott’s Team Australia

      The government’s proposed citizenship stripping laws are about a lot more than taking citizenship off people who try to blow up a train. In fact, they may well rip away the rights of a vast range of people for a staggering number of reasons.

      We’ve gone though the expert responses to the bill – currently before a parliamentary inquiry – and picked out the best ways to see your citizenship disappear if you are a dual national.

      If you’re going to end up banished from Australia, you may as well have some fun doing it.

      Before we go on we should note that it’s not exactly clear how many dual nationals there are in Australia but if you’re one of them, this could soon apply to you. We’re looking at you, John Pilger… Germaine Greer, et al.

    • The Future of One-Party Rule in Singapore

      At the talk titled The Future of One-Party Rule in Singapore, Dr Chee spoke about the implications of one-party rule in the past, present and future and how the next general election will influence democratic politics in Singapore. Students and faculty posed questions after Dr Chee gave brief opening remarks, leading to a lively discussion in an already overflowing room of more than 100 members of the Yale-NUS community.

      [...]

      I am frustrated at how a country this economically advanced can be so socially backward, but to think about it, it is not surprising at all. With all that has been going down in recent years (e.g. Amos Yee, the National Library Board penguin saga), the world is looking at us. What Singapore needs right now is for people in power to put their foot down and say, “Hey, this is wrong, and I’m going to fight for what is right.” Unfortunately, at the end of the day, elections are a race for votes, and few are willing to risk losing votes this way. After all, the less people you piss off, the higher the chances you have at winning. We need social change, and we need it now. Yet how can we ever have real change if advocating for it only puts people off or gets you shut down?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Armors, Glory and… religion in a US trade mark clash

        Regardless of spelling, Armor&Glory’s market impact appears minimal. According to the story, “it has so far made less than $100,000 in revenue since 2013 — about 0.003 percent of Under Armour’s sales just last year. The company’s online store sells $20 shorts and $25 shirts designed largely for a core Christian audience, with slogans like “Be spiritually attractive” and ‘Put on God’s armor and receive His glory.’”.

    • Copyrights

      • Piracy: Hollywood’s Losing a Few Pounds, Who Cares?

        Following news this week that a man is facing a custodial sentence after potentially defrauding the movie industry out of £120m, FACT Director General Kieron Sharp has been confronted with an uncomfortable truth. According to listeners contacting the BBC, the public has little sympathy with Hollywood.

      • Pirate Bay Founder Released From Jail But Immediately Re-Arrested

        Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was released from a Danish prison yesterday, only to be immediately re-arrested by police. The Swede is now expected to be extradited back to his home country where he will be returned to prison, but not before appearing in court today to appeal the decision.

      • Tech Giants Want to Punish DMCA Takedown Abusers

        The CCIA, which represents global tech firms including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, has published an extensive research paper on the future of copyright in the digital landscape. One of the main suggestions is to extent current copyright law, so that senders of wrongful DMCA takedown notices face serious legal consequences.

      • Facebook Wants to Crack Down on Pirated Videos

        Facebook says it will give video creators and publishers a way to remove copyrighted videos that have been uploaded to its popular social network without the proper permission.

08.27.15

Links 27/8/2015: ownCloud Desktop Client 2.0, Red Hat Downgraded

Posted in News Roundup at 8:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Google Hopes Open Source Will Give Its Cloud A Path To The Enterprise

    Instead, Google expects that becoming more open — and releasing more open-source software — will create a path for the company to make inroads into the enterprise. “Google has recognized that open is a better way of building,” McLuckie also noted. “We’ve come to admire the ability of the open-source community to drive innovation.”

    He argued that building out in the open not only allows it to build a better product for its customers, but also to enable faster integration cycles. In addition, having an open-source project that involves other companies also allows it to absorb the DNA of these companies into the product.

  • Like open source software, a book is more than its content

    Instead, we chose to partner with Harvard Business Review (HBR) Press. In many ways, HBR does for books what Red Hat does for open source software; it collaborates with creators and adds value to the products of these collaborations. Like any piece of open source software (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example), a book is far more than the content it contains. Like a software application, a book is a project with multiple stakeholders. It involves an agent that works to put the book on publishers’ radars. It involves an editorial team that reviews manuscripts and suggests improvements. And it involves a marketing team that decides how best to develop and target potential audiences.

  • Aligning Democratic Candidates with Open Source Software OSes

    A few days ago, I aligned Republican presidential hopefuls with open source Linux-based operating systems. Now, it’s the Democrats’ turn: If Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders et al. ran Linux, which distribution would they use? Read on for some perspective.

  • INSIGHT: Top 5 reasons why Open Source technology is the answer

    Organisations that can effectively harness people’s innate tendency to make their lives easier will be more likely to successfully develop software and applications that genuinely disrupt, or protect against disruption, as business needs dictate.

  • Software Development Environment Must Be Open, Says Red Hat

    The application development technology of the future must provide a framework for users to develop software quickly and get it to market fast.

    That’s according to Red Hat, who says open source technology is the answer.

    Red Hat says organisations that can effectively harness people’s innate tendency to make their lives easier will be more likely to successfully develop software and applications that genuinely disrupt, or protect against disruption, as business needs dictate.

  • 10 ways open source tech is changing the rules of the game

    In the last few years, open source software platforms such as Android have established themselves as essential catalysts for technology advances.

  • How Open Source Is Improving The Way Businesses Visualize Data

    It was recently reported that the Colorado-based startup SlamData is working on creating an enterprise version of its open source analytics platform. Their solution allows users to see and understand NoSQL data and this will now enable larger businesses to visualize data more effectively. The platform will enable large businesses to visualize semi-structured NoSQL data by adding proprietary security and management features to the main open source platform.

  • FCC Chairman Promises Open-Source Video-Conferencing Platform for ASL-Signing Callers

    FCC Chairman Tim Wheeler addressed the biannual meeting of the Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. (TDI) Conference in Baltimore on Thursday, with news of interest to anyone who works in assistive technologies.

  • For UNC scientists, open source is the way forward

    But scientists know they can manipulate those kinases to combat the disease. And chemical biologists at the University of North Carolina are leading an open source effort to unlock the secrets of kinase activity—secrets they say could pioneer a new generation of drug discovery.

  • How open source will power tomorrow’s tech unicorns

    With open source technology already powering business like Facebook, Google and Booking.com – and 70% of new apps – will it be the backbone of the next wave of unicorns?

  • A simple, scalable solution for storing and serving build artifacts

    Now we’re making Pinrepo open source on GitHub. There you can find all of the configuration stanzas and instructions to recreate it for yourself. It also includes a pypi release tool to release and maintain pypi packages. Check it out and let us know what you think! And, feel free to contribute back with your customizations and improvements.

  • Stephen Hawking’s Voice Is Now Open Source And Free To Download [Ed: Windows-only, Intel commercial as an ‘article’, exploiting a disabled person as the marketing logo]

    Currently, you’ll need a Windows machine to use ACAT. In the future, though, it would seem like this is exactly the kind of app that should be running on a smartphone, which is already bristling with cameras and sensors.

  • Markup lowdown: 4 markup languages every team should know

    When I ended my Doc Dish article about why you should use a rendered language for documentation, I told you that selecting a language was a matter for another day.

    Well another day has finally arrived.

    There’s no shortage of languages you can use for formatting and publishing your documentation, and your choice of language will depend on your project’s needs. In this article I’ll look at several different language options, ranging from the simplest to the most complex. It’s hardly an exhaustive list, so make the case for your favorite (or most hated) language in the comments.

  • Docs or it didn’t happen

    Many words have been written on community building, engagement, and retention. The discussion around community management is alive and kicking, with articles and blog posts everywhere about how to grow, support, and not mess up open source communities.

  • Events

    • Linux Plumbers Conference 2015

      Linux Plumbers 2015 finished up last Friday. Another great conference. The focus of Plumbers is supposed to be more problem solving/discussion and less talking/lecturing. To really get the most out of Plumbers, you need to be an active participant and asking questions or giving input. Plumbers was co-located with the group of conferences now run by the Linux Foundation. The fist day of Plumbers overlapped with the last day of Linux Con. This day was as bit more lecture focused like a regular conference. Even if Plumbers is typically a discussion conference, the talks I went to were all great.

    • Speakers and Agenda announced for Tizen Developer Conference 2015 Shenzhen

      The Tizen Developer Conference 2015 has been moved this year from San Francisco to Shenzhen, China, from September 17 to 18. This is the annual event that brings together open source and app developers who are interested in contributing to the growth of the Tizen ecosystem worldwide.

    • First Round of systemd.conf 2015 Sponsors

      We are happy to announce the first round of systemd.conf 2015 sponsors!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla CEO threatens to fire person responsible for anonymous hate speech on Reddit

        An anonymous person complaining about “social justice bullies” at Mozilla will be fired if the person is discovered to be an employee, the company’s CEO said today. Speaking at Mozilla’s weekly public meeting, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard said Reddit user aioyama had “crossed the line” in a series of postings about women at the company, including recently departed community organizer Christie Koehler. In a series of tweets earlier this month, Koehler complained about Mozilla’s lack of diversity in the workplace and its failure to address accessibility issues.

      • SIMD in Rust

        For the last two months, I’ve been interning at Mozilla Research, working on improving the state of SIMD parallelism in Rust: exposing more CPU instructions in the compiler, and an in-progress library that provides a mostly-safe but low-level interface to that core functionality.

      • Rust Gains Greater SIMD Support

        A new SIMD scheme is now available in the latest nightly versions of the Rust programming language.

        Mozilla Research has been working on improving SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) parallelism in Rust that’s simple to use.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Eclipse seeks donations for open source development

      The Eclipse Foundation, best known for its Eclipse IDE, is moving into funding its open source projects via donations.

      Previously, all Eclipse development was done by individuals and organizations contributing their time. “Today, we are significantly lowering the barriers for companies and individuals to actively invest in the ongoing development of the Eclipse platform,” Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said in a recent blog post.

    • Mirantis Raises Another $100 Million, This Time from Intel

  • BSD

    • Why FreeBSD should not adopt launchd

      I have been keeping an eye on NextBSD for some time, when it was initially just openlaunchd, an effort initially started by R. Tyler as a GSoC student in 2005 to, unsurprisingly, port the launchd system and service manager to FreeBSD. It was stalled for a long time until its revival in late 2013, but again moving very slowly.

      Around November of 2014 at the MeetBSD conference, Jordan Hubbard delivered a talk entitled “FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years,” which outlined a general desire for a more “event-driven” and unified configuration approach to FreeBSD, strongly implying the use of launchd as system bootstrap and service daemon, as well as other parts of the OS X low-level userspace.

    • LLVM 3.7 & Clang 3.7 Are Bringing Exciting Compiler Features, Improvements

      The LLVM 3.7 release is imminent so here’s our usual look at the new features/improvements for this open-source compiler stack. Complete OpenMP 3 support is a big one but there’s also many other big ticket items to find in this major compiler update.

    • LLVM 3.7′s Release Is Imminent

      The release of LLVM 3.7 is imminent.

      Days after preparing the 3.7-RC3 release, Hans Wennborg of Google has announced the release of 3.7-RC3.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Umeå University computer club supports open source

      The Academic Computer Club at the Umeå University in Sweden is a major supporter of open source projects. ACC UMU hosts one of the popular free software mirrors, and is one of the official sponsors of the Debian open source software distribution, maintaining a few of the project’s servers. The club supports two more well-known projects, the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) and Freenode. Both projects provide communication facilities that benefit free software communities.s

    • How Scotland can protect itself from GCHQ spying by going open source

      One of the key lies out out in last years referendum was that we couldn’t exist securely without the British Security Services (the ones that brought you extraordinary rendition).

    • Digital Assembly developing list of digital rights for interaction with public agencies

      Citizens and businesses should have to provide basic information only once, eGovernment services should be user-friendly and intuitive, and users should be digitally literate in order to use online (public) services. These are the most important digital rights for citizens and businesses when interacting with public agencies, as identified by panellists and the audience at the workshop ‘Promoting e-society’.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Facebook open-sources Hack code generator

      Hack is Facebook’s spinoff of the PHP language, working with the HHVM virtual machine. The library, meanwhile, generates code that is written into signed files to prevent undesired modifications. “The idea behind writing code that writes code is to raise the level of abstraction and reduce coupling,” Facebook said on its GitHub page for Hack Codegen.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • When everything’s a request for comments

      The Internet’s foundational documents are called “requests for comments” or “RFCs.” Published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the organization whose stated goal is “to make the Internet work better,” RFCs define and explain the operational standards by which our worldwide network of networks functions. In other words, they specify the rules everyone should follow when building and implementing new Internet technologies. Engineers working on the Internet discuss potential RFCs, debate their merits, then post their decisions online for anyone to read.

    • Centimeters and Points are the best [ODF]

      For example, when saving ODF with LibreOffice, the unit that is used for storage depends on the user preferences. This can lead to inconveniences and rounding errors. If I specify a margin of 1.25cm and send it to someone who has the preferences set to use inches, the margin will be stored as 0.4925in. When that number is converted back to centimeters, the value is 1.25095cm which is 1‰ more than the original value.

Leftovers

  • Angry Birds maker Rovio plans deep job cuts as profits fall

    Finland’s Rovio, maker of mobile phone game Angry Birds, forecast its earnings would fall for a third consecutive year and said it planned to slash up to 39 percent of its workforce to try to improve its prospects.

    Rovio has failed to create new hit games since the 2009 launch of Angry Birds, the top paid mobile app of all time, though it has tried to capitalise on its most successful brand by licensing its use on string of consumer products.

  • Google Express Workers Vote ‘Yes’ to Union, as Warehouses Plan to Shut Down

    On Friday afternoon, 151 warehouse and shipping workers for Google Express, the search engine’s delivery service, voted in favor of joining a union. Last month, workers at the Palo Alto, Calif., facility agreed to join Teamsters Local 853, which has unionized shuttle drivers for eBay, Apple, Yahoo and other companies.

  • Science

    • MIT creates file system that will survive unexpected crashes

      IT’S A SITUATION that will be familiar to most computer users. Your computer crashes, and when you manage to get it back up and running the disk has corrupted some data. Probably the bit that was vital and so new that it hadn’t been backed up yet.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • NYT: Not Believing in Climate Change Is Like Believing in Food Shortages

      Is rejecting climate science, though, really like having believed that unchecked population growth would lead to food shortages? Contrary to Leonhardt’s glib “it hasn’t,” food shortages are a serious problem in the world right now. According to the UN World Food Programme, “Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life…about one in nine people on Earth.” The WFP notes that about 3.1 million children die from malnutrition a year–and that one in four children on Earth are stunted by lack of food. That seems fairly widespread.

      Unlike climate change denial, which if anything has exacerbated the problem of global warming, warnings about overpopulation may have had the intended effect of curbing population growth. China’s draconian one-child policy was directly inspired by the warnings of limits-to-growth advocates like the Club of Rome, along with numerous less coercive family planning initiatives. Partially as a result of these programs, the global population growth rate declined from above 2 percent in the 1960s and early ’70s to close to 1 percent and falling today. Without this reduction in growth, the population would be about 2 billion higher today than its current 7.3 billion.

  • Security

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • Security updates for Wednesday
    • Court rules FTC can prosecute companies over lax online security

      The Third Circuit US Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has ruled that the Federal Trade Commission does have the right to prosecute firms who mishandle their customers’ data.

      Between 2008 and 2009, hotel chain Wyndham Worldwide – which runs hotels under the Days Inn, Howard Johnson, Ramada, Super 8, and Travelodge brands – suffered three computer intrusions. The hackers stole the personal information and credit card numbers of over 619,000 customers, causing at least $10.6m in thefts.

    • The Basic Principles of Security (and Why They Matter)

      Yet, despite the frequent complaints about the unrealistic demands of security, today the problem is just as likely to be the insistence on convenience. With the rise of desktop Linux and the popularity of Android, the pressure to be as easy to use as Windows is almost irresistible. As a result, there is no question that the average distribution is less secure than those of a decade ago. That is the price we pay for automounting external devices and giving new users automatic access to printers and scanners — and will continue to pay.

    • GitHub combats DDoS cyberattack

      At the time, the code repository said the cyberattack involved “a wide combination of attack vectors,” as well as new techniques including the hijacking of unsuspecting user traffic to flood GitHub, killing the service.

    • Jails – High value but shitty Virtualization

      Virtualization is nothing new, and depending how fundamentalist you define “virtualized environment” one can point to the earliest of timesharing systems as the origin.

      IBM’s mainframe hardware, the 360 machine series, introduced hardware virtualization, so that it was possible to run several of IBMs different and incompatible operating systems on the same computer at the same time.

      It’s more than a little bit ironic that a platform which have lasted 50 years now, were beset by backwards-compatibility issues almost from the start, and even more so that IBMs patents on this area of technology prevented anybody else from repeating their mistake for that long.

      Everybody else did software virtualization.

    • How to crack Ubuntu encryption and passwords

      During Positive Hack Days V, I made a fast track presentation about eCryptfs and password cracking. The idea came to me after using one feature of Ubuntu which consists in encrypting the home folder directory. This option can be selected during installation or activated later.

    • AT&T Hotspots: Now with Advertising Injection

      While traveling through Dulles Airport last week, I noticed an Internet oddity. The nearby AT&T hotspot was fairly fast—that was a pleasant surprise.

      But the web had sprouted ads. Lots of them, in places they didn’t belong.

    • Advertising malware rates have tripled in the last year, according to report

      Ad networks have been hit with a string of compromises in recent months, and according to a new report, many of the infections are making it through to consumers. A study published today by Cyphort found that instances of malware served by ad networks more than tripled between June 2014 and February 2015, based on monthly samples taken during the period. Dubbed “malvertising,” the attacks typically sneaking malicious ads onto far-reaching ad networks. The networks deliver those malware-seeded ads to popular websites, which pass them along to a portion of the visitors to the site. The attacks typically infect computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash, typically triggered as soon as an ad is successfully loaded.

    • How security flaws work: the buffer overflow

      The most important central concept is the memory address. Every individual byte of memory has a corresponding numeric address. When the processor loads and stores data from main memory (RAM), it uses the memory address of the location it wants to read and write from. System memory isn’t just used for data; it’s also used for the executable code that makes up our software. This means that every function of a running program also has an address.

    • Lessons learned from cracking 4,000 Ashley Madison passwords

      When hackers released password data for more than 36 million Ashley Madison accounts last week, big-league cracking expert Jeremi Gosney didn’t bother running them through one of his massive computer clusters built for the sole purpose of password cracking. The reason: the passwords were protected by bcrypt, a cryptographic hashing algorithm so strong Gosney estimated it would take years using a highly specialized computer cluster just to check the dump for the top 10,000 most commonly used passwords.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • UN Official Says Human Suffering in Yemen “Almost Incomprehensible”

      With a staggering four in five Yemenis now in need of immediate humanitarian aid, 1.5 million people displaced and a death toll that has surpassed 4,000 in just five months, a United Nations official told the Security Council on August 19 that the scale of human suffering is “almost incomprehensible”.

      Briefing the 15-member body upon his return from the embattled Arab nation on Aug. 19, Under-Secretary-General for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Stephen O’Brien stressed that the civilian population is bearing the brunt of the conflict and warned that unless warring parties came to the negotiating table there would soon be “nothing left to fight for”.

      An August assessment report by Save the Children-Yemen on the humanitarian situation in the country of 26 million noted that over 21 million people, or 80 percent of the population, require urgent relief in the form of food, fuel, medicines, sanitation and shelter.

    • Media and Nuclear Deal Opponents Continue to Spread Debunked Myth Iran Will Monitor Itself

      There is no dearth of rumors about the Iran nuclear deal. In the latest scare, two allegations have filled the media: the first, that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran made “secret side deals”; the second, that the IAEA, in those negotiations, put the Iranian government in charge of investigating alleged nuclear research at its Parchin military base.

      The latter supposed exposé comes from a now-debunked story by Associated Press (8/19/15). The piece, in its first draft, was full of errors and distortions (Vox, 8/20/15; War on the Rocks, 8/24/15). But its supposed revelations filled the airwaves.

    • The Iran Nuclear Deal: Give Diplomacy a Chance

      A war with Iran would be a catastrophe, yet by opposing diplomacy, hundreds of members of Congress may be blundering into just such a conflict. The Iran nuclear deal, as the complex diplomatic arrangement is popularly called, was agreed upon on July 14 by a consortium of key powerful countries, the European Union and Iran. The goal of the agreement is to limit Iran’s nuclear activities to peaceful purposes, and to block Iran’s ability to construct a nuclear bomb. Despite what its critics say, this agreement is not based on trust. It grants the International Atomic Energy Agency the power to conduct widespread, intrusive inspections to ensure that Iran keeps its many pledges. In return, many, but not all, of the sanctions on Iran, which have been crippling its economy, will be lifted.

      The alternative to diplomacy is to pour gasoline on a region of the world already on fire with intense, complex military conflicts. Iran’s military has more than half a million soldiers, no doubt with many more who could be mobilized if threatened with invasion. Iran shares a vast border to its west with Iraq, and to its east with Afghanistan, two nations with ongoing military and humanitarian disasters that have consumed the U.S. military since 2001, costing trillions of dollars and untold lives.

    • Autoplay Is for a G-Rated World

      Tragedy struck Bedford County, Virginia this morning when two journalists, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, were shot to death on live TV.

      The people viewing the broadcast at home had no choice but to watch the horror unfold, and neither did many social media users. Video of the shooting autoplayed on Twitter, Facebook (despite a content warning feature reportedly implemented in January), and other sites that support autoplay video.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Tourist Unclear On Concept Of Wild Animals Demands Yellowstone Provide Better Bears

      Mashable reports that the following note was left by a guest at Yellowstone and then posted on Reddit by a friend of someone who works at the park. The note was left upon checkout by someone who does not understand how wild bears work (they don’t fuck with you unless you’ve got a pool) but is nonetheless quite polite; it’s refreshing that they were so kind about their disappointment, unlike the woman who threatened to shit herself in anger at Town Hall when Disneyland didn’t have fireworks the last time I went.

    • Environmentalists Blast Obama’s Decision to Let Shell Drill in Arctic

      Apparently the president cares more about Big Oil than the environment, endangered animals, indigenous people — even his own climate legacy.

      [...]

      “This is a disaster,” said Kristin Brown, director of digital strategy at the League of Conservation Voters, in an email. “Shell has an awful safety track record — even the Interior Department says there’s a 75 percent risk of a large oil spill if these leases are developed, and in the unpredictable Arctic Ocean, cleanup would be next-to-impossible.”

    • ​The Nations That Will Be Hardest Hit by Water Shortages by 2040

      Water access is going to be one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century. As climate change dries out the already dry areas and makes the wet ones wetter, we’re poised to see some radical civilizational shifts. For one, a number of densely populated areas will come under serious water stress—which analysts fear will lead to strife, thirst, and even violent conflict. With that in mind, the World Resource Institute has assembled a new report projecting which nations are most likely to be hardest hit by water stress in coming decades.

  • Finance

    • Armando Iannucci urges BBC to monetise its programmes overseas and resist ‘prejudiced’ Tory attacks

      “If it was a car industry, our ministers would be out championing it overseas, trying to win contracts, boasting of the British jobs that would bring. And if the BBC were a weapons system, half the Cabinet would be on a plane to Saudi Arabia to tell them how brilliant it was,” he said.

    • Latest Seattle Jobs Numbers Disprove Fox’s Minimum Wage Misinformation

      New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) disproves allegations promoted by Fox News that the 2015 increase in Seattle’s minimum wage has destroyed restaurant jobs.

    • The stock market roller coaster is not being felt by most Americans for one simple reason

      That’s because fewer people are invested in the stock market today than at any time in nearly the last two decades — the product of dogged wage stagnation and a dramatic loss of faith in markets.

    • Prof. Wolff speaks to The Big Picture’s Thom Hartmann about Market Meltdown

      Prof. Wolff talks to The Big Picture’s Thom Hartmann about Monday’s historic lows in the financial markets. Prof. Wolff breaks down China’s economy and if the devaluation of the yuan is the root to this market meltdown. Then Prof. Wolff and Thom take a look at the U.S. economy and review wage growth, inequality, and pensions.

    • The Stock Market Is Not the Economy

      We are seeing the usual hysteria over the sharp drop in the markets in Asia, Europe, and perhaps the US. (Wall Street seems to be rallying as I write.) There are a few items worth noting as we enjoy the panic.

      First and most importantly, the stock market is not the economy. The stock market has fluctuations all the time that have nothing to do with the real economy. The most famous was the 1987 crash, which did not correspond to any real-world bad event that anyone could identify.

    • WSJ Editorial Blames Progressives For Student Debt, Claims Government Loans Send “Deadbeats” To College
    • Fox Exploits Stock Market Turbulence To Push GOP Policies, Major Tax Cuts

      On August 24, major stock markets in the United States opened their trading sessions with significant declines and sustained losses of 3 to 5 percent throughout much of the morning. Fox News used the event to advocate on behalf of numerous failed Republican policy demands, such as major tax cuts for the wealthy and a significant roll back of federal regulations.

    • Sanders Sends Letter to Postmaster General
    • ‘Suicide guidance’ given to benefits staff preparing for desperate calls on welfare reform

      GUIDELINES on how to deal with suicidal benefits claimants have been handed out by the Department for Work and Pensions to Scots workers tasked with rolling out the UK Government’s controversial welfare reforms.

      As part of a six-point plan for dealing with suicidal claimants who have been denied welfare payments, call-centre staff in Glasgow have been told to wave the guidance, printed on a laminated pink card, above their head.

      The guidance is meant to help staff dealing with unsuccessful applicants for Universal Credit who are threatening to self-harm or take their own life.

      A manager is then meant to rush over to listen in to the call and workers – who insist they have had no formal training in the procedure – must “make some assessment on the degree of risk” by asking a series of questions.

      One section of the six-point plan, titled “gather information”, demands that staff allow claimants to talk about their intention to commit suicide.

      The call-centre workers, who earn between £15,000 and £17,000 a year, must “find out specifically what is planned, when it is planned for, and whether the customer has the means-to-hand”, according to the guidance seen by the Sunday Herald.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • The Illusion of Online Privacy

      As the Ashley Madison hack demonstrated, Web companies can’t guarantee privacy.

    • Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site

      When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.

    • Here’s what Ashley Madison members have told me

      As someone said to me in one of the comments on my blog, trying to remove your data from the web is “like trying to remove pee from a swimming pool”. I added the DMCA comment in there as well because this has come up many times in the press. There’s a good piece on it in an article that emerged after news of the attack first broke last month (paradoxically, stating that DMCA is the reason the full data hadn’t been leaked), do read Parker Higgins’ comment about the “fraudulent” use of the act in terms of its’ use for removing data breaches. Regardless, a US law will in no way stop the mass distribution of this data, particularly via a decentralised mechanism like torrents.

    • Digital surveillance ‘worse than Orwell’, says new UN privacy chief

      The first UN privacy chief has said the world needs a Geneva convention style law for the internet to safeguard data and combat the threat of massive clandestine digital surveillance.

      Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.

      He added that he doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter, and said it was regrettable that vast numbers of people sign away their digital rights without thinking about it.

    • Canada’s Police Want Laws That Will Give Them ‘Real Time’ Access to Your Data

      Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, Canadian cops need a warrant before they can get subscriber information from telecommunication companies—which is why police are now lobbying for a legal workaround so they can access that same information without court approval.

      In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that subscriber information such as names and addresses carries with it a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that accessing such information without a warrant constitutes an unlawful search. The ruling has caused “substantial resource and workload challenges for law enforcement,” according to a resolution adopted by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) at its annual convention in August.

    • Vint Cerf Echoes Widespread Concerns About the Internet of Things

      According to a study from HP Security Research, 70 percent of the most widely used Internet of Things devices have notable security vulnerabilities.

    • Facebook promotes Scheeler to managing director

      Facebook has promoted Stephen Scheeler to the role of managing director of its Australia and New Zealand region business.

    • 9 steps to make you completely anonymous online

      The default state of Internet privacy is a travesty. But if you’re willing to work hard, you can experience the next best thing to absolute Internet anonymity

    • Everybody Hates When You Use Your Phone at Dinner

      It’s official: using your cell phone during a family dinner is frowned upon by pretty much everybody.

      A new survey by Pew Research Center found that 88% of respondents believe it’s “generally” not OK to use a cell phone during dinner. An even larger percentage, 94%, say cell phone use is inappropriate during meetings, while 95% say they shouldn’t be used at theaters and 96% say they shouldn’t be used during religious services.

    • Abe Asks U.S. to Investigate Alleged NSA Spying on Japanese Government

      Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday asked U.S. President Barack Obama to investigate alleged spying by the National Security Agency on the Japanese government and companies, Mr. Abe’s spokesman said.

    • Concerns new Tor weakness is being exploited prompt dark market shutdown
    • IBM Tells Companies To Block Tor On Security Grounds

      Tor is increasingly being used to scan organisations for vulnerabilities and to launch attacks

      The Tor anonymisation network is increasingly used as the point of origin of attacks on public- and private-sector organisations, according to a new report by IBM, which recommends administrators ban access to the network.

      The report also noted increases in SQL injection and distributed denial-of-service attacks and of “ransomware” incidents that encrypt data belonging to an individual or an organisation, and then charge a fee to decrypt it.

    • UN privacy rapporteur invokes Orwell and calls for global digital privacy

      UN PRIVACY RAPPORTEUR Joseph Cannataci has suggested – and he is not the first – that citizens need better data protection from technology companies, governments, the internet, heck the 21st century.

      Cannataci, who assumed the position last month after a 29-person battle royal/interview process, has made it clear that, as a representative for privacy, he will represent privacy.

    • Ashley Madison faces proposed class-action lawsuit over half-deleted data

      After a breach of the site’s database, people combing through the information found that Ashley Madison, and other properties owned by parent company Avid Life Media (ALM), had retained quite a bit of information pertaining to users who purchased a “full delete” of their profile for £15, including GPS coordinates, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, weight, height, among other details. Although e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and descriptions written by users who sought “full deletes” were eliminated by the time the hackers accessed the database, the incidental data that Ashley Madison kept on those users could still paint quite a picture. The Register has a table that nicely illustrates what information Ashley Madison kept on “deleted” users and what it actually deleted.

      In addition, when Ars investigated the “full delete” option on Ashley Madison a year ago, we found that there was little difference between a “full delete” and the “hiding your profile” option, except that messages that a user sent to another user would be deleted if exiting users paid the fee.

  • Civil Rights

    • Former head of the Army leads the calls for translators to be given safe haven in Britain

      Generals, decorated war heroes, grieving families and politicians last night urged soldiers and members of the public to sign a petition to save Afghan interpreters from the Taliban.

      General Sir Richard Dannatt, former head of the Army, led the calls as he pledged to sign a petition asking David Cameron to give all translators a safe haven in Britain.

      He praised the Daily Mail for its Betrayal of the Brave series of articles highlighting the plight of frontline Afghans who risked their lives for UK troops in the battlefield.

      He said: ‘We have a moral obligation to look after these people and if they feel once we have left that they cannot assume their normal lives because of fear having worked for us, then it is our obligation to have them in this country.

    • Saudi Arabia executed 175 people in past year, says Amnesty International

      On average, one person every two days was put to death in kingdom, says new report, with figures for 2015 already ahead of those for whole of last year [...] on average one person every two days [...] Saudi courts allow for people to be executed for adultery, apostasy and witchcraft.

    • Instead of Releasing Dashcam, Cops Hire PR Firm to Help Cover Up Murder of Unarmed Teen

      A former police captain recently signed an affidavit affirming that several formal reprimands are missing from the personnel file of the officer who killed a 19-year-old during a marijuana bust. Although the police chief claims that no disciplinary actions have been taken against the officer, his former supervisor lists multiple performance issues resulting from the officer’s negligence. In an attempt to improve public relations, city officials have hired a PR firm at the expense of taxpayers’ dollars instead of releasing the dash cam videos of the shooting.

    • Woman ‘too drunk to fly’ after downing hundred-pound bottle of cognac airport security officials attempted to confiscate

      A woman reportedly downed a £120 bottle of cognac after airport security officials attempted to confiscate the liquid – only to be denied boarding as she was “too drunk to fly”.

      The woman, who is being identified only by her surname of Zhao, was allegedly seen rolling about on the floor of Beijing Capitol International Airport, according to the Beijing Times.

    • Feds’ cyberbullying reverses cops’ convictions for shooting unarmed people

      In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, five former New Orleans police officers were sentenced to six to 65 years in prison in connection to on-the-job deadly shootings of unarmed civilians. But recently, these five officers had their convictions set aside by a federal appeals court. Why? Federal prosecutors’ anonymous online comments posted underneath local news accounts of the officers’ ongoing 2011 trial “contributed to the mob mentality potentially inherent in instantaneous, unbridled, passionate online discourse,” the court said. In light of that, the appellate court found a fair trial wasn’t possible.

      The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week (PDF) that the prosecutors’ behavior, unearthed by the same forensic expert who helped identify the Unabomber, created an “air of bullying” that federal prosecutors were “sworn to respect.”

    • Virginia Police Force BBC Reporters To Delete Camera Footage Of Police Pursuit Of Shooter

      …apparently two BBC reporters who were covering the police pursuit of the apparent shooter (who then shot himself) were forced by police to delete their own camera footage. This is illegal. I don’t know how many times it needs to be repeated. Even the DOJ has somewhat forcefully reminded police that they have no right to stop anyone from photographing or videotaping things, so long as they’re not interfering with an investigation.

    • Is using your mobile phone in public ruder than you think?

      Some 23% of Americans think it’s not OK to use your phone while walking down the street, but that’s nothing compared to how they feel about the cinema or church

    • Katrina: The Logic of Genocide

      The very upscale New Yorker magazine marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a celebration of the benefits that supposedly accrued to the 100,000 mostly Black and poor people forced into exile from New Orleans. “Starting Over,” by magazine staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, a biracial Canadian who made his bones promoting the hyper-aggressive “broken windows” police strategy, concludes that involuntary displacement is a good thing for people who are stuck in “bad” neighborhoods or bad cities where poverty is high and chances for upward mobility are low. Since every heavily Black city in the country fits that description, the logic is that Black people should be dispersed to the four winds and prevented from forming concentrated populations.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Google Lobbied Against Real Net Neutrality In India, Just Like It Did In The States

      While Google is still seen as (and proclaims to be) a net neutrality advocate, evidence continues to mount that this is simply no longer the case. Back in 2010 you might recall that Google helped co-write the FCC’s original, flimsy net neutrality rules with the help of folks like AT&T and Verizon — ensuring ample loopholes and making sure the rules didn’t cover wireless at all. When the FCC moved to finally enact notably-tougher neutrality rules for wired and wireless networks earlier this year, Google was publicly mute but privately active in making sure the FCC didn’t seriously address the problems with usage caps and zero-rated (cap exempt) content.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Man tries to copyright a chicken sandwich, learns that that’s completely ridiculous

        In 1987, Norberto Colón Lorenzana had what we can all agree is a pretty unremarkable idea. Colón, who had just started working at a fast food joint called Church’s Chicken in Puerto Rico, suggested to his employer that they try adding a basic fried chicken sandwich to a menu that was mostly chicken-by-the-piece.

      • UK Police ‘Hijack’ Ads on 251 Pirate Sites

        Data obtained through a Freedom of Information request reveals that City of London Police have targeted the ad revenue of 251 suspected pirate sites, replacing their banners with anti-piracy messaging. The police won’t reveal the domain names as that would raise their profiles, but the most prominent pirate sites are believed to be included.

      • Megaupload Wants U.S. Govt to Buy and Store its Servers

        Megaupload’s legal team is asking the court to preserve essential evidence hosted on its seized servers. The data is at risk of being destroyed and Kim Dotcom’s lawyers argue that the authorities should buy the servers and transfer them to a safe facility where they can be preserved at the Government’s cost.

      • DIY Tractor Repair Runs Afoul Of Copyright Law

        John Deere would not talk on tape, but in an emailed statement the company said ownership does not include the right to modify computer code embedded in that equipment.

      • Carl Malamud Asks YouTube To Institute Three Strikes Policy For Those Who Abuse Takedowns

        We write frequently about those who abuse the DMCA either directly for the sake of censorship or, more commonly, because some are in such a rush to take down anything and everything that they don’t bother (or care) to check to see if what they’re taking down is actually infringing. The latter, while common, could potentially expose those issuing the takedowns to serious legal liability, though the courts are still figuring out to what extent.

08.25.15

Links 25/8/2015: Linux Kernel 4.2 Final RC, KDE Ships Plasma 5.4.0

Posted in News Roundup at 1:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • For open source legend Eric S. Raymond, user-centric design is long overdue

    It took a while for Eric S. Raymond, one of the founding fathers of the open source movement, to prioritize the end user. But now that he has, he wants you to know how easy it can be.

  • The Open Source Greatness of Linux

    Ubuntu grabbed a large portion of the headlines today with Canonical’s decision to abandon its paid software for desktops to concentrate on mobile devices. The Everyday Linux User reviewed Mageia 5 and Distrowatch.com has added “Release Model” to their database search options. Elsewhere, Danny Stieben said Linux is so great because it’s Open Source and Munich is consdiering switching back to Linux on some machines because folks said there were no text editors, Skype support, or office suites installed. All this and more in today’ Linux news round-up.

  • The open source movement needs folk songs

    So if you have a musical bent, try composing an open source folk song. It’s fine to be silly, too. Surprise us with what you make. Share your story and your song(s) right here on Opensource.com

  • Open source for products in four rules (and 10 slides)
  • Apache Twill: real abstraction is a decoupled algorithm

    To be clearer, this term decoupling arises time & time again in relation to the cloud computing model of service-based processing and storage power.

  • Great Open Source Collaborative Editing Tools

    In a nutshell, collaborative writing is writing done by more than one person. There are benefits and risks of collaborative working. Some of the benefits include a more integrated / co-ordinated approach, better use of existing resources, and a stronger, united voice. For me, the greatest advantage is one of the most transparent. That’s when I need to take colleagues’ views. Sending files back and forth between colleagues is inefficient, causes unnecessary delays and leaves people (i.e. me) unhappy with the whole notion of collaboration. With good collaborative software, I can share notes, data and files, and use comments to share thoughts in real-time or asynchronously. Working together on documents, images, video, presentations, and tasks is made less of a chore.

  • Parse open sources its SDKs

    Earlier this month, mobile backend-as-a-service provider Parse open sourced its iOS, OS X, and Android SDKs, and will be open sourcing additional SDKs in the future.

    Parse, which was acquired by Facebook in 2013, says that its SDKs are used by more than 800 million active app-device pairs per month. By open sourcing those SDKs, Parse believes it can help developers facing challenges similar to those it faced. Specifically, according to Parse, “We’ve had to figure out a way to make a public-facing API easy to understand and use, but continue shipping features fast without breaking any existing functionality. To solve this, we structured our public API as a facade for internal code and functionality that could be consistently changing.”

  • A word to the Wise…

    I have been recently reminded that while it may be hard enough to discuss the role and importance of communities for Free and Open Source Software, it is equally important to understand the complexities and the challenges that a Free and Open Source Software foundation has to meet.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s self-destruct course continues: major add-on compatibility changes announced

        Mozilla announced major upcoming changes to Firefox add-ons on the official Add-ons Blog today. These changes affect add-on developers and Firefox users alike, and will have a major effect on add-on compatibility and permissions.

      • Holes found in Pocket Firefox add-on

        Information security man Clint Ruoho has detailed server-side vulnerabilities in the popular Pocket add-on bundled with Firefox that may have allowed user reading lists to be populated with malicious links.

        The since-patched holes were disclosed July 25 and fixed August 17 after a series of botched patches, and gave attackers access to the process running as root on Amazon servers.

        Ruho says the bookmarking app functioned as an internal network proxy and subsequent poor design choices meant he could glean information on users including IP address data and the URLs customers saved for later reading. Adding redirects meant he gained access to the etc/passwd file.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.0 and Microsoft Office 2013 Full Comparison

      The latest LibreOffice 5.0 is out for some time and it looks like the feature parity with Microsoft Office 2013 is now a lot better. The official wiki from The Document Foundation that shows off the differences and similarities between the two office suites has been updated, and it paints a pretty accurate picture of the progress that’s being made.

    • LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.4 introduces OOXML, PDF, and configuration management improvements

      Today’s release of LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.4 combines Collabora’s latest compatibility, deployment management, and document integrity features with a host of improvements from the LibreOffice community. Redesigned toolbars, menus, rulers, and dialogues make these powerful additions more attractive and efficient to use.

  • Business

  • BSD

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open source part of Poland’s animal tracking project

      Poland’s Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture (ARMA) wants to modernise its animal identification and tracking system. The new solution is required to use Zabbix, an open source solution for IT security monitoring.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Now anybody can create Ransomware using open source kit on GitHub

      Ransomware are a pain for PC and laptop owners because they encrypt PCs/Laptop in return for a ransom which if not paid may permanently lock away users important folders like your images, word and excel files etc. However upto now the malware for Ransomware was only available on Dark Web, but that will change now thanks to a Turkish security researcher, Utku Sen.

    • GitHub figures show huge rise in open source languages
    • Most popular programming languages shift at Github
    • PHP 7 drops first release candidate

      Faster PHP is approaching. PHP 7.0.0, which has been promoted as a much quicker upgrade to the server-side scripting language, has just gone into a release candidate stage, bringing its general availability even closer to fruition.

    • Infinity

      I’m writing a replacement for libthread_db. It’s called Infinity.

    • We’re still catching up to Perl

      That’s from a great little article by Chromatic about modern Perl in the latest issue of PragPub. The article goes in to discuss a number of other strengths of Perl, such as its strong community dedication to testing across numerous architectures, services for understanding package dependencies (that sound like they go beyond anything presently available for Ruby), and legendary standards of documentation.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Government seeks open standards feedback

      The government has launched a consultation on how best to proceed with several open standards proposals that will support inter-connected systems and more cost efficient digital transformation across Whitehall.

    • UK launches its next OGP Action Plan

      Open policy making, Open Data and international cooperation are three pillars that UK Minister for the Cabinet Office Matt Hancock wants to be included in the 2015 UK Action Plan, according to a speech given by the minister to mark the launch of a new Open Government Partnership (OGP) action plan (Transcript is accessible on the gov.uk website).

    • Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that’s a good thing

      Adobe’s Flash, hated the world over for slowing down computers, containing more holes in security than swiss cheese and stubbornly being the video carrier of choice until recently, is dying.

      Video players are migrating to other systems, even if Microsoft’s Silverlight isn’t much better. HTML5-based video and animations are becoming mainstream, and uploaders and other more advanced web-based features can now be replaced with code that doesn’t rely on Flash.

    • Kill Flash? Be careful what you wish for

      Back when Steve Jobs launched the first salvo in the war against Adobe Flash, declaring in no uncertain terms that the iPhone would never support the ubiquitous Web media framework, the anti-Apple crowd was much amused. No one is laughing now — least of all the many IT vendors that have built their management interfaces in Flash, for whom the death of Flash poses huge challenges.

      At the time, Jobs seemed to be climbing out on a limb. But eventually, everyone came to see how painful it was to support Flash on mobile devices, and how much better HTML5 was at delivering the same basic functionality. Developers began skipping over Flash and going with alternative technologies so that they could support mobile and desktop clients with the same codebase.

Leftovers

  • Why developers have more power than you think

    Jeff Lawson is a walking, talking example of the rise of the developer.

    Today, he’s the CEO of API economy darling Twilio, a cloud platform that offers API-accessible telecom services to marquee customers like Home Depot and Uber. But 20 years ago, he was another computer science student who saw the power of the Internet and wanted to try his hand at building Web applications.

  • Hardware

    • My Network Go-Bag

      I often get teased for taking so much tech hardware with me on trips—right up until the Wi-Fi at the hotel, conference center or rented house fails. I’m currently on vacation with my family and some of our friends from Florida, and our rental home has a faulty Wi-Fi router. Thankfully, I have a bag full of goodies for just this occasion.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Linus Torvalds: Security is never going to be perfect

      One of the best kept secrets at this week’s LinuxCon was the presence of Linus Torvalds. I’ve never not seen Linus at any of the LinuxCons I’ve attended since 2009, whether in Europe or North America, but no matter who you asked, the answer was, “He’s not here.” This morning, though, a little bird sang that the surprise guest for the upcoming keynote was none other than Torvalds.

    • Linux Foundation to Launch New Security-Focused Badge Program for Open-Source Software

      During the LinuxCon and CloudOpen events that took place last week in Seattle, North America, Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative announced that they were developing a new free Badge Program and that they wanted to know the open source community’s opinion on the matter.

    • ​Securing the Internet: Let’s Encrypt to release first security certificates September 7

      Some days it seems like the Internet is about as secure as an over-filled diaper. There’s always crap leaking from seamy businesses, such as Ashley Madison; the Federal government, OPM and IRS; and even security companies like LastPass. One of the weakest security links is the connection between you and unsecured web sites. Now almost a year since it was proposed, Let’s Encrypt is almost ready to enable any Internet site to protect its visitors with free Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates.

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • John McAfee: McAfee antivirus is one of the worst products on the planet
    • Highway to hack: why we’re just at the beginning of the auto-hacking era

      Imagine it’s 1995, and you’re about to put your company’s office on the Internet. Your security has been solid in the past—you’ve banned people from bringing floppies to work with games, you’ve installed virus scanners, and you run file server backups every night. So, you set up the Internet router and give everyone TCP/IP addresses. It’s not like you’re NASA or the Pentagon or something, so what could go wrong?

      That, in essence, is the security posture of many modern automobiles—a network of sensors and controllers that have been tuned to perform flawlessly under normal use, with little more than a firewall (or in some cases, not even that) protecting it from attack once connected to the big, bad Internet world. This month at three separate security conferences, five sets of researchers presented proof-of-concept attacks on vehicles from multiple manufacturers plus an add-on device that spies on drivers for insurance companies, taking advantage of always-on cellular connectivity and other wireless vehicle communications to defeat security measures, gain access to vehicles, and—in three cases—gain access to the car’s internal network in a way that could take remote control of the vehicle in frightening ways.

    • backdooring your javascript using minifier bugs

      In addition to unforgettable life experiences and personal growth, one thing I got out of DEF CON 23 was a copy of POC||GTFO 0×08 from Travis Goodspeed. The coolest article I’ve read so far in it is “Deniable Backdoors Using Compiler Bugs,” in which the authors abused a pre-existing bug in CLANG to create a backdoored version of sudo that allowed any user to gain root access. This is very sneaky, because nobody could prove that their patch to sudo was a backdoor by examining the source code; instead, the privilege escalation backdoor is inserted at compile-time by certain (buggy) versions of CLANG.

      That got me thinking about whether you could use the same backdoor technique on javascript. JS runs pretty much everywhere these days (browsers, servers, arduinos and robots, maybe even cars someday) but it’s an interpreted language, not compiled. However, it’s quite common to minify and optimize JS to reduce file size and improve performance. Perhaps that gives us enough room to insert a backdoor by abusing a JS minifier.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Two planes crash at Swiss airshow

      Two light planes have crashed at an airshow in Switzerland, killing one of the pilots.

      Swiss police said they were two of three C-42b aircraft from Germany, flying in formation. They crashed after they touched in mid-air on Sunday morning.

    • America as the Neo-British Empire

      For some writers, imperial freedom floats all boats (and not just the capitalists’). They thank hegemonic powers for liberalism itself, asserting that imperial naval (or air) power deployed overseas leaves domestic liberalism unharmed. By contrast, standing armies are said to threaten domestic liberty. Yet embracing imperial means, we might expect very thin liberalism indeed; with Machiavelli’s “republic for increase” walking the earth, we might at least speak frankly of “free trade imperialism.”

    • French train gunman ‘dumbfounded’ by terrorist tag

      French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Saturday there had been “several shots” before the Moroccan was subdued by the passengers, who included three Americans.

    • North, South Korea reach agreement to ease tensions

      North and South Korea reached agreement early on Tuesday to end a standoff involving an exchange of artillery fire that had pushed the divided peninsula into a state of heightened military tension.

      Under the accord reached after midnight on Tuesday morning after more than two days of talks, North Korea expressed regret over the recent wounding of South Korean soldiers in a landmine incident and Seoul agreed to halt anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts, both sides said.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Paul Haggis: ‘shame on’ press for not asking Tom Cruise about Scientology

      The Oscar-winning director of Crash, who left the church in 2009, has criticised journalists for failing to address the Mission: Impossible star’s beliefs

    • Wall Street rattles Washington

      The stock market closed a wild Monday with the Dow Jones industrial average down over 500 points, setting off fresh fears about the health of the global economy.

      The Wall Street drama quickly spread to the 2016 campaign trail and Washington, as flashbacks to the 2008 financial crisis drew responses from the political world.

      Renewed concern about the strength of China’s economy kicked off a brutal opening, as the Dow opened down more than 1,000 points in the first minutes of trading. While the index largely erased those gains later in the day, it still ended Monday down 588 points, adding to large losses suffered the two days prior.

    • Jeremy Corbyn: Personal attacks by Gordon Brown and Labour grandees are ‘pathetic’

      Labour leadership candidates quizzed on BBC 5 live, Andy Burnham accused of making sexist remark and Yvette Cooper attacks Jeremy Corbyn

  • Censorship

    • Twitter shuts down 30 sites dedicated to saving politicians’ deleted tweets

      Twitter has shut down a network of sites dedicated to archiving deleted tweets from politicians around the world. The sites — collectively known as Politwoops — were overseen by the Open State Foundation (OSF), which reported that Twitter suspended their API access on Friday, August 21st. Twitter reportedly told the OSF that its decision was the result of “thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors,” and that the social media site didn’t distinguish between politicians and regular users.

    • Twitter cuts off Diplotwoops and Politwoops in all remaining 30 countries

      On Friday night, August 21, Open State Foundation was informed by Twitter that it suspended API access to Diplotwoops and all remaining Politwoops sites in 30 countries. After Twitter suspended API access for the US version of Politwoops for displaying deleted tweets of US lawmakers on May 15, Open State Foundation was still running Politwoops in 30 countries, including the European parliament.

    • Malaysia considers forcing news websites to register with gov’t, as political scandal unfolds

      Malaysia’s new Communications and Multimedia Minister has proposed amending the country’s Internet laws to force news websites to register with the government. Human rights groups have been quick to denounce the proposal as a threat to free speech.

    • Come on, how did the Air Force screw up ‘loose tweets sink fleets?’

      Hey, remember when this designer made a whole bunch of amazing internet-themed World War II propaganda parodies? Well, one of those just cropped up in the actual military, albeit not for the first time. In an online bulletin earlier this month, the US Air Forces Central Command repurposed the iconic “loose lips sink ships” slogan to warn service members about the potential dangers of social media. As you might have guessed from the photo above, it’s now “loose tweets destroy fleets.”

    • Russia threatens to ban Wikipedia

  • Privacy

    • Amazon.com will stop accepting Flash ads on September 1

      Amazon has decided to stop accepting Adobe Flash ads starting next month. The move, which goes into effect on September 1, affects not just the company’s website, but its whole advertising platform.

    • Police secretly track cellphones to solve routine crimes

      The crime itself was ordinary: Someone smashed the back window of a parked car one evening and ran off with a cellphone. What was unusual was how the police hunted the thief.

      Detectives did it by secretly using one of the government’s most powerful phone surveillance tools — capable of intercepting data from hundreds of people’s cellphones at a time — to track the phone, and with it their suspect, to the doorway of a public housing complex. They used it to search for a car thief, too. And a woman who made a string of harassing phone calls.

      In one case after another, USA TODAY found police in Baltimore and other cities used the phone tracker, commonly known as a stingray, to locate the perpetrators of routine street crimes and frequently concealed that fact from the suspects, their lawyers and even judges. In the process, they quietly transformed a form of surveillance billed as a tool to hunt terrorists and kidnappers into a staple of everyday policing.

    • Canadians are suing Ashley Madison because a lack of prophylactic protection

      A BRACE OF LAW FIRMS ARE BEHIND A class action lawsuit against Ashley Madison because it did not do enough to protect personal and private information.

      The class action case, from two Canadian law firms, argues that the hookup stations failed users by not protecting their information and for not deleting it after a fee had been paid to ensure its deletion. It seeks $578m.

      According to the New York Post the lawyers want some satisfaction for a cluster of punters who are currently wearing outraged expressions and regretting joining a site that does what it does in the way that it does it.

    • ‘Security Was An Afterthought,’ Hacked Ashley Madison Emails Show

      It’s already clear that, despite handling very sensitive data, Ashley Madison did not have the best security. Hackers managed to obtain everything from source code to customer data to internal documents, and the attackers behind the breach, who call themselves the Impact Team, made a mockery of the company’s defenses in an interview.

  • Civil Rights

    • Bernie Sanders: The Vox conversation
    • [Old] Russia begins blacklisting ‘undesirable’ organizations
    • The Crackdown On NGOs In Russia

      In early March, Russian prosecutors launched spot inspections of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) across the country. Hundreds of groups have already been targeted, from human rights NGOs to environmental groups to health-care associations. Formally, prosecutors are checking compliance with a new law forcing organizations that receive foreign funding and are deemed to engage in “political activity” to register as “foreign agents” — a derogatory term that critics say aims to stigmatize NGOs. Russian authorities say the legislation, which entered into force in November 2012, aims at increasing the transparency and accountability of NGOs. But the audits have drawn international condemnation and raised fears of an unprecedented crackdown on civil society. The number of NGOs subjected to such inspections is difficult to assess due to the absence of an official registry. Most are still waiting for the inspection findings. RFE/RL is closely monitoring developments and will regularly update this chart and map.

    • How Moscow came to embrace fringe anti-Western conspiracy theories

      Black’s interest in the air traffic controller is not insignificant: testimony by “Carlos the Spanish air traffic operator” is one of the earliest versions of the MH17 catastrophe touted by RT and other Kremlin-aligned media, which were immediately exposed as fake. There’s no evidence that WikiSpooks is Kremlin-funded or in any way aligned, but its motivation is explicitly expressed in their mission statement: any fact promoted by the “official narrative” via the “commercially-controlled media” is inherently false and must be disputed. Hence, to WikiSpooks and other similar websites, the position that Russia or Russia-backed rebels shot down MH17 is false simply because it is endorsed by the American government and must be confronted, even if it leads to a jumble of contradictory versions of the same event, based on spurious evidence.

    • Once, firms cherished their workers. Now they are seen as disposable

      …big companies offered paid holidays, guaranteed pensions related to your final salary, sickness benefit and recognised trade unions. Above all, they offered the chance of a career and personal progression…

    • Sai Gets FOIA Docs On The TSA

      Lisa Simeone posts at TSA News Blog on some of what’s been revealed through the docs released in the request by Sai, “an intrepid, indefatigable young man.” As Simeone writes, “He has been forced to tangle with the TSA more than once, when the agency’s workers have bullied, harassed, and illegally detained him.” Chasing illegal movie downloaders proves an unprofitable exercise

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Google joins Facebook in trying to prevent IAMAI from taking strong anti-Zero Rating stand

      Google joined hands with Facebook to try and prevent the Internet and Mobile Association of India, which represents some of the largest Internet companies in India, from taking a stand that counters Zero Rating. According to emails exchanged between IAMAI’s Government Relations committee members, of which MediaNama has copies, Vineeta Dixit, a member of Google’s Public Policy and and Government Relations team, strongly pushed for the removal of any mention of Zero Rating from the IAMAI’s submission, as a response to the Department of Telecom’s report on Net Neutrality. Please note that Google hasn’t responded to our queries, despite multiple reminders.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Two Danes face up to six years in jail for explaining how to use Popcorn Time

        Danish police have arrested two men alleged to be the operators of sites related to the open-source program Popcorn Time, which adds a user-friendly front-end to a BitTorrent client to make the whole process of finding, downloading, and viewing video torrents extremely simple. The two domains, Popcorntime.dk and Popcorn-time.dk, have now been shut down, but copies on the Wayback Machine show that both were merely information sites, and neither offered material that infringed on copyrights, nor any version of the Popcorn Time software itself. Both sites warned users about potential copyright infringement issues.

        The men are accused of “distributing knowledge and guides on how to obtain illegal content online,” as TorrentFreak reports, and have apparently pleaded guilty. Moreover, distributing information is considered such a serious violation of Danish copyright law that “they could face punishment under section 299b of the penal code—offenses which carry a maximum prison term of six years.” That seems an extraordinarily harsh and disproportionate upper limit for merely explaining how to use a program, just because copyright is involved in some way.

        A similar case has already been heard in the UK, where it was found that sites offering downloads of the Popcorn Time software contributed to the copyright infringement that results from its use. In April of this year, the English High Court ordered a number of sites to be blocked for this reason. However, in that case the sites enabled the program to be downloaded directly, whereas in Denmark, the accused simply offered basic information about how the software worked and could be used, together with links to other sites where the program could be obtained.

      • Former Megaupload User Asks Court to Return His Files

        Millions of users lost access to their personal files when Megaupload was raided, and after nearly four years their files are still stashed away in a Virginia warehouse. The company that owns the servers wants to get rid of them, so former Megaupload user Kyle Goodwin has once again asked the court if he can have his files back.

      • Chasing illegal movie downloaders proves an unprofitable exercise

        It has been a bad week for companies wanting to build businesses around make money from illegal movie downloaders. Last Friday saw an Australian judge refuse Voltage Pictures the rigth to send downloaders of Dallas Buyers Club a letter demanding an undisclosed payment. Justice Nye Perram decided that Voltage and its lawyers, were engaging in “speculative invoicing”, a practice that is a form of legal blackmail: “pay us a large enough sum so that we don’t take you to court where you will possibly face an even larger but unspecified fine”.

      • Will Australian Government Use Cost-Benefit Analysis To Kill Off Fair Use Proposal Once And For All?

        Discussions about copyright reform in Australia are now entering their fourth year, and the longer they go on, the worse the proposals become. That’s in part because there has been a change of government in the interim, and the present Attorney-General, George Brandis, has made it clear he’s firmly on the side of copyright companies, and indifferent to the Australian public’s concerns or needs in a digital world.

      • This Anti-Piracy Campaign Will Leave You Speechless

        Anti-piracy campaigns come in all shapes and sizes and usually aim to prod the public into action. To capture the imagination they are often provocative, but just how far is too far? A new campaign for Virgin Radio is currently testing those boundaries to an extent rarely – if ever – seen before.

08.23.15

Links 23/8/2015: BcacheFS Benchmarks, Blackphone 2

Posted in News Roundup at 3:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract

    The Met Office has lost its BBC weather forecasting contract, it has confirmed.

    The UK’s weather service has provided the data used for BBC forecasts since the corporation’s first radio weather bulletin on 14 November 1922.

    The BBC said it was legally required to secure the best value for money for licence fee payers and would tender the contract to outside competition.

  • The Obama Administration Damages American Interests In Blocking China’s Anti-Corruption Efforts

    Sometimes it is hard to find words even to describe, let alone to explain, the Obama administration’s consistently gauche, blundering, even self-damaging policy decisions and actions toward China.

  • A Guide to Chinese Intelligence Operations

    From government hacks to industrial theft, Chinese intelligence operations are making more headlines now than ever before.

  • Obama Administration Warns Beijing About Covert Agents Operating in U.S.

    The Obama administration has delivered a warning to Beijing about the presence of Chinese government agents operating secretly in the United States to pressure prominent expatriates — some wanted in China on charges of corruption — to return home immediately, according to American officials.

  • U.S. warns China about its secret hunt for fugitives [Ed: syndicated from the above]
  • Josef Stalin’s daughter was a ‘spiritual orphan’

    Svetlana Alliluyeva, Josef’s Stalin’s daughter, led a remarkable, if extremely ruptured, life. Her mother, Nadezhda, died in 1932 when Svetlana was 6, likely through suicide. Her father, the brutal dictator, had no compunction about sending Svetlana’s close relatives to the gulag. Her half-brother, Yakov, died in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1943. Her other brother, Vasili, died an alcoholic. She married four times and died as Lana Peters in 2011, at age 85. In 1967, when Svetlana defected to the United States, she left her two children behind in Russia. Her story is vividly told by Rosemary Sullivan — who has also written biographies of Margaret Atwood and Gwendolyn MacEwen — in Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Our conversation has been edited for length.

  • Carly Fiorina out of step with Silicon Valley

    Fiorina is “wrong on the social issues as well as a lot of technology issues” and is “culturally not aligned with the ethos in the Valley,” on top of the fact that “there are also a lot of people who have negative impressions of her” from HP, said Jim Ross, a Democratic consultant in the tech hub of San Francisco.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Carson: Slavery informed my views on abortion

      Former pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson said Sunday that the fight to abolish slavery influenced his views on abortion.

      Carson was asked about a 1992 ad on abortion on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Carson had originally taken a pro-life position on a Maryland abortion referendum, but then appeared in an ad taking back his previous statement and merely asking voters to be educated on the issue before voting.

      Carson said that 20 years ago, “I personally was against abortion, but I was not for causing anybody else to do anything.”

      “I’ve changed, because I’ve learned a lot of things,” said Carson. “I began to think about if abolitionists … had said ‘I don’t believe in slavery, but anybody else can do it if they want to,’ where would we be today? So that changed my opinion.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Chilling Artwork ‘Shoots’ Gallery-Goers From Above in Tandem to US Drone Strikes

      Now, Los Angeles-based artist Jonathan Fletcher Moore has taken that data and created an interactive installation titled Artificial Killing Machine that visualizes the attacks in real time.

    • Pentagon to Sharply Expand U.S. Drone Flights Over Next Four Years
    • Obama Administration to Increase Drone Flights 50 Percent

      The increase in drone flights will give the military more intelligence access as well as increase its firepower, which is needed to take on hot spots around the world, a senior defense official told The Wall Street Journal about the upcoming plan.

    • Pentagon to expand drone killing program
    • US military to step up drone flights by 2019
    • Pentagon increasing drone flights by 50% to meet demand for air strikes and global surveillance
    • The Pentagon is planning 50 percent more drone flights by 2019
    • Pentagon To Increase Unmanned Drone Flights Across The Globe By 50 Percent
    • US military to step up drone flights by 2019
    • Carson: Don’t use drones to kill at border
    • Carson calls for drone strikes on border ‘caves’
    • Ben Carson: ‘In No Way Did I Suggest Using Drones To Kill People’ Along The Border
    • Carson says wants drones to blast caves, not people at U.S.-Mexico border
    • U.S. Military To Privatize, Expand Drone Use In African War Zones
    • Turbulence in Pentagon plans to expand drone flights
    • Editorial: More eyes in the skies
    • Why we fact-check political cartoons
    • Covering Cuba, from Sarasota
    • Moral Theory and Drone Warfare: A Literature Review

      “Legal, ethical, and wise”: these are the three adjectives that the Obama administration has used again and again to describe its program of conducting targeted killings by drone strikes. John Brennan, then the White House’s counterterrorism advisor, used the phrase to justify the drone program in a speech at the Wilson Center in April 2012. Almost a year later, Press Secretary Jay Carney invoked the same phrase in defense of the leaked Department of Justice White Paper on the permissible targeted killing of a U.S. citizen and senior Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula operative who posed an imminent threat.

    • Predator Drone Maker Flying Spy Missions For the Pentagon

      The U.S. military wants to boost its drone presence by 50 percent in four years, and it’s hiring help. General Atomics, maker of the ubiquitous Predator and Reaper drones, began flying intelligence missions for the Defense Department this month.

    • Drone Manufacturer Has Been Flying Spy Missions For Defense Since Early August
    • The Former US Military Top-Brass Working for Companies Profiting from Drone Warfare

      Generals and other top military staff who ran the US “Drone Wars” in the Middle East now work for the top drone firms, with lucrative positions at private contractors holding big contracts to help run the remotely controlled killing machines.

      Supposedly “targeted killings” by drones have led to international concern, as victims of “surgical strikes” carried out by the unmanned weapons include wedding parties in Yemen, friendly-fire killings of Afghan soldiers, and nearly 200 children in Pakistan.

      So, wreaking mass death from above is a negative, but on the positive side they have also led to big contracts for defense firms. A Bureau of Investigative Journalism report identified a bunch of large companies that have major contracts for analyzing data and providing other support work that drones need to operate.

    • Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, by Andrew Cockburn

      There is, of course, some debate about the morality of drone warfare. Is it ethical to deliberately kill people without trial? Where is the warrior code, the moral hazard, for those who attack with impunity from thousands of kilometres away? What happens when mistakes are bloodily made? How does one define a terrorist? Which side are we on again? Why?

    • Shahzad Akbar fights for Pakistan’s drone victims

      The U.S. contends that it’s going after Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, but since the CIA-led drone program is officially secret, little is known about how drone attacks are conducted or targets are chosen. According to a 2014 study by Forensic Architecture, a research project in London, and the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent initiative, this secrecy has contributed to lax bombing practices. To date, the bureau has found that 423 to 965 civilians have been killed in the bombings — 170 to 207 of them children. Most of the victims remain unnamed and unidentified.

    • Simulate The Fatal Fallibility Of Drone Strikes…With A Fun Card Game!

      “The primary [inspiration] was this interactive piece about drone strikes,” Udayasankar tells Co.Design. “Less than 2% of fatalities were high-profile targets. I was fascinated by the fallibility of technology itself and the collateral damage that it facilitates, and, moreover, how we do not take the time to talk about it.”

    • The drone warfare game where you spy on players with your smartphone

      “Bycatch” is a term used by fishermen to describe the extraneous marine life that unintentionally gets caught in their nets. It’s also the name of a card game that deals with a very different sort of collateral damage: the civilians killed by drone strikes.

    • Islamic Militants Demanded Ransom for Bodies of Killed Hostages

      Islamist militants demanded the U.S. government pay ransom for the return of the bodies of two hostages accidentally killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan last January, The Wall Street Journal reports.

    • This top secret World War II drone mission killed JFK’s older brother

      Operation Aphrodite was a top-secret attempt by the Army and Navy to turn old airplanes into suicide drones during World War II. B-17s and B-24s that were past their service life would be packed with several tons of Torpex, an explosive with twice the power of TNT, and then piloted into heavily-fortified targets.

    • Over 10 countries to join China’s military parade

      Troops from at least 10 countries, including Russia and Kazakhstan, will join an unprecedented military parade in Beijing next month to commemorate China’s victory over Japan during the World War-II, Chinese officials said.

      China is inviting foreign troops to participate in a military parade for the first time. It will also be a milestone for President Xi Jinping, who took over as Communist Party leader and military chief in late 2012.

      The parade on September 3 will involve about 12,000 Chinese troops and 200 aircraft, Qi Rui, deputy director of the government office organising the parade, told reporters in Beijing on Friday.

    • Creech Predator crews get help coping with combat

      Critics of drone strikes point out that innocent civilians sometimes die in the attacks. And, there was a friendly fire incident in 2011 involving a Predator missile strike triggered from Creech that left a U.S. sailor and a Marine dead in Afghanistan.

    • Forum: U.S. counterterrorism policy weak, should focus on economic issues

      America actually is relatively safe. Aside from a few cases such as the tragic Chattanooga shootings, Americans killed by terrorists most often are murdered outside of our country, in war zones. However, if we don’t start focusing on the economic instability in vulnerable countries from which most terrorism originates, it is only a matter of time before we see more attacks in our country.

    • Israel Holds Large-Scale Military Drill on Syrian Border

      The Israeli military staged a large-scale drill last week to prepare for a potential ground operation into Syria in the event of an attack by Islamist rebels or the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, according to local media reports.

      The rising number of Islamist fighters, many aligned to the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, arriving near the Israeli border area in the Syrian part of the Golan Heights has placed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on high alert, Israeli television station Channel 2 reported.

    • Israel is Helping Jordanian Special Forces Fighting ISIS on the Ground in Iraq
    • Israel to supply Jordan with drones to help fight Islamic State: report

      As part of a new deal, Israel will supply Jordan with strategic and tactical unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in order to help combat the Islamic State, according to a local media report.

    • AP Interview: Jordan says Syria militants try to sneak in
    • Israeli forces shoot, kill Palestinian attacker in West Bank

      Allan is on the 63rd day of his hunger-strike in protest of his detention by Israel without charge.

      At least six Palestinians were detained late Sunday and on Monday by the Israeli authorities from the West Bank districts of Hebron and Bethlehem, according to local and security sources.

      A Palestinian man who attacked an Israeli soldier with a knife was shot dead Saturday by Israeli soldiers in the north of the occupied West Bank, said the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and the Israeli police.

    • Report: Israeli Drone Strike Kills 5 in Syria

      Israeli airstrikes on the Syrian-controlled portion of the Golan Heights have killed at least five unarmed civilians, according to Syrian state media, in what Israel says was retaliation for rocket fire into its territory. Israel says those killed were Palestinian militants from the Islamic Jihad militant group.

    • Israeli air raids kill five civilians and soldier, says Syria
    • Israel carries out drone strike in southern Syria – killing five

      Israel’s air force has carried out a drone strike in southern Syria – killing five people – while a soldier was killed and seven wounded in an air raid, Syrian state TV has reported.

    • Israeli strike kills 5 Syrian civilians in Qunaitera province
    • Israel Attacks Syria for The second time in 24 Hours

      A new Israeli attack with a drone, killed at least five in al-Koum shanty town, in the Syrian province of Quneitra, at about 67 kilometers southwest of this capital.
      The missile launched from the drone exploded at 10.35 (local time) this Friday, just 50 meters from a popular market, also causing serious material damage.

    • Israeli Attack on Syria’s Quneitera Leaves 5 Civilians Dead

      An Israeli air strike on the Syrian Golan Heights killed at least four Palestinian militants responsible for Thursday’s rocket fire on an Israeli village, an Israeli defense official said on Friday.

    • 50 civilians reported killed in Douma after Syrian army rocket attack

      A Syrian army rocket attack on the rebel-held city of Douma reportedly killed at least 50 civilians.

    • US Drone Strategy Often Violates Sovereignty of Nations – Activist Group

      The US drone strategy frequently undermines the sovereignty of other countries which can damage its own national security, Upstate Drone Action activist Ed Kinane told Sputnik.

    • ‘Probability of US again bombing Libya is always there’

      The US might carry out air strikes again in Libya, but it won’t improve the conditions on the ground, says Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire. The US would rather allow Egypt and the UAE to carry out certain aspects of this foreign policy in Libya, he adds.

    • US Wants To Increase Global Lethal And Surveillance Drone Flights To 30,000 By 2019

      As if in complete defiance of the extensive contention at home and abroad, the Pentagon announced plans this week to dramatically ramp up global drone operations over the next four years.

      Daily drone flights will increase by 50% during this time, and will include lethal air strikes and surveillance missions to deal with the increase in global hot spots and crises, according to an unnamed (and unverified) senior defense official, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

      “We’ve seen a steady signal from all our geographic combatant commanders to have more of this capability,” said Defense Department spokesperson, Navy Captain Jeff Davis to reporters at the Pentagon.

    • ‘No Good Evidence’ Russia Behind Shootdown of Malaysia Air Flight 17 in Ukraine, Says Longtime CIA Analyst Ray McGovern: ‘BradCast’ 8/20/2015

      On today’s BradCast, we are joined by retired, 27-year CIA analyst turned peace activist Ray McGovern, who personal delivered the CIA’s Presidential Daily Briefings to several Presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. His organization,Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) — which includes several high-ranking former intelligence professionals and whistleblowers — have called, once again, on the U.S. to release any evidence to support their claims that Russia was behind the downing of MH17.

    • Ray McGovern: Propaganda, Intelligence, and MH-17

      During a recent interview, I was asked to express my conclusions about the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, prompting me to take another hard look at Official Washington’s dubious claims – pointing the finger of blame at eastern Ukrainian rebels and Moscow – based on shaky evidence regarding who was responsible for this terrible tragedy.

    • US MH17 Evidence ‘Sketchy as One Could Imagine’ – CIA Veteran Analyst
    • ‘Political Hacks’ Wrote US Report Linking Russia To Crash Of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17: Ex-CIA Analyst

      A U.S. government report implicating Russia in the July 2014 crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was created by political writers rather than intelligence analysts, a former CIA analyst-turned-political activist told Russia’s Sputnik News. Sputnik is wholly owned by the Russian government, which reportedly backs Ukrainian separatists accused of firing a missile at the plane as it flew near the Russia-Ukraine border.

      “What [U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry] offered was a ‘government assessment,’ which means it was written in the White House, which means it was a political document written by political hacks, and that the intelligence analysts would not sign on to it,” Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, told Sputnik. McGovern was previously known for implying that President George W. Bush could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York City and Arlington County, Virginia.

    • Former CIA head: Back Iran nuclear deal — with some conditions

      Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, an influential and vocal critic of the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran, said Wednesday that Congress actually should consider approving the accord — but only after tacking on a number of conditions designed to pressure Iran not to cheat on the deal, including an authorization for military action.

    • Britain to reopen embassy in Tehran this weekend
    • The old US embassy, museum in Tehran: Inside the ‘US den of espionage’
    • Britain’s embassy in Iran: a reminder of a difficult shared history

      When the foreign secretary visits Tehran on Sunday to reopen the British embassy after a closure of nearly four years, he will doubtless talk of new beginnings. Now Iran has signed a deal limiting its nuclear programme, the way is clear for new business contracts, new opportunities, a new chapter. That approach may appeal to the British businesspeople on the trip, licking their lips at the prospect of selling oilfield equipment or financial services, but Iranians do not discard history so easily.

    • Britain to reopen embassy in Tehran this weekend after four years
    • What’s Really At Stake With The Iran Nuclear Deal

      Nearly every major western country has recently sent trade missions to Iran in anticipation of sanctions being lifted. Representatives included major international oil companies, banks, and manufacturers. Their enormous influence and immense wealth will weigh heavily in resolving the issue.

    • Iran deal step in right direction

      We would do well to remember that Iran didn’t start this crisis. The crisis didn’t start with Iranians overthrowing the Shah and taking of American hostages in 1979. It started when the U.S. CIA overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government of Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 and installed a brutal dictator (the Shah) in his place.

    • Rogue States and Nuclear Dangers [Ed: reposted below]
    • The Nuclear Deal
    • ‘The Iranian Threat’

      Throughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the U.S. Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.”

    • Backers of Iran deal get key ally

      President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran gained momentum in Congress on Friday as a key Jewish Democrat from New York bucked home-state opposition to support the deal.

    • Obama writes letter to reassure congressional Democrats on Iran deal
    • Five books on the legacy of the 1953 coup in Iran

      This week’s 62th anniversary of the coup upending Mohammad Mossadegh comes with interest as strong as ever in Iran’s best-known prime minister. But while historians and journalists see the coup of 19 August 1953 as a pivotal event for Iran, they agree on little else (including the transliteration of his name into Latin letters).

    • Britain to reopen embassy in Tehran this weekend

      Britain will reopen its embassy in Iran this weekend nearly four years after protesters ransacked the elegant ambassadorial residence and burned the British flag.

    • Iran says it shot down reconnaissance drone near Iraq border after it ‘confronted’ air defense

      Iran’s official IRNA news agency says the military has shot down a reconnaissance drone in western Iran near the border with Iraq.

      IRNA quoted Col. Farzad Fereidouni, a local air defense system commander, in a report Saturday as saying the unmanned aircraft was shot down in recent days after it “confronted” the air defense missile system. He didn’t say which country the drone belonged to, or give specifics on the timing.

    • Iran remembers 1953 US-led coup against then Iran PM

      Iran is remembering the anniversary of the 1953 coup against the government of then democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq.

    • The CIA’s Coup Against Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh

      Mohammad Mossadegh (pictured) became Prime Minister of Iran in 1951 and was hugely popular for taking a stand against the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British-owned oil company that had made huge profits while paying Iran only 16% of its profits and often far less. His nationalization efforts led the British government to begin planning to remove him from power. In October 1952, Mosaddegh declared Britain an enemy and cut all diplomatic relations. Britain looked towards the United States for help. However, the U.S. had opposed British policies; Secretary of State Dean Acheson said the British had “a rule-or-ruin policy in Iran.”

    • COMMENTARY: Best way to get rid of enemy Iran: Get unstuck

      •Quit sending arms to anyone in the region

      •Quit telling Iranian people what to do

      •Offer to help, but not militarily

      •Start lifting sanctions slowly, unilaterally

      •Wait for reciprocity and repeat (Rapoport’s tested game theory)

    • The CIA’s grotesque secret: How it’s partnering with human rights abusers — and sparking blowback

      In a letter to three U.S. senators that recently came to light, CIA director John Brennan outlined how his intelligence agency deals with abusive partners, referring – it would appear – primarily to foreign security forces. But even more striking than the approach he outlines is his brutally honest admission that the CIA sometimes partners with human rights abusers.

      The agency’s covert nature leaves its laws, rules and regulations opaque. However, it has long been known that the CIA is not subject to human rights vetting requirements when it comes to partnering with foreign security forces, as the State and Defense departments are, under what is commonly known as the Leahy Law, named for Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy. Congress first approved the law in 1997, when it was revealed that Colombian army units were receiving U.S. funds while massacring civilians. The Leahy Law restricts the State Department and Pentagon from using U.S. taxpayer dollars to assist, train or equip any foreign military or police unit that is credibly believed to have engaged in gross violations of human rights – such as extrajudicial killings, torture, rape and forced disappearances.

      On moral grounds alone there can be little objection to this restriction. But it also makes sense for national security. While Brennan may not acknowledge it, abusive security forces combatting domestic insurgencies typically exacerbate long-standing grievances and provide armed opposition and terrorist groups with a very powerful recruiting tool.

    • On the brink of destruction: The real NUCLEAR threat if North Korea attacks the South

      North Korea’s main ally is China, which provides fuel and food aid, while it maintains a close relationship with Russia.

      However positive ties with the US and South Korea are non-existent.

      The promotion of Kim Jong-un has leader following the death of his father Kim Jong-Il in 2011 has done little to improve that.

    • Iraq ex-PM Maliki dismisses report blaming him for Mosul’s fall to ISIS

      The former prime minister of Iraq, Nuri al-Maliki, who a domestic investigation has found responsible for Mosul’s conquest by Islamic State in June, 2014, has slammed the panel’s findings on the humiliating fall of the key northern city as having “no value.”

    • Officials: ISIS Arose From US Support For al-Qaeda In Iraq

      A new memoir by a former senior State Department analyst provides stunning details on how decades of support for Islamist militants linked to Osama bin Laden brought about the emergence of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS).

      The book establishes a crucial context for recent admissions by Michael T. Flynn, the retired head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), confirming that White House officials made a “willful decision” to support al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists in Syria — despite being warned by the DIA that doing so would likely create an ‘ISIS’-like entity in the region.

      J. Michael Springmann, a retired career US diplomat whose last government post was in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, reveals in his new book that US covert operations in alliance with Middle East states funding anti-Western terrorist groups are nothing new. Such operations, he shows, have been carried out for various short-sighted reasons since the Cold War and after.

    • Bombing Syria plays into Isis’ hands

      Whoever the new Labour leader is, they’ll have a lot on their plate and one of the first big issues is likely to be Syria. The on-going civil war is only getting worse, and defence secretary Michael Fallon has already announced that a vote on military intervention will take place later in the year.

      In one sense, the question of whether the UK military should be taking part in bombing is a moot one, because it already is. A freedom of information request from Reprieve found UK military personnel have already engaged in air strikes as part of US operations. The admission showed the public and parliament had been misled. MPs voted against bombing Syria in 2013.

    • How to Understand Those 60 Trainees

      So said American Defense Secretary Ash Carter in testimony before an incredulous Senate Armed Services Committee on July 7, explaining that the $500 million American project, announced over a year ago, to train and arm a new Syrian rebel army to bring the Islamic State to its knees and force a political settlement on the Syrian regime simultaneously has, to date, trained just 60 fighters.

    • Lesson from Syrian rebel debacle

      Division 30 was the first contingent of Syrian rebels deployed under a $500 million “train and equip” plan authorized last year by Congress. It’s an overt program, run by U.S. Special Forces, separate from a parallel covert program run by the CIA. The idea is to generate over 5,000 trained fighters a year who could help clear Islamic State extremists in Syria and then hold the ground.

    • Meet The ‘Moderates’ The U.S. Is Supporting In Syria: They’re al-Qaeda

      In this regard, Obama is following the position that was expressed by his friend Brzezinski who has expressed it many times, such as, in 1998, reprinted later under the heading, “How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen.”

    • Robert Fisk: The Syrian War has occupied Turkey

      In a recent article, Robert Fisk, senior Middle East correspondent for the Independent, compared Turkey to Pakistan in the 1980s, and said that the recent air bombardment was no surprising given that all powers in the region have betrayed the Kurds. We spoke to Fisk both about the details of the matters he touches on in his article, and whether power balances have changed in the Middle East. Fisk says that Turkey has become a market place and when seen from this perspective there are more important issues at stake besides whether or not Turkey will enter the war in Syria. “I believe that Syria has started penetrating Turkey. Suruç is an example of this. From this view, the Syrian War but not the Syrians have occupied Turkey. It is not the reverse.”

    • Another Military Comedy of Errors

      On July 24th, highlighting the first Turkish air strikes against the Islamic State and news of an agreement to let the U.S. Air Force use two Turkish air bases against that movement, the New York Times reported that unnamed “American officials welcomed the [Turkish] decision… calling it a ‘game changer.’” And they weren’t wrong. Almost immediately, the game changed. Turkish President Recep Erdogan promptly sent planes hurtling off not against Islamic State militants but the PKK, that country’s Kurdish rebels with whom his government had previously had a tenuous ceasefire. In the process, he created a whole new set of problems for Washington, including making life more difficult for Kurdish rebel troops in Syria connected to the PKK that the Obama administration was backing in the fight against the Islamic State. Erdogan’s acts also ensured that chaos and conflict would spread to new areas of the Middle East. So game-changer indeed!

    • Erdogan-ISIS pincer against Kurds

      Reports from the PKK-aligned Kurdistan National Congress indicate an internal war by the Turkish state against the Kurds in the country’s east, approaching levels of violence not seen in 20 years. Several villages in Diyarbakir province are said to be under heavy shelling by the Turkish army. Many of these villages are reported to be currently burning, with many injured, and an unknown number killed. After hours of shelling, Turkish soldiers reportedly entered the village of Kocakoy, Lice-Hani district, putting homes to the torch—sometimes with families still inside, resulting in further loss of life. Troops then proceeded to force an evacuation of the villages. It is not said where the survivors fled to. A similar attack is reported from Şapatan (Turkish: Altınsu) village in Şemdinli district, Hakkari province, where the blaze has spread to surrounding forest areas. (KNC, KNC, Aug. 18)

    • Think the Donald Can Get Us a Better Deal on Porter Goss?

      None of this is news. Turkey’s not even among the top ten spenders, as far as foreign lobbies go. (That honor usually goes to Canada, although apparently in 2013 it went to the UAE.)

      But here’s the thing that chaps my hide. I’m fine with selling our politicians to foreign governments. We’re running a $43.8 billion trade deficit, after all. We can’t afford to be fussy.

      But aren’t you insulted that we’re selling them so cheaply? We’re the United States of America. Shouldn’t Porter Goss be worth more than a measly 32,000 bucks a month? We borrow more than that every minute, so why should we sell him for less than 32,000 dollars a second? What kind of superpower do these people take us for?

      And if we’ve already established that, and we’re just haggling over the price, we need to get serious about dollars and cents. Because that’s peanuts, and it’s not going to pay the bills.

    • How ‘Manageable Chaos’ Spawned ISIS In The Middle East

      ‘Manageable chaos’ is a myopic idea that has torn the Middle-East apart. To understand why, we need to go back a hundred years in the past. In 1916, Britain and France signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement in secret. Then, in the middle of the First World War, they decided the Ottoman Empire needed to go. Sultan Mehmed VI in Istanbul controlled crucial shipping lanes and the oil riches of the Persian Gulf. So, while T.E Lawrence duped the Arab sheikhs with promises of a “Greater Syria,” the European powers divided the Levant as it suited them.

      The problem was not that outsiders drew the borders. The problem was these borders were indifferent to the people who lived within them. The clean lines carved through the Middle-East ignored sectarian, tribal or ethnic geographies. Many Shia majority areas ended up under Sunni control, and vice-versa. Thirty-million Kurds also ended up homeless. These progeny of the mighty Median Kings of Asia Minor became minorities in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

    • US-trained Syrian rebel expects to fight Assad

      A member of the U.S.-trained Syrian rebel forces says he expects to fight forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, even though they pledged only to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in order to participate the Pentagon program.

    • At Security Council, UN officials spotlight need for effective and accountable security institutions
    • Security Council strongly condemns seizure of United Arab Emirates embassy in Yemen

      The United Nations Security Council today condemned “in the strongest term” the storming and seizure of the United Arab Emirates embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, by the Houthis on the 17 August 2015.

    • U.S. boosts support role in Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen

      A Saudi-led military offensive against Houthi rebels in Yemen has scored major gains this month, including recapturing the strategic port of Aden and the country’s largest air base, after the Pentagon more than doubled the number of American advisors to provide enhanced intelligence for airstrikes.

    • First cargo docks in Aden since war came to south Yemen’s ex-capital

      A commercial ship docked in Aden on Friday, the first to reach the former southern capital since Yemen’s devastating war came to the port city in March.

      The Venus, operated by United Arab Shipping Co, carried a cargo of 350 containers of products ordered by businesses in Aden, said port deputy director Aref al-Shaabi.

    • Al Qaeda deploy in Yemen’s Aden, British hostage freed

      Al Qaeda militants took control of a western district of Yemen’s main port city of Aden on Saturday night, residents said, in another sign that the group is drawing strength from five months of civil war.

    • UAE army frees British hostage as Al Qaeda expands in Yemen
    • Yemen officials say Al Qaeda seizes key areas of Aden
    • 43 killed in airstrikes on Yemen city

      Iranian-allied fighters controlling much of Yemen said on Friday air strikes led by Saudi Arabia killed 43 people in the central city of Taiz.
      Taiz has become the latest focus of fighting for supporters of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was driven into exile in Saudi Arabia by the Houthi fighters. Medical sources said Houthi attacks on the city killed 13 people, including seven children.

    • U.S. needs to take care of its own business

      Nonetheless, we have just about bankrupted ourselves trying.

      We have employed our military abroad more than 70 times since 1945, and also engaged in innumerable instances of not-so-covert CIA interference in the affairs of other sovereign nations.

      The latter include instances of overthrowing democratically elected governments we considered too leftist.

      And the truth is that in none of these instances have we had any long-lasting success in achieving our goals. We have, instead, uselessly wasted an enormous amount of treasure and human lives while creating more and more enemies all over the globe. We have created these enemies because almost all of our high-handed meddling has had unforeseen and unfortunate, often tragic, consequences.

      We now have about 1,000 military bases abroad (the exact figure depends on the number of smaller bases included), well over 300,000 U.S. military personnel deployed abroad, 1.6 million Americans working in defense industries, and the good Lord knows how many working for the CIA and other surveillance/intelligence government agencies and private contractors.

    • Obama’s Secret Elite Interrogation Squad May Not Be So Elite — And Might Be Doomed

      When President Barack Obama took office, he promised to overhaul the nation’s process for interrogating terror suspects. His solution: the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, a small interagency outfit that would use non-coercive methods and the latest psychological research to interrogate America’s most-wanted terrorists — all behind a veil of secrecy.

    • US interrogation strategy gets scrutiny in Benghazi case

      After a suspected militant was captured last year to face charges for the deadly 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, he was brought to the U.S. aboard a Navy transport ship on a 13-day trip that his lawyers say could have taken 13 hours by plane.

      Ahmed Abu Khattala faced days of questioning aboard the USS New York from separate teams of American interrogators, part of a two-step process designed to obtain both national security intelligence and evidence usable in a criminal prosecution.

    • Russia Laughs At U.S. Sanctions Threat

      Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, when asked about the implications of the sale, was said to have scoffed at the threat of U.S. sanctions and said they cause no worry for Moscow.

    • Cyanide in waters near China blast site 277 times acceptable level: government report

      Chinese authorities warned that cyanide levels in the waters around the Tianjin Port explosion site had risen to as much as 277 times acceptable levels although they declared that the city’s drinking water was safe.

    • China: Sodium cyanide levels well past limit at Tianjin explosion site

      High levels of dangerous chemicals remain at the site of last week’s deadly chemical warehouse blasts in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin — hundreds of times higher than is safe at one spot — officials said Thursday, signaling that a cleanup has a significant way to go.

      Water tests show high levels of sodium cyanide, an extremely toxic chemical that can kill humans rapidly, at eight locations at the blast site, Ministry of Environmental Protection official Tian Weiyong said.

    • At least 7 dead after old military jet crashes at air show in England

      At least seven people are dead after a vintage military aircraft crashed Saturday on a busy road in southeastern England, police said.

      The Hawker Hunter jet was taking part in an air show at an airport near Shoreham in Sussex.

    • Why The US Turns A Blind Eye To Saudi Arabia’s Troublemaking

      NOTHING gets US Republican Party politicians fired up like Iran.

      In the first televised debate for candidates competing to lead the Republicans in the 2016 presidential election, Scott Walker promised that he’d tear up the Iran nuclear deal on day one of his presidency. Carly Fiorina blamed the country for “most of the evil that is going on in the Middle East.” Mike Huckabee vowed to topple the “terrorist Iranian regime and defeat the evil forces of radical Islam.”

      Oddly, when the candidates complain about the “evil forces of radical Islam” or trouble in the Middle East, they never seem to mention Saudi Arabia.

      Iran’s no democratic paradise. But on many counts, Washington’s Saudi allies are even worse. The Saudi royals crush dissent with an iron fist, spread extremist ideology, and invade their neighbors with impunity.

      Domestically, the Saudi regime oppresses women, religious minorities, and millions of foreign workers. And it brutally represses criticism from human rights activists, prompting condemnation from both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

      Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, for example, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes just for writing a blog the government considered critical of its rule. Hundreds of political prisoners languish in prison — including Badawi’s lawyer, who was sentenced to 15 years for his role as a human rights attorney. New legislation effectively equates criticism of the government and other peaceful activities with terrorism.

    • Rebels threaten to kill observers, OSCE complains

      OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine deputy head Alexander Hug said at the Aug. 19 briefing in Donetsk that the rebels had threatened to kill OSCE observers if they would come again to Bezimenne, Novoazovsk rayon, UNIAN reports.

    • LETTER: Stop the manufacturing and flying of drones

      When are Americans going to demand our leaders protect us against drones? Our politicians did nothing on gun control. Now they will look the other way on drones.

      Drones should not be produced or manufactured. Take away permits and the right to manufacture them. The U.S. Armed Forces should be the only ones to purchase drones. If I can’t put a 10-by-10 addition on my home without bureaucratic regulations, why is it permitted to manufacture drones?

    • Florida shooting range to serve alcohol in restaurant

      Officials in a Florida city have approved the request of a businessman to serve alcohol in a restaurant he plans to open in a building with an indoor shooting range.

      CNN affiliate WFTV reported that Daytona Beach city commissioners have signed off on Ron Perkinson’s proposed facility, which Perkinson hopes to open by late November. The facility will be located near Daytona International Speedway just off Interstate 95.

    • 9-year-old girl in Ferguson shot dead doing homework on mom’s bed: cops

      Ferguson police are searching for clues about the killing of a 9-year-old girl who was shot when someone fired into a home where she was doing homework on her mother’s bad.

      No arrests have been made in Tuesday night’s fatal shooting of Jamyla Bolden and police don’t yet know if the home was targeted or the shots were random, Ferguson Sgt. Dominica Fuller said Thursday. Jamyla’s 34-year-old mother was struck in the leg and treated at a hospital.

    • What Use Does the Los Angeles Unified School District Have for Military Grade Weapons?

      On Thursday, July 30, 50 Black and Latino students wearing mock bullet proof vests with stickers that stated #StudentsAintBulletProof #End1033, from the Strategy Center’s Fight for the Soul of the Cities, once again asked the Los Angeles Unified School District to give us a list of the weapons they received from the Department of Defense 1033 Program, to return 61 M-16 assault rifles we believe are still in their possession, and to apologize for being in the program in the first place. Students said, after three public comment testimonies, four long letters (September 2014, November 2014, May 2015, July 2015), over 3,500 petitions, appeals, and every other method of persuasion “Why is the LAUSD trying to kill us?” This campaign is part of the Strategy Center’s No Cars in LA and the U.S., No Tanks in LA and the U.S.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Allegations over Maltese group’s links to the CIA

      In the early 1980s suspicions that the Maltese group Front Freedom Fighters was being funded by anti-Communist entities close to the CIA were covertly communicated to the British Foreign Office, recently declassified documents reveal.

    • ISIS Threatens Turkey. Turks Respond With Half-Hearted ‘Meh’
    • Kurdish rebels attack police, military in Turkey, one policeman killed
    • Report: Turkey erects concrete wall along border with Syria

      Turkish media reports say Turkey has started to construct a 45 kilometer- (28 mile-) long concrete wall along a key stretch of its border with Syria.

    • Turkey Pays Former CIA Director and Lobbyists to Misrepresent Attacks on Kurds and ISIS

      Thousands of articles have been published worldwide in recent weeks exposing Turkey’s strategic trickery — using the pretext of fighting ISIS to carry out a genocidal bombing campaign against the Kurds who have courageously countered ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

      The Wall Street Journal reported on August 12 that a senior US military official accused Turkey of deceiving the American government by allowing its use of Incirlik airbase to attack ISIS, as a cover for President Erdogan’s war on Kurdish fighters (PKK) in northern Iraq. So far, Turkey has carried out 300 air strikes against the PKK, and only three against ISIS! Erdogan’s intent in punishing the Kurds is to gain the sympathy of Turkish voters in the next parliamentary elections, enabling his party to win an outright majority and establish an autocratic presidential theocracy.

    • The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

      The history of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—its coups, assassinations, “extraordinary rendition” kidnappings, use of torture, “black sites,” drone executions, dirty wars and sponsorship of dictatorial regimes [1]—not only underscores the bloody and reactionary role of American imperialism, but most especially the ruling elite’s mortal fear of the working class internationally.

    • We deserve a better media

      Here is another clue: ‘We’ll know our disinformation programme is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” CIA Director, 1981. It seems he got his wish.

      Two weeks before the outbreak of WWII, a solemn British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain remarked, “History will judge the Press to have been the principle cause of war.”

      Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador to Berlin echoed the premier’s words. France’s President Lebrun and Foreign Minister warned the Press ‘not to abuse their so-called Press freedom.’ In September 1941, U.S Senator Clark: ‘Half a dozen men controlling the film industry clamour for war.’

    • Psychological warfare and Jeremy Corbyn

      Earlier this month I briefly wrote about how the incessant stream of attacks on Jeremy Corbyn from all parts of the media, represented more than meets the eye. That it is a continuation of an undemocratic and sinister policy of subversion and undermining of any popular left wing movement or leader, that poses a threat to the capitalist system and military-industrial-complex.

    • Fox & Friends Rewrites Background Of Alleged Terrorists To Make Them The Face Of Birthright Citizenship

      Fox & Friends joined The Daily Caller in an effort to make alleged terrorists Anwar al-Awlaki and Yaser Hamdi the face of birthright citizenship, falsely claiming the men were born in the U.S. to “illegal parents” and able to pursue terrorist activities without retaliation because their citizenship protected them.

    • Are Democrats Really Socialists?

      Socialism has had a rough few decades, but it’s enjoying a rare success. Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a socialist, is running for president, drawing big crowds and leading Hillary Clinton in one poll in New Hampshire. All this leads some people to a damning conclusion: Democrats love Sanders because Democrats are socialists.

    • Who shapes our image of the world?

      …Charlotte Wiedemann considers how press freedom and the media are tethered to Western geopolitics

    • France’s far-right National Front party ousts founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen

      Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the party in 1972, was serving as honorary president when he was suspended in May for saying he saw the Holocaust as a “detail of history.” He challenged the suspension in court, and in July a judge overturned it, saying proper procedure had not been followed.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Who Was the CIA Official Who Found Torture Revolting? And Other Questions the ACLU Still Has About CIA Torture

      In early December 2014, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., released a summary of her staff’s five-year investigation of the CIA’s interrogation programs following 9/11.

      Best known as the “Torture Report,” the document revealed searing details of ghastly abuses ranging from “rectal feedings” to “near drowning” on the waterboard.

    • CIA ‘torture’: Inside the ‘blackout box’
    • Key conclusions of the Hoffman report

      Below are some of the key findings of the Hoffman report, an independent review of the American Psychological Association’s ethics guidelines and allegations made against APA. The report concludes that APA failed to challenge and legitimized the “enhanced interrogation” techniques authorized used against terror suspects during the Bush administration. Gerald Koocher, DePaul’s current Dean of the College of Science and Health, served as president-elect of APA in 2005 and president in 2006, the time of these allegations.

    • Roy Eidelson and Jean Maria Arrigo: An unhealthy nexus of interests

      The APA got into this mess by holding tightly to a deeply flawed assumption: that psychology should embrace every opportunity to expand its sphere of influence.

    • Consorting With the Devil

      Throughout the Cold War, and doubtless right down to the present, professional people with skills relevant to “national security” have been secretly recruited to work for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. Universities are among those particularly targeted. Scholars and campus research centers have received CIA and DoD funding for conferences and publications, for collecting intelligence while abroad, and even for spying, all under cloak of secrecy.

      [...]

      The latest revelation concerning those who “consort with the devil” concerns psychologists in the American Psychological Association. In utter disregard for professional ethics, a number of prominent psychologists worked closely with the CIA’s and the Pentagon’s torture programs in Afghanistan. They not only condoned but personally profited from torture, all in the name of supporting the US war effort. It was a case of first-class collusion, abuse of authority, and conflict of interest—and it went largely unnoticed until recently.

    • US Torturers Lose Psychologists’ Corrupt Cooperation

      The resolution proper begins by adopting the international law definition of torture in the UN Convention Against Torture, which is at variance with US law. The resolution also acknowledges that some 3,400 psychologists work for the Department of Defense (mostly at VA hospitals) and commits the APA to supporting the ethical behavior of these psychologists in these and similar “organizational settings.” And the resolution commits the APA to notifying the President, Congress, and other officials of the core of its mandate:

    • Editorial: When psychologists cross the line

      Koocher, in a statement on his website, said he and former APA President Ronald Levant insisted that they “never have supported the use of cruel, degrading or inhumane treatment of prisoners or detainees.”

      But the report, which was drafted at the APA’s request by former City of Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman and his colleagues at the firm Sidley Austin, saw the APA’s actions differently. The report concluded that the APA tried to curry favor with the U.S. Department of Defense, with which it had strong ties and is one of the largest employers of psychologists, by issuing loose ethical guidelines for psychologists involved in interrogations. These guidelines did not constrain the interrogations beyond the rules the government had already set for itself and allowed psychologists to remain involved.

    • Why ethical psychologists play an important role in interrogations [Ed: apologist]
    • When the American Psychological Association was in bed with the CIA

      David Hoffman, former assistant US attorney, conducted a review of the APA’s extensive involvement and wrote in his subsequent report, ‘The evidence supports the conclusion that APA officials colluded the DoD officials to, at the least, adopt and maintain APA ethics policies that were not more restrictive than the guidelines that key DoD officials wanted’.

      Hoffman also stated that the ‘APA chose its ethics policy based on its goals of helping the DoD, managing PR, and maximising the growth of the profession’.

      Prior to Hoffman’s investigation, the APA dismissed and denied allegations of their complicity. The report, however, brought the credibility of the association into question, and earlier this month a ban was approved. In an effort to salvage their reputation, they prohibited any involvement by psychologists in national security interrogations – including noncoercive interrogations under the Obama administration.

    • Good People Doing Bad Things

      Some years ago, the psychologist Albert Bandura listed eight mental tricks people play to disengage their consciences so they can perform the acts of violence they would normally abhor.

      [...]

      Moral Justification, Euphemistic Labeling, Advantageous Comparison, Displacement of Responsibility, Diffusion of Responsibility, Disregard or Distortion of Consequences, Dehumanization, Attribution of Blame

    • COLUMN: American Psychological Association removes psychologists from CIA interrogations

      A number of other psychologists have been, and continue to be, used in CIA black sites and Guantanamo Bay, despite petitions to remove said psychologists.

    • CIA blocked full release of report criticising torture techniques

      Not only did those who combed through six million pages of internal CIA documents expose the brutal tactics used by operatives, which included locking detainees in coffin-shaped box for hours or hanging them on a pole for days, they found the practices – which were eventually deemed by the US Supreme Court as outside the Geneva Convention for human rights – didn’t actually lead to the vital information they claimed.

      [...]

      “I walked out of Zero Dark Thirty, candidly,” Dianne Feinstein, the former chairperson of the State Intelligence Committee told the Frontline program. “We were having a showing and I got into it 15 to 20 minutes and I left, I couldn’t handle it because it’s so false.”

    • Next Cazenovia Forum: A Look Inside the CIA and its Controversies

      Over a 34 year career with the CIA, Rizzo made sweeping legal calls on virtually every major issue facing the spy agency, from rules governing waterboarding, “enhanced interrogation” and drones to answering for the Iran Contra scandal.

    • FORMER CIA LEADERS WRITE BOOK TO WHITEWASH TORTURE HISTORY

      The CIA’s torture-era leadership won’t repent. Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report saying in no uncertain terms that the CIA had tortured its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that torture never elicited any actionable intelligence that saved American lives, Bush-era CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and several of their underlings announced plans to release a book justifying torture.

      They intend to repeat a lie over and over again in this book: that torture worked. They hope that the American people are either so gullible or so stupid that they’ll believe it. It’s up to the rest of us to ensure that our government swears off committing this crime against humanity.

      I know that these former intelligence leaders are lying because I worked with them at the CIA. When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.

      It’s not necessarily news that these former CIA heavyweights believe in torture, even if they refuse to call it what it is. Many television news outlets still run clips of George Tenet’s 2007 appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in which he repeats “We do not torture! We do not torture!” as though he were unhinged and living in a dream world.

    • Leadership: Change Not Welcome Here

      Since the 1990s there have been increasingly open (public) complaints from users about poor quality work from the U.S. Department of Defense intelligence agencies. This all began in the late 1940s when the CIA was established to coordinate all of the U.S.’s intelligence gathering activities. At that point there began a low level war between the CIA and the Department of Defense.

    • What do Don Rumsfeld and others identified with the Pollard Affair fear from his release?
    • ProPublica and John Kiriakou to receive freedom of speech awards

      PEN Center USA, one of two American branches of the international human rights organization, will honor the investigative journalism non-profit ProPublica and the former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who became an inadvertent whistleblower, on November 16 in a ceremony hosted by Aisha Tyler. Though more award winners are yet to be named, these two choices illustrate the wide range of pressures that news organizations currently face.

    • Dodging Torture (Again)

      Last Thursday, Jeb Bush declared to an Iowa audience that he wouldn’t rule out resuming torture practices by the United States government. “I don’t know,” he hedged. “I’m just saying if I’m going to be president of the United States, you take this threat [Islamic State group] seriously.”

      Two Thursdays ago, during Fox’s highly watched GOP debate, Megyn Kelly asked presidential candidate Ben Carson whether he would bring back waterboarding. A retired neurosurgeon, Carson replied in the subjunctive, coyly saying that if he were to reinstate torture methods, he wouldn’t broadcast this and “tell everybody what we’re going to do.” As a doctor (think: first do no harm), Carson must have seen countless patients in pain over his career. Even for him to say he might torture is alarming. More appalling is that his polls have since surged, and as of this week, Carson has been statistically named the winner of the Fox debate.

      A few days before this debate, Donald Trump told ABC that he thinks “waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.” This statement would shock us had Trump not already demonstrated his poor understanding of what torture entails, as evidenced by his disparaging remarks about John McCain’s status as a war hero.

    • ‘Each one of us can make a difference,’ Ban declares as UN marks World Humanitarian Day
    • Louis Stokes, first black U.S. congressman from Ohio, dies at 90

      In 1967, in a campaign that helped change racial politics in the United States, Carl Stokes was elected to the first of two terms as Cleveland mayor. The next year, Louis Stokes, a lawyer who had brought several cases to the U.S. Supreme Court, won the congressional seat that he would hold until his retirement in 1998.

    • Bruce Elfant says U.S. about 100th in voter turnout, Texas near bottom too

      A Travis County official declared the United States and Texas lag far behind other countries and states in voting.

      On Aug. 5, 2015, Democrat Bruce Elfant, the Travis County tax assessor-collector, was interviewed by Dick Ellis of the KOKE-FM Austin Radio Network about the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act.

      Johnson, Elfant said, “would be very disappointed by the number of Americans who choose to use that right. The United States is about 100th in voter turnout among the industrialized nations and Texas is near the bottom in terms of voter registration and voter turnout,” he said.

    • ‘Guantanamo Diary’ details appalling injustice

      I am reading “Guantanamo Diary,” the appalling story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who has been unjustly imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base for 12 years.

      How was Slahi ever arrested in the first place? Likely because he was an early member of Al-Qaida during the days we conveniently forget, when the CIA channeled funds to the Afghan mujahideen to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In other words, Mr. Slahi effectively fought as an ally of the U.S. in 1991-92, after which he left Afghanistan and broke off all relations with Al Qaida.

    • Justice Department: Appeals Court Wrong To Revive Lawsuit Brought By Immigrants Abused After 9/11

      The Justice Department has requested a federal appeals court revisit and reverse its decision to revive a lawsuit against former Justice Department officials, who allegedly violated the rights of Arab or Muslim immigrants when they were detained in the immediate months after the terrorist attacks.

      Attorneys for the Justice Department argue, regardless of whether immigrants had their rights violated, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, and former Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) James W. Ziglar adopted reasonable policies “in an effort to protect the nation during a turbulent time.” The former officials should not be liable for rights violations.

    • Jimmy Carter’s Legacy. Human Rights in the Abstract versus “Shameful and Indefensible Foreign Policy Positions”

      “Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions,” said Noam Chomsky. Much like Nobel Peace-prize winner Barack Obama 30 years later, Carter was an advocate of human rights in the abstract, but of repression and imposition of power through violence in practice.

      Like the current occupant of the White House, Jimmy Carter entered office with a promise to respect human rights, but failed miserably when given the opportunity to do so.

    • DOJ Highlights Media Subpoenas From 2014

      …Department of Justice highlighted its attempts at forcing testimony from New York Times reporter James Risen.

    • Thumbs-down to another Bush in the White House

      Recently Jeb Bush said he had a solution to defeat ISIS. He blamed troubles in the Middle East on presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

      He didn’t say anything about his father or brother. These men were presidents and took us to war in the Middle East.

    • Letter to Jeb Bush: Torture is Never Justifiable

      Mr. Bush — or Jeb if you don’t mind — I was greatly disturbed to hear that if you became president you won’t rule out the resumption of the use of torture arguing that brutal questioning methods might be justifiable and necessary in some circumstances. Torture is never justifiable.

      President Obama banned CIA torture by executive order in January 2009. I urge you to reconsider your statement concerning torture and agree to leave President Obama’s executive order in place. I don’t want a president who would use tortur

    • Free Chelsea Manning!

      Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, the heroic WikiLeaks whistleblower and transgender activist currently jailed in the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, is now being threatened with “indefinite solitary confinement.”

      While on active duty in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, Manning released 700,000 classified and sensitive military and diplomatic documents. They revealed details about modern imperialist wars never before made public. This included the infamous “Collateral Murder” tape of a U.S. “Apache” attack helicopter firing on civilians in Baghdad in 2007, killing 11 adults, including two Reuters journalists. Two children were seriously hurt. Manning also exposed previously hidden facts about the torture of U.S. detainees at the U.S. Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp.

      A U.S. military judge sentenced Manning to 35 years on charges of “aiding the enemy” — a treasonable offense under the 1917 U.S. Espionage Act. Awaiting trial, she suffered torturous conditions, first held in a cage inside a tent in the Kuwaiti desert, threatened by guards with being “disappeared” to Guantánamo. Then Manning was held in solitary confinement in the Marine Corps Brig at Quantico, Va., where she was under 24-hour guard and subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment.

    • John M. Crisp: The conversation of torture should be prominent in the 2016 campaign

      Two interesting stories appeared in the same edition of my local newspaper last week.

      The first involves an awkward problem that Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush faces: His brother, former president George W. Bush.

      Many Republicans have managed to hold their noses when they consider George W. Bush’s administration, especially his unprovoked and ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Jeb Bush has stumbled over this issue several times, looking for ways to put the best face on a huge foreign policy error.

      He has admitted that “mistakes were made” and relied on the dubious proposition that “taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.” But this simplistic notion – Saddam Hussein is easy to demonize – depends on the electorate’s failure to notice the chaos that the Iraq War unleashed.

    • Clerics gather in Egypt to counter extremist fatwas

      Top Muslim clerics gathered in Egypt on Monday to address extremist religious edicts in the face of an unprecedented threat from Islamic State group jihadists who have declared a “caliphate”.

    • The Quiet Demise of the Army’s Plan to Understand Afghanistan and Iraq

      The Army created the Human Terrain System — at the height of the counterinsurgency craze that dominated American strategic thinking in Iraq and Afghanistan late in the last decade, with much fanfare — to solve this problem. Cultural training and deep, nuanced understanding of Afghan politics and history were in short supply in the Army; without them, good intelligence was hard to come by, and effective policy making was nearly impossible. Human Terrain Teams, as Human Terrain System units were known, were supposed to include people with social-science backgrounds, language skills and an understanding of Afghan or Iraqi culture, as well as veterans and reservists who would help bind the civilians to their assigned military units.

    • Ship Transfers Over 1,300 Migrants From Greek Island to Mainland City Port

      A ship with 1,308 refugees has left the Greek island of Kos bound for the port city of Thessaloniki, to process the asylum-seekers, the press office of the Greek Ministry of Shipping and the Aegean told Sputnik.

    • Drones, police violence protest comes through Baraboo

      A 90-mile walk to protest drones and racial profiling is scheduled to begin from the Dane County Jail on Tuesday and go through Baraboo on its way to Volk Field, organizers say.

      The “Let It Shine!” walk will take place over the course of a week, ending Aug. 25 in the village of Camp Douglas. Volk Field is home to a shadow drone training program and has been the site of numerous protests, including one in 2014 in which a Diocese of Madison priest was arrested for distributing fliers critical of the military’s use of drones.

    • Black Lives Matter videos, Clinton campaign reveal details of meeting

      Throughout the 15-minute conversation, Clinton disagreed with the three activists from Black Lives Matter who had planned to publicly press the 2016 candidate on issues on mass incarceration at an event earlier this month in Keene, New Hampshire.

08.22.15

Links 22/8/2015: Chromebook Gains, GNOME 3.18 Clues

Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • John Oliver Exposes the Racket of the Christian Megachurch Industry

    On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver took on the fraudulent behind-the-scenes (and occasionally, not so behind-the-scenes) practices of America’s mega-televangelist ministries — specifically, those that have exploited people’s faith for monetary gain with the promise that “donations will result in wealth coming back to you.” It’s called “The Prosperity Gospel,” and is built on the idea that every donation a congregant gives its pastor is a “seed” that will one day be harvested. “Wealth is a sign of God’s favor,” after all.

  • Hardware

    • Your Toner Is No Good Here: Region-Coding Ink Cartridges… For The Customers

      Everyone likes buying stuff with a bunch of built-in restrictions, right? The things we “own” often remain the property of the manufacturers, at least in part. That’s the trade-off we never asked for — one pushed on us by everyone from movie studios to makers of high-end cat litter boxes and coffee brewers. DRM prevents backup copies. Proprietary packets brick functions until manufacturer-approved refills are in place.

  • Security

    • LinuxCon: CII Program Will Give Badges to Open Source Projects With Strong Security

      Amid this week’s LinuxCon in Seattle, SecurityWeek reported that the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), which funds open source projects, will give the badge to those that meet a set of standard criteria. This includes an established bug reporting process, an automated test suite, vulnerability response processes and patching processes. A self-assessment will determine whether the project owners merit the badge.

    • Why every website should switch to HTTPS

      HTTPS protects both website owners and users from interference by network operators. It provides three protections: data authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. HTTPS makes sure that the website you loaded was sent by the real owner of that website, that nothing was injected or censored on the website, and that no one else is able to read the contents of the data being transmitted. We are seeing more and more evidence of manipulation of websites to inject things that the website owners and users didn’t intend. Additionally, browsers are starting to deprecate HTTP as non-secure, so in the coming years non-HTTPS websites will start throwing warnings by both Chrome and Firefox.

    • Embargoed firmware updates in LVFS

      The new embargo target allows vendors to test the automatic update functionality using a secret vendor-specific URL set in /etc/fwupd.conf without releasing it to the general public until the hardware has been announced.

    • Security updates for Friday

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Two Candidates Surge in 2016 Polling–but Only Trump, Not Sanders, Fascinates Media

      The two big surprises of the 2016 presidential race so far are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Two dark horse candidates opposed by party insiders, each began a substantial surge in campaign polls around the beginning of July. In Real Clear Politics‘ average of polls, Sanders has gone from 12.7 percent to 25.0 percent since July 1, while Trump has gone from 6 percent to 22 percent.

      Yet corporate media show a fascination with just one of these characters. Is it the self-described socialist senator from Vermont, who has focused his campaign on combating the US’s rising inequality? Or is it the billionaire real-estate developer who blames America’s economic troubles on foreigners and calls for massive deportations?

    • Louise Mensch takes swipe at Corbyn campaign – and hits herself

      Mensch was unbowed by the criticism and continued to post examples of abuse she said had come from Corbyn supporters. She did not respond to a request for comment.

    • Louise Mensch Roundly Mocked For Twitter Search Faux Pas In Corbyn Row

      Users of the micro-blogging site were quick to point out the mistake, mocking the former MP for her monstrous faux-pas.

      While anti-Semitism is rife on social media, and Mensch and others has raised concerns regarding Corbyn’s alleged links to high-profile anti-Semites, the gaffe itself was widely appreciated.

  • Censorship

    • Indonesia Blocks The Pirate Bay, IsoHunt, Others

      After promising a strong response to piracy for several years, Indonesia has finally taken action against The Pirate Bay. Along with fellow torrent index IsoHunt.to, the site is among almost two dozen others now ordered by the Ministry of Communications to be blocked at the ISP level.

    • Google ordered to remove links to ‘right to be forgotten’ removal stories

      Google has been ordered by the Information Commissioner’s office to remove nine links to current news stories about older reports which themselves were removed from search results under the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling.

      The search engine had previously removed links relating to a 10 year-old criminal offence by an individual after requests made under the right to be forgotten ruling. Removal of those links from Google’s search results for the claimant’s name spurred new news posts detailing the removals, which were then indexed by Google’s search engine.

      Google refused to remove links to these later news posts, which included details of the original criminal offence, despite them forming part of search results for the claimant’s name, arguing that they are an essential part of a recent news story and in the public interest.

    • Google ordered to remove links to stories about Google removing links to stories

      The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ordered Google to remove links from its search results that point to news stories reporting on earlier removals of links from its search results. The nine further results that must be removed point to Web pages with details about the links relating to a criminal offence that were removed by Google following a request from the individual concerned. The Web pages involved in the latest ICO order repeated details of the original criminal offence, which were then included in the results displayed when searching for the complainant’s name on Google.

    • London ‘Draw Mohamed’ exhibition cancelled due to ‘real possibility people could be killed’

      A planned ‘Draw Mohamed’ exhibition has been cancelled in London after counter-terrorism police warned that people could be killed if it went ahead.

      Organiser Anne Marie Waters, Sharia Watch director and former UKIP candidate, revealed that security services had reason to believe the event might be attacked, with a “very real possibility that people could be hurt or killed – before, during and after”.

      Organisers asked more than 200 galleries to host the exhibition but their requests were almost universally refused, with even the gallery that eventually agreed later pulling out.

    • UK Piracy Police Asked Domain Registrars to Shut Down 317 Sites

      Since its launch two years ago, the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has requested domain name registrars to suspend 317 pirate sites. A lot of requests were denied, but police say they don’t know how many. The numbers were made available in response to a Freedom of Information request by TF, which also reveals more interesting details.

    • Boston Public Broadcaster WGBH Files Bogus DMCA Notice On Public Domain Video Uploaded By Carl Malamud

      It’s amazing the kind of trouble that Carl Malamud ends up in thanks to people not understanding copyright law. The latest is that he was alerted to the fact that YouTube had taken down a video that he had uploaded, due to a copyright claim from WGBH, a public television station in Boston. The video had nothing to do with WGBH at all. It’s called “Energy — The American Experience” and was created by the US Dept. of Energy in 1974 and is quite clearly in the public domain as a government creation (and in case you’re doubting it, the federal government itself lists the video as “cleared for TV.”

    • The biggest threat to comedy? Self-censorship

      ‘A powerful declaration of the primacy of freedom of expression, not always the most fashionable view at a liberal arts festival.’ It’s lines like this that prove we live in strange times. This caught my eye in a review of character comic Sarah Franken’s new Fringe show Who Keeps Making All These People?, a searing satire of the Islamic State, political correctness and the gutlessness of modern Western culture. I wonder if the reviewer recognised the irony.

    • A showgirl’s story of sequins and censorship in Shanghai

      If the strangeness of opening a burlesque club in China had not occurred to Amelia Kallman and Norman Gosney as a Buddhist cleansing ceremony took place in their future venue, it certainly did when they found themselves submitting Frank Sinatra lyrics to be vetted by the local cultural department.

    • China’s official response to emergencies is ‘censorship’

      As Tianjin residents struggle to find answers, China has imposed heavy restrictions on independent media trying to cover the deadly explosions that rocked the port city. DW spoke to China expert Isabel Hilton.

    • How did the Chinese media react to the Tianjin explosions?

      It has now been more than a week since the explosions in Tianjin occurred. Discussions on online social networks such as Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) show Chinese netizens are angry. The incident has been Weibo’s top trending topic for a week, with combined posts gaining more than 3 billion views.

    • FPB unmoved by R2K on ‘censorship’ policy

      The Film and Publication Board (FPB) will not publish public comment on its Draft Online Regulation Policy, which has been heavily criticised as Internet censorship legislation.

      This after the Right2Know Campaign called for records of the FPB’s public hearings and written submissions to do with the controversial draft policy to be made public.

      “We believe the record of public comment will confirm that the majority of South Africans want a free Internet,” says R2K in a statement.

    • Erdogan Enhances Censorship Ahead of Snap Polls

      As predicted, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had absolutely no intention of abiding by the results of the June 7, 2015 when, for the first time in more than 12 years, his Justice and Development lost its majority in parliament. Joining a coalition means compromising with opposition parties rather than continuing his own tyranny of the plurality.

      Hence, Erdoğan has called snap-elections for November 1. Erdoğan is no gambler, however, and he will not trust his fate to the voters determining their party pick on an even playing field.

    • Ongoing censorship blocks Kurdish, critical, data-based media during time of crisis

      A black curtain has been preventing the public from receiving news since certain media outlets’ websites have had all access to their sites from within Turkey blocked since July 25, just as the cease-fire between Turkey and the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) ended and the country enters a war against radical terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

    • Writers slam ‘censorship by bullet’ in Mexico

      Demanding an end to “censorship by the bullet” in Mexico, more than 500 international writers and intellectuals called on President Enrique Peña Nieto to do more to prevent the murder of journalists in a country they say has “no safe haven for the profession”.

    • Censorship by bullet

      It’s hard to know which is worse: the deadly conditions that threaten critical journalists in Mexico or the government’s feeble response to recent deadly attacks. The intolerable situation has produced a letter from 500 global writers and thinkers to Mexico’s president urging him to address his country’s terrible record on protecting news professionals. Among the signers: novelists Salman Rushdie, Junot Diaz, Margaret Atwood and news figures Christiane Amanpour and Tom Brokaw.

    • Europe’s Latest Export to America: Internet Censorship

      American Web users’ access to Internet content may soon be limited, thanks to a recent decision by French regulators. France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberties (known by its French acronym CNIL) ordered Google to apply the European Union’s bizarre “right-to-be-forgotten” rules on a global basis in a June ruling. The search engine announced at the end of July that it would refuse to comply. If it is nevertheless forced to do so, the result could be unprecedented censorship of Internet content, as well as a dangerous expansion of foreign Web restrictions on Americans.

    • India’s Government Censorship

      Since his election in May 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has trumpeted India’s open society and vibrant democracy when he speaks to foreign heads of state and business leaders. But, at home, his government is seeking to restrict freedom of expression, including recent attempts to limit access to the Internet and the freedom of Indian television networks to report the news.

    • Age ratings enforced for UK-produced music videos on YouTube and Vevo

      Videos made in the UK by artists signed to major labels will be classified before release, in measures meant to protect children from unsuitable online content

    • Profile: Are age ratings on music videos and video games appropriate?
    • Mark Latham, censorship and free speech

      Does Mark Latham’s parting of ways with the Australian Financial Review amount to censorship? Has political correctness gone mad? Are commentators not allowed to be provocative? Should we not tolerate a wide array of views – popular or not? Do ‘frightbat’ feminists on Twitter have too much power?

    • How UC can respond to bigoted speech without censorship

      Second, parents should insist on workable procedures for students to report instances of bigotry (and also for allegations that faculty members are failing in their duty to evaluate student work based on its quality, rather than a divergent political view).

      Third, they should ask the regents to ensure that each campus has a plan so that when a significant instance of bigotry occurs, there are clear and immediate communications from the chancellor, campus police and campus administrators.

      Fourth, parents should ask the regents to stress a core principle without which the university cannot function: that attempts to outlaw or chill speech are more dangerous than hateful speech itself. Unless the speech is illegal, such as threats against a person or a group coupled with a clear call for immediate unlawful action, it must be answered with other speech that argues why what was advocated or articulated was not only wrong, but also bigoted. This, not censorship or “trigger warnings,” will tell the students that people of goodwill are speaking out with and for them.

    • Bloggers need to exercise self-censorship

      Bloggers need to exercise ethical self-censorship, one of the organizers of NeForum for Bloggers 2015, LiveJournal head marketing officer Ivan Kalyuzhny told reporters.

    • UK Orders Google to Censor Links to Articles About “Right to Be Forgotten” Removals

      The “right to be forgotten” has always been a double whammy of a disaster: an awful policy based on terrible ideas. Under the right, implemented in 2014 by the European Court of Justice, private citizens can petition search engines to hide results that pertain to their pasts. As a policy, the right to be forgotten is bad because companies like Google have legitimate free speech interests in presenting their results as they see fit. As an idea, it’s bad because it bars search engines from publishing truthful information about matters of public concern—a troubling precedent which, taken to its logical end, could lead to serious censorship.

    • Google to Remove Links on EU Censorship

      On Thursday, a UK court ordered Google to remove links to some stories about the right to be forgotten.

    • Africa: Stand Up Against Unaccountable Net Censorship

      When ISPs and social media platforms are held legally responsible for all content passing through them, we all lose out.

    • Ecuadoran government imposes censorship of media due to volcano crisis outside Quito
    • Why is Ecuador censoring coverage of volcano’s activity?

      The Ecuadorean authorities have imposed “preventive censorship” on all media coverage of Cotopaxi, a volcano 50 km south of the capital that became active again on 14 August after 73 years of inactivity. The government’s communiqués are now the only permitted source of information on the subject.

    • Campus censorship feeds false fears, stifles learning

      The new language of campus censorship cuts out the middleman and claims that merely hearing wrong, unpleasant or offensive ideas is so dangerous to the mental health of the listener that people need to be protected from the experience.

    • Fighting Back Against Internet Censorship in Australia

      Look at a move back in 2014 with proposed legislation that would give more powers to a government regulatory body to say what they want taken offline – all in the name of ‘protecting children.’

    • Dozens of journalists stop reporting following intimidations and censorship

      The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) backs the protest of journalists working in central Somalia due to increasing pressure, intimidations and censorship by armed religious group.

    • Comedian’s take on University campus censorship
    • The little-known history of secrecy and censorship in wake of atomic bombings

      The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago, is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant aspects of that bombing are still not well known.

      I recently published a social history of US censorship in the aftermath of the bombings, which this piece is based on. The material was drawn from a dozen different manuscript collections in archives around the US.

      I found that military and civilian officials in the US sought to contain information about the effects of radiation from the blasts, which helps explain the persistent gaps in the public’s understanding of radiation from the bombings.

    • Censorship By Remote Control

      The recent show-cause notice by the government to three television channels on Yakub Memon’s hanging, and its temporary ban on 857 porn sites, have rekindled apprehensions about overt and covert censorship, and of the kind of coercive constraints on free and fearless expression that is a fundamental right guaranteed to every Indian.

    • New routing method promotes censorship-free internet

      Computer scientists have developed a novel method for providing concrete proof to internet users that their information did not cross through certain undesired geographic areas.

      The new system, called “Alibi Routing”, offers advantages over existing systems as it is immediately deployable and does not require knowledge of the internet’s routing hardware or policies.

      Recent events such as censorship of internet traffic, suspicious “boomerang routing” where data leaves a region only to come back again, and monitoring of users’ data have alerted the researchers.

    • Western Mainstream Media Censor Green Left Pope Francis’ “Laudato Si’” Message For Urgent Action On Climate Change

      Censorship, lying by omission and lying by commission will doom the planet.

    • Don’t censor anti-Semites, argue with them

      Chiming in with the outraged individual who wrote to the Fringe, Gideon Falter, chairman of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, said in a statement that Chabloz’s presence should be ‘of grave concern’ to Fringe organisers and urged Scottish premier Nicola Sturgeon to step up and enforce her pledged ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on anti-Semitism.
      Related categories
      Free speech

      But as dodgy, detestable and potentially anti-Semitic as Chabloz may be, the ease with which people are trying to run her out of the festival, and, potentially, out of the country, is a complete disgrace. In a free society, we must all be free to speak, discuss and salute however we like.

    • Who is policing the word police? Github’s retarded move causes user backlash.

      Currently a controversy is brewing over at Github, which can be described as “the facebook of programmers”. That’s one heck of an elevator pitch, and made Github the darling of VC-funders and happy users alike. It’s a web-based Git repository hosting service, where you can upload your projects and if anyone takes a liking to your repo they can fork it and work on it too.

      Git in this context is a free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full version-tracking capabilities. A fork is a copy of a repository. Forking a repository allows you to freely experiment with changes without affecting the original project, and the original project doesn’t affect yours. Just making that clear so that Adria Richards doesn’t come around in case I make any forking-jokes.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Google joins Facebook in trying to prevent IAMAI from taking strong anti-Zero Rating stand

      Google joined hands with Facebook to try and prevent the Internet and Mobile Association of India, which represents some of the largest Internet companies in India, from taking a stand that counters Zero Rating. According to emails exchanged between IAMAI’s Government Relations committee members, of which MediaNama has copies, Vineeta Dixit, a member of Google’s Public Policy and and Government Relations team, strongly pushed for the removal of any mention of Zero Rating from the IAMAI’s submission, as a response to the Department of Telecom’s report on Net Neutrality. Please note that Google hasn’t responded to our queries, despite multiple reminders.

    • Two Important Speeches: The Threats To The Future Of The Internet… And How To Protect An Open Internet

      Last week, I came across two separate speeches that were given recently about the future of the internet — both with very different takes and points, but both that really struck a chord with me. And the two seem to fit together nicely, so I’m combining both of them into one post. The first speech is Jennifer Granick’s recent keynote at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. You can see the video here or read a modified version of the speech entitled, “The End of the Internet Dream.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Once Again, Megaupload User Asks Court for His Files Back

        Three years ago now, EFF’s client Kyle Goodwin, a sports videographer, asked the court to allow him to retrieve the files he stored in an account on the cloud storage site Megaupload. When the government seized Megaupload’s assets and servers in January 2012, Mr. Goodwin lost access to video files containing months of his professional work. Today, EFF filed a brief on behalf of Mr. Goodwin asking, once again, for the return of the files.

        We originally asked the court for help back in 2012. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia took briefing, and even held a hearing. Unfortunately, since that time not much has happened. The U.S. government has continued pursuing a criminal case and a civil forfeiture case against Megaupload and its owners, but the data stored by millions of Megaupload customers, including material like Mr. Goodwin’s sports videos that had nothing to do with the alleged copyright infringement that Megaupload is accused of, languished in a warehouse on hundreds of servers owned by Carpathia Hosting, Megaupload’s former contractor.

      • Appeals court: Prenda lawyer who drained cash from his law firm must pay up

        A Minnesota court has ordered Paul Hansmeier, one of two lawyers considered the creators of the Prenda Law copyright-trolling scheme, to pay sanctions in a case where he and his colleague John Steele were accused of trying to collude with a defendant.

        An order published Monday by a Minnesota appeals court describes how Hansmeier tried to dodge a $64,000 judicial sanction in the Guava LLC v. Spencer Merkel case by moving money out of his Alpha Law Firm then dissolving it. A district court previously found that Hansmeier’s actions and inconsistent explanations warranted a piercing of the “corporate veil,” and that court ruled that Hansmeier should be held personally responsible for the debt. Now, an appeals court has agreed (PDF) with that conclusion.

08.20.15

Links 20/8/2015: Fedora 24 Plans, Ubuntu Phones in India

Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Dear Amazon: Your work culture really is terrible

    In response to the New York Times much-read takedown of Amazon’s harsh workplace culture, CEO Jeff Bezos asked employees for stories that might reflect the alleged abusive practices — and one person has taken up his offer.

    Beth Anderson, a spouse of a former Amazon AMZN staff member who worked at the company from 2007 to 2013, wrote a public letter on Quartz, and unfortunately for Bezos, Anderson agrees with much of the details in the NYT story: “Many scenarios and anecdotes detailed in the article hit very close to home,” she wrote.

    Specifically, Anderson takes issue with the constant need for her husband to be at the beck and call of the company. Working in a team that manages shipping warehouse software, Anderson’s husband was expected to respond to his pager within 15 minutes, or face repercussions from his manager: “If something came directly from you, Jeff, it was all hands on deck until that problem got figured out. No matter the emotional or physical toll,” Anderson wrote.

  • Science

    • The Town That Decided to Send All Its Kids to College

      College was never much of an option for most students in this tiny town of 1,200 located in the woods of the Manistee National Forest. Only 12 of the 32 kids who graduated high school in 2005 enrolled in college. Only two of those have gotten their bachelor’s degree.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Cleveland Clinic boots McDonald’s from US hospital

      The Cleveland Clinic health center will be getting rid of a McDonald’s franchise after nearly a decade of trying to push the fast-food giant out of its hospital, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

      The renowned US hospital said the move is part of a series of reforms aimed at helping its 44,000 workers and millions of patients make healthier choices.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Who Killed the Venus Flytrap?

      At the height of summer, in this part of North Carolina, the heat can be suffocating. It swells with the humidity, sticks your shirt to your back in seconds. When you lie belly-down on the dry land, every scratch and flicker of grass is a reminder of the life crawling beneath your body: the grasshoppers and mayflies, the ticks and bark lice. She can’t move.

      [...]

      The flytrap only grows wild in one location: a 100-mile range surrounding Wilmington, a city of about 111,000 people, 10 miles from the North Carolina coast.

  • Finance

    • Is Bitcoin facing an existential split?
    • Bitcoin Is Having an Identity Crisis
    • Fork Release Intensifies Bitcoin Community Bitterness
    • Google Went Public 11 Years Ago Today

      historically, one of the best performers in the stock market over the last decade. But 11 years ago to this day, Google’s IPO was considered a disappointment.

      On August 19, 2004, Google went public with a price of $85 for its roughly 19.6 million shares, which as CNBC’s Bob Pisani noted, was at the low end of expectations. The reason was manifold, starting with Google’s choice to sell their shares through a Dutch auction, where buyers went online to indicate the price and amount of shares they wanted until Google determined a fair price for their shares. As USA Today recounts, this didn’t please those who wanted the option of offering first dips at these shares to their interested clients.

    • Loss of Manufacturing Jobs Isn’t ‘Tectonic’–It’s a Policy Choice

      Wall Street executive Steve Rattner had a column (8/14/15) in the New York Times in which he derided Donald Trump’s economics by minimizing the impact of trade on the labor market. While much of Trump’s economics undoubtedly deserve derision, Rattner is wrong in minimizing the impact that trade has had on the plight of workers.

    • Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resigns, calls for snap elections

      GREEK Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has announced his resignation and called for snap elections, as he went on the offensive to defend the country’s massive bailout after it triggered a rebellion within his own party.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Iowa Radio Host Stands By Plan To Enslave Undocumented Immigrants If They Don’t Leave

      Influential Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson — whose show is a frequent destination for Republican presidential candidates — is standing by his plan to make undocumented immigrants “property of the state” if they refuse to leave the country after an allotted period of time. In comments to Media Matters, Mickelson described his plan as “constitutionally defensible, legally defensible, morally defensible, biblically defensible and historically defensible.”

    • Standards of Political Civility and Darwin’s Finches

      One hallmark of this year’s political “discourse” (to abuse a term) has been the number of astonishingly angry and ill-informed accusations made by some candidates against their opponents (and others). Nothing unusual about that, sad to say. But what is different is the degree of acceptance, and even approval, exhibited by many voters that in earlier years might have rejected these candidates as well as their statements.

    • Critical blogger banned from voting in Labour leadership election

      Labour have been accused of ‘purging’ critical voices from the party after a Labour-supporting blogger was banned from voting in the leadership race, after criticising his local council.

      Lambeth Councillor Alex Bigham sent a dossier to his party recommending that website editor Jason Cobb, be excluded from voting, due to “possible entryism”

      The document, seen by Politics.co.uk, included a series of screen-grabbed tweets in which Cobb accused some Labour councils of “social cleansing” in London as well as a link to a 2010 article he wrote for the Guardian in which he criticised Lambeth council.

  • Censorship

    • Facebook has taken over from Google as a traffic source for news

      Anyone who works for a major news website or publisher knows that social referrals—that is, links that are shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter—have become a crucial source of incoming traffic, and have been vying with search as a source of new readers for some time. Now, according to new numbers from the traffic-analytics service Parse.ly, Facebook is no longer just vying with Google but has overtaken it by a significant amount.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • The End of the Internet Dream

      It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.

    • Sprint getting rid of phone contracts, calls them a “thing of the past”

      Sprint is getting rid of two-year smartphone contracts, following a move made previously by T-Mobile US and Verizon Wireless.

      “By the end of the year, customers of the No. 4 wireless company will have to pay the full price for their phones or spread the payments out by leasing the device, an option that started last year,” CNBC reported.

      Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure explained the move in an interview with CNBC. Buying a new phone at the subsidized rate of $199 is “a thing of the past, the industry has changed,” he said.

    • BREAKING: Netneutrality more complex than you thought!

      Interestingly, when zero-rating is squashed, the opposite happens. When the government forbade zero rating in the Netherlands, its largest provider KPN responded by doubling their users’ data caps without a price hike.

      Thus, my suggestion to the Brazil government would be: work with providers to get indiscriminate data bundles to more users, rather than empowering providers to control their users’ Internet usage.

  • DRM

    • Apple Music boasted of 11 million users – but half have already tuned out

      Just over half the people who sampled Apple Music have stuck around to use the service regularly, a study by music industry analytics firm MusicWatch has found. Apple recently took a victory lap for hitting the 11 million user mark among people who had sampled its new service, which is meant to compete with similar offerings from Spotify and Pandora. But 48% of those users aren’t there any more.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Rightscorp’s DMCA Subpoena Effort Crashes and Burns

        Rightscorp’s efforts to unmask file-sharers using the DMCA has crashed and burned. After a federal judge ruled in favor of ISP Birch Communications and quashed the anti-piracy firm’s subpoena, Rightscorp appealed the decision. Now the company has backed down, handing the ISP and privacy a big win.

08.19.15

Links 19/8/2015: LinuxCon Everywhere

Posted in News Roundup at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • News Corp.’s Amplify education experiment: What went wrong?

    That write-down comes nearly five years after it purchased Wireless Generation for $360 million in 2010 and renamed it Amplify. At the time, News Corp. was going to bet about $500 million on Amplify to dominate the market. Amplify was led by Joel Klein, the former head of the New York City Department of Education.

  • Avoiding Amazon? The 5 best alternatives to the online bookseller giants
  • You probably don’t want to work for Amazon

    ‘Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.’

  • The Missing ‘Leadership Principle’ at Amazon
  • Amazon’s 24/7 Hell Is the Future of Work

    Working at Amazon may be hell, but so is working everywhere else. Or at least it will be soon. The blockbuster New York Times report documenting Amazon’s “bruising” white collar culture is a fine piece of labor reporting, yet its revelations shouldn’t be too surprising. Amazon is revealed to be a more efficient and more unpleasant formulation of the standard modern workplace; one shaped by globalization, digitalization, and increasingly limitless expectations placed on the plugged-in worker.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • DDoS attacks on the rise as Akamai warns that ‘mega attacks’ are coming

      THIS IS THE DAWN of the mega denial-of-service (DoS) attack, according to security firm Akamai and its second quarter threat report.

      We wait every three months for the Akamai State of the Internet report, and we are never disappointed. Its content is pretty good too, and allows for a summary of the past quarter and a reminder about things like Shellshock and web perennials like Flash, WordPress themes and application attacks.

    • Ransomware goes open source

      Turkish security bod Utku Sen has published what seems to be the first open source ransomware that anyone can download and spread. The ‘Hidden Tear’ ransomware, available at GitHub, is a working version of the malware the world has come to hate. It uses AES encryption to lock down files and could display a scare warning or ransom message to get users to pay.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Julian Assange and the Value of WikiLeaks: Subverting Illusions

      Above and beyond Assange’s personal freedom, what’s at stake includes the impunity of the United States and its allies to relegate transparency to a mythical concept, with democracy more rhetoric than reality. From the Vietnam War era to today — from aerial bombing and torture to ecological disasters and financial scams moving billions of dollars into private pockets — the high-up secrecy hiding key realities from the public has done vast damage. No wonder economic and political elites despise WikiLeaks for its disclosures.

  • Finance

    • Richard D. Wolff | Déjà Vu: Germany Tightens Its Economic Power Over Europe

      Germany’s leaders herded their European counterparts into imposing harsh austerity on Greece. It was the price, they insisted, that Greece had to pay to receive bailout credits from the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Europeans required those bailout credits to be used mostly to pay back loans the Greek government had gotten earlier from private banks (chiefly German, French and Greek). Those credits could not be used to get Greece out of the 2008 crash that afflicted all of Europe.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Scott Walker’s False Promise of Racial Unity

      When asked about race relations on the first anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Walker replied:

      “I think in general if anyone focuses on racial discord we’re going to get more,” he said. “If we focus on unity we’re going to get more of that.”

      In other words, acknowledging systemic problems like the documented wave of police killings of unarmed black men, or the racial wealth gap, or disparities in sentencing and incarceration, creates “discord.” During the GOP debate, he similarly dodged a question about the Black Lives Matter movement, which even Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly called “the biggest civil rights issue of our time.”

    • 70 Awful Displays Of Sexism On Fox News

      On the 95th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, Media Matters looks back at Fox News’ many displays of sexism, ranging from hosts suggesting young women should not exercise civic duties like participating in jury duty because they “don’t get it,” to Erick Erickson’s claim that “the male typically is the dominant role.”

    • Who Is Intimidating Who?

      The cheerful cheddarheads who showed up at the Iowa State Fair “Soapbox” to razz Scott Walker got a rude reception. The Soapbox is a Des Moines Register tradition and peaceful protesters have long been a part of this exercise in free speech. But after Walker was punked by two young people with a fake $900 million Koch check weeks ago, Team Walker seems a bit tense. At the Soapbox, Walker supporters ripped a sign out of one protester’s hand which read “WARNING Don’t let him do to America what he did to Wisconsin.” Another protester told CNN ”I got pushed into a disabled woman. I fell on her wheelchair. She started screaming at me.”

    • Donald Trump Praises Bill O’Reilly For His Focus On Immigrant “Crime Wave”

  • Censorship

    • MPAA Ducks Censorship Battle With Google, Twitter and Facebook

      The MPAA has dropped its request for a preliminary injunction that would require search engines, ISPs and hosting companies to stop linking or offering services to MovieTube. The decision comes a few days after prominent tech firms including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Yahoo branded the request as a broad censorship attempt.

    • U.S. Government Grabbed Dotcom’s Millions “As a Last Resort”

      The U.S. Government has informed the Court of Appeals that the civil forfeiture case against Megaupload and Kim Dotcom was launched as a last resort. The authorities feared that Dotcom and his colleagues would regain possession of the millions in seized assets and argue that they are properly labeled as “fugitives.”

  • Privacy

    • Warrantless airport laptop search dooms Iran arms sales prosecution

      Federal prosecutors asked a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday to dismiss the government’s prosecution of a South Korean businessman accused of illegally selling technology used in aircraft and missiles to Iran.

      The move comes three months after a judge ruled that the government unlawfully seized and searched the suspect’s computer at Los Angeles International Airport as Jae Shik Kim was to catch a flight home in 2012. The government decided not to appeal and said it was “unable to continue prosecuting this matter.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Desperate Rightscorp Burns Through More Piracy Millions

        Piracy monetization company Rightscorp has published its results for Q2 2015 and it’s yet another three months of misery for the company. At the same time as paying out just $117K to its copyright holder clients, Rightscorp managed to run up $1.95m in expenses, leaving the company with operating losses in excess of $1.72m.

      • Universal Music and Kim Dotcom Prepared a Deal to Tax Google

        A recording of Kim Dotcom and several Universal Music executives captured two days before the Megaupload raids has revealed the label planning to do a deal with the entrepreneur. Amid discussion of ‘taxing’ Google by diverting its ad revenue to the label, the execs offered to downgrade Dotcom from “evil” to “neutral” in return for dropping legal action over the “Mega Song”.

      • Hollywood Keeps Breaking Box Office Records… While Still Insisting That The Internet Is Killing Movies

        Hollywood is still 100% focused on trying to blame the internet for any of its woes, mostly with bogus attacks on internet companies it doesn’t like. And yet… it seems to keep on setting box office records. The latest is that Universal Pictures has broken a new record in bringing in $2 billion in box office revenue faster than any other studio in history, pushed over the top by the successful opening weekend of “Straight Outta Compton” (a movie that seems to have some big fans in Silicon Valley).

08.18.15

Links 18/8/2015: Linux 4.2 RC7, IBM’s LinuxOne

Posted in News Roundup at 6:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Ransomware goes OPEN SOURCE in the name of education

    Turkish security bod Utku Sen has published what appears to be the first open source ransomware that anyone can download and spread.

    The “Hidden Tear” ransomware, available to GitHub, is a functional version of the malware the world has come to hate; it uses AES encryption to lock down files and can display a scare warning or ransom message to get users to pay up.

  • Chinese, Russian, tech giants join global open source efforts

    Alibaba and Yandex joining these open source efforts confounds their home nations’ occasionally-expressed intentions to build technology ecosystems less dependent on US companies. Both China and Russia have cited post-Snowden security concerns as the reason they’re keen to rely on indigenous technologies. With their tech giants now participating in global efforts alongside US entities, technological isolation looks rather harder to achieve.

  • Keen IO open-sources its Data Explorer tool for making quick queries

    Keen IO, a startup with a cloud-based data analytics tool, is announcing today that it’s releasing one of its tools for customers, the Data Explorer, under an open-source license.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla tests a true stealth mode for Firefox

        Mozilla wants to make private browsing truly private.

        The company is testing enhancements to private browsing in Firefox designed to block website elements that could be used by third parties to track browsing behavior across sites. Most major browsers, Firefox included, have a “Do Not Track” option, though many companies do not honor it.

      • Mozilla defaults Tracking Protection for Firefox developer builds, but only for private browsing

        Pre-beta versions of Firefox will block domains known to track users by default when a private browser window is opened.

      • Rust in 2016

        This week marks three months since Rust 1.0 was released. As we’re starting to hit our post-1.0 stride, we’d like to talk about what 1.0 meant in hindsight, and where we see Rust going in the next year.

      • Rust Language Focusing On Infrastructure Improvements, Features & More
      • Firefox Security Exploit Targets Linux Users and Web Developers

        Through the years, Firefox has enjoyed a reputation as one of the most secure Web browsers on any platform, and it’s the default browser for many Linux distros. However, a security exploit appeared this week that has shown users they can’t afford to be complacent about security. Mozilla has rushed to patch the flaw, and a new release has closed the hole (39.0.3). But, plenty of users still haven’t updated their browsers.

      • Mozilla Experiments with True Private Browsing

        Mozilla has a long history of experimenting with new features in pre-beta and developer versions of the Firefox browser, and one of the current experiments could shake up notions about private browsing. The company is experimenting with an approach to private browsing where Firefox could block any and all website elements used by third parties to track browsing behavior. Effectively, the new approach would defy the many organizations that don’t honor “Do Not Track” features in browsers.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • LinkedIn Open Sources Highly Useful Hadoop Tools

      LinkedIn has already adopted Gradle as itsprimary build system. “With Gradle, developers can easily extend the build system by defining their own plugins,” the company claims. “We developed the Hadoop Plugin to help our Hadoop application developers more effectively build, test and deploy Hadoop applications. The Plugin includes the Hadoop DSL, a domain-specific language for specifying jobs and workflows for Hadoop workflow managers like Azkaban and Apache Oozie.”

  • Databases

    • Open Source First Starting to Converge with Cloud First

      Of course, PostgeSQL is only one instance where open source and the cloud are starting to converge. The same argument could also be applied to everything from Node.js to Docker containers. The point is that as the critical mass of open source software in the cloud continues to build, it’s only a matter of time before that same software starts showing up on premise in much greater numbers than it already has.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • First LibreOffice 5.0 Maintenance Release on Its Way to Fix Middle-Click Paste on X11

      After releasing the huge LibreOffice 5.0 update, The Document Foundation announced that the hard team of developers behind the most powerful open-source office suite in the world is hard at work on the first maintenance release of LibreOffice 5.0.0.

    • An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

      So I realize that the Apache Foundation took a lot of pride in and has invested a lot of effort trying to create an Apache Licensed Office suite based on the old OpenOffice codebase, but I hope that now that it is clear that this effort has failed that you would be willing to re-direct people who go to the openoffice.org website to the LibreOffice website instead. Letting users believe that OpenOffice is still alive and evolving is only damaging the general reputation of open source Office software among non-technical users and thus I truly believe that it would be in everyones interest to help the remaining OpenOffice users over to LibreOffice.

  • CMS

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Focal Camera: An Open Source Modular Camera

      Over the past year, Dutch artist Mathijs van Oosterhoudt has been developing a new camera system. No, it’s not a high-tech digital system that’s intended to go up against the major camera companies. Instead, it’s an open-modular camera system that’s intended to teach people how to build complex cameras. Its name is The Focal Camera.

  • Programming

    • Perl Weekly

      Yesterday was CPAN day: the 20th(!) anniversary of the day CPAN appeared online. A few articles of this week’s edition celebrate the event, and promote the kind of interaction that keeps it alive.

Leftovers

  • Former Executive Pleads Guilty to Conspiring to Bribe Panamanian Officials

    A former regional director of SAP International Inc. pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by participating in a scheme to bribe Panamanian officials to secure the award of government technology contracts for SAP.

    Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag of the Northern District of California, Special Agent in Charge George L. Piro of the FBI’s Miami Division and Acting Special Agent in Charge Thomas McMahon of the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) made the announcement.

  • Author shows off the real Jamaica through Bob Marley shooting

    Marlon James is the first Jamaican-born novelist nominated for the Man Booker prize. A Brief History of Seven Killings uses the true story of an attempt on the life of Bob Marley to explore the turbulent politics of Jamaica in the 1970s.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Jeb’s New Iraq Stance: My Brother’s ‘Mission Was Accomplished’

      In the early months of his candidacy, Jeb Bush fumbled whenever he faced extremely predictable questions about his brother’s foreign policy. When asked about Iraq again at last week’s debate, he said that, knowing what we know now, “it was a mistake,” then inelegantly pivoted from praising veterans to blaming Obama for the current situation in the Middle East. This week Bush debuted a new stance: Whatever mistakes President George W. Bush made along the way, the Iraq War ultimately turned out for the best (at least until President Obama and Hillary Clinton messed it all up).

    • AP EXCLUSIVE: Top secret Clinton emails include drone talk
    • New Generation of Cuban-Americans Want Embargo Lifted – Former CIA Officer

      Former CIA counterterrorism officer John Kiriacou claims that a new generation of Cuban Americans is willing to lift the trade embargo on Cuba and end the half-century-long boycott of the island nation.

    • ‘We Wanted to Cut Off Che Guevara’s Head’ – Ex-CIA Agent

      He said that he told the General he could not do it because, being the country’s military chief of staff, Candia just wouldn’t be able to present a severed human head as material proof.

    • Point Person: Our Q&A with Michael Hayden

      Twenty-nine scientists with nuclear specialties signed a letter this month supporting the accord. Are they to be completely dismissed?

    • The Iran Gambit II

      Gambit I was the start of false accusations by the then Bush Administration in 2007 that Iran was preparing a nuclear weapon, when in fact Iran had no such ambitions at all, but a plan to open an Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB) in Teheran, an international hydrocarbon exchange, where all countries, hydrocarbon producers or not, could trade this (still) principal energy source in euros, as an alternative to the US dollar. This would have devastated the dollar as a hegemonic fiat currency – still used on false trust as the main world reserve currency.

    • Neocons to Americans: Trust Us Again

      Marching in lockstep with Israeli hardliners, American neocons are aiming their heavy media artillery at the Iran nuclear deal as a necessary first step toward another “regime change” war in the Mideast – and they are furious when anyone mentions the Iraq War disaster and the deceptions that surrounded it, writes Robert Parry.

      America’s neocons insist that their only mistake was falling for some false intelligence about Iraq’s WMD and that they shouldn’t be stripped of their powerful positions of influence for just one little boo-boo. That’s the point of view taken by Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt as he whines about the unfairness of applying “a single-interest litmus test,” i.e., the Iraq War debacle, to judge him and his fellow war boosters.

      After noting that many other important people were on the same pro-war bandwagon with him, Hiatt criticizes President Barack Obama for citing the Iraq War as an argument not to listen to many of the same neocons who now are trying to sabotage the Iran nuclear agreement. Hiatt thinks it’s the height of unfairness for Obama or anyone else to suggest that people who want to kill the Iran deal — and thus keep alive the option to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran — “are lusting for another war.”

    • Iran carpet industry set for revival after deal
    • Iran Gives UN Information About Past Nuclear Activities

      But Iran and the United Nations agency agreed last month to wrap up the investigation by December, when the IAEA plans to issue a final assessment on the allegations.

      On the sidelines of the deal between Iran and the world powers in the Austrian capital of Vienna on July 14, Tehran and the UN nuclear watchdog signed an agreement to resolve outstanding issue about PMD of its past nuclear activities.

    • Guest commentary: Should get own house in order before bullying others

      Our unelected military ruler, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, tried to stem the backlash, asking Thais to stop blaming the U.S. government for awarding Thailand a low ranking in its annual report.

      But as an American columnist living in Thailand, I have the same question many Thais have, namely: Shouldn’t the U.S. get its own moral house in order before policing the rest of the world?

    • Havana Sells US Diplomatic Ties as Victory
    • US Raises Flag in Cuba After 54 Years (Video)

      The United States and Cuba are taking the next step in restoring diplomatic relations with each other as Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Havana Friday to attend a ceremony marking the reopening of the U.S. Embassy there. This comes after former Cuban President Fidel Castro wrote in a newspaper column that the U.S. owes the island country “millions of dollars” as reparations for its decades-long embargo.

    • The US-Cuba thaw

      Secretary of State John Kerry had the honor of reopening the US embassy in Cuba 54 years after it was closed. But it was the pair of presidents, Barack Obama and Raul Castro, who made it happen, and each in his own way.

    • Cold War thaw: Re-establishing diplomatic ties with Cuba was the right move

      In the 54 years since the United States ended diplomatic ties with Cuba, we’ve learned a lot about our Caribbean adversaries.

    • The Crisis In Ukraine: War Or Rumors Of War?

      The early reports of the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the communist threat now appear at best, to have been greatly exaggerated, or at worst, an intentional deception. Although the intelligence service of the Soviet Era, the KGB, was renamed the Federal Security Service (FSB), it facilitated the rise of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, proving the security service is still very much in power within the “new” Russia.

    • Neocons Falsify Iraq War ‘Lessons’

      Having escaped accountability for the Iraq War disaster, U.S. neocons are urging the use of more military force in the Mideast, in line with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand to block the Iran nuclear deal. From their important perches of power, these war hawks also twist the history of their catastrophic misjudgments, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Analysts concerned over possible civilian casualties from US airstrikes from Turkey

      Speaking to Sunday’s Zaman, Professor Celalettin Yavuz, an expert on foreign policy and security, mentioned the likelihood that US armed drones known as Predators, which have been deployed to İncirlik Air Base, will mistakenly kill civilians in Syria and Iraq as the US-led collation steps up operations against ISIL.

    • Washington Threatens Ecuadorian Democracy

      Rule by powerful monied interests is longstanding US policy.

    • Montagnards: Green Beret’s secret weapon during Vietnam War

      Smokey Stover Theater, onboard the retired USS Yorktown in Charleston Harbor, filled up quickly last night with aging veterans, their spouses, and civilians curious to know more about secret weapons, specifically those employed by U.S. Special Forces Soldiers. That “secret weapon” for the Vietnam-era Green Berets was the indigenous mountain people of Southeast Asia; the Montagnards.

    • AP Interview: Jordan says Syria militants try to sneak in

      Militants have tried to sneak into Jordan from Syria by blending in with Syrian refugees, and attempts to smuggle weapons and drugs into Jordan have increased, the commander of Jordan’s Border Guard said in an interview Sunday.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Why A Democrat Is Now Blocking An Obama Nominee

      Sen. Sherrod Brown has a new tactic in the fight to access secretive trade deal documents.

    • Count finds 40 percent increase in Marin homeless population

      A one-day count of Marin County’s homeless population in January found 1,309 homeless people ­— a 40 percent increase from the 933 homeless reported in 2013.

    • Show Me a Hero: Fear and Loathing in Yonkers

      Show Me a Hero concentrates on the most volatile five years of the clash between Yonkers and U.S. District Court Judge Leonard B. Sand. In 1987, the judge, weary of the city’s stalling in the face of his order to build 200 units of public housing on its predominantly white and middle-class west side, ordered the Yonkers City Council to get the project under way or face escalating fines that would quickly reach $1 million a day and bankrupt the city within three weeks. Making it clear that the case had gone beyond politics or policy wonkery, the judge also fined any council member who voted against the housing.

    • Why is Bitcoin forking?

      So this is it. Here we are. The community is divided and Bitcoin is forking: both the software and, perhaps, the block chain too. The two sides of the split are Bitcoin Core and a slight variant of the same program, called Bitcoin XT. As of August 15th, there is now a full release available.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Jeremy Corbyn and the SNP

      I was impressed by Jeremy’s talk and by the energy in the room. Jeremy was at his strongest when referring to the need for basic human decency and respect in our treatment of those in need for aid from the state, including the homeless and refugees. His basic human empathy and compassion really shone through. He was contemptuous of austerity, marketisation and the neoliberal consensus. His denunciation of Iraq and of Trident galvanised the room. He can talk with a genuine moral authority. He is certainly not a great orator, but sincere and fluent.

    • Kezia Dugdale Got Just 5,217 Votes

      The Labour Party is being remarkably coy about releasing the actual result of its Scottish accounting unit leadership election, giving only a percentage. The entirely complacent unionist media is complicit in what amounts to a deception.

    • Fox Nation Promotes Absurd Conspiracy Theory That EPA “Foul[ed] Up” Animas River “On Purpose”

      On August 12, FoxNation.com republished portions of a post by The Gateway Pundit headlined, “Letter to Editor PREDICTED COLORADO EPA SPILL One Week Before Catastrophe So EPA Could Secure Control of Area.” Fox Nation highlighted the portion of the Gateway Pundit post in which author Jim Hoft wrote: “The letter detailed verbatim, how EPA officials would foul up the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money. If the Gold King mine was declared a superfund site it would essentially kill future development for the mining industry in the area. The Obama EPA is vehemently opposed to mining and development.”

    • Investigative Journalist Slams The Big Media Tycoons’ Public Mind Control

      This has been obvious since Operation Mockingbird, a CIA-based initiative to manage the media came into operation. Most people feel that almost everything we see in the media is just “brainwashing”. A lot of blatant lies are splashing over the TV screen, especially on issues related to “health, food, war (“terrorism”), poverty and more”.

    • ‘Hitler was an Anglo-American stooge’: the tall tales in a Moscow bookshop

      Adolf Hitler was installed in power in Germany as part of an Anglo-American plot, the CIA is planning a full-scale land invasion of Russia from Ukrainian territory within the next five years, and the world has become so dominated by women that they have evolved to be capable of reproducing without the need for male sperm.

    • ABC’s Martha Raddatz Debunks Ben Carson’s Claim That Planned Parenthood Targets Black Communities For Abortion

      ABC’s Martha Raddatz debunked GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson’s claim that Planned Parenthood engages in racist population control by targeting black communities.

  • Censorship

    • Scott DeSmit: Willingly surrendering our freedom

      Put away the tinfoil hats.

      The government spies on us and we can do nothing about it.

      They know. Everything.

      This may be a revelation to most people because it was not reported by most major media outlets, but the government now has access to almost everything we do.

      They know what we ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

      Going to a movie? They know which one and at what time.

      The government has photographs of almost every person in America and photographs of your children, too.

      Your cat? Yes, they have photographs of your pets.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Why Did the FBI Spy on James Baldwin?

      James Baldwin’s FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. During that era of illegal surveillance of American writers, the FBI accumulated 276 pages on Richard Wright, 110 pages on Truman Capote, and just nine pages on Henry Miller. Baldwin’s file was closer in size to activists and radicals of the day — for example, it’s nearly half as thick as Malcolm X’s.

    • The FBI Agent Who Hunted N.W.A

      In the late ’80s, the bureau targeted the hip-hop group for their incendiary anthem ‘Fuck tha Police,’ and transformed the rappers into First Amendment crusaders.

    • [Old] Texas Bill to take on NDAA Indefinite Detention Passes House Committee, 4-2

      A Texas bill that would make indefinite detention, as purportedly authorized by the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a criminal act – passed through a state House committee last week.

    • [Old] Anonymous Launches #Gitmo2Chicago to Shut Down NDAA Style Secret Detention Center By Chicago Police

      Various activist groups and concerned citizens are coming together to oppose the Chicago Police’s secret torture detention center also known as Homan Square.

    • Bush torture comments worry human rights groups over possible resurgence

      Activists lament political culture ‘where tolerating torture is the norm’ and fear potential of Republican successor to Barack Obama overturning his torture ban

    • Republican Presidential candidate Jeb Bush leaves door open for use of torture by government

      The former Florida governor on Thursday said that in general, he believes torture is inappropriate, and that he was glad his brother, former President George W Bush, largely ended the CIA’s use of the techniques before he left office. The CIA used water boarding, slapping, nudity, sleep deprivation, humiliation and other methods to coerce Al-Qaeda detainees, methods the military would be prohibited from using on prisoners of war. “I don’t want to make a definitive, blanket kind of statement,” Bush told an audience of Iowa Republicans, when asked whether he would keep in place or repeal President Barack Obama’s executive order banning so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the CIA.

    • CIA Mistakenly Releases Apology Letter It Wrote to Senate For Illegally Spying On It

      The documents of the US government that were expected to remain out of reach in the coming years have been got hold of by Jason Leopold of FOIA staffers. The CIA would have definitely thought that one of the documents would remain its little secret for the coming years.

    • Where psychologists went wrong

      Too late for Omar Khadr and thousands of other political prisoners tortured at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other CIA “black hole” sites where some APA psychologists may still be “interrogating” with CIA psychologists and psychiatrists.

    • Righting Governance Gone Rogue in the American Psychological Association: The Torture Scandal

      By a nearly unanimous vote and standing ovation, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Council of Representatives voted August 7th, 2015, at their annual convention to adopt a new policy barring psychologists from participating in national security interrogations and torture, including non-coercive interrogations now conducted by the Obama administration. The resolution states “psychologists shall not conduct, supervise or be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities.” The resolution places the APA on the side of international law by “barring psychologists from working at Guantánamo, CIA black sites, and other settings deemed illegal under the Geneva Conventions or the U.N. Convention Against Torture, unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.”1

    • Psychologists contrite on ‘torture’ collusion

      Aside from the personal vindication, Reisner said, the resolution would help repair the APA’s badly damaged image.

      “The public is legitimately wary of the American Psychological Association as the representative of professional psychology,” he said. “And if it is the representative of professional psychology, the public will be wary of professional psychology.”

    • Pre-crime: DHS admits that it puts people on the no-fly list based on “predictive assessment”

      A DoJ filing in an ACLU lawsuit in Oregon admits that you can be put on a no-fly list based on “predictive assessments about potential threats,” as opposed to threatening or dangerous things you’ve actually said or done.

      It’s the first case in which a court is being asked to “review the basis for the government’s predictive model for blacklisting people who have never even been charged, let alone convicted, of a violent crime.”

      The Obama administration is trying to prevent further disclosures about the program’s basis for denying Americans the right to travel based on secret evidence and an opaque process. FBI counter-terrorism assistant director Michael Steinbach defended the no-fly list’s dependence on security through obscurity: “If the Government were required to provide full notice of its reasons for placing an individual on the No Fly List and to turn over all evidence (both incriminating and exculpatory) supporting the No Fly determination, the No Fly redress process would place highly sensitive national security information directly in the hands of terrorist organizations and other adversaries.”

    • New York Times uses rape allegations to promote a wider war in the Middle East

      The New York Times led its Friday edition with a lengthy front-page article headlined “Enslaving Young Girls, the Islamic State Builds a Vast System of Rape.” The article, spread out over more than two pages, provides a lurid account of women and girls belonging to the Yazidi religious minority being systematically captured and sold as sex slaves by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters.

      The author, Rukmini Callimachi, cites various US academics and think tanks to argue that ISIS has devised a religious justification for rape and “developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery.” The prominence of the article, its sensationalist tone and presentation, and its timing—appearing in the midst of a US escalation of its military interventions and proxy wars in Iraq and Syria—make clear that the publication of the piece is calculated to inflame public opinion and build support for a wider war.

    • Kayla Mueller, American hostage, was raped repeatedly by ISIS leader, U.S. says

      American hostage Kayla Mueller was repeatedly forced to have sex with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group, U.S. intelligence officials told her family in June.

    • America’s despicable, hypocritical persecution of Chelsea Manning

      Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army private who was imprisoned for giving thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, was recently threatened with torture for supposedly violating the conditions of her detention.

    • Benghazi Case Focuses Attention on US Interrogation Strategy

      The case, still in its early stages, is focusing attention on an interrogation strategy that the Obama administration has used in just a few recent terrorism investigations and prosecutions. Abu Khattala’s lawyers already have signaled a challenge to the process, setting the stage for a rare court clash over a tactic that has riled civil liberties groups but is seen by the government as a vital and appropriate tool in prosecuting suspected terrorists captured overseas.

    • Decriminalising human suffering

      Rachel Moran is a victim of the sex slave industry, who went on to become a co-founder of the Space International Anti-Sex Trade Group. She made the following comments in her tweet about the 11th Aug 2015 decision by the AI:

      “Amnesty’s decision is ‘breathtakingly disgraceful’. When I first heard this proposal, I got very emotional, I have been through a lot and I am not a woman who usually gets emotional. But this is an insult, from the most publicly recognised human rights body in the world, who is saying everything that happened to me was completely normal, above board and ought to be legal.”

      Hundreds of anti-sex slave organisations around the globe have condemned this move by the Amnesty International UK.

    • Russian Muslims Face Challenges of Demography and Migration

      …Russian Muslims have constantly been at the centre of public attention and the mass media.

    • Torture, show trials common in neocolonial Libya

      A video released last week showing the beating and torture of Saadi Gadhafi is not an anomaly in contemporary Libya where the Pentagon and NATO waged a war of regime change in 2011.

    • The myth of presidential wisdom in foreign affairs

      President George W. Bush stupidly invaded Iraq to the benefit of our arch-enemy Iran and to avenge his family embarrassment at the hands of a gloating Saddam Hussein. He continued fighting a post-9/11 purposeless war in Afghanistan hoping to summon a democracy into being from an antedeluvian political culture.

    • Judith Miller and those Weapons of Mass Destruction

      Her critics said she was grandstanding, playing the journalism martyr to recapture the luster lost during her reporting of the Iraqi war. But she retorted she was standing on journalistic principles, that her sources at first refused to waive a confidentiality agreement, forcing her to go to jail, then relented, allowing her to go free and testify.

    • US government investigated journalists 14 times during 2014

      A Justice Department report says the US government questioned, arrested or subpoenaed journalists 14 times during 2014, including the high-profile subpoena issued to New York Times reporter James Risen.

      Former US attorney general Eric Holder said in February 2014 that the department would release information on how law enforcement officials use its tool to investigate the news media.

      The four-page annual report released on Friday includes 14 incidents, including the subpoena issued to Risen, who refused to divulge his CIA source for a chapter of his book about the Iran nuclear program. The informant, Jeffrey Sterling, was convicted on nine counts in January.

    • California legislators to eye police push for use of drones

      California law enforcement agencies are looking to fly drones as an affordable and efficient way to monitor crime scenes, pursue suspects and search for lost hikers.

    • Yemen In Meltdown: Domestic And Regional Competitions And Destruction Of Nationhood – Analysis

      The national ideal in North Yemen got corroded through the 1980s because of two main reasons. First, there was the natural attrition pertaining to the first generation of leaders and the accompanying reluctance of younger educated Yemenis to return to their country to replace them. The American authority on Yemen, Asher Orkaby, has noted that in 2014 at least 30,000 educated Yemenis were working abroad. This was mainly due to the second contributory factor: the 33-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, first, from 1978 over North Yemen, and then from 1990 over united Yemen, after a short military campaign in which the communist forces were defeated.

    • Florida inmate serving life sentence killed in cell

      A Florida prison inmate serving a life sentence for his role in a 2011 Jacksonville murder was killed in his cell.

      The Florida Department of Corrections said 35-year-old Craig Eugene Roback died on Thursday after an altercation with his cellmate at the Columbia County Correctional Institution.

    • Emigration and war: Capitalist media suppress the obvious

      The reports about tens of thousands of desperate refugees scrambling out of the Middle East and North Africa, trying to reach some place in Europe, are excruciatingly painful. The number who have drowned along the way or died of thirst or hunger is unknown. Others survive these perilous journeys on overloaded boats only to be captured and either interned or turned back at the borders. Photographs show them to be thin, often to the point of emaciation, with few possessions other than the threadbare clothes on their backs.

      Most migrants are men searching for work. But there are women, too, and even children and infants. For every person whose story may be told, thousands remain unrecognized and anonymous. They are only statistics in one of the world’s most perilous mass migrations.

    • 2016 Candidates Must Talk Extrajudicial Drone Strikes

      As President Obama looks to legacy building during his remaining time in office, he’s leaving behind a troubling institution for the next commander in chief to inherit: A program permitting the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens abroad. Though President Bush and his administration were responsible for establishing these practices, the Obama White House has, in some respects, expanded some of them. As the 2016 election season heats up, it is worth looking at where the possible presidents-to-be stand on the issue.

      Despite the fact that targeted killings, whether by unmanned aerial drone or cruise missile, are not a new element of the U.S. military, a new, concerning threshold was crossed in 2011. In an unprecedented move, President Obama authorized a lethal drone strike which successfully targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born citizen. It is unclear if Samir Khan, a U.S. citizen also killed in the strike, was meant to be hit as well. However, the decision to target Anwar al-Awlaki for death has drawn heat from human rights critics, as has the death of his U.S.-born, 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, with good reason.

    • Letter from America: Our Messy, messy world!

      Religious extremism is on the rise all over the globe. And it is as much an Islamic problem, as it is a Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh problem. Not a single religious tradition is impervious from its deadly embrace.

      All these religious extremist groups are abusing their religion to create a world of fitnah and fasad. I have chosen these two Arabic words because of the loaded meanings that each carry. The first word in Arabic means trials/tribulations/persecutions/misguidance and the second word: anarchy/confusion/corruption/mischief.

    • Amazon: Devastating expose accuses internet retailer of oppressive and callous attitude to staff

      Working four days in a row without sleep; a woman with breast cancer being put on “performance-improvement plans” together with another who had just had a stillborn child; staff routinely bursting into tears; continual monitoring; workers encouraged to turn on each other to keep their jobs.

      Life at Amazon sounds bleak, according to a devastating, 5,900-word expose by The New York Times.

      The global internet retailer founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, which paid just £11.9m in tax in Britain last year despite UK sales of £5.3bn, has previously been accused of treating warehouse staff in the UK “like cattle” as they are driven to work harder.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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