Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• 5 Things To Expect From The World Of Linux In 2017

  Linux has come out of oblivion to become a mainstream technology today – making its presence felt in the world of marketing, finance, operations and in every other domain. The New Year 2017, should hold promise for Linux, as Bryan Lunduke said recently. There will be some crucial outcomes of the Linux Foundation-Microsoft partnership as well, which made waves in the tech circles the world over. From the predictions available, there will be increased focus on some areas, while the others will witness a lot of trial and error, and even predictive failure, for that matter.

• Desktop

  • The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

    Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.

    The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

• Server

  • Docker 1.13.0 Just Around the Corner as Docker 1.12.4 Enters Development

    Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.

    The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it’s tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

  • Pet Containers: You’re Not Doing it Wrong

    The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

  • Best Open Source Hosting Control Panels

    Most website owners use web hosting control panels to manage their hosting environment. The fact is, the control panel facilitates the server administration and allows users to manage multiple websites without hiring an expert. Today, with so many options available, you don’t have to be a command line guru in order to host a simple website. All you need is a server and a web hosting control panel. There are paid control panels like WHM/cPanel or DirectAdmin which are very powerful, but if you don’t like to pay for a control panel you can simply choose one of the open source alternatives. In this guide, we will present to you some of the most popular open source hosting control panels.

  • ZEPL Announces $4.1M Funding to Accelerate Innovation and Adoption of Apache Zeppelin For End-to-End Analytics Workflow

  • Apache Zeppelin Gets Commercial Backing from ZEPL

    NFlabs rebrands as ZEPL and announces $4.1M in funding in support of open-source Apache Zeppelin data analytics project.

    The open-source Apache Zeppelin project is an increasingly popular, web-based notebook for interactive data analytics that directly integrates with the Apache Spark project for Big Data analytics. Among the commercial backers of Zeppelin is ZEPL, formerly known as NFLabs. On December 8, the newly branded ZEPL announced that it has raised $4.1 million in an initial funding round.

    The funding round was led by Vertex Ventures and it included the participation of Translink Capital, Specialized Types and Big Basin Capital. The funding is set to be used to help ZEPL build a successful business model. Sejun Ra, co-founder and CEO at ZEPL said that the plan for the new money to help his company build and develop a single platform for end-to-end data analytics workflow.

  • New Amazon Web Services Region Opens in Canada

    Amazon launches AWS Canada (Central) Region in Montreal, extending Amazon’s cloud infrastructure to 15 regions and 40 availability zones around the world.

    At long last, the cloud is coming to Canada. Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced on December 8, the official launch of the new AWS Canada (Central) Region, providing cloud infrastructure from data centers in Montreal, Quebec. The new AWS region is set to help serve customers in Canada with Amazon already highlighting a number of well-known organizations including National Bank of Canada, Porter Airlines and clothing retailer Lululemon.

  • MEF, TM Forum Unite With Open Source Groups on Network Vision

    MEF Thursday announced the release of a new white paper – “An Industry Initiative For Third Generation Network and Services“ – spearheaded by MEF and co-authored by ON.Lab, ONOS, OPEN-O, OpenDaylight (ODL), the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), and TM Forum. The white paper describes an industry vision for the evolution and transformation of network connectivity services and the networks used to deliver them. MEF refers to this vision as the “Third Network,” which combines the agility and ubiquity of the Internet with the performance and security of CE 2.0 (Carrier Ethernet 2.0) networks.

  • The New Role of Assurance for Virtualized Networks

    For as long as any of us can remember, fulfillment and assurance were two independent processes, mostly because they were conceived, operated and purchased by separate departments. As Alfred D. Chandler demonstrated in his classic book “Strategy and Structure,” operations and even business structure follow organizational charts and vice-versa. Fulfillment and assurance are no exceptions, with those organizations driving processes and supporting software purchases. While many know that its not ideal, the situation has mostly worked.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 4.8.13

    I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.13 kernel.

    All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.

    The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at:
    git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

    http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

  • Linux 4.4.37

  • Linux Kernel 4.4.37 LTS Is a Minor Patch with AArch64 Changes, Updated Drivers

  • Linux Kernel 4.8.13 Launches with ARM64 and AMDGPU Improvements, KVM Fixes

    A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.

    While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it’s not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week’s Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

  • Linux Foundation adds an open source networking specialist to the team

    In recognition of the increasingly central role open source technology has played for the networking sector, the Linux Foundation today named Arpit Joshipura as its general manager for networking and orchestration.

    Joshipura, a veteran tech executive who has worked at Dell, Ericsson, and Nortel, among others, is considered by the organization to be a foundational contributor to open source software in general and networking in particular. Currently, he’s the chief marketing officer for Prevoty, an application security startup in Los Angeles.

  • The Linux Foundation Appoints Veteran Networking Professional as General Manager, Networking & Orchestration

  • Three serious Linux kernel security holes patched

    The good news is developers are looking very closely at Linux’s core code for possible security holes. The bad news is they’re finding them.

    At least the best news is that they’re fixing them as soon as they’re uncovered.

    The latest three kernel vulnerabilities are designated CVE-2016-8655, CVE-2016-6480, and CVE-2016-6828. Of these, CVE-2016-8655 is the worst of the bunch. It enables local users, which can include remote users with virtual and cloud-based Linux instances, to crash the system or run arbitrary code as root.

  • At Long Last, Linux Gets Dynamic Tracing

    When the Linux kernel version 4.9 will be released next week, it will come with the last pieces needed to offer to some long-awaited dynamic thread-tracing capabilities.

    As the keepers of monitoring and debugging software start using these new kernel calls, some of which have been added to the Linux kernel over the last two years, they will be able to offer much more nuanced, and easier to deploy, system performance tools, noted Brendan Gregg, a Netflix performance systems engineer and author of DTrace Tools, in a presentation at the USENIX LISA 2016 conference, taking place this week in Boston.

  • It’s Been A Quiet Year-End For BUS1, The Proposed In-Kernel IPC For Linux

    With the Linux 4.10 kernel merge window expected to open this weekend, I was digging around to see whether there was anything new on the BUS1 front and whether we might see it for the next kernel cycle.

    While I have yet to see any official communication from the BUS1 developers, it doesn’t look like it’s happening for BUS1. In fact, it’s been a rather quiet past few weeks for these developers working on this in-kernel IPC mechanism to succeed the never-merged KDBUS.

  • Intel Working On 5-Level Paging To Increase Linux Virtual/Physical Address Space

  • IBM building blockchain ecosystem

    IBM believes blockchain technology, with its capability to create an essentially immutable ledger of digital events, will alter the way whole industries conduct transactions. To make that happen, Big Blue asserts, requires a complete ecosystem of industry players working together.

    To that end, IBM today said it is building a blockchain ecosystem, complete with a revenue sharing program, to accelerate the growth of networks on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric. IBM envisions the ecosystem as an open environment that allows organizations to collaborate using the Hyperledger Fabric.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Mesa 13 Lands In Fedora 25

      While it was disappointing that Fedora 25 shipped with Mesa 12.0, the Mesa 13.0 version has now been sent down as a stable release update.

    • Stable Mesa PPA Offers Latest Drivers on Ubuntu

      Games company Feral Interactive’s call for a PPA be set up to offer the latest Stable Mesa drivers on Ubuntu has been semi-answered. Emphasis on semi, there. As noted by Gaming on Linux, a new stable Mesa PPA is now available — hurrah — but it is not “official” in the way that the stress-tested Nvidia drivers PPA is — boo.

    • Ubuntu now has a community-built PPA for stable versions of Mesa

      Feral Interactive’s call for a stable Mesa PPA has already made progress, as there’s now a stable PPA available for Mesa.

      Paulo Dias “Padoka” has setup another PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/pkppa

      Note: This is a community-run PPA, so it’s possible it may someday go out of date and/or have issues at times.

      This is likely a stop-gap measure until something more official is done.

      It currently hosts Mesa 13.0.2 and LLVM 3.9 along with RADV and ANV the AMD and Intel open source Vulkan drivers.

    • Linux Kernel Developers Discuss Dropping FBDEV Staging Drivers

      Toward the end of November was a discussion that started about potentially dropping all of the FBDEV Linux kernel drivers that are currently in the staging area, but it doesn’t look like that will go through, at least until the relevant hardware has seen basic DRM driver ports.

    • David Airlie Preps Latest Round Of RADV Radeon Vulkan Patches

    • MXSFB DRM Driver Merged Ahead Of Linux 4.10

    • AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 Rolls Out With Southern Islands Support, FreeSync

    • AMD Seeking Comments On DC/DAL Code, Wants To Land It Soon For Future GPU Support

    • AMD Rolls Out AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 Graphics Driver for Linux to Support More GPUs

      Today, December 8, 2016, AMD announced the general availability for download of the latest AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 proprietary graphics driver for Linux-based operating systems.

      Shipping with FreeSync support and DirectGMA for OpenGL, the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 graphics driver provides support for some GNC 1.0 GPUs from the Southern Islands series, namely AMD Radeon R7 M465X, AMD Radeon R7 M370, and AMD Radeon R7 M350.

      Additionally, the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 graphics driver includes install scripts for the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, CentOS 7.3, CentOS 6.8, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 Service Pack 2, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 2 operating systems.

    • AMD strengthens gaming and VR on Linux with graphics improvements

      Windows is the indisputable platform of choice for gaming and VR, but Linux is catching up fast as graphics companies ramp up driver and hardware support for the OS.

      AMD is showing more love for Linux than ever before. The company on Thursday announced some hardware and driver updates that will strengthen gaming and VR on the OS.

      The biggest news is AMD’s support for FreeSync on Linux PCs. FreeSync can improve the rendition of games and high-definition video by allowing GPUs to communicate directly with displays, reducing image stutter and lag time. Images are drawn up on the screen while they are being rendered in GPUs.

    • Vulkan/OpenGL Performance With AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 vs. Mesa 13.1-dev

      This morning’s AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

    • Here Is The AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 Download Link

      AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it’s now available for download from AMD.

      This page has the 16.50 Linux x86/x86_64 driver available for download.

    • It Looks Like AMDGPU DC (DAL) Will Not Be Accepted In The Linux Kernel

      While AMD developers have been working to improve their “DAL” (now known as “DC”) display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it’s still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.

    • AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 actually released, with FreeSync and wider GPU support

    • AMD’s ARM Efforts Appear Stalled, But At Least Zen Should Be Great

    • AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 vs. Mesa 13.1-dev + Linux 4.9 Radeon OpenGL

      For those curious how the latest open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver code is comparing to yesterday’s AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 release, here are some fresh OpenGL Linux driver benchmarks from a few AMD graphics cards.

    • AMD’s GPUOpen Open Capture and Analytics Tool (OCAT) For Linux?

      Announced alongside the AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition driver debut on Thursday (and the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 Linux driver) was their GPUOpen initiative introducing OCAT, the Open Capture and Analytics Tool.

    • More Radeon/AMDGPU Fixes For Linux 4.10 Ahead Of The Merge Window

      With Linux 4.9 expected for release this weekend and the 4.10 merge window to then immediately open, Alex Deucher of AMD sent in an early batch of fixes atop the earlier feature material of AMDGPU/Radeon DRM changes for Linux 4.10.

    • Atomic Mode-Setting Updated For Wayland’s Weston

      Daniel Stone of Collabora has sent out his latest patches for wiring up atomic mode-setting support in Wayland’s Weston.

      These “v2″ patches provide many clean-ups to the original code, various feature improvements, and some plane work too.

    • ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query In The Pipe For Intel Mesa

      While Intel’s at OpenGL 4.5 compliance in Mesa with their open-source graphics driver, there remain a number of modern extensions that aren’t currently mandated by an OpenGL version number, among them is ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Remembering Linux Installfests

    Ah, yes. I remember the good old days when you had to be a real man or woman to install Linux, and the first time you tried you ended up saying something like “Help!” or maybe “Mommmmyyyyy!” Really, kids, that’s how it was. Stacks of floppies that took about 7,000 hours to download over your 16 baud connection. Times sure have changed, haven’t they?

    I remember Caldera advertising that their distribution autodetected 1,500 different monitors. I wrote an article titled “Monitor Number 1501,” because it didn’t detect my monitor. And sound. Getting sound going in Linux took mighty feats of systemic administsationish strength. Mere mortals could not do it. And that’s why we had installfests: so mighty Linux he-men and she-women could come down from the top of Slackware Mountain or the Red Hat Volcano and share their godlike wisdom with us. We gladly packed up our computers and took them to the installfest location (often at a college, since many Linux-skilled people were collegians) and walked away with Linuxized computers. Praise be!

• Server

  • 7 Must-Have Open Source Products for IBM i

    The IBM i operating system is proprietary; its Licensed Internal Code (LIC) is private, and good luck getting into the innards of DB2 for i. But for all the top-secret code running in an IBM i server, there’s a surprising amount of open source technology available for the platform, too. Here are the top seven open source products every IBM i shop should have, or at least be aware of.

    These products are in no particular order. But we would be remiss if we didn’t start with the big one from IBM itself.

  • Paradigm Shift in CI at PayPal with Docker and Mesos by Manivannan Selvaraj, PayPal

  • A Lone Tester at a DevOps Conference

  • Docker persistent storage startup beamed up to the mother ship

  • cat Infinit.tgz | docker import – Infinit:acquired

  • Docker Boosts Container Storage with Infinit Acquisition

    Docker aims to directly integrate storage capabilities into its container engine, while still leaving room for organizations to choose other storage technologies.

    Docker Inc. announced on December 6 that it is acquiring privately-held distributed storage vendor Infinit. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.

  • What’s New with Xen Project Hypervisor 4.8?

    I’m pleased to announce the release of the Xen Project Hypervisor 4.8. As always, we focused on improving code quality, security hardening as well as enabling new features. One area of interest and particular focus is new feature support for ARM servers. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a surge of patches from various ARM vendors that have collaborated on a wide range of updates from new drivers to architecture to security.

  • Xen Project Hypervisor 4.8 Released

  • Xen 4.8 Open-Source Hypervisor Adds Support for Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC

    On December 7, 2016, the Linux Foundation-hosted Xen Project proudly announced the release of Xen 4.8 hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization.

    It’s been a little over five months since the release of the Xen 4.7 series, and it looks like the development team behind this highly customizable, extensible and flexible type-1 or baremetal hypervisor did not stop improving the software and adding new features to it. Xen 4.8 is the latest stable and most advanced version, which focuses on advanced embedded use cases and enhances support of ARMv8-A based servers.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux Foundation events expand with Open Source Summits

    The Linux Foundation released its 2017 schedule, including an Embedded Linux Conference in Portland on Feb. 21-23 that needs proposal ideas by Dec. 10.

    This year, Linux Foundation events attracted over 20,000 “developers, maintainers, sysadmins, thought leaders, business executives and other industry professionals from more than 4,000 organizations across 85 countries,” and 25,000 are expected in 2017, says the not-for-profit Linux advocacy organization. In truth, the LF is now more of an open source advocacy organization as it spreads into non-Linux projects like Zephyr. Fittingly, the co-located LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen events in Japan, North America and Europe have this year combined into new umbrella events called Open Source Summits.

  • Why Is Microsoft Showing So Much Interest In Linux? [Ed: Someone needs to explain to Mathew Lodge what EEE is and how it works. Is the Linux Foundation (including Torvalds as well) still permitted to criticise Microsoft or is it frowned upon internally?]

  • Linux on the Mac — state of the union

    The MacBook Pro introduction in October caused unusually negative reactions among professional users due to the realization that Apple no longer caters equally to casual and professional customers as it had in the past [YouTube video]. Instead, the company appears to be following an iOS-focused, margin-driven strategy that essentially relegates professionals to a fringe group. This has well-known developers such as Salvatore Sanfilippo (of the Redis project) consider a move back to Linux. Perhaps that’s a good moment to look at the current state of Mac hardware support in the kernel. While Macs are x86 systems, they possess various custom chips and undocumented quirks that the community needs to painstakingly reverse-engineer.

  • How well does the Linux kernel support Mac hardware?

    There is an interesting subset of Linux users that prefer to run it on a Mac. Yes, a Mac. That might seem odd given how Apple is known for its closed ecosystems and high cost hardware, but the Linux on Mac folks really do exist out there.

    But how well does the Linux kernel support Mac hardware? LWN.net has a “state of the union” article for Linux on the Mac that could be quite helpful if you are thinking about installing Linux on your Mac.

  • New Kernel Vulnerability Allows Local Root For Unprivileged Processes

    There is yet another new Linux kernel vulnerability being disclosed today that allows for unprivileged processes to gain kernel code execution abilities.

    This new vulnerability is CVE-2016-8655 but it doesn’t seem to be getting too much attention yet. CVE-2016-8655 comes down to a race condition within the af_packet.c code for gaining local root access. The researcher that found it was able to write an exploit to gain root shell on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS system and defeats SMEP/SMAP protection too.

  • Avoiding CVE-2016-8655 with systemd

    Just a quick note: on recent versions of systemd it is relatively easy to block the vulnerability described in CVE-2016-8655 for individual services.

    Since systemd release v211 there’s an option RestrictAddressFamilies= for service unit files which takes away the right to create sockets of specific address families for processes of the service. In your unit file, add RestrictAddressFamilies=~AF_PACKET to the [Service] section to make AF_PACKET unavailable to it (i.e. a blacklist), which is sufficient to close the attack path. Safer of course is a whitelist of address families whch you can define by dropping the ~ character from the assignment. Here’s a trivial example:

  • The Best Features Of The Linux 4.9 Kernel

  • Another nasty Linux kernel bug surfaces [Ed: Did you know that local priv. escalation is a “nasty” bug? CVE isn’t so sexy. Give it a logo, name, and Web site maybe? Look what a disgusting thing the security ‘industry’ and reporting have become…]

  • Don’t have a Dirty COW, man: Android gets full kernel hijack patch

  • Graphics Stack

    • New AMD DC/DAL Patches Continue To Slim Down The Codebase

      The latest patches for the AMDGPU DRM driver’s DC code — what was previously known as DAL — have been published and they reduce the size of the code-base some more.

    • Khronos’ SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 Presentation, Another VR Company Joins Them

    • NVIDIA Releases Linux Graphics Debugger 2.0

      NVIDIA has released a major new version of their Linux Graphics Debugger for helping game developers and others wishing to optimize OpenGL 4.x workloads on a variety of Linux distributions.

    • Intel Iris Pro OpenGL vs. Vulkan Benchmarks With Linux 4.9, Mesa 13.1-dev

      It’s been a while since publishing any fresh Intel Core i7 5775C benchmarks, the socketed Broadwell CPU with Iris Pro 6200 graphics, since normally it’s busy in the daily benchmarking churn of the server room for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org / LinuxBenchmarking.com efforts. But with having been doing some maintenance on that system this week and loading a clean install of Ubuntu 16.10, I did some fresh benchmarks of the Iris Pro 6200 graphics using Mesa 13.1-dev and Linux 4.9, including a look at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for the Iris Pro graphics.

    • Intel Skylake+ On Mesa Wires In Two More OpenGL Extensions

      Intel’s Mesa driver has wired in support for two more OpenGL extensions not part of an official OpenGL specification release. These two new extensions are supported for Skylake and newer.

    • Intel ILO Gallium3D Driver Proposed For Removal, But Could Have Future Use-Cases

      Mesa developers are discussing the idea of removing the Intel “ILO” Gallium3D driver from Mesa since it hasn’t been maintained in a while and provides only limited functionality.

      ILO is the Intel Gallium3D driver that was developed at LunarG Inc and was promising a few years ago with Ivy Bridge and Haswell era hardware. LunarG was using ILO for experimenting with Gallium3D and different driver approaches. But ILO hasn’t been maintained in quite a while now while LunarG has since changed too.

    • AMD working on an updated driver that will support FreeSync on Linux and wider GPU support

      AMD have announced that they are working on a big driver update. The Linux driver will support FreeSync and have wider support for their different GPUs.

    • The Rumor Is Back That Future Intel CPUs To Use Radeon Graphics

      The rumor is back that Intel and AMD have reached a deal for future Intel CPUs to be paired with integrated AMD Radeon graphics.

    • Intel GPU Tools 1.17 Released for Linux with Kaby Lake Support, Many New Tests

      It’s been two months since the release of Intel GPU Tools (intel-gpu-tools) 1.16, the open-source collection of tools for development and testing of the Intel DRM driver for Linux-based operating systems, and Petri Latvala announced the release of version 1.17.

    • AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx rpms, end of an era!

      We had the hope of getting it working for Leap 42.2 in October, but except freezing kernel and xorg, you will not get what you would expect: a stable xorg session

    • Internal Multi-Threading Arrives For Gallium3D’s Direct3D 9 “Nine”

  • Benchmarks

    • Linux Distributions vs. BSDs With netperf & iperf3 Network Performance

      With now having netperf in the Phoronix Test Suite as well as iperf3 for the latest open-source benchmarks in our automated cross-platform benchmarking framework, I couldn’t help but to run some networking benchmarks on a system when trying out a few different Linux distributions and BSDs to see how the performance compares. The operating systems ran with these networking benchmarks included Debian 8.6, Ubuntu 16.10, Clear Linux 12020, CentOS 7, and Fedora 25. The BSDs tested for this comparison were FreeBSD 11.0 and DragonFlyBSD 4.6.1.

• Applications

  • grep-2.27 released

    There have been 40 commits by 4 people in the 9 weeks since 2.26. Note that there were many additional important changes via gnulib.

  • Yum! GNOME Recipes is a New Cooking App for Linux

    Do you like to cook? No, me neither. And that’s largely because I don’t know how to cook.

    Could a desktop cooking app help? GNOME’s Matthias Clasen is hoping so, and has started work on a brand-new desktop recipe app that you — and anyone you know — can help contribute to.

  • Heron Animation, Free Stop Motion Software for Linux

    Looking for free stop motion animation software? If so, you’ll definitely want to check out Heron Animation.

    A free program, Heron Animation lets you take a series of pictures from a connected webcam and assemble each shot into a real moving animation.

    The tool, which is written in web technologies, pitches itself as ‘perfect for beginners and more experienced animators alike’. That sort of balance is notoriously hard to achieve.

  • EasyTAG 2.4.3 Audio Tag Editor Supports MP4 Files with the .aac File Extension

    EasyTAG, an open-source, simple, free, and cross-platform application for viewing and editing tags in audio files, supporting MP3, MP4, FLAC, Ogg, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio, and WavPack files, was updated to version 2.4.3.

    It’s been more than nine months since EasyTAG 2.4.2 was released, and we’re now finally able to update the software on our GNU/Linux or Windows operating systems. Version 2.4.3 is out as of December 5, 2016, bringing support for MP4 files that use the .aac file extension, as well as Adwaita-style artist and album icons.

  • FSF Blogs: Seventeen new GNU releases in November

  • IceCat 45.5.1 release

    GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.

  • Audacious 3.8.1 Open-Source Music Player Supports Opus Cover Art in the Info Bar

    More than two months after the release of the major Audacious 3.8 open-source and cross-platform music player software for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating system, the first maintenance update arrives on December 6, 2016.

  • RcppAPT 0.0.3

    A new version of RcppAPT — our interface from R to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, … commands and their cache powering Debian, Ubuntu and the like — is now on CRAN.

  • Proprietary

    • Permabit Hits New Milestone in 2016 by Delivering the First Complete Data Reduction for Linux

    • The Road to Vivaldi 1.6 Web Browser Continues with Page Title Tab Notifications

      Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard today informs Softpedia about the availability of a new development snapshot towards the Vivaldi 1.6 web browser, versioned 1.6.687.3.

      Rebased on the open-source Chromium 55.0.2883.76 web browser, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.687.3 is here a week after the first development release, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.682.3, to introduce two exciting new features, but also to fix many of the issues and annoyances reported by users since the previous snapshot.

    • Lightworks 14 Introduces A Brand-New Look, New Pro Features

      A new version of Lightworks, the professional-grade video editing software, has entered into public beta.

      It debuts a brand new look, brand new features, and some brand new workflows.

      The new interface is called “Fixed” and it’s designed to offer a “more organised” workspace, helping users discover, use and learn more about the editor’s various features.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Installing an OpenShift Origin Cluster on Fedora 25 Atomic Host: Part 1

    • 10 Best Courses Or Trainings To Learn Linux

      Many people learn Linux for different reasons ranging from work to personal interest, and for all those people, I have selected the best courses/ways to learn Linux.

    • Rev Up Your Graphics Mojo: Get Started with Inkscape

    • An interactive calculator for the Linux command-line

    • 12 lftp Commands to Manage Files with Examples

    • How to gain encrypted email on the Chromebook

    • Install Oracle Java 7 & 8 (JDK & JRE) on CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, Arch Linux & openSUSE

    • Eek! My rounding is biased!

    • Unbound cache-only DNS server setup on RHEL 7 Linux

    • vnStat – A lightweight (command line) network traffic monitor

    • Remote Logging With Syslog, Part 2: Main Config File

    • Functional Programming 101

    • Using New Relic, Splunk, AppDynamics and Netuitive for Container Monitoring

    • My Docker Install Process

    • Send/Recv in mgmt

  • Games

    • Technical issues with the new Cossacks 3 DLC seems to have delayed the Linux version

    • 4Team, a 2D multiplayer battle platformer, now on Steam Early Access

    • Rocket League gets a big update called ‘Starbase ARC’, adds a lot of new free goodies

    • MAME 0.180 Open-Source Arcade Machine Emulator Lets You Play Atari Space Lords

      The MAME open-source emulator program that makes it possible to play a lot of classic arcade games and emulates a large number of old computers, such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, GameBoy, and Atari 2600, received a major update.

    • RetroEngine Sigma Is a Linux-Powered Retro Games Console

      A new Linux-powered retro games console wants to do for the Gameboy, SNES and Genesis, what the NES Classic has done for the NES. As a retro gamer I (quite naturally) was stoked to see the popularity that greeted the $60 Nintendo NES Classic (which, it turns out, runs Linux) last month.

    • Forget the NES Classic, this $49 console can play all the retro games you want

    • The RetroEngine Sigma Emulates 28 Different Consoles

    • Can’t find an NES Classic Edition? RetroEngine Sigma offers an alternative

    • Doyodo RetroEngine Sigma is a Linux-powered classic video game emulation console

    • NES Classic Alternative Plays Games From 28 Consoles

    • Nintendo NES Classic Specs, Latest News & Update: Retro Engine Sigma Lets You Play All Retro Games For $49

    • Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun Hardcore Tactical Stealth Game Out on Linux

      More and more AAA games are coming to our beloved Linux platform, and nothing makes us happier than to see Daedalic Entertainment’s Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun title launching today on Steam for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

      If you’re not familiar with Daedalic Entertainment’s work, they are the creators of the superb and fun Deponia series, but Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is something different, a tactical stealth-strategy game in the style of the Commandos stealth-oriented real-time tactics video game series.

    • Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, the top-down stealth game is now out

      Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun [GOG, Steam, Official Site] is the rather good top-down stealth game from Mimimi Productions. It’s now out way a day-1 Linux release and it has a demo.

      I played the demo and I was massively impressed, so impressed that I would very much like to cover the game properly. So I will be reaching out to the developer for a key.

    • The Keeper, a promising looking side-scrolling survival action game with plenty of action is coming to Linux

      The Keeper side-scrolling survival action game full of boss battles, a combo system for combat and a day and night cycle will come to Linux.

    • Editorial: A chat about asking developers for a Linux port

      It has come to my attention recently that some people have been taking a really hard stance against developers who want to gauge interest for a Linux port. I want to talk about it for a bit.

      [...]

      Be the Linux community I know and love, be helpful to developers, get in on beta testing when you can (I’ve seen plenty of developers give out free keys for this too!) and appreciate the good games we get. We are a smaller market in most people’s eyes, so let’s not turn away anything that could help us grow even a little.

      The fact is, I’ve seen multiple games only come to Linux because Linux fans showed actual interest in it. One such example is Nightside, which I discovered on Steam. After a quick chat with the developer, I was able to convince them to do a Linux build and after a short test they then decided to do support a Linux build. There’s many such examples like this, but due to the amount of games I cover that’s one I could quickly pull up (without having to sift through hundreds of articles).

    • Dawn of War II has a minor patch to fix a few issues

    • Khronos are working on an open standard for VR, Valve will use it

    • BOOR, a new puzzle platformer will arrive with Linux support next year

      BOOR [Official Site] is a new puzzle platformer from developer Dazlog Studio and publisher BadLand Games that will have Linux support.

      We have many puzzle platformers now, so I do hope BOOR has something to set itself apart from the rest of them. I haven’t seen anything in the trailer or the feature list that really jumps out at me. I am hoping when they reveal more gameplay it will look more enticing.

    • The developers of ‘EVERSPACE’ are still working on the Linux version, seeking help from Epic Games

      EVERSPACE [Steam, Official Site] is the fantastic looking UE4 space shooter that’s being ported to Linux, but the developers have encountered a problem with lighting bugs.

      I follow the topic on Steam, but a user also emailed this in to ask me to highlight it. I would have anyway since I’m interested in it.

    • Total War: WARHAMMER – Realm of The Wood Elves DLC will come to Linux soon

      Total War: WARHAMMER – Realm of The Wood Elves [Steam] is the next DLC that introduces an exciting race into this strategy game.

      Feral have confirmed it will be on Linux soon with the quick tweet they sent out.

    • DoomRL or ‘DRL’ as it’s now called has gone open source

      After ZeniMax sent the lawyers knocking, the developer of what was called DoomRL (Doom Roguelike) has changed it’s name to ‘DRL’ [Github, Official Site] and it’s now open source.

      ZeniMax are well within their rights to “protect” the Doom brand, but I still think their lawyers are idiotic for doing this. It’s not like small-time roguelike was actually competing with the real Doom.

• Distributions

  • Kali Alternative: BackBox Linux 4.7 Arrives With Updated Hacking Tools

    BackBox Linux is an Ubuntu-based operating system that’s developed with a focus on penetration testing and security assessment. If you take a look at our list of top 10 ethical hacking distros, BackBox ranks in top 3.

    This alternative of Kali Linux operating system comes with a variety of ethical hacking tools and a complete desktop environment. The software repositories of the hacking tools included in BackBox Linux too are frequently updated. Earlier this year in May, we witnessed the release of BackBox Linux 4.6 that was based on kernel 4.2 and Ubuntu 15.10.

  • New Releases

    • SparkyLinux 4.5.1 MinimalGUI

      There is an update of Sparky 4.5.1 MinimalGUI available to download.

      The Sparky Advanced Installer doesn’t work as it should in the MinimaGUI edition, if you are trying to install an additional desktop. The installer calls a ‘desktop-installer’, but it does not coming back to the main installer with right privileges after. It used to do before, but not any more.

    • SparkyLinux 4.5.1 MinimalGUI ISO Respin Improves the Sparky Advanced Installer

      Only four days after the official release of the Debian-based SparkyLinux 4.5 operating system, the development team published an update MinimalGUI ISO image dubbed SparkyLinux 4.5.1.

    • Kodi-Based LibreELEC 8.0 “Krypton” Sees New Alpha Powered by Linux Kernel 4.8.12

      The development of the open-source and platform-independent LibreELEC (Libre Embedded Linux Entertainment Center) operating system based on the latest Kodi media center software received a new Alpha milestone on December 6, 2016.

  • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Announcing openSUSE’s GPG Key Server – keyserver.opensuse.org

      Does it happen to you, too, that there are moments where you ask yourself why others want something from you that is there already since a while? Exactly this happened with https://keyserver.opensuse.org/: the original machine was set up a long time ago to make it easier for people attending the openSUSE GPG key-signing parties, but it looks like nobody officially announced this “new service” for our users…

      …and so here we are: the openSUSE Heroes team is pleased to announce that keyserver.opensuse.org is up and running as public GPG keyserver. We are of course also part of the official keyserver pool, which means that some people might already noticed us, as they got redirected to our server with their requests. (And for those who are interested to setup their own SKS keyserver: we have also written a nice monitoring plugin that helps you keeping an eye on the pool status of your machine and the ones of your peers.)

    • OpenSUSE Ends Support For Binary AMD Graphics Driver

      Bruno Friedmann has announced the end to AMD proprietary driver fglrx support in openSUSE while also announcing they don’t plan to support the hybrid proprietary AMDGPU-PRO stack either.

      Friedmann wrote, “Say goodbye fglrx!, repeat after me, goodbye fglrx… [In regards to the newer AMDGPU-PRO stack] I will certainly not help proprietary crap, if I don’t have a solid base to work with, and a bit of help from their side. I wish good luck to those who want to try those drivers, I’ve got a look inside, and got a blame face.”

  • Slackware Family

    • Absolute 14.2.2 released

      The update is for the 64-bit version. Updated kernel and Xorg, as well as taking care of security and functional fixes (such as tweaks to pulse audio, network manager, battery management.) Installer also updated to correct error of sometimes not finding drives for autoinstall. All Slackware updates in current included and several programs recompiled to keep up with dependency changes.

  • Red Hat Family

    • New CloudLinux 7 Kernel Released, Rebased to Red Hat’s OpenVZ Linux 3.10 Kernel

      CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi announced the general availability of an updated kernel package for the enterprise-ready CloudLinux 7 operating system based on the freely distributed sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

      CloudLinux is the operating system of choice for hosting providers and data centers, powering over 20 million websites. It’s a super-platform designed for stability, security, and efficiency in shared hosting by isolating each occupant and giving them allocated server resources.

      A new kernel version, tagged as build 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.26, has been announced earlier for those who are using the CloudLinux 7 release on their server infrastructures, and it’s now available for installation from the updates-testing repository. It’s been rebased on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7′s OpenVZ rh7-3.10.0-327.36.1.vz7.18.7 kernel.

    • Finance

      • Technical Buzz on Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

      • Analyst Sentiment Outlines Long Term Upside for Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

      • Swiss National Bank Has $40,643,000 Stake in Red Hat Inc. (RHT)

      • What is the Sell-side Saying About Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)?

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 25: Bleeding edge and bloody brilliant

        I honestly never thought I’d consider Fedora a rock solid enough distribution to serve as a daily driver for anything but developing and testing. This came with good reason: Fedora was always released as a bleeding edge platform, a playground for testers and developers.

        That was the Fedora of old. What they have created with their 25th iteration is some sort of magical confluence of bleeding edge and bloody brilliant.

      • Developers Discuss Future Of CD/DVD Optical Images For Fedora

        With more laptops abandoning DVD drives, USB-based flash drive installers being well supported and widely-used, and CD/DVDs just being far less popular these days, Fedora developers are discussing the future of the official status for optical images in future Fedora releases.

        While Fedora developers continue discussing the possibility of making their release cycles longer, the latest post-F25 topic is the official state for the optical Fedora images. In particular, Fedora QA wondering about future requirements given the significant time requirements spent on testing Fedora CD/DVD images.

      • Korora 25 ‘Gurgle’ Fedora-based Linux distribution now available for download

        I regularly try many Linux-based desktop operating systems on my computers, just so I can be familiar with them. Ultimately, I always return to my favorite — Fedora. While that distribution is very good, it can also be a bit difficult to use — for some. Don’t get me wrong, it functions well ‘out of the box’, but once a user begins needing some non-free packages, it can be tough going. In other words, setting it up can sometimes be a chore.

      • Elections 2016: Nominate community members to Fedora leadership

        With Fedora 25 out the door a couple of weeks ago, Fedora is once again moving ahead towards Fedora 26. As usual after a new release, the Fedora Elections are getting into gear. There are a fair number of seats up for election this release, across both the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and the Fedora Council. The elections are one of the ways you can have an impact on the future of Fedora by nominating and voting. Nominate other community members (or self-nominate) to run for a seat in either of these leadership bodies to help lead Fedora. For this election cycle, nominations are due on December 12th, 2016, at 23:59:59 UTC. It is important to get nominations in quickly before the window closes. This article helps explain both leadership bodies and how to cast a nomination.

      • Endless Sky now available on Fedora

        Endless Sky is a 2D space trading and combat game similar to Escape Velocity. The game sets you as a beginning pilot, just having made a down payment on your very first starship. You’re given a choice between a shuttle, a freighter or a fighter. Depending on what ship you choose, you will need to figure out how to earn money to outfit and eventually upgrade your ship. You can transport passengers, run cargo, mine asteroids or even hunt pirates. It’s an open-ended game that blends the top-down action of a 2D space shooter with the depth and replayability of a 4X.

      • Analysis is confusing

        I’ve known of affinity mapping, and even tried to use sticky notes to figure out some of my data in the first UX project I did. Unfortunately, as I found out at the time, analysis of the data I get in UX research doesn’t really lend itself to being done alone. Much like statistics, I suspect. I’m not at all sure how UX consultants do their analyses, given this!

      • Korora 25 Linux Released, Based on Fedora 25 Ships with Cinnamon 3.2, MATE 1.16

        On December 7, 2016, the development team behind the Fedora-based Korora Linux operating system proudly announced the release and general availability of Korora 25.

      • Remembering a friend: Matthew Williams

        One of the things about working in open source software communities is that you are always moving forward. It’s hard not to get a sense of momentum and progress when it seems you are constantly striving to improve and build on the work you and others have done before.

        But sometimes you have to pause to reflect, because sometimes there is loss.

  • Debian Family

    • Day trip in Cape Town, part 2

      Let me get some interesting tit-bits not related to the day-trip out-of-the-way first –

      I don’t know whether we had full access to see all parts of fuller hall or not. Couple of days I was wondering around Fuller Hall, specifically next to where clothes were pressed. Came to know of the laundry service pretty late but still was useful. Umm… next to where the ladies/gentleman pressed our clothes, there is a stairway which goes down. In fact even on the opposite side there is a stairway which goes down. I dunno if other people explored them or not.

    • Derivatives

      • Second Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” Preview Out Now with Linux Kernel 4.4.35 LTS

        Today, December 7, 2016, the development team behind the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux operating system have announced the release of the second preview version of the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” distribution.

        Still based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” repositories, Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” Test2 is here one and a half months after the previous development release, and ships with more recent technologies and Open Source software projects, including the latest GNOME 3.22.2 desktop environment and Linux 4.4.35 LTS kernel.

      • Welcome to Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15-TEST-2 Release Notes

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • This $90 Kit Converts an ODROID board into a Touchscreen Ubuntu PC

          We’ve seen what the Raspberry Pi can do when you throw in some extra hardware, and we recently heard about what the Pine64 is going to do once it’s inside a laptop casing.

        • Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 Released, This Is What’s New

          Ubuntu OTA-14, the latest over the air update to Ubuntu phone and tablet, has begun to roll out to supported devices. “This time not so many changes released in overall but with the goal of introducing less regressions,” says Canonical’s Lukasz Zemczak in the release announcement mailing list post.

        • How Do You Install Ubuntu: USB, or DVD?

        • What New Is Going To Be In Ubuntu 17.04 ‘Zesty Zapus’

          Right on the heels of Ubuntu 16.10 ‘Yakkety Yak’ is Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus. Ubuntu 17.04 is currently scheduled for release on April 13, 2017 but know that this is only an estimate. One thing to know is that all things being equal, it is going to be released in April 2017. Ubuntu Zesty Zapus will be supported for only 9 months until January 2018 as it is not a LTS (long term support) release.

        • Ubuntu Core has the keys to IoT security

          In October, a DDoS attack on Dyn’s infrastructure took down a big chunk of the internet, making sites like Amazon and Twitter inaccessible. It was the first major attack involving IoT (internet of things) devices. Fortunately, it was also a benign attack: no one got hurt, no one died.

          However, the next attack could be catastrophic. No one knows when it will happen. No one knows the magnitude.

          There are billions of IoT devices out there: web cameras, thermostats, doorbells, smart bulbs, refrigerators, heaters, ovens, and much more. IoT devices are low hanging fruits for cybercriminals because for all theoretical and practical purposes a majority of these IoT devices are insecure by design, they are insecure by default. It should be called IIoT: insecure internet of things.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Zorin OS 12 Ubuntu-based Linux distribution now available — a Windows 10 alternative

            Windows 10 is a really great desktop operating system, but it is not for everyone. For those that care deeply about security and privacy, an open source Linux-based operating system is a wise alternative. The problem? Learning a new user interface can be hard for some. If you have always used a Windows OS in the past, moving to a desktop environment like GNOME or Unity can be confusing and scary.

            Luckily, for those that have difficulty with change, there are some Linux-based operating systems that are designed for Windows-switchers. One fairly popular such offering, Zorin OS, has now reached version 12. It is designed to be familiar to former users of Microsoft’s OS. While the company does charge for an “Ultimate” version, the “Core” edition of Zorin OS 12 is entirely free.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Getting started with Raspberry Pi

    So you have a Raspberry Pi, or you’re thinking of getting one, and you want to know how to get started and how to become a master user of one.

    The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer, meaning that in many ways it’s a regular PC, except that everything that makes up the computer is on a single board rather than a traditional PC, which has a motherboard and requires a number of additional daughterboards to make a whole unit.

  • AsteroidOS is an open source project that wants to save your smartwatch from obsolescence

    Android was once the darling of the open source community, though you’d be forgiven for forgetting that – these days its commercial elements seem to be all that make the news. One developer is hoping that community can save the smartwatch, or at the very least, breathe a little new life into existing designs. Florent Revest, a French computer science student, released the 1.0 alpha version of AsteroidOS today. It’s ready to run on multiple Android Wear devices: the original LG G Watch, the Watch Urbane, the Asus ZenWatch 2, and the Sony Smartwatch 3.

  • AteroidOS Alpha released: open source smartwatch operating system

  • IGEL Introduces Revolutionary Micro Thin Client

  • Phones

    • Tizen

      • BBM coming to Tizen Smartphones, will help boost Indonesian sales

        Whilst BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) might not be seen as an attractive messaging application as it once was, due to the decline in popularity of the BlackBerry Operating System (OS), in some countries it is still continuing to thrive. Worldwide we are possibly looking at over 190 million users, with about 60 million located in Indonesia, a country that has recently had the Samsung Z2 released there.

      • Roposo, Social Photo Share App hits the Tizen Store

      • Tizen DevLabs coming to Ahmedabad and Cochin, India, December 2016

        The Tizen Devlabs series of events are currently being held in India. We have already seen them taking place in Pune, Bangalore, and Delhi. If you missed out on those locations then we also a couple more being held in India this month. Mark your calendars for the following dates:

      • Samsung Gear Manager for S3 / S2 and non-Samsung Android devices

        The Samsung Gear S3 has made its way to many markets including the US, Europe, and the far east. If you have a Samsung Galaxy Device then you can download the Gear Manager App, that is used to connect to the smartwatch with the phone, from Galaxy Apps Store. If you are using a non-Samsung device you have to do things a little differently.

        [...]

        Whilst we wait for the iOS Gear Manager app to become available users are using the Leaked version that became available. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long now for the official version.

    • Android

      • Five Upcoming Android Phones Worth The Wait In 2017

        We’ve rounded up the best upcoming android smartphones for 2017. Those we consider to be the best beyond all platforms, and we’ve regularly updated that list as the smartphone world has evolved. Check out the most anticipated android phones next year.

      • Android platform distribution, December 2016: KitKat is finally toppled, Nougat doesn’t move much

        December’s Android platform distribution numbers are up and… not much exciting has changed in the last month, to be honest. The only real milestone we’re seeing is that Android 4.4 KitKat is finally no longer the most common API level of the platform, having been usurped by Android 6.0 Marshmallow. KitKat’s dominant streak was around two years – let’s hope Marshmallow doesn’t sit on the throne that long.

      • Nvidia may show a revised Shield Android TV set-top box at CES 2017

        So what exactly is going on with Nvidia’s Shield family of products? We may get that answer at the beginning of CES 2017 in early January. Typically, the company uses this time to reveal its automotive-related news, but there is a rumor that Nvidia plans to showcase a new Shield device during the event as well. The rumor indicates that the company may have originally planned to reveal the device during 2016, but pushed the date back for unknown reasons.

      • Fitbit just paid $40 million to kill Pebble, hammering another nail in the smartwatch’s coffin

        You will hear many things about today’s Pebble acquisition by Fitbit – that it was about software, firmware, engineers, intellectual property, or simply that Pebble was unable to continue on as it existed. The one examination you should take to heart, though, is that Fitbit just straight up wrote a check to kill a competitor. There’s really not any other way to slice this deal from Fitbit’s end: Pebble was competition, even if not necessarily in a big commercial sense these days, and this was an easy way to smother a company that had hogged much of the wearable limelight.

      • How to keep Gooligan virus off your Android phone

      • Google Drive Backups tab starts showing up, gives you a glimpse into your device and app backups

      • Unlocked HTC One M9 Now Getting Updated To Android 7.0 Nougat

      • Chrome for Android adds offline downloads for everything

      • Chrome for Android now lets you download web pages and read them offline

      • We want your favorite Android gadget photos!

      • What’s New in Android Nougat

        Android Nougat 7.0 is the latest official Android Operating System update and is currently available only on 0.3% of Android devices, including the Nexus 5X and 6P, and the Android One devices like General Mobile 4G. As with every update, Nougat brings many new features make users’ experience better, easier and more customizable.

      • New Nvidia Shield Android TV box and controller expected for CES 2017

        Nvidia’s Shield Android TV box has been around for more than a year but is still the flagbearer for Android set-top-boxes. It was the first media streamer to offer Netflix in 4K and with HDR, and its Tegra X1 processor and 3GB of RAM ensured that it zipped through Android apps and games like a Ryu fireball through a butter wall.

      • Android Pay has arrived in Ireland: Here’s all you need to know

        Are you an AIB or KBC customer, with an Android phone? If so, there’s some good news for you today. You can now use Android Pay to purchase items.

      • Android Pay makes its way to Ireland

      • Google Wifi officially goes on sale for $129

      • Chrome 55 for Android rolling out w/ new offline ‘Downloads’ feature, reduced memory usage

      • Chrome for Android now lets you download videos and web pages for offline viewing

      • Chrome 55 for Android allows downloads for offline use and more

      • Following in Nintendo’s steps, PlayStation is bringing games to iPhone and Android

      • iPhone sees market share rise in US, decline in China – but Android still dominates

      • Latest Nougat beta for Galaxy S7 and S7 edge renames TouchWiz to Samsung Experience

      • Samsung Experience: the interface formerly known as TouchWiz

      • Android Marshmallow on PC Falls Flat

        The Android-x86 Project eventually may become a viable operating system alternative for your desktop and laptops computers, but it’s not there yet. You will have to wait a while for the developers to fix a number of failures with the latest release upgrading Android-x86 to Marshmallow 6.0.1.

        The developers late this summer released the first stable version of Android-x86 6.0, codenamed “Marshmallow.” Android-x86 lets you run the Android OS with the Google Chrome browser on your desktop and laptop computers, rather than buying one of the qualified Chromebooks with the Google Play Store features bolted on.

Free Software/Open Source

• Communicating To The World: Why Open-Source Could Help Your Small Business

  Just as groundbreaking advancements in technology in the ‘90s and 2000s have fundamentally changed the way film, music and television are produced and distributed today, more recent tech innovations have also provided entrepreneurs with the tools they need to compete in the global marketplace. Here is a look at some of the open-source solutions that you can use in order to realize your entrepreneurial ambitions.

  [...]

  The rise of high quality open-source web utilities has made it possible for anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of web design to make a quality site. In fact, open-source content management systems like WordPress are so easy to use and comprehensive, companies like Best Buy and Xerox use them to maintain their web presences. Additionally, open-source business management and accounting program Solegis, customer relationship management app ConcourseSuite and e-commerce solution Zen Cart all exist to empower entrepreneurs with limited resources.

• What lies ahead for open source technology in 2017?

  2016 has been a polarising year. A year when the unexpected and largely unpredicted has occurred, shocking people worldwide. We have lurched into a post-truth era, where emotion transcends logic, and maintaining the status quo is no longer a given.

  Change is inevitable and there are vast swathes of global society who are disappointed and apprehensive about what lies ahead. In times of uncertainty, an increased focus on collaboration and community is appealing and desirable.

  The internet has long been a polarising force, a connecting platform that allows individuals to find kindred spirits they might not have been able to find before, regardless of their allegiances and views.

• Financial tech-ops chief: open source is a recruitment talent imperative

  Developers don’t want to take what companies tell them at face value: they want to look under the bonnet, and assess the quality and design of the code for themselves. If you want to win credibility among the developer community and encourage the right people to your brand, you need to share your work and demonstrate best practice, not just talk about it.

  The benefits to an open source approach don’t end with the positive impression it can help foster among developers.

• Speaking in Tech: Did an open source guru just ask us to join Amazon?

• FOSS DOS for 21st Century Hardware

  The founder and coordinator of the FreeDOS Project writes about FreeDOS 1.2, which is scheduled for a Christmas Day release. There is good news for classic gamers and nostalgia buffs: this one’s got games.

• 4 open source drone projects

  Over the past few years, interest in both civilian and commercial use of drones has continued to grow rapidly, and drone hardware sits at the top of many people’s holiday wish lists.
  Even just within the civilian side of things, the list of unmanned aerial devices which fit the moniker of drone seems to be constantly expanding. These days, the term seems to encompass everything from what is essentially a cheap, multi-bladed toy helicopter, all the way up to custom-built soaring machines with incredibly adept artificial intelligence capabilities.

• Lenovo Cloud Director: Open Source Technologies Are The Glue That Binds The Hybrid Cloud

  Hardware giant Lenovo is banking on a future where both public and private clouds are critical in driving IT innovation, and the glue binding those hybrid environments is mostly open source technologies.

  Dan Harmon, Lenovo’s group director of cloud and software-defined infrastructure, encouraged solution providers attending the NexGen Cloud Conference & Expo on Wednesday to explore opportunities to engage Lenovo as its products stock the next generation of cloud data centers.

  Both public and private clouds are growing rapidly and will dominate the market by 2020, Harmon told attendees of the conference produced by CRN parent The Channel Company.

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Chrome bug triggered errors on websites using Symantec SSL certificates

  • Mozilla

    • A Look At Async/Await JavaScript For Firefox 52

      While Chrome 55 has JavaScript async/await support, the Firefox support isn’t coming until the Firefox 52.0 stable release in March while currently it’s available in the latest Firefox Developer Edition and early alpha builds.

      Mozilla developer Dan Callahan wrote a post today on hacks.mozilla.org for the async/await support in Firefox and can be used if you are running the latest Firefox Developer Edition. Check it out if you’re interested in JavaScript async await support for more asynchronous programming for the web.

• SaaS/Back End

  • Cloudera Ratchets Up its Training for Top Open Source Data Solutions

    Recently, we’ve taken note of the many organizations offering free or low cost Hadoop and Big Data training. MIT and MapR are just a couple of the players making waves in this space. Recently, Cloudera announced a catalog of online, self-paced training classes covering the company’s entire portfolio of industry-standard Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark training courses. The courses, according to Cloudera, allow you to learn about the latest big data technologies “in a searchable environment anytime, anywhere.”

    Now, Cloudera has announced an updated lineup of training courses and performance-based certification exams for data analysts, database administrators, and developers. The expanded training offerings address the skills gap around many top open source technologies, such as Apache Impala (incubating), Apache Spark, Apache Kudu, Apache Kafka and Apache Hive.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Microsoft Office, Google Docs beware: This open-source startup is after your users

    “That was one of the reasons why we chose an open-source model. We want be open, want people to trust us, want to overcome that barrier they have in mind, those strong beliefs that there’s nothing but Microsoft Office, that nothing better could be created. We won’t change our mind about open source.”

    Bannov says he ultimately sees OnlyOffice becoming a firm that provides consulting, technical support and remote managed services to companies using its open-source products.

  • Collabora Online 2.0 Puts LibreOffice In the Cloud, Adds Collaborative Editing

    Today, December 7, 2016, Collabora Productivity, through Michael Meeks, is proud to inform Softpedia about the general availability of the long anticipated Collabora Online 2.0 office suite based on the LibreOffice, Nextcloud, and ownCloud technologies.

    After being in development for the past six months, Collabora Online 2.0 is finally here as the powerful cloud-based office suite that promises to protect users’ privacy and freedom of expression while editing various documents formats online. Collabora Online is mainly targeted at the enterprise world, hosting and cloud businesses.

• CMS

  • Family Farming and Open Source Wireless Networking

    Open source methods are being covered more often on television and radio these days, as witnessed by this recent story posted Monday on YouTube by CNBC that mentions Drupal-based Farm OS and covers the story of Dorn Cox, an organic grain grower at Tuckaway Farm in Lee NH; the Director of Green Start, an organization working towards food and fuel security; and co-founder of Farm Hack, an open source community for resilient agriculture.

  • WordPress 4.7 Provides Improved Customization

    WordPress 4.7 was released on December 6, providing the tens of millions of internet users that rely on it, with a long list of new features.

    As always with every new major WordPress milestone, there is a new theme. For WordPress 4.7 the new theme is Twenty Seventeen, which provides users with video headers and features images.

• Education

  • High School’s Help Desk Teaches Open Source IT Skills

    The following is an adapted excerpt from chapter six of The Open Schoolhouse: Building a Technology Program to Transform Learning and Empower Students, a new book written by Charlie Reisinger, Technology Director for Penn Manor School District in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In the book, Reisinger recounts more than 16 years of Linux and open source education success stories.

    Penn Manor schools saved over a million dollars by trading proprietary software for open source counterparts with its student laptop program. The budget is only part of the story. As Linux moved out of the server room and onto thousands of student laptops, a new learning community emerged.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GCC 6.3 Should Be Here By Christmas

    For those looking toward the next maintenance release of GCC 6, the GNU Compiler Collection 6.3 is aiming to be out by Christmas.

• Public Services/Government

  • City of Rome: all new software should be open source

    The city of Rome, the fourth-largest city in the European Union, will increase its use of free and open source software, it decided in October. All new software solutions should be based on open source, and the city is to consider replacing existing proprietary solutions by open source alternatives.

  • Dutch govt should consider sharing all its software

    The Dutch government is to create a vision document on how all software developed for and by public administrations can be made available as open source. On Tuesday, the Lower House of the Dutch Parliament agreed that sharing software developed for or by the government has significant benefits, including information security, efficiency and openness.

• Licensing/Legal

  • Open Compliance in the Enterprise: Why Have an Open Source Compliance Program?

    Traditionally, platforms and software stacks were implemented using proprietary software, and consisted of various software building blocks that originated as a result of internal development or via third-party software providers with negotiated licensing terms.

    The business environment was predictable and companies mitigated potential risks through license and contract negotiations with the software vendors. It was very easy to know who was the provider for every software component.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Netflix’s open-source project Hollow, NVIDIA’s deep learning kits for educators, and new IBM Bluemix integrations—SD Times news digest: Dec. 6, 2016

  • Open governance enhances the value of land use policy software

    In December 2015, the COP21 Paris Agreement saw many countries commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through initiatives in the land sector. In this context, emissions estimation systems will be key in ensuring these targets are met. Such solutions would not only be capable of assessing past trends but also of supporting target setting, tracking progress and helping to develop scenarios to inform policy decisions.

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Blender Institute collaborate with Lulzbot in the name of open source

      Blender Institute, a platform for 3D design and animation, are collaborating with Lulzbot 3D printers. This project a continuation of Lulzbot and Blender Institute’s approach to open source and aimed at enhancing collaboration. The Blender Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is an important figure in the Free and Open Source Software community (FOSS). Providing open source design tool software for 3D movies, games, and visual effects. While Lulzbot, a product line of Aleph Objects take an open source approach to hardware through their 3D printers.

• Programming/Development

  • Why You Should Have a Personal CI Server

    As a developer, I rely on a CI server to take care of the day-to-day routine of building, testing and deploying software…so much so that I often find myself committing code after every new class or group of methods as a “fire and forget” signal to the CI server to go ahead and run my tests, check my code for style violations, and push a new version to the dev server. When I have finished my train of thought, I can jump into the CI server and either be greeted with a green tick or have a handy (and more importantly authoritative) list of issues to be addressed.

    However, for all the convenience that a central CI server brings, there are times when this environment lets me down. Maybe my jobs are at the end of the queue, I can’t deploy to the dev servers during a certain time frame, or the configuration of the build just doesn’t quite do what I want it to do but I don’t have the authority to change it.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Bluetooth 5 Specification Released

Leftovers

• First Time Anywhere: 12 Biggest Tech/Media Platforms by Audience Reach, aka the 2 Billion Plus Club

  Time to publish another first, as the first ever source for a statistic related to tech, mobile, media and advertising. As I do my various workshops and seminars, my clients invariably love my numbers and the one they have most asked for, was a comparison of the different media and communication platforms. Because there wasn’t one. And it was a difficult task to try to do. Now I have done it. We have the 12 tech and media with largest reach.

• Hardware

  • AMD will be showing off their Zen CPU Architecture and letting people play with it on December 13th

  • Qualcomm Sampling 10nm 48-Core Server SoC

    With the SoC out now for sampling with partners and potential customers, they have demonstrated this SoC so far with Apache Spark and Hadoop on Linux. Qualcomm anticipates the Centriq 2400 series SoCs being commercially available in H2’2017.

• Health/Nutrition

  • No Decision On WTO Plain Packaging Dispute Before May 2017

    The much-awaited decision of the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body on Australia’s law requiring that tobacco products be sold in plain packages, challenged by four countries, has been postponed and is now expected “not before May 2017.”

  • UNAIDS Board Considers Recommendations On Access To Medicines

    The Board of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) this week is considering a report calling for the 11 cosponsor agencies of the programme to follow the recommendations of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines to improve policy coherence, and to produce reports on the use of intellectual property at country and regional levels, including the use of flexibilities.

• Security

  • Security advisories for Wednesday

  • There’s a new DDoS army, and it could soon rival record-setting Mirai

    For almost three months, Internet-of-things botnets built by software called Mirai have been a driving force behind a new breed of attacks so powerful they threaten the Internet as we know it. Now, a new botnet is emerging that could soon magnify or even rival that threat.

    The as-yet unnamed botnet was first detected on November 23, the day before the US Thanksgiving holiday. For exactly 8.5 hours, it delivered a non-stop stream of junk traffic to undisclosed targets, according to this post published Friday by content delivery network CloudFlare. Every day for the next six days at roughly the same time, the same network pumped out an almost identical barrage, which is aimed at a small number of targets mostly on the US West Coast. More recently, the attacks have run for 24 hours at a time.

  • Open source Roundcube webmail can be attacked … by sending it an e-mail

    The developers of open source webmail package Roundcube want sysadmins to push in a patch, because a bug in versions prior to 1.2.3 let an attacker crash it remotely – by sending what looks like valid e-mail data.

    The authors overlooked sanitising the fifth argument (the _from parameter) in mail() – and that meant someone only needed to compose an e-mail with malicious info in that argument to attack Roundcube.

    [...]

    Roundcube posted a patch to GitHub at the end of November, and issued a version 1.2.3 here.

  • Open Source Flaws Found in Security Software

    Yet another industry survey has flagged open source software that according to one estimate accounts for half of the global code base as a growing security threat. Moreover, a review released by Flexera Software also found that the very security products designed to protect IT infrastructure are themselves riddled with vulnerabilities embedded in open source software.

  • Latest Android security update fixes Dirty COW, GPS vulnerabilities

  • News in brief: DirtyCOW patched for Android; naked lack of security; South Korea hacked

  • Millions exposed to malvertising that hid attack code in banner pixels

    Researchers from antivirus provider Eset said “Stegano,” as they’ve dubbed the campaign, dates back to 2014. Beginning in early October, its unusually stealthy operators scored a major coup by getting the ads displayed on a variety of unnamed reputable news sites, each with millions of daily visitors. Borrowing from the word steganography—the practice of concealing secret messages inside a larger document that dates back to at least 440 BC—Stegano hides parts of its malicious code in parameters controlling the transparency of pixels used to display banner ads. While the attack code alters the tone or color of the images, the changes are almost invisible to the untrained eye.

  • Backdoor accounts found in 80 Sony IP security camera models

    Many network security cameras made by Sony could be taken over by hackers and infected with botnet malware if their firmware is not updated to the latest version.

    Researchers from SEC Consult have found two backdoor accounts that exist in 80 models of professional Sony security cameras, mainly used by companies and government agencies given their high price.

    One set of hard-coded credentials is in the Web interface and allows a remote attacker to send requests that would enable the Telnet service on the camera, the SEC Consult researchers said in an advisory Tuesday.

  • I’m giving up on PGP

    After years of wrestling GnuPG with varying levels of enthusiasm, I came to the conclusion that it’s just not worth it, and I’m giving up. At least on the concept of long term PGP keys.

    This is not about the gpg tool itself, or about tools at all. Many already wrote about that. It’s about the long term PGP key model—be it secured by Web of Trust, fingerprints or Trust on First Use—and how it failed me.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Email cache proves Turkish oil minister’s links to Isis oil trade, WikiLeaks claims

    WikiLeaks has released a cache of thousands of personal emails allegedly from the account of senior Turkish government minister Berat Albayrak, son-in-law of the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which it says shows the extent of links between Mr Albayrak and a company implicated in deals with Isis-controlled oil fields.

    The 60,000 strong searchable cache, released on Monday, spans the time period between April 2000 – September 23 2016, and shows Mr Albayrak had intimate knowledge of staffing and salary issues at Powertrans, a company which was controversially given a monopoly on the road and rail transportation of oil into the country from Iraqi Kurdistan.

    Turkish media reported in 2014 and 2015 that Powertrans has been accused of mixing in oil produced by Isis in neighbouring Syria and adding it to local shipments which eventually reached Turkey, although the charges have not been substantiated by any solid evidence.

  • Wikileaks: Turkish Energy Minister Indirectly Involved In ISIS Oil Trade

    WikiLeaks published on Monday a searchable archive of nearly 58,000 emails from the private email account of Berat Albayrak – Turkey’s incumbent energy minister and son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – revealing the influence Albayrak has in Turkey and his correspondence regarding Powertrans, a company implicated in oil imports from ISIS-controlled oil fields.

    The emails encompass 16 years between April 2000 and September 23, 2016. A search by the ‘Powertrans’ keyword in the published WikiLeaks emails returns 32 results, including emails sent to Albayrak regarding personnel and salary issues at Powertrans.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Exclusive: ‘He will fight to the last breath’: Julian Assange’s mother speaks out six years after his arrest

    Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s mother Christine has told SBS News she feels “angry” but she’s still fighting six years after her son was arrested in relation to sexual assault allegations.

    Assange handed himself in to police in London on December 2010 and was released on bail.

    However, in June 2012 he broke his bail and sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London over fears he would be extradited to the US to face possible espionage charges.

    Since then police have kept the embassy surrounded, preventing him from leaving to Ecuador.

  • Pressure Builds for UK and Sweden to Release WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been in confinement for over 2,100 days without being charged with a crime. Since 2012, Assange has been under asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after he faced extradition to Sweden for questioning related to sexual offenses against two women, which Assange has consistently denied. Assange feared that if extradited to Sweden, he would subsequently be extradited to the United States, where he would likely face criminal charges for his work at WikiLeaks.

    Since its founding in 2006, WikiLeaks has published millions of documents exposing corruption in governments around the world, most notably the United States. WikiLeaks has shown light on the mass surveillance conducted by the NSA, torture in Guantanamo Bay, civilian deaths at the hands of the U.S. military, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rigging the primaries for Hillary Clinton, and many other revelations. This has, in turn, provided WikiLeaks and Assange a despised reputation among the United States government officials implicated in their releases.

    The New York Times and Washington Post, who previously coordinated with WikiLeaks to publish documents, assisted in propagating a narrative that Assange was a Russian ally due to the damage resulting from the leaks of DNC and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails. Assange and his allies affirm that the abrasive attitude toward WikiLeaks from U.S. officials have been a primary cause of Assange’s prolonged detention by the U.K. and Sweden.

  • On Assange, Following the Rules or Flouting Them?

    It should not have been terribly surprising to Sweden or the United Kingdom that the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that the various forms of confinement suffered by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange violate his human rights. The Working Group has many times warned that it is unlawful to force someone to choose between liberty and a fundamental right, such as asylum, which Assange now enjoys only so long as he stays inside the walls of the Ecuadorean embassy.

    What is news are the deplorable rhetorical parries from the UK and Swedish governments, who both stated not just disagreement, but that the Working Group opinion would have absolutely no effect on their actions. This is not what one expects from democratic governments who usually support the UN mechanisms and international law.

  • Assange’s mother pleads for his release

    The mother of Julian Assange has pleaded with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to secure her son’s release, six years to the day after he was arrested.

    Christine Assange made phone calls to the PM’s and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s offices on Wednesday to ask for their help in releasing the WikiLeaks founder from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, six years after he was arrested in the UK on December 7, 2010.

    ‘Today he has been detained six years without charge,’ Ms Assange told AAP on Wednesday. ‘It’s time for the Australian government to stand up for my son’s human and legal rights.’

  • Julian Assange defies Swedish prosecutors by releasing rape statement

    Julian Assange has thumbed his nose at Swedish investigators, who he says have robbed him of his freedom for six years, by releasing the answers he gave to them under questioning in Ecuador’s London embassy last month.

    The decision to issue the statement, which contains for the first time a detailed account by the WikiLeaks founder of his encounter with a woman in August 2010 who made rape allegations against him, marks a fresh twist in a case in which Assange claims an early leak of information from the Swedish police has shaped opinion.

  • Julian Assange’s Defence Statement

    Julian Assange has published his statement given to the Swedish prosecutor. I give it in full below. I do implore you to read it. This is the first time his defence has been made public, although the media have been delighted to report the leaked allegations against him in detail.
    His defence will not be given in the same detail in the media.

    It is worth noting that under Swedish law the identity of both the accuser and the accused ought to be protected, but that did not prevent Swedish police and prosecutors leaking details to a complicit media, or the women concerned selling their story to the tabloids.

    You really do owe it to yourself, to justice and to personal honesty to read Julian’s side of the story.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the EPA, is a literal stenographer for the oil and gas industry

    Sometimes we say that so and so is a “mouthpiece” of some special interest, meaning that they’re in cahoots, that they express their views. Or maybe we say someone’s a “puppet” of industry. Most of the time these are metaphors.

    But sometimes they’re literal. Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s pick to head the EPA, is a mouthpiece and a puppet of the fossil-fuel industry. He’s a stenographer.

    How do we know this? We know this because in 2014 Pruitt sent a letter to that same EPA in his capacity as attorney general of Oklahoma. The letter argued that the agency was dramatically overstating how much pollution new gas wells in his state were causing.

  • Climate Deniers’ Top 3 Tactics

    Climate deniers don’t just want to deny global warming and its danger. They want you to deny it too.

    But man-made climate change is real, the danger is extreme, so they have to use guile to persuade you otherwise. There are three tried-and-false tactics they use often, and to great effect. Let’s take a close look at these misdirection methods, so you can arm yourself for defense against the dark arts.

  • Met Police is still running Windows XP on 19,000 PCs [Ed: I wrote about this before [1, 2, 3]. iophk says, “still running Microsoft at all is a problem”]

    THE METROPOLITAN POLICE SERVICE (MPS) is still running Microsoft’s now-defunct Windows XP operating system on 19,000 PCs.

    This figure, confirmed to the INQUIRER’s sister site V3, marks a decrease of 7,500 from the 27,000 MPS PCs that were running Windows XP in August.

    This means a total of 15,500 machines have been upgraded from XP, although only to Windows 8.1, rather than Microsoft’s newer Windows 10 platform.

  • Trump taps Oklahoma attorney general to lead EPA

    President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Scott Pruitt, the Republican attorney general of Oklahoma and a frequent legal adversary to President Obama, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a transition official told The Hill.

    If confirmed by the Senate to oversee the 15,000-employee agency, Pruitt would take the lead on dismantling the EPA regulations that Trump targeted throughout his campaign as job killers that restrict economic growth.

    Reuters first reported the news Tuesday.

• Finance

  • Boeing Sweats Under Trump Spotlight as SoftBank Feels Warmth

    First came Ford and Carrier. Now Boeing and SoftBank are experiencing the power of Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.

    The president-elect jumped into corporate affairs again Tuesday, tweeting first to criticize one company and then to hail another. He began at 8:52 a.m. New York time by calling out Boeing Co. over costs to develop new Air Force One jets. Just over five hours later he celebrated a $50 billion investment in the U.S. by Japanese telecommunications firm SoftBank Group Corp.

    The tweets, coming after Trump last week announced a deal with United Technologies Corp. to cancel plans to close a U.S. factory, dominated news and moved markets even as details in both cases remained sketchy and the impacts unclear. Trump again showed a willingness to use his bully pulpit to criticize or congratulate companies over actions affecting American workers and government spending.

  • British workers living in poverty ‘at a record high’

    The number of workers living in poverty has reached a record high as the UK’s housing crisis fuels growing insecurity, a think tank has warned.

    Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) showed that 3.8 million workers, or one in eight, live in poverty.

    Low wages are regularly cited as the cause of in-work poverty, but the rising cost of rented housing is also pushing working people into extreme financial difficulty. A total of 7.4 million people, including 2.6 million children, are living in poverty despite being in working households, the report claims.

  • Sports Direct hits out at ‘extreme campaign’ as profits fall 25%

    Sports Direct’s chairman has accused the media, unions and politicians of a damaging “campaign” against the company amid its working practices and governance crisis.

  • The big money behind Trump’s tech deal is from Saudi Arabia

    Donald Trump has taken credit for a Japanese tech conglomerate’s plan to invest $50 billion in America.

    True, Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder and CEO of SoftBank (SFTBF), pledged Tuesday to invest the huge sum in U.S. startups. But that’s only part of the story.

    In reality, a big chunk of the cash is likely to come from the Saudi government.

    In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Son said the source of the investment would be a $100 billion fund SoftBank launched in October with Saudi Arabia.

  • Opting Out of Uber’s Forced Arbitration (The Clock is Ticking)

    You have until December 21st. That’s it. But you can opt out.

    Here’s the deal: Uber changed its terms of service to force people into arbitrations, taking away consumers’ rights to sue the ride sharing company if something goes wrong. Like plow into another car because the driver was looking at his phone to see where his next right might come from.

    That kind of thing.

  • Excellent, deep series on Uber’s Ponzi-scheme economics

    For the past week, Naked Capitalism has run a series of articles by transportation industry expert Hubert Horan on the economic shenanigans of Uber, which cooks the numbers it shows investors, drivers and the press to make it seem like something other than a black box that uses arrogance and lawlessness to make a bet on establishing a monopoly on transport in the world’s major cities.

    Horan started with four articles on Uber’s economics: Understanding Uber’s Bleak Operating Economics; Understanding Uber’s Uncompetitive Costs; Understanding False Claims About Uber’s Innovation and Competitive Advantages and Understanding That Unregulated Monopoly Was Always Uber’s Central Objective — today, he finishes (?) up with a fascinating Q&A with the commentators who’ve followed the series.

  • How to Expose Trump’s Dastardly Bait-and-Switch

    Trump is not an economic populist, he’s just playing one on TV.

    [...]

    Trump’s opening speech of his “thank you tour” in Ohio laid out the bait. While putting forth his “action plan to make America great,” Trump dished out nationalist and populist themes with a characteristic mix of racist signaling. Trump promised to put America first: “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag. From now on it is going to be: America First,” Trump said. “Never anyone again will any other interests come before the interest of the American people. It is not going to happen again.”

    Trump echoed Bernie Sanders with his focus on the “forgotten” American worker. Trump felt their pain, and indicted trade deficits and flight of manufacturing jobs. He promised good jobs. He will renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and take on China. He bragged about the Carrier deal, and pledged a 35 percent tariff on companies that offshore jobs and try to ship products back into the United States.

    Like Sanders, Trump proposed a major plan to rebuild America, including “our inner cities.” His plan will have “two simple rules”: “Buy America” and “Hire America,” phrases that too many Democrats would choke on.

    The conservative core of his program—corporate tax cuts, deregulation, reviving coal and oil, repealing Obamacare—is wrapped in this populist gauze.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Donald Trump just insulted a union leader on Twitter. Then the phone started to ring.

    Jones, a union leader in Indianapolis, represents the Carrier workers whose jobs Donald Trump has pledged to save. He said the sudden attention from the country’s next leader didn’t feel real.

    “My first thought was, ‘Well, that’s not very nice,’ ” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. “Then, ‘Well, I might not sleep much tonight.’ ”

    Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, told The Post on Tuesday that he believed Trump had lied to the Carrier workers last week when he visited the Indianapolis plant. On a makeshift stage in a conference room, Trump had applauded United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, for cutting a deal with him and agreeing to keep 1,100 jobs that were slated to move to Mexico in America’s heartland.

    Jones said Trump got that figure wrong.

  • Michigan election officials refuse to count ballots from black counties

    In Michigan, where Donald Trump won by just 10,704 votes, election officials are refusing to recount ballots in counties Hillary Clinton won handily.

  • U.S. judge reverses order requiring vote recount in Michigan

    A federal judge in Michigan on Wednesday revoked his order requiring a recount of the state’s presidential vote sought by Jill Stein, siding with a state appeals court that found the Green Party candidate had no grounds to mount the challenge.

    U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith’s ruling has the effect of halting the recount in Michigan, at least for now, following conflicting rulings a day earlier by federal and state appeals courts.

    The Michigan Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered the recount stopped, while the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Goldsmith’s earlier decision and said the process should proceed. The dueling rulings had both sides claiming victory but left the future of Stein’s bid unclear.

    Goldsmith, in deferring to the Michigan appeals court, said Stein had not presented valid reasons for him to override that court’s decision, which found that she was not an “aggrieved” candidate with standing to demand a recount.

    The Stein campaign said in a statement following Goldsmith’s ruling that it had appealed again, to the Michigan Supreme Court, and sought to disqualify two justices there because they had been mentioned by Republican President-elect Donald Trump as potential nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  • US judge reverses order requiring vote recount in Michigan

    A federal judge in Michigan on Wednesday revoked his order requiring a recount of the state’s presidential vote sought by Jill Stein, siding with a state appeals court that found the Green Party candidate had no grounds to mount the challenge.

    US District Judge Mark Goldsmith’s ruling has the effect of halting the recount in Michigan, at least for now, following conflicting rulings a day earlier by federal and state appeals courts.

    The Michigan Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered the recount stopped, while the US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Goldsmith’s earlier decision and said the process should proceed. The dueling rulings had both sides claiming victory but left the future of Stein’s bid unclear.

  • As it spreads online and off, Pizzagate gets weirder and more dangerous

    This past Sunday, a man fired a rifle into Comet Ping Pong, the Washington, DC pizza place at the center of an internet conspiracy theory dubbed Pizzagate that claims, in part, that the restaurant is a haven for a child abuse ring. The gunman surrendered to police after he realized there were no children being illegally harbored in the restaurant. What should have been an end to one of the internet’s strangest conspiracy theories appears to be just another moment in its convoluted timeline.

    This week, conspiracy theorists have named other pizza parlors as willing participants in the cover-up. DNA Info reports that New York pizzeria Roberta’s in Brooklyn received a threatening phone call last week after the restaurant was linked to Pizzagate.

  • Colorado electors sue state in effort to block Trump

    Two Democratic electors from Colorado filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday, challenging a state law that requires they vote for the winner of the state’s popular vote, the Denver Post reports.

    Polly Baca and Robert Nemanich had pledged to support Democrat Hillary Clinton, the winner of Colorado’s nine electoral votes.

    But now they are joining so-called “Moral Electors” in other states and say they’ll shift their Democratic votes to a consensus Republican pick — if one emerges.

    The “Moral Electors” want to persuade Republican electors in other states to vote for a third-party candidate, the Post reports, in an attempt to keep Donald Trump from receiving 270 electoral votes.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • International report – LinkedIn unlinked in Russia

    At present, LinkedIn is blocked in Russia. One of the world’s largest social networking sites with over 400 million users in 200 countries, LinkedIn has not been accessible in Russia since November 22 2016. On November 10 2016 the Moscow City Court upheld a lower court’s decision ordering that the website be blocked for all users in Russia.

  • Religious leaders push for Muslim alternative to Peppa Pig

    Islamic leaders in Australia have backed a campaign to produce an alternative to Peppa Pig set in a “predominantly Muslim town”.

    The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) has encouraged parents to raise funds for TV shows that support Islamic values.

    Barakah Hills, a “halal cartoon series”, has been pitched as a Muslim alternative to the UK pre-school show.

    Peppa Pig is a popular children’s animation shown in 180 countries.

    Production company One4Kids, which makes children’s shows with Islamic themes, wants to raise A$20,000 (£12,000; $15,000) to begin production on Barakah Hills.

  • Social Networks Must Stand Against Censorship

  • EU Threatens Massive Internet Censorship If Big Tech Won’t Come To Heel

  • How Long Before This Tool to Censor Images from Terrorists Gets Misused?

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • Connected toys violate European consumer law

    The Norwegian Consumer Council has looked at the terms and the technical features of selected connected toys. The findings show a serious lack of understanding of children’s rights to privacy and security.

    Based on what was discovered, consumer organizations in Europe and the United States in cooperation file formal complaints to relevant authorities on what seems to be obvious breaches of several consumer laws.

    – Children are especially vulnerable, and are entitled to products and services that safeguard their rights to security and privacy. As long as the manufacturers are not willing to take these issues seriously, Internet of things-technologies are not suited for toys, says Finn Myrstad, Head of section, digital services in the Norwegian Consumer Council.

  • Call for privacy probes over Cayla doll and i-Que toys

    The makers of the i-Que and Cayla smart toys have been accused of subjecting children to “ongoing surveillance” and posing an “imminent and immediate threat” to their safety and security.

    The accusations come via a formal complaint in the US by consumer groups.

    They, along with several EU bodies, are calling for investigations into the manufacturers.

  • Reagan Administration “Cavalierly” Leaked NSA Signals Intelligence — Apparently Without Informing the Agency

    On Sunday, November 17, 1985, a short article appeared on page A12 of the Washington Post under the headline “Managua Said to Get Military Copters.”

    The article stated that “Recently stepped-up shipments from Warsaw Pact countries to Nicaragua include at least two Polish Mi2 helicopters that can be used as gunships,” attributing this to “government officials with access to the latest intelligence reports.”

    The last of the story’s seven paragraphs clarified that just one of the Polish helicopters actually was “equipped with launchers for air-to-ground rockets.”

  • Drowning in Information: NSA Revelations From 262 Spy Documents

    By the first half of 2004, the National Security Agency was drowning in information. It had amassed 85 billion phone and online records and cut the ribbon on a new hacking center in Hawaii — but it was woefully short on linguists who could make sense of captured communications and lacked enough network analysts to effectively monitor all the systems it had hacked.

    The signals intelligence collected by the agency was being used for critically important decisions even as NSA struggled to understand it. Some bombs in Iraq were being targeted based entirely on signals intelligence, a senior NSA official told staff at the time — with decisions being made in a matter of “minutes” with “less and less review.”

  • Gunman Acts on Conspiracy Perpetuated by Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn

  • Pence: Trump security pick Flynn’s son not involved in transition

  • Son of Trump’s pick for NSA fired after ‘Pizzagate’ tweets

  • Why Donald Trump’s NSA Pick Is Scaring Some National Security Experts

    On issues of national security and intelligence, no one is likely to have more influence in Donald Trump’s White House than retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn.

    Yet Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, has gained prominence in Republican politics by fueling conspiracy theories and Islamophobic rhetoric that critics warn could create serious distractions—or alienate allies and embolden enemies—if it continues.

  • UK’s new National Cybersecurity Centre responds to nearly 70 hacking incidents in first month

    In its first month of operation, computer experts at the UK’s new GCHQ-led National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) responded to nearly 70 reported hacking incidents including seven cases of ransomware attacks, it has been revealed.

  • Nowhere to hide: NSA, GCHQ wiretapped in-flight phone calls, Snowden leaks show

  • Report: NSA And GCHQ Spying On Israeli Agencies And MK Dr. Ahmed Tibi

  • Report: Britain spied on Israeli diplomats

  • Report: British intelligence spied on Israeli diplomats, IDF

  • NSA and British intelligence spied on Israeli defense-related companies: report

  • British spies monitor Israeli diplomats, with help from US and Jordan – Snowden docs reveal

  • U.K. Intelligence Called Israel ‘True Threat’ to Middle East

  • U.S. and UK intelligence target airborne phone calls – report

  • Government spies can see everything you’re doing with your phone on a plane

  • US, UK spies snooped on Air France inflight phone calls, report

  • ​Government spies surveil phones in flight, report says

  • British and Americans spy on in-flight phone calls ‘in real time’, leaked Snowden files reveal

  • Nowhere to hide: NSA, GCHQ wiretapped in-flight phone calls, Snowden leaks show

  • American and British Spy Agencies Targeted In-Flight Mobile Phone Use

  • Report: NSA, GCHQ spied on Israeli diplomats, defense companies

  • Snowden leaks reveal GCHQ and NSA have been intercepting your in-flight mobile calls for years

  • Edward Snowden points out that David Petraeus “shared information that was far more highly classified than I ever did”

    Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency who leaked tens of thousands of documents revealing that the American government has spied on its own citizens, told Katie Couric on Yahoo News on Monday that retired Gen. David Petraeus, Donald Trump’s potential pick for secretary of state, disclosed far more classified information despite receiving a much lighter punishment.

    “We have a two-tiered system of justice in the United States,” Snowden said to Couric, “where people who are either well-connected to government or they have access to an incredible amount of resources get very light punishments.”

    Snowden went on to juxtapose how he was treated by the federal government with the punishments received by Petraeus, who shared classified information with his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell.

    “Perhaps the best-known case in recent history here is Gen. Petraeus — who shared information that was far more highly classified than I ever did with journalists,” Snowden said. “And he shared this information not with the public for their benefit, but with his biographer and lover for personal benefit — conversations that had information, detailed information, about military special-access programs, that’s classified above top secret, conversations with the president and so on.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Women in Lebanon protest law allowing rapists to marry their victims to escape punishment

    Women in Lebanon are protesting for the removal of a law that allows rapists to escape punishment for their crimes as long as they marry the survivor.

    The outdated statute from the 1940s currently says that rape is punishable by up to seven years in prison. The penalty for raping a minor or someone with mental or physical disabilities is higher – but Article 522 of the law creates a loophole which says that criminal prosecution is suspended if the two people involved get married.

    The law is up for debate on Wednesday after it was raised by a member of parliament. Lebanon’s diverse Christian and Muslim political representatives are currently energised by the election of a president after a more than two-year-long paralysis which meant legislation could not be passed – and activists are optimistic something can be done.

  • Five Afghan teenagers are arrested after a boy is gang-raped at knifepoint for more than an hour in a forest in Sweden

    Five Afghan teenagers have been arrested after a boy was gang-raped at knifepoint in a forest in Sweden, it has emerged.

    The victim, who is under 15, was filmed during the attack, which happened in woodland in Uppsala, south east Sweden.

    He was beaten and dragged out to the forest at knifepoint before being subjected to an ordeal lasting more than an hour, prosecutors say.

  • Obama Leaves Trump a Mixed Legacy on Whistle-Blowers

    Back in 2008, Senator Barack Obama promised that, if elected, he would run the most transparent Administration in history and would champion the cause of whistle-blowers. “Such acts of courage and patriotism . . . should be encouraged rather than stifled,” Obama said of whistle-blowers during his campaign.

    Eight years later, these words ring hollow to admirers of dissenters such as Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake, two of eight national-security “leakers” who have been charged with violating the 1917 Espionage Act during Obama’s Presidency. His Justice Department has prosecuted more such cases against whistle-blowers than all previous Administrations combined, setting a precedent that some fear Donald Trump will invoke—and drastically build upon—to further muzzle dissent.

  • ‘The Moms’ co-host Denise Albert, who is battling cancer, says she felt ‘violated’ during TSA search

    A breast-cancer patient said she felt violated and humiliated in a public TSA search at Los Angeles International Airport Sunday after two security agents put her through what she called an aggressive pat down.

    Denise Albert, a frequent guest on the PIX11 Morning News and co-host of “The Moms,” was traveling through LAX security when two TSA agents pulled her aside for a manual search because she was trying to bring a necessary medical cream with her on her flight, Albert said.

    “I always let them know I have a medical port and that I am wearing a wig,” says Albert.

  • The Person Who Deciphered the Order to Shoot at Kent State

    Stuart Allen died on November 22, 2016. I learned of his death by way of an email from Laurel Krause, whose sister Allison was gunned down by the National Guard on May 4, 1970, just after the noon hour during a demonstration against the U.S. incursion into Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

    Stuart Allen would not like to be called a hero, although he certainly was one. Stuart was both an audio and video expert, with degrees in both fields and worked out of his lab and business in New Jersey that offers expert analyses of that kind of data. Stuart often worked for law enforcement, including the Justice Department and the FBI.

    In 2010, both Stuart and another forensic audio expert, Tom Owen, provided information at the request of the Cleveland Plain Dealer (“New analysis of 40-year old recording of Kent State shootings reveals that Ohio Guard was given an order to prepare to fire,” May 9, 2010) about a new analysis of the famous Strubbe tape, a recording of the events that led up to the death of four students and the wounding of nine others during a demonstration against the U.S. incursion into Cambodia.

    The tape that Stuart analyzed, and the results with which Tom Owen concurred, yielded dramatic new information. Using state-of-the-art forensic audio tools, one of which was developed by the Soviet KGB prior to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Stuart found that a sequence of orders was given to the National Guardsmen as they reached the top of Blanket Hill on the campus of Kent State University, turned in unison, and fired 67 times at unarmed student demonstrators below the hill.

  • How a Muslim Group Shut Down Christmas Celebrations in Bandung

    A Christmas celebration led by preacher Stephen Tong at Sabuga Building in Bandung, West Java, on Tuesday (06/12) was forced to end after a Muslim hardliner group disrupted services.

    The group, identifying as Defenders of Ahlus Sunnah (PAS), forced organizers to end the event and claiming the religious service should be held in a church, not a public building.

  • Arrest of leading Egyptian feminist Azza Soliman sparks anger

    Human rights activists in Egypt have reacted angrily to the arrest of prominent women’s rights advocate Azza Soliman, saying it marked a “chilling escalation” of pressure on civil society organisations.

    Soliman, the founder of the Centre for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance (CEWLA), is one of a number of activists, lawyers and journalists to have been prevented from leaving Egypt in the past month.

    The rights lawyer and leading feminist said last week that she had been turned back on 19 November at Cairo airport. Soon after, Soliman discovered that her personal assets and those of her group had been frozen. On Wednesday, her foundation and a security source said she had been detained by police.

  • Tensions are rising, there are cracks in the façade, and change is in the air. When and how will things snap?

    Tensions between the industrial-age establishment and the networked people-at-large have been rising for years, if not for two decades. Politicians and elites striving to paint themselves on moral high horses are seen as increasingly isolated from the real world, enriching themselves at the expense of everybody else – not just expense in a monetary sense, but even more so in a liberty sense. With a perceived establishment increasingly insisting on their worldview, using an increasing amount of political violence and in contrast with people at large, major changes are inevitably in the cards.

    There are many signs that the political establishment is losing touch with reality – basically, losing touch with everything that happened since the Internet. The political structures they’re a part of were built to solve the problems of a different era, and those organizations are institutionally incapable of realizing that today’s conflicts are completely different from those that defined the industrial age. Therefore, politicians do two things – they keep hammering home messages that come across as increasingly irrelevant, while at the same time strengthening their own reality bubble where they are denying that the world is changing, has already changed, around them.

    [...]

    The UK is preparing for ten years in prison for teenagers who share music and movies directly, as people have always done but in violation of the copyright distribution monopoly, on the basis that they theoretically may have caused somebody to not earn as much money as they feel they should have. This is a prime example of a “let them eat cake” moment: in a referendum, would such a draconian measure even get a single percentage point of support?

    [...]

    When I can’t walk home safely, I just get angry when the taxation money I’ve worked hard for is being spent on things like gender pronoun awareness campaigns and parental leave bonuses within the administration instead of on fixing basic security and foundational liberty in the streets. The elites are now so far isolated from the common people, they’re not even aware that they’re working at the utterly wrong level of the Maslow Pyramid of Human Needs: politicians and establishment are operating at level five (self-emancipation) with society at large at level two (basic safety concerns).

  • Federal judge kills recount effort in Michigan

    A federal judge has stopped the hand recount of nearly 5 million ballots in Michigan, a decision that seems to secure Donald Trump’s narrow victory in the traditionally blue state.

    U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith, who effectively ordered the recount to begin Monday, sided with a state appeals court Wednesday in halting the effort, ABC News reported.

    On Tuesday, a Michigan appeals court ruled 3-0 that Green Party candidate Jill Stein should not have been allowed to demand a recount because she is not an “aggrieved candidate.” Goldsmith, after hearing arguments from the state Republican Party and GOP attorney general, agreed.

    “Because there is no basis for this court to ignore the Michigan court’s ruling and make an independent judgment regarding what the Michigan Legislature intended by the term ‘aggrieved,’ plaintiffs have not shown an entitlement to a recount,” Goldsmith said.

    The Stein campaign’s lead lawyers in Michigan said they were “deeply disappointed” with the ruling.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Court: Usenet Provider is Not Liable for Piracy

      After several years, the appeals court has reached a final decision in the case between anti-piracy group BREIN and Usenet provider NSE. The court ruled that the Usenet provider is not liable for the copyright infringements of its users. However, it also requires the service in question to offer a fast and “effective” takedown procedure.

    • YouTube’s $1bn royalties are not enough, says music industry

      YouTube has said it has paid the music industry $1bn (£794m) in royalties this year – but record companies have responded by claiming it is not enough.

      The spat began on Tuesday, when YouTube’s chief business officer Robert Kyncl posted a blog highlighting the site’s contribution to the industry.

      He said YouTube had distributed $1bn in advertising royalties alone, arguing that “free” streaming was as important as subscription sites like Spotify.

      But record labels were not impressed.

    • IFPI Sneers at YouTube’s $1 Billion Music Industry Revenue Payout

      Google has just announced that during the past 12 months, YouTube paid out $1 billion to the music industry from advertising alone. However, the IFPI remains unimpressed, accusing the platform of taking advantage of artists and producers. YouTube exploits loopholes in the DMCA, the industry group argues, while calling for legislative change to address the “value gap.”

    • Proposed EU Commission Copyright Reform Detrimental To Authors, CEIPI Says

      The opinion explains that recent empirical evidence from national implementation of publishers’ neighbouring rights confirmed a negative impact on small publishers. However, news aggregators might have a positive effect on online news sites, they said.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Why the operating system matters even more in 2017

  Operating systems don’t quite date back to the beginning of computing, but they go back far enough. Mainframe customers wrote the first ones in the late 1950s, with operating systems that we’d more clearly recognize as such today—including OS/360 from IBM and Unix from Bell Labs—following over the next couple of decades.

• Server

  • Docker acquires file syncing and sharing app Infinit, will open-source the software

    Docker, the startup that pushes open source software for packaging up code into containers that can be deployed on many machines, today announced its latest acquisition: file transfer app Infinit.

    Yes, that’s right, Docker bought a company with a consumer-friendly app. It lets you sync files to your other devices or send them to others.

  • How Virtualized Networks Will Save Us From Dropped Calls

    We’ve all been the victim of a dropped mobile phone call and know how frustrating it can be. However, virtualized networks provide network operators with powerful tools to detect and recover from network disruptions, or “faults,” that can drop calls for thousands of subscribers simultaneously. The Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) project together with OpenStack have developed features in software that add resiliency to mobile networks and enable them to recover from network and other outages.

  • It’s Brexploitation! Microsoft punishes UK for Brexit with cloud price-gouging

    “My own story would not have been possible but for the democratizing force of Microsoft technology reaching me where I was growing up,” CEO Satya Nadella told shareholders this week.

    But the price of that “democratizing force” is about to go up, with Britons uniquely singled out. Microsoft has reiterated to Azure customers that prices will go up by 22 per cent from January 1st.

    The problem? The price rise is far greater than any exchange rate post-Brexit fluctuations might justify. Microsoft’s biggest European data centre is in Dublin, a member of the Euro currency. The Euro hovered around €1.28 to one pound for the first six months of the year, before crashing after Brexit. It’s now €1.19, a depreciation of just 9 cents, or 7 per cent.

    The value of the British pound has weakened more dramatically against the US dollar, dropping by 18.9 per cent since 24 June – the day after Brits voted to leave the EU.

    For new Office or Azure cloud customers in the UK, no exchange rate can justify any price rise at all. In September, Microsoft made Azure available in UK data centres.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • 1 Step Forward, 2 Steps Back: EU Copyright Reform

    Today on the podcast we’re looking at the copyright reform that is being proposed by the EU commission. Of course even as I say those words, I can hear some of you clicking off, or saving this for later even if later will never come. Copyright is one of those things – it hits us in so many ways, everyday, yet often the discussions and specifics cause us to get bored or lost… amazingly something that matters so much is really hard to get excited about. But we’re daring to tackle the important on this program, with help from three voices – Polina Malaja of the Free Software Foundation Europe, Dimitar Dimitrov of the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU, and Julia Reda, German Member of the European Parliament.

• Kernel Space

  • Graphics Stack

    • Nouveau Queues Up Last Minute Updates For Linux 4.10

      Overall the Nouveau DRM updates for Linux 4.10 are significant after they missed out on any feature changes for Linux 4.9. Given all the churn, there’s been a last minute pull into DRM-Next of some more fixes and other minor activity.

    • Geminilake Support Added To The Intel X.Org Driver

    • NVIDIA’s Next Linux Driver Release To Support Vulkan Without X11

      NVIDIA has confirmed that their next proprietary driver update for Linux will introduce support for Vulkan rendering outside of the X.Org Server.

      With NVIDIA’s current Vulkan Linux driver it’s not possible to achieve headless Vulkan rendering if the X.Org Server isn’t running, but that limitation is said to be addressed by their next (post-375) driver release.

    • Mesa 3D 12.0.5 Is the Last in the Series, Users Urged to Move to Mesa 13.0

      Today, December 5, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov proudly announced the release and immediate availability of the fifth and last scheduled maintenance update of the Mesa 12.0 3D Graphics Library for GNU/Linux distributions.

    • Khronos To Develop New Standard For VR

    • The next driver release from NVIDIA will support using Vulkan without needing the X11 on Linux

      It seems NVIDIA are preparing a new driver update that will enable the use of Vulkan without needing X11.

    • xinput is not a configuration UI

• Applications

  • Manuskript is a Promising Open-Source Scrivener Alternative

    Whether you plan to work on a book, a screenplay, or better structure your dissertation, you’ll probably see apps like Scrivener recommended. If you’re running Windows, macOS or even Android then you’re spoilt for choice, with various competing proprietary apps at varying price points readily available. On Linux the choices are somewhat limited.

  • Tor 0.2.9 Is Just Around the Corner As 0.2.8.10 Fixes Memory Leak in OpenSSL 1.1

    The past weekend brought us new stable and development builds of the Tor anonymity network project, versioned 0.2.8.10, as the most advanced version out there, and 0.2.9.6 RC (Release Candidate).

  • Pitivi 0.98 Linux Video Editor Adds Customizable Keyboard Shortcuts

    Version 0.98 of the GNOME-aligned GStreamer-powered Pitivi non-linear video editor was tagged today as the newest development milestone.

    The main feature addition of Pitivi 0.98 is now supporting customizable keyboard supports! Aside from finally supporting customizable keyboard shortcuts for this open-source video editor, a lot of warnings were fixed from GTK 3.22, and there has been a lot of other bug fixing. Bugs around Pitivi’s timeline were primarily targeted by this release.

  • Phoronix Test Suite 6.8-Tana Officially Released

    Phoronix Test Suite 6.8.0 is now available as the latest version of our open-source, fully-automated, reproducible benchmarking software for Linux, BSD, Solaris, macOS, Windows, and other operating systems.

    Phoronix Test Suite 6.8 is the latest stable release now of our GPL-licensed benchmarking software updated on its regular quarterly release cadence. Phoronix Test Suite 6.8 development focused on a number of low-level improvements to particularly benefit Phoromatic and the Phodevi (Phoronix Device Interface) software/hardware library abstraction layer.

  • iPerf As Another Network Benchmark Is Now Available Via The Phoronix Test Suite

  • FFmpeg 3.2.2 “Hypatia” Open-Source Multimedia Framework Released with 30 Fixes

    Today, December 6, 2016, the development team behind the powerful, open-source, free, and cross-platform FFmpeg multimedia framework released a new maintenance update in the FFmpeg 3.2 “Hypatia” series.

  • Proprietary

    • Chromium-Based Vivaldi 1.6 Browser Enters Development, Brings Tab Stack Renaming

      Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard informs us about the availability of a new snapshot for the cross-platform, Chromium-based Vivaldi web browser, which promises to let users name tab stacks.

      Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.682.3 marks the beginning of the development of Vivaldi 1.6, the next major version of the popular web browser, and it looks like it has been rebased on Chromium 55.0.2883.64. Besides fixing a bunch of regressions, the new development release implements an option under Settings -> Tabs -> Tab Features -> Tab stacking -> Allow Tab Stack Renaming, which lets you rename or name tab stacks.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to install Docker and run Docker containers on Fedora 25

    • Validating e-mail addresses

    • Keystone Development Bootstrap with Service Catalog

    • Transitioning to Python 3

    • Kubernetes High Availability Setup Using Ansible

    • Secure USB boot with Debian

    • QEMU Advent Calendar 2016

    • Troubleshooting disk usage on a Linux server with ncdu

    • Step by Step Guide to Bodhi Linux 4.0.0

    • Step-by-Step Guide to Bodhi Linux 4

    • Manage Samba4 Active Directory Infrastructure from Windows10 via RSAT – Part 3

    • Ubuntu Server Security Updates Only

    • Bare metal and Virtual Machine Provisioning through Foreman Server

    • How to use and make the most of fuser command in Linux

    • Canonical Log Lines

    • Essentials of OpenStack Administration Part 1: Cloud Fundamentals

    • How To Use Angry IP Scanner (Network Scanner)

    • How To Find And Delete Files Older Than X Days In Linux

  • Games

    • Doyodo RetroEngine Sigma is a Linux-powered classic video game emulation console

      The Nintendo NES Classic is quite an amazing console. True, it is not as powerful as modern game systems like Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but it comes pre-loaded with many classic NES titles. Unfortunately, its strength is also its weakness — those pre-loaded titles are the only games you can play. You cannot load other games, so you are stuck with what you got.

    • Alwa’s Awakening, a game inspired by old NES classics needs Linux testers

      The developers of Alwa’s Awakening [Official Site, Steam] contacted me to let you all know that they are going to need help testing the Linux version of their game.

    • Quern – Undying Thoughts, a puzzle game inspired by Myst released day-1 on Linux

      For those that remember the classic game Myst, Quern – Undying Thoughts [Steam, Official Site] a game clearly inspired by it launched with day-1 Linux support.

    • The circuit building simulator ‘SHENZHEN I/O’ gets ‘overwhelmingly positive’ reviews from Steam users

      SHENZHEN I/O is the new simulator/puzzle game by Zachtronics, the creators of other excellent games like Spacechem, Infinifactory and TIS-100. After being on Early Access for some time, it’s now available on Steam since November, 17th. But most importantly, even when only two weeks have passed since the official release, the game already has ‘overwhelmingly positive’ reviews by Steam users, just like its predecessors; out of a total 785 reviews so far, only 14 are negative against 771 positives, something truly remarkable.

    • Engage in a battle of wits, luck and skullduggery in ‘The Living Dungeon’, now released for Linux

      The Living Dungeon [Steam, Official Site] is a board game come to life in video game form and it’s now available on Linux. Up to 9 players can take part in a battle of wits, luck and skullduggery. It also features a 30 hour story campaign.

    • Stellaris 1.4 update released with a free DLC named ‘Horizon Signal’

      Stellaris [Steam, Official Site] has received a major patch today to address a bunch of bugs, do some optimizations, adds a ton of achievements and more.

    • Lara Croft GO Launches on Steam for Linux, Mac, and Windows with a 20% Discount

      We always love to see AAA titles released with day-one support for Linux, and Square Enix has just launched the Lara Croft GO turn-based puzzle video game on Steam, the next episode in the Tomb Raider series.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Best KDE/Plasma distro of 2016

      The end is near. I mean, 2016 has less than a month left on its credit. We should now step back and contemplate. Which distribution merits our highest regard, most excitement, best praise, prolonged use? However, before we can declare the final result, we need to do it step by step. First, Plasma.

      Overall, Year 2016 was a fairly tough one for us Linux users. Whether you like it or not, Ubuntu plays a very big part in how the world of distros turns. The pendulum of fortune sways heavily toward the gravitational pull of what Canonical does, and when Ubuntu mis-delivers, a large number of other distributions suffers for it, both directly as they be based on Ubuntu, and also indirectly, through the erosion of hope and good karma. Still, despite these challenges, we can sift through all the trouble and search for the nuggets of happiness. The desktop environment candidate for this article is Plasma, and to some extent, KDE.

    • KDE Frameworks 5 Now Available as a Snap for Snapping KDE Apps on Ubuntu Linux

      Long-time KDE Community developer Harald Sitter has been working lately on creating a sharable KDE Frameworks Snap that would make snapping of KDE applications for Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux distros a lot easier and fun.

      In a recent blog post, the developer explains how he managed to bundle KDE apps as Snaps while trying to make them as smaller as possible. The size of the downloadable binary Snap and Flatpak packages, as well as AppImage or other similar technology, always appeared to have been an issue for most users.

      In order for Snaps and Flatpaks to be adopted by the mass, they need to be smaller, and thanks to the hard work of Harald Sitter, there’s now a Snap version of the KDE Frameworks 5 collection of add-on libraries for Qt 5, which KDE developers are using to develop KDE applications for the Plasma 5 desktop environment.

• Distributions

  • Solus Packagers Rejoice: Solbuild Is the New, Faster Solus Package Build System

    We knew it was destined to happen sooner or later, the evobuild package build system used in the Solus Linux-based operating system for building packages in the .eopkg format is now officially deprecated.

  • “Just 1 Link” To Hack North Korea’s “Terrible” Linux Distro Red Star 3

    North Korea built its own Linux distro which was dubbed as the worst Linux distro ever. A security firm known as Hacker House has found a vulnerability that can compromise the Red Star OS 3 using a malicious link.

  • New Releases

    • Linux Lite 3.2 Users Get New Versions of Lite Software and Tweaks, Update Now

      Jerry Bezencon, the creator of the Ubuntu-based Linux Lite operating system for personal computers, kindly informs Softpedia today about an updated version of the in-house built Lite Software app.

    • NuTyX 8.2.91 available with cards 2.1.100

      The NuTyX team is please to annonce the development release 8.2.91 of NuTyX.

      About 1000 commits since version 8.2

      A new ISO is available in 64 bits. The size is 217M.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5: is it near-perfect?

      ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5 64-bit Live (WOW! That’s a long name!) left a decent impression on me. It was quick. I noticed no issues in regards to speed and performance.

      There were no bugs or crushes during the run.

      Both issues I had during the Live session run were linked to the notification area: the icons that should be placed there don’t appear.

      The default menu in ROSA R8 Plasma 5 is not to my taste, but that is easy to change.

      On the positive note, there were no obvious traces of the operating system “nationality”. Unlike full-of-French Emmabuntus, you won’t find anything Russian in ROSA R8.

  • Gentoo Family

    • Gentoo-Based Porteus Kiosk 4.2 Released with Linux Kernel 4.4.36, Firefox 45.5.1

      Porteus Solutions, through Tomasz Jokiel, announced today the release and immediate availability of Porteus Kiosk 4.2.0, the latest stable version of the free and open source Gentoo-based kiosk operating system for web terminals.

      Powered by the latest long-term supported Linux 4.4.36 kernel, Porteus Kiosk 4.2.0 ships with some of the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software projects, including the recently released X.Org Server 1.18.4 display server, as well as the Mozilla Firefox 45.5.1 ESR and Google Chrome 54.0.2840.100 web browsers.

  • Arch Family

    • RaspArch, the Arch Linux Remix for Raspberry Pi 3 SBCs, Now Shipping with Yaourt

      After announcing the release of a new version of his Ubuntu-based ExTiX Linux operating system for Intel Compute Stick devices, Arne Exton has announced today the availability of RaspArch Build 161205.

      RaspArch is a remix of Arch Linux ARM for Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computers, and the latest release is shipping with the long-term supported Linux 4.4.35 kernel and the latest package versions released upstream as of December 5, 2016.

      “When you have installed RaspArch to your Micro SD Card you can use the system like any other Arch Linux system, i.e. install new programs, etc,” said Arne Exton in the release announcement. “Arch motto is KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). RaspArch uses kernel 4.4.35-1-ARCH and the LXDE Desktop environment.”

  • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • openSUSE Leap 42.2 Linux Now Officially Available as 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3 Image

      openSUSE Project, through Douglas DeMaio, proudly informs Softpedia via an email announcement about the general availability of a 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3 image of the openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat brings full JBoss software stack to OpenShift

      Three years ago I wrote about how Red Hat was bringing its JBoss Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) middleware to the PaaS cloud. It took longer than I expected. But, the full Red Hat JBoss Middleware stack is now containerized and available on Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud.

    • Building MySQL DBaaS on OpenStack And Ceph Clouds

      With a properly configured OpenStack deployment and Red Hat Ceph storage backend, DBaaS clients merely go to a self-service interface and request the number and configuration of databases they require. OpenStack dynamically provisions the required storage capacity from the appropriate Ceph storage pool. No more manual placement of these database instances on MySQL clusters of various shapes and sizes. This manual exercise was a bit like playing the old Tetris game, trying to fit new database instances into fixed-sized clusters, followed by moving or rearranging them to new clusters when they outgrew available capacity.

    • Now available: The Open Organization Leaders Manual

      Available now, The Open Organization Leaders Manual is a community-produced companion to Jim Whitehurst’s The Open Organization. With contributions from more than 15 authors, it explores new attitudes and practices leaders should adopt when leveraging the power of transparecy, meritocracy, inclusivity, sharing, and collaboration to build the workplaces of the future.

    • Red Hat Opens Call for Submissions for 2017 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year Award

    • Red Hat Data Shows Big Increases in OpenStack Deployments

      Step back and think about it, and It’s hard to believe that the OpenStack cloud computing story isn’t even five years old yet. Back in 2010, Rackspace and NASA announced an effort to create a sophisticated open source cloud computing infrastructure that could compete with proprietary offerings. Since then, OpenStack has won over countless tech titans that are backing it, and has its own foundation.

      Now, Red Hat is out with results from a survey that show that OpenStack production deployments more than doubled in 2016. Clearly, organizations have moved beyond the evaluation stage and are trusting this open cloud platform.

      Last year, many companies were still learning about OpenStack clouds or developing proof-of-concepts. Now they are deploying OpenStack.

    • Finance

      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Stake Maintained by Verde Servicos Internacionais S.A.

      • National Pension Service Purchases 12,387 Shares of Red Hat Inc (RHT)

      • Red Hat Opens Call for Submissions for 2017 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year Award

      • Identifying Analyst Forecast Summary To Consider: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), Visa Inc. (NYSE:V)

      • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Upgraded to “Strong-Buy” by Vetr Inc.

      • ABR Of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) At 1.31

      • Investor Watch on Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Fedora

      • Longer Fedora Cycles, 2017 Predictions, New Bodhi Guide

        The top story today was Fedora developers’ considering lengthening their developmental cycles and releasing only once a year. Matthew Miller said “PR is a legitimate input into planning.” Bryan Lunduke is back with his prognostications for 2017 and Bruce Byfield has seven tips for using Plasma. DistroWatch Weekly reviewed Fedora 25 and Roger Carter penned an extensive user guide for Bodhi Linux 4.0.

      • Fedora 26 Looks At Updating Its CFLAGS / CXXFLAGS

        The latest change request coming in for Fedora 26 is to update the default C/C++ compiler flags.

        The proposed changes are to add -Werror=implicit-function-declaration and -Werror=implicit-int for helping better prepare C code for future revisions to C and making the code more friendly with C++ programs. Additionally, for Fedora 26 on i686, the plan is to drop -mtune=atom. The tuning for Atom was done previously back when 32-bit Intel Atom CPUs were very common, but now less so, and many i686 Fedora packages are being installed on x86_64 and thus might run a bit faster on current hardware.

      • Outreachy Starts Today!

        This blog should now be showing up on various planets (Fedora, Outreachy, Fedora Design), which means I need to do an introduction.

        Hi, I’m Suzanne. I’ve been working on getting myself into User Experience (UX) for about a year now, although I’ve been interested in smoothing the interface between people and technology for longer than that. Most recently, I spent a few years in a PhD program working with robots and investigating the kind of gestures that robots will most need to understand when conversing with people. When that turned out to not be a good program for me, I figured out that UX was the most interesting and relevant path forward.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • 10 Reasons To Use Ubuntu Linux

          There are numerous Linux distributions designed to serve different needs. Being an open source software, Linux allows the developers to pick its code and create something new and exciting.

          Out of these numerous Linux distributions, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, and Debian are some of the most popular operating systems. If you’re facing trouble with Windows 10’s privacy nuisance, you can surely try out a fresh Linux experience.

        • Canonical and System76 Working on Improving Unity7 HiDPI Support in Ubuntu Linux

          Canonical’s Michael Hall announced on December 5, 2016, that Ryan Sipes, Community Manager at System76, reports on the fact that both companies are currently working together to improve HiDPI support in the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

        • Canonical Patches Important Kernel Vulnerability in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

          On December 5, 2016, Canonical published several security advisories to inform users of the Ubuntu Linux operating system about the availability of new kernel builds for their OSes, patched against a critical security vulnerability.

        • What New Is Going To Be In Ubuntu 17.04 ‘Zesty Zapus’

          Right on the heels of Ubuntu 16.10 ‘Yakkety Yak’ is Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus. Ubuntu 17.04 is currently scheduled for release on April 13, 2017 but know that this is only an estimate. One thing to know is that all things being equal, it is going to be released in April 2017. Ubuntu Zesty Zapus will be supported for only 9 months until January 2018 as it is not a LTS (long term support) release.

        • Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 Officially Released with Revamped Unity 8 Interface, Fixes

          A few moments ago, we’ve been informed by Canonical’s Lukasz Zemczak about the general availability of the long-anticipated Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 software update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices.

        • Ubuntu OTA-14 Released, Fixes A Number Of Bugs

        • Canonical to sue European cloud provider over unofficial Ubuntu images

          Ubuntu Linux producer Canonical plans to sue a European cloud provider for “publishing insecure, broken images of Ubuntu despite many months of coaxing to do it properly.”

          The company says that its cloud OS relies on trust and that such actions undermine the sucess of the certified Ubuntu images that are guaranteed to run on specific cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Ubuntu-Based BackBox Linux 4.7 Is Out with Kernel 4.4 LTS, Updated Hacking Tools

            On December 6, 2016, the developers behind the Ubuntu-based, hacking-oriented BlackBox Linux operating system proudly announced the release of BackBox Linux 4.7.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Open spec SBC dual boots Android and Ubuntu on hexa-core RK3399

    T-Firefly is Kickstartering the first hacker SBC with Rockchip’s Cortex-A72/-A53 RK3399. The Firefly-RK3399 has up to 4GB DDR3, M.2, and USB 3.0 Type-C.

    T-Firefly, which offers Linux- and Android-ready open source boards like the Firefly-RK3288 and sandwich-style Firefly-RK3288 Reload, both of which are based on the quad-core, Cortex-A17 Rockchip RK3288, has advanced to a more powerful Rockchip SoC for its new open spec Firefly-RK3399. The hexa-core Rockchip RK3399 features two server-class Cortex-A72 cores clocked to up to 2.0GHz, as well as four Cortex-A53 at up to 1.42GHz. This appears to be the first RK3399 SBC and the first SBC to include Cortex-A72 cores.

  • Status of Embedded Linux: Tim Bird Warns of Slow Progress on Linux Shrinkage

    As Chair of the Architecture Group of The Linux Foundation’s CE Working Group, Tim Bird has long been the amiable public face of the Embedded Linux Conferences, which he has run for over a decade. At the recent ELC Europe event in Berlin, Bird gave a “Status of Embedded Linux” keynote in which he discussed the good news in areas like GPU support and virtually mapped kernel stacks, as well as the slow progress in boot time, system size, and other areas that might help Linux compete with RTOSes in IoT leaf nodes.

  • This week in vc4 (2016-12-05): SDTV, 3DMMES, HDMI audio, DSI

    The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently started contracting with Free Electrons to give me some support on the display side of the stack. Last week I got to review and release their first big piece of work: Boris Brezillon’s code for SDTV support. I had suggested that we use this as the first project because it should have been small and self contained. It ended up that we had some clock bugs Boris had to fix, and a bug in my core VC4 CRTC code, but he got a working patch series together shockingly quickly. He did one respin for a couple more fixes once I had tested it, and it’s now out on the list waiting for devicetree maintainer review. If nothing goes wrong, we should have composite out support in 4.11 (we’re probably a week late for 4.10).

  • Raspberry Pi VC4 Driver Work On SDTV, HDMI Audio & More

    Eric Anholt’s latest weekly blog post on the VC4 development highlights SDTV support coming together, the Raspberry Pi Foundation contracting Free Electrons to provide more development help on the display stack, HDMI audio support for VC4 DRM driver continuing to inch along, DSI fixes, some code generation improvements for VC4 Gallium3D, and other work.

  • Rugged Skylake embedded PC has wide range power

    Axiomtek’s “eBOX565-500-FL” computer runs Linux or Windows on dual-core Intel 6th Gen CPUs, and offers four USB 3.0 ports and wide-range power.

    The eBOX565-500-FL updates the two-year-old eBOX560-880-FL embedded PC, which provides dual-core Intel 4th Gen “Haswell” Core and Celeron CPUs. The very similar eBOX565-500-FL instead taps the 14nm Intel 6th Gen “Skylake” ULT processors, once again offering two dual-core options: the 2.4GHz Core i5-6300U and the 2.0GHz Celeron 3955U.

  • USB stick turns 64-bit x86 systems into Linux thin clients

    Igel has launched a “UD Pocket” USB stick that boots up a VDI environment on any 64-bit x86 PC, laptop, or other device without overwriting its local OS.

    Since the early days of Linux, IT administrators and demo presenters have been using USB stick and Live CD-based devices to boot up Linux distributions like Knoppix on desktop computers. Now Igel Technology has taken the bootable USB stick to the thin client world with the Igel UD Pocket. The 22 x 12 x 6mm, 3.3gm device plugs into any 64-bit x86 PC, laptop, or tablet with at least 2GB of RAM and a bootable USB port, to turn it into a thin client running a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) user interface.

  • Phones

    • Tizen

      • Auto Rikshaw Racing Game added to Tizen Store

        Hey guys, do you like to play with Auto Rickshaws ? This is a racing game named “Crazy Auto Traffic Racer”, added by Games2Win Pvt. Ltd.

    • Android

      • Android security in 2016 is a mess.

        Your phone probably contains banking, payment and personal information that can be remotely stolen via numerous known and unknown bugs in the Android software. This is attractive to criminals.

        Vendors (LG, Samsung, Xiaomi, etc.), after selling you their phone, have no incentive to keep your phone’s software up to date with Google’s fixes. Your Android phone is probably out of date and therefore a gaping security hole through which attackers can steal your stuff from the safety of their own laptops.

      • Android, Qualcomm move on insecure GPS almanac downloads

      • 3 biggest security threats for Android users today

      • Evie brings a new level of efficiency to the Android home screen

      • Google launches U.K. Android Pay promotions for the holiday season

      • Android Security Bulletin: Everything you need to know

      • Google Patches Android for 74 Vulnerabilities in December Update

      • Android Nougat hits 0.4% adoption after 3 months

      • Plenty of GIF and emoji fun with Android’s latest update

      • Moto G4 & Moto G4 Plus News & Update: Android 7.1 Nougat Update Rolling Out; Moto G Devices, Not Available?

      • Android platform distribution, December 2016: KitKat is finally toppled, Nougat doesn’t move much

      • Nokia’s Android phone revival has to be about more than just phones

      • How to publish an Android library: a mysterious conversation

      • Android 7.1.1 update brings GIFs, new emoji and Pixel features

      • Android Pay users will be sent a virtual Christmas cracker every time they buy something in December

      • Monzo puts payments on Android

      • Vantiv Launches Program With Android Pay

      • Android 7.0 Nougat Release Date, Features & News, Update: Beta Rolled Out For Samsung Galaxy S7, Edge; Corrections Detailed For Upcoming OS

      • How an Android Wear smartwatch can keep your business running smoothly

      • Android 7.1.1 in pictures: Nexus versus Pixel

      • Galaxy S7 Nougat update: Top 10 features to know

      • Google is putting a news feed in Android’s home screen

      • ASUS ZenPad 3S 10 review: The iPad Air running Android

        The history of Android on tablets is complicated. Just as Apple had done in 2007 with the first iPhone, the iPad’s release in 2010 set a very high standard for the rest of the market. The next year, Google released Android 3.0 Honeycomb on the Motorola Xoom, designed specifically with tablets in mind. The Xoom wasn’t the iPad killer that Motorola had hoped for, and there have been very few Android tablets that could stack up to Apple’s iPad line.

Free Software/Open Source

• NIPS conference: Google releases open-source, AI, 3D game-development project

  Today, on the opening day of the marquee AI conference Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona, Google announced in a blog post the release of its DeepMind Lab project available to the AI community under open source licensing terms.

  Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are the next two computing platforms. DeepMind Lab is a 3D AI platform for building virtual games that bring these two platforms together in multiple dimensions. DeepMind Lab uses a special kind of AI, called machine learning (ML). And within the field of ML, it uses an advanced form of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning (DeepRL).

• 7 cool little open source projects that stood out in 2016

  In the early days of the open source movement, a lot of the attention was on operating systems, and later on large content management systems. These days, containers are mentioned regularly even in mainstream news outlets. The big tech stories are great, but they miss the other great activity in the niches of the open source space. I’ve rounded up seven interesting lesser-known projects from the past year. You can see more articles about projects like this in my Nooks and Crannies column.

• The most in demand skills you need for an open source job

  With coding and software development in serious need of talent, it’s essentially a graduate’s market, but you still need the right combination of skills and attributes to beat the competition. When it comes to open source and DevOps, a deeper understanding is essential.

• Why the Open Source Cloud Is Important

  To this end, foundations such as the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Open Container Initiative (OCI) at The Linux Foundation are actively bringing in new open source projects and engaging member companies to create industry standards for new cloud-native technologies. The goal is to help improve interoperability and create a stable base for container operations on which companies can safely build commercial dependencies.

• AI Platforms Welcome Devs With Open Arms

  Two leaders in the field of artificial intelligence have announced that they’re open-sourcing their AI platforms.

  After investing in building rich simulated environments to serve as laboratories for AI research, Google’s DeepMind Lab on Saturday said it would open the platform for the broader research community’s use.

  DeepMind has been using its AI lab for some time, and it has “only barely scratched the surface of what is possible” in it, noted team members Charlie Beattie, Joel Leibo, Stig Petersen and Shane Legg in an online post.

• Open source is so much more than free code

  In 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs officially moved its most critical software, the VistA electronic health record system, into open source by establishing the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA). Along the way, VA officials solicited and followed advice from numerous open source experts, including Red Hat, Carnegie Mellon University and the Industry Advisory Council.

• Events

  • The Linux Foundation Seeks Technical and Business Speakers for Open Networking Summit 2017

• Databases

  • SQL Server on Linux signals Microsoft’s changing development landscape [Ed: This headline is wrong. There is no SQL Server on Linux; it runs on a Windows compatibility layer and it's entirely proprietary.]

  • Exploring the Trend Towards Open Source Database Management Systems

    The popularity of open source DBMSs, as measured by the DB-Engines Ranking, has reached a new record. So, we’re going to analyze the underlying details.

    We have 154 open source systems in our ranking, slightly less than the 156 commercial systems. If we add up the popularity scores of all the open source systems, we get 46% of the overall scores, whereas 54% goes to commercial systems.

  • Cloud convenience is killing the open source database

    Open source has never been more important or, ironically, irrelevant. As developers increasingly embrace the cloud to shorten time to market, they’re speeding past open source, making it even harder to build an open source business.

    After all, if open source were largely a way for developers to skirt legal and purchasing departments to get the software they needed when they needed it, the cloud ups that convenience to the nth degree. In Accel’s annual business review, the vaunted venture capital firm writes: “‘Product’ is no longer just the bits of software, it’s also how the software is sold, supported, and made successful.” The cloud is changing the way all software is consumed, including open source.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice 5.3 Beta 2 to Land Soon as Third Bug Hunting Event Is Held This Week

    Today, December 6, 2016, The Document Foundation, through Italo Vignoli, was proud to announce the upcoming third bug hunting session for the LibreOffice 5.3 open-source office suite.

• CMS

  • WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, More: Keeping Up With Open Source CMS

    Due to its organic nature, the world of open source software is in constant flux, which makes it difficult to keep tabs on.

    To keep you in the loop, I’m kicking off a monthly roundup of open source CMS news, starting today.

    Here are your latest open source CMS highlights.

  • 4 open source peer-to-peer marketplaces

    What happens if your startup can’t afford one of these proprietary solutions or you need customized features? You go look for an open source alternative that could open the space for new solutions and modules. Here are four peer-to-peer marketplaces that are working to become the WordPress or Prestashop of their kind.

  • WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan”

    Version 4.7 of WordPress, named “Vaughan” in honor of legendary jazz vocalist Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.7 help you get your site set up the way you want it.

• Education

  • Pencils down: Why open source is the future of standardized testing

    Administering standardized tests online is trickier than it sounds. Underneath the facade of simple multiple choice forms, any workable platform needs a complex web of features to ensure that databases don’t buckle under the pressure of tens of thousands of test takers at once. On top of that, it also needs to ensure that responses are scored correctly and that it’s impossible for students to cheat.

• BSD

  • LLVM 4.0 Planned For Release At End Of February, Will Move To New Versioning Scheme

    Hans Wennborg has laid out plans to release the LLVM 4.0 (and Clang 4.0, along with other LLVM sub-projects) toward the end of February.

    The proposal by continuing LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg puts the 4.0 branching followed by RC1 at 12 January, RC2 at 1 February, and the official release around 21 February.

• Public Services/Government

  • OpenGov Partnership members mull open source policy

    The Open Government Partnership (OGP) will suggest to its member governments to create a policy on open source. This week, a draft proposal is to be finalised at the OGP Global Summit in Paris.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Why your teams may be failing at the collaboration game

    When we think about skills needed to build open structures and establish open mindsets, collaboration jumps to mind immediately. In order to collaborate effectively, communication—or rather, clear communication—is imperative to making it all work.

    Communication can be defined as a transfer of information from one space or person to another—but it can look like dialogue, conflict resolution, listening skills, or even a knowledge commons. In open organizations, we look for timely transfers of information to all members so that they may do their jobs effectively and efficiently.

  • Open Data

    • Portugal’s AMA publishes two open data guides

      The Portuguese Agency for Administrative Modernisation (Agência para a Modernização Administrativa, AMA) has published two national open data guides.

      As its title implies, the ‘Open Data Introduction Guide’ is aimed at the general public or those interested in learning about the subject.

      The ‘Open Data Guide’ is the official government publication on the subject of public sector data openness. It addresses theoretical issues and practices relevant to the development of open data in Portugal. The topics include open movements, the potential of data openness, processes of opening information, ways of reuse, and an introduction to technical issues. This document is aimed at the various stakeholders in the Portuguese open data ecosystem, such as public agencies, researchers, journalists, citizens and companies interested in reusing or analysing public sector information.

    • Poland looking for new Digital Services and Open Data director

      The Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs is looking for a new director for its Department of Development of Digital Services and Open Data. The director is expected to be a “creative and proactive person who will set out the directions and lead the way for the most important and boldest changes in the state administration”.

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Accelerating Innovation: Michigan Tech patent database/app promotes open-source hardware

      Open-source innovation is making the traditional patent system obsolete. Michigan Technological University associate professor Joshua Pearce and his team work with what is called open-source hardware development.

      “What that means is sort of developing technologies that don’t rely on patents,” Pearce said. “We work collaboratively with engineers and scientists all over the world, and (it’s) fairly successful. And the reason it’s successful is because if you have thousands of people working on something, it tends to get pretty good pretty fast.”

      Pearce said the concept began some time ago with open-source software.

    • Non-profit creates open-source drinking water filter for 1/10th of the cost

      The high-tech vision of open-source software meets low-tech design at non-profit organization OHorizons, an international coalition of innovators working to solve persistent global challenges. The team’s most recent invention is the open-source Wood Mold, designed to allow even the least experienced person to create a BioSand Filter that can deliver clean water at 1/10th of the cost of the traditional method. The Wood Mold is designed to be accessible by anyone who has the DIY, open-source construction manual that OHorizons offers for free online.

• Programming/Development

  • Why Is C Programming Language Continuously Going Down?

    C has ruled the programming world for a long period, becoming the base of many operating systems and programs. However, over the course of past one year, its popularity has fallen, probably, due to lack of any corporate sponsor and increase in the usage of newer languages.

  • How Should You Put Soft Skills on a Technical Resume?

  • Hype-Driven Development, from Frameworks to Microservices

    HDD happens when a development team picks the “newest, hottest technology” to use on a project, based on how the technology is trending on Twitter, or on a number of enthusiastic blog posts or conference talks. A key symptom of HDD is that contrary to the hype, progress doesn’t speed up when the new tech is developed but just the opposite: work slows to a crawl.

Leftovers

• The Operating System Fountain of Youth: iOS

  When I returned to the store this week, the display was gone. Still, the idea is in the air, the two individuals mentioned didn’t know about the Microsoft product.

  The Microsoft implementation might be too kludgy, or immature, or the concept itself could just be a doomed Rube Goldberg fantasy. Back to reality, we’re likely to pick up fresher clues on iOS direction when new iPads show up, probably next quarter.

• 15+ Stunning Satellite Photos That Will Change How You See Our World

  Every single day, Grant shares one satellite photo from Digital Globes to change the way we see our planet. “With a focal length 16 times longer than a standard DSLR camera, the cameras are so powerful that you can take a picture of a beach ball on the Golden Gate Bridge in full resolution…from Los Angeles,” Grant told Bored Panda. “I try to present the images with no bias and let people decide what these altered landscapes mean, based on the facts and the visual evidence in the frame. I believe that this perspective is a means to start a conversation about the condition of our planet and how we can better protect it.”

• Science

  • Teachers’ union ‘concerned’ over Pisa results

    Finland has slipped down the Pisa rankings in recent years, and that trend continued in the latest set of the OECD educational charts released on Tuesday. Although Finland was the only country where girls outperformed boys in science, the number of poor performing students was up and there were fewer high-achievers.

    Finland’s teaching union, the OAJ, says it is concerned about the development in Finnish Pisa results.

    “Finnish results have declined clearly when compared to previous years,” said OAJ expert Jaakko Salo. “The biggest concern in this is that our cornerstone—equality in education—looks to be crumbling.”

• Health/Nutrition

  • Why is a banned pesticide that harms bees actually being used more?

    Goulson called it “sinister” last week when made aware of the silence, but now concludes it was probably an innocent error. Bob Maurer, chairman of the show, told me the event has never received any sponsorship from the big chemical companies that manufacture neonicotinoids. He believes an accidental “technical hitch” by the video producer was responsible.

    Concern over this coincidence can be dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but what cannot be dismissed is the solid scientific evidence that Goulson is helping to produce, showing how neonicotinoids harm bees and other insects.

  • Civil rights commission to discuss Flint water crisis report

    The Michigan Civil Rights Commission will discuss an early version of its report about the lead-contaminated water crisis in Flint at its next meeting.

    The commission, which meets Monday morning at the University of Michigan Detroit center, is expected to check on progress and provide feedback. The report is scheduled to be released next month.

  • California bill would require reporting of ‘superbug’ infections, deaths

    A California state senator introduced a bill on Monday that would mandate reporting of antibiotic-resistant infections and deaths and require doctors to record the infections on death certificates when they are a cause of death.

    The legislation also aims to establish the nation’s most comprehensive statewide surveillance system to track infections and deaths from drug-resistant pathogens. Data from death certificates would be used to help compile an annual state report on superbug infections and related deaths.

    In September, a Reuters investigation revealed that tens of thousands of superbug deaths nationwide go uncounted every year. The infections are often omitted from death certificates, and even when they are recorded, they aren’t counted because of the lack of a unified national surveillance system.

    “The (Reuters) story highlighted some of the problems that have come from the lack of information, the lack of reporting, especially deaths,” said state Senator Jerry Hill, who introduced the bill. “I wasn’t aware that on death certificates, antibiotic-resistant infections have never been called out.”

    Because there is no federal surveillance system, monitoring of superbug infections and deaths falls to the states. A Reuters survey of all 50 state health departments and the District of Columbia found that reporting requirements vary widely.

• Security

  • HP shutting down default FTP, Telnet access to network printers

    Security experts consider the aging FTP and Telnet protocols unsafe, and HP has decided to clamp down on access to networked printers through the remote-access tools.

    Some of HP’s new business printers will, by default, be closed to remote access via protocols like FTP and Telnet. However, customers can activate remote printing access through those protocols if needed.

  • Google Chrome 55 Fixes Flaws, Blocks Flash

  • Cyberattacks are going to get a lot worse, former NSA official says

    The face of cybercrime is changing. Healthcare has gone from a declared mission of stealing personal data to much more disruptive issues. In fact, healthcare has seen the largest jump in ransomware attacks than in any other industry.

    When Joel Brenner opened the HIMSS Privacy & Security Forum in Boston Monday morning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology research fellow – who focuses on cybersecurity, privacy and intelligence policy – and former senior counsel at the National Security Agency, didn’t sugarcoat the state of healthcare security.

    The government isn’t going to sort out that problem until we suffer some great losses, Brenner said.

  • Chrome 55 Now Blocks Flash, Uses HTML5 by Default

    Chrome 55, released earlier this week, now blocks all Adobe Flash content by default, according to a plan set in motion by Google engineers earlier this year.

    Back in May, Google’s staff announced that starting with Q4 2016, Chrome would use HTML5 by default, while Flash would be turned off.

    While some of the initial implementation details of the “HTML5 By Default” plan changed since May, Flash has been phased out in favor of HTML5 as the primary technology for playing multimedia content in Chrome.

  • Google Debuts Continuous Fuzzer for Open Source Software

    A new Google program aimed at continuously fuzzing open source software has already detected over 150 bugs.

    The program, OSS-Fuzz, currently in beta mode, is designed to help unearth programming errors in open source software via fuzz testing. Fuzz testing, or fuzzing is when bits of randomly generated code is inputted into programs as a means to discover code and security flaws.

  • Google Opens Up a Powerful FOSS Security Tool

    Back in 2014, public exposure of the OpenSSL Heartbleed security bug created a stage for security experts and commentators to field opinions on the open source error that left an estimated two thirds of the internet unsecured. We followed up back then with a guest post for OStatic from Eren Niazi, founder of Open Source Storage, where he discussed the security implications for the open source community.

  • Google Finally Patches ‘Dirty COW’ Linux Vulnerability With December Android Security Update [Ed: Google patches don’t matter to news sites until there’s some stupid brand with logo and Web site]

  • Google patches Dirty Cow vulnerability in latest Android security update

  • Docker CEO: Docker Already Is a Security Platform (with Swarm, That Is)

    In a reinforcement of his company’s marketing message that containerization as an architecture is more secure by design, Docker Inc. CEO Ben Golub [pictured right above, with HPE Executive VP Antonio Neri] told attendees at HPE’s Discover London 2016 event last Tuesday morning that the Docker platform addresses and ameliorates its users’ security concerns just by its very architecture.

  • Tuesday’s security updates

  • On CVE-2016-4484, a (security)? bug in the cryptsetup initramfs integration

• Defence/Aggression

  • Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste

    The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

    Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

    The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Julian Assange defies Swedish prosecutors by releasing rape statement

    Julian Assange has thumbed his nose at Swedish investigators, who he says have robbed him of his freedom for six years, by releasing the answers he gave to them under questioning in Ecuador’s London embassy last month.

    The decision to issue the statement, which contains for the first time a detailed account by the WikiLeaks founder of his encounter with a woman in August 2010 who made rape allegations against him, marks a fresh twist in a case in which Assange claims an early leak of information from the Swedish police has shaped opinion.

    The transcript of a police interview with the woman was leaked to media in December 2010, which the Australian, who has not been charged with any crime, says helped to establish an aura of guilt around him.

    Since then, Assange has repeatedly asked to be allowed to tell his side of the story to prosecutors, but until recently they insisted he come to Sweden for questioning. Assange has been confined to Ecuador’s cramped London embassy since June 2012, after claiming asylum to avoid extradition over the allegations.

  • Julian Assange says texts show he is ‘entirely innocent’ of rape; WikiLeaks founder criticises Swedish prosecutor

    The ABC has obtained a copy of the statement the WikiLeaks founder gave prosecutors from his refuge inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on November 14.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • A threat to rainforests in Indonesia: Big banks

    In early 2015, scientists monitoring satellite images at Global Forest Watch raised the alarm about the destruction of rain forests in Indonesia.

    Environmental groups raced to the scene in West Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, to find a charred wasteland: Smouldering fires, orangutans driven from their nests, and signs of an extensive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

    “There was pretty much no forest left,” said Dr Karmele Llano Sanchez, director of the non-profit International Animal Rescue’s orangutan rescue group, which set out to save the endangered primates. “All the forest had burned.”

  • Republicans Vow to Finish the Dakota Access Pipeline Under Trump

    This weekend the Army Corps of Engineers said Dakota Access Pipeline won’t go through as planned since it could have destructive environmental consequences. But, as activists know, that doesn’t mean Republicans are done fighting for the oil pipeline.

    President-Elect Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan were among pipeline supporters who emphasized their commitment to the project, and promised to approve the project in the next term. Trump has suggested in prior speech he would push an oil pipeline through during his first 100 days in office, according to the Wall Street Journal.

  • Five things to watch in Dakota Access pipeline fight

    The Obama administration halted construction on the Dakota Access oil pipeline Sunday, saying it would hold off on granting the final easement for the project while it conducts a thorough environmental review.

    Both the developer and President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have vowed to finish construction, while protesters say they could bring the conflict to court.

    Here are five things to watch in the unfolding fight.

    Trump’s strategy

    When Trump and his administration take office, approving Dakota Access probably won’t be as simple as signing a piece of paper.

    The Army Corps of Engineers ordered an environmental impact statement for the project Sunday. Experts say that because of that, Trump’s administration will have to either complete the yearslong process or find a way to remove the requirement for testing the environmental impact. Doing the latter, however, would be a rare move that could subject the pipeline to a lawsuit.

  • Melting Permafrost Could Affect Weather Worldwide

    Melting permafrost is causing significant changes to the freshwater chemistry and hydrology of Alaska’s Yukon River and could be triggering global climate impacts, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report released yesterday.

    Researchers say the study, which analyzed more than 30 years of data, sheds light on how climate change is already affecting the Arctic.

    According to the report, the Yukon River and one of its major tributaries have accumulated increasing levels of calcium, magnesium and sulfates over the last three decades due to thawing permafrost.

  • Standing Rock protesters asked to ‘go home’ by Sioux leader

    The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has asked the thousands of “water protectors” gathered in encampments along the Missouri river to “go home” after the US Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to drill under the river.

    In a video statement Dave Archambault thanked the thousands of Native American and environmental activists who travelled to North Dakota to help the tribe fight back against the pipeline, which they feared would contaminate their water source and destroy sacred sites.

    But after the “huge victory” of the Army Corps decision, Archambault said: “There’s no need for the water protectors or for anyone to be putting ourselves in unsafe environments.

  • Indonesia takes new step to combat loss of forests, fires

    Indonesia has strengthened its moratorium on converting peat swamps to plantations in a move a conservation research group says will help prevent annual fires and substantially cut the country’s carbon emissions if properly implemented.

    President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s amendment to the moratorium regulation, which was issued on Monday, expands it to cover peatlands of any depth and orders companies to restore areas they’ve degraded.

    Indonesia’s move was welcomed by Norway, which in 2010 pledged $1 billion to help the country stop cutting down its prized tropical forests but has released little of it. As a result of the expanded regulation, Norway said it would give $25 million to Indonesia to fund restoration of drained peatlands and another $25 million once an enforcement and monitoring plan is ready.

    Draining of peat swamps by palm oil and pulp wood companies is a big contributor to destruction of tropical forests in Indonesia and the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. The land conversion worsens annual dry season fires that release huge amounts of carbon stored in the peat. Many of the fires are deliberately set to clear land of its natural vegetation.

  • Britain could slash environmental and safety standards ‘a very long way’ after Brexit, Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg says

    Britain could slash environmental and safety regulations on imported products after it leaves the EU, a Tory MP has suggested.

    Jacob Rees-Mogg said regulations that were “good enough for India” could be good enough for the UK – arguing that the UK could go “a very long way” to rolling back high EU standards.

    The idea, floated at a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee, was immediately rejected by an economist, who said such a move would likely cause “quite considerable” difficulties.

• Finance

  • The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. Don’t assume western democracy will last forever

    Below the medieval citadel in Kazan, two vast frozen rivers turn the landscape white. On a Saturday afternoon there are a few hardy locals shuffling through the icy sludge to take selfies against the mosque, the Christmas lights and the Soviet-era statues.

    It’s 25 years since I was last in Russia, trying and failing to revive the left during the chaotic first days of Boris Yeltsin’s economic reforms. Half a lifetime later I am here to address a room full of people who want to talk about replacing capitalism with something better – and suddenly we have something in common: now we both know what it’s like to see a system that once looked permanent collapsing.

    Since I’ve been here, almost everyone who has chosen to come and hear me is involved in either contemporary arts or philosophy. The journalists who want to interview me – a public critic of Putin’s policy in Syria and Ukraine – mainly write for cultural magazines. These, if not exactly the new rock’n’roll, are the safest intellectual spaces in which critical thought can take place.

  • Tar Heel heist: How the charter school industry is hijacking public education

    If the American Dream is still alive – the one that includes a good job and a house with a yard, kids, and a two-car garage – you can see it taking shape in Wake County in the heart of the state of North Carolina. Signs of surging prosperity are everywhere this morning as I make my way to West Lake Middle School in Apex, NC, on the outskirts of Raleigh.

    What were once sleepy two-lane country roads are now teaming with impatient commuters, school busses, and mini-vans. New housing developments, shopping centers, and office buildings are transforming the rolling Piedmont landscape.

  • TPP May Be Dead – But Its Impact Lingers

    Despite the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being – to all-intents-and-purposes – dead in the water, pursuit of some of the most egregious objectives of the corporate interests driving the TPP agenda rolls on. Pharma is persisting in its push for countries to adopt not just TRIPS-Plus, but in some cases even TPP-Plus intellectual property rules – presumably groundwork for the later emergence of a ‘son-of-TPP’ agreement.

  • India ready to resume BTIA talks with EU without preconditions

    Government is committed to an early and balanced outcome of India-EU Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA) negotiations and is willing to resume talks without any preconditions, Parliament was informed today.

    “The European Union (EU) has expressed willingness to re-engage with India in India-EU Broad based Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA) negotiations subject to certain conditions.

  • The Mafia State

    The list of financial titans, including Trump, who have profited from a rigged financial system and fraud is endless. Many in the 1 percent make money by using lobbyists and bought politicians to write self-serving laws and rules and by forming unassailable monopolies. They push up prices on products or services these monopolies provide. Or they lend money to the 99 percent and charge exorbitant interest. Or they use their control of government and the courts to ship jobs to Mexico or China, where wages can be as low as 22 cents an hour, and leave American workers destitute. Neoliberalism is state-sponsored extortion. It is a vast, nationally orchestrated Ponzi scheme.

    This fevered speculation and mounting inequality, made possible by the two ruling political parties, corroded and destroyed the mechanisms and institutions that permitted democratic participation and provided some protection for workers. Politicians, from Reagan on, were handsomely rewarded by their funders for delivering their credulous supporters to the corporate guillotine. The corporate coup created a mafia capitalism. This mafia capitalism, as economists such as Karl Polanyi and Joseph Stiglitz warned, gave birth to a mafia political system. Financial and political power in the hands of institutions such as Goldman Sachs and the Clinton Foundation becomes solely about personal gain. The Obamas in a few weeks will begin to give us a transparent lesson into how service to the corporate state translates into personal enrichment.

  • We don’t need a charter-school lobbyist as education secretary: Stephen Henderson

    In Detroit, parents of school-age children have plenty of choices, thanks to the nation’s largest urban network of charter schools.

    What remains in short supply is quality.

    In Brightmoor, the only high school left is Detroit Community Schools, a charter boasting more than a decade of abysmal test scores and, until recently, a superintendent who earned $130,000 a year despite a dearth of educational experience or credentials.

    On the west side, another charter school, Hope Academy, has been serving the community around Grand River and Livernois for 20 years. Its test scores have been among the lowest in the state throughout those two decades; in 2013 the school ranked in the first percentile, the absolute bottom for academic performance.

  • Jill Stein Takes Long-Shot Recount Campaign to Trump Tower

    Jill Stein went to Trump Tower on Monday to press her case for long-shot recounts in three closely contested states in last month’s presidential election.

    Ms. Stein, the Green Party presidential nominee and now the leader of the recount campaign, appeared emboldened by an early morning federal court ruling that ordered Michigan elections officials — over the protests of President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies — to begin a recount by noon Monday.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Republican ‘faithless elector’ says he will not cast his vote for Donald Trump as he is ‘unfit for presidency’

    A REPUBLICAN presidential elector has issued the shock claim that he will not cast his vote for Donald Trump in an attempt to block his path to the White House.

    Christopher Suprun said in an article for the New York Times that he could not approve Mr Trump in good conscience as he felt the president-elect was unfit for public office.

    “Mr Trump urged violence against protesters at his rallies during the campaign,” he wrote. “He speaks of retribution against his critics.”

    “I owe no debt to a party. I owe a debt to my children to leave them a nation they can trust.”

  • Trump’s lawyer suggests the president-elect’s fraud claim isn’t true

    As you’ve probably heard, there are progressive efforts underway to force recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – three traditionally “blue” states where Donald Trump narrowly prevailed. Had these three states, where literally every independent poll showed Hillary Clinton ahead in the months leading up to Election Day, voted Democratic, Trump would’ve lost.

  • Jill Stein charges ahead with recount efforts

    Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is vowing to move ahead with recount efforts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, despite legal setbacks and growing opposition from Republicans and other Donald Trump allies in each state.

    “We will not give in to intimidation, to legal maneuvering and to bureaucratic obstruction,” Stein said at a news conference outside of Trump Tower on Monday.

    Her vow came as Stein’s campaign on Monday morning filed a federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania — an attempt to revive the push there after Stein and other Pennsylvania voters dropped a state-based lawsuit to try to force a recount. They gave up on the state-based lawsuit when a judge raised the bond to $1 million, a price Stein panned as exorbitant .

    But even as she railed against the roadblocks in Pennsylvania, Stein lauded developments in Michigan, which was to begin its recount by noon Monday.

  • Trump’s Threat to the Constitution

    On July 7, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, met privately with House Republicans near the Capitol. I was present as chief policy director of the House Republican Conference. Mr. Trump’s purpose was to persuade the representatives to unite around him, a pitch he delivered in a subdued version of his stream-of-consciousness style. A congresswoman asked him about his plans to protect Article I of the Constitution, which assigns all federal lawmaking power to Congress.

    Mr. Trump interrupted her to declare his commitment to the Constitution — even to parts of it that do not exist, such as “Article XII.” Shock swept through the room as Mr. Trump confirmed one of our chief concerns about him: He lacked a basic knowledge of the Constitution.

  • Michigan recount begins, as Jill Stein’s legal battle moves to Pennsylvania

    Presidential candidate Jill Stein’s fight to force presidential recounts in three states focuses Monday on Pennsylvania, where her Green Party is seeking an emergency federal court order for a statewide recount, and Michigan, where a federal judge has ordered a hand recount to begin by noon.

    The recount is underway in Wisconsin.

    President-elect Donald Trump narrowly defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in all three states. The recounts were not expected to change enough votes to overturn the result of the election.

    Stein says her intent is to verify the accuracy of the vote. She has suggested, with no evidence, that votes cast were susceptible to computer hacking.

  • The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming

    Shortly after the Presidential election, a small piece of good news came over the wire: the Thomas Mann villa in Los Angeles has been saved. The house, which was built to Mann’s specifications in the nineteen-forties, went on the market earlier this year, and it seemed likely to be demolished, because the structure was deemed less valuable than the land beneath it. After prolonged negotiations, the German government bought the property, with the idea of establishing it as a cultural center.

    The house deserves to stand not only because a great writer lived there but because it brings to mind a tragic moment in American cultural history. The author of “Death in Venice” and “The Magic Mountain” settled in this country in 1938, a grateful refugee from Nazism. He became a citizen and extolled American ideals. By 1952, though, he had become convinced that McCarthyism was a prelude to fascism, and felt compelled to emigrate again. At the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings on Communism in Hollywood, Mann said, “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ . . . That is how it started in Germany.” The tearing down of Mann’s “magic villa” would have been a cold epilogue to a melancholy tale.

  • 9 Things Obama Can Do Before Leaving Office to Prepare for the Trump Takeover

    In less than seven weeks, President Barack Obama will hand over the government to Donald Trump, including access to the White House, Air Force One, and Camp David. Trump will also, of course, inherit the infamous nuclear codes, as well as the latest in warfare technology, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s fleet of killer drones, the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance and data-collection apparatus, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s enormous system of undercover informants.

  • Why is Donald Trump delegitimizing an election that he won?

    On the other hand, what he DOES is important. When he settled the Trump University for 25 Million, despite prolonging it for multiple years and putting all of the plaintiffs through years of frustration and debt, the news stories lasted less than 12 hours before being drowned by the Hamilton Tweets. My own reaction to the tweet was reflexively the same as others: Our President-elect is so sensitive that anything even slightly negative is considered an insult. But, you have to work HARD to find a story today talking about the settlement (or the fact that some are contesting it), but the fallout from the tweets lasted days. Looking back, more than once a fundamental issue concerning Trump was obscured by Tweet reactions. Nude underage beauty contestants, Manafort Russian connections, a debate that clearly showed Trump unprepared, unpresidential, and unhinged turned immaterial as the world reacted to his tweets about Alicia Machado.

  • Jill Stein On What’s Next With the Recount Effort in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania

    Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has initiated recount efforts in three states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a combined margin of 103,519 votes. (A fourth, partial recount is underway in Nevada, by independent presidential candidate Roque De La Fuente).

    Though considered an “extreme long shot” by the New York Times, Stein’s campaign raised her initial goal of $7 million — twice as much as she raised in her failed campaign bid — in just a matter of days. Clinton’s campaign has cooperated with the effort.

  • Bob Dole’s Law Firm Was Paid $20,000 A Month To Lobby For Taiwan

    The Taiwanese representative office in Washington paid the law firm of former Sen. Bob Dole $20,000 a month to advance its interests in Washington, public filings show. Dole said on Monday his firm helped broker a controversial phone call between President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

    Dole told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that his law firm “may have had some influence” on the phone call, which broke decades of diplomatic precedent, but has been widely praised by China hawks for the tough signal it sends to Beijing. An unnamed Trump transition team official told the paper that Dole had arranged the call.

  • US Power Will Decline Under Trump, Says Futurist Who Predicted Soviet Collapse

    Johan Galtung, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated sociologist who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, warned that US global power will collapse under the Donald Trump administration.

    The Norwegian professor at the University of Hawaii and Transcend Peace University is recognized as the ‘founding father’ of peace and conflict studies as a scientific discipline. He has made numerous accurate predictions of major world events, most notably the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

  • Half of Detroit votes may be ineligible for recount

    One-third of precincts in Wayne County could be disqualified from an unprecedented statewide recount of presidential election results because of problems with ballots.

    Michigan’s largest county voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, but officials couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts during a countywide canvass of vote results late last month.

    Most of those are in heavily Democratic Detroit, where the number of ballots in precinct poll books did not match those of voting machine printout reports in 59 percent of precincts, 392 of 662.

  • Mismatched numbers means Mich. precincts can’t be recounted

    A single missing ballot was enough to scuttle the recount of a Michigan precinct Monday.

    The computerized poll book in Rochester Hills precinct 11 listed the names of 848 voters who cast ballots there, but the ballot box contained just 847 ballots. So where is the other ballot? The poll workers’ notes offered no explanation.

    “It didn’t match on the canvass and it doesn’t match now,” said Joe Rozell, Oakland County’s director of elections. “This precinct is not recountable.”

    Two Michigan counties began the recount process Monday, hours after a federal judge ordered the immediate start of the presidential recount. Six counties are expected to start the recount process Tuesday, with the last batch of counties to start Dec. 12.

  • How the Electoral College Really Started

  • Florida voters sue for recount

    Three central Florida voters are mounting an unlikely bid to overturn the presidential election result in the Sunshine State.

    In a lawsuit filed Monday in Leon Circuit Court, they assert that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, actually won Florida. The plaintiffs, who live in Osceola and Volusia counties, say the state’s official election results were off because of hacking, malfunctioning voting machines and other problems.

    They’re asking for a hand recount of every paper ballot in Florida, at the expense of defendants including Trump, Gov. Rick Scott and the 29 Republican presidential electors from Florida.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • 3 Tips for Teachers to Help Teens Distinguish Fact From Fiction

    The rise in websites dispensing false information has become a problem for Facebook. But for one high school teacher, having students take misinformation at face value is nothing new – though it’s gotten worse.

    “I’m constantly got kids coming to me, ‘Did you know?’ insert whatever conspiracy theory,” says Dave Stuart Jr., who teaches world history at Cedar Springs High School in Michigan. “Ranging from the Apollo missions to the moon never happened, to current events-related stuff.”

    The Common Core standards focus strongly on skills that should prepare students to detect fake news – the standards emphasize the need for students to write and read arguments using and looking for strong reasoning and evidence, says Dana Maloney, an English teacher at Tenafly High School in New Jersey.

  • Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube team up to stop terrorist propaganda

    Four of the largest tech companies—Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and YouTube—are coming together to stop the spread of terroristic content on social media.

    The plan is to create a shared database and track the digital fingerprints of accounts who share propaganda for terror networks helping them identify the content and easily remove photo or videos from their sites.

    “Our companies will begin sharing hashes of the most extreme and egregious terrorist images and videos we have removed from our services — content most likely to violate all of our respective companies’ content policies,” the companies announced in a joint statement Monday night.

  • Pakistani Cinema’s Censorship Problem

    Actor Hameed Sheikh, known for his phenomenol performance in Jami’s Moor, spoke about the difficulty he faced while trying to release the movie

  • Hacker News calls for “political detox,” critics cry censorship

    Can social media even exist without political debate? What about trolls? Hacker News, the social news site run by Y Combinator, is trying to find out.

    The head of the Hacker News community since 2014, Daniel Gackle (whose HN handle is “dang”) on Monday initiated a site-wide “Political Detox Week.”

  • With a new Star Trek TV series incoming, we revisit the show’s long history of censorship at the BBC…

    Star Trek is not a franchise you’d normally associate with controversy. Nevertheless, between 1969 and 1994, four episodes of the original series – Empath, Whom Gods Destroy, Plato’s Stepchildren and Miri – were not aired on the BBC, and other episodes were heavily redacted.

  • Internet giants will join forces to stop online sharing of terrorist material

    Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube have announced that they will be working together to curb the dissemination of terrorist material online. The Web giants will create a shared industry database of hashes—digital fingerprints that can identify a specific file—for violent terrorist imagery and terrorist recruitment materials that have previously been removed from their platforms.

    According to a statement the four companies have jointly released, the hope is that “this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online.”

  • I’m a Journalist and I Was Stopped From Covering Standing Rock

    It was an assignment that I barely prepared for. I didn’t think I had to.

    For most reporting trips I have made in the last decade, I would think long and hard about where I was going and what the variables were. If I was heading to a conflict zone, I would need body armor and a trauma kit. If it was a natural disaster, I would bring a satellite phone and spare food. If I was heading to an authoritarian country where journalism was not allowed, I would need a mix of burner phones, encrypted hard drives and a disposable laptop. I felt I was prepared for every eventuality. But I never thought that I would have to think about these things so close to home.

    For my recent assignment heading from Canada to the U.S. to cover the anti-oil pipeline protests in Standing Rock for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I didn’t prepare for anything extraordinary. But at the border, after handing over my Canadian passport I was taken aside. I wasn’t worried. Why should I be? I had nothing to hide, and I felt like it was the one border in my travels where I could proudly proclaim that I was a journalist to safe ears.

  • Ahead of 2022 World Cup, Qatar doubles down on internet censorship and blocks independent news website

    Last week, an independent news website in Qatar, Doha News, discovered that they had been blocked in Qatar. While there has been no official news on why this block has happened, Doha News stated that they suspect that the block happened at the behest of the government. The news site has a reputation for toeing the line in Qatar, and had previously done such “unprecedented” things in the emirates such as publishing an anonymous article by a homosexual Qatari man. Ahead of the 2022 World Cup, it is more than possible that this is just the first of many censorship actions by Qatar. Another famous international media site that is based in Qatar is none other than Al Jazeera.

    Doha News confirmed that Qatar’s two ISPs, Ooredo and Vodaphone, have blocked Doha News. The independent news source tried to create a new domain name to get past the block but that new website was quickly blocked as well. Doha News’s editor, Shabina Khatri was forced to use a different Medium to communicate after the block.

  • Facebook reportedly testing new tool to combat fake news

    Facebook appears to be testing a tool designed to help it identify and hide so called “fake news” on the social network, in an attempt to quell increasingly vocal criticism of its role in spreading untruths and propaganda.

    The tool, reported by at least three separate Facebook users on Twitter, asks readers to rank on a scale of one to five the extent to which they think a link’s title “uses misleading language”. The articles in question were from reliable sources: Rolling Stone magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chortle, a news site which reports on comedy.

  • Facebook and Google make lies as pretty as truth

    If you asked Google who won the popular vote just after the election, there’s a chance you would have been sent to a conspiracy blog with bogus results. And the site is likely to have looked as legitimate as any other.

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • NSA’s best are ‘leaving in big numbers,’ insiders say

    Low morale at the National Security Agency is causing some of the agency’s most talented people to leave in favor of private sector jobs, former NSA Director Keith Alexander told a room full of journalism students, professors and cybersecurity…

  • Who Are The NSA’s Elite Hackers?

    Last week, a mysterious group calling itself The Shadow Brokers dumped online a series of hacking tools associated with the NSA. The leak provided an unprecedented look into the actual tools that the NSA uses to hack its targets, and in the process, put the spotlight on a little-known team that works inside the spy agency—its elite-hacking unit.

    Known as Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, its existence was barely—if at all—discussed in public until 2009, when intelligence historian and author Matthew Aid described it in his book about the history of the NSA as a “super-secret” unit that taps into “thousands of foreign computer systems” and accesses “password-protected hard drives and email accounts of targets around the world.”

  • Appeals Court to Hear Argument in ACLU Challenge to NSA Internet Surveillance

    A federal appeals court will hear oral argument Friday in Richmond, Virginia, in the case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a broad group of organizations challenging the National Security Agency’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international internet communications.

  • German Investigation Committee ‘Protracting’ Inquiry Into NSA Spying Scandal

    WikiLeaks published 2,400 documents on the NSA spying affair, according to which Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was involved in the creation of the spy software that was later used by the NSA to tap top-ranking officials. It was also said that BND used the software in its work.

  • Court upholds warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens under Section 702

    The U.S. federal appeals court has ruled in United States v. Mohamud, a case that began with a 2010 holiday bomb plot and will end with unique implications for the private digital communications of American citizens.

    Digital privacy advocates had hoped that the appeals case might prompt reform for a contentious portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) known as Section 702. The provision accommodates U.S. surveillance of foreign targets located abroad, although its many detractors argue that Section 702 allows the U.S. government to collect the bulk communications of Americans in the process.

  • United States v. Mohamud

  • No Appeal For US Man Believed Convicted With Warrantless NSA Evidence

    A U.S. man convicted after his emails were revealed by the NSA’s PRISM program, the first public case of its kind, will not have his case overturned, an appeals court has found.

  • German spy agency penetrated by ISIS

    My recent interview about the German domestic spy agency, the BfV – the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, ironically – being allegedly infiltrated by ISIS.

  • Canada Wants Software Backdoors, Mandatory Decryption Capability And Records Storage

    The new Canadian government is looking to further expand its surveillance powers by requiring decryption capabilities for all services, mandatory storage of both internet and phone records for service providers, backdoors that allow interception, and warrantless access to basic subscriber information.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Saudi journalist banned from media after criticising Trump

    Saudi authorities banned journalist Jamal Khashoggi from writing in newspapers, appearing on TV and attending conferences, the Alkhalij Aljadid reported in Arabic.

    This came after Khashoggi’s remarks during a presentation he made at a Washington think-tank on 10 November in which he was critical of Donald Trump’s ascension to the US presidency.

    Two weeks ago, an official Saudi source was cited by the Saudi News Agency as saying that Khashoggi did not represent the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in his interviews or statements.

  • Michael Coe, associate of hate preacher Anjem Choudary, jailed for 28 months

    An associate of hate preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed for 28 months for knocking a schoolboy unconscious because he cuddled his girlfriend in the street.

    Michael Coe, a Muslim convert, has a long record of violent offences starting when he was 16, including assaults, burglary, robbery and violent disorder.

    The married father of two was convicted in August of attacking the boy after he took exception to the 16-year-old cuddling his teenage girlfriend in Newham, east London, in April.

  • Coincidence? German Stats Show Surge in Sex Crime Rate Around Refugee Centers

    A group of German activists have carried out a study which found that rates of sexual offenses increase significantly in the vicinity of asylum reception centers, Germany’s Journalistenwatch news portal reported.

  • Afghan migrant woman ‘hunted down to Europe by abusive husband’

    Forced into marrying a man 25 years her senior after he had allegedly raped her, this 23-year-old Tajik woman from Kabul is now in a Greek camp for migrants.

    But Lina told the BBC that the abusive husband she ran away from is now following her, threatening to kill her for disobeying him.

    Her story was corroborated by volunteers for a Spanish refugee charity.

    Lina’s husband is one step behind her and her two small children, having reached the Greek island of Lesbos shortly after she was transported to mainland Greece.

  • Muslims are failing to integrate because men keep marrying abroad, major report warns

    Muslim communities remain isolated even after decades in the UK because men keep marrying foreign wives, a Government adviser has warned.

    Dame Louise Casey said that there is a “first generation in every generation” phenomenon in Muslim communities which is acting as a “bar” to integration.

    The review also accuses Labour and local authorities of having “ignored or even condoned” harmful cultural traditions for fear of being branded “racist or Islamaphobic”.

    It reports concerns that Sharia Courts in the UK have been “supporting the values of extremists, condoning wife-beating [and] ignoring marital rape”.

  • British ‘subjects’ did not deserve legal equality with their colonial masters: Interview with Marieme Helie Lucas on Sharia Courts in Britain

    Today, the British law of the land applies to all citizens, be they Catholics, Protestants, atheists, etc. Not one single citizen is beyond the law. Except for the former ‘natives’, be they actually British citizens or migrants: those – and those only – are, once more, entitled to laws of their own, because, beyond their official citizenship, they are still seen as ‘different’ from – and inferior to – the (former?) colonial master. ‘Let them have their own customs, it is their way’.

    ‘Proper’ British citizens are ruled by laws they have voted on, that they can change if they come together and press their MPs. How can ‘Sharia laws’ be changed by the will and vote of citizens? A significant proportion of British citizens are now under supposedly religious laws that they have neither voted for, nor can change through a democratic process. Democracy for ‘proper’ British citizens but unchangeable ‘tribal native customs’ for others?

  • European Union Directive on counterterrorism is seriously flawed

    European Union Member States must ensure that a new effort to standardise counterterrorism laws does not undermine fundamental freedoms and the rule of law, a group of international human rights organisations said today.

    Amnesty International, the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Fundamental Rights European Experts (FREE) Group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) are warning that the overly broad language of the new EU Directive on Combating Terrorism could lead to criminalising public protests and other peaceful acts, to the suppression of the exercise of freedom of expression protected under international law, including expression of dissenting political views and to other unjustified limitations on human rights. The Directive’s punitive measures also pose the risk of being disproportionately applied and implemented in a manner that discriminates against specific ethnic and religious communities.

  • Amber Rudd says EU nationals in post-Brexit UK will need ‘form of ID’

    More than 3 million European Union citizens living in Britain after Brexit will have to be issued with “some form of documentation”, the home secretary has said.

    Amber Rudd told MPs she would not yet set out the details for any new EU ID card, but said: “There will be a need to have some sort of documentation. We are not going to set it out yet. We are going to do it in a phased approach to ensure that we use all the technology advantages that we are increasingly able to harness to ensure that all immigration is carefully handled.”

    The home secretary’s statement came in response to Labour’s Hilary Benn, who told MPs that EU citizens already in the UK would need to be documented so that employers and landlords could distinguish them from EU citizens arriving after Brexit.

    During Home Office questions in the Commons, Rudd also said she was aware of the need to continue the seasonal agricultural workers’ scheme after Brexit, but again ruled out demands to remove international students from the annual net migration target.

  • Diverse yet divided: UK is growing apart, Casey report finds

    The UK is becoming more divided as it becomes more diverse, a Government-commissioned review has claimed.

    In the report by Dame Louise Casey, it is revealed that the ‘pace of immigration in some areas has been too much’.

  • Theresa May’s government condemned for driving ‘more austerity and more racism’ after integration review

    Campaigners have condemned a review of integration for “adding to the politics of racism and scapegoating” after it called for immigrants to swear an oath to the UK and children to be taught “British values” in schools.

    Dame Louise Casey’s review, which was commissioned by the Government, found the country is becoming more divided amid growing “ethnic segregation” and that Muslim women in particular were being marginalised by limited English language skills.

  • Sorry, Louise Casey, but Muslim women are held back by discrimination

    Despite the fact that more British Muslim women than men are getting degrees, we are the most disenfranchised group in the country. Not only are we subject to high levels of unemployment and poverty, but discrimination on the basis of our faith, gender and ethnic background hinders our entry into the labour market.

  • Governor Vetoes Bill That Would Have Allowed Agencies To Withhold Names Of Officers Who Deploy Deadly Force

    Last month, Pennsylvania legislators wrapped up a little gift for the state’s law enforcement agencies: a bill that would have allowed agencies to withhold the names of officers involved in deployments of deadly force for at least 30 days. This was just the mandatory withholding window. The bill never stipulated a release date past that point, meaning “never” was also an acceptable time frame.

    The normal concerns for “officer safety” were given as the reason for the new opacity. Rather than see disclosure as an essential part of maintaining healthy relationships with the communities they served, law enforcement agencies saw disclosure as just another way to hurt already very well-protected officers.

    The DOJ itself — often a defender of entrenched police culture — recommended a 72-hour window for release of this information. State legislators, pushed by local police unions, felt constituents would be better served by being kept in the dark. Given the back-and-forth nature of public sentiment, it was unclear how Governor Tom Wolf would react to the passed proposal.

  • Theresa May urged to raise human rights concerns on Gulf visit

    Theresa May has been urged to confirm she will put human rights reform on her agenda when she meets Saudi and Bahraini leaders on Tuesday, after announcements on her two-day trip to the Gulf were squarely focused on trade and security.

    Rights campaigners in Bahrain argue that although the UK has been assisting Bahrain with judicial and police reform since 2012, current levels ofengagement on rights issues have not prevented crackdowns on journalists and pro-democracy activists in the country.

    May said: “I think the UK has always had the position, and we continue to have the position, that where there are issues raised about human rights, where there are concerns, we will rightly raise those.

  • The terrible human rights records of the countries Theresa May is having dinner with tonight

    Theresa May is visiting Bahrain to meet with leaders of Gulf states, who are in the country for a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

    She will attend a dinner with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman on Tuesday, before addressing the plenary session of the summit on Wednesday.

    The Prime Minister will use the visit to announce a new working group with regional nations to combat the financing of terrorists. The UK will provide three specialist cyber experts to the Gulf states to help deal with extremism.

  • Please, Theresa May, save my husband from death in Bahrain

    In 2014 Mohammed was arrested at Bahrain’s airport where he worked as a police officer. My husband believes in human rights, democracy and transparency. He attended peaceful marches in Bahrain calling for our government to respect these values. As a state employee, he knew that it was risky for him to go to these protests. But he believes in reform and so he went anyway.

    After Mohammed was taken into custody, our family heard nothing for four days – we had no idea where he was, or even if he was alive. Eventually, two weeks later, we were allowed to see him, but only with three guards watching us on a surveillance camera. As soon as we saw him, it was clear that Mohammed had been tortured by the security services.

    Mohammed seemed weak and exhausted, and his body was trembling; this suggested to us that he had been subjected to extreme torture. But no one would tell us the reasons for his arrest or the charges against him.

  • Angela Merkel Calls for Ban on Full-Face Veils in Germany

    To loud applause, Chancellor Angela Merkel told her party members on Tuesday that Germany should ban full-face veils “wherever legally possible” and that it would not tolerate any application of Shariah law over German justice.

    Accepting her party’s nomination as its candidate for another four-year term, the chancellor used the moment to broaden her stance on banning the veil, trying to deflect challenges from far-right forces that have made some of their deepest gains since World War II.

    In welcoming nearly one million asylum seekers to Germany a year ago, Ms. Merkel emerged as a powerful voice for tolerance across a Europe gripped by anxiety over waves of arriving migrants and fears of terrorism.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Will Donald Trump Dismantle the Internet as We Know It?

    Talking about net neutrality is so boring, the comedian John Oliver once quipped, that he would “rather listen to a pair of Dockers tell me about the weird dream it had” than delve into the topic.

    So it’s unsurprising that Donald Trump—an entertainer with a flair for the dramatic and little interest in wonky details—has stayed away from the issue almost entirely.

    If you want to captivate a nation, discussing thorny telecommunications policy is generally a terrible way to do it. (For those who have managed to avoid reading up on net neutrality thus far, the term refers to open-web principles aimed at curbing practices that give certain companies competitive advantages in how people access the internet. The FCC formally established rules last year that allow the agency to regulate broadband the way it oversees other public utilities. Those rules ban internet service providers from throttling—or slowing—connections to certain content online, and prohibit providers from offering faster connections to corporations that can afford to pay for premium web services. The rules also discourage zero-rating—in which an internet service provider subsidizes a consumer’s cost of going online but often does so in exchange for a competitive advantage.)

  • Millions in US still living life in Internet slow lane

    Millions of Americans still have extremely slow Internet speeds, a new Federal Communications Commission report shows. While the FCC defines broadband as download speeds of 25Mbps, about 47.5 million home or business Internet connections provided speeds below that threshold.

    Dealing with speeds a bit lower than the broadband standard isn’t too horrible, but there are still millions with speeds that just aren’t anywhere close to modern. Out of 102.2 million residential and business Internet connections, 22.4 million offered download speeds less than 10Mbps, with 5.8 million of those offering less than 3Mbps. About 25.1 million connections offered at least 10Mbps but less than 25Mbps.

    54.7 million households had speeds of at least 25Mbps, with 15.4 million of those at 100Mbps or higher. These are the advertised speeds, not the actual speeds consumers receive. Some customers will end up with slower speeds than what they pay for.

• DRM

  • W3C at a crossroads: technology standards setter or legal arms-dealer?

    The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an amazing, long-running open standards body that has been largely responsible for the web’s growth and vibrancy, creating open standards that lets anyone make web technology and become part of the internet ecosystem.

    Since 2013, the W3C has been working on a very different kind of standard: Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), designed to enable DRM for streaming video, is more than a technology standard. Thanks to US-propagated laws that give DRM makers the right to sue people who break DRM, even for legal purposes, EME will — for the first time in W3C history — give its members the power to sue security researchers, accessibility toolmakers, and competitors who improve EME implementations, regardless of whether these improvements enable copyright infringement or other illegal outcomes.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Pirate Bay Blocking Case Heads Back to Court in Sweden

      In 2015, a coalition of copyright holders lost a court case which demanded an ISP blockade of The Pirate Bay in Sweden. A year later and Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music and Nordisk Film are back, hoping for a victory in a brand new court that could open the floodgates for widespread website blocking.

    • Court: ‘Falsely’ Accused ‘Movie Pirate’ Deserves $17K Compensation

      An Oregon District Court has sided with a wrongfully accused man, who was sued for allegedly downloading a pirated copy of the Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler. According to the court’s recommendations, the man is entitled to more than $17,000 in compensation as the result of the filmmakers “overaggressive” and “unreasonable” tactics.

    • Wild Boys Sometimes Lose It: Duran Duran fail to reclaim their US copyright

      A few weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Duran Duran co-founder Nick Rhodes signed a music publishing agreement assigning his existing and future copyrights to a publisher, as did the other band members. None of them was aged more than 21 at the time.

    • Aussie Celebrities Join Campaign to Oppose Fair Use

      A campaign has been launched in Australia to prevent proposed changes to copyright law and the introduction of a “fair use” doctrine. Australia currently has a “fair dealing” provision but the royalties and anti-piracy group APRA AMCOS and its celebrity supporters are opposing rules that would provide more freedom.

    • Ten Years in Jail For UK Internet Pirates: How the New Bill Reads

      The Digital Economy Bill is currently at the report stage. It hasn’t yet become law and could still be amended. However, as things stand those who upload any amount of infringing content to the Internet could face up to 10 years in jail. With the latest bill now published, we take a look at how file-sharers could be affected.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Eight great Linux gifts for the holiday season

  Do you want to give your techie friend a very Linux holiday season? Sure you do! Here are some suggestion to brighten your favorite Tux fan’s day.

• More Random Gift Ideas For Linux Enthusiasts & Others Into Tech

• Which open source gift is at the top of your holiday wish list?

• 7 Linux predictions for 2017

  Last year I made a set of predictions of events that I thought would happen in the tech world (focused primarily on Linux and free software). I was mostly right. This has emboldened me to make another set of predictions for 2017. I have no inside knowledge on any of these—I am basing this entirely on the twin scientific principles of star maths and wishy thinking.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 4.9-rc8

    So if anybody has been following the git tree, it should come as no
    surprise that I ended up doing an rc8 after all: things haven’t been
    bad, but it also hasn’t been the complete quiet that would have made
    me go “no point in doing another week”.

    Extra kudos to Arnd, who actually root-caused the incredibly annoying
    “modversions do not work with new versions of binutils”, bisecting it
    to a particular change to symbol handling in binutils, and then adding
    a small one-liner patch to the kernel to work around the issue. We
    already had other workarounds in place, but it’s always good to know
    exactly what in the tool chain changed to cause things like this.

  • Linux Kernel 4.9 Slated for December 11 Release as Linus Torvalds Outs RC8

  • Linux 4.9-rc8 Kernel Released

  • Linus Torvalds finds 163 reasons to wait a week for a new Linux

    Linus Torvalds told the world that if it wanted a new Linux he needed a quiet week. But he didn’t get it and now the world has an eighth release candidate of Linux 4.9 to consider.

    The Linux Lord’s weekly what’s up with Linux post says “things haven’t been bad, but it also hasn’t been the complete quiet that would have made me go ‘no point in doing another week’.”

  • Linux Foundation’s Blockchain Collective Hyperledger Hits 100 Members

    Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework and code base.

  • The Blockchain Milestone You May Have Missed

  • Sasken becomes member of Automotive Grade Linux

    Sasken Communication Technologies Ltd has announced its membership with Automotive Grade Linux as its bronze member.

    This will enable Sasken to provide solutions to customers on Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). Sasken will provide product development and system integration services for automotive customers spanning in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), instrument cluster, heads-up display and telematics.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Mesa 12.0.4 Promises 15% Performance Boost for Radeon Users on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

      The Mesa problem in Ubuntu Linux is about to be resolved very soon, after the game developers behind the UK-based Feral Interactive video game publishing company urged Canonical to update the software to a most recent version.

      The Mesa 3D Graphics Library is a unique open-source implementation of the OpenGL graphics API for Linux-based operating systems, and it includes drivers for Intel, Radeon, and Nvidia graphics cards. But it looks like Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) was shipping with a pretty old version of Mesa.

    • The Favorite Open-Source Vulkan Projects Of Phoronix Readers

    • Mesa 12.0.5 Released, End Of Road For Mesa 12

      Mesa release manager Emil Velikov announced the availability today of Mesa 12.0.5, just another point release and what he expects will be the last of the Mesa 12.0.x releases.

    • [ANNOUNCE] mesa 12.0.5

      Mesa 12.0.5 is now available.

    • The future of xinput, xmodmap, setxkbmap, xsetwacom and other tools under Wayland

      This post applies to most tools that interface with the X server and change settings in the server, including xinput, xmodmap, setxkbmap, xkbcomp, xrandr, xsetwacom and other tools that start with x. The one word to sum up the future for these tools under Wayland is: “non-functional”.

      An X window manager is little more than an innocent bystander when it comes to anything input-related. Short of handling global shortcuts and intercepting some mouse button presses (to bring the clicked window to the front) there is very little a window manager can do. It’s a separate process to the X server and does not receive most input events and it cannot affect what events are being generated. When it comes to input device configuration, any X client can tell the server to change it – that’s why general debugging tools like xinput work.

    • Please don’t use pastebins in bugs

• Applications

  • choqok 1.6 Twitter Client was released and completely ported with KDE Frameworks 5

    Choqok is a fast, efficient and simple to use twitter client for Linux (especially built for the KDE desktop environment) that is installed by default to some of the Linux distribution which shipped with KDE Desktop Environment. The name comes from an ancient Persian word, means Sparrow!

  • 10 open source tools for your sysadmin toolbox [Ed: Terrible list which starts with two suggestions of Microsoft EEE]

    Sysadmins, no matter what platforms they work on, are awash in great open source software tools. In this article, we highlight well-known—and not-so-well-known—tools that have released new versions in 2016.

  • NetworkManager 1.2.6 Lets You Activate Multiple PPPoE Connections Simultaneously

    Beniamino Galvani was proud to announce the release and general availability of a new maintenance update to the stable NetworkManager 1.2 series of the open source network connection manager software for GNU/Linux distributions.

    NetworkManager is the most used network connection manager, adopted by almost all Linux-based operating systems on the market, and NetworkManager 1.2.6 is now the most advanced release of the 1.2 stable series, coming four months after the NetworkManager 1.2.4 update to fix a few bugs and regressions reported by users since then.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Piuparts integration in britney

    • How To Quickly Find Emoji from the Command Line

    • Install PHP 7.1 on CentOS, RHEL or Fedora

    • Using Your TPM as a Secure Key Store

    • Suffix Tree: Suffix Array and LCP Array, C++

    • Turn Raspberry Pi 3 Into a Powerful Media Player With RasPlex

      I have hundreds of movies, TV shows and music that I have bought over the years. They all reside on my Plex Media Server. Just like books, I tend to buy these works and watch them once in awhile, instead of relying on “streaming” services like Netflix where content isn’t always available forever.

      If you already have Plex Media Server running, then you can build an inexpensive Plex Media Player using Raspberry Pi 3 and RasPlex. Plex Media Server is based on open source Kodi (formerly XBMC), but is not fully open source. Plex Media Center has a friendly interface and it’s very easy to set up a media center (See our previous tutorial on how to install it on a Raspberry Pi 3 or on another dedicated Linux machine).

  • Games

    • Our latest user survey is done, Steam Controller seems to be the favourite

    • Vendetta Online MMORPG Updated to Improve Analog Stick Sensitivity on Android

      Two weeks after the release of the Vendetta Online 1.8.398 maintenance update, Guild Software developers are proud to announce two new point releases, namely Vendetta Online 1.8.399 and 1.8.400.

      Vendetta Online is a commercial and cross-platform 3D space combat MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) available on GNU/Linux, Android, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and iOS operating systems, supported on both tablet and phablet devices, and 1.8.400 is now the most advanced release of the project.

      Vendetta Online 1.8.400 is a small update bringing Text-To-Speech (TTS) support for mission text and Speech-To-Text feature to the virtual keyboard on Android, which will require a Google Play Store App update, as well as an improved crystal intro menu that better explains the Free-To-Play business model to newcomers.

    • Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun now has the Linux demo available

      Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun [GOG, Steam], a hardcore tactical stealth game set in Japan which has gameplay similar to the Commandos series now has a demo for Linux, right near release.

      Note: The Linux demo is currently Steam-only.

    • Eliosi’s Hunt, a sci-fi top-down shooter could come to Linux with enough interest

      If you’re a fan of good-looking top-down shooters, you may want to know that Eliosi’s Hunt [Steam, Official Site] could come to Linux with enough interest.

    • Dungeon Souls, the action and adventure roguelike has left Early Access

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • 7 Things to do After Installing KDE Plasma

      Even for other Linux users, KDE Plasma can seem like a different operating system. Except for a few standards like LibreOffice, the apps are different, and so is the design philosophy, which tends to cram in every possible feature. As a result, once they install, users are likely to wonder what to do next.

    • KDE Framworks 5 Content Snap Techno

      In the previous post on Snapping KDE Applications we looked at the high-level implication and use of the KDE Frameworks 5 content snap to snapcraft snap bundles for binary distribution. Today I want to get a bit more technical and look at the actual building and inner workings of the content snap itself.

      The KDE Frameworks 5 snap is a content snap. Content snaps are really just ordinary snaps that define a content interface. Namely, they expose part or all of their file tree for use by another snap but otherwise can be regular snaps and have their own applications etc.

      KDE Frameworks 5’s snap is special in terms of size and scope. The whole set of KDE Frameworks 5, combined with Qt 5, combined with a large chunk of the graphic stack that is not part of the ubuntu-core snap. All in all just for the Qt5 and KF5 parts we are talking about close to 100 distinct source tarballs that need building to compose the full frameworks stack. KDE is in the fortunate position of already having builds of all these available through KDE neon. This allows us to simply repack existing work into the content snap. This is for the most part just as good as doing everything from scratch, but has the advantage of saving both maintenance effort and build resources.

    • Calligra 3.0 Is Ready As A Qt5 / KDE Frameworks 5 Office Suite

      It’s been quite a while since last having anything to report on the KDE Calligra open-source graphics/office suite while surprisingly this morning it was pleasant to see Calligra 3.0 tagged for release.

    • KDE Applications 16.12 Up to Release Candidate State, Final Arrives December 15

      The KDE development team was proud to announce the availability of the Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming KDE Applications 16.12 software suite for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

      Work on KDE Applications 16.12 started about a month ago, on November 10, when the third and last maintenance update of the current stable KDE Applications 16.08 release was announced, marking the end of life of the series. Until today, KDE Applications 16.12 received a Beta development version, tagged as build 16.11.80, and now we’re seeing the Release Candidate, tagged as build 16.11.90.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GTK Lands A Big Refactoring Of OpenGL Code

      In addition to Red Hat’s Benjamin Otte working on a Vulkan renderer for GTK4′s GSK, he’s also been working on a big refactoring of the OpenGL code that’s now been merged to master.

      OpenGL is very important for GTK4 as it will play a big role in rendering with GSK. With this “large GL refactoring”, a big clean-up was done of the OpenGL GDK code, affecting the X11, Win32, Wayland, and Mir code too. Some of the specific work includes no longer using buffer-age information, passing the actual OpenGL context, and simplifying the code. More details via this Git commit.

    • A Vulkan Renderer For GNOME’s GTK+ GSK Is In Development

      A Vulkan back-end is in development for GNOME’s GTK’s tool-kit new GTK Scene Kit (GSK) code.

      Benjamin Otte has begun experimenting with a Vulkan back-end for GTK’s GSK code with GTK Scene Kit being one of the big additions in development for the major GTK+ 4.0 milestone. GSK implements a scene graph to allow for more complex graphical control of widgets and other improvements to its graphics pipeline. GSK was merged back in October and currently uses OpenGL for rendering while there is now a branched Vulkan renderer.

    • GNOME loves to cook

      With the upcoming 20th birthday of GNOME next year, some of us thought that we should make another attempt at this application, maybe as a birthday gift to all of GNOME.

      Shortly after GUADEC, I got my hands on some existing designs and started to toy around with implementing them over a few weekends and evenings. The screenshots in this post show how far I got since then.

• Distributions

  • Linux Top 3: SparkyLinux 4.5, Mageia 5.1 and Peppermint 7

    SparkyLinux is (yet another) Debian based Linux distribution. The SparkyLinux 4.5 update codenamed “Tyche’ was released on December 3, providing users with multiple desktop choice other than GNOME. SparkLinux 4.5 ships with KDE, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and Xfce.

  • Upcoming Linux Distributions Releasing In December 2016

    In December 2016, a big Linux distribution release is taking shape in the form of Linux Mint 18.1 Serena, flavored by Cinnamon 3.2. It’ll be accompanied by the release of security and privacy-focused Anonymous Live CD Tails 2.9.

  • New Releases

    • 4MLinux 20.1 Linux Distro Released with Kernel 4.4.34 LTS to Restore PAE Support

      4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki is happy to inform Softpedia today about the immediate availability of the first point release of the 4MLinux 20 stable series of his independently-developed GNU/Linux distribution.

      4MLinux 20.0 was officially released a month ago, on the first day of November, and it’s currently the most advanced version of the Linux-based operating system, shipping with the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel and many recent GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software applications.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Mandriva Fork Mageia 5.1 Lets Users Install the Linux OS on NVMe-Based Drives

      The development team behind the Mandriva fork Mageia Linux distribution are announcing the release and general availability of the first, and probably the last, point release of the Mageia 5 series.

  • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • openSUSE Leap 42.2 gets 64-bit Raspberry Image

      The latest release from openSUSE has new images available for the Raspberry Pi and joins SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Raspberry Pi in becoming the initial distributions with 64-bit for the Raspberry Pi 3.

      The 64-bit image of openSUSE Leap 42.2 for the Raspberry Pi 3 has been out for a couple weeks.

      “The ARM and AArch64 Images for openSUSE Leap 42.2 are not a once-only release,” said Dirk Mueller. “They get continuously updated and include fixes as the Leap 42.2 port matures over time. These are the first usable images, and more variants with more fixes will come over time.”

    • OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 Does A 64-bit Spin For The Raspberry Pi 3

      Following SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as being available in a 64-bit edition catered to the Raspberry Pi 3, openSUSE developers have now released a 64-bit image of Leap 42.2 for the RPi3.

    • SUSE Buys HPE’s OpenStack and Cloud Foundry Assets, Talent

      Back in November, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of an industry-standard platform for cloud applications, announced that SUSE had increased its engagement and support of Cloud Foundry by becoming a Platinum member.

      Now, SUSE has entered into an agreement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to acquire technology and talent that will expand SUSE’s OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. In addition, the company announced that it will accelerate its entry into the growing Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market, and said that the acquired OpenStack assets will be integrated into SUSE OpenStack Cloud.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Why Red Hat takes an ‘upstream first’ approach

      Red Hat has been an open source solution provider since 1993 and is 100% open source-focused. Today, the company has more than 80 offices in more than 40 countries around the globe and employs about 10,000 people.

    • Singapore IT Decision Makers Turn to Open Source for Digital Innovation

      Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the results of a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Red Hat, about the use of open source in digital innovation initiatives in the Asia Pacific region. The results, highlighted in the study Open Source Drives Digital Innovation revealed that IT decision makers in Singapore are turning to open source to drive better efficiency and digital innovation.

    • Linux Pathshala received Red Hat awards

    • Red Hat OpenStack Platform

      The adoption of OpenStack in production environments has burgeoned, necessitating increased requirements for enhanced management and seamlessly integrated enterprise capabilities.

    • Red Hat’s Paul Smith: Open Source the Basis for Gov’t Digital Transformation

      Paul Smith, senior vice president and general manager of Red Hat‘s (NYSE: RHT) U.S. public sector business, has noted that the government utilizes open source technology as the development model for digital transformation efforts, ExecutiveBiz reported Tuesday.

      “Digital transformation is an unstoppable force as constituents and consumers are demanding more value and a greater user experience,” Smith said Nov. 2 at the 2016 Red Hat Government Symposium in Virginia.

    • Finance

      • Gulf International Bank UK Ltd Has $4381000 Stake in Red Hat Inc. (RHT)

      • Consensus Predictions for Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT): Wall Street Analysts Weighing in

      • What do Analysts suggest for: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Fedora

      • Fedora and GNOME at the Engineering Week of UPIG

        I was invited today to present two Free software projects: GNOME and Fedora at UPIG (Universidad Peruana de Integración Global). They celebrated the event during the whole week the “Engineering Week”. This was the advertisement they used to announce the workshop that last two hours. It was offered free admission with certification fee of s/.25.

      • Fedora 25 review

        Even when dealing with the various Wayland oddities and issues, Fedora 25 is a great distribution. Everything is reasonably polished and the default software provides a functional desktop for those looking for a basic web browsing, e-mail, and word processing environment. The additional packages available can easily turn Fedora into an excellent development workstation customized for a developer’s specific needs. If you are programming in most of the current major programming languages, Fedora provides you the tools to easily do so. Overall, I am very pleased using Fedora 25, but I am even more excited for future releases of Fedora as the various minor Wayland issues get cleaned up.

      • Try Fedora in the cloud for free with Dply

        Fedora 25 is now available on Dply. Dply is a new experimental cloud provider which lets you run an instance for two hours at a time — for free, with no catch. That means that with a few clicks, you can try Fedora 25 from the comfort of your home, school, or coffeeshop.

  • Debian Family

    • My Free Software Activities in November 2016

      This was my ninth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 11 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog.

    • Derivatives

      • Debian-Based SparkyLinux 4.5 Brings Support for exFAT Filesystems, systemd 232

        The developers of the Debian-based SparkyLinux distribution announced this past weekend the release and immediate availability for download of the SparkyLinux 4.5 operating system.

        SparkyLinux 4.5 comes more than three months after the SparkyLinux 4.4 “Tyche” release and promises to offer users fully updated installation mediums for its KDE, Xfce, LXDE, LXQt, and MATE flavors, which have been synced with the upstream Debian GNU/Linux repositories as of November 29, 2016. The SparkyLinux 4.5 ISO images are powered by Linux kernel 4.8.7.

      • Debian/TeX Live 2016.20161130-1

        As we are moving closer to the Debian release freeze, I am shipping out a new set of packages. Nothing spectacular here, just the regular updates and a security fix that was only reported internally. Add sugar and a few minor bug fixes.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Canonical Releases Snapcraft 2.23 Snap Creator for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 16.10

          Canonical’s Snappy development team have released a new maintenance version of the Snapcraft 2.x tool that lets applications developers package their apps as Snap packages for Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux distributions that support Snaps.

        • Canonical to sue cloud provider over Ubuntu images

          Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has said it plans to sue an European cloud provider for distributing unofficial images of its cloud distribution despite several warnings.

          The company offers certified cloud images of Ubuntu that are guaranteed to run on specific cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google.

          Performance is optimised and integrated with underlying cloud requirements, with input from the host’s cloud engineers.

        • Pico-ITX SBC runs Ubuntu on Braswell

          DFI announced an Intel Braswell based “BW051” Pico-ITX SBC with up to 8GB DDR3L, mini-PCIe, SATA 3.0, mSATA, and Linux support.

          DFI, which earlier this year tapped Intel’s “Braswell” generation of SoCs for its BW968 COM Express Compact Type 6 module, has now chosen Braswell for a Pico-ITX SBC. The 100 x 72mm BW051 ships with 4-6W Braswell processors including dual or quad-core Celeron models, the quad-core 1.6GHz Pentium N3710, and quad-core, 1.04GHz Atom x5-E8000.

        • Must have Ubuntu Packages

          For most people, any default Ubuntu installation will meet their needs. Ubuntu provides users with Web browsing, email, along with various communication tools right out of the box. Heck, even basic backups are provided…although you must take the time to configure it.

          Putting all of that aside for a moment, let’s consider which “must have Ubuntu packages” aren’t included by default. In this article, I’ll share my top list of must have Ubuntu packages and explain why I rely on each of them.

        • Canonical yells at European cloud provider

          Open saucy outfit Canonical is in the middle of a legal dispute with an unnamed “a European cloud provider” over the use of its own homespun version of Ubuntu on their cloud servers.

          Canonical is worried that the implementation disables even the most basic of security features and Canonical fears that when something bad happens, the great unwashed will not blame the cloud provider but will instead blame Ubuntu.

          Writing in the company bog, Canonical said that it has spent months trying to get the unnamed provider to use the standard Ubuntu as delivered to other commercial operations to no avail. It said that Red Hat and Microsoft wouldn’t be treated like this.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Ubuntu-Based ExTiX OS Updated for Intel Compute Sticks with Improved Installer

            GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton announced this past weekend the release of an updated build of his Ubuntu-based ExTiX Linux distribution for Intel Compute Stick devices.

            Last month, we reported on the initial availability of a port of the ExTiX operating system for Intel Compute Sticks, boasting the lightweight and modern LXQt 0.10.0 desktop environment and powered by the latest Linux 4.8 kernel, tweaked by Arne Exton for Intel Atom processors.

            And now, ExTiX Build 161203 is out as a drop-in replacement for Build 161119, bringing a much-improved Ubiquity graphics installer that should no longer crash, as several users who attempted to install the Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distro on their Intel Compute Stick devices reported.

          • Should Linux Mint be discontinued?

            Linux Mint has been quite popular with many users for a very long time. But changes to Linux Mint in recent years have one redditor wondering exactly what the point of using it is these days. Distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu and others have also stolen some of Linux Mint’s thunder with notable improvements and popular spins.

• Devices/Embedded

  • AMD Extends Strategic Partnership with Mentor Graphics for Linux-based Embedded Solutions

  • Phones

    • Tizen

      • Samsung Z2 gets Firmware Update to Tizen 2.4.0.6 Z200FDDU0BPK3 in India

        Samsung’s latest Tizen-based smartphone, the Z2 model number SM-Z200F, has had a new software / firmware update land in India today. The update takes it to Tizen version 2.4.0.6., firmware Z200FDDU0BPK3. The update log mentions the following improvements: Improved send SOS message (panic mode) and also improvements to the security of the device. Additional bug fixes and performance improvements may have also been bundled in.

    • Android

      • A brighter future sends me back to Android following eight months with iOS

        You might remember that just before April, my trusty Motorola DROID Turbo took a dive into a toilet which was too much for the P2i nano-coating. I decided to accept my daughter’s offer to user her Apple iPhone 5, and from the end of March through now, I was using iOS for the first time since I owned the original Apple iPhone in 2007.

        Right off the bat, I was impressed with how quickly video would load on the iPhone 5. Software updates were a breeze and iOS 10 worked smoothly. Not bad for an old timer. The 8MP rear camera even produced better than average pictures and video. While I was generally happy using the phone, and considered buying the Apple iPhone SE, I was extremely disappointed in Siri. I found that Google Now was far superior as Apple’s voice activated personal assistant sent me to a web site for my answer far too many times than Google Now did. I found myself using the Google iOS app far more often than using Siri.

      • Google Deal Puts Africa on Cusp of First Smartphone Plant

        A Johannesburg startup is set to become the first company ever to manufacture smartphones in Africa, taking advantage of low costs and growing local demand to build handsets, tablets and other devices based on Google Inc.’s Android system.

        Onyx Connect, a privately backed company that’s raised 150 million rand ($10.8 million), will begin production in the first quarter, according to Andre Van der Merwe, its sales director. The company is licensed to load Google software like Android and Chrome onto devices sold under its own brand or products it makes for others.

      • Nokia phones running Android will launch in 2017, here’s all we know about them so far

      • Nokia Android Phones 2017 Release Date, Price, Specs, Latest News & Update: Two Android Models Unveiled – Mid-Range Handset, Flagship Smartphone?

      • How To Download, Update Motorola Droid Turbo To Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow

      • Google to reward UK Android Pay users over the festive season

      • Android Pay helps Brits keep track of their Tube spending

      • Samsung brings Gear S3 features to last year’s Gear S2

      • Vernee Mars is the first Helio P10 smartphone to score Android 7.0 Nougat

      • CyanogenMod 14.1 nightlies arrive for the Nexus 5, Moto X Pure Edition, Nextbit Robin, and more

      • Android 7.1.1 is rolling out now

      • Introducing Toolbox for Google Play Store, a Chrome extension from Android Police that enhances the Play Store

      • Android 7.1.1 released for Pixel and (most) Nexus devices

      • Android 7.1.1 Nougat Stable Version Starts Rolling Out Early: Here’s A List Of Devices That Will Be Getting The Update Very Soon

      • Lenovo Phab 2 landing in India December 6

        The Lenovo Phab 2 – the non-Tango version of the Phab 2 Pro – is landing in India on December 6. The company has sent out press invites to a webinar launch with no mention of the most interesting of Phab 2 family members, the Phab 2 Pro (the Phab 2 Plus already went on sale a month ago).

      • This sleek Asus tablet is the iPad Air 2 of the Android world: First Look

      • Stolen Nexus 6P found using Android Device Manager

        Android Device Manager is a nifty tool that will help you find your lost or stolen Android phone. A good example why every Android user should use ADM was made crystal clear by a post on Reddit. Written by a female Android owner, the post details how she lost and recovered her phone quickly, thanks to the ADM feature. The Reddit poster had her Nexus 6P deftly lifted out of her pocket while she was riding on a bus. The phone does have a fingerprint scanner and a PIN code, but all of her important cards were inside the wallet-style phone case that she used with her handset. That means that the thief had access to her bank account, social security number and other personal information.

      • How to remove virus from Android | How to stop Android virus

      • Android Auto Finally Recognizes a Popular Voice Command

      • OnePlus 3 receives Android 7.0 Nougat update via OxygenOS open beta with extra features [How to download and install]

Free Software/Open Source

• PayPal Reduces Costs 10x With Open Source CI

  The bigger you are, the more small efficiencies add up. Manivannan Selvaraj’s talk from LinuxCon North America gives us a detailed inside view of how PayPal cut operating costs by a factor of ten, while greatly increasing performance and user convenience.

  Everything has to be fast now. We can’t have downtimes. No going offline for maintenance, no requesting resources with a days-long ticketing process. Once upon a time virtual machines were the new miracle technology that enabled more efficient resource use. But that was then. Selvaraj describes how PayPal’s VMs were operating at low efficiency. They started with a single giant customized Jenkins instance running over 40,000 jobs. It was a single point of failure, not scalable, and inflexible.

• AWS hires new open source expert

  Last month, AWS also hired Adrian Cockcroft, who previously shepherded open source efforts at Netflix. At Amazon’s conference last week, Cockcroft said AWS planned to increase its efforts in open source, with Bhorat leading the charge.

• Google Launches Open Source Security Tool in Beta

  Google wants to make “fuzz testing” — providing random data inputs to programs — a standard part of open source development.

  To that end, it just launched a beta program for OSS-Fuzz, a project on GitHub. It seeks to help standardize modern fuzzing techniques and combine them with a distributed execution model that can scale as needed.

• AI/DeepMind

  • OpenAI, DeepMind open source AI training platforms

  • Dip into DeepMind’s 3D playground where AI comes to learn

  • Google and OpenAI want to give their AI programs more real-world exposure

  • Google DeepMind Makes AI Training Platform Publicly Available

  • DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman says general AI is still a long way off

  • The identity of the people on Google’s artificial intelligence ethics board is still a mystery

  • Alphabet DeepMind is inviting developers into the digital world where its AI learns to explore

  • DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman: A.I. Will Allow Us to Evolve as a Species

  • A 3-D World for Smarter AI Agents

  • Google DeepMind releases source code to the Quake III levels its using to train AIs

  • DeepMind CEO: General AI is still decades away

  • Google DeepMind makes AI training available to everyone

  • DeepMind is opening up its ‘flagship’ platform to AI researchers outside the company

  • Google’s DeepMind is using “blockchain related” technology

  • Google open-sources DeepMind lab

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Flash Facing Death as Google Launches Chrome 55

      To support HTML5, the internet giant finally launched an update for Chrome 55 which makes Flash obsolete in many websites except to those that only support Adobe’s multimedia software platform. These exempted websites include Facebook, Youtube, VK, Yahoo, Yandex, OK.ru, Twitch.tv, Amazon, and Mail.ru.

  • Mozilla

    • Helen Turvey Joins the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors

      Today, we’re welcoming Helen Turvey as a new member of the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors. Helen is the CEO of the Shuttleworth Foundation. Her focus on philanthropy and openness throughout her career makes her a great addition to our Board.

      Throughout 2016, we have been focused on board development for both the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation boards of directors. Our recruiting efforts for board members has been geared towards building a diverse group of people who embody the values and mission that bring Mozilla to life. After extensive conversations, it is clear that Helen brings the experience, expertise and approach that we seek for the Mozilla Foundation Board.

    • Why I’m joining Mozilla’s Board, by Helen Turvey

      For the last decade I have run the Shuttleworth Foundation, a philanthropic organisation that looks to drive change through open models. The FOSS movement has created widely used software and million dollar businesses, using collaborative development approaches and open licences. This model is well established for software, it is not the case for education, philanthropy, hardware or social development.

• SaaS/Back End

  • Powering NFV, Kubernetes integration, and more OpenStack news

• Funding

  • Support open-source projects this giving season

• BSD

  • LLVM’s LLD Linker Gets Faster Performance (Parallelized ICF)

  • OpenMake Software Announces Open Source Strategy for Application Release Automation

    OpenMake Release Engineer to be offered as Open Source under the FreeBSD License

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Early Benchmarks Of GCC 7 On Linux x86_64 With An Intel Core i7 6800K

    With the GCC 7 compiler having entered its stage three, feature development is basically over so it’s a great time to begin running more benchmarks of this big compiler update that will be officially released as GCC 7.1.0 in early 2017. Up today are benchmarks of the latest GCC 7.0 development snapshot compared to GCC 6.2 and GCC 5.4 on an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system running Ubuntu 16.10.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • French National Assembly organises its first data camp

      The National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament, in collaboration with Etalab, organised an open data camp on 26 November for the first time in its history.

      During the event, developers, data scientists and citizens were invited to “imagine new usages”, based on data provided by the French Assembly. One of the objectives was to help analyse citizens’ participation and the design of laws based on public consultations, Etalab, the French government agency in charge of Open Data in France, said on its website.

    • Open source planning tool for the energy turnaround: platform for electric power grids

      Hundreds of volunteers are already underway, and their numbers are growing every day. Armed with the OpenGridMap app on their smart phones, they meander through Munich, Berlin, Tokyo and even Teheran. Just another cell phone game? “No, we aren’t chasing Pokémons,” reassures Jose Rivera, director of the OpenGridMap project. “What we are interested in is the electrical infrastructure: High-voltage and low-voltage power lines, transformer sub-stations, wind turbines and solar power plants.”

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Microsemi goes open source with FPGA for RISC-V

      Us-based Microsemi has laid claim to being the first field programmable gate array (FPGA) provider to offer a comprehensive software tool chain and intellectual property (IP) core for RISC-V designs.

Leftovers

• Health/Nutrition

  • Husband of Flint water activist says he’s being mistreated at work

    Leanne Walters helped expose the city’s water emergency – sending water samples to the Virginia Tech Professor who found the lead.

    Her husband, Dennis, is a sailor with the U.S. Navy in Virginia.

• Security

  • Security advisories for Monday

  • Reproducible Builds: week 84 in Stretch cycle

  • 2017 security predictions

    From W-2 scams to WordPress vulnerabilities, ransomware, business email compromises, DDos attacks and allegations of a hacked presidential election — 2016′s been a hell of a year in cybersecurity, and it’s not over yet.

• Defence/Aggression

  • 20 houses of Hindus set on fire in Bangladesh

    At least 20 houses of Hindus were set on fire in Bochaganj upazila of Dinajpur in Bangladesh early Saturday.

    A report published in The Daily Star said that houses of seven families of Hindus were set on fire in Railway Colony.

    Fortunately, no one was injured as residents managed to escape on time.

    A person named Jewel was held by the locals, who allegedly set the fire.

  • Exclusive: WikiLeaks documents highlight sinister relations between Erdogan and ISIS

    The connection of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan΄s family with the oil smuggling of the “Islamic State” is revealed after Wikileaks΄ revealing of emails from the Turkish energy minister, and Erdoğan΄s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak. Albayrak΄s emails seem to confirm the not-so-recent accusations, since the energy minister is appealing to be the “unofficial” owner of the oil company Powertrance which is importing oil from the Isis΄ land in Northern Irak to Turkey.

  • 5 Bizarre Groups That Run Entire Foreign Countries

    Nippon Kaigi is an ultra-nationalist group whose members believe the Japanese are a superior race. They want to alter Japan’s history — like denying the rape and pillage of Nanjing, an onslaught with an estimated 200,000 Chinese victims. And they want to change the constitution, scrapping Japan’s pacifist policies, getting rid of foreigners, keeping women at home, bringing back corporal punishment, and generally doing away with a whole bunch of basic human rights, like freedom of speech.

    That headline about how Japan’s PM likes Trump makes a bit more sense now, doesn’t it?

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Police “legally mug” gang boss to grab unlocked iPhone

    The Metropolitan Police have debuted a new tactic to beat Apple’s iPhone encryption—by mugging a suspect while he was making a call and then keeping the screen alive while they downloaded all the data from the phone.

    The technique, which bears all the hallmarks of a real mugging, is apparently legal and seems set to be adopted as a standard means of gathering evidence from devices that might otherwise be locked to investigators.

    The evidence gathered from the tactic helped jail five men involved in a major fake credit card operation. Officers from Operation Falcon, the specialist London unit tackling major fraud and other related online crime, seized the phone from one of the ringleaders, Gabriel Yew, whose gang were suspected of manufacturing false bank and credit cards and using them across mainland Europe to buy luxury goods.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Federal Officials to Explore Different Route for Dakota Pipeline

    Federal officials announced on Sunday that they would not approve permits for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline beneath a dammed section of the Missouri River that tribes say sits near sacred burial sites.

    The decision is a victory for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of protesters camped near the construction site who have opposed the project because they said would it threaten a water source and cultural sites. Federal officials had given the protesters until tomorrow to leave a campsite near the construction site.

    In a statement on Sunday, the Department of the Army’s assistant secretary for Civil Works, Jo-Ellen Darcy, said that the decision was based on a need to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.

    “Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it’s clear that there’s more work to do,” Ms. Darcy said. “The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.”

  • Nigeria and Morocco Sign Gas Pipeline Deal to Link Africa to Europe

    Nigeria and Morocco have signed a joint venture to construct a gas pipeline that will connect the two nations as well as some other African countries to Europe, Nigeria’s minister of foreign affairs said on Saturday.

    The agreement was reached during a visit by the Morocco’s King Mohammed to the Nigerian capital Abuja, Geoffrey Onyema, the minister, said, adding that the pipeline project would be designed with the participation of all stakeholders.

  • Sanders sings Obama’s praises for stopping Dakota pipeline

    Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders applauded President Obama Sunday evening for halting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

    Sanders, who has been an outspoken opponent of the pipeline, shared his message on Facebook.

    “I appreciate very much President Obama listening to the Native American people and millions of others who believe this pipeline should not be built,” the post read.

    “In the year 2016, we should not continue to trample on Native American sovereignty. We should not endanger the water supply of millions of people. We should not become more dependent on fossil fuel and accelerate the planetary crisis of climate change. Our job now is to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels, not to produce more greenhouse gas emissions.”

  • Sadiq Khan to spend £770m on London cycling initiatives

    London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has promised to spend £770m on cycling initiatives over the course of his term, saying he wants to make riding a bike the “safe and obvious” transport choice for all Londoners.

    Following criticism that Khan has not been as bold as his predecessor, Boris Johnson, in committing to new bike routes, and amid increasing worries about air quality in London, Khan’s office has set out what is described as a hugely ambitious programme to boost cyclist numbers.

    The proposed spending of about £17 per person per year gets near the levels seen in cycle-friendly nations such as the Netherlands and Denmark.

    Among the plans are proposals for two new cycle superhighways, routes on which riders are largely separated from motor traffic by kerbs and dedicated traffic lights, the first of which were built under Johnson and have proved hugely popular.

• Finance

  • Trump’s pick to lead Treasury tried to kick woman out of her house over 27 cents

    Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s pick to lead the Treasury, worked for Goldman Sachs for 20 years. In 2008 Munchin and his partners founded a bank (funded in part by George Soros) that tried to evict a 90-year-old woman from her home because she underpaid a bill by 27 cents.

  • India’s Modi Defends Clampdown on Cash Economy

    Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday defended his crackdown on the cash economy that has left businesses, farmers and families suffering, saying it was necessary to keep inflation in check and ensure basic amenities for all.

    Modi’s decision last month to scrap 500 rupee and 1,000 rupee banknotes as part of a crackdown on tax dodgers and counterfeiters has caused a currency crunch in a country where most people are paid in cash and buy what they need with cash.

    With a small stock of smaller notes available and new bills of 500 and 2,000 rupee in short supply, Indians are being forced to stand in queues outside banks and cash machines to change their old notes.

  • More farmers going bankrupt

    Eero Vilokki from Kiuruvesi in central Finland lost his family dairy farm after declaring bankruptcy in June when the derivative interest rates his bank suggested on his loans grew impossible to pay. He was kicked off his family farmstead by the new owners in late August.

    The locks on the buildings were changed the very same day.

    “My workers’ belongings and computers, along with my clothing and possessions, were all left behind. All I had was the work clothes on my back. No one bothered to ask if I had a place to stay or food,” Vilokki told Yle.

    Before Vilokki was forced to leave, the farm had been transferred to a company with four equal owners. The value of the farm was estimated at 400,000 euros, with an additional 151,000 euros added on for the property’s office space. The farm’s forest property was valued at 24,000 euros.

    “It was highway robbery. The forest land alone was worth 178,000 euros,” Vilokki said.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Austria rejects far-right candidate Norbert Hofer in presidential election

    Austria has decisively rejected the possibility of the European Union getting its first far-right head of state, instead electing a former leader of the Green party who said he would be an “open-minded, liberal-minded and above all a pro-European president”.

    Alexander Van der Bellen, who ran as an independent, increased his lead over the far-right Freedom party candidate, Norbert Hofer, by a considerable margin from the original vote in May, which was annulled by the constitutional vote due to voting irregularities.

  • Bernie Sanders: Trump didn’t win the election, the Democrats lost it

    “I look at this election not as a victory for Mr. Trump, who wins the election as the most unpopular candidate in perhaps the history of our country, but as a loss for the Democratic Party.” -Senator Bernie Sanders, speaking to a sold-out crowd in San Rafael, CA.

  • The Democratic Party has Tuned Out the Jihad… if it Ever Tuned it in to Begin With

    Or, to be more precise, for many Americans it did not really happen because they simply don’t care about Islamic theological violence against their fellow Americans. The reason that many Americans, particularly of the progressive variety, tend not to care about this kind of violence is because to do so is considered “racist” by president Obama, the leadership of the Democratic Party, and the elite media.

    Koranically-based attacks on innocent Americans are, therefore, perceived like the weather. A typhoon or a flood or an earthquake may happen now and again, but what can you do? You cannot dwell on such things. They are simply “acts of God” and there is very little to be done or said, for most of us, beyond, “Gee, how unlucky.”

  • Jury finds Brandon Hall guilty of election fraud

    It took less than an hour Wednesday for a jury to convict political activist Brandon Michael Hall on 10 counts of election law fraud, following a day-and-a-half trial in Ottawa County Circuit Court.

    According to the Grand Haven Tribune, the 27-year-old Grand Haven resident, author of the West Michigan Politics blog and self-admitted political junkie, said the verdict wasn’t a surprise.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The war on ‘fake news’ is all about censoring real news

    Scrambling for an explanation for Donald Trump’s victory, many in the media and on the left have settled on the idea that his supporters were consumers of “fake news” — gullible rubes living in an alternate reality made Trump president.

    To be sure, there is such a thing as actual fake news: Made-up stories built to get Facebook traction before they can be debunked. But that’s not what’s really going on here.

    What the left is trying to do is designate anything outside its ideological bubble as suspect on its face.

  • Academic witch hunts are back: The new McCarthyism, a sign of the stupidity of the post-truth era

    In late November three blocks from the White House, a group of leaders from the so-called alt-right, who many consider to simply be white supremacists, gathered for an annual conference called the National Policy Institute. Their goal was to discuss and debate the opportunities offered by a Donald Trump presidency for their white nationalist plans. In the wake of a rise in hate crimes, the meeting sent a chill throughout the nation.

    But making America whiter “again” is not the only thing we need to fear with a Trump administration. Only two days after the alt-right convention in D.C., Turning Point USA launched Professor Watchlist, a website designed to call out college professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

  • The UK government’s latest deluded idea: ‘banning’ underage sexting on social media

    When the UK government is not busy looking for ways to invade internet users’ privacy, it’s looking for ways to restrict what they are able to do online — particularly when it comes to things of a sexual nature.

    The health secretary Jeremy Hunt has made calls for technology companies and social media to do more to tackle the problems of cyberbullying, online intimidation and — rather specifically — under-18-year-olds texting sexually explicit images. Of course, he doesn’t have the slightest idea about how to go about tackling these problems, but he has expressed his concern so that, in conjunction with passing this buck to tech companies, should be enough, right?

  • Defriend everyone on Facebook if you really want to see the world as it is

    Messing around on Facebook recently, I was appalled to see a man I used to work with gleefully posting about Trump’s election win. I went through a mixture of emotions. First, there was the shock that I had allowed myself to be friends with such a man, because my capacity to make everything about me is impressive, even for a comedian. Second, I couldn’t believe that he could have the temerity to post something that disagreed with what we had all agreed on Facebook was “The Official Viewpoint”. Third, I realised that I probably shouldn’t be on Facebook at my wife’s birthday dinner.

    What I should have done was thank him. It was the first time in ages that I had felt anything approaching an emotion on Facebook. Because I’ve only made friends with people who think like me, my newsfeed is nothing but the sound of people high-fiving each other for having the same opinion. It isn’t even an echo chamber. I am basically part of a Borg hive, speaking in unison on everything. If anyone disagreed with me, I would send them to unfriend exile, as if I were running some sort of Facebook North Korea, or Trump’s America.

  • In these turbulent times, take a break from social media to find comfort

    Five days after the election of Donald Trump, I stood in line at the airport wanting to kill time. I glanced at Twitter on my phone, almost by instinct, to snuff out a momentary feeling of boredom. What greeted me shouldn’t have been a surprise, given what I had read all week: a steady stream of hate promised, chronicled, photographed as it was unleashed throughout America, filled my timeline.

    As the plane began its taxi, my mind spiraled down an abyss of dark thoughts. Was the America I knew, loved, and once lived in, now a place I should viscerally fear? Would I witness this hate firsthand? Would I walk by unsettling graffiti, or feel the string of racism shouted as I spoke in front of crowds of strangers? My stomach churned as the plane climbed, and when the seatbelt sign turned off, I had to lock myself in the bathroom for a few minutes, taking deep breaths to stop my whole body from shaking.

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • UK Police Circumventing Cellphone Encryption By ‘Mugging’ Suspects While Their Phones Are Unlocked

    So, it’s come to this: lawful mugging. Still, it’s not a terrible solution to the problem. Sometimes the best methods are lo-tech, as anyone swinging a $5 Password Acquisition Tool can tell you.

    This method will work in the UK. It may not in the US. UK law enforcement would likely find compelling a suspect to unlock a device a long and possibly fruitless endeavor, but there’s no Riley decision standing in the way of seizing/searching phones on the hoof (as it were).

    Courts here in the US have interpreted the Supreme Court’s Riley decision in diverse ways, but a motion to suppress evidence might succeed if US law enforcement began engaging in this novel form of encryption circumvention. In one case, a judge found that simply opening a flip phone constituted a search under Riley. Keeping a phone “alive” until evidence can be retrieved from it might run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, even if the seizure itself is completely lawful.

    It’s still a better idea than making encryption backdoors mandatory or requiring device manufacturers to make a second set of keys for the government. The solution isn’t elegant but it works. And it will only work in certain circumstances, so there’s not much potential for abuse. It might encourage rougher arrests than usual, if only to separate the cellphone from the suspect, but the small number of arrests where this process would work shouldn’t result in a sharp uptick in excessive force deployment.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Amazombies: Seven seconds to find an item, every move filmed and blistering 12-hours shifts with timed toilet breaks… what YOUR Christmas order does to your ‘worker elves’

    Amazon was last night accused of ‘dehumanising’ its staff battling to deliver gifts to millions of customers in time for Christmas.

    Workers at the internet shopping giant’s distribution centres face disciplinary action if they lose a punishing race against the clock to track down items ordered by online shoppers.

  • Enclaves of Islam see UK as 75% Muslim

    Britain is an Islamic country where the majority of people share their faith, according to a report to be published this week.

    Evidence gathered by Dame Louise Casey, the government’s community cohesion tsar, will lift the lid on how some Muslims are cut off from the rest of Britain with their own housing estates, schools and television channels.

  • Three surprising ways to challenge violence against women

    It’s been more than 20 years since the UN General Assembly committed to eradicating violence against women. Yet today, it’s estimated that one in three women has experienced some form of sexual or physical violence, often at the hands of an intimate partner. This apparent lack of progress doesn’t mean, though, that people aren’t trying to do something about it – sometimes by pretty creative means.

  • Female Genital Mutilation in Pakistan

    World Health Organization defines Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as “procedures that intentionally alter or cause injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.” FGM is classified into four types. Clitoridectomy includes partial or total removal of the clitoris. 85% of the FGM procedures are of this type. The second type is excision which is performed to partially or totally remove the clitoris or the labia minora (inner folds of vulva). Infibulation, the third type, refers to the narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal. The fourth type can include other harmful procedures like piercing, pricking, scraping, incising or cauterizing. More than 200 million girls across the world have undergone the torturous plight of having their genitals sewn up, removed or mutilated.

    The humiliating practice of FGM is carried out in 30 countries of Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is rampant. The migrants from these regions take along their belief-systems, family rituals and customs to their new settlements and influence other people from their communities to practice the same. Many a religious heads, doctors, community leaders and other medically-trained professionals facilitate this oppressive custom either by indulging in genital-cutting or by sanctifying its prevalence. FGM manifests itself in regressive religious practices, community cultures and traditions. The procedural circumcision which is seen as a coming of age custom for a girl in many cultural rituals incurs life-threatening harm to the girl’s body on which it is performed, putting her at a risk of multiple health-hazards and psychological ill-effects. In religious terms, the practice is performed as a mark of entry for a girl-child from childhood to adulthood.

  • “Eliminating FGM is an essential step to realizing other SDGs”—Lakshmi Puri

    Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is one of the most serious violations of human rights of women and girls and no amount of sophistry by its proponents and apologists can change that.

    In 2015, 194 countries at the highest level of government at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit have declared that it must be eliminated and that it’s a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target. So that’s final!

  • The Plot to Sideline Gambia’s First Female Presidential Candidate

    In early September, Gambian feminist activist Isatou Touray stood before a crowd of reporters in the seaside town of Kololi and chastised the administration of President Yahya Jammeh, who has ruled over Gambia with an iron fist since he took power through a bloodless coup in 1994. Touray accused Jammeh of pilfering the country’s natural resources for his own benefit, purposely failing to uphold the rule of law and delegating power to a small and exclusive circle of corrupt men.

    Then she declared her plans to push him out of office in the December 1 presidential election by running for his seat herself. “It is time for him to leave,” she said.

  • The Lesson from Standing Rock: Organizing and Resistance Can Win

    Less than two hours earlier, news came that the Army Corps of Engineers had turned down the permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline to be built under the Missouri River. The company will have to find an alternate route and undergo a lengthy environmental assessment.

    Ever since, the network of camps now housing thousands of water protectors has been in the throes of (cautious) celebration and giving thanks, from cheers to processions to round dances. Here, at the family home of Standing Rock Tribal Councilman Cody Two Bears, friends and family members who have been at the center of the struggle are starting to gather for a more private celebration.

    Which is why the dishes must be done. And the soup must be cooked. And the Facetime calls must be made to stalwart supporters, from Gasland filmmaker Josh Fox to environmental icon Erin Brockovich. And the Facebook live videos must, of course, be made. Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard—here as part of a delegation of thousands of anti-pipeline veterans—is on her way over. (“Exhilarated,” is how she says she feels when she arrives.) CNN must, of course, be watched, which to the amazement of everyone here gives full credit to the water protectors (while calling them “protesters”).

  • Analysis: The Assange case in the context of Sweden’s feminist foreign policy for international trade gains

    A previous analysis concluded that Sweden most likely would persist in neither undertaking nor recognizing the international criticism for its rejection of the UN conclusion regarding the arbitrary detention of Mr Julian Assange [See UNGWAD full document in Appendix 1]. That is to say, it will not do so at least in the nearest future.

    Further, the article hypothesizes that –in the eventuality of a positive intervention by the upcoming Trump administration regarding the case Assange – from the Swedish side the case will be likely used as a tool in a bargain including issues of economic interest, support by the US towards Swedish stances in the Security Council (as publicly anticipated by foreign minister Margot Wallström) [1] and other items already put forward by the letter of PM Stefan Löfven to President-elect Donald Trump. [2]

  • Mistrial in murder case against cop who shot Walter Scott

    A South Carolina judge declared a mistrial Monday after jurors said they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict in the case of a white former North Charleston police officer charged with murder in the death of black motorist Walter Scott.

    The mistrial came just a few hours after Circuit Judge Clifton Newman had ordered jurors to continue deliberating. But the jurors reported later that they were hopelessly unable to reach a unanimous consensus, the Associated Press and CNN reported. The jury had deliberated about 22 hours over four days.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • WIPO Committee On Traditional Knowledge Agrees On Revised Text For Further Discussions

    World Intellectual Property Organization delegates last week agreed on a revised set of draft articles to be further discussed at the next session of the committee working on a potential treaty to protect traditional knowledge. Views differed on the achievements of the week. For the proponents of a binding treaty, the text reflects a better understanding of issues, and some reduction in differences. However, for some developed countries not in favour of a treaty, gaps are still wide open and much work remains.

  • Will The Voice Of Indigenous Peoples Disappear From WIPO Discussions To Protect Their Knowledge?

    What would be the credibility of the World Intellectual Property Organization committee negotiating a system of protection for traditional knowledge held by indigenous peoples, if none of their representatives could participate in the meetings? That has been a recurring question asked by indigenous peoples and the organisation over the years. But now, if no voluntary contributions are made by governments or others, the next committee meeting could very well be first in 16 years held without a single observer from an indigenous community.

  • Copyrights

    • Every Website Needs To Re-register With The Copyright Office, Who Can’t Build A Functioning System

      As we mentioned last month, the Copyright Office — despite being warned this was a bad idea — has decided to implement a brand new system for websites to register DMCA agents, and has done so in a way that will undoubtedly fuck over many websites. It’s already ridiculous enough that in order to be fully protected under the DMCA’s safe harbor rules (that say you’re not liable if someone posts infringing material to your website), you need to register a designated “DMCA agent” with the Copyright Office. The idea behind this is that by registering an agent, copyright holders will be able to look up who to send a takedown notice to. And, sure, that makes sense, but remember that this is the same Copyright Office that supports not requiring copyright holders to register their works, meaning that there may not be any legitimate way to contact copyright holders back.

      The reason for the new system is that the old system was just ridiculous — on that everyone can agree. You had to fill out a paper form, sign it, and send it in. The Copyright Office has been way behind on digitizing everything, so moving to a web based system is a good thing. Also, the old system required payment of over $100, while the new one is just $6. That’s all good. The problem is twofold: first, the Copyright Office has said that it is throwing out all the old registrations, and if you want to retain your safe harbors, you need to re-register. There’s a grace period through the end of next year, but plenty of sites who don’t follow the Copyright Office’s every move are going to miss this, and will no longer have an officially registered agent with the Copyright Office (it’s possible that, should this issue go to court, a platform could reasonably argue that it still did meet the statutory requirements in the original registration, but why force site owners through that hoop in the first place). The second problem, is that this new system will toss out records every three years, so if you forget to renew, you once again can lose your legal safe harbors. This puts tons of websites at serious risk, removing key protections and opening them up to lawsuits from copyright trolls.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Server

  • China builds world’s fastest supercomputer without U.S. chips

    China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel’s fastest microprocessors.

    There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China’s new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops, according to the latest biannual release today of the world’s Top500 supercomputers. It is the first system to exceed 100 petaflops. A petaflop equals one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second.

    The most important thing about Sunway TaihuLight may be its microprocessors. In the past, China has relied heavily on U.S. microprocessors in building its supercomputing capacity. The world’s next fastest system, China’s Tianhe-2, which has a peak performance of 54.9 petaflops, uses Intel Xeon processors.

• Kernel Space

  • Graphics Stack

    • LibRetro’s Vulkan PlayStation PSX Renderer Released

      A few days back I wrote about a Vulkan renderer for a PlayStation emulator being worked on and now the code to that Vulkan renderer is publicly available.

      For those wanting to relive some PlayStation One games this week or just looking for a new test case for Vulkan drivers, the Vulkan renderer for the LibRetro Beetle/Mednafen PSX emulator is now available, months after the LibRetro folks made a Vulkan renderer for the Nintendo 64 emulator.

    • Etnaviv DRM Updates Submitted For Linux 4.10

      The Etnaviv DRM-Next pull request is not nearly as exciting as MSM getting Adreno 500 series support, a lot of Intel changes, or the numerous AMDGPU changes, but it’s not bad either for a community-driven, reverse-engineered DRM driver for the Vivante graphics cores.

    • Mesa 12.0.4 Being Prepped For Ubuntu 16.10/16.04

      Ubuntu is preparing Mesa 12.0.4 for Ubuntu Xenial and Yakkety users. It’s not as great as Mesa 13, but at least there are some important fixes back-ported.

      Mesa 12.0.4 is exciting for dozens of bug fixes, including the work to offer better RadeonSI performance. But with Mesa 12.0.4 you don’t have the RADV Vulkan driver, OpenGL 4.5, or the other exciting Mesa 13 work.

    • A Look At The Many Different Vulkan Engine/Renderer Projects On GitHub

  • Benchmarks

    • More Benchmarks From The 2016 MacBook Pro (Mac-A5C67F76ED83108C)

• Applications

  • Hyper Is a Terminal Emulator Built Using Web Technologies

    A lot of us use the terminal on Ubuntu, typically from an app like GNOME Terminal, Xterm or an app like Guake.

    But did you know that there’s an JS/HTML/CSS Terminal? It’s called Hyper (formerly/also known as HyperTerm, though it has no relation to the Windows terminal of the same/similar name) and, usefulness aside, it’s certainl a novel proof-of-concept.

    “The goal of the project,” according to the official website, “is to create a beautiful and extensible experience for command-line interface users, built on open web standards.”

  • Little Kids Having Fun With “Terminal Train” In Ubuntu Linux

    Linux is often stereotyped as the operating system for tech savvy users and developers. However, there are some fun Linux commands that one can use in spare time. A small utility named sl can be installed in Linux to play with the Terminal Train.

  • This Cool 8-Bit Desktop Wallpaper Changes Throughout The Day

    Do you want a dynamic desktop wallpaper that changes throughout the day and looks like the sort of environment you’d be able to catchPokemon in? If so, check out Bit Day wallpapers. Created by Redditor user ~BloodyMarvelous, Bit Day is a collection of 12 high-resolution pixel art wallpapers.

  • This Script Sets Wallpapers from Imgur As Your Desktop Background

    Pyckground is a simple python script that can fetch a new desktop background on the Cinnamon desktop from any Imgur gallery you want. I came across it while doing a bit of background on the Bit Day wallpaper pack, and though it was nifty enough to be of use to some of you. So how does it work?

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to host multiple websites on one VPS

    • Notifications with Telegram: Pandora FMS

    • 4 Steps to Install Vesta Control Panel on Linux

    • An Introduction to Testing the Linux Kernel with Kselftest

    • issue #57: PHP 7.1, Crypto, NTP, runv, Multibinder, Grafana, FPM & more!

    • How to embed Python code in C program

    • Create a hardened Raspberry Pi NAS

  • Wine or Emulation

    • Wine 2.0 Coming In December~January: DirectX 11 Support Ongoing, No Android Support

      With Wine having moved to annual, time-based releases, the code freeze is indeed imminent for the next stable release, Wine 2.0.

      In this week’s World Wine News it includes notes from WineConf 2016. Indeed, the code freeze is coming up and most likely be released in December or January. But given it’s December already and no code freeze or release candidates, I’d be more prone to bet on January or later.

  • Games

    • ‘Lara Croft GO’, a turn based puzzle-adventure released day-1 on Linux

      Lara Croft GO [Steam], is a turn based puzzle-adventure spin-off of Tomb Raider and it has arrived with day-1 Linux support.

      This was ported over from the mobile game that is essentially the same.

    • Unforgiving but addictive 3D top-down shooter ‘Redie’ is now out on Steam, demo available and some thoughts

    • ET: Legacy Continues Making Progress On Free, Modern Art Assets For Enemy Territory

      While there are many open-source game engines these days, many of which were formerly closed-source/commercial engines, one of the big bottlenecks for community-driven game projects continue to be on the art assets/models and/or their reliance upon the commercial game assets for game engines that were later opened up. ET: Legacy continues making progress on free, modernized assets inspired off the original Wolfenstein Enemy Territory game.

    • The Exiled, an open-world survival arena that combines MMO and MOBA together supports Linux

      Originally, when it was called Das Tal, it ran a Kickstarter campaign that was sadly unsuccessful, so it’s pleasing to see it carry on. I’ve been following it since then and the email update sadly got pushed down my inbox due to an influx of news recently.

    • Redout, a fantastic looking tribute to games like WipeOut could come to Linux, with enough interest

      I was shared an email yesterday from a conversation with the developers of futuristic racer ‘Redout’ [Steam, Official Site]. The developers are willing to do a Linux version, if there’s enough interest.

      It looks damn near incredible and certainly did remind me of WipeOut, a game I wasted hours and probably entire days of my life in when I was younger.

    • Applications for the ‘Disgaea 2 PC’ beta for Linux are now open

      If you want a chance to beta test Disgaea 2 PC [Steam] for Linux, now is your chance. The developers are requested people enter a quick form.

    • Open source RTS game 0 A.D. has a new project leader, continues towards next Alpha version

      0 A.D. [Official Site] has a change in leadership with Erik stepping down, but work continues on and the new Alpha is already shaping up.

      I love 0 A.D. even at this early stage. It is still rather rough, but even release really does bring it forward dramatically. It is one of the most promising open source games available right now.

    • Heavy Gear Assault is heading to Steam, first 1000 people on their mailing list get a free key

    • Early Access physics based building game ‘Besiege’ is now available on GOG

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Productivity++

      In keeping with tradition of LTS aftermaths, the upcoming Plasma 5.9 release – the next feature release after our first Long Term Support Edition – will be packed with lots of goodies to help you get even more productive with Plasma!

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Core Apps Hackfest 2016: report

      I spent last weekend at the Core Apps Hackfest in Berlin. The agenda was to work on GNOME’s core applications: Documents, Files, Music, Photos, Videos, Usage, etc.; to raise their overall standard and to make them push beyond the limits of the framework. There were 19 of us and among us we covered a wide range of modules and areas of expertise.

      I spent most of my time on the plumbing necessary for Documents and Photos to use GtkFlowBox and GtkListBox. The innards of Photos had already been overhauled to reduce its dependency on GtkTreeModel. Going into the hackfest we were sorely lacking a widget that had all the bells and whistles we need — the idiomatic GNOME 3 selection mode, and seamlessly switching between a list and grid view. So, this is where I decided to focus my energy. As a result, we now have a work-in-progress GdMainBox widget in libgd to replace the old GtkIconView/GtkTreeView-based GdMainView.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • SparkyLinux 4.5 is out

      There is an update of SparkyLinux 4.5 “Tyche” available now.

      As before, Sparky “Home” editions provide fully featured operating system based on Debian ‘testing’ with desktops of your choice: LXDE, LXQt, KDE, MATE and Xfce.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Mageia 5.1 Released, Tumbleweed’s Latest, Most Secure

      The Mageia project today announced the release of stopgap version 5.1, an updated “respin” of 5.0 and all updates. The Daily Dot posted their picks for the most sure operating systems and the Hectic Geek is “quite pleased” with Fedora 25. Matthew Garrett chimed in on Ubuntu unofficial images and Dedoimedo reviewed Fedora-based Chapeau 24.

  • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • openSUSE Heroes meeting, day 2

      After a long, but exciting first day, we even managed to get some sleep before we started again and discussed the whole morning about our policies and other stuff that is now updated in the openSUSE wiki. After that, we went out for a nice lunch…

    • Installing Tumbleweed, November 2016

      The Tumbleweed system that I already have installed had desktops KDE, Gnome, XFCE and LXDE. But for recent intstalls (as with Leap 42.2), I have been going with KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXQt, FVWM and MATE. So it seemed reasonable for the new Tumbleweed install to follow the same path. I also added Enlightenment for experimenting.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Finance

      • Shares in the Spotlight: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

      • Despite Recent Market Upturn, This Stock Struggled This Week: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Fedora

      • Rawhide notes from the trail, the 2016-12-03 edition

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Trisquel 8.0 Alpha Pairs A Linux-Libre Experience With MATE

            This past week marked the availability of the first alpha release of Trisequel 8.0 “Flidas”, the latest installment of the Free Software Foundation endorsed GNU/Linux distribution.

            Among the changes coming for Trisquel 8.0 is using the Linux-Libre 4.4 kernel, MATE 1.12.1 is the default desktop over GNOME, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is used as the base.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • It’s official: Kondik is gone from the Cyanogen that bore his handle [Ed: Microsoft deal killed them. As usual.]

        STEVE KONDIK, the original founder of Cyanogen, has been officially ousted from the company following the closure of its Seattle base.

        As reported yesterday, Kondik told developers that he “f*cked up and was f*cked over” and that he was considering what to do next given that he had lost control of rights to the Cyanogen name when he and his co-founder had moved from developer group to business.

        Kondik, aka CyanogenMod, relinquished all control over the operation of the business taking on the moniker of chief science officer, which may or may not have been a simple honorific.

      • Why Android malware scares are almost never as bad as they seem

        The “Verify Apps” feature of Play Services is Google’s firewall against app-based malware. It was introduced in 2012, and first enabled by default in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. (Older versions can manually enable it in the Google Settings app.) Verify Apps works similarly to a traditional PC virus scanner: Whenever the user installs an app, Verify Apps looks for malicious code and known exploits. If they’re there, the app are blocked outright — a message is displayed saying “Installation has been blocked.” (In other, less suspicious cases, a warning message may be displayed instead, with the option to install anyway.)

      • Guess Who’s the Most Profitable Android Smartphone Maker in the World? (It’s Not Samsung)

      • Android Nougat on the OnePlus 3 is impressive, even in beta

      • Build-time dependency patching for Android

      • Android and Chill: I almost miss everything being broken

Free Software/Open Source

• Did Amazon Just Kill Open Source?

  Back in the days, we used to focus on creating modular architectures. We had standard wire protocols like NFS, RPC, etc. and standard API layers like BSD, POSIX, etc. Those were fun days. You could buy products from different vendors, they actually worked well together and were interchangeable. There were always open source implementations of the standard, but people could also build commercial variations to extend functionality or durability.

  The most successful open source project is Linux. We tend to forget it has very strict APIs and layers. New kernel implementations must often be backed by official standards (USB, SCSI…). Open source and commercial implementations live happily side by side in Linux.

  If we contrast Linux with the state of open source today, we see so many implementations which overlap. Take the big data eco-systems as an example: in most cases there are no standard APIs, or layers, not to mention standard wire protocols. Projects are not interchangeable, causing a much worse lock-in than when using commercial products which conform to a common standard.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Firebird 3 by default in LibreOffice 5.4 (Base)

    Lots of missing features & big bugs were fixed recently .
    All of the blockers that were initially mentioned on tracking bug are now fixed.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Linux & Open Source News Of The Week — Comma.ai, Patches For Firefox and Tor, And OSS-Fuzz

  • Open Source Malaria helps students with proof of concept toxoplasmosis pill

    A team of Australian student researchers at Sydney Grammar School has managed to recreate the formula for Daraprim, the drug made (in)famous by the actions of Turing Pharmaceuticals last year when it increased the price substantially per pill. According to Futurism, the undertaking was helped along by an, “online research-sharing platform called Open Source Malaria [OSM], which aims to use publicly available drugs and medical techniques to treat malaria.”

    The students’ pill passed a battery of tests for purity, and ultimately cost $2 using different, more readily available components. It shows the potential of the platform, which has said elsewhere there is, “enormous potential to crowdsource new potential medicines efficiently.” Although Daraprim is already around, that it could be synthesized relatively easily without the same materials as usual is a good sign for OSM.

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Growing the Duke University eNable chapter

      We started the Duke University eNable chapter with the simple mission of providing amputees in the Durham area of North Carolina with alternative prostheses, free of cost.

      Our chapter is a completely student-run organization that aims to connect amputees with 3D printed prosthetic devices. We are partnered with the Enable Community Foundation (ECF), a non-profit prosthetics organization that works with prosthetists to design and fit 3D printed prosthetic devices on amputees who are in underserved communities. As an official ECF University Chapter, we represent the organization in recipient outreach, and utilize their open sourced designs for prosthetic devices.

Leftovers

• Science

  • Global Warming Research in Danger as Trump Appoints Climate Skeptic to NASA Team

    One of NASA’s most high-profile projects has been to track historical average global temperature. In January 2016, the agency released data that showed 2015 had been the hottest year on record. “Today’s announcement not only underscores how critical NASA’s Earth observation program is, it is a key data point that should make policy makers stand up and take notice — now is the time to act on climate,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a statement at the time. Since then, NASA’s monthly updates on temperature delivered a steady dose of dread as month after month was declared the hottest recorded.

    Now Donald Trump’s first NASA transition team pick is Christopher Shank, a Hill staffer who has said he is unconvinced of a reality that is accepted by the vast majority of climate scientists: that humans are the primary driver of climate change. Shank previously worked for Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman who played a key role in dragging out debates on the basic nature of climate change at a time when the science is settled and action is urgent.

    Shank has criticized the type of scientific data NASA regularly releases. As part of a panel in September 2015 at Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes, he said, “The rhetoric that’s coming out, the hottest year in history, actually is not backed up by the science — or that the droughts, the fires, the hurricanes, etc., are caused by climate change, but it’s just weather.”

• Health/Nutrition

  • Federal judge to Michigan: You must deliver bottled water to Flint

    On the same day that researchers said Flint’s water is improving with “amazing progress,” a federal judge delivered a legal blow to state officials in ordering them to deliver bottled water to Flint whether they like it or not.

    In a 12-page ruling, U.S. District Judge David Lawson ruled that Flint’s water is still unsafe to drink for certain residents and that the state must deliver bottled water to those households without properly installed or maintained filters until the problem is cleared up.

    Defendants in the case, Michigan Treasurer Nick Khouri and the state-appointed Flint Receivership Transition Advisory Board, had asked the court to stay that Nov. 10 order, arguing it was unreasonable, overly broad and too expensive — $10.5 million per month — to deliver bottled water door to door in Flint. Those officials, represented by attorneys from the office of Attorney General Bill Schuette, also had argued that bottled water can be picked up as needed at distribution centers and those who can’t pick it up can call 211 to arrange for delivery.

  • New Report Exposes “Patient Advocacy” Groups as a Big Pharma Scam

    “Patient advocacy” groups have a unique power on Capitol Hill. They claim to represent the true voice of constituents, untainted by special interest bias. Politicians and the Food and Drug Administration use their endorsements as reflective of genuine public support.

    But a new study shows that nearly all of these patient advocacy groups are captured by the drug industry.

    David Hilzenrath at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reports that at least 39 of 42 patient advocacy groups who participated in discussions with the FDA over agency review processes for prescription drugs received funding from pharmaceutical companies. And at least 15 have representatives of drug or biotechnology companies on their governing boards.

    The study is particularly notable now because Congress is poised to pass the 21st Century Cures Act, which trades temporary additional funding for the National Institutes of Health and the FDA for permanent weakening of the FDA’s approval process. Over 1,400 lobbyists have been working on this bill, which would be a major financial boon to the drug and medical device industries.

  • Jeremy Hunt wants to ‘Amazonise’ our pharmacies – and 3000 face the chop as a result

    The future of 3,000 community pharmacies hangs in the balance as a round of cuts starts to be imposed on them this month, despite earlier hints of compromise.

    The cutbacks to key pharmacy service subsidies – part of a 12% reduction in overall money allocated to the sector – were first announced in December 2015 and a row has been underway ever since. In September, minister David Mowat appeared to back away from the cuts. But the following month the reductions were confirmed.

    The cuts coincide with longer-term concerns over a planned online centralisation or ‘Amazonisation’ of high-street pharmacy care in England.

    Perplexingly, there appears to be no way of knowing which pharmacies will be forced to close, nor what the government’s rationale for the distribution of the reduced public pharmacy spending is. Rural practices are set to be hit particularly hard.

• Security

  • What’s the most secure operating system?

    Deciding what operating system (OS) to keep your computer running smoothly—and with the highest level of security—is a controversial yet frequent question many business owners, government officials, and ordinary Joes and Janes ask.

    There are many different operating systems—the software at the base of every computer, controlling the machine’s array of functions—like Mac OS10, which comes pre-loaded on Apple laptops and desktops, and Microsoft Windows that’s on the majority of personal computers. Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS for mobile devices are designed specifically for devices with smaller touchscreens.

    Whatever OS you use—and many users are very loyal to their operating system of choice and will argue that their’s is the best—it’s not entirely secure or private. Hackers are still infiltrating systems every day, and they can easily target victims with malware to spy on users and disable their operating system altogether.

    Because of this, choosing a secure system is essential to staying secure online. Below are the top three secure operating systems that will help users take the next step to ensure proper cyber and hardware security.

  • New IoT Botnet, Attackers Target Tor, and More…

    Firefox’s emergency security patch: If you use Firefox at all, and I’m assuming that most of you do, you might want to run an update to get the latest security patch from Mozilla. The patch was rushed to market on November 30 to fix a zero day vulnerability that was being exploited in the wild to attack the Firefox based Tor browser.

    In a blog post on Wednesday, Mozilla’s security head Daniel Veditz wrote, “The exploit in this case works in essentially the same way as the ‘network investigative technique’ used by FBI to deanonymize Tor users…. This similarity has led to speculation that this exploit was created by FBI or another law enforcement agency. As of now, we do not know whether this is the case. If this exploit was in fact developed and deployed by a government agency, the fact that it has been published and can now be used by anyone to attack Firefox users is a clear demonstration of how supposedly limited government hacking can become a threat to the broader Web.”

  • Ransomware: Windows is the elephant in the room

    Ransomware has slowly become the most common and most difficult threat posed to companies and individuals alike over the last year.

    And there is one common thread to practically all ransomware attacks: Windows.

    Microsoft acolytes, supporters and astro-turfers can scream till they are blue in the face, but it is very rare to see ransomware that attacks any other platform.

    Of course, these Redmond backers are careful to say that ransomware attacks “computer users”, not Windows users.

    But statistics tell the truth. In 2015, the average number of infections hitting Windows users was between 23,000 and 35,000, according to Symantec.

    In March, this number ballooned to 56,000 with the arrival of the Locky ransomware. And in the first quarter of 2016, US$209 million was paid by Windows users in order to make their locked files accessible again.

  • GCC Tackling Support For ARMv8-M Security Extensions

    GCC developers have been working to support the compiler-side changes for dealing with ARMv8-M Security Extensions.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Man Who Claimed to be CIA Asset Sentenced to Ten Years in Prison in Arms Deal Sting

    Flaviu Georgescu arrived at U.S. District Court in Manhattan Friday afternoon in a beige prison jumpsuit, shackled around the waist and hands, with his head bowed.

    Earlier this year, a jury convicted Georgescu in this same courtroom on terrorism charges. Federal prosecutors accused Georgescu of helping organize a complex weapons deal involving DEA informants posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a designated terrorist organization.

    Since his arrest, Georgescu has maintained his innocence, claiming that he had been working undercover for the CIA and pointing to phone calls he had made to the agency as proof of his cooperation.

    Georgescu faced a possible life sentence.

  • The Coming War on China

    When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, unforgettably. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, “disappeared”, a political embarrassment.

    I have spent two years making a documentary film, The Coming War on China, in which the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are in the northern hemisphere, on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China.

    The great danger this beckons is not news, or it is buried and distorted: a drumbeat of mainstream fake news that echoes the psychopathic fear embedded in public consciousness during much of the 20th century.

  • Clinton’s ‘Russia Did It’ Cop-out

    The Clinton machine – running on fumes after Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid – is pulling out all remaining stops to block Donald Trump’s inauguration, even sinking into a new McCarthyism.

    In joining a recount effort with slim hopes of reversing the election results, Clinton campaign counsel Marc Elias cited a scurrilous Washington Post article that relied on a shadowy anonymous group, called PropOrNot, that issued a “black list” against 200 or so Internet sites, including some of the most respected sources of independent journalism, claiming they are part of some Russian propaganda network.

  • A Trump Plus: Reduced Tensions with Russia

  • Trump Ponders Petraeus for Senior Job

    President-elect Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington seems forgotten — like so many political promises — as he meets with swamp creatures, such as disgraced Gen. David Petraeus, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • The trolling of Elon Musk: how US conservatives are attacking green tech

    He is the charismatic Silicon Valley entrepreneur who believes his many companies – including the electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors, solar power firm Solar City, and SpaceX, which makes reusable space rockets – can help resist man-made climate change.

    South African-born Elon Musk is a billionaire green evangelist, a bete noire of the fossil fuels industry who talks about colonising Mars and believes it may be possible that we’re living in a computer simulation.

    But having been feted by the Obama administration, he now faces an extraordinary barrage of attacks from rightwing thinktanks, lobbyists, websites and commentators. The character of the assault says much about which way the political wind is blowing in Washington – something that will have consequences that stretch far beyond the US.

    One of Musk’s most trenchant critics has been the journalist Shepard Stewart, who writes for a clutch of conservative online news sites. In several articles in September, not long after a SpaceX rocket exploded, Stewart attacked Musk for receiving billions in government subsidies “to make rockets that immediately self destruct” and branded him “a national disgrace”. As Musk fought back on Twitter, it became apparent that Stewart was an invention. Even his photo byline had been doctored from a LinkedIn profile of a tech entrepreneur. “Definitely a fake,” Gavin Wax, editor-in-chief of the Liberty Conservative, one of the websites that published Stewart, admitted to Bloomberg.

  • Indonesia VP blames foreign countries for destroying forests

    Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla has blamed foreign countries for destroying Indonesia’s forests, and wants them to pay to help restore the damaged land.

    “What happens here is not only our problem. The foreign people also destroyed our forests,” said Kalla when officiating the Indonesia Forest Congress in Jakarta on Wednesday (Nov 30).

    Kalla said he has brought up this point at various international forums, and is angry with those who accused Indonesia for not managing its forest well.

    “During a big conference in Tokyo, someone said that Indonesia has forests, but they are damaged and should be restored,” said Kalla. “I became angry in front of thousands of people. I said, ‘this is a chair, this is a door, this is a window from my country. You take, and pay $5, and you bring it here, and sell for $100. Indonesian companies just get $5’.

    “There is Mitsubishi from Japan, Hyundai and others, they finished what we have. I told them, ‘you have to pay, if not we will cut down all the trees, and let the world feel the heat’. So, the world must also be responsible.”

  • US House Science Committee tweets Breitbart climate misinformation

    The current leadership of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a fraught relationship with climate science. Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who chairs the committee, has used its subpoena powers to target NOAA climate scientists whose temperature dataset he does not like. He has also gone after the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, who are pursuing a securities fraud investigation of ExxonMobil related to its public denial of climate change.

    On Thursday, the committee’s Twitter account hopped on this anti-climate-science bandwagon. It tweeted a link to a story titled “Global temperatures plunge. Icy silence from climate alarmists” that was published by Breitbart—the hard-right, white-nationalist-supporting news outlet that saw its chairman, Steve Bannon, become President-elect Donald Trump’s chief strategist.

    The article was written by James Delingpole, a columnist who has made a career out of insult-laden polemics against climate science. (In an episode of BBC’s Horizon, Delingpole famously admitted that he never reads scientific papers and called himself “an interpreter of interpretations.”) In this case, Delingpole mostly tacked a few put-downs onto quotes from a Daily Mail story written by David Rose—who also has a long history of writing deeply misleading stories about climate science.

  • Kinder Morgan pipeline: Canadians intensify huge opposition to expansion

    Opponents of a contentious Canadian pipeline project are preparing for a lengthy, multifaceted battle that will see thousands take to the country’s streets, courts and legislatures to contest the government’s recent approval of the project.

    Prime minister Justin Trudeau announced on Tuesday that the Liberal government had cleared the way for Kinder Morgan’s C$6.8bn Trans Mountain Expansion project. Designed to transport Alberta’s landlocked bitumen to international markets via Vancouver’s harbour, the project will expand an existing pipeline to nearly triple capacity on the artery to 890,000 barrels a day.

  • Standing Rock Sioux Issue Emergency Proclamation

    The Standing Rock Sioux issued an emergency proclamation in support of Oceti Sakowin Camp in the face of ongoing threats by law enforcement.

    On Wednesday, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Dave Archambault II issued an emergency proclamation calling on the United Nations and U.S. President Barack Obama to take “immediate action” to defend the water protectors at the Oceti Sakowin camp from “retaliatory actions and practices” by state law enforcement agencies, and to defend activists’ “rights to free speech and peaceable assembly.”

  • Police Attack on DAPL Demonstrators: A Hell of Ice and Tear Gas

    Hundreds of “water protectors” marched at dusk from Oceti Sakowin Camp toward police barricades on Highway 1806. Some in the crowd held plastic shields. Many wore googles and had scarves wrapped around their mouths. They massed in front of a barricade on a bridge. It consisted of a barbed-wire fence, a line of militarized police, the burned remains of a massive truck and at least one tank.

    Darkness had fallen when the first tear gas was fired. Spotlights, mounted by law enforcement on a ridge, illuminated the clouds that had started to engulf the crowd. Several people panicked. They were screaming.

    “Stand your ground! Stand your ground! Stand your fucking ground!” someone yelled.

    Amid the clouds and choking tear gas, people began to turn and run. The police kept lobbing tear gas canisters. They fired stun grenades at those running for safety. Overhead, planes and helicopters circled.

  • Naomi Klein, Tulsi Gabbard Travel to Standing Rock Alongside Thousands of Veterans

    The number of veterans traveling to North Dakota to support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its stand against the Dakota Access Pipeline has swollen to over 3,000, an astonishing show of solidarity that aims to shield the water protectors from police violence.

  • #ExxonKnew About Climate Change And ExxonKnows How To Use Trade Deals To Get Its Way

    Public outrage has been brewing about the fact that ExxonMobil—one of the the world’s biggest oil companies—knew about climate change as early as 1977 and yet promoted climate denialism and actively deceived the public by turning “ordinary scientific uncertainties into weapons of mass confusion.”

    A little-known fact, however, is that while ExxonMobil was misleading the public about climate disruption, it was also using trade rules to increase its power, to bolster its profits, and to actively hamper climate action.

  • Donald Trump’s Swamp: Meet Ten Potential Energy and Climate Cabinet Picks and the Pickers

    One of President-elect Donald Trump’s most pressing current tasks is selecting who will serve in his new administration, especially his transition team and cabinet, though there are over 4,000 political appointees to hire for federal jobs in all.

    Much of the mainstream media attention so far has centered around Trump’s choices of Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and former Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon as chief strategist and senior counselor. Congressional Democrats have called for Bannon to be banned from the White House, citing his personal bigotry and the bigotry often on display on Breitbart.com. Meanwhile, Bannon’s hire was praised by the American Nazi Party and KKK.

    Yet, perhaps just as troubling is the army of climate change deniers and fossil fuel industry lobbyists helping to pick or court a spot on Trump’s future climate and energy team.

    Trump is a climate change denier and so is Priebus, who recently told Fox News that climate denial will be the “default position” of the Trump administration.

• Finance

  • Senate takes aim at ‘bots’ that snap up concert seats

    The Senate is cracking down on computer software used by ticket brokers to snap up tickets to concerts and shows.

    Senators passed legislation by voice vote Wednesday that would make using the software an “unfair and deceptive practice” under the Federal Trade Commission Act and allow the FTC to pursue those cases. The House passed similar legislation in September, but the bills are not identical so the Senate legislation now moves to the House.

    The so-called “bots” rapidly purchase as many tickets as possible for resale at significant markups. They are one of the reasons why tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert or “Hamilton” performance can sell out in just a few minutes.

  • The True Cost of Your Uber Ride Is Much Higher Than You Think

    Uber’s become the generic trademark—right up there with Kleenex and “Google it”—for using your phone to get into strangers’ cars.

    But like most cheap commodities, what you’re paying for the sausage might not reflect the actual cost it takes to make it.

    Transportation industry expert Hubert Horan is building a case for why Uber will never become a profitable company on the Naked Capitalism blog. One of the most eyebrow-raising statistics, as gleaned from investor reports, is how little riders are paying of the true cost of their trips: “Uber passengers were paying only 41% of the actual cost of their trips; Uber was using these massive subsidies to undercut the fares and provide more capacity than the competitors who had to cover 100% of their costs out of passenger fares.”

  • How Many People Are In The Labor Force? Unemployment Rate Falls To 9-Year Low, But Participation Stays Down

    The unemployment rate hit 4.6 percent in November, its lowest level since August 2007, according to monthly data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but that figure only tells part of the story.

  • Trump’s Trickle-Down Populism

    Last Thursday President-elect Donald Trump triumphantly celebrated Carrier’s decision to reverse its plan to close a furnace plant and move jobs to Mexico. Some 800 jobs will remain in Indianapolis.

    “Corporate America is going to have to understand that we have to take care of our workers,” Trump told The New York Times. “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Vice President-elect Michael Pence added, as Trump interjected, “Every time, every time.”

    So what’s the Trump alternative to the free market? Bribe giant corporations to keep jobs in America.

    Carrier’s move to Mexico would have saved the company $65 million a year in wages. Trump promised bigger benefits. The state of Indiana will throw in $7 million, but that’s just the start.

  • Race and Class in Trump’s America

    Americans don’t do political introspection well for a reason. The ‘founding’ myth poses an improbable starting point before which history was erased and after which it was subsumed by the imposed unity of ‘nation.’ As Malcolm X put it, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, the rock landed on us” for American Blacks in particular, but in other dimensions of social relations as well. ‘Freedom’ in its Constitutional sense was / is the privilege to impose European property relations on people who were never asked for their consent and whose lives were overwhelmingly diminished and / or destroyed by it.

    The historical dodge that Malcolm X called to account was the tendency to ‘universalize’ the dominant culture’s history and interests as a means of subsuming contrasting experiences under an umbrella of implied consent. In most meaningful ways the interests of slave ‘masters’ and slaves were antithetical— slavers took the most by providing the least in return. This historicized formulation of capitalist ‘efficiency’ found its apologies in the imperial language of ‘the White man’s burden’ and through modern economists’ assertions that capital serves us all no matter how much human misery went into its accumulation.

  • Trump Effectively Gave Carrier Corp. a Tax Cut for Sending 1,300 Jobs to Mexico (Video)

    Donald Trump took credit for persuading the air conditioner manufacturer Carrier Corp. to keep more than 1,000 jobs in the U.S. But he effectively gave the company a tax cut for sending another 1,300 jobs to Mexico.

  • Everything you need to know about Trump and the Indiana Carrier factory

    Donald Trump scored an early public relations win this week as he took the credit for persuading a US firm not to outsource jobs to Mexico. But the case – and its implications – are more complex than they first appeared.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Three Men in a Room: The D.C. Edition

    For years, New York’s dysfunctional state government has been derisively called “Three Men in a Room.” The three men were the Governor, the New York State Senate Majority Leader and the New York State Assembly Speaker. The three have nearly unparalleled control of New York’s government. But as corrupt as Albany has been, the Governor never offered a job to the Speaker’s or Majority Leader’s wives.

    Now it looks like the country will have “Three Men in a Room” on a national scale. Starting in January, the three men will be President Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And the room is oval shaped. And two of the three are already off to a debauched start.

    As all three are Republicans, if they can agree on a legislative agenda, then federal laws could change quite rapidly as they pass the House and the Senate and are signed by the new President.

  • Trump and His Betraying Makeover

    Attention workers who voted for Trump, either eagerly or as a vote against the hawkish, Wall Street favorite, Hillary Clinton: Donald Trump, less than a month after the election, has already begun to betray you.

    You can often see where a president-elect is going by his nominations to high positions in his forthcoming administration. Across over a dozen crucial posts, Mr. Trump has chosen war hawks, Wall Streeters (with a former Goldman Sachs partner, Steven Mnuchin, as his pick for Treasury Secretary) and clenched teeth corporatists determined to jettison life-saving, injury and disease preventing regulations and leave bigger holes in your consumer pocketbooks.

    In addition to lacking a mandate from the people (he lost the popular vote), the president-elect continues to believe that mere showboating will distract from his breathtaking flip-flops in his campaign rhetoric. Remember his last big TV ad where he blasted “a global power structure” responsible “for robbing the working class” with images of Goldman Sachs flashing across the screen?

  • Deepening Contradictions: Identity Politics and Steelworkers

    Stein, it turns out, is a “pwogwessive” as Alexander Cockburn would have put it. She has written for In These Times, Dissent and The Nation—pillars of support for the Sanders campaign and uniting workers on a class basis. Such unity in her eyes precludes affirmative action since it would divide Black and white steelworkers. All lawsuits directed at the union and the corporations designed to promote equality were rejected by her since they were a plot by “Elite whites, possessing a potent brew of concern, guilt, and a desire to retain control of the social order. . .”

    Tired of being relegated to second-class citizenship in steel mills as janitors and other menial positions, Blacks supported affirmative action that would afford them preferential treatment to make up for discrimination endured in the past.

  • A Bare-Knuckle Fight Over Recounts

    The lobbying effort to blame Russia and get the electors to flip their votes is being accompanied by an intense media campaign.

    In the announcement that the Clinton campaign would join the recount, campaign counsel Elias aligned the campaign with an unverified Washington Post article based largely on a shadowy, anonymous group that blamed a list of 200 alternative media sites and political groups for spreading Russian propaganda to influence the election, without providing any evidence.

    “The Washington Post reported that the Russian government was behind much of the ‘fake news’ propaganda that circulated online in the closing weeks of the election,” Elias wrote.

    A Huffington Post article said one of the eight reasons the electors should overturn the election is because “Russian covert action influenced the election.”

    The staunchly pro-Clinton Daily Kos wrote that “Even if they never touched a voting machine, there’s absolutely no doubt: Russia hacked the election.”

    If evidence of hacking is found in the recounts, the Clinton campaign would be greatly aided in lobbying electors with confirmation from the Obama administration that Russia was behind it. But on the day before the Clinton team joined the recount, the Obama administration appeared to throw a wrench into the plan to blame Russia.

  • Trump Allies in Battleground States Rush to Stop Jill Stein’s Recount Efforts

    President-elect Donald Trump’s allies are trying to block the ballot recount being pushed by the Green Party’s Jill Stein.

    Late Thursday, two super PACs and a team of Trump attorneys filed lawsuits in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, respectively, to try to block the efforts in those states. And on Friday morning, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette followed suit, filing a lawsuit to stop the recount that is set to begin today.

    In Wisconsin, where the process is already underway, the Great America PAC, the Stop Hillary PAC, and an individual voter claimed the recount request Stein filed last week violates the due process of voters in the state, and could “unjustifiably cast doubt upon the legitimacy of President-Elect Donald J. Trump’s victory.” They also say the short window for the process could result in errors.

    Meanwhile, the lawsuit in Pennsylvania argues that Stein lacks a valid claim and only “alleges speculative illegality.”

  • As Hate Incidents Rise, Rights Groups Urge Trump to Denounce Bigotry

    Since the election of Donald Trump, an increased number of hate incidents have targeted minority groups in America, and the election results are having a negative impact on America’s schoolchildren, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

    On Tuesday, the SPLC revealed these findings at a press conference held in conjunction with a number of human rights and education leaders, calling on Trump to denounce racism and bigotry and to reconsider some of the high-level appointments he has made since the election.

  • Can Trump be checked and balanced?

    The US presidential system has been much heralded for its system of checks and balances. But Trump’s victory has given rise to a number of questions about the future of US democracy and world politics. The most important of these questions is arguably this: what checks and balances in the US political system will Trump face during his presidency? Based purely on the institutional setup of the US presidential system, how much damage can Trump cause? The answer, unfortunately, is quite a bit.

  • Steve Mnuchin: Evictor, Forecloser and Our New Treasury Secretary

    Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump criticized Wall Street bankers for their excessive political influence and attacked hedge-fund managers for getting away with “murder” under the current tax code. “The hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump said on Face the Nation. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”

    Now, however, Trump has tapped Steve Mnuchin, a 53-year-old Wall Street hedge-fund and banking mogul — and, since May, his campaign finance chair — to be the nation’s secretary of the Treasury.

  • Trump’s Treasury Secretary Pick is a Lucky Man. Very Lucky.

    The former Goldman Sachs banker nominated to become Donald Trump’s treasury secretary had the perspicacity to purchase a collapsed subprime mortgage lender soon after the financial crisis, getting a sweet deal from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Now, if he’s confirmed, he will likely be able to take advantage of a tax perk given to government officials.

    Mnuchin was born into a family of Wall Street royalty. His father was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for 30 years, serving in top management. He and his brother landed at the powerful firm, too. After making millions in mortgage trading, Mnuchin struck out on his own, creating a hedge fund and building a record of smart and well-timed investment moves.

  • Why Trump Would Almost Certainly Be Violating the Constitution If He Continues to Own His Businesses

    Far from ending with President-elect Trump’s announcement that he will separate himself from the management of his business empire, the constitutional debate about the meaning of the Emoluments Clause — and whether Trump will be violating it — is likely just beginning.

    That’s because the Emoluments Clause seems to bar Trump’s ownership of his business. It has little to do with his management of it. Trump’s tweets last Wednesday said he would be “completely out of business operations.”

    But unless Trump sells or gives his business to his children before taking office the Emoluments Clause would almost certainly be violated. Even if he does sell or give it away, any retained residual interest, or any sale payout based on the company’s results, would still give him a stake in its fortunes, again fairly clearly violating the Constitution.

  • [Old] How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul

    It was January 1975, and the Watergate Babies had arrived in Washington looking for blood. The Watergate Babies—as the recently elected Democratic congressmen were known—were young, idealistic liberals who had been swept into office on a promise to clean up government, end the war in Vietnam, and rid the nation’s capital of the kind of corruption and dirty politics the Nixon White House had wrought. Richard Nixon himself had resigned just a few months earlier in August. But the Watergate Babies didn’t just campaign against Nixon; they took on the Democratic establishment, too. Newly elected Representative George Miller of California, then just 29 years old, announced, “We came here to take the Bastille.”

  • Intelligence Committee Senators Call On Obama To Declassify Evidence Of Russian Election Interference

    Of course, it needs to be noted that this will clearly be seen as a partisan effort. Of the seven Senators who signed on to the letter, six are Democrats, and the other, Senator Angus King, is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats. Basically it’s all of the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee except for Dianne Feinstein and Harry Reid. So, it’s easy for some to spin this as a case of sour grapes about the Democrats not winning the election, and even the idea that they’re now clinging to stories of Russian interference to explain what happened.

    But… that spin holds somewhat less weight when you look at the details. First off, the letter itself was put together by Senator Ron Wyden. And, yes, his name comes up a lot around here, but that’s because he has a pretty long history of being right on lots and lots of stuff. And that’s especially true when Wyden says that there’s some secret info that the public deserves to know about. He’s been right on that every single time he’s said it. So the track record is there. When Wyden says the public deserves to know something, pay attention.

    The second thing that provides more confidence here is that this isn’t just random conspiracy theories about “rigged” voting or whatever that some have been spewing. This is a specific request for more transparency by asking for specific information to be released to the public — specific information that the Senate Intelligence Committee members have seen.

  • Trump’s Taiwan phone call preceded by hotel development inquiry

    The woman, known only as Ms Chen arrived from the US in September to meet the mayor of Taoyuan, Cheng Wen-tsan, one of the senior politicians involved in the Aerotropolis project, a large urban development being planned around the renovation of Taiwan’s main airport, Taoyuan International.

    “She said she was associated with the Trump corporation and she would like to propose a possible investment project in the future, especially hotels,” said an official familiar with the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

    The official described the talks, conducted in both English and Mandarin, as a routine meeting with a potential investor. It took place in Taoyuan city hall, on the outskirts of the capital, Taipei, and lasted 15-20 minutes. Chen had not been in touch since.

    “One thing quite sure from her side was that she would like to bring the Trump corporation here to build the hotel,” said the official, who did not know if Chen had a Trump Organization business card.

  • Trump Kicks Off ‘Thank You’ Tour, Reveling in Crowd and Campaign Themes

    He boasted about himself in the third person. He sneered at the opponents he had vanquished. He disparaged journalists and invited angry chants from the crowd, grinning broadly at calls of “lock her up” and “build the wall.” He ridiculed the government’s leaders as stupid and dishonest failures.

  • Yes, you can blame millennials for Hillary Clinton’s loss

    Hillary Clinton’s campaign has lots of excuses for losing. There’s the electoral college, James Comey, the media’s alleged over-exuberance in digging into Clinton’s email server, etc. But Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said Thursday that one particular group is especially to blame: millennials.

  • The Latest: Stein urges federal judge to get recount moving

    Green Party candidate Jill Stein is asking a federal judge to order Michigan to quickly start a recount of presidential votes.

    It’s another legal action in the dispute over whether Michigan will take a second look at ballots from the Nov. 8 election. The recount could start Wednesday because officials say state law requires a break of at least two business days.

    Stein’s attorney, Mark Brewer, filed a lawsuit Friday. He says the law violates the U.S. Constitution. He says the delay means the recount might not be finished by a Dec. 13 deadline.

  • Disney’s Bob Iger Among Donald Trump’s ‘Strategic and Policy’ Advisory Committee

    Walt Disney Co. chairman and CEO Bob Iger is among the list of business leaders who will make up President-elect Donald Trump’s strategic and policy forum, with the first meeting slated for February at the White House.

  • The Real Risk Behind Trump’s Taiwan Call

    If you work in foreign affairs, you learn that a highly unexpected event is often the result of intent or incompetence. (You also learn that what looks, at first, like intent often turns out to be incompetence.) In the Donald Trump era, we may need a third category—exploitation—which has elements of both.

    In his first semiofficial act of foreign policy, President-elect Trump, on Friday, lobbed a firework into the delicate diplomacy of Asia by taking a phone call from Taiwan’s President, breaking thirty-seven years of American practice in a way that is sure to upset relations with China. It wasn’t clear how much he intended to abruptly alter geopolitics, and how much he was incompetently improvising. There is evidence of each; in either case, the way he did it is very dangerous.

    Some background: Taiwan broke away from mainland China in 1949, and the two sides exist in a tense equilibrium, governed by decades of diplomatic agreements that serve to prevent war in Asia. Under that arrangement, the U.S. maintains friendly relations with Taiwan, while Presidents since Ronald Reagan have deliberately avoided speaking directly with Taiwan’s President because the U.S. formally recognizes only the Beijing government.

  • So We’re Gonna Stop Thinking for Four Years?

    So we’re really going to do this? Years of not thinking?

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Media bigwigs converse about ratings and censorship

    Pakistan’s first and only production and entertainment conference, Focus PK ’16, kicked off on Saturday at a Karachi hotel, where discussions were held about the media industry and its future, with a tinge of nostalgia for the bygone days.

  • We need to resist censorship of cyberspace

    The hacking effort – aimed at prominent thinkers including New York Times Pulitzer laureate Paul Krugman , Stanford professor and former diplomat Michael McFaul, Newsweek political editor Matthew Cooper, New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait, and others – comes after Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails were stolen by Russian hackers and amid a new effort to create a national “watchlist” of liberal professors. Questions have also surfaced over whether the US presidential election was hacked.

    Together, these developments suggest something even more chilling: The halcyon WikiLeaks era when our chief fear was that the whole truth might emerge online is officially over. Cyberspace is rapidly becoming censored.

  • Sweden’s pioneering free press act turns 250

    Today marks the 250th anniversary of Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Act, and at a time where both freedom of information and questions over what the media publish are increasingly in the spotlight, the pioneering document is particularly relevant. Here are five facts you should know about it.

  • Thai Activist Arrested for Facebook Share About New King

    Police in Thailand arrested a student pro-democracy activist Saturday for sharing a story about the country’s new king that was posted on Facebook by the Thai-language service of the BBC.

    The arrest was apparently the first under the country’s tough lese majeste law since King Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun took the throne on Thursday, succeeding his late father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Lese majeste, or insulting the monarchy, carries a penalty of three to 15 years in prison.

    Duangthip Karith of Thai Lawyers for Human Rights said that law student Jatupat “Pai” Boonpattararaksa was arrested while attending a Buddhist ceremony in the northeastern province of Chaiyaphum. Jatupat posted that he was being arrested and briefly broadcast the police reading the charge on a Facebook Live video stream.

  • Taslima Nasrin on being a writer in exile: Bans and censorship hurt; but banishment hurt the most

    Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin is back with a new book — this time, a memoir called Exile. Published by Penguin Randomhouse, Exile has Nasrin disclosing the series of events during the seven-month struggle that led to her ouster from West Bengal, Rajasthan and India; the time she spent under house arrest and the “anxious days (she) had to spend in the government safe house, beset by a scheming array of bureaucrats and ministers desperate to see (her) gone”.

  • The “fake news” furor and the threat of Internet censorship

    In the weeks since the November 8 election, US media reports on the spread of so-called “fake news” during the presidential campaign have increasingly repeated unsubstantiated pre-election claims that the Russian government hacked into Democratic Party email servers to undermine the campaign of Hillary Clinton. There is more than a whiff of McCarthyism in this crusade against “fake news” on social media and the Internet, with online publications critical of US wars of aggression and other criminal activities being branded as Russian propaganda outlets.

    A case in point is an article published in the November 24 edition of the Washington Post headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” The article includes assertions that Russian “botnets, teams of paid human ‘trolls,’ and networks of web sites and social media accounts” were used to promote sites across the Internet “as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.”

  • Political correctness debate centers around respect, not censorship

    The political correctness debate is no small misunderstanding. According to the Pew Research center, 59 percent of Americans believe that “too many people are easily offended these days over the language that others use.”

  • We Won’t Let You Forget It: Why We Oppose French Attempts to Export the Right To Be Forgotten Worldwide

    One country’s government shouldn’t determine what Internet users across the globe can see online. But a French regulator is saying that, under Europe’s “Right to be Forgotten,” Google should have to delist search results globally, keeping them from users across the world. That’s a step too far, and would conflict with the rights of users in other nations, including those protected by the laws and Constitution of the United States.

    EFF joined Article 19 and other global free speech groups in a brief to the Conseil d’Etat asking it to overturn that ruling by France’s data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés’ (CNIL). The brief, filed Nov. 23, 2016, argues that extending European delisting requirements to the global Internet inherently clashes with other countries’ laws and fundamental rights, including the First Amendment in the U.S.

    The European Union’s Court of Justice ruled in 2013 that Europeans have the right to demand that certain links be taken out of search engine results. But the French CNIL vastly expanded the effect of these requests when it said in 2015 that Google must remove links from not just search results returned within the EU, but from search results for everyone, anywhere in the world. This interpretation of the Right to be Forgotten runs contrary to policy and practice outside Europe, will harm the global Internet, and inherently undermines global rights, including those protected by the Constitution in the United States. For an in depth analysis, read our legal background document.

  • Senate Responds to Trump-Inspired Anti-Semitism By Targeting Students Who Criticize Israel

    After Donald Trump’s election emboldened white supremacists and inspired a wave of anti-Semitic hate incidents across the country, the Senate on Thursday took action by passing a bill aimed at limiting the free-speech rights of college students who express support for Palestinians.

    By unanimous consent, the Senate quietly passed the so-called Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, only two days after it was introduced by Sens. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Tim Scott, R-S.C.

    A draft of the bill obtained by The Intercept encourages the Department of Education to use the State Department’s broad, widely criticized definition of anti-Semitism when investigating schools. That definition, from a 2010 memo, includes as examples of anti-Semitism “delegitimizing” Israel, “demonizing” Israel, “applying double standards” to Israel, and “focusing on Israel only for peace or human rights investigations.”

  • The Orwellian War on Skepticism

    Under the cover of battling “fake news,” the mainstream U.S. news media and officialdom are taking aim at journalistic skepticism when it is directed at the pronouncements of the U.S. government and its allies.

    One might have hoped that the alarm about “fake news” would remind major U.S. news outlets, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, about the value of journalistic skepticism. However, instead, it seems to have done the opposite.

  • Q&A: Russia, China Swapping Cybersecurity, Censorship Tips

    A series of joint events by Russia and China on cybersecurity has prompted speculation that Moscow is looking to the architect of the Great Firewall of China for inspiration on how to censor and otherwise regulate the Internet. But it’s a two-way street, and Beijing is learning from Moscow, too, says Andrei Soldatov, co-author of the book Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators And New Online Revolutionaries.

  • Qatari news site says website blocked, blames state censorship

    An independent English-language news site in Qatar accused the Gulf state of censorship on Thursday, saying two internet service providers had blocked access to its website.

    The Doha News, which stirred a debate about the limits of tolerance in the conservative country in August with an opinion column on gay rights in Qatar, said the two internet firms had simultaneously barred access to its website on Wednesday.

  • Qatari news website raises ‘censorship’ concerns

  • Blocked Qatari news site blames government censorship

  • Qatar accused of censorship after Doha News website blocked

  • Putin Promises to Halt Censorship of Artists in Russia

  • Vladimir Putin warns Russian artists against offending religious believers after Charlie Hebdo attack

  • Putin CRACKS DOWN on ART in Russia, warning against ‘DANGEROUS’ freedom of expression

  • Putin warns artists against ‘dangerous behavior’

  • Social media site Reddit censors Trump supporters

  • Reddit is censoring the pro-Donald Trump community

  • Reddit Censoring Donald Trump Subreddit From Front Page?

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • The Snowden Movie Illustrates Why I’m So Pessimistic About The Future

    Last night the cybersecurity firm F-Secure hosted a screening of Oliver Stone’s latest film, Snowden – a dramatisation of how the eponymous hero went from working deep inside the American Intelligence apparatus, to becoming an internationally famous whistleblower who has been lionised and demonised in equal measure. Essentially, F-Secure probably couldn’t have asked for a better sales pitch.

    Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Snowden, and the film skips back and forth between the tense days spent in a Hong Kong hotel room after he leaked his insider knowledge to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and The Guardian, and flashbacks through his career and his relationship. It’s hard to know exactly what was real and what was a dramatic invention by the filmmaker – but it makes for a very powerful explanation of exactly what programmes the NSA is running, and what they are capable of, and the potential human consequences of such actions.

  • Tech Companies, Fix These Technical Issues Before It’s Too Late

  • Malware and Mysteries: Secret Surveillance in Argentina

  • Law Enforcement’s Secret “Super Search Engine” Amasses Trillions of Phone Records for Decades

    Although the government still hides too much information about a secret telephone records surveillance program known as Hemisphere, we have learned through EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits that police tout the massive database of private calls as “Google on Steroids” [pdf].

    Hemisphere, which AT&T operates on behalf of federal, state, and local law enforcement, contains trillions of domestic and international phone call records dating back to 1987. AT&T adds roughly four billion phone records to Hemisphere each day [.pptx], including calls from non-AT&T customers that pass through the company’s switches.

    The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and other federal, state and local police use Hemisphere to not only track when and who someone is calling, but to perform complicated traffic analysis that can dynamically map people’s social networks and physical locations. This even includes knowing when someone changes their phone number.

    And federal officials often do it without first getting permission from a judge.

    Indeed, Hemisphere was designed to be extremely secret, with police instructed to do everything possible to make sure the program never appeared in the public record. After using Hemisphere to obtain private information about someone, police usually cover up their use of Hemisphere by later obtaining targeted data about suspects from phone providers through traditional subpoenas, a process the police call “parallel construction” and that EFF calls “evidence laundering.”

  • The IP Act: UK’s most extreme surveillance law

    The Investigatory Powers Act will come into force at the start of 2017, and will cement ten years of illegal surveillance into law.

    It includes state powers to intercept bulk communications and collect vast amounts of communications data and content. The security and law enforcement agencies – including government organisations such as HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) – can hack into devices of people in the UK.

  • How to Protect Yourself From Government Surveillance and Criminal Hackers

    Even if you like to share thoughts and photos on social media, there are certainly plenty of things that you’d like to keep between yourself and a select few. ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project Director Ben Wizner sat down with our principal technologist Christopher Soghoian for a Facebook Live video Q&A on how to keep the government and other snoopers out of your private digital business.

  • CREDO Confirms It’s at Center of Long-Running Legal Fight Over NSLs

    Mobile Provider Battled Gag Order That Forced It to Keep Customers in the Dark

    San Francisco – CREDO Mobile representatives confirmed today that their company was at the center of the long-running legal battle over the constitutionality of national security letters (NSLs), and published the letters the government sent three years ago.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has represented CREDO in this matter since 2013—and the case, bundled with two other NSL challenges, has reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Until now, CREDO was under a gag order, preventing CREDO officials from identifying the company or discussing their role in the case. In March, a district court found that the FBI had failed to demonstrate the need for this gag, and struck it down pending an appeal by the government. But earlier this month, the government decided to drop its appeal of that order, leaving CREDO free to talk about why the legal challenge is important to the company and its customers.

  • Fighting NSL Gag Orders, With Help From Our Friends at CREDO and Internet Archive

    Thanks to our clients and friends at CREDO Mobile and the Internet Archive, EFF was able to shine a rare light on national security letters (NSLs) this week. The FBI uses NSLs to force Internet providers and telecommunications companies to turn over the names, addresses, and other records about their customers. NSLs almost always come with a secrecy provision that bars the companies—in violation of the Constitution—from publicly disclosing the requests. Worse still, NSL gags generally last forever and are imposed by the FBI without any mandatory court oversight.

    The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs since 9/11, and because of their secrecy, NSLs have become a totemic representation of the government’s overreaching surveillance powers.

  • The Problem of Our Surveillance Laws: Report Exposes Deeply Rooted Governmental Secrecy—Underscoring Why Obama Should Act Now

    Kafka wrote in his parable The Problem of Our Laws, “It is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not know.”

    By this standard, America has long been in pain. Secret law runs rampant in the United States, particularly when national security is concerned. It may be legitimate for the government to keep some information secret, like targets of investigations and specific intelligence strategies, but this should be a relatively short list. And it should not, except in the most extreme circumstance, extend to the law itself. A recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liza Goitein, however, exposes just how deep the problem of keeping even the law secret runs—with over-classification fostering constitutionally suspect legal reasoning and the rapid erosion of any meaningful check on governmental power.

    The Brennan Center report also confirms something we’ve been arguing for years—it’s time for some transparency and accountability in our laws. With only 48 days left in Obama’s presidency, the call to shed some light on the law purportedly supporting the government’s secret surveillance programs is all the more urgent. Opening the blinds is a practical step for protecting the democratic principles this country was founded on—especially as the power to invoke secrecy and surveil Americans is posed to pass into new and untested hands. President Obama, the time is now.

  • P/C Industry Warns China’s New Cybersecurity Law Could Hamper Foreign Business

    China’s new wide-ranging cybersecurity law is drawing some serious apprehension from the U.S. property/casualty insurance industry. Trade associations and experts alike caution that it will create business obstacles in the world’s second-largest economy.

    “Most insurers already find China a difficult market in which to get a toehold,” Michael Barry, vice president of media relations with the Insurance Information Institute, told Carrier Management via email. “This action will not make things easier.”

    As reported by Bloomberg and others, the new law was recently passed by China’s main legislative body, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. It takes effect in June and will implement a number of new requirements, such as mandatory testing and certification of computer equipment. Companies are also required to give government investigators complete access to their data if there is suspected wrong-doing, and Internet operators must cooperate in any national security or crime-related investigation.

  • WhatsApp to cut off support for millions of phones, tells people to buy new ones instead [Ed: better surveillance by Facebook]

    WhatsApp is about to stop working on millions of phones.

    Older devices are going to have their support cut off so that they’ll no longer be able to use the free chat app.

    Phones including the iPhone 3GS and Android handsets are about to stop being supported by WhatsApp’s engineers. And when that happens, owners will no longer be able to send or receive messages.

    WhatsApp first announced the change early this year. But it said then that it would be implemented by the end of the year, and so there are only relatively few days left before it happens.

  • Uber knows where you go, even after ride is over

    As promised, Uber is now tracking you even when your ride is over. The ride-hailing service said the surveillance—even when riders close the app—will improve its service.

    The company now tracks customers from when they request a ride until five minutes after the ride has ended. According to Uber, the move will help drivers locate riders without having to call them, and it will also allow Uber to analyze whether people are being dropped off and picked up properly—like on the correct side of the street.

  • Snapchat Maker Expands in London Ahead of Public Offering [Ed: proprietary. The British government will demand back doors. Avoid.]

    Snap Inc. recently posted nearly 20 job openings in London in areas including advertising, software engineering and legal, according to its website. The vacancies come after the company in February signed a 10-year lease on a four-story, 12,570-square-foot (1,168-square-meter) property in the U.K. capital. In October, Snap also opened an office in Paris for staff working on advertising and partnerships with French-language media organizations.

  • Families who sheltered Edward Snowden in Hong Kong say NSA whistleblower ‘gave them hope’

    The three groups of individuals who sheltered American whistle-blower Edward Snowden in Hong Kong after he leaked sensitive intelligence files in 2013, dream of leaving the city and being received by a third country, where they can find safety and rebuild their broken lives.

    “I don’t like staying here, because we are not ­allowed to have a life,” Nadeeka Dilrukski Nonis, an asylum seeker from Sri Lanka, said, holding her ­seven-month-old boy, still too small and fragile to understand his mother’s concerns. “We just want a place where my children can have a future. It can be anywhere, if there’s safety and freedom.”

    Some two months after their photos and names were plastered all over the world press, the families who housed Snowden for a couple of weeks in 2013 told the Sunday Morning Post they had no regrets about helping the former National Security Agency contractor. Although they are still facing the consequences of the exposure that came with it, they said their contact with Snowden gave them something that had been taken from them while in limbo in Hong Kong: hope.

  • GCHQ: from two old sites to one shiny new Doughnut

    When someone in Cheltenham says they work at GCHQ, you know where they mean – that big round building on the A40 – there’s a sign and everything – it’s even on the bus blinds.

  • Explosive document could REVEAL WikiLeaks whistleblowers behind German NSA paper release

    German experts claim one single document holds the key to every single person that helped Wikileaks, which notoriously publishes private and classified information, unveil papers which threaten to derail Angela Merkel’s hopes of dominating the EU.

    A German parliament spokesman warned a lead to informants could spark a criminal investigations, according to local reports.

    It comes after Wikileaks published a 90GB cache containing almost 2,500 top-secret documents, which sheds light on the murky relationship between Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and America’s National Security Agency (NSA).

  • Court Rubber Stamps IRS’s Demand To Get All Coinbase User Data

    A couple weeks back, we wrote about a ridiculous and massively overbroad demand from the IRS that virtual currency exchange/online wallet host Coinbase turn over basically all info on basically all Coinbase users. They did this because they saw evidence of a single person using Bitcoin to avoid paying taxes. Coinbase expressed concern over this, but Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley didn’t seem too concerned, and has granted the IRS’s request by literally rubber stamping the DOJ’s request. I know it’s not all that uncommon for judges to accept “proposed orders” but it’s still a bit disturbing to see it happen on something with potentially massive consequences.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • I, Barrett Brown, Have Returned

    Four years ago, after my overly dramatic arrest by the FBI, I vowed to return to Dallas at the time of its greatest peril, or anyway I meant to vow this. Now I have fulfilled the promise I definitely intended to make; my sentence complete, on Tuesday I rode from a South Texas prison with my mom and dad and Alex Winter for some reason to a halfway house 20 minutes south of downtown. I live in a room with five drug dealers. We have a TV and an Xbox 360. When I came in, they were watching the 1990 Charlie Sheen vehicle Navy Seals, a film of extraordinary obnoxiousness. Further reports will follow.

  • Drunk men screaming Trump’s name try to rip off Muslim student’s hijab as straphangers stand idly by on East Side subway, cops say

    Straphangers stood by and watched as three drunk white men repeatedly screamed “Donald Trump!” and hurled anti-Islam slurs Thursday at a Muslim Baruch College student before trying to rip her hijab off of her head on an East Side subway, the woman told the Daily News.

    Yasmin Seweid said she was stunned by the assault — and the fact that no one in the subway car came to her aid.

    “It made me really sad after when I thought about it,” she said. “People were looking at me and looking at what was happening and no one said a thing. They just looked away.”

    The terrified 18-year-old recounted her harrowing encounter with the hate-spewing trio.

  • Senator Feinstein Asks President Obama To Declassify Senate’s CIA Torture Report

    Could President Obama actually declassify and release the full 6,800 page report on the massive failures of the CIA’s torture program from a decade ago? While it seems unlikely, Senator Dianne Feinstein is urging the President to release the document, fearing that the massive report may disappear into the memory hole soon.

    Some background: While Feinstein has been historically awful on basically anything having to do with reining in the US intelligence community, the one area that really seemed to get her attention and raise concerns was the CIA’s torture regime. She assigned Senate Intelligence Committee staffers to work on a massive and detailed report on the CIA’s torture program after it came out that a key official involved in the program had deliberately deleted videotape evidence about the program. The research and writing of the report went on for years and cost millions of dollars, and then resulted in another big fight over releasing a heavily redacted version of just the executive summary of the report (not to mention that the CIA also broke into the staffers’ computers after it realized it had accidentally given the staffers a really damning document). The fight over releasing the paper was really, really ridiculous.

    There were fights over what ridiculous things to redact, and then the White House put on a full court press against releasing the document, insisting that publicly releasing even a heavily redacted executive summary would inspire terrorist attacks. Even after an agreement was reached on the redactions, John Kerry still tried to block the release, again warning of potential attacks in response.

  • How do you call something dystopic when dystopia keeps upgrading itself to something worse?

    Civil rights activists have a PR problem. When calling a bad development out as the worst seen in a democracy, that’s the strongest you can condemn something. The development thus called out may legitimately be the worst ever seen, and be rightfully called out as such, as a dystopia coming true. But next week, another law proposal appears which is even worse, and so you say again that this is the worst ever seen, again correctly. But when people just hear you saying that everything is the worst, all the time, it becomes a big communications problem and needs to be reframed.

    Every time you think the surveillance hawks have hit rock bottom and can’t possibly sink any lower, they surprise you with new levels of shamelessness. The problem here is the rapidly shifting window of normality.

  • These Big Native American Facebook Pages Are Actually Being Run By People In Kosovo And Vietnam

    As pipeline protesters at Standing Rock prepare to dig in for the winter, a growing network of dubious Native American Facebook pages is cashing in on the movement by selling stolen No DAPL T-shirt designs and by driving traffic to dubious clickbait websites, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found.

    The owners of these pages and websites reside in faraway countries such as Vietnam and Kosovo, and they are capitalizing on online interest in Standing Rock, and Native American culture in general, to make money. BuzzFeed News identified more than 60 Facebook pages with more than 6 million fans that are generating money either by selling counterfeit Native American merchandise, or by driving traffic to ad-filled websites that in some cases have little or nothing to do with Native American issues.

  • Liberal Moroccan Writer Said Nachid: Raif Badawi Is Forced to Pray and Attend Religious Classes in Prison

    Liberal Moroccan writer Said Nachid talked, during a conference of the Adhoc organization of liberal modern thought, held in Rome, about his friend Raif Badawi, who was arrested in 2012 and later sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam through electronic channels.” Nachid said that in the early days of Badawi’s incarceration, when he still had his mobile phone, he used to call him and tell him about the religious guidance one is forced to attend, including mandatory prayers and lessons in the teachings of Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyya. The video was posted on Adhoc’s social media channels on November 13.

  • Slovakia bars Islam from becoming state religion by tightening church laws

    The government in Slovakia has approved a law effectively preventing Islam being registered as a state religion for a number of years.

    The bill was proposed by the Slovak National Party (SNS), and requires a religion to have at least 50,000 followers before it qualifies for state subsidies.

    According to the most recent census, there are currently around 2,000 Muslim people living in Slovakia out of a population of 5.4million, and there are no registered mosques.

  • Norway frees radical Islamist as Italy ends extradition bid

    Italy has cancelled a request for the extradition from Norway of controversial Iraqi Kurdish fundamentalist preacher Mullah Krekar, the Norwegian prosecution agency said on Wednesday, ordering his immediate release.
    The prosecution agency did not provide any explanation for Italy’s move, saying simply that the Italian justice ministry had informed its Norwegian counterpart in a letter that the request would be “withdrawn.”

  • Urgent Action Update: Jailed Filmmaker At Risk Of Flogging (Iran: UA 19/16)

    Iranian filmmaker Keywan Karimi was jailed on 23 November after being summoned to start serving his prison sentence. The authorities have told Keywan Karimi they also intend to carry out his flogging sentence of 223 lashes. He is a prisoner of conscience.

    Iranian filmmaker Keywan Karimi, from Iran’s Kurdish minority, began serving his prison sentence on 23 November. Although he had never received an official written summons, the Office for the Implementation of Sentences had repeatedly telephoned him since February 2016, ordering him to present himself to Tehran’s Evin Prison to begin serving his sentence. The authorities have also told him that they intend to implement his flogging sentence of 223 lashes.

  • UN to pursue further inquiry into death of Dag Hammarskjöld

    What caused the 1961 plane crash that killed former UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld? A Swedish-led UN inquiry the following year concluded that the plane, the Albertina, had crashed in northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) as a result of “pilot error”. But this failed to satisfy many who have long suspected foul play.

    There were claims that the Albertina, which was carrying Hammarskjöld and a 15-strong team seeking to negotiate a ceasefire in the breakaway African republic of Katanga, was riddled with bullets. Several witnesses said they saw as many as eight white men, armed and in combat fatigues, at the crash site.

  • Thanks To Months Of Doing Nothing, Senate Allows DOJ’s Rule 41 Changes To Become Law

    The FBI and others will be able to take advantage of the removal of jurisdictional limits to search computers anywhere in the world using a single warrant issued by a magistrate judge. It will also be granted the same power for use in the disruption of botnets — in essence, searches/seizures of devices owned by US citizens suspected of no wrongdoing.

  • Of 8 Tech Companies, Only Twitter Says It Would Refuse to Help Build Muslim Registry for Trump

    Every American corporation, from the largest conglomerate to the smallest firm, should ask itself right now: Will we do business with the Trump administration to further its most extreme, draconian goals? Or will we resist?

    This question is perhaps most important for the country’s tech companies, which are particularly valuable partners for a budding authoritarian. The Intercept contacted nine of the most prominent such firms, from Facebook to Booz Allen Hamilton, to ask if they would sell their services to help create a national Muslim registry, an idea recently resurfaced by Donald Trump’s transition team. Only Twitter said no.

    Shortly after the election, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty wrote a personal letter to President-elect Trump in which she offered her congratulations, and more importantly, the services of her company. The six different areas she identified as potential business opportunities between a Trump White House and IBM were all inoffensive and more or less mundane, but showed a disturbing willingness to sell technology to a man with open interest in the ways in which technology can be abused: Mosque surveillance, a “virtual wall” with Mexico, shutting down portions of the internet on command, and so forth. Trump’s anti-civil liberty agenda, half-baked and vague as it is, would largely be an engineering project, one that would almost certainly rely on some help from the private sector. It may be asking too much to demand that companies that have long contracted with the federal government stop doing so altogether; indeed, this would probably cause as much harm and disruption to good public projects as it would help stop the sinister ones.

  • In Stunning Reversal, Law Enforcement, Military, and Security Advisors Urge Homeland Security to Shift Away from Private Prisons

    In a surprise development, the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC), an expert panel of law enforcement, national security, military, and other experts who advise the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security voted on Thursday to recommend that the agency shift away from using private prisons to detain immigrants.

  • If Cops Don’t Turn on Their Body Cameras, Courts Should Instruct Juries to Think Twice about Their Testimony

    Since 2014, at least 14 people have been killed by police officers wearing body cameras that were either not turned on or not operational. Roughly two months ago, an officer in Charlotte failed to activate his body camera before fatally shooting Keith Lamont Scott. (On Wednesday, news broke that the officer who killed Scott will not face charges.) Days earlier, an officer in Washington, D.C., failed to turn on his body camera before fatally shooting Terrence Sterling. And this past July, an officer in Chicago failed to activate his body camera before fatally shooting Paul O’Neal in the back.

    These unrecorded killings threaten to undermine confidence in body cameras. If these cameras are only as good as the police officers and departments responsible for deploying them, then their contributions to police accountability will depend on the very people they are supposed to hold accountable.

    But it doesn’t have to be this way. As explained in “No Tape, No Testimony,” a new report by the ACLU of Massachusetts and the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, police officers and departments are not the only ones who can ensure that body cameras are used responsibly. Courts can do it, too.

    Courts can influence body camera usage through a tool that is unique to courts: jury instructions. Consistent with provisions the ACLU recommends that state legislators put into law, the new report proposes a model instruction that would discourage body camera mishaps by empowering juries to devalue or even disregard a police officer’s testimony if, in the jury’s view, the officer unjustifiably failed to record an interaction with a civilian. Courts should consider trying it, for at least three reasons.

  • Internet Archive Successfully Fends Off Secret FBI Order

  • Internet Archive Received National Security Letter with FBI Misinformation about Challenging Gag Order

    Potentially Thousands of Communication Providers Received Bad Instructions for Fighting Secrecy Provisions

    The Internet Archive published a formerly secret national security letter (NSL) today that includes misinformation about how to contest the accompanying gag order that demanded total secrecy about the request. As a result of the Archive’s challenge to the letter, the FBI has agreed to send clarifications about the law to potentially thousands of communications providers who have received NSLs in the last year and a half.

    The NSL issued to the Archive said the library had the right to “make an annual challenge to the nondisclosure requirement.” But in 2015, Congress updated the law to allow for more than one request a year, so that communications providers could speak out about their experience without unneeded delay. Represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Archive informed the FBI that it did not have the information the agency was seeking and pointed out the legal error. The FBI agreed to drop the gag order in this case and allow the publication of the NSL.

    “The free flow of information is at the heart of the Internet Archive’s work, but by using national security letters in conjunction with unconstitutional gag orders, the FBI is trying to keep us all in the dark,” said Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. “Here, it’s even worse: that secrecy helped conceal that the FBI was giving all NSL recipients bad information about their rights. So we especially wanted to make this NSL public to give libraries and other institutions more information and help them protect their users from any improper FBI requests.”

    The Archive received this NSL in August, more than a year after Congress changed the law to allow more gag order challenges. In its letter removing the gag order, the FBI acknowledged that it issued other NSLs that included the error, and stated that it will inform all recipients about the mistake. Given that the FBI has said that it issued about 13,000 NSLs last year, thousands of communications providers likely received the false information, and potentially delayed petitioning the court for the right to go public.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Dead, and That’s Good for Internet Freedom

    The controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is on its deathbed. After international outcry and intense grassroots organizing, US lawmakers from both parties rejected the 12-country deal, including every leading presidential candidate. The president-elect has said he’ll withdraw from the pact on day one.

  • Presidential Commission Sounds Warning Over Botnet Threat

    The next U.S. administration should take immediate steps to prevent and, when possible, eliminate computer attacks like one that recently crippled some of the key systems that run the internet, a presidential commission recommended on Friday.

  • A blow against net neutrality: AT&T’s DirecTV Now service could trigger a sponsored-data arms race

    AT&T unleashed this week one of the most ambitious TV streaming service yet, and one that has piqued the interest of millions of cord cutters who are fed up with satellite and cable service providers, high-priced programming bundles and cumbersome set-top boxes.

    For an introductory offer of $35 a month, DirecTV Now’s “Go Big” 100-channel package gives subscribers access to ESPN and Fox Sports, cable news broadcasters CNN and MSNBC, basic cable channels like TNT and Discovery and popular programs like “The Walking Dead,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Empire,” all delivered to the digital screens of your choice. The company is also offering three larger bundles for up to $70 a month with programming from Univision, NBA TV and the Travel Channel.

    But critics of how AT&T is marketing DirecTV Now argue that America’s second-largest telecommunications company has just upped the ante in an ongoing effort to keep the Internet a level playing field.

  • After Zero Rating Backlash, Facebook Returns With New, Somewhat Murky ‘Express WiFi’ Initiative

    You might recall that earlier this year there was a massive backlash against Facebook for its often clumsy attempts to try and dominate emerging developing nation ad markets through what many saw as bogus altruism. The entire fracas bubbled over in India, where regulators banned Facebook’s attempt to create a sort of zero-rated, net neutrality-violating walled garden of Facebook-curated content under the pretense of helping the nation’s farmers. Facebook didn’t help itself by trying to drum up fake support for its initiatives while labeling those worried about the plan as extremists.

    Under the original idea, low-income families got access to a limited crop of Facebook-approved content; sort of a glorified AOL for poor people. However, net neutrality advocates and critics like Mozilla were (justly) concerned with this giving Facebook too much power over content, so they consistently argued that if Facebook was so desperately interested in helping the poor — the company and its Internet.org initiative should focus on providing actual broadband connectivity.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Mandatory Piracy Filters May Violate EU Law, Scholars Warn

      A group of prominent legal scholars has warned that the EU Commission’s plans to modernize copyright law in Europe appear to be incompatible with EU law. One of the main problems is the mandatory piracy filter Internet services are required to use, which largely ignore existing case law and human rights.

    • Antigua Says It Will Certainly, Absolutely, Definitely Use WTO Permission To Ignore US Copyright And Set Up A Pirate Site, Maybe

      One of the longest-running, and most extraordinary, sagas on Techdirt concerns the island of Antigua. Over 13 years ago, the country filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization (WTO) over the US ban on online gambling, which Antigua said violated a trade agreement between the two countries. Long story short, the WTO not only agreed, but said that the Caribbean country could ignore US copyrights, and set up a WTO-authorized pirate site to obtain the $21 million in WTO sanctions that the US was refusing to pay as compensation for blocking Antigua’s online gambling sites. In 2013, Antigua was still saying it was definitely going to do this if it couldn’t come to some agreement with the US on the matter, and the US was still refusing to settle.

    • Third time lucky? Iceland’s Pirate party given chance to form government

      Iceland’s Pirate Party leader Birgitta Jonsdottir has been asked by the president to try to form a new government, local media reported on Friday, after the two largest parliamentary parties each failed to put together a coalition.

      Speaking to reporters after a meeting with President Gudni Johannesson, Jonsdottir said: “I am hopeful that we will find a way to work together.”

      The anti-establishment Pirate Party, which came third in an October election, will continue talks with four other parties represented in parliament, the Left-Greens, Social Democrats, Bright Future and the Reform Party.

      The Left-Greens suspended coalition negotiations last week. The Independence Party, which as the biggest party was given the first chance to form a governing coalition, said on Nov. 15 that it had failed to do so.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Is Linux the Right Choice for My Business?

  In these hard-economic times, cutting expense is among the keys to the success of a business. Licensing costs can be a huge drain on the wallet of any service. Of course, Microsoft Windows servers are still the standard in a lot of offices, however, there is an unsung hero out there simply waiting to be discovered by more business-owners. This article is obviously describing Linux. While it does have some appeal in both the general public and economic sectors, it is widely used for servers and still not a really popular operating system for workstations but among geeks. Why? You might ask. Microsoft has the marketplace cornered and remains the norm simply by being the standard. This is not to state that Microsoft does not produce quality software application; this post indicates absolutely nothing of the sort. Microsoft got where they are today by their sweat and devoted developers, in no way is this article lessening the quality of Microsoft or their line of products.

• Moving with SQL Server to Linux? Move from SQL Server to MySQL as well! [Ed: SQL Server DOES NOT (!) run on Linux]

  Over the recent years, there has been a large number of individuals as well as organizations who are ditching the Windows platform for Linux platform, and this number will continue to grow as more developments in Linux are experienced. Linux has for long been the leader in Web servers as most of the web servers run on Linux, and this could be one of the reasons why the high migration is being experienced.

• Does Linux community trust Microsoft?

  Does actually Linux community like Microsoft? Does actually Linux community trust Microsoft? I cannot answer the first question for sure, but I have a sure answer for the second question.

• Desktop

  • PINEBOOK Latest News: Affordable Linux Laptop at Only $89 Made by Raspberry Pi Rival, PINE

    PINE, the rival company of Raspberry Pi and maker of the $20 Pine A64, has just announced its two below $100-priced Linux laptops, known as PINEBOOK. The affordable Linux laptop is powered by Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-bit processor and comes with an 11.6″ or 14″ monitor.

  • Some thoughts about options for light Unix laptops

    I have an odd confession: sometimes I feel (irrationally) embarrassed that despite being a computer person, I don’t have a laptop. Everyone else seems to have one, yet here I am, clearly behind the times, clinging to a desktop-only setup. At times like this I naturally wind up considering the issue of what laptop I might get if I was going to get one, and after my recent exposure to a Chromebook I’ve been thinking about this once again.

    I’ll never be someone who uses a laptop by itself as my only computer, so I’m not interested in a giant laptop with a giant display; giant displays are one of the things that the desktop is for. Based on my experiences so far I think that a roughly 13″ laptop is at the sweet spot of a display that’s big enough without things being too big, and I would like something that’s nicely portable.

  • What is HiDPI and Why Does it Matter?

• Server

  • How We Knew It Was Time to Leave the Cloud

    In my last infrastructure update, I documented our challenges with storage as GitLab scales. We built a CephFS cluster to tackle both the capacity and performance issues of NFS and decided to replace PostgreSQL standard Vacuum with the pg_repack extension. Now, we’re feeling the pain of running a high performance distributed filesystem on the cloud.

  • Hype Driven Development

  • SysAdmins Arena in a nutshell

    Sysadmins can use the product to improve their skills or prepare for an interview by practicing some day to day job scenarios. There is an invitation list opened for the first testers of the product.

• Kernel Space

  • How fast is KVM? Host vs virtual machine performance!

  • Kernel maintenance, Brillo style

    Brillo, he said, is a software stack for the Internet of things based on the Android system. These deployments bring a number of challenges, starting with the need to support a different sort of hardware than Android normally runs on; target devices may have no display or input devices, but might well have “fun buses” to drive interesting peripherals. The mix of vendors interested in this area is different; handset vendors are present, but many more traditional embedded vendors can also be found there. Brillo is still in an early state of development.

• Applications

  • Parental Controls for Linux Unleashed

    For years, one of the overlooked areas for the Linux desktop was access to “effective” parental controls. Back in 2003, I remember the now defunct Linspire (then known as Lindows) offered a proprietary option called SurfSafe. Surprisingly, at least back then, the product worked very well in providing accurate content filtering capabilities; something that was not,in fact, available and easy-to-use at that time.

    Years later, an open-source alternative was released to the greater Linux community known as GNOME Nanny. Fantastic in terms of usage control, its web content web filter was laughably terrible. As expected, crowd-sourcing a filtering list isn’t a great solution. And like SurfSafe, the project is now defunct.

  • Proprietary

    • Reviewing Project Management Service `Wrike` And Seems Interesting

      I have been testing some services for our project and found this amazing service, thought why not share it with you guys, it might be useful for you. Project management is a term that in some respects appears common, yet in practice still seems to be limited to large companies. While this may be true, the foundations of project management are actually rather simple and can be adopted by anyone, in any industry. One of the major requirements you need to consider when selecting a good project management software is the ability to run and operate it on the go via your mobile devices. Other factors include the ability to access the software from any platform whether it be Linux, Mac, or Windows. This can be achieved when the project management software is web-based. Wrike is a software that does of all this.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • httpstat – A Curl Statistics Tool to Check Website Performance

    • How To Upgrade GNOME Calendar to Version 3.22 in Ubuntu

    • 5 Ways to Empty or Delete a Large File Content in Linux

    • Make CentOS 7 MATE & Xfce ultra fine with Numix

    • How to Install TeamViewer 12 on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu

    • Importing .ics File from KOrganizer to GNOME Calendar

    • How to Install and Use Ruby on Rails with PostgreSQL on CentOS 7

    • Uncommon but useful GCC command line options – part 2

    • Writing Arabic-Islamic Symbols in LibreOffice Writer (Unicode)

    • How To Enable Shell Script Debugging Mode in Linux

    • Redirect a Website URL from One Server to Different Server in Apache

    • Uncommon but useful GCC command line options

    • The Ninja build tool

    • Install Security Patches or Updates Automatically on CentOS and RHEL

    • How to Install Gitlab on Debian 8 (Jessie)

    • How to hide OpenVPN behind HTTPS/SSL

    • Raspberry Pi Barcode Scanner in Python

    • Redirect Website Requests Based on the Browser Used (Chrome, Firefox or IE)

    • Reasons to Learn Linux Commands for Multiple Linux Distributions

    • What does configure actually run

    • htop explained

    • Your Guide to a Practical Linux Desktop With i3WM

    • A Better ls Command

  • Wine or Emulation

    • World Wine News Issue 403

  • Games

    • OSVR on Steam, Unity drops legacy OpenGL, and more gaming news

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Snapping KDE Applications

      For 20 years KDE has been building free software for the world. As part of this endeavor, we created a collection of libraries to assist in high-quality C++ software development as well as building highly integrated graphic applications on any operating system. We call them the KDE Frameworks.

    • Marble Maps 1.0 has been released

      It’s finally done! I’m happy to tell you that Marble Maps version 1.0 has just landed in the Google Play Store (update: direct APK here if you are not using Google Play). We hope you like it as much as we do

      Many thanks to all contributors who made this possible. Thanks to a multitude of performance improvements all over the place, vector rendering has become very fast. And thanks to the ever-improving vector tile creation toolchain we are able to provide a lot more data than I anticipated some weeks ago. For the first version there are Germany and 200 cities world-wide in full detail, as well as most European countries and the USA in high detail (up to tile level 13 or 15). For the rest of the world we provide medium detail at least (up to tile level 9). The plan, of course, is to provide full vector data for the whole world in the near future.

    • Long time no write

      In KDE-land I’ve mostly been helping out porting and finishing up porting stuff to KDE frameworks. A lot of smaller stuff like krename and kregexpeditor, but also helping out finishing up the porting of e. g. okular, ktorrent and konsole. And of course also Filelight.

    • Fuzzing Qt for fun and profit

    • Kdenlive’s first bug squashing day

    • Plasma 5.8.4, Applications 16.08.3 and Frameworks 5.28.0 available in Chakra

      As you have probably noticed, this move took a while to reach stable due to the issues with our main server, which resulted in a downtime of 2 days for our website and all the related services. There was nothing we could do, since our hosting provider experienced a major subsystem malfunction. The website might be a bit unstable or slow in the following days until the issue is properly fixed. We can only apologize for any inconvenience.

    • Desktops DevRoom @ FOSDEM 2017: you are still on time to submit a talk

    • Qt World Summit 2016 Webinar Series – Christmas Sessions

    • Krita 3.1 Release Candidate

    • KDevelop: Seeking maintainer for Ruby language support

    • KDAB and Meiller – Tipper Truck App

    • Introducing new KCM for network configuration

    • WikiToLearn1.0 action plan is getting real

    • Mentoring for Google Code-in – WikiToLearn

    • Finding a valid build order for KDE repositories

      KDE has been lately been growing quite a bit in repositories, and it’s not always easy to tell what needs to be build before, do i build first kdepim-apps-libs or pimcommon?

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME Core Apps Hackfest 2016

      This November from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 was held in Berlin the GNOME Core Apps Hackfest.

      My focus during this hackfest was to start implementing a widget for the series view of the Videos application, following a mockup by Allan Day.

• Distributions

  • Reviews

    • Chapeau 24 Cancellara – Same same but different

      Fedora plus Moka icons plus some extra software, mainly coming from proprietary sources. I guess that’s the best way to describe Chapeau. But then, what separates one distro from another if not a collection of decorations, as software is essentially the same, apart from a very small number of standalone distributions trying to develop their own identity with their own desktop environments and app stack, re: elementary or Solus + Budgie? Except they struggle, too.

      Chapeau 24 is a nice effort to make Fedora friendlier, but then it does not achieve the needed result without pain. The biggest issues included a botched smartphone support. Samba woes and the horrible bootloader bug. Other than that, it behaved more or less the same way as the parent distro. Then again, why bother if you can pimp up Fedora without any loss of functionality?

      I do like Chapeau Cancellara, but I cannot ignore the fact Fedora does the same with fewer problems. All in all, it’s a welcome effort, but it needs more polish. It does not quite capture the heart the way Fuduntu did. And with some issues looming high above the distro, the grade can only be about 6/10. Most importantly, the bootloader setup must be flawless, and there’s not excuse for small app errors that we’ve seen. We know it can do more. Anyhow, if you’re not keen on any self-service round Fedora, this could be a good test bed for your games. A moderately worthy if somewhat risky and flawed experience.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Happily Announcing Mageia 5.1

      As we’re getting closer to the end of the year, Mageia has a present for you! We are very pleased to announce the release of Mageia 5.1!

      This release – like Mageia 4.1 was in its time – is a respin of the Mageia 5 installation and Live ISO images, based on the Mageia 5 repository and incorporating all updates to allow for an up to date installation without the need to install almost a year and a half worth of updates. It is therefore recommended for new installations and upgrades from Mageia 4.

      The new images are available from the downloads page, both directly and through torrents.

    • After a long wait, Mageia was released! Well, sort of…

  • Red Hat Family

    • Finance

      • Worth Watching: What Will Happen to Red Hat Inc Next? The Stock Just Declined A Lot

      • Vetr Inc. Lowers Red Hat Inc. (RHT) to Buy

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 25 Review: A Stable Release, But Slightly Slow to Boot (on rotational disks)

        If you have a rotational disk, then Fedora 25 will be a little slow to boot and there is nothing you or I can do to fix it. But if you have an SSD, then you shall have no issues here. Other than that, I’m quite pleased with this release actually. Sure the responsiveness sucked the first time on, but as mentioned, it can be fixed, permanently. And the stability is also excellent. While I’m not a huge fan of the GNOMEShell (I think it’s stupid!), the ‘Classic’ session is also available, nonetheless. If you fancy giving it a go, then get it from here, but first make sure to read the release notes.

      • Redshift functionality on Fedora 25 (GNOME + Wayland). Yes, it’s possible!

        For those who can’t live without screen colour shifting technology such as Redshift or f.lux, myself being one of them, using Wayland did pose the challenge of having these existing tools not working with the Xorg replacement. Thankfully, all is not lost and it is possible even right now. Thanks to a copr repo, it’s particularly easy on Fedora 25.

        One of the changes that comes with Wayland is there is currently no way for third-party apps to modify screen gamma curves. Therefore, no redshift apps, such as Redshift itself (which I recently covered here) will work while running under Wayland.

  • Debian Family

    • My Free Software Activities in November 2016

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • MirAL 0.5

          There’s a new MirAL release (0.5.0) available in ‘Zesty Zapus’ (Ubuntu 17.04) and the so-called “stable phone overlay” ppa for ‘Xenial Xerus’. MirAL is a project aimed at simplifying the development of Mir servers and particularly providing a stable ABI and sensible default behaviors.

        • Ubuntu 16.04 Unity 8 + Overlay PPA

        • Nemo 3.2.0 With Unity Patches And Without Cinnamon Dependencies Available In New PPA For Ubuntu 16.04 And 16.10

          Nemo 3.2.0 with Unity patches and without Cinnamon dependencies is available for Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10. To make it easy to go back to Nemo 2.8.0 for Ubuntu 16.04 users in case something doesn’t work properly (because there were quite a few under the hood changes in Nemo), I decided to upload the latest Nemo 3.2.0 to a new PPA.

        • List of PPA Repositories for Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Mofo Linux: The Raw Materials for Security

            The developers of Mofo Linux talk a good game. From the name’s origin in abusive street slang to its self-description on the home page as “Linux designed to defeat state censorship and surveillance,” Mofo presents itself as a champion of security and privacy. Nor is the claim unjustified. However, rather than putting security and privacy into the hands of ordinary users, Mofo simply presents the tools and leaves users to figure them out with a minimum of help. The result is a promising distribution that with only slightly more work, could be a leading one.

            Just possibly, though, this approach is a deliberate tactic, and not the carelessness it appears. Based on Ubuntu, the current release of Mofo offers nothing different in the way of productivity tools. It uses Unity for a desktop, and its applications are the standard GNOME ones. In fact, Mofo shows such little interest in such matters that it does not bother to change the title bar in the installer from Ubuntu.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Google’s ambitious smartwatch vision is failing to materialise

    In February this year, Google’s smartwatch boss painted me a rosy picture of the future of wearable technology.

    The wrist is, David Singleton said, “the ideal place for the power of Google to help people with their lives.”

  • Giving Thanks (along with a Shipping Update)

    Mycroft will soon be available as a pre-built Raspberry Pi 3 image for any hobbyist to use. The new backend we have been quietly building is emerging from beta, making the configuration and management of you devices simple. We are forming partnerships to get Mycroft onto laptops, desktops and other devices in the world. Mycroft will soon be speaking to you throughout your day.

  • Phones

    • Tizen

      • App: Ixigo Indian Rail Train PNR Status for Tizen Smart Phones

        Going on a train journey in India? Ixigo will check the PNR status, the train arrival and departure & how many of the particular tickets are left that you can purchase. You can also do a PNR status check to make sure that your seat is booked and confirmed.

    • Android

      • Sprint Pulls Back Android Leasing as Used Market Dips

        Sprint, the fourth-largest U.S. wireless carrier, stopped leasing certain Android phones to customers after finding that the devices weren’t holding their value on the used market.

      • Finally you can say ‘OK Google’ to command Android Auto in your car

      • What Nokia Android Phones Need to Get Right to Become a Success

      • First Click: Will the ultimate Android phone be a Nokia?

      • Android-powered Nokia smartphones coming early 2017

      • Galaxy Note 5’s Android 7.0 Nougat update may be closer than we think

      • Huawei has announced which of its phones will be updated to Nougat

      • Android 7.1.1 Nougat appears to be rolling out already, at least for the General Mobile 4G Android One phone

      • Android Wear: Will a 2017 Moto 360 Refresh the Platform?

      • First look: Android 7.0 Nougat on OnePlus 3 + 3T

      • Android 7.1.1 Nougat Update Said to Have Already Begun Rolling Out

      • Android 7.0 Nougat Samsung Galaxy Note 5 And Galaxy A Series 2016 Updates In Pipeline

      • Android phone maker Blu pledges to replace Chinese software that stole user data

      • Codemasters ports racing simulator F1 2016 from consoles to Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Google Rolls Out Continuous Fuzzing Service For Open Source Software

  Google has launched a new project for continuously testing open source software for security vulnerabilities.

  The company’s new OSS-Fuzz service is available in beta starting this week, but at least initially it will only be available for open source projects that have a very large user base or are critical to global IT infrastructure.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla Reports 2015 Revenue of $421.3M

      For its fiscal 2015 year, Mozilla reported revenue of $421.3 million, up from $329.6 million that it reported Mozilla’s revenue’s have grown significantly over the last decade. The first year that Mozilla ever publicly disclosed its financial status was for its 2005 fiscal year, when the open-source organization generated $52.9 million in revenue.

    • Mozilla is doing well financially (2015)

      Mozilla announced a major change in November 2014 in regards to the company’s main revenue stream.

      The organization had a contract with Google in 2014 and before that had Google pay Mozilla money for being the default search engine in the Firefox web browser.

      This deal was Mozilla’s main source of revenue, about 329 million US Dollars in 2014. The change saw Mozilla broker deals with search providers instead for certain regions of the world.

• Healthcare

  • Open source wearable Angel shuts down

    “Well, looks like the Angel Sensor folks have (finally) officially thrown in the towel,” he wrote. “Not really a surprise, as they had gone silent for nearly a year after delivering their crowdfunded product over two years late. They did release code for their open-source SDK, and there is a community of developers who have forked it on GitHub3 to continue development. Too bad they gave up, as the promise of a truly open source wearable with an array of useful sensors is lacking in the QS space.”

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • The Three Software Freedoms

    The government can help us by making software companies distribute the source code. They can say it’s “in the interest of national security”. And they can sort out the patent system (there are various problems with how the patent system handles software which are out of the scope of this article). So when you chat to your MP please mention this.

  • Leapfrog Honoring the GPL

  • A discussion on GPL compliance

    Among its many activities, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is one of the few organizations that does any work on enforcing the GPL when other compliance efforts have failed. A suggestion by SFC executive director Karen Sandler to have a Q&A session about compliance and enforcement at this year’s Kernel Summit led to a prolonged discussion, but not to such a session being added to the agenda. However, the co-located Linux Plumbers Conference set up a “birds of a feather” (BoF) session so that interested developers could hear more about the SFC’s efforts, get their questions answered, and provide feedback. Sandler and SFC director of strategic initiatives Brett Smith hosted the discussion, which was quite well-attended—roughly 70 people were there at a 6pm BoF on November 3.

  • Join us as a member to give back for the free software you use

    At the FSF, we run our own infrastructure using only free software, which makes us stand out from nearly every other nonprofit organization. Virtually all others rely on outside providers and use a significant amount of nonfree software. With your support, we set an example proving that a nonprofit can follow best practices while running only free software.

  • The Free Software Foundation is in need of members

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • HiFive1 Is an Open-Source, Arduino-Compatible RISC-V Dev Kit

      Bay Area startup SiFive has announced the Freedom Everywhere 310 (FE310) system-on-chip — the industry’s first commercially-available SoC based on the free, open-source RISC-V architecture, along with the corresponding low-cost, Arduino-compatible HiFive1 development kit.

    • Samsung Defection From ARM to RISC-V.

      It was always thought that, when ARM relinquished its independence, its customers would look around for other alternatives.

      The nice thing about RISC-V is that it’s independent, open source and royalty-free.

      And RISC-V is what Samsung is reported to be using for an IoT CPU in preference to ARM.

    • Neutralize ME firmware on SandyBridge and IvyBridge platforms

      First introduced in Intel’s 965 Express Chipset Family, the Intel Management Engine (ME) is a separate computing environment physically located in the (G)MCH chip (for Core 2 family CPUs which is separate from the northbridge), or PCH chip replacing ICH(for Core i3/i5/i7 which is integrated with northbridge).

Leftovers

• Science

  • Opinion: An Ethical Code for Conferences

    This fundamental form of scientific communication is threatened by modern recording technology and researchers who refuse to adhere to an age-old ethical code.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Non-Corporate Entities Join Forces Against Adoption Of Plant Breeders’ Rights Regulations In Africa

    The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, civil society, and farmers’ representatives have raised serious concerns on the upcoming adoption of draft regulations of a protocol protecting breeders’ rights in Africa. Civil society groups and farmers’ representatives have been blocked from participating in the meeting expected to adopt the regulations, according to them. The Special Rapporteur is calling for a halt to the process, and for starting again with a more transparent, inclusive, and evidence-based process.

• Security

  • Security updates for Friday

  • Understanding SELinux Roles

    I received a container bugzilla today for someone who was attempting to assign a container process to the object_r role. Hopefully this blog will help explain how roles work with SELinux.

    When we describe SELinux we often concentrate on Type Enforcement, which is the most important and most used feature of SELinux. This is what describe in the SELinux Coloring book as Dogs and Cats. We also describe MLS/MCS Separation in the coloring book.

  • The Internet Society is unhappy about security – pretty much all of it

    The Internet Society (ISOC) is the latest organisation saying, in essence, “security is rubbish – fix it”.

    Years of big data breaches are having their impact, it seems: in its report released last week, it quotes a 54-country, 24,000-respondent survey reporting a long-term end user trend to become more fearful in using the Internet (by Ipsos on behalf of the Centre for International Governance Innovation).

    Report author, economist and ISOC fellow Michael Kende, reckons companies aren’t doing enough to control breaches.

    “According to the Online Trust Alliance, 93 per cent of breaches are preventable” he said, but “steps to mitigate the cost of breaches that do occur are not taken – attackers cannot steal data that is not stored, and cannot use data that is encrypted.”

  • UK’s new Snoopers’ Charter just passed an encryption backdoor law by the backdoor

    Among the many unpleasant things in the Investigatory Powers Act that was officially signed into law this week, one that has not gained as much attention is the apparent ability for the UK government to undermine encryption and demand surveillance backdoors.

    As the bill was passing through Parliament, several organizations noted their alarm at section 217 which obliged ISPs, telcos and other communications providers to let the government know in advance of any new products and services being deployed and allow the government to demand “technical” changes to software and systems.

  • EU budget creates bug bounty programme to improve cybersecurity

    Today the European Parliament approved the EU Budget for 2017. The budget sets aside 1.9 million euros in order to improve the EU’s IT infrastructure by extending the free software audit programme (FOSSA) that MEPs Max Anderson and Julia Reda initiated two years ago, and by including a bug bounty approach in the programme that was proposed by MEP Marietje Schaake.

  • Qubes OS Begins Commercialization and Community Funding Efforts

    Since the initial launch of Qubes OS back in April 2010, work on Qubes has been funded in several different ways. Originally a pet project, it was first supported by Invisible Things Lab (ITL) out of the money we earned on various R&D and consulting contracts. Later, we decided that we should try to commercialize it. Our idea, back then, was to commercialize Windows AppVM support. Unlike the rest of Qubes OS, which is licensed under GPLv2, we thought we would offer Windows AppVM support under a proprietary license. Even though we made a lot of progress on both the business and technical sides of this endeavor, it ultimately failed.

    Luckily, we got a helping hand from the Open Technology Fund (OTF), which has supported the project for the past two years. While not a large sum of money in itself, it did help us a lot, especially with all the work necessary to improve Qubes’ user interface, documentation, and outreach to new communities. Indeed, the (estimated) Qubes user base has grown significantly over that period. Thank you, OTF!

  • Linux Security Basics: What System Administrators Need to Know

    Every new Linux system administrator needs to learn a few core concepts before delving into the operating system and its applications. This short guide gives a summary of some of the essential security measures that every root user must know. All advice given follows the best security practices that are mandated by the community and the industry.

  • BitUnmap: Attacking Android Ashmem

    The law of leaky abstractions states that “all non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky”. In this blog post we’ll explore the ashmem shared memory interface provided by Android and see how false assumptions about its internal operation can result in security vulnerabilities affecting core system code.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Hackers destroy computers at Saudi aviation agency

    Hackers destroyed computers at six important Saudi organizations two weeks ago, marking a reappearance of the most damaging cyberweapon the world has ever seen.

    Last time, it was used to destroy 35,000 computers at the oil company Saudi Aramco. U.S. intelligence quietly blamed Iran for that attack.

    This time around, the cyberweapon has attacked at least one Saudi government agency, as well as organizations in the energy, manufacturing and transportation sectors, according to two researchers with direct knowledge of the investigations into the attack.

  • Teacher at Tower Hamlets school ‘condoned Charlie Hebdo terror attack in front of pupils’

    A teacher faces a classroom ban after he allegedly “condoned” the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in front of pupils at a Tower Hamlets school.

    Hamza Jalal Tariq, 28, effectively said during a lesson that the victims murdered by Islamist gunmen “should be killed for insulting the prophet”, a professional conduct panel ruled.

    The panel heard Tariq made the comment in response to a student just days after 12 people were murdered in the French satirical newspaper’s Paris office in January last year.

    Tariq was a teacher at Tower Hamlets PRU, which has four sites across the east London borough, since 2013, but resigned after the accusations surfaced.

  • Don’t Say I’m Violent, Or I’ll Kill You

    Yesterday, I wrote about the thwarted mass murder at Ohio State University. To the Best Vice-President We Never Had, Tim Kaine, it was “a senseless act of gun violence”. To those under attack, it was in fact an act of automobile violence and machete violence. And to the perpetrator, it was not “senseless” but made perfect sense.

  • Donald Trump and the Taiwanese President Just Had an Unprecedented Phone Call

    Donald Trump has spoken with the president of Taiwan, a self-governing island the U.S. broke diplomatic ties with in 1979.

    It is highly unusual, perhaps unprecedented, for a U.S. president or president-elect to speak directly with a Taiwanese leader. The U.S. cut formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan when it shifted diplomatic recognition of China to the communist government on the mainland, although Washington still has close unofficial ties with Taipei.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • A Catastrophic Amount of Carbon Could Leak From the Soil By 2050

    The term “snowball effect” is an unfortunate way to describe climate change, but a new study is predicting just that.

    Climate scientists warn that by 2050, an astonishing 55 trillion kilograms of carbon could be released into the atmosphere from the soil. To put things in perspective, that’s the emissions equivalent of adding another United States to the planet. And, like a rapidly tumbling snowball, more emissions mean more warming, and more warming means… well, you get it.

    Of course, this nightmare scenario hinges on our inability to curb carbon emissions—a fate that’s become significantly more realistic with Donald Trump, a vocal climate change denier and coal aficionado, about to enter the White House. Our failure to meet the goals mandated by the Paris Agreement would result in “about 17 percent more than the projected emissions due to human-related activities during that period,” Tom Crowther, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, said in a statement.

  • Climate change will stir ‘unimaginable’ refugee crisis, says military

    Climate change is set to cause a refugee crisis of “unimaginable scale”, according to senior military figures, who warn that global warming is the greatest security threat of the 21st century and that mass migration will become the “new normal”.

    The generals said the impacts of climate change were already factors in the conflicts driving a current crisis of migration into Europe, having been linked to the Arab Spring, the war in Syria and the Boko Haram terrorist insurgency.

• Finance

  • Corporate Welfare Will Bring Back Jobs vs. Jobs Will Never Come Back

    The story went on to say that Trump and Vice President–elect Mike Pence had promised Carrier they would be “friendlier to businesses by easing regulations and overhauling the corporate tax code.” Probably more to the point from Carrier’s point of view, Schwartz noted that the state of Indiana, where Pence is still governor, “also plans to give economic incentives to Carrier as part of the deal to stay.”

    So Trump’s job program involves cutting business taxes and regulations, plus a corporate-welfare package whose cost will presumably be declared after media attention wanders. This makes Trump “a different kind of Republican” how, exactly?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Yer Fake News Garbage: Trevor Noah Knows Nothing About the Secret Service

    About 1:30 into the video above, Daily Show host Trevor Noah, as echoed by the Huffington Post, committed fake news.

    Well, to be fair, it was more like ignorance than fake, because Noah’s shock and accusations that Trump is going to charge the Secret Service $1.5 million in rent to help protect him at Trump Tower was only a couple of Googles away from being shown to be wrong.

    To begin, Noah appears somewhat surprised that a president-elect is protected, and that protection costs a lot of money. Noah seems somewhat offended that that protection will take place at Trump Tower.

    Surprise! Any president-elect has to live somewhere. It makes sense he’d stay living where he always does. There is no junior White House. Also, presidents do not give up their homes when they move into the White House. All have kept their own homes and the Secret Service has always protected them there. Reagan and Bush had their ranches, remember. Nothing new here.

  • I Don’t Like Trump or Racism

  • Why Are Media Outlets Still Citing Discredited ‘Fake News’ Blacklist?

    The Washington Post (11/24/16) last week published a front-page blockbuster that quickly went viral: Russia-promoted “fake news” had infiltrated the newsfeeds of 213 million Americans during the election, muddying the waters in a disinformation scheme to benefit Donald Trump. Craig Timberg’s story was based on a “report” from an anonymous group (or simply a person, it’s unclear) calling itself PropOrNot that blacklisted over 200 websites as agents or assets of the Russian state.

    The obvious implication was that an elaborate Russian psyop had fooled the public into voting for Trump based on a torrent of misleading and false information posing as news. Everyone from Bloomberg’s Sahil Kupar to CNN’s to Robert Reich to Anne Navarro to MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid tweeted out the story in breathless tones. Center for American Progress and Clinton advocate Neera Tanden even did her best Ron Paul YouTube commenter impression, exclaiming, “Wake up people.”

    But the story didn’t stand up to the most basic scrutiny. Follow-up reporting cast major doubt on the Washington Post’s core claims and underlying logic, the two primary complaints being 1) the “research group” responsible for the meat of the story, PropOrNot, is an anonymous group of partisans (if more than one person is involved) who tweet like high schoolers, and 2) the list of supposed Russian media assets, because its criteria for Russian “fake news” encompasses “useful idiots,” includes entirely well-within-the-mainstream progressive and libertarian websites such as Truth-Out, Consortium News, TruthDig and Antiwar.com (several of whom are now considering lawsuits against PropOrNot for libel).

  • If We Care About the Constitution, Trump Has to Sell His Empire

    Donald Trump is about to become president and immediately begin violating the Constitution. The Constitution explicitly prohibits the president from taking payments and gifts from foreign governments. (Can we stop using the term “emolument“? No one has used it for a hundred years. We want to be clear on what the Constitution means.)

    Donald Trump is right now and will continue to be taking payments and gifts from foreign governments in the form of benefits to his properties, unless he dumps the stuff. This is about as clear a violation of the constitutional provision imaginable, so why on Earth do we have Andrew Ross Sorkin (New York Times, 11/28/16) approvingly accepting Donald Trump’s nonsense claim in his letter to Mr. Trump?

  • Hillary Clinton’s “Corrupt Establishment” Is Now Advising Donald Trump

    “The establishment,” Donald Trump famously said during his closing argument for the presidency, “has trillions of dollars at stake in this election.”

    He described “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

    He asked the country to be “brave enough to vote out this corrupt establishment.”

    Now, less than four weeks after riding that line to victory, he formally invited the establishment into his administration.

    On Friday, Trump announced the creation of a “Strategic and Policy Forum” that will serve to advise him on domestic economic matters. The list of advisers is a who’s-who of corporate elites.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Commission responds to Ombudsman investigation on EU Internet Forum

    In April 2016, the European Ombudsman launched an investigation into the European Commission’s failure to disclose information of the “EU Internet Forum”. The EU Internet Forum brings together US internet companies (Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google), government officials, and law enforcement agencies to discuss how to reduce the accessibility of undefined “terrorist material” (as defined by 28 different national laws that are not even properly implemented in some countries) and badly defined “hate speech” online.

  • Perils of Censorship in the Digital Age

    The ripple effects of the Donald Trump election victory in America continue to wash over many different shorelines of public opinion, like so many mini-tsunamis hitting the Pacific rim over the last few last weeks. The seismic changes have indeed been global, and not least in Europe.

    First up, the Eurocrats have been getting in a bit of a flap about the future of NATO, as I recently wrote. In the past I have also written about the perceived “insider threat” – in other words, whistleblowers – that has been worrying governments and intelligence agencies across the Western world.

    Currently the Twittersphere is lighting up around the issue of “fake news“, with Western mainstream media (news purveyors of the utmost unsullied probity, naturally) blaming Trump’s unexpected victory variously on the US alt-media shock jocks, fake news trolls and bots, and sovereign-state media outlets such as the Russian RT and Sputnik.

    In the wake of US Democrat claims that Russia was interfering in the election process (not a practice that the USA has ever engaged in in any other country around the world whatsoever), we now have the US Green Party presidential candidate apparently spontaneously calling for recounts in three key swing-states in the USA.

  • Self-Censorship: Free Society vs. Fear Society

    In the summer of 2005, the Danish artist Kåre Bluitgen, when he met a journalist from the Ritzaus Bureau news agency, said he was unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his book on Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Three illustrators he contacted, Bluitgen said, were too scared. A few months later, Bluitgen reported that he had found someone willing to illustrate his book, but only on the condition of anonymity.

    Like most Danish newspapers, Jyllands-Posten decided to publish an article about Bluitgen’s case. To test the state of freedom of expression, Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten’s cultural editor at the time, called twelve cartoonists, and offered them $160 each to draw a caricature of Mohammed. What then happened is a well-known, chilling story.

  • Three ways Facebook could reduce fake news without resorting to censorship

    The public gets a lot of its news and information from Facebook. Some of it is fake. That presents a problem for the site’s users, and for the company itself.

    Facebook cofounder and chairman Mark Zuckerberg said the company will find ways to address the problem, though he didn’t acknowledge its severity. And without apparent irony, he made this announcement in a Facebook post surrounded – at least for some viewers – by fake news items.

  • Cameroonian Government Calls Social Media A ‘New Form Of Terrorism’

    But it didn’t stop there. As the Global Voices post notes, when government officials finally admitted that there had been an accident, social media continued to challenge the government version, which tried to play down the number of dead, and to lay the blame on allegedly-defective Chinese-made carriages.

  • China is censoring people’s chats without them even knowing about it

    China’s WeChat originated as a WhatsApp clone, but later evolved into the single-most important tool for connecting people in China. Yet it’s never been clear exactly how China’s internet censors have attempted to control information that spreads in the app. That’s partly because you likely wouldn’t know if you got censored in the first place.

  • Lawyer sues 20-year-old student who gave a bad Yelp review, loses badly

    When 20-year-old Lan Cai was in a car crash this summer, it was a bad situation. Driving home at 1:30am from a waitressing shift, Cai was plowed into by a drunk driver and broke two bones in her lower back. Unsure about how to navigate her car insurance and prove damages, she reached out for legal help.

    The help she got, Cai said, was less than satisfactory. Lawyers from the Tuan A. Khuu law firm ignored her contacts, and at one point they came into her bedroom while Cai was sleeping in her underwear. “Seriously, it’s super unprofessional!” she wrote on Facebook. (The firm maintains it was invited in by Cai’s mother.) She also took to Yelp to warn others about her bad experience.

    The posts led to a threatening e-mail from Tuan Khuu attorney Keith Nguyen. “If you do not remove the post from Facebook and any other social media sites, my office will have no choice but to file suit,” he told her, according to a report in the Houston Press on the saga.

  • China’s WeChat is censoring group chats without users’ knowledge

  • WeChat censorship offers a blueprint for Facebook but here’s why it should not enter China

  • Study: Chinese App WeChat Censors Chinese Users More

  • China’s WeChat is censoring group chats without users’ knowledge

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • Facebook Knows What You’re Streaming

    The Most Interesting Man in the World is said to have invented skinny-dipping and parallel-parked a train, but he’s had trouble holding people’s attention on Facebook. A decade ago, TV commercials listing the Connery-esque mondain’s fictional achievements, backed by a jingle heavy on Spanish guitar, helped turn Dos Equis from a fringe beer into a best-seller.

    On Facebook, though, you’d have to click for the sound, so many people would scroll past the ad and didn’t catch any of the Most Interesting Man’s feats, or hear the Spanish guitar, or even see a bottle of beer. “The ad may work better than most, but the consumer still has the right to swipe past it,” says Ron Amram, manager of global media for Dos Equis owner Heineken.

  • US Judges Can Now Sign Global Hacking Warrants

    On Thursday, changes to the rules around US search warrants came into effect, meaning that magistrate judges can now authorize the hacking of computers outside of their own district.

    Legal experts have described the move as the broadest expansion of extraterritorial surveillance power since the FBI’s inception, an agency that has already embarked on international hacking operations. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, has defended the changes, arguing they are crucial for policing crime in an age of anonymization technology such as Tor.

  • The Investigatory Powers Bill and Online Privacy

    We decided to do a deeper analysis of this law, since it potentially impacts a large number of ProtonMail users. According to our 2016 Encrypted Email User Survey, the UK accounts for the third largest group of ProtonMail users after the US and Russia. It came as a surprise to us that the law passed with such little fanfare, so we feel it is necessary to draw attention to what is quite possibly the worst surveillance law to have been passed so far in a Western democracy.

  • Last-ditch effort to prevent changes to law enforcement hacking rule fails

    A last-ditch effort in the Senate to prevent changes to a rule that will ease the process for law enforcement to use hacking in investigations failed Wednesday morning, allowing the controversial updates to Rule 41 to take effect at midnight.

    Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Chris Coons (D-Del) took to the floor and unsuccessfully asked for unanimous consent to either pass or formally vote on three bills to delay or prevent updates to the process used by law enforcement to get a warrant to hack suspects’ computers.

    “We simply can’t give unlimited power for unlimited hacking,” Daines argued.

    The updates to Rule 41 address two issues raised by modern cyber investigations. Currently, when suspects use technical means to disguise their location of their computers, it is impossible for law enforcement to determine in which jurisdiction officers must apply for a warrant. The updates would allow any judge to issue a warrant to hack a computer of a suspect hiding its location.

  • The NSA and Skilz: Turning spying on you into a video game

    What could possibly be creepier than a government organization (such as the NSA) having nearly unlimited access to your private, personal information (including access to your webcam)?

    Turns out, the answer is: when it gets turned into a video game. And it appears, they have done this.

  • ‘Germany NSA spy scandal will give boost to nationalist organizations’

  • WikiLeaks Releases More Than 2,000 Files Revealing The Cooperation Of Germany Spy Agency And The NSA

  • Wikileaks bombshell could DESTROY Merkel’s plans for EU domination, Julian Assange warns

  • German Parliament chief to OK probe of WikiLeaks documents

  • Angela Merkel, Last Pillar of Liberal Democracy in Europe, Is Wikileaks’s Latest Target

  • ‘Fear of testimony’: Ruling parties try to block Snowden’s questioning on German soil – media

  • Merkel’s government accused of ‘abusing power’ to stop Edward Snowden trip to Germany

  • ‘Scared’ Berlin Slammed for Appeal Against Court Verdict on Snowden Questioning

  • Berlin ‘abusing power’ to stop Snowden coming to Germany

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Trump national security pick once wrote Chelsea Manning should be tried for treason, executed if guilty

    KT McFarland, Donald Trump’s pick to be his deputy national security adviser, once wrote that former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning should be tried for treason and executed if found guilty.

    Manning was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison for handing over a trove of classified documents to Wikileaks. McFarland, a national security analyst and host of an online Fox News show for years, made the comments in a weekly column on the Fox News’ website.

  • NYT Protects Its Pundit Who Dismissed Trans Rights as ‘Boutique Issue’

    If Boylan didn’t catch the name of the commentator she saw, it was not hard to find; if I put “boutique issues November 9 MSNBC” into Google, the first thing that comes up is a piece on Breitbart (11/9/16) approvingly recounting the conversation.

    It seems more likely that the omission of Bruni’s name—a familiar one, of course, to regular readers of the Times op-ed page—was a deliberate choice. Note that Maher got different treatment—which seems to suggest a different standard for commentators who work for HBO vs. those who write for the New York Times.

  • Twitter Only Tech Firm of Nine to Say No to Helping Build Muslim Registry

    Out of nine technology companies, from Facebook to Booz Allen Hamilton, only Twitter confirmed it would refuse to help the Trump administration build a “Muslim registry,” The Intercept reported on Friday.

    The outlet contacted—or attempted to contact—the companies over the course of two weeks, asking if they would contract out their services to help create the hypothetical database, which President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser Kris Kobach has said would track immigrants entering the U.S from Muslim nations.

  • ACLU Suggests Jury Instructions Might Be A Fix For ‘Missing’ Police Body Camera Recordings

    We’ve written plenty of posts about police body cameras — how useful they can be and how useless they often are. What should result in additional law enforcement accountability has been turned into a mostly-optional documentation system. The new tech and its accompanying guidelines have done very little to increase accountability.

    Body cameras are pretty much mainstream at this point, but when excessive force and/or misconduct are alleged, footage captured by police is often nonexistent. Officers disable recording equipment, delete footage, or simply claim the camera “malfunctioned.” Some repeatedly “forget” to activate their cameras ahead of controversial arrests and interactions.

    But what can be done about it? So far, law enforcement agencies have done little but promise to create more policies and guidelines — ones that can continue to be ignored by officers who’d rather not create a permanent record of their actions. There’s been some discipline, but what little of it there is hasn’t been very severe. And stories of repeated tampering with recording devices in some agencies suggests what is in place isn’t much of a deterrent.

  • FBI Gains New Hacking Powers While GOP Congress Sits on Sidelines

    The FBI is now allowed to hack into computers anywhere in the world using only a single warrant, according to a new rule that was quietly implemented on Thursday.

    Prior to the new policy taking effect, federal computer investigators could only hack into a computer within the same district where they obtained a warrant from a judge. “Rule 41,” as it is known, changes those procedures, allowing feds to search potentially any computer, regardless of where the warrant was issued.

    Devices that investigators believe are part of a botnet or that are masking their location would be vulnerable to the new single-warrant intrusions.

    Authorities say the change is necessary for them to effectively investigate cyber-crimes, particularly ones involving botnets–devices that leverage multiple computers to carry out an attack. A side-effect of the rule, however, could lead to the hacking of innocent individuals whose computers were infected by malware making them unknowingly a part the attack.

  • Jakarta protests: Muslims turn out in force against Christian governor Ahok

    A crowd of at least 200,000 Muslim protesters has descended on Jakarta to demand the Christian governor of the Indonesian capital be arrested for insulting Islam.

    There was heavy security at the rally on Friday with authorities wary of the kind of violence that marred a similar demonstration in November.

    People headed towards a huge park in downtown Jakarta to protest against Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known by his nickname Ahok, who has become the target of widespread anger in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

  • Saudi Woman Without Hijab Attacked: Execution Called For By Conservative Muslim Twitter Users

    A number of Saudi social media users reacted with anger when a woman posted Monday a picture showing her in Riyadh without the traditional body covering known as the abaya and headscarf known as the hijab.

    A 21-year-old student from the city of Dammam who called herself Sara Ahmed for fear that her real name could put her in danger shared the tweet of a woman named Malak Al Shehri photographed wearing a dark blue coat, bright multicolored skirt and boots. Next to the picture, she included screenshots of three tweets by accounts calling for justice and even violence against Shehri. All three tweets included an Arabic hashtag that translates to “We demand the imprisonment of the rebel Angel Al Shehri.” The name Malak translates to “Angel” in Arabic.

    “Kill her and throw her corpse to the dogs,” @ab_alshdadi wrote, while @ilQil tweeted “we want blood.” Many others insulted Shehri’s morals.

  • When a Saudi woman daring not to wear a hijab leads to calls for her beheading, maybe it’s time the UK paid attention

    Today it was reported that a Saudi women who posted a picture of herself on social media in public without wearing a hijab faced outrage on social media, including calls for her execution. One man memorably declared: “Kill her and throw her corpse to the dogs.”

    To the surprise of the some, Saudi Arabia – which has been bombing Yemen for 18 months, including one incident where the country’s fighters bombed a funeral, and which has arguably the worst record on women’s rights in the world – was recently re-elected to the Human Rights Council, the United Nations’ premier human rights body. There was, predictably, an outcry.

    Governing women’s clothing, whether on the beaches of Cannes or the streets of Riyadh, is a violation we should all stand against. And clearly people in the Islamic world believe this as ardently as atheists in the West. This year, men in Iran wore headscarves in solidarity with their wives who are forced cover their hair in public places. The campaign against the enforced hijab in Iran has seen women defying morality police in public and even shaving their hair. If men in Saudi Arabia campaigned in similar numbers and joined the fight, perhaps we’d see a change in the Middle East’s political landscape.

  • Jury deadlocked in trial of cop filmed killing fleeing suspect

    Defense attorneys for Michael Slager, a 35-year-old North Charleston officer, called for a mistrial in the murder case, while the judge has ordered the 12-member panel to continue deliberating. All the while, a single juror wrote a note to the presiding judge that he or she could not, “in good conscience, approve a guilty verdict.”

    “You have a duty to make every reasonable effort to reach a unanimous verdict,” Judge Clifton Newman told panelists, who began hearing the case a month ago. The jury began deliberating Wednesday.

    North Charleston police had officially defended Officer Slager until the footage surfaced. At the moment, the video doesn’t appear to be swaying all 12 jurors that the officer is guilty of murder or voluntary manslaughter.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • FCC doesn’t like AT&T, Verizon ‘zero rating’ their own video apps

    Specifically, the regulators said “zero rating” can hurt competition and consumers. In the letter obtained by the Associated Press, regulators make the case that other services could pay Verizon and AT&T to not eat into customers’ cell data. This could be bad for competing video services who aren’t in favor with the carriers, the FCC argues.

    AT&T launched DirecTV Now earlier this week. AT&T Mobility customers can stream video data over LTE without impacting their data allowance. Verizon offers something similar with its go90 service.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • Who Gets To Trademark Iceland?

      When you cover enough trademark disputes, you come to expect a fairly typical pattern to them. Entity X bullies entity Y over a vaguely similar use of a mark that often times is overly broad or generic, and then there is either a capitulation to the bullying, a settlement, or the rare instance of a trial that results in an actual ruling. The outcomes aren’t typically favorable for those of us that think trademark law has been pushed beyond its original intent, but the pattern persists.

      But every once in a while, you find a zebra amidst the thundering hooves of horses. Such is the case with a very strange dispute currently going on between Iceland Foods, a foodstuffs retailer, and Iceland, the island nation between Greenland and the rest of Europe. Due to the retailer’s aggressive protection of its trademark, which consists of a generic term preceeded by the name of a country, Iceland has petitioned to revoke the trademark Iceland Foods has on its name for all of Europe.

  • Copyrights

    • Court Overturns ‘Pirate’ Site Blockade Based on EU Ruling

      A site that was outlawed following mass court action against more than 150 domains has been cleared on appeal. Kisstube embeds movies, some of them infringing, hosted on other platforms such as YouTube. However, the Rome Court of Appeal found that according to an EU ruling, merely embedding pirated content is not illegal.

      Early November, police in Italy targeted more than 150 sites involved in the unauthorized streaming of movies and sports.

      The Special Units of the Guardia di Finanza obtained a mass injunction from a judge in Rome, heralding the largest ever blocking operation in the country.

    • The proposed new VAT rules on e-publications: do they have any implications for copyright and digital exhaustion?

      Yesterday – as part of its Digital Single Market Strategy – the EU Commission unveiled proposals for new tax rules with the objective of supporting e-commerce and online businesses in the EU.

      Among the measures proposed, there is one that may be of interest also from a copyright perspective.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Christmas Gift Ideas For Linux Fans

    Crikey, folks: it’s December, and that means Christmas is shortly to be thrust upon us, whether we’re ready or not!

    It can be tricky to come up with gift ideas for Linux users in your life. And since you’ve probably got more than enough turkey on your plate this holiday season — ho, ho, ho — we thought we’d be swell and save you from getting snowed under trying to find something to buy.

    Or to put it in a less breathy sentence: we’ve got some top Linux gift ideas to help make festive shopping a little easier this season.

  • Apple’s 2016 MacBook Pro & Linux Don’t Mix

    Last month I shared that Linux tests of the 2016 MacBook Pro would be coming and now I’ve finally managed to complete a few, but I highly encourage you not to get the new MacBook Pro if you plan on using anything other than macOS as the experience is a wreck. This is one laptop I don’t mind seeing returned!

• Server

  • Federating Your Kubernetes Clusters — The New Road to Hybrid Clouds

  • Oracle Might Be Canning Solaris

    Oracle might be pulling the plug on the Solaris operating system, at least according to some new rumors.

  • Containers and Virtual Machines: A Dynamic Duo

    It’s easy to think of containers and VMs as a binary choice — deciding whether to use a VM or a container (not both) for your use case. In his keynote at LinuxCon Europe, Brandon Philips, CTO at CoreOS, talked about a case study for using VMs and containers together to take advantage of the strengths of both.

  • Keynote: VM Security and Container Workflows, A Case Study by Brandon Philips, CTO, CoreOS

  • The Year in NV Trends for 2016

    Is it ever too early for a Year in Review column? Didn’t think so. For this attempt, let’s take a look at the exciting trends in network virtualization (NV), as a mixture of open and proprietary technologies battle to be the cloud networking foundation of the future.

    On the competitive front, we took a detailed look at the market in our “Future of Network Virtualization and SDN Controllers Report,” released in September. The market continues to grow, with a dynamic mixture of NV incumbents and startups gaining market traction.

  • Docker Deals with Canonical, Debuts Public Beta on AWS

  • Canonical partners with Docker for cloud container management

  • Canonical and Docker Partner to Distribute Docker Releases as Snaps on Ubuntu

  • Docker, Canonical Team on Enterprise Support

    Docker and Canonical on Wednesday announced a commercial agreement to integrate support for Docker Engine. The partnership gives Canonical customers a single path for support of the Ubuntu operating system and CS Docker Engine in enterprise Docker operations. It provides a streamlined operations and support experience for joint customers by splitting the service obligations in four ways. First, Docker will publish and update stable snap installation packages on Ubuntu, which will enable direct access to the Docker build for all Ubuntu users.

  • Linux Journal December 2016

  • Mirantis Offers Vendor-Agnostic Kubernetes, Docker Certification

    Mirantis, focused on the OpenStack cloud computing platform and ecosystem, has expanded its OpenStack training efforts in big ways over the past couple of years. But cloud deployments are increasingly becoming integrated with container technologies, and now Mirantis is expanding its training scope in recognition of that fact.

• Kernel Space

  • 10 Great Moments from Linux Foundation 2016 Events

  • 10 Great Moments from Linux Foundation 2016 Events

  • Linux Kernel 4.4.36 LTS Introduces Minor PA-RISC Changes, Wireless Improvements

    After announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.8.12, renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman informed us about the availability of the thirty-sixth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.

    The Linux 4.4 LTS branch is currently used in various long-term supported operating systems, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Linux Mint 18 “Sarah,” as well as the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” release, and in rock-solid and widely-used server-oriented GNU/Linux distributions like Alpine Linux. Linux kernel 4.4.36 LTS is here to change a total of 32 files, with 236 insertions and only 94 deletions.

  • Linux 4.4.36

  • Linux Kernel 4.8.12 Released, Brings PA-RISC, PowerPC, and x86 Improvements

    A few moments ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the twelfth maintenance update of the Linux 4.8 kernel series, as well as the availability of Linux kernel 4.4.36 LTS.

  • Linux 4.8.12

  • Graphics Stack

    • Developers’ Planned Changes Still Coming To Mesa 13.1 / Mesa 17.0

      Earlier this week I wrote about a release schedule coming out for Mesa 13.1 that culminates with this next big Mesa update being out in February. Some Mesa developers have now shared the work they still hope to see in this next release.

    • Gallium3D Drivers Prepped For EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync

      Rob Clark has landed his code for supporting EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync in Mesa and his Freedreno Gallium3D driver is the first in-tree Mesa/Gallium3D driver to support the native fence FD support, even beating out the Intel driver.

    • Intel Publishes Renderbuffer Decompression Patches

      A set of 27 patches published this week for GBM and the Intel Mesa driver provide for significant bandwidth savings.

      Intel’s Ben Widawsky published the set of patches enabling renderbuffer decompression for the i965 driver plus the necessary GBM modifications. With these patches there is the potential for massive bandwidth savings. Results shared by Widawsky on a Skylake GT4 GPU show the compression dropping the read bandwidth from 603 MiB/s to 259 MiB/s and the write bandwidth dropping from 615 MiB/s to 337 MiB/s, when using a modified version of kmscube for testing.

    • Razer is now a member of the consortium responsible for Vulkan-based graphics

      The Khronos Group made a brief announcement on Thursday, stating popular PC gaming peripheral maker Razer is now a Contributor Member. The Khronos Group is the non-profit consortium behind the new open-source Vulkan Application Programming Interface (API) that is becoming more commonly used in PC gaming. It’s an alternative to the long-used DirectX and OpenGL graphics APIs.

    • Hardware maker ‘Razer’ has joined The Khronos Group to back open standards

    • Razer Joins The Khronos Group

      Razer joining The Khronos Group looks to be a VR/AR play, but will hopefully help further push Vulkan and other Khronos standards to gamers. The brief announcement at Khronos.org reads in part, “…Razer co-founded OSVR, an open-source platform that integrates VR, AR and mixed reality hardware and software APIs that support a universal VR ecosystem.”

    • Razer pushes on with open-source by joining Khronos Group

      Razer has been a big proponent of Open-Source development for a while now, with its biggest push for open standards coming from OSVR, an open-source virtual reality initiative founded by Razer and supported by quite a few studios. Now, Razer is getting involved with open-source graphics technology by joining the Khronos Group, which maintains Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenCL.

  • Benchmarks

    • PTS: PHP 7.1 vs. PHP 7.0 vs. HHVM Benchmarks

      With today’s PHP 7.1 release, performance isn’t highlighted as much as language improvements to this first major update to PHP7, but I decided to run some PHP 7.1, PHP 7.0, PHP 5.6, PHP 5.5, and HHVM benchmarks of our open-source Phoronix Test Suite code-base.

      These self-tests of the Phoronix Test Suite aren’t the conventional PHP workload of just a CMS, blog, or other web application that can be cached, etc, but effectively of a PHP CLI application. So keep this in mind when looking at the results and that your mileage may vary depending upon use-case.

    • Clear Linux With Mesa 13 Is A Strong Match For Intel Linux Performance

      When benchmarking Intel’s Clear Linux distribution earlier this year we found its Intel graphics performance to be quite good and slightly faster than other Linux distributions even when Clear was using an older version of Mesa. Now with Clear Linux having switched to Mesa 13, I decided to run some fresh Intel OpenGL benchmarks on it compared to other distributions.

• Applications

  • Ardour 5.5 DAW Adds Support for Steinberg CC121 and Avid Artist Control Surfaces

    One of the world’s best open-source and cross-platform DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software, Ardour, has been updated to version 5.5 on the first day of December 2016, as announced by developer Paul Davis.

    Ardour 5.5 comes exactly two months after the 5.4 release, and it’s now considered the most stable and advanced version, further sustaining its position as a mature Digital Audio Workstation application that can be successfully used for amateur and professional music making.

  • CLI System Tool ‘Neofetch’ Gets a Big Update

    Neofetch 2.0 has been released, and is available to install on Ubuntu. The CLI system info tool adds bug fixes, cleaner code, and improved ASCII handling.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Parrot Security Could Be Your Next Security Tool

    • Writing Your Own Ingest Processor for Elasticsearch

    • Blue-Green Deployments for Serverless Powered Applications on AWS

    • An Introduction to Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise

    • Syscall Auditing at Scale

    • Build a Hadoop Cluster in AWS in Minutes

    • How to Build an Email Server on Ubuntu Linux

    • Untangling Macros in C

    • How to read/write NTFS partitions on GNU/Linux

    • Fedora 25 post installation guide

    • Bitcoin on Fedora with Electrum

    • How to install and configure web2py on CentOS 7

    • A revisionist history of configuration management

    • How to speedup Ansible

    • Installing Red Hat Container Development Kit on Fedora

    • Bitcoin on Fedora with Electrum

    • Dual-boot Fedora 25, Windows 10 on a computer with UEFI firmware

    • Kompose Up for OpenShift and Kubernetes

  • Games

    • Edge Of Eternity, a beautiful indie tribute to J-RPG classics is waiting on Unity & Vulkan [Ed: beware Mono inside]

    • Astervoid 2000, a multiplayer​ space brawler with sick music is now on Linux

      Astervoid 2000 [Steam, Official Site] was sent in by the developer and I’ve been testing out this multiplayer​ space brawler to see if it’s worthy. It’s surprisingly great actually! Mixing some lovely pixel art with sick tunes makes for an explosive experience.

      I’m surprised by this one, as it has a single-player wave-based survival mode, as well as the multiplayer mode. In the single-player you are facing off against others on the high-score board as well and I’ve managed to hone my skills enough to get to #18.

    • It looks like more classic Topware Interactive games are coming to Linux

      It seems Topware Interactive are continuing their Linux push with their classic games and I’ve noticed a few more that seem to be coming.

    • Some thoughts on ‘The Dwarves’, the new action RPG from KING Art, a bit unpolished

    • Inner Chains, an incredibly brutal looking UE4-built FPS that’s coming to Linux shows off some gameplay

      The game was funded on Kickstarter where it was given $18,708 towards development. Linux was a stretch goal, but it was set at $15,000 so they gathered well over what they requested for a Linux version.

    • ZeniMax are flexing their muscles towards DoomRL, trying to shut it down

    • The new ‘Master of Orion’ has a major update inspired by the original MOO2 and a new DLC

    • Drift Into Eternity, a single-player sci-fi survival experience is coming to Linux

    • The Dwarves, the new fantasy RPG from KING Art is now available

    • Valve Releases SteamOS 2.98 to Fix a Regression with Some Intel Wi-Fi Adapters

      On the last day of November 2016, Valve pushed the SteamOS brewmaster update 2.98 to the brewmaster_beta channel for public testing, addressing a regression with some Intel Wi-Fi adapters.

    • Steam’s November 2016 Metrics Put Linux Gaming Marketshare At 0.88%

      With the start of the new month comes updated statistics from Valve with their Steam Survey.

      For November 2016, the Steam Survey shows Linux with a 0.88% marketshare, or a decrease of 0.01%. Ubuntu 16.10 gained ground while the other popular Linux distributions saw no change to slight drops. Steam meanwhile saw 95.4% of users on Windows and 3.59% on macOS.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Enlightenment 0.21.4 Desktop Release Adds 106 Changes, Improves Wayland Support

    The fourth maintenance update to the Enlightenment DR 0.21 stable series of the lightweight, modern, and open-source window manager and desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions has been released on the last day of November 2016.

    As expected, Enlightenment 0.21.4 is a bugfix release that addresses numerous of the issues reported by users since the previous maintenance update, namely Enlightenment 0.21.3, which was released more than a month and a half ago, in an attempt to further improve the overall stability of the desktop environment.

    “This is another bugfix and stability release for the Enlightenment 21 Release series. It addresses a number of issues as listed below. While there has been many changes since the last release most changes are related to Bryce and Wayland as such they won’t affect most users,” said Simon Lees in the release announcement.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME Software 3.22.3 Lets Users Upgrade Two Fedora Linux Versions at a Time

      A new maintenance version of the GNOME Software package manager has been released on the first day of December 2016, versioned 3.22.3, for the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment.

    • gtkmm 4 started

      We (the gtkmm developers) have started work on an ABI-breaking gtkmm-4.0, as well as an ABI-breaking glibmm, target GTK+ 4, and letting us clean up some cruft that has gathered over the years. These install in parallel with the existing gtkmm-3.0 and glibmm-2.4 APIs/ABIs.

    • Gtkmm Begins Preparing For GTK4, Now Uses C++14

      Gtkmm, the project providing the de facto C++ interface for GTK+, is preparing for the GTK+ 4.0 era.

      Gtkmm 3.89.1 was released today as the first release based against the GTK+ 4.0 development code and can be installed in parallel with gtkmm-3.0. Aside from basing against GTK 4.0, gtkmm now uses C++14, has removed deprecated APIs, and other changes. Gtkmm using C++14 succeeds its C++11 usage.

    • November Bug Squash Month: GJS

      During November I finally took the leap and offered to become a maintainer of GJS. My employer Endless has been sponsoring work on bugs 742249 and 751252, porting GJS’s Javascript engine from SpiderMonkey 24 to SpiderMonkey 31. But aside from that I had been getting interested in contributing more to it, and outside of work I did a bunch of maintenance work modernizing the Autotools scripts and getting it to compile without warnings. From there it was a small step to officially volunteering.

    • Core Apps Hackfest afterthoughts

      During last weekend, I was very happy to attend the Core Apps Hackfest in Berlin. This is effectively the first hackfest I’ve ever been! Thanks Carlos for organizing that, thanks Kinvolk folks for hosting the event, and Collabora for sponsoring the dinner.

      This event was a great chance to meet the maintainers in person and talk directly to the designers about doubts we have. Since Carlos already wrote down the list of tasks we worked on, I’m not going to repeat it. So here, I’ll report what I was able to work on.

    • Contribute to Polari with this one simple trick!

      I’ve been rather quiet recently working on new features for Builder. But we managed to just release Builder 3.22.3 which is full of bug fixes and a really new important feature. You can now meaningfully target flatpak when building your application. Matthew Leeds has done this outstanding work and it is really going to simplify how you contribute to GNOME applications going forward.

      I’m really happy with the quality of this feature because it has shown me where our LibIDE design has done well, and where it has not. Of course, we will address that for 3.24 to help make some of the UI less confusing.

• Distributions

  • Refracta 8.0 Is a Pint-Sized Powerhouse

    Refracta is a somewhat obscure Linux distribution that offers exceptional functionality and stability.

    Obscurity is not always a bad thing when it comes to Linux distros. You can find some very worthwhile alternatives to your current operating system. Refracta is a big surprise in a small package.

    Many look-alike desktop distros are difficult to distinguish from run-of-the-mill garden varieties. Others offer new adopters something unique that makes using them fun and productive.

    Refracta is one of the few full-service Linux distros that makes an easy and more convenient replacement for pocket Linux options such as Puppy Linux. Not all Linux distros that install to a USB drive — and have the ability to save files and system settings in a persistent mode — work equally well.

  • New Releases

    • 4MLinux 20.1 released.

      This is a minor maintenance release in the 4MLinux STABLE channel. The release ships with the Linux kernel 4.4.34, which restores PAE support that “magically” disappeared in 4MLinux 20.0 (sorry :-). Additionally, some popular programs (Double Commander, Dropbox, Firefox, Java RE, Opera, PeaZip, Thunderbird, Wine) have been updated, too.

    • Manjaro-i3 and Manjaro-Cinnamon 16.10.3

      Both Manjaro i3 and Manjaro Cinnamon have now also been updated to 16.10.3.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • The December 2016 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

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

  • Arch Family

    • Arch Linux 2016.12.01 Is Now Available to Download, Includes Linux Kernel 4.8.11

      Today is the first day of December 2016, which means that we can now download a new ISO respin image of the popular and lightweight Arch Linux operating system.

  • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • openSUSE Tumbleweed Now Powered by Linux Kernel 4.8.10, VirtualBox 5.1.10 Lands

      Today, December 1, 2016, openSUSE Project’s Douglas DeMaio gladly informed the community of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system about the updated packages that landed in the repositories.

    • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2016/48

      After releasing daily snapshots without interruption for 17 days, Tumbleweed did slow down a bit during the last week. As already mentioned in my last review, 1124 had been canceled due to an issue with sddm installing strange branding configurations. And later on, we ‘broke’ our own staging setup and needed to bootstrap a few of them, making the throughput much lower than you were used to. So, we ended up with 3 snapshots since my last review: 1125, 1128 and 1129.

    • Highlights of YaST development sprint 28

      November is over, Santa Claus elves start to stress and the YaST team brings you one of the last reports of 2016. Let’s see what’s new in YaSTland.

    • openSUSE Heroes meeting, day 1

      So starting today, some openSUSE Heroes started to spend the first December weekend in the SUSE Headquarter in Nuremberg. And they really have a lot to do, as you might imagine! That might be the reason why some of them started at 02:00 in the night to arrive at 07:00 in Nuremberg…

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat’s CEO on How to Apologize When You Screw Up at Work

      The number of corporate apologies has increased dramatically over the past decade. And for good reason: Failing to admit a mistake is one of the fastest ways a CEO can put themselves and their company’s reputation at risk. I’m not alone on this – 81 percent of Americans say a public apology from a CEO would be seen as a positive step during a crisis.

      And yet, too many leaders still struggle to publicly acknowledge when they stumble. A 2013 study by Forum Corporation found that of the nearly 1,000 global leaders and employees surveyed, only 19% of employees said their bosses were willing to apologize for mistakes.

    • Finance

      • The Reliance Trust Co. of Delaware Reached $1,220,000 position of Red Hat Inc. (RHT)

      • Where Will Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Peak? Brokerage House Targets in Focus

      • On the move Tech Stock trend: Red Hat, Inc.’s (RHT)

      • 2 Stocks Analyst-Opinion Need Close Watch: Agilent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:A), Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

      • Trading Watch: FCF and Piotroski Score Check for Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

      • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) – Top Stock from Technology Sector

      • Aperio Group LLC Acquires 2,885 Shares of Red Hat Inc. (RHT)

      • Red Hat to Webcast Results for Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2017

      • Stock Rolling Backwards Pre-Bell, Looks for a Reversal: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

      • Buzzer within Analysts Radar: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Fedora

      • PHP version 7.1.0 is released!

      • Atomic Working Group update from this week’s meeting

        Two days back we had a very productive meeting in the Fedora Atomic Working Group. This post is a summary of the meeting. You can find all the open issues of the working group in this Pagure repo. There were 14 people present at the meeting, which happens on every Wednesday 5PM UTC at the #fedora-meeting-1 channel on Freenode IRC server.

      • PHPUnit 5.7

      • Puppet not coming back to EPEL EL-6

      • Phabricator Packages for EPEL, Fedora

        Using Pagure and COPR, Tim Flink and I have settled on using common infrastructure to further the inclusion of Phabricator in to the Fedora repositories (and EPEL). I’m hoping this will bear fruit and get more people on board.

      • Fedora 25 Now Generally Available

      • Fedora 25 Screencast and Screenshots

  • Debian Family

    • My Debian Activities in November 2016

      This month I marked 377 packages for accept and rejected 36 packages. I also sent 13 emails to maintainers asking questions.

    • Debian LTS report for November 2016

      Noevember 2016 was my third month as a Debian LTS team member. I was allocated 11 hours and had 1,75 hours left from October. This makes a total of 12,75 hours. In November I spent all 12,75 hours (and even a bit more) preparing security updates for spip, memcached and monit.

    • Free software activities in November 2016

      Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users.

      The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to permit verification that no flaws have been introduced — either maliciously or accidentally — during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

    • Derivatives

      • Devuan 1.0 Jessie beta 2: That’s Debian Jessie minus systemd

        If you don’t know the history of Devuan, here’s a summary.

        Back when the developers of the Debian Linux distribution made the decision to go with systemd as the init system and service manager, a group of seasoned developers said, hell, no! They’d rather fork Debian than use systemd.

        And that’s exactly what the Veteran Unix Admins did – forked Debian. The result of that is called Devuan.

        The second beta of Devuan 1.0 Jessie is now available for download, testing and bug-reporting. So if you think there’s a place for a Linux distribution that does not use systemd, this is your opportunity to contribute. Details of this release and links to installation images are available here.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu still isn’t free software

          Mark Shuttleworth just blogged about their stance against unofficial Ubuntu images. The assertion is that a cloud hoster is providing unofficial and modified Ubuntu images, and that these images are meaningfully different from upstream Ubuntu in terms of their functionality and security. Users are attempting to make use of these images, are finding that they don’t work properly and are assuming that Ubuntu is a shoddy product. This is an entirely legitimate concern, and if Canonical are acting to reduce user confusion then they should be commended for that.

          The appropriate means to handle this kind of issue is trademark law. If someone claims that something is Ubuntu when it isn’t, that’s probably an infringement of the trademark and it’s entirely reasonable for the trademark owner to take action to protect the value associated with their trademark. But Canonical’s IP policy goes much further than that – it can be interpreted as meaning[1] that you can’t distribute works based on Ubuntu without paying Canonical for the privilege, even if you call it something other than Ubuntu.

        • Canonical Sues Cloud Provider, Mint Beta, Devuan Tour

          Ubuntu parent-company, Canonical, today posted that they’ve been in a dispute with “a European cloud provider” over their use of their own homespun version of Ubuntu on their cloud servers. Their implementation disables even the most basic of security features and Canonical is worried something bad could happen and it’d reflect badly back on them. The post read, “The home-grown images of this provider disable fundamental security mechanisms and modify the system in ways that are unsupportable. They are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways.” They said they’ve spent months trying to get the unnamed provider to use the standard Ubuntu as delivered to other commercial operations to no avail. Canonical feels they have no choice but to “take legal steps to remove these images.” They’re sure Red Hat and Microsoft wouldn’t be treated like this.

        • Taking a stand against unofficial Ubuntu images

          Ubuntu is amazing on the cloud because we work with cloud providers to ensure crisp, consistent and secure images which you can auto-update safely. On every major cloud—AWS, Azure, Google, Rackspace, SoftLayer and many more—you can be confident that ‘Ubuntu’ is Ubuntu, with the same commitment to quality that you can expect when you install it yourself, and we can guarantee that to you because we require that clouds offer only certified Ubuntu images.

        • Canonical Takes Stand Against Unofficial Ubuntu Images, Reportedly Risky & Insecure

          Mark Shuttleworth has written a new blog post where he’s outlining a dispute Canonical is having with a European cloud provider over a breach of contract and “publishing insecure, broken images of Ubuntu” for its cloud customers.

          With these Ubuntu Cloud unofficial images reportedly being buggy, users are complaining to Canonical/Ubuntu, assuming it’s an upstream issue. Having enough of that, they are now preparing for legal steps to remove the unofficial Ubuntu images from the particular cloud provider.

        • Mir’s Abstraction Layer Updated (MirAL 0.5)

          A new version of MirAL is now available, the Ubuntu project for making it easier to develop new Mir servers by offering a stable ABI and other shared/common components.

          The MirAL 0.5 release has some utility scripts for common tasks, improved the tiling window manager mode for miral-shell, more configuration options for the MirAL kiosk mode, and other bug fixes and enhancements.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Trisquel GNU/Linux 8 Alpha Is Now Available to Download

            Trisquel GNU/Linux 8.0 alpha is now available for download and testing. Based on Ubuntu 16.04, Trisquel 8.0 also ships with the MATE 1.12 desktop.

          • Linux Mint 18.1 Beta released

            Well,Just months back Linux Mint 18 got it’s release,now it is the time to have the next point release of Linux Mint 18.Just few hours ago Linux Mint team has announced the availability of Linux Mint 18.1 Beta.
            As Linux Mint users , who have already moved to Linux Mint 18, might be loving it for the newly introduced themes,look & feel and features(of course,they didn’t go like updating only pre-installed packages :p ).So,in this time, coming from rainy to winter season,they have made a good list of new improvements,features and support.

          • Linux Mint 18.1 Beta Is Out with Cinnamon 3.2 & MATE 1.16, Based on Ubuntu 16.04

            A few moments ago, Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre proudly announced the release and immediate availability of the Beta version of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena.”

          • Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ BETA Ubuntu-based operating system now available for download

            Feeling fatigued by Windows 10 and its constant updates and privacy concerns? Can’t afford one of those beautiful new MacBook Pro laptops? Don’t forget, Linux-based desktop operating systems are just a free download away, folks!

            If you do decide to jump on the open source bandwagon, a good place to start is Linux Mint. Both the Mate and Cinnamon desktop environments should prove familiar to Windows converts, and since it is based on Ubuntu, there is a ton of compatible packages. Today, the first beta of Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ becomes available for download.

          • Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” MATE – BETA Release

          • Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Cinnamon – BETA Release

          • Best Features Of Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’

            If you’re fed up with Windows 10 and its hiccups, or you can’t afford the new MacBook Pro with fancy TouchBar, somewhere there’s a solid Linux system waiting for you. Linux Mint is often regarded as one of the best Linux desktop operating systems. Over the years, Mint has established itself as a competent Windows 10 replacement and its impressive releases continue to affirm this notion.

            Earlier this year in June, we witnessed the release of Linux Mint 18 Sarah. Now, the second point release of Linux Mint 18, i.e., Mint 18.1 Serena, is just around the corner. It’s slated to arrive later this December.

• Devices/Embedded

  • 3.5-inch Apollo Lake SBC hands you a sixpack of USB 3.0

    Portwell’s 3.5-inch “PEB-2773” SBC features dual- or quad-core Atom E3900 SoCs, wide-range power, industrial temperature support, and six USB 3.0 ports.

    Portwell’s PEB-2773 extends the 14nm-fabricated Atom E3900 (“Apollo Lake”) system-on-chips in the 3.5-inch SBC form factor. Other 3.5-inch Apollo Lake SBCs include Advantech’s MIO-5350 and PCM-9366, as well as Aaeon’s GENE-APL5 and Avalue’s ECM-APL and Litemax’s AECX-APL0.

  • Tiny i.MX6 COM has a trim little carrier too

    E-Con’s Linux-ready “eSOMiMX6-micro” COM offers an i.MX6 SoC, optional WiFi/BT and GbE, and a 54 x 20mm footprint. Its “Meissa-I” carrier is only 80 x 40mm.

    In 2014, we called the E-Con Systems eSOMiMX6 computer-on-module “tiny” because it used the 70 x 45mm “μQseven” form-factor to expand upon the i.MX6 SoC. Now E-Con has bested that with a eSOMiMX6-micro model that similarly supports NXP’s 800MHz, dual or quad-core i.MX6, but with an even smaller 54 x 20mm (1,080 sq. mm) footprint. This doesn’t quite match Variscite’s 50 x 20mm (1,000 sq. mm) DART-MX6, but it beats out others including Mistral’s 44 x 26mm (1,144 sq. mm) Nano SOM.

  • Jolla Experiments With A Sailfish OS Watch

    Jolla engineers have spent the past few weeks porting Sailfish OS to an Android smartwatch as they feel their Linux-based OS is particularly suited for small screens.

    Jolla isn’t announcing a Sailfish Watch product, but rather looking at it as part of their licensing strategy to offer their OS to smartwatch manufacturers. Joona Petrell shared that they had technical and design inspiration help off the Asteroid Smartwatch OS and their libHybris layer allowed them to quickly bring-up Sailfish and their UI on the Android smartwatch.

  • Amazon extends AWS IoT with offline processing

  • The Great Raspberry PiTop Giveaway

  • Using a fully free OS for devices in the home

    There are more and more devices around the home (and in many small offices) running a GNU/Linux-based firmware. Consider routers, entry-level NAS appliances, smart phones and home entertainment boxes.

  • Rugged EPIC SBC gets a lift from Bay Trail Atoms

    The rugged, Linux-supported WinSystems “EPX-C414” is an EPIC SBC with an Atom E3800, mini-PCIe and PC/104 expansion, and industrial temperature support.

    WinSystems, which recently announced an EBX-style EBC-C413 single board computer based on the Atom E3800, once again taps a Bay Trail Atom, this time for an industrial strength, EPIC form-factor EPX-C414. This upgrade for legacy EPIC environments offers customers modern accoutrements such as dual simultaneous displays, HD video, AES-NI cryptography, dual GbE ports, and dual full-size mini-PCIe slots in addition to old-school PC/104-Plus (ISA + PCI) expansion.

  • Phones

    • Tizen

      • Samsung have Invested $10 Million in Svace, Security Solution to Analyze Tizen Apps

        As part of its security measures, Samsung are using the SVACE technology (Security Vulnerabilities and Critical Errors Detector) to detect potential vulnerabilities and errors that might exist in source code of applications created for the Tizen Operating System (OS). This technology was developed by ISP RAS (Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences), who are based in Moscow, Russia.

    • Android

      • Trouble at Cyanogen [Ed: it chose to be a Microsoft proxy and look what happened; the usual!]

      • What does the future of Android look like in a world with the Pixel?

        Android, the world’s most used mobile operating system, is going through a step change. For years, its creator, Google, only made a small number of own-brand devices running it for developers and enthusiasts. That changed with the release of the Pixel.

        The Pixel is Google’s first real attempt to challenge Apple and Samsung’s smartphone dominance, but it wasn’t made by the same team that makes Android.

      • Android’s market share grows because it can fit any niche, big or small

        The Android software platform lets smartphone builders everywhere create devices for every niche. If Apple’s iPhone is the gold standard against which all other phones must be measured, it’s also a one-size-fits-all strategy with just a handful of models on the market at any given time.

        As a direct result of Android’s open architecture, the platform is sweeping world markets. According to the latest IDC report, 87.6 percent of the 344.7 million smartphones that shipped in the second quarter of 2016 were equipped with Android software. Another 11.7 percent came with Apple’s iOS, leaving less than 1 percent of the pie to share among Windows Phone and other challengers.

        So how did Android become such a success? Let’s have a look in the rear-view mirror.

      • Nokia smartphones to return in 2017 [Ed: Nokia is one among many companies that Microsoft maliciously destroyed for self gain and to harm Linux]

        A company set up by former Nokia employees called HMD Global has licensed the Nokia brand name from Microsoft, struck partnerships with device manufacturer Foxconn and intends to launch an Android smartphone in the early part of 2017.

      • Nokia’s phones return with Android in early 2017

        The first Nokia-branded handsets running Android are due to arrive early next year. After announcing its plans to return to tablets and phones back in May, Nokia is providing more details today as it formalizes a licensing agreement with HMD Global (HMD). Also based in Finland, HMD global is the new home of Nokia phones under a brand licensing deal that will last for at least 10 years.

      • Nokia Android phones are coming in 2017

      • Nokia Android Smartphone Plans Confirmed

      • Nokia Returns With A Bang, To Launch Android Phones In Feb 2017

      • Android malware steals access to more than 1 million Google accounts [Ed: Corporate media should note that this malware gets installed by the users themselves]

      • Gooligan: Android phones targeted in global hack; emails, photos accessible to attackers

      • ​Gooligan Android malware grabs a million Google accounts in huge Google Play fraud

      • Android malware breaches security of more than 1 million Google accounts

      • PluginPhantom Android Malware Uses Novel Approach to Hide Malicious Behavior

      • Android Pay now available in New Zealand

      • Sony Xperia XZ starts receiving the Android 7.0 Nougat update

      • Huawei Reveals Which Phones Will Get Android 7.0 Nougat

      • ​ANZ launches Android-based BladePay mobile payments solution

      • “OK Google” support finally comes to Android Auto

      • Android Auto Gets ‘OK Google’ Support: Hands-Free Voice Option Finally Coming

      • ‘OK Google’ is finally coming to Android Auto

      • Android Auto goes fully hands-free as ‘OK Google’ support revs up

      • Samsung works with Australian carriers to block the Note 7

      • These are the Huawei phones that will be updated to Nougat

      • Huawei Outlines Android 7.0 Nougat Plans: 6 Devices To Get Update In Q1 2017

      • OnePlus 3 Android 7.0 Nougat update: Phone owners can now download new Google OS

      • OnePlus 3 owners can now get Android 7.0 Nougat in open beta

      • First look: Android on Chrome OS is a poor fit

      • Motorola isn’t planning on releasing a Moto 360 successor anytime soon

      • TWRP arrives for the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV, Moto E (2016), and Wileyfox Swift 2 line

      • Android Nougat update comes to another top smartphone – here’s all you need to know