01.10.17
Posted in News Roundup at 8:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
The Federal Digital Analytics Program (DAP) reports that while Windows is the most popular end-user operating system, it’s dropped below 50 percent to 49.2 percent. This is based on 2.17 billion visits over the past 90 days to more than 400 executive branch government domains across about 5,000 total websites, including every cabinet department.
That’s quite a drop. According to DAP, Windows accounted for 58.4 percent of all government website visitors in March 2015.
Looking closer, you can see Windows’ loss didn’t come because users are switching to other desktop operating systems. MacOS still comes in at No. 2, with 9.2 percent. All other operating systems, with Chrome OS leading the way at 1.1 percent, amount to only 2 percent.
True, other sites show desktop Linux gaining serious market share. NetMarketShare reports Linux has held more than two percent of the market since June 2016, while W3counter reports that Linux accounted for 3.80 percent of desktops in December 2016. However, since neither site broke out Chrome OS, I suspect that vast majority of these gains go to Chrome OS’ credit rather than traditional Linux desktops.
-
Weary of the “awful” hour-long updates his Windows computer forced him to periodically endure, usually during prime work hours, Farhang recently abandoned his PC operating system. He switched to Linux, an open-source OS.
The result? Linux turned his laptop into a “very good Mac OS clone,” he says. And the price was right. He paid nothing for the software.
If you’ve upgraded your computer during the holidays and also are thinking of upgrading your operating system, you might be tempted to follow Farhang. But it’s not an easy path, and it’s not for everyone. I know because I just tried to do it.
-
-
Desktop
-
One of the things that makes Linux awesome is that finding and installing common software is really fast and easy. If you use a graphical tool like GNOME’s Software, you can download and install an app in a couple clicks. If you’re a command-line commando, you can install an application with one or two relatively short console commands.
-
Following up on my previous post where I detailed the work I’ve been doing mostly on Purism’s website, today’s post post will cover some video work. Near the beginning of October, I received a Librem 15 v2 unit for testing and reviewing purposes. I have been using it as my main laptop since then, as I don’t believe in reviewing something without using it daily for a couple weeks at least. And so on nights and week-ends, I wrote down testing results, rough impressions and recommendations, then wrote a detailed plan and script to make the first in depth video review of this laptop. Here’s the result—not your typical 2-minutes superficial tour…
-
Dell is updating its Precision mobile workstation line of powerful laptop computers with new models sporting Intel Kaby Lake processors, optional NVIDIA graphics, and a choice of Windows or Ubuntu software.
-
FSF (Free Software Foundation) is backing a crowd-funded project to develop a motherboard for a workstation that’s competitive in the “power” department with Intel’s Xeon. I don’t need anywhere near that kind of power in my home so I’ve opted for ARM for small/efficient computing, but if you need the power and don’t want Intel nor Intel’s backdoor it might be just your thing. The price is a show-stopper for me.
-
Server
-
As many deployments of open cloud computing platforms are maturing, integrating and managing container technologies and platforms is a very high priority. Container management and automation tools represent a hot area for development as companies race to fill the growing need to manage highly distributed, cloud-native applications.
Analysts at 451 Research have called containers the “future of virtualization,” predicting strong container growth across on-premises, hosted, and public clouds. Meanwhile, the OpenStack User Survey shows Kubernetes, an open source container cluster manager, taking the lead as the top Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) tool of all.
-
Kernel Space
-
After informing us about the availability of the Linux 4.8.16 kernel update a few days ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced earlier today the availability of a new maintenance update, which appears to be the last in the stable series.
It was bound to happen sooner or later, especially now that the Linux 4.9 kernel series has been officially declared stable and ready for deployment in production environments, so we’re sad to inform you that there won’t be any update to the Linux 4.8 kernel branch. The last point release is now Linux kernel 4.8.17.
-
Skylake and newer hardware is set to have frame-buffer compression (FBC) enabled by default when the Linux 4.11 kernel rolls around in a few months. This feature can reduce power consumption while reducing memory bandwidth needed for screen refreshes.
-
I am pleased to announce the availability of mdadm version 4.0
-
Version 4.0 of mdadm is out, the tool for managing MD “Soft RAID” on Linux.
While I got excited too seeing “mdadm 4.0″ cross the wire, it’s not a huge update but does have some useful improvements. It turns out the bumping of the major version number was done to reflect developer Jes Sorensen taking over maintainership of MDADM from Neil Brown.
-
Graphics Stack
-
For those not familiar with this latest AMD GPU virtualization effort, see last month’s AMD MxGPU Virtualization For The AMDGPU Driver.
-
Fedora is the latest Linux distribution abandoning the xf86-video-intel driver in favor of the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver.
With Fedora Rawhide as of today and obviously then beginning with Fedora 26, the switch is happening from xf86-video-intel to xf86-video-modesetting. Fedora already has been using xf86-video-modesetting for Skylake graphics while now the change-over is happening for all other Intel IGPs.
-
Peter Hutterer announced the first release candidate for the upcoming libinput 1.6 release, the input handling library supported on X.Org / Wayland / Mir systems.
-
Remember when Feral Interactive, the UK-based game publisher, asked Canonical to update the old Mesa 3D Graphics Library packages in the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating systems?
Well, that didn’t happen, yet, and users who want to play the latest Linux games have to either compile the latest Mesa 3D libraries from sources or rely on either the well-known Oibaf or Padoka PPAs (Personal Package Archives), which include only development, but highly optimized versions of Mesa and related libraries.
-
For those curious about the performance difference if upgrading to third-party PPAs from Ubuntu 16.10 when using a modern AMD Radeon graphics card with the open-source driver stack, here are some fresh numbers.
-
NVIDIA has put out what they call ‘VkHLF’, a high level abstraction library on top of Vulkan. Looks like it’s under a BSD-style license too.
-
-
Applications
-
What piques my interest in Reddit desktop clients? For starters, there is a paucity of Reddit desktop clients available in Linux Mint’s package managers. The Synaptic Package Manager does offer a package for Unity Webapp for Reddit. This is in contrast to say Twitter clients where there are more clients available such as Corebird and bti. Is there a need for a Reddit desktop client? In my opinion, definitely yes. Their website is functional, but it does not organize the content in the most efficient and intuitive way, at least for my purposes. And the desktop clients offer advanced features such as infinite column scrolling, and delivery of text-only versions of articles.
-
Proprietary
-
I’m a big Evernote user. It’s a powerful commercial program that allows you to sync text, photos and documents across multiple devices. Sadly, there’s no native Linux client. Also, it’s a proprietary software package, and that bums me out.
Simplenote has been an alternative to Evernote for quite some time now. It’s created by Automattic, the folks behind WordPress. It’s designed to sync only text-based notes, but that’s usually all I want anyway. Recently, the developers at Automattic decided to release Simplenote as open source! They also compiled binaries for just about every platform out there, including Linux!
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Here’s a tutorial to get 2FA working on both your smartphone and Linux desktop using oathtool.
-
-
-
-
-
I know that the terminal may look scary at the beginning but it’s so useful you can do a lot of things like rename files easier than a graphic interface, watch or stop system processes, start or stop system services. Commands are the great way to understand Linux and learn so much about it. In Linux, there exist a lot of commands. The list that I’m presenting here includes the most common Linux commands for beginners.
-
Wine or Emulation
-
-
The Wine Staging release 2.0-rc4 is now available.
-
Games
-
Thanks to GOG and DOSBox, Linux gamers can enjoy the classic crazy racing game Ignition, which originally released in 1997.
As usual for GOG, the game comes with a ready made DOSBox install. All you need to do is run their simple installer and away you go.
GOG provided me with a copy to try out, but sadly it doesn’t seem to run. This is a first from GOG classic games that hasn’t run and I have reached out to them to see what’s up.
-
-
-
-
-
Lars Doucet, developer of Defender’s Quest has written up a reddit post request Valve to open source the Steam Controller software.
I have to say, I do fully agree with Lars as it would be pretty awesome. It depends on how tied it all is to Steam directly though, Valve may not have had any plans to do this.
-
We’ve learned of a new rumor pointing to Platinum Games’ Xbox One and PC action RPG Scalebound experiencing further development woes, and possibly even getting canned.
The new rumor (via Kotaku) is citing “several sources” close to the project saying the game is stuck in development hell, and might be cancelled. When they reached out to Microsoft, they said, “We’ll have more to share on Scalebound soon.”
-
I decided to extend the submission time for our GOTY awards by one day just to give it a bit more exposure to gather a good list.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Let’s start from the beginning: I got to know quite a few people in the past decade (phew, I’m such a dinosaur!) who use Kate as their editor of choice to hack on C++ code, on a daily basis. While I totally agree Kate is an excellent editor — don’t get me wrong on that, I use it literally every day, too — it doesn’t and can’t possibly provide the best experience when working with C++ code, in my book. This is not about Kate vs. KDevelop — not at all. This is about a text editor vs. an integrated development environment for C++.
-
We’ve been waiting for it for so long, but the wait is now finally over, and the digiKam development team just announced a few moments ago the release and general availability of digiKam 5.4.0.
A major release, digiKam 5.4.0 ships two months after the third point release in the digiKam 5 series, bringing a complete re-write of the video file support, as well as numerous other improvements across a multitude of components, and a nice collection of patches that should resolve many of those nasty issues you’re reported lately.
-
-
Reviews
-
Solus is congenial system. I rather like the Budgie desktop. But you may find that you need to install additional software to meet your needs.
-
New Releases
-
Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today about the general availability of BakAndImgCD 21.0, a new major build of his independently-developed 4MLinux fork designed for data backup and disk imaging operations.
-
After less than two weeks since their end of year announcement, Eagle Eye Digital Solutions have announced the release of a new update of their security-oriented Linux Kodachi operating system, versioned 3.7.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Most of us listen to music when using our computers, be it to pass the time, motivate us, or even help us concentrate (no, really) — but what is the best music app for Ubuntu?
That’s a question that I see new (and not so new) users ask all the time. Answering it is not an easy, but not through a lack of choice!
Finding a music player for Ubuntu is far from difficult. A veritable orchestra of options exist, some new, some old, some in tune with modern trends, others riffing to their own beat.
There’s a good chance you’ve already spun through a chorus of players over the years, and so have we. In this post we present 6 music players for Ubuntu that we think all stand up on their own.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
It’s been almost three months since we last heard something from TheeMahn, the developer of the Ultimate Edition (formerly Ubuntu Ultimate Edition) operating system, a fork of Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but we’ve been tipped by one of our readers about the availability of Ultimate Edition 5.0 Gamers.
The goal of the Ultimate Edition project is to offer users a complete, out-of-the-box Ubuntu-based computer operating system for desktops, which is easy to install or upgrade with the click of a button. It usually ships with 3D effects, support for the latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, and a huge collection of open-source applications.
-
Bertel King, Jr. tried to accentuate the positive over at MakeUseOf today in his review of Elementary OS, but rough edges did show through. Elsewhere, Jesse Smith liked SimpleMEPIS-based MX Linux 16, even if it isn’t recommended for newbies, and Neil Rickert found Solus OS to be “congenial.” Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols discussed operating system market share based on Website usage and Gary Newell summarized the top distros of 2016.
-
Elementary OS isn’t your typical Linux distribution. Some would say it isn’t a distro at all. Elementary’s developers pitch their creation as a free and open alternative to Windows and macOS.
That description is apt, and with the latest release, version 0.4 Loki, Elementary has blossomed into something beautiful. I love it, and I highly recommend it for new and experienced Linux users alike.
-
-
Vector Informatik (Stuttgart, Germany) is supplementing its portfolio of basic software products by adding a flash bootloader for Linux-based ECUs. Developers gain a simplified process for reprogramming these ECUs according to OEM-specific requirements.
-
Phones
-
Android
-
My decision to switch to the Google Pixel from an iPhone 6S began the day that Apple announced that they were eliminating the headphone jack on the 7. While I could reasonably expect another solid year of service at least from my 6S – particularly since Apple had swapped my old one for a brand new replacement due to a battery issue – the 6S was also more valuable from a resale perspective today than it would be a year from now. As it indeed it proved to be, fetching close to $500 on Swappa – a pretty simple way to resell your electronics, incidentally.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
CES has come and gone and the world of Chrome OS is still buzzing over the release of the Samsung Chromebooks Plus and Pro. Samsung’s newest creation, collaborated by Google, is being advertised with the Google Play Store out of the box. While on the show floor we did confirm that the Chromebook plus was running Android apps on the Stable channel, Chrome OS 55.
-
-
-
-
-
-
So, you have a new phone that doesn’t leave your side. Sure, you can get rid of the old one through a resale site or donation, but there is another option: give it a second life with a different purpose.
An old phone or tablet can be a great hand-me-down device for a child, family member, or can serve as your dedicated smart TV companion. I’ve also repurposed old gear to work as a security camera or an always-ready eReader. So before you put it on the auction block, consider one of these uses instead that may add some value and ease of use to your digital life.
-
Today, it is nearly impossible for smartphone manufacturers to build a bad phone. Component makers and the supply chain that serve the manufacturers have amazing momentum. It is the same momentum that drove PCs to market share leadership in the 1990s.
This is good news for consumers because now there are few tradeoffs when choosing a new phone. Consumers with $600 or $700 to spend do not have to make any real tradeoffs when buying a top branded phone. If that’s out of your budget, don’t fear. Unlike PCs, most apps perform well on lower-cost and lower-performance Android phones. Games need raw hardware performance, but apps such as Facebook, Google Search and WhatsApp perform almost indistinguishably.
-
Trello is a visual team collaboration platform that was recently acquired by Atlassian. And by that, I mean as recently as today Monday, January 9 2017.
I’ve been using Trello as a board member of DigitalOcean’s community authors and started using it to manage a small team project for a non-profit organization a couple of days ago. It’s a nice piece of software that any team, including those with non-geeky members, can use comfortable.
If you like Trello, but now want a similar software that you can self-host, or run on your own server, I’ve found four that you can choose from. Keep in mind that I’ve not installed any of these on my own server, but from the information I’ve gathered about them, the ones I’m most likely to use are Kanboard and Restyaboard.
-
“Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer,’” leading software freedom activist Richard M. Stallman explained via the Free Software Foundation.
Open source software is computer software published under a copyright license where the copyright holder provides the rights for the study, change, and distribution of the software’s source code for any purpose. This is important not just for the advancement of technology but for the freedom of expression as an innate human right.
Currently, developers can release software under a few main types of licenses. The General Public License (GPL) demands any modified software from the product—including source code—must be placed under the same type of license. In contrast to traditional copyright laws, this license—often referred to as ‘copyleft’—allows developers to use and modify other developers’ code.
“The GPL is built on copyright, but disables the restrictions of copyright to allow for modification, distribution, and access,” Dr. Gabriella Coleman, the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill, wrote in an essay published in Cultural Anthropology. “It is also self-perpetuating because it requires others to adopt the same license if they modify copylefted software.”
-
After many years of practicing marketing in the B2B tech world, I think I’ve heard just about every misconception that engineers seem to have about marketers.
-
This release summarizes the results of our work for last 16 months, since the start of new development cycle in August 2015. Much thanks to everyone who supported our efforts by contributing to crowdfunding campaign, purchasing training course, donating via downloads and providing continuous support through our Patreon page! You really made this release happen.
-
-
The Synfig 1.2 release has a complete rewritten render engine developed over the past year and is now better optimized, a new lipsync feature, UI changes, support for multiple threads when rendering via the command line, and other improvements.
-
A public-private effort in Sweden to record land titles on a blockchain is set to begin public testing this March.
Spearheaded by the Swedish National Land Survey and blockchain startup ChromaWay, the project was revealed in June to have support from consulting firm Kairos Future and telephone service provider Telia. Now, the project is moving ahead with the addition of two banks that specialize in mortgages, Landshypotek and SBAB, CoinDesk has learned.
ChromaWay CEO Henrik Hjelte said that the sandbox release would seek to test the platform from a business, legal and security perspective, while allowing the public to test the interface and back-end.
-
The open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation works to enable end-to-end service orchestration via network functions virtualization (NFV) over both software-defined networks (SDN) and legacy networks.
-
For those of you who like your reality virtual and your software open, there are options — such as this nifty headset our Phil Shapiro found while searching YouTube.
-
For more than a year now, we’ve steadily taken note of the many projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent times. As Apache moves Big Data projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support. Recently, the foundation announced that Apache Kudu had graduated as a Top-Level project. Then, the news came that Apache Geode had graduated from the Apache Incubator as well. It is a very interesting open source in-memory data grid that provides transactional data management for scale-out applications needing low latency response times during high concurrent processing.
-
Events
-
Amazon launched their Simple Storage Service (S3) service about 10 years ago followed shortly by Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In the past 10 years, Amazon has learned a few things about running these services. In his keynote at LinuxCon Europe, Chris Schlaeger, Director Kernel and Operating Systems at the Amazon Development Center in Germany, shared 10 lessons from Amazon.
-
MoodleMoot UK and Ireland 2017 will be held from 10 – 12 April at Park Plaza Riverbank London.
-
Linux creator Linus Torvalds will speak at Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit again this year, along with renowned robotics expert Guy Hoffman and Intel VP Imad Sousou, The Linux Foundation announced today. These headliners will join session speakers from embedded and IoT industry leaders, including AppDynamics, Free Electrons, IBM, Intel, Micosa, Midokura, The PTR Group, and many others. View the full schedule now.
-
-
The LF posted the schedule for the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland, Feb. 21-23. Keynotes include Guy Hoffman, Imad Sousou, and Linus Torvalds.
Registration is open for the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) and OpenIoT Summit. Early bird prices end Jan. 15. The Linux Foundation also posted a full schedule for the show, which will run Feb. 21-23 in Portland, OR. That will make life easier for Linux and Git creator and long-time Portlandian Linus Torvalds, who will chat on stage with Dirk Hohndel, the former Intel open source guru who is now working as Chief Open Source Officer at VMware.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
Mozilla and other major technology companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Twitter, are joining together in an amicus brief filing that supports Facebook’s ability to challenge both a search warrant for nearly 400 Facebook users’ data, and an indefinite gag order which forbids Facebook from notifying users about government requests for their data.
Mozilla is joining this brief because we believe this type of lengthy, never-ending gag order ultimately infringes on the ability to control one’s online experience. This is part of our fight to protect individual privacy and security online, and to improve internet health by promoting cybersecurity and increasing transparency.
In this case, the government argued that Facebook has no legal right to even challenge the warrant’s scope or validity, and a lower court agreed. This would mean companies like Mozilla couldn’t challenge unlawful orders we receive. And, because gag orders would prevent us from notifying users, those users wouldn’t know to challenge them either. Unlawful warrants would never see the light of day or be apparent to users. This is staggering and unacceptable.
-
CMS
-
There was a time when websites were only afforded and operated by big businesses alone. Nowadays you can easily find free basic websites online. If the free version that you are getting is not up to your standards, you can always purchase a premium one or customize the one that you currently have to suit your needs.
-
Healthcare
-
The southern African country of Mozambique suffers under the most extreme challenges for resource-poor countries: economic instability, political strife, civil unrest, corruption and crime, unreliable infrastructure (such as transportation and telecommunications), and a large-scale HIV epidemic that has yet to be declared under control. The United Nations positions Mozambique’s Human Development Index at number 180 out of 188 countries, placing it as the eighth lowest nation in the world for the three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Over 11 percent of the adult population is infected with HIV, and approximately one in 10 children will die before their fifth birthday. Compounding Mozambique’s problems is a serious shortage of trained medical staff, with only 64 doctors and nurses per 100,000 people.
-
Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
-
BSD
-
Chris Lattner who is known most recently for starting the Swift programming language while most profoundly he is the original creator of LLVM/Clang, is leaving his job at Apple.
Lattner had been the director of the Developer Tools department, including Xcode and similar compiler efforts around Swift/LLVM. Chris joined Apple in 2005 due to his work on LLVM/Clang. His wife is the president of the LLVM Foundation. Coming as a surprise today is that he’s leaving Apple and no longer the Swift Project Lead, per this mailing list post.
-
The latest LLVM and Clang compiler code as of this morning now has support for Zen (AMD Ryzen) processors.
Back in 2015 there was the AMD Zen “znver1″ patches for GCC along with Zen for Binutils while with the latest Git/SVN development code for LLVM/Clang today is similar “znver1″ support.
-
Public Services/Government
-
The clock is ticking on the open source voting effort because Arntz said that the current system is becoming obsolete and in two years he plans to competitively bid for the new line of voting equipment if open source voting isn’t finalized by December 2018.
“If the new open source voting system is not ready in two years, [John] Arntz advises that the Department of Elections plans to conduct a competitive process to lease a new voting system, removing the need for a large expenditure to purchase voting equipment,” the report reads.
Those who support open-source voting systems argue they bring a greater level of transparency and accountability by allowing the public to have access to the source codes of the system, which is used to tabulate the votes. If The City owns the system outright it could come at a savings to taxpayers as opposed to using a private vendor.
-
Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
-
In the months leading up to political elections, public debate intensifies and citizens are exposed to a proliferation of information around policy options. In a data-driven society where new insights have been informing decision-making, a deeper understanding of this information has never been more important, yet the public still hasn’t realized the full potential of public policy modeling.
At a time where the concept of “open government” is constantly evolving to keep pace with new technological advances, government policy models and analysis could be the new generation of open knowledge.
Government Open Source Models (GOSMs) refer to the idea that government-developed models, whose purpose is to design and evaluate policy, are freely available to everyone to use, distribute, and modify without restrictions. The community could potentially improve the quality, reliability, and accuracy of policy modeling, creating new data-driven apps that benefit the public.
-
Open Hardware/Modding
-
Jackson Gordon is an industrial design student at Philadelphia University. Gordon is the founder of Armatus Designs and was commissioned to make a 3D printed bionic hand. The project’s design was inspired by the character Venom Snake from Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.
-
-
Renault is embracing open source with its new car – an electric vehicle named POM.
As the car industry unveils its latest and greatest at the North American International Auto Show, the French carmaker is pushing the POM – which stands for Platform Open Mind – as the future of cars. The space-age golf cart, pictured above, will be powered by an open-source vehicle operating system that runs on ARM-compatible chips.
-
Programming/Development
-
Many of us have a 2017 goal to improve our programming skills or to learn how to program in the first place. While we have access to many resources, practicing the art of code development independent of a specific job requires some planning. Exercism.io is one resource designed for this exact purpose.
Exercism is an open source project and service aimed at helping people level up in their programming skills using a philosophy of discovery and collaboration. Exercism provides exercises for dozens of different programming languages. Practitioners complete each exercise and then receive feedback on their response, enabling them to learn from their peer group’s experience.
-
Yes, the Chinese are at it again. Or rather, machines with IP addresses that belong in a small set of Chinese province networks have started a rather intense campaign of trying to access the pop3 mail retrieval protocol on a host in my care, after a longish interval of near-total inactivity.
-
Yahoo will be renamed “Altaba” and company CEO Marissa Mayer will step down from its board of directors once its major sale to Verizon closes, according to an 8-K filing released by Yahoo earlier today.
It’s a crazy string of events that sounds like the end of one of the web’s most iconic properties. But the reality is a bit different from what the many headlines about this series of moves make it sound like.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
A group of doctors, regulators and outside experts is meeting behind closed doors in Chicago Tuesday to determine if Flint’s water technically meets federal standards again. The meeting at EPA’s regional headquarters could be the start of a shift; from a public health emergency to a longer term response.
Water samples have improved for several months. But there are still some homes with spikes in lead levels that are potentially dangerous without a water filter.
Some experts now believe any homes with a lead water service line are at risk.
-
Security
-
-
-
A new variant of the KillDisk malware is reported to be able to encrypt files and hold them for ransom instead of deleting them. Although KillDisk has been used in attacks aimed at industrial control systems (ICS), experts are now concerned that threat actors may be introducing ransomware into the industrial domain.
-
A hacker has published an open source tool for helping the administrator strengthen the security of their networks.
-
-
-
-
-
Your browser or password manager’s autofill might be inadvertently giving away your information to unscrupulous phishers using hidden text boxes on sites.
Finnish web developer and hacker Viljami Kuosmanen discovered that several web browsers, including Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera, as well as some plugins and utilities such as LastPass, can be tricked into giving away a user’s personal information through their profile-based autofill systems.
The phising attack is brutally simple. Kuosmanen discovered that when a user attempts to fill in information in some simple text boxes, such as name and email address, the autofill system, which is intended to avoid tedious repetition of standard information such as your address, will input other profile-based information into any other text boxes – even when those boxes are not visible on the page.
-
Browser autofill profiles are a reliable phishing vector that allow attackers to collect information from users via hidden fields, which the browser automatically fills with preset personal information and which the user unknowingly sends to the attacker when he submits a form.
Autofill profiles are a recent addition to modern-day browsers. This feature works by allowing the user to create a profile that holds different details about himself that he usually enters inside web forms.
-
In April of 2016 Wordfence launched a full featured WordPress firewall. Since then we have released improvements that make Wordfence faster and better at blocking attacks. If you’re not a security professional it may not be clear what the Wordfence firewall does or how it works. In this post I’m going to describe exactly how the firewall works.
-
Darktrace co-founder Poppy Gustafsson recently predicted, at TechCrunch Disrupt London, that malicious actors will increasingly use artificial intelligence to create more sophisticated spearphishing attacks.
Criminals are just as capable of using artificial intelligence as those trying to thwart them, according to security vendor ESET‘s 2017 trends report, with “next-gen” security marketers throwing around the buzzwords “machine learning,” “behavioral analysis” and more. That’s making it more difficult for potential customers to sift through all the hype.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Defence/Aggression
-
Why has Donald Trump picked so many generals for his cabinet? A few popular theories: Trump has patterned himself on the movie “Patton”; he spent his boyhood years at New York Military Academy; he likes the martial machismo of gold-braided uniforms; he needs to balance the ruthless image he cultivated on the “Apprentice” with a nod to sacrifice and service.
In a speech last month at the Fort Myers Officers’ Club, Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA and CIA, suggested that Trump’s overrepresentation of the military in his appointments was simply due to a lack of a better alternative.
“Many in the power ministry establishment, the foreign policy establishment, have signed letters: Never Trump,” said Hayden, who himself called Trump “erratic” and signed a letter saying that Trump would be “a dangerous president.”
“And he don’t want them anyway,” Hayden quipped. “But he doesn’t want Joe the Plumber either, as the secretary of defense. So where can he go for unarguable expertise without buying into the pre-established political inner circle in Washington? Bing! Go to the armed forces. I think it’s not so much the love of the uniform. It’s that ‘I don’t want to go to the normal well, but I still need talent.’”
-
Several months after the bin Laden raid, in October 2011, SEAL Team 6 held its annual “stump muster,” a reunion of current command members and their families, as well as past leaders and senior operators. That year’s reunion, the first under Wyman Howard as commanding officer, was held at their new headquarters, a $100 million, state of the art testament to the stature of the command as the home of the “President’s Own,” the clandestine global force capable of striking anywhere, killing anyone, the tip of America’s military spear. Outside the main entrance stands a 30-foot trident sculpted out of a fragment of the World Trade Center.
-
As recently as two years ago, Saudi Arabia’s half century-long effort to establish itself as the main power among Arab and Islamic states looked as if it was succeeding. A US State Department paper sent by former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in 2014 and published by Wikileaks spoke of the Saudis and Qataris as rivals competing “to dominate the Sunni world”.
A year later in December 2015, the German foreign intelligence service BND was so worried about the growing influence of Saudi Arabia that it took the extraordinary step of producing a memo, saying that “the previous cautious diplomatic stance of older leading members of the royal family is being replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention”.
-
Senior Palestinian officials have warned that the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s recognition of Israel – one of the key pillars of the moribund Oslo peace agreements – is in danger of being revoked if Donald Trump moves the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The Palestinian leadership is also calling for protests in mosques and churches on Friday and Sunday to object to the move, calling for opposition to the plan “from Pakistan to Tehran, from Lebanon to Oman”.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
-
A day after his inauguration, President Obama signed a memorandum promising: “the most transparent administration in history.”
By May 2016, a different verdict came in. Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan called it “one of the most secretive.” In August 2015, 52 journalism organizations, including the Society of Environmental Journalists, sent an appeal to the White House, asking for an end to restrictions on government employees’ contact with reporters.
-
The announcement comes a week before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which released the U.S. data, and NASA are expected to announce that 2016 set the record for the hottest year globally. Both the global record and the U.S. near-record are largely attributable to greenhouse gas-driven warming of the planet.
Both records also come amid a shift in the tenor of the discussion on U.S. climate policy after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump, who has previously called climate change a “hoax,” has chosen several cabinet nominees who reject the established science of climate change to cabinet positions; Senate confirmation hearings begin this week.
-
Climate change is prompting the need for new technologies to address the consequences of the weather changing patterns. A book authored by a number of scholars provides an introduction to the interactions of climate change with the global intellectual property, innovation, human rights and international trade systems.
-
Our window of time to act on climate may be shrinking even faster than previously thought.
We may only have one year remaining before we lock in 1.5ºC of warming—the ideal goal outlined in the Paris climate agreement—after which we’ll see catastrophic and irreversible climate shifts, many experts have warned.
That’s according to the ticking carbon budget clock created by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). The clock’s countdown now shows that only one year is left in the world’s carbon budget before the planet heats up more than 1.5º over pre-industrial temperatures.
-
The huge decline in coal power last year saw a series of records, including days with no coal power at all, and solar power generating more than coal across six months. The slack was largely taken up by gas-fired power stations, which was up 45% year on year, Carbon Brief found. Its analysis was based on grid data and estimates; official figures are due in March.
-
Finance
-
“I’m still hoping. I can’t really believe it’s going to happen, but in the back of my mind it’s always there. I love this country; I want to live here. I always dreamed of coming, because it was such an open-minded, lovely place where foreigners were greeted. I think that’s part of why I was so shellshocked on 24 June: because this country I thought I knew suddenly turned up a very ugly face.”
Chris Hoffman is a 44-year-old freelance translator who lives in south Birmingham. She is originally from Stuttgart and first came to the UK thanks to the European Union’s Erasmus student exchange programme. Later on, her husband started academic research in Birmingham, which then turned into a full-time job – and a little more than a decade ago, they settled in the city. They have an eight-year-old son. “He might not have a British passport,” she tells me, “but he was born here, and he feels British.”
Now, the prospect of Britain leaving the EU seems to have infected her life with anxiety. Does she think she might have to go back to Germany? “We’ll have to, if they chuck us out,” she says. “We haven’t got EU residency cards; we haven’t gone for naturalisation.”
-
Brexit poses a risk to the global financial system and could spark more than 230,000 job losses in the financial sector, senior City figures have warned MPs as they called for clarity on the UK’s future relationship with the EU.
Xavier Rolet, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange (LSE), warned that Brexit could have an impact on “unimaginably large” contracts which are cleared through the City and which might need to be transferred to the 27 remaining EU member states.
The HSBC chairman, Douglas Flint, also giving evidence to the Treasury select committee, said that while banks did not want to move activities outside London they had to plan for the worst.
-
Theresa May could risk the peace process in Northern Ireland over concerns she is pandering to the Democratic Unionist Party so they will back her Brexit plans, a leading Northern Irish politician has warned.
Naomi Long, who is leader of the anti-sectarian Alliance Party, told The Independent there were growing concerns in Northern Ireland that the Prime Minister’s impartiality on the peace process is being compromised by a need to keep the DUP onside.
The DUP has eight MPs at Westminster, which could prove essential support for the Conservatives who currently have a slim majority in the House of Commons.
Amid growing concerns that some pro-EU MPs could rebel against Ms May, securing support from the DUP is being seen as increasingly important in order to deliver her plans for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
-
Jeremy Corbyn will use his first speech of 2017 to claim that Britain can be better off outside the EU and insist that the Labour party has no principled objection to ending the free movement of European workers in the UK.
Setting out his party’s pitch on Brexit in the year that Theresa May will trigger article 50, the Labour leader will also reach for the language of leave campaigners by promising to deliver on a pledge to spend millions of pounds extra on the NHS every week.
-
Britain must not become a “bargain basement economy” after Brexit, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said.
He told the BBC high-skilled jobs and trade must be protected outside the EU.
Mr Corbyn was asked about his stance on immigration ahead of a speech in which he is to say he is “not wedded” to free movement as a matter of principle.
Asked what this meant, he said EU migrants should be able to continue to travel to the UK, but the right to work would be part of Brexit negotiations.
-
The Green Party has accused Labour of “capitulating” to the Tories on immigration after Jeremy Corbyn said he would accept the end of European freedom of movement.
The Labour leader will say in a speech in Peterborough this morning that his party would push for “fair and reasonably managed migration” and that it was not “wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle”.
-
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will on Tuesday abandon his long-held commitment to open borders and signal that he is willing to allow Theresa May’s government to end the free movement of people once Brexit talks begin with the EU.
In a keynote speech that he is set to give in Cambridgeshire on Tuesday, Corbyn will outline the party’s approach to Brexit under his leadership, including long-awaited clarification on what Labour’s immigration policy is.
-
Zac Goldsmith’s billionaire father, Sir James Goldsmith, tried to upset the 1997 general election with his personally-financed Referendum Party, whose objective was to force a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The campaign failed, Sir James himself winning a negligible number of votes in Putney (where I live); two months later, he died of pancreatic cancer.
-
If the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have any documents related to the “pernicious, discriminatory practices” conducted while Donald Trump’s pick for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, was at the helm of the notorious OneWest bank, they must release them immediately.
So urged Rep. Maxine Waters (D. Calif.), the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee, in a letter (pdf) issued Friday, the same day she urged her colleagues in the U.S. Senate to reject Mnuchin’s nomination, saying “it shocks the conscience” that Trump “would give the keys to the Treasury to a man whose bank engaged in massive fraud and profited off the backs of Americans that his company threw out on the street.”
HUD and the DOJ, she wrote, must “do everything in [their] power to ensure that justice is served for those homeowners that fell victim to the illegal activities of OneWest.”
-
Using a visa loophole to fire well-paid U.S. information technology workers and replace them with low-paid immigrants from India is despicable enough when it’s done by profit-making companies such as Southern California Edison and Walt Disney Co.
But the latest employer to try this stunt sets a new mark in what might be termed “job laundering.” It’s the University of California. Experts in the abuse of so-called H-1B visas say UC is the first public university to send the jobs of American IT staff offshore. That’s not a distinction UC should wear proudly.
-
Boris Johnson has claimed that the UK is “first in line” for a free trade deal with the US after the Trump administration takes office on 20 January. On a hastily arranged trip to the US to reinforce previously weak links with Donald Trump’s transition team, Johnson also declared on Monday that the incoming administration had “a very exciting agenda of change”.
Johnson’s claim about the UK’s future status as Washington’s preferred trading partner was a pointed reference to Barack Obama’s warning during the EU referendum campaign that Britain would be at the “back of the queue” for a trade deal if it chose Brexit.
At the time, the US and EU were trying to complete a transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP), but that appears to have no future under the presidency of Donald Trump, who ran on a platform of opposition to multilateral trade deals.
-
AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
-
Two months after the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the most cohesive message from congressional Democrats is: blame Russia. The party leaders have doubled down on an approach that got nowhere during the presidential campaign — trying to tie the Kremlin around Donald Trump’s neck.
-
Like most people, I’ve long known that factual falsehoods are routinely published in major media outlets. But as I’ve pointed out before, nothing makes you internalize just how often it really happens, how completely their editorial standards so often fail, like being personally involved in a story that receives substantial media coverage. I cannot count how many times I’ve read or heard claims from major media outlets about the Snowden story that I knew, from first-hand knowledge, were a total fabrication.
We have a perfect example of how this happens from the New York Times today, in a book review by Nicholas Lemann, the Pulitzer-Moore professor of journalism at Columbia University as well as a long-time staff writer for The New Yorker. Lemann is reviewing a new book by Edward J. Epstein – the long-time neocon, right-wing Cold Warrior, WSJ op-ed page writer and Breitbart contributor – which basically claims Snowden is a Russian spy.
The book has been widely discredited even before its release as it is filled with demonstrable lies. The usually rhetorically restrained Bart Gellman, whose work on the Snowden story at the Washington Post won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, called the book “bad faith work” that is filled with “distortions” and “baseless and bizarro claims,” several of of which he documented. I’ve documented some of the other obvious falsehoods in the book.
Suffice to say, so fringe is Epstein’s conspiracy claim that even top NSA and CIA officials – who despise Snowden and have repeatedly attempted to disparage him – have rejected the book’s central conspiracy theory that Snowden has worked with the Kremlin. In 2014, Epstein, citing what he claimed a government official told him “off the record,” wrote my favorite sentence about this whole affair, one which I often quoted in my speeches to great audience laughter: “there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation; or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.” He’s apparently now opted for Door #1.
-
Attorney General nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions is testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee today as part of his confirmation process. EFF has voiced concerns about President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Sessions to lead the Justice Department, citing past statements he has made and votes he has cast on a number of critical digital rights issues, including surveillance, encryption, net neutrality, and protections for the press.
-
During the Obama administration, the Civil Rights division — which Attorney General Eric Holder repeatedly referred to as the DOJ’s “crown jewel” — opened 25 investigations of law enforcement agencies, resulting in 19 agreements and 14 consent decrees. But President-elect Donald Trump has called the push for greater police accountability a “war on police,” and Sessions, who if confirmed would be in charge of overseeing such investigations, has said they are an intrusion on local authority and an overreach by the DOJ.
-
From the outset, the recount was met with resistance at every turn. In Pennsylvania, only a small minority of precincts initiated a recount due to obsolete, chaotic rules requiring more than 27,000 citizens to file notarized affidavits by undisclosed deadlines in order to conduct a statewide recount. Reliance on paperless electronic voting machines (“DREs”) for 80% of Pennsylvania voters meant that there were no ballots to recount for most of the state in any case.
-
Most Wall Street bigwigs sided with Hillary Clinton in 2016 but now have adroitly shifted affections to Donald Trump whose populist rhetoric is giving way to another super-rich bonfire of the vanities, explains Mike Lofgren.
-
As the government’s consultation on the Leveson Inquiry draws to a close, and as politicians, campaigners and journalists clamour to make the case for how much freedom the UK’s press deserves, one question has been missed – how free is our press?
With the empire of Rupert Murdoch owning one third of our media, how free are the majority of our journalists, really? There is a glaring gap in the Leveson Inquiry which has failed to challenge the power of media moguls.
Whenever media regulation makes headlines, powerful proprietors and journalists are quick to warn of the threat to the freedom of the press.
The loss of freedom that comes as a result of media ownership becoming more and more concentrated, however, is discussed far less – perhaps unsurprisingly considering that these discussions are mediated and managed by the employees of media corporations. The hands of reporters are tied.
-
An ill wind is blowing in the West. And almost every election is assessed through the lens of Russia. Whether discussing Trump in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK or candidates as different as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, François Fillon and Marine Le Pen in France, it is enough to express doubts about sanctions against Russia or anti-Russian theories from the CIA — an institution surely as infallible as it is beyond reproach — to be suspected of serving the Kremlin’s ends.
In such an atmosphere, one dares not imagine the outpouring of indignation that would have been aroused if Russia, rather than the US, had listened in on Angela Merkel’s telephone calls, or if Google had delivered billions of pieces of private data collected online to Moscow rather than the National Security Agency (NSA). Without quite realising the irony of his words, Barack Obama used a press conference on 16 December to warn Russia: they need to ‘understand that whatever they do to us, we can potentially do to them.’
-
Washington is obsessed by the story put out by US intelligence agencies that Russia tried to interfere in the US presidential election. But for reasons of self-preservation, the blockbuster story just hitting the headlines that an Israeli operative was plotting to get up scandals to unseat British members of parliament will sink like a stone. This, even though part of the concern voiced by official Washington is that Putin may target the elections of European democracies allied to the US to push them in a right wing direction. That’s exactly what the right wing Likud government of Israel has been caught planning to do to Britain.
-
Mark Twain noted that man is the only animal that blushes — or needs to.
He also believed that “public office is private graft.”
Those two observations from our greatest and most sagacious humorist intersected with a bang on Capitol Hill Monday night, when the bright lights of the Republican House Conference met in secret behind closed doors at the end of the New Year’s holiday.
-
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Monday denounced last week’s U.S. intelligence report on Russian hacking, calling it a politically motivated “press release” that provided no evidence that Russian actors gave WikiLeaks hacked material.
In an online news conference, Assange said the report is vague and that U.S. intelligence officials should be embarrassed by the 25-page, declassified document. “This is a press release,” Assange said. “It is clearly designed for political effects.”
-
George Clooney couldn’t make it to this year’s Golden Globes — but he still knows exactly who won. The star, 55, spoke to Us Weekly on Monday, January 9, at a London event for The White Helmets, a 40-minute Netflix documentary about Syrian civil-defense rescue workers who run into the rubble in the aftermath of air strikes to search for injured victims.
-
Donald Trump, the serial liar who will be sworn in as President of the United States next week, lied once again on Monday, rejecting the actress Meryl Streep’s condemnation of him for impersonating a reporter’s physical disability on the campaign trail last year by insisting that he had done no such thing.
“For the 100th time,” Trump wrote on Twitter, “I never ‘mocked’ a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him… ‘groveling’ when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad.”
Trump’s Twitter spats and false claims are by now so routine that it can seem pointless to even report them, but this one is worth unpacking, because it reveals a cascade of lies leading back to a false claim that helped him win: the fantasy that Arab-Americans in New Jersey had openly celebrated the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center as it took place.
-
How long will it take for the European ‘crisis’ to be re-framed as the new norm, and what are the potential consequences of that shift?
-
There is a crisis in American journalism. For too long, news outlets have prioritized their bottom line over real stories, at the expense of the American people. Stories about the vast systemic problems in America, from war to staggering income inequality to climate change to the amount of money being spent on our political system, are perpetually eclipsed by a 24-hour circus of infotainment.
Nowhere has the failure of the media been clearer than in the 2016 presidential election, where scandals, false statements and horse-race politics so often took precedence over policy. A study from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, found that coverage of Trump on eight major news outlets in 2015 alone was worth $55 million in free advertising for the candidate.
Every time major media outlets asked an irrelevant question at the presidential debates, every time they cued a roundtable of Trump and Clinton surrogates, every time they ignored or downplayed independent or third-party candidates, they failed. They decided to play a dangerous political game, and in turn, were played.
Now we have a president who has openly threatened and aggressed against members of the media. He has called for opening up libel laws and suing the press for their coverage. When we do not fully exercise our press freedoms, when we do not remain vigilant, we are jeopardizing those very liberties and thereby jeopardizing our democracy. Democracy is only as strong as a media that is a watchdog, not a lapdog, of power.
-
It’s time to wade into the swamp – or alternative universe – of right-wing media to really understand the twisted “truths” they report.
-
Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is expected to be named senior adviser to the president.
The Associated Press said that Mr Kushner, who has been one of Mr Trump’s top strategists, will continue in that role in the White House.
-
Donald Trump’s intention to name his son-in-law Jared Kushner to a senior White House post violates ethical standards – and the smell test.
A 1967 anti-nepotism law states that a government official can’t hire relatives “in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control.” Kushner’s lawyers are said to be preparing to argue that the White House is somehow not an “agency” and so Trump can do as he wishes, but they are probably wrong and without a change to the law the appointment of Kushner would likely lead to litigation aimed at forcing him out.
And legalities aside, a world leader turning his son-in-law into one of his foremost advisers has an extremely creepy vibe, because it’s straight out of the third world dictator playbook. Raul Castro’s son-in-law has worked for him for decades and now runs the Cuban military’s businesses. Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law was perhaps his top deputy and supervised his WMD programs during the 1980s. Further back, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law served as his foreign minister (until Mussolini had him executed).
-
Censorship/Free Speech
-
Last week, we reported via Twitter that the Iranian state telecom TIC hijacked address space containing a number of pornographic websites. The relevant BGP announcement was likely intended to stay within the borders of Iran, but had leaked out of the country in a manner reminiscent of Pakistan’s block of Youtube via BGP hijack in 2008. Over the weekend, TIC performed BGP hijacks of additional IP address space hosting adult content as well as IP addresses associated with Apple’s iTunes service.
-
IRAN’S EFFORT to stop its citizens accessing pornography have been felt as far afield as Hong Kong as internet users come face to face with over zealous and over-reaching web redirects.
Needless to say that this sort of thing does not go down very well on the internet. Iran might have had its citizens best interests at heart, but its methods have been too blunt.
The Verge reports that the national telecoms register had taken objection to around 250 sites and set up redirecting addresses for them. In short, Iran “began [by] blocking not just the sites, but the basic mechanisms of the web itself”.
What happened is that other internet service providers, some of which are outside of Iran, started following new fake road signs to porno shops, and sending users down blind alleys. The impact was widely felt.
-
Politwoops tracks deleted tweets by public officials, including people currently in office and candidates for office. If you think we’re missing someone, please email us with their name, state, political party, office they hold or are seeking and, of course, their Twitter handle.
-
Someone else who doesn’t understand Section 230 of the CDA is suing search engines for “refusing” to delist revenge porn. The short complaint — filed in New York and spotted by Eric Goldman — is signed by an actual lawyer, but the complaint is so devoid of legitimate (or any) legal arguments, it could be mistaken for a pro se attempt.
According to the complaint, a number of sexually explicit videos were posted to porn websites after a relationship went bad. The plaintiff contacted the websites and had the videos removed, which would seem to have solved the problem. But it didn’t. According to the plaintiff, Yahoo, Bing, and Google searches for her name still bring up websites containing the explicit videos.
-
If you’ve opened your eyes in the last two months, you’ll know that there’s a new boogeyman coming to deceive you and your family: the phenomenon of “fake news.”
The spectre of fake news has been flooding the airwaves — with a noticeable uptick since the U.S. federal election in November — and it seems to be gaining steam with every passing day.
But what is fake news? Everything from celebrity death hoaxes to political misinformation to actual reporting on public statements is now seemingly huddled under the fake news umbrella. Allegations are flying that concerted efforts to circulate fake news impacted the outcome of the U.S. presidential election — a claim made even by the director of U.S. National Intelligence under oath last week. If true, this is cause for concern.
-
Looks like another convicted felon is abusing the DMCA process in hopes of cleansing the web of his misdeeds. Chad Hatten of Houston, Texas, was arrested on multiple counts related to ID theft and access device fraud. Hatten stole credit card numbers to buy gift cards to resell at a discount. He was indicted in 2005 and sentenced to 66 months in prison in 2006.
Now that Hatten is (presumably) no longer behind bars, he’s been doing a little DIY SEO work. His first attempts to get the DOJ’s press releases delisted by Google occurred in 2012, which would line up with the termination of his sentence.
In his first two attempts — both filed under “music” — it appears a third-party link removal service failed to achieve Hatten’s objectives.
-
Respectonomy, a decentralized, self-moderated social network, will allow users the freedom to share content without any fear of censorship and be rewarded for it. The developers of this soon-to-be-released network believe it will be the first to remove all forms of censorship.
The open-source, browser-based network assigns value to data and offers a mechanism for fairly compensating data bandwidth availability. It uses a proof of work (PoW) blockchain and the Bittorrent protocol to determine the value of the RES tokens that run the system.
-
American filmmaker Nina Paley is one of those helping the Singaporean teen’s attempt for political asylum.
On Dec. 28, Paley set up a gofundme online campaign to raise money from people sympathetic to Yee’s cause.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Privacy/Surveillance
-
So we’ve noted that killing net neutrality isn’t the only goal for large ISPs in the new year. Trump’s top telecom advisors have all made it abundantly clear they’d like to defang and defund the FCC as a consumer watchdog entirely, and roll back the decision to classify ISPs as common carriers under Title II. This would not only dismantle net neutrality, but it would also eliminate the relatively basic broadband privacy rules the FCC recently passed. Those rules, in short, require that ISPs not only clearly disclose what’s being sold and who it’s being sold to, but also require they also provide working opt-out tools.
Unsurprisingly, ISPs made quite a stink about the “draconian” nature of the rules, and sector lobbyists are getting a running head start in dismantling them. After all, informed customers with the tools to protect their own privacy could cost them billions of dollars annually. Especially since the rules require that consumers opt in to collection of more sensitive financial data.
-
-
A judge refused Tuesday to dismiss a lawsuit claiming the National Security Agency conducted a mass warrantless surveillance program during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
-
It’s time for Congress to put an end to a glaring loophole in privacy law. Thanks to the wording in a more than 30-year-old law, the papers in your desk are better protected than the emails in your inbox. Congress can fix that by finally passing the Email Privacy Act, reintroduced in the House by Reps. Kevin Yoder and Jared Polis and others today.
The bill would require law enforcement to get a warrant before searching through electronic communications—including things like emails, Facebook messages, and Dropbox files—regardless of how long they have been stored.
That would put an end to the arbitrary standard in the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allows law enforcement to access emails and other communications that have been stored on a server for more than 180 days. It would also set a uniform legal standard by codifying a 2010 federal court ruling that said Fourth Amendment protections require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before accessing stored communications.
-
Law enforcement agencies around the country have been expanding their surveillance capabilities by recruiting private citizens and businesses to share their security camera footage and live feeds. The trend is alarming, since it allows government to spy on communities without the oversight, approval, or legal processes that are typically required for police.
EFF is opposing new legislation introduced in California by Assemblymember Marc Steinorth that would create a tax credit worth up to $500 for residents who purchase home security systems, including fences, alarms and cameras. In a letter, EFF has asked the lawmaker to strike the tax break for surveillance cameras, citing privacy concerns as well as the potential threat created by consumer cameras that can be exploited by botnets.
-
Turkey has a long history of blocking Internet services. It’s become such a thing, there’s even a site called TurkeyBlocks that is exclusively about this phenomenon. A couple of recent stories on the site suggest the Turkish government is aiming to tighten its local control over the online world even more. First, in order to prevent people circumventing social media shutdowns, the Turkish authorities are going after Tor…
-
Possible targets might be the administrators of foreign computer networks, government ministries, oil, defense, and other major corporations, as well as suspected terrorist groups or other designated individuals. Similar Quantum operations have targeted OPEC headquarters in Vienna, as well as Belgacom, a Belgian telecom company whose clients include the European Commission and the European Parliament.
[...]
Significantly, while WINTERLIGHT was a joint effort between the NSA, the Swedish FRA, and the British GCHQ, the hacking attacks on computers and computer networks seem to have been initiated by the Swedes.
-
The ride-hailing company Uber and local governments often do not play well together. Uber pays little heed to regulation while city officials scramble to keep up with the company’s rapid deployment and surging popularity.
But now, with a new data-focused product, Uber is offering a tiny olive branch to its municipal critics.
The company on Sunday unveiled Movement, a stand-alone website it hopes will persuade city planners to consider Uber as part of urban development and transit systems in the future.
The site, which Uber will invite planning agencies and researchers to visit in the coming weeks, will allow outsiders to study traffic patterns and speeds across cities using data collected by tens of thousands of Uber vehicles. Users can use Movement to compare average trip times across certain points in cities and see what effect something like a baseball game might have on traffic patterns. Eventually, the company plans to make Movement available to the general public.
-
In Britain, more than half of 12- to 15-year-olds are on Instagram, according to OfCom (pdf), the country’s communications regulator. So are 43% of 8- to 11-year-olds. But how many of them understand what they signed when they joined? Pretty much 0%, according to “Growing Up Digital”, a report released Jan. 5 (pdf) by the UK Children’s Commissioner.
“Are you sure this is necessary? There are like, 100 pages,” said one 13-year-old who was asked to read Instagram’s terms of service. (Actually 17 pages, with 5,000 words, but still plenty.)
-
Inside the heaving halls of the Las Vegas convention centre, which run thick with the smell of tired feet and one too many late nights spent at a roulette table, a familiar voice can be heard. In any booth, whether it’s LG’s sprawling temple to tech or one of the tiny makeshift stands from CES’ smaller attendees, Amazon’s Alexa is ever present, taking commands from smart alec tech press desperate to spot a crack in her capabilities.
If, as its organisers would have you believe, CES remains the great predictor of tech trends for the year, then 2017 is when Amazon’s AI aide goes from humble home assistant to all-encompassing presence built into every gadget we own. From fridges, to cars, to smartwatches, and even robots, Alexa has quickly become the voice assistant du jour. For an online retailer with a spotty track record in tech (see: the Amazon Fire Phone), it’s an impressive and surprising achievement.
-
An independent Islamic boys’ school where inspectors found a CCTV camera in toilets has been rated “inadequate”.
Ofsted downgraded Darul Hadis Latifiah in Bethnal Green, saying pupils were not being “prepared for life in modern Britain”.
Inspectors found “grimy” facilities and “inappropriate” literature.
The school, for boys aged 11 to 20, said it was “preparing a formal complaint” in response. It said the camera only viewed the “washing area”.
-
When Mike Tigas first created the Onion Browser app for iOS in 2012, he never expected it to become popular. He was working as a newsroom Web developer at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, at the time, and wanted a Tor browser app for himself and his colleagues. Expecting little interest, he then put Onion Browser on the Apple App Store at just $0.99/£0.69, the lowest non-zero price that Apple allows.
Fast forward to 2016, and Tigas found himself living in New York City, working as a developer and investigative journalist at ProPublica, while earning upwards of $2,000 a month from the app—and worrying that charging for it was keeping anonymous browsing out of the hands of people who needed it.
-
When protesters took to the street after police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, they were greeted by law enforcement in full body armor, flanked by armored vehicles. In the two and a half years and countless shootings since, militarized police have become an all too familiar sight. In response, citizens have overwhelmingly begun to film these interactions on their smartphones, making the technology the eyes of our nation. But as we watch the police, they also watch us – only they don’t use an iPhone. Often, they use military grade surveillance equipment that gives them a much broader view than simple cell phone cameras ever could.
-
Scrolling through my online bank statements at Christmas, I was surprised to find I had not removed cash from an ATM for well over four months. Thanks to the ubiquity of electronic payment systems, it has become increasingly easy to glide around London to a chorus of approving bleeps.
As more shops and transport networks adapt to contactless card and touch-and-go mobile technology, many major cities around the world are in the process of relegating cash to second-class status. Some London shops and cafes are now, like the capital’s buses, simply refusing to handle notes or coins.
-
Your medical data is for sale – all of it. Adam Tanner, a fellow at Harvard’s institute for quantitative social science and author of a new book on the topic, Our Bodies, Our Data, said that patients generally don’t know that their most personal information – what diseases they test positive for, what surgeries they have had – is the stuff of multibillion-dollar business.
But although the data is nominally stripped of personally identifying information, data miners and brokers are working tirelessly to aggregate detailed dossiers on individual patients; the patients are merely called “24601” instead of “Jean Valjean”.
At the doctor’s office, Tanner told the Guardian, “you close the door and you think, I’m telling my doctor my most intimate medical secrets, and only my doctor knows about it. But it’s sold commercially.” Patients are reduced to gender, age, particular ailments, and neighborhood. Then, Tanner said, data miners cross-reference that information with data from pharmacies about who they sell prescriptions to, culled by big drugstore chains like Rite Aid and CVS.
-
Civil Rights/Policing
-
By the time I reached my late 20s, I was desperately looking for a way out of Beijing. From 2001 onwards, the city was consumed by preparations for the 2008 Olympics. Every bus route had to be redirected. Every building was covered in scaffolding. Highways were springing up around Beijing like thick noodles oozing from the ground, with complicated U-turns and roundabouts. It was surrounded by a moonscape of construction sites. Living there had become a visual and logistical torture. For me, as a writer and film-maker, it was also becoming impossible artistically, with increasing restraints placed on my work.
-
A divisive vote, with jobs and immigrants the most combustible issues. An outcome that surprised the experts. A nation left on edge, with many anxious about intolerance and the violence that can stem from it.
No, not just America today, but also the United Kingdom seven months ago. Last June, voters there opted out of the European Union, ushering in a new prime minister who has since backed controversial proposals, including one that would require pregnant women to show papers that prove their “right” to use the national health system, before being allowed to give birth in a hospital.
So, were the worst fears of racial, ethnic or other hate violence realized? A mix of government agencies, academics and other organizations have been laboring to offer answers.
In the week after the British went to the polls — widely known as the Brexit vote — there were more than 2,400 accounts of hate crimes reported through Twitter, according to a report from the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos.
-
Women’s reproductive rights, never universally comfortably secure, are in clear and present danger under a Trump administration. But much media coverage of abortion has been marked by a static pro/con framing that presents it as, above all, a political football, rather than a question of women’s fundamental human rights. As Trump-emboldened lawmakers push forward more “heartbeat bills” and waiting-period restrictions, we have to ask if media will rise to the challenge, including acknowledging that, as it stands, all women are not equal when it comes to the ability to make critical reproductive choices.
Destiny Lopez is co-director of All Above All, a coalition of groups and individuals working to lift the bans that deny abortion coverage. She joins us now by phone from North Carolina. Welcome to CounterSpin, Destiny Lopez.
-
Nearly 80 percent of Islamic education teachers in five of 34 Indonesian provinces support implementing Sharia law, according to a new survey that is causing alarm among some moderate Muslim groups.
Researchers led by Dr. Didin Syafruddin of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) in Jakarta interviewed 505 Islamic religious education (Pendidikan Agama Islam) teachers in five of Indonesia’s 34 provinces. In much of Indonesia, religion is taught in public and private schools.
-
The president added he is not a xenophobe and is glad that Vietnamese and Ukrainian migrants had been successfully integrating into the Czech society.
-
“He said that either they must kill me or cut off my foot to stop me escaping,” Lamiya told the Mail on Sunday.
“I told him that if you cut off one foot then I will escape with the other. I told the judge I would never give up. So they replied they would keep on torturing me if I tried to escape.”
-
German interior minister Thomas de Maiziere has announced a series of proposals that revolve around giving the German federal government more power over security agencies, cyber attacks, policing and deportations; permitting the deployment of the military internally; expanding the scope of the proposed EU Entry/Exit System and loosening the the EU definition of “safe third countries”.
The proposals would centralise many responsibilities of Germany’s federal states and are being touted as a response to the Berlin Christmas markets attacks in December, although de Maiziere has reportedly admitted that he has called for most of the changes before.
-
On July 2, 2015, Jasmine Quattlebaum took the bus to Rikers Island to visit her fiancé, who was being held at the jail’s Anna M. Kross Center. Her cousin accompanied her, and as the two women waited to be processed at the Visit Control Building, they were pulled out of line to be searched. Quattlebaum was asked to sign a consent form agreeing to a “pat frisk.”
She entered a search cubicle with a female correction officer she didn’t recognize, who instructed her to put her hands over her head, according to Quattlebaum, and then felt around her bra area, over her shirt. After that, she asked Quattlebaum to unbutton her pants. “I’m not gonna lie, my pants were a little tight, so I’m thinking that’s why she couldn’t get her fingers around the waist,” Quattlebaum recalled. “So I unbutton it for her and put my hands back up.”
Checking a visitor’s waistband is protocol in the pat-down searches permitted by the New York City Department of Correction’s directive on visitor procedure. “The search is conducted by patting the outer clothing over the entire length of the visitor’s body and examining the seams and pockets of the visitor’s clothing,” the directive states. “The visitor may be required to remove his/her outer garments, coat, hat shoes and no other items.” The DOC explicitly prohibits correction officers from conducting more invasive strip searches and cavity searches on visitors to the city’s jails, the majority of whom are women, many accompanied by children, coming to see incarcerated loved ones.
-
Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
-
Back in 2011, AT&T and Verizon eliminated their unlimited data plans, instead shoving users toward metered plans with limited data allotments. While the two companies did “grandfather” their existing unlimited data users at the time, they’ve been engaged in a quiet war to drive these users off the plans for years, ranging from AT&T’s decision to block Facetime from working unless users signed up for metered plans, to throttling these users (and then in some instances lying about it). This is all of course accompanied by a constant barrage of rate hikes (AT&T imposed another $5 bump just last week).
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
What’s particularly regrettable here is not just the loss of biodiversity, and the fact that African farmers will be beholden to Western corporations, but that the NAFSN program will achieve the opposite of its stated aims, and end up taking away what little independence Tanzanian farmers enjoyed under the traditional seed system. No wonder, then, that last year Members of the European Parliament called for the NAFSN to “radically alter its mission”. Judging by what’s happening in Tanzania, there’s no sign of that happening.
-
In order to receive development assistance, Tanzania has to give Western agribusiness full freedom and give enclosed protection for patented seeds. “Eighty percent of the seeds are being shared and sold in an informal system between neighbors, friends and family. The new law criminalizes the practice in Tanzania,” says Michael Farrelly of TOAM, an organic farming movement in Tanzania. Read more below the photo slider …seed evils
-
Copyrights
-
Back in September 2016, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced his plans to modernize existing copyright laws in Europe. They form part of the Digital Single Market reforms. However, Communia, founded by groups including Creative Commons and Wikimedia, believes Juncker’s reforms will actually violate users’ fundamental rights.
Specifically, Communia has issues with the controversial Article 13 of the Digital Single Market reforms. The article would require online providers to implement, and thus, consistently use “[appropriate and proportionate] content recognition technologies.” TorrentFreak gives one example:
“User-generated content sites, for example, would be required to install fingerprinting and filtering systems to block copyright-infringing files.”
-
European lawmakers should boost protections for researchers and educators in the European Commission proposal for a directive on copyright in the digital single market, five research organisations said today. Among other things, lawmakers and policymakers must rethink the provisions on text and data mining as well as the exception for use of works in digital and cross-border teaching, they said.
The statement by the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research, European University Association, League of European Research Universities and Science Europe is here.
-
The Pirate Bay is often portrayed by copyright holders as a site that has no respect for the law, but that overstates the truth. According to one of its original founders, when the torrent site offered to help the authorities catch some really serious criminals several years ago, the police were completely disinterested.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in America, Courtroom, Patents at 9:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Ebbing away from the market…
Summary: The demise of patent trolls in the United States, a trend partly attributable to Alice and other Supreme Court decisions, will likely accelerate soon (later this year) as the future of the Eastern District of Texas courts is at stake
THE US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is doing some fine job in the area of patents. We hope that Justice nominations by Trump won’t ruin it all.
On December 6th the EFF’s Daniel Nazer said that “Supreme Court Curb[ed] Excessive Design Patent Damages” and a week later, on December 14th, his colleague Vera Ranieri said that the “Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Case that Could End Texas’ Grip on Patent Cases”. We wrote several articles about that before. This is very big news and the decision can be historic. In an IDG article by Evan Schuman it said:
For years, patent trolls have been the best evidence that pure evil exists. And like most evil entities, they are almost impossible to stop. Even a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision that was highly critical of patent trolls has done little to slow their slimy, reptilian-like existence. But a federal judge on Dec. 19 crafted a novel tactic to curb patent trolls when she slapped a half-million-dollar bill on the lawyers and said that they were personally responsible for paying it, not their client. This could truly be a game-changer.
This is well overdue, as it will help real companies in the US. Patent trolls contribute nothing to the economy or to competitiveness.
In past years we wrote about all sorts of patent trolls and abusers, including Garfum last year (more than once). The EFF posted an update about this serial abuser, which is politely called just a “Patent Bully”:
District Court Undoes Fee Award Against Patent Bully
A district court judge has issued a disappointing ruling reversing an earlier decision to require an abusive patent litigant to pay an EFF client’s attorney’s fees. Judge Jerome Simandle of the District Court of New Jersey held that, even thought the patent was invalid, the relevant law was too uncertain to find the case exceptional and award fees.
This case began in late 2014 when Garfum.com Corporation sued a small photography website called Bytephoto.com for patent infringement. Garfum claimed to own the idea of having a ‘vote for the best’ competition, but on the Internet. The case had a lot of problems. For one thing, Garfum had filed for its patent in 2007 but Bytephoto had been running online photo competitions since 2003. Also, its absurd patent, U.S. Patent No. 8,209,618, was plainly invalid under the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank, which holds that abstract ideas do not become patent eligible simply by being implemented on a generic computer or on the Internet.
As the above update serves to reveal, Alice among other factors already contribute to the demise of some abusive activity. Suffice to say, to trolls-funded sites such as IAM ‘magazine’ this is terrible news to be protested rather than celebrated. Only last night, for instance, IAM was again grooming the world’s latest patent troll, Intellectual Ventures, as it did several times before.
To quote this new propagandistic masterpiece:
Two of the biggest names in the IP market have joined forces. Intellectual Ventures co-founder and former VP of patent licensing, strategy and litigation at Intel, Peter Detkin, has today become a senior adviser at Sherpa Technology Group, the strategic IP consultancy among whose managing partners is Rembrandts in the Attic author Kevin Rivette. Sherpa was previously known as 3LP Advisors.
Calling them “biggest names in the IP market” is like calling ISIS and Al-Shabaab “biggest names in the political market.” Then again, when you speak for the patent microcosm — much like the media industry that speaks for the military-industrial complex — war-makers are framed as heroes and champions. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in America, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Patents, Samsung at 8:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
When so-called ‘cross-licensing’ with patent purchases (the latest Microsoft method) is actually a disguise/cover for patent settlement after extortion [1, 2, 3, 4]
Summary: The patent lust at IBM, which is suing if not just shaking down companies using software patents, earns plenty of puff pieces from the corporate media
THE notion that the greater the number of patents, the better — a notion so ludicrous that also fails to recognise the raison d’être of patents — is quite a disease. Some people would have us believe that because China created a patents production line in SIPO it's actually at a position of advantage. It’s false and it’s rather infantile to repeat such claims.
One new article, seemingly from an author who is not a fan of software patents (see the short part about it), says today that:
The best ratios I found (i.e., most patents per person) were in very rich Bedford, adjoining Manchester, and almost-as-rich Hollis, adjoining Nashua. Each town had slightly more than 2.7 patents per 1,000 people.
[...]
So keep that in mind when you hear people pointing to patent numbers as a reflection of the braininess of a community, state or country or a company or industry. Take it with a grain of salt.
It’s often just a reflection of which companies are based around that area. But some towns take it out of context and equate patents with innovation or wisdom. The above article came just shortly after a heap of IBM puff pieces. IBM, as our readers are probably aware of by now, bets its future and the whole farm — so to speak — on being more like a patent troll (patent enforcement and shakedown). It has already done that to Twitter, a much smaller company, and it keeps doing that to other Internet companies. “IBM scores a record 8,000 patents in 2016,” enthusiastically screams this headline from Dean Takahashi (or his editor), who just repeated the ‘official’ story as follows:
IBM has proven it is once again dominant in earning patents, as it closed the year with 8,088 U.S. patents granted to its investors in 2016. That’s the 24th consecutive year that the company has earned the most patents of any company.
The second-ranked company, Samsung, had 5,518 U.S. patents granted. About 2,700 of IBM’s 2016 patents covered inventions related to artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, and cloud computing. The patents covered a diverse range of technologies that also included cybersecurity and cognitive health.
We have compiled a list of nearly 20 ‘news’ articles [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17] about IBM claiming 8,000 so-called ‘inventions’ in a single year. Almost all these articles are from yesterday and they add no new information; they’re puff pieces void of any analysis. IBM got many of these patents probably by just calling old stuff “cloud” and “AI” (buzzwords). Is “AI” the new “on a machine”? And “cloud” the new “over the Internet”? When it comes to bamboozling patent examiners (so as to be granted software patents) there are all sorts of tricks, many of which boil down to semantics. IBM is nowadays firing a lot of employees, selling large portions of its physical products divisions to China (notably Lenovo). Is this the future of IBM then? Just ‘hiring’ patents, which it already uses to attack and extort far smaller companies? “Samsung Second & Google Fifth In 2016 Patent Race”, an Android news site said yesterday, so IBM isn’t alone among Linux-oriented firms when it comes to the patents gold rush. Samsung and Google, however, are not patent aggressors. Unlike the above IBM puff pieces, a writer in Fortune published “These Firms Won the Most Patents in 2016″ — a list that shows Microsoft falling down quite sharply. As a Microsoft propaganda site puts it, “Microsoft ranked 8th on the list of companies awarded with most patents in the US” (a lot lower than before).
Well, Microsoft is having issues. Software patents are getting more difficult to get, so it is not managing to keep up with patent filings. Financial issues are not helping either. In the coming years we expect IBM to become more and more like a patent troll whose actual products (if not jobs too) sailed away to China. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Highlighting or reaffirming what they really are and whose interests they represent…
Summary: In a letter to Elodie Bergot (as CC) and Željko Topić, who faces many criminal investigations, FFPE-EPO ringleaders reveal their allegiance not to EPO staff but to those who perpetually attack the staff
SUEPO has been quiet for a long time. It is under attack from several directions in multiple EPO sites. That’s what EPO management hopes to achieve: marginsalisation and silencing, fear of even joining, not just leading the staff union.
The union-busting right-hand woman of Battistelli, Bergot, along with his right-hand ‘bulldog’ (who also did this in Croatia) received the letter above. For those who are not familiar with FFPE-EPO, here is a list of articles about them:
- In the EPO’s Official Photo Op, “Only One of the Faces is Actually FFPE-EPO”
- Further Evidence Suggests and Shows Stronger Evidence That Team Battistelli Uses FFPE-EPO as ‘Yellow Union’ Against SUEPO
- “FFPE-EPO Was Set up About 9 Years Ago With Management Encouragement”
- Fallout of the FFPE EPO MoU With Battistelli’s Circle
- The EPO’s Media Strategy at Work: Union Feuds and Group Fracturing
- Caricature of the Day: Recognising FFPE EPO
- Union Syndicale Federale Slams FFPE-EPO for Helping Abusive EPO Management by Signing a Malicious, Divisive Document
- FFPE-EPO Says MoU With Battistelli Will “Defend Employment Conditions” (Updated)
- Their Masters’ Voice (Who Block Techrights): FFPE-EPO Openly Discourages Members From Reading Techrights
- Letter Says EPO MoU “Raises Questions About FFPE’s Credibility as a Federation of Genuine Staff Unions”
- On Day of Strike FFPE-EPO Reaffirms Status as Yellow (Fake/Management-Leaning) Union, Receives ‘Gifts’
- Needed Urgently: Information About the Secret Meeting of Board 28 and Battistelli’s Yellow Union, FFPE-EPO
- In Battistelli’s Mini Union (Minion) It Takes Less Than 10 Votes to ‘Win’ an Election
- FFPE-EPO Going Ad Hominem Against FICSA, Brings Nationality Into It
- High on EPO: Battistelli’s ‘Social Conference’ Nonsense is Intended to Help Suppress Debate About His Abuses Against Staff and Union-Busting Activities
- Leaked Letter Reveals How Battistelli Still Exploits FFPE-EPO (Yellow Union) to Attack the Real EPO Union, SUEPO
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO’s Staff Union
“This bunch of FFPE clowns,” said our source, “can only produce a letter thanks to SUEPO work and expertise! P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C…
“They must hope to soon get promotions in exchange of serving the soup to their Masters at such low undignified level.”
As we mentioned about a week ago (more information about this is yet to come), VP4 has just had corruption indictments brought against him in the EU Court in Strasbourg. There are additional 6 criminal investigations against Željko Topić in Croatia.
The EPO is still rather quiet (so far this year) as people slowly return from holiday. In 2016, however, based on this new WIPR survey, EPO scandals were a hot topic. To quote:
Around one-quarter of readers also thought that the European Patent Office’s industrial disputes will play a role in 2017.
“It is amazing that the EPO industrial dispute isn’t getting more coverage,” said one reader.
The reader added that they expected “a disgruntled patentee or opponent to petition one or more national courts to ignore a decision of an EPO board of appeal on the basis that all decisions of the boards lack independence and are unenforceable”.
We already said some weeks ago (end of last year), shame on the German media for not covering it (or barely mentioning it). Even the British media, which is far from the EPO, has been doing a better job.
Yesterday our main server broke down and we had to rebuild it from scratch, which took a whole day. Later this week we shall return to regular EPO coverage. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.09.17
Posted in News Roundup at 7:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
According to a report by Jack Wallen, a writer at Linux.com, he expects Parrot Linux to rise in popularity in 2017. This distro is based on Debian, and it offers penetration tools, cryptography tools, cloud and programming tools, and also productivity tools.
In Parrot Linux’s recent DistroWatch distribution release, Parrot Security OS 3.3 contained a collection of utilities designed for penetration testing, computer forensics, reverse-engineering, hacking, privacy, and cryptography. The new Parrot 3.3 release also contains fixes for “minor but unpleasant bugs, and introduces many, many updates,” according to DistroWatch.
-
There is a set criteria I use to determine how suitable a Linux distro is for the average person which is as follows:
Must be easy to install
Must have an intuitive desktop environment
Must be easy to use
Must have a standard and fairly complete set of applications installed
Must have a decent package manager for installing other applications
Must be ready to use straight away
The list is ordered in the same way they are on Distrowatch.
-
Desktop
-
The maker of the GPD WIN, a 5.5-inch Windows 10 handheld game console released last year, is planning to launch a tablet-sized laptop, dubbed ‘Pocket’, which will run Windows or Ubuntu.
-
Although Linux installs and operates as expected for most users, inevitably some users will run into problems. For my final article in The Queue column for the year, I thought it would be interesting to summarize the most common technical Linux issues people ran into in 2016. I posted the question to LinuxQuestions.org and on social media, and I analyzed LQ posting patterns. Here are the results.
-
Apple will steal a march on Microsoft this year when for the first time this century shipments of devices powered by its operating systems outnumber those running Windows, research firm Gartner said today.
-
Raptor Engineering is working and crowdfunding a high-end power8 based desktop computer with zero proprietary firmware blobs in the Talos Secure Workstation. Traditionally IBM, Oracle(Sun), Intel/AMD and others ruled this market segment. But now there is competition to Intel for a desktop computer.
-
It doesn’t look like the Talos Secure Workstation will see the light of day with it’s crowdfunding campaign ending this week and it’s coming up more than three million dollars short of its financing goal. Now there’s another effort to offer a libre system but using off-the-shelf x86 hardware.
-
Virtualization
-
The ARMv8.3 specification is adding support for nested virtualization and already kernel developers have been working to take use of this feature on future ARM CPUs within the Linux kernel.
-
Busily fixing and enhancing the partitioning hypervisor Jailhouse over the last year, we basically forgot to release new versions. Here is one, and it’s another major step forward towards the production-grade of this hypervisor.
-
A new release is now available of the Jailhouse 0.6 partitioning hypervisor that remains an out-of-tree option for Linux server admins.
-
Kernel Space
-
I’m announcing the release of the 4.9.2 kernel.
All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…
-
-
-
Two new Linux kernel releases arrived this past weekend, for the Linux 4.8 and long-term supported Linux 4.4 series, sporting pretty much the same improvements and bug fixes.
Linux kernels 4.8.16 and 4.4.40 LTS are out, as announced by renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, and they’re here three weeks after the release of the previous maintenance updates, namely Linux 4.8.15 and Linux 4.4.39 LTS, due to the obvious Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Continuing on from this weekend’s open-source Nouveau vs. closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver performance are results now added in with showing AMD’s open-source vs. closed-source driver performance with the same tests.
As a reminder from the earlier article, the open-source NVIDIA tests were done with the Nouveau stack found in Linux 4.10 and Mesa 13.1-dev. With the supported Kepler GPUs re-clocking was manually enabled to the 0f pstate along with enabling NvBoost support, new to Linux 4.10. The NVIDIA binary driver tested was the 375.26 driver. The cards tested were the GeForce GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 980, and GTX 980 Ti. Testing was limited of the GTX 900 Maxwell GPUs due to there not yet being re-clocking there on Nouveau and no GTX 1000 Pascal cards were tested since there isn’t yet any accelerated open-source driver support.
-
-
There was talk last year of Mesa moving to a date-based version scheme and that’s now official with Mesa in Git being 17.0-devel rather than 13.1-devel.
Mesa moving forward will now use a YEAR.RELEASE-NUMBER-OF-THAT-YEAR scheme to signify their releases. Mesa 17.0 is due out in February as what was known as Mesa 13.1, then comes 17.1, 17.2, 17.3, and 17.4 if sticking to the existing quarterly release cadence. Mesa 18.0 will then kick things off in 2018.
-
Igalia developers have been doing a lot of work this past week from seeing their FP64 Haswell patches merged, issuing new Ivy Bridge FP64 patches for testing, Float64 support for the Intel Vulkan driver, and related work. The newest from Juan Suarez Romero on behalf of Igalian developers are the 11 patches needed for taking Intel’s Mesa driver for Haswell to the OpenGL 4.2 milestone.
-
Applications
-
To celebrate 40 years of the Star Wars saga, the Kodi developers announced earlier today the codename of the next major release of their open-source and multiplatform media center.
As many of you probably know from our regular reports, Kodi 17 “Krypton” is currently in heavy development with a first Release Candidate snapshot out of the door at the end of 2016, but the team was already looking to codename the next major version, Kodi 18. In early December, they asked the community to vote for the Kodi 18 code name, which should have start with the letter L.
-
By providing a realistic simulated driving experience, the new GENIVI Vehicle Simulator (GVS) assists adopters to develop and test the user interface of an open in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system safely, thereby identifying and executing necessary design changes quickly and efficiently.
-
PCSX2 is a PlayStation 2 emulator for Windows and Linux. It was started by the team behind PCSX (an emulator for the original PlayStation) back in 2002, and as of early 2012 development is still active. The emulator achieved playable speeds only by mid-2007 and subsequent versions have improved speed and compatibility making it both the ultimate solution for PS2 emulation and the instrument to keep and preserve the PS2 legacy in the modern world. Though not yet perfect the program can successfully emulate most commercial PS2 games at playable speeds and good visuals (often better than the original PS2). The project is open source, and it is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3. Currently up to 3 cores are supported (2 cores and an additional one if the new MTVU speed hack is used). To make PCSX2 efficiently use 4 or more cores will require major code changes. PCSX2 only uses 2 cores,so if you have more the CPU usage will be way less 100%. Even if you have exactly 2 cores, the emulator will not cause 100% CPU usage because of the way threading works. This does NOT mean PCSX2 isn’t using the full power of your CPU, it is normal.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine or Emulation
-
As promised, Topware Interactive have released a Linux beta of X-Blades on Steam that uses Wine to make it easy for you.
-
CodeWeavers, Inc., developer of CrossOver the easiest, fastest way to run Windows software on Mac and Linux announced today the release of CrossOver 16. With CrossOver 16, you can run thousands of Windows software titles, without the need for a Windows OS license.
-
The Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) team is back from the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, and to kick off 2017 they’ve just announced the availability of the Wine development release 2.0 RC4.
-
Games
-
Valve appears to be ramping up their open-source AMD Linux graphics driver work, but they are looking for more Linux games that currently don’t work atop the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.
-
Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has tweeted out asking for information on Linux games that don’t currently work with radeonsi.
-
The developer of Chronicon [Steam] has stated that a Linux build will be worked on and should be available in a few months.
I must say, after watching the trailer I’m pretty much sold on it. It looks insanely fun to play when there’s lots of enemies around.
-
Aspyr Media have officially announced today, January 9, 2017, the upcoming availability of the Sid Meier’s Civilization VI turn-based 4X video game for the Linux and SteamOS platforms.
Developed by Firaxis Games and published by 2K Games, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI launched for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems last year on the 21st of October. It already won the “Best Strategy Game” award during the The Game Awards 2016 annual awards ceremony.
-
-
Aspyr Media are handling the port, and have already brought the game to Mac. Until now, Linux gamers have been left hanging, with Aspyr saying they were checking the “feasibility” of a Linux port, but their wait is now over.
“This is by far the most requested game we get asked for by the Linux community,” says Elizabeth Howard, Aspyr’s vice president of publishing, who also discusses the incentives Aspyr have been sent.
-
The gaming performance of Windows 10 is much better as compared to Windows 8. Surprisingly, developments in Linux gaming world — SteamOS, Steam machines, and improved Linux support — forced Microsoft to make amends. Microsoft refocused on Direct3D development and gained a great share in PC gaming market with Windows 10.
-
-
It’s been a bit of a ride, but we now have it confirmed for sure that Civilization VI [Steam] is coming to Linux, and the release isn’t far off. We are able to confirm this with permission before the official announcement from Aspyr Media that is due later today.
I cannot confirm to you the actual release date, but I can confirm if everything goes as planned that you won’t be kept waiting much longer.
-
Late last year the Australian Federal Court ordered Valve Corporation (Valve) to pay penalties totaling $3 million for breaching the Australian Consumer Law.
This followed an earlier finding in March 2016, that Valve had made false or misleading representations to consumers in relation to its online gaming platform, Steam. “The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.”
-
If you had tried playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown [Steam] (not to be confused with XCOM 2) on radeonsi and had it crash constantly, the good news is that this should now be fixed as of Mesa 13.0.3.
-
Mesa has another patch that will be interesting for Linux gamers. This is actually a two-part fix as it was re-worked. The Witcher 2 [Steam, GOG] should have a lot less black flickering with this latest patch.
-
He did a good job of convincing me that Valve is in the process of developing its products to run natively in Linux…but Valve wouldn’t cop to it. It only admitted it was playing around with Linux. Nothing was official. Interestingly, after the notorious Michael Larabel interview and visit, Valve reps actually insisted in that there was no serious Linux project at all with GamesIndustry.biz, anyway.
-
A few years ago, thanks to Valve and Steam, Linux looked like it was going to become a major game platform. That didn’t happen. But, the threat may have forced Microsoft to improve its Windows game support.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
If you’re distro hopping, today’s trend for people who can’t make a decision in choosing the perfect GNU/Linux distribution for their needs, we recommend taking KaOS for a test drive, an elegant and rolling operating system built from scratch.
-
It looks like 2017 will be a good year for users of the Chakra GNU/Linux distribution, a desktop-oriented computer operating system originally based on the popular Arch Linux OS, as they can now install the latest KDE software releases.
That’s right, the KDE Plasma 5.8.5 LTS desktop environment and KDE Applications 16.12 software suite have hit the stable repositories of the GNU/Linux distribution, along with various other Qt/KDE technologies like Qt 5.7.1, Qt Creator 4.2.0, and KDE Development Platform (also known as kdelibs) 4.14.27.
-
Following the 4th release 5.3.0 published in November 2016, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.4.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces several improvements to the similarity search engine and a complete re-write of video file support.
-
Plasma is nearing a new release and with 5.9 coming shortly we have the question of should we switch Neon to use Wayland by default for the Developer Unstable edition. To evaluate it I updated the Plasma Wayland ISO and found it pleasingly functional on VirtualBox. Time to install this setup on my real hardware and see what breaks.
-
Jonathan Riddell has released a new KDE Plasma Wayland ISO for those wishing to try the latest KDE development packages atop Wayland rather than the X.Org Server.
-
-
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
There’s a new stable release of the GTK+ multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs), versioned 3.22.6, which promises to work better with OpenGL ES 2.0, the standard for embedded accelerated 3D graphics.
-
In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 81 commits, with 12205 lines added and 12625 lines removed.
-
-
Linux.com has listed its ranking of the “best Linux distros for 2017”, detailing which Linux distributions suit which scenarios best.
The list by the publication is detailed below, predicting which distros will “rise to the top of their respective heaps”.
-
Remember Linux? Once touted as a serious challenger to Windows on the desktop, the open-source operating system remains hugely popular among a small minority of desktop users. And, of course, its use in data centres is undiminished, powering millions of servers around the world — and literally underpinning the Internet.
Unlike Windows or Apple’s macOS, there are a plethora of distributions — “distros”, or versions — of Linux, each designed with specific uses, and users, in mind.
Linux.com, a website that writes about open-source software and the Linux community, has published its annual list of what it considers the best Linux distros available today, broken down into a number of categories.
-
Reviews
-
MX Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution which grew out of a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS Linux communities. The MX distribution strives to provide a fast, friendly desktop environment on the solid base provided by Debian’s Stable branch. The distribution includes several utilities to make administering the operating system easier and its installation media is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds.
I downloaded the project’s 64-bit build which is 1.1GB in size. Booting from the distribution’s media brings up the Xfce desktop environment. There is an icon for launching the project’s system installer on the desktop. The desktop panel is placed vertically down the left side of the screen with the application menu and system tray located at the bottom. The desktop background shows off a pleasant ocean-side view.
-
New Releases
-
Patrick Verner, the creator of the once very popular Parted Magic disk partitioning, erasing and cloning, as well as data rescue and recovery Live CD based on GNU/Linux technologies, announced the availability of Parted Magic 2017_01_08.
Shipping with the recently released Linux 4.9.1 kernel, which was recently marked as stable and ready for production by renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, as well as an updated graphics stack based on the X.Org Server 1.19.0 display server, Parted Magic 2017_01_08 support the ZFS file system.
-
The first week of the 2017 brought with it multiple Linux distribution updates, particularly to rolling release distros, including Solus, KaOS and Arch
-
OpenSUSE/SUSE
-
At the end of November, the Raspberry Pi Blog announced the availability of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for the Raspberry Pi 3. As Eben Upton said at that time, this was a big deal for two reasons — it was the first official 64-bit operating system for the Pi 3 (Raspbian and other currently available versions are 32-bit), and it was an official release from a major vendor.
The announcement in theSuSE Blog gives a lot more information about the what/why/how of the SLES port, and makes for an interesting read. From what I gather, SuSE and/or ARM gave out some spiffy packages (shown at right) which contained a Raspberry Pi 3 preloaded with SLES 12 SP2: I would have loved to have been there and been blessed with one…
-
With the Talos Secure Workstation not set to hit its goal, I was curious this morning about how the MJ Technology’s openSUSE-powered “First True Linux x86 and x64 Tablet” was doing, but that too has failed to materialize.
-
SUSE supports a lot of architectures and runs on everything from IBM mainframe to x86 machines, and more. With ARM’s push in the data center, it made even more sense for SUSE to work closely with ARM to support yet another platform.
When the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B was announced, SUSE engineers found that it runs on the Broadcom BCM2837 64-bit A53 ARM processor. A lot of work has already been completed on this processor for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, so getting SLES or openSUSE to run on Raspberry Pi 3 Model B was only a matter of time.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the King Abdulaziz University has been signed as a Red Hat Academy Partner in Saudi Arabia. Red Hat® Academy is an open source education program that provides turnkey curriculum materials for educational programs in high schools and institutions of higher education worldwide. Starting today, the university will offer Red Hat courses and exams to current students, who will receive hands-on instruction, curriculum and labs, performance-based testing, and instructor support.
-
-
Finance
-
Debian Family
-
November marked the 20th month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella.
-
-
I spent a lot of time defending the workflow I described in dgit-maint-merge(7) (which was inspired by this blog post). However, I came to be convinced that there is a case for a manually curated series of patches for certain classes of package. It will depend on how upstream uses git (rebasing or merging) and on whether the Debian delta from upstream is significant and/or long-standing. I still think that we should be using dgit-maint-merge(7) for leaf or near-leaf packages, because it saves so much volunteer time that can be better spent on other things.
When upstream does use a merging workflow, one advantage of the dgit-maint-merge(7) workflow is that Debian’s packaging is just another branch of development.
-
Derivatives
-
The Christmas celebrations are now over, so is the New Year’s holiday, and the Parsix GNU/Linux developers are back, porting the latest security updates from the upstream Debian GNU/Linux repositories.
So if you’ve been waiting to update your Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” or Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” (still in development) installations, this is the perfect moment to do it two the both of them. All the recently released security updates from Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” (a.k.a. Debian Unstable) have landed for these two distributions.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Ubuntu phone users will be stuck with their current firmware for a while as the company has no plans to issue another over-the-air update until it switches package formats, according to Pat McGowan, an employee of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu.
-
Before diving into the Ubuntu review, here’s a bit of backdrop — and a bonus review. I downloaded and installed Windows 8 Preview several weeks ago. It took me about two days to realize that Microsoft’s desktop OS had jumped the great white for me. I can see how the Metro UI would be really nice on a tablet, but the concept on a desktop screen baffles me. Coincidentally, my 8 year-old’s installation of Windows 7 got corrupted and he needed a reinstall.
-
-
Axiomtek’s rugged “IFB122” IoT gateway features an i.MX6 UL SoC with dual LANs, dual COMs, mini-PCIe expansion, and extended temperature support.
Axiomtek’s IFB222 is a fanless, vertical DIN-rail form-factor gateway with a smaller, 125 x 100 x 31mm footprint than the company’s recent, Intel Atom-based ICO300-MI Gateway. The gateway is even smaller — and much simpler — than the company’s year-old, i.MX6 based rBOX630.
-
AT&T and Avnet announced the $99 AT&T IoT Starter Kit for its LTE cellular networks back in July, and shipped it the following month. Now, the wireless carrier has launched a second, identically priced kit that similarly combines an AT&T LTE modem and an Avnet M14A2A Cellular Shield with a Cortex-M4-based NXP K64F Freedom Board, but also adds support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in addition to AT&T’s own IoT cloud management service. AT&T also launched a new $59 model that omits the NXP K64F Freedom Board for those users who would rather control the Cellular Shield with a Raspberry Pi.
-
Phones
-
Tizen
-
Samsung is always doing its best to get ahead with trends, and in the area of smart TVs, UHD and 4K content is where it’s at. And yet, there’s always trouble lurking in mobile. With 4K content becoming the new gold standard, there are those who would rather perform more roundabout techniques to access content illegally than to pay for it. For these criminally mastermind individuals, smart TVs must be smarter than ever before. Samsung and Verimatrix have worked out a solution: forensic watermarking.
-
The Samsung Gear S3 is a fantastic Tizen smartwatch, there isn’t much disagreement with that statement, that has some fantastic opportunities for Native / HTML5 / TIzen app and game devs. The Gear S3 looks and feels like a real watch, new UX components, which allows you to use it to build new user experiences.
-
-
Android
-
Google recently announced the release of a new IoT (Internet of Things) platform that utilises the power of Android and will allow developers to easily create new smart devices. Android Things is its name and there’s a real chance that the platform could be a very big deal. We take a quick look at what is Android Things and why it matters.
-
We said Android Wear isn’t dead and sure enough, there’s more signs of life with ZTE confirming it’s working on its first Android Wear smartwatch later in 2017.
The news follows fresh devices last week at CES from Casio and New Balance and could mean that the delay of Android Wear 2.0 and lack of new watches in the run up to the holidays last year was something of a blip.
-
-
-
Nokia is getting back into the smartphone business. A company called “HMD,” which includes a number of old-guard Nokia employees, has emerged to resurrect the brand from the ashes of the Microsoft acquisition. Recently the company announced its new phone: the “Nokia 6.” It runs “the latest version” of Android Nougat (so 7.1.1?), it’s milled out of a single block of aluminum, and it has a 5.5-inch “HD” screen. The bad news is that is has a Snapdragon 430 SoC and is exclusive to China. But hey, this looks like a good first step and serves as a peek into the future of the new Nokia.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Phone-maker Blu started making a name for itself in the States for being an affordable Android brand, but it’s taken some time for the company to bring its wares to the UK.
In fact, the Vivo 6 is the company’s first Blighty-bound device. Having launched in time for a crazy opening-day Amazon discount during Black Friday weekend in 2016, the phone is now back to its full price of £239. So is it worth the cash?
-
This past year may go down as a banner year for Android gaming. We saw some big tech advancements in virtual reality and augmented reality, a great mix of outstanding games from indie developers and established franchises, and we’re looking forward to more of that good stuff in 2017.
Here’s what I saw as the trends and highlights from 2016, and what I’m looking forward to most in the new year.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Chen Bo, a 37-year-old software developer with Beijing-based Cheetah Mobile, remembers clearly how isolated and closed China’s software environment was in 2010. That was a time when the mobile internet revolution was taking hold of the world’s most populous country.
“Every app developer saw his or her software codes as the most precious assets and would never share them with others. You could say the scene was equivalent to people securing their family jewelry in plastic wraps and locking it in burglar-resistant safes,” Chen said.
That was also a time when even employees were allowed access to only a part of the codes they were working on, to pre-empt information leaks to competitors.
But the scene has changed over the last six years. China has blossomed into one of the world’s most dynamic hubs for software developers.
-
For administrators seeking an easier method to turn on HTTPS for their websites, there is Caddy, an open source web server that automatically sets up security certificates and serves sites over HTTPS by default.
Built on Go 1.7.4, Caddy is a lightweight web server that supports HTTP/2 out of the box and automatically integrates with any ACME-enabled certificate authority such as Let’s Encrypt. HTTP/2 is enabled by default when the site is served over HTTPS, and administrators using Caddy will never have to deal with expired TLS certificates for their websites, as Caddy handles the process of obtaining and deploying certificates.
-
-
Healthy productive FOSS projects don’t just happen, but are built, and the secret ingredient is Community over code. Purpose and details are everything: If you build it will they come, and then how do you keep it going and growing? How do you set direction, attract and retain contributors, what do you do when there are conflicts, and especially conflicts with valuable contributors? Joe Brockmeier (Red Hat) shares a wealth of practical wisdom at LinuxCon North America.
-
Technology is only one part of the solution, but at Cadasta we believe it is a key component. While many governments had modern technology systems put in place to manage land records, often these were expensive to maintain, required highly trained staff, were not transparent, and were otherwise too complicated. Many of these systems, created at great expense by donor governments, are already outdated and no longer accurately reflect existing land and property rights.
-
Web Browsers
-
Min is a Web browser with a minimal design that provides speedy operation with simple features.
When it comes to software design, “minimal” does not mean low functionality or undeveloped potential. If you like minimal distraction tools for your text editor and note-taking applications, that same comfort appeal is evident in the Min browser.
I mostly use Google Chrome, Chromium and Firefox on my desktops and laptop computers. I am well invested in their add-on functionality, so I can access all the specialty services that get me through my long sessions in researching and working online.
-
Mozilla
-
Among their proposed goals for Servo in 2017 are finishing Stylo (Servo’s CSS style system into Gecko), extending WebRender as the GPU accelerated back-end, experimenting with initial layout integration in other products, exploring Flexbox, extending and better supporting embedding APIs, and implementing other high priority DOM APIs. Among the research proposed for this year is a magic DOM and JavaScript optimizations along with software transactional memory.
-
As the Internet of Things (IoT) gains momentum, there is a need for collaboration, open and interoperable tools, and governance. In fact, all the way back in 2015, Philip DesAutels, the AllSeen Alliance’s leader, told us that: “In five years, I think all of this will be around us everywhere, in everything. The next phase is going to be the really transformational phase. “Systems around you will have a whole lot more information. They’ll be able to deliver a lot more value.”
Now, Mozilla, which has been keeping track of the convergence of open source and the Internet of Things, is out with a new report calling for “responsible IoT.”
-
SaaS/Back End
-
DataOps describes the creation & curation of a central data hub, repository and management zone designed to collect, collate and then onwardly distribute data such that data analytics can be more widely democratised across an entire organisation and, subsequently, more sophisticated layers of analytics can be brought to bear such as built-for-purpose analytics engines.
-
OpenStack has come a long way since 2010 when NASA approached Rackspace for a project. With 1,600 individual contributors to OpenStack and a six-month release cycle, there are a lot of changes and progress. This amount of change and progress is not without its drawbacks. In the Juno release, there were something like 10,000 bugs. In the next release, Kilo, there were 13,000 bugs. But as OpenStack is deployed in more environments, and more people are interested in it, the community grows both in users and developers.
-
We’ve covered the growth of OpenStack jobs and how you can become involved in the community. Maybe that even inspired you to search for OpenStack jobs and explore the professional opportunities for Stackers. You probably have questions, so we’re here to answer the frequent questions about working on OpenStack professionally.
-
A mixed year for OpenStack with HPE and Cisco seeming to step away from the community.
-
-
At the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, 16 vendors stood on stage and demonstrated interoperability. This was a major breakthrough for OpenStack. It marked a significant departure from just 18 months earlier when the OpenStack Foundation had chided vendors for creating lots of proprietary solutions. Enterprise Times sat down with Angel Diaz, IBM Vice President, Cloud Architecture and Technology to talk about this achievement.
-
On top of her job as a system architect at Nokia, Afek has taken an active role in the OpenStack community as the project team lead (PTL) of Vitrage and a voice in gender equality in the technology field with the Women of OpenStack. You may have also seen her taking center stage at the recent OpenStack Summit Barcelona, where she took part in a daredevil demo.
-
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
More people than ever are enjoying the benefits of LibreOffice. It’s free to use and open source. But what about LibreOffice alternatives? Are there any good LibreOffice Alternative sand should you try them for yourself? This article is going to share some of the best LibreOffice alternatives and provide links where you can learn more about each of them.
-
Ubuntu Tablet – quick test Libre Office in desktop mode tablet Bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition running Unity 8 bluetooth mouse + keyboard
-
CMS
-
December is a traditionally quiet month across most industries, but the world of open source CMS never truly rests.
Sure, open source vendors (and their contributing communities alike) cooled their jets a little as the new year approached — but there was still plenty going on.
If you happened to miss any of it, here are the latest open source CMS headlines.
-
Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
-
Technology transformation wasn’t enough for Walmart to get the most from OpenStack and open source. Walmart needed to change its company culture too.
-
-
-
-
-
-
BSD
-
Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-7 branch or use the netbsd-7-1-RC1 tag.
-
The first release candidate of the upcoming NetBSD 7.1 is now available for testing.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat has provided the latest status report concerning the state of the GNU Compiler Collection 7 code compiler.
GCC 7 has been in “stage three” for a while now meaning only bug/general fixes landing, but they are planning to enter stage four on 19 January. When stage four begins, only wrong-code fixes, bug fixes, and documentation fixes will be accepted.
-
Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
-
Open Hardware/Modding
-
Wave and tidal energy design tool DTOcean has been launched as an open source software package. The tool’s developers say it will assist project developers to design wave and tidal energy arrays by identifying optimal layouts, components and procedures.
An active but growing user community is emerging around DTOcean, which industry and research communities are encouraged to join.
-
The open source movement has had a profound impact on the tech sector over the last two decades, and now those notions are moving beyond software and operating systems to form the basis for flexible yet standardized complete systems – including automobiles.
-
Whether for budgetary, philosophical, or other reasons, an increasing number of embedded systems are being designed using open source elements. For the most part, these elements are software based, although there are some open source board designs in use as well. Now, the microcontroller that empowers a PCB design is available as an open source design.
-
-
Programming/Development
-
Looking out at the world of technology is exciting. It has a lot of moving parts, and it seems the further you dig into it, the deeper it gets, and then it’s turtles all the way down. For that very reason, technology is also overwhelming. Where do you start if you’re keen to join in and help shape the way the modern world functions? What’s the first step? What’s the twentieth step?
-
A new version, now at 0.2.0, of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN. And it brings a significant change: windows builds! Thanks to Dan Dillon who dug deep enough into the libc++ sources from LLVM to port the std::get_time() function that is missing from the 4.* series of g++. And with Rtools being fixed at g++-4.9.3 this was missing for us here. Now we can parse dates for use by RcppCCTZ on Windows as well. That is important not only for RcppCCTZ but also particularly for the one package (so far) depending on it: nanotime.
-
Architectural preservation is rarely so thrilling as it was in 1930s China. As the country teetered on the edge of war and revolution, a handful of obsessive scholars were making adventurous expeditions into the country’s vast rural hinterland, searching for the forgotten treasures of ancient Chinese architecture. At the time, there were no official records of historic structures that survived in the provinces. The semi-feudal countryside had become a dangerous and unpredictable place: Travelers venturing only a few miles from major cities had to brave muddy roads, lice-infested inns, dubious food and the risk of meeting bandits, rebels and warlord armies. But although these intellectuals traveled by mule cart, rickshaw or even on foot, their rewards were great. Within the remotest valleys of China lay exquisitely carved temples staffed by shaven-headed monks much as they had been for centuries, their roofs filled with bats, their candlelit corridors lined with dust-covered masterpieces.
-
The fantastic ambitions of rich men should never be underestimated. Throw enough cash at something and even a failure can have staying power.
When Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and philanthropist, decided he wanted to commission a photographic “archive of the planet” he wasn’t joking. And though the idea of cataloging the earth seems whimsical in scope today, the pictures he helped create between 1909 and 1931 hold our attention like few others from the era.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
It didn’t take long. During the first week of 2017, the new Republican Congress has begun efforts to dismantle America’s health-care system. Their long-standing goal, consistent with their right-wing ideology, is to take away health insurance from tens of millions of Americans, privatize Medicare, make massive cuts to Medicaid and defund Planned Parenthood. At the same time, in the midst of grotesque and growing income and wealth inequality, they’re preparing to allow pharmaceutical companies to increase drug prices and to hand out obscene tax breaks for the top one-tenth of 1 percent.
-
A proposed copper-nickel mine for northeastern Minnesota has passed another milestone.
The U.S. Forest Service on Monday signed off on a proposed land swap with PolyMet Mining. The deal exchanges 6,650 acres of federal land in the Superior National Forest that PolyMet needs for about the same amount of privately owned land within the forest.
• Now what? PolyMet applied to open its copper-nickel mine
PolyMet CEO Jon Cherry calls it “a win for both parties,” giving Superior National Forest lands with better public access.
But Executive Director Paul Danicic of the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness says no exchange of land “can undo the damage” that PolyMet would do to the area.
-
When Gilead brought its new antiviral medicine – Sovaldi – for the treatment of Hepatitis C to the US market for USD 84,000, it triggered a storm of protest. Demand for this revolutionary treatment was so high that the price (despite reductions) became an enormous burden on the American healthcare system. Although the product is cheaper in Switzerland at CHF 48 307, treatment is rationed for reasons of cost.
-
-
Security
-
The Shadow Brokers, the hacker or hackers who stole and are now claiming to sell NSA surveillance software, are now selling the agency’s package of Windows hacking tools.
Like all Shadow Brokers wares, the tools are at least three years old. But codes used to pass through security that were released by the Shadow Brokers in August worked when tested at that time, sparking concerns.
-
CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi is informing users of the CloudLinux 5 series of server-oriented operating systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 about the availability of a new kernel update that patches an important security vulnerability.
-
-
-
MongoDB is a free and open-source NoSQL document database server. It is used by web application for storing data on a public facing server. Securing MongoDB is critical. Crackers and hackers are accessing insecure MongoDB for stealing data and deleting data from unpatched or badly-configured databases. In this tutorial you will learn about how to secure a MongoDB instance or server running cloud server.
-
Last week when the news started hitting the net about ransomware attacks focusing on unprotected instances of MongoDB, it seemed to me to be a story that would have a short life. After all, the attacks weren’t leveraging some unpatched vulnerabilities in the database, but databases that were misconfigured in a way that left them reachable via the Internet, and with no controls — like a password other than the default — over who had privileges. All that was necessary to get this attack vector under control was for admins to be aware of the situation and to be ready and able to reconfigure and password protect.
-
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wants the public to take a crack at developing tools to improve security around Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Specifically, the FTC is hosting a competition challenging the public to create a technical solution that would, at a minimum, help protect consumers from security vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date software. Contestants have the option of adding features, such as those that would address hard-coded, factory default or easy-to-guess passwords.
-
-
As an industry, we suck at giving advice. I don’t mean this in some negative hateful way, it’s just the way it is. It’s human nature really. As a species most of us aren’t very good at giving or receiving advice. There’s always that vision of the wise old person dropping wisdom on the youth like it’s candy. But in reality they don’t like the young people much more than the young people like them. Ever notice the contempt the young and old have for each other? It’s just sort of how things work. If you find someone older and wiser than you who is willing to hand out good advice, stick close to that person. You won’t find many more like that.
-
Defence/Aggression
-
When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq, reporters and editors lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be touched by the same career-killing contagion. They wanted to protect their status at the institution. Retreat into rabbit holes is the most common attempt at self-protection.
[...]
This kind of valor, he knew as a combat veteran, requires a moral courage that is more difficult than the physical courage encountered on the battlefield.
“This unanimous quiet defiance of a power which never forgave, this obstinate, painfully protracted insubordination, was somehow more frightening than running and yelling as the bullets fly,” he says.
The coming arrests mean that a wide range of Americans will experience the violations that poor people of color have long endured. Self-interest alone should have generated sweeping protest, should have made the nation as a whole more conscious. We should have understood: Once rights become privileges that the state can revoke, they will eventually be taken away from everyone. Now those who had been spared will get a taste of what complicity in oppression means.
-
Mrs. Pinckney was the first in a long line of witnesses called by federal prosecutors in the sentencing trial of Dylann Roof last week. The avowed white supremacist was convicted in December for gunning down Reverend Pinckney and eight parishioners during a Bible study at the historic Emanuel AME Church on June 17, 2015. The crime shook the country. President Obama gave a stirring eulogy at Rev. Pinckney’s televised memorial service, singing Amazing Grace. The next day, in a brazen act of civil disobedience, activist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole at the state capitol to take down the Confederate flag; soon after, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley signed legislation to remove the flag from the statehouse, in dedication to the Emanuel Nine. Across the country, Americans marveled at the expressions of forgiveness shown by grieving relatives who spoke at a bond hearing for Roof within days of the crime. But in Charleston, others remained torn, overwhelmed by grief and anger. A year and a half later, many struggle to define what justice would mean.
-
Despite continued clashes between the government and rebel forces, the ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia appears to have significantly reduced the violence in Syria. Following the fall of Aleppo to Assad’s forces, we should be reflecting upon what lessons can be drawn from Syria. I would offer a few. First, in wars that involve officially designated enemies of state, such as Syria and Russia, there is little reason to think that one will be exposed to reasoned, sensible discourse in the U.S. media. Similarly, on “the other side” – Russia in this case – one sees a similar effort to exonerate the government from responsibility for human rights violations. A second, broader lesson from Syria is that “human rights” inevitably serve as a rhetorical weapon, used on “both sides” by powerful societal actors, including officialdom and the press, to advance their own strategic interests.
-
The trouble with this latest fairy tale is that the media has swallowed the state-sponsored story without demanding a scintilla of evidence, and has turned the entire factitious endeavor into a witch hunt aimed at alternative media. The binary constructs of the Bush era are being reanimated for another Halloween of imbecilic fearmongering. So those that apply the withering lens of the scientific method to this latest mythmaking program are quickly labeled as pro-Russian, anti-Democratic, or worse, traitors.
-
There is a fascinating precedent for Putin’s refusal to retaliate for the expulsion of 32 Russian diplomats by Obama, an easy diplomatic win on the international stage. In 1985, my first year in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Margaret Thatcher expelled 25 Soviet diplomats identified as spies by a defector (from memory Gordievsky), and later a further six.
-
People talk of the Deep State, a kind of shorthand to refer to the entrenched parts of the government, particularly inside the military, intelligence, and security communities, who don’t come and go with election cycles. The information they hold, and their longevity, allows them to significantly influence, perhaps control, the big picture decisions that change the way America works on a global scale. Who the enemies are, where the power needs to be applied, which wars will start and what governments should fall.
One of the features of the Deep State is that it prefers to work behind the scenes, in the shadows if you like. The big name politicians are out front, smiling for the cameras, and the lesser pols have to tend to the day-to-day stuff of government. The Deep State doesn’t trouble itself with regulating agriculture or deciding which infrastructure bill to fund. That is in large part why there will never be a full-on coup; why would the Deep State want to take on responsibility for the Department of Transportation?
When the Deep State does accidentally expose itself, it is often by accident, such as in the panic right after 9/11 when the president was sitting around reading a children’s book while Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld were calling the shots. Same for in the 1980s when a set of cock-ups exposed U.S. arms sales to Iran to pay for U.S. proxy forces in Central America while with U.S. support the Saudis paid for jihadists to fight in Afghanistan, laying the early groundwork for what would become the War on Terror.
-
Michael Moore denounced the Iraq War.
So we now have another such moment, as Meryl Streep tearfully addressed the stars assembled at the Golden Globes about her anxieties and distress at the advent of the Trump era in the United States.
-
US President-elect Donald Trump has hit back at Meryl Streep’s criticism of him as she received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes.
He tweeted: “Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes.
“She is a Hillary flunky who lost big,” Mr Trump added of the three-time Oscar-winning actress.
She said: “When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”
-
Remember last year’s hashtag-fueled protest—#OscarsSoWhite – decrying the lack of diversity at Hollywood’s most hyped awards event?
On Sunday night, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association showed up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by rewarding a wider range of talent at the 2017 Golden Globes. Stories by and about African-Americans were recognized at the HFPA’s annual awards-fest, and the night’s biggest honor, the best drama statue, went to a coming-of-age film about a young gay black man growing up in Miami.
-
The third theme was all about rethinking the concept of personal freedom as commonly understood and pursued by most Americans. During the protracted emergency of the Cold War, reaching an accommodation between freedom and the putative imperatives of national security had not come easily. Cold War-style patriotism seemingly prioritized the interests of the state at the expense of the individual. Yet even as thrillingly expressed by John F. Kennedy — “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — this was never an easy sell, especially if it meant wading through rice paddies and getting shot at.
Once the Cold War ended, however, the tension between individual freedom and national security momentarily dissipated. Reigning conceptions of what freedom could or should entail underwent a radical transformation. Emphasizing the removal of restraints and inhibitions, the shift made itself felt everywhere, from patterns of consumption and modes of cultural expression to sexuality and the definition of the family. Norms that had prevailed for decades if not generations — marriage as a union between a man and a woman, gender identity as fixed at birth — became passé. The concept of a transcendent common good, which during the Cold War had taken a backseat to national security, now took a backseat to maximizing individual choice and autonomy.
-
The Pentagon is filled to the gills with cronies and crony capitalism. And Republicans have encouraged this “waste and abuse” – this is the kind way of saying it, and it is on a massive scale – for too long. Do the right thing for once Congress. CUT SPENDING especially on the military civilian bureaucracy which is a taxpayer funded gravy train if there ever was one.
-
The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails. I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war—is the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media, to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment.
The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in the corporate media.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
-
China’s 13th Five-Year-Plan on Energy Development (Energy 13FYP) might be one of the most anticipated energy blueprints in the world for its far-reaching implications for the carbon trajectory of the planet’s largest emitter.
On Jan 5, 2017, the National Energy Administration finally unveiled the plan to reporters, with a set of 2020 targets covering everything from total energy consumption to installed wind energy capacity. Before we delve into details of the plan, one thing is worth noting: with the Energy 13FYP, China might have once again raised ambitions for its low-carbon future, highlighting the urgency that this smog-ridden country attaches to moving away from fossil fuels.
-
A single bluefin tuna sold for $632,000 on Thursday, the second highest amount ever paid for such a fish, according to a report.
The sale of the 470-pound fish, reported by the Associated Press, was made to sushi chain owner Kiyoshi Kimura.
-
The last known grizzly in So Cal was shot in 1916 by Cornelius Birket Johnson, an industrious farmer living at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in north Los Angeles. The hungry bear trampled the man’s newly planted vineyard, chomping on his young grapes for three straight nights. Ol’ Johnson wasn’t about to let the pesky bear get away with such thievery and destruction, so one night he lured the grizzly with a slab of beef and snagged him in a trap, but like all feisty grizzlies, this young guy wouldn’t go down easy. Johnson later shot the bear dead after finding it gravely injured, exhausted, bloodied and suffering, having dragged the metal trap far from where it was originally set. Thus, at the hands of Johnson, the extinction of the So Cal grizzly was complete.
-
But Perry had a similar relationship with another Texas billionaire, Harold Simmons, owner of WCS. And in return, under Gov. Perry, WCS’s lucrative radioactive waste dumping activities underwent major expansion.
-
The bloated orange president-elect is in love with dumb-thug Russians, tweets about himself in the third person and is readying his murder of conspiracy-minded billionaire-idiots to lead the nation into the darkest, most shamelessly corrupt period in our short history, all undertaken with a sexual predator’s shrug and an engraved gold pinky ring that spells out #-l-o-s-e-r.
Meanwhile, the 7th-largest economy in the world just underwent truly biblical flooding – and not necessarily the helpful kind – following a half-decade of being parched to the bone, thanks to weather extremes wrought, unstoppably, of climate change.
Cars are going driverless, homes are going Big Brother, women are being slammed back to 1950, immigrants are in mourning, Democrats are going underground and stunned Millennials are moving back in with their wary parents as the planet records yet another year as the hottest on human record, shuddering and sighing and girding for much – and with Trump, we do mean much – worse to come.
-
Finance
-
Brexit uncertainty hasn’t hit the UK housing market, according to new figures from the Halifax today.
Halifax reports that house prices jumped by 1.7% in December, surprising economists who only forecast a 0.2% rise. On a annual basis, prices were 6.5% higher.
-
Professor Henry Giroux says Trump’s appointments signal a future of more war, violent military interventions, and an embrace of Islamophobia
-
Cuts in local government funds and tax changes made at the state level will cost Ohio counties and communities nearly $1.2 billion in 2017, as compared to 2010, a new report shows.
Chief among those cuts were elimination of the state’s estate tax, the halving of local government funds and accelerated phase-outs of local business taxes, a report from the liberal leaning think tank Policy Matters Ohio found.
But the report drew criticism from Gov. John Kasich’s administration, which argues that focusing solely on cuts tells only part of the story. Growth in income and sales tax revenues as Ohio’s economy recovers from the recession have helped offset the cuts, a spokeswoman said, citing alternative research.
-
The UK would lose “negotiating capital” in Europe if it unilaterally granted EU citizens the right to remain after Brexit, the government has said.
In a letter to a group of EU citizens from the office of the home secretary, Amber Rudd, the government said it “recognises that EU nationals make an invaluable contribution to our economy and society”.
However, in an apparent hardening of the official position, the letter warned that the government cannot do anything to address their position after Brexit until it has assurances that British citizens in Europe will receive reciprocal protection in the country where they have settled.
“Agreeing a unilateral position in advance of these negotiations would lose negotiating capital with respect to British citizens in EU member states and place the UK at an immediate disadvantage,” said the letter signed by Peter Grant, an official in the free movement policy team of the immigration and border policy directorate of the Home Office.
-
Politico badly misled readers this morning in an article that said Trump “can’t simply divest from his businesses.” The article cited a number of experts who explained how difficult and complicated it would be for Trump to sell off his various businesses, many of which have complex ownership arrangements, along with debts and other legal obligations.
While selling Trump’s business enterprises in short order would be complicated, as I explained shortly after the election, this is not what is necessary for Donald Trump to avoid conflicts of interest. The key to the process I outline in that piece is that Trump arrange to get independent teams of auditors to provide assessments of the property. I suggested he go with the middle assessment provided by three teams of auditors. This would limit the likelihood of a major error in the assessment.
Trump would then buy an insurance policy that would guarantee him the estimate from this middle audit. The enterprises would then be turned over to an executor who would run and offload the businesses with the goal of maximizing the value. When the businesses are sold off the proceeds would be placed in a blind trust. If the cumulative value from the sales exceeds the estimate, then the proceeds go to a charity of Trump’s choosing, but not under his control. If the proceeds from the sales are less than the value of the estimate he collects on the insurance policy.
-
Betsy DeVos has never gone to public schools. Her children have never attended public schools. She has never taught or served as an administrator in public schools. She has made a career out of funding schemes to cripple or destroy public schools. And now Donald Trump has a new way to put Betsy DeVos and public schools in the same sentence: Let Betsy DeVos help shape the future of public schools as head of the Education Department.
Is it any wonder why a public school teacher like me — someone who knows the value of this institution both as educator and as student — finds this idea nothing short of horrifying?
-
At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, an estimated one out of every 54 homeowners lost their homes. Workers and seniors lost lifetimes’ worth of savings or retirement accounts, small businesses went under, and vulnerable consumers fell victim to toxic and manipulative financial products offered by Wall Street and the big banks.
[...]
At the helm of the bureau is Director Richard Cordray, who has proven to be a tireless and effective leader. Under his watch, the CFPB has cracked down on the tricks and traps of payday lenders, credit cards companies, debt collectors and bad actors in the industry from taking advantage of unsuspecting Americans.
In its five years as an agency, the CFPB has recovered more than $11 billion for 27 million consumers harmed by illegal practices of financial institutions. The bureau has secured relief in more than 100 cases, directly putting money back in the pockets of American consumers who have been victimized by companies that refuse to follow the law.
-
AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
-
Editor-in-chief Julian Assange called the report “embarrassing to the reputation” of U.S. intelligence services because it more resembled a “press release” than an actual intelligence report. “It is clearly designed for political effect,” which has happened in the past with the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam War as well as intelligence reports claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
“Critical question here is whether the allegation is that Russian intelligence services themselves or people under their direction hacked the Democratic National Party and [Clinton campaign chairman] John Podesta with the intent of favoring Donald Trump,” Assange suggested.
“Even if you accept that the Russian intelligence services hacked Democratic Party institutions, as it is normal for the major intelligence services to hack each others’ major political parties on a constant basis to obtain intelligence,” you have to ask, “what was the intent of those Russian hacks? And do they connect to our publications? Or is it simply incidental?”
Assange accused U.S. intelligence agencies of deliberately obscuring the timeline. He said they do not know when the DNC was hacked.
-
Once East Aleppo fell to government forces, it turned out that there were less than 90,000 people there, about what the Syrian government estimated but only a fraction of the much higher numbers confidently repeated ad nauseam by Western officials and media.
Part of the reason for this misreporting was that Syrian rebels had publicly killed Western and independent journalists to secure a monopoly on information coming out of rebel-controlled areas. Given the West’s disdain for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and sympathy for his opponents, the mainstream Western media then became reliant on anti-government rebels and allied activists for what was going on in those parts of Syria.
-
Eight years ago the world was on the brink of a grand celebration: the inauguration of a brilliant and charismatic black president of the United States of America. Today we are on the edge of an abyss: the installation of a mendacious and cathartic white president who will replace him.
This is a depressing decline in the highest office of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. It could easily produce a pervasive cynicism and poisonous nihilism. Is there really any hope for truth and justice in this decadent time? Does America even have the capacity to be honest about itself and come to terms with its self-destructive addiction to money-worship and cowardly xenophobia?
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville – the two great public intellectuals of 19th-century America – wrestled with similar questions and reached the same conclusion as Heraclitus: character is destiny (“sow a character and you reap a destiny”).
-
There is no starker proof of the golden chains in which Israel has entangled the British political class, than the incredible fact that “diplomat” Shai Masot has not been expelled for secretly conspiring to influence British politics by attacking Britain’s Deputy Foreign Minister, suggesting that he might be brought down by “a little scandal”. It is incredible by any normal standards of diplomatic behaviour that immediate action was not taken against Masot for actions which when revealed any professional diplomat would normally expect to result in being “PNG’d” – declared persona non grata.
Obama has just expelled 35 Russian diplomats for precisely the same offence, with the exception that in the Russian case there is absolutely zero hard evidence, whereas in the Masot case there is irrefutable evidence on which to act.
[...]
The two stories – Russian interference in US politics, Israeli interference in UK politics – also link because the New York Times claims that it was the British that first suggested to the Obama administration that Russian cyber activity was targeting Clinton. Director of Cyber Security and Information Assurance in the British Cabinet Office is Matthew Gould, the UK’s former openly and strongly pro-Zionist Ambassador to Israel and friend of the current Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev. While Private Secretary to David Miliband and William Hague, and then while Ambassador to Israel, Regev held eight secret meetings with Adam Werritty, on at least one occasion with Mossad present and on most occasions also with now minister Liam Fox. My Freedom of Information requests for minutes of these meetings brought the reply that they were not minuted, and my Freedom of Information request for the diary entries for these meetings brought me three pages each containing only the date, with everything else redacted.
-
Registered voters who didn’t vote on Election Day in November were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out, according to a post-election poll from SurveyMonkey, shared with FiveThirtyEight. In fact, Donald Trump probably would have lost to Hillary Clinton had Republican- and Democratic-leaning registered voters cast ballots at equal rates.
Election-year polls understandably focus on likely voters. Then, after the election, the attention turns to actual voters, mainly using exit polls. But getting good data on Americans who didn’t vote is more difficult. That’s why the SurveyMonkey poll, which interviewed about 100,000 registered voters just after Election Day, including more than 3,600 registered voters who didn’t vote, is so useful.1 It’s still just one poll, and so its findings aren’t gospel, but with such a big sample we can drill down to subgroups and measure the demographic makeup of nonvoters to an extent we couldn’t with a smaller dataset.
-
Left activists plan to take on President Donald Trump from Day One, with tens of thousands of protesters promising to show up in Washington to protest his inauguration on Jan. 20 and a major women’s march scheduled the next day.
But the challenge for the Left goes deeper than protesting Trump and some of his policies. The difficulty also involves how to build a progressive agenda that is not compromised by corporate Democrats at election time. I discussed these questions with Norman Solomon, media activist, author, former delegate for Bernie Sanders Delegate and Rootsaction co-founder.
Dennis Bernstein: Norman Solomon, welcome back. […] Say a little bit about your background. I want people to know where you’re coming from and, if I’ve got it right, you sort of came in the activists door.
-
The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power. I’ve known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people’s fears, could take control of the levers of power.
I just read Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler’s and Mussolini’s rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.
His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.
-
In “an unprecedented break” from tradition, Democrats in the US Senate are expected to challenge as many as eight of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, including Betsy DeVos for US Secretary of Education, according to a report by the Washington Post.
The opposition to DeVos, Politico reports, comes from “more than a dozen Democratic senators from all wings of the party” who “will portray DeVos’ views as being outside the education mainstream.”
-
When pro-nuclear disarmament organisations last October cheered the United Nations decision to start in 2017 negotiations on a global treaty banning these weapons, they probably did not expect that shortly after the US would elect Republican businessman Donald Trump as their 45th president. Much less that he would rush to advocate for increasing the US nuclear power.
The United Nations on Oct. 27, 2016 adopted a resolution to launch negotiations in 2017 on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons, putting an end to two decades of paralysis in world nuclear disarmament efforts.
[...]
The global ani-nuke movment, however, soon saw its joy being frustrated by the US president-elect Donald Trump, who in a tweet on Dec. 22, 2016, wrote:
Donald J. Trump Verified account @realDonaldTrump : “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
Trump’s announcement, if materialised, would imply one of the most insourmountable hardles facing the world anti-nuclear movement.
-
The head of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) sent a letter to Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Chuck Schumer (NY) on Saturday expressing “great concern” over the fact that the hearings are set to begin on Tuesday and his office had not yet received financial disclosure reports for some of the scheduled nominees.
“As OGE’s director, the announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me,” wrote Walter Shaub, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013. wrote in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
The current confirmation schedule, which has six nominees scheduled for the same days as well as a Trump press conference and a Senate ‘vote-o-rama,’ he wrote, “has created undue pressure on OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews.”
-
By now it’s quite clear that many in the US intelligence community believe strongly that Russia tried to influence the US election, and part of that included hacks into the DNC’s computer systems, a spearphishing attack on Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails and some exploratory surveillance hacking into the computer systems of state election systems (but not into the voting machines themselves). The US intelligence services said it back in October. And they said it again last month. And, they said it again on Friday with the release of an unclassified “incident attribution” report.
Because the debate over this issue has gotten quite silly in some places — and ridiculously political as well — let’s start with a few basic points: It is absolutely entirely possible that the Russians hacked into all these systems and that it was trying (and perhaps succeeding?) to influence the election. Nothing in what I’m saying here is suggesting that’s not true. What I am concerned about is the evidence that’s presented to support that claim — mainly because I think we should all be terrified when we escalate situations based on secret info where the government just tells us to “trust us, we know.” And, yes, governments (including the US) have done this going back throughout history. That doesn’t make it right.
-
The U.S. government has now generated numerous news stories and released multiple “reports” aimed at persuading us that Vladimir Putin is to blame for Donald Trump becoming president. U.S. media has dutifully informed us that the case has been made. What has been made is the case for writing your own news coverage. The “reports” from the “intelligence community” are no lengthier than the New York Times and Washington Post articles about them. Why not just read the reports and cut out the middle-person?
The New York Times calls the latest report “damning and surprisingly detailed” before later admitting in the same “news” article that the report “contained no information about how the agencies had collected their data or had come to their conclusions.” A quick glance at the report itself would have made clear to you that it did not pretend to present a shred of evidence that Russia hacked emails or served as a source for WikiLeaks. Yet Congresswoman Barbara Lee declared the evidence in this evidence-free report “overwhelming.” What should progressives believe, the best Congresswoman we’ve got or our own lying eyes?
-
European governments are nervous about a Trump presidency, but – for economic and other reasons – many on the Continent would welcome a friendlier approach toward Russia, reports Andrew Spannaus.
-
Censorship/Free Speech
-
Can’t get legislators off their asses to pass a budget in a timely manner or, I don’t know, step up to do anything about the DOJ’s Rule 41 changes, but you can count on them to apply long-dormant self-motivation to personal agendas.
Rep. Hunter, offended on behalf of an entire nation unions offended on behalf of their members, saw to it that painting, which the police unions bitched at length about, was removed from the public eye. Not that there was any outrage shown by a majority of constituents, who most likely first heard about this painting after it was removed. Here’s the most offending part of the painting, as captured by the Independent Journal Review.
-
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” These are the dramatic opening lines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s immensely powerful treatise “The Social Contract.” Freedom is the most fundamental pillar of democracy: in its absence democracy turns into autocracy.
The French Revolution of 1789 made Liberty, Equality and Fraternity the most sacrosanct values of humanity. Any ruler or government that ensnared man away to a life of bondage has always met with perdition eventually. Their lives and reigns have been written in blood in the annals of history for posterity to remember them with derision and disdain.
-
A coalition of free speech organisations rallied together last week to defend Simon & Schuster’s choice to publish professional irritant Milo Yiannopoulos’s autobiography, Dangerous, saying that boycotting the book, as so many people have called for, would have “a chilling effect” on free speech.
I’m sure that having his book (which hit the No 1 spot on Amazon’s pre-sale charts the day after it was announced) pulled from shelves or dropped from S&S would catapult it to even greater success at another publisher, but never mind. It’s clear that this coalition of organisations are standing up for what they believe in, and feel it is important to defend Yiannopoulos’ well-rehearsed right to speak his mind.
Defending free speech often means finding yourself in the difficult position of having to defend people who say disgusting things. People who make jokes about rape; Holocaust deniers; straight-up racists. Though we might not like what these people say, it’s important that they’re allowed to say it. You can’t go around censoring people just because you don’t agree with them. If we can’t all express what we think, then we can’t talk to each other about our ideas. We can’t have a discussion; we can’t improve; we can’t function as a society.
-
As calls come for Facebook to crackdown on how it moderates Live posts, The Drum looks back at some of the challenges the social network has faced over the past year when it comes to self-censorship.
At the end of last week Facebook faced mounting pressure to impose stricter measures on its Live video feature after allowing a disturbing video depicting torture to resurface on the site.
Just days after being removed for violating the platform’s community standards, the video showing the attack of a young man with disabilities in Chicago resurfaced again within Facebook’s walls having been repackaged and re-uploaded by right wing news site the Daily Caller, attracting millions of new viewers.
-
New York City. The Statue of Liberty glistens in its harbor. The ultimate symbol of what this country stands for. Ellis Island is just a stone’s throw away – the gateway to America. The Freedom Tower, the Empire State Building, the hustle and bustle of busy, free New Yorkers and visitors from around the world. It’s the last place you would expect censorship. But that’s just what we got this past year when the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) decided to pull its Birth Index Books that were on loan to the New York Public Library (NYPL) in order to keep the public from viewing their contents.
Genealogists lost a valuable resource that day. Adoptees who were born in New York City lost even more. The Birth Index Books contain information that may be key to their identities, something that most people take for granted, but what many adoptees yearn for and live painfully without. When I found my given name listed in the 1971 book a few years ago, I felt a sense of joy. There it was – a record of my truth. Something most people take for granted.
-
Privacy/Surveillance
-
THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT is continuing to make it difficult for locals to use LinkedIn and has now ensured that the application is not available through either the Apple or the Google app stores.
This is bad news for anyone in the country that hasn’t decided that they do not want to sign up to LinkedIn yet, but must be reassuring to a government that likes to stop people from communicating at times, and is really not keen on the business social network with more leaks than a colander.
-
As the result of an FOIA lawsuit brought by the Associated Press, USA Today, and Vice, the FBI has finally released documents about the one-time iPhone exploit/hack it purchased from an unknown foreign vendor. Well, more accurately, the FBI released a bunch of paper with nearly nothing left unredacted, as USA Today’s Brad Heath pointed out multiple times on Twitter.
-
This article adds two reasons to why I think a post-Brexit UK is very unlikely to offer an adequate level of protection in terms of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
One reason relates to recent comments made by Prime Minister Theresa May about human rights. The other relates to the non-compliance of the national security agencies with their existing data protection obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA).
-
Civil Rights/Policing
-
A Saudi court has sentenced dozens of migrant workers to imprisonment and flogging, employees of the construction giant Binladin Group, for having gone on strike against non-payment of back wages.
The Saudi press has not yet specified the nationality of the workers who were on strike over arrears in monthly salaries; the protests eventually escalated into street violence, which led to the arrests.
The first to report the incident was Arab newspaper Al-Watan et Arab News, which, however, it did not clarify the nationality of migrant workers. Some diplomats contacted by AFP were unable (or unwilling) to clarify the affair, claiming to not know the details.
-
Feeling burned out in your work for peace and social justice? A new book provides essential guidance.
-
Despite the protests, media scrutiny, and all around heightened national attention, young black men in 2016 continued to be the predominant victims of police violence in the United States.
According to year-end figures published Sunday by the Guardian database The Counted, “[b]lack males aged 15-34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers last year,” and were “killed at four times the rate of young white men.”
Overall, the number police killings fell slightly—1,091 last year, according to the Guardian tally, from 1,146 in 2015—but the pattern of brutality has remained consistent.
-
There was a jaw dropping but not unexpected article at The Guardian this week. It was actually part of a series of pieces at that paper that have sought to manufacture a legacy for Obama, the outgoing president, since his actual legacy is one of imperialist foreign policy, CIA support of jihadists, right wing coups, and most acutely, perhaps, a massive subverting of free speech and civil liberties. What Robert Parry has called a ‘war on dissent’. The Guardian piece took the form of asking novelists, public intellectuals {sic} and TV hacks what they perceived to be Obama’s legacy — and even the use of that word, *legacy* is a loaded indicator of the direction this piece was headed. What struck me most was not the predictable support for Obama policy (more on that later) but the utter banality of the writing. There were writers in this group who I have admired (Richard Ford for one, Marilynne Robinson, as well) but the sentiments were so stupefyingly superficial, so fatuous and fawning that it was hard not to see this as a kind of mini referendum on the state of Western culture.
-
With less than two weeks remaining in his eight-year administration, President Barack Obama will be under heavy pressure from public advocacy groups to grant high-profile pardon decisions. But Obama has not been shy about granting pardons and commuting prison sentences, particularly as a lame duck president.
Obama pardoned 78 people and commuted the sentences of 153 others Dec. 19, further cementing his legacy as the most generous grantor of clemency in modern presidential history.
The Department of Justice official website says Obama has granted 148 presidential pardons in his time in office, a number that exceeds the combined total of the last six presidents. In 2016, he pardoned 82 federal inmates, more than his seven previous years combined. Most of the pardons have been for drug offenders.
-
Law enforcement has a number of informants working for it and the companies that already pay their paychecks, like UPS, for example. It also has a number of government employees working for the TSA, keeping their eyes peeled for “suspicious” amounts of cash it can swoop in and seize.
Unsurprisingly, the FBI also has a number of paid informants. Some of these informants apparently work at Best Buy — Geek Squad by day, government informants by… well, also by day.
-
Chuck Canterbury, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, has been given an editorial megaphone over at the Daily Caller. Canterbury’s using this platform to defend the pretty much indefensible: civil asset forfeiture.
Colloquially known as “cops going shopping for things they want,” asset forfeiture supposedly is used to take funds and property away from criminal organizations. In reality, it’s become an easy way for law enforcement to take the property of others without having to put much effort into justifying the seizures. In most states, convictions are not required, meaning supposed criminal suspects are free to go… but their property isn’t.
-
The fallout from cheap field drug tests continues. The lab that does actual testing of seized substances for the Las Vegas PD had previously expressed its doubts about the field tests’ reliability, but nothing changed. Officers continued to use the tests and defendants continued to enter into plea bargains based on questionable evidence.
The Las Vegas PD knew the tests were highly fallible. After all, the department had signed off on a report saying as much and handed it into the DOJ in exchange for federal grant money. But cops still used them and prosecutors still relied on them when pursuing convictions.
-
Following last month’s controversial report by Dame Louise Casey warning of “worrying” levels of segregation in the UK, an interim report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration has gone further to say that all immigrants should have either learnt English before coming to the UK, or be required to sign up to classes when they arrive.
The All Party group described speaking English as a “prerequisite for meaningful engagement with most British people”. Labour MP, and chair of the group, Chuka Umunna has defended the report arguing that integration is a “two-way” street. He said that whilst there is a role for migrants there is also an obligation on Britain to fund English language classes.
-
Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
-
If you were to sit down and consciously select a politician that best represents the stranglehold giant telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have over the legislative process, you probably couldn’t find a better candidate than Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn. From her endless assault on net neutrality, to her defense of awful state protectionist laws written by ISP lobbyists, there has never been a moment when Ms. Blackburn hasn’t prioritized the rights of giant incumbent duopolists over the public she professes to serve.
Blackburn has been fairly awful on technology policy in general, from her breathless support of SOPA to her claim that fair use is just a “buzzword” obscuring our desperate need for tougher copyright laws. As such, there should be little surprise that Blackburn has been selected to head the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. The subcommittee tackles most of the pressing internet-related issues, with Blackburn replacing Oregon Representative Greg Walden.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Chapter 6 visits antitrust issues with standard essential patents, which happens when patented technology is standardised, through standards-setting organisations such as the International Telecommunication Union, and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.
-
Copyrights
-
As stories from the UK, Kenya, Peru, Slovakia, Canada, Germany, Taiwan, and the US demonstrate, there’s really something rather special about copyright collection societies. Back in 2012, Mike discussed a paper on the subject that listed over 90 examples of actions taken by collection societies around the world that have been bad either for artists or for users.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Net Applications pegged Linux’s user share at 2.2% in December, slightly off the 2.3% peak of November.
-
In 2012, your editor predicted that LibreOffice would leave OpenOffice (which had been recently dumped into the Apache Software Foundation) in the dust. That prediction was accounted as a failure at the end of the year. Four years later, though, it has become clear that that is exactly what has happened. Your editor happily takes credit for having been a bit ahead of his time, while pointing to something shiny to distract you all from the fact that he didn’t see the issue coming to a head in 2016.
-
Desktop
-
Over the course of its four-year lifespan, Dell’s extremely popular XPS 13 Developer Edition line has become known for one thing—bringing a “just works” Linux experience to the company’s Ultrabooks.
Of course, today Dell is just one of many manufacturers producing great Linux machines. System76 makes the Oryx Pro (still my top pick for anyone who needs massive power), and companies like Purism and ZaReason produce solid offerings that also work with Linux out of the box. Even hardware not explicitly made for Linux tends to work out of the box these days. I recently installed Fedora on a Sony Vaio and was shocked that the only problem I encountered was that the default trackpad configuration was terribly slow.
-
The GPD Pocket is a 7-inch laptop that’s small enough to fit in to a pocket — and it will apparently be available with Ubuntu!
As reported on Liliputing, GPD (the company) is currently only showing off a few fancy renders right now, but as they have form for releasing other (similar) devices, like the GPD Win, and Android gaming portables, this is unlikely to be outright vapourware.
-
Kernel Space
-
Jason Donenfeld who has been working on the WireGuard secure network tunnel for Linux has also been working on another security enhancement: adding the SipHash PRF to the Linux kernel.
Donenfeld is now up to his third version of patches for integrating the SipHash pseudorandom functions into the Linux kernel. For those wanting some background about SipHash, there is an explanation via Wikipedia while a lot more technical information can be found via this SipHash page.
-
So after that very small rc2 due to the xmas break, we seem to be back
to fairly normal. After a quiet period like that, I tend to expect a
bigger chunk just because of pent up work, but I guess the short break
there really was vacation for everybody, and so instead we’re just
seeing normal rc behavior. It still feels a bit smaller than a usual
rc3, but for the first real rc after the merge window (ie I’d compare
it to a regular rc2), it’s fairly normal.
The stats look textbook for the kernel: just under 2/3rds drivers,
with almost half of the rest arch updates, and the rest being “misc”
(mainly filesystems and networking).
So nothing in particular stands out. You can get a flavor of the
details from the appended shortlog, but even more importantly – you
can go out and test.
Thanks,
Linus
-
Linux 4.10-rc3 is now available as the latest weekly update to the Linux 4.10 kernel.
-
A few moments ago, Linus Torvalds made his Sunday evening announcement to inform us about the general availability of the third RC (Release Candidate) snapshot of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel.
According to Linus Torvalds, things appear to be back to their normal state, and it looks like Linux kernel 4.10 RC3 is a fairly normal development release that consists of two-thirds updated drivers, and half of the remaining patch are improvements to various hardware architectures. There are also some minor networking and filesystems fixes.
-
We’ve been waiting for it, and it’s finally here! The first point release of the Linux 4.9 kernel was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman this past weekend, which means that most modern GNU/Linux distribution can finally start migrating to the series.
Yes, we’re talking about Linux kernel 4.9.1, the first of many maintenance updates to the Linux 4.9 kernel branch, which is now officially declared stable and ready for production. It’s also a major release that changes a total of 103 files, with 813 insertions and 400 deletions, according to the appended shortlog.
-
Benchmarks
-
Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks showing the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver performance on Linux 4.10 with the new NvBoost capability for finally being able to hit the “boost” clock frequencies with Kepler graphics cards when using this reverse-engineered driver. While the manual re-clocking and enabling NvBoost is able to increase the Nouveau driver’s performance, how do these results compare to using the closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver? These benchmarks answer that question.
-
In preparation for Intel Kaby Lake socketed CPU benchmark results soon on Phoronix, the past number of days I have been re-tested many of the systems in our benchmark server room for comparing to the performance of the new Kaby Lake hardware. For those wanting to see how existing Intel and AMD systems compare when using Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 and the latest Linux 4.10 Git kernel, here are those benchmarks ahead of our Kaby Lake Linux CPU reviews.
-
It’s been quite a number of months since last trying out the HD Graphics P530 and thus while having a Xeon E3-1245 v5 running Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 for some fresh benchmarks after changing out the motherboard, I figured I would see how the graphics performance for this Xeon CPU compares to the Core IVB / HSW / BDW / SKL results from yesterday.
-
Applications
-
This article is an introduction to the world of free and open-source applications for symbolic mathematics. These are programs that assist the researcher or student through their ability to manipulate mathematical expressions, rather than just make numerical calculations. I’ll give an overview of two large computer algebra packages available for Linux, and a briefer sampling of some of the more specialized tools aimed at particular branches of mathematics.
This category of software is traditionally called a “computer algebra system”, but that description can be misleading. These systems can find analytic solutions to algebraic and differential equations; solve integrals; sum infinite series; and generally carry out nearly any kind of mathematical manipulation that can be imagined. At the least, symbolic mathematics software can replace the bulky handbooks of mathematical information that have been lugged by generations of graduate students.
Over decades, mathematicians have honed these programs, encoding within them the accumulated mathematical knowledge of centuries: information about special functions, for example, that’s so difficult (for some of us) to remember. They have learned to reduce such things as algebraic simplification and calculating derivatives to patterns of symbol manipulation ripe for automation. The earliest of these systems, developed in the 1960s, were based on Lisp, the obvious choice at the time, but development of later systems used a variety of languages.
Fortunately, most of the best of this software is free and open source, which allows us to look under the hood and examine or alter the algorithms employed.
-
Alacritty is a blazing fast, GPU accelerated terminal emulator. It’s written in Rust and uses OpenGL for rendering to be the fastest terminal emulator available. Alacritty is available on GitHub in source form.
-
-
Monitoring disk usage and storage space in your system is important for you as a stand-alone system owner or as a system admin of a company to know to maintain the efficiency of your Linux system. In this article, we will discuss about the top tools and command line utilities available in Linux to monitor your disk usage to provide information about total size available, total used, file system information and partition information etc. Let’s see how these tools help in retrieving this information:
-
You can use the Linux terminal to do mathematical calculations using command line calculator utilities. This includes the inbuilt gcalccmd and GNU bc. Qalculator, a third party utility is also a good command line calculator.
-
Proprietary
-
For those in need of a professional-grade Linux video editor, the Lightworks 14 release is near as the latest feature-update that is more than powerful enough if needing to do any simple home video editing or of holiday videos.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine or Emulation
-
The Intel developer working on UMIP (User-Mode Instruction Prevention) support for the Linux kernel has been collaborating with Wine developers about this security-minded feature to be introduced with future Intel CPUs.
-
Games
-
In a post on the game’s Kickstarter page, Red Thread Games announced the enhanced version would also be made available for Linux, Mac and PC.
The new and updated version of the game will be known as The Final Cut, and its release will coincide with Dreamfall Chapters on consoles. It will be released as a free update for existing game owners.
-
Avenger Bird was created as a tribute to PC DOS and Amiga shareware games from the ’90s. It looks pretty good and certainly appeals to the more casual gamer hiding inside of me.
-
-
With running fresh benchmarks on all of my Intel systems for comparison with my upcoming Kaby Lake desktop CPU Linux reviews, this weekend I have some fresh results of the past few generations of Intel hardware when looking at their HD/Iris Graphics performance when using the latest Linux driver code as of Linux 4.10 Git and Mesa 13.1-devel Git from this week.
-
Good news for Linux fans, as multiple big websites showing off statistics have shown Linux is on the rise!
Note: These should always been taken with a pinch of salt. Even with that said, multiple places are reporting a rise in Linux market-share, which is a good sign when put together.
[...]
Looks like things are going pretty nicely for Linux in general right now. This is good news for us, as more people using Linux means more people are likely to look into gaming on Linux too.
-
Divinity: Original Sin [Official Site] is one game that the open source Mesa drivers currently cannot run without hacks, but it looks like the Mesa team has been testing it.
Just today a commit was sent in to Mesa which mentioned “drirc: Allow extension midshader for Divinity: Original Sin (EE)”.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, although it has image processing capabilities, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters. Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering. Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with a snappy response.
Krita is the full-featured free digital painting studio for artists who want to create professional work from start to end. Krita is used by comic book artists, illustrators, concept artists, matte and texture painters and in the digital VFX industry. Krita is free software, licensed under the GNU Public License, version 2 or later.
-
Our mission statement above is what we try to do and having continuous integration of KDE development and continuous deployment of packages is great, if you have KDE neon installed. You can test our code while it’s in development and get hold of it as soon as it’s out. But wait, what if you want to do both? You would need to install it twice on a virtual machine or dual boot, quite slow and cumbersome. Maybe you don’t want to use neon but you still want to test if that bug fix really worked.
So today I’m announcing a beta of KDE neon on Docker. Docker containers are a lightweight way to create a virtual system running on top of your normal Linux install but with its own filesystem and other rules to stop it getting in the way of your OS. They are insanely popular now for server deployment but I think they work just as well for checking out desktop and other UI setups.
-
Ex-Kubuntu maintainer and renowned KDE developer Jonathan Riddell was proud to announce the availability of the KDE Neon operating system on Docker, the open-source application container engine.
KDE Neon is currently the only GNU/Linux distribution allowing users to enjoy the newest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, as well as KDE Frameworks and Applications software suite as soon as they’re out. If you’re a bleeding-edge user and love KDE, then KDE Neon is the distro you need to use in 2017.
-
My blog has been syndicated on Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu for a long time, but sometimes topics I want to write about are not really relevant to these aggregators, so I either refrain from writing, or write anyway and end up feeling a bit guilty for spamming.
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
Your editor, who is normally not overly worried about operating-system upgrades, approached the Fedora 25 transition on his laptop with a fair amount of trepidation. This is the release that switches to using Wayland by default, pushing aside the X.org server we have been using for decades. Such a transition is bound to bring surprises, but the biggest surprise this time around was just how little breakage there is. There is one exception, though, that brings back some old questions about how GNOME is developed.
The problematic change is simple enough to understand. While X sessions are started by way of a login shell in Fedora (even though the user never sees that shell directly), Wayland sessions do not involve a shell at all. As a result, the user’s .bash_profile and .bashrc files (or whichever initialization files their shell uses) are not read. The place where this omission is most readily noticed is in the definition of environment variables. Many applications will change their behavior based on configuration stored in the environment; all of that configuration vanishes under Wayland. It also seems that some users (xterm holdouts, for example) still run applications that use the old X resources configuration mechanism. Resources are normally set by running xrdb at login time; once again, that doesn’t happen if no login shell is run.
-
-
When it comes to desktop operating systems, there are three main camps into which people fall: Windows, Mac and Linux. In the case of the latter camp things can be confusing because there are endless distros to choose from — but which is best?
The beauty of Linux is that it can be tweaked and tailored in so many ways. This means that while the plethora of choice can seem overwhelming, it is also possible to find the perfect distro for just about any scenario. To help you make the right choice, here’s a helpful list of the best distros to look out for in 2017.
-
BlankOn X operating system finally launched at January 1st 2017 as the 10th release codenamed “Tambora”. BlankOn is a GNU/Linux distribution from Indonesia, a low-resource operating system with ultimate aim for desktop end-users. In this Tambora release, BlankOn brings the latest Manokwari desktop with improvements, along with its own BlankOn system installer, and some other stuffs. This Tambora release is a continuation of the BlankOn 9 release in 2014 named Suroboyo. This article sums up what’s new for BlankOn in this Tambora version.
-
2016 was an incredible year for Solus. We went from having our first release in December of 2015, to completely switching to a rolling release model. We had multiple Solus releases, multiple Budgie releases, several rewrites of different components of Solus, ranging from the Installer to the Software Center. We introduced our native Steam runtime and improved both our state of statelessness as well as optimizations.
When I first started talking about Solus at the beginning of 2016, I used the analogy that what we were building was the engine for our vehicle, one to deliver us to our goals for Solus. While we’re still building that engine, we’re in a drastically better shape than we were in 2016, and we’re more confident, and bolder, than ever.
-
Reviews
-
Maui Linux 2.1 Blue Tang is a surprisingly and yet expectedly good Plasma system, using some of that Mint-like approach to home computing. It’s what Kubuntu should have been or should be, and it delivers a practical, out-of-the-box experience with a fine blend of software, fun and stability. That’s a very sensible approach.
Not everything was perfect. Plasma has its bugs, the printer and the web cam issues need to be looked into, and on the aesthetics side, a few things can be polished and improved. The installer can benefit from having some extra safety mechanisms. But I guess that is the sum of my complaints. On the happy side, you get all the goodies from the start, the application collection is rich, the distro did not crash, and the performance is really decent for a Plasma beastling. A fine formula, and probably the best one we’ve seen in the last eighteen months or so. Good news if you like KDE. And indeed, this is definitely one of the distros you should try. 9/10. I’m quite pleased. Have a maui day.
-
Screenshots/Screencasts
-
Arch Family
-
Manajro Linux recently released a new version of operating system but they also keep their package updated. So some time ago Manjaro team updated some packages and introduced new features to main distribution. According to official announcement new feature called Brisk-menu is introduced in MATE edition of Manajro which is actually developed by Solus team. Thunderbird received some security update, linux48 will soon upgrade to linux49. Broadcom-wl, calamares, fightgear and few Ruby packages are updated.
-
Red Hat Family
-
According to the vendor, the new Red Hat CloudForms will enable IT teams to increase service delivery while focusing on critical, business-impacting issues. The Red Hat CloudForms, based on the open source ManageIQ project, provides an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual and cloud IT environments, including Linux containers. CloudForms helps IT organisations offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the service lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. It can also define and enforce advanced compliance policies for new and existing IT environments, better enabling operators to optimise the costs of a given environment and system.
-
Yes, Red Hat’s forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.9 will come with stability and security improvements. That’s not the real news. The big story is it supports the next generation of cloud-native applications through an updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 base image.
-
Finance
-
Fedora
-
A handful of weeks and hundreds of GB down the road, my Lenovo G50 machine is in a much better shape when spinning the kernel 4.8.7 than anything else before, but there are still situations where the network might drop down. This means I will need to reserve my previous observation, from the original report. Good but not perfect. Part of that Nirvana has gone back to Valhalla. Fedora 25 is the salvation you seek, though.
Under ordinary circumstances, most people will probably not hit the issue, unless they have hundreds of idle HTTP connections that are slowly being closed, causing the driver to get a little confused. This could happen if you download like mad from the Web and then go calm. That’s why I said ordinary users, then again, Fedora and Manjaro folks aren’t really the Riders of the Gaussian. Still, something to look forward to being fixed eventually. Now that we have this 99% fix, the rest should be easy. More to come.
-
We have been getting a lot of reports of people unable to get updates for EPEL or Fedora at various times. What people are seeing is that they will do a ‘yum update’ and it will give a long list of failures and quit. At this moment we seem to have pinpointed that most of the people having this problem are in various Asia Pacific nations (primarily Australia and Japan). The problem for both of these seems to be a lack of cross connects between networks.
In the US, if you are on Comcast in say New Mexico and going to a server on Time Warner in North Carolina, your route is usually pretty direct. You will go from one network to various third party providers who will then send the packets the quickest path to the eventual server. If you use a visual grapher of locations, you even find that the path usually follows a linear path. [You might end up going to say California or Seattle first but that is only when Texas and Colorado cross connects are full.] Similarly in most European countries you also see a similar routing algorithm.
-
Debian Family
-
This month I marked 367 packages for accept and rejected 45 packages. This time I only sent 10 emails to maintainers asking questions.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
For the last little while we’ve been working to snap up Unity8. This is all part of the conversion from a system image based device to one that is entirely based on snaps. For the Ubuntu Phones we basically had a package layout with a system image and then Click packages on top of it.
-
I didn’t want to write this post but a lot of people are raging at us for writing an article we didn’t. So, join me as I go through we actually wrote, line-by-line.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Clement Lefebvre has published a new update of the beautiful, modern and responsive Cinnamon desktop environment, for the latest 3.2 stable series, of course, versioned 3.2.8.
It’s been a little over two weeks since the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment received an update, and Cinnamon 3.2.8 is here to add many improvements to the Menu applet, which have all been contributed by Michael Webster. Among these, we can notice that the Menu applet is now capable of constructing only one context menu for recent files.
Of course, this context menu can be re-used for other files as required, and we can’t help but notice that the Menu applet will no longer reconstruct recent files, just re-order, remove, or add them, if necessary. When refreshing the installed applications, the Menu applet won’t be very destructive.
-
At elementary, redesigns don’t necessarily happen purely as sketches or mockups and they may not even happen all at one time. Many times, we design iteratively in code, solving a single problem at a time. Recently we built out a new, native bluetooth settings pane to replace the one we inherited from GNOME. We took this time to review some of the problems we had with the design of this pane and see how we could do better. Pictured below is the bluetooth settings pane as available today in elementary OS Loki…
-
-
Phones
-
Tizen
-
Samsung’s success, in large part, has been due to the power of its partnerships that it forges with other players in the tech scene, and this could be no truer than in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT), a field that connects everything, including door knobs and remote controls, to the internet. While IoT promises to turn every home into a smart home where everything works well together, achieving that reality is more complex than it sounds.
-
-
Blokstok Bow Rescue Archery is a game where you have to save your friends from death as they are hanged. Currently, you can get the full version for FREE and the developer, Darksun Technologies Private Limited, has made a few other games eg.Tank Shoot, Math monster blokstok, Flappy crush blokstok, Switch color blokstok and Monku adventure blokstok. You either save your friends by shooting the rope or speed up their death process by ‘accidentally’ shooting them.
-
Android
-
-
This year’s CES has a couple more days yet to go, but the announcements for the show have settled out, and we probably won’t be seeing any more big news from the world’s largest technology conference. As such, we’re about to head out ourselves from Las Vegas, and we’re leaving you with some of our favorite technology announced this year. Without further ado, these are Android Police’s picks for the Best of CES in 2017. (Presented in no particular order.)
-
-
-
-
-
-
Services consume from the pipeline via the client library, and at Yelp feed into targets like Salesforce, RedShift and Marketo. The library reportedly handles Kafka topic names, encryption, and consumer partitioning. Centralizing service communications through a message broker while enforcing immutable schema versioning helps protect downstream consumers and is also a primary motivation behind the broader data pipeline initiative.
-
I’d like to share a few lessons I’ve learned about creating a press kit. This helped us spread the word about our recent FreeDOS 1.2 release, and it can help your open source software project to get more attention.
-
Events
-
The Vault Storage and Filesystems conference will be held March 22 and 23 in Cambridge, MA, USA, immediately after the Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit. The call for presentations expires on January 14, and the conference organizers would really like to get a few more proposals in before then. Developers interested in speaking at a technical Linux event are encourage to sign up.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
A couple of days ago I blogged about using Firefox’s “Delete Node” to make web pages more readable. In a subsequent Twitter discussion someone pointed out that if the goal is to make a web page’s content clearer, Firefox’s relatively new “Reader Mode” might be a better way.
-
BSD
-
There’s a long tradition amongst science fiction writers of selling bit parts in books in exchange for charity donations. It’s called tuckerization.
I see no reason why science fiction writers should have all the fun.
I need a sample user for the forthcoming book on OpenBSD’s httpd and relayd. This user gets referred to in the user authentication sections as well as on having users manage web sites. They will also get randomly called out whenever it makes sense to me.
That sample user could be you.
All it would cost is a donation to the OpenBSD Foundation.
-
Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
-
-
Open Data
-
Open Hardware/Modding
-
-
-
With its processor cores installed in practically every automotive chip used in vision SoCs, sensor fusion ICs and secure microcontrollers, ARM, a microprocessor IP giant, has not only witnessed the automotive industry’s evolution, but has become an integral part of the story.
-
Programming/Development
-
Today, Rcpp passed another milestone as 900 packages on CRAN now depend on it (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo declarations). The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage over time.
-
I’ve seen the Kymera Magic Wand selling for as low as $60.00 on ebay and as much as $100.00 Amazon and I have to say it’s a treat every time I can avoid picking up my old remotes.
-
Science
-
I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.
I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.
[...]
Universities, without doubt, have to own some of this mess. The idea of telling students that professors run the show and know better than they do strikes many students as something like uppity lip from the help, and so many profs don’t do it. (One of the greatest teachers I ever had, James Schall, once wrote many years ago that “students have obligations to teachers,” including “trust, docility, effort, and thinking,” an assertion that would produce howls of outrage from the entitled generations roaming campuses today.) As a result, many academic departments are boutiques, in which the professors are expected to be something like intellectual valets. This produces nothing but a delusion of intellectual adequacy in children who should be instructed, not catered to.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Since June 2009—before the Affordable Care Act even became law—congressional Republicans have promised to be weeks away from proposing their own blueprint for health-care reform. More than seven years later, House Speaker Paul Ryan still seems confused about whether his party does or does not have a plan ready to replace the ACA. “We already know what we’re replacing with. We’ve been extremely clear with what replace looks like,” Ryan insisted in an interview on Wednesday. The following day found him pleading with a reporter for more time. “We’re just beginning to put this together,” Ryan admitted.
Regardless, Republicans are moving quickly to gut the ACA. Repeal will be the “first order of business” for the new administration, vice president–elect Mike Pence said on Wednesday after speaking to GOP lawmakers on the hill. That same day Senate Republicans began laying the groundwork for a budget maneuver that would allow them to roll back parts of the law with a simple 51-vote majority, thus skirting a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Despite the fast pace, the plan is remarkably shaky—not just in detail but also for the lack of political support behind it. Almost no one outside Congress thinks the GOP’s current strategy is a good idea, and even a few Republican lawmakers are getting skittish.
-
Republicans are preparing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and have promised to replace it with something that doesn’t leave more than 20 million Americans stranded without health insurance.
But they still haven’t come up with a replacement. “We haven’t coalesced around a solution for six years,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton admitted last week. “Kicking the can down the road for a year or two years isn’t going to make it any easier to solve.“
They won’t solve it. They can’t and won’t replace Obamacare, for three big reasons.
-
The total amount thrown at the banks by the taxpayer to enable their casino banking scams and cocaine fuelled lifestyles to continue, was £1.16 trillion, courtesy of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. By one of life’s more meaningful coincidences, that is precisely ten times the annual budget of the NHS for the whole UK. Equally neatly, the latest contingency for quantitative easing announced by Mark Carney – money given directly to financial institutions by the central bank in exchange for junk – is £250 billion, which is precisely ten times the total hamstringing debts of the NHS.
-
openDemocracy is a political discussion site so how could I end this contribution without some discussion of politics. Very shortly after I returned home I became involved in an interchange of emails with some American friends about the election of Trump and what has become known as Obama Care. Here is my response:
When I discuss American politics and get to Obama care I often end up kind of dumbfounded like someone who has just been told that the moon is actually made of green cheese. I get the same feeling when watching Fox news on the same topic. Where do obviously intelligent people get such crazy ideas? And what do you say to them in reply? Well this is my reply now.
-
Date on which North Carolina’s newly sworn-in Gov. Roy Cooper (D) announced he’d take executive action to expand Medicaid, the public health insurance program for the poor, under the Affordable Care Act: 1/4/2017
Year in which North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law barring the executive branch from expanding Medicaid under ACA, complicating Cooper’s efforts: 2013
Number of North Carolinians who could benefit from expansion of Medicaid, which in that state is currently available only to children, people with small children, or those who are pregnant, disabled, or in a nursing home: up to 600,000
Amount of investment Medicaid expansion would bring to North Carolina: $2 billion to $4 billion
-
New York’s “dangerously decrepit” Indian Point nuclear power plant will officially shut down by April 2021, according to an agreement reached this week between the state and Entergy utility company.
A source “with direct knowledge of the deal” told the New York Times that one reactor will “cease operations by April 2020, while the other must be closed by April 2021,” the paper reported on Friday.
In recent years, radioactive tritium-contaminated water had been leaking from the aging Westchester County facility, which sits on the bank of the Hudson River, just 25 miles north of New York City, spurring calls for its closure from activists and concerned residents.
Recognizing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s history of supporting New York’s upstate nuclear facilities, including a $7.6 billion bailout this August for four other plants, anti-nuclear campaigners reacted to the news with caution.
-
Security
-
How do you avoid this? Depending upon the nature of the data contained within the air-gapped system, you should only allow certain staff members access to the machine. This might require the machine to be locked away in your data center or in a secured room on the premises. If you don’t have a data center or a dedicated room that can be locked, house the computer in the office of a high-ranking employee.
-
I will admit that I have not fully thought this through yet, so I am
writing this in the hope that other folk will follow up, share their
experiences and thoughts.
So: I have installed a bunch of Tor systems in the past few months -
CentOS, Ubuntu, Raspbian, Debian, OSX-via-Homebrew – and my abiding
impression of the process is one of “friction”.
Before getting down to details, I hate to have to cite this but I have been
a coder and paid Unix sysadmin on/off since 1988, and I have worked on
machines with “five nines” SLAs, and occasionally on boxes with uptimes of
more than three years; have also built datacentres for Telcos, ISPs and
built/setup dynamic provisioning solutions for huge cluster computing. The
reason I mention this is not to brag, but to forestall
-
Intel’s Clear Containers technology allows admins to benefit from the ease of container-based deployment without giving up the security of virtualization. For more than a year, rkt’s KVM stage1 has supported VM-based container isolation, but we can build more advanced security features atop it. Using introspection technology, we can automatically detect a wide range of privilege escalation attacks on containers and provide appropriate remediation, making it significantly more difficult for attackers to make a single compromised container the beachhead for an infrastructure-wide assault.
-
Let me first introduce myself: I’m Youness Alaoui, mostly known as KaKaRoTo, and I’m a Free/Libre Software enthusiast and developer. I’ve been hired by Purism to work on porting coreboot to the Librem laptops, as well as to try and tackle the Intel ME issue afterwards.
I know many of you are very excited about the prospect of having coreboot running on your Librem and finally dropping the proprietary AMI BIOS that came with it. That’s why I’ll be posting reports here about progress I’m making—what I’ve done so far, and what is left to be done.
-
Gigabytes of medical, payroll and other data held in MongoDB databases have been taken by attackers, say security researchers.
-
HTTPS enables privacy and integrity by default. It is going to be next big thing. The internet’s standards bodies, web browsers, major tech companies, and the internet community of practice have all come to understand that HTTPS should be the baseline for all web traffic. Ultimately, the goal of the internet community is to establish encryption as the norm, and to phase out unencrypted connections. Investing in HTTPS makes it faster, cheaper, and easier for everyone.
-
Defence/Aggression
-
The hysteria about Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee servers and the phishing scam run on Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is short on evidence and high in self-righteousness. Much of the report issued Friday was old boilerplate about the Russia Today cable channel, which proves nothing.
My complaint is that American television news reports all this as if it is The First Time in History Anyone has Acted like This. But the head of the Republican Party in the early 1970s hired burglars to do the same thing– break into the Watergate building and get access to DNC documents in hopes of throwing an election. Dick Nixon even ordered a second break-in. And it took a long time for Republican members of Congress to come around to the idea that a crime had been committed; if it hadn’t been for the Supreme Court, Nixon might have served out his term.
-
Two former high-ranking intelligence officers teamed in an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun that ripped apart the Obama administration’s unproven claim that The Russians interfered with the U.S. election by way of hacking systems of the Democratic establishment to lock in Donald Trump’s win.
-
The undisguised and clearly politically motivated report on the alleged 2016 US “election hack” displays a severe lack of “professional discipline” in the intelligence community, former NSA technical director and whistleblower William Edward Binney told RT.
-
The main U.S. intelligence official pushing claims that Russia hacked the Democratic party is James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.
-
The Russian hacking hysteria in the US media, and among parts of the public — especially liberal Democrats — is becoming increasingly embarrassing.
Over and over we have been told that the government, whether in the form of the departing President Obama or unidentified “intelligence sources” cited in news reports, or statements by private security contractors with their vested interest in trying to show how vulnerable America’s (and the Democratic Party’s!) servers are, that they have solid evidence that the Russians hacked DNC emails and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, only for it to turn out to be more of the same innuendos, circumstantial “evidence,” suspicions, and inevitably ridiculous and embarrassing errors (like the Washington Post’s breathless and false story that the Russians had hacked the Vermont power grid and could shut off the heat during a cold snap).
-
A truck rammed into a group of Israeli soldiers who were disembarking from a bus in Jerusalem Sunday, killing four people and wounding 15 others, Israeli police and rescue services said.
Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the truck veered off course and rammed into the group. She said the attacker was shot dead.
The attack comes amid a more than yearlong wave of Palestinian shooting, stabbing and vehicular attacks against Israelis that has slowed of late. Sunday’s incident marks the first Israeli casualties in three months.
-
If you were on the edge of your seat, waiting for the US government to drop its much-anticipated report on Russian hacking operations against American targets and particularly targeting the 2016 presidential election, I’m really sorry to say, you’ll be truly disappointed.
-
The designation came the same day that US intelligence officials published an unclassified version of a report concluding that Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin directly ordered intelligence agencies to collect data from the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and other organizations. The agencies then oversaw an effort to discredit Clinton, the Democratic party, and the US democratic political process through “information operations,” according to the report, which was jointly written by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the FBI.
-
Much of America’s recent demonization of Russia relates to deep cultural and even religious differences between the two countries, requiring a deeper understanding of the other’s strengths and weaknesses, writes Paul Grenier.
-
The New Cold War promises untold riches for the Military-Industrial Complex, causing hawks inside the Obama administration to push for more hostilities with Russia, as in a Syrian case study dissected by Gareth Porter for Truthdig.
[...]
When Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, spoke to reporters at a press briefing outside a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the U.S. attack on Syrian troops, he asked rhetorically, “Who is in charge in Washington? The White House or the Pentagon?”
-
Seven years after the Hillary-backed Honduran coup, Mrs. Clinton and the capitalist-imperial U.S. Deep State she has long served helped place the thin-skinned megalomaniac and right-wing quasi-fascist Donald Trump atop the executive branch of the world’s most powerful state.
[...]
But what pre-existing “democracy” is Trump “taki[ng] control” of, exactly? It is well known and established that the United States’ political order is an abject corporate and financial plutocracy – an oligarchy of and for Wealthy Few. You don’t have to be a supposedly wild-eyed leftist radical to know this. Just ask the establishment liberal political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern). Over the past three plus decades, these leading academic researchers have determined, the U.S. political system has functioned as “an oligarchy,” where wealthy elites and their corporations “rule.” Examining data from more than 1,800 different policy initiatives in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Gilens and Page found that wealthy and well-connected elites consistently steer the direction of the country, regardless of and against the will of the U.S. majority and irrespective of which major party holds the White House and/or Congress. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” Gilens and Page write, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” As Gilens explained to the liberal online journal Talking Points Memo two years ago, “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.” Such is the harsh reality of “really existing capitalist democracy” in the U.S., what Noam Chomsky has called “RECD, pronounced as ‘wrecked.’”
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
-
-
-
In many cases, real animals are required for the story for it to be realistic and believable. In the very same premise, in a scene from Oro, a Metro Manila Film Festival entry, a dog was slaughtered because “it is part of a tradition.”
-
-
If we compare this lone offense to over 6,000 deaths since the anti-drug campaign was declared by President Duterte, some of us will detect an insane exaggeration.
We must amplify our anger over the dog killing, more than 6,000 times, to show that we truly value human life. Else, it will appear that our values have become mixed-up.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Is this but a tempest in a teapot? Not quite. Observance of the law is the bedrock of our democratic way of life. The accusation that people are being selective at summoning outrage over the killing of a dog versus the killing of thousands of Filipinos employs a false dichotomy. And it is one that does not apply to this paper, for instance, which has forcefully and consistently denounced the ongoing wave of extrajudicial killings.
-
The scandal is making waves across the cinema world as well as animal activists groups in the Philippines. Recently, staff of the independent film, “Oro”, directed by Filipino director, Alvin Yapan, admitted that a dog had been killed for the sake of a scene.
-
-
It has been five years since Tilikum attacked and killed his Sea World trainer, and the repercussions are still ongoing. Bad press continues. Profits and stock value drop even further. The park’s image may never fully recover. Yet Tilikum has seemingly disappeared from view. I am not talking about Sea World literally stashing him away. I mean that Tilikum is no longer spoke of in discussions. Pick up any news article or commentary on Sea World written in the past year or two and chances are you’ll find absolutely no mention of him, even though it was his actions that started all of this to begin with. It is as if his history has been slowly erased.
[...]
But ultimately this erasure of Tilikum’s history is symptomatic of something much greater: the long-standing belief that animals have no history to begin with. They can certainly play a role in history, but only in the sense that they are being used and manipulated by humans. Animals are, historically speaking, little more than passive objects.You could just as easily be talking about a hammer, “a hammer shaped history,” and still have the same meaning. Why is this? Well, I can give you 2500 years of argument condensed into a nutshell. Animals have no history because they have no intentionality. Why? Because they have no rationality or language. Why? Because they have no soul. Why? Because God made humans in his image and only they can be special. Indeed, everything in regards to this argument can be traced back to this one well-spring: the idea of human exceptionalism.
-
Finance
-
Britain risks a “catastrophic” Brexit because the government is so dismissive of the concerns of trade experts, according to one of the figures behind the EU-Canada trade deal which took a decade to negotiate.
-
On the first day that the Kentucky legislature got underway with a newly elected Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican governor, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity group blew the whistle and legislators jumped to do their bidding.
This week, the Speaker of the House Jeff Hoover rammed through the legislature three bills to break the back of unions and lower wages for highly-skilled construction workers.
It was bare-knuckled partisan politics. “We can pretty much do whatever we want now!” crowed GOP Kentucky Rep. Jim DeCesare behind closed doors.
You have only to look at Trump’s narrow victory in Rust Belt states to understand why the GOP is desperate to get rid of the Democratic Party’s boots on the ground.
-
AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
-
At first blush, there’s a baffling, inside-out quality to Julian Assange’s latest star turn in our shambolic national story.
He belongs in jail for “waging his war” against the United States by exposing its secrets, the conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity has said of him. An “anti-American operative with blood on his hands,” Sarah Palin once called him.
Yet last week brought the sight of Mr. Hannity speaking with Mr. Assange in glowing terms about “what drives him to expose government and media corruption” through Clinton campaign hacks that American intelligence has attributed to Russia. And Ms. Palin hailed him as a great truth teller, even apologizing for previous unpleasantries. (Cue sound of needle sliding across record album.)
-
The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. heard oral arguments today in the lawsuit filed by Level the Playing Field (LPF) challenging the nonprofit status of the Commission on Presidential Debates, just under two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn into office.
LPF’s lead attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, provided extensive evidence, analysis, and historical background to support the plaintiffs’ claim that the Commission on Presidential Debates uses unfair criteria to keep competitive voices outside the two major parties out of presidential debates.
Specifically, LPF takes issue with the 15% rule that requires candidates outside the Republican and Democratic Parties to poll at 15% in 5 national polls selected by the debate commission to gain entry into the debates.
“The two parties have rigged the system… CPD board members are big funders to candidates and campaigns… and the 15% is an impossible threshold,” Shapiro said.
-
President-elect Trump says that information published by Wikileaks, which the U.S. intelligence community says was hacked by Russia, had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” This was not the view of candidate Trump, who talked about Wikileaks and the content of the emails it released at least 164 times in last month of the campaign.
ThinkProgress calculated the number by reviewing transcripts of Trump’s speeches, media appearances and debates over the last 30 days of the campaign.
Trump talked extensively about Wikileaks in the final days of a campaign that was ultimately decided by just 100,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania combined.
-
The eagerly awaited Director Of National Intelligence’s (DNI) report “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” didn’t need such a long winded title. They could have just called it: “We Really Don’t Like RT.”
Almost every major western news outlet splashed this story. But it was probably the New York Times’ report which was the most amusing. America’s “paper of record” hailed the DNI’s homework as “damning and surprisingly detailed.” Then a few paragraphs later admitted the analysis contained no actual evidence.
-
ABC reports: “Showdown at Trump Tower as President-Elect Set to Receive Intel Briefing.” Politico reports: “Pompeo’s confirmation hearing for CIA director set for Jan. 11.”
[...]
Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president’s daily brief one-on-one to President Reagan’s most senior national security officials from 1981-85.
-
When I wrote on election night that the Clinton campaign had forsaken class politics for “politics by algorithm,” I had no idea that they really had such an “app” or that they had named it after Lord Byron’s daughter, the brilliant Ada Lovelace, the real brains behind the first computer. (Ada would have run a better campaign.) Apparently, Clinton campaign gameboy Robbie Mook ran 500,000 simulations of the election on his Xbox. How many of them had 90,000 Michigan voters leaving their choice for president blank? How many results showed her losing the white women vote by 10 percent? How many showed the vote in union households split nearly 50-50?
As we know from the Wikileaks dumps, Clintonian paranoia extended far beyond her decision to set up a private email server and began to infect the campaign itself. Nargiza Gafurova was an analytics specialist for one of the database companies doing contract work for the Clinton campaign. “Our company worked with her campaign on their data needs – they’ve been extremely secretive about the data and algorithms they use,” Gafurova told me. “Secrecy was so deep that we couldn’t help them effectively as they didn’t even tell us who they want to target.”
-
In a parting shot near the end of his depressing, center-right presidency, Barack Obama wants the world to know that he would have defeated Donald Trump if the U.S. Constitution didn’t prevent him from running for a third term. It was a stab at Hillary Clinton as well as the president-elect.
I suspect Obama is right. Like Bill Clinton, Obama is a much better fake-progressive, populism-manipulating campaigner than Hillary. Also like Bill, he has more outward charm, wit, charisma, and common touch than Mrs. Clinton. Plus, he’s a male in a still-sexist nation, and he would have had some very sharp election strategists on his side.
-
Not that political corruption doesn’t happen with divided government, but with Republicans controlling all three branches, the prospects for more Abramoff-type scandals rise, warn Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.
-
Mr. Trump’s skepticism is warranted not only by technical realities, but also by human ones, including the dramatis personae involved. Mr. Clapper has admitted giving Congress on March 12, 2013, false testimony regarding the extent of the National Security Agency’s collection of data on Americans. Four months later, after the Edward Snowden revelations, Mr. Clapper apologized to the Senate for testimony he admitted was “clearly erroneous.” That he is a survivor was already apparent by the way he landed on his feet after the intelligence debacle on Iraq.
Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for pinpointing the location of weapons of mass destruction — if any.
[...]
Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA’s formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and all data crossing the network.
Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic trace.
Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any “hacked” emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.
Lastly, the CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in this electronic arena. Given Mr. Clapper’s checkered record for accuracy in describing NSA activities, it is to be hoped that the director of NSA will join him for the briefing with Mr. Trump.
-
Repeating an accusation over and over again is not evidence that the accused is guilty, no matter how much “confidence” the accuser asserts about the conclusion. Nor is it evidence just to suggest that someone has a motive for doing something. Many conspiracy theories are built on the notion of “cui bono” – who benefits – without following up the supposed motive with facts.
-
Donald Trump has a plan for dealing with the stock market bubble. Make it bigger.
Before the election candidate Trump blasted Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen for keeping interest rates too low for too long to keep the economy humming along while Obama was still in office. The president elect accused Yellen of being politically motivated suggesting that the Fed’s policies had put the country at risk of another stock market Crash like 2008.
“If rates go up, you’re going to see something that’s not pretty,” Trump told Fox News in an interview in September. “It’s all a big bubble.”
Yellen of course denied Trump’s claims saying, “We do not discuss politics at our meetings, and we do not take politics into account in our decisions.”
As we shall see later in this article, Yellen was lying about the political role the Fed plays in setting policy, in fact, last week’s FOMC statement clearly establishes the Fed as basically a political institution that implements an agenda that serves a very small group of powerful constituents, the 1 percent. If serving the interests of one group over all of the others is not politics, than what is it?
[...]
First of all, slashing taxes for the wealthy does not boost growth. We know that. It doesn’t work. Period.
[...]
Trump’s tax plan will increase inequality by making the rich richer. He wants to reduce the top tax rate from 39.6% to 33% which means that people “making $3.7 million or more in a year, would receive $1 million in annual tax savings.” (USA Today) The plan is bad for the economy, bad for the deficits and bad for working people who will see more aggressive attacks on Social Security to make up for the losses in revenue.
-
We are told we are living in a “post truth” world in which fake news proliferates and the established news media, once a bastion of civil society and a pillar of democracy, has lost its influence. As we should expect, alarmist statements such as these, have one foot in fact and the other resting on a shifting foundation of clicks, likes and shares. Alarming headlines work better on social media but they also reduce complex ideas to a series of half understood slogans.
Much is changing in the way in which we find and share news stories but these changes are a product of many factors. Some rest in national media systems, others are a product of technical changes and all are influenced by, or have an influence upon, the shifting geopolitical situation. Fake news is not responsible for the rise of right wing populism in Europe and America but it has certainly fed the fire.
The decline of trust in the mainstream media is genuine but it is not global. In the Northern European countries, where commercialisation has been tempered by firm statutory intervention and clear professional conventions, trust is still relatively high. In the rampantly commercial systems of the UK and the USA trust has plummeted. The UK press has the lowest level of public trust of any European country (with higher levels for TV) while the US media has low levels of trust for both TV news and the press (Aarts, Fladmoe, & Strömbäck 2012).
-
Censorship/Free Speech
-
Thursday afternoon, something very unusual happened to superbigcocks.com. That site and 255 others — many of them porn sites — suddenly began dropping off the web. The servers showed no problems, but users from Russia to Hong Kong were typing the URLs into their browsers and getting blank pages. Something on the internet was getting in the way.
That obstacle, as it turns out, was the state telecom of Iran. The country has long maintained an extensive-but-scattershot web censorship system — but on Thursday, it began blocking not just the sites, but the basic mechanisms of the web itself.
-
He said the money is needed to aid his legal team’s travel expenses. and also for his transition to a new life in the United States. But many netizens who responded to the mainstream media’s report on Yee’s appeal ridiculed him.
-
Zamel said that when she wanted to open her accounts, a message appeared telling her that the accounts were closed but without giving any reasons. She said she sent messages to Facebook to complain.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Abuse of social media is a characteristic of the modern authoritarian – it gives the ability to speak directly to supporters without the context provided by a professional media. Meanwhile, Twitter is having plenty of corporate problems of its own.
Could now be the time for a cooperatively run, open source alternative to Twitter, perhaps run along the lines of Wikipedia? Owned by everyone, responding to community concerns: tools to defend against trolling, manipulation by Russia or to help stem the tide of fake news.
-
Privacy/Surveillance
-
There are times when you have tons of historical research lined up for a column about legal structures making bad assumptions based on facts that are no longer true, and then something just comes along that makes you wipe your desk and say “no. scrap all of this work. This. I need to post this, and I need to post this now.”
Right now is such a time. The topic of cost structures of publishing in the 1800s will wait for another day (it’s already waited for over 200 years, after all).
In this interview (cut courtesy of Fight for the Future), Edward Snowden does one of the things he excels at – he summarizes very complex topics in such an accessible way that he practically turns long legal debates into one soundbite.
-
Rick Falkvinge, founder of the original pirate party and head of privacy at PrivateInternetAccess.com, joins us to discuss his recent article, “Today, the FBI becomes the enemy of every computer user and every IT security professional worldwide.” We dissect the new “Rule 41” that gives American law enforcement unprecedented leeway to break into any computer in the world, the implications this has for a world in which privacy is increasingly a thing of the past, and what people can do to protect themselves from the New Online Order of global FBI operations.
-
The FBI on Friday released 100 pages of heavily censored documents related to its agreement with an unidentified vendor to hack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters, but it did not identify whom it paid to perform the work or how much it cost.
The records were provided in response to a federal lawsuit filed against the FBI by The Associated Press, Vice Media and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today.
The media organizations sued in September to learn how much the FBI paid and who it hired to break into the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people at a holiday gathering of county workers in December 2015. The FBI for weeks had maintained that only Apple Inc. could access the information on its phone, which was protected by encryption, but ultimately broke or bypassed Apple’s digital locks with the help of an unnamed third party.
-
Civil Rights/Policing
-
Computer science student Justin Liverman, who was arrested by the FBI in September on suspicion of involvement with Crackas with Attitude (CWA), has signed a plea agreement. CWA claimed to have accessed emails from the AOL account of CIA Director John Brennan in late 2015, which were later published by WikiLeaks as the Brennan emails.
-
Australia’s peak administrative Islamic body is refusing to relinquish land being used by one of the state’s largest schools despite the potential for it to save the school from being shut down.
The Administrative Appeals Tribunal upheld the federal Department of Education’s decision to strip funding from the 2400 student school on Thursday after it found the school was operating for a profit through millions of dollars in inflated rent payments and loans made to the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.
-
There is an alarming presence of forced religious conversion of indigenous children at the hands of radicals in Bandarban.
Muslim fanatics seduce underprivileged families with scopes of a better education and lifestyle for their children, and forcefully convert the children in madrasas in Dhaka without their parents’ knowledge.
Over the past seven years, police have rescued 72 children from this crime ring.
-
Donald Trump’s victory has been nothing but good news for the private prison industry.
The day after the election, shares of the two biggest private prison corporations — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — jumped 43 and 21 percent, respectively.
-
Republicans stormed to power in state elections across the country in November on a promise to take on the establishment and return government to the average citizen.
But in state capitals where they gained control, they moved quickly to do something else entirely: They’ve consolidated their newfound power — and rewarded their corporate donors — by delivering death blows to a longtime enemy: organized labor.
In Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire, three states that flipped to unified Republican control, legislators have prioritized passing Right to Work, a law that quickly diminishes union power by allowing workers in unionized workplaces to withhold fees used to organize and advocate on their behalf.
That might seem odd to voters who heard promises to “drain the swamp,” but its what Republican partisans and business lobbyists have been demanding for years.
-
In 2013, just one week after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden came forward as the source of documents revealing the global extent of the NSA’s mammoth surveillance regime, Coats penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal lambasting the disclosures and the ensuing media coverage.
“Unfortunately, the Obama administration — especially of late — has fueled people’s distrust of government, which has made the reaction to Mr. Snowden’s leak far worse,” he wrote, pleading with his colleagues in Congress to stop “mischaracterizing” the surveillance programs Snowden exposed.
Coats said the NSA’s programs, including its bulk collection of American telephone records, were “legal, constitutional and used under the strict oversight of all three branches of government” — though courts later disagreed, and Congress amended the law to end the American records collection program, as Snowden pointed out on Twitter on Thursday.
-
After the coup of 2013, the practice of torture in Egypt has taken a qualitative shift to the worse.
The use of torture and violence by the police is nothing new to Egypt; to the contrary, Mubarak was regularly condemned by various international human rights organizations for the use of torture and violence against political opponents and regular citizens who were unlucky enough to be arrested for petty crimes.
However, after the coup of 2013 and the inauguration of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, this practice has taken new forms. There has been a proliferation of sexual violence against detainees including children, as well as an alarming increase in forced disappearances and torture.
Some of the kidnapped reappear after a few months, others meet an unknown fate. The most prominent, and international example was the murder of Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge PhD student who was tortured to death and subjected to “animal like” violence for conducting research on the Egyptian labor movement. It is believed that the Egyptian security services were behind this heinous crime.
-
“We are trying to stop Jeff Sessions from becoming the Attorney General of the United States,” Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, told AlterNet over the phone. “We are not backing down at all.”
Just days ago, Simelton was one of dozens who staged a sit-in at Sessions’ Mobile, Alabama office, an action timed to coincide with the onset of the 115th Congress. Media attention and support from across the country poured in.
[...]
Sessions was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1986 as a federal judge, but rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee—some of them Republicans—on the grounds that he was too racist to serve.
-
The youth in the United States don’t support Trump; people of color in in the US don’t support Trump; the majority of women don’t support Trump. Those, like Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who now hail Trump as “their” President whom they do not want to see fail, are normalizing a stolen election. They are abdicating their responsibility as stewards of representative democracy.
-
We had to know this was coming. It was always here, but now it can be seen more clearly through the unvarnished lens of protofascism. Retrenchment and revanchism arrive with a new pitchman, selling rollbacks disguised as opportunities and promising to reclaim that which has been lost after decades of social progress and cultural liberalization. This isn’t a “new normal” but rather an old one reemerging, and the only sort of normality it represents is that which is perversely defined by a type of mass insanity.
Things have been heading in this direction for a long time now, but the pace obviously has accelerated in the digital age. The lamentations about the demise of truth and the advent of bogus “news” are legion, as are the observations about the omnipresence of technology and the implications thereof. But all this hasn’t happened to us — it has veritably been demanded. Obscured by the handwringing and finger-pointing is the deeper reality of a culture obsessed with on-demand indulgences, no matter the cost.
This is a manifestation of convenient compartmentalization, as if what happens in one realm has no bearing on another. Mass consumption of artificial foods, infotainment tidbits, contrived “reality” fare, and “brain candy” is seen as innocuous or just a guilty pleasure if it’s even thought about at all. Yet when politics are shown to be dominated by artifice, and when sensationalism trumps responsible journalism, suddenly there are waves of consternation and disbelief. How could this happen? Well, how could it not.
-
On December 23, 2016 Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a federal law that is passed every year. NDAA authorizes defense appropriations but it is also used as a Trojan horse to hide attacks on civil liberties. In 2011 the NDAA authorized indefinite detention of anyone deemed a terrorism suspect. Tucked inside this year’s NDAA was the passage of the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act which establishes the little known or discussed Global Engagement Center.
The title seems benign enough until one reads its mission. “The purpose of the Center shall be to lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.”
In plain English, this act establishes an official propaganda arm of the United States government. Of course there has always been governmental coordination used to spread lies about American foreign policy. The government doesn’t even have to work very hard because the corporate media usually march in lock step and repeat their every claim uncritically. But these are dangerous times for the American hegemon. Its ability to continue exercising imperial control has been damaged by foreign governments successfully resisting its efforts and by the election of Donald Trump.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.08.17
Posted in America, Asia, Microsoft, Patents at 3:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Hiding behind fronts, attack dogs, and interest groups
Summary: A potpourri of reports about some of the world’s worst patent trolls and their highly damaging enablers/facilitators, including Microsoft which claims that it “loves Linux” whilst attacking it with patents by proxy
THE ISSUE associated with patents as a ‘pure’ business model, or patent trolling, is widely understood. Imagine a world where people profit from making nothing at all, just demanding money from (if not blackmailing) companies that make actual sales and have a source of income/revenue, namely customers that buy products.
More patent trolls news came from the trolls-funded IAM the other day. “According to a December 29th release,” it quoted, ““Fortress will have the sole discretion to make any and all decisions relating to the company’s patents and patent monetisation activities.” Inventergy has around 740 patent assets acquired from Nokia, Huawei and Panasonic in a series of three separate deals in the first half of 2014.”
Here again we see Nokia as trolls’ ammunition, just like at MOSAID (now known as Conversant, which pays IAM’s publisher). Speaking of MOSAID, which Boris Teksler is involved in (hopping between Microsoft-connected trolls), see this new list from IAM. The Editor in Chief of IAM gives him (yet again!) some special honour, without noting that his employer paid IAM (under the new name, Conversant). So much publicity for an aggressive firm (actually a patent troll) from IAM… one might begin to think that it’s coverage that money simply buys. Conversant is such an evil patent troll (working for Microsoft’s interests now) that it had to change its name and now it’s trying to improve its reputation with some puff pieces? And from who, from IAM? Watch this latest IAM revisionism about Xiaomi (yet again!), maybe for the third time in the past month alone. We already explained that Microsoft was extorting Xiaomi with patents, but IAM tells a sanitised, face-saving PR story for Microsoft:
Xiaomi – Who says the IP deals market is flat? During 2016, Chinese mobile manufacturer Xiaomi – not yet 10 years old – seemed to be on a one company mission to prove that this is far from the case. In January it emerged that it had got its hands on a suite of Broadcom patents while a month later came the news that it had acquired a significant portfolio of US assets from Intel. Both deals, though, were eclipsed by the ground-breaking transaction with Microsoft announced at the end of May – a win-win for both that exemplified the way that IP is now forming the bedrock of much wider co-operative agreements between operating companies. While all this was happening. Xiaomi was also incorporating Zhigu Holdings into its internal operation – a move that saw the aggregator’s president and chief operating officer Paul Lin become Xiaomi’s VP of IP strategy. That could well prove to be a masterstroke, with Lin having gained a great deal of deal-making experience at both Intellectual Ventures and Microsoft while based in the US. Like many young Chinese technology businesses, Xiaomi is running a significant patent deficit; but unlike many of them it has recognised it needs to be aggressive in doing something about this. To expand, it will not only have to develop its own IP, but must continue to be active and creative in bringing it in form third parties. With Lin enjoying enlightened support from the very top of the company, Xiaomi is set to become an even bigger patent player in 2017.
Notice the connection between “Intellectual Ventures and Microsoft” (in the above text). It’s a strong and well established connection, which we have been covering for nearly a decade now. Microsoft uses the world’s largest patent troll, which it itself created/funded, to attack Linux. It’s a common tactic where the troll is mostly/only a proxy.
Similarly, as mentioned here the other day, Faraday Future throws its patents at some shell company and this new article from TechDirt looks deeper at the anatomy of it:
That’s all interesting… but what’s amazing is that in all of these discussions about how Faraday Future “doesn’t own its intellectual property” absolutely no one seems to point out the fact that the company that everyone compares it to, Tesla, famously dumped all its patents into the public domain and told anyone to go ahead and use them. That seems like a relevant point to make in articles about this upstart competitor and its “intellectual property.” Of course, it’s possible that the articles could mean something else when it says “intellectual property” — such as trademarks — but it seems unlikely that the trademarks for a flailing company that is unlikely to ever get anything on the market are that valuable.
The whole story, and the ignoring of Tesla’s stance on patents… is just strange. It is true that sometimes failing companies hang onto their patents as a sort of last ditch effort to extract some return for their investors in a patent fire sale. But if you’ve reached that point, things have already gone way too far south to really matter. Tesla has shown that it can build a pretty damn successful company without relying on “intellectual property.” It seems that people should stop freaking out that Faraday Future may have dumped its patents into some offshore company, and focus on the company’s real problems — like the fact that its execs are racing out the door as fast as possible.
Remember that Microsoft has its own patent “assertion” (trolling) department/entity (they call it “Licensing”) and several more large companies now do something similar. Sites like IAM just call that NPEs.
“For NPEs,” (i.e. trolls) Florian Müller explained the other day, “it’s often actually desirable to make litigation more, not less, expensive. Speed and injunctive relief attract them.”
Yes, this is a truthful statement and it helps demonstrate how to mitigate/tackle the trolling epidemic if there was sufficient desire, just like limiting trolls’ movement/travel. Currently, in the Eastern District of Texas, where defendants haven’t much confidence in winning (not cheaply anyway), trolls are making a killing.
East Asia is rapidly becoming the breeding ground for the trolling epidemic, as we noted here before. The above from IAM is just one example of it, as is the IAM article titled “The signs suggest that IP monetisation activity is on the rise in Southeast Asia, says A*STAR tech transfer chief” (“IP monetisation” is a euphemism for trolling). Another new article is titled “$130 million patent claim against Apple in Shenzhen shows NPEs in China increasingly strident”. It sure looks as if SIPO has turned China into a cesspool of patent trolls. Who benefits from this? A few parasites, not ordinary Chinese people. To quote IAM, “GPNE’s Chinese assertion appears to have begun back in 2013 in the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court. The court’s database shows four lawsuits against Apple and associated companies at the trial stage. According to a report in China’s National Business Daily, the most recent hearing was in late November 2016; the same article also states that Apple has made three separate attempts to invalidate the asserted patent at SIPO’s Patent Reexamination Board, with all of these complaints being dismissed on appeal.”
Poor patent quality at SIPO, just like at USPTO before it, emboldens patent trolls. IAM is siding with the trolls, as usual, also in the case of Nokia against Apple — a case which it belatedly covers (Nokia has become like a patent troll which merely licenses the brand).
Writing about patent trolls in general, Wolf Greenfield & Sacks PC bemoans what happens in the US. “Over the course of the last decade,” it says, “the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions making it more difficult for so-called non-practicing entities (NPEs)—companies that own and enforce patents but do not offer products or services covered by them—to extract value from their patents. The Court may now be ready to take a step in the other direction by removing the equitable defense of laches against patentees’ past damages claims—up to six years of damages in many cases. Oral arguments were heard in the landmark case of SCA Hygiene Products Aktiebolag v. First Quality Baby Products, LLC on November 1, 2016, and a decision is expected later this term.”
“Patent Value” for patent trolls (ignore euphemisms like “NPEs”) is also mentioned in this article. We can’t help but feel like patent law firms — not just sites like IAM (which trolls are paying) — take the side of trolls. They don’t care about innovation, just litigation. They profit from that.
United for Patent Reform, a group that battles against patent trolls, wrote the other day that “Crowdfunding company @gustly won its case over a #PatentTroll after 2 years in court.” Here is part of the statement:
The patent lawsuit filed by AlphaCap claimed ownership over “online equity financing”. As with most other patent lawsuits, the case was brought in the Eastern District of Texas. This court is known as a patent troll haven and has benefitted economically from an assumed bias in favor of trolls.
So here again we have an example where legitimate companies are hit hard by trolls that make nothing at all, just lawsuits. “Wearable device company Fitbit has moved for termination of its ITC patent complaint against Jawbone, which is unhappy at suggestions about its financial stability,” MIP wrote the other day (a move which we covered in this older post of ours). As before, Fitbit makes shameless excuses, trying to portray itself as merciful after it attacked a rival, only to realise that its case is going nowhere fast and is only wasting its own (Fitbit’s) financial resources.
Fitbit, like many other companies, must have realised that certainty of winning patent cases has gone down. Moreover, Jawbone sued Fitbit in retaliation, causing quite a big (and expensive) headache to Fitbit. As Fitbit is not a patent troll (it has actual products that it sells) it’s not hard to sue it as well, thereby compelling it to reach a ‘ceasefire’.
Meanwhile, as even IAM cares to admit, litigation numbers are down sharply and patent trolls suffer a lot:
Unified Patents and RPX have both released their early numbers on new US patent litigation cases in 2016, confirming what we have known for some time: district court cases fell dramatically, with Unified putting the total number of filings at 4,382 – a drop of 24.8% year-on-year. That is the lowest volume of new cases since 2011 when the America Invents Act (AIA) came into effect and a change in joinder rules led to an immediate increase in the number of suits. According to Unified, disputes at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) saw a slight drop down to 1,723 from 1,793, although last year was still the second busiest on record.
The question now is whether the 2016 litigation drop was a blip or part of a longer-term trend. The last few years have seen sharp fluctuations in the number of cases with 2013, the busiest year on record, leading into a marked fall in 2014 as plaintiffs were seemingly turned off by the Supreme Court’s Alice decision and by the prospect of patent reform. So if that is repeated, we might expect to see the number of new cases rise again this year.
MIP takes into consideration an upcoming SCOTUS case (alluded to above), but it barely bothers to mention that this case would affect trolls the most. To quote what is not behind a paywall:
Natalie Rahhal speaks to former Federal Circuit Chief Judge Paul Michel and others to assess the potential impact of In re TC Heartland at the US Supreme Court. One outcome could be a sharp fall in filing in the Eastern District of Texas and an increase in a potentially under-resourced District of Delaware
In re TC Heartland is already shaping up to be one of the most important patent cases in the US this year. The Supreme Court on December 14 granted cert in the case, which will give the court an opportunity to revisit the case law and statute governing forum selection in patent infringement suits.
We look forward to the outcome of this case because the Justices, probably well before Trump introduces new ones, are expected to serve a blow to patent trolls. Today’s Justices tend to be sceptical on issues pertaining to patents maximalism. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in America, Patents at 3:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Stuff one can do with pen and paper is not an invention but a mental process
Summary: Some of the patent microcosm, or those who profit from the bureaucracy associated with patents, responds to claims made by Techrights (that software patents are a dying breed in the US)
TECHRIGHTS is not a site that patent law firms like. We are fine with that, as we never intended to be pals of those who promote patent maximalism, or those whom some dubbed the “patent microcosm” (because patents are their only ‘products’).
Yesterday we noticed that a patent lawyer had gotten sanctioned for misbehaving again (recall Andrew Y. Schroeder), based on this new (rather short) blog post from Patently-O:
From what I can tell, the lawyer was sanctioned by the district court because he settled a case, but then consistently asserted that he hadn’t; he was sanctioned on appeal for making some unsupported arguments and falsely attacking opposing counsel, it seems.
Longtime readers of ours know that we don’t have much trust and faith in the patent profession — by which we mean people who make a living purely out of patents rather than research and/or development. We don’t mean examiners (those who attempt to ensure patent quality) but those who try to convince examiners to grant every applications that they send on behalf of clients. The financial motivation of patent law firms is very much like that of companies that sell weapons and thus prefer wars or at least tension (which motivates purchases of weapons, in the name of perceived “defense”).
Mark Summerfield, writing in his blog today (in Australia where time is many hours ahead), does not agree with us (as usual) that software patents as a whole are dead and instead says that “computer-implemented business methods, including ecommerce and finance applications” — however one defines them — are in somewhat of a limbo/trouble. We mentioned this before. To quote from his conclusions:
The data presented above demonstrates that in established fields of software technology, covered by associated Art Units in USPTO Technology Center 2100, neither US court decisions nor changes in management have resulted in any identifiable deviation in US patent grant rates, despite the consistent gleeful claims of opponents that ‘software patents are dead’.
Software patents are not dead. They are here, they have been here for many years, and they are here to stay.
Computer-implemented business methods, including ecommerce and finance applications, on the other hand, are a different matter. The data clearly shows that the USPTO under Kappos was more friendly to this subject matter than under his predecessor, although the CAFC decision in Bilski appears to have forced applicants to claim machine-implementation more explicitly. However, the US Supreme Court decision in Alice looks to have eliminated about 75% of new business method patents. This implies that a similar proportion of such patents issued at least since the start of the Kappos era are invalid, which accords with the impact we have seen at the CAFC since Alice.
Whether or not patents on software get granted does not matter as much as whether or not courts deem them eligible. As we have shown here time after time the higher a case goes (up the ladder all the way up to SCOTUS), the less likely to withstand the patent/s at the centre of the case will be. We stand by our assertion that patents on software are a waste of time and money, even if the USPTO continues to grant a lot of them. Certainty around software patents is very low in the United States and it takes courages to even have them tested in a court (no out-of-court settlement or shakedown). █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
Further Recent Posts
- Eight Wireless Patents Have Just Been Invalidated Under Section 101 (Alice), But Don't Expect the Patent Microcosm to Cover This News
Firms that are profiting from patents (without actually producing or inventing anything) want us to obsess over and think about the rare and few cases (some very old) where judges deny Alice and honour patents on software
- 2017: Latest Year That the Unitary Patent (UPC) is Still Stuck in a Limbo
The issues associated with the UPC, especially in light of ongoing negotiations of Britain's exit from the EU, remain too big a barrier to any implementation this year (and probably future years too)
- Links 7/1/2017: Linux 4.9.1, Wine 2.0 RC4
Links for the day
- India Keeps Rejecting Software Patents in Spite of Pressure From Large Foreign Multinationals
India's resilience in the face of incredible pressure to allow software patents is essential for the success of India's growing software industry and more effort is needed to thwart corporate colonisation through patents in India itself
- Links 6/1/2017: Irssi 1.0.0, KaOS 2017.01 Released
Links for the day
- Watchtroll a Fake News Site in Lobbying Mode and Attack Mode Against Those Who Don't Agree (Even PTAB and Judges)
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
- The Productivity Commission Warns Against Patent Maximalism, Which is Where China (SIPO) is Heading Along With EPO
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
- Technical Failure of the European Patent Office (EPO) a Growing Cause for Concern
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
- Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3
Links for the day
- Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released
Links for the day
- Financial Giants Will Attempt to Dominate or Control Bitcoin, Blockchain and Other Disruptive Free Software Using Software Patents
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
- New Article From Heise Explains Erosion of Patent Quality at the European Patent Office (EPO)
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
- Insensitivity at the EPO’s Management – Part V: Suspension of Salary and Unfair Trials
One of the lesser-publicised cases of EPO witch-hunting, wherein a member of staff is denied a salary "without any notification"
- Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones
Links for the day
- Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released
Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end