• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Xojo: A Linux development suite that doesn’t really support Linux

If a company is going to support Linux… it needs to actually freaking support Linux.

In one of my past lives, I was a software developer. And even though I no longer code for a living, I still find tinkering with various languages, IDEs, and frameworks more fun than I probably should. Truth be told, I consider playing with a new development environment to be a bit of a hoot. (Yes. I just wrote “bit of a hoot.” That’s how confident I am in my own masculinity.)

I’m also not the kind of guy to be prejudiced for – or against – any particular language. Python? Awesome. C++? Tons of fun (in an “I-like-to-hurt-myself” kind of way). Pascal, BASIC, Smalltalk and JavaScript? All delightful. I like ‘em all… for the most part.

Do you need programming skills to learn Linux?

A few months ago I took the Introduction to Linux course offered through edX. It’s an 18 chapter course with lots of reading, some videos, and a casual level of testing your knowledge. I wrote about the first six chapters and how the course works in, What happens when a non-coder tries to learn Linux.

My main goal in taking the course was to get a better, high level understanding of Linux. I didn’t have to install Linux but wanted to, so before I started chapter 7, I did. I wanted to test out some of the things I was learning, and ‘learning is doing’ to a large extent.

New Linux Trojan Found, Part of Turla

The top story today is the discovery of a new Linux trojan that experts say could have been in place for years. Kaspersky Lab is saying this newly discovered Linux malware is part of the Turla campaign indicating that the culprits aren’t limiting themselves to Windows. And that’s not all that’s unusual about this code.

The ‘Penquin’ Turla

Breaking: Stealth “Turla” Malware Infects Unknown Number of Linux Systems

The Linux Turla is a new piece of malware designed to infect only Linux computers, which has managed to remain relatively hidden until now and has the potential of doing a lot of harm. Unfortunately, very little is known about it or how to fix it.

Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

Server

• Intel Becomes Newest OpenDaylight SDN/NFV Project Member

• Intel Ups Investment in OpenDaylight SDN, NFV Effort

  The chip maker, which sees SDN and NFV as growth areas in the data center, is now a Platinum member of the vendor-based consortium it helped found.
  Intel, one of the founding members of the OpenDaylight Project, is increasing its commitment to the software-defined networking standards body.

  Intel is joining such tech vendors as IBM, Cisco Systems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks as a Platinum member of OpenDaylight, a move that increases the chip maker’s financial backing of the group and includes the adding of an Intel official on the board of directors.

• Rocket vs Docker and The Myth of the “Simple, Lightweight Enterprise Platform”

  With seemingly everyone who’s ever written an app or booted a VM jumping on the cargo ship at the moment, it’s hardly surprising to see the launch this week of Rocket; a credible challenger to Docker in the container space.

• New data center OS allows single-source command for Linux servers

  Mesosphere, a startup that provides commercial support for the Apache Mesos cluster management system, has debuted a “data center operating system.”

  Mesosphere DCOS uses the Mesos project to gang together machines running Linux, whether hosted in any number of clouds (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) or running on nearly any kind of infrastructure (bare metal, OpenStack, VMware).

  Widely deployed at scale by companies like Twitter and Airbnb, Mesos has a proven track record. However, Mesosphere DCOS is designed to manage not only the applications but also the systems they run on.

• Mesosphere Raises $36M for Application Data Center OS

  Lead commercial sponsor behind Apache Mesos project announces new commercial effort that leverages open source components as well as its own ‘secret sauce.’

• Mesosphere Grabs $36M in Funding for Data Center OS Built on Apache Mesos

  The B round brings Mesosphere’s total funding to approximately $50 million and the company says it plans to accelerate investment in global growth.

Kernel Space

• Cloud Foundry Foundation Matures–Becomes A Linux Foundation Collaborative Project

  The way the deal is structured sees the Linux Foundation become the contracting service provider to the Cloud Foundry Foundation and offer all the services that it requires – Cloud Foundry Foundation employees will technically be Linux Foundation hires and Cloud Foundry Foundation events and the like will be managed by the Linux Foundation.

• Linux Foundation Taps CloudFoundry as ‘Go-To’ Cloud PaaS

• Linux 3.18 Diseased Newt Released

  Linus Torvalds formally released the Linux 3.18 kernel on December 7, even though a regression issue that first showed up in Linux 3.17 has yet to be resolved.

• Significant ACPI & Power Management Changes In Linux 3.19

  Rafael Wysocki of Intel mailed in the ACPI and power management changes for the Linux 3.19 merge window. As said by the ACPI/PM subsystem maintainer, “This time we have some more new material than we used to have during the last couple of development cycles.”

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Catalyst 14.12 Linux Driver Released — Huge Update!

    Today’s Catalyst 14.12 for Linux delivers OpenCL 2.0 support, VA-API video decoding with H.264/VC-1/MPEG-2/MPEG-4 format support, and distribution-specific packages offered at AMD.com for Ubuntu and Red Hat. There’s also many bug fixes, support for modern kernel versions / xorg-server, potential performance improvements, and a range of other work.

Applications

• Nuvola Player 2.5 Released With Spotify Web Player And Grooveshark Mobile (HTML5) Support

  Nuvola Player 2.5 was released yesterday, bringing support for new services such as Spotify Web Player, Grooveshark Mobile (HTML5) and others, as well as improvements for some already existing services.

• arkurses: Harder, better, faster, stronger

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 9 mail/mailx command examples to send emails from command line on Linux

  • Send mail from command line with external smtp server on Linux

  • How to speed up a WordPress website with CloudFront CDN

  • Ncdu a NCurses Based Disk Usage Analyzer and Tracker

  • cpio command – copies, lists & extracts files to and from archives

  • How To Migrate From MySQL To MariaDB On Linux

  • Reset root password in Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, CentOS or pretty much any Linux distributions

  • How to speed up a WordPress website with CloudFront CDN

• Games

  • 2k Games Confirms Bioshock Infinite Coming to Linux

    Ever since the announcement of Windows 8 there has been a renewed push for gaming on Linux. We saw one game developer even go so far as to make their own semi-customized flavor of Linux in the form of the SeamOS. Although interest in Linux gaming has tailored off due to delays in the “Steam Box” and other problems (lack of games) we are hearing that at least one very popular AAA title will be coming to Linux.

  • Grim Fandango Release Date And Day Of The Tentacle Special Edition

    Grim Fandango itself now has a release date of the 27th of January, arriving on Linux alongside other desktop and Sony platforms. The trailer above highlights some of the retexturing and lighting enhancements as well as the re-recorded score performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

  • bingo: Occasionally, I wonder why

  • cboard: I can quit my whining now

    This is the last true “game” post I have, out of this recent run of nine or 10. And since I promised more than a few days ago to show something actually playable as a chess game for the console, I’m quite excited to finish with cboard.

  • Bonus: A score of games after a score of games

  • ox3d: Tic-tac-toe-tough

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • The Pillars of KDE “Now”

    Oxygen, Sonnet (remember that?), Solid, Plasma, Akonadi and Decibel… This list in one way or another might be wrong. Not so cool. But you know what is cool? People remembered the Pillars of KDE 4 existed and the effect they had.

Distributions

• Ask Slashdot: Paying For Linux Support vs. Rolling Your Own?

• Reviews

  • Linux Mint 17.1 review—less change is good change

    While most of what’s new in Mint 17.1 will be seen in the updated desktops, there are some common components to both Cinnamon and MATE. While accessing some of these new tools varies slightly by desktop, the results are the same in both. Right away, you’ll notice the login screen is among these new and improved elements.

  • ​Best Linux Desktop of 2014: Linux Mint 17.1

    Personally, I prefer Cinnamon — so that is what I used. With Cinnamon 2.4, you get a few minor new features. For instance, you can set directories to different colors to make them more visible in Nemo, the Cinnamon file manager. Cinnamon has also been tightened and cleaned up. The result is a faster, more memory efficient desktop. The one bug I’ve seen to date is that some desktop icons, such as the computer, can’t have their names changed. So, for example, I can’t rename “Computer” to “Blitz,” my Dell desktop’s real name.

    Over all, though, that’s like complaining about a scratch on a 1955 Mercedes 300 SLR Racer: Mint’s still the best available desktop today.

• Screenshots

  • Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS : Video Overview and Screenshot Tours

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 21 Release Review: An Impressive Developer Workstation

      Fedora is among the most respected Linux-based distributions. Known as a bleeding edge operating system it offers the latest technologies at the earliest stages. It’s also known for working with upstream projects instead of patching things downstream.

      Fedora displays both qualities due to the fact that Fedora/Red Hat developers are among the leading contributors to many major open source projects, including the Linux kernel; they work for everyone and not just for their own distribution.

      Fedora 21 has just been released and I have been playing with the beta for a while. There are now three editions of Fedora: server, workstation and cloud. Since I am using it for my desktop I downloaded and installed the Workstation.

    • Fedora 21 Officially Released

      One year after the introduction of Fedora 20 and going through many changes this year with the Fedora.Next initiative (and going through multiple delays in delivering F21), Fedora 21 finally greets the world today. Fedora 21 features all of the latest GNOME 3.14 software, is powered by the Linux 3.17 kernel, and has a ton of other improvements and changes as noted in dozens of Phoronix articles. Fedora 21 Server users also have Docker improvements, cloud computing enhancements, and the new Cockpit console.

    • Announcing Fedora 21!

    • Fedora 21 Now Available, Delivers the Flexibility of Fedora.next

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Developer Tools Center Renamed To Ubuntu Make, Sees New Release

        Ubuntu Developer Tools Center, a project to allow easy installation of common developer tools, has reached version 0.2. With this release, the project was renamed to Ubuntu Make, based on name proposals from the community.

      • Ubuntu Core Changes The Game For Container Operating Systems

        This last couple of weeks has seen some tension within the Linux Container world as CoreOS launched its Rocket container and questioned Docker’s longer term motives. Adding fuel to the fire today comes Canonical with its new “snappy” Ubuntu core. The new rendition of of Ubuntu is a minimal server image that shares the same libraries as today’s Ubuntu but via a simpler mechanism. Most importantly, the snappy approach allows Ubuntu to provide stronger security guarantees for applications. Snappy apps and Ubuntu Core itself can be upgraded atomically and rolled back if needed – an approach to systems management that lends itself to container deployments.

Devices/Embedded

• TI expands IoT cloud ecosystem and simplifies code development with open-source Energia support

  DALLAS, Dec. 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Texas Instruments (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) is expanding its third party ecosystem of Internet of Things (IoT) cloud service providers. With 10 new members since launching in April 2014, the TI IoT cloud ecosystem supports multiple cloud options with a total of 18 companies. Ecosystem members deliver solutions to help customers get their TI-based IoT solutions connected to the cloud quickly. The new members include Intamac/Kynesim, Keen IO/Technical Machine, Micrium, Octoblu, PTC, PubNub, Temboo and Weaved.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • To Leak or Not to Leak? That is the Question ….. Samsung Z1 Tizen SM-Z130H

      The reasoning of no reveal is that Samsung’s launch strategy is secret, like many companies, but it looks like they will do a “soft launch” ie a press event and a URL to where you can buy this product in India, and I don’t know how the Samsung marketing machine will position the Tizen phone and how they will convey some of the Information in our possession, so in an effort to not damage the Samsung marketing strategy for Tizen we have chosen NOT to reveal anything. It is hoped that Samsung appreciate this move.

  • Android

    • Google pushes ‘go’ on Android Studio

      Worried Oompa-Loompas are questioning security guards and combing the wilds of Mountain View after it was discovered that Google has allowed a product, the Android Studio IDE, to escape from the Chocolate Factory’s near-impenetrable Beta compound.

    • Google Launches Android Studio 1.0, Offers Migration Path from Eclipse

      At the 2013 Google I/O conference, the company announced Android Studio, and characterized it as a new development environment that would make it much easier for Android developers to build apps. Today, Google has announced the official version of Android Studio 1.0. It’s available now for download as a stable release on the Android Developer site. Here are more details on how this will provide big benefits for developers.

Open source all over the world

Phil Shapiro. “I administrate 28 Linux work stations at a small library in D.C. I consider these folks my coworkers and colleagues. And it’s wonderful to know that we can all feed into the energy and share ideas. My main interests are how FOSS intersects with dignity, and enhancing dignity.

A look back at open source in 2014

The year 2014 will be marked as one where open source changed for me. It didn’t change overnight or even very rapidly, but in July I noticed that the open source of today was not what I imagined it would be.

And this can be a good thing.

When I starting working full time with open source, back in 2001, the idea was to build a lot of free software. It reminded me of when I got my first computer back in 1978 (a TRS-80) and the environment encouraged a lot of code sharing. In those days, it was easy to differentiate open source from commercial software, and the thought was to replace the expensive walled gardens of proprietary code with better, freer, alternatives. But from a business perspective we were still in search of a business model.

SaaS/Big Data

• Bill Rowan, VMware’s New US Federal Lead, on Open Source’s Evolution and Data Analytics Collaborations

  There is a great place for the OpenStack solutions, even though it may not be a fit for everybody. In my opinion, the item for greater consideration is that the government will need to acquire and retain talent who can help them with the programming aspects of OpenStack. But we will continue to contribute to the OpenStack initiatives as we have in the past and allow customers to leverage our solutions inside those OpenStack environments.

Funding

• Nginx gets $20M, because an open-source web server is just the beginning

  Developers know Nginx as a popular open-source web server they can use to run websites. But some of the people behind Nginx, at the startup by the same name, aren’t content with that achievement on its own. They want to build a big company around the technology.

  Which is why investors are now giving the startup $20 million, Nginx announced in a statement today.

BSD

• FreeNAS 9.3 Released

  Here’s an early Christmas present for you all: FreeNAS 9.3!

  This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases, featuring a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 clustering, better VMWare integration, including VAAI support, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. We’re quite proud of it and excited to make it publicly available.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Committee begins review of High Priority Projects list — your input is needed

  Send your suggestions for projects of strategic importance to the goal of freedom for all computer users.

Public Services/Government

• Home Office Locked Into £330m Oracle Contract

  The Home Office is obliged to continue paying Oracle for ERP services until 2016, even as it signs a cost-cutting shared services ERP deal

  The Home Office has disclosed that it is locked into a £330 million contract with Oracle for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which may conflict with government efforts to cut back-office IT costs by shifting to shared services centres.

  The contract, signed in 2009 under the previous Labour government, provides 29, 518 users with access to Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), and is set to expire in January 2016, according to a statement published in response to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request.

Standards/Consortia

• Is Google coming back to the open community on document formats?

  At the ODF Plugfest in London, Google’s head of open source told the audience that work once once again in progress extending OpenDocument support in Google’s products.

  At the opening of the event, Magnus Falk, deputy CTO for HM Government, told the audience that the decision to adopt ODF (alongside HTML and PDF) as the government’s required document format is now well in hand. When asked by an audience member about various government agencies that currently require submissions from the public in Microsoft-only formats, Falk said that all such departments must make a migration plan now for how they will achieve use of the required formats.

Video-game pioneer Ralph Baer dies

Video-game pioneer Ralph Baer has died at the age of 92.

Mr Baer is widely seen as the “father of video games” for his pioneering work that led to the creation of the Odyssey games console.

The Odyssey, licensed to TV-maker Magnavox, went on sale in 1972 and inspired many other firms to make their own consoles.

Atari’s Co-Founder Explains Why Pong’s Ball Wasn’t Round

I really have some concerns, though, about privacy. Every kid has the right to have their teenage years forgotten. And I think we’re losing that. I can honestly say that I’m glad that my teenage years are mostly forgotten.

Security

• Shocking: Sony Learned No Password Lessons After The 2011 PSN Hack

  The great Sony hack of 2014: what’s it all about? Is it a subversive plot by North Koreans operating out of China in revenge for a film starring two guys from Freaks and Geeks? Or maybe it’s simply fodder for stupid politicians to remind us that all the world’s ills could be cured if only internet service providers took on the challenge of fixing all the things in all the places? No, my dear friends, no. The Sony hack of 2014 is a beautiful Christmas gift (your religious holiday may vary) of a wake-up call to anyone silly enough to think that Sony would bother to learn the lessons very recent history has tried to teach it.

• Sony’s PlayStation hit by hack attack

• LibreSSL 2.1.2 Previews The LibTLS Library, Works On Windows Support

• LibreSSL 2.1.2 released

  We have released LibreSSL 2.1.2, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon.

• Be scared: The Sony-style hack is no rare event

  Only the wanton destructiveness of the Sony attack made it an outlier; the scale was not uncommon. Maybe the bad publicity will be a wake-up call

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• “Dead bodies and wasted money”: How I learned firsthand the worst lesson of war

  Westerners like to dignify war as we can with the resources that we have, to make it sound like a chess game or science project with ascertainable goals, well-delineated procedures and verifiable conclusions. We actually have war colleges and war diplomas. People study military science and take war-leadership classes. Yet what a country actually does while at war – whether that country is an advanced nation or medieval relic – is try to survive; and if the war is truly about survival they throw everything in their possession at the enemy, flailing arms desperately, chucking money, bullets, grenades and prayers in the hope that they hit something. And you know what? Sometimes they do. But it takes a peculiar leap of faith to take this for knowledge or expertise. It takes an even more precious naiveté to pay people for the wisdom derived from collective stupidity.

• Wrong-on-Iraq Pundit Gives Lessons in Media Accountability

  It’s helpful that Lowry brought up white male privilege on ABC. It’s hard to know what else you might call a system that enables people like Lowry to continue to appear on television as some sort of expert. Not everyone gets to be so lucky.

• Establishment Media’s Illusion of Debate Supports US Strikes against Islamic State

  A new study authored by Peter Hart at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that in the lead up to the decision to increase military action against ISIL, there were very few anti-war voices in the television and the media in general. The FAIR study found that during a crucial two-week period in September 2014, only six out of the 205 interviewed sources opposed the U.S. intervening to stop the advance of ISIL. On well-known Sunday talk shows only 1 out of 89 guests was against the US going to war to stop ISIL. On television, there were many debates involving the advance of ISIL and the position of the United States. All of the debates revolved around the mechanics of the war, such as drone strikes and how many troops to send, not specifically that the war should not be happening. In defense of the media, after several beheadings, public opinion turned positive toward US involvement.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Fracking chemicals’ untold threat to reproductive health

  The chemicals used in fracking are linked to a number of serious health issues, a new review finds

• Big Energy Corporations Exploit Developing Nations

  Big Energy corporations that sell oil, coal, and natural gases are targeting developing countries as their future customers. Wealthy countries such as the United States are turning to renewable energy sources, so the fossil fuel industries are seeking to sell their energy sources to developing countries.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• North Carolina Newspapers Mostly Silent As ALEC And Koch Brothers Rewrite History

  North Carolina newspapers have largely missed the connection between a Koch-funded education non-profit organization contracted to help shape new statewide history curriculum materials, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative model legislation mill that wrote the bill mandating the new course work.

  In 2011, the North Carolina legislature passed a bill known as the “Founding Principles Act,” which would require high school students to pass a course on “Founding Philosophy and the Founding Principles of government for a free people.” The bill was generated as a piece of model legislation by ALEC, a conservative group that brings corporations and politicians together to vote on and construct bills to be used in multiple states. According to the Huffington Post, North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction, which has been tasked with drawing up the curriculum required by the Founding Principles Act, proposed on December 3 to “‘highly recommend’ social studies material from the Bill of Rights Institute,” an organization which “receives funding from the billionaire Koch brothers.”

Privacy

• Press release: Permission granted for judicial review of DRIPA

  A judicial review of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) has been granted permission by Mr Justice Lewis in the High Court today. Open Rights Group (ORG) and Privacy International (PI) intervened in the case, which was brought by Tom Watson MP and David Davis MP, represented by Liberty. ORG and PI have now been given permission to make further submissions in advance of the next hearing.

Civil Rights

• The victim-blaming hypocrisy of Rep. Peter King

  In case you have been living under a rock this week, a grand jury in New York City borough of Staten Island declined to return an indictment this week against a police officer who put a chokehold on a man who was allegedly committing the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes. This chokehold resulted in the man’s death. The man’s name was Eric Garner, and the chokehold and subsequent application of pressure to his head and neck by the same officer directly led to Garner’s death.

  There is full video of the incident. None of the facts are in dispute. The officer in question had three colleagues with him. Garner was unarmed. Unlike the case in Ferguson where officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown with no indictment, there is no way that Daniel Pantaleo, the New York City police officer in question, could have claimed that he felt his life was in danger. The chokehold he used was banned as a tactic by the NYPD. Even worse, Garner complained no fewer than 11 times that he was unable to breathe because of Pantaleo’s actions. And yet no indictment was returned against the officer who committed an unequivocal homicide.

• And Now, to Discuss Police Killings: Rush Limbaugh?

• Torture Enablers Spin Unreleased Senate Report

  The fact that former CIA officials might object to a report critical of the CIA isn’t that surprising. But these accounts, along with the stories stoking fears about attacks on US facilities as payback for the Senate report, serve to obscure the more important findings about CIA torture and deception: As Marcy Wheeler (Emptywheel, 4/2/14) has noted, there is plenty of evidence of the CIA lying to Congress about torture. Wheeler (2/22/10) has also shown that Michael Hayden has lied to Congress too, which is something to keep in mind as journalists bring him on television to discuss whether or not the agency ever misled anyone.

• The Most Gruesome Moments in the CIA ‘Torture Report’

  Interrogations that lasted for days on end. Detainees forced to stand on broken legs, or go 180 hours in a row without sleep. A prison so cold, one suspect essentially froze to death. The Senate Intelligence Committee is finally releasing its review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs. And it is brutal.

• Here are the names of the 119 prisoners who were detained in the CIA’s secret prisons program

  The Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program for the first time released the names of all the prisoners who were detained in secret prisons around the world. Of the 119, 20 names were previously unknown.

• The Debate about Torture We’re Not Having: Exploitation

  Partly by design, the debate about torture that has already started in advance of tomorrow’s Torture Report release is focused on efficacy, with efficacy defined as obtaining valuable intelligence. Torture apologists say torture provided intelligence that helped to find Osama bin Laden. Torture critics refute this, noting that any intelligence CIA got from those who were tortured either preceded or long post-dated the torture.

  Even setting aside my belief that, even if torture “worked” to elicit valuable intelligence, it still wouldn’t justify it, there’s a big problem with pitching the debate in those terms.

• Senate report: CIA misled public on torture

• Live Coverage of the Senate Torture Report

  One of the worst myths official Washington and its establishment media have told itself about the torture debate is that the controversy is limited to three cases of waterboarding at Guantánamo and a handful of bad Republican actors. In fact, a wide array of torture techniques were approved at the highest levels of the U.S. Government and then systematically employed in lawless US prisons around the world – at Bagram (including during the Obama presidency), CIA black sites, even to US citizens on US soil. So systematic was the torture regime that a 2008 Senate report concluded that the criminal abuses at Abu Ghraib were the direct result of the torture mentality imposed by official Washington.

• CIA torture report released: latest news

  • CIA lied to Senate and White House on torture methods: report

• Obama Would Not — Cannot — Deem Any Activities Authorized by Gloves Come Off Finding Illegal

  Just 3 days after he assumed the Presidency, a drone strike Obama authorized killed as many as 11 civilians, including one child, and gravely injured a 14 year old boy, Farim Qureshi. And several years into his Administration, Obama ordered the CIA to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with no due process. As far as we know, both of those things were done using that very same Finding, the Finding that Romero would like Obama to declare authorized war crimes.

Intellectual Monopolies

• We’re Back at the World Intellectual Property Organization to Fight For Users’ Rights at the UN

  EFF is in Geneva this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), where the organization’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is gathered to debate proposals for a treaty to give new legal rights to broadcasters, and for instruments that would standardize copyright limitations and exceptions for libraries, archives, educators and researchers.

• The True Cost Of Corporate Sovereignty For The EU: €3.5bn Already Paid, €30bn Demanded – Even Before TAFTA/TTIP

  While the debate about the inclusion of a corporate sovereignty chapter in TAFTA/TTIP continues to rage in the EU, the European Commission insists there’s nothing to worry about here. In a recent article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (original in German), the new European Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmström, wrote that EU member states have signed 1400 agreements with other nations that included corporate sovereignty provisions — implying that such investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) elements are perfectly normal, don’t cause problems, and won’t cause problems.

• Copyrights

  • Copyright Hub Goes Public: Where’s the Public Domain?

    It’s certainly hugely welcome that the technology behind the Hub will be open sourced. Unfortunately, that’s about the most open part of the new site: the rest of it is all about asking “permission”, a word that figures frequently throughout the site. Of course, given that this is a copyright hub, and that it has been funded by the creative industries, that’s perhaps understandable. But it is also rather retrogressive – unlike the open-sourcing of the code – and unbalanced.

    One of the most important shifts in the creative world in recent years has been to open licensing, encouraging a *permissionless* approach to building on the work of others, which of course is what has taken place for most of human history. Indeed, the Copyright Hub tends to treat copyright as if it were the eternal background of creativity, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. For most of human history (and prehistory), nothing like copyright existed or was felt necessary. Copyright is not natural, but a modern aberration when viewed in the larger historical context.

    This skewed view of the world makes itself felt throughout the site. For example, in the Discover section, where we “find out all about copyright”, there is not a single mention of the fact that copyright is temporary, or that the ultimate state of creativity is as part of the great commons known as the public domain. Indeed, I couldn’t find any reference to the public domain anywhere in my quick look through most of the Web pages.

  • UK Users Need 27 Services to Get Most Popular Films, Report Finds

    If UK Internet users want access to most recent popular film content they’ll need to remember a lot of passwords. A new survey from KPMG has found that while overall availability is good, users wanting the best will have to use a patience-challenging 27 services.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Marines ask Northrop Grumman to switch G/ATOR radar computers from Windows to Linux software

U.S. Marine Corps leaders are ready to switch software operating systems in a radar system designed to protect Marines on attack beaches from rockets, artillery, mortars, cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other low observables.

Linux Mobile-Desktop Convergence

Over the past couple of years there has been talk of mobile-desktop convergence from various mobile and desktop OS providers. As a general concept, this sounds fantastic! Unfortunately once we dive into things a bit deeper, it appears this is easier said than done.

Server

• Docker: Here, take the wheel – now YOU can run your own containers

  Docker is all the rage among hip startups and early adopters, but Docker the company would like to get its tech into enterprises, too – which is why it’s working on adapting its hosted Docker Hub service into a product specifically targeting large business customers.

• Docker Founder Must Right His Ship

  Success can build a feedback loop that sustains its own momentum, making those who are successful certain they are doing the right thing. I don’t want to charge Docker with such hubris, but recent events illustrate why open source code projects function the way they do.

Kernel Space

• Greg Kroah-Hartman on Contributing to the Kernel, Life as a Maintainer, Beer, and More

  A Reddit AMA last week with Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer and Linux Foundation Fellow, went beyond the usual questions about his workstation setup and job description. Much of that was preempted by Kroah-Hartman’s lengthy list of resources where the un-initiated can find his previous writing and presentations on those topics. Instead, he was able to answer more timely and specific questions which ranged from his thoughts on specific kernel patches, to the overall development process, to personal questions about his family, work habits and favorite beer. Below is an edited digest of some of the best responses. Visit the r/linux subreddit for the full AMA.

• Linus Torvalds releases Linux 3.18 as 3.17 wobbles

  Linus Torvalds has pressed the go button for a new release of his eponymous kernel.

  Linux version 3.18 was loosed on Sunday, US time, after what Torvalds wrote was a “tiny” patch to get release candidate 7 done.

• Linux 3.18 released

• Linux Kernel 3.18 Released, This Is What’s New

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 10.4 Is Delayed A Few Days As It’s Busted On Older GPUs

    The release of Mesa 10.4 is being dragged out by a few days due to a regression affecting older GPUs/drivers that causes this new Mesa version to be in bad shape. Hopefully by the end of this coming week though, Mesa 10.4.0 will be christened.

  • Intel Skylake Support Merged Into Mainline Mesa

  • The Future Direction & Purpose Of Wayland’s Weston Is Being Revisited

    Pekka Paalanen, the Collabora developer who has effectively been serving as the Wayland/Weston release manager with Kristian Høgsberg still being away from Wayland development, is seeking some discussion from Wayland developers about their intended view of Wayland’s Weston compositor and what direction it should take moving forward.

  • NVIDIA 346.22 Beta Adds X.Org Server 1.17 Support, Fixes

    Just a few days after the NVIDIA 343.36 Linux driver release, NVIDIA has outed the next beta in the NVIDIA 346 Linux driver series.

Applications

• PostInstallerF – A Post Installer Tool To Make A Perfect, Full-fledged Fedora, Ubuntu, And Manjaro Distro

• PhpMyAdmin Gets Biggest Update this Year with Version 4.3.0

  PhpMyAdmin is a famous tool written in PHP and it’s built to handle the administration of MySQL databases. The developers have just released a major upgrade that should prove to be quite interesting.

• 14 top data recovery softwares – Data rescue tools

  Data recovery is the process of salvaging and handling the data through the data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives, solid-state drives (SSD), USB flash drive, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system (OS).

• Instructionals/Technical

  • A beginner’s guide to bash scripting

  • How to use Evernote from the command line on Linux

  • 9 mail/mailx command examples to send emails from command line on Linux

  • Computing without a Computer

  • How to Manually Install NVIDIA Beta Drivers in Ubuntu

  • The Ultimate Windows 8.1 And Ubuntu Dual Boot Guide

• Games

  • Unvanquished Alpha 34 Brings Fixes, Still Being Ported To PNaCl

  • Speculation: BioShock Infinite Might Be An EON Port

    After the BioShock Infinite SteamDB entry was found by Linux users we’ve been debating who’s going to be behind the port and it might very well be Virtual Programming. Prepare for some speculation.

  • iO Is a New Abstract 2D Platformer Game for Linux

    iO is a new type of 2D platformer developed by Gamious and published on Steam by KISS ltd. A Linux version was also made available, along with the support for the other platforms.

  • Valve’s Dota 2 Game Can (Still) Run Natively On Mir

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Randa Meetings 2014 – Another Great Success

    It’s been quite some time since the Randa Meetings 2014 and even this year’s edition of the KDE Community Summit called Akademy has already happened, but it’s still nice to look back and see what was accomplished at this KDE Tech Summit in the middle of the Swiss Alps.

  • On porting Fcitx KCM module to KF5

    Porting Fcitx KCM to KF5 is not that easy. It’s not only about porting kcm itself, but also porting missing part of fcitx-qt5 to Qt5 (mostly widgets). The old pkgconfig file is quite messed up, so I decided to experiment with extra-cmake-modules (ECM) a bit.

  • Dolphin Overlay Icons for ownCloud Sync Client

    Our recent ownCloud Client 1.7.0 release contains the new feature of overlay icons in GNOME nautilus, MacOSX and Windows. That is nice, but that makes us as old KDE guys sad as Dolphin was missing on the list.

  • Why do(n’t) you use Activities?

    On our quest for improving the concept of Virtual Desktops and Activities on the KDE Desktop, we once again ask you to share your experiences.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • A look at new developer features

    As the development window for GNOME 3.16 advances, I’ve been adding a few new developer features…

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Ultimate Edition 4.3

    What is Ultimate Edition 4.3? Ultimate Edition 4.3 was built from the ground up debootstrapped from the Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Thar tree using Tmosb (TheeMahn’s Operating System Builder) which is also included in this release. This release is a Long Term Supported (LTS) release, supported until the year 2019. This release is most certainly worthy of the Ultimate Edition title. I personally hate KDE, and found it very visually attractive in all its “Wobbly Windowness” that I miss from the Mate desktop environment. I must admit I do miss the eyecandy that it provides off the rip. I have included many, many tools I am constructing that reside under the hood of virtually all Ultimate Edition releases, most newer and upgraded.

  • SparkyLinux 3.6 LXDE, MATE, Razor-Qt & Xfce

    I am happy to announce the fourth and the last this year iso images of SparkyLinux 3.6 “Annagerman” LXDE, MATE, Razor-Qt and Xfce. At the beginning, I’d like to thank to all of our small but strong community members for their help with searching and solving bugs and problems.

• Screenshots

  • OpenSUSE 13.2 GNOME Edition : Video Overview and Screenshot Tours

  • MakuluLinux 7.0 Xfce Screenshot Tour

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat (RHT) Stock Declines Today After Analyst Downgrade

  • Wells Fargo Cuts Red Hat To Hold, Says Stock Lacks Catalysts, Has Little Upside

  • Red Hat product president Paul Cormier disses the Docker myth

    So just what is the relationship between red-hot container company Docker and open source stalwart Red Hat? Are the two companies on the same side, or not? Do Docker containers complement or compete with Red Hat’s Linux offerings?

    To get some answers, I talked with Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies, and he had some pretty strong opinions on the subject. But it all boils down to Red Hat’s position that container technology (and Docker) simply isn’t the be-all and end-all that many people seem to want it to be—at least not in the enterprise.

  • Fedora

    • LiveUSB-Creator Is Ready For Fedora 21

      Fedora’s Live USB Creator, aptly named liveusb-creator, hasn’t seen much attention recently but with Fedora 21 due out tomorrow it was updated just in time. The latest version, liveusb-creator 3.13, is now available in the Fedora repositories.

    • The Cockpit Management Console In Fedora 21 Makes Linux Administration Easy

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Devuan: Unto Us a Fork Is Born

      We knew it was possible; the signs were all there. The Systemd Inferno, after all, had been raging for far too long.

      But more than a few of us were still holding out hope. “Things will surely get better,” we thought.

      Then the news came. The rumored Debian fork has now become real, and its name is “Devuan.”

    • MX-14.3 Is an OS Based on Debian That Can Bring Old Computers Back to Life

      MX-14, a fast, lightweight, and easy-to-install Linux Live CD distribution based on Debian stable, for Intel-AMD x86-compatible systems, has been upgraded to version 14.3 and is now available for download.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 15.04 to Get GTK+ 3.14 and Updated GNOME Packages

        The Ubuntu devs are considering upgrading the GTK+ packages to the latest 3.14 version, which was made available just a couple of months ago, a decision that would really help a number of other Ubuntu flavors as well.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 17.1 Freshens Up Linux Desktop

          Linux Mint 17.1, which was officially released on Nov. 29, provides users of the popular Linux desktop with an incremental update and some additional polish. Code-named Rebecca, Linux Mint 17.1 offers a choice of desktop user interfaces, the two primary ones being MATE and Cinnamon. The MATE desktop is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop environment. The GNOME Linux desktop community moved to the GNOME 3 desktop in 2011, a move that some desktop users did not embrace. In the Linux Mint 17.1 MATE edition, support has been added for the Compiz window manager, which can enable a desktop with multiple special effects for window transitions and events. The Cinnamon desktop, which was created by Linux Mint creator Celement Lefebvre, provides users with a familiar GNOME 2 look but also adds some of the advanced capabilities of newer GNOME releases. Linux Mint 17.1 builds on the innovations that first debuted in Linux Mint 17 earlier this year, with usability, interface and performance gains in several areas. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the improvements in the Linux Mint 17.1 release.

Devices/Embedded

• How to get the most out of a Raspberry Pi? Your tech questions answered

  From robotics kits and ultrasound sensors to Arduino-based accessories and Lego Mindstorms

• Tinkering with the Raspberry Pi A+

  The Raspberry Pi team is on fire (in a good way), making new Raspberry Pi models faster than we can review them.

• $6 quad core SoC targets low cost 4K set-top boxes

  Allwinner unveiled a $6 “H3″ SoC targeting $35 to $50 OTT STBs, featuring four Cortex-A7 cores, a Mali-400 GPU, 4K HDMI output, and 5MP camera support.

  [...]

  Android and Linux are the most likely platforms here.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Samsung’s Gear VR headset is on sale now for $199

      The Gear VR, Samsung’s virtual reality headset, is now on sale through AT&T and Samsung’s US sites. The $199 headset fits around a Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, turning it into a mobile VR display. It was originally announced in September, but it’s so far only been slated for a vague early December launch, though it’s been available to try at a handful of malls around the country. The Gear VR was built in partnership with Oculus, and it incorporates a tracking sensor from the first Oculus Rift development kit, as well as a custom “Oculus Home” interface app. Unlike the Rift, though, it’s wireless and fairly light, and if you’ve already got a Note 4, it’s somewhat cheaper (if you don’t, you’ll have to add an extra $800 to the price above.) While it’s more polished than the current version of the Oculus Rift, however, it’s still an “Innovator Edition,” so be warned that you’re still essentially participating in a mass beta test of virtual reality.

    • Tizen DevLab and portathon coming to London 13 December

  • Android

    • A hacker’s journey: freeing a phone from the ground up, first part

      Every once in a while, an unexpected combination of circumstances ends up enabling us to do something pretty awesome. This is the story of one of those times. About a year ago, a member of the Replicant community started evaluating a few targets from CyanogenMod and noticed some interesting ones. After some early research, he picked a device: the LG Optimus Black (P970), bought one and started porting Replicant to it. After a few encouraging results, he was left facing issues he couldn’t overcome and decided to give up with the port. As the device could still be an interesting target for Replicant, we decided to buy the phone from him so that I could pick up the work where he stalled.

    • Commercials for Amazon’s crappy phone in Amazon Prime videos?

      If you want your phone to sell, make it better. If it’s as good as other Android-based phones or as good as the iPhone then people will buy it. But you DO NOT disrupt someone’s TV show to peddle your second-rate phone or any of your other products.

      I canceled Amazon Prime tonight. If you want my business back, Amazon, then make sure you remove all commercial interruptions from Prime programming. Otherwise, I’ll be using Netflix exclusively. If I wanted commercials, I’d watch network TV or cable.

    • The best Android phones for the holiday season

      There are lots of Android phones out there, but sometimes it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Fortunately, Android Central has a holiday guide to help you complete your Android shopping list.

    • The best Android phones

      These are the best Android smartphones that are currently available. Price listed is for each carrier’s monthly payment over 24 months. Up-front, on-contract pricing will be higher, usually between $100 and $300, depending on the phone. Click through to each carrier’s listing for off-contract costs.

Why Channel 4 chose open-source MuleSoft over ‘prohibitively expensive’ Oracle and Microsoft

Channel 4 is using MuleSoft open-source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in order to more efficiently share information on application program interfaces (API) with businesses outside the broadcaster.

SK Telecom develops open-source oneM2M IoT platform

SK Telecom has completed the development of an open-source Internet of Things platform based on OneM2M, the M2M and IoT standards partnership, Business Korea reports. SK Telecom launched an M2M platform in 2008. The operator has also participated in the development of open-source platform Mobius from late 2011 as a national project, together with the Korea Electronics Technology Institute and Ntels. As oneM2M announced a candidate for an IoT/M2M standard in August of this year, SK Telecom implemented the standard with the Mobius, finishing the development of a commercialization-ready platform.

Events

• LLVM 2014 Developer Meeting Slides & Videos

  The slides and videos from the 2014 LLVM Developers’ Meeting that took place in San Jose at the end of October are now online.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Leverage Strong Development Tools from Your Browser

    There continues to be very strong demand for web and application development skills in the job market, and there is especially demand for people familiar with open development tools. One of the biggest trends going among developers is leveraging browser extensions focused on developers.

  • Mozilla Joins Hour of Code

    This campaign launched in 2013, to align with Computer Science Education Week, and to demystify code and show that anyone can learn the basics. While we’re surrounded by technology and the web in our daily lives, few people understand how it all works. In our mission to protect the open web as a global resource for all, we must educate others about how and why the web exists, but also how the web is a creative platform with endless possibilities and opportunities now and for our future.

SaaS/Big Data

• Cloudera and Others Rally Behind Hadoop Challenger Spark

• Landing your first contribution, OpenStack dominates open source cloud, and more

  Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

• “Mr. Windows” Bets Big On The Mesosphere Datacenter OS [Ed: it’s this thug]

• Silicon Valley high rollers toss $36m at ‘data centre OS’ Mesosphere

• Mesosphere Raises $36M From Khosla Ventures to Build Out Data Center Operating System

  Mesosphere will accelerate development of its data center operating system with $36 million in funding it received in a round led by Khosla Ventures, one of the Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capital fims. In June, Mesosphere raised $10 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

• Mesosphere’s new data center mother brain will blow your mind

  The DCOS also includes common OS features one would would find in Linux or Windows, like a graphical user interface, command-line interface and a software-development kit.

Funding

• Errplane Snags $8.1M To Continue Building Open Source InfluxDB Time Series Database

  Errplane founders Paul Dix and Todd Persen had an idea for a company last year around anomaly detection in data center monitoring, but they soon realized that field was crowded and it would take a long time to build out the infrastructure for the company. At the same, time they heard from customers they were more interested in the underlying infrastructure than the service they were offering, and they did something brave. They decided to pivot and build an open source product that would meet the needs of the entire market, rather than try to compete directly.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU wget 1.16.1 released

Public Services/Government

• European Commission to update its open source policy

  The European Commission wants to make it easier for its software developers to submit patches and add new functionalities to open source projects. Contributing to open source communities will be made central to the EC’s new open source policy, expects Pierre Damas, Head of Sector at the Directorate General for IT (DIGIT). “We use a lot of open source components that we adapt and integrate, and it is time that we contribute back.”

Openness/Sharing

• OpenMotics improves home automation

  OpenMotics is an open source home automation hardware and software system that offers features like switching lights and outputs, multi-zone heating and cooling, power measurements, and automated actions. The system encompases both open source software and hardware. For interoperability with other systems, the OpenMotics Gateway provides an API through which various actions can be executed.

• Wanted: a tinkerer’s charter

  Users should be allowed to fiddle with the way consumer products work without suffering penalties from governments or sanctions from manufacturers

Standards/Consortia

• Lithuania e-government cloud gets document management tools

  “Out of 3500 public administrations and government institutions in the country, 2500 do not yet have a DMS”, says Arelija Orlova, a specialist working for Lithuania’s Information Society Development Committee. “By including this in SIRIP, we expect an increase in the use of e-documents, boosting electronic government services.”

More than a billion dollars a week in lost data

Australian businesses lose over $65 billion a year from data loss and downtime per year, according to major new global study.

Storage vendor EMC has published its annual global Data Protection Index, which includes data specifically on Australia.

It found that more than three quarters (78%) of Australian IT professionals are not fully confident in their ability to recover information following an incident, and that 58% of organisations in Australia still lack a disaster recovery plan for emerging workloads, and just 7% have plans for big data, hybrid cloud and mobile.

Science

• Germany: ‘International competitiveness depends on ICT’

  Germany’s international industrial position will rely on its increasing use of ICT, the Digital Economy Working Group writes in a report prepared for an IT summit in Hamburg last October. In all classic industries, innovation will rely on the use of ICT, the working group reports: “The digital economy is crucial for the future of Germany.”

Security

• Security advisories for Monday

Transparency Reporting

• Why aren’t more news outlets covering Sen. Rockefeller’s shameful attempt to kill FOIA reform?

  An uncontroverisal, mild Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reform bill may die on Monday, despite passing 410-0 in the House earlier this year, and with a similar bipartisan vote expected in the Senate. The bill had already been stripped of its most substantive provisions that government agencies objected to, but on Thursday, Democractic Senator Jay Rockefeller—who is set to retire at the end of the year—unilaterally placed a hold on the bill, apparently doing the bidding of federal agencies who don’t want any more of their communications subject to public scrutiny. (Senate rules allow a single Senator to hold up votes on bills in certain situations.)

• Julian Assange clocks up four years at the Ecuadorian embassy

  WIKILEAKER Julian Assange is entering his fifth year as a man with a travel toothbrush and the heavy weight of legal charges over his head.

  Assange is languishing in luxury or spending his time between chair and treadmill, depending on who you listen to. He most certainly is not at liberty, however, and has been living in a room at the Ecuadorian embassy.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Chicken farmer who spoke out about factory farm abuses immediately audited by Perdue

  Almost immediately after the animal welfare group Compassion in World Farming released a video exposing the “humane” (read: atrocious) conditions for chickens raised on a factory farm for Perdue, the poultry giant audited the farmer who opened his doors to the cameras.

• The Pentagon — the climate elephant: Expose the Pentagon, the world’s largest & most dangerous climate criminal!

  There is an elephant in the climate debate that by U.S. demand cannot be discussed or even seen. This agreement to ignore the elephant is now the accepted basis of all international negotiations on climate change.

  It is well understood by every possible measurement that the Pentagon, the U.S. military machine, is the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products and the world’s worst polluter of greenhouse gas emissions and many other toxic pollutants. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.

  Ever since the Kyoto Accords or Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1998, in an effort to gain U.S. compliance, all U.S. military operations worldwide and within the U.S. are exempt from measurement or agreements on reduction. The U.S. Congress passed an explicit provision guaranteeing U.S. military exemptions. (Interpress Service, May 20, 1998)

Finance

• Tories seek to avert rift with Church of England over food bank report

  Party blamed for rising use of food banks in church-funded report which links growing poverty to austerity measures

• A Quarter Of Brits Fear The Sack Due To Lack Of Digital Skills

  And 45% of professionals do not know where to go to further IT knowledge, according to a Code.org UK study

  There is a huge disparity amongst UK professionals around their attitudes to digital literacy and skills, with 40% admitting they have average to poor digital knowledge.

• U.S. Children Suffer From Federal Healthcare Policy

  16.1 million children in the United States are currently living in poverty.

Privacy

• Response to the HASC report on RIPA

  “When a senior Parliamentary Committee says that the current legislation is not fit for purpose, then this simply cannot be ignored. It is now abundantly clear that the law is out of date, the oversight is weak and the recording of how the powers are used is patchy at best. The public is right to expect better.

  “The conclusion of the Committee that the level of secrecy surrounding the use of these powers is permitting investigations that are deemed ”unacceptable in a democracy”, should make the defenders of these powers sit up and take notice. At present, the inadequacy and inconsistency of the records being kept by public authorities regarding the use of these powers is woefully inadequate. New laws would not be required to correct this.

• HASC concludes that surveillance legislation is “not fit for purpose”.

  The Home Affairs Select Committee has published a report today into the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, concluding that the legislation “is not fit for purpose” and “needs a complete overhaul”.

• A shadowy consortium opposes your Internet privacy

  It should be obvious why we need SPDY. Ever since Edward Snowden demonstrated that Internet paranoia is justified, a stream of discoveries has made always-on, end-to-end encryption even more desirable. The recent move by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, and others, who announced they will back a new nonprofit to promote and enable secure communications on the Internet, was welcome – by most of us.

• Secretive UK Court That Approves Of GCHQ Surveillance Says That GCHQ Surveillance Doesn’t Violate Human Rights

  For a while now, we’ve been covering various legal challenges in Europe related to the GCHQ’s surveillance activities. One of the main cases, brought by Amnesty International and Privacy International, argued that the surveillance violated the European Convention on Human Rights (specifically article 8, on right to privacy, and article 10, on freedom of expression). While it was always expected that the case would eventually go to the European Court of Human Rights, the first step was the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in the UK — a secretive court that reviews complaints about surveillance, but (as with nearly all “secretive courts” charged with “oversight” on the intelligence community) almost always sides with the intelligence community. Between 2000 and 2012 the IPT only sided against the intelligence community 10 times out of 1468 cases brought (about half of one percent of all cases). In other words, this is a court that (in secret) regularly okays GCHQ’s surveillance efforts on UK citizens.

• Court finds that GCHQ’s Tempora is fine and dandy

  THE UK COURTS have found that GCHQ’s Tempora system is legal in principle under the inglorious Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

  Pressure group Privacy International challenged Tempora in the courts, and this weekend it got its answer. It did not like it.

• The beginning of the end of the private mail server

  Thanks to overzealous filtering by mail relays, the small mail server is becoming an endangered species

• NSA warrantless bulk phone metadata spying continues unabated

  The NSA’s bulk phone metadata spying program was renewed for another 90 days, the fourth time the warrantless snooping has been reauthorized following President Barack Obama promising reform last January, the government said Monday.

Civil Rights

• New York City Officer Cleared In Chokehold Death Was Sued By Other Black Men

  The white New York City police officer who put unarmed black Staten Island resident Eric Garner in a chokehold moments before his death has been accused by other black men of violating their civil rights while he was on patrol.

  A grand jury’s decision on Wednesday not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for his role in the videotaped confrontation that left 43-year-old Garner dead has sparked days of protests by groups claiming U.S. law enforcement unfairly targets African-Americans and other minorities.

• Farage blames immigration for traffic on M4 after no-show at Ukip reception

  The Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, has blamed his late arrival at an event on immigration. He was due to appear at a “meet the leader” drinks reception as Ukip prepared to host its first Welsh conference. But he was running more than two hours late and failed to show.

• No felony charges for SPD cop’s bone-breaking punch of handcuffed woman

  Federal prosecutors say they will review an incident in which a Seattle police officer punched and seriously injured a handcuffed, intoxicated woman, after King County prosecutors said Friday they won’t charge the officer.

• Another Batch Of Baggage Handlers Accused Of Stealing From Luggage; Because Airport ‘Security’ Isn’t

  Now, if this were a one time thing, it might not even be that noteworthy. But this seems like fairly common practice at airports. A few years ago, we wrote about TSA agents stealing iPads and stories of TSA agents and baggage handlers stealing stuff from luggage are not at all hard to find. In fact, reports from a few years ago noted that over 400 TSA employees have been fired for stealing from passnegers in the past decade.

• Kennedy Airport bag handlers accused of stealing from passengers’ luggage

  Seven bag handlers at Kennedy Airport have been charged with stealing electronics, jewelry and other items worth more than $20,000 from checked luggage, Queens prosecutors said Wednesday.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Piracy ≠ Theft? Movie Industry Workers Speak Out

    The mantra often heard from Hollywood’s leaders is that pirates are thieves. However, not all people in the industry feel that way. Today we present the views of four regular filmmakers on this controversial topic, what the impact is on the industry, and what can be done in response.

  • Concern Over Russian “Piracy Buster” Internet Tax

    Russian officials have expressed caution over proposals to introduce an Internet tax to compensate copyright holders for online piracy. The proposals, which were put forward by the Russian Union of Rightsholders, are said to be worth around $860m a year to creators.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

U.S. Marine Corps Wants to Change OS for Radar System from Windows XP to Linux

When it comes to stability and performance, nothing can really beat Linux. This is why the U.S. Marine Corps leaders have decided to ask Northrop Grumman Corp. Electronic Systems to change the operating system of the newly delivered Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar (G/ATOR) from Windows XP to Linux.

Prisoners learning how to code with Linux

Seems like a great idea to me. It makes sense to prepare inmates for life outside of prison with useful skills, and the Linux job market is certainly hot right now.

Server

• U.S. Exascale Supercomputer will Obsolete China’s Tianhe-2

  American intelligence agencies announced Friday their plans to develop and build a new superconducting supercomputer that will increase the current computing capacity while simultaneously reducing energy consumption and the physical footprint of the machines.

Kernel Space

• Some stable kernel updates

• New Features On The Horizon For The Linux Kernel

  Besides the many Linux graphics driver changes for Linux 3.19, there’s many other non-graphics features out on the horizon in kernel land — some of which might land in Linux 3.19 but most of the other items are post-3.19 material. Linux 4.0 also isn’t likely far out.

• Linux 3.18 Kernel Released, But It Doesn’t Fix That Odd Regression

• Linux 3.18 released

  It’s been a quiet week, and the patch from rc7 is tiny, so 3.18 is out.

• Linux Kernel 3.17.5 Officially Released

  A new version of the Linux kernel, 3.17.5, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman and it’s now the latest and most advanced version that you can get, at least for a few hours. The 3.18 branch is scheduled to make an appearance very soon.

• Graphics Stack

  • Major AMD Catalyst Linux Update Expected Next Week

    Due out next week is a very significant update to AMD’s Catalyst Linux graphics driver as they continue to work towards the unified AMD Linux driver strategy.

  • Major NVIDIA Stable Driver Released

  • NVIDIA 343.36 Updates Stable Drivers With Bug Fixes, New Kernel/X.Org Support

    While NVIDIA’s 346 Linux driver series is in beta with a great deal of improvements and new features, for those sticking to the 343.xx stable series there is out this Friday the 343.36 driver.

  • Exciting Graphics Driver Changes Coming In Linux 3.19

    With Linux 3.18 likely coming out today, we can begin focusing more of our attention and testing on the code that will become the Linux 3.19 kernel over the weeks ahead. Once again, when it comes to the DRM graphics driver changes, there’s lots of exciting improvements.

  • AMD A10-7800 Kaveri: Radeon Gallium3D Improves, But Still Tough Catalyst Fight

    It’s been a while since last running any open-source vs. closed-source Linux graphics driver benchmarks with AMD Kaveri APUs, but with being busy adding some Kaveri systems to the new Linux test farm, I ran some fresh Linux GPU driver tests on an AMD A10-7800 system. Here’s results on Ubuntu 14.10 — plus with Linux 3.18 and Mesa 10.5-devel — while compared to the latest Catalyst binary blob.

• Benchmarks

  • Sporadic Behavior With Linux 3.16 vs. 3.17 vs. 3.18 Test Results

    Here’s some more Linux 3.18 kernel benchmarks I did with the final release due out likely today. However, these results seem to be a bit odd.

    With an Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system on an ASRock X99 Extreme3 motherboard with 16GB of DDR4 memory, 256GB Corsair Force LX SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 graphics I did some fresh benchmarks using the stable Linux 3.16 and 3.17 kernels. The stable vanilla kernels were compared to Linux 3.18 Git — all kernels obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

Applications

• CDEmu – A Virtual CD/DVD Drive For Linux

  As you may know, CDEmu is a tool to emulate an optical drive(CD/DVD ROMs) in Linux. Using this tool you can mount images like ISO, BIN, IMG, and MNF without the need of a physical drive. Automounting is also possible. This simple and useful was developed by a small group of friends named Robert Penz and Justus Schwartz. Originally, this app was named Virtual CD, and then was renamed to CDEMU back in 2007 due to trademark issues.

• alienwave: The fast and the furious

• phpMyAdmin version 4.3

• PHPUnit 4.4

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Install eZ Publish Community Project on a CentOS 7 VPS with Nginx and PHP-FPM

  • How To Install Kernel 3.17.5 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Kadu 1.2 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install CherryTree 0.35.5 On Ubuntu, Debian And Derivative Systems

  • How to upgrade Ubuntu 14.10 kernel to version 3.17.1

  • How to upgrade the Linux Mint 17.1 kernel from version 3.13 to 3.16

  • Palm tree, volcano, hospital: How to enable emoji on any Android phone

  • pointer acceleration in libinput – building a DPI database for mice

  • Hive: dealing with Out of Memory and Garbage Collector errors.

  • Hyper-v to Kvm

  • virt-manager 1.0 creates qcow2 images that don’t work on RHEL6

  • Docker Quick Start Guide

  • Configured Zabbix to keep my server cool

  • Mirrormanager and ansible FAD (day 3)

  • How To Install Xtreme Download Manager (XDMAN) 4.7 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 , Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install BRL-CAD 24.2.0 On Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE And Derivative Systems

  • WideOpenId – woid.cryptobitch.de

    Uh, I meant to blog about this a while ago, but somehow, it got lost… Anyway, I was inspired by http://openid.aliz.es and intrigued by OpenID I set out to find an implementation that comes with an acceptable level of required effort to set up and run.

• Games

  • Dota 2 In H1’2015 Will Receive Major Engine Update

    While there’s been signs for months that within Valve’s Dota 2 game that it’s transitioning from the Source Engine to Source Engine 2, it looks like Valve’s next-generation game engine will be fully utilized within this multiplayer online battle arena game in 2015.

  • Mutant Aliens!: We gotta get out of this place

  • Enter the Gungeon Set To Release on PS4, PC, Mac and Linux in 2015

    Enter the Gungeon was revealed earlier today at the Sony keynote. It is a brand new gunfighting dungeon crawler that is set to come out in 2015 for PS4, PC, Mac and Linux from Devolver Digital and the development studio Dodge Roll. Take on the role of one of several Gungeoneers, each haunted by their past and looking for a brighter tomorrow, as you Enter the Gungeon. Set your sights on the Cult of the Gundead as you blast through hand-designed chambers of the Gungeon’s constantly evolving labyrinth of firepower.

  • The Developer Of ‘Pixel Piracy’ Has Announced New Mystery Game

    One of the developers have confirmed that the new game will be available for Linux…

  • SteamLUG December Linux Gaming Events

  • Valve Fixes Steam for Linux Game Broadcast with New Update

    Valve has released a new Beta version of the Steam client, and the developers have fixed a number of problems, especially for the newly added Broadcast feature that is still far from working properly.

  • Desura’s Linux Client Will Finally See An Update Soon

    Looks like Bad Juju’s acquisition of Desura will pay off for us Linux gamers soon. They tweeted to let people know the Desura client updates are currently in testing!

  • Minimalist Platformer ’6180 The Moon’ Available For Linux

    The platformer from developer Turtle Cream has some very interesting mechanics and a beautiful soundtrack and is a welcome addition to our platform for fans of the genre. It has been available for Linux since 24th November according to the official announcement on Steam, but we would have missed it had it not been for a tip from a reader.

Distributions

• Antergos Is Working Out Well For Measuring Up Arch Linux

  This past week I’ve been carrying out a number of system installations using Antergos as an Arch-based distribution with its quick and easy GUI/CLI installer. In seeking somewhat of a stable/sane base of settings and default packages that’s easy to reproduce by others on independent systems yet still rolling-release with Arch, I’ve been happy with Antergos thus far.

• Budgie: A Lightweight, Chrome OS Inspired, GNOME-Aligned Desktop

  The latest new open-source Linux desktop initiative is Budgie, a desktop focused on simplicity. The Budgie desktop is now undergoing possible review for inclusion into Fedora.

  Budgie is the desktop environment designed for the Evolve OS Linux distribution. According to its developers, Budgie is “designed with the modern user in mind, it focuses on simplicity and elegance. A huge advantage for the Budgie desktop is that it is not a fork of another project, but rather one written from scratch with integration in mind.”

• New Releases

  • MakuluLinux Xfce 7 is Live !

    MakuluLinux Xfce 7 is now Live, it has been a long month for me, but it is finally done and ready for public daily use.

• Red Hat Family

  • RHQ 4.13 released

    This release contains a lot of bug fixes and smaller improvements, as well as some new features:

    Alerts have a new status ‘recovered’, that can be filtered upon

    The UI allows to hide elements that are not needed on a per user basis

    The as7/WildFly plugin now supports runtime queues and topic subscribers

    Further improvements in the Storage Nodes

  • Three Years and Counting!

    Making a quick pit stop to mark this milestone in my professional career: today is my 3-year anniversary at Red Hat! Time has certainly flown by and I really cannot believe that it has been three years since I joined this company.

  • The first CentOS Linux Rolling media release

  • Red Hat and Partners Aim to Infuse Open NFV Tools in Telco Data Centers

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 21 Is Coming In Just Two Days With Big Improvements

      Fedora 21 is the first release of the Fedora.Next initiative that separates Fedora out into three products: Fedora Cloud, Fedora Server, and Fedora Workstation. These new Fedora “products” are fairly self explanatory and it’s the Fedora 21 Workstation that most users will be after who want Fedora as a desktop operating system.

    • Fedora 21 Release on December 9 Confirmed

    • Infra FAD 2014 – Part 1: MirrorManager

      The last two days have been quite busy for the Fedora infrastructure team. Most of us are indeed meeting up in Raleigh, in the Red Hat tower down-town and together with Matt Domsch, the original developer of MirrorManager, we have been on MirrorManager2.

• Debian Family

  • The Little Woman Takes a Thin Client

    This Tutorial describes the downgrade process you need to run to get back stable after sid upgrade.

  • Dyson OS Is Trying To Pair Debian With The Illumos Kernel

    Not to be confused with the Dyson vacuum cleaners, Dyson OS is an attempt at becoming a general purpose operating system based on Debian while using the Solaris-derived Illumos kernel.

  • security.debian.org for Asia region

  • Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant

    I’m glad to announce that I’ve been awarded a 5,000 USD “Flash Grant” by the Shuttleworth Foundation.

  • Derivatives

    • Elive OS Is a Unique Debian and Enlightenment Combination

      Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses the Enlightenment desktop environment to provide a unique user experience, is now at version 2.4.6 and the developers are getting closer to a stable release.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Chasing the wrong problems

        So the real issue is if the Ubuntu Community wants to tackle it is not leadership or governance because we have brilliant leaders and members of governance but instead it is making contributors feel like they are stakeholders again and kept in the loop. Mind you, the Canonical Community Team has repeatedly promised to help Canonical employees get better at keeping the community in the loop even promising such at UDS-P but my experience has been they never really got better.

        Finally, I think an Ubuntu Foundation is still a great idea and could create some harmony between Canonical’s commercial interests and the community interests of the project. Projects that have had companies controlling the project have never had great success at sustaining a community because the commercial interests always win at the end of the day.

      • UbuTab Ubuntu/Android tablet with 1TB storage gets closer to its goal on Indiegogo (VIDEO)

        The UbuTab has already raised $15,026 of its $36,000 goal at the time of writing, with 20 more days to go. The $245 and $275 early bird tiers are already sold out, but interested backers can still pledge $290 or more. The crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo will close on Dec. 26, and the first UbuTab units are set to start shipping in March 2015. For more details about this tablet, check out the video below.

      • Dota 2 Runs Natively on Mir with the Same Performance as X11

        Canonical has been working on the Mir display server for some time, although most of their efforts have been made towards the mobile platform. They are now looking to optimize it for desktop use and nothing reflects the progress made more than a famous game running on Mir.

      • OnePlus One with Ubuntu Touch Mockup Looks Stunning

        The Ubuntu Touch operating system officially supports the Nexus 4 devices and it will be out soon on some Meizu MX 4 hardware, but that’s about it. There are some ports in the works, like the one for Nexus 5, but they are not complete.

      • Year End Core Apps Hack Days Announced for Ubuntu Touch

        Canonical is looking to improve the core apps that are already available for Ubuntu Touch and is organizing a new Core Apps Hack Days event that should galvanize the efforts of more developers towards this platform.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • DistroWatch reviews Trisquel 7.0

          There are three different versions: Trisquel, Trisquel Mini and Trisquel Sugar TOAST. Trisquel is the main version and the ISO weighs in at 1.5 GB, the Trisquel Mini ISO is just 600 MB, and Trisquel Sugar TOAST is a 500 MB educational spin.

        • Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” OEM and No-Codecs Editions Officially Released

          Clement Lefebvre, the leader of the Linux Mint project, has announced that the Linux Mint 17.1 OEM ISO images have been made available and they are now ready for download.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Yes, I’m somewhat skeptical about Samsung and open source

      Yes, I hope it’s true that Samsung will be giving back to the open source community. But seeing is believing, and I prefer to wait a while…perhaps a good long while…to see if Samsung’s real-world actions match its rhetoric and public relations efforts.

    • How Samsung hopes to evolve Into an Open Source Company

      The following video shows Samsung embarking on a journey. The journey is Open Source which was started 18 months ago with a single member, Linux and FOSS advocate Ibrahim Haddad. Fast forward to today and there are over 40 people at the new Open Source Innovation Group, which includes 20 developers, devoted full-time to working on upstream projects and helping the inroads of Open Source into Samsung.

  • Android

    • Android Circuit: Galaxy S6 Leaks, Google’s Best Android Games From 2014, Lollipop’s Big Review

    • Android L Update for HTC One M8, M7 Delayed; No Release Dates for LG G3 or Sony Xperia

      There are many Android users currently running KitKat (Android OS 4.4.4) on their devices, but long for the Lollipop (Android OS 5.0) update. Phone Arena reports that less than 0.1 percent of all Android devices are running Lollipop, and this is on a global scale. There has been a lot of speculation that some devices, such as the HTC One M7, the HTC One M8, the LG G3, and Sony Xperia series, will be the first in line to receive the Lollipop update, but this update has yet to rollout entirely for these devices.

    • AutoMath Solves Equations with Your Android Phone’s Camera

      Android: If you’re having trouble figuring out that complicated math problem, AutoMath will solve it for you and even give you step-by-step instructions—all just by pointing your camera at the equation.

    • Android 5.0.1 Lollipop update coming soon

    • 140 wallpapers for Android inspired by Google’s Material Design

    • Android’s Jack and Jill compilers head uphill to developers

      Android’s new, largely undocumented compilers are still works in progress, but aim to speed up the compilation process

    • Google’s Massive New Android Update Is Coming To The Galaxy S5

      Samsung’s flagship smartphone will soon be getting the latest version of Android, which Google has been calling its biggest mobile software update yet.

November 2014 OSI Newsletter

The OSI Board met in San Francisco, CA USA on November 11th and 12th, 2014 with a focus on strengthening the organization’s current outreach efforts and building new bridges between open source communities. The Board was excited to review five new applications for Affiliate Membership as well as implement several new initiatives to help drive Individual Membership through the recognition of various roles and levels of access among our community. This included new Individual Membership discounts for students, volunteers working on OSI supported activities, those already members of OSI Affiliate organizations, members of Free Software Foundation and complimentary memberships based on need.

Pydio: open source alternative to Dropbox & Box

Pydio 6.0 an open source file sharing solution that is said to offer “tight control of information” on the scale demanded by enterprises and service providers.

Open Source Continues its March into the Enterprise

These include LibreOffice and OpenOffice for front-office productivity tools, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Ingres for databases, Pentaho for decision support, SugarCRM and Hipergate for customer relationship management, Apache Lucene, Opentext, Filenet, and Documentum for content management, and RedHat JBoss as an application server.

While open source applications specifically for the core functions of the insurance industry are still few and far between, there are a few options, such as OpenUnderwriter.

The main issue with open source is that while the software provides all the components needed for IT operations, expertise is needed to pull it all together for the business. But there’s always a good case to be made for open source, and often, this comes right from commercial IT vendors themselves. Prashant Parikh of CA Technologies, for instance, recently posted the reasons why open source makes sense.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Hotspots: My Firefox OS phone saved the day

    However, and as paradoxical as it may be, I own a ZTE Open Firefox OS phone, which I use basically to check my email and calendar on the go, quickly browse a web page, and receive messages from family members.

    I practically never use the function that gives the device its name (telephone), that, is, making calls. I see my phone as a tiny tablet thingie and use it as such.

    But today, I had to take care of my 4-year-old daughter. It was raining and she is recovering from a bad flu, so going out was out of the question. The cable was not working, so no TV for her… which she did not really mind. But she wanted to use her computer to see her favorite videos online and we had no connection.

    What to do? I used the phone as a hotspot to share its Internet connection with my laptop.

  • Mozilla All Hands: They can’t hold us!

    I also spent some time talking to folks about Firefox in Ubuntu and rebranding Iceweasel to Firefox in Debian (fingers crossed something will happen here in 2015). Also it was great to participate in discussions around making all of the Firefox channels offer more stability and quality to our users.

  • Mozilla will finally bring Firefox to iOS

    I used to be a big fan of Firefox, and I still use it for certain things. But it just doesn’t have the mindshare that it used to have back when it’s big claim to fame was being the alternative to Internet Explorer. Mobile has been where the growth is, and many mobile users have gravitated to Safari, Chrome and other browsers on their phones and tablets.

  • Mozilla wants to put Firefox on iOS

    Mozilla has been staunchly opposed to an iOS version of its Firefox browser for a while. It wants to use its own web engine, but Apple will only let companies use its in-house code in the name of security. However, the organization is clearly having a change of heart — VP Jonathan Nightingale has revealed that Mozilla wants to bring Firefox to iOS. He didn’t say how it would happen, but it’s most likely that the company will use Apple’s engine and layer a custom interface on top, like Google does with Chrome. We’ve reached out to Mozilla and will let you know if it can say more.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Cgicc 3.2.16 released

Project Releases

• Long Time No See – DevAssistant 0.10 is Here

  DevAssistant 0.10.0 is sort of pre-1.0.0, so for next release, we’re planning to go from Beta to Stable. That’s a big promise, but I think at this point DevAssistant can afford that. There will be some backwards incompatible changes between 0.10.0 and 1.0.0, but after that we’ll keep things stable until 2.0.0. In addition to that, we’re planning a major GUI overhaul – basically we’ll rewrite it from scratch, since we want it to look completely different. We’re working with Mo Duffy on the design and while it’s not finished yet, some preliminary sketches can be found at Mo’s fedorapeople page.

• Weblate 2.1

  Weblate 2.1 has been released today.

Openness/Sharing

• Piccolo Pocket Open Source CNC 3 Axis Drawing Robot (video)

  Makers and hobbyists that enjoy building electronic projects may be interested in this pocket sized open source CMC 3-axis drawing robot called the Piccolo that can draw pictures up to 50mm square.

Health/Nutrition

• Pesticides May Contribute to Farmers’ Depression and Suicides

  According to Bienkowski’s report, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson, Cathy Milbourn, writes that of the seven pesticides examined, “only aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are still registered and in use.” The EPA cancelled the registrations of ethylene dibromide, 2,4,5-T, dieldrin, and parathion, Milbourn said. Aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are undergoing EPA review.

• China looking to curb fertilizer, pesticide use

  China, the world’s top producer of rice and wheat, is seeking to cap the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that have helped to contaminate large swathes of its arable land and threaten its ability to keep up with domestic food demand.

  More than 19 percent of soil samples taken from Chinese farmland have been found to contain excessive levels of heavy metals or chemical waste. In central Hunan province, more than three quarters of the ricefields have been contaminated, government research has shown.

• Delay in law on plain packs for cigarettes angers MPs

  Failure to push through law in time for general election would be seen as ‘victory’ for big tobacco and lobbyists

• Please Write to Your MP about Plain Packaging for Cigarettes

  I was disturbed to read in the Guardian that the UK government may be wavering on introducing plain packs for cigarettes. Failing to do so before the General Election would be seen as a huge victory for the tobacco companies, and have knock-on effects around the world.

  [...]

  As you know, what is particularly interesting about these cases is that they use the highly controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process in order to claim an indirect expropriation of property. Since the company is doing this through subsidiaries – one in Switzerland, the other in Hong Kong – it is not even clear whether those cases can proceed. However, it is evident that one of the main reasons Philip Morris is taking this route is to intimidate other countries thinking about bringing in plain packs measures. Indeed, New Zealand has put its own plans on hold pending the result of the Australian case, which shows that strategy is having its effect.

Security

• North Korea calls claims of its Sony Pictures hacking ‘false rumor’

  North Korea on Sunday denied claims that it had hacked into Sony Pictures, calling the allegations a “false rumor” spread by South Korea.

  The U.S. film company had come under cyber attack late last month after a series of threats from North Korea for its comedy movie “The Interview,” in which the CIA plots to assassinate the country’s young leader Kim Jong-un.

• U.S. movie about killing N.K. leader will likely be ‘blockbuster’

  A soon-to-be-released comedy film about a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will likely be a “blockbuster” thanks to the strong protests Pyongyang has raised about it, the U.S. human rights envoy said Friday.

• OpEdNews Hacked, I Meet With an FBI Agent

  On Tuesday, it appears that OEN was hacked. An article that was not submitted by an editor, not submitted through the queue and not submitted by a trusted author, was published by someone who signed up the same day. The article reported that a hacker group, Cyberberkut, had hacked the phone of a member of Joe Biden’s diplomatic entourage to Ukraine.

  The anomaly– an article published outside the usual routes– led me to investigate and discover that one of the IP addresses the submitter used was associated with malware– SQL insertion, spam, even blackmail.

  I checked the name of the purported author and found someone in Ukraine with that name. But the photo used in the author ID did not match. I did a reverse image search using tineye.com and there were no other copies anywhere. I hid the article and checked google Webmaster tools, which is my first go-to place to check for malware on the site. Our webmaster also checked his tracking system. No malware was detected. I had already removed one image from Reuters because it violated copyrights. Vidya removed another image that had been included and a link, because they are higher risk for SQL insertion of malware.

• FBI investigates threatening emails sent to Sony employees at Culver City studio

  The company has been scrambling to repair the damage to its computer system after a hack by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace.

• Hacking at Sony has similarities with earlier attacks in Middle East and South Korea

  In 2012, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company and Qatar’s RasGas were hit by a virus known as Shamoon that damaged tens of thousands of computers. In 2013, more than 30,000 PCs at South Korean banks and broadcasting companies were hit by a similar attack by a virus dubbed DarkSeoul malware.

• Friday’s security updates

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Suspension of Zoabi from Knesset Raises Questions about Israeli Democracy

  In July 2014 Haneen Zoabi, the first Arab Israeli woman to be elected to the Israeli legislative body, the Knesset, was banned by the Knesset Ethics Committee from all Knesset activities. As Lahav Harkov reported in October 2014, this was a direct response to her declaration that the June kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers (later found murdered) was not an act of terrorism.

  [...]

  They covered Zoabi’s initial suspension and followed her story of failed appeals to the Knesset and the High Court. Corporate news sources such as CNN and the New York Times, on the other hand, have not reported on any aspect of the matter, while Al-Jazeera America briefly mentions Zoabi’s suspension at the end of an article about Hamas’ terms for a ceasefire.

• ​Watching the watchmen: US shield to protect drones from ‘spoofing’ cyber-attacks

• Chile’s Neoliberal Flip Flop

  The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with help from classified CIA support as well as cloak-and-dagger cheerleading from distant corners of the world, Milton Friedman in Chicago and Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C.

• Prefer cautious presidents

  I prefer a cautious president to a reckless one. Invading Iraq was reckless, doubling down on that is foolish.

• Ukraine: Lethal Aid And Weapons Authorized By U.S. House Resolution 758, Will Obama Take On Vladimir Putin?

  Lethal aid to Ukraine has been authorized by recently passed United States House Resolution 758, which calls for President Barack Obama to send both lethal and non-lethal aid to the Ukrainian military. If the U.S. Senate passes similar legislation, it’s possible Obama may choose to escalate the confrontation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

• Better for the US to stop costly wars, nuke upgrade

  The American people ought to realize — and critically respond to — the dangers involved in two directions of national-security policy that their government is pursuing:

  1) It is escalating the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (while extending its war in Afghanistan), and 2) discarding a previously espoused disarmament agenda in order to push a “massive modernization of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines,” to cost beyond $1 trillion over 30 years.

  These are concerns not only of Americans. They also affect the rest of the world’s peoples.

Transparency Reporting

• The C.I.A.’s Power to Purge

  Not only that, Mr. Aftergood found out the National Archives and Records Administration had already offered tentative approval in August of the plan to — as a spy might put it — disappear the email of every worker but the C.I.A.’s top 22 managers, three years after they left the agency.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• U-S Petro Dollar Hegemony and Global Imperialism

• Why Shell could buy BP for just £5 a share

  One of Britain’s oldest oil companies BP could be about to be sold to its biggest rival for a fiver per share.

  The rumoured deal, if realised, would complete one of the most ignominious falls for the once great Persian Oil company that powered Britain’s Navy to victory during the First World War.

• Fracking Footprint Visible from Space

  Methane gas, a main component linked to damaging climate change, is being released in record amounts in the Four Corners region where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. The Four Corners regions is one of the prime location for fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock layers deep within the earth. A joint study by researchers at the University of Michigan and NASA finds that the environmental impacts of fracking are more significant than previously documented. With the help of a new satellite instrument — the European Space Agency’s SCIAMACHY — a team at University of Michigan has been able to get regional methane measurements over the entire United States back in 2009. Using this tool, they were able to identify the hotspot at the Four Corners. The footprint is so large it is visible from space.

Finance

• Supplemental Poverty Measure Provides More Accurate Measure of U.S. Poverty

  Currently the official government measure of poverty under-represents the number of poor in the United States. The seemingly simple formula, created in the 1960s, has set the national poverty threshold for decades. Last year the official poverty threshold was about $23,600 for a family of two adults and two children. Yet our official poverty yardstick fails to recognize the difference in standards of living across the United States. Whether a family lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming or San Francisco, California, where the average housing costs are 225% higher than Cheyenne, the government standard makes no adjustment for regional variations in cost of living.

• California, the Golden State, Is Actually the Poorest of All

  It has the Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Napa Valley wineries. It has something else, according to the Census Bureau. It’s the poorest state in the world’s largest economy.

• Does China Really Have The Most Powerful Economy In The World?

  Market Watch columnist Brett Arends wrote that China has surpassed America as the number one economy, a move he claims may lead to a collapse of U.S. political and military hegemony. But does China truly have the strongest economy in the world?

  [...]

  We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A.

• Costs of Global Capitalism

  The ILO report’s key chart below summarizes the key wage results of global capitalism over the last decade. Economic growth, rising real wages, and rising standards of living are the economic reality of China. Economic crisis, stagnant wages, and deepening inequalities of income and wealth are the economic realities for western Europe, the US, and Japan.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• 5 Most Insidious Conspiracy Theories of 2014

  I’ve found that the conspiracy theories spread most widely — and the ones that seem plausible to many, unfortunately — are those based on current headlines and often propagated by public figures such as politicians, celebrities and media figures. They travel by word-of-mouth at light speed and become “a known fact.” These theories are often believed by those who assume there must be a coherence behind world events and occurrences don’t just happen randomly. Using that as our criteria, here are the most insidious conspiracy theories of 2014.

Censorship

• No female ejaculation, please, we’re British

  Though this compendium is strangely lacking in frogs or any other animals (perhaps they’re catalogued elsewhere), it is a list of the new pornography restrictions that the UK government—through the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014, something I’d never heard of before today—introduced on 1 December to ‘safeguard children.’ Which is the same reason five major UK Internet service providers (ISPs) gave for blocking my own website, even though it’s more about literature, publishing, and current affairs than it is about pornography. (Most of these ISPs unblocked the site when I told them that there were no words on it that could be ‘deemed sensitive to a young audience.’)

• New world for Britain’s online smut: censorship

• British Censors Ban Spanking, Female Ejaculation And Other Sex Acts From Online Porn

  Lawmakers in the United Kingdom have deemed face-sitting to be a “life-endangering” act worthy of censorship, the Independent reports.

• U.K. Censors Online Porn; Spanking, Rough Sex, Other Assorted Kink Banned

  Continuing on its recent censorship-happy path, the U.K. government amended regulations this week to prohibit online porn from depicting a variety of erotic activities. Now-illicit acts range from the very specific (female ejaculation; “spanking, caning, and whipping beyond a gentle level”) to the incredibly broad (“verbal abuse”). But basically, the U.K. has banned BDSM and certain forms of fetish porn—or at least, charging money for that sort of porn.

• The UK’s sexist new pornography restrictions aren’t just an act of state censorship, but could be the first step towards something even worse

  As you might have already heard, an act of state censorship has been declared against British pornography in the guise of innocuous regulation. But what you might not know is that it has also marked the first stage in a campaign to impose global trade sanctions. Strangely, this proposition has received less coverage.

• The Spectator at war: Censorship and mystification

  Let us say that we have not ourselves suffered from the Censorship at all. We have never submitted, and have never been asked to submit, any article to the Press Bureau. Such censorship as has been exercised in our columns has been the purely voluntary censorship which is exercised at all times, whether in war or in peace, by every editor who has any sense of public duty, and that remark, we believe, applies to the whole British Press, daily and weekly. We have, of course, constantly asked ourselves whether it would be wise on general grounds to make this or that comment, or whether we ought to refrain from comment which we thought sound in itself because we knew or believed it to run counter to the Government view, and to be likely to interfere with their action and policy. Our feeling was that, as the Government and not we were responsible for the conduct of the war, it was our business as good citizens to support their action, even when we did not think it wise. There can be only one driver of a coach, and as long as he is on the box he must be trusted, and no effort must be made to jog his elbow or snatch at the reins. For example, there are certain things which we believe it would be to the public interest to say about foreign States, and which it would be practically impossible for the Government to suppress even under the most exaggerated interpretation of the rights of the Censor ; but these comments we have not made on the ground just given—that it is the Government who are responsible for foreign affairs, and we must not do anything which in their opinion, whether right or wrong is no matter, would injure or weaken them in the difficult task before them.

• Russia and Turkey Lead on Internet Censorship Growth, Survey Shows

  Internet users in Russia and Turkey have been subjected to the greatest increase in web censorship over the past year, according to the latest Freedom on the Net survey.

• Pakistan, China among top 10 worst countries for Internet freedom

  Majority among the top ten worst countries are from Asia, including Iran, Syria, China, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

• Copyright Law as a Tool for State Censorship of the Internet

  When state officials seek to censor online speech, they’re going to use the quickest and easiest method available. For many, copyright takedown notices do the trick. After years of lobbying and increasing pressure from content industries on policymakers and tech companies, sending copyright notices to take media offline is easier than ever.

• Independent news portals now popular due to government’s censorship

  The government crackdown on the media during the anti-government protest and corruption scandals of last year and the two elections this year have led to the growth of a number of independent news portals as an alternative source of information for many in Turkey.

Civil Rights

• Sean Hannity Finds A Way To Make Eric Garner’s Death About Benghazi

  Hannity Indignant Over Boehner’s Calls For Congressional Hearings On Garner’s Death Rather Than Benghazi

• You Can’t Live With Us: 53 Britons Stripped of Citizenship

  The issue of UK citizens being stripped of their nationality has not been well covered, especially in major US news outlets. For example, since 2003 the New York Times has published only three stories on the topic, while the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today have published just one story each, for a total of just six stories over the course of eleven years in major US newspapers. Instead, significant coverage of this issue comes from the independent sources, such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which maintains an ongoing series of reports under the title, “Citizenship Revoked.”

• An MRAP Is Not a Blanket

  Americans watched in horror as the police descended on peaceful protesters in Ferguson…

• Long-awaited CIA torture report could pose risks to hostages: State Department

  Secretary of state John Kerry has asked Senator Dianne Feinstein to “consider” the timing of the expected release of a long-awaited report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques.

• Kerry asks Feinstein to consider CIA report timing

• CIA Won’t Defend Its One-Time Torturers

• Kerry to Feinstein: Consider timing of CIA report

• WHITE HOUSE GETTING COLD FEET OVER EXPOSING CIA’S TORTURE SECRETS

• Inside the Battle Over the CIA Torture Report

• John Kerry asks to delay CIA torture report

• Lawmakers Insist On Release Of CIA Torture Report, Despite Administration’s Objections

• As CIA, senators settle feuds, long-awaited ‘torture’ report imminent

• New Obstacle Arises to Release of CIA Torture Report

• MARK UDALL PROMISES AMERICA WILL “BE DISGUSTED” AT CIA TORTURE REPORT

  The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Dianne Feinstein of California, is soon expected to release its summary of the so-called CIA Torture Report, the committee’s four-year-long investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era torture practices. Release of the summary is the result of months of wrangling and negotiating with the White House on what would be released to the public and when—and it will likely be heavily redacted. During an interview conducted on Friday, November 21, by Esquire writer at large Scott Raab, outgoing senator Mark Udall of Colorado, who lost his reelection race on November 4, once again said that if the report is not released in a way he deems transparent, he would consider all options to make it public. In this excerpt from the interview, Raab asks Udall if he will read the document into the record on the floor of the Senate before he leaves in January, an act for which he cannot be prosecuted.

• ARE YOU THERE, CIA? IT’S ME, SIOBHAN.

  These are boom times for national security reporters, with government surveillance becoming a major topic after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of NSA documents, but one of the most well-known journalists on the intelligence beat, Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal, has decided to throw in the towel and join the Dark Side—in Gorman’s case, a global communications company called Brunswick, where she will reportedly focus on privacy and data security.

  Gorman has done very solid reporting for the Journal and her previous employer, The Baltimore Sun. She has been prolific–and not just on the printed page. It turns out that she has had a lot of correspondence with the Central Intelligency Agency’s public affairs office, 246 pages of which were provided to us under a Freedom of Information Act request. We published the emails without comment earlier this year, as part of a story about reporter Ken Dilanian’s eyebrow-raising interchanges with the CIA, but in the event Gorman or her employers need a copy of her correspondence with our spymasters (perhaps the Journal has already revoked her access to its computers), we are re-upping them.

  It’s colorful reading—Gorman shows a lot of interest in learning about the CIA’s gym facilities (“I was just told that the facilities at the black sites were better than the ones at CIA”), and a year to the day after the killing of Osama bin Laden she cheerily began an email to the agency by asking, “So do I wish you a ‘happy anniversary’ today’?” There’s also this mysterious missive she sent the CIA about an apparent meeting she had with an agency official: “What prompted my guest to leave so suddenly? Bat phone rang twice, and then he excused himself?” And a word of warning to her next boss at Brunswick—watch what you say, because Gorman, when asking the agency for guidance on a rumor that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had been killed, explained to the CIA that the info came from the editor of her paper “but his tips aren’t always accurate.”

• US: Release Torture Report

  The US Senate’s intelligence committee should release as planned its report summary on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s detention and interrogation program, Human Rights Watch said today. The White House’s expressed support for the release has been undermined by statements from the State Department raising concerns over the timing of the release and possible foreign policy implications.

• Udall plays with a loaded deck

  Udall can wield a lot of power, forcing even classified portions of the report into the spotlight.

• Rand Paul — from ophthalmologist to US Constitution guardian

  The 51-year-old doctor was sent to Washington by voters furious with a system that kept swelling the national debt, and anxious over what Paul sees as government zeal for war and encroachment on American civil liberties.

• Feinstein fights to release torture report before GOP takeover

  The full report runs 6,700 pages, covering the committee’s review of 6.2 million pages of documents from the CIA and the Defense Department. Feinstein met fierce resistance from the CIA during the entire investigation, and now with less than a week before she hands the Intelligence Committee gavel to North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, she is battling the White House over its refusal to declassify the report.

• Anger against police tops Sunday talk shows

• Police violence in US UN documents torture

  The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.

• Top police officer: many viewing child abuse images should be treated on NHS

  Norfolk chief constable Simon Bailey believes thousands on police database ‘pose no threat’ and don’t belong in prison

• New York’s Next Killer-Cop Grand Jury

  Mass protests in New York were stretching into their third day when a new grand jury was announced on Friday. Not for the case of Eric Garner—a previous grand jury’s decision earlier this week not to indict the officer seen choking him on film before he died sparked the current protests. The latest grand jury will investigate the death of Akai Gurley, another unarmed black man who was killed by a police officer months after Garner’s death, in what the department says was an accidental shooting.

• Abject failure of US to come clean on torture

  Now, more than ever, it is vital to show the world that real democracies are not like terrorist groups because they demand real accountability

• Why Hosting Rudy Giuliani To Talk About Race Is A Bad Idea

• Reporting the News Like Black Lives Don’t Matter

  “Black lives matter” is the rallying cry of the burgeoning nationwide movement against police killings. The Associated Press (12/5/14), covering that movement, has produced a perfect example of what journalism looks like when black lives don’t matter.

  [...]

  Or even to make the basic medical point that being able to talk is a sign that you don’t need the Heimlich maneuver–not that you don’t need a cop to stop administering a notoriously lethal chokehold.

  You don’t get any of those points in the article, because AP didn’t feel any need to quote (or, seemingly, talk to) anyone who thought that the life of Eric Garner was more important than the feelings of New York Police Department officers. Because, one has to assume, to AP black lives don’t matter.

DRM

• Why Marvin has become my favorite ebook app

  Oh, and if you need to you can move your Kindle books over to Marvin via Calibre by removing the DRM. I, of course, do not advise you to do this one way or the other. It’s entirely your choice and may be affected by whatever the relevant laws are for that sort of thing.