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

07.21.16

Links 21/7/2016: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS, Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Xfce Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 3:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • 7 Differences Between Linux and Windows: User Expectations

      When I was a boy, I imagined that other languages were codes, whose words had a one-to-one correspondence to English. In the same way, many Windows users expect Linux to be an exact equivalent.

      The reality, of course, is quite different. Both Windows and Linux are operating systems — the programs used to run other applications — but they often fulfill basic functions in different ways. Like any application, they have their own unspoken logic, and part of learning either is to learn their logic.

    • Feral Linux users should learn when to shut up

      The very words alpha in the name of the release indicate that the Skype which was announced on 14 July is not ready for prime time. That should be apparent to anyone with the IQ of the common cockroach.

      But it is apparently not evident to some Linux users.

      Things do not seem to be clear to some so-called Linux writers, either. Here is one claiming that “The Skype for Linux alpha does not have all the features that will be released into the final version.”

    • Intel Developer Has Been Working On Systemd Support For Chrome OS

      Google’s Chrome OS currently relies upon Upstart as its init system, but work done by an Intel developer is pushing towards systemd support.

    • The Linux Setup – Jerry Bezencon, Linux Lite

      My name is Jerry Bezencon and I’m a technology consultant, investor, programmer and promoter of/advocate for free and open source software.

    • Microsoft ordered to fix ‘excessively intrusive, insecure’ Windows 10

      A French regulator has issued Microsoft a formal warning over Windows 10, saying the operating system collects excessive amounts of personal data, ships that information illegally out of the EU, and has lousy security.

      The warning comes from the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), an independent data privacy watchdog with the power to levy fines against companies. The CNIL has been investigating Windows 10 since its launch and has now drawn up a damning list of criticisms.

      “The CNIL has decided to issue a formal notice to Microsoft Corporation to comply with the Act within three months,” said the group on Wednesday.

      “The purpose of the notice is not to prohibit any advertising on the company’s services but, rather, to enable users to make their choice freely, having been properly informed of their rights. It has been decided to make the formal notice public due to, among other reasons, the seriousness of the breaches and the number of individuals concerned.”

  • Server

    • Containers rated more secure than conventional apps

      Containers are more secure than apps running on a bare OS and organisations that like not being hacked therefore need to seriously consider a move, according to analyst firm Gartner.

    • Evolution of Linux Containers and Future

      Linux containers are an operating system level virtualization technology for providing multiple isolated Linux environments on a single Linux host. Unlike virtual machines (VMs), containers do not run dedicated guest operating systems. Rather, they share the host operating system kernel and make use of the guest operating system system libraries for providing the required OS capabilities. Since there is no dedicated operating system, containers start much faster than VMs.

    • 10 Essential Skills for Novice, Junior and Senior SysAdmins

      As the world evolves for systems administrators, “Linux is exploding with new ideas and it’s a little scary …,” as commenter Mike Tarkowski put it.

      Keeping up with emerging technologies in cloud computing such as OpenStack will be key to navigating this changing landscape, according to Randy Russell, director of certification for Red Hat.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • FLOSS Weekly 397: CoreOS Update
    • SJVN Talks FOSS, Linux, Microsoft & More…

      The official Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols LinkedIn page says, “I’ve written over 9,000 articles on business and technology subjects. Highlights include the first popular news story about the web and the first Linux benchmarks. My articles range from features to reviews to OpEd to news reporting.”

      A large percentage of those articles have been about Linux and FOSS, so it was logical for us to ring up SJVN (as he is commonly known) and ask him what’s the biggest news about FOSS so far in 2016, and what we can expect in the rest of the year.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • GSoC Update: Tinkering with KIO

        Secondly, the ioslave is now completely independent from Dolphin, or any KIO application for that matter. This means it works exactly the same way across the entire suite of KIO apps. Given that at one point we were planning to make the ioslave fully functional only with Dolphin, this is a major plus point for the project.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Writing an ebook about usability?

        I write more about this on my Coaching Buttons blog, that I’m thinking about writing an ebook. Actually, it’s several ebooks. But the one that applies here is Open Source Usability.

      • GNOME Mutter 3.21.4 Released WIth New Screen Capture API, NVIDIA vRAM Robustness

        Various GNOME software components were checked in today in preparation for this week’s GNOME 3.21.4 development release.

        When it comes to the Mutter 3.21.4 compositor / window manager release, there are a few new features on top of fixes. This 3.21.4 release includes the frame-buffer / display work I talked about this morning that should allow multiple monitor setups to have different DPIs, among other design improvements. There is also improved X11 to/from Wayland copy/paste interaction, support for the NV_robustness_video_memory_purge extension, a screen capture API has been added to Mutter itself, and various other fixes/improvements.

      • Mutter 3.21.4

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Linux Top 3: Network Security Toolkit, Untangle NG Firewall and IPFire

        There is no shortage of Linux distributions that provide a platform for security researcher to conduct various security research. Among them is the Network Security Toolkit (NST), which was recently updated to version 24-7977. The 24 is a referenced to Fedora, which NST is based on.

        Aside from simply integrating existing tools, NST goes a step further and provides a number of innovative capabilities including a new Multi-Traceroute (MTR) networking tool.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 Alpha 3 Released

        Ludwig Nussel has announced the release today of the third alpha release for the forthcoming openSUSE “Leap” 42.2 update.

        OpenSUSE 42.2 Alpha 3 finishes up the merge of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP2 components, updates to GNOME, KDE Plasma 5.7 integration, and various other changes.

      • openSUSE Leap 42.2 Alpha3 released
      • SUSE LLC’s SUSE Manager

        SUSE Manager is a open-source IT management solution with a centralized console for managing multiple Linux distributions, hardware platforms (x86, IBM Power Systems and z Systems), as well as physical, virtual and cloud environments. SUSE says that the solution helps customers reduce the complexities of managing their IT infrastructures, a key advantage as customers look to cut costs and increase the responsiveness required to adopt DevOps and hybrid cloud solutions.

      • Tally ERP 9 on Linux

        Recently we implemented Tally ERP 9 solution for Antico Pumps. That itself is not interesting, the interesting part is they are using LTSP Fat client system on openSUSE. They have only one server from which all their client computers boot over the network, the clients do not have hard disk, client OS with all softwares they need including wine(Tally is Windows only software), as well as users’ data resides on the server. Once the client boots all the local resources are used so single low power server can be used to serve many clients.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Interoute gets certification from Red Hat

        Interoute was named a Certified Cloud and Service Provider by Red Hat for its networked cloud infrastructure platform, Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC).

      • Interoute becomes first European Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider with Red Hat Cloud Access Designation

        Interoute, owner operator of a global cloud services platform and one of Europe’s largest networks, has today announced that it has been named a Certified Cloud and Service Provider by Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, for its global networked cloud infrastructure platform, Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC).

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Microsoft Privacy Violations, Fedora: Season’s Pick

          Topping today’s Linux news is the wrist slapping of Microsoft by French Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés for excessive spying. Back in Linuxland, openSUSE 42.2 Alpha 3 and Mint 18 Xfce Beta were released for early testers. Bruce Byfield compares Linux and Windows users and Dedoimedo found another distribution he likes. VarGuy Christopher Tozzi ran down five Open Source projects that didn’t work out and Sam Varghese scolds Linux users for expecting Final quality out of Alpha releases.

        • Fedora 24 – And we represent!

          I am pleased. I am really pleased. Fedora 24 delivers an excellent, modern experience. Such a refreshing departure from all the sadness I had to deal with it in the last two months. While it’s not aimed at new users and does not offer D2D fun right away, Fedora still managed to give a most satisfying and a highly consistent experience. With a little bit of tweaking, it’s superb.

          Looking across the board, we have good networking support overall with a permanent workaround for Realtek woes, good smartphone support, stability, speed, battery life, excellent hardware compatibility, a much improved package management system. After pimping, the fun extends to multimedia and some extra customization. And Gnome isn’t half as bad as it used to be. Really lovely.

          There are some small problems still, here and there, the chief amongst them being the ultra short support life of a typical Fedora release. But then, just look at my CentOS 7.2 reviews, the recent Gnome and Xfce ones. You get pretty much the same experience plus a whooping 10 years of support. That’s what I’ve always been waiting for in Linux. Anyhow, Fedora 24 is a very good summer release. 9/10, and I’ve had a lot of fun sorting things out, because they remained sorted out, there are no silly errors, and the network is solid and stable. Linux as it should be. This is your pick for this season. Enjoy.

        • Fedora APAC FAD KL 2016

          Fedora APAC budget panning FAD 2016 was held on 9th-10th of July 2016 in Malaysia. I was there with Fedora ambassadors from other countries within APAC region.

        • Search for Code in Pagure

          I was trying to get into code search in Pagure, thing that I land up on got really interesting and amazing. If you want to have a code searching mechanism in your website you need to look into something called Indexing.

          The way search happens in some E-commerce sites like Amazon or be it the search happening on Google, with Google its web scrapping and then indexing on the results. The point being the response time , while you are searching for something you get results in few microseconds.

    • Debian Family

      • Reproducible builds: week 62 in Stretch cycle

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The Ubuntu-powered BQ Aquaris M10 tablet: Almost amazing

            BQ Aquaris M10, the first Ubuntu-powered tablet to ship, has some flaws, but the fact that it runs traditional Linux desktop apps will make many Linux users happy

          • Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition Review – The King of All Ubuntu Phones

            It has been one year since our previous review of an Ubuntu Phone, namely examining the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, and the time has come for us to take a look at the best handset powered by Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system that you can buy right now, the Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition.

          • Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS released

            The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
            (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well
            as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.

            As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated
            installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to
            be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and
            corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining
            stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

          • Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS Released
          • Howdy, Ubuntu on Windows! An Intro From Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland

            Hi there! My name is Dustin Kirkland, a Linux user for nearly 20 years, and an open source developer for almost as long. I worked on Linux at IBM for most of a decade, on site at Red Hat for a bit, and now at Canonical for nearly another decade. I started at Canonical as an engineer on the Ubuntu Server team and eventually evolved into the product manager responsible for Ubuntu as a server and cloud platform. I’ve authored many open source utilities used by millions of Ubuntu users every day. Open source software is my passion, my heart, and my soul.

            I was working in Cape Town, South Africa when I received a strange call from a friend and colleague at Microsoft in January of 2016. The call was decorated with subtlety as he danced around the technology underpinning what you and I today know as “Ubuntu on Windows,” but without any detail. There was plenty of confusion. Confusion around exactly what we were talking about. Confusion about how this could even work. Confusion about how I should feel about this.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Xfce – BETA Release

              Linux Mint 18 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

            • Linux Mint 18 Sarah Xfce released in Beta

              So after the release of Linux Mint 18 sarah in the flavours of Cinnamon and MATE,now the team is focoused on working over other flavours too.As a result Xfce has been choosen to be the next flavour to be provided officially.

              So,If you were waiting for Linux Mint 18 to be available in Xfce DE(Desktop Environment) then Linux Mint team has started to roll the beta release of Sarah in Xfce DE. Linux Mint team announced the release of Linux Mint 18 Xfce Beta with some already known issues and workarounds too.This xfce edition features Xfce 4.12, MDM 2.0 and it is coming with Linux Kernel 4.4.

            • Linux Mint 18 Xfce beta is out

              While the release comes with the new X-Apps, the Mint-Y theme, new artwork, an Ubuntu 16.04 base, and version 4.4 of the Linux kernel, it still runs Xfce 4.12 and MDM 2.0, both of which were present in Mint 17.3. The reason Xfce and MDM are at the same versions is because they are the latest upstream versions. They’ll likely be updated with new point releases in the Mint 18 cycle.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Microsoft Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

    The only major negative for Microsoft in this report comes from the usual suspect: mobile. Microsoft phone revenue fell by 71 percent, for a dollar loss estimated by the Register to be $870 million. Even search advertising, which forever was a big loser for Redmond, saw in increase of over a half billion dollars.

  • Science

    • Something Is Causing Siberia’s Tundra to Literally Bubble Underground

      The frigid plains of northern Siberia are becoming a hotspot for mysterious geological phenomena. Over the past couple of years, sudden craters have been exploding from the permafrost-laden ground. Last month, we reported on a giant chasm in the Sakha Republic that looms so wide and deep, locals refer to it as a “gateway to the underworld.”

      Now, the frozen tundra on Siberia’s remote Belyy Island is home to the region’s newest aberration: eerie, rippling, underground bubbles.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • New Report: Problem Care Harms Almost One-Third of Rehab Hospital Patients

      Patients may go to rehabilitation hospitals to recover from a stroke, injury, or recent surgery. But sometimes the care makes things worse. In a government report published Thursday, 29 percent of patients in rehab facilities suffered a medication error, bedsore, infection or some other type of harm as a result of the care they received.

      Doctors who reviewed cases from a broad sampling of rehab facilities say that almost half of the 158 incidents they spotted among 417 patients were clearly or likely preventable.

      “This is the latest study over a long time period now that says we still have high rates of harm,” says Dr. David Classen, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah School of Medicine who developed the analytic tool used in the report to identify the harm to patients.

    • Free Trade Agreements Threaten Farmers’ Rights, Food Security, Group Says

      Small farmers around the world are threatened by new free trade agreements, a civil society group has argued. Those agreements go beyond the requirements of agreed international intellectual property rules and jeopardise the ability of small farmers to save, produce, and exchange seeds, the group said.

      GRAIN just published its latest opinion piece [pdf], part of its “Against the grain” series. This one focuses on the potential threat of free trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in Asia.

    • The Significance Of Uruguay’s Win Over Philip Morris International

      The tobacco industry’s global efforts to use bilateral and multilateral agreements to challenge the spread of tobacco control measures such as trademark-minimising plain packages were dealt a significant blow last week when the World Bank dispute settlement body dismissed a case brought by Philip Morris against the government of Uruguay.The decision is seen a landmark for those who view the company as using test cases to continually challenge and delay public health protection measures and discourage other countries, particularly those with fewer resources, from strengthening their health regulations. Additionally, the case reasserted that trademarks are subject to government regulations and also illustrated the role that international organisations and actors can play in support of national governments defending their health measures.

    • After Japan Embraces ‘Sensational’ Anti-Vaxxer Report, HPV Vaccination Rates Collapse

      Just three years after the Japanese government withdrew support for a vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), a new report finds the country’s girls are dramatically more vulnerable to contracting the cancerous disease. Japan’s decision was solely informed by one “sensationalized” report from a non-medical anti-vaccine activist group called Vaccine Victims, which is under investigation by the Japanese government.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Open Source Information Security Tool Aimed at MSSPs

      A Virginia software developer announced today the release of what’s billed as the first open source information security analytics tool for managed security services providers (MSSP) and enterprise.

      IKANOW says its new platform features multi-tenancy, enterprise scalability and is fully customizable.

    • Most companies still can’t spot incoming cyberattacks

      Four out of five businesses lack the required infrastructure or security professionals with relevant skills to spot and defend against incoming cyberattacks.

      According to a new report by US cybersecurity and privacy think tank Ponemon Institute on behalf of cybersecurity firm BrandProtect, 79 percent of cybersecurity professionals say that their organisations are struggling to monitor the internet for the external threats posed by hackers and cybercriminals.

    • HTTpoxy Flaw Re-emerges After 15 Years and Gets Fixed

      After lying dormant for years, flaws in the HTTP Proxy header used in programming languages and applications, such as PHP, Go and Python, have now been fixed.
      Some flaws take longer—a lot longer—than others to get fixed. The newly named HTTpoxy vulnerability was first discovered back in March 2001 and fixed in the open-source Perl programming language, but it has sat dormant in multiple other languages and applications until July 18.

      The HTTPoxy flaw is a misconfiguration vulnerability in the HTTP_PROXY variable that is commonly used by Common Gateway Interface (CGI) environment scripts. The HTTPoxy flaw could potentially enable a remotely exploitable vulnerability on servers, enabling an attacker to run code or redirect traffic. The flaw at its core is a name space conflict between two different uses for a server variable known as HTTP Proxy.

    • Hack The World

      Currently HackerOne has 550+ customers, has paid over $8.9 million in bounties, and fixed over 25,000 vulnerabilities, which makes for a safer Internet.

    • EU aims to increase the security of password manager and web server software: KeePass and Apache chosen for open source audits [“pyrrhic because of Keepass : flushing the audit money down the toilet on MS based cruft” -iophk]

      For the FOSSA pilot project to improve the security of open source software that my colleague Max and I proposed, the European Commission sought your input on which tools to audit.

      The results are now in: The two overwhelming public favorites were KeePass (23%) and the Apache HTTP Server (19%). The EU has decided to follow these recommendations and audit both of these software projects for potential security issues.

    • KeeThief – A Case Study in Attacking KeePass Part 2

      The other week I published the “A Case Study in Attacking KeePass” post detailing a few notes on how to operationally “attack” KeePass installations. This generated an unexpected amount of responses, most good, but a few negative and dismissive. Some comments centered around the mentality of “if an attacker has code execution on your system you’re screwed already so who cares“. Our counterpoint to this is that protecting your computer from malicious compromise is a very different problem when it’s joined to a domain versus isolated for home use. As professional pentesters/red teamers we’re highly interested in post-exploitation techniques applicable to enterprise environments, which is why we started looking into ways to “attack” KeePass installations in the first place. Our targets are not isolated home users.

    • Giuliani calls for cybersecurity push

      Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani made a surprise appearance at the BlackBerry Security Summit, warning of the rapid growth of cybercrime and cyberterrorism.

      Cybercrime and cyberterrorism are both growing at rates between 20% and 40%, said Giuliani, who made a brief return from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to speak at BlackBerry’s New York event.

      “Think of it like cancer. We can’t cure it… but if we catch it early we can put it into remission,” he said. The quicker you can spot an attack, the less chance there is of loss.

    • Notorious Hacker ‘Phineas Fisher’ Says He Hacked The Turkish Government

      A notorious hacker has claimed responsibility for hacking Turkey’s ruling party, the AKP, and stealing more than 300,000 internal emails and other files.

      The hacker, who’s known as Phineas Fisher and has gained international attention for his previous attacks on the surveillance tech companies FinFisher and Hacking Team, took credit for breaching the servers of Turkey’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party or AKP.

      “I hacked AKP,” Phineas Fisher, who also goes by the nickname Hack Back, said in a message he spread through his Twitter account on Wednesday evening.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Coup in Turkey has Thrown a Wrench in Uncle Sam’s “Pivot” Plan

      A failed coup in Turkey has changed the geopolitical landscape overnight realigning Ankara with Moscow while shattering Washington’s plan to redraw the map of the Middle East. Whether Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan staged the coup or not is of little importance in the bigger scheme of things. The fact is, the incident has consolidated his power domestically while derailing Washington’s plan to control critical resources and pipeline corridors from Qatar to Europe. The Obama administrations disregard for the national security interests of its allies, has pushed the Turkish president into Moscow’s camp, removing the crucial landbridge between Europe and Asia that Washington needs to maintain its global hegemony into the new century. Washington’s plan to pivot to Asia, surround and break up Russia, control China’s growth and maintain its iron grip on global power is now in a shambles. The events of the last few days have changed everything.

    • US-Led Airstrikes Kill as Many Civilians as Nice Attack–but Get No Front-Page Headlines in Major US Papers

      A coalition airstrike reported on Tuesday that killed at least 85 civilians—one more than died in the Nice attack in France last week—wasn’t featured at all on the front pages of two of the top US national newspapers, the New York Times and LA Times, and only merited brief blurbs on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, with the actual stories buried on pages A-16 and A-15, respectively.

      According to the London Telegraph (7/19/16), the airstrike killed “more than 85 civilians” after the “coalition mistook them for Islamic State fighters.” Eight families were represented among the dead, with victims “as young as three.” The Intercept (7/19/16) reported the death toll could end up being well over 100.

    • NYT’s ‘Journalistic Detachment’ Before Iraq War Is Detached From Reality

      One has to ask where the New York Times’ “journalistic detachment” was in 2002 and 2003. Rutenberg himself (2/18/03) in the lead up to the invasion reported on the use of “embedded journalists” for the first time since World War II. How “detached” from a war effort can journalists be if they are literally attached to an invading army?

      It’s a subtle piece of revisionism, but an important one: For those in center-left media, the impulse to rewrite their own role in selling the Iraq War is all too tempting–to turn Fox News into a cartoon propaganda outlet, and their own editorial drum-beating, war protester-mocking, aluminum tube-peddling and Dick Cheney water-carrying as “detached” journalism, simply calling balls and strikes. Certainly Ailes’ Fox News was more naked in its war promotion, but the New York Times, with its nominal liberal reputation and air of objectivity, was almost certainly more effective.

    • The ’28 Pages’ Explained

      It took fourteen years for the public to see this document…

    • Stomping the Embers of Turkey’s Democracy

      Whatever motivated Turkey’s failed coup, President Erdogan is exploiting the outcome to round up his political enemies and consolidate his dictatorial style rule, a challenge to the U.S. and E.U., as Alon Ben-Meir describes.

    • Failed Turkish Coup’s Big-Power Impact

      Turkey’s failed “coup” has shaken up the region’s geopolitics, splintering the powerful Turkish military, forcing President Erdogan to focus on internal “enemies,” and undermining the Syrian rebels next door, says ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.

    • Orlando Shooter’s Statements Vindicate Ron Paul

      Despite all the articles and analysis in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting, one important fact seems to have been completely overlooked: the shooter validated Ron Paul’s warning that American military intervention in the Mideast causes terrorist attacks.

    • US-Backed Syrian ‘Moderates’ Behead 12-Year-Old

      The grisly beheading of a 12-year-old boy by U.S.-backed Syrian rebels spotlights Washington’s creepy excuses for arming “moderate” jihadists who are barely distinguishable from Al Qaeda and ISIS, reports Daniel Lazare.

    • Cashing in on a Failed Coup

      Mr. Erdogan, who has long attempted to create pliable state institutions, said that the coup was a “gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army”. The government arrested more than 6,000 people from the military and other state institutions. Saying that the Gülen movement had become a “cancer virus” on society, Mr. Erdogan pledged to purge its membership from positions of authority. The ultimate arbiter of who is or is not in the Gülen movement will be left to Mr. Erdogan’s own loyalists, who are likely to remove those who have long resisted the President’s own bid to monopolise power. Mr. Erdogan deliberately linked the Gülen movement to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which the Turkish army has attacked in its bases in south-eastern Turkey and in Iraq. To call both the Gülen movement and the PKK ‘terrorists’ is a convenient way to sweep up all Erdogan enemies into one target and use the coup — a “gift from God” — as the opportunity to go after them with vehemence.

    • The Surprising Popularity of Military Coups

      The attempted military coup in Turkey and the possibility of a President Trump may have more Americans considering the military option.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Hottest ever June marks 14th month of record-breaking temperatures

      As the string of record-breaking global temperatures continues unabated, June 2016 marks the 14th consecutive month of record-breaking heat.

      According to two US agencies – Nasa and Noaa – June 2016 was 0.9C hotter than the average for the 20th century, and the hottest June in the record which goes back to 1880. It broke the previous record, set in 2015, by 0.02C.

      The 14-month streak of record-breaking temperatures was the longest in the 137-year record. And it has been 40 years since the world saw a June that was below the 20th century average.

    • Republicans in Cleveland Deny Climate Change as Arctic Snow Turns Pink

      Donald Trump’s reported top pick for energy secretary, oil and fracking billionaire Harold Hamm, declared on the Republican National Convention stage on Wednesday night, “Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded.”

      One day earlier, NASA had announced that this June was the hottest June on record, and that the same could be said for every month in 2016 — part of a long-term climate trend that has exacerbated geopolitical conflicts.

      The convention adopted a platform that rejected the Paris climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Meanwhile, researchers published a study indicating that climate change worsened a 2003 heat wave enough to kill 570 more people in Paris and London than would have died in an unchanged world.

      Rep. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, who will take the convention stage Thursday, told a Cleveland panel on Monday that “the earth is no longer warming and has not. For about the past 13 years, it has begun to cool.”

    • A Climate Change Op-Ed the Wall Street Journal Simply Doesn’t Need

      I bet not many high schoolers read the Wall Street Journal. And, as a recent graduate, I can tell you confidently it’s because we’re too busy with other things. And I don’t mean busy playing Pokémon Go. I guess I’d consider myself an outlier as an unusually high consumer of news and opinion, particularly from the Wall Street Journal. Either way, as a young person that will feel the worst effects of climate change as I get older, it’s extremely important to me that the issue receives the attention it deserves from mainstream media.

      The Wall Street Journal hasn’t exactly been at the forefront when it comes to leading fair and unbiased commentary on climate change, especially on its editorial page. That’s why I was truly shocked by the full page ad series about man-made climate change currently running. I saw the first ad that ran back on June 14 and those that have run every few days since. The shock came partly just because the ad existed, but the fact that it was actually slamming the Wall Street Journal for its overt climate denial was almost unbelievable. I dug deeper and learned through a piece by the Washington Post that only for a fee higher than it normally charges for ad space was the Journal willing to place the ads… not exactly equitable. Does the WSJ charge Big Oil more to run their ads?

    • Trump’s Killer Kids
    • Taxpayer Groups, Environmentalists, Students Call on Congress to End $4 Billion Annual Oil Industry Subsidies

      In an open letter sent to Congress today, a coalition of 40 national taxpayer, labor, environmental and other groups called on the federal government to repeal almost $4 billion in annual tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, calling them wasteful and lambasting Congress for subsidizing activities that will make climate change worse.

      The groups called on Senators to support the FAIR Energy Policy Act, which would slowly phase out nine special tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry.

      “Oil companies receive billions in tax breaks, despite being among the world’s largest and most profitable corporations,” the groups wrote. “For too long, America has subsidized the oil industry’s bottom line at middle class Americans’ expense.”

      Another law passed earlier this year revokes the wind industry’s production tax credit, and the FAIR Energy Policy Act would wind down some of the oil industry’s subsidies on the same schedule.

  • Finance

    • Why Public Needs Go Begging

      For decades, Americans have been sold on rugged individualism and told to disdain collectivism and community, a philosophy that has starved many public institutions and fattened up the few at the top, as Lawrence Davidson explains.

    • Barroso: from Europeanist to Global Banker

      Mr. Barroso’s appointment as Goldman Sachs non-executive chairman is shameful. As a former President of the European Commission, he should be held to higher ethical standards.

    • Sovereignty and responsibility after Brexit
    • US eyes quick post-Brexit trade deal with UK to get stalled TTIP moving

      The US is hoping that a quick trade and investment deal with the UK after it leaves the EU could kickstart the stalled negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which has met increasing resistance on the continent.

      As well as serving the US’s purposes, such an agreement would be welcomed by the UK government as proof that it can recreate the necessary web of trade links post-Brexit.

      The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has just spent two days in the UK talking with the prime minister’s officials and with the new foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, exploring what form such a UK-US trade deal might take.

      As The Guardian explains: “The UK cannot formally sign any trade deals with other countries or trading blocs until it has left the EU, but it appears to be accepted that negotiations on the outline shape of such deals can start before that happens.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Letting Tarzan Swing Through History

      Still, I wouldn’t have missed the film for the world. After all, it’s the first action movie that — as you’ll see from TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild’s piece today — has ever based itself in any way on a book I edited, in this case his classic King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. As a result, I left the theater filled with wild fantasies. (Even editors can dream, can’t they?) I began to imagine Who Rules the World?, Noam Chomsky’s latest book, absorbed into a future X-Men: Apocalypse America. Or the late Chalmers Johnson’s Dismantling the Empire as the basis for the next Jason Bourne romp. Or Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers at the grim heart of American Sniper: The Next Generation. Or, in Tarzan-style, Andrew Bacevich’s writing on America’s twenty-first-century Middle Eastern wars as part of a reboot of Lawrence of Arabia — perhaps King David of Iraq: The Surge to Nowhere.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Top VP Pick Lets Big Banks Know He’s in Their Corner

      Sounding another alarm for progressives wary of the Democratic establishment’s support for Wall Street, the man said to be leading the pack of potential Hillary Clinton running mates—Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine—has just this week sent a clear message to big banks: He’s in their corner.

      Kaine, who is reportedly Bill Clinton’s favorite for the vice presidential slot, signed onto two letters on Monday pushing for financial deregulation—letters that show the Clinton camp “how Kaine could be an asset with banking interests on the fundraising trail,” according to David Dayen at The Intercept on Wednesday.

      The first missive, signed by 16 Democrats and every Republican senator, calls on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to exempt community banks and credit unions from certain regulations.

    • Tim Kaine, Possible Hillary Clinton Pick for Vice President, Goes to Bat for Banks

      Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, considered a leading contender for the Democratic vice presidential nomination, has spent this week signaling to the financial industry that he’ll go to bat for them.

      On Monday, Kaine signed onto two letters, one to federal banking regulators and the other to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, urging them to loosen regulations on certain financial players. The timing of the letters, sent while Kaine is being vetted for the top of the ticket, could show potential financial industry donors that he is willing to serve as an ally on their regulatory issues.

      In the letters, Kaine is offering to support community banks, credit unions, and even large regional banks. While separate from the Wall Street mega-banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, these financial institutions often partner with the larger industry to fight regulations and can be hostile to government efforts to safeguard the public, especially if it crimps their profits.

      They also represent a key source of donor funds, one that has trended away from Democrats. The Independent Community Bankers of America have given 74 percent of their $873,949 in donations this cycle to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Regional banks like PNC Financial Services, SunTrust Bank, and First Republic Bank, have given even higher percentages to the Republicans.

    • Saudi Arabia’s PR Machine Uses the 28 Pages to Blame Iran for 9/11 Attacks

      Last Friday the U.S. government finally released 28 pages of a 2002 congressional report that detail possible ties between the Saudi Arabian government and the 9/11 hijackers.

      The document lists various forms of assistance provided by Saudi agents to the hijackers, including help finding a flight school and various forms of financial support when the hijackers arrived in the United States. Many of the findings in the report have not been fully vetted as several of the Saudi agents named in the 28 pages have refused to cooperate.

      But that has not stopped Saudi-funded lobbyists and media outlets from claiming that the disclosure of the 28 pages ends all speculation about the role of Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 terror attacks. Several outlets controlled by Saudi Arabia’s vast public relations machine are trumpeting the document as a vindication that closes the door on any suggestion that the Saudi government had any ties to the 9/11 terrorists.

      “The question of Saudi involvement in 9/11 should be entirely put to rest,” said Fran Townsend, a former Bush administration official, in a 28 pages-related video posted on social media this week. The video was produced by Focus Washington, an interview series managed by Qorvis MSL, a lobbying firm retained by the Saudi government to influence American policymakers. The Saudi Embassy Twitter account distributed the video.

    • This Is What a Broken Party Looks Like

      Cruz doesn’t disagree with Trump. He thinks Trump is a pretender to the cause, or he remains angry at how Trump personally insulted him, his wife and his father – or both.

      The person who really disagrees with Trump is his vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence, who said in December that “calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.” In 2006 he concluded “it is not logistically possible to round up 12 million illegal aliens.” He supports NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). And he disavowed negative campaigning 25 years ago.

    • VP Choice Pence Reaffirms Israel Devotion

      Donald Trump may alarm Washington’s foreign policy establishment with his “America First” rhetoric but Mike Pence, Trump’s VP choice, reaffirms a commitment to the traditional “Israel First” doctrine, as Sam Husseini shows.

      [...]

      I’ve heard him say that before. Being a journalist based in the Washington, D.C. area, I try to ask tough questions of political figures when I can. Perhaps my favorite question is some variation of “do you acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons?” I’ve asked this of many political figures and virtually no one has given me a straightforward response.

    • In the US, Money Talks When It Comes to Israel

      The grubby underside of US electoral politics is on show once again as the Democratic and Republican candidates prepare to fight it out for the presidency. And it doesn’t get seamier than the battle to prove how loyal each candidate is to Israel.

      New depths are likely to be plumbed this week at the Republican convention in Cleveland, as Donald Trump is crowned the party’s nominee. His platform breaks with decades of United States policy to effectively deny the Palestinians any hope of statehood.

    • This Anti-Feminist Leader Is Very Pleased With The GOP Platform

      As delegates at the Republican National Convention approved a platform banning women from combat, restricting a woman’s right to an abortion in cases of rape or incest, and without any mention of equal pay or paid family leave, Phyllis Schlafly looked on with a huge smile.

      The notorious 91-year-old anti-feminist and RNC delegate sat in her wheelchair in the back of Missouri’s delegation, craning to get a look at Donald Trump as he entered the arena for the first time on Wednesday night. During the 1970s, Schlafly led the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have amended the Constitution to ban discrimination based on gender. Schlafly, who has participated in every convention since 1952, told ThinkProgress that Trump is the candidate to best represent the needs of women from the White House. In fact, she said, there’s no need for a woman in the Oval Office at all.

    • Folha’s Journalistic Fraud Far Worse Than We Reported Yesterday: A Smoking Gun Emerges

      On Wednesday, The Intercept published an article documenting the extraordinary journalistic fraud committed by Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, in radically distorting the views of Brazilians on the key questions of the country’s political crisis. Specifically, Folha blasted headlines to the country announcing that 50 percent of Brazilians now want the extremely unpopular interim president, Michel Temer, to complete Dilma’s term and remain as president through 2018, while only 3 percent favor new elections and only 4 percent want both Dilma and Temer to resign. That was squarely at odds with prior polling showing vast majorities opposed to Temer and favoring new elections. As we documented, the actual polling data — which Folha’s polling firm, Datafolha, only published days after the article — did not remotely support Folha’s claims.

      But after our article was published, much more evidence was found — through amazing collaborative work by internet sleuths — showing how extreme Folha’s behavior was, including the discovery of a smoking gun proving that it was much worse than we knew when we published yesterday. Do not let the fact that this story involves polling data and methodologies obscure how significant this episode is:

      Weeks before the conclusion of the country’s most virulent political conflict in at least a generation — the final Senate vote on Dilma’s impeachment — Folha, Brazil’s largest and most influential newspaper, not only distorted, but actively concealed, crucial polling data that completely negated what they “reported”: data that establishes that a large majority of Brazilians want “interim President” Michel Temer to resign, not remain in office as the paper claimed. Put simply, this is one of the most remarkable, flagrant, and serious cases of journalistic malfeasance one can imagine.

      [...]

      Most amazingly of all, this was all done in service of denying the need for democracy: deceiving the country into believing that most Brazilians support the person who seized power undemocratically and that there is no need for elections, when in fact the majority of the country wants this “interim President” to quit and new elections to be held to choose the legitimate leader.

      As we noted yesterday, it’s impossible to say whether Folha acted with deliberate intent to deceive or with extreme journalistic ineptitude and recklessness, although evidence suggesting the former is certainly more abundant now than it was yesterday. But motives aside, what is now beyond debate is that Folha misled the country in fundamental ways about this generation’s most consequential political conflict, and hid from the public vital evidence that they only admitted existed once they got caught red-handed doing all this.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Not censorship but responsible journalism is the need of the hour

      Even as newspaper printing resumed in the Kashmir valley on Wednesday after four days, a group of journalists who gathered here for a panel discussion condemned the alleged ban as a gag on the freedom of speech and expression.

      They also said that coverage by a certain section of the media was alienating the local population even further.

      During the panel discussion, Rahul Jalali, president of Press Club of India said, “It was one of the most bizarre incidents of censorship that took place in the country. As of now no assurance has been given to the journalists that they are free to function and would not be touched hereafter.”

    • Editors’ body condemns ‘undeclared censorship’ on newspapers in Kashmir
    • Does Delhi media care enough for Kashmiri media?

      Early this year, in February, the who’s who of Delhi journalism had assembled at the Press Club of India, at Raisina Road, to defend their right to report. The reason was the attack on journalists who were covering the Jawaharlal Nehru University sedition case at the Patiala House Court.

      Almost five months later, a motley group of journalists gathered at the same venue for same reasons – except this time, the attack was not on Delhi media but a ban on Kashmiri media. Barely 10 journalists sat on a dharna at about 1pm at the press club with the placard: “Journalists with Kashmir”.

    • As Constitutional Referendum Nears, Thailand Intensifies Censorship

      Thailand’s military-backed government has authorized the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) to shut down TV and radio stations which are found guilty of broadcasting programs that threaten national security. Furthermore, the junta gave NBTC officials immunity from legal accountability.

      Human rights groups believe this ruling aims to prevent activists and other political forces from campaigning against the approval of a draft constitution in a national referendum scheduled for August 7.

    • Stop censorship of student journalists

      Censorship must be resisted on all fronts, at all times, wherever conflict occurs. Nowhere is that message more important than in our schools, and that’s why we applaud a newly re-introduced bill aimed at preventing administrative censorship of student newspapers.

      The bipartisan legislation sponsored by Assembly members Gail Phoebus, R-Sussex, and Troy Singleton, D-Burlington, would be similar to a Maryland initiative that has already been signed into law. It is rooted in concerns that oversensitive school officials have been preventing student publications from using certain stories of which they disapprove. That’s insufficient cause to ignore First Amendment principles, and the bill would forbid any requirement that all content be subject to administrative review before publication.

    • SABC censorship runs deeper than protest ban, says fired journalist

      THE SABC’s protest footage ban is just one of a slew of policies and “draconian anti-journalistic practices” at the public broadcaster, one of the fired journalists said on Thursday.

      “You can withdraw the protest policy but you still have an environment that is not conducive to the practice of ethical journalism in the SABC,” Thandeka Gqubule said.

    • Serbia populists exhibit criticism to fight censorship claim

      Serbia’s ruling populists have created an exhibition highlighting media critical of their leader and his government in a bid to counter mounting allegations of censorship in the Balkan country, which is seeking EU membership

    • Onlinecensorship.org Launches in Spanish

      We are excited to announce that Onlinecensorship.org, a joint project of EFF and Visualizing Impact, is now available in Spanish. Onlinecensorship.org seeks to expose how social media sites moderate user-generated content. By launching the platform in the second-most widely spoken language in the world, we hope to reach several million more individuals who’ve experienced censorship on social media. Now, more users than ever can report on content takedowns from Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and YouTube and use Onlinecensorship.org as a resource to appeal unfair takedowns.

    • Censorship in Venezuela: Over 370 Internet Addresses Blocked

      In Venezuela, at least 372 web portals have been blocked by main Internet service providers (ISP). Also, 43 Internet domains have been blocked by these same providers, both public and private.

      Of those, 44 percent are web pages related to black market dollars. An additional 19 percent of the pages are news media and an additional 12 percent feature blogs critical of Nicolás Maduro’s administration.

    • The South African Broadcasting Corporation in court over censorship saga
    • The SABC makes U-turn on its ‘censorship’ ruling
    • Court order prohibits SABC from implementing ‘the censorship decision’
    • SABC interdicted from protest censorship
    • Milo Yiannopoulos, rightwing writer, permanently banned from Twitter
    • Twitter Bans Milo Yiannopoulos for Leading Abuse Campaign Against Actress

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Edward Snowden’s New Research Aims to Keep Smartphones from Betraying Their Owners

      In early 2012, Marie Colvin, an acclaimed international journalist from New York, entered the besieged city of Homs, Syria while reporting for London’s Sunday Times. She wrote of a difficult journey involving “a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches.” Despite the covert approach, Syrian forces still managed to get to Colvin; under orders to “kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil,” they bombed the makeshift media center she was working in, killing her and one other journalist, and injuring two others.

      Syrian forces may have found Colvin by tracing her phone, according to a lawsuit filed by Colvin’s family this month. Syrian military intelligence used “signal interception devices to monitor satellite dish and cell phone communications and trace journalists’ locations,” the suit says.

      In dangerous environments like war-torn Syria, smartphones become indispensable tools for journalists, human rights workers, and activists. But at the same time they become especially potent tracking devices that can put users in mortal danger by leaking their location.

      National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has been working with prominent hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang to solve this problem. The pair are developing a way for potentially imperiled smartphone users to monitor whether their devices are making any potentially compromising radio transmissions. They argue that a smartphone’s user interface can’t be relied to tell you the truth about that state of its radios.

    • The Secret Documents That Detail How Patients’ Privacy is Breached

      When the federal government takes the rare step of fining medical providers for violating the privacy and security of patients’ medical information, it issues a press release and posts details on the web.

      But thousands of times a year, the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services resolves complaints about possible violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act quietly, outside public view. It sends letters reminding providers of their legal obligations, advising them on how to fix purported problems, and, sometimes, prodding them to make voluntary changes.

    • Internet of Things in healthcare: What’s next for IoT technology in the health sector

      Internet of Things technology holds the potential to revolutionise the healthcare industry, but not before overcoming barriers of security and data ownership.

      Internet of Things (IoT) refers to any physical object embedded with technology capable of exchanging data and is pegged to create a more efficient healthcare system in terms of time, energy and cost. One area where the technology could prove transformative is in healthcare – with analysts at MarketResearch.com claiming the sector will be worth $117 million by 2020.

    • The Snooper’s Charter still has an encryption problem: Parliament continues to grapple with end-to-end encryption in the Investigatory Powers Bill

      With everything else that has been happening in the UK and abroad over the past month you could be excused for missing a House of Lords debate over the Investigatory Powers Bill last week.

      With the majority of the country distracted by Brexit and the upheaval among the two major political parties – including the former Home Secretary and architect of the controversial Bill Theresa May becoming the UK Primer Minister – this vital legislation has not been quite so high on the news agenda.

      However, discussions around encryption at the 13 July Investigatory Powers Bill committee stage debate could have a huge impact on personal and enterprise data security – in particular the ability to ban end-to-end encryption. You can read the entire debate here.

    • Snooper’s Charter: What you need to know about the Investigatory Powers Bill

      Since December last year, the government’s Investigatory Powers Bill has sparked debate over the balance between privacy concerns and national security in the post-Snowden era, with controversy around encryption, bulk data and hacking being aimed at the former home secretary Theresa May.

    • This Guy Trains Computers to Find Future Criminals

      When historians look back at the turmoil over prejudice and policing in the U.S. over the past few years, they’re unlikely to dwell on the case of Eric Loomis. Police in La Crosse, Wis., arrested Loomis in February 2013 for driving a car that was used in a drive-by shooting. He had been arrested a dozen times before. Loomis took a plea, and was sentenced to six years in prison plus five years of probation.

      The episode was unremarkable compared with the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling at the hands of police, which were captured on camera and distributed widely online. But Loomis’s story marks an important point in a quieter debate over the role of fairness and technology in policing. Before his sentence, the judge in the case received an automatically generated risk score that determined Loomis was likely to commit violent crimes in the future.

    • Revealed: Rail companies’ plans to track your movements and make you pay more to stand on packed trains

      Rail passengers could be forced to pay more to stand on packed trains as the country’s biggest train ticket website plans to monitor their movements to “ease congestion”.

      Clare Gilmartin, chief executive of the Trainline, told The Telegraph that the website was planning to use GPS technology installed within its app constantly to let rail firms update ticket prices, under a scheme which could be rolled out in less than two years.

    • European court rights adviser recommends ‘strict’ guidelines on UK spying laws

      UK GOVERNMENT plans to retain communications data do not sit well with the European Court of Justice, which has warned that such plans should not be rushed through.

      Advocate general Henrik Saugmandsgaard Øe and his peers have issued their opinion on British and Swedish plans to make communications providers sit on customer data for an extended period of time.

    • EU Court Of Justice Advisor Suggests UK’s Last Surveillance Bill May Be Legal, But Hints That The New One Might Not Be

      Over at the EU Court of Justice, the Advocate General has weighed in on the legal challenge to DRIPA, the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill (DRIPA) that was rushed through the UK Parliament almost exactly two years ago. The law was challenged by a group made up of cross-party Parliament Members, and the Advocate General has sort of punted on the issue. If you don’t recall, the Advocate General’s role in the EU Court of Justice is basically to make a recommendation for the actual rulings. The court doesn’t have to (and doesn’t always) follow the Advocate General’s suggestion, but does so often enough that the opinions certainly carry a lot of weight and suggest what’s likely to happen. In this case, the opinion stated that, even though the court had previously rejected the EU-wide Data Retention Directive as intruding on privacy — the UK’s data retention law might be okay.

      The opinion basically says some data retention laws may be okay if the powers are “circumscribed by strict safeguards” set up by the national courts.

    • Marines, NSA To Bring Smartphones To Rifle Squad

      The Marine Corps and National Security Agency have joined forces to bring cellphones to the battlefield by 2019. Working with the NSA’s new Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) program should let the Marines acquire cutting-edge civilian technology swiftly without sacrificing security, said Maj. Kevin Shepherd of Marine Corps Systems Command.

    • From revolutionary art to dystopian comics: Ganzeer on Snowden, censorship and global warming

      It is 949 years since a global flood of biblical proportions. The world is reliant upon a vast grid of solar panels to power its factories around the clock. Night-time has been consigned to legend. In the aftermath of environmental catastrophe, the world’s clean water is now confined to a network of towers built by the world’s richest man.

      While the dystopian scenario of Ganzeer’s debut graphic novel, The Solar Grid, is science fiction, the story is rooted in history, political and personal. The Egyptian artist, best known for murals that championed the spirit of the 2011 Cairo revolution, took inspiration from his first sighting of the Nile’s Aswan dam. As child, he felt awe. Today, Ganzeer sees the environmental impact of the dam on Egypt as emblematic of humanity’s adverse impact across the whole planet.

    • Former NSA Official Sentenced to 12 Years in Death of Adopted Special-Needs Son

      A former division chief for the National Security Agency was sentenced to prison on Tuesday for causing the 2014 death of his 3-year-old adopted special needs son by throwing him against a wall, PEOPLE confirms.

    • For The Third Time, Whatsapp Blocked (And Then Unblocked) By Brazilian Judges For Failing To Decrypt

      What’s up with Brazilian judges not understanding Whatsapp? In the last few months, judges keep freaking out that Whatsapp messages are end to end encrypted, and that the company is unable to decrypt them at all. On Tuesday morning, the news broke that Judge Daniela Barbosa had ordered Whatsapp blocked yet again, along with a $50,000 per day fine until it decrypts information that it cannot decrypt. While various ISPs set about blocking the extremely popular app, as with the previous times, it took only a few hours for a higher court to suspend Barbosa’s ruling, and to make the app available again.

      Of course, this is the third time that Brazilian courts have done this particular dance. It happened in December and again in May. And who can forget the time in March where a Brazilian judge ordered a Facebook exec arrested over the same issue (Facebook owns Whatsapp).

    • Microsoft kills P2P Skype, native OS X, Linux clients [Ed: Microsoft is making it easier to do mass surveillance; will record all your calls, not just keystrokes.]

      In the same month as Microsoft announced its alpha WebRTC-based Skype for Linux, Redmond has put it and the native OS X Skype client on the end-of-life list due to a rebuild for Skype that will replace its peer-to-peer architecture with cloud-centric code.

    • Forget Trump: Peter Thiel Is So Dangerous and Fascinating You Have to Watch Him Tonight

      Thiel has also postured as a libertarian, and even as his ideology shifts toward something more nihilistic — The Economist now calls him a “corporate Nietzschean” — he continues to rail against government programs like Medicare and Social Security. Meanwhile, he is chairman and co-founder of Palantir Technologies, a mass-surveillance-software company that makes a good deal of its money selling to the government; Palantir’s clients reportedly include the Department of Defense (including the NSA and various military branches), the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA. Thiel is, inexplicably, pro-monopoly. And don’t forget that Peter Thiel believes death is nothing but a bug in the feature set of mankind, and one he can buy his way out of.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Florida police shoot black man lying down with arms in air

      An autistic man’s therapist was shot and wounded by police in Florida while lying on the street with his hands in the air.

      Charles Kinsey, who works with people with disabilities, was trying to get his 27-year-old patient back to a facility from where he wandered, North Miami assistant police chief Neal Cuevas told the Miami Herald.

      Cuevas said police – who were responding to reports of a man threatening to shoot himself – ordered Kinsey and the patient, who was sitting in the street playing with a toy truck, to lie on the ground.

      Kinsey, who is black, lay down and put his hands up while trying to get his patient to comply. An officer fired three times, striking Kinsey in the leg, Cuevas said. No weapon was found on either Kinsey or his patient.

    • American Academy Of Pediatrics Claims Broad Consensus On Violent Media Effect That Doesn’t Remotely Exist

      Search through all of our stories about the supposed link between violent movies and games and real world violence by those that enjoy them, and you should come away with the impression that, at the very least, the science isn’t settled on the issue. The more specific impression you should get is that violent media might — might — have a short-term impact on behavior, but that there isn’t anything like a general agreement on the long term effects, which is obviously the vastly more important question.

    • Kudos To Senator Leahy: Fighting To Keep Privacy & Civil Liberties Board From Being Hobbled

      While I think that Senator Patrick Leahy has been ridiculously and dangerously wrong on copyright issues for years, he’s actually quite good on a number of other issues that are of interest to us here at Techdirt. In particular, he’s been a strong supporter of civil liberties on the internet and protecting the 4th Amendment (it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t see how his desired copyright policies might undermine some of that, but that’s another post for another day). Thankfully, his latest move is to push back against a plan by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees to strip the federal government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB).

      Back in May, we wrote about this effort, whereby Congress appeared to be deliberately stripping powers from the PCLOB in order to limit the board’s ability to actually make sure that the intelligence community wasn’t abusing its powers. Senator Leahy has now sent a fairly direct letter to Senate Intelligence chair Senator Richard Burr and vice chair Senator Dianne Feinstein calling out how terrible this plan is.

    • Turkey coup attempt: Crackdown toll passes 50,000

      More than 50,000 people have been rounded up, sacked or suspended from their jobs by Turkey’s government in the wake of last week’s failed coup.

      The purge of those deemed disloyal to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan widened on Tuesday to include teachers, university deans and the media.

      The government says they are allied to US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who denies claims he directed the uprising.

    • Turkey Coup: Erdogan declares three-month state of emergency

      Turkey’s president has declared a state of emergency for three months following a failed coup to oust his government.

      President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the measure was being taken to counter threats to Turkish democracy. He said the move was not intended to curb basic freedoms.

      Speaking after a meeting of the National Security Council in Ankara lasting nearly five hours, he said the state of emergency was needed “to remove this threat as soon as possible”.

    • In Secret Email, CIA’s Chief Lawyer Mocked ‘Pesky Little International Obligations’

      Bush administration lawyers made the law into a joke, and no one has been held accountable.

      In response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the government has released several documents that shed new light on Bush administration lawyers’ attempts to evade the absolute prohibition on torture and abuse of prisoners. The documents concern the widely-discredited legal process that purported to authorize the CIA to commit war crimes and include shocking new details.

      One revelation is an email by John Rizzo, the CIA’s acting general counsel, which displays the ways in which government lawyers actively undermined the laws they were sworn to uphold. Rizzo, a key architect of the torture program, has claimed, “[M]y major concern as the chief lawyer was: Were these techniques legal?”

    • Cleveland Police to RNC Protesters: Don’t Hide Your Faces (Facial Recognition)

      Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams issued a warning to an undisclosed number of masked protesters outside the Republican National Convention: “If you are a member of a group that causes you to have to hide your face, then you probably need a different cause.”

    • Welcoming Constitutional Expert David Cole as Our New National Legal Director

      Cole will oversee the ACLU’s Supreme Court practice and the work of the organization’s nearly 300 lawyers

      We’re excited to tap David Cole, a leading constitutional law expert and litigator, to become our National Legal Director, leading our Supreme Court practice and overseeing the work of the organization’s nearly 300 lawyers. The ACLU has participated in nearly every landmark case involving political expression, freedom of the press, speech on the internet, and separation of church and state in the U.S. Supreme Court during the last 96 years. Cole will replace Steven R. Shapiro, who has served as National Legal Director for a quarter century.

      In his role as National Legal Director, Cole will direct a program that includes approximately 1,400 state and federal lawsuits on a broad range of civil liberties issues. He will directly manage 100 ACLU staff attorneys in New York headquarters, oversee the organization’s U.S. Supreme Court docket, and provide leadership to more than 200 staff attorneys who work in ACLU affiliate offices in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. Another 1,700 volunteer cooperating attorneys throughout the country are engaged in ACLU litigation. With an annual headquarters budget of $140 million, and 1.3 million supporters, the ACLU is the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization.

    • Cornel West: Justice and Accountability are Necessary to End Tension over Killings by Police

      We discuss the killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge and the recent nationwide protests against police brutality with Cornel West. Cornel West is a professor at Union Theological Seminary. “When I hear the authorities call for peace,” West says, “I say, yes, but it’s not the absence of tension. It’s got to be the presence of that justice and accountability.”

    • Terror, Tennis Balls and Tamir Rice

      Welcome to Cleveland, where the Republican National Convention (RNC) is underway. The RNC is a highly scripted, elaborately staged and lavishly publicly funded private party. Here, credentialed Republican delegates, most of them party activists from around the country, circulate within a militarized perimeter of what authorities have designated a “national special security event.” As such, the U.S. Secret Service is handed complete control of an area, in the case downtown Cleveland. The area is ringed with a temporary but imposing black steel fence, patrolled by the full spectrum of law enforcement, from local police to federal SWAT teams. Yet because Ohio has extremely lenient gun laws, people can “open carry” here. And they do. Scores of Trump supporters have proudly shown up with their guns at their sides, including semi-automatic AR-15s, walking the downtown streets.

      It is not a total free-for-all, however. Many things are banned: tennis balls, sleeping bags, selfie sticks and canned goods. To highlight the absurdity of the situation, the women’s peace organization Code Pink staged a demonstration at the security checkpoint to enter the RNC. In their bags, the dozen or so pink-clad women carried 500 pink and green tennis balls with the phrase “Ban Guns, Not Balls” written on them. They began tossing them to each other.

      A line of Cleveland police officers quickly formed and tried to encircle the protest. They started to confiscate the tennis balls. There was confusion, as one officer asked a superior, “What do we do with the balls?” “Put them in your pocket,” came the exasperated reply. The police aggressively expanded their line, pushing observers, and us journalists, farther away. We managed to dodge them and got in close to ask Code Pink member Chelsea Byers what was going on: “We’re here saying that it’s ridiculous that the RNC has banned tennis balls, and yet they continue to let open carry happen in these streets. If they’re concerned about safety, they should be taking the guns off of these streets, not banning toys.” To reinforce the Cleveland police, a large contingent of Indiana State Police showed up, then riot police were deployed. Finally, a phalanx of police on horseback arrived. All this for about 15 women and one man from Code Pink and their 500 tennis balls.

      The second evening of the RNC was about to begin. Thousands were packing into the Quicken Loans Arena. For the first time ever, an official from the National Rifle Association was invited to address the convention.

      Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told us at the protest, “We think that the NRA has, unfortunately, been setting the agenda for this entire nation, especially the Republican Party. It’s unfortunate that the NRA has so much power in this country. That’s why we see guns on our streets and people being shot every single day, every single hour of every single day.” Eventually, with all the tennis balls safely confiscated, the police marched away.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Tennessee Study Shows State Remains A Broadband Backwater Thanks To AT&T Lobbyists, Clueless Politicians, And Protectionist State Law

      We’ve talked at great lengths about how AT&T’s gruesomely cozy relationship with many state legislatures has severely damaged broadband expansion and adoption across huge swaths of the country. That’s particularly true in Tennessee, one of nineteen states where AT&T lobbyists have literally written protectionist state laws defending AT&T’s monopoly from broadband competition. AT&T’s goal has been to stop the rise of public/private partnerships, which have only emerged as a direct response to AT&T’s apathy.

      AT&T lobbyists have been happily getting such laws passed for fifteen years with little attention by the media. That began to change with the rise of efforts like Google Fiber, which more clearly illustrated how public/private partnerships have become essential in bringing broadband competition to countless areas incumbent ISPs deem “not profitable enough” to care about. Last year, the FCC finally woke up from its own long slumber on the subject, stating it would be preempting measures in two such state laws (in North Carolina and Tennessee) that hindered municipal broadband efforts from expanding.

      Tennessee’s response? To sue the FCC — claiming that state rights were being violated (letting AT&T write bad state law? Perfectly ok, though).

    • Internet 3.0: How we take back control from the giants

      AT THE heart of the internet are monsters with voracious appetites. In bunkers and warehouses around the world, vast arrays of computers run the show, serving up the web – and gorging on our data.

      These server farms are the engine rooms of the internet. Operated by some of the world’s most powerful companies, they process photos of our children, emails to our bosses and lovers, and our late-night searches. Such digital shards reveal far more of ourselves than we might like, and they are worth a lot of money. They are not only used to target advertising and sell stuff back to us, but also form the building blocks for a new generation of artificial intelligence that will determine the future of the web.

      “Very big and powerful companies own a huge chunk of what happens on the web,” says Andrei Sambra, a developer with the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the main standards organisation for the web. But we – the ones producing this valuable data – have lost control.

      The time has come to push back. Sambra is part of a growing movement to wrest back control over our digital lives by breaking the monopolies of the server farms and the people who own them. Tweak the technology on which the web runs and we can each keep our own little part of it in our pockets, they say – and determine who or what makes money out of who we are.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WHO Updates Patent Status Info For New Hepatitis C Medicines

      The World Health Organization has issued updated information on the patent status of hepatitis C medicines, including assessments of hurdles for affordable generic versions of latest drugs.

    • Quia timet, de minimus and Novartis v Hospira: Mr Justice Arnold speeds through Napp v Dr Reddy pain dispute

      The invention lay in the use of certain penetration-enhancing excipients which are solid at room temperature and were therefore thought to be of limited use in assisting diffusion out of the matrix into the skin. The patent disclosed that on melting and cooling, these excipients formed so called “supercooled melts”, which have a melting point above room temperature, but remain liquid after cooling to room temperature.

    • Trademarks

      • Miami Brewing Co. Sends Cease And Desist To M.I.A. Beer Co. Over Trademark Concerns

        We talk a lot about silly trademark disputes here at Techdirt. But the really infuriating trademark stories tend to deal with not just overly broad terms that have been granted marks by the USPTO, but terms that are so broad because they are simple geographic identifiers. The other aspect of trademark disputes that can be face-palm inducing are claims of confusion that are laughable in the extreme. The dispute we’re about to discuss mixes both of these, supercharging the frustration to dangerous levels.

      • Federal Court of Justice greenlights colour mark red

        In the ongoing dispute between the Sparkassen Group and Banco Santander, which led to the CJEU’s decision in cases C‑217/13 and C‑218/13, the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has annulled the decision of the Federal Patent Court which invalidated Sparkassen’s contourless colour mark “red” and held that the mark had acquired distinctiveness at the time of the Federal Patent Court’s decision in 2015.

        Sparkassen Group has been using the colour red in connection with financial services, namely retail banking, in Germany since the 1960s. In 2002, it filed a trade mark application for the contourless colour “red” (HSK 13) for financial services, namely retail banking, which was granted – after an initial rejection – sometime in 2007. Banco Santander and Oberbank, two new entrants to the German retail banking market that also used the colour red in their home markets, filed for invalidity. In 2009, the German IPO (DPMA) dismissed the actions. On appeal, the Federal Patent Court referred several questions to the CJEU, which the CJEU answered in joined cases C-217/13 and C-218/13 in 2014.

      • US Justice Department Nails Three In Mass Mailing Trademark Scam

        US Justice Department Nails Three In Mass Mailing #Trademark Scam http://www.ip-watch.org/2016/07/20/us-justice-department-nails-three-in-mass-mailing-trademark-scam/

    • Copyrights

      • Research and Remixes the Law Won’t Allow

        Some day, your life may depend on the work of a security researcher. Whether it’s a simple malfunction in a piece of computerized medical equipment or a malicious compromise of your networked car, it’s critically important that people working in security can find and fix the problem before the worst happens.

        And yet, an expansive United States law, passed in 1998 and emulated in legal codes all over the world, casts a dark legal cloud over the work of those researchers. It gives companies a blunt instrument with which to threaten that research, keeping potentially embarrassing or costly errors from seeing the light of day.

        That law is Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Simply put, Section 1201 means that you can be sued or even jailed if you bypass digital locks on copyrighted works—from DVDs to software in your car—even if you are doing so for an otherwise lawful reason, like security testing.

      • EFF Lawsuit Takes on DMCA Section 1201: Research and Technology Restrictions Violate the First Amendment

        Washington D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the U.S. government today on behalf of technology creators and researchers to overturn onerous provisions of copyright law that violate the First Amendment.

        EFF’s lawsuit, filed with co-counsel Brian Willen, Stephen Gikow, and Lauren Gallo White of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, challenges the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the 18-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). These provisions—contained in Section 1201 of the DMCA—make it unlawful for people to get around the software that restricts access to lawfully-purchased copyrighted material, such as films, songs, and the computer code that controls vehicles, devices, and appliances. This ban applies even where people want to make noninfringing fair uses of the materials they are accessing.

        Ostensibly enacted to fight music and movie piracy, Section 1201 has long served to restrict people’s ability to access, use, and even speak out about copyrighted materials—including the software that is increasingly embedded in everyday things. The law imposes a legal cloud over our rights to tinker with or repair the devices we own, to convert videos so that they can play on multiple platforms, remix a video, or conduct independent security research that would reveal dangerous security flaws in our computers, cars, and medical devices. It criminalizes the creation of tools to let people access and use those materials.

      • Section 1201 of the DMCA Cannot Pass Constitutional Scrutiny

        Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids a wide range of speech, from remix videos that rely upon circumvention, to academic security research, to publication of software that can help repair your car or back up your favorite show. It potentially implicates the entire range of speech that relies on access to copyrighted works or describes flaws in access controls—even where that speech is clearly noninfringing.

        At EFF, we’ve been worried about this law since before it was passed. We were counsel in one of the first major tests of the law, but in those early days, we failed to convince the courts of its dangerous risk to speech. Ever since, we’ve documented those speech consequences. We’ve called on Congress to reform the law, to no avail. So today, we’re going to back to court, armed with nearly twenty years of knowledge about Section 1201’s interference with lawful speech and with key Supreme Court cases that have been decided in that time. For more about the problems caused by this law, see our companion post on the issue.

        Section 1201 was billed as a tool to prevent infringement by punishing those who interfered with technological restrictions on copyrighted works. After the DMCA was passed, the Supreme Court was asked to evaluate other overreaching copyright laws, and offered new guidance on the balance between copyright protections and free speech. It found that copyright rules can be consistent with the First Amendment so long as they adhere to copyright’s “traditional contours.” These contours include fair use and the idea/expression dichotomy.

      • KickassTorrents Alternative? KAT Makes A Comeback With ‘Dxtorrent.com’ Domain

        It looks like the world’s most popular torrent website KickassTorrents is back with a new domain dxtorrent.com. The website features the same layout and seems like a mirror of notorious torrent sharing website KAT. The original KickassTorrents domain was recently seized by the U.S. Government.

      • Paris Court Says Search Engines Don’t Need To Block Torrent Searches

        Copyright rulings in France have occasionally been a complete disaster in the past, so it’s nice to see the High Court of Paris recognize that Google and Microsoft cannot be forced to block any searches that include the word “torrent.” The two separate lawsuits were brought by SNEP, which could be seen as the French version of the RIAA. The organization argued that since the law allowed “all appropriate measures” to be used to block infringement, it could demand that search engines block any searches that include the word torrent.

      • Prenda (Mostly) Loses Again; Court Says ‘We Warned You To Stop Digging, But You Still Did’

        Because Steele and Hansmeier can’t help themselves, they appealed again, leading to this latest ruling. Believe it or not, Steele actually may be temporarily happy with this latest ruling as he actually won on one point (but may lose even bigger in the long run). Still, the court is clearly not happy with either Steele or Hansmeier. It does note that since Hansmeier has filed for a (highly questionable) bankruptcy, he cannot pursue the appeal and thus his appeal is dismissed out of hand.

      • U.S. Government Sued for Software Piracy, Maker Claims $600m
      • Alleged founder of world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested
      • Feds Seize KickassTorrents Domains, Arrest Alleged Owner (Updated)
      • KickassTorrents domains seized after alleged owner is arrested in Poland
      • KickassTorrents Domains Seized, Alleged Founder Arrested

        KickassTorrent, the world’s most popular torrent website, has faced a major setback. The U.S. Government has arrested the alleged owner of the website and seized all of its domains.

      • More Copyright Law ≠ Less Copyright Infringement

        If you only listened to entertainment industry lobbyists, you’d think that music and film studios are fighting a losing battle against copyright infringement over the Internet. Hollywood representatives routinely tell policymakers that the only response to the barrage of online infringement is to expand copyright or even create new copyright-adjacent rights.

Links 21/7/2016: An Honorary Degree for Alan Cox, Looks Back at DebConf16

Posted in News Roundup at 2:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Has open source become the default business model for enterprise software?

    The announcement this week that Splice Machine is open-sourcing its product has become just the latest reminder that — in emerging technology markets — open source is increasingly the rule, not the exception.

    Open-source software is one of those overnight successes that’s been a decade and more in the making. It’s a far cry from the early aughts when Red Hat and JBoss blazed a trail that still has doubters. Arguably, there’s still the issue of whether Red Hat, a publicly-traded, open source company, is a Unicorn from a different twist. Nonetheless, today, when we get acquainted to a new startup, one of the first questions that we pop is whether they’re open source.

  • Spark-powered Splice Machine goes open source

    Splice Machine, the relational SQL database system that uses Hadoop and Spark to provide high-speed results, is now available in an open source edition.

    Version 2.0 of Splice Machine added Spark to speed up OLAP-style workloads while still processing conventional OLTP workloads with HBase. The open source version, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, supplies both engines and most of Splice Machine’s other features, including Apache Kafka streaming support. However, it omits a few enterprise-level options like encryption, Kerberos support, column-level access control, and backup/restore functionality.

  • 3 lessons from Gratipay’s take-what-you-want compensation experiment

    This is the second in a two-part series on hiring and compensation practices in open organizations. In Want the best employees? Let them hire themselves, I introduced the concept of open hiring with examples from Drupal (the well-known CMS) and Gratipay (a payments start-up and open organization; I’m the founder). We saw how open source thinking about onboarding best practices can lead naturally to including new collaborators in money distribution.

  • Healthcare colored with blockchain’s open-source foundation

    Technological change forces economic growth. Technology extends the science of discovery and produces artifacts used in everyday life. It’s the small technical discoveries that make larger scientific endeavors possible. It’s also these seemingly unrelated breakthroughs that make their way into our daily lives.

  • Apache Foundation Crucial to Hadoop, Big Data’s Success

    Looking back at 10 years of Hadoop, project co-founder and Cloudera Chief Architect Doug Cutting can see two primary factors in the success of open source big data technology: a heap of luck and the Apache Foundation’s unique support.

  • What is DevOps? Gareth Rushgrove Explains

    Gareth Rushgrove is known by many people as the creator and editor of the popular DevOps Weekly email newsletter, and he spent several years working for the U.K. Government Digital Service (GDS) on GOV.UK and other projects. As Senior Software Engineer at Puppet, you can find him building some of the latest infrastructure automation products when he isn’t speaking at events on a wide variety of DevOps and related topics.

  • Coffee Shop DevOps: Clearly defining and communicating team goals

    Last month I interviewed the Cockpit team about team practices. We had an interesting conversation from many different angles, but most notable were the themes we kept returning to: understanding goals, the importance of feedback loops, and committing to open and transparent communication. I found I could easily correlate each of these back to other teams I have worked with in the past. When you inspect the behaviors and inner workings of a team, these themes seem to be remarkably central to team conflict.

  • Google’s Magenta Seeks to Leverage TensorFlow for Art and Music

    As we’ve noted, artificial intelligence and machine learning are going through aamini-renaissance right now. Google recently made a possibly hugely influential contribution to the field of machine learning. It has open sourced a program called TensorFlow that is freely available. 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.

    In a related open project from the Google Brain team, dubbed Magenta, Google is calling for efforts to leverage TensorFlow and machine learning to create compelling art and music. Some of the early examples from this effort are eye-opening.

  • Nintendo NX Spec Rumors Say The Console’s Games May Support Open-Source Virtual Reality

    Nintendo NX spec rumors keep coming, and the latest chatter suggests that the console may support open-source virtual reality for certain games. This would allow the 2017 machine to compete with the likes of Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR.

    The news comes to Design & Trend via Chinatimes as referenced by the sometimes-accurate Digitimes. The report should be taken with a grain of salt, but it’s certainly interesting.

    As indicated by the secondary source, Nintendo allegedly has a production partnership with a certain chipmaker called Pixart. While the outfit is most known for its heart-rate monitoring hardware, mentions are also made to “tape-out chips supporting VR technology by the end of 2016.” These chips “will support next-generation Nintendo NX game machines.”

  • Learn an instrument with this open source music teacher

    Playing musical scores is a heavy kind of art. The Nootka app will help you understand the basics of music notation reading, and help you improve by practicing various kinds of exercises. Nootka gives real-time feedback, has multiple difficulty levels, and is customizable.

  • Open source offers job security as businesses navigate an IT talent war

    If you’re in open source and looking for a job, chances are you won’t have to search long. According to recent research, businesses are going out of their way to find—and hang onto—their best open source talent. Last month, the 2016 Open Source Jobs Report found that 79% of hiring managers have increased incentives to retain their current open source professionals.

  • Google Leverages its AI Tools to Slash Data Center Energy Consumption
  • Tutorials, workflows, and a place to showcase high-quality FOSS photography

    There’s a special place to chat with fellow photographers, learn about high-end FOSS photography software, and share your work with others. It’s called PIXLS.US, and it’s a large and wonderful world beyond Photoshop.

    This is truly a golden age in the hobby of photography. Never before has it been so inexpensive and easy to take and share great photos. The rise of smartphones has fueled an explosion in casual photography, and the ecosystem is further extended through the proliferation of media-sharing apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Lower costs for better cameras has enabled many budding photographers to take up the hobby. Unfortunately, while much of the underlying software that fuels the apps and platforms is built on free/open source software, there is little fanfare for the projects that are available directly to photographers.

  • Events

    • Solskogen 2016 videos

      I just published the videos from Solskogen 2016 on Youtube; you can find them all in this playlist. The are basically exactly what was being sent out on the live stream, frame for frame, except that the audio for the live shader compos has been remastered, and of course a lot of dead time has been cut out (the stream was sending over several days, but most of the time, only the information loop from the bigscreen).

    • REMINDER! systemd.conf 2016 CfP Ends in Two Weeks!

      Please note that the systemd.conf 2016 Call for Participation ends in less than two weeks, on Aug. 1st! Please send in your talk proposal by then! We’ve already got a good number of excellent submissions, but we are interested in yours even more!

      We are looking for talks on all facets of systemd: deployment, maintenance, administration, development. Regardless of whether you use it in the cloud, on embedded, on IoT, on the desktop, on mobile, in a container or on the server: we are interested in your submissions!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Reducing Adobe Flash Usage in Firefox

        Browser plugins, especially Flash, have enabled some of our favorite experiences on the Web, including videos and interactive content. But plugins often introduce stability, performance, and security issues for browsers. This is not a trade-off users should have to accept.

        Mozilla and the Web as a whole have been taking steps to reduce the need for Flash content in everyday browsing. Starting in August, Firefox will block certain Flash content that is not essential to the user experience, while continuing to support legacy Flash content. These and future changes will bring Firefox users enhanced security, improved battery life, faster page load, and better browser responsiveness.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Empowering Growth Hackers with Big Data

      Growth hacking often leverages customer data in the experimentation process, in the form of A/B testing. The goal is to use big data to gain a better understand of the customer, via a complete view across every touch point of the organization, in order to enable an optimal customer experience. Growth hackers—who can be anyone from marketing professionals to product manager and engineers—are seeking insights to help optimize marketing campaigns across channels, increase customer loyalty and retention, and enhance the customer experience.

    • TP empowers Singapore students with big data analytics skills

      Temasek Polytechnic (TP), Singapore and Cloudera have teamed on cultivating the next generation of data professionals through the Cloudera Academic Partnership (CAP) program.

    • TP, Cloudera to help S’pore students prepare for big data-related roles

      Temasek Polytechnic (TP) and Cloudera are working together to cultivate the next generation of data professionals through the Cloudera Academic Partnership (CAP) program. Through this program, students from Temasek Polytechnic’s School of Informatics & IT (IIT) have access to the latest Apache Hadoop curriculum, software and skills training for the Hadoop platform.

    • Apache Hadoop at 10 – Doug Cutting, Chief Architect, Cloudera
    • Report Shows Hadoop Growing at 53.7% CAGR, But Complexity Remains an Issue

      The latest in a string of market research reports has arrived forecasting huge growth for big data analytics platform Hadoop, but not everyone agrees that Hadoop adoption is going so smoothly. According to researchers at Stratistics MRC, the global hadoop market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 53.7% over the forecast period 2015 to 2022. ” Increasing investments in data management, rising amount of structured and unstructured data, hasty growth in consumer data and rapidly increasing demand for big data analytics are the factors influencing the market growth,” the study’s authors report.

      Here are some of the details, and some of the warning signs coming in pointing to too much complexity required in deploying Hadoop.

    • 5 Stages of Cloud Adoption

  • Databases

    • Splice Machine Launches Open Source RDBMS Sandbox

      Splice Machine, which provides an RDBMS powered by Hadoop and Spark, has announced a cloud-based sandbox for developers to put its just launched open source Community Edition to the test. The company is making available an open source standalone and cluster download, and has announced the general availability of V2.0, and the launch of its developer community site.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LIBOCon: get around Brno

      Yesterday I added Get around Brno page to the LibreOffice Conference website. There you can find comprehensive information about public transport in Brno, how to buy tickets, how to get to the hotel/venue if you arrive by train/bus/car/plane etc. All accompanied with maps and pictures of described places. So hopefully no one will get lost on their way to the hotel or venue, or struggle purchasing tickets.

    • LibreOffice developer interview: Winfried Donkers

      In this week’s developer interview, we talk to Winfried Donkers, a Dutch coder who has been using LibreOffice (and its predecessors) for almost two decades, and today works on Calc.

  • CMS

    • Koha Integrated Library System Brings FOSS to Libraries

      Randal Schwartz, from TWiT.tv’s “FLOSS Weekly,” interviews Nicole Engard and Brendan Gallagher, about the open source Koha Integrated Library System (ILS), which originated in New Zealand in 1999. Along with being a web developer, Nicole is a prolific blogger on Opensource.com and last year was recognized by Red Hat for her significant contributions to open source advocacy.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Results of the EU-FOSSA survey

      Between 17 June and 8 July, you sent the EU-Fossa project 3282 answers, to help us choose which open source software to audit.

      First, thank you very much for the many interesting and encouraging comments!

    • EC to audit Apache HTTP Server and Keepass

      The European Commission is preparing a software source code security audit on two software solutions, Apache HTTP server and Keepass, a password manager. The source code will be analysed and tested for potential security problems, and the results will be shared with the software developers. The audits will start in the coming weeks.

    • NZ govt agencies now have open source software at their side

      Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) is helping government agencies pave the way for open source software use, opening doors for software developers keen to shape new innovative software, says Land Information Minister Louise Upston.

      The NZGOAL Software Extension guidelines were themselves developed using open source tools and facilitated through Loomio, an online group decision-making platform. The final drafts were crafted through GitHub, an open source repository.

    • UK.gov digi peeps hunt open source chief

      The British government’s Digital Service is looking for a chief penguin to head up open source.

      GDS has created a brand-new position for an individual to conduct open source technology projects, adoption and working practices for the government’s IT arm.

      Moreover, the chosen candidate will be charged with forging relationships with individuals and projects outside government in the open-source community.

      Until now, GDS had a number of people working in different roles taking the lead on open source. The new individual will be nestled in GDS’s technical architecture team.

    • ‘GovStrap’ open source kit helps sites replicate GDS website theme

      Open Source Software specialist OpusVL has created a way to take the Gov.UK website theme created by the Government Digital Service (GDS) and reproduce it quickly in designing and building public sector websites.

      The solution uses Bootstrap, an HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework originating from Twitter, which is used for creating front end websites and applications. With an increase in the variety of devices used to view websites, Bootstrap is a standard toolkit for building responsive design and enabling websites to be mobile and tablet friendly.

      With sharing and re-use of software and technology high on the GDS agenda, OpusVL adopted the principle by importing the GDS work and “re-factoring” it in the form of the Bootstrap framework in addition to the methods originally created by GDS.

    • As it Mandates Open Source, is Bulgaria Opening Questionable Doors?

      For decades now, open source tools and applications have been gaining enormous traction in parts of Europe, and cities such as Munich have even been involved in a multi-year effort to transform technology infrastructure by throwing out proprietary applications and using open source tools instead.

      In the latest move on this front, Bulgaria recently passed legislation requiring that government software be open source. The move underscores how pervasive open source applications and platforms have become. Now, though, there is growing debate about whether Bulgaria is making a wise move, or one that could open it up to security threats.

    • Could Bulgaria’s open source law transform government software worldwide?

      Ripples from Bulgaria’s recent decision requiring all software written for the government to be open source could build into something bigger.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • The Importance of Following Community-Oriented Principles in GPL Enforcement Work

      The GNU General Public License (GPL) was designed to grant clear permissions for sharing software and to defend that freedom for users. GPL’d code now appears in so many devices that it is fundamental to modern technology. While we believe that following the GPL’s requirements is neither burdensome nor unreasonable, many fail to do so. GPL enforcement — the process to encourage those who fail to correct problems and join our open software development community — is difficult diplomacy.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open-Source Farming Machine Plants And Waters Seeds

        While it is nice to have access to produce that is not in season, the unseen use of pesticides and other harmful additives is a difficult problem to avoid.

      • California dreaming: DIY, open-source SoCs with RISC-V

        With its customizable, open-source SoCs built on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture, SiFive, a San Francisco start-up, is poised to reverse the industry’s rising licensing, design and implementation costs.

        With on the one hand Moore’s Law ended or approaching the end and on the other, vast investments required for to develop a modern, high-performance chip, it looks impossible for smaller system designers to join the traditional economic model of chip building. However, the body of software and tools available from the open-source community under the guidance of the RISC-V Foundation, can substantially cut the cost of developing custom silicon. System designers can use the SiFive Freedom platforms to focus on their own differentiated processor without having the overhead of developing a modern SoC, fabric or software infrastructur

      • Lawn Da Vinci Open Source RC Lawnmower (video)

        If you find the prices of the current range of robotic lawnmowers just a little too high for your budget, you might be interested in a new open source remote control lawnmower which has been created called the Lawn Da Vinci.

        Okay so it’s not completely autonomous but you can still add a little extra fun to those lawn mowing days, with the addition of a little remote control to the humble petrol powered lawnmower.

      • A open source toolkit for building your own home

        The evidence is overwhelming that large scale collaboration leads to superior technology. FOSS showed us the way and now free and open source hardware is rapidly gaining traction. There is a growing list of open source hardware projects, which are bringing millions (billion?) of dollars of value to the world. Now a new initiative from the Open Building Institute (OBI) is adding “house” to the list of killer open hardware apps.

      • Open Source Hardware: What It Means and Why It Matters

        You’ve heard of open source software. But what about open source hardware? Here’s an overview of what open source hardware is, what the challenges are and why open hardware is poised to grow in importance as the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to boom.

      • The Ember 3D Printer: High-Resolution, Open-Source 3D Printing on Your Desktop

        Though Autodesk’s interest in 3D printing was not unknown, it may have been a bit of a surprise when the CAD developer entered the industry with its own 3D printer in 2014. Ember, Autodesk’s first hardware product, is a digital light processing (DLP) 3D printer capable of high-resolution prints for prototyping and even end part production. What may be most unique about the Ember is that both the printer and one of its materials are open-source, a bold move for a large corporation like Autodesk.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • AT&T, Orange target NFV, SDN open source, standards

      AT&T and Orange signed a deal to tackle NFV and SDN open source and standards issues that continue to plague the telecom industry

      AT&T signed a deal with European operator Orange to work on open source and standardization initiatives linked to the carrier’s push toward increasing control of its network resources using software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technology.

    • DIGST: ‘Denmark should update eInvoicing systems’

      Denmark’s public administrations should overhaul their eInvoicing solutions, writes the Agency for Digitisation (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen – DIGST). The agency wants public administrations to prepare to introduce a European-wide eInvoicing standard, and to concentrate on the use of Danish 2010 eInvoicing standard, OIOUBL. Its forerunner, OIOXML, is to be phased out.

Leftovers

  • The Dig: Is Your School’s Plan Right for Your Special Needs Child?

    Recently, I got a plea from the mother of a child with special needs. She asked: “Can you do a column on how to investigate your child’s special education file?” Two thoughts flashed to my mind: 1) That’s such a fundamental and important thing to be able to investigate. And 2) I don’t know anything about it.

    Luckily, one of the joys of working at ProPublica is being surrounded by super smart people. And our education reporter, Heather Vogell, is uncommonly sharp, having covered the most important stories in education for years. (Remember the cheating scandal in Atlanta schools? Heather and her colleagues at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution uncovered that.)

  • Science

    • Putting Your Computer Inside Oil Sounds Crazy, But It’s Super Useful. Here’s How To Do It

      Very few of you would be knowing about the existence of mineral oil-cooled PCs. These are custom made computers submerged in non-conductive mineral oil. Compared to regular air cooling , the mineral oil cooling setup works with up to 5-times more efficiency. If you find this interesting, you can read ahead and watch some useful videos that detail the process of making a mineral oil-cooled PC.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • WHO: Countries Need To Step It Up On Noncommunicable Disease Commitments

      Despite “remarkable” progress by some countries on addressing noncommunicable diseases like cancer and diabetes, there is a need to accelerate efforts in order to meet agreed global commitments, the World Health Organization said this week.

    • Jeremy Hunt has broken NHS funding pledges, report finds

      The government has broken its pledges on NHS funding and is misleading the public about how much extra money it is actually putting into the health service, a committee of MPs has said.

      In a highly critical report, the House of Commons health select committee accuses Jeremy Hunt and other ministers of giving the cash-strapped NHS “less than would appear to be the case from official pronouncements”.

      The cross-party group of MPs refutes the health secretary’s persistent claim the government will have given the NHS in England an extra £8.4bn by 2020-21 compared with 2015-16. That was one of the Conservatives’ key pledges in last year’s general election campaign, and was repeated many times after that by David Cameron and George Osborne while they were still the prime minister and the chancellor.

    • Damning Probe Finds EPA ‘Turning Blind Eye’ to Toxic Chemical Cocktails

      While the use of one toxic chemical—on our foods, lawns, and elsewhere—has its inherent risks, scientists warn that the combination of two or more such ingredients in common pesticides could have an even more noxious impact, one which is commonly overlooked.

      In fact, a investigation released Tuesday by the environmental watchdog Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) found that over the past six years the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved nearly 100 pesticide products that contain these so-called “synergistic” compounds, effectively “increasing the dangers to imperiled pollinators and rare plants.”

      As CBD explains, “[s]ynergy occurs when two or more chemicals interact to enhance their toxic effects,” turning “what would normally be considered a safe level of exposure into one that results in considerable harm.”

      “The EPA is supposed to be the cop on the beat, protecting people and the environment from the dangers of pesticides. With these synergistic pesticides, the EPA has decided to look the other way, and guess who’s left paying the price?” asked Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center and author of the report, Toxic Concoctions: How the EPA Ignores the Dangers of Pesticide Cocktails (pdf).

  • Security

    • Mental Note: Keep Working Email on Forum Account
    • No Passwords Stolen During Ubuntu Forums Data Breach
    • SQL Injection Exposes 2 Million Ubuntu Forum Users
    • Ubuntu forum breach traced to neglected plugin
    • Ubuntu Forums Database Hacked
    • Passwords not compromised by Ubuntu Forums data breach
    • Ubuntu forum breach traced to neglected plugin
    • Canonical warns users after Ubuntu forum data breach
    • Flaw in vBulletin add-on leads to Ubuntu Forums database breach
    • CrypTech — Internet Engineers’ New Open Source Weapon Against ‘Creepy’ Governments

      The CrypTech project is an independent security hardware development effort that consists of an international team. CrypTech Alpha is an open source crypto-vault that stores the private/public keys and separates the digital certificates from the software using them. It has been developed as a hardware secure module (HSM) to make the implementation of strong cryptography easier.

    • Entrepreneur in £10m swoop for hacking team

      One of the northwest’s best-known entrepreneurs has splashed out about £10m on a cyber-security venture that helps businesses repel hackers.

      Lawrence Jones, who runs the Manchester-based internet hosting and cloud computing specialist UKFast, has bought Pentest, an “ethical hacking” firm whose staff help detect flaws in clients’ cyber-defences.

      Jones, 47, will merge Pentest’s 45 staff into his own cyber-security outfit, Secarma. “It’s become obvious that there is a massive need to put emphasis on cyber-security,” said the internet tycoon, whose wealth is calculated by The Sunday Times Rich List as £275m.

    • Guilt by ASN: Compiler’s bad memory bug could sting mobes, cell towers

      A vulnerability in a widely used ASN.1 compiler isn’t a good thing: it means a bunch of downstream systems – including mobile phones and cell towers – will inherit the bug.

      And an ASN.1 bug is what the Sadosky Foundation in Argentina has turned up, in Objective Systems’ software.

      The research group’s Lucas Molas says Objective’s ASN1C compiler for C/C++ version 7.0.0 (other builds are probably affected) generates code that suffers from heap memory corruption. This could be potentially exploited to run malware on machines and devices that run the vulnerable compiler output or interfere with their operation.

    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • BlackBerry Inks Software Deal With U.S. Senate
    • BlackBerry inks security software deals, shares slip
    • BlackBerry Announces String of Small Security Software Deals
    • BlackBerry inks U.S. government software deals; shares slip
    • Carbanak Gang Tied to Russian Security Firm?

      Among the more plunderous cybercrime gangs is a group known as “Carbanak,” Eastern European hackers blamed for stealing more than a billion dollars from banks. Today we’ll examine some compelling clues that point to a connection between the Carbanak gang’s staging grounds and a Russian security firm that claims to work with some of the world’s largest brands in cybersecurity.

      The Carbanak gang derives its name from the banking malware used in countless high-dollar cyberheists. The gang is perhaps best known for hacking directly into bank networks using poisoned Microsoft Office files, and then using that access to force bank ATMs into dispensing cash. Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab estimates that the Carbanak Gang has likely stolen upwards of USD $1 billion — but mostly from Russian banks.

    • Now you can ask Twitter directly to verify your account

      Do you have an army of imposters online pretending to be you? Probably not, but now you can still request for a verified Twitter account.

      On Tuesday, Twitter launched an official application process so that any account can be verified and receive a blue checkmark badge next to its username. Twitter users interested in applying should have a verified phone number and email address, as well as a profile photo that reflects the person or company branding.

      Verified accounts get to filter their mentions to only see those from other verified accounts. But that seems to be the only real feature or perk that comes from having a blue badge–aside from bragging rights, of course. Additionally, verified accounts can’t be private, and the username must remain the same or you will have to seek verification all over again. If you are rejected, you can reapply after 30 days. Previously, the verification process was never clear-cut, and it seemed to require a direct connection to a Twitter rep.

    • Software flaw puts mobile phones and networks at risk of complete takeover [Ed: proprietary software]

      A newly disclosed vulnerability could allow attackers to seize control of mobile phones and key parts of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure and make it possible to eavesdrop or disrupt entire networks, security experts warned Tuesday.

      The bug resides in a code library used in a wide range of telecommunication products, including radios in cell towers, routers, and switches, as well as the baseband chips in individual phones. Although exploiting the heap overflow vulnerability would require great skill and resources, attackers who managed to succeed would have the ability to execute malicious code on virtually all of those devices. The code library was developed by Pennsylvania-based Objective Systems and is used to implement a telephony standard known as ASN.1, short for Abstract Syntax Notation One.

    • https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/rebooting-digital-security

      Wednesday, July 20 is the final day of EFF’s Summer Security Reboot, a two-week membership drive that focuses on taking stock of our digital security practices and bolstering the larger movement to protect digital civil liberties. Besides a reduced donation amount for the Silicon level membership, the Reboot features sets of random number generators: EFF dice with instructions on how to generate stronger and more memorable random passphrases. EFF even produced three new passphrase wordlists to improve upon Arnold Reinhold’s popular Diceware list, first published in 1995.

      EFF is a longtime advocate for personal security, and over the years we have continued to fight threats to user privacy and freedom. With the Summer Security Reboot, we want the public to engage with the larger questions of how one can and should control personal information in spite of high-profile attempt after attempt to compromise our devices. The world has increasingly recognized privacy and strong crypto as integral parts of protecting international human rights. A recent Amnesty International report states encryption is “an enabler of the rights to freedom of expression, information and opinion, and also has an impact on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly, association and other human rights.” Strong passphrase use is but one basic part of a diverse toolkit that can help you protect personal information, whether from identity thieves or government surveillance (ideally both!).

    • Hacking Facebook By Stealing Facebook Access_tokens In Device Login

      A security researcher has located a flaw in Facebook’s device login feature that allows one to easily authorise apps on IoT devices. Due to the lack of CSRF protection, an attacker can fool Facebook’s systems and grab the access_token of the victim. Facebook has now fixed the bug and awarded $5,000 bounty to the white hat hacker.

    • Neutrino EK adopts new exploit after open source POC release

      The Neutrino exploit kit (EK) added a former Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability affecting to its arsenal.

    • Arbor Networks Report: Largest DDoS Attack Of 579Gbps In The First Half Of 2016

      Arbor Networks has published the statistics of the DDoS attacks in the first half of 2016. The largest one went up to 579Gbps. An interactive map shows the DDoS attacks made on a global level.

    • Security updates for Wednesday
    • How many mobile phone accounts will be hijacked this summer?

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Hell Hath No Fury Like a Teflon Sultan

      When Turkish President/aspiring Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan landed at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport early Saturday morning, he declared the attempted coup against his government a failure, and a “gift from God.”

    • Again? Op-ed by Philippe Aigrain in the aftermath of the Nice attacks

      Yet another? But yet another what? One does not even know. Once more tens of people killed, many more injured. Once more, a human being has carried them over towards death and suffering in his trajectory of violence and self-destruction. And both ISIS and most western commentators rush to describe him as the soldier of a cause when one does not even know if and when he discovered it.

    • The political strategy for peace

      The success of peace requires not only the legal security of the agreements, but also, importantly, a grassroots political process that includes popular support. To date, the government and guerrillas have done little to win public support over the agreement. In fact, many critics have opposed the advances of the Negotiating Table in La Habana, and some, including former president Álvaro Uribe, have called for a “civil resistance” claiming that the agreement promotes impunity. Levels of citizen knowledge about the agreements are low, legitimacy and popular confidence of the peace process have decreased in the latest months, polarization continues to grow with post-paramilitary groups committing human rights abuses, and political strategies to encourage support are non-existent.

    • Mhairi Black on Trident

      Note that the government benches are almost empty. The people who bothered to be present and listen to the debate were overwhelmingly those who voted against Trident. With all Scotland’s MPs but one opposing, this is yet another reason to get a move on with Indyref2. I don’t share the criticism of the Tories for calling this debate and vote – it helpfully clarifies that the representatives of Scotland are treated with contempt, and that the Blairite majority in the Parliamentary Labour Party are in hock to arms industry interests.

    • Ryan Richardson and Siddhattha Gurung: Kurdish Autonomy, Under Siege

      On a hot Friday afternoon in April, hundreds gather at the House of Mourning to pay their respects to the fallen youth of the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır. Among the crowd are families and friends, neighbors and colleagues, municipal officials and local politicians, as well as leaders of the Kurdish movement and many of its most committed supporters. At the invitation of our hosts, we are here to witness the funeral of Yusuf, 19, one of hundreds of young Kurds killed during recent clashes with Turkish forces in the ancient neighborhood of Sur.

    • Fox, Gould, Werritty and Israel – Please write to your MP

      It is to me disgusting that a politician so thoroughly disgraced as Liam Fox should be back in power. Answers were blanked on the actual purpose of the Werritty connection, and I think collectively we should try to do something about that.

    • ‘Fraud’ Alleged in NYT’s MH-17 Report

      An amateur report alleging Russian doctoring of satellite photos on the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 case – a finding embraced by The New York Times – is denounced by a forensic expert as an “outright fraud,” reports Robert Parry.

    • Erdogan Unleashes Unprecedented Crackdown: Fires All University Deans; Suspends 21,000 Private School Teachers

      Over the weekend, after the initial reports of the purge unleashed by Erdogan against Turkey’s public, we previewed the upcoming, far more dangerous counter-coup as follows: “it was the next step that is the critical one: the one where Erdogan – having cracked down on his immediate military and legal opponents – took his crusade against everyone else, including the press and the educational system.”

    • Summer Convention Fun: Keep an Eye (Ear) Out for the LRAD

      The LRAD was first deployed for use in Iraq, and quickly found its way onto Navy and commercial ships sailing amongst Somali pirates. The bad boy is a sound cannon.

      The LRAD company prefers to label its product a tool to broadcast messages and pain-inducing “deterrent” tones over long distances. The device produces a sound that can be directed in a beam up to 30 degrees wide, and the military-grade LRAD 2000X can transmit at up to 162dB up to 5.5 miles away.

      Fun fact: A jet engine at 100 feet is 140dB. Sound at 180db will cause tissue damage.

      But of course the LRAD is non-lethal, so its maker says that anyone within a 100 meters of the device’s sound path will experience extreme pain. The version generally utilized by police departments (the LRAD 500X) is designed for short bursts of directed sound that cause severe headaches in anyone within a 300 meter range. Anyone within 15 meters of the device’s audio path can experience permanent hearing loss.

      Permanent hearing loss begins at 130dB, and if the device is turned up to 140dB, anyone within its path would not only suffer hearing loss, they could potentially lose their balance and be unable to move out of the path of the audio.

    • Civilian Death Toll From Coalition Airstrikes in Syria Could Be Single Largest in U.S.-Led War on ISIS

      Scores of civilians trapped in Islamic State-controlled territory in northern Syria were reportedly killed Tuesday by airstrikes from Western coalition aircraft. The reported death toll, potentially the highest ever to result from a coalition bombing in the international campaign against ISIS, continued to climb as The Intercept reached out to monitoring groups tracking operations in the area.

      The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 56 civilians were killed when their convoy of vehicles attempted to slip out of an area north of the city of Manbij in the predawn darkness, as U.S.-backed forces pushed forward in an increasingly bloody offensive in the area. In a brief phone interview, a representative from the Britain-based organization said that while coalition aircraft were believed to be responsible for the air raid, the group suspected it was a “100 percent mistake.”

      Airwars, a nonprofit that tracks claims of civilian casualties resulting from the international air campaign against ISIS, said incoming reports indicated the death toll may prove to be well over 100 civilians — potentially making it the largest single loss of civilian life resulting from coalition airstrikes since the U.S.-led campaign to destroy ISIS began nearly two years ago. Tuesday’s reports were the latest in a string of recent incidents in which coalition aircraft have been implicated in the deaths of civilians in the Manbij area.

      “Really these civilians are in a desperate situation,” Chris Woods, head of Airwars, told The Intercept. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

    • Chris Christie and Karl Rove’s US Attorney Project

      The Republicans were supposed to talk about how they plan to Make America Work Again last night. And I supposed Paul Ryan — and to a lesser extent Mitch McConnell, when he wasn’t being booed — presented a vision of how they think Republicans run the economy. That vision doesn’t actually resemble the protectionist big government approach Donald Trump has been running on. But given the revelation that Trump offered to let John Kasich run both domestic and foreign policy if he would be his VP candidate (Kasich was still reluctant), perhaps we should focus more on how Mike Pence wants to suffocate the economy.

      Instead, as most people have focused, Republicans continued to attack Hillary (Hillary continues to attack Trump, though I suspect she will focus somewhat more on policy next week than Republicans have thus far). Many people have unpacked Chris Christie’s rabble inciting witch hunt last night, but Dan Drezner backs his review of it with some data on the risks to democracy (click through to read all of, which is worth reading).

    • Senator Ron Johnson Lies About Hillary Clinton to Accuse Her of Dishonesty on Benghazi

      It has become an article of faith among Republicans that the anti-Islam video, which had sparked protests in Cairo in the hours before the attack in Benghazi, and across the Arab world in the days after it, had absolutely nothing to do with the killing of the Americans. Inside that bubble, carefully nurtured by Fox News, any suggestion that the offensive video — a trailer for a film biography of the prophet made to antagonize Muslims — acted as a catalyst for the assault by Islamist militants was part of a cover-up by the Obama administration.

      According to a subsequent investigation by New York Times reporters, however, “extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack” suggested that the violence was indeed “fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”

    • Turkey’s Nukes: A Sum of All Fears

      The post-coup chaos in Turkey is a reminder about the risk of leaving nuclear weapons in unstable regions where they serve no clear strategic purpose but present a clear and present danger, explains Jonathan Marshall.

    • 9/11: 28 Pages Later

      Why the long wait, and what do the 28 pages reveal?

      If we’re to believe the headlines in Saudi media (e.g. Al Arabiya) and mainstream American media (e.g. Time and the Washington Times) the big news is what they don’t reveal: A “smoking gun” connecting the government of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.

      If we’re to believe the 28 pages themselves, the big news is that they do, in fact, reveal a “smoking gun” connecting the government of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.

      Here’s the opening sentence from the newly released material: “While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected with the Saudi government.”

    • Military Regimes Shouldn’t be Recognized

      The military upheaval in Turkey, whose final consequences are yet to be seen, highlights a major weakness in worldwide efforts to promote democracy. This event underscores the need to establish binding international legal principles to ban the recognition of military regimes as a result of coups d’état. Establishment of such principles, and the creation of the legal mechanisms for applying them, would foster democracy throughout the world.

      The circumstances in Turkey mimic several similar situations in recent history: the coming to power of governments without support from the military. Once confronted with a threat to their political hegemony, the military either overthrow the civilian government or refuses to surrender power to democratically elected civilians.

      Overt recognition by Western democracies or implied recognition through ambivalent signs of disapproval have encouraged military officers to overthrow many constitutional governments freely chosen by the people. The military relinquish power only when forced by popular will, or when its own incapacity to govern has made its position untenable.

      This happened to the Greek junta after its debacle in Cyprus, to the Chilean regime under Augusto Pinochet and to the Argentine military after the Falklands conflict. New principles could be developed, however, that would automatically bar the recognition of such de facto regimes.

      Given the need to expand the role of the United Nations in keeping peace, the General Assembly and its International Law Commission could be called upon to draw up appropriate legislation. As the late Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold once said, the United Nations is “the most appropriate place for development and change of international law on behalf of the whole society of states.”

      Establishment of non-recognition of post coup d’état a universal principle raises some difficult practical questions. What about already established and recognized military regimes? These cases show the difficulties of applying the principle retroactively.

      But what if a country’s military forces stage a coup against an oppressive or corrupt civilian regime? An ousted civilian government that has been freely elected by the people should not be denied recognition in favor of a post-coup military regime unless the overthrown government was responsible for gross human rights violations. Further, after a coup, recognition should be withheld until another civilian government is chosen in free and democratic elections.

    • Should Police Use Bombs To Kill Criminals?

      In the wake of the two seemingly outrageous slayings of African American men by police in Minnesota and Louisiana and the equally heinous retaliatory killings of five police officers in Dallas by a black former Army Reservist, questions have been raised in all three cases about excessive police behavior.

    • US air strike in Syria kills nearly 60 civilians ‘mistaken for Isil fighters’

      A US air strike killed nearly 60 civilians, including children, in Syria on Tuesday after the coalition mistook them for Islamic State fighters.

      Some eight families were hit as they tried to flee fighting in their area, in one of the single deadliest strikes on civilians by the alliance since the start of its operations in the war-torn country.

      Pictures of the aftermath of the dawn strikes on the Isil-controlled village of Tokhar near Manbij in northern Syria showed the bodies of children as young as three under piles of rubble.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Prolific FOIA Requester Celebrates 50th Anniversary Of FOIA Law By Suing FBI Over Its Document Search Methods

      No better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act than filing a lawsuit claiming an agency is refusing to comply with it. FOIA enthusiast Ryan Shapiro has done exactly that, suing the DOJ [PDF] for the FBI’s continued refusal to perform anything more than a cursory search, using its most outdated software, for responsive records.

    • Justice department ‘uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests’

      Shapiro told the Guardian that the reason the DoJ gave for refusing to use its $425m Sentinel software to process Foia requests after ACS had failed to recover records was that a Sentinel search “would be needlessly duplicative of the FBI’s default ACS UNI index-based searches and wasteful of Bureau resources”.

    • Judge Tells DOJ Lawyers That A Search For FOIA Docs Requires More Than Chatting With A Couple Of Employees

      Jason Leopold is back in court (is he ever NOT there?) battling the NSA and the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) over the release of documents related to the NSA and FBI’s surveillance of federal and state judges. The two parties had already been told to do more looking around for responsive records by Judge Tanya Chutkan, who rejected their original request for summary judgment last July.

      The two agencies went back and performed another search. And still came up empty-handed.

      Let me rephrase that: the two agencies went back and performed another “search.” Here’s what that “search” actually entailed, as described in the opinion [PDF].

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Federal Agents Went Undercover To Spy on Anti-Fracking Movement, Emails Reveal

      When more than 300 protesters assembled in May at the Holiday Inn in Lakewood, Colorado — the venue chosen by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for an auction of oil and gas leases on public lands — several of the demonstrators were in fact undercover agents sent by law enforcement to keep tabs on the demonstration, according to emails obtained by The Intercept.

      The “Keep it in the Ground” movement, a broad effort to block the development of drilling projects, has rapidly gained traction over the last year, raising pressure on the Obama administration to curtail hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, and coal mining on federal public lands. In response, government agencies and industry groups have sharply criticized the activists in public, while quietly moving to track their activities.

      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. During the auction, both local law enforcement and federal agents went undercover among the protesters.

      The emails further show that police monitored Keep it in the Ground participating groups such as 350.org, Break Free Movement, Rainforest Action Network, and WildEarth Guardians, while relying upon intelligence gathered by Anadarko, one of the largest oil and gas producers in the region.

    • ‘World’s saddest polar bear’ exhibited in Chinese shopping centre

      More than 285,000 people have signed a petition calling for the closure of an aquarium in southern China that is home to an animal dubbed “the world’s saddest polar bear”.

      The lethargic bear, whose name is Pizza, is on show at an “ocean theme park” located inside the Grandview shopping centre in the city of Guangzhou.

      The aquarium made international headlines after its opening in early January with one Hong Kong-based animal rights charity denouncing it as a “horrifying” animal prison.

    • This Ridiculously Low Oil Spill Fine Is What’s Wrong With Environmental Enforcement

      Six years after spilling more than 27,000 barrels of oil into local rivers, Enbridge Energy Limited Partnership is finally facing the music: a $177 million settlement with the U.S. government.

      The music is a little soft.

      The settlement covers two spills, but one of them was a doozy. On July 25, 2010, an Enbridge pipeline ruptured, ultimately spilling 20,000 barrels of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River and becoming the largest ever on-shore tar sands oil spill. Tar sands oil, extracted primarily in Canada and piped into and across the United States, is heavy, thick, and mud-like. Unlike most other oils, it sinks, making it even more difficult to clean up. After the Kalamazoo spill, Enbridge had to dredge the river and then replant native vegetation. At the five-year mark of the spill, the river’s ecology had not fully returned.

  • Finance

    • What Donald Trump doesn’t get about ‘free trade’

      The future Republican presidential nominee is right to criticize so-called ‘trade’ deals like NAFTA, but he does so for the wrong reasons.

    • The Republican Platform’s Surprise Revival of Glass-Steagall Legislation

      The last-minute decision to include in the Republican platform a call to restore the firewall between commercial and investment banking comes as a surprise, because Donald Trump himself has never publicly addressed or endorsed such a reform in his year-long presidential run.

      Trump did once say at a debate in New Hampshire, “nobody knows banking better than I do,” but a review of the transcripts of all twelve Republican debates shows that he never endorsed restoring Glass-Steagall, legislation first passed in 1933. Websites devoted to detailing Trump’s positions find no record of him having any opinion on the Depression-era law. The issues pages of Trump’s presidential website steer clear of anything related to banks or finance.

    • The Corporate Liberal in America

      Sound familiar? King’s white moderate and Marx’s ostensible friend is our corporate liberal. Same spin, different decade. The corporate liberal is an embodiment of the idea that political parties are the graveyards of movements. Hedges himself wrote a book called, “Death of the Liberal Class” five years ago. It should’ve been the elegy before the interment of the Democratic Party as a serious option in electoral politics. Yet here we are, about to anoint another corporate liberal to the highest seat in the land. In that case, consider this article yet another epitaph awaiting its headstone. Let’s hope it’s not a long wait. Voices like Sawant’s and the momentum of movements like BLM give us reason to think it won’t be.

    • What’s The Rent? NYC Housing Officials Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

      The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is flouting a rent-reporting requirement for apartments built under the city’s single biggest housing tax break. Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn’t seem to mind.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Exclusive: Trump could seek new law to purge government of Obama appointees

      If he wins the presidency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would seek to purge the federal government of officials appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama and could ask Congress to pass legislation making it easier to fire public workers, Trump ally, Chris Christie, said on Tuesday.

    • Trump Supporters Accused of Bullying Delegates Who Don’t Fall In Line

      Some Republican convention delegates are complaining that pro-Trump thugs harassed and threatened them for not falling into line behind the nominee.

      This is not a new phenomenon; there’s even a Delegate Defense Hotline set up by the Ted Cruz campaign in April that bullied delegates can call.

      Kera Birkeland, a delegate from Utah, said she was confronted by two women in the bathroom at the Quicken Loans Arena Monday night. “They yelled at me, called me names,” she wrote on Facebook. “They said I should die. They said the police should be pulled from the Utah delegation and we should all die. They never touched me. They did not say they would kill me. They just said I should die.”

      Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, joked about the incident on Tuesday. “I think I have a pretty good sense of what’s going on in this convention, but I haven’t gone in to the bathrooms yet,” he told reporters.

      Birkeland was part of a group of delegates who unsuccessfully called for a roll call vote on the convention’s rules on Monday – widely seen as the last gasp of a #Nevertrump movement. Birkeland initially supported Rand Paul for president, then Ted Cruz.

      Tommy Valentine, a 22-year-old Virginia delegate, told ThinkProgress that representatives from the Trump campaign threatened him about the petition for a roll call vote: “I had one Trump staffer who came to me and said, ‘When Trump becomes president, he will remember,’” Valentine said. “They were going around to the delegates who would sign the documents intimidating them and telling them to take their names off it.”

    • Trump Adviser Calls For Hillary Clinton’s Execution

      RNC delegates and convention-goers can buy merchandise calling Hillary Clinton a “bitch” and a “tramp.” On both Monday and Tuesday, the floor has broken out in chants of “lock her up!” Listening to the speaker after speaker spend a significant chunk of their time denouncing Clinton, one might be led to believe hating on Hillary is an official plank in the Republican Party’s platform.

    • G.O.P. Formally Nominates Donald Trump for President
    • RNC Headliners Avoid Talking About Jobs and Donald Trump on Day to Talk About Jobs and Trump

      Tuesday was “Make America Work Again” day at the Republican National Convention, which also happened to coincide with the party formally nominating Donald Trump as its nominee.

      But neither jobs nor Trump got much attention as a grab-bag of Republican headliners Tuesday spent most of their time demonizing Hillary Clinton and talking about themselves without offering an affirmative case for the nominee or a concrete economic policy agenda.

      The keynoter, House Speaker Paul Ryan, spoke nearly 1,500 words, but mentioned Trump’s name just twice. Promising he’ll be standing alongside “Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump” at next year’s State of the Union address, Ryan spent the lion’s share of his time castigating the Democratic Party instead.

    • Will Clinton VP Pick Be ‘Pronounced Middle Finger’ to Millions Who Voted for Bernie?

      Appropriate progressive response to inadequate choice, says one Democratic delegate, ‘would be expressions of outrage and nonviolent protest, from the convention floor in Philadelphia to communities across the country.’

    • GOP Crazy Talk Comes to Cleveland

      The Republican National Convention has been an orgy of crazy talk – mixed in with some plagiarism by Donald Trump’s wife and a vast kangaroo court convicting Hillary Clinton – a truly remarkable spectacle, as Michael Winship describes.

    • Donald Trump’s Most Idiotic Moments
    • The Coronation of a Charlatan

      Years from now, bright-eyed children will look up at Grandma or Grandpa and ask, “Where were you when they nominated Donald Trump?” Far too many prominent Republicans will have to hang their heads in shame.

      As the garish imperial coronation in Cleveland reaches its climax, there will be much commentary—some, no doubt, from me—about fleeting events. Did So-and-so’s speech help Trump or hurt him? Did one line of attack against Hillary Clinton seem more or less promising than another? All of this is news, but we must not lose sight of the big picture: The “Party of Lincoln” is about to nominate for president a man who is dangerously unfit for the office.

      Trump is a brilliant showman, no question about that. His life’s work has been self-aggrandizement, not real estate, and all those years of practice served him well when he turned to politics. He knows how to work a crowd. He understands television and social media. He dominated and vanquished a field of experienced campaigners as if they were mere apprentices.

    • Boris Johnson grilled over past ‘outright lies’ at uneasy press conference

      Boris Johnson was embarrassingly forced on to the back foot during his first London press conference as foreign secretary on Tuesday as he was repeatedly pressed to explain his past “outright lies” and insults about world leaders, including describing the US president as part-Kenyan and hypocritical.

      Standing alongside John Kerry, the US secretary of state, Johnson claimed his remarks had been misconstrued, that his past journalism had been taken out of context, and world leaders he had met since his appointment fully understood his past remarks.

    • A Lens on the RNC: Dispatches From Day 1 of the Convention (Photos)

      What happens outside Quicken Loans Arena during the 2016 Republican National Convention may be more interesting than what happens inside the star-spangled halls.

      Photojournalist Michael Nigro is in Cleveland to provide Truthdig with a view of noteworthy moments from around the convention centers, where protesters and activists have gathered to express their views.

    • Inside The Delegate Revolt At The RNC

      Boos, screams of “no,” and cries of “shame” rang throughout the Republican National Convention’s arena Monday afternoon as party leaders rejected demands from at least ten states to allow a vote on the rules that bind delegates to vote for Donald Trump.

      The delegates leading the eleventh-hour rebellion, including Colorado’s Kendal Unruh, were furious. She told ThinkProgress minutes after the vote that she felt cheated by her own party and its nominee.

    • Anti-Trump Dead-Enders Hit a Dead End

      Party divisions over Donald Trump reached the floor of the Republican Convention on Monday afternoon as anti-Trump delegates attempted a complicated procedural maneuver: petitioning the convention’s chairman to force a roll call vote over the acceptance of the convention’s rules.

      It was an act of desperation.

      “I think Trump is the absolute worst candidate that the Republican Party could put forth,” said Craig Licciardi of Flint, an alternate delegate from Texas who said that he supported the roll call vote. (Nearly half the delegates attending the convention are technically “alternates,” who don’t get an actual vote on the floor.)

      Like many from his state’s delegation, he wore a Lone Star shirt and a cowboy hat. “He’s a Democrat in disguise,” Licciardi said. “I would hope that everything he says has a measure of truth to it, but it was only a few years ago that he was praising Hillary and Bill as his good friends, and good people.”

    • The Long, Sad, Corrupted Devolution of the GOP, From Eisenhower to Donald Trump

      The Intercept and our partners at AJ+ produced the video above documenting the GOP’s 60-year-long de-evolution

      The Republican Party is poised to nominate a presidential candidate who has built his platform on promises to ban a billion people from entering the United States based on their religious faith and build a gigantic wall south of the border.

      But Donald J. Trump is not an accident. The GOP has in the last 40 years relentlessly devolved away from addressing the needs of ordinary people, catering instead to extreme ideologies and the wealthiest donors.

      Rather than addressing pressing problems like income inequality and climate change, the modern GOP focuses instead on cutting taxes for the super-wealthy, expanding earth-killing carbon extraction, and endless war.

      But it wasn’t always this way. Sixty years ago, the Republican Party was advocating for civil rights and gender equality, a stronger welfare state, and to protect the environment. This is the story of the Republican Party that once was.

    • American Pravda: Relying Upon Maoist Professors of Cultural Studies

      Last week America suffered the loss of Sydney Schanberg, widely regarded as one of the greatest journalists of his generation. Yet as I’d previously noted, when I read his long and glowing obituary in the New York Times, I was shocked to see that it included not a single word concerning the greatest story of his career, which had been the primary focus of the last quarter century of his research and writing.

      The cynical abandonment of hundreds of American POWs at the end of the Vietnam War must surely rank as one of the most monumental scandals of modern times, and the determined effort of the mainstream media to maintain this enormous governmental cover-up for over four decades raises serious doubts about whether we can believe what our newspapers report about anything else.

      A couple of mainstream academics, one liberal and one conservative, whose names would be recognized as those of prominent public intellectuals, dropped me notes strongly applauding my effort to reopen the POW controversy and help get the truth out at last.

    • GOP Leans In To Misogyny During Convention

      Each day of the Republican National Convention, as tens of thousands of delegates, reporters, and curious onlookers pushed and shoved their way down a single narrow street leading to the arena’s main stage, a group of vendors hawked t-shirts and buttons attacking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

    • R.I.P., GOP?

      The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions.

      The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected the faith that Henry Clay and his admirer Abraham Lincoln had in the federal government’s ability to invest in fostering economic growth and expanding educational opportunity. Its partisans embodied what John C. Calhoun, slavery’s chief ideological defender, described disdainfully as “the national impulse.” It was, in fact, a good impulse.

    • Trump-Loving KKK Leader: Jewish Speechwriter Sabotaged Melania Trump

      In the last 24 hours, the Donald Trump campaign has offered a number of dubious excuses for why Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention’s opening night appeared to lift passages of First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic Convention speech word-for-word. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who has enthusiastically endorsed Trump, offered a novel explanation: the Jewish agenda.

      Trump initially refused to disavow the notorious white supremacist’s endorsement, eventually distancing himself from Duke after pressure from the party establishment. But Duke has continued to vociferously defend Trump against all accusations of racism, generally by blaming the Jews.

    • Melania Trump Remarks on Values Plagiarized From Michelle Obama

      A central portion of Melania Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Monday night, about the core values her parents instilled in her and her sister as children, seems to have been lifted almost word for word from the speech Michelle Obama gave on the first night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

    • GOP Platform Calls for Elimination of Almost All Campaign Finance Laws

      A key part of Donald Trump’s campaign to become the Republican presidential nominee was based on claiming to self-fund his campaign while calling his opponents “puppets” of big contributors. But the 2016 Republican platform takes some of the most extreme positions on money in politics, measures that would force almost all politicians to seek out their own personal puppet masters.

      First, the GOP platform advocates “raising or repealing contribution limits” on donations directly to politicians.

      Currently individuals can give only $2,700 per election directly to a candidate. Primaries count as separate elections, so you can give Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s campaigns $5,400 – half for the primary and half for the general elections.

      Thanks to Citizens United and related rulings, you can also — if you can afford to — give unlimited amounts to Super PACs that are theoretically uncoordinated with campaigns.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • GCHQ and Leamington charity aim to inspire girls to take up a career in cyber security [Ed: Today's femmewashing]
    • Surveillance, power and communication

      Algorithms make digitally mediated surveillance or watching over technically very easy. Applications can support and mitigate the damage of disasters, they can help protect people in public spaces, they can help signal health risks and in that sense, they combat disease. They help in monitoring climate change. Algorithms are being used to help companies to boost profits and countries are (in some cases) experiencing economic growth as a result – that is the claim and it can be verified. Algorithms also of course support sousveillance or undersight as Steve Mann and others call it; and so algorithmic based watching from below also supports a radical politics of resistance.

    • What Could Go Wrong With Asking Teachers To Monitor Kids for ‘Extremist’ Beliefs?

      The FBI wants to implement a program to counter extremism in U.S. schools that’s similar to a disastrous one in the U.K.

      Are these the tell-tale signs of kids at risk of committing violence: An 8-year-old who wore a t-shirt saying he wanted to be like a seventh-century Muslim leader? A 17-year-old who sought to draw attention to the water shortage in Gaza by handing out leaflets? A 4-year-old who drew a picture of his dad slicing a vegetable?

      Teachers and school officials in the United Kingdom thought so, and they referred these children for investigation as potential terrorists. They were interrogated by U.K. law enforcement. They’re likely subject to ongoing monitoring, with details of their childhoods maintained in secret government files potentially indefinitely.

      A report released last week by Rights Watch (UK) highlights these and other children’s experiences under a U.K. countering violent extremism (CVE) program known as Prevent. Prevent imposes a legal obligation on schools to implement policies assessing whether children have “extremist” views or are at risk of engaging in terrorism, and to “intervene as appropriate.” Intervention may include referring the child to a related program in which panels of police officers, teachers, and other government employees identify children they think are vulnerable to terrorist recruitment.

      Why should any of this concern Americans? Because the FBI wants to do something a little bit too close for comfort in U.S. schools, and American schoolchildren may come under similar suspicion and scrutiny.

    • France orders Microsoft to stop collecting excessive user data

      The French data protection authority on Wednesday ordered Microsoft to stop collecting excessive data on users of its Windows 10 operating system and serving them personalized ads without their consent.

      The French data authority, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), said the US company had three months to stop tracking browsing by users so that Windows apps and third-party apps can offer them targeted advertising without their consent, failing which it could initiate a sanctions procedure.

      A number of EU data protection authorities created a contact group to investigate Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system following its launch in July 2015, the French privacy watchdog said.

    • Now You Can Hide Your Smart Home on the Darknet

      The privacy software Tor has aided everything from drug dealing marketplaces to whistleblowing websites in evading surveillance on the darknet. Now that same software can be applied to a far more personal form of security: keeping hackers out of your toaster.

      On Wednesday, the privacy-focused non-profit Guardian Project, a partner of the Tor Project that maintains and develops the Tor anonymity network, announced a new technique it’s developed to apply Tor’s layers of encryption and network stealth to protecting so-called “Internet of things” or “smart home” devices. That growing class of gadgets, ranging from refrigerators to lightbulbs to security cameras, are connected to the Internet to make possible new forms of remote management and automation. They also, as the security research community has repeatedly demonstrated, enable a new breed of over-the-Internet attacks, such as the rash of hackers harassing infants via baby monitors or the potential for hackers to steal your Gmail password from your fridge.

    • White privilege protects Taylor Swift’s Instagram while racist slurs force Leslie Jones off Twitter

      Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift had an exhausting day on the internet on Monday. In the immediate aftermath of Kardashian releasing video footage confirming that Swift did, in fact, have a conversation with Kanye West about her name drop in his song “Famous,” public opinion has taken a dramatic turn against Swift.

    • Instagram Protects Taylor Swift While Twitter Lets Racist Trolls Attack Leslie Jones

      Censorship on social media is a tricky issue. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram have to balance community policing with freedom of expression. When does bullying cross the line? Should hate speech be banned? And who gets to decide? It’s often a gray area — except when it’s black and white.
      Since Kim Kardashian uploaded snippets on Sunday night of Kanye’s conversation with Taylor Swift — you know, the phone call about “Famous” that Swift insisted never happened — Kimye supporters have been hard-core trolling Swift’s Instagram response to the debacle. Commenters have been calling her a liar, a fake, and things much nastier than that — or simply resorting to the snake emoji, as inspired by this tweet of Kardashian’s. Not nice — but nothing egregious or unusual, either.

    • Tor Veteran Lucky Green Exits and Withdraws Critical ‘Tonga’ Node and Relays
    • Health Gadgets and Apps Outpace Privacy Protections, Report Finds

      The federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA has not kept pace with wearable fitness trackers, mobile health apps and online patient communities, leaving a gaping hole in regulations that needs to be filled, according to a much-delayed government report released today.

      The report, which was supposed to be complete in 2010, does not include specific recommendations for fixing the problem, even though Congress asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide them.

    • Russia Asks For The Impossible With Its New Surveillance Laws

      It’s been a rough month for Internet freedom in Russia. After it breezed through the Duma, President Putin signed the “Yarovaya package” into law—a set of radical “anti-terrorism” provisions drafted by ultra-conservative United Russia politician Irina Yarovaya, together with a set of instructions on how to implement the new rules. Russia’s new surveillance laws include some of Bad Internet Legislation’s greatest hits, such as mandatory data retention and government backdoors for encrypted communications—policies that EFF has opposed in every country where they’ve been proposed.

      As if that wasn’t scary enough, under the revisions to the criminal code, Russians can now be prosecuted for “failing to report a crime.” Citizens now risk a year in jail for simply not telling the police about suspicions they might have about future terrorist acts.

      But some of the greatest confusion has come from Internet service providers and other telecommunication companies. These organizations now face impossible demands from the Russian state. Now they can be ordered to retain every byte of data that they transmit, including video, telephone calls, text messages, web traffic, and email for six months—a daunting and expensive task that requires the kind of storage capacity that’s usually associated with NSA data centers in Utah. Government access to this data no longer requires a warrant. Carriers must keep all metadata for three years; ISPs one year. Finally, any online service (including social networks, email, or messaging services) that uses encrypted data is now required to permit the Federal Security Service (FSB) to access and read their services’ encrypted communications, including providing any encryption keys.

    • Deep Dive: EFF’s New Wordlists for Random Passphrases

      Randomly-generated passphrases offer a major security upgrade over user-chosen passwords. Estimating the difficulty of guessing or cracking a human-chosen password is very difficult. It was the primary topic of my own PhD thesis and remains an active area of research. (One of many difficulties when people choose passwords themselves is that people aren’t very good at making random, unpredictable choices.)

    • The Things We Need to Know

      The national security state steps out of bounds.

      [...]

      After 9/11, Hayden and a small group of White House officials, intelligence officers, and lawyers secretly put in place a warrantless wiretapping program whose purported legality relied on radical exceptions to both the Fourth Amendment and a federal statute that strictly governs foreign-intelligence surveillance on domestic soil. Even as he defends the program, codenamed “Stellarwind,” as a “logical response” to 9/11 and “not the product of demented cryptologic minds,” Hayden calls it “the agency’s edgiest undertaking in its history.” (He may be right, but he devotes just five lines to describing the program’s most legitimate competitor for that title: the vast domestic spying, detailed in the 1975 and ’76 Church Committee Reports, that he calls a “scandal” in scare quotes. He mentions government surveillance of “the likes of” Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and Benjamin Spock; he leaves out a host of legislators and civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr.) Situating the controversy Stellarwind ignited, Hayden writes my favorite sentence in the book: “Domestic intelligence has always been countercultural in America.”

    • Pokemon Go Cheat Fools GPS with Software Defined Radio

      Using Xcode to spoof GPS locations in Pokemon Go (like we saw this morning) isn’t that much of a hack, and frankly, it’s not even a legit GPS spoof. After all, it’s not like we’re using an SDR to spoof the physical GPS signal to cheat Pokemon Go.

    • DOJ Pushes Out Legislation Proposal To Undercut Microsoft Case Decision About Overseas Searches

      No sooner had the ink dried on the Second Circuit Appeals Court decision regarding Microsoft and its overseas servers than new legislation designed to undercut the court’s finding has been printed up by the DOJ and presented to the administration.

      Microsoft successfully argued that the US government couldn’t force it to unlock a server in Dublin, Ireland, so it could rummage around for evidence. Nor could the DOJ force the company to act on its behalf, performing a search of its overseas servers for documents the US government couldn’t access otherwise.

      Since that decision obviously just won’t do, the DOJ has presented proposed legislation [PDF] that would alter existing Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) so the agency can do the very thing a court just said it couldn’t do.

      The details are discussed in, um, detail over at the Lawfare blog by none other than a former DOJ lawyer (David Kris). Needless to say, the post skews towards “supportive,” but the analysis is thorough and offers some excellent insight on what the DOJ hopes to open up — and what it’s willing to concede in return for this new power.

    • Former Marine Dad Blames Son’s Beating Death on PTSD
    • Md. dad who killed adopted son sentenced to 12 years in prison
    • Former NSA Employee Sentenced for Adopted Son’s Death
    • Former NSA official gets 12 years in death of adopted son

      A former division chief for the National Security Agency, who admitted that he hurled his 3-year-old adopted son against a wall in his Maryland home, was sentenced to 12 years in prison Tuesday for the boy’s death.

    • War veteran gets 12 years in prison for brutally killing three-year-old adopted son
    • PTSD claim helps deadly dad get low end sentence
    • Former NSA official sentenced to 12 years in death of adopted son

      Much of the six-hour hearing dealt with O’Callaghan’s mental state. He had served tours in Kosovo and Iraq as a Marine, saw the dead bodies of children, and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, testimony showed. His attorney, Steven McCool, described that history as a mitigating factor in the crime.

    • Theresa May wrong to pass spy law, and DRIPA opinion proves it—MP says

      Politicians, lawyers, and civil rights groups have slammed the UK government’s present and future surveillance laws in light of the advocate general’s opinion on the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA)—which said that Theresa May’s emergency spy law is legal if strong safeguards are in place.

      [...]

      Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson—who, alongside Tory MP and the government’s new Brexit chief David Davis—brought the original legal action against the UK’s DRIPA legislation, said: “This legal opinion shows the prime minister was wrong to pass legislation when she was home secretary that allows the state to access huge amounts of personal data without evidence of criminality or wrongdoing.”

      Human rights group Liberty, which represented Watson in the courts, said that if the CJEU judges agree with the advocate general’s opinion, “the decision could stop the government’s fatally flawed Investigatory Powers Bill in its tracks and mark a watershed moment in the fight for a genuinely effective, lawful, and targeted system of surveillance that keeps British people safe and respects their rights.”

    • Germany Wants To Put Black Boxes In Self-driving Cars, Just Like Airplanes

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • There Will Be No Second American Revolution: The Futility of an Armed Revolt

      America is a ticking time bomb.

      All that remains to be seen is who—or what—will set fire to the fuse.

      We are poised at what seems to be the pinnacle of a manufactured breakdown, with police shooting unarmed citizens, snipers shooting police, global and domestic violence rising, and a political showdown between two presidential candidates equally matched in unpopularity.

      The preparations for the Republican and Democratic national conventions taking place in Cleveland and Philadelphia—augmented by a $50 million federal security grant for each city—provide a foretaste of how the government plans to deal with any individual or group that steps out of line: they will be censored, silenced, spied on, caged, intimidated, interrogated, investigated, recorded, tracked, labeled, held at gunpoint, detained, restrained, arrested, tried and found guilty.

      For instance, anticipating civil unrest and mass demonstrations in connection with the Republican Party convention, Cleveland officials set up makeshift prisons, extra courtrooms to handle protesters, and shut down a local university in order to house 1,700 riot police and their weapons. The city’s courts are preparing to process up to 1,000 people a day. Additionally, the FBI has also been conducting “interviews” with activists in advance of the conventions to discourage them from engaging in protests.

    • Court Says There’s No Remedy For Person Whose Vehicle Was Subjected To Civil Forfeiture After An Illegal Search

      A bizarre case comes out of the Texas court system — landing squarely in the middle of a legal Bermuda Triangle where illegal searches meet civil asset forfeiture… and everything is still somehow perfectly legal. (via FourthAmendment.com)

      The facts of the case: police officers arrested Miguel Herrera and seized his 2004 Lincoln Navigator. An inventory search of the vehicle uncovered drugs and the state moved to seize the vehicle itself as “contraband” using civil (rather than criminal — this is important) asset forfeiture. Herrera argued that the stop itself was illegal and anything resulting from it — the drugs and the civil seizure of the vehicle — should be suppressed.

      The Supreme Court of Texas examines the facts of the case, along with the applicable statutes, and — after discarding a US Supreme Court decision that would have found in Herrera’s favor — decides there’s nothing he can do to challenge the seizure. He can’t even move to suppress the evidence uncovered following the illegal stop — the same search that led to the state seizing his vehicle under civil forfeiture statutes.

    • FBI, Police ‘Visited’ Activists’ Homes Ahead of the Republican National Convention

      In another step towards the fascist state Donald Trump has warm dreams envisioning, FBI agents and Cleveland police officers “visited” the homes of local activists in an attempt to gather intelligence on possible planned demonstrations surrounding the Republican National Convention.

    • Republican Congressman Steve King Sets White Supremacist Tone in Cleveland

      Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, insisted on Monday that there was nothing wrong with the lack of diversity at the Republican National Convention since, he said, members of other races had contributed relatively little to human civilization.

      King’s literal assertion of white supremacy, in response to criticism of the party by the Esquire blogger Charlie Pierce, came during a live appearance on MSNBC, and seemed to stun the host, Chris Hayes, as well as Pierce and April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks’ Washington bureau chief.

    • Amid Unrest, South Sudanese Journalist Arrested

      Alfred Taban, a prominent South Sudanese journalist and editor-in-chief of the Juba Monitor, was arrested by government national security service agents on Saturday, according to the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project (DefendDefenders). His arrest reportedly stemmed from his recent editorial calling for the removal of South Sudan’s president Salva Kiir and his first vice president Riek Machar, following a new round of bloodletting in South Sudan’s long-running civil war.

      “What Alfred wrote was within the constitutional right (freedom of expression), it is not an offense,” Edmund Yakani, the executive director of Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, a civil society organization that tracks the harassment of journalists, told The Intercept by email.

    • The dangerous denial of dangerous instincts

      Power-seeking demagogues appeal, unknowingly, to our dangerous instinct to fear and hate rival groups: unknowingly, partly because the scientific community denies the existence of instinct.

    • Puerto Rican Police Officials Find Out They Can’t Force Officers to Pray or Demote Them When They Refuse

      It’s really simple: Government officials cannot punish subordinates for refusing to pray.

      How does a 13-year veteran of the Puerto Rico Police Department go from being a patrol officer to washing police cars? In the case of Officer Alvin Marrero-Méndez, all it took was refusing to participate in his boss’s official Christian prayers. After Officer Marrero-Méndez, an atheist, objected to the unlawful practice and declined to join his colleagues in prayer, he was demeaned by his supervisors, stripped of his gun, and effectively demoted to a messenger and car-washer.

      In 2013, the ACLU and ACLU of Puerto Rico filed a federal lawsuit against Officer Marrero-Méndez’s supervisors. Today, ruling against the supervisors, a federal appeals court affirmed the obvious: The government cannot punish someone for refusing to pray, and officials who violate this basic constitutional principle can be held liable in court for their conduct.

      The defendants had argued that they should be immune from liability because, according to them, the law at the time was not clearly established. But as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit explained today, “If these actions do not establish religious coercion, we would be hard-pressed to find what would.”

    • Police officer among three stabbed as Hyde Park water fight turns ugly

      One police officer was stabbed and another injured after a water fight in London’s Hyde Park on the hottest day of the year turned violent.

      Two other people suffered stab wounds in addition to the police officer as the park descended into a “war zone”.

    • Hyde Park disorder – two police officers injured and two others stabbed
    • Security, Territory and Population Part 2: Initial Discussion of Security

      The first lecture in the series Foucault calls Security, Territory and Population is primarily a discussion of security. Instead of a definition, Foucault gives two sets of examples. The first group involves penal statutes. In the simplest case, there is a prohibited practice (you shall not steal) and a punishment (amputation). In the second, the disciplinary case, the prohibition and the punishment are present, but in a more complex context, including a system of supervisions, inspections and checks to identify the likelihood that a person will commit a crime; and instead of a spectacular punishment like amputation or banishment, there are incarceration and efforts at transforming the person. In the third case, the first two remain in place, but we add a supervisory regime of statistics and other efforts to understand the problem created by the prohibited practice and to set up mechanisms that are cost-effective in trying to keep the prohibited acts at a tolerable level with cost-benefit analysis and other constructs.

      The second set of examples concerns illness. In the Middle Ages, leprosy was dealt with using a strict protocol of separation. A bit later, the Plague was treated with a robust series of quarantines, inspections and other regulatory steps to prevent spread. In the third case, there is smallpox, treated with inoculations, so that the crucial questions are the effectiveness of the vaccine, the modes of insuring widespread inoculation, and other more formal statistical understandings.

    • The choice before the Labour party

      Underlying this question for the party was a question for the country as a whole, the fundamental and perennial question, ‘who is to be master?’ Is society to be dominated by a few hundred thousand bankers, industrialists and landowners? Or will the whole nation come to comprehend and control its economic policy and ‘distribute the product of its labours in accordance with some generally recognised principles of justice?’

    • Brazil’s Largest Newspaper Commits Major Journalistic Fraud to Boost Interim President Temer

      One of the looming mysteries during the last several months of Brazil’s political crisis (as The Intercept has repeatedly noted) has been the complete absence of polling data from the country’s largest media outlets and polling firms. The lower house voted on April 17 — more than three months ago — to send to the Senate impeachment charges against democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff, which resulted in the temporary installation of her vice president, Michel Temer, as “interim president.”

      Since then, there had been no published polls from Datafolha — the polling firm used by Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de.S Paulo — asking Brazilians if they favor Dilma’s impeachment, if they favor the impeachment of Temer, and/or if they want new elections to choose a new president. The last Datafolha poll prior to the impeachment vote was on April 9, and it found that 60 percent favored Dilma’s impeachment, while 58 percent favored the impeachment of Temer. It also found that 60 percent wanted Temer to resign after Dilma was impeached, and 79 percent favored new elections once they both left.

    • Former STL Cardinals Scouting Director Gets Jail Time For Illegally Accessing Astros Scouting Database

      If you’ll recall, early on this year we wrote about the very strange story in which the at-the-time scouting director for the St. Louis Cardinals, Chris Correa, used the old passwords of a former employee who had since taken a job with the Houston Astros to break into the opposing team’s scouting database. The actions were fairly brazen, leading many to wonder how in the world Correa thought he was going to get away with this. The government charged him under the CFAA, to which Correa pleaded guilty. At the time, I concluded the post guessing that Correa, given his standing and the fact that he isn’t named Aaron Swartz, would get off with minimal if any jail time.

    • Cardinals Employee Sentenced to Almost 4 Years in Prison for Guessing a Password

      Christopher Correa, the former scouting director for Major League Baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, has been sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for guessing the password of a Houston Astros manager.

    • Rudy Giuliani Brags About Treating All Muslims Like Criminal Suspects

      In his grab-the-pitchforks address to the Republican National Convention on Monday night, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani insisted the enemy wasn’t “most of Islam,” just “Islamic extremist terrorism.”

      But in an interview with The Intercept on the convention floor Tuesday night, Giuliani enthusiastically defended policies that treat all Muslims like criminal suspects.

      Asked whether he supports Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s proposals to have police spy on mosques, Giuliani replied “I was the mayor who put police officers in mosques, in New York and New Jersey.”

      Giuliani even claimed credit for a longer history of police surveillance of New York area mosques than is widely known, predating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “We did it for the eight years I was mayor,” he said. Giuliani was mayor from 1994 through December 2001.

      “After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremist terrorists from New Jersey, I did it in early January of 1994.”

      After the 9/11 attacks, the New York Police Department launched a now well-documented but then-secret program of spying on every mosque within a 100-mile radius of New York City, including in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England. The department acknowledged in 2012 court testimony that the program had never generated an investigative lead and in 2014, Mayor Bill De Blasio shut down the program’s most controversial unit.

    • Cleveland Police Swarm Protestors Brandishing Tennis Balls

      Dozens of police officers swarmed protestors from the activist group CodePink outside a main entrance to the Republican National Convention Tuesday, because they were holding tennis balls.

      In June, the City of Cleveland added tennis balls to its list of prohibited items inside a 3.3 square mile “event zone,” surrounding the Quicken Loans Arena. Other prohibited items included tape, rope, bike locks, and any stepstool that could be used to address a crowd. But the prohibition did not apply to guns – meaning that convention attendees and onlookers are allowed to openly carry firearms, including assault weapons.

      Cleveland Police requested that Ohio Gov. John Kasich suspend open carry laws inside the “event zone,” but he denied the request.

    • Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Long Nightmare at Guantánamo Is Finally Coming to an End

      After 14 years, the author of ‘Guantánamo Diary’ has been cleared for release from indefinite detention by the government.

      After 14 long years languishing at Guantánamo without charge or trial, Mohamedou Slahi has finally been cleared for release.

      Today the Periodic Review Board — a panel of national security, intelligence, and other officials — made that decision after determining that Slahi poses no significant threat to the United States. The government of his native Mauritania has said that it would welcome him home.

      Slahi is the author of the best-selling memoir “Guantánamo Diary,” and he appeared before the Periodic Review Board on June 2. We provided the PRB with a slew of evidence and support for Mohamedou’s release. We especially appreciate the letter of support from a former U.S. military guard at Guantánamo who was assigned to Slahi for 10 months, and another support letter from former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions, Col. Morris Davis.

      A campaign to free Slahi spearheaded by the ACLU has gathered major support both in the U.S. and abroad. The ACLU and Change.org have collected more than 100,000 signatures calling for his release. High-profile supporters of the petition include Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Roger Waters. In the U.K., several members of Parliament signed a letter urging the British government to call on the U.S. to release Slahi.

    • “Guantánamo Diary” Author Cleared for Release After 14-Year Imprisonment

      An interagency review board has determined that Guantánamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi poses no threat to the United States and has recommended that he be released, setting the bestselling author on the path to be reunited with his family.

      Slahi was arrested in his native Mauritania in 2001, and was held and tortured in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Jordan before being secreted to Guantánamo, an odyssey he recounted in a memoir, Guantánamo Diary, which became a bestseller last year. He has been imprisoned for over 14 years without being charged with a crime.

      In early June, Slahi made his case to the Periodic Review Board as part of a sort of parole process instituted by the Obama administration to evaluate the cases of the remaining men at Guantanamo to determine if they might be safely transferred to another country.

      At that hearing, Slahi’s advocates, including his lawyer and two representatives from the military, described his plans to continue writing and to start a small business, and noted the strong network of family and other supporters who could help him. They spoke to his unusual language skills and warm relationship with his lawyers and even the guards assigned to him. The military representatives described him as “an advocate for peace,” and stated that they were “certain that Mohamedou’s intentions after Guantánamo are genuine, and that he possesses sound judgment, and that he is good for his word.” One former guard submitted a letter attesting that he “would be pleased to welcome [Slahi] into my home.” (In keeping with the general secrecy of proceedings at Guantánamo, Slahi was not allowed speak during the open portion of the review, and he declined to have his own statement from the closed session made public.)

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • La Quadrature du Net answers to BEREC EU consulation on Net Neutrality

      Today ends the BEREC consultation on Net Neutrality. This consultation aimed at consulting the people on the guidelines clarifying the implementation of the telecom regulation1. The version sent by La Quadrature du Net is the one written by the FDN Federation, we believe this answer is appropriate and we support its provisions.

    • Europe Builds a Network for the Internet of Things. Will the Devices Follow?

      With much industry fanfare last month, Dutch telco KPN announced that it had completed nationwide coverage of the Netherlands in a wireless Internet of things network. Like a traditional cellular network, but with far lower costs and energy requirements, KPN’s network can connect sensors monitoring everything from rail switches at Utrecht Central station to depth sounders at the Port of Rotterdam and baggage handling at Schiphol Airport.

    • Handover of internet control to ICANN now officially blocked by Republican policy

      The planned transition of the internet’s critical technical functions from the US government to a technical body may come under further attack after the Republican Party officially agreed to block it on Monday.

      The Republican Platform for 2016 [PDF] was formally approved during a chaotic first day of the party’s national convention in Cleveland, and among its 66 pages of policy positions is its stance on “Protecting Internet Freedom.”

      In contrast to most of the document, the effort to move ultimate control of IANA from the US Department of Commerce (DoC) to non-profit DNS overseer ICANN is covered in largely hyperbolic terms.

    • IoT Gateways

      IoT Gateways connect IoT Devices to IoT back-end systems. Gateways connect to devices using interfaces like Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN, RS-485 and CANbus. Gateways connect to back-end systems through the Internet, commonly using Ethernet, WiFi, or cellular connections. Gateways perform multiple tasks, including concatenation of multiple devices, protocol conversion, device management, and security. Gateways may also perform application processing.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • EU Anti-Counterfeiting Rapid Intelligence System: One Database For All Data On IPR Infringement

      The Anti-Counterfeiting Rapid Intelligence System (ACRIS) is new database created by EUIPO’s Observatory in cooperation with DG Trade. The database provides EU companies with an overview of IP risks in third countries and offers a collection of IPR infringement cases. In the database, information is also given on the actions taken by third country local authorities in response to IP infringements. This information is intended to help companies to make informed decisions as to their business strategies in third countries and how to avoid and mitigate risks of IP infringement.

    • UK Government Called To Action To Further Boost IP Enforcement

      The United Kingdom-based Anti-Counterfeiting Group (ACG) industry group launched a “manifesto” earlier this month, calling on the government to establish a more effective and comprehensive response to intellectual property crime.

      A summary press release and the manifesto can be found here.

      The UK government is estimated by industry to lose £1.3 billion in unpaid tax from the sale of counterfeits. Additionally, whilst there has been an increase in the counterfeit products entering the UK markets, there has unfortunately been a decrease in the number of these products being seized at EU borders, the group said.

    • Patenting By Universities Unhelpful, Paper Says; WIPO Programme To Be Reviewed

      A new publication analysing the relationship between intellectual property and access to science explores ways countries have developed to counter the potential barriers created by IP rights, and says patenting by universities is counterproductive.

    • AIDS Conference: Will The UN High-Level Panel Report Deliver R&D And Access To Medicines?

      The lessons derived from the history of AIDS treatment have become a rallying call for civil society organisations globally. Not being able to afford AIDS medicines should not be repeated for people with other diseases, including HIV co-infections, treatment activists told world leaders here.

    • Copyrights

      • German Software Company Sues US Gov’t For Copyright Infringement

        A German software company, Bitmanagement Software, is now suing the US government for copyright infringement and demanding almost $600 million. The lawsuit, which was filed in the US Court of Federal Claims (basically a special court set up just for cases involving suing the US government for money), says that the US Navy copied Bitmanagement’s 3D virtual reality software, BS Contact Geo. Apparently, the Navy had tested the software and had an evaluation license allowing the software to be used on 38 computers. And then the Navy just copied it onto hundreds of thousands of computers.

        The lawsuit notes that the Navy had specifically requested the removal of Bitmanagement’s usage tracking code, and then told the company that it wanted to license the software for upwards of 500,000 computers — but also that it started doing those installs while the company was still negotiating a license. While that negotiation was ongoing, someone (accidentally, apparently) forwarded an email to Bitmanagement indicating that the software had already been installed on 104,922 computers. Apparently, a few months later, the Navy also disabled some other tracking software, called Flexwrap. This part is a bit confusing in the lawsuit, since earlier it notes that the evaluation contract required Bitmanagement to remove tracking software, but then the lawsuit notes that later on it was the Navy that removed Flexwrap, “in violation of the terms” of the license.

      • The conflict between social media and copyright

        Sharing is an inherent feature of social media. But, asks Alice Gatignol, is there any way this can be reconciled with established principles of copyright protection?

      • How Google Fights Piracy? 523,000,000 Pirate Links Removed In 2016

        Copyright holders running after pirates is not a new tune to our ears. Google, the biggest search engine provider on the planet, publishes regular reports of their fight against removing pirated content. They’ve managed to blank out around 523 million links from Google Search this year and will continue to remove more of them in the coming months.

      • Francis Gurry appoints Sylvie Forbin, lobbyist for Vivendi, as new head of copyright at WIPO

        Francis Gurry has appointed the new Deputy Director General for the Copyright and Creative Industry Sector. She is Sylvie Forbin, a national of France, and most recently Senior Vice President for Public and European Affairs, for Vivendi. Here is the WIPO announcement: as PDF.

        If the past is a guide, she is a hardliner for the industry, opposing user rights and favoring very aggressive enforcement measures.

        Among other things, she has described the social movements for access to knowledge as “very organized” and “opaque networks” that serve technology giants.

      • A Fan’s Case For Putting Batman & Superman In The Public Domain

        The crux of the argument is that these iconic characters currently appear to be in a bit of a death spiral. Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman met with a mixed-at-best response from fans and critics, and while both made good money in the big picture, they also showed some worrying signs — like failing to catch up to Marvel’s superhero movies (which was the whole point) and breaking records of audience drop-off between the much-hyped opening night and the following week (when word begins to get around that the movie sucks). Schmidt is not the first to attribute this to the creators’ disdain for the characters: Zack Snyder has openly expressed his lack of real interest in Batman and Superman, and made it clear that he doesn’t really understand their appeal. Writer David Goyer has made similar comments. And the same people are already hard at work on the follow-up Justice League films, which seem unlikely to break the pattern of mediocrity.

      • Farmers Demand Right to Fix Their Own Dang Tractors

        This might be hard to believe for non-farmers, but owners of tractors aren’t actually allowed to fix them, thanks to a set of laws designed to protect software intellectual property.

      • Cable Industry’s False Copyright Claims Are Killing Cable Box Reform Efforts

        In the quest to stop the FCC from bringing competition to the set top box, the cable industry has trotted out all manner of misleading arguments, most of which have been pushed in editorials in newspapers nationwide without highlighting author ties to the sector. Some of them have tried to pretend that cable box competition will create a piracy apocalypse. Others have tried to somehow argue that better, cheaper hardware and choices will somehow harm minority communities. Most of those are just flimsy attempts to try and keep the FCC from cracking open a $21 billion monopoly on cable box rental fees.

        Fearing their own loss of control, the entertainment industry has joined the cable sector in also claiming new cable box rules will somehow violate copyright law. Under the FCC’s original proposal (pdf), the agency simply states that existing cable content must be delivered to third-party hardware using the copy protection of the industry’s choice. Nothing in the rules will change that, or magically give third-party vendors the right to violate copyright. Still, opponents of the rules have consistently tried to claim the rules are some kind of cabal by Google to freeload off of and repackage “their innovation.”

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