• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Sad News!

So, XP is dead, “7” is dying, “8” is a zombie, and “10” is vapourware with nowhere to call home. M$ continues layoffs. POOF! It all falls down. In the meantime Google and the OEMs will crank out many millions of ChromeBooks. Canonical, Linpus, RedHat, Suse… and the OEMs will crank out many millions of GNU/Linux PCs. Several OEMs will crank out many millions of GNU/Linux thin clients. Android/Linux will reverberate with another billion or so units of small cheap computers(tablets, smartphones). This looks like good news to me.

Desktop

• China will move to Linux by 2020 in ‘de-Windowsifying’ process

  CHINA HAS DISCLOSED plans to move its systems to a state-endorsed version of Linux by 2020.

Server

• Linux Warehouse partners with Stratus Technologies to expand fault tolerance and high-availability solutions

  Linux Warehouse, a value-added distributor of enterprise open source solutions, is proud to announce its collaboration with Stratus Technologies, a global provider of always-on solutions. The partnership will enable Linux Warehouse to introduce Stratus Technologies’ next-generation software, everRun Enterprise, which has been developed to prevent downtime, to the sub-Sahara African market.

• CoreOS offers private Docker container registries for world+dog

  Container-loving Linux vendor CoreOS has made its on-premises Docker container registry software available as a standalone product.

Kernel Space

• Stable kernels 3.17.2, 3.16.7, 3.14.23, and 3.10.59

• Meet systemd, the controversial project taking over a Linux distro near you

  If Linus Torvalds doesn’t have any big issues with the design of systemd, perhaps it’s not all bad. If you’d like a calm look at why a Linux distribution might want to go with systemd, Debian’s systemd discussion document is good reading.

• Linux 3.16.y.z extended stable support

  The Ubuntu kernel team is pleased to announce that we will be providing extended stable support for the Linux 3.16 kernel until April 2016 as a third party effort maintained on our infrastructure. The team will pick up stable maintenance where Greg KH left off with v3.16.7 [1].

• DisplayLink USB 3.0 Support Sounds Like A Mess

  David Airlie at Red Hat spent today looking at DisplayLink USB 3.0 support and froum the sounds of it, it’s going to be a mess to support without some official documentation or development support.

• a day with DisplayLink USB3 and HDCP

• PulseAudio Gains A Native Bluetooth Headset Backend

  Wim Tayman added a native Bluetooth HSP headset backend to PulseAudio. This backend allows PulseAudio to output audio to a headset supporting the HSP profile. HSP is short for the Headset Profile and is the most commonly used profile for Bluetooth headsets and mobile phones. Those wishing to learn more about Bluetooth HSP can visit Bluetooth.org.

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org Server 1.17 ABI Bumped

    For those wondering whether there’s ABI breakage with this week’s X.Org Server 1.17 Release Candidate, there is indeed some breakage that will warrant the proprietary driver ABIs to be updated and released.

  • xfree86: Bump ABI versions (video: 19, extension: 9)

    Among other things, commit b851ca968b7cce6d1a6438c05d3d5c8832249704 added a NameWindowPixmap function pointer to ScreenRec, shifting some of the fields around.

  • Has The Sky Fallen? Qualcomm Contributes To Freedreno’s DRM/KMS Driver

    In an interesting change of events, Code Aurora on the behalf of the Qualcomm Innovation Center has added Adreno A4xx product support to the Freedreno-spawned DRM/KMS “MSM” driver.

  • X.Org Foundation Decides On Its Women Outreach Project

    At yesterday’s X.Org Foundation Board of Directors meeting they approved one project for the Outreach Program for Women.

Applications

• Quick Terminal Access with Yakuake, Quake-Style

  There are quite a few terminals out there, and some of them follow the drop-down style. GNOME has Guake, a GTK-based terminal emulator with lots of features, but there is also Tilda or Final Term, while the KDE de-facto terminal is Yakuake.

• dradio: Not to be blamed

• the_silver_searcher: Intergalactic searcher smackdown

• Official Atom 64bit RPM And DEB Packages Available For Download [Quick Update]

  I’m sure many Atom users already know this, but I didn’t get to write an article about it, so here’s a quick update: the Atom developers have started providing 64bit DEB packages for more than a month. Also, 4 days ago, they added official 64bit RPM packages.

• CherryTree Review: The Rich Tree Notes Application

  CherryTree is a notes-taking application which organizes your notes into a hierarchical tree, has support for text formatting, and is written in GTK2/Python. Lately this application has got a lot of attention due to rich features and frequent updates. It also comes by default in distributions such as MakuluLinux MATE Edition.

• GSmartControl Review – Read SMART Data and Test Your Drives

  GSmartControl is an application that allows users to check the health of the drives with the help of the SMART data. It’s not a unique application and there are others that can do this job, but it’s always a good thing to have alternatives.

• Xine Media Player Review – Powerful but Outdated

  Xine is both an open source multimedia playback engine and a video playback application that’s been around for a very long time. The number of people using this application has diminished, and there are few maintained third-party apps that are based on this engine. We’ll take a closer look at the application to see why this is happening.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Automated Installations of Multiple RHEL/CentOS 7 Distributions using PXE Server and Kickstart Files

  • How to create a cool terminal dashboard in Linux

  • Install LAMP Server (Apache, MySQL or MariaDB, PHP) On Ubuntu 14.10/14.04/13.10

  • Tip of the day: bind tomcat7 to loopback i/f only

  • Collection of Useful Bash Functions and Aliases

  • Install LEMP Server (Nginx, MySQL or MariaDB, PHP And phpMyAdmin) On Ubuntu 14.10/14.04/13.10

  • The Perfect Server – Ubuntu 14.10 with Apache, PHP, MySQL, PureFTPD, BIND, Postfix, Dovecot and ISPConfig

  • 8 Tips to Solve Linux & Unix Systems Hard Disk Problmes Like Disk Full Or Can’t Write to the Disk

  • MariaDB Practical How-to for Linux Admins

    She who rules databases rules the world. Even if you don’t want to rule the world, knowing a good set of database commands will make your life easier.

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine Announcement

    The Wine development release 1.7.30 is now available.

  • Wine 1.7.30 Continues Work On DirectWrite & Offers Regedit Fixes

    The newest release, Wine 1.7.30, still lacks the Direct3D command stream multi-threading work or any breakthroughs in better Direct3D 10/11 support, but it continues working on Wine’s recent focus of DirectWrite support, a text layout and glyph rendering API with hardware aceleration that began in the Windows 7 days to replace their GDI(+) interface.

• Games

  • Humble Bundle organizers have ported over 100 games to Linux

    Humble Bundle’s in-house port team has ported more than 100 games to the Linux platform, the company announced today.

  • Humble Bundle Celebrates Surpassing 100 Linux Games Milestone

    It’s no longer absurd to build a gaming box around Linux. Sure, there are still far more titles available for Windows, but between solutions like Wine and a growing concerted effort to support the open source platform, the situation is improving at a faster rate than ever before. Valve deserves kudos for promoting Linux through Steam, and surprise, surprise, Humble Bundle is fast becoming a pioneering force with over 100 games having been ported to Linux.

  • Steam Halloween Sale Kicks Off, Tens of Linux Games Up to 90% Discount

    The Steam Halloween Sale is a new promotion which includes games fit for the Halloween theme, which will last until November 3rd. Tens of titles for Linux are included as well, and come at discounts as high as 90%.

  • Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition Now Available on Steam for Linux

    Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition is a role-playing game which has finally made it to Steam earlier today. The game takes place in a fantasy universe called the Spine of the World and features single-player, multi-player and co-op modes.

  • Transistor Now Available For Mac And Linux

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Desktop Linux users beware: the boss thinks you need to be managed

  Desktop Linux users beware: IT has noticed you and decided it;s time you were properly managed.

  So says VMware, which yesterday at its vForum event in China let it be know that it will deliver a desktop virtualisation (VDI) solution for Linux desktops.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Window and Desktop Switcher moved to Look’n’Feel Package

    Today we did an important change in how KWin will distribute its assets in the upcoming 5.2 release. When we started our thoughts about the Look’n’Feel Package and how we want to have meta themes for the complete Plasma workspace we also wanted to have this for the Window and Desktop switcher provided by KWin. So the structure of the Look’n’Feel Package already has all the pieces for including the Window and Desktop Switcher, but it was not used. Now we finally addressed this for the 5.2 release and moved the default switcher into the Look’n’Feel Package and KWin can locate the switchers from the Look’n’Feel Package.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GTK+ 3.16′s New GtkGLArea Widget Gets Improved

    Earlier this month GTK+ 3.16 development code gained native OpenGL support. This GTK+ OpenGL support involved adding support for wrapping an OpenGL context for native windows with GLX on X11 and EGL on Wayland to use OpenGL to paint everything. A GtkGLArea widget was also added for providing OpenGL drawing access within GTK+ applications. The GtkGLArea has already seen some more improvements to better GTK’s OpenGL support.

  • Recent improvements in libnice

    For the past several months, Olivier Crête and I have been working on a project using libnice at Collabora, which is now coming to a close. Through the project we’ve managed to add a number of large, new features to libnice, and implement hundreds (no exaggeration) of cleanups and bug fixes. All of this work was done upstream, and is available in libnice 0.1.8, released recently! GLib has also gained a number of networking fixes, API additions and documentation improvements.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Quick Look: Puppy Linux 6.0

    Puppy Linux 6.0 is a lightweight Linux distribution that can easily be run off a USB stick, SD card or live disc. This version has been dubbed “Tahrpup” by the Puppy Linux developers, and it is based on Ubuntu 14.04. It also uses Linux kernel 3.14.20.

  • Security-Minded Qubes OS Will Satisfy Your Yen for Xen

    It has advanced far beyond the primitive proof of concept demonstrated more than four years ago. Release 2 (beta), which arrived in late September, is a powerful desktop OS.

    Qubes succeeds in seamless integrating security by isolation into the user experience. However, comparing Qubes to a typical Linux distro is akin to comparing the Linux OS to Unix.

• New Releases

  • Black Lab Education Desktop 6.0.1 to Be Supported Until 2022

    There are numerous Linux distributions that are oriented towards education, but you can never have too many in a domain such as this one. It’s based on the Black Lab Professional Desktop, which is a very good and powerful solution. Interestingly enough, Black Lab Linux is actually based on Ubuntu, and the latest one uses the 14.04.1 base (Trusty Tahr).

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro Works To Make Calamares A Distribution-Independent Installer

    The Arch-based Manjaro crew has been developing Calamares, an open-source installation framework they hope will basically lead to being a universal Linux distribution installer.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat delivers latest developer tools

    Adlink released two Linux-ready COM Express Type 2 modules running on Intel 4th Gen. Core and Intel Atom e3800 SoCs, respectively.

  • Open source software firm Red Hat looks to grow its shared-services base and add more jobs

    Open source software company Red Hat expects big business in India as the government kick-starts its investment in IT and number of startups in the country grows and also expects to grow its shared-services base in India.

  • Latest Version of Red Hat Software Collections Now Generally Available

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 21 Beta To Be Released Next Week

      While Fedora 21 Beta was delayed, today it received the go ahead to be released next week Tuesday.

      Jaroslav Reznik of Red Hat shared that at today’s Go/No-Go meeting the F21 Beta was approved by Fedora QA, release engineering, and development teams. Fedora 21 Beta will make it out now on Tuesday, 4 November.

    • Fedora 21 Beta status is Go, release on November 4, 2014

      At the Fedora 21 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting #3 that just occurred, it was agreed to Go with the Fedora 21 Beta by Fedora QA, Release Engineering and Development.

    • Ohio Linux Fest 2014 — Observations from the Fedora Booth

      We arrived at the olf1Drury Friday afternoon and got settled into the room. We then checked on the event and got our registration stuff all taken care off that afternoon. I checked out where we needed to set up. We had the table right next to the Red Hat table. We were in a good location at the end or the isle for easy access for everyone to get to. This weekend the weather was good and there was not a cloud in the sky. We were hoping for a busy day on Saturday.

    • This week in rawhide, spooky halloween edition

      This week saw a nasty little bug land in rawhide that hit most everyone: bug 1159117

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Atom-based Ubuntu Touch tablet specs leaked

        Specs have been leaked for a 10.1-inch Ubuntu Touch tablet called “UT One” that runs on an Intel Atom Z3735D SoC, with shipments expected in December.

      • The Wide World of Canonical

        I thought perhaps it was a one-off mistake made by a marketing department flunky who perhaps had too much Red Bull while writing a press release. Being the responsible company that Canonical/Ubuntu is, and being the good FOSS community member that it portrays itself to be, I assumed they’d fix the error right away and make sure that ludicrous hyperbole was not the order of the day.
        Would that be asking too much?

        Perhaps. Sadly, a company that claims to be a FOSS leader can’t be bothered with getting simple facts correct. An ad on LinkedIn posted a week ago today makes the same claim for a job in London. You can click on the photo to the right and read, “It is used by over 20 million people in 240 countries in 80 languages.”

      • NVIDIA’s Linux Driver On Ubuntu 14.10 Can Deliver Better OpenGL Performance Than Windows 8.1

        The same Intel Core i7 4770K system used for yesterday’s Windows vs. Linux graphics benchmarks were used when benchmarking the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, 970, and 980 graphics cards. Windows 8.1 Pro x64 had all available system updates at the time and was running the NVIDIA 344.48 WHQL binary driver that was their latest release at the time of testing. When running Ubuntu 14.10 x86_64 on the system with its Linux 3.16 kernel, the NVIDIA 343.22 driver was used. The 343.22 driver was the latest publicly available proprietary Linux driver at the time of testing and their first to support the GTX 970/980 under Linux. All of the same hardware was used under each operating system and each OS was with its software default settings as were the driver settings.

      • The First Vivid-Based Ubuntu Touch Image Has Been Released

        As I have previously announced, the Ubuntu Touch development branch is based on Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, while the Ubuntu RTM branch is still using Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn as code base, because it has already received stability improvements and will by default on the first Ubuntu powered Meizu phone. Currently, all the new features are implemented on the Ubuntu-Devel branch, the RTM one receiving only fixes.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux accessory adds web access to dumb cameras

  Lumera Labs is aiming to Kickstarter an open source Linux camera attachment for one-click transfers to the cloud via WiFi, plus GPS tagging, HDR, and 3D.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Tizen IVI version 3.0 Milestone M3-Oct2014 has been released

      As promised, the Tizen IVI team announced the release of the Tizen IVI 3.0-M3-Oct2014 Release for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI). The major changes are below:

  • Android

    • Google’s surprise Nexus 6 preorders anger some Android users

      The Nexus 6 is Google’s biggest phone, and judging by the initial reaction from Android users, it may end up being its best-selling phone ever. Creating the Nexus 6 was a bold move by Google and it has resulted in pandemonium as Google’s initial supplies of the phone were quickly depleted by enthusiastic buyers. However, Google gave no warning about Nexus 6 preorders and that has angered some Android users who tried to buy it.

    • Nexus 6 Pre-Orders Were A Joke

      Today, the Nexus 6 went up for pre-order on the Google Play Store for a grand total of five minutes by my count. No warning, no announcements, no broadcasts from the Nexus Twitter account, no excitement from Sundar Pichai or any other Android leaders, nothing. I, like many of you, had no idea that pre-orders had even started. And by the time I tried to go order, it was too late. Sold out, gone. Nexus 4 all over again.

    • Download APKs From Google Play To Your Computer With Google Play Downloader

      Google Play Downloader is a simple open source application which can be used to download APKs from Google Play to your computer.

    • Android creator Andy Rubin is leaving Google

      The move is, perhaps, not a total surprise. Last March, Rubin left the Android group and was replaced by Sundar Pichai. His latest project, as detailed in a lengthy New York Times report in December, was creating robots for a project outside of the company’s Google X lab, something that dovetailed with Google’s shopping spree of robotics companies. In 2012, there were also rumors abound that Rubin planned to leave for a stealth-mode startup called CloudCar, though they were vehemently denied.

We All Work For Open Source Companies Now

But here’s another, equally salient fact: Every company on the planet must embrace open source to varying degrees, including vendors that make their money selling proprietary software or services.

New Projects from the Ever-Protean World of Open Source

In my previous column, I pointed out that free software was now so successful, and in so many fields, that people might wonder whether there’s anything left to do. The question was rhetorical, of course, of course: the ingenuity of the open source community means that people there will always find new and exciting projects. And not just the big one that I suggested of baking strong crypto into all our communication tools. There are countless other novel uses for open source, as these three very different examples below indicate.

Events

• Ohio LinuxFest 2014 – A Look At Tomorrow

  I went to the Ohio Linux Fest this year to give the closing keynote address to somewhere around 300 folks. And trust me…this will show up later so you’ll know what I mean…the last two minutes of my keynote were the best part. Wait for it…soon.

SaaS/Big Data

• Simplifying application development in the cloud

  Everett is also a core contributor to the Apache jclouds project, an open source tool designed to make it easier for developers to build applications which are able to reap the benefits of cloud computing while being agnostic to which cloud infrastructure project lies underneath.

• PLUMgrid Delivers Suite of Tools for OpenStack Clouds

  This week, PLUMgrid, which specializes in virtual network infrastructure for OpenStack cloud deployments, announced the availability of its Open Networking Suite (ONS) version 2.0 with expanded support for OpenStack distributions and network functions. The company claims that “PLUMgrid ONS for OpenStack is the industry’s first software-only virtual networking suite that provides terabits of scale out performance, production-grade resiliency, and secure multi-tenancy for businesses to build agile cloud networks.”

CMS

• Boycott Linux, Fedora Beta a Go, and Drupal Yikes

  The top story tonight is a highly critical flaw in Drupal 7 that may have allowed a lot of compromised websites. At tonight’s Go/No-Go meeting, Fedora 21 Beta was approved for next week. The folks at ROSA have released an LXDE version and LibreOffices 4.3.3 and 4.2.7 were released. Red Hat Software Collections 1.2 was released and Jack Wallen looks at the “science behind Ubuntu Unity’s popularity.”

• Drupal Hack & WordPress Users

  The current situation being faced by Drupal users is evidence of just how determined the black hats are in their quest to find vulnerable sites and exploit them. According to Drupal, “Automated attacks began compromising Drupal 7 websites that were not patched or updated to Drupal 7.32 within hours of the announcement of” the vulnerability. On any site on any platform, paying attention to security is just as important as paying attention to content.

• What you need to know about the Drupal vulnerability CVE-2014-3704

  For those that fall into the affected category we’re looking at 264,265 live sites that are currently running Drupal version 7, as a CMS at least, as of this writing. The advisory outlining this problem was originally posted on October 15th, 2014. Within 7 hours there were multiple exploits circulating in the wild. A safe assumption that if you are running an affected version that you were compromised unless you managed to have your site updated or patched before Oct 15th, 11pm UTC.

• Drupal Users Had Seven Hours to Patch or Be Hacked

  Whenever a security exploit is fixed, users are advised to patch quickly to reduce the risk of attack. In the case of a recent open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) vulnerability, the window in which users needed to patch before being exploited has been quantified as being only seven hours.

Healthcare

• How to train your doctor… to use open source

  The federal hospitals are running a system that was released in to the public domain called VistA, written in MUMPS. This is the same language that the $100 million software is written in! Except there is a huge difference in price. OSEHRA was founded to protect this software.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Interview with Jessica Tallon of PyPump

  This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.

• A political party of nerds and geeks: What should it stand for?

  …Eric Mack thinks it might be time for a “GNU” political party.

Openness/Sharing

• Ubuntu turns 10, patent-free cancer drugs, and more

  In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Ubuntu at 10 years, open source for patent-free cancer drugs, Berlin backsliding on open source, and more!

• An Open-Source Standard Could Spur Drone Development

  On October 13, the Linux Foundation launched Dronecode, an open-source project to unite coders working on a software standard for unmanned aerial vehicles.

Programming

• Go 1.4 Beta Release Brings Big Runtime Changes

  Google’s Go language implementation is now in beta for the upcoming 1.4 major release.

  Go 1.4 is bringing Android ARM support, NaCL on ARM support, big changes to the Go runtime, minor performance improvements, changes to Go’s existing libraries, and a ton of other improvements.

• Rocker: Run R in Docker containers

  Rocker is hosted on GitHub, with three containers already available in the repository – r-base, r-devel and rstudio. The last container (rstudio) provides R and an instance of RStudio Server. RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R.

Standards/Consortia

• W3C Declares HTML5 Standard Complete

  More than four years ago, Steve Jobs declared war on Flash and heralded HTML5 as the way to go. You could be forgiven if you thought the HTML5 standard — the follow-up to 1997’s HTML 4 — has long been set in stone, given that developers, browser vendors and the press have been talking about it for years now. In reality, however, HTML5 was still in flux — until today. The W3C today published its Recommendation of HTML5 — the final version of the standard after years of adding features and making changes to it.

Farewell from Neelie Kroes

Today is my last day in office at the European Commission.

Over the years, I have met a lot of people – people who have inspired, encouraged, and energised.

In fact over 5 years in digital policy there have almost been too many to thank. But that is what I would like to today.

Security

• Google Accounts Now Support Security Keys

  People who use Gmail and other Google services now have an extra layer of security available when logging into Google accounts. The company today incorporated into these services the open Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) standard, a physical USB-based second factor sign-in component that only works after verifying the login site is truly a Google site.

• Friday’s security updates

• More Failures Of The Wintel Monopoly

  Of course, this damage could have been mitigated by promptly patching when M$ releases their “Patch Tuesday” updates or sooner in an emergency. That’s the point. Consumers are not IT-people. They don’t know about this stuff. They just know about the speed and convenience of PCs on the web. That other OS is supposed to be “easy to use” but that’s just PR in the ads. It’s also easy to lose all security, have the system slow to a halt or crash. Sometimes, M$ gets it wrong and the patches don’t work. Consumers eventually buy another machine or take the box in for repairs to get it working again.

  [...]

  Of course, one should patch GNU/Linux systems too, but they do very well unpatched. The great beauty of GNU/Linux for consumers is that there are hundreds of distros and the typical malware-artist can’t hack them all simultaneously whereas “the monopoly” is a single big fat target. So, better code, fewer malwares and diversity all work together to protect consumers whereas the salesmen running M$ seek to make life “easy” for both consumers and malware-writers. I choose freedom. I use Debian GNU/Linux.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Ottawa Shootings — my RT interview

  Yes­ter­day I was asked to do an inter­view on RT in the imme­di­ate after­math of the Ott­awa shoot­ings. As I said, there needs to be a full forensic invest­ig­a­tion, and I would hope that the gov­ern­ment does not use this ter­rible crime as a pre­text for yet fur­ther erosion of con­sti­tu­tional rights and civil liber­ties. Calm heads and the rule of law need to pre­vail.

• The war on drugs funds terrorism

  Here is a short excerpt from a panel dis­cus­sion I took part in after the Lon­don première of the new cult anti-prohibition film, “The Cul­ture High”. This is an amaz­ing film that pulls together so many big issues around the failed global 50 year policy of the war on drugs. I ser­i­ously recom­mend watch­ing it.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ALEC Tampers with Wisconsin Constitution

  On November 4, Wisconsin voters will decide if the state constitution should be amended to require that “revenues generated by use of the state transportation system be deposited into a transportation fund administered by a department of transportation for the exclusive purpose of funding Wisconsin’s transportation systems and to prohibit any transfers or lapses from this fund.” The ballot measure reflects model legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that is intended to prioritize road funding over all other types of transportation spending.

• Media Cry Foul When Democrats Talk About Race

  epublicans are accusing Democrats of race-baiting? It sounds like the Times’ Jeremy Peters is making that accusation–isn’t that what “race-baiting” means, to “play on fears” with “racially charged messages”?

• Rick Berman Exposed in New Audio; Hear His Tactics against Environmentalists and Workers Rights

  Rick Berman, the king of corporate front groups and propaganda, has been caught on tape detailing his attacks on public interest groups in the labor and environmental movements, including on efforts to increase the minimum wage for workers.

  As noted in a new story by Eric Lipton at The New York Times, Berman met with energy company executives at the posh Broadmoor Hotel earlier this year to raise money from them to attack groups representing citizens concerned about clean water, clean air, and the future of the planet. But Berman’s “win ugly” tactics apparently did not persuade all of his prospective clients for his lucrative business of creating tax-exempt non-profit front groups that then contract with his for-profit PR firm to give corporations cover for his attacks on their opponents. The way Berman profits from this arrangement has spawned a legal complaint to the IRS.

  An audio tape of Berman and his associate, Jack Hubbard, has been provided by a person at the Broadmoor event to the Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes PRWatch and has long tracked Berman’s deceptive PR operations.

• Journalists need a point of view if they want to stay relevant

  If extreme polarization is now an enduring feature of American politics — not just a bug — how does that change the game for journalists? I have some ideas, but mainly I want to put that question on the table. “Conflict makes news,” it is often said. But when gridlock becomes the norm the conflicts are endless, infinite, predictable and just plain dull: in a way, the opposite of news. This dynamic has already ruined the Sunday talk shows. Who can stand that spectacle anymore?

• How Facebook Could End Up Controlling Everything You Watch and Read Online

  How many of you are reading this because of a link you clicked on Facebook? In the online publishing industry (which WIRED obviously is part of), Facebook’s influence on site traffic—and therefore ad revenue—is difficult to overstate. Over the past year especially, “the homepage is dead” has become a standard line among media pundits. And more than anything else, it’s Facebook that killed it.

  Given that links appear to be more clickable when shared on Facebook, online publishers have scrambled to become savvy gamers of Facebook’s News Feed, seeking to divine the secret rules that push some stories higher than others. But all this genuflection at the altar of Facebook’s algorithms may be but a prelude to a more fundamental shift in how content is produced, shared, and consumed online. Instead of going to all this trouble to get people to click a link on Facebook that takes them somewhere else, the future of Internet content may be a world in which no video, article, or cat GIF gallery lives outside of Facebook at all.

Censorship

• BBC refuses to include Green party in general election TV leader debates

  The BBC has rejected a demand from the Green party to be included in the proposed TV leader election debates, saying that it, unlike Ukip, has not demonstrated any substantial increase in support.

  The broadcasters have proposed three debates, one including Ukip, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Conservatives, a second involving the Lib Dems, Labour and the Conservatives, and finally one between Ed Miliband and David Cameron.

  The Green Party was infuriated that they had been excluded and won support in online petitions.

Privacy

• GCHQ views data without a warrant, government admits

  British intelligence services can access raw material collected in bulk by the NSA and other foreign spy agencies without a warrant, the government has confirmed for the first time.

  GCHQ’s secret “arrangements” for accessing bulk material are revealed in documents submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the UK surveillance watchdog, in response to a joint legal challenge by Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International. The legal action was launched in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations published by the Guardian and other news organisations last year.

• More RIPA Revelations

  Yet more evidence has come to light to show that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) is woefully out of date.

  It has been revealed that GCHQ, has the ability to request large amounts of un-analysed communications from foreign intelligence agencies without first obtaining a warrant. The documents, obtained in the course of a case brought before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), show that the use of a warrant was not necessary if it is “not technically feasible” for GCHQ to obtain one.

• Sony Xperia devices are sendng your data to China

  If you are using a Sony Xperia device running either Android 4.4.2 or 4.4.4 it’s advised (by me) that you install a custom ROM on your device. Several reports have appeared online that the stock firmware on these devices contains Baidu spyware that is discreetly sending data back to servers in China, you do not need to have installed any software on your phone as it’s bundled into the firmware.

• Congress Still Has No Idea How Much the NSA Spies on Americans

  Adequate oversight is impossible when even diligent members of the Senate Intelligence Committee can’t get basic facts about surveillance.

• 49 Orgs Call on Congress to Restore Whistleblower Rights for Intelligence Contractors

  Congress should quickly restore whistleblower rights for government contractors who work in the intelligence community (IC), 49 ideologically diverse organizations and the Make It Safe Coalition told lawmakers in a letter today.

• Liberty exposes secret links between GCHQ and the NSA

• The NSA Scandal May Have Just Gotten Even Worse

  The National Security Agency might not have only collected personal information belonging to millions of Americans. It may very well have shared it too – with at least one foreign government.

  A report released yesterday by the U.K.-based human rights organization Liberty reveals Britain’s intelligence agencies can access information which the NSA has already collected whenever and wherever it wants – and without a warrant.

• Brazil-to-Portugal Cable Shapes Up as Anti-NSA Case Study

  Brazil is planning a $185 million project to lay fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean, which could entail buying gear from multiple vendors. What it won’t need: U.S.-made technology.

• Brazil greenlights $200m internet cable to Europe in bid to outfox NSA

  Brazil is moving ahead with plans to build an “anti-NSA” internet cable to Europe, even though it won’t make the slightest difference to spying efforts.

  Francisco Ziober Filho, president of state-run telecoms company Telebras, announced earlier this week that the company will form a joint venture with Spain’s IslaLink to run the submarine connection between Fortaleza at the northern tip of Brazil and Lisbon, Portugal. Filho also strongly suggested that the cable will not include any equipment from US manufacturers – take that, NSA.

  Despite the rhetoric, however, one expert in cable infrastructure told The Register that not only does the cable not make economic sense but it amounts to little more than “a $185m propaganda statement” on the part of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

• How NSA Director Wants to Build an IoT Security Coalition

  Admiral Michael Rogers is preparing a coalition of government, military and commercial interests to fight a global cyber war if necessary.

• NSA chief calls for more “permeable” barrier between state and tech corporations

  In two speeches this month, US National Security Agency (NSA) Director Admiral Mike Rogers called for a further integration between the NSA and major technology and communications companies.

• National Journal: NSA Outsources Surveillance of Americans to British Intelligence

• A Secret Policy Lets the UK Suck Up Any Bulk NSA Data It Wants

• Court: UK spies get bulk access to U.S.’s NSA data

• GCHQ Can Access Raw Data From NSA Without a Warrant, Secret Policies Disclose

• Comforting the NSA and Afflicting Its Dissenters

  No serious defense of the surveillance state can ignores its anti-democratic abuses, its lawbreaking, and its record of punishing whistleblowers.

• FBI Seeks New Powers To Hack And Spy

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seeking more powers to hack into a suspect computer no matter where it is located, and carry out surveillance.

• New NSA Documents Shine More Light into Black Box of Executive Order 12333

  Today, we’re releasing a new set of documents concerning Executive Order 12333 that we — alongside the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School — obtained in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. EO 12333 hasn’t received much public attention to date, but the government’s prior disclosures in our suit have shown that the executive order in fact governs most of the NSA’s surveillance. In the NSA’s own words, EO 12333 is “the primary source of the NSA’s foreign intelligence-gathering authority.”

• Cricket Revealed As Mobile ISP That Was Blocking Encrypted Emails

  A few weeks ago, we wrote about how VPN company Golden Frog had quietly revealed in an FCC filing that an unnamed mobile broadband provider had been (even more) quietly blocking people from sending encrypted emails — basically blocking users from making use of STARTTLS encryption. The Washington Post has now revealed that the mobile operator in question was Cricket — a subsidiary of AT&T, and that it stopped blocking such encryption a few days after our post was published.

• Mobile ISP Cricket was thwarting encrypted emails, researchers find

  Some customers of popular prepaid-mobile company Cricket were unable to send or receive encrypted e-mails for many months, according to security researchers, raising concerns that consumers may find that protecting their privacy is not always in their hands.

• Swedish regulator orders ISP to retain customer data despite death of EU directive

  The Swedish Telecoms Regulator PTS has threatened Kista-based ISP Bahnhof to continue storing records of its customer communications, even though the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled the 2006 Data Retention Directive invalid [PDF] in April of this year.

• Vermont’s Automatic License Plate Readers: 7.9 Million Plates Captured, Five Crimes Solved

  The sales pitch for automatic license plate readers is how great they are at helping cops solve crimes. From hunting down stolen cars to tracking pedophiles across jurisdictions, ALPRs supposedly make policing a breeze by gathering millions of time/date/location records every single day and making it all available to any law enforcement agency willing to buy the software and pay the licensing fees.

• License Plate Scanners Raise Privacy Concerns, But Do They Help Police?

  Over the past five years, law enforcement agencies in Vermont have invested more than $1 million in technology that gathers millions of data points every year about the whereabouts of vehicles across the state.

• Amazon-CIA $600 Million Deal Facing Scrutiny: “What’s the CIA Doing on Amazon’s Cloud?”

  A billboard challenging Amazon to fully disclose the terms of its $600 million contract to provide cloud computing services for the Central Intelligence Agency has been unveiled at a busy intersection near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

• FBI’s Use Of ‘Sneak And Peek’ Warrants Still Steadily Increasing, Still Has Nearly Nothing To Do With Fighting Terrorism

  Another tool supposedly “crucial” to the War on Terror is just another lowly footsoldier in the War on Drugs. Some long-delayed reports on Section 213 “sneak and peek” warrants have finally been released by the US government, providing more detail on the constantly-expanding use of delayed-notification warrants by the FBI.

• Government Authority Intended for Terrorism is Used for Other Purposes

  The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law enforcement was adamant Section 213 was needed to protect against terrorism. But the latest government report detailing the numbers of “sneak and peek” warrants reveals that out of a total of over 11,000 sneak and peek requests, only 51 were used for terrorism. Yet again, terrorism concerns appear to be trampling our civil liberties.

Civil Rights

• Ex-Libyan rebel leader allowed to sue Britain over torture claim

• Libyan rebel free to sue UK over ‘torture’

• Abdel Hakim Belhaj wins right to sue UK government over his kidnap

• If the Republicans Win Big on Tuesday, So Will the CIA

  Republicans stand to gain as many as eight seats in the Senate this election. But America’s spies stand to gain much, much more.

  If the Nov. 4 elections deliver a GOP-controlled Senate, the chairmanship of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee is likely to go to a North Carolinian whose unwavering support for the CIA and NSA could radically transform the committee’s oversight agenda.

• The CIA torture cover-up continues

  One of the numerous issues being carefully avoided by the political establishment in the US midterm elections, now less than one week away, is the constitutional crisis surrounding the plot to cover up torture carried out by the CIA.

  All of the institutions of government are complicit in the cover-up, which is centered on preventing the publication of a Senate Intelligence Committee summary detailing US torture practices far exceeding in scope and brutality those made public so far. The logic behind the cover-up is simple: the report details crimes so harrowing that its publication would prove politically explosive.

• You’ll Probably Never Know Why The CIA Spied On The Senate

  When Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) took to the Senate floor earlier this year to allege that the CIA had spied on the U.S. Senate, she confirmed the existence of a secret document.

  That document, she said, could further validate a scathing report on the spy agency’s torture practices that is expected to be unveiled in the next few weeks.

• The US and torture

  A soon-to-be released report of the US Senate criticises the CIA under President George W. Bush of conducting torture of Al Qaeda suspects. However, it doesn’t assess the responsibility of Bush himself nor his vice president, Dick Cheney.

  According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman Dianne Feinstein the 6,000 page report is “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the US.”

  The report shows that the CIA did not provide accurate information to Congress and also provided misleading information. The report also concludes that the CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making. While the report was being prepared the CIA penetrated the Senate Committee’s computers, arousing the fury of its members.

• Report to U.N. Calls Bullshit on Obama’s ‘Look Forward, Not Backwards’ Approach to Torture

  Months after President Obama frankly admitted that the United States had “tortured some folks” as part of the War on Terror, a new report submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates his administration for shielding the officials responsible from prosecution.

• CIA refuses to make torture report readable, blames Senate for delay

  The Central Intelligence Agency is firing back at allegations that it is responsible for delaying the release of the Senate report on the controversial post-9/11 interrogation program, insisting that lawmakers themselves are to blame.

• DOJ again asks for delay on CIA report’s release

  The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday for the fourth time asked a court to delay the release of a 500-page summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into a Bush-era CIA rendition, detention and interrogation program.

• Frustrated CIA Blames Torture Report Delays on Senators Who Want It To Be Intelligible

• Denis McDonough Supported Intelligence Oversight When Bush Was President

• Former outed CIA operative Valerie Plame calls Cheney a traitor

  Valerie Plame says former Vice President Dick Cheney is a traitor for allegedly having outed her in 2003 as an undercover CIA operative overseas.

  It’s now been more than a decade since Plame found herself in the center of a political firestorm.

  The incident began when Plame’s husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, was sent to Niger by the George W. Bush administration to investigate claims that Iraq had arranged to buy and import uranium from Niger. Wilson reported to Bush that Iraq had no such program.

• The CIA and the FBI Protected at Least 1,000 Nazis

  For decades, the CIA and the FBI reportedly employed and protected at least 1,000 Nazis, using them as spies and later shielding them from prosecution, the New York Times reports.

  According to Eric Lichtblau,who reviewed declassified reports and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the two intelligence agencies recruited at least 1,000 Nazis to operate as spies and informants—a number experts say is probably a lowball estimate.

  Historians say they were recruited under a “cold war mentality” that the Nazis’ ability to gather intel on the Russians outweighed their war crimes.

• CIA and FBI used ‘over 1,000 ex-Nazis and collaborators’ as spies during Cold War

• The CIA and FBI Had 1,000 Nazi “Assets” During Cold War

• CIA, FBI employed at least 1,000 ex-Nazis as spies during the Cold War, book claims

  One such spy was involved in the Lithuanian massacre of tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust; another worked closely with Adolf Eichmann, according to the book.

• Report: CIA Protected 1,000 Ex-Nazis It Hired As Cold War Spies

  The CIA and other U.S. agencies hired at least 1,000 ex-Nazis to serve as spies during the Cold War and took pains to conceal the suspected war crimes of those informants living in America, according to a New York Times report published Monday.

• Conor Friedersdorf: CIA allied itself with Nazis

  One serious shortcoming of American democracy is our perennial failure to properly police the CIA. Over the decades, no federal agency has been caught up in more scandals: democratically elected governments overthrown, the rendition of prisoners, torture, spying on Congress.

• FBI, CIA used 1,000 Nazis as spies during Cold War

  Recently disclosed government records and interviews reveal that after World War II, the FBI and CIA recruited 1,000 ex-Nazis as informants during the Cold War.

  According to the New York Times report, which was adapted from Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, not only did the government agencies recruit ex-Nazis of all ranks as anti-Soviet “assets,” but the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and CIA’s Allen Dulles also helped these spies immigrate to the U.S. This was done in a bid to conceal their participation in the war or their “moral lapses,” so that they could be shielded from the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazi pursuers.

• The Most Disturbing Sentence in the Bombshell Report on the CIA and Nazi Spies

  The U.S. government often went to great lengths to protect its use of former Nazis in the global fight against communism. Times reporter Eric Lichtblau notes that, as recently as the 1990s, spy agencies “concealed the government’s ties” to Nazi war criminals still living in America.

• U.S. Had 1,000 Nazi Spies During Cold War

  The U.S. government used about 1,000 Nazis as spies during the Cold War, according to a new report, including one who was among the highest-ranking members of the Hitler’s Third Reich.

• In Cold War, U.S. spy agencies used 1,000 Nazis

  In the decades after World War II, the CIA and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.

  At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and Allen Dulles at the CIA aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.

• CIA shocked to find out Nazis make unreliable spies

• U.S. recruited over 1,000 ex-Nazis as anti-Communist spies, NY Times reports

• US used Nazis as Cold War spies

• Report: The US Employed ‘At Least 1,000′ Nazis After World War II

• U.S. used 1,000 Nazis as anti-Soviet ‘assets’ in Cold War, records reveal

• New Book Sheds Further Light on US Government Protection of Ex-Nazis

• Partnering with Nazis

• ‘Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men’: US Used Nazis as Cold War Spies

• US Spy Agencies Employed 1,000 Nazis as Anti-Soviet ‘Assets’

• Nazis-turned-US spies produced useless intelligence

• US Spy Agencies Used Nazis During Cold War: Declassified Report

• Utilitarianism Run Amok

• U.S. spy agencies hired at least 1,000 Nazis, new book alleges

• Let’s Play “Who Goes Nazi”

• U.S. Intelligence Agencies Employed 1,000 Nazis As Spies During The Cold War

• U.S. spy agencies ‘hired at least 1,000 Nazis’

• Cover Up: U.S. Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis for Cold War Spying

• U.S. intelligence recruited at least 1,000 former Nazis as spies during Cold War

• US used at least 1000 Nazi spies in Cold War: Report

• Federal Agencies Just Doing Whatever They Want Now

  The Times piece also revealed that the CIA hid their precious assets from Nazi hunters and prosecutors trying to deport then-old men in the 1980s and even into the ‘90s. Most disturbing, one of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann’s little buddies, Otto von Bolschwing, was protected until 1982, when he conveniently died of a brain disorder before he could be deported or prosecuted.

  [...]

  More alarming still is the description of von Bolschwing’s panic when Mossad agents snatched Eichmann from Argentina, to bring him to trial in Israel in 1961. The CIA, it seems, assured him he would be safe in America. No Nazi hunters would come make him pay for his crimes – or “embarrass the US” – not while the agency could use Bolschwing to presumably win the Cold War.

• While Jewish DPs languished, Nazi criminals given refuge by US

  In the waning days of World War II, Waffen SS general Karl Wolff, made a deal with the American intelligence operative Allen Dulles that he would surrender his men in Northern Italy in exchange for immunity from war crimes. With the imminent collapse of the Third Reich, Wolff had more to gain from this understanding than Washington, but Dulles kept his promise, protecting Wolff from prosecutors at Nuremberg.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Both Comcast And Verizon Agree To Pay Millions To Settle Overbilling Claims

• Verizon: ‘Title II Is Not The Answer… Except When It Gives Us Massive Subsidies, Then It’s Totally The Answer’

• Report: Verizon’s Tech News Site Will Ignore the NSA and Net Neutrality

  Who doesn’t want to have their own tech site these days? According to the Daily Dot, Verizon’s recently launched SugarString will have two very conspicuous holes in its tech coverage: U.S. government surveillance and net neutrality. What a big fat coincidence that Verizon is embroiled in both.

• Verizon’s new big budget tech-news site prohibits reporting on NSA spying or net neutrality

  They’re positioning the new site “Sugar String” as a well-funded competitor to Wired, but reporters are not allowed to mention NSA spying (in which Verizon was an enthusiastic partner) or net neutrality (which Verizon has devoted itself to killing, with campaigns of overt lobbying and covert dirty tricks).

  Cole Stryker, Sugar String’s editor-in-chief, sent recruiting letters to reporters last week offering them jobs at the site on the condition that they pretend that the major investor’s major embarrassments — which have made headlines all over the world on a virtually daily basis — didn’t exist.

  Reporters are, however, permitted to write about net neutrality violations and mass surveillance by governments not allied to the US, particularly China.

• Detailed Report Shows How ISPs Are Making ‘Business Choice’ To Make Your Internet Connection Terrible

  A couple of years ago, we wrote about an effort by the big broadband players to push the FCC away from using M-Lab to measure basic network diagnostics on the internet. M-Lab is a very interesting project, focused on collecting a huge amount of data about internet performance, and making that data widely available. In the past, for example, we’ve highlighted an M-Lab project showing which ISPs were throttling BitTorrent.

Intellectual Monopolies

• New Zealand’s Trade Minister Admits They Keep TPP Documents Secret To Avoid ‘Public Debate’

  A couple years ago, then US Trade Representative Ron Kirk explained why the negotiating text of trade agreements like the TPP needed to be kept secret: because if the public debated it, the agreement probably wouldn’t be approved. He used, as an example, a failed trade agreement where the text had been public. Beyond the “small sample size” problem of this explanation, the much more troubling aspect is the obvious question of recognizing that if public debate would kill the agreement, perhaps it’s the agreement that’s the problem and not the public.

• Response to EU Ombudsman’s Consultation on TTIP Transparency

  The EU Ombudsman is running a consultation on how to improve the transparency of the TTIP negotiations. This shouldn’t be hard, since there is currently vanishingly small openness about these secret talks.

• Trademarks

  • Pizzeria Attempts To Trademark The Flavor Of Pizza. Yes, Seriously.

    Trademark, while generally one of the better forms of intellectual property as used in practice and in purpose, can certainly still be abused. It can also fall victim to an ever-growing ownership culture that seems to have invaded the American mind like some kind of brain-eating amoeba. And that’s how we’ve arrived here today, a day in which I get to tell you about how there is currently a trademark dispute over the flavor of pizza.

• Copyrights

  • Gottfrid Svartholm Found Guilty in Hacking Trial

    Gottfrid Svartholm has today been found guilty of hacking crimes by a Danish court. The Swedish Pirate Bay founder and his 21-year-old accomplice were found to have been involved in illegally accessing systems operated by IT company CSC. It was the biggest hacking case ever conducted in Denmark.

  • Pirate Bay co-founder convicted in Denmark’s “largest hacking case” ever

    One of the co-founders of the notorious Pirate Bay website was convicted (Google Translate) Thursday in a major hacking case in Denmark, and could face up to six years in prison.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• China will upgrade all PCs to Linux by 2020

  China have announced a new time frame in which they will move to a new operating system. It will consist of 15% of government computers being switched to Linux per year. The report by Ni Guangnan outlining the transition won government approval and by 2020 the Chinese Government’s transition to Linux should be complete.

• Things I Do in Windows When I Forget It’s Not Linux

  Many Linux users out there dual-boot with a Windows system, or they just use the two operating systems separately. An interesting thing happens when you’re in Windows and you try to do something that you think is normal, but that feature doesn’t exist.

Server

• Weapons of MaaS Deployment

  I’ve been researching OpenStack deployment methods lately and so when I got an email from Canonical inviting me to check out how they deploy OpenStack using their Metal as a Service (MaaS) software on their fantastic Orange Box demo platform I jumped at the opportunity. While I was already somewhat familiar with MaaS and Juju from research for my Official Ubuntu Server Book, I’d never seen it in action at this scale. Plus a chance to see the Orange Box–a ten-server computing cluster and network stack that fits in a box about the size of a old desktop computer–was not something I could pass up.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Bad Voltage Season 1 Episode 28: Everything is Orange

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel Finally Being Optimized For SSHDs

  The Linux kernel is finally being optimized for use of solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) that follow the ATA 3.2 standard.

• Video: KvmGT – GPU Virtualization for KVM

  Here is a video I’ve been waiting for by Jike Song from Intel. The KVM Forum 2014 was held in conjunction with the recent LinuxCon Europe and someone (from the Linux Foundation or the KVM Forum) has been processing and posting presentation videos to YouTube in a staggered fashion. About 13 hours ago this video appeared. When I noticed the topic on the KVM Forum schedule (along with the slide deck [PDF]) a week or two before the event, I was really looking forward to learning more.

• Conspirationist Website Wants People to Boycott Linux and Use Minix

  This is not the first initiative of its kind. In fact, a similar website was released just a couple of weeks ago, asking users to support forking Debian because it adopted systemd. Now, the Linux kernel is the target and the website claims to be the work of multiple users (developers?).

• Ease your kernel tracing struggle with LTTng Addons

  If you are new to Linux tracing and/or LTTng, go no further. Head on to the new and awesome LTTng Docs to know what this stuff is all about. I wrote an article on basics of LTTng and then followed it up with some more stuff a few month back too.

• Graphics Stack

  • GLAMOR Acceleration Continues To Be Cleaned Up

    Now that X.Org Server 1.17 RC1 has been released with a focus on improving GLAMOR and integrating the xf86-video-intel DDX, Keith Packard has written a blog post about the work that has gone on so far since GLAMOR’s inception for optimizing and cleaning up this 2D-over-OpenGL acceleration method.

• Benchmarks

  • Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 With Intel HD Graphics

    For those curious how the latest open-source Intel Linux graphics driver is performing against Intel’s newest closed-source Windows OpenGL driver, we’ve put Ubuntu 14.10 (including a second run with the latest Linux kernel / Mesa) against Microsoft Windows 8.1 with the newest Intel GPU driver released earlier this month.

Applications

• slap: Intuitive and colorful

  I got a note a little less than a month ago from pouet, pointing out a text editor called slap. pouet said I might like it, if I wasn’t fond of bizarre double-control-key command sequences or arcane letter combinations for controls.

• bashmarks: The simple solution

• Russia’s Yandex Web Browser Finally Released For Linux

  Russian Phoronix readers can rejoice that Yandex Browser is finally available for Linux after it’s already come for Windows, OS X, Android, and iOS. Yandex Browser is powered by Google’s WebKit-forked Blink layout engine and based on the Chromium code-base. The Yandex Browser checks web page security against its systems and has other additions on top of the vanilla Chromium code.

• Proprietary

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to run SQL queries against Apache log files on Linux

  • Install LibreOffice 4.3.3 in Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10

  • How To Use Vagrant To Create Small Virtual Test Lab on a Linux / OS X / MS-Windows

  • Ability to remove TLS 1.0 from httpd in CentOS 6

  • How To Install Oracle Database 12c On CentOS 7

• Games

  • Transistor Available On Linux Now

    Transistor, a game made by the developers of the well-received Bastion, is finally available on Linux.

  • Win A Copy Of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

    Surprise! Hello everyone it’s been a while since I wrote anything here, so how about a chance to win some Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel keys?

  • SteamOS & Steam’s Big Picture Mode Now Have Better Filter Options

    One of the annoyances that may come with people using SteamOS is buying games from the store they cannot use a game-pad controller with, and Valve are taking steps to improve this.

  • Europa Universalis IV: Art Of War, Biggest Expansion To EU IV Yet, Released

    Art of War, the newest expansion to the popular Europa Universalis IV has been released. There’s a lot of content to go around this time, prominently including an overhauled reformation mechanic that promises to spice up the religious wars in Europe.

  • Animal Gods Coming To Linux, Now On Kickstarter

    Animal Gods is top-down action adventure game now on Kickstarter inspired by classics from the 90′s brought to the 21st century with full HD, dynamic lighting and high-res textures.

  • The Last Dogma Is Now On Greenlight, Offering Linux Version Exclusively For SteamOS

    The Last Dogma is a dark comedy adventure set in the year 1999 of an alternate reality world, where US actively campaigns for world domination, UK is ruled by the dictator from Iran and Yugoslavia is being invaded by several countries.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kubuntu 15.04 Will Use KDE’s Plasma 5 By Default

    Kubuntu’s Jonathan Riddell has shared that “Kubuntu Vivid”, a.k.a. Ubuntu 15.05 for the Vivid Vervet, will use Plasma 5 by default.

  • A Good Puppy, Urban Legends, and Kubuntu Plasma 5

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.15.1 Released

    The first development snapshot for the GNOME 3.15 cycle is now available, which will end up being GNOME 3.16 come next March.

  • GNOME 3.15.1

    GNOME development continues apace; here is the first snapshot of the GNOME 3.15 development cycle, the 3.15.1 release.

Distributions

• Ubuntu & SUSE & CentOS, Oh My!

  It’s Halloween week, and the big names in Linux are determined not to disappoint the trick-or-treaters. No less than three mainline distributions have released new versions this week, led by perennially-loved-and-hated crowd favourite Ubuntu.

  Ubuntu 14.10, better-known by its nom de womb “Utopic Unicorn”, hit the streets last Thursday. It appears to be a mostly update release, with more of the release announcement’s ink devoted to parent-company Canonical’s “Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu Openstack” than to Utopic’s “latest and greatest open source technologies”. Among those, the v3.16 kernel has been included, as well as updated versions of GTK, Qt, Firefox, LibreOffice, Juju, Docker, MAAS, and of course, Unity. Full details can be found in the official release notes.

• New Releases

  • Zentyal announces Zentyal Server 4.0, major new Linux Small Business Server release

    Zentyal, developer of server technology natively interoperable with Microsoft® server products, today announced a new release of the Zentyal Linux small business server. Zentyal Server 4.0 aims at offering small and medium businesses (SMBs) a Linux based Small Business Server that can be set up in less than 30 minutes and is both easy-to-use and affordable.

  • 4MLinux Rescue Edition 10.1 Beta Helps Users with Data Recovery

    4MLinux Rescue Edition, a special distribution that includes a wide set of system maintenance and recovery applications, has advanced to version 10.1 Beta and is now ready for testing.

• Screenshots

  • Puppy Linux 6.0 Screenshot Tour

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Is Released

    Enterprise users who rely on SUSE Linux now have access to a new and updated version of the platform: SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, announced Monday. SUSE says the key benefits this update offers to customers are increased uptime, improved operational efficiency and accelerated innovation.

  • Suse enterprise Linux can take your system back in time

    The newest enterprise edition of the Suse Linux distribution allows administrators to go back in time, for instance, to immediately before they made that fatal system-crippling mistake.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Software Collections 1.2 Adds GCC 4.9, Nginx 1.6

    Red Hat has released their third update to their “Software Collections” that provide updated development tools/packages to RHEL6/RHEL7 users as an alternative to their default packages.

  • Red Hat Offers Startups a Free Cloud Platform

    Application testing and development has traditionally been one of the chief drivers of public cloud usage, as it presents extremely little real risk to a company. Because critical information — customer data, credit card numbers and so on — isn’t being stored, the benefits of cloud computing are more apparent and immediate. Now, Red Hat Inc. wants to make it’s even easier, by offering a version of its OpenShift platform specifically for software startups.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical Adds Ubuntu OpenStack Distribution for Open Source Cloud Computing

        Ubuntu Linux has already enjoyed the distinction of being the most popular platform for hosting OpenStack clouds. But now, Canonical has taken its commitment to OpenStack a step further with the announcement of its own OpenStack distribution.

      • Canonical’s OpenStack Offerings to Change the Company’s Direction

        Canonical is drawing a lot of attention after unveiling its own Ubuntu OpenStack distribution, and part of the reason is that Ubuntu is already the most popular platform of all for building OpenStack deployments on. That fact was reported in the OpenStack Foundation’s survey findings and has been bolstered elsewhere.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ubuntu Kylin 14.10

Devices/Embedded

• ARM unveils toolkit for students learning how to program

  ARM has unveiled a toolkit for university students who wish to learn embedded systems design and programming.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Cool Devices and Demos at Tizen Developer Summit Shanghai

      All around it was a great event, with additional keynotes from luminaries in the Chinese government and industry, sessions from Intel, Samsung, and the community, and a well-attended DevLab where attendees learned how to write and deploy their first wearable Tizen app. I spoke to one person who had written a complete sketchpad app in the 1.5 hour session, who had never used the Tizen wearable platform before. All around, we were very pleased with the event and the attendees were as well.

    • Samsung’s Gear S smartwatch coming to the US on November 7th

      Samsung’s Gear S smartwatch will launch in the United States on November 7th, the company announced today. All four major US carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile) will carry the device, and you’ll also be able to purchase it from Samsung’s store-in-a-store shops at Best Buy locations across the US. The Gear S will be available in black or white, but Samsung’s not revealing any pricing details; it’s leaving that task to the carriers. Just don’t expect the Gear S, with its built-in cellular radio and curved OLED screen, to come cheap.

    • Samsung values your need for security and your input to Samsung KNOX

      Samsung as a company is not the most open at times, but they are trying to change their ways with Open Source initiatives within the company, and also them trying to take onboard Open Source projects like Tizen. It looks like the Samsung KNOX team also wants their customers, partners, and basically anyone to know that they value the quality of Samsung KNOX that they are offering, and welcome you to contact them regarding any concerns you might have or information you want to contact to share publicly or privately.

  • Android

    • Google’s new open source project lets developers add live YouTube streaming to their Android apps

      With the new YouTube WatchMe for Android project, developers can now integrate live streaming into their apps. Thanks to this new open source project, more third-party devs will be able to offer video streaming features similar to Sony’s Live on YouTube by – Xperia and HTC’s upcoming RE camera.

    • 35 Essential Android Apps for Daily Use

      This list of essential Android apps are the ones you must have apps you need every day. They help with email, weather, music, and handful of other essential tasks.

    • Windows Phone Shrinks In Android-Dominated Europe, As New iPhones Boost iOS’ Share

      Spare a thought for Microsoft, a relative newcomer to the mobile making business, after Redmond completed its $7.2BN+ acquisition of former European mobile making powerhouse Nokia earlier this year. If Microsoft was hoping to see quick marketshare wins in Europe once its hands were fully on the levers of production that has not come to pass.

    • Puppy Linux 6.0 Tahrpup CE released

      Puppy Linux has long been one of the more prominent lightweight Linux distributions. This time around it’s up to version 6.0 and it has been dubbed “Tahrpup” by the Puppy Linux developers. Puppy Linux 6.0 is based on Ubuntu 14.04 and uses Linux kernel 3.14.20.

    • KDBUS Submitted For Review To The Mainline Linux Kernel

      It looks like KDBUS, the Linux kernel D-Bus implementation, is posed to be added to the next kernel release after Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out its patches today.

    • Three great Android tools for Linux and Windows sysadmin

      Systems administration isn’t a simple job — and being able to respond to issues quickly is a definite plus. Not long ago, server problems meant receiving a phone alert followed by a trip to the data center to fix whatever was wrong. Today, having full-powered computers such as smartphones or tablets literally in your hand is a tremendous help when doing sysadmin. Load Android with a few key applications and you can remotely monitor servers and services, get alerts and warnings as they occur, and solve problems without any travel at all.

    • Android’s dominance in Europe crushes Windows Phone

      In today’s Android roundup: Windows Phone is in deep trouble in Europe as Android reigns supreme. Plus: LG sells 16.8 million Android phones, and Android 5.0 Lollipop’s security features

    • Watch a working Project Ara prototype demonstrated ahead of Spiral 2 reveal

      The engineers behind Project Ara are trying to make the last smartphone you’ll ever need. Their design for a modular device has users slotting components — a camera, extra storage space, a Wi-Fi connector — into their phones, as and when they need them. It’s an ambitious scheme, but engineers working at NK Labs in Boston have already produced a working prototype, which they showed off to modular smartphone evangelist Dave Hakkens during a recent visit.

Has the time come to rebrand open source?

I wonder how many other businesses are experiencing the same problem. I’m keen to start a conversation about how others fair when selling FOSS solutions and whether its time to get together again and think again about a re-branding that will have my prospective customers asking, “OK tell us more” rather than “open sounds insecure”. To that end I would like to nominate a brand new name that I have seen used in FOSS communities as a suitable candidate… Community Software.

Elastix seeks LatAm open-source VoIP community

Vast majority of software developers now use open source, Forrester reports

Both developers and organizations are adopting open-source software based on merit rather than ideology, according to the findings of the report. A full 80 percent of the more than 1,200 coders from tech firms and traditional companies that participated in the survey said they use free tools because they’re functionally superior to commercial alternatives in the same category, while 72 percent said the broad participation in open-source projects can make the code more secure.

This time it’s SO REAL: Overcoming the open-source orgasm myth with TODO

What can the world learn from Google, Twitter and Facebook – apart from how to make millions through ads flinging? How to run a successful open-source project.

The trio in September announced TODO, to make open-source project “easier.” Joining them are Dropbox and Box and code-site GitHub, payment providers Square and Stripe, US retailer WalMart Labs and a body called the Khan Academy.

Facebook, Google, and the Rise of Open Source Security Software

Arpaia is a security engineer, but he’s not the kind who spends his days trying to break into computer software, hoping he can beat miscreants to the punch. As Sullivan describes him, he’s a “builder”—someone who creates new tools capable of better protecting our computer software—and that’s unusual. “You go to the security conferences, and it’s all about breaking things,” Sullivan says. “It’s not about building things.”

Facebook Builds Open-Source Osquery for Security Insight

The tool is designed to expose what’s going on inside an OS. Osquery, Facebook’s new open-source framework, could give enterprises new security insight.

Events

• An Open Source Platform That Makes Building Apps Cheap and Easy

  Schmidt thinks it’s a waste of time for companies to build these same foundations again and again, which is why he founded Meteor, which builds an open source web programming framework that anyone can use to build complex, desktop-style applications in the browser. “The idea of Meteor is that everyone should have that stuff,” he says. “It shouldn’t take a couple years to get to the market.”

• Open-source JavaScript platform Meteor turns 1

• OpenStack Paris Summit Could be a Turning Point for Project

• KVM Matures, and the Use Cases Multiply

  As I look back in the rear view mirror at the conferences now, the key takeaway for me is that KVM use is rapidly expanding. From first being used to virtualize Linux servers, it has now evolved to form the basis of the open cloud, being used for emerging new uses such as network function virtualization, and running on many more processor architectures.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • GPU Profiling Support Lands In Mozilla Firefox

    The built-in profiler for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser now has the ability to provide GPU profiling information.

    Mozilla graphics team has added GPU profiling support that so far will show how much GPU time is spent when compositing. The GPU profiling support has already proven useful for debugging issues and optimizing Firefox’s GPU usage.

  • Introducing SIMD.js

    SIMD.js will accelerate a wide range of demanding applications today, including games, video and audio manipulation, scientific simulations, and more, on the web. Applications will be able to use the SIMD.js API directly, libraries will be able to use SIMD.js to expose higher-level interfaces that applications can use, and Emscripten will compile C++ with popular SIMD idioms onto optimized SIMD.js code.

  • SIMD For JavaScript Continues Coming Along

    SIMD for JavaScript continues to be worked on by Mozilla, Google, Intel, and others for better accelerating particular workloads in the web.

SaaS/Big Data

• Contributing effectively to OpenStack’s Neutron project

  Earlier this year, Kyle Mestery posted an article on his blog outlining some common misconceptions about contributing to the Neutron project and how to contribute effectively upstream. Kyle is a Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems where he works on OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and Open vSwitch. He is also Program Technical Lead (PTL) for the OpenStack Neutron project, the networking component of OpenStack handling the complex task of connecting machines in a virtual environment.

• DreamHost Takes its OpenStack IaaS Platform Out of Beta Tests

  DreamHost has now taken its DreamCompute infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) OpenStack cloud platorm out of private beta testing. The company, with a platform that comes from the creators of Ceph, is set to compete with Amazon and other players in the cloud game.

• This Polish startup aims to “do to open source what DigitalOcean did to SaaS”

  With almost 80,000 followers on Twitter and series A funding of $37.2 million in the bank, cloud hosting firm DigitalOcean is a suitable company to look up to for VirtKick.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice based document editor comes to the iPad

  LibreOffice is enjoying some serious adoption. CloudOn, a US-based company has launched a document editor for Apple’s iPad which is based of free and open source LibreOffice. The company says in a press statement that the app offers a, “…new experience for creating and editing mobile documents with a gesture-first doc editor that removes all the clutter, overload and lag of yesterday’s tools. Now people can intuitively create and collaborate on thoughts, ideas and information in ways that fits with the way they work.”

• LibreOffice 4.3.3 Released with 62 Bug Fixes

  A new minor release of the hugely popular open-source office suite LibreOffice has been made available for immediate download.

Healthcare

• PwC pitches open-source electronic health records

  According to PWC’s Dan Garrett, who heads the firm’s Health IT practice, the VistA solution makes sense in the short term because of existing interoperability between DOD and VA, and in the long term because the open architecture of VistA gives DOD the ability to modernize at its own pace.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • TIBCO announces open-source version of TIBCO Jaspersoft 5.6

Funding

• SwiftStack CEO: Enterprises are using our open source storage

  SwiftStack CEO Joe Arnold delves into new Series B funding, competition, customer trends and the firm’s future direction.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GCC 4.9.2 Released Today To Fix Regressions

  GCC 4.9.2 was released today as the latest point release in the GCC 4.9 series for the compiler originally released earlier this year.

• GCC 4.9 Release Series

• GDB 7.8.1 Brings Various Fixes For The GNU Debugger

  Version 7.8.1 of the GNU Debugger is now available and it brings various bug fixes over the major GDB 7.8 release.

• GDB 7.8.1 released!

• On joining the FSF board

• FreeIPMI 1.4.6 Released

Public Services/Government

• Paris extends smart city open source tools to region

  The French capital is pushing for the use of free and open source software solutions to extend its smart city project to the city region. Making databases and applications interoperable and creating smart city grids requires tools to be as open as possible, and the use of open source provides many advantages over proprietary tools, says the city’s Deputy Mayor Jean-Louis Missika.

Openness/Sharing

• Iron Man costume made on the shoulders of giants

  When Iron Man set foot on stage at the Red Hat Halloween party last year, my jaw dropped. A huge applause erupted. It was like the real Iron Man stepped out of the Hollywood big screen and was right in front of us. I was waiting for it to start flying.

• SnapJet is the World’s First Open Source Instant Film Printer for Smartphones

Programming

• Job No. 1 In Open Source: Making Sure Others Can Understand Your Code

  While I’ve pointed out the importance of hiring exceptional writers to help craft and articulate meaningful stories about why a product matters, the reality is that strong writing skills matter just as much for developers as for marketers. In part this is a matter of developers doing a better job of marketing their projects to rally contributors, but it’s actually much more fundamental.

Standards/Consortia

• The Failed Promise of HTML5

  The W3C announced this week that the HTML5 specification is now an official recommendation. While I was an avid supporter of the HTML5 effort in the early days, seven years ago, you can count me among those that aren’t all that excited by the W3Cs announcement.

  [...]

  As I see it, web standards are now evolving every six to eight weeks and the W3C is merely a bystander in the process.

Windows 7: Officially Dead This Week

With no funeral, retrospectives, accolades, or notes of sadness, the Windows 7 era has come to an end.

Freedom Reaches Retail Shelves On Friday

Perhaps freedom won’t turn on like the flick of a light-switch. It will be a gradual process that’s been going on for a while but it will be faster now. People I meet are still wondering what to do about XP. “7” or “8*” or Wintel are not on their radar any longer. They are thinking that if Android/Linux is what I like, why do retailers only offer Wintel on retail shelves? They are thinking that something must be available and they are finding GNU/Linux. On their own. That’s the game-changer. That’s the shift in mind-share.

Security

• Security advisories for Thursday

• Hackers breach some White House computers

  Hackers thought to be working for the Russian government breached the unclassified White House computer networks in recent weeks, sources said, resulting in temporary disruptions to some services while cybersecurity teams worked to contain the intrusion.

• LAX flight delayed after WiFi hotspot name prompts concerns

  An American Airlines flight from Los Angeles International Airport to London was delayed Sunday after concerns over the name of a WiFi hotspot.

  A passenger saw the WiFi connection, named “Al-Quida Free Terror Nettwork,” and expressed concern to a flight attendant.

• Stupid WiFi Hotspot Name Gets American Airlines Flight Grounded

  America: land of the ass coverage policy and home of “better safe than sorry.” Free and brave? Not so much. If anyone wants to know if the terrorists have won, here’s another one to file under “Exhibit A: Yes, At Least A Sizable Partial Victory.”

• Hackers Are Using Gmail Drafts to Update Their Malware and Steal Data

  In his career-ending extramarital affair that came to light in 2012, General David Petraeus used a stealthy technique to communicate with his lover Paula Broadwell: the pair left messages for each other in the drafts folder of a shared Gmail account. Now hackers have learned the same trick. Only instead of a mistress, they’re sharing their love letters with data-stealing malware buried deep on a victim’s computer.

• Security Specifications

  There are many potential sources for security specifications. Some of them are government standards. For example, in the United States, HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, specifies requirements for administrative safeguards, physical safeguards, and technical safeguards of medical records and personally identifiable information. Anyone dealing with Protected Health Information must comply with HIPAA.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Drones posing global security issues

  To date, only the US, Britain and Israel have used armed drones in an overt, operational environment in which they killed opponents. But the reason why other nations have not used drones is political, not technological, for almost every government is developing an offensive UAV capability.

• Bill to ban armed drones from N.J. skies advances in Legislature

  A bill that would criminalize the outfitting of drones with weapons was advanced by a state Assembly committee today.

  The bill, introduced in January, primarily limits the use of the unmanned aerial vehicles by law enforcement and fire departments to certain situations where search warrants have been obtained, or where there is a clear emergency, such as an Amber Alert or an active fire, according to the legislation.

• DoD, Lockheed Shake On 29 F-35s; Price Drops 3.6%

  The eighth Low Rate Initial Production contract includes 19 F-35As, six F-35Bs and four F-35Cs. “It also provides for the production of the first two F-35As for Israel, the first four F-35As for Japan along with two F-35As for Norway and two F-35As for Italy. The United Kingdom will receive four F-35Bs. The contract also funds manufacturing-support equipment as well as ancillary mission equipment.”

• Killer robots are here and we must stop them, expert says

  From “The Terminator” to the Avengers’ upcoming battle with Ultron, pop culture’s parade of killer robots has long expressed fears that modern technology’s marvels might turn against us.

  In fact, the killer robots are already here – in the form of military drones and missiles, for now – and so is a movement to ban them by such organizations as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. So says physicist Mark Gubrud, who appears tonight at a Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition meeting to speak about the “robot arms race” and the growing possibility of “robot armies fighting a war and humans playing no role.”

• Elon Musk: ‘We are summoning the demon’ with artificial intelligence

  Elon Musk, a chief advocate of cars smart enough to park and drive themselves, continues to escalate his spooky speech when it comes to the next level of computation — the malicious potential of artificial intelligence continues to freak him out.

• Rethinking a Negative Perception of Drones | Commentary

  We hear a lot about the nasty realities of modern drone usage — the targeted strikes that kill indiscriminately and the surveillance operations that concern privacy advocates. The side of the story we hear far less often is that of the large, military aircraft’s smaller brethren: the UAVs that have demonstrated significant advantages with disaster relief, search and rescue, conservation, forest fire detection and scientific research efforts. Unfortunately, myths persist publicly and in Congress there is no middle ground between libertarian-leaning privacy advocates who oppose drones and those who are in favor of them.

• Drone deliberately flown at plane above Essex sparking terror fears

  A passenger plane was just 75ft from a mid-air crash with an unmanned drone, an official report has revealed.

  The quadcopter drone was deliberately flown towards the turbo-prop plane as it came into land, according to the co-pilot. He feared there was a high risk of a collision with the plane, which holds up to 74 passengers.

• US drone strike kills five people in Pakistani tribal region

  A suspected US drone strike killed at least five militants in a Pakistani tribal region today, with local villagers saying the dead included a senior Arab commander.

• What’s the cause of endless wars?

  Todd Chretien argues that the imperial state doesn’t just defend oil industry thieves, but the system of competitive capitalism worldwide–the so-called “free market.”

• Students protest BAE’s ‘careers in killing’

  The Lancaster University Careers Fair was again the venue for a protest against the inclusion of BAE Systems. A Group of Lancaster University Students and activists staged a “die-in” at the careers fair in the university’s Great Hall this afternoon. The group lay on the floor to symbolise the death and destruction caused by arms manufacturer BAE Systems, who were represented at the fair.

• Obama’s Hypocritical Crusade Against Extremism

• US urges battle against IS to be waged online

  The US-led coalition has carried out fresh air strikes against jihadists in Syria and Iraq as Washington called for the battle against the Islamic State group to be taken to the Internet.

• Video – Thales Watchkeeper UAV deployed to Afghanistan

  Since 25th September, the Thales Watchkeeper has been cutting its teeth in Afghanistan. From the British Army base in Helmand province, in the south of the country, the tactical UAV has conducted regular monitoring and reconnaissance missions to protect the estimated 10,000 British soldiers stationed there since 2001 as part of the International Security Assistance Force.

• A sky full of drones

  Western enthusiasm for Malala Yousafzai overshadows the fact that western policies deny children in Pakistan their most basic rights. The short-term memory of the media cycle, coupled with political self-interest and selective attention continue to marginalise the trauma of CIA drones.

• The Malala that they ignore

  The press pick and choose which of Malala’s messages are amplified ― and which are silenced. They can hardly get enough of her insistence on the importance of “the philosophy of nonviolence I have learned from Gandhi, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa”.

  [...]

  In March last year, Malala sent this message to a congress of Pakistani Marxists: “First of all, I’d like to thank The Struggle and the IMT [International Marxist Tendency] for giving me a chance to speak last year at their Summer Marxist School in Swat and also for introducing me to Marxism and socialism.

  [...]

  When the courageous activist speaks of the importance of education and non-violence, the West shouts her words loudly from the mountain tops. When that same activist criticises predator drones and, that most sacrosanct entity of all, capitalism, the silence is deafening.

• Naming the Dead: visualised

  The database of names is built on over two years of research in and outside Pakistan, using a multitude of sources. These include both Pakistani government records leaked to the Bureau, and hundreds of open source reports in English, Pashtun and Urdu.

Transparency Reporting

• Swedish officials weigh up option to question Assange ahead of court ruling

  Sweden’s chief prosecutor said on Tuesday she was seriously considering an invitation by the British government to question Julian Assange in London, before a court ruling in Sweden on whether to lift the warrant for his arrest.

  The Foreign Office said on Tuesday it would welcome a request by the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny to question Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy and would be happy to facilitate such a move, which is seen by Assange’s lawyers as an important step towards breaking the deadlock surrounding the case.

• Timeline: Julian Assange sex allegations

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Fox News Ignores Climate Change On The Anniversary Of Hurricane Sandy

  On the second anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, Fox News promoted a plan called the “Hurricane Slayer,” which works to cool ocean temperatures through geoengineering, without mentioning climate change or the role it played in exacerbating the devastating storm.

Finance

• IRS Also More Than Willing To Steal Money Under The Pretense Of Crime Fighting

  The Department of Justice and its underlings (the FBI and nearyl every law enforcement agency in the nation) have turned the ideal of asset forfeiture (defund drug dealers; return money to the defrauded, etc.) into a free-roaming, many-tentacled opportunistic beast, one that “liberates” any amount of “suspicious” cash from tourists, legitimate business owners or anyone else who just happens to have “too much” cash in their possession.

• Detroit man fights $30k child support bill for kid that is not his

  The State of Michigan is ordering a Detroit man to pay tens of thousands of dollars, or go to prison. The reason? He owes back child support for a child that everyone agrees is not his.

  “I feel like I’m standing in front of a brick wall with nowhere to go,” said Carnell Alexander.

  He says he learned about the paternity case against him during a traffic stop in Detroit in the early 90s. The officer told him he is a deadbeat dad, there was a warrant out for his arrest.

Censorship

• Hungary Internet-Tax Protest Swells Into Anti-Orban Demo

  A rally to block a planned tax on Internet use in Hungary swelled into one of the largest anti-government demonstrations since Prime Minister Viktor Orban came to power in 2010.

• Street Demonstrations Against Hungary’s Plan To Tax Internet Data Lead To A Partial Climbdown By Government

• FDA Is Angry That ICANN Won’t Just Censor Websites On Its Say So

  It’s not just the City of London Police demanding that websites be taken offline without any due process. It appears that the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is getting in on the game as well. The Wall Street Journal recently published a detailed article about how angry the FDA is with ICANN (there’s also a corresponding blog post which may not face the same paywall restrictions) for not simply killing domains that the FDA deems “rogue pharmacies.” That’s not to say that there aren’t reasonable concerns about rogue pharmacies. There are clearly some concerns about those sites, but it seems like there are better ways to deal with those than just barging in and saying that ICANN and registrars need to take down sites based solely on their say so.

Privacy

• You Can’t Vote Out National Security Bureaucrats: And They, Not Elected Officials, Really Run The Show

  A year ago, we noted a rather odd statement from President Obama, concerning some of the Snowden leaks. He more or less admitted that with each new report in the press, he then had to go ask the NSA what it was up to.

• Documents Show FBI Impersonated Newspaper’s Website To Deliver Spyware To Suspect’s Computer

  The court documents didn’t detail how the FBI managed to install the weaponized payload on Glazebook’s computer. The emails obtained by the EFF, however, expose the electronic paper trail.

• During Cold War, CIA And FBI Hired Over 1,000 Nazis As Spies, Limited Investigations Of Those Nazis

  A new book by Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, apparently details how the FBI and CIA hired over 1,000 Nazis during the height of the cold war, forgiving them their past sins, so long as they might help spy on the Soviet Union.

• Entirely Coincidentally, NSA Signals Intelligence Director Moved To New Position After Conflicts Of Interest Were Exposed By Buzzfeed

  The NSA’s newly-developed concern for “optics” is being tested by employees both former and current. Keith Alexander, the NSA’s longtime leading man, took his snooping show on the road, offering his expertise to banks for $1 million/month. But he couldn’t leave it all behind, attempting to drag the current NSA CTO along with him by offering him an interesting — but conflicting — part-time position with IronNet Security. The NSA said, “That’s fine.” Then it said, “We’re looking into it.” Then it said nothing while Keith Alexander pulled the plug on the deal while simultaneously denying any sort of impropriety.

• UK’s GCHQ Can Get Warrantless Access To Bulk NSA Data

• Secret policy reveals GCHQ can get warrantless access to bulk NSA data

• Verizon is launching a tech news site that bans stories on U.S. spying

  The most-valuable, second-richest telecommunications company in the world is bankrolling a technology news site called SugarString.com. The publication, which is now hiring its first full-time editors and reporters, is meant to rival major tech websites like Wired and the Verge while bringing in a potentially giant mainstream audience to beat those competitors at their own game.

• FBI Raids House Of ‘Second Leaker’ Who Provided Terrorist Watchlist Documents To The Intercept

  The government appears to have located the “second leaker.” Snowden obviously still remains out of reach in Russia, but the other leaker — one hinted at over the past few months and confirmed in Laura Poitras’ Snowden documentary “Citizenfour” — seems to have been identified by the FBI. Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News breaks the news.

• More Surveillance Punishes Canadians, Not Terrorists

  The potential destruction of terrorism is infinitesimally smaller than the damage done to our rights by a disproportionate attempt to prevent it.

  Please. Please remember this. It’s even more important now, when that fact is so easily forgotten in the wake of the attack on our Parliament and the tragic deaths of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Cpl. Nathan Cirillo.

• White House Says Obama Doesn’t Think Netanyahu Is a ‘Chickenshit’

  On Tuesday, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that “The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here,” and it begins with an anonymous senior administration official calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “chickenshit.”

  Now, White House damage control is officially in effect. Press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday afternoon that the Obama administration does not think that Netanyahu, as Goldberg reported, is in fact a “chickenshit.”

• Islamophobia TV

  THE THURSDAY before Homeland’s season premiere, I wrote an article for the Washington Post calling Homeland “the most bigoted show on television.” While I am not the first person to present many of the arguments I laid out in the article, the moment was right and the article went viral.

  [...]

  The only male Muslim character who’s allowed to be something other than a terrorist–an innocent victim–is Issa, Abu Nazir’s young son, who’s killed in a drone strike that mistakenly targeted his school.

• Twitter Might Be In Worse Shape Than You Think

  For Twitter, old news is bad news. On Monday, the company once again had to tell investors that its strenuous efforts to attract new users met with only middling results in the third quarter. The market reacted much as it did upon receiving similar news in February and May, lopping more than 10% off Twitter’s share price upon the open of trading Tuesday amid a handful of analyst downgrades.

• The 7 Privacy Tools Essential to Making Snowden Documentary CITIZENFOUR

  What needs to be in your tool belt if you plan to report on a massively funded and ultra-secret organization like the NSA? In the credits of her newly released CITIZENFOUR, director Laura Poitras gives thanks to a list of important security resources that are all free software. We’ve previously written about CITIZENFOUR and Edward Snowden’s discussion of his motivation to release closely guarded information about the NSA. Here’s a closer look at the seven tools she names as helping to enable her to communicate with Snowden and her collaborators in making the film.

• More Apple privacy concerns: Yosemite uploads unsaved TextEdit docs to iCloud

  If you’re using Apple’s latest desktop OS, Yosemite, you might want to adjust your iCloud settings to avoid unsaved documents ending up on Apple’s servers.

  Apple’s latest desktop OS, OS X Yosemite, and its latest mobile update, iOS 8.1 are designed to make work across multiple Apple devices a lot more convenient, courtesy of syncing features rooted in iCloud Drive (Apple’s answer to Dropbox) and “continuity”.

• Apple’s OS X Yosemite slurps UNSAVED docs into iCloud

  Apple’s OSX 10.10 – aka Yosemite – is silently uploading users’ unsaved documents and the email addresses of their contacts to Apple’s iCloud, according to security researcher Jeffrey Paul.

• Apple Mac OS X Yosemite ‘Secretly’ Uploading Private Data to iCloud Servers

  A security researcher claims that Apple’s latest desktop software secretly and silently uploads unsaved documents and email addresses to the company’s servers without a user’s knowledge.

  According to Berlin-based hacker and security researcher Jeffrey Paul, changes made in Mac OS X Yosemite causes sensitive and private data to be automatically uploaded to Apple’s servers.

Civil Rights

• 12 Nobel Peace Prize Winners Ask Nobel Peace Prize Winning President Obama To Release CIA Torture Report

  The signatories of the letter are Desmond Tutu, Jose Ramos-Horta, Mohammad ElBaradei, Leymah Gbowee, Muhammad Yunis, Oscar Arias Sanchez, John Hume, F.W. De Klerk, Jody Williams, Carlos X. Belo, Betty Williams and Adolfo Perez Esquivel. One hopes that this would help drive things forward on actually releasing the report, except that the CIA seems dead set against it.

• An End to Torture

  Twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates have written to President Barack Obama asking the US to close the dark chapter on torture once and for all. Please add your voice in support of their message below. It will be forwarded to the President. And please share widely.

• We Hardly Knew Ye: Judge Dismisses Manuel Noriega’s Publicity Rights Suit Against Activision

  Sometimes it’s difficult to maintain any faith in our legal system, particularly when it comes to intellectual property, and perhaps even more particularly when it comes to publicity rights. Then, some former drug-running dictator comes along to sue a video game and the system actually manages to do right. Yes, the case brought by Manuel Noriega against Activision over the game’s depiction of the dictator in the Call of Duty franchise has been tossed out by the judge.

• Manuel Noriega case against Call of Duty is dismissed

  Noriega did work as a CIA informant before the agency broke ties with him.

• More Cops Investigate More Teens ‘Sexting.’ Now What?

  The reason for police involvement — beyond the slim chance that it could net them some cheap child porn busts, thanks to existing laws being applied badly — is left unstated. Apparently, the discovery of suggestive and/or explicit photos couldn’t be left up to the students and their parents to handle. Instead, somebody will need to be punished for something that appears to be incredibly common and often wholly voluntary.

• The TSA Stole My Belt Buckle… For Safety.

  On my flight out to LA, I dealt with the same issue with an imperious and stupid TSA supervisor who tried to take the buckle under the same pretenses at DCA until I protested long enough for her to get the top level supervisor in the terminal.

• Footage shows homeless black man Milton Hall being shot at 46 times by police in the US

  Graphic footage has emerged showing a homeless man being shot and killed by police in the US who fired a barrage of 46 bullets as he held a penknife.

  Milton Hall, who was mentally ill, was surrounded by eight officers training their guns in a shopping centre car park in Saginaw, Michigan, in July 2012.

  The 49-year-old had been arguing with police after an alleged altercation with a shop assistant for several minutes and the video shows him refusing an officer’s demand to put down the knife.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• FTC Sues AT&T For Selling ‘Unlimited’ Data Plans That Were Actually Throttled

  AT&T — a company with one of the most powerful DC lobbying operations around — is not having a very good month. Just weeks after being fined by both the FTC and the FCC for SMS cramming, the FTC has also filed a lawsuit against AT&T for lying to consumers about “unlimited” data plans, and then… throttling those same plans. The issue was that, while AT&T stopped offering an unlimited data plan, it did promise to grandfather in those users, so long as they didn’t change plans. However, it didn’t take long for AT&T to start throttling just those users on unlimited plans in an effort to get them to switch away from an unlimited data plan. From the complaint:

• FTC Says AT&T Has Misled Millions of Consumers with ‘Unlimited’ Data Promises

• Verizon Launches Tech News Blog… That Bans Any Articles About Net Neutrality Or Government Surveillance

  Patrick O’Neill, over at The Daily Dot, has a scoop about Verizon getting directly into our game: tech blogging. It’s launched a brand new tech news website, called SugarString, which apparently is supposed to compete with other tech news sites.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Gottfrid Svartholm Found Guilty in Hacking Trial

    Gottfrid Svartholm has today been found guilty of hacking crimes by a Danish court. The Swedish Pirate Bay founder and his 21-year-old accomplice were found to have been involved in illegally accessing systems operated by IT company CSC. It was the biggest hacking case ever conducted in Denmark.

  • Pirate Bay founder guilty in historic hacker case

    Gottrid Svartholm Warg and his 21-year-old Danish co-defendant were found guilty on Thursday morning, with the Dane released on time served and Warg to be sentenced on Friday.

  • Pirate Bay Swede found guilty in Denmark

    Sweden’s Pirate Bay Founder Gottrid Svartholm Warg was found guilty of hacking crimes in a Danish court on Thursday.

  • Dotcom Tries To Reclaim Millions Seized in Hong Kong

    It was a place where Kim Dotcom loved doing business but it took just 13 minutes for a Hong Kong court to authorize the seizure of $42 million of his assets in 2012. Now the tycoon wants his cash back, with his legal team arguing that justice officials misled the courts.

  • EFF Ranks Service Providers For Who Stands Up To Copyright/Trademark Bullies

    We’ve written in the past about the EFF’s Who Has Your Back rankings, in which it looks at various internet companies to see who protects your privacy against governments and lawsuits. Now, the EFF has come out with an offshoot chart, looking at who has your back when it comes to bogus copyright and trademark demands. The only two companies that get a perfect score are Automattic/WordPress and NameCheap, as you can see on the full chart. The worst, somewhat surprisingly, is Tumblr, which scored a big fat zero out of the five listed items.

  • Crooner in Rights Spat

  • When Even The New Yorker Is Doing Long Features On The Ridiculous State Of Copyright Law…

    This article has been out for a few weeks now, but I’ve finally had a chance to read through the whole thing. Louis Menard, over at the New Yorker, has a long piece on just how messed up copyright laws are today, going over many of the same grounds we have (for nearly two decades). The piece itself is a sort of book review of Peter Baldwin’s new The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle, but basically repeats the main point: copyright law as it is today really doesn’t make much sense. The first half of the article is a great look at the problems of copyright law, but unfortunately, the second half of the article goes off the rails by leaping on familiar and misleading tropes about why people feel the way they do about copyright. Still, the first half covers a number of copyright’s problems quite well.