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12.30.14

Black Duck Debunked Again, Data Asserted Invalid

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, GPL at 12:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Black Duck’s GPL-hostile numbers are hinged on a biased collection of data, claims controversial columnist Byfield

JUST before Christmas we wrote this critique of Redmonk because it was using data from its former paymasters at Black Duck. The data was used to discredit the GNU GPL, a cornerstone of copyleft (which in inherently one of the biggest threats to the likes of Microsoft, which is in turn closely connected to Black Duck).

“No article is perfect, but the takeaway from Byfield’s article is that Black Duck’s claims deserve no trust.”An article from Bruce Byfield (excerpt in [1]), a person whom we typically disagree with (he tends to aggravate projects or sites and then malign them using their response, i.e. the troll’s modus operandi), finally disputes the Black Duck ‘data’, which is in some case derived directly or funneled through Microsoft (for over 5 years now). Byfield criticises “both the Red Monk studies and their main source, Black Duck Software,” noting quite correctly that the way data is collected is biased by designed (incomplete and tilted in favour of large corporations such as Microsoft).

While we cannot agree with all of Byfield’s assertions, some of his points align with ours and bolster critics of Black Duck, including Debian heavyweight Bruce Perens, who warned people that Black Duck's claims about the GPL are "B.S."

Will Hill, a Debian user, has highlighted numerous flaws in Byfield’s article, including:

Oh no, he’s dredging up all that bullshit again? It was pretty conclusively dealt with at the time by counting packages in Debian, etc. Let me count the howlers,

Because permissive licenses are more flexible and less likely to generate compliance problems, the possibility is strong that these sources could have a conscious or unconscious bias against copyleft licenses.

That’s basically what Black Duck was trying to get people to believe, that software freedom is not “flexible” enough for businesses who prefer “permissive” BSD. This is silly and wrong, but he’s stated as a fact. What a turkey.

Debian, for example, notes that its license “include” a short list but makes no guarantee that the list is complete, and goes no further than to note that a half dozen licenses are “common.”

This undermines people’s ability to see the best rebuttal in a dishonest way. The answer came from counting the total number of packages and the number of GPL packages to see that GPL use had increased.

No article is perfect, but the takeaway from Byfield’s article is that Black Duck’s claims deserve no trust. They are selling agenda and bias. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. The problem with license trends

    The conventional wisdom is that free software licenses are rapidly evolving. The copyleft licenses are supposed to be in decline, and the permissive licenses gaining popularity, according to two widely-quoted studies from Red Monk by Stephen O’Grady and Donnie Berkholz, In fact, writing in 2012, Berkholz declares that new project licenses are more likely to use a permissive license than anything else. However, on closer examination, whether these conclusions are accurate is open to question.

    For one thing, both the Red Monk studies and their main source, Black Duck Software and its Open Hub site (formerly Ohloh) are business-oriented. Because permissive licenses are more flexible and less likely to generate compliance problems, the possibility is strong that these sources could have a conscious or unconscious bias against copyleft licenses.

Links 30/12/2014: Linux 3.19 RC2 Released While Torvalds Turns 45

Posted in News Roundup at 11:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • ‘One frickin’ user interface for Linux’

    It’s almost 2015 now, and it turns out he was right. That “1FUI” is called whatever Android has, and it has made Linux the dominant player in the next big computer revolution. Linux does great in servers, embedded stuff, supercomputing, and utterly owns mobile computing (Apple people, the world is bigger than the US, UK, and Australia).

    Linux didn’t need a ‘year of desktop Linux’ after all.

  • Desktop

    • Install Linux on used laptop

      Now that Windows XP has been officially discontinued there are a huge number of Windows XP laptops for sale on eBay. Many of these run really well with a light Linux distro, such as Linux Mint XFCE.

      At my public library job, I installed Linux Mint 16 XFCE on someone’s Windows XP laptop and was amazed at how much faster the laptop ran. So, my curiosity got the best of me, and I searched eBay to find that particular laptop model: a Dell Latitude C640, manufactured in 2002. Someone was selling such a laptop on eBay for $20. The description of the laptop was that it was in perfect working condition, so I bid $20.

  • Server

    • Five Great Applications For Systems Admins

      Being a systems administrator is a difficult, often thankless job. You’re one of the people responsible for keeping the entire IT infrastructure of your business up and running. What that means is that whenever something doesn’t work the way it should, all eyes immediately turn in your direction.

      You can hardly be blamed for looking to make your life a bit easier. I’d actually recommend that you do so, truth be told. The less time you spend slogging through all the basics of administration, the more time you can devote to improving your server.

      To that end, I’ve compiled a list of a few of the best sysadmin apps on the web; tools that any Linux administrator worth their salt should consider using.

    • 5 Key Enterprise Computing Trends in 2014

      It’s often striking at the end of any given year to reflect upon how much things changed over the preceding 12 months, and 2014 is no exception. After all, open source software reached a “tipping point” this year, as Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin recently noted, achieving new prominence in software development and driving what Zemlin calls an “innovation renaissance.”

    • Cloud Computing Will Continue to Have Legs in 2015

      All you have to do get a guage on how hot open cloud computing is is check the job listings. Opportunities abound for those with OpenStack skills, for example.

      But there are strong signs that some of the big growth in cloud computing may lie ahead, and Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud, may face much stiffer competition.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.19-rc2 Is A Tiny Release
    • Linux 3.19-rc2

      This -rc is tiny, for all the obvious reasons.

      I don’t expect that to last, but we’ll probably have another week of
      relative calm until things really start normalizing.

      Aboit 80% drivers (drm being the bulk of it by far), with a few small
      fixes around arm64, auditing and some random small oneliners
      elsewhere.

      Linus

    • OpenVZ & Parallels Cloud Server To Merge Into Open-Source Virtuozzo Core
    • Parallels to merge OpenVZ and Cloud Server
    • Happy Birthday Linus, Looking Back, and Korora Tidbits

      Softpedia.com today remembered the birthday of our founding father Linus Torvalds. In other news some Korora tidbits popped up in the feeds and Matthias Clasen is hinting that Red Hat 7.2 may feature the latest GNOME 3.14. Phoronix.com highlights their top stories for the year in Fedora and Debian and Sean Michael Kerner looks back at the top kernel news of the year.

    • Linus Torvalds Turns 45, Happy Birthday!

      Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and the current maintainer of the most advanced versions released, has just turned 45 and we wish him “Happy Birthday.”

    • Linux in 2014: Six New Kernels, Thousands of New Features

    • Graphics Stack

      • X.Org & Wayland Can Both Co-Exist & Continue Marching Forward

        While many view Wayland as the future of the Linux desktop, the X.Org Server shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon as beyond needing it for legacy X11 applications, there’s still much innovation happening within the conventional xorg-server as shown by the progress it’s made in 2014.

      • Intel Haswell HD Graphics End Of 2013 vs. 2014 Benchmarks

        Following on from yesterday’s Phoronix testing that provided an extensive look at AMD’s incredible open-source driver advancements over 2014 by benchmarking the open-source graphics stack from the end of 2013 compared to the end of this year, out now is similar treatment for Intel HD Graphics with their open-source Linux driver for Haswell hardware.

      • Mesa 10.3 & 10.4 Point Releases For The New Year

        Emil Velikov has announced new point releases in the Mesa 10.3 and Mesa 10.4 series in getting ready new open-source graphics drivers for 2015.

      • Linux Gains Support For Really High Frame Rates With The PS3 Eye Camera

        A new patch has been proposed today for the Linux kernel that would allow the PlayStation 3 Eye camera to capture at much higher frame-rates.

        The PlayStation Eye camera for the PS3 is similar to a web camera but can also be used for computer vision and gesture recognition tasks. The PlayStation Eye has been supported by the Linux kernel since the late Linux 2.6 days but with a future update (Linux 3.20 or later given that the 3.19 merge window is closed) will support higher modes.

    • Benchmarks

      • USB Flash Drive File-System Tests On Fedora

        For those wondering what Linux file-system is most performant on a USB 3.0 flash drive, here are some benchmarks using Fedora 21.

      • Intel Ivy Bridge Linux OpenGL Benchmarks Over Two Years

        Alongside the recent year-end tests of the Intel HD Graphics 4600 Haswell desktop OpenGL benchmarks were also some separate HD Graphics 4000 results from a Core i7 Ivy Bridge laptop. The ASUS Zenbook used for benchmarking had a Core i7 3517U processor with HD Graphics 4000, 4GB of RAM, and dual 128GB SSDs.

        For this testing the same Zenbook with the same settings was tested across Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 13.10, and Ubuntu 14.10 with upgrades to the Linux 3.18 kernel and Mesa 10.5-devel to mark the end 2014 experience. Across the Ubuntu upgrades were new versions of the Linux kernel, Mesa, and xf86-video-intel DDX to affect the OpenGL and 2D performance along with other factors like switching of default CPU governors and 2D acceleration architectures.

      • Radeon Gallium3D Moved Closer To Performance Parity With AMD’s Catalyst In 2014

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Major Release

        Since then, we had a lot of things to be proud of: we made nice friends around the world, we strengthened local KDE communities in Brazil, we’ve been representing KDE for seven years in a row in major FLOSS Brazilian conferences. There were countless talks, short courses, hunting for new contributors, the first Akademy-BR and two LaKademies. That makes me happy but I’m, above all, a programmer. I’ve been missing the commits I haven’t done, the features I haven’t implemented and the bugs I haven’t fixed. I joined KDE already chased by that voice: “you have a Ph.D. to complete …” and it’s quite easy to let your passions dominate the priorities of your tasks

      • Processed in digiKam Call for Submissions

        Sharing is caring, right? So if you use digiKam for processing photos, why not share your photo editing techniques and tips with other users and showcase your best photos? I invite you to participate in the new Processed in digiKam feature on this very blog.

      • January Bug of the Month

        The KDE Gardening Team selected the January “Bug of the Month”. Before announcing it, let me write more about this initiative.

      • Knetwalk running on KF5 :)

        With this screen shot i think my work of porting knetwalk is complete. I would like other kde members to test knetwalk’s framework branch and report if they are experiencing any issue installing it on kf5. I will try and fix that error on my part.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Mutter Now Uses GTK+ For Drawing All Window Decorations

        Fixed this morning in Mutter Git for GNOME 3.16 development is Bug #741917 for having the GNOME3 window manager letting GTK+ draw window decorations. The bug by Florian Müllner explained, “With CSD [client side decorations] support in GTK+, we are now maintaining two very different (but supposedly matching) themes for the same elements. Just ditch our own theme format (which everyone hates anyway) and use GTK+ for server-side decorations as well. This has been lying around locally for a couple of months now and in a public branch for quite some time, so I consider this fairly well tested by now (mostly using the default theme).” Florian just wasn’t complaining about the issue but came with patches in hand.

  • Distributions

    • OpenELEC 5.0: Linux-based OS focused on Kodi 14 media center

      There are plenty of ways to turn a PC into a media center, but one popular (and powerful) option is to install Kodi, the application formerly known as XBMC. Kodi presents a full-screen, remote control-friendly user interface for navigating music, videos, photos, and other content. It also supports plug-ins that let you stream content from the internet or use your computer as a DVR to record live TV.

    • Reviews

      • Review: CentOS 7.0 GNOME

        I tried CentOS 7.0 GNOME on a live USB made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it’s like. (As will become clear soon enough, there are no pictures in this review, and for the same reason, this review will be relatively shorter. Suffice it to say for now that the distribution basically looks identical to Scientific Linux 7.0 GNOME from screenshots.)

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Linux Antique

        Let me introduce you to Linux Antique, aka Red Hat 5.2 KDE.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 to Finally Land in Present Times with GNOME 3.14

        Everyone knows that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not exactly the trend setter when it comes to adopting the latest packages. The operating system has always operated under the assumption that old means stable, but that is not true anymore. It’s possible that RHEL 7.2 will switch to the latest GNOME 3.14 version.

      • Exclusive CEO Interview: How Red Hat Inc. Crushed Expectations in Q3, and What’s Next

        Open source software veteran Red Hat (NYSE: RHT ) reported third-quarter results recently and the company crushed analyst expectations on both the top and bottom lines. Shares jumped as much as 14% higher the day after the release, and have only climbed higher in the few days since.

      • Red Hat March 2016 Options Begin Trading

        Investors in Red Hat Inc (Symbol: RHT) saw new options become available today, for the March 2016 expiration. One of the key data points that goes into the price an option buyer is willing to pay, is the time value, so with 445 days until expiration the newly available contracts represent a potential opportunity for sellers of puts or calls to achieve a higher premium than would be available for the contracts with a closer expiration. At Stock Options Channel , our YieldBoost formula has looked up and down the RHT options chain for the new March 2016 contracts and identified the following call contract of particular interest.

      • Red Hat Receives New Coverage from Analysts at Piper Jaffray (RHT)

      • Fedora

        • 18 Things to Do After Installing Fedora 21 Workstation

          If you’re a Fedora fan, I’m sure that you know that Fedora 21 has been released a few days ago, Fedora 21 came with many new changes which you can view in our last article about it. Also you may view the installation guide for Fedora 21 that we published few days ago.

        • Korora 19 “Bruce” Reaches End Of Life

          Since we use Fedora as the base for our distribution and thus follow the Fedora Project’s life cycle, it means that Korora 19/19.1 reaches it’s End Of Life status soon just like Fedora 19. We advise our users to upgrade to K20 before January 6th 2015 or, if it is released by then, K21. After this date systems that still run K19, won’t receive any security updates anymore and are considered to be vulnerable.

        • Korora 21 development progress

          As always we are working hard on the next Korora Project release to present our users an overall polished and smooth desktop experience.

        • Fedora 21 Gaming Benchmarks: X.Org vs. XWayland To End 2014

          As some extra benchmarks over the holidays, here’s some fresh numbers when running some OpenGL gaming tests on GNOME running natively on X.Org vs. GNOME on Wayland and the games running through XWayland.

          As my most recent benchmarks were from (X)Wayland on Fedora 21 from its pre-release form in September, before ending out the year I figured it’s time to run some new reference tests with all available Fedora 21 updates. Fedora 21 was tested with the GNOME on its X.Org Server and GNOME on Wayland sessions available via the F21 GDM log-in screen. The tests in question were running through XWayland to look at the overhead for this approach of running legacy X11 games/applications on Wayland.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source and Linux in 2014
  • Best open education tools and tales in 2014

    A great Bengali polymath and noble prize winner in literature (Rabindranath Tagore) once said: “Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time”. With changing times, the systems and customs that govern our society should also change. Human beings are intrinsically curious. To quote Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher, “Curiosity is the lust of the mind”. However, there also seems to be another aspect of our human nature that sees systems and customs in a preordained manner. This aspect stifles disruptive innovation, restricts growth in a vertical direction, and fortifies the stubborn staying power of our fixations with these systems and customs.

  • FOSS’ Shining Moments of 2014

    “This year we had a very dark highlight with the Systemd situation,” said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. “Wounds are still bleeding in some communities; forks were made; tons of antacids were consumed. Time will heal those, but for now, the bitter taste remains.” That said, “distros like Slackware, Gentoo and PCLinuxOS stayed put on their convictions not to use it, and that is very good.”

  • Improving on bug reports

    There’s nothing like the comments to justify an article. After I wrote about the average user’s difficulty with filing bugs, the responses came rapidly. Many agreed with me, or were willing to consider my comments plausible, but two with long histories of involvement with free software seemed only intermittently aware that any problem existed, and were more interested in faulting me for not suggesting more solutions.

  • The Open Bay – an open source Pirate Bay has emerged through Github

    The Pirate Bay previously made its website open for hosting by anyone with “minimal web knowledge”. After it was closed recently time and time again thanks to various lawsuits, GitHub has seen 372 copies of “The Open Bay” created, seeing The Pirate Bay hit the open source market.

  • Open Source Players Make IoT, Big Data Predictions for 2015

    Executives from Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, MapR and Splice Machine offer predictions for open source, big data, the Internet of Things, containerization and networking in 2015.

  • What will 2015 bring for the open source cloud?

    Regardless of what we see in 2015, the open source cloud will continue to grow, change, and adapt. What is your top prediction for this year?

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • MozJPEG Is Evolving Well For Better Optimized JPEGs

        While Fabrice Bellard’s work on the BPG Image Format has been getting a lot of attention in recent weeks for being an image format trying to replace JPEGs with offering higher compression ratio and other features over JPEGs, its design around the encoding of HEVC/H.265 makes its blocked by patents. For at least the interim, Mozilla is committed to making JPEGs better for the web.

      • MozJPEG 3.0

        Mozilla has done a study of image formats and concluded that WebP and JPEG XR are not a big-enough improvement over well-optimized JPEG. In the study only HEVC (H.265) was significantly better, but it’s a patent-encumbered format, so it can’t be used freely (shhhh!)

        It seems that Mozilla has a short-term and a long-term plan for image compression. They’re sponsoring development of the Daala codec, which is technically very interesting, but not production-ready yet.

  • CMS

  • Education

    • Get a college minor in open source

      In this lightning talk presentation, Remy tells us about the first academic minor in open source software at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) that has both a technical and non-technical track. The courses in this minor all use open source software in some way, shape, or form. Additionally, student engagement on campus includes social coding through hackathons and meetups.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Nana project + github

      There has been little activity on GNU Nana for the last few years so I’ve decided to leave this as a frozen archive. A slowly updating version is available on https://github.com/pjmaker/nana which deals with issues such as 64 bit CPU’s and autoconf.

    • User Liberation: Watch and share our new video

      Most people interact with free software every day, but many of those people don’t know what free software is or why they should go out of their way to use it. We want to fix that (and we think you do too), so we commissioned a short video that makes free software easy for everyone to understand:

    • The Licensing and Compliance Lab interviews Aaron Wolf of Snowdrift.coop

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

      In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Aaron Wolf, co-founder of Snowdrift.coop, a web platform coordinating patronage specifically for freely-licensed works. Aaron Wolf is a music teacher by trade who got involved in the free software movement in 2012 building on his earlier interest in free culture and cooperative economics.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Best open source in government: policies, new tools, and case studies

      As I reflect on another year of open source in government stories, I took a look back at the articles we published on Opensource.com this year to see if there were any noticeable commonalities. I found that most articles on the government channel fell into one of three categories: government policies, new tools available, and case studies.

      This is consistent with the trend I highlighted last year (We have policies. Now what?). As Mark Bohannon is fond of saying, “Governments are wrestling with the ‘how tos’ of open source choices; not ‘whether’ to use it.” Government policies are become more refined and sophisticated in regards to open technologies, and increasingly, governments are choosing to “default to open.” However, governments still need help implementing those policies, and citizens are stepping up by creating new, open source tools and open formats to help governments get the job done.

      Rather than do a traditional Top 10 list this year, I wanted to highlight a few standouts from each of these categories from 2014 that I think are worth reading if you missed them the first time. Or might even be worth a second read if it’s been a while.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • This Md. startup is taking off thanks to the global open-source hardware movement

        It’s for an analog-to-digital converter circuit: in English, a board for “computers that can take dozens of signals from the world and figure out what to do with them,” explained Umar Farooq, the cofounder of Scarab Hardware.

      • Bridging gongkai and free/open source
      • From Gongkai to Open Source

        Compared to the firmware, the hardware reverse engineering task was fairly straightforward. The documents we could scavenge gave us a notion of the ball-out for the chip, and the naming scheme for the pins was sufficiently descriptive that I could apply common sense and experience to guess the correct method for connecting the chip. For areas that were ambiguous, we had some stripped down phones I could buzz out with a multimeter or stare at under a microscope to determine connectivity; and in the worst case I could also probe a live phone with an oscilloscope just to make sure my understanding was correct.

Leftovers

  • AirAsia plane with 159 aboard overshoots Philippine runway

    An AirAsia Zest plane carrying 159 people overshot the runway and got stuck in a muddy field Tuesday at an international airport in the central Philippines after landing from Manila in windy weather, officials said. There were no reports of injuries.

  • EU judges oppose accession of EU to ECHR

    Accession of the EU to the ECHR has been a very slow-burn process, with the Commission starting things off in 1979 (sic). The breakthrough, or so it appeared at the time, was the entry into force of Article 6 of the Lisbon Treaty of European Union, in December 2009. This (Art.6(2)) makes it a treaty obligation that the EU

  • Virgin Atlantic pilot lands 447 passengers safely in Gatwick drama

    A Virgin Atlantic plane carrying 447 passengers was forced to make an emergency landing at Gatwick after landing gear problems hit a US-bound flight.

    Hundreds of holidaymakers applauded in relief after their pilot returned the Boeing 747 to base safely following an unconventional journey that included dumping fuel at sea and flying low over the Gatwick control tower twice so that air traffic controllers could scrutinise the main undercarriage with binoculars.

  • Video shows Virgin Atlantic plane’s faulty landing gear as it touches down
  • Virgin Atlantic VS43: Watch terrifying footage from inside plane as it makes emergency landing at Gatwick
  • The Myth of the Last Man

    …it is time to revisit one of the most potent myths of the British Empire

  • The best countries for work-life balance

    According to a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that ranked its 34 member countries on work-life balance, the United States comes in 29th in the category, which the report attributes to long work hours and a lack of social activities.

  • Science

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • 6 Ways New Media Are Getting It Right On Climate Change — And 1 That’s Very Wrong

      While some mainstream media outlets are starting to get the message about the threat of climate change, they are still far behind emerging media when it comes to climate coverage.

      Throughout 2014, new TV and web-based news sources have been continuing the trend of providing excellent climate coverage. Media Matters has identified six positive trends in how new media are covering climate change — and one trend that may be cause for alarm.

    • Pope to push for action on climate change

      Over the weekend, The Guardian reported that Pope Francis will issue an encyclical urging Catholics to push for action on climate change. The push will coincide with the efforts to follow up on the Lima agreement in the hope that they will lead to binding agreements for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

  • Finance

    • Empire of the pig

      China’s insatiable appetite for pork is a symbol of the country’s rise. It is also a danger to the world

    • Leading European truckmakers operated cartel for 14 years: FT

      Top European truckmakers operated a cartel for 14 years to delay the progress of emissions-reducing technology, the Financial Times reported, citing leaked documents in a European Commission investigation.

      The newspaper said that one of the documents states that DAF Trucks, Daimler, Iveco, Scania, Volvo and MAN “agreed the timing and price increase levels for the introduction of new emission technologies” to comply with Euro 3 rules on nitrogen oxide and other emissions in 2000. (on.ft.com/1vanmz5)

      A spokeswoman for the European Commission, which announced last month it had sent charges to truckmakers it accused of a long-running and serious price-fixing cartel, said it would not comment on the leaked document. Known as a statement of objections, it lists the accusations against the firms.

      Daimler, Volvo and Iveco parent CNH Industrial all confirmed receipt last month of the statements of objections, together with Volkswagen-controlled Scania and MAN.

  • Censorship

    • MIT indefinitely removes online physics lectures and courses by Walter Lewin

      MIT’s action comes in response to a complaint it received in October from a woman, who is an online MITx learner, claiming online sexual harassment by Lewin. She provided information about Lewin’s interactions with her, which began when she was a learner in one of his MITx courses, as well as information about interactions between Lewin and other women online learners.

    • Gmail blocked in China

      Google Inc’s Gmail was blocked in China after months of disruptions to the world’s biggest email service, with an anti-censorship advocate suggesting the Great Firewall was to blame.

      Large numbers of Gmail web addresses were cut off in China on Friday, said GreatFire.org, a China-based freedom of speech advocacy group. Users said the service was still down on Monday.

      “I think the government is just trying to further eliminate Google’s presence in China and even weaken its market overseas,” said a member of GreatFire.org, who uses a pseudonym.

      “Imagine if Gmail users might not get through to Chinese clients. Many people outside China might be forced to switch away from Gmail.”

      Google’s own Transparency Report, which shows real-time traffic to Google services, displayed a sharp drop-off in traffic to Gmail from China on Friday.

    • Gmail Access Blocked in China

      Gmail users in China are reportedly having trouble accessing Google’s free email service in the region.

      The shutdown was first reported by GreatFire.org, an organization that monitors online censorship in China. The site today re-tweeted a message from a Beijing-based writer who said in a translated message that Gmail was “fully blocked.”

    • Reports Arrive Showing Gmail and Service Provision Blocking in China

      For a growing array of users, Google’s Internet and cloud services are the backbone of how they stay connected, productive and informed. From Gmail to the Google Cloud Platform, Google has established Internet and cloud service standards around the world — but in China, not so much.

    • Cuba’s ‘offline internet’: no access, no power, no problem

      Cubans have found a unique albeit semi-legal way around their country’s practically nonexistent internet access – external hard drives passed from person to person

  • Privacy

    • Facebook’s Illuminating Algorithmic Cruelty

      My own year has had much that I value, but little of it has been shared with Facebook so my own edition is largely valueless. It also thankfully omits the things that make me cry, like the memory of my mother’s passing this spring or the six months of triage following it. If you’ve chosen to share with Facebook, this is a wake-up call that you have also given them the implicit permission to make you relive memories on command.

      Frankly it’s no worse than the other things you’ve given them permission to do with the intimacies you’ve shared. They are just as free with advertisers and social data miners; you just don’t have that rubbed in your face. If you dislike “Year In Review” you probably will hate the things they do with your data without telling you (even if they have secured your permission in advance through their Terms of Service).

    • Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty

      A picture of my daughter, who is dead. Who died this year.

      Yes, my year looked like that. True enough. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl. It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.

      And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault. This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.

      But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.

      To show me Rebecca’s face and say “Here’s what your year looked like!” is jarring. It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate. These are hard, hard problems. It isn’t easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it’s hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.

    • Facebook’s ‘Year in Review’ app swings from merely annoying to tragic

      Unless you’re making an active decision to disconnect this holiday season, you’ve probably seen a flood of Facebook “Year In Review” posts — a sort of digital card highlighting the biggest moments of 2014, algorithmically customized for each user.

      The posts are slickly designed, even if their visual uniformity can make scrolling through a newsfeed of the digital holiday letters a bit grating. However, in some cases the summaries can go beyond irritating and become downright cruel.

      The default tagline for the posts is “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.” But not everyone actually had a great year. For some users, the prompts to view their own digital year in review may dig up painful memories.

    • Prying Eyes: Inside the NSA’s War on Internet Security

      US and British intelligence agencies undertake every effort imaginable to crack all types of encrypted Internet communication. The cloud, it seems, is full of holes. The good news: New Snowden documents show that some forms of encryption still cause problems for the NSA.

    • NSA Documents: Attacks on VPN, SSL, TLS, SSH, Tor
    • Dotcom: Encrypted MegaChat is “Coming Soon”

      As 2014 draws to an end, encryption and privacy remain high on the agendas of many netizens. Cloud hosting service Mega has been building its reputation in this niche and is now preparing to deliver a new privacy tool. According to Kim Dotcom the company he founded will soon wave “bye bye” to Skype with the debut of MegaChat.

    • Revealed: supposedly uncrackable encryption tools still not safe

      An online article supposedly reveals the encryption tools that spies can’t hack, but the list doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

      An article over at Fairfax Media entitled ‘Revealed: the encryption tools spies can and can’t hack’ starts off with a lot of stuff about Edward Snowden, his revelations, COMINT, Five eyes and more.

      It references Australia’s Federal Attorney-General naming Edward Snowden as ‘an American traitor’.

    • Jacob Appelbaum: Reconstructing narratives – transparency in the service of justice [31c3]
    • LEAKED: Secret Negotiations to Let Big Brother Go Global

      Much has been written, at least in the alternative media, about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), two multilateral trade treaties being negotiated between the representatives of dozens of national governments and armies of corporate lawyers and lobbyists (on which you can read more here, here and here). However, much less is known about the decidedly more secretive Trade in Services Act (TiSA), which involves more countries than either of the other two.

      At least until now, that is. Thanks to a leaked document jointly published by the Associated Whistleblowing Press and Filtrala, the potential ramifications of the treaty being hashed out behind hermetically sealed doors in Geneva are finally seeping out into the public arena.

      If signed, the treaty would affect all services ranging from electronic transactions and data flow, to veterinary and architecture services. It would almost certainly open the floodgates to the final wave of privatization of public services, including the provision of healthcare, education and water. Meanwhile, already privatized companies would be prevented from a re-transfer to the public sector by a so-called barring “ratchet clause” – even if the privatization failed.

    • Inside the NSA’s War on Internet Security

      NSA documents indicate they can get into SSH, along with IPSec and PPTP, but that PGP/GnuPG and OTR, as well as TrueCrypt are secure.

    • Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters [TED video]

      In some ways it may be fair to say that 2014 was the year when issues of survaillance and privacy became a huge part of our public discourse. And so I thought that re-posting this fantastic TED video by Glenn Greenwald on Why Privacy Matters is rather appropriate.

    • Open Source Privacy Tools NSA Can’t Crack: OTR, PGP, RedPhone, Tor And Tails

      In a recent talk at the Chaos Communication Congress, Jacob Appelbaum, who is a core member of the Tor Project and is now working with Der Spiegel and Laura Poitras to analyze the Snowden documents, unveiled some documents showing which tools NSA couldn’t crack.

  • Civil Rights

    • Thrown in the cells for beeping at a police car! Driver handcuffed and DNA-tested… then faces six-month legal ordeal

      The 34-year-old train driver, who has never been in trouble with the police in his life, was accused of abusive and threatening behaviour and charged with a public order offence.

      [...]

      Each time, Mr Samara said, he beeped his horn instinctively. ‘For a train driver, especially because we have no brake, using the horn if there is danger is just a natural thing to do,’ he said.

      On the last occasion the van stopped and a policewoman got out and challenged him.

      ‘I didn’t shout or swear or wind my window down, but I did tell her the manner of her driving had caused me to slam on the brakes,’ Mr Samara said.

      He said the policewoman told him she was out looking for a missing child. She was upset about his attitude and told him: ‘When you have a problem don’t come to us as we won’t want to know.’

      Mr Samara told her he was going to make a complaint about her.

      Then her male colleague joined her, ordered him out of his car and handcuffed him. Mr Samara was arrested and taken to the police station where he was left in the cells for two hours and eventually charged.

      He appeared at a preliminary court hearing but prosecutors dropped the case last month after CCTV obtained from the police station contradicted the officer’s evidence that he was threatening and abusive.

    • Victim: Indecent proposition from New London chief was ‘chilling’

      Speaking publicly for the first time, Janelle Westfall said state laws failed her after New London’s former police chief made her a proposition: If she posed nude for him, the underage alcohol charges against her would be dropped. Because of Westfall’s complaint, David Seastrand will never be allowed to serve as a police officer again. She also received a $70,000 settlement from the town. But, she adds, “It just bothers me that it happened, and that they couldn’t prosecute (Seastrand). It bothers me that it could happen again to someone else.”

    • The Sneakiest Way Prosecutors Get a Guilty Verdict: PowerPoint

      At least 10 times in the last two years, US courts have reversed a criminal conviction because prosecutors violated the rules of fair argument with PowerPoint. In even more cases, an appellate court has taken note of such misconduct while upholding the conviction anyway or while reversing on other grounds (as in the case of Sergey Fedoruk). Legal watchdogs have long asserted that prosecutors have plenty of ways to quietly put their thumb on the scales of justice —such as concealing exculpatory evidence, eliminating jury-pool members based on race, and so on. Now they can add another category: prosecution by PowerPoint. “It’s the classic ‘A picture is worth a thousand words,’” said Eric Broman, a Seattle attorney who focuses on criminal appeals. “Until the courts say where the boundaries are, prosecutors will continue to test the boundaries.”

    • Freedom of Info at 10: Tony Blair’s WORST NIGHTMARE

      Although the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 2000, it didn’t come into force until 1 January 2005, meaning we’ve had just about 10 years of FoI – as the Information Commissioner’s Office was keen to point out in a minor PR blizzard.

      That load of celebratory snippets* included such worthy-but-dull moments as the first ICO decision notice. Issued in February 2005, it ordered Westminster Council to cough up information about pavements.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Flash! Amazon Acts like For-Profit Company!

      Apparently, Amazon just might be pursuing a way to maximize its own profits rather than those of indie authors. What a shock!

      Meanwhile, Kindle Unlimited authors are reacting by chopping books up into smaller pieces so that they get more fees for the same amount of work (a bit unseemly and obvious, to my taste), or by pulling their books from the program entirely (a rational response, but what will Amazon do next? After all, it has complete authority over what it chooses to pay authors, regardless of the program involved).

      It’s ironic that the scales should now be falling from the eyes of Amazon fans so soon after the Hatchette dispute led them to vilify traditionally published authors for their gullibility in siding with their publishers, and their business model, instead of abandoning them for Amazon. Now, it seems, that career path does not seem so certain.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • UK cinema calls police on preteens with iPads during Mockingjay screening

        Both The Daily Mail and The Argus are carrying the story of seven 12-year-old Brighton, UK girls who were questioned by police after staff at a Cineworld multiplex reportedly saw that some of the girls had iPads and smartphones. Concerned that the girls might be engaging in copyright infringement by recording parts of the movie, the staff called 999 (the UK emergency services number, equivalent to 911 in the US) and requested police to help deal with the situation, which the Mail says the staff characterized as an “emergency.”

      • isoHunt Founder: Piracy is A Convenience and Access Problem.

        For isoHunt Founder Gary Fung, 2014 was the first full year without him taking a central place in the BitTorrent landscape. But even though his site was crushed by the MPAA, Hollywood is still facing the same piracy problems. Today Fung shares his views on piracy and the future of media distribution.

User Liberation: Watch and share the FSF’s new video

Posted in Videos at 7:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz


12.28.14

EPO Corruption: Battistelli Augments His ‘Loyals’ Circle With Frederic Angermann and Charm Offensive in Patent Lawyers’ Sites

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Jesper Kongstad
Jesper Kongstad. Photo from the Nordic Patent Institute.

Summary: The extent of the EPO’s corruption is further revealed by new appointments that reek of conflict of interest and a revival of Benoît Battistelli’s fearless authoritarianism (protection offered by an extension of those ‘loyal’ to his reckless authority)

Battistelli has done a bit of a ‘media tour’ as of late, striving to improve his image and restore the reputation taken from him by his very own staff.

Battistelli, for reasons we have demonstrated in many past articles, is a bully and a tyrant. He turned the EPO into a private venture, totally detached from public interests, completely unaccountable (Battistelli ousted his opposition and those who oversee him, including external ones in the Enlarged Board of Appeal and perhaps the European Parliament), and filled with a baggage of serious corruption, including many criminal charges. To use a timely analogy, see this year’s exclusive report titled “The corruption of Britain: UK’s key institutions infiltrated by criminals”. As soon as the media becomes active again we will return to covering new documents and new stories about the EPO scandals. Today we shall look back at recent developments, preceding Christmas Day.

“The collusions galore has turned a seemingly self-regulating disparate collection of organisms (AC, BoA, EPO etc.) into a superorganism that devours or destroys opposition without any accountability.”The president of the FFII, which opposes software patents in Europe, wrote last week that “EPO staff representatives who attended heard “je m´en fou de vos opinions” and “encore un mot et vous etes virez”,” noting what he called “EPO corruption” because Battistelli “appointed Frederic Angermann, with whom Benoit [Battistelli] had already successfully worked together at INPI”.

This is already the subject of complaints in France, but be sure Battistelli will jump into the scene fuming with “damage control” in the face of many anonymous comments (probably his staff). Patents glamourisation site “Managing Intellectual Property has just published an article,” [puff piece] said IP Kat, “containing a series of questions and answers [softball opening lines], put by Managing Editor James Nurton to EPO President Benoit Battistelli and Chariman of the Administrative Council, Jesper Kongstad.”

Here is this puff piece from the patent lawyers’ site.

“Mr Jesper Kongstad reminds people that the EPO is financing itself for the patent fees,” wrote the FFII’s President, correctly calling it a lie (“wrong”) because much of the money is actually derived from European taxpayers. “Sorry Mr Jesper Kongstad,” he continues, “representatives of 38 gov of EPO AC are not democratically elected, not elected by people” (in fact, some are very much connected to those whom they are supposed to oversee or regulate).

As we have shown before, Jesper Kongstad is loyal to Battistelli and his cronies. He even provides coverup for them. Him speaking alongside Battistelli serves as somewhat of a clue here. That’s not how two independent bodies should present themselves to the press. They’re conjoined through mutual loyalty, or ‘protection’, to use Mafia-inspired terminology. The collusions galore has turned a seemingly self-regulating disparate collection of organisms (AC, BoA, EPO etc.) into a superorganism that devours or destroys opposition without any accountability. Even the European Parliament is too timid to handle this monster, which resembles the way that Congress and Senate in the United States now approach three-letter agencies, especially the CIA.

What goes on in the EPO is a very big deal because those who run the organisation do a huge disservice to all member nations. “Videos of the UPC rules of procedure being written by the patent industry are here,” writes the FFII’s President. We have been warning about the UPC for years.

Thankfully, judging by the will of the staff (the heart of the EPO), the EPO’s management continues its collapse as people at all levels protest. As Merpel from IP Kat put it the other day: “Over the past month, this weblog has hosted news and developments of reports of unrest among the workers at the European Patent Office (EPO). These have been some of the most commented-upon posts in this history of the blog. The unrest is not, as might have been supposed, only at the level of the Examiners and regular employees, but even within the exalted ranks of the Boards of Appeal and Enlarged Board. Since news does not develop in a neat and tidy manner, the IPKat has asked Merpel to review the recent events, to write a brief summary of the events themselves and to outline the issues now facing the EPO. Merpel emphasises the word “brief”; with hundreds of comments, it is not going to be possible to reflect them all in detail.”

A lot of this debate comes from and is shaped by EPO staff, not just stakeholders. In the coming weeks we shall say a lot more about what’s wrong with the EPO and why some of its managers (including the very top ones) should be in prison, not in an overpriced office in Munich (alluding not only to Željko Topić here). We welcome sources to come forth if there is more that they can anonymously share with us. █

EPO Breaking News: The European Parliament Dismisses Complaint About EPO Abuses

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Petition 2848/2013 — a petition which deals with the EPO scandals we have been covering for months — is dismissed in a fashion that leaves the Parliament arguably complicit and at best toothless

“We just got news from Zagreb,” said one of our numerous sources inside and outside the EPO. The “Petitions Committee of the European Parliament has recently decided not to admit Petition 2848/2013,” said our source, enclosing the image below (click the image for a larger version).

“In a rather bizarre twist,” explained the source, “the Chair of the Petitions Committee (Swedish MEP Cecilia Wikström) suggests that the petitioner should contact the EPO Boards of Appeal.

“However, the EPO Boards of Appeal deal exclusively with patent-related appeal cases and have no competence to investigate managerial appointments at the EPO. That is the responsibility of the Administrative Council which has already ignored a number of requests to submit Topic’s appointment to an independent investigation.”

Moreover, complaints from the EPO have already come from the Enlarged Board of Appeal to the capacity possible, directed at the Administrative Council which is very much complicit in Battistelli’s reign of terror (more on that in future articles of ours). This basically means that the European Parliament is unwilling to intervene and stop a scenario of very gross abuse. What does that say about the European Parliament?

“This basically means that the European Parliament is unwilling to intervene and stop a scenario of very gross abuse.”“So it seems the European Parliament has decided to wash its hands of the affair,” said our source. “This means that although they are apparently content to entrust the administration of the EU Unitary Patent to the EPO, they are not prepared to exercise any oversight with respect to the governance of the EPO.”

Given some of the ‘free’ ‘trade’ affairs as of late, the European Parliament has given citizens of the EU many reasons for distrust and suspicion, “Work that one out if you can,” summed up our source.

The scandals are far from over as we still have a pile of documents to organise, analyse and present. The EPO is a laughing stock, but for those affected by it (including EPO workers) it is not funny. █

Petition Nr. 2848-2013

Links 28/12/2014: OpenELEC 5.0, KaOS 2014.12

Posted in News Roundup at 5:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Funding

  • Openness/Sharing

    • GitHub’s Most Popular Project Is The New Open Source Pirate Bay

      After The Pirate Bay made its site available for anyone to host with “minimal web knowledge”, the project has become a hit on the popular developer site GitHub, and 372 copies of “The Open Bay” have been created.

      The Pirate Bay was recently raided by police in Sweden, knocking its services offline. Its answer? Make it possible for anyone to create their own Pirate Bay, complete with all of its old torrents, and the ability to carry on the tradition.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Douglas Carswell tells Ukip to stop blaming foreigners as youth poll shows Nigel Farage is even less popular than Nick Clegg

    Douglas Carswell, one of Ukip’s most senior figures, has called on the party to stop making “the mistake of blaming outsiders” for Britain’s problems and described disliking foreigners as “not merely offensive, but absurd”.

    The former Tory MP’s comments came as a damning new poll showed Ukip had failed to win the support of young voters ahead of the general election in May, who were found to be six times more likely to choose the Green Party.

    Mr Carswell, whose by-election victory over his former party in October made him one of Ukip’s most influential faces and one of their two members in the Commons, said it was “interdependence that put the Great into Great Britain”.

    His comments come after party leader Nigel Farage defended the language used by Ukip candidate Kerry Smith, who mocked gay party members as “p******s”, joked about shooting people from Chigwell in a “peasant hunt” and referred to someone as a “C****y bird”.

    Mr Farage also made headlines last month when he blamed his lateness to a paid-for party event on “immigrants” causing greater traffic on the M4.

  • AirAsia Flight From Indonesia To Singapore Loses Contact With Air Traffic ControlAirAsia Flight From Indonesia To Singapore Loses Contact With Air Traffic Control

    Flight QZ 8501 — an Airbus 320-200 — lost communication with Indonesia’s Surabaya Juanda International Airport at 7:24 Singapore time on Sunday morning, the airline said. The plane “was requesting deviation due to enroute weather before communication with the aircraft was lost,” AirAsia said in a statement.

    “The weather was not good — it was bad — at the estimated location the plane lost contact,” Indonesian Transport Ministry official Hadi Mustafa said.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be Privatized

      Former Nestle CEO claims water is not a human right and should be privatized and controlled. He also states that GMOs have never caused illnesses despite hundreds of independent studies showing otherwise.

      So, is water a free and basic human right, or should all the water on the planet belong to major corporations?

      Should the poor who cannot afford to pay these said corporations suffer from starvation due to their lack of financial wealth?

  • Security

    • A Straightforward Chronology of the Sony Hacking Incident

      Security geeks reveal government disinformation

    • Experts Are Still Divided on Whether North Korea Is Behind Sony Attack

      The FBI announcement last week that it had uncovered evidence in the Sony hack pointing to North Korea appears to have settled the issue for a lot of people—in Washington, DC.

      “As a result of our investigation,” the FBI announced, “and in close collaboration with other U.S. government departments and agencies, the FBI now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions.”

    • Who Really Hacked Sony Is Like A High-Tech Movie Plot

      Everyone has a theory about who really hacked SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT website, according to ASSOCIATED PRESS.

    • Sony Emails, Seth Rogen Fuel Speculation of CIA Role Making The Interview

      Truth can definitely be stranger than fiction, especially if you believe what actor/director Seth Rogen recently said about the production behind his latest film, The Interview.

    • Sony’s ‘The Interview’ makes $1m on Christmas Day

      Sony Pictures’ controversial movie “The Interview” collected more than $1m in a limited Christmas Day release, and is expected to make several millions of dollars over the holiday weekend.

    • Chinese Viewers Mostly Give Thumbs Up for ‘The Interview’

      Although Beijing is Pyongyang’s only significant ally on the world stage, many ordinary Chinese have mixed feelings about their government’s relationship with North Korea, which has been called as close as “lips and teeth.” Some have come to see a reflection of their own condition in North Korea’s poverty, repressiveness and over-the-top propaganda. Online, some commentators have begun to refer to the North Korean leader as “Fatty Kim the 3rd.”

    • False Flagging the World towards War. The CIA Weaponizes Hollywood

      The campaign of aggression against North Korea, from the hacking of Sony and the crescendo of noise over the film, The Interview, bears all the markings of a CIA false flag operation.

      The hacking and alleged threats to moviegoers has been blamed entirely on North Korea, without a shred of credible evidence beyond unsubstantiated accusations by the FBI. Pyongyang’s responsibility has not been proven. But it has already been officially endorsed, and publicly embraced as fact.

      The idea of “America under attack by North Korea” is a lie.

      The actual individuals of the mysterious group responsible for the hacking remain conveniently unidentified. A multitude of possibilities—Sony insiders, hackers-for-hire, generic Internet vandalism—have not been explored in earnest. The more plausible involvement of US spying agencies—the CIA, the NSA, etc. , their overwhelming technological capability and their peerless hacking and surveillance powers—remains studiously ignored.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Afghanistan conflict: When Enduring Freedom is turned asunder

      In December of 2001, the mightiest military force the world has ever known launched ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan. Today, the US and NATO military mission in that distant country officially comes to a close, but the foe remains unvanquished.

      [...]

      To sum up, the US and NATO mission in Afghanistan can rightfully be called disastrous. The America that once was aghast at the idea of torturing people wholesale, is today subdued and numbed to the so-called “black sites” in Afghanistan and around the globe, where torture became the norm. Compared to NSA spying on US citizens, the cover-up or misdirection used to conceal these activities are outright war crimes for most people. Names like Parwan Detention Facility, the Salt Pit, and detainees like Khaled el-Masri and other tortured detainees echo a dark reality of this war on terror. For the leaders who have helped perpetuate these wars, though, cheap talk still resonates. Barack Obama just spoke to US troops on Christmas day about this war’s effects. He said:

    • 2 Drone Strikes in Pakistan Are Said to Kill 9 Militant Suspects

      At least nine people suspected of being militants, including four foreigners, were killed in two separate drone strikes in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, a Pakistani security official said.

    • Two U.S. drone strikes kill seven militants in Pakistan

      Two suspected U.S. drones fired missiles at militant hideouts in northwest Pakistan on Friday killing at least seven fighters, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

    • US drone strike kills 3 in Afghanistan’s Logar

      A US drone strike has killed at least three civilians in Afghanistan’s troubled southeastern province of Logar.

    • US Drones Kill Seven People in Pakistan

      At least seven alleged Taliban fighters died in two separate US drone attacks in the northern-western Pakistani province of North Waziristan, where the Army is carrying out an air and ground operation against the insurgency.

    • U.S. Air Force Intel Unit Helped Kill 1,200 People in a Year

      A secretive group of U.S. Air Force intelligence specialists flying aboard American spy planes helped U.S. military commandos kill more than a thousand enemy combatants in just a single year back in 2012.

    • Torture, Drones, and Hollywood: A Former CIA Operative Talks

      Robert Baer: Assassination doesn’t work, generally. I approached it from the premise that had we assassinated Hitler in 1933 we would have saved lives and destruction. Probably we would have, but in general assassination doesn’t turn out to be a way to avoid war. I take my own experience and other assassinations through history and get a lot into the drone program, which doesn’t work, as well. It’s clear to me, with the massacre at this Pakistani school [at Peshawar]; the CIA in a sense had a role in that, because the two predecessors of the man [Maulana Fazlullah, AKA “Mullah Radio”] who ordered that were both killed by drones. – See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/12/187945/torture-drones-and-hollywood-former-cia-operative-talks#sthash.jMxsX8Oy.dpuf

    • If the Senate issued a report on America’s drone program

      There were the new tidbits of information on the workings of the president’s “kill list” and the convening of “terror Tuesday” briefings to target specific individuals around the world. There were the insider discussions of ongoing decisions to target American citizens abroad for assassination by drone without due process of law and the revealing emails in which participants up to presidential advisers discussed how exactly to craft the exculpatory “legal” documents for those acts at the Department of Justice.

    • Marjorie Cohn on Drone Warfare: Illegal, Immoral and Ineffective

      Law professor, writer and social critic Marjorie Cohn explores human rights and US foreign policy, and the frequent contradiction between the two in her monthly Truthout column, “Human Rights and Global Wrongs.” She agreed to an interview with Leslie Thatcher recently about her new book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.

    • The cyclical nature of the War on Terror

      Acts of ‘terror’ have been permeating through our televisions screens and newspapers in the West to the extent that we now seem to be surrounded by them. The ‘war on terror’ makes ‘us’ in the West feel safe, but what is almost never considered is how ‘our’ safety affects the lives of the ‘others’ we aim to destroy.

    • After Scrutiny, C.I.A. Mandate Is Untouched

      Over a lunch in Washington in 1976, James J. Angleton, for years the ruthless chief of counterintelligence at the C.I.A., likened the agency to a medieval city occupied by an invading army.

      “Only, we have been occupied by Congress,” he told a young congressional investigator. “With our files rifled, our officials humiliated, and our agents exposed.”

      The spymaster had cause for worry. He had endured a public grilling about his role in domestic spying operations by a select committee headed by Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, that spent years looking into intelligence abuses. And the Central Intelligence Agency, used to doing what it wanted while keeping Congress mostly in the dark, was in the midst of convulsions that would fundamentally remake its mission.

    • Drone strikes: are they Obama’s enhanced interrogation techniques?

      The Obama administration insists that international humanitarian law (IHL) is the applicable law because it claims the US is involved in an armed conflict.

    • Drone strikes: Obama’s torture technique?

      On November 24, two weeks before the Senate Intelligence Committee released its “torture report,” Reprieve, a UK-based human rights NGO, published the results of its latest investigation into President Obama’s drone strike program. While Obama was preparing for the inevitable release of the Senate’s report which provided the most extensive insight yet into the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush administration, Reprieve provided insights of its own into the Obama administration’s equally disturbing targeted drone assassination program.

    • Comment: Are US military drone strikes legal?

      On November 24, two weeks before the Senate Intelligence Committee released its “torture report,” Reprieve, a UK-based human rights NGO, published the results of its latest investigation into President Obama’s drone strike program. While Obama was preparing for the inevitable release of the Senate’s report which provided the most extensive insight yet into the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush administration, Reprieve provided insights of its own into the Obama administration’s equally disturbing targeted drone assassination program.

    • How the CIA Sold Obama on Counterinsurgency by Drone Assassination

      The Washington Post, ABC News, and other news outlets stress the report’s findings that targeted assassinations had limited impacts on Taliban targets. While this leaked report does criticize the effectiveness of some High-Value Target (HVT) assassination operations, such characterizations mistake the CIA’s argument that not all counterinsurgency problems can be solved with targeted assassinations as an argument against such operations. Far from dismissing HVT operations, the report advocates them in select conditions.

      What the Post and others miss is the role this CIA report played in larger conversations about counterinsurgency strategies among members of the CIA, Pentagon, Congress, White House, and corporate military profiteers. In 2009, these conversations focused not only on the roles counterinsurgency should play in warzones, but whether this counterinsurgency should be based on soft power models (providing needed services, etc.) or hard power models (like Project Phoenix in Vietnam, or JSOC’s targeted assassination programs in Iraq). While this leaked document is only a single report, it provides a view into the types of intelligence analysis that informed President Obama’s rapid increased use of CIA HVT drone operations targeting individuals, including American citizens, in Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan.

      This 18-page CIA report reads like a Harvard International Relations dissertation proposal—an observation more about audience, than author–as it reviews data on past HVT programs, weighing the “positive and negative implications of targeted assassinations” in select insurgency campaigns around the world. High-Value Targeting refers to “focused operations against specific individuals or networks whose removal or marginalization should disproportionately degrade an insurgent group’s effectiveness. The criteria for designating high-value targets will vary according to factors such as the insurgent group’s capabilities, structure, and leadership dynamics and the government’s desired outcome.”

    • ‘Why are covert CIA agents operating in allied EU countries?’

      After a CIA memo explaining how to get through tighter EU border security checks was leaked to WikiLeaks, the question arose why are there covert agents in the countries the US is meant to share intelligence with, former MI5 agent Annie Machon told RT.

    • Judge: CIA recruit must testify in leak case

      While the source isn’t named, Risen’s 2006 book “State of War” discusses a Russian nuclear scientist the CIA used as an intermediary to pass nuclear blueprints containing intentional flaws to Iran for use in their nuclear program. Risen’s account of what the CIA effort code-named “Operation Merlin” suggests that the Russian became concerned the flaws were too obvious and flagged them to the Iranians.

    • Torture just one CIA abuse

      One case of many was the CIA’s involvement beginning in 1970 with the overthrow of the elected Chilean President Salvador Allende. They did this through instigating a coup that installed the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. His repression called the Caravan of Death resulted in the death of thousands and torturing tens of thousands. This account is a sordid story and approval went for it went all the way to the White House. Check out the details on Wikipedia. Unbelievable.

    • Dividing the CIA in Two

      When created in 1947, the CIA was meant to coordinate objective intelligence and thus avert some future Pearl Harbor attack, but its secondary role – engaging in covert operations – came to corrupt its independence, a problem that must now be addressed, says ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.

    • Let the C.I.A. Do What It Is Supposed to Do

      From its inception in 1947, the C.I.A. was designed with one overriding mission: preventing strategic surprise. Its controversial interrogation program is just the latest symptom of a larger disease, the tyranny of the current. Since 9/11, rather than assessing the threat landscape of the future, the C.I.A. has been mired in the terrorist threat of the here and now. Time and energy spent on targeted killings, black sites and interrogations with water boards and rectal hydration was time and energy that could have been spent better assessing and anticipating emerging challenges like the Arab Spring, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions, or ISIS’s gathering strength. White House officials and warfighters naturally worry most about today. The C.I.A.’s job is to also worry about tomorrow.

    • White House petition seeks release of all JFK files

      Prominent JFK assassination researcher and author Lamar Waldron has posted on the White House website a petition calling for the release of all classified government files on the JFK assassination and a pardon for former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden.

    • Wikileaks: CIA’s Brennan on ‘witch hunt’ when Hastings was killed

      A 2010 email released by Wikileaks from a top-level CIA contractor asserts that CIA Director John Brennan, the subject of a story by deceased journalist Michael Hastings, was on a “witch hunt” against “investigative journalists” perceived as hostile.

      [...]

      The story on Brennan was never published.
      Stratfor was once called “The Shadow CIA” by Barron’s. In 2012 WikiLeaks began publishing “The Global Intelligence Files,” over five million e-mails from the Texas-based company.

      The email has never been disavowed by Stratfor. When San Diego 6 reporter Kim Dvorak asked the CIA for comment on the email in the context of the Hastings’ death, in an August, 2013 report, a CIA spokesman responded:

      ““Without commenting on information disseminated by WikiLeaks, any suggestion that Director Brennan has ever attempted to infringe on constitutionally-protected press freedoms is offensive and baseless.” ”

      Michael Hasting was killed on June 18, 2013, when the new Mercedes C250 SUV he had just leased hit a tree after running numerous red lights at over 100 mph in Los Angeles. A surveillance video at a pizza shop captured a fiery, violent explosion, which is uncharacteristic of high-speed impacts. Generations of advances in safety design have made accidents exhibiting these characteristics unheard of.

    • Letters: CIA torture report is disturbing

      Those of us who lived through the atrocities of World War II, the Nuremberg trials of Axis leadership for crimes against the peace and humanity, and the growth of the U.S. national security state are aware of CIA’s principal role. It’s to do things that the government wants done with plausible deniability. Harry Truman’s creation of the CIA was the worst mistake of his presidency.

    • Head of Stratfor, ‘Private CIA’, Says Overthrow of Yanukovych Was ‘The Most Blatant Coup in History’

      In a December 19th interview in the Russian magazine Kommersant, George Friedman, who is the Founder and CEO of Stratfor, the ‘Shadow CIA’ firm, says of the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych that occurred on February 22nd of 2014: “It really was the most blatant coup in history.” Perhaps he is saying this because of the videos that were uploaded to the Web which showed it to be so, but this statement by him contradicts the description that is asserted by the U.S. White House and the European Union, and the Western press, which description is that Yanukovych’s overthrow was instead just the result of the U.S. Government’s $5+ billion expense since 1991 to establish ‘democracy’ in Ukraine.

    • LETTER: Is U.S. run by war merchants, drone killers and CIA torturers?

      Wars against nations that haven’t harmed us in any way.

  • Finance

    • Tourists to UK ‘to spend record levels in 2015′

      Spending by tourists visiting the UK is expected to reach record levels next year, the government has said.

      Spending by overseas visitors will top £22bn for the first time, according to forecasts by tourism body VisitBritain.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Worst 2014 Smears From Right-Wing Websites

      Right-wing media websites continued to undermine their credibility in 2014 by peddling a number of false, ridiculous, and bigoted smears. Here are the top smears from conservative websites The Daily Caller, Breitbart.com, and The Washington Free Beacon.

  • Censorship

    • The Interview and free speech: let’s not get too smug

      Censorship battles are usually a good thing, especially when powerful voices and interests are ranged on opposing sides. They illuminate the social and political landscape in a country – our own, as well as those we routinely regard as less enlightened. But the triangular controversy over Sony Pictures’ low-budget comedy The Interview, North Korea and the White House has not made my Christmas.

    • 1961 | The C.I.A. Readies a Cuban Invasion, and The Times Blinks

      In an abundance of caution, Mr. Szulc’s article was shifted at the last moment from its position in the upper right corner as the lead story of the day. It was further demoted in importance when the revised layout for Page 1 specified a headline one column wide rather than four columns.

    • Iran expands ‘smart’ Internet censorship

      Iran is to expand what it calls “smart filtering” of the Internet, a policy of censoring undesirable content on websites without banning them completely, as it used to, the government said on Friday.

    • Tailored censorship? Iran unveils ‘smart’ web filters

      Iran is rolling out new “individual filters” that will let citizens receive access to different parts of the internet, depending on government clearance, and will allow censors to weed out specific website pages – not entire domains, as they currently do.

    • Google and Social Media Resisting Russian Censorship Orders

      Google, Facebook and Twitter are putting up resistance to orders received from the Russian government to block and remove information about the planned rally by the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny next month, which might result into a full scale showdown as Russia tried to censor online content.

    • China censors news on Sony hack

      Censorship is a part of daily life in China. News articles are erased from online search engines, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are banned, and CNN is routinely blacked out for Chinese viewers.

      Instagram was a huge hit in China — until the government banned it during the Hong Kong protests.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Don’t drink and do remember your bribes: The CIA guide to how to travel like James Bond

      Take it easy at the Christmas party if you plan to fly the next day. According to the CIA’s secret travel guide for spies, travellers with “shaking or trembling hands, rapid breathing for no apparent reason, cold sweats, pulsating carotid arteries, a flushed face, and avoidance of eye contact” will arouse suspicion.

    • CIA manuals advising spies how to maintain their cover while using false documents at airports released by Wikleaks
    • How CIA spies move freely through Europe on fake passports

      Secret CIA documents advising undercover American spies on how to move through Europe on fake passports have been published online, revealing growing concern that tighter EU rules could blow the cover of US intelligence agents.

      Two documents released by WikiLeaks show that CIA agents are currently able to freely enter and travel through the 26 countries of the Schengen Area with only a “minimal” risk that EU border guards will grow suspicious.

      There is little chance of being detected when first entering the Schengen Area because European border guards are focused on “illegal immigration and criminal activities, not counterintelligence”, the CIA documents concluded.

    • Calls For Holder To Investigate, Prosecute CIA Torture
    • Calls Grow to Prosecute Former US Officials for CIA Torture

      The ACLU presented a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Monday demanding an investigation into those responsible for the CIA’s torture tactics.

      Recent revelations about CIA torture under former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney between 2001-2009 have put the two figures under increased scrutiny.

    • Human rights groups call for special prosecutor to investigate CIA torture

      The ACLU and Human Rights Watch say the offences amount to ‘a vast criminal conspiracy’ and are ‘shocking and corrosive’ to US democracy and credibility

    • Human rights groups urge criminal investigation into CIA torture

      President Barack Obama should appoint a special prosecutor to determine if former Bush administration and CIA officials broke the law by having suspected terrorists abducted and tortured in secret prisons by waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods, two leading human rights groups said Monday.

    • Operation Mind Control: Chilling CIA Experiments On US Citizens

      Bacteria to infect the enemy, poisons for assassinations, truth drugs for interrogations, germ warfare and brainwashing

    • Violence, torture and pestilence: 2014 was not a great year for U.S.

      For the United States, 2014 was a year of racial violence, rape, war, terrorism, drought and pestilence.

    • Polish MPs to investigate CIA payment for torture sites

      As a recent US Senate report showed, the CIA handed over up to USD 30 million to the secret services of an unnamed country that hosted the “black sites” where terrorist suspects captured in Afghanistan and Iraq were detained without warrant and subjected to “enhanced investigation techniques”, that is, torture, daily Rzeczpospolita reported. – See more at: http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/191518,Polish-MPs-to-investigate-CIA-payment-for-torture-sites#sthash.uaNfAO9A.dpuf

    • Polish Committee Investigates Allocation of Funds for CIA Secret Prisons

      Marek Biernacki, head of the Sejm Special Services Committee, stated that it is necessary to investigate where the money allocated for CIA “black sites” in Poland has gone.

    • Under pressure over CIA jail, Poland sends out mixed messages

      This month’s acknowledgment by Poland’s former president that he allowed the CIA to operate a secret interrogation centre throws the Polish government’s appeal against a European court ruling on the jail into disarray.

    • A new look at Zimbabwe-USA ‘tortuous’ relations via the CIA

      Zimbabwe is one among a number of African countries that assisted the United States of America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its notorious rendition programme. This emerged from a recent report that the USA Senate made public recently. – See more at: http://nehandaradio.com/2014/12/28/new-look-zimbabwe-usa-tortuous-relations-via-cia/#sthash.H0yxACxL.dpuf

    • A Brief History of the CIA’s Unpunished Spying on the Senate

      This is the story of John Brennan’s CIA spying on Congress and getting away with it.

      Last March, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the CIA of spying on the Senate intelligence committee as it labored to finalize its report on the torture of prisoners. “I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution,” she said. “I have asked for an apology and a recognition that this CIA search of computers used by its oversight committee was inappropriate. I have received neither.”

    • U.S. Senate and CIA agree torture program was mismanaged

      The Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation program and the spy agency’s official response clash on almost every aspect of the long-secret operation, including the brutality and effectiveness of its methods and the agency’s secret dealings with the Bush White House, Congress and the media. Both reports largely agree on one major CIA failure: the agency’s mismanagement of the now-shuttered program.

    • The Senate’s CIA report may help to lead to a new politics of intelligence in Washington.

      The Senate’s recent report into the CIA’s interrogation methods has prompted new discussions on how the U.S. should be conducting intelligence gathering, and the level of Congress’ oversight. Glenn Hastedt writes that the report raises the prospect of a new era of intelligence politics characterized by a skeptical Congress that more tightly controls and challenges the intelligence community, as well as one of continued leaks. He also argues that concerns over short political time frames will continue to push the intelligence community to retroactively justify its actions.

    • Pressure grows on PM to hold judge-led inquiry into Britain’s role in CIA torture

      David Cameron was last night under intense pressure to deliver on his promise to hold a judge-led inquiry into British complicity in torture.

    • Public won’t let Washington sweep CIA torture under the rug – Russian diplomat

      The Obama administration won’t be able to throw the torture issue under the table, as the US Senate report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program has sparked a global public outcry, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s human rights ombudsman told RT.

      “It’s to be continued. If you wish, this report is to be continued against the will of those who would like to hush it down,” Konstantin Dolgov stressed.

      The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture following 9/11 will be “discussed in the international forum, including, hopefully, in the UN Council of Human Rights and in some other international formats,” he added.

    • CIA torture report: Right also condemns torturers

      Two responses to the Senate report have stood out for me. The first was by Republican Senator John McCain. On the floor of the Senate, he described the use of torture as “shameful and unnecessary”.

      He continued: “The use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies; our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights.”

      The second response was that of the Conservative MP David Davis. Referring to “the barbarism of the secret CIA torture programme”, he went on to state that “our association with torture causes us to lose our moral strength and serves to galvanise those who oppose us”.

    • CIA Decides that the CIA Hacking into Members of Congress is not a Punishable Offense

      A panel appointed by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan to assess blame for the CIA’s intrusion into Senate Intelligence Committee computers has—no surprise—found that those who broke into the computers shouldn’t be punished.

      The handpicked committee, composed of three CIA officers; Robert F. Bauer, who served as White House counsel during President Barack Obama’s first term; and chairman Evan Bayh, a former Democratic senator from Indiana who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the three CIA technology officers and two lawyers who participated in the computer hacking should not be punished.

    • Human rights record in the United States of America alarming

      The United States Obama administration won’t be able to throw the torture issue under the table, as the US Senate report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program has sparked a global public outcry

      “It’s to be continued. If you wish, this report is to be continued against the will of those who would like to hush it down,” , the Russian Foreign Ministry’s human rights ombudsman Konstantin Dolgov told the media.

      The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture following 9/11 will be “discussed in the international forum, including, hopefully, in the UN Council of Human Rights and in some other international formats,” he added.

    • Did the CIA Torture So Bush Could Invade Iraq? (Video)

      The Bush administration and the CIA tortured al-Qaida suspects because they wanted evidence that linked Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and could be used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Middle East expert Patrick Cockburn writes at The Independent.

    • Following Senate report, Johnston leaders tout reported CIA contractor as ‘good corporate citizen’

      Johnston County leaders say they have no reason and no authority to probe a Smithfield-based company long linked to the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program.

      A Raleigh-based anti-torture group says a recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report names 17 detainees transported by Aero Contractors, a company that leases space at the Johnston County Airport and at the Global TransPark in Kinston. Based on flight logs and other data, the group, North Carolina Stop Torture Now, says Aero Contractors transported another 14 detainees not named in the report.

      Tony Braswell, chairman of the Johnston County Board of Commissioners, said he doesn’t know much about what Aero Contractors does. He said he does know, however, that the company has always been a “good corporate citizen.”

      “That’s all we know, and we don’t know if they committed any crimes in Afghanistan or Pakistan,” Braswell said. “Our job is to deal with schools and provide clean drinking water and have a budget for the sheriff.”

      But Christina Cowger, coordinator of North Carolina Stop Torture Now, said the Senate report confirms that Aero Contractors was vital to the CIA’s capture and interrogation of terror suspects using techniques that some consider torture. Now, she said, it’s time for elected officials to ask more questions.

    • The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings

      Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

    • How a false witness helped the CIA make a case for torture

      Buried amid details of “rectal rehydration” and waterboarding that dominated the headlines over last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee findings was an alarming detail: Both the committee’s summary report and its rebuttal by the CIA admit that a source whose claims were central to the July 2004 resumption of the torture program — and, almost certainly, to authorizing the Internet dragnet collecting massive amounts of Americans’ email metadata — fabricated claims about an election year plot.

    • Irony 101: Study Ethics with Legal Ace Who Sanctioned NSA Wiretapping, CIA Torture

      Waterboarding: Yes or no? It’s OK to selectively violate the Geneva Convention, right? Spying on Americans is illegal, but aren’t rules made to be broken?

      The world is a confusing place and it’s hard for young people to answer complicated questions like these on their own. Fortunately, students at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, have Professor Robert Deitz to help them navigate the contemporary moral morass. “All of us are familiar with basic ethical notions,” he writes in the syllabus for his Spring 2015 course, Ethical Challenges in Public Policy. “We learn from childhood the idea that some conduct is right and other conduct is not right.”

      How’d Deitz get so smart about ethics? He’s magna cum laude from Harvard (like President Obama) and then spent eights years as General Counsel at the National Security Agency, serving as the official Yes Man for General Michael Hayden, and after that three years as his Senior Councillor at the Central Intelligence Agency until 2009. At the former post Deitz rubber-stamped NSA surveillance. At the latter, he sought to derail an independent investigation by then-CIA Inspector General John Helgerson into the agency’s torture and rendition of terrorism suspects.

    • CIA Report Fallout: Alissa Starzak Could Lose Shot At Becoming US Army’s Top Lawyer

      Alissa Starzak will have to wait until after the holidays to find out if accusations she stole and leaked classified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents will scuttle her chances of becoming the U.S. Army’s top lawyer. And her chances could rely on whether Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will back her.

    • CIA torture report: Did US military create Isis through brutal interrogation techniques?

      The CIA torture report covers over 100 detainees but that’s so pale and insignificant compared with the actual number of detainees who experienced enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. That number would run into the thousands, during the period when EITs were deemed legal. Every interrogator was allowed to use them.

    • The Horrific Stories of CIA-sponsored Torture That Aren’t in the Senate Report.

      There’s still no official account of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other victims of torture that the CIA is responsible for.

    • Do We Need the C.I.A.?

      Would the security needs of the United States be better served if the C.I.A. were dismantled?

    • Jeremy Renner On The CIA Plot Behind ‘Kill The Messenger’ – The Contenders

      Star Jeremy Renner and producer Scott Stuber talk about Kill the Messenger, their film about Gary Webb, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. Webb uncovered a CIA plot in the 1980s that funneled cocaine into the United States to finance arms purchases and other operations in Central America, then faced a campaign to undermine and deny his work.

    • SA man at centre of CIA sting

      An infamous South African, linked to some of the most shady scandals of this century, has emerged at the centre of a US transcontinental sting operation that netted an alleged drug cartel assassin.

      Paul Calder le Roux shopped former American Special Forces-trained sniper Joseph Hunter, who was arrested in Thailand in an operation spearheaded by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

    • CIA Torture Report: Will South Africa Own Up? – OpEd

      For South Africa to own up and come clean on its shameful role in assisting America’s immoral WOT is a matter we will continue to agitate for.

    • Human rights group calls for inquiry into Malaysia’s role in CIA torture

      Human rights group Suaram urged Putrajaya to set up an independent commission of inquiry to unravel the authorities’ involvement in the United States’s torture programmes, following a US Senate report in which Malaysia was implicated.

    • Effective oversight of the CIA depends on Congress

      In a recent piece here on The Monkey Cage, Michael Colaresi discussed the need for change in oversight of the CIA and by extension the entirety of the intelligence community. He suggests that in the wake of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture issued Dec. 9, “current and former CIA officials, as well as President Obama, seem bent on missing the relevant lessons to improve governance of national security. The CIA needs more, not less, oversight” (my emphasis).

    • The CIA’s Road to Infamy

      Beyond the drama created by the Report’s surviving multiple assassination attempts, what is there that should grab our attention? The CIA designed and conducted a program of systematic torture of those it suspected of being associated with terrorism. It did so at several of the notorious “black sites,” at Guantanamo and probably elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan. Torture was the official policy of the United States government as stipulated by President George W. Bush with the unanimous approval of his national security team – including Colin Powell. The torture program continued for years – carried out by the Army as well as the CIA. Several of those tortured were held on basis of no evidence whatsoever, something that did not shield them from abuse and imprisonment under brutal conditions.

    • CIA’s poisonous legacy starts with who we are

      Senator John McCain spoke the truth on the Senate floor this month, in response to the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: “. . . this question isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are, and who we aspire to be.” Many voices insisted that the revelations contained in the report — savage, even murderous treatment of prisoners; illegal renditions; black sites — were not true to the American character. The CIA — having carried out torture; having lied about it at the time; and having lied about it this month in response to the report — was discussed as if it were “not who we are.” But is that true?

      American officials, and the American people, know very well what the CIA is, and what it does. It was McCain who, when CIA waterboarding of terror suspects first surfaced as an issue some years ago, recalled that, after World War II, Japanese waterboarding of POW’s — what McCain calls “mock execution” — was one of the war crimes for which Japanese prisoners were hanged. But on the Sunday talk shows after the Senate report’s release, various CIA defenders, including Dick Cheney, talked of such tactics with stoic pride. President Obama decried torture and swore never again, but simultaneously defended the honor of the CIA, and declined to prosecute its war criminals. It comes as no surprise then, that in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released last week, a majority of Americans found that “the harsh interrogation practices” laid out in the report were “acceptable under the circumstances.” Really?

    • Why The Government Needs to Release the CIA Torture Photos

      As details emerge from the CIA Torture Report, many Americans are finding themselves reeling. Yet we are still getting an incredibly sanitized version of the truth. This is because thousands of photos, taken at these CIA black sites, are being withheld by the government under the guise of ‘national security.’

      The photos are currently locked in a court case that has been going on for some time, but last Friday the government was forced to submit reasoning for every photo they wanted to remain classified. NY State Judge Alvin Hellerstein is expected to make a ruling shortly regarding their release, but the United States may still attempt to withhold them.

    • Has a Top CIA Official Been Exposed as the Leading Liar About Torture?

      Senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky has reportedly been described in several articles by large, credible sources as a linchpin figure in the CIA torture program. However, she was unidentified, but The Intercept has named her as being that instrumental figure in the CIA torture program.

      After being called a “key apologist,” “The Unidentified Queen of Torture,” noted as “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’” and identified in having a central role in lying to Congress about the CIA’s torture methods, Bikowsky appears to be the main liar. Last week, according to The Intercept, “NBC News reported that one senior CIA officer in particular was responsible for many . . . false claims.”

      The report noted that Bikowsky, remaining unnamed, “also participated in ‘enhanced interrogations’ of self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.”

    • Penn prof. ‘horrified’ life’s research is connected to CIA torture techniques

      The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” outlined in a controversial report released earlier this month from the Senate Intelligence Committee, was influenced by a Penn professor’s research.

      Psychology professor Martin E. P. Seligman famously conducted studies at Penn in the 1960s that revealed a “learned helplessness” in dogs subjected to repeated eletric shocks. Instead of adjusting their behavior upon receiving multiple shocks, the dogs remained in place, providing valuable insight into the workings of depressed or abused persons. Now, his research is being used for torture rather than healing according the the Senate report.

    • Former CIA Operative On Torture Report

      Glenn Carle retired from the CIA after 23 years of service. He participated in the interrogation of top-level members of al-Qaida and refused orders to engage in torture.

    • The Continuing Shame of the CIA’s Torture Program

      For a clue into how out-of-control, un-American, and just plain wrong our CIA’s torture program was, note the frantic and furious reactions by the CIA establishment to reports about its torturous cruelty.

      First were flat-out denials. George Tenet, CIA director during the most vigorous period of torturing al Qaeda suspects, almost blew a gasket in 2007, when a “60 Minutes” interviewer pressed him about the agency’s waterboarding of prisoners. “We don’t torture people.” Tenet practically hollered at the reporter – “Let me say that again to you, we don’t torture people. OK?”

    • CIA torture report: Why the silence from local human rights groups?

      Questions are being asked as to why local human rights groups and other non-governmental organisations that fight for people’s rights have remained silent over the US CIA Torture Report.

      PAS official mouthpiece, Harakahdaily said there seems to be very little outcry from rights groups everywhere, adding that protest notes have yet to be sent to the US embassy over its treatment of detainees purportedly involved in terrorism.

    • The CIA & NYPD: Perilous Insubordination In Our Democracy

      It is very simple. If the CIA is insubordinate to the president, whom the country elected, then it is insubordinate to all of us.

    • Before the EITs: James Mitchell’s Special Invite to FBI/APA Conference at Quantico on “Combatting Terrorism”

      The narrative is in place. James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen made millions of dollars having convinced the CIA to construct a torture program via reverse-engineering brutal methods of interrogation used in their previous employment in a military program meant to prepare U.S. military and intelligence personnel for torture by a foreign power or terrorist group.

    • Conditioning brain through fear, CIA program sought to render detainees helpless

      At times, waterboarding rendered al-Qaida terror suspect Abu Zubaydah hysterical. But later, a message to CIA headquarters described an interrogator merely lifting his eyebrow and snapping his fingers, and Zubaydah “slowly walked on his own to the water table” to lie down.

    • Non-religious Americans believe CIA “treatment of suspected terrorists” unacceptable, poll reveals

      The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life conducted polls in 2009. The surveys discovered that the religious Americans are more likely to believe that torture of suspected terrorists is justifiable.

      Five years after the survey was conducted, a new poll was done and it was discovered not much has changed.

      The new poll, conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News, found that more Christian Americans, compared to non-Christians, find that CIA “treatment of suspected terrorists” is acceptable.

    • The Mysterious Case of Prisoner 212

      Researchers and reporters had long counted the total number of prisoners who cycled through Guantanamo at 779, but the Senate intelligence committee’s report on CIA torture revealed that there was one more previously unknown detainee. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, also known as prisoner 212, was held at a secret black site at Guantanamo Bay, according to the report, bringing the total number of detainees to 780.

      That al-Libi was held by the CIA is long established. After all, al-Libi’s name is notorious as the source of bad information used by the Bush administration to tie Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda to support the US invasion of Iraq — information he provided while being tortured in Egyptian custody, and later recanted.

12.27.14

Links 28/12/2014: Red Hat CEO Talks, Ruby 2.2.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Mac OS X Yosemite, From The Perspective Of A Linux User

    It’s been a while since Mac OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” has been released into the wild, so we have a pretty good idea of how it performs. Mac OS X is also sometimes used as the poster child for a clean and elegant interface (most of the time, anyways). As a Linux writer, it’s my duty to make comparisons not only amongst Linux distros, but also against the competition.

  • How About 2014?

    As for */Linux taking over the world, I think it’s inevitable. Android/Linux seems to be working on it’s third billion users perhaps by the end of 2015. At some point there will be saturation but the diversity is amazing. I saw a young lady with a Christmas gift of a CyanogenMod Android/Linux smartphone. CyanogenMod is a customization of Android/Linux which gives users more features and some independence from Google. She’s leaving a feature-phone behind as soon as she can switch “sim” cards. Within hours she’s learned to use a bunch of features including speech-to-text (It was nearly perfect)… Strangely, at about the same time her regular notebook PC (GNU/Linux) melted down (hard drive suspected). It will be interesting to see whether she even needs to replace it. This smartphone is just so powerful. Maybe I will get one and leave Beast to serving/storing stuff.

  • OMG! GNU/Linux @ Walmart.com, sort of…

    Remember the netbooks with GNU/Linux at Walmart, years ago?

  • Heartbeat of Canada

    Canadians tend to lag USAians in some trends (GNU/Linux) and sprint ahead of them in others (Medicare).

  • Desktop

    • Librem Linux Laptop Drops NVIDIA Graphics But Still Coming Up Short Of Goal

      One of the oddest things I found about the crowd-funded Librem 15 laptop when writing about it last month was that it wanted to be open-source down to the component firmware/microcode yet they opted to ship with a NVIDIA GPU. In an updated earlier this month, at least they came to their senses and dropped the discrete NVIDIA GPU. While I have no problems recommending NVIDIA graphics for Linux gamers and those wanting the best performance, that’s only when using the proprietary drivers, and certainly wouldn’t recommend it for a fully open-source system — NVIDIA on the desktop side doesn’t do much for the open-source drivers, let alone down to the firmware/microcode level. Instead the Librem folks have opted to upgrade the design to using an Intel Core i7 4770HQ processor that features more powerful Intel Iris Pro 5200 Graphics, which isn’t as powerful as a discrete NVIDIA GPU but at least is more open-source friendly.

    • How to set up your new Chromebook the right way

      Setting up a new Chromebook is much easier than setting up a PC. Chromebooks don’t require major updates or antivirus software. You start simply by signing in with your Google Account (or creating that account, if you don’t already have one).

      All that said, Chromebooks have some unique quirks—such as limited offline capabilities, and a wonky method for connecting a printer. Here’s everything you need to know to set up your new Chromebook up the right way—starting with the tools that let you replace the Windows software that just won’t work on a Googley laptop.

  • Kernel Space

    • Features Of The Linux 3.19 Kernel: Graphics & Disks Rule

      The merge window is closed and 3.19-rc1 was released on Saturday, marking the end of new mainline Linux kernel features for 2014. Here’s a rundown of the exciting new features of the Linux 3.19 kernel for what will become the first major kernel release of 2015.

    • OpenVZ: Past and Future

      Since Russia has 10 days of holidays in January, I really don’t expect anything to be released until late January or more likely in February. One major change in the upcoming RHEL7-based Virtuozzo Core release is the move from the internal chkpoint code to CRIU. Although there are a lot more details and specifics to come, overall I see this as a very possitive move.

    • Live Patching Support Planned For Linux 3.20/4.0 Kernel

      This year there’s been kGraft and Kpatch in development as new live kernel patching solutions to reduce downtime when applying maintenance/security updates to the kernel by avoiding system reboots, similar in nature to Ksplice. These solutions were devised independently by Red Hat and SUSE while more recently a unified infrastructure combining both kGraft and Kpatch was proposed. It looks like for Linux 3.20 is when that code will be merged.

    • Heterogeneous Memory Management Is Coming Along For The Linux Kernel

      Jerome Glisse remains hard at work on readying his Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) patch-set for eventual integration into the mainline Linux kernel. This HMM memory management will benefit HSA/OpenCL workloads on Linux.

    • Biggest Linux Kernel Features & Work Of 2014

      Richard Hughes is looking to develop an open-source USB ambient light sensor as an OpenHardware initiative.

    • That Peculiar Linux 3.18 Kernel Bug Might Be Closed Soon

      For the past month there’s been kernel developers investigating “a big unknown worry in a regression” that have left many key kernel developers — including Linus Torvalds — puzzled. It looks like that investigation is finally being close to being resolved.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • 2014 Year-End NVIDIA Linux Benchmark Comparison

        While on the AMD side there were just three official driver releases in 2014 (Catalyst 14.4, 14.9, and 14.12), on the NVIDIA side there were many more driver updates… NVIDIA continues to do a splendid job of maintaining multiple driver branches for their frequent and stable drivers, along with continuing to maintain multiple legacy driver branches for their older hardware that is still maintained for modern Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases along with important bug-fixes.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • My KWin short-cuts experiment

        Inspired by Aurélien Gâteau’s blogpost and the thread on KDE Forums, I decided to change my global KWin short-cuts as well to see how it fares.

      • QuickPlot: A collection of native QtQuick plotting items

        For a project at university I recently needed a plotting widget to display some data. Naturally, Qwt came to my mind. I’ve already been using it in a number of other projects and it works great.

        The one drawback, however: The project was intended to be run on the Raspberry Pi. Now the X-Server on the R-Pi doesn’t have any 3D acceleration yet, so the performance of Qwt was subpar.

      • 11 years developing Krita

        Back in 2003 Krita had never been released and the application was only able to do some very crude painting. I think the main reason that I started contributing to Krita back then was that I was much more comfortable with the single window UI and the fact that it used Qt/KDE and C++. In the early days I would never have imagined that I would be still with the project after 10+ years and how big the project is now. Even that the project exists today is a miracle and result of many developers putting in effort without ever knowing how it would develop. For the first few years we had almost no users and the users that we had were die-hard KDE users. At the time that wasn’t a bad thing as it allowed us to do some radical changes and experiments. Many features that were developed during this time still provide the base for the current Krita.

      • The Christmas break project – autocompletion of KDE projects for kdesrc-build

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Libra Is Great Light Gtk Theme for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

        Libra is one of the best theme derived from flattastic theme suite. This theme is light with combination of blue color and it has menu colored buttons (minimize, maximize, close). It features a modern and clean look, with fully integrated and tested support for many of the popular desktops Including: Unity, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon, Mate, Gnome Classic & Fallback. It has been designed to be compatible with most GTK2/3 desktops out of the box. Rave-X-Colors and Ursa icons used in following screenshots. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool or Ubuntu-Tweak to change themes.

      • An Open-Source Hardware Ambient Light Sensor Is Brought Up

        GNOME developer Richard Hughes who is responsible for a lot of work on open-source software as well as being the engineer behind the open-source ColorHug color calibrating device is now looking at the possibility of making a USB ambient light sensor that’s open-source. A few days ago I wrote about Richard’s brainstorming over making a SD card based random number generator to provide fresh entropy to the system, but he’s received a lot of feedback with similar devices that have already been developed and are too Linux/open-source friendly.

  • Distributions

    • Webconverger 27 Is a Linux Kiosk OS with No End of Life

      Webconverger is a Linux distribution used for deployment in places like offices or Internet cafes, where only web applications are used. A new update has been released and the version number has advanced to 27.

    • Your Old Computer Can Live Again with Emmabuntüs 2

      Emmabuntüs 2 1.09, a distribution created for reconditioning old computers and relying on the robustness of Xubuntu 12.04.5 LTS, has been released and is now ready for download.

      The Emmabuntüs developers only use LTS editions of Xubuntu, and that means they actually have two distros out right now that are maintained and improved. We had Emmabuntüs 3 1.0 released a few weeks ago, but that one was using Xubuntu 14.04 LTS as the base. Now, the old branch based on Xubuntu 12.04, Emmabuntüs 2, has been improved as well and the devs have made quite a few changes.

    • Happy New Year 2015!!

      We would like to wish to all the Chakra community a happy and creative 2015!

    • New Releases

      • SparkyLinux 3.6 e19, JWM and Openbox Editions Now Ready for Download

        SparkyLinux 3.6, a lightweight, fast, and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customized e19, JWM and Openbox desktops has been released and is now ready for download.

      • Black Lab Education Desktop 6.0 Beta 2 Shows Major Improvements

        Black Lab Education Desktop 6.0 Beta 2, a Linux distribution built for an education environment and based on the Black Lab Professional Desktop series, is now ready for testing and download.

      • 4MParted Is a New Distro Based on the Very Small 4MLinux OS and GParted

        4MParted is a new Linux distribution based on the 4MLinux 11.0 OS and GParted. It has a simple goal, to provide users with the tools they need to make adjustments to the partition of their PC without having to actually go into the operating system.

      • OpenELEC 5.0 RC3 Is a Bleeding Edge Distro Based on Kodi and Linux Kernel 3.17

        OpenELEC, a powerful embedded operating system built specifically to run the Kodi media player hub and to run on most available hardware, has been updated once more and the developers are getting closer to the final version.

      • KaOS ISO 2014.12

        KaOS is very proud to announce the availability of the December release of a new stable ISO. This ISO marks two major milestones for this distribution. Since it’s inception almost two years ago, a need to be ready for UEFI installs has always been a priority. That was tied though to getting a modern Qt based installer that could handle such UEFI installs. With this ISO, both are implemented.

      • Q4OS 0.5.23 released

        The Christmas release improves XDG standards compliance, brings more accurate GTK3 theme and fixes screen resolution detection weighty bug. Several internal improvements and bugfixes has been closed as usual.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat CEO lauds open source’s progress

        For years, Red Hat executives fielded questions about its open source software from prospective customers: “Is open source safe? Is it secure? Is it reliable?”

        But such inquiries have faded as open source software has gained momentum, CEO Jim Whitehurst wrote in a recent blog posted on the website of the Raleigh-based company. Red Hat is the leading open source software company.

        “Today, it is almost impossible to name a major player in IT that has not embraced open source,” Whitehurst wrote. “Only a few short years ago, many would have argued we would never see that day.”

      • Red Hat Tech Exchange highlights: Architect, Implement, Enable

        As open source advances, education is key for IT professionals to understand how their organizations can best take advantage of the technologies that are driving everything from cloud and mobile to big data and the Internet of Things.

      • From Red Hat’s CEO: Reflecting on a ‘great year,’ looking to ’15

        It is confirmed: 2014 has been a great year for Red Hat. [On Dec. 18], we announced third quarter results of our fiscal year 2015 and, with that, celebrated our 51st consecutive quarter of revenue growth – more than 12 years of consecutive revenue growth. Thank you to the team of Red Hat customers, partners, open source contributors, and associates around the world, for helping us propel Red Hat to new heights. While 2014 has been a fantastic year for Red Hat, it has also been a banner year for open source.

      • Fedora

        • Linux Best & Worst, Live Patchin’, and Devuan Good

          It was a fairly slow news day today in Linuxville. Nevertheless, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains why 2014 “was the best of years, it was the worst of years.” Gary Newell asks if the Debian-fork Devuan is a good idea and Serdar Yegulalp looks at the competing live kernel patchers and Fedora 21 is reviewed again, twice.

        • ROSA Fresh R5, Year in Ubuntu, and Fedora to the Rescue

          Still a bit slow on the news front but yesterday, like a Christmas present, ROSA Fresh R5 was released. Simon Phipps offers his Open Source confessions and Phoronix.com reviews the year in Ubuntu. Also, William Moreno Reyes offers a few thoughts on his recent Fedora 21 Workstation install.

        • Punching Out the Week on Boxing Day

          Also nearing release is Korora 21, the Fedora remix from down under, which should be ready sometime early in the new year, according to lead developer Chris Smart… As for the speakers for the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 13x, the SCALE Team has chosen most of the speakers and they are setting the schedule for the four-day event in February. Keynoters have yet to be named, and I have it on the highest authority that SCALE 13x could be unique regarding the keynotes and many of the speakers this year.

        • Fedora 21 review – Uh, not again

          Why did Fedora 21 have to be so buggy? Why? I wanted it to succeed, I wanted it to be cool and fun, just like the last release. There was so much potential, and then, something went wrong. Quite a few somethings, apparently. Installer partition selections, bootloader, login, codecs, printing, desktop effects. Damn. Fedora, where art thou?

          Anyhow, Fedora 21 KDE is just not as good as it should be. Not as good as its predecessor, not as good as its rival, and most importantly, not as good as Fedora. There must be a baseline to quality, and it must never be crossed, downwards. This time, I did not get what I wanted, and I’m sad, because I know that Fedora can do it. We’ve all seen it happen. So more time is needed in the special oven for naughty distros. Perhaps I rushed testing just days after the official release, but it is how it is. 6/10. Done.

        • Fedora 21 GNOME Review: If you can ignore the initial hiccups, fantastic operating system!

          I am definitely going to recommend Fedora 21 to users fed up with Unity/Ubuntu and contemplating a change. Novice users may wait for Korora release. The 6 month release cycle of Fedora will ensure that you always have the latest packages. Many reviewers suggest to avoid Fedora for production purposes. Possibly in 2015, I’ll try to use Fedora for a year or so for all production purposes to understand if it is true or not.

        • F2FS Might Get Enabled In Fedora

          On Sunday I wrote about how I found it surprising that Fedora didn’t enable F2FS support within its Linux kernel while it packaged the user-space F2FS tools and contains plenty of other experimental/early-adoption features. The discussion resulting from this article about F2FS for Fedora has been both good and bad.

        • Fedora Workstation [not English]

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The magic behind Ubuntu

            Ubuntu, the latest LTS version 14.04 operating system (OS), is definitely worth trying. My statement is backed by the fact that Ubuntu won the operating system of the year award from W3tech not only once but three times consecutively, followed by admiration from major players in the market and an inclusion of major organisations such as Lenovo, Dell, HP, IBM, and Asus etcetera.

          • Notifications Without User Interaction on Ubuntu Are Annoying

            The Unity desktop environment has a simple and rather ineffective system notification mechanism and it looks like that’s not going to change, not even with the arrival of Unity 8.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Macbuntu strikes again, and we likes it!

              Remember Macbuntu? It’s a MAC OS X transformation pack for Ubuntu, which lets you tweak your Ubuntu desktop into looking like an Apple’s offering. I have tried it about four years ago, on Lucid, but haven’t played with the software since Unity replaced Gnome 2 as the desktop environment. I decided it was time for another attempt.

              If you read online, you will find multiple references to Macbuntu, so it can be a little confusing. There’s the SourceForge hosted project, and there’s the initiative by Noobslab, who have packaged together a handful of PPA and scripts to help you refashion your Unity desktop in a modular and easily reversible way. We checked.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Confessions of an open source purist

    I have also repeatedly evaluated GNU/Linux as a platform for my daily writing and administration. Each time, I’ve found it fairly easy to install (moreso every time I try) and easy to add applications. I’ve never had problems with malware, but at some point in the life of the system, a problem arises that at best causes an inconvenience (like the sleep mode failing) and at worst leaves the system impossible to boot.

  • Open Source’s 2014: MS ‘cancer’ embrace, NASDAQ listings, and a quiet dog

    Ho hum. Another year, another slew of open source announcements that prove the once-maligned development methodology is now so mainstream as to be tedious. Running most of the world’s most powerful supercomputers? Been there, done that. Giving retailers the ability to deliver highly customized paper coupons to consumers based on warehouse inventory nearby? So 2013!

    And yet in 2014 we had a few events in open source that managed to surprise us, and suggest an even brighter future.

  • Marvell Releases New Open-Source 802.11ac WiFi Driver

    On Christmas Eve, Marvell announced the release of a new open-source driver for one of its 802.11ac chips in cooperation with Linksys.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • What is your Mozilla Resolution?

        2014 was both a phenomenal year for Mozilla while a wild ride for us as we waded through what seemed like hit after hit from the tech press but we fared well.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • CIOs debate cloud, open source transformation

      Cloud computing is no longer an issue of “if” for enterprises anymore, clearly all businesses will adopt or are adopting cloud in some shape or form as the basis for transforming their IT infrastructures into more agile and flexible organizations.

      Whether from government, telecoms, retail or even the highly regulated financial sectors, companies across the board are jumping on the cloud bandwagon in efforts to create a new model for IT.

    • HP Sees NFV as a ‘Huge Opportunity’

      Hewlett-Packard is bullish on the future of the cloud and on network functions virtualization (NFV). Helping to lead HP’s NFV and cloud efforts is Senior Vice President Saar Gillai, who is also the general manager for NFV as well as the chief operating officer for HP Cloud.

  • Databases

  • Healthcare

    • Healthcare one of the most impacted industries by open source

      Healthcare is one of the most urgent socioeconomic issues of our time. This year, Opensource.com saw a variety of news and feature stories about applying the open source way and open source software (including tools) to alleviating the many problems faced by the healthcare industry. Here are this year’s best of the best from Opensource.com in open health.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Kodi 14.0 Helix Unwinds

      Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone! We are proud to announce the release of Kodi 14.0, which comes with a new name, a new logo, and a wide variety of new features, but underneath the new coat of paint remains the same software we all love.

      A detailed changelog for Kodi 14 can be found under milestones on our code repository, should you be interested. With that said, let’s take a look at some of the features that come with Kodi 14.0.

    • Kodi 14.0 Released For The Holidays – Formerly Known As XBMC
    • Kodi 14.0 Is Out and Replaces the Old XBMC

      Kodi 14.0, the successor of the famous media hub XBMC, has been released. The developers have been working on this new version for some time and it’s finally here.\

    • Announcing Subsurface 4.3

      The Subsurface development team proudly announces release 4.3 of Subsurface, an open source divelog and dive planning program for Windows, Mac and Linux.

    • BusyBox 1.23.0 Unstable Release Arrives

      BusyBox 1.23.0 is the new release and it brings a wide variety of changes across the table. There’s far too many changes to note but among the BusyBox 1.23.0 updates are a lot of fixes for ash, find improvements, ntpd improvements, etc.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Campaign promotes open source in Finland’s towns

      Municipalities using open source are reaching out to other towns and cities, motivating them to switch to this type of software. The past four months, members of Finland’s Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) have been visiting towns around the country, talking about their use of free and open source.

      The so-called ‘Open Knowledge Roadshow 2014’ involves six municipalities, Turku, Mikkeli, Pori, Oulu, Tampere and Rovaniemi. Apart from reaching out to their colleagues, the towns of Mikkeli, Oulu and Rovaniemi also organised a workshop, reports COSS on its website.

    • Open source now part of Romania’s Digital Agenda

      All of Romania’s public administrations are to use open source and open standards software. The government is making this a (minute) part of the 2014-2020 Digital Agenda, made public in November. The approach will increase interoperability of ICT systems.

    • Cenatic to focus on open source reuse and certification

      sIn 2015, Cenatic, the open source software resource centre of the Spanish government, will campaign to get enterprises to implement, share and re-use open source solutions. The centre wants to help companies select the right free software solutions. It will also promote sharing and re-use, and reinforce the network of free software service providers.

  • Licensing

    • Varying Vagrant Vagrants Adopts Open Source MIT License

      One of the most important updates in VVV 1.2 is the addition of a license. The project has adopted the open source MIT license after a six-month long discussion with participation from more than 50 contributors on the project.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Security in open source, a Google surprise, and more
    • Eco-friendly open-source dental toolkit

      Goodwell toothbrushes, equipped with a medical grade aluminum handle have bristles made from Binchotan which is a biodegradable fiber that can repel negative ions, remove plaque and bad breath.

    • Enter the abyss with OpenROV, the $899 open source kit

      The OpenROV submersible is a low cost and open source kit designed for exploration and education. Originally launched on Kickstarter in 2012 it has now grown into a dedicated global community launching missions everywhere from Hawaii to the UK. The project raised $111,662 from 484 backers and has now reached version 2.7. Today the kit costs $899 with a fully assembled version coming in at $1,450 which you can purchase from the online store. Units weigh in at 2.6kg and normal battery life is expected to last between 2-3 hours depending on use.

    • Open Data

      • Open data portals should be API [First]

        Not long ago, I was speaking at the National Association of Government Web Professionals. At the same conference, Mark Headd was speaking. We were speaking on different open data topics. My discussion was about the difference between open government and open data and his talk was about API [First].

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Security

    • Git Vulnerability Exposed; Patch Now or Be Hacked Later

      A vulnerability in the widely used Git open-source development tool has been revealed, but there is a patch.

    • Old FOSS Friend & Foe Represents Sony in Hack

      Boies, along with three attorneys representing the States, brought Microsoft to it’s knees — or so it seemed at the time.

      On November 5, 1999, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that Windows dominance on the PC made the company a monopoly and that the company had taken illegal actions against Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, RealNetworks, Linux, and others in order to maintain that monopoly. He ordered Microsoft broken in two, with one company producing Windows and another handling all other Microsoft software.

      As we all know, Judge Jackson’s solution was never implemented.

      Although an appeals court upheld the verdict against Redmond, the breakup of the company was overturned and sent back to the lower court for a review by a new judge. Two years later, in September, 2001, under the Bush Administration, the DOJ announced that it was no longer seeking the breakup of Microsoft, and in November reached a settlement which California, Connecticut, Iowa, Florida, Kansas, Minnesota, Utah, Virginia and Massachusetts opposed.

      The settlement basically required Microsoft to share its APIs and appoint a three person panel that would have complete access to Microsoft’s systems, records, and source code for five years. The settlement didn’t require Microsoft to change any code or stop the company from tying additional software with Windows. Additionally, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code.

    • Security updates for Wednesday
    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • Security advisories for Christmas day
    • Rackspace Joins Ranks of the Holiday Hacked

      Are hackers and malware purveyors targeting cloud and network service providers over the holidays? With the news of the Sony hack fresh in everyone’s minds, unusual hacking reports are flowing in.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Seeing Behind the Corporate Spin

      There have been some rumblings from officials in Russia in recent days. I caught something like “the US needs to take another look at the real story behind the shooting down of Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine last July.” The US-NATO were quick to blame Russia after the plane was shot down – the same kind of campaign we now see with North Korea over the Sony ‘comedy’ that I believe is truly aimed at creating more antipathy towards that nation. Today I stumbled upon this fascinating story about an eye witness who claims that it was a Ukrainian military jet that accidentally took down the Malaysian airliner.

    • The Empire is Crumbling, That is Why it Needs War

      The world is in turmoil. Like in the early 1940’s, something tremendous is gaining shape, something irreversible.

      Almost all of us who have been analyzing the Empire fighting against the propaganda and nihilism it spreads, and its venomous tentacles extending to every corner of the globe, know that ‘appeasing’ Western imperialism is clearly impossible, as it is impractical, and even immoral.

      Just as George W. Bush (clearly borrowing from fundamentalist Christian rhetoric), liked to say: “You are either with us or against us”. Countries are now evidently put on the spot: ‘they either accept the Western neo-colonialist doctrine’, or they get destroyed, one after another, as were Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

      No logic can help, no negotiations, no international mediation from the United Nations. The willingness to compromise is mocked. Appeals for simple human compassion do not move the rulers of the Empire even an inch.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • China’s powerful economic presence begins to fade for Australian investors

      With the federal government fore­casting a $9 billion shortfall in ­revenue over the next two years as iron ore plunges to new five-year lows, the view of China from Australia is one of a ­country struggling to maintain the growth that turned it into a ­economic superpower.

      Shadow banking, ghost cities, ­slumping property prices, a ­manufacturing slowdown and debt defaults are just some of the ­headwinds that threaten the world’s second-largest economy.

  • Censorship

    • In Black Lives Matter Protest, Corporate Rights Trump Free Speech

      Minnesotans protesting police violence and institutional racism could face “staggering” fees and criminal charges for a protest at Mall of America, with the City of Bloomington announcing plans to force organizers to pay for the mall’s lost revenue during the exercise of their free speech rights, highlighting important questions about free speech in an era of privatized public spaces.

    • Does Facebook have an “unsafe” blacklist of sites that criticize it?

      My thanks to John B for giving me a heads up about this, I found his message to be quite fascinating. And if it’s found to be true that Facebook is blacklisting sites that criticize them, then I consider it a badge of honor to be on that list. There’s no way for me to know if Facebook actually is doing that, but I have wondered why I get so much more referral traffic from Twitter and Google+ than I do from Facebook. It seemed quite odd to me and I guess now I know why.

    • Atkinson defends right to offend

      Rowan Atkinson defended the right of comedians to poke fun at other people’s religion last night as he joined the campaign against Government plans to create a new offence of incitement to religious hatred.

      The star of the BBC’s Blackadder television series lined up with leading barristers, writers and politicians to oppose the proposed law.

    • Man gets apostasy death sentence in Mauritania

      Mauritanian court issues first death sentence against Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed for writing something blasphemous against prophet.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Revealed: Police using pre-charge bail to muzzle protesters

      Police are being accused of trying to muzzle protest movements as figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the widespread use of bail to ban hundreds of innocent people from attending lawful demonstrations.

      The data shows that around 85% of those barred from protesting when bailed have not been subsequently charged with any crime. Civil liberties and protest groups accused police of dealing out their own justice and called for a change in the law.

      The figures show that a least 732 people have been banned by police forces in England and Wales since 2008 but then never charged. They come as the government confirms it is considering overhauling the police bail rules.

    • American Democracy and Torture

      It’s no secret that former Vice President Dick Cheney has never been one of my favorites. And I will admit that when I saw him rise again on the Sunday morning shows and other television outlets around this torture report a few weeks back, my first reaction was “Why are they talking to him? Shouldn’t he be on trial for violating international law?” So, of course he should have been there. We live in a democracy! And, as he sits square in the middle of this whole controversy I had to admit I was curious as to his reaction.

      There he was in all his glory, in all his arrogance, defending torture, or rather enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding and rectal feeding — which he said he believed was done for medical reasons. Really? He defended it all. I couldn’t help but think that maybe it’s time Vice President Cheney move from defending his actions on Fox News and Meet the Press, and be asked to defend it in a court of law.

      Let’s face it, turning this kind of microscope on our own actions brings with it a lot of controversy, calls that we are endangering or damaging the CIA, or opening a can of worms that is best left closed. The dilemmas of a free society are many, and this is one of them. And the dilemmas of a free society are messy. But we should never walk away from them because of that.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Boycott the Marriott and other hotels that block Wi-Fi hotspots

      The media has been abuzz with stories recently about how the Marriott hotel has blocked Wi-Fi access in a desperate attempt to get its customers to pay the hotel for Internet access. Yes, the Marriott – a billion dollar corporation – has been attempting to gouge its customers by blocking private Wi-Fi connections, and now the company wants the FCC to give them its blessing. And to make the story even weirder,

    • Bharti Airtel to charge for using VoIP services

      Bharti Airtel Ltd, India’s largest telecommunications carrier by subscribers, will soon start charging users extra money for using services such as Skype as Indian operators look to boost their data network and revenues.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate Bay’s Fredrik Neij Now “Wanted for Hacking”

        Former Pirate Bay operator Fredrik Neij is currently jailed in Sweden after being captured in Thailand last month. However, according to leaked emails, the MPAA believes that the Swede could also face hacking related charges – and it doesn’t stop there.

      • The Open Bay helps launch 372 ‘copies’ of The Pirate Bay in a week, becomes GitHub’s most popular project

        isoHunt, the group now best known for launching The Old Pirate Bay, has shared an update a week after debuting The Open Bay. The Pirate Bay, the most popular file sharing website on the planet, still isn’t back following police raids on its data center in Sweden, but its “cause” is very much alive.

        The Open Bay, which lets anyone with “minimal knowledge of how the Internet and websites work” deploy their own version of The Pirate Bay online, is becoming an open source engine of The Pirate Bay website, the group told VentureBeat in an email. “The fate of Open Bay is now in the hands of worldwide community.”

      • Being a Pirate is OK, But Being a Cheapskate Sucks

        There can be few Internet-savvy people around who haven’t, on occasion, downloaded an MP3 or two. Among those people’s parents, find a person who has never listened to a copied CD or cassette-taped LP and i’ll show you the bar where Bigfoot buys the Loch Ness Monster a beer on Friday nights.

12.25.14

Links 26/12/2014: Devuan in the News, New PCLinuxOS

Posted in News Roundup at 7:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Sinofsky, The Creator Of That Other OS, Sees The Light

    He sees the end of the old ways and the arrival of newer software with less baggage on ARM and the cloud giving us all a fresh start. GNU/Linux gives a fresh start too. Yes, refreshing. Why can’t the trolls be as forthcoming?

  • Enterprise Advances Brought Linux Success in 2014

    For Linux, 2014 could easily be labeled the year enterprise really and truly embraced Linux. It could just as easily be labeled the year that nearly forgot Linux on the desktop. If you weren’t Docker, containers, OpenStack, or big data ─ chances are the spotlight didn’t brighten your day much. If, however, you (or your product) fell into one of those categories, that spotlight shined so brightly, it was almost blinding.

    Let’s glance back into our own wayback machine and see where Linux succeeded and where it did not. The conclusions should be fairly simple to draw and are incredibly significant to the state of Linux as a whole.

  • Christmas Quiz

    Forget the fancy graphics of Valve’s latest offering – the only computer game a Linux user needs this year is a good quiz on all things Linux-y. Here are eight rounds of fiendish questions on everything from the Kernel to hardware to see if you know your Tux from your Beastie.

  • ​Linux and open source 2014: It was the best of years, it was the worst of years

    There was great news and there was awful news in the world of Linux and open-source software during 2014.

  • Desktop

    • Welcome to the Pre-Post-PC Era

      Today’s float on the parade of the PC-is-dead prognostications comes from The Register, which says, “At the very moment that Linux desktops seem to be reaching new levels of sophistication, polish and ‘just works’ ease-of-use, the entire future of the desktop computer (by which I also mean laptop) feels in doubt.”

      The only thing that’s in doubt is whether that sentence is anywhere near remotely accurate. But let’s put that aside for a moment and assume we can see the future of how we deal with our digital lives.

    • Windows and Linux: The same, but different

      I use Windows 8.1 and Linux Mint 17.1 a lot nowadays, to do things like write, surf the web, check twitter and other web-based things.

      Sometimes I boot into Windows, sometimes Mint, but who cares which? I am just going to Chrome anyway. It’s all the same thing.

    • UNIX Industry Banks on Linux Strategies

      Struggling UNIX server makers are strengthening their Linux strategy in line with the open-source application environment. The move is aimed at maintaining remaining customers, since users are increasingly abandoning UNIX servers. However, it is receiving a lukewarm response from the market.

      According to industry sources on Dec. 22, server vendors such as IBM and HP are concentrating on the development of products so that the Linux operating system and related applications can be used as UNIX servers.

  • Kernel Space

    • Updating the Linux Kernel Without Restart Could Arrive Soon for Users

      A new development cycle has been started for the Linux kernel, 3.19, but it looks like the 3.20 branch is about to receive a very interesting patch that should really shake things up if it’s going to get accepted, that is.

    • The winning Linux kernel live patch: All of the above

      Life’s choices often amount to one of two options: Linux or Windows? Android or iOS? Kgraft or Kpatch?

      That last pair consists of the two major contenders for the technology Linux could use for live kernel patches. Now a winner is in, and it amounts to all of the above.

      According to a post on the official Linux kernel developer’s mailing list, a kernel patching system that works with both Kgraft and Kpatch and uses “core functionality abstracted out of [those] already existing implementations” has been proposed as an addition to the Linux 3.20 kernel.

    • Eudyptula Challenge: superfast Linux kernel booting

      One of the first tasks of this quite interesting challenge is to compile and boot your own kernel

    • Linux Kernel Developers Consider Live Kernel Patching Solution

      kPatch and kGraph may soon enable live kernel updates on all Linux distributions, making it possible to apply security and other patches on the open source operating system without rebooting.

    • OPNFV Plans Next Steps for Open Source NFV, SDN

      OPNFV, the open source software-defined networking and network-functions virtualization project, said development of both code and community will be its focus for 2015.

    • Does Linux suffer from bloat?

      Linux has long been known as an operating system that would run well even on older hardware. But has Linux become bloated in recent releases and how does it compare to Windows 8 in terms of system requirements?

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Linux Lite 2.2

        It’s been quite a while since I last looked at Linux Lite, the last version I reviewed being 1.0.6. Much has changed in Linux Lite since that release and now it’s reached version 2.2. If you aren’t familiar with it, you should know that Linux Lite is a distribution geared toward helping current Windows users transition to the Linux desktop.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS 2014.12 released

        PCLinuxOS has been updated to version 2014.12, and you can download it in a variety of flavors including the super-humongous 4.8 GB Full Monty version that comes with tons of additional software.

      • Santa Claus has Linux in his sack — PCLinuxOS 2014.12 is here
      • Happy Holidays from PCLinuxOS

        PCLinuxOS 2014.12 isos have been released for Full Monty, KDE, MATE and LXDE. Highlights include kernel 3.18.1, ffmpeg 2.5.1, mesa 10.4.0, SysVinit (no systemd) and all popular applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and VLC have been updated to their latest versions. Please note if you have been keeping up with your PCLinuxOS software updates then there is NO NEED to install fresh from a 2014.12 iso. These ISOS are final releases based on legacy technology. Future releases will default to grub2 and support uefi and gpt partition formats.

      • Christmas rest for the braves

        We planned initially to release Mageia 5 beta 2 around the 16th of December. We still have some work left to complete to release a proper beta 2 that would drive us through to the final release.

        Releasing development ISOs is a good way to test all the functions of the installer with the largest possible scope of use cases and variety of hardware. We still have some issues left with EFI integration and some tricky bugs in the installer. So in order to allow some time to fix them and also to still enjoy the Christmas period with friends and family, it has been decided to delay beta 2 until the 6th of January 2015, the initial date of the RC, and then postpone the final release.

      • Mageia 5 Has Been Delayed
      • Mageia Beta Delayed, Christmas Quiz, and 7 Best Alternatives

        Today in Linux news the Mageia project announced another delay in version 5 Beta 2. The Linux Voice is running a Linux quiz for Christmas and Gary Newell offers up his list of the seven best alternative Linux distributions of the year. The Register says 2015 will be the year of Linux – on mobile. Three reviews need to be highlighted and, finally today, Matt Hartley says everyone should switch to Ubuntu MATE.

      • ROSA Fresh R5 is out

        The ROSA company is happy to finally present ROSA Desktop Fresh R5, the number 5 in the “R” lineup of the free ROSA distros with the KDE desktop as a main graphical environment.

      • Hands-on with PCLinuxOS: A terrific release

        I had been thinking that a new PCLinuxOS release was due any time now, based on their quarterly release schedule. Sure enough, it has now arrived, just in time for Christmas – PCLinuxOS 2014.12.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Stock: 3 Pros, 3 Cons

        Red Hat Inc (RHT) is ending the year with a flourish, as the stock has hit a 52-week high of $70. This puts the market cap at nearly $13 billion. In the past year, RHT stock has gained about 23%.

      • Fedora

        • Trying on Fedora 21

          I think it is arguable the Fedora project has done just that, created a small “core” base that products (such as Workstation, Server and Cloud) can be built on. And I applaud Mr Miller for working successfully toward his vision. Still, I am disappointed the result appears to be a smaller, less interesting Fedora. It is a more, to borrow Mr Miller’s term, “boring” foundation distribution, rather than a powerful desktop or server distribution. It is not a solution that brings more functionality to the table, something that would approach Mint’s level of “just works”, Ubuntu’s task oriented work flow or openSUSE’s level of integration. As a core platform we can use as a base to install Docker containers and run services, Fedora 21 can be considered a success. As a workstation operating system I would use to develop code or a desktop distribution I would install for friends & family, I do not think Fedora is a good match for those roles.

    • Debian Family

      • Devuan rebels hope to deliver Debian fork in 2015

        Devuan, the Debian spin-off that will not include systemd has posted its first progress report.

        The missive says things are going well, as the project now has a GitLab repository and has built the first devuan-baseconf package.

      • Linux Bloat, Linux Lite, and Devuan Update
      • Don’t panic and keep forking Debian™! :^) Once upon a time there was a Debian fork

        This is an update on the progress of the Devuan.org project, born out of the Debianfork.org declaration to defend our growing community from the systemd avalanche.

      • Is Devuan really a good idea?

        I was idly looking through the press releases and news stories when I came across this article which talks about the new Debian fork called Devuan.

        Devuan is a complete fork of the Debian system minus systemd.

        I know that there are lots of people who aren’t happy with the inclusion of systemd as part of the next release of Debian but to make such a radical decision to clone the entire thing and start your own project could be deemed overkill.

        I can understand a single developer or a handful of developers taking a Debian or Ubuntu base and then creating a new distribution with a specific purpose in mind. I actually think smaller distributions are a good thing because they come up with and implement ideas that might not reach the light of day in one of the base distributions.

        Many people are of the opinion however that it is better to pool resources and have just a few distributions where everybody works together to make those distributions as good as they can possibly be.

      • Devuan Is Still Moving Along As A Debian Fork Without Systemd

        The Devuan fork of Debian is progressing as Debian GNU/Linux without systemd present on the system.

      • Bonus: More from the deepest depths of Debian

        And not just Debian this time, since I have one or two here that elude me and are from the Arch corpus only. By and large the relevant theme here is a consistent lack of required hardware, although I’m throwing in an oddball application or two that I just can’t seem to get working, for more traditional reasons. Like extensive or esoteric setups. Or my own thick-headedness.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • NTP Vulnerabilities Closed in Supported Ubuntu OSes

            Canonical has announced that a number of NTP vulnerabilities have been corrected for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Cinnamon Review: As always, Impressive!

              I am very happy with Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon. It looks great with very polished interface, hundreds of attractive wallpapers, easy customization options and awesome collection of themes. The distro offers really good performance and excellent battery life. If you are looking for a functional distro which offers attractive looks and impressive performance, I definitely feel you should try out Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 2014: A Banner Year for Open Source

    Open source was initially adopted for low cost and lack of vendor lock-in, but customers have found that it also results in better innovation and more flexibility. Now it is pervasive, and it is challenging proprietary incumbents across technology categories. It is not only mainstream, open source is truly leading innovation in areas like cloud, mobile, big data, the Internet of Things, and beyond.

    As we embark on a new year, I cannot help but reflect on the speed with which technology is changing. Rapidly delivering technology is about much more than just the technology – it is about people and culture. More than ever, this is why executives are looking at key technology companies – including Red Hat – as their partner instead of as a vendor.

  • IsoHunt releases roll-your-own Pirate Bay

    Torrent site ISOhunt has created a roll-your-own, open source, version of infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.

    IsoHunt’s motive for the release seems to be a belief that big targets like The Pirate Bay will inevitably be picked off by law enforcement agencies. Lots of sites, however, present a tougher target. Open-sourcing what it’s calling “OpenBay” means there’ll be more targets for law enforcers to consider.

    “History of torrent sites such as Isohunt and The Pirate Bay gives us a lesson that would be a crime not to learn,” says the new OpenBay site. “The era of individual torrent sites is over.”

  • The Pirate Bay’s Site Goes Back Online (With a Giant, Waving Flag For Now)
  • There Are Gonna Be 9280928 Pirate Bays Because Anyone Can Make a New One
  • Pirate Bay Site Is Back Online, But Pirate Booty Is Hidden Behind Encryption
  • Facebook’s 2014 Open-Source Highlights
  • A real-time editing tool for Wikipedia

    Wikipedia is one of the most frequently visited websites in the world. The vast online encyclopedia, editable by anyone, has become the go-to source for general information on any subject. However, the “crowdsourcing” used by Wikipedia opens their doors to spin and whitewashing–edits that may be less than factual in nature. To help journalists, citizens, and activists track these edits, TWG (The Working Group) partnered with Metro News and the Center for Investigative Reporting to build WikiWash.

  • Open Source Meritocracy Is More Than a Joke

    In January 2014, Github removed the rug in its office’s waiting room in response to criticism of its slogan, “United Meritocracy of Github.” Since then, the criticism of the idea of meritocracy has spread in free software circles. “Meritocracy is a joke,” has become a slogan seen on T-shirts and constantly proclaimed, especially by feminists.

    Such commentary is true — so far as it goes, but it ignores the potential benefits of meritocracy as an ethos.

    Anyone who bothers to look can see that meritocracy is more of an ideal than a standard practice in free software. The idea that people should be valued for their contributions may seem to be a way to promote fairness, but the practice is frequently more complicated.

  • Unmanagement and unleadership

    Luis Ibanez is a senior software developer at Google. In this short talk he explains what he means by “unmanagement” and “unleadership” and how they can change the course of a project.

  • Using Your Open Source Work to Get a Job

    So you’ve worked on an open-source project, and you want to place that experience on your resume in order to move your career forward. Fantastic! In theory, there’s no reason an employer should shun your experience, just because you did the project from home on your own time. But how can you actually leverage that project work to obtain a full-time job?

  • Events

    • Help improve diverse accessibility for PDX’s Open Source Bridge conference

      Sumana writes, “Open Source Bridge is already a leader among tech conferences in diversity-friendliness — OSB featured a strong code of conduct, accessibility, well-labelled food for all needs, and cheap & free admissions before they became de rigeur, and in 2014 boasted a gender-balanced slate of speakers.”

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Symantec Brings Security Savvy as OpenStack Gold Member

      If you ask many enterprises considering doing an OpenStack deployment why they aren’t pulling the trigger, lots of them will cite security concerns as the primary obstruction. As I covered recently, IDG Enterprise came out with results from a new survey it did involving 1,672 IT decision-makers who report that they are very focused on cloud computing, including open cloud platforms such as OpenStack. The survey clearly showed that security and protection from disaster were among IT managers’ chief concerns in implementing cloud deployments.

    • Banks and other institutions leverage the Tor network as a security layer.

      Now that many enterprises are actually moving forward with OpenStack deployments, they are also wrestling with the complexities of putting applications and appropriate services on their cloud platforms. The last days of 2014 have brought news of some interesting choices becoming available for OpenStack deployments.

    • Mirantis, Tesora Partner on OpenStack Cloud Interoperability

      Tesora and Mirantis have partnered to certify the interoperability of their respective OpenStack open source cloud computing distributions and tools.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter, December 22, 2014

      In this issue, you’ll get a summary of all the FreeBSD development work we’ve supported; highlights of all the conferences that we sponsored and attended; plans for the FreeBSD Journal in 2015; another great testimonial from a commercial user; and our Q1-Q3 financial reports. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my favorite part of our semi-annual newsletter, the insightful and always inspirational letter from our president and founder, Justin Gibbs.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Turing Church and Open Source Religion: Ben Goertzel Interviews Giulio Prisco

      In 2011 I — Ben Goertzel – interviewed physicist and futurist Giulio Prisco on his notion of Technological Transcendence. Since that time Giulio has been very active in developing these ideas further – and quite recently he has taken the initiative to start a “Turing Church” with an open-source spirit. So it seemed time to have another conversation with Giulio on his Turing Church concept and plans, and what it may mean for the future of humanity, transhumanism and spirituality.

    • RichRap Unveils The Open Source, 3D Printed Universal Pellet Extruder

      If you are like me, you can’t help but see dollar signs every time you run your 3D printer. “How much filament is this using?” “What if the printer screws up just as the project is nearing completion?” Those are thoughts that run through my head as I watch the spool of filament slowly unravel and my finances follow right behind.

    • Sifteo’s intelligent cubes go open-source after disappointing commercial run

      Sifteo, a system of intelligent gaming cubes launched with significant fanfare in 2011, has gone open-source.

    • Mars Express images and videos for everyone

      As of December 19, the European Space Agency (ESA) is now sharing all of its images and videos from the Mars Express mission under CC BY-SA. ESA is using the intergovernmental organization (IGO) port of CC BY-SA 3.0. ESA is one of several intergovernmental organizations to use the IGO port since we introduced it last year.

    • Open Data

      • The year in local open data

        It was another year full of encouraging news on the open data front in states and municipalities across the country. New open data policies were approved in municipalities of all sizes from coast to coast, existing open data programs matured and sparked new innovations, and there were numerous other open government wins as a result of advocacy efforts.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Security

    • VeriSign Warns of DNS Security Risks

      The CSO of VeriSign discusses his concerns about domain collisions and the risks they entail.

    • 12 Million Home Routers Vulnerable to Takeover

      More than 12 million devices running an embedded webserver called RomPager are vulnerable to a simple attack that could give a hacker man-in-the-middle position on traffic going to and from home routers from just about every leading manufacturer.

    • Apple pushes first ever automated security update to Mac users

      Apple Inc has pushed out its first-ever automated security update to Macintosh computers to help defend against newly identified bugs that security researchers have warned could enable hackers to gain remote control of machines.

      The company pushed out the software on Monday to fix critical security vulnerabilities in a component of its OS X operating system called the network time protocol, or NTP, according to Apple spokesman Bill Evans.NTP is used for synchronizing clocks on computer systems.

    • Thunderbolt devices can infect MacBooks with persistent rootkits

      Attackers can infect MacBook computers with highly persistent boot rootkits by connecting malicious devices to them over the Thunderbolt interface.

      The attack, dubbed Thunderstrike, installs malicious code in a MacBook’s boot ROM (read-only memory), which is stored in a chip on the motherboard. It was devised by a security researcher named Trammell Hudson based on a two-year old vulnerability and will be demonstrated next week at the 31st Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg.

    • NTP The Latest Open Source Security Problem

      The problem was discovered by the Google Security Team which seems to be responsible recently for more than its fair share of vulnerabilities detected. Some of the vulnerabilities are in older versions of the NTP code and have been fixed. So as long as you have been keeping up-to-date there is nothing to worry about.

    • NTP Is The Latest Project Struck By Security Issues

      Now public via the ICS-CERT after the discoveries were made by the Google Security Team are multiple vulnerabilities with the widely-used NTP. These vulnerabilities could lead to arbitrary code execution with the same privileges as the NTP daemon. These vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely and the ICS-CERT characterizes them as requiring low skills to exploit.

    • Why the Sony hack is unlikely to be the work of North Korea.

      Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here’s why:1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in “Konglish”. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English.

    • Sony Pictures hackers say they want ‘equality,’ worked with staff to break in

      The hackers who took down Sony Pictures’ computer systems yesterday say that they are working for “equality” and suggest that their attack was assisted or carried out by Sony employees. In an email responding to inquiries from The Verge, a person identifying as one of the hackers writes, “We Want equality [sic]. Sony doesn’t. It’s an upward battle.” The hackers’ goals remain unclear, but they used the attack yesterday to specifically call out Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, referring to him as a “criminal” in a tweet.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Delta employee charged with helping smuggle guns onto plane

      The FBI and New York police held a news conference to discuss the latest on an airline security breach involving a Delta employee facing federal charges.

      Police say more than 150 guns were illegally smuggled from Atlanta to New York on more than a dozen trips. Channel 2′s Rachel Stockman broke the news Monday that a former Delta employee at Hartsfield-Jackson is accused of using his clearance to help smuggle the guns.

    • Leaked CIA docs teach operatives how to infiltrate EU

      Wikileaks has released two classified documents instructing CIA operatives how best to circumvent global security systems in international airports, including those of the EU, while on undercover missions.

      The first of the documents, dated September 2011, advises undercover operatives how to act during a secondary airport screening. Secondary screenings pose a risk to an agent’s cover by focusing “significant scrutiny” on an operative via thorough searches and detailed questioning.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Flaw in open-source PDF viewer could put WikiLeaks users, others at risk

      An open-source component used to display PDF files on WikiLeaks.org and other websites contains vulnerabilities that could be exploited to launch cross-site scripting (XSS) and content spoofing attacks against visitors.

      The vulnerable component is called FlexPaper and is developed by a company called Devaldi, based in New Zealand. The company confirmed the issues, which were first reported Thursday on the WikiLeaks supporters forum, and released FlexPaper 2.3.0 to address them.

  • Finance

    • The Cost of US Wars Since 9/11: $1.6 Trillion

      The cost of US war-making in the 13 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks reached a whopping $1.6 trillion in 2014, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

    • Christmas comes early to Hong Kong, as millions of bank notes spill out onto busy street

      Sheeta Leung Hui-kwan, a spokeswoman for G4S Hong Kong, said an internal investigation was underway, but initial findings suggest a broken door sparked the incident.

      Armed police were quick to arrive at the scene, and closed off two lanes of the road.

      According to reports, witnesses to the accident were seen running onto Gloucester Road and grabbing HK$500 notes. One person allegedly filled their arms with wrapped bundles of cash, a witness told the SCMP.

    • Why Won’t Warren Quit Worrying and Learn to Love Wall Street?

      Illustrating that nothing rattles corporate media like progressive populism, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius (12/24/14) is the latest establishment journalist to launch a salvo against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and “her jihad against Wall Street.”

      Echoing the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin (FAIR Blog, 11/26/14), Ignatius goes after Warren for opposing the nomination of Antonio Weiss to be the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for domestic finance. He makes the same extraneous points Sorkin did about Weiss (He’s a Democrat! He publishes the Paris Review!) and similarly misrepresents Warren’s primary reason for opposing him, which is, as she wrote in the Huffington Post (11/19/14), that “Weiss has spent most of his career working on international transactions,” so “neither his background nor his professional experience makes him qualified to oversee consumer protection and domestic regulatory functions at the Treasury.”

      Ignatius also criticizes Warren for including on her “enemies list” Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, despite the fact that they “had never worked as private bankers.” Summers may not have been a private banker, but he was a managing director of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, which paid him $5.2 million; he also got $2.7 million in “speaking fees” from financial firms, including major banks like Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase (Salon, 4/4/09). But he wasn’t a private banker!

  • Censorship

    • Amy Adams: ‘Confused’ by ‘Today’ show treatment

      Amy Adams says she is still “really confused” about having her live interview on The Today Show dramatically pulled minutes before it was due to take place Monday morning.

      Adams told USA TODAY on Tuesday night that she was “surprised” that the segment was unceremoniously canceled after she expressed misgivings over discussing aspects of the Sony hacking scandal on live television.

  • Privacy

    • ‘Citizenfour’ Producers Sued Over Edward Snowden Leaks (Exclusive)

      Horace Edwards, who identifies himself as a retired naval officer and the former secretary of the Kansas Department of Transportation, has filed a lawsuit in Kansas federal court that seeks a constructive trust over monies derived from the distribution of Citizenfour. Edwards, who says he has “Q” security clearance and was the chief executive of the ARCO Pipeline Company, seeks to hold Snowden, director Laura Poitras, The Weinstein Co., Participant Media and others responsible for “obligations owed to the American people” and “misuse purloined information disclosed to foreign enemies.”

      It’s an unusual lawsuit, one that the plaintiff likens to “a derivative action on behalf of the American Public,” and is primarily based upon Snowden’s agreement with the United States to keep confidentiality.

    • 8 Free Privacy Programs Worth Your Year-End Donations

      Free software isn’t free. Someone’s got to shell out for the expensive development, maintenance, bug fixes and updates for programs that so many of us who live online have come to see as almost natural resources. And increasingly, those taken-for-granted tools have become vital for the privacy and security of millions of people.

    • Tor Project Leaders Warn of Possibly Imminent Network Attack

      In the world of online anonymity, the Tor network is a silent king. Millions of users depend on Tor to keep their tracks untraceable online, and not just individual users. Banks and other institutions leverage the Tor network as a security layer. In the U.S. last year, when NSA snooping was in the news, usage of the Tor network doubled within a matter of days.

    • Facebook: Colonialism 2.0

      The Western media has attempted to portray Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious plan to get every human being online as altruistic at first, but later revealed as simply what could be called “profitable empathy.” In reality however, the truth is much more sinister, with Facebook already revealed to be much more than a mere corporation run by Zuckerberg and his “ideas”

  • Civil Rights

    • Obama Should Prosecute the Torturers

      The New York Times has a blistering editorial calling on President Obama to prosecute those who committed torture…

    • Iraq: Yezidi women and girls face harrowing sexual violence

      Torture, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, suffered by women and girls from Iraq’s Yezidi minority who were abducted by the armed group calling itself the Islamic State (IS), highlights the savagery of IS rule, said Amnesty International in a new briefing today.

    • Oakland PD Body Cams Help Cut Police-Involved Shootings From 8 A Year To Zero In The Last 18 Months.

      A body camera system is nothing without solid policies backing them up. Anyone can instruct an officer to wear a camera, but only a department solidly behind the program will hold them accountable if they fail to do so. According to public records obtained by Ars Technica, the Oakland PD is making a genuine effort to ensure devices are on and recording.

    • EXCLUSIVE – Ryan Ferguson on his first year of freedom: Man wrongly jailed for TEN YEARS reveals how the girlfriend he met in prison is helping him cope with life outside and tells of the hell of solitary confinement

      A review of the trial later revealed that police coerced and coached key witnesses

    • 2015 – Looking Forward

      But still, mainstream politicians still don’t think that issues like civil liberties, mass surveillance, digital rights and freedom of speech will move people’s votes at a general election. That is why so many MPs simply ignored their constituents when it came to crackdowns like the DRIP vote. They count that once election will be run in exactly the same way as previous decades.

    • Secret Torture versus Open Source Intelligence

      The DNI, USDI, and CIA went over the cliff when they confused technology with thinking, secrets with intelligence, and spending money with progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the world of intelligence as decision-support, Big Data is noise. The best intelligence — precision intelligence — is from a human source with direct access, and that is not something we can do today despite millions of such sources being available. We have no penetrations of ISIS, the clandestine service refuses to deal with “overt” human experts, while the diplomats and attaches have no money for commercial sourcing and modest performance fees. In consequence we have no human assets of any import across the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, or the Americas at the same time that our analysts are children lacking in real-world experience — who in addition rarely speak the target language and have no grasp of the culture or history of the target population.

    • A Majority of Cop Killers Have Been White

      As officials continue to investigate Saturday’s tragic killing of two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, details have surfaced about the suspect, 28 year old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who allegedly shot a woman in Baltimore before traveling to New York. Anti-police posts he appears to have published on social media sites prior to the killings have lead many to connect his crime to protests that occurred in previous weeks, and some commenters have cast blame on officials including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Attorney General Eric Holder, and President Obama, all of whom have condemned the violence.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality Takes a Wild Ride: 2014 in Review

      If you’ve been watching the issue of net neutrality this year, you know it’s been quite a ride. The year started with the D.C. Circuit overturning the majority of the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet rules, explaining that the FCC can’t impose “common carrier”-type rules on ISPs without actually classifying them as “common carriers.” Having chosen to classify them instead as “information services” back in 2004, the ruling meant the FCC had to go back to the drawing board. That led to a new proposal in May by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler that many believed would actively undermine the open Internet in the name of protecting it.

    • It’s Almost Christmas. Is Anyone Still on the Internet?

      Offices everywhere are emptying as people head home for a few days of light dining and constructive political conversations with relatives. But is the Internet as much of a ghost town as your workplace over the holiday season? Nope. Internet usage is likely to be higher than usual for the rest of the week, according to Sandvine, a firm that tracks Internet traffic. The only exception: a few hours on Christmas Eve, when people have no choice but to put away devices and talk to one another.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • MPAA Secretly Settled With Hotfile for $4 Million, Not $80 Million

        Last December the MPAA announced one of its biggest victories to date. The Hollywood group won its case against file-hosting site Hotfile, who agreed to a $80 million settlement. However, this figure mostly served to impress and scare the public, as we can now reveal that Hotfile agreed to pay ‘only’ $4 million.

      • Raid on Kim Dotcom’s Mansion Was Legal, Supreme Court Rules

        A high-profile police raid carried out on Kim Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion has been declared legal by the country’s Supreme Court. The Court acknowledged that the search warrants used against Dotcom were ‘deficient’ in detail, but this did not result in a miscarriage of justice.

      • UK Cinema Calls Police on Kids With iPhones Over Piracy Concerns

        A group of 12-year-old girls had the police called on them after they decided to bring their iPhones and iPads to a showing of The Hunger Games at a local cinema. The police officers who rushed to the scene were unable to find any recorded footage, but by then the children were too distressed to watch the rest of the film.

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