• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• 10 Places To Buy A Laptop With Linux Preloaded

  I want a Linux system without having to pay a Microsoft tax. The hardest part of using Linux is to find out the correct hardware. Hardware compatibility and drivers can be a big issue. But where one can find Linux desktops or Laptop for sale? Here are ten places to buy a preinstalled Linux Desktop and Laptop in alphabetical order.

Server

• IBM’s Watson Now Powers AI For Under Armour, Softbank’s Pepper Robot And More

  From its debut to the world as a Jeopardy champion in 2011, IBM’s Watson has made a name for itself as a powerful artificial intelligence platform for large enterprise applications, from medical research through to finance. Now IBM is aiming to take Watson to the consumer.

• Microservices are not the same thing as components

  Mention cloud, mention DevOps and it won’t be long before microservices enters the discussion.

  But what is, or are, microservices? The name implies something small – but what? Is it a part of a bigger thing or a piece of discrete functionality? And how are microservices different to application components? And why should we care?

Kernel Space

• Top 5 Virtual Networking Predictions for 2016

  The Linux Foundation-hosted Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) Collaborative Project, which was created just over a year ago to help address the growing demand for NFV functionality, is at the forefront of this transformation. Tasked with creating a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate new NFV products and services, OPNFV boasts 56 member companies (including top mobile, wireline and cable operators, chip vendors, and startups), a forthcoming second release and a successful inaugural Summit held this past November. The project’s swelling community demonstrates the hunger for agile solutions that meet evolving network demands.

• AllSeen Alliance Announces New Open Source IoT Certified Devices

• AllSeen Alliance Continues Membership Growth as AllJoyn(R) IoT Technology Gains Major Market Momentum

• Allseen welcomes 14 new members, certifies products

• The AllSeen Alliance Adds New Products to AllJoyn Certified List

• New AllJoyn(R) Certified Products Deliver on the Promise of “Smart” and Connected in the Home and Beyond

• CES brings the first big crop of AllJoyn IoT products

  More than a dozen smart-home products at the CES show this week can find and interact with each other through the AllJoyn software framework, one of the major platforms vying to connect the Internet of Things.

• AMD Posts Accumulated Power Reporting Support For Linux

• New Patches Posted For Addressing Year 2038 Problem In Linux File-Systems

  Some patches from 2014 have been revived in hopes of addressing the Year 2038 problem for Linux file-systems.

  For those out of the loop, the Year 2038 problem is the issue of the Unix time format no longer being able to fit in a signed 32-bit integer after 19 January 2038. After then, there will be an integer overflow; if this happens to be your first time hearing about the Year 2038 problem, see Wikipedia.

• Graphics Stack

  • It Looks Like Nouveau Will Not Have Any Exciting Changes For Linux 4.5

    With the Linux 4.2 kernel there was no feature update for Nouveau and it’s looking like it might be that way too for Linux 4.5.

    I’ve already been writing about some of the changes for Linux 4.5 but you may have noticed that Nouveau hadn’t been mentioned… Well, that’s because there doesn’t even seem to be a 4.5/-next branch for this new kernel cycle where its merge window will open next week.

  • Beignet Continues Slowly Tackling OpenCL 2.0 For Intel Linux Graphics

  • Imagination Announces The PowerVR Series7XT Plus With OpenCL 2.0 Support

  • Intel Turns On Kabylake For Mesa, Libdrm

    Intel has committed all of the PCI IDs to Mesa and libdrm for the graphics processors of their next-generation Kabylake hardware.

    Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have been working on Kabylake support in the open for the past few months now. This successor to Skylake is due out later this year and on the kernel-side there’s a lot of Kabylake stuff for Linux 4.5.

• Benchmarks

  • An Interesting Difference Between AMD & NVIDIA Linux Drivers When Comparing System Usage

    When running the tests recently for the NVIDIA Linux Driver 2015 Year-in-Review and How AMD’s Proprietary Linux Driver Evolved In 2015, I also ran some extra tests comparing the AMD Radeon Software 15.12 and NVIDIA 358.16 proprietary drivers when looking at their CPU usage, memory consumption, and other system sensors.

    From the same i7-5960X system running Ubuntu 15.10, I compared the system sensor output for the Radeon Software 15.12 and NVIDIA 358.16 drivers when testing two cards on each driver. On the Radeon side was the R9 290 and R9 Fury while on the NVIDIA side was the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and GTX 980.

Applications

• Fotoxx Open-Source Image Editor Gets Its First Release for 2016 with New Features

  Michael Cornelison or Kornelix, the developer of the Fotoxx open source image editor application for GNU/Linux operating systems proudly announced the release of the first Fotoxx version for 2016.

• 3 open source personal finance tools for Linux

  With the start of the new year, many people take this time to resolve to get a better handle on their personal finances. Whether this means making and sticking to a budget, reducing unnecessary expenses, or simply getting a better understanding of their financial situation, pretty much any approach to person finance is dependent on having a good idea of the numbers inside their bank accounts, where they come, and where they go.

  Which tools allow you to take the best to approach organizing your finances depends a little bit on your situation. Do you primarily make purchases electronically, or do you rely heavily on cash? Is the archiving and organization of receipts going to be important for you come tax time? Do you operate a small business and need a more powerful tool which can manage the more complex finances of sales, customers, employees, and business expenses? Or do you use multiple currencies (perhaps BitCoin?) and want to keep track of those values as well?

• Longing to bin Photoshop? Rock-solid GIMP a major leap forward

  Despite its relatively obscure version number, GIMP 2.9.2, released recently, represents a major leap forward for the popular image editing suite.

  Like all odd-numbered GIMP releases, 2.9.2 is considered a technical preview, but the features here will form the base of the stable release GIMP 2.10.

  In the mean time, I’ve found 2.9.2 to be very stable, though you will need to compile it yourself in most cases.

• ownCloud 9 Will Be a Cool Release, Says Frank Karlitschek

  It looks like the ownCloud developers will have a great year in 2016, as the company’s CTO, Mr. Frank Karlitschek, has just announced on his Twitter account that ownCloud 9 is shaping up really nicely and that it will be a cool release.

• In Search of a Linux Calendar

  When all is said and done, a calendar app is a calendar app is a calendar app. Except for Sunrise’s propensity for sharing secrets with its cloud based parent calendar, there’s not a nickle’s difference between any of these apps; they all do the same thing in basically the same way. I’ve put my affinity for KOrganizer aside for the time being and have settled in with Lightening, mainly because of its tight integration with Thunderbird. Among other thing, that means I won’t have to remember to open it, as it’ll be there automatically as a tab on Thunderbird, so I might even find myself using it.

  I’m not uninstalling KOrganizer however. I might yet change my mind.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • “git find” published; test, review, fix it please

  • Thoughts on Puppet 4 related packages

  • Downgrading network-manager

  • Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 on IBM POWER8 and x86 in bare metal mode: A comparison

  • Server Monitoring with Munin and Monit on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

  • How to use the Photo Raw Software Darktable 2.0 on Ubuntu

  • How to customise your Linux desktop: i3 Window Manager

• Games

  • A Quake 2 Game Might Get Ported To Linux

    Berserker@Quake2 has been around since about 2005, but only supported on Windows. Now though the Russian developer behind this game mod has finally published his code in hopes of someone porting it to Linux.

  • PlayStation 4 Linux Hack Now Supports 3D Acceleration, USB Support Coming Soon

    We reported on the last days of 2015 that a group of talented hackers that go by the name of fail0verflow managed to hack Sony’s PlayStation 4 gaming console to run the Gentoo Linux operating system.

    The hack was made possible due to a broken NOP command on the integrated AMD Radeon GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), something that Sony might not be able to fix anytime soon.

  • Feel like fragging? You can do that in your browser with QuakeJS

    Here’s an interesting thing I stumbled upon while I was looking up ioquake3 stuff. QuakeJS is a port of the ioquake3 engine to Javascript and WebGL and it plays original Quake 3 maps.

  • Oculus Rift Pre-Orders Start, But Linux Support Is Still Halted

    Oculus Rift pre-orders opened up this morning for $599 USD and an anticipated ship date of April. However, the Facebook-owned company isn’t yet back to providing Linux support.

    With today’s pre-order launch, I was curious to see whether they would comment on restoring Linux (and OS X) support, but they have not. Oculus suspended Linux and OS X support last year in order to focus on their Windows support with no timeline for when they planned to come back to providing Linux support. However, now that everything is ready to go, they apparently aren’t yet ready to jump back into the VR scene for Linux gamers. There’s also nothing new with regards to Linux via the Oculus developer area.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Plasma 5.5.3 Comes With 20 Changes

  • KDE’s conf.kde.in 2016 Conference to Take Place in Rajasthan, India, on March 5-6

    On January 6, 2016, KDE announced that the upcoming conf.kde.in 2016 conference for KDE developers would take place this spring, between March 5 and 6, in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • The importance of Keywords for the software center

    So, what do I want you to do? If you have no existing keywords, I would like you to add some keywords in the desktop file or the AppData file. If you want the keywords to be used by GNOME Shell as well (which you probably do), the best place to put any search terms is in the keywords section of the desktop file. This can also be marked as translatable so non-English users can search in their own language. This would look something like Keywords=3D;printer; (remember the trailing semicolon!)

Distributions

• The Linux Setup – Ikey Doherty, Solus

  Ikey is living the dream—he made his own desktop environment. Perhaps even more impressive, he made it for his own distribution! Perhaps most impressive of all, Solus, Ikey’s distribution, is built from scratch, meaning it’s not based upon another distribution. It’s a lot of work, but Ikey doesn’t seem to mind it. Ikey also flags git as his essential tool-of-choice. I’m using git to submit chapters for my book and it’s a pretty amazing piece of software. It’s impacting all kinds of work.

• New Releases

  • Q4OS 2.0.2 Scorpion, testing

  • Tiny Core Linux 7.0 Enters Beta, Includes Linux Kernel 4.2.7, GCC 5.2 and BusyBox 1.24.1

    Robert Shingledecker announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first Beta build of the upcoming Tiny Core Linux 7.0 computer operating system.

  • EXTON Linux MultiBootCD Includes Porteus, GParted, PuppEX, 4MLinux, SliTaz and Tiny Core

    After informing us of the release of the DebEX KDE Build 160102 and DebEX GNOME Build 160105 GNU/Linux distributions, Linux developer Arne Exton has now sent us details about the immediate availability of EXTON Linux MultiBootCD 6-OS Build 160106.

    EXTON Linux MultiBootCD 6-OS is a Live DVD based on GNU/Linux technologies and designed from the ground up to ease system rescue operations for sysadmins by offering them a collection of six popular distributions that have been tailored for such tasks.

  • Kali Linux NetHunter 3.0 Android Mobile Penetration Testing Platform Out Now

    After being in development for over a year, the Kali Linux NetHunter 3.0 Android application has been released earlier today, January 6, 2016, by Offensive Security, the company behind Kali Linux, the successor of BackTrack.

  • Hackers rejoice, Kali Linux NetHunter 3.0 Android Mobile Penetration Testing Platform released

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • Another look at NetworkManager and Tumbleweed

    I last looked at NetworkManager when it was at version 1.0.0. It is now at version 1.0.6, and with some changes that persuaded me to do some more testing.

    To test, I setup a connection and then did some tests. I repeated this for KDE/Plasma 5, for Gnome and for XFCE. It is also possible to run “nm-applet” and a polkit daemon in Icewm, where configuring the network is similar to what happens with XFCE (which also uses “nm-applet”).

  • Highlights of development sprint 13

    As promised in the previous post on this blog, we’ll try to keep you updated about what is happening in the YaST world. Before Christmas we finished an specially short sprint, interrupted by another successful Hackweek. Although we always reserve some time for bug fixing, the last two sprints has been quite focused in looking into the future, implementing new solutions for old problems and trying to prepare replacements for some legacy stuff we have been carrying on for too long. Here you are the highlights.

  • Suse Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 1 adds full Docker support and extended availability

    Linux firm Suse has released the first service pack for Suse Linux Enterprise 12, adding full Docker support for operating containerised applications and enhanced capabilities to improve uptime and disaster recovery.

    Suse Linux Enterprise 12 is the most recent version of the firm’s Linux distribution for operating mission-critical applications and services, and the Service Pack 1 (SP1) release is the first major update since it shipped in October 2014.

• Red Hat Family

  • Why Red Hat, Inc. Gained 20% in 2015

    Of course, Red Hat paved the way toward that touchstone moment by building a strong reputation and rising sales over the years.

  • Agree To Buy Red Hat At $65, Earn 8.9% Using Options

    Investors eyeing a purchase of Red Hat Inc (Symbol: RHT) stock, but tentative about paying the going market price of $81.25/share, might benefit from considering selling puts among the alternative strategies at their disposal. One interesting put contract in particular, is the January 2018 put at the $65 strike, which has a bid at the time of this writing of $5.80. Collecting that bid as the premium represents a 8.9% return against the $65 commitment, or a 4.4% annualized rate of return (at Stock Options Channel we call this the YieldBoost ).

  • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Posts Quarterly Earnings Results, Beats Expectations By $0.02 EPS

    Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) posted its earnings results on Thursday. The open-source software company reported $0.48 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the Thomson Reuters’ consensus estimate of $0.46 by $0.02, ARN reports. During the same quarter in the previous year, the company earned $0.42 EPS. The firm earned $523.60 million during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $521.66 million. The business’s revenue was up 14.8% compared to the same quarter last year. Red Hat updated its Q4 guidance to $0.47 EPS.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 24 Will Likely Be Delayed

      While we are not even up to the alpha release yet of Fedora 24, there’s a call to already push back the entire schedule by up to a few weeks.

      The current schedule puts the alpha freeze / software string freeze / change checkpoint on 16 February, Fedora 24 Alpha on 1 March, Fedora 24 Beta on 12 April, and the final release on 17 May. However, a proposal being pushed to the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee would end up pushing back all of the F24 milestones by a few weeks: up to three or four weeks.

    • It’s Possible To Run Fedora 23 With A Mainline Kernel On A Tegra K1 Chromebook

      While the Tegra X1 is the latest and greatest NVIDIA SoC out there currently, the Tegra K1 is still a beauty and still blows many other ARM boards out of the water. If you happen to have a Tegra K1 Chromebook, it’s possible to get Fedora 23 Linux running on there with a bit of hacking.

      Fedora developer Kushal Das has written a blog post about getting Fedora 23 running on a Tegra K1 Chromebook. The particular Chromebook is the Acer CB5311. With a bit of work and following the Fedora ARM Wiki for Chromebooks, he was able to get the latest version of Fedora Workstation running on the device. He was also able to build a mainline kernel on the Tegra K1 Chromebook itself for getting the wireless support to work.

• Debian Family

  • 7 Reasons Why Debian is the Dominant Linux Distro

    I first installed Debian sixteen years ago. Since then, I have tried countless other Linux distributions, and even used one or two regularly for several months, but my main distribution has always been Debian, or at least one of its many derivatives.

    Familiarity probably explains some of my preference. However, most of my preference comes from comparing other distributions unfavorably with Debian.

  • In memory of Ian Murdock

    In an entertaining read on his blog Ian recounts how in the winter of 1992 he met Linux

  • Debian Domination, Unstable Fedora, Simple Elementary

    The loss of Ian Murdock is still making the headlines, but not much new has come to light. The police did issue a public statement, but didn’t really say anything new. They acknowledged Murdock’s arrests and subsequent suicide, but claim there is no connection and Murdock’s injuries were self-inflicted. Murdock’s family is still silent and requesting privacy. The Debian project yesterday posted a second memorial (third if you count the mention in last week’s project news) to Murdock, this time remembering his contributions to Linux and the Open Source philosophy.

  • Debian Founder And Open Source Visionary Ian Murdock Dies At 42

  • Debian Project mourns the loss of Ian Murdock

    The Debian Project sadly announces that it has lost the founder of its community and project, Ian Murdock.

    Debian is only a part of Ian’s legacy but perhaps the one that he is most known for.

    Ian was introduced to computers early in his life, and his curiosity turned to familiarity which led him to start actively programming at nine years of age. Later as a young adult at the Krannert School of Management a mandatory programming class rekindled his fascination with computer programming along with an idea and an opportunity to make something better.

    Ian started the Debian Project in August of 1993, releasing the first versions of Debian later that same year. At that time, the whole concept of a “distribution” of Linux was new. Inspired as he said by Linus Torvalds’ own sharing of Linux, he released Debian with the intention that this distribution should be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.

  • Derivatives

    • Debian-Based DebEX GNOME Linux OS Now Includes MATE 1.12.1 and GNOME 3.18.3

      After announcing the release of a new build for his DebEX KDE GNU/Linux distribution, today, January 6, 2016, Arne Exton informs Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of DebEX GNOME Build 160105.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” to Have a New Look and Feel

          The leader of the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre, has confirmed today that the name Linux Mint 18 will be “Sarah.”

          The information that Linux Mint 18 was going to be named “Sarah” was revealed a few months ago by Clement Lefebvre in one of his monthly updates, but he didn’t say anything after that. Now, the Linux Mint leader decided to confirm the name, but he also talked a little about what’s coming in the new version.

          One of the things we knew for sure, since the launch of Linux Mint 17.x, was that all new major versions of the OS were going to be based solely on Ubuntu LTS versions. The switch was made with the 17.x branch, which used Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as a base. It was obvious that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS was going to be the base for Linux Mint 18.x.

        • Linux Mint 18 details revealed — code name, release date, and more!

          When it comes to desktop computing, I love me some Linux. While Ubuntu is my favorite distro of the moment, I use many others from time to time, such as Fedora, deepin, and Linux Mint. My desktop environment preference is Unity or Gnome, but I understand the love for Mint’s Cinnamon or MATE. If you are coming from Windows, and prefer the “Start Menu” approach as an interface, both of those primary Mint DEs will make you comfortable.

        • Upgrade path to 17.3 now open for all editions

          The upgrade path from Linux Mint 17, 17.1 and 17.2 to Linux Mint 17.3 is now open for all editions (Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce).

        • Linux Mint 18: Powered By Ubuntu 16.04, Coming This Summer

Devices/Embedded

• GPU Virtualization: The Next Step in Automotive Innovation

  With the rapid adoption of automotive virtualization, manufacturers can now run multiple systems on a single computer, from highly reliable Linux software for mission-critical functions to highly customizable Android software for infotainment services. Although virtualization enables limitless opportunities to customize the driving experience, all these different virtual machines must still run their graphics processing requests through a single GPU.

• Intel’s new Atom and Core M Compute Sticks get faster and look better

  The new ones either come with Windows 10 or no operating system at all, and the specs are the same either way—users can install their preferred Linux distribution on their own.

• Linksys Finally Provides DD-WRT Support For Latest Routers

• Linksys to Provide DD-WRT Support for All Current WRT Routers

  Linksys has just revealed at CES 2016 that all the WRT routers now have DD-WRT support, making this the first company of its type to fully embrace an open source solution.

• Rugged touchscreen PCs come in ARM and x86 flavors

  Adlink’s Intel-based models with WES7 preinstalled (and WES8 available as an option) are available now, with the ARM-based models with Ubuntu preinstalled following in February, says Adlink. Ubuntu support for the Intel-based models will be added by the second half of 2016. Pricing is unlisted. Additional details may be found at Adlink’s STC-1005/1205/1505 (Intel) and STC-1006/1206/1506 (ARM) product pages.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Samsung 2016 SUHD Smart TV to become your Smart Home IoT Hub

      Samsung has officially unveiled its new line-up of SUHD TVs at CES 2016. The SUHD TVs offer great picture quality using cadmium-free, 10-bit Quantum dot display, which provide a premium high dynamic range (HDR) experience, with 1,000 nit HDR minimum for a higher level of contrast between light and dark images

    • Video: Gear Watch Designer Released, Create You Own Watch Faces

    • Premium Samsung Gear S2 Launched in 18K Rose Gold and Platinum

    • The Samsung Z3 and the Galaxy S3: How the Nostalgic Surrenders to the New

  • Android

    • Remix OS Is a New Android-Based OS for the PC Desktop

      Remix OS is a new operating system based on the famous Android-x86 that aims to bring the Android system to the PC platform.

    • Android N switches to OpenJDK protected by GPL, official open source version of the Java Platform

    • Switch to Open Source Java Limits Google Copyright Exposure

    • Google’s Move to OpenJDK to Benefit Developers

    • Android N switches to OpenJDK, Google tells Oracle it is protected by the GPL

    • Remix OS is Android for the desktop, and it works with nearly any PC

      See, between CES 2015 and today, Jide created a Kickstarter campaign for the Remix Mini, a $70 device that can run Android on any screen with an HDMI input. It took in $1.6 million.

    • BlackBerry going all-in on Android phones

      This will be an all-Android year for BlackBerry’s newest phones.

      The Ontario, Canada-based company plans to release one new product, and potentially a second phone, tin 2016. Both will run on Google’s mobile software, CEO John Chen confirmed in an interview at CES in Las Vegas.

      His comments follow news that Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Sprint will sell the BlackBerry Priv, the company’s first phone running on Android, after a 60-day exclusive deal with AT&T.

    • Casio’s First Android Wear Watch Will Be Ruggedized And Have Up To A Month Of Battery Life

      Most of the Android Wear devices out there are similar takes on the same use case, but watchmaker Casio is trying something a little different. The Casio Smart Outdoor Watch (WSD-F10) is an Android Wear device with sport watch styling and a seriously rugged design. It can even run for as long as a month in basic monochrome mode. It might not be a watch you wear every day, but outdoorsy folks might really dig it.

    • Recon Instruments Announces A ‘Smart Mask’ For Paintball Based On Its Android Heads-Up Display

      Part of the attraction of things like laser tag and paintball is that they bring the team-based combat that’s become so popular in online shooters into the real world. After some notable success with its embedded heads-up display for snowboarders, Recon Instruments (recently acquired by Intel) is bringing a modified version of the Android-based system to the enthusiast paintball market. The Empire EVS “smart mask” includes a tiny Google Glass-style display in the visor that relays various bits of battlefield information to the player.

2015 – Year of Open Source explosion

Open source software – software freely shared with the world at large – is an old idea, dating back to the 1980s when Richard Stillman started preaching the gospel calling it free software. Then Linus Torvalds started working on Linux in the early 1990s. Today, Linux runs our lives. The Android operating system that runs so many Google phones is based on Linux. When you open a phone app like Twitter or Facebook and pull down all those tweets and status updates, you’re tapping into massive computer data centers filled with hundreds of Linux machines. Linux is the foundation of the Internet.

Does Open Source Have a Place in DevOps?

Open source software (OSS) is generally considered to be an integral part of DevOps, and for a couple of good reasons. It has led to the rapid emergence of innovative tools to meet the requirements of those leading the automation charge, and has also made those tools freely available. DevOps practitioners can adopt solutions to try new ideas and approaches without going through the usual investment justification and procurement process, or even seeking management permission.

From emergency fix to business backbone

The words I hear some clients ask when they first see my Linux set up is: “Is it that unix thing?.” If they know it well-enough to ask that question, I’m usually on the verge of going full geek mode.

Before I impart words of wonder and inspiration, I think about how awesome it will be to open this person’s eyes to the world of possibilities outside proprietary software, and how excited they will be to discover how Linux and open source software are the foundation of the World Wide Web as they know it. As it turns out, its really difficult to sum up why open source is so great in a single sentence.

[...]

Giving back to the open source community is such an important part of what makes open source software amazing and so powerful. Each year we strive to improve our efforts in this area.

Mycroft Releases Key AI Component as Open Source

The Mycroft team has released the Adapt Intent Parser as open source, which is a piece of code that converts natural language into instructions that can be understood by a machine.

Why is this parser so important? There are at least a couple of reasons why Mycroft chose to release this important piece of code as open source. To make it clearer, the Adapt Intent Parser transforms what the user speaks into something that can be interpreted by an application on a device, like a phone or a desktop.

Hour of Code Volunteer: Kids See No Barriers to Open Source Coding

In December, the Linux Foundation joined many organizations in support of Hour of Code (HoC). This program, which is sponsored by Code.org, provides children with a one-hour introduction to computer science using tutorials designed to explain code in a simple way and show that anyone can be involved. The program offers tools that both teachers and volunteers can use to present basic coding ideas to children. This year’s tutorials aimed to engage young coders using examples from Minecraft and Star Wars, and also featured Anna and Elsa from Frozen.

Greenpeace makes 7 shifts toward open

If you’ve been following Opensource.com and the Open Organization Ambassadors there, then you’ll know that I’ve been working to help Greenpeace internalize the principles of an open ethos. But to do this, we’ve had to distill this ethos into a few concrete principles, actionable items the organization can more easily grasp. On its journey to becoming an open organization, Greenpeace has set seven cultural “waypoints,” some guideposts for its transition to an open organization. In this article, I’d like to explain them.

Social Justice Warriors Wreaking Havoc In Open Source Software

Throughout 2015, social justice warriors were repelled on a number of fronts. Gaming. Sci-fi & fantasy writing. Reddit. One fight that hasn’t been covered yet — but which definitely should be — is the world of open source software development.

Two kinds of kernel bugs

As I am sure many of you are aware, bugzilla generates a lot of email. While the web interface does have some interesting search capability, email is the main method of getting notified of new bugs. The better those initial emails (your bug reports) are worded, the more likely we can have a real understanding of the nature or priority of that bug.

NORDUnet announces CrypTech open source web security

Scandinavian research network NORDUnet has announced the development of CrypTech to improve internet security. It said software developers and electronics designers from around the world are uniting their efforts in the CrypTech project, building open source hardware securing the authenticity of digital content transmitted through the internet. The project allows a maximum donation per donor of USD 100,000 per year to ensure diversity of influence.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla hastily backpedals on SHA-1 ban after impact larger than thought

    The impact of Mozilla’s decision to depreciate SHA-1 at the start of 2016 with the release of Firefox 43 turned out to be larger than it anticipated. As a result, Mozilla hastily released an update on Wednesday that re-enabled support for SHA-1 certificates as it seeks to better evaluate how many users might be affected.

    Firefox 43 was supposed to ratchet up security for its users as part of Mozilla’s roadmap by dropping support only for new SHA-1 certificates, while continuing to support older SHA-1. The rationale behind this move was to present a clear disincentive for certificate providers to move away from SHA-1 without penalizing – as yet – existing SHA-1 certificates that are already in use.

  • Firefox’s ban of SHA-1 certs causing some security issues, Mozilla warns

    Mozilla has warned Firefox users that its decision to reject SHA-1 certificates has caused an unfortunate side effect: some man-in-the-middle devices, such as security scanners and antivirus products, are failing to connect to HTTPS sites.

    The browser maker advised any netizens affected by the interference to install the latest version of Firefox, which reinstates support for SHA-1.

  • Firefox 43.0.4 Fixes Folder Creation on Linux and Brings Back SHA-1

    Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox, 43.0.4, which is just a maintenance release that happens to have an important fix for the Linux platform.

  • Mozilla: 40 Percent of Firefox Users Don’t Have Add-Ons Installed

    According to an internal analysis, Mozilla staff estimates, based on anonymous telemetry data, that around 40% of its userbase does not have add-ons installed on their browser.

SaaS/Big Data

• ProphetStor Leverages Mellanox Tech for Next-Gen Cloud Computing

  Today ProphetStor Data Services rolled out a reference cloud computing platform with Mellanox based on the open-source projects OpenStack and Ceph. The solution leverages each company’s respective strength in software-defined-storage, state-of-the-art server hardware, and high-speed networking. Based on ProphetStor Federator SDS, this joint project addresses the key issues of OpenStack’s storage management solution as well as improving the functionality and performance of Ceph, the de facto storage backend for OpenStack.

Databases

• PostgreSQL 9.5 Brings UPSERT & Big Data Features

  PostgreSQL 9.5 was officially released this morning with several exciting new features.

  First up, PostgreSQL 9.5 adds UPSERT, a simplified shorthand for doing an INSERT to the database but on conflict to update the record. This PostgreSQL support also eases in migrating legacy MySQL programs to PostgreSQL.

  PostgreSQL 9.5 also brings new big data features including BRIN indexing, faster sorts, CUBE / ROLLUP / GROUPING SETS, foreign data wrappers, and TABLESAMPLE.

• SQLite 3.10 Released With Performance Optimizations & New Features

  SQLite 3.10 has been released today as the latest version of this widely-used SQL database engine library.

• Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 5.1 Arrives in February with Awesome New Features, Here’s What’s New

  The Document Foundation non-profit organization teased users on Twitter about the upcoming features of the LibreOffice 5.1 open-source office suite, due for release in the first week of February 2016.

• LibreOffice Bug Hunt Organized for Major 5.1 Update

  The LibreOffice community is preparing for the launch of the first major update for LibreOffice 5.x, and they are organizing a bug hunt.

  The LibreOffice bug hunts are done before the launch of each big update for the office suite. They are a sort of development sprint which allows devs to concentrate on the biggest problems or to fix some of the easy-to-identify issues.

CMS

• WordPress 4.4.1 Updates for XSS (and 52 other issues)

  The first WordPress update of 2016 is out and like many other incremental updates, it is being triggered by a security vulnerability. The single security issue being patched in WordPress 4.4.1 is a cross site scripting vulnerability that could have potentially enabled a site compromised.

  From a general usability and bug perspective there are 52 bugs that WordPress developers are addressing in the 4.4.1 update that spans multiple area of the popular open-source content management system including.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Harris Corporation Collaborates with Boundless for Open-Source Geospatial Solutions

  Boundless’ OpenGeo Suite is the leading open-source enterprise geospatial software bundle and it expands Harris’ existing offerings like 1O1T. Boundless experts support and consult around the implementation of OpenGeo Suite components including GeoServer, PostGIS, Open Layers and QGIS.

Funding

• Dutch government: Encryption good, backdoors bad

  Will also provide a grant of $537,000 to support the OpenSSL project.

BSD

• FreeBSD Foundation Takes Right Steps

  First things first: I’m the new kid on the BSD block. While in the process of still figuring things out on PC-BSD — dang that Synaptics! — and finding a place to contribute in the community, I have no real handle on the nuances of the inner workings of the wider BSD community. To my self-promoting credit, I am a quick study and the learning curve is not as difficult as I imagined. On the whole, I like what I see in those contributing to BSD, especially in the way of eagerness to help new users.

  However, when Randi Harper decided to bail on participation in FreeBSD as she outlined in her blog, it raises the question, “Where have we seen this before?” Taking a step back, it raises the question, “Why does this keep happening in FOSS communities?”

  Before we begin to answer those questions — and answers to those questions extend far beyond this commentary — I’m less interested in the “he said, she said” of the past than in finding workable solutions to permanently removing the 500-pound gorilla in the room — the quarter-ton simian of harassment and lack of proper channels to adequately address it.

• LLVM 3.7.1 Released, Restores API/ABI Compatibility With LLVM 3.6/3.8

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Spotlight with Brandon Invergo: 22 new GNU releases in the last month as of December 24, 2015

• Hardware we certified in 2015 to Respect Your Freedom

  To prove naysayers wrong and to motivate production of real options for users, we created the Respects Your Freedom (RYF) hardware certification program. This certification is a guiding light companies can follow in order to demonstrate their commitment to respect your freedom, your privacy, and your right to control your devices.

Public Services/Government

• Galicia shares Abalar ICT educational system

  The Abalar code has been made available under the GPLv2 license as well as the European Union Public…

Licensing

• The Licensing and Compliance Lab interviews Guillaume Roguez, Ring Project Director

  Ring is multi-media communication platform with secured multi-media channels, that doesn’t require centralized servers to work. It is developed by Savoir-faire Linux, a Canadian company located in Montréal, Québec. It is a potential free-software replacement for Skype, and possibly more.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Textbook of the future: Free, open, remixable

    Recently the Office of Educational Technology of the United States Department of Education stated that it believes “creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information.” What’s more, according to the FCC, “the U.S. spends more than $7 billion per year on K-12 textbooks, but too many students are still using books that are 7-10 years old, with outdated material.”

• Open Hardware

  • Richard Sapper, Designer Of IBM ThinkPad, Has Died

    Richard Sapper passed away at the age of 83 on New Year’s eve. While this German-born Italy-based industrial designer created a variety of products ranging from household goods to cars, he was best known for designing the first IBM ThinkPad in 1992. He served IBM as the chief design consultant for many years.

  • Open-Source Firmware for a Mini Quadrotor

    The Eachine H8 is a typical-looking mini-quadcopter of the kind that sell for under $20. Inside, the whole show is powered by an ARM Cortex-M3 processor, with the programming pins easily visible. Who could resist? [garagedrone] takes you through a step-by-step guide to re-flashing the device with a custom firmware to enable acrobatics, or simply to tweak the throttle-to-engine-speed mapping for the quad. We had no idea folks were doing this.

Wall Street thinks Twitter’s 10,000 character plan is ‘desperate’ and so do you

Good news, Twitter: you’ve finally accomplished the impossible, getting Wall Street and your user base to agree about something.

Bad news: they both agree you’re acting desperate.

Twitter is reportedly planning to move beyond the 140 character limit that has defined the social network for nearly a decade as part of a continued effort to re-think its fundamentals and reverse its flailing user numbers. The move was first reported by Re/code on Tuesday and seemingly confirmed later by cryptic (and lengthy) comments by CEO Jack Dorsey.

Apple’s Wi-Fi Assist feature blamed for teen’s $2,000 phone bill

Ashton Finegold didn’t think much of the text message he received from his mobile phone service saying that he was nearing his data limit.

But the San Francisco teen was shocked when he received a phone bill totaling $2,021.07.

“I thought my dad was going to kill me,” he told CBS News.

“It’s usually $250 a month — and this was over $2,000,” the teen’s father, Jeff Finegold, said.

The outrageous overcharge was due to “Wi-Fi Assist,” a new feature on Apple’s IOS 9 operating system. Wi-Fi Assist automatically switches the phone to draw on cellular service when a user is in an area with a weak Wi-Fi signal.

Does Donald Trump Think Paris Is In Germany?

Presidential hopeful Donald Trump seemingly flunked geography if his latest Twitter gaffe is anything to go by.

The Republican candidate for the top job was reacting to the news that a man wearing a fake suicide belt was shot dead in Paris while running towards a police station.

But his rant seemed to mistake the capital of France for another country altogether.

Hardware

• ​CES 2016: Fasetto Link, 2 TB NAS in the palm of your hand

  We all know that there are a lot of silly gadgets at CES. Sometimes, though, we stumble over a small company with a big idea. That was the case with me with Fasetto and its tiny, 48 by 23 millimeter Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, Link.

Health/Nutrition

• This Controversial Pesticide Is Harming Honeybees

  The Environmental Protection Agency has finally begun to answer a major question on honeybee health.

  This week, the EPA released its first findings on neonicotinoids, a widely-used class of pesticides that many think play a role in the staggering honeybee losses over the last few years. The agency examined imidacloprid — one of four neonic pesticides that the EPA plans to assess, and the most commonly-used neonicotinoid in the United States — and found that it is harmful to bees when applied to certain crops, like cotton or citrus, but not when applied to others, like corn and berries.

  That’s because, the assessment found, the main thing that mattered when determining whether or not the pesticide would harm bees was the concentration of the pesticide in the nectar the bees brought back to their hives. If bees returned to their hives with nectar that contained more than 25 parts per billion (ppb) of imidacloprid, it negatively impacted the hive — meaning, as the AP reports, fewer bees and less honey. But if the concentration was less than 25 ppb, the bees fared OK. Some crops contained nectar with higher concentrations than others — while others produce no nectar at all — which explains the difference in danger from crop to crop.

• Toxic chemical discovered in San Francisco’s fog

  Scientists who studied the fog along the coast of California found that it deposits a neurotoxin called monomethyl mercury — at a concentration about 20 times that of rain — as it sweeps across the city.

  The scientists said the finding reveals a new pathway to land of a compound that comes largely from burning coal and other fossil fuels.

Security

• Twitter Community Helps Create Improved Linux Encoder Ransomware

  November 2015 saw the emergence of Linux.Encoder.1, the first piece of ransomware to target vulnerable Linux web servers. A programming flaw allowed Bitdefender researchers to obtain the decryption key and provide victims with a free recovery utility.

• Plain cruelty: Boffins flay Linux ransomware for the third time

  Probably the world’s most tragically determined blackhat developers have had their revitalised Linux.Encoder ransomware pwned again by meddling BitDefender whitehats.

  The third iteration of the Linux.Encoder ransomware was unleashed on the world, infecting a paltry 600 servers before a crack team of security analysts returned to rip it apart.

• Windows and Linux Malware Linked to Chinese DDoS Tool

  Similar-looking malware targeting both Linux and Windows computers has been linked to a DDoSing toolkit sold by Chinese hackers via the ddos[.]tf service, Malware Must Die! reports.

  The malware, codenamed Linux/DDOSTF (or Linux/MrBlack) targets mainly Linux machines running Elasticsearch servers, but it also attacks and infects Windows systems, particularly older Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server instances.

• Exploiting Silent Circle’s Secure Blackphone

  The highly secure device could have been exploited, were it not for the responsible disclosure by a security researcher.

  Any modern device is made up of multiple hardware and software components, any one of which could represent a potential risk. That’s a reality that secure mobile phone vendor Silent Circle has learned with its Blackphone, thanks to the responsible security disclosure from Tim Strazzere, director of mobile research at SentinelOne.

• Severe Silent Circle Blackphone vulnerability lets hackers take over

  Researchers have revealed a severe vulnerability in Silent Circle’s Blackphone which could allow attackers to take control of the device’s functions.

  Silent Circle’s Blackphone, born after former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden exposed the intelligence agency’s spying practices on the global stage, is a phone peddled to the privacy-conscious. The Blackphone grants users complete control of app permissions and includes encrypted services such as Silent Phone and Silent Text, designed to prevent surveillance and eavesdropping.

  The device runs on PrivatOS, a custom Android build with a set of security-focused tools.

• Security Notification and Linode Manager Password Reset

  The entire Linode team has been working around the clock to address both this issue and the ongoing DDoS attacks. We’ve retained a well-known third-party security firm to aid in our investigation. Multiple Federal law enforcement authorities are also investigating and have cases open for both issues. When the thorough investigation is complete, we will share an update on the findings.

• How Hackers Invaded 30 Million Web Servers On The Internet With A Poem

  From an IP address associated with 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (32c3) taking place in Germany, some unknown hackers sent a poetic message to all the IPv4 addresses on the Internet who left with their web servers port open. Later, the hackers said that they didn’t mean to harm anybody and wished to remind the people the importance of keeping the Internet open and decentralised.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Politicians Use North Korea H-Bomb Fears to Pitch Wasteful Missile Defense Projects

  Republican politicians responded almost reflexively to the North Korean nuclear test on Tuesday by demanding more spending on missile defense programs that have historically proved ineffective at preventing an enemy strike — but are built by companies that have lavished policymakers with campaign cash and political support.

  Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., released a statement calling for the country to “reinvest in missile defense and our military presence in the Pacific.” Mike Rogers, R-Ala., called for Obama to “dramatically enhance trilateral missile defense” and declared that Obama should deploy a Lockheed Martin missile defense system in South Korea. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are among his top donors. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Tex., issued a statement specifically calling for spending on that same program; Lockheed Martin is by far his biggest donor over the course of his congressional career.

  Since the early 1990s, politicians of both parties have cited the threat of North Korea to demand funding for an array of missile defense programs that quickly became monumental examples of government waste. Meanwhile, the contractors involved in these projects, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon, among others, have manipulated the politics around these programs by funding politicians, pundits, think tanks, and lobbyists behind the never-ending spiral of taxpayer spending.

• Why North Korea’s Nuclear Test Isn’t Business as Usual

  There’s still plenty of doubt about whether North Korea did in fact detonate a sophisticated hydrogen bomb on Wednesday local time, or if the explosion that triggered a 5.1-magnitude earthquake was a nuclear test more akin to previous ones in 2006, 2009, and 2013. Even as the UN Security Council held an emergency session on Wednesday, the White House said initial US findings were “not consistent with North Korean claims of a successful hydrogen bomb test”—something that would have represented a major ramp-up in North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.

  But this test was not business as usual for North Korea in one important way, believes Charles K. Armstrong, a leading expert in Korean history and politics at Columbia University: “It’s not clear that they are really interested in using this as a negotiating tactic.”

• South Korea says it will resume anti-North broadcasts

  South Korea on Thursday said it will resume cross-border propaganda broadcasts, after its northern neighbor claimed it successfully tested its first hydrogen bomb.

  Seoul said the broadcasts, which North Korea considers an act of war, will begin Friday.

  Cho Tae-yong, deputy chief of South Korea’s presidential office of national security, told reporters that the test is a “grave violation” of a deal reached between the two neighbors in August to defuse tensions after a landmine at the border injured two of the South’s soldiers.

• FBI Turns 18-Year-Old With An IQ Of 51 Into A Terrorist; Dumps Case Into Laps Of Local Prosecutors

  County Judge Alan Furr set Pruitt’s bail at $1 million and refused to lower it, despite evidence surfacing that the young man is developmentally-disabled (IQ estimated at 52-58, last tested at 51) and the total amount of “support” was “less than $1,000″ — a Class C felony, which normally results in much lower bail amounts. (The guidelines in the state’s criminal procedure rules suggest a $5,000-$15,000 range, although judges are free to depart from this recommendation.)

  Judge Alan Furr must not like alleged terrorist sympathizers. Two accused murderers and a teacher charged with sexual misconduct involving a student who previously faced Judge Furr combined for less than half the amount set for Pruitt ($450,000).

• Ruqia Hassan Mohammed: The activist and citizen journalist that Isis murdered – and then posed as for three months on social media to entrap other opponents

  Isis jihadists hijacked the Facebook account of a captured female activist in Raqqa in a bid to lure other opponents into a trap, according to a member of Syria’s most prominent anti-Isis resistance group.

  It has emerged that Ruqia Hassan Mohammed, a vocal Isis opponent with a dry sense of humour, was killed by the jihadists three months ago in punishment for her outspoken social media posts. But they continued to operate her social media accounts until very recently.

• Saudi Arabia funds and exports Islamic extremism: The truth behind the toxic U.S. relationship with the theocratic monarchy

  “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.” So advised world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky, one of the most cited thinkers in human history.

  The counsel may sound simple and intuitive — that’s because it is. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. ignores it.

  Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading sponsor of Islamic extremism. It is also a close U.S. ally. This contradiction, although responsible for a lot of human suffering, is frequently ignored. Yet it recently plunged back into the limelight with the Saudi monarchy’s largest mass execution in decades.

• Why Experts Doubt That North Korea Tested a Hydrogen Bomb

  North Korea claimed on Wednesday that it had tested a hydrogen bomb, the most powerful kind of nuclear weapon. Related Article

  But the yield, or total energy released by the weapon, was close to that of North Korea’s previous three tests of atomic bombs, which are simpler.

  It is possible that North Korea tested a boosted atomic bomb, a weapon whose destructive power is increased by injecting tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen. This would be an advance in the country’s nuclear capabilities.

  But a boosted atomic bomb has nowhere near the destructive power of a hydrogen bomb, and it is not considered a thermonuclear weapon. Here is the energy released by two large hydrogen bombs.

• The single most important fact for understanding North Korea

  North Korea: There is probably no other country on Earth that draws such obsessive fascination from Americans yet is so widely misunderstood.

  You can see it in the (many) portrayals of North Korea in American popular culture. The country and its leader, Kim Jong Un, are almost always presented either as comically ridiculous cartoon villains or as certifiably insane. But neither really makes sense: Cartoon villains and crazy people don’t hold on to power for decades while ruling over a broken economy, a miserable population, and a weak military surrounded by enemies.

  The North Korean system and leadership, as popularly portrayed, would seem to be impossible and doomed. But clearly it’s survived for some time. So what’s going on?

  [...]

  That fact is this: While we typically talk about North Korea as a holdover of Soviet-style hard-line communism, and sometimes we indulge North Korea’s own propaganda that claims it follows a bizarre and unique ideology known as “juche,” neither of those is really correct. In fact, the country is best understood as a holdover of 1930s-style Japanese fascism, left over from Japan’s early colonization of the peninsula.

• One Map That Explains the Dangerous Saudi-Iranian Conflict

  The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia executed Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr on Saturday. Hours later, Iranian protestors set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran. On Sunday, the Saudi government, which considers itself the guardian of Sunni Islam, cut diplomatic ties with Iran, which is a Shiite Muslim theocracy.

  To explain what’s going on, the New York Times provided a primer on the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam, informing us that “a schism emerged after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632” — i.e., 1,383 years ago.

• Ending the Gun Lobby’s Con Game

  The apologists for the weapons industry—they pass themselves off as the gun rights movement—demonstrate their intellectual bankruptcy by regularly contradicting themselves with a straight face.

• Knife-wielding man shot dead at Paris police station

  A man wielding a knife and wearing a purportedly fake explosives vest was shot dead by officers Thursday at a police station in Paris on the one year anniversary of the terror attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, French officials said.

  Luc Poignant, a police union official, said the man cried out “Allahu Akbar” or ‘God is great’ in Arabic, as he tried to enter the station in the 18th arrondissement in northern Paris. the Associated Press reported.

  The attack occurred only minutes after French President Francois Hollande, speaking at police quarters in another district, had paid homage to police officers killed in the line of duty, including three police shot to death last January during the Charlie Hebdo attack.

• Meat cleaver-wielding man shot dead after trying to attack Paris police station

• Charlie Hebdo anniversary: Paris police shoot man dead

  French officials say the man shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Great) outside a police station in Goutte d’Or, near Montmartre, where police shot and killed him.

• Kosovo: NATO’s Success Story?

  The argument is entirely fallacious. One obvious difference between the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999 and the British bombing of Syria today is the contrast in their stated aims. NATO were ostensibly bombing Yugoslavia to achieve a limited goal – the secession of Kosovo. In Syria today, however, the ostensible aim of airstrikes against ISIS is the destruction of ISIS. In other words, whilst the first aimed to force a concession from the force it was targeting; the other apparently aims at the total elimination of its target. Whilst enough punishment might persuade someone to concede a demand, it will not persuade anyone to agree to their own eradication. There is, thus, no parallel in the logic behind the two campaigns, and anyone trying to draw one is being entirely disingenuous.

• Why Is David Brooks So Very Afraid?

  The conservative columnist and the whole GOP field can’t stop wildly exaggerating the threat of terrorism.

  For 21st century conservatives, “fear” is not an authentic feeling of actual concern for your safety, but an ideological pose struck to justify the darker, more sadistic urges that motivate the Republican base.

  In our day and age, declaring you want war for the pleasure of conquest or that you support racist policies out of unvarnished bigotry is socially unacceptable. So fear is donned as a costume to conceal the hate. The shivering coward is a more sympathetic figure than the snarling bigot, and so no matter how laughably implausible their posture of fear is, conservatives will strike it.

• Academic activism against the Arms Fair

  Every two years, DSEi sets up shop at London’s ExCel centre, not just tolerated but also explicitly welcomed by the British government, who provide the event with both financial and personal support. This September, 32,000 arms dealers descended on East London for what TripAdvisor reviewer Ian W, giving a mark of 4 out of 5, describes as the ‘Largest display of Big Boys Toys around!’. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon rather more soberly described DSEi as ‘a truly global event… [one that] ensure[s] that the nations represented here can continue to prosper’.

• Ghost Squad Hackers Hack Ethiopian Websites In Response To Killing Of Protesting Students

  Ghost Squad Hackers group has taken down multiple .gov websites in Ethiopia. The collective has blamed the government for killing “students for opposing the ‘master plan’ to expand the main city Addis Ababa”. Talking to fossBytes, the group has said, “we need the government to stop this madness or we will hack more sites.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In pictures: Snow in Scotland through the years

  With snow forecast for parts of Scotland tonight, we take a look back at the country’s bigger snowfalls over the years

  There are plenty of jokes made about Scotland and snow, given the country’s reputation as a cold place. But there are also some quite astonishing facts.

• Police Scotland have issued a warning to Perthshire residents to only travel if it’s essential, as another amber weather warning hits the big county

  Police have advised Perthshire residents in flood affected areas to only travel if it’s absolutely essential, as the area prepares for another period of adverse weather.

  Heavy rain is forecast to fall until around 8am on Friday January 8, with temperatures expected to drop in the next few days.

• A single gas well leak is California’s biggest contributor to climate change

  The single biggest contributor to climate change in California is a blown-out natural gas well more than 8,700ft underground, state authorities and campaign groups said Monday.

  The broken well at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage site has released more than 77,000 metric tons of the powerful climate pollutant methane since the rupture was first detected on 23 October, according to a counter created by the Environmental Defense Fund.

• Dear Gov. Snyder: You Have to Go to Jail

  Thanks to you, sir, and the premeditated actions of your administrators, you have effectively poisoned, not just some, but apparently ALL of the children in my hometown of Flint, Michigan.

  And for that, you have to go to jail.

  To poison all the children in an historic American city is no small feat. Even international terrorist organizations haven’t figured out yet how to do something on a magnitude like this.

• Snyder may request federal aid for Flint water crisis

  Gov. Rick Snyder on Tuesday declared a state of emergency in Flint because of its contaminated drinking water, setting the stage for a possible request for federal assistance in the city’s crisis.

  Snyder’s declaration makes available all state resources in cooperation with local response and recovery operations and authorizes the Michigan State Police, Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division to coordinate the state’s efforts.

• Oklahoma Fracking Company Defies Plan To Reduce Earthquakes

  Wastewater is an issue across the industry. During fracking, chemical-laced water is injected at high pressure into the ground, allowing pockets of trapped oil and gas to loosen and be captured. The process creates a huge amount of wastewater, which cannot be reused due to the chemical content and contamination from elements in the ground, often including oil itself. It is possible to truck the water to treatment plants, but it is more expensive.

  The SandRidge case could spark the first real test of the earthquake-fracking connection. Another case, in which a homeowner is suing another natural gas company for injuries she sustained in an earthquake, has not yet been heard.

  Some say that finding the companies at fault for damages would be devastating for Oklahoma’s fracking industry, but the industry’s official position is that it supports the commission’s attempts to protect the public.

• TransCanada Announces It Will Sue U.S. Over Keystone XL Denial

  TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, announced Wednesday it is filing a claim under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), saying that the project’s permit denial was “arbitrary and unjustified.” TransCanada is seeking $15 billion in costs and damages due to the denial, and has also filed a separate lawsuit against the U.S. in federal court.

  Under NAFTA, companies can sue governments that put investments at risk through regulation. If it proceeds, the case will go in front of an international tribunal. (A U.S. company sued Montreal in 2013 over a fracking ban, using the same rationale). The tribunal cannot overturn the permit denial, but it can force payment of damages.

Finance

• 10 More Reasons Wall Street Will Hate Bernie Sanders

  Some of Sanders’ suggestions: Break up banks. Tax speculators. Cap interest rates.

  Bernie Sanders has declared war on the biggest players in Wall Street’s financial sector. He says they are overrun with “greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance,” and criticizes his top rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, as being naïve about what needs to happen to create a financial system that “works for all Americans.”

  On Tuesday, he upped the ante. “To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear,” Sanders said in a midtown Manhattan speech. “Greed is not good. In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the fabric of our nation. And here is a New Year’s resolution that I will keep if elected president: If you do not end your greed, we will end it for you.”

  Sanders laid out a 10-point program to deeply change the nature of the financial sector, while occasionally digressing to emphasize how much more sweeping his proposals are compared to Clinton’s. As always, he started by recounting how the “20 richest people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans”—and said the finance industry has spent “billions” to get Congress and federal agencies to deregulate almost all areas of the financial industry while weakening consumer protection laws.

• Bernie Sanders Attacks Hillary Clinton’s Refusal to Take On Wall Street

  In a fiery speech detailing his plan to break up “too big to fail” banks, Sen. Bernie Sanders issued his sharpest criticism of Hillary Clinton yet, pointing to the large fees she has collected giving speeches to a financial industry she is conspicuously reluctant to regulate.

  “My opponent says that as a senator, she told bankers to ‘cut it out’ and end their destructive behavior,” Sanders said of Clinton. “But, in my view, establishment politicians are the ones who need to cut it out. The reality is that Congress doesn’t regulate Wall Street. Wall Street and their lobbyists regulate Congress. We must change that reality, and as president, I will.”

• Bernie Sanders Attacks Hillary Clinton Over Regulating Wall Street

  Mr. Sanders said that Mrs. Clinton was “wrong” to oppose his plan to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall Act, which would legally separate commercial banking, investment banking and insurances services. And the senator implicitly criticized Mrs. Clinton for being a patron of bankers when he pointed to their huge campaign donations and noted that they “provide very generous speaking fees to those who go before them.”

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren Cheers Bernie’s Fight to “Hold Big Banks Accountable”

  Sen. Bernie Sanders got a shout-out from big bank critic Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday a day after the presidential hopeful gave a policy speech laying out his tough on Wall Street stance.

• Ex-Obama Aide Known As “Hedge Funds’ Secret Weapon” Assails Bernie Sanders’ Wall Street Overhaul

  But Goolsbee is hardly an unbiased observer. Since leaving government, he’s become a valuable tool for Wall Street.

  Here are some of his tweets:

  Goolsbee is now a partner at 32 Advisors, a financial strategy and government relations firm that works with Wall Street. He touts, on his company’s website, a 2014 CNBC profile where he was dubbed “hedge funds’ secret weapon.”

• George Osborne warns of ‘dangerous cocktail’ of economic risks

  George Osborne has re-found his gloomy boots. After a relatively positive Autumn Statement, in which the Chancellor said that the UK was “growing fast”, Mr Osborne will today lay out a litany of risks the UK economy faces over the next 12 months.

  And a Happy New Year to you all, you can almost hear him saying.

  Tensions in the Middle East, slowing growth in China, low prices for commodities such as oil and copper are all weighing on global confidence, he will say in a speech.

• Iceland Has Jailed 29 Bankers. Why Can’t the UK and US Do the Same?

  Just before Christmas, the former CEO of Iceland’s Glitnir bank and two other senior bankers were sentenced to jail terms of up to five years for market manipulation and breach of fiduciary duties. This brings the total number of senior Icelandic bankers so far sentenced for crimes in the run-up to the 2008 banking crash to 29.

  By contrast not a single senior banking executive in the US or the UK has been jailed for their role in the financial crisis. Whilst banks – such as the five found to be rigging the Libor rate – have been hit with substantial fines, the individual bankers behind the fraud, market rigging and irresponsible lending that led to the economic meltdown have all avoided time behind bars.

  On top of this came news last week that Britain’s financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, has shelved a planned inquiry into the culture of banking. Whilst this inquiry was never going to hold the guilty to account, it was hoped that it might at least provide a level of transparency and analysis to help shape more rigorous future regulation.

• [Older] Three Icelandic Bankers to Prison
  

  Former CEO of Glitnir bank Lárus Welding was sentenced yesterday to five years in prison for breach of trust in the so-called Stím Case, RÚV reports.

  Jóhannes Baldursson, former director of capital markets at Glitnir, received a two-year prison sentence, and Þorvaldur Lúðvík Sigurjónsson, former head of Saga Capital, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, both for breach of trust. The sentences were announced in the Reykjavík District Court. The defendants are also to pay defense costs.

• Detroit Public Schools Face Bankruptcy: ‘We’re Running Out Of Money In April’

  A little over a year after the city emerged from the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, Detroit’s public schools are still so mired in debt that they are redirecting nearly half of the money they get for students toward paying back creditors.

  And unless something changes soon, even that radical redistribution of cash won’t be enough to save the Motor City’s schools from going broke by the time the class of 2016 graduates.

  In February, the school system must begin paying $26 million per month to service over $260 million in loans taken out to keep schools open over the the past few years. That’s a giant jump from the roughly $15 million in monthly debt payments the district faced last year, according to the Detroit News. It also only covers a sliver of the system’s total debts: $1.5 billion or more that would become Michigan’s responsibility if the school district goes bankrupt.

• Why Bernie Sanders Deserves More Attention Than Hillary Clinton

  Have the media stopped feeling “the Bern”? Or has the Democratic Party, which should probably be renamed the Clintoncratic National Committee, extinguished the fire?

  It’s both.

  Sen. Bernie Sanders deserves far more attention than he’s getting. The 74-year-old frowzy-haired Democratic Socialist from Brooklyn by way of Vermont raised $33 million in the fourth quarter of 2015. That’s just $4 million less than Hillary Clinton.

  People vote with dollars, as any tearful hater of money in politics will tell you. When it comes to Sanders, lots of folks throw in small amounts of cash. So when he raises $33 million in three months, it means a lot of people care.

  Beyond the fundraising, poll numbers in early primary states justify a much brighter spotlight on Sanders than the media shine.

• Poor People Really Get Screwed By Ben Carson’s Tax Plan

  There’s still no reason to care about this since Carson is obviously doomed to return to the book promotion racket at this point. Still, just for the record, I figure this deserves a chart to memorialize it for posterity. So here it is.

• Carl Icahn’s Utterly Dishonest Case for Big Corporations Not to Pay Taxes They Owe

  Corporate predator Icahn is crying poverty for poor superrich chieftains of profiteering giants.

  Carl Icahn, noted corporate predator and takeover specialist who made billions of dollars in corporate deals, has recently begun pushing a charitable cause involving a group of people who, through no fault of their own, are being forced out of America. Syrian migrants who’ve lost everything, you ask? Or maybe Central American children fleeing the horrors of drug wars? Nope, none of those foreign sob stories for Icahn. Rather, he weeps for the incomprehensible suffering of a small tribe of Americans, namely: the CEOs of several U.S.-based multinational corporations.

  You see, Carl is fronting for CEOs of a small group of huge multinational conglomerates who are demanding that Congress drastically slash the taxes they owe on foreign sales of their products. This “reform” would let them escape paying most of the $600 billion in taxes that U.S. law assesses on some $2.6 trillion in profits they’ve been hiding in foreign bank accounts and offshore tax havens. Three-fourths of these hidden profits belong to only 50 enormously profitable corporations.

• George Osborne warns mortgage holders: Be prepared for interest rates rise this year

  George Osborne has hinted that interest rates could soon rise and warned that the UK must be prepared for the prospect of the first increase since 2007.

• Why George Osborne is wrong about household debt

  This morning George Osborne, amidst warnings about the ‘dangerous cocktail’ of threats faced by the British economy, claimed this is ‘not a debt fuelled recovery’ and ‘overall levels of household debt have fallen in our country over the last five years’.

  This is not true. A number of reports point to increases in the UK household debt burden over recent years, from the Centre for Social Justice’s report which outlines the ‘growing issues of problem debt’ to the Money Charity’s December 2015 Debt Statistics, which claimed that ‘people in the UK owed £1.456 trillion at the end of October 2015… up from £1.42 trillion at the end of October 2014 – an extra £706.71 per UK adult’.

  The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that these increases will continue over the current parliament, and by 2020 household debt is set to have risen to 167% of household income.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Trump Amazes WaPo Columnist by Drawing 60% Fewer People Than Sanders

  The headline of Cillizza’s Sanders crowd piece is: “20,000 People Came to See Bernie Sanders in Boston. Why Aren’t We Talking More About It?” That’s a good question. Like, why aren’t we talking about it when we’re getting excited three months later about Trump drawing 60 percent fewer people?

  I guess the answer to that is implicit in a piece Cillizza posted a little more than a week later (10/14/15), headlined “Why Bernie Sanders Isn’t Going to Be President, in Five Words.” The five words, if you’re wondering, are “I am a democratic socialist.” And that makes you ineligible to be president, in Cillizza’s view, since only 3 in 10 people say they have a favorable opinion of socialism and 61 percent express an unfavorable opinion of it.

  As it happens, those were almost exactly the favorable/unfavorable numbers for the Republican Party the last time CBS polled about it (10/4-8/15)—32 percent favorable, 59 percent unfavorable—but nobody says that means it’s impossible for a Republican to be elected president.

  The beyond-the-pale status of “socialism” does mean, however, that Sanders comes up in relation to Trump’s crowd numbers only as a reason not to get too excited about Trump’s crowd numbers: “After all,” writes Cillizza (1/5/16), “if crowd size at rallies was determinative, Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, would be the heavy favorite to be the Democratic presidential nominee.”

• Fox’s Katie Pavlich: If Obama Wants To Do Work On Guns, He Should Work With NRA [Ed: well…]

• The difficulty of ‘neoliberalism’

  This is not a new critique. ‘Neoliberalism’ is a term that has attracted a remarkable degree of frustration and fury, in politics, the media and within academia. Journalists such as Independent columnist John Rentoul and Newsnight policy editor Christopher Cook have expended some energy on twitter and in print dismissing the term as vacuous. Orthodox economists, who do not encounter the term in their microeconomics training, dismiss it as useless. In academia, ‘neoliberalism’ has been criticised by historians and some social scientists as over-determined. Since Jeremy Bentham, the English tradition of positivism has rested on the notion that only acutely defined terms are politically valid – a premise that can quickly flip into the idea that if I don’t know exactly what you mean, then you are talking nonsense.

Censorship

• Serbia: Independent media increasingly targeted as spies

  It was a Wednesday morning in early November when investigative journalist Slobodan Georgijev opened Informer, one of Serbia’s notorious tabloids. He had just arrived at his office, the newsroom of Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), one of Serbia’s few independent media outlets. When he turned the page he was shocked by what he saw; a picture of his own face amongst two others, in an article calling three media outlets known for critical reporting of the Serbian government, including BIRN, “foreign spies”.

  “It was funny and unpleasant at the same time,” Georgijev recalled, speaking to Index on Censorship. “Funny because I knew that this is just a campaign by Informer to undermine the credibility of independent journalists.” More importantly, he had begun worry about his own safety. “It’s also unpleasant because you never know how people will interpret such defamations.”

• Stories On Cologne Assaults Face Censorship On Reddit

  Moderators on the link-sharing and discussion site Reddit deleted dozens of links and comments about immigrant gang violence and sexual assault in Cologne, Germany in an apparent attempt to clamp down on “vileness.”

• German mayor blames victims for sex attacks by 1,000 Muslims: Media coverup

  The Mayor of Cologne, Germany, blamed the victims of a mass sexual assault/rape, saying they should follow a “code of conduct” to ensure they don’t get raped again. Over 90 women have filed police reports so far, saying they were attacked by 1,000 Muslim men of “Arab or North African origin” at a New Year’s Eve celebration in the Cologne city square.

• Art says rationale for censorship a ‘load of bullshit’

  Lawyer says the Film Censorship Board’s decision to mute the word “binatang” in a documentary for fear it could be a security threat is insulting to Malaysians.

• Malaysian Censorship Board says good reason to mute word in Singaporean documentary

  The Malaysian Censorship Board (LPF) says the decision to mute the words binatang-binatang (animals) from a scene in a Singaporean documentary was taken to avoid turning it into a controversy.

  LPF chairman Datuk Abdul Halim Abdul Hamid said the censorship board’s decision was in accordance with the Film Censorship Guidelines.

• Poet Yang Lian: ‘There are cracks and holes in China’s censorship’

  In Hong Kong publishers are going missing, while a book that cannot be published in Beijing may appear in Shanghai. In an interview with DW, Chinese poet Yang Lian discusses the current fight for freedom of expression.

• US Copyright Office is taking comments about how well the DMCA is working

  The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the law that allows content owners to remove copyrighted material from the Internet, and it’s made just about no one happy. Content owners are bitter that their material tends to keep popping up, even when they’ve asked for it to be removed hundreds or even thousands of times. Internet platforms that host large amounts of user-generated content must cope with millions of infringement allegations, mass-produced by software. When those algorithms make mistakes, it’s often users who pay the price—told they’re copyright scofflaws because there was background music in their home video or they shared a photo of a toy they bought.

• The Charlie Hebdo Massacre: One Year Later, Still Misunderstood

  Christine Boutin, the head of France’s conservative Christian Democrat Party felt “this tragedy deserved better” than to be sullied by Charlie Hebdo’s current cover art depicting an old, bearded white guy (supposedly depicting the Euro-centric representation of God) strapped with a Kalashnikov rifle, blood on his hands and clothes, crouching beneath the words “One year on: The assassin is still out there.” Boutin wrote that Hebdo’s hostility to religion is “becoming an obsession.”

  [...]

  In both the immediate aftermath of the massacre and throughout the year, the slain journalists were both lionized as free speech martyrs and also vilified as racists and Islamophobes because of their usage of crude and ribald imagery, particularly when it came to the Prophet Muhammad.

• The truth about Charlie: one year after the 7 January attacks

  Meanwhile, the campaign to support the presentation of the PEN award to Charlie Hebdo was led by Salman Rushdie, who is of Muslim heritage, and whose name is derived from a great 12th century Andalusian Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd who likely would not have been terribly troubled by provocative cartoons, and whose own books on philosophy and theology were burned by Muslim fundamentalists while his Christian followers were slain by the Inquisition.

  So, we must remember that January 7, 2015 was one in a long line of far right attacks on creativity, and part of a history of fundamentalist assaults against artists and intellectuals who have defied them. And, sadly, it was only one of the first armed Islamist salvos of 2015 which will be remembered as the year of endless, expanding jihad. Charlies and Ahmeds, Ceciles and Samiras died in many regions of the world at the hands of those seeking a free ticket to paradise.

• Charlie Hebdo attack survivor says ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan has been ‘misused’ in year since atrocity

  One of the cartoonists who survived the Charlie Hebdo massacre has said the slogan that united the world in the aftermath of the atrocity has been “misused”.

  Corinne Rey, known as Coco, said “Je suis Charlie” was originally used to express solidarity but has lost its way.

  “It’s a phrase that was used during the march as a sign of emotion or resistance to terrorism,” she told France Inter radio.

• Permanent State of Emergency? France Seeks Alarming Expanse of Police Powers

  Citing last year’s Paris attacks as justification, the French government is seeking to expand police powers permanently—relaxing rules around the firing of weapons, enabling nighttime raids, and loosening restrictions on searching and detaining suspected terrorists, according to a draft bill seen by the newspaper Le Monde.

• Occupy-linked DJs dumped as Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK rejects censorship accusations

• A threat to whom? Some implications of the rise of “extremist rhetoric”

  It is through the use of the nebulous term “extremism”, which remains undefined in the Bill itself, that the oppressive policy logic of the Prevent strategy is grounded. Extremism is identified vaguely in the original Prevent guidance as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. Building on this troubling definition, the guidance goes on to propagate that extremism is not always violent, and not always illegal. In fact, the crux of its argument is that non-violent and legal extremism is what needs to be tackled first and foremost. In fact, the crux of its argument is that non-violent and legal extremism is what needs to be tackled first and foremost. This assertion then provides the rationale for those employed in the education and community sectors to act as an arm of government surveillance. Under the Bill, those working in schools and universities have a duty to “create an environment where extremism cannot operate” and as such to report any students suspected to be “at risk”, with the threat of legal penalties for individual employees if they cannot prove that they are taking steps to do this.

• One Year After Charlie Hebdo, More Censorship Than Ever In Europe

  It took a week for German authorities to admit Muslim rape gangs were running wild in the streets on New Year’s Eve, and the police are still mumbling about having insufficient resources to follow up on leads, but apparently they’ve got infinite resources to crack down on “hate speech” against the new occupants.

• Charlie Hebdo anniversary: free-speech groups unite in defence of ‘right to offend’

• On the anniversary of the attack on Charlie Hebdo we must defend the right to blaspheme

• On the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre

• The Mystery Of The Disappearing Book Publishers

  If Chinese authorities kidnapped Lee from Hong Kong, they will have encroached on its independence. Since 1997, Hong Kong and China have been ruled by a “one country, two systems” principle which affords those in Hong Kong civil liberties that those in China do not enjoy. Chief among them is the freedom of expression, which is why many Chinese tourists stocked up on Causeway Bay Bookstore’s scandalous titles while on the island.

Privacy

• NSA Did Not Spy On Congress Members During Iran Nuclear Debate, Top Intel Officials Say: Report

  Top U.S. intelligence officials told the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday that the National Security Agency (NSA) did not spy on Congress members during last year’s Iran nuclear debate, CNN reported. The testimony came in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report that alleged that the NSA had maintained surveillance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other U.S. allies, even though two years ago President Barack Obama had promised to end the practice. It also purported that communications between Congress members and Netanyahu might have also been inadvertently picked up.

• House Committee to Consider Safeguards for Handling Communications Intercepted by NSA

  The U.S. House Intelligence Committee will consider whether new safeguards are needed for handling communications intercepted by the National Security Agency that involve U.S. lawmakers or other Americans, the top Democrat on the panel said on Wednesday.

• First on CNN: Top intel officials say NSA didn’t spy on members of Congress

  Top U.S. intelligence officials told the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday that the National Security Agency did not spy on any members of Congress during last year’s contentious Iran nuclear debate.

• Fingerprints For Food: Venezuela Shows How Not To Use Biometrics

  Venezuela is clearly the country to watch if you want to see how not to use biometrics.

• Your fingerprint for a kilogram of flour: biometric and privacy in Venezuela

  In Caracas or Maracaibo’ supermarkets and drugstores, buying a kilogram of grain or a pack of cookies has become a complex procedure: it’s required for you to deliver an ID, full name, phone number, address, date of birth and to slide both thumbs in a device: the emblematic “fingerprint scanner”; a device which usage by stores was originally voluntary, but which evolution, months afterwards, is one of omnipresent machinery, kind of a necessary toll for the acquisition of a simple pack of gum in any chain store.

• Pioneer In Internet Anonymity Hands FBI A Huge Gift In Building Dangerous Backdoored Encryption System

  I first came across cryptography pioneer David Chaum about a decade ago, during the debates about online voting. Many in the technology world were insisting that such things were impossible to do safely, but Chaum insisted he had come up with a way to do online voting safely (he’d also tried to do electronic money, DigiCash… unsuccessfully). Many people disagreed with Chaum and it led to some fairly epic discussions. It appears that Chaum is again making moves that are making many of his colleagues angry: specifically creating a backdoored encryption system.

• TOR Anonymity: Things Not To Do While Using TOR

  TThe internet is awe-inspiring, but it has its nightmares for the ones who get stalked and harassed in the digital world. They can’t really get away from the predicament, one possible recourse is to go anonymous while using the internet with the help of various tools available. Name it, VPN, TOR, or you can use a proxy server for your anonymity needs.

  Apart from all these available options, clearly, TOR stands out first in the line when we compare the level of anonymity provided by sundry tools. The Onion Router project has been regarded as the best cloak for those people who want to hide on the internet. Edward Snowden, who came into light after he acted as the whistleblower and exposed NSA’s unethical surveillance activities, used TOR browser in order to do so. He was also inculpated by the federal agencies that his disclosure of confidential information was the impetus behind the Paris death massacre.

  The Onion Router has the forte to protect you and hide you from all those stalkers and malevolent minds, who follow you on the internet. Even if you want to be another Edward Snowden, you can very well do so, by using TOR browser. But you just can’t turn a blind eye on the fact, little of your mistake will contribute to divulging your identity on the internet, no matter how secure do you consider yourself. TOR doesn’t magically read your mind and prevent any of the foolish activities that you may perform. So, there are a few things you need to keep in mind and it will help you to be anonymous online.

  [...]

  Don’t use TOR with Windows

  Microsoft’s Windows is the world’s most used operating system for desktops, but it doesn’t seem to do well when you would like to use TOR browser on it. The credits are bagged by the vulnerabilities that exist on the operating system and may reveal your identity even if you are using the TOR to access the internet.

  Linux systems will serve you well for this purpose. Linux distributions like Tails and Whonix are pre-configured with TOR or you can configure it manually on any distribution you may like.

• Former NSA Official Tells UK Politicians Mass Surveillance Risks Citizen Safety

  What if mass surveillance was not only ineffective, but a potential danger to the safety of citizens?

  That’s the argument made by one former intelligence official. As the UK’s proposed new surveillance law looms, several evidence hearings with experts, government officials and activists have taken place in front of the Joint Select Committee that is vetting the draft Investigatory Powers Bill. In one session on Wednesday, retired NSA technical director turned whistleblower William Binney argued that mass surveillance, and particularly forms of it executed by the US and British governments, is fundamentally flawed, and may even result in the loss of life.

• Former NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney Warns UK Lawmakers Mass Surveillance Will ‘Cost Lives In Britain’

• Microsoft shows off just how much data it’s collecting from Windows 10 users

  “The statistics indicate that Microsoft may be collecting more data than initially thought,” writes Brinkmann. “While it is unclear what data is exactly collected, it is clear that the company is collecting information about the use of individual applications and programs on Windows at the very least.”

• DHS Issues Process and Privacy Guidance on State and Local Drones

  One of the most timely aspects of the best practices is their recognition of the value of encryption. Despite self-serving claims by intelligence officials that encryption represents a threat to national security, DHS’ 2015 guidance on drones explicitly advises local and state authorities to employ encryption to ensure the security of data they collect and retain.

  By recognizing that encryption enhances security, the DHS guidance could undermine half-baked FBI proposals to subvert encryption by mandating back doors for intelligence agencies and instead reinforce a common sense consensus uniting the tech community and privacy advocates.

• Do you own your phone or does it own you?

  Turning it off is a powerful act of showing who is in charge. If you feel you can’t live without it, then you are putting your life in the hands of the people who expect an immediate answer of their calls, your phone company and the Silicon Valley executives who make all those apps you can’t stop using.

  As security expert Jacob Appelbaum puts it, cell phones are tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. Isn’t that a chilling thought to reflect on the next time you give one as Christmas gift?

• NSA ‘confident’ in new system at center of Rubio-Cruz fight

  The National Security Agency said on Thursday that it was “confident” in its powers under a new phone records collection scheme, in a claim that backs up assertions from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

  In a post on the influential legal blog Lawfare, NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell addressed the operations of the spy agency’s new program, which began in November following a tough congressional fight last summer.

• Top Democrat says no evidence of NSA spying on US lawmakers

  A key House Democrat said Thursday there is no evidence the intelligence community was spying on members of Congress, following a report that the National Security Agency swept up some conversations with lawmakers in the course of spying on Israel.

Civil Rights

• Judge Doesn’t Buy CBP’s Argument That Dog Can ‘Smell’ The Difference Between Concealed And Unconcealed Humans

  If there’s an unreasonable, warrantless search happening, there’s a good chance Deputy (literal) Dog is on the case. Cops love their K9 buddies, mainly because nearly any motion or noise a police dog makes can be construed as an “indication” or an “alert.” It’s a blank permission slip, signed with a paw print.

• Oregon Militia

• Cologne New Year gang assaults: Mayor says women should have code of conduct to prevent future assault

  The Mayor of Cologne said today that women should adopt a “code of conduct” to prevent future assault at a crisis meeting following the sexual attack of women by 1000 men on New Year’s eve.

  Mayor Henriette Reker attended an emergency meeting with Chief of Police Wolfgang Albers and Wolfgang Wurm to discuss how to deal with the attack, where dozens of women were repeatedly touched and groped, with one case of alleged rape in the center of town.

• IBM union calls it quits

  After trying since 1999 to turn IBM into a union shop, the Alliance@IBM, a Communications Workers of America local, is “suspending” its organizing efforts.

  “Years of job cuts and membership losses have taken their toll,” said the Alliance in a statement Tuesday.

  The Alliance, which had 400 dues-paying members at its peak, now has about 200. But this figure doesn’t tell the real story about the Alliance’s accomplishments.

• More religion?

  It is an error for politicians and institutions to invite British Muslims to think about extremism as Muslims, rather than as citizens.

• An Act of Terror: Deporting a Kurdish Activist Back to Turkey

  In the quaint tourist town of Harbert, Michigan sits an unassuming restaurant that has been owned and operated by a man who is considered a pillar of his community. Cafe Gulistan is owned by Ibrahim Parlak. He is, by almost all appearances, a classic example of the immigrant success story. There is just one problem: The U.S. government is trying to deport him to Turkey, where he has a well-founded fear of imprisonment, torture and possibly death. After a quarter of a century here in the United States, he now has about 75 days left to fight deportation.

  Parlak is Kurdish, born in the region of Turkey called Anatolia, in 1962. His childhood was marred by increasing government repression of Turkey’s Kurdish ethnic minority. Turkey banned the Kurdish language, Kurdish cultural expression, and attempted to forcibly assimilate the Kurdish people to destroy their heritage. Resistance to that assimilation included protests and grass-roots organizing, but also, by the 1980s, armed resistance from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. In the late 1970s, Parlak, as a teenager, was jailed for three months for engaging in peaceful protests. He then moved to Germany to avoid further repression from the Turkish government. He remained active in the movement for Kurdish autonomy, hosting cultural events and raising funds for the political, nonmilitary wing of the PKK, known as the National Front for the Liberation of Kurdistan. After seven years in Germany, Parlak decided he could better support the Kurdish cause back home.

• Keys Case Spotlights Flaws of Computer Hacking Law

  Old laws can cause confusion and unduly harsh consequences, particularly when courts confront situations Congress did not anticipate. This is particularly true for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030—the federal “anti­hacking” statute prompted in part by fear generated by the 1983 techno­thriller “WarGames.” The CFAA was enacted in 1986, and the government’s current prosecution of journalist Matthew Keys—who faces sentencing on Jan. 20 for three counts of violating the CFAA—illustrates the 30-­year­-old statute’s many problems.

  The CFAA makes it illegal to intentionally access a “protected computer”—which includes any computer connected to the Internet—”without authorization” or in excess of authorization. But the CFAA does not define “without authorization.” This has given overzealous prosecutors broad discretion to bring criminal charges against individuals for behavior that simply doesn’t rise to the culpability Congress had in mind when it passed this serious criminal law, such as doing something on a computer network that the owner doesn’t like. (There is currently a circuit split on whether violations of employer­imposed use restrictions can give rise to CFAA liability, with the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Second, Fourth and Ninth Circuits finding that they cannot, and the First, Fifth, Seventh and Eleventh finding that they can.)

  The Keys case centers on behavior that essentially amounts to Internet vandalism. After being fired from the Tribune Company, Keys shared the username and password of the Tribune Company’s content management system in an online chat room. Another individual then used the credentials to log into the CMS and make some juvenile but relatively innocuous changes to a Los Angeles Times article, including modifying the title of the article to read “Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337″ (from “Pressure builds in house to pass tax­cut package”). The changes were live for only about 40 minutes, after which the Tribune Company restored the original article and effectively blocked outside access to its CMS.

• State Trooper Who Arrested Sandra Bland Indicted on Perjury Charge

  Brian T. Encinia, the Texas State Trooper who made the initial and violent arrest of Sandra Bland during a routine traffic stop just days before she was found dead in a jail cell last summer, was indicted on charges of perjury by state prosecutors on Wednesday for making false statements regarding his behavior during the incident.

• BREAKING: Officer Who Arrested Sandra Bland Charged For Lying In His Police Report

  Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Brian Encinia was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday for perjury, based on a statement he made in his report on his encounter with 28-year-old Sandra Bland.

  Encinia’s traffic stop and arrest of Bland went viral after she was found hanging in her cell three days later. Video of the arrest showed Encinia pointing a Taser at Bland yelling “I will light you up!” after he pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change. Encinia got more and more heated after Bland refuses to put out her cigarette, at one point trying to pull her out of the car. Bland can be heard saying “you knocked my head in the ground and I got epilepsy.” “Good,” Encinia responds.

  Before the video went public, Encinia claimed that Bland had assaulted him by swinging her elbows at him and kicking him in the shin. The perjury charge reportedly stems from his statement that he pulled Bland out of her car in order to continue the investigation.

• The Texas Trooper Who Pulled Over Sandra Bland Was Just Indicted

  Trooper Brian Encinia pulled over Bland in Prairie View on July 20, citing an improper lane change. Dash cam footage later released by county officials showed that the encounter quickly escalated after Encinia ordered Bland out of her car. In the video, Encinia can be heard saying, “I’m going to drag you out of here,” as he reached into Bland’s vehicle. He then pulled out what appeared to be a Taser, yelling, “I will light you up!” Encinia eventually forced Bland to the ground as she protested the arrest. Encinia arrested Bland for “assault on a public servant” and booked her into the Waller County jail, where she was found dead three days later.

• DHS Immigration Raids Reverse Policy of Deporting Felons, Not Families

  Despite Donald Trump’s ignorant comments to the contrary, it is not possible to detain and deport every undocumented immigrant. It’s not even a simple matter to determine who is deportable and who isn’t – evinced best, perhaps, by the overworked dockets of immigration judges across the country. That’s why there must be sensible prioritization of removals.

• Oregon Tribal Leaders Say Militant Group Needs To ‘Get The Hell Out’

  The Oregon tribe that once inhabited the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has made its stance clear on the militant group now occupying refuge headquarters: They’re not welcome.

  “We as Harney County people can stand on our own feet,” said Jarvis Kennedy, a member of the Burns Paiute Tribal council. “We don’t need some clown to come in here and stand up for us.”

  Kennedy joined other tribal leaders at a Wednesday press conference representing the 200 tribal members living on the Burns Paiute Reservation, located 30 miles from the refuge.

  “They say they don’t want to bother the community,” he said. “But you know what? Our kids are sitting at home right now when they should be in school.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• With Fixed Costs And Fat Margins, Comcast’s Broadband Cap Justifications Are Total Bullshit

  For a while Comcast tried to pretend that its slowly-expanding usage cap “trials” were about managing network congestion. At least until leaked Comcast documents, the company’s top engineer, and the cable industry’s top lobbyist all confirmed that justification was bullshit (caps don’t really help manage congestion anyway). Since then, Comcast has veered away from any hard technical explanation for the glorified price hike, instead focusing on the ambiguous claim that these new “flexible” pricing models bring “fairness” to the broadband industry.

• What you need to know about IPv6 in 2016

  Right now, a lot of content and services are only available on IPv4. Content providers haven’t seen demand and they’ve actually been worried about making user experience worse by making content available over IPv6. As IPv6 support in operating systems and applications has increased, and as networks devices start to support it, devices obtain IPv6 addresses automatically. So-called “dual stack” devices with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are more common, but just because a device has an IPv6 address doesn’t mean that it can reach everywhere on the IPv6 Internet. In these early deployment days, sometimes IPv6 works only on the local network because the ISP or larger enterprise network doesn’t support IPv6. In such scenarios, an application can receive an IPv6 address in a DNS response and try to connect, only to frustrate users with timeouts or other failures.

Intellectual Monopolies

• UN Initiative On Access To Medicines Calls For Contributions

  The United Nations Secretary-General’s newly formed High Level Panel on Access to Medicines launched a call for contributions by stakeholders at the end of December, in an effort it says could transform millions of lives.

  The High-Level Panel seeks to address “one of the greatest public health challenge of our time,” which is “how to promote innovation and increase access to medicines, vaccines, diagnostics and related health technologies in low-, middle-, and high-income countries,” according to a press release.

• How 3-D Printing Threatens Our Patent System

  Patents will have even more trouble with 3-D copies than copyright law had with digital music sales

• Copyrights

  • Monkey selfie case: judge rules animal cannot own his photo copyright

    A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that a macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs cannot be declared the copyright owner of the photos.

    US district judge William Orrick said in a tentative opinion Wednesday that while Congress and the president can extend the protection of law to animals as well as humans, there is no indication that they did so in the Copyright Act.

    The lawsuit filed last year by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sought a court order allowing Peta to administer all proceeds from the photos for the benefit of the monkey, which it identified as six-year-old Naruto.

    The photos were taken during a 2011 trip to Sulawesi, Indonesia, by British nature photographer David Slater, who asked the court to dismiss the case. He says the British copyright obtained for the photos by his company, Wildlife Personalities Ltd, should be honored worldwide.

  • Judge In Nutty PETA Monkey Copyright Trial Skeptical Of PETA’s Argument, But Let’s Them Try Again

    We’d been covering the story of that selfie for years, since first noting that it was almost certainly in the public domain, as copyright law only recognizes human authors. This discussion spurred not one, but two, separate legal threats made against us by representatives of David Slater, the guy whose camera the monkey used. It’s also gotten Wikipedia involved (after Slater asked the site to not allow the image to be used, while Wikipedia agreed with us that the image is public domain).

  • Ninth Circuit Appeals Court Decision On Fair Use And Right Of First Sale Fails To Budge The Needle On Either Issue

    A ruling on fair use, the right of first sale and the limits of trademark protection has been handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel. Normally, I’d proceed the word “ruling” with an adjective like “important,” or “terrible,” or “wonderful.” But this ruling is none of those. It’s a ruling, and I suppose it does set some sort of precedent, but thanks mainly to Adobe’s inept handling of the case, it does very little to clarify any of the above issues.

  • Richard Prince Finally Sued (Again) For Copyright Infringement Over His ‘Instagram’ Art

    Remember Richard Prince? He’s the well-known “appropriation artist” who was involved a few years ago in a key fair use case concerning his artwork. That case involved him taking photographs taken by another photographer, Patrick Cariou, of a bunch of Jamaican Rastafarians, and adding some minor modifications, blowing the images up and selling them as “art.” Whether or not you appreciate Prince’s art, the lawsuit raised some serious questions about whether or not it’s appropriate for judges to determine what is art and what is not. A district court determined that the works were infringing, but, thankfully, the appeals court overturned most of that ruling, declaring that the majority of Prince’s artowrk was fair use. Unfortunately, before the case could go any further, the case settled, so there was some murkiness over the precedent.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Ciena, ON.Lab collaborate on Open Source OS

  Ciena announced that it will offer a fully-supported commercial version of its Open Networking Operating System (ONOS).

• Amazon Makes EC2 Cloud Hosting Cheaper, Especially for Linux

  Amazon EC2 cloud hosting has become cheaper than ever following a price reduction for certain services and regions, especially if you use Amazon’s Linux images.

• Picking a public cloud? Think beyond AWS, Google, and Microsoft

  Again, the answer to these questions is never simply AWS, Microsoft, or Google. It’s much more complex, but much more valuable.

Kernel Space

• Ford, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Subaru get on board with Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation began a new initiative in 2012 called Automotive Grade Linux as an open-source project to develop common Linux-based software cores for connected cars. Now major automakers like Ford, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Subaru have joined AGL alongside existing members Toyota, Nissan, and Jaguar Land Rover.

• High schooler awarded Linux Foundation scholarship

  RJ Murdok spends his days studying Linux and contributing to bug reports, and he’s only 15 years old.

  Recently, he received a Teens-in-Training scholarship from the Linux Foundation. In the past five years, the Foundation’s Training Scholarship Program has awarded 34 scholarships totaling more than US$100,000 in free training to students and professionals.

  Murdok, who is legally blind, started studying Linux in 2012. He became interested in it when his older brother introduced him to the system. And a year year ago he started using openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Applications

• Proprietary

  • Vivaldi Web Browser Gets Its First Snapshot for 2016, Final Release Coming Later This Year

    On January 5, Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the first snapshot build of the Vivaldi cross-platform web browser for 2016.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to check boot path (partition) in Linux

  • Installing Windows 8.1 guest on Linux Mint KVM

  • Install And Scan By ClamAV On OpenSUSE 42.1

  • How to undefine and unset a bash environment variable on Linux or Unix

  • Install GLPI on Debian 7

  • How to list all iptables rules with line numbers on Linux

  • Getting started with webcams on Linux using QtCAM

  • How To Use Character & Paragraph Styles in Scribus

  • New Year Mejiro Update

  • FreeRADIUS Active Directory Integration with NTLM-MSCHAP

  • tip: Launch a new terminal with F1

  • Screencasting with Open Tools

    I recently posted a screencast about using Pulp to synchronize openSUSE and SLES repositories, which sparked interest in the tools I used to create the screencast. This video (the Screencast Screencast™) give a brief rundown of those tools, with particular focus on using my current video editor of choice, OpenShot.

• Games

  • Linux on PlayStation 4 Highlights Open Source War with Closed Hardware

    A group of open source hackers called fail0verflow has made the PlayStation 4 game console the latest hardware platform capable of running Linux. They’ve also touched off a cat-and-mouse game between Sony and the open source community over keeping the device Linux-friendly, which could be indicative of struggles to come during the IoT revolution.

  • Hackers Get Linux Running On PlayStation 4 And Reckon SteamOS Should Just Work

  • Arma 3 Linux port update in testing, possible BattlEye support to come too

    Exciting news for FPS fans. The Arma 3 developers have updated everyone on what’s happening with the Linux port, and it looks like they are even going to work on the BattlEye anti-cheat system.

  • Natural Selection 2 has a major update, the Linux experience is quite terrible

    Natural Selection 2 has been updated again, and this time some essential parts of the game have been improved.

    The latest update has improved the hit detection with better net code, so you could find yourself actually enjoying the experience a lot more.

  • Looks like Total War: Rome II might not be coming to Linux & SteamOS now

    Creative Assembly aren’t the best at communication, and it seems the Total War: Rome II Linux & SteamOS port was silently dropped.

    Originally the Total War: Rome II Steam page listed it was coming to SteamOS & Linux, but that was removed. It also also listed in the big announcement from Valve about games coming to SteamOS.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kubuntu 15.10 Gets Plasma 5.4.3 and Applications 15.08.3

    Even if Ubuntu and its flavors don’t usually receive big updates after an official release, Kubuntu doesn’t subscribe to this policy and get big updates for the Plasma desktop and other KDE components.

  • KDE Plasma 5.6 to Land on March 22, 2016, Will Have Five Point Releases

    We reported earlier today, January 6, 2016, the availability of the third maintenance release for the KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment, and we’ve promised to share some details about the release schedule of the next major version, KDE Plasma 5.6.

  • KDE Plasma 5.5.3 Desktop Environment Brings the First Plasma 5 Bugfixes for 2016

    The third maintenance release of the KDE Plasma 5 open source desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems was supposed to be released on Tuesday, January 5, 2016, according to the official release schedule.

  • Plasma 5.4.3 and Applications 15.08.3 for Kubuntu 15.10

    In the last months after the 15.10 release, developers have been very busy updating and improving our workflows and documentation which left little time for packaging. But we’re getting back on track, so here’s the missing announcement for Plasma 5.4.3 and KDE Applications 15.08.3.

    Many of you have been asking for Plasma 5.5. We are working on it and are close to finishing the packages for the development release, 15.10 packages will follow soon after.

  • conf.kde.in 2016

    Building on the success of conf.kde.in 2014 at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Community Technology (DA-IICT) in the land of Gujarat and 2015 at Amritapuri in Kerala, India, the horizon of the KDE Community is broadening and shifting to north India. conf.kde.in 2016 takes place on the 5th and 6th of March at Jaipur in Rajasthan, India. As in previous years of the conference, conf.kde.in 2016 will promote the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS) and offer ideas to build awareness about FOSS culture at the college level, when most technology students have their first experience with Open Source. The emphasis will be on KDE technology and Qt, the popular cross-platform application framework.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Maps Will Allow Users to Add POIs on OpenStreetMap

    The GNOME Maps developers continued to provide really interesting updates for the application, and now they are working on a new feature that will allow users to add POIs on OpenStreetMap.

  • Add your local joint to the map

  • More NX & Chrome Books

    The most recent end point offering is using a ChromeBook. This is not yet in production, and being tested mostly by me at this point. We purchased a HP 14 inch ChromeBook with 4GB memory for around $250. It boots immediately. After opening the Chrome browser, you just put in the right URL and credentials and after a few seconds the GNOME desktop appears. The experience is then the same as the other platforms and this platform will resume sessions started on other types of devices. This ChromeBook is full 1920×1080 and provides an excellent canvas space for running software.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Q4OS 2.0.2 “Scorpion” Is Based on Debian 9.0 “Stretch” and Trinity Desktop 14.0.3

    Today, January 6, we have been informed by the Q4OS developers abut the release and immediate availability for download of the Q4OS 2.0.2 “Scorpion” computer operating system.

  • SparkyLinux 4.2-dev Budgie

    There are new, testing iso images of SparkyLinux 4.2 Budgie Desktop.
    Sparky 4 is based on and fully compatible with Debian testing “Stretch”.

    The iso images provide the Budgie Desktop 10.2.1 installed on the top of SparkyLinux 4.2.

    The base system has been upgraded from Debian testing repository as of January 04, 2016, and runs on the Linux kernel 4.3.0.

  • SparkyLinux 4.2 Budgie Edition Out Now, Based on Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 “Stretch”

    On January 5, 2016, the developers of the SparkyLinux computer operating system were extremely proud to inform us about the immediate availability for download of the first development milestone of the upcoming SparkyLinux 4.2 Budgie Edition OS.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

  • The January 2016 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

    The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the January 2016 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro Update 2016-01-05 (stable)

    We are happy to announce our second update for Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)!

    Packages of the new major version of PHP have been released into all our repositories. Besides the new PHP 7 features there are the following packaging changes. In general the package configuration is now closer to what was intended by the PHP project. Also refer to the PHP 7 migration guide for upstream improvements.

    Read more

  • PHP 7 and Linux Kernel 4.4 RC8 are Now Available in Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella)

    On January 5, the Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, announced the general availability of the second stable update for the Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) computer operating system.

    The “Manjaro Update 2016-01-05″ update is here to upgrade all the PHP packages to the latest stable and most advanced version of the world’s most popular server-side programming language, PHP 7. With this occasion, the Manjaro devs made a few adjustments for better integration of PHP 7 in Manjaro Linux, such as to remove the php-pear, php-mssql, php-ldap, php-mongo, php-xcache, and graphviz packages.

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • Bryan Lunduke for openSUSE Board

    I, Bryan Lunduke, am officially running for a seat on the openSUSE Board.

    Consider this post to be my campaign platform.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Updates CloudForms Hybrid Cloud Management Platform; Adds Support for Microsoft Azure, Containerization

    Red Hat’s latest upgrade to its CloudForms hybrid cloud management platform expands its collection of managed platforms to include Microsoft Azure, following the recent Red Hat / Microsoft partnership. CloudForms 4 also adds management support for container architectures and even self-service features.

  • JPMorgan Chase & Co. Reiterates Overweight Rating for Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “overweight” rating restated by equities research analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in a research report issued to clients and investors on Monday, MarketBeat reports. They currently have a $89.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock, up from their previous price objective of $85.00. JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s target price indicates a potential upside of 8.66% from the company’s previous close.

  • Top Stocks of the day: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

  • Fedora

    • Sylvia Sanchez: How do you Fedora

      Sylvia Sanchez is a Fedora user and contributor living in Uruguay. She started using Linux ten years ago when she bought her first computer. Sanchez recalls, “My first computer came with Guadalinex, an Ubuntu-based distribution, promoted by the government of Andalusia, Spain.” In an odd twist, Sylvia was converted to Fedora at an Ubuntu release party. She has been a Fedora user since Fedora 16. Her childhood heroes are Wonder Woman and Spiderman. Milanesas with salad and fried potatoes is her favorite food. She is an aviation enthusiast who loves airplanes and studying history. She recently started a personal blog called Crossing the Air.

    • Does Fedora Linux need to be more stable?

      Fedora Linux is one of the best known Linux distributions, and it’s proven to be quite popular with some users. But is Fedora stable enough or does it need some additional improvement in that area?

      A developer at Red Hat recently shared his thoughts about Fedora Workstation and the ongoing work of improving its stability.

    • Fedora 23 on Tegra K1 Chromebook

      Last year during Flock I got myself an Acer CB5 311 Chromebook with Nvidia Tegra K1 ARM board, and 2 GB ram. It is a very nice machine to run ChromeOS, but my goal behind getting the hardware was all about running Fedora on it. With the great help from Jon Disnard (IRC: masta) on #fedora-arm channel, I finally managed to do that this morning.

• Debian Family

  • The birth of Debian, in the words of Ian Murdock himself

    Fast forward to 2016 and we now know just how prescient Murdock’s words were: a recent family tree of GNU/Linux distributions (pictured above) makes clear the absolutely key role played by the Debian project in the world of free software, and the enduring contribution of the man who created it.

  • Derivatives

    • TeX Live security improvements

      Today I committed a set of changes to the TeX Live subversion repository that should pave the way for better security handling in the future. Work is underway to use strong cryptographic signatures to verify that packages downloaded and installed into a TeX Live installation have not been tinkered with.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Update for Ubuntu Phones Delayed for January 27, 2016

        After yesterday’s report about the latest new features implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 software update for Ubuntu Phones, the Ubuntu Touch development team decided to delay it for a week.

      • System 76 Oryx Pro review: A laptop for your desk

        In 2013 when I moved to the U.S. from Europe, I need a new laptop. My powerful desktop PC was on some ship due to arrive in 2-3 months. (Linux users will know how hard it can be to find a decent laptop that can run Linux without any issues.) I finally settled on a Macbook Pro that I have been using as my main laptop ever since.

      • RockWork Is an Awesome Unofficial Pebble App for Ubuntu Touch

        The Ubuntu community is full of developers that want to expand the use of the Ubuntu phones and they are bringing an unofficial Pebble App.

      • uNav GPS Navigation App for Ubuntu App Gets Updated

      • Ubuntu Touch OpenVPN Support Gets a Prototype UI, Here’s How to Install It

        Many Ubuntu Phone users have asked Canonical to implement VPN (Virtual Private Network) support on the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, and initial OpenVPN support landed on Christmas Eve last year.

      • Lots of Samba Vulnerabilities Closed in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

        Details about Samba vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been published by Canonical in a security notice.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Elementary OS’ Freya Dumbs Down Linux

          The release last month of Elementary OS Freya version 0.3.2 showed little has changed in this new-style Linux distro that wraps its own lightweight desktop design around the Ubuntu core.

          Elementary OS first appeared in 2011. I last looked at its Freya beta release in 2014. I liked its fresh, new look and simplified approach to desktop management. However, my hopes for more features and a faster-evolving desktop environment in the latest release went unfulfilled.

        • Linux Mint 17.3 Upgrade Path Is Now Open for All Editions, Including Xfce and KDE

          After we reported a few days ago that the Linux Mint devs promise exciting features for the GNU/Linux operating system, earlier today, January 6, 2016, Clement Lefebvre drop the news that all Linux Mint 17 users can now upgrade to the recent Linux Mint 17.3 computer operating system, no matter the edition used.

Devices/Embedded

• Dueling Raspberry Pi drone autopilots ship in Q1

  Erle Robotics unveiled a Dronecode-ready “PXFmini” drone autopilot for the Raspberry Pi, and Emlid updated its Pi autopilot to a HAT-ready “Navio2.”

  In 2014, Emlid launched a Navio drone autopilot shield for the Raspberry Pi. Last month, the company unveiled a Navio2 update with HAT compatibility, and now Spanish drone firm Erle Robotics has launched a competitor called the PXFmini. The shield works with any Raspberry Pi, but is optimized for the Raspberry Pi Zero.

• The Rokos Core OS Turns Your Raspberry Pi Into A Bitcoin Node

  The Rokos Core, now in its fourth version, is a disk image for Raspberry Pis that can turn your single-board computer into a full bitcoin node. The system will allow you to hold a bitcoin wallet and mine, send, and receive bitcoin over the network.

  Understand that without specialized hardware this thing is essentially the way to actively waste electricity and/or hold bitcoin. However, because it is a full BTC node, you’ll be doing the bitcoin world a favor while learning a bit about mining.

• Raspberry Pi Raspbian Cross Compiler Toolchains on 64-bit Linux

  It might be obvious if you’re more familiar with gcc and cross compiler toolchains, but in the Raspberry Pi tools project there’s 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the tools. Trying to use the 32 bit versions on 64 bit Linux does not work. Rather than some useful error though, trying to execute any of the 32 bit versions from a shell gives a rather un-useful “No such file or directory” error.

• Raspberry Pi Closes December on Up Note

  With the holidays and all, the month of December wasn’t as action packed as some of the past months have been concerning the Raspberry Pi, but there were still some interesting stories that occurred. Let’s take a minute to reflect back on the Raspberry Pi and December.

• Intel, Qualcomm stake claims in Linux drones

  In Linux-related drone news at CES: Intel acquires AscTec, ZeroTech tips a Snapdragon Flight based “Ying” UAV, and DJI and Ford launch a $100K app contest.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android N switches to OpenJDK, Google tells Oracle it is protected by the GPL

      The Oracle v. Google legal battle over the use of Java in Android keeps on going, but this week Google made a change to Android that it hopes will let the company better navigate its current legal trouble.

      Google told VentureBeat that it in “Android N,” the next major version of Android, it is swapping Android’s Java libraries from its own Apache Harmony-based implementation to one based on Oracle’s OpenJDK—yes that Oracle, the same company suing Google. OpenJDK is the “official” open source version of the Java Platform, and Oracle makes it available under the GPL with a linking exception.

    • 2016 Technology of the Year Finalist: Android Auto

      Ever wonder why the tiny little Android-powered computer constantly riding around with you in your car is subjected to a life as a dust collector while you struggle to comprehend the terribly designed infotainment system that resides in the center of your car’s dashboard? We feel your pain. Which is why we’re so excited by the promise offered up by Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

    • Android has a serious bug that looks a lot like Stagefright

    • Casio’s first smartwatch brings Android Wear outdoors

      For all the talk of smartwatches over the past year-plus, it’s been difficult to convince most people that it’s worth wearing one every day. Casio thinks it has a solution, though — while you definitely won’t want to wear its first smartwatch seven days a week, you might find it genuinely useful for one or two.

    • Huawei made a 10-inch Android tablet with a stylus

      Huawei didn’t spend too much time talking about this one at its CES press conference today, but the Chinese smartphone maker revealed a new 10-inch Android tablet called the MediaPad M2, a larger version of the 8-inch M2 it shipped last year.

    • New Balance is making an Android Wear smartwatch, and Intel is putting chips in its shoes

      New Balance is now a gadget company. The athletics giant has created a Digital Sport division that will focus on devices, embedded technology (e.g. sensors in New Balance shoes and apparel), and performance sport (e.g. sensors in sports equipment).

      Its first product? An Android Wear-powered smartwatch that will “track runners’ routes via GPS and also enable them to run with music” without the need to bring along a smartphone. Unfortunately that’s about all we know at the moment. New Balance’s smartwatch launches this holiday season.

    • Haier Launches New 9.7-inch Android Tablet

      Haier might not be a brand many are familiar with, but if you have been keeping up with the tech scene for a while, you might have heard their name pop up once or twice. The company has launched a variety of products in the past, like smartwatches for kids, and just last year during CES, they even unveiled a 105-inch TV.

    • Google Announces New Chromecast Audio And Android TV Hardware Partners

      You could be forgiven if you had already forgotten about Android TV, but Google’s one-year-old Android-based successor to its ill-fated Google TV project is still around and kicking. Today, Google announced a number of new hardware partners for Android TV, as well as a number of new partners who plan to build Chromecast Audio — it’s recently launched audio version of Chromecast — directly into their speakers.

      Soon, you will find Android TV on screens from brands like Arcelik, Vestel, RCA, Hisense, TCL and Bang & Olufsen. Google is also working with Indonesian cable and broadband provider Linknet to offer an Android TV-based set-top box. Previously, the only Android TV sets were available from Sony, Sharp and Philips.

    • Casio launches Android Wear smartwatch that lasts a month per charge

      Casio has launched the G-shock of smartwatches with its first Android Wear device that can last a month between charges.

      The Smart Outdoor Watch, which was launched at CES 2016 in Las Vegas, is the first true smartwatch aimed at the outdoors that can run apps but is waterproof and shockproof to US military MIL-STD-810 standards. That means the watch will be fine in water up to 50m deep – most smartwatches can manage up to 1.5m – and will probably survive a tumble down a rocky outcrop.

    • The excellent Remix OS is bringing Android to every old x86 PC (and Mac) for free

      When I first tested the Remix Mini at the end of last year, I was blown away. Sure, the hardware is interesting and portable, but it’s the fork of Android adapted to make the Remix Mini into something resembling a desktop system that really took me by surprise.

      It’s what Chrome OS should be, in some ways: productivity-focused and instantly familiar, with full support for Android apps from the Google Play store.

    • Nvidia’s Shield Android TV gets a little more customizable with Marshmallow upgrade

      Android 6.0 Marshmallow is coming to the Nvidia Shield Android TV, bringing with it a handful of small and useful updates. Nvidia hasn’t said exactly when the upgrade will be available, but released a video yesterday outlining the new features. These include more customization for the home screen, greater control over external storage, and a hands-free, first time setup process that lets you add your Google account to the Shield just by telling your smartphone: “OK Google, set up my device.”

    • Android’s latest version is still hard to come by

    • More than 4x as many people are running Gingerbread than Marshmallow

      Do you remember when Gingerbread came out? This would have been December 2010: more than five years ago. Do you remember your excitement and anticipation as you waited for Android 2.3 to finally arrive on your device? You might be feeling the same way about Marshmallow now, eagerly awaiting its eventual appearance.

    • Android needs a bit of growing up for productivity

      Tablets were initially designed for consuming content, like web pages, videos, and ebooks. They were, to some extent, larger but somewhat dumber cousins of smartphones. Advancements in mobile technology as well as the pervasiveness of the Internet, however, eventually introduced tablets to new use cases. People now compose documents, make great arc, and even compose music or edit videos on their tablets. In other words, tablets have become devices for productivity aside from entertainment.

    • Android is ousting Windows from its last mobile bastion

      They’re everywhere, but you rarely notice them: the millions of handheld devices — often equipped with scanners — that delivery people, store clerks, and hospital staff responders often carry to manage inventory, process orders, and verify delivery.

      Nearly all of these supply chain-oriented devices run a version of the Windows Embedded operating system, which has had many names over the last decade. But within five years, the companies using these devices will have ditched Windows and moved to Android in one of the biggest industry platform shifts ever.

    • Android Set Top Box Lets You Stream and Record via HDMI Input

      While on the hunt for some hardware that would let him stream video throughout his LAN [danman] got a tip to try the €69 Tronsmart Pavo M9 (which he points out is a re-branded Zidoo X9). With some handy Linux terminal work and a few key pieces of software [danman] was able to get this going.

    • Sun, Oracle, Android, Google and JDK Copyleft FUD

      I have probably spent more time dealing with the implications and real-world scenarios of copyleft in the embedded device space than anyone. I’m one of a very few people charged with the task of enforcing the GPL for Linux, and it’s been well-known for a decade that GPL violations on Linux occur most often in embedded devices such as mobile hand-held computers (aka “phones”) and other such devices.

    • ZTE launches two inexpensive Android phones at CES 2016

      If you’re tuned into our CES coverage, these new ZTE smartphones might not be your first choice for a handset. But they’re aimed at a critical market for phone makers; consumers who don’t want to spend flagship prices or get pulled into a monthly financing plan with US carriers. First is the $129.99 Grand X3, an Android 5.1.1 Lollipop handset with a 5.5-inch HD (720p) display, 1.3GHz Qualcomm quad-core processor, and 16GB of storage, which can be expanded up to 64GB with microSD cards. It’s got an 8-megapixel camera, with a 2MP sensor on the front. It’s not going to win any performance awards, and at this size, 720p is noticeably less crisp than 1080p. It’s not a terrible looking display though, and the amount of bloatware is minimal. That’s nice to see. This one’s headed for Cricket.

    • New Balance announces Android Wear smartwatch for running smartphone-free

      Smartwatches can be hugely convenient tools when it comes to tracking runs and workouts. But the vast majority require that you also bring your smartphone along for the run or ride which, for some, limits the appeal of a wrist-mounted tracker.

OpenSSL’s teachable moment: Secure Shell key management in light of open source vulnerabilities

Imagine an Internet without encryption. Credit card numbers would flow in the clear from point to point. Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information would be sitting ducks for any cyber criminal to make off with. And government secrets wouldn’t stay secret for long.

Events

• FOSDEM and Devconf.cz trip

  As two years and year ago I plan to make conference combo: FOSDEM in Brussels and then Devconf.cz in Brno. Weekend after weekend. But this time I want to make it different.

  First I thought that will skip devconf.cz one. But this is quite important Fedora conference so checked how to make it cheaper that in previous years. And found out few deals and setup a trip which should be interesting.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox OS will Power New Panasonic UHD TVs Unveiled at CES

    Panasonic announced that Firefox OS will power the new Panasonic DX900 UHD TVs, the first LED LCD TVs in the world with Ultra HD Premium specification, unveiled today at CES 2016.

    Panasonic TVs powered by Firefox OS are already available globally, enabling consumers to find their favorite channels, apps, videos, websites and content quickly and pin content and apps to their TV’s home screen.

  • CES 2016: Firefox OS Still Alive, Powering New Panasonic UHD TV

    The open source Firefox OS will be used to power new Panasonic DX900 UHD TVs, Mozilla and Panasonic have announced.

Databases

• UK spies publish NoSQL database system as open source

  Last month, the British intelligence agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) published its first public project under the Apache 2 open source license.

• Oracle fends off open source to stay top rated database

  Oracle is maintaining its place at the top of the database software rankings, according to new data that has been released by website DB-engines.

  The numbers show that the company is still successfully managing to hold off open source challengers, and ranks higher than MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, despite its rating being slightly down from last month.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Android devs using Visual Studio now have an open source option [Ed: Windows only, proprietary SDK]

  Newly open-sourced Android++ tool is aimed at C/C++ developers looking to deploy speedy code on Android

• Toyota, QNX And Others Adopt Ford’s SmartDeviceLink Platform For Connecting Mobile Apps And Cars

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Christopher Allan Webber: Goodbye 2015, Hello 2016

  The reduced time spent coding on MediaGoblin proper has been deceptive, since most of the projects I’ve worked on have spun out of work I believe is essential for MediaGoblin’s long-term success. I took a sabbatical from MediaGoblin proper mid-year to focus on two goals: advancing federation standards (and my own understanding of them), and advancing the state of free software deployment. (I’m aware of a whiff of yak fumes here, though for each I can’t see how MediaGoblin can succeed in their present state.) I believe I have made a lot of progress in both areas. As for federation, I’ve worked hard in participating in the W3C Social Working Group, I have done some test implementations, and recently I became co-editor on ActivityPump. On deployment, much work has been done on the UserOps side, both in speaking and in actual work. After initially starting to try to use Salt/Ansible as a base and hitting limitations, then trying to build my own Salt/Ansible’esque system in Hy and then Guile and hitting limitations there too, I eventually came to look into (after much prodding) Guix. At the moment, I think it’s the only foundation solid enough on which to build the tooling to get us out of this mess. I’ve made some contributions, albeit mostly minor, have begun promoting the project more heavily, and am trying to work towards getting more deployment tooling done for it (so little time though!). I’m also now dual booting between GuixSD and Debian, and that’s nice.

Openness/Sharing

• Mayor Bowser Just Made DC’s Economic Data Open-Source

• How the Open Source Car Could Change the Auto Industry

  Show-stopping rims, subwoofers that make your license plate rattle, razor-sharp decals — custom car modifications that regular people can still do themselves are getting fewer and farther between, and even updates like these take considerable effort and skill and might be beyond the reach of most car owners. In the not-so-distant past, car owners who were so inclined could make all sorts of changes to their cars. Open an engine on a current model, though, and you have to practically be a technology expert to do anything. But what if all the technology, all the blueprints and patents, were readily available to everyone? What if, instead of purchasing a pre-made car manufactured by an industry veteran, you could set up a microfactory and actually build your own car? And, what if car manufacturers, rather than spending years and years and untold sums racing to be the first to discover and perfect the latest technologies, instead shared their findings, encouraging rapid development, the likes of which we can now only imagine?

• Open Hardware

  • How to build an open hardware amplifier in 5 steps

    ElectroSmash just released an open hardware guitar amplifier called the 1Wamp. Designed as a small and portable 1 watt amplifier loaded with all the features of big amps, the project was fully developed using only open source tools—like KiCAD, a design suite to create schematics and layouts in any platform.

Programming

• Build a web browser with 20 lines of Python

  The Qt graphical toolkit has been at the heart of the KDE desktop since its inception, and it’s used by many other cross-platform applications. It’s a great because it does so much of the hard work for you, even at a low level. There’s a Qt class for dealing with string manipulation, for example, or sorting lists. There’s exceptional networking support and transparency, file handling, native XML and image handling. Using Qt to perform all these tasks means you don’t have to re-invent the wheel or import yet another library into your project. But Qt is still best known for it’s high level user-interface design, where you can quickly construct an application from buttons, sliders, forms and images and tie them all together from your code.

• PHP 5 Support Timeline

  With the new year starting the PHP project is being asked to decide about the PHP 5 support timeline.

  While Aligning PHP 5.6 support timeline with the release date of PHP 7.0 seems like common sense to keep the support schedule continuous, there’s a big question whether to extend it further to an additional one year of security support till the end of 2018. This would make PHP 5.6, the last of the PHP 5 branch, to have 2 years of security support and de facto getting the same life span as PHP 7.0 would (ending support of both in Dec 2018).

• Java loses no luster in popularity index

  Java is coming off a banner year in language popularity indexes, and it looks to continue its momentum in 2016.

  Named the Programming Language of the Year on the Tiobe index and scoring the largest increase in popularity, Java remains in the top spot for the first month of this year as well. Tiobe’s index is calculated based on a formula assessing searches on languages in a variety of different search engines.

Bulgaria reports eGovernment progress

The Bulgarian government is making good progress in offering electronic government services. The country’s Ministry for ICT in December reported on progress in providing online validation of documents, and making these documents available online.

Science

• Cyborg jobs are here to stay

  Bots, drones, 3D printers, the Web, self-driving cars…

Health/Nutrition

• These 19 Big-Name Toothpastes and Face Scrubs Will Be Forced to Ditch Tiny Bits of Plastic

  Just before Christmas, Congress passed a law banning microbeads—those tiny pieces of plastic that act as exfoliants in face washes, toothpastes, and other personal-care products.

• As If Slavery Weren’t Enough, 6 Other Reasons to Avoid Shrimp

  Ah, shrimp. Americans can’t get enough of it: Per capita consumption has doubled since the early ’80s, and we now eat on average about four pounds per year of the briny crustacean. Not even tuna and salmon (about 2.3 pounds each) outshine the shrimp on the US dinner table.

  But the all-you-can-eat specials and fish counter fire sales ride on a massive shrimp-farming boom in the developing world, mainly in South Asia. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, global farmed shrimp production leapt from 154,00 metric tons in 2000 to 3.3 million metric tons in 2013. Imports now account for 90 percent of the shrimp we eat.

Security

• Security updates for Wednesday

• Third try is no charm for failed Linux ransomware creators

  Getting cryptographic implementations right is difficult. A group of malware creators is currently experiencing that hard truth, to the amusement of security researchers.

  For the past several months, a group of cybercriminals have been infecting Linux systems — primarily Web servers — with a file-encrypting ransomware program that the security industry has dubbed Linux.Encoder.

• Indian Hackers Attack Pakistani Websites In Response To Pathankot Terror Attack

  An Indian hacking collective named Indian Black Hats has defaced multiple Pakistani websites. This Kerala-based group has dedicated the attack to the little daughter of a Pathankot terror attack martyr. The group told fossBytes, “Harming is not our aim..but if anyone pick their eyes on our mother India..we stand for it”.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Saudi Coalition Just Bombed a Center for the Blind in Yemen

  THE NEW YEAR seems to have brought little change for civilians living under bombs in Yemen. Early Tuesday morning, missiles reportedly fired by aircraft supporting the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed coalition damaged a center for the blind in the capital city of Sanaa, as well as the city’s chamber of commerce, a wedding hall, and at least one residential area.

  Multiple outlets reported that the attacks caused no casualties, though one local report, citing an unidentified security official, claimed “at least three people” were wounded at the al Noor Center for Care and Rehabilitation of the Blind in Sanaa. Footage from the capital, published by the International Business Times, showed images of crumbled buildings, collapsed rooftops, and a young man weeping in the street. A spokesperson for UNICEF in Sanaa told Vice News that the al Noor Center offers classes for visually impaired students.

  In an email to The Intercept Tuesday, Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, confirmed that his office had received reports of airstrikes in Yemen indeed hitting the al Noor Center, as well as the other reported sites. The Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, did not respond to requests for comment.

• The 18-Minute Gap

  Frankly, I’m more interested in why the FBI doesn’t have cell phone tracking data from this period, especially given that they clearly have it from after the 18 minute gap. I asked on Twitter today but none of the journalists who covered this presser seem to have asked that obvious question (though there seems to be a map indicating some kind of cell tracking).

  If they shut off their phones or otherwise hid their tracks, it would suggest some importance to whatever they were doing in that 18 minute gap.

  One thing the FBI didn’t say, nor any of the crack reports I saw covering the press conference, is that the 18 minute gap — from 12:59 p.m. to 1:17 — happens to coincide with a period when Farook’s now arrested buddy, Enrique Marquez, was not captured on his employers’ closed circuit video.

• New Hillary Emails Reveal Propaganda, Executions, Coveting Libyan Oil and Gold

  The New Year’s Eve release of over 3000 new Hillary Clinton emails from the State Department has CNN abuzz over gossipy text messages, the “who gets to ride with Hillary” selection process set up by her staff, and how a “cute” Hillary photo fared on Facebook.

• For a Return to Normalcy

  The economic “emergency” required that we surrender the very concept of economic freedom, the foreign “crisis” meant we had to mobilize the nation, impose conscription, institute rationing, and turn industry over to the cartels. The social and economic life of the country was militarized, and dissent was crushed, along with the Constitution: hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans were interned, antiwar activists were prosecuted for “sedition,” and the Supreme Court itself was besieged by the enemies of liberty.

• Saudi-Iran Crisis Spells a Long Syrian War

  The Saudi decision to start the new year with mass executions bore the hallmarks of a calculated move. Riyadh doubtless anticipated that the Basij would do to Saudi diplomats what had been done to previous representatives of governments who had incurred the Ayatollah’s wrath. The Saudis were prepared to cut diplomatic relations, and ensure that other Arab states followed suit.

  Not for the first time in recent months, an Iran which prided itself on anticipating the next step of its enemies and on outsmarting them, found itself wrong-footed by the Saudi move. Just as it was when Riyadh announced its military offensive against the Houthi takeover of Yemen, Iran still worked on old assumptions that Saudi Arabia moved cautiously and behind a bead curtain.

• North Korea Claims It Just Detonated a Hydrogen Bomb For the First Time

  This doesn’t mean that North Korea has actually detonated a real hydrogen bomb, however, and experts are already suggesting that it’s unlikely the country has done what it claims. At least one U.S. official has already told ABC News that the U.S. does not believe North Korea has developed hydrogen bomb tech yet.

• There’s No Evidence North Korea Has an H-Bomb–but NYT Knows Fear Sells Papers

  Fusion-based hydrogen bombs have more explosive power than nuclear fission bombs that rely on uranium or plutonium. “If the North Korean claim about a hydrogen bomb is true, this test was of a different, and significantly more threatening, nature,” the Times reports. It’s not made clear, though, what if anything North Korea could achieve by having a bomb that could destroy a city and its suburbs rather than just a city, or how the response by the US and its allies to such a threat would be in any way different.

• Wednesday Morning: Otherwise Known as Mike-Mike-Mike Day

  NK’s Kim Jong Un later confirmed a “miniaturized hydrogen nuclear device” had been successfully tested. Governments and NGOs are now studying the event to validate this announcement. The explosion’s size calls the type of bomb into question — was this a hydrogen or an atomic weapon?

• When Will China Finally Abandon the Loons in North Korea?

  There’s something a little hard to understand about China’s continued sponsorship of North Korea. Historically it’s easy enough to understand, but for the past couple of decades it’s surely been nothing but a huge millstone around their necks. Are they really that worried about problems on the border with North Korea? Would they really lose that much face if they abandoned North Korea for good? And surely that would be more than made up for by the goodwill it would generate with the West.

• The Deceptive Debate Over What Causes Terrorism Against the West

  Ever since members of the U.K. Labour Party in September elected Jeremy Corbyn as party leader by a landslide, British political and media elites have acted as though their stately manors have been invaded by hordes of gauche, marauding serfs. They have waged a relentless and undisguised war to undermine Corbyn in every way possible, and that includes — first and foremost — the Blairite wing of his party, who have viciously maligned him in ways they would never dare do for David Cameron and his Tory followers.

  [...]

  Beyond such studies, those who have sought to bring violence to Western cities have made explicitly clear that they were doing so out of fury and a sense of helplessness over Western violence that continuously kills innocent Muslims. “The drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody,” Faisal Shahzad, the attempted Times Square bomber, told his sentencing judge when she expressed bafflement over how he could try to kill innocent people. And then there’s just common sense about human nature: if you spend years bombing, invading, occupying, and imposing tyranny on other people, some of them will want to bring violence back to you.

• New ‘Jihadi John?’ ISIS Video Features English-Speaker

  For those who still don’t get why the War of Terror continues to fail after 14+ years, here is another lesson.

  We all remember “Jihadi John,” who of course was never called that except in the western media. John (real name: Mohammed Emwazi) was a British citizen who became radicalized, joined ISIS and went on to do horrible things, including beheadings. The media, in hand with the White House and Downing Street, fluffed this one loser guy up into an international super villain. So, when eventually the world’s most powerful nation finally killed him in November 2015 with million-dollars air sorties and drones, we were all supposed to go full-out-bin-Laden-celebration, on the road to victory over Islamic State, with a little old fashioned Wild West vengeance thrown in for the feel good.

  And so now guess what?

  There’s a new guy to replace Jihadi John. He doesn’t have a stupid nickname yet, so let’s be the first and call him Haji Hank. He executed five persons claimed to be British spies, creating the video you see above in the process.

• Does the media say too much when reporting on terrorism?

  efore committing their heinous acts, terrorist-minded individuals will be sure to wipe out all the information on their cell phones after learning in the media how the damaged handsets found near the San Bernardino shootings in early December helped the FBI track a confidante. They may also decide not to use phone communication altogether after reading precise media reports on how, in January last year, Belgian police were able to kill two jihadists after intercepting suspicious calls originating in Athens. The same ill-intentioned individuals will tear to pieces their receipts after finding out in the mass media how French police linked one of the terrorists of the Paris bloodbath to Brussels, thanks to parking tickets issued in Molenbeek, a district in the Belgian capital.

• ISIL/ Daesh Threatens to attack Saudi Arabia after Executions

Transparency Reporting

• UK Government Spends Three Years And Large Sums Of Money To Avoid Revealing The Number ’13′

  Nothing very threatening there, you might think, but the UK government refused on the basis that disclosing this magic number would “impinge on cabinet collective decision-making”. So Buchanan appealed — first, to the Cabinet Office, the department he had made the request to, where he was turned down, and then to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which oversees this whole area of government transparency.

• Red tape and a three year FOI battle with Cabinet Office

  Journalism is, at least in part, the art of delivering new information in a timely manner.

  In which case, I have to admit a failure.

  It’s important to point out that I wasn’t wholly to blame, what with the government taking me to court and all that.

  Nonetheless what I’ve finally learned isn’t a story now – and probably wouldn’t have been when I thought it might have been.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Tensions flare over environmental threat of Canadian gold mine in Kyrgyzstan

  The remote Issyk Kul province in eastern Kyrgyzstan, on the border with China, is home to some of the most stunning vistas of the rugged Tian Shan mountain range that cuts through much of Central Asia. Mountain goats and endangered snow leopards roam the rocky slopes, while rare species of dandelion and wild tulip bloom in alpine meadows.

• VW Lawyer

• Here’s what David Cameron’s Flood Resilience Review must do

  This is starting to feel a bit like Groundhog Day. Two years ago, the UK experienced horrendous floods during its wettest winter ever. Back then, David Cameron charged Oliver Letwin with reviewing our flood defences. But his report was never published.

  Two years on, and the Met Office have just confirmed that December 2015 was the wettest month on record, ever. Storms Desmond, Eva and Frank broke new rainfall records and have devastated the North of England and Scotland with floods. And David Cameron has… ordered another flooding review, led by Oliver Letwin.

  This time, if the Government’s Flood Resilience Review is to be at all meaningful, it needs to tackle four crucial issues: climate change, land management, budgets and governance.

• America’s Food System Could Be More Vulnerable to Climate Change Than We Thought

  For billions of people around the world, the most immediate threat posed by climate change is at the dinner table, as staple crops face a steadily worsening onslaught of drought, heat waves, and other extreme weather events. The United States certainly isn’t immune to these challenges; for proof, just look at California, where an unprecedented drought has cost the state’s agriculture industry billions.

  Still, the conventional thinking among many scientists is that developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia—where people are typically hit harder by food price spikes and generally more reliant on agriculture as a primary source of income—are the most vulnerable to food-related climate impacts.

  A paper published today in Nature may add a wrinkle to that assumption. Scientists often track the impact that an individual weather disaster has on crops (again, see California), but the new research takes it a step further.

• Energy boost for Russia and neighbours

  Renewable energy could supply Russia and Central Asian countries with all the electricity they need by 2030 − and cut costs significantly at the same time.

• Midwest Flooding Damage Assessment Imagery

  NOS’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS) continues to collect damage assessment imagery of flooding along the Mississippi and Arkansas River. A team of NOAA aviators began collecting the photographs on January 2, flying above the area at around 7,500 feet aboard NOAA’s King Air aircraft equipped with specialized remote-sensing cameras. Imagery is available online to view and download.

• If Obama is a Climate Leader, Why Is US Oil Industry Booming?

  Despite President Barack Obama’s claims of climate leadership, the U.S. oil industry is booming under his watch.

  Bloomberg Business journalist Jennifer Dlouhy reported on Tuesday that “U.S. oil production has surged 82 percent to near-record levels in the past seven years and natural gas is up by nearly one-quarter.”

  The domestic fracking surge—a pillar of Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy—is key to this trend.

• VP Kalla Slams Neighboring Countries Over Haze Complaints

  Vice President Jusuf Kalla has denounced neighboring Singapore and Malaysia for complaining about the severe haze caused every year by Indonesian forest fires. He said he took note of the way the neighboring countries had kept complaining when toxic haze from adjacent areas in Indonesia, Riau in particular, fouled their air.

  “For 11 months, they enjoyed nice air from Indonesia and they never thanked us. They have suffered because of the haze for one month and they get upset,” Kalla said on Tuesday.

  Environmental group Greenpeace Indonesia reported forest fires in Riau have worsened from 6,644 hotspots in 2011 to 15,112 hotspots in 2013.

• Oklahoma Is Now the Earthquake Capital of America

  Earthquakes in Oklahoma increased by 50 percent in 2015, surpassing the previous year’s record and sounding new alarms over the risks of oil and gas operations like hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

• EPA Releases the First of Four Preliminary Risk Assessments for Insecticides Potentially Harmful to Bees

  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a preliminary pollinator risk assessment for the neonicotinoid insecticide, imidacloprid, which shows a threat to some pollinators. EPA’s assessment, prepared in collaboration with California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation, indicates that imidacloprid potentially poses risk to hives when the pesticide comes in contact with certain crops that attract pollinators.

Finance

• VIDEO: Bernie Sanders Inveighs Against Wall Street in Major Address on Economic Policy Proposals

  We need a banking system that is part of the productive economy – making loans at affordable rates to small- and medium-sized businesses so that we create decent-paying jobs. Wall Street cannot continue to be an island unto itself, gambling trillions in risky financial instruments, making huge profits and assured that, if their schemes fail, the taxpayers will be there to bail them out.

• Work less, play more

  Time is perhaps the most precious commodity of all. While we can buy more possessions and work new jobs, we can never make more time or recapture what has already been spent. But considering how much work dominates our lives, we question concepts around working and time relatively little.

  While paid employment can provide security, for many, jobs are a means of putting “food on the table” within a work culture that feels more enslaving than natural or joyful. But now there is growing recognition that traditional working patterns no longer serve us. More and more people are searching for freedom from bosses, wages, commuting and consuming, seeking instead the lives we truly want to lead.

• Thomas Piketty Ran The Numbers On Income Inequality. Here’s What He Found.

  Some of the top experts on income inequality released a study of new, more accurate data this week, revealing that Americans in the top 1 percent have done far better than everyone else for the last half century — and why they’ve gotten so far ahead.

  At the American Economic Association conference this week, economists Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, and Thomas Piketty released their preliminary research that uses a new analysis of tax, survey, and national accounts data. That’s more accurate, they say, than just looking at tax data, which misses huge chunks of the actual income people bring home.

• The cracks begin to show: a review of the UK economy in 2015 (part one)

• The cracks begin to show: a review of the UK economy in 2015 (part two)

  Thus, the ultra-flexible UK labour market (“with employers in the driving seat”, in the government’s own charming words) – to be enhanced by the repressive new Trade Union Act – has had the effect of causing productivity to fall.

• Convincing the Young to Blame the Old, Not the Rich

  First, Rampell’s comparison is misleading, since there are few married couples with single breadwinners turning age 65. Most women have been in the workforce for the last four decades. If we look to the same study referenced by Rampell, and take the more typical case of a couple with an average earner and low earner, we find that the value of the Medicare benefit is roughly four times (rather than six) times the taxes paid.

  Most of the reason the value of Medicare benefits exceeds the value of the taxes paid is not the generosity of the benefits received by our seniors. The main cause is the fact that we pay our doctors twice as much as doctors in Canada, Germany and other wealthy countries. We also pay twice as much for our drugs and medical equipment. This is a case of upward redistribution from the rest of us to members of the 1 Percent. (Almost all doctors are in the richest 1 or 2 percent of the income distribution.) But rather than talking about how the rich raise the cost of our healthcare, Rampell wants us to be upset at seniors.

• Surprise! Corporate America Is Throwing Down for the TPP

  American big business has now officially endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), giving many all the proof they need that the 12-nation deal—poised to be the largest ever—is bad news for people and the planet.

  An association of Chief Executive Officers known as the Business Roundtable (BRT) announced its formal backing on Tuesday, indicating that it plans to use its muscle to press Congress to approve the deal this year. In fact, BRT president John Engler told The Hill that the association wants the TPP to pass as quickly as possible—before the summer.

• Ben Carson Has a Tax Plan!

  This is great! At a guess, your average zillionaire would have an effective tax rate of about 8 percent compared to about 20 percent today. Ka-ching!

• Lots of Rich People Seem to Be in Tough Financial Straits

  I’m not sure what to make of this. Either there are a whole lot of rich people who manage their money really badly, or else this is some kind of statistical artifact. Or maybe rich people consider separate summer and winter getaway homes to be among the things they “need.” It’s a headscratcher.

• How Bernie Sanders And Hillary Clinton Differ On Wall Street

  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) unveiled a comprehensive financial reform plan in a speech Tuesday just a few miles from Wall Street itself, vowing to break up large financial institutions that pose a threat to the economy and complete the “unfinished business” of reform which began under President Obama.

• Greece’s Varoufakis to Launch Pan-European Progressive Movement

  Hoping to show Europeans they have an alternative to the prevailing system of “authoritarianism” and austerity, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced a new cross-continent movement with a “simple, common agenda:” To democratize Europe.

  The movement, known as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (or DiEM 25), will be launched on February 9 at Berlin’s Volksbühne theater.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Ted Cruz Knows What His Followers Want

  The president is the one on the right, of course. He’s the menacing one who looks more like a stormtrooper than the actual Nazi, but still retains plausible deniability in case someone like me happens to point out the entirely coincidental resemblance. It comes to us courtesy of the Ted Cruz campaign, which is apparently fully adopting Trumpism as its guiding vision.

• Ted Cruz: Obama Is Putting On Commando Gear And Coming For Your Guns

• 2016 Will Be a Test for Super PACs

  What do Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have in common? Pause for requisite awful hair joke. No really. From a campaign finance perspective, they have one distinctive thing in common: they have no Super PACs propping up their candidacies.

• Would a privatised Channel 4 still be a serial risk-taker?

  Why do we care so much about Channel Four? After all, as a supplier (I’ve worked for Channel Four on and off since 1984, that’s, scarily, more than three decades) it can be truly infuriating. And, every few years, there’ll be an article in the broadsheets, or a session at Edinburgh, about how Channel Four ‘isn’t what it used to be’. But, isn’t that the point? It keeps changing and it’s always the same. It’s as much part of Britain and its media landscape as the BBC – and that’s saying something. It is the place where most of the new stuff happens – formats, styles of documentary, new shapes of different types of content. It’s one of the reasons networks all around the world see Britain as a player.

• The Most Chilling Political Appointment That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Censorship

• Censorship: Plateau journalists caution Lalong

  The Correspondents’ Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, NUJ in Plateau state has urged the State Governor, Simon Lalong to resist the subtle attempt to censor the practice of journalism in the state.

• Censorship board amends Singaporean documentary to avoid misunderstanding

• ‘Friends’ mistaken for ‘animals’, say censors over cut in Singapore film

• Malaysian censorship board wanted to amend documentary Singapore GaGa to avoid misunderstanding

• Using The Word “Binatang-Binatang” Is A Security Threat − Malaysian Film Censorship Board

• Support for Tan Pin Pin pulling film out of KL festival

  Many are in support of Singaporean film-maker Tan Pin Pin’s decision to pull her 2005 film documentary Singapore GaGa from an event due to be held in Kuala Lumpur next week.

• U.S. Govt Reviews Impact and Efficacy of DMCA Safe Harbor

  The U.S. Government has launched a public consultation to evaluate the effectiveness of the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provisions. The study aims to signal problems with the current takedown procedures and also addresses the repeat infringer issue that affects ISPs, copyright takedown abuses, and the ever-increasing volume of DMCA notices.

• Home Ministry witnesses deny discussing film censorship trial in WhatsApp group

  Two Home Ministry officers denied at the Magistrate’s Court here today that their superior had used a WhatsApp group to discuss the case of an allegedly illegal film screening in which they were all witnesses.

  They were testifying in an ongoing trial against human rights activist Lena Hendry for allegedly screening a documentary on Sri Lanka’s civil war without obtaining approval from the government’s censorship board.

• Kyrgyzstan and Britain: united by censorship

  ou know freedom of speech is in a dire state when you have to defend someone’s right to make a dick joke.

• In Kyrgyzstan: British man deported after comparing the country’s national dish to horse penis

• Kyrgyzstan to deport Briton who ‘insulted country’

• It’s Not Just About The Horse Penis, It’s About The Gold Mine

• Centerra Gold worker arrested in Kyrgyzstan after ‘horse penis’ remark

• Make a horse penis joke on Facebook, get 5 years in Kyrgyzstan prison

• Scots worker apologises as he faces deportation after comparing Kyrgyzstan delicacy to horse penis

• It’s Not Just About The Horse Penis, It’s About The Gold Mine

• Dare not speak the truth about this horse penis-like sausage

• Kyrgyzstan deports Briton after horse penis comment

• Kyrgyzstan deports Briton after horse penis comment

• Kyrgyzstan deports Briton after ‘horse penis’ Facebook comment

• A Horse Penis Sausage Joke Got a Man Deported from Kyrgyzstan

• Man deported from Kyrgyzstan after making joke about horse dick

• Kyrgyzstan deports Scottish man for insulting national cuisine

• Professor Who Said Christians And Muslims Worship ‘Same God’ Is About To Be Fired

  Wheaton College, a Christian school in Illinois sometimes called the “Harvard of evangelicalism,” is preparing to fire a professor for claiming that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

  On Tuesday, Wheaton released a statement announcing that the school’s provost has recommended terminating Dr. Larycia Hawkins, a Christian professor who caused controversy last year for donning a headscarf in solidarity with Muslims facing unprecedented violence across the United States and publishing a Facebook post that declared “as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

• Academic censorship? Prof removed from course.

• Laurentian University professor removed for asking students to agree to profane language

• A Canadian Professor Is Sanctioned After Asking for Free Rein to Swear in Class

• Laurentian says removing prof from class over foul language form about breaking rules

• Laurentian University prof yanked over waiver to students warning of crude language in class

• Laurentian University professor loses class after asking students to sign form allowing offensive language

• Politically correct waiver sees Laurentian prof banned: report

• Laurentian professor Dr. Michael Persinger asked class to tolerate ‘uncomfortable’ vulgar language

• OAKLEY: Professor Pulled for Swears and Slurs

• Professor Removed From Course Over Vulgarity Waiver

• Laurentian psych prof can resume teaching course if profane language waiver dropped: university

• Sudbury professor bounced for “vulgar language” course

• GQ And Forbes Go After Ad Blocker Users Rather Than Their Own Shitty Advertising Inventory

  And so the war on ad blockers marches on. Lots of sites have recently made ad blocking software a target of their ire, complaining that such software ruins everything and is a form of puppy genocide or whatever. We, of course, know that to be bullshit, so we think it’s just fine if you block ads (in fact, we make it easy to do so). Still, some of these attempts are getting more and more aggressive, such as what two recent sites, GQ and Forbes, have decided to do.

Privacy

• An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

  But why should any of us take relationship advice from you? Because you founded Facebook? That isn’t a qualification. Because you run a massively popular website and can broadcast such advice to millions (even through third-party news outlets)? That doesn’t automatically make it good advice. Our relationships, on any level, are not for you to judge. In this case, your so-called “advice” is worthy only of contempt. And so, in reponse I say:

  Piss off, you sexist hypocrite.

• NSA hacked two key encryption chips

  None of the documents in the Snowden archive identify all or even most of the encryption standards that had been targeted, and there was a concern that if an attempt were made to identify one or two of them, it could mislead the public into believing that the others were safe. There also seemed to be a concern among some editors that any attempt to identify specific encryption standards would enable terrorists to know which ones to avoid.

• UK mass surveillance ‘totalitarian’ and will ‘cost lives’, warns ex-NSA tech boss

  Planned surveillance laws in the UK are “totalitarian” and the bulk collection of people’s data makes people “more vulnerable” to terrorist attacks, a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower has said.

• GCHQ mass spying will ‘cost lives in Britain,’ warns ex-NSA tech chief

  Plans by the UK’s Conservative government to legitimize the mass surveillance of Brits won’t work, and will cause lives to be lost to terrorism.

  That’s the view of a former senior US National Security Agency (NSA) staffer, who will sound off on blanket snooping at a parliamentary hearing this afternoon (Wednesday).

  William Binney, the former technical director of the NSA’s Analytic Services Office, will give evidence before the Investigatory Powers Bill committee, which is scrutinizing proposals to grant fresh spying powers to British agencies.

• Neocons Protest US Spying on Israel

  U.S. neocons are livid over a report that U.S. intelligence spied on Israeli efforts to sabotage the Iran nuclear talks, though they are curiously silent on evidence that Israel spies on the U.S. Ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar says it would be a mistake to let this pressure blind U.S. leaders on what Israel is up to.

• The FBI’s ‘Unprecedented’ Hacking Campaign Targeted Over a Thousand Computers

  In the summer of 2015, two men from New York were charged with online child pornography crimes. The site the men allegedly visited was a Tor hidden service, which supposedly would protect the identity of its users and server location. What made the case stand out was that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had used a hacking tool to identify the IP addresses of the individuals.

  The case received some media attention, and snippets of information about other, related arrests started to spring up as the year went on. But only now is the true extent of the FBI’s bulk hacking campaign coming to light.

• Selective outrage at NSA snooping

  The U.S. has been caught spying on foreign heads of state – again. And just as with the tapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, revealed in 2013 by the Edward Snowden documents, the target was the leader of a supposed ally: in this case, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

  Despite President Barack Obama’s promise two years ago to limit spying on heads of state of friendly nations, a Wall Street Journal report last week described National Security Agency spying on Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials while the U.S. was negotiating a nuclear arms agreement with Iran and trying to sell the resultant agreement to a fairly skeptical Congress.

• Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

  The governments of Australia, Germany, the UK and the US are destroying your privacy. Some people don’t see the problem…
  “I have nothing to hide, so why should I care?”

  It doesn’t matter if you have “nothing to hide”. Privacy is a right granted to individuals that underpins the freedoms of expression, association and assembly; all of which are essential for a free, democratic society.

• UK Legislators Want To Toss Tech Company Officials In Jail If They Inform Users About Government Surveillance Efforts

  Default mode at tech companies these days is to inform users of government surveillance. Unless explicitly forbidden to do so, multiple companies have stated they will inform users of requests for data or suspected state-sponsored hacking attempts.

  The mechanisms inherent in US law usually prevent notification. Requests made by foreign governments, however, operate in a much grayer area. UK legislators are trying to close perceived loopholes with new legislation that would make it illegal to notify users of UK agencies’ requests for data.

• UK government wants to send tech execs to jail for disclosing surveillance

  Ministers are lobbying to make it a criminal offense for a tech company to inform a user that the UK government is spying on them.

Civil Rights

• New Zealand’s Raid On Investigatory Journalist Was Illegal

  This reminds me of the raids on Kim Dotcom’s house as well, which involved a bogus warrant. Though, in that case, the High Court, after admitting that the warrants were not drafted properly, decided they were “good enough.” Either way, those are the only two law enforcement raids in New Zealand, and both came under sketchy circumstances, where the police couldn’t be bothered to actually follow the rules. What’s going on down there?

• Fox Host On Obama’s Emotional Response To Child Victims Of Gun Violence: “Check That Podium For A Raw Onion”

• As Obama Issues Executive Orders, Gun Stocks Explode

  Stocks for two major gunmakers skyrocketed as President Obama unveiled a long-awaited series of executive orders intended to reduce gun violence.

  Gunmaker Smith & Wesson’s stock price closed at $25.86, higher than at any point in 2015. A year ago, on January 7th, 2015, it closed at just $9.93.

• The Many Hypocrisies of the Oregon Standoff

  The militia members purportedly are “defending” father and son ranchers sentenced for two separate arsons of public lands. The corporate media has been portraying these arsons as some unfortunate accident, when the reality is quite different.

  [...]

  The grandson, a ThinkProgress article reports, had good reason to “keep his mouth shut” out of fear of his family. He later told a sheriff’s deputy that he had been abused multiple times, being punished by blows, forced to eat cans full of chewing tobacco, being driven 10 miles away and forced to walk home, and after carving two letters into himself with a paper clip having the letters removed with sandpaper.

• Hundreds rally against sexual violence after NYE attacks in Cologne

  Protesters held aloft a sign reading, “Arm Cologne” as up to 500 people rallied against attacks by members of the migrant community during the city’s New Year celebrations, and the authorities’ failure to stop dozens of sexual assaults which took place.

• Why It’s Scary That the Mall of America Can Crush Dissent

  ON DECEMBER 23, the day before Christmas Eve, the United States’ largest mall moved to shut down a potentially landmark Black Lives Matter demonstration before it even really began.

  Management at the shopping center, Mall of America, located just outside Minneapolis, had stores lower their metal security gates about half an hour before the protest started, part of a “lockdown” that cleared shoppers from that wing of the mall. Only moments after Black Lives Matter organizers entered the mall’s east rotunda, the cousin of Jamar Clark, whose death at the hands of police was the center of the protest, was led away by a throng of police. Organizers directed demonstrators to exit the mall toward the light-rail station. As protesters walked out, the mall broadcast a looping announcement in a friendly Midwestern voice: “Mall of America is now going into lockdown. Seek shelter in the nearest store, and follow employee instructions.”

• From Waco to Burns: Chicken Wings and Militiamen

  Nearly 25 years ago, on Feb. 28, 1993, preacher David Koresh and his 125 live-in congregants, the “Branch Davidians,” exchanged fire outside Waco with agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Six of their number and four ATFers were felled. After encircling it for 51 days, the FBI assaulted the Davidian compound, Mt. Carmel, with volatile CS gas and Army tanks, leading to a fire that took more than 80 lives, including those of two dozen children. In retribution for their deaths, thinking that his action would spark a revolution, “patriot” Timothy McVeigh on April 19, 1995 planted a fertilizer bomb at the curbside of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168; again, some of the victims were toddlers. In anybody’s book, all of that was tragedy.

  But today’s standoff by armed “patriots,” “Constitutionalists” and “sovereign citizens” outside Burns, Ore., will most likely be in accord with Marx’s dictum that history first presents itself as tragedy—and then as farce.

  The practices and preconditions for another bloodbath are simply not present at the Malhueur National Wildlife Refuge, where a dozen buildings have been seized by a group that calls itself a militia.

  The apparent organizers of the occupation are Ammon and Ryan Bundy, sons of Cliven Bundy, who with a little help from his friends held federal forces at bay in Nevada in April, 2014. Ammon Bundy has proclaimed that “I know the Lord is involved” in the Oregon occupation, but neither he nor his brother, like Koresh, is a guru of a passionate church. Their accomplices are not in agreement about God, without whose blessing, it seems, few members of our species are today prepared to face martyrdom.

• Judge Helps Ensure That The More Ignorant Law Enforcement Officers Are, The More They’ll Be Able To Get Away With

  Why? Because probable cause is whatever a cop says it is. This is an ongoing issue in states where marijuana has been partially legalized. In California, medical marijuana is legal. The cops can’t seem to deal with this new reality. So, they find bogus reasons to raid houses, relying on multiple law enforcement-friendly exceptions to the Fourth Amendment to keep their busts intact… or at least minimize the number of times judges will find them culpable for violations. Cops say “upon information and belief” and magistrate judges nod in approval.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• HTTP/2.0 — The IETF is Phoning It In

  A very long time ago —in 1989 —Ronald Reagan was president, albeit only for the final 19½ days of his term. And before 1989 was over Taylor Swift had been born, and Andrei Sakharov and Samuel Beckett had died.

  In the long run, the most memorable event of 1989 will probably be that Tim Berners-Lee hacked up the HTTP protocol and named the result the “World Wide Web.” (One remarkable property of this name is that the abbreviation “WWW” has twice as many syllables and takes longer to pronounce.)

  Tim’s HTTP protocol ran on 10Mbit/s, Ethernet, and coax cables, and his computer was a NeXT Cube with a 25-MHz clock frequency. Twenty-six years later, my laptop CPU is a hundred times faster and has a thousand times as much RAM as Tim’s machine had, but the HTTP protocol is still the same.

• IPv6 non-alternatives: DJB’s article, 13 years later

  With the world passing 10% IPv6 penetration over the weekend, we see the same old debates coming up again; people claiming IPv6 will never happen (despite several years now of exponential growth!), and that if they had only designed it differently, it would have been all over by now.

  In particular, people like to point to a 2002–3 article by D. J. Bernstein, complete with rants about how Google would never set up “useless IPv6 addresses” (and then they did that in 2007—I was involved). It’s difficult to understand exactly what the article proposes since it’s heavy on calling people idiots and light on actual implementation details (as opposed to when DJB’s gotten involved in other fields; e.g. thanks to him we now have elliptical curve crypto that doesn’t suck, even if the reference implementation was sort of a pain to build), but I will try to go through it nevertheless and show how I cannot find any way it would work well in practice.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Patent Venue: Limits on Venue in Patent Infringement Litigation

  The pending Federal Circuit mandamus action of In re TC Heartland involves an interesting legal question that has now been fully briefed. The Federal Circuit has not yet announced whether it will hold oral arguments in the patent venue debate.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Voice of the masses: 2015 was the year of Linux and open source software. What next?

  It’s the start of a new year here in the Shire, and later this week we’re going to record the first episode for series 4 of our podcast. We’ve left this a little late, but here’s the first voice of the masses of 2016. Over on ZDNet.com, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes, “In 2015, Microsoft embraced Linux, Apple open-sourced its newest, hottest programming language, and the cloud couldn’t run without Linux and open-source software. So, why can’t people accept that Linux and open source have won the software wars?”

• Welcome to the 2015 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards

• Goodbye Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple Inc. (AAPL), Here Comes Linux

  A Journalist from Veteran technology, Dan Gillmor said, I had to install Linux a number of times over a span of years and went back either to the Mac or Windows. The reason was there were many loop holes in this operating system. It didn’t have much of those applications to support what I need to do. It was complicated for everyday use. As the time passed by, it just got better and better and then it was time to finally switch to Linux in the year 2012.

• Switching to Linux, saying goodbye to Apple and Microsoft

  Veteran technology journalist Dan Gillmor’s been using GNU/Linux since 2012, switching away from all the “control freak” services, tools and software that he’d grown used to over decades of computing.

• A Linux switcher doesn’t miss Apple or Microsoft

  Linux has much to offer any user, including journalists. One writer at Medium switched to Linux and said goodbye to Apple and Microsoft. He’s never been happier with his computer and shared his thoughts in a long and detailed post.

Server

• 2015’s top five cloud developments and what they mean for 2016

  More telling than OpenStack’s continued rise is how everyone is adopting open-source operating systems and technologies into the cloud. Nothing demonstrates that more than Microsoft — Microsoft of all companies! — adopting Linux.

  Microsoft launched its first Linux-based program, Azure Cloud Switch in 2015. After that, the boys from Redmond started offering Hadoop-on-Azure with Ubuntu Linux as its base. Then, the company added Red Hat Enterprise Linux to its Azure cloud offerings. That was followed up with Debian GNU/Linux being added to a list of supported Linux distributions available on Azure. Finally, and almost unbelievably, Microsoft is now offering a Linux on Azure certification.

Kernel Space

• Car Makers Rev Up Automotive Grade Linux at CES

  The hottest up-and-coming auto show may very well be CES. Many of the world’s biggest automakers will be there, and they’ll be showing off more than new electric or self-driving cars. The technology inside our cars for music, infotainment, and GPS is also a big part of story. Especially with consumers expecting their “connected” car experience to be as glitzy, convenient, simple and easy to upgrade as their smart phone or wearable.

• Linux-running car: can you feel me?

  Let’s start with something that relates to Linux. That’s the huge screen you see first when looking through the front door. Huge 17-inch touch panel is a user interface for the Linux-based computer system that controls the whole car. It is really impressive.

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA’s 2016 Tegra SoC Is Looking Even More Interesting

    At NVIDIA’s CES press conference last night they announced the DRIVE PX2 as a “in-car super-computer” that’s “as powerful as 150 MacBook Pros”, while this SC is powered by a yet-to-be-announced SoC.

    The DRIVE PX2 is designed for self-driving cars and with having so much information to process, the SoC powering this has to be a beast. NVIDIA hasn’t formally announced the SoC successor to the Tegra X1, but there’s speculation that this System-on-a-Chip could be a refined version of the delayed “Parker” SoC.

  • NVIDIA’s Drive PX 2 is a liquid-cooled supercomputer for cars

  • Primary Selection Support Still Being Worked On For Wayland

    The Wayland primary selection protocol was published nearly one month ago and continues to be reviewed and further refined by developers. This new protocol is one of the keys to whether Fedora 24 will enable Wayland by default.

  • NVIDIA 361.16 Beta Driver Now Includes Long-Awaited GLVND

    NVIDIA’s Unix graphics driver team is starting off the new year by releasing their first public beta in the 361 Linux driver series.

  • VA-API Video Acceleration Now Enabled For Nouveau Gallium3D

    For the past few months a Samsung developer has been working on VA-API support for Nouveau. After a few patch revisions, that work is finally hitting mainline Mesa.

    Landing in Mesa this morning was NVC0 driver’s support for the VA state tracker (Video Acceleration State Tracker) and enabling the support for builds.

  • Nvidia 361.16 Beta Out Now for Linux, BSD and Solaris with OpenGL Vendor-Neutral Driver

    Earlier today, January 5, 2016, Nvidia announced the release of a new Beta version of its graphics drivers for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems, version 361.16.

Applications

• Git v2.7.0 released

• Munin 3 packaging

  The Munin project is moving slowly closer to a Munin 3 release. In parallel, the Debian packaging is changing, too.

  The new web interface is looking much better than the traditional web-1.0 interface normally associated with munin.

• ‘Shotcut’ Video Editor (4K Supported) 16.01 Version Released, Available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint via PPA

  Shotcut is an open-source, free and cross-platform video editing software for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Dan Dennedy, started Shotcut project in 2011 and it is developed on the MLT Multimedia Framework. Video editing has been never easy but Shotcut is an user-friendly and simple video editor that gives you tons of functions and features to edit/manage your videos with just mouse clicks, but do not under estimate this product because it has complex functions too that many paid product offers.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Setting up pagure on a banana pi

  • Getting Started with WP-CLI on Ubuntu 15.10

  • How to start building websites on Linux with Django

  • Raspberry PI as WiFi to Ethernet Bridge

    Recently my cable modem refused to connect to my provider, stating “Connection Refused”. The provider (UPC Austria) stated, that they have to my place and make some measurements. But this will be in one week…. WTF?? One week without internet? No way!

  • Installing Firestorm (Second Life viewer) for Linux

  • Evade monitoring by IP spoofing in Kali Linux with torsocks

  • PlayOnLinux Updated to 4.2.10, Install in Ubuntu/Linux Mint via PPA

  • Linux Learners Guide – Book Written by Ankam Ravi Kumar

  • How to add disks to LVM volume on Linux

  • Solve Kernel Panic on Arch Linux

  • Quick guide to port an app for Gtk+ 3.20

• Games

  • Infinium Strike Coming To Xbox One, PC, Mac and Linux in 2016

  • PlayOnLinux and PlayOnMac 4.2.10 have been released

  • The PlayStation 4 Has Been Hacked To Run Linux

  • PS4 hacked to play Pokemon Emerald, SteamOS should “just work”

  • PS4 Hack Enables Console to Run Using Linux, SteamOS Should “Just Work”

  • PS4 Hacked To Run On Linux OS, Plays Pokemon Game: Shows It’s Easy To Run Pirated Games? [Video]

  • Hacked PS4 Plays Pokemon

  • Now that the PS4 has been hacked to run Linux, SteamOS is an inevitability

  • PS4 Hack: Linux on PS4, Sony’s PlayStation 4 Hacked to Run Pokémon

  • PS4 got Hacked – Linux Distribution is on the web

  • ‘Pokemon’ News: PlayStation 4 Hack Allows ‘Pokemon Emerald’ Play

  • Hackers Run Pokemon and Linux on PlayStation 4 –

  • PS4 has been hacked to run Linux OS and play Pokemon

  • Hackers fail0verflow demonstrate Linux running on jailbroken PlayStation 4

  • Hand of Fate is a brilliant game, you should really give it a go on Linux & SteamOS

    We have covered Hand of Fate before, but since release it has gained four major free content updates, so I took it for a spin.

  • Jailbreak! Sony PS4 “can now run Linux”

    In recent years, Sony has been a target of considerable interest to Linux-loving jailbreakers.

    That’s because Sony used to let you run Linux on your PlayStation, and even provided official tools to help enthusiasts do so, before abruptly revoking that right and locking its devices down so that switching to any other operating system was impossible.

  • PlayStation 4 Running Linux Can Use Open-Source Radeon Gallium3D Driver

    Released a few days back was a modified Linux kernel that can run on the PlayStation 4. With a Sony PlayStation 4 hack by “fail0verflow”, it’s possible to run a Linux desktop on this latest-generation game console. Now these device hackers have managed to get the PlayStation 4 working with the Radeon Gallium3D driver.

  • This $99 Android box streams PC games to your TV with open-source Nvidia Shield tech

    Emtec’s GEM Box microconsole can stream all sorts of games and media from all sorts of places—even full-blown PC games from Nvidia-equipped computers.

  • EMTEC Unveils GEM (Game * Entertainment * Multimedia) Box at CES 2016 with PC Library and GameFly Streaming

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • “Multiple merge candidates, aborting” workaround

    I’ve found a workaround that fixes the cause that makes Akonadi (and in turn Kmail) throw this error and stop syncing the emails.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Black Lab Enterprise LInux DP3 has been released!

    Today PC / Opensystems LLC is pleased to announce its very first OS update of the year for Black Lab Enterprise Linux : version, 8.0, Developer Preview 3. DP3 (for short) previews many of the enhancements which will be featured in the upcoming stable release of the BLE Linux desktop. PC / Opensystems stays in touch with our end-users;all fixes that have been introduced are based on feedback from customers and developers around the globe.

  • Q4OS 2.0.2 Scorpion, testing

  • Black Lab Enterprise Linux 8.0 DP3 Supports Android Studio, XBox One Controller

    We have just been informed today, January 5, 2016, by Black Lab Software about the immediate availability for download and testing of the Black Lab Enterprise Linux 8.0 Developer Preview 3 operating system.

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • Video: Alpine Linux-based LiveCD with OpenVZ kernel / tools

    I recently encountered an Alpine Linux developer in the #openvz Freenode IRC channel who was working on an Alpine Linux-based LiveCD that uses the OpenVZ Legacy stable kernel and tools. If you aren’t familiar with Alpine Linux (and I wasn’t prior), it is a very minimal Linux distro that uses BusyBox. The LiveCD sharfire (his IRC nick) created is ~ 100MB in size. Since I know OpenVZ very well, shafire asked me to lend a hand with testing.

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro Linux Budgie 16.01 Edition Now in Testing, Ships with Budgie Desktop 10.2.2

    On January 4, 2016, Stefano Capitani was proud to announce the immediate availability for download of the first RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Manjaro Linux Budgie 16.01 operating system.

    Based on the testing branch of Manjaro Linux, Manjaro Linux Budgie 16.01 RC1 incorporates the latest build of the awesome Budgie Desktop from the Solus Project, version 10.2.2, but with some tweaks and optimizations to make it blend in with the Manjaro guidelines.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Three More Features Proposed For Fedora 24

      Suds Jurko Fork – With this proposal, the python-suds package for this SOAP-based client for Python would switch to using a fork of the project maintained by Jurko Gospodnetić. His fork of Python SUDS has Python 3 support and more modern features.

      Sen TUI For Docker – Providing the Sen terminal user interface for managing Docker containers/images from the command-line. Sen allows for interactive management, support for key bindings, and much more. Fedora would be one of the first distributions packaging Sen for Docker.

      Cloud MOTD – Fedora Cloud users would receive update details, security information, etc, as their message of the day.

    • How Close Fedora Is To Switching To Wayland By Default

      Kevin Martin of the Fedora Project has written a status update and plan around the “Wayland-by-default” effort for Fedora 24.

      Kevin provided a status update via this desktop list update. The current state of various Wayland features are now listed via this Fedora Wiki page.

    • Fedora Workstation and the quest for stability and robustness

      So keeping this is mind the retrace server is an important tool for us and one that at least gives us a decent indication of how we are doing with quality. But we can always do better so we will keep reviewing the reports we get through the ABRT and retrace systems and I also do strong recommend any application or library maintainers out there to look into what major issues are reported against their own modules.

    • Tracking Bugs & Making Fedora Workstation More Stable

      Red Hat’s Christian Schaller has written a blog post today about Fedora Workstation and the quest for stability and robustness.

      Schaller wrote about how the overall consensus of Fedora Workstation with its few releases now is that its very stable — much better than the older Fedora Linux releases. I certainly agree so — at least if using the GNOME-based desktop of Fedora Workstation — that Fedora 21 and newer have been rock solid.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Posts Longer Tribute In Honor Of Its Founder

    The Debian project has today published a longer tribute in honor of Ian Murdock after briefly announcing his passing last week.

    Debian’s tribute today talks about how Ian began programming at nine years old, how he started Debian in 1993, some excerpts from the Debian Manifesto and some early Debian release announcements, etc

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Nvidia Uses Ubuntu at CES 2016 to Show Nvidia DriveWorks

        Nvidia announced at CES 2016 some really interesting new hardware that’s aimed at autonomous cars, along with NVIDIA DriveWorks, and it looks like they used Ubuntu for the demo.

      • Canonical Patches New Vulnerability for Ubuntu 15.10′s Desktop and Raspberry Pi 2 Kernels

        Just a few minutes ago, January 5, 2016, Canonical published several Ubuntu Security Notices to inform Ubuntu users about the availability of new Linux kernel versions for their operating systems.

      • Xenial Xerus Alpha 1 released!

      • Ubuntu Linux Vagrant Images Pass the 10 Million Download Mark, Says Canonical

        On January 5, Canonical’s Jorge O. Castro was proud to announce that the Ubuntu Linux Vagrant images have passed the 10 million download mark at the beginning of 2016.

        Vagrant is one of the most popular DevOps software that has been designed from the ground-up to let developers manage virtual machines on their notebooks with ease, while making use of the same libraries that are available on their server operating system.

Devices/Embedded

• Fixed-wing Parrot Disco drone stays aloft for 45 minutes

  Parrot showed off a fixed-wing, hand-launchable “Disco” drone that can fly for up to 45 minutes at up to 50 mph, and offers a new autopilot mode.

  Just two months after launching its second generation, Linux-based BeBop 2 quadcopter, claimed to offer a groundbreaking 25 minutes of flight time, Parrot showed off a fixed-wing Disco UAV claimed to almost double that with 45 minute battery life. Although Parrot doesn’t mention it on its product page, several CES reports, including one from BGR, claims the Disco can fly at speeds of up to 50mph, far faster than prosumer quadcopter speeds.

• ​DD-WRT Linux firmware comes to Linksys routers

  Long time networking device leader Linksys has finally made good on its promise to bring the open-source DD-WRT to its Wi-Fi router family. At CES, Linksays announced you’ll be able to use the Linux-based, alternative open-source firmware with the company’s WRT1900AC, WRT1200AC, and recently released WRT1900ACS dual-band Gigabit Wi-Fi routers.

• Some Linksys 802.11ac WiFi routers now officially support DD-WRT open source firmware

  DD-WRT is an open source, Linux-based replacement for the firmware that comes with many WiFi routers. It has a reputation for giving users more control over their router’s performance and security. But historically the companies that produce networking hardware haven’t really encouraged you to replace their firmware.

• DD-WRT Software Heading to Linksys Routers

  The Linksys WRT1900AC, WRT1200AC, and recently released WRT1900ACS Dual-band Gigabit Wi-Fi routers will all have access to DD-WRT as an alternative to Linksys’ own management software and the OpenWrt’s “Chaos Calmer” release.

• Linksys And DD-WRT Announce Support For The Latest WRT Routers

• Linksys And DD-WRT To Support Latest WRT Routers

  Linksys and DD-WRT, a Linux based alternative OpenSource firmware suitable for a variety of WLAN routers and embedded systems, today announced the expansion of DD-WRT support to include the WRT1900AC, WRT1200AC, and recently released WRT1900ACS Dual-band Gigabit Wi-Fi routers*.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Samsung Announces new Smart TV User Experience and Tizen Smart Remote Control

      Samsung has announced a new Smart TV user experience and Smart Hub for its Tizen 2016 TV range and also a new Samsung Smart Control remote. The new Smart Hub interface promises to more tightly Integrate with your existing content and services, allowing you to easily switch between them. There is also an updated search system that allows users to search multiple sources simultaneously.

  • Android

    • Oracle sinks its claws into Android

      This is my first blog post since leaving my role as Mozilla’s CTO 6 months ago. As you may have read in the press, a good chunk of the original Firefox OS founding team has moved on from mobile and we created a startup to work on some cool products and technologies for the Internet of Things. You’ll hear more about what we are up to next month.

    • Android Lollipop passes 30% adoption, Marshmallow still under 1%

    • Aptoide Lands $4M To Grow Its Alternative Android App Store In Emerging Markets

    • Alcatel OneTouch Pixi 4 hands-on

      We are here at CES 2016 with Alcatel OneTouch, where the company has taken the wraps off of their latest series of affordable entry-level smartphones. What do these devices have to offer? We find out, as we go hands on with the Alcatel OneTouch Pixi 4!

    • Toast raises $30 million for Android-powered point-of-sale system to challenge Square

      Toast announced today that it has raised a $30 million Series B funding round to support its Android point-of-sale (POS) system for restaurants. This latest investment was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and will be used for hiring talent, updating products, and marketing. Additional investors include GV (formerly Google Ventures), along with unnamed private investors.

      Founded in 2011, the Boston-based company offers a mobile POS system for restaurants, bars, and other food and beverage establishments. It offers solutions for restaurants seeking to improve customer loyalty and track sales — enabling gift cards, for example, and making it possible to view reports on labor and sales right on a mobile device. Toast said that it currently has more than 1,400 customer establishments across 43 states in the U.S.

    • Poll: Open Source Fans Are Not Keen on Android, iOS Mobile Devices

      A poll of open source users reveals the types of operating systems and devices they use. GNU/Linux-based laptops and PCs top the list; Android and iOS are much less popular.

    • Android 6.0 Marshmallow Update For Samsung Galaxy S6, S6 Edge: Screenshots Surface, Refreshing New Design Revealed

    • Weekly Poll Followup: Smartphones for Christmas

    • Google tells court new Android versions with OpenJDK released last month

    • [Hands-On] Camera MX Now Takes iOS-Like “Live Photos” On Android

    • Google fixes another Mediaserver bug in monthly Android security update

    • Google fixes dangerous rooting vulnerabilities in Android

    • Activity tracker Human finally arrives for Android, bringing new ‘Pulse’ feature with it

    • Android Wear Revisited: Perfect Companion for the Internet of Things

      From running your smartphone to your kitchen sink, Android has proven to be quite the versatile operating system. Android devices have become ubiquitous throughout the world, yet many consumers are probably unaware of what exactly it is their smart device is running.

Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L desktop board

Libreboot Gets Support For An Older Core 2 Desktop Motherboard

While the Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L is a motherboard from nearly a decade ago and is powered by the Intel G41 + ICH7 chipset combination, as of today it now has support in Libreboot for being able to initialize the hardware without any binary blobs.

Open source is programming the digital future

I’ve been working with open source technologies for more than a decade, and in that time I’ve seen open source go from a cheaper alternative to proprietary software to becoming the primary source of innovation that is driving the industry forward. Just look at how fast new technologies such as containers, Hadoop, and OpenStack arrived. Even those industry-leading digital businesses I cited earlier are turning to open source technologies as a source of innovation.

Databases

• Open Source Databases are on the Rise, But Oracle Still Commands Top Popularity

• Oracle’s Database Cost Is Its Best Defense in Open Source Space

  In the previous article, we saw that the increasing adoption of open-source databases is causing a dent in Oracle’s (ORCL) dominance in the database market, as well as its earnings. On June 17, 2015, Oracle announced its fiscal 4Q15 and 2015 results. Software licensing and support contribute approximately half of Oracle’s overall revenues.

• Despite the Rise of Open Source, Oracle Was 2015’s Fastest-Growing Database

  Oracle has always been strong on the job listings side, Solid IT co-founder Matthias Gelbmann says, but the growth this year was primarily due to a big increase in the number of conversations about Oracle’s flagship product on social media and Q&A sites.

  [...]

  The world is still adopting new, open source databases at a rapid clip.

CMS

• What’s New This January in Open Source CMS

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Hyperion Confirms Leak Of AmigaOS 3.1 Source Code

  Hyperion Entertainment confirmed that at the end of December the source code to AmigaOS 3.1 was leaked, which is now causing problems for the company continuing to develop this proprietary operating system.

• Android++ For Visual Studio Is Now Open Source

  The tool is mainly for Android native development kit-based C and C++ applications and comes with a debugger that can be controlled within the Visual Studio IDE. According to the creator of Android++, Justin Webb, the tool is geared towards supporting applications where performance is critical, such as a game or simulation. He made the software as he saw Visual Studio was inadequate in supporting the development of those kinds of Android applications.

• Toyota joins with Ford to adopt SmartDeviceLink open source in-vehicle app

BSD

• LLVM Gets Tuned Up For Samsung’s Exynos M1 Mongoose

Openness/Sharing

• US: University carrot project highlights open source breeding

• Open Hardware

  • Version 2.0 of inspiring open source Hovalin 3D printed violin now available

    Over the past few years, we’ve seen plenty of fantastic examples of what 3D printing can do when placed in the hands of musicians, but few have been as impressive as the 3D printed Hovalin violin we reported on back in October. While that violin already sounded, in a single word, amazing, the husband and wife team behind the Hovalin are now back with their second generation, in an attempt to deal with some structural issues and to simply optimize the design of this 3D printed instrument.

Science

• Virtual Reality Is the Future … of Inducing Nausea and Headaches

  Users have already reported feelings of nausea, headache and eye strain after using headsets. And manufacturers are putting various warnings on their products. Adults should take at least 10-minute breaks from the technology, and some manufacturers recommend against children using virtual reality devices. (Good luck with that!) If users feel odd after using their device, they should avoid operating cars or heavy machinery, say manufacturers. And those are just the physical problems.

• Better-performing, cheaper clouds ahead in 2016, IEEE predicts [Ed: takes analysis of and calls it "cloud" even though IEEE does not say cloud at all]

• IEEE Computer Society Predicts Top 9 Technology Trends for 2016

Hardware

• Adobe and MIT Create Algorithm to Optimize Old Source Code for Modern Hardware Specs

  Adobe and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have teamed up for Project Helium, an initiative to help developers update older software for modern-day hardware.

Health/Nutrition

• Residents Sue Over ‘Negligent’ Practices By Gas Company, As Pipeline Leak Goes Into Third Month

  For more than two months, methane has been escaping from a storage well in Los Angeles, causing the evacuation of thousands of homes and dumping more than six coal plants’ worth of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

  Now, residents are suing, alleging that Southern California Gas Company took out and never replaced a safety valve that could have shut off the leak, and generally failed to maintain the site.

• Thousand of Californians Are Fleeing an Enormous Methane Leak. Here Are 8 Things You Need to Know.

  For more than two months, California has experienced a slow-moving environmental disaster: Methane leaking from a faulty natural gas well near Los Angeles neighborhood Porter Ranch has displaced thousands of families and is releasing the greenhouse gas equivalent of driving 7 million cars each day.

• The GOP’s ‘First Priority Of 2016’ Is Pretending They Can Repeal Obamacare

  Republicans in Congress have wasted no time in establishing their lead battle of the new year: repealing Obamacare. House Speaker Paul Ryan calls it his “first priority of 2016,” and the Senate promises a bill repealing the health law will hit President Barack Obama’s desk no later than Tuesday.

  For now, the GOP’s threat is purely symbolic. Obama will undoubtedly veto any move to quash his landmark health care law. But, with an election on the horizon, this may be the point. This is the first time that a bill seeking to repeal Obamacare will actually reach the White House — and, for conservative members of Congress, the fact that a bill will make it that far is a success.

• Organic Farmers Score New Victory in ‘David and Goliath’ GMO Fight

  Jackson County, Oregon wins new protections against cultivation of genetically engineered crops

Security

• Tuesday’s security advisories

• Microsoft’s Latest Trick – “Use Windows 10 Because Windows 7 Has Serious Problems” [Ed: spyware trap]

  Microsoft Marketing Cheif Chris Capossela has made a surprising statement about Windows 7 by calling it unsafe to use. He warned the users and asked them to use it “at their own risk, at their own peril”. However, the reality offers a totally different picture.

• Boolean: virt_use_execmem What? Why? Why not Default?

  In a recent bugzilla, the reporter was asking about what the virt_use_execmem.

  What is it?
  What did it allow?
  Why was it not on by default?

• Tuesday Morning: Wow, You Survived Business Day 1

  And hey, look, the hackers may have used backdoors! Hoocudanode hackers would use backdoors?!

• Author of Linux.Encoder Fails for the Third Time, Ransomware Is Still Decryptable

  The Linux.Encoder ransomware has received a third update, which security researchers from Bitdefender have managed to crack, yet again, for the third time.

  Antivirus maker Dr.Web first discovered Linux.Encoder at the start of November 2015. News about the ransomware spread quickly, mainly because it targeted Web servers, looking to encrypt crucial files used in Web hosting and Web development environments.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Bribery over Humanity: The UK, Saudi Arabia and the UN Human Rights Council

  Wither human rights – especially when it comes to strategic partnerships. The UK-Saudi Arabia relationship has been one of a seedier sort, filled with military deals, mooted criticism and hedging. When given the John Snow treatment as to what Britain’s role behind securing Saudi Arabia its position on the UN Human Rights Council was, Prime Minister David Cameron fenced furiously before embellishing Riyadh’s value in its relations with the West.

• Ottawa going ahead with Saudi arms deal despite condemning executions

  But the biggest Saudi mass execution in decades – delivered by beheading and in a few cases firing squad – is not moving Ottawa to reconsider a massive deal to supply the Mideast country with armoured fighting vehicles. The transaction will support about 3,000 jobs in Canada for 14 years.

• Canada Condemns Saudi Executions, But Arms Sales Speak Louder Than Words

  Despite condemning Saudi Arabia’s recent mass executions and raising concerns about human rights abuses, the Canadian government said this week it is moving forward with a controversial $15 billion weapons sale to the Gulf state.

  Reportedly Canada’s largest-ever arms export contract, the deal was confirmed amid growing condemnation of ongoing western support for Saudi Arabia, despite mounting evidence of atrocities committed by the state, from neighboring Yemen to its own soil.

• The Refugee Conundrum

  This past summer, Germany suspended the Dublin regulation, requiring refugees to remain in their port of entry, unfairly burdening certain countries with a staggering number of refugees.

• US Enabled Saudi Arabia’s Crackdown on Pro-Democracy Protesters

  Just days before Saudi Arabia performed a mass execution of 47 people, including four pro-democracy protesters; the US approved tens of millions in military contracts to the Saudi government. The contracts include $24 million to Raytheon Company for equipment relating to Patriot missiles, $12 million to Advanced Electronics Co. for electronics updates to F-15 fighter jets, and tens of millions of dollars to Boeing Co. for implementation of a laser guided, air-to-ground weapons system.

• Iraqi Shiites up in Arms, claim Saudi “Spying on behalf of ISIL/Daesh”

  Saudi Arabia’s execution on Saturday of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr Baqir al-Nimr has so far not created a crisis between Riyadh and the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government. But Saudi Arabia’s name with the rank and file Shiites and parliamentary backbenchers is mud.

  On Tuesday, thousands (or perhaps only hundreds) of demonstrators from the Muqtada al-Sadr bloc came out in front of the walled-in Green Zone to demand that the Saudi embassy be closed. Alarmed, al-Jubeir called his counterpart, expressing fears that the mission might be overwhelmed by angry crowds. The Iraqi foreign minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, pledged to Riyadh that his government would protect the Saudi embassy. Contrary to some reports, it has not been attacked.

• Saudi Arabia, Our Great and Good Ally

  One way or another, there’s not much question that this was a calculated move by Saudi Arabia. They knew how Iran would react—and they hoped that it might scuttle the Syrian peace talks, maybe the Iranian nuclear deal too, and at the very least, create some chaos that they could take advantage of.

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is our great and good ally. They flog apostates. They export Sunni extremism. They treat women as chattel. They flog and imprison gays. They import slave labor from abroad. They have no truck with freedom of religion or freedom of speech. Their royal family is famously corrupt. And they really, really want to start up a whole bunch of wars that they would very much like America to fight for them.

• The Saudis Go Full ISIS

  Saudi Arabia has perpetrated a mass execution that puts ISIS’s beach beheadings to shame. Forty-seven heads rolled on Saturday. One of them belonged to Nimr al-Nimr, a revered Shi’ite cleric who had been sentenced to death for sermons in which he criticized the government (especially for its persecution of the country’s Shi’ite minority). His brother has been sentenced to be crucified.

• US Should Stop Supporting Likely Saudi War Crimes

  Yemen is a small, poor, and insignificant (from the perspective of US vital interests) country just South of Saudi Arabia. It doesn’t even produce much oil; but of course Saudi Arabia does – and that’s why the Saudis are getting so much US support, despite Saudi Arabia’s despicable foreign and domestic policies. The US government ousts dictators in Iraq and Libya and loudly criticizes Iran’s bad human rights policies; in contrast, the United States mutes its criticism of Saudi Arabia’s atrocious human rights record, sweeps under the under the rug that the 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudi nationals, and ignores that Saudi Arabia is the biggest exporter of militant Sunni Islamism by its support for radical schools around the Islamic world. Why does the world’s only superpower tolerate a major ally supporting potential US enemies (the US has the same toleration for Pakistan doing a similar thing)?

• US Military Leadership Resisted Obama’s Bid for Regime Change in Syria, Libya

  Seymour Hersh’s recent revelations about an effort by the US military leadership in 2013 to bolster the Syrian army against jihadist forces in Syria shed important new light on the internal bureaucratic politics surrounding regime change in US Middle East policy. Hersh’s account makes it clear that the Obama administration’s policy of regime change in both Libya and Syria provoked pushback from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

• Does Bernie Sanders’ Imperialism Matter?

  When Sanders attempted to frame Hillary as “pro-regime change” in relation to the catastrophe she created in Libya, Hillary pointed out that Sanders voted “yes” to support that regime change. As the war machine rolled into Libya Sanders wasn’t a speed bump; he was a lubricant. Clinton and Sanders both have Libyan blood on their hands.

  Sanders has Afghan blood on his hands too, having voted for the invasion of the now-endless Afghan war that triggered the beginning of the flurry of Middle East wars. And while Sanders brags about voting “no” for the 2003 Iraq war, his vote soon morphed into a “yes,” by his several votes for the ongoing funding of the war/occupation.

  Sanders also voted “yes” for the U.S.-led NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, and supports the brutal Israeli military regime that uses U.S. weapons to slaughter Palestinians.

  When it was announced that Obama was choosing sides and funneling guns to the Syrian rebels — thus exacerbating and artificially extending the conflict — Bernie was completely silent; a silence that helped destroy Syria and lead to the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

• Saudi Arabia ‘Torpedoes’ American Middle East Policy With Execution Of Shia Cleric

  The execution of Nimr has already raised sectarian tensions in the Middle East between Iran, a country ruled by Shia Ayatollahs, and a few Sunni-majority states. The execution led to protests by Shia in Baghdad, Al Awamiyah in Saudi Arabia, Srinagar and Lucknow in India, and Tehran. A crowd stormed and torched the Saudi embassy in Tehran over the weekend, leading Sunni-ruled states Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan, and Bahrain to suspend diplomatic ties with Iran.

• Donald Trump Displays Profound Foreign Policy Incoherence on O’Reilly Factor

  First off, the US is already plenty involved in Yemen, with more than a billion dollars in sales of munitions (including internationally-banned cluster bombs) to the Saudis, as well the use of US military personnel offering direct “targeting assistance” for the relentless Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who overthrew the Saudi-backed Yemeni government last year.

• Agh Scary Dark Hordes Are Coming!

  So fetid real Donald Trump has released his first TV ad, a stunningly unsavory mess of race-baiting, fear-mongering and lies that highlights the long, dark, mournful plunge this country has taken from our better angels. The grainy=sinister black and white ad begins with images of Obama and Hillary quickly and subtly morphing into photos of the San Bernardino shooters – get it?!? – and goes downhill from there. The real Trump says Muslim terrorists are everywhere which is why we need a “temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until we can figure out what’s going on” – the most coherent policy proposal and Bestest Line Ever – and then Donald will “quickly cut the head off ISIS and take their oil,” even though actually it’s not theirs, and then he’ll “stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for.” This promise is accompanied by overhead video of ant-like brown folks swarming toward a wall that turns out to be Moroccan migrants trying to cross the border into Spanish territory in 2014; his campaign said “No shit, but that’s what our country is going to look like” – even though actually illegal immigration has steadily dropped – and the “Pants on Fire” lie was “1,000% on purpose,” so it’s all good. Or, umm, not.

• Pentagon Slush Fund is Draining the Economy and Militarizing Foreign Policy

  Late last year, Congress authorized $514 billion in baseline defense spending for fiscal year 2016. However, on top of the baseline budget, another $59 billion was authorized for the war budget, also known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund. These budgets combined give the Pentagon a total of $573 billion to spend this fiscal year.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Power Imbalances in Ukraine

  The western press is ginning up alarm because hackers caused a power outage in Ukraine.

  [...]

  While the physical attack did get coverage, there seemed to be little concern about the implications of an attack aiming to undercut Russian control of the peninsula. Whereas here, the attack is treated as illegitimate and a purported new line in the sand.

• US gives meat producers a pass on climate change emissions

  If the Paris climate pact is going to succeed at staving off climate change disaster, the 195 participating countries will need to achieve a difficult feat – trust.

  Yet the U.S. government already is failing to implement its own rules on tracking emissions. It is not collecting emission reports from one of the country’s largest sources of greenhouse gases: meat production.

• ‘Volcanic’ Porter Ranch Gas Leak May Take Months to Close

  The gas leak in Porter Ranch, California that has been pumping tens of thousands of kilograms of methane into the air every hour since October 23 may take months to close up, according to state officials.

  Thousands of residents in the San Fernando Valley community, roughly 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles, have been forced to relocate due to health problems caused by the fumes—including, in some cases, bleeding eyes and gums.

  However, officials recently announced that fixing the broken pipe will take more time than initially planned, with emergency crews unlikely to finish closing it up before March or April due to unexpected safety concerns.

  Methane emissions are up to 87 times more polluting than carbon dioxide over a 20-year span. Advocates for the residents warned there could be untold public health consequences, while environmentalists note that the size of the leak, which continues full force, is roughly a quarter of California’s total annual methane emissions.

• Sanders Blasts Trump On Weird Climate Change Claim

  Bernie Sanders is apparently fed up with Donald Trump’s offhand and often outlandish claims. On Monday night, the Democratic candidate blasted Trump’s claim that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

  “What an insight,” the independent senator from Vermont told the audience at a New Hampshire rally. “How brilliant can you be? The entire scientific community has concluded that climate change is real and causing major problems, and Trump believes that it’s a hoax created by the Chinese. Surprised it wasn’t the Mexicans.”

• Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Fate of Our Earth

  It’s clear that neither of these true terrors of our planet and our age has to happen (or at least, in the case of climate change, come to full fruition). To ensure that, however, we and our children and grandchildren would have to decide that the fate of our Earth was indeed at stake and act accordingly. We would have to change the world.

Finance

• Trade negotiators won’t face the truth: investors don’t need special treatment

  The year started with a bang in the trade world. The Commission published initial findings from a 2014 public consultation on the reform of ISDS, or investor-state dispute settlement. The report found that less than 3% of the 150,000 participants supported this reform agenda. The remaining 97% opposed either ISDS reform or the mechanism altogether.

• How The TPP Is Trouble: Public Interest Explicitly Tossed In Favor Of Corporate Interests

  Michael Geist is counting down the days to when the TPP can first be signed in the US (February 4th) by going through and highlighting problematic aspects of the agreement. He’s started with the simple fact that the TPP’s intellectual property section is explicitly designed to favor corporations over the public. We’ve obviously discussed some of this ourselves, such as the fact that the only reference to things like the public’s rights (such as fair use) is to recommend that countries consider them, but when it comes to stronger copyright and patents, the TPP requires them.

• Wall Street Kicks Off 2016 With a Faceplant

  While the proximate cause of the current turbulence is China’s flagging manufacturing sector, the underlying reasons are even more important, like the dismal state of the US economy which continues to languish in a long-term coma. Here’s a brief recap from economist Jack Rasmus at CounterPunch:

• Why Sanders’ Economic Plan Is Best For The 99 Percent

  Sanders would increase the public investments in jobs-creating infrastructure by $1 trillion over the same five-year period – creating one million new jobs, while helping to retool the U.S. economy to reduce carbon emissions.

• ‘Break Em Up!’: Sanders Speech Takes Aim at Big Bank Greed

• U.S. Laws Criminalizing Sleeping in Public Have Grown as Much as 60 Percent in Just a Few Years

  There is a war on, and it concerns the homeless’ right to sleep. Across the United States, recent years have seen a spate of municipal laws that criminalize the act of sleeping in public places. These laws often target the act of sleeping in private vehicles under the guise of “anti-camping” legislation.

• People My Age Have Had Their Aspirations Crushed by Austerity – It’s Time to Change That

  We know the devastating impact austerity has had on our most vulnerable, but what we don’t talk about is how it has resulted in crushed aspirations for a whole generation.

• Ghoulish Wall Street Speculators Pour Money Into Gun Companies

  Even before President Obama began explaining a slate of executive actions to tighten background checks for gun buyers on Tuesday morning, Wall Street speculators delivered a late Christmas present to gun manufacturers.

  Stocks in Smith & Wesson and competitor Sturm Ruger leapt dramatically in morning trading as investors flocked to the firms, anticipating that gun sales will spike in response to the modest tightening of background check rules.

• Top bosses will earn ‘more than UK average salary’ by end of today

  Top FTSE 100 bosses will have earned more money by Tuesday afternoon than the average British worker will do in the entire year, a think tank has claimed.

  The High Pay Centre (HPC) compared the earnings of top executives with the average salary of UK workers and found that bosses would only need to work 22 hours to reach the median full-time employee salary.

• Happy 2016! These CEOs Have Already Banked An Average Worker’s Salary

  By lunchtime Monday, Canada’s top chief executives had already banked an average worker’s annual salary.

  To put that another way, in 2014, the country’s top-paid CEOs took home 184 times as much as the average Canadian worker, according to an annual report on publicly-traded companies released Monday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

  According to the report, the average take-home for a CEO in the country was $8.96 million, accumulated through salaries, stock options, bonuses, and share grants. Meanwhile, the average worker earned a total of $48,636, while the average minimum wage worker got $22,010.

• Who’s Being Fined? Not Corporate Criminals

  One way to check on government action against corporate crime is to type into Google News the word “fined.”

  Who is getting fined for wrongdoing?

  Five years or so ago, if you did this, you would get a smattering of corporate criminals on the first page.

  But let’s look and see what we get today.

  First story up out of the NBA — Paul George, Marcus Morris fined for Saturday’s altercation.

  Second story up also out of the NBA — Bucks’ Mayo fined $25,000 by NBA for dispute with referee.

  Then you have a story out of Thailand — Western tourists fined for flashing their breasts on Thai island of Phuket.

• The ‘Pink Tax’ Is a Myth

  During the height of holiday shopping season, a consumer report stoked ample ill-will toward American manufacturers after purporting to show that women’s products are priced higher for completely arbitrary reasons. This so-called “pink tax,” said the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), affects almost every product marketed at American females, “from cradle to cane.”

• Dow Plunges 276 Points in First Trading Day of 2016

  Global stocks kicked off 2016 with a stumble, as a disappointing report on China’s economy rekindled concerns over slowing global growth and tempered hopes for a better year.

• Forget the Market Plunge. This Year, the Global People Plunge Continues

  Though global stocks peformed gymnastics on Monday, the real problem for working- and middle-class people: The economy is rigged.

• The Economy in 2016: On the Edge of Recession

  Consider: The median wage is 4 percent below what it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. The median wage of young people, even those with college degrees, is also dropping, adjusted for inflation. That means a continued slowdown in the rate of family formation—more young people living at home and deferring marriage and children – and less demand for goods and services.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• O’Reilly Lets Trump Off The Hook For His Misleading TV Ad That Misrepresented US Southern Border

• 12 Craziest Things About Trump’s Spokeswoman Katrina Pierson

  Pierson’s most recent act of provocation was wearing a necklace of bullets for a CNN interview, to show her love and support for the NRA. When she was criticized, she said she’d wear a necklace of fetuses next time, to bring “awareness to 50 million aborted people that will never [get] to be on Twitter.” She did not stop there, adding “the liberals freaking out about my accessories are sexist. They only approve of women in pantsuits and jackets. Oh, and tampon earrings.” That last bit was a reference to MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry’s unusual accessories in a July 2013 broadcast.

• Debate Schedule Is Allowing GOP To Frame Election Narrative

  The last Democratic presidential debate was buried on a Saturday night up against the opening of Star Wars. Naturally it drew a fraction of earlier Republican debate audiences – and even of the earlier Democratic debates. The next debate is scheduled, astonishingly, on a Sunday night, January 17, the middle day of a three-day weekend. But just in case that might still draw an audience, it is also up against NFL playoff games. What is going on?

• Jeb Bush May Seek a Campaign Boost From His “Very Popular” Brother

  With Hillary Clinton bringing her husband (and 42nd US president) Bill Clinton on the campaign trail with her in New Hampshire, Jeb Bush may soon follow suit with his presidential kin. The former Florida governor appeared on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning, and host Brian Kilmeade asked whether he would follow Clinton’s lead and recruit his brother, former president George W. Bush, to boost his struggling campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Censorship

• Schools’ PC censorship strangles the free mind

  In the face of spiraling campus demands for trigger warnings, safe spaces, mandatory diversity training and sanctions against offensive words, some pundits are asking where today’s college students learned to be so fearful of competing viewpoints.

  One answer that has escaped scrutiny could lie in our public schools, where principals and school boards too often fail to teach and respect students’ speech rights.

  Writing in 1943, while the nation was at war, in a case on the right of students to refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, Justice Robert Jackson proclaimed that individual rights must be respected even in grade schools “if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source.”

• Turkey Has Released VICE News Journalist Mohammed Rasool On Bail

  VICE News journalist Mohammed Ismael Rasool has been released on bail in Turkey after spending more than four months behind bars on terrorism charges.

  Rasool was detained alongside two VICE News colleagues on August 27 and sent to a maximum security prison.

  A document issued by a court in Diyarbakir stated that no bail payment was made, that Rasool was detained “as a protective measure,” and he cannot leave the country. He must also report twice a week to a police station near where he lives.

• US Copyright Office Asks For Public Comments On DMCA’s Notice And Takedown

  What comes out of this may certainly be interesting, but it’s not difficult to predict that there will be two huge piles of responses that are more or less diametrically opposed: a group of content creators who are obsessed with the fact that they have to send takedown notices and that their works still keep popping up will complain about all of this, and say that the notice and takedown process is too onerous for content creators, and that we should move instead to a world where platforms have to pro-actively monitor things, such as with a “notice and staydown” procedure. On the flip side, you’ll have plenty of people and internet platforms talking about how onerous things are from the other side: platforms are inundated with piles of requests, many of which are completely bogus, but which companies often feel compelled to take down to avoid liability. And end users face tons of censorship due to bogus and abusive takedowns.

• ‘ISIS New Years Eve Terror Plot’ Story Is Totally Bogus

  Another major holiday, another sensational ISIS terror plot the FBI takes credit for preventing. This time, the case splashed across the news is that of Emanuel Lutchman, a 25-year-old panhandler in Rochester, New York who allegedly plotted to attack a restaurant on New Years Eve. All major network broadcasts lead with the story and it was breathlessly featured everywhere from The New York Times to CNN. There’s only one problem: the way the story is being presented is wildly inaccurate and in many ways factually false.

  Like almost all 11th hour FBI terror busts, the only thing the media has to go off is a DOJ criminal complaint that’s released to the press. Statements from the accused or their lawyer very rarely reach the public. And he criminal complaint and FBI press release are framed to deliberately deceive the media.

  Let’s run down some of the key claims made by the media and why they’re either factually incorrect or misleading.

Privacy

• Talking points straight out of Tel Aviv? Silence is deafening on NSA spying

  It’s the biggest story no one’s heard of.

  I’m talking about the Wall Street Journal’s recent revelations concerning NSA spying on the Israelis as they lobbied Congress unsuccessfully against that nuclear treaty with Iran.

  The article was a blockbuster for two reasons. The first was that the NSA captured phone calls revealing a concerted effort by the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to influence votes in the U.S. Congress.

  The second was that it revealed the Israelis had done some spying of their own.

• The Consequences for Violating Patient Privacy in California? Depends Where the Hospital Is

  In 2008, outraged by a string of snooping incidents involving celebrities’ medical records, California legislators passed a groundbreaking law that compelled hospitals to quickly report patient privacy breaches and gave the state power to levy fines for such violations.

• Former UK Bureaucrat Whines About People Happily Looking At Mobile Phones Rather Than Fearfully Spying On Everyone Else

  However, Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the UK, has taken this form of anti-smartphone luddism to new and even more ridiculous levels, claiming that all these people looking at their mobile phones or listening to music/podcasts in public are a public nuisance, because they’re not watching out for terrorists. Really.

• Mobile and headphone use in public ‘a barrier to terror alertness’

  People should avoid using mobile phones and headphones in public to remain alert to the danger of a potential attack, a former counter-terrorism minister has suggested.

• Dutch Government Supports Encryption, Opposes Backdoors

  This statement of support contrasts with recent efforts by European countries to institute encryption bans or backdoors. This is also somewhat at odds with recent efforts by this same government to grant greater surveillance and hacking powers to its intelligence/law enforcement agencies.

• Dutch government backs strong encryption, condemns backdoors

  The move comes as governments in the United Kingdom and China act to legally require companies to give them access to wide swaths of encrypted Internet traffic. U.S. lawmakers are also considering introducing similar legislation.

Civil Rights

• Man Charged With Planning (Non-) Attack on Behalf of ISIS

  New York governor Andrew Cuomo said in an interview that “the arrest of Emanuel Lutchman is an important reminder of the new normal of global terrorism.”

• Out of Options, California Ships Hundreds of Troubled Children Out of State

  At 14, Deshaun Becton’s life is a roadmap to California’s faltering efforts to care for its most troubled children.

  Over more than a dozen turbulent years, he lived with a half-dozen foster families and in five different group homes. Now he is among the more than 900 children that California sends to out-of-state residential facilities, most of them in Utah, a ProPublica analysis shows.

  Each of these children represents a surrender of sorts: a tacit acknowledgement that California — the nation’s biggest and, by some measures, richest state — somehow has no good answer for them.

• Children Caught In Sweep as Feds Begin Mass Deportations

• More Than 120 Central Americans Taken Into Custody In Large-Scale Deportation Raid

  Don’t open your door. Ask for a warrant when a stranger knocks on your door. Memorize the phone numbers of relatives and lawyers.

  These are just some of the pieces of advice that immigrant advocates have been giving Central Americans who entered the country after May 2014, now that the Obama administration has begun an aggressive immigration operation targeting them for deportation in the new year.

  Over the weekend, at least 121 Central American individuals primarily from Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina were taken into custody and are now in the process of being repatriated to their countries of origin.

• Cliven Bundy’s Neverending War

  A year and a half after television news crews departed Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch, the revolution he hoped to spark against federal stewardship of public lands is still going. But it’s hard to say it’s going strong.

• It’s Not Just Militia Members Who Want to Take Over Federal Land

  Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has also endorsed state or private control of federal land. “You run into problems now with the federal government being, you know, this bully,” Paul told a crowd in June before meeting with Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who refused to pay more than $1 million in fees for grazing his cattle on federal land. The meeting, Bundy said, helped show Paul “the difference between Cliven Bundy’s stand and Ken Ivory’s stand.” Bundy’s son Ammon is currently leading the armed occupation in Oregon.

• The Rule Of Law No Longer Exists In Western Civilization — Paul Craig Roberts

  Bundy and militiamen, whose count varies from 15 to 150 in the presstitute media, have seized an Oregon office of the BLM as American liberty’s protest against the frame-up of the Hammonds on false charges. As I write the Oregon National Guard and FBI are on the way.

• The Bundy Siege is a Wake-Up Call: American Extremists Are Getting Desperate and Dangerous

  Something scary is happening in the so-called libertarian west. Armed terrorists have taken over a federal building in Oregon. By now, you know the story, even as it plays out in real time. It’s an escalation of an ongoing battle that started with the Cliven Bundy Ranch fiasco, wherein a gutless Federal government let a bunch of armed kooks run roughshod over basic law enforcement. Bundy refused to pay his grazing fees, and instead decided to make his private profit with stolen public resources, threatening violence if authorities attempted to correct his infractions. This latest dustup is superficially about a couple of ranchers given five-year prison sentences for setting fires that destroyed public land, but that is only a flimsy pretext; this is another round of antisocial behavior by a group of (mostly) men who are watching the decline—if not outright elimination—of their power and influence in the west.

• What’s Wrong With Laughing & Labeling Oregon Militants “Terrorists”

  There are others, who have made similar funny remarks. Cliff Schechter, a Daily Beast columnist, suggests, “Could be much worse. Could be group of 12 year-old African American kids wielding toy guns in Oregon. Then we’d use napalm.” And various others believe they are clever as they compose variations of, when will leaders in the White community renounce this violence?

  I have a joke of my own. Good thing these militants aren’t in North Waziristan. Otherwise, President Kill List would have an armed drone flying over their heads faster than one could say white caliphate.

  However, there is one issue with all of this humor: it is predicated on concepts of identity, which are reinforced through disproportionate actions of the State.

  The language is a product of understandable frustration and cynicism toward a government, which fails to apply a system designed to fight “terrorism” equally against all people regardless of their skin color or religion. It is rooted in a powerlessness, a recognition that there is no movement to meaningfully unravel a system, which fuels the disparity in law enforcement. But the target appears to be the government for failing to criminalize all people to the same extent as the government would criminalize brown or black people, who engaged in similar acts.

• These Two Photos Are Worth a Million Words in Explaining Oregon Militia Leader Blain Cooper

  These two photos are pretty much all you need to know about the leader of the armed white men who have taken over the federal building in Oregon, a group the Internet has dubbed Y’all Qaeda.

• Terrorism, American Style

  We in America thus must deal with the unfortunate fact that domestic terrorism is becoming a serious national security threat, greatly helped by the provocative rhetoric of the leading Republican presidential candidates. Since 9/11, “non-Islamic extremists” actually account for more lives lost than “Islamic extremists,” by 48 to 45. Yet, this predominantly white, male, Christian terrorism invariably escapes being labeled as such. Instead, the mass media uses more polite language, such as “militia men” and “armed activists”—words that probably would not be applied if the terrorists were American Indians, African Americans, Jews, or of course Muslims. As Janell Ross writesin the Washington Post, “The descriptions of events in Oregon appear to reflect the usual shape of our collective assumptions about the relationship between race and guilt—or religion and violent extremism—in the United States.”

• Take a Bite Out of Crime

  Henderson, Nevada, officials have agreed to pay $13,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a 17-month-old girl mauled by a police dog.

• Confusion, language barrier contribute to Henderson police dog biting child — VIDEO

• Who Killed Sammy Younge Jr.? SNCC, Vietnam, and the Fight for Racial Justice

  Issued more than a year before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous Riverside Church speech against the war, SNCC faced repercussions for its dissent. For example, the Georgia legislature denied SNCC spokesperson and elected state representative Julian Bond his seat because he stood by the statement. As he fought for his elected office, Bond wrote an educational comic book on the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the connection between the struggles of the Vietnamese and the struggles of African Americans for self-determination and human rights.

• Attacks on Hoffman Report From Military Psychologists Obfuscate Detainee Abuse

  In the wake of the July 2015 Hoffman Report, which found that the American Psychological Association (APA) colluded with the Department of Defense (DOD) to ensure that no APA policy would constrain psychologists’ participation in DOD’s “enhanced interrogation” program, the APA Council of Representatives passed an historic ban on the involvement of psychologists in national security interrogations and at detention sites that operate outside or in violation of international law, including Guantánamo Bay Detention Center.

• “Speed Trap Town” Dissolves Entire Police Dept After Years of Officials Getting Rich from Fines

  Despite issuing and collecting a record number of traffic fines, the money from those fines never found its way to the village bank account. The clerk of courts and the deputy clerk of courts, with the help of the ticket writing cops, enriched themselves to the tune of $260,000 before they were finally caught in October.

• Report Finds Juvenile Program Failed to Reduce Robberies, but Police Are Expanding It

  For years, the New York Police Department has tried to stop robberies before they might happen by intervening in the lives of some young offenders. The approach was heralded by the author Malcolm Gladwell in a best-selling 2013 book as an innovative way to shake up the criminal justice process. Elected leaders gave $2 million over the last two years in support.

• Upholding Power of the People, Court Says Voters Can Weigh In on Citizens United

  When it ruled Monday that California lawmakers can ask for voters’ opinions on campaign-spending laws, the state Supreme Court underscored “that the ultimate power of our government is vested in the people,” Common Cause senior vice president Karen Hobert Flynn declared in the wake of the decision.

  By upholding the legality of Proposition 49—which would ask voters whether Congress should propose an amendment overturning the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United—the court spoke “directly to the question we have faced since the Citizens United ruling,” Hobert Flynn continued. “Are we a democracy of, by, and for the people, or are we to be ruled by an elite, moneyed class, where the power of government rests in the hands of a few wealthy special interests?”

• California Supreme Court backs advisory ballot measures

  The unprecedented legal test stems from Proposition 49, a measure removed from the November 2014 ballot by the state’s high court that sought voter views on whether Congress should be asked to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 Citizens United ruling on unlimited independent campaign spending.

• California Supreme Court Says Voters Can Advise on Citizens United

  A California Supreme Court ruling will let the state’s voters offer their collective opinion on political campaign financing. The court decision, which was handed down Monday, allows Californians to urge their members of Congress to pass a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United.

• Conservatives Mock Obama For Crying About Child Victims Of Gun Violence During Speech

  Several conservative media figures attacked President Obama for crying as he spoke about child victims during a speech detailing executive actions designed to reduce gun violence.

• ISIS’ War On Children

  Grace “Khadija” Dare’s camo-clad child might be one of the youngest to appear in an ISIS propaganda video, but the militant group has been eerily inclusive when it comes to children. Perhaps more than any other militant group, ISIS has made children into war machines. Children have long been brainwashed, drugged, and threatened children into picking up arms. ISIS has elevated their place in conflicts, given them revered roles as trained executioners, guards, and recruiters. The United Nations has confirmed that children as young as 12 are being trained by ISIS.

• You Can’t Report Truthfully on Israel Without Facing Its Wrath

  Makarim Wibisono has announced his resignation as UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, the position I held for six years until June 2014.

  The Indonesian diplomat says that he could not fulfill his mandate because Israel has adamantly refused to give him access to the Palestinian people living under its military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

  “Unfortunately, my efforts to help improve the lives of Palestinian victims of violations under the Israeli occupation have been frustrated every step of the way,” Wibisono explains.

  His resignation reminds me in a strange way of Richard Goldstone’s retraction a few years ago of the main finding in the UN-commissioned Goldstone report, that Israel intentionally targeted civilians in the course of Operation Cast Lead, its massive attack on Gaza at the end of 2008.

• Entire Florida Police Dept Busted Laundering Tens of Millions for International Drug Cartels

  The latest revelations show that at least 20 people in Venezuela were sent drug money from the Florida cops, including William Amaro Sanchez, the foreign minister under Hugo Chavez and now special assistant to President Nicolas Maduro.

  They wired a total of $211,000 to Sanchez, even while the U.S. government was investigating Venezuelan government leaders involved in the drug trade. Instead of reporting their knowledge of Sanchez to federal agencies, the cops went on laundering money, taking their cut, and all the while aiding Sanchez in his machinations, which likely included political corruption.

• Cologne sex attacks: Merkel disgust at New Year gang assaults

  Women have made at least 90 criminal complaints to police about the harassment by gangs at Cologne’s main railway station on Thursday night.

  Germans have been shocked by the scale of the attacks, involving many groups of drunk and aggressive young men.

  Witnesses and police said the men were of Arab or North African appearance.

  Mrs Merkel called Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker on Tuesday and expressed her “outrage over these disgusting attacks and sexual assaults”.

  The chancellor said everything must be done “to find the perpetrators as quickly and comprehensively as possible and punish them, regardless of their origin or background”.

  Up to 300 women demonstrated against the violence near the scene of the attacks on Tuesday evening. One placard read: “Mrs Merkel! Where are you? What do you say? This alarms us!”

  There is an intense debate in Germany about refugees and migrants, who arrived in record numbers last year. But Mayor Reker urged people not to jump to conclusions about the Cologne assailants.

  “It’s completely improper… to link a group that appeared to come from North Africa with the refugees,” she said, after crisis talks with the police.

• Two Arab-Israeli passengers deplane following demands of Israelis on-board

  “The whole episode , which did indeed delay the flight for more than 1 hour and 30 minutes, is indeed very unfortunate and we are grateful that the two Israeli passengers affected did agree to fly the next day. We thank again the two Israeli passengers that agreed to disembark for their understanding and collaboration and we apologize for the whole episode which was indeed extremely unfortunate.”

  The Director of Amnesty International in Israel Yonatan Gher said the incident on the plane reflected the Israeli government’s incitement against the Arab Israeli community following the Tel Aviv shooting attack last week in which two people were killed.

• Imagine If They Were Black: How Oregon Reveals the Real Story About Race and Whiteness in America

  I recently wrote two pieces on white privilege and the occupation of federal property in Oregon by a gun-toting terrorist insurrectionist “militia” that is led by the sons of Cliven Bundy—the Nevada rancher who, with the aid of an armed group of anti-government protesters, stood down federal authorities in 2014 because he did not want to pay his back taxes and grazing fees.

• Families are taken into custody as push to deport immigrants denied refuge begins

  After searching the house, the agents showed Gutierrez a photo of her niece, 30-year-old Ana Lizet Mejia. Mejia fled Honduras when her brother was killed by gangs. She entered the U.S. illegally with her son as part of a wave of Central American migrants seeking refuge from violence in the summer of 2014.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• DSL Users Still Can’t Get Advertised Speeds They Pay For, Nation’s Telcos Couldn’t Care Less

  And that 12 Mbps mark is rather generous. There are tens of millions of DSL customers who are lucky to nab 3 Mbps downstream on a good day, thanks to phone companies that face no serious competitive incentive to upgrade. Worse, some of these companies (like AT&T and Verizon) are actively trying to drive these unwanted customers away with apathy and price hikes so they can focus on more-profitable wireless. Others, (like Frontier, Windstream and CenturyLink) are buying these aging assets up, but wind up being so saddled with debt meaningful upgrades aren’t possible (assuming they had competitive incentive to do so).

• What Is P2P File Sharing And How It Works?

  The rudimentary internet was more like a peer-to-peer network – “Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the World Wide Web was close to a P2P network in that it assumed each user of the web would be an active editor and contributor, creating and linking content to form an interlinked “web” of links”,” writes Wikipedia.

DRM

• Warner Brothers, Intel Begin Futile Legal Assault To Defend Ultra HD And 4K DRM

  Believing it can keep the lid on HDCP 2.2 stripping technology, Warner Brothers and Intel’s daughter-company Digital Content Protection have filed suit (pdf) against LegendSky. According to the lawsuit, the company’s technology violates not only the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, but also the Lanham Act by falsely claiming that its HDFury hardware complies with HDCP’s license requirements.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Understanding David Lowery’s Lawsuit Against Spotify: The Insanity Of Music Licensing

    We generally don’t talk much about musician David Lowery around here any more. We covered a few stories about him a few years ago, and he seemed to take it ridiculously personally, and continues to attack me with false and misleading claims. Every so often someone sends me a link to a blog post he’s written and it’s almost always laughably wrong (for example, in one recent story he falsely claimed that “Google” is on Spotify’s board — because a former Google exec who is no longer at the company also happens to be on Spotify’s board). So, take the following with that caveat in mind. I tried to be objective in the analysis, but some will likely suggest that’s impossible given his years-long attacks on me.

  • Daughters Sue ‘Big Bang Theory’ Over Infringing Use Of Mother’s 82-Year-Old Poem ‘Warm Kitty’

    A copyright infringement lawsuit has been filed against a long list of defendants — all of it related to the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.” Supposedly, a poem written in 1933 is being used without permission of the putative rights holders (the author’s daughters) and making everyone involved with the show a lot of money.

    The poem, titled “Warm Kitty,” is often sung by one of the main characters. It has been used often enough to become its own cultural force, resulting in a pile of Big Bang Theory merchandise featuring the words and/or title.

  • Celebrate Aaron Swartz in Seattle (or Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, NYC, SF)

    I’m organizing an event at the University of Washington in Seattle that involves a reading, the screening of a documentary film, and a Q&A about Aaron Swartz. The event coincides with the third anniversary of Aaron’s death and the release of a new book of Swartz’s writing that I contributed to.