Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

08.16.16

Links 16/8/2016: White House Urged by EFF on FOSS, Go 1.7 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Why private clouds will suffer a long, slow death

      Analyst firm Wikibon believes that no vendor is making more than $100 million via OpenStack. If that’s anywhere near true, the sum total of all vendors has to be less than $2 billion.

    • M$ Shoots Foot, Again

      Not being able to sell software unbundled from hardware is a terrible deficit in a world where people are building open servers.

    • Microsoft: Why we had to tie Azure Stack to boxen we picked for you

      Microsoft has explained the rationale behind last month’s announcement that you won’t be allowed to simply download Azure Stack and get going.

      In July Redmond informed fans the only way they’d be able to get Azure in their own data centres would be on hardware of its choosing.

      Specifically, Azure Stack will only come pre-installed on pre-integrated servers from Dell, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Lenovo. Other OEMs, we’re promised, will follow.

      The Dell, HP and Lenovo will come “sometime” in 2017. Azure Stack had been expected by the end of 2016, but the work with to produce integrated systems will mean a delay.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linus Torvalds Announces the Second Linux Kernel 4.8 Release Candidate Build

      As expected, Linus Torvalds made his Sunday announcement for the second RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel branch, which is now available for public testing.

      Linux kernel 4.8 entered development last week, when the merge window was officially closed and the first Release Candidate development milestone released to the world. According to Linus Torvalds, the second RC build is here to update more drivers, even more hardware architectures, as well as to fix issues for supported filesystems and add some extra mm work.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Frameworks Now Requires Qt 5.5 or Later, Build 5.25.0 Updates Breeze Icons

        The KDE project announced this past weekend the release of KDE Frameworks 5.25.0, another monthly update to the collection of over 70 add-ons for the Qt5 GUI toolkit and the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

        KDE Frameworks 5.25.0 comes in time for the recently released KDE Plasma 5.7.3 maintenance update of the modern and widely used Linux desktop, promising to update many of the core components, including but not limited to Attica, which now follows HTTP redirects, the Breeze icon set with lots of additions, extra CMake modules, KDE Doxygen tools, KXMLGUI, KWindowSystem, and KWidgetsAddons.

        KDE apps like KTextEditor, KArchive, and Sonnet received bugfixes and other improvements in the KDE Frameworks 5.25.0. The release also comes with many other updated components, among which Plasma Framework, NetworkManagerQt, KXMLGUI, KCoreAddons, KService, Kross, Solid, Package Framework, KNotification, KItemModels, KIO, KInit, KIconThemes, KHTML, KGlobalAccel, KFileMetaData, and KDeclarative.

      • Chakra GNU/Linux Users Get KDE Plasma 5.7.3, Mozilla Firefox 48.0 & Wine 1.9.16

        Chakra GNU/Linux maintainer Neofytos Kolokotronis has been happy to inform the community about the availability of the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment and software applications in the main repositories of the distribution.

        We bet that Chakra GNU/Linux users have been waiting for this announcement for quite a while now, and the main reason for that is the KDE Plasma 5.7.3 desktop environment, which brings a month’s worth of bug fixes, updated language translations, and improvements to many KDE apps and core components.

        In addition to the KDE Plasma 5.7.3 desktop environment, Chakra GNU/Linux users can now install some of the latest open-source applications, among which we can mention the Oracle VirtualBox 5.1.2 virtualization software, SQLite 3.13.0 SQL database engine, LibreOffice 5.1.5 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 48.0 web browser, and Wine 1.9.16.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Report of GUADEC 2016

        So this year was our first GUADEC, for both Aryeom (have a look at Aryeom’s report, in Korean) and I. GUADEC stands for “GNOME Users And Developers European Conference”, so as expected we met a lot of both users and developers of GNOME, the Desktop Environment we have been happily using lately (for a little more than a year now). It took place at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • 4MParted 19.0 Distrolette Now In Beta, Based on 4MLinux 19.0 and GParted 0.26.1

        4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today, August 15, 2016, about the availability of the first public Beta release of the upcoming 4MParted distrolette people can use to partition disk drives independent of a computer OS.

      • Server-Oriented Alpine Linux 3.4.3 Lands with Kernel 4.4.17 LTS, ownCloud 9.0.4

        The Alpine Linux development team is happy to announce the release and general availability for download of the third maintenance update to the Alpine Linux 3.4 series of server-oriented operating systems.

      • First Beta of Black Lab Linux 8 “Onyx” Hits the Streets, Based on Ubuntu 14.04.5

        Until today, Black Lab Linux 8.0 “Onyx” has been in the Alpha stages of development and received a total of four Alpha builds that have brought multiple updated components and GNU/Linux technologies, but now the Ubuntu-based operating system has entered a much more advanced development state, Beta, and the first one is here exactly six months after the development cycle started.

        “Today the Black Lab Linux development team is pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 8 ‘Onyx’ Beta 1. Bringing us one step closer to our goal of a stable, secure, and long term supported Linux desktop for the masses. ‘Onyx’ Beta 1 is a culmination of over 6 months of user collaboration and feedback,” says Roberto J. Dohnert, Black Lab Software CEO.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 Goes Stable with KDE Plasma 5.6.5 and Linux Kernel 4.6.5

        Softpedia was informed by the OpenMandriva team about the general availability of the final, production-ready release of the OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 operating system.

        OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 has been in development for the past four months, as the first Alpha build got released sometime in the third week of April 2016. Since then, the hard working development team behind this open source project have managed to keep up with the latest GNU/Linux technologies and software releases, so that they can bring you an usable and up-to-date computer OS.

        “OpenMandriva Lx is a cutting edge distribution compiled with LLVM/clang. Combined with the high level of optimization used for both code and linking (by enabling LTO) used in its building, this gives the OpenMandriva desktop an unbelievably crisp response to operations on the KDE Plasma 5 desktop which makes it a pleasure to use,” reads the announcement.

      • OpenMandriva 3.0, Google Linux Snub, TCP Vulnerability

        OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 was announced Saturday with Linux 4.6.5, Plasma 5.6.5, and systemd 231. An early reviewer said he liked OpenMandriva but Plasma not as much. Elsewhere all anyone can seem to talk about is Google’s decision to use something other than Linux to power its next embedded devices and a TCP vulnerability that could allow remote hijacking of Internet traffic. Patrick Volkerding has upgraded the toolchain in Slackware-current and Red Hat security expert said you can’t trust any networks anywhere.

    • Slackware Family

      • Zenwalk Linux 8.0 – A more Zen Slackware

        There were a few things I enjoyed about Zenwalk 8.0 and several I did not. Before getting to those, I want to acknowledge that Zenwalk is, in most ways, very much like Slackware. The two distributions are binary compatible and if you like (or dislike) one, you will probably feel the same way about the other. They’re quite closely related with similar benefits and drawbacks.

        On the positive side of things, I like that Zenwalk trims down the software installed by default. A full installation of Zenwalk requires about two-thirds of the disk space a full installation of Slackware consumes. This is reflected in Zenwalk’s focused “one-app-per-task” approach which I feel makes it easier to find things. Zenwalk requires relatively little memory (a feature it shares with Slackware) and, with PulseAudio’s plugin removed, consumes very few CPU cycles. One more feature I like about this distribution is the fact Zenwalk includes LibreOffice, a feature I missed when running pure Slackware.

        On the other hand, I ran into a number of problems with Zenwalk. The dependency problems which annoyed me while running Slackware were present in Zenwalk too. To even get a working text editor I needed to have development libraries installed. To make matters worse, the user needs a text editor to enable the package manager to install development libraries. It’s one of those circular problems that require the user to think outside the box (or re-install with all software packages selected).

        Other issues I had were more personal. For example, I don’t like window transparency or small fonts. These are easy to fix, but it got me off on the wrong foot with Zenwalk. I do want to acknowledge that while my first two days with Zenwalk were mostly spent fixing things, hunting down dependencies and tweaking the desktop to suit my tastes, things got quickly better. By the end of the week I was enjoying Zenwalk’s performance, its light nature and its clean menus. I may have had more issues with Zenwalk than Slackware in the first day or so, but by the end of the week I was enjoying using Zenwalk more for my desktop computing.

        For people running older computers, I feel it is worth noting Zenwalk does not offer 32-bit builds. The distribution has become 64-bit only and people who still run 32-bit machines will need to turn elsewhere, perhaps to Slackware.

        In the end, I feel as though Zenwalk is a more focused flavour of Slackware. The Slackware distribution is multi-purpose, at least as suited for servers as desktops. Slackware runs on more processor architectures, has a live edition and can dump a lot of software on our hard disk. Zenwalk is more desktop focused, with fewer packages and perhaps a nicer selection of applications. The two are quite similar, but Slackware has a broader focus while Zenwalk is geared to desktop users who value performance.

      • New Toolchain on Current

        Patrick is now upgrading basic toolchain in current branch. The basic trio combination (GCC, GLIBC, and Kernel) are normally the first one to update since it will be used as a base for next Slackware release.

        GCC is now upgraded to 5.4.0, which is the latest version for 5.x branch. Their latest version is at 6.1 while their development version is at 7.0.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Booting Lenovo T460s after Fedora 24 Updates
        • Flock 2016
        • Ideas for getting started in the Linux kernel

          Getting new people into OSS projects is always a challenge. The Linux kernel is no different and has it’s own set of challenges. This is a follow up and expansion of some of what I talked about at Flock about contributing to the kernel.

          When I tell people I do kernel work I tend to get a lot of “Wow that’s really hard, you must be smart” and “I always wanted to contribute to the kernel but I don’t know how to get started”. The former thought process tends to lead to the latter, moreso than other projects. I would like to dispel this notion once and for all: you do not have to have a special talent to work on the kernel unless you count dogged persistence and patience as a talent. Working in low level C has its own quriks the same way working in other languages does. C++ templates terrify me, javascript’s type system (or lack there of) confuses me. You can learn the skills necessary to work in the kernel.

        • Żegnajcie! Fedora Flock 2016 in words

          From August 2 – 5, the annual Fedora contributor conference, Flock, was held in the beautiful city of Kraków, Poland. Fedora contributors from all over the world attend for a week of talks, workshops, collaboration, fun, and community building (if you’re tuning in and not sure what Fedora is exactly, you can read more here). Talks range from technical topics dealing with upcoming changes to the distribution, talks focusing on the community and things working well and how to improve, and many more. The workshops are a chance for people normally separated by thousands of miles to work and collaborate on real issues, problems, and tasks in the same room. As a Fedora contributor, this is the “premier” event to attend as a community member.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Elive 2.7.2 Beta Is Out with Spotify Support, Improved Artwork, and Thunar Fixes

          On August 14, 2016, the Elive development team was proud to announce the release and immediate availability of yet another Beta version of the Elive Linux operating system.

          Elive 2.7.2 comes only three weeks after the release of the previous Beta build, version 2.7.1, to implement out-of-the-box support for the popular Spotify digital music service, giving users direct access to millions of songs if they have a paid subscription, and a much-improved artwork, as both the system and icon themes were enhanced.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Show Off Converged Terminal App Design

            Reshaping the classic terminal app to fit multi-form factor world isn’t easy, but it’s the task that the Canonical Design team face as part of their work on Unity 8.

          • Canonical Plans on Improving the Ubuntu Linux Terminal UX on Mobile and Desktop

            Canonical, through Jouni Helminen, announced on August 15, 2016, that they were planning on transforming the community-developed Terminal app into a convergent Linux terminal that’s easy to use on both mobile phones and tablets.

            Terminal is a core Ubuntu Touch app and the only project to bring you the popular Linux shell on your Ubuntu Phone or Ubuntu Tablet devices. And now, Canonical’s designers are in charge of offering a much more pleasant Linux terminal user experience by making Terminal convergent across all screen formats.

            “I would like to share the work so far, invite users of the app to comment on the new designs, and share ideas on what other new features would be desirable,” says Jouni Helminen, Lead Designer at Canonical. “These visuals are work in progress – we would love to hear what kind of features you would like to see in your favorite terminal app!”

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Coffee Shop DevOps: How to use feedback loops to get smarter
  • How to design your project for participation

    Working openly means designing for participation. “Designing for participation” is a way of providing people with insight into your project, which you’ve built from the start to incorporate and act on that insight. Documenting how you intend to make decisions, which communication channels you’ll use, and how people can get in touch with you are the first steps in designing for participation. Other steps include working openly, being transparent, and using technologies that support collaboration and additional ways of inviting participation. In the end, it’s all about providing context: Interested people must be able to get up to speed and start participating in your project, team, or organization as quickly and easily as possible.

  • Events

    • Open Source//Open Society Conference Live Blog

      This conference offers 2 huge days of inspiration, professional development and connecting for those interested in policy, data, open technology, leadership, management and team building.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • So long, Firefox Hello!

        After updating my PCLinuxOS install, I noticed that the icon of Firefox Hello had changed: it was read and displayed a message reading “Error!”

        I thought it was a simply login failure, so I logged in and the icon went green, as normal. However, I noticed that Hello did not display the “Start a conversation” window, but one that read “browse this page with a friend”.

        A bit confused, I called Megatotoro, who read this statement from Mozilla to me. Apparently, I had missed the fact that Mozilla is discontinuing Hello starting from Firefox 49. Current Firefox version is 48, so…

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 11.0 Up to Release Candidate State, Support for SSH Protocol v1 Removed

      The FreeBSD Project, through Glen Barber, has had the pleasure of announcing this past weekend the general availability of the first Release Candidate for the upcoming FreeBSD 11.0 operating system, due for release on September 2, 2016.

      It appears to us that the development cycle of FreeBSD 11.0 was accelerated a bit, as the RC1 milestone is here just one week after the release of the fourth Beta build. Again, the new snapshot is available for 64-bit (amd64), 32-bit (i386), PowerPC (PPC), PowerPC 64-bit (PPC64), SPARC64, AArch64 (ARM64), and ARMv6 hardware architectures.

  • Public Services/Government

    • White House Source Code Policy Should Go Further

      A new federal government policy will result in the government releasing more of the software that it creates under free and open source software licenses. That’s great news, but doesn’t go far enough in its goals or in enabling public oversight.

      A few months ago, we wrote about a proposed White House policy regarding how the government handles source code written by or for government agencies. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has now officially enacted the policy with a few changes. While the new policy is a step forward for government transparency and open access, a few of the changes in it are flat-out baffling.

  • Programming/Development

    • Go 1.7 is released

      Today we are happy to announce the release of Go 1.7. You can get it from the download page. There are several significant changes in this release: a port for Linux on IBM z Systems (s390x), compiler improvements, the addition of the context package, and support for hierarchical tests and benchmarks.

      A new compiler back end, based on static single-assignment form (SSA), has been under development for the past year. By representing a program in SSA form, a compiler may perform advanced optimizations more easily. This new back end generates more compact, more efficient code that includes optimizations like bounds check elimination and common subexpression elimination. We observed a 5–35% speedup across our benchmarks. For now, the new backend is only available for the 64-bit x86 platform (“amd64″), but we’re planning to convert more architecture backends to SSA in future releases.

    • Go 1.7 Brings s390x Support, Compiler Improvements

      Go 1.7 includes a new port to the IBM System z (s390x) architecture, numerous compiler improvements, and more. Compiler work for Go 1.7 includes a new SSA back-end that yields 5~35% speedups on 64-bit x86, a new and more compact export data format, speed increases to the garbage collector, optimizations to the standard library, and more.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Serving Up Security? Microsoft Patches ‘Malicious Butler’ Exploit — Again

      It’s been a busy year for Windows security. Back in March, Microsoft bulletin MS16-027 addressed a remote code exploit that could grant cybercriminals total control of a PC if users opened “specially crafted media content that is hosted on a website.” Just last month, a problem with secure boot keys caused a minor panic among users.

      However, new Microsoft patches are still dealing with a flaw discovered in November of last year — it was first Evil Maid and now is back again as Malicious Butler. Previous attempts to slam this door shut have been unsuccessful. Has the Redmond giant finally served up software security?

    • Let’s Encrypt: Why create a free, automated, and open CA?

      During the summer of 2012, Eric Rescorla and I decided to start a Certificate Authority (CA). A CA acts as a third-party to issue digital certificates, which certify public keys for certificate holders. The free, automated, and open CA we envisioned, which came to be called Let’s Encrypt, has been built and is now one of the larger CAs in the world in terms of issuance volume.

      Starting a new CA is a lot of work—it’s not a decision to be made lightly. In this article, I’ll explain why we decided to start Let’s Encrypt, and why we decided to build a new CA from scratch.

      We had a good reason to start building Let’s Encrypt back in 2012. At that time, work on an HTTP/2 specification had started in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a standards body with a focus on network protocols. The question of whether or not to require encryption (via TLS) for HTTP/2 was hotly debated. My position, shared by my co-workers at Mozilla and many others, was that encryption should be required.

    • PGP Short-ID Collision Attacks Continued, Now Targeted Linus Torvalds

      After contacted the owner, it turned out that one of the keys is a fake. In addition, labelled same names, emails, and even signatures created by more fake keys. Weeks later, more developers found their fake “mirror” keys on the keyserver, including the PGP Global Directory Verification Key.

    • The Brewing Problem Of PGP Short-ID Collision Attacks
    • Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, IHG hit by malware: HEI

      A data breach at 20 U.S. hotels operated by HEI Hotels & Resorts for Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt and Intercontinental may have divulged payment card data from tens of thousands of food, drink and other transactions, HEI said on Sunday.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The U.S. will rearm Saudi Arabia to the tune of $1.5 billion as airstrikes resume in Yemen

      This week, the Pentagon announced its intention to sell $1.5 billion in armaments, tanks, and military advisory support to Saudi Arabia. If that sounds like a major deal, consider that the United States sold more than $20 billion worth of military equipment and support to the Saudis last year. And this is an alliance that goes back decades.

      All of that and much more from the United States is put to use in the fierce war that the Saudi military is waging against Shiite militias in Yemen. For instance, the Saudis command U.S.-made fighter jets that drop U.S.-made cluster bombs — a munition that is so imprecise that it has been banned by 119 nations. The U.S. provides targeting assistance, intelligence briefings and even daily aerial jet refueling for the Saudis and their coalition partners, which are mostly other oil-rich Persian Gulf nations.

    • China launches quantum satellite for ‘hack-proof’ communications

      China said it had launched the world’s first quantum satellite on Tuesday, a project Beijing hopes will enable it to build a coveted “hack-proof” communications system with potentially significant military and commercial applications.

      Xinhua, Beijing’s official news service, said Micius, a 600kg satellite that is nicknamed after an ancient Chinese philosopher, “roared into the dark sky” over the Gobi Desert at 1.40am local time, carried by a Long March-2D rocket.

      “The satellite’s two-year mission will be to develop “hack-proof” quantum communications allowing users to send messages securely and at speeds faster than light,” Xinhua reported.

      The Quantum Experiments at Space Scale, or Quess, satellite program is part of an ambitious space programme that has accelerated since Xi Jinping became Communist party chief in late 2012.

    • China Launches “Hack-Proof Quantum Satellite” To Transfer Secure Data
    • Trouble Follows When the U.S. Labels You a ‘Thug’

      There is a nasty pattern in American political speech, going back into the 1980s at least: when a senior U.S. official labels you a thug, often times wars follow. Thug is the safest word of American Exceptionalism.

      So it is with some concern that lots of folks are pushing each other away from the mic to call Putin a thug (fun fact: Putin has been in effective charge of Russia for 15 years. As recently as the Hillary Clinton Secretary of State era, the U.S. sought a “reset” of relations with him.)

      While the current throwing of the term thug at Putin is tied to the weak evidence presented publicly linking a Russian hacker under Putin’s employ to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computers, there may be larger issues in the background. But first, a sample of the rhetoric.

    • Putin’s incredible shrinking circle

      True to the informal tradition that August brings surprises in Russia, on the 12th it was announced that Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, was leaving his position as head of the Presidential Administration (AP) and taking up the new and rather less pivotal job of presidential representative for transport and the environment. In his place, Putin elevated one of Ivanov’s deputies, the essentially-unknown 44-year old Anton Vaino. Whatever Vaino’s strengths, this points to the way Putin is hollowing out his inner elite, surrounding himself with fewer but also less substantial peers, who are unlikely to challenge his worldview and opinions.

    • Doctors Without Borders Hospital Bombing in Yemen Earns Rare Saudi Rebuke at State Department

      After the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition bombed a hospital in Yemen supported by Doctors Without Borders on Monday, the U.S. State Department offered a rare condemnation of the coalition’s violence.

      “Of course we condemn the attack,” said Elizabeth Trudeau, a spokesman for the State Department.

      The State Department has previously deflected questions about coalition attacks by referring reporters to the Saudi government — even though the U.S. has supplied the coalition with billions of dollars of weapons, and has refueled Saudi planes.

      Trudeau also stressed that “U.S. officials regularly engage with Saudi officials” about civilian casualties — a line that spokespeople have repeated for months. Saudi Arabia has nevertheless continued to bomb civilian sites, including homes, markets, factories, and schools.

    • In Rudy Giuliani’s Universe, 9/11 Is Everything and Nothing

      Warming up the crowd for Donald Trump on Monday in Youngstown, Ohio, former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani offered a glimpse into the alternate reality he has now signed on to by describing the presidency of George W. Bush as a time of undisturbed peace and security for Americans.

      During “those eight years, before Obama came along,” Giuliani said, “we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States — they all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”

    • Aid Worker in Aleppo Says Joint U.S.-Russian Airstrikes Would be “Diabolical”

      A British aid worker based in rebel-held East Aleppo says that reported plans by the United States and Russia to conduct joint airstrikes against the city are “ludicrous and diabolical,” and, if carried out, would have a disastrous impact on civilians living there.

      Tauqir Sharif, 29, speaking to The Intercept from a hospital in Aleppo, says that Russian and Syrian government airstrikes on the city are creating nightmarish conditions for ordinary people. The addition of American forces to the mix would compound the misery of civilians, while giving the impression that the United States was openly siding with the Assad government.

      Last week an alliance of Syrian rebels and Islamist groups broke the longstanding government siege on the eastern half of the city. Sharif says that since then, the frequency and intensity of airstrikes has increased. “There has been an almost constant bombardment from strikes because the regime is very, very angry that a corridor has been opened into the city from the south,” Sharif says. “The siege in some ways is still in place because it is very difficult to bring aid in due to constant airstrikes on vehicles driving the routes to the city.”

    • Six Years Later, the US Continues to Facilitate Saudi War Crimes

      Over six years ago, according to a State Department cable liberated by Chelsea Manning, the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia met with Prince Khalid bin Sultan to complain about all the civilians the Saudis killed in an airstrike on a health clinic. Prince Khalid expressed regret about the dead civilians. But the Saudis “had to hit the Houthis very hard in order to ‘bring them to their knees.’”

    • US War Crimes or ‘Normalized Deviance’

      The U.S. foreign policy establishment and its mainstream media operate with a pervasive set of hypocritical standards that justify war crimes — or what might be called a “normalization of deviance,” writes Nicolas J S Davies.

    • Simplistic Second-Guessing on ISIS

      Official Washington’s neocons, the mainstream U.S. media and Donald Trump are on the same page at least in blaming President Obama for ISIS, a case of all three parties being wrong, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Finance

    • Morrissey says leave voters were victimised and made to look irresponsible after Brexit

      Morrissey has accused the British media of victimising those who voted to leave the EU.

      The 57-year-old singer said he was left “shocked” by the unfair reporting following the outcome of the EU referendum.

      He claimed those who voted in favour of Brexit were judged as “racist, drunk and irresponsible” yet those who voted to remain were not questioned in the same way.

      Speaking to Israeli publication Walla! he said: “I am shocked at the refusal of the British media to be fair and accept the people’s final decision just because the result of the referendum did not benefit the establishment.

    • Banks Won’t Wait Around to See What Brexit Deal the U.K. Can Get

      Big investment banks with their European headquarters in London will start the process of moving jobs from the U.K. within weeks of the government triggering Brexit, a faster timeline than their public messages of patience would imply, according to people briefed on the plans being drawn up by four of the biggest firms.

    • Upset by Brexit, Some British Jews Look to Germany

      But looking for a way to ensure that he could still work and live in Europe once Britain leaves the bloc, Mr. Levine, 35, who was born in Britain and lives in London, decided to do what some Jews, including his relatives, might consider unthinkable: apply for German citizenship.

    • Brexit Timing Illusions Exposed in Unusual Tale of Greenland

      There’s a man in the European Union who has already led a country out of the bloc. His name is Uffe Ellemann-Jensen. He’s a former foreign minister of Denmark who handled negotiations on Greenland after its citizens voted to leave the EU in 1982.

      With a population of just 56,000 and a gross domestic product of about $2.5 billion, Greenland still took three years to exit. Ellemann-Jensen says any notion in Britain that all it needs to do is trigger Article 50 and two years later it will be out is illusory.

      “Negotiating Greenland’s exit was a fairly simple task that resulted in a relatively simple and easy to understand protocol,” Ellemann-Jensen, 74, said in an interview. “That took three years. Britain will take much longer. It’s impossible to say how long.”

    • U.K. Input Costs Jump as Pound’s Brexit Drop Fuels Prices: Chart

      The drop in the pound caused by the U.K.’s European Union referendum is already affecting manufacturers. Manufacturers’ costs for materials and fuels jumped an annual 4.3 percent in July, the fastest pace in three years. Still, the surge may not worry Bank of England officials yet, since policy makers have indicated they intend to look through any inflation generated by the currency’s slump as they add stimulus to bolster growth.

    • 7 Brexit promises that have already been abandoned

      As soon as we voted to Leave the EU, the phrase “post-truth” started to be thrown about a lot more, assisted in part by a certain national embarrassment running for US president.

      It’s probably fair to say the Leave campaign may have had something to do with this – campaign promises were literally abandoned the morning after the Brexit vote.

      Just to remind you, here’s what those who campaigned to Leave are really hoping people will shut up about.

    • Brexit Bulletin: Banks Already Plotting City Exodu

      Larger investment banks with their European headquarters in London are already making plans for their own withdrawal.

      Many plan to start the process of moving jobs from the U.K. within weeks of the government triggering Brexit, people briefed on the plans of four of the biggest firms told Bloomberg’s Gavin Finch.

      That suggests the banks may move faster than their public messages of patience would imply, and reflects dismay with the U.K.’s lack of a clear plan to protect its status as a global financial hub. There are concerns British-based banks will lose the right to sell services freely around the European Union.

    • Brexit damage to economy will outweigh modest wage gains, says study

      Damage to the economy caused by Brexit will more than offset the modest wage gains for British-born workers in low-paid jobs caused by cutting net migration to the tens of thousands a year, a study has found.

      A report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank said there would be a small pay increase to native-born employees in sectors such as security and cleaning if there was a big cut in the number of workers arriving in Britain from overseas.

      But it estimated that these benefits would fail to compensate for the reduction in real incomes caused in the short term by the higher inflation triggered by a falling pound, and in the long term by a slowdown in the economy’s growth rate.

    • Will ‘decent work’ or Victorian brutality mark India’s dash for the top?

      Although all too often glossed over, Victorian Britain’s harsh working conditions are no secret.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Assange: DOJ set ‘new standard’ for Clinton

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the Department of Justice (DOJ) set a new standard for its investigations with its probe of Hillary Clinton.

      “Our D.C. lawyers are delivering a letter tomorrow to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking her to explain why it is that the now six-year-long national security and criminal investigation being run against WikiLeaks, the reason I have political asylum, has not been closed,” he said on CNN’s “The Lead” on Monday.

      “Because the DOJ, whose actions seem to be setting a new standard by closing the Hillary Clinton case,” Assange added. “The Hillary Clinton case has only gone for one year.

      “Hillary Clinton’s case has been dropped, the case against WikiLeaks continues. So why is it that the quote, ‘pending law enforcement proceedings’ against WikiLeaks continue? There’s a problem here.”

      Assange compared the DOJ’s investigation of his organization with the agency’s probe of Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

      “It was closed under the basis that [FBI Director] James Comey said that they couldn’t establish that there was an intent to damage national security,” he said of the DOJ’s probe of Clinton. “In our case, there’s no allegation that we have done anything except publish information for the public.

      “The U.S. government had to say under oath in 2013 not a single person has been physically harmed by our publication. You don’t have intent. You don’t have serious harm.”

      Assange added Clinton’s campaign is trying to discredit WikiLeaks by focusing on his lack of American citizenship.

      “Of course they’re desperate for anything,” he said. “We operate and report on all different countries. We have staff in the United States. That’s what we do for every country.

    • Ten years ago, Trump’s campaign manager warned of a rigged election — in Ukraine

      “The only way” Hillary Clinton can win in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump said at a rally in that state on Friday evening, “and I mean this 100 percent — [is] if in certain sections of the state they cheat, OK?” That was “the way we can lose the state,” he said, of a state where he currently trails by 9 points. “And we have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching.” On Saturday, his campaign unveiled an effort to somehow formalize the campaign’s fraud-prevention system, encouraging sign-ups on their website for “Trump Election Observers.”

      There’s no demonstrated in-person voter fraud problem in Pennsylvania (or anywhere else, for that matter), and it’s not clear if Trump’s fraud-prevention effort is simply an attempt to collect voter contact information and boost GOP voter enthusiasm, or if it’s actually meant to combat a problem that doesn’t exist. But it’s not surprising that this is a part of Trump’s campaign in one sense: When Trump’s campaign director Paul Manafort was helping to coordinate the campaign effort of a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine in 2006, he used similar tools and rhetoric.

    • Democratic National Committee Creates A ‘Cybersecurity Board’ Without A Single Cybersecurity Expert

      The Democratic National Committee, still reeling from the hack on its computer system that resulted in a bunch of leaked emails and the resignation of basically all of its top people, has now created a “cybersecurity advisory board” to improve its cybersecurity and to “prevent future attacks.”

    • Con vs. Con

      During the presidential election cycle, liberals display their gutlessness. Liberal organizations, such as MoveOn.org, become cloyingly subservient to the Democratic Party. Liberal media, epitomized by MSNBC, ruthlessly purge those who challenge the Democratic Party establishment. Liberal pundits, such as Paul Krugman, lambaste critics of the political theater, charging them with enabling the Republican nominee. Liberals chant, in a disregard for the facts, not to be like Ralph Nader, the “spoiler” who gave us George W. Bush.

      The liberal class refuses to fight for the values it purports to care about. It is paralyzed and trapped by the induced panic manufactured by the systems of corporate propaganda. The only pressure within the political system comes from corporate power. With no counterweight, with no will on the part of the liberal class to defy the status quo, we slide deeper and deeper into corporate despotism. The repeated argument of the necessity of supporting the “least worse” makes things worse.

    • Did Trump Campaign Manager Reap Millions in Stolen Ukrainian Wealth?

      The bromance between Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin—even when reminded of the murders of anti-Putin journalists—has been one of the oddities of the 2016 presidential campaign. Besides Trump’s praise of Putin as a strong leader, and the GOP presidential nominee’s invitation to Russia to hack into the email server of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, there’s the work done on behalf of a Putin ally by Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager.

    • Milwaukee’s War on Black People

      Donald Trump supporter and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke has built a national profile by openly declaring war on the Black Lives Matter movement, from the floor of the Republican National Convention to the pages of national media outlets, once even proclaiming on social media that racial justice protesters will “join forces” with ISIS.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • WordPress blocks latest Guccifer 2.0 docs

      The blog platform WordPress blocked or obfuscated public access to the entire recent cache of documents from the account of hacker Guccifer 2.0, including the contact information for Democratic members of Congress and lists of passwords.

      Guccifer 2.0, the hacker or hackers behind the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) breach last month, published some of the documents taken from the DCCC system on Friday.

      “Some content on this page was disabled on August 13, 2016 upon receipt of a valid complaint regarding the publication of private information,” the site posted in place of the documents and accompanying blog post, along with a link to its privacy policy.

      While the site only deleted one file — the database of congressional contact information — deleting the post removed all links to other documents in the recent cache. Knowing a direct web address of the files, a user could still download them. The site no longer provides any direction on how to get to those documents.

    • “A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment

      For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it. With public backlash at an all-time high and growth stagnating, what is the platform that declared itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” to do? BuzzFeed News talks to the people who’ve been trying to figure this out for a decade.

    • Abuse on Twitter is a ‘fundamental feature,’ report says

      Its commitment to free speech since its very beginning, plus the pressure to grow the number of users, have overshadowed efforts to curtail the abuse on the platform, former employees told BuzzFeed News. Add to that the general internal chaos of a startup.

      [...]

      The article echoes some of the well-known criticisms of the internet firm, such as the allegation that it takes better care of celebrities who complain of abuse than it does average people.

      Twitter has deployed something called the “censoring algorithm” — for example, when it has hosted town halls with famous people such as Caitlyn Jenner — the story said.

      Perhaps Twitter’s “original sin” was its homogenous leadership team, a former employee told BuzzFeed. White, male leaders didn’t prioritize the abuse problem in part because they were not victimized.

    • National anti-censorship group weighs in on book battle in Chesterfield County

      In a letter sent to Chesterfield’s School superintendent this month, the National Coalition Against Censorship asked the school system to do away with plans to review several books from a summer reading list some parents voiced concerns over, alleging they are not age appropriate and are objectionable.

      “Parents have complete control. This was an optional book list. The right response at this point is if parents don’t want their kids reading things, then they tell their kids not to read it,” said Claire Guthrie-Gastanaga with the ACLU of Virginia.

      The ACLU is part of the coalition and says beyond limiting diversity in education, there are legal troubles with taking books off reading lists.

    • AdWeek Articles On Google Ad VP Torrence Boone Hit With Bogus DMCA Notices Issued By Bogus ‘News’ Websites

      It appears there’s still no shortage of quasi-reputation management efforts being deployed in the form of bogus DMCA takedowns issued by bogus “news” websites.

      Pissed Consumer uncovered this shady tactic back in April, noting that legitimate-sounding sites like the “Frankfort Herald” and the “Lewisburg Tribune” were issuing takedown notices on complaints posted to the gripe site. These fake news sites tended to be filled with a blend of scraped content and and negative reviews/posts from sites like Pissed Consumer and Ripoff Report copy-pasted in full and backdated to make them appear as if they’d appeared at the bogus sites first.

      Our article about this tactic, containing some additional details we tracked down, caught the eye of an entity called Web Activism, which is now digging up as many details as it can about this DMCA-abusing reputation management tactic. Web Activism notified Adweek that a couple of past articles hosted there were being targeted by bogus DMCA notices.

    • Who Filed Fake Copyright Infringement Complaints Against AgencySpy?

      Earlier this year, someone using a fake name, a fake employer and a fake job description filed a fraudulent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request with our parent company’s legal team.

      Here’s what almost certainly happened: A reputation PR firm had a client who wanted a post written way back in 2010 to disappear from Google’s search results forever, so an employee of this firm copied and pasted our post into a fake news story, backdated it to make the claim more believable, then used a fictional but official-sounding identity to threaten our employer with unspecified legal action.

    • Which Crazy Copyright Holder Took Down Katie Ledecky/Carlos Santana ‘Smooth’ Mashup First?

      Someone — either the Olympics or whoever holds the copyright to the song — issued a takedown. This is ridiculous. The use here was almost certainly fair use. But when you have two of the most aggressive copyright aggressors around — record labels and the Olympics — I guess it’s no surprise that they would ignore fair use and take down content like this, which is the kind of content that would likely only get more people interested in either the Olympics or the music. But, no, copyright is apparently more important than that.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Alain Philippon pleads guilty over smartphone password border dispute

      A Quebec man who refused to give his smartphone password to border officials at Halifax Stanfield International Airport last year has pleaded guilty and been fined $500.

      Alain Philippon, of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Que., had said he would fight the charge of hindering or obstructing border officials, but changed course Monday morning when his lawyer entered a guilty plea on his behalf in provincial court in Dartmouth, N.S.

    • Malaysian maid agencies stunned by new directive barring non-Muslim maids for Muslims

      Maid agencies in Malaysia are stunned by a “new” directive imposed by the Immigration Department barring them from hiring non-Muslim maids.

      Employers have questioned the rationale behind the policy, which department officials said was not new, as they were worried that they may not get any maids at all.

      Malaysian Maid Employers Association (MAMA) president Engku Ahmad Fauzi said the policy would limit the supply of maids for Muslims.

      “Religion should not be an obstacle. When you work in an office, you don’t base it on religion and likewise, this should not be the case for the maid in the home,” he said on Sunday (Aug 14).

    • Helsinki Uber drivers now face criminal charges when caught

      Police in Helsinki are criminally charging drivers caught working for the smartphone-based chauffeur service Uber. Previously, drivers found behind the wheel of an Uber only faced a misdemeanor fine.

    • Egyptian judo athlete sent home after refusing to shake hand of Israeli opponent

      For all the professionalism that has overwhelmed the Olympics, the games are supposed to be conducted with a spirit of sporting fraternity.

      And officials reacted sternly after a member of the Egyptian judo team refused to shake hands with the Israeli athlete who had just defeated him.

      The International Olympic Committee said Islam El Shehaby received a “severe reprimand” for his behaviour following his first-round heavyweight bout loss to Or Sasson last Friday.

    • Police to hire law firms to tackle cyber criminals in radical pilot project

      Private law firms will be hired by police to pursue criminal suspects for profit, under a radical new scheme to target cyber criminals and fraudsters.

      In a pilot project by the City of London police, the lead force on fraud in England and Wales, officers will pass details of suspects and cases to law firms, which will use civil courts to seize the money.

      The force says the scheme is a way of more effectively tackling fraud – which is now the biggest type of crime, estimated to cost £193bn a year. It is overwhelming police and the criminal justice system.

      The experiment, which is backed by the government and being closely watched by other law enforcement agencies, is expected to lead to cases reaching civil courts this year or early next year.

      Officers will use the private law firms to attempt to seize suspects’ assets. If unsuccessful, police could decide to leave it at that or pursue the case themselves through the criminal courts.

      Commander Chris Greany, head of economic crime at City of London police, said: “It is a huge shift … Civil recovery allows us to get hold of a criminal’s money sooner, and repay back victims sooner.”

    • Study Says Police Body Cameras Have Contributed To Increased Uses Of Deadly Force

      While I don’t doubt that some officers believe footage may assist them in justifying shootings, there’s very little here that suggests anything more than a statistical blip. No such increase was noted in 2013 or 2014, and a 3.64% increase would seem to be a fluctuation, rather than anything correlative.

      The authors of the study note one issue that may be skewing the numbers slightly upward: there’s very little data available to differentiate between justified shootings and unjustified shootings. Without this, it’s difficult to draw the conclusion that officers have made conscious or unconscious decisions about the perceived exculpatory value of capturing deadly force incidents on tape. And yet, such a conclusion is being tentatively drawn.

    • Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths

      In the wake of high-profile police shootings, the Obama administration has encouraged local police departments to equip their officers with body-worn cameras. The devices, said Attorney General Loretta Lynch, “hold tremendous promise for enhancing transparency, promoting accountability, and advancing public safety.”

      A new study by Temple University researchers, however, suggests that the wearable video cameras may not lead to fewer police shootings of civilians, but may actually make officers more likely to use lethal force.

    • African-American Women Make Olympic History

      After winning an Olympic medal, Simone Manuel said, “It means a lot, especially with what is going on in the world today, some of the issues of police brutality. This win hopefully brings hope and change to some of the issues that are going on.”

    • This Is What You Get

      The police shooting of another young black man, this time in Milwaukee, has proved “a spark to a powder keg” that is the city’s decades-long segregation, toxic racial climate, gross economic inequity, police abuses, and political leadership that not only ignored but often exacerbated those tensions. The death of Sylville Smith, 23, has provoked two days and nights of sometimes violent protests by a community that, said the brother of another police shooting victim, “has nothing. It’s a neglected community. To burn down something, to them, it meant, ‘Do you hear us now?’”

      The shooting and riots have put a spotlight on what has been called the worst place to be black in America, a city so segregated and divided from its suburbs that an old racist joke claims the city’s 16th Street viaduct bridge is the longest in the world because it links “Africa to Europe.” Milwaukee’s population of 600,000 is roughly 60% black and Latino, with a poverty rate of over 30%, dilapidated infrastructure, and little or no access to decent jobs; its suburbs are rich, up to 96% white and staunchly Republican – and Gov. Scott Walker is blamed for long working to keep it that way.

    • Tribute to Fidel Castro on His 90th Birthday
    • Fidel the Guerrilla in 2015–16 and Beyond

      Fidel stepped out of his hideaway, as though from a mountain hideout, to provide the very first salvo against illusions about U.S. imperialism. However, this is coupled with the expressed desire for a peaceful solution of the decades of conflict between the two neighbours, which is worth repeating: “I do not trust the policy of the United States, nor have I exchanged one word with them, though this does not in any way signify a rejection of a peaceful solution to conflicts or threats of war.”

    • Fidel Castro: 90 Revolutionary Years

      In October 1960, Senator John Kennedy said: “Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in 7 years – a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars, and he turned democratic Cuba into a complete police state – destroying every individual liberty.” This gives a measure of Fidel’s audacity to undertake his own legal and political defence.

    • Human Rights Groups Hold Candle Lighting for the Victims of Extra Judicial Killings; Call on President Duterte to Stop the Killing & Respect the Rights of Every Individual, and Follow Due Process

      iDefend, composed of Human Rights Defenders, has come out with a public statement and organised the candle lighting as a form of protest to #StopTheKillings on 15th August 2016, Monday at Tomas Morato cor. Timog Cirlce and Welcome Rotonda in Quezon City.

    • Kerry’s Brazil Meeting: Showing Support for an Illegitimate Government

      On Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) also weighed in, noting, “After suspending Brazil’s first female president on dubious grounds, without a mandate to govern the new interim government abolished the ministry of women, racial equality and human rights.” He added: “The United States cannot sit silently while the democratic institutions of one of our most important allies are undermined.”

      It is extremely rare to see this type of challenge to the policy of an administration from members of Congress of the same party, over a country as big and important as Brazil. In dealing with such a country, with a land mass that is bigger than the continental United States, more than 200 million people, and the seventh largest economy in the world, it is normal for Democratic legislators to defer to their Democratic president, especially in an election year.

  • DRM

    • It looks like the headphone jack dilemma will be pretty messy to start

      As you’ve heard ad nauseam, Apple appears extremely likely to remove the headphone jack from its next iPhone. This hasn’t gone over well! Apart from forcing some people to buy new wired (or wireless) headphones, it’s likely to raise the cost of the average headphone, and make many learn to live with dongles.

      Still, there are some potential benefits to adopting a digital audio connection like Lightning — noise-cancelling could become standard, for instance, and higher-end Lightning cans could provide better sound. Plus, if Apple makes jack-less iPhones the norm, it’d at least do so in one fell swoop. Lightning replaces 3.5mm, and that’s that.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • AbbVie v Amgen: Is the “patent dance” fair for both sides?

      The suit is the first filed under the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA) in which two parties have disagreed upon which patents should be in dispute, and raises a question about the efficacy of the “patent dance” process established by the BPCIA.

    • A Specification’s Focus on Particular Embodiment Not Limiting if Other Embodiments are also Expressly Contemplated

      The claim at issue is directed to a conveyor and “automatic” collating system for prescription containers. U.S. Patent No. 6,910,601, Claim 8. The claim itself does not specify how the collation occurs, but throughout the specification the patentee indicates that the containers will be collated by patient name and storage space availability. Seeing that distinction, the district court agreed with the challenger that the claims fail because they were not commensurate with the written description of the invention. [...]

      “Without including a limitation to address the storage by patient name, the claims are simply too broad to be valid.”

    • Trademarks

      • Trademark Office Tosses Phyllis Schlafly’s Opposition To Her Son’s Brewery Name Trademark Application

        We discuss trademark disputes centering on the beer and alcohol industry around here because that particular industry is finding itself at something of a barrier centered on how brews are named. Still, one story from a couple of years ago was particularly head-scratching. That story was that of Schlafly beer, made by Tom Schlafly’s St. Louis brewery, and the opposition to his trademark application from his aunt and cousin, Phyllis and Bruce Schlafly repsectively. Both family members filed oppositions to the trademark application, claiming that having their last name associated with an alcoholic product would negatively impact them. Bruce is an orthopedic surgeon, making one wonder exactly how bone-shattering Schlafly beer actually is. Phyllis, meanwhile, is a super-conservative commentator with an audience particularly cultivated amongst Mormons and Baptists, therefore an alcohol product with her surname on it would be ultra negative for her commentating business.

    • Copyrights

      • Attribution on the web

        The web is a great thing that’s come a long way, yadda yadda. It used to be an obscure nerd thing where you could read black Times New Roman text on a gray background. Now, it’s a hyper popular nerd thing where you can read black Helvetica Neue text on a white background. I hear it can do other stuff, too.

        That said, I occasionally see little nagging reminders that the web is still quite primitive in some ways. One such nag: it has almost no way to preserve attribution, and sometimes actively strips it.

        As a programmer, I’m here to propose some technical solutions to this social problem. It’s so easy! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

      • Lots Of Newspapers Discovering That Paywalls Don’t Work

        For many years, while some journalists (and newspaper execs) have been insisting that a paywall is “the answer” for the declining news business, we’ve been pointing out how fundamentally stupid paywalls are for the news. Without going into all of the arguments again, the short version is this: the business of newspapers has never really been “the news business” (no matter how much they insist otherwise). It’s always been the community and attention business. And in the past they were able to command such attention and build a community around news because they didn’t have much competition. But the competitive landscape for community and attention has changed (massively) thanks to the internet. And putting up a paywall makes it worse. In most cases, it’s limiting the ability of these newspapers to build communities or get attention, and actively pushing people away.

        And, yes, sure, people will point to the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as proof that “paywalls work.” But earth to basically every other publication: you’re not one of those publications. The paywalls there only work because of the unique content they have, and even then they don’t work as well as most people think.

        Not surprisingly, more and more newspapers that bet on paywalls are discovering that they don’t really work that well and were a waste of time and effort — and may have driven away even more readers.

      • Newspapers rethink paywalls as digital efforts sputter

        Newspapers in the English-speaking world ended paywalls some 69 times through May 2015, including 41 temporary and 28 permanent drops, according to a study by University of Southern California researchers.

      • US Seizes Dotcom’s Millions, Entrepreneur Fights Back

        On Friday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected efforts by Kim Dotcom to regain control over millions of dollars in assets seized by the US Government. By remaining outside the US, the court found that the Megaupload founder is a fugitive from justice. But Dotcom isn’t ready to give in and will take his case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

08.15.16

Links 15/8/2016: Linux 4.8 RC2, Glimpses at OpenMandriva Lx 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • One Of The Best Note-Taking Apps ‘Simplenote’ Is Now Open Source

    Simplenote, a lean but powerful note-taking app, has been made open source by its owner Automattic. Released under the GPLv2 license, developers can use its code for different platforms and take the app in new directions. But, it seems like the server-side code of the app is not yet released.

  • Research reports explore the open-source software market

    The mantra “you get what you pay for” doesn’t always to software. Because sometimes the best software really is free.

  • Events

    • Where in the World is the OSI?

      If you’re out and about at conferences this month, we hope that you’ll have a chance to attend one of these talks by OSI Board Members. If you’re an OSI member and you’ll be giving at talk about open source topics, please get in touch. We’d love to let folks know about your talk!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 49 for Linux gains plugin-free support for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video

        The Linux version of Firefox 49 is due for a proper release in September, although preview versions are currently available for those who want to try it out. With Widevine being free for anyone to use, Firefox’s adoption of plugin-free support for it could well mean that the standard is embraced by a larger number of sites. Support for DRM makes the protocol particularly appealing to content providers, as does the lack of license fee.

      • Firefox 49 for Linux Will Let You Watch Netflix Without Plugins

        Firefox is to begin supporting the Google Widevine CDM on Linux from next month, allowing native, plugin-free playback of encrypted media content like Netflix.

      • Firefox 49 To Offer Linux Widevine Support, Firefox Also Working On WebP Support

        There are two exciting bits of Mozilla Firefox news to pass along today: Winevine support on Linux out-of-the-box to handle Netflix and friends. Separately, WebP image support is being worked on.

        Trailing the Windows and OS X support, Winevine is being advertised as supported out-of-the-box now on Firefox for Linux. This change will happen for the upcoming Firefox 49 release.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • This Theme Pack Makes GIMP Look and Behave like Photoshop

      We’re all aware The GIMP is the best free alternative to Photoshop — but is there a way to make it look like Photoshop, too? This is open-source software we’re talking about, of course there is a way! Why Use a GIMP Photoshop Theme?

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing/Legal

    • VMware survives GPL breach case, but plaintiff promises appeal

      Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig’s bid to have VMware’s knuckles rapped for breaching the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) has failed, for now, after the Landgericht Hamburg found in Virtzilla’s favour.

      The Software Freedom Conservancy backed Hellwig when he alleged that some of his contributions to the Linux kernel have found their way into VMware’s very proprietary flagship ESXi product, in a component called “vmklinux”. Hellwig and the Conservancy believe that as ESXi includes code licensed under the GPLv2, ESXi should itself be released as open source code under the same licence.

    • Linux developer loses case against VMware

      Hellwig claimed the outfit had violated version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence and says he will appeal against the verdict.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Open data on open data portals

        The Open Data Inception project presents a comprehensive list of more than 2600 open data portals all over the world. The information is geotagged so it can be searched by topic as well as country.

        The list has been compiled by the Open Data Soft company as a showcase. They wanted to bring together as many open data resources as they could, and present these on a map per country for easy browsing.

        The creators aim to maintain the list and ask visitors to contribute links to portals and datasets that are currently not yet in the list. The dataset itself has also been made available as open data.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Chemists to get their own service for preprint sharing

        Physics researchers have a long history of sharing work they’re preparing for publication in order to solicit suggestions and comments from their peers. Like so many things, this behavior migrated to the Internet: Cornell University’s arXiv server hosts over 1.1 million documents, many of which later appeared in formal peer-reviewed literature.

        The physics and astronomy communities see arXiv as beneficial, and biologists put together their own database called The BioRxiv. Now it appears that chemists are going to get their own equivalent. The American Chemical Society is asking for input from the research and publishing communities about what they’d like to see in a ChemRxiv.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Amazon Announces Application Load Balancer for the Cloud

        Load balancers have been part of the networking landscape for decades, more often than not in recent years being lumped together under the category of Application Delivery Controllers (ADC). Various load balancing services have been available in the cloud, but this week Amazon announced a significant new entrant – the Application Load Balancer for Elastic Load Balancing.

      • Carnegie Mellon U aims to unlock industrial 3D printing potential with new consortium that includes GE, Alcoa and United States Steel

        You don’t need to be an expert to see that 3D printing is slowly finding its way into the hands of designers throughout the world. From prototype airplane parts to hip replacements and implantable organs; 3D printing is appearing everywhere. But for the 3D printing revolution to really pick up steam, a major push or technological breakthrough is needed to make this a truly accessible and affordable large-scale manufacturing option. In an attempt to realize that breakthrough, Carnegie Mellon University has announced a new consortium that brings together major companies, nonprofit institutes and the US government. Together, they will be working to fully unlock the potential of industrial 3D printing.

Leftovers

  • Kenny Baker, ‘Star Wars’ Actor Behind R2-D2, Dead at 81

    Kenny Baker, the actor who portrayed the robot R2-D2 in six Star Wars films, died Saturday after a long illness. He was 81.

  • Orkut, once India’s social media darling, is back

    In 2004, a Turkish engineer at Google, Orkut Buyukkokten, started the social network Orkut.com. According to a Forbes report, it gathered 27 million users by 2009. Most of them were from India and Brazil. With time, its sheen wore off as Facebook and Twitter got ahead in the race. When Google finally shut it down in September 2014, the internet saw nostalgic tributes. For many, Orkut was their introduction to social networking. Now, 41-year-old Buyukkokten is back in the game. His new social network, Hello, is already off the ground and active in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Ireland, among other countries. The location-based social network is due for launch in India by September. Buyukkokten spoke to TOI over a video call from San Francisco and discussed his time spent at Google, building Orkut, and the way we are online.

  • Kenyan Start-Ups Make The Ride Tough For Uber

    After making a dramatic entry into the African market late last year that was marked by as much drama as elsewhere in the world, global taxi hailing service Uber is facing tough times in the Kenyan market, thanks to a number of innovative tech start-ups that are giving the company a run for its money.

    Local start-ups in the East African country have come up with innovative apps similar to that of Uber, but which have additional features suited to the local market situation and demands.

    While Uber in Kenya has a provision for cash payments in a country where electronic payments remain a preserve of the elite, local firms have come up with a payment feature where fares can be paid by use of the popular and ever-growing mobile money service M-Pesa, a Kenyan creation that has caught the attention of the entire world of money transfers.

  • Population projections reveal shocking future trends

    Finland is home to fewer children now than at anytime in the last century. In a decade the number of pensioners will exceed the number of working-aged adults. The latest projections from Statistics Finland paint a sparse and elderly future.

  • Science

    • Switzerland Stars, China In Top 25, Innovation Rating Finds

      A global innovation rating has found Switzerland to be the most innovative nation in the world for the sixth consecutive year even if some other countries are on its heels. The lead group of countries continued to be mainly composed of most economically advanced nations, while innovation is lagging in many developing countries, but China and India made notable leaps up the list this year. The rankings stirred a broader discussion today of the shifting global economy and the role of innovation, including a call for a new approach to global innovation governance.

    • Is 5G technology dangerous? Early data shows a slight increase of tumors in male rats exposed to cellphone radiation

      As wireless companies prepare to launch the next generation of service, there are new questions about the possible health risks from radiation emitted by cellphones and the transmitters that carry the signals.

      Concerns about the potential harmful effects of radiofrequency radiation have dogged mobile technology since the first brick-sized cellphones hit the market in the 1980s.

      Industry and federal officials have largely dismissed those fears, saying the radiation exposure is minimal and that the devices are safe. Incidences of and deaths from brain cancer have shown little change in recent years despite the explosion in cellphone usage, they note.

    • Vikings Possibly Spread Smooth-Riding Horses Around the World

      This week, equestrian athletes at the Rio Olympics are competing in an event called “dressage,” in which they guide their horses to perform complex combinations of different gaits, including the walk, trot and canter.

      One type of footwork (or hoofwork, if you will) you likely won’t see is an “amble,” a sometimes comical four-beat gait that’s faster than a walk, slower than a gallop and well-suited for smooth, long rides.

  • Hardware

    • Storage Solutions – All You Need To Know

      Being a computer user, at some point of time we all were introduced to the fear of losing our data. I know it sounds familiar because we all love our data. The data can be of many types but most importantly you would not like to know that your precious pictures have been deleted due to new operating system installation or hard drive has been damaged. In this article, I’ll discuss the importance of cloud storage and different popular cloud storage that provide more free space.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Social costs of Flint’s lead drinking water crisis equal $395 million

      The social costs stemming from dangerous levels of lead in the drinking water of Flint, Mich., such as the effect on children’s health, amount to $395 million, according to an analysis by a professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

    • Patient groups that backed new cancer drug received £60,000 from pharma firm

      THREE patient groups that successfully lobbied for a new leukaemia drug to be on the NHS received over £60,000 from the pharma firm behind the product.

      One of the charities relies on Big Pharma for 70 per cent of its funding and has a trustee with financial links to Janssen-Cilag, which manufactures the Ibrutinib drug.

      Professor David Miller, an academic who is also a transparency campaigner, said the practice of healthcare giants funding these groups “distorts” the decision-making process.

    • Grizzly Delisting and the Irony of Public Comments

      When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asks for public comments, they don’t mean you, and they don’t mean me. In fact, they don’t mean the public at all.

      Dan Ashe, the Director of the USFWS, highlighted the public’s ability to make public comments in his March 3rd announcement of the agency’s proposal to delist grizzlies from the endangered species list and he made much ado about the importance of the public’s input.

      Did he mean it? In a word, no.

    • Florida Keys Residents Resist Controversial GMO Mosquito Trial

      Residents of the Florida Keys are up in arms over a plan to release genetically-modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Key Haven neighborhood and are trying to get the word out about the trial, which they say would make them “lab rats” in their own community.

      The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the controversial study by U.K.-firm Oxitec earlier this month, amid renewed fears over mosquito transmission of the Zika virus.

      “We need to help educate the public about the very real, scientifically based problems with this genetically modified mosquito release,” Mara Daly, who has been helping organize a protest at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control Board meeting Tuesday afternoon, told the Miami Herald.

    • Protest planned at bug board over genetically modified mosquitoes

      A Keys woman says a protest Tuesday at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control Board will target the release of genetically modified mosquitoes.

      “We will be outside with signs protesting peacefully. I think this will be the opportunity for moms, teachers, nurses to have a voice. I just wanted to give people a little push to do it,” said Mara Daly, who works at a Key Largo salon. “It’s to let them know there are concerns from people they have not heard from. Maybe the fat lady has already sung, I don’t know.

      The meeting starts at 3 p.m. at the board’s building, 503 107th St. in Marathon. Agenda items include an update on the Zika virus and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Aug. 5 approval to allow a test release of GM Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the Lower Keys neighborhood of Key Haven. Aedes aegypti spread Zika, which can cause birth defects in the children of pregnant women, and whose symptoms include fever and pain in the joints, bones and muscles.

    • Holding Monsanto to Account: the People’s Tribunal in The Hague

      As one of the world’s leading seed and chemical companies, Monsanto’s activities affect us all.

      Its best-selling weedkiller is made from a chemical called glyphosate that the World Health Organisation has found to probably cause cancer. Yet its use is now so widespread that traces are found in one out of every three loaves of bread in the UK.

      That’s why earlier this year, in the lead up a EU decision about whether to relicense glyphosate, we mounted public pressure on decision makers through our Monsanto honest marketing campaign.

  • Security

    • Hacker demonstrates how voting machines can be compromised [Ed: Microsoft inside]

      Concerns are growing over the possibility of a rigged presidential election. Experts believe a cyberattack this year could be a reality, especially following last month’s hack of Democratic National Committee emails.

      The ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee sent a letter Monday to the Department of Homeland Security, saying in part: “Election security is critical, and a cyberattack by foreign actors on our elections systems could compromise the integrity of our voting process.”

      Roughly 70 percent of states in the U.S. use some form of electronic voting. Hackers told CBS News that problems with electronic voting machines have been around for years. The machines and the software are old and antiquated. But now with millions heading to the polls in three months, security experts are sounding the alarm, reports CBS News correspondent Mireya Villarreal.

    • Another Expert Weighs in on Election Hacking

      Today the old Gray Lady, the New York Times, no less, weighed in on election hacking in an Op/Ed piece titled The Election Won’t be Rigged. But it Could be Hacked. Of course, anyone who’s read my second cybersecurity thriller, The Lafayette Campaign, a Tale of Election and Deceptions, already knew that.

      The particular focus of the NYT article is that since voting can be hacked, it’s vital to have a way to audit elections after they occur to see whether that has been the case, and to reveal the true electoral result.

    • Linux.Lady Trojan Turns Redis Servers to Mining Rigs
    • New release: usbguard-0.5.11
    • New release: usbguard-0.5.12
    • New FFS Rowhammer Attack Hijacks Linux VMs

      Researchers from the Vrije University in the Netherlands have revealed a new version of the infamous Rowhammer attack that is effective at compromising Linux VMs, often used for cloud hosting services.

    • Minica – lightweight TLS for everyone!

      A while back, I found myself in need of some TLS certificates set up and issued for a testing environment.

      I remembered there was some code for issuing TLS certs in Docker, so I yanked some of that code and made a sensable CLI API over it.

    • Guy Tricks Windows Tech Support Scammers Into Installing Ransomware Code

      A man named Ivan Kwiatkowski managed to install Locky ransomware on the machine of a person who was pretending to be a tech support executive of a reputed company. Ivan wrote his experiences in a blog post tells that how the tech support scammer fell into the pit he dug for innocent people.

    • Fixing Things

      Recent reports that TCP connections can be hijacked have kicked an anthill at Kernel.org. Linus and others have a patch.

    • Linux TCP flaw fix likely in next stable release

      A patch to fix a weakness in the transmission control protocol used in the Linux kernel since 2012, which could lead to remote hijacking of Internet connections, is available in the public stable queue tree and is likely to be included in the next stable release.

    • Linux Has a TCP Flaw, Researchers Find
    • Can’t Trust This!
    • Monday’s security advisories
    • Running a Hackathon for Security Hackers

      H1-702 was one piece in a picture to ensure HackerOne is the very best platform and community for hackers to hack, learn, and grow.

    • It’s the Year of Application Layer Security in Public Clouds

      The cloud continues to be a significant force in enterprise computing and technology adoption. Enterprises that have adopted cloud have seen slashes capital expenses, increased agility, centralized information management, and scaled their businesses quickly.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Isis ranks dwindle to 15,000 amid ‘retreat on all fronts’, claims Pentagon

      A top US commander has claimed the military campaigns in Iraq and Syria have taken 45,000 enemy combatants off the battlefield and reduced the total number of Islamic State fighters to as few as 15,000.

      Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland said both the quality and number of Isis fighters was declining, while warning that it was difficult to determine accurate numbers. Earlier estimates put the number of Islamic State fighters at between 19,000 and 25,000 but US officials say the range is now roughly 15,000 to 20,000.

    • ISIL fighter number falls to 15,000 as Manbij capture Cuts off Route to Europe

      Without Manbij, Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) will find it more difficult to import weapons and foreign fighters to al-Raqqa. Other routes still open to it, such as Jarabulus, are also under pressure and could be the next target of the Syrian Democratic Forces. It is much further to import foreign munitions.

      Daesh as a territorial power is coming to a slow end; Daesh as a source of terrorism still has a good long run.

    • No, Obama did not found ISIL, Mr. Trump: That was the GOP

      There had been no al-Qaeda in Iraq before Bush invaded. Operatives flocked there to fight the US troops, and gathered under the rubric first of al-Tawhid of the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But al-Zarqawi initially had bad relations with Usama Bin Laden. In order to fight the US presence, he made up and joined al-Qaeda and formed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. AFter he was killed by the US in 2006, the new, Iraqi leadership declared itself the Islamic State of Iraq and deepened their al-Qaeda affiliation.

    • Jeremy Corbyn interview: ‘There are not 300,000 sectarian extremists at large’

      I have just heard the result. Very disappointed. People joined the Labour party in order to take part in the party and were specifically told that they were able to vote in the leadership election and that was decided by the high court that they could. The appeal court has said they can’t and I would imagine that those who brought the case will be considering whether or not to take it to the supreme court.

    • Trashing Nicaragua’s Success

      The New York Times is the best old-style, broad-sheet newspaper in America; it still covers the world with resourceful and enterprising reporters and commentators. But, then, there’s the other New York Times, the imperial rag that prints editorials like the one on August 5 titled “ ‘Dynasty,’ the Nicaraguan Version.” It’s not that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is a saint or even a model democrat; it’s that the editorial department and the writer who penned this sloppy embarrassment are still playing a version of the Reagan Cold War game of the 1980s. Those days are over; one hopes for something a bit more worldly.

    • Seymour Hersh on White House Lies About bin Laden’s Death, Pakistan and the Syrian Civil War

      In The Killing of Osama bin Laden, Seymour Hersh offers a compelling alternative version to the details that led to bin Laden’s death. He also investigates unproven assertions justifying the US’s thus far disastrous involvement in the Syrian civil war. Truthout recently interviewed Hersh about the book.

    • Hillary Clinton Donors and Jeb Bush Donors Are the Same People

      It seems that Hillary Clinton donors and Jeb Bush donors don’t care much which of the two of them wins, as long as one of them does.

      Mark Horne has written about how easily George Bush and Bill Clinton get along. We also find that Hillary Clinton is perfectly acceptable to the financial elite as a speaker when George Bush can’t make a scheduled (and highly paid) speaking event.

      If you needed confirmation for what you might guess on the basis of such stories, here it is from the Daily Beast: “Hillary Clinton’s Mega-Donors Are Also Funding Jeb Bush.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Mega-Donors Are Also Funding Jeb Bush

      For some wealthy donors, it doesn’t matter who takes the White House in 2016—as long as the president’s name is Clinton or Bush.

      More than 60 ultra-rich Americans have contributed to both Jeb Bush’s and Hillary Clinton’s federal campaigns, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by Vocativ and The Daily Beast. Seventeen of those contributors have gone one step further and opened their wallets to fund both Bush’s and Clinton’s 2016 ambitions.

      After all, why support just Hillary Clinton or just Jeb Bush when you can hedge your bets and donate to both? This seems to be the thinking of a group of powerful men and women—racetrack owners, bankers, media barons, chicken magnates, hedge funders (and their spouses). Some of them have net worths that can eclipse the GDPs of small countries.

    • The bombing comes just as the U.S. announced a $1 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia

      A Saudi-led coalition airstrike has hit a hospital in Yemen on Monday, killing at least seven and injuring at least 13, Reuters reports.

      A witness said the attack on the clinic, located in the Abs district in Yemen’s northern Hajja province and supported by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), could not be immediately evacuated because rescue crews feared more bombings were coming as warplanes continued flying over the area.

    • 10 Children Killed in US-Backed Coalition Strike: Yemeni Officials

      Ten children were killed and 28 other children were wounded on Saturday when an airstrike struck a school in northern Yemen, medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders said.

      All the casualties were 8-15 years old, the group, which uses its French acronym, MSF, posted on Twitter.

      Yemeni officials say that the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition was responsible for the attack, the Associated Press reports.

      As Reuters explains, “Saudi Arabia and its allies have launched thousands of air strikes against the Houthis since they drove the internationally recognized government into exile in March 2015.”

    • Airstrike on Yemen school kills 10 children, wounds dozens

      Yemeni officials and aid workers say an airstrike on a school purportedly carried out by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen has killed at least 10 children and wounded dozens more.

      The Islamic school says in a statement that the Saturday strike in Saada, deep in the Houthis’ northern heartland, was part of raids that have resumed against the rebels after peace talks collapsed earlier this month.

    • As ISIS Brewed in Iraq, Clinton’s State Department Cut Eyes and Ears on the Ground

      An investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post finds that Secretary of State Clinton initially pressed to keep civilian programs and listening posts after the U.S. troop pullout in 2011, but then her State Department scrapped or slashed them at the behest of the White House and Congress.

    • People in Syria’s Manbij Rejoice by Shaving, throwing off Veil as ISIL fighters Flee

      People in Syria’s norther town of Manbij, now entirely liberated from the rule of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), rejoiced on Saturday. Men shaved their beards (which had been imposed on them by the fundamentalists) and women threw off their burqas (full-face veils) and burned them. The burqa is a Gulf custom, not a Muslim one, and many Muslim countries frown on it, including Egypt. In 2010 it was banned in Syrian schools.

      People were also happy in the city that Daesh fighters, who had taken 2,000 hostages, released some of them as they escaped for Jarabulus, the last major border town they hold.

    • Liberals rally to sink Obama trade deal

      Liberals are amping up their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on and off of Capitol Hill, amid escalating concerns that the package will get an 11th hour vote after the November elections.

      Republican leaders in both chambers have said it’s unlikely the mammoth Pacific Rim trade deal will reach the floor this year. But the accord remains a top priority for President Obama in the twilight of his final term, and the critics — leery of pro-TPP members in both parties — aren’t taking anything for granted.

      Liberal TPP opponents this month have launched a new wave of petition campaigns and fundraising drives; a free concert series is touring the country through the summer; and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are vowing to do “everything we possibly can,” in the words of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), to block a vote this year.

      “Make no mistake about it, Speaker [Paul] Ryan and the administration are working hand-in-hand to plot a path for the TPP in a lame duck session of Congress,” DeLauro, who’s among the loudest TPP critics, said this week in an email. “They will do everything possible to try to pass the TPP after the election.”

    • How Blocking the Saudi Arms Deal Could Help Stop Lame Duck TPP

      In this strategy memo on why progressive Democrats and Empire-skeptic Republicans should do what they reasonably can to assist efforts to block the recently proposed Saudi arms deal, I will cover four points.

    • Amid More Civilian Deaths, Lawmakers Push to End Saudi Arms Flow

      U.S. senators are attempting to block the State Department’s deal to sell Saudi Arabia nearly $1.5 billion in weapons, just days after the move was announced by the Obama administration.

      Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told Foreign Policy that he would “work with a bipartisan coalition to explore forcing a vote on blocking this sale. Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally with a poor human rights record. We should not rush to sell them advanced arms and promote an arms race in the Middle East.”

      Congressional opposition to the arms sale came as the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed military coalition broke an unsteady five-month ceasefire in Yemen last week and resumed bombing in the capital city of Sana’a—prompting immediate reports of civilian deaths. On Saturday, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported that an airstrike on a school in northern Yemen killed 10 children and wounded 28 others.

      Paul and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), both of whom sit on the Foreign Relations Committee, are outspoken critics of the coalition.

      “If you talk to Yemeni Americans, they will tell you in Yemen this isn’t a Saudi bombing campaign, it’s a U.S. bombing campaign,” Murphy said in June. “Every single civilian death inside Yemen is attributable to the United States.”

    • New Hacks Threaten Chaos for Soros and Democratic Party

      Online hacktivists have thrown the Democratic elite into complete chaos after a pair of websites, Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks, posted a series of leaks this weekend exposing the personal data of federal lawmakers and the internal records of party donor and influencer George Soros.

      Purporting to “shed light on one of the most influential networks operating worldwide,” DCLeaks on Saturday published more than 2,500 documents, which included “workplans, strategies, priorities, and other activities” related to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

      The Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist a major donor to the Democratic Party and, predictably, conservative and other ideological websites are having a field day with the data drop.

      Less than 24 hours before that leak, the infamous Democratic National Committee (DNC) hacker Guccifer 2.0 late Friday published a spreadsheet containing the personal cellphone numbers and email addresses of nearly 200 current and former members of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and their staff.

    • DNC creates cybersecurity advisory board following hack

      The Democratic National Committee is creating a four-member cybersecurity advisory board, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO on Thursday.

      The advisory board is a response to the recent DNC hack and subsequent email leak that led to the resignation of former Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other top DNC officials.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Watch Your Coastal Property. Here Comes the Sea

      Climate scientists have long warned of a rise in sea level as global warming melts the world’s glaciers. But while the level has been increasing at about 3.5 millimeters a year, the rate of increase itself has fluctuated, leading some people to doubt the warnings and the broader impact of rising carbon emissions.

      Fresh evidence, in a study published today in Scientific Reports, suggests the scientists were right, and that satellite measurements have been distorted by the eruption in 1991 of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.

      The volcanic eruption, the second-largest of the 20th century, is estimated to have spewed almost 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, lowering global temperatures by about 1 degree Fahrenheit from 1991 to 1993, as gas and dust particles blocked solar radiation, and causing sea levels to drop. The researchers, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Old Dominion University, used models to calculate the impact of the Pinatubo eruption and found that sea levels fell about six millimeters.

    • McKibben: Time to Declare a War (Literally) on Climate Change

      We’re under attack, says author and climate campaigner Bill McKibben, and the only way to defeat the enemy is to declare a global war against the destructive practices that threaten the world’s imperiled ecosystems and human civilization as we know it.

      In a new piece published Monday in The New Republic, the co-founder of the global climate action group 350.org says there is simply no more time to waste and that a full-scale mobilization, like the one orchestrated by the U.S. government during World War II, is now necessary if the adversary—human-caused global warming and the climate change that results—is to be vanquished.

      “World War III is well and truly underway,” writes McKibben. “And we are losing.”

    • We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.

      In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”

    • ExxonMobil’s Latest Campaign to Stonewall Federal Climate Action

      Recent press accounts report that ExxonMobil is now actively promoting a carbon tax. If true, that’s big news. It would mean that, after nearly 20 years of blocking action on climate change, the world’s biggest energy company has finally come to its senses.

      But wait a minute. If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So one might well ask: Is this anything more than a PR ploy?

    • Hunger Strike Pushes South Korea to Defer Coal Plant Plan

      Finally, on the afternoon of July 26, the Ministry announced the proposed plant would be delayed indefinitely.

    • If It Hadn’t Been for Those Meddling Climate Kids

      In 1962, Diane Arbus took a photo of a lanky young boy in Central Park holding a hand grenade. He stands before the camera, a deranged look on his face, his free hand contorted into a menacing claw. It’s an iconic image that captured the generational tension around the Vietnam War and, according to songwriter of that time Graham Nash, one that questions the lessons we teach our children.

    • “Don’t Rely on Your Past Experiences:” La. Battles “Unprecedented” Flooding

      Louisiana continues to battle “unprecedented” flooding on Sunday, as experts warn that the historic rainfall that sparked the rising waters is the kind of extreme weather event to expect on a warming planet.

      Over 7,000 people have been rescued, at least three people have died, and a state of emergency has been declared.

      “This is unprecedented,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said Saturday. “Please don’t rely on your experiences in the past.”

    • Louisiana Flooding: At Least Three Dead, 7,000+ Rescued

      More than 7,000 people have been rescued from their homes after massive floods swept across Louisiana, and officials warned Sunday that even though the rain had subsided, dangers loomed.

      “It’s not over,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said Sunday. “The water’s going to rise in many areas. It’s no time to let the guard down.”

    • Is Undead Smallpox Reemerging From Siberian Graves?

      As if the news that resurrected anthrax from thawed-out reindeer wasn’t bad enough, increasingly warming temperatures are prompting renewed fears that permafrost could thaw enough to unleash smallbox from remote Russian cemeteries.

      As The Siberian Times reports, this year the permafrost melt has been three times more extreme than usual above the Arctic Circle, causing erosion near graveyards of a town where smallpox wiped out 40 percent of the population decades ago.

      Yet, some scientists argue that it’s not the graves we should be worried about.

      Scientists from Russia’s Virology and Biotechnology Center (or Vector) in Novosibirsk are investigating the bodies, some of which show bone sores associated with smallpox. Fortunately, only fragments of the strain’s DNA were found, rather than any evidence of surviving smallpox. However, the center plans to conduct more research on “deeper burials” in the future, just to make sure. So far, luckily, that’s been the case for years, as another expedition in 2012 found only “fragments” as well.

    • Anthrax Strikes Wildlife in Rapidly Thawing Arctic

      A full-scale medical emergency has broken out in the Yamal region of Siberia, with troops from the Russian army’s special biological warfare unit spearheading efforts to contain an outbreak of anthrax.

      A 12-year-old boy died after consuming infected venison, other people are believed to have died or become infected with the disease, and thousands of reindeer suspected of carrying it have been killed and incinerated.

      One of the main reasons cited for the outbreak of anthrax – one of the world’s most deadly pathogens – is an unprecedented heatwave experienced in the north Siberia region in recent weeks. Temperatures have been between 25°C and 35°C, which is way above the average for the time of year.

      Anthrax, an infection caused by the bacterium Bacillum anthracis, can occur naturally in certain soils, with infection usually spread by grazing animals. It has also been developed for use in chemical warfare.

    • Are Climate-Related ‘Hot Blobs’ Spreading and Killing Marine Life Worldwide?

      A massive swath of hot water off the West Coast of North America devastated marine life for years—killing sea lions, whales, starfish, birds, and more—and new research finds that such marine heatwaves are growing more and more frequent.

    • ‘The blob’: how marine heatwaves are causing unprecedented climate chaos

      First seabirds started falling out of the sky, washing up on beaches from California to Canada.

      Then emaciated and dehydrated sea lion pups began showing up, stranded and on the brink of death.

      A surge in dead whales was reported in the same region, and that was followed by the largest toxic algal bloom in history seen along the Californian coast. Mixed among all that there were population booms of several marine species that normally aren’t seen surging in the same year.

      Plague, famine, pestilence and death was sweeping the northern Pacific Ocean between 2014 and 2015.

    • The Blob That Cooked the Pacific

      The first fin whale appeared in Marmot Bay, where the sea curls a crooked finger around Alaska’s Kodiak Island. A biologist spied the calf drifting on its side, as if at play. Seawater flushed in and out of its open jaws. Spray washed over its slack pink tongue. Death, even the gruesome kind, is usually too familiar to spark alarm in the wild north. But late the next morning, the start of Memorial Day weekend, passengers aboard the ferry Kennicott spotted another whale bobbing nearby. Her blubber was thick. She looked healthy. But she was dead too.

      Kathi Lefebvre is talking about the whales as we crunch across a windy, rocky beach, 200 miles north of Kodiak. In a typical year eight whales are found dead in the western Gulf of Alaska. But in 2015 at least a dozen popped up in June alone, their bodies so buoyant that gulls used them as fishing platforms. All summer the Pacific Ocean heaved rotting remains into rocky coves along the more than 1,000-mile stretch from Anchorage to the Aleutian Islands. Whole families of brown bears feasted on their carcasses.

      Lefebvre, a research scientist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Washington, had examined eye fluid from one of the carcasses in a failed attempt to winnow the cause of death. Now the two of us are on Kachemak Bay in Homer, Alaska, inching toward a wheezing, dying sea otter sprawled out on the shore. Otter deaths are skyrocketing on the shoreline beneath the snowcapped Kenai Mountains, so Lefebvre is here to see whether the fates of these otters and whales are somehow intertwined.

    • The Earth Just Experienced the Hottest Month on the Books. Period.

      On Monday it was confirmed that the Earth has broken an ominous climate milestone amid a wave of troubling records: July 2016 was the hottest recorded month—ever.

      According to new NASA data, the global mean surface temperatures last month were 0.84° Celsius (1.51° Fahrenheit) above average and was the warmest July in their data set, which dates back to 1880.

      This marks the 10th straight month to set a new monthly warming record, based on NASA’s analysis. “Every month so far this year has been record hot,” reported Climate Central’s Andrea Thompson. “In NASA’s data, that streak goes back to October 2015, which was the first month in its data set that was more than 1C hotter than average.”

      The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) releases its monthly temperature report on Wednesday and it is likely theirs will reflect a 15-month streak of record-shattering heat. (Some previous reporting on monthly records here, here, here, and here.)

      What’s more, because July is typically the hottest month of the year, it stands that July 2016 was “the warmest month of any in a data record that can be extended back to the nineteenth century,” according to the U.K.-based Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS), which last week published similar temperature results.

    • Spotting the Havoc Wreaked by Climate Change

      I returned home angry. How can we, as Americans, be even contemplating the idea of installing at such a moment of crisis in mankind’s history, either of two candidates who don’t really give a damn that we are destroying the earth’s ability to sustain human life, or for that matter, most of the astonishing ecosystem that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years of evolution? Trump denies that climate change is real, while Clinton, vastly funded by a banking industry that finances the industries that are destroying the earth, by energy companies, power companies and automotive companies that are doing the actual destruction, has no intention of taking dramatic action to halt the pumping of more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

    • Evidence Suggests the Oil Industry Wrote Big Tobacco’s Playbook, Then Used It to Lie About Climate Change

      A recent analysis of more than 100 industry documents conducted by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a Washington, DC-based advocacy group, has revealed that the oil industry knew of the risks its business posed to the global climate decades before originally suspected.

      It has also long been assumed that, in its efforts to deceive investors and the public about the negative impact its business has on the environment, Big Oil borrowed Big Tobacco’s so-called tactical “playbook.” But these documents indicate that infamous playbook appears to have actually originated within the oil industry itself.

      If that is true, it would be highly significant — and damning for Big Oil — because the tactics used by the tobacco industry to downplay the connection between smoking and cancer were eventually deemed to have violated federal racketeering laws by a federal court. The ruling dashed efforts by Big Tobacco to find legal cover under the First Amendment, which just happens to be the same strategy that ExxonMobil and its GOP allies are currently using to defend the company against allegations of fraud. If the playbook was in fact created by the oil and gas industry and then later used by ExxonMobil, it ruins the company’s argument of plausible deniability, making it highly likely that the company violated federal law.

    • How Bad Is Your Air-Conditioner for the Planet?

      As of 2009, nearly 90 percent of American homes have air-conditioners, which account for about 6 percent of all the country’s residential energy use…

  • Finance

    • Housing official in Silicon Valley resigns because she can’t afford to live there

      Once Kate Downing and her husband Steve did the math, it was obvious that if they wanted to raise a family, staying in Palo Alto, California, was not an option. Although Steve, 33, works as a software engineer at a nearby Silicon Valley technology company and Kate, 31, is a product attorney at another tech firm, the cost of owning a home near their jobs has simply become too steep for them.

      If they wanted to purchase their current house – which they rent with another couple for $6,200 a month total – it would cost $2.7m plus monthly mortgage and tax payments of $12,177, adding up to more than $146,000 a year.

      Instead, the couple will soon relocate 45 miles south to Santa Cruz, a city by the beach where they can afford to purchase a home and eventually raise children.

    • Raise America inspires a new generation of organizing for low-wage workers

      While the Fight for $15 raises headlines and wages across the United States, June 15 saw a national day of action in cities around the country for the annual anniversary of the Justice for Janitors campaign. For SEIU Local 32BJ, which handles 155,000 property service workers along the East Coast from New Hampshire to Florida, this was a chance to reclaim the history of a campaign that did the unthinkable in the early 1990s.

    • The ‘Big Lie’ Behind the Rosy Unemployment Rate

      When Donald Trump on Monday questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s glowing employment reports, it may have seemed like another unsubstantiated outburst from a famously loose-with-the-facts candidate. But in this case, he was joining a bipartisan chorus of businesspeople, economists and lawmakers who say the monthly employment report is an artificial portrait deliberately airbrushed by statisticians to make the jobs picture look better than it really is.

    • How labor’s decline opened door to billionaire Trump as ‘savior’ of American workers

      Out of the economic maelstrom of the last decade, Donald Trump has emerged as the improbable, and self-proclaimed, champion of American workers.

      And that’s despite the fact that Trump has failed to articulate substantive policy positions regarding labor issues, other than generic railing against foreign competition and bad trade deals. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, for one, has attacked him by tweeting a number of examples in which Trump’s past behavior shows that he is no friend to working people.

    • Are You Sure You Want to Eat That?

      Whether we shop for sustenance at a chain grocery store, the corner bodega or even at a farmers market, we all share a basic desire—to not get sick from the food that is supposed to nourish us. In fact, much of the time, most of us don’t think twice about the safety of our food.

      But not all nations have the same food safety standards as ours, and if the controversial trade deal known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) goes into effect, some of the food in our stores may not be safe to eat.

      The TPP puts the interests of Big Food ahead of yours and mine. That’s because it wasn’t negotiated in the public’s interest. The TPP is instead intended to allow corporations to expand into new markets and make more money. If passed, it will overwhelm already overtaxed border inspectors, flood our food system with potentially unsafe imports and even empower other countries to challenge our common sense food safety protections as illegal trade barriers.

    • Social Security and the 1 Percent

      Between 1982 and 2014, the percentage of wage income escaping taxation went from 10.0 percent to 17.3 percent, an increase of 7.3 percentage points; the top 1 percent of wage earners saw their share of total wage income go up 5.1 percentage points during the same time period. This means that the greater share of wages going to the top 1 percent of wage earners accounts for over 70 percent of the increase in untaxed earnings.

    • The Brexit Hangover Just Got Worse

      Those who supported a departure from Europe are only now coming to terms with the crippling economic realities—including the fact that many didn’t quite understand the rules and the whims of their neighbors.

    • Economists have worked out how much Brexit could cost us

      Or at least that is the theory put forward by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, which has calculated the cost of leaving the single market.

      Not being a member (which is a possible scenario) could see the UK lose out on an additional 4% of GDP by 2030, the IFS has said.

      That 4% is equivalent of two years worth of growth, and equates to around £70 billion in today’s money – or £2,900 for each household.

      It said that loss would outweigh the benefit of no longer paying in a net £9bn a year into the European Union budget.

      The gloomy forecast comes after senior European politicians made it clear Britain can’t keep its membership of the single market unless its makes sizeable contribution to the EU budget and allows the free movement of EU workers.

    • Sports Direct will pay back thousands of workers after giving them less than minimum wage

      Sports Direct has agreed to pay money back to thousands of workers who lost out after being effectively paid less than minimum wage by the company while employed in its warehouses, according to a report from The Guardian.

      The payments centre around an investigation into Sports Direct’s working and employment practices by the House of Commons Business Select Committee, which found that conditions in some of the company’s warehouse facilities were akin to those in a “Victorian workhouse.”

    • Post-war fantasies and Brexit: the delusional view of Britain’s place in the world

      Claims about Britain’s past are made regularly in the referedum debate. But claims about Britain’s historical place in the world – courageously standing alone, being outnumbered and outgunned but in the end outperforming everyone – are not based on fact, writes Mike Finn. These myths could nonetheless have very real consequences: this is the self-image that the Brexit campaign portray and which many think they will revive by voting to Leave.

    • John Oliver: We Should Be Worried About the Subprime Car Loan Bubble That’s About to Burst (Video)

      In a scary and important episode, the “Last Week Tonight” host sounds a warning about a boom in subprime automobile loans that promises to make “your eye twitch with flashbacks to the mortgage crisis.”

    • Three More Reasons Why We Need to Stop CETA

      Last week I joined activists and campaigners from across the globe who came to Canada for the World Social Forum. A major topic of discussion was the problems with TTIP-style free trade agreements and how we can stop them.

      For us in Europe the big one is now CETA – the Canada-EU trade deal (formally the Comprehensive Economic & Trade Agreement) which could become law as early as next year. Unless we stop it.

      Our allies from across Europe and Canada gave some strong reasons for us to get more active on CETA.

    • Congress: AWOL and Out of Control

      Taken as whole, with exceptions, the American people have the strangest attitude toward the Congress. Our national legislature spends nearly a quarter of our income and affects us one way or another every day of the year. Yet too many people withdraw in disgust instead of making Congress accountable to them. Warren Buffett once said, “It’s time for 535 of America’s citizens to remember what they owe to the 318 million who employ them.”

      People have a low regard for Capitol Hill. Polls show less than 20% of people approve of what Congress does and does not do. In April a poll registered a 14% approval rate. People know that Congress takes a lot of days off – all with pay. Senators and Representatives work over 100 fewer days than average Americans do. Specifically, members were in session 157 days in 2015 and 135 in 2014. This year the House is scheduled to be in session for only 111 days, with the August recess alone stretching nearly six weeks.

    • Unruly Britannia: Why we can no longer call our kingdom ‘united’

      This is what shrunken dreams look like. This Britain post-Brexit contained not one reference to Scottish independence and the prospect of any future referendum. Worse, there wasn’t one mention of the threat to the Northern Irish peace process, which has been dealt a severe blow by the hauling out of Europe of the UK. Many people, particularly in London elites, will say that these divisions have always existed as they currently do. But that’s not true; they are in fact getting worse. Two conceptions of ‘Britain’ characterise and feed into this spiral of deepening divisions. One is the vision held by ‘winner Britain’: the view of those who have made it, think they can make it, or hang on the coat tails of this class. They tell themselves they are a cosmopolitan, outward focused group – but only with time for similar minded people. This was one of the defining features of the Brexit debate – that the Remain side and the large parts of the London media couldn’t understand anything beyond this class. Any opposition, from places such as ‘the North’ was about handing on to the past, or worse, about being losers. The second factor is the emergence of an English nationalism – which in large part presents itself in opposition to the above. It claims that in recent decades we have ‘lost’ control of our country – to immigrants, the PC brigade, and Europe – and now is the time to ‘take it back’.

    • The “$500 million club” of colleges tends to be stingy with aid to low-income students

      Call them the top four percent: elite private colleges and universities that together sit atop three-quarters of the higher education terrain’s endowment wealth.

    • Trade, Truth and Trump

      Donald Trump is a hateful bigot, but that doesn’t mean that everything he says is wrong. It would be a huge step forward if his critics could acknowledge that the recent pattern of trade has been harmful to large segments of the population. Furthermore, this is due to the way trade policy was designed, not the uncontrollable forces of globalization.

      If respectable leaders in politics and the media continue to repeat glib clichés rather than taking the economic reality of trade policy seriously, it should not be surprising that the victims of trade will look to demagogues like Trump. It is unfortunate when we get a more honest discussion of a major policy issue from Donald Trump than the New York Times.

    • The medical debt crisis: The prognosis is still dire for Americans struggling to pay off massive health care bills

      Recent evidence suggests that the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce the burden of medical debt for American consumers. Yet, especially in states that have not expanded Medicaid, millions of Americans still lack insurance and many plans offer thin coverage. The result is that in 2014, 64 million people were struggling with medical debt, the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. In my latest Demos report, “Enough to Make You Sick: The Burden of Medical Debt,” I explore how medical debt affects household finances and why we need more aggressive policies to reduce medical debt.

      My report details the results of two surveys (in 2008 and 2012) Demos commissioned to explore the finances of lower to middle-income households carrying credit card debt. I find that households carrying medical debt on their credit card are more likely to take extreme measures to pay off their debts and forgo care. Medical debt has significant negative impacts on household finances, even when people are insured. A public option could help reduce the chances of people taking on medical debt, and that more rigorous consumer protection could mitigate the consequences.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • ¡Fuera Trump!: Our Writer Traveled to Mexico City, Where People Definitely Had Choice Words for ‘The Donald’

      Responses varied. While the organillero didn’t believe Trump would win the election, some predicted that Trump would take it all in November. Others hinted at a conspiracy between Trump and Mexico’s president. A few bluntly compared Trump to Hitler. And some likened his campaign to a stunt, instead of an honest attempt to win the White House. Lots of people described the man with the darkest of humor: His campaign is a joke, but not a funny one.

    • The Summer of the Shill

      Campaign 2016 won’t just have lasting implications for American politics. It’s obliterated what was left of our news media

    • The BBC must improve how it reports statistics

      How much does the UK contribute to the EU each week? How tired did you get of hearing that question, and of the inaccurate answer that it’s £350 million?

      Even if you didn’t watch the debates or read the op-eds, it was hard to miss the pictures of Boris Johnson and other high profile Vote Leave campaigners standing in front of a big red bus with the inaccurate £350 million statistic emblazoned across the side.

      Misleading claims supported by murky statistics were used on both sides of the EU referendum debate. But the £350 million claim became the iconic slogan of the Leave campaign, and helped to show why the BBC needs to be braver in challenging statistical assertions if it is to be a useful public service.

    • The Racial Wealth Gap Will Persist Until Neoliberalism and Its Peddlers Are Defeated

      For the leaders of the fight for racial equality throughout the twentieth century, anti-discrimination and anti-capitalism went hand in hand; the struggle for economic justice was always viewed as integral to and inseparable from the struggle for racial justice.

      “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community,” Martin Luther King Jr. said at an AFL-CIO convention in 1961, expressing the prevailing sentiment among the socialist leaders of the civil rights movement.

      Bayard Rustin, the key organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, emphasized the importance of organized labor in advancing the rights and material conditions of black Americans in a 1971 essay, in which he asserted both the centrality of unions and the need for a radical approach to inequality.

      He urged that “only a program that would effect some fundamental change in the distribution of America’s resources for those in greatest need of them” would be enough “to meet the present crisis.”

    • TV Networks Should Open Up the Presidential Debates

      If ten major TV networks got together and decided to nationally televise a presidential debate restricted to Republican nominee Donald Trump and right-leaning Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, while barring other candidates including Democrat Hillary Clinton, it would be recognized as an act of media bias or exclusion.

      But what if the televised debates this fall are restricted to just Trump and Clinton? That, too, needs to be recognized as an intentional act of media exclusion.

      In the coming weeks, we need to generate a debate about the debates – who controls them and which candidates are included. That’s the goal of a new petition launched by RootsAction.org, a group I co-founded.

      Beginning in 1988, major TV networks granted journalistic control over the debates to a private organization with no official status: the Commission on Presidential Debates. The CPD is often called “nonpartisan.” That’s absurdly inaccurate. “Bipartisan” is the right adjective, as it has always carried out the joint will of the Republican and Democratic parties. (See George Farah’s meticulously reported book, “No Debate.”)

    • The Pro-Nuclear War Party

      According to a Wall Street Journal report, the following people and entities would like the United States to begin a nuclear war: Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, the U.K., France, Japan, South Korea, and Germany. If any of those people or entities believe they can prove a case of libel, it might be a huge one. (Are you listening, Rupert?)

      According to Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper, the White House has been discussing the possibility of declaring that the United States no longer has a policy of engaging in the first use of nuclear bombs. The trouble is that those individuals and nations named above object. They insist, we are told, that the United States should have the policy of beginning a nuclear war.

      Have the people of the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, Germany, or the United States itself been polled on this? Has any legislature pretending to represent any of those populations voted on this? Of course not. But what we could do, perhaps, is amend the policy to read: “When the United States begins the nuclear war, it shall announce that it is doing so in the name of democracy.” That should be good.

      Has Mr. Kerry, Mr. Carter, or Mr. Moniz been evaluated by a psychiatrist? Was Mr. Kerry against this before he was for it? The important question, I believe, is whether they want to start the nuclear war with any hatred or bigotry in mind. If what they intend is a loving, tolerant, and multicultural nuclear war, then really what we ought to be worrying about is the unfathomable evil of Donald Trump who has said that he’d like to kill families — and particular types of families.

      Now, I am not claiming to have fathomed the evil of Mr. Trump, but it has been U.S. policy since before there was a United States to kill families. And it is my strong suspicion that a nuclear war and the nuclear winter and nuclear famine it would bring to the earth would harm at least some families of every existing type.

    • ‘Bipartisan Fraud’: Debate Rules Shut Out Third-Party Candidates

      As of Monday, neither Libertarian Gary Johnson nor the Green Party’s Jill Stein had enough support to get a spot onstage alongside Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, which open debate advocates say amounts to a fraud of bipartisanism.

      One such advocacy group, RootsAction, launched a petition on Monday calling for the executives at ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox Broadcasting, PBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Univision, and Telemundo to present debates including all four candidates, even if the commission—or Trump or Clinton—wants otherwise.

      “If Trump or Clinton balk, let them know you’re happy to leave their podium empty,” the petition states.

    • Third-party candidates on outside as debate criteria released

      The Commission on Presidential Debates has released the polls it will use to decide the participants of September’s first presidential debate as third-party candidates struggle to make the stage.
      Candidates will need to hit an average of 15 percent in polls conducted by ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, CNN/Opinion Research Corporation, Fox News, and NBC/Wall Street Journal. The 15 percent threshold had been announced months ago, but the commission released its polling selections on Monday after consultation with Frank Newport, the editor-in-chief of Gallup.

      Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump are virtually assured a slot each on the stage for the Sept. 26 debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. But it remains unlikely that a third-party candidate will join them, despite voters’ historic dislike of both Clinton and Trump.

      As of Monday, neither Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson nor Green Party nominee Jill Stein would qualify, and neither has come close to hitting 15 percent in any qualifying poll.

    • Political Word Games

      Understandably Mr. Trump took umbrage at the suggestion he had sacrificed nothing, and to prove his point, gave us all a new understanding of the word “sacrifice.” Mr. Trump said: “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of job. . . built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.” Thus, the new meaning for sacrifice is being very successful in whatever you undertake.

      Hillary Clinton has imparted new meaning to words that were commonly associated with things electrical. The words are “Short Circuit.” “Short circuit” first entered the lexicon in its new incarnation when Ms. Clinton was discussing her use of email while serving as Secretary of State. Although the use or misuse of her email is of no substantive importance, her attempts to consistently explain her email procedures, while serving as Secretary of State, has given the question a life of its own that far overshadows any substantive concerns over her practices.

    • Inside the administration’s $1 billion deal to detain Central American asylum seekers

      As Central Americans surged across the U.S. border two years ago, the Obama administration skipped the standard public bidding process and agreed to a deal that offered generous terms to Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison company, to build a massive detention facility for women and children seeking asylum.

      The four-year, $1 billion contract — details of which have not been previously disclosed — has been a boon for CCA, which, in an unusual arrangement, gets the money regardless of how many people are detained at the facility. Critics say the government’s policy has been expensive but ineffective. Arrivals of Central American families at the border have continued unabated while court rulings have forced the administration to step back from its original approach to the border surge.

      In hundreds of other detention contracts given out by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, federal payouts rise and fall in step with the percentage of beds being occupied. But in this case, CCA is paid for 100 percent capacity even if the facility is, say, half full, as it has been in recent months. An ICE spokeswoman, Jennifer Elzea, said that the contracts for the 2,400-bed facility in Dilley and one for a 532-bed family detention center in Karnes City, Tex., given to another company, are “unique” in their payment structures because they provide “a fixed monthly fee for use of the entire facility regardless of the number of residents.”

    • With Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton

      His chances, as measured in the polls, went almost overnight from fairly decent to utter crap. For much of this year, populism had the gilded class really worried. There was Bernie Sanders and the unthinkable threat of a socialist president. There was the terrifying Brexit vote. Just a short while ago the American national newspapers were running page-one stories telling readers it was time to take seriously Trump’s followers, if not Trump himself. And on 3 August, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman actually typed the following: “It scares me that people are so fed up with elites, so hate and mistrust [Hillary] Clinton and are so worried about the future – jobs, globalization and terrorism” that they might actually vote for Trump.

      Yes, it scared Friedman that the American people didn’t like their masters any longer. As it has no doubt scared many of his rich friends to learn over the past few years that the people formerly known as middle class are angry about losing their standard of living to the same forces that are making those rich people ever more comfortable.

    • Robert De Niro Compares Donald Trump to His ‘Taxi Driver’ Character: He’s ‘Totally Nuts’

      Robert De Niro compared Donald Trump to Travis Bickle, the mentally disturbed character he played in the 1976 movie “Taxi Driver.”

      “What he has been saying is totally crazy, ridiculous, stuff that shouldn’t be even… he is totally nuts,” De Niro said.

      His comments came during a Q&A at the Sarajevo Film Festival on Friday, according to the AP.

      Elaborating on the character which earned the actor an Oscar nomination, De Niro said, “One of the things to me was just the irony at the end, [Bickle] is back driving a cab, celebrated, which is kind of relevant in some way today too.”

      He then drew a comparison to the current presidential candidate for the Republican party: “People like Donald Trump who shouldn’t be where he is so… God help us.” The AP reports that De Niro’s comments were met with applause.

    • Trump: I’m running against media, not Clinton

      Donald Trump said Saturday that his true opponent in the general election is the media.

      “I’m not running against crooked Hillary, I’m running against the crooked media,” Trump said at a rally in Fairfield, Conn. “That’s what I’m running against, I’m not running against crooked Hillary.”

      Trump has repeatedly lashed out at media that he calls “dishonest” over the course of his campaign.

      Earlier Saturday, he bashed the New York Times after a report came out in which sources characterized Trump as “sullen” and struggling to recover in light of lagging poll numbers.

      He renewed those attacks on the Times at the rally Saturday, saying he’s considering revoking their credentials to cover his rallies.

      “I’ll tell you in particular lately we have a newspaper that’s failing badly, its losing a lot of money, its gonna be out of business very soon: the New York Times,” he said.

      Trump blasted the use of anonymous sources in the Times report, saying “I don’t think they have any names.”

      “They never call me,” he added. “It’s going to hell.”

      “Maybe what we’ll do,” Trump continued, “we’ll start taking their press credentials away from them.”

    • Pirates Looking Into “Election Pokéstops”

      The Pirate Party is looking into the idea of setting up “election Pokéstops” to attract more young people to take part in the vote.

      Kjarninn reports that in the most recent election – the municipal elections of 2014 – voter turn-out for those aged 18 to 29 was only at about 50%. To help improve this situation, Birgitta Jónsdóttir and other Pirates are currently looking into an unconventional way to get young people to the polls: namely, by setting up Pokéstops at polling places.

      To this end, Birgitta is hoping that the company Unity Technologies could take part in the project. The company, which amongst other things takes part in designing the Pokémon Go environment in Iceland, is partially owned by Icelander Dav­íð Helga­son.

    • new shadow passwd functions

      Long, long ago, password hashes were kept in the /etc/passwd file. This is obviously bad because it allows users to pry into other users’ hashes, attempting to crack them. The solution was to move the real hashes to another file, called master.passwd on OpenBSD. BSD systems also turn the text passwd files into a database file so that calling getpwnam is fast even with thousands of users on a 10MHz vax.

      On some systems, e.g. Linux, there are two sets of functions. Normal functions like getpwnam that open the regular passwd files, and shadow functions like getspnam that open the files with password hashes. The problem is that struct passwd and struct spwd are not the same, making it difficult to write code that can work with both variants. Everything must be written twice, even though the code will be identical except for a few characters difference.

    • Found: A New Major Opposition Party

      Imagine what a Commons party could achieve with this menu! It could also blacklist Congressional members and Administrations ignoring these demands, despite their swearing to “promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Or cut the Pentagon’s allocation in half and put the remainder into domestic needs.

      Such movements also taught veteran campaigners and newbies to put principles before personalities in everything from fundraising, canvassing, creating media and overpass signs, phonebanking, fliering, street theatre and demonstrations and running those “huuuuge” rallies around the country.

      Meetings usually weren’t held in plush quarters or rented halls, but in homes, warehouses, libraries, schools, pizza parlors, pubs and backyard potlucks. Leadership generally followed Napoleon’s guideline: “Every French soldier carries a [general’s] baton in his knapsack.” So leaders were rotated from the ranks instead of bossy, ambitious wannabe “generals.”

      Occupy’s democratic meeting methods reappeared: timed agenda items, fair input by “stacking,” “twinkling” fingers for approvals, and projects assigned to initiators.

      In his latest major interview, Sanders spoke for the fearful, the despairing, and the angries about what those in other times and other places did to change their countries, and to follow their example unless we want to be ruled by lesser evils preferring we vanish.

    • Stark New Evidence on How Money Shapes America’s Elections

      Outrage over how big money influences American politics has been boiling over this political season, energizing the campaigns of GOP nominee Donald Trump and former Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders alike. Citizens have long suspected that “We the People” increasingly means “We the Rich” at election time.

      Yet surprisingly, two generations of social scientists have insisted that wallets don’t matter that much in American politics. Elections are really about giving the people what they want. Money, they claim, has negligible impact on elections.

      That was a good line for Cold War propaganda, and good for tenure, too. Corporate titans seized upon it to argue that their money should be freer to flow into political campaigns. Not only billionaires, but academics, too, argued that more money in elections meant more democracy.

      Even today, many academics and pundits still insist that money matters less to political outcomes than ordinary citizens think, even as business executives throw down mind-boggling sums to dine with politicians and Super Pacs spring up like mushrooms. The few dissenters from this consensus, like Noam Chomsky, are ignored in the U.S. as “unpersons,” though they are enormously respected abroad.

    • Thousands of Pages of Confidential Think Tank Documents Detail Corporate Ties, New York Times Reports

      Thousands of pages of confidential internal think tank emails and documents published by the New York Times yesterday shine a revealing spotlight on how some of the nation’s most prominent think tanks are used by corporate donors to promote specific policies — while concealing the financial interests involved.

      The emails provide a “smoking gun” of evidence that corporations that donated to non-profit think tanks like The Brookings Institution were promised specific receivables in return.

      For example, Lennar Corp., a home building company and Brookings donor was offered a spot as a Brookings senior fellow for one of its executives. “’He would be a trusted adviser,’ an internal Brookings memo said in 2014 as the think tank sought one $100,000 donation from Lennar,” the Times reported.

      While critics of the institutions may have long suspected that corporate donors receive special treatment from the think tanks they back, think tanks have managed to maintain an air of independence and the respect of many policy makers in Washington D.C.

      The newly revealed emails are striking in part because they reveal how corporate interests have affected left-wing think tanks like Brookings, which are sometimes regarded as less under the corporate thumb than right-wing overtly pro-corporate think thanks like the American Enterprise Institute or The Heartland Institute.

      The documents show the precise ways that corporate donors are able to control the messages coming out of the think tanks they fund behind the scenes, while still preserving a public veneer of independence.

      “The likely conclusions of some think tank reports, documents show, are discussed with donors — or even potential ones — before the research is complete,” the Times reported. “Drafts of the studies have been shared with donors whose opinions have then helped shape final reports. Donors have outlined how the resulting scholarship will be used as part of broader lobbying efforts.”

    • For millennial voters, the Clinton vs. Trump choice ‘feels like a joke’

      Jo Tongue doesn’t have much time for politics, but the Hillary and Trump show is hard to tune out. And even harder to take. To this 31-year-old mother of two, with a third on the way, the presidency should be an honorable office, but instead she feels “bummed that we’re at a place where it all feels like a joke.”

      “Watching Jimmy Fallon, I feel like, ugh, is this how we should start out? We’re already mocking our president?”

      Tongue says she is both “sad” and “defeated” and — in a world filled with shootings, bombings and financial strain — maintains scant hope that a new president will change any of it.

      At a sports bar 1,800 miles away in Goldsboro, N.C., Aaron Stewart is shooting pool with a buddy and thinking the same thing. The pair doesn’t just feel cut off from the current campaign, but from a political system they see as controlled by mysterious networks, greased by money and off-limits to people like them.

      “I’m not really a conspiracy theo rist, but the system is corrupt,” says Stewart, 21, who works at a convenience store. He draws a $1 bill from his wallet, holds it up to the bar’s faint light and declares, “This little piece of paper tells me what I can and cannot do.”

      At the Panetta Institute for Public Policy in California, the summer interns are up on the issues. But Dominic Cicerone has a similar sense of foreboding. For him, the big issue is his own safety — he was afraid to go to the July 4 fireworks at Fisherman’s Wharf because the Islamic State had released a video claiming San Francisco as a target — and neither candidate is easing his concerns.

    • The Real Reason They Attack Jill Stein

      The attacks on Jill Stein’s blossoming supporter base from establishment Democrats have continued as frantically and aggressively as ever, despite Hillary Clinton enjoying a comfortable and enduring lead in the polls over Donald Trump. Numbers have stabilized, and it looks like Hillary will win without the support of the Bernie-or-Bust crowd.

      So why continue the vitriol? It hasn’t lessened. In fact, it’s ramped up, and our social media news feeds are teeming with false accusations of Stein being anti-vaccination, anti-science, anti-Bernie Sanders, and now, surprise surprise, an anti-American Putin sympathizer.

      Yes, the old red under the bed tactic. Clinton ally John Aravosis has continued the Democrats’ bizarre resurrection of the time-honored McCarthyist tradition of red-baiting their critics and political opponents, joining the Democrats’ diversionary tactic of pointing indignantly at Russia and its ties to Trump for the DNC hacks in the hopes that it will make everyone forget about the content of the leak itself. Over the weekend, Aravosis wrote an attack editorial, casting suspicion on Stein for attending a convention for alternative media outlet RT last winter, which Aravosis laughably tries to spin as evidence that the anti-war Green party candidate is a traitor in league with “the Kremlin’s propaganda agency.”

    • The U.S.: a four- or five-party country jammed into a two-party system

      Years ago, when Boris Yeltsin came to town, I had a chance to ask him one question. Through a translator, I asked this: “You call yourself a Communist, but you disagree with the Communist Party’s ideology on most subjects. What makes you a Communist?” He replied: “Party card.”

      By the time Yeltsin became president, opposition parties were still banned. But being a Communist didn’t require you to believe anything in particular. Yet the system still required you to be a card-carrying Communist to run for office. I don’t favor a one-party system.

      Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. Never really was. Never really claimed to be.

      Donald Trump is not a Republican. Not in any meaningful sense.

      But in America, since the Dem-Repub duopoly took over our system in 1856, if you want to be president, you have to be the nominee of one of the two major parties.

    • The Perfect G.O.P. Nominee

      All these woebegone Republicans whining that they can’t rally behind their flawed candidate is crazy. The G.O.P. angst, the gnashing and wailing and searching for last-minute substitutes and exit strategies, is getting old.

      They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up — unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else.

      The Republicans have their candidate: It’s Hillary.

      They can’t go with Donald Trump. He’s too volatile and unhinged.

      The erstwhile Goldwater Girl and Goldman Sachs busker can be counted on to do the normal political things, not the abnormal haywire things. Trump’s propounding could drag us into war, plunge us into a recession and shatter Washington into a thousand tiny bits.

    • WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: Attacks Against Jill Stein Are “Going to Go Through the Roof”

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke via video stream to the Green Party convention in Houston, Texas, about the corporate control of information during the 2016 election. He also predicted that attacks against Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein would surge ahead of November’s election.

    • Jill Stein Smeared As Anti-Vaccine Crank As Sanders Supporters Consider Alternative To Clinton

      As Hillary Clinton officially became the Democratic Party’s nominee, interest in Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein grew exponentially. Several establishment journalists, including those known for their open contempt for dissent, turned their attention to Stein to marginalize her campaign before it picked up more than a small amount of support from disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters.

      One false and slanderous claim against Stein has picked up a huge amount of traction in the press: the idea that Stein is an “anti-vaxxer,” opposes vaccines, or has pandered to individuals who believe vaccines cause autism.

      The Washington Post is primarily responsible for this smear. It had two of its reporters, Sarah Parnass and Alice Li, interview Stein. David Weigel, another Post journalist, wrote about the interview, and a Post editor gave it the following headline, “Jill Stein on vaccines: People have ‘real questions,’” which was extremely misleading.

      At the moment, over a dozen media outlets have picked up the interview and chastised Stein for supposedly having anti-science views. Some of the pieces on Stein’s interview are mean-spirited, written by journalists who would have found something to make her look like a crank even if the Post had not spoken with her about vaccines.

    • Stein hits Clinton on emails: Voters “owed an explanation”

      Green Party candidate Jill Stein attacked Hillary Clinton on Monday for her use of a private email server as Secretary of State, amid reports that notes from Clinton’s interview with the FBI during its probe of the matter would be turned over soon to Congress.
      Declining to say whether she thought Clinton should have faced criminal charges from the FBI after its probe, Stein said that the issue “raises real questions about her competency.”

      “I think there should have been a full investigation. I think the American people are owed an explanation for what happened, and why top secret information was put at risk, why the identity of secret agents were potentially put at risk,” Stein told CNN’s Carol Costello.

    • Why Latinos Support Donald Trump

      No amount of semantic somersaulting can whitewash the racist overtones of Donald Trump’s campaign.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • How to Make YouTube Stop Watching What You Watch

      A. When you are logged in to your Google Account, YouTube keeps a running list of everything you watch on the site for a few reasons. For one, YouTube uses your viewing history to suggest other videos it thinks you may like, similar to the way Netflix makes recommendations for its members.

      [...]

      Next, click the Pause Watch History button. If you would also like to wipe out the collected list of clips, click the Clear All Watch History button next to it. If you do not want to clear all videos from the list — but want to remove some of them — click the “X” on the right side of the screen next to a listed clip.

    • New law targets people who leak classified information

      People who leak Government information will be targeted with a new offence that carries a maximum sentence of five years in jail.

      Prime Minister John Key has announced legislation that will also let the Government Communications Security Bureau spy on New Zealanders’ private information.

      The bill comes in the same week that information leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden resulted in media reports about the GCSB’s monitoring of a Fiji democracy activist.

      The Government denied the new power to target whistle blowers was related to the Snowden leaks.

      Its introduction is a response to a broad-sweeping intelligence review by Sir Michael Cullen and Dame Patsy Reddy, released in March with 107 recommendations.

    • Report: Target of NSA’s online surveillance identified

      Tony Fullman was targeted from July through August 2012…

    • NSA is everywhere: New Zealand peace activist victim of ‘illegal’ PRISM snooping program

      A new report by The Intercept and Television New Zealand reveal the National Security Agency (NSA) worked with New Zealand’s government to illegally spy on one of its citizens in a failed terrorism investigation.

      A group of “democracy and freedom” activists were thought to be plotting the overthrow of Fiji’s military regime in 2012, according to the Kiwi snoops at the Security Intelligence Service (SIS).

      With help from the NSA via the Five Eyes alliance, which Edward Snowden called a “supra-national intelligence organization that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries,” they staged a covert operation to catch the alleged terrorist group.

      Snowden’s leaked documents show the NSA intercepted Facebook communications and emails between associates of the Fiji Democracy and Freedom Movement campaign, using the PRISM surveillance system, before passing the information onto New Zealand on the other side of the globe. More than 190 pages of documents between May and August 2012 reveal the scale of the NSA’s spying.

    • After NZ spooks misidentified pro-democracy activist, NSA spied on him for them

      Tony Fullman is one of the only people that we know to have been targeted by Prism, the NSA’s signature mass-surveillance tool: he’s a Fijian-born expatriate with New Zealand citizenship, and had his passport seized and his name added to terrorism watchlists after the NSA helped their New Zealand counterparts spy on him, intercepting his bank statements, Facebook posts, Gmail messages, recorded phone conversations, and more.

      Fullman is one of the organisers of “thumbs up for democracy,” a peaceful online campaign that questions the legitimacy of Frank Bainimarama, an authoritarian military dictator who seized control of Fiji in a coup. An internal NZ investigation revealed that the New Zealand government mistook a group of NZ-based Fijian pro-democracy activists for terrorists and illegally spied on 88 of them between 2003 and 2012, including Fullman.

      Fullman was naturalised into NZ citizenship after moving there when he was 21, and worked for 20 years as a civil servant in the tax department, while volunteering at a soup-kitchen and completing two Master’s degrees (one in public management, the other in IT). He moved back to Fiji in 2009 to run the country’s water authority.

    • Report reveals identity of NSA and PRISM surveillance target

      It’s been over three years since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a trove of documents detailing the extent to which the American government was able to spy on its citizens. A big part of those revelations was PRISM, a system that allowed the government to expediently request and collect data from a variety of huge internet companies including Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and more. Today, a new report from The Intercept contains details on the first person to be identified as a target of PRISM.

      Tony Fullman of New Zealand was targeted in 2012 by the NSA in cooperation with the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The NSA was able to intercept his Facebook chats and Gmail messages and passed them along to the GCSB, which itself did not have the authority to monitor Fullman’s communications. Fullman was apparently targeted because New Zealand believed that he was planning an act of terrorism, but it turns out that intelligence was incorrect. That didn’t stop the New Zealand government from raiding his home and revoking his passport, however.

    • This Was the First Confirmed Prism Surveillance Target

      A new report based on the leaks of former U.S. National Security Agency worker Edward Snowden has for the first time named a target of the NSA’s controversial Prism program—a civil servant and pro-democracy activist named Tony Fullman.

    • What it looks like when the NSA hacks into your Gmail and Facebook

      For the first time, a target of the National Security Agency’s controversial Prism program has been identified.

      Tony Fullman, a New Zealand citizen who was born in Fiji, had the contents of his Facebook and various Gmail accounts intercepted by the NSA, The Intercept reports, based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • ViaSat’s encryptors NSA-certified [Ed: ViaSat really wants us to know it’s in bed with the NSA; assume “golden key”?]
    • Special investigation: Inside one of the SIS’s biggest anti-terrorism operations

      One of the Security Intelligence Service’s biggest ever anti-terrorism operations – conducted between July and August 2012 – targeted a group of pro-democracy campaigners who it mistakenly thought were planning to overthrow the military government in Fiji.

      A New Zealand man had his communications monitored, probably illegally, his home raided and his passport cancelled by the SIS. But there were no guns or bombs. He was not part of a plot.

      The man, Tony Fullman, was a long-time public servant and peaceful pro-democracy campaigner who, like the New Zealand and Australian governments at that time, was opposed to the Bainimarama military government.

    • BRITISH PM CAMERON HOAXED BY DRUNK PRANK CALLER AS GCHQ BOSS
    • Did The FBI Get Confused And Arrest One Of Its Own Informants For Helping Create One Of Its Own Plots?

      For a few years now, we’ve been writing about how the FBI has been arresting a ton of people for “terrorism” who were really guilty of little more than being gullible and naive and pushed by FBI undercover agents and informants into taking part in a plot that wouldn’t exist but for the FBI itself. These so-called own plots seem to be a huge part of what the FBI does these days. Somewhat ridiculously, courts have (mostly) allowed these, claiming that if, eventually, the accused person expressed some support for terrorism or terrorist groups, it shouldn’t be considered entrapment. But, over and over again, you see cases where it’s clearly the FBI doing not just the majority of the plotting, but also pushing and pushing targets to “join” the plot, even when they show sustained resistance. The more details you read about these cases, the more ridiculous they get.

      However, in just the latest example of this — the arrest of Erick Hendricks for supposedly trying to recruit people to carry out attacks for ISIS — there’s been something of an odd twist. Hendricks claims he has no idea why he was arrested because he’s been an FBI informant for years, helping the FBI find other gullible souls to entrap in these “own plots.” As Marcy Wheeler notes, it’s possible the FBI lost track of one of its own informants and ended up having him “caught” in one of the plots where he thought he was helping the FBI find possible terrorists. Wouldn’t that be something.

    • In Bungled Spying Operation, NSA Targeted Pro-Democracy Campaigner

      As part of the spy mission, the NSA used its powerful global surveillance apparatus to intercept the emails and Facebook chats of people associated with a Fijian “thumbs up for democracy” campaign. The agency then passed the messages to its New Zealand counterpart, Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB.

    • Snowden Docs Show NSA, New Zealand Spied On Pro-Democracy Activists [Ed: Snowden’s remark]

      The “act of terrorism” claims were odd, considering Fullman’s activism was aligned with the New Zealand government’s own views: opposition to neighboring Fiji’s authoritarian ruler, Frank Bainimarama. Utilizing PRISM, the NSA intercepted Fullman’s Gmail and Facebook messages, along with gathering everything it could from his public postings — including this data on his apparently terrorism-related personal vehicle.

    • NSA Hacked? ‘Shadow Brokers’ Crew Claims Compromise Of Surveillance Op
    • Hackers claim to be selling NSA cyberweapons in online auction
    • Hacking group purportedly hacked NSA-linked Equation Group, auctioning cyber weapons
    • Hackers Say They Hacked NSA-Linked Group, Want 1 Million Bitcoins to Share More
    • Hackers Claim to Auction Data Stolen From NSA-Linked Spies
    • Hackers claim to auction NSA source code
    • Group claims to have hacked the NSA, wants $500 million to release files
    • NSA offshoot ‘The Equation Group’ has been hacked
    • So, Uh, Did The NSA Get Hacked?
    • The Tools The NSA Uses To Snoop Are Allegedly Being Auctioned Off By Hackers

      We’ve known for a while, thanks to the Snowden leaks and the ensuing investigations, that the NSA has both broad authority to breach and investigate the communications of innocent Americans and the tools to get into your private business with ease. It’s been an ugly chapter in American history, and it’s about to get a lot uglier with the news that the NSA has been hacked, and all its spying tools might soon be online for anybody to use.

    • ‘Shadow Brokers’ claim to have hacked an NSA-linked elite computer security unit

      Cybersecurity experts are searching for answers after an unidentified group claimed on Monday to have hacked into “Equation Group” — an elite cyber-attack group associated with the NSA.

      The “Shadow Brokers” claimed in a post on blogging service Tumblr to have hacked Equation Group, and say they are holding an “auction” to sell off the “cyber weapons” they were able to steal. Shadow Brokers have also provided a sample of files, free to access, to “prove” their legitimacy.

    • Should cloud vendors cooperate with the government?

      35 percent believe cloud app vendors should be forced to provide government access to encrypted data while 55 percent are opposed. 64 percent of US-based infosec professionals are opposed to government cooperation, compared to only 42 percent of EMEA respondents.

      “Forcing cloud app vendors to comply with government or law enforcement access requests to data has provided a real mixed bag of responses, with everything to no way, to help yourself, and even to I don’t care. This really makes no sense because surely with so much debate about the challenges facing law enforcement, to the privacy considerations that have dominated the press we would have expected at least some common consensus. This of course creates a challenge for app vendors, because it will not be possible to create models to suit all opinions. It therefore demands some form of open debate on the best approach to take in terms of addressing this most challenging issue,” Raj Samani, CTO EMEA at Intel Security, told Help Net Security.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Muslims Are Celebrating Murderer Of The Glasgow ‘Apostate’ Shopkeeper

      Muslims around the world are celebrating a British man, who murdered an innocent shopkeeper who they considered an “apostate”, as an Islamist hero.

    • Russia Provides Two Be-200 Aircraft on Portuguese Fire-Fighting Mission

      Russia Provides Two Be-200 Aircraft on Portuguese Fire-Fighting Mission

      Portugal has asked Russia for help in extinguishing forest fires, head of the press service of the Russian Emergencies Ministry, Alexei Vagutovich, told Sputnik, and Russia is happy to help out.

    • In Zambia’s contentious election, the EU finds a new challenge

      Supporters of the United Party for National Development opposition party attend election rally in Lusaka, Zambia, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016 amid concerns about political violence. Moses Mwape / Press Association. All rights reserved.Zambians went to the polls on August 11 in presidential and parliamentary elections in what is expected to be a tight race between President Edgar Lungu’s governing PF party and the opposition UPND led by Hakainde Hichilema. The EU on the ground, along with other international observers, can exert a positive influence in what has been a tense and sometimes violent campaign. In its new Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy the EU commits to supporting democracies where they emerge, for “their success […] would reverberate across their respective regions” – Zambia presents an opportunity for the EU to show it still has serious clout as a foreign policy actor.

    • Your Parents Aren’t Your Parents, an Announcer Tells an Olympian

      Many eyes were watching, then, as NBC learned a lesson, maybe. Biles has been open about her family; she and her sister were adopted at a young age by her maternal grandfather and his wife. “I call them Mom and Dad. Everything’s just been so normal,” she’s been quoted. But NBC announcer Al Trautwig seemed to feel he knew better, referring repeatedly to Biles’ “grandparents.” When someone on Twitter noted that was incorrect, Trautwig responded, “they may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents.”

      After, one imagines, a call from PR, Trautwig declared he regretted that he “wasn’t more clear in my wording,” though he didn’t explain what it was he was trying to “word” or why. (USA Today wrote that he had apologized “for suggesting that Simone Biles’ parents through adoption are not really her parents.” If saying “they are NOT her parents” is “suggesting” they are not her parents, then sure.)

      Olympics coverage involves a lot of storytelling; commentators create narratives for athletes, and no doubt some feel it’s “humanizing” when, faced with one of the best athletes in the world, they focus on what one called her “broken home.” Of course, what they’re really revealing is just the narrowness of their vision.

    • Recent court decisions fuel renewed push for restoring the Voting Rights Act

      In an op-ed for Time magazine, Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said these decisions “have been a triumphant win for voting rights advocates, but they are not the long-term answer.”

      “As we face the first presidential election without a fully functioning VRA,” he wrote, “it is more critical than ever to restore the full powers and protections of the law.”

      Greenblatt observed that “the backdrop of the latest set of rulings paints a bleaker picture — one of legislatures around the country passing laws that discriminate against voters of color.”

    • One Quote Predicts Today’s Police Brutality Nearly 50 Years Ago

      The violence of last week conjures up the history and memory of the violence and racial tension of 1968, and a quote from a famous author and cultural critic makes the comparison seem all too apt.

    • Online crime: UK cops to use law firms to tackle fraud in civil courts

      A pilot scheme run by the City of London police will use law firms working for profit to tackle online crime and fraud cases.

      Cops will pass details of cases to companies involved with the scheme. They will be tasked with attempting to seize the assets of suspects—and, if successful, receive a share.

      The advantages for the police are twofold: more cases can be tackled, since some will be handled by the law firms, and suspects will be pursued in civil courts, whereas police have to go through the criminal court system in order to use provisions from the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA).

    • DEA Accessing Millions Of Travelers’ Records To Find Cash To Seize

      The monster is insatiable. The DEA loves taking cash from travelers so much it has hired TSA screeners as informants, asking them to look for cash when scanning luggage. It routinely stops and questions rail passengers in hopes of stumbling across money it can take from them.

      But it goes further than just hassling random travelers and paying government employees to be government informants. As the USA Today’s article points out, the DEA is datamining traveler info to streamline its forfeiture efforts.

    • Documents Confirm CIA Censorship of Guantánamo Trials

      In January 2013, during the military trial of five men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, a defense lawyer was discussing a motion relating to the CIA’s black-site program, when a mysterious entity cut the audio feed to the gallery. A red light began to glow and spin. Someone had triggered the courtroom’s censorship system.

      The system was believed to be under the control of the judge, Col. James Pohl. In this case, it wasn’t.

    • Election Meddling: Bad if Done to USA, Bad to Complain About if Done by USA

      When US media—to say nothing of the leading contender to be the next president of the US—allege that foreign elements are steering our politics, that’s rational, serious discourse. When others do it, it’s laughable, unhinged blabbering.

      [...]

      If the Washington Post had to argue that US meddling was the good kind of meddling, because it’s a necessary balance to Putin’s autocratic rule, this nuance would get in the way of the Post’s simplistic “paranoid strongman vs. good, clean US democracy” dichotomy, so the reader is left with the ahistoric and childish impression that the US doesn’t interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries.

      [...]

      To omit the endless string of examples of US interfering in other countries in an editorial about fears of US interfering in other countries is at best negligent and at worst deliberately obtuse. It’s hard to describe foreign leaders as being paranoid about US meddling and coups if you acknowledge that the US has been involved in meddling and coups for more than a century.

    • Humanitarian Nightmare for Colombia’s Wayuu Fails to Awaken Corporate Media

      Colombia’s Supreme Court has ordered the government to ensure that the Wayuu, the largest indigenous community in the country, have access to basics of survival, including drinkable water. Last year, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights called attention to the crisis, noting the documented deaths of more than 4,700 Wayuu children in just the last eight years—although the Wayuu themselves say the number is closer to 14,000 children who have died from preventable disease, thirst and malnutrition. It’s a humanitarian nightmare, but as human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik noted in a piece for Huffington Post, corporate media appear unmoved.

      The Wayuu are suffering not just from climate change–driven drought, but from the loss of access to the Rancheria River, drained by a dam built in 2011 for the coal mining company Cerrejon. Cerrejon Mine, at first a joint venture between Colombia and Exxon, opened in 1983 and has been displacing indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities ever since. Kovalik reports that Cerrejon now uses 17 million liters of water a day, while residents of the region have an average of 0.7 liters a day to live on.

    • When USA Gymnastics Turned a Blind Eye to Sexual Abuse

      With the summer Olympics in full swing, three reporters at the Indianapolis Star newspaper have been investigating painful secrets kept by some of the nation’s young gymnasts-in-training.

      For this ProPublica Podcast, I talked with Marisa Kwiatkowski, Mark Alesia and Tim Evans about their incredible report on sexual misconduct by coaches affiliated with USA Gymnastics, the nonprofit responsible for developing the United States’ gymnastics team for the Olympics and training thousands more children and young adults.What the reporters discovered was that the organization had policies on reporting sexual abuse that were likely to discourage people from speaking up.

    • The Right-Wing Legacy of Justice Lewis Powell, and What It Means for the Supreme Court Today

      The memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was breathtaking in its scope and ambition, and far more right-wing than anything Scalia ever wrote. It was, as writer Steven Higgs noted in a 2012 article published by CounterPunch, “A Call to Arms for Class War: From the Top Down.”

      Back in 1971, when the memo was prepared, Powell was a well-connected partner in the Richmond-based law firm of Hutton, Williams, Gay, Powell and Gibson and sat on the boards of 11 major corporations, including the tobacco giant Philip Morris. He also had served as chairman of the Richmond School Board from 1952 to ’61 and as president of the American Bar Association from 1964 to ’65. In 1969, he declined a nomination to the Supreme Court offered by President Nixon, preferring to remain in legal practice, through which he reportedly had amassed a personal fortune.

    • Man Claiming that He is the Brother of Man Shot by Officers Speaks to CBS 58 During the Violence

      CBS 58′s Evan Kruegel spoke exclusively to a man claiming to be the brother of the man shot and killed by police yesterday.

      He was with a crowd of people at the O’Reilly Auto Parts as it burned last night.

      “There is riot going on because once again the police have failed to protect us like they said they would. They failed to be here like they say like they sworn in to do. Us as a community, we are not going to protect ourselves. But, we don’t have anyone to protect us than this is what you get. So you got riots. We got people right here going crazy. We are losing loved ones everyday to the people that are sworn in to protect us,” said the man.

    • “This is the Madness They Spark”: Uprising in Milwaukee After Police Kill 23-Year-Old Black Man

      Protests are continuing in Milwaukee two days after police shot dead a 23-year-old African-American man named Sylville Smith. On Sunday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker activated the National Guard after local residents set fire to police cars and several local businesses, including a gas station, on Saturday night. Seventeen people were arrested. Four police officers were reportedly injured. Milwaukee police say Smith was shot while trying to flee from an officer who had stopped his car. Police Chief Edward Flynn said he had viewed video from the officer’s body camera, and it showed Smith had turned toward him with a gun in his hand after the traffic stop. Many local residents said the tension between their community and the police has been rising for years. Milwaukee is considered to be one of the most segregated cities in the country. We speak with Muhibb Dyer, community activist, poet and co-founder of the organization Flood the Hood with Dreams.

    • Milwaukee Sheriff Provokes Outrage, Blames ‘Urban Pathology,’ ‘War on Police’ for Police Brutality

      Days of demonstrations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin following Saturday’s fatal police shooting have shined a national spotlight on the city’s segregation and police practices—and the city’s infamous right-wing sheriff provoked further outrage Sunday when he blamed the community of the shooting victim for the police violence that ended his life.

      Clarke decried “urban pathologies” and a “war on police”—popular right-wing catchphrases—in impoverished, largely black communities for the demonstrations and the shooting that provoked them.

      “The urban pathologies have to be addressed to shrink the growth of an underclass,” he said, referring to the community which has suffered through the deaths of many of its members at the hands of police.

    • Black Americans and Police State Fascism

      Korryn Gaines was shot to death by police in her own home near Baltimore, Maryland. Her five year-old son was also shot and injured. Ms. Gaines came into contact with police initially because of a traffic violation and a dispute with her boyfriend. Every day thousands of people are given tickets or make accusations against one another but rarely do they have an expectation of ending up dead as a result.

      Arrest warrants are the first line of defense for the police, who are the 21st century embodiment of the slave patrol. If black people are lucky they may have to pay a fine or suffer some inconvenience, if unlucky they are killed.

    • Justice and accountability for war related sexual violence in Sri Lanka

      As the testimonies of survivors of sexual violence in Sri Lanka’s long war enter the public domain and the government designs transitional justice mechanisms, is an end to impunity in sight?

    • The Dark Secret of Israel’s Stolen Babies

      According to campaigners, as many as 8,000 babies were seized from their families in the state’s first years and either sold or handed over to childless Jewish couples in Israel and abroad. To many, it sounds suspiciously like child trafficking.

      A few of the children have been reunited with their biological families, but the vast majority are simply unaware they were ever taken. Strict Israeli privacy laws mean it is near-impossible for them to see official files that might reveal their clandestine adoption.

      Did Israeli hospitals and welfare organisations act on their own or connive with state bodies? It is unclear. But it is hard to imagine such mass abductions could have occurred without officials at the very least turning a blind eye.

      Testimonies indicate that lawmakers, health ministry staff, and senior judges knew of these practices at the time. And the decision to place all documents relating to the children under lock untl 2071 hints at a cover-up.

      [...]

      Ben Gurion needed not only to destroy Palestinian society, but to ensure that “Arabness” did not creep into his new Jewish state through the back door.

      The large numbers of Arab Jews who arrived in the first decade were needed in his demographic war against the Palestinians and as a labour force, but they posed a danger too. Ben Gurion feared that, whatever their religion, they might “corrupt” his Jewish state culturally by importing what he called the “spirit of the Levant”.

    • Eliminate Profit from Punishment

      In July 2010, Marissa Alexander, a young Black woman from Florida, faced the fight of her life only nine days after giving birth to her youngest daughter. Her estranged husband, Rico Gray, attacked, strangled, and threatened to kill Marissa in her own home. To get rid of Rico, Marissa fired a warning shot into the ceiling. The single shot injured no one. And yet she was subsequently charged with several criminal charges and incarcerated for a victimless crime.

      Marissa’s story is just one example of how prisons, profit, policing, and poverty are intimately connected. Prisons have long been warehouses for the poor and individuals who are unable to defend themselves in a vicious legal system. Undue profiling by law enforcement has long been the gateway into the incarceration system. And increasingly rich people and the multi-billion dollar security industry make money off of mass incarceration.

      Marissa Alexander fought a long battle in the Florida courts to appeal her conviction on the basis of her right of self-defense. She eventually was successful and in 2015 she was released from jail and put on probation. But in the meantime, she paid a high cost. Throughout her entire ordeal, she not only missed irreplaceable time with her children. She also had to pay $105 every week for the use of an ankle monitor while she was under house arrest and an additional $500 every other week for a bond cost.

    • Doncaster girl raped at gunpoint in Pakistan so cousin could get British visa

      But for Tabassan Khan, it marked the beginning of a very different life. British-born Tabassan, given a new name to protect her identity, was told she was going on a summer holiday.

      Instead, she was forced at gunpoint to marry a cousin six years her senior in Pakistan. She was held captive and abused over the next three years.

      Now, having found a way back to safety, she wants to share her story and shine a light on the plight of thousands of young British victims.

      Her life had already been difficult. Her father had murdered her mother when she was 12, leaving her and three brothers in the care of an aunt in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

      The now 26-year-old said: “I thought I was going to Pakistan on holiday. I was excited. Then two months passed and it was time to start the school year. I asked my uncle when I should go back and he just kept saying, ‘Stay a bit longer’ for weeks. After four months, he came up to my room with a gun and told me I had to marry my cousin.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • The FCC Can’t Save Community Broadband — But We Can

      Last year, while most of us were focused on the FCC’s Open Internet Order to protect net neutrality, the FCC quietly did one more thing: it voted to override certain state regulations that inhibit the development and expansion of community broadband projects. The net neutrality rules have since been upheld, but last week a federal appeals court rejected FCC’s separate effort to preempt state law.

      The FCC’s goals were laudable. Municipalities and local communities have been experimenting with ways to foster alternatives to big broadband providers like Comcast and Time/Warner. Done right, community fiber experiments have the potential to create options that empower Internet subscribers and make Internet access more affordable. For example, Chattanooga, Tennessee, is home to one of the nation’s least expensive, most robust municipally-owned broadband networks. The city decided to build a high-speed network initially to meet the needs of the city’s electric company. Then, the local government learned that the cable companies would not be upgrading their Internet service fast enough to meet the city’s needs. So the electric utility also became an ISP, and the residents of Chattanooga now have access to a gigabit (1,000 megabits) per second Internet connection. That’s far ahead of the average US connection speed, which typically clocks in at 9.8 megabits per second.

  • DRM

    • Why Apple Removing The Audio Jack From The iPhone Would Be A Very, Very, Very, Bad Move

      It’s been rumored for months now that the next iPhone will be removing the standard analog headphone jack — the same jack that’s existed on portable audio devices for ages. It would immediately make a whole bunch of headphone and microphone products obsolete overnight for those who use iPhones. And while some have compared it to when Apple surprised everyone nearly two decades ago in removing the floppy drive from the iMac, this is quite different. The floppy drive really was pushing the end of its necessary existence, and with the internet and (not too long after) the rise of USB, the internal floppy drive seemed less and less important. But that’s not the case with the standard audio jack.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • More examples of how licensing kills progress: the stories of Gopher and GIF

      At Private Internet Access, we’re dependent on – and celebrating – the existence of free and open strong cryptography. Time and again, people proclaiming the virtues of monopolies and exclusive rights – copyrights, patents – are trying to push their model of closedness and permissioned gates onto the Internet. And time and again, the Internet rejects the notion wholesale.

      Without free and open cryptography, we would not have strong privacy today – and without strong privacy, we no longer have Freedom of Speech at all, in the wider social context. Numerous commissions have looked at the possibility of outlawing private encryption altogether today, like private encryption was banned in France before the first crypto wars, with the usual scapegoat of “because terrorism”. However, they all concluded that because of the mere existence of free and open cryptography, which fall under free speech laws since the first crypto wars, terrorists will always have access to strong cryptography – unlike with gun regulation, there are no per-item sales you can regulate.

08.14.16

Links 14/8/2016: ‘Goodbye Windows – Hello Ubuntu’, Linux Mint 18 Xfce Overview

Posted in News Roundup at 6:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Envisioning Bitcoin’s Technology at the Heart of Global Finance

    A new report from the World Economic Forum predicts that the underlying technology introduced by the virtual currency Bitcoin will come to occupy a central place in the global financial system.

    A report released Friday morning by the forum, a convening organization for the global elite, is one of the strongest endorsements yet for a new technology — the blockchain — that has become the talk of the financial industry, despite the shadowy origins of Bitcoin.

    “Rather than to stay at the margins of the finance industry blockchain will become the beating heart of it,” the head of financial services industries at the World Economic Forum, Giancarlo Bruno, said in a statement released with the report.

  • Intriguing details emerge about Fuchsia OS, Google’s latest project
  • Shhh: Google Is Secretly Making A Fuchsia OS, And It’s Not Based On Linux
  • Google is developing an OS called “Fuchsia,” runs on All the Things
  • Google Is Working On ‘Fuchsia’, Its Own, Non-Linux Based Operating System For ‘Modern’ Devices
  • Google is secretly creating a new OS that’s not based on Linux

  • Events

    • Midwest Drupal Summit

      Join us for 3 days this summer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the 2016 Midwest Drupal Summit and help make D8 the best version yet.

      With the launch of Drupal 8, there’s a lot to be excited about in the Drupal community — and a lot left to contribute!

      For this year’s Summit, we’ll gather on the beautiful University of Michigan campus for three days of code sprints, working on issues such as porting modules and writing or updating documentation. We will start around 10AM and finish around 5PM each day.

    • Three Weeks Until QtCon!

      From 1 to 4 September 2016 the communities of KDE, Qt, FSFE, VideoLAN and KDAB join forces in Berlin for QtCon. The program consists of a mix of Qt trainings on day 1, unconference sessions, lightning talks and more than 150 in-depths talks on technical and community topics on days 2 to 4. Track topics range from KDE‘s Latest and Greatest, Testing and Continuous Integration and QtQuick to Free Software policies and politics, Community and Beyond code. Check out the program.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Funds PyPy In Latest Round Of Open Source Funding

        Mozilla is giving $200,000 to Baroque Software to work on PyPy, specifically to implement support for Python 3.5. Eight other open source projects also shared $385,000 in the recent round of funding.

        PyPy is a Python interpreter with an integrated JIT compiler that currently supports Python 2.7. The money from Mozilla will be used to implement the Python 3.5 features in PyPy. The money will be used over the coming year to pay four core PyPy developers half-time to work on the missing features, and on some of the big performance and cpyext issues.

  • Databases

    • Why Uber dropped PostgreSQL

      The rivalry between database management systems is often somewhat heated, with fans of one system often loudly proclaiming that a competitor “sucks” or similar. And the competition between MySQL and PostgreSQL in the open-source world has certainly been heated at times, which makes a recent discussion of the pros and cons of the two databases rather enlightening. While it involved technical criticism of the design decisions made by both, it lacked heat and instead focused on sober analysis of the differences and their implications.

      The transportation company Uber had long used PostgreSQL as the storage back-end for a monolithic Python application, but that changed over the last year or two. Uber switched to using its own Schemaless sharding layer atop MySQL and on July 26 published a blog post by Evan Klitzke that set out to explain why the switch was made. There were a number of reasons behind it, but the main problem the company encountered involved rapid updates to a table with a large number of indexes. PostgreSQL did not handle that workload particularly well.

    • Automatic PostgreSQL config with Ansible

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • The Open Source School Redefines Education in Italy

      Threading elements of the great educational experiments of Bauhaus and Roycroft Community models together with Pierre Levy’s modern definition of “collective intelligence,” La Scuola Open Source (The Open Source School) embodies the principles of the sharing movement. Its success hinges on cooperative work, co-design, shared skills, and an open source culture. The school’s 13 co-founders believe in the power of people’s collaborative qualities. Their unusual constitution is testimony to this.

      I believe La Scuola Open Source has the capacity to extend from its origin in Puglia on the southern heel of Italy and inspire the acquisition of knowledge and educational development on a global scale. Recently, I talked with two of its co-founders — Lucilla Fiorentino and Alessandro Tartaglia — how digital artisans, creators, artists, designers, programmers, pirates, dreamers, and innovators are collaborating to create Italy’s most important service for social innovation and community development: education. Fiorentino and Tartaglia answered my questions in tandem.

    • Can 42 US, a free coding school run by a French billionaire, actually work?

      Welcome to 42 US, a free (as in beer) coding school, which opened just last month. Even the optional dorms are free. (Good news: laundry is also free! Bad news: you have to pay the dorm $75 a week if you want two meals a day.) Admittedly, it sounds totally crazy.

  • Public Services/Government

    • In limiting open source efforts, the government takes a costly gamble

      The vast majority of companies are now realizing the value of open sourcing their software and almost all have done so for at least certain projects. These days Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and almost every major company is releasing code to the open source community at a constant rate.

      As is the case with many cutting edge developments it’s taking governments a while to catch on and understand the value in going open source. But now governments around the world are beginning to take the view that as their software is funded by the public, it belongs to the public and should be open for public use and are starting to define codified policies for its release.

      [...]

      The vast majority of code is still not classified and therefore, much higher levels of open sourcing are possible. While a bigger embrace of open source may seem like a risk, the real danger lies in small, overly-cautious implementation which is costing taxpayers by the day and making us all less secure.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Hellwig Announces He Will Appeal VMware Ruling After Evidentiary Set Back in Lower Court
    • Linux developer loses GPL suit against VMware

      Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig has lost his case against virtualisation company VMware, which he had sued in March 2015 for violation of version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence.

      The verdict was issued in the Hamburg District Court on 7 August.

      Hellwig, who is the maintainer of the kernel’s SCSI sub-system, has said he would appeal. “I’m disappointed that the court didn’t even consider the actual case of reusing the Linux code written by me, and I hope the Court of Appeal will investigate this central aspect of the lawsuit,” he said in a statement.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Leftovers

  • Kenny Baker, actor behind R2-D2, dies

    The British actor who played R2-D2 in the Star Wars films has died at the age of 81 after a long illness. Kenny Baker, who was 3ft 8in tall, shot to fame in 1977 when he first played the robot character.

  • Science

    • Brain wiring needed for reading isn’t learned—it’s in place prior to reading

      Our brains are apparently really good at divvying up heavy mental loads. In the decades since scientists started taking snapshots of our noggins in action, they’ve spotted dozens of distinct brain regions in charge of specific tasks, such as reading and speech. Yet despite documenting this delegation, scientists still aren’t sure exactly how slices of our noodle get earmarked for specific functions. Are they preordained based entirely on anatomy, or are they assigned as wiring gets laid down during our development?

      A new study, published this week in Nature Neuroscience, adds more support for that latter hypothesis. Specifically, researchers at MIT scanned the brains of kids before and after they learned to read and found that they could pinpoint how the area responsible for that task would develop based on connectivity patterns. In other words, the neural circuitry and hookups laid down prior to reading determined where and how the brain region responsible for reading, the visual word form area, or VWFA, formed.

      “Long-range connections that allow this region to talk to other areas of the brain seem to drive function,” Zeynep Saygin, lead study author and researcher at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, said in a news release.

      The finding squares with researchers’ hunch that connectivity is key, plus previous findings from studies done on ferrets. In those experiments, researcher manually re-wired the brains of the developing mustelids, rerouting the input wires from the retina to a region of the brain normally tasked with handling sound input. In response, that auditory cortex developed distinct functions involved with vision. Thus, it’s connectivity, not other intrinsic features of brain regions, that might explain functional divisions, the researchers speculated.

    • Inside the IBM PC 5150: The first-ever IBM PC

      35 years ago (today), IBM launched the most influential commercial computer system of all time, the IBM PC 5150. Over the past three and a half decades, architectural descendants of this single machine have taken over the desktop, workstation, server, and even game console markets. And despite inroads from ARM-based smartphones, its digital descendants are still relied upon for just about all the heavy lifting in the computer industry.

      On the anniversary of such a monumentally important computer, I thought it would be instructive to take a deeper look into the machine that started it all. How? By taking apart one of these bad boys on my trusty workbench, of course. And that’s exactly what you’ll see in the slides ahead.

    • First wearable brain scanner to probe people with amazing gifts

      Take a walk while I look inside your brain. Scientists have developed the first wearable PET scanner – allowing them to capture the inner workings of the brain while a person is on the move. The team plans to use it to investigate the exceptional talents of savants, such as perfect memory or exceptional mathematical skill.

      All available techniques for scanning the deeper regions of our brains require a person to be perfectly still. This limits the kinds of activities we can observe the brain doing, but the new scanner will enable researchers to study brain behaviour in normal life, as well providing a better understanding of the tremors of Parkinson’s disease, and the effectiveness of treatments for stroke.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • How Factory Farming Is Giving Rise to Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs

      America is facing a real crisis in regard to antibiotics resistant infections, and factory farming is one of the main reasons.

      In May, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research reported the first U.S. case of Colistin-resistant infection, involving a patient in Pennsylvania. Also that month, researchers at USDA and Health and Human Services reported finding Colistin-resistant E. coli in a pig intestinal sample. Because Colistin is a last resort drug for treating superbug (multi-drug-resistant) infections, these discoveries signal we are that much closer to what has been referred to as a post-antibiotic era, where people will die from once-treatable infections.

    • Marijuana to remain illegal under federal law, DEA says

      Marijuana advocates who hoped the cascade of states moving to legalize medical marijuana would soften the federal stance on the drug faced disappointment Thursday as the Drug Enforcement Administration announced it will keep marijuana illegal for any purpose.

      Marijuana will remain a Schedule 1 substance under the Controlled Substances Act. Substances in Schedule 1 are determined by the Food and Drug Administration to have no medical use. States that allow marijuana for medical use or legalize recreational use remain in defiance of federal law.

      The announcement to be published Friday in the Federal Register relaxes the rules for marijuana research to make it easier for institutions to grow marijuana for scientific study. The DEA currently authorizes just one grow facility in Mississippi.

    • Stop Treating Marijuana Like Heroin

      Supporters of a saner marijuana policy scored a small victory this week when the Obama administration said it would authorize more institutions to grow marijuana for medical research. But the government passed up an opportunity to make a more significant change.

      The Drug Enforcement Administration on Thursday turned down two petitions — one from the governors of Rhode Island and Washington and the other from a resident of New Mexico — requesting that marijuana be removed from Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act. Drugs on that list, which include heroin and LSD, are deemed to have no medical use; possession is illegal under federal law, and researchers have to jump through many hoops to obtain permission to study them and obtain samples to study. Having marijuana on that list is deeply misguided since many scientists and President Obama have said that it is no more dangerous than alcohol.

    • Polio is back in Nigeria because Boko Haram kept kids from being vaccinated

      Polio is back in Nigeria, just when the World Health Organization thought the virus might be gone completely. Two kids have been paralyzed by the virus for the first time in two years, the WHO announced today. Both live in northeastern Nigeria, where it has been hard to vaccinate kids because the area is controlled by terrorist group Boko Haram. The government is now preparing an emergency immunization program as researchers fear a possible outbreak.

    • Farmers threaten new “tractor march” to protest govn’t budget

      The farming community is disappointed by the terms of the government’s draft budget proposal presented earlier this week. Some say that they feel betrayed, that the government has failed to keep promises made to the hard-pressed agricultural sector following a tractor march protest in the capital last spring. They intended to bring their protest, and their tractors, back to Helsinki to try again.

  • Security

    • One bug to rule them all: ‘State-supported’ Project Sauron malware attacks world’s top PCs

      Two top electronic security firms have discovered a new powerful malware suite being used to target just dozens of high-value targets around the world. The research shows that it was likely developed on the orders of a government engaging in cyber espionage.

      The California-based Symantec has labeled the group behind the attack Strider, while Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs dubbed it ProjectSauron. Both are references to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a nod to the fact that the original malware code contained the word “Sauron.”

    • Disable WPAD now or have your accounts and private data compromised

      The Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol (WPAD), enabled by default on Windows and supported by other operating systems, can expose computer users’ online accounts, web searches, and other private data, security researchers warn.

      Man-in-the-middle attackers can abuse the WPAD protocol to hijack people’s online accounts and steal their sensitive information even when they access websites over encrypted HTTPS or VPN connections, said Alex Chapman and Paul Stone, researchers with U.K.-based Context Information Security, during the DEF CON security conference this week.

    • With Anonymous’ latest attacks in Rio, the digital games have begun

      A wave of denial of service (DDoS) attacks on state and city websites followed immediately after Anonymous delivered their statement. The group boasted taking down at least five sites, including www.brasil2016.gov.br, www.rio2016.com, www.esporte.gov.br, www.cob.org.br and www.rj.gov.br. They broadcast their exploits using the hashtags #OpOlympicHacking, #Leaked and #TangoDown, some of which were set up months ago.



    • Kaminsky Advocates for Greater Cloud Security

      There are a lot of different reasons why organizations choose to move to the cloud and many reasons why they do not. Speaking at a press conference during the Black Hat USA security event, security researcher Dan Kaminsky provided his views on what’s wrong with the Internet today and where the cloud can fit in.

      “There’s a saying we have,” Kaminsky said. “There is no such thing as cloud, just other people’s computers.”

      While the cloud represents a utility model for computing, Kaminsky also suggests that there are ways to use the cloud to improve overall security. With the cloud, users and applications can be isolated or ‘sandboxed’ in a way that can limit risks.

      With proper configurations, including rate limiting approaches, the impact of data breaches could potentially be reduced as well. As an example, Kaminsky said that with rate limiting controls, only the money from a cash register is stolen by a hacker, as opposed to stealing all of a company’s corporate profits for a month.

    • Linux TCP Flaw allows Hackers to Hijack Internet Traffic and Inject Malware Remotely
    • Our Encrypted Email Service is Safe Against Linux TCP Vulnerability

      ProtonMail is not vulnerable to the recently announced Linux TCP Vulnerability

    • Troyan Virus Turns Linux Servers into Bitcoin Miners

      A new and dangerous computer virus has been targeting Linux servers, its goal: to turn computer servers into Bitcoin miners. The attack is aimed at environments running the Redis NoSQL database, the virus is also able to probe the network interfaces of its hosts to propagate itself.

      Approximately more than 30,000 servers running the Redis database are in danger due to the lack of an access password. The virus is named “Linux.Lady” and it was discovered first by the Russian IT-security solutions vendor Dr. Web. The company released a report on the virus, classifying it into the Troyan subcategory.

    • A New Wireless Hack Can Unlock 100 Million Volkswagens

      In 2013, when University of Birmingham computer scientist Flavio Garcia and a team of researchers were preparing to reveal a vulnerability that allowed them to start the ignition of millions of Volkswagen cars and drive them off without a key, they were hit with a lawsuit that delayed the publication of their research for two years. But that experience doesn’t seem to have deterred Garcia and his colleagues from probing more of VW’s flaws: Now, a year after that hack was finally publicized, Garcia and a new team of researchers are back with another paper that shows how Volkswagen left not only its ignition vulnerable but the keyless entry system that unlocks the vehicle’s doors, too. And this time, they say, the flaw applies to practically every car Volkswagen has sold since 1995.

    • Almost every Volkswagen sold since 1995 can be unlocked with an Arduino

      The first affects almost every car Volkswagen has sold since 1995, with only the latest Golf-based models in the clear. Led by Flavio Garcia at the University of Birmingham in the UK, the group of hackers reverse-engineered an undisclosed Volkswagen component to extract a cryptographic key value that is common to many of the company’s vehicles.

    • Road Warriors: Beware of ‘Video Jacking’

      A little-known feature of many modern smartphones is their ability to duplicate video on the device’s screen so that it also shows up on a much larger display — like a TV. However, new research shows that this feature may quietly expose users to a simple and cheap new form of digital eavesdropping.

      Dubbed “video jacking” by its masterminds, the attack uses custom electronics hidden inside what appears to be a USB charging station. As soon as you connect a vulnerable phone to the appropriate USB charging cord, the spy machine splits the phone’s video display and records a video of everything you tap, type or view on it as long as it’s plugged in — including PINs, passwords, account numbers, emails, texts, pictures and videos.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Clintons and Kissinger
    • Canadian Man Killed During Police Raid Had Built Online Life Around Supporting ISIS

      Aaron Driver was boarding a taxi outside his sister’s home in the small Canadian town of Strathroy, Ontario when armed law enforcement agents moved in to arrest him. Driver, 24, was known to local authorities as a prolific online supporter of Islamic State. He had previously been placed under government surveillance due to his social media postings and had received a judicial order in February banning him from use of the internet.

      Acting on a tip that Canadian authorities say came from the FBI, police on Wednesday descended on the home of Driver’s sister on suspicion he was planning to carry out an imminent terrorist attack. In Driver’s possession were two explosive devices. As police approached, he detonated one device while sitting in the backseat of the taxi, before being shot. He died in the encounter, while his taxi driver escaped with minor injuries.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Embrace of Kissinger Is Inexcusable

      Word comes from Politico that Hillary Clinton is courting the endorsement of Henry Kissinger. No surprise. Kissinger and the Clintons go back a ways, to when Bill in the early 1990s sought out Kissinger’s support to pass NAFTA and to, in the words of the economist Jeff Faux, serve as “the perfect tutor for a new Democratic president trying to convince Republicans and their business allies that they could count on him to champion Reagan’s vision.” Hillary has continued the apprenticeship, soliciting Kissinger’s advice and calling him “friend.”

      Still, Bernie Sanders, and Sanders supporters and surrogates, should use the Politico story to draw a line, making clear that they will withdraw their support of Clinton if Clinton accepts Kissinger’s endorsement. If Sanders stands for anything, it is the promise of decency and civil equality, qualities that he has worked hard to bestow on Clinton since the Democratic National Convention. By accepting Kissinger’s endorsement, Clinton wouldn’t just be mocking that gift. She’d be sending the clearest signal yet to grassroots peace and social-justice Democrats that her presidency wouldn’t be a “popular front” against Trumpian fascism. It would be bloody business as usual.

      Kissinger is a unique monster. He stands not as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s feared recklessness and immorality but as his progenitor. As Richard Nixon’s aide-de-camp, Kissinger helped plan and execute a murderous, illegal foreign policy—in Southeast and South Asia, Southern Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America—as reckless and immoral as anything Trump now portends. Millions died as a result of his actions. Kissinger and Nixon threatened to use nuclear weapons, and, indeed, Kissinger helped inscribe the threat of “limited nuclear war” into doctrine. Kissinger, in the 1970s, not only dug the hole that the greater Middle East finds itself in, but, as an influential cheerleader for both the first Gulf War in 1991 and its 2003 sequel, helped drive the United States into that ditch.

    • Muslim-American Gold Star Parents, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

      While Khizr and Ghazala Khan expressed much needed moral clarity about Donald Trump, their testimony helps to further remove from national consciousness and justify the immorality of our bi-partisan government’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. A war that world-renowned political analyst, activist and author Noam Chomsky has called, not a “mistake” but “the worst war crime in this Century.” (“Noam Chomsky: 2003 ‘Invasion of Iraq is the Worst Crime of 21st Century,” sputniknews.com, 10-28-2015)

      Three days after Khizr Khan’s powerful speech, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, speaking in a church, distanced herself from her support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and turned morality on its head. She said to a Christian congregation, “Mr. Khan paid the ultimate sacrifice in his family, didn’t he? . . . And what have we heard from Donald Trump?,“ she continued. “Nothing but insults, degrading comments about Muslims, a total misunderstanding of what made our country great.” (“Donald Trump’s Confrontation With Muslim Soldier’s Parents Emerges as Unexpected Flash Point,” By Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker, The New York Times, July 31, 2016) Never mind that Clinton herself is directly implicated in the unnecessary “ultimate sacrifice” of Khizr and Ghazala Khan’s son. Here, “what makes our country great” requires the all-encompassing moral universe to disappear for Iraqi children and mothers and fathers.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • The Assange case – time for the next step?

      There are signals from Ecuador suggesting that Swedish prosecutors soon might interview Wikileaks editor in chief Julian Assange, in the country’s embassy in London – where he has been taking refuge for some four years.

      From the Swedish prosecutor’s office (where everyone important seems to be on summer retreat) there are only vague comments. There are reasons to believe that the Swedes are in no hurry to get this done and over with.

      As the case has dragged out in time, there seems to be some confusion in medias reports. To refresh our memory…

      The Swedish case about sexual misconduct against Assange is very thin. There are reasons to believe that the case will be dropped altogether as soon as an interview has been conducted.

    • Sweden accepts Ecuador offer to interview Assange

      Sweden has made a formal request to Ecuador to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Quito’s embassy in London, where he has been holed up for more than four years.

      There was a standing offer from Ecuador to Sweden to conduct such an interview. Signs of a thaw in the impasse were reported last month.

      A request from Sweden to the Ecuadorian attorney-general has met with a positive response, according to a published report.

      “In the coming weeks a date will be established for the proceedings to be held at the Embassy of Ecuador in the United Kingdom,” according to a statement issued by Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Lakota Lead Native Americans, Ranchers and Farmers in Fight Against Dakota Access Pipeline

      Amidst the cries of “protect our water, protect our land, protect our peoples,” Native Americans, ranchers and farmers are standing their ground along a highway in North Dakota. They are blocking the crews of Energy Transfer Partners — a Dallas-based company whose workers are protected by both police and armed, private security personnel — from accessing the site of the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

      The roughly 1,200-mile-long pipeline would transfer about a half million barrels of oil a day from North Dakota to Illinois. Opponents of its construction worry that a leak or rupture would spell disaster for not only the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, but for all communities along the Missouri River that depend on it for drinking and agriculture.

    • The Government Quietly Just Approved This Enormous Oil Pipeline

      It took seven years of protests, sit-ins, letter writing, and, finally, a presidential review to prevent the Keystone XL oil pipeline from being built. Now, in a matter of months, America’s newest mega-pipeline—the Dakota Access Pipeline Project (DAPL)—has quietly received full regulatory permission to begin construction. Known also as the Bakken Pipeline, the project is slated to run 1,172 miles of 30-inch diameter pipe from North Dakota’s northwest Bakken region down to a market hub outside Patoka, Illinois, where it will join extant pipelines and travel onward to refineries and markets in the Gulf and on the East Coast. If that description gives you déjà vu, it should: The Bakken Pipeline is only seven miles shorter than Keystone’s proposed length.

    • SoCal hit with worst smog in years as hot, stagnant weather brings surge in hospital visits

      Southern California is experiencing its worst smog in years this summer as heat and stagnant weather increase the number of bad air days and drive up ozone pollution to levels not seen since 2009.

      Where pollution is worst, in the Inland Empire, hospitals and asthma clinics are reporting increases in patients seeking treatment for respiratory illness, their breathing difficulties exacerbated by the persistent heat and pollution.

      Ozone, the lung-searing gas in smog that triggers asthma and other health problems, has exceeded federal standards on 91 days so far this year compared to 67 days over the same period last year, according to South Coast Air Quality Management District data through Monday.

      In June, only four days had healthy air across the South Coast basin, which spans Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. In July, ozone levels violated federal health standards every day except July 31.

    • Deadly Wildfires on Portuguese Island of Madeira Reach Its Largest City

      Firefighters on the Portuguese island of Madeira continued on Thursday to battle wildfires that have reached Funchal, the island’s largest city, killing three people and destroying over 150 homes, while the national government sought help to deal with nearly 200 blazes on the mainland.

      Prime Minister António Costa planned to travel to Madeira on Thursday, and Portugal activated a European Union plan to get emergency assistance. Italy has already sent one firefighting aircraft. Madeira is the largest island in an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean that lies about 360 miles off the Moroccan coast, and about 600 miles southwest of Lisbon.

      The biggest fire on Madeira broke out on Monday and rapidly encroached on the residential outskirts of Funchal, home to about 110,000 people.

    • Indonesia Prepares for Another Dangerous Fire Season

      Last year, some of the biggest fires in recent history burned through parts of Indonesia.

      The fires sent huge clouds of smoke across Indonesia and its neighbors. They also produced large amounts of carbon dioxide. Studies have linked increasing carbon dioxide levels to rising temperatures in Earth’s atmosphere.

      For years, Indonesian farmers and businesses have cleared land for agriculture by setting fire to fields and undeveloped areas. This year’s fire season is to begin soon. But measures to limit the burning are now in place.

    • Asean countries agree on steps to fight haze, but refrain from pressuring Indonesia

      Asean countries agreed on contents within its roadmap to control the haze problem in a meeting on Thursday (Aug 11) to discuss the region’s next step to combat the perennial issue, but stopped short of exerting more pressure on Indonesia to take serious action against culprits of plantation fires.

      “We work together to overcome any problem but we can’t bulldoze through… We must respect others’ sovereignty,” Malaysian minister of natural resources and environment Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said at a joint press conference with his Asean counterparts at the end of the one-day 12th conference of the parties to the Asean Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution (AATHP) in Kuala Lumpur.

    • We’ve Already Used Up Earth’s Resources For 2016 — And It’s Only August

      It’s less than eight months into 2016 and the ominous day is already nearly upon us: Earth Overshoot Day, previously known as Ecological Debt Day, is a reminder of the enormous toll we take on the Earth.

      The day marks the juncture when humanity’s demand for ecological resources exceeds what the planet can replenish annually. In 2016, it falls on Monday, which means people have already consumed an entire year’s worth of the world’s resources ― and we still have four months to go until the year’s end.

      For the rest of 2016, we’ll be “living on resources borrowed from future generations,” as the World Wildlife Fund pointed out when we failed last year.

      Troublingly, this year’s Overshoot Day is happening earlier than ever before.

    • ‘They’re Trying to Poison Our Future,’ Resistance Heats Up to Stop ‘Black Snake’ From Slithering Through Midwest

      Resistance against a new Bakken crude pipeline stepped up this week with the arrest of 12 people on Thursday near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota.

      “They’re trying to lay a pipe across our water. They’re trying to poison our future,” said one of the people taking part in the action.

    • Twelve arrested at Dakota Access Pipeline protest

      Authorities in North Dakota have arrested a dozen people protesting the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline.

      Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said the 12 arrests as of Thursday evening were for disorderly conduct or criminal trespass.

      He says some protesters encroached on a zone established for workers’ safety. Those arrested were brought to the Morton County Correctional Center.

    • Leonardo DiCaprio Stands With Great Sioux Nation to Stop Dakota Access Pipeline

      Dakota Access—a subsidiary of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners LP—has proposed a $3.7 billion, 1,168-mile pipeline that will transfer up to 570,00 barrels of crude oil per day from the North Dakota Bakken region through South Dakota and Iowa into Illinois.

      The DAPL, also referred to as the Bakken pipeline, would cross the Missouri River less than a mile away from the Standing Rock Reservation that stands in North and South Dakota. The Missouri River, one of the largest water resources in the U.S., provides drinking water for millions of people.

      The people of Standing Rock, often called Sioux, warn that a potential oil spill into the river would threaten the water, land and health of their reservation.

      In DiCaprio’s tweet, the Oscar-winning actor and clean energy advocate said he was “standing with the Great Sioux Nation to protect their water and lands,” and linked to a Change.org petition that urges the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

    • EPA’s Own Advisory Board Demands Revision of Deeply Flawed Fracking Report

      The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Science Advisory Board, a panel of independent scientists, is calling on the agency to revise last year’s much-maligned report that declared fracking to have “no widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.”

    • EPA’s science advisers challenge agency report on the safety of fracking

      Science advisers to the Environmental Protection Agency Thursday challenged an already controversial government report on whether thousands of oil and gas wells that rely on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” systemically pollute drinking water across the nation.

      That EPA draft report, many years in the making and still not finalized, had concluded, “We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States,” adding that while there had been isolated problems, those were “small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells.”

      The conclusion was widely cited and interpreted to mean that while there may have been occasional contamination of water supplies, it was not a nationwide problem. Many environmental groups faulted the study, even as industry groups hailed it.

      But in a statement sure to prolong the already multiyear scientific debate on fracking and its influence on water, the 30-member advisory panel on Thursday concluded the agency’s report was “comprehensive but lacking in several critical areas.”

      It recommended that the report be revised to include “quantitative analysis that supports its conclusion” — if, indeed, this central conclusion can be defended.

    • EPA’s Fracking Finding Misled on Threat to Drinking Water, Scientists Conclude

      An Environmental Protection Agency panel of independent scientists has recommended the agency revise its conclusions in a major study released last year that minimized the potential hazards hydraulic fracturing poses to drinking water.

      The panel, known as the Science Advisory Board (SAB), issued on Thursday its nearly yearlong analysis of a June 2015 draft EPA report on fracking and water. In a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy that accompanied the analysis, the panel said the report’s core findings “that seek to draw national-level conclusions regarding the impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources” were “inconsistent with the observations, data and levels of uncertainty” detailed in the study.

      “Of particular concern,” the panel stated was the 2015 report’s overarching conclusion that fracking has not led to “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” The panel said that the EPA did not provide quantitative evidence to support the conclusion.

      “The SAB recommends that the EPA revise the major statements of findings in the Executive Summary and elsewhere in the final Assessment Report to clearly link these statements to evidence provided in the body of the final Assessment Report,” the panel wrote to McCarthy.

    • Statement on SAB Report Concerning Water Pollution from Fracking
    • Did federal agents spy on offshore oil lease protesters in New Orleans?

      This week the Center for Biological Diversity filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal agencies that oversee oil and gas leasing. The Aug. 11 filings came in response to a recent report by The Intercept that revealed several participants in a May protest of a fossil fuel auction in Lakewood, Colorado, were actually undercover agents sent by law enforcement to monitor the demonstration, and that they were relying on intelligence gathered by Anadarko Petroleum, a major Texas-based oil and gas producer.

    • Woman and dog dramatically rescued from floodwaters

      A dramatic video shows a woman and a dog being rescued after their car got swept up by floodwaters.

      Three men in a small boat battled to pull the woman from the convertible that had been swallowed by the flooded river in Baton Rouge in Louisiana.

      The woman could be heard yelling: “Oh my god, I’m drowning.”

  • Finance

    • Republicans have themselves to blame for the slow economy, study says

      The US’s slow recovery from the 2008 recession is due to Republican policies on the local, state and federal level, according to a new study published by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

    • How to Break the Power of Money

      Our current political chaos has a simple explanation. The economic system is driving environmental collapse, economic desperation, political corruption, and financial instability. And it isn’t working for the vast majority of people.

    • To Corner Trump on Finances, Clinton Releases Tax Returns
    • Clintons made $10.6 million in 2015, paid federal rate of 34%

      Hillary and Bill Clinton released their 2015 tax returns on Friday, showing they paid $3.6 million in taxes on adjusted gross income of $10.6 million.

      The release appeared to be aimed at drawing renewed attention to Donald Trump’s refusal to release his own tax records.

    • Food startup Deliveroo raises $275M as Uber eats into its European market

      Deliveroo, a popular on-demand restaurant food delivery startup in Europe, has raised another $275 million in funding, a Series E investment that we have heard from sources values the company at around $1 billion. This latest round is led by new investor, Bridgepoint, previous investors DST Global and General Catalyst, and also had participation from existing investor Greenoaks Capital.

      Deliveroo says the investment will go into growing its service in both new and existing markets, where it’s now live in 84 cities. It’s also going to keep investing in its new initiatives. These include a new B2B remote kitchen service, RooBox, which gives restaurants access to delivery-only kitchens in key locations. Other new services have included an expansion into alcohol delivery.

      Deliveroo, which is not confirming its valuation, has now raised $475 million to date.

      This latest funding comes at a time when the startup is facing a lot of heat from others who are also targeting the higher, foodie end of the prepared food market (typical Deliveroo restaurants include artisanal pizza and burger joints, trendy Middle Eastern delis, and hipster donut bakeries).

    • Why the Next President Should Forgive All Student Loans

      Particularly for younger voters and voters with families, she has to capture their imaginations with a bold, simple, and common sense proposal to address one of the most critical financial and social problems currently facing a generation: the student loan crisis. And she needs to do so in a way that can do the most immediate good for the nation at large.

    • One-Third of Americans Have Nothing Saved for Retirement. Here’s How to Fix That.

      Big airport restrooms get messy fast. So, the management at Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam came up with a clever solution: The airport etched an image of a black fly near the drain in the airports’ urinals. According to their measures, cleanliness increased by 80 percent. As New Republic put it, “It turns out that, if you give men a target, they can’t help but aim at it.”

    • Dear Wendy’s: I’m Boycotting You, but I’m Not the One You Should Be Worried About

      In the summer of 1988 I worked in Lowell, Massachusetts painting houses.

      The pay was lousy, the heat oppressive, and the work was exhausting. Many nights I would collapse, fully clothed, on my mattress on the floor of the dingy, mouse-infested apartment I rented.

      But before I hit the sack, there was one thing I usually looked forward to: your Superbar (now defunct). For about $3.00 I could get my fill of salad, fruit, Mexican food, and pasta.

      And that’s the only reason I’m writing you today, Wendy’s. I have nostalgic feelings for your SuperBar, even though I now know it’s tainted. But I’m offering you a heads up anyway: the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is coming for you, and you will lose.

    • Are human rights treaties a “reputational umbrella” for foreign investment?

      Evidence suggests that human rights treaties provide a reputational shield for companies to invest in the worst rights-violating countries.

    • Thousands Moving Money to Black-Owned Banks

      The latest response to discrimination and police brutality is renewed calls to #BankBlack and bring economic empowerment to struggling communities.

    • What Does Trump Have to Hide? A Tiny Tax Return

      What does Donald Trump have to hide? The New York Times interviewed tax and real estate experts and reports that it’s likely the billionaire and Republican presidential candidate pays zero taxes – legally – taking full advantage of the loopholes available to the superwealthy.

      The previous nine Republican nominees have released their tax information – it’s a routine request. Mitt Romney balked about releasing his federal returns, understandably since they showed he paid about 14 percent of his income in taxes, well below the burden shouldered by everyday folks the U.S.

    • How Did Trump’s and Clinton’s Economic Policy Speeches Compare?

      Despite the vast differences between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, there were some striking similarities between the economic speeches they delivered this week. They both spoke in Michigan, where they both talked a lot about manufacturing, with both of them insisting that they would obtain fairer trade deals.

    • Where the Presidential Candidates Stand on Their Tax Returns

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • In private dealings, Trump lies constantly and without apparent purpose

      In 2007, Trump was suing a reporter who exposed unflattering facts about his true level of wealth. The Washington Post reports on a 2007 deposition, related to Donald Trump’s failed lawsuit over the expose, in which he was nailed to a series of “falsehoods and exaggerations” remarkable in just how pointless and stupid they were.

    • Wordsmiths

      A report in Politico describes the various things Ms. Clinton has said over the past year with respect to her e mail usage while serving as Secretary of State. It then contrasts her statements with FBI Director, James Comey’s testimony before the House Benghazi Committee in early July. Among other things, Mr. Comey contradicted Ms. Clinton’s assertion (a) that while serving as Secretary of State she used only one device (he said she used four), (b) that she returned all work-related e mails to the state department (he said thousands were not returned), and (c) that she did not e mail “any classified material to anyone on my email” (Comey said “there was classified material emailed.”)

      When Ms. Clinton was speaking to a convention of black and Hispanic journalists in Washington on August 5 2016, the e mail question once again presented itself. Ms. Clinton asserted that she did not lie to the FBI (which no one has disputed since no one knows what she said to the FBI) but then made a convoluted explanation that introduces us to the new use of the word “short circuit.” She told the assembled journalists: “What I told the FBI-which he [Comey] said was truthful-is consistent with what I have said publicly.” That, of course, seems to be untrue when considered in the context of Mr. Comey’s testimony before the Congressional Subcommittee. Continuing her explanation to the assembled journalists she said: “I may have short circuited, and for that, I will try to clarify.” Here follows an example of how those two words can be used in common situations in which readers may, from time to time, find themselves.

    • For the Record: Clinton email scandal, version 3.0

      Hey everyone, we need help looking for a friend of ours. We got into an argument; we said “Pokemon is the only video game that could translate to the real world,” and he said, “No, you totally could make Donkey Kong into a real-life game,” and the last time we heard from him, he was trying to rent a gorilla and a bunch of barrels and have them delivered to the top of Trump Tower. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

      Meanwhile, on the ground, more emails spell more trouble for Clinton after a new crop show some uncomfortable closeness between her team at State and the Clinton Foundation. But she got some good news when a ton of Republicans and independents joined her team.

    • Hack of Democrats’ Accounts Was Wider Than Believed, Officials Say

      Officials have acknowledged that the Russian hackers gained access to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is the fund-raising arm for House Democrats, and to the Democratic National Committee, including a D.N.C. voter analytics program used by Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.

      But the hack now appears to have extended well beyond those groups, and organizations like the Democratic Governors’ Association may also have been affected, according to Democrats involved in the investigation. However, in a statement Thursday, the governors association said it “was informed that our analytics data was not compromised as part of the D.N.C. breach that affected the Clinton campaign.”

      The group added that “we have no reason to believe that any D.G.A. emails were compromised by the D.N.C. breach.”

    • Clinton strategist: Kill Julian Assange

      It seems like some Hillary Clinton supporters are now fully on-board with the time-tested mafia-favored strategy of “kill-the-guy.” Democratic strategist Bob Beckel, referring to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told a Fox Business host panel that “a dead man can’t leak stuff,” and that someone should “illegally shoot the son of a b*tch.” These comments come after the famed whistle-blower implied that 27 year-old DNC staffer Seth Rich, recently (and mysteriously) murdered in Washington DC, was a Wikileaks source connected to the DNC email scandal.

    • Perv sat behind Trump while he blasted Clinton for shooter’s dad at rally

      Trump’s buffoonery is so outrageous, you just couldn’t make this stuff up. He may have topped himself in last night’s performance at his rally in Sunrise, Florida, when he went on about how horrible it was that Hillary Clinton allowed the Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen’s father to sit behind her at one of her rallies this last week.

      “When you get those seats, you sort of know the campaign, so when she [Hillary Clinton] said, ‘Well we didn’t know’…They knew!” Trump shouted. “Wasn’t it terrible when the father of the animal that killed the wonderful people in Orlando was sitting with a big smile on his face?” Trump turned to the people behind him. “How many of you people know me? A lot of you know me!”

      And here is the punchline. Disgraced animal ex-congressman Mark Foley was sitting right behind Trump at his rally, and even raised his hand to say that yes, he knows Trump. Mark Foley was a republican congressman from 1995-2006, but had to resign after he was caught sending explicitly sexual emails and instant messages to teenage boys. He and Trump have been chums since 1987.

    • Another Democratic Party Group Hacked: ‘Even Easier Than DNC Breach’

      The hacker or hackers known as Guccifer 2.0 on Friday claimed credit for a new leak of information, this time from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, writing on their blog, “It was even easier than in the case of the DNC breach.”

      Guccifer 2.0 already claimed responsiblity in June for three document dumps from the DNC, or Democratic National Committee, servers. The separate hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, meanwhile, was first reported in late July.

      The newly published documents include “cellphone numbers and other personal information of nearly 200 current and former congressional Democrats,” as the Wall Street Journal reported; they also appear to include “shared passwords for the committee shared accounts to various news services, Lexis, and a federal courts public access system called PACER,” NBC News adds.

      Further, they include “what purports to be documents stolen from the computer of Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking Democrat in Congress,” as the International Business Times reports.

      The hacker continues: “As you see the U.S. presidential elections are becoming a farce, a big political performance where the voters are far from playing the leading role. Everything is being settled behind the scenes as it was with Bernie Sanders.”

      “I wonder what happened to the true democracy, to the equal opportunities, the things we love the United States for. The big money bags are fighting for power today. They are lying constantly and don’t keep their word. The MSM [corporate media] are producing tons of propaganda hiding the real stuff behind it. But I do believe that people have [the] right to know what’s going on inside the election process in fact.”

    • Let the Battle of the Lesser Evils Commence

      Now that the Democratic and the Republican Party conventions are over, the U.S. presidential campaign is entering its last phase before the actual vote in November. Normally this should the point at which each party is very internally united and focusing on presenting its own program and attacking the opponent. However this time around, it seems each party continues to be more divided than ever. More and more Republicans are defecting from Donald Trump. And on the Democratic side, the debate is still raging about who supporters of Bernie Sanders should vote for in November. With us to present his analysis of the post-conventions and the U.S. elections, is Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City. His latest book is “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.”

    • The Biggest Spender Backing Donald Trump? The NRA.

      The NRA has spent $6 million in TV ads on behalf of the Republican presidential candidate, which is $6 million more than the Trump campaign has spent on itself. (A super PAC, Rebuilding America Now, claimed in June to have $32 million in commitments from four donors, but has only spent $5 million on ads to date. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson once made a pledge to create his own $100 million super PAC, but as of July has not followed through.)

    • Hillary Clinton Does Not Represent All Women—and Makes Some Feel Powerless

      Hillary Clinton is the first woman ever to get the presidential nomination from a major political party in the history of the United States. This is, of course, a historic, and long overdue, moment. For many feminists, the nomination is a pretty straightforward, unambiguous victory for women and cause for celebration. For others, however, it’s complicated.

      Of course, no feminist would defend the uninterrupted male lineage of the presidency. For feminist critics of Clinton, the problem lies not in her gender but in her track record, policies and positions, many of which have had a less than liberating effect on women.

      As a feminist, I find myself moved, from time to time, when I think of how hard so many people have fought over the generations to make such a nomination possible. The undeniable sexism, misogyny and double standards Clinton has faced (though not on a structural level) occasionally fill me with a sense of compassion, solidarity, “get it girl” camaraderie and pride.

    • Donald Trump and His Words, Words, Words

      Merriam-Webster defines sacrifice as “the act of giving up something that you want to keep especially in order to get or do something else or to help someone.” Trump was not able to name one true sacrifice. Trump has only and always taken for himself.

      In the past week, Trump got away with another whopper. After dominating the news cycle for 36 solid hours with his ridiculous claim that President Obama is the founder of Islamic State, he chastised the media for not recognizing that he was being “sarcastic.”

      He clearly doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

      He could have said he was being silly, ridiculous or unserious, but sarcastic? Sarcasm requires that the words used convey a meaning opposite to what the speaker truly believes or means. Had Trump said, “Obama is the greatest president in world history,” the media would immediately understand that he was being sarcastic because so much of what he has said indicates the true disdain in which he holds the president.

    • Did Companies and Countries Buy State Department Access by Donating to Clinton Foundation?

      Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Grimaldi of The Wall Street Journal, who has covered the Clinton Foundation for years, looks at the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, and what it would be if she became president. Newly released State Department emails include exchanges between top members of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s top State Department advisers, including Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. The FBI reportedly wanted to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, but US Attorney General Loretta Lynch pushed back.

    • #NeverNeverTrump: What’s Evan McMullin Really After?

      Echoing those promises, a shadowy group calling itself “Better For America,” funded by Mitt Romney associate John Kingston III, has been doing prep work for that unnamed candidate.

      On August 8 the suspense, such as it was, came to an end. The candidate is David Evan McMullin, a name unfamiliar to voters but well-known on Capitol Hill. Starting as an adviser to congressional Republicans on national security issues, he rose to the position of GOP House policy chief. Now he’s running for president.

    • Congress: AWOL and Out of Control

      Members of Congress do not have time for this responsibility when they are spending so much of their workday asking for money and implying agreement with the demands of the “monied interests,” to use Thomas Jefferson’s phrase.

      This is why Congressman Jolly introduced the “Stop Act,” which would ban all federally-elected officials from directly soliciting donations. Members of Congress can attend fund-raisers but others would have to ask for the money. No more direct telephone calls to the “fat cats” for checks. So far he only has nine co-sponsors for his bill.

      Congressman Jolly says this is not “campaign finance reform,” it is “Congressional reform,” adding “members of Congress spend too much time raising money and not enough time doing their job. Get back to work. And do your job.”

      Hey America! No more withdrawal cynicism. Shaping up or shipping out your members of Congress can be our great national civic hobby! There are plenty of opportunities for improvement and it could be lots of fun. Don’t forget there are only 535 of them and they put their shoes on every day like we do!

      Start small and build. Announce to your lawmakers with a letterhead – “Congress Watchdogs from the xxx Congressional District. The people want you to do your jobs!” The benefits of this effort are better lives and livelihoods for all Americans.”

    • Dual Power as the Route to Democratic Socialism, Sanders or No Sanders

      Right now I am working to build such a WSDE with my Rhode Island Media Cooperative (RIMediaCoop.org). On the front end, it is intended to be a news aggregator for progressive/leftists, particularly Sanders supporters, that brings together RSS feeds from various news websites that are willing to be anti-imperial and critical of the Democratic Party, such as RT, TeleSur, PressTV, CounterPunch, and a few other favorites. This is augmented by original content from local media creators (actors, filmmakers, artists, writers) that effectively showcases material for potential clients.

      On the back end, the intention is to get enough members who want to go to our local healthcare exchange, HealthSourceRI, to buy a small group insurance plan that would be complimented with a health savings account (HSA) to pay for expenses like copays and deductibles. We also would work on retirement by having a meeting to select a financial institute with which we would all open individual retirement accounts (IRAs). After a year of paying into the institute, say 20 people putting in $1,000 each, you have people with $20,000 worth of leverage that can be utilized when cosigning a loan for cooperative business infrastructure. This method can also be utilized, by the way, with the aforementioned small businesses that would transition to a cooperative.

      Wolff has created here a schematic that uses the culture shift from Keynesian to neoclassical economics in public policy to the advantage of the working class. It is meeting neoliberals like Gov. Raimondo on their turf and using free markets and deregulation to build a new society from where the old has absconded their responsibilities. The neoliberal state is the exoskeleton in which a WSDE economic order can grow until it is ready to burst out of that shell and give way to the withering of the state. And this is because he has effectively created a dialectical antithesis of a union organizing drive while keeping democratic control central.

      This year is the 80th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War, an event that has reached a fetishized level of adulation on the Left for reasons that are beyond the scope of this discussion. Yet in all the debate that occurs over who is responsible for the fall of the Republic, there is, objectively speaking, a failure to account for how the Republic survived. It was the Mondragon cooperative, founded by Basque Father José María Arizmendiarrieta Madariaga, which came about under Franco’s rule that serves as the model Wolff has adopted for this project. The corollary of that story is that such a movement must have within its orientation room for those who are not leftists. So too must things be here in America. By creating full employment, we create far less pressure on the working class, the primary engine of reactionary chauvinism driving the Trump base. Simultaneously, we begin to have the conversations with white workers that politically educates them about chauvinism with what Fr. Madariaga would have called grace.

      Putting it another way, conventional wisdom in Providence is that you don’t vote for politicians, you buy them. In that vein, why not get the best democratic socialism money can buy and cut the middleman, the state, out of the process like they wish to be?

    • Donald Trump Makes It Very Hard to Figure Out What He Really Thinks

      Video of the comments from NBC News showed that Trump then accused the media of intentionally distorting his words, pointing at the assembled press corps and telling the crowd, “these people are the lowest form of life.”

      As his supporters cheered, the candidate then executed another half pivot. “They are the lowest form of humanity!” Trump bellowed. “Not all of them, they have about 25 percent that are pretty good actually, but most of them.”

      The meandering, jokey way Trump speaks, riffing on subjects like a stand-up comic working out his material live on stage, makes the task of reporting his comments unusually challenging.

    • Newly released Clinton emails shed light on relationship between State Dept. and Clinton Foundation

      Newly released emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state raise questions about the nature of the department’s relationship with the Clinton Foundation.
      Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, released 296 pages of emails from the Democratic presidential nominee, including 44 that Judicial Watch says were not previously handed over to the State Department by Clinton. The emails, many of which are heavily redacted, raise questions about the Clinton Foundation’s influence on the State Department and its relations during her tenure.

    • Bill Clinton, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson and Sean Reyes Make History in Las Vegas
    • In Tweetstorm, Bernie Sanders Eviscerates Donald Trump on Trade and Taxes

      Bernie Sanders bore down on Donald Trump’s economic agenda in a series of tweets on Friday morning, calling him “the poster child of failed trade policies.”

      The social media take-down began with Sanders posting a link to a Washington Post story from earlier this week, which revealed how a “little-noticed provision in Donald Trump’s tax reform plan has the potential to deliver a large tax cut to companies in the Republican presidential nominee’s vast business empire.”

    • Sanders Statement on Push to Pass Pacific Trade Pact
    • ‘Disappointed’ in Obama, Sanders Calls on Top Dems to Drop Lame Duck TPP Push

      Hillary Clinton may not have heeded progressives’ call to clearly say she’ll urge the White House and her fellow party members to oppose a “lame-duck” vote on the Trans Pacific Partnership, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has done just that, calling on Democratic Congressional leadership to publicly oppose a post-Election Day vote on the “job-killing trade deal.”

    • ABC LIVE POLL: Who Are You Voting For? [Ed: Greens growing fast]
    • Donations From Gov’t To Clinton Foundation Sparks Scandal In Norway

      Daily newspaper Dagbladet has tracked $89.6 million of contributions back to Norway. Foreign Minister Børge Brende violated the government’s own policies by handing $3.57 million from the foreign aid budget to the Clinton Foundation, according to an internal memo.

      The government and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation both split up donations into different channels of the Clinton Foundation in an attempt to make each contribution look smaller than it was.

    • Clinton Received Millions From Sharia Law Teaching Firm

      Former President Bill Clinton received $5.6 million in fees from a Dubai-based firm that teaches Sharia law through a network of more than 100 schools worldwide.

      Clinton served as the honorary chairman of the company GEMS Education from 2011 to 2014, the Daily Caller reported this week, citing Clinton’s federal tax returns.

      GEMS Education teaches Sharia law in over 100 schools around the world, including in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. One of the company’s schools, located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, taught 1,600 students in 2013. Saudi Arabia is known for enforcing Wahhabism, a fundamentalist view of Islam that strictly adheres to Sharia law.

      Sharia law is an Islamic legal system that many in the West believe violates human rights and represses women and various minority groups.

    • Labour MPs call on David Miliband to return and topple Jeremy Corbyn as leader

      Labour MPs are appealing to David Miliband to return to UK politics in a desperate bid to oust Jeremy Corbyn .

      Senior backbenchers want Miliband, who quit politics to run a charity in the US, back here as quickly as possible.

      And they say one possible route would be for him to stand in the Batley and Spen seat left empty by the killing of Jo Cox.

      No date has been set for a by-election but rumours are growing that the solid Labour seat would be ideal for Miliband.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Apple at BlackHat: Reopening the “Going Dark” Debate

      Just over a week ago, at the BlackHat hacker convention in Las Vegas, Ivan Krstić, Head of Security Engineering and Architecture at Apple gave a talk entitled “Behind the scenes of iOS Security,” the slides of which are available here.

      It’s a historic talk for a couple of reasons. First, Apple is traditionally very secretive about how it technically does security on its devices. Apple also announced its first bug bounty program. So far, so newsworthy.

      But something else happened at that talk. Unbeknownst to the presenter or anybody in the audience, Apple just reopened the “Going Dark” dispute between the FBI and the privacy community, and it turned the entire dispute on its head. In the cold light of day, I suspect Apple, the US government, and privacy activists are going to be rather unhappy when they digest the sobering implications of the talk, though they will likely be upset for entirely different reasons.

    • Why Facebook Will Win the Ad-Blocking War

      Facebook will disable the ad-blocker’s blocker blocking

      The back-and-forth between Facebook and ad-blocking software companies has become almost farcical at this point: After Facebook said it would block the use of ad blockers, the leading ad-blocking company announced that it will block the use of Facebook’s ad-blocker blocker. And now Facebook says it is rolling out a fix that will disable the ad-blocker’s blocker blocking.

      As humorous as this cat-and-mouse battle may seem, there is a serious principle at stake for Facebook. If it can’t reliably ensure that users are seeing its advertising, then the $1 billion it currently makes on desktop ads is potentially in jeopardy, and questions might also be raised about its ability to display ads on mobile too, which is a $5-billion business.

    • LinkedIn suffers huge bot attack that steals members’ personal data

      Data thieves used a massive “botnet” against professional networking site LinkedIn and stole member’s personal information, a new lawsuit reveals.

      The Mountain View firm filed the federal suit this week in an attempt to uncover the perpetrators.

      “LinkedIn members populate their profiles with a wide range of information concerning their professional lives, including summaries (narratives about themselves), job histories, skills, interests, educational background, professional awards, photographs and other information,” said the company’s complaint, filed in Northern California U.S. District Court.

      “During periods of time since December 2015, and to this day, unknown persons and/or entities employing various automated software programs (often referred to as ‘bots’) have extracted and copied data from many LinkedIn pages.”

      It is unclear to what extent LinkedIn has been able to stymie the attack. A statement from the firm’s legal team suggests one avenue of penetration has been permanently closed, but does not address other means of incursion listed in the lawsuit.

    • The Internet Doesn’t Route Around Surveillance

      One of the most famous quotes about the web says that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” But what about surveillance? Is it possible to make the internet route around spying?

      In the last few years, especially after revelations of pervasive monitoring by the NSA and its British sister spy agency the GCHQ, some countries, Brazil being the most vocal, have publicly announced their intentions to avoid sending internet traffic to the US and the UK in an effort to dodge surveillance.

      As it turns out, all internet pipes lead to surveillance. Or, at least, it’s really hard—if not impossible—to avoid routing web traffic through surveillance states like the United States, according to a recent paper by a group of Princeton University researchers.

    • How connected car tech is eroding personal privacy

      All he wanted was to disable a device in his car: An always-on, net-connected “helper” that provides the car’s driver with app connections, turn-by-turn navigation, and roadside assistance… at the expense of personal driving data. Similar devices track how fast you’re going, how hard you ride the brakes, even your final destination. And all that info gets sent back to the manufacturer. Scannell wanted out. Unfortunately, it was easier said than done.

      You see, Scannell is a security guy. And, while Scannell thought these features of the Car-Net system in his new Volkswagen Golf were pretty neat, for him the system was a lot more than the “partner” that VW advertises. But he’s been in privacy for years. In fact, it’s literally his job — he’s an adviser for security start-ups. And he knows all too well how simple it is to hack into a system with an open internet connection. For him, Car-Net wasn’t a helper. It was an opening for companies to spy on him. For a hacker to take control over his steering wheel. To find himself in a potentially dangerous situation.

      It’s a reality that is present in basically every single new car that hits the market these days. Our cars are all waking up and coming online. The companies that manufacture them are filling each one full of hundreds of sensors that capture endless amounts of data about us and how we drive. It’s the last bastion of consumer information.

      And just like your mobile phone, which has been spying on you for years, your car is not your friend.

    • Tor creates ‘social contract’ promising never to harm users

      ANONYMITY ENGINE and gateway to the dark web Tor has announced what it calls a “social contract” with its users, guaranteeing that the group won’t install backdoors or other nasties.

      Tor, formerly an abbreviation of The Onion Router, actually received a great deal of the money that keeps it alive from the US government (although not the NSA obviously) and the Tor Social Contract should act as further reassurance that there is no conflict of interest.

      The organisation is already licking its wounds after one of its developers, Jacob Appelbaum, was forced to step down in June amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

      Meanwhile, the FBI is said to have cracked Tor using students with funding from the US Department of Defence. That’s a lot of government organisations at odds.

    • Canadian court rules that your text messages are not as private as you think they are

      If you expect text messages privately sent to others to not be used against you in court, you might need to tweak that expectation in a big way, if a new ruling from the Ontario Court of Appeal sets a future precedent, reports Vice.

      The case at hand centers around Nour Marakah and Andrew Winchester, both of whom authorities charged with gun trafficking. Through an investigation launched against Winchester sometime in 2012, law enforcement learned that he legally purchased 45 firearms during a six-month span, only to turn around and illegally sell them.

    • ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library

      OpenPGPjs is the world’s most popular JavaScript PGP email encryption library and is used by millions of end users and hundreds of developers.

    • The Internet of Onions

      In brief, Home Assistant is a Python-based tool that provides a single web interface for a wide range of individual IoT devices. Freitas’s contribution is a network configuration that routes Home Assistant’s web interface over a Tor Hidden Service (so that it can only be accessed by a Tor-enabled browser via a special .onion domain name).

    • NSA Cracks Bavaria Attackers, Daesh Encrypted Correspondence

      The US National Security Agency (NSA) has helped German investigators to decipher coded messages sent by the Daesh jihadist group’s masterminds to the perpetrators of recent terror attacks in Bavaria, local media reported Saturday, citing sources close to the probe.

    • Germany asks NSA to decipher Bavaria attackers’ chat with ISIS mastermind – report

      According to chats with the IS affiliate, the Wurzburg attacker, 17-year-old Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, who injured five people with an axe and a knife on a train on July 18, was initially supposed to drive a car into a crowd. The plan was later abandoned because the minor didn’t have a driving license, and Ahmadzai said he would attack commuters on a train instead.

    • French Government Wants A ‘Global Initiative’ To Undermine Encryption And Put Everyone At Risk

      Remember, of course, that much of the planning and communications for the Paris attacks last year were done without encryption, and in fact much of the planning was done fairly out in the open with little effort to mask what was happening. Of course, that won’t always be true — and certainly it’s quite likely that people are plotting all sorts of nasty stuff with encryption — but even then that doesn’t actually result in law enforcement “going dark” as they’d have you believe. First of all, encryption is still difficult to use and easy to mess up. In fact, most reports suggest that ISIS is pretty bad about its opsec when it comes to encryption. And, even if they are successfully using encryption, they still leave plenty of other breadcrumbs for law enforcement and the intelligence community to track.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • How Many Children Are Tasered By School Police? It’s Hard to Tell

      How many children are Tasered by school police officers? It’s hard to tell. This investigation found at least 84 incidents of children being Tasered by school police — and that number is probably a huge underestimation, because there is no organization that tracks use of Tasers in schools.

    • Set To Stun

      Children are being Tasered by school-based police officers. No one knows how often it’s happening or what impact it’s having on students.

    • Private federal prisons more dangerous, damning DoJ investigation reveals

      Privately operated government prisons, which mostly detain migrants convicted of immigration offenses, are drastically more unsafe and punitive than other prisons in the federal system, a stinging investigation by the US Department of Justice’s inspector general has found.

      Inmates at these 14 contract prisons, the only centers in the federal prison system that are privately operated, were nine times more likely to be placed on lockdown than inmates at other federal prisons and were frequently subjected to arbitrary solitary confinement. In two of the three contract prisons investigators routinely visited, new inmates were automatically placed in solitary confinement as a way of combating overcrowding, rather than for disciplinary issues.

      The review also found that contract prison inmates were more likely to complain about medical care, treatment by prison staff and about the quality of food.

    • End Prisons-for-Profit

      On Thursday the U.S. Department of Justice inspector general released a scathing report on the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ monitoring of “contract prisons,” a shadow network of private, for-profit prisons that hold about 11 percent of the nation’s 193,000 federal prisoners.

    • Revealed: Private Federal Prisons More Abusive and Violent
    • Refugee Trauma on Nauru: the Leaked Incident Reports

      Human sensibility has been given another sound beating with the leak of 2,116 incident reports from Australia’s remorseless detention camp on Nauru. The reports total some 8,000 pages covering the period of May 2013 to October 2015 and were published by the Guardian on Wednesday.[1]

      The newspaper notes that children are heavily, in fact “vastly over-represented in the reports” featuring in a total of 1,086 incidents despite making up only 18 percent of the detained population. Even the bureaucratic “ratings” of harm and risk given by the private security firm Wilson’s can’t varnish the brutalities.

    • Risks from Trump’s Reckless Invective

      One of the more pertinent observations about Donald Trump’s comment this week on what gun owners could do about a Hillary Clinton presidency comes from columnist Thomas Friedman, who recalls the assassination in Israel 21 years ago of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The assassination was preceded by a stream of hateful invective with violent overtones directed by elements on the Israeli right against Rabin — for his having taken a step, in the form of the Oslo accords, toward making peace with the Palestinians.

      The invective was condoned rather than condemned by prominent political leaders on the right, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The inflammatory rhetoric and its widespread toleration helped to convince the assassin that his lethal act would be not only widely accepted but even legitimate. This whole tragic and abominable story is told in detail in Dan Ephron’s gripping book Killing a King, wh

    • We Shouldn’t Wait Another Fifteen Years for a Conversation About Government Hacking

      With high-profile hacks in the headlines and government officials trying to reopen a long-settled debate about encryption, information security has become a mainstream issue. But we feel that one element of digital security hasn’t received enough critical attention: the role of government in acquiring and exploiting vulnerabilities and hacking for law enforcement and intelligence purposes. That’s why EFF recently published some thoughts on a positive agenda for reforming how the government, obtains, creates, and uses vulnerabilities in our systems for a variety of purposes, from overseas espionage and cyberwarfare to domestic law enforcement investigations.

      Some influential commentators like Dave Aitel at Lawfare have questioned whether we at EFF should be advocating for these changes, because pursuing any controls on how the government uses exploits would be “getting ahead of the technology.” But anyone who follows our work should know we don’t call for new laws lightly.

      To be clear: We are emphatically not calling for regulation of security research or exploit sales. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how any such regulation would pass constitutional scrutiny. We are calling for a conversation around how the government uses that technology. We’re fans of transparency; we think technology policy should be subject to broad public debate, heavily informed by the views of technical experts. The agenda in the previous post outlined calls for exactly that.

    • The Other Olympic Sports: Racism, Sexism, Outing Gay Athletes From Violently Homophobic Countries

      Amidst the graft, excess, sniping, jingoism, and social and environmental devastation that is the Olympics in Rio – where so many poor residents have been internally displaced some observers have dubbed it “the city of shame,” the poignant presence of Olympic refugees has suggested the alarming normalization of mass exile as a Refugee Nation, and protesters have organized The Exclusion Games because the real ones are “not for the people who live here” – there have been many moments of remarkable drama and athletic perfection. Mostly notable have been the gold-winning triumphs of the two young African-American Simones – the gymnast Simone Biles and the swimmer Simone Manuel. But their and others’ real achievements were too often met by stunningly tone-deaf, face-palm-worthy media coverage that repeatedly exposed the rampant sexism, racism and cultural obliviousness of so much mainstream America journalism.

      Biles’ astonishing performances were met with well-earned praise – some have hailed her the world’s greatest athlete – but also insulting lapses, like Fox inexplicably covering not her astonishing floor performance but bad Russian ones from the past and stammering coverage of her difficult childhood and adoption; she quickly shut it down with the concise, “My parents are my parents.” Manuel’s surprise victory in the 100-meter freestyle – making her the first African-American woman to win an individual medal in swimming – the same night as a Phelps victory was heralded in one blindingly offensive headline: “Michael Phelps Shares Historic Night with African-American.” The ensuing outrage brought a change of headline and some suggested improvements, like, “Simone Manuel Shares Historic Night with White Guy.” At every turn, the athletes rose above their often-tawdry treatment: After her victory, a tearful Manuel acknowledged “the weight of the black community” and declared, “This medal is not just for me. It’s for a whole bunch of people that came before me and have been an inspiration to me. It’s for all the people after me, who believe they can’t do it.” Ultimately, Biles offered the best-ever retort to the idiocy: “I’m not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps,” she said. “I’m the first Simone Biles.”

    • Team Refugee and the Normalization of Mass Displacement

      It was after midnight when the small refugee Olympic team strode into the stadium in Rio, the very last before host country Brazil’s huge contingent danced in to the samba-driven opening ceremonies. Ten amazing athletes, originally from four separate countries but sharing their status as unable to return home, marching under the Olympic flag.

    • The Rampant Sexism on Display at the Rio Olympics

      On Thursday night, American swimmer Simone Manuel tied with Canadian Penny Oleksiak for a historic gold medal in the 100m freestyle. NBC didn’t air Manuel’s medal ceremony right away — even though she’s the first African American woman to win gold for an individual swim.

      Instead, the network aired a delayed broadcast of Russian gymnasts. The BBC, however, did air the medal ceremony as it was happening. Watch the contrast between both programs here.

      The sexism and racism aren’t limited to broadcast coverage. The San Jose Mercury News didn’t even bother to include Manuel’s name in a headline that read: “Olympics: Michael Phelps shared historic night with African-American.”

      Throughout the first week of the Rio Olympics, sexism has been on display again and again in the coverage of the athletic prowess of thousands of incredible women athletes…

    • Kabul’s women seek refuge indoors after a series of acid attacks

      In early July, the citizens of Kabul were faced with a confronting sight. Armed with a loudspeaker, novice rapper Elinaa Rezaie hit the streets, lifted the front of her burqa and displayed a bandaged face to passersby in the Pul-i-Surkh district of the city.

      Rezaie stood before the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission building, protesting violence against women and the acid attacks she and others feared. That day, Nafisa Nouri, a wife and mother of two girls, was hospitalized after an attack. Nouri’s 7-year-old daughter Parinaz and another female relative of the family also suffered burns to their bodies and face from the acid.

      Mobilzed by her anger, Rezaie rapped against the government’s weak response to violence against women. “I went to visit the acid victims in the hospital to tell them I feel their pain,” Rezaie told Women in the World. “Then I decided to demonstrate … because the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about us.”

    • Police ‘too scared’ to stop vote rigging in Muslim areas, damning report finds

      The study, headed by Sir Eric Pickles, found that authorities are not doing enough to stamp out bullying and religious intimidation among Asian authorities during the lead up to elections.

      The report has even called for a dramatic overhaul of the electoral system, warning the “integrity of democracy” is at stake.

    • The Election Won’t Be Rigged. But It Could Be Hacked.

      In my old workplace, right next to the comfortable couches where we would take breaks, we kept a voting machine. Instead of using the screen to pick our preferred candidate, we played Pac-Man. We sent Pac-Man’s familiar yellow chomping face after digital ghosts with the same kind of machine that had been used in 2008 in more than 160 jurisdictions with about nine million registered voters.

      This was at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, where researchers had been able to reprogram the voting machine without even breaking the “tamper evident” seals.

      Voting isn’t a game, of course, and we need to trust the machines that count our votes. Especially this year. Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, raised the possibility of “rigged” elections, and his former adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. has warned of a “blood bath” in such a case. A recent poll found that 34 percent of likely voters believed the general election would be rigged.

      It’s unclear what mechanism the Trump campaign envisions for this rigging. Voter fraud through impersonation or illegal voting is vanishingly rare in the United States, and rigging the election by tampering with voting machines would be nearly impossible. As President Obama pointed out in a news conference last week, where he called charges of electoral rigging “ridiculous,” states and cities set up voting systems, not the federal government. That’s true, and it means the voting machine landscape is a patchwork of different systems, which makes the election hard to manipulate in a coordinated way.

      But it’s still a bleak landscape.

    • Egyptian booed after refusing judo handshake

      Egyptian judoka Islam El Shehaby was loudly booed at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics after his first-round loss to Israel’s fifth-ranked Or Sasson, when he refused to bow or shake Sasson’s hand, in a major breach of judo etiquette.

      Sasson defeated El Shehaby with two throws for an automatic victory, with about a minute and a half remaining in the bout.

      Afterward, El Shehaby lay flat on his back for a moment before standing to take his place before Sasson, in front of the referee. When Sasson extended his hand, El Shehaby backed away, shaking his head. El Shehaby refused to comment afterward.

      Judo players always bow or shake each other’s hands before and after the match as a sign of respect in the Japanese martial art.

      El Shahaby had come under pressure from Islamist-leaning and nationalist voices in Egypt to withdraw entirely from the fight.

    • Dallas Police Want to Suppress Bomb Robot Evidence That’s ‘Embarrassing’

      The Dallas Police Department is trying to suppress all evidence it has relating to its use of a bomb robot to kill the man suspected of killing four police officers at a Black Lives Matter protest last month. It has asked the Texas attorney general to allow it to withhold information that is “embarrassing” and has said that much of the evidence is “of no legitimate concern to the public.”

      Dallas Police Chief David Brown said the department took the unprecedented measure of using “our bomb robot” after Micah Johnson had holed up in a parking garage and had apparently exchanged gunfire with law enforcement.

      “We saw no other option than to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension to detonate where the suspect was,” Brown said at a press conference soon after Johnson was killed. “Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger.”

    • Witness Recounts Fatal Shooting of 73-Year-Old Florida Woman During Police Drill

      An eye witness to the fatal shooting of a Florida retiree during a citizen police academy drill in which she was playing a role said Wednesday at first they thought it was “theater” when she suddenly collapsed.

      But when they saw that Mary Knowlton was bleeding, they realized this was no act, witness John Wright told NBC News

    • Irish court orders alleged Silk Road admin to be extradited to US

      A 27-year-old Irishman who American prosecutors believe was a top administrator on Silk Road named “Libertas” has been approved for extradition to the United States.

      According to the Irish Times, a High Court judge ordered Gary Davis to be handed over to American authorities on Friday.

      In December 2013, federal prosecutors in New York unveiled charges against Davis and two other Silk Road staffers, Andrew Michael Jones (“Inigo”) and Peter Phillip Nash (“Samesamebutdifferent”). They were all charged with narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy.

      After a few years of operation, Silk Road itself was shuttered when its creator, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested in San Francisco in October 2013. Ulbricht was convicted at a high-profile trial and was sentenced to life in prison in May 2015.

    • Texas Readies to Kill Man—Who Killed No One—for Murder

      The case prompted roughly 50 Evangelical leaders from across the county to write to Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday, urging them to stop the execution. “Officials have a moral obligation to rectify this mistake and stop this execution while they still can,” they wrote, adding, “It deeply troubles us when the criminal justice system concludes that some of the most vulnerable in society can be executed and disposed of.”

      From the Washington Post’s lengthy reporting Friday on the case: “If executed this month, Wood will be the ‘least culpable person executed in the modern era of death penalty,’ said Scott Cobb, president of Texas Moratorium Network, a group that advocates against capital punishment.”

    • In Texas, a man who didn’t kill anybody is about to be executed for murder

      The scheduled execution is Wood’s punishment for the 1996 death of a man he did not kill — and, by some accounts, did not know was going to be killed.

      Legal experts say his case is rare, even in Texas, the execution capital of America — and a state that allows capital punishment for people who did not kill anyone or did not intend to kill.

    • Security Territory and Population Part 4: Conclusion of Description of Security and Population

      The third lecture by Michel Foucault in Security, Territory and Population begins with a discussion of the systems of law and discipline considered from the standpoint of “norms”. In the system of law, norms are the acceptable behaviors,derived from sacred texts or societal customs or the will of the sovereign. They are then codified and made mandatory. In disciplinary systems, the goal is to identify the best way to do some act, and the people are taught those actions and punished or reeducated for not doing them. In a security system, the ideas of the new sciences of understanding of the nature of the human species are brought to bear on the problem, with the goal of freeing people from the problem, or channeling their behavior into the best known forms. Normalization in the security regime consists in recognizing a problem, and working out solutions using analysis and planning.

      He illustrates the latter with a detailed discussion of the introduction of inoculation and the related advances in medicine, administrative controls and statistics, showing that the basic idea of security as a method of government is to treat the population as a whole. There is a nice example of this here. In fact, once you get used to thinking about government as Foucault describes it, you see examples everywhere.

      In a law regime, the determination of norms is based on the will of the sovereign, or some sacred text or long-established custom. In a disciplinary regime, the determination of norms is made to fulfill the desires of the powerful, including the sovereign. The examples given, how to load guns, how to form up for a battle, make this clear. Foucault does not discuss the way that norms and the process of normalization are derived in the security regime. How is the decision made as to what problem should be solved, or what behavior should be encouraged or discouraged? These decisions are made through relationships of power, so perhaps we will get more on this later.

    • From slave market to Olympic venue: variations of capitalist accumulation in the port of Rio de Janeiro

      There is a repeated primitive accumulation throughout the history of capitalism required by capitalist expansion itself, which must commodify not yet commodified spaces in order to develop.

    • An Open Letter to NY Times Public Editor Liz Spayd, from Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Advocates

      We are a global community of survivors of child sexual abuse and advocates. We were heartened when, under your editorial direction, the Columbia Journalism Review published a piece by Steve Buttry, Director of Student Media at LSU: “The voiceless have a voice. A journalist’s job is to amplify it.” We would like to ask you and The New York Times to consider amplifying our collective voice; we reiterate our request, emailed to you on July 11, 2016.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Too Poor to Afford the Internet

      All summer, kids have been hanging out in front of the Morris Park Library in the Bronx, before opening hours and after closing. They bring their computers to pick up the Wi-Fi signal that is leaking out of the building, because they can’t afford internet access at home. They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework.

      Last year, the Federal Communications Commission reaffirmed what these students already knew: Access to broadband is necessary to be a productive member of society. In June, a federal appeals court upheld the commission’s authority to regulate the internet as a public utility.

  • DRM

    • How a digital-only smartphone opens the door to DRM (and how to close the door)

      Fast Company’s Mark Sullivan asked me to explain what could happen if Apple went through with its rumored plans to ship a phone with no analog sound outputs, only digital ones — what kind of DRM badness might we expect to emerge?

      Start by understanding this: copyright lets you do a lot of stuff without permission (and even against the wishes) of rightsholders. For example, it let Apple launch the Ipod and Itunes, both of which were bitterly denounced by the record industry at their launch — as far as they were concerned, “Rip, Mix, Burn” was an invitation to piracy, and Apple was wrong to encourage this behavior. But because copyright has limits — fair use, and the limits on copyrightability itself — Apple was able to revolutionize music.

      Enter the DMCA: in 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Section 1201 of which says that breaking DRM, even to accomplish those legal activities that lead to so much improvement and innovation in the entertainment industry (like Itunes and Ipods and Iphones) is illegal.

    • Why Cory Doctorow Thinks Apple’s Disappearing Headphone Jack Should Scare You

      It’s almost a certainty that Apple has removed the standard headphone jack from the next iPhone, which will be announced in a matter of weeks. The new phone will deliver sound through the Lightning port at the bottom of the phone, or via Bluetooth to wireless headphones. These are both digital outputs; the analog output of the headphone jack is probably gone for good.

      This is good and bad. The end-to-end digital audio stack will allow for higher quality audio and some new features, but it’ll also open the door for increased DRM control over music content by the record labels that own it.

      “If Apple creates a circumstance where the only way to get audio off its products is through an interface that is DRM-capable, they’d be heartbreakingly naive in assuming that this wouldn’t give rise to demands for DRM,” Electronic Frontier Foundation special advisor Cory Doctorow told Fast Company in an email exchange Monday.

      If a consumer or some third-party tech company used the music in way the rights holders didn’t like, the rights holders could invoke the anti-circumvention law written in Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Court: US seizure of Kim Dotcom’s millions and 4 jet skis will stand

        The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday in favor of the American government’s seizure of a large number of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s overseas assets.

        In the US civil forfeiture case, which was brought 18 months after the initial criminal charges brought against Dotcom and Megaupload, prosecutors outlined why the New Zealand seizure of Dotcom’s assets on behalf of the American government was valid. Seized items include millions of dollars in various seized bank accounts in Hong Kong and New Zealand, multiple cars, four jet skis, the Dotcom mansion, several luxury cars, two 108-inch TVs, three 82-inch TVs, a $10,000 watch, and a photograph by Olaf Mueller worth over $100,000.

      • Rightscorp Threatens Every ISP in the United States

        Following a court win by its client BMG over Cox Communications this week, Rightscorp has issued an unprecedented warning to every ISP in the United States today. Boasting a five-year trove of infringement data against Internet users, Rightscorp warned ISPs that they can either cooperate or face the consequences.

      • EFF Asks Supreme Court To Review ‘Dancing Baby’ Copyright Case

        The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a petition on behalf of its client Stephanie Lenz asking the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure that copyright holders who make unreasonable infringement claims can be held accountable if those claims force lawful speech offline.

        Lenz filed the lawsuit that came to be known as the “Dancing Baby” case after she posted—back in 2007—a short video on YouTube of her toddler son in her kitchen. The 29-second recording, which Lenz wanted to share with family and friends, shows her son bouncing along to the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy,” which is heard playing in the background. Universal Music Group, which owns the copyright to the Prince song, sent YouTube a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), claiming that the family video was an infringement of the copyright.

08.13.16

Links 13/8/2016: Plasma 5.8 LTS, Alpine Linux 3.4.3

Posted in News Roundup at 11:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Simplenote for Android and other platforms now open source
  • Note-Taking App ‘Simplenote’ gets Open Sourced
  • Flow Home launcher is dead, some elements will be released open source

    Almost two years ago, we covered the Flow Home launcher as a rather innovative take on the Android home screen. It gave you the things you usually want to check on your phone – Facebook feed, Twitter, Instagram, the weather – and put it together in a kind of timeline flow. At its time, it was a totally new thing.

    As the whole Android ecosystem has moved forward in over 2 years, we’ve realized that people kind of want to stay with a standard home launcher – this is why the successful launchers like Nova and Action Launcher don’t change a lot in the basic Android proposition for a home screen. HTC’s Blinkfeed – quite similar to Flow Home – has gotten a small following, but like Flow Home it hasn’t quite caught the masses’ attention.

  • Adblock Plus says open source developers will fight for users’ right to block ads on Facebook

    Following on from Facebook’s decision to override users’ ad blocking tools, Adblock Plus has fired one more shot, saying that it will continue the fight for the right to an ad-free social networking experience.

    After finding a way to prevent Facebook blocking ads, which Facebook then bypassed once again, Adblock Plus says that while the game of cat and mouse may continue, it wants to use what it describes as “probably be the last time we talk about it for a while” to say that the open source community will fight the good fight for users.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 49 for Linux: Plugin-Free Netflix and Amazon Video

        ozilla plans to support plugin-free streaming on Netflix and Amazon Video on Firefox for Linux starting with version 49 stable of the browser.

        The streaming world is slowly moving towards using HTML5 for streaming purposes and away from using plugins such as Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash.

      • “Way Cooler” Is A Wayland Window Manager / Compositor Written In Rust

        Way Cooler is another project to add to the list of interesting Wayland compositors / window managers from the futuristic NEMO-UX to Swap to many others.

        Way Cooler advertises itself as a tiling window manager written in Rust and targeting Wayland. Similar to Sway, Way Cooler features i3-style tiling. This new open-source project also has client application support via an IPC, a Lua scripting environment to extend the window manager, and there is support for XWayland X11 programs.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation’s 2015 Annual Report

      Besides the Free Software Foundation issuing their first-ever annual report this week, The Document Foundation has come out this week as well with their 2015 annual report.

      Their annual report covers new advisory board members, the releases made by LibreOffice over the course of the year, financials, conferences / events, and more.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Public Services/Government

    • U.S. government seeks reduced use of custom software, releases new policy to ‘free the code’

      With the presidential election season upon us, I’m often asked whether the U.S. government efforts to encourage use of open source software (OSS) will continue when a new administration comes into office in January.

      As I’ve written before, there has been a shift, going back almost a decade, away from the debate over whether to use open source to a focus on the how to. The release by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of the U.S. Federal Source Code Policy on August 8th is the latest manifestation of this shift. It achieves the goal laid out in the Obama administration’s Second Open Government National Action Plan (PDF) for improved access to custom software code developed for the federal government. The plan emphasized use of (and contributing back to) open source software to fuel innovation, lower costs, and benefit the public. It also furthers a long-standing “default to open” objective going back to the early days of the administration.

    • A Policy Win For Open Source Software In New Zealand [Ed: by Open Source Open Society]

      The recent announcement of a new policy framework providing guidance to public agencies on the licensing of open source software (OSS) will lead to better results across government and industry by enabling more collaboration. The policy is significant as it increases the likelihood of future government web services being developed using open source code and allowing external parties to copy, adapt or integrate their features. It will drive more efficient use of public money, more integrated government web services, local innovation and economic growth. However, perhaps most remarkable is the transparent and collaborative online consultation and drafting process through which this ambitious idea became a robust policy in less than a year.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Russia’s 3Dquality Continues to Expand and Impress with Growing Range of 3D Printers
      • Minimalist Cetus 3D Printer Soon to Hit Kickstarter
      • Qubie is an open hardware solution for tracking wait times at voting places

        With an incredibly important national election coming up, it’s more critical than ever that everyone who can vote does — and is able to. Election tech firm Free and Fair is hoping to help avoid overflowing voting locations with a simple, open source device that automatically monitors waiting times and keeps voters and officials informed.

        Free and Fair creates open source software for polling places, from checking in voters to actually taking and tallying votes — but Qubie is the company’s first original hardware, created for the Hackaday Prize. Founder Daniel Zimmerman explained that it was just another aspect of the voting process that struck them as out of date.

        “In the last few elections there have been reports of long queue times, people giving up and going home,” he told TechCrunch. “Election technology is in a pretty sorry state — we thought it’d be nice to gather data on that rather than anecdotes.”

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

08.12.16

Links 12/8/2016: Ardour 5.0, Simplenote Liberated

Posted in News Roundup at 3:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition: Is This Linux Laptop Worth $1,500?

      Thanks to its lightweight chassis, gorgeous screen and epic battery life, the Dell XPS 13 has been our favorite laptop overall for more than 18 months now. Though it’s not targeted directly at business users, the laptop’s industry-leading design and strong performance make it a great choice for workers, especially coders. The XPS 13 Developer Edition ($1,049 to start, $1,550 as tested) is a version of the notebook running Ubuntu Linux 14.04 that is primed for, you guessed it, developers.

    • Business users force Microsoft to back off Windows 10 PC kill plan

      Microsoft has backed down on its plan to hustle owners of certain PCs to Windows 10 by crimping support options.

      Redmond revealed the plan last January, when it decreed that PCs running 6th-generation Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs and Windows 7 would only get limited security and stability support until mid-2017. By March it backed off a little, extending support for another year and promising critical patches would flow until end of life.

    • People Demand Control Of Their PCs

      You can no longer dictate to the world what folks will do with the hardware they own.

    • The Best Chromebook You Can Buy Right Now (Aug. 2016)
    • Attention, College Students: Chromebooks Are About to Get Awesome

      Here’s some unhelpful back-to-school advice: Don’t buy a laptop. Borrow one, steal one from a family member, buy a piece of junk for 40 bucks on Craigslist. If you can find a way to wait a couple of months before dropping serious coin on a new clamshell, you’ll be glad you did.

      Later this fall, Apple’s almost certainly going to release a new MacBook Pro, which is desperately in need of a revamp. And there will be Windows PCs practically falling from the ceiling—maybe even a few made by Microsoft itself. But the real reason to hold off on your purchase is to wait for the new breed of Chromebooks that are on their way.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Cross-Compilation Support Coming Soon to Flatpak Universal Binary Packages

        GNOME and Flatpak development Bastien Nocera reports the other day on his personal blog about an upcoming feature that’s about to be implemented in the next release of the Flatpak universal binary format.

        The GUADEC conference for GNOME developers is taking place these days in Karlsruhe, Germany, between August 12-14, and it looks like Mr. Nocera was supposed to present a lightning talk about what’s coming to Flatpak later in the year, as well as to run a contest related to his presentation, whose prize was a piece of hardware.

        “Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to finish the work that I set out to do, encountering a couple of bugs that set me back,” said Bastien Nocera in the blog announcement. “Hopefully, this will get resolved post-GUADEC, so you can expect some announcements later on in the year.”

      • Thoughts about reviewing large patchsets
      • LVFS has a new CDN

  • Distributions

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Announces the Release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7.2.6

        Red Hat, through Scott McCarty, is happy to announce the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7.2.6, a maintenance update that adds many performance improvements for most of the included components.

        For those behind their Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host reading, we’ll take this opportunity to inform them that Red Hat’s Atomic Host offering for the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system is a specially crafted version of the OS that has a small footprint and it’s designed to run containerized workloads.

      • How Red Hat Can Take Cloud Market Share Away From Its Key Rival

        Recently, Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) has taken a back seat to Ubuntu in low cost cloud infrastructure. Ubuntu Linux has been a key rival of Red Hat and has experienced major success in capturing cloud infrastructure totaling to over a 65 percent share of all cloud server operating system instances.

        Deutsche Bank’s Karl Keirstead commented on Red Hat’s potential to fulfill its opportunities in cloud infrastructure. Keirstead’s comments came after he met with Ubuntu company management.

      • Red Hat stands by HB2 stance at shareholders’ meeting

        Red Hat defended its decision to take a stand against North Carolina’s House Bill 2 when asked about it by a Washington think tank at Thursday’s shareholders meeting in Raleigh.

        Justin Danhof, general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, attended the meeting to seek an explanation from Red Hat about its decision to join an amicus brief along with 67 other companies, such as IBM and Cisco, in support of the U.S. Department of Justice’s opposition to the law. He posed his questions to Red Hat Chief Executive Jim Whitehurst, but company General Counsel Michael Cunningham responded.

      • Group questions Red Hat over legal brief on NC’s HB2

        A lawyer for a conservative think tank who appeared at Red Hat’s annual shareholder meeting Thursday to question the software company’s support of a lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s House Bill 2 characterized his move as part of a broader effort to reshape public perception of the law.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Want make Linux run better on laptops?

          So we have two jobs openings in the Red Hat desktop team. What we are looking for is people to help us ensure that Fedora and RHEL runs great on various desktop hardware, with a focus on laptops. Since these jobs require continuous access to a lot of new and different hardware we can not accept applications this time for remotees, but require you to work out of out office in Munich, Germany. We are looking for people with people not afraid to jump into a lot of different code and who likes tinkering with new hardware. The hardware enablement here might include some kernel level work, but will more likely involve improving higher level stacks. So for example if we have a new laptop where bluetooth doesn’t work you would need to investigate and figure out if the problem is in the kernel, in the bluez stack or in our Bluetooth desktop parts.

        • Last Day

          This was my last week at RedHat and I feel I had really good learning experience so far. I am happy that I had great mentors like Maririn Duffy, Ryan Lerch, Paul Frields, Pierre and Sayan who always helped me out whenever needed. For me personally, the biggest advantage has been the opportunity to work with some really wonderful people. Open source allowed me to make connections far outside my normal circle of co-workers. Having access to such a huge pool of talented people was daunting to me at first. I had to deal with issues I have not encountered before, like getting feedback for your design work or working with people from different time zones. But all this was a good learning experience. Working on open source projects allowed me to develop my skills and gain valuable experience working in highly collaborative software project. I learnt how to be able to function as a part of a team and contribute my time not to only to technical tasks but also to several side projects with respect to conferences like FAD, Flock etc. Lastly, I feel the experience that I have gained here will prove invaluable for my future career.

        • Flock 2016 Report

          I spent previous week in Kraków at Flock. It is a conference of Fedora developers and users.

        • Women in technology: Fedora campus presence

          This week, we kicked off an initiative for engaging more women contributors in Fedora. Sumantro Mukherjee helped me guide new contributors on this Hangouts call. The purpose was to bring in more woman contributors to the Fedora Project and help them be industry-ready. As buzzwords in the industry boom, these meet-ups are focused to generate awareness in the first few rounds. Then, they address fields like the Internet of Things (IoT), ML, and mobile app development, to mention a few.

        • Flock 2016, Krakow

          Last week, I got to attend the 2016 edition of Flock — the Fedora Contributor Conference. As always for Flock, the 2016 edition of Flock (in Krakow, Poland) provided an amazing opportunity to meet up and work alongside many of my fellow Fedora contributors for a week of talks, hackfests, workshops, and evening events.

        • Flock to Fedora: Krakow, PL Edition

          Flock, the Fedora Contributors conference held annually in August has happened again. This year the conference was in Krakow, Poland. I was one of the organizers and my employer, Red Hat, paid for my trip. I continue to be thankful to Red Hat for their support of the Fedora community and, in this case, me. Completely without bias (hah!) I must also point out that this is the single best organized conference I have ever attended in my life. So strap in, this is a long roundup!

    • Debian Family

      • My Free Software Activities in July 2016

      • Derivatives

        • ExLight Linux Is Now Based on Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS and Debian GNU/Linux 8.5

          GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs us about the availability of a new build of his very popular ExLight Linux Live DVD operating system based on the latest Ubuntu and Debian technologies.

          ExLight Linux Build 160810 is here to rebased the entire OS to the recently released Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, as well as to upgrade the default desktop environment to Enlightenment 0.20.99.0 from 0.19.12, and move to a kernel from the Linux 4.6 series, specially optimized by Arne Exton to support more hardware.

        • ExLight is very popular!

          ExLight Linux Live DVD has been downloaded about 2000 times per week the last two months. I have therefore made a new upgraded version of ExLight today (160810). I have also created a new special WordPress site for ExLight.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Releases Snapcraft 2.14 for Ubuntu with New Rust Plugin, Improvements

            Canonical, through Sergio Schvezov, has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of Snapcraft 2.14 Snap creator tool for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

            Coming hot on the heels of Snapcraft 2.13, the new 2.14 maintenance update is here to introduce a bunch of new plugins, namely rust, godeps, and dump. You can find more information about each one by running the “snapcraft help dump|rust|godeps ” command in a terminal window.

          • Ubuntu Touch Mobile OS to Be Soon Rebased on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Not Yakkety Yak

            One of our readers was asking us last week if we have any news on when Ubuntu Touch will switch to a newer version of Ubuntu? The official answer came a few days ago from Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak, who reveals the fact that the Ubuntu mobile OS will soon be rebased on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

            It appears that this is not the first time the Ubuntu Touch developers have been asked by Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet users what’s the state of operating system’s baseline, which right now is still using the packages from the now deprecated Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) release.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Trends in corporate open source engagement

    In 1998, I was part of SGI when we started moving to open source and open standards, after having been a long-time proprietary company. Since then, other companies also have moved rapidly to working with open source, and the use and adoption of open source technologies has skyrocketed over the past few years. Today company involvement in open source technologies is fairly mature and can be seen in the following trends:

  • Open source and saving the earth from asteroids

    The web app is using open source technologies such as PHP, Bootstrap, MySql and Apache and the team is working on making the web application code as well as the image recognition algorithm open source.

  • Open source R extension simplifies data science with IBM Watson
  • Upskill U: Telstra Tackles Open Source & NFV

    Open source’s momentum is building in the telecom industry due in part to the appeal of a more collaborative development process between vendors, users and developers. Open source also has the potential to reduce development cycle times and costs; lay the foundation for improved software interoperability and customization across different companies; and deliver new solutions, such as those needed to support NFV.

  • GigaSpaces Empowers Developers with Open Source In-Memory Computing Platform

    GigaSpaces, a provider of in-memory computing (IMC) technologies, announced the launch of XAP 12, the company’s first open source initiative for its high-performance data grid. The open core enables developers to build upon a proven IMC platform that’s been utilized by hundreds of Fortune 500 companies worldwide, including top banks, leading retailers, and many of the world’s largest transportation, telecommunications and healthcare companies.

  • Simplenote, the planet’s most useful piece of software, is now open source on iOS, macOS and Android

    If you’re not using Simplenote, you’re missing out. This… well, simple note app has been a standby and lifesaver for me for years, though occasionally I have worried about its future: Will it survive if Automattic, which bought it back in 2013, goes under or gets bought itself? What if the servers go down? Is there a god, and if so, does he or she use Simplenote, too?

    At least a couple of those worries are alleviated with the news that Automattic is open-sourcing the Simplenote apps on iOS, Mac and Android. The Windows app was already open, so this doesn’t come as a total surprise, but it’s still good news.

  • Remains of the Day: Simplenote Goes Open Source
  • Simplenote for Android is now open source

    Simplenote is a lightweight yet full-featured note taking app that’s cross-platform on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac. It’s a great alternative to Evernote and their new pricing, and offers syncing and sharing as well as the ability to work while offline. And as of today, it’s now open source on all platforms.

  • Simplenote is Now Open Source Across Platforms

  • Databases

    • Percona Introduces Open Sourced Platform for MongoDB

      Percona unveiled a new open sourced platform for MongoDB called the Percona Memory Engine for MongoDB.

      With Percona Memory Engine for MongoDB, Percona has now delivered an open source in-memory storage engine that works with Percona Server for MongoDB, the open source drop-in replacement for the MongoDB Community Edition that includes enterprise-grade features and functionality.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Foundation Released 2015 LibreOffice Report

      The Document Foundation today released its annual accounting report highlighting accomplishments for the year. “TDF Annual Report starts with a Review of 2015, with highlights about TDF and LibreOffice, and a summary of financials and budget.” LibreOffice saw two major and 12 minor releases that year earning €1.1 million in donations. The project now sports over 1000 contributors with 300 making commits in 2015.

      This years report covered a long list of topics beginning with the City of Munich and Russian RusBITech joining The Document Foundation’s Advisory Board. The migration team got a honorable mention before the diagram of the power structure. But the best portion was that dedicated to the releases. Two major releases were announced in 2015, 4.4 and 5.0, as well as 12 minor updates, 4.3.6 through 5.0.4.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • US federal agencies to publish 20% custom software as open source

      Over the next three years, US federal agencies will be required to publish at least 20 percent of their newly-made custom software as open source. This requirement is part of a pilot established by the Federal Source Code Policy published last week by the President’s Executive Office.

    • U.S. Open Source Policy Seeks to Leverage Code Reuse

      The Obama administration has released a new federal open-source policy for improving access to software developed by or for federal agencies.

    • The US government now has an open source policy—but it doesn’t go far enough

      In short: All new code developed for the federal government needs to be made available to other federal government organizations. And then a small portion of that is going to be looked at being released to the public.

      I’m still reading through everything—it’s a rather dull read—but I was surprised at what was not included. Specifically, there’s no mention of the GNU Public License (GPL) whatsoever. In fact, the only mention of GNU or free software is one word tucked away at the bottom of the document under a definition of “Open Source.” I’m not surprised, but still it’s a bit disappointing.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Which type of open source license do you prefer?
    • What is copyleft?

      While the GPL family are the most popular copyleft licenses, they are by no means the only ones. The Mozilla Public License and the Eclipse Public License are also very popular. Many other copyleft licenses exist with smaller adoption footprints.

      As explained in the previous section, a copyleft license means downstream projects cannot add additional restrictions on the use of the software. This is best illustrated with an example. If I wrote MyCoolProgram and distributed it under a copyleft license, you would have the freedom to use and modify it. You could distribute versions with your changes, but you’d have to give your users the same freedoms I gave you. If I had licensed it under a permissive license, you’d be free to incorporate it into a closed software project that you do not provide the source to.

      But just as important as what you must do with MyCoolProgram is what you don’t have to do. You don’t have to use the exact same license I did, so long as the terms are compatible (generally downstream projects use the same license for simplicity’s sake). You don’t have to contribute your changes back to me, but it’s generally considered good form, especially when the changes are bug fixes.

    • Hellwig v. VMware Hits A Rock

      They wanted line by line evidence, not pointers to the lines. You’d think there would be a script for that…

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open Source Hardware Camp 2016

        Open Source Hardware Camp 2016 will take place place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge. For the third year running it is being hosted as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival, featuring 12 talks on the Saturday and 4 hands-n workshops on the Sunday.

  • “Fuchsia”

Leftovers

  • Nigel Farage wows social media with new moustache

    Nigel Farage has spent his time post-Brexit working on his facial hair.

    The usually clean-shaven former UKIP leader wowed social media with his daring new look.

  • Science

    • “Evolution Is Just A Theory” – Mike Pence Argues To Congress

      I am always impressed with how smoothly a trained lawyer can present “facts” without presenting any… facts. Below is CSPAN video of once-Congressman Mike Pence (who would later go on to become Governor of Indiana and the official Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States) arguing against the “theory” of evolution on the Congressional floor in an attempt to reinsert creationism (masquerading under the new term “intelligent design”) back into public school – using the Bible as his source of…, what? Evidence?

  • Health/Nutrition

    • A Rush to Judgment on Russian Doping [Ed: Chinese and Bulgarian just got caught too (EPO doping)]

      The West’s anti-Russian bias is so strong that normal standards of fairness are cast aside whenever a propaganda edge can be gained, a factor swirling around the treatment of Russian athletes at the Rio Olympics, Rick Sterling says.

    • Donna Murch on For-Profit Punishment, Patty Lovera on GMO Labeling

      This week on CounterSpin: One of the legacies of Michael Brown’s killing, two years ago this week, was the exposure of police departments like Ferguson, Missouri’s, that have a system for profiting from fines and fees for low-level infractions that targets African-Americans disproportionately. That’s only one aspect of the interrelationship between economics, race and criminal justice our guest says calls out for scrutiny. Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers and author of Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. We’ll talk about her new essay, “Paying for Punishment: The New Debtors Prison.”

    • Unsafe levels of toxic chemicals found in drinking water for six million Americans

      “For many years, chemicals with unknown toxicities, such as PFASs, were allowed to be used and released to the environment, and we now have to face the severe consequences,” said lead author Xindi Hu, a doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard Chan School and Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS. “In addition, the actual number of people exposed may be even higher than our study found, because government data for levels of these compounds in drinking water is lacking for almost a third of the U.S. population—about 100 million people.”

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Ex-CIA Chief advocates murder

      Well, this was an interesting one. As I was stepping out of the shower this morning, my phone rang – RT asking if I could do an interview asap.

      The subject under discussion? A former acting head of the CIA apparently recommending that the USA covertly start to murder any Iranian and Russian citizens operating against ISIS in Syria, and bomb President Assad “to scare him, not to kill him”.

    • Hyde Park cordoned off after body discovered in ‘suspicious’ incident

      The area of Speakers’ Corner has been cordoned off, while pictures show a number of police cars on the scene.

      Police were alerted shortly before 6am after a member of public found a man with injuries.

      A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “Police in Westminster were called to Hyde Park, W2 at 05:50hrs on Friday, 12 August, following concerns for a man.

      “Officers attended and found a man deceased. This incident is being treated as suspicious.

    • Thailand blasts: More explosions target tourist towns

      A series of coordinated blasts across Thailand has targeted tourist towns leaving four dead and many injured, with reports of more explosions.

      In the popular resort town of Hua Hin four bombs exploded over the last 24 hours. Several blasts also hit the island of Phuket on Friday.

      No group has said it carried out the attacks, but suspicion is likely to fall on separatist insurgents.

      The timing is sensitive, as Friday is a holiday marking the queen’s birthday.

    • Thailand bombings: At least four dead and many injured after explosions in tourist towns

      At least four people have been killed in a series of bombings targeting some of Thailand’s most popular tourist resorts.

      The attacks started with two explosions in the beachside town of Hua Hin that were detonated remotely just minutes apart in a bar area popular with foreigners.

      Police said a Thai woman was killed and 21 people were injured, sparking chaos as crowds fled and local shops and restaurants were shut down on Thursday night.

    • Poppies, patriots and pro-Brexit propaganda: Revisiting the myths of Britain’s past

      This year marks the anniversary of the Battle of Verdun, which raged from 21 February to 18 December 1916. By the end of this terrible struggle, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the First world war, some 143,000 German and 162,000 French soldiers had been killed. But because British forces were not involved in this battle, this part of the Western Front is less visited by the British than are the more westerly battlefields such as those of the Somme and the Marne. And yet the whole area, throughout the length of the war, saw some of the worst battles of the entire conflict – not least in the hilly, forested area south west of Verdun, known as the Argonne. Such spots can teach us a great deal about the past and draw lessons for the future, but as I discovered, in these raw post-Brexit times, even what they tell us is a matter of controversy.

    • Donald Trump Talks Tough About Military Contractors, But Quietly Signals Friendship

      Donald Trump, who has railed against the political influence of military contractors, denounced wasteful Pentagon spending, and promised a less interventionist foreign policy has nevertheless added to his transition team the leader of a group of defense contractors who advocate greater American militarism.

      Michael Rogers, the hawkish former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, will be advising the Trump transition team on national security, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

      After leaving Congress, Rogers founded a pressure group called Americans for Peace, Prosperity, and Security, intended to “help elect a president who supports American engagement and a strong foreign policy.”

    • Rethinking The Cold War

      The Cold War was pointless except for the Dulles brothers’ interests and those of the military/security complex. The Soviet government, unlike the US government today, had no world hegemonic asperations. Stalin had declared “Socialism in one country” and purged the Trotskyists, the advocates of world revolution. Communism in China and Eastern Europe were not products of Soviet international communism. Mao was his own man, and the Soviet Union kept Eastern Europe from which the Red Army drove out the Nazis as a buffer against a hostile West.

    • Lopsided Peace Talks Collapse, Saudis Resume Bombing Yemen and U.S. Sells More Weapons

      The Pentagon announced an additional $1.15 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia this week, even as a three-month cease-fire collapsed and the Saudi-led coalition resumed its brutal bombing campaign of the Yemen capital Sana.

      The U.S. has already sold more than $20 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia since the war began in March 2015, defying calls from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to cut off support. The Saudi-led coalition is responsible for the majority of the 7,000 deaths in the conflict, which has left more than 21 million people in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. Saudi Arabia has been accused of intentionally targeting homes, factories, schools, markets, and hospitals.

      On Tuesday, the coalition targeted and destroyed a potato chip factory, killing 14 people (see top photo). The Yemeni press has since reported that coalition has conducted hundreds more airstrikes across the country, killing dozens of people.

    • The Pentagon Money Pit

      But how about a report by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General saying that the US Army had $6.5 trillion in unaccountable expenditures for which there is simply no paper trail? That is 6,500 billion dollars! Have you heard about that? Probably not. That damning report was issued back on July 26 — two whole weeks ago — but as of today it has not even been reported anywhere in the corporate media.

    • Contradicting Prior Claims, Pentagon Admits US Forces on the Ground in Libya

      The Pentagon confirmed this week that U.S. forces are indeed on the ground in Libya as the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) continues.

      A “small number of U.S. forces have gone in and out of Libya to exchange information with these local forces in established joint operations centers, and they will continue to do so as we strengthen the fight against [ISIS] and other terrorist organizations,” Deputy Defense press secretary Gordon Trowbridge said Wednesday.

      The news comes just days after the U.S. launched new airstrikes in Libya, centering largely around the strategic port city of Sirte, on August 1. At the time, defense officials claimed there were no troops on the ground supporting the bombings.

      On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that “U.S. Special Operations forces are providing direct, on-the-ground support for the first time to fighters battling the Islamic State in Libya,” quoting U.S. and Libyan officials.

    • Magical Thinking in US Foreign Policy

      The U.S. foreign policy establishment cloaks its desire for global dominance in the language of humanitarianism and “democracy promotion” even when the policies lead to death and chaos, as James W Carden describes.

    • Why does the west turn a blind eye to Rwanda’s dictatorship?

      Paul Kagame led his country away from genocide and war, but today his regime is upheld by authoritarian controls and political violence.

      [...]

      In 1994, Paul Kagame and his rebel forces, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), took Rwanda’s capital Kigali from Hutu extremists, bringing an end to the genocide that saw close to a million people killed in 100 days. Although only officially elected president in 2000, Kagame has been the de facto leader ever since and, following recent changes in the nation’s constitution that allow him to run for a third term, he could remain in power until 2034. Rwanda has seen great progress during his incumbency and has been held up by many in the international community as an exemplary model of development in Sub-Saharan Africa.

    • Stunning revelation: Wikileaks hack shows that Soros called the shots on US policy toward Albania

      Who was in charge of U.S. foreign policy when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state? That is a legitimate question to consider in light of the most stunning revelation yet mined from the Wikileaks hack. George Soros is suggesting an intervention in domestic Albanian politics, and getting his way!

    • Merchant Marine cadets endure rough waters as sexual misconduct roils their ranks

      It’s the secret code that cadets at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy are advised to use if things get really rough during their year-long shipboard training on merchant vessels thousands of miles from shore, or at ports far from home. Women — and men, in some cases — can use it as a fail-safe if the lewd comments and unwanted advances from fellow sailors escalate to something worse. The government will bring them ashore.

    • NYT Reveals Think Tank It’s Cited for Years to Be Corrupt Arms Booster

      As the Times also notes, CSIS is funded largely by Western and Gulf monarchy governments, arms dealers and oil companies, such as Raytheon, Boeing, Shell, the United Arab Emirates, US Department of Defense, UK Home Office, General Dynamics, Exxon Mobil, Northrop Grumman, Chevron and others.

      Anyone with a seven-year-old’s understanding of causality can conclude that CSIS would, in the aggregate, promote the expansion of the military and surveillance state, since that’s who pays their bills; what the Times did was reveal a specific, rather direct example, using heretofore secret documents.

    • If Anyone Runs Out of Guns and Grenades, Here’s a Shopping Market in Baghdad That’s Well-Stocked

      You know how it is. You just get back from a trip to the store and your significant other says “Honey, I just realized we are all out of AK-47s. And while you’re at the market, could you also grab a couple of mortars and some grenades in case your mother stops by again unexpectedly?”

      Yes, it could be Texas, but it actually is what’s going on in Baghdad.

      Iraq news site Niqash tells us about a market in Baghdad’s Sadr City, where masked men display their wares on open tables the same way vegetable sellers do in other city markets. Next to grenades on the tables are rockets, mortars and plenty of other weaponry, with markings that indicate they come from a number of different sources. Welcome one and all to Maridi market, one of Baghdad’s, if not, Iraq’s, most famous “illegal” arms markets.

      (The photo above shows beautiful Sadr City back in the good old days, when America liberated it.)

      There are a lot of ways he obtains weapons, said one trader in the market. The most significant route is across unguarded border crossings from NATO ally Turkey. The guns and other weapons enter Kurdistan (another American ally) and are then brought to Baghdad; checkpoints (manned by Iraqi security forces the U.S. pays for) don’t seem to be a problem and if they are, counterfeit ID cards or a bribe will often work.

    • Maybe FBI Has Lost Track of Who the Informants Are?

      Not mentioned at all in this narrative is the role played by Joshua Goldberg, a Jewish guy who adopted many avatars online to incite all kinds of violence, including, under the name of Australi Witness, Garland. In December Goldberg was deemed incompetent to stand trial, though in June it was decided with more treatment he might become competent enough to stand trial, so they’re going to check again in four months.

      So, the cell that committed the Garland attack consisted of the two now-dead perpetrators, four informants, an undercover FBI officer, a mentally ill troll, and Hendricks.

      [...]

      Has the FBI simply lost track of who are real and who are the people it is paying to play a role? Or is it possible someone from another agency, claiming to be FBI, recruited Hendricks (don’t laugh! That’s one potential explanation for Anwar al-Awlaki’s curious ties to US law enforcement, a story that wends its way through a related mosque in VA)?

      Sure, maybe Hendricks is making all this up (at the very least, it may necessitate the BoP to protect him in prison since he has now publicly claimed to be a narc). But FBI’s network of informants sure is getting confusing.

    • CounterSpin interview with William Hartung on US arms sale

      American media love the rich. Besides constant, assiduous attention to the things they buy and eat and wear, we see lists of the richest people alongside numbers indicating what we straightforwardly refer to as their worth. Of less interest is how the rich got and stay that way.

      And the same holds true for corporations, which, of course, are a big part of how rich people got and stay that way. Success is success after all, and for all the tales of a muckraking media, our guest’s experience suggests that when it comes to one of the most stupendously successful US industries, the press corps don’t seem all that eager to look behind the curtain.

    • Mike Morell’s Kill-Russians Advice

      Washington’s foreign policy hot shots are flexing their rhetorical, warmongering muscles to impress Hillary Clinton, including ex-CIA acting director Morell who calls for killing Russians and Iranians, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

      Perhaps former CIA acting director Michael Morell’s shamefully provocative rhetoric toward Russia and Iran will prove too unhinged even for Hillary Clinton. It appears equally likely that it will succeed in earning him a senior job in a possible Clinton administration, so it behooves us to have a closer look at Morell’s record.

      My initial reaction of disbelief and anger was the same as that of my VIPS colleague, Larry Johnson, and the points Larry made about Morell’s behavior in the Benghazi caper, Iran, Syria, needlessly baiting nuclear-armed Russia, and how to put a “scare” into Bashar al-Assad give ample support to Larry’s characterization of Morell’s comments as “reckless and vapid.” What follows is an attempt to round out the picture on the ambitious 57-year-old Morell.

    • Congressional Investigation Affirms Reporting on ISIL War Intelligence Manipulation

      A report issued on Thursday by a Republican congressional task force confirmed that military leaders doctored intelligence analyses in order to paint a rosier picture of the war on the Islamic State (ISIL).

      The investigation confirms Daily Beast reporting first published last year on the integrity of those intelligence reports, which originated from US Central Command (CENTCOM)—the arm of the Pentagon that oversees operations in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

      Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), one of the task force’s members, noted that the findings are preliminary. There is still a Pentagon inspector general investigation into the allegations, which were brought to the watchdog last year by fifty whistleblowers.

      “We still do not fully understand the reasons and motivations behind this practice and how often the excluded analyses were proven ultimately to be correct,” Wenstrup said, according to The Hill.

      In its report, the task force noted that it “did not receive access to all the materials it requested.” The group said it would “continue its work following the conclusion of the [Department of Defense inspector general] investigation and other ongoing efforts.” That probe is supposed to wrap up by the fall.

    • The Invisible Man: George W. Bush and a Hole in History

      There’s a missing page to this recipe, one that has been deliberately deleted like a classified email from The Book Of Days. Trump runs around blaming Secretary Clinton for the state of the economy while arguing in tandem that Clinton and President Obama created ISIS out of thin air. “He’s the founder of ISIS,” Trump said on Wednesday. “He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder. He founded ISIS. I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.” The corporate “news” media lap it up because its “good television,” and even his most ardent opponents fail to say the one missing word.

      Bush.

      Noam Chomsky explained the phenomenon best, and it is remarkable to watch it unfold in real time. According to Chomsky, the most effective way to control a populace is to severely limit the parameters of debate, but have the debate within those hedged parameters be vigorous so people think something of worth is actually taking place. Hence, they shout and stomp about responsible budget priorities without ever discussing the bloated “defense” budget, because that topic has been deemed off limits. Likewise, they shout and stomp about ISIS and the economy without ever mentioning George W. Bush, because he is simply too embarrassing to too many people sitting behind important desks with a lot to lose.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • FOIA Request Probes Extent of Government Spying on Climate Protesters

      Citing an investigation that revealed federal agents went undercover to spy on environmental activists, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) on Thursday filed nine Freedom of Information Act requests seeking information on surveillance of peaceful protests at federal fossil fuel auctions.

      As they wrote at The Intercept in July, journalists Lee Fang and Steve Horn obtained emails showing that in May, local law enforcement and federal agents monitored and infiltrated a “Keep it in the Ground” protest at a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auction in Lakewood, Colorado.

      “The emails, which were obtained through an open records act request, show that the Lakewood Police Department collected details about the protest from undercover officers as the event was being planned,” they wrote. “During the auction, both local law enforcement and federal agents went undercover among the protesters.”

    • Washington County Shocks Big Oil With Ban on Fossil Fuel Exports

      Environmentalists and industrialists were both shocked by the move from the coastal county once known as “Wide Open Whatcom” for its welcoming of oil refineries and a massive aluminum smelter.

    • Tribal Members Block Pipeline Construction, 12 Arrested

      Yesterday (August 11), approximately 200 protestors from the Oceti Sakowins (commonly known as the Sioux people)—joined by “Divergent” actress Shailene Woodley—blocked crews constructing the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline set to run through their land. Though the group remained peaceful, the Morton County Police Department arrested 12 for disorderly conduct or criminal trespass, reports the Associated Press.

  • Finance

    • Brexit harm denial and the exchange rate

      There seems at the moment some confusion in the Brexit camp: is all the bad news just wishful imagination by Remainers, or is it real but caused by Remainers. Some specific thoughts on the extraordinary Telegraph editorial are here, but one event that was not in anyone’s imagination was the depreciation in sterling as the result became known. Brexiters tend to think markets know what they are doing, so they have resorted to all kinds of arguments why this depreciation was not really bad news.

      First, the reason why it is bad news. A depreciation in sterling makes everyone in the UK poorer, because the goods we buy that are made overseas or sold in world markets (oil) will cost more. That this depreciation happened as a result of the vote is beyond dispute. So what do Leave apologists have to say in response? So far I have heard the following.

    • ‘Strongest Words Yet,’ But Clinton Still Refuses to Push Obama on TPP

      Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Thursday offered her “strongest words yet against the TPP,” according to one progressive organization—but whether it will be enough to convince skeptics remains to be seen.

      In an economic policy speech delivered in Warren, Michigan, Clinton said her “message to every worker in Michigan and across America is this: I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages—including the Trans Pacific Partnership. I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election, and I’ll oppose it as President.”

    • Why a Tax on Wall Street Trades is an Even Better Idea Than You Know

      One of Bernie Sanders’s most important proposals didn’t receive enough attention and should become a law even without a president Sanders. Hillary Clinton should adopt it for her campaign.

    • The Fiscal Myth That’s Killing The Economy, In 7 Steps

      A new economic working paper reinforces an important reality: We need more government spending to repair the economy for millions of working Americans. Unfortunately, our political debate is being held back by an economic myth – one that has yet to be challenged in political debate, despite an ever-growing body of evidence against it.

    • Jill Stein and the Green Party Add More Ballot Lines This Week

      Jill Stein and the Green Party filed their petitions for ballot access in 3 more states this week: Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Utah. The campaign is confirmed on the ballot in 28 states, and awaits state government confirmation in 7 others where we have filed in the last month. 12 more states have pending deadlines where we will be filing between now and September 9.

    • GOP Obsession With Austerity Is to Blame for Sluggish Economic Recovery

      Fiscal austerity in the wake of the Great Recession—imposed by Republicans on the federal, state, and local levels—is responsible for the sluggish pace of economic recovery since 2009, states a new paper that undercuts conservative attempts to pin the blame on President Barack Obama.

      “By far the biggest drag on growth throughout the recovery from the Great Recession has been the fiscal policy forced upon us by Republican lawmakers in Congress and austerity-minded state legislatures and governors,” wrote Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which put out the analysis on Thursday.

      Because the “ability of conventional monetary policy to spur recovery following the Great Recession was more limited than in any other post-war recovery,” Bivens explained, increases in government spending and federal aid to states were necessary to help working Americans following the recession that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.

    • The Olympics Are a Colossal Waste and a Shameful Distraction

      Everyone loves the Olympics. They allow people all over the world to set aside their political and religious differences and enjoy a few weeks of healthy competition between a few thousand people who have spent years honing their skills.

      At least, this is what we tell ourselves.

      In fact, not everyone loves the Olympics. Often, the poorest sectors of society within the host countries experience displacement and other forms of oppression as authorities work hard to impress visiting athletes and spectators. In Brazil, the first South American country to serve as the international showcase, this was certainly true; more than 20,000 families were displaced to make way for Olympics-related infrastructure. In fact, the state of Rio de Janeiro, where the games are being held, is in such desperate financial circumstances that state workers are not being paid and health care centers cannot even afford to take on the Zika virus crisis. Rio declared bankruptcy ahead of the games, and the state’s governor declared a “state of calamity.”

      But the mayor of Rio de Janeiro was quick to assure the world that the economic disaster “in no way delays the delivery of Olympic projects and the promises assumed by the city of Rio.” Apparently, delivering basic services to the city’s residents is a lower priority than accommodating the Olympics.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Jeremy Corbyn earns geordie acclaim at debate against Owen Smith

      Clutching Momentum and socialist party banners, and placards reading “Geordies got ya back Corbyn”, a crowd of about 50 people swarmed around the Labour leader as he arrived at the Hilton hotel in Gateshead on Thursday evening, chanting his name as he got out of his car. Owen Smith received no such welcome.

    • Diane Abbott says Labour entryist claims are a distraction

      The shadow health secretary, Diane Abbott, a staunch Jeremy Corbyn supporter, has dismissed suggestions that the Labour party is being infiltrated by hard-left activists, saying the claims are being peddled by “people within the Westminster bubble”.

      Abbott said the Labour deputy leader Tom Watson’s claims that the party was vulnerable to a takeover by Trotskyist entryists were a “distraction”.

      Her comments come ahead of a court of appeal ruling on whether tens of thousands of new members of the Labour party will have the right to vote in the forthcoming leadership election between Corbyn and Owen Smith.

    • An Open Letter to Ivanka Trump from Michael Moore: ‘Your Dad Is Not Well’

      Every day he continues his spiral downward—and after his call for gun owners to commit acts of violence against Mrs. Clinton, it is clear he needs help, serious help. His comments and behavior have become more and more bizarre and detached from reality. He is in need of an intervention. And I believe only you can conduct it.

    • FEC Commissioner, Citing The Intercept, Calls for Ban on Foreign Money in Politics

      Federal Election Commission member Ann Ravel on Tuesday proposed a ban on political contributions by domestic subsidiaries of foreign corporations.

      Ravel’s proposal cites The Intercept series last week reporting that American Pacific International Capital, a California corporation owned by two Chinese nationals, donated $1.3 million to Right to Rise USA, the main Super PAC supporting Jeb Bush’s presidential run.

      Ravel wrote that as a result of Citizens United and subsequent Supreme Court decisions, “our campaign finance system is vulnerable to influence from foreign nationals and foreign corporations through Domestic subsidiaries and affiliates in ways unimaginable a decade ago.”

    • US Presidential Race 2016: Cruella de Vil Versus Captain Klutz

      Like or hate Trump, the media bias against him for challenging the neoliberal order is astonishing, harkening back to Cold War thinking. He is vilified out of fear he might shake the old order up: Reorder NATO, work with the Russian president, focus money on US infrastructure.

      [...]

      The New York Times, Washington Post, mainstream/cable news reek of polemic and government “officials” in a stunning disinformation campaign while at the same time they try to dismiss Clinton’s continued flirtation with the FBI/IRS over email, the shenanigans of the Clinton Foundation, and her militaristic “love a man in uniform”, and her coup instigating past. Even former military commanders and the CIA have gotten in on 2016 presidential campaign.

    • Don’t Be Fooled By Small Donations to Presidential Campaigns

      When Bernie Sanders ended his run for the Democratic nomination, the small donor narrative seemed over for this presidential cycle. But last week, small donors roared back, reportedly fueling Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee’s huge July fundraising take.

      At a rally last week, Trump announced that he had raised $35.8 million from 517,000 small donors with an average contribution of $69.

      As usual, Trump’s numbers don’t quite add up. The total July fundraising take was $82 million. The campaign announced it had raised $64 million from an email and snail mail campaign, the bulk from small donors. But was the $69 average from a $35.8 million subset of one of these amounts? No telling until the official numbers are filed with the Federal Elections Commission later this month.

      Until then, Trump won’t let the details get in the way. He boasted at a Columbus, Ohio, rally that small donors were keeping him honest: “I’m going to do what’s right for you,” he said. “[Hillary Clinton] has got to do right for her donors.”

    • I’m Sick of the So-Called “News”

      If you turn on MSNBC or CNN any morning, all you’ll hear is the hosts and guests arguing about the latest absurd thing that Donald Trump has said.

      On Monday, Trump laid out his economic plan, but the media ignored the details and the fact that his plan is Voodoo Economics 2.0, and they instead focused on the fact that he called Hillary Clinton unfit to serve as president.

      [...]

      Honestly, it doesn’t matter what day of the week or what time of day a person tunes into the 24-hour news networks, he or she can always find out the latest vapid and boorish insult that’s spewed from Trump’s lips.

      The problem is… it isn’t news!

      It’s nothing but pure infotainment.

      The corporate commercial networks are much, much happier presenting personal drama in the form of packaged infotainment and faux outrage rather than any sort of programming in the public interest.

    • First on CNN: Inside the debate over probing the Clinton Foundation

      Officials from the FBI and Department of Justice met several months ago to discuss opening a public corruption case into the Clinton Foundation, according to a US official.

      At the time, three field offices were in agreement an investigation should be launched after the FBI received notification from a bank of suspicious activity from a foreigner who had donated to the Clinton Foundation, according to the official.

      FBI officials wanted to investigate whether there was a criminal conflict of interest with the State Department and the Clinton Foundation during Clinton’s tenure. The Department of Justice had looked into allegations surrounding the foundation a year earlier after the release of the controversial book “Clinton Cash,” but found them to be unsubstantiated and there was insufficient evidence to open a case.

    • EXCLUSIVE: Joint FBI-US Attorney Probe Of Clinton Foundation Is Underway

      Multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption charges against the Clinton Foundation, according to a former senior law enforcement official.

      The investigation centers on New York City where the Clinton Foundation has its main offices, according to the former official who has direct knowledge of the activities.

    • 2016 Election Lawsuit Tracker: The New Election Laws and the Suits Challenging Them

      There are 15 states with new voting laws that have never before been used during a presidential election, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice. These laws include restrictions like voter ID requirements and limits on early voting. Many are making their way through the courts, which have already called a halt to two laws in the past month — one in North Carolina and one in North Dakota.

      “All the sides were pushing for opinions over the summer so that nobody would run into the concern that it was all of a sudden too late to shift what the state had been planning to do,” said Jennifer Clark, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.

      We’re tracking the new laws and the suits against them in the run-up to Election Day. We’ll keep this updated as decisions roll in.

    • Hate Trump? You should still hold Clinton’s feet to the fire

      Here’s a news flash: if you’re a progressive, you can and should critique Hillary Clinton right now – and that doesn’t have to mean that you want Donald Trump to be president.

      It means we are still using our brains, “That we are not checkmated,” as Michelle Alexander puts it, that engaging in discourse is not just possible, but necessary in a race with less than terrific choices. No matter who you ultimately vote for, don’t stop demanding a candidate endorse policies that benefit you in order to get your support, even if you vote for them.

      Clinton should be pushed relentlessly by the left on her economic policies and history, for starters. While she made fun of Trump on the stump for having “a dozen or so economic advisers he just named: hedge fund guys, billionaire guys, six guys named Steve, apparently,” she is living in a glass house funded by Goldman Sachs and should be throwing no stones. We’ll see whether she does in the big economic policy speech she is due to give on Thursday.

    • The Seven Deadly Sins of Political Punditry

      There are lots of reasons to question the infatuation of pundits with polls and how too much of a fuss is made over statistically insignificant changes in their results. Post RNC and DNC, a lot of noise was made in terms of convention bumps and who was in the lead. Historically presidential candidates get convention bumps but after a couple of weeks it fades. No news here. Pundits nonetheless angst over them, especially when they pay for them and make them their main news story, such as what CNN has done recently.

      Finally, aggregate public opinion polls in presidential races are meaningless–remember it is not the popular but the electoral vote that determines the president. The race for the presidency is really 51 separate elections, of which only about ten really matter because that is how few swing states there are.

    • Don’t Mistake a Protest Vote for a Strategy

      Last week, I received the same response from a crowd of Bernie Sanders backers that I had seen another group of his supporters give the man himself the prior week in Philadelphia – they jeered me. I was kind of flattered, actually. In Bernie’s case, the negative reaction was in response to his support for the election of Hillary Clinton, against whom we had all campaigned for so long. In my case, I didn’t even argue against voting for Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, in California, a “non-battleground” state, but I did express the hope that no one who did so would mistake a protest vote for a strategy. In other words, we shouldn’t abandon the Democratic Party – where we may not feel loved – for the Green Party, where we may feel better, but go nowhere.

      I found a bit of personal irony in the situation, in that I had come in for a quite similar response just down the hall in the very same building a little over four years ago. That night I sat on a panel with Rocky Anderson, a former mayor of Salt Lake City then seeking the presidency on the Justice Party ticket. What had met with audience disapproval then was my argument that, while my co-panelist seemed like a fine candidate, the problem was that if we had really wanted to effectively take on Barack Obama, what Anderson or someone else should have done was enter the Democratic primaries. Anderson ultimately did not make it onto the ballot in California; he received 86 write-in votes in San Francisco, some no doubt from that audience. He got 43,018 nationwide, 0.03 percent of the total.

    • Paul Ryan: ‘Eunuch’ or ‘Powerhouse’?

      House Speaker Paul Ryan is a servile political “eunuch” twisting himself to meet the capricious whims of Republican nominee Donald Trump, smirked Late Night host Stephen Colbert.

      Yet Ryan is “the most powerful Republican politician in America,” according to the astute MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, a long-time observer of American politics.

      So which is it? Actually, Ryan fits both descriptions. Shamelessly endorsing Trump despite repeated racist and inflammatory statements, Ryan wants to display just enough support for Trump in this campaign to avoid alienating Republican voters who oppose both “free trade” and immigration.

    • Tainted Gifts: Time to Enforce Ethics Laws

      Was it wrong for Senator Tim Kaine to accept $201,600 in corporate gifts –many of them from businesses and lobbyists seeking favors from state– during his eight years as Virginia’s lieutenant governor and then governor? That’s the question voters may ask as Mr. Kaine campaigns as Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential running mate.

      Sadly, our courts and state ethics commissions seem to be turning a blind eye to conflicts of interest.

      Neither former Governor Kaine nor his successor Bob McDonnell broke any law when they accepted costly gifts from businessmen who had pending business interests before the state– because the State of Virginia had no conflict of interest law on the books when they accepted their gifts.

    • Did Companies & Countries Buy State Dept. Access by Donating to Clinton Foundation?

      Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Grimaldi of The Wall Street Journal, who has covered the Clinton Foundation for years, looks at the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, and what it would be if she became president. Newly released State Department emails include exchanges between top members of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s top State Department advisers, including Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. The FBI reportedly wanted to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, but U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch pushed back.

    • “Historians Against Trump” Demonstrates Crucial Role for Public Intellectuals

      The group took inspiration from Ken Burns’ 2016 commencement speech at Stanford University. Burns’ performance in fact brings to the fore some of Fish’s points, and in particular the issue of the deportment of intellectuals in public. Burns was welcomed at Stanford as a celebrated documentary filmmaker — the level of recognition he was awarded was matched only by how comfortable the audience seemed to be to welcome the man who taught them so much about baseball, jazz, the Civil War and many other subjects.

      However, when he launched into a bitter and urgent tirade against Donald Trump, the mood changed. At first, especially amongst the graduates, there was surprise and wild applause. But as Burns kept on that topic, digging deeper into Trump’s mendacity and utter lack of qualifications, as Burns began to talk about fascism and totalitarianism, there was less applause. He seemed to have overstayed his welcome.

      Why is this important to note? Because it points to something that Richard Hofstadter noted half a century ago in his magisterial Anti-intellectualism in American Life — even when they approach others with humility, academic intellectuals are still often viewed with suspicion and written off as inherently arrogant and unnecessary to everyday life. And this is especially true when they appear in public. Then they may be intolerable. Fish takes on the job of putting them in their place: “Professors are at it again, demonstrating in public how little they understand the responsibilities and limits of their profession.”

    • Progressives Beware: Why a Vote for Neoliberals is a Vote for the Fascists and the Far Right

      Decades of voting for the corporate-controlled neoliberal elite has led to perpetual wars, the complete disintegration of several nations, resulting in millions of dead and millions of refugees on a scale not seen since WWII, to Al Qaeda-turned ISIS, to a situation on the brink of a catastrophic war between NATO and Russia, and to a nearly complete demise of the once vibrant middle class in most advanced economies. This in turn has resulted in extreme political discontent and a polarized political order rejecting the centrist “business as usual” neoliberal order. This rebellion of sorts is manifested by the rise of the ‘radical’ left in Greece, Spain and even the United States, countered by the rise of the far-right with France’s Le Pen, Germany’s AfD, Greece’s Golden Dawn, leading to a trend that has recently resulted in a Brexit vote in the UK and the rise of the Donald Trump phenomenon in the United States.

    • Civil Rights Icon John Lewis: I’m Probably Gonna Get Arrested Again (Video)

      And quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis added, “We must be hopeful. We must be optimistic. We must never hate. As Dr. King would say, hate is too heavy a burden to bear.”

      Lewis also maintains that non-violence is key.

      “You were a founder of the SNCC, which was a student council that was specifically designed around nonviolence,” Noah pointed out. “That was an important distinction that you had to make—I’ve always been fascinated as to why you made that distinction.”

    • Austerity nostalgia, racism and xenophobia

      Why anti-racism and migrants rights activism need to be central to anti-austerity campaigning.

    • Labour Appeal: Fury as High Court Judge Philip Sales’ intimate links to Tony Blair revealed

      In what is a consolation victory for the Labour Party’s establishment in the Court of Appeal, it has been revealed by WikiLeaks that there may be more to the decision than meets the eye.

      After Sir Philip Sales QC overruled the previous High Court decision to allow the 130,000 disenfranchised Labour Party members to vote in the up and coming leadership election – notorious whistle-blower Wikileaks revealed that Sales had been a Blair insider for years, having been recruited as Junior Counsel to the Crown in 1997.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • A Possible Solution To Twitter’s Difficult Problem Of Abusive Behavior: Let People Speak, Don’t Force Everyone To Listen

      BuzzFeed had a long and interesting article earlier this week noting Twitter’s ongoing difficulty in figuring out an appropriate way to deal with harassment and abuse that is often heaped upon certain users — especially women and minorities. The article is interesting — even as Twitter disputes some of its claims. It’s also noteworthy that this debate is not even remotely new. Last year, I wrote about it, suggesting that one possible solution is to switch Twitter from being a platform into being a protocol — on which anyone could then build services. In that world, Twitter could then offer various filters if it wanted — while other providers could compete with different filters or services. Then the tweets could flow without Twitter having to take responsibility, but there would be options (possibly many options) for those who were dealing with abuse or harassment.

      Not surprisingly, that kind of suggestion is unlikely to ever be adopted, but reading through the BuzzFeed article, something else struck me. To some extent, the article seemed a bit unfair in portraying some of Twitter’s execs as willfully clueless about the abuse and harassment. It repeatedly portrays those who support freedom of expression as somehow being unreasonable extremists.

    • Another Unfortunate Example Of Facebook Silencing Important Videos

      Another day, another case of Facebook disappearing a video that it should have left up. A politician in Hong Kong says that Facebook banned him from the site for 24 hours for a “terms of service violation” after he posted a video of him confronting men who had been following him around for weeks.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Privacy: What Not To Do
    • Surveillance Isn’t Colorblind

      Rapidly developing technology exposes communities of color to near-constant surveillance and over-policing.

    • La Quadrature du Net supports Reporters Without Borders against the German Surveillance Law

      La Quadrature du Net supports Reporters Without Borders with its action against the German bill on BND surveillance, which would allow the German foreign intelligence service to spy on foreign journalists. This bill is a direct attack on freedom of information, and thus undermines democracy and fundamental rights. German MPs must refuse to yield on values that they would defend for their own country just as well as foreign surveillance is concerned. Fundamental rights cannot simply be accommodated whenever convenient.

      La Quadrature du Net seizes the opportunity to remind that attacks on the rights of journalists, which are indeed intolerable, must not distract from massive infringement on the fundamental rights of the whole of the population, as entailed in the various surveillance laws passed in the recent years across European Union Member-States and which, far too often, are in contradiction with the principles of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

      Similarly, foreign surveillance laws should serve as warnings on conditions by which intelligence, individually targeted or wide-ranging, is being shared between European Member-States and third parties, as well as on agreements to share or access interception systems : usually downright absent from the laws on foreign intelligence (in France or elsewhere), these provisions constitute a grave danger of collateral surveillance being carried out in the greatest opacity and with no avenue of appeal.

    • Illinois Sets New Limits On Cell-Site Simulators

      Illinois has joined the growing ranks of states limiting how police may use cell-site simulators, invasive technology devices that masquerade as cell phone towers and turn our mobile phones into surveillance devices. By adopting the Citizen Privacy Protection Act, Illinois last month joined half a dozen other states—as well as the Justice Department and one federal judge—that have reiterated the constitutional requirement for police to obtain a judicial warrant before collecting people’s location and other personal information using cell-site simulators.

      By going beyond a warrant requirement and prohibiting police from intercepting data and voice transmissions or conducting offensive attacks on personal devices, the Illinois law establishes a new high watermark in the battle to prevent surveillance technology from undermining civil liberties. Illinois also set an example for other states to follow by providing a powerful remedy when police violate the new law by using a cell-site simulator without a warrant: wrongfully collected information is inadmissible in court, whether to support criminal prosecution or any other government proceedings.

    • Turkish Reporter: These Grand Theft Auto Cheat Codes Are The Secret Messages Of The Failed Coup Attempt

      Let’s take Turkey, for instance. Yes the country with the petulant and easily-upset President Tayyip Erdogan, also has some reporters that truly just make stuff up. For instance, you can read about one reporter who managed to find some secret documents from the plotters of the recently failed coup attempt against Erdogan, and you can see an image of the secret codes she found below.

      [...]

      Yup, those are cheat codes for Grand Theft Auto 4. The reporter, meanwhile, apparently insisted that these were secret communications by the plotters against Erdogan. And you have to admit that that doesn’t make any sense, because if those plotters could get more guns and health just by repeating a video game cheat code, the coup probably would have went off without a hitch.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • How A Man Got $115,000 After A Random Facebook Post Destroyed His Life

      The social media gripped-world has now started to think about the consequences of the skyrocketing presence of websites like Facebook in their life.

      No one would have thought, a simple Facebook post would invite a life-threating experience for a 74-year-old man. But it happened.

      Australia-based Kenneth Rothe used to run two hotels, Nirvana Village and Blue Dolphins, in Nambucca, New South Wales. Everything was going fine until a dark day came when a Facebook post popped up out of nowhere and destroyed Rothe’s life thereon.

      The following post was made by an electrician named David Scott in March 2014,

      “Pedophile [sic] warning:- Nambucca has been used as a relocation for these monsters – blue dolphin –nirvana hotel and above the Indian restaurant! …Bus stops are right out front of theses hotels for our children?”

      Rothe accommodated the ones affected by family disputes but he never allowed pedophiles and people with a criminal history to stay at his properties.

      After the post, Rothe started experiencing anonymous calls with consent for hanky-panky acts. He even requested Scott for an apology regarding the problems he was facing due to the post but his request only fell upon deaf ears.

    • Trump favors Guantanamo trials for US terrorism suspects

      Donald Trump says it would be “fine” to try Americans suspected of terrorism at the Guantanamo Bay detention center if possible.

      The Miami Herald asks Trump whether he’d approve new detentions at the prison if he’s elected president. The Republican says he wants to ensure the U.S. has a “safe place” to keep a “radical Islamic terrorist.”

    • Nearly 100 people shot in Chicago in less than a week

      Nearly 100 people have been shot in Chicago in less than a week, pushing the number of shooting victims so far this year to more than 2,500 — about 800 more than this time last year, according to data kept by the Tribune.

      Between last Friday afternoon and early Thursday, at least 99 people were shot in the city, 24 of them fatally. At least nine people were killed on Monday alone, the deadliest day in Chicago in 13 years, according to Tribune data. Among the wounded that day was a 10-year-old boy shot in the back as he played on his front porch in Lawndale.

    • Australian diplomats in UK and New Zealand may be called in to explain Nauru files

      British and NZ governments are facing calls to summon Australian high commissioners to explain revelations of child abuse and sexual assault

    • The Dysfunctional United Kingdom

      The late Duke of Westminster is characterised as a “philanthropist” by mainstream media even though the percentage of both his income and his wealth he gave to charity was less than most ordinary people’s mite, myself included, and I am willing to bet that what he did do, was tax-deductible. That a parasite who sat on £9 billion of unearned money in a country where disabled people commit suicide from poverty, and who got two O levels from Harrow, was Prince Charles’ closest friend, cuts through the lying propaganda about the Royal family we are constantly fed.

    • WATCH: This Student Was Arrested for Challenging an Abusive Officer in School

      One day last fall, Niya Kenny was sitting in her math class at Spring Valley High School in Richland County, South Carolina, when a police officer came into the classroom. A girl in her class had refused to put away her cell phone, and the teacher had summoned an administrator, who called on the officer assigned to the school.

      Niya thought the officer was bad news — his name was Ben Fields, but he was so aggressive that students knew him as Officer Slam. As soon as he entered the room, she called out for other students to record him.

    • ‘We’re Trying to Transform How Policy Looks in the 21st Century’

      Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: “We have always said that state violence was bigger than just police murdering black people.”

    • We can’t all be “radicals”, but we should all support them.

      “Violence is never the answer” is a sentiment I often hear parroted by people who celebrate the 4th of July in America, a holiday commemorating a violent and deadly rebellion. People have a habit of glorifying violence in history, while condemning violence in modern times.

      I’ve seen people who claim to love Malcolm X denounce modern day revolutionaries who embody the same principals that made X who he was. It seems that there are many people who only like the idea of revolution if they’re reading about it in a history book.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol

      It was mid-March 1992, and Mark McCahill had never been to San Diego before. Back home in Minneapolis, the skies had been dumping snow for six months, and would keep at it for several more weeks. McCahill checked into the Hyatt Islandia, an 18-story high-rise hotel overlooking Mission Bay. “There were palm trees,” he recalls. “Boy, was it nice.”

    • Federal Court Delivers a Blow to Municipal Broadband

      The digital divide is alive and well in 2016 and there are still millions of people in the United States living without internet access. And a court decision that came down this week hasn’t helped matters.

      On Wednesday, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the FCC’s 2015 order to preempt state-level restrictions in North Carolina and Tennessee on municipalities seeking to build their own high-speed broadband networks.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • KickassTorrents Admins Needs Your Help To Rebuild The Site

        Some long-time moderators of KickassTorrents have come together with a common aim to bring back the website to its former glory. To achieve this goal and maintain the community website Katcr.co, the KickassTorrents crew has asked for donations. They are accepting donations via PayPal and a Gofundme campaign.

      • Archivists Grapple With Problems Of Preserving Recent Culture Held On Tape Cassettes And Floppy Drives

        It is an irony of these formerly high-tech holdings that they are far less durable than old-fashioned paper-based systems. And researchers studying them face problems of compatibility that simply don’t arise with paper. This is a major issue that is only now being faced, as cultural figures of Greer’s generation pass on their archives to universities and libraries, who must start to grapple with the core tasks of deciphering and preserving them.

        The good news is that once they have been decoded, they can be transferred to other media, and in more open formats that will be easier to access in the years to come. But that still leaves the problem of how to store all these archives in a way that will stand the test of time. Perhaps they will be encoded as data held on the ultimate storage medium, DNA. Or maybe it would just be easier to print the lot out on paper.

      • Compulsory collective management of copyright for images displayed by search engines: a French cultural exception to EU law

        A few weeks ago this Blog explored the possible of implications of a case currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), Marc Soulier C-301/15, in particular should the Court follow the Opinion of Advocate General (AG) Wathelet. This reference for a preliminary ruling from France concerns the compatibility with EU law of the 2012 loi (Law No 2012-287 of 1 March 2012) adopted to allow and regulate the digital exploitation of out-of-print 20th century books.

        The AG held the view that such law is not really compatible with EU law because it envisages a mechanism that, contrary to Articles 2 and 3 of the InfoSoc Directive, gives approved collecting societies – rather than authors – the right to authorise the reproduction and the representation in digital form of out-of-print books.

        In my comment to the Opinion, I highlighted how the law on out-of-print books might not be the only case of potential incompatibility with EU law. In particular, in early July France introduced Loi No 2016-925 on la liberté de la création, l’architecture et patrimoine (freedom of creation, architecture and cultural heritage), which introduces new provisions into the French Intellectual Property Code (IPC) to regulate the publication of a plastic, graphic or photographic work by an online communication service. In particular, new Article 136-2(1) IPC provides that the publication of a plastic artwork, graphic or photographic work by an online communication service is subject to the consent, not of authors, but rather … one or more collective management organisations (CMOs) appointed to this end by the French Ministry of Culture.

      • Why Does The Copyright Office Keep Acting Like A Lobbying Arm For Hollywood?

        We’ve noted a few times recently that the Copyright Office has inserted itself into policy disputes where it has no business being. It’s important to note that the role of the Copyright Office is supposed to be a rather specific one: to handle the registration of copyrights. It has little official roles in terms of actual policymaking — the role is more about executing on the policy decisions of Congress. And, yet, over the years the Copyright Office has become a revolving door way station for execs from the entertainment industry, where they seek to use the Copyright Office as something of a taxpayer funded pro-legacy industry lobbying arm. Just in the last few months, we’ve reported on how the Copyright Office was flat out lying to the FCC about how copyright works in an effort to support the cable industry’s plan to stop competition in set top boxes. Then there’s its plan to strip websites of their safe harbors by making it a bureaucratic nightmare. Oh, and also its new plan to mess up the part of copyright law that protects libraries and archives. And let’s not forget the absolutely ridiculous hearings the Copyright Office held a few months ago about the DMCA safe harbors, where they seemed 100% focused on pushing the RIAA/MPAA’s plan to blame Google for everything.

        What the hell is going on with the Copyright Office? This is not in its mandate and yet it’s run like a government-funded lobbying arm of Hollywood? The folks over at Public Knowledge have now started putting together a long list (much longer than the above examples) of the Copyright Office incorrectly weighing in on policy issues, taking positions that favor the desires of the legacy copyright industries, rather than what the law actually says. It’s a long and very troubling list.

      • Appeals Court Says It’s Perfectly Fine For The DOJ To Steal Kim Dotcom’s Money Before Any Trial

        Last year, there was a series of very troubling rulings by a district court in a case related to the criminal prosecution of Kim Dotcom. This wasn’t, technically, part of the actual criminal case against him, but rather a separate effort by the government to steal his money. We’ve been covering the ridiculous process of civil asset forfeiture for a while, and it’s really problematic in general. In Dotcom’s case, it’s something of a farce. Remember, civil asset forfeiture is the situation where the US government effectively files a civil (not criminal) lawsuit against inanimate objects, rather than people. In this case, it basically filed a lawsuit against all of Kim Dotcom’s money, arguing that it was the proceeds of a crime and therefore, the government should just get it all. Again, this is entirely separate from the actual criminal trial of Kim Dotcom, which has been put on hold while the extradition battle plays out in New Zealand (determining if Dotcom can be forcibly sent to the US to stand trial).

        Just the whole process of civil asset forfeiture is troublesome enough. As we’ve detailed over and over again, it’s basically a system whereby law enforcement gets to steal money and other stuff (cars are popular) from people, simply by claiming that they were used in a criminal endeavor. Since the lawsuit is against the stuff, if people want it back, they have to go and make a claim on it, and it’s a fairly convoluted process. In this case, things were even more ridiculous, because the government argued that because Dotcom was resisting extradition from New Zealand, he could be declared “a fugitive” and the judge overseeing the case (the same one overseeing his criminal case, Judge Liam O’Grady) agreed. That effectively meant that Dotcom had no legal right to protest the government simply taking and keeping all of his assets — and they moved forward and did exactly that.

        It is difficult to see how this can be legitimately described as anything but theft by the US government. It got someone locked up in New Zealand, based on questionable legal theories, and while he was (quite reasonably) fighting extradition to the US (a place he’s never visited and where he has no business ties), it initiated a separate legal process to keep all his money, no matter what happens in his extradition fight and criminal trial. On top of that, it effectively barred him from making an official claim on that money by having him declared a fugitive for exercising his legal due process rights to fight extradition. So while he exercises his legal due process rights in New Zealand, he’s blocked from doing so in the US. And all of his money goes to the US government.

        As we said after O’Grady’s ruling came out, even if you think that Dotcom is guilty of a criminal copyright conspiracy, and even if you think he should be extradited, tried and locked up this should concern you. Let him go through the full legal process, with all that due process entails, and then determine what should happen to his assets. To take them before that’s happened, through this questionable side process is immensely problematic.

      • Facebook’s ContentID Clone Had A Vulnerability That Opened Up Ability For Users To Game Others’ Videos

        Earlier this year, we noted that Facebook had launched its own ContentID clone, called Rights Manager, which was a response to a bunch of angry YouTubers who were annoyed at people “freebooting” popular YouTube videos onto Facebook. We noted that, like ContentID, we fully expected the system to be abused to take down content. While we haven’t heard examples of that just yet, it does appear that Rights Manager had some serious vulnerabilities that enabled anyone else who was signed up for Rights Manager to manipulate the information and rules on any other video in the system (including, obviously, those claimed by other users).

08.11.16

Links 11/8/2016: New Chromebooks, Features in Linux 4.8

Posted in News Roundup at 6:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Won. So, Now What?

    The government is now a little more open. This week, the White House released its first official federal source code policy, detailing a pilot program that requires government agencies to release 20 percent of any new code they commission as open source software, meaning the code will be available for anyone to examine, modify, and reuse in their own projects. The government agencies will also share more code with each other, essentially adopting open source practices within their own governmental universe.

    It’s the latest in a long line of high-profile victories for the open source movement. As recently as a decade ago, the worlds of both government and business worried that using open source software would open them up to bugs, security holes, and countless lawsuits. But despite these early fears, open source came to dominate the digital landscape. Today, practically every major piece of technology you interact with on a day-to-day basis—from the web to your phone to your car—was built using at least some form of freely available code.

  • Professional media production with Linux and free, open source software

    Building a professional media production toolkit on Linux is a viable course of action whether you want to create digital or physical products. More importantly, there are a number of excellent project management and team collaboration tools available to keep your production organized and on track. Are you using Linux and FOSS applications for professional media production? We’d love to hear about your projects: info@dototot.com

  • Call Public Blockchain Developers What They Are: Open Source Coders Not Fiduciaries

    Angela Walch, Associate Professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law, has written a thought-provoking editorial where she argues that developers are in a position of trust, therefore, they must be burdened with responsibilities – including, perhaps, outright licensing requirements to ensure a certain standard.

    Although the professor has many good points, the open source system is designed in such a way as to adequately minimize any negligence or oversight to a point where one can say that users do not need to trust any one developer, but all developers which can include anyone who can code.

  • How open source platform Ghost solves security and productivity for bloggers

    Finding a blogging platform that suits your needs can be a difficult endeavor. The incumbent favorite, WordPress, is a frequent victim of hacks, either from the core WordPress code itself, or due to insecure plugins. Hosted options such as Blogger are problematic, due to incidents of blogs being unilaterally deleted without recourse.

    Ghost, a blog platform that leverages node.js and ember.js, is not just a more secure option, but one that eases the process of composition by offering a more tightly focused product.

  • How FOSS Influences All Aspects of Our Culture

    In this fascinating interview, UNC’s professor Paul Jones explains that the concept of “free and open source” was a part of our culture long before there were computers, or even electronic technology, and that it’s actually a rich part of our heritage. As for FOSS, he makes the case that it’s now an ingrained part of the digital infrastructure.

  • Braving the new data frontier: How to create a strategic open source contribution

    Open source has changed the way we process, stream and analyze data while helping tech giants and startups alike solve massive computing issues. However, integrating open source into a business strategy can be a challenge—both for organizations looking to contribute to the ecosystem and those hoping to reap the benefit from open source products and services. Only with the right strategies can enterprises execute a rewarding long-term open source plan.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Hortonworks DataFlow Leverages Open Apache Tools for Streaming Analytics

      Hortonworks, which focuses on the open source Big Data platform Hadoop, has steadily been shifting gears in response to the trend toward streaming data analytics. And now, the company has announced the next generation of Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF) version 2.0 for enterprise productivity and streaming analytics.

      “HDF is an integrated system for dataflow management and streaming analytics to quickly collect, curate, analyze and deliver insights in real-time, on-premises or in the cloud,” the compay reports. “With HDF, customers get an easy to use and enterprise ready platform to manage data in motion anywhere and in any environment.”

      DataFlow wraps in several cutting-edge open source technologies from Apache. It has new graphical user experience and integration of Apache NiFi, Apache Kafka and Apache Storm into Apache Ambari for accelerated deployment and real-time operations.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Inside How Microsoft Views Open Source [Ed: So that how it works. Microsoft pays the Linux Foundation and now the Linux Foundation needs to print Microsoft propaganda. Sadly, Linux OEMs that Microsoft is now paying have to play along with Big Lies like “Microsoft Loves Linux”. Money talks? Screams? It’s also a well established fact that Microsoft demands speaking positions in FOSS/Linux events that it ‘sponsors’. “I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?” -Microsoft's chief evangelist]

      Editor’s Note: This article is paid for by Microsoft as a Diamond-level sponsor of LinuxCon North America, to be held Aug. 22-24, 2016, and was written by Linux.com.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Tools Cauldron

      We are pleased to announce another gathering of GNU tools developers. The basic format of this meeting will be similar to the previous meetings. However this year the meeting will be immediately preceded by the first ever LLVM Cauldron.

      The purpose of this workshop is to gather all GNU tools developers, discuss current/future work, coordinate efforts, exchange reports on ongoing efforts, discuss development plans for the next 12 months, developer tutorials and any other related discussions.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing/Legal

    • GPL enforcement action in Hellwig v. VMware dismissed, with an appeal expected

      A decision in the GPL enforcement case in Germany between Christoph Hellwig (supported by the Software Freedom Conservancy) and VMware recently became public. The court dismissed the case after concluding that Hellwig failed to identify in the VMware product the specific lines of code for which he owned copyright. The GPL interpretation question was not addressed. Hellwig has indicated that he will appeal the court’s decision.

  • Programming/Development

    • Indian Government To Launch Its Own Open Source Collaboration Platform Like GitHub

      In a step that will boost open source adoption in India in a big manner, the Indian government plans to launch its own open source collaboration platform. Just like GitHub and SourceForge, people would be able to visit this platform and share their code with others. The government also plans to use it for open sourcing the code of software used in its offices.

    • Government to launch India’s own open source collaboration platform

      Months after rolling out a policy to support open source software development, the Indian government is now all set to launch its own collaboration platform for hosting open source projects. The new move is apparently aimed to encourage software developers and various government bodies to let them start sharing codes of their major projects under one roof.

      The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) released a policy related to the adoption of open source software in April 2015. Called “Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications”, the policy is targeted to provide a comprehensive framework for archiving government source code in repositories. The framework is primarily designed to open software repositories to enable reuse, sharing and remixing of new and existing codes.

      “While the policy is in place, it needs to be supported by appropriate technology infrastructure to create and grow a thriving open source community around Indian e-governance,” a source told Open Source For You, suggesting the launch of the open source platform.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • ‘Politics Above Science’: Obama Administration Keeps Marijuana Restrictions

      The Obama administration has rejected efforts to reschedule marijuana to a less restrictive drug category, keeping it classified as a Schedule 1 substance—illegal for any purpose.

      That means states that allow marijuana for medical or recreational use will remain in violation of federal law.

      The decision, announced by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on Thursday, follows efforts by lawmakers and activists to reschedule marijuana to a category in the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) that would loosen restrictions on its use. In a letter to the petitioners—Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, and New Mexico nurse practitioner Bryan Krumm—DEA chief Chuck Rosenberg wrote, “Simply put, evaluating the safety and effectiveness of drugs is a highly specialized endeavor.”

    • Why the DEA just said ‘no’ to loosening marijuana restrictions

      For the fourth consecutive time, the Drug Enforcement Administration has denied a petition to lessen federal restrictions on the use of marijuana.

      While recreational marijuana use is legal in four states and D.C., and medical applications of the drug have been approved in many more, under federal law, it remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance, which means it’s considered to have “no currently accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse.”

      The gap between permissive state laws and a restrictive federal policy has become increasingly untenable in the minds of many doctors, patients, researchers, business owners and legislators.

    • Farmer Forced By USDA Board To Dump Cherry Crop On Ground

      Uncle Sam is forcing American farmers to dump thousands of pounds of the nation’s tart cherry crop on the ground this year, and one particular farmer wants everyone to know about it.

      The Michigan farmer, Marc Santucci, posted a picture to Facebook July 26 showing thousands of cherries on the ground, hours from rotting, because of an order from a board that is overseen by the US Department of Agriculture. He said he was forced to dump 14 percent of his crop, and other farmers as much as 30 percent.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Police hunting drone operator after ‘near miss’ with plane at Newquay Airport with 62 people on board
    • Here’s why Amazon’s drone delivery idea isn’t a gimmick [Ed: creepy stuff, can hijack and fly them into planes]

      It is n0t just secretive, the way Apple is, but in a deeper sense, Jeff Bezos’ ecommerce and cloud-storage giant is opaque. Amazon rarely explains either its near-term tactical aims or its long-term strategic vision. It values surprise. To understand Amazon, then, is necessarily to engage in a kind of Kremlinology. That is especially true of the story behind one of its most important business areas: the logistics by which it ships orders to its customers.

    • Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart

      This is a story unlike any we have previously published. It is much longer than the typical New York Times Magazine feature story; in print, it occupies an entire issue. The product of some 18 months of reporting, it tells the story of the catastrophe that has fractured the Arab world since the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago, leading to the rise of ISIS and the global refugee crisis. The geography of this catastrophe is broad and its causes are many, but its consequences — war and uncertainty throughout the world — are familiar to us all. Scott Anderson’s story gives the reader a visceral sense of how it all unfolded, through the eyes of six characters in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Accompanying Anderson’s text are 10 portfolios by the photographer Paolo Pellegrin, drawn from his extensive travels across the region over the last 14 years, as well as a landmark virtual-reality experience that embeds the viewer with the Iraqi fighting forces during the battle to retake Falluja.

      It is unprecedented for us to focus so much energy and attention on a single story, and to ask our readers to do the same. We would not do so were we not convinced that what follows is one of the most clear-eyed, powerful and human explanations of what has gone wrong in this region that you will ever read.

    • How Media Distorted Syrian Ceasefire’s Breakdown

      Coverage of the breakdown of the partial ceasefire in Syria illustrated the main way corporate news media distort public understanding of a major foreign policy story. The problem is not that the key events in the story are entirely unreported, but that they were downplayed and quickly forgotten in the media’s embrace of themes with which they were more comfortable.

      In this case, the one key event was the major offensive launched in early April by Al Nusra Front—the Al Qaeda franchise in Syria—alongside US-backed armed opposition groups. This offensive was mentioned in at least two “quality” US newspapers. Their readers, however, would not have read that it was that offensive that broke the back of the partial ceasefire. On the contrary, they would have gotten the clear impression from following the major newspapers’ coverage that systematic violations by the Assad government doomed the ceasefire from the beginning.

      [...]

      But the relationship between the CIA-backed armed opposition to Assad and the jihadist Nusra Front was an issue that major US newspapers had already found very difficult to cover (FAIR.org, 3/21/16). US Syria policy has been dependent on the military potential of the Nusra Front (and its close ally, Ahrar al Sham) for leverage on the Syrian regime, since the “moderate” opposition was unable to operate in northwest Syria without jihadist support. This central element in US Syria policy, which both the government and the media were unwilling to acknowledge, was a central obstacle to accurate coverage of what happened to the Syrian ceasefire.

      This problem began shaping the story as soon as the ceasefire agreement was announced. On February 23, New York Times correspondent Neil MacFarquhar wrote a news analysis on the wider tensions between the Obama administration and Russia that pointed to “a gaping loophole” in the Syria ceasefire agreement: the fact that “it permits attacks against the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate, to continue.”

      MacFarquhar asserted that exempting Nusra from the ceasefire “could work in Moscow’s favor, since many of the anti-Assad groups aligned with the United States fight alongside the Nusra Front.” That meant that Russia could “continue to strike United States-backed rebel groups without fear…of Washington’s doing anything to stop them,” he wrote.

      [...]

      The lesson of the Syrian ceasefire episode is clear: The most influential news media have virtually complete freedom to shape the narrative surrounding a given issue simply by erasing inconvenient facts from the storyline. They can do that even when the events or facts have been reported by one or more of those very news media. In the world of personal access and power inhabited by those who determine what will be published and what won’t, even the most obviously central facts are disposable in the service of a narrative that maintains necessary relationships.

    • ‘Extremist & absurd’: Lawmakers blast ex-CIA official’s call to ‘covertly’ kill Russians

      Several Russian lawmakers have expressed extreme indignation over the statements by former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who proposed in a TV interview that US agents should “covertly” kill Russians and Iranians in Syria.

      Deputy head of the State Duma Security Committee Dmitry Gorovtsov told RIA Novosti that Morel’s words could be described as extremism. “In essence, this is akin to Nazi ideology. Retired officials who allow such statements should be brought to court,” the Russian lawmaker said.

      “Instead of trying to establish cooperation with our country and fight terrorism, Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS/ISL] and other banned groups, the American hawks make statements that pursue only one goal – to aggravate the international situation and to worsen the mutual relations between Russia and the United States.,” Gorovtsov noted

    • ‘Sage’ Advice That’s Nuttier Than Trump

      An intelligence professional, regardless of his or her personal political views, has a responsibility to tell the truth and offer unvarnished, bias-free analysis. By this standard Morell is an utter disgrace. My wrath is not just inspired by his reckless and vapid recent comments on the Charlie Rose Show. Even before this latest debacle, Morell demonstrated in his actions to help Hillary Clinton lie about Benghazi that he would shade the truth and hide the facts in service of a politician whose ass he desperately wanted to kiss.

      During a Tuesday night appearance on Charlie Rose, Morell said the following: “What they need is to have the Russians and Iranians pay a little price. … When we were in Iraq, the Iranians were giving weapons to the Shia militia, who were killing American soldiers, right? The Iranians were making us pay a price. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price . . . .[and] you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”

    • Donald Trump, the Nuclear Arsenal, and Insanity
    • ‘High Alert’: Ukraine and Russia Building Up Military at Crimean Border

      Both Ukraine and Russia are escalating military activity along the Crimean border, as tensions between the two nations—largely stoked by the West—mount once again.

      On Thursday, a Ukrainian spokesman said that in recent days, there has been “a strengthening of the [Russian] units that are at the border.”

      Meanwhile, in response to Russian claims that the Ukrainian government was plotting terrorist attacks inside Crimea, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko on Thursday ordered “all military units near Crimea and the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region to be at the highest level of combat readiness,” RT reports.

    • The Olympics Are Back and Tensions Between Russia and Ukraine Are Heating Up

      On August 8, 2008, shortly after the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Summer Olympics, Russia and Georgia kicked off a five-day war. More than five years later, following the conclusion of the Sochi Winter Olympics and ouster of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in late February 2014, soldiers without insignia — later confirmed to be Russian special forces — appeared in Crimea, sparking a chain of events that ended with Moscow annexing the peninsula from Ukraine less than a month later.

      Now, with the Rio Summer Games in full swing, tensions on Russia’s periphery are once again rising — this time with Kiev, along Crimea’s de-facto border with Ukraine.

    • Putin Accuses Ukraine of Terrorist Tactics in Crimea

      Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Ukraine was using terrorist tactics instead of trying to work towards peace in the region Wednesday following an announcement from Russia’s security agency that they had thwarted Ukrainian attacks in Crimea.

    • What Really Led to the Killing of Osama bin Laden?

      It’s been four years since a group of US Navy SEALS assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

    • Military Dissent Is Not an Oxymoron: Freeing Democracy from Perpetual War

      The United States is now engaged in perpetual war with victory nowhere in sight. Iraq is chaotic and scarred. So, too, is Libya. Syria barely exists. After 15 years, “progress” in Afghanistan has proven eminently reversible as efforts to rollback recent Taliban gains continue to falter. The Islamic State may be fracturing, but its various franchises are finding new and horrifying ways to replicate themselves and lash out. Having spent trillions of dollars on war with such sorry results, it’s a wonder that key figures in the U.S. military or officials in any other part of America’s colossal national security state and the military-industrial complex (“the Complex” for short) haven’t spoken out forcefully and critically about the disasters on their watch.

      Yet they have remained remarkably mum when it comes to the obvious. Such a blanket silence can’t simply be attributed to the war-loving nature of the U.S. military. Sure, its warriors and warfighters always define themselves as battle-ready, but the troops themselves don’t pick the fights. Nor is it simply attributable to the Complex’s love of power and profit, though its members are hardly eager to push back against government decisions that feed the bottom line. To understand the silence of the military in particular in the face of a visible crisis of war-making, you shouldn’t assume that, from private to general, its members don’t have complicated, often highly critical feelings about what’s going on. The real question is: Why they don’t ever express them publicly?

      To understand that silence means grasping all the intertwined personal, emotional, and institutional reasons why few in the military or the rest of the national security state ever speak out critically on policies that may disturb them and with which they may privately disagree. I should know, because like so many others I learned to silence my doubts during my career in the military.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate science: revolution is here

      A host of innovations in energy technology is transforming the climate-change outlook – one of the world’s three required paradigm shifts.

    • ExxonMobil Takes The Olympic Gold In Deceitful Advertising

      ExxonMobil wants you to know that it has a long “to-do” list.

      In an ad it debuted during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics on Friday night, the world’s largest oil company presented itself as nothing more than a merry band of do-gooders who were “mapping the oceans,” “turning algae into biofuel,” and “defeating malaria.”

      “And you thought we just made the gas,” joked a woman at the end, giving us a knowing smile.

    • A 400-year-old shark? Greenland shark could be Earth’s longest-lived vertebrate

      In the frigid waters of the sub-Arctic ocean lurks a mysterious and slow-moving beast known as the Greenland shark. It’s a massive animal that can grow up to 20 feet in length. Now, new research suggests it may have a massive lifespan as well.

      According to a paper published Thursday in Science, the Greenland shark could live for well over 250 years, making it the longest-living known vertebrate on Earth.

      “I am 95% certain that the oldest of these sharks is between 272 and 512 years old,” said lead author Julius Nielsen, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen. “That’s a big range, but even the age estimate of at least 272 years makes it the oldest vertebrate animal in the world.”

    • 272-Year-Old Shark Is Longest-Lived Vertebrate on Earth

      It’s no fish tale: The Greenland shark is the longest-lived vertebrate on the planet, a new study says.

      The animal, native to the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic, can live to at least 272 years—and possibly to the ripe old age of 500. (Related: “Meet the Animal That Lives for 11,000 Years.”)

      “We had an expectation that they would be very long-lived animals, but I was surprised that they turned out to be as old as they did,” says study leader Julius Nielsen, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen.

  • Finance

    • Post-Brexit Sunderland: ‘If this money doesn’t go to the NHS, I will go mad’

      Early morning on the quay at the mouth of the Wear in Sunderland and two middle-aged men wearing flak jackets descend on a dwindling band of seafarers. Their nets lie idle, as the quotas for fish have been used up or sold off. Half the fishing boats here won’t be used to fish again. The trade has been forced into other catches. The “quota cops”, with their body-mounted cameras recording everything, oblige the men to account for the crabs and lobsters caught in pots deposited on the sea bed just outside the harbour. As the crustaceans are counted into a leather-bound register, the exasperated fishermen complain of harassment. These may be the men from the British government ministry, but in post-Brexit Britain, perception is everything. In the eyes of Arthur Mole, the inspectors are as much a product of Brussels as a fruit beer or a sprout. The EU is to blame. “We’ve been like this for 30 years now. On a downward decline. Now we can see a future,” he says.

      Taking back control can rarely appear so tangible as in the interaction between Brexit-supporting fishermen and the quota police. For Mole, it is the mere possibility of accountability from anyone on the same island.

    • Brexiting Through the Media

      In the end, Brexit has very clear winners. While David Cameron personally lost his job (a collateral damage), Theresa May – with Boris Johnson (the clown) as foreign secretary – continues to be in power which, after all, is the only game in town. But having shaped public opinion on Europe and migration for decades, David Cameron was able to claim that the British people have spoken and that we (the Torries) carry out the democratic volonté générale of the British people. For many, it was the Torries that defended Britain against the foreign take-over through migrants and European rule. Now post-Brexit British neo-liberalism is even freer from the EU’s regulatory regime. It can further de-regulate the few remnants of the once British welfare state. And it can better prevent European regulation of tax havens impacting on British capitalism – a small but not insignificant win for David Cameron’s personal monetary affairs.

    • The Battle over Trump’s Taj Mahal Is a Battle for Us All

      In Atlantic City right now workers at the Trump Taj Mahal casino hotel, members of UNITE HERE Local 54, are waging a struggle that should make it one of those crystallizing flashpoints that garner national attention and mobilize support from the entire labor movement, progressives, and working people at large.

      Such flashpoints arise only occasionally in workers’ struggles for justice. In living memory, for example, Eastern Airlines, PATCO, Pittston, the Decatur wars, UPS, and most recently Verizon are among those that have attained that status. Those flashpoints of national concern and mobilization occur when what particular groups of workers are fighting for and against connects with broader tendencies and concerns in workplaces and the society in general. Downsizing, speedup, outsourcing, privatization, capital flight, unsafe working conditions, profitable employers’ demands for concessions that imperil workers’ standard of living are all among conditions that have triggered those moments. The striking Trump Taj Mahal workers are involved in precisely such a fundamental struggle now, one that should resonate far and wide among American workers and their unions.

    • Donald Trump Has Some Explaining to Do

      First things first, Donald Trump: Release. Your. Tax. Returns.

      No excuses.

    • Trump’s Economic Agenda: Mostly, More of the Same

      Currently, high-income taxpayers pay a 39.6% tax rate on income over $415,000 for a single individual. If a high-level executive or Wall Street trader makes $2.4 million a year (roughly the average for the richest 1%), they would save $120,000 from their tax bill just on the reduction in the top tax bracket. For the richest 0.1%, the savings would average almost $700,000 a year.

    • The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today

      If those trends persist for another 30 years, the average white family’s net worth will grow by $18,000 per year, but black and Hispanic households would only see theirs grow by $750 and $2,250 per year, respectively.

    • Donald Trump Economic Adviser John Paulson Took Billions in Auto Industry Bailout

      Hedge fund manager and Donald Trump adviser John Paulson made billions in the mortgage market collapse of 2007 and by holding the auto industry hostage for taxpayer money, investigative reporter Greg Palast told The Real News Network.

      Paulson “is the guy who made more money than anyone on the planet in a single year, $5 billion,” Palast said. “They say he got that $5 billion by betting against the mortgage market when the mortgage market collapsed. That’s really the wrong way of putting it. He kicked the mortgage market over the cliff and bet that it would crash when it hit the bottom.”

      “Most people thought he was going to end up in prison… but now I guess he’s Donald Trump’s economic advisor.”

      “And the Times of London,” Palast continued, “hardly a Marxist rag — it’s owned by Murdoch and very right-wing — the Times of London said that JP, John Paulson, should be paraded through the streets of London naked while people throw rotten fruit at him for what he’s done. Just in England. And that was nothing compared to what he’s done in the U.S.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • How To Spot A Shill In Eight Easy Steps

      Julian Assange warned Jill Stein voters that Hillary’s online paid shills will be relentless in their attacks in the coming weeks…

    • Trump Revealed As Racist Bastard And Nut-case

      Yes, Trump wants to make USA Great Again just like USA was great in the 1930s when it fought trade wars that ruined the world’s economy. The very arguments Trump makes about USA versus Mexico are much more applicable to Canada. Why then does Trump not go after Canada?

    • America’s NAFTA nemesis: Canada, not Mexico
    • The Cynicism of Hillary

      Hillary Clinton’s completely unfounded claim that Russia was behind the passing to WikiLeaks of Democratic National Committee documents was breathtakingly cynical. It was a successful ploy in that it gave her supporters, particularly those dominating mainstream media, something else to focus on other than the fact that the DNC had been busily fixing the primaries for Hillary.

      It was however grossly irresponsible – an accusation that a US Secretary of State would hesitate to make in public even at the height of the Cold War. It raises further the tensions between the World’s two largest nuclear armed powers, and plays into the mood of rampant Russophobia which we are seeing whipped up daily in the press. With the Ukraine and Syria as points of major tension, to throw such an accusation wildly in defence of her own political ambitions, shows precisely why Hillary should never be US President.

    • Leftists Against Clintonism: It’s Not Just About the Lies, It’s About the Record

      Speaking at Georgetown University in October of 1991, shortly after he announced that he would be pursuing the presidency, Bill Clinton put forward what he called “A New Covenant,” an agenda that proposed an alternative to both “small government” conservatism and “big government” liberalism.

      He spoke of a “third way to approach the American family,” one that would do away, once and for all, with “the old big-government notion that there is a program for every social problem.” Most famously, Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.”

      While these proposals were nominally centrist, in practice they relied on insidious right-wing rhetoric that decried “dependency” and lauded “personal responsibility.”

      Indeed, years into his presidency, when Clinton finally achieved his professed goal, the legislation he signed was a major plank of the reactionary Contract with America, a platform written in part by Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House in 1995.

    • Clinton Should Tell Obama To Withdraw TPP To Save Her Presidency

      Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says she opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) but is having trouble convincing people to believe her. Imagine the trouble Hillary Clinton will have trying to build support for her effort to govern the country if TPP is ratified before her inauguration.

    • Clinton Must More Forcefully Reject TPP or Risk Losing Election: Groups

      Following in Donald Trump’s always-controversial footsteps, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton will give a much-anticipated speech on her economic policy plans in Michigan Thursday—and progressives nationwide are demanding Clinton use the opportunity to roundly reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal.

    • Donald Trump’s Implied Assassination Threat, Fox News and the NRA

      Donald Trump is giving new meaning to “bully pulpit,” ratcheting his irrational campaign rhetoric to new and dangerous lows. In North Carolina Tuesday, he said: “Hillary wants to abolish—essentially, abolish—the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick—if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.” Trump’s suggestion that his supporters could assassinate Hillary Clinton or the judges she might appoint provoked outrage, not only nationally, but around the globe. His virulent, demagogic language did not alienate everyone, though; as more and more Republicans denounce Trump, he still enjoys fervid support from some personalities at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel and the National Rifle Association. This unholy trinity of Trump, Fox and the NRA could easily provoke political violence during this campaign season.

      Hours after his remarks, Trump made his first news appearance on Fox’s “Hannity” show. Sean Hannity pre-empted Trump, offering his own twisted logic to help blunt the deepening catastrophe: “So, obviously you are saying that there’s a strong political movement within the Second Amendment and if people mobilize and vote they can stop Hillary from having this impact on the court.” Trump obligingly concurred with that revisionist version of his call to arms. But the ploy fails on its face. Trump was not advocating for a political movement to stop Hillary Clinton from gaining office; he was suggesting that “Second Amendment people” could take action after the fact, if she wins.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Assassination Comment
    • Trump threatens Sec. Clinton with Gun Nuts, imitates Tinpot 3rd World Regimes

      Donald Trump said Tuesday there was nothing that his supporters could do if Hillary Clinton won and got “to pick her judges.” Then he “thought” a moment and amended his pessimism: “Though the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

      Former CIA director Michael Hayden suggested that the remark, which implied that an NRA member should assassinate Sec. Clinton, was a criminal offense and that the Department of Justice should look into it: “if anybody else had said this, they’d be out in the parking lot in a police wagon being questioned by the Secret Service.”

    • Country First: Why John McCain Must Dump Trump

      “Country first” requires McCain to repudiate Trump, tell the truth about what he represents, and accept the political consequences. By refusing to make that choice, he is betraying himself, and us. He can still repeat those two words, but their meaning is gone.

    • Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age

      Under such circumstances, the foundations for stability are being destroyed, with jobs being shipped overseas, social provisions destroyed, the social state hollowed out, public servants and workers under a relentless attack, students burdened with the rise of a neoliberal debt machine, and many groups considered disposable. At the same time, these acts of permanent repression are coupled with new configurations of power and militarization normalized by a neoliberal regime in which an ideology of mercilessness has become normalized; under such conditions, one dispenses with any notion of compassion and holds others responsible for problems they face, problems over which they have no control. In this case, shared responsibilities and hopes have been replaced by the isolating logic of individual responsibility, a false notion of resiliency, and a growing resentment toward those viewed as strangers.

    • Jill Stein Accepting Green Party Presidential Nomination: ‘We Are Saying No to the Lesser Evil’

      The Green Party’s convention in Houston culminated last weekend with the official nomination of Jill Stein for president. In her acceptance speech, Stein talked about the drastic impact of climate change but also focused on giving political power back to the people.

      Notes of positivity were threaded throughout Stein’s speech. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Stein said. “This is our moment. Together, we do have the power to create an America and a world that works for all of us.”

    • Has Trump Been Reading Kissinger?

      Responsible for illegal bombing campaigns that caused millions of deaths throughout Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, Kissinger also fomented genocide in East Timor, and Bangladesh. In addition to abetting murder in southern Africa, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Argentina, he also notoriously enabled and supported the Pinochet regime in Chile, which seized power in a military coup – a coup that led to the deaths of thousands, including the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende in the presidential palace.

    • Everything Burns: Gotham in the Age of Trump

      Consider Trump in the context of the old, terrible ’60s Batman TV series. Here’s a villain with gross orange facepaint, a truly stupid live-ocelot-on-his-head hairdo, an astonishingly outsized sense of self-importance. It would not at all surprise me if, not long from now, Trump went off on one of his blundering rants and the cartooned words BAM! PHIZ! GOMP! TWEE! started appearing after he drops his silly little verbal bricks. Trump and Adam West would have made boon foes in the age of bell bottoms and Nixon.

    • Beyond a Protest Party: What Will It Take for the Green Party to Start Winning?

      There wasn’t fancy catering, blaring music or the release of thousands of balloons at the Green Party’s presidential nominating convention in Houston, Texas. Nor was there the presence of thousands of cops from dozens of state and federal agencies, or hundreds of cameras snapping photos as mainstream television reporters prepared outside for live standups.

      Rather, one bored-looking campus security officer stood outside the University of Houston’s (UH) multipurpose room as the party’s media coordinators handwrote my press credentials and handed me the weekend’s schedule of events. One might not even know a convention for a political party was happening at the campus at all — many UH students I spoke to over the weekend didn’t.

    • Fox News Now Just Openly Mocking Donald Trump and His ‘Unfair Media’ Rants

      After weeks of controversies and tanking poll numbers, it’s no wonder Donald Trump doesn’t want to debate Hillary Clinton. But now he’s pivoting from his earlier statements regarding “a letter from the NFL” (proven false) to focus on a different excuse for failing to commit to the presidential debate schedule: the media.

      Trump has frequently blasted the media for “unfair coverage,” despite the fact that the nonstop coverage he has gotten has propelled his campaign. Now he is using the allegedly unfair media to attempt to wriggle out of debating Hillary Clinton.

    • Left’s Labour’s Lost

      Corbyn’s stewardship of Labour is of a piece with the history of the Labour party in the 20th Century. The Labour party, historically, ends up doing some right-wing things when it achieves power. This was the case with Atlee and the arguably inevitable post-war imposition of austerity, with Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle’s effort to impose draconian Union controls, with James Callaghan acknowledging the realities of global finance with the management of inflation as the new standard for managing political economy. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, prior to achieving office, signed up to Conservative spending plans. The distinguishing feature of the Corbyn leadership is that it has managed to do this in opposition. Prior to Corbyn’s ascension to leadership he ran on a moderately soft-left platform of anti-austerity, rail nationalisation, people’s quantitative easing, a National Education Service, and international anti-militarism; basically things which social democrats can set their clocks by. His current Leadership selection platform pledges £500 billion in economic investment. However, in opposition, these policies have been either shelved, watered down, forgotten or U-turned. Notwithstanding opposition to cuts in working tax credits, itself a Blair/Brown policy, there are several examples of this rightward drift in UK Labour’s policy platform under Corbyn. The immediate call to trigger Article 50 without delay after the Brexit referendum, not voting on Trident at the party conference in September 2015, and above all John McDonnell’s affirming the role of the Office of Budget Responsibility (effective acquiescence to the imposition of austerity). The Corbyn/McDonnell duopoly at the head of Labour is really nothing more than Milibandism with bells on and better spin; more Little Blue Book than The Communist Manifesto. It is in the tradition of attempting to stymie and put the brakes on capitalism in the interests of some of the working class.

    • Why the Libertarians Should Dump Bill Weld

      Libertarians support gun rights. Libertarians support due process, not presumed forfeiture of rights due to inclusion on secret enemies lists. These items are in our platform, and they’re not negotiable.

    • Naked Cynicism—Can I Be Bribed to Vote for a Phony, Hedge-Fund Loving Warmonger?

      Back in 2000, when the evangelical, chicken hawk, smirking frat boy—another rich kid, spoiled brat—grabbed the presidency, the Democrats blamed (and never forgave) Ralph Nader and the Green Party. If Trump wins, a similar scapegoating will not work, not if we remember the unequivocal realities of the polls.

      Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party establishment, and now heavy-hitter progressives—including Elizabeth Warren, Robert Reich, and Bernie Sanders himself—are begging those of us repulsed by Donald Trump but cynical of Hillary Clinton, “Please. Fear Trump so much that you can transcend your contempt for Hillary Clinton and vote for her.”

      Those of us repulsed and distrustful of both Trump and Clinton are in the overwhelming majority. Both Trump and Clinton have historic unfavorable ratings, with Trump’s July 2016 unfavorable polls average at 57% (favorable at 36%) and Clinton’s July 2016 unfavorable polls average at 56% (favorable at 38%).

    • “U.S.A.” Chant: Hegemonic Unity in Global Domination

      What have America’s major political parties become but agents of pacification, canceling out political change while the exercise of power is funneled into an elitist system of Upper Capital in which the military is welcomed with open arms. Trump vies with Clinton in extolling the virtues of strength and National Greatness, which boil down to self-accredited authority to define and regulate international politics to achieve, among other things, global ideological purification. It is as though imperialism, centered on market penetration, has given way to domination for its own sake. And complementing that, we find an arousal of anger to divert attention from the failings of capitalism, thereby disarming criticism and at the same time tightening the screws of a discrepant framework of wealth-and-income distribution.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Australia’s Census Fail Goes Into Overdrive — A Complete And Utter Debacle

      Earlier this week, we wrote about how the Australian census was looking like a complete mess, with the government deciding that it was going to retain all the personal info that it was collecting, including linkages to other data, rather than destroying it after it got the aggregate census numbers. There were lots of concerns about privacy and security — and we highlighted some ridiculous statements from people in the Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS) who are running the census, insisting their security was “the best security” while at the same time they were storing passwords as plaintext.

      Little did we know that the disaster that many expected was underestimating the actual disaster. You see, once the census website launched on Tuesday, the site immediately got hit by a series of denial of service attacks which took the entire system offline. In fact, it ended up remaining entirely offline for nearly 48 hours, and while the ABS says it’s back, many people are still reporting problems. Perhaps that’s because the ABS seems to be taking extreme and ridiculous measures to try to block more denial of service attacks, including blocking anyone who’s using a VPN or a third-party DNS provider such as Google’s DNS offering. For a system that talks up how secure and private it is — to then push people to drop their use of VPNs and/or more secure DNS providers raises all sorts of questions — none of them very good.

    • NSA spied on global medical non-profits, newly released documents from leaked Snowden archive reveal

      Newly released documents from the Edward Snowden archive, made public on 10 August, reveal that the NSA, in collaboration with the military-focused Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) intercepted communications from various non-profit organisations across the world, in efforts to gather “medical intelligence”. The previously unseen top-secret documents also reveal that the initiative was launched in the early 2000′s.

      According to the documents, the scope of information surveilled by the NSA included that relating to outbreak of diseases, the ability of foreign nations to respond to biological, chemical and nuclear attacks, the proficiency of pharmaceutical companies abroad, medical research and advancements in medical technology and more, the Intercept reported.

      The documents reveal that such information is gathered and used in efforts to protect US forces, identify facilities manufacturing bio-weapons, find chemical weapons programmes and study the process by which diseases spread, among others. The NSA specifically brought in an infectious disease expert from the DIA to help its NGO spying wing – the International Organisations Branch – to collect information on outbreaks. Among others, the topics looked into were “Sars in China, cholera in Liberia, and dysentery, polio, and cholera in Iraq”.

    • France says fight against messaging encryption needs worldwide initiative [Ed: but French terrorists used no encryption]

      Messaging encryption, widely used by Islamist extremists to plan attacks, needs to be fought at international level, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Thursday, and he wants Germany to help him promote a global initiative.

      He meets his German counterpart, Thomas de Maiziere, on Aug. 23 in Paris and they will discuss a European initiative with a view to launching an international action plan, Cazeneuve said.

      French intelligence services are struggling to intercept messages from Islamist extremists who increasingly switch from mainstream social media to encrypted messaging services, with Islamic State being a big user of such apps, including Telegram.

      “Many messages relating to the execution of terror attacks are sent using encryption; it is a central issue in the fight against terrorism,” Cazeneuve told reporters after a government meeting on security.

    • 48 hours later, Adblock Plus beats Facebook’s adblocker-blocker

      On August 9, Facebook announced that it had defeated adblockers; on August 11, Adblock Plus announced that it had defeated Facebook.

      ABP’s Ben Williams explained that the countermeasure originated with the Adblock Plus community, one of whom wrote a filter extension that would disable Facebook ads without a hitch (“facebook.com##DIV[id^="substream_"] ._5jmm[data-dedupekey][data-cursor][data-xt][data-xt-vimpr="1"][data-ftr="1"][data-fte="1"]“).

      The question is, will Facebook really dedicate engineers to inserting features that its users are going to extraordinary lengths to defeat, or will they try to woo, cajole, or trick their users into disabling their adblockers?

    • Crisis Engulfs Fox News as Roger Ailes Sexual Harassment & Spying Scandal Grows

      Further revelations about former Fox News chief Roger Ailes are surfacing, raising questions about how much the company was aware of his transgressions. Ailes has now been accused of sexual harassment by more than 20 women, including Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and former anchor Gretchen Carlson. Earlier this week, another former Fox News host also accused Ailes of sexual harassment. Andrea Tantaros says she repeatedly reported Ailes’s harassment to senior Fox executives last year. She says she was demoted and then taken off air as a result. To talk more about these revelations, we’re joined by Sarah Ellison, Vanity Fair contributing editor. Her most recent piece is an exclusive headlined “Inside the Fox News Bunker.” It exposes the existence of explosive audiotapes recorded by multiple women in conversation with Ailes. Sarah Ellison is also the author of “War at The Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire.”

    • Head of UK oversight body to join GCHQ ‘tech help desk’ [Ed: revolving doors andcronyism in the UK]

      Joanna Cavan OBE, a champion for transparency as the head of the UK’s oversight body for communications interception, is set to take the top job at GCHQ’s National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC).

      After five of the “the most challenging and rewarding years with [the Interception of Communications Commissioner's Office]” Cavan stated she was proud to have worked towards “building public trust through education, transparency and accountability.”

      Widely admired for her public role as the head of IOCCO, The Register understands Cavan has been encouraged to continue such work in championing transparency at NTAC.

      IOCCO stated that the office was “sad” to announce that Cavan was leaving, adding: “During her tenure Joanna has made a significant contribution to improving compliance within the intelligence agencies and law enforcement” and listing her key achievements as “building relationships with industry and NGOs, and transforming IOCCO into a dynamic public facing body.”

      “We’re really going to miss her, but wish her the very best with her move,” the office continued, adding that “there will be a recruitment campaign in due course.”

      Speaking to The Register, Javier Ruiz of the Open Rights Group added the NGO’s positive impression of Cavan, stating “She has been a very welcome presence at IOCCO and we hope her advocacy for transparency will continue.”

    • Two ViaSat network encryptors now NSA-certified[Ed: ViaSat is working with the enemy (of democracy)]

      Two ViaSat network encryptors recently received U.S. National Security Agency certification, the company announced Wednesday.

    • ViaSat Pushes the Boundaries of Secure Networking at the Battlespace Edge with Two New NSA-Certified Network Encryptors
    • ViaSat’s New Network Encryptors to Boost Secure Networking
    • NSA Awards Students at Science Fair [Ed: because “think about the children!”]
    • Cybersecurity paper on government backdoors earns 2016 EFF award

      A team from CSAIL has been awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) 2016 Pioneer Award for their paper “Keys Under Doormats” on government backdoors and data security. EFF instituted the award in 1992 to spotlight those dedicated to expanding freedom and creativity in the technology sector.

      The CSAIL team’s report argues that allowing law-enforcement agencies to be able to access encrypted data to help them solve crimes poses major security risks to people’s information.

      The authors of the report were noted for bringing technical and scientific clarity to the encryption debate as a part of the global narrative on security.

      “[The report] both reviews the underlying technical considerations of the earlier encryption debate of the 1990s and examines the modern systems realities in the 21st century, creating a
compelling, comprehensive, and scientifically grounded argument to protect and extend the availability of encrypted digital information and communications,” the EFF announced in a related news story. “The authors of the report are all security experts, building the case that no
knowledgeable encryption researchers believe that weakening encryption for surveillance purposes could allow for any truly secure digital transactions.”

      The award is chosen by EFF staff and focuses on innovative contributions in accessibility, health, growth, or freedom of computer-based communications in ways that are technical, academic, legal, social, economic, or cultural. The team is joining a list of inventive individuals and groups including Representative Zoe Lofgren, Senator Ron Wyden, activist Aaron Swartz, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, the Tor Project, Citizen Lab, and many more.

    • Until at Least 2014, NSA Was Having Troubles Preventing Back Door Searches of Upstream Searches

      That explicit violation of the rules set by Bates in 2011 was part of a larger trend of back door search violations, including analysts not obtaining approval to query Americans’ identifiers.

    • [Joke] CIA still laughing at Zuckerberg for thinking he came up with Facebook [Remark: “I was stood next to Zuckerberg when the CIA were showing him how to write Facebook. @schestowitz Don’t know how he forgot that.”]

      CIA AGENTS are still chuckling to themselves about how Mark Zuckerberg actually thinks he created Facebook.

      Zuckerberg is credited as devising the social media site, and believes he did it without being covertly manipulated by the secret services, who would obviously have no interest in such a mass communication tool.

      CIA Agent Tom Booker said: “I mean come on, I’ve got shoes older than him and he thinks he invented this incredibly huge communication system and spying tool.

      “This all began when he ‘accidentally’ overhead some sexy girls talking about it at college, then was introduced to some computer experts at a frat party who just happened to be 10 years older than everyone else and wearing suits.

      “We only chose him because he seemed astonishingly gullible.”

      He added: “He thinks because he wears the same clothes every day that makes him a genius. I’ve got an uncle who wears the same clothes everyday and believe me, he’s no genius.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Daniel Ellsberg: Manning should not face charges related to suicide attempt

      Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has joined calls for Chelsea Manning to face no charges or punishment related to her suicide attempt in jail last month.

      Army employees told Manning – who is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks – she was being investigated on multiple charges stemming from her 5 July suicide attempt, according to her lawyers. If convicted, the US army soldier could be placed in solitary confinement or be subjected to other punishment.

      “These new charges … seem designed to cause her to break down, basically to break her down as a human being,” said Ellsberg, a former US military analyst whose Pentagon Papers leak in 1971 revealed the full scope of the US government’s action during the Vietnam war.

      Ellsberg and other supporters spoke to reporters after a group of organizations delivered a petition demanding that Manning not be punished. The petition, which organizers said had more than 115,000 signatures, was submitted Wednesday morning to the secretary of the army, according to multiple activist groups supporting Manning. The petition also demanded that Manning receive adequate treatment for “both her gender dysphoria and her suicide attempt”.

    • If Police Officials Won’t Hold Officers Accountable, More Cameras Will Never Mean More Recordings

      Cameras have been referred to as “unblinking eyes.” When operated by law enforcement, however, they’re eyes that never open.

      Dash cams were supposed to provide better documentation of traffic stops and other interactions. So were lapel microphones, which gave the images a soundtrack. Officers who weren’t interested in having stops documented switched off cameras, “forgot” to turn them back on, or flat out sabotaged the equipment.

      Body cameras were the next step in documentation, ensuring that footage wasn’t limited solely to what was in front of a police cruiser. Cautiously heralded as a step forward in accountability, body cameras have proven to be just as “unreliable” as dash cams. While some footage is being obtained that previously wouldn’t have been available, the fact that officers still control the on/off switch means footage routinely goes missing during controversial interactions with the public.

      The on/off switch problem could be tempered with strict disciplinary policies for officers who fail to record critical footage. Or any disciplinary procedures, actually.

    • Judge Who Signed ‘Criminal Defamation’ Warrant For Sheriff’s Raid Of Blogger’s House Says Warrant Perfectly Fine

      Nothing’s going to stop Louisiana sheriff Jerry Larpenter from defending his good name. If you “print lies” about the sheriff, he’ll “come after you.” He’ll have to use a criminal complaint filed by someone else (insurance agent Tony Alford) and an unconstitutional law to do it… but he’s still coming after you.

      The “you” in this case is a local police officer who allegedly runs a blog that allegedly made defamatory comments with claims of corruption involving the sheriff, his wife, and the insurance agency she works for.

      Defamation isn’t normally a criminal offense. Louisiana, for some reason, still has a criminal defamation statute on the books, but it only applies to non-public figures, which the sheriff — and the parish’s insurance agent, Tony Alford — are not. Alford, who filed the complaint, not only holds two government positions but his agency also secured a no-bid contract to provide insurance services to the parish.

      Never mind all that, though. Sheriff Larpenter found an off-duty judge to sign a search warrant and raided Officer Wayne Anderson’s home, seeking evidence that he was the author of the posts. Anderson denies having anything to do with the blog posts, not that it matters. Larpenter’s deputies have already made off with five electronic devices, including a laptop belonging to the officer’s kids.

    • Will Jeffrey Sterling’s Trumped-Up Espionage Conviction Be a Death Sentence?

      CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling is in trouble. He’s not in trouble with prison authorities or with the government, at least not any new trouble. His health is failing, and prison officials are doing nothing about it. Jeffrey has collapsed twice in the past few weeks. He has a history of atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat, and is a candidate for a pacemaker. He has repeatedly sought medical attention in the prison’s medical unit. And each time he’s been brushed off.

    • President Macri’s perilous gambit

      It is time not to open the Pandora Box of the “war on drugs” in Argentina. It is crucial that the United States avoid any signal in favor of such a strategy.

    • New NYPD Commissioner’s Focus on Community Policing Is a Distraction, Not a Solution

      When New York Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced incoming Police Commissioner James O’Neill last week, he praised him as the “architect” of neighborhood policing — the city’s version of the “community policing” approach being implemented across the country as a solution to the increasingly contentious relationship between law enforcement and people of color.

      “When New Yorkers know their local officers and trust their local officers, we are all safe as a city,” the mayor said following the announcement that Commissioner William Bratton would be resigning. “In times like these, we have a responsibility to provide our nation with a model for respectful and compassionate neighborhood policing. … If we want to keep all New Yorkers safe, policing must be of, and for, and by the people.”

      But members of these communities say that knowing their local cops won’t stop them from getting killed by the police. Trust must be earned through accountability, they say, not optics. Advocates for radical change to the country’s policing culture have become increasingly critical of community policing as a meaningless, politically expedient catchphrase that is used to deflect attention from deeper problems within police departments.

      The New York Police Department first introduced its Neighborhood Coordination Program in May 2015 — and it’s now expanding the initiative to about half the city’s precincts. O’Neill, who spearheaded the effort, said last week that it aims to establish “closer relationships and mutual understanding.”

      “It’s all about our communities personally knowing their local cops, and trusting those cops to help them and their neighbors lead better lives,” O’Neill said.

    • U.S. Government Using Gang Databases to Deport Undocumented Immigrants

      The “M” and the “S” Carlos had etched in his arms with a homemade tattoo gun when he was a teenager in Guatemala City were part of a different life. During his adolescence in the mid-1990s, Carlos, who asked that his real name not be used, hung out with deportees from Los Angeles who had been subsumed into Southern California’s gang culture and brought 18th Street and Mara Salvatrucha from Los Angeles to Central America. Carlos and his brother joined the Normandie Locos clique of Mara Salvatrucha, also known in the United States as MS-13, and got tattoos marking their membership in the gang. They joined because it made them popular with girls, Carlos said, and most of his childhood friends were part of the clique as well.

      Guatemalan law enforcement took a hard-edged approach in the late 1990s, and Carlos was shot in three separate incidents by police officers in Guatemala City. His brother was killed by police in September 2000, according to a sworn declaration Carlos later submitted to the Los Angeles city attorney’s office.

    • At Swanky Federal Reserve Retreat, “Computer Glitch” Cancels Minority Protesters’ Hotel Reservations

      The Kansas City Federal Reserve’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, attracts central bankers, economists and the global elite. The past two years, some new faces came to Jackson Hole: low-wage workers who object to the Fed raising interest rates when too many at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder still struggle.

      This year, somebody appears to be ensuring that ordinary people won’t disrupt the party.

      The Fed Up campaign, a coalition that brought the workers to Jackson Hole in 2014 and 2015, has filed a formal complaint with the departments of Justice and the Interior, along with the National Park Service, because their hotel reservations for this year’s conference were mysteriously canceled.

    • A South Carolina Student Was Arrested for ‘Disturbing a School’ When She Challenged Police Abuse, So We Sued

      One day last fall, Niya Kenny was sitting in her math class at Spring Valley High School in Richland County, South Carolina, when a police officer came into the classroom. A girl in her class had refused to put away her cell phone, and the teacher had summoned an administrator, who called on the officer assigned to the school.

      Niya thought the officer’s appearance was bad news — his name was Ben Fields, but he was so aggressive that students knew him as Officer Slam. As soon as he entered the room, she called out for other students to record him.

      Three different students made cell phone videos of what happened next. Fields picked the girl up, flipped her in her desk, and then grabbed an arm and a leg to throw her across the room. Niya stood up and called out, she recalled later. “Isn’t anyone going to help her?” she asked. “Ya’ll cannot do this!”

    • How the Pentagon Became Walmart

      Our armed services have become the one-stop shop for America’s policymakers. But asking warriors to do everything poses great dangers for our country — and the military.

      [...]

      Today, American military personnel operate in nearly every country on Earth — and do nearly every job on the planet. They launch raids and agricultural reform projects, plan airstrikes and small-business development initiatives, train parliamentarians and produce TV soap operas. They patrol for pirates, vaccinate cows, monitor global email communications, and design programs to prevent human trafficking.

      Many years ago, when I was in law school, I applied for a management consulting job at McKinsey & Co. During one of the interviews, I was given a hypothetical business scenario: “Imagine you run a small family-owned general store. Business is good, but one day you learn that Walmart is about to open a store a block away. What do you do?”

      [...]

      Like Walmart, today’s military can marshal vast resources and exploit economies of scale in ways impossible for small mom-and-pop operations. And like Walmart, the tempting one-stop-shopping convenience it offers has a devastating effect on smaller, more traditional enterprises — in this case, the State Department and other U.S. civilian foreign-policy agencies, which are steadily shrinking into irrelevance in our ever-more militarized world. The Pentagon isn’t as good at promoting agricultural or economic reform as the State Department or the U.S. Agency for International Development — but unlike our civilian government agencies, the Pentagon has millions of employees willing to work insane hours in terrible conditions, and it’s open 24/7.

    • Federal Investigation Lays Bare How Baltimore Police Systematically Abuse the Civil Rights of the City’s Mostly Black Residents

      Yet, as in Ferguson, Missouri, it was the sustained mobilization to Baltimore’s streets that forced the world to see the systemic racism of the city’s police department, and forced Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to ask the Department of Justice to launch an investigation. Poor black residents of the deeply segregated city described a police department that behaved like an occupying force, brutalizing and disproportionately targeting them with unnecessary stops and deadly force.

    • We Will Create Our Freedom: The Importance of the Movement for Black Lives Platform

      There is a movement rumbling through the streets of this country. There is sustained organizing, national and local collaborations that are enduring the grueling work of refusing to allow extrajudicial Black death to continue to be hushed up, accepted as normal.

    • Why Did a University Quarter Police and Soldiers in Its Dorms?

      Black lives matter at Case Western Reserve University. That’s why several Black Case Western students, including myself, drafted an online petition demanding answers for Case Western President Barbara R. Snyder’s quartering of 1,700 out-of-state police officers and 200 members of the National Guard in the university’s dormitories during the Republican National Convention (RNC). A whistleblower had alerted us to her unilateral agreement with Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson to house hundreds of police officers, which she had made without students’ knowledge or consent. Within a week of posting our petition on Change.org, we had more than 330 signatures.

    • Yes, Black Lives Matter in the UK too

      Last Friday, traffic on main roads across England was disrupted by activists calling for an end to global structural racism. Motorways leading to Birmingham, London’s Heathrow airports, and tram tracks in Nottingham were blocked as part of a ‘day of rage’ organised by Black Lives Matter UK.

      The actions got a lot of media attention and the general opinion voiced by mainstream media was that the deliberate targeting of ‘innocent people’ was wrong and that while the Black Lives Matter movement is relevant to the USA, British campaigners were just jumping on a bandwagon. Both of these responses show a lack of understanding (or a deliberate ignorance) of the state of racism in the today’s Britain.

    • Judge On Whether Twitter Is Legally Liable For ISIS Attacks: Hahahahahaha, Nope.

      This is not a surprise, but the judge overseeing the case where Twitter was sued by a woman because her husband was killed in an ISIS attack has tossed out the case. We fully expected this when the lawsuit was first filed, and the judge was clearly skeptical of the case during a hearing on it back in June. The order dismissing the case comes in at slightly longer than 140 characters, but you get the feeling that was really about all that was needed to point out how ridiculous this case was. As we expected,

    • NY Daily News Admits It Got It All Wrong When Declaring Crime Increases Would Follow Stop-And-Frisk Decision

      When federal judge Shira Scheindlin ordered a number of stop-and-frisk reforms three years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Chief Ray Kelly both predicted a drop in unconstitutional stops would result in a dramatic rise in criminal activity.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Speed Up Your Access or Optimize Your WAN?

      Early this year, researchers from the University College London Optical Networks Group set a record for the fastest-ever data rate for digital information — 1.125 Tb/s. That’s terabits. With that data rate, you could download the entire Games of Thrones series, in HD, within one second!

      To achieve their record-breaking date rate, researchers built an optical communications system with multiple transmitting channels and a single receiver using techniques from information theory and digital signal processing. They then applied coding techniques commonly used in wireless communications, but not yet widely used in optical communications, to ensure the transmitted signals adapt to distortions in the system electronics.

    • How To Find Free Wi-Fi Hotspots Anywhere In The World — 6 Ways

      If you are looking for ways to find free Wi-Fi hotspots, then you are at the right place…

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • No Inspiration Without Payment: Ed Sheeran Sued For Two Songs Sounding Too Similar To Old Songs

        There’s a fairly long history of lawsuits over songs sounding too “similar” — from the lawsuit over George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” sounding too much like “He’s So Fine” to the Verve getting sued by The Rolling Stones for the hit “Bittersweet Symphony” sounding similar to the Stones’ “The Last Time.” But after last year’s verdict in favor of Marvin Gaye’s estate in the “Blurred Lines” case, the floodgates seem to have opened, with a bunch of similar lawsuits over songs that sound vaguely similar, but not much more. A couple of months ago, in a bit of a surprise, Led Zeppelin actually won its case over whether or not it had infringed on someone’s copyright in “Stairway to Heaven,” so there’s at least some hope that not every “similar sounding” song will face a copyright lawsuit — but even then the arbitrariness of these decisions seems problematic.

Links 11/8/2016: Linux 4.6.6, KDE Kirigami UI Framework

Posted in News Roundup at 6:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Be Cautious With Containers Says FutureAdvisor’s DevOps Director

      Docker is a fantastic technology, but it’s not one that’s well understood. If we take a look at the lessons of the past, there was more hype than understanding around cloud as well — and before that, around virtualization. I’m seeing the same patterns repeat themselves here, and in some circles this is a far from popular viewpoint.

    • A brief introduction to Linux containers and image signing

      Putting software inside of containers is basically a platform migration. I’d like to highlight what makes this difficult to migrate some applications into containers.

    • How the CORD Project Will Change the Economics of Broadband

      On July 29 at the Sunnyvale Tech Corner Campus in Calif., Google hosted the open source community for the inaugural CORD Summit. CORD, or Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter, launched last week as an independently funded On.Lab software project hosted by The Linux Foundation. The sold-out event featured interactive talks from partners and leading stakeholders of the newly formed CORD Project, including AT&T, China Unicom, Ciena, Google, NEC, ON.Lab, ONF, The Linux Foundation, University of Arizona, and Verizon.

      CORD is the biggest innovation in the access market since ADSL and the cable modem. Considering the broad scope of the access network, and the technical roadmap the growing open source CORD community laid out at the Summit, CORD has the potential to redefine the economics of access.

    • Midokura Embraces Kubernetes Container Networking

      Midokura CTO Pino de Candia explained that the new Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) 6.2 update is based on Open Source MidoNet 5.0. Midokura first open-sourced its MidoNet platform in November 2014 at the OpenStack Summit in Paris.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE’s Kirigami UI Framework Gets its First Public Release

        Kirigami, KDE’s lightweight user interface framework for mobile and convergent applications, which was first announced in March, is now publicly released! This framework allows Qt developers to easily create applications that run on most major mobile and desktop platforms without modification (though adapted user interfaces for different form-factors are supported and recommended for optimal user experience). It extends the touch-friendly Qt Quick Controls with larger application building blocks, following the design philosophy laid out in the Kirigami Human Interface Guidelines.

      • KDE Kirigami UI Framework Makes First Debut
      • KDE Announces the First Public Release of Their Kirigami UI Framework for Mobile

        Today, August 10, 2016, KDE’s Thomas Pfeiffer has had the great honor of announcing the availability of the first public release of the Kirigami UI (User Interface) framework for building mobile and convergent applications.

        Work on the Kirigami user interface framework started back in March 2016, when the KDE development team announced their plans for creating one of the most powerful and sophisticated tool that would allow application developers to build cross-platform Qt-based apps for mobile platforms.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Getting ready for GUADEC!

        I have already attended at GUADEC 2015 and it was a great, motivating experience with nice people having the same interest as mine.

      • GUADEC

        I’m going to talk about the evolution of GTK+ rendering, from its humble origins of X11 graphics contexts, to Cairo, to GSK. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, you can either attend my presentation on Saturday at 11 in the Grace Room, or you can just find me and have a chat.

        I’m also going to stick around during the BoF days — especially for the usual GTK+ team meeting, which will be on the 15th.

      • See you in GUADEC!
      • Going to GUADEC 2016
      • GUADEC in Karlsruhe Awaits

        On Thursday I’m taking a plane to Germany. I’m also accompanied by a friend who’d like to know more about GNOME and get involved in GNOME. Again this year I’m also volunteering – so far I have worked on t-shirts and streaming artwork for GUADEC.

      • The much awaited GUADEC, 2016

        Well the time has come to catch up with the smart peeps behind IRC nicks. \o/ This time GUADEC is organized in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany and I am all set for it. Oops forgot to mention about GUADEC. So GUADEC is annual conference of GNOME (FOSS) Organization where all users, contributors and developers meet together and have an amazing time discussing about future prospects of building the community stronger and better. Also there is good discussion on various projects and applications. Besides that, there are many interesting workshops and talks scheduled.

      • gnome-boxes: Coder’s log 2
      • gnome-boxes: Coder’s log 3
      • GSK Demystified (II) — Rendering
      • Debugging GNOME Online Accounts

        I spent some time today documenting how to debug various problems with online account integration in GNOME. It is also linked from the main GNOME Online Accounts wiki page. So, you can find it via the usual click-stream and don’t need to rely on this blog.

      • GSoC progress part #5

  • Distributions

    • Bedrock Linux Is Working To Combine Different Linux Distributions Into One

      Bedrock Linux is a unique Linux distribution that offers the best elements of different distros. The users are allowed to build a rock-solid base derived from Debian, RHEL etc. After that, one has the choice to add different packages from multiple Linux distributions according to the need. Bedrock Linux is able to perform this trick by manipulating the virtual file systems.

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Linux: Should You Trust Love at First Sight?

        My first impression of Manjaro is just the opposite. The power and performance are obvious, but it feels as if it’ll run with the dependability of a well oiled sewing machine. I think that if I were a gamer, which I’m not, I would try this one on for size. Out of the box, it comes Steam ready, and gaming would offer an ultimate test on how it performs under pressure.

        The trouble with impressions is that they come from a place that’s devoid of any experiences other than the educated guess, a lesson I learned back in the ’70s when I blew every dime I had on a cute little underpowered Opel Kadett. Because I knew the Germans’ reputation for building fine automobiles, I had the impression that this would be a car that would keep me going for a while. The day after I bought it, I ran across a friend — a mechanic friend, I might add — who’d once owned the very same make and model. “Get rid of it,” he said. “Now, while you can. They’re junk.” I didn’t listen; I’d already fallen in love with the car. A week later I was walking.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Porting APT to CMake

        I have not yet tested building on exotic platforms like macOS, or even a BSD. Please do and report back. In Debian, CMake is not up-to.date enough on the non-Linux platforms to build APT due to test suite failures, I hope those can be fixed/disabled soon (it appears to be a timing issue AFAICT).

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tough, expandable Bay Trail SBC measures just 95 x 55mm

      Versalogic’s sandwich-style “Osprey” SBC offers Atom E3800 SoCs, dual GbE ports, dual mini-PCIe slots, MIL-STD-202G ruggedization, and -40 to 85°C support.

      Like Versalogic’s recent BayCat and earlier Bengal single-board computers, the Osprey is based on Intel’s “Bay Trail” Atom E38xx family of SoCs. Unlike those boards, which conform to 4.2 x 3.8-inch (107 x 97mm) PC/104 family specs, the Osprey has a considerably smaller, 95 x 55mm footprint and omits stackable PC/104-style expansion.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Kyocera ‘DuraForce PRO’ rugged Android smartphone has integrated HD action camera

          Today, Kyocera announces an interesting smartphone that stands out among the others. The ‘DuraForce PRO’ is super-rugged, and has both an octacore processor and large 3,240mAh battery. The stand-out feature, however, is the integrated wide-angle HD action camera.

          “DuraForce PRO was designed by Kyocera to be rugged for a reason — to provide businesses and consumers with a dependable smartphone that can withstand the harshest environments and mishaps, all with the peace of mind of a 2-year manufacturer’s warranty. For an industrious worker, an adventurous thrill-seeker or a parent on the go, DuraForce PRO incorporates cutting-edge technology and features designed to function in life’s most demanding moments. It is equipped with a large 5-inch Full HD display and a Qualcomm Snapdragon octa-core processor (1.5GHz x 4/1.2GHz x 4) with X8 LTE and multi-mode to ensure fast connections on diverse global networks”, says Kyocera.

        • Bang & Olufsen’s new 4K TV runs on Android TV

          Bang & Olufsen is known for making some beautifully designed TVs, and its latest creation, the BeoVision 14, is no exception. The newest addition to the BeoVision lineup features aluminum piping and oak wood lamellas, making it feel like a piece of furniture versus the minimalistic displays we’ve grown accustomed to.

        • Survey: Android’s Lead is Consolidated

          According to the latest Developer Nation Q3 2016 survey from VisionMobile, Android’s lead over iOS as primary platform and developer mindshare has been consolidated. Also, Windows developers prefer C# in the cloud while Linux ones stay with Java.

        • Hyundai’s DIY Android Auto update system expanded to four new cars, including the Sonata Hybrid and Veloster

          It must be nice to have a car with a media system that can be updated – some of us are lucky just to get Bluetooth. Some Hyundai owners can actually upgrade their in-car entertainment systems to give them Android Auto support, and today that list expands by four according to Cnet. Owners of the 2016 Sonata Hybrid (standard and plug-in), 2016 Veloster, and 2015/2016 Azera can now get some sweet, sweet Android Auto action with a download and a bit of legwork.

          To get started, head over to MyHyundai.com and put in your car’s Vehicle Identification Number. You’ll need a standard-sized SD card and a few hours of time, first to download the package via a standard PC, then to transfer it to the card, then to run the update program on your car. It’s not exactly a streamlined process, but anyone who’s ever rooted an Android phone and installed a custom ROM can probably handle it. And the end result – shiny new Android Auto goodness for your vehicle – is certainly worth it.

        • How to test drive the Andromium OS with your Android device
        • $99 Superbook Turns Android Phone Into Laptop — Sort Of

          If you’re looking to converge your laptop and smartphone experience, at a fair price, you might only have to wait for the release of the Andromium Superbook in early 2017.

          The Superbook is basically a laptop shell that uses your smartphone’s brains to operate. It looks more or less like a laptop, but instead of having the usual software that laptops use, the Superbook allows you to connect your Android smartphone for a full laptop experience. Essentially, the Superbook turns your phone into a computer.

        • 15 Android Apps Actually Worth Paying For

          Android’s poly-manufacturer ecosystem has long since eclipsed iOS as the world’s most popular mobile operating system. However, app developers still tend to fare better in the Applesphere—financially speaking. Even though Google Play regularly outshines the App Store in total number of downloads, Apple users are far more willing than their Android counterparts to actually plunk down cash for their apps.

          This is not surprising, given what we know about users of each ecosystem. Speaking very broadly, Apple is a premium brand that appeals to users who will spend extra for what they believe (rightly or wrongly) to be a superior experience, while Android is the mass appeal brand for those who are fine with the basics.

        • Vulnerability Exposes 900M Android Devices—and Fixing Them Won’t Be Easy
        • Netflix publishes a dedicated Android app for its FAST Speed Test
        • Google Nexus Sailfish goes through AnTuTu and Geekbench with Android 7.0 Nougat, Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM
        • 4 essential Android add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets
        • How to create more powerful Android notifications

Free Software/Open Source

  • Mattermost — The Open Source Slack Alternative You’ll Love

    Slack has exploded in popularity among a wide variety of teams for coordination and planning. It has especially become notable in infrastructure and information technology on both the development and operations sides. One of the biggest and most crucial aspects of working in a team is communication, and this is where Slack, and now Mattermost, shine.

  • If you build it, they won’t come: Why your project needs better marketing

    FOSS (free and open source software) conferences are full of talks about how to improve your code, or how you manage your code, or what the latest and greatest languages and tools are. But a successful open source project is about more than good code. First, let’s talk about what success is, because success isn’t a guarantee.

    University of Massachusetts faculty members Charles Schweik and Robert English have studied open source projects and their success extensively. In a study of 174,333 projects through 2009, they were able to declare success or abandonment for only 145,475. (Although this specific data is aging, I believe it is still accurate to prove the point.) Almost half of those were abandoned before a first release. Another third were left behind after that first release. Success also doesn’t have to mean becoming a household name or having thousands of contributors. It’s your project, which means you get to define what success means. But that also means that for your first step, you need to establish what your goals are.

  • Development Democracy: How IoT Innovation Grows from Open Source

    The history of the Internet is a story of innovative development coming from the bottom and working its way into the commercial and then consumer spaces along a pretty clear upward trajectory. Not so, it seems with the IoT. It seems like all the development news we hear these days comes from the enterprise players and the vendors that service them.

  • XtraLife unveiled as a rebranded Gaming Back End, now gives Devs Open Source access
  • Clan of the Cloud rebrands as XtraLife, goes open source

    Formerly known as Back End as a Service (BaaS) Clan of the Cloud, XtraLife gives developers access to an Open Source Back End in response to developer frustration over insufficient transparency and sustainable back end technology in the market.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome to make Flash mostly-dead in early December [Ed: but do we replace one blob with another? (Chrome is proprietary)]

        Google yesterday set an early December deadline for purging most Flash content from its Chrome browser, adding that it will take an interim step next month when it stops rendering Flash-based page analytics.

        In a post to a company blog, Anthony LaForge, a technical program manager on the Chrome team, said the browser would refuse to display virtually all Flash content starting with version 55, which is scheduled for release the week of Dec. 5.

        Previously, Google had used a broader deadline of this year’s fourth quarter for quashing all Flash content except for that produced by a select list of 10 sites, including Amazon, Facebook and YouTube.

      • Google Chrome’s plan to kill Flash kicks into high gear

        Google is getting serious about ending the reign of Adobe Flash on the web.

        The company recently detailed a timeline for bringing Flash on Chrome to an end—kind of. Even in these late stages of Flash’s life on the web you still can’t kill it off entirely. Instead, Google says it will “de-emphasize” Flash to the point where it’s almost never used except when absolutely necessary.

      • HTML5 Wins: Google Chrome Is Officially Killing Flash Next Month

        With an aim to bring security, better battery life, and faster load times, Google is de-emphasizing Flash next month. After this change in Chrome 53, the behind-the-scenes Flash will be blocked in favor of HTML5. Later, with Chrome 55, HTML5 will be made the default choice while loading a web page.

    • Mozilla

      • Help Mozilla build out their Location Service while walking about with your phone

        You can help build a free geolocation service while you’re out wandering around your neighborhood with your Android device. Install the Mozilla Stumbler app and let it run continuously in the background to help improve the Mozilla Location Service. The app registers the Wi-Fi signals around you and their estimated GPS coordinates, and then sends this off to Mozilla.

        Psst: There is also an optional competitive element to the app for those who’ve gotten hooked on augmented reality games like Pokémon GO and Ingress.

  • Databases

    • Open Source Tool ‘Rethinks’ Databases

      An open source tool for writing queries and modeling data designed for use with the RethinkDB query language is being positioned as an alternative to developing applications using the ReQL query language.

      Compose, a provider of hosted databases founded in 2010, acquired by IBM (NYSE: IBM) last year and incorporated into its Cloud Data Services unit, is pitching the ReQL alternative dubbed “Thinky.” The tool is described as an open source object relational mapper (ORM) designed for RethinkDB. IBM is offering RethinkDB and a batch of other hosted database services through its Compose Enterprise platform.

    • Where the Database Market Goes From Here

      It’s hard to remember now, but a decade ago the idea of non-relational databases was a foreign one. Outside of successful and widely adopted alternatives such as Berkley DB, generally the word database could reasonably be assumed to mean relational database. When we wrote about the possibility of non-relational alternatives then eleven years ago last March, the general reaction was a shrug, consternation or both.

      As developers increasingly took control of the decision making processes around technology selection, however, they looked outside the enterprise to the likes of Google for architectural inspiration, and non-relational databases first emerged and then exploded. From a consolidated handful of enterprise-oriented relational databases which are still the backbone for millions of existing applications, the database market added a wide variety of new specialized database types: columnar, distributed storage and process, document, graph, in-memory, key-value and more.

      Each of these categories began with the creation of specialized engines that excelled at a particular task, but that also involved tradeoffs traditional database buyers were unfamiliar with. Hadoop’s Map Reduce, for example, was less accessible to traditional DBAs (at least until companies such as Facebook wrote SQL-like interfaces such as Hive), but it could attack larger scale datasets than was practical with traditional relational databases, and it could do so far more efficiently.

      The database market today, then, looks very different than the database market of a decade ago. The traditional relational databases are all still around, but they are increasingly one of many databases employed in a given business rather than the database employed.

    • Couchbase: data shapes in the new digital economy [Ed: is it a paid-for marketing piece?]

      This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog written by Luke Whitehead in his capacity as head of EMEA marketing for Couchbase — the firm is am an open source, distributed (shared-nothing architecture) multi-model NoSQL document-oriented database specialist.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Reactive? Serverless? Put to bed? What’s next for Java. Speak up, Oracle

      The future of Java Enterprise Edition is on many developers’ minds. After the community came to the conclusion that the platform’s progress has come to a standstill, a plethora of initiatives has arisen with the goal of encouraging Oracle to pick up the work on Java EE 8 again.

      It’s time to take inventory.

      The bone of contention was Josh Juneau’s unsparing analysis of concrete activities in the Java EE specifications since 2015 in April this year. As an Expert Group Member of JSRs 372 (JavaServer Faces 2.3) and 368 (Java Message Service 2.1), he took a close look at Oracle’s participation in the development by examining mailing lists and GitHub activities.

    • Oracle Java patch problem? Browsium rolls management fix

      Released in 1995, Java went from a language running in a browser to the ubiquitous platform of today, one which underpins the entire industry and with deep tentacles in enterprise IT.

      After more than 20 years, Java remains one of the world’s most popular programming languages and employed by nine million devs.

      Java runs on 97 per cent of PCs in the enterprise and 89 per cent of US desktops and, somehow, three billion mobile phones. There’s no count on servers but it is huge thanks to the tireless work over the years in tools and middleware of IBM, Oracle and the deceased BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems.

      Yet with ubiquity and history has come risk, and Java now dances with Adobe’s Flash to get ahead in terms of number of vulnerability warnings and fixes.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • Here’s why Andreessen Horowitz is looking to invest in open source

      If you look strictly at declining information technology budgets, it might look like tech’s traditional mainstay “infrastructure” market — computing hardware, software and networking gear — is spiraling into insignificance.

      Indeed, it even looked that way to Martin Casado (pictured above), who cofounded the networking software startup Nicira Networks in 2009 before selling to VMware in 2012 for $1.3 billion and becoming general manager of its networking and security portfolio. “I was caught in this malaise for awhile,” said Casado, now a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

      No more. Speaking at the OpenStack Days conference today in Mountain View, CA, Casado declared, “We’re at the cusp of one of the biggest renaissances in infrastructure.”

  • BSD

    • Lumina Desktop Environment Hits 1.0 Milestone After Four Years of Development

      PC-BSD developer, Ken Moore, is extremely happy to announce that after being in development for more than four years, his unique Lumina desktop environment has hit the 1.0 stable milestone.

    • GhostBSD 10.3 RC1 is ready for testing

      This first RC release is ready for testing new feature in GhostBSD 10.3, MATE and XFCE is available on SourceForge for the i386, amd64, and amd64-uefi architectures.

    • GhostBSD 10.3 RC1 Is Out, but ZFS Disk Encryption Was Pushed Back to GhostBSD 11

      The GhostBSD developers are announcing on August 10, 2016, the general availability of the first RC (Release Candidate) development milestone towards the upcoming GhostBSD 10.3 operating system.

      GhostBSD 10.3 has been in development for quite some time now, since Spring 2016, and it looks like the final release gets closer and closer now that the Release Candidate 1 build is available for public testing. This time, both the MATE and Xfce editions have been made available for download to early adopters.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

  • Programming/Development

    • App dev silos are DevOps killers: Start by tearing them down

      The road to DevOps can be rocky. Larger enterprises often cite cultural barriers such as the “developers vs. operations” mentality as the biggest obstacles to achieving DevOps, and much has been written about how to break down those barriers.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • After debate, ABA House calls for publication of privately drafted standards used in legislation

      A resolution calling on Congress to make privately drafted parts of the law freely available attracted accusations in the House of Delegates that the ABA was trying to give away other people’s intellectual property.

      When federal agencies incorporate privately drafted standards into their rules by reference, Resolution 112, passed by the ABA House on Tuesday, asks Congress to make the relevant portion of those privately drafted standards available to the public online. The measure, sponsored by the Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice, was intended to advance the idea that the American public should have access to laws that regulate things like food additives, windshield safety standards and toy safety. (This was the subject of an ABA Journal feature in 2014.)

Leftovers

  • State of the Art: Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick? Think Again

    Amazon is the most obscure large company in the tech industry.

    It isn’t just secretive, the way Apple is, but in a deeper sense, Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce and cloud-storage giant is opaque. Amazon rarely explains either its near-term tactical aims or its long-term strategic vision. It values surprise.

    To understand Amazon, then, is necessarily to engage in a kind of Kremlinology. That’s especially true of the story behind one of its most important business areas: the logistics by which it ships orders to its customers.

  • Looks Can Kill: The Deadly Results of Flawed Design

    Earlier this summer, 27-year-old actor Anton Yelchin was crushed to death when his Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled downhill, pinning him against the security gate in front of his Los Angeles home. No one will ever know exactly what happened in the moments before the accident. But we know that his car is one of more than 1.1 million Jeep and Dodge vehicles that are part of a recall by Fiat Chrysler. The problem? Flawed design.

    Specifically, it’s the unintuitive automatic shifter, which can make drivers think they’ve put the car in park when they haven’t. If a driver were to exit the car with the engine not in park, all 5,000 pounds of the vehicle could roll away, crashing into any objects (or people) in its path.

  • Bipartisan Panel of State Lawmakers Agree: NCLB Has Failed US Kids

    Confirming what many public education advocates have been saying for years, a new report from a bipartisan panel of state lawmakers declares that the United States has little to show for more than a decade of reform efforts inspired by the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

    The report released Tuesday from the National Conference of State Legislatures, No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State (pdf), charges that “[s]tates have found little success” in developing an effective education system. Indeed, the executive summary reads, “Recent reforms have underperformed because of silver bullet strategies and piecemeal approaches.”

  • Italian administrations rapidly embrace ePayment

    The number of Italian public administrations and public organisations offering online payment is increasing rapidly, according to the Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale (AGID), the country’s Agency for the Digitalisation of the Public Sector. Just over 60% of all public administrations and organisations have implemented PagoPA, the electronic payment system developed by AGID.

  • Science

    • Online gaming may boost school scores but social media is wasted time, study suggests

      In what could be music to the ears of many parents, teenagers who regularly play online games are more likely to get better school scores, an Australian study suggests.

    • Millions of people might be ingesting a potentially harmful toxin in drinking water

      A new study out Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters looked at a national database that monitors chemical levels in drinking water and found that 6 million people were being exposed to levels of a certain chemical that exceed what the Environmental Protection Agency considers healthy.

      The chemicals, known as poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, are synthetic and resistant to water and oil, which is why they’re used in things like pizza boxes and firefighting foam. They’re built to withstand the environment.

      But PFASs also accumulate in people and animals and have been observationally linked to an increased risk of health problems including cancer. And they can’t be easily avoided, like with a water filter, for example.

      The kind of PFASs that are considered the most harmful are rarely used in the US, but other countries like China still use them, and that could have effects elsewhere, experts say.

    • High school price tag: 2,000 euros

      The Union of Upper Secondary School Students calculates the average cost to a student of three years of high school education at around 2,000 euros.

      The organisation’s chair, Elli Luukkainen, says the estimate includes equipment costs. As matriculation examinations will be completely electronic by 2019, each high school student must have the use of an up-to-date laptop that meets certain specifications.

      “The overall cost has specifically been raised by the need to buy a computer. The total cost of books may be 1,700-1,800 euros, depending on which titles are required by the curriculum,” says Luukkainen, 19-year-old Helsinki art student. Secondary schooling in Finland usually lasts three years, although some students graduate in two or four years depending on their field of study.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • DEA Reaffirms ‘Flat Earth’ Position With Regard To Marijuana Scheduling

      Although the DEA’s ruling continues to classify marijuana in the same category as heroin, the agency is also anticipated to advocate for regulatory changes that could expand the production of research-grade cannabis for FDA-approved clinical studies. Presently, any clinical trial involving cannabis must access source material cultivated at the University of Mississippi — a prohibition that is not in place for other controlled substances. Tomorrow, the agency is expected to take steps to permit, for the first time, multiple parties to apply for federal licenses to grow marijuana for FDA-approved trials — thus ending the U-Miss/NIDA monopoly on the production of material. This change was initially recommended by the DEA’s own administrative law judge in 2007, but her decision was ultimately rejected by the agency in 2011.

    • Filleting the Lion

      Fortunately for our coral reefs, the flashy lionfish has caught the attention of the hungriest predators of all: people! Once stripped of its venomous spines, cleaned, and filleted like any other fish, the lionfish becomes delectable seafood fare. NOAA scientists researching the lionfish’s spread and impact are now encouraging a seafood market as one way to mitigate the species’ impacts on reef communities.

    • Healthy Snack Invented on Indian Reservation Now Faces Stiff Corporate Competition

      The Pine Ridge Indian reservation is not the first place you’d look for good news about creating a new kind of economy that works for everyone.

      This corner of South Dakota includes several of the poorest counties in America, according to census figures. Ninety-seven percent of Pine Ridge’s Lakota Indian population lives below the federal poverty line, reports the American Indian Humanitarian Foundation. The unemployment rate is well over 50 percent.

      Yet these dire conditions—compounded by public health problems like diabetes and addiction—have not snuffed hope. Growing numbers of Pine Ridge residents are embracing their own traditions as a path toward healing and economic self-sufficiency.

      The Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, for instance, is moving forward on an ambitious set of projects, including a worker-owned construction company, a worker-owned IT firm and a farm to combat lack of access to nutritious food.

    • At Least Six Million Americans Are Drinking Toxic ‘Teflon Chemicals’ With Their Water

      PFOA and PFOS chemical compounds—including C8, popularly known as the Teflon chemical—are extremely dangerous to human health, and despite an EPA advisory released earlier this year and increasing calls for action, research shows they are near-ubiquitous in the United States.

      “Virtually all Americans are exposed to these compounds,” said Xindi Hu, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student at Harvard’s Department of Environmental Health, to the Post. “They never break down. Once they are released into the environment, they are there.”

      Moreover, the study also notes that research suggests “that exposure to these chemicals can make people sick, even at or below the concentration recommended as acceptable under the EPA health advisory,” according to the Gazette-Mail.

    • Researchers find unsafe levels of industrial chemicals in drinking water of 6 million Americans

      Drinking water supplies serving more than six million Americans contain unsafe levels of a widely used class of industrial chemicals linked to potentially serious health problems, according to a new study from Harvard University researchers.

      The chemicals — known as polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs — have been used for decades in a range of industrial and commercial products, including non-stick coatings on pans, food wrappers, water-repellent clothing and firefighting foam. Long-term exposure has been linked to increased risks of kidney cancer, thyroid problems, high cholesterol and hormone disruption, among other issues.

    • Experiments Involving GMO Animals Are Skyrocketing, Study Finds [Ed: In practice, as Monsanto makes abundantly evident, GMO is like a ploy for 'privatising' life (fauna after the flora experiment) for profit; a passageway to monopoly on life with patents]

      Experiments involving genetically engineered animals have nearly tripled in Germany in the past 10 years, driven by a burgeoning global industry that involves inventing and patenting genetically altered species for scientific research, says a new study commissioned by Germany’s Green Party and conducted by the research group Testbiotech.

      [...]

      Ebner also told Süddeutsche Zeitung that he fears so-called “free trade” deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) will lead to the worldwide dispersal of products from genetically modified animals.

      The newspaper observes that “meat and other products from genetically modified animals cannot be sold in Germany. [...] In other countries, however, among other things scientists are experimenting with altering the ingredients of milk by changing the genes of cows. For such experiments, embryos must be genetically altered and then implanted in a surrogate. The Testbiotech study notes that these experiments often involve pain and suffering, as such laboratory animals are frequently killed in order to remove cells or the genetically modified embryo.”

      It seems other countries have reason to worry, as the U.S. government continues to fight for pro-GMO legislation. Indeed, when President Obama last week signed into law a corporate-friendly GMO labeling bill, he “scratched out the laws of Vermont, Connecticut, and Maine that required the labeling of genetically engineered foods,” reports AlterNet.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Sultan and the Tsar: Erdogan Travels to Russia

      So the Sultan travels to see the Tsar at the royal seat of St Petersburg. And the Caliph of Damascus will watch from Syria with the conviction that Ba’ath Party policy has once again proved its worth. The policy? Wait. And wait. And wait.

      For just as Turkey’s power over Syria – its Pakistan-like role of conduit for Arab Gulf money and arms to the civil war, its smuggling routes to Isis, al-Qaeda (or Jabhat al-Nusra or Fatah el-Sham or whatever) – seemed an overwhelming threat to Damascus, along comes Turkey’s mysterious coup, its army neutered, and Sultan Erdogan scurrying off to St Petersburg to move his country from Nato to Mother Russia.

    • Will Nagasaki be the last use of nuclear weapons?

      Today is the 71st anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Last week I was in Nagasaki, participating in a symposium on nuclear issues organised by Asahi Shinbun, Japan’s second largest national newspaper. I met several survivors of the Nagasaki bombing (known as Hibakusha), including Michiko Kano, whose son has just published a book about her experiences “15 year old Hibakusha: So as not to erase history”.

    • 71 Years Ago: When Truman Failed To Pause — And The Nagasaki War Crime Followed

      Seventy-one years after the twin atomic attacks on Japan, historians continue to debate whether the first bombing, over Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945, was justified, and whether it was even the most important factor in the country’s swift surrender. Many of those who still defend President Truman’s decision on that assault, however, consider the bombing of Nagasaki three days later completely avoidable, even a crime of war.

    • Planes land at Brussels, Toulouse after reported bomb alerts – Belgian media

      Two airplanes which were heading to Zaventem Airport in the Belgian capital, Brussels, had reported bomb alerts on Wednesday, according to national broadcaster VRT.

      Emergency services had been deployed at the airport, VRT reported.

      According to VRT, which cites the Belgian federal prosecutor, the threat was “serious enough to take action.”

    • ‘Kill Russians and Iranians, threaten Assad,’ says ex-CIA chief backing Clinton

      Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell, who supports Hillary Clinton and insists that Donald Trump is being manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, said that Russians and Iranians in Syria should be killed covertly to “pay the price.”

    • The Stench of Raw Propaganda

      Washington was caught in a bind. In Iraq Washington was fighting ISIS, because ISIS was overthrowing Washington’s puppet in Iraq. However, in Syria Washington was supporting ISIS, often characterizing ISIS as “moderates” fighting to bring democracy to Syria. Now that ISIS is on the verge of total defeat in Syria, Washington’s whores among the “experts” want Russia punished for blocking Washington’s overthrow of Syria.

    • Shocking audio surfaces: Khomeini’s ex-heir acknowledges massacre of PMOI by Iran regime

      A shocking audio recording has been published for the first time of Khomeini’s former heir-apparent, Hossein-Ali Montazeri, acknowledging the brutal nationwide massacre in Iran in 1988 of activists of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK).

      Montazeri, who was subsequently dismissed as the heir by then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini, is heard addressing a meeting with the “death committee,” comprised of Hossein-Ali Nayeri, the regime’s sharia judge; Morteza Eshraqi, the regime’s prosecutor; Ebrahim Raeesi, deputy prosecutor; and Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, representative of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). He tells the death committee members: “The greatest crime committed during the reign of the Islamic Republic, for which history will condemn us, has been committed by you. Your (names) will in the future be etched in the annals of history as criminals.” He also added, “Executing these people while there have been no new activities (by the prisoners) means that … the entire judicial system has been at fault.”

      In the summer of 1988, the Iranian regime summarily and extra-judicially executed 30,000 political prisoners held in jails across Iran. This massacre was carried out on the basis of a fatwa by Khomeini. The Iranian regime has never acknowledged these executions or provided any information as to how many prisoners were killed.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Eight Years After a Mercaptan Spill, Residents of Eight Mile, Alabama, Call For Evacuation

      Eight years after a mercaptan spill at a Mobile Gas facility in Eight Mile, Alabama, residents still affected by the spill are fighting back. “For years we have been told there is not a problem anymore, though the smell of gas never really goes away,” Eight Mile resident Geraldine Harper told DeSmog, “and I’m sure breathing that stuff is making my health worse.”

    • To Stop Climate Change, Don’t Just Cut Carbon. Redistribute Wealth.

      This year’s Democratic platform has the fingerprints of progressive movements all over it. A $15 minimum wage, a pathway to cannabis legalization, improvements to Social Security, police accountability, and financial reforms — including a tax on speculation — all make an appearance.

      The platform also highlights the critical link between climate and the economy. In particular, it argues that “carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases should be priced to reflect their negative externalities.”

      That’s a complicated way of saying that the cost of the harm done to people and the planet should be calculated into the price of energy generated by burning coal, oil, and gas. If these costs were factored into the price consumers pay at the pump or in their utility bills, it could make dirty energy expensive enough to change both consumer and industry behavior. And that, in turn, would make renewable energy much more cost-competitive.

    • Warren and Whitehouse: Exxon Climate Scandal a ‘Master Class’ in Corporate Rigging

      Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) have a thing or two to say to about efforts by Exxon, and their Republican henchmen, to shut down state probes into whether the oil giant deliberately misled the public about the connection between fossil fuels and climate change.

      “Let’s call this what it is: a master class in how big corporations rig the system,” the pair wrote in a searing op-ed published in the Washington Post late Tuesday.

      The senators lay out how the ongoing investigation by Massachusetts and New York attorneys general (AG) into potential crimes committed by ExxonMobil is “something state AGs do every day. Sometimes AGs uncover fraud and sometimes they don’t, but if the evidence warrants it, the question of fraud will be resolved in open court, with all the evidence on public display.”

      “But instead of applauding the AGs for doing their jobs,” Warren and Whitehouse continue, “this particular investigation against this particular oil company has brought down the wrath of congressional Republicans—and a swift effort to shut down the investigation before any evidence becomes public.”

    • Grounded 17,000-Ton Oil Rig Leaking Diesel Near Rare North Sea Habitat

      A 17,000-ton drilling rig had broken lose and was blown ashore on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis and officials warned on Wednesday that it is now leaking oil.

      According to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), two of the four holding tanks aboard the Transocean Winner have been damaged and are releasing an unknown amount of diesel oil. The rig was reportedly carrying 280 metric tonnes of oil.

      Environmentalists say that the accident, which occurred in the North Sea off Scotland’s outer Hebrides, highlights why offshore oil drilling is so risky and controversial, as it poses a grave threat to local ecosystems and economies.

      “Leaking diesel oil could create a serious problem for wildlife in such a sensitive area, which is often home to whales, dolphins and important seabirds,” said Friends of the Earth Scotland director Dr. Richard Dixon. “The local community is dependent on tourism and fishing, both of which would be badly impacted by a serious spill.

    • Diesel oil leak from grounded rig Transocean Winner

      Two fuel tanks on the grounded drilling rig Transocean Winner have been breached, releasing an unknown amount of diesel oil.

      The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) said the rig at Dalmore beach, a beauty spot on the Isle of Lewis, was carrying 280 metric tonnes of the oil.

      It said two out of four tanks holding the oil appeared to have been damaged.

    • Humans Have Used All the Earth’s Resources for the Year

      As of yesterday, we’ve officially overspent nature’s resource budget, according to the Global Footprint Network, an international climate research organization. Metaphorically speaking, if Earth were a bank, we’d be in over our heads with overdraft fees.

      This year, “Earth Overshoot Day” fell on August 8, based on measurements of each nation’s withdrawal of natural capital. From carbon sinks to fisheries, humanity has taken more from nature than it’s been able to reproduce. Quite simply, we’re in environmental debt.

  • Finance

    • Little Britain, After Brexit: UK Plunges into the Deep End of the International Market

      There are many problems with this story, not the least being the very meaning of the word sovereignty. Indeed, in many senses, Brexit substantially reduces the sovereignty of the UK. Not only will the new everyday situation be a more costly version of business-as-usual, but Britain itself will also exist in a more dangerous environment of risk.

      Contrary to the tale of an independent, prosperous Britain is that of an isolated and exposed Britain – a vulnerable Britain, awash amid the harsh reality of the international market. This avoidable self-exposure gives the UK very little moreover as much of the regulatory regime, for instance, will continue as is or slightly rebranded since it is underwritten by WTO trade rules and EU market entry requirements (55% of UK exports).

      The challenges of globalism have been met by nations through regional and inter-regional associations, from Asia, the Americas, Africa and, of course, Europe.

      Russia and China continue to integrate their economies and have developed a cooperative network of nations in Asia and around the globe through groupings such as BRICS and its fledgling New Development Bank. This network was meant to include cooperation between China and the UK, viewed as the gateway to Europe, especially in financial services. Yet, with Brexit, China is re-assessing its investment strategy and commitments in the UK.

      With strength in numbers, nations have achieved a more tangible sovereignty, an existential security, if you will, through peaceful cooperation and sustainable development. Stronger and better trade deals have been negotiated, by the EU, for example, providing members with greater discretion for democratic self-governance.

      Of course, the UK could attempt to strengthen its own global network of nations, as with the Commonwealth and the Anglosphere. Yet, such fantastic hopes fly in the face of the reality of the current international order.

    • While in the White House, Economist Received Personal Loans From Top Washington Lawyer

      In 2011, Gene Sperling had a problem. He was working as President Obama’s chief economic advisor but his government salary did not cover his expenses. He and his wife lived in a Georgetown townhouse valued today at around $2 million, but did not have enough equity to qualify for a second mortgage or credit line. He didn’t want to sell the house and he wanted to keep working at a prestigious but relatively low-paid public service job.

      And so Sperling turned to a close friend from law school: Howard Shapiro. A top partner at the Washington powerhouse law firm WilmerHale, Shapiro had loaned Sperling money before and was willing to do so again. Sperling asked the White House Counsel’s office and the Office of Government Ethics for permission to borrow from Shapiro, whose firm frequently negotiates with the government on behalf of some of the nation’s leading corporations. Officials approved the transactions.

      So in 2011, Sperling borrowed between $100,000 and $250,000 from Shapiro at 5 percent, a rate that appears to be well below the interest banks charged at the time for comparable loans. Sperling listed his borrowing on his financial disclosure forms.

      In each of the next two years, Sperling went to Shapiro again, taking out two more loans that brought his debt to a total of between $300,000 and $600,000. (The forms require disclosure of a range, not specific figures.) The loans are unsecured. Sperling consolidated earlier loans from Shapiro, one made in 2006 and the 2011 loan, into the later ones.

    • Russia’s Weakness Is Its Economic Policy

      According to various reports, the Russian government is reconsidering the neoliberal policy that has served Russia so badly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If Russia had adopted an intelligent economic policy, Russia’s economy would be far ahead of where it stands today. It would have avoided most of the capital flight to the West by relying on self-finance.

    • The State of Missouri Was Right to Say No Church Playground Renovations on the Taxpayers’ Dime

      In Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley, the Supreme Court will consider whether the state of Missouri violated the U.S. Constitution when it denied the church’s application for a cash grant to subsidize the cost of resurfacing its playground with recycled scrap-tire material. While, at first blush, this may appear to be a simple dispute about payments for playground improvements, it implicates one of our most essential, enduring constitutional commitments: the ban on direct government funding of houses of worship.

    • How Long Can Economic Reality Be Ignored?

      Yesterday I listened to the NPR presstitutes say how Trump pretends to be in favor of free trade but really is against it, because he is against all the free trade agreements such as NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic partnerships. The presstitutes don’t know that these are not trade agreements. NAFTA is a “give away American jobs” agreement, and the so-called partnerships give away the sovereignty of countries in order to award global corporations immunity from laws.

      As I have reported on many occasions, the Oligarchs’ government lies to us about everything, including economic statistics. For example, we are told that we have been enjoying an economic recovery since June, 2009, that we are more or less at full emploment with an unemployment rate of 5% or less, and that there is no inflation. We are told this despite the facts that the “recovery” is based on the under-reporting of the inflation rate, the unemployment rate is 23%, and inflation is high.

    • Rampaging Debt Collectors are Committing Highway Robbery

      Some corporations engage in such abusive consumer rip-offs that they’re just plain evil. But then there are some profiteers that dig even deeper into the dark void of their corporate souls to achieve the ultimate status: TRULY EVIL.

      Consider the gang of debt collection firms that are thugglishly and lawlessly rampaging across the country ruthlessly abusing consumer rights and common decency. Susan Macharia, a California administrative employee, is one of thousands of middle-income and low-wage workers each year who get robbed by these relentless money grabbers. Out of the blue, she got a rude call in January from a collector demanding she pay $10,000 for a credit card debt she ran up in 2003.

      Only, Ms. Macharia had no such debt. In fact, as she told the New York Times, she didn’t even have a credit card until 2013. Yet, the collection agency declared that it had a copy of a 2006 court judgement for non-payment filed against her, addressed to her California residence — so, pay up, or else! But wait, she lived in Atlanta in 2006, not California. Nonetheless, ignoring facts, the callous collection outfit got a court to rubber stamp an order to let the creditor garnish Macharia’s paycheck, effectively stealing $800 a month from her.

    • Free people from ‘dictatorship’ of 0.01%

      The only way to counter globalisation just a plot of land in some central place, keep it covered in grass, let there be a single tree, even a wild tree.” This is how dear friend and eminent writer Mahasweta Devi, who passed away on July 28, at the age of 90, quietly laid out her imagination for freedom in our times of corporate globalisation in one of her last talks.

      Our freedoms, she reminds us, are with grass and trees, with wildness and self-organisation (swaraj), when the dominant economic systems would tear down every tree and round up the last blade of grass.

      From the days we jointly wrote about the madness of covering our beautiful biodiverse Hindustan with monocultures of eucalyptus plantations, which were creating green deserts, to the work we did together on the impact of globalisation on women, Mahaswetadi remained the voice of the earth, of the marginalised and criminalised communities.

      She could see with her poetic imagination how globalisation, based on free trade agreements (FTAs), written by and for corporations, was taking away the freedoms of people and all beings. “Free trade” is not just about how we trade. It is about how we live and whether we live. It is about how we think and whether we think. In the last two decades, our economies, our production and consumption patterns, our chances of survival and the emergence of a very small group of parasitic billionaires, have all been shaped by the rules of deregulation in the WTO agreements.

      [...]

      The TPP requires all its signatories to join UPOV 91. It allows patents on “inventions derived from plants” which would open the floodgates of bio-piracy, as in the case of neem, basmati and wheat. The TPP has sections on “biologicals” which covers biological processes and products, thus undoing the exclusions in the WTO TRIPS agreement. Given how there is a rush to patent and impose untested and hazardous vaccines, and new GMO technologies like gene editing and gene drives, it is clear that the TPP is the instrument for the next stage of bio-imperialism.

    • Trump Taj Mahal workers continue strike despite impending closure

      On a recent scorching Sunday afternoon in Atlantic City, New Jersey, more than two dozen striking workers from UNITE HERE Local 54 walked in a tight circle on the boardwalk in front of the Trump Taj Mahal chanting “Taj Mahal, on strike! If we don’t win, shut it down!”

      Casino workers walked off the job early on the morning of July 1 after contract negotiations between Local 54 and owner and multi-billionaire Carl Icahn failed.

      Last week, the strike, which is now the longest in Atlantic City since the first casino opened almost 40 years ago, was dealt a fatal blow. Taj Mahal Entertainment, the company that runs the casino, announced that it will close this fall due to lackluster profits and the negative impact of the strike on the casino’s bottom line.

      The struggle between Local 54 and Icahn over a number of worker concerns — including the lack of health care and pension benefits, along with mostly stagnant hourly wages — has been ongoing since Icahn assumed ownership of the casino this past March.

      Employees lost their health care and pension benefits 23 months ago when the casino’s previous owner, Avenue Capital Group, filed for bankruptcy in 2014, making workers at the Taj Mahal the first casino employees to go without heath care since the industry opened shop in Atlantic City in 1978.

    • America’s Racial Wealth Divide Is Nothing Short of Shocking

      The average wealth for white households is $656,000. For Latinos it’s $98,000, and for black households it’s just $85,000. The average wealth of black and Latinos combined still doesn’t come close to half of white wealth.

      And while white wealth continues to grow substantially, any gains in black and Latino wealth pale in comparison. Current estimates show that if nothing changes, the racial wealth divide will grow to $1 million by 2043.

    • ‘Personnel is Policy’: Progressives Urge Clinton to Avoid Wall Street Cabinet

      A coalition of progressive organizations published an open letter to Hillary Clinton on Wednesday, urging her to keep Wall Street veterans out of her administration if she wins the presidency.

      The 15 signatories, which include advocacy groups, a labor union, a political party, and other organizations, wrote the letter to “reaffirm the importance of selecting executive branch appointees with a documented record of fighting for the public interest.”

      “Historically, too many Wall Street executives and corporate insiders have traveled through the revolving door between private industry and government,” the letter states. “The result of this practice is that the interests of elites are over-represented in Washington.”

      Earlier this year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a report which found that Washington’s revolving-door system is part of what allows corporate crime to run rampant.

    • Trump Trade Position Is Opposite Of What People Think It Is

      But Trump is, after all, the Republican candidate. He is, after all, a businessman. He has, after all, openly expressed his wish to bring American wages down in the past and even voiced his plan to pit states against each other to accomplish that.

      So we should, after all, understand that a Republican businessman who has made it clear that he thinks wages need to go down does not suddenly have the best interests of American workers at heart. He is also a politician, and in this one instance he has learned to keep his mouth shut, at least when it comes to his argument that wages are too high. That doesn’t mean his argument has changed.

    • Groundbreaking Lawsuit Targets ‘Extortionist’ Cities Near Ferguson That Lock Poor People In Cages

      Civil rights lawyers sued 13 St. Louis-area cities in federal court on Tuesday, alleging they violated the constitutional rights of poor people by locking them in squalid jail cells in connection with minor traffic infractions ― a practice that contributed to the tension that boiled over in Ferguson two years ago after a police officer shot an 18-year-old to death.

      The lawsuit, filed on the two-year anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown, targets the city of St. Ann and 12 smaller municipalities ― some with just a few hundred residents ― that use St. Ann’s jail to hold municipal debtors under what the lawsuit calls “inhumane” conditions.

    • Ferguson-Area Cities “Terrorizing” Poor Through Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons: Federal Lawsuit

      A new federal class-action lawsuit accuses 13 St. Louis-area municipalities of “terrorizing” poor, primarily African-American people through a “deliberate and coordinated conspiracy” by “creating a modern-day police state and debtors’ prison scheme that has no place in American society.”

      The non-profit ArchCity Defenders and the law firm Arnold & Porter filed the suit Tuesday, the same day as demonstrators were marking the two-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Mo. police officer.

      The U.S. Department of Justice released a report last year into Ferguson’s police practices, concluding that the department engaged in systematic targeting of African-American citizens, and “consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity.”

      As the Guardian reports, “Tuesday’s suit describes how this revenue-focused policing model has continued apace in St. Louis County’s neighboring municipalities.”

    • Right-to-buy reform urged as council leaders fear for social housing

      Council leaders in England have called on the government to make urgent reforms to the right-to-buy scheme, after figures showed that the number of sold-off homes replaced by local authorities fell by more than a quarter last year.

      Analysis by the Local Government Association (LGA) showed that 12,246 council homes were sold to tenants under right to buy in England in 2015-16, but just 2,055 replacements were started by councils – a drop of 27% on the previous year.

      The right-to-buy scheme allows low-income tenants to buy their council-owned home at a sizeable discount to market value. Since it was launched by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, almost 2m properties have been sold by councils across England and the proportion of homes that are social housing has fallen from 31% to 17%. Use of the scheme was slowing until the Conservative government relaunched the scheme in 2012 and quadrupled the discounts available to London tenants.

      Right to buy has been scrapped in Scotland and the Welsh assembly last week confirmed that it planned to do the same. The LGA said the scheme could become a thing of the past in England, too, if councils were not helped to fund replacement homes.

    • Everyone is quitting

      As an Amazon recruiter, I ask you to please believe everything you see on this site about how awful Amazon is as an employer. I read the online reviews before joining here, but I thought that I can overcome any of these situations and work anywhere for 4 years to maximize my stock payout. I was WRONG.

      For a company that prides itself on having smart employees, I reported to some of the worst managers in my entire career. All I learned from them was how to suck-up, lie, blame others, and cheat the performance numbers.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Could crowdfunding – yes, crowdfunding – save journalism in partly free societies?

      For decades, journalists and activists have tried to break the stranglehold that repressive governments or plutocrats hold on media around the globe.

      During the Cold War, outlets such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Marti and Voice of America elbowed their way into the airless media environments of the Eastern bloc, Cuba and elsewhere to report on events censored in those countries and to offer an alternative view of the west.

      With the end (mostly) of the Cold War-era practices of signal-jamming and the expulsion of foreign journalists, free press groups changed their approach. They started training reporters in countries where newly free people and markets, and a newly accountable political class, were expected to lead to a robust, independent media scene.

    • CNN’s Brian Stelter Recalls Dating a Fox News Staffer Who Spied on Him for Roger Ailes

      The avalanche of news regarding Roger Ailes’ sexual harassment of female employees during his reign as chairman and CEO of Fox News includes shocking revelations of corporate coverup and retaliation against the women who reported the abuse. Over the weekend, a report by New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman exposed a Nixon-esque operation headed by Ailes that used Fox News funds to finance public relations and surveillance programs against reporters who threatened the embattled former CEO. And on Monday, CNN’s senior media correspondent Brian Stelter admitted when he was a young reporter fresh on the media beat, he dated a Fox News employee until he realized she was actually spying on him.

    • Former Cult Member Explains How Donald Trump and His Followers Are Just Like a Cult

      Kendal Unruh — a Republican delegate and high school teacher from Colorado — grew up in a religious cult, and that’s why she’s determined to stop Donald Trump from becoming president.

      The 51-year-old Unruh, who was raised among members of The Move cult established by Sam Fife, said she knows what a cult leader looks like, and she said that perfectly describes the Republican presidential nominee.

    • Hillary Emails: Message in Private Server Betrayed Name of NSA Agent

      An email sent through Hillary Clinton’s private sever betrayed the name of the National Security Agency’s representative to the State Department.

    • Green Party candidate Jill Stein says we need a jobs program like the ‘New Deal’

      Green Party candidate Jill Stein told CNBC on Wednesday she is the only 2016 presidential nominee who is free to provide the medicine the economy needs.

      “As the only candidate that is not poisoned by corporate money lobbyists or super PACs, I can actually stand up for what it is we need,” she said in an interview on “Squawk Box.”

      She said the United States needs an emergency jobs program like the New Deal — “a green New Deal” to solve “the emergency of climate change,” and a cancellation of student debt to “liberate a generation to lead us forward to the economy of the future.”

      She said she would also make higher education free and make health care universal through a Medicare for all system.

    • A Conversation With Green Party Nominee Dr. Jill Stein

      As Bernie Sanders was at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia beseeching his backers to throw their support to Hillary Clinton or risk a Donald Trump presidency, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was outside with another message. Don’t compromise, she said. Vote for me. Vote for a green New Deal. Stein wants college debt forgiveness, free tuition, Medicare for all and an emergency transition to green energy, food, transportation. This hour On Point, the Green Party’s Jill Stein.

    • Donald Trump Suggests ‘Second Amendment People’ Could Act Against Hillary Clinton

      Donald J. Trump on Tuesday appeared to raise the possibility that gun rights supporters could take matters into their own hands if Hillary Clinton is elected president and appoints judges who favor stricter gun control measures.

      Repeating his contention that Mrs. Clinton wanted to abolish the right to bear arms, Mr. Trump warned at a rally here that it would be “a horrible day” if Mrs. Clinton were elected and got to appoint a tiebreaking Supreme Court justice.

      “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”

    • State Dept. discussed favor for Clinton foundation donor

      CNN’s Drew Griffin explains the connections between Clinton family and aides, donors named in new emails sent during Clinton’s time as Secretary of State.

    • Debunking the media’s smear campaign against Green presidential candidate Jill Stein

      The surging fundraising and poll numbers for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein since the end of the Bernie Sanders campaign must be hitting a nerve, because Democratic insiders and the mainstream media are resorting to smear tactics.

    • The Great White Hype: No One Is Energizing the White Working Class, Not Even Donald Trump

      It has become an article of faith among political pundits that GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump is energizing the white working class.

      Trump is “rallying white working class voters,” Bill Schneider wrote for Reuters in December.

      The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki wrote last year of Trump’s “popularity among working-class voters,” which has allowed him to appeal to voters former 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt “Romney couldn’t reach.”

      Political scientist Justin Gest wrote for Reuters that Trump “bluntly acknowledges an acute sense of loss that has been uniquely felt by the white working class.”

      This week alone, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Trump could compete in Pennsylvania because of the “sort of white working class bastions that would provide him opportunities to win”; CNN political commentator Matt Lewis declared that Trump’s “populist, protectionist, anti-globalist trade politics … I think plays well with a lot of working class Americans out there”; and conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell “The white poor, the white working class in America feels very cut out by elites like you and me,” but “Trump is tapping into them in a big way.”

    • The Fragility of American Democracy

      A top neocon excuse for invading other countries is to spread American-style “democracy,” but – amid all that carnage – there has been a steady erosion of U.S. democratic values, observes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Donald Trump Under Fire After Hinting Gun Owners Could Assassinate Hillary Clinton
    • Donald Trump and the ‘Banality of Evil’
    • Donald Trump’s Incendiary Language [Video: “Clinton in 2008 saying she won’t drop out of the primaries because if someone assassinates Obama she can still win”]

      Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is taking a P.R. pounding for a sloppy Second Amendment reference interpreted as calling for Hillary Clinton’s assassination, but what was his intent, asks Robert Parry.

    • Hillary Clinton and the Big (Neoliberal) Lie

      Today Hillary Clinton shamelessly presents herself as a friend of working people. She trots out the elites of organized labor, concerned primarily with their own positions atop demoralized and fragmented unions, and trumpets their endorsements of her. And even these working class backstabbers have to grit their teeth and smile as they kneel before the high priestess herself in hopes of eight more years of privileged relations and fine dining.

      But behind closed doors, everyone in America who even casually follows politics knows the truth: Hillary Clinton is a crusader for free trade and neoliberalism.

      And that’s precisely why Hillary’s anti-free trade posture at election time is so deeply cynical, to say nothing of the insult to working people. In 2007-2008, in the midst of a hotly contested primary campaign against then Senator Barack Obama, Clinton repeatedly claimed that she was anti-free trade, and critical of NAFTA. In a debate in late 2007, Clinton admitted that NAFTA had been a mistake “to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would.”

      Of course, these were just the populist sentiments that Clinton knew she needed to utilize in order to deceive organized labor, and the working class in general, that she was an ally, rather than a devout worshiper at the altar of the god of neoliberalism.

      After Obama became president and appointed Clinton Secretary of State she immediately reverted to being the great champion of free trade. Indeed, in her position as America’s top diplomat Clinton traveled the world preaching the gospel of free trade. And by this point she had a new holy scripture to tout: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

      Clinton unabashedly lied during Democratic national debates on the issue of the TPP, saying that she now opposes it, despite having been in favor of it as late as 2012 when she said the TPP “sets the gold standard in trade agreements.” While she now masquerades as a protectionist opposing a deal that would be bad for working people, she has demonstrated her unflagging support for this type of so called free trade in the past.

    • Paul Ryan Won His Primary, but He’s Still the GOP’s Fading Star

      The only time we hear from Ryan anymore is when Donald Trump talks about him.

    • Behind the Booing: A Sanders Delegate Reflects on the DNC Protests

      It all started three weeks before the Democratic National Convention (DNC), which I was attending as a Bernie Sanders delegate from California. I started Los Angeles for Bernie in June of 2015, so going to the convention was the culmination of my year-long journey for Bernie. Little did I know that Sanders’ actions would leave a vacuum for me and my fellow delegates to fill.

      Like most supporters, I was disappointed to see Sanders endorse Hillary Clinton two weeks before the convention. When rumors started flying about this possibility, I lent my voice to try to stop it with an open letter to him. I knew it was in vain. It became clear that he had stopped fighting for the nomination after the primary in Washington, DC, when it was reported that he was not going to send a planned letter to the superdelegates, making the case that he was more likely to beat Donald Trump. Plus, when he decided to run as a Democrat, he had said he would support the eventual nominee. I just wasn’t expecting it to happen before the actual nomination. How many times had he said that it would be a contested convention?

    • From Resentment to Possibility: How Enjoyment Shapes the Political Imagination in Election 2016

      Since the nomination of both Trump and Hillary Clinton, another mode of enjoyment has emerged. With an apocalyptic narrative of a potential Trump presidency in place, some liberals and progressives are expressing outrage and condescension toward presumed allies who dare to support third-party candidates, or who are choosing to abstain from presidential election voting, or who, in some cases, are simply critiquing Clinton’s policies and practices. How can anyone in this moment not do the pragmatic and responsible thing and fully support the only candidate that can defeat pure evil?! How can they risk a Trump presidency?!

    • Russ Feingold Wins Wisconsin Primary to Take Back Senate Seat in November

      Russ Feingold won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat for Wisconsin on Tuesday, setting up a long-awaited face-off with incumbent Republican Ron Johnson in November.

      The Associated Press called the open primary just after 8pm on Tuesday. Feingold defeated businessman Scott Harbach of Kenosha to make it onto the ticket.

      “I’m incredibly grateful for the thousands of Wisconsinites who voted in today’s primary, and I’m proud to accept the Democratic nomination to serve the people of this state in the U.S. Senate,” Feingold said in a statement following the vote.

      Feingold represented Wisconsin in the Senate for 18 years before being ousted during a 2010 Tea Party wave that elected Johnson to his seat. In 2015, however, Politico described Johnson as “one of the most vulnerable incumbents on the 2016 Senate map.”

    • Heated Presidential Primary Lives on as Clinton Stumps for Wasserman Schultz

      “The Democratic presidential primary lives on in Florida’s 23rd congressional district,” the Miami Herald reported Tuesday after Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton paused her campaigning to endorse former party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is in the midst of a close primary fight with the Bernie Sanders-backed Tim Canova.

      Clinton appeared beside the embattled incumbent at her strip-mall campaign headquarters in Davie, Florida, telling supporters: “I have to have her in Congress, by my side, working day after day…And I am committed to doing whatever I can to support her as she returns to the Congress with your support.”

      “I really respect Debbie’s fighting spirit,” Clinton added.

      Indeed, Wasserman Schultz has quite a bit to contend with these days. Not only is her progressive challenger (her first primary opponent in 24 years) gaining traction, the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair was forced to resign from her post last month after leaked emails showed the party improperly favoring Clinton over Sanders during the presidential primary.

      The emails validated accusations Sanders and his supporters made throughout his campaign. Following her resignation from the DNC, Clinton announced that Wasserman Schultz would now serve as her presidential campaign’s honorary chair.

      Those very same emails also prompted Canova’s campaign to file an official FEC complaint (pdf) against Wasserman Schultz on Monday, accusing her of using DNC resources to strategize against his congressional campaign.

      As the Sun Sentinel put it on Tuesday, “The Canova vs. Wasserman Schultz primary is a microcosm of the Sanders vs. Clinton presidential primaries.”

    • The Trump Cult Is One Without A Leader. Trump is Only Its Willing Figurehead

      The Trump phenomenon will be studied for decades. How could someone come out of nowhere, destroy a powerful field of veterans in politics, take the party’s nomination with ease, then go down to lose in one of the biggest election landslides (my current forecast says 18% loss in November, that is based on the situation August 1, before the latest week of more Trumpian madness). But yes, WHY is Trump behaving this way. What is going on. Why is he so bizarre and why are his supporters like they are, etc. Its baffling. So I have a fresh theory. Trump is in front of a cult which he did not create, and he does not lead: he is only their figurehead.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Facebook Deletes ExtraTorrent Official Page And Disables User Accounts

      Facebook has removed the official page of ExtraTorrent. The social network has taken this step against ExtraTorrent after repeated complaints from copyright holders. Facebook has also disabled the accounts of users who were moderating the Facebook page.

    • Censor board ‘cuts’ that made headlines

      Reportedly, two mild cusswords have been deleted from ‘Rustom’ which has been conferred with a UA certificate.

    • Belarus: Government uses accreditation to silence independent press

      Despite repeated calls by international organisations for reform, Belarus’ regime for press accreditation continues to help the government maintain its monopoly on information in one of the world’s most restrictive environments for media freedom.

      The government of president Aleksandr Lukashenko uses the Law on Mass Media to control who reports and on what in an arbitrary procedure that is open to manipulation. While Article 35 sets out journalists’ rights to accreditation, Article 1 of the law defines the process as: “The confirmation of the right of a mass medium’s journalists to cover events organised by state bodies, political parties, other public associations, other legal persons as well as other events taking place in the territory of the Republic of Belarus and outside it.”

      By outlining credentialing as a system providing privileges for journalists, Belarus’ accreditation structure is contrary to international standards. The law allows public authorities to choose who covers them by approving or refusing accreditation. It also denies accreditation to journalists who do not work for recognised media outlets. Even journalists who report for foreign outlets must be full-time employees to be able to be accredited by the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

      In practice, the law blocks freelance journalists or independent media outlets from covering the activities of the government and makes accreditation a requisite for a career in journalism. Only journalists who work for state-run outlets are accredited to report on state ministries, parliament or local governments.

    • NFL Cuts Out Shout-Out To St. Louis In HoF Speech YouTube Upload, Streisand Effect Takes Over

      The NFL is almost a perfect study in how the combination of an attempt at strict control of its content and a complete lack of understanding of the Streisand Effect will produce the opposite of the intended result. Past versions of this have included the NFL’s insane claim of copyright on the only footage that exists of the original Super Bowl, meaning nobody actually gets to see the footage, as well as the league’s attempt to bury an ESPN documentary about head trauma as it relates to football. In both cases, the NFL comes out looking petty at best, and much worse in the case of trying to hide the negative health effects of the game from the parents of children who might otherwise play it.

      But even that kind of evil and petty takes a back seat to the NFL deciding to cut out a portion of Orlando Pace’s Hall of Fame induction speech in which he gives a shout-out to the city of St. Louis, former host of the Rams.

    • Apple Patents Remote ‘Kill Switch’ for iPhone Cameras

      What to do about all those darn videos showing cops murdering people?

      They make it much harder for law enforcement to lie about their own actions, and just get everyone all fired up. Why not ask Apple (for starters) to build in a “feature” on a future generation of iPhones that will allow cameras to be disabled remotely?

      A patent granted to Apple this month details technology that remotely disables iPhone cameras using infrared sensors. Someone you do not know and cannot see will be able, without your permission, to disable the camera on a phone you own and are legally using, perhaps to take video of your son’s Little League game, perhaps to take video of a police officer choking to death an innocent man.

    • Russia Plans Social Media Piracy Crackdown

      Authorities in Russia are planning new legislation that could see a crackdown on users uploading pirated content to social networks. Also under consideration are measures to ban advertising from infringing sites and block subscription-based platforms from processing user payments.

    • Lubdhak Chatterjee: Censorship is supremely regressive which can only take the society backwards

      Hailing from Delhi, engineering student Lubdhak Chatterjee had never dreamt that his first short film ‘In A Free State’ will be screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and will be received so well. In an exclusive interview with the TimesofIndia.com, the aspiring bundle of talent spoke about how he made the cut, censorship issues and much more.

    • Sarah Snook speaks out against censor

      ACTOR Sarah Snook has spoken about her involvement in a controversial documentary that was heavily censored after a politician took court action against the film.

    • Anurag Kashyap Excited to Deliver Master Class on Censorship at Melbourne Film Fest
    • Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s ‘Raman Raghav 2.0′ to be screened at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne
    • Localist Edward Leung gets 24-hour Facebook ban after posting video of men following him
    • Hong Kong Leading Writer’s Dismissal Draws Comments About Censorship
    • Nathan Law: Officials adopting double standards on poll leaflets
    • Why more Hong Kong people are supporting Taiwan independence
    • Why Olympics will no longer serve to promote patriotism in HK
    • Legco elections: Another de facto referendum
    • Spotlight on Hong Kong Independence
    • Hong Kong’s independence movement is also a rebellion against the “old seafood” generation

      Ho concluded that Lu Ting was the perfect symbol for the cultural identity of Hong Kong because of its ability to navigate two different worlds: Hong Kong, as a British colony, was somewhere in between China and Britain. So culturally speaking, the city did not belong to either of them.

      When Hong Kong was ceded to the British after the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, China was an economically backward place, closed off from the rest of the world. Hong Kong successfully harnessed the role of an in-betweener, thriving on the great discrepancies between China and the rest of the world.

      As China plunged into a long period of chaos and darkness, Hong Kong acted as a safe haven for those fleeing the Chinese civil war, and later Mao’s Cultural Revolution—just like the story of Lu Tings. Those who arrived before 1949 brought their capital, talent, and even treasures such as antiques to the city, providing the resources that helped Hong Kong’s entertainment and manufacturing industries take off.

    • Twitter user’s account shut down after posting Olympic videos
    • Twitter user’s account taken out after posting Olympic videos
    • Here Is The End Result Of The USOC And NBC’s Over-Protectionist Olympic Nonsense

      When it comes to intellectual property bullying, the unholy alliance between the USOC and NBC seems to be trying to see exactly how far it can push things. Between NBC’s “most live ever” broadcast of the games that still has unnecessary delays in both its television and streaming product and the USOC’s strange belief that companies that sponsor athletes year-round somehow can’t tweet out factual results or news images of those athletes as it relates the games due to trademark law, it’s enough to make you laugh.

      But it’s not only the antics of the USOC and NBC that is chuckle-worthy. Local sports coverage of the Olympics is too, thanks to the laughable restrictions NBC has put in place. Here’s my hometown sports anchor, for instance, who came up with a creative way to cover the Olympics by not covering them at all in protest.

    • Photographer explores emoji censorship and the artistic nude
    • Donald Trump gets a harsh lesson on self-censorship

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • You don’t have Freedom of Speech without Privacy

      Freedom of Speech is the idea that you can discuss ideas without fear of harassment. But the judicial protection is actually quite weak; it only protects you from repercussions from your government. In order to allow society to discuss forbidden ideas, ideas that may turn out to be in the right, a much wider Freedom of Speech is needed: one that requires Privacy.

      Freedom of Speech comes in two flavors: the strict, judicial definition, and the other definition that actually matters to the development of society.

      The judicial, lexical definition says Freedom of Speech is a right against your government, and not against your peers. It says that your government may not punish you for any opinion you express. It usually comes with a very large list of exceptions, which makes the first statement kind of false: in Germany, you may not express a long list of hate speech, in Turkey, you may not say that the genocide of Armenians was a genocide (or pretend it happened at all), and so on. This definition of Freedom of Speech is the right usually enshrined in constitutions and bills of rights around the world, like the First Amendment in the United States (which has a very strong Freedom of Speech against the government in an international comparison).

    • How did Facebook get my number? And why is it giving my name out to strangers?

      Facebook thrives on data, prodding users to provide it with their memories, cherished moments and relationships. And for years, it has badgered users into handing out their phone numbers.

      More recently, however, it has taken a different tack – taking mobile numbers from other, less direct, sources and adding them to profiles. Users who don’t willingly give the company their mobile number are now asked to verify one that Facebook “thinks” is yours.

      This has shocked some users who, having not given the app permission to see their contacts, wondered how it had got hold of their numbers.

    • Oh well, looks like Facebook just got all anti-user

      Earlier today Facebook announced that it would start trying to circumvent users with ad-blocking software and show them ads. This is an unfortunate move, because it takes a dark path against user choice. But it’s also no reason to overreact: cat-and-mouse games in tech have been around as long as spammers have tried to circumvent spam filters.

      But you kind of have to wonder about the thinking that went into this decision. I mean, let’s also not forget something their blog post said: “When we asked people about why they used ad blocking software, the primary reason we heard was to stop annoying, disruptive ads.” So if that’s true, Facebook apparently agrees that users have a good reason for using ad-blocking software … but yet those users shouldn’t be given the power to decide what they want to block themselves?

      In any case, it’s hard to imagine Facebook or the brands that are being advertised on its site getting any sort of value for their ad dollar here: publishers (like Facebook) alienate their audience and advertisers (the brands) allow their cherished brand name to be shoved down people’s throats. Yikes.

    • Botnet Bill Could Give FBI Permission To Take Warrantless Peeks At The Contents Of People’s Computers

      What would normally be awarded an expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment becomes subject to the “plain view” warrant exception. If a passerby could see into the house via the broken blinds, there’s nothing to prevent law enforcement from enjoying the same view — and acting on it with a warrantless search.

      Of course, in this analogy, the NIT — sent from an FBI-controlled server to unsuspecting users’ computers — is the equivalent of a law enforcement officer first entering the house to break the blinds and then claiming he saw something through the busted slats.

      The DOJ may be headed into the business of breaking blinds in bulk. Innocuous-sounding legislation that would allow the FBI to shut down botnets contains some serious privacy implications.

    • New Cache of 2003 NSA Internal Communications Published in Snowden Archive

      The second batch of articles leaked from the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Signals Intelligence Directorate internal newsletter, SIDtoday, was published by The Intercept.

    • NSA leaks show worries over intelligence gaps, training tips for media leaks

      Among the latest batch of internal NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden are tips for analysts on what to notice about media leaks, playing catch-up over intelligence, and medical surveillance. TrendsNSA leaks.

    • Iraqi Insurgents Stymied the NSA and Other Highlights from 263 Internal Agency Reports
    • How the U.S. Spies on Medical Nonprofits and Health Defenses Worldwide

      As part of an ongoing effort to “exploit medical intelligence,” the National Security Agency teamed up with the military-focused Defense Intelligence Agency to extract “medical SIGINT” from the intercepted communications of nonprofit groups starting in the early 2000s, a top-secret document shows.

    • 263 Internal NSA Documents Published From Snowden Archive

      Two hundred sixty-three internal National Security Agency documents were made public on Wednesday with the publication of articles from the agency’s Signals Intelligence Directorate newsletter leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

    • 4-Star General, Former Director of CIA and NSA on Donald Trump: ‘He has a sense of autocrat envy’

      Four Star General and the only man to hold both the position of Director of the NSA and Director of the CIA, Michael Hayden joins Roe Conn and Anna Davlantes to talk about why he doesn’t believe Donald Trump is right for America.

    • Ex-CIA/NSA Chief Questions Clinton, Trump Fitness to Work With US Intelligence

      The US intelligence community will face challenges working with the next president, whether it is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) Director Michael Hayden said on Wednesday.

    • Tor can be cracked “like eggshells”, warns US judge

      A US judge has put into the public record, during a hearing in Tacoma, Washington, an interesting pair of comments about Tor.

      Tor, of course, is the so-called onion router network, originally designed by the US Navy as a technique for using the public internet in an anonymous way.

      End-to-end encryption, such as you get when you point your browser at an HTTPS site like Naked Security, is good for confidentiality: eavesdroppers can’t keep track of which pages you’re most interested in, or sneakily sniff out your email address when you publish a comment.

      HTTPS is also important for authenticity, so that when you visit Naked Security, you know that you really are reading our site, rather than content provided by a bunch of imposters.

      But anonymity depends on more than that: you might not want an eavesdropper to know that you visited Naked Security at all.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Murdered by a SWAT Team for Traffic Tickets: Inside the Police Killing of Black Mother Korryn Gaines

      In New York City on Monday, more than 100 people marched to protest the recent police killing of 23-year-old African-American mother Korryn Gaines in Maryland after what Balitmore police say was an armed standoff. Police were at Gaines’s apartment to execute an arrest warrant related to a traffic violation. They initially said they entered Korryn Gaines’s apartment with a key obtained from her landlord. But court documents say police kicked down the door. Once the police entered the apartment, Korryn Gaines was live-streaming the standoff via Facebook before her account was shut down. Police say they killed Gaines after she pointed a shotgun at them. Police also say they shot her 5-year-old son, Kodi Gaines, who suffered an injury to his cheek but survived. We speak to protesters in New York and to Charlene Carruthers, the national director of the Black Youth Project 100.

    • Does poverty cause crime?

      Socio-economic determinism is inadequate as an explanation of criminality.

      I was 12 years old when I got a letter from my father saying that he was due to serve a three month prison sentence for getting caught for drunk driving, having already lost his licence for the same thing the previous month. He had done stints of a year or two before, and although I haven’t seen him since, when I try to imagine him today I think of him in jail. Fraud and violence were characteristic of his behavior—whereas my criminal record consists of the £20 fine I got for running a red light on my bicycle.

      Objectively I’m innocent compared to my father, but subjectively it feels like I’m serving a suspended sentence for crimes myself. Like many other people, I need to know that I’m not like my dad, but it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen him. His photographs are bleached, and I don’t know enough about him to know why we are different. So I tell myself that I didn’t have to endure the degree of hardship that he did growing up in Liverpool 65 years ago. Perhaps the scarcity of his early life made transgression seem necessary, whereas living within the law hasn’t caused me any real disadvantage.

      Holding fast to this sort of socio-economic determinism makes me feel a little more immune from inheriting the sins of my father, since if his crimes were borne of a poverty that I haven’t shared then I won’t be part of his sin either, or so goes my own personal lore. Not wanting to be like him has shaped my politics: I believe that if government supported people in poverty more effectively then there would be less people in his situation, and less crime.

    • Judge Says Stash House Sting Operations Allow Prosecutors To Be Judge, Jury, And Executioner

      The question the government doesn’t want to answer is whether we’re better off pursuing fake criminals or capturing the real ones. Law enforcement does both, but sting operations — both of the terrorist and the drug variety — have been increasing over the years, turning officers and agents into actors and stage directors.

      The FBI has been crafting “terrorists” from a collection of outcasts, retirees, and the developmentally disabled for years. Canada’s law enforcement is just as willing to score on unguarded nets, traipsing happily over the line between “highly questionable” and “actual entrapment” in its own terrorist “investigations.”

      The ATF and DEA have combined forces to drag weapons into drug dealing using elaborate sting operations to entice no small number of people to get prepped to rob a nonexistent stash house of imaginary drugs. This would be bad enough, as it often appears the ATF is willing to bust anyone that engages in speculation about stash house robberies. Adding insult to injury, the federal government recommends sentences based on the fake amount of fake drugs not actually found in the fake stash house suspects talked about robbing.

    • Woman accidentally killed during ‘shoot, don’t shoot’ training exercise at police department

      A woman was shot to death during a “shoot or don’t shoot” training exercise Tuesday at the Punta Gorda Police Academy, according to police.

      Punta Gorda police Chief Tom Lewis said the woman was “mistakenly struck with a live round” during a Citizens Academy scenario designed to simulate the use of lethal force. It’s not clear how the apparent fatal ammunition mix-up occurred.

      The woman, identified as Mary Knowlton, was randomly selected to participate in the exercise as roughly 35 people watched.

    • DOJ Report on Baltimore Police Is ‘Stunning Catalog of Discrimination’

      The relationship between Baltimore residents and their police force is “broken,” according to a new U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report that details a pattern and practice of racial discrimination in the Baltimore Police Department (BPD).

      The DOJ civil rights probe, launched in the wake of Freddie Gray’s 2015 killing, found that Baltimore police routinely violated residents’ constitutional rights by using excessive force, making unlawful stops and arrests, and “using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches, and arrests of African Americans.”

      The document—which will be officially released Wednesday and was leaked to news outlets Tuesday night—pinned the blame on “systemic deficiencies at BPD,” including failure to provide officers with sufficient training and to hold officers accountable for misconduct.

    • Justice Department report: Baltimore police routinely violated civil rights

      Baltimore police routinely violated the constitutional rights of residents by conducting unlawful stops and using excessive force, according to the findings of a long-anticipated Justice Department probe to be released Wednesday.

      The practices overwhelmingly affected the city’s black residents in low-income neighborhoods, according to the 163-page report. In often scathing language, the report identified systemic problems and cited detailed examples.

      The investigators found that “supervisors have issued explicitly discriminatory orders, such as directing a shift to arrest ‘all the black hoodies’ in a neighborhood.”

    • DOJ Finally Going To Force Law Enforcement Agencies To Hand Over Info On People Killed By Police Officers

      At long last, the federal government is getting serious about tracking the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers.

      For most of the last two decades, the DOJ has been collecting this information from local law enforcement agencies, but only on a voluntary basis. As a result, the federal numbers have nearly no relation to the real numbers — which have been compiled by a handful of private actors, including The Guardian, a UK-based journalistic entity.

      Last June, legislators introduced a bill (that promptly went nowhere) which would replace voluntary reporting with mandatory reporting. The FBI expressed its concern about the government’s inability to collect accurate information on citizens killed by police officers, offering on multiple occasions to replace its voluntary system with a better voluntary system.

    • 4 Years Later, Sweden Accepts Ecuador’s Offer to Hear Assange

      Sweden made a formal request to interview Assange in Ecuador’s London Embassy in June, a shift in policy that could mark an end to the stalemate.

      More than four years after Ecuador offered Swedish authorities the opportunity to interview Julian Assange in the nation’s London Embassy, a deal appears to have been struck Wednesday after Ecuador’s attorney general responded positively to a request from the Swedish government to interview the WikiLeaks founder in the building.

    • Marvelous City, Militarized City

      Roughly 85,000 personnel, including Army and National Force troops, have been deployed in Rio de Janeiro to maintain — or at least maintain the illusion of — security for the Olympic Games. Assault rifles and armored vehicles, that have long been part of the daily routine in most marginalized and repressed areas, now also occupy the elite, picturesque slivers of the “Marvelous City” frequented by tourists. For foreign visitors, at times, it can be difficult to determine if Rio is currently the host of a massive celebration or a war zone.

    • Vindication for Baltimore Police Critics — But No Action

      There is the woman being publicly strip-searched after being stopped for a missing headlight. There are the officers coercing sex from prostitutes in exchange for avoiding arrest, planting drugs on people they stopped, cursing “shut the fuck up bitch” because they are “the fucking law.” There is the supervisor telling officers “to arrest ‘all the black hoodies’ in a neighborhood.” There are officers using templates for arrests where they only had to fill in dates and names — the words “black male” were already inked in.

      Running to 163 pages, the Department of Justice report on the ongoing abuse inflicted upon African Americans by the Baltimore police is full of stories like these.

      The investigation was started shortly after Freddie Gray died of a severed spine after officers tossed him into a police van following a possibly illegal stop. Just last month, prosecutors dropped all charges against the remaining officers facing trial for Gray’s death after the first cases ended in acquittals.

    • Canadian police “manufactured” terror plot to ensnare couple

      In a damning judgment, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce ruled Friday that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) broke the law and “manufactured” a terrorism plot as part of a months-long entrapment operation that ended in a Vancouver-area couple being arrested and ultimately sentenced to life in prison.

      John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were arrested July 1, 2013 and accused of planting bombs on the grounds of the British Columbia legislature in Victoria.

      But Justice Bruce found that the couple would never have taken any action had it not been for the active encouragement and coercion of undercover RCMP officers. “This was not a situation in which the police were attempting to disrupt an ongoing criminal enterprise,” declared Bruce in her 210-page judgment. “Rather, the offences committed by the defendants were brought about by the police and would not have occurred without their involvement. By any measure, this was a clear case of police-manufactured crime.”

      Undercover officers posing as Islamist extremists, befriended the isolated couple, who were recent converts to Islam, and encouraged them to act on statements they had made decrying the killing of Muslims in US-led wars and threatening to wage jihad and die as martyrs for Islam. Subsequently, the police suggested and facilitated the legislature bomb plot, removing obstacles that the police themselves acknowledged Nuttall and Korody would not have been able to overcome alone, and going so far as threaten them when they appeared reluctant to proceed.

    • These States Wanted to Keep Communities of Color From Voting, but the Courts Said No, That’s Discriminatory

      We assume every American adult has a basic right: to vote. But state legislators in recent years have created barriers that limit that right. They have restricted the forms of ID voters must provide, eliminated same-day registration, and narrowed time periods for voting — mainly affecting people of color.

      Now the tide is changing for voting rights, as judges in cases in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Texas, and North Dakota have ruled that the states’ restrictions discriminate on the basis of race. In Kansas, courts ruled that voters need not provide citizenship documentation.

    • The Government’s Own Rules Show Why Watchlists Make Bad Policy

      Politicians of all stripes have been embracing watchlists lately.

      Legislators in both parties have proposed using the watchlisting system to regulate gun purchases — an approach that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton support. Others have been even less burdened by legal or constitutional concerns. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), for instance, proposed immediately deporting all immigrants who are on watchlists, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani called for forcing Muslims who are on watchlists to wear electronic location monitoring tags.

    • Killer Instincts: When Police Become Judge, Jury and Executioner

      Any police officer who shoots to kill is playing with fire.

      In that split second of deciding whether to shoot and where to aim, that officer has appointed himself judge, jury and executioner over a fellow citizen. And when an officer fires a killing shot at a fellow citizen not once or twice but three and four and five times, he is no longer a guardian of the people but is acting as a paid assassin. In so doing, he has short-circuited a legal system that was long ago established to protect against such abuses by government agents.

      These are hard words, I know, but hard times call for straight talking.

      We’ve been dancing around the issue of police shootings for too long now, but we’re about to crash headlong into some harsh realities if we don’t do something to ward off disaster.

    • World Social Forum in Montreal: “Another world is once again being constructed without Africa”

      After having carefully prepared their applications over the past year, travelled to sometimes distant Canadian embassies and consulates and paid fees to Canada, to the WSF organization (entry fees, site rental fees for their conferences or workshops, equipment charges, interpretation fees, and various other charges), as well as thousands in flight, hotel and other transport and accommodation costs, at least 234 community organization leaders and representatives were denied visitor visas to attend and give presentations at the international conference, including persons who were invited and had Canadian sponsors.

    • Olympics spat as Lebanese stop Israelis joining them on bus

      The Israeli and Lebanese Olympics teams became involved in a heated argument about access to a bus to the opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Games.

      Both sides acknowledged Saturday that Israeli athletes were blocked from boarding a bus packed with the Lebanon team on Friday but they are at odds over the reasons for the actions of the head of the Lebanese delegation.

    • Olympic Tensions Offer a Window Into Lebanese History

      The beginning of this year’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro was marked by a now widely publicized situation in which Lebanese athletes refused to share the same bus with their Israeli counterparts before the opening ceremony. While there are different accounts of how the incident developed, it appears that the Lebanese delegation prevented the Israeli athletes from entering the bus. Competing explanations suggest that the reason for this was that the bus was specifically designated for the Lebanese team, or that there were many other buses, or that the Israeli team was trying to cause trouble, or that the nine Lebanese athletes did not want to share a bus with the 47 Israelis.

    • ‘Not a Good Day for Democracy’: Senate Approves Impeachment Trial for Brazil’s Rousseff

      Brazil’s Senate on Wednesday voted to hold an impeachment trial for suspended President Dilma Rousseff, an effort that could mark the end of 13 years of rule by her leftist Workers’ Party.

      “Today is not a good day for our democracy,” said Senator Paulo Rocha, an ally of the nation’s first female president. He added that “there is a political alliance that smells of a coup” working against her.

      Rouseff is accused of breaking budget laws, though the federal prosecutor last month found that she did not commit a crime.

      The 59-21 vote marks “the final step before a trial and vote on whether to remove her from office,” the Associated Press reports.

      “A verdict is expected at the end of the month and will need the votes of two-thirds of the Senate to convict Rousseff, five votes less than her opponents mustered on Wednesday,” Reuters reports.

      Rousseff has been suspended since May when the senate voted to start an impeachment trial against her. That meant then-Vice President Michel Temer became interim president. If Rousseff is removed, the unelected, right-of-center Temer would serve until 2018, the rest of Rousseff’s term.

    • Brazil Senate sends suspended president Dilma Rousseff to trial

      Brazil’s Senate on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to put suspended President Dilma Rousseff on trial, bringing the nation’s first female president a step closer to being permanently removed and underscoring her failure to change lawmakers’ minds the last several months.

      After some 15 hours of debate, senators voted 59-21 to put her on trial for breaking fiscal rules in her managing of the federal budget. It was final step before a trial and vote on whether to definitively remove her from office, expected later this month. The political drama is playing out while Rio de Janeiro is hosting the Olympic Games, which run through Aug. 21.

    • Each Other’s Keepers: The Right to Record

      With the ongoing police killings of unarmed African-Americans – and the little-reported, all-too-common police targeting, harassment and arrest of those who record them – dozens of high-profile documentary filmmakers have published an open letter calling on their community to defend those citizen journalists who have “shattered America’s myth of racial equality (and) moved white Americans closer to conscience and consciousness.” Signatories to the letter, organized by “(T)ERROR” director David Felix Sutcliffe and published at The Talkhouse, include Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney and many other prize-winning filmmakers, some of whom have won Courage Under Fire awards for making politically explosive works. All stand behind what Sutcliffe calls their “core belief that images have insurmountable power” to create change, and demand accountability.

    • More Than 115,000 Decry ‘Egregious Miscarriage of Justice’ in Manning Case

      Decrying new charges faced by Chelsea Manning related to her July suicide attempt as “sadistic and outrageous,” supporters delivered more than 115,000 petition signatures to the Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning on Wednesday calling for any additional punishment to be dropped.

      As Common Dreams reported, army officials recently informed the imprisoned whistleblower that she is being investigated for new charges related to her July 5th attempt to take her own life. If convicted of these “administrative offenses”—which include “resisting the force cell move team,” “conduct which threatens,” and “prohibited property”—she could be placed in indefinite solitary confinement for the remainder of her decades-long sentence or lose access to the phone and the law library at the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas military prison.

      This comes on top of existing allegations that Manning, a transgender woman, has been denied healthcare and other rights while serving out her sentence in a male prison.

    • Chelsea Manning Supporters Demand Army End Punishment For Surviving Suicide Attempt

      Supporters of United States military whistleblower Chelsea Manning and one of her defense attorneys demanded the Secretary of Army drop administrative charges brought against her. The charges stem from a suicide attempt while in prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

      Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, RootsAction, and Care2 circulated a petition and obtained over 115,000 signatures, which were delivered to the Secretary of Army this morning. They contend the Army is essentially punishing her for surviving her suicide attempt.

    • Qatar wanted a team for the Rio Olympics, so it headhunted one

      Marko Bagaric, a 204 centimetres, shiny-headed barrel of an athlete, stood alongside his teammates before the start of their Olympic opener. The Croatian-born handball player remained silent during the playing of his country’s national anthem.

      That was probably the toughest part, as Bagaric was wearing the uniform of a different country at the time.

    • Twitter is not legally responsible for the rise of ISIS, rules California district court

      A lawsuit accusing Twitter of providing material support to ISIS has been dismissed by a California District Court. First filed in January, the lawsuit argued ISIS’s persistent presence on Twitter constituted material support for the terror group, and sought to hold Twitter responsible for an ISIS-linked attack on that basis.

      Filed by the family of an American contractor named Lloyd Fields, the lawsuit sought damages from an ISIS-linked attack in Jordan that claimed Fields’ life. The plaintiff’s initial complaint alleged widespread fundraising and recruitment through the platform, attributing 30,000 foreign actors recruited through ISIS Twitter accounts in 2015 alone.

      The judge assigned to the case was ultimately not swayed by that reasoning, finding that the plaintiffs had not offered a convincing argument for holding Twitter liable. The plaintiff will have the chance to submit a modified version of the complaint within 20 days of the order, the second such modification ordered by the judge.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Internet access is now a human right: part 3 – Chips with Everything tech podcast

      On 1 July the United Nations resolved that access to the internet is to be considered a basic human right. While this decision may seem straightforward, with the complex nature of human rights law considered, the resolution is far from simple.

      In the face of the UN’s resolution, in part three of our series, we flip the coin and look at the the threats to net neutrality and unrestricted internet access. For this deep dive, we consult with the CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation, Anne Jellema and director of strategy for Free Press, Tim Karr.

    • Appeals Court Strikes Down FCC Attempt To Eliminate Protectionist State Broadband Laws

      For years we’ve discussed how incumbent broadband providers protect their duopoly by writing and lobbying for awful protectionist state laws. These laws, passed in nineteen different states, either significantly hamstring or outright ban towns and cities looking to build their own networks, or strike public/private partnerships with companies like Google Fiber. In most instances, these towns and cities only jumped into the broadband business after being under-served for a decade — if they were able to get broadband in the first place.

      While it was overshadowed by the net neutrality vote at the time, back in February the FCC voted 3-2 to try and take aim at the most restrictive parts of these laws. The FCC argued that it could use its authority under Section 706 of the Communications act — which requires the FCC to ensure “reasonable and timely” deployment of broadband access — to pre-empt these restrictions working in contrast to that goal. But North Carolina and Tennessee quickly sued, arguing that preventing them from letting AT&T and Comcast write awful state laws violated their state rights.

    • U.S. court blocks FCC bid to expand public broadband

      A federal appeals court said on Wednesday the U.S. Federal Communications Commission could not block two states from setting limits on municipal broadband expansion, a decision seen as a win for private-sector providers of broadband internet and a setback for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

      Cities in Tennessee and North Carolina had sought to expand municipal broadband networks beyond current boundaries, but faced laws forbidding or placing onerous restrictions on the expansions.

    • Win for Telecom Giants as Court Puts Dagger in Municipal Broadband
    • States win the right to limit municipal broadband, beating FCC in court

      The FCC in February 2015 voted to block laws in North Carolina and Tennessee that prevent municipal broadband providers from expanding outside their territories. The FCC, led by Chairman Tom Wheeler, claimed it could preempt the laws because Congress authorizes the commission to promote telecom competition by removing barriers to investment.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Norwegian Supreme Court: no “retransmission” without “transmission”

      This judgment has the apparent potential to undermine the position of collecting societies and umbrella groups such as Norwaco. If transmissions of the same intellectual content sent to distributors via fibre optic encryption and then broadcast publicly on usual cable connections are not characterised as retransmissions, revenue could be channelled away from collecting societies, with a shift towards the rightholders negotiating content distribution for themselves.

      There are additional possible considerations of compliance with international obligations including Berne and TRIPS which may arise in a future dispute which speaks to the fundamental aspects of the author’s exclusive rights, but were not examined in detail in this case. What do Kat readers think – will transmission/retransmission disputes rear up in the era of simultaneous internet television transmission?

    • Copyrights

      • As Expected Judge Upholds His Own Problematic Ruling Concerning Cox’s Repeat Infringer Policy & The DMCA

        For nearly two years now, we’ve been following an important DMCA-related case between music publisher BMG and the ISP Cox Communications. While the issues are a bit down in the weeds, what it really comes down to is a question of whether or not internet access providers are required to have a “repeat infringer” policy that removes customers who are seen to have been engaged in too much copyright infringement. Most people had assumed that the DMCA’s requirements for a repeat infringer policy only applied to hosting providers — i.e., those who help people host content — as opposed to transit providers, who are merely providing the connectivity. In this case, though, that important nuance seemed to have gotten lost in the shuffle, mainly because of some stupid behavior on the part of Cox. Amazingly, Cox is basically the only major ISP out there that has a history of actually kicking people off its service for infringement. Most others have historically refused to do so. But Cox’s policy is ridiculously complex, and involves something around 13 steps… and, on top of that, Cox admitted that once it’s kicked people off they can just sign up for new service. Seeing all that, the court basically decided that Cox was acting in bad faith, and thus jumped right over the question of whether or not the repeat infringer policy even applied to Cox.

      • Publishers Association Sends Whiny Complaint Letter To Dean After Academic Librarian Discusses Sci-Hub

        It’s no secret that big publishing companies (especially academic publishing companies) really really dislike Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub, of course, is the quite interesting site that enables academics to access and share PDFs of published scientific research. We’ve written about it a bunch, including Elsevier’s ridiculous legal crusade against the site, which has only served to act as a huge advertisement for the site. As we noted, using copyright to shut down Sci-Hub seemed to go entirely against the purpose of copyright, which was officially designed to promote “learning” and scientific knowledge.

        Nonetheless, the publishers really, really hate it. But even so, it seems pretty ridiculous for the Association of American Publishers (AAP) to freak out so much about an academic librarian just mentioning Sci-Hub while on a panel discussion, that it would send an angry letter to that librarian’s dean. But, that’s exactly what AAP did, in complaining about comments by librarian Gabriel Gardner to his dean, Roman Kochan, at the University Library for California State University.

      • Hulu Ditches ‘Free’ Model Without Giving It A Chance To Succeed

        For years we’ve noted how as a product of the cable and broadcast industry, Hulu has often gone out of its way to avoid being truly disruptive. Owners 21st Century Fox, Disney and Comcast/NBC have worked hard to ensure the service is never too interesting — lest it cannibalize the company’s legacy cable TV cash cow. So Hulu has been doomed to walk the halls of almost but not quite compelling purgatory, a rotating crop of execs for years trying to skirt the line between giving consumers what they actually want — and being a glorified ad for traditional cable television.

08.10.16

Links 10/8/2016: digiKam 5.1.0 Released, GigaSpaces Liberates Code

Posted in News Roundup at 5:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux subsystem could cause Windows 10 Anniversary Update to eat itself [Ed: CrowdStrike is somewhat of a Microsoft proxy; now badmouths Linux, as usual. Lots of negative press for GNU/Linux at Black Hat because of them. CrowdStrike is the same bunch of propagandists who baselessly spread anti-Russia rhetoric for DNC after the embarrassing leaks. It’s only them which the media cited as “experts” and there was no evidence to support that. More people need to realise that there is agenda to sell and firms like CrowdStrike sell agenda.]

    Security company CrowdStrike said that this has increased the chessboard of possible attacks to a ruddy great Go board.

  • Linux Trojan Mines for Cryptocurrency Using Misconfigured Redis Database Servers [Ed: Misconfigured Redis database servers are now being used to blame GNU/Linux. Blaming GNU/Linux for an improperly set up third-party component is like blaming Windows for Apache flaws or worse: misconfiguration due to human error.]

    Security researchers have discovered a new self-propagating trojan targeting Linux systems, which uses unsecured Redis database servers to spread from system to system.

    Discovered by Russia-based antivirus maker Dr.Web, the trojan, named Linux.Lady, is one of the few weaponized Go-based malware families.

    Researchers say that Linux.Lady is written using Google’s Go programming language and mostly relies on open source Go libraries hosted on GitHub.

  • Why a Linux Kernel Update Is Good News for Microsoft Users [Ed: A lot of the corporate press span the release of Linux 4.8 RC1 as a Microsoft 'thing'. Microsoft boosters in particular did it by selective coverage, maybe so as to generate eye-catching headlines.]

    An update that will be made to the Linux kernel will bring a long series of improvements that will include support for Microsoft Surface 3’s touchscreen, thus making it possible to benefit from the full power of Linux on a Microsoft device.

  • Linux Kernel 4.8 Is Adding Microsoft Surface 3 Support [Ed: No, Linux does not love Microsoft (see picture); that's just another big lie. Support for a device is another matter. To replace Windows.]

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • 4 Linux Torrent Clients That You Should Try Out

      Having recently made the switch from Ubuntu to Arch Linux, I’m in the process of building my Arch system up to the full desired functionality. One important tool in any Linux user’s system is a torrent client, which is becoming a more preferred method for downloading, as the decentralised download sources spread resource use among the users, rather than having all of the burdens lay on a server somewhere. For example, when downloading new Linux .iso files to test out, I tend to prefer to download them via torrent rather than directly from my web browser.

    • Audacious 3.8 to Finally Add Support for Running Multiple Instances, Beta Is Out

      The popular Audacious music player is again in development, and it looks like the next major release will be version 3.8, for which a Beta milestone has been made available for public testing.

    • ownCloud Desktop Client 2.2.3 Adds HiDPI Improvements, Linux Minimal Mode

      A new update of the popular ownCloud Desktop Client has been released bringing numerous improvements and fixes for some of the most annoying bugs reported by users since the previous release.

      ownCloud Desktop Client 2.2.3 is now the latest and most advanced version of the graphical application for ownCloud users who want to quickly access their files from an ownCloud server. The application was made available for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

    • FFmpeg 3.1.2 “Laplace” Open-Source Multimedia Framework Updates Components

      Today, August 9, 2016, the FFmpeg development team proudly announced the general availability of the second maintenance update for the FFmpeg 3.1 “Laplace” series of the widely-used open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework.

      Released a few weeks back, FFmpeg 3.1 “Laplace” was a massive release introducing numerous new features and improvements to the popular multimedia backend used by dozens of open-source and commercial software products. FFmpeg 3.1.2 is now the latest stable and most advanced version.

      Already available in the software repositories of the most used GNU/Linux distributions, including the powerful Arch Linux, the second maintenance update to the FFmpeg 3.1 “Laplace” series is here to update several of its core libraries, as well as to fix the most annoying bugs reported by users since the FFmpeg 3.1.1 release.

    • Claws Mail 3.14 Email Client Lets You Secure Passwords with a Master Passphrase

      A new major release of the user-friendly, lightweight, open-source, cross-platform and fast Claws Mail GTK+ email client has been announced for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems with new features and countless bug fixes.

      Claws Mail 3.14.0 is now available as the latest and most advanced version, bringing support for securing passwords for your email accounts by using a Master Passphrase. Additionally, the password storage method has been changed and it looks like all passwords are now stored in a separate file under ~/.claws-mail/passwordstorerc, and a stronger encryption method will be used to secure them.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Godot Engine 2.1 Released, Focuses On Usability Improvements

        Version 2.1 of the Godot Engine, a cross-platform 2D/3D game engine that was opened up back in 2014, is now available.

        Godot 2.1 development was focused around usability improvements in large part. The project’s release announcement explained, “This release marks the conclusion of a series focusing on usability improvements. We have listened to and worked with our awesome community to make Godot one of the easiest game development environments to use. Our goal is and will always be to aim for the top in the ease of use vs power ratio.”

      • Godot reaches 2.1 stable!

        After almost six months of hard work, we are proudly presenting you the marvellous Godot Engine 2.1. Just like 2.0, this version focuses almost exclusively on further improving usability and the editor interface.

        This release marks the conclusion of a series focusing on usability improvements. We have listened to and worked with our awesome community to make Godot one of the easiest game development environments to use. Our goal is and will always be to aim for the top in the ease of use vs power ratio.

      • Vendetta Online 1.8.384 Adds New Voice Chat Commands, VR Improvements

        Guild Software announced a new maintenance update for their popular Vendetta Online MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) title, version 1.8.384, for all supported platforms.

        According to the release notes, Vendetta Online 1.8.384 is a small update that only introduces a /voicegroup set of commands designed to allow players to create random Voice Chat channels supporting up to 32 users. The /voicegroup command set is similar to the /group command set, and to learn how to use it simply type /voicegroup.

      • Arma 3 Linux beta has been updated

        This is version 1.58, so it’s not currently as up to date as the Windows version. This means you won’t be able to play online with your Windows pals just yet unless they are using the same version.

        It looks like this version now has BattlEye anti-cheat enabled for Linux gamers, so at least we can play on servers using it now.

      • How to fix bodies not showing in Shadow of Mordor with Nvidia drivers temp fix
      • Super Crate Box, GUN GODZ & Serious Sam: The Random Encounter to come to Linux

        Vlambeer have written up a blog post detailing what they have been up to recently and the news is good for us. Super Crate Box (freeware), GUN GODZ (freeware) & Serious Sam: The Random Encounter (Steam) will all get updates which include Linux support.

      • The Great Whale Road developers are looking for a small amount of Linux testers

        The Great Whale Road developers posted on their forum that they are looking for a small group of testers to help with dependencies and troubleshooting.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • digiKam 5.1.0 is published…

        After a first release 5.0.0 published one month ago, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.1.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces a new huge bugs triage and some fixes following first feedback from end-users.

      • KDE DigiKam 5.1 Released With Bug Fixes, New RAW Camera Support

        The first update following the major digiKam 5.0 release is now available.

      • digiKam 5.1.0 RAW Image Editor Brings Support for Samsung Galaxy S7, New Cameras

        The development team behind digiKam, a popular open-source and cross-platform RAW image editor, viewer and organizer for KDE and Qt-based desktop environments and operating systems, announced today, August 9, 2016, the release of digiKam 5.1.0.

        digiKam 5.1.0 is the first maintenance update since the release of the major digiKam 5.0.0 milestone that brought numerous new features and dozens of improvements to the open-source image editor software used by many GNU/Linux users around the world on their KDE desktop environments.

      • Arc Theme for KDE Plasma? Yup, It Exists

        We’re big fans of Arc GTK theme here on OMG! Ubuntu! — but I’m going to guess you already know that. Over the past few months we’ve shown you how to install the Arc theme on Ubuntu (and how it’ll be available on Ubuntu 16.10); how to make use of a stylish Arc VLC skin…

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Internal compression

        My project continues with support for internal compression in Nautilus. The operation comes with integrated progress feedback and support for undoing and redoing. Also, the new archive will be automatically selected once the operation is complete. The feature is available from the context menu, where the menu item from file-roller’s extension would normally be:

      • GNOME Music is fast again

        Yo GNOMErs! It’s been a while, huh?

        Yesterday I was with a very strong headache, and I couldn’t sleep. So I decided to listen to some classical music and see if I could relax a little bit. What a great chance to try GNOME Music again!

        Well, it wasn’t such a please. My music collection is large, literally over 9000, and Music took a f*cking minute to be ready. No. No no no no.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • New Version of GParted

        Life on Linux has been much less stressful. The modern filesystems have made endless defragging a thing of the past for me, and partitioning is much simpler too. There are many options when it comes to disk maintenance, but GParted is one of my favorites. I use it on all my machines.

        GParted is a nice tool for managing disk partitions in Linux. It’s very powerful, but the interface is simplicity itself. The live version is OS-independent. You can use it on most computers that can boot from a USB drive or CD—just plug the USB or CD in to the machine and reboot. Instead of loading the operating system, you get GParted, all by itself.

      • Vine Linux 6.5 Enters Beta, Adopts Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS, Glibc 2.23 & GCC 4.9.3

        After one and a half years of hard work, the Vine Linux developers are happy to announce that the next major release of the GNU/Linux operating system is now in development.

      • BakAndImgCD 19.0 Data Backup and Disk Imaging Live CD Officially Released

        4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today, August 9, 2016, about the immediate availability of download of the BakAndImgCD 19.0 data backup and disk imaging Live CD.

        Based on 4MLinux Backup Scripts 19.0, and implicitly on the 4MLinux 19.0 operating system, BakAndImgCD 19.0 is here in its final and production-ready state to help you backup your data from any possible Linux, Microsoft Windows, or Mac OS X file system, including Btrfs, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, HFS, and HFS+.

    • Slackware Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Manage Your Red Hat Systems With the New Satellite 6.2

        Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Satellite 6.2, a systems lifecycle management tool across physical, virtual, and private and public cloud environments. Red Hat Satellite 6.2 now enables users to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host as a compute resource, as well as directly deploy containers to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host. The latest release of Red Hat Satellite also introduces remote execution and extends capabilities for container management and security.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Report Flock 2016 – Kraków, Poland
        • Fedora Presentation Backgrounds

          I have been asked to do a presentation in September for a local Linux user group. I always make my own slid backgrounds and typically make a new one for each presentation. I made this set based on the Fedora Marketing advice on the Logo Usage Guidelines wiki page.

          I like how these came out and thought I would share them with the community. All of the images here is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

        • F24-20160808 updated lives

          Using the updated isos will save about 500M of updates after install YMMV (Gold MATE install updates as of 20160808 is 577M)

          I would like to thank the community and the seeders for their dedication to this project.

        • How to deal with your Fedora distro and Windows 10 using usb stick.
        • Fedora Linux Account System Patched for Serious Flaw

          Fedora Linux and Red Hat are investigating the potential impact of a major vulnerability that was first disclosed Aug. 8. The Fedora Account System (FAS), which provides user information management for Fedora, had a vulnerability identified as CVE-2016-1000038, which could have enabled an unauthorized user to make changes to the system. Fedora is Red Hat’s community Linux effort.

          “This flaw would allow a specifically formatted HTTP request to be authenticated as any requested user,” Paul Frields, engineering manager at Red Hat, wrote in a mailing list message. “If the authenticated user had appropriate privileges, the attacker would then be able to add, edit, or remove user or group information.”

        • FlocktoFedora learnings for Diversity

          I cannot express the happiness of having a team of so wonderful people, who despite the timing (12h difference) managed to help me being informed about everything that happened surrounding the Diversity efforts we are building towards Fedora at Flock. Endless IRC and Telegram chats have made it possible. So here are my list of thoughts, tasks and inputs about what we accomplished at Flock Krakow:

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Univention Corporate Server 4.1-3 Released with Active Directory Enhancements

          Univention is pleased to announce the release of Univention Corporate Server 4.1-3 server-oriented Linux operating system based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux technologies.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical makes subscribing to Ubuntu Advantage professional Linux support easier

            Many people think the big selling point of Linux is that it doesn’t cost money. Yeah, operating systems based on the open source kernel are largely free up front, but that isn’t the whole story. True, home users can probably get by without paid support, but businesses can’t always rely on Google searches and forum posts for help.

            Enter Ubuntu Advantage. If you are a small, medium, or large business that is transitioning to the Ubuntu operating system, going it alone is not always wise. UA is a paid subscription offering from Canonical, which provides professional-level support. Today, the company makes it even easier for users to subscribe.

          • Canonical Makes Its Ubuntu Linux Professional Support More Accessible to Anyone

            Today, August 9, 2016, Canonical, through Ellen Arnold, announced that the professional support subscription, namely Ubuntu Advantage (UA), is now even more accessible and easier to purchase.

          • UbuntuBSD 16.04 “A New Hope” Beta 1 Now Available Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

            UbuntuBSD developer Jon Boden was extremely proud to announce today, August 9, 2016, the release and immediate availability of the first Beta development milestone towards the upcoming UbuntuBSD 16.04 operating system.

          • Canonical Makes It Easy to Port Native iOS and Android Apps to Ubuntu Mobile OS

            Today, August 9, 2016, Canonical, through Richard Collins, was proud to announce the availability of the React Native web development framework for its popular Ubuntu Linux operating system.

            It appears that Canonical love web developers, and they always keep them in the loop with all the tools needed for the perfect job. After introducing support for the Cordova framework, which is very well supported on Ubuntu Linux and has received a lot of attention from web developers, today Canonical promise to offer full support for another great framework, namely React Native.

          • UbuntuBSD 16.04 Beta Pairs Ubuntu Xenial With FreeBSD 10.3

            The first 16.04 beta is now publicly available of UbuntuBSD, the unofficial Ubuntu derivative that pairs the Ubuntu user-space with the FreeBSD kernel.

          • 5 Simple Ways To Free Up Space on Ubuntu

            When you need to free up space on Ubuntu here are 5 simple things you can do – from cleaning the apt cache to removing old kernels.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 18: Fresher Than Ever

              There is no urgency in updating to Linux Mint 18 — the changes it brings are subtle. However, the collection of tweaks and additions and UI improvements will give you a more pleasant computing experience.

              Linux Mint 18 is a solid improvement. This distro continues to get better with age. You have nothing to lose with installing the upgrade sooner rather than later.

              You have everything to gain by taking Linux mint 18 for a spin if you are not already a committed user. A few other distros offer the Cinnamon desktop, but Linux Mint has much more in its favor than Cinnamon.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Build a $20 Computer with PINE64

      I love my Raspberry Pi, which I use for many different projects. But when I saw Kickstarter campaign for 64-bit PINE64 I could not resist, so I pre-ordered one for myself.

      I wanted to play with the board and see whether I could do some home automation kind of stuff or make my Traxxas X-maxx smart. There are three editions of PINE64: 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB RAM, and I ordered the 512MB version.

      The PINE64 is almost twice as big as the Raspberry Pi 2 (Figure 1), so it’s not as compact as I expected. Still, it’s a good size for a whole range of projects.

    • This Open Source Modular PC Might Solve The E-Waste Problem

      What do you think about this open source modular PC? A yay or a nay? Would you support this campaign?

    • Change Cometh

      I did finally kill off the last theme-related problem. I installed gtk-theme-config. It’s sad to think such a tool is needed to fix black on black as a default configuration… but it worked very well instantly. I picked light coloured backgrounds for default, panel and menu and dark foregrounds, mostly black. Done.

    • Embedded oriented Mini-ITX board packs serious Skylake-S heat

      With its 14nm-fabricated 6th Generation Core based INS8349A Mini-ITX board, Perfectron has leapfrogged several generations of Intel Core chips since its previous 3rd Gen “Ivy Bridge” INS8346B. The upgrade over Ivy Bridge gives you a 35 percent faster CPU and up to 49 percent faster GPU, says the company.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Business of Open Source Software

    Although open source software (OSS) has been around for decades, only within the past several years has there been a surge in its acceptance within the business world. Today, open source is perceived as a viable business alternative to commercial solutions, and is used by 64 percent of companies. Several factors have led to this shift in perception of OSS, including an evolving culture of software developers, undeniable business advantages, and, perhaps most importantly, the success of Linux—the leading open source operating system. The background of how and why the open source model has matured is also a key to understanding why organizations of all sizes continue to not only adopt OSS but to also actively support and contribute to open source projects.

  • GigaSpaces Launches Open Source In-Memory Data Grid Project

    One of the more profound developments with enterprise IT as of late has been the rise of in-memory data grids. As a technology, in-memory data grids have been around for a while. But as the cost of memory has gone down, the feasibility of deploying in-memory data grids has correspondingly increased. To help spur that adoption further, GigaSpaces announced today it has made its core XAP 12 data grid offering available as an open source project.

    Data grids that run in memory are becoming more relevant because they enable distributed applications to access data residing in-memory in real time. As the usage of data grids running in memory increases, the actual place where the data ultimately winds up residing becomes less relevant. For example, organizations that employ a data grid running in memory are not necessarily going to need a database that also resides in memory. Many of those organizations will just rely on some form of Flash storage or even traditional magnetic drives to provide applications with access persistent data directly via a data grid.

    Ali Hodroj, vice president of product and strategy for GigaSpaces, says this interest in data grids is already quite high in vertical industries where there are a significant number of distributed applications that now have access to almost 3TB of memory on a server platform.

  • GigaSpaces Empowers Developers with Open Source In-Memory Computing Platform
  • GigaSpaces opens up its in-memory data grid
  • Defining the ‘open’ in open source

    Frankly I have no issue with using open source as a way of getting more software users, letting them experiment with it before buying. I don’t even have much trouble sifting through the marketing BS behind a vendor’s altruistic motives. It’s all fine. We’re a sophisticated enough bunch to get it after all.

  • Google Launches a Slew of Open Source Parsers, to Work with 40 Languages

    Artificial intelligence and machine learning are going through a mini-renaissance right now, and some of the biggest tech companies are helping to drive the trend. Recently, I covered Google’s decistion to open source a program called TensorFlow. It’s based on the same internal toolset that Google has spent years developing to support its AI software and other predictive and analytics programs.

  • Events

    • Upskill U on Open Source With OpenDaylight

      On Friday, Jim Fagan, director of cloud practice at Telstra, will continue the series by addressing the impact of open source on NFV platforms in the course “The Role of Open Source in NFV.” Next week, speakers from Heavy Reading and LinkedIn will round out the Open Source series with a look into how open source can be used in data centers and cloud services, and how open source is impacting the white box transformation.

  • Education

    • Moodle App Could Be a Game Changer for Community Organizations

      Moodle is a very popular free and open source learning management system, like Blackboard, used extensively around the world. Back in 2004, a very smart friend of mine, Gina Russell Stevens, explained to me that Moodle is so useful it could be used for many purposes beyond education. Her comment stuck with me. When I noticed that Moodle now has a free mobile app available for Android and iOS, it occurred to me that this app could be customized for many civic communication purposes.

    • Pythian, Willis College team up to launch new diploma program

      An Ottawa-based tech company has formed a new partnership with a local career college in an effort to train more open source database specialists.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • MapR Closes $50 Million in Funding, Looks Ahead to an IPO

      MapR Technologies, one of the fastest moving players in the Big Data arena, is marking new milestones and may be headed for an IPO very soon. The company announced an equity financing of $50 million. The additional funding accompanies yet another consecutive record quarter, according to the company, which reported more than a 100 percent increase in bookings over the prior year. MapR is particularly well-known for its focus on Hadoop.

      Here are more details on where this company is headed.

      MapR’s $50 million equity financing was led by Future Fund, with participation from all existing investors, including: Google Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associates, Qualcomm Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures. With this financing, MapR has raised a total of $194 million in equity to date. And, the company is being direct about its intent to go public.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • diffutils-3.4 released
    • Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: August 12th
    • Licensing resource series: h-node hardware directory

      This is the second installment in the Free Software Foundation’s Licensing & Compliance Lab’s series highlighting licensing resources.

      While our Respects Your Freedom hardware certification program gets lots of attention from all the new fully free hardware being certified, the FSF has actually had more resources on hardware for quite some time. In the past, we maintained a list of hardware that worked well with free software. But a few years back we made this into a community run project, h-node.

      Hardware listed on h-node doesn’t come with FSF certification, but it does come with the information users need to find out the extent to which the hardware is supported by fully free GNU/Linux distros. Members of the community can submit entries to h-node whenever they get a chance to test it against one of these free operating systems. By sharing this information, everyone can help more users to make the switch to a fully free system by making it easier to know what hardware already works perfectly with a free system. Hackers looking to help increase support can also find hardware with some remaining issues and direct their efforts there.

    • GNU dico Version 2.3

      Version 2.3 is available for download from the Main GNU site as well as from its home. Mirrors worldwide are also available.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Christoph Hellwig’s case against VMware dismissed

      The GPL-infringement case brought against VMware by Christoph Hellwig in Germany has been dismissed by the court; the ruling is available in German and English. The decision seems to be based entirely on uncertainty over where his copyrights actually lie and not on the infringement claims.

    • Hellwig To Appeal VMware Ruling After Evidentiary Set Back in Lower Court [Phipps (OSI): “VMWare gets away with it on a technicality without even having to defend their alleged abuse”]

      Christoph Hellwig announces today that he will appeal the ruling of the Hamburg District Court, which dismissed his case against VMware. The ruling concerned German evidence law; the Court did not rule on the merits of the case, i.e. the question whether or not VMware has to license the kernel of its product vSphere ESXi 5.5.0 under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • POSM, OSM without the Internet

        The Portable OpenStreetMap, or POSM, device is a small server that hosts all the tools needed to compile, edit, and publish collected mapping data without Internet connectivity. The project was discussed at the US State of the Map (2016) and the video is a must-watch.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Stand Up for Open Access. Stand Up for Diego.

        Diego Gomez is a recent biology graduate from the University of Quindío, a small university in Colombia. His research interests are reptiles and amphibians. Since the university where he studied didn’t have a large budget for access to academic databases, he did what any other science grad student would do: he found the resources he needed online. Sometimes he shared the research he discovered, so that others could benefit as well.

        In 2011, Diego shared another student’s Master’s thesis with colleagues over the Internet. That simple act—something that many people all over the world do every day—put Diego at risk of spending years in prison. In Colombia, copying and distribution of copyrighted works without permission can lead to criminal charges of up to eight years if the prosecution can show it hurt the commercial rights of the author (derechos patrimoniales).

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • What happens when the carnival moves on: Incredible photos show the decaying former Olympic sites across the world – from Germany in 1936 to Beijing in 2008

  • Science

    • Beyond Pokémon Go: augmented reality is set to transform gaming

      Daniel Bartlett thinks nothing of driving halfway across the UK to visit places that aren’t really there. Most of the time he’s out to scupper enemy plans. A couple of months ago, he made a 500-kilometre round-trip from London to defend an alien portal at the lifeboat station on Cromer Pier, on the east coast of England.

      In between scoffing a portion of chips and an ice cream, he coordinated with around 50 people at other key coastal positions from Scotland across to the Netherlands. Over the course of an afternoon, they took control of the North Sea, turning it from blue to green.

      Barlett has been playing Ingress for two and a half years. Released in 2012 by San Francisco studio Niantic, the game layers a sci-fi world navigated by smartphone over the actual one. Players join one of two factions – green or blue – and compete in a global tussle for territory by taking control of virtual portals hidden in plain sight. Cromer’s lifeboat station is one of thousands.

      The North Sea operation was a small stage in a six-week event called Aegis Nova, which involved nearly 10,000 players in dozens of countries. The finale, an epic showdown between factions in Tokyo on 21 July, was the biggest augmented reality event ever.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • No, A New Study Does Not Say Uber Has No Effect On Drunk Driving

      The first rule of science journalism is to read the study before you write about it. Alas, that hasn’t stopped media outlets from routinely misreporting, exaggerating or exercising insufficient skepticism about scientific research, particularly in the service of clickbait headlines and extra views.

      A recent study from the American Journal of Epidemiology on whether the introduction of ridesharing has had an effect on alcohol-related crash fatalities was the latest victim of this kind of sloppy reporting. The Washington Post announced: “Is Uber reducing drunk driving? New study says no.” CNN declared: “Uber doesn’t decrease drunk driving, study says.” Fortune writes: “A New Study Says Uber Has Had No Impact on Drunk Driving.” Other outlets published similar stories.

      But alcohol-related fatalities are not the same thing as drunk driving rates. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nearly 10,000 Americans die each year in crashes involving a drunken driver; about two-thirds of that total are the drunken drivers themselves. But according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, there are annually about 1.1 million arrests for driving under the influence, which itself is just a fraction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s estimate of 121 million incidents each year in which intoxicated drivers aren’t caught. Astoundingly, according to one analysis, drunk drivers average just one arrest per 27,000 miles driven while intoxicated.

    • Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock: Why Even the Insured Are Waiting Too Long for Care

      Though a strong majority of all Americans support adopting a single-payer, Medicare for all model of healthcare policy, their political candidates and elected officials have failed to move confidently and clearly in that direction. Most of us know it is not rational to allow our healthcare system to be grounded in the same inhumane, cold-hearted and economically unsustainable way as it has been in the past many decades. The American public is funding ever increasing profits for the insurance giants, the pharmaceutical giants and the provider giants of the healthcare industry, and we are paying for those profits with our premium dollars, our co-pays/deductibles/out-of-pocket expenses, and with our own public tax dollars that pay huge amounts for the ACA subsidies to private insurance companies and that offer massive windfalls to insurance companies gaming the Medicare Advantage programs.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • Reproducible builds: Finishing the final variations
    • Reproducible builds: week 67 in Stretch cycle
    • Easily Improving Linux Security with Two-Factor Authentication

      2-Factor Authentication (2FA) is a simple way to help improve the security of your systems. It restricts the scope of damage if a machine is compromised. If, for instance, you have a security token or authenticator app on your phone that is required for ssh to a remote machine, then even if every laptop you use to connect to the remote is totally owned, an attacker cannot establish a new ssh session on their own.

    • GnuTLS 3.5.3

      Released GnuTLS 3.5.3, a minor enhancement and bug fix release in next stable branch.

    • No, 900 million Android devices are not at risk from the ‘Quadrooter’ monster

      Guys, gals, aardvarks, fishes: I’m running out of ways to say this. Your Android device is not in any immediate danger of being taken over a super-scary malware monster.

      It’s a silly thing to say, I realize, but we go through this same song and dance every few months: Some company comes out with a sensational headline about how millions upon millions of Android users are in danger (DANGER!) of being infected (HOLY HELL!) by a Big, Bad Virus™ (A WHAT?!) any second now. Countless media outlets (cough, cough) pick up the story and run with it, latching onto that same sensational language without actually understanding a lick about Android security or the context that surrounds it.

      To wit: As you’ve no doubt seen by now, our latest Android malware scare du jour is something an antivirus software company called Check Point has smartly dubbed “Quadrooter” (a name worthy of Batman villain status if I’ve ever heard one). The company is shouting from the rooftops that 900 million (MILLION!) users are at risk of data loss, privacy loss, and presumably also loss of all bladder control — all because of this hell-raising “Quadrooter” demon and its presence on Qualcomm’s mobile processors.

    • 900 Million Androids Could Be Easy Prey for QuadRooter Exploits
    • Annoying “Open PDF in Edge” Default Option Puts Windows 10 Users at Risk

      Microsoft released today its monthly security patch, and one of the five security bulletins labeled as critical was a remote code execution (RCE) flaw in its standard PDF rendering library that could be exploited when opening PDF files.

    • Linux TCP flaw enables remote attacks

      Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, say they have found a weakness in the transmission control protocol (TCP) used by Linux since late 2012 which allows the remote hijacking of Internet communications.

    • Serious security threat to many Internet users highlighted
    • Your ‘Smart’ Thermostat Is Now Vulnerable To Ransomware

      We’ve noted time and time again how the much ballyhooed “internet of things” is a privacy and security dumpster fire, and the check is about to come due. Countless companies and “IoT” evangelists jumped head first into the profit party, few bothering to cast even a worried look over at the reality that basic security and privacy standards hadn’t come along for the ride. The result has been an endless parade of not-so-smart devices and appliances that are busy either leaking your personal details or potentially putting your life at risk.

      Of course, the Internet of Things hype machine began with smart thermostats and the sexy, Apple-esque advertising of Nest. The fun and games didn’t last however, especially after several botched firmware updates resulted in people being unable to heat or cool their homes (relatively essential for a thermostat).

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Emails Show Hillary Clinton Aides Celebrating F-15 Sales to Saudi Arabia: “Good News”

      The shockingly brutal Saudi air campaign in Yemen has been led by American-made F-15 jet fighters.

      The indiscriminate bombing of civilians and rescuers from the air has prompted human rights organizations to claim that some Saudi-led strikes on Yemen may amount to war crimes. At least 2,800 civilians have been killed in the conflict so far, according to the United Nations — mostly by airstrikes. The strikes have killed journalists and ambulance drivers.

      The planes, made by Boeing, have been implicated in the bombing of three facilities supported by Doctors Without Borders (Médicins Sans Frontières). The U.N. Secretary General has decried “intense airstrikes in residential areas and on civilian buildings in Sanaa, including the chamber of commerce, a wedding hall, and a center for the blind,” and has warned that reports of cluster bombs being used in populated areas “may amount to a war crime due to their indiscriminate nature.”

    • Are There Any Limits on Obama’s Drone War, Really?

      Early in his second term, President Obama set out to create a Rule Book that would provide some semblance of legal oversight over his administration’s drone program, which in the previous four years had become the administration’s preferred method of targeting suspected terrorists in remote regions of Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Sometimes dubbed the “Disposition Matrix,” news articles about the Rule Book offered tidy flow charts of how a suspected terrorist would go from “suspect” to “dead”—or, less realistically, “captured.” The book was intended to bring new order to the war on terror, there being “a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade,” as The Washington Post reported in the fall of 2012.

      Obama announced the formalization of the Rule Book—now dubbed the Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG)—in May 2013. It was partly a response to critics who said the administration was essentially conducting extrajudicial killings, with no rubric by which to judge whether it was staying within the bounds of international law. Obama explained that after four years of drone war without such formal rules, he was now “insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight, and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance.”

    • Yes, the Drone Rule Book Is a One-Off
    • Is America Any Safer?

      Since 9/11, the United States has spent $1 trillion to defend against al-Qaeda and ISIL, dirty bombs and lone wolves, bioterror and cyberterror. Has it worked?

      [...]

      However, the president has failed to finish the job of securing radiological material in hospitals and industrial facilities, or to crack down on the threats from bioweapons and toxic chemicals. Second, with his revised EPA guidelines on dirty-bomb damage, Obama has taken a tentative but insufficient step toward leveling with the public in a way that deprives terrorists of their ability to spread hysteria. That mirrors what he has tried to do more generally: tentatively steer Americans toward the realistic view that while terrorism is inevitable, it is not an existential or apocalyptic threat—unless we treat it like the apocalypse.

      This is a politically perilous path—which may explain why the administration proceeded so quietly when announcing the revised radiological-contamination guidelines.

      In fact, this may be a path only a lame duck could risk. The politically easier path is to promise “never again.” As Trump’s hard-line rhetoric about the president being weak on terrorism demonstrates, Obama and anyone who follows him and tries to continue on that path will be an easy target for opponents who will claim that transforming homeland security from the fantasy of never-again prevention to a combination of prevention and mitigation and recovery is throwing in the towel.

      That this is still a debate in an election season 15 years after the 9/11 attacks is evidence that although we’ve made progress, we’re still a long way from adjusting—politically and psychically—to this new normal, where, unlike during the Cold War, there is no relying on deterrence for protection.

    • The Just Right Fear Industry, in 18,000 Words

      Steven Brill thinks we’re not worried enough about bioterrorism and dirty bombs. He makes that argument even while acknowledging that a dirty bomb attack launched in Washington DC would result in just 50 additional cancer deaths. And curiously, his extensive discussion about germ threats (inspired by a Scooter Libby report, no less!) doesn’t mention that the Russian military is currently struggling to contain an anthrax attack launched by a thawing reindeer.

      That’s the problem with Brill’s opus: anthrax attacks only matter if they’re launched by Islamic extremist reindeers, not reindeers weaponized by climate change. (And if you were wondering, although he discusses it at length, Brill doesn’t mention that the 2001 anthrax attack, which was done with anthrax derived from a US lab, has never been solved.)

      He makes a similar error when he spends 18 paragraphs focusing on what he (or his editors) dub “cyberterrorism” only to focus on OPM as proof the threat exists and includes this paragraph from Jim Comey admitting terrorists don’t yet have the capabilities to hurt us our Chinese and Russian adversaries do.

    • ISIS Intel Was Cooked, House Panel Finds

      A leading U.S. general pressured his intelligence analysts into playing down the ISIS and al Qaeda threats, according to a Congressional task force.

      A House Republican task force has found that officials from the U.S. military’s Central Command altered intelligence reports to portray the U.S. fight against ISIS and al Qaeda in a more positive light than lower-level analysts believed was warranted by the facts on the ground, three officials familiar with the task force’s findings told The Daily Beast.

      A roughly 10-page report on the controversy is expected to be released by the end of next week, two officials said. While it contains no definitive evidence that senior Obama administration officials ordered the reports to be doctored, the five-month investigation did corroborate earlier reports that analysts felt the leaders of CENTCOM’s intelligence directorate pressured them to conclude that the threat from ISIS was not as ominous as the analysts believed, the officials said.

    • Christianity and the Nagasaki Bomb

      Though Christianity began as a religion of peace, it soon became a cloak for genocidal violence, such as the incineration of defenseless civilians in Nagasaki, including many Japanese Christians, 71 years ago, writes Gary G. Kohls.

      [...]

      And, if those Christians had never seen, heard or smelled the suffering humanity that the bomb caused on the ground, most of them would not have experienced any remorse for their participation in the atrocity – especially if they had been blindly treated as heroes in the aftermath.

    • Nagasaki Mayor: ‘Come Find Out What Happened Under the Mushroom Cloud’

      To mark the grim anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima 71 years ago, the mayor of Nagasaki on Tuesday urged leaders of nuclear powers to visit the cities and see what their weapons are capable of.

      “I appeal to the leaders of states which possess nuclear weapons and other countries, and to the people of the world: Please come and visit Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” Mayor Tomihisa Taue said during a ceremony for the occasion.

      “Find out for yourselves what happened to human beings beneath the mushroom cloud,” Taue said. “Knowing the facts becomes the starting point for thinking about a future free of nuclear weapons.”

      The mayor also delivered a Peace Declaration calling for global communities to use their “collective wisdom” to work for disarmament.

    • Nagasaki mayor tells world: Visit to see how nukes affect humans

      The Nagasaki mayor on Aug. 9 urged leaders of nuclear powers to follow the example of U.S. President Barack Obama and learn for themselves the horrific effects wrought by nuclear weapons.

      “I appeal to the leaders of states which possess nuclear weapons and other countries, and to the people of the world: Please come and visit Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” Mayor Tomihisa Taue said in the ceremony marking the 71st anniversary of the atomic bombing on this city. “Find out for yourselves what happened to human beings beneath the mushroom cloud. Knowing the facts becomes the starting point for thinking about a future free of nuclear weapons.”

      Referring to Obama’s visit to Hiroshima in May, the first by a sitting U.S. president, Taue said Obama “showed the rest of the world the importance of seeing, listening and feeling things for oneself.”

      The ceremony was held at Nagasaki Peace Park in the city’s Matsuyama district, the area surrounding ground zero of the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan.

      A minute of silence was observed at 11:02 a.m., the time the atomic bomb exploded over this city on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the Hiroshima blast.

      The ceremony was attended by government officials, atomic bomb survivors and ambassadors and other dignitaries of 53 nations, including eight nuclear powers.

    • How US Hiroshima Mythology Insults Veterans

      With President Obama’s May 27 visit to Hiroshima, reporters, columnists and editors generally adhered to the official story that “the atomic bomb…ultimately spared more Japanese civilians from a final invasion,” as Kaimay Yuen Terry wrote for the Minneapolis StarTribune, or that, “Without it, more Japanese would have died in a US assault on the islands, as would have tens of thousands of Americans,” as Mike Hashimoto wrote for the Dallas Morning News.

      [...]

      Obama — uttering not a word about the historical controversy roiling since 1945 — perpetuated the rationalization, cover-up, and nostalgia that guarantees the US will never apologize for the needless and experimental massacre of 200,000 Japanese civilians. As Hashimoto wrote, “No apology [is] needed for sparing lives on both sides…”

      The New York Times reported vaguely that, “Many historians believe the bombings on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, saved lives on balance, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed.”

      While “many” historians may still believe this, the majority do not. As noted by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s chief historian J. Samuel Walker: “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it,” Walker wrote in the winter 1990 issue of Diplomatic History.

      Five years earlier, historian Gar Alperovitz wrote in Atomic Diplomacy, “[P]resently available evidence shows the atomic bomb was not needed to end the war or to save lives — and that this was understood by American leaders at the time.” Further declassification made his lengthy history, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of An American Myth (Knopf, 1995) even stronger on this point.

    • Dirty War Files Show How Clinton Ally Kissinger Backed Regime of Terror

      Newly declassified papers on the U.S. government’s role in Argentina’s 1976-83 “Dirty War” have been released, detailing—among other things—how former secretary of state Henry Kissinger stymied attempts to end mass killings of dissidents.

      The files were published just after Politico reported that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is courting Kissinger’s support, among other Republican elites.

      Kissinger lauded Argentina’s military dictatorship for its “campaign against terrorism,” which included the imprisonment, torture, and killings of tens of thousands of leftist activists and students, the files reveal.

      “His praise for the Argentine government in its campaign against terrorism was the music the Argentine government was longing to hear,” one document states.

      During a private meeting with the conservative diplomat group Argentinian Council of International Relations (CARI), Kissinger said that “in his opinion the government of Argentina had done an outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces.”

      U.S. ambassador to Buenos Aires, Raúl Castro warned that Kissinger’s praise for the military dictatorship “may have gone to some considerable extent to his hosts’ heads.”

      “There is some danger that Argentines may use Kissinger’s laudatory statements as justification for hardening their human rights stance,” Castro said.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Turn to McCarthyism

      The irony of Hillary Clinton’s campaign impugning the patriotism of Donald Trump and others who object to a new Cold War with Russia is that President George H.W. Bush employed similar smear tactics against Bill Clinton in 1992 by suggesting that the Arkansas governor was a Kremlin mole.

      Back then, Bill Clinton countered that smear by accusing the elder President Bush of stooping to tactics reminiscent of Sen. Joe McCarthy, the infamous Red-baiter from the 1950s. But today’s Democrats apparently feel little shame in whipping up an anti-Russian hysteria and then using it to discredit Trump and other Americans who won’t join this latest “group think.”

      [...]

      As the 1992 campaign entered its final weeks, Bush – a much more ruthless political operative than his elder-statesman image of today would suggest – unleashed his subordinates to dig up whatever dirt they could to impugn Bill Clinton’s loyalty to his country.

      Some of Bush’s political appointees rifled through Clinton’s passport file looking for an apocryphal letter from his student days in which Clinton supposedly sought to renounce his citizenship. They also looked for derogatory information about his student trips to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

    • Ex-CIA Director Who Endorsed Clinton Calls for Killing Iranians and Russians in Syria

      Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell said in an interview Monday that U.S. policy in Syria should be to make Iran and Russia “pay a price” by arming local groups and instructing them to kill Iranian and Russian personnel in the country.

      Morell was appearing on the Charlie Rose show on PBS in the wake of his publicly endorsing Hillary Clinton on the New York Times opinion pages.

      Clinton has expressed support for increased military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government. Iran and Russia are backing Assad.

      “What they need is to have the Russians and Iranians pay a little price,” Morell said. “When we were in Iraq, the Iranians were giving weapons to the Shia militia, who were killing American soldiers, right? The Iranians were making us pay a price. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price.”

      Morell said the killing of Russians and Iranians should be undertaken “covertly, so you don’t tell the world about it, you don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say ‘we did this.’ But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”

    • Trump and the Bomb

      Donald Trump has nukes on the brain. During the course of a one hour foreign policy briefing the Republican Presidential candidate asked the same question three times: “If we have nukes, why can’t we use them?”

      Joe Scarborough broke the story on August 3 on his MSNBC Morning Joe program. Scarborough did not name his source.

      Scarborough said that the briefing was “several months ago.” Scarborough did not say why he waited until now to tell us about it.

      [...]

      John Noonan agrees that nukes must never be used. Noonan, a Jeb! Bush foreign policy adviser, has first-hand knowledge of nuclear deterrence. As a U.S. Air Force officer, Noonan served in a nuclear missile silo 100 feet beneath Wyoming. The same day as Scarborough’s revelation, Noonan launched a barrage of twenty tweets. Noonan tweeted: “[T]he whole idea behind nuclear deterrence is that you don’t use the damn things.” Noonan said that a President Trump “would be undoing 6 decades of proven deterrence theory. The purpose of nukes is that they are never used. Trump disagrees?”

    • Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen food factory kill at least 14 people

      More than a dozen people have been killed in Yemen after the Saudi-led coalition resumed airstrikes on the capital Sana’a, following the collapse of UN-brokered peace talks.

      In the first such attacks since 11 April – when an often-violated ceasefire was put in place – coalition jets bombed a potato factory in the capital’s Nahda district on Tuesday, killing at least 14 people working there, mostly women.

      The airstrikes came days after the suspension of inconclusive peace talks in Kuwait .

      The factory targeted was situated inside an army maintenance camp. Firefighters scrambled to control the resulting blaze but were unable to rescue people inside the building. More than half of those killed are believed to be women. Abdullah al-Aqel, the factory director, said the death toll stood at 16, with more than 10 people injured.

    • Amid Uptick in Bombings and Civilian Deaths, US Sells More Arms to Saudis

      The Saudi-led, U.S.-backed military coalition has resumed bombing in Yemen as an uneasy, five-month-long ceasefire gives way to an escalation in fighting that puts besieged civilians at even greater risk.

      According to news outlets, there were “immediate reports of civilian deaths” after coalition airstrikes in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a on Tuesday.

      Citing medics at the scene, Reuters reports that the death toll hit 13 and that “[m]ost of the casualties were women working at the al-Aqel potato chip factory in the Nahda district of the capital.”

    • 500 days of fighting in Yemen: Humanitarian crisis is ‘untenable’

      A prominent refugee agency has warned that Yemen faces an “untenable” humanitarian situation, as the war-torn nation on Sunday marked 500 days since Saudi Arabia began its bombing campaign.

      Figures released by the Norwegian Refugee Council set out the humanitarian situation in Yemen, where 21 million people – 80 percent of the population – require some form of aid amid an ongoing war.

      The NRC said at least 6,500 people have been killed – more than half of them civilians – and 32,000 injured since Saudi Arabia formed a military coalition aimed at reinstating the government of President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi.

      Riyadh launched their bombing campaign in March 2015 to push back Houthi rebels who the Saudis say are backed by regional rival Iran. The Houthis seized control of the capital Sanaa in September 2014, forcing Hadi into exile in Riyadh.

    • US Dramatically Escalates Role Supporting Saudi Bombing of Yemen

      Between the year and a half Saudi war against Yemen not achieving the expected quick victory, and the growing talk of war crimes as the civilian death toll from Saudi airstrikes soars, a lot of nations would be looking to distance themselves from the disastrous failure. Not the US, however, as they brag up their escalating support for the Saudi air war.

    • Pakistan Mourns After Bombing at Hospital Kills At Least 74, Including Dozens of Lawyers

      Lawyers in Pakistan have begun a nationwide strike after dozens of attorneys were slain in a suicide bombing outside a hospital in the city of Quetta in Balochistan, the country’s poorest province. Authorities said at least 70 people died in the attack, including as many as 60 attorneys; 120 were injured. The suicide bombing targeted lawyers who had assembled outside the hospital to mourn the assassination of Bilal Kasi, the president of the Balochistan Bar Association, who was killed earlier on Monday as he headed to court. Kasi had strongly condemned recent attacks in the province and had announced a two-day boycott of court sessions in protest of the killing of a colleague last week. A faction of the Pakistan Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack and for the murder of Bilal Kasi. ISIS also claimed responsibility.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘Clexit’: New Fears for UK as Brexit Planners Push to Withdraw from COP21

      The same architects of Britain’s exit from the European Union are now pushing for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the global climate treaty negotiated in Paris last December—a movement called Clexit (for “Climate Exit”).

      The post-Brexit development confirms what many climate advocates feared might happen. Environmental group Friends of the Earth warned after the June referendum that the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU “is a huge challenge to decades of progress on improving the environment and tackling climate change.”

      As Graham Readfearn reported for DeSmog Blog last week, the Clexit movement—launched “enthusiastically” by climate deniers—is backed by a “blitzkrieg of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science.”

    • After Brexit, Climate Science Denialists Form New Group to Call for a Clexit

      In the wake of the political tsunami caused by the UK’s decision to leave the EU, a group of climate science denialists has formed to jump enthusiastically onto the Brexit bandwagon.

      Backed by a blitzkrieg of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science, a rapidly convened new group called Clexit has been formed.

      The group claims to have “60 well-informed science, business and economic leaders from 16 countries” signing on to a founding statement that is chock-full of long-debunked climate change myths, together with attacks on renewable energy and the United Nations.

      In a not unambitious founding statement, Clexit says: “The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control the climate.”

    • Hundreds sickened in Indonesia’s Aceh as peat fires burn

      Since August 3, peat fires in Indonesia’s westernmost Aceh province have blanketed some areas in a choking haze, sickening hundreds of people and forcing at least one school to close.

      Fires have appeared as far south as Subulussalam, which borders neighboring North Sumatra province, and as far north as Aceh Besar, the province’s northernmost tip.

      In West Aceh, 150 military and police officers are helping the disaster mitigation agency fight the fires. Hundreds of people there have developed acute respiratory infections. Two students have had to be hospitalized.

      “Our son began to have trouble breathing at school, they immediately rushed him to the local clinic,” said Darmawan, a relative of the boy.

    • Trump’s Speech Was Riddled With Lies and Inaccuracies About Fossil Fuels

      On Monday, presidential candidate and climate change denier, Donald Trump, laid out his proposed economic reforms in a speech at the Detroit Economic Club. As part of his destructive manifesto, Trump threatened to demolish “job-killing energy restrictions” enacted during the Obama administration.

      “The Obama-Clinton Administration has blocked and destroyed millions of jobs through their anti-energy regulations, while raising the price of electricity for both families and businesses. As a result of recent Obama EPA actions coal-fired power plants across Michigan have either shut down entirely or undergone expensive conversions.”

      In classic Trump form, not a single policy was ever named during the address, but the sentiment was self-evident: more drilling means more jobs. However, point by point, Trump’s promises and allegations about an energy revolution were riddled with inaccuracies and bunk data. What he calls an “America first energy plan” is no more than a strawman propped up by xenophobia, limited government, and the idealization of a dying coal industry.

    • We’re trashing the oceans — and they’re returning the favor by making us sick

      Six years ago, in a bracing TED talk, coral reef scientist Jeremy Jackson laid out “how we wrecked the ocean.” In the talk, he detailed not only how overfishing, global warming, and various forms of pollution are damaging ocean ecosystems — but also, strikingly, how these human-driven injuries to the oceans can be harmful to those who live on land.

      Toxic algal blooms, for instance, can actually damage air quality near the coast. “The coast, instead of being paradise, is harmful to your health,” he said.

    • Humans are Poisoning the Ocean—and It’s Poisoning Us Back

      It’s no secret that we have trashed, poisoned, and warmed oceans at an unprecedented rate via human-caused climate change and pollution.

      It seems that oceans may be paying us back in kind, according to a new study that found levels of bacteria responsible for life-threatening illnesses spiking in the North Atlantic region.

      The study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) discovered that a deadly variety of bacteria known as vibrio is spreading rapidly throughout the Atlantic as a result of hotter ocean temperatures.

    • Colorado Readies for ‘All Out War’ as Anti-Fracking Measures Advance to Ballot

      The government of Colorado has so far managed to quash efforts to halt the spread of fracking in that state, but come November, residents will finally have the chance to overpower the will of politicians and Big Oil and Gas.

      Petitioners on Monday submitted more than 200,000 signatures backing two separate initiatives to amend the Colorado constitution, specifically in regards to the controversial drilling method.

      “This is a good day for Colorado, and it’s a good day for democracy,” said Lauren Petrie, Rocky Mountain Region director of Food and Water Watch. “These initiatives will give communities political tools to fend off the oil and gas industry’s effort to convert our neighborhoods to industrial sites. This is a significant moment in the national movement to stem the tide of fracking and natural gas.”

      Initiative 78 would establish a 2,500-foot buffer zone protecting homes, hospitals and schools, as well as sensitive areas like playgrounds and drinking water sources, from new oil and gas development. This expands the current mandate of a 500-foot setback from homes and, according to Coloradans Resisting Extreme Energy Development (CREED), is based upon health studies that show increased risks within a half mile of fracked wells and the perimeters of real-life explosion, evacuation, and burn zones.

      Colorado regulators say that, if passed, Initiative 78 could effectively halt new oil and gas exploration and production in as much of 90 percent of the state.

      Initiative 75 would establish local government control of oil and gas development, authorizing local municipalities “to pass a broad range of more protective regulations, prohibitions, limits or moratoriums on oil and gas development—or not,” according to the grassroots group.

      This measure challenges a May ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court which said that state law overrides local fracking bans.

      Various moratoriums or anti-fracking measures bans have been passed by the communities of Lafeyette, Boulder, Fort Collins, Broomfield, El Paso County, and Longmont—though many of these efforts were quashed by the Supreme Court ruling. Campaigners are hopeful that the initiatives would lay the foundation for many more.

    • Latin America ‘Most Dangerous Region in the World’ for Land and Rights Defenders: Report

      Human rights and land defenders face unprecedented levels of violence, torture, abductions, and murder across Latin America, according to a report published Tuesday by the Center for International and Environmental Law (CIEL)—and the situation is even worse for Indigenous people.

    • Ecuador Foreign Minister: $3B in Tax Havens Could Fund Earthquake Reconstruction

      Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa recently announced a national referendum that would bar any politician from having assets in tax havens.

      This is part of a concerted effort by the Ecuadorean government against their use. This has seen President Correa become the only world leader to sign Oxfam’s recent petition calling for a ban on tax havens. Ecuador will also be taking a proposal to the U.N. in September to launch a global initiative against tax havens.

    • Cashing in on Cellulosic Ethanol: Subsidy Loophole Set to Rescue Corn Biofuel Profits

      Subsidies intended for next-generation cellulosic ethanol production are to be applied to a trivial improvement to corn ethanol refining technologies. Since cellulosic ethanol qualifies for much higher subsidies, this will significantly increase corn refinery profits and boost the demand for corn but will do nothing to combat climate change or promote energy independence. This is all thanks to an EPA policy to boost the previously (almost) non-existing cellulosic biofuel production in the US by widening and watering down the definition of that term. Thanks to this policy, cellulosic ethanol subsidies can now go towards biofuels made from the same corn kernels as conventional corn ethanol.

  • Finance

    • Norway may block UK return to European Free Trade Association

      Norway could block the UK if it tries to rejoin the European Free Trade Association, the small club of nations that has access to the EU single market without joining the EU itself.

      Senior Norwegian government members are to hold talks with David Davis, the UK minister responsible for overseeing the UK exit from the EU, in the next few weeks.

      Some Brexit supporters have suggested the EFTA would be a way of retaining access to the EU single market while honouring the referendum mandate to leave the EU.

      Norway is not a member of the European Union but has access to Europe’s lucrative single market via its membership in the European Economic Area (EEA), which groups all EU members and three of the four EFTA members (Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, but not Switzerland).

    • As the nation’s capital booms, poor tenants face eviction over as little as $25

      Her mother told her to always maintain poise, no matter the indignity, so she awoke early to prepare for a day she thought would be full of it. She put on a purple blouse — her favorite color — dabbed her face with makeup, then sprayed herself with a $10 perfume called Winter Candy Apple. She stepped across an apartment bereft of furniture, unsure if it would be her last morning there. Any day now, the U.S. Marshals Service could arrive, deposit her few possessions on the street and leave her homeless.

      “I’m worried,” Brittany Gray told a reporter, taking a deep breath as she left Brookland Manor, a labyrinthine, Depression-era development perched along Rhode Island Avenue NE. She had arisen that morning feeling ill and didn’t know what to expect when she got to where she was going. “Do I go in there and ask for a lawyer or something?”

      It was half past 9 when she reached the District’s landlord and tenant court, the city’s busiest chambers, where tens of thousands of cases are churned through every year. In a metropolis of surging rents and posh condominiums, the debts cited can easily soar into five figures.

    • Sorry you lost your home: Americans deserve more than an apology for the foreclosure fraud epidemic

      “I lost my home of 30 years to fraudclosure.”

      “I have been fighting this bank for over five years now. I am finally losing everything to their fraud.”

      “We feel captive in our own home.”

      This is a sampling of what I have awakened to practically every day for the past few months, since my book “Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud” came out. Hundreds of people have emailed me, sent me letters, attended my public events, to relate their personal horror stories of foreclosure and dispossession. They come from across America, from different social and economic backgrounds. Some lost everything, and some haven’t given up.

      They contact me, a non-lawyer who has only written about and not participated in their struggle, because they have been abandoned, by a government that chose sides against them after the crash of 2008. They seek answers that I mostly don’t have and support I mostly cannot provide. Outside of referring them to legal aid, I cannot solve their foreclosure problems. I cannot convince a judge disinclined to rule in their favor, or a bank disinclined to see them as anything but a financial asset to be plucked, to change their minds. I can only note in sorrow that the massive netting of fraud laid by the mortgage industry over a decade ago continues to capture people like them.

    • Looming Brexit headache for Nissan’s Sunderland plant

      Nissan’s car manufacturing plant in Sunderland is the UK’s largest, producing 500,000 vehicles a year. But it could face a crunch point for investment as soon as next year, sources tell BBC Newsnight, as a result of the uncertainty following the vote to leave the European Union.

      The question is how Sunderland, which employs nearly 7,000 people, stacks up against other plants in the Renault-Nissan Alliance while the details of the UK’s future trading and customs arrangements with Europe remain unclear.

      The Franco-Japanese group makes its plants bid against each other to win significant new production contracts, with Sunderland facing stiff competition from Renault plants in continental Europe.

    • How the Dutch could derail CETA

      Free trade and investment treaties will be a key topic of discussion for the tens of thousands of activists gathering in Montreal this week for the World Social Forum. Resistance to trade deals, once the domain of anti-globalization activists, is now widespread. Large demonstrations are taking place against deals such as the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Facing such public pressure it is becoming ever more likely that a proposed Trade and investment treaty between Canada and the EU, CETA, will be blocked by a referendum vote in the Netherlands.

    • New Jersey Senate Examines Controversial Student Loan Agency

      Almost a dozen people with harrowing experiences with New Jersey’s controversial student loan program testified on Monday before state lawmakers, detailing its aggressive collection tactics and onerous terms that some said had ruined them financially.

      “Hesaa destroyed my family,” Tracey Timony, referring to the state’s Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, said at a hearing before the Higher Education and Legislative Oversight Committees of the New Jersey State Senate.

    • The Shell Game of the Economic Elite’s Hamilton Project

      Take Barack Obama, who hopes to burnish his legacy by securing final congressional passage of the arch-global-corporatist Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). If achieved, this measure will be a fitting capstone to what Robert Reich calls “one of the most pro-business administrations in America history.” Obama has continued the cringing, Wall Street-directed corporatism of Bill Clinton, helping bring the United States to a new Gilded Age in which (as Bernie Sanders said repeatedly during his presidential campaign) the top 1/10th of the United States’ top 1 percent has nearly as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent—this while more than a fifth of the nation’s children (including nearly four of every 10 black children) are growing up beneath the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level. Thanks in no small part to Obama’s chillingly fake-progressive presidency, fully 95 percent of new national income generated during his first term went to the nation’s top 0.1 percent. Corporate profits (primarily now financial sector profits) have risen to their greatest state in the U.S. economy since 1929.

    • Scotland would not be independent inside the EU

      On July 8, former Permanent UK Treasury Secretary Sir Nicholas Macpherson wrote an article in the Financial Times titled “The case for Scottish independence looks stronger post-Brexit.” The ex- civil servant, who advised Scots to vote ‘No’ in 2014, joins growing numbers of Scottish voters whose support for independence appears to be growing in the aftermath of the EU referendum.

    • The Sanders movement is only just beginning

      Last week, Pramila Jayapal, one of the rising stars of the Bernie Sanders movement, won a decisive victory in the primary race for Washington’s 7th Congressional District. She will advance to the November general election, where she is favored to win. She is not alone. Jamie Raskin, a progressive state legislator and leading constitutional authority on civil rights and voting rights, won his primary to fill an open Democratic seat in Maryland. Zephyr Teachout, who literally wrote the book on political corruption and challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in the gubernatorial race two years ago, is running a brilliant campaign in an uphill battle for a Republican-held seat in New York.

    • The Incredible Shrinking Populist: Donald Trump’s Tiny Economic Vision

      On Monday, Donald Trump talked about the economy on television for an hour. That may have exceeded the graduate-level curriculum at Trump University. But the biggest lesson I learned is that Trump contradicts himself more, and becomes more typically Republican, with every passing day.

      It’s rare to see Trump put much effort into anything, so it was almost likable to watch him work so hard to read his speech from a Teleprompter. All that concentration! It was like watching a child learn to draw.

      [...]

      Trump embraced the House GOP’s three-tiered income tax rate, with deep cuts in the highest bracket. He proposed a steep reduction in the top corporate tax rate and suggested eliminating the estate tax, which is only levied on the wealthiest heirs and heiresses, altogether.

    • New Rules Needed to Vanquish Legacy of Inequality and Growing Wealth Gap

      Reforming the U.S. tax code to help low-income Americans build wealth and savings while reducing wealth concentration at the top would go a long way toward narrowing an “ever-growing gap” between white households and households of color, according to a new study released this week.

      The report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), entitled The Ever-Growing Gap: Failing to Address the Status Quo Will Drive the Racial Wealth Divide for Centuries to Come (pdf), reveals a stark and widening chasm that—absent significant reforms to large-scale public policies—will only continue to grow.

    • When Systems Crumble: Looking Beyond Global Capitalism

      As global capitalism staggers painfully, unevenly and dangerously in the wake of its 2008 collapse, its critics divide into two broad camps. One commits to fixing or reforming a capitalism that has somehow lost its way. The other finds capitalism irreparably inadequate and seeks transition to a new and different system. The two camps see many of the same faults: how capitalism relentlessly deepens inequalities of income, wealth, power and access to culture; capitalism’s instability (those socially costly cycles it never managed to prevent); and its consequent injustices. Sometimes the two camps can ally and work together. However, at other times — such as now — the camps become more wary of, disaffected from, and competitive with one another. Adding complexity these days, the critics favoring system change are also redefining — for potential recruits and for themselves — the new system they seek.

    • Stop Being Partisan on So-Called “Free Trade”

      It’s been just over 30 years since Reagan proclaimed that, and every president since then has followed the religious belief that so-called “free trade” will save us all. And 30 years later, it’s pretty clear that Reagan was dead wrong about trade, and so are the Democrats today who are saying the same thing.

      The fact is, sweeping trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the TPP and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) only benefit the CEOs of the corporations that are at the negotiating table.

    • “Capitalism Is a Lot More Important Than Democracy,” Says Donald Trump’s Economic Adviser

      But of course Trump won’t pay any price for choosing Moore as an adviser, since their mutual distaste for democracy and affection for general chicanery are shared by many other people at the top of the U.S. political system.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Corporate sponsorships of Olympics make political investments look like a very good deal

      If you thought there was a lot of corporate money in politics, you haven’t seen the amount of cash that goes into sponsoring the U.S. Olympic games.

      Eleven multinational corporations each paid the International Olympic Committee an estimated $100 million for a four-year partnership that gives them coveted advertising rights during the global sporting competition. (International Olympics Committee reps won’t say how much a top sponsorship deal costs, but on p. 114 of the IOC’s 2014 annual report, revenue for 2013-2016 is forecast to be $5.5 billion. Sponsorship deals account for 19 percent of that.)

    • Jill Stein: U.S. Voter Revolt Is Well in the Making

      Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, discusses her economic plan and the election with Bloomberg’s David Gura and Vonnie Quinn on “Bloomberg Markets.”

    • Jeremy Corbyn team accuses Tom Watson in Trotsky row

      Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson has been accused of “peddling baseless conspiracy theories” by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign.

      It came after Mr Watson told the Guardian Labour was being infiltrated by “Trotsky entryists” who had “come back” to bolster Mr Corbyn.

      Mr Corbyn’s campaign team said he should be trying to “unite” the party, rather than “patronising” members.

      The Labour leader is embroiled in a contest with challenger Owen Smith.

    • FBI probe of Clinton’s emails prompted by espionage fears, secret letters say

      Two secret letters the FBI sent to the State Department have revealed for the first time that the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and the classified emails sent through it, stemmed from a so-called “Section 811″ referral from the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General (ICIG). The ICIG determined that classified, national security information in Clinton’s emails may have been “compromised” and shared with “a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.”

      Section 811 of the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1995 “is the statutory authority that governs the coordination of counterespionage investigations between Executive Branch departments or agencies and the FBI.” A Section 811 referral is a report to the FBI about any unauthorized information that may have been disclosed to a foreign power.

    • Election 2016: The Greatest Show on Earth

      Yep, it finally happened. In early May, after a long, long run, the elephants of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus were ushered into retirement in Florida where they will finish their days aiding cancer research. The Greatest Show on Earth was done with its pachyderms. The same might be said about the Republicans after Donald Trump’s version of a GOP convention. Many of them had also been sent, far less gracefully than those circus elephants, into a kind of enforced retirement (without even cancer research as an excuse). Their former party remained in the none-too-gentle hands of the eternally aggrieved Trump, while the Democrats were left to happily chant “USA! USA!,” march a barking retired four-star general and a former CIA director on stage to invoke the indispensable “greatness” of America, and otherwise exhibit the kind of super-patriotism and worship of the military usually associated with … no question about it … the GOP (whose delegates instead spent their time chanting “lock her up!”).

      And that’s just to take the tiniest of peeks at a passing moment in what continues to be, without the slightest doubt, the Greatest Show on Earth in 2016.

      My small suggestion: don’t even try to think your way through all this. It’s the media equivalent of entering King Minos’s labyrinth. You’ll never get out. I’m talking about — what else? — the phenomenon we still call an “election campaign,” though it bears remarkably little resemblance to anything Americans might once have bestowed that label on.

      Still, look on the bright side: the Republican and Democratic conventions are in the rearview mirror and a mere three months of endless yakking are left until Election Day.

    • WikiLeaks Offers $20K Reward for Information in Murder of DNC Staffer

      WikiLeaks is offering a reward for information in the murder of a Democratic National Committee staffer.

      WikiLeaks said in a tweet Tuesday that the group is issuing a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the death of Seth Conrad Rich.

    • Black Pastors Are Breaking the Law to Get Hillary Clinton Elected

      It is illegal for clergy to support or oppose political candidates from the pulpit. Houses of worship can host candidate forums and voter-registration drives; pastors and rabbis and imams can even bend the rules a little to advocate “as individuals” at conventions or other events. But for more than 60 years, religious groups have been forbidden from electioneering.

      Apparently, a lot of pastors don’t pay attention to this rule. According to a new survey from Pew Research Center, roughly 9 percent of people who have attended religious services in the last few months have heard clergy speak out in favor of a political candidate, and roughly 11 percent have heard clergy speak in opposition. What’s remarkable, though, is how much this is apparently happening at one particular kind of church: those run by black Protestants.

    • Can Jill Carry Bernie’s Baton? A Look at the Green Candidate’s Radical Funding Solution

      Bernie Sanders supporters are flocking to Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential candidate, with donations to her campaign exploding nearly 1000% after he endorsed Hillary Clinton. Stein salutes Sanders for the progressive populist movement he began and says it is up to her to carry the baton. Can she do it? Critics say her radical policies will not hold up to scrutiny. But supporters say they are just the medicine the economy needs.

      Stein goes even further than Sanders on several key issues, and one of them is her economic platform. She has proposed a “Power to the People Plan” that guarantees basic economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities; living-wage jobs for every American who needs to work; an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health insurance program; tuition-free public education through university level; and the abolition of student debt. She also supports the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.

    • Ex-NSA Head: Others Would Be Detained Over Trump’s ’2nd Amendment’ Line
    • Donald Trump ‘hints that Hillary Clinton could be shot’ by gun rights supporters
    • Donald Trump seems to suggest ‘Second Amendment folks’ could assassinate Hillary Clinton if she becomes President
    • Trump’s remarks on gun rights, Clinton unleash torrent of criticism
    • Trump raises Second Amendment as option to block Clinton justices
    • Trump criticized for offhand gun rights slap at Clinton
    • Did Trump Just Suggest Gun Nuts Should Shoot Hillary Clinton?

      During a campaign rally in North Carolina on Tuesday, Republican presidential nominee casually suggested that “Second Amendment people” could take care of Hillary Clinton, which many interpreted as a thinly veiled indication that those concerned about their right to bear arms could actually shoot Clinton if they wanted.

    • Trump Makes Apparent Threat To Clinton’s Life. Would He Do The Same To Energy Protesters?
    • MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki Makes Absurd Defense of Donald Trump’s 2nd Amendment Remark

      After his remark that only “Second Amendment people” might be able to stop Hillary Clinton once she has made her picks for the Supreme Court, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump didn’t seem to have a friend in the world, not a single Republican, Democrat, or other homo sapien who failed to take the plain meaning of his quote, or who would entertain his campaign’s absurd attempts to spin the remark. Then, an MSNBC liberal tried to help him out.

    • Are Think Tanks as Independent as We Think?

      Are think tanks “blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists”? Eric Lipton and Brooke Williams of The New York Times certainly think so. In a long report published Sunday, Lipton and Williams come to the conclusion that some of the world’s most renowned think tanks “have frequently become vehicles for corporate influence and branding campaigns.”

    • Revolution at a Crossroad [Ed: Bad advice from Brad Blog: vote Clinton because “Not Trump”]
    • The Election From Hell

      Yep, it finally happened. In early May, after a long, long run, the elephants of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus were ushered into retirement in Florida where they will finish their days aiding cancer research. The Greatest Show on Earth was done with its pachyderms. The same might be said about the Republicans after Donald Trump’s version of a GOP convention. Many of them had also been sent, far less gracefully than those circus elephants, into a kind of enforced retirement (without even cancer research as an excuse). Their former party remained in the none-too-gentle hands of the eternally aggrieved Trump, while the Democrats were left to happily chant “USA! USA!,” march a barking retired four-star general and a former CIA director on stage to invoke the indispensable “greatness” of America, and otherwise exhibit the kind of super-patriotism and worship of the military usually associated with… no question about it… the GOP (whose delegates instead spent their time chanting “lock her up!”).

    • Hillary Clinton is raking in millions from GOP donors

      A surprising number of people who donated to former Republican primary candidates are jumping ship to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton rather than giving money to her rival, Donald Trump.

      Donors who contributed $200 or more to the campaigns of Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina are overwhelmingly more likely to also have donated to Clinton than Trump, according to a New York Times report.

      In some cases, the disparity is pronounced. Of the 397 donors to Jeb Bush, who switched to another candidate, 303 of them donated to Clinton.

    • Survey of Our Readers: 41.7% for Hillary Clinton, 33.4% for Jill Stein, 13.4% Would Write-In Bernie

      Hillary Clinton has just an 8-point lead over Jill Stein in an Aug. 3-5 survey of Common Dreams’ US readers who are likely to vote in the November election. While the Democratic Party nominee is favored by 41.7 percent, support for the Green Party candidate sits at 33.4 percent. And, 13.4 percent would still write-in Bernie Sanders name.

      The survey also found that while over 80 percent of the 11,449 respondents were Bernie Sanders supporters during the primary, the majority of them are not yet ready to support Clinton in the general election. Only 40.7 percent say they are now planning to vote for Clinton; 32.2 percent for Stein; 16.6 percent will write-in Sanders and 8.1 percent are undecided.

    • 5 Ways To Make Sure Trump Loses

      Still feeling giddy about all the bad news surrounding Trump this week? Here’s another bucket of cold water: Trump can actually lose Florida, Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico — and STILL WIN! All he has to do is carry the rust belt “Brexit States” of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Hillary lost three of these four in the primaries. Nothing can be taken for granted. Once more: This is all about who shows up November 8th — not who’s ahead in the popularity polls right now. On the morning of the Michigan Primary, Hillary was ahead of Bernie in a WJBK/TV2-Detroit poll by 22 points. Twelve hours later, she lost. Leave your bubble now!

    • G.O.P. “Never Trumpers” Get Their Spoiler Candidate: An Ex-Goldman Banker and Former CIA Spook

      A former congressional wonk, covert CIA agent and Goldman Sachs investment banker has emerged as an eleventh hour Republican challenger to Donald Trump.

      Evan McMullin announced Monday that he would run as an independent conservative candidate for President. Until revealing his campaign, he was a senior policy staffer for House Republicans.

      A virtually-unknown figure that has already missed his chance to even vie for an electoral college majority, McMullin, at this point, can only play the role of a spoiler. He appears intent on it.

      “Republicans are deeply divided by a man who is perilously close to gaining the most powerful position in the world, and many rightly see him as a real threat to our Republic,” he said in a statement on a newly-established campaign website.

      McMullin could impact the race in a few improbable swing states. Reliably-Republican states that have either come into play for Hillary Clinton or show signs of being within reach for her this November include: Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi and Utah. Of the four, the deadline for independent candidates to apply to get on the ballot has only passed in Georgia.

    • The Movement and Elections: It’s What We Do That Matters

      Participatory democracy is the key to the revival and reconstruction of representative democracy.

    • Is Debbie Wasserman Schultz ‘Dodging Debates’ With Progressive Challenger?

      On the same day he filed a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint against former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, congressional candidate Tim Canova questioned whether the incumbent congresswoman indeed plans to debate him as promised before the August 30 Democratic primary.

      Six-term U.S. Rep. Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said last week she would debate her progressive challenger, a law professor who is backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and—as of Monday—the Democratic Progressive Caucus of Florida.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Privacy Scandal Haunts Pokemon Go’s CEO

      Before Niantic Labs CEO John Hanke was the man behind an unfathomably popular smartphone goldmine, he ran Google’s Geo division, responsible for nearly everything locational at a time when the search company was turning into much more, expanding away from cataloging the web and towards cataloging every city block on the planet. Hanke landed at Google after his wildly popular (and admittedly very neat) CIA-funded company Keyhole, which collected geographic imagery, was acquired in 2004 and relaunched as Google Earth in 2005. By 2007, Hanke was running basically everything at Google that involved a map. In a 2007 Wired profile, (“Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World”) Hanke was lauded as a pioneer (“Led by John Hanke, Google Earth and Google Maps are delivering cartography tools to the masses”) and deified, appearing in photo with an enormous globe across his shoulders.

      [...]

      Hanke, through a spokesperson, denied any knowledge of the Wi-Fi collection at the time it was happening, pinning blame on Google’s mobile division. But a unit within his division, not mobile, was the focus of the largest investigation into the matter by U.S. regulators, and it was his division whose vehicles did the actual collection. The way Wi-Fi traffic was intercepted under Hanke’s nose should alarm people who use, or whose children use, Pokemon Go.

    • Encryption and privacy: La Quadrature du Net Welcomes the Opinion of the European Data Protection Supervisor

      In its opinion on the draft revision to the ePrivacy directive, published on 25 July 2016, the EDPS (European Data Protection Supervisor) took a stand for stronger regulation in favour of privacy. La Quadrature du Net approves the main propositions of this opinion and encourages European legislators to follow them.

    • Census website attacked by hackers, ABS claims

      But the government has contradicted the country’s chief statistician with a semantic denial that the census was neither “hacked” or “attacked”.

      The privacy commissioner is investigating the ABS over the reported cyber attacks that forced the Bureau to close down its site on census night on Tuesday.

    • Why online privacy matters — and how to protect yours

      Christopher Soghoian of the ACLU talks privacy, security and why you should put a sticker on your webcam right now, in conversation with investigative journalist Will Potter.

      As the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, Christopher Soghoian (TED talk: How to avoid surveillance … with the phone in your pocket) spends much of his time thinking about privacy and surveillance and how individuals can protect themselves from spying. Recently, he recorded a Facebook Live conversation with his fellow TED Fellow, Will Potter (TED Talk: The secret US prisons you’ve never heard of before), a reporter and author who specializes in covering dissident politics and culture and whose first question to Christopher was: If I don’t have anything to hide, why should I be concerned about privacy or security, anyway? With that, they were off.

      Christopher Soghoian: I hear this all the time from people, and you know, I think many of us do have something to hide. We may not all be worried about the government, but there are things we may not want our employers or members of our families to know. We have curtains in front of our windows, we wear clothes, we get prescription medications, and we have components to our lives that we don’t reveal to everyone we know. Children may not be worried about the government, but they may not want the principal at their school to know what they’re interested in or who they’re talking to.

    • Why It Matters That Facebook Is Taking on Ad Blockers [iophk: "malware not mentioned"]

      Facebook has a message for the roughly 200 million people who use ad-blocking software around the world: Your plugin’s no good here.

    • Facebook Will Force Advertising on Ad-Blocking Users [iophk: "needs those back doors delivered in-browser"]

      Facebook is going to start forcing ads to appear for all users of its desktop website, even if they use ad-blocking software.

      The social network said on Tuesday that it will change the way advertising is loaded into its desktop website to make its ad units considerably more difficult for ad blockers to detect.

      “Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they’re not a tack on,” said Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, vice president of Facebook’s ads and business platform.

      User adoption of ad-blocking software has grown rapidly in recent years, particularly outside of the U.S. According to estimates by online advertising trade body the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 26% of U.S. internet users now use ad blockers on their desktop devices. Facebook declined to comment when asked on what portion of its desktop users have ad-blocking software installed.

    • EFF Announces 2016 Pioneer Award Winners: Malkia Cyril of the Center for Media Justice, Data Protection Activist Max Schrems, the Authors of ‘Keys Under Doormats,’ and the Lawmakers Behind CalECPA

      Max Schrems is a data protection activist, lawyer, and author whose lawsuits over U.S. companies’ handling of European Union citizens’ personal information have changed the face of international data privacy. Since 2011 he has worked on the enforcement of EU data protection law, arguing that untargeted wholesale spying by the U.S. government on Internet communications undermines the EU’s strict data protection standards. One lawsuit that reached the European Court of Justice led to the invalidation of the “Safe Harbor” agreement between the U.S. and the EU, forcing governments around the world to grapple with the conflict between U.S. government surveillance practices and the privacy rights of citizens around the world. Another legal challenge is a class action lawsuit with more than 25,000 members currently pending at the Austrian Supreme Court. Schrems is also the founder of “Europe v Facebook,” a group that pushes for social media privacy reform at Facebook and other companies, calling for data collection minimization, opt-in policies instead of opt-outs, and transparency in data collection.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Julian Assange files appeal on UN ruling

      WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange has filed an appeal in a Swedish court over the ruling by a United Nations working group that his confinement inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London amounted to arbitrary detention.

      The UN panel called on the Swedish and British authorities earlier this year to end the Australian’s “deprivation of liberty”, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation.

      In May, a Stockholm district court upheld an arrest warrant against Assange, who is wanted for questioning in Sweden over a sex allegation, which he denies.

    • Handcuffed While Dying: Police Killing of Black Teenager Paul O’Neal Sparks Protests in Chicago
    • Chicago Police Officers Allegedly Caught High-Fiving After ‘Execution’ of Paul O’Neal

      Chicago police officers were caught double-checking to make sure their body cameras were off and reportedly giving each other “high-fives” after the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Paul O’Neal in video released Friday by Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority, reports CBS Chicago’s Charlie De Mar.

      As previously reported by The Root, O’Neal was shot and killed by Chicago police officers July 28 after allegedly crashing a stolen Jaguar into two police officers and then attempting to flee. Officers pursued O’Neal, shooting at him at least “five times,” according to a police officer. That turned out to be a severe underestimate. The video proved that at least 15 shots were fired.

      The police officer who fired the shots allegedly believed that he had no choice but to shoot O’Neal, shouting at him on the video, “Get down! Hands behind your back! You shot at us, motherf–ker!” Other officers on the scene were not so sure, asking whether the teen really opened fire on them.

      It was later proved that O’Neal was unarmed.

    • Court: Feds must get warrant to search e-mail, even if cops find child porn

      A federal appeals court in Denver has ruled that e-mailed images obtained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children constituted a warrantless search and therefore must be suppressed as part of a child pornography case.

      The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Friday in favor of a Kansas man who sent an e-mail in April 2013 with four attachments that included suspected child porn via his AOL account. AOL immediately flagged the message via its hash value matching algorithm, believing one of the attached images was suspect, and sent them all on to NCMEC. (Providers have a “duty to report” to the NCMEC if their users access, transmit, or store child pornography.) The agency then opened his message and confirmed that Walter Ackerman had indeed attempted to transmit not just one, but four illegal images.

      The following month, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent got the tip through the NCMEC system, and he sought and received a warrant to search Ackerman’s home in Lebanon, Kansas. Under questioning, Ackerman admitted to distributing child pornography via e-mail. Months later, Ackerman was formally indicted on two counts of child pornography. His lawyers filed a motion to suppress in February 2014, arguing that his e-mail was searched illegally. Ackerman eventually accepted a plea deal in September 2014. Although he was sentenced to 170 months in prison, he was kept out of custody pending an appeal on the Fourth Amendment question.

    • Court Says Child Porn Clearinghouse Acts As A Government Entity, Cannot Perform ‘Private Searches’

      A recent decision by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reaches two conclusions: one obvious, and one not quite so obvious.

      The defendant, Walter Ackerman, appealed the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained through a warrantless search of his email. Unsurprisingly, the court finds [PDF] that the content of his emails are subject to Fourth Amendment protections. More surprisingly (and apparently to the government’s complete surprise), it finds a private entity to be a government entity — one unable to perform “private searches.” (via FourthAmendment.com)

      First, some background. Ackerman’s AOL email account was flagged by the service provider when messages containing hashes known to be related to child porn images were discovered. AOL turned over the flagged email to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) as it is required to do by federal statute. NCMEC is the clearinghouse for any suspected child porn discovered by ISPs and works directly with law enforcement to locate suspects.

    • Sanders Condemns Efforts to Remove Brazil’s Democratically Elected President

      U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday issued the following statement calling on the United States to take a definitive stand against efforts to remove Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff from office:

      “I am deeply concerned by the current effort to remove Brazil’s democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff. To many Brazilians and observers the controversial impeachment process more closely resembles a coup d’état.

      “After suspending Brazil’s first female president on dubious grounds, without a mandate to govern, the new interim government abolished the ministry of women, racial equality and human rights. They immediately replaced a diverse and representative administration with a cabinet made up entirely of white men. The new, unelected administration quickly announced plans to impose austerity, increase privatization and install a far right-wing social agenda.

    • Bernie Sanders Calls on U.S. to Stand Against Brazilian Attempt to Oust President Dilma Rousseff
    • Behind the Rio games lies a calamity on an olympic scale

      As the Olympics gets underway in Rio de Janeiro, Brazilians and foreigners alike will almost certainly have a great time. Despite the delays, the protests and the Zica virus (now apparently under control), there is a lot going for these Olympics: no other people in the world are as good as the Brazilians at organising spontaneous street parties; the weather is warm but not sweltering; and Rio de Janeiro is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

      But this should not mask the disturbing political changes that are happening in Brazil at this very moment.

      At a press conference in Rio on Thursday (4 August) leaders from Brazil’s three leading fronts, representing the main social movements, expressed their profound apprehension.

      Edson Carneiro, a leader from Intersindical, a radical trade union body, said: “There are 10,000 journalists in the city and we must get our message across to them – that there is a coup underway. Information isn’t getting out, as all the powerful media groups in Brazil support it. We must break through the information blockade.”

      He is referring to the current process to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, from the Workers’ Party, the PT. The proceedings are already advanced and are expected to start drawing to an end on 26 August, just after the Olympics have ended (but before the Paralympics), when Senate is due to begin voting.

    • Bernie Sanders Denounces Brazil’s Impeachment as Undemocratic, Calls for New Elections

      Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders yesterday denounced in harsh terms the impeachment of Brazil’s democratically elected president. As the Brazilian Senate heads toward a final vote later this month, Sanders described his position, set forth in a statement posted on his Senate site, as “calling on the United States to take a definitive stand against efforts to remove Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff from office.” He added: “To many Brazilians and observers the controversial impeachment process more closely resembles a coup d’état.”

    • Brazilians Can Protest Against Temer Inside Olympic Venues, Court Rules

      A federal judge in Rio de Janeiro issued an injunction late Tuesday night barring the police from ejecting spectators from Olympic venues simply for protesting against Brazil’s unpopular interim president, Michel Temer, by wearing T-shirts, waving signs or chanting slogans against him.

    • ‘Travesty of Democracy’ as Canada’s Closed Borders Mar Opening of World Social Forum

      This year’s World Social Forum (WSF), which is being held in Montreal this week, is off to a rocky start as hundreds of international activists were denied entry due to Canada’s restrictive visa policies.

      Aminata Traoré, who is one of the candidates to replace United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, was among those barred from attending. Traoré, an anti-globalization activist and a former minister of tourism and culture in Mali, called Canada’s closed-border policy a “dreadful lesson in democracy.”

      This year marks the first time the annual summit, which aims to bring together civil society, organizations, and social movements who want to build a sustainable and inclusive world, is being held in North America and in a G7 nation.

    • Tuesday: En Garde

      Another example of crappy coverage comes from BBC — can’t imagine why the UK became so white nationalist, can you? Let’s not note the countries or the individual competitors, let’s point out their attire and hint at religious and political positions at the same time. What garbage.

    • FBI Agent Goaded Garland Shooter to “Tear Up Texas,” Raising New Alarms About Bureau’s Methods

      The revelation that an undercover FBI agent encouraged a would-be terrorist to “Tear up Texas” shortly before he opened fire on a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, last year raises new concerns about FBI counterterrorism efforts that were already under fire for manufacturing terrorism cases rather than halting them.

      According to an affidavit filed in a related case last week, Elton Simpson — one of two men who donned body armor and fired assault weapons before being shot dead by a Garland police officer — had been corresponding with an undercover FBI agent. And in a text message roughly a week before the attack, as they discussed the cartoon contest, the agent had exhorted Simpson to “Tear up Texas.”

    • Fighting For the People Six Feet Under

      FYI, this is still happening: Chicago police have released video of their latest atrocity, wherein a swarm of panicked cops chased and wildly fired at a stolen vehicle before shooting in the back and killing its fleeing driver Paul O’Neal, who was black, 18 and unarmed. O’Neal was killed July 28 after allegedly crashing a stolen Jaguar into two officers and running away on foot. The video, including dash-cam and body-camera footage, was released by Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority. It shows a chaotic scene: Cursing officers randomly shooting at a distant car down the street where other cops stand, thus putting them in harm’s way and violating policy; over 15 shots fired though officers said it was about five; cops lumbering after the suspect with guns drawn and no idea where he is. The cop who took the fatal shot is alternately belligerent and confused, handcuffing and shouting at the bleeding O’Neal already lying on the ground, “Get down! Hands behind your back! You shot at us, motherf–ker!” even as other cops suggest actually he didn’t; the shooter cop worries, “Fuck, I’m going to be on desk duty now” and “I’m going to be fucking crucified, bro,” while one of his brothers in blue reassures him, “Relax, he was in a hot car. Nothing to worry about.” Because, duh, the punishment for stealing a car is death.

    • ‘What the Hell Is Going on in Ferguson?!’ How #MikeMike Changed Our World

      It’s hard to believe it’s been one year since then-Ferguson, Mo., Police Officer Darren Wilson’s bullets plowed through the body of 19-year-old Michael Brown Jr.

      One year since the teen’s slain body was left lying in the middle of Canfield Drive in the sweltering heat for four hours, his warm blood trickling down the pavement, the responding rage exploding in the air.

    • Vowing to Fight On, Activists Honor Legacy of Ferguson’s Mike Brown
    • The Post-Convention Crash: Cleveland Gets Back to Work on Policing and Race Relations

      Three weeks after the Republican National Convention, Cleveland officials and residents are back to work on a task more daunting than hosting that event: reforming the city’s troubled police department.

      When delegates and visitors left Cleveland last month, city officials sighed in relief. The massive street protests many had predicted failed to materialize, and the military equipment the city had acquired was left untouched. In total, 24 people were arrested — too many, according to both Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams and legal observers — but significantly fewer than everyone expected.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Ad board to Comcast: Stop claiming you have the “fastest Internet”

      Comcast should discontinue its claim that Xfinity service “delivers the fastest Internet in America,” the National Advertising Division (NAD) recommended today. Comcast should also discontinue certain ads where it claims to have the “fastest in-home Wi-Fi,” the group said.

      For its fastest Internet claim, Comcast relied on crowdsourced data from the Ookla Speedtest application. An “award” provided by Ookla to Comcast relied only on the top 10 percent of each ISP’s download results.

      “Although Xfinity offers a variety of speeds at a range of prices and tiers, Comcast’s advertising does not limit its claims to a particular tier,” the NAD’s announcement said. “NAD determined that the claims at issue in both print and broadcast advertising reasonably conveyed a message of overall superiority—that regardless of which speed tier purchased by a consumer, in a head-to-head comparison, Xfinity would deliver faster speeds.”

    • Why I’m finally leaving cable TV

      I’m a millennial and I still pay for cable. I feel like I should apologize.

      Cable isn’t cheap — plenty of beat reporters have explained as much, including The Verge’s own — but it is easy. With cable, I can watch whatever I’d like when it airs, on-demand, or recorded onto DVR. All of my favorite shows are in one place, not spread across a handful of apps. Cable never buffers.

      For years I figured that when I scrapped my cable plan, it would be because an even easier option appeared. But this week, I’ve considered finally cutting the cord for a different reason: subscriptions services better respect my time.

    • AT&T Fined For Turning A Blind Eye As Drug Dealers Ripped Off Its Customers

      While Comcast gets the lion’s share of the public’s loathing, there’s an argument to be made for AT&T actually being a worse company. Think Comcast, but with slower broadband speeds, more dubious executive ethics, and an even greater disdain for its paying customers. In just the last few years AT&T has been: fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired; fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families; and fined $105 million for helping “crammers” by intentionally making such bogus charges more difficult to see on customer bills.

      In every instance AT&T was either busy ripping off customers directly, or turning a blind eye to fraud aimed directly at AT&T customers — because in most instances AT&T got a cut of the profits.

    • Building Large-Scale Mesh Networks Using Ubiquitous Software-Defined Radios

      A couple of years ago, we noted that one lesson from Snowden’s leaks was that the NSA and GCHQ were listening in to all the major pipes and nodes that go to make up the Internet. Mesh networks seemed one way to make things harder for the snoopers, but they have been slow to develop on a scale large enough to make a difference. A fascinating article on the Wireless Week site offers tantalizing glimpses of a new generation of wireless technologies that could make meshes easy to set up and hard to monitor.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Donald Trump On Intellectual Property: China Is Bad

      As you may have heard, in an effort to refocus his Presidential campaign, this week, Donald Trump erased his original economic plan (literally, it just disappeared from his website) and launched a brand new plan with a speech in Detroit. The speech came across as a mishmash of semi-random ideas, pulled from whatever that crazy list of folks he’s calling his advisors are these days. However, for the folks around here, what may be interesting is that this is really the first time I can recall Trump even mentioning intellectual property, and his entire summary of it is basically “China bad, we need more protection.”

    • Copyrights

      • Kickass Torrents Asks Justice Department To Drop Case

        Last month, we looked at the criminal complaint against the alleged operator of the torrent search engine Kickass Torrents (KAT) and raised a number of questions about the complaint. We noted that it appeared that the alleged operator, Arten Vaulin, was getting the “Megaupload treatment,” as there were a number of similarities between the two cases and the legal leaps of logic employed by the Justice Department in making their case. Thus, it was little surprise that Ira Rothken, who has managed the legal efforts for Kim Dotcom/Megaupload, has now signed on to represent Vaulin as well. His first move, last week, was to send the DOJ a letter, asking it to drop the case. While I would imagine that the request resulted in some hearty laughter among DOJ lawyers, it does lay out some of the key arguments that Vaulin will likely make as the case moves forward.

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts