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07.06.16

Links 6/7/2016: KDE Plasma 5.7, DigiKam 5.0

Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux: An Evolving Trend That Is High On Demand

    When we discuss the advancement of Linux, well then several companies along with developers are playing their part in bringing up the technology, especially desktop, the area where Linux strived hard to excel. Stack Overflow conducted a survey of more than 50,000 developers that stated that nearly 21.7% choose Linux, in particular to develop on the LAMP stack. In spite of the fact that 50% of developers use the same, the rate is steadily depleting, making the competition effortless for Linux.

  • When Linux is the face of kindness

    My late father, Lou Shapiro, was an early leader of UNICEF, so relief work was baked into the genetics of my family. His work was centered on emergency relief for the survivors of earthquakes and other natural disasters. Whenever there was an earthquake in the world, I knew dad would be coming home late from work—and I was so proud that some family experiencing trauma would be sleeping in a dry tent, with warm blankets and clean water, because of my dad’s work. Following in my father’s footsteps, my own relief work has been centered on digital inclusion—and open source is the tool I turn to most often.

    Let me share two stories with you in that regard. In April, a young dad visited the public library where I work. He appeared interested in using the public computers our library offers. It turns out someone had stolen his family’s only computer, a Macbook, and his tax return was due that day. When I learned about his predicament, I asked, “Would you like to borrow a Linux laptop until your family buys another laptop?” He perked up and asked, “Does this library lend laptops?” I replied, “The library doesn’t, but I do. You can bring this back to me after you’re done with it.”

  • 4 open source tools I used to write a Linux book

    I spent the past year or so writing Learn Linux in a Month of Lunches, which is designed to introduce desktop Linux to non-technical users. This is a rundown of the tools I used to create the book, with the HUGE caveat that tools are just that—tools. They don’t actually do any work or planning for you. However, the right tools make the work much easier. These are the tools that were right for me.

  • Desktop

    • Can Desktop Linux Conquer its Challenges?

      Despite countless inroads made by today’s best and brightest Linux distributions, it’s still difficult for the Linux desktop to get ahead. In this article, I’ll talk about the biggest challenges I’ve seen and what can be done to overcome them.

    • Windows 10 to Linux

      There is a lot of noise at the moment about Microsoft’s new operating system called Windows 10. Without repeating all the details you can have a look, say here or here or here. The essence of the story is that Microsoft is making it very difficult to avoid the new operating system. The advice being given is to not install the upgrade – which is anything but easy, since Windows 7 is supported until 2020.

    • A Windows zealot trashes Linux

      Linux has always been a fantastic alternative to Windows for many users. But there are some people who are so attached to Windows that the very idea of Linux offends them. So it was with one woman who became outraged when a Linux user tried to help her mother with some computer problems related to Windows 10.

    • The New Fullscreen Windows 10 Upgrade Nagging Reminder
    • Microsoft’s final Windows 10 nagware gets up close and personal
  • Server

    • LzLabs launches product to move mainframe COBOL code to Linux cloud

      Somewhere in a world full of advanced technology that we write about regularly here on TechCrunch, there exists an ancient realm where mainframe computers are still running programs written in COBOL.

      This is a programming language, mind you, that was developed in the late 1950s, and used widely in the ’60s and ’70s and even into the ’80s, but it’s never really gone away. You might think it would have been mostly eradicated from modern business by now, but you would be wrong.

      As we march along, however, the pool of people who actually know how to maintain these COBOL programs grows ever smaller by the year, and companies looking to move the data (and even the archaic programs) to a more modern platform could be stuck without personnel to help guide them through the transition.

    • Java on the Mainframe – on z/OS rather than Linux – An opportunity well worth researching, if you run a Mainframe

      There is suddenly new interest in monitoring Java on mainframes – I’m not talking about running lots of Java VMs on Linux but about running Java against big mainframe systems on z/OS. This might be about modernising legacy COBOL applications (Java skills are easier to find than COBOL skills these days) or about extending the legacy with new business functionality. JAVA is very flexible, you can use it in DB2 stored procedures, or in CICs, or even in IMS programming (yes, IMS database is still in active use). According to BMC’s 2015 Mainframe Survey, 46% of those surveyed say that Java usage on their mainframe has increased by over 10% in the past two years; and 70% of respondees reporting growth indicated that writing new applications in Java was a key factor in this.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE neon Adds KDE Games

        Are you feeling too productive in your day? Then try the latest addition to KDE Neon! I’ve added the KDE Games applications to our repositories.

      • digiKam 5.0.0 is published…

        After two year of work, the digiKam team is proud to announce the final release of digiKam Software Collection 5.0.0. This main version introduces a new cycle of releases, which will be shortly released to quickly include all the fixes reported by end users.

        This release marks almost complete port of the application to Qt5. All Qt4/KDE4 code has been removed and many parts have been re-written, reviewed, and tested. Porting to Qt5 required a lot of work, as many important APIs had to be changed or replaced by new ones.

      • DigiKam 5.0 KDE Photography Software Released

        After two years of development, DigiKam 5.0 has been released as the digital photography management software from the KDE camp that’s now been ported to Qt5.

        The Qt5 port alone makes this a huge release and it does remove around 80% of the KDE-specific dependencies as in the future the developers are looking at making it Qt5-only. The dropping of many KDE dependencies is being used to make it easier to port and maintain this digital photography software on Windows, OS X, and other operating systems.

      • digiKam 5.0.0 Powerful Image Editor Officially Released, Ported to Qt5

        Today, July 5, 2016, the development team behind the digiKam open-source and cross-platform image editor software proudly announced the final release of digiKam 5.0.0.

        digiKam 5.0.0 comes two years after the release of digiKam 4.0.0. During these years, it received numerous snapshots that brought various nifty features and improvements, all of which are now present in this final build, which is available for download right now for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

      • KDE Neon 5.7 Lets You Taste the New KDE Plasma 5.7 Desktop Environment, Qt 5.7

        After informing us the other day about the availability of new ISO respins of the KDE Plasma Wayland images, ex-Kubuntu leader Jonathan Riddell has now announced the release of KDE Neon 5.7.

        For those behind on their KDE Neon reading, we’ll take this opportunity to inform them that the open-source initiative promises to offer ISO images as well as a repository that can be added on top of Kubuntu or any other Ubuntu flavor, with the most recent KDE Plasma, KDE Applications, and KDE Frameworks technologies.

      • KDE Plasma 5.7 Officially Released with Great Wayland Improvements, Many Changes

        Today, July 5, 2016, KDE has had the enormous pleasure of announcing the availability of the final KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment release.

        Yes, that’s right, the Beta testing phase is now over, and the final release of the highly anticipated KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment, which is used by default in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems, including openSUSE Leap, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, and many others, has hit the streets.

      • KDE Plasma 5.7 Officially Released
      • KDE Plasma 5.7
      • Animations on lock screen – Plasma Wallpaper support

        With Plasma 5.7 released I’m allowed to blog about new features in Plasma 5.8. One of the features missed by many users in the Plasma 5 series was the lack of animations in the lock screen architecture. With Plasma 5 we dropped support for the old XScreenSaver and went QtQuick only. Now technically it was always possible to have animations on the lock screen. Our lock screen architecture loads the QtQuick files through the lookandfeel package mechanism, which means that one could provide an animation in a lookandfeel package.

      • Synchronizing the X11 and Wayland clipboard
      • News from Randa, Café and next release
      • Interview with Matteo Pescarin

        It was a couple of years ago, I’ve grown disillusioned with the quality of the work I was able to get out of The GIMP from an artistic point of view until I started reading a couple of reviews of Krita online and decided to try it.

      • KDE Applications 16.08 Software Suite for KDE Plasma 5.7 to Land August 18, 2016

        Now that the release cycle of the KDE Applications 16.04 software suite is coming to an end, as the third and last maintenance update will arrive on July 12, it’s time for the KDE developers to concentrate their efforts on the next series.

        We’ve always wondered what will be the next version of the KDE Applications software suite for KDE Plasma 5.7, and now we know, as the release schedule of KDE Applications 16.08 has been published recently in the usual places.

      • Chakra GNU/Linux Users Can Now Test KDE Plasma 5.7, Qt 5.7 & KDE Frameworks 5.24

        The developers of the Chakra GNU/Linux rolling operating system are informing the community today, July 5, 2016, about the availability of the just released KDE Plasma 5.7.0 and Qt 5.7.0 in the testing repositories.

        As we reported earlier today, the KDE project has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the final KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment, which already landed in the testing repos of the Arch Linux operating system, as well as today’s KDE Neon 5.7 User Edition Live ISO images. Now Chakra GNU/Linux devs have uploaded the latest KDE Plasma 5.7 packages, along with Qt 5.7 on their testing repositories.

      • KDE Plasma 5.7 released with more progress towards Wayland
    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Shining design – available and yet as well to come!

        The current vibrant coloured bg/theme is not the final one we’re going to release in GA. It has been intended for celebrating the new (and great) Plasma5, the default OMLx3 desktop.

        As always, we do our best possible to provide the users with an overall nice and stylish look for our loved distro.

    • Slackware Family

      • Slackware 14.2

        Slackware was familiar. I could easily go back to using it. However, I have been spoiled by my experience with opensuse. With slackware, there are no configured repos. Any install of addition software takes additional effort, though perhaps just unpacking a tar file. And security updates require periodic checking for announcements and then manual installing.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Lenovo G50 & CentOS 7.2 KDE – Really nice and cool

        CentOS 7 is an excellent choice for home use, even on a laptop that’s not Linux friendly, and it does its work well despite the challenges, the likes of Realtek, UEFI and other buzz words. Now, if only different distros could blend the good elements from their peers. In this case, Ubuntu and friends are more media friendly, and you have better smartphone support. But CentOS does the basics much better, and this means stability, consistency, and weirdly, hardware support.

        It’s like being asked whether you want to lose an arm or a leg, and you can’t have both. In theory, Ubuntu is supposed to give you that LTS fun plus the latest and greatest software, but in reality, this is not happening with Xerus. Yes, Trusty is there, and it’s still the best overall candidate for desktops, in whatever guise. CentOS comes rather close. Yes, it does have its antiquities and enterprise idiosyncrasies, but the problems are solvable. That’s a really nice thing. You can actually fix issues, and there are no surprises waiting for you the next day.

        I did invest a significant amount of energy in making CentOS 7 work on the G50 machine. We can’t ignore that. But the yield is highly positive. The outcome is worth the effort. You need the right network support and some extra repos, but after that, you can add new software, codecs, bells and whistles, drivers for other filesystems and protocols, and anything else you fancy. Well, almost. All considered, this is far more than you’d ever expect. There’s still more work to be done. I will address all sorts of issues in follow up articles, including stuff like MTP, Flash performance, adblocking, volume control, and more. And I think you will be amazed how far you can take CentOS if you set your mind to it. Hint, Gnome edition perhaps?

        Which makes it a darn good candidate for your systems. For one reason only. It needs fixing only once. It does not regress. For me, this is a hugely important attribute for anything I may consider for my production setup. CentOS 7, the biggest and most pleasant surprise this awful spring testing season. Modern hardware, here you go. Off to you guys. Do it. Do it.

      • Red Hat Wants To Repeat The Magic of Linux With Containers

        At the recently held Red Hat Summit, Red Hat’s annual user conference, containers took the center stage. The keynotes emphasized the importance of containers, both for the company, and the broader open source ecosystem.

      • The State of Flatpak In GNOME Software

        Richard Hughes of Red Hat has written a post about Flatpak and GNOME Software. His new post covers the per-user and system-wide plugins for dealing with Flatpak packages, GNOME Software interoperates well with the Flatpak command-line utility, and various other details about the current state of Flatpak integration for GNOME Software.

      • Red Hat, Eurotech Team Up On IoT Platform

        Red Hat and Eurotech have announced a jointly sponsored Eclipse Foundation project: a multi-device IoT platform based on donated Eurotech code.

      • Flatpak and GNOME Software
      • Red Hat CEO: Avoiding bloody noses, hammering home open source participation, and why Microsoft is trying to stay relevant

        Whitehurst believes that virtually all of the newer innovations in technology are happening on Linux first.

        “If you look at Hadoop – Linux only, Microsoft paid Hortonworks to port it to Windows but I don’t know anybody who actually runs it on Windows, if you look at everything happening round SDN or containers, they are Linux containers,” said Whitehurst.

        Microsoft’s plays were described as a company that is effectively playing catch-up, chasing the pack and trying to re-ignite the domination of the 90s that came about because the Microsoft Developer Network started building on Windows, said the CEO.

        Whitehurst said: “I think they are recognising that all the developers, all the cool kids, are developing on Linux now, so there is a nexus of innovation happening there and they are trying to figure out how to work in that new system.”

        Microsoft has made a play to try and stay relevant with developers that are increasingly comfortable with open source tooling and Linux as the operating system.

      • A childhood’s dream

        I will be joining the Platform Operations Team at Red Hat as a System Administrator starting from mid-July! Being part of a great family which cares about Open Source and its values makes me proud and I would really like to thank Red Hat for this incredible opportunity.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 24 – It isn’t for everybody, but then, it doesn’t try to be

          On June 23, after installing Fedora for my first ever look at the distro for this review of Fedora 24, I pinged a friend who writes about Linux seeking help for a pesky configuration problem. I was trying to get GNOME to quit demanding a password every time I walked away from the computer for five minutes or so, which I thought should be easy, but wasn’t. After finding sort of a solution for the problem, I sent him another email.

          “I would expect Fedora to have an easy way to deal with this,” I wrote. “Actually, I find very few configuration tools in this installation of Fedora, which surprises me. This must be what you get when you have server people supervising the development of a desktop OS.”

          “Exactly,” he pinged back with record speed. “I’ve never cared much for it myself. Never really found it that compelling. Arch/etc I get; Ubuntu/Mint, I also see the appeal. But Fedora and SuSE always lost me. Nothing negative about them, rather, I fail to see the appeal unless you’re someone who uses these at work.”

        • Nvidia Drivers Install Fedora 24
        • Armadillo 7 and Nikola 7.7.9 now in Fedora 24

          A new update is available in Fedora 24 fedora-updates-testing repository. This is a major version change from version 6 to 7 and since this implies an .so (dynamic library) major number bump we had to rebuild all the packages that link with armadillo:

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Bullseye, More Obnoxious Windows 10, Slack 14.2 Notes

        Today in Linux news Debian announced version 10 codename at DebConf16 currently in session. In other news Microsoft was just kidding about that whole easier-to-decline thing and Li-f-e may be switching base from openSUSE to Ubuntu. Elsewhere, several reviews warrant a mention besides Neil Rickert’s and my own thoughts on Slackware 14.2.

      • twenty years of free software — part 8 github-backup
      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • IBM SoftLayer Now Ubuntu Certified Cloud Partner

            IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure division has partnered with Ubuntu to offer users certified Ubuntu Linux images, giving access to all the latest Ubuntu features, compliance accreditations, and security updates to SoftLayer customers.

          • Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux Looks To Ditch 32-Bit

            Canonical is the latest software maker looking to end support for Intel’s once-great 32-bit platform

          • E-Shelter Offers Up Managed Ubuntu OpenStack Through Canonical

            Canonical and NTT Communications-owned data centre business e-shelter have launched a joint managed OpenStack private cloud service for e-shelter customers. Advertising.

          • Ubuntu 16.10 Unity 8 – Keyboard navigation
          • Fairphone 2 and OnePlus One Ubuntu Phones Receive Bluetooth, Voice Call Support

            Marius Gripsgård was happy to announce the biggest Ubports update ever for many of the unofficial Ubuntu Phone devices that he and other contributors to this project are maintaining.

          • Canonical Announces Snappy Sprint Event in Germany to Shape Up Universal Snaps

            Today, July 5, Canonical’s David Planella has informed Softpedia about an upcoming event that aims to gather together developers and contributors from various well-known projects to work on shaping up the universal Snaps.

            Last month, Canonical informed the media about Snaps becoming universal binary format for various GNU/Linux distributions that decide to adopt it in addition to various other similar formats, such as Flatpak or AppImage.

            Snaps are currently enabled by default in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, but Canonical made it possible for users of various other operating systems, including, but not limited to, Arch Linux, Debian, and elementary OS, to use it as well.

          • Linux distros look to drop 32-bit support
          • Linux distros to ditch 32-bit support
          • Flavours and Variants

            • First Thoughts on Linux Mint 18 “Sarah”

              I am a big fan of Linux Mint and I look forward to every release. This week Mint 18 “Sarah” was released. I decided to try it out on my Dell XPS 13 laptop since it is the easiest machine of mine to base and they really haven’t suggested an upgrade path. The one article I was able to find suggested a clean install, which is what I did.

              First, I backed up my home directory, which is where most of my stuff lives, and I backed up the system /etc directory since I’m always making a change there and forgetting that I need it (usually concerning setting up the network interface as a bridge).

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Goodwill is the source code at this open coder collective

    About a year ago, Gautam Rege decided that he wanted to do something to give back to the open source community.

    Rege, along with Sethupathi Asokan, is the cofounder of Josh Software, is among the top companies working on the Ruby on Rails framework in India.

    “With an experience of many years in the open source world, we realised that there is a need to build a platform for measuring the open source contributions, which coders make every day across the world,” Rege told ET.

  • Moving from a traditional product/release focused delivery model to a rolling model

    GDP was born as a “demo” project. The main goal was to provide a platform to show the software components for automotive that the different GENIVI Expert Groups were developing. This was done through a delivery model focused on publishing a stable and easy to consume version of the project every few months, a major release.

    Strictly speaking, GDP is a derivative. It is based on poky and uses Yocto tools to “create” the Linux based platform, adding the different components developed by the GENIVI Alliance together with upstream software. For the defined purpose, the release centric model works fine, especially if you concentrate your effort is very specific areas of the software stack with a small number of dependencies on the other areas, and a limited number of contributions and environments where the system should work.

    During this 2016, the GDP has grown significantly. We have more software, more contributors, more components and more target boards to take care of. Although the above model has not been not challenged yet, it was just a matter of time.

  • Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository

    This article outlines the scale of that codebase and details Google’s custom-built monolithic source repository and the reasons the model was chosen. Google uses a homegrown version-control system to host one large codebase visible to, and used by, most of the software developers in the company. This centralized system is the foundation of many of Google’s developer workflows. Here, we provide background on the systems and workflows that make feasible managing and working productively with such a large repository. We explain Google’s “trunk-based development” strategy and the support systems that structure workflow and keep Google’s codebase healthy, including software for static analysis, code cleanup, and streamlined code review.

  • IoT Security: What IoT Can Learn From Open Source

    When personal computers were introduced, few manufacturers worried about security. Not until the early 1990s did the need for security become widely understood. Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is following the same pattern — except that the need for security is becoming obvious far more quickly, and manufacturers should have known better, especially given the overwhelming influence of open source.

    The figures speak for themselves. In 2014, a study by Hewlett-Packard found that seven out of ten IoT devices tested contained serious security vulnerabilities, an average of twenty-five per device. In particular, the vulnerabilities included a lack of encryption for local and Internet transfer of data, no enforcement of secure passwords, and security for downloaded updates. The devices test included some of the most common IoT devices currently in use, including TVs, thermostats, fire alarms and door locks.

  • Nextcloud 9 update brings security, open source enterprise capabilities and support subscription, iOS app
  • ​Nextcloud adds enterprise support and iOS appliance

    The ownCloud fork, Nextcloud is aggressively seeking private cloud business customers.

  • Nextcloud Improves Security, Adds Enterprise Support

    A month ago, Frank Karlitschek, founder of the ownCloud project, forked the code to create a new company called Nextcloud. Now in its first platform release the company’s technology is getting enterprise support.

    In keeping with ownCloud’s numbering, the new release is Nextcloud 9, though the release brings more than what is available in the ownCloud 9 release that debuted in March.

    “Nextcloud is building open-source replacements for the ownCloud closed-source enterprise-only features,” Karlitschek told eWEEK. “With this release, 80 percent is done and the rest will be coming soon.”

    Nextcloud isn’t simply replicating features that already exist in ownCloud. Karlitschek said Nextcloud is also developing its own set of new and innovative features.

  • Project aims to store publicly available software

    A French organisation dedicated to computational sciences has started a project to collect, organise, preserve, and make easily accessible the source code of all publicly available software.

    Inria has dubbed the project Software Heritage and says it will adopt distributed infrastructure in order to ensure long-term availability and reliability.

  • Events

    • How to write an excellent event recap
    • HaL deadline extended

      There is this long-running workshop series Haskell in Leipzig, which is a meeting of all kinds of Haskell-interested folks (beginners, experts, developers, scientists), and for year’s instance, HaL 2016, I have the honour of being the program committee chair.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Support Public Education and Web Literacy in California

        Web literacy — the ability to read, write, and participate online — is one of the most important skills of the 21st century. We believe it should be enshrined as the fourth “R,” alongside Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. From our open source learning tools to our free educational curriculum, we are dedicated to empowering individuals by teaching Web literacy.

        In 2015, 65% of California public schools offered no computer science courses at all. Public schools should do more to expose students to Web literacy: a paucity of funding and the elimination of digital skills classes and curriculum are a disservice to students and the state’s future.

        On June 30, we submitted an amicus letter to the California Supreme Court urging review of the case Campaign for Quality Education v. State of California. The issue in this case is whether the California Constitution requires California to provide its public school students with a quality education. We wrote this letter because we believe that California students risk being left behind in our increasingly digitized society without a quality education that includes Web literacy skills.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • Formula E championship drives on Intellicore & Basho Riak TS

      Basho Technologies has announced Intellicore’s adoption of its Riak TS to power its Sports Data Management Platform, used by the FIA Formula E Championship to provide real time race analysis to its customers.

    • MongoDB Sets Up Real-Time Analytics Muscle with Apache Spark Connector

      The MongoDB World meetup took place last week, and there were a lot of interesting announcements made, including ones related to connecting open source database functionality to Apache Spark. From cloud developers working to incorporate databases with their deployments to enterprises that want more flexibility from their data repositories, open source databases are flourishing, and MongoDB is a leader in this area.

      At last week’s event, the MongoDB Connector for Apache Spark was announced. It is billed as “a powerful integration that enables developers and data scientists to create new insights and drive real-time action on live, operational, and streaming data.”

    • Why object storage is eating the world

      The traditional file system-and-database web backend is no longer adequate, and must make way for storage systems that manage unstructured data. In this article we will learn about the differences between structured and unstructured data, and why web storage backends must evolve to manage unstructured data.

      Traditionally, web applications use file systems and databases to store user data. This is simple to manage, as web applications generate structured data by accepting text input in forms, and saving the input to a database. However, times are changing; with the advent of social media, cloud storage, and data analytics platforms, increasing quantities of unstructured data are being pushed onto the Internet.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Japan Says Yes To Mirrorless Cars

      It’s clear that, at one point, glass mirrors will be a thing of the past, as companies will drop them in favor of video screens, but until then, they’ll have to wait for the legislation to change.

      Last month, however, the idea came closer to reality in Japan, which became one of the first countries to allow vehicles to use cameras instead of mirrors, as AutoNews reports.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Swedish politicians consider opening population’s medical-research DNA database for private insurance companies

      Since 1975, Sweden has taken a DNA sample from all newborns for medical research purposes, and asked parents’ consent to do so for this research purpose. This means that over time, Sweden has built the world’s most comprehensive DNA database over everybody under 43 years of age. But now, politicians are considering opening up this research-only DNA database to law enforcement and private insurance companies.

    • The Dutch & Pharma Policy: A Groundbreaking Presidency

      For the next steps, the European Commission seems rather hesitant to deliver on the tasks mandated by the Council. Drugmakers certainly feel uncomfortable with the debate around intellectual property and have even threatened to move their businesses out of Europe, should there be any changes to the IP regime. National governments, including the Netherlands, therefore will need to stand firm and prove that they are serious about what they signed off on June 17. They should guarantee that the European Commission delivers a bold and meaningful report and not another self-congratulatory inventory. And it remains to be seen how the political momentum will be maintained during the upcoming Slovak and Maltese Presidencies… In other words, June 17 was just the start rather than the end of the journey.

    • Celebrated eye hospital Moorfields lets Google eyeball 1 million scans

      Famous eye hospital Moorfields has agreed to give Google’s DeepMind access to one million anonymous eye scans as a part of a machine learning study intended to spot early signs of sight loss.

      Explicit patient consent is not required because the scans are historic, meaning the results won’t affect the care of current patients. Under the project, the hospital will also have access to related anonymous information about their eye conditions and disease management.

      DeepMind is a British AI company founded in London in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014 for £400m. DeepMind Health was launched in February 2016 to work with clinicians in the NHS and other health services.

    • Google’s DeepMind AI to use 1 million NHS eye scans to spot common diseases earlier

      Google’s DeepMind division has announced a partnership with the NHS’s Moorfields Eye Hospital to apply machine learning to spot common eye diseases earlier. The five-year research project will draw on one million anonymous eye scans which are held on Moorfields’ patient database, with the aim to speed up the complex and time-consuming process of analysing eye scans.

      The hope is that this will allow diagnoses of common causes of sight loss, like diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, to be spotted more rapidly and hence be treated more effectively. For example, Google says that up to 98 percent of sight loss resulting from diabetes can be prevented by early detection and treatment.

    • VA Officials Pledge New Studies Into Effects of Agent Orange

      The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is expanding its efforts to determine how Vietnam veterans and their children have been affected by exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange.

      The VA will conduct its first nationwide survey of Vietnam veterans in more than three decades and request an outside panel of experts to continue its work studying the health effects of Agent Orange on veterans, their children and their grandchildren. Both initiatives were discussed Thursday in Washington at a forum hosted by ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot on the possible multi-generational impacts of Agent Orange.

      Vietnam veterans have argued for years that their exposure to the toxic herbicide has damaged their health as well as their children’s. From 1965 to 1970, some 2.6 million U.S. service members were potentially exposed to Agent Orange, which contained a dangerous strand of the chemical dioxin. While the VA has linked Agent Orange exposure to a host of diseases in Vietnam vets, experts and veterans advocates have criticized the lack of research into the effects on future generations.

      “I believe that these individuals deserve an answer,” Linda Spoonster Schwartz, the VA’s assistant secretary for policy and planning, said in response to a question about the lack of research. “I believe that we need to at least ask the question. … This is the right thing to do.”

    • Fate of Vermont’s Historic GMO-Labeling Law in US Senate’s Hands

      As the nation’s first GMO labeling law takes effect, food policy experts are warning that its benefits could be “fleeting,” should the U.S. Senate pass a so-called “compromise” bill this week that would nullify Vermont’s historic law as well as other state efforts in the works.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • But I have work to do!

      There’s a news story going around that talks about how horrible computer security tends to be in hospitals. This probably doesn’t surprise anyone who works in the security industry, security is often something that gets in the way, it’s not something that helps get work done.

      There are two really important lessons we should take away from this. The first is that a doctor or nurse isn’t a security expert, doesn’t want to be a security expert, and shouldn’t be a security expert. Their job is helping sick people. We want them helping sick people, especially if we’re the people who are sick. The second is that when security gets in the way, security loses. Security should lose when it gets in the way, we’ve been winning far too often and it’s critically damaged the industry.

    • Lenovo ThinkPwn UEFI exploit also affects products from other vendors [Ed: Intel and Microsoft told us UEFI was about security but it wasn’t]

      A critical vulnerability that was recently found in the low-level firmware of Lenovo ThinkPad systems also reportedly exists in products from other vendors, including HP and Gigabyte Technology.

      An exploit for the vulnerability was published last week and can be used to execute rogue code in the CPU’s privileged SMM (System Management Mode).

      This level of access can then be used to install a stealthy rootkit inside the computer’s Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) — the modern BIOS — or to disable Windows security features such as Secure Boot, Virtual Secure Mode and Credential Guard that depend on the firmware being locked down.

      The exploit, dubbed ThinkPwn, was released by a security researcher named Dmytro Oleksiuk last week without sharing it with Lenovo in advance. However, since then Oleksiuk has found the same vulnerable code inside older open source firmware for some Intel motherboards.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Why the Sanders ‘Revolution’ Must Take on the Permanent War State

      The Sanders campaign never explicitly raised the issue of the permanent war state during the primary election contest, either. He did present a sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton when they debated foreign policy, effectively demolishing her position urging a more militarily aggressive policy in Syria. He called for a policy that “destroys ISIS” but “does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East.”But he never talked about ending the unprecedented power that national security institutions have seized over the resources and security of the American people.

    • Is Coup Against Corbyn a Plot to Spare Blair from War Crimes Probe?

      In the tumultuous wake of Brexit, why has the Labour Party turned on leader Jeremy Corbyn for campaigning for the “Remain” camp, while the Conservatives have welcomed new leader Theresa Mays for doing exactly the same?

      Alex Salmond, former Scottish First Minister, has proposed one damning theory by suggesting that the Labour Party’s coup against Corbyn is an orchestrated attempt to stop him from “calling for Tony Blair’s head” when the Chilcot Report, the government’s official inquiry into the Iraq War, is published on Wednesday.

      In a blistering op-ed published Sunday in Scotland’s Herald, Salmond writes, “It would be a mistake to believe that Chilcot and current events are entirely unconnected. The link is through the Labour Party.”

    • Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel’s “Night”

      “According to Seidman’s account, published in the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies”, Cohen wrote, “Wiesel substantially rewrote the work between editions — suggesting that the strident and vengeful tone of the Yiddish original was converted into a continental, angst-ridden existentialism more fitting to Wiesel’s emerging role as an ambassador of culture and conscience. Most important, Seidman wrote that Wiesel altered several facts in the later edition, in some cases offering accounts of pivotal moments that conflicted with the earlier version. (For example, in the French, the young Wiesel, having been liberated from Buchenwald, is recuperating in a hospital; he looks into a mirror and writes that he saw a corpse staring back at him. In the earlier Yiddish, Wiesel holds that upon seeing his reflection he smashed the mirror and then passed out, after which ‘my health began to improve.’)”

    • Report Shows How War Profiteers Are Now Refugee Profiteers, Too

      As Europe comes to terms with a Brexit vote fueled in large part by anti-immigrant hate-mongering, a new report exposes how war profiteers are influencing EU policy to make money from unending Middle East conflicts as well as the wave of refugees created by that same instability and violence.

    • Iraq Mourns After Weekend Bombing Deathtoll Rises Above 200 People

      The deathtoll from a massive truck bomb detonated in a Baghdad shopping district over the weekend has climbed to over 200 people, with hundreds more injured and scores still missing, making it one of the deadliest such attacks in the recent history of war-torn Iraq.

    • Iraqis want crackdown on ‘sleeper cells’ after huge Baghdad bomb

      By Monday evening, the toll in Karrada stood at 175 killed and 200 wounded, according to police and medical sources. Rescuers and families were still looking for 37 missing people.

    • Poll Disputes Claim of Obama’s Weakness

      Democrats’ hawkishness is fed by fear that Republicans will attack them as doves, a concern heightened by the charge that President Obama is disdained globally for not using more military force, a point disputed by ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Iraq Inquiry: Chilcot says ‘careful analysis needed before war’

      The chairman of the UK’s inquiry into the Iraq war says he hopes future military action on such a scale will only be possible with more careful analysis and political judgement.

      His 12-volume report on the Iraq War is due to be released later – more than seven years after the inquiry began.

      Sir John Chilcot told the BBC it would criticise individuals and institutions.

      He said he hoped it would help families of the 179 Britons who died between 2003 and 2009 answer some questions.

    • Grandfather fears Iraq War report will be a cover-up

      The grandfather of a Devon soldier killed in Iraq fears the long-awaited report into Britain’s role in the conflict will just be a cover-up.

      Sir John Chilcot is due to publish his long-awaited report into the war today, seven years after hearing evidence from his first witness.

      David Godfrey, who runs a fundraising shop in Cullompton, can’t believe it’s taken so long. For him, the UK should never have gone to war in the first place.

    • Families of Iraq War dead hope British inquiry will criticise ex-PM Blair

      A British inquiry into the Iraq War delivers its long-awaited report on Wednesday, with critics of the U.S.-led invasion hoping it will condemn former Prime Minister Tony Blair while some families of slain soldiers fear it may be a whitewash.

      To be published seven years after the inquiry was set up when the last British combat troops left Iraq, the report runs to 2.6 million words – about three times the length of the Bible – and will include details of exchanges Blair had with then U.S. President George W. Bush over the 2003 invasion.

    • WikiLeaks publishes more than 1,000 Hillary Clinton war emails

      WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website, has released more than 1,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server pertaining to the Iraq War.

      The website tweeted a link to 1,258 emails on Monday that Clinton sent during her time as secretary of state. According to the release, the emails were obtained from the US State Department after they issued a Freedom of Information Act request. The emails stem from a State Department release back in February, The Hill reports.

    • Wikileaks publishes Clinton war emails

      WikiLeaks on Monday published more than 1,000 emails about the Iraq War from Hillary Clinton’s private server during her time as secretary of State.

      The website tweeted a link to 1,258 emails that Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, sent and received. They stem from a trove of emails released by the State Department in February.

      WikiLeaks combed through the emails to find all the messages that reference the Iraq War.

    • For Hillary Clinton’s Campaign, “Extremely Careless” Is a Soundbite to Celebrate

      When Hillary Clinton first acknowledged in March 2015 that she had indeed used a private email account — and her own server — to conduct official government business as secretary of state, it would have been hard to imagine that her campaign would 16 months later pronounce itself “pleased” that an FBI investigation concluded that she and her aides “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

    • Washington Has Been Obsessed With Punishing Secrecy Violations — until Hillary Clinton

      Secrecy is a virtual religion in Washington. Those who violate its dogma have been punished in the harshest and most excessive manner – at least when they possess little political power or influence. As has been widely noted, the Obama administration has prosecuted more leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined. Secrecy in DC is so revered that even the most banal documents are reflexively marked classified, making their disclosure or mishandling a felony. As former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden said back in 2000, “Everything’s secret. I mean, I got an email saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a top secret NSA classification marking.”

      People who leak to media outlets for the selfless purpose of informing the public – Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden – face decades in prison. Those who leak for more ignoble and self-serving ends – such as enabling hagiography (Leon Panetta, David Petreaus) or ingratiating oneself to one’s mistress (Petraeus) – face career destruction, though they are usually spared if they are sufficiently Important-in-DC. For low-level, powerless Nobodies-in-DC, even the mere mishandling of classified information – without any intent to leak but merely to, say, work from home – has resulted in criminal prosecution, career destruction and the permanent loss of security clearance.

    • Misunderstanding Russia and Russians

      Western media has demonized Russia and President Putin with unrelenting propaganda that has dazed and confused many Russians, a condition that retired U.S. Col. Ann Wright encountered on a recent visit.

    • Chilcot Report: Parents of major killed in Iraq say Blair must now face legal action

      The parents of the 95th British serviceman to be killed in Iraq have said there would be “something terribly wrong with our political process” if the Chilcot Report did not produce grounds for the families of dead soldiers to take legal action over the Iraq war.

      Roger and Maureen Bacon lost their son Matthew, 34, a major in the Intelligence Corps, when his Snatch Land Rover was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Basra on 11 September 2005.

      Speaking to The Independent hours before the long-awaited publication of Sir John Chilcot’s report on the Iraq War, Mr and Mrs Bacon accused Tony Blair of betraying their son and misleading Britain into a war that was “a total and utter catastrophe”.

    • Blair Can Be Tried For War Crimes

      There is no requirement in international law for the appropriate jurisdiction of a tribunal – or even the tribunal itself – to be in place before a crime is committed, in order for it to try that crime. The most obvious evidence of this is the Nuremburg Tribunal, which did not even exist when the crimes which it tried were committed. But in fact international law has a long tradition of arbitration or judgement by bodies which were set up after the event, but judging by the law applicable at the time of the event. It is the crime itself which must be a crime at the time it is committed. The jurisdiction of the body which tries the criminal can be created after the crime itself.

      Total nonsense has been written widely that it would be retroactive law, and thus unacceptable, for Tony Blair to be tried at the Hague for the crime of waging aggressive war. But the crime itself was very plainly already in existence when Blair committed it.

    • The 179 British personnel who died during the Iraq war

      The invasion of Iraq led to the deaths of 179 British personnel between March 2003 and February 2009.

      Tony Blair told the Chilcot Inquiry into the conflict he had “deep and profound regret” about the loss of life suffered by British troops and the countless Iraqi civilians.

    • With Brexit, Israel Loses a Major Asset in the European Union

      Britain helped moderate and balance EU decisions about the peace process, blunt criticism and even harness the member states against anti-Israel moves at the UN; voices sympathetic to the Palestinian cause could now become more dominant.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Does Jim Comey Think Thomas Drake Exhibited Disloyalty to the United States?

      As you’ve no doubt heard, earlier today Jim Comey had a press conference where he said Hillary and her aides were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” but went on to say no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute any of them for storing over 100 emails with classified information on a server in Hillary’s basement. Comey actually claimed to have reviewed “investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information” and found no “case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.”

      [...]

      I can only imagine Comey came to his improper public prosecutorial opinion via one of two mental tricks. Either he — again, not the prosecutor — decided the only crime at issue was mishandling classified information (elsewhere in his statement he describes having no evidence that thousands of work emails were withheld from DOJ with ill intent, which dismisses another possible crime), and from there he decided either that it’d be a lot harder to prosecute Hillary Clinton (or David Petraeus) than it would be someone DOJ spent years maligning like Sterling or Drake. Or maybe he decided that there are no indications that Hillary is disloyal to the US.

      Understand, though: with Sterling and Drake, DOJ decided they were disloyal to the US, and then used their alleged mishandling of classified information as proof that they were disloyal to the US (Drake ultimately plead to Exceeding Authorized Use of a Computer).

      Ultimately, it involves arbitrary decisions about who is disloyal to the US, and from that a determination that the crime of mishandling classified information occurred.

    • FBI Director Comey Preempts Justice Department By Advising No Charges for Hillary Clinton

      FBI Director James Comey took the unprecedented step of publicly preempting a Justice Department prosecution when he declared at a press conference Tuesday that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server.

      The FBI’s job is to investigate crimes; it is Justice Department prosecutors who are supposed to decide whether or not to move forward. But in a case that had enormous political implications, Comey decided the FBI would act on its own.

      “Although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case,” he said. Prosecutors could technically still file criminal charges, but it would require them to publicly disagree with their own investigators.

    • FBI Recommends “No Charges” Against Hillary Clinton

      In a surprising statement which concluded moments ago, FBI director James Comey announced that Federal officials have decided not to pursue federal charges against Hillary Clinton for her private email setup, an announcement that will send a shockwave throughout national politics.

    • FBI: Clinton ‘Should Have Known’ Private Email Server ‘No Way To Handle Classified Info’, But No Charges Will Be Sought

      But at the end of it all, the FBI found Clinton’s use of private email server to be severelty stupid, rather than criminal. Comey says the FBI found no signs of “intentional misconduct” by lawyers during personal email deletions or routine purges. Likewise, there was “no clear evidence of intentional misconduct by staffers,” but Clinton’s emails were “clearly mishandled.”

      The FBI’s final conclusion is damning, but only in terms of harsh words, not actual punishment. Clinton and her staff “knew or should have known” a private email server was “no way to properly handle classified email” — especially when housed on private server with “no full-time staff” or anything approaching the level of service one would equate with email services like Gmail. Comey also noted that Clinton used her personal domain “extensively” outside of the US, needlessly exposing sensitive information in the “presence of hostile actors.”

      James Comey also took a little time to bash her agency, stating that the FBI found the “security culture” of the State Department to be “lacking.”

    • ‘No Charges Are Appropriate’: Statement by FBI Director Comey on Clinton Email Probe
    • ‘Most Transparent’ President Signs Into Law FOIA Reform Bill That Won’t Affect His Administration

      While this is cause for some celebration, let’s not overlook what’s actually happened here. Obama has signed a bill he can saddle his successors with. Neither leading candidate seems particularly amenable to openness and transparency — not Donald Trump with his big ideas on how to change laws to make things better for him rather than for the nation, and not Hillary Clinton, who set up her own email server to route around FOIA requests.

      While touting his administration as the Openest Place on Earth, FOIA responsiveness actually took several steps backward during his tenure. His administration also spent several years fighting FOIA reform, something that was ironically uncovered by documents obtained via a FOIA request.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • How the Great Lakes Observing System Supports Regional Health, Safety, Economy

      The Great Lakes are a vital shipping channel for the U.S., annually carrying billions of dollars of cargo to and from the Atlantic. They also contain 20 percent of the world’s freshwater, have 10,000 miles of coast, and—much like the ocean—the waters of the Great Lakes heavily influence the climate in the region. Knowing what’s happening and forecasting what’s to come in Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario keep us safer, healthier, and economically sound.

  • Finance/Brexit

    • Despite What Media Says, TPP Isn’t About Free Trade — It’s About Protecting Corporate Profits

      The news media and advocates of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement have repeatedly described opponents of the deal as “protectionist” or opposed to trade itself.

      For instance, after Donald Trump pressed Hillary Clinton to swear off passage of the deal, the New York Times reported that Trump was embracing “nationalistic anti-trade policies.” The Wall Street Journal said Trump expressed “protectionist views.” President Obama warned that you can’t withdraw “from trade deals” and focus “solely on your local market.”

      But opposition to the TPP is not accurately described as opposition to all trade, or even to free trade.

      In fact, the deal’s major impact would not come in the area of lowering tariffs, the most common trade barriers. The TPP is more focused on crafting regulatory regimes that benefit certain industries.

      So the most consequential parts of the deal would actually undermine the free flow of goods and services by expanding some protectionist, anti-competitive policies sought by global corporations.

      “We already have trade agreements with six of the 11 countries. Canada and Mexico — our two biggest trading partners — are in there. The tariffs are almost zero [with those countries] anyhow,” Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told The Intercept. “What’s in the deal? Higher patent and copyright protection! That’s protectionism.”

    • More in hope, less about immigration: why poor Britons really voted to leave the EU

      A popular Brexit narrative is that those left out of rising prosperity lashed out at the establishment because they could take no more punishment. They had suffered years of recession and austerity exacerbated by a Dutch auction – in which the asking price is lowered until there’s a buyer – driven by rising immigration.

      The latest NatCen British Social Attitudes Survey shows the true extent of concerns about immigration. Clear majorities thought migrants were having a net negative effect on British schools and the NHS. This was an area where there was substantial agreement between people with different levels of education. Another area in which the public was even more of one mind was in their awareness that the NHS has a funding problem.

      To find out where those left out of rising prosperity differed from the rest, however, we need to look at other survey questions. These introduce two important caveats to the popular narrative: that at least until the eve of the referendum campaign, poor Britons were not sure that leaving the EU would reduce immigration; and that it wasn’t just rising prosperity that they felt excluded from.

    • Like imperialists of old, Nigel Farage blundered ignorantly in and nicked our country from under our noses

      So farewell, for now and for a while, to the anti-Martin Luther King.

      With his charming poster of Syrians queuing forlornly in that distant corner of the UK that will forever be Slovenia, Nigel Farage reminded us that he too has a dream, albeit the reverse of Dr King’s.

      Nigel dreamed of a land where people are judged not by the content of their character, but by the colour of their skin. He also dreamed of taking this country back to the Fifties, and he has doubled out splendidly on that.

      We are transported back to the mid-1950s, of course, after the end of bread rationing but before large scale immigration from the former colonies. That mythical Elysium, sun-dappled age of innocence when Pop Larkin thought everything “perfick”, and boarding house owners had no need to express their absolute right as Her Britannic Majesty’s free born subjects to announce which potential guests they found undesirable.

    • How Nigel Farage pocketed a £7,500 pay rise after Brexit

      Shameless Nigel Farage has pocketed a whopping £7,500 pay rise by getting Britain to leave the EU.

      The outgoing UKIP chief has seen the value of his MEP wages soar since we voted for Brexit , because he is paid in euros by the Brussels Parliament.

      The shock result sent the pound plunging in value, and as of Tuesday it was down almost 9% against the Euro since the June 23 poll.

      As Mr Farage lives in leafy Kent it means his salary has effectively rocketed from £75,295 to £82,707 in just 11 days.

    • How remain failed: the inside story of a doomed campaign

      On Friday 10 June, five men charged with keeping Britain in the European Union gathered in a tiny, windowless office and stared into the abyss.

      Just moments before, they had received an email from Andrew Cooper, a former Downing Street strategist and pollster for the official remain campaign, containing the daily “tracker” – the barometer of support among target segments of the electorate. It had dropped into the defeat zone. The cause was not mysterious. “Immigration was snuffing out our opportunity to talk about the economy,” Will Straw, the executive director of Britain Stronger In Europe, recalled.

    • Canada, Europe trade deal at risk as EU gives 38 parliaments a binding say

      The European Union put its landmark free-trade accord with Canada on a slow track for approval, increasing the risk of a veto amid an anti-globalization backlash across Europe.

      The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, proposed that its first trade agreement with a fellow member of the Group of Seven leading industrialized countries face ratification by national parliaments in the 28-member bloc. A total of 38 different national parliamentary chambers, including in some cases regional assemblies, will have a binding say.

    • [Old] ‘France is totally bankrupt’: French jobs minister Michel Sapin embarrasses Francois Hollande with shocking statement on state of the country’s economy

      France’s employment minister Michel Sapin has admitted the country is “totally bankrupt”.

      The unexpected news came during a radio interview yesterday and is thought to have sent the country’s business leaders into a state of shock.

      “There is a state but it is a totally bankrupt state,” Mr Sapin said. “That is why we had to put a deficit reduction plan in place, and nothing should make us turn away from that objective.”

      Mr Sapin’s “totally bankrupt” statement is likely to cause huge embarrassment for President Francois Hollande, who will be left to undo the potential damage to his socialist government’s reputation.

    • About 100 BBC Monitoring jobs to be axed amid £4m cuts

      At least 98 jobs at the BBC Monitoring department are to be cut ahead of a £4m reduction in funding.

      The department, which has 320 staff, analyses local media from 150 countries in 100 different languages, but the operation is to be scaled down.

      The World Service said the Mazar-i-Sharif bureau in Afghanistan will be closed and new bases will open in Istanbul and Jerusalem.

      The team will relocate from Caversham Park in Reading, its base since 1942.

      The BBC said it would begin consultations with unions shortly.

      The loss of jobs will mean a reduction of nearly a third.

    • Aviva Investors says suspends UK property trust

      Aviva Investors, the fund arm of insurer Aviva (AV.L), has suspended its UK Property Trust with immediate effect, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

      “The extraordinary market circumstances, which are impacting the wider industry, have resulted in a lack of immediate liquidity in the Aviva Investors Property Trust. Consequently, we have acted to safeguard the interests of all our investors by suspending dealing in the fund with immediate effect,” a spokesman said.

      The suspension of the 1.8 billion pound fund comes a day after Standard Life Investments, the fund arm of insurer Standard Life (SL.L), suspended its 2.9 billion pound UK real estate fund.

    • EU rivals vie to wrest drug and banking agencies from London

      Milan’s new mayor Giuseppe Sala will fly into London on Wednesday, stepping up a battle between European cities competing to wrest two prestigious European Union agencies from London in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the bloc.

      The European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Banking Authority (EBA) together employ more than 1,000 skilled staff from across the EU. Both are expected to relocate as a result of the so-called Brexit decision.

      The agencies are prized not only for jobs but also for their potential to act as hubs for finance and pharmaceuticals, two of Europe’s most important industries.

      That has set off a battle from Madrid to Stockholm to Warsaw as EU members seek to grab one or other organisation, in the knowledge that banks and drugmakers will want to maintain close ties with key regulators.

    • Universities take a knock post-Brexit

      European academic bodies are pulling back from research collaboration with UK academics, amid post-Brexit uncertainty about the future of UK higher education.

      While post-Brexit Britain might remain inside the European research funding system, academics in other countries are nervous about collaborating with UK institutions.

      UK-based academics are being asked to withdraw their applications for future funding by European partners.

      BBC Newsnight is aware of concerns raised by academics at Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter and Durham.

      Chris Husbands, the vice-chancellor at Sheffield Hallam, says that his researchers are already seeing significant effects.

    • Hillary’s National Security Alliance for Quivering Over Bank Prosecutions

      Again, I’m okay if Hillary wants to spend her time fearmongering about the dangers of Trump.

      But to do so credibly, she needs to be a lot more cognizant of the dangers her own team have created.

    • So long, Nigel Farage, the latest rat to jump from the sinking Brexit ship

      Hot on the heels of ‘Don’t Be A Quitter’ Dave and ‘Stabbed In The Back’ Boris, another politician leaves us to deal with the mess they created

    • ‘Brexit’ and the Democracy Myth

      There’s a theory going around that referenda are the ultimate in direct democracy. There’s something about masses of people voting for or against some major issue that causes would-be populists to go weak in the knees. But the theory is pure myth, as the Brexit debacle shows. Rather than raising democracy to a new level, referenda often drag it down.

      The classic example occurred in the early 1850s when Napoleon III, nephew of the more famous Napoleon I, engineered back-to-back plebiscites that allowed him to institute a dictatorship for nearly 20 years. Instead of democracy, France got the opposite – political prisoners by the thousands, foreign adventures, and a disastrous war with Germany.

    • Swimming Against the Loan Sharks

      Federal regulators have proposed new rules to rein in payday lenders, and those of us who’ve been fighting these legalized loan sharks for years are bracing for a major backlash from the industry while also pushing for tougher standards.

      Issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the proposal comes after years of grass roots pressure – in the face of nasty opposition by loan predators.

    • Britain needs to hire foreign experts to redo all the trade deals it voted to ditch

      Now that Britain has voted to leave the European Union, it faces the daunting task of renegotiating a long list of trade deals as a newly independent entity: all the deals the EU already has with other countries, the ones the EU is currently negotiating, and a deal with the EU itself after it leaves the bloc.

      This work will require millions of hours of work by seasoned negotiators with experience of the complex, high-stakes art of top-level government deal-making.

    • Brexit: Dual nationality on the table for Britons?

      It is more than a week since Britain voted to leave the European Union, and there is still little certainty regarding the future status of EU citizens currently living in the UK, or of British people living elsewhere in the EU.

      While many British citizens are happy to potentially wave goodbye to freedom of movement within the EU, some Britons would like to hold on to the opportunity to live and work in the other 27 countries that make up the union.

      At the weekend, German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said the remaining members should not “pull up the drawbridge” for young Britons, who largely voted to remain, and so should consider offering dual nationality to young British citizens “who live in Germany, Italy or France, so that they can remain EU citizens in this country”.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Theresa May wins more than half of MPs’ votes as Stephen Crabb pulls out and Liam Fox is eliminated

      Theresa May has taken pole position in the race to succeed David Cameron, with a comfortable advantage after securing the backing of more than half of Conservative MPs in the first round of voting.

      If the Home Secretary can repeat her triumph by winning the support of Tory members, she will be installed in September as Britain’s second female Prime Minister, after Margaret Thatcher.

      Stephen Crabb, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pulled out of the race on Tuesday evening after finishing second last with 34 votes. He backed Mrs may for leader.

      Former Defence Secretary Liam Fox was eliminated from the contest after winning the support of just 16 MPs when the results were revealed at 6.30pm on Tuesday.

    • Theresa May is bad, but the other Tory candidates are worse

      Imagine Britain’s membership of the European Union as a cat. The cat is sealed in a box with an unstable radioactive element, “Article 50”. At some point the toxicity of A50 will kill the cat – an outcome that is confirmed on opening the box. But as long as the box is sealed, moggy is simultaneously dead and alive. This state is known as Schrödinger’s EU membership, after the Austrian physicist who described something similar in 1935 to elucidate the mysteries of quantum mechanics.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Censorship Crusade: Far-Right Politician, Parents Team Up To Ban Books In Va. Public Schools

      Some parents in a Virginia county are upset about a few books on public school summer reading lists – so much so that they’re calling for censorship.

      Chesterfield County, which is just south of Richmond, has been besieged for a second-straight year by a group that is clearly under the influence of the Religious Right.

      Last year, Shannon Easter and her allies protested the inclusion of multiple titles on the Chesterfield County summer reading lists for middle and high schoolers after Easter consulted materials she found online, which were produced by organizations affiliated with a prominent far-right group: Focus on the Family (FOF).

      In 2015, Easter and her allies made enough noise that four books were removed from the summer reading list, even though librarians in the county have noted that the books on the list are merely suggestions to encourage reading – no one is required to read any of them.

    • David Stratton on censorship, ‘Sandra’ and the Sydney Film Festival

      What I proposed to the Sydney Film Festival was that if any cuts were demanded in festival films they should be publicised. There should be a press release issued and interviews given and make as much noise about it as possible, because when something is done in secrecy you can get away with a lot more.

      The director of the festival at the time felt that he could not implement that motion, and there was a valid reason for it, actually. The festival had an agreement with the Customs Department, which allowed the festival to import films without paying customs duty.

    • How one filmmaker is battling censorship in Lebanon and encouraging others to do the same

      In making her short film I Say Dust, Darine Hotait wanted to explore Arab American identity from her perspective as a New York-based American Lebanese writer and director. It just so happened that her two lead characters would be women in their 20s who share a kiss. That kiss, however, has put I Say Dust at the centre of a long-standing discussion about censorship after it was recently banned from two film festivals in the Middle East.

    • SA sides with censorship countries, says DA

      The Democratic Alliance has expressed shock at South Africa’s move to vote against a UN resolution promoting Internet freedom.

      Last week, UN member states voted on the resolution which affirms political commitment to protecting human rights online.

      It also seeks to condemn the intentional disruption of Internet access to the public.

      South Africa voted against it, together with China and Russia amongst others.

    • South Africa’s ruling party condemns its own national broadcaster for censoring political violence

      South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has condemned its own public broadcaster for practicing censorship by not broadcasting images of violent anti-state protests.

      The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was initially accused by opposition parties of pro-government bias when it brought in a policy of self censorship when violence flared as local elections approached.

    • ANC condemns broadcaster for censorship

      South Africa’s ruling African National Congress said on Tuesday the public broadcaster, accused by opposition parties of pro-government bias as local elections approach, was exercising censorship by not broadcasting images of violent anti-state protests.

    • ANC does not condone SABC censorship – Mthembu
    • ‘ANC just as clueless as the public over SABC censorship’

      The African National Congress (ANC) says it believes the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) failure to consult it on policy changes being introduced is a sign of disregard.

      Speaking at Luthuli House, ANC Chief Whip Jackson Mthembu addressed developments at the public broadcaster and media freedom.

      The ANC says it believes it should have been notified about changes made at the broadcaster, because it’s the ruling party.

    • ANC Slams Censorship at South African Public Broadcaster

      South Africa’s ruling African National Congress said it hasn’t sought to influence news coverage at the national broadcaster, countering a claim by its former acting chief executive officer, and described its current leadership as “lacking.”

    • South Africa’s ruling ANC condemns public broadcaster for censorship

      South Africa’s ruling African National Congress said on Tuesday the public broadcaster, accused by opposition parties of pro-government bias ahead of local elections, was practicing censorship by not broadcasting violent anti-state protests.

      The comments by party chief whip Jackson Mthembu represent a U-turn and may point to schisms in the ANC, which in May welcomed the broadcast ban by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) as the “best decision.”

      “When property is burnt, people of South Africa need to be shown those images, that is the ANC view. Because when you don’t show those images, that amounts to censorship,” Mthembu said in a televised media briefing.

    • Media censorship is back in all its glory!

      Now since the SABC’s COO is above the law, and at the same time the person who single handedly decide what should and should not be shown on the local media, one can only assume the he is yet another deployed cadre not fit for the job!

      Now although education may not be the alpha and omega in Africa, most people in executive positions hold some sort of tertiary qualification!

      [...]

      Lest not forget, the SABC is there to serve all people of South Africa and not only the ANC leadership with their dysfunctional policies!

    • The reality of life under Turkey’s internet censorship machine

      Turkey, the world champion in Twitter censorship, presents a tough challenge for regular internet users thanks to its growing blacklist of 100,000 banned websites.

      But determined Turks are tough. After all, they are the ones who placed the #TurkeyBlockedTwitter hashtag on world’s top trends list—while Twitter was blocked nationwide.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • These Maps Show What the Dark Web Looks Like

      What does the dark web actually look like? Well, new research maps out the relationships between a load of Tor hidden services, and shows that many dark web sites, rather than being isolated entities, are perhaps more intimately intertwined than commonly thought.

      “The dark web is highly connected,” reads the latest OnionScan report published on Sunday. Made by security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis, OnionScan is a tool for probing Tor hidden services for vulnerabilities and issues that might reveal identifying information about the site.

    • Ron Wyden: Obtaining ECTRs without a Warrant Is Almost Like Spying on Someone’s Thoughts

      The other thing obtaining ECTRs with NSLs would do, though, is avoid a court First Amendment review, which should be of particular concern with web search history, since everything about web browsing involves First Amendment speech. Remember, a form of emergency provision (one limited to Section 215’s phone chaining application) was approved in February 2014. But in the September 2014 order, the FISC affirmatively required that such a review happen even with emergency orders. A 2015 IG Report on Section 215 (see page 176) explains why this is the case: because once FISC started approving seeds, NSA’s Office of General Counsel stopped doing First Amendment reviews, leaving that for FISC. It’s unclear whether it took FISC several cycles to figure that out, or whether they discovered an emergency approval that infringed on First Amendment issues. Under the expanded emergency provision under USAF, someone at FBI or DOJ’s National Security Division would do the review. But FBI’s interest in avoiding FISC’s First Amendment review is of particular concern given that FBI has, in the past, used an NSL to obtain data the FISC refused on First Amendment grounds, and at least one of the NSL challenges appears to have significant First Amendment concerns.

    • UK Police Accessed Civilian Data for Fun and Profit, New Report Says

      More than 800 UK police staff inappropriately accessed personal information between June 2011 and December 2015, according to a report from activist group Big Brother Watch.

      The report says some police staff used their access to a growing trove of police data, which includes personal information on civilians, for entertainment and personal and financial gain.

      The report, which is based on Freedom of Information requests sent to all UK police forces, raises questions about the police’s ability to protect civilian data. Specifically, privacy advocates are concerned about access to Internet Connection Records, which is the new type of data that would be collected under the UK’s Investigatory Powers Bill.

      In several notable incidents, one Metropolitan Police officer found the name of a victim so funny that he attempted to take a photo of the driving license and send it to his friend over Snapchat. A Greater Manchester Police officer tipped someone off that they would be arrested, and one from North Yorkshire Police conducted a check on a vehicle on his phone whilst off-duty.

    • Paris attacks: Call to overhaul French intelligence services

      French intelligence services should be overhauled following last year’s terror attacks in Paris, a parliamentary commission of inquiry has recommended.

      Commission president Georges Fenech said all the French attackers had been known to authorities, but these had not communicated with each other.

    • 2015 Wiretap Report Doesn’t Have Much To Say About Encryption, But Does Show Feds Run Into Zero Judicial Opposition

      Whatever the government is doing with these other options can’t easily be examined by the general public because there are no reporting requirements tied to these, unlike wiretap warrants. So, the number of times where encrypted communications (not contained in locked phones) are holding up law enforcement cannot be nailed down with any certainty. The DOJ could collect and disseminate this data, but it would certainly prefer to keep its reporting requirements to a minimum, even if this data would back up Comey’s encryption histrionics.

      What hasn’t changed, however, is what wiretaps are used for: drugs. 3,367 or 4,148 issued in 2015 were for narcotics investigations. And for those of you who have followed the explosion of possibly illegal wiretaps originating from a single county courthouse in California, it’s no surprise the state issuing the most federal wiretap orders is that particular coastal “drug corridor.”

    • Thomas Jefferson’s Ghost Visits the White House

      “And so we pretty much trashed the Fourth Amendment and now spy on all Americans 24/7. The First Amendment, especially the right to free speech part, that hasn’t held up well, either,” said Obama. “And you have to take your shoes off at the airport but none of us remember why that is anymore.”

      “But Barack, a well-informed citizenry, secure in their persons and papers, who can assemble to speak truth to their government is essential,” Jefferson said. “Actually, that’s kinda the whole thing.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • To Find Out Why Schools Are Sending In Cops To Bust Third Graders, Ask The Local Prosecutor

      Who’s leading the installation of police officers inside schools and the implementation of zero tolerance policies? In New Jersey, the answer is the local prosecutor’s office.

      A little background: police were called to a third-grade class party because a nine-year-old allegedly made a racist remark when discussing the brownies they were eating. NO. REALLY.

    • Triggering Article 50 will plunge the UK into turmoil – and the EU with it. It’s mutually assured destruction

      With the rise of so many far-right parties across Europe, we could be seeing the return of fascism to the continent

    • Former Donald Trump Adviser Calls Racial Profiling “Common Sense”

      A former adviser to Donald Trump on Wednesday endorsed racial profiling and warned that mainstream Muslim American organizations are waging a covert war of cultural subversion against the United States.

      Sebastian Gorka teaches at Marine Corps University and advises law enforcement and national security officials on terrorism and irregular warfare. Last fall, he was paid $8,000 for policy consulting with the Trump campaign. On Wednesday, he spoke at the Family Research Council, a social conservative advocacy group, touting his new book Defeating Jihad: A Winnable War.

    • The Revolt Against Globalism

      There was William Galston at the European Council on Foreign Relations, listening to his fellow elitists and foreign policy honchos caviling about the rise of Donald Trump and bemoaning the fate of the European Union (EU) at the hand’s of Britain’s Euro-skeptics. As the assembled luminaries had a collective sad in their five-star hotel, wondering how the proles could’ve gotten so far out of hand, Galtson – longtime Democratic party hack, former domestic advisor to Bill Clinton, and a senior fellow at the “centrist” Brookings Institution – heard a call to arms. It was almost as if Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist and original founder and financier of the Council on Foreign Relations, had spoken to him from on high – or, rather, from below – and commanded him to spread the Word far and wide:

    • MPs From All Parties Tell Theresa May: EU Citizens In The UK Must Not Be Kicked Out

      London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Lib Dem leader Tim Farron and Green MP Caroline Lucas are among those who have signed a statement urging protection for 3million EU citizens living in the UK.

      In a statement to HuffPost UK, representatives of Labour, the Conservatives, Lib Dems, SNP, Ukip and the Greens called on whoever takes over as Prime Minister to vow not to force EU nationals in the UK to leave the country.

      The future of EU migrants settled in the UK has been thrown into doubt after the front-runner for the Tory leadership, Theresa May, said their status could be part of any Brexit negotiation.

      Leadership rival Liam Fox has put forward the same view.

    • Theresa May under fire for threatening to deport EU migrants after Brexit

      The Government believes it would ‘unwise’ to guarantee EU migrants can stay in the UK

    • In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears

      Last week’s Brexit vote prompted pundits and social media mavens to wonder aloud if allowing dumb people to vote is a good thing.

      [...]

      In “How American Politics Went Insane,” Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.

      He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.

      “Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry,” he writes, before concluding:

      “Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.”

      Rauch’s audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan’s clarion call for a less-democratic future in New York magazine (“Democracies end when they are too democratic”), is not merely a warning about the threat posed to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.

      It’s a sweeping argument against a whole host of democratic initiatives, from increased transparency to reducing money in politics to the phasing out of bagmen and ward-heelers at the local level. These things have all destabilized America, Rauch insists.

    • TSA Scores Another PR Win With Assault Of Nineteen Year Old Brain Tumor Patient On Her Way To Treatment

      Rather than chalk this up to a big, bloody misunderstanding, the TSA and local authorities worked together to lock Hannah up overnight while her and her family’s baggage continued on to Chattanooga without them. Charges were dropped, but that’s not going to be the end of it. Cohen has filed a lawsuit against the TSA and Memphis law enforcement agencies.

      The TSA, meanwhile, took immediate steps to mitigate the damage by stating that Hannah’s parents should have called ahead if it didn’t want their child terrorized and tackled.

      [...]

      No apology. No admission that this might have been handled better. No recognition that the agents’ failure to listen to Hannah Cohen’s mother might have resulted in a brain tumor patient covered in less blood and fear. Just a bit of victim blaming where the TSA implies that agents may not have reacted so badly to a metal detector beep if only they’d been informed ahead of time that the alarm would go off and Hannah Cohen would react badly to swiftly escalating screening efforts.

      The most ridiculous thing about the spokesperson’s comment is that we’re supposed to believe the TSA will listen to parents of disabled travelers if they call ahead — when it’s plainly apparent they won’t listen to them when they’re STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO THEM.

    • The Death Penalty Is Largely Driven by a Small Number of Overzealous Prosecutors

      “Cowboy” Bob Macy was a legendary — and infamous — prosecutor in Oklahoma City. Elected the top law enforcer in his county five times, Macy, who died in 2011, was known for his wide-brimmed cowboy hat, his classic western bowtie, and carrying his gun in court. He was also known for his passionate advocacy in support of the death penalty. During his 21 years in office, Macy was personally responsible for sending 54 individuals to death row, an accomplishment that earned him the dubious distinction of deadliest prosecutor in America.

      Also part of Macy’s legacy was the high rate of misconduct allegations levied against him — misconduct was alleged in 94 percent of the death cases he prosecuted and substantiated in one-third of them. Courts overturned nearly half of the death convictions Macy obtained; three of those defendants were ultimately exonerated.

      The numbers paint a grim portrait of a prosecutor who once told members of a jury it was their “patriotic duty” to sentence a defendant to death. But Macy isn’t alone. He belongs to a small club of five so-called deadliest prosecutors identified in a new report released today by Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project. Together, the five prosecutors, only one of whom is still in office, secured 440 capital convictions — the equivalent of 15 percent of the nation’s current death row population.

    • The Fire Sprinkler War, State by State

      From New York to Minnesota, how homebuilders headed off mandatory fire sprinklers with help from friendly legislators.

    • Turkey’s cautionary tale

      The case of Academics for Peace in Turkey shows us academics trapped between authoritarianism and precarity, and why international solidarity has become crucial.

    • Theresa May and the love police

      Our country has failed Ahmed and many like him. And in one of the most worrying developments of all, there is increasingly little we can do about it. In recent years in a Europe-wide trend known as the ‘criminalization of solidarity’, we as ordinary citizens have lost our right to care about and help other people like him. In a seismic shift that has barely made the morning papers, we have lost our right to love certain categories of migrants.

    • Donald Trump Doesn’t Seem to Understand What Rape Is

      Donald Trump likened backers of international trade agreements to rapists on Tuesday. “The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country, just a continuing rape of our country,” he said. “That’s what it is, too. It’s a harsh word: It’s a rape of our country.”

      It wasn’t the first time he’d used the word that way. He accused China of rape last month: “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he said. “And that’s what they’re doing. It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”

      But looking at how Trump uses the word rape, and whom he accuses of it, reveals a pattern. He uses it to demonize his political targets. At the same time, he seems to lack empathy or understanding of what rape actually is.

      “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said last year about Mexican immigrants. He defended the statement by citing a Fusion report that an estimated 80 percent of Central American women coming across the border are raped. “I use the word rape and all of a sudden everyone goes crazy,” he said last July.

    • Iceland’s Soccer Team Is Great, Its Treatment of Asylum Seekers Less So

      Some of the facts of the men’s case were in dispute, like whether the younger of the two was 16 or 19, but the legal grounds for their detention and expulsion from the country was clear. The men, identified in the local press by their first names, Ali and Majed, had arrived in Iceland seven months ago after first applying for asylum in Norway. So, despite asking for permission to stay in Reykjavik, where there is a small community of Iraqi refugees, they were deported in accordance with a European agreement known as the Dublin Regulation, which requires anyone fleeing persecution in another part of the world to stay in the first European country they reach. The terms of that agreement excuse Iceland from having to even investigate the claims of those who say they are fleeing persecution in their home countries.

      [...]

      Toshiki Toma, the Lutheran Church of Iceland’s pastor for immigrants, told The Intercept by phone that the two men, who had converted to Christianity last week, were jailed on their return to Norway, and now expect to be returned to southern Iraq, which is considered safe by Norwegian authorities.

      Toma, a native of Japan who has lived in Iceland for more than 20 years, said that he and Kristín Tómasdóttir, the parish priest at Laugarneskirkja church in Reykjavik, had received permission from the Bishop of Iceland to offer shelter the two men, in the hope that the police would respect the ancient tradition of treating houses of worship as places of sanctuary.

    • Swedish politician: Migrant rape isn’t as bad

      Swedish Left Party politician Barbro Sörman has suggested that it’s “worse” when Swedish men rape women, than when immigrants do so.

      “The Swedish men who rape do it despite the growing gender equality. They make an active choice. It’s worse imo [in my opinion],” Sörman tweeted.

      Sörman, a self-described socialist and a feminist, made the observation in response to what she claimed was excessive media focus on the fact that most of the rapes in Sweden are committed by immigrants.

    • Saudi Arabia arrests two for holding ‘dog beauty contest’ in Jeddah

      Two men have been arrested in Saudi Arabia for trying to organise a beauty contest for dogs.

      The pair had been planning a show which would find the most beautiful dog in Jeddah, a port city on the Red Sea coast.

      According to local media, three awards had already been dished out in the competition’s early stages.

    • Appeals Court: A Bunch Of Mostly-Irrelevant Information Is Not ‘Probable Cause’

      A drug conspiracy with no drugs. A house searched because a car carrying no drugs was registered to the address. It’s little things like these that add up to a successfully suppressed evidence, even if it took defendant Ricky Brown a trip to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to achieve it.

      The DEA, working with Michigan State Police, pulled over two vehicles that had left a house they had under surveillance, apparently on their way to a heroin buy set up by an informant. One vehicle, a Chevy Silverado driven by Steven Woods, was searched after a MSP traffic stop and approximately 565 grams of heroin were recovered. The other vehicle, a GMC Yukon in which Brown was a passenger was stopped as well. However, there were no drugs in this vehicle, just four cell phones.

    • Directive on Terrorism: The EU on a Securitarian and Post-Democratic Drift?

      Yesterday evening, the LIBE Committee of the European Parliament (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) adopted the draft Directive on Combating Terrorism proposed by the European Commission by 41 votes to 4 with 10 abstentions. The EPP (conservative) Rapporteur Monika Hohlmeier had turned the directive into a text that will give credence to the worst anti-terrorism and surveillance laws from across the European Union. She clearly bowed under pressure from the French Government (FR), who is seeking to whitewash its own controversial laws regarding surveillance and websites censorship at the European level. La Quadrature du Net denounces this “europeanisation” of extrajudicial surveillance and censorship, all the more considering that the process surrounding the directive is in and of itself a staggering denial of democracy: Indeed, the draft Directive will be further discussed in secret “trilogue” negotiations, which will preclude any substantial amendment during the plenary debate of the European Parliament. Under the guise of security, the European Union is undermining its own fundamental values.

    • ‘They’re Making Racism and Xenophobia Into a Legitimate Voice’

      The story of masses of Britons googling “What’s the EU?” seems to be apocryphal, unsurprisingly. But it is fair to say many people were shocked by referendum results calling for Britain to leave the European Union.

      In the wake of the vote, some say many proponents of a so-called Brexit didn’t really expect it to happen. So how did it? And what is there to be learned from the echoes between the racism and nativism demonstrated and exploited by some Leave campaigners, and certain stokers of those same sentiments closer to home?

    • Voting Rights for 70,000 Louisiana Felons Sought in Constitutional Challenge

      Kenneth Johnston, 67, served in Vietnam and attended University of New Orleans before becoming addicted to heroin in part to address the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder he acquired in Vietnam. He spent 22 years in prison after a felony conviction and has been out for 23 years. Because he is on parole for life he will never be allowed to vote.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Frontier Backs AT&T’s Lawsuit To Keep Google Fiber Out Of Louisville

      Earlier this year, we noted how companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable were engaged in incessant whining about Google Fiber’s planned entry into Louisville, Kentucky. More specifically, the ISPs were upset that Louisville passed “one touch make ready” fiber rules that dramatically speed up fiber deployment times by letting licensed third-party contractors move other ISPs’ equipment when necessary. Such reforms generally help all ISPs by dramatically reducing the time it takes to deploy fiber infrastructure, often by as much as half a year.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ‘Just’ 5% of UK Internet Users are Hardcore Pirates

        A report published by the Intellectual Property Office has revealed that around a quarter of all UK media consumers pirated at least one item during a three-month period earlier this year. Infringement of movies and TV shows are both up in 2016, but music has shown a marked decrease.

      • Internet piracy falls to record lows amid rise of Spotify and Netflix

        Internet streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix have resulted in online piracy falling to its lowest rate in years, an official report claims.

        Research commissioned by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), which is tasked with fighting copyright infringement, found that 15pc of internet users illegally accessed films, music and other material between March and May.

        This is down from 18pc a year ago and was the lowest recorded rate in the five years the study has been carried out.

      • Documentary About Freeing Happy Birthday From Copyfraud Comes Out The Day After Happy Birthday Officially Declared Public Domain

        You may recall that last fall, a judge ruled that Warner/Chappell did not hold the copyright on the song “Happy Birthday,” as the company had alleged for decades (and which it used to take in approximately $2 million in licenses per year). Of course, while many in the press immediately claimed the song was in the public domain, we noted that was not what the court actually said, and the song had actually become something of an orphan work, and theoretically, someone else could claim the copyright. Indeed, the heirs of Mildred and Patty Hill (who are often cited as the creators of the song) stepped up to claim the copyright. In December, all the parties agreed to settle the case with Warner agreeing to pay $14 million to go to some of the people who had falsely licensed the song. But, part of the settlement agreement was a stipulation that the song, finally, officially be declared in the public domain.

07.05.16

Links 5/7/2016: KDE Plasma 5.7 Released, GSK Demystified

Posted in News Roundup at 8:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla emits nightly builds of heir-to-Firefox browser engine Servo

        Mozilla has started publishing nightly in-development builds of its experimental Servo browser engine so anyone can track the project’s progress.

        Executables for macOS and GNU/Linux are available right here to download and test drive even if you’re not a developer. If you are, the open-source engine’s code is here if you want to build it from scratch, fix bugs, or contribute to the effort.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Is my OpenStack ready for Cloud Foundry?

      This year’s first Cloud Foundry Summit took place in Santa Clara at the end of May. Beyhan Veli from SAP and I gave a presentation about the Cloud Foundry OpenStack Validator, a new tool we developed as one of the results of our collaboration with SAP on the BOSH OpenStack Cloud Provider Interface project.

  • CMS

    • German ecommerce software Shopware becomes open source

      Shopware, said to be the largest shop system manufacturer of Germany, released version 5.2 of its ecommerce software. One of the biggest changes is the elimination of encryption software ionCube, thus making its software 100 percent open source.

      Shopware made version 5.2 of its ecommerce software available for download. Aside from the switch to open source, Shopware also added numerous new features, which it says are the result of more than 70,000 members from its community submitting proposals for improvement. CEO Stefan Hamann: “For several years, we have encouraged an open dialogue with the community in order to more directly connect with their wishes for an ecommerce platform.”

    • Install Cockpit CMS on Ubuntu 16.04
  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Sources: Microsoft Tried To Buy Docker for $4B

      At last week’s DockerCon 2016 event in Seattle there was a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter about Microsoft wanting to buy Docker for billions of dollars. Microsoft’s bid for Docker was rumored to be as much as $4 billion for the 250-person container technology startup in the last six months, according to multiple sources with contacts close to both companies.

    • Uber Drives Gains With Open-Source Development

      The popular ride-sharing company adopts an open-source development platform to speed application coding and support more than five million trips per day.

  • BSD

    • PC-BSD’s Lumina Desktop Now In Beta For v1.0

      The Lumina Desktop Environment has made available their v1.0 beta release of the Qt-written desktop.

      PC-BSD developers and others continue working on Lumina as an alternative, lightweight desktop environment. While originating in the BSD world, Lumina continues to be designed to work on any Unix-like OS and is licensed under a 3-clause BSD license. Should you not be familiar with Lumina from our past articles, visit Lumina-Desktop.org to learn more about the project.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Bulgaria passes law requiring government software to be open source

      Amendments have been passed by the Bulgarian Parliament requiring all software written for the government to be open source and developed in a public repository, making custom software procured by the government accessible to everyone.

      Article 58 of the Electronic Governance Act states that administrative authorities must include the following requirements: “When the subject of the contract includes the development of computer programs, computer programs must meet the criteria for open-source software; all copyright and related rights on the relevant computer programs, their source code, the design of interfaces, and databases which are subject to the order should arise for the principal in full, without limitations in the use, modification, and distribution; and development should be done in the repository maintained by the agency in accordance with Art 7c pt. 18.”

    • Every country needs to follow Bulgaria’s lead in choosing open source software for governance

      The Bulgarian Parliament has passed amendments to its Electronic Governance Act which require all software written for the government to be open source and developed in a public repository.

    • Bulgaria Makes A New Law Requiring All Government Software To Be Open Source

      From the world of open source, here comes a great news. The Bulgarian government has passed a law that has made the use of open source software in government offices compulsory. We welcome this step and hope that other governments will take similar steps and make more information accessible to the users.

    • Bulgaria Got a Law Requiring Open Source

      Less than two years after my presentation titled “Open source for the government”, and almost exactly one year after I became advisor to the deputy prime minister of Bulgaria, with the efforts of my colleagues and the deputy prime minister, the amendments to the Electronic Governance Act were voted in parliament and are now in effect. The amendments require all software written for the government to be open-source and to be developed as such in a public repository.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Building a water collection vessel from scratch

        The Engineering Academy program is offered to top students from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, as well as the School of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering in Singapore Polytechnic. The program aims to impart skills from a multitude of disciplines: electrical, electronics, mechanics, chemistry, design, and business.

        The project statement we were presented with at the beginning of the semester was: “Design a vehicle that can take two samples of water, at one meter and two meters underwater.” This posed a challenge to us as there were many intricacies of the vehicle that we had to think about, and it was a huge undertaking.

        However, we welcomed the challenge with open arms. We knew it would put all of our knowledge to the test and would necessitate the search for even more information on our own. This article will outline the very iterative process of planning and prototyping, and showcase the fruit of our labor.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Tony Blair faces calls for impeachment on release of Chilcot report

      Senior figures from Labour and the Scottish National party are considering calls for legal action against Tony Blair if the former prime minister faces severe criticisms from the long-awaited inquiry into the war in Iraq.

      A number of MPs led by Alex Salmond are expected to use an ancient law to try to impeach the former prime minister when the Chilcot report comes out on Wednesday.

      The law, last used in 1806 when the Tory minister Lord Melville was charged for misappropriating official funds, is seen in Westminster as an alternative form of punishment that could ensure Blair never holds office again.

    • How the U.S. Military Promotes Its Weapons Arsenal to the Public

      A young boy “shoots” a machine gun from a Vietnam-era helicopter at the New York Air Show in 2015. There are no certain statistics for the number of Vietnamese casualties during the war, but at least 1 million died, and potentially 2 million or more. A 1991 survey found that Americans estimated that about 100,000 Vietnamese had been killed.

    • Hacked Emails Reveal NATO General Plotting Against Obama on Russia Policy

      Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, until recently the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, plotted in private to overcome President Barack Obama’s reluctance to escalate military tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine in 2014, according to apparently hacked emails from Breedlove’s Gmail account that were posted on a new website called DC Leaks.

      Obama defied political pressure from hawks in Congress and the military to provide lethal assistance to the Ukrainian government, fearing that doing so would increase the bloodshed and provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with the justification for deeper incursions into the country.

      Breedlove, during briefings to Congress, notably contradicted the Obama administration regarding the situation in Ukraine, leading to news stories about conflict between the general and Obama.

      But the leaked emails provide an even more dramatic picture of the intense back-channel lobbying for the Obama administration to begin a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

    • Refuse To Celebrate July 4th Militarism

      Did you know that 85 to 90 percent of war’s casualties are non-combatant civilians?

    • How Hillary Clinton Ignores Peace

      Despite neocon-instigated chaos and bloodshed across the Mideast (and now into Europe), Hillary Clinton continues to advocate more “regime change” wars with almost no fear from a marginalized anti-war movement, writes Robert Parry.

    • America Destroyed

      When I was young, America still existed. No more. Not even the blather from the 4th of July can hide the obvious fact.

      The young do not know that they have lost their country, because they are born into a time when the country is lost. To them that is normalcy.

      Besides, the young are too busy texting and describing themselves, often intimately, on social media to be aware of the fate that awaits them, lost as they are in their insouciance.

      When I was young, the police were the public’s friends. We could count on them to help us, not abuse us. False arrest was rare. Abuse of citizens even rarer. Today both are routine.

    • The Orlando Shootings: Police SWAT Team Involved in the Killings?

      The official FBI police report acknowledges shootings at 2am, it does not confirm the occurrence of killings of hostages prior to 5am. The killings started when the Police SWAT Teams stormed the Building at 5.13am. (see Timeline Below)

      The Orlando Police Department Timeline summarized in an FBI Tampa Press release not only suggests that no one was killed before 5.13am when the SWAT team broke into the building, it also confirms that the first deadly shots were fired at 5.14am and that the suspect was killed one minute later at 5.15am. This assessment was confirmed by Judge Napolitano in a Fox News report.

      [...]

      The Obama Administration, the FBI, the Media have casually dismissed the possibility of police involvement in the killings despite the statements emanating from police sources. Theater of the absurd: The official story is that the killings were ordered by the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) based in Raqqa, Northern Syria, which happens to be supported and financed by two of America’s staunchest allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in close liaison with Washington.

      The CCTV camera footage which is available to law enforcement officials will, most probably, not be made public.

    • The worst ISIS attack in days is the one the world probably cares least about

      First, they came for Istanbul. On Tuesday night, three suspected Islamic State militants launched a brazen assault on Turkey’s main airport, exploding their suicide vests after gunning down numerous passengers and airport staff. At least 45 people were killed. The world panicked; Istanbul Ataturk Airport is one of the busiest hubs in Europe and the Middle East, and it is among the most fortified. Are our airports safe, wondered American TV anchors. Could this happen here on the Fourth of July?

      Next, they came for Dhaka. Gunmen whom many have linked to the Islamic State raided a popular cafe in an upscale neighborhood in Bangladesh’s teeming capital. After a 10-hour standoff, authorities stormed the establishment; at least 20 hostages, mostly Italian and Japanese nationals, died at the militants’ hands. U.S. college students also were among the dead. The Islamic State’s reach is growing far from the Middle East, security experts fretted. Foreigners are at risk all over the Muslim world.

      Then, they attacked Baghdad. In the early hours of Sunday morning, as hundreds of Iraqis gathered during the holy month of Ramadan, a car bomb exploded in the crowded Karrada shopping district. The blast killed a staggering number of people — the latest death toll is at least 187 — including many children. The area is predominantly Shiite, making it a choice target for the Sunni extremist group.

    • Too Many Moments of Silence

      In silence we stop the world for an instant with a symbolic gesture lacking productive solutions. Courageous acts of integrity transform our intentions into new realities for ourselves and the world. When will we speak? When will we pay attention? Uncommon lives do more than stand and wait. When will we take time to really listen, learn and act upon what matters most? Do we know what that means anymore? Some say ours is a throw-away world. Do we see ourselves and others as disposable waste? Is that why we stand motionless and simply look on or look away? Perhaps we know too much about war and too little about peace.

    • Thomas Jefferson: America’s Founding Sociopath

      So, Jefferson perhaps more than any figure in U.S. history gets a pass for what he really was: a self-absorbed aristocrat who had one set of principles for himself and another for everybody else.

    • Public Eclipse of a Shining Patriot

      Such persecution continued for 88 days. The mainstream media (virtually the only media at that time) besieged Jewell’s private residence. Television networks spent $1,000 per day subletting an apartment of the tenant next door to Jewell’s so as to observe him. At any given time were an estimated 150 to 200 members of the press, some with high-intensity photo lenses, trained on every move Jewell made. The object of this maelstrom stated, “They had people over there who could read lips. They had a sound dish. They could hear everything that we said. They have a person writing down everything we said.”

      For three months this behavior was all but sanctioned by the FBI who allowed the media to be its willing handmaidens rather than act as a check on its power. That agency too kept both Richard Jewell and his mother under 24-hour surveillance as they allowed the real culprit to escape further and further away from justice. Agents lied to Jewell about seeking his participation in an anti-terror documentary to induce him to a police station where they promptly read him his Miranda rights. He correctly (and wisely) asked for an attorney. In the days which followed the FBI collected hair his samples, confiscated his truck, interrogated everyone he knew and compelled several to undergo polygraph tests.

    • President Obama’s New, Long-Promised Drone “Transparency” Is Not Nearly Enough

      The Obama administration released a summary today of the numbers of “non-combatants” it has killed outside actual war zones primarily through targeted killing strikes, as well as a new executive order aimed at creating new transparency and accountability rules for such strikes.

      Unfortunately, both the release and the new order fall far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government’s targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law.

    • Colombia’s Peace Finally at Hand

      With terrorist massacres hitting the news every few days, and financial markets reeling over the uncertain future of Europe, it’s no wonder pundits like Roger Cohen of the New York Times are warning that “the forces of disintegration are on the march” and “the foundations of the postwar world … are trembling.”

      But the news media have given only glancing coverage to one of the most positive developments of our time: the end to 52 years of armed conflict between the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

    • Drone Death Figures Show the U.S. “Simply Doesn’t Know Who it has Killed”

      Responding to civilian casualty figures released by the White House today, international human rights organization Reprieve has expressed dismay at how little the Obama Administration appears to know about those it has killed in its covert use of lethal drones outside of war zones.

    • For Obama’s Secret Wars, the Record Suggests a Far Worse Reality

      The new White House data relates only to Obama’s first seven years in office – during which it says 473 covert and clandestine airstrikes and drone attacks were carried out in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.

    • A Less-Secret Drone Campaign

      The public’s right to information about the drone campaign, and about counterterrorism policy more generally, should not depend on the grace of executive branch officials. Transparency should be required by law.

    • When will the White House tell us the whole truth about drone killings?

      The Situation Room, a commander-in-chief with rapidly graying hair, a cluster of grim-faced men and women debating the ethics and the legality of a killing. This is how the Obama administration has for years sought to portray its notorious global drone killing program: cautious, calculated and as conscientious as possible.

      The Obama administration just released numbers suggesting this depiction is closer to reality than fiction. It announced that drone strikes in countries excluding Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have resulted in between at least 64 and 116 noncombatant deaths during his administration. The president also issued an executive order effectively directing his successor to do as he is doing, and publish this data going forward.

    • Obama Administration Finally Releases Its Dubious Drone Death Toll

      In a long-anticipated gesture at transparency, the Obama administration on Friday released an internal assessment of the number of civilians killed by drone strikes in nations where the U.S. is not officially at war.

      According to the data, U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya killed between 64 and 116 civilians during the two terms of the Obama administration — a fraction of even the most conservative estimates on drone-related killings catalogued by reporters and researchers over the same period. The government tally also reported 2,372 to 2,581 combatants killed in U.S. airstrikes from January 20, 2009, to December 31, 2015.

    • American Journalist in Rebel-Held Syria Reports Barely Dodging a Missile Strike

      An American journalist and documentary filmmaker reporting from Syrian rebel-controlled territory near Aleppo says he was nearly killed in what he suspects was a drone strike last Sunday. Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American citizen originally from New York, was sitting in a car with his driver outside the village of Khan Touman, he reports, when a missile struck nearby the vehicle.

      “We heard some drones traveling overhead about half an hour before, which is not uncommon, but there were none of the screams that you normally hear before an airstrike,” Abdul Kareem told The Intercept. “We were sitting in the car, and then all of a sudden, everything went black. It felt like the earth had split open and we’d fallen into it. In reality, the explosion had sent the car into the air.”

      A video Abdul Kareem posted after the bombing on his YouTube channel showed the damage to the vehicle, as well as his camera equipment. He says this is the fourth airstrike that has nearly hit him in the past month. Given the frequency of the near-misses, Abdul Kareem believes he is being targeted. “Locals had told me that I was being targeted by someone, but I hadn’t believed it before,” he says. “I just chalked it up to being in a war zone — bad things happen — but now it seems clear that someone is targeting me.”

      Abdul Kareem is one of the last Western journalists covering the conflict in Syria from rebel-controlled territory. Earlier this year, he helped produce a series of exclusive CNN reports from Syria with journalist Clarissa Ward. His reporting has also been featured on the British outlets Channel 4 and Sky News.

    • At Their Own Peril, Americans Are Fuzzy on History

      Because many people in the United States don’t value history very much, they tend to allow politicians to be selective in their remembering of historical events – usually to manipulate public nationalism (which now passes for patriotism) for their own dubious policy goals. For example, if Americans had focused more on the fact that historically, the Vietnamese had been fighting fiercely over the centuries to throw out foreign invaders – such as the Japanese, the Chinese, and recently the French – perhaps they would have demanded that their politicians think twice, even three times, about invading that country. And if Americans had known that the historically fractious Iraq, an artificial country that had been created by the greedy colonial powers after World War I to exploit the country’s oil reserves, they might have wisely rejected George W. Bush’s attempt at military social work in one of the most unlikely places in the Middle East for democracy to flourish.

    • In Hopeless Occupation, War Becomes its Own End

      Other occupations — Belgium in the Congo, Japan in China, France in Algeria, Russia in Afghanistan, etc. — provide ample, if imperiously unheeded warnings, because they all failed. Wasn’t British colonial rule overthrown by insurgent militias using unconventional methods against superior forces here? Milt Bearden, a 30-year CIA veteran, wrote for the New York Times, “[I]n the history of the 20th century, no nation that launched a war against another sovereign nation ever won. And every nationalist-based insurgency against a foreign occupation ultimately succeeded.” Not some, not most: every one.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Sadiq Khan pledges “urgent action” to clean up London’s air quality

      All cars built before 2005 are to be charged an additional £10 per day to enter central London, Mayor Sadiq Khan announced today.

      The levy, which will be in addition to the existing congestion charge and will apply to all vehicles with pre-Euro 4 emission standards, is one of a package of measures aimed at cleaning up London’s poor quality air.

      City Hall says the new fee, which it dubs the ’T-charge’, would “be the toughest crackdown” on polluting vehicles by any major city around the world when it comes into effect next year.

    • Climate Change’s Iniquitous Transmission of Urgency: The Gulf South

      The “South,” both as a global region and within industrialized countries, is where the people most vulnerable to climate catastrophe are located. It is here that we find the highest concentration of fossil fuel sacrifice zones, home to low-wealth citizens who enjoy little to no access to political power in their respective nations. And it’s here that we find some of the more efficacious models of climate resistance and resilience that you’ve never, or barely, heard about.

  • Brexit and Finance

    • Brexit: Which Kind of Dependence Now?

      The EU in essence is a cartel intended to suppress competition among the states of Europe — which is not to say it has had no liberalizing objectives or effects, such as freedom to move and work without visas, and disincentives for corporate subsidies. (I said this is complicated.) Competition, however, is too important to be suppressed because it reveals critical information we are unlikely to acquire otherwise. Since vital knowledge is disbursed among large numbers of people, competition is, as Nobel laureate economist F. A. Hayek put it, a unique “discovery procedure.” It’s not just a matter of freedom; it’s a matter of progress, and of life and death for those in the developing world.

    • EU Accused of Trying to Push Through ‘Toxic’ Trade Deal Ahead of Brexit

      Trade campaigners in the UK have accused the European Commission of attempting to hasten attempts to push through a controversial trade deal between Canada and the EU ahead of the UK leaving the EU. The accusations come before a meeting tomorrow of the EU Commissioners in Brussels where it’s expected the implementation of the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) will be agreed upon.

    • Nigel Farage has said ‘the real me will come out’ now he’s resigned and people are terrifed by what that means

      The leader of Ukip – a political party whose primary platform had been to push the UK towards leaving the EU – seems to have stepped down.

    • Charlotte Church ‘Shocked’ At ‘Horrifying’ Abuse After Nigel Farage Tweet

      Charlotte Church has said she is “shocked” by “horrifying” abuse she has received after tweeting about Nigel Farage in the wake of his resignation as Ukip leader.

      After the Brexit campaigner stepped down saying he “wants his life back”, the singer was one of many well-known people who vented their anger.

    • David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage described as ‘rats fleeing a sinking ship’ after Brexit vote

      David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have been described as “rats fleeing a sinking ship” following their resignations in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s historic European Union referendum.

      Guy Verhofstadt, the former Prime Minister of Belgium who now heads up the alliance of Liberal and Democrats for Europe, made the comparison the day after Mr Farage resigned as the leader of the UK Independence Party, saying “he couldn’t possibly achieve more”.

    • Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are unpatriotic quitters, says Juncker

      Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, has accused Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson of being unpatriotic quitters, after the pair stood back from leadership positions after the UK’s historic vote to leave the European Union.

      “The Brexit heroes of yesterday are now the sad heroes of today,” Juncker told MEPs at the European parliament in Strasbourg.

      “Those who have contributed to the situation in the UK have resigned – Johnson, Farage and others. They are as it were retro-nationalists, they are not patriots,” he said.

    • Christoph Waltz calls Nigel Farage ‘head rat’ and condemns Brexit as ‘abysmal stupidity’

      Waltz criticised Mr Farage for not failing to see through and stand up for what he had been vigorously campaigning for throughout his political career.

    • Tax haven route won’t work for post-Brexit UK, OECD says

      The United Kingdom is unlikely to try to lure international investment by becoming a tax haven after it leaves the European Union, according to an internal memo prepared by the body responsible for the drafting international tax rules.

      The head of tax at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which advises developed nations on policy, said the UK could use its freedom from EU rules to slash corporate tax but the political price would be high.

      The idea the country may cut tax on multinational companies’ profits, which could also help them avoid tax on profits made elsewhere in the EU, has been raised by some accountants and policy experts since the country voted to leave the bloc.

      “The negative impact of the Brexit on UK competitiveness may push the UK to be even more aggressive in its tax offer,” the OECD’s head of tax, Pascal Saint-Amans said in the memo, details of which were seen by Reuters.

    • Business pessimism ‘doubles after Brexit vote’

      UK business confidence has fallen sharply in the aftermath of the vote to leave the EU, research suggests.

      The share of businesses that reported feeling pessimistic about the UK economy doubled in the week after the Brexit vote.

      The figure jumped from 25% the week before the referendum to 49%, according to YouGov and the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

      Falling confidence can lead companies to pull back on investment and hiring.

      Scott Corfe, director at the CEBR, said that the figures indicated a “significant shock reaction” among UK businesses following the vote last month.

    • Disaster capitalism: the shocking doctrine Tories can’t wait to unleash

      One of the most startling aspects of the Brexit debate is the rapidity with which the Conservatives have set it behind them. Within hours of the result David Cameron was on the steps of 10 Downing Street, describing this slim majority as “a very clear result” and proposing irrevocable steps to set it in motion. Within days his chancellor, who had threatened a punishment budget only weeks earlier, was falling into line.

      The referendum was manifestly won on the basis of misinformation, and puts the UK in an extremely dangerous situation, and there are several plausible scenarios for avoiding it. Yet among the candidates to succeed Cameron, even former remainers are now voting leave. “Brexit means Brexit,” Theresa May stated on joining the race on Thursday. “There must be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to rejoin it through the back door, and no second referendum.” All the bloodshed in the Tory leadership contest masks an underlying consensus: they are all determined to block every exit from Brexit.

    • Does Article 50 require an Act of Parliament? A brief thought-experiment.

      Here is a question: would a decision by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union require an Act of Parliament?

      On this question, one week or so after the referendum vote for Leave, it may be fairly said that “views differ”. Some constitutional lawyers say one thing, others say the other.

    • The Mishcon de Reya legal challenge on Article 50 – some thoughts
    • Post Brexit, trade unions must fight to protect NHS workers including those from the EU

      Trade unions must take immediate action to reassure NHS and social care staff from the EU that they are welcome and needed in the UK – and to protect the rights of all workers.

    • Sanders Organizing Grassroots Push Against TPP for DNC Platform Meeting

      Environmentalists oppose it. So do labor unions, medical professionals, and major religious groups, as well as every leading presidential candidate.

      So why hasn’t the Democratic Party gone on record opposing the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)?

      That’s what Bernie Sanders wants to know.

    • New Jersey’s Student Loan Program is ‘State-Sanctioned Loan-Sharking’

      Amid a haze of grief after her son’s murder last year, Marcia DeOliveira-Longinetti faced an endless list of tasks — helping the police access Kevin’s phone and email, canceling his subscriptions, credit cards and bank accounts, and arranging his burial in New Jersey.

      And then there were his college loans.

      When DeOliveira-Longinetti called about his federal loans, an administrator offered condolences and assured her the remaining balance would be written off.

    • Austerity and ‘Benefits Street’ in Stockton-on-Tees

      The myths on which Benefits Street was based – namely the myth of so-called “workless communities” – are demonstrably false; however the furore it has generated demonstrates that the politics of class and representation still matter.

    • Obituary: British Austerity (2010-2016)

      Many, even on the Conservative backbenches, now question its utility. Growth in the UK stalled throughout the period, falling markedly below competitors in the global markets. The UK was positioned as the foremost adherent of this bastardised Keynesian policy which saw its own Government cannibalise its own functions in a maudlin effort to lose weight. Over the past six years spending fell 10% – similar crashes have been seen previously only in times of war or famine.

    • A Sad And Shameful Day For Puerto Rico

      “You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel infamously said when he was President Obama’s White House chief of staff. So it is with the legislation that President Obama signs into law Thursday that offers Puerto Rico a process for managing its crushing debt.

      This bill is being heralded as a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation to solve a serious crisis, in this case the default by Puerto Rico on more than $1 billion of general obligation bonds on July 1. The island’s government has already missed payment deadlines on other bonds.

    • STRIKE! Nearly 1,000 Trump Taj Mahal Workers Walk-Off Job Ahead of Atlantic City’s Biggest Weekend of the Year

      Many workers at the Trump Taj Mahal, including those with years on the job, have seen only $.80 in total raises over the last twelve years. The cost of living in Atlantic City has risen over 25 percent in the same time period. Housekeepers, servers and other casino workers at the Taj Mahal earn an average of less than $12/ hour.

    • Them, Freeloaders.

      Comfort zones are available for us to shatter them, both physically and mentally.

    • Robert Reich’s Impossible Quest: to Save Capitalism for the Many

      Robert Reich’s latest book, Saving Capitalism For the Many, Not the Few, graphically details how current U.S. capitalism operates in stark contrast to the post-World War II period of the 50s, 60s and 70s. For Reich, the earlier period represented almost an ideal state: “the rules of the game were basically fair.” The rules defined a system in which “widely shared prosperity generates more inclusive political institutions, which in turn organize the market in ways that further broaden the gains from growth and expand opportunity.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Major Political News Outlets Offer Interviews for Sale at DNC and RNC Conventions

      For high-rolling special interests looking to make an impression at the presidential conventions next month, one option is to pay a lot of money to a media outlet. Lobbyists for the oil industry, for instance, are picking up the tab for leading Beltway publications to host energy policy discussions at the convention, including the Atlantic and Politico.

      And for the right price, some political media outlets are even offering special interviews with editorial staffers and promotional coverage at the convention.

    • The Busted Theory of ‘Broken Windows’ Still Has Media Defenders

      Broken Windows was always about constant police contact with vulnerable groups of people. A buffet of interactions, the theory was in some ways just a crude, physical form of surveillance. The fact that it never worked was secondary to what did work: creating a politically accepted justification for crackdowns on those populations. After all, the theory implied that the squeegee man, the subway dancers, the “loosie” sellers and the homeless were responsible for the murder rate. Broken Windows was not a failure but a hugely successful communications strategy that promoted the idea that the poor were dangerous and that the cops should be unshackled to deal with them.

      It’s time to bury that idea and reverse that strategy by listening to the stories of those who’ve been dealing with the fallout of decades of a law and order onslaught.

    • Back to the Future

      The priority now of the political “elite” is to ensure voters never again get the chance to make a choice the political class do not want. Jeremy Corbyn is the thing the political class want least.

      Do you remember when 184 Labour MPs refused to vote against the Tory benefit cuts that ruined lives and caused suicides? They did so on the grounds that their focus groups showed the public wanted benefit cuts, and so it would be wrong to oppose the Tory Welfare Reform and Work Bill.

    • Trump Taps Consultant Accused of Defrauding PAC to Lead Colorado Campaign

      Patrick Davis has denied allegations that he inappropriately steered hundreds of thousands of dollars raised by a conservative PAC to organizations linked to himself and his friends. Now he’ll lead Trump’s campaign in a key swing state.

    • On the Lost Art of Intellectual Honesty

      Politics has become a branch of PR. It is just about selling. The party, candidate or policy you are selling must be portrayed as the absolute epitome of excellence, with no flaws whatsoever. Political discourse has therefore become juvenile. It is about expensively dressed, well groomed salesmen with perfect teeth. Thought is positively frowned upon.

    • Hillary’s Mode of Governance: Boozy X Chromosomes Making Peace

      The NYT has an article describing how a bunch of apparently moronic Hillary aides believe they will govern when she becomes President. I say moronic not just because — in a week when Hillary’s spouse scored an enormous own goal by chatting up Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmack in Phoenix — numerous Hillary aides said Hillary might keep Lynch as AG.

    • Theresa May, Your New Islamophobic Prime Minister?

      A quick Google news search for “Theresa May and “Abu Qatada” reveals over 2,000 mainstream media articles in the last three days combining both. This is hardly surprising, as in her speech announcing her candidacy for Tory leader (and thus PM) May dwelt on her deportation of Abu Qatada as evidence she was qualified for the job. The May supporting Tory MP who was put up for Sky to interview immediately afterwards managed to say “Abu Qatada” three times in a two minute interview.

      Abu Qatada should indeed be a powerful symbol – but not the symbol he has become, a hate figure. He should rather be a symbol of the hate-filled and intolerant place Britain has become, and the dreadful injustice meted out to individuals both by the state and the media.

    • How Unpatriotic Is Donald Trump?

      There is little in Trump’s rambling off-the-cuff speeches and media interviews, or in his reactionary stream-of-conscious tweets, that demonstrate his understanding of patriotism. Trump is a snake oil salesman, and he is arguably in the midst of his greatest pitch to date. Smart consumers should do their research to find out the truth about the “product” they are being sold by Mr. Trump.

    • Journalistic Standards at the Guardian

      Note Ms Hinshliff’s use of inverted commas there, indicating that “media conspiracy” was the actual phrase used. Except it wasn’t. Wadsworth never used the phrase, or indeed either of the words “media” and “conspiracy” separately. What he actually said is widely available, as is video footage of him saying it. I published it yesterday, along with what I hope was a very rational consideration of what the incident did and did not signify .

    • Thoughts on the Media and the EU Referendum

      a) I did not accept the argument that the BBC was biased in the referendum campaign towards Brexit. Indeed especially in the last few days, I thought it was biased towards Remain.
      b) However the BBC had been guilty of helping promote Brexit by giving Farage massive and disproportionate publicity for many years, from when UKIP was a negligible electoral force. They were always willing to give right wings views publicity but not left wing views.
      c) The right wing print media were indeed a major problem distorting democracy. However the solution to this should be to break up media ownership, not impose government control of content.
      d) Project Fear had not succeeded in the Scottish referendum. It had seen a 35 point unionist lead cut to a 10 point lead, making it one of the most disastrous campaigns in history. The question of why Project Fear “succeeded” in Scotland but not the EU referendum was therefore a false one.
      e) Media coverage focused on the despised political class rather than the facts.

    • Hillary Cheated

      Who are you going to believe: us, or your lying eyes? That’s the good word from Democratic Party powers that be and their transcribers in the corporate media, in response to the “allegations” by Bernie Sanders supporters that the nomination was stolen by Hillary Clinton.

    • Wow. Americans Really, Really Don’t Like Trump or Clinton

      Via a new Gallup poll, more evidence comes Friday that the nation’s electorate really doesn’t like this year’s leading presidential candidates.

      Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has the dubious distinction of being the most unfavorably viewed of any candidate over the past seven decades—displacing 1964 Republican candidate Barry Goldwater from the bottom spot.

      The poll offers no smug moment for Clinton: her scores put her among the bottom four presidential candidates, with scores barely better than those of Goldwater.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Court battle looming over SABC censorship

      The Helen Suzman Foundation has launched an urgent court bid to stop the SABC from implementing its decision to censor reporting of protests.

      The application is against the SABC, its board, chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng and communications minister Faith Muthambi, the foundation said in a statement on Monday.

      It would be heard in the high court in Pretoria. The provisional court date is 29 July, but it could be moved forward pending the availability of lawyers.

      “It is impermissible for the SABC to distort or refuse to cover important news, as a result of political partisanship or otherwise.

    • Are ad-blockers killing the media?

      In the summer 2016 issue of Index on Censorship magazine, Spiegel Online’s managing editor Matthias Streitz and Privacy International technologist Richard Tynan go head to head to debate the rise of ad-blockers.

      Many publishers have voiced concern that this software – which allows users to block online adverts from their screens – is damaging their revenue streams.

      “If you consume our content, you must allow us some means of monetisation,” said Streitz. While Tynan argued that online adverts pose a security risk and ad-blockers allow users to “retain control over who the communicate with, and [minimise] the amount of data companies collect on users’ online patterns”.

    • SABC facing court challenge on censorship

      The Helen Suzman Foundation has launched an urgent application asking the High Court in Pretoria to suspend the implementation of the policy until the court has decided whether it is lawful, or pending the finalisation of an inquiry by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) into the matter.

    • Icasa to rule on SABC’s ban on protest reports

      The SABC is likely to know on 7 July whether its contentious decision to ban coverage of violent protests is valid.

    • Sanity, Shami Chakrabarti and the Ruth Smeeth Affair

      On the Chakrabarti report itself, it seems to me a model of good sense. It is interesting to note that her recommendations on what areas (including holocaust denial and the Nazis) and what language to ban from discourse, end up very closely mirroring the same rules we have adopted over the years on this blog, effectively to bar anti-Semitism.

    • Censorship reform: a concession too far?
    • Of censorship and cyberbullying

      The recent clash between Brikkuni vocalist Mario Vella and OPM aide and blogger Glenn Bedingfield has once again exposed the limitations of freedom of speech.

      Vella is widely known to be outspoken and vitriolic in his public commentary. On this occasion, however, many felt that his comment about Michelle Muscat (which was both obscene and highly personal) had ‘crossed the line’.

    • Israel Says Facebook Has ‘Simply Become A Monster’

      Israeli Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said Facebook was responsible for a spate of Palestinian attacks on the country’s citizens.

      “Facebook today sabotages, it should be known, sabotages the work of the Israeli police, because when the Israeli police approach them, and it is regarding a resident of Judea and Samaria, Facebook does not cooperate” with the West Bank, Erdan said in a television interview Saturday, Reuters reported.

    • A contemporary twist to Khajuraho: A Bengaluru artist redefines censorship through art

      Applying censorship to illustrate censorship itself is what Akshita’s art intends to achieve.

    • Sony Locks Up The PSN Account Of A Man Named ‘Jihad’ Because You’ll Never Guess Why

      Terrorism is scary. That’s the entire point of terrorism, of course. The relatively meager bodycounts of acts of terror — compared with, say, most minor individual battles in either of the World Wars — are actually attempting to create some kind of political or social change amongst the victims. And guess what? It totally works! After all, western nations, the bastions of freedom and puppy dogs that we are, have reacted to what is ultimately a minor threat by reporting toddlers to the authorities, freezing the bank accounts of people with dogs whose names are a couple of letters off of the scary terror-enemy, and refusing online services to people with scary (read: Islamic) sounding names. Freedom, you see, isn’t free, and we have to pay for it with freedom.

      And the real lesson that should be learned from pretty much the entire early part of this century is that once you start the fear-ball rolling when it comes to terrorism, it gets really hard to prevent it from trampling a great deal of innocent people in some of the dumbest ways possible.

    • The SABC and censorship on Al Jazeera

      South Africa is embroiled in a national debate over media censorship. This, after the SABC made the editorial decision to stop airing video of violent protests. The SABC has maintained the move was to protect journalists from becoming victims while covering such events.

    • The SABC and media censorship
    • Like North Korea and China, SA is a huge fan of censorship, DA says
    • ‘SA unashamedly parades love for censorship on international stage’: DA

      What does South Africa have in common with China‚ Russia and North Korea? “Poor human rights track records” and they are the “biggest practitioners of censorship”‚ the Democratic Alliance’s Phumzile van Damme suggested on Tuesday.

    • ANCYL backs SABC management amid anti-censorship debacle
    • SABC facing court challenge on censorship
    • ANC is also a victim of SABC censorship: Mantashe
  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • FBI Still Not Counting How Often Encryption Hinders Their Investigations

      The annual wiretap report is out. The headline number is that wiretaps have gone up, and judges still don’t deny any wiretap applications.

    • Federal Court: The Fourth Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer

      In a dangerously flawed decision unsealed today, a federal district court in Virginia ruled that a criminal defendant has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in his personal computer, located inside his home. According to the court, the federal government does not need a warrant to hack into an individual’s computer.

      This decision is the latest in, and perhaps the culmination of, a series of troubling decisions in prosecutions stemming from the FBI’s investigation of Playpen—a Tor hidden services site hosting child pornography. The FBI seized the server hosting the site in 2014, but continued to operate the site and serve malware to thousands of visitors that logged into the site. The malware located certain identifying information (e.g., MAC address, operating system, the computer’s “Host name”; etc) on the attacked computer and sent that information back to the FBI. There are hundreds of prosecutions, pending across the country, stemming from this investigation.

    • Your Favorite Website Might Be Discriminating Against You

      And because of a little-known law, it can be illegal to test for discrimination online.

      It can be pretty convenient when Facebook processes the gargantuan amount of personal data it has on you to show you ads for the precise lemon curd recipe you never knew you were craving.

      But what are the harms associated with this kind of targeting? It’s hard to answer that question — because an overbroad law actually prohibits the kind of studies best positioned to figure it out.

      The implications go far beyond dessert — studies have shown that people are being treated differently online based on their race, actual or perceived. Websites have been found to use demographic data to raise or lower prices, show different advertisements, or steer people to different content.

    • Security Tips Every Signal User Should Know

      There are dozens of messaging apps for iPhone and Android, but one in particular continues to stand out in the crowd. Signal is easy to use, works on both iOS and Android, and encrypts communications so that only the sender and recipient can decipher them.

    • Making Sense of a Troubling Decision: New Court Ruling Underscores the Need to Stop the Changes to Rule 41

      We wrote about a case last week that was deeply disturbing: a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia held that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a personal computer located inside their home. In this court’s view, the FBI is free to hack into networked devices (aka, pretty much everything) without a warrant.

      Fortunately, this is only the opinion of a single district court judge, so it’s not controlling precedent throughout the country. But the decision makes one thing clear: we need to stop the changes to Rule 41, amendments that will make it easier for the government to get a warrant to remotely search computers.

      First, the changes to Rule 41 are going to result in a lot more government hacking. And, as the decision in the Eastern District of Virginia illustrates, that dramatic increase in government hacking is going to occur in a legal environment where judges are struggling to understand the technology and the implications their decisions will have for people’s security and privacy. If law enforcement is going to be allowed to stockpile and exploit vulnerabilities to investigate domestic crimes, there need to be stringent safeguards on the circumstances when they can do this. And it’s up to Congress, not the courts, to create those rules. If Congress allows the changes to Rule 41 to go through, they’re effectively saying: “Courts, you figure it out.” As the recent court decision shows, that is a perilous path.

      Second, the changes to Rule 41 will encourage forum shopping. As we wrote before, under the changes, law enforcement will be able to apply for warrants before judges or in districts with the most flexible view on the Fourth Amendment and its requirements. And, if last week’s decision is any indication, the FBI has a very friendly venue conveniently located near its headquarters—the Eastern District of Virginia. If the FBI is looking to obtain an expansive warrant under the new Rule 41 to search a computer whose location is hidden by “technological means,” it won’t have to travel far.

    • FBI Cameras in Seattle Need to Be Regulated by the Public — Not Secretly Imposed on the Public

      While you’re strolling the Seattle streets this summer, take a moment to look up. Thanks to the FBI, there’s a new bird in town atop the maples and the power lines: surveillance cameras housed in birdhouse-like “concealments” attached to the city’s utility poles.

      The new species was first spotted in the wild last July, and a state public-records request by KIRO 7 yielded limited information from Seattle City Light in November. But most Seattleites likely weren’t aware of their presence in the city until recently, when the U.S. Department of Justice sued the city and Seattle City Light to prevent the release of additional information about the cameras, including their locations. A federal judge promptly blocked the release of the location information, at least for now.

      Whether that decision is correct as a legal matter is complicated. The government claims, “Every FBI pole camera is associated with a particular subject or particular investigation,” and that revealing a camera’s location would have a “devastating impact” on ongoing police work.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Disabled cancer patient slammed to the ground by TSA guards, lawsuit claims

      A disabled teenage cancer patient was injured during a violent arrest by security agents at Memphis international airport, her family has alleged in a lawsuit filed against the Transport Security Administration.

      Hannah Cohen, 18, at the time of her arrest on 30 June 2015, and her mother had been on their way home to Chattanooga from St Jude’s hospital in Memphis, where Hannah underwent her final treatment for a brain tumor.

      Hannah and her mother, Shirley, told the Guardian that the pair had made the trip hundreds of times, and knew the airport security routine well. Shirley would usually go through the scanner first and wait for Hannah on the other side, since Hannah’s tumor, and numerous surgeries and treatments since she was two years old, had left her easily confused and frightened in unfamiliar situations.

      According to the complaint, the warning alarm was triggered when Hannah passed through the body scanners. Hannah attributed the alarm to her shirt’s design.

    • Racial Bias and Arrest Tech

      Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court took away a little more of your right to be free from unlawful police searches. In a 5-3 decision in Utah v. Strieff, the Court held that if the police illegally stop and search you, they can use against you any evidence they find, as long as they determine—after they’ve stopped you—that you’re one of the 7.8 million Americans with an outstanding arrest warrant.

      Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a fiery and spot-on dissent that forcefully demonstrates the troubling links between racial discrimination, police stops of pedestrians and motorists, arrest warrant databases, and out-of-control police surveillance technologies.

    • I’m a Former Marine Who Was on the No Fly List for 4 Years — and I Still Don’t Know Why

      “You’re on the no-fly list,” the woman at the kiosk told me. It was a Wednesday, six years ago, at Midway Airport in Chicago. I was traveling to Spokane, Washington, for my job as a dog trainer.

      I had absolutely no idea how I could have ended up on the No Fly List. I waited for Ashton Kutcher to come out and tell me I was being Punk’d. No luck.

      At least 30 federal agents swarmed me. They didn’t handcuff or manhandle me, but the sheer number of them was intimidating. I was in a state of shock, looking at them confusedly. Their expressions turned puzzled, too, when they noticed my Marine Corps shirt.”You’re on the no-fly list,” the woman at the kiosk told me. It was a Wednesday, six years ago, at Midway Airport in Chicago. I was traveling to Spokane, Washington, for my job as a dog trainer.

      I had absolutely no idea how I could have ended up on the No Fly List. I waited for Ashton Kutcher to come out and tell me I was being Punk’d. No luck.

      At least 30 federal agents swarmed me. They didn’t handcuff or manhandle me, but the sheer number of them was intimidating. I was in a state of shock, looking at them confusedly. Their expressions turned puzzled, too, when they noticed my Marine Corps shirt.

    • ‘Vatileaks’ trio including mother of newborn facing jail terms

      Vatican prosecutors have demanded prison sentences for a senior clergyman, a communications consultant and a journalist accused of involvement in “Vatileaks” – the leak of sensitive Holy See documents.

      The prosecution called for three years and nine months’ prison for communications consultant Francesca Chaouqui, who had been involved in a review of Vatican finances and is accused of both “inspiring” and of ultimate responsibility for the leaks.

    • Directive on combating terrorism: LIBE Committee must oppose dangerous provisions!

      This evening the committee of the European Parliament on Civil Liberties (LIBE) will vote on the draft directive on combating terrorism. La Quadrature du Net already warned about the dangerous provisions of this text and urges once more MEPs to oppose this text.

    • America’s Female Prison Population Has Grown 800% and Nobody Is Talking About It

      Holly Harris may wear cowboy boots to work, but the Kentucky mom and Executive Director for the US Justice Action Network (USJAN) is far from your average southerner.

      This past Saturday, June 25th, Harris talked about her work to a group of journalists and bloggers who traveled to Washington D.C. from different corners of the country to hear from leaders of the criminal justice reform movement. Harris was the first speaker at FreedomWorks’ #JusticeForAll event, and as the leader of USJAN, she set the tone for what turned out to be a fascinating conference.

    • Time Served for a Non-Violent Drug Offense? Sorry, You Still Can’t Vote if You Live in Iowa

      When Americans go to the polls in November to elect the next president, more than 5.8 million of them will be unable to vote due to a past felony conviction.

      Many of them, like our client Kelli Griffin, were convicted of a non-violent drug offense and have since recovered from drug dependence, served their sentence, and returned to their communities. But because Kelli lives in Iowa — one of three states, along with Florida and Kentucky, that disenfranchise people for life after a felony conviction — she remains a second-class citizen denied full participation in the democratic process.

    • Donald Trump, Torturer in Chief

      Among the many controversial statements made by Mr. Donald Trump, his recent one on the use of waterboarding tops them all. Speaking at a rally in Ohio, when asked if the U.S. should use waterboarding to extract confessions from prisoners, Trump said, “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.” It was an irresponsible statement by a man who knows no moderation on serious issues.

      Waterboarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of a person, causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning. It causes not only extreme pain, but also damages the lungs and the brain due to oxygen deprivation. In addition, it may cause lasting psychological damage and death. It is among the cruelest forms of torture.

    • Because the Prosecutors Withheld Evidence, This Man Has Spent 30 Years on Death Row

      The prosecution denied its misconduct for decades. Then the Supreme Court gave Terry Williams a chance for a new trial.

      The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office intentionally withheld critical evidence in 1986 when it prosecuted 18-year-old Terry Williams and won a death sentence. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Pennsylvania courts, putting the prosecution’s wrongdoing on display.

      At Terry’s trial, the prosecution told the jury a story: at age 18, Terry had killed 56-year-old Amos Norwood for “no other reason” than to rob him. The prosecutors described Norwood as a kind man who volunteered at church. But they knew much more about Norwood than they let on. When they withheld that information from the defense and from the jury, they violated the law.

      Terry had grown up in a terror-filled household, the victim of beatings by his mother and stepfather. He was six when an 11-year-old neighbor, someone he considered to be like a big brother, first lured him with promises of food — something that he often didn’t have at home — and then sexually assaulted him. Terry was repeatedly sexually abused and exploited by adults, including one of his middle school teachers.

    • Computer Crime Bill Stalls in Rhode Island

      Rhode Island legislators recently decided not to advance a bill that would have made that state’s bad “anti-hacking” law even worse. This is good news. But the struggle continues against other vague and overbroad computer crime laws.

      As EFF previously explained, this Rhode Island bill was a threat to many different kinds of innocent, common, and beneficial uses of computers. It would have further empowered prosecutors to bring charges against computer users who violate a corporate terms-of-service agreement to access confidential information, as well as whistle blowers and independent computer security researchers. It would have imposed a minimum of five years of incarceration for a first offense, even where there was no intent to obtain financial gain. It allowed for the stacking of charges, enabling prosecutors to seek even lengthier prison terms. And there was no showing that existing laws are insufficient to protect confidential computer data.

    • Independence Day Delusions

      The concept of “freedom” is at the very least ambiguous, and, at the most, destructive to those being deceived by false patriotism. The people who benefit from the uncontrolled pursuit of money push the concept of individual freedom on the rest of us, making us feel unpatriotic if we disagree. “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself,” once blathered Milton Friedman, whose economic theories made America the most unequal developed nation.

    • July 4: What the Flag Means to Me on My Birthday

      It wasn’t until many years later, while reading an issue of the armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes in Vietnam that I began thinking and feeling differently about the flag and what it represents. There was a story about an arrest and jailing for flag burning somewhere in the United States. I had recently experienced the horror of seeing numerous bodies of young women and children that were burned alive in a small Delta village devastated by napalm. Since the pilots had “successfully” hit their targets, they were feeling good and had received glowing reports that would bode well in their military record for promotions. I wondered why it was okay to burn innocent human beings 9,000 miles from my home town, but not okay to burn a piece of cloth that was symbolic of the US policies intentionally burning villagers to death with napalm. Something was terribly wrong with the Cold War rhetoric of fighting communism that made me question what our nation stood for. There was a grand lie, an American myth that was being fraudulently preserved under the cloak of our flag.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • How Do We Achieve an Open, Secure, Trustworthy, and Inclusive Internet?

      Today at the OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Digital Economy in Mexico, the Global Commission on Internet Governance released its final report, One Internet. Despite its important-sounding name, the Commission is not an official body, but a think tank convened in 2014 by the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and Chatham House, composed of a diverse panel of 29 invited experts from industry, government, academia, and civil society (including EFF Pioneer Award recipient Anriette Esterhuysen).

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Aspartame is back–and is Pepsi playing by a new branding playbook?

        Nevertheless, it turns out that trademark strategy may sometimes be better viewed as the use of generic (or nearly so) terms without any apparent interest in whether or not they meet the requirements for registration. Case in point is the announcement last week by PepsiCo, as reported here, regarding changes to its soft drink line-up and the names assigned to these products. At the heart of these moves by Pepsi is the presence or absence of the artificial sweetener, aspartame. While used for a long time, aspartame has been challenged on various health grounds, so much so that in 2015 Pepsi removed it from the formulation for its Diet Pepsi soft drink product, in favor of sucralose. Pepsi thereby hoped to capture customers who are wary for health reasons of products containing aspartame. The problem is that the removal of aspartame from the Diet Pepsi soft drink did not blunt the continuing decline in sales. The solution—bring back the diet version with the aspartame ingredient.

    • Copyrights

      • [Older] California Legislature Drops Proposal to Copyright All Government Works

        You spoke, and the California Legislature listened. We’re happy to report that A.B. 2880 was amended in the State Senate to remove the dangerous sections that EFF and over 25 other organizations opposed. Your messages to the Legislature were vital to this effort.

        The prior version of A.B. 2880 that was passed by the State Assembly would have given state government agencies vast new power to assert copyrights and trademarks over government-created work. It also would have added a broad new exemption to the California Public Records Act, the state’s version of FOIA.

      • Pirating TV-Shows and a Movie Costs Finnish Man Over €32,000

        The so-called ‘copyright-trolling’ piracy lawsuits in Finland have claimed their first victim in court. Despite operating an open Wi-Fi network, a man has been ordered to pay more than 32,000 euros in damages and costs for sharing ten episodes of the TV show “Black Sails” and a movie.

      • With Canada’s Entry, Treaty for the Blind Will Come Into Force

        A groundbreaking international agreement to address the “book famine” for blind and print-disabled people is now set to go into force after passing another key milestone today. The agreement requires countries to allow the reproduction and distribution of accessible ebooks by limiting the scope of copyright restrictions.

        The Marrakesh agreement takes aim at the global shortage of ebooks available in suitable formats for the print disabled, which in some regions is as low as 1% of published books. At the time of its completion, only 57 of the 184 member countries of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) had copyright exceptions for this purpose, and inconsistencies between them made sharing books between countries nearly impossible.

      • EFF to Copyright Office: No New Barriers to DMCA Safe Harbors

        As the debate over the future of the DMCA safe harbors heats up, the US Copyright Office is proposing a plan that could undermine those safe harbors much sooner.

        One of the myriad conditions of DMCA safe harbor protection from copyright liability (protection on which thousands of intermediaries rely to survive) is to register an agent to receive DMCA takedown notices. Last month the Copyright Office announced that it would finally be implementing a new, much cheaper and streamlined electronic registration process.

      • Chilean Proposal for Unwaivable Payments to Authors Creeps Onward to Colombia

        EFF has observed an alarming trend: when certain parties face challenges in attempting to monetize their contributions to copyrighted works, lawmakers often attempt to address it by handing out new copyright-like veto powers. We’ve dubbed this trend “copyright creep”, and it’s running rampant all over the world.

07.04.16

Links 4/7/2016: VectorLinux 7.2 Beta, Linux 4.7 RC 6

Posted in News Roundup at 2:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why PayPal bets on open-source

    The old way was to spend a lot of money on limited software and hardware. The new way, as PayPal’s Bill Scott, VP of next gen commerce found, is to scale out with lots of low-cost hardware and software. Open-source enables this, and to marvelously good effect.

    Scott, a firm believer in lean engineering, stands by the fact that it’s the secret sauce that fosters innovation and efficacy.

    Lean engineering, simply put, is becoming a part of the experimentation and learning cycle. The idea is to have rapid iteration and get feedback from customers quickly.

  • Distributed, Open Source Chat with Vector and Matrix

    When it comes to chat, you have many choices. Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, Whatsapp, Kik, and Slack are all viable options. However, all of these choices are proprietary, and require you to use servers that you can’t run yourself. They’re highly centralized, closed source tools.

    In the open source world, IRC has been the go to solution for chat for many years, and for good reason. Anyone can run a server, there’s many clients, and it’s built on open standards. But IRC comes from a pre-mobile world, and relies on clients to maintain persistent connections to the server. It’s not the best experience on a phone.

  • The Growth of the Linux and Open Source Channel since 1989

    The Linux kernel was born twenty-five years ago this summer. Since that time a thriving partner ecosystem has arisen around open source platforms built on Linux, GNU and other free and open source software products. Here’s a look at milestones in the evolution of the Linux channel and partner ecosystem.

  • Living, in Limbo [Ed: Pieter Hintjens, famous Free software developer, with terminal cancer]

    “Is he getting better, or is he dying?” asked my nephew of me. How to explain? The hospital sent me home three months ago with boxes of pain killers, oxygen, a medical bed, and home care. Palliative care: aim for quality of life, not return to normal. And yet here I am, not on oxygen, not taking the pain killers, and seeing medical staff only when it’s time for my biweekly chemotherapy.

    I’m clearly not dying yet. And still, slowly losing weight and muscle. A simple walk leaves me tired and needing to sit. I wake up, make an early morning cup of chicory/coffee, drink it, then lie down again, hit by the simple effort of standing up.

    We did a CAT scan a few weeks ago. Inconclusive. Things don’t seem worse. Yet the numerous little blobs of cancer are still there in my lungs, patient. Another scan in a month, and we’ll have a better idea.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

  • CMS

    • Arastta: Community Driven & Open Source eCommerce

      Arastta eCommerce is an open source project which is driven by its community. For a relatively new startup project Arastta has a great community sharing ideas, translating into different world languages, reporting issues and bugs, contributing the source code and helping to plan the future of the project.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Peerplays creates open-source profit sharing module

      Blockchain-based online gaming and wagering platform Peerplays, has created an open-source fee sharing module that will enable direct profit distribution to token holders by any Graphene-based blockchain platform.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Wevolver Open Source 3D Printable Robots And More (video)

        …if you are interested in creating your own 3D printed robots using a little Arduino programming, open source coding or making in general. You might be interested in some new 3D printed open source robot projects which have been published to the Revolver website for all skill levels.

Leftovers

07.03.16

Links 3/7/2016: GNU/Linux Desktop Market Share Hype, Fedora 24 Release Party in Panama

Posted in News Roundup at 1:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Implementing NATO’s standards (STANAG)

    I recently joined Linnovate, and while working on one of the open source projects the company produces, we needed to process video content according to NATO’s standard agreement (STANAG) 4609: NATO Digital Motion Imagery Standard.

  • Cygwin library now available under GNU Lesser General Public License

    Today, we’re pleased to announce that the next release of the Cygwin library (version 2.5.2) will be available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3. The Cygwin library is the core of the Cygwin project, which includes a distribution of the popular GNU tools and other open source tools designed to enable easier porting of Linux applications to Microsoft Windows. This change to the Cygwin library, previously available under the GNU General Public License, opens up a variety of commercial opportunities for companies to use the newest Cygwin versions in their products.

  • Universal rendering with SwiftShader, now open source
  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • This Week In Servo 69

        In the last week, we landed 84PRs in the Servo organization’s repositories.

        One of our contributors, Florian Duraffourg, landed a patch recently that switched our public domain list matching source and algorithm, resulting in a huge speedup in page load times (~25%!). Shing Lyu tracked down and measured this unexpectedly-large gain through a new automated page load testing performance infrastructure that he has been testing. It compares Servo daily builds against Firefox for page load on a subset of the Alexa Top 1000 sites. Check it out!

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • 4 Reasons an Open Source CMS Should Be Appealing to IT

      With an open source CMS, there’s a massive development community, which alleviates the constraint of a limited pool of technical resources. That coupled with full access to the code allows organizations to drive their technical needs based on their business requirements — not the other way around. A site built for the business user reduces the need for technical support in the first place, further enabling non-technical users to take control of their online presence.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • What’s up with nano?

      As expected, the recent state of events where nano transitioned maintainership to Benno Schulenberg, and the project left GNU, has a lot of people speculating about what happened, and more disappointingly, making some pretty nasty assertions about motivations. I want to try and give a brief update on them to hopefully calm things down.

    • User freedom in the age of computer-generated software

      Many of us share a vision for the way software, free or otherwise, is developed: software is written by a programmer as “source code” and transformed through some mechanisms into “object code.” As free software activists, we are used to thinking about our legal, development, and community processes and tooling in terms of this workflow. But what happens when software which used to be written manually by humans is developed generatively through other software? How does this affect software and user freedom?

    • Unifont 9.0.01 Released

      This release includes all Basic Multilingual Plane and Supplemental Multilingual Plane scripts that are easily drawn in a 16-by-16 pixel grid up through all new Unicode 9.0 scripts. This release also incorporates changes to scripts that The Unicode Consortium altered. See the ChangeLog file for full details.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • The Macintosh is at a new crossroads

      Late last week, Apple announced it has discontinued its Thunderbolt Display, a once-groundbreaking 27-inch monitor that functioned not only as a monitor but as a hub for MacBooks and other Macs attached to it.

      The Thunderbolt Display, which hadn’t been updated since 2011, epitomized Apple’s Mac strategy at the time of providing high-capacity, high-speed peripheral connections to set Macs apart from the pokey peripheral buses then common on PCs. The Mac was for power users; the PC was not.

    • Inside Japan’s Future Exascale ARM Supercomputer

      The rumors that supercomputer maker Fujitsu would be dropping the Sparc architecture and moving to ARM cores for its next generation of supercomputers have been going around since last fall, and at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany this week, officials at the server maker and RIKEN, the research and development arm of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) that currently houses the mighty K supercomputer, confirmed that this is indeed true.

    • Fujitsu turns to ARM for Post-K supercomputer

      Alternative chip architectures are taking some thunder away from Intel’s x86 at this week’s International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt.

      China’s TaihuLight, which was ranked the world’s fastest supercomputer, has a homegrown chip. And the ARM architecture, which dominates mobile-device chips, will appear in Fujitsu’s next flagship supercomputer.

    • Intel: ARM Servers To Renew Their Attack

      Up until now, server chips based on ARM Holdings’ (NASDAQ:ARMH) architecture have had little impact on the data center market, and Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) Data Center Group has continued to grow. ARM server vendors are preparing the next wave of server chips based on 14-16 nm FinFET technology. These will be much more competitive and energy efficient and could start to erode Intel’s share of the data center by 2017.

  • Security

    • Progress Towards 100% HTTPS, June 2016
    • Exploiting Recursion in the Linux Kernel
    • Home Computers Connected to the Internet Aren’t Private, Court Rules [iophk: "MS Windows == insecure, therefore all computer are game"]

      A judge in Virginia rules that people should have no expectation of privacy on their home PCs because no connected computer “is immune from invasion.”
      A federal judge for the Eastern District of Virginia has ruled that the user of any computer that connects to the Internet should not have an expectation of privacy because computer security is ineffectual at stopping hackers.

      The June 23 ruling came in one of the many cases resulting from the FBI’s infiltration of PlayPen, a hidden service on the Tor network that acted as a hub for child exploitation, and the subsequent prosecution of hundreds of individuals. To identify suspects, the FBI took control of PlayPen for two weeks and used, what it calls, a “network investigative technique,” or NIT—a program that runs on a visitor’s computer and identifies their Internet address.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Hindu temple volunteer hacked to death in Bangladesh, say police

      A Hindu temple worker was hacked to death in western Bangladesh on Friday, police said, the latest in a series of attacks on religious minorities by suspected Islamists.

      Shyamananda Das, who helped to conduct prayers at the Radhamadan Gopal Bigraha Math in Jhenaidah district, was killed by three men on a motorcycle as he was walking on a highway adjacent to his temple early in the morning, police said.

    • Police blow up suspicious car near Stade de France

      French police used an explosive to blast entry to a car parked illegally near the Stade de France stadium in Paris where France and Iceland will play a Euro 2016 quarter-final match tonight.

      The blast by the stadium – which was targeted by terrorist attacks last November – caused jitters among fans arriving for the key game.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Palm oil companies ditch landmark Indonesian ‘zero deforestation’ pact

      Major palm oil companies that backed a landmark Indonesian “zero deforestation” pact on green practices have now ditched it in favour of less strict standards, triggering criticism the companies have caved into Indonesian government pressure.

      The companies signed the 2014 Indonesia Palm Oil Pledge, or Ipop, in an agreement hailed as boosting efforts to fight rampant deforestation and annual forest fires and the haze. As part of the pledge, the firms, which include top palm oil producers and traders, pledged no development of peatlands of any depth. Peatland fires are a major source of the haze.

      But on Friday (July 1), the companies said Ipop had run its course and was no longer needed. They supported the Indonesian government’s efforts to “transform the palm oil sector” and to strengthen the country’s own certification standards called the Indonesia Sustainable Palm Oil, or Ispo.

  • Finance/Brexit

    • After Brexit, Germany Should Give Brits Citizenship: Minister

      Britain voted 52 to 48 percent on June 23 in favor of quitting the EU.

      Germany should offer citizenship to young Britons living in Germany given that it was largely older voters in England and Wales who voted for “Brexit” in last month’s referendum, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Saturday.

      Britain voted 52 to 48 percent on June 23 in favor of quitting the European Union, with the referendum splitting the country along several lines such as old versus young, England and Wales versus Scotland and Northern Ireland.

    • SPD urges Germany to offer citizenship to young British expats

      SPD member Sigmar Gabriel has said Britons living in Germany should get EU citizenship. His words come amid growing uncertainty in the wake of Britain’s decision to leave the EU.

    • Germany should offer young Britons EU citizenship after Brexit, says German Vice-Chancellor

      Germany should offer citizenship to young Britons living in Germany, since it was largely older voters who voted to leave the European Union, the German Vice-Chancellor has said.

      Speaking at a meeting with the Social Democratic Party in Berlin on Saturday, Sigmar Gabriel, who is also the Economy Minister, said the UK’s referendum was a further reason to campaign to relax the rules on dual citizenship in Germany.

      “Let us offer it to young Britons who live in Germany, Italy or France, so they can remain European Union citizens in this country,” he said.

    • The rest of the world is laughing at the UK – but one country is explaining why they love us

      It’s been a difficult week for the UK. After voting to leave the European Union in a historic referendum, our country seems to have been split down the middle.

      Remain voters are blaming Leave voters for ‘ruining their futures’, Leave voters are telling Remain voters to stop complaining, politicians are tearing each other to shreds.

      The Prime Minister has resigned, the shadow cabinet is falling apart, we’re not sure what’s happening to our economy and there are worrying reports of increased xenophobia.

      It’s fair to say we don’t have much cause to love the UK at the moment.

      We’ve also been made the butt of the joke all over the world.

    • ‘Let EU migrants stay’ say the British public, plus voices from business and politics

      The Government and nominees to be the next Conservative Leader faced new pressure today to make a clear and unequivocal statement to reassure the 3 million EU citizens living in the UK that they would be able to stay after Brexit, and that a similar deal would be pursued to protect the status of the 1.2 million British citizens living in other EU countries.

      New research from ICM for British Future finds that 84% of the British public supports letting EU migrants stay – including three-quarters (77%) of Leave voters. Among Conservatives, support for protecting the status of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in Europe is even higher at 85%, with 78% of UKIP supporters in agreement.

      Just 16% of the public think that EU citizens should be required to leave the UK and that UK citizens in Europe should return home, with 23% of Leave voters and 15% of Conservatives agreeing.

    • The Tories played with fire and you can hear the flames crackling round you

      Writing of the British intellectuals who fell for Stalin, George Orwell came up with a sentence that applies as well to today’s conservatives as to the socialists of the 1930s. “So much of leftwing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” I was repeating it almost hourly as I watched the frivolous, dishonest, over-privileged and over-grown adolescents who presumed to govern us skip away from the consequences of their folly.

      At a moment when Britain is more fragile and angry than I have seen it, when parliament has been silenced by the referendum, and the opposition has collapsed, they have manured the soil in which extremism flourishes.

      Before I go on, I accept that you cannot get a hearing on immigration, race and the backlashes they inspire until you acknowledge hard truths. It is not the case that everyone who voted to leave was racist, or even primarily concerned about immigration. It is arguable that the origins of our crisis lie in the last Labour government’s decision to open Britain up to hundreds of thousands it never expected to arrive.

    • British Conservatives in Chaos Over Brexit, but Labour Party’s in No Position to Pounce

      Until Thursday, the political wrangling in Britain over how, or whether, to withdraw from the European Union — a move supported by a narrow majority of the voters in last week’s referendum, but opposed by 75 percent of the members of Parliament elected just last year — seemed likely to trigger a new general election.

    • Poll reveals young remain voters reduced to tears by Brexit result

      Almost half of voters aged 18 to 24 cried or felt like crying when they heard that the UK had voted to leave the European Union, according to polls conducted for the London School of Economics.

      The findings were released last night after tens of thousands of people demonstrated in central London against the results of the referendum.

      The polling by Opinium, conducted as part of an LSE electoral psychology initiative called “Inside the mind of the voter”, found that the electorate’s verdict on EU membership prompted a far more emotional reaction than the results of most other elections or referendums.

      Overall, out of a sample of 2,113 British adults questioned between 24 and 30 June, 32% of respondents said they cried or felt like crying when they discovered the result.

    • Douglas Carswell challenged by Leave voter over broken NHS pledge

      Ukip MP claims Vote Leave only ever promised £100m a week – despite £350m a week being at the top of his Twitter profile

    • Thousands of patients could be denied life-extending drugs and treatment in wake of Brexit

      Thousands of patients could be denied life-extending drugs and treatment in the wake of Brexit , the Sunday People reports.

      NHS bosses have delayed funding for vital medicines and services because the fall in the value of the pound means they may no longer be able to afford them.

      And kidney patient Abi Longfellow, the teenager who won her battle for a wonder drug thanks to a Sunday People campaign, is one of those hit by the devastating blow.

      The cost of Abi’s drug went up by £16,000 overnight due to Brexit . When the NHS first agreed to buy the drug form the US it cost £136,000.

      But the price has now shot up to £152,000 because the pound has slumped against the dollar.

      The delays also hit cancer patients, children with gender issues, HIV patients and stroke victims.

    • EU tells Swiss no single market access if no free movement of citizens

      The European Union is to show its determination to make no concessions to the UK on Brexit terms by telling Switzerland it will lose access to the single market if it goes ahead with plans to impose controls on the free movement of EU citizens.

      The Swiss-EU talks, under way for two years but now needing a solution possibly within weeks, throws up the exact same issues that will be raised in the UK’s exit talks – the degree to which the UK must accept free movement of the EU’s citizens as a price for access to the single market.

      The Swiss are desperate to strike a deal in order to give its politicians time to pass the necessary laws to meet a February 2017 deadline imposed by a legally binding referendum in 2014.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Jeremy Corbyn exclusively reveals why he’s offering Labour MPs a peace deal – in his own words

      Britain now faces an economic and political crisis.

      Since voters decided to leave the ­European Union, financial markets have been in a tailspin.

      Threats to living standards have grown. The Prime Minister has announced his resignation, the country is divided and the Government is in disarray.

      George Osborne has finally had to agree to ditch his job-destroying plan for a budget surplus, as Labour has been demanding.

      But Tory ministers have no EU exit plan. Instead, they are threatening to make working people pay for their ­failures, with more spending cuts
      and tax rises.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • MDA ticked off for irrational censorship by Festival Director and acclaimed photographer

      Newsha Tavakolian an acclaimed Iranian photojournalist and documentary photographer, and Singapore’s cultural medallion winner Ong Keng Sen have hot out at the Singapore authorities for the unnecessary censorship of works of artistic merits.

    • ICANN: We Won’t Pass Judgment on Pirate Sites

      Following more pressure from rightsholders, domain name oversight body ICANN has again made it clear that it will not act as judge and jury in copyright disputes. In a letter to the president of the Intellectual Property Constituency, ICANN chief Stephen Crocker says that ICANN is neither “required or qualified” to pass judgment in such cases.

    • Man arrested for posting picture insulting PM in WhatsApp group

      Police have arrested a man for sharing a crude photo insulting the Prime Minister in a WhatsApp group.

      Johor police chief Comm Datuk Wan Ahmad Najmuddin Mohd said that the man was arrested in Kampung Tunku, Petaling Jaya at around 12.15pm on Saturday.

      He said the suspect, who goes by the name Pa Ya, had uploaded the photo into a WhatsApp group called “Bicara Politik Melayu”.

      “The photo has insulted and hurt the feelings of Malaysians,” he said in a statement on Saturday.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Landlords, ISPs team up to rip off tenants on broadband

      Who would have thought that handing out free coffee and donuts in an apartment house would lead to Comcast reprimanding the building owners? That’s exactly what happened in Norcross, Ga., when cruller-baring Google representatives recently tried to tell residents about the company’s new fiber, high-speed Internet service.

      The landlord in question was reminded that he, like apartment building owners in many states, has an exclusive deal that deems Comcast the only company that can provide broadband to the building. Such deals with Comcast and other major ISPs effectively rob residents of the right to choose broadband providers, and they bar competitors from even setting foot in certain buildings.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Comodo spat shows importance of effective PR around trademark strategies

        US-based Comodo Group is the world’s largest issuer of SSL digital certificates (which are small data files that allow secure website connections, usually with an annual cost). A new entrant to the market is non-profit Let’s Encrypt, which was founded in 2014 by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and offers similar digital certificates for free. The rivalry between the organisations turned bitter last week after ISRG executive director Josh Aas revealed that Comodo had filed three trademark applications for the term LET’S ENCRYPT.

    • Copyrights

      • BitTorrent Protocol Turns 15 Years Old Today

        Fifteen years ago a developer named Bram Cohen posted a short message online, announcing his new file-sharing tool BitTorrent. Three years later his protocol was responsible for a quarter of all Internet traffic, and now it helps people to share hundreds of petabytes of data per day.

07.02.16

Links 2/7/2016: Kodi 17 Alpha 2, Slackware 14.2

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Oracle Loses Again, Red Hat Competes With FOSS & More…

    Also included: LinuxQuestions.org has a birthday, six new distro releases, Ubuntu considering dropping 32-bit support and the feds were after Snowden.

  • Desktop

    • Is Your OS Working For You Or Enslaving You?

      Essentially, folks bought a PC to use, run their applications and browse their networks and MS has installed malware on them to advertise “10”. Malware. That’s what this is. If the guy who made your OS deliberately installs malware on your PC, what are you going to do?

    • Microsoft’s Windows 10 nagware goes FULL SCREEN in final push

      As the Windows 10 free upgrade period draws to a close, Microsoft is stepping up its operating system’s nagware to full-screen takeovers.

      The Redmond software giant confirmed today it will start showing dark blue screens urging people to install the latest version of Windows. The full-screen ads will pop up on Windows 7 and 8.1 desktops from now until July 30, when the free upgrade period ends.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Check out ‘Why, Phil?’, new Linux audio webshow series

      Philip Yassin has recently started an upbeat Linux audio webshow series called ‘Ask Phil?’. Only recently started, the series has already notched up an impressive 7 episodes, most of which revolve around Phil’s favourite DAW, Qtractor.

  • Applications

    • Grammar and style-checking tools for Emacs

      Grammar be hard. Both for human beings and for software programs. These days, writers who use free software generally have their choice of reliable utilities for catching spelling mistakes, regardless of what editors or word processors they use. The outlook for grammar-and-style checking is not nearly as rosy. I recently explored the options available for Emacs, and was underwhelmed with the status quo.

    • Unblock Censored Websites Using Lantern Browser in Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint

      Lantern is an open source, free software that allows reliable and secure access to open Internet. It is Internet proxy tool developed to access blocked websites anywhere in the world and it is cross-platform available for desktop OS (Linux, Mac and Windows), as well as for Android. Lantern is built by the Brave New Software Project and lead by Adam Fisk as developer, a non-profit dedicated to creating software that tackles tough global challenges, the basic idea behind this project was to allow user an unfiltered Internet access.

    • VLC media player with skins for Ubuntu/Linux Mint/other Ubuntu derivatives

      VideoLAN and the VLC development team released the new major version of VLC, 2.2.2. With a new audio core, hardware decoding and encoding, port to mobile platforms, preparation for Ultra-HD video and a special care to support more formats, 2.2.2 is a major upgrade for VLC. Rincewind has a new rendering pipeline for audio, with better effiency, volume and device management, to improve VLC audio support. It supports many new devices inputs, formats, metadata and improves most of the current ones, preparing for the next-gen codecs.

    • Kodi v17 “Krypton” Alpha 2

      Since the dawn of time, or at least since 2008 each released version has received a code name next to the version number. Giving each development iteration a code name in a certain category is kind of a tradition that is not only applicable for software but also for hardware. Google does so for Android, Intel and NVIDIA also names their chips. Who are we to break this tradition and as such we follow in their steps with a theme that started out with mythical places or names. For our v17 release we actually let the public chose the name and with an overwhelming majority they chose the name “Krypton”.

    • Kodi 17 Alpha 2 Released
    • Kodi 17 “Krypton” Media Center Gets Ready for Android 6.0, Alpha 2 Out Now

      Today, July 2, 2016, the development team behind the popular Kodi open-source and cross-platform media center software has announced the release of the second Alpha build for the upcoming Kodi 17 “Krypton” series.

      Work on Kodi 17 started in early December 2015, but it took the developers about six months to push an Alpha build to public testers, which should have arrived in May 2016. Two weeks ago, on June 21, they announced that there are only ten days left until the first Alpha hits the streets.

      Well, today is the tenth day, but we didn’t get the first Alpha. Instead, we can download the second Alpha milestone, which should be more stable and offer us an early taste of what’s coming later this year in Kodi 17. This happened because of some code issues that needed to be fixed first.

    • The Numerous Features Coming To Ardour 5.0

      If you use Ardour as your digital audio workstation software, you’ll want to read this article about the features coming to Ardour 5.0.

      Last month we talked about Ardour 5.0-pre0 and since then Ardour 5.0 has continued moving along for release later this year. The developers behind Ardour for Linux and OS X have published a feature guide for this next release.

    • 5+ Linux Video Editing Tool Tips

      Finding a video editor in Linux that isn’t severely handicapped or come with an extreme learning curve is difficult. But this article isn’t about fancy video editors. As it turns out many of the things you need to get done are easiest with a few command-line tools. The packages you’ll want to install are mpv, ffmpeg, mencoder, normalize, and sox.

    • Pitivi 0.96 Video Editor Promises Fast and Accurate Editing for Any Video Format

      The road to Pitivi 1.0 continues, and the development team was proud to announce the release of the 0.96 milestone, which is yet another step in the development cycle of the powerful, open-source video editor.

      Therefore, Pitivi 0.96 arrives with the usual bug fixes and code cleanup maintenance stuff, but it also introduces a new feature, something that the Pitivi developers like to call “Proxy editing,” and that it promises fast and accurate editing with any video file format.

      “To provide the best experience, we decided to give you the ability to seamlessly work with media formats suitable for video editing,” explained the devs. “Now you can edit and render a video project with any video files with great accuracy, thanks to proxy files.”

    • Pitivi: An Open Source and Powerful Video Editor for Linux

      Pitivi is a well known video editor, the initial release was back in May, 2004 and still in active development. It is an open source, non-linear video editor for Linux developed by various contributors from all over the world, licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It aims to be a powerful and flexible video editor that can attract to prosumers and professionals.
      In February, 2014 the project held a fundraising campaign through Gnome foundation, the goal was to raise €100,000 for further development. The fundraiser did not reach the goal but raised above €23,000 as of 2015, which allowed partially funded development.

    • Proprietary

      • Veeam Agent for Linux, the Beta is now available!

        At Veeam, we all love virtualization and truly believe that modern data centers should be virtualized to guarantee the highest degree of Availability. However, the reality is that not every workload is virtualized. Some workloads cannot be reached through the hypervisors they run on even when they are virtualized, like in public cloud environments.

        This is one of the reasons Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE has seen such tremendous success since its initial launch in 2015. Now, that’s just one side of the story –– especially when you consider that in public cloud the vast majority of deployed virtual machines (VMs) are running one of the many flavors of Linux.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Locally-made Linux distro gets an upgrade

        You may not know it, but South Africa actually produces two maker-oriented boards offering an alternative to popular names like Arduino. One of those boards, the Blue Penguin, runs its own distro of Linux called “Guinnux”, and it just got an upgrade.

        The Blue Penguin and Guinnux is created by local company Keystone Electronic Solutions. Director and co-founder John Eigelaar runs us through the changes between the previous version, Guinnux 4, and Guinnux 5.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Arch Family

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • GeckoLinux 421.160527.0

        GeckoLinux is one of the more recent distributions to land in the DistroWatch database. GeckoLinux (or Gecko, as I will refer to the distribution) is based on openSUSE. Gecko offers two key features above and beyond what its parent provides: patent encumbered software installed by default and live desktop editions. The openSUSE project avoids shipping software with licensing or patent restrictions and offers just two editions of Leap (a full DVD and a net-install disc). The Gecko distribution provides some extra packages, including multimedia support, and provides live discs for seven different desktop environments: Budgie, Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXQt, MATE and Xfce. For people who want something lighter, Gecko offers an eighth “Barebones” edition.

        I decided to try Gecko’s MATE edition which is available as a 966MB download. While I was downloading the ISO file, I looked into why Gecko uses such long version numbers, such as 421.160527.0. I learned the first part indicates which version of openSUSE Gecko uses as a base, in this case openSUSE 42.1. The second number is the date the ISO was created, 27th of May, 2016. The final number is reserved for revisions or re-builds. In this case the trailing zero indicates no rebuilds were necessary.

    • Slackware Family

      • Zenwalk 8.0 Is Based on Slackware 14.2, Gets New Desktop Layout for Xfce 4.12.1

        Jean-Philippe Guillemin, the developer of Zenwalk, proudly announced today, July 2, 2016, the final release of the Slackware-based Zenwalk 8.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

        Based on the just released Slackware 14.2 operating system, Zenwalk 8.0 is finally here, powered by Linux kernel 4.4.14 LTS, the same one that powers the monumental Slackware Linux, thus offering users support for the latest hardware devices. Zenwalk’s default desktop environment is Xfce 4.12.1, and it now ships with a new layout that’s more user-friendly than ever.

      • Slackware Release Announcement

        Slackware 14.2 brings many updates and enhancements, among which
        you’ll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available
        today: Xfce 4.12.1, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and
        easy to use desktop environment, and KDE 4.14.21 (KDE 4.14.3 with
        kdelibs-4.14.21) a stable release of the 4.14.x series of the award-
        winning KDE desktop environment. These desktops utilize eudev, udisks,
        and udisks2, and many of the specifications from freedesktop.org which
        allow the system administrator to grant use of various hardware devices
        according to users’ group membership so that they will be able to use
        items such as USB flash sticks, USB cameras that appear like USB storage,
        portable hard drives, CD and DVD media, MP3 players, and more, all
        without requiring sudo, the mount or umount command. Just plug and play.
        Slackware’s desktop should be suitable for any level of Linux experience.

      • Slackware 14.2 is Here, Mageia 6 STA1 is too

        Woohoo! Slackware 14.2 is here! Patrick Volkerding announced the release early July 1 saying it brings “many updates and enhancements.” Elsewhere, the Mageia project announced the first stabilization snapshot for upcoming version 6 and Dominique Leuenberger posted this week’s Tumbleweed review. The end of life for Fedora 22 is fast approaching and the end of an era is upon us as distributions drop 32-bit support.

      • Slackware 14.2 Officially Released

        Slackware 14.2 was released today to kick off July. Slackware 14.2 has been long in development while today it was christened.

        Slackware 14.2 features Xfce 4.12.1 and KDE 4.14.21 desktops, is powered by the Linux 4.4.14 kernel, glibc 2.23, BlueZ 5 for Bluetooth, GCC 5.3 is the default compiler, and various other updated packages. Slackware 14.2 is also notable for finally making use of PulseAudio.

      • Slackware 14.2 Released
      • Slackware Linux 14.2 Officially Released with Linux Kernel 4.4, without systemd

        After many months of hard work, two Betas and two RCs, Patrick J. Volkerding was extremely proud to announce today, July 2, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the final Slackware 14.2 Linux operating system.

        Slackware Linux 14.2 arrives two and a half months after the mid-April release of the second and last Release Candidate (RC) build, and it has now been declared stable and ready for deployment as your daily driver. Powered by the latest (at the moment of writing this article) long-term supported Linux 4.4.14 kernel, Slackware 14.2 ships with many up-to-date components and GNU/Linux technologies.

      • Slackware 14.2 released
      • sbopkg 0.38.0 is out for Slackware 14.2

        What a busy day today with all the releases for Slackware 14.2, MATE 1.14, Cinnamon 3.0 and now sbopkg 0.38.0.

        [...]

        We are finalizing SBo repository for Slackware 14.2, but at least you don’t have to wait 3 months just like previous cycle as we have prepared it since last January. Stay tune for SBo announcement on slackbuilds-user mailing list.

      • MATE 1.14 and Cinnamon 3.0 for Slackware 14.2

        Just hours since Slackware 14.2 is released, we proudly present to you MATE 1.14 and Cinnamon 3.0 for Slackware 14.2 users!!! We have been working under the hood of testing these two projects since they were released last April.

        The binary packages are compiled against Slackware 14.2 official ISO and it’s now uploaded to the usual repository in http://slackware.org.uk/msb and http://slackware.org.uk/csb. Thanks to Darren Austin for providing a place to host these two projects.

      • Bear is working for its money

        Since I made the new Slackware 14.2 data available 24 hours ago, the server has been pushing out 1.67 Terabytes of data, at an average of 155 MBytes/sec. Needless to say that this server was a good investment, I could never have managed this on my old platform.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Realtek spins wireless oriented Arduino compatible SBC

      Realtek has launched a $25, Arduino compatible “Ameba” SBC, built around a 166MHz Cortex-M3 RTL8195AM chipset, and offering WiFi and NFC.

      When you think of Realtek Semiconductor, you probably think about audio codecs, but the company makes a wide variety of other ICs and MCUs that end up on hacker boards. Realtek is now trying its hand at its own Arduino compatible SBC: the Realtek IoT Ameba Platform. The board is backed by a community site with plenty of examples of robots, drones, home automation gizmos, and more that run on the Ameba.

    • That Open, Upgradeable ARM Dev Board Is Trying To Make A Comeback

      Remember that Improve Dev Board using an open-source, upgradeable design and running Mer from 2013~2014 before the project collapsed? It’s back now in the form of a new crowdfunding campaign with some changes to the hardware and the option of a build-your-own laptop.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Tizen OS gets ported to Russia’s Elvees microprocessor

          During the Skolkovo Startup Village – Russia’s largest conference which took place last month, we had reported of a customized corporate version of Tizen OS being showcased on the Samsung Z3. Now, we have come across the news that the event also saw Tizen OS being implemented on the multi-core processor 1892ВМ14Я belonging to Russian manufacturer Elvees Multicore. The Tizen OS was ported to this ARM based processor thanks to a joint effort from the Russian consortium experts and engineers from Tizen.RU. The project proves to showcase the flexibility and open source nature of Tizen and according to the officials at the event, this implementation of Tizen OS in a Russian made hardware helps in leveraging security to higher levels, while we believe the intention is also to reduce the use of processors from foreign brands like mediatek, qualcomm, rockchip, etc.

      • Android

Free Software/Open Source

  • SourceForge eyes a comeback

    Years ago, SourceForge.net was the premiere hosting service for open-source and free-software projects. But, after changing hands several times, the site ran seriously afoul of the development community in 2015; its staff was accused of secretly commandeering inactive project accounts and of replacing project downloads with installers side-loaded with adware or even malware. In early 2016, however, the site changed hands yet again, and its new owners have set out to regain the community’s trust.

    To recap, SourceForge was launched in 1999 by VA Linux Systems, which was initially a hardware vendor. Over the next few years, the company acquired several other free-software related sites, including Freshmeat, Slashdot, and NewsForge (where I worked for several years). For a while, VA operated SourceForge.net for “community” open-source projects and offered a separate “enterprise” edition to corporate clients.

  • NEC establishes Open Source Software Technology Centre in India

    NEC Corporation and NEC Technologies India Private Limited (NTI) announced the establishment of the “OSS Technology Centre,” an organization specializing in technical support related to the use of open source software (OSS).

  • Why an international sports betting and gaming operator uses open source

    Enterprise business is one thing, but most people live down in the trenches. The common business doesn’t have a budget or staff to match the big dogs, but they do have the same needs. One of these needs is for solid, reliable server and data operations. The open-source movement has become a refuge for smaller companies, offering software and services that, in many cases, match what enterprise uses.

  • The WRT54GL: A 54Mbps router from 2005 still makes millions for Linksys

    In a time when consumers routinely replace gadgets with new models after just two or three years, some products stand out for being built to last.

    Witness the Linksys WRT54GL, the famous wireless router that came out in 2005 and is still for sale. At first glance, there seems to be little reason to buy the WRT54GL in the year 2016. It uses the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, which has been surpassed by 802.11n and 802.11ac. It delivers data over the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band and is limited to speeds of 54Mbps. You can buy a new router—for less money—and get the benefit of modern standards, expansion into the 5GHz band, and data rates more than 20 times higher.

    [...]

    Linksys doesn’t bother promoting the WRT54GL much. But La Duca mentioned the continued production of the WRT54GL recently when I interviewed him for a story on Linksys’ project to let users install open source firmware on new routers without breaking the latest FCC anti-interference rules. The WRT54GL was the first wireless router I ever purchased about a decade ago; I was surprised that Linksys still produces them, so I asked the company for more details.

  • Events

    • Hadoop Summit Brings Big Data News

      Multiple Big Data vendors and efforts debut new Hadoop technologies at this week’s summit in California.

      It was a big week for Big Data, with multiple vendors making announcements at this week’s Hadoop Summit in San Jose.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Improving LibreOffice User Experience (UX)

      Effective from May 2016, Heiko Tietze has started working as a consultant to drive LibreOffice UX one step further.

      Heiko has been one of the most active UX volunteers during the last few years, and has been instrumental in a rather large number of the user interface improvements since LibreOffice 4.4.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • Twisted in an asyncio world
    • Pyjion
    • Automated testing of CPython patches
    • Why is Python slow?

      Python users often complain that the language is slow. Kevin Modzelewski presented some of his findings on Python’s slowness at the 2016 Python Language Summit. He works at Dropbox on the Pyston just-in-time (JIT) compiled version of Python; that project has learned some interesting things along the way about what causes Python to be slow.

    • The Python JITs are coming

      Nathaniel Smith envisions a future where just-in-time (JIT) compiler techniques will be commonly used in Python, especially for scientific computing. He presented his ideas on where things are headed at the 2016 Python Language Summit. He currently works at the University of California, Berkeley on NumPy and other scientific Python projects. Part of what he has been doing is “working on the big picture of what JITs will mean for scientific computing”.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • 11 essential data security tips for travelers [iophk: "unfortunately VPNs have dated crypto"]

      I travel all over the world for my job, and for my hobbies. Although there are still plenty of places I haven’t been, I’ve visited enough foreign countries that I don’t deny it when someone calls me a world traveler. Over the years, I’ve experienced my fair share of foreign spying. I know what it’s like to be snooped on.

      I’m no longer surprised when I suddenly get gobs of spam from a country I’ve visited. My best guess is that someone in the country intercepted my email and recorded my email address. I still get porn spam in Arabic and ads for weight loss products in Mandarin. I’ve had my laptop and USB keys searched at countless borders.

    • Yet another letsencrypt (ACME) client

      Well, I apparently joined the hordes of people writing ACME (the Protocol behind Let’s Encrypt) clients.

      Like the fairy tale Goldilocks, I couldn’t find a client in the right spot between minimalistic and full-featured for my needs: acme-tiny was too bare-bones; the official letsencrypt client (now called certbot) too huge; and simp_le came very close, but it’s support for pluggable certificate formats made it just a bit too big for me.

    • Keynote – Complexity: The Enemy of Security
    • Security Holes Found in Widely-Used File Compression Library, Leaving Other Products Dangerously Exposed
    • StartEncrypt considered harmful today

      Recently, one of our hackers (Thijs Alkemade) found a critical vulnerability in StartCom’s new StartEncrypt tool, that allows an attacker to gain valid SSL certificates for domains he does not control. While there are some restrictions on what domains the attack can be applied to, domains where the attack will work include google.com, facebook.com, live.com, dropbox.com and others.

    • Unikernels Will Create More Security Problems Than They Solve

      Unikernels, the most recent overhyped technology in search of a problem to solve, have a number of claimed attributes that make them a “better choice.” One most often claimed is that they are “more secure.” This is the first in a series of articles bringing some light to the reality of unikernels so that you can think about them properly, employ them for what they are good for, and avoid the hype.

    • The Python security response team

      As the final presentation of the 2016 Python Language Summit—though it was followed by a few lightning talks that we are not covering—Christian Heimes led a discussion on the Python security response team. There have been some problems along the way that generally boil down to a need for more people working on the team.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Bangladesh siege: Twenty killed at Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka

      Twenty people, most said to be foreigners, have been killed in an attack on a cafe in Bangladesh claimed by so-called Islamic State.

      Gunmen stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery cafe in Dhaka late on Friday before troops entered almost 12 hours later.

      Six attackers were also killed and one was arrested, officials said. Bangladeshi PM Sheikh Hasina has declared two days of national mourning.

      At least nine Italians and seven Japanese were among those killed.

      Italy’s Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said one other Italian was still unaccounted for. Many of the Italians reportedly worked in the garment industry.

    • Where To Invade Next by Michael Moore

      Europeans regard America as “exceptional” only in its social backwardness and lack of social compassion.

  • Finance

    • Joe Macare on Brexit, Rory O’Connor on the Danny Award

      UK politics are up in the air in the wake of a referendum calling for Britain to leave the European Union. The so-called Brexit campaign is drawing comparisons to that of Donald Trump, due to the nativism and racism that marked it, but what else is at work here? Joe Macare is publisher of Truthout, the news organization.

    • To Lump Him With Trump, Zakaria Lies About Sanders on Brexit

      It’s a subtle but potent lie. Sanders, unlike Trump, has long been opposed to Britain leaving the European Union. How can Zakaria casually claim two opposing positions are “largely indistinguishable”? How could the editors at Washington Post allow such a blatant falsehood to reach print?

      And it’s not an inconsequential one, either. If Brexit wreaks the havoc on the UK economy many are predicting, Washington Post’s millions of readers thinking Sanders supported such a measure would go a long way toward damaging both his credibility and that of the broader progressive movement.

      The piece, of course, is not really about Sanders or Trump. It’s clear the framing is a gimmick to hook the reader into hearing Zakaria’s boilerplate cheerleading for “free trade” while continuing the long tradition of lazy pundits lumping Sanders and Trump into the same ideological space.

    • Brexit supporters one week on: ‘It is ridiculous there was no plan’

      Under the headline “Take a bow Britain”, the paper’s edition last Saturday celebrated “the day the quiet people of Britain rose up against an arrogant, out of touch elite”.

    • In Brexit Britain the elites will run amok

      A week on from the referendum that was going to take back democracy from the elites, and we still don’t know exactly who will be taking back democracy for us. But it will be one representative of the elites or another. At the moment, it looks like Michael Gove or Theresa May will be their political face. Unless someone else in the Tory party offers them a better deal between now and September.

    • ‘We are the 48%’: tens of thousands march in London for Europe

      The hollow, bitter wit of the banners and placards was a fair indication of who took to the streets of London, in their tens of thousands, on the March for Europe on Saturday, hastily scrambled on Facebook. “And if this isn’t big enough,” said Jonathan Shakhovskoy, who is with a marketing firm in the music industry, “we’ll do it again next week, and the week after. Normalise the mood, make it less ugly.”

      “Un-Fuck My Future”, “No Brex Please, We’re British”, they read. Pictures of Whitney Houston with “I Will Always Love EU”, “Europe Innit” and “I wanna be deep inside EU”. “All EU Need is Love”, “Fromage not Farage”, “Eton Mess” and, more seriously, “Science Needs EU”. “Hell no, we won’t go!” they shouted, rounding Piccadilly Circus.

      No one was fooling themselves that these were the penitent huddled masses from Ebbw Vale or Sunderland come to beg after all for EU funding; this was a vocal segment of the 48% for whom departure from the EU is a disgrace, a catastrophe or both.

    • Post EU Referendum Racism Documented Online And It’s Really Scary
    • Brexit research suggests 1.2 million Leave voters regret their choice in reversal that could change result

      Up to 7 per cent of the people who voted for a Brexit in the EU referendum now regret their choice, new research has found.

      When the survey’s findings are projected on to last week’s vote, they would cut the Leave share by 1.2 million, almost wiping out the majority that gave Friday’s shock result.

      Research by Opinium found that 3 per cent of those who voted Remain also regretted their choice and that British people are now divided on the priorities in the negotiations ahead.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • SABC censorship allegations serious – ANC

      The allegations of censorship at the SABC are very serious and should be investigated, the ANC said on Friday.

      There was no place in a constitutional democracy for censorship and the ANC expected the SABC to deal with the allegations in a way that upheld freedom of the press, spokesperson Zizi Kodwa said.

      He said an entire institution should not be made into a problem because of one individual – SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng.

    • Security researcher gets threats over Amazon review

      For the average Amazon shopper, reviews are just a casual part of the experience. You might pay attention to a pun-filled review by George Takei or spend half an hour laughing at the parody reviews for “Fresh Whole Rabbit,” but you probably don’t thoroughly examine every review before buying a product.

      But for sellers, reviews are no laughing matter. Amazon retailers sometimes go to extreme lengths to guarantee good reviews, as security developer Matthew Garrett recently discovered when he wrote a one-star review of an internet-connected electric socket. When Garrett politely pointed out that the socket in question was woefully insecure, he received emails from the manufacturer claiming that the review would get employees fired and that other reviewers were campaigning to get Garrett’s review taken down.

      The socket in question is the AuYou Wi-Fi Switch, a $30 device that lets you turn the power from a wall outlet on and off using your phone. It’s a nice way to turn your lights on and off if you don’t want to invest in smart bulbs, or to turn other plugged-in devices on and off. The AuYou Switch works whether or not you’re home — so you can switch your lights on in your apartment while you’re still in your office.

    • Thin-Skinned Chinese Govt. Declares Media War On Lady Gaga For Meeting With The Dalai Lama

      It’s pretty common knowledge at this point that the Chinese government spends a great deal of time and effort attempting to censor the internet at its own whim. And, while the walls of censorship erected are penetrable with enough effort, it still results in much of the population being unable to search out information that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government, such as references to the Tiananmen Square incident, for instance. But while examples like that can make some measure of sense to outside observers, even as they still decry the censorship, the fact is that the Chinese government’s application of this censorship has been managed so erratically and unpredictably that the result is everyone watches where they step for fear of a takedown.

      Which naturally brings us to Lady Gaga, whose meeting with the Dalai Lama recently resulted in the Chinese government attempting to wipe her off of the China-facing interwebz.

    • Lawmakers Question Colorado University President Over Censorship of Students and Professors

      At least two Colorado state lawmakers have contacted the University of Northern Colorado’s president, expressing concerns after reporting by Heat Street revealed that the Bias Response Team’s behavior had restricted free speech on campus over the past two semesters.

    • ‘It is freedom of expression that gave us this vocation’ – Thandeka Gqubule

      The SABC’s economics editor, Thandeka Gqubule, who was suspended last week for challenging a decision in an editorial meeting not to show footage of violence at protests, was among journalists who picketed outside the public broadcaster’s offices in Auckland Park, Johannesburg, this morning.

      She addressed the crowd in a touching speech, which was met with resounding nods of agreement and ululation.

      In her speech, she called on the “ancestors” of journalism such as Ruth First, Peter Magubane and Can Themba to be with them in spirit as they marched to the Constitutional Court to defend freedom of expression.

    • Scores join censorship protest at the SABC
    • Crimes against journalism stop today – suspended SABC journalists
    • ANC leaders break ranks on SABC censorship
    • Zizi Kodwa slams media, starts #SaveOurSABC
    • Sanef plans to meet with MPs to discuss concerns over SABC censorship
  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Run, don’t walk, from China’s Big Brother law

      China’s National People’s Congress has drafted a second version of a controversial cybersecurity law. It would bring a great deal of censorship for both foreign and domestic citizens and businesses, whether they use the cloud or not.

      China is a wasteland for the modern internet. Websites like Facebook and Google are blocked. Moreover, web traffic is monitored and censored by the government. It’s Big Brother for real.

    • People Support Ethical Automated Cars That Prioritize The Lives Of Others — Unless They’re Riding In One

      This social dilemma sits at the root of designing and programming ethical autonomous machines. And while companies like Google are also weighing these considerations, if utilitarian regulations mean less profits and flat sales, it seems obvious which path the AV industry will prefer. That said, once you begin building smart cities where automation is embedded in every process from parking to routine delivery, would maximizing the safety of the greatest number of human lives take regulatory priority anyway? What would be the human cost in prioritizing one model over the other?

      Granted this is getting well ahead of ourselves. We’ll also have to figure out how to change traffic law enforcement for the automated age, have broader conversations about whether or not consumers have the right to tinker with the cars they own, and resolve our apparent inability to adhere to even basic security standards when designing such “smart” vehicles. These are all questions we have significantly less time to answer than most people think.

    • In Bill Ford’s Future, the Cars Talk to Each Other

      Bill Ford’s seen the future, and it’s crowded.

      The great-grandson of both Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, now executive chairman of Ford Motor Co., certainly knows his way around cars. What he doesn’t know is how they’re going to get around in an increasingly congested world.

      “Some of it’s just mathematics,” Ford says. “We’re going from 7 billion people on the planet today to 9 billion by mid-century. At the same time, people are increasingly moving into cities. We’re going to see many megacities with populations of 10 million or more, and gridlock will accompany that growth.”

    • Facebook-Dependent Content Farms Will Finally Die

      Facebook has made the drastic and controversial announcement that it will value content from friends over content generated by pages of media outlets and brands. Truthfully, it’s only controversial if you are a publisher of content meant to invade the feeds of regular people.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Here’s how police arrested Lauri Love – and what happened next

      Lauri Love was arrested on suspicion of offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 early in the evening of 25 October 2013, when a National Crime Agency officer wearing dungarees and posing as a UPS courier told Love’s mother that Lauri himself had to come to the porch to collect his delivery.

      In his dressing gown and pyjamas, Love confirmed his identity and was then informed of the ruse and handcuffed. Over the next five hours a total of 14 NCA officers attended the property wearing agency-branded windbreakers, which were easy visible to the neighbours.

      Six of these officers had been tasked with searching for digital media which are alleged to contain evidence that the 28-year-old had criminally accessed private sector, military and government computer systems in the United States.

    • North Georgia newspaper publisher jailed over open records request

      A North Georgia newspaper publisher was indicted on a felony charge and jailed overnight last week – for filing an open-records request.

      Fannin Focus publisher Mark Thomason, along with his attorney Russell Stookey, were arrested on Friday and charged with attempted identity fraud and identity fraud. Thomason was also accused of making a false statement in his records request.

    • Cop who drew gun on man filming him says man deserved it

      In May, we told you of a lawsuit involving a Rohnert Park, California, cop who looked ready to fire his handgun at a man who was filming him. Last year’s standoff happened right outside the resident’s house. Claiming civil rights violations, the alleged victim sued (PDF) the officer and police department that is located about an hour north of San Francisco.

      The police department and officer, David Rodriguez, have now responded to the lawsuit. They essentially say it was resident Don McComas’ fault from the get go and that McComas’ own actions outside his house prompted the officer to draw his weapon on the Rohnert Park man.

      “And for a third, separate and affirmative defense, these answering defendants allege that the sole proximate cause of the injuries and damages, if any, claimed by plaintiff was the negligence and fault of the plaintiff…,” they responded in court documents. (PDF)

      Besides that, police claimed the suit should be tossed because the officer held an “objectively reasonable belief that the safety of the life of the defendants and others were imminently threatened… ” The authorities said McComas wasn’t complying with repeated orders to take his hands “out of his pocket.” McComas eventually complied, and the situation escalated. The officer continued wielding his weapon, according to the video.

    • ‘We the Prisoners’: The Demise of the Fourth Amendment

      In a carceral state—a.k.a. a prison state or a police state—there is no Fourth Amendment to protect you from the overreaches, abuses, searches and probing eyes of government overlords.

      In a carceral state, there is no difference between the treatment meted out to a law-abiding citizen and a convicted felon: both are equally suspect and treated as criminals, without any of the special rights and privileges reserved for the governing elite.

  • DRM

    • Encrypted Media Extensions and exit conditions

      In March, we reported on the contentious argument surrounding the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) framework developed by a working group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). At the time, there were several active protest efforts underway to dissuade the W3C from renewing the charter for the working group in question, since that renewal was slated to come up for a vote soon. Since then, although public activism has quieted down significantly, there have been several important developments.

      To recap, the EME framework defines a set of APIs for Content Decryption Modules (CDMs) that implement some form of authentication scheme used to enable or disable playback of audio or video elements. While there is a simple, plain-text CDM defined in the specification (and even though open-source CDMs have been developed), the ultimate goal of EME is to allow media-delivery companies like Netflix or Hulu to deploy proprietary, binary-only CDMs that implement a DRM scheme.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Ford Dealership Swipes Game Image For Ad, Thinks It’s Kosher Because It Came From A DMCA Compliant Site

        A brief review of the many, many posts we’ve done here about the DMCA and its notice and takedown platform will reveal to even the casual reader that the whole thing is rife with complications, abuse, and inconsistencies. It can be a difficult realm to navigate, but there are times when an entity’s claims of ignorance just don’t ring true.

        Which brings us to one independent Ford dealership that decided to simply yoink an image from a relatively new video game and use it to advertise automobiles.

      • Video game art swiped this week by Beijing hockey team, Ford dealership

        On Wednesday, news hit the wire that a video game’s indistinguishable logo and art style had been lifted without permission, all done to advertise a wholly unrelated product. Sadly, the news brought on a real case of deja vu. As in: wait, didn’t this just happen?

        As it turns out, it had. Two very similar stories unfolded within 48 hours of each other, and they each speak to a pair of modern copyright issues: the ease with which images can be lifted and reappropriated by a lazy design firm, and how easy it is for such copycats to be busted by the court of public opinion.

      • EU to tax links to news

        Germany and Spain introduced in their legislation what some people call a “Google tax”. The idea came from the publishers. They claimed the right to get an additional copyright, “ancillary copyright”, on any news that are published online. The idea of this “tax” (that is actually not a tax) was to charge the online news sites who publish news snippets, short extracts of news, such as Google News. Even if the main target of publishers was Google News, the laws affect other similar services, for example meneame in Spain. Ultimately it could even undermine the whole concept of links to information.

        The result of this “Google tax” was a complete failure: Google decided to close Google News in Spain, while in Germany everyone except Google ended up paying the “tax”. Now, even after these clear failures, the European Commission (EC) is determined to make this error a European one; it’s considering implementing the ancillary copyright everywhere in the European Union (EU) – and on an even bigger scale than in Spain and Germany.

07.01.16

Links 1/7/2016: New PCLinuxOS Magazine, Mageia 6 Close to Release

Posted in News Roundup at 6:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • UK farming left ‘in the dark’ after Brexit, says NSA

      British agriculture has been left “completely in the dark and rudderless” since voters went to the polls to make their voices heard on European Union membership, the National Sheep Association (NSA) has stressed.

      The organisation, which works to safeguard the interests of British sheep farmers, said there has been “nothing but political rhetoric and unanswered questions” since the British public voted to leave the European Union in last week’s referendum.

  • Finance

    • Hollande says competition rules need ‘adapting’ under new post-Brexit priorities

      The UK’s decision to leave the European Union has galvanized its remaining members to look anew at where they want to go as a 27-nation bloc. Part of the new policy drive should involve “adapting” competition laws, French President Francois Hollande has said.

    • Spotify’s concerns over Apple Music are obvious but it’s just manufacturing an App Store antitrust issue

      I wish to clarify upfront that I’ve never done any work for Apple or Spotify. A more elaborate disclosure can be found at the end of this post. The perspective from which I am writing this post is that of an app developer who happens to have fought hard for fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) behavior by companies wielding monopoly power. And one of the two iOS apps I’ll launch later this year will come with two different types of subscription offerings, which users can even use in combination. So I do have a strong interest in this, but for now I can’t see any wrongdoing on Apple’s part.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Lewandowski Hire Makes Journalists Choose Between Defending Their Profession and Embracing Its Demise

      Faced with the destruction of journalistic values by the corrupting effects of the profit motive, journalists can either stand up for the principles that brought many of them into the career in the first place—or else identify with the corruption, telling themselves that they’re siding with the smart money even as it destroys the institutions that form the basis for their profession.

      Both reactions were on display in the wake of CNN‘s decision to hire recently fired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. The conservative New York Post (6/24/16) quoted an anonymous “TV insider” saying that “CNN is facing a near internal revolt over the Corey hiring,”with another unnamed source saying, “Everyone at CNN — and even people who used to work there — are pissed about Trump’s former campaign manager being hired on salary.”

    • BuzzFeed’s Obama Coverage Is 99 Percent Uncritical–and Borderline Creepy

      Since its launch as a scrappy clickbait site in 2006, BuzzFeed has grown to become one of the biggest names in online media and news, venturing into serious news coverage of politics and world events in attempt to add gravitas to a name typically associated with levity and listicles. While BuzzFeed has certainly done important work of late, on issues ranging from sex harassment to AIDS in Africa, when it comes to the most powerful person on earth, however—the president of the United States—its coverage is almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic.

    • There Will Be No Early General Election

      Labour and Tories were neck and neck on 32% in the Mail on Sunday Survation poll on 25 June, the day before the Blarites launched their coup against the “unelectable” Corbyn. Before Corbyn became leader, Labour were consistently between 7 and 12 points behind on Survation. That Corbyn has done so well in popular opinion and in elections, is remarkable considering the Blairites who dominate his own parliamentary labour party have been conspiring and briefing against him from day one.

      The coup “rationale” is based on two lies – that Labour was struggling in the polls, and that an early general election is imminent.

      Whoever becomes the new Tory Prime Minister, there is not going to be an early general election. No new Tory PM will throw away the 30 seat gain over Labour the Tories will get from the new Boundary Commission Review.

    • British Conservatives in Chaos Over Brexit, but Labour Party’s in No Position to Pounce

      Until Thursday, the political wrangling in Britain over how, or whether, to withdraw from the European Union — a move supported by a narrow majority of the voters in last week’s referendum, but opposed by 75 percent of the members of Parliament elected just last year — seemed likely to trigger a new general election.

      Although the ruling Conservative Party is not required to call an election until 2020, most political observers expected Prime Minister David Cameron to be replaced by the leader of the campaign for a British exit from the EU, Boris Johnson, who would then want a fresh mandate from the public.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Leak Reveals Secret FBI Guidelines That Basically Give Them Free Rein To Spy On Journalists And Sources

      Eleven months ago, we wrote about a lawsuit filed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation seeking to get a copy of the DOJ’s infamous new rules for spying on journalists. The new rules came about after it had come out that the DOJ had spied on Associated Press reporters as well as lied to a court to claim that Fox News reporter James Rosen was a co-conspirator in a leak investigation. To date, the DOJ has steadfastly refused to reveal the rules.

      Thankfully, someone has now leaked the rules, or at least the 2013 version of some of the rules, which show that, contrary to what then Attorney General Eric Holder had suggested, it’s still ridiculously easy for the FBI to spy on reporters and their sources in trying to hunt down a leak. In fact, it appears that these rules, around the use of NSLs are actually separate from the rules that Holder was talking about — meaning that there’s an entirely separate path for the DOJ to spy on journalists. The rules show that the FBI can just issue a National Security Letter (NSL), the mechanism that the FBI has been known to regularly abuse without consequence and which it’s trying to expand. The “process” by which the media is supposedly protected under these new rules is that if someone in the DOJ is seeking an NSL to get phone records of someone in the media, they need to get some permission from someone else in the DOJ first…

    • Michael Bloomberg Comes Down On The Wrong Side Of The Crypto Wars: Supports Backdooring Encryption

      This is perhaps not surprising, but still disappointing. Former NYC mayor and current billionaire media/tech company boss Michael Bloomberg has come down on the wrong side of the “going dark” encryption fight. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (possible paywall link) he scolds tech execs for daring to side with Apple over the FBI and the Justice Department on the question of backdooring encryption. Bloomberg does not appear to actually understand the issues at play.

      [...]

      Note the false framing here. Bloomberg is setting up the argument that backdooring encryption for the sake of the FBI/DOJ is “good for national security and public safety.” He’s wrong. It’s not. It’s not even close. It actually puts many more people at risk, because the only way to backdoor encryption effectively is to break that encryption and put everyone who uses it at much more risk. Yes, it means that the FBI/NSA won’t be able to track some people, but it’s a very small number of people, and they have other ways to track them without undermining the security of everyone else.

    • IoT Already at Work in 65% of Enterprises

      A majority of enterprises, 65 percent in fact, have already incorporated Internet of Things (IoT) technologies into their environments, gathering data from sensors, equipment and other devices and using it for business purposes, according to 451 Research’s inaugural Voice of the Enterprise: Internet of Things report. The most common type of data collected is of the machine sensing type (71.5 percent), followed by environmental data (20 percent) and biological data from people and animals (8.5 percent).

    • 84% of IoT Data Comes From Data Center Equipment

      Even though they may not be familiar with the term “Internet of Things” (IoT), 65 percent of organizations are collecting data from equipment, devices, or other connected endpoints. And they’re using that data for business purposes, according to an IoT study conducted by 451 Research.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Reporter kicked out of Gatineau courtroom over dress

      A reporter says she was kicked out of the Gatineau courthouse because her skirt was too short and her shoulders were exposed.

      CTV Ottawa’s Annie Bergeron-Oliver says she was in court to cover a manslaughter case Thursday morning when a male police officer approached her and said she’d have to step out.

      “Of course, I’m confused. I don’t have my cell phone out. I’m not eating. I don’t think I’ve broken any rules,” she told CFRA’s Ottawa Now. “So he pulls me outside and says ‘I’m sorry. Your skirt is too short. ‘ ”

    • Illinois Court Says State’s Cyberstalking Law Is Unconstitutional

      One of several problems with hastily-enacted laws meant to deal with advances in technology is that they often skip a step or several when being written. In many cases, the step skipped is an important one: the consideration of intent. By crafting laws that cater to subjective views of a situation — whether it’s meant to address cyberbullying or other forms of online harassment — the laws blow past, sometimes intentionally, the requirement that there be malicious intent behind the targeted actions.

      This has led to courts striking down newly-enacted laws as unconstitutional because they have skipped this step. Without this requirement in place, the laws curb free speech by enacting new limits on First Amendment expression based almost solely on subjective reading of the allegedly “criminal” content.

    • Chatbot Helps Drivers Appeal Over $4 Million In Bogus Parking Tickets

      In what is likely a sign of the coming government-rent-seeking apocalypse, a 19-year-old Stanford student from the UK has created a bot that assists users in challenging parking tickets. The inevitable result of parking nearly anywhere can now be handled with something other than a) meekly paying the fine or b) throwing them away until a bench warrant is issued.

      While a variety of bots have been created to handle a variety of tasks, very few have handled them quite as well as Joshua Browder’s “robot lawyer” — which is certain to draw some attention from disgruntled government agencies who are seeing this revenue stream drying up.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Access To Medicines Resolution Adopted By UN Human Rights Council

      A resolution on access to medicines proposed by a number of developing countries was adopted today by the United Nations Human Rights Council, as well as a resolution on enhancing capacity-building in public health. This marks yet another United Nations fora in which developing countries seek to raise the issue of access to medicines, particularly with regard to high prices.

    • First DTSA decision entered, as new trade secrets cases roll in [Ed: Anti-whistleblower law already being put to use]

      The Northern District of California appears to be the first federal court to enter a written decision under the Defend Trade Secret Act.

    • Kanye West’s ‘Famous’ music video: publicity rights vs the First Amendment

      Kanye West’s music video for “Famous” has sparked outrage for portraying naked celebrities in bed, in the form of life-like wax figures. It is not simply the nudity, but the individuals portrayed, which has led to criticism; Rihanna is seen lying next to former boyfriend and abuser, Chris Brown, alleged serial rapist Bill Cosby is featured, as well as Taylor Swift, Anna Wintour and Amber Rose. Subsequent to the release of the video, Kanye tweeted, “Can somebody sue me already #I’llwait” but later deleted it.

    • Copyrights/Culture

      • Think Tank: The Library Of Congress Has Too Many Librarians, So We Should Reject New Nominee To Run It

        When you get quotes like that — especially on the record — for someone retiring from a longstanding job, you know things were bad. And Hayden appears by almost any measure to be perfect for the job. She’s run large libraries, showing that she has the knowledge and administrative skills to run the Library of Congress. She’s also got experience dealing with a variety of policy issues, including ones around surveillance and access to information. I’ve spoken to many people who either know or have worked with Hayden, and I can’t recall ever hearing such levels of praise about anyone.

        But, of course, some are unhappy about this. But with such a supremely qualified nominee, the attacks have been weird and getting weirder. We recently wrote about a laughable complaint that Hayden was “pro-obscenity” because she fought against mandatory porn filters on all computers in libraries. And now someone has pointed out a complaint from Hans von Spakovsky from the Heritage Foundation, claiming that Hayden is unqualified for the position… because she’s a librarian. Really.

Links 1/7/2016: Enlightenment 0.21.0, Peppermint 7, New Mint

Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Google Calendar is down and people are freaking out

    If you depend on Google Calendar to manage your every minute, today isn’t exactly your day.

    Google Calendar went down on Thursday morning, preventing people from accessing their schedules.

  • Science

    • Light Pollution Is Throwing Off the Seasons

      We already know that light pollution has made the Milky Way invisible to one third of humanity. Now researchers have found that it might also be fast-forwarding the arrival of spring in the UK.

      In a study published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers describe how night-time light pollution is causing early budburst—emergence of new leaves on a tree—in four common types of British tree: ash, oak, sycamore and beech. The researchers based their findings on data collected by citizen scientists and satellite imagery giving information on levels of light pollution in areas across the UK.

      “For the last 13 years, a bunch of citizen scientist have been noting the time at which four common tree species come into budburst,”Richard ffrench-Constant, paper co-author and an entomologist at the University of Exeter, told me. “We found that budburst correlates with the amount of artificial light in an area.”

    • Stephen Hawking: Humankind is still greedy, stupid and greatest threat to Earth

      Physicist Stephen Hawking says pollution coupled with human greed and stupidity are still the biggest threats to humankind.

      During an interview on Larry King Now, the science superstar told King that in the six years since he’s spoken with the talk show host people haven’t cleaned up their act.

      “We certainly have not become less greedy or less stupid,” Hawking said. “The population has grown by half a billion since our last meeting, with no end in sight. At this rate, it will be eleven billion by 2100.”

      He noted that the massive problem of pollution has only grown in the last five years.

  • Hardware

    • How Sony, Microsoft, and Other Gadget Makers Violate Federal Warranty Law

      There are big “no trespassing” signs affixed to most of our electronics.

      If you own a gaming console, laptop, or computer, it’s likely you’ve seen one of these warnings in the form of a sticker placed over a screw or a seam: “Warranty void if removed.”

      In addition, big manufacturers such as Sony, Microsoft, and Apple explicitly note or imply in their official agreements that their year-long manufacturer warranties—which entitle you to a replacement or repair if your device is defective—are void if consumers attempt to repair their gadgets or take them to a third party repair professional.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Gun nut mom went back for more bullets before executing daughter

      Police say that Christy Sheats, the gun nut mom who shot dead her two daughters during a family confrontation that spilled into a Texas street, returned inside to reload before executing her child in view of horrified neighbors. She was still shooting when cops arrived, which is why they killed her.

    • Christy Sheats’ Daughters Beg For Their Lives In Chilling 911 Tapes

      The daughters of Texas mom Christy Sheets can be heard begging for their lives in 911 recordings released by police.

      The 42-year-old woman allegedly grabbed a gun and killed them Friday after calling a family meeting.

      In calls from Taylor Sheats, 22, and Madison Sheats, 17, they both can be heard begging their mother to put the gun down. “Please, don’t shoot. Please, I’m sorry. Don’t do it,” one of the young women urges.

      The voice of a man, presumably the girls’ father, Jason Sheats, 45, can be heard saying: “I’m sorry! I promise you whatever you want.”

    • Texas gun advocate shoots and kills her two daughters

      In March, Christy Sheats, 42, wrote on Facebook: “It would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that’s exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semiautomatic weapons.”

    • Islamic Radicalisation Surges In German Jails

      The trial of an Islamic State fighter in Germany has revealed the extent to which Salafists have infiltrated prisons and are radicalising Muslim criminals.

    • High Court grants legal challenge against British arms sales to Saudi Arabia

      British courts could ban the Government from signing off arms sales to Saudi Arabia after the first hurdle to a legal challenge was cleared.

      The High Court on Thursday granted a judicial review into the legality of UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia after a bid by campaigners and lawyers, who say the sales are unlawful.

      MPs on the international development committee and MEPs in the European Parliament earlier this year called on the Government to stop selling weapons to the autocratic petro-state.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • ACLU Files Challenge To CFAA Over Blocking Research Into Discrimination Online

      There’s been a lot of talk lately about the possibility of discrimination being built into the algorithms that determine our lives. In the past year, multiple publications have discussed what happens when algorithms are racist in a time when algorithms decide more and more of our lives. Just recently, we talked about judges using proprietary algorithms in sentencing, and how those algorithms themselves may judge people based on things like skin color. And just a few days ago, there was a fascinating NY Times article about inherent bias in artificial intelligence systems. I even went to a conference recently, where there was a whole discussion on the question of what do you do “if your algorithm is racist.” It’s not an easy question to answer, honestly, but one thing that we should not be doing is holding back research into these systems.

      And yet… that’s exactly what’s happening. And the culprit, once again, is the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA), which we’ve written about for years. The law, which is woefully out of date, and was passed (literally) by a Congress that was freaked out over the movie WarGames, is supposed to target evil “computer hackers.” But it’s written so broadly, including terms like “unauthorized access” or “exceeding authorized access,” that it’s been used against things like violating a terms of service (that you didn’t read or even agree to) or against downloading too many files. And that’s scaring the hell out of researchers.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • These fires are huge, hidden and harmful. What can we do?

      As forest fires devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta, last month, a different sort of fire may have started beneath the ground. Peat, a carbon-rich soil created from partially decomposed, waterlogged vegetation accumulated over several millennia and the stuff that fueled Indonesia’s megafires last fall, also appears in the boreal forests that span Canada, Alaska and Siberia. With the intense heat from the Fort McMurray fires, “there’s a good chance the soil in the area could have been ignited,” says Adam Watts, a fire ecologist at Desert Research Institute in Nevada.

      Unlike the dramatic wildfires near Fort McMurray, peat fires smolder slowly at a low temperature and spread underground, making them difficult to detect, locate and extinguish. They produce little flame and much smoke, which can become a threat to public health as the smoke creeps along the land and chokes nearby villages and cities.

  • Finance

    • With The Brexit In The Bag, ‘Vote Leave’ Starts Vanishing Away Its Promises And Faulty Math

      In the aftermath of what is generally considered to be a Bad Idea, the forces behind the UK’s exit from the European Union has pulled up stakes on its website and shut the whole thing down. The problem is that it looks more like an attempt to bury the past than to warmly greet the future it helped create, as Wired’s Matt Kamen notes.

    • Brexit is great news for the rest of the EU

      Democrats across Europe are in shock over Brexit, when they should be jubilant. That a slim majority of British voters – primarily English and Welsh – have acted against their own short- and long-term economic interests to leave us is a blessing. For decades British governments have played a double game: getting all the benefits of EU membership while opting out of its burdens, in the meantime undermining and even blackmailing the club from within. All of this is now over.

    • Article 50: decoding Donald Tusk’s careful remarks

      So: Prime Minister David Cameron avoided blurting out any notification under Article 50 at yesterday’s European Council meeting.

    • Carney Signals Rate Cuts as Brexit Chaos Engulfs Political Class

      Mark Carney signaled the Bank of England could cut interest rates within months as the central bank tries to shield an economy rattled by the shock of Brexit and the chaos engulfing Britain’s political classes.

    • Stop Giving Chickens Away, Bill Gates

      If you are talking about a short-term food donation to stave off hunger, such as after an earthquake, go ahead, please help. But for any long-term good to come of all this, it must respect the realities of the local market, and it must be sustainable. Free chickens are unlikely to do that.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Leave donor plans new party to replace Ukip – possibly without Farage in charge

      The Brexit campaign’s biggest financial donor has said he is considering backing a new political party taking in members of Ukip, Labour and the Conservatives.

      In a sign that the referendum aftershocks already rocking the Conservative and Labour parties could be spreading to Ukip, the insurance multi-millionaire and Ukip funder Arron Banks criticised the party’s growth and proposed harnessing Brexit support in a new party. When asked if Farage would be in charge, he said the Ukip leader “may have had enough”.

    • ‘Donald Trump’ emails British MP asking for money – receives ‘warm hope’ his ‘repugnant’ campaign will fail

      Glasgow East MP Natalie McGarry also finds it extraordinary that the anti-immigration US billionaire appears to be approaching foreign nationals with his ‘beggging bowl’

    • Burn It All Down

      Unless Lin-Manuel Miranda does a musical of his life, Bernie’s just a footnote in the history books. But the stigma that he won via a set of tricks to include the “superdelegate system,” some election fraud, and overt partisanship by the Democratic National Committee and much of the media, never mind what Obama does with the FBI report into her mishandling of classified information, lingers like the smell of ripe sh*t in a stadium toilet.

    • This is the creepiest thing David Cameron has ever said

      He will say Britons believe in “certain values”, adding: “To belong here is to believe in these things. And it means confronting head-on the poisonous Islamist extremist ideology. Whether they are violent in their means or not, we must make it impossible for the extremists to succeed.”

      It’s expected Cameron will introduce a counter-extremism bill in his Queen’s Speech later in May. Planned measures include introducing new orders to ban extremist organisations and restrict people who seek to radicalise youngsters.

    • Top Clinton aide was “frustrated” with her boss’ e-mail practices

      We already knew that Hillary Clinton’s e-mail and mobile device issues were likely a pain for State Department employees—and even some foreign governments. But new testimony recorded on Tuesday by one of Clinton’s top aides illuminates the extent of those headaches.

      Huma Abedin is the vice-chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign and the former deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to Clinton during her stint as secretary of state. She was deposed on June 28 by an attorney representing the conservative action group Judicial Watch as part of discovery for a lawsuit being brought against Clinton. Judicial Watch published the transcript of that deposition yesterday, and Abedin revealed what she knew about Clinton’s use of the mail server and how she was “frustrated” with the technical glitches caused by Clinton’s mobile device and e-mail travails.

    • Feds ask for 27-month delay in release of Clinton staff emails

      The Obama administration on Thursday asked a federal court to delay until October 2018 the release of 14,000 pages of emails from aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

      In a court filing on Wednesday, administration lawyers said the State Department miscalculated the amount of material it would need to process the documents as part of a lawsuit with the conservative organization Citizens United.

      As a result, the government asked for a 27-month delay to release the emails, which were originally due out on July 21.

      “State deeply regrets these errors, and is working diligently to correct them as quickly as possible,” the lawyers said.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • US courts didn’t reject a single wiretap request in 2015, says report

      The number of wiretaps authorized by the courts in 2015 rocketed compared to the year before, says a new report.

      According to the annual wiretap report released on Thursday, which outlines how many real-time intercept requests were submitted by state and federal law enforcement agencies, the courts allowed 4,148 wiretaps during the last calendar year, up by 17 percent on the year-ago period.

      Most were issued by state courts. The majority of wiretaps were authorized in California, which accounted for 41 percent of all applications.

      New York came in second with 17 percent of wiretaps for the year.

      But not a single wiretap request was rejected during 2015, the report showed.

    • How many US wiretap requests were rejected in 2015? Not a single one.

      A new federal report shows that the number of surveillance requests skyrocketed in 2015, and that courts approved every single one of them. That’s right, not one single wiretap request was rejected during 2015.

      The U.S. government’s annual wiretap report details how many real-time intercept requests were submitted by state and federal law enforcement agencies. The most recent edition of this report, released today, says America’s courts allowed 4,148 wiretaps during the last calendar year, up by 17 percent from the previous year.

      Most of the wiretap requests in the most recent report period were issued by state courts, and California approved the most of all states — a whopping 41% of all applications.

    • A Government Error Just Revealed Snowden Was the Target in the Lavabit Case

      It’s been one of the worst-kept secrets for years: the identity of the person the government was investigating in 2013 when it served the secure email firm Lavabit with a court order demanding help spying on a particular customer.

      Ladar Levison, owner of the now defunct email service, has been forbidden since then, under threat of contempt and possibly jail time, from identifying who the government was investigating. In court documents from the case unsealed in late 2013, all information that could identify the customer was redacted.

    • Lavabit founder confirms feds’ Snowden spy efforts led to encrypted email service shutdown

      Lavabit founder Ladar Levison last week confirmed what had been an open secret: That he shuttered his encrypted email service in 2013 because of the federal government’s pursuit of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

      In a statement issued June 24, Levison said that the gag order that had enforced his silence had been lifted. “After three years, and five separate attempts, the federal judge overseeing the case has granted Mr. Levison permission to speak freely about [the] investigation,” the statement read.

    • Snowden’s email provider confirms it was an investigation target

      It’s a poorly kept secret that officials targeted Lavabit’s secure email service as part of their investigation into Edward Snowden’s leaks. Heck, the US government inadvertently leaked the truth itself. However, a gag order has prevented Lavabit from publicly acknowledging this… until now. In a statement, company founder Ladar Levinson can finally confirm that law enforcement pursued Lavabit in order to access Snowden’s communications. When the investigation began, authorities wanted the provider to hand over an encryption key that would not only expose Snowden, but all 410,000 Lavabit customers. It’s no wonder that Levinson decided to close shop — it’s hard to advertise private email when the feds can theoretically spy on any of your users.

    • Government websites to use HTTPS encryption from October

      GOVERNMENT DIGITAL SERVICES (GDS) websites will use HTTPS encryption from 1 October, according to new security guidelines. And about time too.

      In addition, all services will have to publish a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) policy applicable to their email systems.

    • Leaked FBI documents reveal secret rules for spying on journalists with National Security Letters

      Today, The Intercept published leaked documents that contain the FBI’s secret rules for targeting journalists and sources with National Security Letters (NSLs)—the controversial and unconstitutional warrantless tool the FBI uses to conduct surveillance without any court supervision whatsoever.

    • US efforts to regulate encryption have been flawed, government report finds

      US Republican congressional staff trying to find a middle ground on encryption have said previous efforts to regulate privacy technology were flawed and that lawmakers need to learn more about technology before trying to regulate it, according to a report released on Wednesday.

      The 25-page white paper – entitled Going Dark, Going Forward: A Primer on the Encryption Debate – does not claim any magical solution to the fight over encryption software that has roiled western capitals for more than two years. It was written by Republican staff on the House committee on homeland security, led by representative Michael McCaul, who has proposed a bipartisan top-level panel of encryption experts with senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat.

      But the document remains notable nonetheless for its measured language and criticism of other lawmakers who have tried to legislate their way out of the encryption debate. It also sets a new starting point for Congress as it mulls whether to legislate on encryption during the Clinton or Trump administration.

    • Facebook is chipping away at privacy – and my profile has been exposed

      Quietly, over the last year, Facebook has killed the concept of a private account.

      The site has always had a love-hate relationship with privacy: it’s long offered some of the most granular controls of any social network for choosing who sees what content, letting users make posts visible on a sliding scale from “everyone” to “only me”.

      That’s increasingly important for Facebook, which has seen a reduction of 21% in “original sharing”, users making posts about their own life. As people have become more aware of the downsides of sharing personal details publicly, it seems that they’ve stopped sharing altogether. Letting them have some control over who sees what they post is an important part of restoring trust.

    • Facebook wins privacy case, can track any Belgian it wants

      In a somewhat unexpected twist, Facebook has won a legal battle against Belgium’s data protection authority, which had sought to prevent Facebook from tracking non-Facebook (or not-logged-into-Facebook) users, both on the Facebook website itself but also via the company’s Like and Share buttons that can be found in even the darkest depths of the known universe.

      The Brussels appeals court dismissed the case on Wednesday, saying that the Belgian CPP (Commission for the Protection of Privacy) had no jurisdiction over Facebook, which has its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

      “We are pleased with the court’s decision and look forward to bringing all our services back online for people in Belgium,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

    • Facebook Wins Belgian Court Case Over Storing Non-User Data

      Facebook Inc. won an appeal overturning a Belgian privacy ruling that prompted the social network to block people without an account from accessing its site within the country.

      The Brussels Court of Appeal said the nation’s data protection authority couldn’t prevent Facebook from storing data from non-users in a fight over measures the technology giant says help it combat hacking attacks.

      “Belgian courts don’t have international jurisdiction over Facebook Ireland, where the data concerning Europe is processed,” the Brussels court of appeal said in a ruling Wednesday, referring to the company’s European headquarters. The court also said there was no urgency to rule on the case since Belgian court proceedings only started in mid-2015 over behavior that started in 2012.

    • My Activity Dashboard — How To Know How Much Google Knows About You
    • Google’s My Activity reveals just how much it knows about you

      Google has rolled out new tools to let users see what its ad-tracking service has learned about them, and to let users opt in or out of a new personalised ads service.

      The addition to Google’s account settings, called My Activity, allows users to review everything that Google has tracked about their behaviour – across search, YouTube, Chrome, Android and everything else – and edit or delete it at each step.

      If you use Google for everything you do, you might be surprised by just how much it catalogues about your comings and goings on the internet.

    • Another Terrorist Watchlist Leaks, This One Compiled By Thomson Reuters

      Thomson Reuters’ “global screening solution” pulls from hundreds of other databases, including sanctions lists, law enforcement lists, and compiled data from regulatory agencies. The collection doesn’t cause too many problems in the United States, but as Joseph Cox of Motherboard points out, it’s a bit more a problem when deployed in Europe.

      [...]

      As we’ve seen from other terrorism blacklists, the US government is no better at drawing conclusions or checking its lists for false positives on a regular basis. The fact that Thomson Reuters database pulls from hundreds of sources is probably better than the FBI/DHS method of shrugging people onto terrorist watchlists based on hunches, surnames, or camera ownership. It’s still disturbing that a private entity can control access to various services around the world by selling a watchlist to corporate customers, but there’s no reason to believe this private blacklist is any worse than those compiled by various governments.

    • US Intelligence Agencies To Americans Travelling Abroad: Trust No One, Use Burner Phones, They’re All Out To Get You

      The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has been going through something of an awkward phase the last few years. The Office, which is a part of the White House, and is supposed to direct and coordinate various parts of the intelligence community, has been trying to figure out how to be more open and “transparent” to the public since the Snowden documents began flowing. Given that historically the intelligence community has focused on being as secret as is humanly possible, it’s not very good at this whole transparency thing. And sometimes it’s just really, really awkward. Just try (really) to watch this video it put out on Wednesday, telling US travelers abroad to fear everyone and everything.

    • Encryption thwarting Feds, terrorists going dark … or not, actually

      Despite repeated warnings by the Obama administration over the use of encrypted communications by criminals, the government says that it encountered less encryption last year than in 2014.

      This according to the latest US Courts Wiretap Report on government surveillance requests, which was published this month.

      The report, which logs federal and state wiretap authorizations, finds that law enforcement officials encountered encrypted communications during wiretaps just seven times in 2015, compared to 22 times in 2014.

    • US border control could start asking for your social media accounts

      The US government is proposing making social media accounts part of the visa screening process for entry into the country.

      US Customs and Border Protection’s proposed change would add a line on both the online and paper forms of the visa application form that visitors to the US must fill out if they do not have a visa and are planning on staying for up to 90 days.

      The following question would be added to both the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (Esta) and I-94W forms: “Please enter information associated with your online presence—Provider/Platform—Social media identifier.”

      The information will be optional, for now, but the proposed change published by the US Federal Register states that “collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide Department of Homeland Security (DHS) greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case.”

    • Amazon Dash buttons may get a new brand blitz
    • Here’s What Facebook’s Big New Change Really Means
    • Mobile messaging apps vying for dominance in Asia and beyond
    • App providers ordered to fulfill ’6 obligations
    • China tightens rules for mobile app developers
    • App providers face new data collection regulations in China
    • China issues regulations on mobile APP collection of user data
    • Mobile app developers in China hit with draconian new rules
    • New Regulations Could Make Apple Part of China’s Surveillance and Censorship Machine
    • Alexa does not like when you ask her about the NSA

      Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa is pretty good at answering most questions. But if you ask her if the NSA is monitoring you right now? She turns herself off.

    • Defending Human Rights in a Digital Age
    • Federation Council Approves Controversial Anti-Terrorism Laws

      The upper house of the Russian parliament, the Federation Council (FC), has passed a controversial anti-terrorism legislation package, the Interfax news agency reported Wednesday.

      The laws include far-reaching surveillance initiatives, harsher punishments for inciting or justifying terrorism online, and an increase in the number of crimes with which children aged between 14 and 17 can be charged. The lower house of parliament, the State Duma, approved the laws on June 24.

      Independent Duma Deputy Dmitry Gudkov took to social media to call the vote a “revolution” after five of the 170 council members voted against the legislation. The FC usually passes legislation unanimously.

    • Guy Asks Indian Supreme Court To Ban Encrypted WhatsApp… Because People Plan Raves With It

      And, yes, he also tossed in the “fear! terrorists!” argument as well, because of course. And it’s not just WhatsApp. He also wants a variety of other messaging platforms, such as Telegram, Hike and Viber, banned for using encryption (even though the implementations on many of those platforms is questionable). Of course, we don’t need to go through all the reasons why this is dumb. Strong encryption is much more likely to help protect the private information of the general populace from people looking to do bad things with it than it is to help terrorists in their planning. Could terrorists use it? Yes, just as terrorists can use other neutral, but important technologies for bad purposes. But we don’t go and ban them entirely just because they can be misused.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Donald Trump renews support for waterboarding at Ohio rally: ‘I like it a lot’

      Donald Trump offered renewed support on Tuesday for the use of torture while repeatedly comparing a proposed free trade agreement to rape.

      Trump, who has often praised the use of waterboarding and has spoken positively about alleged war crimes committed by American troops, said at a campaign rally, “We have to fight fire with fire”, after referencing the penchant for beheadings by Isis.

    • Texas Judge Indicted For Making Secret 10-Year Deal With Red Light Camera Company

      The market for red light cameras obviously can’t sustain itself, even with certain legislators drooling over the prospect of installing these revenue generators at every intersection.

      Part of the problem is the technology is still incredibly fallible. Cameras have issued tickets to walls, parked vehicles, and many, many drivers obeying all traffic laws. Millions of dollars of refunds have been paid out by municipalities who once thought they’d have to do nothing more than sit back and let the cash roll in.

      Citizens aren’t fans, so legislators have often pushed these through with a minimum of discussion. Major players in the traffic cam industry lobby hard for placement of their products — sometimes going as far as to engage in good old analog bribery and corruption.

      Officials, both public and private, have been indicted (and convicted) for their participation in the proliferation of traffic cams. Not that the cameras themselves were necessarily illegal, but because the only thing better than an uptick in public funds is an uptick in private funds.

    • Silicon Valley’s Leaky Pipeline Problem

      The latest data point from a Bloomberg analysis reveals that nearly 1,900 U.S. entrepreneurs received venture capital funding for their startups, 2009-2016. Of those, just 141 were women.

      So, then, you have to ask: Which women? Because things are even worse for women of color. A recent report from #ProjectDiane showed that from 2012 to 2014, African American female founders effectively received next to no venture funding. Of the 10,238 funding deals during that period, only 0.2 percent (24, total) went to African American women entrepreneurs.

      What’s happening here? If you believe that entrepreneurial capacity and talent are evenly distributed by gender and race, then why is there this vast difference in how men versus women, versus women of color, are able to tap venture funding?

    • Chagos islanders cannot return home, says Supreme Court

      Former residents of the Chagos Islands who were forcibly removed from their homeland more than 40 years ago have lost their legal challenge to return.

      Families left the Indian Ocean islands in the 1960s and 70s to make way for a US Air Force base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the group of islands.

      An Immigration Order preventing anyone from going back was issued in 1971.

      The Supreme Court – UK’s highest court – upheld a 2008 House of Lords ruling that the exiles could not return.

    • Apostates refused service at Wegmans bakery – fear of invoking offense led to discrimination, says Ex-Muslims of North America

      Wegmans, a chain of 89 grocery stores, refused to bake and decorate a cake for a private celebration for those who have left the faith of Islam.

      The request included a picture of the Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA) name and logo, with a caption of “Congratulations on 3 years!”, but was refused by an associate from the Fairfax branch of the popular chain, stating that the request was “offensive”.

    • Scientology Seeks Captive Converts Via Google Maps, Drug Rehab Centers

      Fake online reviews generated by unscrupulous marketers blanket the Internet these days. Although online review pollution isn’t exactly a hot-button consumer issue, there are plenty of cases in which phony reviews may endanger one’s life or well-being. This is the story about how searching for drug abuse treatment services online could cause concerned loved ones to send their addicted, vulnerable friends or family members straight into the arms of the Church of Scientology.

    • No decision after hearing for UK man accused of hacking FBI, NASA

      After two days of evidence, Lauri Love still does not know whether he will be extradited to the United States.

      In hearings at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, the Judge heard from 15 witnesses for the defence, but none from the prosecution. Lauri Love, 31, of Stradishall, has been accused by the US authorities of hacking into the US Federal Reserve, NASA, the FBI, and the Missile Defence Agency.

      He was first arrested by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) in October 2013 and was released on bail in July 2014. US prosecutors claim that Love’s alleged offences were not politically motivated and were instead designed to “to disrupt the operations and infrastructure of the US government” by stealing classified data and personally identifying information of government and military personnel.

    • Johnny Manziel’s Lawyer Accidentally Texts The AP And Then Threatens To Sue Them If They Report On It

      It’s become common game by many in America and elsewhere to crap on lawyers whenever the opportunity presents itself. This is done unfairly in many cases, with a lack of understanding of what the adversarial nature of our legal system requires of legal advocates. For instance, a lawyer that strongly advocates for a client accused of something terrible isn’t himself or herself terrible. That’s the duty of the job.

      But for one of the lawyers on the staff of Johnny Manziel, the seemingly troubled and frequent guest of the court who was once primarily known as a football player, it appears both that proper lawyer-ing is a bit more difficult than for most and that he’s a bully to boot. As you may have heard, Bob Hinton, who had been tasked with representing Manziel in his domestic abuse court case, accidentally texted the Associated Press information about his attempts to settle the case in a rather unfavorable light with respect to his client.

    • Rhode Island Governor Dumps Revenge Porn Bill In Favor Of Upholding First Amendment

      In an unexpected turn of events, Rhode Island’s governor has chosen the First Amendment over the hot button issue of revenge porn. One of several bad bills recently introduced by legislators (the others being a dreadful CFAA clone and badly-written “cybercrime” bill) is dead, killed by a politician who actually realized the potential damage to free speech it might have caused.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Xbox Fitness Users Shelled Out Big Bucks For Workout Programs They’ll Soon Be Totally Unable To Use

      In late 2013, Microsoft launched Xbox Fitness for the then-new Xbox One. The fitness program leaned heavily on the Kinect motion sensor you’ll recall Microsoft initially and ingeniously forced everybody to buy — even though many users had no interest in the accessory. Xbox Fitness included 30 free training sessions, but also allowed users to pay significantly more for additional workouts, including shelling out $60 for P90X routines, to individual Jillian Michaels videos that cost users $12 each. These users likely assumed that once they bought these workouts, they’d be able to use them indefinitely.

      Those users apparently didn’t get the memo that we no longer own the things we buy.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • African Group Proposes Patents And Health Programme At WIPO

      This week in the World Intellectual Property Organization patent law committee, the African Group submitted an updated proposal for a work programme on patents and health that would help developing countries tailor patent law to their circumstances.

    • US Sees Weak African IP Protection, But Not Enough To Lose Unilateral Trade Benefits

      The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) today (29 June) released its annual report on the eligibility of African nations for unilateral trade benefits offered by the US. While some countries were praised for progress on intellectual property protection, others were found to be weak in this area, but none were removed from eligibility for that reason. Overall, reporting on IP rights varied widely in the report.

    • TAFTA/TTIP Just Got Harder: Brexit Is ‘A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare’ Says EU Trade Commissioner

      After the dramatic and largely unexpected victory of the “Brexit” (Britain Exit) camp in the UK — those who want the country to leave the European Union — politicians around the world are trying to work out what the implications will be. For the UK, of course, it meant an immediate trashing of the UK pound against the US dollar; for the US, it meant the loss of a reliable ally within the EU camp.

      [...]

      As that mentions, trade is one area where the UK played a key role for the US, and its departure from the EU will make negotiations for the TAFTA/TTIP deal, now dragging on into their fourth year, even harder, since the UK was one of the main countries pushing for it. The European Commission is worried: after the results of the Brexit vote were known, the EU’s commissioner for trade, Cecilia Malmström, called it “A midsummer night’s nightmare,” (original in Swedish.)

    • Will the USPTO’s “Patents 4 Patients” Program Even Make It Off the “Cancer Moonshot” Launch Pad?

      Second, in the field of biology specifically, there is considerable debate about whether there are any laws of nature at all. The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis states that there are no laws of biology, since biological relationships are the result of evolutionary forces—random mutations, environmental variables and selection pressures, and multiple functionally equivalent adaptions. As Stephen Gould put it vividly: “evolution is like a videotape that, if replayed over and over, would have a different ending every time.” That a particular sequence of amino acids codes for a specific protein is just as much a result of contingent evolutionary forces as the ability of aspirin to stop headaches: neither was a necessary outcome of the universe. Or to put in the terms overused by the Supreme Court, neither of these are on the level of Einstein’s E=mc2 or Newton’s universal law of gravitation.

    • WIPO Patent Law Committee Adopts Work Programme; Good Omen, Some Say

      World Intellectual Property Organization members attending this week’s patent law committee meeting agreed on a work programme, reflecting divergent views on patents and health, exceptions and limitations, and patent quality.

    • Trademarks

      • You’ll Never Guess Which Portmanteau Everyone Is Suddenly Trying To Trademark

        It had to happen. There was no avoiding it. It’s quite common for individuals, and sometimes even businesses, to surf the wave of a popular news cycle and attempt to translate some story into a trademark to exploit. A good percentage of the time, this is done as something of a short-term squatting attempt, where some word or phrase becomes suddenly popular and someone races to trademark it in order to license or sell it to another entity. Other times, it’s simply done to capitalize on the sudden popularity of a word or phrase directly.

        You already know where this is going. Yes, the “Brexit” trademarks are starting to pour in, almost literally in the case of Sam Adams Boston Lager maker Boston Beer.

      • NRA Trademark Complaint Over Yes Men Parody Takes Down 38,000 Websites

        You may have seen last week a website called ShareTheSafety.org, which was an impressively detailed parody site, pretending to be from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and gunmaker Smith & Wesson about a “buy one, give one” handgun program — where it claimed you’d buy a handgun, and a free handgun would then be sent to an inner city individual “in need” of a gun. The parody was deep and thorough — including setting up another domain, NRApress.org, in order to post a single press release about this program, and which cleverly is designed with actual links to actual NRA press releases and, if you just go to the main domain, it redirects to the NRA’s actual press site. The site definitely fooled a few people, and there were lots of questions popping up on Twitter about whether or not it was real or parody.

        Of course, a day or so after it started spreading, it was revealed that famed pranksters The Yes Men were behind it. They also posted a promo video and a fake press conference announcing the program (the fake press conference being a fairly common Yes Men trope).

    • Copyrights

      • Marrakesh Treaty brought into force by Canada accession

        Canada has become the key 20th nation to accede to the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled. This means the treaty will come into force on September 30, three months after Canada’s accession.

      • WIPO Treaty On Copyright Exceptions For Visually Impaired Enters In Force

        The World Intellectual Property Organization treaty to facilitate access to books in special formats for visually impaired people will enter into effect, as the 20th member state acceded to the treaty today.

        As a result of the accessions, the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled will enter into effect on 30 September 2016, according to sources.

      • Malibu Media Sues Its Former Lawyer Over Missing Funds, Breach Of Bar Rules

        All aboard the schadenfreude express! It appears that when you base your business model on dubious litigation, you also to attract dubious litigators. (See also: Righthaven, Prenda Law.) So, this latest development in the Malibu Media saga — brought to our attention by Sophisticated Jane Doe of Fight Copyright Trolls — is perhaps less surprising than inevitable.

06.29.16

Links 29/6/2016: SteamOS 2.83 Beta, Alpine Linux 3.4.1

Posted in News Roundup at 11:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Glyphosate: one pesticide, many problems

      The latest episode in the glyphosate saga just took place, with the EU’s Health and Food Safety Commissioner, V. Andriukaitis, announcing that the European Commission would extend the current market authorisation of glyphosate by 18 months. [this article is an updated version of the same piece on June 24.]

    • Brexit: Vote Leave wipes NHS £350m claim and rest of its website after EU referendum

      The cached version includes a banner image touting the pledge to ‘give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ – which has already been walked back by Leave supporters

    • Private docs remain popular despite rising fees

      Costs of private doctors’ services have risen much faster than inflation, the newspaper Savon Sanomat reports on Tuesday. However reimbursements by the Social Insurance Institution (Kela) have not risen at the same pace. For instance prices at paediatric receptions rose by more than 23 percent within five years. Nearly one in three Finns visits a private doctor at least once a year.

      Whereas general inflation was around nine percent in the years 2010-15, some doctors’ fees rose by three times that much during the same period.

      The biggest spike, 28 percent, was in psychiatrists’ fees. Other significant price rises were in visits to paediatricians (23.5 percent) as well as to gynaecologists and general practitioners (both 22 percent).

    • Flint water crisis probe costs triple, may hit $5 million

      Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s wide-ranging probe into the Flint water crisis could cost as much as $4.9 million, more than triple the amount allocated by the state in a contract in March, according to a posting on the state Administrative Board website.

      Earlier this year, Schuette received approval from the board to expand the contract to up to $1.5 million, from the original $249,000, with Flood Law, a Royal Oak legal firm. Todd Flood is the lawyer Schuette tapped to head his investigation into whether any state laws were violated in the lead contamination of Flint drinking water, which has led to state and federal emergency declarations and instructions to Flint residents not to drink tap water without using a lead filter.

  • Security

    • Security Analysis of TSA PreCheck

      The Transportation Security Administration’s PreCheck program is risk-based screening that allows passengers assessed as low risk to be directed to expedited, or PreCheck, screening. We begin by modelling the overall system of aviation security by considering all layers of security designed to deter or disrupt a terrorist plot to down an airliner with a passenger-borne bomb. Our analysis suggests that these measures reduce the risk of such an attack by at least 98%. Assuming that the accuracy of Secure Flight may be less than 100% when identifying low and high risk passengers, we then assess the effect of enhanced and expedited (or regular and PreCheck) screening on deterrence and disruption rates. We also evaluate programs that randomly redirect passengers from the PreCheck to the regular lines (random exclusion) and ones that redirect some passengers from regular to PreCheck lines (managed inclusion). We find that, if 50% of passengers are cleared for PreCheck, the additional risk reduction (benefit) due to PreCheck is 0.021% for attacks by lone wolves, and 0.056% for ones by terrorist organisations. If 75% of passengers rather than 50% go through PreCheck, these numbers are 0.017% and 0.044%, still providing a benefit in risk reduction. Under most realistic combinations of parameter values PreCheck actually increases risk reduction, perhaps up to 1%, while under the worst assumptions, it lowers risk reduction only by some 0.1%. Extensive sensitivity analyses suggests that, overall, PreCheck is most likely to have an increase in overall benefit.

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Tuesday’s security advisories
    • The future of security
    • Prepare to be hacked: Information security for small organizations

      Information security is challenging, and can be breathtakingly expensive in money and staff energy. Smaller organizations may not have the money or staffing expertise to do the job right, even when the need is the greatest. At OSCON 2016, Kelsey Gilmore-Innis of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI) gave a really interesting talk on how her small nonprofit has done some creative thinking about security, and how that influences the deployment and operation of their application.

    • DDoS Attack Powered by 25,000 CCTV Cameras

      Security researchers have revealed a unique new DDoS attack launched against a small business, which was powered entirely by thousands of compromised CCTV units.

      Sucuri founder Daniel Cid explained in a blog post that 25,513 IP addresses were spotted, with a plurality in Taiwan (24%), the US (12%) and Indonesia (9%) – although they spread out over 105 countries in total.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Tony Blair responds to war criminal claims with astonishing attack on Jeremy Corbyn

      Jeremy Corbyn represents the “politics of protest” and is standing by while people are “bombed, beaten and starved into submission” in Syria, Tony Blair has said, in his most vehement attack on the Labour leader yet.

    • Moment Istanbul airport attacker is shot before detonating suicide bomb

      A triple suicide bombing and gun attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport has killed at least 36 people, including foreigners, with Turkey’s prime minister saying early signs pointed to an assault by the Islamic State group.

      The attackers began spraying bullets at the international terminal entrance before blowing themselves up at around 10.00 pm local time on Tuesday, Turkish authorities said.

      It is the deadliest of four attacks to rock Turkey’s biggest city this year, with two others blamed on Isil and another claimed by a militant Kurdish group.

      Though there was no immediate claim of responsibility for Tuesday’s carnage, “the evidence points to Daesh,” Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told journalists at the scene, using another name for the jihadists.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • This Could Be the Biggest Threat To Our Climate If We Don’t Act Fast

      When you think “peatland,” you probably picture water, or mosquitoes, or creepily preserved human artifacts. What most of us don’t consider are catastrophic wildfires—but that’s precisely what scientists are now worried about when it comes to one of the most carbon-rich ecosystems on Earth.

      Mike Waddington is a forest ecologist at McMaster University in Ontario. He’s been studying the peatlands that pepper the Canadian boreal forest for going on thirty years, and he’s begun to notice an alarming trend. When peatlands that have been drained by humans for forestry or mining catch on fire, they burn like crazy, eating through meters of carbon-rich soil over the course of months.

      “I always tell people to think about the fire swamp from Princess Bride,” Waddington told Gizmodo. “Peat fires are very difficult to put out because they just keep smoldering down into the soil.”

  • Finance

    • Scottish MEP receives standing ovation in European Parliament after passionate speech saying Scotland ‘voted to remain’

      A Scottish MEP has received a lengthy standing ovation from hundreds of members of the European Parliament after asking members “not to let Scotland down”.

      Alyn Smith, from the Scottish National Party (SNP), addressed a special session on the Brexit in Brussels moments after Nigel Farage hailed Britain’s “independence day”.

    • The 2016 Abolition Act

      I think it is time for parliamentary democracy to re-establish itself, and this legislation will be just the thing to bring sense back to British politics.

    • Trump vows to reopen, or toss, NAFTA pact with Canada and Mexico

      Trump criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement as a U.S. job killer, saying he would be willing to scrap the pact if Canada and Mexico were unwilling to budge. He also tried to link Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to the deal on the eve of a meeting in Ottawa of the “three amigos,” the leaders of the three NAFTA signatories: the United States, Mexico and Canada.

    • Trump Plans To Ruin USA

      I imagine Canadian trade with Mexico will do really well if USA agrees to stop trading with both of us, although we may have to trade by sea.

    • Democratic Party Platform Committee Undermines Clinton On TPP

      The Democratic party’s elites must not think that trade and jobs will be big issues in the coming election. Apparently, they’ve never listened to a Donald Trump speech, and didn’t notice that working-class people in the United Kingdom just voted to “brexit” from the European Union (EU) over these issues.

      The Democratic platform writing committee has voted not to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), with the pro-TPP majority saying that doing so would undercut President Obama’s efforts to pass the agreement.

    • Hillary Clinton Hints at Giant, Trump-Like Giveaway to Corporate America

      Hillary Clinton gave a big speech in Raleigh on her plans for the economy on June 22. It was full of Bernie Sanders-like rhetoric about “outrageous behavior” by business and Wall Street.

      But it also included a dog whistle that only huge multinational corporations would hear, telling them that she plans to deliver on one of their greatest dreams and slash their longterm taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars.

    • JP Morgan says Scottish independence, new currency now its ‘base case’

      U.S. bank JP Morgan said on Wednesday it now expects Scotland to vote for independence and introduce its own currency before Britain leaves the European Union in 2019.

      “Our base case is that Scotland will vote for independence and institute a new currency at that point (2019),” JP Morgan economist Malcolm Barr said in a note to clients on Wednesday.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Angela Eagle’s Local Party Has Backed Jeremy Corbyn

      Angela Eagle’s local Labour party has come out in support of Jeremy Corbyn, HuffPost UK can reveal.

      The chair and secretary of Wallasey constituency Labour party have written to express their backing for the leader.

      Kathy Miller and Kathy Runswick said that their local party had decided at their annual meeting on Friday to urge their MP to oppose the ‘motion of no confidence’ in Corbyn.

      MPs voted by 81% today to back the motion and Eagle, the former Business Secretary, is expected to announce she will stand in a leadership contest.

    • Bernie Sanders influences the Democratic Party platform — with some limits

      Over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee began drafting the party’s official policy platform, which will be rolled out next month at the organization’s national convention in Philadelphia. Though it’s virtually impossible that Sen. Bernie Sanders would become the Democratic nominee, he’ll still have a big influence on the party’s agenda going forward.

    • Scalia’s Lurch to the Left–and Other New York Times Pipe Dreams

      That’s the message of a chart that takes up a good chunk of some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world, the top half of the front page of the New York Times (6/28/16). Looking at the chart, you can see that just about every justice has moved to the left over time: Of the Democratic appointees, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Bryer are all well to the left of where they were when they were appointed; only Elena Kagan is more or less where she started out.

    • Another Media Setup?

      This picture has been all over twitter, promoted by every high level Blairite you can think of, from JK Rowling down. Yet all may not be what it seems.

    • Brexit: Who governs Britain? This is the UK’s new 10-party system

      Who governs Britain? Farage? Boris? Gove? Cameron? May? Sturgeon? Corbyn? Corbyn’s critics? Never have so many actors mattered and so few had any actual power.

      In the wake of Brexit, the old party divisions no longer apply. Britain is now a ten-party system, with the major parties cleaved in two between leavers and remainers.

      Using data from YouGov, who have reweighted their final EU referendum poll to reflect Thursday’s 52:48 vote for Brexit, we can discover the proportion of each party’s supporters who voted for leave or remain.

      And if we take the vote shares for each party at last year’s general election (the latest polls suggest similar shares), we can see where power really lies.

    • Donor promised to make Clinton ‘look good’ if appointed to board

      A major Democratic donor personally lobbied then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office for a seat on a sensitive government intelligence board, telling one of her closest aides that if appointed he would make Clinton “look good.”

      Rajiv Fernando acknowledged that he may not have the experience to sit on a board that would allow him the highest levels of top-secret access, but he assured deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin in newly released 2009 emails that he was talking to two professors who were “getting me up to speed on the academics behind the field.”

      Fernando, who contributed to Clinton, her family’s foundation and Barack Obama, described himself as one of “Hillary’s people” and mentioned that he recently had sent an ailing Clinton flowers to wish her a speedy recovery.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Twitter Deletes SCOTUSblog Twitter Account Briefly Thinking Its Running Of The Trolls Meant It Was Hacked

      We’ve mentioned and linked to the wonderful SCOTUSblog many times in the past, and have even mentioned its annual running of the trolls, in which the site’s Twitter account responds sarcastically to people who think that it is the Supreme Court’s twitter account, rather than a blog of some journalists and lawyers covering the court. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the Supreme Court doesn’t have its own Twitter feed, combined with Twitter’s eagerness to suggest alternate accounts when people are assuming SCOTUS must have a Twitter feed. But, really, a big part of the problem is people tweeting inane things at SCOTUSblog without realizing it’s not SCOTUS.

    • Twitter debacle

      Today we had our annual running of the trolls — wherein we respond to people who direct mostly hateful and sometimes cute things to our @SCOTUSblog account, thinking it is the official Twitter account of the Supreme Court. We’ve done this for several Terms without incident. But this Term, Twitter — probably through some automated system — decided that our account had been hacked. So it kicked us out of our account — thinking we were the hackers — and then blocked all the tweets, so they have disappeared. We’re trying to get our account back — so far without success. But for posterity, and for those who thought we had deleted the tweets ourselves, here are some screen shots captured from our Twitter followers (many others are blocked by Twitter so even retweets don’t show them):

    • Will Murdoch’s new media outlet bow to UAE’s censorship rules?

      Have you heard of Vice Media? Rupert Murdoch has – in 2013 he called the internet and print publishing upstart a “wild interesting effort to interest millennials” and a “global success.” Not long after, he bought a five per cent stake in what is known as the “hipsters bible”, and his son, James, now sits on its board. The company, which runs dozens of websites and magazines, is said to be at least as valuable as the New York Times.

      Last week it was announced that Vice is moving into the Middle East with a major new partnership with Moby Group, an Afghan media company which has also been a long-term collaborator. Together, the companies hope to bring the Vice brand to much of the Arab world, including all the Gulf Cooperation Council states, Jordan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and Algeria as well as to Afghanistan.

    • Artist Updates Ancient Indian Erotica To Show Just How Messed Up Censorship Is

      The Khajuraho temples are a group of Hindu and Jain holy shrines built between 950 and 1050 in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Although 85 were originally built, only 22 remain today.

      The holy structures are known for housing an extensive array of erotic images — from Kamasutra-style entangled sex positions to sculptures of curvaceous, nude women celebrating their sensual forms. The temples even included some wonderfully nasty depictions of orgies and bestiality.

    • S. African broadcaster in censorship battle

      A simmering row at public broadcaster SABC could soon boil over into renewed protests. Just weeks before crucial polls, journalists, civil society, and trade unions accuse SABC of political meddling and censorship.

    • Allegations of censorship at SABC

      There are no issues within the SABC according to its Chief Operating Officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng – despite the public broadcaster having decided to censor public protest visuals on television.

      For the past few weeks, the SABC’s decision not to show footage of violent service delivery protests has raised some concern. The media believe that the broadcaster is engaging in censorship, but Motsoeneng has denied it. According to him, censorship is English, and he added that he doesn’t know what it is.

    • Behave or go, says Hlaudi

      Controversial SABC boss Hlaudi Motsoeneng has effectively told frightened employees to make peace with being dutiful lapdogs or walk out.

      Motsoeneng, the chief operating officer, allegedly made these remarks during a staff meeting at the SABC headquarters in Auckland Park, Joburg, on Tuesday.

    • We welcome Matthews’s decision to resign – NUMSA

      The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) strongly condemns the suspension of three South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) journalists – economics editor, Thandeka Gqubule, Radio Sonder Grense executive producer Foeta Krige and senior journalist Suna Venter – for the “offence” of questioning the ban on visual coverage of protests, in particular a protest against censorship at the public broadcaster itself.

    • These brave SABC employees have publicly spoken out against Hlaudi

      The recent editorial shakeup that has been taking place at the SABC is a very serious issue, with the media freedom of the public institution being threatened. Journalists have been censored by the banning of showing violent protest and the threat of suspension and dismissal hanging over their heads. However through all this, there have been a number of brave journalists from the SABC who have spoken out against Hlaudi Motsoeneng and the recent editorial decisions being made at the public broadcaster.

    • Journalists mutiny over SABC censorship

      South Africa’s public broadcaster is battling to quell a journalist revolt over censorship of programmes that portrayed the government in a negative light and its ban on screening footage of protesters destroying property because it didn’t want to encourage violence.

    • ACLJ Demands Answers, Files FOIA Request to Expose Obama Administration’s Censorship of Jihadist’s 911 Transcript
    • ACLJ Files FOIA Lawsuit Against Obama Administration, Seeks Records on Iran Negotiation Cover-up
  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Facebook Privacy Status Hoax Is Back To Fool You. Don’t Fall For It.

      Facebook privacy hoax status update is back to fool you. Before going into the details, let me tell you one thing — DON’T fall for this hoax and copy-paste some privacy message on your wall. You are in full control of your Facebook content and you can take a privacy checkup anytime to confirm it.

    • Facebook backtracks, saying it isn’t stalking you to recommend friends

      SOCIAL ADVERTISING PORTAL Facebook has made a dramatic U-turn. Despite confirming to The INQUIRER on Tuesday that the site tracks your location to recommend new friends, the firm has since changed its mind and said that it’s not.

      News broke this week, courtesy of news site Fusion, that Facebook has been taking it on itself to recommend hooking up with people in the same area. People did this organically in the old days by meeting or speaking.

      The report said that the privacy-unaware company has already exposed a couple of concerned parents and identified them following a hook-up at an anonymous help session.

    • Facebook’s Flip-Flop: Is It a Law Enforcement Thing?

      One part of this comment is easy: Facebook is not using locations you mark for yourself (so if I said I was in Grand Rapids, they wouldn’t use that to find new Grand Rapids friends for me). But it’s not really clear what they mean by “device location.” Determined by what? GPS? Cell tower? IP location? Wifi hotspot colocation?

      Which got me thinking about the way that federal law enforcement (in both the criminal and FISA context, apparently) are obtaining location data from social media as a way to tie physical location to social media activity.

    • Snowden: Norway gives no guarantees

      Norway can issue no guarantee that Edward Snowden will not be extradited to the US, should he visit the country. This a Norwegian court decided Monday. The court argues that such guarantees can not be given when it comes to someone who is not presently inside the country.

    • India goes from village to village to compile world’s biggest ID database

      The digital revolution arrives in remote Indian villages such as Akbarpur by communication methods old and new: a WhatsApp message buzzes through to the village chief; he notifies his fellows via megaphone.

      The world’s biggest biometric ID programme is coming to town.

      The next day, two men arrive at the village in Palwal district, Haryana state, with devices the residents have never seen: an iris scanner, a fingerprint machine, a camera and laptop. They are here to register the people of Akbarpur.

    • People Can’t Tell What Apps Use Encryption, And Don’t Really Care, Study Finds

      Is your messaging app using encryption? And, actually, do you even care about that?

      Even though people have more choices than ever when using mobile messaging apps billed as secure and private, and surveillance and encryption have been steadily in the news for the last few years, some consumers don’t seem to really grasp what an encrypted app actually is, and they might not really care that much, according to a new study.

      [...]

      The researchers conducted the study trying to figure out how much users, both security experts and regular people, cared about security and privacy when choosing and using messaging apps.

      As it turns out, when choosing apps, the main motivation is whether other people, mainly “friends,” use it, not whether it’s secure or private, according to the study.

      [...]

      Another participant said he or she stopped using an (unnamed) app after news of a privacy incident, switching to a more secure alternative. But eventually, he or she had to go back to the original messenger because it’s “too dominant” among his friends.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • US Suddenly Discovers Why Supranational Tribunals Are A Problem, Just As It Starts Losing In Them

      As the article explains, that’s not going down too well with other WTO members, including Brazil, the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, who are traditionally allies of the US in trade matters. So what exactly has Chang done to incur the wrath of the US?

    • White Supremacists Are Met With Rocks in Sacramento and Scorn in Newcastle

      As my colleague Glenn Greenwald argues, it is too simple to suggest that last week’s rejection of the European Union by more than half of the British electorate, like Donald Trump’s victory in the Republic primary, can be explained by dismissing the voters as racists.

      In both countries, and across the Western world, xenophobic bigots who pin the blame on foreigners, and promise to restore prosperity by walling us off into ethnic-nationalist enclaves, have grown in prominence only after decades of failure by the traditional parties of left and right to find solutions for the suffering caused by the globalization.

      At the same time, however, it seems clear that the rhetoric of the referendum campaign in Britain, like Trump’s demonization of Mexican and Muslim immigrants, has emboldened the white supremacist fringe in ways too dangerous to ignore.

      As the British historian Victoria Stiles observed, the referendum result, which has been followed by a 57 percent spike in reported hate crimes, seems to have encouraged the kind of public displays of racism in Britain that make physical assaults more likely.

    • A Week in the Life of the American Police State

      Not content with merely spying on our emails and phone calls, the NSA wants to spy on thermostats, refrigerators, and pacemakers.

    • Canadian jailed in Iran over ‘feminism and security’ issues

      A Montreal-based university professor being held in an Iranian jail is being investigated for ‘dabbling in feminism and security matters,’ according to her family.

      Homa Hoodfar’s niece, Amanda Ghahremani, said the Tehran public prosecutor made a statement to Iranian media on the case on Friday.

      Ghahremani said the family doesn’t know whether Hoodfar has been charged with a crime.

      She said the prosecutor’s statement was the first indication of why the 65-year-old professor has been held in Iran’s notorious Evin prison since her arrest on June 6.

      “We’re very concerned that we have no news from her, that the family hasn’t been able to see her, that the lawyer hasn’t been able to see her, and we don’t know her mental state, her health, or the conditions of her detention,” Ghahremani told The Canadian Press.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Europe’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules Fail to Ban BitTorrent Throttling

      After years of negotiating Europe has agreed on a set of Net Neutrality rules. While the legislation is a step forward for some countries, experts and activists warn that it may leave the door open for BitTorrent and VPN throttling. With the “EU Slowdown” campaign that launches today, they encourage the public to have their voice heard to improve the current rules.

    • Why ISPs’ fight against net neutrality probably won’t reach Supreme Court

      The US appeals court decision upholding the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules wasn’t quite the final word on the matter, as ISPs immediately vowed to appeal the ruling, with AT&T saying it “expect[s] this issue to be decided by the Supreme Court.”

      But while ISPs will give it their best shot, there are reasons to think that the Supreme Court won’t take up the case. The appeal probably won’t even make it to a rehearing by the full appeals court, a potential intermediate step before a Supreme Court case, legal expert Andrew Jay Schwartzman wrote last week in a Benton Foundation article titled, “Network Neutrality: Now What?” Schwartzman is a Georgetown Law lecturer, an attorney who specializes in media and telecommunications policy, and a longtime consumer advocate who previously led the Media Access Project.

  • DRM

    • Netflix hurt by Australian competitors and VPN blocking

      The news of explosive SVOD growth in Australia over the past year has not been good for the global market leader Netflix which finds that two well-resourced local competitors are nipping at its heels, while it appears to have cut off its nose to spite its face by blocking access to its big differentiator.

      As reported in iTWire this week, SVOD subscriptions would have grown by almost 900,000 during the 12 months to the end of June 2016.

      However, the main beneficiaries of that growth have been local players Stan (jointly owned by Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media) and Presto (jointly owned by Foxtel and Seven West Media).

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • A Comprehensive And Fair Solution To The Price Of Medicines

      Marie-Paule Kieny, World Health Organization Assistant Director-General, Health Systems and Innovation, writes: Amid public outcry, political battles and media articles, no one seems to understand how, exactly, medicines prices are set. For years, pharmaceutical research companies have cited the large investment of time and resources that go into bringing a drug to market. More recently, they argue that their medicines are actually saving money by preventing expensive medical interventions like surgery and hospitalization.

      But whatever the argument used, the price setting mechanisms for commodities that are inextricably linked to people’s health and survival must be made more transparent so that we can, as a global community, devise effective solutions.

    • Embassy In London Under Siege, IP A ‘Neo-Liberal Pillar’, Ecuador Minister Says

      Guillaume Long, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility of Ecuador, who was fresh from a three-day visit to the UN in Geneva with several meetings, including with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said during a press briefing that he paid a visit to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on 19 June in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, on the 4th anniversary of his taking refuge in the embassy.

      Four years ago, Long said, Julian Assange walked into the embassy and asked for asylum. After two months of studying his request, Ecuador decided to grant Assange asylum on human rights grounds, Long said, in particular because there were fears of significant political persecution of Assange, he said.

      In particular, Ecuador was unable to obtain a guarantee that Assange would not be extradited to a third country, he said. Ecuador is not seeking to interfere with the Swedish judicial system but have been told by the United Kingdom government that it can neither confirm nor deny that Assange would be extradited.

      [...]

      On a separate issue, access to health and access to medicines are pillars of Ecuadoran policy, Long said today, answering a question from Intellectual Property Watch on the leading role that Ecuador has said it wanted to have in the management of intellectual property policy. In particular, Ecuador has issued a number of compulsory licences, allowing the production of generic versions of expensive brand name drugs.

      When criteria for compulsory licences are met, Ecuador will carry on issuing compulsory licences when the country has to do so. “We are in the confines of the WTO [World Trade Organization] and other bodies,” he said, as he underlined the country’s “progressive approach to IP.”

      “Intellectual property is the new free trade agenda, the new neo-liberal pillar,” he said. In most trade agreements, “intellectual property is massive.”

      “We are in a knowledge economy and a science and technology age, and a patenting age,” he added.

      Unfortunately, since the 1980s, he said, patenting has become much more recurrent and more lenient. There is a greater privatisation of knowledge which affects countries that are low producers of knowledge and do not have an innovation economy, he said.

      The more knowledge circulates, the more it becomes a public good, and the more innovation you can have, he explained. Although intellectual property is legitimate, the right balance should be struck, he said.

    • Copyrights

      • Two Judges Punch Holes In Copyright Trolls’ Claims That An IP Address Is The Same Thing As A Person

        Fight Copyright Trolls has tracked down two more court decisions that reach an obvious conclusion: an IP address is not a person. In both cases, the normal trolling tactics were used: legal threats against alleged infringers, based on nothing more than IP addresses. In the first case, New Jersey Judge Kevin McNulty disagreed with Malibu Media’s request for default judgment, pointing out that the limited info it was working with could not rule out a successful defense being raised by the accused infringer.

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