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03.13.16

Links 13/3/2016: KDE at CERN, FCC Versus FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 5:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Why Is Styrofoam Still a Thing?

      It might not have the sexiest name, but expanded polystyrene is truly a wonder material. Widely—and incorrectly—known by by the trademarked name Styrofoam™, this lightweight substance is crafted from petroleum-based polystyrene beads, which are stretched out during an intricate steaming and moulding process. The resulting product is 98 percent air, extraordinarily cheap to manufacture, and has widespread applications ranging from life rafts to fast food containers.

    • Google AI goes 3-0, wins Go match against humanity’s champ Lee Se-dol

      Late on Tuesday night, Google’s DeepMind AI group began its show down against one of the world’s best human Go players, Lee Se-dol of South Korea. Now by the end of the week, the search giant’s robotic hivemind has defeated humanity 3-0 in a clean sweep.

      The matchup was best of five games in total between AlphaGo (DeepMind’s Go-playing software) and Lee, all played at the Four Seasons hotel in Seoul. The winner of the series receives a $1 million (£700,000) prize—so with DeepMind winning, it will donate the proceeds to charity. Lee, by virtue of being a champion prizefighter who has spent most of his life honing his Go skills, still received about £100,000 just for turning up.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Britain’s care homes are being turned into complex financial instruments

      Adult social care in the UK is in crisis. This much we are told by those in the sector and this much we can see in the statistics. To cite but a few of these: around 1.86 million people over the age of 50 are not getting the care they need; approximately 1.5 million people perform over 50 hours unpaid care per week; and the proportion of GDP the UK spends on social care is among the lowest in the OECD, with budgets having undergone an overall reduction of over 30 per cent since 2010.

      Reflecting on the severity of the situation, Ian Smith, chairman of the largest care home chain in the UK, Four Seasons Healthcare, recently declared himself to be ‘embarrassed to be British at the state of our health and social care.’ As with the NHS, a mood of impending catastrophe hangs heavy over social care.

      Yet whilst attention has overwhelmingly been focused on the impact of austerity in reducing levels of state support, something murkier and altogether more complicated is going on in the shadows.

      According to a groundbreaking new report by the research organisation CRESC, large care home chains – which account for around a quarter of the industry – are rife with dubious financial engineering, tax avoidance, and complex business models designed to shift risks and costs from care home owners on to staff, the state and private payers.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • OpenSSH Security Advisory: x11fwd.adv
    • [openssh-unix-announce] OpenSSH Security Advisory: xauth command injection
    • [OTR-users] Security Advisory: upgrade to libotr 4.1.1
    • Why Microsoft’s vulnerability severity ratings are obsolete

      The distinction between ‘critical’ and ‘important’ has become meaningless. It makes no sense to treat them differently. Patch Tuesday needs a patch.

    • Let’s Encrypt Free Certificates’ Success Challenges SSL/TLS Industry

      NEWS ANALYSIS: The free security certificate effort backed by the Linux Foundation achieves a major milestone with one million free certificates, but are all those free users actually secure?

    • DDoS attacks: Getting bigger and more dangerous all the time

      Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are more frequent, bigger and more damaging than ever before a new report by internet security firm Verisign has warned.

      According to statistic published in the VeriSign Distributed Denial of Service Trends Report, DDoS activity is the highest it’s ever been, with the final quarter of 2015 seeing an 85 percent rise in instances – almost double the number of attacks – when compared with the same same period in 2014. The figures for Q4 2015 also represent a 15 percent rise on the previous quarter.

      The report also suggests that cyber attackers are getting much more persistent as targets are now being hit by repeated attacks, with some reportedly being the target of DDoS attacks up to 16 times in just three months.

    • The Firejail security sandbox
    • New Name, New Home for the Let’s Encrypt Client

      Over the next few months the Let’s Encrypt client will transition to a new name (soon to be announced), and a new home at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

      The goal of Let’s Encrypt is to make turning on HTTPS as easy as possible. To accomplish that, it’s not enough to fully automate certificate issuance on the certificate authority (CA) side – we have to fully automate on the client side as well. The Let’s Encrypt client is now being used by hundreds of thousands of websites and we expect it to continue to be a popular choice for sites that are run from a single server or VPS.

    • 600,000 TFTP Servers Can Be Abused for Reflection DDoS Attacks

      A new study has revealed that improperly configured TFTP servers can be easily abused to carry out reflection DDoS attacks that can sometimes have an amplification factor of 60, one of the highest such values.

    • Do you trust this application?

      Much of the software you use is riddled with security vulnerabilities. Anyone who reads Matthew Garrett knows that most proprietary software is a lost cause. Some Linux advocates claim that free software is more secure than proprietary software, but it’s an open secret that tons of popular desktop Linux applications have many known, unfixed vulnerabilities. I rarely see anybody discuss this, as if it’s taboo, but it’s been obvious to me for a long time.

    • Do you trust this website?

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Negotiating a New (Sykes-Picot) Contract for the Middle East

      The old Sykes-Picot divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in 1916. The Agreement was enforced by the superpowers of that moment, Britain and France with buy-in from the Russians. The immediate goal was colonialism, not independent states, but the unspoken end point was a form of stability. Following the massive realignment of the balance of power that was World War I, the lines were literally drawn for the next eight decades. The lines themselves did not cause all the problems per se; the lines codified the problems on the ground.

    • If a US Drone Strike Kills 150 People, Does Anyone Care?

      Americans can sleep easier now that the US military has wiped out 150 more “terrorists.” US airstrikes over Somalia targeted al-Shabab militants, who were, according to Pentagon spokesperson Captain Jeff Davis, planning “offensive operations.” Davis neglected to elaborate on what “offensive operations” were planned by the group.

      He did say that they had been monitoring the camp for a while and had a “sense” that the “operational phase was about to begin.” Unsurprisingly Davis failed to elaborate on the details of the “operational phase” or what it might have looked like. Or how they got their “sense” to begin with.

      Interestingly, Davis also said that “their removal will degrade al-Shabab’s ability to meet the group’s objectives in Somalia.”

    • US Airstrikes Kill 150 People in Somalia

      U.S. airstrikes in Somalia over the weekend killed more than 150 people, U.S. officials revealed on Monday.

    • Bernie Sanders Promises “Level Playing Field” on Israel-Palestine

      Signs pointed to his taking Israel’s side. During the 2014 war in Gaza, he famously told a pro-Palestinian critic at a Vermont town hall to “shut up,” and he has mostly been seen as a strong defender of Israel in its past conflicts.

      In the context of U.S. politics, however, his comments Tuesday were fairly remarkable, bucking the bipartisan establishment consensus that the United States should be openly biased in favor of Israel in its conflict with the rest of the region.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • FBI Can’t Have Whistleblower Protection Because It Would Encourage Too Many Complaints

      The Department of Justice is undercutting Chuck Grassley’s efforts to provide FBI employees whistleblower protection. That became clear in an exchange (2:42) on Wednesday.

      The exchange disclosed two objections DOJ has raised to Grassley’s FBI Whistleblower Protect Act. First, as Attorney General Loretta Lynch revealed, DOJ is worried that permitting FBI Agents to report crimes or waste through their chain of command would risk exposing intelligence programs.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • What Indonesia Doesn’t Know About Peatlands Could Undermine its Climate Goals

      Peat forests, or wetlands, are some of the most important ecosystems for Indonesia and climate change. The country holds the largest tropical peatland in the world, which acts as a major carbon sink. At the same time, carbon emissions from peat decomposition and peat fires account for 42 percent of Indonesia’s total emissions, and spikes in peat fires in 2015 pushed the country to move from world’s sixth-largest to the fourth-largest emitter.

    • Fighting of fires must continue under blue skies — Simon Tay

      Blue skies breed amnesia. With the clear skies, many may now struggle to recall the urgency and anger over the smoke haze pollution in the region.

      Last year was one of the worst on historical record for fires and it was barely six months ago that the haze reached its peak, hitting a Pollutants Standards Index (PSI) of 2,300 in Central Kalimantan.

      It is critical that governments, corporations in the relevant industries and concerned citizens continue to work on the issue. Predictions are that 2016 may not be as dry as last year.

    • Indonesian province declares emergency as forest fires flare

      Indonesia’s western province of Riau has declared a state of emergency over forest and land fires blazing on the island of Sumatra, a government official said on Tuesday.

      The fires, which send choking smog over Southeast Asia every year, raged uncontrollably across several provinces last year, costing an estimated $16 billion, and pushed average daily greenhouse gas emissions above those of the United States.

      “The governor has declared an emergency now, to be able to prevent a repeat of the haze that occurred in 2015,” said provincial government spokesman Darusman, adding that life in the province continued to be normal.

  • Finance

    • Russian Bitcoin issuers will risk seven-year prison sentence

      The Russian Ministry of Finance is planning an amendment to the criminal code to establish severe penalties for those who issue the Bitcoin cryptocurrency or other ‘money substitutes’.

    • Providers’ Newsletter Service Has Broken Down, Awaiting A Fix By The Provider

      As I have previously reported, in January 2004, 12 years ago, I stated in a nationally televised TV economic debate about jobs offshoring that the United States would be a Third World country in 20 years. I over-estimated the time it would take. We are already there. We have 23% unemployment, no jobs for university graduates, deteriorating and collapsing infrastructure, large percentages of the population drowning in debt and its service, the decay of cities that were once the sites of our industrial and manufacturing power, such as Detroit, Michigan, largely in ruins, and Flint, Michigan, where the water is undrinkable.

    • Why Your Boss Hates Your Commute More Than You Do

      Companies are starting to include emissions from employee commuting into calculations of their carbon footprint. Now, there’s an app for that.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Sanders, Redbaiting and the ‘Denouncing’ Double Standard

      Clinton’s sudden—and hypocritical—support for “human rights” notwithstanding, the moment was predictable as it was routine. It’s been 25 years since the end of the Cold War, so younger voters may not be used to these types of loyalty rituals. But whenever the issue of socialism—or communism, its more fear-inducing cousin—comes up, the press must attempt to compel those who have previously expressed support or sympathy for red politics to “denounce” their prior statements. Sanders’ refusal to do so caused noticeable agitation among the moderators.

      [...]

      A handful of Clinton partisans jumped at the chance to paint Sanders as a far-left loony who likes to cozy up to “dictators.” Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, one of the media’s most reliable Clinton boosters, jumped right in, linking to a recent Daily Beast piece by Michael Moynihan, former senior editor of libertarian Reason magazine and current Vice/Bank of America talkshow host, who did a rundown of Sanders’ dreaded leftist past. Suddenly, a topic Marcotte had never once tweeted about, or expressed any public concern for, was of utmost importance and needed to be brought to the forefront of public discourse.

    • Ben Bagdikian, Visionary

      Before almost anyone else, Ben warned about the impact of the modern wave of media mergers that accelerated during the Reagan years (and accelerated further during the Clinton administration). In the first years of FAIR, I heard from various sympathetic journalists in mainstream media who said they were thrilled that, finally, a pro–working journalist media watch group had formed . . . but that we were off-base to emphasize the impact of corporate owners—that the problem was in the newsroom far more than the boardroom. A few years and a few mergers later, these same journalists told us that we’d been right, almost prophetic—that boardrooms were undermining journalism, often quite nakedly.

    • How Activists Mobilized To Shut Down Trump In Chicago

      On Friday night, so many protesters descended upon a Donald Trump rally at the University of Illinois-Chicago that the Republican presidential front-runner canceled his appearance, citing security concerns. Violence broke out inside and outside the rally, with Trump quickly criticizing the “thugs who shut down our First Amendment rights.” Conservative commentators avidly defended Trump, saying that it was a shame that protesters — also making use of their First Amendment right — had shut him down.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Snowden hits out after Obama sides with FBI against Apple

      Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden has come out swinging against US President Barack Obama after the latter, referring to the ongoing spat between Apple and the FBI, urged Americans not to adopt absolutist positions on privacy and security.

      Snowden was speaking from Moscow to the Logan Symposium in Berlin organised by the London-based Centre for Investigative Journalism on Friday and Saturday. Obama was participating in a keynote conversation at the 2016 South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, the first sitting president to grace the stage of an SXSW event.

      Obama, responding to a question from Evan Smith, editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, said he could not talk directly about the Apple-FBI matter, where the FBI is demanding that Apple produce a modified version of its iOS mobile operating system so that the agency can access information from an iPhone that was used by Syed Rizwan Farook, an employee of the San Bernardino county health department and one of two responsible for the deaths of 14 people in December last year.

    • VPN Provider’s No-Logging Claims Tested in FBI Case

      While many VPN providers say they do not log their users’ activities in order to protect anonymity, it’s not often their claims get tested in the wild. However, a criminal complaint filed by the FBI this week notes that a subpoena sent to Private Internet Access resulted in no useful data being revealed about a suspected hoaxer.

    • Obama Wants Nonexistent Middle Ground on Encryption, Warns Against “Fetishizing Our Phones”

      President Barack Obama says he wants strong encryption, but not so strong that the government can’t get in.

      “The question we now have to ask technologically is if it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there is no door at all?” he asked, speaking at the South By Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin on Friday.

      “Then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot? What mechanisms do we have available to do even simple things like tax enforcement? If in fact you can’t crack that all, if the government can’t get in, then everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket. There has to be some concession to the need to be able to get into that information somehow.”

    • NSA: House Of Cards Plot Is “Illegal And Unbelievable”

      Unlikely. First of all, Section 702 is designed for foreign surveillance, and would be much more likely to be used in cases of international communications. Instead, the government would be much more likely to lean on another legal authority. It might still be a longshot, but Section 214 of the Patriot Act would be a smarter bet. Section 214 was the NSA’s go-to authority when it conducted its program, discontinued in 2011, of tracking Americans’ internet and email metadata. That means it would track, for instance, the “to” and “from” fields of a given email, but not what’s written in the body, as well as which websites people visited—similar to the kinds of voter profiles developed in the show.

    • NSA to share more data with domestic law enforcement
    • FBI channels Kafka with new rules on slurping Americans’ private data
    • NSA Privacy Concerns Assert Serious Federal Sidestep
    • Federal Judge Inadvertently Confirms Existence of NSA Spying Program
    • Encryption Makes Us Safe, Says Sen. Mark Warner at SXSW
    • Trackers

      A couple of weeks ago I went to the local shopping centre looking for a thermometer. After entering one store upon leaving without buying anything a tracker was assigned to me. I didn’t think much of it at first, but he followed me dutifully around the shopping centre, took careful note of how I walked. Whenever I visited a store he made a note in his little black book (he kept calling it my profile, and he didn’t want to show me what was in it so I assume it was actually his, rather than mine). Each of those stores of course assigned trackers to me as well and soon enough I was followed by my own personal veritable posse of non-descript guys with little black books making notes.

    • Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again?

      Last week I arrived in San Francisco to hear good news: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman had won the ACM A.M. Turing Award. This is the Nobel Prize of computer science, with a million-dollar check and priceless prestige. The choice of these 2016 honorees is both long overdue and appropriately timely. Overdue because their contribution to the field (and to the world) was public key cryptography, which they created in 1976. And timely because the consequences of their invention — which would lead to the development of online privacy tools, whether the government liked it or not — are once again a flash point of Constitutional proportions.

    • Obama attempts to heal rift between tech world and government at SXSW

      The president did not directly comment on the battle between Apple and the FBI but said that ‘fetishishing our phones above every other value is incorrect’

    • New Documents Solve a Few Mysteries in the Apple-FBI Saga
    • Obama weighs in on Apple v. FBI: “You can’t take an absolutist view”
    • Government Can’t Let Smartphones Be `Black Boxes,’ Obama Says

      President Barack Obama said Friday that smartphones — like the iPhone the FBI is trying to force Apple Inc. to help it hack — can’t be allowed to be “black boxes,” inaccessible to the government. The technology industry, he said, should work with the government instead of leaving the issue to Congress.

      “You cannot take an absolutist view on this,” Obama said at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. “If your argument is strong encryption no matter what, and we can and should create black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years, and it’s fetishizing our phones above every other value.”

      Obama’s appearance on Friday at the event known as SXSW, the first by a sitting president, comes as the FBI tries to force Apple Inc. to help investigators access an iPhone used by one of the assailants in December’s deadly San Bernardino, California, terror attack. Apple has appealed a magistrate court order that it assist the government, saying to do so would undermine its encryption technology.

    • Why Isn’t DOJ Complaining about Apple’s Cooperation with Police States Like South Korea … or the US?

      There was lots that was nasty in yesterday’s DOJ brief in the Apple vs FBI case. But I want to look at this claim, from DOJ’s effort to insinuate Apple is resisting doing something for the US government it has already done for China.

    • FBI Has New Plan to Spy on High School Students

      The FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies as potential future terrorists, warning that such “extremists” are in the same category as ISIS.

    • Alvaro Bedoya on Facial Recognition and the Color of Surveillance

      But in 2016 America, the conversation can suffer from not being grounded in an understanding of how surveillance technology is actually being used right now. Whether we are being watched by private companies or by law enforcement and the state, our guest says, not everyone is watched equally.

    • To prevent whistleblowing, U.S. intelligence agencies are instructing staff to spy on their colleagues.

      Elham Khorasani was sitting in her car at a stoplight in Northern Virginia when she got the call. It was April 16, 2013. “I’m with the FBI,” a man on the line said, “and we’re at your home executing a search warrant.”

      Khorasani was flummoxed. (A pseudonym is being used to protect her privacy.) The Iran native, a U.S. citizen since the 1990s, had worked as a Farsi and Dari language analyst at the National Security Agency (NSA) going on eight years. She had recently been selected for a second tour at Menwith Hill station, the NSA’s mammoth listening post in northern England. Minutes before the FBI called, she’d left a meeting at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

    • President Obama Is Wrong On Encryption; Claims The Realist View Is ‘Absolutist’

      This is not all that surprising, but President Obama, during his SXSW keynote interview, appears to have joined the crew of politicians making misleading statements pretending to be “balanced” on the question of encryption. The interview (the link above should start at the very beginning) talks about a variety of issues related to tech and government, but eventually the President zeroes in on the encryption issue. The embed below should start at that point (if not, it’s at the 1 hour, 16 minute mark in the video). Unfortunately, the interviewer, Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune, falsely frames the issue as one of “security v. privacy” rather than what it actually is — which is “security v. security.”

    • A Judge Just Admitted The Existence Of The NSA’s PRISM Program

      A U.S. judge has just admitted the existence of the NSA’s infamous PRISM program by name, apparently the first time any federal judge has done so.

      PRISM has been an open secret since June 2013, when documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were first made public. An ominous NSA PowerPoint training slide claimed that PRISM allowed “collection [of user data] directly from the servers” of major American tech companies like Yahoo, Google and Apple, though those tech companies immediately and fiercely protested that no, to their knowledge, they didn’t give the NSA such access. It’s since been generally accepted that the NSA wasn’t physically accessing those companies’ servers with PRISM, but instead creating a streamlined legal process to compel those companies, via orders processed in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to turn over users’ data.

    • Scheer Intelligence: William Binney and Blowing the Whistle On the NSA

      Binney also discusses the ThinThread data collection system that he helped create while at the NSA, which ended prematurely, and why he believes the agency chose instead to implement the more expensive and bulky Trailblazer, later widely considered to be a failure.

    • Obama Urges Techies to Compromise on Encryption

      President Barack Obama stopped by South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas today to talk about, among other things, encryption. The crux of his argument: techies shouldn’t be “absolutists” on the issue, because information in your phone shouldn’t be treated differently than information in your home.

      “This notion that somehow our data is different, and can be walled off from those other tradeoffs we make, I believe is incorrect,” said Obama, while also claiming he is “way on the civil liberties side of this thing.”

    • Skype co-founder launches ultra-private messaging, with video

      A group of former Skype technologists, backed by the co-founder of the messaging platform, has introduced a new version of its own messaging service that promises end-to-end encryption for all conversations, including by video.

      Wire, a 50-person start-up mostly made up of engineers, is stepping into a global political debate over encryption that pits privacy against security advocates, epitomized by the standoff between the U.S. government and Apple.

  • Civil Rights

    • Feds Ask For 5 Years In Jail For Matthew Keys Giving Up Tribune Account Password; Still Don’t Care About Actual Hacker

      We’ve written a few times now about the somewhat bizarre Matthew Keys case. While he still denies having done anything, he has been found guilty under the CFAA for sharing the login information to the Tribune Company’s computer systems, which apparently resulted in someone hacking a story on the LA Times website. The hack was nonsensical and lasted for all of about 40 minutes. There’s no indication that this bit of vandalism did any actual harm — or even that very many people saw it. And yet… the Feds had to work overtime to figure out how to turn this minor bit of vandalism (which everyone agrees Keys did not actually do directly) into nearly $1 million in damages (thanks to emails that the Tribune Company says were worth $200+ each, and random claims about “ratings declines” due to a separate incident involving Keys and the Tribune-owned TV station Keys used to work for).

    • Why Immigration Concern Is Racist

      Since 1979 UK governments have deliberately and systematically pursued policies which prioritised the speculative financial industries of London and damaged large scale manufacturing. The apotheosis of this policy was the massive transfer of money from everybody in the land to the bankers in 2008 by Gordon Brown.

      There are two major results of this forty year policy. The first is that the deliberately engineered manufacturing decline has caused social and economic devastation in the UK outside South East England. The second has been an astonishing accumulation of wealth in a tiny number of hands as income inequality levels have risen to the highest disparity in all of human history, wealth centred in South East England.

      This has naturally led to rising discontent among many people in many areas, despite the concentrated use of mass communication media under elite control to spread narratives to contain or divert discontent. But as unrest has continued to threaten control, a particular diversionary narrative has become dominant.

      [...]

      Concern about immigration is racism. A racism deliberately whipped up to divert people from their real enemies.

    • Outrageous to Criticise Pharisees, Says Archbishop
    • Drugs, Dams, and Power: The Murder of Honduran Activist Berta Cáceres

      Last year, the group Global Witness named Honduras as the world’s deadliest country for environmental activists. “There is a straight line between environmentalist activism and assassination in Honduras,” said Dr. David Wrathall, a United Nations University geographer who studies Honduras. Over the last decade, Central America has become awash in drug money, Wrathall says, which frequently ends up entangled in large-scale agriculture and development projects such as dams.

    • No Bern Notice: the Imperial Myopia of Candidate Sanders

      Does Bernie Sanders know what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did to Honduras? Does he care? Last week saw yet another savage murder of a Honduran activist for democracy — one of hundreds such atrocities since Clinton and Obama blessed a brutal oligarchical coup there in 2009. But Sanders said nothing — says nothing — about this damning legacy of his opponent. It’s an extraordinary omission by someone presenting himself as an alternative to the failed elitist policies of the past.

    • Former paid agent of Swedish Security Police dictated Amnesty Sweden’s stance against Assange

      The government security agent, Martin Fredriksson, was mainly active during the years that former Foreign Minister Carl Bildt was dictating Sweden’s foreign policy, when the “Assange Affair” was widely publicized on the home page of Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to statements Fredriksson posted on Twitter, his “work” at SÄPO covered different periods between 2004 and 2010, the year Sweden opened its ‘investigation’ against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

    • Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last Fifty Years

      The shocking story isn’t the rise of Donald Trump but how the GOP slowly morphed into a party of hate and obstruction.

    • Trump Concerned His Rallies Are Not Violent Enough

      For months now, Donald Trump has been complaining about the level of violence inflicted on protesters at his campaign rallies. Complaining, that is, about protesters — who have been tackled and kicked, pushed, spat on, and sucker-punched — not being subjected to nearly enough violence.

      In the latest instance, at a rally in St. Louis on Friday, Trump complained about the overly gentle treatment of protesters being dragged from a theater and things got ugly outside, as his supporters faced off with protesters.

    • European Parliament to Vote on Torture Resolution Over Italian’s Death in Egypt

      THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a resolution that strongly condemns “the torture and assassination” of Italian student Giulio Regeni in what the resolution describes as a pattern of “torture, death in custody, and enforced disappearances across Egypt.”

      Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian researcher, disappeared in Cairo on January 25, the fifth anniversary of the uprising that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak. Regeni’s body was found last month on a highway on the outskirts of Cairo bearing signs of torture. Italy’s interior minister said Regeni had suffered “inhuman, animal-like” violence. Egypt’s security forces, notorious for arbitrary arrests and abuse of detainees, are widely suspected of being involved in his death, though the government has denied any involvement.

    • The Most Wanted Man in China

      Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist who inspired Chinese pro-democracy student protesters in the late 1980s, gives a fascinating and insightful account of his life in a memoir now published nearly four years after his death in exile. In “The Most Wanted Man in China,” Fang takes us from the 1940s, when he joined an underground Communist Party youth organization, through the years when he was expelled from the party and sent to the countryside to dig wells, labor in a coal mine and work on a railroad construction site.

    • On Being Far Left

      Yet in 1976 I was a Liberal, and politically centre or only slightly left of centre. My views were absolutely mainstream and were voiced in mainstream media every day.

      While standing still, I now find myself far left as the mainstream political spectrum rushed rightwards past me.

      Is this because the Thatcherite revolution, carried on so enthusiastically by Blair and New Labour, proved wildly successful? Is it because deregulation and privatisation has brought prosperity, harmony and an inarguably better society?

      No, not at all. The new right wing consensus has been a disaster. It led directly to the great crash of 2008 and the resulting austerity, which will dog us for another two decades at this rate. It led to massive, astonishing inequality of wealth and a society in which it is considered normal for top executives of an organisation to be paid 100 times more than the lowest employee. It led to hedge fund managers owning our politicians, and to Russian mafia owning our football clubs. It led to a world where Save the Children can pay its chief executive £375,000 a year of donation money yet nobody pukes. It led to collapse in manufacturing and to vast areas of blight and hopelessness, to a generation who will never afford a house while buy to let multi millionaires abound, to QE transferring yet more money straight to financial institutions.

      [...]

      I am not without hope. There is no doubt that the Sanders/SNP/Corbyn phenomenon represents a reaction to the dreadful inequality of society and all the evils which I have described. But I would also argue that this reaction has only been practical because of the new maturity of social media, weakening the grip of corporate media on the popular field of debate and the popular imagination.

    • We Are Witnessing the Decline of Saudi Arabia as a Major Power

      Five years ago, when the Arab Spring seemed at its most hopeful point, a Saudi diplomat told me, scornfully, that it would come to nothing. I had met him in the halls of the United Nations, where I had been asking diplomats about their views on Libya. The Saudis were eager to have the UN validate armed action to remove Muammar Qaddafi. A Saudi news outlet, al-Arabiya, had suggested that the Libyan military was killing its citizens with abandon. Fog surrounded Libya. The U.S. State Department seemed clueless. It did not have any reliable intelligence. Hillary Clinton, who pushed for war, relied upon the French and the Saudis for their assessment of Libya. These were unreliable narrators. Saudi Arabia, at least, wanted the Arab Spring shut down. It threatened its own undemocratic regime. The diplomat’s scorn grew out of this anxiety.

      Like an angry dragon, Saudi Arabia lashed around the region, throwing money and arms, encouraging chaos in this and that country. One underestimates the biliousness of monarchs: at a 2009 Arab League meeting, Qaddafi had cavalierly dismissed the King of Saudi Arabia as a creation of the British and a protectorate of the Americans. It was evident that the monarchs would not tolerate his existence for much longer. Two years later, they—with Western help—dismissed him.

    • Saudi Arabia due to ‘complete’ January mass executions with four more deaths

      Four more prisoners are reportedly to be killed by Saudi Arabia as the country moves to “complete” a wave of mass executions that started in January.

      The kingdom put 47 people to death on a single day that month, including the prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr and at least one teenager, sparking global protests.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Netflix Can’t Stream House of Cards Globally, Blames Licensing Deals

      Netflix’s release of the fourth season of House of Cards has turned into a bitter disappointment for fans in dozens of countries. Due to “legacy” licensing agreements, Netflix is not allowed to show its own original programming in countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Hong Kong, causing many people to turn to pirate sources.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • CIPIL Spring Conference: what is the scope of IPR protection (and what should it be)?

      This year’s conference, chaired by Mr Justice Richard Arnold and – as usual – attended by practitioners and academics alike, is devoted to exploring the scope of IPR protection.

    • Trademarks

      • Twitter Won’t Stop Fighting To Trademark ‘Dronie’

        You know the word “selfie” by now (whether you like the concept or not), but what about “dronie”? It seems that, back in 2014, Twitter, of all companies, decided to try to make “dronie” a thing, combining drones with selfies (i.e., photos of yourself, taken from drones). It even set up a twitter feed for @dronie and tried to highlight examples of such things — focusing on a campaign around the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. The concept did drum up some fairly lame press coverage (because of course it did), with some puff pieces on “dronies,” pretending that it was the next new thing — even though it was just a Twitter marketing campaign. Never mind the fact that others apparently had been using the term before Twitter started in.

    • Copyrights

      • MPAA Wants to Keep Its Anti-Piracy Secrets From Google

        Hoping to find out more about the collaboration between the MPAA and Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood, Google recently requested a deposition of MPAA lead counsel Steve Fabrizio. This week the Hollywood group told the court that the request goes too far, claiming that Google is using the legal process to uncover its anti-piracy strategies.

      • Music Licensing Shop Harry Fox Agency Appears To Be Scrambling To Fix Its Failure To Properly License Songs

        A couple of months ago, I wrote a long post trying to dig into the details of David Lowery’s class action lawsuit against Spotify. In the end, while there was some question over whether or not streaming music services really need to get compulsory mechanical licenses for producing reproductions of songs, it seemed like the fact that such licenses are compulsory and can be obtained easily via having the Harry Fox Agency issue a “Notice of Intention” under Section 115, it seemed crazy to think that the various music services had not done that. In fact, we noted that the only way the lawsuits made any sense was if the various music services and HFA ignored this and didn’t send out such NOIs. At the time, I noted that this would be a surprise, and it could mean the services were in deep trouble.

03.11.16

Links 11/3/2016: LibreOffice 5.1.1, Android N Previews/Analysis

Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Microsoft loves open source? Only when it’s convenient

    But while this has been going on, you’re not hearing about another part of Microsoft. Simultaneous with the Eclipse and SQL Server announcements, Microsoft announced it had successfully extracted patent licenses out of Wistron of Taiwan for its use of Android and out of Rakuten of Japan for use of Linux and Android. Though there’s been something of a lull in patent aggression lately, it has a long history and generates a significant revenue stream.

    Yes, that’s right: With one face, Microsoft wants us to forgive and forget the “cancer” comments, the dirty tricks, and the standards fixing. Even as the body of SCO lays slightly warm following the Redmond-financed fight against Linux, Microsoft wants us to overlook more than a decade of hostility and accept it as a full-status community member because it showed up with code, cash, and compliments. But with the other face, Microsoft wants members of the Android and Linux communities where it claims membership to pay up crates of cash for patent licenses or face destructive litigation.

  • Making music with field recordings and open source

    We get a lot of rain in the Pacific Northwest, especially in the winter. But temperatures are also pretty mild, which gives us plenty of opportunity to get outside. Once we’re outside—provided that we’re paying attention—we can see and hear much of nature’s subtle beauty that is too easy to miss while running errands or commuting. For example, we northwesterners often see drops of water clinging to branches and glowing as they refract the light.

  • 75 Open Source Mobile Tools

    According to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of American adults now have a smartphone—just five percent less than own a desktop or laptop. And 45 percent of adults in the U.S. now own a tablet.

    Given the prevalence of mobile devices, it’s no surprise that the open source community is increasingly working on projects related to mobility. This month, we’re highlighting 75 of these tools—a full 25 more than we included when we updated this list last year. And because there are now so many open source projects related to mobility, we narrowed it down a little bit by focusing only on those that might be of interest to organizations. As a result, we have a list that’s full of mobile development tools, security and privacy solutions, and apps useful for corporate employees.

  • TP-Link blocks open source router firmware to comply with new FCC rule

    Networking hardware vendor TP-Link says it will prevent the loading of open source firmware on routers it sells in the United States in order to comply with new Federal Communications Commission requirements.

    The FCC wants to limit interference with other devices by preventing user modifications that cause radios to operate outside their licensed RF (radio frequency) parameters. The FCC says it doesn’t intend to ban the use of third-party firmware such as DD-WRT and OpenWRT; in theory, router makers can still allow loading of open source firmware as long as they also deploy controls that prevent devices from operating outside their allowed frequencies, types of modulation, power levels, and so on.

  • TP-Link Blocks Open Source Router Firmware In Compliance with FCC Rules
  • Apache Flink, an Unsung Big Data Tool, Arrives in Version 1.0

    Are you familiar with Apache Flink? Not everyone is, but Flink is competing with tools like Apache Spark in the Big Data space, and has released its first API-stable 1.0 version this week. Flink came from Berlin’s Technical University, and it was previously known as Stratosphere before it was added to Apache’s incubator program.

    Like Spark, Flink is essentially positioned as a possible improvement on Hadoop’s MapReduce technology. Spark is primarily for in-memory processing of batch data, while Flink emphasizes the streaming data model. Here are more details.

  • With ownCloud 9 Arriving, Get Up and Running with it Fast

    Earlier this week, we covered the news that the extremely popular ownCloud open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds has just arrived in version 9.0 The release comes with many improvements, including full federation, letting users on different servers share directories and files.

  • Tailoring open source system management software from GitHub

  • Events

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Deployment, Complexity Concerns Persist

      The OpenStack cloud-computing platform is making inroads in the datacenter where an industry survey found that 30 percent of early adopters are using it to support projects or for production workloads. Roughly the same percentage of respondents to the recent survey said they are evaluating the open-source cloud technology, primarily as a way of offsetting pricey public cloud alternatives.

    • Talligent report finds OpenStack still being debated in the industry
    • OpenStack, the open-source cloud, still gaining converts, survey shows

      OpenStack, the open-source cloud platform, has been embraced by many enterprises for private and hybrid cloud initiatives (and public as well, in some cases). As it matures, however, it is also experiencing growing pains. (The platform was first launched by NASA and Rackspace in 2010.) Namely, a lack of operational tools, security approaches, and lingering concerns about managing private/hybrid cloud cost structures are top challenges facing OpenStack adoption,

    • Rackspace’s Upgraded Bare Metal Servers Integrate OpenStack

      Several companies have been focusing on appliances and servers that incorporate OpenStack, and essentially make deploying an OpenStack cloud an unboxing experience. Now, Rackspace has announced new “OnMetal Cloud Servers” integrating OpenStack — bare metal, single-tenant servers that are API-provisioned in what the company claims is two minutes, “providing near-instant scalability and elasticity.”

      This latest version of OnMetal Cloud Servers delivers connectivity between public cloud and dedicated hardware and enables hybrid cloud performance, too. Both Microsoft and Linux workloads can run on them.

    • When is a link actually, y’know, UP?

      Debugging TripleO deployments is fiendishly hard and this was made more complex by being unable to connect to the failed nodes. Deployed TripleO nodes only allow key-based ssh authentication. It’s great to see security being so good even the sysadmin can’t access the node I guess.

  • Databases

    • Weblate 2.5

      After almost six months of development Weblate 2.5 has been released. It brings lot of improvements and it’s quite hard to point few ones. The most important ones include support for Python 3, reports generators, placeables highlighting, extended keyboard shortcuts, configurable dashboard or group based ACLs.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.1.1 released

      The Document Foundation (TDF) releases LibreOffice 5.1.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family, with a number of fixes over the major release announced on February 10. LibreOffice 5.1.1 offers a long awaited feature in Writer – the first request dates back to 2002 – as it allows hiding the white space between pages to provide a continuous flow of text. This feature is extremely useful on laptops.

      LibreOffice 5.1.1 is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For more conservative users, and for enterprise deployments, TDF suggests the “still” version: LibreOffice 5.0.5. For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation suggests the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

    • LibreOffice 5.1.1 Fulfills 14 Year Request

      Italo Vignoli today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1.1, the first update to 5.1 released last month. Today’s release brings 83 bug fixes and one new feature that was originally requested in 2002. In other news, a new router was awarded the Free Software Foundation Respects Your Freedom certification and Dr. Roy Schestowitz is unhappy with the coverage of the Microsoft Linux love feasting this week. Several Solus and a couple of Korora reviews have popped up in recent days as well.

    • LibreOffice 5.1.1 Released, Brings a 14-Year-Old Feature Request in Writer

      The Document Foundation, through Italo Vignoli, has had the great pleasure of announcing just a few minutes ago, March 10, 2016, the immediate availability for download of LibreOffice 5.1.1.

      Exactly one month ago, on February 10, 2016, Softpedia announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1, which introduced major features like a redesigned interface for improved ease of use, better interoperability with OOXML files, enhanced support for the ODF 1.2 file format, as well as additional Spreadsheet functions and features.

    • LibreOffice 5.1.1 Released With New Features Added

      The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family, with a number of mostly bug fixes over the last major release, version 5.1.0 which was released on February 10. According to a press release from The Document Foundation, today’s release includes a long anticipated feature in Writer, the office suite’s word processor, that has been requested since 2002. The feature allows users to hide white spaces between pages to provide a continuous flow of text — considered useful for laptop users.

  • Openwashing Without Code

    • Google has joined Facebook’s Open Compute Project and submitted a 48-volt rack design

      Google has joined Facebook’s Open Compute Project and proposed a new design for server racks that could help cloud data centers cut their energy bills.

      The OCP was started by Facebook six years ago as a way for end-user companies to get together and design their own data center equipment, free of the unneeded features that drive up costs for traditional vendor products.

    • Google Is Finally Ready To Open Source Its Data Centre Infrastructure

      Google joins Facebook’s Open Compute Project as web giant starts work on standardised racks for artificial intelligence, machine learning

      Google has, after many years of keeping its data centre infrastructure secret from the rest of the technology world, joined Facebook’s Open Compute Project (OCP).

      Announced at the annual Open Compute Summit in San Jose, not only has Google joined the OCP but it is already working with Facebook on new hardware.

      It was 2011 when Facebook took the lid off its server designs, and one-upped competitors who thought keeping their own data centre hardware secret would give them a competitive edge.

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD 5.9 Set for May 1 Release; Pre-orders Available

      For those of you keeping score at home, OpenBSD is like other BSD derivatives, however this derivative is regarded as one of the safest systems due to the OpenBSD team’s attention to security (and could very well be the folks on the receiving end of Linus’ infamous “monkey” quote regarding, um, attention to detail on security issues, but I digress).

  • Public Services/Government

    • White House continues push to open source federal code

      The White House on Thursday issued a draft policy for public comment that would support making computer code used by federal agencies open source.

      It’s part of an on-going effort by the Obama administration to make government computer systems more efficient both by using open source programs and by releasing code written by government agencies both inside and outside the government to use.

    • OMB’s 3rd policy memo in a week targets software purchasing

      The Office of Management and Budget’s busy week continued Thursday with its third policy memo in the last seven days.

      Along with a draft data consolidation guidance and a final mandate for every agency to set up a Buyers Club for innovative acquisitions, OMB now is taking aim at the software that runs in those data centers and is bought by those procurement experts.

      Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott released a draft open source software policy March 10 with a goal of reducing duplicative purchases and taking advantage of industry best practices.

    • Are you ready to share your code?

      The Office of Management and Budget has released a draft policy to improve how custom code developed for the government – including code developed by contractors – is acquired and distributed.

    • White House wants more sharable, reusable code

      The White House is looking to make software code used by the federal agencies more open, sharable and reusable. In a March 10 blog post, federal CIO Tony Scott announced a new draft Federal Source Code policy that would create a new set of rules for custom code developed by or for the federal government.

    • Agencies would face new open source software requirements under OMB draft policy

      The White House issued a draft policy today that would require federal agencies to open source a significant portion of its software code. Under the proposed Federal Source Code Policy, the Office of Management and Budget would pilot the requirement to share publicly all custom code developed in-house by federal IT personnel and at least 20 percent of newly developed custom code by third party developers or vendors on behalf of a covered agency.

    • OMB moves to make all federal code open source

      The administration has been looking to embrace the best practices in software development, using innovation shops like 18F and the U.S. Digital Service to test and promote methods like agile development and making use of open source code.

      Now, the entire federal government will be getting on board with the latter. The Office of Management and Budget released the first draft of the Federal Source Code policy, a mandate to make federally-developed code available to everyone.

    • Open source lets Irish Taxes scale IT solutions

      The freedoms that come with open source software licences have set Ireland’s tax authorities free to scale-up its enterprise search. On top of that, using Apache Solr has greatly improved finding information on the Intranet and across the many network drives at the Office of the Revenue Commissioners. This would be unaffordable with proprietary software licences, says Cleo O’ Beirne, Content Team Manager at the Revenue Commissioners.

    • New OMB policy aims to make federal agency code open source

      The White House will release a draft policy Thursday for sharing source code among federal agencies, including a pilot program that will make a portion of federal code open source.

    • Microsoft looking for feds to trial new SQL for Linux [Ed: US government asks for FOSS, Microsoft uses openwashing to shove PROPRIETARY down its throat]

      Analysts said the move would enable the company to compete more effectively with Oracle and IBM, who already produce Linux-compatible database products.

    • Leveraging American Ingenuity through Reusable and Open Source Software

  • Licensing

    • Ubuntu and ZFS: Possibly Illegal, Definitely Exciting

      The project originally known as the Zettabyte File System was born the same year that Windows XP began shipping. Conceived and originally written by Bill Moore, Jeff Bonwick and Matthew Ahrens among others, it was a true next generation project – designed for needs that could not be imagined at the time. It was a filesystem built for the future.

      Fifteen years later, it’s the future. Though it’s a teenager now, ZFS’s features remain attractive enough that Canonical – the company behind the Ubuntu distribution – wants to ship ZFS as a default. Which wouldn’t seem terribly controversial as it’s an open source project, except for the issue of its licensing.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source Fashion Manifesto Asks You to 3D Print Your Clothes & Rock the Runway in a Brave New Fashion World

      I love a good manifesto—whether it’s political or personal. Assuming it’s not of a feverish or crazy Unibomber-ish slant, interesting ideas are usually presented by progressive writers offering an aim for change. I figure if they went to enough trouble to outline an official mission, it’s worth taking a look. And that’s definitely the case with ‘Open Source Fashion Manifesto.’ While initially I was attracted to and curious about the fashion angle in combination with 3D printing, I discovered a much deeper message than anticipated—and one that most definitely needs to be heard, shared, and followed.

    • Italy to adopt first “Sharing Economy Act” in Europe — but does it share EU law principles?

      Katfriend and sharing-economy enthusiast Revital Cohen (Baker & McKenzie, Milan) tells us about what appears to be the very first attempt to provide an overall legal framework for (almost) all those disruptive business that usually go under the definition of “sharing economy”. This legislative proposal comes from a country where sharing indeed matters, ie Italy, but it is not so certain whether Italians really got what sharing services among EU Member States is about.

  • Programming

    • Google Looks To Open Up StreamExecutor To Make GPGPU Programming Easier

      Google developers are looking at starting a new LLVM sub-project around parallel runtime and support libraries for GPUs, CPUs, and other platforms. As part of it, they are also looking to open-source their StreamExecutor that wraps around the CUDA and OpenCL runtimes.

    • GCC 6 Is On Track To Be Officially Released In About One Month

      Longtime GCC developer Richard Biener shared a status update today concerning the state of the GNU Compiler Collection 6.

    • PyPy 5.0 released

      We have released PyPy 5.0, about three months after PyPy 4.0.1. We encourage all users of PyPy to update to this version.

    • PyPy 5.0 Brings Faster Performance, Lower Memory Use

      PyPy 5.0 has been released today as the alternative Python interpreter and JIT compiler focused on performance and efficiency.

      PyPy 5.0 comes down to being faster and leaner, having an upgrade to its C API, profoiling with vmprof is now supported on more platforms, CFFI 1.5.2 for embedding PyPy into a C program, and various other highlights.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Rate our Catalogue of Interoperability Solutions

      The catalogue allows European public administrations, standardisation bodies and providers of IT services to find high-quality interoperable IT solutions that can be reused, rather than developed from scratch.

Leftovers

  • Beware! This Windows 7 And 8.1 Security Update Is Basically A Windows 10 Downloader

    Microsoft has hidden a Windows 10 ad-generator/downloader in a latest security update KB 3139929. This security update is meant for IE11 users who are running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. So, before installing any Patch Tuesday, take a moment to look at what’s inside.

  • Windows patch KB 3139929: When a security update is not a security update

    If Microsoft’s documentation is correct, installing Patch Tuesday’s KB 3139929 security update for Internet Explorer also installs a new Windows 10 ad-generating routine called KB 3146449.

    Many people — present company included — feel that putting an ad generator inside a security patch crosses way over the line. In fact, you have to ask yourself if there are any lines any more.

    [...]

    If the documentation can be verified, Microsoft’s intrusive Get Windows 10 behavior has reached new lows.

  • Science

    • Tell Congress: It’s Time to Move FASTR

      When you pay for federally funded research, you should be allowed to read it. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (S.779, H.R.1477), which was just passed out of a major Senate committee.

      Under FASTR, every federal agency that spends more than $100 million on grants for research would be required to adopt an open access policy. Although the bill gives each agency some flexibility to develop a policy appropriate to the types of research it funds, each one would require that published research be available to the public no later than 12 months after publication.

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • High-Level UN Initiative On Global Public Health Gap Holds Landmark Hearing

      An initiative of the United Nations secretary general yesterday gathered what could be described as an assembly of many of the world’s best thinkers and practitioners on public health and intellectual property rights. Industry, activists, academics, international organisations, and possibly some governments poured out their views for nearly seven hours – at times coming to tears and tension – shepherded by an astute moderator, as they responded to the call to take a longstanding debate on medicines access and high prices to a breakthrough.

    • Pasta Lovers Beware: New Study Links Carbs to Lung Cancer

      Carbs have gotten a bad rap over the years for lots of reasons, most of them related to weight. (Remember the “Atkins revolution” a decade ago that had everyone swearing off bread?) For the most part, carbohydrates have been seen as a relatively innocuous, and totally delicious, part of our diets. But a new study suggests the health risks posed by certain carbs are much greater than previously thought, and that we may need to be choosier about the carbs we eat.

    • Protesting Police Comes With A Lot Of Health Risks

      In August 2014, the world watched as police in riot gear cracked down on nonviolent protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. Tear gas, smoke bombs, and rubber bullets rained down on demonstrators. Officers equipped with military tanks and firearms looked ready for war, pointing their guns in the direction of unarmed men and women.

    • French palm oil tax ‘unfair’ and ‘destructive’, producers say

      French plans to place an additional tax on palm oil as part of its biodiversity bill have angered Malaysia and Indonesia. The bill is expected to be passed next week. EurActiv France reports.

      For years, environmentalists have condemned palm oil as one of the main causes of deforestation in certain tropical countries. Now France is responding with an increased tax on the palm oil destined for use in food products.

      The expansion of palm oil plantations in tropical countries has been a major contributing factor to the degradation of forest resources and biodiversity. Yet Europe remains one of the world’s main palm oil importers.

    • Rainforest Activists Just Scored a Big Win Against One of Pepsi’s Closest Business Partners

      The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund has divested from a major snack food company due to its failure to implement ethical palm oil policies. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), which is valued at around $880 billion, divested from First Pacific Group Ltd (HK: 0142), the parent company of Indonesia-based Indofood, which has controlling interests in one of the biggest plantation companies in Indonesia tied to conflict palm oil.

    • Admiral Jeremy is not so admirable

      Just how did we end up with this most unsuitable health secretary?

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Bibi Cancels Meeting With Obama, Demands More Money Instead

      On his own and through his proxies in what is called the US “Israel Lobby,” Benjamin Netanyahu expended enormous political and financial capital in attempt to sink President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Though the deal is already done, the pro-Likud lobby in Washington with the backing of a significant number of elected Members of the House and Senate is still determined to turn back the hands of time to a US war-footing against Iran. They may well succeed, particularly as most presidential candidates have promised to rip up the Iran deal on day one.

    • Done In by the American Way of War

      And yes, as Campbell headed off stage, General John Nicholson, Jr., beginning his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan, has officially taken command of ISAF. Though it wasn’t a major news item, he happens to be its 17th commander in the 14-plus years of Washington’s Afghan War. If this pattern holds, by 2030 that international force, dominated by the U.S., will have had 34 commanders and have fought, by at least a multiple of two, the longest war in our history. Talk about all-American records! (USA! USA!)

    • The tragedy of Cologne and Its aftermath – the depletion of civility

      This reaction is deeply frustrating. Groups of men sexually assaulting women in public spaces is a new form of violence against women which needs to be condemned and punished. But this wave of reporting on Cologne has increased an already existing anti-immigrant fervor and has given fresh impetus for further violent xenophobic attacks, as another stereotypical image of a migrant, this time as a rapist, is settling in our imagination and exacerbating our fears.

    • Hillary Clinton: the Queen of Chaos and the Threat of World War III

      Maidhc Ó Cathail: In your latest book, you dub Hillary Clinton the “Queen of Chaos”. Can you explain why you chose this derogatory sobriquet to describe Hillary?

    • Neocons Red-Faced Over ‘Red Line’

      Official Washington’s neocons love to condemn President Obama for not enforcing his “red line” after a sarin attack in Syria in 2013, even though one neocon now admits that U.S. intelligence lacked the proof, writes Robert Parry.

    • Defence on the Brexit frontline

      Consequently a vote for Brexit would be less disruptive for the UK’s defence policy than for other aspects of Britain’s EU membership. However, if the public votes for the UK to remain in the EU, might the enthusiasm be translated into the UK pushing for more Europe in the field of defence?

    • Trump Will Make His Peace with the War Party

      Similarly, while Trump might be able to seize the presidency in spite of establishment opposition, he will never be able to wield it without establishment support. And since war is the health of the State (as well as the health of war profiteers), one of the power elite’s non-negotiable demands is the perpetuation of the empire and its wars.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Tips for building a successful open web API
    • Research consortium to help measure the impact of Open Government

      Five academic and advocacy organisations involved in Open Government launched the Research Consortium on the Impact of Open Government last February to “improve the understanding of the effectiveness and impact of Open Government reforms” in the world. Global Integrity, The Governance Lab, The World Bank’s Open Government Global Solutions Group, Open Government Partnership’s Support Unit and the Results for Development Institute are the founding members of the initiative.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • House Republicans Get Secret Briefing from Koch Veterans Group

      The Koch brothers’ group targeting veterans gave a secret briefing to U.S. House Republicans on “Reforming Veterans Health Care” last week, according to an invitation to the meeting provided to CMD.

      The Kochs’ Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) has been in the news lately for a six-figure ad campaign in Nevada supporting Rep. Joe Heck’s campaign for Senate.

      The politically-active nonprofit does not disclose its funding sources, but tax documents reveal that since 2011 CVA and its related organizations have received nearly $21 million from Freedom Partners, the Koch brothers’ “secret bank,” and almost $2 million from the Koch-linked TC4 Trust.

    • Noam Chomsky: If Trump Wins, 5 Reasons Why the ‘Human Species Is in Very Deep Trouble’

      The first question we have to ask ourselves regarding a Trump presidency is if Trump means what he’s saying. “Trump says all sorts of things,” Noam Chomsky reminded us. “Some of them make sense; Some of them are crazy. But the U.S. is an extremely powerful state [and] if Trump means what he’s saying, the human species is in very deep trouble.”

      Here are his top five reasons why.

    • Family Wins Case Against Fracking Company After 7 Years Of Polluted Drinking Water

      Two Pennsylvania families who have been fighting to prove that a fracking company polluted their well water got a major win in court this week. A federal jury awarded the Dimock, PA residents $4.24 million Thursday, after finding that Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. — one of Pennsylvania’s largest oil and gas companies — guilty of polluting their well water with methane.

      The couples — Nolen Scott Ely, Monica Marta-Ely, and Raymond and Victoria Hubert — first sued Cabot back in 2009, the Times-Tribune of Scranton reports, a suit that at the time was joined by about 40 other homeowners, all alleging well water pollution from Cabot’s oil and gas activities. That suit reached a settlement with most of the plaintiffs in 2012, but the Elys and Huberts refused to settle, deciding instead to continue fighting the case in federal court.

  • Finance

    • Retailers Sue Visa, MasterCard Over Chip-Reader Rules

      Lawyers behind a new antitrust suit in California claim credit card issuers shifted $8 billion of liability onto merchants overnight.

    • How Hillary Helped Banks Foreclose on 5 Million Families

      Let me be clear at the outset: I think what follows is a bullshit argument. But I think it is less unfair of an argument than Hillary’s claim that, by voting to withhold the second tranche of TARP funding on January 15, 2009, Bernie Sanders voted against the auto bailout.

      As you’ll recall, in October 2008, the Bush Administration threw some vaguely laid out plans on some cocktail napkins over the wall to Congress and got it to release $700 billion dollars to bail out the banks. Between the time the new Congress got sworn in but before Obama became President, Republicans in the Senate wrote a bill to withhold the second tranche, or $350 billion, of those funds. In the days before the vote, Larry Summers threw two more cocktail napkins of promises to Congress. Bernie was one of seven Democrats who voted not to release the funds based on a series of what were effectively ideas on cocktail napkins.

    • Democratic Senators Take Issue With Hillary Clinton’s Portrayal Of Bailout Vote

      Heading into crucial primaries in auto industry states such as Michigan and Ohio, Hillary Clinton in recent days has argued that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2009 vote to block the release of Wall Street bailout money proves he “was against the auto bailout” and that he voted “against the money that ended up saving the auto industry.” But other Democratic lawmakers who voted the same way as Sanders are challenging Clinton’s portrayal of that vote.

      In interviews with International Business Times, two former Democratic senators took issue with the notion promoted by the former secretary of state that their vote to block Wall Street bailout money somehow put them at odds with the auto industry. Another Democratic senator’s office told IBT that the vote was about reining in the financial industry — not about opposing help for autoworkers.

    • Who’s Pumping Money into 2016 Election? Hedge Fund Heads

      A new analysis by Reuters offers a fresh look at the interests pouring money into the 2016 president election.

      Hedge fund managers are upping their game in this election season, with Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and Republican Ted Cruz the biggest beneficiaries, Reuters’ review of Federal Election Commission filings found.

      “About $47 million has been lavished on presidential candidates and lawmakers and the political action committees that support them by two dozen of the industry’s top managers in the first 13 months of this election season,” the news agency reports.

      In fact, hedge fund managers are on track “to more than double the amount they gave in the 2012 election campaign.”

    • Survey: German companies call for changes to free trade agreement

      German small and medium-sized enterprises are calling for changes to the planned free trade agreement between the European Union and the USA (known as TTIP). A significant majority of companies surveyed currently expects the deal will have a negative impact on the German economy. This is revealed in a members survey carried out by the research institute, Prognos, on behalf of the BVMW (German Association of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses) and the Schöpflin Foundation.

    • Node Counter On Blockstream, Bitcoin Core and Censorship

      Politics in Bitcoin are never far away, and a message posted on the Node Counter front page earlier today only confirms that statement. In fact, the statement they had on their page left very little to the imagination, as it was an outspoken judgement on Bitcoin Core and how the development of Bitcoin has been bought out by Blockstream. It is not the first time these types of allegations appear on the Internet, but this may have taken things one step too far.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Nation is Not Divided and Still Prefers Bernie Sanders

      According to a recent CNN/ORC poll, 69 percent of Americans claim to be very or somewhat angry with regard to “the way things are going” in the country. Similarly, a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll indicated about the same percentage agreeing with this statement: “I feel angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington, rather than it working to help everyday people get ahead.”

    • Bernie Sanders Won America’s Largest Arab Community by Being Open to Them

      In October, Sanders shared an emotional moment with a Muslim college student who asked him to stand up to Islamophobia. He invited her up to the stage and cited his own background as the grandson of Holocaust victims as informing his views on bigotry, telling her, “There is a lot of anger being generated, hatred being generated, against Muslims in this country. … If we stand for anything, we have got to stand together and end all forms of racism.”

    • Bernie Wins MI — Wait Whut?

      MI’s Muslims voted for the elderly Polish Jew, by wide margins. That’s not a huge population, but it is big enough to have accounted for much of the differential between Hillary and Bernie.

    • Bernie Sanders knows politics can save lives

      Several members of Senator Bernie Sanders’ immediate family died in the Holocaust. His aunt Chana Reibscheid and her son Leopold Reibscheid, his uncle Jakob Gutman, and his half-uncle Abraham Schnützer were all executed in Limanowa, Poland, in 1942. I only bring this up to underline the fact, perhaps already evident in his bearing, demeanour, and conduct (Inside the mind of Bernie Sanders…, 19 June 2015), that politics is not and never has been a game for Senator Sanders; it is serious, life-and-death business. Rhetoric can be dangerous. Combined with economic hardship and social deprivation, it can be deadly. In the hands of a gifted and twisted demagogue, it can be catastrophic. The antidotes – genuine social security (think about what that term meant, when it was first coined), and the potential for empowerment, engagement and upward mobility – are not just moral imperatives, and humane necessities to ensure. They are what protect a population from the seduction of scapegoating. Bernie is not trying to give away “free stuff”; he is trying to save lives (perhaps lives that were lost long ago). He is trying to build the safe and sane framework to keep his fellow countrymen on track, on board, and in it together. Because he has seen, in vivid personal detail, where the other way of doing business leads.

    • Clinton Proves Best PR in the World Can’t Sell a Terrible Product

      Democrats don’t fight over the size of their presidential candidate’s genitals. But that’s little reason for Democrats to gloat in 2016. If Democratic officials get their way — at this writing, that seems more likely than not — Hillary Clinton will win her party’s nomination partly due to the same reason as Donald Trump seems poised to win his: massive ignorance on the part of the voters.

      The result will be a yuge disaster.

    • Donald Trump’s Get-Rich-Quick Advice Makes a Mockery of His Campaign Rhetoric

      But he has some pretty disturbing advice on how exactly you should do that: Don’t save your money, he says; spend it! In fact, live above your means — it will fill you with confidence. Getting a job is for losers; the key is to get other people to work for you. And spend other people’s money, too. Above all, market yourself aggressively and enthusiastically.

    • Did Bernie Sanders Oppose the Auto Rescue?

      If you agree, then Hillary’s pragmatic willingness to compromise looks pretty responsible and Bernie’s intransigence looks pretty reckless. But if you think TARP was a blank-check travesty that did little more than give a bunch of free money to big banksters and the shaft to ordinary homeowners—and you’re willing to bet the ranch that it wasn’t really necessary anyway—then Hillary looks like a lackey of Wall Street and Bernie looks prescient.

    • Why Bernie May Have a Better Shot at Winning in November Than Hillary

      Much as I’ve liked Bernie Sanders, I never believed he’d be a stronger candidate than Hillary Clinton in the November run-off against the Republicans’ pick for president. I knew he polled better than her when pitted against the leading Republicans, but those polls didn’t factor in the red-baiting and hippie-baiting (Bernie being a child of both the ‘30s and ‘60s lefts) he’d be subjected to by a desperate GOP.

      After all, the only remotely analogous campaign to Sanders’s in modern American politics was that of Upton Sinclair for governor of California in 1934. A lifelong socialist, Sinclair switched his registration from the Socialist to the Democratic Party in late 1933, stunned everyone by winning the Democrats’ gubernatorial primary the following summer, and looked poised to depose the unpopular Republican governor that November. One month before the election, however, virtually every newspaper in the state, and all the leading movie studios, began a concerted drive to bring “Uppie” down, distorting Sinclair’s beliefs and fabricating stories and newsreels showing how he’d ruin the state. Sinclair lost—and I feared that Sanders, though a far more seasoned and adept pol than Sinclair ever was, would meet a similar fate after being subjected to a kindred barrage.

    • Michigan Voters Roundly Rejected Hillary’s Wall St-Friendly Agenda

      Hillary lost Michigan because she truly believes Wall Street, trade and runaway inequality are separate, single issues. She really has no choice. If she admitted the connections, her entire neo-liberal Wall Street-friendly edifice comes crumbling down.

  • Censorship

    • Censorship row as Italy bishops curtail release of gay film

      British film “Weekend” was restricted to just ten cinemas on its release in Italy on Thursday after the country’s bishops branded Andrew Haigh’s acclaimed gay love story “indecent” and “unusable” in the country’s many Church-owned film theatres.

    • Caixin Media’s display of courage against China’s censors

      WHEN CHINA’S president, Xi Jinping, visited the leading party and state news organizations Feb. 19, he demanded absolute loyalty to the Communist Party, saying the media must “have the party as their family name.” His purpose was to cajole and intimidate. But for intimidation to work, it has to inspire fear. This week, a Chinese news organization showed that it was not afraid.

      The publication, Caixin Media, is headed by one of China’s most respected journalists, Hu Shuli, who has often pioneered reporting that exposed failures by the state and private sector. Her journalism has pushed the limits of what’s permissible in a nation where free expression and independent journalism are usually and routinely suffocated by the state.

    • UK News Editors ‘Rarely’ Breach Official Censorship – Advisory Committee

      Infringements of the UK’s Defense and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) code – a system of media censorship that the British Government has operated for almost one hundred years – are “rare” and “in the main inadvertent,” the secretary of DSMA committee told Sputnik on Thursday.

    • U. of Arizona Marginalized Students Demand Trigger Warnings, Censorship, Half a Million Dollars

      The Marginalized Students of the University of Arizona have published their demands: like a lot of student-activists at other colleges, they want mandatory trigger warnings, sanctions for microaggressors, and obligatory cultural sensitivity training. They also want half a million dollars. For diversity.

    • The Media Freedom Summit: Celebrating 40 Years of Project Censored October 21-22, 2016 at Sonoma State University

      Project Censored cordially invites you to attend the Media Freedom Summit: Celebrating 40 Years of Project Censored, to be held at Sonoma State University (SSU) in scenic Northern California on October 21-22, 2016. The Summit will be an opportunity for journalists, students, faculty, activists, and community members to identify and address crucial threats to media freedom, to learn about and share effective strategies for advancing media freedom, and to promote critical media literacy education in service of social justice and positive, meaningful change in local communities and larger society.

    • Italy: Church censure a film on homosexuality

      Weekend film, the British Andrew Haigh, released this week in Italy only 10 rooms, the Church, which controls many independent cinemas in the peninsula, having deemed “scandalous” and “unusable” this gay love story nonetheless hailed by criticism.

      For the Italian authorities, this film is only prohibited under 14. But for the Evaluation Commission of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), it is “not recommended, scabrous and unusable.”

      Therefore, the film was rejected by more than 1,100 cinemas belonging to the Church, which form the core of the network of independent cinemas in the country, alongside the major chains operating, according to its distributor, Teodora Film.

    • The Artist Who Drew Donald Trump With a Micropenis Has Been Banned From Facebook
    • Artist’s Portrait of Trump with Tiny Endowment Censored on Facebook
    • Nude Donald Trump Art Arouses Passion, Censorship
    • How a New York art show about Chinese online censorship found itself censored
    • Censorship debated as comic faces human rights tribunal for disabled teen jokes

      Making fun of a child, especially one with a disability or deformity, is something many comedians say they would never do.

      “I draw a line but it depends where you’re at in your world,” says Gerry Dee. “I have a wife and three kids, so I try to remember that they might hear the joke.”

      “It’s probably something I wouldn’t do,” says Kevin McDonald. “But on the other hand, in the ’90s the Kids in the Hall did lots of stuff that I probably wouldn’t do now.”

      Martin Short takes a harder stance: “You don’t do that, it’s obvious.”

      But many in the standup world believe comedians should have carte blanche when it comes to material, and that being called before a human rights tribunal for their jokes sets a dangerous precedent.

    • Comics discuss censorship in comedy in wake of Mike Ward case in Quebec
    • China Raising TV Censorship

      The Chinese government has issued a ban on all depictions of gay and lesbian people on television. The government says that the move is part of a cultural crackdown against “vulgar, immoral, and unhealthy content.” Chinese censors have released new regulations for content that they say “exaggerates the dark side of society,” and now deems a wide swathe of categories, including homosexuality, suggestive clothing, smoking and drinking, and even reincarnation as illegal on screen. The Chinese government says that TV shows must not undermine social stability.

    • Film & Cinema: Tunisians defy censorship and win awards

      The November 2015 Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia showed there is a demand for more challenging and thought-provoking films, despite strong voices of disapproval in the region.

      “Tunisia is as conservative as Morocco but the difference is that there different points of view can co-exist and debate is tolerated,” says Nabil Ayouch. Ayouch’s film Much Loved was shown at the festival, despite being banned in cinemas in Morocco.

    • TV & Cinema: Pushing out beyond the comfort zone

      “I don’t see myself as an activist,” states Moroccan-French director Nabil Ayouch, whose film Much Loved was banned in Morocco in May 2015 for – according to the authorities – distorting the country’s image. “I do not make a movie to create a debate but I am happy if it does.”

    • China’s Censors Denounced in Online Attack

      China’s formidable propaganda apparatus came under renewed attack on Friday, when a denunciation spread online in the name of an employee of Xinhua, the main state-run news agency.

  • Privacy

    • Broadband Industry Has A Hissy Fit As FCC Unveils Some Fairly Basic New Broadband Privacy Protections

      As had been hinted at for months, the FCC formally unveiled its plans to apply some relatively basic privacy protections for broadband service. And while you’ll likely see the broadband industry bitching up a storm over the next few months, none of the requirements are particularly onerous (and many are things ISPs are doing already). The agency’s full announcement (pdf) notes the rules will require that ISPs are a) transparent about what they’re doing, b) have basic systems in place to protect collected data and alert users in case of data breach and c) provide users with opt out technology that actually works.

    • We Read The DOJ’s Latest Apple Filing To Highlight All Of Its Misleading Claims
    • Apple General Counsel Blasts Justice Department For Crazy Filing
    • Irony alert: Adblock will show its 50 million users ads protesting online censorship

      This is slightly ironic. Adblock plans to show advertising to its 50 million users tomorrow for 24 hours protesting online censorship in support of an Amnesty International campaign.

      On March 12, Adblock users will see messages from Edward Snowden, Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei protesting cyber censorship. Each advertisement will appear in the form of banner ads – funnily, what Adblock sets out to remove – and send viewers to longer content from each person.

    • Edward Snowden, Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei protest cyber censorship

      Prominent activists recorded online messages for World Day Against Cyber Censorship, and even teamed up with AdBlock to bring their voices to the public

    • Snowden, Pussy Riot, and Ai Weiwei launch AdBlock campaign to protest censorship

      Ai Weiwei, Edward Snowden, and Pussy Riot have partnered with AdBlock and Amnesty International on an online campaign to protest censorship. The campaign will launch at 4PM ET today and will only be visible to AdBlock users, with messages from the activists displayed where advertisements would normally be placed.

      The global campaign will run throughout the day on March 12th, which is the World Day against Cyber Censorship. It also comes amid heightened concerns over government surveillance, which have been magnified during Apple’s ongoing standoff with the FBI over encryption and national security. Amnesty International, a London-based rights group, has joined other privacy advocates in supporting Apple, arguing that allowing the government backdoor access to encrypted communications would threaten free speech and security.

    • How JavaScript Functions And Mouse Movements Can Reveal TOR Users’ True Identity

      While TOR software suite promises enhanced privacy and security, researchers have found new ways like TOR user fingerprinting to unmask the users.

    • Obama Administration to Expand Unconstitutional Warrantless NSA Spying on Americans

      Spy agency officials and lawyers are putting together a new set of rules that will allow the National Security Agency to share whatever information it garners from its extensive electronic surveillance efforts about American citizens with other law enforcement agencies, reported the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. No warrants needed.

    • New NSA rules allow agency to share data without privacy protections or terrorism links
    • Twitter Asks Court To Dump Ridiculous Lawsuit Claiming It Provides Material Support For Terrorists

      Back in January, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous case, in which Tamara Fields sued Twitter, after her husband was tragically killed in an ISIS raid last year. Why Twitter? She apparently blames Twitter for the rise of ISIS. She provides no evidence to show that the people who killed her husband (a government contractor for DynCorp International) was killed by people who used Twitter. Or that anything about the attack was related to Twitter. It’s entirely just “ISIS uses Twitter. ISIS killed by husband. Let’s sue Twitter.” As we noted at the time, Section 230 should easily get this lawsuit tossed out quickly, and the company has now filed its Motion to Dismiss. The TL;DR: “Section 230, Section 230, What a stupid lawsuit this is.”

    • High School Students Debate Surveillance in Post-Snowden America

      “Bulk information overload, that’s my favorite argument in debate,” Lena Grossman tells me in between bites of pizza during a short lunch break after winning a round at the Billy Tate Southern Bell Forum, a highly competitive, invitation-only debate competition held annually in Nashville. She thinks the U.S. government vacuums up more digital data than it knows what to do with — which hinders investigations more than it helps. “The evidence is always going to be better. … It’s just unbeatable,” she says. “People are lazy in research sometimes — but the strategies against this argument just don’t exist.”

    • Snowden Calls “Bullshit” on FBI’s Claim It Needs Apple to Unlock iPhone
    • In Bizarre Move, Dianne Feinstein Attacks Tech Companies for Profiting Off Spying on Their Customers

      The only other possibility I can imagine is that the government is trying to expand its access to this proprietary information under PRISM, and providers are balking. Which would be rather interesting.

    • DOJ to Apple: Start Cooperating or You’ll Get the Lavabit Treatment

      DOJ has submitted its response to Apple in the Syed Farook case. Amid invocations of a bunch of ominous precedents — including Dick Cheney’s successful effort to hide his energy task force, Alberto Gonzales effort to use kiddie porn as an excuse to get a subset of all of Google’s web searches, and Aaron Burr’s use of encryption — it included this footnote explaining why it hadn’t just asked for Apple’s source code.

    • DOJ brief in San Bernardino iPhone case ‘sounds like indictment’ – Apple

      The Justice Department has accused Apple of “false” and “corrosive” rhetoric in a court brief over access to the work iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple said the brief contained false accusations and sounded like an indictment.

    • Worried about Apple? California Has a Bill That Would Disable Encryption on All Phones

      Similar proposals have been made by Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who published a white paper [pdf] in November 2015 arguing that law enforcement needs to access the contents of smartphones to solve a range of crimes. A nearly identical bill is also pending in the New York State Assembly.

    • US tech companies feel heat of government pressure

      U.S. tech companies are beginning to feel the heat from government pressure to decrypt customer data.

    • FBI Access to NSA Data Limited, Whatever That Means

      The NSA’s surveillance targets communications abroad, but often captures the activities of Americans who are on the sending or receiving end. A leaked 2008 spy document offers a peek at how the NSA collects some of its information, with hilariously named and highly classified programs like “IRONCHEF” and “ANGRYNEIGHBOR.”

    • Jennifer Walsmith: NSA Eyes Acquisition Innovation Through ‘Skunk Works’ Office, Women-Owned Businesses

      Jennifer Walsmith, senior acquisition executive at the National Security Agency, has said NSA has started to establish a “Skunk Works” or rapid innovation office in an effort to introduce novel approaches to its acquisition process, Federal News Radio reported Wednesday.

      “It’s not for Skunk Works technologies, but rather for Skunk Works just thinking about acquisition,” Walsmith said at a National Defense Industrial Association event in Virginia Wednesday.

      Scott Maucione writes Walsmith noted that the agency has started to reach out to women-owned businesses amid the industrial base concerns that NSA faces.

    • Why the NSA doesn’t support the FBI in the San Bernardino iPhone case
    • Senate Intel encryption bill could come next week

      The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says a bill to give law enforcement access to encrypted data could come as early as next week.

      “I’m hopeful,” Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) told The Hill before a Wednesday vote.

      The long-awaited bill — in the works since last fall’s terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. — is expected to force companies to comply with court orders seeking locked communications.

      The FBI and law enforcement have long warned that encryption is making it more difficult to uncover criminal and terrorist plots.

      Burr, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been drafting legislation to address the issue with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the committee’s ranking member.

    • Senators Burr And Feinstein, Once Again, Threatening New Bill To Backdoor Encryption

      They’ve been promising it for months now, without ever actually doing anything, but Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr (the two top members of the Senate Intelligence Committee) now insist that they’re finally ready to release their anti-encryption bill.

    • Senator Feinstein Revives Stupid Idea That Internet Companies Are ‘Materially Supporting Terrorism’ If ISIS Members Use Their Sites

      Last year, FBI Director James Comey floated a ridiculous idea that retweeting ISIS tweets could be seen as “material support” for terrorism. Indeed, an American teenager got sentenced to 11 years in jail for pro-ISIS tweets, with the “material support” being that some of those tweets linked to pages that taught people how to use Bitcoin. Some have taken this idea even further, and argued that internet companies can be slapped with “material support for terrorism” claims or charges if they let ISIS members or other terrorists make use of their services.

    • FBI and Access to NSA Data on Americans

      The FBI has quietly revised its rules for searching data involving Americans’ communications collected by the National Security Agency.

      The classified revisions were accepted by the secret U.S. FISA court that governs surveillance, under a set of powers colloquially known as Section 702. That is the portion of law that authorizes the NSA’s sweeping PRISM program, among other atrocities.

      PRISM, and other surveillance programs, first came to mainstream public attention with the information leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, preceeded by other NSA whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake and Bill Binney.

    • FBI quietly changes rules on how it handles NSA data, to the benefit of privacy
    • FBI quietly changes its privacy rules for accessing NSA data on Americans
    • FBI and Access to NSA Data on Americans
    • While You Were Watching Donald Trump, Obama Expanded Domestic Spying … Again
    • A federal judge just blew the cover off the NSA’s worst-kept secret
    • Apple Engineering VP: The FBI Wants Us To Make Everyone Less Safe
    • White House Apparently Not Necessarily In Agreement With FBI’s Position On Encryption Backdoors

      There is a (reasonable) tendency to argue that in this big fight over encryption backdoors and “going dark” and “should Apple help the FBI” to assume that the various DOJ/FBI efforts to force backdoors into encryption are the official position of the Obama administration. After all, the Justice Department is a part of the administration and the head of the DOJ, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, reports to President Obama. And the FBI is a part of the DOJ. But it’s also been quite clear for some time that there are a variety of opinions within the White House on these issues, with many outside of the DOJ not supporting backdooring encryption at all. In fact, many are actively opposed to such ideas. And now it’s reaching the stage where people are starting to push stories that the White House is not at all happy with FBI Director James Comey and his crusade on this issue.

    • Warrant For FBI’s Hacking Technique Makes No Mention Of Hacking Or Malware

      Motherboard has obtained a copy of the warrant used by the FBI to deploy its NIT (Network Investigative Tool) to obtain information about visitors to child porn site “Playpen.” This site was seized by the FBI and left running for two weeks while it gathered information.

    • Surprise! NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism

      This basically formalizes what was already happening under the radar. We’ve known for a couple of years now that the Drug Enforcement Administration and the IRS were getting information from the NSA. Because that information was obtained without a warrant, the agencies were instructed to engage in “parallel construction” when explaining to courts and defense attorneys how the information had been obtained. If you think parallel construction just sounds like a bureaucratically sterilized way of saying big stinking lie, well, you wouldn’t be alone. And it certainly isn’t the only time that that national security apparatus has let law enforcement agencies benefit from policies that are supposed to be reserved for terrorism investigations in order to get around the Fourth Amendment, then instructed those law enforcement agencies to misdirect, fudge and outright lie about how they obtained incriminating information — see the Stingray debacle. This isn’t just a few rogue agents. The lying has been a matter of policy. We’re now learning that the feds had these agreements with police agencies all over the country, affecting thousands of cases.

  • Civil Rights

    • How About an Election Without Polls?

      Sen. Bernie Sanders won the Democratic presidential primary in Michigan, defeating Hillary Clinton … and all the pollsters. Election statistician Nate Silver wrote that Sanders’ Michigan victory “will count as among the greatest polling errors in primary history.” Imagine if we had an election season without polls. Instead, the energy, investigation and money should be spent delving into candidates’ records, whether they’re a businessman like Donald Trump or they’re politicians like Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. This will lead to a better informed, more engaged electorate.

    • CNN’s Trump Apologist Blames Violence At Trump Rallies On Protesters And “The American Left”
    • Trump Supporter On CNN Compliments Man Charged With Assaulting Protester For Getting “Good Exercise”
    • Trump Defends Comments Encouraging Violence At Rallies: Some Protesters Are ‘Bad Dudes’

      A day after a black man was punched in the face by a white Donald Trump rally attendee and then wrestled to the ground by police officers, Trump shrugged off any responsibility and expressed sympathy for the anger his supports feel.

    • Trump Supporter Sucker Punches Black Protester

      On Wednesday night, a black man, Rakeem Jones, protested a Donald Trump rally in North Carolina. As he was being escorted out of the rally by men in “Sheriff’s Office” uniforms, Jones was punched in the face by a Trump supporter wearing a cowboy hat. The officers then quickly wrestled Jones to the ground, pinned his arms behind his back, and led him out of the venue.

    • Video: Black Man Punched In Face At Trump Rally

      The now-common violent outbreaks at Donald Trump rallies escalated further at an event in Fayetteville, North Carolina on Wednesday. Footage that surfaced Thursday morning showed a black man getting punched in the face by a white rally attendee and then wrestled to the ground by police officers.

      The protesters were being led out of the rally by men who were wearing sheriff’s uniforms when Rakeem Jones flipped his middle fingers to the crowd. In the video, he’s punched in the face by a white man in a cowboy hat. The crowd cheers, and Jones is pushed to the ground by the officers and handcuffed.

    • Turkey’s Path to Dictatorship

      Throttling Turkey’s democracy, President Erdogan seized an opposition newspaper that dared reveal his clandestine arming of jihadists seeking to overthrow neighboring Syria, as Alon Ben-Meir explains.

    • The Life and Legacy of Berta Cáceres

      She was highly critical of US Americans for our lack of that coherence. She once led an anti-oppression training for an organization I was running, in which she asked us to examine whether we were Caesars or artisans. She meant whether our practice – not just our statements – aligned us with the oppressors or with the oppressed, and whether we were promoting the grassroots or ourselves as leaders. For a long time after, the refrigerator that Berta and I shared held her line drawing of a thonged Roman sandal. She also commented to me once that the problem with US Americans is our attachment to comfort.

    • Hillary Clinton, Stalwart Friend of World’s Worst Despots, Attacks Sanders’ Latin American Activism

      At Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders for praising Fidel Castro in the 1980s, as well as for standing with Central American governments and rebel groups targeted by Ronald Reagan’s brutal covert wars. “You know,” said the former secretary of state, “if the values are that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill people for expressing their opinions, for expressing freedom of speech, that is not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere.”

      To defend her remarks, Clinton’s faithful Good Democratic supporters began instantly spouting rhetoric that sounded like a right-wing, red-baiting Cold War cartoon; in other words, these Clinton-defending Democrats sounded very much like this:

      Vehement opposition to Reagan’s covert wars in Central America, as well as to the sadistic and senseless embargo of Cuba, were once standard liberal positions. As my colleague Jeremy Scahill, observing the reaction of Clinton supporters during the debate, put it in a series of tweets: “The U.S. sponsored deaths squads that massacred countless central and Latin Americans, murdered nuns and priests, assassinated an Archbishop. I bet commie Sanders was even against Reagan’s humanitarian mining of Nicaraguan waters & supported subsequent war crimes judgment vs. U.S. Have any of these Hillarybots heard of the Contra death squads? Or is it just that whatever Hillary says must be defended at all costs? The Hillarybots attacking Sanders over Nicaragua should be ashamed of themselves.”

    • We support Jeremy Corbyn on decriminalisation

      Prostitution is rising along with poverty in Britain. To protect women both the criminalisation of sex work and austerity must be reversed.

    • MSNBC Cuts Off Florida Governor’s Mic After He Refuses To Denounce Islamophobia

      Scott’s refusal to disavow wholesale condemnations of the Islamic faith is especially surprising given that Florida is home to a number of established Muslim communities in places such as Tampa Bay. The governor did mention to Scarborough that Muslims and other groups “live peacefully” in his state, but even that statement seems divorced from the lived reality of many Florida Muslims: since November 2015, Muslims in the Sunshine State have fallen victim to at least four anti-Islam incidents, including attacks on mosques, shots fired at Muslim homes, and unsettling threats to burn down Islamic houses of worship and murder Muslim children.

    • Allah vs atheism: ‘Leaving Islam was the hardest thing I’ve done’

      “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done – telling my observant family that I was having doubts. My mum was shocked; she began to cry. It was very painful for her. When she realised I actually meant it, she cut communication with me,” said Ms Farah. “She was suspicious of me being in contact with my brothers and sisters. She didn’t want me to poison their heads in any way. I felt like a leper and I lived in fear. As long as they knew where I was, I wasn’t safe.”

    • Israeli Police Officer Who Shot Wounded Palestinian Suspect Could Face Charges

      Israeli and Palestinian journalists and rights activists are apparently not the only ones wondering if video recorded in the immediate aftermath of a knife attack in Israel showed the suspected attacker being executed by the police after he had already been subdued.

      A division of Israel’s justice ministry that investigates police officers is reportedly examining the video, recorded by a witness to the mayhem near the seaside in Jaffa yesterday, when Bashar Masalha, a 22-year-old laborer from the West Bank, stabbed a dozen civilians, including an American tourist who died of his injuries and a fellow Palestinian. The 29-second clip shows the suspected attacker lying on the ground as two officers train their guns on him, and an unseen bystander urges one of them to shoot Masalha in the head.

    • Salon With Robert Scheer: John Kiriakou Challenges the American Injustice System

      After that, while working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he ran into trouble because of an interview he gave to a reporter for The New York Times, in which he revealed the name of a former non-covert CIA agent who talked about his CIA job on social media. This disclosure led to his prosecution in 2012 for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act—a 1982 amendment to the National Security Act of 1947—and was payback for his admission to ABC that the United States waterboarded prisoners. Kiriakou served more than two years in prison. He was released in 2015 and now is working to reform the security state in America.

    • Nearly Half of Israeli Jews want to Expel Palestinian-Israelis from Country

      Nearly half of the over 6 million Israeli Jews want to expel from the country the 1.6 million citizens of Palestinian heritage, most of them Muslims, according to a just-released Pew Forum poll

      This is a startling statistic. It would be as though half of Flemish Belgians wanted to expel the Walloons or French-speakers from the south of the country. There isn’t any member of the European Union where a large plurality of the population wants to ethnically cleanse a fifth of their co-citizens.

    • The American Fascist

      I’ve been reluctant to use the “f” word to describe Donald Trump because it’s especially harsh, and it’s too often used carelessly.

      But Trump has finally reached a point where parallels between his presidential campaign and the fascists of the first half of the 20th century – lurid figures such as Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, and Francisco Franco – are too evident to overlook.

      It’s not just that Trump recently quoted Mussolini (he now calls that tweet inadvertent) or that he’s begun inviting followers at his rallies to raise their right hands in a manner chillingly similar to the Nazi “Heil” solute (he dismisses such comparison as “ridiculous.”)

      The parallels go deeper.

    • The Transformative Power of Democratic Uprisings

      Major modern movements suggest, they point out, that Bernie stands a far better chance than Hillary of altering the grim status quo in Washington; that today’s activists fighting for immigrant rights as well as those battling the forces of climate change can, in fact, make a major difference — even against long odds, great doubts, and business-as-usual Beltway intransigence.

      [...]

      Never before has humanity depended so fully for the survival of us all on a social movement being willing to bet on impracticality.

    • Ex-ADL chief: Trump’s ‘raise your hand’ gambit was deliberate, Nazi-style ‘fascist gesture’

      Former Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman excoriated Donald Trump for urging his supporters at a weekend rally to raise their right hands and promise to support him, a gambit Foxman said evoked echoes of Hitler salutes from Nazi rallies in the 1930s and ’40s.

      “Let’s do a pledge. Who likes me in this room?” the Republican presidential candidate asked a large crowd Saturday in Orlando, Florida. “Raise your right hand: ‘I do solemnly swear that I — no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions, if there’s hurricanes or whatever — will vote, on or before the 12th for Donald J. Trump for president.’” (Trump misstated the date of the Florida primary, which will be held on March 15.)

      As the audience enthusiastically complied with his request, the candidate told them: “Don’t forget you all raised your hands. You swore. Bad things happen if you don’t live up to what you just did.”

      For Foxman, who was born in Poland in 1940 and was saved from the Nazis by his Catholic nanny, watching Trump whip up his supporters in this fashion was extremely disturbing.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Congress Keeps Holding Repeated, Pointless Hearings Just To Punish The FCC For Standing Up To ISPs On Net Neutrality

      When the rules were approved you might recall that net neutrality opponents also tried to claim that the White House “improperly influenced” the creation of the rules, since the White House vocally supported the Title II approach in November of 2014, and Wheeler voiced his support for Title II in February of 2015. This, net neutrality opponents argued, was clear evidence of an unholy cabal.

    • ICANN Marrakesh Meeting Reaches Milestone For IANA Transition

      For nearly two decades, the IANA has been managed by ICANN under a contract with the NTIA.

    • Netflix’s Assault On VPNs Is Stupid, Annoying And Erodes User Security

      Earlier this year Netflix surprised everybody by announcing it was expanding into 130 additional countries, bringing its total footprint to 190 markets. But alongside the announcement came the less-welcome news that Netflix was also planning to crack down more on “content tourism,” or the act of using a VPN to trick Netflix into letting you watch content specifically licensed for other countries. If you take a look at what’s available per country, the motivation to use a VPN to watch content not available in your market becomes abundantly obvious.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Middle Earth Enterprises Attempts To Block Wine Importer From Using The Word ‘Hobbit’

        We’ve seen all kinds of strange trademark actions revolving around the works of Tolkien, including threats against holiday campsites and pubs. The dual threat of dumb in these disputes always ends up being both the protectionist aims against businesses that don’t operate anywhere near the literary or theatrical realms in which Tolkien’s works normally operate and the sketchy history of the term “hobbit” itself, with it being rather clear that Tolkien both didn’t invent the word itself and actually based his hobbit characters on previous fictional works. This of course hasn’t precluded anyone with any kind of ownership stake in rights associated with Tolkien from sending out threats to anyone and everyone that in any way uses the term.

03.10.16

Links 10/3/2016: Qubes OS 3.1, Linux Kernel 4.4.5

Posted in News Roundup at 8:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Elastic Stack makes searching easy, fast and open source

    The Elastic stack is the search engine you’ve been using without knowing it. Powering some popular and big names – Facebook and Netflix, Atlassian, SEEK and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to name just five – Elastic provides an open source and freely available operating system-agnostic search engine. It retrieves data at high-speed, freeing a business from the arduous task of managing mass volumes of data to actually working with meaningful, insightful information. It opens the possibilities of exploring and finding trends, something which can only happen when your basic reporting requirements are so well met that they are no longer a pressing issue.

  • 9 open source alternatives to Picasa

    Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve had to recommend alternatives to a discontinued Google product; three years ago, we helped you find open source alternatives to Google Reader for your RSS reading needs.

    While there’s no word yet on whether Google will release the code for Picasa under an open source license now that it has been discontinued, fortunately for you, there are many open source alternatives already out there to help you with your photo organizing and editing needs.

  • Open Source Initiative says standards aren’t open unless they protect security researchers and interoperability

    The OSI’s new document, Principles of DRM Nonaggression for Open Standards, deals with standards bodies that are dealing with DRM, as the World Wide Web Consortium has been doing, rather controversially. The problem is that DRM is protected by laws like the DMCA, that prohibit breaking DRM even for legitimate reasons — like making interoperable products or doing basic security research. This is the opposite of how open standards are supposed to work: an open standard should be implementable by anyone, and there should be no barriers to improving it by pointing out security problems with it.

  • Standards Are Only Open If They Protect Security and Interoperability

    The Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit that certifies open source licenses, has adopted an important principle about standards, DRM, and openness, and just in time, too.

    The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which makes the core standards that the Internet runs on, is in the midst of a long, contentious effort to add “DRM” (Digital Rights Management1) to HTML5, the next version of the Web. Laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which has analogs all over the world) give companies the power to make legal threats against people engaged in important, legitimate activities. Because the DMCA regulates breaking DRM, even for legal reasons, companies use it to threaten and silence security researchers who embarrass them by pointing out their mistakes, and to shut down competitors who improve their products by adding legitimate features, add-ons, parts, or service options. The Web relies on the distributed efforts of independent security researchers, and its historic strength has been the ability of companies and individuals to innovate without permission, even when they were disrupting an existing business.

  • Docker Claims Performance Advantage Over Kubernetes

    Docker had its Swarm orchestration product tested against Kubernetes and claims the results show a 5X advantage in speed to initiation.

  • Is Open Source Eating the World?

    The phrase, “Software is eating the world,” first showed up in 2011. In 2015, open source took its rightful seat at the table.

    “If the theory pervades deeper – and software does eat the world – then surely open source software will swallow it, right?” Forbes hesitantly prodded in early 2015. Later in the year they more confidently thrusted with a piece titled It’s Actually Open Source Software That’s Eating the World.

    This isn’t a movement spearheaded by a single voice. Wired joined with articles like, Open Source Software Went Nuclear This Year. Replete with quotes like: “This is not just a turning point, but a tipping point,” says Brandon Keepers, the head of open source at GitHub

  • ‘Black magic’ mystery of open computing being dispelled for consumers
  • The evolution of open source and the data center

    Society today runs on information, and the tech world is no small part of this data revolution. However, it’s easy to forget that these programs and online services people use every day all run on black boxes, blinking away in a room somewhere. This is the data center, the core of computing technology in the modern world. While data centers have traditionally run on software and hardware from monolithic vendors, new technologies from the open-source community are creeping in under the door.

  • Events

    • Ultimate unconference survival guide

      If there is one area in which open source has never suffered it is a lack of events. From your big professional conferences right down to your friendly, local meetups, there is just something so delightfully fun about getting together in person to share ideas, learn from each other, and have fun.

      One of the most popular types of event are unconferences, and there are more and more of them cropping up all over the world.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Firefox 45.0 Lands in All Supported Ubuntu OSes Without GTK3 Integration

        As reported yesterday, Mozilla pushed the Firefox 45.0 web browser to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

        Firefox 45.0 is not a worthy update, but we still recommend users to upgrade as soon as possible if they want to receive the latest security patches, which keep their data and privacy safe from prying eyes or online scammers.

        In the last 24 hours, since our previous blog post with the direct download links for Firefox 45.0, we have noticed that several popular Linux kernel-based operating systems have updated their Firefox packages to the new version.

        Ubuntu is, of course, among them, and users of the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) should know that they need to update their systems to Mozilla Firefox 45.0 as soon as possible.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Ubuntu Choice, Linux Movies, LibreOffice Documentation

      The big story today was the decision by Ubuntu developers to discontinue providing AMD proprietary graphic drivers. Olivier Hallot has been appointed to lead the new LibreOffice documentation project and Jun Auza has a round-up of Hollywood movies that use Linux in some way. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is heading for Qualcomm ARM server and Linux is back on PlayStations.

    • LibreOffice documentation, help and beyond

      Today, I’d like to talk about what is going on at the LibreOffice documentation project. My name is Olivier Hallot and I am a French national living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since my infancy. Back in 2002, I got involved in the OOo project leading the software translation team for Brazilian Portuguese. My background includes being an executive in two of the major software companies before going on my own and joining the open source community.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Microsoft is removing Android, iOS, and Windows support from Visual Studio Application Insights [Ed: After embrace and extend… extinguish]

      Microsoft today announced that it will be cutting support for Android, iOS, Windows Store, and Windows Phone app in the Application Insights tool for its Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Application Insights, which offers analytics on performance and usage, will stop accepting new apps for those platforms on April 15, and on June 15, the feature will stop showing data for apps on those platforms.

    • How We Build Code at Netflix

      How does Netflix build code before it’s deployed to the cloud? While pieces of this story have been told in the past, we decided it was time we shared more details. In this post, we describe the tools and techniques used to go from source code to a deployed service serving movies and TV shows to more than 75 million global Netflix members.

    • R you ready? Open source stats come to Visual Studio [Ed: As expected, Microsoft is embracing, extending, extinguishing R to make it tied to proprietary software]

      To get cracking on the business of shipping code, devs need Visual Studio, RTVS, and Microsoft R Open. The division between the last two is necessary for licensing reasons: R is licensed under the GLPv2, while Redmond’s favourite open source license is the MIT license.

    • How to DCEPT your Attackers [Ed: Windows]

      Catching attackers in their tracks sounds harder than it actually could be. Last week MSSP Dell Secureworks launched what it called the “open source honeytoken tripwire” DCEPT, to prevent those attacks which do not use malware.

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing

    • ICFJ Knight Fellows share 12 open source tools for any newsroom

      During their fellowships, the ICFJ Knight Fellows help spur a culture of media innovation and experimentation. Through their work, fellows develop and build a variety of new tools and technologies that have helped revolutionize newsrooms across the globe.

      The tools range from HackDash, a platform that helps keep track of ideas and participants during hackathons and other collaborative projects, to Yo Quiero Saber, which helps voters compare their views with those of political candidates. In addition to the newsrooms from which they originated, the tools can help media organizations everywhere adapt to the latest technologies and better engage their readers.

    • Designers release open source manifesto heralding a 3D fashion revolution

      Dutch fashion designers Martijn van Strien​ and Vera du Pont​ have proposed a “third industrial revolution” and “democratisation of production” using 3D printing and other technology.

      Published in a limited edition of 20 copies and available to order online for free, the duo’s Open Source Fashion Manifesto shifts our gaze to what the designers deem the three most important issues facing fashion today – our dwindling planetary resources, the disposability of clothing and the questionable conditions under which that clothing is produced ­–­ only to propose a complete shake-up.

  • Programming

    • Eclipse Che Rethinks Open Source IDEs by Leveraging Containers, Cloud

      he Eclipse Foundation, which develops open source programming tools for developers, has rolled out what it says is a next-generation development platform that leverages the cloud, containers and a plug-in framework in the form of Eclipse Che.

    • SAP lures developers with Eclipse Che IDE

      SAP continues to demonstrate its commitment to open source with the announcement at EclipseCon that SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA is based on Eclipse Che. Eclipse Che is an open source developer workspace server and cloud IDE.

      This next edition complements the existing SAP Web IDE. It will allow developers familiar with the workspace to develop applications, database models and user interfaces on SAP HANA software, including the development of SAP Fiori apps. SAP along with Codenvy are two of the first companies to offer the new workspace to developers. For those developers and companies looking to develop their own environment the open source is available on Github.

    • SAP web IDE for HANA is based on Eclipse Che

      No but seriously, SAP has announced the availability of its SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Sweden updates list of mandatory IT standards

      The ‘Open IT standards’ list includes only those standards that fit the open standard definition in the European Interoperability Framework (version 1.0). The Swedish National Procurement Services (Statens inköpscentral, NPS) asked the University of Skövde to check which IT standards meet the definition’s requirements.

    • Making Use Of Vulkan’s Validation Layers

      AMD’s Daniel Rakos has written a blog post for GPUOpen concerning Vulkan’s validation layers and making use of them for debugging and testing your code using this new high-performance graphics API.

      The plug-able validation layers is one of the big design differences compared to OpenGL. Rakos’ blog post on the matter covers different error types, preparing code for the validation support, and more.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Zika Virus R&D: No Vaccine Before 3 To 5 Years, Sample Sharing Needs Incentives

      International experts convened by the World Health Organization this week on the Zika virus said vaccine development is a priority for the future but the most pressing need is to get diagnostic and prevention tools. Over 60 groups are hard at work on experimental products, according to the WHO, while a system of incentives to share virus samples is being considered.

      At a 9 March press briefing, Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director-general, Health Systems and Innovation, said the meeting took place from 7-9 March, and provided the first global platform for scientists working on Zika virology and immunology, as well as clinicians, product developers, regulators, funders and policy experts, “to take stock of the R&D (Research and Development) pipeline.”

    • WHO Welcomes UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel, Offers Suggestions

      The World Health Organization has provided a list of suggestions to the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, highlighting WHO activities in this area and making suggestions on areas the WHO has not yet been able to complete. It also describes several new proposals by WHO, including a global “fair pricing forum,” a pooled health product R&D fund, and a global antibiotic research and development facility.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • encrypt all the things: blogs
    • Changes to password policies

      In reaction to the recent attacks on Linux Mint, many measures were taken to reduce the risk of future intrusions, but we also worked on the eventuality of being hacked again. In particular, additional measures were taken to detect issues faster, to reduce their impact and to recover from them more efficiently. Today, we’re implementing a final set of measures aimed at lowering the value of the information stored on our servers.

    • The rise of IoT hacking: New dangers, new solutions

      The explosive growth of the Internet of Things has created a host of new threats for the enterprise. Here’s how hackers are targeting your connected devices and what you can do about it.

    • Google Offers Tool to Help Evaluate Vendor Security

      The vendor security evaluation framework provides questions that organizations need to ask to accurately assess a third-party’s security and privacy readiness, Google said.

      Google has released a framework to open source that it implements internally to evaluate the security posture of the numerous vendors it uses for various services each year.

    • A new name and roadmap for the Let’s Encrypt client

      Yesterday, the Let’s Encrypt CA issued its millionth certificate. This is a perfect occasion for us to talk about some plans for the CA and client software through the rest of 2016.

      In April of this year, all of the clients for Let’s Encrypt will be renamed to be clearly distinct from the CA service offered by ISRG. The Let’s Encrypt python client has primarily been an EFF project, so we’ll start hosting it to make that clear.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • “Moderate Rebels” Use Yellow Phosphorus on Kurds in Aleppo

      Cameron’s “moderate rebels” – Saudi supplied Wahhabi jihadists – have this past 48 hours been bombing civilian areas of Aleppo with yellow phosphorus. The BBC, which went to such extraordinary lengths to fake reports of chemical attacks by Assad, has not reported these genuine chemical attacks at all. Probably because it is too difficult to explain not just why Cameron’s allies are using chemical weapons – and who gave them the chemical weapons – but also why these “friendly” jihadists are attacking Cameron’s other allies, the Kurds, all during a ceasefire.

      This video of Robert Stuart is a must see. Let me pin my colours to the mast and say that I am absolutely convinced that the BBC did deliberately and knowingly fake evidence of chemical attacks.

      [...]

      It is clever propaganda because careful analysis of the text reveals a story very different to the overall picture being deliberately portrayed. Just after the women appear, the reporter slips in that the hardship is caused by hoarding by rebels – i.e. it is actually David Cameron’s moderate forces, not the government, who are causing suffering to the civilians. But you would have to be following very closely and analysing very carefully to pick up on that.

      The BBC really has become one of the more outrageous vehicles of government propaganda on the international scene.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • New FOIA Documents Confirm FBI Used Dirtboxes on Planes Without Any Policies or Legal Guidance

      EFF recently received records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Justice for information on how the US Marshals—and perhaps other agencies—have been flying small, fixed-wing Cessna planes equipped with “dirtboxes”: IMSI catchers that imitate cell towers and are able to capture the locational data of tens of thousands of cell phones during a single flight. The records we received confirm the agencies were using these invasive surveillance tools with little oversight or legal guidance.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Shocker: WaPo Investigates Itself for Anti-Sanders Bias, Finds There Was None

      Right off, the framing is inaccurate: The scope wasn’t “this week,” it was a 16-hour period after the Flint, Michigan, debate—and following a weekend in which Sanders won three of four state contests with Hillary Clinton. The do-or-die stakes for Sanders in Michigan couldn’t have been higher, and how one of the most influential newspapers in the United States covered his debate performance and his primary showing was important.

      [...]

      At a moment when even the Koch brothers are coming out against overincarceration, a story that thumbnails it as “releasing lots of criminals” can indeed be considered a negative framing, if not more importantly one that shortchanges readers’ intelligence and understanding.

      Still, note that “negative” is not intended as the opposite of “factual.” When the George Bush Sr. campaign focused on Michael Dukakis’ prison furlough program—the so-called “Willie Horton” issue—its attacks were nominally fact-based. Yet many people saw them as an unfair exploitation of racial fears, and it was relevant to address them on those terms.

      Bigger picture: The reason the graphic and FAIR’s blog post went so viral is because people can intuitively look at a litany of stories over such a short period and see bias. Nature made us pattern-seeking mammals for a reason, and the Washington Post’s post-debate coverage post-debate displays an obvious pattern.

    • It should be over for Hillary: Party elites and MSNBC can’t prop her up after Bernie’s Michigan miracle

      You wouldn’t know it from watching TV last night or reading the national papers this morning but Bernie Sanders’ Michigan win ranks among the greatest upsets in presidential primary history.

      Should he win the nomination it will be go down as the biggest upset of any kind in American political history.

      If he wins the election it will change the fundamental direction of the nation and the world.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Five things about David Cameron and sovereignty

      Here are five things to remember when you hear the Prime Minister praise the “sovereignty of parliament”.

      First, ministers and officials are encouraged to use statutory instruments as much as possible, which do not get proper parliamentary scrutiny.

      Second, the government has sought to cut the “Short money” which funds the scrutiny work of opposition parties in parliament.

      Third, the government is seeking to push through the Investigatory Powers Bill through parliament at speed, just as it did with the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act.

      Fourth, when the House of Lords (sensibly) rejected cuts to certain benefits (which were later dropped), Cameron sought to limit the power of the Lords.

    • This Women’s History Month, Celebrate Title VII for Banning Sex Discrimination in the Workplace

      The last-minute addition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made a few giant leaps toward gender parity possible.

    • Univision Asked Hillary Clinton And Bernie Sanders If Donald Trump Is A Racist. Here’s What They Said.

      “And let us not forget that several years ago Trump was in the middle of the so-called Birther movement trying to delegitimize the President of the United States of America,” Sanders continued, to applause. “My dad was born in Poland and I know a little bit about the immigrant experience. Nobody has ever asked me for my birth certificate. Maybe it has something to do with the color of my skin.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • German court refuses amendments filed on appeal

      Patent attorneys in Europe have become accustomed in recent years to the EPO appeal boards refusing to consider on appeal claim amendments that could have been, but were not, filed in first instance proceedings.

      Katfriend Heiko Sendrowski tells us that this approach is now being adopted by the German courts also. Just so we have our acronyms straight, the tale involves nullity proceedings which were decided at first instance in the Federal Patents Court, or Bundespatentgericht (BPatG) and which were appealed to the Federal Court of Justice, or Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) which is in effect the Supreme Court other than in constitutional matters.

    • Gene Sequencing Giant Tries To Use Patents To Block Rising Star’s Pocket-Sized Unit From US

      Last year, Techdirt wrote about how one of the most significant breakthroughs in the field of genomics is already embroiled in a nasty patent battle. But it’s not just the fundamental techniques in this field that are being held back by selfish attempts to “own” key technologies.

    • Copyrights

      • Supreme Court Declines To Hear Batmobile Copyright Case

        We wrote last year about a copyright dispute between DC Comics and guy by the name of Mark Towle, who had been custom producing Batmobiles for Batman fans. Mike’s analysis in that post is wonderfully detailed and you should read it if you want a deep dive into the specifics of how the court ruled, but I will summarize it here for you as well. The 9th Circuit ruled that the Batmobile was deserving of the same copyright protections as other fictional characters, despite it being a depiction of an inanimate object, and it completely ignored the entire expression/idea dichotomy that is supposed to govern copyright law. That dichotomy can be explained as giving copyright protection to specific expressions of an idea without protecting the idea itself. For instance, the depiction of HAL the homicidal computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey may be covered under copyright, but the idea of a homicidal artificial intelligence is not.

      • Usenet Provider and BREIN Continue Battle Over Piracy Keyword Filter

        The legal dispute between Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group BREIN and Usenet provider News-Service.com will continue after a Dutch court delayed its decision over a requested piracy filter. The court wants both parties to answer detailed questions about the efficacy and costs associated with such a filtering mechanism.

03.09.16

Links 9/3/2016: Tails 2.2, Developer Preview Of “Android N”

Posted in News Roundup at 5:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Flash and Open Source in Datacenter: The Next Frontier

    Open Source Stacks: Both cloud providers and hyperscale companies have driven the use of open source in the data center. They have made it ready for production environments at scale. This creates an abundance of available open source projects for use in the modern data center with reference models to emulate.

  • Open Source Mathematica Compatible Mathics 0.9

    Mathematica is a big powerful math package, but what do you do when you can’t justify its cost? Mathics is an open source math package that has just reached version 0.9 and it is a possible alternative.

    The Mathics project is small compared to the resources that Wolfram can throw at Mathematica so don’t expect a full clone of the commercial program. However, it is close enough for many purposes.

  • Open Source SDN Orchestration: Real Time OSS Foundation for ICT Service Agility

    Next-generation networking technologies such as SDN, NFV and cloud computing are enabling autonomous, real-time telecom operations. However, many conventional operational support systems (OSS) are based on proprietary software, which leads to fragmented technologies and interoperability issues for carriers.

    To address this issue, The Linux Foundation, China Mobile and Huawei in February held a press conference, together with China Telecom, KT and 10 other industry partners, announcing the OPEN-Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O) to develop the first open source software framework and orchestrator.

  • Open source is programming the digital future

    What do Uber, Facebook, Alibaba, and AirBnB all have in common? They’re all digital-first businesses and new leaders in long-established industries. They’re proof that every industry is going digital, and at tremendous speed. Consider this:

    “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate,” writes Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media.

  • Events

    • The twisted road through right-to-left language support

      English is written left to right. Hebrew is written right to left. We know that. Browsers—for the most part—know that too, just like they know that the default directionality of a web page is left-to-right (LTR), and that if there is a setting that explicitly defines the direction to right-to-left, the page should flip like a mirror. Browsers are smart like that. Mostly.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Firefox 45 Removes Tab Groups, Provides Security Updates

        Mozilla provides 21 security advisories for its Firefox 45 browser. New features in the browser include improvements to the Firefox Hello communication tool.
        Mozilla today released the Firefox 45 Web browser, which provides users with incremental feature updates and security fixes.

      • Updates to Firefox Hello Beta

        Firefox Hello Beta is a communication tool that lets you share tabs you’re browsing in Firefox with others and chat over video or text, free and without needing an account or login. Firefox Hello Beta in Windows, Mac and Linux helps you discuss and make decisions about anything online by sharing the website you’re browsing in your conversation. This makes it easier and faster to do things like to shop online together with friends, plan a vacation with the family or collaborate on work with a colleague.

      • Encryption, Journalism and Free Expression

        Over the past several weeks, Mozilla has been running an educational campaign about encryption. We believe it’s essential for everyday Internet users to better understand the technology that helps keep the Web a more secure platform.

        So far, we’ve explored encryption’s role in helping protect users’ personal, intimate information. We’ve created an animated short that uses plain language to explain how encryption works. And we’ve expressed our support for Apple in its ongoing case against the FBI.

        Today, we’re spotlighting how encryption can support not only our personal security, but also how it can play a role in promoting values like free expression that most of us hold dear.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Talligent Survey Points to More OpenStack Adoption, but Security is an Issue

      Talligent, which focuses on cost and capacity management solutions for OpenStack and hybrid clouds, has announced the results of its inaugural ‘2016 State of OpenStack Report,’ an independent survey focused on identifying the key use cases, barriers and what’s driving OpenStack adoption.

      Survey results were commissioned by Talligent through media firms CloudCow and VMblog, and the State of OpenStack Report surveyed 647 virtualization and cloud IT leaders from across the globe. The most notable finding was about shifts from evaluation of OpenStack to concrete usage: Respondents stated they expect use of OpenStack to quickly expand beyond development environments, with lab growth moving from 43 percent to 89 percent and QA/Test to grow from 47 percent to 91 percent, both within the next 12 months.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Java evangelist leaves Oracle to save Java

      Java evangelist Reza Rahman has left Oracle, to help save Java.

      Rahman writes, on an Oracle blog, that he is “… certain that this is the way I personally can best help continue to advance the Java and Java EE communities.”

      On his personal blog he’s more candid, saying he joined Oracle in part because he’d have the chance to work with Cameron Purdy, once senior veep of development at Big Red.

  • CMS

    • A Drupal-based platform for collaborative research

      Collaborating on scholarly research projects can sometimes become complicated and disorganized. For example, using Flickr for sharing and commenting on images while communicating via email and editing documents together in Google Docs works, but it places information about the research in way too many places.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming

    • Help us integrate GitLab and the Open Science Framework

      For years, the benefits of open source code development have been self-evident to the software development community: Transparency leads to collaboration, and collaboration leads to better and more secure code. The scientific community is just starting to understand these benefits.

      The growing open science movement is using these same lessons to make the scientific process more transparent, so that research findings will be more reproducible. In order to realize the benefits of open science, we must use a wide set of research tools to enable transparency, which will lead to increased discoverability, reuse, and collaboration.

      To that end, the Center for Open Science (COS) is funding the development of an integration between GitLab and the Open Science Framework (OSF), and is seeking interested members of the open source community to contribute to this effort.

    • Software dev 101: ‘The best time to understand how your system works is when it is dying’

      William Hill is a Java shop; but its next-generation bet settlement system under development is written in Erlang, which is designed for concurrency. “The syntax is simple,” said Stevenson, “and the supervisor hierarchy makes it really nice to work with.”

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Local government and GDS open consultation for common digital standard

      The Government Digital Service (GDS) is asking council staff and other interested parties for their views on a draft standard for delivering digital services.

      The draft local government digital service standard has 18 key recommendations, including creating a service using the agile, iterative and user-centred methods set out in the Government Service Design Manual, using open source tools, making source code open where possible, and using open standards where available.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Gilead Solvaldi Case Reveals Patent-Health Fissures In India

      Are patient groups, health activists and manufacturers of low-cost generic drugs always on the same page? Do India’s generic companies think alike? The short answer: not necessarily, though their interests have overlapped on many occasions.

      Both questions are once again being debated in India in the wake of the patent opposition hearings in case involving sofosbuvir (brand name Sovaldi).

      Last month, the Indian Patent Office in Delhi heard arguments by several parties on why US pharmaceutical Gilead Sciences’ patent application for the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi should be rejected. Sovaldi costs $1,000 per pill in the United States.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Limit the Next President’s Power to Wage Drone Warfare

      WHEN Barack Obama took office as the reluctant heir to George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” he renounced some of his predecessor’s most extreme policies. There is one Bush-era policy, though, that President Obama made emphatically his own: the summary killing of suspected militants and terrorists, usually by drone.

      In less than a year, the president will bequeath this policy, and the sweeping legal claims that underlie it, to someone who may see the world very differently from him. Before that happens, he should bring the drone campaign out of the shadows and do what he can to constrain the power he unleashed.

    • Now That We Know These Disturbing Numbers, Can We Trust Air Marshals?

      Seven and a half years ago, as a new reporter at ProPublica, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all reports of misconduct by federal air marshals.

      It had been several years since the US government rapidly expanded its force of undercover agents trained to intervene in hijackings after 9/11. And a source within the agency told me that a number of air marshals had recently been arrested or gotten in trouble for hiring prostitutes on missions overseas.

      I knew the FOIA request would take a while—perhaps a few months—but I figured I’d have the records in times for my first ProPublica project.

      Instead, I heard nothing but crickets from the Transportation Security Administration.

    • ‘Hate-Motivated Terrorism Is a Serious Problem in This Country’

      White supremacy in its various strains is among the most significant, least discussed phenomena in US media discourse. A news report may note that a pundit stated that black people are lazier and more violent than other people, and urged public policies premised on that idea, or that a candidate’s followers singled out African-Americans or Latinos to harass or assault, and that these things are concerning.

    • Nobody Knows the Identities of the 150 People Killed by U.S. in Somalia, but Most Are Certain They Deserved It

      The U.S. used drones and manned aircraft yesterday to drop bombs and missiles on Somalia, ending the lives of at least 150 people. As it virtually always does, the Obama administration instantly claimed that the people killed were “terrorists” and militants — members of the Somali group al Shabaab — but provided no evidence to support that assertion.

    • Tel Aviv Pins Hopes on Clinton

      There has never been such a fascinating US Presidential race, both I a good way and in a bad way. I would never have believed somebody as genuine and bright as Bernie Sanders could get this close to becoming President. I would never have believed something as florid and off the wall as Donald Trump could become this close to becoming President.

      One of the things that makes both Trump and Sanders so entirely different from the mainstream US political class is that neither of them genuflects to Tel Aviv and both of them take the idea that Palestinians have rights too. In fact the only chance of Israeli dominance of US foreign policy appears to rest with Hillary Clinton. She may be Goldman Sachs’ dog in this fight, but she is also Tel Aviv’s.

      Unfortunately, despite continuing wins and trouncing Clinton in debate, it seems most unlikely Sanders will get the nomination. Clinton control of party machinery and firm position with those who have made an extremely fat living for themselves personally out of identity politics (sorry heroes of the civil rights movement), should ensure that. Can I commend you to read The Catholic Orangemen of Togo to see how just one ride in a car with Jesse Jackson put me right off him.

    • Canada’s Changing Mission in Iraq

      Canada formally announced it had stopped all air strikes in Iraq and Syria on 15 February. They will continue to fly aerial refueling missions, and conduct reconnaissance from the air. More significantly, Canada will up its small ground forces, who are engaged in what has to be the longest and most thorough training mission in human history, inside Iraq.

    • Pink-Slipping Hillary: On Remembering the Victims of the Iraq War

      In March 2003, just before the US invasion of Iraq, about one hundred CODEPINK women dressed in pink slips weaved in and out of congressional offices demanding to meet with representatives. Those representatives who pledged to oppose going to war with Iraq were given hugs and pink badges of courage; those hell-bent on taking the US to war were given pink slips emblazoned with the words “YOU’RE FIRED.”

  • Transparency Reporting

    • It Took a FOIA Lawsuit to Uncover How the Obama Administration Killed FOIA Reform

      The Obama administration has long called itself the most transparent administration in history. But newly released Department of Justice (DOJ) documents show that the White House has actually worked aggressively behind the scenes to scuttle congressional reforms designed to give the public better access to information possessed by the federal government.

      The documents were obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports journalism in the public interest, which in turn shared them exclusively with VICE News. They were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — the same law Congress was attempting to reform. The group sued the DOJ last December after its FOIA requests went unanswered for more than a year.

    • FOIA Request Results In Details Of Administration’s War On FOIA Reform

      Do you like irony? Documents obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (and shared with Jason Leopold of Vice) through an FOIA request show how the Obama administration and various agencies worked together to dismantle FOIA reform efforts. “Presumption of openness,” my [REDACTED].

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Sanders scores Michigan upset; Trump tightens grip with wins

      Bernie Sanders won a huge upset in Michigan on Tuesday night, giving his campaign a jolt of momentum even as Donald Trump tightened his grip on the Republican nomination by scoring victories in Michigan and Mississippi.

      Entering Tuesday, not one public poll had shown Sanders leading in Michigan, and most had him down by double-digits, creating expectations that Hillary Clinton would cruise to victory.

      But Sanders took the lead from the moment polls closed in the state and never let go. News networks projected him the winner just before midnight, with the Vermont senator leading 50 to 48 percent.

    • Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours

      All of these posts paint his candidacy in a negative light, mainly by advancing the narrative that he’s a clueless white man incapable of winning over people of color or speaking to women. Even the one article about Sanders beating Trump implies this is somehow a surprise—despite the fact that Sanders consistently out-polls Hillary Clinton against the New York businessman.

  • Censorship

    • Standing up to censorship

      Students who find themselves on the second floor of Moffett Library are likely to see a poster featuring a stack of books with the question “Have you seen us?” in bold. The books in the stack have all been censored or restricted at some point since publication, and the poster is promoting the anti-censorship movement.

      Since 1990 there have been more than 18,000 attempts to remove books from libraries and schools across the United States. A significant number of these attempts are done by parent groups or religious organizations.

    • AG begs for time over ‘censorship’ law

      GIBA specifically wants the court to expunge regulations 3 to 12 and 22 of the NMC (Content Standards) Regulations 2015 (LI 2224) as being inconsistent with the 1992 Constitution which guarantees unfettered media freedom.

      The regulations in contention basically require media owners to apply for content authorization, submit programme guide and content for approval and go by a set of rules stipulated by the NMC or in default pay a fine or serve between two and five years in jail.

    • Digital TV broadcasting prone to censorship, says expert

      The House of Representatives has outlined a policy to digitize broadcasting in a draft revision of the 2002 Broadcasting Law, which could make it easier for the government to control television programs in the future, according to an expert.

      The revision was first proposed to the House in 2010, but has yet to make it into law. Last January, the House’s Legislation Body included the same bill in the 2016 National Legislation Program (Prolegnas). The House then started work on the draft before eventually discussing it with the government.

      “The migration of analog to digital TV broadcasting is one of the main points in the revision of the law,” lawmaker Meutya Hafid said on Monday.

    • SCMP’s online presence in mainland China completely wiped out

      Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post has become the latest casualty of China’s tightening grip on the media as internet censors shut down its microblogging accounts on Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, as well as its WeChat page on Tuesday.

      The broadsheet’s official Sina Weibo page now leads to an error message that reads, “Sorry, there is something wrong with the account you are currently trying to access, and it is temporarily inaccessible.” A similar error message can be seen on what used to be SCMP’s Tencent Weibo page.

      Over at SCMP’s official WeChat account, an empty shell is all that remains as all previous posts published on the page have been deleted.

      If past history is any indication, the shutdown doesn’t appear temporary, and there is little chance that the accounts will be restored.

    • Censorship Is Not All Bad [Ed: not that I agree with this...]

      Thus, hate speech is really anti-speech because it aims to shut down the speech of others. And in the United States, hate speech has shut down the speech of minorities and women for hundreds of years. Defenders of hate speech often disguise it as “pride,” “state’s rights” or “religious freedom.” But we are mistaken to treat anti-speech as if it were normal speech, deserving of protection. We can and should be intolerant of intolerance.

    • Chinese govt deletes article, magazine publishes rejoinder in defiance
    • Caixin ‘Won’t Comment’ on Deletion of Anti-Censorship Article
    • Chinese Financial Magazine Challenges Content Censorship
    • Top China Adviser Pushes for More Freedom of Speech
    • Caixin Challenges Censors After Xi Demands Loyalty
    • Article exposing censorship of interview on free speech gets censored
    • Article denouncing censorship censored from Chinese magazine’s English website
    • Caixin, censored by govt, exposes article’s removal
    • China magazine Caixin defiant on censorship of article

      Prominent Chinese financial magazine Caixin has highlighted censorship of its content, in a rare defiant move against the government.

      It claimed on Monday, in an article published on its English-language website, that censors had deleted an interview on the issue of free speech.

      But by Tuesday evening that article appeared to have been deleted as well.

      Chinese media is heavily regulated with government censors often removing content on websites and social media.

    • Chinese magazine challenges government over censorship

      One of China’s most respected current affairs magazines has lashed out at Communist party censorship of its work, just weeks after the president, Xi Jinping, demanded absolute loyalty from his country’s media.

    • Caixin ‘Won’t Comment’ on Deletion of Anti-Censorship Article

      A spokesman for the highly regarded Chinese financial and economic magazine Caixin on Wednesday declined to comment on the deletion of a recent article hitting out at government censorship from its website in recent days.

    • UD faculty artist, student address creative censorship
    • Creating freedom in censorship

      In our last editorial, the Flyer News staff restated our ded­ication to the pursuit of truths in the Dayton community. We pledged our support to the Mountain Echo, the student news­paper of Mount St. Mary’s University, as they countered cen­sorship from their new president, Simon Newman–as well as the University of Dayton faculty and students who petitioned against the president’s actions. Since our last issue was published, President Newman resigned–a testament to the power of collec­tively speaking out against censorship.

    • Valley News: Man flies Confederate flag to fight censorship, but neighbors object

      At the dead end of Latham Works Lane, a flagpole bears a rectangle of red cloth dominated by a big blue X and 13 white stars.

      It’s the Confederate flag, a symbol of the Civil War-era American South that is increasingly seen as a sign of the South’s resistance to civil rights.

    • White House’s Claims that the TPP Would Curb Internet Censorship are Fantasy

      One of the United States government’s priorities in Internet policy is encapsulated by a term that’s recently been making the rounds; the “free flow of information.” It appears almost every time U.S. officials describe how they intend to protect the free and open Internet, especially when it comes to international law. The general idea is that bits of online data should not be discriminated against, hindered, or regulated across national boundaries. As a general principle, this sounds positive. It could be a helpful antidote against arbitrary data localization rules that threaten to break up the global Internet, or attempts by governments’ to block and censor foreign websites using nationwide filters.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • ‘A woman died in my arms: her crime? To refuse FGM’

      Gift Abu is describing what she says was her most harrowing experience working as an anti-FGM activist in Nigeria. A mother-to-be was having complications but the cutters wouldn’t help her give birth safely unless she allowed them to cut her. “They left her for dead when she said no, and blamed me because I tried to stop them.”

    • What’s Wrong With Feminism: Why I Call Myself A Humanist, Not A Feminist

      Above all, I am for what feminism is said to be — equal rights for men and women. Yes, men, too.

      I see, far too often, that feminism is about hating, demeaning, and denying rights to men.

      I am for rights — like the First Amendment right — for neo-nazis (who marched in Skokie back when I was a young teen), and for all sorts of people I think are assholes and idiots.

      I am certainly for rights of people I like, and I like men.

    • Police warn women not to go out alone in Swedish town after spate of sex attacks

      Police in the icy Northern Swedish city of Ostersund have warned single women against venturing out alone after dark, following a space of violent attacks, with nine cases reported in less than three weeks.

      As yet another attack was reported on Tuesday, the local police chief Stephen Jerand told state broadcaster SVT that he was convinced that his warning, highly unusual in Sweden, had been justified.

      “It is always a consideration whether to go out with this kind of thing or not. But we don’t want to sit here for another week and have more crime victims on our desk,” he said.

    • New Mexico Attorney General Would Rather See Sexting Teens Treated As Sex Offenders Than See His Funding ‘Jeopardized’

      Teens sexting can’t be addressed by existing laws. Law enforcement — which far too often chooses to involve itself in matters best left to parents — bends child pornography laws to “fit” the crime. They often state they’re only doing this to save kids from the harm that might result by further distribution of explicit photos. How exactly turning a teen into a child pornographer who must add his or herself to the sex offender registries is less harmful than the imagined outcomes cited by law enforcement is never explained.

    • New Mexico Attorney General Protests Bill That Would Decriminalize Teen Sexting

      New Mexico’s state legislature is considering a bill that would stiffen the penalties for people caught with child pornography while also legalizing consensual sexting between underage teenagers. But that’s an unacceptable tradeoff for the state’s Democratic attorney general, whose staff walked out of a hearing in protest of the bill’s leniency toward teen offenders.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Governments Agree To ICANN Accountability Proposals, Giving Green Light For IANA Transition

      Governments gathered at the 55th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Marrakesh this week have agreed to not object to the final proposal on enhancing ICANN accountability. By the move, the governments cleared the way to allow a potential handover of the management of the central root zone of the domain name system and other core databases to ICANN from the United States Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

  • DRM

    • Show them the world is watching. Stop DRM in HTML.

      For years, Defective by Design and the anti-DRM movement have been fighting media and proprietary software companies who want to weave Digital Restrictions Management into the HTML standard that undergirds the Web. Winning this is a top priority for us — the DRM proposal, known as EME (Encrypted Media Extensions), would make it cheaper and more politically acceptable to impose restrictions on Web users, opening the floodgates to a new wave of DRM throughout the Internet.

      The battle is coming to a head as EME approaches a final vote by the Web’s standardization organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We need to make our voices heard now — the W3C is convening March 20-22 and is scheduled to discuss the proposal.

    • Join the struggle to keep digital restrictions out of Web standards

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • BREAKING – Louboutin case referred to CJEU: can a colour be a shape?

      This Kat understands that not all language versions of the directive speak of ‘shape’. Indeed, the French version refers to ‘forme’, the German version speaks of ‘form’, and the Italian version speaks of ‘forma’. In Italian a ‘forma’ is not necessarily three-dimensional, but can also be two-dimensional, and the same is true in French and German as well.

    • Copyrights

      • Pub fined for illegal Sky transmission

        A UK pub has been fined nearly £24,000 ($34,100) for illegally showing Sky television, following an investigation by trade body the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

      • Norwegian Police Seize Popcorn-Time “Information” Site

        Norwegian economic crime police have seized the domain name of a local Popcorn-Time website. The site in question didn’t offer any copyright infringing material, but featured news articles and links to external sites where the popular application could be downloaded. No arrests were made.

      • Stripping 4K Content Protection is Fair Use, Court Hears

        LegendSky, a hardware manufacturer that creates devices enabling consumers to bypass 4K copy protection, has informed a New York federal court that they’re not breaking any laws. The company is being sued by Warner Bros. and Intel daughter company Digital Content Protection, who want to shut down their sales.

03.08.16

Links 8/3/2016: Future Kodi Versions, Solus 1.1

Posted in News Roundup at 7:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • ​Enterprise ready: OwnCloud 9 handles petabytes of data

    When you think of ownCloud, you think of a cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud you can run off a home server. OwnCloud 9, which will be released tomorrow, March 8, is far more than that.

  • Still reeling, SourceForge looks to the future

    The SourceForge and Slashdot communities have had a much bumpier ride than the opendesktop.org communities over the years. I won’t go into detail about the ownership changes, but here’s the tl;dr: The founders of Slashdot, Rob ‘CmdrTaco’ Malda and Jeff Bates, sold the site in 1999, about two years after its launch, to Andover.net. Then in 2000, Andover.net merged with VA Linux, which changed its name to SourceForge, Inc. in 2007, and became Geeknet, Inc. 2009.

  • Open source security: know your code [Ed: the FUD firm uses terms like “code hygiene”]

    The adoption of open source is a good thing overall, leading to faster time-to-market and lower development costs. But if we are relying on open source so widely (and we are), we have an obligation as security professionals to understand what we’re deploying. Since 2014, more than 6,000 new vulnerabilities associated with open source have been disclosed. And the fact that the open source code you use today is free from vulnerabilities doesn’t mean that it will remain that way in the future.

  • Google vendor security review tool goes open source

    Google’s decided that the first-phase questionnaire it uses to vet vendors might be useful to the rest of the world.

    Until now an internal document, the Vendor Security Assessment Questionnaire (VSAQ) was created to help Mountain View cope with the huge number of vendor approaches it receives.

    The questionnaires help vendors describe their security posture to Google, so as to thin out the amount of stuff the Chocolate Factory has to let in the door for a presentation.

  • ownCloud 9.0 Released with Major Enhancements, Brings Federation to a New Level

    Today, March 8, 2016, ownCloud Inc. is proud to announce the release and immediate availability of ownCloud 9.0, the next major release of the self-hosting cloud server used by millions of people worldwide.

  • ownCloud 9.0 officially announced; innovative collaboration leads new features
  • Intel Appears To Be Rolling Out FSP 2.0 Blob

    A controversial point of Intel’s Coreboot support has been the FSP, or Firmware Support Package, which is needed for initializing the systems on all recent hardware generations. With the upcoming Apollo Lake it appears there is now a “FSP 2.0″, but still relies upon binary blobs.

  • OSI: Don’t Forget To Vote!

    With just a few days to go in our elections, here’s your gentle reminder to vote on who you would most like to see on the board of the OSI. You have until midnight PST on March 14th, 2016 to do so.

  • ownCloud 9.0 is a Must-Have Upgrade for the Popular Cloud Platform
  • OwnCloud 9.0 Released As Latest Version Of Open-Source Dropbox Alternative
  • 9.0 is the biggest ownCloud release so far
  • Non-Linux FOSS: CreateUserPkg
  • WSO2 Unveils a Lightweight Java Framework for Building Microservices

    “It started about a year ago, from zero to pretty much every single customer asking us: What is your strategy on microservices, and what is your strategy for container-based services?” noted Isabelle Mauny, who is the vice president of product management at WSO2.

    In effect, the customers were telling the middleware company,”That’s what we want to deploy,” Mauny said.

  • Amida Technology Solutions Releases Indaba, an Open Source Data Collaboration and Knowledge Management Tool [Ed: source code]
  • Google opens up VSAQ security assessor to the open source community

    On Monday, the tech giant said the Vendor Security Assessment Questionnaire (VSAQ), a selection of self-adapting questionnaires, have been used in the past to help the firm assess the practices and risk related to hundreds of vendors and their security every year.

  • When selling a site means selling a community

    In January, the CEO of ownCloud, Frank Karlitschek, sold his network of more than 30 community sites. The same month, DHI Group, Inc. announced that it completed the sale of its Slashdot and SourceForge community-driven businesses to BIZX, LLC.

    In both cases, websites weren’t the only things changing virtual hands. Entire online communities transferred to new stewards.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • LLVM 3.8 Officially Released

      While running late, the release of LLVM 3.8 and Clang 3.8 is now officially available.

      If you missed out on LLVM/Clang 3.8 features, see our feature overview. Aside from all the traditional compiler improvements, LLVM 3.8 is also exciting for AMDGPU users as being an important update for those using the AMD open-source Linux graphics driver stack.

    • Bitcoin Devs Could Learn a Lot from BSD

      There’s never been a whirlwind of politics surrounding an open source project on the scale that we see with Bitcoin. Alternative implementations are considered controversial on principle, and Core devs can’t propose a bug fix without being accused of manipulation on behalf of outside interests. However, BSD, another popular open source project, doesn’t seem to have these problems. Why not?

    • Proactive Security & (re)discovering OpenBSD

      OpenBSD — a security-focused & research-based Operating System — started auditing their source code tree in 1996. They combed their source code repository looking for bugs that could lead to security vulnerabilities. The results were hundreds of security bugs found & patched. Thankfully, some of those fixes made it to Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. Today, OpenBSD proudly boasts about 2 vulnerabilities in more than 10 years. Code auditing is still on-going !

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Free Software Foundation submits comment to Copyright Office with over 1200 co-signers calling for end to DMCA anti-circumvention provisions

      The Copyright Office was seeking comments in response to a request from Congress to study the effects of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions and the triennial exemptions process. The DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions create legal penalties for the circumvention of technologies that restrict access to copyrighted works, known as Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). It further criminalizes the sharing of tools needed to avoid DRM. The DMCA also set up a system where activists, academics and researchers may request that certain uses be exempted from the anti-circumvention provisions. Every three years they may submit a request to the Copyright Office that the circumvention of a particular type of work be free from the DMCA’s penalties. Even when an exemption is granted, it expires three years later when the next round of the exemptions process begins, requiring repeated effort to maintain narrow exemptions.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Juha Saarinen: IT plans need open-source solutions

      Oh, and those open-source-based solutions work too. So well, in fact, that they can be used to build businesses and public services that run on top of them.

      By now there should be more than enough examples of successful, large-scale enterprise open-source solutions for our authorities to at least trial, rather than automatically tying themselves to proprietary software – and burning through enormous amounts of cash in return for nothing in the process.

    • Achieving IT independence through open-source

      The unwelcome possibility arose that we might have to purchase these expensive systems all over again in a few years, once support for the discontinued products ceased.

      In fact, this kind of dependence on a few large foreign software vendors is a common hazard in many industries.

      Fortunately, Kazi Farms group, the parent company of Deepto TV, also runs a software company called Sysnova which has helped our other businesses to run on free and open source software.

    • Millions saved by Spain’s eAdministration tool

      The SIR software is made available for free to all Spanish public administrations. They can download the software from the CTT repository.

  • Licensing

    • GPL Fun

      The other one is Canonical who have announced it plans to ship zfs with Ubuntu. An employee wrote in a confusing blog post “As we have already reached the conclusion, we are not interested in debating license compatibility, but of course welcome the opportunity to discuss the technology.” but in linking to differing opinions feels the need to highlight “please bear in mind that these are opinions.” The Software Freedom Conservancy wrote an post discussing why it was a derived work and why that’s illegal to distribute. And the SFLC’s Eben Moglen wrote another one which based on a link from Dustin’s blog is the opinion they are replying upon for thinking everything is ok. Eben’s blog post is fascinating and makes for page turning bed-time reading by going into exactly why it’s a derived work. It all depends on “literal interpretation of GPLv2’s system library exception” and that based on that

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Tiny Open Source Robot

        We watched the video introduction for this little open source robot, and while we’re not 100% sure we want tiny glowing eyes watching us while we sleep, it does seem to be a nice little platform for hacking. The robot is a side project of [Matthew], who’s studying for a degree in Information Science.

      • TAU Open Source Mini Arduino Zero Development Board Unveiled (video)

        Arduino enthusiasts that are looking for a smaller Arduino Zero board for their next project may be interested in a new piece of hardware called the TAU that has been developed by Rabid Prototypes and which has been equipped with an Atmel ATSAMD21E17A ARM Cortex M0+ micro controller and offers 16KB RAM.

        The TAU has been created to provide an affordable open source miniature version of the large Arduino Zero and offers 32-bit ARM processor running at 48MHz and can be easily programmed using the Arduino IDE.

Leftovers

  • Internet Archive brings hundreds of classic Apple II games to your web browser

    The Internet Archive has been on a roll lately, bringing back classic MS-DOS games, Windows 3.1 software, and even defanged versions of old PC viruses.

    Now, the site has hit a milestone with its Apple II collection: A group of anonymous hackers have successfully broken the elaborate copy-protection schemes on more than 500 classic games and programs. The result is that these Apple II classics are now playable directly in modern web browsers.

  • Retro Apple II software lands at the Internet Archive

    DIGITAL HOARDER the Internet Archive has unleashed a load of previously copy-protected Apple II software from their old floppy prisons and added them to its accessible shelves.

    This is great news for people who like to have a go on things that they used to have a go on in the 1980s and 1990s. You could be in the Apple Computer software library now, running riot and making merry with all the stuff that the 4am Group has found, stored and shared with you. There is a lot of it.

    “Among the tens of thousands of computer programs now emulated in the browser at the Internet Archive, a long-growing special collection has hit a milestone: the 4am Collection is now past 500 available Apple II programs preserved for the first time,” said the Internet Archive in a blog post.

  • These Drone Photos Show the Density of High-Rises in Hong Kong

    Hong Kong is a densely populated city where high-rises are crammed close together and where an estimated 100,000+ people live in 40-square-foot cubicle apartments. Photographer Andy Yeung used a drone to capture this density for his project Urban Jungle.

    The photo above of the Sheung Wan area of the city was selected as a 500px.com Editors’ Choice.

  • Science

    • The End of Journals

      From the Section of Cardiovascular Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT; Department of Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT; and Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, CT.

    • 8 guidelines to advance women in tech on International Women’s Day

      Just in time for International Women’s Day, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)’s Luskin Center for Innovation has released “Rethinking Public, Private and Nonprofit Strategies to Advance Women in Technology,” a 60-page report that articulates just how far the tech industry still needs to go to address its gap in gender diversity – and how it can get there.

    • Guy Who Pretends He Invented Email Whines At Every Journalist For Writing Obit Of Guy Who Actually Helped Create Email

      Over the years, we’ve written a few times about Shiva Ayyadurai, a guy who’s basically staked his entire life on the misleading to false claim that he “invented” email. Every couple of years he pops up again as he’s able to fool some reporters into believing him. In 2012, he fooled the Washington Post and, astoundingly, the Smithsonian. In 2014, he was somehow able to get the Huffington Post to publish a multi-part series claiming he had “invented” email — though after we called them out on it (and after they stood by it) — those stories were eventually deleted. Ayyadurai also threatened to sue us for calling out his false claims, but there’s been no lawsuit yet.

  • Hardware

    • Heat doesn’t kill hard drives. Here’s what does

      “Free-cooled” datacenters use ambient outside air instead of air conditioning. That lets us see how environment affects system components. Biggest surprise: temperature is not the disk drive killing monster we thought. Here’s what is.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Two Billion People Eat Insects and You Can Too

      Edible insects have long been a part of the human diet and are commonly consumed as a food source in many regions of the world, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It is estimated that two billion people currently consume insects as part of their diets. Insects may be an increasingly important source of protein because of the rising cost of animal protein, food insecurity, environmental pressures, climate change and population growth.

    • WHO: Zika Virus Spreading, R&D Needs Financing, Sample Sharing Discussed

      The World Health Organization said today that evidence of the relationship between the Zika virus and neonatal malformations and neurological disorders is growing stronger, and that the virus is spreading geographically. The Emergency Committee set up by the WHO at a gathering today issued advice to the WHO director general, including warning pregnant women to avoid travelling to Zika infected countries. Meanwhile, discussions are ongoing on the sharing of the samples of the virus, and on the question of benefit-sharing. And a call was made for research and development to intensify.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Exclusive: Navy Secretly Conducting Electromagnetic Warfare Training on Washington Roads

      Without public notification of any kind, the US Navy has secretly been conducting electromagnetic warfare testing and training on public roads in western Washington State for more than five years.

      An email thread between the Navy and the US Forest Service between 2010 and 2012, recently obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Oregon-based author and activist Carol Van Strum in November 2014, revealed that the Navy has likely been driving mobile electromagnetic warfare emitters and conducting electromagnetic warfare training in the Olympic National Forest and on public roads on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula since 2010.

    • Drone Casualty Report Promised as U.S. Airstrike Kills 150 Al Shabaab Members

      AFTER YEARS OF INTENSE SECRECY, the Obama administration on Monday announced that it will for the first time acknowledge the number of people it has killed in drone strikes outside of conventional war zones, including civilians. The report, administration officials said, will be released “in the coming weeks,” and will continue to be released annually. The news came as the Pentagon confirmed that it had carried one of the largest airstrikes in the history of the war on terror.

      Lisa Monaco, the president’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, described the plan in comments made during a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We know that not only is greater transparency the right thing to do, it is the best way to maintain the legitimacy of our counterterrorism actions and the broad support of our allies,” Monaco said, adding that the operations described in the report would not cover areas of “active hostilities,” such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

    • The Noxious Legacy of Fracking King Aubrey McClendon

      WHEN FRACKING BILLIONAIRE Aubrey McClendon died after crashing his Chevy Tahoe into a bridge last week, the federal investigation into his alleged bid-rigging came to an end. At his memorial in Oklahoma City today, his friends and family will remember him as a “swashbuckling innovator” and a loyal friend, but his most enduring legacy may be his role in convincing policymakers and the public that natural gas could be an environmental boon and a solution to global warming. More than any other individual, McClendon personified the excesses of the fracking boom, gobbling up land so quickly and spinning the boom’s story so effectively that regulators, environmentalists, and even Wall Street struggled to keep pace.

      McClendon was not only the founder of Chesapeake Energy, the most important fracking company in the technique’s history, but he also co-founded one of the gas industry’s most important lobbying arms, America’s Natural Gas Alliance. In creating both, McClendon became an architect of the energy market’s reorientation around a product whose climate-warming emissions rival those of coal.

    • Finding Security by Helping the ‘South’

      Official Washington’s new group think is that more money must be poured into the Military-Industrial Complex to continue wars in the Middle East and hem in Russia and China on their borders. But the real security threats come from mass dislocations in the Third World, says ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

    • Saudi Arabia’s Exploding Christmas Gifts From Hillary Clinton

      As Hillary Clinton emerges as the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, she is receiving increased scrutiny for her years as Secretary of State. Many are criticizing her hawkish foreign policy, which is the best indication of what President Hillary’s foreign policy would be, with many focusing on her long relationship with Saudi Arabia.

      On Christmas Eve in 2011, Hillary Clinton and her closest aides celebrated a $29.4 billion sale of over 80 F-15 fighter jets, manufactured by US-based Boeing Corporation, to Saudi Arabia. In a chain of enthusiastic emails, an aide exclaimed that it was “not a bad Christmas present.”

      These are the very fighter jets the Saudis have been using to intervene in the internal affairs of Yemen since March 2015. A year later, at least 2,800 Yemeni civilians have been killed, mostly by airstrikes – and there is no end in sight. The indiscriminate Saudi strikes have killed journalists and ambulance drivers. They have hit the Chamber of Commerce, facilities supported by Médecins Sans Frontières (also known as Doctors Without Borders), a wedding hall, and a center for the blind. The attacks have also targeted ancient heritage sites in Yemen. International human rights organizations are saying that the Saudi-led strikes on Yemen may amount to war crimes.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Former paid agent of Swedish Security Police dictated Amnesty Sweden’s stance against Assange

      Svenska Dagbladet (Svd), one of Sweden’s leading newspapers, has now revealed that a well-known journalist and ‘left activist’ – who, among other things, exerted considerable influence with Amnesty International Sweden – was a paid agent of Sweden’s Security Police (SÄPO). [5]

      The government security agent, Martin Fredriksson, was mainly active during the years that former Foreign Minister Carl Bildt was dictating Sweden’s foreign policy, when the “Assange Affair” was widely publicized on the home page of Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to statements Fredriksson posted on Twitter, his “work” at SÄPO covered different periods between 2004 and 2010, the year Sweden opened its ‘investigation’ against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

      The Swedish media establishment awarded this SÄPO secret agent its highest investigative journalism prize, ‘Guldspaden’ (Golden Spade), in 2014. The rationale on which the award was given to Fredriksson referred precisely to the work he had implemented as a paid agent of Sweden’s Secret Police. [6] In the photo below, at the centre of the group, the ex-Security Police agent Martin Fredriksson.

    • Last chance for a pro-transparency trade legacy for Obama

      As the presidential campaign heats up, President Obama continues to press forward with his policy agenda. High on his remaining “to do” list is his trade agenda. With less than a year left in office, President Obama continues to urge Congress to approve the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) while pressing forward on an ambitious trade deal with Europe, the Transatlantic Trade Partnership (TTIP). For the moment, according to Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), it appears the votes aren’t there for TPP approval. Central to the challenge is a problem of the administration’s own making.

    • Two Former White House Tech Advisors Tell The President To Actually Be Transparent About Trade Deals

      Two former Obama tech staffers — Professor Colleen Chien (who advised the administration on intellectual property issues) and Quentin Palfrey (who worked for years in the Commerce Dept and the Office of Science and Technology Policy on intellectual property issues) — have written a fantastic opinion piece for The Hill, arguing that the White House has one last chance to actually be transparent in trade negotiations as it moves forward with the TTIP agreement with the EU. The piece notes that part of the reason that the TPP agreement is in so much trouble was its secrecy…

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • You’re Running Out of Time to See One of Nature’s Most Spectacular Sites

      If you have ever been snorkeling in a tropical paradise and seen the psychedelic colors and teeming variety of otherworldly sea critters, you were gazing upon something increasingly rare: a healthy coral reef. That site also does a lot more than dazzle vacationers. Coral reefs occupy just 0.1 percent of the oceans’ bottom but provide habitat to a quarter of the world’s fish species. They also prevent erosion along coastlines and buffer the impact of storms, providing protection, food, and livelihoods for about 500 million people.

    • On Fracking, Clinton And Sanders Give Vastly Different Answers

      Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders gave vastly different answers on fracking at the CNN Democratic debate on Sunday, illustrating a key policy contrast between the two.

      The candidates were asked by University of Michigan student Sarah Bellaire about whether they support fracking, the controversial process of injecting high-pressure water, sand, and chemicals underground to crack shale rock and let gas flow out more easily. Clinton, who answered first, said she does — but only under certain conditions.

      Specifically, Clinton said that she would not support fracking when local communities don’t want it; when it causes pollution; and when fracking companies don’t disclose the chemicals they use.

  • Finance

    • Corporate Sovereignty Now So Toxic, For Once It Isn’t Being Used Against Canada — Yet

      Despite that painful track record, in 2014 Canada signed the Foreign Investor Protection Agreement (FIPA) with China, which not only included corporate sovereignty provisions, but guaranteed that they would take precedence over the Canadian constitution for 31 years. However, it seems that something — maybe the decision by TransCanada to sue the US for $15 billion because of President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline — has started to make people aware of ISDS’s dangers. That, at least, is what a blog post on the Canadian Dogwood Initiative suggests. It’s a story about a Chinese mining company filing a lawsuit against Canada’s provincial government in British Columbia (BC) over a land transfer.

    • The Financial System Is A Larger Threat Than Terrorism

      In the 21st century Americans have been distracted by the hyper-expensive “war on terror.” Trillions of dollars have been added to the taxpayers’ burden and many billions of dollars in profits to the military/security complex in order to combat insignificant foreign “threats,” such as the Taliban, that remain undefeated after 15 years. All this time the financial system, working hand-in-hand with policymakers, has done more damage to Americans than terrorists could possibly inflict.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Hillary Is Now Picking and Choosing Which Obama Accomplishments to Take Credit For

      According to Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign ploy, she deserves credit for domestic policies passed under Obama — notably, ObamaCare — but not issues — in this case, trade deals — she negotiated as Secretary of State.

      She rolled out former Governor and erstwhile Michigan resident Jennifer Granholm (when this story hit, some local folks were talking about how Granholm hasn’t been seen in these parts of late) to claim that Hillary can’t be held responsible for NAFTA — which she supported when it got passed by her spouse (who is, of course, a key campaign surrogate) — or for the Trans-Pacific Partnership — which she helped negotiate as Secretary of State. It’s the latter I find particularly remarkable.

    • Tim Cook, Larry Page, And Elon Musk Plan To Stop Donald Trump At A Secretive Meeting

      The top leaders from Silicon Valley and Republican Commiserate recently met at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum gathering. Apparently, meeting’s main agenda was “How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump?”

    • At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs And Top Republicans Commiserate, Plot To Stop Trump

      Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.

      The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

    • Michigan mayor says he was nearly kicked out of Dem debate

      Fouts, an Independent mayor who attended both the Republican and Democratic debates in his home state, commented on the noticeable differences between the two events.

      “The Democratic debate is totally controlled by Hillarys [sic] good friend DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz,” Fouts wrote in a Facebook post. “No commentary is allowed by the audience. Particularly if you are cheering Bernie Sanders. Persons who do not adhere to Hillarys [sic] rules are threatened with expulsion.”

      He also said the Democratic Party’s debate process “borders on totalitarian control” and in an interview on Monday, he said Wasserman Schultz should resign.

      This is not the first time fellow Democrats have been publicly critical of Wasserman Schultz and how she’s handled the party’s debates. Critics have accused the DNC chairwoman of limiting the number of debates in order to aid Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

    • An LSD trip story: “Went to a Donald Trump speech on acid SUPER BAD VIBES”

      It may be fact, it may be fiction. We do not know. But this first-hand account of an unfortunate fellow who fell under the delusion that it would be a good idea to attend a campaign rally for GOP presidential candidate and noted racist shitbag Donald Trump while tripping balls–it’s a very good acid trip story.

    • Donald Trump’s Sworn Testimony About His University: “I Don’t Know the People”

      Trump University, a now-defunct sales ploy that promised to teach Donald Trump’s real estate “secrets” to enrollees and make them rich in the process, has become a flashpoint in the Republican presidential primary debates. In last night’s debate in Detroit, for instance, Sen. Marco Rubio lit into Donald Trump over the “handpicked” instructors. Trump retorted with a fabrication, claiming that the Better Business Bureau had given Trump University an A rating. As Rubio pointed out in the exchange, the most recent rating was a D minus.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Verizon racks up $1.35M fine for violating consumer privacy

      On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission said it had reached a deal with Verizon over the company’s use of a technology that allowed marketers to track customers’ web browsing so they could provide more targeted advertising. The so-called supercookies were hidden bits of code that couldn’t be easily erased when consumers cleared their browsing history.

    • Victory: Verizon Will Stop Tagging Customers for Tracking Without Consent

      Today, Verizon reached an agreement with the FCC to acquire affirmative consent before injecting their UIDH tracking header into their customers’ web activity on non-Verizon owned sites. This is exactly what we asked them to do in November 2014, and is a huge win for Internet privacy. ISPs are trusted carriers of our communications. They should be supporting individuals’ privacy rights, not undermining them.

      Verizon started their tracking header program in 2012, but did not describe the program in its privacy policy at that time. In 2014, EFF analyzed the header and warned that it acted as an undeletable supercookie, bypassing typical steps people take to protect their Internet privacy, like deleting cookies or using browser extensions that block unwanted tracking.

    • Punished for a Paradox: Brazil’s Random Detention of Facebook Executive Fails Justice

      Yesterday, Diego Dzodan, Facebook’s Vice President for Latin America, was arrested at his Sao Paolo home by federal police, escorted to a forensic institute and then held at Pinheiros Provisional Detention Center in the city. His arrest was ordered by Judge Marcel Montalvão, who was been demanding personal data from WhatsApp as part of a drug-related investigation in Brazil’s northeastern state of Sergipe. The arrest comes after the judge had begun serving WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, a series of fines for withholding information from the court.

      Davi Tangerino, WhatsApp’s lawyer, told reporters what he told the court: WhatsApp can’t provide the contents of the communications, because the company has no record of those communications. That may be for technological reasons—many WhatsApp communications are end-to-end encrypted. It may also be result of the companies own logging policies: WhatsApp says it makes no permanent record of the data that the court requires. In either case, the court is punishing a single employee for the court’s own impossible demands.

    • Broadband Industry ‘Studies’ Claim Users Don’t Need Privacy Protections Because ISPs Are Just Harmless, Innovative Sweethearts

      With few protections in play, most of the last decade broadband ISPs have collected any and every shred of data about their customers’ online behavior. It began with clickstream data, which ISPs sold to third parties, then either refused to comment on or outright lied about. Since then, more intelligent network hardware has let ISPs use deep packet inspection to track and monetize user online behavior down to the second. In wireless, carriers like AT&T and Verizon not only collect and sell user online behavior and location data, but now embed stealth packet headers to track and profile users across the entire Internet.

      It was that last decision that raised eyebrows at the FCC, prompting the agency recently to consider whether it should use its new Title II authority to build at least some basic rules of the road regarding broadband user privacy. This has, of course made the broadband industry rather nervous. After all, the telecom industry has grown very comfortable with the fact that nobody has bothered to give half a damn about broadband privacy for the better part of a generation.

    • Amid an Inconclusive Answer on Encryption, Hillary Reveals She Doesn’t Understand How Metadata Works

      Right in the middle, however, Hillary reveals not understanding a key part of this controversy. To the extent Syed Rizwan Farook used the Apple software on his work phone to communicate with accomplices, we know who he communicated with, because we have that metadata (as Admiral Mike Rogers recently confirmed). We just don’t know what he said.

      We wouldn’t necessarily know who he talked to if he used an App for which metadata was more transient, like Signal. But if so, that’s not an Apple problem.

      Moreover, if ISIS recruits are — as Hillary said — smart, then they definitely wouldn’t (and in fact generally don’t) use Apple products, because they’d know that would make their communications easily accessible under the PRISM or USA Freedom programs.

      This response is not really any different from what we’re getting from other to Obama officials. But it does come with some indication of the misunderstandings about the problem before us.

    • EFF Opposes McCaul-Warner Encryption Commission

      Senator Mark Warner and Representative Mike McCaul are calling on Congress to create an “Encryption Commission” composed of business, tech, and law enforcement and intelligence agency leaders that will investigate and report on encryption issues. The commission is set to ask questions already answered in the 1990s like whether or not the government should mandate backdoors or otherwise change current law. The answer is no. At the end of the day, the commission shows Congress still hasn’t learned that math is not something you can convince to compromise.

      The Warner-McCaul Commission tasks Senate and House leaders with appointing 16 representatives from private industry, law enforcement, academia, the privacy and civil liberties community, and the intelligence community to publish two reports within a year. Each report will investigate (among other topics) how encryption is used, if current law or warrant procedures should change, the value of encryption, the effects of encryption on law enforcement, and the costs of weakening encryption standards.

    • Of Cockpits And Phone Encryption: Tradeoffs And Probabilities

      Blake Ross (boy genius Firefox founder and later Facebook product guy) has written a somewhat bizarre and meandering — but totally worth reading — article about the whole Apple v. FBI fight, entitled (believe it or not): Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors. There are a few very good points in there, about the nature of programming, security and the government (some of which even make that title make sense). But I’m going to skip over the farts and colors and even his really excellent description of the ridiculousness of TSA security theater in airports, and leap forward to a key point raised in the article, focused on airplane security, which presents a really good analogy for the iPhone encryption fight. He points out that the only thing that has truly helped stop another 9/11-style plane hijacking (as Bruce Schneier points out repeatedly) is not the TSA security theater, but reinforced, locked cockpit doors that make it impossible for people in the cabin to get into the cockpit.

    • FBI makes clandestine changes to rules governing access to NSA data

      A secret court accepted changes to the rules governing the FBI’s access to NSA data about US citizen’s international emails and phone activity. The Guardian received confirmation from US officials that the classified changes were made to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa).

      The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Group (PCLOB) has previously revealed that the FBI was able to search through NSA’s collection of trawled data about international communication. The classified nature of the latest changes mean it is impossible to know exactly what they entail, but they are described as being a step towards “enhancing privacy”.

    • FBI adopts new rules for accessing NSA data: report

      New policies adopted by the FBI reportedly affect the bureau’s access to intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency on U.S. citizens, but officials say they’re barred from explaining since the changes are classified.

      The Guardian newspaper reported on Tuesday that the FBI has “quietly revised” its privacy rules with respect to how it searches NSA databases for phone records, email information and other metadata concerning Americans.

      Specifically, the changes are said to involve the way the FBI uses Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the federal law that allows the U.S. intelligence community to collect information regarding non-U.S. persons.

    • FBI quietly changes its privacy rules for accessing NSA data on Americans

      The FBI has quietly revised its privacy rules for searching data involving Americans’ international communications that was collected by the National Security Agency, US officials have confirmed to the Guardian.

      The classified revisions were accepted by the secret US court that governs surveillance, during its annual recertification of the agencies’ broad surveillance powers. The new rules affect a set of powers colloquially known as Section 702, the portion of the law that authorizes the NSA’s sweeping “Prism” program to collect internet data. Section 702 falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), and is a provision set to expire later this year.

      A government civil liberties watchdog, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Group (PCLOB), alluded to the change in its recent overview of ongoing surveillance practices.

    • Sweden re-evaluates eID needs and requirements

      The Swedish government is re-evaluating its approach to electronic identification tools. A report will be submitted at the end of the month, summarising the changing needs and requirements of public administrations, compared to the available private sector solutions.

      For their eGovernment services, Swedish public administrations commonly rent private sector eID solutions under a country-wide framework agreement signed in 2008. This contract will end this summer, which is why Sweden is studying the alternatives.

    • DOJ To NY Court: Hey, Can We Have Another Judge Look Over That Ruling About Breaking Into iPhones?

      This is hardly a big surprise, but the Justice Department is not at all happy about NY magistrate judge James Orenstein’s decision last week in the case against accused drug trafficker Jun Feng, that it cannot force Apple to break the security on an iPhone using the All Writs Act. While so much of the attention concerning iPhone encryption has been placed on the case in San Bernardino, the NY case made news well before the California case, and Orenstein was clearly aware that his ruling would have a much wider impact (and it was clearly written with that intent in mind). The Justice Department, of course, is now, in effect asking for a second opinion on the issue, carefully trying to position this case as something quite different than the San Bernardino case. In particular, the Justice Department is claiming that since this particular iPhone is using iOS 7, rather than 8, Apple already has a backdoor, and can easily unlock the contents of the phone.

      [...]

      As we’ve noted, that’s not actually true. The earlier orders involved earlier versions of iPhones where Apple did have easy access to opening up those phones — and the San Bernardino case was different because it used a more modern version of the operating system, where it did not have such access.

    • Amazon will restore Fire OS‘ encryption support in the spring
    • Amazon Decides to Re-Encrypt Fire OS Mobile Device Data for Privacy
    • Hacker Shows How To Hack Anyone’s Facebook Account
    • The technology at the heart of the Apple-FBI debate, explained
    • Apple Fight Could Lead To “Virtually Limitless” Surveillance Powers, Judge Warns
    • Deep Dive: Why Forcing Apple to Write and Sign Code Violates the First Amendment
    • British Spy Agency Chief Says Tech Companies Should Be Able to Provide a Way Around Encryption
    • GCHQ’s Robert Hannigan: Leave internet privacy laws to politicians, not tech companies
    • GCHQ chief urges Government action over data encryption

      The head of GCHQ has called for politicians to set out the boundaries on the use of data as he called for greater co-operation between technology companies and spy agencies over the issues of encryption.

    • Why is GCHQ boss encouraging activists and journalists to use the Tor network?
    • Britain’s GCHQ seeks co-operation from tech firms to facilitate State surveillance
    • GCHQ: Government Should Have Final Say on Encryption, Not Tech Firms
    • GCHQ boss: Tech needs ‘new relationship’ with security services
    • Head of Britain tech security agency backs encryption
    • GCHQ director says Tor is a ‘brilliant invention’
    • GCHQ: Crypto’s great, we’re your mate, don’t be like that and hate
    • GCHQ boss denies Snooper’s Charter will weaken encryption
    • GCHQ director: Tech companies ‘routinely’ help law enforcement
    • British Spy Agency Chief Says Tech Companies Should Provide a Way Around Encryption
    • The head of GCHQ wants a ‘new relationship’ with tech companies
    • GCHQ director: Tor is a ‘brilliant invention’ that highlights the perils of encryption
    • UK Spy Chief Says Tech Companies Need to Work With Government on Encryption
    • GCHQ: US and UK tech firms need to work together to solve encryption challenges
    • Privacy fight risks letting terrorists in, says head of GCHQ [Ed: British media helps the propaganda]
    • UK’s head of GCHQ seeks co-operation with tech groups
    • Welcome common sense on encryption
    • GCHQ chief urges Government action over data encryption
    • UK spy chief calls for tech sector co-operation to combat “abuse of encryption”
    • GCHQ uses MIT speech to get chummy with tech industry over crypto backdoors

      GCHQ’s director, Robert Hannigan, used a speech he gave yesterday at MIT to try to cosy up to the tech industry in order to promote what he called “a constructive dialogue.” That’s a dramatic reversal of his position less than 18 months ago, when he wrote in the Financial Times that Internet companies were “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals,” and “in denial” about it.

      On Monday, Hannigan admitted that his comments in the FT had caused “a bigger stir than I expected, and were widely seen as an attack on the tech industry.” Now, he said, “we recognise that we need a new relationship between the tech sector, academia, civil society and Government agencies. We should be bridging the divide, sharing ideas and building a constructive dialogue in a less highly-charged atmosphere.”

      Encryption is the key area where Hannigan believes that dialogue is needed, and he devoted most of his speech to the topic. “The idea that we do not favour strong encryption is alien to anyone who has worked in my organisation,” he said, and went on to emphasise: “I am not in favour of banning encryption. Nor am I asking for mandatory backdoors.”

    • Some impressions from the TorDevMeeting and the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) in Valencia

      Overheard at the Tor Dev meeting in Valencia, from people speaking about online identities: “You were on top of the list of the people I thought were you.”

    • Advanced Tor Browser Fingerprinting

      The ability to privately communicate through the internet is very important for dissidents living under authoritary regimes, activists and basically everyone concerned about internet privacy.

      While the TOR network itself provides a good level of privacy, making difficult or even practically impossible to discover the real I.P. address of the tor users, this is by no means enough to protect users privacy on the web. When browsing the web, your identity can be discovered using browser exploits, cookies, browser history, browser plugins, etc.

      Tor browser is a firefox browser preconfigured and modified to protect user privacy and identity while browsing the web using TOR. Browser plugins are disabled, history and cache aren’t persistent and everything is erased after closing the browser, etc.

  • Civil Rights

    • In blow to inmates’ families, court halts new prison phone rate caps

      Prison phone companies today were granted a judicial stay that halts implementation of new, lower rate caps on inmate calls. The court did not halt new limits on certain ancillary fees related to inmate calls, though, so the overall price of prison calling should go down.

      Global Tel*Link (GTL) and Securus Technologies had asked the US Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia to stay new price regulations until a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission is decided, arguing that they have a high likelihood of prevailing in the case. The companies argue that the FCC overstepped its authority and that the new limits fall short of what prison phone companies are contractually obligated to pay in “site commissions” to correctional facilities. Despite protest from the FCC, the court today partially granted the stay request.

    • DOM Defense Department Seeks SUB Hackers, Tech Companies For Partnership Built On Distrust

      Despite these limitations, Defense Secretary Ash Carter thinks the program will be a success. He believes the DoD and whatever hackers actually make it past the vetting process will “enhance national security” by playing controlled cyberwar games in a controlled environment.

    • International Women’s Day

      On a lighter note, it is also rather charming that International Women’s Day, designed by Communists as a rather heavy handed propaganda vehicle, morphed through the actions and desires of ordinary human beings into a celebration of romance. Throughout the Eastern Bloc, International Women’s Day became indistinguishable from the Western practices of Valentine’s Day, only with the gifts and flowers and dining taken to even higher levels of corniness. Restaurants throughout the UK will be busy today as couples involving at least one partner from our brilliant new large Eastern European population go out to celebrate. Including us.

    • Read Bernie Sanders’ 1961 Testimony on His University’s Racist Housing Policy

      On the campaign trail, Sen. Bernie Sanders often mentions his work as a civil rights activist in the early 1960s, when he was a campus organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). As a leader of the University of Chicago chapter, he led sit-ins to protest racial discrimination at university-owned properties and picketed a Howard Johnson’s restaurant.

      Now we know a little bit more. L.E.J. Rachell, a researcher with the CORE Project, which is dedicated to collecting and preserving the records of CORE, recently uploaded four documents offering more details about Sanders’ involvement with the group. During this period in 1961, UChicago’s CORE chapter was sending white and black volunteers to university-owned housing facilities in the neighborhood to determine if the school was honoring its anti-discrimination policy.

      The most interesting of the CORE Project documents is a testimonial written by Sanders himself. In it, he details a “test” he conducted of a hotel just off campus. He visited to see if it would rent a room to his older brother, Larry, and the clerk assured him that they would. When UChicago CORE finished its testing, the results were clear—rooms that were available to white students were not available to black students. The next year they launched a series of sit-ins to force the university’s hand.

    • What Do Children’s Doctors and Nuns Have in Common? They Both Support Women’s Access to Contraception.

      The premiere pediatric association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Coalition of American Nuns are among a diverse group of organizations and individuals who recently filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the latest Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception requirement. Nearly 30 briefs were filed in support of the federal government’s argument that women are legally entitled to insurance coverage for contraception coverage with no co-pay, regardless of their employer’s religious beliefs.

    • Harvard Law School Wants to Remove Slaveholder’s Crest From Logo

      After months of student protests, Harvard Law School could soon stop using its official symbol, a shield based on the crest of an 18th-century slaveholder whose donation paid for the first professorship of law at the university.

      In a letter to the university’s president and fellows released on Friday, the dean of the law school, Martha L. Minow, argued that the time had come to dissociate the school from the legacy of Isaac Royall, who left Harvard part of a fortune acquired through the labor of slaves at his father’s sugar plantation in Antigua.

      Every year, the dean wrote, she welcomes new students with a discussion of the benefactor’s portrait in which she notes “that while Harvard University at that time acted legally in accepting the gift, it is crucial that we never confine ourselves to solely what is currently lawful, for the great evil of slavery happened within the confines of the law.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • ICANN Meeting In Marrakesh: More Hiccups On Way To IANA Transition

      The 55th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Marrakesh this week is expected to finalise the last proposal necessary for the transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), a set of core functions necessary for the running of the internet.

      [...]

      Sharply criticising the transition proposal, Ismailov said it appeared that ICANN would remain a US corporation and the functions of the NTIA would just be resolved within the ICANN procedures, and be totally laid on US ground. “We hope that will be a temporary situation,” he said, adding concerns about “internal contradictions” in the US, pointing to recent letters from Republican Presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • UN Global Dialogue On Innovation And Access To Medicines This Week

      The United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines is holding a global dialogue this month, attended by governments, civil society, industry and academia, to discuss potential solutions to promote innovation and at the same time increase access to medicines. The first public dialogue session is this week, on 10 March in London.

      The High-Level Panel was established in November. In December, the panel issued a call for contributions to address the issue of alignment of the rights of inventors, and international human rights laws, trade rules and public health (IPW, Public Health, 1 February 2016).

    • Copyrights

      • Perfect 10 and the RIAA Still Trying to Rewrite Copyright to Give Hollywood A Veto Right Over Innovation: EFF Files Brief In Support of Giganews and Sound Copyright Policy

        Some people just never learn. For decades, porn purveyor Perfect 10 has been fighting a losing battle to deputize service providers to police potentially infringing uses of its works. Indeed, at this point Perfect 10 spends far more time on litigation than creation. But court after court has rejected those efforts. In fact, Perfect 10′s main achievement in the courts has been to inadvertently make good copyright law. For example, its litigation led to key decisions ruling that an image search engine was fair use and confirming that rightsholders must follow DMCA Section 512′s clear rules for takedown notices.

      • Author Sues Google For Copyright Infringement For Copying His ‘Philosophy’ In A TV Ad

        Yeah, by now, we get it. The legacy copyright folks have spent decades beating into the minds of the public that every idea and concept and philosophy is “owned” and that you need to get permission for just about everything that it’s no surprise to see crazy, nutty copyright lawsuits pop up every here and there. At least, usually, the really nutty ones are filed pro se (i.e., without a lawyer) and quickly dumped. However, it’s doubly amazing when you get a lawsuit that feels like a pro se lawsuit, but is actually filed by a real lawyer. In this case, the lawyer is Joel D. Peterson, whose website lists “intellectual property” as one of his specialties. If that’s the case, he may want to demand a refund from his law school.

      • Dutch Govt Denies Blame For Movie Piracy Losses

        The Dutch Government has no intention of compensating local film companies for the piracy losses they have allegedly suffered. A coalition of filmmakers is demanding 1.2 billion euros in piracy damages claiming that the Government failed to deter illegal downloading, but the Dutch Minister of Justice denies any liability.

      • “Disgusted” Member of Parliament Intervenes in Internet Piracy Case

        A Member of Parliament has intervened after an 83-year-old grandmother was accused of illegally downloading the Robert Redford movie The Company You Keep and hit with a demand for £600. Ian Austin MP has called on the UK Business Secretary to safeguard consumers from copyright trolls and will also raise the matter in Parliament.

      • Google Asked to Remove 100,000 ‘Pirate Links’ Every Hour

        Copyright holders are continuing to increase the number of pirate links they want Google to remove from its search results, which have now reached a record-breaking 100,000 reported URLs per hour. This remarkable milestone is more than double the number of pirated links that were reported around the same time last year.

03.07.16

Links 7/3/2016: New Linux RC, Firefox in Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 8:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript

    I’m having a really weird browser issue, where scripts on some pages just won’t run until about 20 seconds have passed.

    Whatever you’re about to suggest, yes, I’ve thought of it, and no, it’s not the problem. I mention this not in the hope that someone will help me debug it, but because it’s made me acutely aware of a few… quirks… of frontend Web development.

    (No, really, do not try to diagnose this problem from one sentence, I have heard and tried almost everything you could imagine.)

  • Science

    • Remains of Anglo-Saxon island discovered in Lincolnshire village

      The remains of an Anglo-Saxon island have been uncovered in Lincolnshire in a significant find that has yielded an unusually wide array of artefacts.

      The island, once home to a Middle Saxon settlement, was found at Little Carlton near Louth, Lincolnshire, by archaeologists from the University of Sheffield after a discovery by a metal detectorist.

    • E-mail inventor Ray Tomlinson, who popularized @ symbol, dies at 74

      If you’ve ever sent an e-mail, you can thank Raymond Samuel Tomlinson for putting the @ symbol there.

      On Friday, Tomlinson died of suspected heart failure. He was 74.

      Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York in 1941, and he earned a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967, he joined Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a company that played a key role in the development of the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet.

      In 1971, according to the Internet Hall of Fame, he wrote the first ARPANET mail client, combining the existing SNDMSG and CPYNET programs. Tomlinson himself came up with the idea of using the @ symbol as a way to separate local e-mails from those that could be sent to external networks through the user@host syntax.

    • The Founder of Email, Ray Tomlinson, Dies

      Ray Tomlinson, the man credited with founding email, has passed away at the age of 74, according to a report from the Sydney Morning Herald. According to the report, Tomlinson died of a heart attack.

    • Email inventor Ray Tomlinson dies at 74

      Internet pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who is credited with the invention of email, has died at the age of 74.

      The US computer programmer came up with the idea of electronic messages that could be sent from one network to another in 1971.

      His invention included the ground-breaking use of the @ symbol in email addresses, which is now standard.

  • Hardware

    • An AMD ARM 64-bit Dev Board Is Launching For $299 USD

      Since last year we have been waiting for AMD to launch their “HuskyBoard” ARM development board built around their Opteron A1100 ARM 64-bit SoC. That board was originally supposed to ship in Q4’15 while now available for pre-order is a new A1100 development board that looks like it may be taking its place.

      AMD had been teasing their ARM development board for nearly one year and talked of it being a low-cost ARM development board that would be in compliance with the 96Boards’ Enterprise Edition specification.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Post-Flint, Half Of Americans Are Worried About Their Tap Water Too

      Ahead of the Democratic debate in lead-poisoned Flint, Michigan on Sunday, a new poll shows that many Americans don’t trust the public water system.

      Only half the country is “very confident” that tap water is safe to drink. A third of respondents said they were “moderately confident,” while nearly one in five said they aren’t confident at all.

      More than half the respondents said that the water crisis in Flint — in which city water was contaminated with lead for 18 months, potentially causing longterm damage to thousands of children — was a sign of a widespread infrastructure problem in America.

    • ‘Raise The Wage, Clean Our Water’: Flint Residents Demand $15 Minimum Wage

      Tyrone Stitt has worked as a maintenance technician at Taco Bell for 18 years. He started at $3.25 an hour when he was 25 years old and today, despite the skyrocketing cost of living in Flint, he makes just $8.50 an hour. He says that amount is not enough to support himself and his family, let alone afford bottled water.

      “I’m breaking out in rashes and paying for water,” he told ThinkProgress as he marched across the University of Michigan campus in Flint among a group of protesters. “Increasing the minimum wage would help tremendously. It would make a tremendous difference in my life because I’d be able to pay my bills and provide for my family.”

    • Five Years After Fukushima, ‘No End in Sight’ to Ecological Fallout

      And U.S. nuclear regulatory agency comes under fire for ‘half-baked’ reforms that fail to improve public safety

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Killing Someone Else’s Beloved

      Yet Trump’s pledge to murder the civilian relatives of terrorists could be considered quite modest — and, in its bluntness, refreshingly candid — when compared to President Obama’s ongoing policy of loosing drones and U.S. Special Operations forces in the Greater Middle East. Those policies, the assassinations that go with them, and the “collateral damage” they regularly cause are based on one premise when it comes to the American public: that we will permanently suspend our capacity for grief and empathy when it comes to the dead (and the living) in distant countries.

    • ‘Obama could have stopped Syria’s suffering. And he didn’t do it’

      Michael Hayden, a former head of both the CIA and the NSA, tells Toby Harnden about righteous violence in the war on terror and the deep moral scar left by the president’s inaction over Assad

    • Bill Clinton neglect left NSA ‘brain dead’ as al Qaeda plotted 9/11 attacks

      Retired Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the NSA director at the time, describes the decline in a memoir, writing an insider’s view of an agency that the government at one time refused to acknowledge even existed.

    • You Will Obey Me — Trump to Military

      General Michael Hayden, former Central Intelligence Agency director, NSA director, and other experts have said that when you asked the US military to carry out some of your campaign promises, specifically targeting terrorists’ families, and also the use of interrogation methods more extreme than waterboarding, the military will refuse, because they’ve been trained to turn down and refuse illegal orders.

    • High-tech ‘bazooka’ fires a net to take down drones

      Could this bazooka-style device become a crucial weapon in law enforcement’s battle with drones?

      The brainchild of U.K.-based OpenWorks Engineering, SkyWall 100 uses a compressed air launcher to fire smart projectiles at targeted drones.

    • Syria: Phantom “Rebels” Return from the Dead

      The French colonial green, white, and black banner of Syria adapted by the West’s proxy “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) had long been forgotten in the sea of black banners held aloft by Washington and Riyadh’s more extreme ploy to gain leverage upon and more direct access to the battlefield.

      However, as Syrian forces backed by its regional allies and Russian airpower overwhelm these forces while building alliances with other factions, including the Kurds, the West’s entire regime change enterprise faces ignominious collapse.

      It appears that – having exhausted all other options – the West has decided to change as many of those black banners back to the “rebel” green, white, and black as possible, before the conflict draws to a close, giving the West the most favorable position achievable ahead of “peace talks.”

    • State Dept Staffs Syria Ceasefire Violations Hotline — With Non-Arabic Speakers

      telephone

      Is there a better way to ensure no troublesome violations of John Kerry’s signature ceasefire in Syria get reported than by staffing the hotline where violations are to be reported by Syrians with non-Arabic speakers?

      Gotta love those clever gals and guys over at the State Department. The Department is all a twitter, high-fiving each other and sending congratulatory emails to Secretary of State John Kerry over his negotiating a ceasefire in Syria. And, in order to monitor compliance with the terms of the ceasefire, State set up a hotline. Ordinary Syrians, out there on the ground, could call in to report violations.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Meet Lucy Gavaghan, The Teen Who’s Trying To Make Tesco Stop Selling Eggs From Caged Hens

      A 14-year-old who is campaigning to stop Tesco from selling eggs from caged hens has rallied more than 88,000 people to support the cause, yet the supermarket giant has failed to change their policy.

      Lucy Gavaghan, from Sheffield, started a Change.org petition after writing letters to stores was not successful.

      “I thought that a petition may be able to create the impact needed to make a company like Tesco change their ways,” she told HuffPost UK. “I think that animal welfare and commercial treatment is a really important issue and I know that many others share this view.”

  • Finance

    • Another Phony Jobs Report

      The monthly payroll jobs reports have become a bad joke.
      No growth in real retail sales, but 55,000 retail trade new jobs in February.
      No growth in real consumer income, but 40,000 more waitresses and bartenders.
      86,000 new jobs in Education, health services, and social assistance. February is a strange month to be hiring new teachers. If February brought a quarter million new jobs, how come a big hike in social assistance jobs? Manufacturing lost 16,000 jobs.

    • The seven sins of the EU investment court

      European trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem and Canadian minister for trade Chrystia Freeland have confirmed that the EU-Canada CETA agreement will include far-reaching investor privileges.

      The investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clause in the deal is set to be based on EU proposals for an Investment Court System (ICS) that were announced last autumn following unprecedented public outcry. However, ICS is no new departure. Indeed, it is the same special rights for foreign investors come back from the dead.

      Plans for ISDS were among the most contentious parts of the proposed TTIP deal between the EU and US. Debate has been focused on the rights that corporations will acquire to challenge democratic decisions when they consider them a threat to their profits.

    • How Hillary Turned Her Support for Welfare for Banks into an Auto Bailout Attack

      For a campaign that has spent days insisting Bernie Sanders should not launch attacks against her, the Hillary Clinton campaign sure engaged in some dishonest hackery last night.

      During the debate in Flint, Hillary attacked Bernie for “vot[ing] against the money that ended up saving the auto industry.” She was talking about a January 15, 2009 attempt to withhold the second $350 billion of TARP funding that failed (here’s the resolution); Bernie voted not to release those funds. But the vote was not directly about auto bailout funding. It was about bailing out the banks and funding what turned out to be completely ineffective efforts to forestall foreclosures.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Explaining Donald Trump’s Dick

      Why did Donald Trump inexplicably defend the size of his penis in Thursday’s debate? Because he’s unnaturally sensitive about it? Because, as Jeet Heer suggests, it’s part of a venerable history of monarchs and presidents? Because Hillary Clinton would be the first penis-free president, so it’s a good way of contrasting himself?

    • Michael Bloomberg Will Not Enter Presidential Race

      Michael R. Bloomberg, who for months quietly laid the groundwork to run for president as an independent, will not enter the 2016 campaign, he said Monday, citing his fear that a three-way race could lead to the election of a candidate he thinks would endanger the country: Donald J. Trump.

      In a forceful condemnation of his fellow New Yorker, Mr. Bloomberg said Mr. Trump has run “the most divisive and demagogic presidential campaign I can remember, preying on people’s prejudices and fears.” He said he was alarmed by Mr. Trump’s threats to bar Muslim immigrants from entering the country and to initiate trade wars against China and Japan, and he was disturbed by Mr. Trump’s “feigning ignorance of white supremacists,” alluding to Mr. Trump’s initial refusal to disavow an endorsement from David Duke.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • EFF Urges Sixth Circuit to Revisit Case Finding No Warrant Needed for Ten Weeks of Covert 24/7 Video Surveillance

      EFF joined NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, ACLU, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Libertarian National Committee, and former Congressman Bob Barr in urging the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit a recent opinion finding no reasonable expectation of privacy in 10 weeks of continuous, surreptitious video surveillance. The opinion sets a dangerous precedent that law enforcement officers in Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee don’t need a warrant to film your every move in front of your house.

    • They Are Watching. Are You?

      Encouraged by millions of dollars in federal grants, local law enforcement agencies across the country are acquiring surveillance technologies at an alarmingly rapid rate. As more and more invasive technologies are created for the military and intelligence agencies, they trickle down to our increasingly militarized police forces. Often, local lawmakers and the public are not familiar with these systems and their dangers to civil liberties, and so public policy in response to surveillance lags behind.

    • French Parents Face Fines, Lawsuits And Prison For Posting Pictures Of Their Own Children Online

      As Techdirt reported recently, the controversial “right to be forgotten” — actually more of a right to be de-linked in search engines — is starting to spread around the world. But its spiritual home is definitely in Europe, where privacy concerns tend to outweigh other considerations, like freedom of speech, that are regarded as paramount elsewhere — in the US, for example. Leading the charge in the EU is France, which has been pushing Google to de-link items even more widely.

    • Verizon Strikes $1.35 Million Settlement With FCC Over Its Use Of Stealth ‘Zombie Cookies’

      Last year you’ll recall Verizon Wireless found itself in hot water after being caught modifying user packets to insert stealth tracking technology. By embedding each packet with a unique identifier traffic header, or X-UIDH. Verizon and its marketing partners were not only able to ignore user browser preferences and track their behavior around the Internet, they were then able to use this technology to build detailed user profiles. Verizon Wireless launched and operated the technology for two years before security researchers even noticed the program, and it required another six months of public pressure for Verizon to even offer an opt-out option.

      According to the FCC’s full press announcement (pdf), the fairly measly $1.35 million settlement doesn’t stop the program, which likely won’t please many privacy advocates. Verizon Wireless will however need to transparently notify users of the system and get their explicit opt-in (a rare dinosaur in online tracking rules) consent before sharing any of this data with third parties. The FCC is quick to highlight how Verizon previously proclaimed the technology couldn’t be abused by third parties to build detailed profiles of users — right before it was.

    • French Parliament Votes For Law That Would Put Tech Execs In Jail If They Don’t Decrypt Data

      Of course, this comes at the same time that basically the entire tech industry is rallying in support of Apple’s stance of refusing to hack into its own systems to remove security features and make it easier to decrypt data. And it’s coming right as the world was ridiculing Brazil for arresting (and then releasing) a Facebook exec for refusing to hand over data from subsidiary Whatsapp.

      This kind of move is so stupid on so many levels that it defies any kind of logic. It’s bad for security, because weak encryption puts us all at much greater risk than the threat of terrorists or criminals using encryption (in part, because this kind of thing won’t stop them from using secure encryption, and in part because those threats are very low probability risks). It’s also bad for the economy, because you’ve just given a ton of important tech companies every reason in the world to no longer operate in France due to such a ridiculous law that may put execs in jail. It’s bad for the public in that it will mean less secure services and devices that put them at risk, while also potentially cutting off more innovative and useful products and services.

      This is the kind of kneejerk reaction from people who are too ignorant and too scared to understand the actual technology and the actual issues at stake. Why do citizens in these countries continue to allow ignorant scared people to make such blatantly bad rules?

    • Book ‘Dark Territory’ chronicles how NSA hacked DoD command-control systems in four days

      In what was the first-ever high-level exercise testing the U.S. military’s ability to defend itself against a cyberattack, the NSA in 1997 hacked into the DoD’s entire network in just four days, using nothing but commercially available equipment and soft­ware, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan.

    • GHCQ head calls for cooler heads amid Apple and FBI encryption feud
    • GCHQ boss calls for new relationship with tech firms over encryption
    • GCHQ boss: Tech firms should co-operate over encryption
    • GCHQ chief offers olive branch to technology firms in online privacy row
    • GCHQ losing cyberwar despite £860mn extra funding – spy chief

      Despite being handed hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ cash, British spooks are losing the cyberwar, a top GCHQ director has acknowledged.

      Alex Dewdney, who is head of the Communications Electronics Security Group (CESG) branch of GCHQ, told an audience in the US that UK intelligence is lagging behind.

    • GCHQ admits £1bn spend on cyber security ‘hasn’t worked’

      GCHQ is losing the cyber security war, according to director of cyber security at CESG (Communications-Electronics Security Group) Alex Dewedney, who admitted that, despite a £1bn spend over the past five years, “the bottom line is it hasn’t worked”.

      Speaking at the RSA security conference in San Francisco late last week, Dewedney also suggested a “more interventionist policy” may now be needed.

    • The Privacy Shield is Riddled with Surveillance Holes

      The European Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce have finally announced the details of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, an agreement designed to ensure that personal data can flow between Europe and the U.S. for commercial purposes while maintaining the privacy rights Europeans have come to love and expect. Lawmakers in the U.S. and abroad were under intense pressure to produce some sort of agreement after the European Court of Justice (CJEU) dissolved the safe harbor agreement related to transatlantic data flows last October, leaving countless international tech firms in a lurch about how to handle data. The court decision and subsequent negotiation could have been a powerful motivator for the U.S. to clean up its surveillance policies. Instead, the patchwork of concessions in the Privacy Shield leaves the door open for the digital surveillance of hundreds of millions of Europeans.

      It’s unclear what, if anything, the new Privacy Shield is supposed to be shielding people from— except perhaps shielding U.S. companies from the inevitable consequences of their country’s mass surveillance program.

    • EFF and 46 Technology Experts Ask Court To Throw Out Unconstitutional Apple Order

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and 46 technology industry experts, including inventors of modern cryptography, told a federal court today that forcing Apple to write and sign computer code disabling crucial iPhone security features that protect millions of users violates the company’s free speech rights.

      The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) should not be allowed to, in effect, stand over the shoulders of Apple programmers and force them to create and sign off on code that would decimate the iPhone’s security, EFF said. The signed code would send a clear message that it’s OK to undermine encryption that users rely on—a view the government endorses but Apple fiercely opposes. EFF made its arguments in a friend-of-the-court brief filed today in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The brief was signed by 46 technologists, security researchers, and cryptographers, including digital signature pioneers Martin Hellman and Ronald Rivest.

    • Inside “Eligible Receiver” [Ed: previous headline was "The NSA Hacked Into the U.S. Military by Digging Through Its Trash"]

      The task turned out to be appallingly easy. Many defense computers, it turned out, weren’t protected by passwords. Others were protected by the lamest passwords, like “password” or “ABCDE” or “12345.” In some cases, the Red Team snipped all of an office’s links except for a fax line, then flooded that line with call after call after call, shutting it down. In a few instances, NSA attachés—one inside the Pentagon, the other at a Pacific Com­mand facility in Hawaii—went dumpster diving, riffling through trash cans and dumpsters, looking for passwords. This trick, too, bore fruit.

    • IoT subscriber growth surpasses smartphone users’ in January

      The number of users subscribing to Internet-of-Things (IoT) services grew at a faster pace than those subscribing to smartphones in Korea on-month in January, data showed Sunday, on the back of the rising sales of wearable smart devices.

      According to data compiled by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, the number of Koreans subscribing to IoT-related services shot up 83,577 in January from a month earlier, compared to the 70,097 new smartphone subscribers over the cited period.

    • Amazon Flip-Flop Lands Fire OS Back in Encryption Camp
    • After Backlash, Amazon Promises To Bring Back Encryption On Fire OS

      Just to close the loop on this one: just after the firestorm last week when Amazon was called out for removing device encryption from Fire OS 5 (at the very same time as its CTO was saying encryption is “mandatory” and the company signed on to a brief supporting Apple in the encryption fight, the company has admitted that it will restore encryption to Fire OS 5 “sometime in the spring.”

    • Amazon douses flames, vows to restore Fire OS fondleslab encryption

      Amazon has U-turned on its decision to remove filesystem encryption from Fire OS, which powers its Fire and Kindle slabs.

      We’ve been told that a version due out within the next month or two will return support for encrypting documents stored on the devices. This decision to restore the feature comes just days after it emerged that Amazon had axed the encryption from the latest build of its tablet operating system: Fire OS 5.

      Removing the crypto sparked outcry from furious Fire and Kindle owners as well as the wider tech world. Amazon appears to have taken notice.

    • How the FBI will lose its iPhone fight, thanks to ‘West Coast Law’

      The vast majority of it has centered on the rights and the wrongs, about the loss of privacy, and of the precedent that breaking one iPhone would create.

    • US to renegotiate rules on exporting “intrusion software”

      After nearly a year of protests from the information security industry, security researchers, and others, US officials have announced that they plan to re-negotiate regulations on the trade of tools related to “intrusion software.” While it’s potentially good news for information security, just how good the news is will depend largely on how much the Obama administration is willing to push back on the other 41 countries that are part of the agreement—especially after the US was key in getting regulations on intrusion software onto the table in the first place.

      The rules were negotiated through the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies, an agreement governing the trade of weapons and technology that could be used for military purposes. Originally intended to prevent proliferation and build-up of weapons, the US and other Western nations pushed for operating system, software, and network exploits to be included in the Wassenaar protocol to prevent the use of commercial malware and hacking tools by repressive regimes against their own people for surveillance.

    • GCHQ: Spy chief admits UK agency losing cyberwar despite £860m funding boost

      A top director at UK spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has admitted he was fighting a losing battle when it comes to cybersecurity – despite an £860m boost in government funding over the past five years.

      Alex Dewdney, director of cybersecurity at CESG which is the information security arm of GCHQ, was speaking during the recent RSA conference in San Francisco where he outlined some major problems encountered by cyber-experts tasked with protecting the UK from attack.

    • Eric Schmidt gets a job at the Pentagon

      Secretary of Defense Ashton Carton on Wednesday appointed Schmidt the head of a new Defense Innovation Advisory Board, which will help the Pentagon keep up with the latest Silicon Valley ideas and apply them at the Department of Defense.

    • Military hits snag in Silicon Valley recruitment

      The fight between the FBI and Apple over a locked iPhone is threatening to undermine the Pentagon’s attempt to recruit talent from Silicon Valley.

      Defense Secretary Ash Carter spent this week out West, meeting with tech executives and launching new cybersecurity initiatives that will rely on help from the Bay Area.

      But under the looming shadow of the FBI’s request that Apple help bypass the iPhone’s security measures, Carter also made a noticeable effort to send a signal to techies: We get you.

    • Ronald Reagan’s Viewing of 80’s Movie Classic ‘Wargames’ Set Basis for NSA Spying

      When Ronald Reagan saw it in a Joint Chiefs meeting, he asked chairman John Vessey to investigate whether it was Hollywood magic, or if American military systems could really be compromised by an industrious kid or a Soviet initiative. Vessey relayed his findings to President Reagan a week later: Not only was it possible, it was, in fact, becoming increasingly probable.

    • Please Write To MPs To Call For More Time To Debate Investigatory Powers Bill

      Last week, the UK government published a revised Investigatory Powers Bill, aka the Snooper’s Charter. Surprisingly, it took no notice of the the serious criticisms made by no less than three Parliamentary committees; indeed, in some respects, it has made the Bill even worse.

  • Civil Rights

    • Stop the global crackdown on academic freedom! Act now!

      A call for the global community of teachers and students to protest against this most dangerous trend by signing, translating and circulating this statement, and organising protest meetings in all universities.

    • The Fight to Keep Abortion Safe & Legal: A Special Report from Outside the U.S. Supreme Court

      The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in the most significant abortion case in a generation. Abortion providers in Texas, led by Whole Woman’s Health, have challenged provisions of a sweeping anti-choice law passed by the Texas state Legislature in 2013 despite a people’s filibuster and an 11-hour stand by Texas state Senator Wendy Davis. The provisions at stake force abortion clinics to meet the standards of hospital-style surgery centers and require providers to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital—a task many can’t achieve, in part due to anti-choice sentiment. Similar restrictions have been passed in multiple states. As the case was being argued inside the court, a few thousand people rallied outside in support of Whole Woman’s Health, including fellow abortion providers and women who have had abortions. Democracy Now!’s Amy Littlefield was at the rally and also spoke with the anti-choice protesters, who held a competing demonstration.

    • Don’t Say ‘Opposing Gay Rights’ When You Mean Discriminating Against Gays

      What you aren’t allowed to do—in some situations—is discriminate against LGBT people, and these bills are an effort to make it OK to do so. Discrimination has not generally been seen as a First Amendment–protected activity; if it had been, the civil rights movement would have been effectively stymied. But the organized homophobia movement is trying to rebrand discrimination as a kind of speech—hence the marketing of these pro-discrimination bills as “First Amendment Defense Acts.”

    • The Genesis of #HateHurts

      It is seemingly everywhere nowadays. It’s at the center of the conversation during this perpetual election season. It’s a focal point of the anti-refugee sentiment that is stretching across the Western world. It hangs over the interactions of everyday people, those Muslim and those perceived to be Muslim.

    • Louis C.K. Compares Donald Trump to Hitler: ‘He’s an Insane Bigot’

      Louis C.K. is the latest public figure to criticize Donald Trump, calling him an “insane bigot” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler.

      In a Saturday morning email blast announcing the sixth episode of his web series “Horace and Pete,” C.K. included a lengthy postscript urging readers not to vote for Trump.

      “Please stop it with voting for Trump,” C.K. writes. “It was funny for a little while. But the guy is Hitler. And by that I mean that we are being Germany in the ’30s. Do you think they saw the sh-t coming? Hitler was just some hilarious and refreshing dude with a weird comb over who would say anything at all.”

    • Abuse Of Power: Laws Should Be Designed As If The People We Distrust The Most Are In Power

      There have been a few stories lately that have all combined to make a few key points crystallize in my mind, concerning various legal powers and the way that some people view them. It starts with an excellent article from Trevor Timm in which the title lays out the issue: Imagine Obama’s national security policies in Trump’s hands. After all, this is the guy who hasn’t been shy in promising to settle scores if he’s elected.

    • New Film Delves Into FBI Arrests of Youths for Terrorism Crimes They Might Commit

      IN AN EARLY SCENE from the HBO documentary Homegrown, an FBI agent describes his angst while tracking a teenager’s engagement in the online jihadi world. “You almost want to pick up the phone and say, ‘Son, don’t do this,’” the agent reflects. The teenager in question was Shifa Sadequee, a 19-year-old who was arrested on terrorism charges in 2006. Following a 2009 trial in which Sadequee represented himself, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison plus an additional 30 years of supervision.

      The ethical issues involved in preventive counterterrorism cases like Sadequee’s are the theme behind much of Homegrown. Following 9/11, law enforcement agencies were given a mandate to halt terrorist acts before they occurred, rather than investigate crimes after the fact. This directive inevitably gave rise to some disturbing ethical questions. When is it acceptable to arrest someone for a crime they haven’t actually committed, but you think they might commit in the future? At what point do a teenager’s online postings turn into a terrorism offense?

    • Donald Trump, America’s Own Silvio Berlusconi

      AS A WRITER who has covered Silvio Berlusconi since he became Italy’s prime minister in 1994, it has been difficult not to be overcome with a powerful sense of déjà vu all over again watching the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

    • Texas’ Annual Roundup of the Working Poor

      The Great Texas Warrant Roundup is an annual statewide collaboration of courts and law enforcement agencies. Their goal is to collect payment of overdue fines and fees from Texans who have outstanding warrants for unpaid traffic tickets and to arrest and jail those who can’t pay. What little press is dedicated to the Roundup focuses on praising cities for the so-called “amnesty” period that precedes it.

  • DRM

    • DRM Is Evil, Part 8,492: Nook Pulls Out Of UK, Exploring Options To Let People Retain Access To At Least Some Books

      Yet another story of how badly DRM screws over legitimate buyers, with no actual benefit for copyright holders. This time, it’s about the total failure of Barnes & Noble’s Nook ebook reader, which is struggling globally, and shutting down entirely in the UK. Nate Hoffelder has a great article explaining why the Nook has been such an abject failure, but a key point highlighted by the Register is that the company is still working to see if there are ways that legitimate buyers can keep access to at least some of the books they purchased.

    • Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Apple’s Appeal In eBook Price Fixing Case

      This isn’t a huge surprise, but this morning the Supreme Court refused to hear Apple’s appeal of its loss in the case brought by the Justice Department for engaging in price fixing on ebooks with the big book publishers. During the course of the case and appeals, Apple worked out a settlement, agreeing to pay $450 million — but only after the appeals process was exhausted. And, that’s now happened. As with basically all appeals rejected by the Supreme Court, the court gave no reason. It just denied cert.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Findings of EU Project On Conservation Of Genetic Resources Due Out In June

      The findings, conclusions and preliminary recommendations of a European Commission initiative on the conservation and sustainable use of genetic diversity are to be presented in June, the Commission has announced.

      The “Preparatory action on EU [European Union] plant and animal genetic resources in agriculture” followed an initiative tabled by the European Parliament, and was launched in July 2014 for a period of two years, according to the commission.

      The EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 [pdf] includes an action to conserve Europe’s agricultural genetic diversity. The preparatory action is meant to support the EU “in recognizing the potentials for added value in the field of conservation and sustainable use of agricultural genetic resources,” according to the preparatory action webpage.

    • Copyrights

      • The Donald Sends Cease And Desist Threat To Band Over The Use Of His Name In Music And Video

        So, the political season is really starting to ramp up now, which means the insanity ramps up along with it. This particular go around in presidential politics has been particularly absurd, causing even those of us that try to view it all through the prism of entertainment to be more than a little frightened. Still, there can be no doubt that there has been an uptick in the engagement level of the American people, including from musical artists looking to provide commentary on American politics. Take this song and video released by music duo Fight Clvb, for instance. It’s called Donald Trump and it is massively NSFW.

      • Foreign Copyright Holders Could More Actively Protect IP In Russia

        Russia is continuing to strengthen its national legislation in the field of intellectual property, through the provision of means for foreign copyright holders to more actively protect their intellectual property in Russia and the elimination of bureaucratic hurdles, according to official sources.

        This is taking place as part of the ongoing reform of the national IP policy.

        On 15 February, the scope of the Russian anti-piracy law was significantly expanded, through the inclusion of all copyrighted works (music, books, inventions) and related rights in the subject of protection. This provided an opportunity to foreign rights holders to better protect their IP in Russia.

      • “Kanye Bay” — Kanye West Now Gets His Own Pirate Bay Proxy

        Responding to the latest screenshot that suggested that Kanye West was pirating some music software, the Pirate Bay offered him a dedicated “Kanye Bay” proxy.

      • Apple is Running BitTorrent Trackers in Cupertino

        Apple is not known for being friendly towards BitTorrent software in its App Store but it appears the technology giant isn’t averse to using the technology itself. In fact, according to data provided by “Internet of things” search engine Shodan, Apple is running BitTorrent trackers from dozens of IP addresses in Cupertino.

      • BitTorrent Hater Apple Is Running BitTorrent Trackers At Its Headquarters

        Shodan, the IoT Search engine, has come up with proof that Apple was running BitTorrent trackers in their Cupertino office.

03.06.16

Links 6/3/2016: KDE Sprint at CERN, Collabora Office 5.0

Posted in News Roundup at 10:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • ReactOS Participation in Google Summer of Code 2016
  • ReactOS: Building a Free-Licensed Windows

    From dual-booting to WINE, free software has always struggled to provide a solution for running Windows applications. However, few of these efforts have been more ambitious than ReactOS, a free-licensed implementation of Windows. The project has been at work since 2006 and, in February 2016, ReactOS finally released its first alpha version, after a decade of difficult and necessarily cautious development.

  • ReactOS Gains Btrfs File-System Support

    ReactOS, the project aiming for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows (Server 2003), now has Btrfs file-system support.

    While there’s just a primitive Btrfs driver for Windows, ReactOS has already gained native Btrfs file-system support.

  • MAME is now Free and Open Source Software

    After 19 years, MAME is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!

    We have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license. We had limited choice to 3 that people already had dual-license MAME code with.

  • 10 months later, MAME finishes its transition to open source

    Almost a year after the folks who maintain the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or (MAME) said they would make the project completely open source, they’ve declared the transition a success.

    MAME is seen by many developers to be the foremost emulator of arcade games, and while MAME source code has long been freely available for use, it hasn’t technically been open source.

  • MAME is now free as well as free of charge

    MAME, the arcade emulator originally created by Nicola Salmora 19 years ago, is now comprised entirely of free and open-source software. It’s taken a lot of wrangling, reports MAMEDev.org, due to the large number of contributors and interlinked components.

  • After 19 Years, MAME Goes Open Source

    The MAME Team has announced that after 19 years – MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) has gone open source.

    The arcade emulator is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license. This means the source code for the long-running emulator is readily available to fans – you’ll now be able to modify, utilize, and distribute it for a variety of purposes.

  • Machine Learning for Hackers with Debian and Ubuntu

    Data Science and Machine Learning are hot topics at the moment. Many people are considering how to extend their skills into these areas and many solutions have appeared, including full online degrees, free online courses combined with free software and for those who prefer hard copy, a staggering choice of books on the topic.

  • Machine Learning and Open Source: What You Need to Know Now

    The basic goal with most machine learning tools is to take a vast quantity of data and reduce it to manageable, actionable insights. Now, some of the biggest tech companies are putting the tools in place to let the community advance these efforts. Expect much more in this space as 2016 continues.

  • Serro unveils new open source SDN framework, AuSM

    Serro Solutions, a San Francisco-based technology services firm, has made its new SDN framework open source. Automated Service Manager, or AuSM, is aimed at connecting network tools via API. AuSM creates a single platform from which users can write unified business policies and implement them consistently across data center networks, WANs and storage systems.

  • The One thing you can do to Ensure Success in Open Source Deployments

    What is it about an Open source project that gets business excited? and more importantly, is – ROI- under the hype?

    The primary reason most enterprises focus on Open source solutions is the potential cost savings. This is followed closely by the abilityto fix or modify the technology to something specific for the business, without having to wait for enterprise software updates. Thereare more Open source middleware products, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings and application development frameworks, with the ability to change out an underlying, closed source vendor.

  • HFOSS: Quiz #1

    In the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development (HFOSS) course at the Rochester Institute of Technology, quizzes are in the form of blog posts submitted during the class period. The room stays quiet, but it is an open IRC quiz, so many of the students collaborated with each other in #rit-foss on freenode for the quiz.

  • VoIP Supply Bolsters its PBX Appliances via Three Open-Source Models
  • NFV/SDN Reality Check: DDoS attack security for NFV- and SDN-powered networks – Episode 49
  • DDoS attack security for NFV- and SDN-powered networks
  • OPNFV Unveils Second Release of Open-Source NFV Platform

    “Brahmaputra” brings a range of new features that come from collaboration with other projects, including OpenDaylight and OpenStack.

    The industry consortium developing an open-source platform for network-functions virtualization is unveiling the second release of its software, which not only brings an array of new features and use cases but also is an indication of the growing maturity of the group.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome 49 released to stable channel, smooth scrolling now enabled by default
      • Taint Tracking for Chromium

        For future work in the Web context, the approach presented here can be made compatible with server-side taint tracking to persist taint information beyond the lifetime of a Web page. A server-side Web application could transmit taint information for the strings it sends so that the client could mark those strings as tainted. Following that idea it should be possible to defeat other types of XSS. Other areas of work are the representation of information about the data flows in order to help developers to secure their applications. We already receive a report in the form of structured information about the blocked code generation. If that information was enriched and presented in an appealing way, application developers could use that to understand why their application is vulnerable and when it is secure. In a similar vein, witness inputs need to be generated for a malicious data flow in order to assert that code is vulnerable. If these witness inputs were generated live while browsing a Web site, a developer could more easily assess the severity and address the issues arising from DOM-based XSS.

    • Mozilla

      • Introducing the WebVR 1.0 API Proposal

        2016 is shaping up to be a banner year for Virtual Reality. Many consumer VR products will finally be available and many top software companies are ramping up to support these new devices. The new medium has also driven demand for web-enabled support from browser vendors. Growth in WebVR has centered on incredible viewing experiences and the tools used to create online VR content.

      • Mozilla Jumps On IoT Bandwagon

        Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Collabora Office 5.0 Release
    • Bruce Byfield Interview: Designing With LibreOffice

      Our colleague Bruce has a book coming out! It’s called Designing with LibreOffice. It tackles the subject of how to make documents look good and professional, while taking advantage of all the design features LibreOffice has to offer. So I got together with Bruce and we talked about his book, LibreOffice, design, and the eternal struggle of documenting Open Source projects.

    • Collabora Office 5.0 Released As Its LibreOffice Enterprise Flavor

      The folks at Collabora have released version 5.0 of Collabora Office, their downstream distribution of LibreOffice.

      Collabora Office 5.0 pulls in features from upstream LibreOffice 5.0 as well as some backported features from LibreOffice 5.1. Collabora Office 5.0 features improvements to the Microsoft filters, UI enhancements, remote file open/save support, security fixes, and much more.

    • Losing the Art of Wiki

      The past few months I read here and there around the LibreOffice community complaints about our wiki. According to these sources, our wiki is unusable, chaotic and poorly maintained. As we have a full time team dedicated to infrastructure management I am pretty sure that last criticism is unjustified to a large extent at least, but it also dawned on me that very few people around the LibreOffice project or any other community, for that matter, hail wikis as their most important tool or platform. Obviously, we are no longer in 2007. But what’s happening here is interesting, because it seems that people may have actually forgotten about the basic reasons wikis are around.

    • How To Cite PDF & Make Bibliography with Zotero & LibreOffice
    • How to create list for LibreOffice Calc cell

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 Brings Security Fixes, Hyper-V Tweaks

      FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 was released today as the newest development milestone leading up to FreeBSD 10.3 that should be officially released later this month.

      FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 has a number of OpenSSL security fixes, Hyper-V driver changes, regression fixes, and other bug fixes.

    • Pre-orders for 5.9 are up!

      OpenBSD 5.9 is shaping up to be quite a big release, and pre-orders for the CD sets have just been activated.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Helsinki region utilities turn to open source

      Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority (HSY) is turning to open source software solutions for its web applications and other online services. The first open source-based service to go live is the one for water metering. Others will follow soon, says Risto Sipilä, who works for Cybercom, an IT consultancy contracted by HSY to help build the services.

    • Basque open source sector almost doubles

      The revenue and number of IT workers employed by open source service providers in the Basque Country has nearly doubled in 2015, according to figures published by a regional trade group for the sector, ESLE. The combined 2015 revenue of the nearly 40 companies that ESLE represents is 58 million compared to 31 million the year before. The number of workers grew by 413 new staff members. Altogether, ESLE members now employ 1033 people.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source on another level

      BrewDog, a UK brewery which soon celebrates its tenth anniversary, has decided to “open source” all of their 215 beer recipes. From their original and still extremely popular (and tasty) beer “PUNK IPA“, moving on to “Hops Kill Nazis“, “Doodlebug” and finally arriving at their latest “Jet Black Heart” which was first brewed last month (!)

    • Raspberry Pi 3, Linux Mint security breach, Google data processing for the Zika virus, and more
    • This Open Source Script Lets You (and Police) Search Twitter For Guns

      It’s now possible to do both of these things, thanks to a free, open-source tool designed by security researcher Justin Seitz as a part of his larger open-source intelligence project.

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware

      • First Open Source GPU Could Change Future of Computing

        Nyami is significant in the research, computing and open source communities because it marks the first time open source has been used to design a GPU, as well as the first time a research team was able to test how different hardware and software configurations affect GPU performance. The results of the experiments the researchers performed are now part of the open source community, and that work will help others follow in the original research team’s footsteps. According to Timothy Miller, a computer science assistant professor at Binghamton, as others create their own GPUs using open source, it will push computing power to the next level.

      • We are happy to share our FREE and OPEN-SOURCE microprocessor system PULPino!

        Not a toy design: PULPino is a mature design: it has been taped-out as an ASIC in UMC 65nm in January 2016. The PULPino platform is available for RTL simulation as well for FPGA mapping. It has full debug support on all targets. In addition we support extended profiling with source code annotated execution times through KCacheGrind in RTL simulations.

        And it is free, no registration, no strings attached, you can use it, change it, adapt it, add to your own chip, use it for classes, research, projects, products… We just ask you to acknowledge the source, and if possible, let us know what you like and what you like and don’t like.

      • Wiring was Arduino before Arduino

        Hernando Barragán is the grandfather of Arduino of whom you’ve never heard. And after years now of being basically silent on the issue of attribution, he’s decided to get some of his grudges off his chest and clear the air around Wiring and Arduino. It’s a long read, and at times a little bitter, but if you’ve been following the development of the Arduino vs Arduino debacle, it’s an important piece in the puzzle.

Leftovers

03.04.16

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Accounting Software for Small Business

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

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

  • Image processing at NASA with open source tools

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

  • Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes

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

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla unveils Firefox OS based IoT projects

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

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

  • SaaS/Big Data

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

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

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

  • Databases

    • Tune Up Your Databases!

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

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 10.3: Third Beta Available

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

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

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

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

    • OpenBSD 5.9 network improvements

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

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Foundation of Guix Europe

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

    • GnuTLS 3.4.10

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

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • IDE For Python Programming

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

Leftovers

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

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

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

  • Science

  • Security

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

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

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

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

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

    • Brave Afghan Forces Kill Inside Hospital, for Freedom

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

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

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

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

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

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

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

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

  • Finance

    • Bitcoin’s nightmare scenario has come to pass

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The New Mind Control

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

    • Sandy Hook Puzzles

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

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

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

      [...]

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

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

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

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

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

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

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

    • Race and the Crime of Felony Disenfranchisement

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

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

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

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

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

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

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

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

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

    • Copyrights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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