10.04.15

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Curious about Linux? Try Linux Desktop on the Cloud

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

• Server

  • A gentle introduction to microservices

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

• Kernel Space

  • The Art of Communicating with LKML

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

  • Linux 4.2.3

  • Linux 4.1.10

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

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

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

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

  • Linux Foundation Says Open Source Code Worth $5 Billion

  • Graphics Stack

    • Mesa 10.6.9 Released, Marks The End Of The Line: Upgrade To Mesa 11

      Emil Velikov announced Mesa 10.6.9 today as the newest point release for the aging Mesa 10.6 series.

      Mesa 10.6.9 fixes an Intel crash issue with KDE, Unreal Tournament is fixed for Gallium3D drivers, and there are various other Mesa OpenGL fixes.

• Applications

  • MPlayer 1.2 released

    Mplayer 1.2 is compatible with the recent FFmpeg 2.8 release. The tarball already includes a copy of FFmpeg, so you don’t need to fetch it separately.

  • MPlayer 1.2 Released

    It’s been three years since the release of MPlayer 1.1 while surprisingly this weekend MPlayer 1.2 was released.

  • Lightworks: A Professional Video Editor Available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint/Fedora

    Lightworks is a professional video editor which is the fastest, most accessible and focused on Non-Linear Editing (NLE) software, the initial release of Lightworks was in 1989; 26 years ago. It support all resolutions available to public up to 4K as well as video in SD and HD formats. Lightworks has the widest support available for formats currently available in a professional NLE. MXF, Quicktime and AVI containers, with every professional format you can think of: ProRes, Avid DNxHD, AVC-Intra, DVCPRO HD, RED R3D, DPX, H.264, XDCAM EX / HD 422.

  • Using G’MIC to Work Magic on Your Graphics

    If you’re a Gimp power user, G’MIC is, without a doubt, one of the single most important add-ons available for the flagship open source image editing tool. With G’MIC you can bring some real magic to your digital images… and do so with ease. Give it a go and see if it doesn’t take your Gimp work to the next level.

  • VirtualBox 5.0.6 Brings Fixes For Linux 4.3 & More

  • Kodi 16: Alpha 3

  • Kodi 16 Alpha 3 Released

    The third alpha release of the Kodi 16 HTPC open-source software is now available for testing with long-press support.

    Given the number of devices these days with limited remote control buttons but relying upon a long-press of the OK/Enter button to pull up a context menu, Kodi has now implemented similar long-press support for remotes. That’s the main new feature of Kodi 16 Alpha 3.

  • Third Alpha Build of Kodi 16 Media Center Adds Long-Press Support for Remotes

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Infinity compiler update

    • Dealing with Boundary Issues

    • How to Monitor Progress of (Copy/Backup/Compress) Data using ‘pv’ Command

    • Manjaro 15.09 (Bellatrix) Update With Calamares Installer, Tweaks And Latest Applications

  • Games

    • Steam Linux Usage Went Up A Tiny Amount In September, Still Less Than 1%

      While more games continue to be ported over to Linux and offered on Steam, the overall Linux gaming market-share remains under 1%.

    • The Latest Steam Hardware Survey Shows Very Little Difference

    • RollerCoaster Tycoon World Releasing December 10th, Linux Included

      We covered it before, but now RollerCoaster Tycoon World has a proper release date, and Linux will be included.

    • Party Hard, A Stealth Strategy Game Is Now On Linux, Looks Interesting

      Party Hard has recently released for Linux, and it looks like a pretty interesting game. You need to infiltrate your noisy neighbours parties, and kill them.

    • Polychromatic Is A Fantastic Arcade Game Now On Linux

      Polychromatic is probably one of my favourite new releases recently, it’s so simple, but it’s highly addictive.

    • Cocos2d update, Amazon Fire TV gaming, pick of the week, and more gaming news

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE Ships Plasma 5.4.2, bugfix Release for October

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

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

    • Kubuntu 15.10 Will Have KDE Plasma 5.4.2

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

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

    • Randa Meetings update

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

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME’s 2014 Annual Report Published

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

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

• Distributions

  • Reviews

    • Antergos 2015.09 review

      Aside from a slightly buggy installer that’s not feature-complete, Antergos is a pretty good desktop distribution. It’s not as popular as Ubuntu or Linux Mint, but there’s nothing you can do on those distributions that you cannot do on Antergos. If you’re still distro-hopping, you can put this atop your list of distributions to try. And if you’re coming from the Windows side, and are new to Linux, Antergos is one of the better distributions to test-drive the popular desktop environments on. Installation images for 32- and 64-bit architectures are available for free download here.

  • New Releases

    • KaOS 2015.10

      It is with great pleasure to present to you the 2015.10 ISO. As always with this rolling distribution you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.14.0, Plasma 5.4.1 and KDE Applications 15.08.1.

    • RapidDisk / RapidCache 3.4 now available.

    • RapidDisk / RapidCache 3.4 now available.

    • Netrunner Rolling 2015.09 – 64bit released

      Netrunner Rolling 2015.09 has gotten a complete overhaul:
      The desktop transitioned from KDE4 to Plasma5 together with KDE Applications 15.08 and hundreds of packages updated to their latest versions.
      Calamares is now used as the default Installer.
      LibreOffice and VirtualBox now ship in their 5.-versions.
      Gmusicbrowser has been finetuned to load and display large music collections in an efficient and easy way, automatically adding album covers from the internet.

    • KaOS 2015.10 Officially Released with a Gorgeous KDE Plasma 5.4 Desktop, Wayland Session

      On October 2, Anke Boersma had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the KaOS 2015.10 GNU/Linux computer operating system.

    • KaOS 2015.10 KDE-focused Linux distro available now

      While I am a GNOME fan, I recognize how wonderful KDE is too. If you prefer a traditional desktop user interface, KDE is a smart choice. Not only is it it easy to use for beginners, but it offers a ton of customization options for advanced users too.

      There are quite a few KDE-based Linux distros, such as Kubuntu, Linux Mint KDE, and Netrunner, but the lesser known KaOS offers a more pure experience. This distro has a goal of remaining lean, while being fairly bleeding edge regarding KDE packages — it is a great showcase for the desktop environment. Today, version 2015.10 sees release, and you can download it now.

  • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Network Security Toolkit 22-7248 Screenshot Tour

    • SparkyLinux 4.1 KDE Screenshot Tour

  • Gentoo Family

    • Gentoo-Based Calculate Linux 15 Released

      Calculate Linux 15 was released today in its KDE, MATE, and Xfce desktop spins along with Calculate Linux Directory Server, Linux Scratch, Scratch Server, and Media Center editions.

  • Arch Family

    • Manjaro Linux i3 15.09 Officially Released, Brings Calamares and Linux Kernel 4.1

      After the release of the Manjaro Linux 15.09 computer operating system with its official editions, including Xfce, KDE, and Net Install, it is time to take a closer look at the community flavors of the Arch Linux-based distro.

    • Manjaro Linux LXDE 15.09 Community Edition Has Linux Kernel 4.1.8 LTS, AUR Support

    • Manjaro Linux LXQt 15.09 Now Available for Download, Powered by Linux Kernel 4.1 LTS

    • Manjaro Linux GNOME 15.09 Is Out, Based on Linux Kernel 4.1.9 LTS and GNOME 3.16

  • Slackware Family

    • Unofficial Linux Kernel 4.2.2 Now Available for Slackware 12.0 and Its Derivatives

      Arne Exton, the developer of numerous Linux kernel-based and Android-x86 distributions, was happy to inform Softpedia about the release of a custom kernel for the Slackware 12.0 operating system and its derivatives.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Earnings Focus: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

      Investors will be intently watching the EPS number that Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) reports when they announce their upcoming earnings.

    • Second Quarterly Report Doesn’t Rally Red Hat Stock [Ed: much older]

    • Red Hat Launches New OpenStack Training, Certification Offerings

    • Fedora

      • Network Security Toolkit Is Now Based on Fedora 22, Powered by Linux Kernel 4.1.7

        On October 3, the developers of the Network Security Toolkit (NST) open-source network monitoring and security analysis toolkit for Linux kernel-based operating systems announced the release of Network Security Toolkit 22-7248.

      • Intel Core i7 6700K Skylake Linux Benchmarks On Fedora 22, Debian & Ubuntu

        Since August I’ve been delivering various Linux benchmarks of the Core i5 6600K “Skylake” processor, but unfortunately don’t have access yet to a i7-6700K Linux box. Fortunately, thanks to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software and the OpenBenchmarking.org collaborative cloud component, there are already numerous result files.

      • F23, FUDCon LATAM in review, distro collaboration panel, “unbundling”, and all-in with Ansible

        Of course, last week marked the release of Fedora 23 beta. So far, reports are good, and I’m really happy using it on my system. (I’ve heard at least one “even better than F22 final release”!) If you haven’t yet, check it out (making sure to scan the F23 Common Bugs page, which to my eye is comfortingly short — looks like we’re on good track for our Halloween release!

      • Schedule of Fedora 24 published

      • Fedora 24 Is Planned For Release In Mid-May

        Fedora 24 is anticipated to be a very exciting release with likely using the GNOME Wayland desktop by default, doing more to drop i686, likely depending upon KDBUS, and all of the other changes coming via GNOME 3.20 and the next few Linux kernel release cycles.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Ubuntu To Make It Easier To Ship Micro-Release Updates, New Features Post-LTS

        Generally Ubuntu Linux hasn’t allowed new minor point releases of software to be sent down as stable release updates (SRUs) once the Ubuntu release ships, but there’s been many exceptions, and now Ubuntu’s Technical Board has agreed to make changes to make it easier to send down micro-release updates as well as offering new features to existing LTS (Long-Term Support) releases.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • The Default Wallpapers of Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) – Gallery

          We reported back in August that Canonical put together another contest for the default wallpapers of the next major release of Ubuntu Linux, this time entitled Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase.

        • Canonical Launches Pilot for Ubuntu Touch, Adds 10 New Wallpapers to Ubuntu 15.10

          We reported back in August that Canonical put together another contest for the default wallpapers of the next major release of Ubuntu Linux, this time entitled Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase.

        • Make Ubuntu Look Like Mac With the Gela Theme

          Up until Ubuntu went public with Unity, out-of-the-box Linux has always been rather ugly compared to both Windows and Mac. (And depending on who you ask, Ubuntu’s Unity was even a step in the wrong direction!)

          If you recently switched from Mac to Linux, or if you’re just a regular Linux user who happens to like the aesthetics of Mac, the good news is that you can do something about it — by using the Gela Theme.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Nest Labs advances its Weave home automation ecosystem

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

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

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

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

  • OpenDerby Update

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

  • Phones

    • Five things that doomed the big and brilliant BlackBerry 10

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

    • Tizen

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

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

    • Android

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

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

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

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

      • Android fans have yet another reason to cheer Motorola

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

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

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

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

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

      • Nvidia Shield Android TV review

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

Free Software/Open Source

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

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

• Your field’s talent is expecting openness

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

• Events

  • All Things Open exclusive preview and discount

    Join us in Raleigh, North Carolina, from October 19 – 20 at All Things Open 2015. You can also enter for a chance to win a free pass to All Things Open 2015.

• SaaS/Big Data

  • The official user survey, visualizing your cloud, and more OpenStack news

  • At Demo, Hadoop inventor calls NSA snooping a cautionary tale for devs

    The creator of Hadoop said web app developers must put public trust first and argued that actions by the National Security Agency (NSA) offer a cautionary tale for the future of big data.

    Doug Cutting, who in 2004 developed the open-source implementation of the Map-Reduce framework, said big data analytics has opened the floodgates for capturing new consumer data as well as analyzing vast stores of historical information.

  • Arcadia Enterprise: Visual Business Intelligence Meets Hadoop

    Hadoop is on a roll in the Big Data space. Allied Market Research has forecasted that the global market for Hadoop along with related hardware, software, and services will reach $50.2 billion by 2020, propelled by greater use of raw, unstructured, and structured data.

  • On Getting the OpenStack Skills That Get Jobs

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

  • The State of Hadoop: Survey Forecasts Substantial Growth

  • Talend Delivers Spark-Powered Data Integration Platform

  • Hortonworks unveils big data scorecard

    At Strata + Hadoop World here yesterday, Hadoop distribution specialist Hortonworks unveiled a new tool called the Hortonworks Big Data Scorecard designed to help organizations develop a plan for jumpstarting big data projects.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice merchandising is available from Spreadshirt.Net

  • Oracle’s “planned obsolescence” for Java

    Oracle is no longer interested in Java, according to an anonymous top-level Java source at Oracle. As rumours of Oracle’s neglect pile up, it looks more and more like IT’s most popular programming language is becoming a driverless train.

• BSD

  • Call for Testing: tame userland diff

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

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Pipe dream – Debian GNU/Hurd 8 Review

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

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

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

• Openness/Sharing

  • Zulip chat from Dropbox, Linux Foundation report, FCC rules, and more news

  • Lunduke Pens Book, Year of the Desktop Won’t Happen & More…

    Mea culpa: I went to bed last night thinking it was Wednesday, woke up today thinking it was Thursday, went along with my usual Thursday work plan (which differs little from any other weekday) until Christine Hall emailed me and asked, “Where’s the wrap?”

• Programming

  • Teach, Don’t Tell

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

    [...]

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

  • Remote-First vs. Remote-Friendly

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

Leftovers

• Science

  • 3 Ways Scrappy Entrepreneurs Can Keep Data Scientists on Board and Motivated

    These days, there’s a lot being said about big data and the value that comes from properly utilizing it. I’ve written previously about the importance of having a data science team. The next goal is to figure out how to keep those data scientists happy.

• Hardware

  • AMD to Cut 5% of Workforce

    Advanced Micro Devices Inc., reacting to a continued slump in its business, said it will cut its workforce by about 5% as part of a restructuring to trim costs at the chip maker.

  • Some Linux Game Developers Don’t Even Have Contacts At AMD

    It’s sad right now that we’re going through a time where many new Linux game releases only work with NVIDIA graphics and flat out fail with AMD’s Catalyst driver. While AMD is known to deliver game fixes several months late, making matters worse, it seems some game developers don’t even know who to contact at AMD about Linux driver issues.

  • How Steve Jobs Totally Tricked Carly Fiorina

    Carly Fiorina likes to boast about her friendship with the late Apple founder Steve Jobs. But it turns out she may have gotten taken advantage of by the company’s leader.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Ministers ‘are hiding details of £2bn NHS cash crisis’

    Government ministers have buried NHS statistics that show the service hurtling towards an unprecedented £2bn deficit to avoid overshadowing the Tory party conference, say top NHS officials.

    One senior figure at the health service regulator Monitor said his organisation had been “leaned on” by Whitehall to delay its report, which shows that NHS finances are worsening.

• Security

  • ATM Skimmer Gang Firebombed Antivirus Firm

    It’s notable whenever cybercime spills over into real-world, physical attacks. This is the story of a Russian security firm whose operations were pelted with Molotov cocktail attacks after exposing an organized crime gang that developed and sold malicious software to steal cash from ATMs.

  • Scottrade had no idea about data breach until the feds showed up

    Scottrade announced Friday that it suffered a security breach in late 2013 and early 2014, affecting approximately 4.6 million customers. It said it had no idea that the breach had occurred until law enforcement officials told them about it.

  • VMware vCenter and ESXi fall foul of remote code execution bugs

    An insecure configuration of Java Management Extensions (JMX) within VMware’s vCenter has been pinned as the cause of an exploit that would allow code execution on host machines.

  • DoD taking stabs at phishing attempts

    The government has a phishing problem. The method hackers use to enter federal IT systems by luring them into clicking bogus links has led to massive data breaches, and now lawmakers want to ensure agencies are doing something about it.

  • Making Sense of the U.S. Policy on Disclosing Computer Vulnerabilities

    I believe Michael Daniel when he asserts that the United States discloses the majority of the vulnerabilities that it discovers. Thanks to Edward Snowden, a lot of people in the cybersecurity community don’t. The Obama administration could rebuild some of that trust if it was more transparent on the process. One easy step is to release some of the annual reports that the VEP requires. Obviously some classification issues would need to be worked out but they are not insurmountable. The administration could release a range of the percentage of vulnerabilities it has disclosed, similar to what already exists for tech companies that want to disclose government surveillance requests. Not only will that help rebuild the trust between security researchers and the U.S. government, but provide tangible proof to U.S. rivals that its vulnerabilities stockpile isn’t as big as they think it is.

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Anger as Saudi Arabia blocks UN inquiry into ‘war crimes’ in Yemen

    Western countries have ditched plans for a United Nations-led inquiry into alleged war crimes by Saudi Arabia and others in Yemen, instead backing an investigation by the Saudi-allied Yemen government.

    The move came despite rising concern at the number of civilians killed in air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition and indiscriminate shelling by the Houthi rebels. The UN reported on Tuesday that 2,355 civilians had been killed over the last six months. Britain supplies arms to Riyadh and there have been claims these could be being used to commit war crimes.

  • Army Officials Withheld FOIA Documents To Push Out Its Spin On Head Injuries

    The Freedom of Information Act does open up the government to closer examination by taxpayers. The ideals of the law are rarely achieved, though. It requires agencies to respond in a reasonable amount of time, but far too often it takes a successful lawsuit to force an agency to give up the documents requested.

  • Russia ‘targets CIA-trained militants’ in Syria

    Russian air strikes in Syria are targeting Free Syrian Army recruits trained by the CIA, US Senator senate John McCain has said.

  • Russia in Syria: CIA-backed ‘moderate’ rebels struck by fresh air strikes as Iranian troops ‘pour into conflict’

    A military inferno is in the making in Syria after Russia unleashed bombing raids on what it said were “terrorist” targets but which, on early evidence, seemed to have included at least one CIA-backed rebel group – and as reports surfaced of Iranian troops pouring into the conflict.

  • The Trade Union Bill

    A government which claims the right to kill its own citizens with no judicial process on the basis of the vote of 24.4% of the qualified electorate, legislates that workers cannot strike without the support of 40% of their qualified electorate because strikes can inconvenience people. Not as inconvenient as being sliced to pulp by flying metal, I should have thought.

  • PolitiFact Is Right That Ted Cruz Is Wrong, But Still Botches Iran Deal Facts

    …Cruz declared that the JCPOA “will facilitate and accelerate the nation of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.” This is, of course, a ridiculous thing to say. Beyond the fact that we’ve heard for over three decades that the advent of an Iranian nuke is just around the corner–only a few years, maybe two years, a year and half, 12 months, six weeks away!–and these estimates have never been based upon a shred of credible evidence, the enhanced monitoring and inspections implemented under the new deal effectively prevent any hypothetical Iranian move toward weaponizing its program for at least a decade, probably far longer.

  • Lesson From Kunduz

    The destruction by US bombs of the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz – killing doctors, nurses and patients – comes as a stinging corrective to the media pretence that Russian bombs are somehow uniquely evil and destructive. The West has inflicted far more damage in recent years. But the Russians also showed just how ruthless they can be in their brutal suppression of the legitimate desire for national independence of the Chechen people. It is the Americans who today expose most starkly the evils of attempting to solve complex political questions by bombs.

  • Afghanistan: MSF Demands Explanations After Deadly Airstrikes Hit Hospital in Kunduz

    The international medical organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) condemns in the strongest possible terms the horrific aerial bombing of its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Twelve staff members and at least seven patients, including three children, were killed; 37 people were injured including 19 staff members. This attack constitutes a grave violation of International Humanitarian Law.

    All indications currently point to the bombing being carried out by international Coalition forces. MSF demands a full and transparent account from the Coalition regarding its aerial bombing activities over Kunduz on Saturday morning. MSF also calls for an independent investigation of the attack to ensure maximum transparency and accountability.

  • Death Race 2015

    Just between 2003-5, US forces killed 15 journalists in Iraq, the majority either Westerners or working for Western news agencies.

  • Bombs Kill Shock

    After UK and US bombs have been devastating the Middle East for over a decade, killing certainly tens and probably hundreds of thousands of people, including many thousands of children, the media have suddenly noticed this morning that bombs kill an awful lot of civilians. But only Russian bombs, of course. British bombs are cheerful, happy and their shrapnel and blast are brilliantly engineered only to go in the direction of bad guys.

  • Suspect in Chinese parcel bombings was killed in the blasts, police say

    The main suspect in a series of parcel bombings in southern China was killed in one of the blasts, according to local police.

    According to state media reports, police said a 33 year-old quarry worker, Wei Yinyong, was responsible for the 18 bombs hidden in packages that exploded at a series of locations in the southern region of Guangxi on Wednesday and Thursday, killing 10 and injuring 51.

  • China Tightens Censorship on Guangxi Blasts

    Authorities in China have imposed censorship controls on domestic media reporting on this week’s deadly bomb blasts in Guangxi Province, which claimed seven lives and caused more than 50 injuries on the eve of National Day.

    A notice from the central propaganda department, issued on Thursday, restricts all Chinese media including social media from sending reporters to Liuzhou or publishing special coverage while another notice by the cyberspace administration bans the use of close-up shots of the blast scenes.

  • A Woodworm Off the Old Block

    Benn went on to advocate the “Responsibility to Protect”, the Blairite code for supporting United States military and especially bombing missions abroad. The thesis that Western bombing improves and stabilises countries appears tested well beyond destruction, but the neo-cons stick with it because of the corporate interests it does so much to boost.

• Transparency Reporting

  • State Department ‘Planted’ Anti-Wikileaks Questions For 60 Minutes Interview With Julian Assange

    The latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails have been revealed, and Trevor Timm, the Executive Director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, points us to a particularly interesting one, in which then State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley tells Clinton that the State Department has successfully “planted” questions for the show, 60 Minutes, to ask Assange.

• Finance

  • 2016 GOP CONTENDERS: CARLY FIORINA

    There is a reason Fiorina shows up on lists of the “Worst CEOs Of All Time,” (See here, here, here, here, and here among others) and it’s not because the whole business world is engaged in some kind of conspiracy to portray her as an incompetent. Was HP better off after Carly left than when she arrived? The answer is no. [Link] Despite the spin she tries to put on it, Carly Fiorina was a disaster for Hewlett Packard, and they’re still suffering from her so-called leadership. [Link] Fiorina left HP with one of the largest golden parachutes, really unheard of! [Link]

    Don’t forget about her trading with Iran in violation of U.S. trade sanctions by using a foreign entity. [Link] According to a column by Josh Rogin: “Under Fiorina’s leadership, Hewlett-Packard sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of products to Iran through a foreign subsidiary, despite strict U.S. export sanctions.” [Link]

    When Carly was forced out of HP, the very next day, HP stock jumped over 10%. [Link]

  • ‘These Are the Crimes That Really Matter’ – CounterSpin interview with Brandon Garrett on corporate criminals

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Media Coverage Is ‘a Sort of Advertisement to Mass Murder’

    Investigators are reportedly looking into whether the apparent killer in the latest mass shooting announced his murderous intentions beforehand on the social media site 4chan. Because of 4chan‘s anonymity, it’s impossible to say whether the poster who warned “don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest” actually was Chris Harper-Mercer, identified as the person who shot nine people to death at Umpqua Community College the next day before being killed by police.

  • NRA News Commentary: School Shootings Happen Because Kids Don’t “Respect” Firearms

    A new commentary video produced by the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) NRA News suggests that school shootings occur because children do not “respect” firearms or know how to handle them safely.

  • ‘They’re Robbing Kids of Critical Thinking’

    Janine Jackson: Seattle public school teachers reached a tentative agreement with the school system after a five-day strike. As with most labor actions, there were a number of points at issue, but one of them was the question of basing teacher evaluations on student scores on standardized tests that are a source of frustration for growing numbers of teachers, parents and students.

  • Jeffrey Lord Is CNN’s On-Staff Donald Trump Apologist Who Carries His “Fetid Water Every Day”

    Jeffrey Lord is using his CNN political commentator position to defend Donald Trump’s most outlandish remarks on the campaign trail. Lord’s pro-Trump advocacy has been so over the top that his own colleagues have repeatedly called him out for pushing inaccuracies, defending misogynistic and anti-Muslim remarks, and carrying Trump’s “fetid water every day.” Lord’s ongoing defense of Trump should not be a surprise, as the billionaire businessman reportedly “helped Lord get his job at CNN.”

  • Meet the Press on Clinton: Focusing on Image, Distracting From Issues

    So the consensus is that Hillary Clinton’s problem is that she’s not her husband, she lacks his “amazing campaign skills” and is “not very defined for people.” That’s why, from the perspective of NBC‘s Beltway studio, there’s “chatter about an alternative — whether Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden.” If only she could make it “more about the policy or the substance,” get some credit for Bill’s “economic legacy” and convey that “she’s done a lot for middle-class Americans.”

• Censorship

  • Cartoons and the ‘jihadi veto’

    September 30, 2015, marked the 10th anniversary of the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten, a decision that would ignite a global battle of values over the relationship between free speech and religion that is still ongoing.

    On one side of this conflict are those who insist that free speech includes the right to offend any idea, religious or secular, and that tolerance means putting up with those expressions that you most despise. On the other side are those who believe that religion, and in particular Islam, must be protected from scorn and mockery, a small minority of whom are willing to use violence to enforce a “jihadist’s veto.” In between are the many members of what Salman Rushdie has called the “but-brigade,” people who are formally committed to free speech, but for whom a commitment to tolerance and social peace means imposing society-wide norms of self-censorship on ideas that may offend or hurt members of religious or ethnic groups.

  • Free Speech Advocate: College Censorship Is Damaging Young Minds [VIDEO]

    Greg Lukianoff, the President and CEO of FIRE, starts this 20 minute video interview for The Daily Caller by assessing global issues. “The international situation for freedom of speech is dire,” says Lukianoff, focusing on the emergence of blasphemy laws to not offend Islam.

  • The UN proposal on cyberbullying is a blueprint for censorship

    The United Nations was born out of the deadliest tragedy in the world. The institution thus set a principled mission to never allow the repetition of past mistakes by promoting universal human rights, peace, and values of enlightenment. It was a force for good.

    But things have changed. While the UN headquarters still remains in New York, the ideological powerhouse is now based in middle class suburbs of Islington, Hampstead, and the like. Its sole duty has become addressing capricious concerns of the middle classes. It’s evident, from the absurdity of Saudi Arabia heading the Council of Human Rights to the obsession with Israel and a “green economy”, that the UN is now a joke organisation completely detached from its noble past aims.

  • Cormier panel: Censorship is more subtle, but still exists

    As the late author and Leominster native Robert Cormier argued decades ago, a panel of teachers and scholars argued at Fitchburg State University on Thursday: even with the best intentions, censorship does more harm than good.

  • Censorship vs. Activism on Social Media

    Vice’s Motherboard blog recently reported about a campaign to raise awareness of domestic violence on Tinder was removed for “inappropriate images,” and “bad behavior.” The images featured women who appeared to have facial injuries. When the profiles received messages from other users, those users were directed to an advocacy website. An hour into the campaign on Tinder, the profiles behind the campaign were suspended.

  • 5 Surprising Cases Of Video Game Censorship

    Nintendo had a tendency in the eighties and nineties to over-edit their games before releasing them overseas to maintain their family-friendly image. Final Fight is one of the best examples of how this strategy often resulted in nonsensical changes. For the game’s SNES release here in the West, black enemies were given lighter skin. Trans criminals Roxy and Poison were changed into male thugs “Billy” and “Sid.” Instead of grabbing whiskey to regain health, players could grab “vitamine.” My personal favorite change, though, was to the boss Belger. Instead of fighting you in a wheel chair, he now fights you while riding a chair with…slightly smaller wheels. I’m still not sure why they thought these changes would make the game more palatable to a Western release. If Japanese gamers could handle the original version, why couldn’t we?

  • The Cab Ride as Artistic Rebellion

    How much do movies matter to you? Director Jafar Panahi was thrown in jail by a harsh theocratic regime that then banned him from movie-making for the next 20 years. Since then he’s made three internationally acclaimed films in less than five years. Panahi, the Iranian filmmaker who first became known in the West for the 1995 art-house hit The White Balloon, has become an international symbol of the power of dissident art simply by continuing to find ways, even under the most restricted circumstances, to make art from whatever he has at hand.

  • Review: In ‘Taxi,’ a Filmmaker Pushes Against Iranian Censorship From Behind the Wheel

  • Malaysia: Drop Charges for Showing Film

  • Activist to stand trial after apex court throws out challenge to Film Censorship Act provision

  • Stop prosecution of activist for screening film on Ski Lankan civil war: HRW to Malaysia

  • Film Censorship Act provision constitutional, Federal Court rules

  • The Chinese government is censoring a documentary about mothers who love their gay kids

  • Movie censored, China suit claims

  • OSCE to examine censorship of critical channels by Tivibu

  • Online broadcaster Tivibu stops streaming critical TV outlets

  • Turkish Journalist Association condemns Tivibu’s censorship of TV channels critical of gov’t

  • In June, author and all-around American treasure Judy Blume spoke at Washington, D.C.’s Politics & Prose bookstore.

    In 1982, in response to a massive push to ban certain books from schools…

  • Banned Books Week serves as warning against censorship

  • Long Live Banned Books Week!

  • Banned Books Week draws attention to censorship

  • Banned Book Week puts censorship behind bars

    How to see a pair of eyes changed the perception of Banned Books Week.

    Each year the American Library Association dedicates an entire week to preventing censorship at local libraries.

    This year’s theme was “Readstricted,” a play on words meant to encourage the reading of restricted material.

  • The truth about banned books is stranger than you think

    You may already have heard that this is Banned Books Week, a venerable event established 33 years ago by the American Library Association (ALA). Like me, you may have walked into your local bookstore and seen a display of “banned books,” a display designed to stoke indignation and righteous First Amendment fury.

  • Banned Books Week Is a Crock

    The latest story about censorship in America began when a Knoxville, Tennessee, woman named Jackie Sims found out that her 15-year-old son had been assigned to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks over the summer. Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book tells the true story of a poor black woman whose cancerous cervical cells became the basis for medical advances including the polio vaccine and in vitro fertilization without her knowledge; it’s a best-selling, critically acclaimed account about science, race, ethics, and family. But Sims told a local TV station that she “consider[s] the book pornographic,” and wanted it out of the hands of all students in the district.

  • Apple’s App Store Censorship Doesn’t Make Any Sense

    Apple reserves the right to deny apps entry into its App Store, but its application of this policy is maddeningly inconsistent.

    Take the case of software engineer Charles Yeh, who developed an app called Speed Camera Alert and recently tried submitting it to Apple’s marketplace. The company decided to block his program — which tells drivers in Washington, D.C., when they’re nearing local police speed cameras — from being sold in the App Store and downloaded on iOS devices.

  • Julia Farrington: Pre-emptive censorship by the police is a clear infringement of civil liberties

    In 1972, Michael Scammell, the first editor of Index on Censorship magazine, wrote in the launch issue: “Freedom of expression is not self-perpetuating but needs to be maintained by the constant vigilance of those who care about it.”

  • Anti-Censorship Org Not Cool With Censorship at Nashville Prep

    The National Coalition Against Censorship has weighed in on a Nashville charter school’s decision to censor a novel without permission. Guess what? They don’t approve.

  • Utah State University students claim censorship over anti-abortion chalk art on campus

    Some students claim they were censored on the campus of Utah State University after police ordered them to remove anti-abortion messages they wrote on sidewalks.

    Four students set out to express anti-abortion sentiments on campus last Thursday to show support for “Women betrayed national day of action.”

    They drew nearly 900 hearts on the sidewalk with chalk with a banner reading, “Say No to Abortion.”

  • Banned In Boston (And Elsewhere): The American Tragedy Of Censorship

    When I was kid, the phrase “Banned in Boston” confused me. I thought of Boston as a liberal, cosmopolitan city. Surely they didn’t censor things there.

    They don’t anymore, but they sure used to. About 100 years ago, Boston was in the grip of dour “vice” crusaders who used their religious beliefs to decide what books and magazines people could read and what performances they could see on stage. And it wasn’t alone.

  • Decorated Chinese author opens up about censorship

    Yan noted that he has experienced many rejections in his career because editors feared that his writing would cause controversy. Although he put great emotion into his work, he said he was rejected nine out of 10 times. Eventually, he realized that if he wrote something of quality, it would be published—adding that he is now “the champion of receiving rejections.”

  • Belarus Free Theatre’s Natalia Kaliada: “Funding can lead to self-censorship” – speech in full

    The major question that is hanging in air now: do we need to go underground in London in order to continue to create shows that we feel need to exist for world politicians to understand that we are watching them no matter where we are: in Belarus, Rwanda, Uganda, Australia, or the UK – and that we can make free art with no fear of losing funding? Is it possible?

  • Former professor calls for University to apologize for censorship

    Former Feinberg Prof. Alice Dreger, who resigned from her position after she said the University censored a faculty magazine, is calling for an official apology from the administration.

    “They need to say that a mistake was made and that they apologize and that it won’t happen again,” Dreger told The Daily.

    Speaking Wednesday evening to a gathering of about 30 students and community members at Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston, Dreger explained her decision to leave Northwestern in August, just six months after publishing “Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science,” a book on the ethics of medical research and academic freedom based on research made possible through support from the University.

  • Free To Learn? Think Again: Campus Censorship On The Rise

    Is there no end to the illegal suppression of free speech and debate on America’s public university campuses?

  • Pemberton Twp. schoolteacher files civil suit after censorship controversy

    A teacher at Pemberton Township High School is alleging that his job was changed in retaliation for his refusal to censor articles written for the student-run newspaper, The Stinger, and the subsequent controversy that ensued.

  • Obama Wakes Up to Censorship on Campus

    The plague of political correctness infecting every corner of life on American college campuses has grown so ubiquitous that even President Barack Obama—by no means a conservative or contrarian on education matters—is bemoaning student-initiated censorship.

  • Malaysian police target online sales of cartoonist’s latest book

    Malaysian police have opened an investigation on the latest book of political cartoons by Zulkiflee SM Anwar Ulhaque, or Zunar.

    A sales assistant who manages online sales of the title, Sapuman – Man of Steal, on the website zunar.my has been ordered to attend a meeting with police under the sedition act. The questioning will take place in central Kuala Lumpur on Monday 5 October at noon.

    “I strongly condemn these latest police tactics to frighten people from getting access to read and buy my books. My sales assistant did nothing illegal as the Sapuman – Man of Steal is not officially banned by the government. On the contrary, the police should investigate who took RM2.6 billion ($384 million) of public funds instead of clamping down on book sellers who sell books legally,” Zunar said in a statement.

  • Thai activists crash government websites in censorship protest

    Internet users on Wednesday (Sep 30) attacked Thai government websites leaving them impossible to access for many hours.

    It is believed online activists used social media to mobilise supporters, who then went to these websites where they clicked to refresh the pages continuously.

  • Thailand reportedly close to introducing its own China-style Internet firewall

  • Inspired by China, Thailand setting up its own Great Firewall

  • Junta mulls ‘Great Firewall’ for Thailand

  • Thailand aims to build its own Great Firewall of Internet censorship

  • Thai government websites crash in ‘symbolic act’ by censorship critics: officials

  • Censorship is alive in New Zealand. I should know: my book was banned

    After 40 days I had a novel in my laptop called Thunder Road, all about boys and cars, and swearing, and girls, and fighting, and sex and … did I mention swearing?

  • Five Very True Tales of Book Censorship

    NCAC and our Banned Books Week partners know this all too well. But still we can manage to be surprised– both by the ways in which some schools and administrators will bend the rules to placate book banners, but also by the creative and determined activism to defend the freedom to read.

    In the spirit of Banned Books Week, we bring you five stories from the field. A few of them will make shake your head, while the others will have you pumping your fist.

  • Has Mark Zuckerberg accidentally revealed secret Facebook plans to censor negative refugee crisis posts?

    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has mistakenly hinted at the social network’s plans to censor people who publish anti-migrant posts.

    In a move which has angered free speech activists, the billionaire suggested his firm was working to silence racists and people who post hate speech.

  • Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Admits Plans To Censor Anti-Migrant Posts

    Over the weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was overheard discussing with German Chancellor Angela Merkel his website’s censorship of a wave of anti-immigrant posts appearing on the social network as Europe continues to deal with the largest refugee crisis since World War II, reported Bloomberg.

  • Festival explores censorship versus freedom of expression

    Is terror legislation being used to stifle free expression? Where should the line be drawn on pornography? Can national broadcasters be truly independent at a time of war? In a series of provocative debates at this year’s Cambridge Festival of Ideas (19 October – 1 November), censorship and freedom of expression will be explored by a range of leading thinkers and experts in their fields.

  • New Smithsonian secretary defends Cosby exhibit: ‘We have to avoid censorship.’

    Skorton acknowledged the risks of the decision and that it could hurt the Smithsonian’s reputation.

    “If a person strongly disagrees, I believe it will change that person’s view of the Smithsonian, but I believe taking down an exhibition will tarnish our reputation among museum professionals and others,” he said. “Creative activity of any kind can generate controversy. We will from time to time get beat up about some of these things.”

  • US: Tech Firms Shouldn’t Enable China Censorship

    The CEOs of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other major technology firms should press Chinese President Xi Jinping and Internet czar Lu Wei to reverse their expansion of surveillance, censorship, and data collection, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter.

  • Students are the real victims of censorship

    Case in point is the story of Ellen Pao. A hotshot Harvard-educated lawyer, Pao sued her Silicon Valley venture-capital employer for gender discrimination. As evidence, she cited a partner’s referring to a porn star on a private jet.

    Where would an otherwise worldly woman come to see a mere mention of porn-watching as evidence of sexual bias? No need to answer.

    [...]

    Brown offers an exhaustive list of advice for men wanting to counter sexual violence. Item No. 9: “Refuse to purchase any magazine, rent any video, subscribe to any website, or buy any music that portrays girls or women in a sexually degrading or abusive manner.”

    Firstly, most pornography is legal, and school administrators have no business telling their scholars what is permissible reading.

  • Escape from Eritrea: Ismail Einashe

    As refugees flee one of the world’s most repressive and secretive regimes, Ismail Einashe talks to Eritreans who have reached the UK but who still worry about the risks of speaking out

    [...]

    After graduating top of his class from Eritrea’s Asmara University, Debesai became a well-known TV journalist for state-run news agency Erina Update. But from 2001, the real crackdown began and independent newspapers such as Setit, Tsigenai, and Keste Debena, were shut down. In raids journalists from these papers were arrested en masse. He suspects many of those arrested were tortured or killed, and many were never heard of again. No independent domestic news agency has operated in Eritrea since 2001, the same year the country’s last accredited foreign reporter was expelled.

  • China’s Xi Defends Censorship Amid Chorus of Support For Embattled Rights Community

    Activists stepped up calls for Chinese President Xi Jinping to end an ongoing crackdown on rights activists back home as he defended his government’s tight controls on the Internet on Thursday.

    Xi, who traveled from Washington state to Washington, D.C. on Thursday ahead of talks with Obama and a state dinner at the White House on Friday, has been greeted by protesters at every stop of his state visit to the United States this week.

    Activists have hit out at the continued detention of prisoners of conscience, an ongoing crackdown on human rights lawyers, mistreatment of Tibetans and Uyghurs and continued harassment of non-governmental and civic organizations.

  • Groups Call Wyoming Ag-Gag Law Censorship

    A diverse group of conservationists, animal advocates, academics and the press filed a federal lawsuit challenging two Wyoming laws they say chill free speech and punish people who collect data on open land.

  • TV stations given guidelines on censoring of films

    A circular on Special Guidelines for Television Film Censorship has been enforced since June 15, 2015, the Film Censorship Board (FCB) said.

  • ‘This is a censorship I do not want to see in Argentina’

    “This government wanted there to be more voices with the media law. My support and solidarity.”

    Scioli also slammed the administration run by mayor and presidential rival Mauricio Macri. “This is a stage of censorship that I never want to see again in Argentina,” he said.

  • Cuba’s Internet: Censorship And High Costs Mean Web Access Will Remain Elusive For Most Cubans

    Earlier this year, Sen. Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico, introduced a bill on the congressional floor titled the Cuba DATA Act. The bill encouraged U.S. telecommunication companies to set up shop in Cuba and was widely cheered by human rights activists and business leaders alike.

  • Ecuador’s President Used Millions Of Dollars Of Public Funds To Censor Critical Online Videos

    The records, seen by BuzzFeed News, show that at least one contract, for just under $4.7 million, was signed with a Mexican company that then successfully removed material from YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and Dailymotion.

  • Yahoo report shows it rejected government censorship requests

    Yahoo denied requests by law enforcement agencies in India, Ireland and the United Kingdom to remove content earlier this year, but agreed to remove a single Flickr image that glorified terrorism, according to the Sunnyvale company’s transparency report published Thursday.

  • Teenage blogger Amos Yee tests limit of Singapore’s laws (and patience)

    At first glance, 16-year-old Amos Yee seems timid, naïve, almost oblivious to what he did: Challenge the very foundations of Singapore and its revered founder.

    But within five minutes, Yee deliberately and clearly articulates why he believes his blog posts are worth jail time.

    “I feel like I’m the one who’s actually supposed to break that boundary so that other people will be able to talk about things in an honest way and discuss about it, which I feel is really important,” says Yee, during an exclusive interview with CNN, while seated in his family’s flat in Singapore.

  • Amos Yee sketch cut from Chestnuts may go online

    The Media Development Authority (MDA) had issued a licence for the performance of Chestnuts 50 after the “problematic segment” was dropped.

  • AND S’PORE JAILED AMOS YEE! In US, boy arrested for homemade ‘bomb’ clock gets White House dinner & Facebook job offer

    Ways to get invited to the White House for dinner: Make a clock that looks like a bomb.

    Ahmed Mohamed, 14, was arrested after his teacher mistook the timepiece for an explosive device.

    But Obama has since tweeted inviting the boy for dinner. Then Mark Zuckerberg said he was keen to meet the boy over at Facebook HQ.

  • The Lion Needs Freedom

  • Media and the Lion-Country

    All Singapore’s prime ministers, from PM Lee Kuan Yew, PM Goh Chok Tong, and PM Lee Hsien Loong, have been using the mass media to support their power. That explains why the government controls all media resources, from the capital, infrastructure, permits, editorial structure, to even tones of news.

    Several senior Singaporean journalists recount that from 1965 to 1980s, PM Lee Kuan Yew use an iron fist to silence the media. During those times, the vocal, mostly leftist journalists and activists had to face hard Singapore laws.

    “Between 1965-1977, no less than 10-15 journalists were imprisoned. They were charged as posing dangers to national security, or accused as using media to renounce against the government,” said one senior journalist in Singapore.

  • Singapore lesson: Don’t take the internet too seriously

    Also, there’s the case of teenage dissident Amos Yee Pang Sang (余澎杉), whose imprisonment after he posted a vitriolic video on YouTube against Lee Kuan Yew shortly after the latter’s death opened a floodgate of sympathy for the outspoken blogger.

  • Lessons for Hong Kong from Singapore’s poll

    Finally, social media encourages Singaporeans to share their political views and to discuss political issues with other citizens.

    Inasmuch as mainstream media and new outlets are under the ironclad grip of the government, Facebook and Twitter have been serving as a political platform, such as in the calls for teen blogger Amos Yee to be freed when he was jail. His release in July demonstrated the growing influence of online social media on politics in Singapore.

    Regardless of why the PAP is losing its edge, there is little doubt Singaporeans are starting to recognise the vulnerabilities that come with a one-party dominant system. Hongkongers should definitely cherish the divergent spectrum in the political ideologies that we still have in Legco.

• Privacy

  • Adblock Plus and (a little) more

    What’s more, in true open source spirit we’re letting other ad blocking software use the Acceptable Ads guidelines and whitelisting processes also. Last week, Dean Murphy at Crystal took us up on the offer, and today we are welcoming tens of millions of AdBlock users to our Acceptable Ads whitelist. We’re all fighting on the same side for the consumer, after all.

  • Snowden slip-up leads to 47GB avalanche of Twitter e-mail notifications

    Technically Incorrect: He might pose as a tech expert. But even the best make mistakes. Having signed up for Twitter, Edward Snowden gets buried in e-mail notifications from followers.

  • Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test

    To block ads or not to block ads on your mobile device? That’s the philosophical dilemma facing consumers since Apple added support for ad blockers to its iPhone operating system a couple of weeks ago.

    To help answer the question, we decided to put multiple ad blockers to the test. Over the course of four days, we used several ad-blocking apps on our iPhones and measured how much the programs cut down on web page data sizes and improved loading times, and also how much they increased the smartphone’s battery life.

  • CIA yanks personnel from U.S. Embassy in Beijing – Washington Post

    The CIA has withdrawn a number of its personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing following two massive cyber attacks involving U.S. government employee records, according to the Washington Post.

  • CIA pulls staff from Beijing following a cyber attack on government employees

    CIA operatives have been withdrawn from China amid fears over their safety following one of the worst cyber hacks of US government data in history.

    Computers belonging to the American office of personnel management (OPM) were hacked in April, compromising the details of approximately four million government employees.

  • Edward Snowden joins Twitter and follows NSA

    In the US he faces charges that could put him in prison for up to 30 years.

    Earlier this year, speaking via video-link to a Geneva audience, he said he would like to be granted asylum in Switzerland.

  • Former NSA Tech Director Says US Has Become A Totalitarian State

    In this video acTVism Munich interviews William Binney to talk about his experience at the National Security Agency (NSA) where worked for circa 36 years and how he uncovered fraud, crime and corruption at the agency. Other issues that are discussed in detail include the role & significance of whistleblowers in society, scope & capacity of the US intelligence state and solutions that the government as well as the individual can employ to reform the NSA.

  • Fiorina: I rushed out HP servers to power NSA snooping. Mwahahaha!

  • Carly Fiorina defends Bush-era torture and spying, calls for more transparency

  • Carly Fiorina Defends CIA Torture, Handed HP Servers To NSA

  • Fiorina boasts of giving HP servers to NSA as it began bulk data collection

  • Carly Fiorina on giving HP servers to NSA: ‘I felt it was my duty’

  • Carly Fiorina: I Supplied HP Servers for NSA Snooping

  • Carly Fiorina on providing HP servers to the NSA: ‘I felt it was my duty to help’

  • At HP, Fiorina supplied NSA with surveillance material

  • Carly Fiorina fesses to cosy HP/US intelligence agencies relationship

  • Carly Fiorina Isn’t Just Defending Waterboarding – She’s Also Got a Story About Her Response to 9/11

  • Carly Fiorina: No regrets enabling NSA spying

    Fiorina said, “I’m not aware of circumstances” in which NSA surveillance “went too far,” although she supports “the checks and balances” put into place by Congress that ended agency bulk collection of phone records. She also suggested that there were greater government threats to privacy than NSA surveillance and other U.S. intelligence programs.

  • Facebook will now be able to show you ads based on the porn you watch

    Four years ago, Facebook promised that the “Like” buttons that had sprung up on non-Facebook sites all around the web wouldn’t be used to track users. In 2011, Facebook said, “No information we receive when you see social plugins is used to target ads; we delete or anonymize this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information.” Back then, Facebook said it only used the information to target you if you actually clicked on one of its off-site Like buttons. Which calmed the privacy storm at the time.

  • Facebook accused of spying on Belgian citizens like the NSA

  • Facebook is spying on people around the world ‘just like America’s NSA’ says data protection watchdog during court hearing in Belgium where the company is accused of violating privacy laws

  • ‘Facebook as bad as NSA spies for snooping’: Belgium accuses social network of mass privacy breaches

  • Belgian Privacy Commission accuses Facebook of using NSA tactics to spy on users

  • European privacy watchdog accuses Facebook of NSA-style snooping

  • Facebook Spying On Belgians Just Like NSA: BPC

  • Facebook compared to NSA, accused of spying on Belgians

  • Belgium accuses Facebook of NSA-style ‘spying’ on users

  • Facebook spying on people just like NSA

  • Facebook accused of NSA level spying

  • Facebook Spies On People Even After They Log Out: Belgian Watchdog Claims

  • Our cookies save you from TERRORISTS, Facebook thunders to Belgian judge

  • Our cookies save you from TERRORISTS, Facebook thunders to Belgian judge

  • Belgian privacy regulators filed in a lawsuit against Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) for spying people like US National Security Agency (NSA)

  • Facebook accused of spying, again

  • NSA? Illegal spying? EU top lawyer is talking out of his Bot – US gov

    The US government has responded to Europe’s top lawyer, who last week said sending people’s private data to the United States is illegal.

    Uncle Sam is not happy.

    At the heart of the matter is the so-called safe harbor agreement between the US and the EU. You cannot by law pipe people’s private information out of Europe unless you can promise to keep that data safe. Under the safe harbor framework, America promises to do exactly that, and respect Europeans’ privacy. That agreement is being renegotiated as you read this.

    In the meantime, the European Court of Justice’s Advocate General Yves Bot has said, what with all this mass spying going on worldwide by the NSA, the safe harbor agreement is not worth the paper it’s written on.

    In response, America reckons Bot has said some stupid things and gone too far.

    “We believe that it is essential to comment in this instance because the Advocate General’s opinion rests on numerous inaccurate assertions about intelligence practices of the United States,” the US mission to the European Union stated on Monday.

  • Tim Cook: The NSA Won’t Be Asking for Backdoors (Anymore)

    Apple CEO Tim Cook said he doesn’t think we will hear the U.S. National Security Agency asking for a back door into our iPhones, at least not any more. In an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered on Thursday, Mr. Cook implied that even the FBI is coming around on the need for end-user encryption.

  • Tim Cook talks NSA, customer privacy, and more in NPR interview

  • France’s Government Aims to Give Itself—and the NSA—Carte Blanche to Spy on the World

    The United States makes an improper division between surveillance conducted on residents of the United States and the surveillance that is conducted with almost no restraint upon the rest of the world. This double standard has proved poisonous to the rights of Americans and non-Americans alike. In theory, Americans enjoy better protections. In practice there are no magical sets of servers and Internet connections that carry only American conversations. To violate the privacy of everyone else in the world, the U.S. inevitably scoops up its own citizens’ data. Establishing nationality as a basis for discrimination also encourages intelligence agencies to make the obvious end-run: spying on each other’s citizens, and then sharing that data. Treating two sets of innocent targets differently is already a violation of international human rights law. In reality, it reduces everyone to the same, lower standard.

  • ACLU Argues for Right to Sue NSA for “Upstream” Surveillance

    A group of nine plaintiffs rep­res­en­ted by the Amer­ic­an Civil Liber­ties Uni­on is fight­ing to get over the first hurdle in the law­suit: con­vin­cing Judge T.S. El­lis of the East­ern Dis­trict Court of Vir­gin­ia that they have stand­ing to sue the gov­ern­ment, a hurdle the ACLU was un­able to clear two years ago in a sim­il­ar case.

    [...]

    Al­though El­lis was presid­ing over the hear­ing in Al­ex­an­dria, Vir­gin­ia, the case was ini­tially filed in Mary­land, where the NSA is based. The Mary­land Dis­trict Court handed the case off be­cause of a pe­cu­li­ar con­flict, Toomey said after the hear­ing: Ed­ward Snowden’s moth­er is an ad­min­is­trat­or in a Mary­land court.

  • Court hears first arguments in case challenging bulk data collection by NSA

    The plaintiffs claim that the NSA’s “upstream” program, which was partially revealed in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in June 2013, is illegally surveilling the communications of all internet users.

    The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of the Wikimedia foundation – which owns and operates Wikipedia – as well as Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and several other plaintiffs including the Nation magazine.

    Attorneys representing the NSA filed a motion to dismiss the case, claiming the plaintiffs’ case was “speculative” and had no standing.

  • This New Campaign Wants To Help Surveillance Agents Quit NSA or GCHQ

    Support groups help cult and gang members break free of their former lives. Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous help addicts overcome their dependencies. And now one group of privacy campaigners wants to offer its target audience an escape route for what it sees as a equally insidious trap: Their jobs working for intelligence agencies like the NSA.

  • What @Snowden Told Me About the NSA’s Cyberweapons

    From MonsterMind to TreasureMap, we’ve only just scratched the surface of the United States’ hyper-clandestine offensive capabilities.

  • The ‘Athens Affair’ shows why we need encryption without backdoors

    Just as it seems the White House is close to finally announcing its policy on encryption – the FBI has been pushing for tech companies like Apple and Google to insert backdoors into their phones so the US government can always access users’ data – new Snowden revelations and an investigation by a legendary journalist show exactly why the FBI’s plans are so dangerous.

  • Athens knew of CIA, NSA involvement in 2004 wiretaps

  • Did a Rogue NSA Operation Cause the Death of a Greek Telecom Employee?

    JUST OUTSIDE THE MAIN DOWNTOWN part of Athens lies Kolonos, an old Athenian neighborhood near the archaeological park of Akadimia Platonos, where Plato used to teach. Along the maze of narrow streets, flower-filled balconies hang above open-air markets, and locals gather for hours at lazy sidewalk cafes, sipping demitasse cups of espresso and downing shots of Ouzo in quick gulps.

    [...]

    The day before his death, Costas’ boss at Vodafone had ordered that a newly discovered code — a powerful and sophisticated bug — be deactivated and removed from its systems. The wiretap, placed by persons unknown, targeted more than 100 top officials, including then Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis and his wife, Natassa; the mayor of Athens; members of the Ministerial Cabinet; as well as journalists, capturing not only the country’s highest secrets, but also its most intimate conversations. The question was, who did it?

  • 5 ways Edward Snowden has changed the world since 2013 NSA document leaks

    Hero, traitor, geek – no matter what you think of Edward Snowden there is no doubt that he has changed the world a great deal.

    In June 2013, the globe-shaking document leaks from Snowden put a spotlight on the National Security Agency’s domestic spying.

    The revelations Snowden presented to journalist Glenn Greenwald — who worked at the Guardian at the time of the disclosures — have made people question the Obama administration’s mass surveillance practices.

    The U.S. government also considered making changes to its surveillance programs such as Prism.

  • NSA director just admitted that government copies of encryption keys are a big security risk

    The director of the NSA, Admiral Michael Rogers, just admitted at a Senate hearing that when Internet companies provide copies of encryption keys to law enforcement, the risk of hacks and data theft goes way up.

    The government has been pressuring technology companies to provide the encryption keys that it can use to access data from suspected bad actors. The keys allow the government “front door access,” as Rogers has termed it, to secure data on any device, including cell phones and tablets.

    Rogers made the statement in answer to a question from Senator Ron Wyden at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday.

  • NSA chief admits risk in decrypting smartphone data

  • NSA chief says private email servers like Hillary Clinton’s are an ‘opportunity’ for spies to gather intelligence

    It would present an ‘opportunity’ for spy agencies if the foreign minister of Russia or Iran were to use a private email server for official business, the chief of the U.S. National Security Agency said on Thursday.

  • Hillary Clinton’s private email use would be ‘opportunity’ for foreign spies, says NSA

  • NSA director admits risk in gov’t obtaining encryption keys, pressed on Clinton’s email scandal

  • NSA head: Clinton server a ‘priority’ target for foreign agencies

  • NSA Director: Private server open to spying

  • Adm. Michael Rogers Seeks to ‘Optimize’ NSA Through Reorganization

  • NSA preps for first major reorganization in two decades

    The National Security Agency is considering a reorganization to prepare for future threats and a changing security landscape.

  • NSA Director Previews Reorganization And Discusses Security Threats

  • The NSA’s Official Love Notes Are Deeply Weird

  • Did You Know Saturday Was ‘Love Notes Day?’ Neither Did We, but Here’s the Way NSA Celebrated the Occasion

  • The NSA designed some strange, security-themed love notes for you to share

    On Sept. 26, during a little-known quasi-holiday called “Love Note Day” that encourages the writing of sentimental blather to loved ones, there was one very unusual contributor to the gushing chatter on social media: the US National Security Agency (NSA).

  • These German artists tried to persuade NSA employees to quit

    “Hoped to serve your people? Ended up spying on them? Exit intelligence.”

  • Twitter Sends NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden 47 GB of Notification

    Looks like Edward Snowden’s excitement of joining Twitter just got lowered after he received 47 GB of notification from the micro-blogging site unknowingly.

    The 32-year-old NSA whistleblower forgot to check his notification settings, as he was unaware that Twitter sends e-mail notifications for pretty much every social interaction, reports The Verge.

  • EU data transfer deal with US may be illegal, says Europe’s top legal counsel

  • EU Court Advocate General Deals Severe Blow to NSA Surveillance

  • European Court Opinion Threatens NSA Spying Overseas

  • EU-US data flows using “Safe Harbour” may be illegal because of NSA spying

  • Facebook privacy campaign advances after EU court opinion

  • Court advised to ban US spies from accessing online data of Europeans

    In a significant move for internet privacy campaigners, a lawyer for the European Court of Justice said an EU-US agreement on the transfer of huge data banks does not stop watchdogs from suspending the movement of information.

    Yves Bot, advocate general in the Luxembourg-based court also said the deal should not prevent investigations of complaints against web giants.

  • A Q&A with Edward Snowden

    This week, I interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Awards, an event that recognizes those protecting freedom on the Internet. We chatted by Google Hangout because Snowden remains in Russia, stuck in international limbo after the U.S. revoked his passport in 2013.

  • What Is an ex-NSA Employee Doing at Uber?

    Perhaps the word “exploding” should be used advisedly: This ex-NSA fellow, Charlie Miller, made a name for himself recently when he and another man — Chris Valasek who, like Miller, also just joined Uber — demonstrated that they could mount a remote hack on an automobile, essentially take it over and, potentially, kill the driver.

  • Human Rights Watch demands to know who’s been snooping on it

  • Twitter Comedian Defends NSA-Leaker Edward Scissorhands on HLN

  • UK: Human Rights Watch Challenges Surveillance

    Human Rights Watch and three anonymous individuals filed a complaint today over surveillance by the United Kingdom. The complaint by Human Rights Watch to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) charges its rights had been violated by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in intercepting, using, and retaining its communications and in particular, sharing them with the US National Security Administration (NSA).

  • Privacy group and people are taking on GCHQ and NSA over unlawful data sharing

  • Here’s how you can find out if you were spied on by the UK and US governments

    Want to know if the British and American government are spying on you? You don’t need to go through a lengthy court battle to find out—now you just need to fill out an online form.

  • You can now find out if GCHQ spied on you

    Claims must be submitted by 5 December, 2015 as the Investigatory Powers Tribunal will only search for records obtained and shared within the last year. King estimates that it will take at least six months for filed claims to be answered.

  • Here’s an Easy Way to Figure Out if You’ve Been Spied On by the NSA

  • Now You can find out if NSA and GCHQ spied on you

    The British Civil Liberties Group, Privacy International is now offering a new online tool through which individuals and organizations can file complaints with GCHQ about surveillance of phone calls and internet usage. Privacy International has long concerned itself with the sharing of data between the US National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ and government surveillance.

  • Did GCHQ illegally spy on you? Now you can find out – from this page

  • Find out if the NSA spied on you and shared it with GCHQ

  • GCHQ data sharing with NSA challenged in court by members of the public

  • Extent Of U.K.’s Surveillance Dragnet Probed In Fresh Legal Challenge

  • HRW challenges UK surveillance

  • Human Rights Watch files complaint against UK over unlawful surveillance

  • Did GCHQ spy on you? Here’s how to find out

  • Is the UK government spying on you? Here’s how you can find out

  • Human Rights Watch sues GCHQ, alleges unlawful surveillance

  • Did GCHQ illegally spy on you? Here’s how you can find out

  • Edward Snowden Calls on UK Students to Rise Up Against Spying

  • How to find out if you’ve been spied on

  • UK’s ‘Karma Police’ bulk surveillance operation likely dwarfs NSA’s, says report

  • Leaked documents show UK Karma Police program was just as intrusive as the NSA — and spied on the US

  • Move over NSA: British spy agency aimed to record every internet user

  • Britain’s Surveillance App Spies on ‘Every Visible Internet User’, Says NSA Whistleblower

  • ProtonMail Bids For Google’s Crown With Fully Encrypted Email For Everyone This November

  • Judge wrestles with Wikimedia NSA surveillance lawsuit

  • Wikipedia’s Lawsuit Against NSA Internet Vacuum Has First Day in Court

  • Wikipedia publisher urges judge to keep lawsuit over NSA surveillance alive

  • NSA Metadata Challengers Get 2nd Shot To Block Program

  • Help for troubled spies – How to leave intelligence agencies

  • Intelexit campaign asks NSA and GCHQ employees to quit jobs

  • German Group Offers Support Services to Help Disillusioned Members of NSA Get Out of the Spy Business

  • Anti-surveillance group tells spies: ‘Listen to your heart, not private phone calls’

  • “Listen to Your Heart, Not Private Phone Calls.”

  • Intelexit Aims to Get Government Workers Out of the Spying Game

  • Intelexit motivates and helps spies leave intelligence services

  • This Campaign Helps Intelligence Workers Become Whistleblowers

  • Could this ex-NSA hotshot protect your email from hacking?

  • NSA to snoop on Iranian president at UN meeting: NBC News report

  • NSA said to have spied on Iran during UN visit

  • NSA spied on entire Iranian UN delegation in 2007 – report

  • Secret Document: How the NSA Spied on Iranians in New York

    The NSA will probably spy on foreign leaders like Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during the UN General Assembly in New York this week, applying a “full court press” that includes intercepting cellphone calls and bugging hotel rooms, former intelligence analysts told NBC News.

  • NSA, Mossad Bugged Iran Nuclear Talks but Tehran ‘Was Ready for it’

    The NSA intercepted and spied on all telephone calls and correspondence, as well bugged the hotel rooms of all 143 members of the Iranian delegation, including then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during the 62nd UN General Assembly in New York in 2007, NBC reported.

  • Finding art in NSA Powerpoints

    Not everyone is inspired artistically by Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who leaked classified NSA documents. But then again not everyone is Simon Denny, the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist, who took the PowerPoint slides leaked by Snowden and turned them into art for his installation show “Secret Power.”

  • The NSA Museum

  • Watch Ai Weiwei & Jacob Applebaum Combat Government Propaganda in “Panda to Panda”

  • Why the Graphics in NSA Leaks are 21st Century Masterpieces

  • Why Is It So Hard to See the NSA?

    But at the photographer Trevor Paglen’s new exhibition at Metro Pictures, the crowd was decidedly different. Instead of sleek monochrome, visitors wore hoodies and T-shirts, and clutched messenger bags instead of totes. The shift is probably because Paglen’s project, uncovering the infrastructure of governmental surveillance, resonates with a decidedly more hacker crowd than minimalist sculpture.

  • Trevor Paglen Dives Deep

  • Judge allows Klayman’s suit against NSA to proceed

    The federal judge refereeing a court battle over the National Security Agency’s phone-snooping program said Wednesday he will allow a conservative lawyer’s lawsuit to proceed with new plaintiffs but urged the attorney to narrow his focus in order to speed up the case.

    Despite attempts by attorney Larry Klayman to push the court to question the government on whether it had specifically collected data from his phone records, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon urged Mr. Klayman to keep the case specific to new plaintiffs — who used a phone company already known to have provided data to the NSA.

  • Facebook case may force European firms to change data storage practices

    European companies may have to review their widespread practice of storing digital data with US internet companies after a court accused America’s intelligence services of conducting “mass, indiscriminate surveillance”.

  • India’s Modi wants to woo Silicon Valley, but censorship and privacy fears grow at home

    So when he heads to California’s Silicon Valley this week, Modi, 65, will get the red-carpet treatment as he dines with chief executives, promotes India’s start-up community and meets tech leaders including Apple’s Tim Cook and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. On Sunday, he will appear at an online “town hall” session with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

  • George W. Bush Made Retroactive N.S.A. ‘Fix’ After Hospital Room Showdown

    President George W. Bush sought to retroactively authorize portions of the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 surveillance and data collection program after a now-famous incident in 2004 in which his attorney general refused to certify the program as lawful from his hospital bed, according to newly declassified portions of a government investigation.

    Mr. Bush’s effort to salvage the surveillance program without changes did not satisfy top Justice Department officials, who threatened to resign. But the newly disclosed passages of a report by inspectors general of six agencies suggest that the confrontation in the hospital room came after the Justice Department identified several problems, including a “gap” between what Mr. Bush had authorized the N.S.A. to collect and what the agency was collecting in practice.

  • Hasidic Woman From Borough Park Is Now The PR Face To NSA

    One Hasidic woman from Borough Park has broken all the religious stereotypes which normally confine women to being mothers and caregivers. She has taken her knowledge and talent and used it to be the ultimate mensch, working for NSA to keep the U.S. safe.

    According to YNetNews, Anne Neuberger, 39, was raised speaking Yiddish and studying Torah, but always had a passion for justice and civil rights, deciding to further her education at Columbia University with the support of her father and husband.

  • Professor earns NSA’s Best Cybersecurity Paper award

  • NSA Codebreaker Challenge 3.0

    NSA, the United States National Security Agency, is challenging university students in the US to exercise their reverse engineering and low-level code analysis skills while working on a fictitious, yet realistic, security threat.

  • Večer Comments on Slovenia Being Wiretapped by the NSA

    Maribor, 3 October – That there are no friendly countries in the world is an old diplomatic saying. Countries can only have shared interests, or they do not have them but will in the future, the daily Večer says on Saturday as it comments on allegations that the NSA had intercepted international calls from Slovenia in 2005-2008.

  • Former Dutch Government Official Slams US Patriot Act

    The Patriot Act allows the U.S. authorities including the NSA to collect and search communications data stored on servers from U.S. technology providers.

    ​Former Dutch Government Minister Dion Kotteman slammed the U.S. Patriot Act on Tuesday for allowing U.S. intelligence agencies including the National Security Agency (NSA) the ability to spy and collect the personal data of European citizens.

  • ‘We can’t guarantee the NSA won’t touch our data,’ says former Dutch government CIO

    The US Patriot Act means it’s impossible to guarantee that the NSA and other American intelligence services aren’t able to snoop on data stored on European data centre servers, Dion Kotteman, executive adviser to the Dutch Ministry of Finance and Former CIO of the Dutch Government has said.

  • Jeb’s plan to woo Silicon Valley: Gut net neutrality, kill encryption, bulk up NSA

    Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush — or just “Jeb!” as he’s called in his campaign signs — probably won’t win the endorsement of the Electronic Frontier Foundation given his positions on tech policy. In fact, we can’t imagine many Silicon Valley types are pleased with Jeb’s latest declarations this week that as president he’ll kill net neutrality rules while at the same time bulking up the data collection powers of the National Security Agency.

  • Opinion: Everyone’s Wrong About Snowden and the NSA

    It’s not just your pictures the NSA has access to. Every email you’ve sent will most certainly have passed through an AT&T cable at some point. Fun fact: AT&T has been fully co-operating with the NSA since the Patriot Act was passed. So the NSA has all of your emails. Any personal information you’ve sent through an email, they’ve got it.

    Legally, the NSA’s supposed to get permission to look at it. However, it’s all sitting there on their servers. Some employee, say, an independent contractor named Edward Snowden, could get their hands on it and do whatever they want. You see, it’s not just the government you have to worry about. It’s identity theft, revenge porn, those sorts of things perpetrated by some rogue employee who decides it would be fun to post all of this data on the internet for everyone to see, such as the people who posted the nude photos of celebrity women that they stole from Apple’s cloud storage service.

    If Edward Snowden could get away from the NSA and escape the country to Russia with classified information, what’s stopping someone from getting away with everyone’s emails? Which brings me to another point: if politicians are worried about Snowden revealing these things making the nation less safe, then they should be demanding answers from the NSA about how he got away with it in the first place. The word “security” is in their name. They had one job. They couldn’t even do that right.

  • Former NSA Director To Keynote China’s International Security Conference September 29th

    China’s speakers will include General Hao Yeli, vice president of the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, and Zhang Li, assistant to the director of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations. Both are expected to “discuss the establishment of a new order in the cyber world and China’s outlook.”

  • NSA chief warns cyberthreats persist despite China accord

  • NSA Chief: Cyber Spying Continues Despite US-China Talks

  • The Tricky Encryption That Could Stump Quantum Computers

    On August 11, the National Security Agency updated an obscure page on its website with an announcement that it plans to shift the encryption of government and military data away from current cryptographic schemes to new ones, yet to be determined, that can resist an attack by quantum computers.

  • Opposition in German NSA spy scandal files constitutional complaint

    Germany’s Left and Greens are demanding the full list of “selectors” to be published.

  • The German NSA Affair and the Need for Reform in Berlin

  • EU-US data-sharing deal faces major challenge in EU court

  • Is India heading the NSA way?

    Last week saw a lot of reactions on social media over a draft proposal submitted by a government committee. The suggestions included some points that could at the least be qualified as draconian in today’s digital age. However, not sliding on to the political ramifications of this, let us discuss this in a global scenario. The whole world was in arms on social media when Snowden dropped the bomb on NSA- alleged snooping of citizens calls, messages and private data by the government had people worried. According to Snowden, the NSA surveillance systems collected roughly 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications every day. Although the furor that was created then is all but dead now, its existence persists. Not so long ago we also heard the likes of RIM (Research in Motion) for a tussle over handing over their data to the government.

  • Feds: Still no proof Verizon Wireless in NSA surveillance program

    The Justice Department is persisting in the implausible claim that there is no reliable proof that Verizon Wireless was part of the National Security Agency’s program to sweep up data on U.S. telephone calls, notwithstanding a government document officially released last month that appears to confirm the cellphone carrier’s involvement.

  • Why the U.S. Doesn’t Deserve a Back Door to Your Data

    Because it can barely keep its own data safe.

  • Is NSA using a young Belgium guy to track people’s expenses through the social network called PEEPME?

    There has been a continuos stir arising among people about the National Security Agency peeking into people’s lives by tracking their social network or social media platforms. Also, the rumours have surfaced about NSA tracking people’s buying patterns with the help of an app called PEEPME, created by a young guy from Belgium named Zeki Sever.

    Although NSA has completely denied the rumours that it has impersonated any US company website, including PEEPME to collect data and spy on targets but sources have suggested that NSA is using Metadata to compile ‘Social netwrok Diagrams’ on PEEPME to view people’s lifestyle, how much and on what they are spending. To do this, they are using Zeki Sever as their puppet.

    Keeping apart the continuing rumours about NSA, the unique app is surely gaining huge popularity among the people and in fact, a lot of celebrities like Tyga, Scott Disick and Amber Rose have come out on social media to promote the app.

  • Sen. Wyden lifts his hold on bill allowing funding of NSA, FBI and CIA

    Sen. Ron Wyden on Monday stopped blocking a bill that authorizes 2016 funding for the FBI, CIA, and the National Security Agency after it was stripped of a provision that would have required Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies to heavily police their users’ online speech.

  • NSA Employees Stage 9/11 Event; Lie in Unison

    Military and civilian employees of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) gathered at the agency’s Memorial Wall on September 11, 2015 – Patriot Day – to collectively recite the Oath of Office, reaffirming their commitment to the Constitution and to the safety, security, and liberty of the American people.

    No. This is not the opening sentence of an Onion article. This actually happened.

    In real life.

    Maybe it was opposite day.

    It’s tempting to call this staged event Orwellian. It reeks of doublespeak. But this is really too ridiculously transparent and silly to even qualify. It is an insult to doublespeak.

    Seriously, look up “implausible” in the dictionary and you will find the words “NSA agents safeguarding the Constitution and liberty.”

    Here is a photo of all of the NSA employees who are faithful to the Constitution standing on the beach.

    OK. Perhaps I’m being too harsh.It could have been an honest mistake, Maybe the pocket Constitutions they pass out to NSA employees don’t include the Bill of Rights. Or maybe the Fourth Amendment got all blurred because of some kind of ink smear. It could have been a printing mistake or something.

  • Band-Aids Can’t Fix Bullet Holes: Silicon Valley and the NSA

    The NSA committed at least three major acts: the battle over FISA orders against Yahoo, sabotaging US products in transit, and the bulk surveillance of Yahoo and Google’s internal networks, that all represent not just attacks on Silicon Valley companies, but attacks on the very business models these companies operate on. For Silicon Valley, beyond anything else, needs a reputation for trust, a reputation directly attacked by the NSA.

  • NSA chief admits risk in decrypting smartphone data

    Adm. Mike Rogers has long posited that strong encryption on consumer devices hampers law enforcement and intelligence work. But on Thursday he acknowledged the possible security downside of one proposed way for the government to decrypt data on consumer devices.

  • Booksellers and librarians file brief in new NSA spy case

    The American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE) has joined the American Library Association (ALA) and other library groups in urging a federal court to limit the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance of international electronic communications, including those relating to the purchase and use of books. On September 3, ABFE and ALA filed an amicus brief in support of an ACLU lawsuit challenging Upstream, a once-secret program that was revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward J. Snowden.

  • CIA, Special Ops and NSA Cooperating to Kill Militants in Syria and Iraq

    The CIA, the National Security Agency and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command have been leading a dedicated manhunt to methodically detect and kill senior militants in Syria and Iraq.

    According to The Associated Press, “The drone strikes—separate from the conventional bombing campaign run by U.S. Central Command—have significantly diminished the threat from the Khorasan Group, an al-Qaida cell in Syria that had planned attacks on American aviation, U.S. officials say. The group’s leader, Muhsin al-Fadhli, and its top bomb-maker, David Drugeon, were killed this past summer.”

  • CIA, NSA and military work closely to track and kill ‘high value targets’ in Syria, Iraq

    A dedicated manhunt by the CIA, the National Security Agency and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command has been methodically finding and killing senior militants in Syria and Iraq, in one of the few clear success stories of the U.S. military campaign in those countries.

  • The Growing Link Between Intelligence Communities and Academia

    The idea of university professors or students working with the FBI or CIA probably makes you raise your eyebrows.

    But then perhaps you’re picturing someone like the fictional Henry McCord in Madam Secretary. He’s a Georgetown theology professor who was asked to plant a bug for the National Security Agency (NSA) at the home of a scholar believed to be connected to a terrorist.

  • Video: Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald & David Miranda Call for Global Privacy Treaty

    NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, Brazilian privacy activist David Miranda and others have launched a new campaign to establish global privacy standards. The proposed International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers would require states to ban mass data collection and implement public oversight of national security programs. The treaty would also require states to offer asylum to whistleblowers. It is being dubbed the “Snowden Treaty.” At a launch event last week, Edward Snowden spoke about the need for the treaty via teleconference from Russia. “This is not a problem exclusive to the United States or the National Security Agency or the FBI or the Department of Justice or any agency of government anywhere. This is a global problem that affects all of us,” Snowden said.

  • Inside the CIA’s new Digital Directorate

    The goal of the new directorate is to provide CIA analysts with a “wide range of cyber options in the initial trade space” to help them solve problems earlier in the intelligence cycle, Roche told FCW during a recent visit to Langley. This means, among other things, locating and understanding the “digital dust” left behind by actors in the cyber domain. It is an open question whether the new directorate will serve as a platform for offensive operations.

  • Should you be concerned about spying if you have nothing to hide?

    One of the most consistent responses to the concerns raised by EFF and others about the US government’s mass spying programs is this: If you’ve got nothing to hide you have no reason to fear.

    [...]

    We know that the government claims that any evidence of a crime can be sent to domestic law enforcement agencies and we also know that the DEA built its own database of telephone records, which was supposed to be limited to drug crimes but was used far beyond its initial mandate.

    Second, even if you don’t think you have something to hide, it’s possible the government thinks you do. One legal expert has argued that the average person likely commits three felonies a day without ever realizing it.

    That’s not surprising since there are so many criminal laws on the books – an attempt to catalogue them all in the 1980s failed. And even if you don’t ever violate any law or draw the ire of policeman or prosecutor, someone you know and love could.

  • Inside the British government’s sweeping cyber surveillance program

    For years, the British government has reportedly tracked and stored billions of records of Internet use by British citizens and those outside the UK in an effort to track every visible user on the Internet. Ryan Gallagher of the Intercept joins Hari Sreenivasan via Skype from Brighton, England, with more on UK cyber surveillance.

• Civil Rights

  • Homeland Security Detains Stockton Mayor, Forces Him To Hand Over His Passwords

    Anthony Silva, the mayor of Stockton, California, recently went to China for a mayor’s conference. On his return to San Francisco airport he was detained by Homeland Security, and then had his two laptops and his mobile phone confiscated.

  • Prison phone companies charging “endless” fees to families of inmates

    “Just how high are these rates? A pro bono attorney paid $14 a minute to speak to an incarcerated client,” FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said in a speech last week. “Families write explaining how they are making extraordinary sacrifices by paying $400-$500 a month to hear their loved one’s voice. The endless array of new and increasing fees can add nearly 40 percent to costs—fees as high as $9.50 to open a new account, $4.75 to add money to an account, and $2.99 a month for the account maintenance fee. These rates and fees would be difficult for any family to bear, but if you were already struggling to stay afloat, you are now foregoing basic necessities like food and medicine just to make a phone call. No family should be forced to make this choice.”

  • Fiorina Endorses Torture, Warrantless Wiretap Programs

  • Carly Fiorina endorses waterboarding ‘to get information that was necessary’

  • Now Carly Fiorina says she’s pro-torture as she defends WATERBOARDING and says it helped with ‘keeping our nation safe’ after the 9/11 terror attacks

  • Fiorina defends waterboarding

  • Carly Fiorina defends CIA torture during Bush-era, calls for more transparency

  • Carly Fiorina Defends CIA ‘Torture’ Tactics as a Way to ‘Keep Our Nation Safe’

  • Fiorina Approves of Waterboarding Torture to Stop Terrorism

  • Carly Fiorina: Waterboarding Necessary to ‘Keep Our Nation Safe’

  • SNP, Labour and Internal Democracy

    Not even Turkmenistan, where the Glorious Leader renamed the days of the week after his family and bequeathed the Presidency to his dentist (who remains President) do they have a national anthem as ludicrously obsequious as the British. Furthermore, even North Korea’s anthem makes no mention of the ruling dynasty. I haven’t sung the British hymn to arse-licking since I was old enough to understand what it meant (about 13). As a British diplomat and Ambassador I used to do exactly what Corbyn did – stand silently. And I have done that while in the Queen’s company.

  • ‘Can We Hold Noncitizens to a Different Standard of Justice?’

  • With Saudi Silence on Rape Case, NSA Doval Looped In

    Saudi Arabia has still not responded to India’s request to interrogate one of its diplomats, accused of raping two Nepali women who worked for him.

  • US government drops espionage charges against US physics professor

    The US Attorney’s Office [official website] on Friday dismissed all charges against the former chairman of Temple University’s physics department, Xi Xiaoxing [University profile], for allegedly sharing American-made schematics of a device used in superconductor research to Chinese scientists. The charges were based on emails of technological specifications of the device, known as a pocket heater, that the professor sent during his time as chairman of the physics department at Temple. The US Attorney’s Office declined [AP report] to comment on the matter other than the decision to dismiss the charges was based on “new information.” The motion comes after a presentation by the professors’ attorney that demonstrated the information he exchanged with China had little to no commercial value and did not involve restricted technology. Xi’s attorney argued that the government misunderstood the science and Xi’s attorney presented several experts that testified on behalf of Xi.

  • Ukrainian rebels call for Israeli media censorship

    An Israeli media report on a Ukrainian woman who recently immigrated has caused consternation among pro-Russian separatists in the east of the former Soviet republic, with representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic calling on Jerusalem to censor her story.

  • China is bringing sophisticated censorship to the US for president Xi’s state visit

  • The Morning News: Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Internet Censorship Edition

  • US Security Firm Defends Partnership with Censorship-Happy Chinese Giant Baidu

    The American tech company CloudFlare, known for its no-compromise stance on internet freedom and freedom of expression, announced nearly two weeks ago that it had finally entered—sort of—a territory where those principles are often compromised: China.

    Technically, CloudFlare didn’t really enter China. The company agreed to an unprecedented partnership with the Chinese internet giant Baidu, creating something like a fast lane for websites both inside and outside of the communist country, through a service owned by Baidu and called Yunjiasu, or “Fast Cloud.”

    Some, given CloudFlare’s history of defending websites against censorship, and its public goal of making the internet better, saw this as sort of a deal with the devil. Richard Bejtlich, a well-known security expert who works for another security firm, FireEye, wrote in a Motherboard op-ed that the deal was dangerous for two reasons: intellectual property, and censorship.

  • Swaziland: Call to End Swazi Media Censorship

    They also call for more independent newspapers and media houses to be allowed to operate in Swaziland, where King Mswati III rules as sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

  • Bassel Khartabil Safadi Moved to Court; Fate Uncertain

    As we’ve reported in the past, Bassel Khartabil Safadi, a 31-year-old Palestinian-Syrian, is a respected computer engineer specializing in open source software development. He has been a project leader for open source web software called Aiki Framework. He is well known in online technical communities as a dedicated volunteer to major Internet projects like Creative Commons, Mozilla, Wikipedia, Open Clip Art Library, Fabricatorz, and Sharism.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • How someone acquired the Google.com domain name for a single minute

    We’ve all been there: It’s nearly 2 in the morning and you’re cruising around the Internet looking for new domain names to purchase. I mean, talk about a cliched night, right?

  • EFF Urges Federal Appeals Court to Protect Speech, Guard Against Censorship By Upholding Net Neutrality Order

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking a federal appeals court to approve Federal Communications Commission (FCC) net neutrality rules that prevent Internet service providers from interfering with and censoring content on the Web.

    U.S. telecommunication providers sued the FCC in Washington D.C. federal circuit court after the FCC published the rules, called the Open Internet Order, earlier this year. Among other things, service providers and their supporters argue that the order strips telecom companies of control over which speech they transmit.

• DRM/eBooks

  • Digital Apocalypse Not: NYT Celebrates Publishers Deciding They Don’t Want to Sell E-Books

    The main difference, from the publishers’ point of view, between print books and e-books is that it’s very difficult to self-publish a print book: It’s difficult for an author to distribute physical books to thousands of real-world bookstores. In a world where books are mostly delivered electronically, it’s hard to imagine that publishers will play much of a role.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Court Says USTR Can Continue To Keep The Public From Seeing The Trade Agreements They’ll Be Subjected To

    Towards the end of 2013, IP-Watch — along with the Yale Media Freedom and Access Center — filed a FOIA lawsuit against the USTR for its refusal to release its TPP draft documents. The USTR spent a year ignoring IP-Watch’s William New’s request before telling him the release of draft agreements would “harm national security.”

  • Trademarks

    • The BASMATI saga: General Court accommodates extended passing off within Community trade mark system

  • Copyrights

    • Ruling in ’dancing baby’ case could curb copyright censorship

      Copyright holders must consider fair use before taking down YouTube videos of cute cavorting children, federal judges have ruled. The decision in the landmark digital copyright case is expected to curb takedown requests, although some loopholes remain.

    • NZ lawyers spent 29,334 hours and $3M-plus trying to prosecute Kim Dotcom

      Kim Dotcom’s oft-delayed extradition hearing is slated to begin on Monday, nearly three years and 10 months since the infamous raid of Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion. Over that time span, Dotcom’s legal team has managed to drag out the affair through 10 extradition hearing delays and various other legal maneuvering. And according to some number crunching from the New Zealand Herald (confirmed by the Crown Law Office, the NZ prosecutors representing the US there), Dotcom’s trials and tribulations have cost NZ taxpayers nearly NZ$5.8 million in legal fees (or approximately $3.7 million).

    • There are laws making it illegal to collect data on open land

      Wyoming lawmakers adopted legislation making it illegal to gather data on open space—such as performing water quality tests or taking photographs—for the purpose of reporting to the government harmful farming practices, environmental degradation, or other ills.

      The two-part legislative package, signed by Gov. Matt Mead earlier this year, is the subject of a constitutional legal challenge from environmentalists, animal rights advocates, and the media.

    • Pokemon Wants To Totally Bankrupt One Of Its Biggest Fans, Thanks To Copyright

      Back at the end of August, we wrote about a ridiculous situation in which the Pokemon Company decided to sue two fans in Seattle who had set up a Pokemon-themed party leading into the big PAX conference. As soon as the threats came down, these guys shut down the party entirely, but the Pokemon Company would not be stopped in its determination to totally bankrupt and destroy such a big fan who was out there promoting Pokemon and Pokemon culture. The company, represented by big copyright maximalist law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, went forward with the ridiculous lawsuit anyway. While they dismissed one guy from the lawsuit, the other, Ramar Larking Jones, didn’t hire a lawyer, saying he had no money for it.

    • Argentina Plans To Increase Copyright In Photos From 20 Years To Life Plus 70 Years, Devastating Wikipedia

      As Techdirt has pointed out, copyright extensions are bad enough, but retroactive ones are even worse, since the creation of the work has already occurred, so providing additional incentives makes no sense, even accepting the dubious idea that artists think about copyright terms before setting to work. Moreover, copyright extensions are a real kind of copyright theft — specifically, stealing from the public domain. If you think that is just rhetoric, it’s worth looking at what is happening in Argentina.