TechrightsSearch results for 'monsanto' (page 1 of 22) http://techrights.org Free Software Sentry – watching and reporting maneuvers of those threatened by software freedom Tue, 10 Jan 2017 14:35:36 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.14 Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones http://techrights.org/2017/01/03/imposing-tpm2-on-linux/ http://techrights.org/2017/01/03/imposing-tpm2-on-linux/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2017 14:28:01 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=98144 This great search was powered by Search Unleashed.
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… in the food sector. Consider the latest proposed merger be­tween global giants Bayer and Monsanto pending antitrust approval. And remem­ber, DuPont-Dow, Syngenta–Chem China and Monsanto-Bayer (if the mergers go through) aren’t agriculture companies first — they’re chemical companies.

How Trump can help working-class Americans: Keep funding Planned Parenthood

Can Congress stop harassing Planned Parenthood? That would be my wish for the new year. Unfortunately, …

]]> http://techrights.org/2017/01/03/imposing-tpm2-on-linux/feed/ 0 Drunk on ‘Production’, the European Patent Office (EPO) Grants Patents on Recipes http://techrights.org/2016/11/18/kongstad-and-battistelli-patents/ http://techrights.org/2016/11/18/kongstad-and-battistelli-patents/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2016 12:47:39 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=96855 Kongstad beerSummary: Kongstad and Battistelli seem to be perfectly alright with patents on food and beverages, clearly a very steep decline when it comes to patent quality at the EPO

THE WEB page “No Patents on Beer!” was published yesterday. The title is self explanatory and the introduction names Carlsberg from Denmark, where the Chinchilla Man of the Administrative Council is from. Here is what EU Business says:

In 2016, the European Patent Office (EPO) granted three patents to the Danish brewery, Carlsberg. The patents cover barley plants derived from conventional breeding, their usage in brewing as well as the beer brewed thereof. In a joint letter, several civil society organisations are now calling on Carlsberg to drop these patents. They consider the patents to be an abuse of patent law and in conflict with the interests of consumers.

“There should be no patents on beer and barley. Breeding plants and brewing beer are not inventions, but based on centuries-old tradition,” says Erling Frederiksen from Friends of the Earth in Denmark (NOAH). “Carlsberg should make it clear that they just want to produce good beer and are not acting against the interests of citizens and consumers. We do not want corporate control of our food or patent monopolies. No matter whether they are held by Monsanto, Bayer or Carlsberg.”

Quickly afterwards the mainstream media in Germany joined in. It has written about it as well, citing the above. Remember how protests against software patents and patents on life at the EPO culminated in talks, including one from Richard Stallman, in which he sort joked about patents on recipes and what the ramifications would be? Well, his analogy is no longer just an analogy:

The European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich and the Carlsberg company were sloshed Thursday in an open letter by campaigners opposed to the patenting of plants and animals.

No Patents on Seeds, an alliance including Greenpeace, the Catholic charity Misereor, and globally networked small-scale farmers, called on the Danish brewer to voluntarily relinquish three patents it received earlier this year from the EPO.

Documents published by the EPO also list Heineken of the Netherlands as a patent proprietor.

What next after that? Can cooks and chefs pursue patents on their cuisine? How low can one go? Can Mr. Kongstad and his wife pursue patents on methods for cutting a chinchilla? His wife certainly seems to know what she is doing (for the camera even!). Here she is “at work”:

LANDBRUG photo

People who planned to apply for a job at the EPO actually told me that they had changed their mind after reading Techrights. If this is what qualifies for an EP (European Patent) these days, then no wonder the EPO struggles to recruit and lies about it instead.

Last year the EPO actually paid respected publications not just for ads but also for puff pieces aimed at recruitment. Science is fundamentally against lies, but at the EPO lies have become the norm. Staff and journalists are habitually lied to by EPO management and now we have European media which is PAID (even large publications like The Financial Times) to repeat these lies. ‘Informecials’ for recruitment and outright defamation of staff that Battistelli does not like now dominate European media. Yesterday the EPO promoted this new puff piece in Twitter. Is this one also of one of these paid puff pieces? It’s hard to tell. The opening paragraph is purely promotional and it says: “Patenting is an integral part in every technology-driven industry since its protects ideas and enables inventors to create a business around them. But not every inventor or researcher necessarily is a man or woman of business, too. They need help by someone to deal with legal questions to patent and to protect their ideas. The European Patent Office (EPO) can help them.”

Well, what the EPO stands for right now isn’t inventors but booze companies and foreign monopolies. It got a lot harder to derive joy and pride from an EPO job. The only time EPO staff actually enjoys is the time down the pub (after work). █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/11/18/kongstad-and-battistelli-patents/feed/ 0 Links 23/10/2016: Alcatel’s New Android Smartphones, Another Honorary Doctorate for Stallman http://techrights.org/2016/10/23/another-honorary-doctorate-for-stallman/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/23/another-honorary-doctorate-for-stallman/#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2016 16:12:58 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=96331

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The basics of open source quality assurance

    Open source depends on a sustainable community to develop code rapidly, debug code effectively, and build out new features. Because community involvement is voluntary, people’s skills, levels of involvement, and time commitments can vary. Given the variable nature of these factors, along with the fact that open source often relies on a philosophy of “release early, release often,” quality assurance can be become challenging.

  • An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

    Running our own Heroku… It shouldn’t be that hard, right?

    We have a small set of servers we use to run our internal applications. Nothing too complex, just monitoring, our ELK stack, Jenkins, and a few internal services.

    Given our rather modest requirements it may seem obvious that our first attempt at deployment automation, Chef, was a bit overkill for our needs. Not only that, we also wanted our engineers to be able to easily deploy applications to our servers without having to set up a Chef recipe — like the role Heroku plays in many of our client projects. We could have decided to run our internal applications on Heroku as well, but their pricing model wasn’t compatible with our relatively small-scale requirements.

  • The role of Free Software in a world that doesn’t care

    The Free Software movement is about personal and social liberties. Giving the owner and user of a computer control over it. But most people don’t see the problem with a small number of multinational mega-corporations having control over everyone’s computers. They think: “Apple and Microsoft know what they’re doing, and they do a good job, so why would I need Free Software?”

    Accepting that most people reject the Free Software message, what can the Free Software movement contribute to the world?

  • 5 Best Open Source Mobile Test Automation Tools

    There is a wide range of devices and platforms one needs to account for when developing a mobile app. An automation app for Mobile Testing can save development and testing time. Here are 5 top open source automated mobile testing frameworks to use, including the likes of Appium, Robotium, and Selendroid.

  • Could open-source coding ‘save the world’?

    Open Source Day is one of the most popular events at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This year, a day-long open-source hackathon was devoted to participants developing open-source projects for humanitarian causes.

    Neetu Jain, product manager at SoftLayer, an IBM Company, and Daniela Dorneanu, solution developer and product trainer at Appway, joined Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Grace Hopper event to discuss the mission of Open Source Day and the goal of the hackathon for humanity.

  • Yahoo open sources NSFW neural network porn detector

    Embattled former darling of the search wars Yahoo has open sourced its neural network porn detector software.

    The firm has explained that it is in fact tremendously difficult to automatically identifying that an image is not suitable/safe for work (NSFW).

  • Events

    • An introduction to color spaces

      The Kernel Recipes conference is, unsurprisingly, focused on kernel-related topics, but one of the potentially most useful talks given there was only marginally about the kernel. Applications that deal with the acquisition or display of video data must be aware of color spaces, but few developers really understand what color spaces are or how they work. Media subsystem maintainer Hans Verkuil sought to improve this situation with an overview of the color-space abstraction.

    • A tale of two conferences

      The “small” criterion can be a bit of a problem since it, naturally, limits the number of people who can participate in this kind of event. The Linux Plumbers Conference (now just a few weeks away) is always trying to find the right balance between size and quality of the event, and there, too, tickets tend to sell out quickly. The nice thing about an event like Kernel Recipes, though, is that it ought to be reproducible in other parts of the world. We have a ready supply of good speakers and interesting things to talk about in our community, and it doesn’t take that many speakers to make an event like this work.

      In the end, it was a privilege to be able to attend both events. Your editor’s only regret was being unable to stay in Berlin for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe the following week. Conferences are an opportunity to get a sense for what is happening in our community and to renew one’s enthusiasm and energy; both LinuxCon and Kernel Recipes succeeded on all of those fronts. A diverse community needs a diverse range of events; happily, that is just what was in store in Europe during these weeks.

    • All Things Open Next Week – MCing, Talks, and More

      I was really impressed with All Things Open last year and have subsequently become friends with the principle organizer, Todd Lewis. I loved how the team put together a show with the right balance of community and corporation, great content, exhibition and more.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Seafile and Collabora make LibreOffice Online available for Seafile Pro

      Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, and Seafile, a leading open source file sharing vendor, announce the availability of Collabora Online in the newly released Seafile pro edition 6.0.

    • Office Binary Document RC4 CryptoAPI Encryption

      In LibreOffice we’ve long supported Microsoft Office’s “Office Binary Document RC4 Encryption” for decrypting xls, doc and ppt. But somewhere along the line the Microsoft Office encryption scheme was replaced by a new one, “Office Binary Document RC4 CryptoAPI Encryption”, which we didn’t support. This is what the error dialog of…

  • CMS

    • Open Source CMS Pros and Cons – a Developer’s Perspective

      The phrase “Open Source CMS” lingers in the minds and hearts of many developers. CMSes are today’s talk of the Internet, and you won’t miss the discussion in local schools and private offices either. I don’t remember for how long I have used Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) to manage local and international websites. However, I have implemented CMS-based solutions long enough, and I can tell you from experience these tools did become the big digital craze for many professional reasons.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • Eclipse Foundation Collaboration Yields Open Source Technology for Computational Science

      The gap between the computational science and open source software communities just got smaller – thanks to a collaboration among national laboratories, universities and industry.

    • PyCon India 2016

      “This is awesome!”, this was my first reaction when I boarded my first flight to Delhi. I was having trouble in finding a proper accommodation Kushal, Sayan and Chandan helped me a lot in that part, I finally got honour of bunking with Sayan , Subho and Rtnpro which I will never forget. So, I landed and directly went to JNU convention center. I met the whole Red Hat intern gang . It was fun to meet them all. I had proposed Pagure for Dev Sprint and I pulled in Vivek to do the same.

      The dev sprint started and there was no sign of Vivek or Saptak, Saptak is FOSSASIA contributor and Vivek contributes to Pagure with me. Finally it was my turn to talk about Pagure on stage , it was beautiful the experience and the energy. We got a lot of young and new contributors and we tried to guide them and make them send at least one PR. One of them was lucky enough to actually make a PR and it got readily merged.

    • Hack This: An Overdue Python Primer

      In writing the most recent Hack This (“Scrape the Web with Beautiful Soup”) I again found myself trapped between the competing causes of blog-brevity and making sure everything is totally clear for non-programmers. It’s a tough spot! Recapping every little Python (the default language of Hack This) concept is tiring for everyone, but what’s the point in the first place if no one can follow what’s going on?

      This post is then intended then as a sort of in-between edition of Hack This, covering a handful of Python features that are going to recur in pretty much every programming tutorial that we do under the Hack This name. A nice thing about Python is that it makes many things much clearer than is possible in almost any other language.

    • Why I won’t be attending Systems We Love

      Here’s one way to put it: to me, Bryan Cantrill is the opposite of another person I admire in operating systems (whom I will leave unnamed). This person makes me feel excited and welcome and safe to talk about and explore operating systems. I’ve never seen them shame or insult or put down anyone. They enthusiastically and openly talk about learning new systems concepts, even when other people think they should already know them. By doing this, they show others that it’s safe to admit that they don’t know something, which is the first step to learning new things. They are helping create the kind of culture I want in systems programming – the kind of culture promoted by Papers We Love, which Bryan cites as the inspiration for Systems We Love.

      By contrast, when I’m talking to Bryan I feel afraid, cautious, and fearful. Over the years I worked with Bryan, I watched him shame and insult hundreds of people, in public and in private, over email and in person, in papers and talks. Bryan is no Linus Torvalds – Bryan’s insults are usually subtle, insinuating, and beautifully phrased, whereas Linus’ insults tend towards the crude and direct. Even as you are blushing in shame from what Bryan just said about you, you are also admiring his vocabulary, cadence, and command of classical allusion. When I talked to Bryan about any topic, I felt like I was engaging in combat with a much stronger foe who only wanted to win, not help me learn. I always had the nagging fear that I probably wouldn’t even know how cleverly he had insulted me until hours later. I’m sure other people had more positive experiences with Bryan, but my experience matches that of many others. In summary, Bryan is supporting the status quo of the existing culture of systems programming, which is a culture of combat, humiliation, and domination.

      [...]

      He gaily recounts the time he gave a highly critical keynote speech at USENIX, bashfully links to a video praising him at a Papers We Love event, elegantly puts down most of the existing operating systems research community, and does it all while using the words “ancillary,” “verve,” and “quadrennial.” Once you know the underlying structure – a layer cake of vituperation and braggadocio, frosted with eloquence – you can see the same pattern in most of his writing and talks.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM’s IT guy

      Fletcher Previn could be one of the funniest IBM vice presidents the company employs.

      Before achieving what he jokes as his “true life-long ambition of middle management at IBM” he worked as an intern on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and did a stint for Conan O’Brian, too, he told attendees at the Jamf tech conference.

    • You guys, I got my Ono-Sendai working again!

      I’ve had this terminal sitting under my desk gathering dust for… close to two decades, I think. This is an Ann Arbor Ambassador 60, manufactured in 1982 or 1983. It is a terminal. You probably think that word means “a GUI window that runs a command line shell in it”. You think this thing must be a computer because it looks like what computers used to look like. But it is not a computer, it is a peripheral. This object consists of a keyboard, a serial port, and a CRT screen, and that’s about it. A screen, I must emphasize, that is capable of displaying only text, and that text can be in any two colors you like, as long as those colors are green and black.

      Look at the sustain on that phosphor. Just look at it! The video is a little long, but it’s moody.

      You plug the serial port on the back into the serial port of your mainframe, or into a modem, and boom, Thus We Go Forth Into Cyberspace.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Your groceries may be cheaper, but farmers and supermarkets feel the pain

      If you’re just a little irked that gasoline prices have edged up recently, maybe this will cheer you up: Groceries are a bargain.

      Average supermarket prices fell 2.2% in September from a year ago, the most since late 2009, and they’ve been down on an annual basis for 10 straight months, the longest such streak since 1959-60, Labor Department figures this week showed.

      But while that breakfast of eggs, toast and bacon may not be putting as big of a dent in your wallet, falling prices at the checkout are spreading hardship across the nation’s farm belt and hammering the earnings of grocery chains.

    • ‘If I could afford to leave, I would.’ In Flint, a water crisis with no end in sight.

      Even now, the people of Flint, Mich., cannot trust what flows from their taps.

      More than one year after government officials finally acknowledged that an entire city’s water system was contaminated by lead, many residents still rely on bottled water for drinking, cooking and bathing.

      Parents still worry about their kids. Promised aid has yet to arrive. In ways large and small, the crisis continues to shape daily life.

    • EPA Bows to Industry in Delay of Glyphosate Cancer Review

      However, the EPA Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) meetings were “postponed,” just four days before they were suppose to meet, after intense lobbying by the agrichemical industry, including Monsanto. The industry first fought to keep the meetings from being held at all, and argued that if they were held, several leading international experts should be excluded from participating, including “any person who has publicly expressed an opinion regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate.”

      As the meetings drew near, CropLife America, which represents the interests of Monsanto and other agribusinesses, specifically took issue with at least two scientists chosen for the panel, alleging the experts might be unfavorably biased against industry interests. On Oct. 12, the group sent a letter to the EPA calling for Dr. Kenneth Portier of the American Cancer Society to be more deeply scrutinized for any “pre-formed conclusions” about glyphosate. More notably, CropLife called for leading epidemiologist Dr. Peter Infante to be completely disqualified from panel participation.

      “EPA should replace Dr. Infante with an epidemiologist without such patent bias,” CropLife told the EPA. The chemical industry group said Infante was unlikely to give industry-sponsored research studies the credibility the industry believes they deserve. CropLife said Infante has testified in the past for plaintiffs in chemical exposure cases against Monsanto.

    • ‘Drug Dependence Hasn’t Been Stopped by 45 Years of the War on Drugs’

      Janine Jackson: “Police Arrest More People for Marijuana Use than for All Violent Crimes Combined” is the headline in the Washington Post. In the New York Times, it’s “Marijuana Arrests Outnumber Those for Violent Crimes, Study Finds.”

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • World’s first hack-proof Wi-Fi router with open source firmware is here

      Turris Omnia WiFi Router, the world’s first hack-proof router with open source firmware launched yesterday at the CES Unveiled Show in Prague, Czech Republic.

    • Open-source hack-proof router aims to close cyber security gap

      Routers are the gateway of every home internet network. Yet, while many computers run antivirus software, little has been done thus far to protect routers against cyber threats. A new device, described as the world’s first hack-proof router, was launched on Thursday at the CES Unveiled Show in Prague.

      The main strength of the Turris Omnia router, a spin-out of a cyber security research project by Czech Republic’s domain administrator NIC.cz, is the fact that it automatically updates and patches vulnerabilities as they become known.

    • Adding a phone number to your Google account can make it LESS secure.

      Recently, account takeovers, email hacking, and targeted phishing attacks have been all over the news. Hacks of various politicians, allegedly carried out by Russian hackers, have yielded troves of data. Despite the supposed involvement of state-sponsored agents, some hacks were not reliant on complex zero-day attacks, but involved social engineering unsuspecting victims. These kinds of attacks are increasingly likely to be used against regular people. This recently happened to a friend of mine:

      Two weeks ago, an ex-colleague (actually, my officemate at Google way back in 2002) — let’s call him Bob — had his Google account compromised while on vacation in Hawaii. With his primary email account compromised, the attacker could have:

    • “Dirty COW”, the most dangerous Linux Bug for the last 9 years

      Red Hat, the leading open source software developer firm, has revealed that Linux Kernel has been infected with a serious bug for the past 9 years. The bug has been dubbed as Dirty Cow. It is deemed dangerous because through this bug, an attacker can get write access to read-only memory.

    • Serious Dirty COW bug leaves millions of Linux users vulnerable to attack
    • Cyber attack: hackers ‘weaponised’ everyday devices with malware to mount assault

      The huge attack on global internet access, which blocked some of the world’s most popular websites, is believed to have been unleashed by hackers using common devices like webcams and digital recorders.

      Among the sites targeted on Friday were Twitter, Paypal and Spotify. All were customers of Dyn, an infrastructure company in New Hampshire in the US that acts as a switchboard for internet traffic.

      Outages were intermittent and varied by geography, but reportedly began in the eastern US before spreading to other parts of the country and Europe.

      Users complained they could not reach dozens of internet destinations, including Mashable, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Yelp and some businesses hosted by Amazon.

    • Homeland Security Is ‘Investigating All Potential Causes’ of Internet Disruptions

      Cyber attacks targeting a little known internet infrastructure company, Dyn, disrupted access to dozens of websites on Friday, preventing some users from accessing PayPal, Twitter and Spotify.

      It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the outages that began in the Eastern United States, and then spread to other parts of the country and Western Europe.

      The outages were intermittent, making it difficult to identify all the victims. But technology news site Gizmodo named some five dozen sites that were affected by the attack. They included CNN, HBO Now, Mashable, the New York Times, People.com, the Wall Street Journal and Yelp.

    • Blame the Internet of Things for Destroying the Internet Today

      A massive botnet of hacked Internet of Things devices has been implicated in the cyberattack that caused a significant internet outage on Friday.

      The botnet, which is powered by the malware known as Mirai, is in part responsible for the attack that intermittently knocked some popular websites offline, according to Level 3 Communications, one of the world’s largest internet backbone providers, and security firm Flashpoint.

      “We are seeing attacks coming from a number of different locations. We’re seeing attacks coming from an Internet of Things botnet that we identified called Mirai, also involved in this attack,” Dale Drew, chief security officer at Level 3 Communications, said on a livestream on Friday afternoon.

    • How to Understand Today’s Internet Outage in 4 Words

      A massive DDoS attack against a major DNS service likely using a botnet of IoT devices resulted in Internet issues across the eastern United States Friday, making it hard for many users to access their favorite sites.

      Phew. That’s a lot of acronyms.

    • IoT Can Never Be Fixed

      This title is a bit click baity, but it’s true, not for the reason you think. Keep reading to see why.

      If you’ve ever been involved in keeping a software product updated, I mean from the development side of things, you know it’s not a simple task. It’s nearly impossible really. The biggest problem is that even after you’ve tested it to death and gone out of your way to ensure the update is as small as possible, things break. Something always breaks.

      If you’re using a typical computer, when something breaks, you sit down in front of it, type away on the keyboard, and you fix the problem. More often than not you just roll back the update and things go back to the way they used to be.

    • Hacked Cameras, DVRs Powered Today’s Massive Internet Outage

      A massive and sustained Internet attack that has caused outages and network congestion today for a large number of Web sites was launched with the help of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, such as CCTV video cameras and digital video recorders, new data suggests.

      Earlier today cyber criminals began training their attack cannons on Dyn, an Internet infrastructure company that provides critical technology services to some of the Internet’s top destinations. The attack began creating problems for Internet users reaching an array of sites, including Twitter, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, Spotify and Netflix.

    • How an army of vulnerable gadgets took down the web today

      At some point this morning, one of the US’s critical internet infrastructure players was hit with a staggering distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that has taken out huge swaths of the web. Sites like Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, and many others — all clients of a domain registration service provider called Dyn — have suffered crippling interruptions and, in some cases, blanket outages.

      Details are now emerging about the nature of the attack. It appears the cause is what’s known as a Mirai-based IoT botnet, according to security journalist Brian Krebs, who cited cyber-threat intelligence firm Flashpoint. Dyn’s chief strategy officer Kyle Owen, who spoke with reporters this afternoon, later confirmed Flashpoint’s claim, revealing that traffic to its servers was clogged with malicious requests from tens of millions of IP addresses in what the company is calling a “very sophisticated and complex attack.”

    • Fixing the IoT isn’t going to be easy

      A large part of the internet became inaccessible today after a botnet made up of IP cameras and digital video recorders was used to DoS a major DNS provider. This highlighted a bunch of things including how maybe having all your DNS handled by a single provider is not the best of plans, but in the long run there’s no real amount of diversification that can fix this – malicious actors have control of a sufficiently large number of hosts that they could easily take out multiple providers simultaneously.

      To fix this properly we need to get rid of the compromised systems. The question is how. Many of these devices are sold by resellers who have no resources to handle any kind of recall. The manufacturer may not have any kind of legal presence in many of the countries where their products are sold. There’s no way anybody can compel a recall, and even if they could it probably wouldn’t help. If I’ve paid a contractor to install a security camera in my office, and if I get a notification that my camera is being used to take down Twitter, what do I do? Pay someone to come and take the camera down again, wait for a fixed one and pay to get that put up? That’s probably not going to happen. As long as the device carries on working, many users are going to ignore any voluntary request.

    • Indiscreet Logs: Persistent Diffie-Hellman Backdoors in TLS

      Software implementations of discrete logarithm based cryptosystems over finite fields typically make the assumption that any domain parameters they are presented with are trustworthy, i.e., the parameters implement cyclic groups where the discrete logarithm problem is assumed to be hard. An informal and widespread justification for this seemingly exists that says validating parameters at run time is too computationally expensive relative to the perceived risk of a server sabotaging the privacy of its own connection. In this paper we explore this trust assumption and examine situations where it may not always be justified.

      We conducted an investigation of discrete logarithm domain parameters in use across the Internet and discovered evidence of a multitude of potentially backdoored moduli of unknown order in TLS and STARTTLS spanning numerous countries, organizations, and protocols. Although our disclosures resulted in a number of organizations taking down suspicious parameters, we argue the potential for TLS backdoors is systematic and will persist until either until better parameter hygiene is taken up by the community, or finite field based cryptography is eliminated altogether.

    • Rigging the Election [Ed: too much Microsoft [1, 2]]

      When Dorothy discovers fraud in the land of Oz, she is told by the Wizard, “Don’t look behind the curtain.” But she does. In America, we demand truth and accountability in so many aspects of our daily lives, and yet somehow there’s little public outcry for transparency within voting, the sacred cornerstone of our democracy. For the most part, we sleep soundly under the blanket of assurances from government officials. FBI Director James Comey even attempted a spin of irony recently, noting that our “clunky” voting process actually makes wholesale rigging more difficult. However, Comey misses the bigger picture.

      [...]

      Hardly anyone uses the same computer from 12 years ago, yet large sections of the country currently vote on aging electronic systems which utilize proprietary software that cannot be publicly examined. Unverifiable technology remains deployed in 29 states – including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida – and other key battleground states, which may determine our next president. Races in these areas are not evidence based, and consequently, we cannot be certain ballots reflect voter intent. Bereft of such knowledge, how can we put faith in the legitimacy of our government?

    • How to Hack a Presidential Election
    • ‘Nice Internet You’ve Got There… You Wouldn’t Want Something To Happen To It…’

      Last month, we wrote about Bruce Schneier’s warning that certain unknown parties were carefully testing ways to take down the internet. They were doing carefully configured DDoS attacks, testing core internet infrastructure, focusing on key DNS servers. And, of course, we’ve also been talking about the rise of truly massive DDoS attacks, thanks to poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and ancient, unpatched bugs.

    • Update Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Linux Kernel Without Rebooting With The Canonical Livepatch Service
    • Livepatch – Apply Critical Security Patches to Ubuntu Linux Kernel Without Rebooting
    • GitLab reinstates list of servers that have malware

      Willem de Groot published a list of web stores that contain malware. He first hosted this list on GitHub but it was deleted. Then he hosted it on GitLab where it was also deleted. The reason we gave him for the deletion was “GitLab views the exposure of the vulnerable systems as egregious and will not abide it.”. Willem wrote about his experience in a blog post.

    • Dirty COW — Critical Linux Kernel Flaw Being Exploited in the Wild
    • CVE-2016-5195 Found in Every Linux Version (for the Last 9 Years)
    • Explaining Dirty COW local root exploit – CVE-2016-5195
    • CVE Request: OpenSSH: Memory exhaustion issue found in OpenSSH
    • OpenSSL after Heartbleed

      Rich Salz and Tim Hudson started off their LinuxCon Europe 2016 talk by stating that April 3, 2014 shall forever be known as the “re-key the Internet date.” That, of course, was the day that the Heartbleed vulnerability in the OpenSSL library was disclosed. A lot has happened with OpenSSL since that day, to the point that, Salz said, this should be the last talk he gives that ever mentions that particular vulnerability. In the last two years, the project has recovered from Heartbleed and is now more vital than ever before.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Philippines not really severing ties with US, Duterte says

      Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has clarified his comments that seemed to call for a split from the United States, saying he was advocating a “separation of foreign policy” rather than “a severance of ties.”
      Addressing a press conference in Davao City after his return from a state visit to China, Duterte said:

      “It is not severance of ties. You say severance of ties, you cut the diplomatic relations. I cannot do that.
      “Why? It is in the best interest of my country that we maintain that relationship. Why? Because there are many Filipinos in the United States. Well, Americans of Filipino ancestry.
      “Why? Because the people of my country [are] not ready to accept. I said separation — what I was really saying was separation of a foreign policy.”

    • Jilted Muslim man killed a Dalit Hindu girl by acid attack in Nadia, West Bengal.

      It’s a tragic death of 17 year old Hindu schoolgirl, Mou Rajak on Tuesday in NRS Hospital in Kolkata after her eight day’s long struggle for life since she was admitted here for a critical care being a victim of acid attack. Her lungs were almost damaged as the acid thrown by a Muslim man Imran entered into lung through trachea.

    • Asia Bibi appeal adjourned — her death row ordeal drags on

      Release International urges Pakistan to take a stand against intimidation and release Asia Bibi, following the Supreme Court appeal setback. Release calls for courage to confront intolerance and repeal the blasphemy law. Pakistan’s Supreme Court has adjourned Asia Bibi’s appeal against her death sentence, following the decision of a leading judge to withdraw from the trial.

      Justice Muhammad Iqbal Hameed Ur Rehman stepped back from the case on the grounds that he had been a judge in the case of the Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer who was murdered for taking a stand against the blasphemy laws.

      “It seems strange to pull out on the day of the appeal,” says Paul Robinson, Chief Executive of Release International. “Surely any potential conflict would have been known in advance? What is clear is that it will take immense courage to withstand intimidation and release Asia Bibi — a fact underlined by the presence of so many riot police at the court.”

    • French police chief orders investigation after officers hold Paris protest

      The head of France’s national police force on Tuesday ordered an internal investigation after hundreds of police officers held an unauthorized protest in central Paris overnight.

      Angry police officers marched on the iconic Champs Elysées boulevard in the French capital after dark on Monday, complaining that they are understaffed and ill-equipped.

      The rebel police officers, who held the demonstration without permission or backing of their labour unions, accused Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve of grandstanding while failing to provide the resources they need to do their jobs.

    • Investigators find no evidence Muslim child was attacked on school bus

      The Wake County school system and the Cary Police Department say they haven’t found evidence that a 7-year-old Muslim student was assaulted by classmates on a school bus last week.

      Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani says his son Abdul Aziz was bullied and beaten by classmates at Weatherstone Elementary School in Cary while riding home on the bus last Friday because the first-grade student is Muslim.

      Usmani’s Facebook post, with the words “Welcome to the United States of America of Donald Trump” and a picture of Abdul Aziz’s left arm in a sling, has sparked worldwide social media and news media attention about Islamophobia.

      School and law enforcement officials say they’ve taken the allegations seriously and don’t tolerate bullying. But they say their investigations don’t confirm an assault even occurred.

    • Revealed: The UK is training Saudi pilots amid accusations of war crimes in Yemen

      The Saudi Air Force is being trained by the British Government amid accusations that it is carrying out atrocities in neighbouring Yemen, it has emerged.

      The Liberal Democrats – who uncovered the instruction being given, in both Saudi Arabia and the UK itself – described the revelation as “shameful”.

      Tom Brake, the party’s foreign affairs spokesman, called on the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to end the training immediately and for much stricter controls on arms exports to the oil-rich kingdom.

    • Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war

      Short of troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago, the California National Guard enticed thousands of soldiers with bonuses of $15,000 or more to reenlist and go to war.

      Now the Pentagon is demanding the money back.

      Nearly 10,000 soldiers, many of whom served multiple combat tours, have been ordered to repay large enlistment bonuses — and slapped with interest charges, wage garnishments and tax liens if they refuse — after audits revealed widespread overpayments by the California Guard at the height of the wars last decade.

      Investigations have determined that lack of oversight allowed for widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet enlistment targets.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Strategic Ambition In A Nutshell. “Regime Change” in Russia… Putin is an Obstacle

      It has become crystal clear.

      For the record, here it is.

      She has big ambitions, which she does not spell out for fear of frightening part of the electorate, but which are perfectly understood by her closest aides and biggest donors.

      She wants to achieve regime change in Russia.

      She enjoys the support of most of the State Department and much of the Pentagon, and Congress is ready to go.

      The method: a repeat of the 1979 Brezinski ploy, which consisted of luring Moscow into Afghanistan, in order to get the Russians bogged down in their “Vietnam”. As the Russians are a much more peace-loving people, largely because of what they suffered in two World Wars, the Russian involvement in Afghanistan was very unpopular and can be seen as a cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

      This led to the temporary reign of the drunken Boris Yeltsin who – as recounted in Strobe Talbott’s memoirs – was putty in the hands of Bill Clinton. Hillary would like to renew that sort of relationship. Putin is an obstacle.

    • Hillary’s War Crime

      Muammar Gaddafi was the most progressive political leader in the world. Gaddafi used Libya’s oil wealth for the benefit of the Libyan people. He lived in a tent, a nice tent, but not in a palace, and he did not have collections of European exotic cars or any of the other paraphernalia associated with the ruling families in Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates that are Washington’s Middle Eastern allies.

      In Libya, education, medical treatment, and electricity were free. Gasoline was practically free, selling for 14 US cents per litre. Women who gave birth were supported with cash grants and couples received cash grants upon marriage. Libya’s state bank provided loans without interest and provided free startup capital to farmers.

      [...]

      Washington organized mercenaries, termed them “rebels” as in Syria, and sicced them on Libya. When it became clear that Gaddafi’s forces would prevail, Washington tricked naive and gullible Russian and Chinese governments and secured a UN no-fly zone over Libya to be enforced by NATO. The express purpose of the no-fly zone was to prevent Gaddafi from attacking civilian targets, which he was not doing. The real reason was to prevent a sovereign state from using its own air space so that the Libyan Air Force could not support the troops on the ground. Once the gullible Russians and Chinese failed to veto the Security Council’s action, the US and NATO themselves violated the resolution by using Western air power to attack Gaddafi’s forces, thus throwing the conflict to the CIA-organized mercenaries. Gaddafi was captured and brutally murdered. Ever since, Libya, formerly a prosperous and successful society, has been in chaos, which is where the Obama regime wanted it.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • WikiLeaks urges supporters to ‘stop taking down the US internet’

      The site WikiLeaks asked its “supporters” on Friday to stop taking down the internet in the U.S. following a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that disrupted a number of major sites.

      “Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing,” the site tweeted. “We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point.”

    • Why Did WikiLeaks Tweet a Picture of Gavin MacFadyen?

      MacFadyen has a long history as a journalist who’s friendly to WikiLeaks. He was the director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London, an adviser to The Whistler, and focused much of his work on discussing and protecting whistleblowing activities. He even created the Julian Assange Defence Committee to raise funds to help pay for Assange’s legal expenses.

      WikiLeaks had been releasing a series of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. Just this past week, Julian Assange’s Internet connection was cut, leading to speculation as to whether Assange is even still at the embassy. These rumors and conspiracy theories, combined with other rumors about WikiLeaks’ Twitter account itself, led to a lot of questioning about why WikiLeaks tweeted MacFadyen’s photo without an explanation.

    • George W. Bush’s White House ‘lost’ 22 million emails

      For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.

    • FOI Coalition assesses state of FOI in the first 100 days of Duterte administration

      Prof. Solomon Lumba of the UP College of Law, who is working with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism in conducting research on FOI, reported a brief analysis on the issue of exceptions. According to Atty. Lumba, one way to simplify the plethora of exceptions included in the initial exception inventories from the Department of Justice and the Office of the Solicitor General is to group them into conceptual categories, as was done in jurisdictions such as the US and Australia.

      Lastly, Atty. Eirene Jhone E. Aguila, co-convenor of R2KRN, delivered the Coalition’s Statement on the state of FOI in President Duterte’s first 100 days in office. The Coalition acknowledges the issuance of EO No. 2 as significant step towards guaranteeing the people’s right to know, but stresses the huge amount of work left to be done, particularly: completing the People’s FOI Manuals and implementing details of EO No. 2 for each agency, clarifying the issue of exceptions, and passing a long sought-for Freedom of Information law by the Congress.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Remember When We Thought Climate Change Would Matter This Election?

      This was supposed to be the election where climate change really mattered. Only, anyone watching the presidential debates wouldn’t have a clue that 1) 2016 has been history’s hottest year on record, and 2) our future leaders give any sort of crap about it.

      Climate change was mostly ignored during the last three debates, mentioned only in passing, and never discussed directly or at length. In fact, I’m fairly sure that Americans know more about Donald Trump’s sexual proclivities than his environmental policies (hint, hint: he doesn’t have any).

      But should we really feign surprise? Surely even the most hopeful of us didn’t expect global warming to compete with jobs, the border, or national security on the campaign trail. After all, this has been an election based on political identity, and when Americans can’t even agree on whether climate change is real, what’s incentivizing our candidates to fight for it?

      Just one question, posed during a town-hall by Ken Bone, a coal industry worker, shed any sort of light on the climate agendas of our two vastly different candidates. (And even then, Bone was criticized for not asking anything of real substance, as if energy policy, which lies at the heart of our climate change catastrophe, matters less than whether a candidate is a fan or not of science.)

    • 6 Sinking Cities to Visit Before It’s Too Late

      With the growing threats due to climate change – rising sea levels, devastating storms and tidal flooding – it’s no mystery why some of the world’s most iconic cities and natural wonders are at risk. And while there’s no clear-cut answer on the rate at which many cherished places the world over will be underwater, with the impending long-term effects of climate change – including the melting polar ice cap – we have a very narrow window before there will be dramatic repercussions, says Costas Christ, Chairman of the National Geographic World Legacy Awards and sustainable travel expert. “We have a window of 10 or 20 years at most before we set in motion the temperatures that we can’t turn back,” he says.

      Happily, the outlook isn’t all bleak. Our travel choices and actions make a difference, Christ says. “What can we do as travelers? We can choose those companies that are practicing and embracing sustainability,” he explains. By rewarding companies that are substituting plastics, generating less waste, offsetting their carbon footprint, using renewable energy and supporting national parks and fragile ecosystems, among other sustainable practices, we can advance conservation efforts, travel responsibly and have a positive long-term impact. With that in mind, here are six cities starting to submerge, and expert-endorsed tips for limiting your carbon footprint and aiding conservation efforts on your next trip.

  • Finance

    • Shop steward: Yle lay-offs “just the start”

      The Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle) announced on Thursday that it plans to cut more than a third of current staff in its production unit. That will free up resources to spend more on outside acquisitions, which is a key goal of a parliamentary report published earlier this year. Employee representatives say that these lay-offs are only the beginning of an extended period of change for the company.

    • Ceta talks: EU hopes to unblock Canada trade deal

      The European Parliament president says he is optimistic that a free-trade deal between the EU and Canada can be signed soon despite last-minute obstacles.

      Objections by a Belgian region, which opposes the deal, “are for us Europeans to solve”, Martin Schulz said.

      He was speaking after meetings in Brussels with Canadian Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland and the head of Belgium’s Wallonia region.

      Ms Freeland said: “It’s time for Europe to finish doing its job.”

      After seven years of negotiations on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta), talks broke down on Friday.

    • Left Alliance pushes to criminalize underpayment of wages

      The Left Alliance political party has proposed that employers found guilty of paying a wage below the lowest acceptable level agreed upon in Finland’s collective wage agreements should be subject to criminal charges.

    • Ari Berman on Rigging Elections, Dean Baker on the Debt Bogeyman

      Also on the show: Explosive entitlement spending! Runaway national debt! These are familiar bogeymen for elite media, but how much there is there? Dean Baker will join us to unpack the oft-heard media phrase “debt and entitlements,” and explain what it really means to call for cutting them. He’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and writes the blog Beat the Press.

    • CETA: A way out of European self-dwarfism

      Anti-CETA campaigns and mass protests have put the EU-Canada deal under constant pressure. Daniel Caspary MEP asks: What are we going to do if the European Union buries its common trade policy?

      Daniel Caspary is a German MEP and is the EPP group’s coordinator on the Committee on International Trade (INTA) in the European Parliament and Parliamentary Secretary (Chief-Whip) of the German CDU/CSU Delegation.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • WikiLeaks: Clinton-Kaine Even Lied About Timing of Veep Pick

      A conversation between Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and political consultant Erick Mullen leaked by WikiLeaks suggests that Tim Kaine — and Hillary Clinton — lied to the American people about the Virginia senator’s selection as Clinton’s running mate.

      In the email, Mullen complains to Podesta that attorney Bob Glennon “won’t stop assuring Sens Brown and Heitkamp (at dinner now) that HRC has personally told Tim Kaine he’s the veep.” The email was sent on July 15, 2015 — over one full year before the campaign’s official announcement.

      Clinton announced Kaine’s selection on July 22, 2016. The Clinton campaign behaved as if it were still sifting through possible VP picks until practically that very day. “Just got off the phone with Hillary. I’m honored to be her running mate. Can’t wait to hit the trail tomorrow in Miami!” Kaine tweeted.

    • No comment: Clinton has ‘nothing to say’ about Wikileaks email revealing $12M quid-pro-quo with Morocco’s king that an aide said was a ‘mess’ of her own making

      A stone-faced Hillary Clinton refused to comment tonight on an email a top aide sent calling a Clinton Foundation quid pro qou a ‘mess’ of the former secretary of state’s own making.

      ‘I have nothing to say about Wikileaks, other than I think we should all be concerned about what the Russians are trying to do to our election and using Wikileaks very blatantly to try to influence the outcome of the election,’ Clinton said.

      The Democratic nominee was responding to a question posed by DailyMail.com during a question and answer session with reporters riding on her campaign plane.

    • Megyn Kelly hits Donna Brazile on feeding Clinton debate question

      Interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile accused Megyn Kelly of “persecution” Wednesday evening when the Fox News anchor asked Brazile about an email, published by WikiLeaks, that indicated Brazile provided Hillary Clinton’s campaign with a question in advance of a CNN town hall.

      “As a Christian woman, I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted because your information is totally false,” Brazile said during an interview conducted shortly after the third presidential debate.

      “Since I play straight up and I’ll play straight up with you, I did not receive any questions from CNN,” she said. “First of all, what information are you providing to me that will allow me to see what you’re talking about?”

      Kelly cited an email made public by WikiLeaks last week that indicated Brazile had informed high-level Clinton campaign aides that she sometimes received “questions in advance” before relaying a question about the death penalty that closely matched a question later asked during the CNN town hall. Roland Martin, a TV One host who partnered with CNN for the event, sent CNN a question containing the same language the day after Brazile sent it to the Clinton campaign.

    • Blanket Corporate Media Corruption

      It is disconcerting to be praised by a website whose next article warns of a “plague of sodomites”. Sometimes truth-telling is a difficult act because truth is a simple matter of fact; who might seek to exploit that truth is a different question. I almost certainly have little in common with the anti-gay people who chose to commend me.

      It is however incumbent on those who know truth to reveal it to the best of their ability, particularly if it contradicts an untruth being put about widely. The lie that WikiLeaks is acting as an agent of the Russian state is one that needs to be countered. Wikileaks is much more important than a mere state propaganda organisation, and needs to be protected.

      Political lying is a sad fact of modern life, but some lies are more dangerous than others. Hillary Clinton’s lies that the Podesta and Democratic National Congress email leaks are hacks by the Russian state, should be countered because they are untrue, and because their intention is to distract attention from her own corrupt abuse of power and money. But even more so because they recklessly feed in to a Russophobia which is starting to exceed Cold War levels in terms of open public abuse.

      Clinton has made no secret of her view that Obama has not been forceful enough in his dealings in Syria, and within her immediate circle she has frequently referred to the Cuban missile crisis as the precedent for how she believes Russia must be faced down. It is her intention to restore US international prestige by such a confrontation with Putin in Syria early in her Presidency, and perhaps more to the point to restore the prestige of the office of POTUS and thus enhance her chances of getting her way with a probable Republican controlled senate and congress.

      [...]

      It is worth noting that Hillary’s claim that 17 US Intelligence Agencies agree that Russia was the source of the leaks is plainly untrue. All they have said is that the leaks “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed attacks.” Under extreme White House pressure to state that the Russians did it, that extremely weak statement was the only thing that the US Intelligence chiefs could cobble together. It is very plainly an admission there is no evidence that Russia did it, but the appalling corporate media have reported it as though it “proves” Hillary’s accusation of Russia is true.

      Bill Binney is like myself a former recipient of the Sam Adams Award – the World’s foremost whistleblowing award. Bill was the senior NSA Director who actually oversaw the design of their current mass surveillance software, and Bill has been telling anybody who will listen exactly what I have been telling – that this material was not hacked from Russia. Bill believes – and nobody has better contacts or understanding of capability than Bill – that the material was leaked from within the US intelligence services.

    • Media’s Debate Agenda: Push Russia, ISIS, Taxes; Downplay Climate, Poverty, Campaign Finance

      Russia, ISIS and taxes overwhelmed all other topics during the four presidential and vice-presidential debates, totaling 429 mentions from both candidates and questioners.

      Russia (and Putin) alone came up in the four debates 178 times, more than national debt/entitlements, Social Security, the Supreme Court, race/racism, education, abortion, drugs, poverty, LGBTQ people, climate change, campaign finance/Citizens United and the environment combined, with the latter topics totaling 164 mentions.

      Clinton’s emails were mentioned less than half as often as Trump’s tax returns (30 vs. 80 mentions), but still more than topics such as Social Security, the Supreme Court and education.

      Domestic issues that were mentioned somewhat frequently were immigration, police brutality/race, and Obamacare. Immigration is obviously a hot button issue given Trump’s calls to forcefully cleanse 11 million largely Latino immigrants from the United States.

    • Most Americans want Hillary indicted for email scandal – poll

      Over half of American voters surveyed in a recent poll disagree with the FBI’s decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her emails scandal.

      A survey of 1,000 likely voters was conducted on October 18 and 19 by the polling company Rasmussen Reports. Voters were asked whether they agreed with the FBI’s decision not to file criminal charges against Hillary Clinton, despite acknowledging that she had been reckless and potentially exposed classified information to hostile countries. The results were released on Friday.

    • Rigged Elections Are An American Tradition

      It is an obvious fact that the oligarchic One Percent have anointed Hillary, despite her myriad problems to be President of the US. There are reports that her staff are already moving into their White House offices. This much confidence before the vote does suggest that the skids have been greased.

      The current cause celebre against Trump is his conditional statement that he might not accept the election results if they appear to have been rigged. The presstitutes immediately jumped on him for “discrediting American democracy” and for “breaking American tradition of accepting the people’s will.”

      What nonsense! Stolen elections are the American tradition. Elections are stolen at every level—state, local, and federal. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s theft of the Chicago and, thereby, Illinois vote for John F. Kennedy is legendary. The Republican US Supreme Court’s theft of the 2000 presidential election from Al Gore by preventing the Florida vote recount is another legendary example. The discrepancies between exit polls and the vote count of the secretly programmed electronic voting machines that have no paper trails are also legendary.

      So what’s the big deal about Trump’s suspicion of election rigging?

    • October 2016: The Month Political Journalism Died

      On Wednesday evening during the final presidential debate of the campaign, Hell did not freeze over. Moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News, where climate denial plays nothing but home games, passed on the final opportunity to ask Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton about climate change.

      This presidential campaign has been a catastrophe for American democracy and for American political journalism.

      Amid the relentlessly tawdry campaign news, most Americans haven’t even noticed the absence of virtually any high-level campaign discussion of environmental issues, let alone what many have called the biggest challenge of the 21st century.

      For now.

      But I invite you to think ahead to that “oh crap” moment that awaits us all, five, ten or 25 years from now, when America looks back to reckon with our self-imposed climate silence in the debates.

      Journalism—and the memes of our day—have failed us.

      I don’t mean to condemn all journalists, or even all political journalists. This campaign has seen Pulitzer-worthy investigative work, notably by old-media giants like the New York Times and Washington Post, on both major party candidates and their respective problems with veracity and transparency. But the horse-race coverage, driven by Twitter, bluster and clickbait, has predictably left important issues in the lurch.

    • Get Ready to Ignore Donald Trump Starting on November 9, or He’ll Never Go Away

      Donald Trump’s true gift is his uncanny ability to capture the attention of the news media.

      His declaration during Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate that he may not accept defeat in three weeks captured global headlines, once again making him the lead story in the world, even as his chances of winning are essentially vanishing.

      But this is nothing new. There are countless other examples of successful attention-getting in Trump’s past, including his crusade against the Central Park Five in 2005, and the six weeks in 2011 where he monopolized TV news with his quest to find Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

      In fact, one way to look at Trump’s run for the presidency is as an attention-getting, brand-building exercise from start to finish. And in that context, this latest twist makes even more sense: It turns his otherwise sputtering campaign into a sort of dystopian season of “The Apprentice” where viewers watch for the cliffhanger: Will Trump bow out gracefully, or will he rally his supporters to declare his loss the result of a grand conspiracy?

      Not coincidentally, a half hour before the start of Wednesday’s debate, his campaign launched #TrumpTV, a livestream on his Facebook featuring Trump surrogates — leading to speculation that this served as a sort of a beta test for a rumored Trump-helmed television network. With that network, Trump could seek to monetize a panicked support base.

      On November 9, when Trump likely loses the presidential election in a big way, the news media will face a moment of truth: Will they continue to obsessively cover him and his post-election antics? Or will they ignore him?

      They should ignore him.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NLG and ACLU Submit FOIA and Open Records Requests to Investigate Unconstitutional Surveillance of Water Protectors at Standing Rock

      Today, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), in conjunction with the ACLU of North Dakota, sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and North Dakota Open Records Act requests to multiple state and federal agencies in response to the surveillance and arrests of the Native-led Water Protectors attempting to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). In an affront to First Amendment rights, Water Protectors and allies have been continuously surveilled by low-flying planes, helicopters, and drones, and have had local cell phone communications jammed and possibly recorded. Dozens of local and out-of-state law enforcement have been called in, maintaining a heavily militarized presence at the site in an effort to intimidate activists and chill dissent.

    • How Could NSA Contractor Harold Martin Have Been Taking Home Classified Info For 20 Years Without NSA Noticing?

      A few weeks back, we wrote about the arrest of Harold Martin, an NSA contractor working at Booz Allen, for apparently taking “highly classified information” from the NSA and storing it electronically and physically in his home. There were a lot of questions about whether or not Martin was connected to the Shadow Brokers release of NSA hacking tools, though as more info comes out, it sounds like perhaps Martin was just found because of an investigation into Shadow Brokers, but not because he was connected to them. Soon after the arrest was made public (after being kept sealed for a little over a month), reports came out suggesting that Martin was basically a digital hoarder, but not a leaker (or a whistleblower).

    • Geofeedia, In Damage Control Mode, Issues Bogus DMCA Over Brochure Posted By Reporter

      And it’s time for yet another story of copyright being used for out and out censorship. Remember Geofeedia? That’s the creepy company that was selling its services to law enforcement agencies and school districts promising to spy on social media feeds to let law enforcement/schools know when people are planning bad stuff. After a big ACLU investigative report, basically all the major social media companies cut ties with Geofeedia, claiming that it was violating their terms of service. I’d imagine that the various law enforcement agencies and school districts who paid tens of thousands of dollars for this data may be asking for their money back.

      So what does Geofeedia do? Well, for starters, it abuses the DMCA to try to take down information. The Daily Dot’s Dell Cameron had actually written about how the Denver police spent $30k on Geofeedia back in September, a few weeks before the ACLU report dropped (nice scoop and great timing). Cameron then followed up with a detailed story following the ACLU report as well, noting that there were still plenty of other Geofeedia competitors on the market. At the end of that post, Cameron included a brochure that Geofeedia had apparently sent to a police department last year. But you can’t see it now, because (yup) Geofeedia issued a DMCA takedown to Scribd, the company that was hosting it.

    • Victory for the Exegetes Amateurs! French Surveillance Censured by Constitutional Council

      The French Constitutional Council has censored this morning the article of the 2015 French Surveillance Law on radio wave surveillance. Following a Priority Preliminary ruling on the issue of constitutionality (QPC) tabled by the Exegetes Amateurs (FDN Federation, FDN and La Quadrature du Net and the Igwan.net NGO), this is a clear victory for advocates of privacy against disproportionate surveillance promoted by Manuel Valls’ government. La Quadrature du Net is glad with this decision which effects are to be applied immediately (although regretting the extended time given to the legislator to conform to this decision in the long term) and calls on all citizens concerned with civil rights to support the tireless judicial and technical work accomplished with our friends of FDN and the FDN Federation.

    • Google’s Allo Sends The Wrong Message About Encryption

      When Google announced its new Allo messaging app, we were initially pleased to see the company responding to long-standing consumer demand for user-friendly, secure messaging. Unfortunately, it now seems that Google’s response may cause more harm than good. While Allo does expose more users to end-to-end encrypted messaging, this potential benefit is outweighed by the cost of Allo’s mixed signals about what secure messaging is and how it works. This has significance for secure messaging app developers and users beyond Google or Allo: if we want to protect all users, we must make encryption our automatic, straightforward, easy-to-use status quo.

      The new messaging app from Google offers two modes: a default mode, and an end-to-end encrypted “incognito” mode. The default mode features two new enhancements: Google Assistant, an AI virtual assistant that responds to queries and searches (like “What restaurants are nearby?”), and Smart Reply, which analyzes how a user texts and generates likely responses to the messages they receive. The machine learning that drives these features resides on Google’s servers and needs access to chat content to “learn” over time and personalize services. So, while this less secure mode is encrypted in transit, it is not encrypted end-to-end, giving Google access to the content of messages as they pass unencrypted through Google servers.

      Allo’s separate “incognito” mode provides end-to-end encryption, using a darker background to distinguish it from the default mode. Messages sent in this mode are not readable on Google’s servers, and can be set to auto-delete from your phone after a certain period of time. The Assistant and Smart Reply features, which depend on Google having access to message content, don’t work in “incognito” mode.

    • Half of All American Adults Have Pictures in Police Facial Recognition Systems

      If you’re already worried about the growth of the surveillance state, a new study may give you pause. Researchers from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology have found that half of Americans have photos in facial recognition networks used by law enforcement around the country—and many are likely unaware of it. The resulting report notes that the study is “the most comprehensive survey to date of law enforcement face recognition and the risks that it poses to privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights.”

      Study authors Alvaro Bedoya, Jonathan Frankle and Clare Garvie queried more than 100 police departments across the nation over the course of a year to come to their conclusions. They found that more than 117 million adults—overwhelmingly law-abiding citizens of these United States—have pictures in these systems. Amassing such a large number of photos of American adults is a result of interagency collaboration. In addition to mugshot photos taken following arrests, “26 states (and potentially as many as 30) allow law enforcement to run or request searches against their databases of driver’s license and ID photos.” They also write that big-city police departments—Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles among them—are looking into real-time recognition on live street surveillance cameras, which allow “police [to] continuously scan the faces of pedestrians walking by a street surveillance camera.”

    • Using search warrants to get into fingerprint-locked phones

      A peculiar legal workaround might give federal authorities the right to access an individual’s phone data.

      Investigators in Lancaster, Calif., were granted a search warrant last May with a scope that allowed them to force anyone inside the premises at the time of search to open up their phones via fingerprint recognition, Forbes reported Sunday.

      The government argued that this did not violate the citizens’ Fifth Amendment protection against self incrimination because no actual passcode was handed over to authorities. Forbes was able to confirm with the residents of the building that the warrant was served, but the residents did not give any more details about whether their phones were successfully accessed by the investigators.

      “I was frankly a bit shocked,” said Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), when he learned about the scope of search warrant. “As far as I know, this warrant application was unprecedented.”

    • Virtual lineup: Your face is already on file

      If local police showed up at your door requesting fingerprints and DNA samples, would you passively and unquestioningly comply? Or would you ask what crime you’re suspected of committing and demand probable cause for making the request or proof of a search warrant?

      The fact is, there’s a 50 percent chance your photo is already part of a biometric database. And law enforcement agencies across the country are using facial recognition software to regularly search this “virtual lineup” with little to no regulation or limits, according to an eye-opening 150-page report, “The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America,” published this week by the Georgetown Center on Privacy & Technology.

    • Supreme Court rules that IP address allocation is personal data, but to what use?

      The European Supreme Court rules that the subscriber identity behind an IP address is personal data, making such data protected by privacy laws. However, the court rules in a very narrow context of a web site operator, and says that the protection of personal data takes second place to a so-called “legitimate objective”. This may be an important verdict for future case law, but right now, it looks rather narrow.

      The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU, has ruled that the information about who was allocated a certain IP address at a certain time is personal data. This is a very important key word in European legislation, which means the data’s availability and use is protected by a mountain and a half of regulations and laws.

      The case was brought to the European Court of Justice by Patrick Breyer, a Pirate Party MP in the German State Parliament of Schleswig-Holstein, who is also a lawyer. Mr. Breyer was suing the Federal Government of Germany to prevent them from storing and recording his every visit to federal authorities’ websites.

    • Google is now tracking your private, personally identifiable information from all sources possible (ie; Gmail, Chrome, DoubleClick) by default

      Since this summer, new users are now being tracked to Google’s fullest potential unless they opt-out. Google has bought many tech companies over the last few decades. One such purpose, in 2007, of DoubleClick, prompted many concerns. Google, which had the promising slogan “Do no evil,” back then, promised that they would not combine Google’s already monolithic stack of user internet browsing history data with new acquisitions such as DoubleClick. DoubleClick is an extensive ad network that is used on half of the Internet’s top 1 million most popular sites. Now, Now that DoubleClick’s data is available to Google, Google can easily build a complete profile of you, the customer. This profile could include name, search history, and keywords used in email, all of which will expressly be used to target you for advertising or handed over to the government at the drop of a rubber stamp.

    • Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

      After we published this story, Google reached out to say that it doesn’t currently use Gmail keywords to target web ads. We’ve updated the story to reflect that.

      When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.”

      And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.

      But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools.

    • Argentine Soccer Club Wanted to Implant Microchips in Fans, Until They Revolted

      How do you solve a problem like blood-thirsty football hooligans? According to one Buenos Aires-based football club, just stick microchips in spectators’ arms and scan the bad apples away.

      Back in April, first division club CA Tigre proposed surgically implanting microchips—or “passion tickets,” as they called them—into fans’ bodies to expedite their access to the stadium and curb violence during games. The initiative was rejected after a brief trial period, CA Tigre informed Motherboard, and though the club wouldn’t say why, we expect public outrage had something to do with it.

      “Passion ticket allows fans to enter the stadium without anything else, just their passion for their team, and allows the club to maintain a trustworthy level of control over fans,” CA Tigre tweeted at the time to explain the initiative.

    • Internet Privacy: “You’re Only Anonymous On The Internet Because Nobody’s Tried Very Hard To Figure Out Who You Are”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Imprisoned Saudi blogger faces more lashes: supporters

      Imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, whose public flogging in the kingdom last year generated a global outcry, now risks a new round of lashes, a co-founder of a Canadian foundation advocating his release said on Tuesday.

      Evelyne Abitbol, who founded the Raif Badawi Foundation with Badawi’s wife, said a “reliable source” in Saudi Arabia claims he faces a new flogging after being sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and 1,000 lashes in 2014 for breaking the kingdom’s technology laws and insulting Islam.

      Saudi embassy officials in Ottawa and Saudi government officials in Riyadh were not immediately available for comment.

    • Raif Badawi: Atheist Saudi blogger faces further round of lashes, supporters say

      Saudi blogger Raif Badawi is facing a new round of lashes, according to his supporters.

      A Canadian foundation campaigning for his release said a “reliable source” in Saudi Arabia told them he faces a renewed threat of flogging.

      The 32-year-old was handed 1,000 lashes and a ten-year jail term in 2014 for insulting Islam online.

    • ‘He didn’t know the boy didn’t want to be raped’ court throws out migrant child sex charge

      When the youngster went to the showers, Amir A. allegedly followed him, pushed him into a toilet cubicle, and violently sexually assaulted him.

      Following the attack, the accused rapist returned to the pool and was practising on the diving board when police arrived, after the 10-year-old raised the alarm with the lifeguard.

      The child suffered severe anal injuries which had to be treated at a local children’s hospital, and is still plagued by serious post-traumatic stress disorder.

      In a police interview, Amir A. confessed to the crime; telling officers the incident had been “a sexual emergency”, as his wife had remained in Iraq and he “had not had sex in four months”.

    • Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament

      I have just finished giving evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament on torture and extraordinary rendition. I am dashing off now and will give a fuller account later of what I said only. But I will just say that I was very happily surprised by how genuine the committee were, by the acuity of their questioning and by what was revealed of the general trend of their thinking. I perceived no hostility at all. I rather hope, and believe I have grounds to hope, that their eventual report will contain more of both truth and wisdom than is generally expected.

    • Homeland Security Must Stop Using Private Prisons for Immigration Detention. Here’s How to Do It.

      ACLU policy paper explains why detaining fewer immigrants must be part of the plan to stop using private prisons.

      This August, the Justice Department made history when it announced that the Bureau of Prisons would curtail — and eventually end — its use of private prisons. As the Justice Department noted, this change was made possible by criminal justice reforms that reduced its prison population. Now the ACLU is releasing a policy paper that calls on the Department of Homeland Security to follow suit by reducing its detention population and then ending its own use of private prisons.

      The paper, “Shutting Down the Profiteers: Why and How the Department of Homeland Security Should Stop Using Private Prisons,” provides a concrete plan for how ICE can and should phase out its reliance on private prisons. The number of immigrants in detention has skyrocketed in the past two decades, and without these unnecessary detentions, there would be no need for private prison beds. The paper describes the human toll of over-detention and privatization and lays out ICE’s dangerously close relationship with the private prison industry.

    • Police Want to 3D Print a Dead Man’s Fingers to Unlock His Phone

      I’ll unpack the Constitutional issues in a bit, but first, the technology. Michigan State University professor who holds six U.S. patents for fingerprint recognition technology was asked by police to help catch a murderer. The cops scans of the victim’s fingerprints and thought that unlocking his phone might provide clues as to who killed him.

    • Police arrest more people for marijuana use than for all violent crimes — combined

      On any given day in the United States, at least 137,000 people sit behind bars on simple drug-possession charges, according to a report released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch.

      Nearly two-thirds of them are in local jails. The report says that most of these jailed inmates have not been convicted of any crime: They’re sitting in a cell, awaiting a day in court, an appearance that may be months or even years off, because they can’t afford to post bail.

      “It’s been 45 years since the war on drugs was declared, and it hasn’t been a success,” lead author Tess Borden of Human Rights Watch said in an interview. “Rates of drug use are not down. Drug dependency has not stopped. Every 25 seconds, we’re arresting someone for drug use.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Harris Faulkner Suit Against Hasbro Over A Toy Hamster Ends In Settlement, Hasbro To Discontinue The Toy

      While we cover a lot of silly intellectual property disputes here, none has the potential to upend our society into a circus of hilarious litigious stupidity as much as publicity rights do. This barely-arrived form of intellectual property has been the star of all kinds of legal insanity, with one needing only to note its use by such upstanding denizens of our reality as Lindsay Lohan and the brother of Pablo Escobar. But I have to admit I had reserved a special place in my humor-heart for Harris Faulkner, the Fox News anchor that sued toy-maker Hasbro for making a a hamster figurine that shared her name. Because the sharing of a name isn’t sufficient to arise to a publicity rights violation, the IRL-non-hamster-Faulkner had to claim that the ficticious-hamster-Faulkner also borrowed from her physical likeness, an argument which her legal team actually made. As a reminder, here are images of both.

    • Trademarks

      • No One Owns Invisible Disabilities

        The purpose of registered trademarks is to protect people. When you buy a bottle of Club-Mate, the trademark affords you some certainty that what you’re buying is the product you already know and love and not that of a sneaky impostor. But when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issues overly broad or generic trademarks, those trademarks do just the opposite: they can expose us to the risk of legal bullying. One recent round of bullying over a trademark on “invisible disabilities” has shown how a bad trademark can even be used to threaten people’s right to assemble and express themselves online.

        It started in late 2015 when a group called Invisible Disability Project (IDP) applied for a trademark on its name. A lawyer representing the Invisible Disabilities Association (IDA) sent IDP a letter threatening to sue it over the use of the term “invisible disability.” (IDA had received a trademark on the term in 2013). In July 2016, IDA used Facebook’s trademark report form to have IDP’s Facebook page—the main place where IDP’s members and supporters congregate—taken down. IDA even registered the domain names invisibledisabilityproject.com and .net and directed visitors to those sites to its own website.

    • Copyrights

      • Anti-Piracy Outfits Agree to Strengthen International Cooperation

        Government officials and representatives from anti-piracy outfits from the United States, Europe and Russia met up in Brussels this week. The roundtable, “Combating Internet Piracy: International Practice”, focused on the need for international cooperation and the strengthening of copyright legislation.

        With the Internet and therefore online piracy having developed into a truly global phenomenon, anti-piracy groups everywhere are expanding their reach.

        What was once a semi-isolated affair has become a multi-agency, cross-continent operation, with governments and rights holders alike striving to share information and pool resources.

      • The Bernie Sanders of Iceland is a Pirate, a poet and possibly the country’s next leader

        Birgitta Jónsdóttir is a poet, a Web developer and a former WikiLeaks activist. She’s also founder and leader of Iceland’s Pirate Party, which has been at or near the top of polls ahead of national elections Oct. 29.

        Washington Post London Bureau Chief Griff Witte sat down with Jónsdóttir for an interview at her office in Reykjavik on Oct. 19. The following are excerpts from their conversation.

      • Cisco Develops System To Automatically Cut-Off Pirate Video Streams

        Cisco says it has developed a system to disable live pirate streams . The network equipment company says its Streaming Piracy Prevention platform utilizes third-party forensic watermarking to shut down pirate streams in real-time, without any need to send takedown notices to hosts or receive cooperation from third parties.

      • Team Prenda Loses Big Again: Told To Pay Over $650k For Bogus Defamation Lawsuit

        Welp, it looks like another bad day for Team Prenda. The law firm that went around uploading its own porn films and then shaking down people on the internet has had a bad few years in terms of courts blasting them for abusing the court system and ordering them to pay up for all sorts of awful things. Every few weeks it seems like we read about another loss for John Steele and Paul Hansmeier (the third “partner” in this mess, Paul Duffy, passed away). The latest is not only a pretty big hit, it’s also a complete “own goal” by Team Prenda. This one wasn’t in one of their crappy shakedown lawsuits where a defendant hit back. No, this was in the case where Prenda tried to sue all of its critics for defamation in both Illinois and Florida. The Florida case, filed by John Steele, was quickly dismissed once Steele realized it broke all kinds of rules. But the Illinois cases moved forward. There was some bouncing around between state and federal court, before the case was dismissed and some sanctions were added.

      • Prenda lawyers’ careers are up in smoke, but sanctions keep coming

        After a few years suing Internet users over piracy claims, the lawyers behind the Prenda law copyright-trolling operation had made millions. But beginning in 2013, they were hit with repeated sanctions from federal judges. Now, their careers are in shambles—Paul Hansmeier had his law license suspended, John Steele is facing a bar complaint, and both may be facing an FBI investigation. (A third lawyer who was involved, Paul Duffy, passed away last year.)

        Even as their scheme collapses, they continue to be hit with sanctions. This week, Hansmeier and Steele got hit with a big one. US District Judge John Darrah oversaw litigation related to one of Prenda’s most audacious moves—their defamation lawsuit against their critics. They sued Steele’s former housekeeper, Alan Cooper, and his lawyer, Paul Godfread, for accusing Steele of identity theft. For good measure, they also sued anonymous blog commenters who called Prenda attorneys “brain-dead” and “assclowns.”

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/23/another-honorary-doctorate-for-stallman/feed/ 0 Loose Patent Scope Becoming a Publicity Nightmare for the EPO and Battistelli Does a China Outreach (Worst/Most Notorious on Patent Quality) http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/sipo-and-battistelli/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/sipo-and-battistelli/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2016 23:38:25 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95854 Who needs examiners anyway? Battistelli makes the EPO more like INPI or SIPO (China).

SIPO and Battistelli

Summary: The highly corrosive and destructive nature of Battistelli’s EPO presidency is demonstrated by his latest moves, which he foolishly advertises in the EPO’s Web site today (both the so-called ‘news’ section and his so-called ‘blog’)

WHETHER or not the EPO is becoming 'French' (i.e. no patent examination) it might be too early to tell, but in a matter of 2-3 years the stock will have run out and EPO examiners can expect massive layoffs. Insiders too tell us so.

“Battistelli is causing irreparable damage and people are seeing that.”The very low quality of patents in China (granted by SIPO, not the Croatian one) may be a sign of things to come at the EPO, under the leadership of Battistelli and the people he brought to the EPO (mostly from France, usually former colleagues from INPI where there’s no quality control). It’s all about quantity, not quality. Apparently, as I was told this earlier today by a university professor, Saudi Arabia had been pursing a similar strategy. They just use patents as trophies (false surrogate for innovation) and provide incentives — sometimes huge financial awards — for people to pursue the dumbest of patents just to increase the number of patents and give the illusion of scientific advancement/leadership. If this sounds like what the EPO is becoming, then it’s probably because it’s true.

“Dusting off some old files (some as old as 18 years ago we’re told!) and rubberstamping them is not “production” but a shoddy job, a cheat, and a rapid destruction of everything that the EPO stands for.”In my daily life I happen to speak to various academics and people who work in my domain. A lot of companies in Europe — as today I’ve learned — are reassessing the value of EPs (European patents) after the EPO descended to the gutter of patent quality. Dutch attorneys too are receiving queries to that effect, based on their letter which we published last week. Battistelli is causing irreparable damage and people are seeing that. Dusting off some old files (some as old as 18 years ago we’re told!) and rubberstamping them is not “production” but a shoddy job, a cheat, and a rapid destruction of everything that the EPO stands for.

Based on this tweet from earlier today and the Battistelli brain fart it links to (warning: epo.org address), the very low-quality patents of China are now common grounds for Battistelli. Is this what he strives for now? Attracting all the rejects, even from other countries, in order to just rubberstamp their rubbish? Is this the future of the EPO? It’s spelling doom for the EPO’s reputation and value. How much would people pay for EPs? 500 Euros apiece? What would that mean to existing grantees of EPs? How can one separate the wheat from the chaff or the noise from the signal? Battistelli, in our view, finds friends only in authoritarian regimes these days (including China) because no honourable politicians in Europe would associate with such a thug (they do their homework or have it done for them by their PAs). Here is the bogus ‘news’ from today (warning: epo.org address), complete with a photo op and glamourisation of the thug, Battistelli. To quote: “On Friday 30 September, President Benoît Battistelli welcomed Commissioner Shen of the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO) to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France. The visit was held on the occasion of the annual EPO-SIPO Heads of Offices meeting, this year hosted by the EPO in Europe. The meeting is an annual fixture for the two offices and offered a valuable opportunity to discuss strategic topics of mutual interest and to take stock of the results achieved within the framework of both IP5 and bilateral co-operation.”

“Battistelli, in our view, finds friends only in authoritarian regimes these days (including China) because no honourable politicians in Europe would associate with such a thug (they do their homework or have it done for them by their PAs).”Worth noting: this meeting took place in France. Saint-Germain-en-Laye even (Battistelli was the mayor of the Paris suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye). The EPO has no branches/office in France. France is not a host country and France’s patent system is mostly a joke (some say because language barriers discourage applications from being sent there).

Battistelli has made the EPO look like something worse than a joke. It’s a banana republic!

And speaking of bananas, watch today’s news headlines to find “Seedy business: Patent war looms over Europe’s crop diversity”

Well, how far should patent scope go? Under Battistelli, anything goes…

Patents on seeds and plants are supporting a monopoly’s business model, not innovation or common interests. Here is what the article says:

An imminent EU legal opinion on food patents has raised fears among smaller businesses that agrichemical giants such as Monsanto and Syngenta will be able to monopolize varieties of staples like carrots and broccoli.

The European Commission is expected to issue an opinion before the end of the year to clarify ambiguities in EU law over the extent to which food products can be patented. The forthcoming decision has sparked a flurry of 11th-hour lobbying from industry and green campaigners.

The debate hinges on the nature of the innovation and whether the plant breeding techniques constitute genetic modification, or involve processes that are seen as altered or accelerated versions of more natural, biological processes.

Big companies argue that the ability to patent foods and seeds is critical to their business model, which involves pouring millions of euros into engineering bio-tech crops that they say are healthier for consumers and more resistant to pests. Their opponents say biological processes and their products should not be allowed to become exclusive to individual companies. They complain that food security and the environment could be at risk if crop diversity is reduced, with the most common vegetables being controlled by a handful of deep-pocketed companies.

In other news from today, the EPO has granted another crappy patent, this time on a thing that can prevent access to life-saving treatment. The patent is now partly revoked [1, 2, 3, 4]. How many people need to die from Hepatitis C because the EPO under Battistelli continues to fail to actually do the job properly*? Verging endorsement of software patents again, today the EPO links to a notorious page that we wrote about before and soon enough the Office is going south (not just literally), to a country where software patents sort of exist.

“How many people need to die from Hepatitis C because the EPO under Battistelli continues to fail to actually do the job properly?”If the EPO does not sort out its patent quality, for which it earned reputation in the first place, then it will lose everything. Battistelli doesn’t need to care because he can always go back to his political career in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Politicians needn’t retire in their 60s and Nicolas Sarkozy, Battistelli's political ally, is reportedly running for leadership again. █
_____
* Like organising stupid and self-aggrandising festivals for lobbying purposes at the expense of millions of Euros while buying the media — all this instead of focusing on actually examining patents, then granting or rejecting them based on their merit.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/05/sipo-and-battistelli/feed/ 0 Links 1/10/2016: Linux 4.7.6 and 4.4.23, Blender 2.78 http://techrights.org/2016/10/01/blender-2-78/ http://techrights.org/2016/10/01/blender-2-78/#comments Sat, 01 Oct 2016 08:21:30 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95741

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Linux Unable To Boot Lenovo Yoga 900 & 900; Is Microsoft At Fault?

      The popular device developer Lenovo has verified the claims that Lenovo Yoga 900 and 900s unable to boot Linux OS but only Microsoft Windows 10. The new Lenovo convertible laptop, Lenovo Yoga 900 and 900s, would reject and decline any attempt to install Linux operating system, making users turn their heads to Microsoft as the suspect for this issue.

      [...]

      This issue about the OS started when an identity of BaronHK posted on Reddit about installing Linux on the latest Lenovo Yoga book in which BaronHK encountered being blocked by a locked solid state drive (SSD) which Linux cannot define itself, and come up to link the issue to Microsoft.

  • Server

    • Why Good Linux Sysadmins Use Markdown

      The Markdown markup language is perfect for writing system administrator documentation: it is lightweight, versatile, and easy to learn, so you spend your time writing instead of fighting with formatting.

      The life of a Linux system administrator is complex and varied, and you know that documenting your work is a big time-saver. A documentation web server shared by you and your colleagues is a wonderful productivity tool. Most of us know simple HTML, and can whack up a web page as easily as writing plain text. But using Markdown is better.

    • How to Effectively and Efficiently Edit Configuration Files in Linux

      Every Linux administrator has to eventually (and manually) edit a configuration file. Whether you are setting up a web server, configuring a service to connect to a database, tweaking a bash script, or troubleshooting a network connection, you cannot avoid a dive deep into the heart of one or more configuration files. To some, the prospect of manually editing configuration files is akin to a nightmare. Wading through what seems like countless lines of options and comments can put you on the fast track for hair and sanity loss.

      Which, of course, isn’t true. In fact, most Linux administrators enjoy a good debugging or configuration challenge. Sifting through the minutiae of how a server or software functions is a great way to pass time. But this process doesn’t have to be an exercise in ineffective inefficiency. In fact, tools are available to you that go a very long way to make the editing of config files much, much easier. I’m going to introduce you to a few such tools, to ease some of the burden of your Linux admin duties. I’ll first discuss the command-line tools that are invaluable to the task of making configuration more efficient.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 4.7.6

      I’m announcing the release of the 4.7.6 kernel.

      All users of the 4.7 kernel series must upgrade.

    • Linux 4.4.23
    • Linux Kernel 4.7.6 Is Out with MIPS and OCFS2 Improvements, Updated Drivers

      Today, September 30, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the sixth maintenance update to the latest stable Linux 4.7 kernel series.

      Linux kernel 4.7.6 comes only five days after the release of the previous maintenance version, Linux kernel 4.7.5, and, according to the appended shortlog and the diff from the last update, it changes a total of 76 files, with 539 insertions and 455 deletions. In summary, it updates multiple drivers, adds improvements to various filesystems and hardware architectures, and improves the networking stack.

    • Linux Kernel 4.4.23 LTS Has ARM and MIPS Improvements, Updated Filesystems, More

      Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.7.6, Greg Kroah-Hartman proudly informed the community about the general availability of the Linux 4.4.23 LTS kernel.

      The Linux 4.4 kernel is a long-term supported branch, the latest and most advanced one, used in many stable and reliable GNU/Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Alpine Linux 3.4. Therefore, it is imperative for it to receive regular updates that bring fixes to the most important issues, as well as other general improvements.

    • From NFS to LizardFS

      If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that we started our data servers out using NFS on ext4 mirrored over DRBD, hit some load problems, switched to btrfs, hit load problems again, tried a hacky workaround, ran into problems, dropped DRBD for glusterfs, had a major disaster, switched back to NFS on ext4 mirrored over DRBD, hit more load problems, and finally dropped DRBD for ZFS.

    • IBM’s Ginni Rometty Tells Bankers Not To Rest On Their Digital Laurels
    • BUS1, The Successor To KDBUS, Formally Unveiled — Aiming For Mainline Linux Kernel

      BUS1 has been in development as an in-kernel IPC mechanism building off the failed KDBUS project. An “RFC” will soon be sent out to Linux kernel developers about BUS1 and the subject will be discussed at next month’s Kernel Summit.

      David Herrmann, one of the BUS1 developers, presented at this week’s systemd.conf conference about the new capability-based IPC for Linux. He talked about how BUS1 is superior to KDBUS, how BUS1 is similar to Android’s Binder, Chrome’s Mojo, Solaris’ Doors, and other common IPC implementations.

    • A New Wireless Daemon Is In Development To Potentially Replace wpa_supplicant

      In addition to the BUS1 presentation, also exciting from the systemd.conf 2016 conference is a thorough walkthrough of a new wireless daemon for Linux being developed by Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center.

      Intel has been developing a new wireless daemon for Linux to potentially replace wpa_supplicant. This new daemon isn’t yet public but the code repositories for it will be opened up in the next few weeks. This new daemon has improvements around persistency, WiFi management, reduced abstractions for different operating systems and legacy interfaces, and changes to operation. This daemon is designed to be very lightweight and work well for embedded Linux use-cases especially, including IoT applications.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Libinput X.Org Driver Updated For X.Org Server 1.19

        Peter Hutterer has announced the release of a new version of xf86-input-libinput, the X.Org DDX driver that makes use of libinput for input handling on the X.Org Server.

      • xf86-input-libinput 0.20.0

        Most important fix is the use of input_lock() instead of the old SIGIO stuff to handle the input thread in server 1.19.

      • Mesa 13.0 Planning For Release At End Of October, Might Include RADV Vulkan

        Following the mailing list talk over the past two days about doing the next Mesa release, plans are being discussed for releasing at the end of October and it might have just got a whole lot more exciting.

        Emil Velikov, Collabora developer and Mesa release manager for the past several release series, has commented on that previously discussed mailing list thread. He mentioned he was secretly waiting in hopes of seeing the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver merged for this next release! He said he’d even be willing to see it merged even if it’s “not perfect/feature complete.”

    • Benchmarks

      • FreeBSD 11.0 Comes Up Short In Ubuntu 16.04 vs. macOS Sierra Benchmarks

        Yesterday I published some macOS 10.2 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS benchmarks from a Mac Mini and MacBook Air systems. For those curious if BSDs can outperform macOS Sierra on Apple hardware, I tested the MacBook Air with FreeBSD 11.0 compared to the Linux and macOS results on that Core i5 system. Here are those results.

      • Early Benchmarks Of The Linux 4.9 DRM-Next Radeon/AMDGPU Drivers

        While Linux 4.9 will not officially open for development until next week, the DRM-Next code is ready to roll with all major feature work having been committed by the different open-source Direct Rendering Manager drivers. In this article is some preliminary testing of this DRM-Next code as of 29 September when testing various AMD GPUs with the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers.

        Linux 4.9 does bring compile-time-offered experimental support for the AMD Southern Islands GCN 1.0 hardware on AMDGPU, but that isn’t the focus of this article. A follow-up comparison is being done with GCN 1.0/1.1 experimental support enabled to see the Radeon vs. AMDGPU performance difference on that hardware. For today’s testing was a Radeon R7 370 to look at the Radeon DRM performance and for AMDGPU testing was the Radeon R9 285, R9 Fury, and RX 480. Benchmarks were done from the Linux 4.8 Git and Linux DRM-Next kernels as of 29 September.

      • How Ubuntu 16.10 Beta 2 Performance Compares To Some Other Linux Distros

        The final Ubuntu 16.10 Beta for “Yakkety Yak” was released this week and we found its performance doesn’t differ much from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (with the exception of the newer graphics stack) while here are some results comparing it to other modern Linux distributions.

        Tested for this quick, one-page-article comparison were Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10 Beta 2, Clear Linux 10660, Fedora 24, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20160927, and the Arch-based Antergos 16.9-Rolling release.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt 3D WIP branches
      • New Qt 3D Functionality Is Being Worked On

        Sean Harmer of KDAB is organizing work around some upcoming “major Qt 3D features” for the open-source toolkit.

        It’s not known if the next round of Qt 3D features will be ready for the Qt 5.9 tool-kit release, but KDAB is looking to have these new branches for feature work with continuous integration coverage.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Calendar App to Feature a New Sidebar, Week View & Attendees in GNOME 3.24

        GNOME developer Georges Stavracas wrote an in-depth blog post the other day to inform the GNOME, Linux, and Open Source communities about the upcoming improvements and new features coming to the GNOME Calendar apps.

        Now that some of us are already enjoying the recently released GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, the GNOME developers are hard at work to improve the GNOME apps and core components by either adding new exciting features and technologies or improving existing ones.

      • Cinnamon 3.2 in Linux Mint 18.1 Supports Vertical Panels, Better Accelerometers

        After informing the community a few days ago about the Mintbox Mini Pro PC and the upcoming improvements and new features shipping with the XApps software projects in Linux Mint 18.1, Clement Lefebvre just published the monthly Linux Mint newsletter.

      • Cross-compiling WebKit2GTK+ for ARM

        Of course, I know for a fact that many people use local recipes to cross-compile WebKit2GTK+ for ARM (or simply build in the target machine, which usually takes a looong time), but those are usually ad-hoc things and hard to reproduce environments locally (or at least hard for me) and, even worse, often bound to downstream projects, so I thought it would be nice to try to have something tested with upstream WebKit2GTK+ and publish it on trac.webkit.org,

      • Should we drop Vala?

        Is it Vala development a waste of time? Is Vala suitable for long term support libraries?

  • Distributions

    • LXLE: A Linux distro to give new life to old hardware

      I’ll bet that somewhere, perhaps at home and most likely at work, you’ve got some old hardware lying around. What to do with it? It still works but what’s it running? Windows XP? Vista? Windows 7 Starter or Home Basic?

      Yep, you’re stuck on some old version of Windows but moving that machine up to a newer version of Windows could be tricky ‘cause one or more of those old graphics cards and printer drivers have probably have fallen out of the update cycle.

      Even if those subsystems are still available, you’ll still have a problem as the newer OSs’ are pretty much guaranteed to suck the life out of old processors with the result that performance and therefore usability will be marginal at best.

      So, what to do? Before you start looking for a deal on a new machine and an e-waste disposal site, consider moving to Linux and, most specifically, consider migrating to LXLE, the LXDE eXtra Luxury Edition (though some people also claim it stands for Lubuntu Extra Life Extension).

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat, Logicalis in digital transformation partnership in Latin America

        PromonLogicalis, a provider of information technology and communication solutions and services in Latin America, and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced a collaboration that aim to help organizations navigate the digital transformation of their infrastructures to pave the way for cloud and the software-defined technologies, and to advance open source technology awareness in the region.

        Open source is delivering significant advancements in many areas of technology through community-powered innovation, including cloud computing, mobile, big data, and more. And, as companies embrace modern technology as a competitive advantage via digital transformation efforts, many are turning to open source because of the flexibility and agility it can enable.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • PHP version 5.6.27RC1 and 7.0.12RC1
        • An Easy Way To Try Intel & RADV Vulkan Drivers On Fedora 24

          Fedora 25 should have good support for the open-source Vulkan Linux drivers (particularly if it lands the next Mesa release) while Fedora 24 users can now more easily play with the latest Mesa Git RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers via a new repository.

          A Phoronix reader has setup a Fedora Copr repository that is building Intel’s Vulkan driver from Mesa Git plus the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver re-based from its source (David Airlie’s semi-interesting GitHub branch). Fedora COPR, for the uninformed, is the distribution’s equivalent to Ubuntu PPA repositories.

        • Meeting users, lots of users

          Every year, I introduce Fedora to new students at Brno Technical University. There are approx. 500 of them and a sizable amount of them then installs Fedora. We also organize a sort of installfest one week after the presentation where anyone who has had any difficulties with Fedora can come and ask for help. It’s a great opportunity to observe what things new users struggle with the most. Especially when you have such a high number of new users. What are my observations this year?

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 10 reasons why CIOs should consider open source software

    A recent survey shows 78 percent of companies run part or all of their operations on open source software. Indeed, open source continues to gain market traction as more companies adopt open technology to speed innovation, disrupt industries and improve overall productivity.

    Those who remain hesitant about adopting open source are in danger of being left behind. Because open source architecture lends itself to more frequent updates, and because of the openness, open source provides the freedom to innovate and mature in the way that enterprises need.

  • Kubernetes Arrives in New Flavors

    Kubernetes has taken center stage in recent days, and, as we’ve been noting in recent posts, the open source container cluster manager is heading in new directions. Google has just announced the release of Kubernetes 1.4, which makes the tool much easier to install.

    Meanwhile, Canonical has now launched its own distribution of Kubernetes, with enterprise support, across a range of public clouds and private infrastructure. It’s Kubernetes at the core, but features a number of extra bells and whistles.

  • 2016 Women in Open Source Award Winners

    We hope you enjoy and are inspired by this short video celebrating Preeti Murthy and Jessica McKellar, the winners of this year’s Red Hat Women in Open Source Awards.

  • Tech, talent and tools: The secret to monetizing open-source

    “In California during the gold rush, you didn’t make money digging for gold; you made money selling shovels,” said Mehta. A fitting metaphor for the idea that investing in talent and tools, especially tools, is how to turn a profit. The actual data, databases, algorithms and so on would be open source. Money would come from the tools to use that technology to benefit specific areas, such as automation of healthcare.

    And healthcare is a good place to start. “Big Data is all about making life cheaper, better. … If we forget about how to solve problems for humans, we’ve lost. We want to be known for enriching life,” said Mehta.

  • Changing the way we design for the web

    On the one hand, open source should mean lower cost of entry for people from poorer communities (like me, growing up). But on the other, I feel it is hard to contribute when under- or unemployed. I had a grant to work on the Web Animations API documentation, but I can’t do as much as I’d like with other animation features (motion paths, advanced timing functions) because I need to spend a lot of time working on my own business, getting paid.

    Essentially this leads to an awkward model where the only contributors are employed programmers—and when it comes to open source animation or design APIs, platforms, etc, this lack of user input really starts to show. Or, the only products with thriving open source development teams are those that have financially lucrative futures, turning the open source software (OSS) model into a capitalist one.

  • Asterisk 14 Improves Open-Source VoIP

    Digium, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Asterisk open source PBX project announced the release Asterisk 14 this week, continuing to evolve the decade old effort, making it easier to use and deploy.

  • Yahoo open-sources a deep learning model for classifying pornographic images

    Yahoo today announced its latest open-source release: a model that can figure out if images are specifically pornographic in nature.

    The system uses a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data (like dirty images) and getting them to make inferences about new data. The model that’s now available on GitHub under a BSD 2-Clause license comes pre-trained, so users only have to fine-tune it if they so choose. The model works with the widely used Caffe open source deep learning framework. The team trained the model using its now open source CaffeOnSpark system.

    The new model could be interesting to look at for developers maintaining applications like Instagram and Pinterest that are keen to minimize smut. Search engine operators like Google and Microsoft might also want to check out what’s under the hood here.

    “To the best of our knowledge, there is no open source model or algorithm for identifying NSFW images,” Yahoo research engineer Jay Mahadeokar and senior director of product management Gerry Pesavento wrote in a blog post.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • CloudReady by neverware

        I thought I would put together a quick “installation” review of a product called CloudReady by neverware. What is CloudReady? CloudReady is basically a project to bring Chromium OS to those who would like to convert traditional laptops into Chromebook-like devices. I stumbled on them several months ago and finally decided to see how hard it was to install Chromium OS and how functional it actually was as a Chromebook-like device. I have a few low end (netbook-like) devices and I have been trying to figure out how I could make them functional for my boys, I thought this might be the solution.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla tells Firefox OS devs to fork off if they want to chase open web apps vision

        The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox development team has decided enough is enough and will stop supporting Windows XP and Vista in March 2017 and also bin Firefox OS.

        The OS first. In this post Mozillans Ari Jaaksi and David Bryant, respectively the head of connected devices and veep for platform engineering, write that “By the end of 2015 Mozilla leadership had come to the conclusion that our then Firefox OS initiative of shipping phones with commercial partners would not bring Mozilla the returns we sought.”

        That decision means that “as of the end of July 2016 have stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS.”

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Cloudera Delivers Release Built on Apache Spark 2.0, and Advances Kudu

      Cloudera, focused on Apache Hadoop and other open source technologies,has announced its release built on the Apache Spark 2.0 (Beta), with enhancements to the API experience, performance improvements, and enhanced machine learning capabilities.

      The company is also working with the community to continue developing Apache Kudu 1.0, recently released by the Apache Software Foundation, which we covered here. Kudu is an open source columnar storage engine built for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem designed to enable flexible, high-performance analytic pipelines. Taken together, Cloudera’s new tools are giving it more diverse kinds of presence on the Big Data scene.

      Cloudera claims it was the first Hadoop big data analytics vendor to deliver a commercially supported version of Spark, and has participated actively in the open source community to enhance Spark for the enterprise through its One Platform Initiative. “With Spark 2.0, organizations are better able to take advantage of streaming data, develop richer machine learning models, and deploy them in real time, enabling more workloads to go into production,” the company reports.

    • Cloudera Delivers Enterprise-Grade Real-Time Streaming and Machine Learning with Apache Spark 2.0 and Drives Community Innovation with Apache Kudu 1.0
    • Vendors Pile on Big Data News at Strata

      Cloudera, Pentaho and Alation are among vendors making Big Data announcements at this week’s Strata event.

      Vendors big and small are making news at this week’s Strata + Hadoop event as they try to expand their portion of the Big Data market.

      Cloudera highlighted a trio of Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects to which it contributes. Among them is Spark 2.0, which benefits from a new Dataset API that offers the promise of better usability and performance as well as new machine learning libraries.

    • New alliances focus on open-source, data science empowerment

      How can data science make a true market impact? Partnerships, particularly amongst open source communities. As IBM solidifies its enterprise strategies around data demands, two new partnerships emerge: one with Continuum Analytics, Inc., advancing open-source analytics for the enterprise; and another with Galvanize, initiating a Data Science for Executives program.

      Continuum Analytics, the creator and driving force behind Anaconda — a leading open data science platform powered by Python — has allied with IBM to advance open-source analytics for the enterprise. Data scientists and data engineers in open-source communities can now embrace Python and R to develop analytic and machine learning models in the Spark environment through its integration with IBM’s DataWorks Project.

      The new agreement between IBM and Galvanize, which provides a dynamic learning community for technology, will offer an assessment, analysis and training element for Galvanize’s Data Science for Executives program. This program empowers corporations to better understand, use and maximize the value of their data. The program will support IBM’s DataFirst Method, a methodology that IBM says provides the strategy, expertise and game plan to help ensure enterprise customers’ succeed on their journey to become a data-driven business.

    • Apache Spot: open source big data analytics for cyber

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • TDF Releases Fresh Update to LibreOffice 5.2

      The Document Foundation today announced the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.2, the second update to the “fresh” 5.2 family. “LibreOffice 5.2.2, targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release announced in August.” These fixes include the usual number of import/export/filter fixes as well as a lot of interface adjustments and a few crashes.

      One of the more interesting import bugs fixed had first been reported 4 1/2 years ago. In version 3.5.0 when importing RTF files with several tables the formatting isn’t retained in all cases. The original reporter said this included column widths and placement. Comments updated the report throughout several versions on various systems. The bug sat for another year before being bumped and eight months later a patch was committed. After further input and more adjustments, Miklos Vajna committed patches for several versions including today’s 5.2.2.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD 6.0 Limited Edition CD set (signed by developers)

      Five OpenBSD 6.0 CD-ROM copies were signed by 40 developers during the g2k16 Hackathon in Cambridge, UK.

      Those copies are being auctioned sequentially on ebay.

      All proceeds will be donated to the OpenBSD Foundation to support and further the development of free software based on the OpenBSD operating system.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Licensing resource series: Free GNU/Linux distributions & GNU Bucks

      When Richard Stallman set out to create the GNU Project, the goal was to create a fully free operating system. Over 33 years later, it is now possible for users to have a computer that runs only free software. But even if all the software is available, putting it all together yourself, or finding a distribution that comes with only free software, would be quite the task. That is why we provide a list of Free GNU/Linux distributions.

      Each distro on the list is commited to only distributing free software. With many to choose from, you can find a distro that meets your needs while respecting your freedom.

      But with so much software making up an entire operating system, how is it possible to make sure that nothing nasty sneaks into the distro? That’s where you, and GNU Bucks come in.

    • Friday Working together for Free Software Directory IRC meetup: September 30th
    • August and September 2016: photos from Pittsburgh and Fresno
    • Libre Learn Lab: a summit on freely licensed resources for education

      Libre Learn Lab is a two-day summit for people who create, use and implement freely licensed resources for K-12 education, bringing together educators, policy experts, software developers, hardware hackers, and activists to share best practices and address the challenges of widespread adoption of these resources in education. The 2nd biennial conference is Saturday, October 8th, and Sunday, October 9th, at the MIT Tang Center.

      The keynote addresses will be delivered by the FSF’s own Richard M. Stallman, former Chief Open Education Advisor Andrew Marcinek and founder of HacKIDemia Stefania Druga. At the event, there will be a special tribute to Dr. Seymour Papert (the father of educational computing) by Dr. Cynthia Solomon.

  • Programming/Development

    • Machine Learning with Python

      I first heard the term “machine learning” a few years ago, and to be honest, I basically ignored it that time. I knew that it was a powerful technique, and I knew that it was in vogue, but I didn’t know what it really was— what problems it was designed to solve, how it solved them and how it related to the other sorts of issues I was working on in my professional (consulting) life and in my graduate-school research.

      But in the past few years, machine learning has become a topic that most will avoid at their professional peril. Despite the scary-sounding name, the ideas behind machine learning aren’t that difficult to understand. Moreover, a great deal of open-source software makes it possible for anyone to use machine learning in their own work or research. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that machine learning already is having a huge impact on the computer industry and on our day-to-day lives.

Leftovers

  • Salesforce tries to block Microsoft’s LinkedIn acquisition

    Microsoft made a splash earlier this year when it announced the largest acquisition in its history, signing an agreement to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. But now, Salesforce is trying to convince the European Union to block the deal.

    Salesforce Chief Legal Officer Burke Norton will argue to the EU’s competition authority that Microsoft’s control of LinkedIn’s dataset following an acquisition would be anticompetitive. EU competition chief Margarethe Vestager said in January that her agency would be looking directly at whether a company’s use of data is bad for competition, and these complaints seem aimed squarely at those comments.

    “Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of LinkedIn threatens the future of innovation and competition,” Norton said in a statement on Thursday. “By gaining ownership of LinkedIn’s unique dataset of over 450 million professionals in more than 200 countries, Microsoft will be able to deny competitors access to that data, and in doing so obtain an unfair competitive advantage.”

  • The Rise of the Helpful Operational Bots: ChatOps

    While some of the concepts surrounding ChatOps has been around for a long time, it is fair to say that the idea only really began to get traction within technical communities when Jesse Newland gave a talk on ChatOps at Github during PuppetConf 2012. Since 2012 we have seen a growth in interest in the new use of bots within operations.

  • Facebook Video Metrics Crossed The Line From Merely Dubious To Just Plain Wrong

    What happened here is actually pretty subtle, so bear with me. Facebook distinguishes “plays” from “views” — with the former being every single play of the video, including those auto-plays that you scroll straight past and never even look at, and the latter being only people who actually watched the video for three seconds or longer. Of course, there are still a million ways in which this metric is itself broken (I’ve certainly let plenty of videos play for more than three seconds or even all the way through while reading a post above or below them) but the distinction is a good one. All of the more detailed stats are based on either plays or views (mostly views) and are clearly labeled, but the one metric at issue was the “Average Duration of Video Viewed.” This metric could be fairly calculated as either the total amount of time from all plays divided by the total number of plays, or the same thing based only on time and number of views — but instead, it was erroneously being calculated as total play time divided by total number of views. In other words, all the second-or-two autoplays from idle newsfeed scrollers were being totalled up, and that time was being distributed among the smaller number of people who stayed on the video for more than three seconds as part of their average duration, leading to across-the-board inflation of that figure.

  • Journalist Tom Henderson on Cloud Vendor Lock-In

    This video is not technically about free or open source software, but it’s 100 percent about the danger of falling victim to proprietary vendors and their habit of making it hard to leave their sweet embrace once they get their paws on you. The Network World column by Tom Henderson that generated this interview is titled, The Many Dimensions of Cloud Value, and is subtitled, “Put your snorkels on: The marketing for cloud services is getting deep.” So is the marketing for many other proprietary something-as-a-something offerings ranging from operating systems to (obviously) cloud platforms.

  • Science

    • Why Deep Learning Is Suddenly Changing Your Life

      Over the past four years, readers have doubtlessly noticed quantum leaps in the quality of a wide range of everyday technologies.

      Most obviously, the speech-recognition functions on our smartphones work much better than they used to. When we use a voice command to call our spouses, we reach them now. We aren’t connected to Amtrak or an angry ex.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Bayer Makes Deal With GMO Giant Monsanto

      That preemption bill was similar to other anti-local democracy measures peddled by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

      From fracking bans to minimum wage and GMO labeling, ALEC and its politicians have successfully driven preemption efforts with its “model” legislation throughout different parts of the country at the behest of giant corporations.

      An Oregonian who leads a group with ties to Monsanto claimed he authored the bill, but as Lisa Arkin of the Pesticide Action Network North America noted both the Oregon bill and the ALEC bill share the same name and have the same core operative language and effect: “A local government may not enact or enforce a . . . measure, including but not limited to an ordinance, regulation, control area, or quarantine, to inhibit or prevent the production or use of agricultural seed, flower seed . . . or vegetable seed or products of agricultural seed, flower seed . . . or vegetable seed.”

      After the Oregon bill was introduced in 2013, it was taken to ALEC’s 40th anniversary meeting in Chicago, as the “Preemption of Local Agricultural Laws Act,” which is known as the “Monsanto Protection Act,” by its foes.

    • More Than 9 in 10 People Breathe Bad Air, W.H.O. Study Says

      The World Health Organization said Tuesday that 92 percent of people breathe what it classifies as unhealthy air, in another sign that atmospheric pollution is a significant threat to global public health.

      A new report, the W.H.O.’s most comprehensive analysis so far of outdoor air quality worldwide, also said about three million deaths a year — mostly from cardiovascular, pulmonary and other noncommunicable diseases — were linked to outdoor air pollution. Nearly two-thirds of those deaths are in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region, compared with 333,000 in Europe and the Americas, the report said.

      “When you look out through the windows in your house or apartment, you don’t see the tiny little particles that are suspended in the air, so the usual perception is that the air is clean,” Rajasekhar Balasubramanian, an air quality expert at the National University of Singapore who was not involved in the study, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

      “But the W.H.O. report is a clear indication that even in the absence of air pollution episodes, the concentrations of particles suspended in the air do exceed what’s considered to be acceptable from a health viewpoint,” he said.

      In previous studies, the W.H.O. estimated that more than eight in 10 people in urban areas that monitored air pollution were breathing unhealthy air and that about seven million deaths a year were linked to indoor and outdoor pollution.

  • Security

    • Linaro organisation, with ARM, aims for end-end open source IoT code

      With the objective of producing reference software for more secure connected products, ranging from sensors and connected controllers to smart devices and gateways, for the industrial and consumer markets, Linaro has announced LITE: Collaborative Software Engineering for the Internet of Things (IoT).

      Linaro and the LITE members will work to reduce fragmentation in operating systems, middleware and cloud connectivity solutions, and will deliver open source device reference platforms to enable faster time to market, improved security and lower maintenance costs for connected products. Industry interoperability of diverse, connected and secure IoT devices is a critical need to deliver on the promise of the IoT market, the organisation says. “Today, product vendors are faced with a proliferation of choices for IoT device operating systems, security infrastructure, identification, communication, device management and cloud interfaces.”

    • An open source approach to securing The Internet of Things
    • Addressing the IoT Security Problem

      Last week’s DDOS takedown of security guru Brian Krebs’ website made history on several levels. For one, it was the largest such reported attack ever, with unwanted traffic to the site hitting levels of 620 Gbps, more than double the previous record set back in 2013, and signalling that the terabyte threshold will certainly be crossed soon. It also relied primarily on compromised Internet of Things devices.

    • Linaro beams LITE at Internet of Things devices

      Linaro launched a “Linaro IoT and Embedded” (LITE) group, to develop end-to-end open source reference software for IoT devices and applications.

      Linaro, which is owned by ARM and major ARM licensees, and which develops open source software for ARM devices, launched a Linaro IoT and Embedded (LITE) Segment Group at this week’s Linaro Connect event in Las Vegas. The objective of the LITE initiative is to produce “end to end open source reference software for more secure connected products, ranging from sensors and connected controllers to smart devices and gateways, for the industrial and consumer markets,” says Linaro.

    • Don’t Trust Consumer Routers

      Another example of why you shouldn’t trust consumer routers. d-link

      It isn’t just this specific d-link router. We’ve seen the same issues over and over and over with pretty much every non-enterprise vendor.

      Plus we don’t want our devices used by crackers to DDoS Brian Krebs anymore, right?

      We are Linux people. We CAN do this ourselves.

    • D-Link DWR-932 router is chock-full of security holes

      Security researcher Pierre Kim has unearthed a bucketload of vulnerabilities affecting the LTE router/portable wireless hotspot D-Link DWR-932. Among these are backdoor accounts, weak default PINs, and hardcoded passwords.

    • The Cost of Cyberattacks Is Less than You Might Think

      What’s being left out of these costs are the externalities. Yes, the costs to a company of a cyberattack are low to them, but there are often substantial additional costs borne by other people. The way to look at this is not to conclude that cybersecurity isn’t really a problem, but instead that there is a significant market failure that governments need to address.

    • NHS trusts are still using unsupported Windows XP PCs

      AT LEAST 42 National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the UK still run Microsoft’s now-defunct Windows XP operating system.

      Motherboard filed Freedom of Information requests with more than 70 NHS hospital trusts asking how many Windows XP machines they use. 48 replied within the allotted time, and a whopping 42 of them admitted that they still use the operating system that reached end-of-life status in April 2014.

      Some of the culprits include East Sussex Healthcare, which has 413 Windows XP machines, Sheffield’s Children’s hospital with 1,290, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust in London with an insane 10,800 Windows XP-powered PCs.

      23 replied to Motherboard’s quizzing about whether they have an extended support agreement in place and, unsurprisingly, the majority said that they do not.

    • Friday’s security advisories
    • ICANN grinds forward on crucial DNS root zone signing key update

      The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is moving — carefully — to upgrade the DNS root zone key by which all domains can be authenticated under the DNS Security Extensions protocol.

      ICANN is the organization responsible for managing the Domain Name System, and DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) authenticates DNS responses, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks in which the attacker hijacks legitimate domain resolution requests and replaces them with fraudulent domain addresses.

      DNSSEC still relies on the original DNS root zone key generated in 2010. That 1024-bit RSA key is scheduled to be replaced with a 2048-bit RSA key next October. Although experts are split over the effectiveness of DNSSEC, the update of the current root zone key signing key (KSK) is long overdue.

    • Cybersecurity isn’t an IT problem, it’s a business problem

      The emergence of the CISO is a relatively recent phenomenon at many companies. Their success often relies upon educating the business from the ground up. In the process, companies become a lot better about how to handle security and certainly learn how not to handle it.

      As a CIO, knowing the pulse of security is critical. I oversee a monthly technology steering committee that all the executives attend. The CISO reports during this meeting on the state of the security program. He also does an excellent job of putting risk metrics out there, color coded by red, yellow, and green. This kind of color grading allows us to focus attention on where we are and what we’re doing about it.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Congress May Rewrite Saudi 9/11 Law After Veto Override

      The two top Republicans in Congress said they’re prepared to rewrite legislation allowing victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia — less than 24 hours after Congress took the extraordinary step of overriding President Barack Obama’s veto of the measure to make it law.

      Both House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that the measure could have unintended consequences — including the fact that it could leave U.S. soldiers open to retaliation by foreign governments.

      “I would like to think there’s a way we can fix so that our service members do not have legal problems overseas while still protecting the rights of the 9/11 victims,” Ryan told reporters Thursday, one day after his chamber voted 348-77 to override the veto.

      McConnell also said he was worried about unintended consequences of the measure, saying changes to the law might be needed.

      “It’s worth further discussing,” he told reporters Thursday. “It was certainly not something that was going to be fixed this week.”

    • Arab responses to 9/11 bill point to US interventions abroad

      Others support the bill, but point out that the U.S. is meanwhile backing a Saudi-led intervention in Yemen that has led to the deaths of thousands of civilians there.

      Two Arabic hashtags were trending on Twitter when the bill was passed, one referring directly to the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, and the other simply titled: #TheAmericanTerrorism.

      Some Arabic Twitter users shared a photo montage that depicted U.S. military actions in Japan and Vietnam, as well as naked Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison being humiliated by smiling U.S. troops. It read: “Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan can’t wait for JASTA to be implemented so they can, in turn, prosecute the U.S.”

      Another shared a 2005 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial cartoon of a young boy on his father’s lap watching an image of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud and asking: “Which terrorist group did that?”

      One post shared more than 750 times included a clip with Arabic subtitles of stand-up American comedian Eddie Griffin talking about U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying these wars are about “money, money, money.”

      The criticism, of course, is nothing new, says Eurasia Group’s Director for the Middle East and North Africa Ayham Kamel.

      “The Middle East, as a region where the U.S. has been dominant, has always been critical of U.S. policy,” he said.

    • Pakistan threatens to DESTROY India with nuclear bomb as atomic enemies edge to the brink of war

      PAKISTAN’S Defence Minister has threatened to “destroy” India – after India said on Thursday it had carried out “surgical strikes” on suspected militants preparing to infiltrate from Pakistan-ruled Kashmir.

      The strikes, which were a response to shots fired across the de facto border through the disputed Himalayan territory, could lead to a military escalation between the two nuclear-armed neighbours – risking a ceasefire agreed in 2003.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • ‘We Believe in What We’re Doing’

      WikiLeaks is now 10 years old. SPIEGEL met with founder Julian Assange, 45, to discuss the whistleblower platform’s achievements and whether recent criticism leveled at the site is justified.

      SPIEGEL: Mr. Assange, 10 years after the founding of WikiLeaks, the whistleblower platform is again being criticized. WikiLeaks is said to have put millions of Turkish voters in danger. What is your response?

      Assange: A few days after the publication of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee, an entirely false story was put out that we had published the names, addresses and phone numbers of all female voters in Turkey. It is completely false. And it was and is simple to check. Power factions fight back with lies. That’s not surprising.

      SPIEGEL: Quite a few German journalists have long sympathized with WikiLeaks and also with Edward Snowden. But they aren’t impressed with the publishing of the DNC emails. Are you campaigning on behalf of Donald Trump?

      Assange: Our publication of the DNC leaks has showed that the Democratic National Committee had effectively rigged the primaries in the United States on behalf of Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. That led to the resignation of leading members of the DNC, including its president Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

      SPIEGEL: People within the Clinton campaign have suggested that the DNC emails were given to you by the Russian secret service.

      Assange: There have been many attempts to distract from the power of our publications. Hillary Clinton is the favorite to win. As always, most media aligns with the presumptive winner even though their claimed societal virtue is to investigate those in power.

      SPIEGEL: The fact is, WikiLeaks is damaging Clinton and bolstering Trump.

      Assange: We’re not going to start censoring our publications because there is a US election. Our role is to publish. Clinton has been in government so we have much more to publish on Clinton. There is a lot of naivety. The US presidency will continue to represent the major power groups of the United States — big business and the military — regardless of who the talking head is.

      SPIEGEL: If someone submitted internal documents from the Trump campaign or the Republican Party, you would publish that as well?

      Assange: Yes, of course. That’s what we do.

    • CIA Took Three Years To Reject FOIA Request For Criteria For Rejecting FOIA Requests

      Curious about what criteria the CIA have for determining if they “can neither confirm nor deny” something? So did Jason Smathers, who back in 2010 filed one of MuckRock’s earliest requests for exactly that. Six years later, he still doesn’t know.

      Smathers first filed in October 2010 – to the agency’s credit, they only took a mere two months to get back to him.

    • Government Agencies Apparently Not Interested In Following Congressional Directives On Overclassification

      I’m not sure what this says about government transparency. Maybe it doesn’t say anything useful. Maybe it’s just the mixed signals we can expect from agencies only willing to make the most minimal transparency efforts. Or maybe it says something about the momentum of even slowly-moving large objects. A bureaucracy has a large turning radius and asking it to suddenly change its ways means you have to lower your expectations as to how “suddenly” should be defined. Whatever it says, it’s nothing good.

      Overclassification is a government-wide problem. Legislation has been passed to fix it. While the government expects the private sector to get right on it when laws are passed, it obviously cuts itself a lot more slack when faced with internal legislative redirection.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate justice meets racism: Standing Rock was decades in the making

      Attack dogs and waves of arrests by police in riot gear could look like isolated incidents of overreaction to the activism stemming from the Standing Rock reservation. But for the Lakota Sioux who live in these marginalized hillsides, the escalated militarization behind their battle against the Dakota Access pipeline is a situation decades in the making.

      North Dakota is not the whitest state in America, but it’s arguably the most segregated. More than 60 percent of its largest minority population, Native Americans, lives on or near reservations. Native men are incarcerated or unemployed at some of the highest rates in the country. Poverty levels for families of the Standing Rock tribe are five times that of residents living in the capital city, Bismarck. In Cannon Ball, the heart of the tribal community, there are rows of weathered government homes, but no grocery store. Tucked behind a lonely highway, this is where mostly white farmers and ranchers shuttle to and from homesteads once belonging to the Sioux.

    • Most people alive today set to witness dangerous global warming in their lifetime, scientists warn

      The world could hit two degrees Celsius of warming – the point at which many scientists believe climate change will become dangerous – as early as 2050, a group of leading experts has warned.

      In a report called The Truth About Climate Change, they said many people seemed to think of global warming as “abstract, distant and even controversial”.

      But the planet is now heating up “much faster” than anticipated, said Professor Sir Robert Watson, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and one of the authors of the report.

      If their analysis is correct, it means the majority of people alive today will experience what it is like to live on a dangerously overheated planet.

    • 9 wonders of the world set to vanish forever: How many have you ticked off?

      This month, we learned that Spain was facing the prospect of becoming the first European Union member state to have a natural World Heritage Site make Unesco’s “danger list”. The Doñana coastal wetlands in Andalucía – home to the endangered Iberian lynx – is said to be under threat from a mining and dredging plan, as well as 1,000 illegal wells in the area.

      But it’s just one among a number of incredible sites the world over that, according to Unesco, could be lost forever. Here are just a few World Heritage Sites in Unesco’s danger zone that you might need to scrub off the bucket list.

    • To Reduce Haze and Save Indonesia’s Forests, Address the Root Cause of Fires

      Over the past few months we have seen heated debates over the problem of Indonesian forest fires and the associated haze in neighboring countries like Singapore. A new law in Singapore permits the prosecution of companies deemed to be responsible for causing such fires, and speculation about how the El Nino phenomenon might lead to particularly intense fires in the next month have drawn global attention to the issue.

      Three years ago, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono made a pledge to dedicate the remainder of his term in office to protect Indonesia’s environment and forests. Over the last three years he has done just that — with the historic moratorium on new logging concessions implemented in 2011, which has since been extended to May 2015. This policy has helped to protect more than 63 million hectares of primary forest and peat land, equivalent to an area larger than the landmass of Malaysia and the Philippines combined, and helped to lower Indonesia’s deforestation rate from 1.2 million hectares per year between 2003 and 2006, to between 450 and 600 thousand hectares per year since 2011. We also see the private sectors in the region stepping up their zero-deforestation commitments, including from the pulp and paper and palm oil industries.

    • Fires driving deforestation in Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem

      Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem lost 4,097 hectares of forest cover in the first six months of 2016, according to Forest, Nature and Environment of Aceh (HAkA), an NGO. At the same time, 187 fire hotspots were recorded in the nationally protected area during the period.

      “The hotspots overlay the forest cover loss in Aceh,” HAkA’s Agung Dwinurcahya said at a press conference in Jakarta. “For example, the high number of hotspots in Aceh Timur is the main contributor to deforestation in Aceh Timur.”

      Leuser, home to one of the Southeast Asian country’s last great swaths of intact rainforest, lies in Indonesia’s westernmost Aceh and North Sumatra provinces. It’s the only place in the world where orangutans, rhinos, elephants and tigers coexist in the wild.

    • Seven Popular Foods That Might Disappear Because of Climate Change

      Throughout history, different types of food have surged and dropped in popularity, and some foods that existed at one point just aren’t around anymore. But we’re not talking about foods that aren’t popular, quite the opposite in fact. Some of our favorite foods and drinks could be considered “endangered” because the places where they are grown are being severely impacted by climate change. If this isn’t proof that we need to do something about climate change, I don’t know what is. To start off, here are a few foods that are part of our everyday lives that might not be around for long.

  • Finance

    • In Wells Fargo Case, News Really Did Happen To An Editor

      Several years after I returned to New York from Oregon, I made a strange discovery. Bank accounts I was certain I had closed were inexplicably racking up service charges. It seemed bizarre, particularly because I had gone in person to a newly opened local branch of my West Coast bank to make sure the accounts were shut down.

      The failure to pay these charges (bills were sent to my old address and never caught up with me) resulted in penalties and a report to a credit agency. After an increasingly frustrating series of exchanges at the local branch, the bank agreed to wipe out the charges but said I would have to deal with the credit agencies on my own.

      It seemed outrageous, and as the editor in chief of an investigative news operation, I thought about asking Paul Kiel, ProPublica’s crack reporter on bank shenanigans, to take a look.

      But then I stopped myself.

      There’s an old saying in the journalism business for this sort of thinking: News is what happens to an editor.

      As with so many newsroom aphorisms, it’s meant to be proclaimed with an eye roll and a tone of deep sarcasm. Reporters view editor-generated stories as the bane of their existence, and not without reason. Random events and pet peeves are not often a great starting point for serious stories.

    • People born in the 1980s are HALF as wealthy in their thirties as people a decade older

      People born in early Eighties were around half as wealthy at age 30 as their counterparts who were born in the Seventies, analysis shows.

      The children of the “Baby Boomer” generation, currently in their early 30s, have an average net household wealth of £27,000 each a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank showed.

      By comparison the median wealth of those born in the 1970s had £53,000 on average by the same age. The figure takes into account housing, financial and private pension wealth.

    • Wealth of people in their 30s has ‘halved in a decade’

      People in their early 30s are half as wealthy as those now in their 40s were at the same age, a report finds.

      Today’s 30-something generation has missed out on house price increases and better pensions, according to research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

      Those born in the early 1980s have an average wealth of £27,000 each, against the £53,000 those born in the 1970s had by the same age, said the IFS.

      They will also find it harder to amass wealth in the future, it added.

      The think tank found that people born in the early 1980s were the first post-war group not to have higher incomes in early adulthood than those born in the preceding decade.

    • Children of Thatcher era have half the wealth of the previous generation

      The children of the Thatcher era have reached adulthood with half as much wealth as the previous generation, finds a major study published today.

      The report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies concludes people born in the early 1980s are the first post-war generation to suffer smaller incomes in early adulthood than those born 10 years before.

      A toxic mix of low interest rates and the calamitous crash of 2008 mean it is much harder to accumulate wealth, leaving them with meagre pensions and a lower rate of home ownership.

    • Basic Income — A concrete and financed proposal for Sweden

      I have now translated my proposal for basic income for Sweden, which I presented in Swedish some time ago.

      Although the proposal as such is strictly about Sweden and Swedish conditions, I am hoping that the reasoning and design principles I have applied may be of interest to basic income activists in other Nordic and European countries as well. In many ways, the welfare systems we have today are basically quite similar, and many of the problems we face are the same as well.

    • Portugal threatened with first treaty claim

      A Mexican company has threatened to bring a €42 million investment treaty claim against Portugal over a cancelled deal to privatise part of Lisbon’s public transport system.

      Grupo Autobuses de Oriente (ADO) announced last week that it had served a notice of dispute to the Portuguese government under the Mexico-Portugal bilateral investment treaty after negotiations proved “fruitless”.

      If the dispute reaches arbitration, it would be the first known investment treaty case that Portugal has faced – as well as a rare example of a Latin American multinational invoking a BIT to protect investments in a European state.

      The dispute relates to two “sub-concession agreements” that ADO, through its Spanish subsidiary Avanza, signed with Portugal’s then centre-right government under Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho in June 2015.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Gary Johnson Is Not the Third-Party Candidate You’re Looking For

      With Hillary Clinton failing to provide a genuine voice for the 99% against Donald Trump’s bigoted fake-populism, a left-wing third-party candidate like Jill Stein can act as an important pole of attraction for a section of workers and youth sick and tired of the status quo. But Stein isn’t the only third-party challenger to Trump and Clinton. Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, is running for president under the Libertarian Party. Johnson has been consistently outpolling Stein, and some polls even show Johnson beating Stein among former Bernie Sanders supporters.

      Given his polling results, Johnson may appear to be the best bet for building a viable challenge to the two-party system. And Johnson has a number of progressive positions on certain isolated issues, such as support for the legalization of marijuana and opposition to government surveillance. But, as socialists, we have to be clear that Gary Johnson, and libertarian politics in general, are a dead end for anyone trying to build a voice for the 99%.

    • Hacked Audio Reveals Hillary Clinton Sees Herself Occupying “Center-Left to Center-Right”

      In the hacked recording of a private conversation with campaign donors in February, Hillary Clinton distanced herself from progressive goals like “free college, free healthcare” and described her place on the political spectrum as spanning from the center-left to the center-right.

      Clinton has been inconsistent in the past about espousing political labels. She has at times touted herself as stalwart liberal. For instance, she said last July: “I take a backseat to no one when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values.” But a few months later, she told a group in Ohio: “You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center. I plead guilty.”

      The newly disclosed comments came in audio, apparently from hacked emails, that was revealed this week by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative blog run by a Republican communications strategist. Clinton was speaking at a Virginia fundraiser hosted by Beatrice Welters, the former U.S. ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, and her husband Anthony Welters, the executive chairman of an investment consulting firm founded by former Clinton aid Cheryl Mills.

      Clinton’s opponent at the time, Sen. Bernie Sanders, was pointing to successful programs in Norway and Sweden, which provide universal daycare, family leave, and government sponsored healthcare and college education, as policies that he would seek to adopt.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Palestinians boycott Facebook over ‘censorship’

      Palestinian activists have recently launched a campaign to boycott Facebook after the popular social-media platform blocked several Palestinian accounts and deleted numerous posts – at Israel’s request – for alleged “incitement”.

      Earlier this week, campaigners – using the hashtag #FBCensorsPalestine – called on supporters to refrain from posting on Facebook between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. (Jerusalem time) on Sept. 25.

      Hussam al-Zayegh, the campaign’s Gaza-based spokesman, told Anadolu Agency that the initiative had been launched in response to what he described as Facebook’s “pro-Israel bias”.

      According to al-Zayegh, the world’s most popular social-networking site is actively working to undermine Palestinian activists and journalists who rely on Facebook to help spread their message.

    • Palestinian Activists Are Angry About Alleged Facebook Censorship

      Palestinian activists are running an online campaign to hold Facebook accountable after the social media giant deleted a number of pro-Palestine posts and suspended several Palestinian journalists’ accounts.

      Quds News Network and other publications launched the hashtag #FBCensorsPalestine on Friday, when news emerged that seven Palestinian journalists associated with popular outlets in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories had their accounts shut down for “violating community guidelines.”

      According to the seven journalists, four of whom work for Shehab News Agency and three of whom work for Quds, Facebook provided no further explanation of what standards were violated.

    • Donald Trump and the Return of Seditious Libel

      In 1733, New York printer John Peter Zenger began publishing the eighth newspaper in the American colonies, and the first willing to venture criticism of the government. The New-York Weekly Journal was the second paper in a city of 10,000 or so people, 1700 of them slaves.

      As we are reminded in Richard Kluger’s comprehensive new book, “Indelible Ink,” the first full-length account of Zenger’s travails, by 1735, Zenger (and the likely editor of his paper, James Alexander) had so offended Britain’s royal governor of New York and New Jersey, William Cosby, that Cosby brought suit against Zenger for seditious libel—the crime of criticizing the government. Under the law then in effect in Britain and its colonies, truth was not a defense to this charge. The leading legal treatise of the day explained that “since the greater appearance there is of truth in any malicious invective, so much the more provoking it is.” And: “The malicious prosecution of even truth itself cannot… be suffered to interrupt the tranquility of a well-ordered society.” This was deemed especially the case with true attacks on those in power, as they would have “a direct tendency to breed in the people a dislike of their governors and incline them to faction and sedition.”

    • Thoughtless and dangerous EU approach to free speech online

      There is a lot of ambiguity when it comes to the EU cooperation with Facebook, Twitter, Youtube/Google and Microsoft to censor the Internet – the Joint Referral Platform.

      On the one hand, it has been marketed as a tool to stop »radicalization« that could lead young people to religiously motivated violence, e.g. terrorism or joining the Islamic State in the Middle East.

      On the other hand, in documents and speeches the EU is totally focused on this project to stem »illegal online hate speech«, e.g. when it comes to racism and Islamophobia.

      On that account, what is deemed to be »illegal« adds to the confusion. Incitement to violence is clearly and reasonably within this definition. But when it comes to the broader definition of hate speech, laws vary between EU member states.

    • Chinese Communism’s Anniversary Shines Light On Censorship — In America

      Due to SAPPRFT restrictions, all American movie scripts are vulnerable to “requested” changes or self-censorship based on the Communist Party’s wishes.

    • Popular YouTuber Experiments With WebTorrent to Beat Censorship

      A popular YouTuber is experimenting with torrent-based technology in order to take control of his content and avoid third-party censorship. Bluedrake says that the potential for freedom when using WebTorrent “blows his mind” and has already carried out tests to get the project underway.

    • Banned Book Week brings awareness to censorship, individual choices

      Banned Books Week is from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1.

      This year will be the 34th anniversary of Banned Books week. The last week of September) will be when words will attempt to overthrow unnecessary censorship.

      After all, in the words of Laurie Anderson “censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”

      The heat-wave surrounding censorship of books sent the media in a frenzy in the 1980s, urging society to fight against authority, ensuring that there would be a change in social behavior and moral values.

    • Orwell 2016: Censorship in the age of social media

      If George Orwell is watching from above, he must be impressed. In his novel 1984, what was meant as a cautionary tale against government control and intellectual obscurantism, seems to have come to pass without our full knowledge.

      Where have our media taken us?

      To be brutally honest, I would say down the yellow brick road and around the tree a few times over already. As our world has become more and more dependent on media, we have opened ourselves up to the bite of censorship, control and the ever-evolving deity which is ‘social trend’.

      In other words, our need to be “connected” has pretty much left us dependent on information technology.

    • Singapore court sends teen blogger back to jail for criticising religion
    • Singapore rebel teen jailed for anti-religion posts
    • Singapore Teen Gets 6 Weeks in Jail for ‘Intending to Wound’ God’s Feelings
    • Teen blogger jailed in Singapore for insulting Muslims, Christians

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The “Pardon Snowden” Case Just Got Stronger

      Yesterday, the Department of Justice Inspector General (DoJ IG) issued a long overdue Congressionally-mandated report on FBI compliance with the PATRIOT Act’s Section 215 “business records” provision between 2012 and 2014. It is the first such report issued that covers the initial period of Edward Snowden’s revelations about widespread domestic mass surveillance by the federal government. Since his indictment for leaking the information to the press, Snowden’s lawyers have argued that he should not be prosecuted under the WW I-era Espionage Act because his revelations served the public interest.

    • Intel Community To Institute Actual Whistleblower Award For ‘Speaking Truth To Power’

      The Intelligence Community is looking to reward whistleblowers for “speaking truth to power.” No, seriously. Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News has posted a recent Intel Community announcement [PDF] that looks to fold a whistleblower honor into the community’s existing awards program.

      This is part of the intel community’s cautious foray into the harsh sunlight of transparency — itself a response to a presidential directive that our nation’s spies head outside for a bit and expose themselves a bit.

      The award may as well be called the “Snowden.” But the wording makes it explicit Snowden himself will never be eligible to receive the honorific fruits of his whistleblowing.

    • How Bulk Interception Works

      Mobile digital devices are ever more ubiquitous, generating new forms of data in quantities that continue to grow exponentially. Moreover, the costs of storing data have decreased drastically, and continue to do so every year. Most importantly, the technical means of combining datasets and analyzing this vast trove of data have advanced so rapidly that what were previously considered meaningless or incoherent types and amounts of data can now produce incredibly revelatory analyses. Metadata is structured in such a way that computers can search through it for patterns faster and more effectively and learn more about us than similar searches through the actual content of our communications.

    • The secret smartphone war over the struggle for control of the user

      There’s a war going on behind closed doors for control of your smartphone. It’s between the phone makers and the operators, but it’s not over privacy or data or cost – it’s over you.

      The battles are raging over who owns the consumer and your phone: is it the buyer or the manufacturer? And is the smartphone a device you purchase, or a service you pay for monthly?

      The boom years for the industry, when a smartphone was a user’s first, are long gone in developed nations with most smartphones now sold to people who already have one. In the US and UK market penetration has hit roughly 85%. This means the growth a phone maker needs each year can only come at the expense of a competitor. And that has changed how the manufacturers see the market.

      Marina Koytcheva, director of forecasting at CCS Insight says: “After years of analysts and commentators talking about mobile phone market peaking within the visible horizon, it has now reached that point.”

      The research firm expects total mobile phone sales to decline by 1.3% this year over last, with smartphones accounting for almost three-quarters of the market and up only 4.1% globally.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Cops Dodge 4th Amendment By Phoning In ‘Anonymous’ Tips; Watch Their Drug Bust Vanish After They’re Exposed

      The two horses called in tips twice, resulting in searches of two residences. Despite costing them a nice drug bust and successful prosecution, both the DA (Shane Scanlon) and the Chief of Police (Carl Graziano) are defending not only the faux tipsters’ actions, but their work as law enforcement officers as well.

    • NYPD sent undercover officers to Black Lives Matter protest, records reveal

      Legal papers filed by the New York police department reveal that the department sent its own undercover officers to protests led by Black Lives Matter after the death of Eric Garner. The NYPD documents also show that it collected multimedia records about the protests.

      The NYPD disclosed its undercover operations in response to a group of New York attorneys requesting records under the state freedom of information law. The department has thus far declined to provide the records requested. But its descriptions in August court filings of the records it is refusing to release provide new details about its monitoring of protests at Grand Central Station:

      The first set contains “multimedia records” relating to the petitioners’ request for “pictures, videos, audio recordings, data, and metadata” collected or received by the NYPD at the Grand Central Station protests, which Black Lives Matter groups are still leading, according to the NYPD response.

      The second “consists entirely of communications between and among NYPD undercover officers and their handlers”, pertaining to the protests. According to a 22 August NYPD Memorandum of Law, these undercover communications “consist primarily of immediate impressions concerning ongoing events”.

    • FBI, DOJ And Their Forensic Scientists State They’ll Continue Using Discredited Junk Science To Put People Behind Bars

      For dozens of years, criminal prosecutions have relied on junk science. Forensic science, properly applied, can actually provide matches that identify suspects. But it’s not properly applied. In the hands of the DOJ, forensic evidence examination is a closed loop. Outside scientists have been granted access to the DOJ’s DNA work, but everything else — from fingerprints to hair samples — has been locked away in the government’s database.

      Still, the DOJ insists its science is solid, something it bases on confirmation bias. The matches determined in its forensic labs are “scientifically certain” because the DOJ’s expert witnesses have said so in court. Not only are outside scientists locked out of examining evidence and forensic processes, but defense lawyers are as well.

      The DOJ has finally decided to dial back its “scientific certainty” a bit by issuing guidance instructing its experts to not make this claim in court. This follows years of bogus matches being presented as sure things by forensic experts in court, leading to an unknown number of false convictions. This step back is a step forward for an agency that is mostly unwilling to admit to any mistakes or wrongdoing.

    • Video released shows officers shooting 6-year-old

      A Louisiana judge released body cam video Wednesday showing officers firing multiple rounds into a car, unknowingly striking and killing a 6-year-old boy.
      The incident, which happened in September 2015, resulted in the indictments of two marshals on second degree murder and second degree attempted murder charges.

      The marshals began pursuing the car after they witnessed an argument between a man and his girlfriend in front of a local bar, a source told CNN. Officers moved to detain the man, identified as Christopher Few, who took off in his car.
      The pursuit ended in gunfire on a dead-end street in Marksville, Louisiana.

    • Massachusetts Detective who Threatened to Murder Teens and Plant Drugs Won’t Be Fired or Charged

      A Springfield, Massachusetts narcotics detective has been placed on leave for 60 days, but not fired, after videos surfaced showing him threatening to murder two teenagers and plant drugs on them — videos which have cast doubt on the detective’s numerous drug cases.

      Detective Gregg A. Bigda was caught on video on February 26 at the Palmer Police Department, where he interrogated two teenagers, who along with a third teen were suspected of stealing an undercover police car outside a pizza shop, when he made the threats, according to a report on MassLive.com.

    • New Jersey Woman Forced into Mental Facility for Video Recording Courthouse

      It was a beautiful day in Freehold, New Jersey, so Jen Coombs decided to do First Amendment audits at the Monmouth County jail and courthouse to see how well officials there would respect her right to record in public.

      The New Jersey woman who runs a Facebook page called Time to Stand – New Jersey ended up forced into a mental facility against her will for four days. Not that it kept her from doing another First Amendment audit on the same courthouse upon her release.

      It all started on September 15, 2016 when Coombs made her way around the public areas of the facility and was approached within minutes by two jail employees who seemed determined to snatch the camera out of her hand before even asking her what she was doing.

      It wasn’t just her camera they were after. Coombs was immediately placed in handcuffs and her car keys were taken. Police then used her keys to find her parked car.

      Officials did not stop at just running her tags to get her information though. They used the keys to open her car and rummage around inside in an apparent search for something, anything, to charge her with.

    • Christian boy, 16, facing DEATH PENALTY for offending Muslims in Facebook post

      The boy has been arrested and charged with blasphemy after a photo of the Kaaba in Mecca, one of the holiest sites in Islam, appeared on his profile.

      A Muslim man told police the image, which was part of an alleged derogatory post against Islam on the boy’s profile, was insulting and sacrilegious.

      The black cube-shape is built around an ancient stone at the centre of Islam’s most sacred mosque Al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

      Locals reportedly claimed the image showed the Kaaba with a pig’s head on top.

    • Is It Still An Anonymous Tip If It’s Me?

      In Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, two police officers found a way to get around one of those annoying loopholes that prevent them from locking up people who are guilty, guilty, GUILTY!!! The loophole is known to the rest of us as “The Fourth Amendment,” which states (among other things) “that no warrant shall issue except upon probable cause.”

      Detective Harold Zech and Lawrence Spathelf didn’t have probable cause to search the homes of Albert McCullough and Dakeem Booker, so they made their own. They phoned in “anonymous” tips to McCullough’s and Booker’s parole officers, who searched their and found some heroin.

    • New Guantánamo intelligence upends old ‘worst of the worst’ assumptions

      The “Dirty 30” probably weren’t all Osama bin Laden bodyguards after all. The “Karachi 6” weren’t a cell of bombers plotting attacks in Pakistan for al-Qaida. An Afghan man captured 14 years ago as a suspected chemical weapons maker was confused for somebody else.

      An ongoing review shows the U.S. intelligence community has been debunking long-held myths about some of the “worst of the worst” at Guantánamo, some of them still held today. The retreat emerges in a series of unclassified prisoner profiles released by the Pentagon in recent years, snapshots of much larger dossiers the public cannot see, prepared for the Periodic Review Board examining the Pentagon’s “forever prisoner” population.

    • DEA’s Army of 18,000 Informants Pocketed $237 Million Over Five Years

      It’s no secret that the Drug Enforcement Administration relies heavily on an army of confidential sources — men and women compelled, coerced, or enticed to share information with law enforcement, sometimes to alleviate their own legal troubles, sometimes for cash.

      Precisely how those relationships play out, however, is often shrouded in secrecy.

      A recently published audit by the Department of Justice has now offered a startling glimpse behind the scenes of those operations, revealing a world in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been doled out to thousands of informants over the last five years. Those informants include package delivery personnel, bus company employees, and Transportation Security Administration agents moonlighting as drug war spies — all operating with abysmal oversight and scant evidence of return on investment.

    • Military-Style Raid Ends Native Prayer Against Dakota Pipeline

      Up to 21 people were arrested during a peaceful prayer service.

      North Dakota police with military-style equipment surrounded Native Americans gathered in prayer against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline on Wednesday, disrupting their plan to cross sacred and treaty-protected land in protest of a project they fear will destroy their livelihood.

    • U.S. Court Of Appeals Upholds Ruling That New Hampshire’s Silly Ballot Selfie Ban Violated The First Amendment

      You may recall that roughly a year ago, a federal judge struck down a New Hampshire law that made “ballot selfies” illegal. The state had essentially updated its laws revolving around limiting the ability to sell votes or influence the public through depicting who a person voted for to include criminalizing anyone that took a picture of their completed ballot and shared it on social media. The state had said that allowing that sort of thing encouraged voter corruption, with the idea that ballot selfies would be used as a form of proof that a bought vote had been completed, or might otherwise be used to influence other members of the public as to how to vote. It was a strange theory, given how unlikely it would be for a corrupted voter to post evidence of his or her corruption on Facebook, not to mention that stating that a person essentially couldn’t engage in a form of political speech via a picture was flatly unconstitutional. The federal judge agreed.

    • Border Patrol Agent Caught Watching Porn On The Job Blames The Internet Filter For Not Stopping Him

      We talk about porn filters occasionally here at Techdirt. Usually those discussions revolve around how useless and easily circumvented those filters are, even as the more clueless in government insist that we need more of this non-filtering filtering. This is not one of those stories. Instead, it is the story of one of the most tone-deaf individuals with a penchant for excuse-making I’ve ever come across.

      We start with Gizmodo, a website that used to be owned by Gawker Media until a rich guy decided to show America exactly what a rich guy with a lot of money could do and had Gawker shut down, presumably then diving into a pile of gold coins and rubbing hundred dollar bills on his nipples. Gizmodo recently filed an FOIA request to get at documents involving the misuse of computer equipment with the Department of Homeland Security. The site was hoping to see if there were any cases of overreach and abuse of technology by the department. Instead, it uncovered four cases of people watching porn, including one really special case involving a border patrol agent that simply would not stop looking at porn while on the job.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Ridiculously Stupid: 4 State Attorneys General File Totally Bogus Lawsuit Against Internet Transition

      Okay, this is really dumb. What is it about state attorneys general making totally bullshit claims? It seems to happen with fairly consistent frequency. The latest is that four state AGs (from Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma and Nevada) have filed a lawsuit to stop the IANA transition. If you don’t recall, we’ve written about this a bunch. A bunch of people are up in arms over something they don’t seem to understand. The IANA transition is a good thing. It’s not the US government handing over the internet to Russia and China as you may have heard. It’s the Commerce Department severing an almost entirely symbolic link between it and a very specific internet governance capability concerning top level domains. And it’s important to complete the transition because other countries (including Russia and China) keep pointing to this symbolic link as a reason for why they should have more say in internet governance. Getting rid of the link keeps the internet functioning as it has for decades — and takes away a weapon from Russia and China. More importantly, going back on the transition now actually gives even more ammo to Russia and China, allowing them to point to unilateral actions by the US gov’t to block a process that everyone had agreed upon earlier.

      Anyway, to the actual lawsuit. It’s dumb. It’s really dumb. If you live in Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma or Nevada, you should be embarrassed for your Attorneys General. Elect better ones next time, please. First of all, they have no standing whatsoever to file this lawsuit. The IANA/top level domain system is not those states. They have no claim here other than “HEY LOOK! POLITICAL FOOTBALL THAT WE CAN GRANDSTAND OVER!” That does not give them standing. The best they can come up with for claiming standing is… uh… “hey, we have some websites.” No, really.

    • Judge Says No Way To Attorneys General Looking To Block IANA Transition

      Well, this isn’t much of a surprise, but following the ridiculous last minute attempt to block the IANA transition by four state attorneys general (who have absolutely no standing or argument), a judge has flatly denied their request for an injunction meaning that the transition is a go for midnight tonight, barring any really last minute unforeseen methods to block it (or a desperate leapfrog to an appeals court).

      Having spent part of the morning responding to clueless conspiracy theorists on my earlier post, I’m sure you’re going to hear the standard ridiculous lizard people warnings about how this is enabling “the UN” or “leftists” and “globalists” to “takeover” the internet and how it will allow China to build the “Great Firewall” into the core functioning of the internet. None of that is even remotely true. What happens tonight at midnight is… nothing, basically. ICANN, which has managed the IANA function through its multistakeholder process for almost two decades… will continue to do so. Nothing changes. The only “change” is that the US Commerce Dept. no longer has to issue a contract to ICANN for the IANA functions. And that’s it.

    • Net Neutrality: BEREC on the Right Path, Let’s Keep the Pressure on

      Net Neutrality is one of central challenge in the application of fundamental rights in the digital space. Too often it has been only considered as a technical or commercial issue, but it has serious impact on the real exercise of right to freedom of speech, right to information and on how the society build and think of itself; but also has important impacts on industrial and commercial issues. La Quadrature du Net has followed this issue since its start in the European debate circa 2009 by trying to defend a definition and wording in EU law of a strict Net Neutrality, protecting users and guaranteeing opportunities of development in a sane digital environment. As the BEREC guidelines for the Telecom Regulation adopted in October 2015 have been published, it is time to come back on the few years of campaign and to present the next fights and challenges for fundamental rights.

      La Quadrature du Net has defended, since 2009 and the first announces of EU works on Net Neutrality, an approach based on the defence of fundamental rights: to secure Net Neutrality, it is to defend the access of all to the Internet network, it is to allow to receive and send information with the same condition for all, it is to guarantee technical condition to a free and fair exercise of freedom of speech and information.

      It was not self-evident: as soon as the subject was within the speeches of Telecom operators and big digital companies, everything was made to consider Net Neutrality only from the perspective of financing Internet traffic and not as a major issue for the balance of the network that determines the quality of access and circulation of the information and services for the users as a whole.

    • A Massive Cable Industry Disinformation Effort Just Crushed The FCC’s Plan For Cable Box Competition

      Back in February the FCC proposed a new plan to bring competition to the cable box. Under the plan, cable providers would need to provide their programming to third party hardware vendors without the need for a CableCARD. The goal? Bring some competition to bear on a stagnant, captive market, resulting in cheaper, more open, and higher quality cable boxes. But because the plan would demolish $21 billion in rental fees while eroding sector control, the cable industry launched one of the most unprecedented lobbying and disinformation efforts I’ve ever seen in 16 years of covering the sector.

      Politicians loyal to the cable industry wrote letters lambasting the FCC for “jeopardizing the incredible evolution of video distribution services,” falsely comparing the idea to Popcorn Time. A flood of editorials magically began appearing in newspapers country wide claiming the FCC’s plan would boost piracy, hurt consumer privacy, and even “steal the future.” The cable sector even trotted out Jesse Jackson, who claimed in a horribly misleading op-ed that increased cable box competition was akin to the “snarling dogs, water hoses and church bombings” of America’s racist history. Seriously.

  • DRM

    • Racing Game Developers Sacrifice Playability On The Altar Of Anti-Piracy, Deliver Laggy Mess To Paying Customers

      So much for the advantages of PC gaming. Build a rig to your specifications and company reps tell you to use bog-standard settings to keep from being tripped up by anti-piracy and anti-hacking asset checks. If gamers wanted a one-size-fits-all gaming experience, they’d have settled for the console version. And there’s no guarantee that will work. The problem has been linked to on-the-fly decryption of game assets, which isn’t going to be solved in all cases by using default video settings.

      There’s a fix on the way but it’s tough to see how the developers are going to get around built-in asset checks that run through Windows EFS. There’s no easy “switch” to turn that off. While I understand developers are concerned about software piracy and cheaters/hackers ruining the online experience of honest players, there’s simply nothing to be gained by irritating those who’ve spent perfectly functional money on deliberately-broken software.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Time To Talk Digital Issues At WTO With Focus On Developing Countries, Forum Hears

      Now is the time for those who want to bring new voices to the digital trade and general trade debate involving the World Trade Organization, says an adviser to a leading security think tank in Switzerland.

      “If the objective is for trade policy to effectively bring in non-traditional voices this is a perfect time for that to take place,” Nick Ashton-Hart, a consultant and associate fellow for the Geneva Centre for Security Policy said at the WTO’s 27-29 September Public Forum yesterday.

    • Uber hires former Google licensing executive in what could be a familiar pre-IPO play

      In a major move in the licensing community, former Google patent executive Kurt Brasch has moved to Uber as senior manager, patents. He joins an IP team led by fellow former Google employee Michael Meehan who jumped ship in February of this year.

      Brasch left Google earlier in the summer as the search giant let go of most of the legacy licensing team that it had picked up through its 2012 acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

      At Google he played a role in the Patent Purchase Promotion and its recent industry-wide successor IP3; helped launch the Patent Starter Program designed to encourage start-ups to join the License on Transfer Network; and led the team behind the 2014 cross licence with Cisco. That series of successes last year led this blog to name him as one of the IP personalities of 2015.

    • Gurry Speaks On Allegations For First Time As WIPO Members Discuss Actions

      Heading into next week’s annual UN World Intellectual Property Organization General Assemblies, WIPO member states are considering a report from the United Nations investigations office regarding allegations of wrongdoing made involving WIPO Director General Francis Gurry. And for first time since the allegations arose, Gurry has offered his defence. Spoiler alert: he neither confirmed nor denied it but raised questions about the legality of sharing the report with member states.

    • Trademarks

      • Supremes to rule on feds’ trademark censorship

        The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the case alleging improper government censorship of a trademark for a band named The Slants, a precedent that also likely will impact significantly the current fight over the Washington NFL team’s name, the Redskins.

        According to the Rutherford Institute, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the band’s name, the censorship “openly discriminates against speech on the basis of content and viewpoint, violating the most fundamental constitutional guarantees to freedom of expression under the First Amendment.”

        The Asian-American dance rock band sued after the federal government, through its U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, censored them.

      • Can you trademark an offensive name or not? US Supreme Court to decide

        The Supreme Court on Thursday said it would decide, once and for all, whether federal intellectual property regulators can refuse to issue trademarks with disparaging or inappropriate names.

        At the center of the issue is a section of trademark law that actually forbids the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from approving a trademark if it “consists of or comprises immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.”

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/10/01/blender-2-78/feed/ 0 Links 29/9/2016: Russia Moving to FOSS, New Nmap and PostgreSQL Releases http://techrights.org/2016/09/29/nmap-and-postgresql-releases/ http://techrights.org/2016/09/29/nmap-and-postgresql-releases/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2016 01:53:40 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95716

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Microsoft is no longer Russia’s first choice of technology provider

    Moscow plans to open the replacement cycle by swapping Exchange and Outlook for email systems developed by New Cloud Technologies and distributed by by state-run carrier Rostelecom PJSC, Bloomberg reports. The software will be eventually deployed to as many as 600,000 computers.

    The city is also considering dropping Windows and Office, but state officials are still looking into alternatives, says Moscow’s head of information technology Artem Yermolaev.

    Putin has been pushing for technological independence after American corporations were forced to sever ties with major Russian institutions following the annexation of Crimea back in 2014.

    To actively encourage the adoption of local solutions, Putin’s internet czar German Klimenko has plans to raise taxes on Western tech companies operating within Russia.

  • Moscow Drops Microsoft on Putin’s Call for Self-Sufficiency

    Moscow city will replace Microsoft Corp. programs with domestic software on thousands of computers in answer to President Vladimir Putin’s call for Russia’s authorities to reduce dependence on foreign technology amid tensions with the U.S. and Europe.

    The city will initially replace Microsoft’s Exchange Server and Outlook on 6,000 computers with an e-mail system installed by state-run carrier Rostelecom PJSC, Artem Yermolaev, head of information technology for Moscow, told reporters Tuesday. Moscow may expand deployment of the new software, developed by Russia’s New Cloud Technologies, to as many as 600,000 computers and servers, and may also consider replacing Windows and Office, Yermolaev said.

  • Why Microsoft is getting the cold shoulder from Moscow

    Since the German city of Munich decided to ditch Microsoft Windows and Office, a growing number of European agencies have followed suit – from France’s national police force to the Italian military.

    The latest authority to turn its back on Microsoft is reportedly Moscow City Hall, which is transferring employee email from Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook to the Russian-built MyOffice Mail.

    About 6,000 Moscow state employees will be switched over, including teachers, doctors and civil servants. If the move is a success, the city will consider shifting 600,000 PCs and servers away from Microsoft, and may also replace Windows and Office, according to Bloomberg.

  • Moscow will replace Microsoft’s products with local offerings

    Microsoft might lose a whole city of customers in Russia. According to Bloomberg, Moscow will begin replacing Redmond’s products with homegrown software as a result of Vladimir Putin’s urging to stop depending on foreign tech. Artem Yermolaev, the city’s head of information technology, told reporters that Moscow will begin by dropping Microsoft’s Exchange Service and by replacing Outlook on 6,000 computers with state-run carrier Rostelecom PJSC’s email system. Authorities are looking to deploy the email software to as many as 600,000 computers in the future. They might even replace Windows and the Office suite entirely, though there seems to be no solid plan for that at the moment.

  • Desktop

    • Alphabet’s Plans to Create Android PCs Should Make Microsoft a Little Nervous

      Four years after Microsoft (MSFT) first tried to give the world unified PC/mobile operating systems via the dual fiascoes known as Windows 8 and Windows RT, Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google appears set to take its own stab at the concept. And there are reasons to think the company will see a measure of success.

      Citing “two independent and reliable sources,” Android Police reports Google plans to launch a notebook in the third quarter of 2017 that will likely be the first new device to showcase Andromeda, a version of Android that will integrate many features associated with Google’s Chrome OS PC operating system.

      The notebook will reportedly be called the Pixel 3, and carry a $788 price. Its feature set reportedly include a 12.3-inch display, an Intel (INTC) processor, a glass trackpad, a tablet mode and stylus support.

    • 4 of the Best Linux Distros for Windows Users

      For the past year Microsoft has offered free upgrades to their latest operating system, Windows 10. This was mainly due to the fact that Windows 8 and 8.1 were poorly received, especially when compared to Windows 7. Unfortunately the free upgrade period has passed, so if you want to give Windows 10 a try, you’ll have to dig into your wallet to do it. If your faith in the tech giant has waned over the years, you’re not alone. The latest versions of Windows have all been heavily criticized, proving that they have been a far cry from the world dominance of Windows XP.

      If you’re one of the many people turned off by the latest iterations of Windows, the jump to Linux might look very appealing. Unfortunately, a new OS often comes with a steep learning curve. Windows, with the exception of the fumble that was 8, has more or less looked and behaved the same for years. Having to re-learn everything can be a daunting task, one that could pressure you into staying with Windows forever.

      However, you do have options. There are many different distributions of Linux out there, with some aiming to replicate the look and feel of Windows. The goal of this is to make transitioning relatively painless. With Linux boasting improved hardware support, long term stability and a wider range of software applications, there is no better time to try it out!

    • Microsoft Applications and Services chief Qi Lu leaves the company [Ed: Microsoft exodus)

      Lu has been heading up the Applications and Services Group — the unit that has encompassed the Office applications team and the Bing search team.

      In an email to employees on September 29, CEO Satya Nadella announced Lu was leaving so as to recover from “health conditions caused by a prior injury.” (A couple of other reports, including the Wall Street Journal’s, say Lu’s injury was related to a biking accident.)

      Lu will continue to act as a “personal advisor” to Nadella and Microsoft Founder Bill Gates after his recovery, but he won’t be returning in his former role, Nadella said in his mail.

  • Server

    • Linux servers deliver greater performance and efficiency ‘than available on any x86-based server’
    • What are configuration management tools?

      For most people, computers don’t stay the same. Software is added, removed, and updated. Configurations are changed. Think about the changes you’ve made to your computer since the first time you booted it up. Now imagine making those changes to 10, 100, or 1,000 more computers. Configuration management tools are what make implemententing and enforcing these changes possible.

    • 5 new OpenStack tutorials and guides
    • Ericsson: The Journey to a DevOps Future in SDN

      There are big transformations going on in the world today that are driving rapid changes to the business of networks, said Santiago Rodriguez, VP of Engineering and head of the product development unit SDN & Policy Control at Ericsson, in his keynote Tuesday at OpenDaylight Summit.

      “Society is transforming, the way we do business is transforming, and accordingly the way we build our networks is transforming,” Rodriguez said.

      The three pillars of this network transformation include: 5G, virtualization and open source.

    • OpenDaylight sets product quality label, metrics for SDN solutions

      Initial OpenDaylight-based products expected to receive the “Powered by OpenDaylight” mark are offerings from Brocade, Ericsson, HPE, Inocybe and Serro.

    • Telstra Sees Quadrupled Data Capacity by 2020

      The latter service led Telstra to re-think its fiber deployment strategy, choosing to use pre-provisioned fiber connections to data centers in advance of customer demand, because the company knew that demand was coming, Blackall said. The strategy worked well with Telstra’s acquisition of Pacnet, which had already deployed SDN capabilities to connect its 27 points of presence around Asia.

    • The Tiny Internet Project, Part I

      As LJ readers well know, Linux drives many of the technologies we use every day, from smart TVs to Web servers. Linux is everywhere—except most homes and classrooms.

      That’s a problem if we want to help breed the next generation of engineers and computer scientists. In fact, if teenagers (or any other group of curious individuals) want to learn about Linux, they often must rely on a geeky friend or parent willing to show them the way.

      This three-part series seeks to change that by offering a way for anyone to learn about Linux by building what is essentially a tiny, self-contained Internet. Using old equipment and free software, you’ll build a private network (with your own domain name), build Web sites, set up an e-mail server, install and use a database, and set up a Linux distro mirror.

      Read more

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • Ubuntu 16.10 Doesn’t Change Much With Performance, Clear Linux Still Leads In Most Tests

        Given yesterday’s Ubuntu 16.10 final beta release ahead of the official “Yakkety Yak” debut in two weeks, I decided to run some benchmarks of Ubuntu 16.10 compared to Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS on the same system plus also throwing in the Intel Clear Linux distribution given it tends to be one of the most performant.

        For those that haven’t yet tried out Ubuntu 16.10 nor followed its development, GCC 6.2 is now the default compiler in place of GCC 5.4 from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Mesa 12.0.3 provides the stock graphics drivers and Linux 4.8 is the stock kernel.

      • DDR4 Memory Speed Tests With The Core i7 6800K On Ubuntu Linux

        A few days ago I posted my first Core i7 6800K benchmarks under Ubuntu Linux compared to various other CPUs. Out of requests from some premium members, here are some straight-forward memory clocking tests of the i7-6800K on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the Linux 4.8 kernel. Tests were done from dual-channel DDR4 up through quad-channel DDR4 at DDR4-3000MHz.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Calendar Pencils In Great New Features

        GNOME Calendar is one of the few decent desktop calendaring apps available on Linux — and it’s going to get better.

      • The future of GNOME Calendar

        Today, the Calendar Team had the first meeting in history. Isaque, Lapo, Renata, Vamsi and I attended it, and the meeting was extremely productive! In fact, we were able to sketch out the general direction that GNOME Calendar will head towards.

  • Distributions

    • Endless OS 3: Linux for the Net Less

      In the West, we take the Internet for granted. Oh, we may grumble about a slow connection, but that’s a first-world problem. For many, however, the Internet is a “maybe” thing. For those users, Endless’s Endless OS 3, may be just what they need.

    • New Releases

      • Qubes OS 3.2 has been released!

        I’m happy to announce that today we’re releasing Qubes OS 3.2!

        This is an incremental improvement over the 3.1 version that we released earlier this year. A lot of work went into making this release more polished, more stable and easier to use than our previous releases.

        One major feature that we’ve improved upon in this release is our integrated management infrastructure, which was introduced in Qubes 3.1. Whereas before it was only possible to manage whole VMs, it is now possible to manage the insides of VMs as well.

      • Security-Oriented Qubes OS 3.2 Improves the Integrated Management Infrastructure

        Today, September 29, 2016, Joanna Rutkowska announced the general availability of the second point release of the Qubes OS 3 stable series of the security-oriented and open-source Linux-based computer operating system.

        Qubes OS 3.2 is a maintenance release, which means that it mostly adds general fixes and improvements to various of the distribution’s core components and functionalities, including the integrated management infrastructure that was introduced as part of the previous update, Qubes 3.1, allowing users to also manage the “insides” of a virtual machine.

      • Alpine Linux 3.4.4 Is Out, Ships with Linux Kernel 4.4.22 LTS, OpenSSL Patches

        Today, September 28, 2016, Alpine Linux creator and lead developer Natanael Cop has the pleasure of announcing the release of the fourth maintenance update to the latest stable Alpine Linux 3.4 server-oriented operating system series.

        Alpine Linux 3.4.4 is out as the most advanced version, powered by the recently released, long-term supported Linux 4.4.22 kernel and bringing up-to-date components to make your Alpine Linux-based server(s) more stable and reliable than ever. Most of the core components have been updated, but the most important one is OpenSSL 1.0.2j, which received the latest security fixes, just like in the rest of the GNU/Linux distros.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Software Company Red Hat banks on India to hit $ 5 billion turnover in 5 years

        Red Hat, the open-source software company, said its India business was growing at more than double the rate of the overall company and would be an important contributor to its target of reaching $5 billion in the next five years.

        Red Hat has over $2 billion in annual revenue currently and grew over 21% in constant currency last year. Open-source software is freely available, so Red Hat’s business model depends on customers paying for the support and service it offers and not on license fees, making the company’s offerings typically cheaper than proprietary software. “India is one of our fastest growing markets. Red Hat does really when there is net new infrastructure to be set up. And the rapid pace of development that India is seeing sets really well with our offerings,” James Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, told ET.

      • Red Hat claims headway in Asia, bets big on container and hybrid cloud

        While the smallest in terms of revenue contribution, Asia is Red Hat’s fastest growing region and is likely to continue its upwards trajectory as emerging markets roll out new infrastructure.

        Developing nations in the region were embarking on many net new infrastructure projects, rather than replacement for existing technology, and open source would be involved in a large share of such projects. The decisions on which technology to deploy would rarely be between proprietary or open source, but rather on which open source vendor to go with or to do so internally, said Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Node.js 6.x LTS coming to EPEL 7

          Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. Its package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world. You can read more about Node.js at the project website.

        • Switched to HTTPS

          Perhaps you already noticed it, I have switched all the sites for a secured browsing using HTTPS.

          So, new addresses are:

          https://blog.remirepo.net/ for this Blog (with an automatic and permanent redirection)
          https://forum.remirepo.net/ for the Forum (with an automatic and permanent redirection)
          https://rpms.remirepo.net/ for the Repository, but classical address stay available.

        • Fedora Hubs: Getting started

          Fedora Hubs provides a consistent contributor experience across all Fedora teams and will serve as an “intranet” page for the Fedora Project. There are many different projects in Fedora with different processes and workflows. Hubs will serve as a single place for contributors to learn about and contribute to them in a standardized format. Hubs will also be a social network for Fedora contributors. It is designed as one place to go to keep up with everything and everybody across the project in ways that aren’t currently possible.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu’s Shuttleworth Explains Why Not All Containers are the Same

            Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, was an early backer of OpenStack as well as containers. This week, Shuttleworth’s company Canonical announced new commercial support for Kubernetes, which is a widely deployed container orchestration and management engine.

            In an interview with Datamation Shuttleworth emphasized that it’s important to understand the different use cases for containers and what the different types of container systems are all about.

          • Ubuntu Linux 16.10 ‘Yakkety Yak’ Beta 2 open source OS now available for download
          • Canonical Jumps On The Container Management Bandwagon With A Commercial Kubernetes Offering
          • ​Ubuntu’s new take on Kubernetes
          • When two tribes go to war: Docker Swarm on the left, easier-to-install Kubernetes on the right
          • Canonical Launches Commercial Support for Kubernetes
          • Canonical Releases Snapcraft 2.18 Tool for Creating Snaps in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

            Canonical, through Sergio Schvezov, announced the release of yet another maintenance update to the Snapcraft open-source utility that helps application developers package their apps as Snaps.

          • Ubuntu Budgie Remix 16.10 Beta 2 Officially Released with Budgie Desktop 10.2.7

            Softpedia was informed today, September 29, 2016, by David Mohammed from the budgie-remix project about the availability of the second and last Beta release of the upcoming Ubuntu Budgie Remix 16.10 operating system.

            Coming hot on the heels of yesterday’s Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Final Beta release, Ubuntu Budgie Remix 16.10 Beta 2 is based on most of the GNU/Linux and Open Source technologies used in Ubuntu 16.10, such as systemd 231 and Linux kernel 4.8, but it’s built around the latest version of the beautiful Budgie desktop environment created by the Solus Project.

          • Budgie-Remix Makes Progress With Ubuntu 16.10 Base, Beta 2 Released

            Budgie-Remix, the unofficial Ubuntu spin making use of the Budgie Desktop, has released its 16.10 Beta 2 milestone following this week’s Yakkety Yak Beta 2 release.

            Budgie-Remix is re-based to the latest Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety package changes. In addition, a number of the Budgie-0Remix packages have been working their way into Debian proper and thus are available to Ubuntu 16.10 users via the official channels. Now available this way is the budgie-desktop package, Moka icon theme, Faba icon theme, and the Arc theme. The Ubuntu repository has also pulled in the Budgie artwork and wallpaper packages too.

          • Yakkety Yak Final Beta Released
          • Canonical Launches Commercial Support for Kubernetes

            Canonical, the lead commercial vendor behind the open-source Ubuntu Linux operating system, is getting into the Kubernetes market. Canonical now offers a freely available implementation of Kubernetes as well as commercial-support options.

            “I have no doubt that Kubernetes will be one of the major container co-ordination systems,” Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, told ServerWatch.

          • [How To] Build an Ubuntu Controlled Sous-Vide Cooker

            I’ll be honest with you from the off: I had zero idea what sous-vide cooking was before I started writing this post. Wikipedia dutifully informs me that’s Sous-Vide is a style of cooking that involves a vacuum, bags, and steam.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu Studio 16.10 to Offer an Up-to-Date Multimedia Oriented Linux Distro

              We reported earlier today, September 28, 2016, on the availability of the Final Beta (Beta 2) development milestone of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system and its official derivatives.

              We’ve already talked here about what’s new in the Beta 2 of Ubuntu MATE 16.10, Lubuntu 16.10, and Kubuntu 16.10, and now we would like to tell you a little bit about Ubuntu Studio 16.10, which promises to offer users an up-to-date multimedia oriented Linux-based operating system.

              That’s right, it looks like today’s Ubuntu Studio 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Beta 2 snapshot comes with all the latest software releases and a bunch of new apps that you might need for audio, video, or graphics processing jobs. But first, we need to tell you that Ubuntu Studio 16.10 is powered by a low-latency Linux 4.8 kernel.

            • Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 Beta 2 Released with Many Apps from the GNOME 3.22 Stack

              As part of yesterday’s Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Final Beta launch, some of the opt-in flavors received their Beta 2 release, including Ubuntu GNOME 16.10, about which we would like to tell you all about in this article.

            • Linux Mint’s XApps to Get Screen Blanking, Sublime-like Search Bar Lands for Xed

              We already know that work on Linux Mint 18.1, the next major release of the popular Ubuntu-based operating system loved by many users, already begun, and Clement Lefebvre shares with us today some of the improvements coming to XApps.

            • Mintbox Mini Pro

              MintBox Mini Pro

              The new model is called “Mintbox Mini Pro”, it’s just as small as the original Mintbox Mini but with much better specifications.

            • Mintbox Mini Pro Linux Mini PC Launches For $395

              This week a new version of the popular Mintbox Mini Linux PC has been launched for $395 in the form of the Mintbox Mini Pro which is now equipped with 120 GB of SSD mSATA together with 64-bit AMD A10-Micro6700T system-on-a-chip with Radeon R6 graphics and features 8GB of DDR3L.

              The latest Mintbox Mini Pro is shipped preloaded with the awesome Linux Mint 18 operating system and includes a microSD card slot a serial port, and a micro SIM card reader.
              The new Mintbox Mini Pro is the same size as the original and measures 4.3 x 3.3 x 0.9 inches in size and weighs in at around 255g. The Linux mini PC incorporates a fanless design and features an all-metal case made of aluminium and zinc.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Expandable, outdoor IoT gateway runs Android on i.MX6

      VIA’s “Artigo A830” IoT gateway runs Android on an i.MX6 DualLite SoC and offers HDMI, GbE, microSD, numerous serial and USB ports, plus -20 to 60° operation.

      As the name suggests, the VIA Technologies Artigo A830 Streetwise IoT Platform is designed for outdoor Internet of Things gateway applications. These are said to include smart lockers, vending machines, information kiosks, and signage devices that run “intensive multimedia shopping, entertainment, and navigation applications.” The outdoors focus is supported with an extended -20 to 60°C operating range, as well as surge and ESD protection for surviving challenges such as a nearby lightning strike.

    • Raspberry Pi Announces PIXEL Desktop Environment

      Today the Raspberry Pi Foundation formally announced the Raspberry Pi PIXEL, their own desktop that will be used in future Raspbian spins.

      PIXEL is short for Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight desktop. PIXEL is derived from the LXDE desktop environment but with both appearance and fundamental changes, including some new applications.

    • Raspberry Pi Foundation Unveils New LXDE-Based Desktop for Raspbian Called PIXEL

      Today, September 28, 2016, Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Simon Long proudly unveiled a new desktop environment for the Debian-based Raspbian GNU/Linux operating system for Raspberry Pi devices.

      Until today, Raspbian shiped with the well-known and lightweight LXDE desktop environment, which looks pretty much the same as on any other Linux-based distribution out there that is built around LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment). But Simon Long, a UX engineer working for Raspberry Pi Foundation was hired to make it better, transform it into something that’s more appealing to users.

    • MintBox Mini updated with faster AMD SoC and 8GB RAM

      CompuLab’s Linux Mint flavored MintBox Mini Pro mini-PC updates the Mini with an AMD A10 Micro-6700T, plus BT 4.0, mini-PCIe, and twice the RAM and storage.

      The CompuLab built, $395 MintBox Mini Pro, which ships with the Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon distribution, updates the $295 MintBox Mini with a lot more performance and features in the same compact 108 x 83 x 24mm footprint. That’s considerably smaller than earlier collaborations between CompuLab and the Linux Mint project, such as the circa-2013 MintBox 2.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • ​Google beats back Oracle again in Java Android case

          To recap, Oracle claimed the 37 Java application programming interface (API) packages Google used to develop Android are covered by copyright. Of course, that’s not really the issue. True, the the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals foolishly ruled that APIs could be copyrighted. But the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in May 2016 that Google’s use of the Java APIs were not subject to copyright licensing fees. Instead, Android’s use of the APIs was covered by “fair use.”

        • Google’s Open Source Fuchsia OS: The Mystery Linux Distro

          Few things are more tantalizing than a good mystery, and Google is making waves for an open source-centric mystery that may end up having profound implications. It all started in August when an extensive and unusual code repository for a new operating system called Fuchsia was discovered online, and now the growing source code set is on GitHub.

          Thus far, Google officials have been mostly mum on the aim of this operating system, although they have made a few things clear in chat forums. Two developers listed on Fuchsia’s GitHub page — Christopher Anderson and Brian Swetland — are known for their work with embedded systems. The Verge, among other sites, has made a few logical deductions about the possible embedded systems focus for Fuchsia: “Looking into Fuchsia’s code points gives us a few clues. For example, the OS is built on Magenta, a “medium-sized microkernel” that is itself based on a project called LittleKernel, which is designed to be used in embedded systems,” the site reports.

          The GitHub postings that confirm that Fuchsia is based on Magenta are particularly notable because Magenta has had applications in the embedded systems space. Here are some direct quotes: “Magenta is a new kernel that powers the Fuchsia OS. Magenta is composed of a microkernel as well as a small set of userspace services, drivers, and libraries necessary for the system to boot, talk to hardware, load userspace processes and run them, etc. Fuchsia builds a much larger OS on top of this foundation.”

        • As Blackberry pulls out of handset business it has some big patent strategy calls to make
        • Luna Launcher turns your Android phone into a kid-friendly device

          On the fence about whether your child is old enough for their own smartphone? A new app called Luna Launcher can help you warm to the idea, by offering a simple way to limit access to select apps and actions, including who they can call or text – a list you can restrict to family members, for example. Of course, because of the way it needs to interact with your phone’s operating system in order to restrict access, Luna Launcher is only available on Android.

        • Google delays launch of Android Wear 2.0 to next year

          Google’s next-generation smartwatch platform, Android Wear 2.0, will not be seeing the light of day this year. The company announced today that it is delaying the launch of the update, which was originally scheduled for this fall, to sometime in early 2017.

          Instead of launching the final version this fall, Google is extending the developer preview program for Android Wear 2.0, and today it’s releasing the third preview of the platform for developers. The company says that it is using the extra time to fine tune the software via feedback from developers, and it will have another preview build released before the end of the year. Today’s version adds a number of new features, most notable of which is the Play Store for smartwatches.

        • Moto Z series and G4 Plus getting Android 7.0 Nougat update in Q4
        • Android Wear watches aren’t connecting to the iPhone 7
        • Many Android Wear watches aren’t working with the iPhone 7
        • Google Maps gains new voice commands on Android
        • OnePlus 3 Android 7.0 Nougat update is in the works
        • Huawei will introduce its next flagship on November 3
        • This is Google Cloud and G Suite
        • Exchange email down for Android and iOS users

          Microsoft Exchange mobile users on Android and iOS users have been unable to access emails on their phones due to a planned shift away from its Exchange Active Sync (EAS) protocol.

          The issue first appeared yesterday and is still affecting users.

          One customer got in touch to say: “Exchange Mobile device access seems to be up the Swanny for iOS and Android users.” They quipped: “Fortunately neither of the Windows Mobile users are affected.”

        • Latest Fitbit Blaze firmware update finally makes the tracker worth buying

          The Fitbit Blaze is a deceptive little fitness tracker. It may look like a smartwatch on the surface, but dive a little deeper and you’ll find it’s actually missing most of the smartwatch-y features we’ve come to expect from fitness tracker/smartwatch hybrids. When we reviewed the Blaze a few months ago, the lack of third-party notification support and poor selection of watch faces were some of our biggest gripes with this tracker. Thankfully Fitbit has finally heard our cries and released a new update that fixes these issues.

        • Android Wear watches aren’t connecting to the iPhone 7

          One of Android Wear’s biggest strengths is it that the platform is designed to be cross compatible with Android and iOS. However, a number of consumers are reporting that they can’t connected a range of Android Wear smartwatches up to the new iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus.

        • Multiple Android Wear smartwatches are not pairing with the iPhone 7
        • Google Allo rockets past 5 million downloads
        • BlackBerry to stop developing its own hardware, will rely on manufacturing partners instead
        • How to copy music to your Android phone
        • Spaces v1.7 adds capability to save posted images [APK Download]
        • Firefox Aurora arrives on the Play Store in “unreleased” state
        • Mercedes and Kia add new Android Auto models

          Buying a new car comes with myriad of considerations. Is it fuel efficient? Is it safe? Will it play nicely with my phone? People sometimes neglect the last one, but you’re going to be carrying the phone literally every time you get in the car, so why not make sure? Mercedes and Kia seem to get that. They’ve added support for Android Auto to a ton of new cars today.

        • Sony Xperia X Compact review: Small Android is still good, but not much better

          Sony’s Xperia X Compact is basically the newest version of the Z5 Compact that hit the US earlier this year. But just because it’s a newer version of the (comparatively) tiny handset doesn’t mean it’s an upgrade in every way. Sony is pushing the camera sensors in the X Compact and the flagship-level XZ, as well as new features like five-axis image stabilization and HDR photo mode. Sony knows cameras, so we know the shooter in the X Compact will at least be competent. However, it has to be good enough to encourage photography buffs to shell out $499 for this unlocked handset while delivering solid performance across the board as well.

        • How I Use Android: Android Central Editor Emeritus Phil Nickinson

          In the meantime, I was able to convince Phil to step out of his metaphorical kitchen for a few minutes to chat about how he uses Android in his day-to-day life. This is a man who has seen and used practically every Android device over the past several years, after all — and a fair number of apps and customization tools, to boot.

          So what devices does someone with so much knowledge carry around in his own trousers, and how does he make the most of what they have to offer?

          Enough with the suspense already. In his own words, this is how Phil Nickinson uses Android.

        • Best Android Phones Under 5.7 Inches

          There’s no question that Samsung hit a home run with its Galaxy S7 line. We already think the smaller GS7 is the best phone under 5.2 inches, and the larger, curved-screen Galaxy S7 edge is our pick for the best phone under 5.7 inches. Why? It takes everything we love about the smaller phone and makes it bigger — but not too much.

Free Software/Open Source

  • But is it safe? Uncork a bottle of vintage open-source FUD

    Most of the open source questioners come from larger organisations. Banks very rarely pop up here, and governments have long been hip to using open source. Both have ancient, proprietary systems in place here and there that are finally crumbling to dust and need replacing fast. Their concerns are more oft around risk management and picking the right projects.

    It’s usually organisations whose business is dealing with actual three dimensional objects that ask about open source. Manufacturing, industrials, oil and gas, mining, and others who have typically looked at IT as, at best, a helper for their business rather than a core product enabler.

    These industries are witnessing the lighting fast injection of software into their products – that whole “Internet of Things” jag we keep hearing about. Companies here are being forced to look at both using open source in their products and shipping open source as part of their business.

    The technical and pricing requirements for IoT scale software is a perfect fit for open source, especially that pricing bit. On the other end – peddling open source themselves – companies that are looking to build and sell software-driven “platforms” are finding that partners and developers are not so keen to join closed source ecosystems.

    These two pulls create some weird clunking in the heads of management at these companies who aren’t used to working with a sandles and rainbow frame of mind. They have a scepticism born of their inexperience with open source. Let’s address some of their trepidation.

  • Real business innovation begins with open practices

    To business leaders, “open source” often sounds too altruistic—and altruism is in short supply on the average balance sheet. But using and contributing to open source makes hard-nosed business sense, particularly as a way of increasing innovation.

    Today’s firms all face increased competition and dynamic markets. Yesterday’s big bang can easily become today’s cautionary tale. Strategically, the only viable response to this disruption is constantly striving to serve customers better through sustained and continuous innovation. But delivering innovation is hard; the key is to embrace open and collaborative innovation across organizational walls—open innovation.

    Open source communities’ values and practices generate open innovation, and working in open source is a practical, pragmatic way of delivering innovation. To avoid the all-too-real risk of buzzword bingo we can consider two definitions of “innovation”:

    creating value (that serves customer needs) to sell for a profit; or
    reducing what a firm pays for services.

  • Minijail: Running Untrusted Programs Safely by Jorge Lucangeli Obes, Google
  • Minijail: Google’s Tool To Safely Run Untrusted Programs

    Google’s Minijail sandboxing tool could be used by developers and sysadmins to run untrusted programs safely for debugging and security checks, according to Google Software Engineer Jorge Lucangeli Obes, who spoke last month at the Linux Security Summit. Obes is the platform security lead for Brillo, Google’s Android-based operating system for Internet-connected devices.

    Minijail was designed for sandboxing on Chrome OS and Android, to handle “anything that the Linux kernels grew.” Obes shared that Google teams use it on the server side, for build farms, for fuzzing, and pretty much everywhere.

    Since “essentially one bug separates you and any random attacker,” Google wanted to create a reliable means to swiftly identify problems with privileges and exploits in app development and easily enable developers to “do the right thing.”

    The tool is designed to assist admins who struggle with deciding what permissions their software actually needs, and developers who are vexed with trying to second guess which environment the software is going to run in. In both cases, sandboxing and privilege dropping tends to be a hit or miss affair.

    Even when developers use the privilege dropping mechanisms provided by the Linux kernel, sometimes things go awry due to numerous pitfalls along that path. One common example Obes cited was trying to ride a switch user function that will drop-root and then forgetting to check the result of the situation relief, or setuid function, afterwards.

  • Intel and Cloudera Give Apache an Open Source Data/Security Tool

    For the past year, we’ve taken note of the many Big Data projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves Big Data projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support.

    Recently, the foundation announced that Apache Kudu has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). Kudu is an open source columnar storage engine built for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem designed to enable flexible, high-performance analytic pipelines. And, Apache Twill has graduated as well. Twill is an abstraction over Apache Hadoop YARN that reduces the complexity of developing distributed Hadoop applications, allowing developers to focus more on their application logic. In another Apache-related Big Data move, Cloudera and Intel have announced that they’ve contributed a new open-source project to the Apache Software Foundation targeted at using Big Data analytics and machine learning for cybersecurity.

  • Twitter Open Sources Stream Processing Engine Heron

    Twitter announced the open sourcing of Heron, a stream-processing engine that is a successor to Apache Storm. Heron is backwards compatible with Apache Storm, which eases its adoption amongst developers. Heron has replaced Apache Storm as the stream data processing engine inside Twitter due to its scalability, debug-ability, ability to work in a shared cluster infrastructure and better performance. A comprehensive list of features is listed in the documentation.

  • Events

    • PyCon 2016

      I come from a place where everyone worships competitive coding and thus cpp, so the experience of attending my first pycon was much awaited for me.

      This year’s PyCon India happened in Delhi and i along with a couple of my friends reached on 23rd September, the first day. We were a bit late but it was all right because, we didn’t miss anything.

    • What do you have to say? Share it at LibrePlanet 2017
    • LibrePlanet returns March 25-26, 2017, call for proposals for annual free software conference now open

      LibrePlanet is an annual conference for free software enthusiasts. The conference brings together software developers, policy experts, activists and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments and face challenges to software freedom. Newcomers are always welcome, and LibrePlanet 2017 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels.

      This year, the theme of LibrePlanet is “The Roots of Freedom.” This encompasses the historical “roots” of the free software movement — the Four Freedoms, the GNU General Public License and copyleft, and a focus on strong security and privacy protections — and the concept of roots as a strong foundation from which the movement grows.

      “LibrePlanet is an impactful, exciting free software conference. Attendance has grown each year, yet the community-minded atmosphere has grown even stronger,” said John Sullivan, executive director of the FSF.

    • The Linux Foundation Announces Session Lineup for MesosCon Asia

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the schedule for MesosCon Asia, taking place November 18-19 in Hangzhou, China.

    • Tencent: Transforming Networks with SDN

      “SDN can really transform the way we do networks,” said Tom Bie, VP of Technology & Operation of Data Center, Networking and Server, Tencent, during his Wednesday keynote address at the Open Daylight Summit. The China telecom giant should know about the issues of massive scale networks: they have more than 200 million users for QQ instant messaging, 300 million users of their payment service, and more than 800 million users of their VChat service. Bie noted that Tencent also operates one of the largest gaming networks in the world, along with video services, audio services, online literature services, news portals, and a range other digital content services.

    • The Second Wave of Platforms, an Interview with Cloud Foundry’s Sam Ramji

      In today’s world of platforms, services are increasingly connected. In the past, PaaS offerings were pretty much isolated. It’s that new connected infrastructure that is driving the growth of Cloud Foundry, the open source, service-oriented platform technology.

      Sam Ramji is CEO of Cloud Foundry, which is holding its European event in Frankfurt this week. At the conference, we spoke with Ramji to discuss, among other topics:

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • This Week In Servo 79

        In the last week, we landed 96 PRs in the Servo organization’s repositories.

        Promise support has arrived in Servo, thanks to hard work by jdm, dati91, and mmatyas! This does not fully implement microtasks, but unblocks the uses of Promises in many places (e.g., the WebBluetooth test suite).

        Emilio rewrote the bindings generation code for rust-bindgen, dramatically improving the flow of the code and output generated when producing Rust bindings for C and C++ code.

        The TPAC WebBluetooth standards meeting talked a bit about the great progress by the team at the University of Szeged in the context of Servo.

      • Servo Web Engine Now Supports Promises, Continues Churning Along

        It’s been nearly two months since last writing about Mozilla’s Servo web layout engine (in early August, back when WebRender2 landed) but development has kept up and they continue enabling more features for this next-generation alternative to Gecko.

        The latest is that Servo now supports JavaScript promises. If you are unfamiliar with the promise support, see this guide.

        The latest Servo code has improvements around its Rust binding generator for C and C++ code plus other changes.

      • Announcing Rust 1.12

        The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.12. Rust is a systems programming language with the slogan “fast, reliable, productive: pick three.”

        As always, you can install Rust 1.12 from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.12 on GitHub. 1361 patches were landed in this release.

      • Rust 1.12 Programming Language Released

        Rust 1.12 has been released as the newest version of this popular programming language with a focus on “fast, reliable, productive: pick three.”

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • Riak TS for time series analysis at scale

      Until recently, doing time series analysis at scale was expensive and almost exclusively the domain of large enterprises. What made time series a hard and expensive problem to tackle? Until the advent of the NoSQL database, scaling up to meet increasing velocity and volumes of data generally meant scaling hardware vertically by adding CPUs, memory, or additional hard drives. When combined with database licensing models that charged per processor core, the cost of scaling was simply out of reach for most.

      Fortunately, the open source community is democratising large scale data analysis rapidly, and I am lucky enough to work at a company making contributions in this space. In my talk at All Things Open this year, I’ll introduce Riak TS, a key-value database optimized to store and retrieve time series data for massive data sets, and demonstrate how to use it in conjunction with three other open source tools—Python, Pandas, and Jupyter—to build a completely open source time series analysis platform. And it doesn’t take all that long.

    • PostgreSQL 9.6 released

      PostgreSQL 9.6, the latest version of the world’s leading open source database, was released today by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. This release will allow users to both scale up and scale out high performance database workloads. New features include parallel query, synchronous replication improvements, phrase search, and improvements to performance and usability, as well as many more features.

    • PostgreSQL 9.6 Officially Released With Parallel Query Support

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Office Suite Celebrates 6 Years of Activity with LibreOffice 5.2.2

      Today, September 29, 2016, Italo Vignoli from The Document Foundation informs Softpedia via an email announcement about the general availability of the first point release of the LibreOffice 5.2 open-source and cross-platform office suite.

      On September 28, the LibreOffice project celebrated its 6th anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than to push a new update of the popular open source and cross-platform office suite used by millions of computer users worldwide. Therefore, we would like to inform our readers about the general availability of LibreOffice 5.2.2, which comes just three weeks after the release of LibreOffice 5.2.1.

      “Just one day after the project 6th anniversary, The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family,” says Italo Vignoli. “LibreOffice 5.2.2, targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release announced in August.”

    • LibreOffice at 6, New Souped up Mint Mini

      September 28 was the official birthday for LibreOffice and Italo Vignoli looked back at some of the milestones for the project. Elsewhere, the Ubuntu family got new betas and Clement Lefebvre announced a new Mintbox Mini. Jack M. Germain reviewed Panther OS and Ryan Lynch recommended four distributions for Windows users.

      Happy Birthday LibreOffice! It was officially six years ago September 28 that The Document Foundation and LibreOffice were announced. The project consisted of former OpenOffice.org developers and volunteered who feared the worst after its sale to Oracle. Since that time, LibreOffice has grown and matured into an award winning Open Source office suite. Group photos taken at the LibreOffice conference at Brno were also shared including one of the attendees who were there on day one, as Bjoern Michaelsen explained. Although they were the seed, the project has grown to hundreds of contributors from all over the world. Italio Vignoli said the project attracted new developers every month for 72 straight months. He also said tomorrow begins the LibreOffice 5.3 developmental cycle, which is planned for release in January 2017.

    • Merging Communities
    • Happy 6th Birthday, LibreOffice
    • LibreOffice 5.2.2 Now Available to Download

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE Needs To Be Respun Due To Security Issues

      The delayed FreeBSD 11.0 release just suffered another last-minute set-back. While “FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE images” were distributed to FTP mirrors and the official announcement expected today, these images need to be re-spun to contain some security fixes and thus pushing back the official release.

      Glen Barber noted today on the mailing list, “Although the FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE has not yet been officially announced, many have found images on the Project FTP mirrors. However, please be aware the final 11.0-RELEASE will be rebuilt and republished on the Project mirrors as a result of a few last-minute security fixes we feel are imperative to include in the final release.”

    • FreeBSD 11.0 Operating System Lands October 5 Due to Last-Minute Security Issues

      A few minutes ago, Glen Barber informed the FreeBSD community that they should not hurry and install the ISO images of the FreeBSD 11.0 operating system made available a few days ago on the official FTP mirrors.

      These images aren’t safe to use and contain various security vulnerabilities that need to be fixed before the FreeBSD Project will officially unveil the final release of the FreeBSD 11.0 operating system in the coming days. According to the release schedule, FreeBSD 11.0 should hit the streets later today, September 29, 2016.

      However, until then the FreeBSD development team is hard at work patching those nasty security issues and rebuilding the final ISO images, which will be made available on the respective FTP mirrors later today as FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE-p1. If you’re already running FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE, you will soon be provided with instructions to safely update your system

    • OpenBSD Founder Calling For LLVM To Face A Cataclysm Over Its Re-Licensing

      For over one year there’s been talk of LLVM pursuing a mass relicensing from its University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which is similar to the three-clause BSD license, to the Apache 2.0 license with explicit mention of GPLv2 compatibility. As mentioned in that aforelinked article, this re-licensing is moving ahead.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Free Software Directory meeting recap for September 23rd, 2016
    • Don’t be a stranger to GIMP, be GIMP…

      I can try and do more coding, more code reviewing, revive designing discussions… that’s cool, yet never enough. GIMP needs more people, developers, designers, community people, writers for the website or the documentation, tutorial makers… everyone is welcome in my grand scheme!

      Many of my actions lately have been towards gathering more people, so when I heard about the GNOME newcomers initiative during GUADEC, I thought that could be a good fit. Thus a few days ago, I had GIMP added in the list of newcomer-friendly GNOME projects, with me as the newcomers mentor. I’ll catch this occasion to remind you all the ways you can contribute to GIMP, and not necessarily as a developer.

  • Public Services/Government

    • EC approves Slovenia courts data exchange solution

      First CEF AS4-compliant b2b solution developed as open source by a public administration

      The European Commission has tested and approved Laurentius, an eDelivery court documents and case exchange solution compliant with the AS4 profile of the OASIS ebMS standard. In September, Laurentius passed all tests by the EC’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) for its so-called “e-SENS AS4 conformant solutions”.

  • Programming/Development

    • SDL 2.0.5 Is Readying For Release: Relative Mouse Mode For Wayland/Mir, Audio Capture

      SDL 2.0 point releases have ranged from being a few months apart to as much as two years apart. Fortunately, SDL 2.0.5 is now being put together for release just nine months after SDL 2.0.4.

      With the Mercurial repository, Sam Lantinga bumped the version in preparation for the SDL 2.0.5 release. The SDL 2.0.5 release hasn’t officially happened yet, but it should be here soon.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open standards default at Slovenia supreme court

      The use of open ICT standards is an IT requirement at Slovenia’s Supreme Court, responsible for the IT support of the entire court system in the country. The Supreme Court’s IT department has a strong preference for the development of modular, reusable software solutions. This strategy provides agility and flexibility, says Bojan Muršec, director of IT.

      The focus on open standards frees up the IT department to concentrate on the business, Muršec says. The IT department takes the modular approach serious: the first reusable module ever developed by the court – a court documents dispatch and delivery system – is re-used by all IT systems across the courts. “Making everything reusable prevents creation of silos in the organisation”, the IT director says.

      A positive side effect of the IT strategy is that the court uses mostly open source software solutions. This in turn helps to keep IT costs down, says the IT director, who estimates that the court saves EUR 400 to 500 thousand per year on licence fees: “The cost of proprietary licences always goes up.”

    • Why there is no CSS4 – explaining CSS Levels

      We had CSS1, and CSS2. We even had CSS2.1 and we then moved onto CSS3 – or did we? This post is a quick explanation of how CSS is versioned today.

      CSS versions 1 and 2 were monolithic specifications. All of CSS was included in one massive document. Selectors, positioning, colour – it was all in there.

      The problem with monolithic specifications is that in order to finish the spec, every component part also has to be finished. As CSS has grown in complexity, and new features are added, it doesn’t make sense to draw a line at which all work is stopped on all parts of CSS in order to declare that CSS version finished. Therefore, after CSS2.1 all the things that had been part of the 2.1 specification were broken down into modules. As the new CSS modules included all that had gone before plus any new features, they all came into being at Level 3. Hence CSS3, and people like me who understood CSS as a single specification referred to the group of Level 3 modules as “CSS3”.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • 6 Ways Driverless Cars Are Going To Kill Lots Of People

      You’ve probably read a few articles about driverless cars over the past couple of years. The technology is coming along quickly, with fleets of test cars already on the roads in some states. It seems like soon we’ll achieve the American dream of stuffing our faces and texting all we want while still managing to avoid public transportation.

      But the reality is quite different. We’re diving into this technology a little too quickly and ignoring all the warning signs about how we are going to screw up on the way to Driverless Car Utopia.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Reporter who quit on air to fight for cannabis legalization could face prison

      Charlo Greene did not plan to curse on live television, but on 22 September 2014, the words came pouring out.

      Then a reporter for KTVA, a station in Alaska, Greene ended her segment on marijuana by revealing that she was a proponent of legalization – and was the owner of the Alaska Cannabis Club, the subject of her news report.

      “Fuck it, I quit,” she said, before abruptly walking off camera. The 26-year-old’s stunt shocked her colleagues and made her a viral sensation overnight.

    • Marijuana Arrests Are At a 20-Year Low

      Marijuana-related arrests are the lowest they’ve been in 20 years, but someone’s still getting busted for weed a little more than once every minute.

      According to new statistics released by the FBI on Monday, there were 574,641 arrests in 2015 for marijuana possession, which is the lowest it’s been since 1996. Between 2011 and 2014, possession arrests hovered above 600,000. And since possession arrests peaked at 800,000 in 2007, that’s a 25 percent decrease.

      As pot gets increasingly normalized, with 10 states considering medical or adult use marijuana legalization in this year’s election, law enforcement may be less likely to see it as a threat. The divide between federal and state laws is also becoming an increasingly absurd policy to enforce. Even Hillary Clinton mentioned in Monday’s debate that the prevalent prison sentences for nonviolent crimes, like marijuana possession, are unnecessary.

      The drop in weed possession arrests likely results from from adult use policies in places like Colorado, where all marijuana-related arrests have plummeted in recent years, Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, told Motherboard. “The recent decline in arrests in New York City, as well as in other major metropolitan areas that have imposed decriminalization ordinances in recent years, is also likely playing a role in this nationwide decline.”

    • House passes waterways bill with Flint aid

      The House easily passed a major waterways bill on Wednesday that included a bipartisan compromise to address the drinking-water crisis in Flint, Mich.

      A late-night deal on Flint aid helped resolve Democratic opposition to a stop-gap spending bill that lacked emergency funding for the city, paving the way for Senate passage of a continuing resolution earlier in the day and ending the threat of a government shutdown.

      In a 399-25 vote, House lawmakers approved the Water Resources and Development Act (WRDA), which authorizes dozens of water-related infrastructure projects around the country.

      Lawmakers adopted numerous amendments during floor debate, including one from Reps. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) and John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) that would authorize up to $170 million for Flint.

      “We decided we don’t want to create brinksmanship. That doesn’t do anybody any good,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

    • Farming mega-mergers threaten food security, say campaigners

      When an Indian farmer plants his cotton crop, there’s at least a 75% chance the seeds have been been bought from a company owned by Monsanto. If a Latin American farmer sprays insecticide on her genetically engineered soya beans, the chemical is more than likely to have been provided by German chemical and drugs company Bayer or by US firm Dupont.

      And when African farmers add chemicals to their maize fields or plant it’s odds-on that they have come from Swiss company Syngenta.

      Until recently, six or seven global agri-food businesses competed with each other for a share of the world market for seeds and chemicals. But if EU and US regulators allow a series of mega-mergers to take place, within months just three companies will be left in control of nearly 60% of the world’s seeds, nearly 70% of the chemicals and pesticides needed to grow food and nearly all of the world’s GM crop genetic traits.

    • Should Kratom Be Banned? Here’s What the Experts Say

      While lots of people reading this are patiently waiting for marijuana legalization to finally reach their state — most likely passing the time by smoking marijuana — lots of others are about to see Prohibition show up at their door for the first time. They are the “kratom” users. That’s a plant-based painkiller which some people describe as “herbal heroin.” It was, up until now, completely legal. I first used it back in 2009 — not because I was in pain, but because I wanted to get high without failing a drug test (like many painkillers, you can also take it for fun). Then, a couple of years ago, I introduced kratom to someone who does live with chronic pain — Cracked contributor Marina Reimann.

  • Security

    • security things in Linux v4.5
    • Time to Kill Security Questions—or Answer Them With Lies

      The notion of using robust, random passwords has become all but mainstream—by now anyone with an inkling of security sense knows that “password1” and “1234567” aren’t doing them any favors. But even as password security improves, there’s something even more problematic that underlies them: security questions.

      Last week Yahoo revealed that it had been massively hacked, with at least 500 million of its users’ data compromised by state sponsored intruders. And included in the company’s list of breached data weren’t just the usual hashed passwords and email addresses, but the security questions and answers that victims had chosen as a backup means of resetting their passwords—supposedly secret information like your favorite place to vacation or the street you grew up on. Yahoo’s data debacle highlights how those innocuous-seeming questions remain a weak link in our online authentication systems. Ask the security community about security questions, and they’ll tell you that they should be abolished—and that until they are, you should never answer them honestly.

      From their dangerous guessability to the difficulty of changing them after a major breach like Yahoo’s, security questions have proven to be deeply inadequate as contingency mechanisms for passwords. They’re meant to be a reliable last-ditch recovery feature: Even if you forget a complicated password, the thinking goes, you won’t forget your mother’s maiden name or the city you were born in. But by relying on factual data that was never meant to be kept secret in the first place—web and social media searches can often reveal where someone grew up or what the make of their first car was—the approach puts accounts at risk. And since your first pet’s name never changes, your answers to security questions can be instantly compromised across many digital services if they are revealed through digital snooping or a data breach.

    • LibreSSL and the latest OpenSSL security advisory

      Just a quick note that LibreSSL is not impacted by either of the issues mentioned in the latest OpenSSL security advisory – both of the issues exist in code that was added to OpenSSL in the last release, which is not present in LibreSSL.

    • Record-breaking DDoS reportedly delivered by >145k hacked cameras

      Last week, security news site KrebsOnSecurity went dark for more than 24 hours following what was believed to be a record 620 gigabit-per-second denial of service attack brought on by an ensemble of routers, security cameras, or other so-called Internet of Things devices. Now, there’s word of a similar attack on a French Web host that peaked at a staggering 1.1 terabits per second, more than 60 percent bigger.

      The attacks were first reported on September 19 by Octave Klaba, the founder and CTO of OVH. The first one reached 1.1 Tbps while a follow-on was 901 Gbps. Then, last Friday, he reported more attacks that were in the same almost incomprehensible range. He said the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were delivered through a collection of hacked Internet-connected cameras and digital video recorders. With each one having the ability to bombard targets with 1 Mbps to 30 Mbps, he estimated the botnet had a capacity of 1.5 Tbps.

      On Monday, Klaba reported that more than 6,800 new cameras had joined the botnet and said further that over the previous 48 hours the hosting service was subjected to dozens of attacks, some ranging from 100 Gbps to 800 Gbps. On Wednesday, he said more than 15,000 new devices had participated in attacks over the past 48 hours.

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • How 1.5 Million Connected Cameras Were Hijacked to Make an Unprecedented Botnet

      Last week, hackers forced a well-known security journalist to take down his site after hitting him for more than two days with an unprecedented flood of traffic.

      That cyberattack was powered by something the internet had never seen before: an army made of more than one million hacked Internet of Things devices.

      The hackers, whose identity is still unknown at this point, used not one, but two networks—commonly referred to as “botnets” in hacking lingo—made of around 980,000 and 500,000 hacked devices, mostly internet-connected cameras, according to Level 3 Communications, one of the world’s largest internet backbone providers. The attackers used all those cameras and other unsecured online devices to connect to the journalists’ website, pummeling the site with requests in an attempt to make it collapse.

    • NHS Hospitals Are Running Thousands of Computers on Unsupported Windows XP

      Hospitals across England are running thousands of out-of-date Windows XP machines, potentially putting patient data and other sensitive information at risk.

      Motherboard has found that at least 42 National Health Service (NHS) trusts in England are still using the Windows XP operating system, with many of them confirming that they no longer receive security updates for the software. Legal experts say that the NHS hospitals may be in breach of data protection regulations.

      “If hospitals are knowingly using insecure XP machines and devices to hold and otherwise process patient data they may well be in serious contravention of their obligations,” Jon Baines, Chair of the National Association of Data Protection and Freedom of Information Officers (NADPO), wrote in an email.

      In April 2014, Microsoft officially ended support for Windows XP, meaning that the company would no longer release security patches for the aging operating system. Any vulnerabilities discovered after that date would therefore be left for hackers to exploit. Governments and businesses could pay Microsoft for a custom extended support deal; the Crown Commercial Service, which is sponsored by the Cabinet Office, spent £5.5 million ($9 million) to continue receiving updates for the public sector, including for the NHS. That agreement ended in April 2015 and was not renewed.

    • Linux.Mirai Trojan causing mayhem with DDoS attacks

      A Trojan named Linux.Mirai has been found to be carrying out DDoS attacks.

      The malicious program first appeared in May 2016, detected by Doctor Web after being added to its virus database under the name Linux.DDoS.87. The Trojan can work with with the SPARC, ARM, MIPS, SH-4, M68K architectures and Intel x86 computers.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Does Free College Threaten Our All-Volunteer Military?

      Does free college threaten our all-volunteer military? That is what writer Benjamin Luxenberg, on military blog War on the Rocks says. But the real question goes deeper than Luxenberg’s practical query, striking deep into who we are as a nation.

      Unlike nearly every other developed country, which offer free or low cost higher education (Korea’s flagship Seoul National University runs about $12,000 a year, around the same as Oxford), in America you need money to go to college. You need the bucks for tuition and books, and for most students, you need the bucks to not work full-time for a couple of years. Typical of America’s top end schools, Harvard charges $63,000 for tuition, room, board and fees. That’s more than a quarter of a million dollars for a degree. Even a state school wants $40,000 a year.

    • White House Is Profoundly Wrong About the Most Embarrassing Thing Senate Has Done

      The White House reacted harshly to the Senate’s overwhelming vote on Wednesday to override President Obama’s veto of a bill that would enable the family members of 9/11 victims to sue the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in U.S. Courts.

      Press Secretary Josh Earnest called it “the single most embarrassing thing the United States Senate has done possibly since 1983.”

      As it happens, the White House’s principled opposition to the bill was based on its worry that it would open the door to lawsuits from foreigners accusing the U.S. government of crimes, possibly including the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, torture, deaths of innocent people with drones, and global mass surveillance.

      That makes Earnest’s comment the single most hyperbolic thing he’s said since — well — ever.

    • ‘Peace With Justice Is Still a Long Way Away’ – CounterSpin interview with Mario Murillo on Colombian accords

      The peace deal signed between the government of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC, the largest and oldest insurgency in Latin America, is historic. More than 50 years of fighting have killed more than 220,000 Colombians, overwhelmingly poor civilians. These years have seen executions, disappearances, detentions, torture. The violence has forced some 7 million people from their homes, the largest number of internally displaced people in the world.

    • Forget Blairite Propaganda. Sierra Leone was not Blair’s “Good War”.

      This was my speech to the World Beyond War conference at American University, Washington DC on 24 September.

    • Is Your Nation The Exceptional One?

      Nations such as this just don’t have what it takes to be Exceptional. They may have a few nice traditions that mark them out from other nations, and may even be very nice people. But Exceptional? Get out of here!

    • Can Russia Learn From Brazil’s Fate?

      Everyone should read Engdahl’s article. He reports that part of the attack on Rousseff stemmed from Brazil’s economic problems deliberately created by US credit rating agencies as part of Washington’s attack to down grade Brazilian debt, which set off an attack on the Brazilian currency, the cruziero.

      Brazil’s financial openness made Brazil an easy target to attack. One might hope that Vladimir Putin would take note of the cost of “economic openness.” Putin is a careful and thoughtful leader of Russia, but he is not an economist. He has confidence in neoliberal Elvira Nabiulina, Washington’s choice to head the Russian central bank. Nabiulina is unfamiliar with Modern Monetary Theory, and her commitment to “economic openness” leaves the Russian economy as exposed as Brazil’s to Washington destabilization. Nabiuina believes that the assault on the ruble is due to impersonal “global market forces,” not to Washington’s financial clout.

    • British Parliament Confirms Libya War Was Based On Lies … Turned Nation Into a “Shit Show” … Spread Terrorism

      The UK Parliament just confirmed what the alternative media has been saying for years.

      Specifically, a new report from the bipartisan House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee – based on interviews with all of the key British decision-makers, review of documents, and on-the-ground investigations in Africa – found that the Libyan war was based on lies, that it destroyed the country, and that it spread terrorism far and wide.

    • Trump Promises No First Nuclear Strike, Sort of; New Bill Would Make it Illegal

      Donald Trump tried to ease fears about his finger being on the nuclear button during Monday night’s presidential debate, declaring that “I would certainly not do first strike.” He added: “Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.”

      But moments later, the Republican presidential nominee seemed to backpedal, claiming that he “can’t take anything off the table.”

      Two members of Congress don’t want Trump to have the option.

      Responding to the majority of Americans who say they would not trust Trump with the nuclear arsenal, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass, and Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., introduced legislation Tuesday that would bar the president from conducting a nuclear strike unless Congress had issued a formal declaration of war.

    • Clinton’s Faulty New Scheme to ‘Fight’ ISIS

      Even as Hillary Clinton pushes a new scheme for defeating ISIS, the reality is that contradictory U.S. policies in the Mideast that she helped formulate are fueling the growth of jihadi extremism, writes Daniel Lazare.

    • Congress overrides Obama’s veto of 9/11 bill

      Families of those killed in the terror attacks on 9/11 are now legally allowed to sue Saudi Arabia, after Congress voted Wednesday to override President Barack Obama’s veto of the legislation, the first override of his presidency.

      The votes by the House and Senate were overwhelming. Members of both parties broke into applause on the House floor after the vote.

      The Senate approved the override on a 97-1 vote, with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid the lone Senator voting to sustain the president’s veto. Hours later, the vote in the House was 348-77, with one Democratic member voting “present.”

      White House spokesman Josh Earnest said aboard Air Force One before the House had voted that the Senate’s override is the “single most embarrassing thing the Senate has done since 1983,” referring to the last time the Senate overrode a veto by such a large margin.

    • Barack Obama brands Congress decision on Saudi 9/11 lawsuits bill ‘a mistake’

      Barack Obama says Congress is making a “mistake” and setting “a dangerous precedent” by passing a bill that would allow families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government for damages.

      Both the Senate and the House of Representatives voted by an overwhelming majority to override the President’s veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).

      The votes on Wednesday afternoon were the first time in the whole of Mr Obama’s presidency that he has been overruled by Congress.

      And speaking on CNN in the wake of the decision, Mr Obama warned that it left the US exposed to lawsuits from people around the world who have been affected by American foreign policy.

    • 9/11 bill veto override angers Saudi Arabia, Gulf nations: We “will stand by Saudi Arabia in every way possible”

      Saudi Arabia’s lobbying and warnings to Congress were not enough to blunt the passing of legislation allowing families of Sept. 11 victims to sue the kingdom for the attacks.

      The oil-rich country, which has a long but often troubled relationship with Washington, maintains an arsenal of diplomatic and commercial tools it could respond with.

      They include curtailing official contacts, pulling billions of dollars from the U.S. economy, and persuading its close allies in the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council it dominates to scale back counterterrorism cooperation, investments and U.S. access to important regional air bases.

    • Sudanese government ‘killing hundreds of civilians with chemical weapons attacks’ in Darfur – Amnesty

      The Sudanese government has been accused of launching chemical weapon attacks on its own civilians, killing hundreds of people including scores of children, in what would be a dramatic escalation of the Darfur conflict.

      Amnesty International says it has compiled the first credible body of evidence to suggest the forces of President Omar al-Bashir bombed swathes of the crisis-hit Jebel Marra region with chemical agents.

      The charity has released before-and-after satellite images, photographs of horrific burn wounds on children and evidence from more than 200 interviews, and called for a United Nations investigation.

      Chemical weapons attacks on the African continent in the post-war era have been extremely rare, and even the accusation that it has carried them out could represent a major setback for Sudan’s improving relations with the international community.

      But it also serves to highlight the ongoing armed conflict in Darfur that, since the peak of the violence and international attention in 2003, has continued to rage more or less unnoticed.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Palm oil company with links to Tory donors accused of failing to prevent ‘thousands of acres’ of rainforest being destroyed

      A palm oil company with links to Tory party donors and friends of David Cameron has been accused of failing to prevent massive fires devastating the rainforest.

      The firm, called Astra Agro Lestari, is a subsidiary of multi-billion dollar conglomerate Jardine Matheson, which owns major retail outlets, a string of luxury hotels and construction firms – as well as selling second-hand cars – mostly in Asia.

      Jardines is largely controlled by the well-connected Keswick family, descendants of its founders as an opium trader in 19th century China.

      David Cameron’s father Ian was a friend of the Keswicks and worked as a stockbroker to the family. In the 1980s, the future Prime Minister briefly worked at the company’s office in Hong Kong.

    • Trump’s Campaign Is Trying to Cover Up His Lies About Climate Change

      In a delicious turn of events at this week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump received his comeuppance over a four-year-old tweet in which he denounced climate change.

      On stage, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, referenced the tweet from 2012, and remarked that “Donald Trump thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.” His reply? An easily fact-checked lie. “I did not. I do not say that,” he scrambled to say, like a child who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

    • Finnish firm creates roofing with integrated solar cells

      A Finnish sheet metal manufacturer has teamed up with MiaSolé, an American company that manufactures thin-film photovoltaic products. The film is integrated into the roofing material at Virte’s Turku factory.

      CEO Jaakko Virtanen is excited about integrated solar electricity systems.

      “I’ve dreamed of building materials that would themselves generate electricity, from roofs, windows and wall. Now that’s becoming a reality,” he tells Yle.

    • Earth is locked into 5 degrees Celsius of global warming? Not so fast.

      On Tuesday, a new climate study sent media outlets into a frenzy. News articles declared that Earth was “locked into” 5 Celsius degrees of warming – an exceptionally dire forecast, since most climate scientists warn that a boost of just 2 degrees C. would be catastrophic.

      But fortunately for coral reefs and coastal communities, scientists now say that prediction was wrong.

      It was Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who led the charge. Dr. Schmidt was perhaps the most vocal of a group of prominent dissenters, all of whom insist that the actual committed warming estimate hovers around 0.5-1 degrees C. That number, while still significant in terms of global effects, is a far cry from the initial findings. So what caused the discrepancy: bad science or bad science journalism?

  • Finance

    • Passengers in Uber’s self-driving cars waived right to sue for injury or death

      Anyone requesting an Uber ride in a 12-sq mile area in the center of Pittsburgh might now be randomly allocated a self-driving Ford Fusion rather than a human-operated vehicle.

      But passengers riding in Uber’s computer-controlled cars today might be surprised at just how experimental the technology is. According to documents obtained by the Guardian under public records laws, until as recently as June anyone not employed by Uber riding in one of its autonomous vehicles (AVs) had to sign a legal document waiving the company of any liability for their injury or death.

      One senior Pittsburgh police officer signed a waiver on 23 June: “I acknowledge that some or all of the AVs in which I ride are in a development phase, are experimental in nature, and that riding in an AV may involve the potential for death, serious injury, and/or property loss.”

      The document was required by Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center (ATC), a research hub that in early 2015 hired dozens of robotics experts from nearby Carnegie Mellon University. Since then the ATC has been working furiously to catch up with the likes of Google and Tesla in self-driving technology – a task Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has described as “basically existential for us”.

    • The Questions That Should Be Being Asked About Trump’s Tax Returns

      A lot has been said about Trump’s refusal to make his tax returns public. But despite the volume of commentary, it’s not clear the right questions even are being asked.

      Trump claims he can’t release his returns because he’s under audit. At some level, that’s a legitimate concern. It would hardly be fair if thousands of tax professionals who oppose Trump politically helped the IRS by publishing their own analyses of the returns. Ultimately, however, it’s a phony excuse.

      But rather than challenge the logic behind Trump’s refusal to release returns, a series of questions should be asked:

      First, what tax years are under audit? Does it go back beyond 2012? If not, can the 2011 return be released? After all, the statute of limitations on the audit of that year has passed, so there’s no exposure to Trump by releasing that return. If not 2011, how about 2010?

      Second, why haven’t the audit notices been released? An audit notice is a short, generic letter from the IRS stating that a taxpayer’s return has been selected for examination. There’s nothing so sensitive in such a generic notice that it could not be made public. At this point, Trump has not even offered up this most basic evidence that he is really even under audit. Why hasn’t proof been demanded?

    • Brexit – who has the power to change UK law?

      Another way of seeing the inconsistency of the Government argument is this. If the Crown has the power to leave the EU without Act of Parliament, then it has always had it. The Referendum Act contains no provision that alters the constitutional position – it provided for a referendum on EU membership, defining the question to be asked, but without specifying what was to be done with the result. For that reason it is often referred to as “advisory”. Therefore, if the Government has the power to take the UK out of the EU today, then it equally had the power one year ago. But I do not think anyone would have seriously argued before the Referendum that the Government could take the UK out of the EU under prerogative power without any Parliamentary approval.

    • Britain’s backdoor to EU influence

      The U.K. has launched a behind-the-scenes diplomatic effort to influence EU affairs during the Brexit process by offering to lend officials to two small countries that will hold the bloc’s presidency next year.

      Britain gave up its six-month slot in the rotating presidency calendar, which had been scheduled for the second half of 2017, after other countries felt it would be inappropriate to have the U.K. setting the political agenda for a union it had voted to leave. But soon after the June referendum, London began hedging its bets by trying to position officials in Malta and Estonia, which will take their turns in the presidency next year.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Donald Trump’s Roger Rabbit Moment

      As usual, what may have been most important is what went unsaid. The phrase “income inequality” came up only once, and that was from moderator Lester Holt. There was little mention of education or health care; some talk of energy policy but almost nothing on global warming other than Clinton’s reference to Trump claim that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese (last night he denied ever saying it, but he has).

      And absolutely no mention of the ruinous influence of money in politics, which in retrospect made it a bit jarring that when Bill and Chelsea Clinton entered the debate auditorium they sat next to Vernon Jordan, a close family friend and adviser, certainly, but also senior counsel at Akin Gump, the biggest and most profitable lobbyist in Washington, prime peddlers of influence and privilege on Capitol Hill.

    • NYT Makes Bill Clinton’s Sex Life the Lead Story–Without Mentioning Trump’s

      Now we know how candidates can get a piece of information featured in the lead story of the New York Times: They just need to declare that they aren’t going to talk about it during a national debate.

      Thus Donald Trump’s cryptic last-minute debate comment—”I was going to say something…extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, ‘I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. It’s inappropriate. It’s not nice’”—was unfolded into a piece in the top right corner of the Times‘ front-page (9/27/16), arguably the most valuable journalistic real estate in the United States, about Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs.

    • Lester Holt Asks Zero Questions About Poverty, Abortion, Climate Change

      Presidential debates do as much to illustrate corporate media priorities as they do to showcase the candidates. They provide a snapshot into what the media, in this case represented by NBC’s Lester Holt, prioritizes as issues worthy of discussion.

      A week before the debate, Comcast-owned NBC announced the topics, and one could already tell we weren’t going to be in for a substantive evening: “Achieving prosperity,” “America’s direction” and “securing America.” This generic approach lead to a generic debate that focused mostly on horserace disputes and vague, open-ended questions about taxes and jobs.

      Holt didn’t ask any questions about the following topics: poverty, abortion, climate change, immigration, healthcare, student debt, privacy, LGBTQ rights or drug policy. (NBC reported before the debate that abortion and immigration were two of the policy issues that voters were most interested in, as indicated by Google searches, along with the economy and police shootings.)

      What was discussed: jobs, Trump’s tax returns, who did or didn’t support the Iraq War, raising taxes on the rich, race (framed mostly in a way that pandered to Trump’s theme of a country in disarray), Russian cyberattacks, ISIS, Obama’s birth certificate, Clinton’s physical appearance and whether the candidates would accept the election results.

    • Blow-by-Blow Analysis of the Decisive Moment of the Debate – through the eyes of a former debate coach

      I wasn’t planning to do a second blog about ‘the debate’ but two days after it, as we start to await the first polling to show its impact, I feel the need to write one more blog. I do believe this debate decided the election. I think many will come back to look at that Monday night as the time when Trump folded, and some will also see the brilliance of how Hillary skewered Trump and trapped him to make that debate far worse for Trump than it might have been. So, with the very rare opportunity for me to write a debate review on this blog, why not do something more serious about the blow-by-blow. How did it go? Lets get into the weeds. How did Hillary demolish Trump. I am using the full recording of the debate via Real Clear Politics which had the ABC network feed.

      Trump needed to remain Presidential throughout the first debate, he’d then get something near a tie. Hillary had to clearly win the debate, a tie was not good enough, she was expected to be the superior debater and had to now deliver.

    • Stein trolls Johnson on world leaders gaffe, also fails to name world leaders

      May, Stédile, and Corbyn, however, aren’t technically world leaders, as none holds a top position in their country’s government. May is a member of the Canadian House of Commons. Stédile is an economist and member of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement, which he helped found. Corbyn is the leader of the Labour Party in Britain.

      Johnson, sitting with Libertarian vice presidential nominee Bill Weld, was asked by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to “name one foreign leader that you respect and look up to.” Johnson couldn’t name any.

    • Sunday Paper Q&A: Jill Stein

      You may not realize it, but there are actually two women running for president this year. In addition to Hillary Clinton, the first female major-party candidate, voters also have the choice to elect Jill Stein, who represents the Green Party.

      Stein is a practicing physician and an environmental health advocate. While her low polling numbers prevented her from participating in the first debate, Stein remains committed to her campaign. She exclusively sat down with us for this week’s Sunday Paper Q&A to explain why she’s motivated to stay in the race.

    • Endorsement: Libertarian Gary Johnson for president

      Today this newspaper does something it has never done in its 143-year history: endorse someone other than the Republican candidate in a presidential contest.

      Since its founding in 1873, The Detroit News has backed a Republican every time it has made a presidential endorsement (three times we have sat on the sidelines — twice during the Franklin Roosevelt elections and in the 2004 Bush/Kerry contest).

      We abandon that long and estimable tradition this year for one reason: Donald J. Trump.

      The 2016 nominee offered by the Republican Party rubs hard against the editorial board’s values as conservatives and Americans. Donald Trump is unprincipled, unstable and quite possibly dangerous. He can not be president.

    • Gary Johnson tries to get past ‘brain freeze’ with Detroit newspaper’s endorsement

      But Johnson’s self-described “Aleppo moment” on Wednesday night’s MSNBC town hall proved irresistible for critics and rivals. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who has fallen even further back in polls than Johnson, took the opportunity on Thursday to name the foreign leaders she admired — if anyone was curious. (No one she mentioned is currently serving as the head of government in any country.)

    • Politico Tries to Play Gotcha with Jill Stein’s Comments on Gary Johnson’s ‘World Leader’ Gotcha

      Last night on MSNBC, Chris Matthews asked Gary Johnson to name three foreign leaders that he admired. Rather than rejecting the question for its implicitly pro-government bias and as a silly thing to ask someone running for president, Johnson tried to answer by listing former Mexican president Vicente Fox and blanked on the name, saying it was another “Aleppo moment.” (Maybe soon they’ll be calling them Gary Johnson moments)

      Within minutes, social media was ablaze with users who probably couldn’t name a world leader (except maybe for Justin Trudeau, who’s become something of a favorite of social media progressives) claiming that Johnson couldn’t name a foreign leader at all, when the question was about leaders you respected.

      [...]

      Responding to my comment based on Twitter, Stein suggested that Politico was “just trying to play gotcha to distract from their favored candidate’s awful foreign policy record.” It’s hard to disagree with that assessment.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Singapore jails teen blogger Amos Yee for anti-religion posts
    • Amos Yee gets 6 weeks’ jail for wounding religious feeling
    • Amos Yee gets 6 weeks’ jail for wounding religious feelings
    • Amos Yee pleads guilty to 3 charges
    • Jordan Imposes Media Blackout on Christian Writer’s Assassination as Protests Erupt

      Jordanian authorities imposed a blackout on the country’s press and social media Monday, preventing any coverage of the murder of the Christian writer shot dead outside an Amman court as protesters called for the government’s resignation.

      The censorship order by the Jordanian judiciary came after the murder of Nahed Hatter as he arrived at the city’s Palace of Justice on Sunday, accused of sharing a satirical cartoon on Facebook and of breaching the country’s blasphemy laws.

    • Montreal Muslim school president was ‘devastated’ by feminist’s criticisms, slander trial hears

      Quebec’s long-running debate over secularism and the place of religious minorities moved into the courtroom Monday as a slander trial opened against an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism.

      A crowd of supporters, including two who arrived from France, filled the room to hear the case against Djemila Benhabib, who is being sued by a private Muslim school after she likened its teaching to the instruction received in terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

      Benhabib, who was born in Ukraine but spent much of her childhood in Algeria, was invited on to a Montreal radio show in 2012 after writing a blog post about the Muslim School of Montreal.

      Benhabib told 98.5 FM host Benoît Dutrizac that she was shocked by what she found on the school’s website.

      Koranic verses being taught to children were “extremely violent” and “misogynistic,” she told Dutrizac in a recording played in the court. She said the school offers students “an indoctrination worthy of a military camp in Afghanistan or Pakistan.” The school, she said, “is creating fundamentalist activists who in a few years will be demanding accommodations and all sorts of bizarre things … We are an extremely long way from citizenship, from the values that belong to our society.”

    • Migrants Are Racist to Blonde Women, Swedish Ethics Professor Says

      Professor of Ethics Ann Heberlein has argued that blonde people in Sweden are subjected to racist abuse and violence from “people with a non-European appearance”.

      Ms. Heberlein, who appears regularly on Swedish Radio’s “Thoughts for the Day” and “Philosophical Room”, says blonde and Swedish victims of this racism choose to stay silent because “anti-racist” left wingers say that as a “privileged” group, ethnic Swedes have no right to complain.

      The professor at Lund University describes the racist abuse hurled at white women in Sweden, with phrases like “Svenne (meaning ethnic Swede) whore” and “bloody racist whore” shouted at them by people with migrant backgrounds.

    • Singapore jails teenager for hurting God’s feelings

      Amos Yee, a 17-year-old blogger in Singapore, is to spend six weeks in jail for “wounding religious feelings.” It is his second such jail term: he spent a month in jail last year for criticizing Christianity.

    • Donald Trump Happily Repeating Lie About Google Autocomplete Suppressing Negative Hillary News

      While politics isn’t generally a topic we dive into around here, technology policy and issues certainly are. And, since presidential election cycles infect every conceivable topic like a wine stain spreading across your favorite couch, we’ve talked about the two mainstream candidates quite a bit recently. And I get the complaints from all sides against both candidates, but it’s become somewhat breathtaking to watch Donald Trump build a campaign in large part on nonsensical and easily debunked conspiracy theories, such as how the planned internet governance transition will cede control of the web to China and Russia, or that our current sitting President might be a secret communist Muslim clay-person, but maybe not.

      And, of course, there is the constant claim of victim-hood at the hands of that damned liberal establishment, which now apparently includes Google. Some background for you is in order. Over the summer, a really dumb video went viral after claiming to show that Google was manipulating autocomplete searches to keep any bad press out of the results for searches about Hillary Clinton. Compared with Bing, for instance, Google’s autocomplete failed to finish off a search for “Hillary Clinton cr” with “Hillary Clinton crimes”, instead completing as “Hillary Clinton Crimea.” While your drunk uncle lost his goddamned mind over a conspiracy surely proven, Google chimed in to note that it specifically designed its autocomplete feature to keep disparaging results from anyone’s name, not just Hill-Dog’s. This was easily shown by putting in “Donald Trump cr”, which likewise autocompleted as “Donald Trump Crimea.”

      And that really should have been the end of that. But, because Donald Trump’s campaign isn’t one to pass on a good chem-trails story, its candidate tried to deflect a general panning of his debate performance by repeating this already disproved accusation.

    • Censorship is Killing the Spirit of Social Media

      Take Twitter, for example. The online social networking service is often criticized for not protecting its users and allowing pretty much anything on its platform. Because it does allow anything on its platform and that’s part of why people love it so much.

      Twitter is also kind of like a filing cabinet that records and preserves our digital history for us. You can go to Twitter, search a hashtag and find photos, articles and all the opinions you could ever want to hear on a particular moment from (recent) history. That’s pretty cool, when you think about it. But what’s not cool is finding tweets that you never saw, tweets that seemingly disappeared even though the 140-characters were typed.

      Twitter has been caught removing tweets, hiding tweets and deleting trending hashtags. Such accusations have opened the doors to how such a prominent platform—which sources the news for over half the population-gets away with censorship before our very eyes.

      It was just a few months ago that Twitter was accused of censoring tweets under ‘#DNCLeak’ during the WikiLeaks e-mail debacle. In this particular scenario, conservative Twitter users accused the platform of removing the hashtag from the trending bar, despite it displaying an estimated 250,000 tweets about the leaked employee e-mails from the Democratic National Committee.

      On the other side of the political spectrum, of course, is the whole Milo Yiannopoulos situation, which involves permanent censorship in the form of banning. Another accusation comes from Trump supporters, which say the social platform concealed his tweets asking for campaign donations.

      But is this censorship? Or is it just the work of a flawed algorithm?

    • HRC concerned about censorship of publications

      The Human Rights Commission(HRC) has released a statement regarding Freedom of Expression in relation to Cayman’s Prohibited Publications Order.

      The statement has been released during World Banned Books Week which is held each year, the last week in September and is recognised by the American Libraries Association. During the week, attention is focused on freedom of expression in relation to reading and the issue of censorship. In the Cayman Islands censorship of reading materials is found in the Prohibited Publications Order (under the Penal Code) which first came into effect in the Cayman Islands in 1977.

    • Censorship: Facebook Deleted 100,000 ‘Hate Posts, Insults’ in Just One Month

      Facebook revealed that within the last month it deleted 100,000 posts by German users for containing “hate”, but Justice Minister Heiko Maas has blasted the figure as too low.

      At a conference in Berlin, Maas said that to be accountable, social networks must publish the number of posts contested by users. The Justice Minister’s remarks implied that complainants on social media are valid judges of what constitutes criminal speech, something usually only determined by a court.

    • BANNED TOGETHER: A CENSORSHIP CABARET Set for Banned Books Week in NYC
    • Wallace students read banned books aloud to draw attention to censorship
    • Distributed Censorship or Extortion? The IoT vs Brian Krebs

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • UK Government Says Smart Meters Can Definitely Be Trusted Because GCHQ Designed Their Security

      The idea behind smart meters — that detailed information about how you consume electricity will allow you to use power more efficiently and thus cut your bills and your home’s carbon emissions — is a good one in theory. And yet smart meters are still not used very widely, even in countries like the UK, where the government has a strategy to install millions of them by 2020. Actually, the likely savings by users are small, but smart meters also promise to allow the electricity industry to lower salary costs by carrying out meter readings remotely, which is one reason why it is so keen on the idea. Another is because smart meters make it is easy to cut off someone’s supply if they don’t pay their bills.

      The slow uptake of smart meters seems in part to be due to public concerns about security. People are worried that their smart meter will spy on them, sending back information to electricity companies that might be intercepted and used for targeted burglary when they are away. Similarly, there are fears that if the smart meter control system were compromised, domestic electricity supplies might be at risk on a large scale.

      One of UK Parliament’s most important committees, the one monitoring science and technology, has just published a report into the UK smart meter roll-out, offering recommendations for ways to speed it up.

      [...]

      has reported, one of the worst features of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Bill that is currently wending it way through Parliament is that it creates a legal framework to allow GCHQ and the other intelligence agencies to hack into any kind of equipment in order to carry out surveillance. Of course, that’s really rather easy when you were the one who designed its security systems.

    • FBI’s Controversial Surveillance Program Declined After Snowden

      The FBI’s use of a controversial program that collected Americans’ phone records decreased significantly after Edward Snowden exposed it to the world in 2013, a new report has found.

      The program allows the FBI to get access to phone records—but not the content of phone calls—with permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Between 2012 and 2014, that court approved 561 so-called “business records orders,” but that number dropped from a nine-year high of 212 in 2012 to 170 in 2014, a nearly 20 percent decrease, according to a review by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

      The number fell again in 2015 to 142 orders. Snowden’s revelations helped fuel a change in U.S. law that ended the government’s practice of collecting and storing the phone records. Now, the government must request the information from phone companies.

    • Canadian Bank Prohibits Giving Passwords to Police

      While waiting for ten minutes on “hold” to make an appointment with my local branch of Scotiabank, I had time read through the new “Digital Services Agreement. Most of the eighteen pages were unremarkable, but a couple of things stood out.

      When you click “Accept”, you are agreeing to not give your password to police if they ask!

    • WhatsApp refuses to delete user data in India after court ruling

      Changes to WhatsApp’s data sharing rules are causing more controversy this week. The company refuses to comply with a court order from India’s Delhi High Court, which requested that the company delete any and all data collected by users who opted out of the company’s new privacy policy before September 25th.

      Since WhatsApp announced that it would be sharing some user data, including phone numbers, with Facebook, the app has come in for some serious critisism for undermining consumer privacy in India. These changes were made under the guise of cutting down on spam and improving services, but a good portion of users remain unconvinced.

    • EU clamps down on sale of surveillance tech to despotic regimes

      The European Commission has set out new measures to stop European companies exporting surveillance gear to despotic regimes. The proposal would also partially relax the rules on exporting cryptography tools.

      The proposal to overhaul the EU’s export controls on dual-use products—powerful technologies such as crypto software or rocket engines that can be used for good or evil—was presented on Wednesday (PDF) and includes a new human rights dimension.

      “It’s not a revolution. It’s an evolution of our current structure,” a commission source told Ars. “The foundation that is already there, is fairly solid, but this new proposal is more efficient, and will reduce the cost of the control, both for authorities at national level and also for the industries that have to apply for licenses.”

      “This new human security dimension comes from a conviction that our export controls should also enable us to prevent the misuse of items that are used to violate human rights. The types of technologies we are talking about, surveillance, etc., do not fit clearly within the current military regulation,” the source continued.

    • Apple Logs Your iMessage Contacts — and May Share Them With Police

      Apple promises that your iMessage conversations are safe and out of reach from anyone other than you and your friends. But according to a document obtained by The Intercept, your blue-bubbled texts do leave behind a log of which phone numbers you are poised to contact and shares this (and other potentially sensitive metadata) with law enforcement when compelled by court order.

      Every time you type a number into your iPhone for a text conversation, the Messages app contacts Apple servers to determine whether to route a given message over the ubiquitous SMS system, represented in the app by those déclassé green text bubbles, or over Apple’s proprietary and more secure messaging network, represented by pleasant blue bubbles, according to the document. Apple records each query in which your phone calls home to see who’s in the iMessage system and who’s not.

      This log also includes the date and time when you entered a number, along with your IP address — which could, contrary to a 2013 Apple claim that “we do not store data related to customers’ location,” identify a customer’s location. Apple is compelled to turn over such information via court orders for systems known as “pen registers” or “trap and trace devices,” orders that are not particularly onerous to obtain, requiring only that government lawyers represent they are “likely” to obtain information whose “use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Apple confirmed to The Intercept that it only retains these logs for a period of 30 days, though court orders of this kind can typically be extended in additional 30-day periods, meaning a series of monthlong log snapshots from Apple could be strung together by police to create a longer list of whose numbers someone has been entering.

      The Intercept received the document about Apple’s Messages logs as part of a larger cache originating from within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Electronic Surveillance Support Team, a state police agency that facilitates police data collection using controversial tools like the Stingray, along with conventional techniques like pen registers. The document, titled “iMessage FAQ for Law Enforcement,” is designated for “Law Enforcement Sources” and “For Official Use Only,” though it’s unclear who wrote it or for what specific audience — metadata embedded in the PDF cites an author only named “mrrodriguez.” (The term “iMessages” refers to an old name for the Messages app still commonly used to refer to it.)

    • Terrorism Directive: European Parliament to Cowardly Surrender to Outrageous Security Call

      For a few months, the European Parliament has been discussing a directive aimed at updating the European legislation on combating terrorism. After a vote in the LIBE Committee, MEPs agreed to send the text directly to a trialogue discussion; this reduces opportunities for a democratic debate on an issue that bears strong consequences for fundamental rights.
      Today, Wednesday 28 September, the third trialogue between the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union is to take place. Faced with the deadlock organised by European institutions, La Quadrature du Net emphasises the dangers of this text.

    • Allo: Snowden Says New Google App Could Become Tool For Police Surveillance

      Google recently released a new messaging application called Allo that it calls “revolutionary,” but whistleblower Edward Snowden warns that the app could be used for government surveillance.

      Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear spoke with Professor Bryan Ford, leader of the Decentralized/Distributed Systems lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, about the app and its potential impact on personal privacy.

    • Why Edward Snowden (NSA Whistleblower) Just Warned People Not to Use Google’s New Chatting App

      According to Edward Snowden, if you want to avoid giving law enforcement the green light to check out all your communications, don’t use it.

      “What is #Allo? A Google app that records every message you ever send and makes it available to police upon request,” the whistleblower tweeted.

      Tech giant Google has been working hard to infiltrate the virtual chatting world, launching Spaces, Duo, and most recently, Allo, all in the past couple of months.

      On its site, Allo is described as “a smart messaging app that helps you say more and do more. Express yourself better with stickers, doodles, and HUGE emojis & text. Allo also brings you the Google Assistant, preview edition.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • For Latinos, the Problem Isn’t Trump—It’s Trumpismo

      Anyone watching this year’s elections knows that Latinos are going to play a critical role. The Age of LatinX is upon us. Without a doubt, LatinXs will play a determinate role in these important elections. As the presidential candidate for the Green Party, I take seriously the urgently critical role of the Latino vote in the 2016 elections. That’s why our campaign continues the work of raising LatinX and other issues.

      In an election where some are depressed because they see no path other than one that winds between two obsolete but deadly choices, this is a race to the bottom between the “lesser evil” and the “greater evil,” Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Such a choice starkly reflects the problems Latinos and we all face, ones that reach far and beyond Donald Trump. Trump’s candidacy is a virulent symptom of a far more sinister problem infecting our entire political system, something every community, including Latinos, experiences in very particular ways, regardless of their political affiliation.

      Growing numbers of Latinos are among the millions who helped push the question—“How do I vote for Jill Stein?”—as a top Google search term for our campaign after Monday’s debate. LatinXs have heard our message and are acting on their desire for change. I am confident and see every day on the campaign trail that even more are preparing to join us in this election. Our presidential platform is packed with the policies and positions—student debt forgiveness, free college education, fair trade, not free trade, labor rights, racial justice and police reform, a Green New Deal, and others—that we all know are necessary, and that Latinos especially have good reason to be concerned with.

    • The Military Logic of Punishing Chelsea Manning’s Suicide Attempt

      Last week, imprisoned whistle-blower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 14 days in solitary confinement as punishment for her suicide attempt in early July at the prison barracks at Fort Leavenworth. The Fort Leavenworth disciplinary panel could not explicitly punish Manning for attempted suicide. Completed suicide is not a disciplinary violation and, to be guilty of attempting a crime, it’s necessary for the act which is attempted to be one. They disciplined her instead under a charge known as “conduct which threatens,” stating that Manning’s attempt to die interfered with “orderly running, safety, good order and discipline, or security” of the facility. (She is also being disciplined for possessing an unauthorized book). The whistle-blower stated that she was driven to suicide over the prison’s then-failure to appropriately treat her gender dysphoria. Why Manning injuring herself is deemed a threat to the facility’s functioning says much about the nature of that place’s function, says much about the true function of prisons.

      Before 1823 in England, according to early common law, if a person committed suicide, they would be posthumously punished. The body would be buried at the crossroads of a highway, impaled by a stake, often with a stone laid over the face (to prevent resurrection as a ghost or vampire). The deceased’s property would be forfeited to the king. Suicide was criminal because sovereignty over life and death did not then reside with the individual but with God, and with his chosen earthly emissary, the king. And since suicide was deemed an ungodly, criminal act, so too was an attempt—at times punishable by hanging. There’s no contradiction here: To execute a person who has herself tried to die is still punishment, not wish fulfillment. It’s the punishment of removing every last shred individual sovereignty; it’s the state’s reminder of where sovereignty really resides. Current state punishment of attempted suicide, in its rare cases like Manning’s, serves the same purpose.

    • Does The FTC Get To Ignore Section 230 Of The CDA?

      The case involves weight loss products, including colon cleanses, vended by LeanSpa. To generate more sales, LeanSpa hired LeadClick to act as an affiliate marketing manager. LeadClick coordinated promotion of LeanSpa’s products with LeadClick’s network of affiliates. Some affiliates promoted the products using fake news sites, with articles styled to look like legitimate news articles and consumer comments/testimonials that were fake. Apparently, all of this added up to big business. LeanSpa paid LeadClick $35-$45 each time a consumer signed up for LeanSpa’s “free” trial (which was a negative billing option). LeadClick shared 80-90% of these sign-up fees with affiliates and kept the remainder for itself. In total, LeadClick billed LeanSpa $22M, of which LeanSpa paid only $12M. Still, LeanSpa turned into LeadClick’s top customer, constituting 85% of its eAdvertising division’s sales.

    • An Ongoing Lack Of Technical Prowess Is Resulting In Bad Laws, Bad Prosecutions, And Bad Judicial Decisions

      Everyone in government is talking cyber-this and cyber-that, even though a majority of those talking don’t have the technical background to back up their assertions. This leads to dangerous lawmaking. The CFAA, easily one of the most abused computer-related laws, came into being thanks to some skittish legislators who’d seen one too many 80′s hacker films. (“WarGames,” to be specific.)

      Faulty analogies have led to other erroneous legislative conclusions — like the comparison of email to snail mail — which has led to the government treating any unopened email as “abandoned” and accessible without a warrant.

      But the problem goes further than the legislative branch. The executive branch hasn’t been much better in its grasp of technical issues, and the current slate of presidential candidates guarantees this won’t change for at least another four years.

      The judicial branch has its own issues. On both sides of the bench, there’s very little technical knowledge. As more and more prosecutions become reliant on secretive, little-understood technical tools like cell tower spoofers, government-deployed malware, and electronic device searches, unaddressed problems will only multiply as tech deployment ramps up and infusions of fresh blood into the judicial system fail to keep pace.

    • Court Dumps Cops’ Complaint They Were Unfairly Treated After Shooting Two Unarmed Suspects 47 Times

      In 2012, Cleveland police officers engaged in perhaps the most one-sided “shootout” ever with two suspects at the tail end of an (unauthorized) police chase. By the time it was over, officers had fired 139 bullets into a vehicle they had trapped in a school parking lot. Twenty-three of those hit the driver. Twenty-four hit the passenger. Both vehicle occupants were killed.

      One officer — Michael Brelo — apparently thought he was starring in his own action film. He unloaded 49 rounds in just over 20 seconds while standing on the hood of the stopped vehicle. All told, more than 75 Cleveland PD vehicles joined the chase/shooting. At the end of a yearlong investigation, 63 officers were suspended for their participation. Six officers were charged.

      The genesis of the horrific debacle was nothing more than a car backfiring. One cop mistook this for a gunshot and all hell broke loose. No weapons were recovered from the vehicle.

      One of the stranger offshoots of the infamous shootings was a lawsuit filed by several Cleveland police officers who took part in the chase. In their view, they were punished more harshly than African American officers who also participated in the unauthorized pursuit.

    • Help Me Choose a Nominee for the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award

      The Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards were established in 1979 to honor individuals who have made significant contributions to protect the First Amendment rights of Americans. They are looking for nominees for this year’s awards, and I’d like to send them a name.

    • Agent who interrogated Abu Zubaydah: ‘Where we went wrong as a nation’

      “His case represents the A to Z of where we went wrong as a nation,” said former FBI agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated some of the most prized captives of the war on terror, and considered Abu Zubaydah “a high-ranking terrorist” at his capture. “In a way, it was the original sin that led to the institutionalization of the so-called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.”

    • Police Brutality Is a Campaign Issue, So Departments Ignore It on Social Media

      There’s zero doubt that police forces across the nation are caught between the crosshairs of politics and systemic racism; their losses and crimes either championed or hurriedly swept beneath the rug on the campaign trail.

      Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump addressed race relations in the United States as a symptom of a larger criminal justice problem. Trump went as far as to call America’s legacy of police brutality a matter of “law and order,” mirroring the strategic oversimplification of racism that has contributed to the killings of 285 black and Hispanic people by police officers in 2016 alone.

      But despite desperate efforts by citizens to document the unlawful abuse of minorities by officers, police departments still wield considerable control over their images and public messages. Thanks to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, police are attempting to humanize themselves online, whether or not they’re physically repairing their relationships with America’s communities.

    • Russian journalist arrested for ‘illegal’ voting after exposing fraud in Duma elections

      An award-winning journalist who exposed voting fraud during Russia’s parliamentary elections has himself been arrested for alleged fraud.

      Denis Korotkov, a correspondent for the independent news website Fontanka, was scheduled to appear in court in St Petersburg on Wednesday on charges of “illegally obtaining a ballot”.

      But campaigners say Mr Korotkov was working undercover to expose vote rigging in the Duma elections, which have provoked international concern, and is now being harassed for his work.

      Mr Korotkov documented how he posed as a voter on 18 September and was given a sticker by polling station officials, who then arranged for him to be transported around St Petersburg with others to cast multiple ballots for specified candidates.

    • Denmark reverses course on refugee ‘child brides’

      Specifically, the agency concluded that the separate living quarters would violate the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to one’s “private and family life”.

      Josephine Fock, an MP for The Alternative who raised the issue with DIS, cheered the reversal.

      “It is completely outrageous. We are talking about people who have fled to Denmark who are being split from each other. Some of them have children together and investigating individual [asylum] cases takes an unbelievably long time,” Fock told Metroxpress.

      In January, the Integration Ministry obtained an overview of the Danish asylum system that revealed that there are currently 27 minors who have spouses or partners. According to an earlier report in Metroxpress, there are two married 14-year-old girls at Danish asylum centres. One is married to a 28-year-old man, while the other is pregnant and has a 24-year-old husband.

    • [Older] Woman who mocked burka goes into hiding after online trolls offer bounty for her murder

      In a controversial article, Lejla Colak said forcing women to wear the Islamic headscarf was like forcing them to strap a sex toy to their heads.

      Twisted online trolls have launched a sick hate campaign against the Bosnian reporter, offering a cash prize if anyone kills or rapes her.

      One social media user, reportedly a member of the Bosnian army, wrote: “Are there any volunteers to rape lovely Lejla? I will personally pay for it.”

    • When ‘Yelling Commands’ Is the Wrong Police Response

      The story out of El Cajon, Calif., a San Diego suburb, had an eerie familiarity: The police respond to a person exhibiting some kind of disturbing behavior, but the subject — perhaps lost in his own, altered world — does not comply with the usual commands, does not heed the standard warnings, acts in a way that seems to invite danger, and ends up dead.

      An officer in El Cajon fatally shot a man identified as Alfred Olango on Tuesday, after Mr. Olango’s sister called 911 for help because he was acting erratically. The police released a still frame from a bystander’s video showing Mr. Olango, 30, mirroring the shooting stance of the officer facing him — feet apart, hands clasped and pointed at the officer. But one man had a gun and the other, it turned out, did not.

      “I called for help; I didn’t call you guys to kill him,” the sister wailed on a Facebook video recorded by a bystander.

      Far too little is known about what happened in El Cajon to judge the officer’s conduct, law enforcement experts and advocates for mentally ill people say. But the police use of force — sometimes lethal — against those with diminished mental capacity is distressingly common. The experts and advocates say that while training and practices have improved in the last generation, officers in many agencies still receive little or no education in how to recognize and deal with people who may not behave rationally.

      Like other police uses of force, confrontations involving people with diminished mental capacity have increasingly been caught on video and turned into national news. In July, officers in Sacramento shot and killed a man who was walking and running in the street, gesticulating wildly, and who refused to obey orders to drop the knife he was holding or to lie down.

    • Stand in solidarity with imprisoned writers in Saudi Arabia

      English PEN is continuing to hold monthly vigils in support of imprisoned writers Raif Badawi, Waleed Abulkhair and Ashraf Fayadh. Please join us to show them they have not been forgotten.

      English PEN has been holding regular vigils outside the Saudi Embassy in London in support of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi and his lawyer Waleed Abulkhair since January 2015 when Badawi was first flogged for his peaceful activism. While Badawi has not been flogged since, he is continuing to serve a ten-year prison sentence, while Abulkhair is serving 15 years in prison for his human rights activism.

      PEN is also continuing to call for the immediate release of Palestinian poet and artist Ashraf Fayadh. Originally sentenced to death, Fayadh is now serving 8 years in prison and, like Badawi, continues to have the threat of hundreds of lashes looming over him.

      Please join us on Friday 30 September from 9 – 10am for a peaceful vigil at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in London. Activists are asked to meet at the Curzon Street entrance to the Embassy. (note: the postal address of the Embassy is 30-32 Charles Street, Mayfair, London).

    • Teen boy in Saudi Arabia arrested for “unethical behaviour” after flirty chat with YouTube teen girl star

      Abu Sin (his name means “toothless”) and Christina Crockett jokingly declared their love for one another in a silly YouNow stream that has since been uploaded to YouTube. They struggled through language barriers and acted like goofy young people.

      Evidently, being a cute kid is a crime in Saudi Arabia, where the 19 year old internet goofball lives.

      A Saudi attorney told Okaz newspaper the videos violate the country’s interpretation of Sharia law and internet regulations. Abu Sin could face up to three years in prison.

    • Man hit by tram after mass brawl breaks out between migrants in Vienna

      At least 20 people were involved in the fight, believed to have been between a group of Chechen and Turkish migrants, in the Austrian capital of Vienna on Tuesday evening.

      Austrian media reported that the trouble started when a Chechen man approached a group of 15 Turkish men socialising in an internet cafe and told them to be quiet.

      A brawl ensued, spilling out of the cafe and into the streets of the city’s Favoriten district.

      There was reports that one man was armed with a knife.

      Vienna is also home to a large population of Chechen migrants.

    • Interview: John Kiriakou On Supporting Jeffrey Sterling So He Doesn’t Die In Prison

      Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who served a prison sentence at a federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, joined Shadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola to talk about the case of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, which they have both followed closely.

      Kiriakou’s reporting describes how officials at the Englewood federal prison, where Sterling is confined, failed to give him proper medical treatment for heart attack symptoms. Gosztola recently exchanged letters with Sterling and published a report on how the Bureau of Prisons is failing him.

      During the interview, Kiriakou shares his experiences with prison medical care and how all too often those who need care are denied proper treatment. He talks about how the Bureau of Prisons thinks prisoners like Sterling are malingering, which means they are lying about and faking serious health problems. He also describes why it is so important for a person in this situation to have outside support.

      Sterling has demanded the prison give him access to an outside doctor so that he can have his severe heart problems addressed.

    • Inside the Chicago Police Department’s secret budget

      When the clerk called Willie Mae Swansey’s case in a crowded courtroom last February, the 72-year-old approached the judge slowly, supporting herself with a four-pronged cane. It had been a busy afternoon in the Daley Center’s civil forfeiture courtroom, with more than a dozen quick hearings and a pair of trials preceding her own. The crush of defense lawyers and hopeful claimants had thinned by the time Swansey stepped up to the bench. She steadied herself beside a prosecutor and stood with a stately straightening of her back.

      Swansey was here to reclaim her car. The Chicago Police Department had seized the 2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser two years prior, arresting the driver, Swansey’s son, and charging him with manufacturing or delivering 15 to 100 grams of heroin. The car had been impounded ever since. Swansey herself was never charged with a crime, and it was her name, not her son’s, on the title. All the same, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had agreed with CPD that the vehicle, which the office valued at $1,400, was worth keeping for good.

      [...]

      “I’m a poor black woman,” Swansey says. “I don’t have no money for an attorney.” Instead, she continued to represent herself.

      At her next appearance in May, she informed the court that her son’s criminal case was over. He had pleaded guilty, and having been under house arrest for 745 days, he was credited with time served and put on probation, according to county records.

      So on June 30, Swansey’s trial date finally arrived, two years and four months after CPD took her car. She had brought her son with her to court to testify that he had taken her keys without her knowledge. But the judge she saw that day, Paul Karkula, didn’t want to hear from him, she says.

      Instead, Swansey recalls, “The judge said, ‘I can’t give you back your car, because it would be right back on the road with drugs.’ ” (Karkula declined to comment for this story.)

      The decision struck Swansey as racist and deeply unfair. Swansey says she watched as four other cases that day were called and resolved, including one involving a wheelchair-bound white woman with a case very similar to hers. This woman got her car back, Swansey says. She did not.

    • How I Taught A Jury About Trolls, Memes And 4Chan — And Helped Get A Troll Out Of Jail

      A few weeks ago, CNN had a story on how a jury failed to convict Peter Wexler, an unemployed IT worker, who had been arrested and spent nearly a year in jail (without bail) for writing some mean stuff on his blog. He was literally arrested for five blog posts (which came with 20 criminal charges, as they had multiple charges on each post) and was facing up to 15 years in jail for those posts. Ken “Popehat” White blogged briefly about it, noting that it was a huge First Amendment win in a case where the defense team included one of his partners, Caleb Mason (along with lawyer Marri Derby, who was appointed by the court to represent Wexler through the Criminal Justice Act). It’s also a case that involved… me. I was an expert witness in the case, brought in to explain to the jury the nature of internet discourse, including how trolls quite frequently say outrageous things to get attention, and how it’s (for better or worse) not that uncommon to see people post angry rants on the internet, or to talk about how certain people should die, or to photoshop famous people into weird scenarios.

      I’ve avoided writing about the case up until now, mostly because of my involvement. And since Wexler was found not guilty on some charges, while the other charges resulted in a hung jury (the jury foreperson said that they voted 8 to 4 to acquit on those other charges), there’s a chance there may be a second trial. So recognize that it’s a case that I may still have future involvement in — and where I’m choosing my words carefully (the prosecutors in the case tried to take some of my posts on Techdirt out of context to attack my credibility, and it’s possible that could happen again — though I will admit to some confusion over being asked, twice, on the stand if I consider myself “an advocate for internet freedom,” as if that were a bad thing).

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • FCC Postpones Vote on Set-Top Box Reform in a Blow to Chairman Wheeler

      The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday postponed a vote on its highly-anticipated proposal to increase competition in the video “set-top box” market after the chairman of the agency failed to secure the necessary votes to approve the plan.

      The delay amounts to a humbling setback for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who had made reforming the $20 billion set-top box market a centerpiece of his pro-consumer agenda. With 40 days to go before a presidential election that will determine the makeup of the FCC going forward, the fate of the reform measure is now in doubt.

      As recently as Thursday morning, the vote was still scheduled, but Wheeler was ultimately unable to come to an agreement with his fellow Democratic commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who had previously raised concerns about his plan, and who represents the key swing vote at the five-member agency.

      “Commissioner Rosenworcel came to Chairman Wheeler’s office with a bunch of edits on the order, and those edits were unacceptable to his office,” according to a person familiar with the matter. “And that led to an impasse. As of 8 a.m. this morning the vote was on, and then by 9 a.m. the vote was pulled.”

    • FTC won’t give up fight against AT&T unlimited data throttling
    • The FCC Wants To Know Why Journalists Had To Pay $200 For WiFi At Presidential Debate

  • DRM/Broadcast

    • Don’t Hide DRM in a Security Update

      Over 10,000 of you have joined EFF in calling on HP to make amends for its self-destructing printers in the past few days. Looks like we got the company’s attention: today, HP posted a response on its blog. Apparently recognizing that its customers are more likely to see an update that limits interoperability as a bug than as a feature, HP says that it will issue an optional firmware update rolling back the changes that it had made. We’re very glad to see HP making this step.

      But a number of questions remain.

      First, we’d like to know what HP’s plans are for informing users about the optional firmware update. Right now, the vast majority of people who use the affected printers likely do not know why their printers lost functionality, nor do they know that it’s possible to restore it. All of those customers should be able to use their printers free of artificial restrictions, not just the relatively few who have been closely following this story.

    • 46 California Cities Join Rush To Impose ‘Netflix Tax’

      Last year, Chicago proudly declared that the city would be expanding its 9% amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar entertainment) to online streaming services and cloud computing. While Chicago was hungrily pursuing the $12 million in additional revenue the expanded tax would provide, it ultimately faced a lawsuit questioning the legality of Chicago’s move. The ongoing lawsuit by the Liberty Justice Center claims Chicago violated city rules by not holding a full vote on the changes, and is violating the Internet Freedom Tax Act.

      Legal or not, Chicago’s push to impose a Netflix tax has opened the floodgates.

    • What Cord Cutting? Cable Sector Hiked TV Prices 40% In Last Five Years

      We’ve noted time and time again that the cable and broadcast industry could compete with cord cutting by lowering prices, it just chooses not to. Even with last quarter seeing the biggest quarterly defection by paying subscribers ever recorded, time and time again you’ll see sector sycophants proclaim that cord cutting either doesn’t exist, or has been violently over-hyped and isn’t worth taking seriously. In fact, most sector executives still believe that the shift away from traditional cable will magically end once Millennials start procreating (protip: it won’t).

      As such, they’ve continued to raise cable TV rates at an absurd rate in the belief that they can keep milking the legacy cable TV cash cow in perpetuity. And while broadcasters certainly take the lion’s share of the blame for raising the cost of programming, you’d be hard pressed to find a cable TV provider that isn’t making things worse by also saddling consumers with misleading fees for nothing and soaring cable box, modem, and other hardware rental costs.

      The end result is users paying 40% more for cable TV than they did just five years ago. In fact the average cable bill is now $103.10 per month, an increase of 4% in the past year. And while the cable sector is quick to proclaim that this just reflects the “increased value” of cable TV, the reality is that most cable ops are trimming back overall channels to try and offset the bloated, soaring cost of sports programming.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • UN Panel Report On Access To Medicines Seen As Holding Potential For Change

      Speakers at a side event to the United Nations General Assembly last week commended a new report on access to medicines prepared by a high-level panel hand-chosen by the UN secretary general as containing fresh ideas and the potential to bring change to a longstanding problem.

      The breakfast dialogue, entitled, The Role of Health Technology: Innovation & Access in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, was organised on 23 September by the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, whose report was released last week (IPW, United Nations, 14 September 2016).

    • WIPO staff council legal rep demands immediate removal of Gurry after distribution of misconduct report [Ed: about time?]

      The legal counsel to the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Staff Council has called for the immediate removal of Francis Gurry as the UN agency’s director general and the lifting of his diplomatic immunity so that he might face possible criminal investigation or civil proceedings over the findings of a report into alleged misconduct that was delivered to the Chair of the WIPO General Assemblies in February.

      The demand is contained in a letter sent to “All Ambassadors and Permanent Representatives to the United Nations and other International Organizations in Geneva” yesterday. IAM has obtained a copy of the letter and has verified that it is authentic.

      The letter was sent following the distribution earlier this week of a heavily redacted version of the findings of an investigation, carried out by the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), into a series of allegations originally levelled at Gurry by the former deputy director general of the organisation James Pooley back in April 2014. Although the OIOS submitted its findings in February it is only now that WIPO member states have been able to see a copy of the report – albeit one in which large chunks have been blacked out.

    • Signs Of Changing Trends In FTAs’ IP Chapters, Speakers Say At WTO

      On intellectual property, the EU has published factsheets and position papers on what they would like to see in the agreement, she said. One of the focuses of those documents is raising awareness on the benefits of IP, and “we regret that the focus is not also on the human right to access information,” she said.

    • Trademarks

      • Lee v. Tam: Supreme Court Takes on the Slants

        In the case, Simon Tam is seeking to register a mark on his band name “The Slants.” The USPTO refused after finding that the mark is disparaging toward individuals of Asian ancestry.

      • US Supreme Court to hear Slants case

        The US Supreme Court has granted cert in Lee v Tam, the case involving Asian-American band The Slants and the issue of offensive trade marks.

        The issue presented is: “Whether the disparagement provision of the Lanham Act, 15 USC 1052(a), which provides that no trademark shall be refused registration on account of its nature unless, inter alia, it ‘[c]onsists of . . . matter which may disparage . . . persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute’ is facially invalid under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”

    • Copyrights

      • YouTube Hires Music Executive as a Liaison to the Industry

        For the last year, the music industry has been waging a bitter war against YouTube, accusing the popular video site of paying too little in royalties. The conflict has often seemed tribal, with record companies and stars on one side, and Silicon Valley on the other.

        Now, YouTube has brought over a major player from the music side.

        Lyor Cohen, who got his start in the early days of hip-hop and went on to top executive positions at Def Jam and the Warner Music Group — earning a reputation as the most tenacious force in any deal — has joined YouTube as the service’s global head of music, YouTube announced on Wednesday.

        It is the latest effort by a tech company to fortify itself by hiring a music insider. Two years ago, Apple bought Beats, which was founded by Dr. Dre and the producer Jimmy Iovine; in June, Spotify hired Troy Carter, the former manager of Lady Gaga.

        In a statement, Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer, suggested that Mr. Cohen’s role was, to some degree, to be a bridge to the music world.

      • Kim Dotcom’s Extradition Appeal Concludes, Will He Get a “Fair Go”?

        After more than four weeks the extradition appeal hearings of Kim Dotcom and his former Megaupload colleagues have concluded. In his closing arguments, Dotcom’s lawyer urged the court to carefully weigh the facts and give his client a “fair go,” which he says the District Court failed to do. However, even if the High Court sides with the defense, the case is still far from over.

      • Dotcom Petitions Appeals Court For Rehearing Over Seized Millions

        Last month, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected efforts by Kim Dotcom to regain control over millions of dollars in assets seized by the US Government. Yesterday, Dotcom’s legal team petitioned the Court for a rehearing and rehearing en banc on the issues of forfeiture of assets and fugitive disentitlement.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/09/29/nmap-and-postgresql-releases/feed/ 0 Links 19/9/2016: Linux 4.8 RC7, KDevelop 5.0.1 http://techrights.org/2016/09/19/kdevelop-5-0-1/ http://techrights.org/2016/09/19/kdevelop-5-0-1/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2016 04:21:51 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95509

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Overcoming language and distance barriers in open source projects

    Open source communities were among the first to use the Internet to make the physical distance between people irrelevant. The Internet is a great tool, since it helps us collaborate wherever we are. It doesn’t matter if you’re having lunch at the Eiffel Tower or waking up in sunny San Francisco, the Internet has helped us connect people on deeper levels.

    I am from Peru, and have always lived in Peru. I study in Peru, and the Internet has helped me find valuable information for projects and life in general. However, when I joined the the Linux community, my life changed radically.

  • A beginner’s bumpy journey to find a few good bugs

    I’d been trying to contribute to open source for about two years. Yes. Two years. And there’s one thing I can tell you with a lot of certainty—it is intimidating. It’s tough to get started. You have to learn how to work within a large code base. You have to learn and adhere to a project’s coding style guides. Nothing makes sense: the control flow, how different modules interact, how and why the code is organized the way it is—it’s all one big maze. You need to muster a lot of courage to ask questions, dive into the code base knowing next to nothing, and keep fighting with it. (This is a generalization about how some projects operate, but many have difficulty making their projects accessible to new contributors.)

  • Top 10 Open Source CRM

    Clearly, finding the right open source CRM (customer relationship management) for your business isn’t as simple as randomly selecting one. To be sure, there are plenty of good open source CRM apps, but still: you must carefully weigh features, function, licensing and support, for your own needs.

    In this article, I’ll share my top open source CRM picks. And with any luck, you’ll find one that’ll be a great match for your business!

  • Adept Releases Open-Source Energy Measurement Tools for Parallel Hardware

    Over its three-year lifespan, Adept has investigated energy consumption in parallel hardware and software. Energy efficiency is becoming a serious consideration for developers of high-performance and high-throughput computing systems. As computers become more powerful, they inevitably consume more energy – unless the technology is improved so they become more efficient.

    [...]

    The Adept Tool Suite consists of three parts: a benchmark suite, power measurement infrastructure, and power and performance prediction tool.

  • Riot wants to be like Slack, but with the flexibility of an underlying open source platform

    In the ‘old days’ there were plenty of messaging apps and aggregators, but they survived in an open source world. Today, business models dictate that platforms like Slack must keep their messages to themselves.

    It would be nice if open-source alternatives could bring back the days of flexibility, combined with today’s world of excellent user experience. What if Slack were simply an excellent tool running on an underlying open-source platform? Could it create the same value?

    Riot (formerly known as Vector while it was running in Beta) is a new UK-borne app hoping to have a crack at that.

  • Orange to test AT&T’s open source ECOMP platform

    Orange’s R&D division Orange Labs Network plans to test ECOMP, an open source platform designed by AT&T for creating and managing software-centric network services. ECOMP, which stands for Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy, will be released to the wider telecom industry as an open source offering managed by the Linux Foundation.

  • MongoDB cofounder explains what to do when a project has gone off track

    It has happened to nearly every technology leader. A project that seemed like an excellent idea when you started it either drifted off course, proved too ambitious or not as useful as originally thought. What do you do when you’re in the middle of a project that you realize is not going well?

    Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of open source database company MongoDB, knows this problem first-hand. In an interview with The Enterprisers Project, he explains what happened when he and his co-founder realized they had to pull the plug on the original version of their technology.

  • Open Source OpenPokeMap Project Will Enable Anybody To Run A Pokemon Go Tracker

    The 3rd party development community around Niantic’s hyper successful Pokemon Go game is not slowing down. A new project will enable everybody interested to run his own Pokemon Go map service. OpenPokeMap is an open-source, open-infrastructure map for Pokemon Go. The developer behind FastPokeMap is supporting the project as a “consultant.” He says that OpenPokeMap is similar to FastPokeMap.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • IBM (IBM), Hortonworks (HDP) Announce Open Source Distribution on Power Systems

      IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Hortonworks (NASDAQ: HDP) today announced the planned availability of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP®) for IBM Power Systems enabling POWER8 clients to support a broad range of new applications while enriching existing ones with additional data sources.

      HDP’s secure, enterprise-ready open source Apache Hadoop distribution provides clients with a highly scalable storage platform designed to process large data sets across thousands of computing nodes. For enterprise users running POWER8-based systems, the first microprocessor designed for big data and analytics, Hortonworks provides a new distribution option for selecting a cost-effective platform for running their big data and analytics workloads. This open source Hadoop and Spark distribution will complement the performance of Power Systems by allowing clients to quickly gain business insights from their structured and unstructured data.

    • Canonical and IBM Deepen Their OpenStack Partnership

      Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is spreading out with its OpenStack eforts. It has announced that Ubuntu OpenStack is now available for IBM customers who want to manage their own OpenStack cloud across IBM platforms such as IBM z Systems, IBM LinuxONE and IBM Power Systems, including IBM’s newly announced OpenPOWER LC servers. This is an expansion of the companies’ hybrid cloud partnership, and many instances of OpenStack already run on top of Ubuntu.

      As the OpenStack marketplace shifts, there is a shortage of people available to build secure and private clouds. IBM reports that it is following in the footsteps of companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Tele2, Bloomberg and Time Warner Cable in making Ubuntu OpenStack available to customers as a tested and supported cloud solution.

    • Making installation easy, Hackathon winners, and more OpenStack news

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • NetBeans Going to Apache: Is Java Next?

      Most followers of open source probably weren’t surprised by Wednesday’s fuss over NetBeans’ possible move from Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation. If you missed it, it started with an announcement on the NetBeans website that “Oracle has proposed contributing the NetBeans IDE as a new open-source project within the Apache Incubator.”

      The announcement goes on to indicate the move is being made out of the goodness of Oracle’s heart. “Oracle is relinquishing its control of NetBeans and introducing it to Apache’s widely accepted governance model, which will provide new opportunities to the NetBeans community and stimulate further code contributions.”

  • CMS

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Does Microsoft really love Linux?

      Microsoft has always had an…uneasy…relationship with Linux, to say the least. But a writer at The Verge is convinced that Microsoft does indeed love Linux these days, and that its stormy Linux past is now behind the Redmond giant.

    • PerfView is now Open Source On GitHub [Ed: Microsoft uses PerfView in an openwashing effort in order to market proprietary Visual Studio, which adds surveillance to compiled code]

      The readme associated with the GitHub repository has getting started information (how to fetch the repository, how to build, test and deploy the code. We use Visual Studio 2015. You can download a free copy of Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition that has everything you need to clone, build test and deploy PerfView. Thus you can get going with PerfView RIGHT NOW. The instructions on the PerfView repository tell you how to get started even if you know nothing about GIT (although knowing something about GIT and Visual Studio certainly helps).

    • Microsoft will close its Skype office in London [Ed: in recent years, as Microsoft pretends to be “Open” (it’s the opposite), layoffs have become routine at the company]

      Microsoft is going to close Skype’s London office, in a move that could impact the jobs of the nearly 400 people employed there. The company told the Financial Times that is will “unify some engineering positions,” but that it “will be entering into a consultation process to help those affected by the redundancies.”

      The London office is a key part of Skype’s history, since it was the primary engineering site and headquarters of the company before Microsoft acquired it, and it also survived Skype’s strange interlude under the ownership of eBay before it was acquired by the big M.

      While the move is no doubt a blow to London’s tech scene, some former insiders told the FT that it’s also not a surprise to see it go, largely because a steady stream of executive departures over the last few years have foretold a shift in the locus of power at the company. Post-acquisition, Microsoft has also done a lot of product work on Skype, with plenty of integration with Office 365 and a number of feature introductions that bring it closer in line with Slack.

    • Microsoft (MSFT) news recap: Microsoft loves open source, Garage gets a new look and more [Ed: Microsoft advocacy site repeats the Big Lie; Microsoft still lobbies against FOSS, e.g. in India this year]

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • #SoftwareFreedom: India’s Lukewarm Relationship with FOSS Needs to Change

      For a over decade, the third Saturday of every September has been celebrated as Software Freedom Day in dozens of countries around the world. The free and open source software (FOSS) movement, which grew in the 1980s out of frustrations with restrictions on use of copyrighted software, has changed considerably in the last decade. Barring a few exceptions, there has been a dilution in the focus on replacing Windows’ domination of mainstream computing. But FOSS, which some people may know as Linux, still forms the backbone of our technological lives. In developing countries like India, where scaling affordable access to technology is an admitted priority of the government, the promotion and adoption of FOSS seems to be a viable and pragmatic policy decision.

      Whether one is aware of it or not, FOSS is behind the majority of all computing that makes modern, digital life possible. FOSS runs most of all smartphones, supercomputers, ATMs, servers and websites around the world. In India, two massive citizen-facing projects, our railway booking website IRCTC, and Aadhaar’s online infrastructure, use Linux servers too. But why should you care for FOSS?

    • Commission makes a list of its open source solutions

      The European Commission is about to make a public inventory of the open source solutions used by the Commission and the European Parliament. A methodology for creating the inventory was just accepted by the EC’s Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT), as part of its ‘EU Free and Open Source Software Auditing’ (EU-Fossa) project.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • LA launches open source business portal

      The open source LA Business Portal was funded by the Small Business Administration’s Start Up In A Day initiative and used the codebase of San Francisco’s Business Portal as a foundation for LA’s code.

      As an open source project, the LA Business Portal can help cities without the resources or capacity to build a solution from the ground up improve their business climate, officials said. The startup guides and starter kits for popular business types will be made available to be adapted and used by other local government entities.

  • Programming/Development

    • Ada Gets Promoted To Being A First-Class Language In Coreboot

      Coreboot has mainlined a months-old patch to make the Ada programming language “a first class citizen” in this low-level open-source project.

      As of today in Coreboot GNAT runtime system was also added today for the Ada code.

    • LLVM Still Pursuing Apache 2.0 License + GPLv2 Compatibility

      COMPILER –
      It’s been a while since last talking about the discussions among LLVM developers about re-licensing the project. The re-licensing is moving forward and they are settling on the Apache 2.0 license plus explicitly stating compatibility with GPLv2.

      For the past year they’ve been eyeing the Apache 2 license for the LLVM stack over their University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which is similar to the three-clause BSD license.

    • Update on Node.js npm Tool and Express Module

      The second day at Node Interactive Europe last week had two keynotes that concentrated on specific tools and modules. Kat Marchán talked about the npm packaging tool, and Doug Wilson explored the state of the express module.

    • Git Developers Want Your Feedback (2016 Git Survey)

Leftovers

  • The Mystery of Scandinavia’s Car-Burning Spree

    What’s behind the spate of vehicle arsons that have swept Scandinavia’s cities this year? Over the summer, cars have been set on fire across the region in a spree that shows no sign of abating just yet.

    Between June and mid-August, 134 vehicles were set ablaze in Stockholm, 43 in Sweden’s second city of Gothenburg, and 108 in its third city, Malmö. Meanwhile, across the water in Copenhagen, there were 30 arson attacks on vehicles in August alone, until the arrest of a 21-year-old suspect led police to hope the streak would end. It didn’t, and this week Copenhagen’s car burnings began again, as they also did in neighboring areas of Sweden. Internationally at least, this isn’t what people expect from a region that is usually a byword for prosperity and social order.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Exclusive: How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards Came Tumbling Down

      In a searing investigation into the once lauded biotech start-up Theranos, Nick Bilton discovers that its precocious founder defied medical experts—even her own chief scientist—about the veracity of its now discredited blood-testing technology. She built a corporation based on secrecy in the hope that she could still pull it off. Then, it all fell apart.

    • Monsanto Merges with Bayer, “Their Expertise is War”. Shady Historical Origins, IG Farben, Part of Hitler’s Chemical Genetic Engineering Cartel

      The expertise of these companies are those of war. IG Farben – Hitler’s economic power and pre-war Germany’s highest foreign exchange earner – was also a foreign intelligence operation. Herman Shmitz was President of IG Farben, Shmitz’s nephew Max Ilgner was a Director of IG Farben, while Max’s brother Rudolph Ilgner handled the New York arm of the ‘VOWI‘ network as vice president of CHEMNYCO.

      Paul Warburg – brother of Max Warburg (Board of Directors, Farben Aufsichsrat) – was one of the founding members of the Federal Reserve System in the United States. He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Max Warburg and Hermann Schmitz played a central role in the Farben empire. Other “guiding hands” of Farben Vorstand included Carl Bosch, Fritz ter Meer, Kurt Oppenheim and George von Schnitzler. Every one of them were adjudged ‘War Criminals’ after World War II, except Paul Warburg.

    • Bayer Purchased Monsanto (And We Are All Screwed)

      Cash. That makes it the biggest deal ever in the history of blah blah blah, who gives a shit, are we right?

      If you’re anything like us, your brain turns off when you hear numbers that big being transferred from one giant group of white guys to another. And traditionally, that’s exactly the way giant groups of white guys want it. Especially this one. See, there’s reason to believe this particular group of rich white guys shouldn’t be trusted with the awesome power they’d have after combining.

    • No jail time in Flint water crisis plea deal for former state epidemiologist

      A deal between Flint water crisis prosecutors and a former state epidemiologist includes no incarceration for Corinne Miller, who pleaded no contest to failing to warn hospitals and the public about a Legionnaires’ disease epidemic in Genesee County.

      Miller, 65 of Dewitt, former director of the state Department of Health and Human Services’ Bureau of Epidemiology, pleaded to the least serious charge against her on Wednesday, Sept. 14 — a midemeanor count of neglect of duty by a public officer.

    • Who are Suspect 1 and Suspect 2? Flint water crisis prosecutor won’t say

      Special Flint water crisis prosecutor Todd Flood won’t name two individuals identified only as “Suspect 1″ and “Suspect 2″ in a plea agreement filed in Genesee County District Court this week.

      But after reaching a deal for former state epidemiologist Corinne Miller to plead no contest to a misconduct charge and to cooperate with prosecutors, Flood said the unnamed suspects are evidence that his investigation “is far from over.”

      “You just saw in that plea agreement … obviously there was Suspect 1 and Suspect 2,” Flood said when asked if he expects more criminal charges related to Flint water.

      Miller was the director of the Bureau of Disease Control, Prevention and Epidemiology at Department of Health and Human Services until November 2015, but 10 months earlier, she was “tasked by Suspect 1″ to provide a report regarding a 2014 outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Genesee County and to meet with Suspect 2, according to Miller’s plea agreement.

    • Lansing Politicians Slow To Enact Policy Reforms After Flint Water Crisis

      In the year since Flint’s man-made drinking water crisis exploded and was exposed primarily as a failure of state government, Michigan has allocated $234 million toward the public health emergency that exposed children to lead and has been linked to a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak.

      The state has been much slower, however, in enacting policy reforms to address problems uncovered.

      It’s likely that no major action in the Republican-led Legislature will occur until 2017, angering Democrats who are pushing for changes to the emergency manager law and lead testing.

      It’s been four months since a bicameral legislative committee concluded hearings about Flint’s crisis. It has yet to issue a report and recommendations.

      They are now expected by year’s end. Democrats say there’s no reason to wait to start debating legislation.

  • Security

    • HDDCryptor Ransomware Overwrites Your MBR Using Open Source Tools [Ed: Windows ransom but the headline only says “Open Source”]

      Most of the research on this infection has been done by Marinho, who says that his company was called in to investigate and fix a massive infection at a multi-national company that affected computers in its Brazil, India, and US subsidiaries.

    • The power of protocol analyzers

      In the complicated world of networking, problems happen. But determining the exact cause of a novel issue in the heat of the moment gets dicey. In these cases, even otherwise competent engineers may be forced to rely on trial and error once Google-fu gives out.

      Luckily, there’s a secret weapon waiting for willing engineers to deploy—the protocol analyzer. This tool allows you to definitively determine the source of nearly any error, provided you educate yourself on the underlying protocol. The only catch for now? Many engineers avoid it entirely due to (totally unwarranted) dread.

    • Bitcoin: A Sequence of Proofs

      A potential solution to the growing pains of Bitcoin is the use of proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work. An attacker which has a stake in the history already on the blockchain is unlikely to jeopardize it. In proof-of-stake, the cryptocurrency is paid by the miners into the bets of the next block to win. If an attacker bets on multiple chains, then they’re guaranteed to lose money. This, combined with the fact that buying a lot of currency is more expensive than a lot of computer power, makes proof-of-stake practical. We will cover Peercoin later, which does proof of stake and has other mitigations for certain attacks.

      An interesting idea is vote tattling. When an attacker votes on one block with a predecessor, and then votes on another with the same predecessor, peers can observe this. They can report double voting by using the votes as cryptographically-verified evidence, and taking the attacker’s vote-money.

    • Why real hackers prefer Linux over Windows and Mac

      We have published many tutorials for hackers and security researchers. You may have noticed that most tutorials are based on Linux operating systems. Even the hacking tools out there are based on Linux barring a few which are written for Windows and Mac. The moot question here is that why do hackers prefer Linux over Mac or Windows?

      Today we look at the reason why hackers always prefer Linux over Mac, Windows, and other operating systems. You may have your own reasons for choosing Linux but what do hackers really look forward to while working with Linux.

    • Why Hackers are Choosing Linux Over its Competitors

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Barrel Bomb Conundrum

      It is of course only part of the media distortion around the Syria debacle. Western intervention is aimed at supporting various Saudi backed jihadist militias to take over the country, irrespective of the fact that they commit appalling atrocities. These the media label “democratic forces”. At the same time, we are attacking other Saudi controlled jihadists on the grounds that they are controlled by the wrong kind of Saudi. You see, chopping off the heads of dissidents and gays is OK if you are one of the Saudis who directly controls the Saudi oil resources. It is not OK if you do it freelance and are one of the Saudis who is merely acting at the covert behest of the other Saudis who control the Saudi oil resources.

    • US, Israel sign massive military aid deal for $38 billion over 10 years

      The United States and Israel have signed a new aid deal that will give the Israeli military $38 billion over the course of 10 years. It’s the largest such agreement the U.S. has ever had with any country.

    • After Orlando Massacre, Queer Art Takes a Political Turn

      In the past month, Efrem Zelony-Mindell has transformed a small gallery in New York City into a space for LBGTQ reinvention. His show, n e w f l e s h, seeks to redefine gender and sexual identities through novel representations of the queer community — a task that Zelony-Mindell, a curator and visual artist, considers uniquely pressing in the face of increasingly visible anti-LGBTQ violence. His approach: to abstract, obscure, or remove the body entirely from the works on display. “We tend to see queerness portrayed as a physical or corporeal matter,” he told The Intercept. “This thinking is dehumanizing, and that dehumanization inevitably leads to violence.”

    • Suicides among military bomb techs at crisis level

      In June 2010, after a day of drinking at an American Legion Post in Wyoming near the family’s home, Jeff Hackett downed a couple more swigs of alcohol, said “cheers” and shot and killed himself.

      Among the highly skilled and elite ranks of military explosive ordnance disposal technicians — the men and women who have been on the front line of the war on terror since Sept. 11, 2001 — suicide is a growing concern.

      “It is literally an epidemic,” said Ken Falke, a former EOD technician and founder of the Niceville-based EOD Warrior Foundation, which supports current and former military EOD techs and their families.

    • The couple and their army of retired police officers taking £5m a year from taxpayers to pursue British soldiers around the globe

      For hundreds of British troops, the prospect of being prosecuted for events that took place in Iraq 13 years ago remains a very real nightmare.

      Almost 1,500 cases of abuse of Iraqis, including allegations of torture and even murder, are being investigated by a special team set up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

      Soldiers are terrified of being arrested more than a decade on from the occupation of Iraq, and are dismayed and disgusted by the length of time the investigations are taking. But for one husband and wife team, the British occupation of southern Iraq has proved a cash bonanza.

    • NATO planes bomb Syrian government forces

      The diplomatic row rumbles on after US-led air strikes hit Syrian government forces in Deir ez-Zour, killing 62 soldiers and injuring over 100. This happened only a few days into a week-long trial ceasefire designed to be a precursor to US-Russian joint operations against ISIS.

      It has now been reported that British forces were involved and, needless to say, that the ceasefire is over, with the Russians and the Syrians naturally being blamed.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Julian Assange says he’ll turn himself in if Obama pardons Chelsea Manning

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would turn himself in to US authorities if President Barack Obama grants clemency to Chelsea Manning, the organization said on Twitter Thursday. WikiLeaks’ statement was released one day before a Swedish appeals court decided to maintain a warrant for Assange’s arrest over a 2010 rape charge. Assange has said that extradition to Sweden would lead to his eventual extradition to the US, where he could face charges related to WikiLeaks’ publication of secret government documents.

    • 5 Reasons The WikiLeaks Guy Is Losing His Mind [Ed: attack piece]

      And so, for the past four years, Assange has been working long days in a one-and-a-half-room apartment. He’s not getting any fresh air, he doesn’t get many social calls, and the Ecuadorian government doesn’t have much of a budget. His bathroom doubles as a makeshift gym. He has friends, supporters, and an internet connection, but that can only do so much when you have less variety in your day than most prisoners. And goddamn, is it ever showing.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • On Solidarity with Standing Rock, Executive Clemency and the International Indigenous Struggle

      I call on all my supporters and allies to join the struggle at Standing Rock in the spirit of peaceful spiritual resistance and to work together to protect Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth. I also call upon my supporters and all people who share this Earth to join together to insist that the US complies with and honors the provisions of international law as expressed in the UNDRIP, International Human Rights Treaties and the long-neglected Treaties and trust agreements with the Sioux Nation. I particularly appeal to Jill Stein and the Green Parties of the US and the world to join this struggle by calling for my release and adopting the UNDRIP as the new legal framework for relations with indigenous peoples.

      Finally, I also urge my supporters to immediately and urgently call upon President Obama to grant my petition for clemency, to permit me to live my final years on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Scholars, political grassroots leaders, humanitarians and Nobel Peace Laureates have demanded my release for more than four decades. My Clemency Petition asks President Obama to commute, or end, my prison term now in order for our nation to make progress healing its fractured relations with Native communities. By facing and addressing the injustices of the past, together we can build a better future for our children and our children’s children.

    • Native American Activist Winona LaDuke at Standing Rock: It’s Time to Move On from Fossil Fuels

      While Democracy Now! was covering the Standing Rock standoff earlier this month, we spoke to Winona LaDuke, longtime Native American activist and executive director of the group Honor the Earth. She lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. She spent years successfully fighting the Sandpiper pipeline, a pipeline similar to Dakota Access. We met her right outside the Red Warrior Camp, where she has set up her tipi. Red Warrior is one of the encampments where thousands of Native Americans representing hundreds of tribes from across the U.S. and Canada are currently resisting the pipeline’s construction.

    • Arrests After #KeepItInTheGround Activists Occupy Interior Department

  • Finance

    • 300,000 Join Massive Protests in Germany Against US-EU Corporate Trade Deals

      Hundreds of thousands took to city streets across Germany on Saturday as they marched against a pair of corporate-backed trade deals they say will undermine democracy, attack workers and local economies, and accelerate the threats posed by corporate hegemony and global warming.

      Taking aim at both the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), European Union deals with the United States and Canada respectively, opponents say the agreements are not really concerned with expanding trade but rather increasing corporate power.

    • Warren Slams ISDS Provision in Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal

      Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday said that the investor-state dispute settlement provision in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal would allow corporations to challenge foreign laws before private arbitration panels outside of the traditional legal system.

      “It allows companies to challenge foreign laws they don’t like and potentially win millions or even billions of dollars from taxpayers,” Warren (D-Mass.) told reporters on a conference call, which was hosted by left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen and included economist Jeffrey Sachs and law professors Cruz Reynoso and Alan Morrison.

    • Uber accused of cashing in on bomb explosion by charging almost double to take terrified New Yorkers home

      TRAUMATISED families caught up in the New York bomb blast have accused Uber of cashing in on the tragedy by charging almost double to take them home.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Bernie Sanders, who launched career on protest votes, dismisses Gary Johnson and Jill Stein as protest votes

      Bernie Sanders is one of the most electorally successful non-major party candidates in United States political history. And he said Friday that voting for a third-party candidate for president in 2016 would amount to a “protest vote.”

      “Before you cast a protest vote — because either Clinton or Trump will become president — think hard about it,” Sanders said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This is not a governor’s race. It’s not a state legislative race. This is the presidency of the United States.”

    • Two parties use legitimate means to mask rigged debates

      For several election cycles, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) – a self-proclaimed “non-partisan” private organization that sponsors the debates – has required a 15% average in hand-picked polls as the criteria for debate inclusion. This threshold makes it difficult for candidates outside of the traditional Democratic and Republican parties to appear on stage.

      Like most Americans, I’ve generally accepted these polls at face value. However, a review of publicly available information shows that not only are most of the polls in question inherently unscientific, but that the CPD and its hand-picked pollsters are engaged in a concerted effort to elect establishment candidates in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular.

      There are five polls being used to inform the 15% average. Two of these show blatant scientific problems: Fox News polls under-samples independents by more than 20%, and the CNN-ORC poll admits to dramatically under-sample Millennials. The polling staff have failed to return repeated requests for clarification. This level of unresponsiveness is unheard of within the formal scientific community. Thus, are the polls scientific?

      Almost every reputable scientific journal asks scientists who hope to publish in its pages to disclose any conflicts of interest. The implication is that, if the researcher, or those funding or sponsoring the research favor a specific research outcome, the data might be tainted. Using publicly available information alone, I’ve uncovered massive conflicts of interests that have laid dormant for years.

    • Democrats: A Vote for Third Party is a Vote for Trump?

      The most recent appeal from the Democratic party “warning” voters that a vote for a third party candidate is like a vote for Trump is evidence of a real shift in the awareness of the American people. First, let me clarify: A vote for Trump is a vote for Trump; A vote for Clinton is a vote for Clinton. Using fear to persuade voters to support political parties that have continually disappointed on major issues from foreign policy, education, healthcare and the economy, is the epitome of a failed democracy. Second, let’s address the fact that the Democrats are admittedly launching a “multimillion-dollar digital campaign that talks about what’s at stake and how a vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Donald Trump.” Yet they refuse to #OpenTheDebates. It’s interesting how quickly millions of dollars get thrown at attempts to control the minds and opinions of the people when over half of the workers in this country make less than $30,000 a year.

    • Donald Trump’s birther event is the greatest trick he’s ever pulled

      Donald Trump is, at heart, a showman. He rose to national fame thanks to star turns on reality TV in which he played the tough-talking boss to a group of aspirants hoping to become as successful as he has been in business. His great gift is the ability to draw attention — and then use that attention for his own, usually commercial, purposes.

      Trump may have outdone himself on Friday morning. He and his campaign touted a “major” announcement at his newly opened hotel in Washington, D.C., at 10 a.m. The word was that Trump would walk away from his past skepticism about President Obama’s citizenship while also laying the blame for the birther movement at the feet of Hillary Clinton. (That, of course, isn’t true — according to numerous fact-checkers — but no matter: Trump planned to say it anyway.)

    • Merkel’s party loses support in Berlin state election

      Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party endured a second setback in a state election in two weeks on Sunday, as many voters turned to the left and right in Berlin, according to projections based on exit polls.

      The Social Democrats (SPD) and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) emerged from the Berlin state election as the strongest two parties, but both lost enough support that they won’t be able to continue a coalition government, the projections show.

    • The Mini Film Studio Operating Inside Clinton’s Campaign

      The shot comes about two minutes and thirty-four seconds into the video. A mother in her late 60s, dressed in a cream-colored suit, stands in an almost empty room, watching her daughter on TV. As her daughter speaks, the mother turns to the woman who is seated next to her, and squeals: “Ohhhh she looks so prettyyyyy!”

      It’s a show of motherly pride so natural it would be completely unremarkable were it not for the fact that the the mother in the room is Hillary Clinton, the daughter is Chelsea Clinton, and the clip is part of a backstage compilation video about the 2016 Democratic National Convention, produced by the Clinton campaign.

    • GOP Lobbyist Offers Reward in Murder of DNC Staffer in Hopes of Laying Rumors to Rest

      Around the same time this piece was published, however, WikiLeaks Editor in Chief Julian Assange spoke of a possible connection between Rich’s death and the DNC email leak. “I’m suggesting that our sources take risks,” he said in a video interview on the Dutch television program “Nieuwsuur,” although Assange refused to say whether Rich was a WikiLeaks source.

      “It’s quite something to suggest a murder,” the interviewer responds, “and that’s basically what you’re doing.”

      “Well, others have suggested that,” Assange carefully replies. “We are investigating to understand what happened in that situation, with Seth Rich. I think it is a concerning situation, but there’s not a conclusion yet.”

    • Monopolizing the Debates

      Soon most of the country will be watching the debates. To be told that you will be watching the ‘debates’ is an insult to your intelligence. They’re not forums to inform and enlighten the electorate, but spectacles where the candidates preen and pander to the viewers; political performances to showcase the triumph of form over substance. I was wondering why they are even called debates instead of grudge matches? This year features two of the most unlikable wrestlers, I mean candidates, in history. In this corner we have Donald “The Demagogue” Trump and in the other corner we have Hillary “The Crusher” Clinton.

      The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) is a non-profit, tax exempt organization. In their mission statement they talk about providing: “the best possible information to viewers and listeners” and how voter education is one of their goals. Any person reading this might think that the CPD is just another charitable organization demonstrating their altruism. Nothing could be further from the truth! Even though the CPD claims to be independent of the two major parties, their past and present leadership consists of democratic and republican politicians (with an occasional media acolyte). Because none of the members is a current office holder, the CPD likes to claim they are non-partisan. As the Libertarian SuperPAC claims in their open letter to the CPD: “Bi-partisan is not the same as non-partisan”. The debates always did highlight the two duopoly candidates, but the CPD seeks to make sure any non-duopoly candidates with a different point of view aren’t heard.

      Throughout the years, the number of debates has varied between two and four. Recently the CPD has settled on four debates, with one of them between the vice-presidential candidates, but it’s their decision to limit the debates to candidates with over 15% in the polls that has drawn scrutiny. They initiated this 15% threshold to be included in the debates in 2000. In the hundred years before this decision, there were some presidential candidates who received less than 15% of the vote, yet won votes in the electoral college. That hasn’t happened in almost 50 years, thanks in large part to duopoly members controlling who is in the debates.

    • Green Party’s Stein and Baraka on ballot for 90% of US voters

      The Green Party campaign for presidential candidate Jill Stein and vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka has completed its 2016 ballot access drive. Stein-Baraka will be on the ballot in 45 states, including Washington, D.C., and they will be official write-in candidates in three more states. Ballots cast for official write-in candidates are counted, whereas unofficial write-in ballots are not.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Italy on the verge of the stupidest censorship law in European history

      After a string of high-profile cyberbullying and revenge-porn incidents, the Italian Chamber of Deputies has put forward a bill that will do nothing to prevent these abuses, and everything to allow for rampant, unaccountable censorship of the Italian internet, without rule of law or penalty for abuse.

      Under the proposed law, the “site manager” of Italian media, including bloggers, newspapers and social networks would be obliged to censor “mockery” based on “the personal and social condition” of the victim — that is, anything the recipient felt was personally insulting. The penalty for failing to take action is a fine of €100,000. Truthfulness is not a defense in suits under this law — the standard is personal insult, not falsehood.

    • The No-Censorship Approach to Life

      Students at my institution, Columbia University, exist in a world where virtually every human thought ever conceived is open to study, examination, consideration, acceptance, rejection, debate, and analysis. To be sure, we have standards that guide us as we move through this vast wilderness of the human mind — we insist on notions like reason, fact, nonpartisanship — but nothing is out of bounds for intellectual inquiry.

      Over the past couple of years, there have been a number of controversies on campuses across the country, including mine, which were all more or less about speech — the speech of fellow students, of residence-hall administrators, of faculty, of institutions through the naming of buildings and the display of pictures, and of outside people invited to the campus. The debate, in part, has been about what to do about speech that was considered offensive or dangerous. Sometimes there were calls for bans on speech and official punishments.

    • Corporate rights have a long history

      This argument could contain some merit, especially if “corporate personhood” were a new concept — but it’s not.

    • Video blogger claims YouTube ‘threatened’ her over Juncker interview

      A French video blogger selected to interview European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Sunday she was pressured by YouTube to ask “soft questions” during the webcast.

      “I found out they expected for me to ask only very soft questions,” said Laetitia Birbes in a Facebook video about her interactions with YouTube before last week’s interview. “The whole point was to give advertisement to Juncker.”

      The interview was conducted online Thursday, a day after Juncker had delivered his “State of the Union” address, and was sponsored by YouTube, Euronews and the Debating Europe online platform.

      Birbes, a blogger from the outskirts of Paris, told French news website Rue 89 she was “assured” by YouTube that she was free to ask any question, but that a representative from the video site suggested she ask Juncker questions such as “What is happiness?” and for details on his vintage Nokia phone and dog “Plato.”

      But Birbes said YouTube balked at accepting some “more important questions.” She said a YouTube representative advised her he would need to speak to Juncker’s spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud about potential “red-flag” questions.

    • Anti-Piracy Outfits Caught Fabricating Takedown Notices

      Not all anti-piracy vendors play fair when it comes to removing copyright-infringing content from the Internet. In fact, there is clear and convincing evidence that several companies ‘make up’ links that have never even existed, perhaps in part to boost their own numbers.

    • Tattooed man rubbishes Facebook censorship of his bum, says ‘if you don’t like, don’t look’

      Sweide Lum-Wairepo had the puhoro done on his buttocks, thighs and upper back by tattooist Hirini Katene, who posted videos and photos of the work on Facebook.

      However, the video was taken down after it was deemed to violate the community guidelines and only the photos have been allowed to remain online.

      The video shows the man’s back then spins to his front, where he can be seen cupping his genitals to obscure them from the camera.

      However, a thatch of pubic hair remains visible.

      Mr Lum-Weirepo said that if people didn’t like it, they didn’t have to watch it.

      “I thought it was pretty s*** … because it’s just something cultural,” he said.

    • Montenegro: Mayor accused of repeatedly undermining press freedom

      Kolasin, which is the centre of a regional municipality of about 10,000 people, has a small media market that includes just one local newspaper named Kolasin and four correspondents working for the national dailies — Pobjeda, Dan, Vijesti and Dnevne Novine. There is no local TV station. The local government is run by a coalition of opposition parties — Democratic Front, the Social Democratic Party of Montenegro (SDP) and the Socialist People’s Party of Montenegro — while the Democratic Party of Socialists is the majority party in the national parliament and it runs the Government.

    • Censoring the terrors of war
    • Facebook reverses ‘napalm girl’ photo censorship following media pressure
    • Our Father, who art Facebook: is the social media giant getting too big for its boots?
    • Norwegian newspaper calls out Facebook’s founder
    • Facebook takes U-turn over ‘Napalm girl’ photograph

      Numerous posts were deleted but Isaksen’s was still up Friday afternoon. Hansen said he received an email Wednesday from the social network requesting that the image be taken down.

      Facebook is facing criticism over its regulation of content as it aims to find a universal standard to apply to its 1.7 billion monthly users, and bans on pornography prevent posting art or historic photographs like the one at the heart of the controversy in Norway.

    • TV self-censorship takes toll on National Games
    • CNN Indonesia Extends Apology to KPI over Blurred Images
    • Indon swimmer sparks censorship debate
    • Broadcasting Commission Washes Hands of Censorship as Indonesia Loses Focus
    • Overzealous censors return: TV station blurs out National Games swimmer’s entire body
    • Indon swimmer sparks censorship debate

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Assange, Manning and Snowden, Standing with the Conscience of Truthtellers

      Last week, Oliver Stone’s biopic “Snowden” hit the theaters. The film illuminates the life of Edward Snowden between 2004 and 2013, aiming to humanize one of the most wanted men in the world. Just before its release, a public campaign was launched urging President Obama to pardon this renowned NSA whistleblower.

      The massive US government persecution of truthtellers over the past years has exiled conscience from civil society, locking it behind bars and driving it into asylum. Yet, despite these attacks, it refuses to die.

      From prison where she is serving 35 years, Chelsea Manning is standing up for her dignity. Recently, she protested her dehumanizing treatment by engaging in a hunger strike. All the while, WikiLeaks editor in chief Julian Assange keeps publishing, giving asylum to the most persecuted documents, while being arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian embassy for the last 4 years. As this struggle continues, the torch for transparency and courage that kindled hearts and has sparked public debate keeps shedding light on the state of the world we live in.

    • Why Is HPSCI’s Snowden Report So Inexcusably Shitty?

      There’s now a growing list of things in the HPSCI report on Snowden that are either factually wrong, misleading, or spin.

      One part of the spin the report admits itself: the committee assessed damage based on the 1.5 million documents Snowden touched — an approach the now discredited General Michael Flynn presented in briefings to the committee — rather than the far more limited set the Intelligence Community included in its damage assessment.

    • Why Obama Should Pardon All Leakers and Whistleblowers — Not Just Edward Snowden

      Of course President Obama should pardon Edward Snowden — and Chelsea Manning, too.

      But this story is not about the excellent reasons for thanking rather than locking up the two most famous whistleblowers of the post-9/11 era. Plenty of people are already calling for that in powerful ways. A new petition on Snowden’s behalf has been signed by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey as well as Steve Wozniak, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aragorn (also known as Viggo Mortensen). Organizations coming out in support of a pardon for Snowden, who is currently a political refugee in Moscow, include the ACLU, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. And Oliver Stone has just released “Snowden,” a movie that emphasizes his good and patriotic intentions.

      But the unfortunate truth of our times is that Obama is not going to pardon Snowden and Manning. His administration has invested too much capital in demonizing them to turn back now. However, there are other leakers and whistleblowers for whom the arguments in favor of pardons are not only compelling but politically palatable, too. Their names are Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake. All of them were government officials who talked with journalists and were charged under the Espionage Act for disclosures of information that were far less consequential than the classified emails that Hillary Clinton stored on her server at home or the top secret war diaries that David Petraeus shared with his biographer and girlfriend. Petraeus, a former general and CIA director, got a fine for his transgressions. Clinton got a presidential nomination.

    • The Washington Post is wrong: Edward Snowden should be pardoned

      With the launch of Oliver Stone’s Snowden film this past weekend came a renewed push for a pardon for Edward Snowden from the world’s leading human rights organizations.

      But predictably, not everyone agreed that he should be pardoned. On Saturday, the Washington Post editorial board deplorably editorialized against it despite its own paper winning the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on his leaked documents.

    • Why President Obama should pardon Edward Snowden

      Cases like Edward Snowden’s are precisely the reason the president’s constitutional pardon power exists.

      Historically, outgoing presidents have often invoked this power in the last days of their terms — at times on behalf of people who’ve committed reprehensible acts — under the premise that mitigating circumstances outweigh the rationale for punishment.

      President Obama now has the opportunity to use this power proudly, in recognition of one of the most important acts of whistleblowing in modern history.

      Since Snowden first disclosed documents in 2013 detailing the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, we’ve seen an unprecedented global debate about the proper limits of government spying. This debate has had a transformative effect: on privacy laws and standards, on the security of the devices we depend on to communicate with one another and store sensitive information, and on how we understand our relationship to the institutions that govern us.

    • Commentary: How ‘Snowden’ the movie could help win a pardon for Snowden the man

      The days leading up to last Friday’s release of director Oliver Stone’s Snowden looked like one long movie trailer.

      The American Civil Liberties Union and other human-right groups on Wednesday announced a campaign to win a presidential pardon for Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contract employee who leaked hundreds of thousands of its highly classified documents to journalists. The next day, the House Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan letter to the president that advised him against any pardon and claimed Snowden “caused tremendous damage to national security.”

      The week before, Stone had invited me to a private screening of his movie in Washington. I once worked in an NSA facility, and I’ve written about the agency for decades, so I was surprised and pleased by how successful Stone was in creating an accurate picture of life in the NSA.

      He did a remarkable job of capturing the sense of how rare, difficult and risky it is for anyone in the agency to challenge the ethics and legality of its operations. I was astounded by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s doppelganger-like portrayal of Snowden. At one point in the film, when the real Snowden appeared, it took me a moment or two to realize the switch.

    • Limehouse author Sinclair Mckay is exploring Cold War codebreaking in The Spies Of Winter [Ed: GCHQ puff pieces again]

      “If you think Europe is having a crisis now, go back to 1946 when the entire continent was blasted back to medieval times,” says Sinclair McKay, author of The Spies Of Winter, which delves into the lives of The GCHQ codebreakers, who fought the Cold War and knew the darkest secrets of British Intelligence at that time.

      After World War Two had ended, the devastation left across Europe was tremendous, as hundreds of people were displaced and millions had been slaughtered.

      There was also a lingering fear that the war wasn’t really over and would break out again at any second. However, this time around there was also a much bigger threat as the world had moved in to the age of nuclear weapons where mass destruction was a clear and present danger.

    • UK explores national DNS filtering system

      Ciaran Martin, current Director-General Cyber at GCHQ and the first Chief Executive of the new National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), has set out a new UK approach to cyber security. Speaking at the Billington Cyber Security Summit in Washington DC, Martin outlined how the new NCSC will adopt a more active posture in defending the UK from the range of cyber threats, as well as the need for government, industry and law enforcement to work in even closer partnership.

    • Britain’s GCHQ looks at creating nationwide Internet firewall
    • Op-Ed: Why Obama should pardon Edward Snowden

      I have signed on to the letter asking President Obama to pardon Edward Snowden that was released today. I know this will be an unpopular position among many of my former colleagues in the national security community. My reasons for doing so are not fully captured by that letter. They are different from those who see Snowden simply as a hero and the NSA as the villain. I have concluded that a pardon for Edward Snowden, even if he does not personally deserve one, is in the broader interests of the nation.

    • Chicago woman launches lawsuit against Canadian maker of app-based vibrator

      An American woman has launched a proposed class-action lawsuit against the Canadian-owned maker of a smartphone-enabled vibrator, alleging the company sells products that secretly collect and transmit “highly sensitive” information.

      The Chicago-area woman, identified in a statement of claim only as N.P., has made her complaints against Standard Innovation (US) Corp., which is owned by the Ottawa-based Standard Innovation Corp, over a “high-end” vibrator called the We-Vibe.

      The lawsuit, which was filed earlier this month in an Illinois court, explains that to fully operate the device, users download the We-Connect app on a smartphone, allowing them and their partners remote control over the Bluetooth-equipped vibrator’s settings.

      In particular, the app’s “connect lover” feature — which promises a secure connection — allows partners to exchange text messages, conduct video chats and control a paired We-Vibe device, the woman’s statement of claim said.

    • How an Art Exhibit on Surveillance Says Too Little by Showing Too Much

      Photography and video are powerful mediums for these sorts of topics. They are inherently entwined in tools of surveillance, but they allow artists to play with and document surveillance. Photography can really make us think about the meaning of privacy, and the best work in “Public, Private, Secret” proves that to be true. But the exhibit, trying to say everything, doesn’t say much.

    • “We Are Adopting Principles of Fascism”

      Retired Army JAG Major Todd Pierce explains how his perspective on U.S. foreign policy and politics has changed as he watched the nation’s slide into “perpetual war,” in Part Two of an interview with Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss.

    • The Value of Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’

      As Stone emphasized in person at a screening that I attended, the film is not a documentary and was decidedly fictionalized for dramatic effect. That said, many specifics and incidents are true — and Stone remained true to Snowden in terms of his intelligence, temperament and reasoning that helped shape the actions he took.

      This riveting film — Stone’s latest foray into the dangers and excesses of the National Security State — has all the ingredients that we’ve come to expect from the frequent Academy Award winner and nominee. Stone’s touch is everywhere evident in the film.

      The story that Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald weaves is compelling. The characters grow and evolve over the course of the film. The score is evocative. Shots are artfully crafted to make a rich movie-going experience. The visuals — and in one particular sequence, visualizations — are stunning.

      Stone takes us along on Snowden’s personal journey of discovery in a film that is anchored by the love story between initially political opposites who grow, change and learn to make sacrifices to protect each other.

    • Cyber Command, NSA split could affect west county

      Fort George G. Meade and the surrounding area could see an increase in military contracts and investments with a unified U.S. Cyber Command that is separate from the National Security Agency.

      By becoming a combatant command, U.S. Cyber Command would become a more influential institution within the Department of Defense, with the ability to directly procure resources for its operations and have its own contracting arm, as opposed to going through the NSA.

      The debate has resurfaced whether the two agencies should have a single leader, with officials examining how such a split would work.

      “By elevating it, it’s a big broadcast mechanism for the state of Maryland and for this region,” said Tim O’Farrell, president of the Fort Meade Alliance.

    • CyberCom and the NSA need a divorce

      Separating the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command is the right thing to do and would correct the mistake made by combining them in the first place.

    • Can the NSA Stop the Next Snowden?

      William Evanina has never met Edward Snowden, but the two are intimately bound. As national counterintelligence executive—essentially the man in charge of American counterintelligence—Evanina is tasked with fixing the damage that leaks like Edward Snowden’s have done to the U.S. intelligence community, and preventing new ones.

      In the summer of 2013, Evanina was assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office. When the Snowden breach was announced, he was put on the case.

    • WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)

      Three of the four media outlets which received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden – The Guardian, The New York Times and The Intercept – have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a newspaper, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which – by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them – implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

      But not The Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU-and-Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page not only argued today in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — their paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” “accept[] a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Glenn Beck: Empathy for Black Lives Matter

      In a recent speech to a group of conservatives, I made what I thought was a relatively uncontroversial point about the commonalities between Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter activists. I thought this was a simple idea, but the criticism was immediate and sharp: How dare I try to understand the “other side”?

    • One in 4 French Muslims in ‘revolt’ against secular laws

      Around one in four French Muslims, mostly young people, support an ultra-conservative form of Islam, including the wearing of the full-face veil, but the vast majority accept France’s strict secular laws, a study showed Sunday.

      The Ifop survey carried out for a major study of French Muslims by Institut Montaigne, a liberal think-tank, showed that the vast majority of people who identify as Muslim accept curbs on religion in public.

      But 60 percent considered girls should nonetheless be allowed to wear the headscarf in school, 12 years after it and other religious symbols were banished from the classroom, the survey published in Le Journal du Dimanche weekly showed.

      And around one in four — 24 percent — supported the wearing of the burqa and niqab, the full-face veils that were banned in public places in 2010.

      The survey of 1,029 people aims to inform the government’s plans to overhaul French Muslim bodies in the wake of several jihadist attacks, most of them the work of French extremists.

    • Inspector General Says FBI Probably Shouldn’t Impersonate Journalists; FBI Says It Would Rather Impersonate Companies Anyway

      The FBI’s impersonation of an AP journalist during an investigation raised some serious questions about what the agency considered to be acceptable behavior when pursuing suspects. The outing of this tactic led to a lawsuit by the Associated Press, which was naturally unhappy its name was being used to deliver malware to a teenaged bomb threat suspect.

      The FBI performed its own investigation of the matter (but only after it had become public knowledge — seven years after the incident actually occurred) and found that rules may have been broken by this impersonation of a news agency. Certain approval steps were skipped, making the investigatory tactic not exactly by the book. But in the end, the report congratulated the FBI on using the ends to justify the means.

    • Green Party VP Ajamu Baraka on Human Rights Violations in the United States

      In an interview with Sharmini Peries, Baraka discusses Black Lives Matters, the Flint water crisis, shelter, immigration, and more

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Town Loses Gigabit Connections After FCC Municipal Broadband Court Loss

      Back in February the FCC voted to use its Congressional mandate to ensure speedy broadband deployment to dismantle protectionist state laws intentionally designed to hinder broadband competition. But the FCC recently found itself swatted down by the courts, which argued the agency lacks the authority to pre-empt even the worst portions of these laws. As a result municipal broadband providers continue to run face first into protectionist provisions written by incumbent ISP lawyers and lobbyists solely concerned about protecting the current broken broadband market.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The gold standard for trade secret theft (or is that the way of the world)? Robert Fortune and Chinese tea

      By the 1830’s, a significant feature of economic life of the British Empire was about opium and tea. Opium was raised in the Indian east and delivered, mainly by inland waterways, to the Indian west coast (think Calcutta), and from there smuggled for sale in China, despite the protestations of the Emperor. With the proceeds, the English purchased quality Chinese tea, which it then brought home (“[n]early one in every ten pounds sterling collected by the government came from the import and sale of tea” (p. 1). The English loved their tea, but all agreed that Chinese tea was far superior to what was being produced in India. However, the Chinese took careful measures to keep secret their tea industry, including control both of the tea plants and their means of production.

      This worked well enough for a while, but one side-effect of the First first Opium War (1839-1942), which opened up Chinese markets to English traders, was that China began to raise locally the poppy seeds from which opium was derived. Should this continue, England would have less Indian-sourced opium to sell, meaning it would have less revenues from which to purchase Chinese tea. The solution: develop an Indian-based tea industry that would produce tea of Chinese quality. To do this, they needed to find tea terroir similar to that in China (think the Darjeeling area and the Himalayan foothills). More importantly, they had to learn as much as possible about the secrets of the Chinese tea industry. The person tasked with this mission was a Scottish botanist/adventurer named Robert Fortune.

    • After Two-Year Hiatus, WIPO Resumes Discussions On Protecting Traditional Knowledge [Ed: WIPO talks about preserving knowledge whilst attacking (illegally) its staff for speaking out]

      How can traditional knowledge be protected against misappropriation and who should benefit from this protection is at the heart of discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organization this week. After over a two-year hiatus, WIPO delegates are resuming discussions this week on a potential treaty protecting traditional knowledge. The week’s focus is to find common understanding of core issues, such as the definition of traditional knowledge, and the scope of protection.

      The 31st session of the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore is taking place from 19-23 September.

    • Copyrights

      • Indian Court Says ‘Copyright Is Not An Inevitable, Divine, Or Natural Right’ And Photocopying Textbooks Is Fair Use

        Last week there was a big copyright ruling in India, where a court ruled against some big academic publishers in ruling that a photocopying kiosk that sold photocopied chapters from textbooks was not infringing on the copyrights of those publishers. We wrote about this case over three years ago, when it was first filed. It’s actually fairly similar to a set of cases in the US that found college copyshops to be infringing — leading to a massive increase in educational material costs for college students.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/09/19/kdevelop-5-0-1/feed/ 0 Links 17/9/2016: Debian 8.6 Released, More Microsoft Layoffs and Dead Products http://techrights.org/2016/09/17/debian-8-6-released/ http://techrights.org/2016/09/17/debian-8-6-released/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2016 19:34:46 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95468

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Good things come from projects that fail

    Without realizing it, I joined the open source movement in 1999 during the midst of the Kosovo refugee crisis. I was part of a team helping route aid supplies to local humanitarian organizations running transit camps across Albania. These are the camps that refugees often arrived at first before being moved to larger, more formal camps.

  • Monitoring open source software key for DevOps shops

    Open source software is all the rage, as the DevOps movement advances, but it’s important to keep track of it carefully for licensing and security purposes.

  • Elizabeth Joseph Talking Open Source Careers in Oman

    Sometimes we wonder how Ms. Joseph finds the time to balance her career at HP with writing, evangelizing Ubuntu and public speaking, along with an active life in the city by the bay. That she is an inspiration to open sourcers everywhere can be seen in this video.

  • HPE sells Vertica analytics, thanks to the growth of open source software

    HPE is paring down its software holdings, including analytical software in the Vertica line. A sale to Micro Focus is due to close next year.

  • Nextcloud and Canonical Introduce Nextcloud Box to Create Your Own Private Cloud

    Today, September 16, 2016, Nextcloud informs Softpedia about the launch of a new hardware product, the first in the company’s history, in collaboration with Canonical and WDLabs.

  • Canonical & Nextcloud Roll Out An Ubuntu-Powered Nextcloud 10 Box

    The embargo expired this morning on the Nextcloud Box, a device from the cooperation of Canonical, Nextcloud, and WDLabs for making it easy to deploy your own Ubuntu-powered personal cloud.

  • Canonical and Western Digital launch Ubuntu Linux ‘Nextcloud Box’ powered by Raspberry Pi

    Cloud storage is amazingly convenient. Unfortunately, the best part of the cloud can also be the worst. You see, having your files stored on someone else’s severs and accessing them over the internet opens you to focused hacking, and potentially, incompetence by the cloud storage company too. As a way to have the best of both worlds, some folks will set up net-connected local storage so they can manage their own ‘cloud’.

  • Run Your Own Private Ubuntu Cloud with the Nextcloud Box

    Most of us love using the cloud. It gives us on-the-go-access to our personal files, photos and documents, and helps keep our busy lives in sync.

    But loving the cloud doesn’t mean you have to love using a proprietary closed-off services like Dropbox, Google Drive or One Drive.

  • Cache in hand, Varnish cloud workload tuning goes one louder

    Content delivery firm Varnish Software has announced its Varnish Plus Cloud product — essentially, a full version of the Varnish Plus software suite that can be accessed via the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Marketplace.

  • Nexenta wins NetNordic open source storage contract

    NetNordic said it has recently chosen Nexenta to create a centralised storage repository for its customer base as well as for the company, as the operator and its customer base continue to grow. Nexenta provides open source-driven, software-defined storage, which offers extra data with compression turned on, a significant factor for NetNordic, said its operations engineer Sander Petersson.

  • Toyota, Open Source Robotics Foundation to partner on automated vehicle research
  • The scourge of LEDs everywhere: Readers speak out

    Open Source to the Rescue

    One solution to LED overload is going with open source technology.

    One Slashdot commenter going by the handle of guruevi uses OpenWrt: “You can reprogram any LED on your router for whatever purpose. Want them all on or off at the certain time of day or blink if it detected anomalous traffic.”

    I also got email from Dave Taht, who happened to recently write a blog post titled “Blinkenlights: A debugging aid AND a curse” (with the subhed of “Too many LEDs! Give me back the stars!”). Taht is a busy guy as director of the Make Wi-Fi Fast project and co-founder of the Bufferbloat and CeroWrt projects, though took time out to share some LED disabling tips in his blog post.

    Taht, like many of those cited above, has made his share of manual fixes over the years, using electrical tape and just plan moving devices behind things. Only recently did he start monkeying with software to solve his problem.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Healthcare

    • On the importance of patient empowerment and open source: A Medicine X panel weighs in

      Speaker Karen Sadler, JD, heartedly agreed that developing open-source software for medical devices is critical. She is the executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organization that develops, promotes and defends open-source software. Her life was changed when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart problem and implanted with a defibrillator. “I went from someone who thought open source was cool and useful to someone who thought great open-source software is essential for our society,” Sadler said.

  • Microsoft Openwashing and EEE

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: September 16th
    • denemo Version 2.0.12 is out.
    • Libreboot Leaves GNU Claiming Gender Identity Discrimination by FSF

      A disturbing story broke this morning concerning the sudden action by the Libreboot project to leave the GNU project. I started to write “potentially disturbing,” until it occurred to me that no matter how this plays out, the news is disturbing.

    • FSF Says Firing Wasn’t Discrimatory [Ed: There are a lot of examples of sexism, homophobia and other abuse inside Microsoft and Apple but unlike FOSS communities they hide it. Here are examples of Microsoft sexism [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and Microsoft homophobia [1, 2, 3]

      Friday afternoon after we published our report, Richard Stallman, founder and president of FSF, posted a brief, unofficial statement in an email to the thread around Rowe’s email. “The dismissal of the staff person was not because of her gender,” he said. “Her gender now is the same as it was when we hired her. It was not an issue then, and it is not an issue now.”

    • FSF, RMS Issue Statements Over Libreboot’s Accusations
    • Leaked Apple emails reveal employees’ complaints about sexist, toxic work environment [Ed: apropos the above and new report, too]

      Danielle* didn’t expect her workday to begin with her male coworkers publicly joking about rape.

      Danielle is an engineer at Apple — and like many of the women in the company, she works on a male-dominated team. On a Tuesday morning in July, when men on her team began to joke that an office intruder was coming to rape everybody, Danielle decided to speak out about what she described as the “very toxic atmosphere” created by jokes about violent sexual assault.

      The coworker who first made the joke apologized, repeatedly assuring her that something like this wouldn’t happen again. But his assurances did little to instill confidence. This wasn’t the first time Danielle had allegedly seen something like this happen on her team, nor was it the first time she complained that the office culture at Apple was, in her words, toxic. Despite repeated formal complaints to her manager, Danielle said, nothing ever changed.

      But this rape joke was the final straw. The next day, Danielle escalated her complaint about the offense to the very top: Apple CEO Tim Cook.

    • Happy Software Freedom Day!

      And today is the 13th edition of Software Freedom Day! We wish you all a great day talking to people and discovering (or making them discovery) the benefits and joys of running Free Software. As usual we have a map where you can find all the events in your area. Should you just discover about SFD today and want to organize an event it is never too late. While the date is global, each team has the freedom to run the event at a date that is convenient in their area. We (in Cambodia) are running our event on November 26 due to university schedule, other conferences and religious holidays conflicting.

  • Public Services/Government

    • EU FOSSA publishes core sections of its deliverables

      To promote the exchange of comments made by the Free and Open Source Software communities, the EU FOSSA project points out some specific sections of the deliverables he produced so far. By consulting these chapters, you have a more direct insight to what the project team consider as the most relevant information.

      Read more

    • LEOS – drafting legislative texts made easy

      While LEOS has been developed to support the drafting of legislation by the European Commission services (i.e. proposals for directives, regulations and autonomous acts), public administrations can download and adapt the code to meet their own specific requirements. The code is available under the free European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • PHP version 5.6.26 and 7.0.11
    • anytime 0.0.2: Added functionality

      anytime arrived on CRAN via release 0.0.1 a good two days ago. anytime aims to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to POSIXct (or Date) objects.

    • GitHub’s new features aim for business and open-source users

      GitHub, the popular code repository service, has to serve two masters. It’s well-known for hosting popular open-source projects, but it’s also working to acquire more large and small business users to privately store and manage their proprietary code.

      Those different constituencies sometimes need different things. But Chris Wansrath, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told the company’s annual user conference this week that building new features into GitHub isn’t a matter of helping only one or the other.

    • GitHub gets all grown-up with better code review, project management, etc

      The GitHub Universe event has kicked off in San Francisco, with a number of new GitHub features announced by CEO Chris Wanstrath.

      GitHub’s main product is a collaborative source code repository, which you can use on the public cloud or in your own private deployment. There are now over 19 million open source projects hosted on GitHub, with 5.8 million active users.

      The focus of today’s announcements is on project management and workflow. A new Project dashboard lets you create cards from pull requests, issues or notes, and organize them into groups such as Backlog, In Progress, and Ready.

    • JDK 9 release delayed another four months

      Oracle’s asking for more time to complete JDK 9.

      The chief architect of Oracle’s Java Platform Group, Mark Reinhold, took to the Java developer’s mailing list to say that while work on JDK 9 is coming along nicely “We are not, unfortunately, where we need to be relative to the current schedule.”

      The hard part of JDK 9 is “Project Jigsaw”, an effort to “design and implement a standard module system for the Java SE Platform, and to apply that system to the Platform itself and to the JDK.” Reinhold says “it’s clear that Jigsaw needs more time.”

    • Pass the ‘Milk’ to make code run four times faster, say MIT boffins

      MIT boffins have created a new programming language called “Milk” that they say runs code four times faster than rivals.

      Professor Saman Amarasinghe says the language’s secret is that changes the way cores collect and cache data.

      Today, he says, cores will fetch whole blocks of data from memory. That’s not efficient when working on tasks like big data, when only some of a block’s content is needed by an application that may want to work on only a few items across very large data set.

    • Node.js: Building Better Technology and a More Diverse Community
    • Open Source Mobile Dev Tool Onsen UI Breaks Free from AngularJS Dependency

      Monaca today announced Onsen UI 2.0, a UI framework and tools for building HTML5-based native mobile apps, is now JavaScript framework-agnostic, having broken from its AngularJS dependency roots.

      The open source Onsen UI is itself based on the popular open source Apache Cordova/PhoneGap projects, which facilitate creating native iOS and Android apps with one codebase based on technologies usually used for Web development: HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.

    • The Python Packaging Ecosystem

      There have been a few recent articles reflecting on the current status of the Python packaging ecosystem from an end user perspective, so it seems worthwhile for me to write-up my perspective as one of the lead architects for that ecosystem on how I characterise the overall problem space of software publication and distribution, where I think we are at the moment, and where I’d like to see us go in the future.

Leftovers

  • After 23 years, the Apple II gets another OS update

    You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There’s also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk.

  • Microsoft Azure borkage in central US leads to global woes

    At its height, the fault affected API management, web apps, Service Bus and SQL database services in the central US region, and Azure DNS globally.

    Microsoft’s Azure status page has just now reported that SQL database is still affected in the central US region.

    As is often the case, however, customers noticed confusion with Microsoft’s messages, as Azure Twitter feeds and status pages seemed to disagree on the speed of recovery.

  • OECD report shows sharp rise in numbers of marginalised young men

    Finland is sixth in an OECD ranking of countries by the number of young men who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs). Some 21.1 percent of Finnish men aged 20-24 fall into that category. The number has leapt up in recent years, from just 12.2 percent in 2005.

    The figures are not replicated among young women. In 2005 13.9 percent of young women fell into the NEET category, and ten years later that stood at 15.4 percent.

  • Science

    • Innovation and its Discontents – Where are we heading?

      Nearly two years ago, Kat Neil wrote about declining public trust in innovation. It is becoming increasingly apparent that economic growth and innovation is not benefitting everyone, and that it needs to be addressed by policy and society. At the SPRU conference, a session on IP looked at clashes between intellectual property rights and human rights’ protection.

      An ongoing concern is the potential that the participation of low-skilled workers in production will be rendered obsolete. A dystopian take on this suggests that innovation in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will give rise to the Useless Class, a disenfranchised section of society with skills for which there is no demand. The potential social fall-out from this disenfranchisement is extremely unpleasant with a large portion of society no longer having a “reason to get up in the morning.”

    • Audi works with Chinese technology companies to develop intelligent cars

      German carmaker Audi has signed agreements with Chinese technology companies Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent to work on data analysis, internet connected vehicles and intelligent public transport.

      Audi China and FAW-Volkswagen – a joint venture between state-owned car manufacturer FAW Group and Volkswagen that makes Audi and Volkswagen cars in China – will work with the three technology companies on features for “the connected car of the future”, Audi said.

  • Hardware

    • Intel’s Chips Finally Find Their Way Into the iPhone

      The smartphone years have not been kind to Intel. The company ignored the transition to mobile early on, allowing ARM-based processors to take an early, decisive lead. Intel’s presence in pocket computers hasn’t just been minimal, it’s been practically nonexistent. That is, until the iPhone 7.

      Bloomberg first reported that Intel had worked out a deal with Apple in June, but now that the iPhone 7 has shipped, we have actual confirmation, thanks to a teardown from Chipworks. Apple may make its own processors now, but Intel’s providing an entire mobile cellular platform to the Cupertino company, the transceivers and modem that help put the “phone” in smartphone. For the first time, a flagship mobile device has Intel inside. Better late than never.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • South Sudan: Hunger, Shortages, and Hyperinflation

      South Sudan’s leaders stand accused of industrial-scale embezzlement, ripping off public money to fund property and business investments across the region. That opulence is in sharp contrast to what the vast majority of their fellow citizens are enduring, as they wrestle with chronic shortages and hyperinflation.

      Nationwide, food inflation hit a record 850 percent in August, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Some food price rises are 1,000 percent above the five-year average in Northern and Western Bahr el Ghazal, the World Food Programme has warned.

      Renewed fighting in July in the capital, Juba, between the forces of President Salva Kiir and those of his rival-turned vice president Riek Machar contributed to the latest jump in the inflation rate.

      The fear the country would return to civil war sent the South Sudanese pound tumbling to the current rate of 80 to the dollar, compared to 15 to one a year ago. That is driving up prices in a country dependent on imports from its neighbours, including much of its food and all of its fuel.

    • Upholding Michigan’s Emergency Manager Law

      A task force in March found that emergency managers appointed in Flint, along with Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, were the primary culprits for Flint’s water crisis. The task force found the state’s actions “inappropriate and unacceptable.”

    • Court rejects challenge to Michigan’s emergency manager law
    • Bayer clinches Monsanto with improved $66 billion bid

      German drug and crop chemical maker Bayer clinched a $66 billion takeover of U.S. seeds company Monsanto on Wednesday, ending months of wrangling with a third sweetened offer that marks the largest all-cash deal on record.

      The $128-a-share deal, up from Bayer’s previous offer of $127.50 a share, has emerged as the signature deal in a consolidation race that has roiled the agribusiness sector in recent years, due to shifting weather patterns, intense competition in grain exports and a souring global farm economy.

      “Bayer’s competitors are merging, so not doing this deal would mean having a competitive disadvantage,” said fund manager Markus Manns of Union Investment, one of Bayer’s top 12 investors.

    • Bayer Just Bought Monsanto, Here’s Why You Should Care

      A giant company just bought another giant company, but if you’re not an investor or a farmer, you may not have noticed. Bayer—the aspirin company that also makes farm products like pesticides—announced on Wednesday it was merging with Monsanto, the massive genetically-modified seed producer that owns about a third of the seed market in the US.

      The $66 billion merger is the largest this year, and means Bayer now controls more than a quarter of all seeds and pesticides on the planet, according to the BBC. But what’s even crazier is that this is just the latest in a long list of big mergers of agricultural companies this year, meaning the options for where farmers buy their seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers are shrinking at lightning speed.

    • This Polish Law Would Imprison Women Who Have Abortions

      A girl raped by her own father will have no choice but to give birth. A woman at high risk of dying in childbirth or of carrying a dead baby will not be able to seek a termination. This will be the impact of new legislation to be debated in the Polish Parliament later this week which, if passed, would usher in an almost complete ban on abortion.

      On Sunday in Warsaw, London and other cities, protesters will gather opposing the amendment to Poland’s existing abortion legislation. The amendment aims to criminalize women and girls who have sought or had an abortion, making them liable to a prison term of between three months and five years. It also will increase the maximum jail term for anyone who assists or encourages women have an abortion.

    • Stronger Rx Than Obamacare Needed to Cover Everyone and Control Costs: Physician Leader

      “The Census Bureau’s official estimate that 29 million Americans, including 3.7 million children, still lacked health insurance in 2015, five years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, starkly illustrates how our inefficient, private-insurance-based system of financing care is fundamentally incapable of providing universal coverage,” said Dr. Robert Zarr, a Washington-based pediatrician who is president of Physicians for a National Health Program.

    • UN panel recommends stricter patentability rules and compulsory licensing to improve access to medicine [Ed: IAM protesting the UN's request that life should be put before patents]
    • Vegans, You’re Contributing to Antibiotic Resistance, Too

      There are a lot of different reasons why some people choose not to consume any animal products. The fact that we regularly pump our livestock full of antibiotics, significantly contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance, is one of them.

      But what some vegans may not realize is that just eschewing animal products doesn’t absolve them of any responsibility for the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs, at least as it relates to the food supply. We douse our fruits and vegetables in antibiotics, too (though at a much, much lower rate than meat). Unless you strictly eat organic, your food is contributing to a problem that threatens to send us back to the dark ages of medicine, where every cut or scrape could be life-threatening.

      I point this out not to shame vegans, but to serve as a reminder. We are all contributing to the problem, and we’re all at risk because of it. Even if you keep a strict, organic, vegan diet, and never take antibiotics unless you absolutely need them, you’re not granted a magic halo of protection against superbug infection. You can do everything ostensibly right, and it still won’t stop antibiotic resistance. Paying attention to what we eat is part of the solution, but there’s more work to be done.

    • Antimicrobial Resistance A ‘Global Societal Challenge And Threat’, WHO Official Says

      Antimicrobial resistance had in the last decades emerged as a health issue, but only in the last couple of years has there been an understanding that we are facing a “global societal challenge and threat.” On a day-to-day basis, people worldwide are said to be driving resistance across human health and agriculture.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security advisories
    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Spies and criminals biggest cybersecurity threat

      The report shows that well-organised criminals focus on the use of ransomware. “Professional criminals have evolved into advanced actors and implement long-term and high-quality operations.” The larger the hacked organisation, the bigger the ransom demands, the cybersecurity experts conclude. Regular backups and computer network segmentation help to reduce the impact of such attacks.

    • 20 Questions Security Leaders Need To Ask About Analytics

      It would be an understatement to say that the security world tends to be full of hype and noise. At times, it seems like vendors virtually xerox each other’s marketing materials. Everyone uses the same words, phrases, jargon, and buzzwords. This is a complicated phenomenon and there are many reasons why this is the case.

      The more important issue is why security leaders find ourselves in this state. How can we make sense of all the noise, cut through all the hype, and make the informed decisions that will improve the security of our respective organizations? One answer is by making precise, targeted, and incisive inquiries at the outset. Let’s start with a game of 20 questions. Our first technology focus: analytics.

    • Trend Micro shows that Linux systems not so bulletproof against trojans [Ed: very low risk (must fool the user or gain physical access)]
    • Sixth Linux DDoS Trojan Discovered in the Last 30 Days [Ed: drama over something that must fool users]

      Linux users have yet another trojan to worry about, and as always, crooks are deploying it mostly to hijack devices running Linux-based operating systems and use them to launch DDoS attacks at their behest.

    • Yet Another Linux Trojan Uncovered
    • Secure Docker on Linux or Windows platforms

      With Docker appearing in businesses of all shapes and sizes, security is a concern for many IT admins. Here’s how to secure Docker on the container or the host machine.

    • New release: usbguard-0.6.1
    • Ransomware Getting More Targeted, Expensive

      I shared a meal not long ago with a source who works at a financial services company. The subject of ransomware came up and he told me that a server in his company had recently been infected with a particularly nasty strain that spread to several systems before the outbreak was quarantined. He said the folks in finance didn’t bat an eyelash when asked to authorize several payments of $600 to satisfy the Bitcoin ransom demanded by the intruders: After all, my source confessed, the data on one of the infected systems was worth millions — possibly tens of millions — of dollars, but for whatever reason the company didn’t have backups of it.

    • Web security CEO warns about control of internet falling into few hands

      The internet was designed to be a massive, decentralized system that nobody controlled, but it is increasingly controlled by a select few tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, and they are continuing to consolidate power, said the CEO of a cybersecurity company.

      “More and more of the internet is sitting behind fewer and fewer players, and there are benefits of that, but there are also real risks,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive officer of web security company CloudFlare, in an interview with CNBC. His comments came at CloudFlare’s Internet Summit — a conference featuring tech executives and government security experts — on Tuesday in San Francisco.

      Facebook has faced a lot of criticism for perceived abuse of its editorial sway among the 1.7 billion monthly active users who visit the site to consume news alongside family photos and ads. For example, a Norwegian newspaper editor recently slammed Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook’s removal of a post featuring an iconic image known as the Napalm Girl that included a naked girl running from napalm bombs.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Obama, Pressing Senators, Delays Veto of Bill Exposing Saudis to 9/11 Suits

      President Obama is delaying a planned veto of a bill that would allow the families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the plot, hoping to tap into an unusual well of buyer’s remorse among senators who passed the measure unanimously in the spring.

      The measure sailed through the House last week after a surprise last-minute vote, raising the prospect of the first veto showdown between Mr. Obama and a bipartisan coalition in Congress. But an intense lobbying campaign by the White House and Saudi Arabia, among others, has cast doubt on what had appeared to be an inevitable override of the president’s long-expected veto.

      Officials have refused to say when Mr. Obama would veto the bill, and he has until next Friday to do so. His advisers are considering whether he should wait until then, after Congress is expected to recess on Thursday for the November elections, which could give him weeks to persuade lawmakers to drop their support for the measure before they return and consider the veto override.

      Already, cracks are showing, even among Republicans who generally would love to exercise the first veto override against Mr. Obama.

    • Every 72 minutes, a veteran commits suicide: Our view

      Many Americans have heard by now that 20 veterans commit suicide each day. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump cited the figure at last week’s Commander-in-Chief Forum viewed by 14.7 million people, further raising the issue’s visibility.

      But a 46-page suicide analysis released by the Department of Veterans Affairs last month reveals just how swift this current of self-destruction is flowing, particularly for young veterans fresh from war. It’s a pace of killing unknown to most Americans and a source of national shame.

      A veteran is choosing death every 72 minutes, and the VA could be doing more to keep that person alive. When veterans manage to ask for help, too many of their calls are not getting through to VA’s suicide hotline (800-273-8255). The agency isn’t offering enough veterans the kind of cutting-edge treatment therapies that researchers are finally uncovering.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Government Again Shows Its Inconsistency On Punishing The Mishandling Of Classified Documents

      Mishandling classified material can result in a variety of punishments, depending on who you are. If you’re a presidential candidate, the routing of hundreds of sensitive documents through an unsecured, private email server might result in a few conversations with the FBI, but not in any criminal charges. If you’re a retired general, routing classified material to your biographer/mistress might result in criminal charges, but not any time served. If you’re a whistleblower taking your complaints to the press, you’ll likely see some jail time to go along with your destroyed career.

      And if you’re a Marine Corps officer trying to warn others of trouble headed their way, you’re more likely to be treated like Jason Brezler than Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, or even former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

      Brezler is facing dismissal from the Marine Corps for mishandling a classified document — one containing information about an allegedly corrupt Afghan police chief who had already been kicked off a US base by Brezler himself.

      [...]

      At this point, the Marine Corps is offering him an honorable discharge — a “thanks, but no thanks” for his attempt to warn his fellow soldiers about the long list of allegations against police chief Sarwar Jan. Brezler sued for full reinstatement as a Marine and the discharge has been put on hold pending a possible jury trial later this year.

      There are a handful of disturbing aspects of the Marine Corps’ dismissal of Brezler, not the least of which is its decision to ramp up its efforts to rid itself of him after it had been publicly embarrassed by a US congress member. It also highlights the absurdity — and danger — inherent to the military’s weirdly-selective non-interventionist policy: one deployed by an outside force playing World Police within its borders (decidedly interventionist) that draws the line at preventing the sexual abuse of minors on its bases by local officials.

      The decision to go after the messenger — one that self-reported his mishandling of sensitive information — shows the government, by and large, cares more about protecting itself from embarrassment than solving its problems.

    • Secret government electronic surveillance documents must be released, judge says

      In a major victory for journalists and privacy and transparency advocates, a federal court has started the process of unsealing secret records related to the government’s use of electronic surveillance.

      US District Court Judge Beryl Howell said at a hearing Friday morning that absent an objection by government attorneys, the court would post to its website next week a list of all case numbers from 2012 in which federal prosecutors in Washington, DC applied for an order to install a pen register or a trap and trace device.

      A pen register is an electronic apparatus that tracks phone numbers called from a specific telephone line (though the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act expanded the definition of pen register to allow for collection of email headers as well). A trap and trace device is similar, but tracks the phone numbers of incoming calls.

      For decades, court records relating to these documents have typically been sealed in their entirety, including even the docket numbers. Next week’s release, which is in response to a three-year-old petition filed by VICE News, will be a crucial first step in learning details about the electronic surveillance orders, and the beginning of a multilayered process that will ultimately lead to the disclosure of thousands of pen register applications dating back at least five years.

      Pen registers and other similar devices do not intercept the content of communications, and the government is not required to obtain a warrant or to have probable cause that the target committed a crime. Instead, a government attorney can simply obtain authorization by filing an application with a federal court stating that the information that would be obtained is “relevant” to a criminal investigation. The FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal law enforcement agencies have used pen registers.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Arctic sea ice coverage is at its 2nd lowest on record

      Mark it down, Arctic sea ice watchers: the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has (preliminarily) called the annual minimum ice extent. On September 10, Arctic sea ice coverage dipped to 4.14 million square kilometers (1.6 million square miles) before ticking back upward for a few days. While it’s possible that a couple more days of shrinkage could come along, that was probably the low point for the year.

      That puts 2016 in second place for the lowest minimum on record—statistically tied with 2007, which was within the error bars of this year’s data. The record low is retained by 2012, which fell to an incredible 3.39 million square kilometers. This continues the trend of marked decline observed by satellites since 1979.

    • Did lightning strike this 19th Century church in Newcastle?

      Stark white against the glowering blue skyline, a bolt of lightning flashes over Newcastle , narrowly missing the spire of a 19th century church.

      Thursday night’s thunderstorm had photographers throughout the city taking some impressive shots, and this dramatic view over the west end is one of our favourites.

      The church in the picture is St Stephen’s, in Low Elswick, a Grade II-listed Anglican church built in 1868.

    • Alabama pipeline ruptures, leaking 250,000 gallons & causing ‘fuel emergency’

      At least 250,000 gallons of gasoline have spilled following a pipeline rupture in central Alabama. Emergency responders are working to repair the spill, while Alabama and Georgia have declared a state of emergency due to possible fuel shortages.

      The spill, equivalent to 6,000 barrels, took place in a rural area southwest of Helena, Alabama, and was first noticed Friday. A spokesman for Colonial Pipeline said the spill has affected an area about two acres in size, Birmingham’s WBRC-TV reported.

      According to local media, the spill is located near Lindsey’s Crossing in Shelby County, about 28 miles southwest of Birmingham.

    • Indonesia dispatches nearly 5,000 firefighters to Kalimantan, after surge in hotspots

      Indonesia has dispatched almost 5,000 fire-fighters to Kalimantan as the dry spell continues across the western and central parts of the island, where hundreds of hot-spots have been detected in recent days.

      The National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) said on Wednesday (Sept 14) that it has deployed 2,492 and 2,363 personnel in west and central Kalimantan respectively.

      The group includes soldiers, policemen as well as officers from the BNPB, the Environment and Forestry Ministry, as well as local volunteers, said agency spokesman Dr Sutopo Purwo Nugroho.

      The reinforcements were sent in after satellite data from Indonesia’s meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency (BMKG) showed 536 total hot-spots across Kalimantan as of Wednesday.

    • Spain could be first EU country with national park listed as ‘in danger’

      A Spanish wetland home to 2,000 species of wildlife – including around 6 million migratory birds – is on track to join a Unesco world heritage danger list, according to a new report.

      Doñana is an Andalusian reserve of sand dunes, shallow streams and lagoons, stretching for 540 square kilometres (209 square miles) where flamingoes feed and wild horses and Iberian lynx still roam.

      But the Doñana region is said to have lost 80% of its natural water supplies due to marsh drainage, intensive agriculture, and water pollution from the mining industry.

      Spain now has until 1 December to declare Doñana permanently off limits for dredging and industrial activity in a report to Unesco, or face becoming the first EU country to have a national park classified as being “in danger”.

    • What the ‘sixth extinction’ will look like in the oceans: The largest species die off first

      We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.

      In this case, the perturbation is us — rather than, say, an asteroid. As such, you might expect to see some patterns to extinctions that reflect our particular way of causing ecological destruction. And indeed, a new study published Wednesday in Science magazine confirms this. For the world’s oceans, it finds, threats of extinction aren’t apportioned equally among all species — rather, the larger ones, in terms of body size and mass, are uniquely imperiled right now.

  • Finance

    • Obama’s Last Gasp At Trade Deals: Lame Duck Push On TPP; And ‘Lite’ Version Of TTIP

      So, uh, that sounds good. Why do we need the rest of the crap that they’re debating, around corporate sovereignty ISDS provisions — especially since the entire basis for those kinds of agreements was supposed to be to encourage investment in developing countries. The EU and the US have perfectly decent court systems, so any dispute shouldn’t need a special tribunal.

      But, of course, those who have relied on shoving all sorts of pork and special interest protectionism through trade deals do not like the idea of a “lite” agreement that covers the officially discussed reasons for a trade deal. Why, that would be horrible! How could they continue to hide all the sneaky stuff they want to get in?

    • CETA Without Blinders: How Cutting ‘Trade Costs and More’ Will Cause Unemployment, Inequality and Welfare Losses

      The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is now in the process of being ratified by Canada and the European Union (EU). Like other ‘new generation’ trade agreements, CETA aims at further liberalizing trade, investment and other sectors of society so far protected from market competition. CETA is thus more than just a ‘trade deal’ and needs to be approached in its complexity, without blinders.

      CETA’s proponents emphasize the prospect of higher GDP growth due to rising trade volumes and investment. However, official projections suggest GDP gains of up to 0.08% for the European Union 0.76% for Canada. More importantly, all these projections stem from a single trade model, which assumes full employment and no negative impact on income distribution in all countries excluding the major risks of deeper liberalization. This lack of intellectual diversity and of realism shrouding the debate around CETA’s alleged economic benefits calls for an alternative assessment grounded in sounder modeling premises.

    • NAFTA burn: The Real Ford Escape? Moving its small-car production to Mexico

      In speech after speech, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has decried companies sending jobs abroad to low-wage countries, calling it a profound betrayal of the American worker. And despite having profited from his Trump branded Chinese-made cufflinks and dress shirts woven in Bangladesh, the real estate mogul has pledged to crack down on labor outsourcing if elected.

      But Trump’s threats have not discouraged American auto companies from setting up factories south of the U.S. and then sending finished vehicles north.

      On Wednesday, Ford Motor Co. CEO Mark Fields announced further efforts to take advantage of Mexico’s low-cost labor force, telling investors at an event near Detroit that Ford would soon shift all the company’s U.S. small-car production to Mexico by 2018.

    • $100 Million Awarded in Contest to Rethink U.S. High Schools

      An organization announced on Wednesday that it had chosen the winners of $10 million grants in a competition to rethink the American high school.

      The organization — the XQ Institute, which is backed by Laurene Powell Jobs — is funding 10 schools, for a total of $100 million.

      One of the winners, the Somerville Steam Academy in Somerville, Mass., will operate without standard class periods and without separating students by age.

      Rise High in Los Angeles will be designed for students who are homeless or in foster care. It will share locations around the city with service providers, like medical or mental health centers, and will have a mobile classroom to teach or tutor students wherever they are.

      And in New York City, at the Brooklyn Laboratory Charter High School, the school day will last from 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.

      “Each of these represent schools that don’t exist today,” said Russlynn H. Ali, chief executive of the XQ Institute and a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the federal Education Department.

      Ms. Powell Jobs, chairwoman of the XQ Institute’s board of directors, was the wife of Steven P. Jobs, the Apple co-founder who died five years ago next month.

      The Super School Project was announced a year ago by the Emerson Collective, the organization Ms. Powell Jobs uses to make philanthropic investments. The goal was to offer $50 million to schools that offered new approaches to education. Ms. Ali said American high schools had “stayed the same for 100 years” and were badly in need of new ideas and paradigms.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Hillary Clinton Takes Aim at Voters Drifting Toward Third Party

      Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies, unnerved by the tightening presidential race, are making a major push to dissuade disaffected voters from backing third-party candidates, and pouring more energy into Rust Belt states, where Donald J. Trump is gaining ground.

      With Mrs. Clinton enduring one of the rockiest stretches of her second bid for the presidency, her campaign and affiliated Democratic groups are shifting their focus to those voters, many of them millennials, who recoil at Mr. Trump, her Republican opponent, but now favor the Libertarian nominee, Gary Johnson, or the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

      While still optimistic that the race will turn decisively back in Mrs. Clinton’s favor after the debates, leading Democrats have been alarmed by the drift of young voters toward the third-party candidates.

    • September 14, 2016 – Trump Cuts Clinton Lead In Half, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds, Most Americans Are Voting Against, Not For, A Candidate

      In a largely negative presidential campaign, where most Americans are voting against, rather than for, a candidate, Democrat Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump 48 – 43 percent among likely voters nationwide, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.

      This compares to a 51 – 41 percent Clinton lead in an August 25 survey of likely voters nationwide, by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University.

    • 5 reasons Trump might fall in autumn

      The GOP nominee prefers his KFC by the bucket, devours the fries before the Big Mac, and only eats greens out of taco bowls perched atop white linen napkins — but make no mistake, these are Donald Trump’s salad days.

      Counted down in the dark days after his gloomy Cleveland convention, with polls showing him behind by double digits, Trump has mounted what, to the unschooled political observer, appears to be a remarkable comeback. He’s pulled even with Clinton among likely voters in the latest New York Times/CBS national poll — a 42 to 42 percent deadlock that has been reflected in a raft of tightening battleground state polls. And he’s surged to an 8-point lead in Iowa, reflecting his improvement in critical battleground states.

    • Republicans are careful when talking about their nominee — and so are Greater Minnesota’s Democrats

      The big story of this year’s House and Senate elections is how the presence of Donald J. Trump at the top of the GOP ticket affects Republicans running for Congress.

      What’s getting less ink this cycle, however, is how Democrats are reckoning with the down-ballot effect of their nominee, Hillary Clinton — but that doesn’t mean some Democratic candidates aren’t having problems.

      There’s good reason for that: broadly, Trump polls worse than Clinton, nationally and in the North Star State. And there are few elected Democrats out there who, like Rep. Erik Paulsen did with Trump, say that Clinton hasn’t earned their support.

    • Nigel Farage bows out as Ukip leader with nude skinny dip off Bournemouth Pier

      Nigel Farage celebrated his last night as Ukip leader with a late night skinny dipping session off Bournemouth pier, it has been revealed.

      Key financial backer Arron Banks told BBC Radio 4′s Any Questions? show on Friday night that he and Mr Farage had stripped off their clothes and jumped in the sea after a late night drinking session on Thursday.

      Multi-millionaire businessman Mr Banks had been challenging claims during the political talk show that Mr Farage might stage another comeback as leader.

    • Trump’s successful tax dodge: Months of lying and stonewalling somehow aren’t a major scandal

      It’s a rare thing to see honesty emerge from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but we were all treated to a bracing dose of forthrightness this week by the Republican candidate’s son, Donald Trump Jr., on the subject of his father’s tax returns. Speaking with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Trump Jr. explained that his dad’s tax information would remain hidden because if people saw it, then they’d talk about something other than what the campaign wants them to talk about.

      “He’s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create . . . financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would detract from (his father’s) main message,” the paper reported Trump Jr. as saying. That’s about as clear-cut an explanation as you could hope for: The campaign will keep on stonewalling because it doesn’t want people scrutinizing and talking about Donald Trump’s tax history and financial arrangements.

    • Green Party nominee says she’s going to presidential debate

      US Green Party nominee Jill Stein says she is planning to appear at the first presidential debate despite being ignored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

      The commission announced on Friday that Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson and Stein will not participate in the September 26 debate because they failed to garner the 15 percent support in five polls required to qualify for the debate.

      But the Green Party presidential nominee rejected the standards set by the commission and told CNN she plans to show up at the event with her supporters.

      “We will be at the debate to insist that Americans not only have a right to vote, but we have a right to know who we can vote for,” she said.

      Meanwhile, Johnson said in a statement he wasn’t surprised by the decision to “exclude” him from the first debate.

      He said he plans to have the 15 percent polling threshold to make it to the second debate in early October.

      “There are more polls and more debates, and we plan to be on the debate stage in October,” he stated.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Xiaomi phones are pre-backdoored; your apps can be silently overwritten

      Thijs Broenink audited the AnalyticsCore.apk app that ships pre-installed on all Xiaomi phones (Xiaomi has their own Android fork with a different set of preinstalled apps) and discovered that the app, which seemingly serves no useful purpose, allows the manufacturer to silently install other code on your phone, with unlimited privileges and access.

      The app phones home to Xiaomi once a day and transmits the user’s “IMEI, MAC address, Model, Nonce, Package name and signature,” all in the clear, then gets instructions back about which apps to install — it can seemingly overwrite your signed, pre-installed apps with modified versions.

    • Playpen: The Story of the FBI’s Unprecedented and Illegal Hacking Operation

      In December 2014, the FBI received a tip from a foreign law enforcement agency that a Tor Hidden Service site called “Playpen” was hosting child pornography. That tip would ultimately lead to the largest known hacking operation in U.S. law enforcement history.

      The Playpen investigation—driven by the FBI’s hacking campaign—resulted in hundreds of criminal prosecutions that are currently working their way through the federal courts. The issues in these cases are technical and the alleged crimes are distasteful. As a result, relatively little attention has been paid to the significant legal questions these cases raise.

      But make no mistake: these cases are laying the foundation for the future expansion of law enforcement hacking in domestic criminal investigations, and the precedent these cases create is likely to impact the digital privacy rights of Internet users for years to come. In a series of blog posts in the coming days and weeks, we’ll explain what the legal issues are and why these cases matter to Internet users the world over.

    • At war against the “totalitarian temptation”

      Bill Binney is not mincing his words. In a rallying battle cry against mass surveillance, the former NSA analyst tells an audience at the UK premiere of A Good American that we are basically at war. In every democracy across the world; in our very “hearts and minds”, a war “against the totalitarian temptation” is being waged.

      Perhaps because Binney is such a quiet, considered man, his words seem to carry extra weight. But it’s not just his solemnity that captures attention. Binney is not just a campaigner for civil liberties, speaking of principles and rights. He was on the inside – one of them. A high-level NSA analyst, technical director, and one of the best mathematicians the agency ever had, Bill Binney was their man for 32 years. And then, suddenly, he was their enemy.

    • A Good American: a personal take on mass surveillance

      Director Friedrich Moser draws some conclusions on mass surveillance from his groundbreaking documentary on the work of NSA whistleblower, Bill Binney

    • USA TODAY, others sue FBI for info on phone hack of San Bernardino shooter

      Three news organizations, including USA TODAY’s parent company, filed a lawsuit Friday seeking information about how the FBI was able to break into the locked iPhone of one of the gunmen in the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

      The Justice Department spent more than a month this year in a legal battle with Apple over it could force the tech giant to help agents bypass a security feature on Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. The dispute roiled the tech industry and prompted a fierce debate about the extent of the government’s power to pry into digital communications. It ended when the FBI said an “outside party” had cracked the phone without Apple’s help.

      The news organizations’ lawsuit seeks information about the source of the security exploit agents used to unlock the phone, and how much the government paid for it. It was filed in federal court in Washington by USA TODAY’s parent company, Gannett, the Associated Press and Vice Media. The FBI refused to provide that information to the organizations under the Freedom of Information Act.

    • Senator John McCain Uses Cybersecurity Hearing To Try To Shame Twitter For Not Selling Data To The CIA

      John McCain — fighting for the government’s right to get all up in your everything — has decided to embrace the “grumpy” part of his “grumpy old legislator” personality.

      Back in July, McCain expressed his displeasure with Apple declining his invitation to show up and get yelled at/field false accusations at his hearing on encryption. He dourly noted that he was “seeking the widest variety of input,” but his invited guests included Manhattan DA Cy Vance, a former Bush-era Homeland Security advisor and former NSA deputy director Chris Inglis. Not having Apple to kick around peeved McCain, who finished off the “discussion” with subpoena threats.

      Another encryption hearing hosted by McCain devolved into the senator ranting about something no one cares about but him: a tech company not immediately prostrating itself in front of an intelligence agency. Here’s Marcy Wheeler’s summation of McCain’s “contribution” to the discussion.

    • AP, USA Today, Vice Sue FBI Over Refusal To Release Information About Contractor Who Cracked iPhone For It

      USA Today, the Associated Press, and Vice News have joined forces to sue the FBI over its refusal to release even the most minimal amount of information on the hack it purchased to crack open the iPhone seized during its San Bernardino shooting investigation.

      The DOJ certainly seemed adamant that Apple disclose all sorts of inside info to the government during the heated litigation. It turned down offers of assistance from hackers and security researchers before finally shelling out an unknown amount of money to an Israeli firm to gain access to the phone’s contents. It also ensured it would never have to discuss the technical details of the hacking by not demanding this information be included in the purchase price.

      Now, it refuses to even discuss the purchase price. Educated guesses that put it north of $1 million are based on a James Comey comment in which he said it was several times his annual salary. Somehow, the actual amount paid — if revealed — would somehow prevent the FBI’s investigation from reaching its conclusion.

      This FOIA lawsuit [PDF] targets other innocuous information the FBI refuses to release: contractor info on the party used to open up the seized iPhone (and discover nothing of investigative use on it).

    • Shock US government report says Edward Snowden did A Bad Thing

      The report ended by saying that the NSA needs to improve its work on creating an environment in which another Snowden-style leak cannot take place, claiming that not enough has been done to reduce the risk.

    • House Intel Committee Says Snowden’s Not A Whistleblower, ‘Cause He Once Emailed His Boss’s Boss

      As you probably heard, the ACLU and other have launched a massive campaign asking President Obama to pardon Ed Snowden. You can check it out here and sign the petition. There have also been a bunch of high profile op-eds and endorsements from a wide variety of people — from former intelligence officials to human rights groups and more. The campaign was obviously timed to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone’s new movie, Snowden.

      Apparently also timed with the release of the movie, the House Intelligence Committee has released a “report” that they claim they spent two years writing, detailing why they believe Snowden is no whistleblower. They’ve released an unclassified three page “executive summary” that is, at best, laughable. Honestly, if this is the best that the House Intel Committee can put together to smear Snowden, they must have found nothing bad. I mean, it’s the stupidest stuff: like that he once got into a dispute with his boss over some software updates at work and (*gasp*) emailed someone higher up the chain, for which he got reprimanded…

    • The NSA Has Files on a Country That Doesn’t Exist

      A couple years ago, Robert Delaware requested from the NSA any entries from its Intellipedia – the agency’s internal answer to Wikipedia – regarding the micronation “The Conch Republic.” The agency later released four pages, which is a fairly impressive feat considering that, strictly speaking, the Conch Republic doesn’t exist.

    • NSA leaker Edward Snowden says will vote in US presidential election
    • Snowden Says He’ll Vote in US Presidential Election

      Edward Snowden, in exile in Moscow after leaking U.S. National Security Agency documents, said Friday he intends to vote in the U.S. presidential election, but did not say which candidate he favors.

      “I will be voting,” Snowden said, speaking at a conference in Athens by video link from Moscow.

      “But as a privacy advocate I think it’s important for me … that there should never be an obligation for an individual to discuss their vote. And I won’t be doing so with mine.”

    • Snowden says he will vote in US elections

      Edward Snowden, in exile in Moscow after leaking documents of clandestine spying by the U.S. National Security Agency on everyday Americans, said Friday he intends to vote in the U.S. presidential election, but did not say which candidate he favours.

    • ‘Corrupt’ US Intel Unable to Prevent Terrorism, NSA Whistleblower Tells Sputnik

      Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency and intelligence whistleblower, has delivered a scathing indictment of US mass surveillance techniques. Binney told Sputnik that the current strategy of collecting bulk data is doomed to result in “people ending up getting killed.”

      When you think of intelligence whistleblowers, Edward Snowden may be the first name that springs to mind. But before Snowden, another NSA operative, Bill Binney, felt compelled to lift the lid on the secretive surveillance actions of his government.

    • Edward Snowden stole defence secrets and is no whistleblower, US report says

      Mr Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, to avoid prosecution and now wants a presidential pardon as a whistleblower.

    • U.S. House panel slams former NSA contractor Snowden
    • GCHQ’s plan for a Great British Firewall creates a dangerous norm

      Intelligence agencies are in the business of deception and misinformation. Truth has little objective meaning or value, but rather exists as it is necessary or useful. How else to make sense of the announcement earlier this week that agencies who just a few years ago railed against strong encryption and were exposed as trying to undermine it, and thus the security of the internet as a whole, are now claiming to be the internet’s protector?

      On Tuesday the director of the UK’s new National Cyber Security Centre laid out vague plans to build a Great British Firewall to protect us from the dangers of cyberattacks in the digital age: “We’re exploring a flagship project on scaling up DNS filtering,” said Ciaran Martin.

      Filtering, or domain name system (DNS) blocking, is controversial – especially when done by a government, as it can interfere with the essential architecture and security of the internet. In the US, bills to mandate DNS blocking such as the Stop Online Piracy Act failed after vigorous debate. Many spam and phishing attacks spoof legitimate sites or email servers, so blocking them has huge collateral damage.

    • The Feds Will Soon Be Able to Legally Hack Almost Anyone

      Digital devices and software programs are complicated. Behind the pointing and clicking on screen are thousands of processes and routines that make everything work. So when malicious software—malware—invades a system, even seemingly small changes to the system can have unpredictable impacts.

      That’s why it’s so concerning that the Justice Department is planning a vast expansion of government hacking. Under a new set of rules, the FBI would have the authority to secretly use malware to hack into thousands or hundreds of thousands of computers that belong to innocent third parties and even crime victims. The unintended consequences could be staggering.

    • 5 Cool Tech Tidbits From the ‘Snowden’ Movie

      Critics are giving mixed reviews to Snowden, the Oliver Stone film that opens in theaters on Friday. But as I wrote this week, the movie is essential viewing for anyone who cares about the national security debate and NSA’s co-opting of familiar technology like Google and Facebook to spy on us.

      One reason the movie is worth watching is the realistic depiction of technology and hacker culture. Even as Snowden engages in Stone-style propaganda to support its hero, it avoids the stupid clichés that often appear when Hollywood takes on tech topics. I spoke with screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald and technical supervisor Ralph Echemendia, who explained that Edward Snowden himself read drafts of the film and corrected details he felt were inaccurate.

      Here are five aspects of the film that make Snowden a convincing tale about tech.

    • 5 Corporations Now Dominate Our Privatized Intelligence Industry

      The recent integration of two military contractors into a $10 billion behemoth is the latest in a wave of mergers and acquisitions that have transformed America’s privatized, high-tech intelligence system into what looks like an old-fashioned monopoly.

      In August, Leidos Holdings, a major contractor for the Pentagon and the National Security Agency, completed a long-planned merger with the Information Systems & Global Solutions division of Lockheed Martin, the global military giant. The 8,000 operatives employed by the new company do everything from analyzing signals for the NSA to tracking down suspected enemy fighters for US Special Forces in the Middle East and Africa.

      The sheer size of the new entity makes Leidos one of the most powerful companies in the intelligence-contracting industry, which is worth about $50 billion today. According to a comprehensive study I’ve just completed on public and private employment in intelligence, Leidos is now the largest of five corporations that together employ nearly 80 percent of the private-sector employees contracted to work for US spy and surveillance agencies.

    • Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Joins Call for Edward Snowden Pardon

      Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union launched a joint campaign and public petition to urge President Obama to pardon Snowden and allow him to return to the United States without the fear of persecution.

      The campaign is being supported by a number of politicians and celebrities, including Senator Bernie Sanders, Susan Sarandon, Daniel Radcliffe, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Terry Gilliam, Noam Chomsky, Senator Ron Wyden as well as former NSA director Michael Hayden.

      It coincides with the release of Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” movie. The movie is largely based on Snowden’s own story, who worked as a NSA contractor until defecting in 2013. Snowden initially took refuge in Hong Kong, then fled to Russia, and worked with journalists at newspapers like Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian to reveal details about the NSA’s surveillance programs against U.S. citizens.

    • The House Intelligence Committee’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Snowden Report

      Late yesterday afternoon the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a three-page executive summary (four, if we count the splendid cover photo) of its two-year inquiry into Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency (NSA) disclosures. On first reading, I described it as an “aggressively dishonest” piece of work.

    • Film Review: Human Element Makes Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ Quite Captivating

      Every whistleblower undergoes some kind of transformation that pushes them to the point where they make the pivotal decision to challenge power. Oliver Stone’s film about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden portrays how he went from a person reluctant to question the government to a person who believed it was virtuous to challenge abuses of government power.

      “Snowden” unfolds in the Mira Hong Kong Hotel, where Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) met with journalists Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto). The script intermittently flashes back to periods of Snowden’s life, from his time in a military boot camp to his time working for the CIA in Geneva to when he worked at an NSA facility in Oahu, Hawaii.

      Gordon-Levitt nails the intonation of Snowden’s voice. Shailene Woodley is fabulous as his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, and the choice to make much of the film revolve around Snowden’s relationship with Mills positively elevates the film to a fairly compelling love story. In fact, the way the story is told suggests Snowden’s views on questioning the government changed from post-9/11 flag-waving nationalism the more his romance with Mills blossomed, especially since she was against the Iraq War and other acts of President George W. Bush’s administration.

    • A Cosmopolitan Defense of Snowden

      Like me, Goldsmith believes there’s no chance Snowden will get a pardon, even while admitting that Snowden’s disclosures brought worthwhile transparency to the Intelligence Community. Unlike me, he opposes a pardon, in part, because of the damage Snowden did, a point I’ll bracket for the moment.

    • HPSCI: We Must Spy Like Snowden To Prevent Another Snowden

      I was going to write about this funny part of the HPSCI report anyway, but it makes a nice follow-up to my post on Snowden and cosmopolitanism, on the importance of upholding American values to keeping the servants of hegemon working to serve it.

      As part of its attack on Edward Snowden released yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee accused Snowden of attacking his colleagues’ privacy.

    • Protect Intelligence Whistleblowers

      To get to the offices of the congressional intelligence committees, you must follow a shaft of sunlight down a circular staircase, into the bowels of the Capitol, and down a corridor until you reach heavy wooden doors guarded by an armed sentry. Behind those doors, there are no windows, there is no sunlight. Behind those doors, members of Congress and their staff review our nation’s most secret espionage programs. And on occasion, whistleblowers have helped shine a light into this dark and secret world.

      But high-profile leakers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning indicated that they thought approaching Congress would be futile, even dangerous. That is because there is a history of prosecution of whistleblowers and myriad internal hurdles to clear before anyone can report possible classified wrongdoing to Congress—hurdles that are greater in the intelligence arena than any other. So instead they went to the media.

      This must change. Congress must encourage whistleblowers concerned about sensitive intelligence programs to approach the committees first, not to go straight to the media. If the committees made a few changes to welcome whistleblowers, they might avoid having sensitive intelligence programs revealed, while strengthening our national security.

    • Hit Job: Congress Attacks Ed Snowden, Continues Ostrich-style “Oversight”

      If you’re a current or former member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) or a current or former staff member of the same and you’ve decided to read this, I commend you. It will be the first step in a multi-step program you’ll need to undergo in order to come to terms with how the nearly 40 year-old institution that you are or were a part of, an instiution that was originally designed to police the Intelligence Community, has instead become’s its chief guardian — and in so doing, enabled that same Intelligence Community to become the single biggest threat to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that we’ve faced in the history of the Republic.

    • Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower

      Oliver Stone’s “Snowden,” a quiet, crisply drawn portrait of the world’s most celebrated whistle-blower, belongs to a curious subgenre of movies about very recent historical events. Reversing the usual pattern, it could be described as a fictional “making of” feature about “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary on the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. That film seems to me more likely to last — it is deeper journalism and more haunting cinema — but Mr. Stone has made an honorable and absorbing contribution to the imaginative record of our confusing times. He tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, and discreetly embellishing the record in the service of drama and suspense.

      In the context of this director’s career, “Snowden” is both a return to form and something of a departure. Mr. Stone circles back to the grand questions of power, war and secrecy that have propelled his most ambitious work, and finds a hero who fits a familiar Oliver Stone mold. Edward (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, leaning hard on a vocal imitation) is presented as a disillusioned idealist, a serious young man whose experiences lead him to doubt accepted truths and question the wisdom of authority. He has something in common with Jim Garrison in “J.F.K.” and Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July,” and also with Chris Taylor and Bud Fox, the characters played by Charlie Sheen in “Platoon” and “Wall Street.”

    • NYPD Says Talking About Its IMSI Catchers Would Make Them Vulnerable to Hacking

      Typically, cops don’t like talking about IMSI catchers, the powerful surveillance technology used to monitor mobile phones en masse. In a recent case, the New York Police Department (NYPD) introduced a novel argument for keeping mum on the subject: Asked about the tools it uses, it argued that revealing the different models of IMSI catchers the force owned would make the devices more vulnerable to hacking.

      Civil liberties activists are not convinced. Christopher Soghoian from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote in an affidavit as part of a petition against the NYPD’s decision not to share this information, “It would be a serious problem if the costly surveillance devices purchased by the NYPD without public competitive bidding are so woefully insecure that the only thing protecting them from hackers is the secrecy surrounding their model names.”

      The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), an affiliate of the ACLU, has been trying to get access to information about the NYPD’s IMSI catchers under the Freedom of Information Law. These devices are also commonly referred to as “stingrays”, after a particularly popular model from Harris Corporation. Indeed, the NYCLU wants to know which models of IMSI catchers made by Harris the police department has.

      “Public disclosure of this information, and the amount of taxpayer funds spent to buy the devices, directly advances the Freedom of Information Law’s purpose of informing a robust public debate about government actions,” the NYCLU writes in a court filing. The group has requested documents that show how much money has been spent on the technology.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • 4 Things to Consider When Running Social Media Campaigns About Texas Inmates

      Two such advocates reached out to EFF: Esther Große and Carrie Christensen. These women work with a high-profile inmate, Kenneth Foster, to try to secure his release and reform Texas’ so-called “Law of Parties,” which allows the state to assign capital punishment to accessories to a murder, even if they didn’t actually commit the act. Foster was facing the death penalty under this rule, but hours before his scheduled execution in 2007, Gov. Rick Perry commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Ever since, Foster has engaged in political activism from behind bars through his writing and poetry.

      Esther and Carrie had been running various social media accounts to support Foster. They maintained editorial control of these accounts and posted his writing. But they voluntariliy suspended these accounts after the new TDCJ rule was announced for fear of the impact on Foster. EFF communicated (.pdf) with TDCJ on their behalves to establish better clarity on what will and will not be permitted under the policy. Based on the information we and others (.pdf) received from TDCJ, we can now share lessons we’ve gleaned for operating a social media campaign regarding an inmate.

    • FBI Agent Posing as Journalist to Deliver Malware to Suspect Was Fine, Says DOJ

      In 2007, an FBI agent impersonated an Associated Press journalist in order to deliver malware to a criminal suspect and find out his location. According to a newly published report from the Department of Justice, the operation was in line with the FBI’s undercover policies at the time.

      Journalistic organisations had expressed concern that the tactic could undermine reporters’ and media institutions’ credibility.

      “We concluded that FBI policies in 2007 did not expressly address the tactic of agents impersonating journalists,” the report from the Office of the Inspector General reads.

      The case concerned a Seattle teenager suspected of sending bomb threats against a local school. FBI Special Agent Mason Grant got in touch with the teen over email, pretending to be an AP journalist. After some back and forth, Grant sent the suspect a fake article which, when clicked, grabbed his real IP address. Armed with this information, the FBI identified and arrested the suspect.

    • Tesla is suing an oil-company executive it says impersonated Elon Musk

      Tesla is suing an oil executive under suspicion of impersonating Elon Musk to dig up confidential financial information from the company, Forbes reported on Wednesday.

      The lawsuit, reportedly filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, claimed that Todd Katz, the chief financial officer for Quest Integrity Group, emailed Tesla’s chief financial officer using a similar email address as Musk’s looking to gain information that wasn’t disclosed in an earnings call with investors.

    • Tesla sues oil exec for impersonating Elon Musk

      Tesla Motors is suing an oil pipeline service executive in a California court, claiming the man impersonated Tesla CEO Elon Musk in an attempt to gain undisclosed financial information.

      The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, says Quest Integrity Group CFO Todd Katz sent an email to Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler from a Yahoo email address similar to one Musk has used in the past.

      A spokesman for the Quest’s parent company called the allegations involving company officials “unsubstantiated” and “absurd.”

    • Former hacker blasts Love’s trial as an ‘absurd ordeal’

      ALLEGED HACKER Lauri Love, the 31-year-old British citizen accused of breaking into the systems of the FBI, the US Missile Defence Agency and the Federal Reserve Bank in 2013, has lost his appeal over extradition to the US.

      The judgement was delivered within minutes of the commencement of this afternoon’s session at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

      Love’s lawyer, Tor Ekeland, said that Love had “embarrassed” the US authorities and that they had “very bad security and these hacks used exploits that were publicly known for months”.

      Former hacker and ex-Anonymous and LulzSec mouthpiece Jake ‘Topiary’ Davis attended the hearing and live tweeted the verdict, calling it “a horrible decision” and “a mess from the start”.

      According to Davis, Love was immediately advised by the judge that he could appeal against the decision and that the case would be sent on to the Secretary of State while he remains, for the time being, on bail.

      Love, referring to his appeal, told press and supporters outside the court: “This means we’ve been given a higher platform. There will be justice. Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

    • Lauri Love to be extradited to the US to face hacking charges, court rules

      Briton Lauri Love will be extradited to the US to face charges of hacking, Westminster Magistrates’ Court ruled on Friday.

      Love faces up to 99 years in prison in the US on charges of hacking as part of the Anonymous collective, according to his legal team.

      Handing down her ruling at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, district judge Nina Tempia told Love that he can appeal against the decision. The case will now be referred to the home secretary Amber Rudd while Love remains on bail.

    • Judge Rules to Extradite Alleged UK Hacker Lauri Love

      Copy This URL

      Lauri Love will be extradited to the US to face charges related to his alleged involvement in #OpLastResult, a UK judge has ruled today.

      Speaking at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this afternoon, Judge Nina Tempia said: “I will be extraditing Mr Love, by which I mean I will be passing the case to the Secretary of State.”

      The ruling, which lasted under five minutes, was attended by Love, his parents, and around 40 supporters. Leaving court, some of his supporters derided the decision, shouting: “Bullshit, kangaroo court!”

    • Lauri Love loses fight against extradition

      Lauri Love has lost his court case against extradition to the US to face hacking charges.

      Love was indicted in US courts in 2013 after it emerged that he had hacked into servers at the Federal Reserve, NASA, Missile Defence Agency and the US Army as part of hacker group known as Anonymous.

      He and his doctors have consistently argued in extradition hearings that he should not be extradited to the US from his home in south-eastern England because he suffers from Asperger syndrome and depression. Love has repeatedly told the media that he would rather commit suicide than face trial in America.

    • Alleged hacker Lauri Love to be extradited to US

      An autistic man suspected of hacking into US government computer systems is to be extradited from Britain to face trial, a court has ruled.

      Lauri Love, 31, who has Asperger’s syndrome, is accused of hacking into the FBI, the US central bank and the country’s missile defence agency.

      Mr Love, from Stradishall, Suffolk, has previously said he feared he would die in a US prison if he was extradited.

    • Computer activist Lauri Love loses appeal against US extradition

      Lauri Love, the student accused of hacking into the computer systems of the US missile defence agency, Nasa and the Federal Reserve, has lost his appeal against extradition to America.

      Judge Nina Tempia said the 31-year-old, who has Asperger syndrome, could be cared for by “medical facilities in the United States prison estate” and implied that he should answer the “extremely serious charges” in the country where the damage was inflicted.

      Love, who lives with his parents in Newmarket, Suffolk, was granted permission to appeal against Friday’s ruling and given bail pending further legal action. The battle over his fate could eventually reach the European court of human rights in Strasbourg and last several years.

      There were gasps in the courtroom as Tempia read out her ruling, which followed a full case hearing in June. Love’s supporters, who stormed out of Westminster magistrates court in London shouting “kangaroo court”, fear he could face up to 99 years in a US jail if convicted on all counts.

    • UK Court Says Lauri Love Can Be Extradited To Face Hacking Charges In The US

      There’s little to be gained by adding up the maximum possible jail sentence facing Love. Rest assured, if convicted, it will likely be over a decade. Consolidation of the cases and charges is likely, but more than one of the charges carry possible 10-year sentences.

      Meanwhile, back in the UK, Love has managed to escape being jailed for refusing to turn over passwords and encryption keys to law enforcement. UK investigators fought hard to force Love — who they’ve never formally charged — to crack open multiple seized devices for them. This attempt was shot down in May by a judge who viewed this as an end run around protections built into RIPA, the laws governing law enforcement’s investigatory powers.

      The final decision on Love’s extradition is in the hands of Elizabeth Truss, the recently-appointed Secretary of State for Justice. Truss’ previous government work doesn’t really provide much guidance on which side she’ll come down on this, but her voting record tends to indicate she’s more sympathetic to national security/law enforcement interests than those of her constituents. Considering the UK and US have a very cozy surveillance relationship, it stands to reason Truss will likely decide to appease the DOJ, rather than overturn the court’s decision.

    • Swedish appeals court upholds detention order for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

      A Swedish appeals court on Friday upheld a detention order for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, dismissing the latest attempt by the 45-year-old Australian to make prosecutors drop a rape investigation from 2010.

      The decision by the Svea Court of Appeal means that the arrest warrant stands for the 45-year-old computer hacker, who has avoided extradition to Sweden by seeking shelter at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012.

      Assange, who denies the rape allegation, has challenged the detention order several times. He says he fears he will be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges if he leaves the embassy.

    • Muslims are most disliked group in America, says new study

      Muslims are the most disapproved group in America, according to a new study, amid increasing anti-Muslim rhetoric from conservative politicians.

      A new study from sociologists at the University of Minnesota, which analysed Americans’ perceptions of minority faith and racial groups, found that their disapproval of Muslims has almost doubled from about 26 per cent 10 years ago to 45.5 per cent in 2016.

      Amid increasing focus on immigration, refugees and national security and in the wake of multiple terrorist attacks around the world, the study found that almost half of those surveyed would not want their child to marry a Muslim, compared to just 33.5 per cent of people a decade earlier.

    • Court: Officer Killed Man Less Than a Second After Command

      A Southern California police officer gave a man less than a second to raise his hands before opening fire and killing him, a federal appeals court noted Friday in rejecting the officer’s request to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against him.

      The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Tustin Police Officer Osvaldo Villarreal couldn’t reasonably have feared for his safety when he shot 31-year-old Benny Herrera after responding to a domestic dispute call in December 2011.

      That determination ran counter to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, which said in 2013 that the shooting was reasonable and justified because Villarreal fired after Herrera ignored orders to show his hands.

      A video captured by a police dashboard camera shows otherwise, according to the 9th Circuit judges who cited the footage.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • NYC Kills Internet Browsing At Free WiFi Kiosks After The City’s Homeless Actually Use It

      Earlier this year, New York City undertook one of the biggest free city WiFi efforts ever conceived. Under the plan, an outfit by the name of LinkNYC is slated to install some 7,500 WiFi kiosks scattered around the five boroughs that will provide free gigabit WiFi (well, closer to 300 Mbps or so), free phone calls to anywhere in the country (via Vonage), as well as access to a device recharging station, 311, 911, 411 and city services (via an integrated Android tablet). The connectivity and services are supported by a rotating crop of ads displayed on the kiosks themselves.

    • Is New York City’s Public Wi-Fi Actually Connecting the Poor?

      Two young men sit on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 54th Street, huddled against a tall silver obelisk on a hot summer day. One man is sprawled on the ground in dirty sweatpants, and the other is 20-something, shirtless and examining an iPhone plugged into the kiosk’s USB port. Around them on the ground is a backpack, a duffel, loose cigarettes, and a roughed-up phone.

      LinkNYC, New York City’s newest communications network, includes more than 350 kiosks installed on sidewalks throughout the city and was created to repurpose payphone infrastructure through public kiosks offering free internet, phone calls, and USB charging ports. The project is a collaboration between the city and a consortium of private technology and media companies including Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet (read: Google) company, and represents an important innovation in the “smart city” movement integrating information and communication technologies into all aspects of urban life.

    • cloudflare and rss

      Let’s say somebody has a blog that I’d like to read. Subscribe to even. Let’s say they have an RSS link on their page. This should be easy.

      Now let’s say the blog in question is hosted/proxied/whatever by Cloudflare. Uh oh.

      Just reading the blog in my browser is now somewhat hampered because Cloduflare thinks I’m some sort of cyberterrorist and requires my browser run a javascript anti-turing test. But eventually the blog loads, I read it, click the RSS link to subscribe, see that it is in fact XML rendered in my browser, and copy the link.

    • Internet speed – you don’t get what you pay for

      The age old cry is that “The internet too slow.” In part that has been exposed by the raft of new AC routers that may be able to connect at up to a gigabit in your network but grind to a halt when it hits the internet.

      The internet speeds offered by Telcos, ISPs and RSPs are a theoretical maximum speed – more guidelines really and they are under no real obligation to provide even a fraction of the advertised speed. The vast majority of ADSL connections are heavily contended (bandwidth is shared by other users on the same DSLAM), so when the kids get home, internet speeds slow even more.

      Like any advertised goods or services, you should get what you pay for – a kilo of fruit must weight a kilo, or there are huge fines for “short weight.” But it seems ISPs are dead against that principle telling the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to butt out.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Cuba, US hold first talks on intellectual property

      Cuba and the US held their first talk on the issue of intellectual property, the island’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday.

      A statement revealed that Daniel Marti, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at the White House visited Havana on September 8-9 and met with representatives of the Cuban Office of Industrial Property, the National Centre of Copyright, the Faculty of Law of the University of Havana, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment.

      Marti was accompanied by officials from the State Department, the Copyright Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Xinhua news agency reported.

      “In this first official meeting between Cuba and the US on intellectual property, the parties exchanged views on current regulations in the respective countries … and the legal framework of the two states for the protection of trademarks, patents and legal copyright,” read the statement.

    • Copyrights

      • Alleged KickassTorrents Owner Denied Access to U.S. Counsel

        This week the U.S. sent notice to Polish authorities indicating it wants to extradite Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents. Vaulin’s defense team is reviewing the request but warns that the case is turning into an international due process problem, as he is still unable to meet his U.S. counsel.

      • European Commission wants to break the web, give publishers the right to charge for inbound links

        The European Commission’s “copyright modernisation” plan is an unmitigated disaster, but there’s one particularly insane section of it that I want to call your attention to: the “link tax,” which entitles publishers to payment when people link to them on the internet.

        Fundamentally, this is the insane idea that companies own the information about where they and their assets are located, a shitty idea that we’ve been making fun of since 2001, which the elected European Parliament has repeatedly rejected, which experiments in Germany and Spain have shown to be a disaster.

        But the unelected, thoroughly captured bureaucrats of the European Commission refuse to let go of this ridiculous plan.

      • Nobody Is Watching Kim Dotcom’s Livestreamed Extradition Hearing

        Remember Kim Dotcom? He’s the convicted fraudster-turned rich dude who ran MegaUpload, that file storage website that hosted a ton of pirated content. In January 2012, Dotcom was raided by New Zealand authorities and he’s been in legal purgatory ever since. Right now, Dotcom is fighting extradition by the United States for charges of online piracy.

      • Incumbents rule

        The European Union’s online reforms help the old more than the new

      • Wi-Fi providers not liable for copyright infringements, rules top EU court

        Businesses such as coffee shops that offer a wireless network free of charge to their customers aren’t liable for copyright infringements committed by users of that network, the ruling states—which, in part, chimes with an earlier advocate general’s opinion. But hotspot operators may be required, following a court injunction, to password-protect their Wi-Fi networks to stop or prevent such violations.

        In 2010, Sony sued Tobias McFadden, who provides free Wi-Fi access at his lighting and sound system shop in Munich, Germany. The company claimed a copyrighted song had been offered for download from his wireless network. Although he wasn’t the individual responsible for the infringement, the local court mulled a ruling of indirect liability because the network hadn’t been secured.

      • Copyright Trolls Now Threatening College Students With Loss of Scholarship, Deportation

        In all of our coverage of copyright trolls, those rent-seeking underdwellers that fire off threat letters to those they suspect of copyright infringement with demands designed to extract cash without having to actually take anyone to court, it’s quite easy to become somewhat numb to the underhanded tactics they employ. Between specifically targeting folks over pornography in order to minimize the chance that anyone might want to actually go to trial, to the privacy invading tactics occasionally used when a court case actually commences, it becomes easy to simply shrug at the depravity of it all.

        But there is a special place in hell for copyright trolls who falsely inform students that failure to pay on receipt of threat letters, or who falsely inform foreign students that deportation could result from a failure to pay. According to at least one university in Canada, this is apparently a new favored tactic among some copyright trolls.

      • Another Bad EU Ruling: WiFi Providers Can Be Forced To Require Passwords If Copyright Holders Demand It

        For quite some time now, we’ve been following an odd case through the German and then EU court system, concerning whether or not the operator of an open WiFi system should be liable for copyright infringement that occurs over that access point. Back in 2010, a German court first said that if you don’t secure your WiFi, you can get fined. This was very problematic — especially for those of us who believe in open WiFi. The EU Court of Justice agreed to hear the case and the Advocate General recommended a good ruling: that WiFi operators are not liable and also that they shouldn’t be forced to password protect their access points.

        The ruling, unfortunately, says that WiFi operators can be compelled to password protect their networks. It’s not all bad, in that the headline story is that WiFi operators, on their own, are not liable for actions done on the network, but that’s completely undermined by the requirement to password protect it if a copyright holder asks them to.

      • Do memes violate copyright law?

        Who owns a meme—those pictures, videos and ideas that go viral on the internet?

        In the case of the Socially Awkward Penguin, the answer might be National Geographic, since a staff photographer took the original penguin picture. Around 2009, internet users got hold of that photo, changed the background, added text and made it an internet phenomenon.

        But stock photo company Getty Images says it controls the penguin—and its meme progeny. Last year, Getty Images, which licenses National Geographic’s pictures, told the German company Get Digital that it owed license fees for using the penguin meme on one of its blogs. And Getty’s bill was twice the normal licensing fee, according to Get Digital.

      • Apparently, Ubuntu is ‘infringing’ Paramount’s Copyrights over Transformers movie!

        For some unknown reason, Paramount Pictures has decided that the freely distributed Ubuntu OS torrents are “infringing” their copyrights on Transformers movie! Paramount Pictures recently sent a DMCA takedown notice to Google, accusing Ubuntu OS of infringing their copyrights.

      • Torrent Site Founder, Moderator and Users Receive Prison Sentences

        The 28-year-old former operator of a French-based torrent site has been ordered to serve a year in jail and pay a five million euro fine. A moderator received a four-month suspended sentence. Somewhat unusually, four regular users of the site were tracked down by their IP addresses. They too received custodial sentences.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/09/17/debian-8-6-released/feed/ 0 Links 4/9/2016: Git 2.10.0, Z-Wave Public Specification http://techrights.org/2016/09/04/git-2-10-0/ http://techrights.org/2016/09/04/git-2-10-0/#comments Sun, 04 Sep 2016 17:50:07 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95222

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How open source technologies are transforming the BBC

    The BBC Archive contains material dating the back to the 1880s, preceding the formation of the Corporation itself.

    Created in recognition of the intellectual and cultural value in BBC public service programming, it preserves the BBC’s content as a cultural record and for the benefit of future generations.

    The UK government recently set out a proposal for increased archive access, agreeing with BBC that the Archive represents a valuable resource for the general public and academia.

    The BBC Rewind project was born of a converged editorial and engineering team originating at BBC Northern Ireland, liberating archived content for public access prototypes and continued use in production. It also focuses on using smart data management technologies to improve the way the Archive can be searched and content discovered.

  • Making your first contribution to open source software

    I believe that open source software needs to be personal to you if you’re going to do it at all. Open source software is a hobby—but it’s more than that. I find myself thinking about the open source software projects I maintain, contribute to, and use almost daily. So if you’re going to contribute to open source software, make it something you care about.

  • Events

    • FUDCon Phnom Penh: Call for Papers

      FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a major free software event held in various regions around the world, usually annually per region. FUDCon is a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests in which project participants can work on specific initiatives. FUDCon is always free to attend for anyone. For 2016, the FUDCon for the APAC region will be in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It will be held at Norton University (NU) Phnom Penh from 04. to 06. November 2016. The event happens synchronized with the BarCamp Phnom Penh/ASEAN, the biggest technology-oriented event in Cambodia and one of the biggest in the region with 4,000 registered visitors.

    • QtCon FInished First Day of 13 Tracks of Talks

      David Faure is one of the longest-standing developers of KDE software. Today he wanted to give some history of KDE development as it was done back in KDE 1 days, to see how that links to current community practices. The K in KDE stood for Kool before that was dropped, but who knew the Q in Qt stood for Quasar before that was transformed into Cute. He spoke of the original kfm code which Martin Graesslin said still remained in KWin to support Konqueror as a desktop window. Today it was decided this code could now be removed!

    • Video: KVM Forum 2016 – Painless Switch to KVM
    • Video: KVM Forum 2016 – KVM Status Report
    • Audio Workshop Accepted into 2016 Linux Kernel Summit and Linux Plumbers Conference

      Audio is an increasingly important component of the Linux plumbing, given increased use of Linux for media workloads and of the Linux kernel for smartphones. Topics include low-latency audio, use of the clock API, propagating digital configuration through dynamic audio power management (DAPM), integration of HDA and ASoC, SoundWire ALSA use-case managemer (UCM) scalability, standardizing HDMI and DisplayPort interfaces, Media Controller API integration, and a number of topics relating to the multiple userspace users of Linux-kernel audio, including Android and ChromeOS as well as the various desktop-oriented Linux distributions.

    • LinuxCON Kids’ day

      Part of this year’s LinuxCON / ContainerCON in Toronto was a full day program called Kids’ Day. Its purpose was to foster an interest in technology among junior nerds and the children of their nerd parents (raises hand). My 12 and 15 year olds were keen to lay hands on some hardware and hang out with like-minded instructors, so we signed up.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 51 To Support FLAC Audio Codec

        Beginning with the Firefox 51 web-browser release, FLAC audio will finally be supported natively.

      • Fighting Back Against Secrecy Orders

        Transparency is the core pillar for everything we do at Mozilla. It is foundational to how we build our products, with an open code base that anybody can inspect, and is critical to our vision of an open, trusted, secure web that places users in control of their experience online. Our reform efforts in the areas of vulnerability disclosure and government surveillance are also centered on the transparency ideal.

      • Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

        Earlier this summer I wrote about Mozilla’s efforts to rollout a multi-process architecture, codename Electrolysis, for Firefox. In the months since, Mozilla has completed its initial tests on 1 percent of its user population and the initial numbers are good, according to Asa Dotzler, director of Firefox at Mozilla.

        The company is reporting a 400 percent improvement in responsiveness and a 700 percent improvement in responsiveness for loading large web pages.These numbers mean that users are far less likely to see their browser freeze, pause, lag or crash. Dotzler himself used the word “janky” to describe previous versions of the browser.

        Over the next week, multi-process will be coming to 10 percent of total Firefox users. For now, users with add-ons will not be getting the new architecture. The staggered rollout is fairly industry standard to avoid shipping bugs. Having two independent groups of users allows Mozilla to benchmark metrics from the new version against unconverted users.

        For now, multi-process is limited to a single content process and a single browser process. Later versions will include multiple content processes and sandboxing.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • OpenOffice Retirement, CPUs Will Linux, Kernel.org Hacker Arrested

      A suspect has been arrested for hacking into kernel.org five years ago topping the Linux headlines on a busy news day. It caused a lot of headaches back then and a months downtime. In other news, reports of the latest AMD and Intel chips only supporting Windows 10 weren’t exactly accurate and Apache is seriously considering throwing in the towel on OpenOffice. Neil Rickert posted a look at the latest Leap Beta and more details emerge on PC-BSD’s move to TrueOS.

    • What Would OpenOffice Retirement Involve? (long)

      I have regularly observed that the Apache OpenOffice project has limited capacity for sustaining the project in an energetic manner. It is also my considered opinion that there is no ready supply of developers who have the capacity, capability, and will to supplement the roughly half-dozen volunteers holding the project together. It doesn’t matter what the reasons for that might be.

    • OpenOffice In Danger of Shutting Down, Project VP Warns

      The future isn’t look bright for OpenOffice, the open-source office suite run by the Apache foundation.

    • Redesigning Tor, Goodbye OpenOffice & More…

      Building Tor to a next new level: Tor is still safe, but there are cracks in it’s armor. You can still safely cruise the net through The Onion Router with your identity kept secret — most of the time but not always. Thankfully, for the time being that “not always” stands at about one in several million, but organizations like the NSA and the Brit’s GCHQ have been working at chipping away at those odds to turn them more in their favor.

  • Education

    • The Open Source School Redefines Education in Italy

      The commons are what we share, together and with each other. In sociology, we’d speak of “collective intelligence.” According to the French philosopher Pierre Levy, the spread of communication techniques for digital media has led to the emergence of new ways of social bonding based on gathering areas of common interests, open processes of cooperation and an exchange of knowledge. We keep saying, “Innovation is always social, otherwise it’s just profiting from people’s ignorance.” Sharing knowledge is the first and most essential common for us. It generates a real process of emancipation and civilization since it enables any person to serve their community. Simultaneously, it allows each individual to freely express and enhance their uniqueness, while giving them the opportunity to appeal to all the intellectual and human qualities of the community itself.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • Revisiting W^X with OpenBSD 6.0

      OpenBSD 6.0 was released today, and with it some exciting new security features. From my perspective, the chief among them is the technical enforcement of W^X in user-land. Since moving to a technical control rather than a policy statement for enforcing executable space protection was a result of discussions caused by my last blog post on the situation, I’m very excited about this development and thought that giving a demonstration and discussion would be in order. (In the spirit of not putting the headline on Page 1 and the retraction on Page 11, hopefully BSDNow will cover this as well).

    • OpenBSD 6.0 : why and how

      The only operating system I use on my computers is not Mac, not Windows, and not even Linux. It’s OpenBSD, and I love it so much.

      Since OpenBSD 6.0 was released today, I figured I should say a little something about why I love it, and how you can try it.

    • OpenBSD 6.0 released

      September 1st, 2016: The OpenBSD team announces the availability of 6.0!

    • OpenBSD 6.0
    • PC-BSD Evolves into TrueOS

      We are proud to announce that the PC-BSD project has evolved into TrueOS: a modern, cutting-edge distribution of FreeBSD focused on security, simplicity, and stability for desktops, servers, and beyond! TrueOS harnesses the best elements of PC-BSD, combines it with security technologies from OpenBSD, and layers it on top of FreeBSD to provide a complete system for modern machines.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Why does Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation get so much hate?

      Within the open source and free software worlds, Stallman (and the Free Software Foundation—the FSF) hold an almost deity-like position in the hearts of many. For other people, well, they have the exact opposite feeling towards the man.

      Then there are the people who feel both positively and negatively (in equally strong measures) towards Stallman. If you made a Venn diagram comparing “People who revere Stallman” and “People who despise Stallman” my guess is there would be an awful lot of overlap of those two circles.

      For my part, I understand both positions.

      In years past, I was highly critical—bordering on hostile—of both the words and actions of Stallman and the FSF. While some of my criticisms of Stallman were not entirely unfounded, there was certainly a deeper reason behind much of it.

      When someone acts as a messenger to point out a core problem in society—in this case, software freedom (and overlapping issues) —the messenger is quite often vilified (many times, subconsciously) by those who are a part of the existing, problematic system.

    • GNU Libreboot, version 20160902 released

      This is a bugfix release, based on 20160818. It contains no new board changes. The previous 20160818 release had build errors in the _src archive, and the _util archive was only source code.

    • GIMP 2.9.5 AppImage
    • Eighteen new GNU releases in August 2016

      adns-1.5.1
      binutils-2.27
      dico-2.3
      diffutils-3.5
      fontopia-1.7
      freeipmi-1.5.3
      gama-1.18
      gcc-6.2.0
      glibc-2.24
      gnudos-1.9
      gnuhealth-3.0.3
      gnupg-2.1.15
      gnutls-3.5.3
      guix-0.11.0
      hyperbole-6.0.2
      java-training-wheels-2.8
      parallel-20160822
      xboard-4.9.1

  • Public Services/Government

    • Shame On My Country, Canada…

      I’m proud of Canada. It’a vital place and home of several generations of my family. One can still afford health care here, get a good education for a reasonable price, grow your own food or hunt/gather it, get plenty of clean water and fresh air, live in mountains, planes, deserts and forests, whatever you choose. However, when it comes to government spending money foolishly on non-Free software that the world can and does provide at cost as Free/Libre Open Source Software, Canada is as backwards as governments in Africa and the Middle East.

    • Don’t write off Jeremy Corbyn’s Digital Democracy Manifesto – here’s why it’s a lofty bill of ideas [Ed: Microsoft trying to sneak itself in there as well]

      Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn this week unveiled a ‘Digital Democracy Manifesto’ that was widely derided in the British media – but there are some ideas within it that, though unfortunately dressed in clunky jargon, are more radical and far-reaching than they are being given credit for.

      [...]

      Jeremy Corbyn’s call for platform cooperatives is an idea that has also been put forward by British Computer Society fellow, Microsoft UK CTO, and former NHS IT director Jerry Fishenden on our sister site CIO. Simply put, the ‘platform cooperative’ is the idea of turning sharing economy apps on their head as the basis for a software platform of mutual aid and cooperation but outside of private profit.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Free the Reviews: Why Free Culture Needs Free Opinions

      Thanks to the free culture movement, vast knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and StackExchange allow content to be re-used freely and built upon, and many major sites offer Creative Commons licensing as part of their user interfaces.

      Yet there’s one area in which free culture has made very little progress to date: online reviews. Sites like Yelp, IMDB, Amazon.com, TripAdvisor, Goodreads, and others rely on millions of users to review products and services, but the resulting text and media are licensed only to the operating companies and not available for re-use, which means reviews are stuck in silos.

      They may disappear at a moment’s notice. They can’t be translated, remixed or built upon, outside the narrow exemptions granted by fair use. Reviews could be the glue that connects a lot of existing free and open information, including Wikidata and OpenStreetMap if only they were freely licensed.

    • Motion Comic project by Nikolai Mamashev

      To finish, Nikolai propose all the sources files, and his work as CC-BY-SA. An open-license! So, more free culture around, and yes, I’ll be able to reuse sample of his work for, exemple, a Pepper&Carrot trailer or when I’ll need to pitch the project in a video.

    • SMS on the Linux desktop, Linux’s 25th birthday, and more open source news

  • Programming/Development

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Z-Wave protocol specification now public

      The Z-Wave wireless home-automation protocol has been released to the public. In years past, the specification was only available to purchasers of the Z-Wave Alliance’s development kit, forcing open-source implementations to reverse-engineer the protocol. The official press release notes that there are several such projects, including OpenZWave; Z-Wave support is also vital to higher-level Internet-of-Things abstraction systems like AllJoyn.

    • Introducing the Z-Wave Public Specification

      Z-Wave is the world’s most widely-deployed smart home technology, found inside tens of millions of smart products. Now, Z-Wave is also the most open protocol, as Sigma Designs has made the Z-Wave interoperability layer public.

Leftovers

  • No, the Internet Has Not Killed the Printed Book. Most People Still Prefer Them.

    Even with Facebook, Netflix and other digital distractions increasingly vying for time, Americans’ appetite for reading books — the ones you actually hold in your hands — has not slowed in recent years, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

    Sixty-five percent of adults in the United States said they had read a printed book in the past year, the same percentage that said so in 2012. When you add in ebooks and audiobooks, the number that said they had read a book in printed or electronic format in the past 12 months rose to 73 percent, compared with 74 percent in 2012.

    Twenty-eight percent said they had opted for an ebook in the past year, while 14 percent said they had listened to an audiobook.

    Lee Rainie, the director of internet, science and technology research for Pew Research, said the study demonstrated the staying power of physical books.

  • Microsoft’s fancy new outlook.com, planned for this year, now delayed until next

    In May 2015, Microsoft announced a big overhaul was coming to its Outlook.com free mail service. The new look Outlook.com looked a lot closer to the Outlook Web Access component in Exchange. It had Exchange features like the Clutter folder for handling all those e-mails that aren’t quite spam but aren’t quite important, pinned and flagged mail, new calendar views, and a better mobile interface that supports swipe-based gestures. In February 2016, this new experience was announced as being out of beta, and Microsoft rolled it out immediately to new users in North America. Everyone else was scheduled to be upgraded by the end of summer.

  • Twitter Jumps After Co-Founder Says Company Has to Consider M&A

    Twitter Inc. jumped as much as 5.8 percent, the most in two weeks, after co-founder Ev Williams said in an interview with Bloomberg TV that the company has to weigh all options amid ongoing speculation it’s a takeover target.

    Williams initially declined to comment when asked by Bloomberg’s Emily Chang whether Twitter can remain an independent company. He went on to say, “We’re in a strong position now, and as a board member we have to consider the right options.”

  • After Steve Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO, he was still working on an Apple TV set

    Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple five years ago, but he didn’t plan on leaving the company.

    Instead, Jobs was going to focus his energy on one very specific, secret project: Apple’s reinvention of TV — including the TV set itself.

    Walt Mossberg, Recode’s editor at large and an executive editor at The Verge, says Jobs called him on the night he announced he was formally handing over control of his company to Tim Cook, and told him about his TV ambitions.

  • Why parents are getting angrier: ‘Children are bored out of their skulls with real life’

    “It’s hard to know the difference between parenting and bullying,” admits Matt, father of two and one of a growing number of parents seeking help to control what they see as unacceptable levels of anger towards their children. Matt is an articulate and successful self-employed businessman in his 40s. After he split up from their mother five years ago, his two sons, then 11 and 14, started to act up by answering back, skipping homework, drinking and taking drugs. It marked the start of a phase of intense anger for Matt, who eventually sought help.

    “I have on a few occasions grabbed my eldest son by the scruff of his neck and shouted in his face. I couldn’t understand why they don’t do what I want them to do. Even now they make me question my skills as a parent.”

    He’s not alone.

    Over two decades, Mike Fisher has seen first-hand the effect of anger on children and their parents. Since setting up the British Association of Anger Management in 1999, he has worked with tens of thousands of people, helping them to manage and understand their anger. For the past 13 years he has also delivered one-day workshops specifically aimed at parental anger, for Ealing council in west London. The course is always heavily oversubscribed.

    “We always have to turn people away and put them on a waiting list for the next one,” says Kate Subanney, Ealing’s parent commissioner, whose idea it was to get Mike involved.

    The parents she sends his way have all been referred to her by social services, the NHS, police, or solicitors, but Mike is quick to dispel any assumption that they come from one demographic. “I’d say at least 20% are middle-class parents and are particularly well-educated and affluent. Yet social services are involved. It really is across the board.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Down the Atomic River

      Despite its status as a national monument, conferred by Bill Clinton exactly 10 years ago as a morsel to politically-famished greens, the Hanford Reach remains largely a closed and forbidden landscape. Ominous signs warn that entry to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the world’s most toxic site, on river right will result in arrest and prosecution. Most of the Saddle Mountain Wildlife Refuge on river left is closed. There’s no overnight camping allowed anywhere along the Reach. Even the islands are off limits. Only on the river are you really free.

      The plan is to kayak as much of the Reach as we can, a forty-mile stretch from below Priest Rapids Dam, once home of Smohallah, the apocalyptic Dreamer of the Wanapum tribe, down to Ringold, site of a strange fish hatchery cordoned off by concertina wire. What dark plot are they protecting the salmon fry from? The Cold War is long gone, but the paranoia persists.

    • California and EPA Poised to Expand Pollution of Potential Drinking Water Reserves

      As the western United States struggles with chronic water shortages and a changing climate, scientists are warning that if vast underground stores of fresh water that California and other states rely on are not carefully conserved, they too may soon run dry.

      Heeding this warning, California passed new laws in late 2014 that for the first time require the state to account for its groundwater resources and measure how much water is being used.

      Yet California’s natural resources agency, with the oversight and consent of the federal government, also runs a shadow program that allows many of its aquifers to be pumped full of toxic waste.

      Now the state — which relied on aquifers for at least 60 percent of its total water supply over the past three years — is taking steps to expand that program, possibly sacrificing portions of dozens more groundwater reserves. In some cases, regulators are considering whether to legalize pollution already taking place at a number of sites, based on arguments that the water that will be lost was too dirty to drink or too difficult to access at an affordable price. Officials also may allow the borders of some pollution areas to be extended, jeopardizing new, previously unspoiled parts of the state’s water supply.

      The proposed expansion would affect some of the parts of California hardest hit by drought, from the state’s agriculturally rich central valley to wine country and oil-drilling fields along the Salinas River. Some have questioned the wisdom of such moves in light of the state’s long-term thirst for more water supplies.

    • Sadistic Religious Fanatic: Mother Teresa Was No Saint

      Mother Teresa was a moral monster, a sadistic religious fanatic guilty of medical malpractice.

    • I Needed Treatment, Not Judgment From My Catholic Hospital

      Last December, I slipped on water on my bathroom floor and fell hard onto the tile. Later that night, I felt cramping in my back and abdomen. The next morning I was bleeding. After doing some online research, I feared my intrauterine device (IUD) was dislodged. I knew I needed to see a doctor.

      I did what anyone would do — I called an OB-GYN in my insurance network and made the soonest appointment I could. The doctor examined me briefly and confirmed my suspicion that my IUD had become dislodged. She said it needed to be removed.

      However, instead of removing the IUD, the doctor said she couldn’t help me. Her hands were tied because of religious restrictions imposed on her practice by Mercy Hospital and Medical Center. She explained that those restrictions prohibited her from removing the IUD because it was being used solely to prevent pregnancy.

      I was shocked.

    • California’s waters, a death trap: Uncovering the Golden State’s secret whale and dolphin massacre

      Until the 1980s, fishermen who fished for swordfish off the coast of California used harpoon guns to reel in their prey. As the industry modernized, the guns were exchanged for drift gillnets — gigantic nets the size of the Golden Gate Bridge that hang vertically in the water. By 1985, the catch reached a historic high, with fishermen landing more than 2,000 metric tons of fish. But there was a tragic and under-discussed consequence of that approach.

      A drift gillnet catches far more than just the target fish. It scoops up any marine animal unfortunate enough to swim in its path, including whales, dolphins and marine mammals like seals and sea lions. Turtles, sharks, fish and even seabirds are inadvertently trapped and killed by these nets, which environmentalists have dubbed “invisible curtains of death.” California is the last state in the nation to permit this destructive, unsustainable fishing method.

    • Apple and Others Help Customers Donate to the Red Cross, And Only the Red Cross

      Despite yet more evidence of trouble with the Red Cross’ disaster response — this time to floods in Louisiana — Apple, Amazon, T-Mobile, and many others have made the venerable charity the exclusive conduit for helping victims.

    • USA Today Helps Mylan Sell an Extortionate Price for EpiPen

      The drug-maker announced that it would be selling an unbranded version of the lifesaving anti-allergy device for $300 for a two-pack. That’s actually a little more than a 50 percent reduction from the current list price; a two-pack of EpiPens generally sells for $608.

      But that’s the recently jacked-up price that sparked the outrage that forced Mylan to offer a generic alternative. A year ago, an EpiPen set was going for $461. That would make the $300 price a 35 percent reduction, not 50 percent.

      [...]

      You don’t need time travel to make the generic EpiPen a bad deal, though; you just need to travel across the border into Canada, where a single pen retails for about $120 in Canadian money, which is about $92 in US currency. In France, where the device is made by a company Mylan recently bought, a twin-pack sells for about $85—or 28 percent of Mylan’s new “discount” price.

      Raising prices exorbitantly so that you can present a slightly less extortionate price as a “sale” is a time-honored marketing tradition. USA Today is under no obligation to feature the scam in a headline, however.

    • Trading Politics for Medical Profits

      Pay-to-play, the merger of politics and business, has many features including how to exploit political influence to maximize business profits even when children’s lives are at risk, says Michael Winship.

    • SEC Awards $22 Million to Ex-Monsanto Executive Through Whistleblower Program

      A former Monsanto Co executive who tipped the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to accounting improprieties involving the company’s top-selling Roundup product has been awarded more than $22 million from the agency’s whistleblower program, the executive’s lawyer said on Tuesday.

      The award of $22,437,800 was tied to an $80 million settlement between the SEC and Monsanto in February, according to the lawyer, Stuart Meissner in New York, in a statement. It is the agency’s second largest under the program.

      Meissner declined to reveal the whistleblower’s identity.

      Monsanto said in an emailed statement, “It would be inappropriate for our company to comment on the SEC’s whistleblower program or this specific award.”

      The Dodd Frank financial reform law empowered the SEC to award money to whistleblowers who give information to the agency which leads to a fine.

      Awards to 33 whistleblowers by the SEC’s program have now surpassed a total of $107 million since the agency launched the program in 2011, the agency said in a statement on Tuesday. The largest award, in 2014, was $30 million, the agency said.

      Monsanto’s $80 million SEC settlement followed allegations that the company misstated its earnings in connection with Roundup, a popular weed killer.

      The SEC’s case against Monsanto revolved around a corporate rebate program designed to boost Roundup sales.

    • Unconventional natural gas wells associated with migraine, fatigue

      New research suggests that Pennsylvania residents with the highest exposure to active natural gas wells operated by the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) industry are nearly twice as likely to suffer from a combination of migraine headaches, chronic nasal and sinus symptoms and severe fatigue.

    • Adverse Reproductive and Developmental Health Outcomes Following Prenatal Exposure to a Hydraulic Fracturing Chemical Mixture in Female C57Bl/6 Mice

      This work suggests potential adverse developmental and reproductive health outcomes in humans and animals exposed to these oil and gas operation chemicals, with adverse outcomes observed even in the lowest dose group tested, equivalent to concentrations reported in drinking water sources. These endpoints suggest potential impacts on fertility, as previously observed in the male siblings, which require careful assessment in future studies.

    • Exposure to Chemicals Released During Fracking May Harm Fertility

      More than 15 million Americans live within a one-mile radius of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) operations. UOGs combine directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to release natural gas from underground rock. Scientific studies, while ongoing, are still inconclusive on the potential long-term effects fracturing has on human development. Today, researchers at the University of Missouri released a study that is the first of its kind to link exposure to chemicals released during hydraulic fracturing to adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes in mice. Scientists believe that exposure to these chemicals also could pose a threat to human development.

      “Researchers have previously found that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) mimic or block hormones — the chemical messengers that regulate respiration, reproduction, metabolism, growth and other biological functions,” said Susan C. Nagel, Nagel, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health in the School of Medicine. “Evidence from this study indicates that developmental exposure to fracking and drilling chemicals may pose a threat to fertility in animals and potentially people. Negative outcomes were observed even in mice exposed to the lowest dose of chemicals, which was lower than the concentrations found in groundwater at some locations with past oil and gas wastewater spills.”

      Researchers mixed 23 oil and gas chemicals in four different concentrations to reflect concentrations ranging from those found in drinking water and groundwater to concentrations found in industry wastewater. The mixtures were added to drinking water given to pregnant mice in the laboratory until they gave birth. The female offspring of the mice that drank the chemical mixtures were compared to female offspring of mice in a control group that were not exposed. Mice exposed to drilling chemicals had lower levels of key hormones related to reproductive health compared to the control group.

    • WHO Experts Seek To Have Its Flu Framework Recognised Under Nagoya Protocol

      Will an international instrument protecting genetic resources get in the way of the world’s preparedness to fend off the next influenza pandemic? This is one of the questions left open for a group of experts reviewing the World Health Organization Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Framework. On the side, one stakeholder is claiming to have been denied full and fair participation.

    • Medicinal cannabis to be legalised in Australia from November

      Medicinal cannabis will become legal, but strictly controlled from November this year, under a formal decision reached by the Therapeutic Goods Administration this week.

      The final decision was published on Wednesday, paving the way for the drug to be legalised for medicinal use, as the federal government works towards creating a national regulator.

    • Bee farm ‘looks like it’s been nuked’ after millions die in spraying for Zika mosquitos

      There’s been some collateral damage in the fight against Zika – millions of honeybees in South Carolina.

      Dorchester County officials have apologized for killing the bees when the county failed to notify local beekeepers about mosquito spraying last weekend.

      Four travel-related cases of the Zika virus have been confirmed in the county northwest of Charleston. Aerial mosquito spraying operations were conducted Sunday morning.

    • Free As In Health Care

      Most of our debates define freedom in terms of “freedom to” now, and the arguments are about the limitations placed on those freedoms. If you’re really lucky, like Malibu-driver lucky, the discussions you’re involved in are nuanced enough to involve “freedom from”, but even that’s pretty rare.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Western Media Propaganda Threatens Peace and Prolongs the Deadly Conflict in Eastern Ukraine

      Western media is becoming unhinged as its anti-Russia propaganda struggles to keep a hold on its consumers. Two recent examples provide evidence.

    • Why They Invaded

      Former British ambassador Craig Murray on the UK’s decision to invade Iraq and the lessons still not learned.

    • As Hillary Clinton kisses up to Henry Kissinger, RT looks at 4 of his most heinous acts
    • Turkey’s Coup: Winners & Losers

      As the dust begins to settle from the failed Turkish coup, there appear to be some winners and losers, although predicting things in the Middle East these days is a tricky business. What is clear is that several alignments have shifted, shifts that may have an impact on the two regional running sores: the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.

      The most obvious winner to emerge from the abortive military putsch is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his campaign to transform Turkey from a parliamentary democracy to a powerful, centralized executive with himself in charge. The most obvious losers are Erdogan’s internal opposition and the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

    • White House Congratulates Itself on Modest Refugee Milestone
    • America’s True Role in Syria

      Syria’s civil war is the most dangerous and destructive crisis on the planet. Since early 2011, hundreds of thousands have died; around ten million Syrians have been displaced; Europe has been convulsed with Islamic State (ISIS) terror and the political fallout of refugees; and the United States and its NATO allies have more than once come perilously close to direct confrontation with Russia.

      Unfortunately, President Barack Obama has greatly compounded the dangers by hiding the US role in Syria from the American people and from world opinion. An end to the Syrian war requires an honest accounting by the US of its ongoing, often secretive role in the Syrian conflict since 2011, including who is funding, arming, training, and abetting the various sides. Such exposure would help bring to an end many countries’ reckless actions.

    • Experts Raise Alarms as US War Hawks Push for Deeper Syria Intervention

      As the civil war in Syria deepens, American war hawks are using recent atrocities to push for direct U.S. military intervention against the Syrian government, according to observers who warn that further escalation will only worsen what has been dubbed “the most dangerous and destructive crisis on the planet.”

      At The Nation on Thursday, journalist James Carden wrote that “neoconservative advocacy groups” are citing a new report by the United Nations’ Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in order to craft a narrative that “asserts that the widespread suffering of the Syrian people could have been averted if only the [Obama] administration had intervened in the Syrian conflict sooner; if only President [Barack] Obama simply had not reneged on his ‘red line’ pledge and unleashed a full scale, Iraq-style intervention, surely the situation would be better than it is today.”

      The OPCW report, which contains new accusations of chemical-weapons use by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, “provide[s] the war party in the United States with the perfect cudgel with which to beat the administration for backing off of the ‘red line’ policy the president spelled out in 2012,” Carden argued.

    • Some Hindsight: The Lies that Dumped America Into the Syrian War

      Checking out the news these days, it might seem pretty clear why the U.S. is at war in Syria: destroy ISIS. That is almost certainly the way the two main presidential candidates will see it during their upcoming first debate, in a rare point of agreement.

      The funny thing is that ISIS did not become the reason for what now is a major regional war until late in the game.

      If we rewind about three years, the original justification was to “rid the world of the dictator,” Syrian president Bashar Assad. The U.S. involvement was started under the pretext that Assad was using chemical weapons against the other side in what was once confined to a civil war. American declared Assad thus had to go to avoid a genocide and humanitarian disaster.

      FYI: If you read no further, remember anytime a politician uses the word “genocide” these days we’re about to be dragged into another conflict that will morph into a quagmire.

      So here’s a reprise of something I wrote three years ago. Let’s revisit it and see whether or not any of the current disaster, political and humanitarian, could have been anticipated.

    • Woman shoots drone: “It hovered for a second and I blasted it to smithereens.”

      With a single shotgun blast, a 65-year-old woman in rural northern Virginia recently shot down a drone flying over her property.

      The woman, Jennifer Youngman, has lived in The Plains, Virginia, since 1990. The Fauquier Times first reported the June 2016 incident late last week. It marks the third such shooting that Ars has reported on in the last 15 months—last year, similar drone shootings took place in Kentucky and California.

      Youngman told Ars that she had just returned from church one Sunday morning and was cleaning her two shotguns—a .410 bore and a 20-gauge—on her porch. She had a clear view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and neighbor Robert Duvall’s property (yes, the same Robert Duvall from The Godfather). Youngman had seen two men set up a card table on what she described as a “turnaround place” on a country road adjacent to her house.

    • U.S. Strategy to Fight ISIS Has Set Off a New Conflict in Syria

      Five years after the start of Syria’s uprising, the Turkish military directly entered the fray last week, sending troops to occupy the northern Syrian town of Jarablus, previously held by the militant group the Islamic State. Turkey’s intervention represents a significant escalation of the conflict, as well as a sign that the country is likely to take a more aggressive approach to foreign policy following July’s failed military coup and subsequent purge.

      But Turkey’s intervention is also an indication that the U.S. strategy of empowering Kurdish groups to fight the Islamic State in Syria has helped trigger an entirely new conflict, this time between U.S.-backed militias and a NATO ally.

    • When Putin Bailed Out Obama

      As pressure again builds on President Obama to attack Syria and press a new Cold War with Russia, the extraordinary events of three years ago after a sarin attack near Damascus are worth revisiting, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

    • A US-Fueled Syrian Sectarian Bloodbath

      The Obama administration helped fuel a conflict in Syria that inevitably was going to degenerate into a sectarian bloodbath, a reckless strategy pushed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as Gareth Porter explains.

    • Ignoring the Pentagon’s Multi-Trillion-Dollar Accounting Error

      Times (10/12/14) ran a major investigative piece by reporter James Risen about several billion dollars gone missing, part of a shipment of pallets of $12 billion–$14 billion in C-notes that had been flown from the Federal Reserve into Iraq over a period of a year and a half in an effort to kickstart the Iraqi economy following the 2003 US invasion. Risen reported that about $1.5 billion of the cash, somehow stolen, had been discovered in a bunker in Lebanon by a special inspector general appointed to investigate corruption in the US occupation of Iraq. The article got front-page play.

      Earlier that same year, the Washington Post (4/7/14) ran a story reporting the US State Department inspector general’s finding that during Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary, the State Department had lost records for or misreported some $6 billion in government contracts. (State claimed the money was not lost, just not accounted for.)

      These stories are basic Journalism 101, the kind of bread-and-butter reporting on government that one expects from a major news organization. So how to explain that neither of these prestigious and influential newspapers—or practically any of the corporate media in the US, for that matter—bothered to mention it when the Pentagon’s inspector general this year issued a report blasting the US Army for misreporting $6.5 trillion (that’s not a typo; it’s trillion with a T) as its spending total for the 2015 fiscal year.

      Now, clearly that number cannot be correct, since the entire Pentagon budget for 2015 was a little over $600 billion, or less than 10 percent of what the Army was saying it had spent.

    • US Arms Makers Invest in a New Cold War

      Behind the U.S. media-political clamor for a new Cold War with Russia is a massive investment by the Military-Industrial Complex in “think tanks” and other propaganda outlets, writes Jonathan Marshall.

    • Vice Photospreads Present ‘Girly, Teenage’ Side of Israeli Occupation

      What this means is never made clear, but it would probably come as a surprise to those in Israel who actually refuse military service that serving in the IDF is a form of “protest against violence”—so long as one has pouty lips and “girly, teenage boredom.”

      [...]

      In April 2016, Mondoweiss’ Dan Cohen (4/29/16) criticized Vice for passing off Israeli propaganda about IDF soldier Elor Azarya’s execution of a Palestinian as a “leaked report.” Vice (4/28/16) uncritically repeated claims that Azaraya was a one-off zealot while downplaying his popular support among Israelis.

      Vice, it should be noted, also runs coverage sympathetic to Palestinians, or at least from a Palestinian perspective.

    • Israel’s Abnormal ‘Normal’ with its Neighbors

      Israel often acts as if a simmering state of war with its Muslim neighbors is the only possible future, while occasionally playing off one nation against another, a “normal” that is not normal, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar

    • Saudi forces are killing civilians in Yemen, so why is the UK still arming the regime?
    • Medea Benjamin and Greg Palast

      For the first half of the program, Peter and Mickey speak with author and Code-Pink cofounder Medea Benjamin; her new book, “Kingdom of the Unjust,” examines the history of U.S.-Saudi Arabian relations, and how the two governments remain close despite the Saudis’ repressing their own population, fighting a war in Yemen, and promoting the Wahabist version of Islam across the Mideast and beyond. In the second half-hour, investigative journalist Greg Palast speaks about his latest investigations into voter disenfranchisement, which is carried out primarily (but not exclusively) by Republican secretaries of state. Palast has a new article in the Rolling Stone, and a forthcoming documentary film, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.”

    • Belated Pushback on Saudis’ War on Yemen

      Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign against Yemen’s Houthi rebels has created a humanitarian crisis, with opposition finally emerging in Congress to the U.S. assistance in the bloodbath, writes Jonathan Marshall.

    • Alan Kurdi Symbolized an Army of Dead Children. We Ignore Them at Our Peril

      The body of Aylan Kurdi has gone beyond the ‘iconic’. Being small and dressed like a little European boy, and being white rather than brown-skinned, his very name posthumously and subtly shifting to the homely English ‘Alan’, the son of the Kurdish refugee family fleeing across the Mediterranean from Turkey to Europe became ‘our’ child. The moment his tiny body washed up on the beach near Bodrum and appeared on front pages around the world, the closet racism of our politicians was briefly stilled. What stone heart could condemn this little boy as part of a ‘swarm’, a word used about the occupants of the Calais camp by a former British prime minister?

      But the image of Alan Kurdi obscured a host of lessons which we ignored – and continue to disregard – at our peril. Firstly, of course, he was a mere representative of the thousands of other Alans whose remains lie today on the sea bed of the Mediterranean, forever unrecorded and unfilmed. Alan was a symbol, perhaps even a representative of this army of dead children. But he also became a sacrificial three-year-old, thrown up by the waves as a ‘martyr’ rather than a victim of political violence and betrayal, while the Turkish police officer in rubber gloves gently taking his body from the sand became a kind of male version of the ‘pieta’. But if grief was depicted thus by Michaelangelo half a millennium ago, it was nonetheless odd that we regarded the Syrian Kurdish child as the victim of a frightening new phenomenon.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘Sickening’ Killing of Wolf Pack Proceeds Despite Research Debunking Program
    • Profanity Peak wolf pack in state’s gun sights after rancher turns out cattle on den
    • Taking A Stand For Washington’s Wolves

      Snipers, including gunners in helicopters, have snuffed out half of Washington state’s Profanity Peak wolf pack and have put the rest of the pack in the crosshairs. This wolf family has been shattered by the loss of the breeding alpha female and five other members. All that’s left is an adult male and a few 4-month-old pups.

      By the time you read this, the pack could be wiped out — 12 percent of the state’s fledgling wolf population in just a few days.

      Sadly it’s another reminder that although we’ve come a long way in terms of tolerating predators like wolves and grizzly bears on our landscapes — there’s still much more to be done.

    • Canada regulator suspends TransCanada pipeline approval hearing

      Canada’s National Energy Board on Tuesday suspended Montreal hearings on TransCanada Corp’s (TRP.TO) proposed Energy East pipeline after protests disrupted the first day of the process on Monday.

      The board, Canada’s energy regulator, also said in a statement it would not proceed with further hearings until it had considered two motions asking for the recusal of members from the panel considering the pipeline. The NEB has invited written comments on the motions by Sept. 7.

      Opponents want two of the three panel members to step down after it emerged they had privately discussed the pipeline last year with former Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who at the time was working for TransCanada as a consultant.

    • NASA: Earth Is Warming at Rate ‘Unprecedented in 1000 Years’

      Another day, another dire warning about the global climate emergency.

      The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) top climate scientist announced Tuesday that the Earth is warming at a pace not seen in at least the past 1,000 years, making it “very unlikely” that global temperatures will stay below the 1.5 C limit agreed to in the landmark climate treaty negotiated in Paris last December.

    • Pope Francis says destroying the environment is a sin

      Pope Francis has called for urgent action to stop climate change and proposed that caring for the environment be added to traditional Christian works of mercy such as feeding the hungry and visiting the sick.

      In a message to mark the Catholic church’s World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation that he launched last year, Francis said the worst impact of global warming was being felt by those who were least responsible for it – refugees and the poor.

    • As Elephant Populations Drop, We Learn Even Their Footsteps Serve a Purpose

      A slate of new studies this week reveal two realities about elephants: they’re great at protecting tiny critters in their environment, and humans are terrible at protecting elephants.

      On Wednesday, data from two major surveys of African elephant populations uncovered rapidly declining numbers. One, a massive census of 18 African countries that was conducted by 90 scientists and dubbed the “Great Elephant Census,” found that there are only 352,271 savannah elephants left on 93 percent of the elephant habitat. Researchers found that, after rebounding a bit in the 90s, African elephant populations are now declining at a rate of 8 percent every year, mostly due to poaching.

      “If populations continue to decline at the 8 percent rate we estimated for 2010–2014, Great Elephant Census survey areas will lose half of their savannah elephants every nine years, and [local extinction] of some populations is possible,” the researchers wrote in a paper on their findings, published in PeerJ.

      This survey did not include forest-dwelling African elephants (which many experts believe are a distinct species), but another study published this week did. Unfortunately, the news was not any better.

    • Korean palm oil firm burned large tracts of forestland in Indonesia, NGOs allege

      The Korindo conglomerate is accused of using fire to clear land illegally in Indonesia’s easternmost Papua region, destroying rainforest and contributing to the country’s annual haze.

    • European Parliament investigates Dieselgate emissions scandal

      Diesel fuel powered cars by the manufacturer VW pollute the environment much more than is allowed, the US government agency EPA asserted in September 2015.

      While they meet legal emissions limits in lab tests, they actually emit much more harmful Nitrogen oxides (NOx) under real driving conditions. VW admitted to deliberately cheating on the tests using so-called “defeat devices” deployed in 11 million cars worldwide. Such devices are specifically forbidden under both EU and US law.

    • ‘We Are Peaceful Protectors of Water and of Health’ – CounterSpin interview with Kandi Mossett on Native American pipeline protest

      For months now, the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota have been engaged in peaceful protest over the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Intended to carry fracked oil from the Bakken fields more than a thousand miles into Illinois, the pipeline would, among other concerns, cross and recross the Missouri River that serves as a life source for the Standing Rock and others in the region.

    • Though Promised for Domestic Use, Dakota Access Pipeline May Fuel Oil Exports
    • ‘World Watching’ as Tribal Members Put Bodies In Path Of Dakota Access Pipeline

      Thirty-eight activists were arrested in two states on Wednesday as protests against the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) continue.

      While construction on one section of the pipeline has been halted until a court ruling expected next week, work continues at other sites. Earlier this week, a federal judge in Des Moines, Iowa, foiled an attempt by DAPL parent company Energy Transfer Partners to silence protests there by denying its request for a temporary restraining order.

      Subsequently, 30 people were taken into custody on Wednesday, during “one of the largest demonstrations yet” in that state against the four-state pipeline project, according to the Des Moines Register.

      “It also was the first time a formal effort was made to encourage a large number of arrests in a bid to obstruct construction work in Iowa,” the Register noted. “Organizers vowed afterward that additional demonstrations will be forthcoming, along with more arrests.”

    • The world got together to try to save the monarch butterfly, and then climate change ruined the plan

      In the winter months of 2015-2016, monarch butterflies had their best migration in years, arriving in record numbers to the Central Mexico forests where they hibernate. Unfortunately, those forests had a really bad year.

      Severe storms toppled many of the oyamel fir trees where millions of the iconic orange-winged insects rest after their long trip from Canada. More than 70 hectares of forest were damaged, the biggest loss since the 2009-2010 winter, according to data (link in Spanish) released Tuesday (Aug. 23) by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). In more bad news, experts expect the butterflies’ overwintering grounds to get hit by this sort of extreme weather more frequently in the future due to climate change.

    • Queen bees, North Dakota honey production industry in peril

      The annual replacement of queen bees to maintain hive fertility has strained the apiary community and their suppliers. It’s raising questions as to whether North Dakota can remain the national leader for honey production in coming years, the Williston Herald reported.

      Owner of D & L Apiaries Dave Huelsman owns 130 beehive locations in northwest North Dakota, a business he has grown since 1992. He now faces the near impossible task of placing an order to suppliers for 4,000 queen bees, a year in advance, if he is to be assured mated queens come spring.

    • Illegal Forest Fires Threaten Another Indonesian Province

      A group of environmental nonprofits warns that the practice of setting fires to clear land for plantations is spreading in Papua, a part of Indonesia that had been fairly untouched.

    • Inuit Are Embedding Sensors in the Ice Because It’s Getting Dangerously Thin

      Inuit communities in Canada’s North have lived on the ice for centuries, and rely on it for hunting, transportation, and a way of life. Now, because of climate change, the ice is turning to slush. In many places, it’s becoming unsafe. So two Arctic communities are installing high-tech sea ice monitors that can track changes in the ice.

      “We’re not trying to replace traditional knowledge,” said Trevor Bell of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, a collaborator on SmartICE, which is being piloted around Nain, Labrador, and Pond Inlet, Nunavut. “We’re trying to augment traditional knowledge, with new technology.”

    • Tree kangaroos ‘on brink of extinction’ due to palm oil deforestation

      Indonesia’s native tree kangaroo is on the brink of extinction due to the planet’s addiction to palm oil, it has been revealed.

      The systematic bulldozing and burning of the endangered creatute’s rainforest home to make the substance use in a massive range of everyday products is leading to a dramatic dwindling of its numbers.

      The kangaroo’s cousin, the cuscus, is also facing extinction as hunting and habitat loss takes its toll, according to environmental group Mighty.

    • US and China ratify Paris agreement in major step for climate change fight

      Following the earlier climate announcement, Barack Obama has reportedly told his host Xi Jinping the pair now need to have “candid talks” on topics such as human rights and maritime issues.

      Reuters is reporting Obama made the comments when the pair met in Hangzhou ahead of tomorrow’s G20. Xi and Obama are due to dine together tonight after a series of bilateral meetings.

      Human rights activists and experts are not expecting US to put China under major pressure, however – at least not in public. Confrontation “would fly in the face of either side’s interests at the moment,” says Nick Bisley, an Asia expert at La Trobe University in Australia.

    • NASA Is Studying Alaska’s Creepy Bubbling Lakes from Space

      Every single month of 2016 has been the hottest on record, and this uptick in temperature is sure to have wide-ranging consequences around the world. One of the weirdest and least understood of these climate-related side effects is that Arctic boreal lakes are boiling over with methane bubbles. Indeed, some of these areas are such rich producers of methane that scientists can light plumes of the lake’s escaped gas on fire.

    • Climate simulations show effects of releasing permafrost carbon

      During the last deglaciation, between roughly 21,000 and 10,000 years ago, there was a rise in atmospheric carbon. This surge brought CO2 levels up to where they were in preindustrial times and contributed to the warming that ended the glacial period. But there’s a significant item missing from this picture: we don’t know where the carbon came from.

      Researchers had suggested that changes in the distribution of ice, driven by alterations in Earth’s orbit and tilt, altered the ocean’s capacity to absorb CO2. But a new paper performed a model-driven analysis of past changes in carbon levels and come up with a somewhat different answer. The authors’ simulations showed that, when a permafrost carbon component was included, it was possible to reproduce the atmospheric CO2 levels seen in ice core measurements—suggesting that carbon released by melting permafrost contributed to the rise of CO2.

    • Didcot Power Station: Body found in rubble identified

      A body found in the ruins of a collapsed building at Didcot Power Station has been identified.

      Christopher Huxtable, 34, from Swansea, had been missing since the collapse in February.

      His body was found on Wednesday and workers who carried out the search formed a guard of honour as it was driven from the site in the early hours of the morning.

      Ken Cresswell, 57, and John Shaw, 61, both from Rotherham, remain missing.

      The body of a fourth man, Michael Collings, 53, from Brotton, Teesside, was previously recovered from the site.

  • Finance

    • Goodbye, Ivory Tower. Hello, Silicon Valley Candy Store.

      For eight years, Peter Coles had an economist’s dream job at Harvard Business School.

      His research focused on the design of efficient markets, an important and growing field that has influenced such things as Treasury bill auctions and decisions on who receives organ transplants. He even got to work with Alvin E. Roth, who won a Nobel in economic science in 2012.

      But prestige was not enough to keep Mr. Coles at Harvard. In 2013, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. He now works at Airbnb, the online lodging marketplace, one of a number of tech companies luring economists with the promise of big sets of data and big salaries.

      Silicon Valley is turning to the dismal science in its never-ending quest to squeeze more money out of old markets and build new ones. In turn, the economists say they are eager to explore the digital world for fresh insights into timeless economic questions of pricing, incentives and behavior.

      “It’s an absolute candy store for economists,” Mr. Coles said.

      The pay, of course, is a lot better than you would find in academia, where economists typically earn $125,000 to $150,000 a year. In tech companies, pay for a Ph.D. economist will usually come in at more than $200,000 a year, the companies say. With bonuses and stock grants, compensation can easily double in a few years. Senior economists who manage teams can make even more.

    • World’s Largest Strike? Tens of Millions in India Rise Up Against Right-Wing Economic Policies

      “Our strike will be 100 percent successful … we will prove that this strike is the world’s largest ever,” Pandey said.

      “Among the trade unions’ 12 demands were a 692-rupee daily minimum wage, universal social security, and a ban on foreign investment in the country’s railway, insurance, and defense industries,” the Guardian reports.

      Prime Minister Modi’s administration has opened up several state-run industries to private foreign investment since Modi’s election in 2014.

      Al Jazeera reports that union officials “said about 180 million workers, including state bank employees, school teachers, postal workers, miners, and construction workers, were participating, but the figure could not be independently verified.”

      Prof. Jayati Ghosh, a development economist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, “said Modi’s changes had built on a 25-year neoliberal reform agenda that had left workers across the country worse off,” according to the Guardian.

      “Less than four percent of workers in India come under labor protection, and even those protections have become more and more eroded. There’s a general sense that instead of targeting poverty they are targeting the poor, and there has been a real running down of spending on essential public services,” Ghosh told the Guardian.

    • Obama Appoints Social Security Critic to Fix Puerto Rico’s Budget

      Andrew Biggs, an American Enterprise Institute resident scholar and architect of conservative efforts to cut and privatize Social Security, has been named by President Obama to a seven-member fiscal oversight board for the debt-ridden U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. That board, which will work out restructuring for over $70 billion in debt, has widespread authority to institute additional austerity on the island’s citizens, including potential reductions in public pensions. And Biggs appears to be the only member of the board that has significant experience with social insurance.

      Under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act signed into law in June, the fiscal oversight board will be effectively in charge of the island’s finances, usurping its democratically elected government. The oversight board is tasked with balancing Puerto Rico’s budget and pursuing all avenues to pay off its massive debt, including cuts to the island’s education, police, and health care systems. It can sell off Puerto Rican assets, lower the island’s minimum wage, order layoffs, and enforce a ban on public employee strikes. Only as a last resort can the island obtain court approval for a debt restructuring agreement, and negotiate with creditors, which include several “vulture funds” that scooped up Puerto Rican debt at a discount in the hopes of a big payday.

      The president gets to freely choose one of the seven fiscal oversight board members; the other six must come from approved lists provided by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Bloomberg was the first to release the seven names.

    • German activists take EU-Canada trade deal to Constitutional Court

      German activists take EU-Canada trade deal to Constitutional Court

      Activists delivered what they said was Germany’s biggest-ever public complaint to the Constitutional Court on Wednesday, hoping it will scupper a trade agreement between the European Union and Canada.

      The deal, which some see as a template for an EU-U.S. agreement still being negotiated, is the EU’s most ambitious trade pact to date and could increase trade between the two areas by some 20 percent.

      It would eliminate tariffs on 98 percent of goods immediately. It also would encompass regulatory cooperation, shipping, sustainable development and access to government tenders. But its ratification faces obstacles.

    • Let’s Rename Housing Benefit more fairly as “Landlord Bonus”.

      So-called “Housing benefit” is of zero benefit to tenants. It is a massive flow of taxpayer cash to landlords – an incredible £25 billion per year. It plays a pivotal role in the growth of landlordism and the bubbling of house prices to well beyond the pockets of most young people.

      It is argued on the right of politics that rent controls would be an unwarranted interference that would distort the housing market and prevent it operating efficiently. Yet housing benefit is itself a massive distortion, allowing landlords to charge rents far beyond what the market would ordinarily bear. If the state is to pay or top-up rents in this way, the state must also have a right to interfere in the level of rents.

      For the sake of clarity of argument, I do not regard “Housing Associations” as anything but part of the landlord class, especially given the high salaries they pay their executives.

    • ‘World in despair over Brexit’: Thousands march for Europe in protests across UK

      Thousands took to the streets today in a series of ‘march for Europe’ rallies in protest against the referendum vote to leave the EU.

      The demonstrations in London, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Oxford and Cambridge are demanding a pause in the Brexit process and call for tight economic, cultural, and social ties with the rest of Europe.

    • Apple Squeezes Parts Suppliers to Protect Margins

      As Apple Inc. grapples with falling iPhone sales this year, it is pushing to cut better deals for parts with its suppliers, while carriers in the crucial China market have mobilized to push iPhone sales with deep discounts.

    • Standing up to Apple

      For years, Washington lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have attacked big corporations for avoiding taxes by parking their profits overseas. Last week the European Union did something about it.

      The European Union’s executive commission ordered Ireland to collect $14.5 billion in back taxes from Apple.

      But rather than congratulate Europe for standing up to Apple, official Washington is outraged.

    • Why the EC Ruled Against Apple

      Ireland’s tax incentives to Apple are illegal and Dublin must recover up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) from the American tech giant, the European Commission ruled Tuesday.

    • EU hits Apple with $14.5 billion Irish tax demand

      The European Commission ordered Apple Inc to pay Ireland unpaid taxes of up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) on Tuesday as it ruled the firm had received illegal state aid.

      Apple and Dublin said the U.S. company’s tax treatment was in line with Irish and European Union law and they would appeal the ruling, which is part of a drive against what the EU says are sweetheart tax deals that usually smaller states in the bloc offer multinational companies to lure jobs and investment.

      The U.S. feels its firms are being targeted by the EU and a U.S. Treasury spokesperson warned the move threatens to undermine U.S. investment in Europe and “the important spirit of economic partnership between the U.S. and the EU.”

    • Apple’s Ireland tax deal to be ruled illegal by EU

      Apple is set to face a challenge in its dealings with Ireland, with the European Union’s anti-trust regulator to rule soon that the company’s tax deals with Dublin are in violation of the EU’s rules, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

      The company is to be accused of receiving illegal state aid from Ireland, according to another report (paywalled) in the Financial Times. A giood portion of the FT report has been reproduced here.

    • Apple facing record bill for Irish tax

      Apple could be ordered to pay billions of euros in back taxes in the Republic of Ireland by European Union competition officials.

      The final ruling, expected on Tuesday, follows a three-year probe into Apple’s Irish tax affairs, which the EU has previously identified as illegal.

      The Financial Times reports that the bill will be for billions of euros, making it Europe’s biggest tax penalty.

      Apple and the Irish government are likely to appeal against the ruling.

      Under EU law, national tax authorities are not allowed to give tax benefits to selected companies – which the EU would consider to be illegal state aid.

      According to EU authorities, rulings made by the Irish government in 1991 and 2007 allowed Apple to minimise its tax bill in Ireland.

      Apple’s company structure enabled it to legally channel international sales through Ireland to take advantage of that tax deal.

    • Apple’s Cook blows hot and cold on cash stash

      Apple chief executive Tim Cook is keeping people guessing as to whether the company will repatriate its massive pile of cash stashed outside the US or leave things as they are.

      In an interview with the Irish state radio broadcaster RTE, Cook said the company expected to repatriate billions of dollars of global profits to the United States next year.

      Questions about what Apple will do with its massive pile of cash, estimated to be more than US$200 billion, which is stashed outside the US, have arisen in the wake of the EU order that the company pay €13 billion (A$19.73 billion) in back taxes to Ireland.

      “We provisioned several billion dollars for the US for payment as soon as we repatriate it, and right now I would forecast that repatriation to occur next year,” Cook told RTE.

      But when asked by the Wall Street Journal about this, an Apple spokeswoman said this reflected Cook’s optimism that the US would make changes to its tax rate next year in order to make it attractive for the company to take the cash back to the US.

    • A Tax Expert Takes Tim Cook’s EU Letter Apart Point By Point

      Apple’s business structure and tax practices in Europe were around long before Tim Cook became CEO. He didn’t invent those things, but he’s vigorously defending them. His arguments in media interviews sound compelling, but they present only one side of a hot-button issue that’s easily relatable to the overarching wealth distribution and fair taxation themes of election cycles in both the U.S. and Europe this year.

      The European Union, after a lengthy investigation, ruled Tuesday that Apple’s use of Irish subsidiary companies to avoid paying taxes amounts to the tech giant receiving “illegal state aid” from Ireland. As a result, Apple may be required to pay around $14.5 billion in back taxes dating back to 2004.

      Cook had a carefully worded—and, at times, sharply worded—open letter ready to publish when the judgment was officially announced. He opens the letter by describing Apple’s history in Ireland dating back to 1980, when Steve Jobs set up the company’s first factory there. Apple employed 60 people in Cork county then, and employs more than 6,000 there now, Cook says. He points out that Apple’s Irish operations have helped create and sustain millions of app development, manufacturing, supplier, and small business jobs across Europe.

    • Rather Than Coming Up With Brand New Taxes For Tech Companies, The EU Just Issues A Massive Fine On Apple

      For quite some time now, we’ve seen EU regulators talk fairly openly about their desires to harm American internet companies, mostly in a misguided attempt to boost local European companies (and to collect more money). It’s why we keep hearing about weird, carefully targeted regulations designed to pump up how much money companies like Google, Apple and others pay.

      At the same time, parts of Europe (Ireland, in particular) have been doing basically everything they can think of to woo American tech companies. Ireland has successfully offered ridiculously friendly policies, leading many large internet companies to set up offices in Dublin, and then use that as the place where they “recognize” all their revenue. There are a variety of tax dodges employed here, which go by fun names like Dutch Sandwich and Double Irish.

      US Companies have been doing this for many years, and while it (frankly) looks pretty sleazy, they do seem to mostly play by the rules. We can argue over whether or not the tax breaks they get are worth it, but the whole thing just feels sketchy in that it’s clearly playing some jurisdictional games to get lower tax rates. Of course, there’s also been another looming issue on all of this, which is that these giant internet companies have been pushing heavily to be able to get the cash that they’ve been accumulating in Ireland back into the US, without then having to pay all those taxes on it. So they’ve been pushing for some sort of “amnesty” period or “holiday” where they can bring the cash back in.

    • Europe’s multi-billion dollar tax ruling against Apple throws treatment of IP assets into spotlight

      But it also throws into the spotlight the treatment of IP assets given that the dispute with Apple focuses on two Irish subsidiaries of the tech giant which, according to the EC’s announcement: “Hold the rights to use Apple’s intellectual property to sell and manufacture Apples products outside of North and South America under a so-called ‘cost-sharing agreement’ with Apple Inc.” The two Irish subsidiaries, the Commission claims, made annual payments to Apple in the US to fund R&D efforts, which amounted to $2 billion in 2011 but which significantly increased in 2014. The Commission alleges that those payments contributed to fund “more than half of all research efforts by the Apple group in the US to develop its intellectual property worldwide”. Given the deal that Apple struck with Ireland in 1991, the EC claims that the beneficial tax treatment amounted to state aid.

    • Funding, staffing woes for UK science after Brexit vote

      The Nobel Prize-winning head of Europe’s biggest biomedical research centre in London said that Britain’s vote to leave the EU is worrying his European employees and will hit “extremely important” funding.

      Paul Nurse, head of the world-renowned Francis Crick Institute, told AFP that EU funds account for around £5 million a year (€5.9 million), or around 5% of his annual budget.

      “It’s money we can use in a wide variety of ways,” he said in an interview at the institute’s new futuristic £650-million headquarters near the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, which was inaugurated this week.

      “It’s not tied down in particular objectives and that’s extremely important… when you’re trying to run an innovative research institute,” said Nurse, who won a Nobel Prize in 2001 for his work on cell cycles.

      Nurse said 55% of the institute’s post-doctoral researchers were from other parts of the European Union and some of them were concerned about their future status.

    • Brexit is not inevitable, says former civil service chief

      Brexit is not inevitable and Britain could still remain a part of a changed European Union, the former head of the civil service has said.

      Gus O’Donnell, who was the cabinet secretary from 2005-11, told the Times (subscription) that he anticipated the UK would retain EU laws and rules regardless of its status in the union.

      The crossbench peer said: “Lots of people will say, ‘We’ve had the referendum, we’ve decided to go out, so that’s it, it’s all over’. But it very much depends what happens to public opinion and whether the EU changes before then.

    • Theresa May ‘acting like Tudor monarch’ by denying MPs a Brexit vote
    • Theresa May calls Brexit meeting amid reports of single market split
    • Theresa May will trigger Brexit negotiations without Commons vote
    • Theresa May tells pro-EU civil servants to get on with the job of delivering Brexit
    • Chancellor blamed as cabinet splits over single market
    • Theresa May, the Brexit enforcer, orders her Cabinet ministers to come up with blueprint for EU exit
    • Whitehall must not try to block Brexit

      Theresa May has wisely decided not to hold a parliamentary vote before opening negotiations to trigger Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. The idea that MPs might have vetoed Brexit is awful – and the very fact that such a threat existed attests to how out of touch so many politicians are. Alas, they are not alone. Government sources have told this newspaper that many civil servants are not keen on Brexit either. It should be made clear immediately that Whitehall cannot veto Brexit.

    • Brexit: a story of a brainstorm

      Today the Cabinet are having an away day, where they will “brainstorm” (horrendous verb) what they mean by Brexit.

    • Local Governments Are Letting Silicon Valley Skirt Public Disclosure Laws

      Uber is likely seeking such arrangements in other cities around the country as Uber begins to transition from being a wholly private service to being one that, with taxpayer subsidization, could replace mass transit.

    • Putting the Con in the Gig Economy

      It’s called the Independent Drivers Guild—but the new organization for New York City’s estimated 35,000 Uber drivers is “independent” in name only.

      Co-founded by Uber and the Machinists union, it’s not a union, it has no collective bargaining rights, and it receives financial support from Uber.

      Just how much support, we don’t know, since Uber and the Machinists won’t release their agreement—not even to drivers.

      If the shroud of secrecy isn’t enough to raise your eyebrows, consider who’s heaping praise on this cozy new partnership. The Mackinac Center—a Koch-backed anti-union mouthpiece that pushed for “right to work” in Michigan—calls it a “model that could bring unionization into the 21st century.”

      What will it do? The Guild gives drivers a process to appeal their terminations (which Uber calls “deactivations”). Ten union-selected drivers will attend monthly meetings of a “works council.”

      “It’s an opportunity for drivers to sit across the table from Uber management and discuss issues related to pay, dispatch procedures, and paid time off,” said Jim Conigliaro, general counsel and business rep for Machinists District 15. “There are no obligations on either side to come to an agreement. It’s just a discussion.”

      Bhairavi Desai has a more critical view. She heads the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a worker center that represents 19,000 drivers in the city, including several thousand who drive for Uber.

    • ICT joins competitiveness pact, triggering tax breaks of €100M

      Trade Union Pro estimates in a press release that approximately 25 per cent of the 16,000–18,000 workers in the sector are temporary workers. The agreement reached yesterday, it adds, will allow for the establishment of local guidelines for the use of temporary workers and make shop stewards better equipped to monitor the use of temporary workers.

    • Donald’s Trump Visit to Mexico Is Not the Real Irony—NAFTA Is

      But Trump—and many other critics in the U.S.—only talk about how NAFTA has hurt U.S. workers. Largely unacknowledged in the U.S. is how it has devastated Mexican family farms and small industry—which leads to desperate migration from Mexico to the U.S. (along with the drug war).

    • In Attempted Hit Piece, NYT Makes Putin Hero of Defeating TPP

      In an remarkable hit piece NYT spent over 5,000 words yesterday trying to prove that all of WikiLeaks’ leaks are motivated from a desire to benefit Russia.

      That of course took some doing. It required ignoring the evidence of the other potential source of motivation for Julian Assange — such as that Hillary participated in an aggressive, and potentially illegal, prosecution of Assange for being a publisher and Chelsea Manning for being his source — even as it repeatedly presented evidence that that was Assange’s motivation.

    • Groups to Obama: Don’t Cede Climate to TTIP or Fossil Fuel Subsidies

      Environmental groups on Thursday sent an open letter to President Barack Obama warning him that the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) threatens to upend his climate legacy.

      The letter (pdf), released ahead of the upcoming Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hangzhou, China, calls on Obama to protect the 2008 G20 commitment to phase out “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption” by opposing the TTIP.

      If approved, the U.S.-European Union trade deal would allow G20 counties to “maintain fossil fuel subsidies for ‘economic’ or ‘security of supply’ reasons,” and would “encourage industry self-regulation rather than actually requiring firms to increase energy efficiency,” the letter states.

      “Instead of undermining important climate agreements and goals, trade deals should move us towards the end of fossil fuel subsidies that is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change,” it continues.

    • Called it: The TTIP (“the US-European TPP”) is all but dead

      The TTIP is all but dead: it will never happen. That’s my professional political opinion after Germany and France have said that it’s stalled and called for its scrapping, respectively. I predicted this several months ago on this blog.

      TTIP is the so-called “free trade agreement” that is the direct opposite of free trade that’s being negotiated – scrap that, was being negotiated – between the US and Europe, like the infamous TPP but eastbound from the United States instead of westbound like the TPP.

      The reason the United States is choosing to negotiate two different agreements this time to try to give benefits to U.S. corporations, at the expense of everybody else’s business and liberty, is spelled ACTA. That was the most recent attempt of a worldwide rent-seeking agreement that ended abruptly in 2012. The mistake the US negotiators did in attempting ACTA was to try to make it one global agreement covering every economy but China, in a very thinly veiled attempt to make that someone in particular fall in line.

    • TTIP in further doubt as Hollande questions timing

      The TTIP trade deal was dealt another blow on Tuesday as the French president cast doubt on when an agreement would be reached.

      Francois Hollande said it would not be finalised before Barack Obama left office later this year.

      Meanwhile, Germany’s economy minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said it had no chance of being agreed before the US presidential election in November.

      The Americans were unwilling to compromise with Europe, he said.

    • TTIP’s ‘failure’ gives us a clue about Britain’s post-Brexit trading future

      The apparent failure of the EU-US trade talks signalled by German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel should come as little surprise – for good and bad reasons – and contains some interesting clues about the UK’s post-Brexit trading future.

      One “good” reason for the negotiators being unable to agree so far on a single chapter of the 27 in the draft Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is that the Europeans are deeply suspicious about how much power will be given to large multinational companies in the process. The secret “court” for settling disputes is absurdly opaque and unaccountable, for example. That would be bad enough across most areas of the economy, but when it impinges on the way the NHS operates for the public good, it is plainly unacceptable.

    • Can We Save Venice Before It’s Too Late?

      A deadly plague haunts Venice, and it’s not the cholera to which Thomas Mann’s character Gustav von Aschenbach succumbed in the Nobel laureate’s 1912 novella “Death in Venice.” A rapacious tourist monoculture threatens Venice’s existence, decimating the historic city and turning the Queen of the Adriatic into a Disneyfied shopping mall.

      Millions of tourists pour into Venice’s streets and canals each year, profoundly altering the population and the economy, as many native citizens are banished from the island city and those who remain have no choice but to serve in hotels, restaurants and shops selling glass souvenirs and carnival masks.

      Tourism is tearing apart Venice’s social fabric, cohesion and civic culture, growing ever more predatory. The number of visitors to the city may rise even further now that international travelers are avoiding destinations like Turkey and Tunisia because of fears of terrorism and unrest. This means that the 2,400 hotels and other overnight accommodations the city now has no longer satisfy the travel industry’s appetites. The total number of guest quarters in Venice’s historic center could reach 50,000 and take it over entirely.

      Just along the Grand Canal, Venice’s main waterway, the last 15 years have seen the closure of state institutions, judicial offices, banks, the German Consulate, medical practices and stores to make way for 16 new hotels.

    • Confusion Over Purpose of U.S. Education System

      There is no consensus among the public about the role of the public school system in the U.S., according to a new poll that also shows widespread discontent with some of the education policies that have been a major focus of the reform movement.

      “This really calls into question in many ways whether the agenda that has been set over the last 16 years, in particular over the last two administrations, is really what parents want to see,” said Johsua Starr, CEO of PDK, the education organization that’s released the poll annually for the last 48 years.

      Notably, the poll shows that only 45 percent of respondents thought the main goal of public education should be preparing students academically, while the rest was split between the main goal being preparing students for work or preparing them to be good citizens.

      “That finding is perhaps one of the most intriguing,” Starr said. “One has to really question whether the direction we’ve been going is consistent with what the public wants.”

      That question is put into sharp focus, said Starr and others, by one finding in particular – that an overwhelming majority of the public does not believe the best way to fix poor performing schools is by closing them.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Donald Trump’s campaign is based on the NFL’s business model. Here’s how

      Political pundits have been wondering — or depending on the partisan affiliation, chortling — about Donald Trump’s choice of venues for his campaign appearances. In recent weeks, these have included rallies in Texas, a reliably red state, and Mississippi, where not only does he poll higher than in any other state, but the prize is a measly six electoral votes.

      On the other side of the ledger are Trump appearances in states like Maine, which also has a tiny number of electoral votes (four), but is fairly securely blue.

      The looming start of the National Football League season allows us to recognize the basis of Trump’s campaign strategy: It’s the NFL’s business model.

    • Universal bogeyman

      Hillary Clinton claims the woes of the world are due to a vast alt-right conspiracy – and it is run out of Moscow.

    • Donald Trump Wins Over Secretive “Children of Israel” Megadonor

      Donald Trump attended a $25,000-per-ticket fundraiser Monday night at the Woodside, California home of Saul Fox, the CEO of private equity firm Fox & Paine.

      Fox is the donor behind Children of Israel LLC, whose $884,000 in contributions has made it the second-most generous “ghost corporation” in the 2016 cycle. This election has seen a surge in “ghost corporations,” the term used for businesses that appear to exist solely to shield the identity of individuals who want to put money into the U.S. political process.

      Fox’s ownership of Children of Israel was unknown until The Intercept reported on it several weeks ago.

      Children of Israel gave $150,000 in 2015 to Pursuing America’s Greatness, a Super PAC supporting Mike Huckabee’s presidential run; $400,000 in 2016 to Stand for Truth, a Super PAC supporting Ted Cruz’s candidacy; and $334,000 to the Republican National Committee.

    • Don’t Expect Donald Trump to Stop Lying About Huma Abedin

      Once again treating news of other people’s pain as an opportunity to score political points, Donald Trump seized on Huma Abedin’s decision to separate from Anthony Weiner on Monday as an opportunity to repeat his unsubstantiated claim that Hillary Clinton’s closest aide must have shared classified information with her husband and draw attention to a fringe conspiracy theory that she is a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood.

    • Congressional Democrats Call on FBI to Investigate Their Political Adversaries’ Kremlin Ties

      Leading House Democrats on Tuesday sent a letter to FBI Director James Comey, which they promptly published, asking the agency to investigate whether the Trump campaign and the Russian government have entered into a joint plot “to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.” Although the House Democrats say they do not know whether such a conspiracy with Moscow exists, they say that “serious questions have been raised” — specifically about whether Trump supporters worked in tandem with Kremlin agents to hack Democratic Party computer systems, and “about overt and covert actions by Trump campaign officials on behalf of Russian interests.”

      As grounds for their suspicions, these top Democrats cite certain associations between Trump advisers and various Russians, suspicious visits by them to Moscow, and statements Trump supporters made that are critical of the United States of America or advocate better relations with Moscow. These statements and policy views, these top Democrats suggest, demonstrate possible disloyalty to the United States, which should be investigated.

    • Third Party Loyalists: Insanity Redefined or Political Attention Deficit Disorder?

      As we know, however, the reality was not like that at all: The longest serving independent in congressional history actually won 45 percent of the delegates elected in the Democratic Party primaries and caucuses. Yes, we were never expected to win the nomination and, yes, we did not win the nomination in the end. At the same time, most everyone heavily involved in the Sanders campaign recognized they were in a power struggle very unlike the “Come the revolution” meetings they may have previously attended. And a lot of people came out of it with ideas about how we could do it even better next time. So why wouldn’t we be looking toward a next time, then? Presumably because the third party presidential route held more promise.

    • Making ‘Our Revolution’ Ours

      One of the most remarkable things about Sanders’ campaign was how it electrified the young, reinvigorated progressives, and forced Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to lurch desperately to the left.

      Of course, once she got the nomination, she wasted no time in tacking back to the right of center and doing what Democrats have always done – assuming that progressives would fall in line because there was nowhere else to go.

    • Jill Stein Won’t Apologize for Her Running Mate’s ‘Uncle Tom’ Comment on Obama

      Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein met Thursday with The Washington Post’s editorial board to discuss her platform, which the paper later described as “poorly formed and wildly impractical.”

      Stein is the third 2016 presidential nominee to talk with the Post’s editorial board, which met with Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson in July and Republican nominee Donald Trump in March. Hillary Clinton has yet to sit down with the board, although it has condemned her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

      After meeting with Johnson, the board members wrote that his and his running mate William Weld’s “refreshing honesty could not cover up the ticket’s defects and lapses.” Of Trump, they noted that his interview “provided no reassurance regarding Mr. Trump’s fitness for the presidency,” adding that “his answers left little doubt how radical a risk the nation would be taking in entrusting the White House to him.”

    • The Corbyn crowd, and its signal

      What is really going on in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party? An open-air meeting and the changes in a ward branch give some clues.

    • Clinton’s embrace of Republicans will harm her own party’s future

      The Clinton campaign has now spent months trying to convince relatively obscure former Republican officials to endorse her campaign while also adopting many Republican slogans and arguments in her quest for the presidency.

      One has to wonder how much long term damage she is doing to progressive policies by deploying this strategy, even if she beats Donald Trump along the way.

      Clinton gave a speech in Ohio on Wednesday with yet another former Bush official, James Clad. The speech was billed as touting “American exceptionalism”, one of the more repellent nationalistic concepts that Republicans have used to shame progressives in the past. She spoke mostly about foreign policy, a subject in which Clinton – with her penchant for supporting foreign wars and beefed up US military presence everywhere – seemingly has more in common with mainstream Republicans than the Obama administration.

      Last week, Clinton again handed legitimacy to the Republican party through the way she has decided to attack Trump. She gave a speech in which she praised prior GOP candidates for their treatment of Muslim Americans, including George W Bush, in an attempt to rhetorically separate Trump from these other supposedly upstanding Republicans. In the process, she is kneecapping Democratic candidates around the country who are attempting to retake the House and Senate.

    • The ‘Anti-Clinton Media’ Are Big Donors to Clinton Foundation–and to Clinton

      Earlier this week, an Associated Press (AP) story showed that a disproportionate number of Clinton’s meetings with private citizens at the State Department were with large donors to the Clinton Foundation. At the very least, these stories ought to spark a serious media conversation about money, politics and philanthropy. Instead, much of the media, especially the wide array of Clinton loyalists all over the industry, have been quick to dismiss the story as part of an anti-Clinton agenda.

      The media industry, which many claim is out to get Clinton, is actually made up mostly of donors to the Clinton Foundation. These donors are also actively supporting Clinton’s campaign with donations and even fundraising. Indeed, while Clinton’s potential conflicts of interest at the State Department are thought-provoking, her financial ties to Big Media are a concern in their own right. These close ties are especially unsettling on the heels of a primary season in which the corporate media attacked Bernie Sanders constantly, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was caught manipulating the media on Clinton’s behalf.

      It is understandable that many want to avoid criticizing Clinton, out of fear of giving the reckless, racist, authoritarian Donald Trump fodder to attack her. However, this type of suspension of critical thinking will not prevent a Trump presidency; Trump will attack Clinton no matter what “fodder” is or isn’t provided. However, the backlash against any critique of Clinton’s donor relationships may have long-term political consequences. Every time liberals do cartwheels trying to defend Clinton on this issue, they are undercutting their own fundamental arguments against Citizens United and the influence of the likes of the Koch brothers.

    • College Trash Stub: Brady Versus the Ess Eee See

      In another very important development, the FBI has just revealed that Hillary will have to stay away from the White House during her first four months as President because she was exonerated on the underlying crime but destroyed a few phones.

    • FBI releases Hillary Clinton email report
    • FBI publishes notes on Hillary Clinton’s use of private email [iophk: "Friday before a major holiday?"]

      The FBI has released 58 pages of documents from its recently closed investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, including a summary of agents’ interviews with Clinton and several of her aides.

      The documents include technical details about how the server in the basement of Clinton’s home was set up.

      Friday’s release of documents involving the Democratic presidential nominee is a highly unusual step, but one that reflects the extraordinary public interest in the investigation into Clinton’s server.

    • Bill Clinton Staffer’s Email Was Breached on Hillary’s Private Server, FBI Says

      Since it came to light that Hillary Clinton ran a private email server during her time as Secretary of State, that computer’s security has become a subject of controversy among politicos whose only notion of a “server” until recently was a waiter carrying canapés at a fundraising dinner. But now the FBI has released the first hint that Clinton’s private server may have been compromised by hackers, albeit only to access the email of one of former president Bill Clinton’s staffers. And though there’s no evidence the breach went further, it’s sure to offer new fodder to critics of Clinton’s handling of classified data.

      On Friday afternoon, the FBI released a new set of documents from its now-concluded investigation into Clinton’s private email server controversy. The 60-page report includes a description of what sounds like an actual hacker compromise of one of Bill Clinton’s staffers. It describes that in early January 2013, someone accessed the email account of one of his female employees, whose name is redacted from the report. The unnamed hacker apparently used the anonymity software Tor to browse through this staffer’s messages and attachments. The FBI wasn’t able to determine how the hacker would have obtained the her username and password to access her account, which was also hosted on the same private server used by then-Secretary of State Clinton.

    • All the Clintons’ servers: Hillary first used a Power Mac tower for e-mail

      It was kismet, and in March of 2009, Pagliano delivered two servers to Chappaqua—a Dell PowerEdge 2900 running Windows Server and Microsoft Exchange and a Dell PowerEdge 1950 running Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). Cooper and Pagliano together acquired additional network and storage hardware. Initially, Pagliano said, he believed the servers were for President Clinton and not for the Secretary.

    • Hacker Guccifer gets porridge for revealing Hillary Clinton’s email stash

      INFAMOUS HACKER Guccifer is presumably packing his suitcase for an extended stay in the US and a future of people asking him questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

      Guccifer, or Marcel Lehel Lazar, used to be a taxi driver, according to the International Business Times, which makes sense because the hacker was able to find his way anywhere, often via short cuts, and end up on the winning side of any deal.

      But Lazar took one journey too far when he found himself in the uncharted waters of the home-based email server that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used to carry out official work and things like the booking of private jets.

      The proverbial hit the fan when news about this unusual use came out, some of it going in the Clinton direction and some of it to Lazar and his native Romania.

    • Romanian hacker ‘Guccifer’ sentenced to 52 months in U.S. prison

      A Romanian hacker nicknamed “Guccifer” who helped expose the existence of a private email domain Hillary Clinton used when she was U.S. secretary of state was sentenced on Thursday to 52 months in prison by a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.

      Marcel Lazar, 44, who used the alias online, had pleaded guilty in May to charges including unauthorized access to a protected computer and aggravated identity theft after being extradited from Romania.

      Lazar’s public defender, Shannon Quill, was not immediately available for comment.

    • Top Jeb Bush donor says he’s with Clinton

      Donald Trump is unqualified for the presidency, Mike Fernandez, a top Jeb Bush and Rick Scott donor, said Thursday, announcing that he’ll be voting across party lines for Hillary Clinton in November.

      Fernandez identified himself as “a firm believer in the fundamental tenets of the Republican Party” and as someone who takes his civic responsibilities seriously before slamming the GOP’s standard-bearer.

    • Feds Spend $499,571 to ‘Combat Online Trolling’

      The National Science Foundation is spending roughly half a million dollars to combat “online trolling.”

      A joint project by Northwestern and Northeastern universities is examining how to create “trolling-free environments” on the Internet. The researchers define online trolls as those who try to influence public opinion by boosting “misleading” and “inauthentic comments.”

      “Today, almost every browsing click that users make is collected by numerous trackers associated with a variety of online services (e.g., advertising networks, online social networks, e-commerce platforms),” a grant for the project states. “Users have often expressed concern about the lack of privacy and control over their personal data. Nonetheless, despite a substantial effort to expose and control this prevalent behavior, the reality is that users keep accepting updated online privacy policies, which in turn grant the gathering of more personal data.”

    • I Get Paid To Write Fake Reviews For Amazon

      Whether you need to find a motel in Winnipeg that doesn’t reek of despair (good luck!) or track down the cheapest possible Chinese food in El Paso, internet reviewers have got your back. But some businesses have become so desperate for that elusive fifth star that they’re paying for positive reviews online, a crime filthier than the rats running around that El Paso Chinese place. We spoke with Jessica Carson, a paid online reviewer, and she told us …

    • PR Firm Says It Ghost-Wrote Thousands of Op-Eds in Major US Papers

      Additionally, paying $5,000 for this service is not simply paying for research or editing. It’s paying for the unfair advantage of having your op-ed pitched by people who’ve built cozy relationships with op-ed page editors, and who in at least some cases used to be op-ed page editors.

      Even worse, it’s paying for the insider skill of churning out or transforming an op-ed into just the sort of familiar, boring, cookie-cutter columns that clutter up the dying institution of the daily, dead-tree, advertising-and-rewritten-government-statement sheets we call major newspapers.

      This is why the more stimulating op-eds are often to be found on independent websites.

      But to the extent that this service can really reach 50,000 people whom one wouldn’t have otherwise reached, it is part of the corruption of a thoroughly corrupt communications system. It’s part of the rigging of everything that breeds cynicism and resentment.

      Do op-ed page editors know that Keybridge pitches op-eds that it claims to have ghost-written? Are they all completely, or only partially, ghost-written? Those might be questions for some future WikiLeaks release.

      Meanwhile, here’s a fun fact: Keybridge is a supposedly savvy PR firm in Washington, DC, that bears the name of a bridge named for Francis Scott Key, who owned people as slaves, supported killings of African-Americans, penned an anti-Muslim poem that later became a celebration of killing people escaped from slavery and of a flag surviving a battle that killed human beings during a war that failed to conquer Canada but succeeded in getting the White House burned. That revised poem became the US national anthem. Great image, guys! I’d pay $5,000 for that.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Do we need to rein in Facebook and Google’s power?

      DO YOU remember your first Google search, with the world’s information at your fingertips? Or perhaps the thrill of rediscovering old friends when you opened a Facebook account. From those heady, early days, Google and Facebook have become custodians of crucial technologies relied upon by hundreds of millions of people all over the planet.

      The key to their success is no secret: the services they offer are the best and so droves of people choose to use them. But with the droves comes data and with that, a new form of power. This, coupled with the fact that most users understand little about this new currency, has led some to worry that there is very little holding these companies to account.

      “They really control what you know and what you see. They control your universe,” says Ariel Ezrachi, who studies competition law at the University of Oxford. Is it time to rein them in? Even if we wanted to, could we?

    • I Have Never Stood Up for the National Anthem—and Never Will

      I do not follow sports, so I had not heard of Colin Kaepernick before this week. The San Francisco 49ers quarterback took a simple action Friday during a football game: He chose not to stand during the national anthem, and for that he has now become a household name. His act was one to which I could strongly relate.

      Some years ago, I was at the Hollywood Bowl for a concert that had absolutely nothing to do with a national holiday, the military or the government. It was just a music event. But simply because there was a large gathering of people in one place, the venue upheld its irrational tradition of playing the national anthem and, like programmed robots, everyone in the stadium stood. I refused.

    • What Athletes Should Stand For

      Honoring a venerable tradition of activist athletes dating from Muhammad Ali, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has continued his protest against racial injustice, police brutality and a lack of accountability by those in power “getting away with murder.” He has taken a knee during another national anthem at a game in San Diego, vowed to donate $1 million to grassroots organizations working in poor communities, and inspired two more NFL players – teammate Eric Reid and the Seahawks’ Jeremy Lane – to join him “until justice is served.”

      Their willingness to take a stand for what’s right, despite sometimes steep personal cost, follows in the admirable footsteps of Ali’s Vietnam-era refusal to be drafted to fight other people of color. After mega-stars Jim Brown, Bill Russell and the great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar spoke up in support of Ali, many others have followed suit over the years: From the 1968 Olympics’ Black Power protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, to hoodies, “I Can’t Breathe,” and “Black Lives Matter” shirts worn by NBA and NFL players to protest the killings of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and so many more, to the searing speech at July’s ESPY Awards by NBA heavyweights Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul and LeBron James.

    • Pre-censorship is a reality today: Mahesh Bhatt
    • Does YouTube Ad Policy Equate to Censorship? Give Me a Break
    • Apple’s €13 Billion Irish Tax Kerfuffle, Explained for Normal People
    • Apple must pay $14.5 billion in back taxes to Ireland, the EU says
    • Apple ordered to pay €13bn after EU rules Ireland broke state aid laws
    • Apple must pay Ireland $14.5 billion in unpaid taxes
    • EU stoush: Apple’s Cook starts off on wrong note
    • Apple holds Europe to ransom: Tech giant threatens to cut jobs in EU after Brussels orders it to pay back £11BILLION in tax over ‘illegal’ sweetheart deal with Irish government
    • Two Months of Internet Blackouts Have Taken a Toll on Kashmir

      Earlier this summer, the north Indian state of Kashmir was hit with a new wave of riots when young militant leader Burhan Wani was killed by state police. Wani was the controversial head of Hizbul Mujahideen, a group fighting for the state to separate from India. He was embraced as a freedom fighter by many in Kashmir, and considered a terrorist by Indian officials.

      Kashmiris have been forced to live with regular curfews and military presence in their daily lives. Their mountain and valley homes have been caught in the crosshairs of border wars between India, Pakistan and China for decades. But in moments of peak violence the law enforcement in Kashmir has started wielding a new means of control: mobile and digital blackouts.

    • Bhutan’s Gross National Unhappiness: In The Wake Of The Country’s First Facebook Defamation Lawsuit, Fears Of Censorship Rise

      It remains to be seen what that new policy will entail, and the extent of the censorship imposed. But it’s sad to see a country that cares about maximizing national happiness taking precisely the same route as less enlightened nations.

    • Defamation case will be a landmark case: PM

      With the recent defamation case between a businessman and a freelance journalist underway for the sharing of a post on social media, proper use of the platform was discussed during the 26th Meet the Press yesterday.

      Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay said that because of social media, some landmark cases have taken place and how the judiciary implements the laws of the land is very significant. “We have to be bound by the judiciary’s decision ultimately,” Lyonchoen said. “The recent defamation case will also be a landmark case we should be paying attention to. These are very important times in our country,” he said.

    • Another 19th Century Moral Panic: Theater

      Every so often, we’ve written about examples of historical “moral panics” — those moments when “concerned citizens” (often including the press and/or politicians) freaked out about the moral horrors of… some awful “new” thing. You all know the obvious ones: like comic books and Dungeons & Dragons, but we like to highlight the truly oddball ones that people these days don’t realize were ever possibly considered a threat to our moral fabric. Things like chess and the waltz. Oh, and of course the printing press. Evil, evil, evil filthy things that will warp the minds of our young people and make them lazy, violent and degenerate.

    • YouTube accused of censorship: Video sharing site defends rules that strip adverts from ‘inappropriate’ content

      YouTube has been accused of censorship after it emerged it has been removing the ability for users to make money from their videos if they express politically incorrect or offensive views.

      Users of the video sharing site began noticing the adverts had been stripped from their content after receiving alerts from the site saying they had breached their ‘advertiser friendly content guidelines’.

      These state that videos containing sexually suggestive content, violence, inappropriate language, promotion of drugs or controversial or sensitive subjects will not be monetised.

    • A Laid-Off Facebook News Curator Reveals What Fueled ‘Trending’ Topics

      There’s no doubt: Trending topics on Facebook get big reach. Nearly half of U.S. adults say they get their news from the social platform, and the prominently placed feature makes it more likely that a small number of stories could make their way to large numbers of Facebook’s massive user base (The network reached 1.13 billion daily active users in June).

      It’s no wonder that such reach would get attention — and scrutiny. This year, the company has faced criticism over what makes a topic or story “trend” on the News Feed’s sidebar. Some even alleged political bias, which Facebook says is unfounded. The process got extra attention recently with last week’s layoff of the contracted “news curator” team. Though the curators knew their roles were temporary and that they were essentially helping to train the algorithm, the move still came as a surprise.

    • YouTube star PewDiePie suspended from Twitter after IS joke

      YouTube star PewDiePie was suspended from Twitter after making a joke about so-called Islamic State.

      The suspension was short lived and his account is now live again.

      He was removed from the site after he told followers that he and fellow YouTube star Jack Septic Eye had joined IS.

      Twitter shut down his account, according to their rules on promoting “organizations or individuals associated with promoting hate”.

    • PewDiePie suspended from Twitter after tweeting Islamic State joke

      YouTube star PewDiePie was temporarily booted off Twitter on Tuesday after tweeting a joke about the Islamic State group.

      PewDiePie describes the debacle in a new YouTube video, which has already received over half a million views. The clip sees the internet star criticize the platform and social media in general, claiming (rather eloquently) that it makes people “retarded.”

      According to PewDiePie, the trouble began after he decided to un-verify himself by adding a globe icon next to his name on Twitter, with many of his fans following suit. A parody news account then tweeted an obviously fake story claiming PewDiePie had lost his Twitter verification due to “suspected relations with ISIS.”

    • HostSailor Threatens to Sue KrebsOnSecurity

      Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity published The Reincarnation of a Bulletproof Hoster, which examined evidence suggesting that a Web hosting company called HostSailor was created out of the ashes of another, now-defunct hosting firm notorious for harboring spammers, scammers and other online ne’er-do-wells. Today, HostSailor’s lawyers threatened to sue this author unless the story is removed from the Web.

      Obviously, I stand by my reporting and have no intention of unpublishing stories. But I’m writing about HostSailor again here because I promised to post an update if they ever responded to my requests for comment.

      The letter, signed by Abdullah Alzarooni Advocates in Dubai — where HostSailor says it is based — carries the subject line, “Warning from Acts of Extortion and Abuse of the Privacy of Third Parties.” It lists a number of links to content the company apparently finds objectionable.

      Could this same kind of legal pressure be why security industry giant Trend Micro removed all reference to HostSailor from the report that started all this? Trend hasn’t responded to direct questions about that.

    • Muslim Activist Qudosi Banned Permanently From Facebook

      Facebook has intervened in a political dispute between Muslim reformist and activist Shireen Qudosi and Muslim leader Javed Ali by banning Qudosi permanently from Facebook.

      The spat originated after Qudosi stood up for Clarion Project’s National Security Analyst Ryan Mauro, who provided training in San Diego to various police departments last week on what to be aware of when fighting radical Islam.

      Mauro was subjected to a silencing campaign by the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which attempted to shut down the training sessions by inundating the police with complaints. CAIR was founded by Muslim Brotherhood members and was designated by the FBI as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism financing trial in American history.

    • Mark Zuckerberg visits Pope Francis at home [Ed: censorship of "blasphemy" and any "offensive" political speech (those in power decide what's offensive) the long-term goal]

      Pope Francis met with Facebook Inc. founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, at the Vatican on Monday.

      One topic of discussion at the meeting was “how to use communication technologies to alleviate poverty, encourage a culture of encounter, and make a message of hope arrive, especially to those most in need,” Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said.

    • Mark Zuckerberg meets Pope Francis, gives him a drone

      On Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan met with Pope Francis, as part of Zuckerberg’s trip of Italy, announced following the devastating earthquake that hit the country last week, killing hundreds. After discussing the importance of connecting people in the world without internet access, Zuckerberg presented the Pope with a drone – but, alas, not a working one. Instead, it was a model of Facebook’s solar-powered Aquila aircraft, designed to beam internet access to those areas of the world that are lacking connectivity.

    • Facebook is telling the world it’s not a media company, but it might be too late

      Mark Zuckerberg really doesn’t want people to think of Facebook as a media company.

      The topic came up as part of his live-streamed Q&A session on Monday, when someone asked the CEO about Facebook’s role in the media and whether the company sees itself as an editor.

    • The Coddling of the American Mind

      In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

    • Youtube clarifies it has not changed its policy after vlogger Philip De Franco accuses website of ‘censorship’

      On Wednesday, De Franco, a vlogger with 4.5million subscribers, posted a video titled ‘YouTube Is Shutting Down My Channel and I’m Not Sure What To Do’, which has now been viewed more than 3.6 million times. He told viewers several of his videos had been demonetised meaning Youtube had determined they were not “advertiser friendly” so he could not earn money from the advertising revenue. This video in question does have advertising in.

    • YouTuber PewDiePie ‘stripped of Twitter blue tick over Isis joke’

      Popular YouTuber PewDiePie has claimed Twitter unverified his account after he joked he and fellow YouTuber Jacksepticeye had “joined Isis”.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Amazon Thinks I’m Some Sort Of Serial Killer In Training

      I used to have a cat named Kyle. He died in 2014. He and his sister, Selina, were the first real pets I ever had. Having lived in apartments with strict “No Pets” policies all my life, I could never enjoy the company of a real pet. I had to settle for lower-tier pets, like fish and turtles — animals that are more like living home accessories than cuddly best friends. It’s like if your ottoman could look at you.

    • The NSA’s stash of digital holes is a threat to everyone online

      Here’s a phrase to conjure with: “zero-day vulnerability”. If you’re a non-techie, it will sound either like a meaningless piece of jargon or it’ll have a vaguely sinister ring to it. “Year Zero” was the name chosen by the Khmer Rouge for 1975, the year they seized power in Cambodia and embarked on their genocidal rule. Behind the term lay the idea that “all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch”.

    • Are You There, Democracy? It’s Me, the Internet.

      In February, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his web-based production company, hitRECord, teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union to create a five-part educational series on the topics of technology and democracy.

      The actor became passionate about issues of mass surveillance and digital privacy while preparing for his role as Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone’s upcoming movie, “Snowden.” Gordon-Levitt asked the public to submit videos to hitRECord answering the question: “Is today’s technology good or bad for democracy?” The goal of the project was not to gather expert opinions or talking points but instead to hear personal stories from people all over the world. Keeping with the style of hitRECord productions, each documentary is edited with music and interactive DIY animations.

    • NSA Designates Forsyth Tech as Training Center for Cybersecurity [Ed: Universities (or colleges as they call them) in the US are in bed with the NSA]
    • EFF to Court: Government Must Inform People That It’s Accessing Their Emails, Personal Data

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal court today that the government is violating the U.S. Constitution when it fails to notify people that it has accessed or examined their private communications stored by Internet providers in the cloud.

      EFF is supporting Microsoft in its lawsuit challenging portions of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that allow the Department of Justice (DOJ) to serve a warrant on the company to get access to customers’ emails and other information stored on remote servers—all without telling users their data is being searched or seized. In a brief filed in Microsoft v. Department of Justice in U.S. District Court in Seattle, EFF, joined by Access Now, New America’s Open Technology Institute, and legal scholar Jennifer Granick, said Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government apply to all of our information—no matter what the format or where it’s located.

    • How to Change Your WhatsApp Settings Before Facebook Data Sharing Begins

      WhatsApp’s plans to share user information—including phone numbers, contact lists, and usage data—with parent company Facebook threaten users’ privacy and control over their data. We describe details of this data sharing arrangement and the new privacy policy that makes it possible in a previous blog post.

    • What Facebook and WhatsApp’s Data Sharing Plans Really Mean for User Privacy

      WhatsApp is establishing data-sharing practices that signal a significant shift in its attitude toward privacy—though you wouldn’t know it from the privacy policy update that popped up on users’ screens last week. The new policy lays the groundwork for alarming data sharing between WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook. The update screen that users see, however, mentions only benign new features like WhatsApp calling, and requires a user to click a “Read more” link to see any mention of how the data sharing arrangement will work for users. Where WhatsApp could have offered users up-front information and choices, the UI as it stands buries critical details and options. If WhatsApp wants to merge user data with Facebook, it should give users opportunities to make choices about their privacy—starting with a clearer, more informative UI.

    • Using Prisoner Phone Calls to Convict? NY’s Highest Court Puts Critical Question on Hold

      Two years ago, a New York City man named Marcellus Johnson was convicted of robbery — in part as a result of incriminating telephone conversations that had been recorded while he was awaiting trial in a Rikers Island jail cell. Last April, New York’s highest court affirmed the conviction, upholding the use of the recorded conversations.

      However, the justices of the New York Court of Appeals left open a future challenge to the use of such recordings.

      “Our resolution of the narrowly drawn issues presented on this appeal,” the justices wrote, “should not be interpreted as the Court’s approval of these practices.”

      These practices, the court made clear, involve the routine recording of inmate telephone conversations by corrections officials, and the nearly as routine practice of turning those recordings over to prosecutors.

      Justice Eugene F. Pigott, in a concurring opinion, put the court’s concerns plainly.

      “The current arrangement between the Department of Corrections and the district attorney’s office creates a serious potential for abuse,” Pigott wrote, adding, “Something needs to change.”

    • Privacy Act IRR Released – NPC to Educate Public about Privacy

      Civil Society organization, Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) was instrumental in organizing Public Consultations for the Implementing Rules, According to FMA Director Alan Alegre; “The FMA is pleased with the spirit of inclusive participation of stakeholders in the development of the DPA’s IRR, Kudos to all stakeholders who participated in the public consultations, submitted comments online and offline, and produced position papers.”

      Personal Information Controllers and other stakeholders participated in five public consultations and several meetings with the NPC. These stakeholders included representatives from banks, retail, education, research, health Informatics, civil society, business process management, the migrant sector and Government organizations. Among the organizations that helped organize public consultations were the Philippine Computer Society, U.P Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Development (OVCRD), Department of Health, Philippine Council for Health Research and Development, Ateneo de Davao University, UP-PGH, National Telehealth Center and FMA.

      The NPC will focus on conducting public information campaigns aimed at educating the public and organizations on the importance of data privacy in its first year of operations. According to Privacy Chairman Raymund Liboro, “With the prevalent use of personal data in access devices, social media, smartphone apps as well as the delivery of basic services, it is extremely important that the public and organizations be made aware of the need to
      responsibly handle personal information,” Commissioner Liboro explains.

      Commissioner Liboro emphasized that the DPA and its IRR were developed with the rights of the individual should be given priority. “The rules were made with the citizen’s protection and the country’s progress in mind. Personal data are your personal assets that should be guarded. Collectively, they become a national asset too.” Chairman Liboro added.

    • Companies are making money from our personal data – but at what cost?

      It is the strangely conspiratorial truth of the surveillance society we inhabit that there are unknown entities gathering our data for unknown purposes.

      Companies and governments dip into the data streams of our lives in increasingly innovative ways, tracking what we do, who we know and where we go. The methods and purposes of data collection keep expanding, with seemingly no end or limit in sight.

      These range from irritating infringements, including WhatsApp sharing your name and phone number with Facebook so businesses can advertise to you, or a startup that uses your phone’s battery status as a “fingerprint” to track you online, to major intrusions such as Baltimore police secretly using aerial surveillance systems to continuously watch and record the city. Or like the data brokers that create massive personalized profiles about each of us, which are then sold and used to circumvent consumer protections meant to limit predatory and discriminatory practices.

      These instances of data harvesting are connected by a shared compulsion – a data imperative – that drives many corporations and governments. This imperative demands the extraction of all data, from all sources, in whatever ways possible. It has created an arms race for data, fueling the impulse to create surveillance technologies that infiltrate all aspects of life and society. And the reason for creating these massive reserves of data is the value it can or might generate.

    • Now BBC iPlayer police ‘may spy on your net use’ to punish people who watch on-demand programmes without a TV licence

      The BBC could spy on home internet use to enforce new rules designed to punish those who watch on-demand programmes online without a TV licence, experts have warned.

      The overhaul of the ‘iPlayer loophole’ means that from tomorrow viewers will need to pay the £145.50 licence fee to catch up on programmes using their mobile devices and laptops.

      But fears have been raised that the secretive techniques used by the BBC to police the new system could be a breach of privacy.

    • FBI director James Comey wants a serious chat about encryption

      FBI DIRECTOR James Comey is expecting technology companies to wake up and finally listen to his demand for changes to encryption that would essentially make his job easier and the technology security landscape more baggy.

      Comey is not a fan of technology companies and their habit of making a feature of encryption, and has often suggested that this is one of those situations when less is more.

      Unfortunately for him, the technology firms think otherwise and would rather offer the protection to their customers.

      But Comey has now had enough, and wants to have a proper, he reportedly said “adult”, conversation about the problem.

      Comey said at the 2016 Symantec Government Symposium that the industry is wrong and that encryption is a marketing ploy that values sales over anti-terrorism.

      We don’t know what Symantec was expecting to hear, but if we were betting people we might have put a wager on encryption coming up.

    • Facebook Slapped With FTC Complaint Over WhatsApp Data Grab

      Consumer privacy watchdogs filed a federal complaint Monday against Facebook over the tech titan’s decision to begin harvesting phone numbers from its popular WhatsApp messaging service.

      The complaint, which was expected, was filed with the Federal Trade Commission, and accuses Facebook of violating Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices.”

      “When Facebook acquired WhatsApp, WhatsApp made a commitment to its users, to the Federal Trade Commission, and to privacy authorities around the world not to disclose user data to Facebook,” Marc Rotenberg, President of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a statement. “Now they have broken that commitment.”

      Indeed, when Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for a whopping $19 billion, the two companies insisted that the social networking giant would keep the messaging service at arms-length. At the time, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum assured users that “privacy is coded into our DNA.”

      But last Thursday, WhatsApp announced that it would begin sharing user phone numbers with its parent company Facebook in an effort to improve “ads and products experiences.”

    • Facebook recommended that this psychiatrist’s patients friend each other

      Facebook’s ability to figure out the “people we might know” is sometimes eerie. Many a Facebook user has been creeped out when a one-time Tinder date or an ex-boss from 10 years ago suddenly pops up as a friend recommendation. How does the big blue giant know?

      While some of these incredibly accurate friend suggestions are amusing, others are alarming, such as this story from Lisa*, a psychiatrist who is an infrequent Facebook user, mostly signing in to RSVP for events. Last summer, she noticed that the social network had started recommending her patients as friends—and she had no idea why.

      “I haven’t shared my email or phone contacts with Facebook,” she told me over the phone.

      The next week, things got weirder.

    • Finnish security police: Don’t take your phone abroad with you

      Finland’s security police Supo says that Finns should leave their mobile phones and laptops at home when they travel abroad. If it’s absolutely necessary to take your device when travelling, be sure to keep an eye on it at all times, says Supo.

    • Police Seize Two Perfect Privacy VPN Servers

      VPN provider Perfect Privacy has had two of its servers seized by Dutch police, as part of an active investigation. Police bypassed the VPN service and went directly to the company’s hosting provider, I3D, who complied with a subpoena requesting the hardware. At the time of writing, it remains unclear why the servers in question were taken.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Hidden Clauses Coming To Software Licensing Agreements

      Because they’re so widely ignored, companies have been putting some pretty crazy shit in them for a while now. This is a problem which isn’t going to get better. Using Cracked’s supply of plutonium and this crazy old grandfather clock I found, I cobbled together a crude time machine, and used it to travel into the near future to check out the license agreements, because sure, why not. Here are 14 of the craziest clauses I found.

    • Powder Keg: the Rage in Urban America
    • Couple Brutally Attacked For Ordering Ham On Their Pizza [Ed: Breitbart extremely unreliable on stories, but if this one is true, then, well…]

      Two men who attacked a young couple for eating a pizza topped with ham have been sentenced to 18 months in prison.

    • Refugee Attempts To Burn Wife Alive, Dies In The Process

      A man in a German refugee shelter attempt to set his wife on fire Thursday, police said. The man died apparently in the act of attempting to set his wife ablaze, according to English-language German news outlet the Local.

      The woman, who has not been identified, was left with very serious injuries as a result of the incident. The 45-year-old man was “previously known to police,” according to the Local. The attempted burning occurred in the town of Rüdesheim on Germany’s Rhine river in the centrally located state of Hesse.

      The woman had previously separated from her husband. After the attempted burning, she was rushed to the hospital via helicopter, according to news outlet Agence France-Presse, which put out the original news story about the incident from which the Local based its report. Part of the shelter that houses 14 people was set on fire during the incident and two others were injured.

    • Illegal Koranic school with up to 20 students found CONCEALED inside Paris mosque

      AN UNREGISTERED Koranic school with the potential to indoctrinate children has been found within the walls of Al-Islah mosque – which is known for harbouring Jihadists – during a police raid in Paris yesterday.

    • At nearly 43%, Muslims have highest percentage of illiterates: Census

      Muslims have the highest number of illiterates at nearly 43 per cent, while Jains have the highest number of literates among India’s religious communities as over 86 per cent of them are educated.

      According to the Census 2011 data, Jains have just 13.57 per cent illiterate – aged seven years and above – among all the communities.

      The census has taken those between zero and six years as illiterate.

    • Saudi Arabia sentences a man to 10 years in jail and 2,000 lashes for tweeting that he was an atheist

      A COURT in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a man to ten years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism on Twitter.

      The 28-year-old reportedly refused to repent, insisting what he wrote reflected his beliefs and that he had the right to express them.

    • Child Brides On The Rise In German Capital [Ed: The far right in the US uses Europe concerns to advance its own agenda]

      The trend of underage migrant girls entering Germany married to older men is on the rise, with the city of Berlin recording 100 child marriages this year alone.

      While the majority of underage migrants flowing into Germany are young boys, underage girls tend to come as ‘child brides’ to older migrant men who are more often adults.

    • Reverse assimilation: The Muslim takeover of Europe

      For the last several decades, Europe has been a haven of opportunities for immigrants from a myriad of countries. For various reasons ranging from political to economic to ethnic, people from all over the world have flocked to the continent, slowly changing the demographics of “Old Europe.”

      The reasons various immigrants left their countries were not necessarily the same as the reasons for the hosting countries to accept them. In many cases like France and Germany in the 1950s and following decades, the hosting countries were interested in cheap labor as well as a labor force that would be willing to take on the tasks some of the natives deemed unworthy. I grew up in the 1960s in France where almost all street sweepers and trash collectors were either Arabs or Africans. Immigrants came seeking a better life; they didn’t always find it.

    • Police: Westerly man shot corncobs at neighbor’s house

      A Wompag Road resident was arrested Tuesday night after the police said he fired corncobs at a neighbor’s house with a homemade potato gun.

      The man, Jeffrey M. Osella, 50, of 12 Wompag Road, was taken into custody on charges of disorderly conduct and firing in a compact area, the police reported. He was released on bond and is scheduled for arraignment Friday in 4th Division District Court.

    • LAX ‘shooting’ scare: Man in Zorro costume arrested following false reports of gunshots

      A man dressed as fictional character Zorro has been arrested following false reports of shots being fired at Los Angeles International Airport.

      One bystander claimed the man was a “super nice guy” who had not done anything wrong, but the incident resulted in delays for some passengers, including BBC Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker whose flight to LA was diverted.

      Video footage showed a man sitting outside the airport wearing black clothing and a black hat, before being surrounded by six police officers ordering him to “get on the ground”.

    • Foreign visitors should not wear skirts or short dresses, says India’s tourism minister

      Foreign women travelling to India should not wear dresses or skirts and should not walk alone at night “for their own safety”, India’s tourism minister has said.

      Speaking to the media in Agra about India’s official safety advice for women, Mahesh Sharma also advised women to take photographs of the number plate of any vehicles they were travelling in.

      His remarks have sparked controversy in India, where several high-profile gang rapes and attacks on women in recent years have focused global attention on the problem within the country.

    • Russian journalist critical of Vladimir Putin found dead on his birthday with gunshot wound to his head

      A well-known Russian journalist and critic of President Vladimir Putin has been found dead in his Kiev apartment with a gunshot wound to the head.

      The body of Alexander Shchetinin, founder the Novy Region (New Region) press agency, was found at his flat after friends tried to visit him on his birthday.

      A police spokesperson said Kiev forces were alerted of Ms Shchetinin’s death at around midnight on Saturday. He is believed to have died a few hours earlier, between 8 and 9.30pm.

    • People in crowds do not spontaneously de-evolve into subhuman beasts

      This episode’s guest, Michael Bond, is the author of The Power of Others, and reading his book I was surprised to learn that despite several decades of research into crowd psychology, the answers to most questions concerning crowds can still be traced back to a book printed in 1895.

      Gustave’s Le Bon’s book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, explained that humans in large groups are dangerous, that people spontaneously de-evolve into subhuman beasts who are easily swayed and prone to violence. That viewpoint has informed the policies and tactics of governments and police forces for more than a century, and like many prescientific musings, much of it is wrong.

    • FBI: Detroit suspect fantasized about deadly attacks

      It appears agents have not found evidence indicating that Gregerson was providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He has not been charged with a terrorism-related crime, but the investigation is ongoing. And there was no specific planned attack outlined in the court records.

    • Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

      Twenty years ago, when I was a senior at Yale, the graduate students embarked on a two-week “grade strike,” during which they refused to hand in the fall grades of the undergraduates they were teaching. Grades were due on January 2, 1996, but the grad students, then as now agitating for union recognition, withheld the grades until two weeks later, when it became clear that they were losing the battle on all fronts. The dean of the graduate school brought three union leaders up on disciplinary charges (one was dismissed, though the other two had their punishments overturned); some faculty members threatened graduate students with reprisals, like poor letters of recommendation; and the Yale undergraduates, for whom a transcript without grades was like a scull without oarsmen, turned viciously on their teaching assistants.

      That spring, a writer for the late, great small magazine Lingua Franca went to Yale and found that even campus liberals hated the grad-student-union movement. “They undertook an obligation and reneged,” the president of the Yale College Democrats told the reporter. “They’re holding the grades hostage of people they have no beef with.” Farther down in the article, the same student was in high snark mode: “It’s hard to tell an undergraduate who’s in debt $27,000 a year that your $10,000 stipend and full-tuition waiver isn’t enough,” he said. “You could argue that there is no one more privileged than the graduate students.”

      That student, poster child for anti-union animus, was me. I quickly came to regret, and eat, my words: two years later, I returned to Yale as a graduate student, and I immediately joined the union (then called the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, or GESO), eventually becoming an organizer in the religious-studies department. I couldn’t argue with the basic logic: doctoral students worked as graders and teaching assistants, and workers should have collective-bargaining rights.

    • No Review Necessary: Stop Using Private Prisons for Immigration Detention

      Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has announced that he is setting up a committee to review whether to continue using private prisons for immigration detention. But it doesn’t take a study to figure out that the system Secretary Johnson runs is costly and causes needless human suffering. We should stop filling for-profit prison beds with asylum-seekers, children, and thousands of others who never got a fair day in court.

    • G20 ‘honey trap’ warning: Fears Prime Minister’s officials will be seduced by Chinese spies and have hotel rooms bugged

      Theresa May’s officials have been warned to avoid “honey traps” amid fears that the Prime Minister’s team will be targeted by Chinese spies offering sex during the G20 summit.

      British government aides have fallen victim to spying on previous official trips to China, with one Downing Street official reported to have had his mobile phone and secret documents stolen after he was seduced.

      Government security chiefs are anxious to avoid a repeat of the incident, which took place during a visit by Gordon Brown in 2008, and have provided detailed guidance to Mrs May’s team.

    • The Women Behind the 19th Amendment Had a Grander Vision Than Just the Right to Vote

      Last week we commemorated Women’s Equality Day, a celebration of the anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Most people remember that the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. However, many people forget the Amendment’s original intent: to make women fully equal citizens to men in all respects under the Constitution.

      On August 26, 1920, the United States adopted the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Throughout the 19th Century, women played a significant role in the abolitionist movement, writing articles for abolitionist papers, circulating pamphlets, and signing petitions to Congress calling for the demise of slavery. While some women became prominent leaders in the abolitionist movement, most still faced discrimination in society and within the movement. This exclusion led to their politicization on the issue of women’s rights. Two of these trailblazing abolitionists were Jeannette Rankin and Crystal Eastman.

      In 1916, Rankin successfully ran for Congress becoming the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. In this position, she introduced a bill to allow women citizenship independent of their husbands and opened congressional debate on women’s right to vote. Crystal Eastman, a lawyer, antimilitarist, and journalist, worked on the 1912 Wisconsin suffrage battle and was one of the four drafters of the original Equal Rights Amendment. These two women championed the women’s suffrage movement, and in August 1920, their efforts culminated in the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Later that same year, Rankin and Eastman help found the American Civil Liberties Union.

      In the decades since, countless other ACLU advocates (including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the co-founder and first director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project) have fought to further women’s equality at home, in society, and in the workplace, but that fight is still not won. Even as women have advanced and families have changed, our workplaces have not kept up. On average, women of all races earn 79 cents to every dollar that men earn, while women of color earn even less. Pay inequity not only affects individual paychecks, it compounds over time and compromises the financial stability of future generations.

    • A Moment of Hope

      There is no telling if Karimov is already dead or not, but a massive stroke has with certainty ended his rule. There is much speculation on what happens next. The one thing we can be quite certain will not happen is a free and fair election of a successor.

      The formal process, presided over by the speaker of parliament, is an irrelevance to the power grab that is going on and depends on control of the army, the separate Ministry of the Interior armed forces, the police and the security services. By common consent Rustam Inoyatov is a key kingmaker, and for the last two years Prime Minister Mirzaeyev has been carefully cementing this alliance. Mirzaeyev is probably the most ruthless of all the candidates – he is as cold-blooded a killer as Karimov, and I suspect this quality will bring him through.

      Mirzaeyev comes from the same Samarkand power base as Karimov, but he faces a difficult balancing act in ensuring nobody else has any power to challenge him, while at the same time placating powerful Tashkent and Ferghana interests. If Mirzaeyev can gain the support of the Gafur Rakhimov/Alisher Usmanov mafia nexus he will probably be home and dry. But to emphasise how complex and vicious this will be, when the Alisher Usmanov/Mirzaeyev family relationship was due to be cemented in 2013 by a marriage alliance featuring Usmanov’s nephew and heir Babur Usmanov, the groom was killed in a “car crash” at the behest of Inoyatov. This murder was probably just a friendly reminder that Inoyatov cannot be cut out, and one Mirzaeyev seems to have heeded, but underlines the potential for it all to go violently wrong.

    • The West and Karimov’s Anti-Terrorism Charade

      Hillary Clinton and John Kerry courted Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s brutal dictator, every bit as assiduously as George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

      The west is interested in gas, gold and uranium, but is still more entranced by the allure of the false gold of Uzbekistan’s “successful” anti-terrorism strategy. Karimov was courted as the strong man who held Central Asia against Islamic fundamentalism. His methods – imprisoning, torturing and killing anybody who appeared religious – were viewed as admirable. That all reputable sources acknowledge that 10,000 people are imprisoned solely for their political and religious beliefs did not matter. That young men can be imprisoned or “disappeared” solely for growing a beard, or for praying five times a day, was viewed as “effective”.

    • Labor Day Special: Workers and Corporate Media

      This week on CounterSpin: a special episode in celebration of Labor Day. It’s presented by corporate media as most importantly a long weekend, with a parade—or, more seriously, as a holiday fought for by US trade unions to honor American workers. But the holiday has more complex origins.

      A national holiday had been a goal of US labor—several states already celebrated—but Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day in the midst of an attack by federal troops on striking Pullman railway workers, leading many to see it as more an attempt to appease workers than to honor them.

      It’s fitting that the holiday remind us of the struggles as well as the advances of US workers, who face today some of the same problems as workers in 1894—including distant and disconnected owners, whose self-enriching, anti-worker policies are enabled and, if need be, enforced by government.

    • Predictive Policing Software Is More Accurate at Predicting Policing Than Predicting Crime

      “Predictive policing” has an enticing ring to it. The idea is that you feed a bunch of data into a mysterious algorithm, and poof, out comes intelligence about the future that tells police where the next crime is going to occur, or even who is going to commit it. What’s not to get excited about?

      Unfortunately, many predictions made by policing software don’t come true. This is because predictive tools are only as good as the data they are fed. Put another way: garbage in, garbage out.

      Data collected by police is notoriously bad (we don’t even know how many people police kill every year), easily manipulated, glaringly incomplete, and too often undermined by racial bias. When you feed a predictive tool contaminated data, it will produce polluted predictions. In fact, it appears predictive policing software is more accurate at predicting policing than predicting crime. Rather than informing us where criminals will be and when they will commit crimes, these algorithms more reliably predict where the police will deploy.

    • Discrimination by Design

      A few weeks ago, Snapchat released a new photo filter. It appeared alongside many of the other such face-altering filters that have become a signature of the service. But instead of surrounding your face with flower petals or giving you the nose and ears of a Dalmatian, the filter added slanted eyes, puffed cheeks and large front teeth. A number of Snapchat users decried the filter as racist, saying it mimicked a “yellowface” caricature of Asians. The company countered that they meant to represent anime characters and deleted the filter within a few hours.

      “Snapchat is the prime example of what happens when you don’t have enough people of color building a product,” wrote Bay Area software engineer Katie Zhu in an essay she wrote about deleting the app and leaving the service. In a tech world that hires mostly white men, the absence of diverse voices means that companies can be blind to design decisions that are hurtful to their customers or discriminatory.

      A Snapchat spokesperson told ProPublica that the company has recently hired someone to lead their diversity recruiting efforts.

    • Black Activists in Missouri Are Fighting to Preserve the Right to Vote

      Before she died six years ago, Rev. Cassandra Gould’s mother used to say that “everybody marched with Dr. King” but that she had been in Selma, Alabama, “before Dr. King got there.” As a 19-year-old from a nearby town, she would ask an older cousin to drive her to the city, where she registered voters, joined sit-ins, and marched. For the rest of her life, she carried a gash on her thigh, a reminder of the police officer who shot her on March 7, 1965, “Bloody Sunday,” the day that perhaps more than any other precipitated the passage of that year’s Voting Rights Act.

      Gould and her siblings grew up faithful to their mother’s directive — “If you don’t do anything else, you vote” — but never experienced firsthand the ferocious racism of those days. Gould moved to St. Louis, Missouri — “Mississippi North,” as she only half-jokingly calls it — and became a reverend and activist. She quickly learned the subtle and insidious ways in which racism had survived and adapted in the aftermath of the civil rights era, but like many of her generation she remained relatively sheltered from racial violence.

    • Racial Disparities in Policing Are Real And Rising. New Hampshire Needs Criminal Justice Reform at All Levels.

      New Hampshire is often viewed, including by those who live here, as a white, homogenous state. But this is no longer true. New Hampshire’s demographics, like those of much of the country, are rapidly changing and becoming more diverse.

      For example, in Manchester and Nashua — New Hampshire’s two largest cities — the white population in each has gone from around 98 percent in 1980 to 86 percent and 83 percent, respectively, in 2010. With these pronounced changes have come racial disparities in policing that have been endemic for decades elsewhere in the country.

    • Former Anti-Terror FBI Employee Now Finds Himself a Target

      As an FBI surveillance employee, Ray Tahir spent the last decade tailing Muslims in counterterrorism cases.

      Among the investigations whose surveillance Tahir led were those of the charity Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in Texas and North Carolina’s Daniel Patrick Boyd, who with others was convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to commit murder, maiming, and kidnapping overseas.

      Both FBI cases had their critics. The American Civil Liberties Union described the prosecution of Holy Land Foundation as “discriminatory enforcement of counterterrorism laws.” In the Boyd case, as in other informant-led FBI stings, there are questions about whether the men convicted would have done anything at all were it not for the FBI’s involvement.

      As the FBI targeted Muslims in the United States following the 9/11 attacks, Tahir was among the front-line employees who made some of these cases possible.

      Now, he alleges, he has become a target himself.

      On May 11, 2012, Tahir was at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., fighting to keep his $78,000-per-year job. A 26-year FBI veteran, Tahir was a member of the Mobile Surveillance Team, a special unit that monitors suspects of espionage and terrorism.

      Tahir, who had been called for a hearing at the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was accused of making personal charges on his covert credit card, unauthorized gasoline purchases, and lack of candor. He had been placed on suspension pending the hearing.

      The FBI employee had admitted to his supervisors that he made more than 200 personal charges during a four-year period, many of them for groceries at stores like Harris Teeter and Food Lion. He ran up a balance of $10,000, which he’d begun to pay back by the time he was called to headquarters; he blamed the charges on personal financial troubles.

      But Tahir denied the unauthorized gasoline purchases and maintained that he had been candid while he was under investigation, though he did admit that he changed the address where the card’s statements were to be sent in order to hide his personal spending from supervisors. Nevertheless, Tahir thought that if he admitted to the credit card purchases, explained the circumstances, and apologized, he’d walk away with a suspension. He knew other FBI employees had received reprimands or suspensions for similar transgressions.

    • Milwaukee Police Forcibly Arrested Two Men Last Night for Doing Nothing Wrong. They Got a Surprise When One Was A State Rep and the Other Was From the ACLU.

      Last night in the Sherman Park area, Milwaukee police officers in riot gear wrongfully arrested two men for no good reason. But this time, the men they arrested had the means to demand their rights and were released. The men were Jarrett English, an organizer at the ACLU of Wisconsin, and State Representative Jonathan Brostoff.

      At about 9:30 p.m., a handful of people, including Mr. English and Rep. Brostoff, stood on the northeast corner of Sherman Boulevard and Auer Avenue, observing a large contingent of police officers who had blocked off Auer on the west side of Sherman. The street has been the gathering place for community members since the fatal police shooting of Sylville Smith on August 13.

      Numerous officers then forcibly arrested Mr. English as he was walking away as instructed. He was handcuffed, forced to the ground, involuntarily searched, and placed in a police van with Rep. Brostoff. After officials became aware that they had arrested a state legislator, the two were released without charges.

      [...]

      The Milwaukee Police Department has once again demonstrated its preference for occupation, excessive force, and belligerence over genuine engagement, civil dialog, and de-escalation. People have a right to stand on a street corner – to observe and record the police, as Jarrett was doing, or for any other reason. Unfortunately, rather than protecting people and their rights, law enforcement in this community all too often engages in the sort of destructive behavior to which Jarrett and Jonathan were subjected to last night.

    • Maine Gov. Paul LePage is Donald Trump’s Noxious Canary

      You’ve heard of the canary used in coal mines to warn of impending hazards to the miners. The canaries were smaller and breathed faster so carbon monoxide and other toxic gases affected them more quickly than the humans and donkeys used to mine coal. Introduced to underground coal mining in the early 20th century, these birds were charged with alerting the miners in time for them to correct the problem or just get the hell out.

      The canaries were only one kind of many sentinel species humans have used over the years to warn of various quagmires and dangers in their surroundings. The Japanese even used cats to indicate the presence of poisoned fish. Perhaps that’s a more apt analogy for Donald Trump’s presidential race and potential tenure in the oval office.

      Anyway, Governor Paul LePage of Maine is now stationed in the coal shaft of U.S. politics. They don’t call Maine, and her neighboring New England states, the tailpipe of the country for nothing. And there, breathing the exhaust from low wage earners, sits Gov. Lepage blazing an ugly trail through white mainstream America indicating just how safe it is for Donald Trump to mine the anger and resentment buried in the American psyche.

    • Gov. LePage, Show Us The Binder

      We’re disappointed that the governor’s office is delaying the release of these records. Our request was narrowly tailored and should be simple to fulfill. Further, the records in question pertain to matters of utmost importance to the Maine people, and their release is essential to a fully informed public discussion.

      Without the binder, we can’t know exactly what information the governor is relying on to support his claim. But we do know there are at least two major problems with it.

      First, it’s beyond belief that nine out of 10 people selling drugs in Maine are Black. So if nine out of 10 people being arrested for selling drugs are Black, we have a serious problem. Studies show that Black people and white people use and sell drugs at similar rates. Significant disparities in arrests, such as the nine-to-one disparity suggested by Gov. LePage, can almost surely be attributed to racial profiling and selective enforcement by police officers.

    • Georgetown’s Gesture on Slavery’s Evils

      After decades of delays and denials, Jesuit-led Georgetown University finally confessed to a near-two-century-old abuse of African-American slaves, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

    • Colin Kaepernick Pledges $1 Million to Social Justice Groups as More Players Sit

      San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest is growing, and with it, his mission.

      When Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem ahead of the 49ers’ Thursday night preseason finale against the San Diego Chargers, he was joined by his teammate Eric Reid—while further up the coast, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Jeremy Lane also sat down in solidarity as the anthem played ahead of a game against the Oakland Raiders.

      “I believe in what [Kaepernick] is doing,” Reid told ESPN. “I believe that there are issues in this country—many issues, too many to name. It’s not one particular issue. But there are people out there that feel there are injustices being made and happening in our country on a daily basis. I just wanted to show him I support him. I know there are other people in this country that feel the same way.”

    • #VeteransForKaepernick Stand Up for His Right to Sit Down

      My colleague Jon Schwarz startled many Americans by pointing out that our national anthem “literally celebrates the murder of African-Americans” in a rarely sung or talked about third verse about slaughtering escaped slaves who chose to fight for their freedom, and against the United States, in the War of 1812.

      The San Francisco 49ers quarterback, however, told reporters on Tuesday that he was aware of those lyrics before he began his protest by refusing to stand for the anthem before exhibition games.

      In the heated environment of the election campaign, it is also notable that Kaepernick explained that his attempt to draw attention to racial injustice — which was criticized by Donald Trump — is not something he expects to be resolved by the victory of either candidate.

    • Hillary Clinton’s ‘Exceptionalist’ Warpath

      Democrats and Hillary Clinton are delighting in attacking Donald Trump from the right, employing McCarthyistic tactics and embracing the imperialist notion of “American exceptionalism,” says Daniel Lazare.

    • The Scuffle over ‘American Exceptionalism’

      Hillary Clinton gave a speech this week in which American exceptionalism was a major theme. She obviously chose that theme partly because it would appeal to her specific audience (an American Legion convention) and partly because it would enable her to criticize Donald Trump, who has said he doesn’t like the term “American exceptionalism” because people in other countries don’t like to hear it and feel insulted by it.

      Trump is right about that, although in many other respects he shows he doesn’t have qualms about insulting people in other countries, including Mexico, the country he briefly visited on Wednesday and has described as a nation of rapists and drug dealers.

    • California Isn’t Sure How to Fix Sexual Assault Problem Without Adding to Mass Incarceration

      Gov. Jerry Brown has not said whether he will sign the legislation, but it contradicts one of his own ballot measures. Proposition 57 seeks to allow those convicted of a nonviolent felony to be eligible for parole after serving the primary sentence for their primary offense, excluding any enhancements or consecutive sentencing. The proposition is a turnaround for Brown, who signed a bill mandating prison time for serious crimes when he first became governor in 1977.

      “One of the key unintended consequences was the removal of incentives for inmates to improve themselves, to refrain from gang activity, using narcotics, otherwise misbehaving,” he said, discussing Proposition 57. “Nothing that would give them the reward of turning their life around.”

      Under California law, sexual assault of an unconscious or severely intoxicated person is considered a nonviolent felony, but Turner’s sentencing sparked allegations that the judge was influenced by race and class bias. The judge, Aaron Persky, said “a prison sentence would have a severe impact” on Turner. Persky has since given up proceeding over criminal cases.

    • Media Continues to Refer to Brock Turner as a “Stanford Swimmer” Rather Than a Rapist
    • Overturning Feticide Conviction, Judge Orders Purvi Patel Immediately Freed

      A superior court judge in Indiana on Wednesday ordered the immediate release of Purvi Patel, the Indiana woman who was convicted of “feticide” and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2015 for losing her pregnancy, after resentencing Patel to less time than she has already served.

      After Patel appealed the original sentence, her feticide conviction was vacated by an appeals court in July. She was still found guilty of a class D felony charge of child neglect.

    • Defending the indefensible: France, the burkini affair and the further mainstreaming of racism
    • iDEFEND QUESTIONS “STATE OF LAWLESS VIOLENCE”

      On September 3, 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte declared a “state of lawless violence” in the Philippines following an explosion in Davao Night Market in Davao City that claimed the lives of 14 people and left more than 60 others injured.

      In a statement, his declaration is different from Martial Law as there will be no curfews and no suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus. The state of lawless violence also applies to the whole country, not just in Davao City.

      In contrary, iDEFEND, a grassroots movement that defends the rights and upholds the dignity of all Filipinos, released a statement to question and seek clarity over the President’s declaration of state of lawless violence.

      [...]

      We strongly disapprove that the issues of terrorism, drugs and extrajudicial killings are being conflated when these are distinct issues requiring different approaches. Moreover, mobilizing the Armed Forces of the Philippines to become direct participants in the issue of drugs, will further escalate rights violations of various kinds. Instead of abating the Extrajudicial Killings, this will even increase its uptake. There have already been too many deaths – including those of very young children- since the President’s assumption into office.

      We know, being a grassroots movement, that nationwide conditions is far from the threshold of “lawless violence” as stipulated in section 18 of ARTICLE VII of the Philippine Constitution. For this reason we question the nationwide mobilization of the military. There is no widespread absence and breakdown of law, peace, conditions of disorder and chaos, despite a bombing event in one city. What warrants a nationwide red alert now when in previous years, a spate of bombings in Davao merited only a state of emergency in the city? What is clear, however, is that the state’s widespread and hard-lined approach on drugs, including the state-sanctioned and unaddressed killings, has compromised the safety of the public.

    • Nicola the Haverer

      Replacing Alex with Nicola set back the cause of Scottish Independence. It was a great success for the SNP as an institution, but it is now abundantly clear that the institutional health of the SNP and the cause of Independence are two quite separate things.

      I have posted at intervals this last two years that I have heard nobody from the SNP argue the case for Independence since Indyref1. I still have heard nobody from the SNP argue the positive case for Independence since Indyref1. To the extent that when the tendentious GERS report came out and was splashed all over mainstream media, nobody from the SNP explained why the finances of an independent Scotland would work. (To give just one example Scottish taxes contribute £2.2 billion to housing benefit of which only a quarter of Scotland’s contribution is spent in Scotland).

      Unionist propaganda is still streamed out of the mainstream media every day. If nobody counters with the case for Independence, support for Independence will never increase. The latest YouGov poll putting us back at 46% is probably accurate. The idea that you wait until support has – by magic – increased to a regular 60% before you start campaigning is self-evidently delusional.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Iran’s national internet network starts today

      The project will be inaugurated in the Communications and Information Technology Ministry.

      A national internet network is an organization under the umbrella of a Regional Internet Registry with the task of coordinating IP address allocations and other Internet resource management functions at a national level within a country or economic unit.

      As adopted by the Supreme Council of Cyberspace Iran’s national internet network will operate domestically and independently from all other networks in the world (internet). It is protected from all other networks globally with the ability to interact with them should the permission is granted.

    • Putin Is Building a Great Russian Firewall

      Denis Davydov, executive director of the Safe Internet League, a nongovernmental organization closely linked to the Kremlin, is happy with what the Duma did this summer. Davydov says a piece of legislation signed into law on July 7 by President Vladimir Putin will protect the nation from terrorists. The law requires internet service providers such as MTS, a cell phone operator, and search engine Yandex to store all Russian traffic, including all private chat rooms, e-mails, and social network posts, for as long as six months at their own expense as of July 1, 2018. The providers, which include global giants such as Facebook’s WhatsApp, must also surrender encryption keys to Russian security services. The backers of the measure argue that by giving the Kremlin total access to internet traffic, the guardians of public safety will never be taken unawares.

      The law is one of about a dozen enacted over the last four years to police Russia’s cyberspace and cordon it off from the global net. One piece of legislation allows the state to block sites without seeking a court’s approval. Hundreds have been blocked already. Thanks to such measures, Davydov says, “we can be sure that here in Moscow no one will take a truck and ram it into a crowd of people or take an ax and start hacking people on a suburban train.”

    • FCC Won’t Appeal Municipal Broadband Defeat to Supreme Court

      The Federal Communications Commission will not appeal a recent court decision that kneecapped the agency’s power to promote municipal broadband development nationwide, a FCC spokesperson told Motherboard on Monday.

      In 2014, the FCC asserted the power to preempt state laws that pose barriers to municipal broadband, but earlier this month, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down the agency’s authority to do so, in a stinging defeat for community broadband advocates.

      “The FCC will not seek further review of the Sixth Circuit’s decision on municipal broadband after determining that doing so would not be the best use of Commission resources,” agency spokesperson Mark Wigfield said.

    • Should You Reset Your CSS?

      In a blog post titled No CSS Reset, developer and book author Jonathan Snook said that he’s “okay if the various browsers show things slightly differently.” He likes his “lists to have bullets and strong elements to have bolded text.”

      Web standards and accessibility advocate, Tommy Olsson, professes that he’s not “a big fan of CSS resets” in an interview via email in late 2010. He said people that use CSS resets are “stuck in a print design mindset,” and are continuing to believe in the myth of “Pixel Perfection”. He finds CSS reset stylesheets inefficient, because you “provide a lot of rules that you know you’re going to override later.”

    • An Internet Giveaway to the U.N.

      When the Obama administration announced its plan to give up U.S. protection of the internet, it promised the United Nations would never take control. But because of the administration’s naiveté or arrogance, U.N. control is the likely result if the U.S. gives up internet stewardship as planned at midnight on Sept. 30.

    • Open Internet Advocates Claim Victory in Europe Net Neutrality Fight

      Open internet advocates celebrated on Tuesday after Europe’s top telecom authority issued stronger-than-expected guidelines protecting net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible to consumers.

      The new guidelines, which were announced by the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communication (BEREC), are designed to ensure that European consumers have unfettered access to the global internet, and the freedom to choose what kind of digital devices they use to communicate online.

      The guidelines, which provide a roadmap to help the various EU national regulators implement the recently-passed Telecoms Single Market Regulation, the continent’s new telecom law, represent a significant victory for net neutrality advocates in the multi-year battle between public interest groups and European telecom giants over how best to ensure that the internet remains an open platform for free speech and innovation.

      “Based on a preliminary reading of the text, this is a triumph for the European digital rights movement,” Thomas Lohninger, a leading net neutrality activist who helped spearhead the SaveTheInternet.eu campaign, said in a statement. “After a very long battle, and with the support of half a million people, the principles that make the internet an open platform for change, freedom and prosperity are upheld in the EU.”

    • BEREC launches Net Neutrality Guidelines

      The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) has today published its Guidelines to National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) on the implementation of the new net neutrality. BEREC’s mandate to produce the Guidelines stems from the Telecoms Single Market Regulation on open internet access.

      The Guidelines provide guidance for NRAs to take into account when implementing the rules and assessing specific cases. After meetings with European-level stakeholders in December 2015 and a workshop with high-level academic, legal and technical experts in February 2016, BEREC launched a six-week public consultation on the draft Guidelines, closing at 14:00 CET on 18 July. The number of 481,547 contributions received before the deadline was unprecedented for a BEREC consultation, and coming from diverse categories of respondents: civil society, public institutions and independent experts, ISPs, content and application providers and other industry stakeholders. The BEREC Office has processed the contributions received, and BEREC has conducted a thorough evaluation of the contributions, updating about a quarter of the paragraphs in the final Guidelines.

    • Europe’s net neutrality guidelines seen as a victory for the open web

      Europe’s telecommunications regulator has published final guidelines on how the EU will implement net neutrality rules that were adopted last year, in what digital rights groups are hailing as a victory for the free and open internet. The guidelines, published Tuesday, clarify vaguely worded provisions that experts say could have been exploited by telecoms to favor certain internet services over others.

      The net neutrality rules adopted by the European Parliament last year aimed to strengthen net neutrality by requiring internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all web traffic equally, without favoring some services over others. But the regulations contained several loopholes that raised concerns among net neutrality advocates, including a provision that would have allowed ISPs to create “fast lanes” for “specialized services,” and another that would have allowed for zero-rating, under which certain services and apps would be exempt from counting against monthly data limits. A “traffic management” provision would have allowed telecoms to prioritize internet traffic from some services over others.

    • Europe’s Net Neutrality Doesn’t Ban BitTorrent Throttling

      Today, the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communication (BEREC) published its implementation guidelines for Europe’s net neutrality rules. While public protests resulted in several positive changes from a net neutrality perspective, BitTorrent throttling is still allowed.

    • Network-Wide Ad-Blocking in the EU ?

      Net neutrality is a hot topic, apparently.

      When BEREC, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications, launched a six week public consultation on the issue this June, they sure as heck didn’t expect 481,547 responses. Somewhat miraculously, they managed to sift, analyze and classify through all of them in another 6 weeks. That’s 16,051 requests, and a couple of paragraphs, for the mathematically challenged amongst you, per day. Which makes for a first observation: European holidays aren’t what they’re presumed to be, anymore.

    • Court Sides With Time Warner Cable Over Cable Box Rentals

      While the FCC and cable companies battle over what kind of standard will replace the cable box rental model, some related news broke on Friday: The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmeda lower court’s ruling throwing out an antitrust case against Time Warner Cable (or TWC, now part of Charter) over its set top box rental procedures.

      The original complaint, filed in 2008 in federal court in Kansas, argued that TWC violated the Sherman Act by “requiring purchasers who bought a package of television channels to lease from Time Warner cable boxes necessary to transmit that programming.” The plaintiffs had to plausibly show that the sale of the cable service is conditioned on the box rental, that TWC “uses actual coercion to force buyers to” rent the boxes, that TWC “has sufficient economic power” in the cable market to coerce customers into renting the boxers, that “the tie‐in has anticompetitive effects in the tied market,” and that “a not insubstantial amount of interstate commerce is involved in the tied market. “

      In a two to one decision, the judges writing the majority opinion, Ralph Winter and Denny Chen, noted that, for example, “Notably lacking is any allegation that there has ever been separate sales of cable boxes and cable services in the United States, even in markets where cable providers are in competition with each other or with fiber optic cable services that employ different technology.” Even if the plaintiffs did not allege this, for-sale boxes have existed in the United States, even if you have to go back a long time.

  • DRM/Streaming

    • Researchers Map Locations of 4,669 Servers in Netflix’s Content Delivery Network

      When you open Netflix and hit “play,” your computer sends a request to the video-streaming service to locate the movie you’d like to watch. The company responds with the name and location of the specific server that your device must access in order for you to view the film.

    • YouTube disappearing from 50 Sony Bravia sets highlights why smart TVs suck

      If ever there was a cautionary tale about why it’s a bad idea to buy Smart TVs, this is it. Sony recently announced on its UK support site that 50 different 2012 Bravia TV models will lose their YouTube app on September 30, as first reported by 9 to 5 Google.

      The reason for this loss is due to hardware limitations of the models following a change to YouTube’s specifications. Google announced in August that YouTube would be moving all its traffic to HTTPS. The company warned that over time it would phase out insecure connections, which means some devices would lose access to YouTube.

      Samsung users of the affected Bravia TVs recently started complaining of freezing issues, black screens, and error messages when using YouTube. It appears YouTube’s HTTPS switch may be the cause of these issues—though Sony has not confirmed this.

      You can find a complete list of Bravia models affected by this change on Sony’s support site, which includes TV sets ranging in sizes from 20 to 89 inches.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Committee Recommends ‘High Priority’ Changes To WIPO Oversight Charter [Ed: a body in crisis]

      The World Intellectual Property Organization Program and Budget Committee (PBC) this week agreed to recommend changes to the UN agency’s Internal Oversight Charter as a high priority by next month, including to strengthen investigatory processes against senior officials, and access to confidential documents by member states. In a separate issue, after days of intensive talks behind closed doors, the committee could not agree on which countries will get new WIPO external offices.

    • Committee Agrees WIPO Strategic Plan: Possible Rethink For Norm-Setting [Ed: paywall]
    • US Industry Warns Of Restrictive Policies In ICTs, Including On IP Rights [Ed: The CoC wants more and more power for corporations, using ‘IP’ as a tool]

      The report further provides a series of recommendations to governments to balance their national security and economic interests and to allow for the free flow of ICT products, services and data. One recommendation calls for security measures to be consistent with the most-favoured nation and national treatment principles as set out in WTO agreements. Any deviations should be proportional and clearly fall under a specific national security exemption, it said.

    • Trademarks

      • My My Mylan: The Trademark Silver Lining for Mylan’s EPIPEN

        Mylan Pharmaceuticals received a huge amount of press in the United States recently. Why so much (negative) attention? Mylan is under heavy criticism for raising the price of its popular and very useful–even life saving–EPIPEN. Not only are U.S. Senators upset, but the media and public are outraged by Mylan’s pricing. Is all of this publicity good or bad for Mylan? From a trademark perspective, it appears it is both.

    • Copyrights

      • Publishers Fail to Block Russia’s Top Search Engine Over Pirate Links

        After Russia’s leading search engine Yandex failed to remove links to pirate books from its search results, publisher Eksmo filed a complaint with the Moscow Court. Technically, Yandex could’ve found itself blocked nationwide for copyright non-compliance but in the end, cooler heads prevailed.

      • Top Torrent Sites See Traffic Surge After ‘Shutdowns’

        The past month has been a turbulent one for the torrent community. With the closure of KickassTorrents and Torrentz.eu, two of the largest players were gone without prior notice. Today we take a look at the aftermath, showing that the big sites have expanded their userbases but that some smaller torrent sites are actually worse off now.

      • Latest Leak Confirms European Copyright Plans Offer Little for Users

        In our previous piece about a leaked European impact assessment on copyright, we described how the foreshadowed changes to European copyright law would place onerous new responsibilities on Internet platforms to scan your uploaded content on behalf of large entertainment companies. We also described how the changes would give news publishers a new, copyright-like veto power over the publications of snippets of text from news stories, even if these are merely by way of linking to the publisher’s website.

      • It could not be worse: Draft proposal for the copyright directive leaked

        We have just received the draft proposal of the European Commission for a new copyright directive. It shall complement – i.e. in general not amend – other directives inter alia the InfoSoc directive from 2001. As it had to be expected from the Impact Assessment that was leaked last week, the draft reads like an answer to the wish list of the publishing industry. Here comes a first assessment.

      • The next fight between Megaupload and the US will be livestreamed
      • Kim Dotcom Can Livestream Legal Fight Against the U.S.: Judge
      • Kim Dotcom’s Extradition Hearing Will Be Live Streamed on YouTube
      • Kim Dotcom’s extradition hearing live stream makes legal history but no drama

        The live streaming of Kim Dotcom’s extradition hearing in a New Zealand high court kicked off on Wednesday with warped pictures, delayed audio and dwindling viewership as the day wore on.

        Megaupload founder Dotcom is fighting an extradition order to the United States, where he is wanted on online piracy charges.

        On Tuesday, his lawyers were granted permission to live stream the court proceedings on YouTube, on the condition that it would be deleted at the conclusion of the case (estimated to be in six to eight weeks’ time) and that the video would air after a 20-minute delay in case any evidence was suppressed. Comments on the live stream have also been disabled.

      • Kim Dotcom wins right to live stream extradition court hearing

        Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has been granted his wish to live stream his bid to avoid extradition to the United States, where he is wanted on online piracy charges.

        Attempts by the US to block the live streaming request were rejected by Judge Murray Gilbert in the Auckland high court on Tuesday.

      • Kim Dotcom’s Extradition Appeal Gets Underway

        Last year a District Court judge in New Zealand found that there was an “overwhelming” case for Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, to be extradited to the United States to face trial for their alleged roles in the Mega Conspiracy. Today the trio were in the High Court to mount their appeal.

      • Kim Dotcom wants his extradition appeal live-streamed on YouTube

        Kim Dotcom wants the world to be able to watch his extradition appeal on YouTube and it appears as if he’ll get his wish.

        The Internet entrepreneur’s appeal hearing began Monday and, while the judge overseeing his case was frustrated by Dotcom’s late request for the event to be livestreamed, he granted Dotcom’s request.

      • Music Group Protests ISPs Move for a Declaratory Ruling on Piracy Liability

        Music rights group BMG says that Internet providers RCN and Windstream should not be allowed to obtain a declaratory judgment on their potential liability for pirating subscribers. According to BMG, the providers are improperly trying immunize themselves, hiding behind the DMCA’s safe harbor.
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      • New BBC iPlayer Rules Easily Defeated, Especially via VPN

        A change in the law means that from today, all UK viewers of BBC iPlayer need to pay a £145.50 license fee, regardless of which services they use. The UK’s TV licensing body says it will crack down on those using iPlayer without a license but in reality that will be an extremely difficult task. For those using a VPN, being detected will be all but impossible.

      • Attention Swedish Pirate Bay Users, Copyright Trolls Have Arrived

        After years of being left alone by entertainment industry companies, regular file-sharers in Sweden are now in the cross-hairs of copyright trolls. Using data gathered by anti-piracy outfit Excipio, lawyers are about to send users of The Pirate Bay and similar sites demands for hard cash – or else.

      • Industry Proposals Contrary To Spirit Of Marrakesh Treaty, Libraries Say

        An international group of librarians has warned that rights holder organisations in some countries are promoting provisions that restrict and impede the access envisaged by the Marrakesh Treaty providing exceptions to copyrighted works for visually impaired persons.

        The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Person with Print Disabilities, adopted in 2013 introduced limitations and exceptions to copyright rules to promote access to knowledge to benefit of blind and visually impaired persons. The treaty is entering into force this year.

        Now, however, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), says provisions are being pushed at the national level that undermine the treaty. The library federation in a statement expressed concern that the principle objectives of the Marrakesh Treaty are being impeded by measures promoted by rights holder organisations.

      • Here’s text of draft Communication on promoting a fair and efficient European copyright-based economy

        After the leaked draft version of the Commission Staff Working Document – Impact Assessment on the modernisation of EU copyright rules and yesterday’s Kat-exclusive draft version of the forthcoming Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market, today – thanks to another Katfriend – is the turn of the draft Communication from the Commission on Promoting a fair and efficient European copyright-based economy in the Digital Single Market.

      • US Gov’t Takes On Predatory Publishers

        The Federal Trade Commission has filed a legal complaint against the OMICS Group for allegedly engaging in deceptive practices.

      • Professor Eric Goldman Stops Writing At Forbes, In Part Because Of Its Stance On Ad Blocking

        We’ve discussed Forbes’ anti-ad blocker policies, even wondering if we should stop linking to Forbes articles. I know that, for a while, Forbes was misidentifying me as using an ad blocker and not letting me access stories on the site. I can say that, more than once, I wasn’t able to read some of Goldman’s posts, that we might have written about, because of those blocks.

        Most of our focus was on how this impacted readers and also folks like us who might send Forbes traffic — but it’s worth also thinking about how it impacts writers as well, and taking away their audience, or otherwise upsetting them. We’ve seen in the past some writers leave publications that had put up paywalls, and now the same impact may be happening for those that block ad blockers as well.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/09/04/git-2-10-0/feed/ 0 Links 23/8/2016: GNOME 3.22 Beta, Android 7.0 Nougat http://techrights.org/2016/08/23/android-7-0-nougat/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/23/android-7-0-nougat/#comments Tue, 23 Aug 2016 18:57:56 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=95054

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux rules the world. Where to next?

    From Android phones to supercomputers to clouds to car, it’s all Linux all the time. Linux is the poster child for the open-source revolution.

    The latest Linux kernel report, Linux kernel development – How fast it is going, who is doing it, what they are doing, and who is sponsoring it, details just how quickly Linux changes. In the last 15 months, more than 3 million lines of code have been added to the Linux kernel. For those of you coding at home, that’s 7.8 changes per hour.

  • Almost open: BIOS and firmware update tips for Linux users

    I suppose I’m lucky in that for more than 10 years my primary work environment has been Linux-based, yet all to often I’ve been forced to dig out a DOS or Windows image because I need to patch some BIOS device firmware. These days I don’t own anything than has a valid Windows license, and even my 2008 white MacBook has spent most of its life running either Ubuntu or Fedora. Luckily most hardware manufacturers have started to provide bootable images for patching system firmware, and for enterprise-grade hardware they even provide Linux-ready tools. In this article, I’ll walk through my recent firmware update on Linux, and I’ll share a few recommendations based on that experience.

    In the consumer/prosumer landscape there has been a shift toward UEFI-based systems for desktops and laptops, and along the way many manufacturers appear to have removed the option for the BIOS to update from a USB Stick. Historically we’d only see firmware updates for enterprise-class spinning rust (hard drives), but many SSD manufacturers are also providing regular firmware updates for consumer-class devices. Whilst we often should stand by the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I’m a strong believer when standing up a new environment to make sure all my firmware is current. So begins my journey…

  • THE BIG LIE About Operating Systems

    The desktop also is not locked in. Despite slow progress at times, GNU/Linux is gradually gnawing away at Microsoft’s lock on the desktop. It happened in my schools, in my home, in governments in Europe and a few places around the world. It’s obvious the world can make its own software and does have a complete stack with GNU/Linux.

  • Desktop

    • Desktop Linux Absent from Zemlin’s LinuxCon Pep Rally

      “As all of you may know, Thursday, August 25 is the 25th anniversary of Linux,” he said during the opening portion of the address. “It’s the day when Linus Torvalds, 25 years ago, sent out his note introducing this funny little operating system that wouldn’t amount to much of anything.”

      “Linux at 25 is a big thing,” he added. “Most things in life just don’t last as long and are as enduring as Linux. And Linux has gone so far beyond what anyone who has participated in this community could have ever expected. Linux today really is…the most successful software project in history.”

      After this opening, he pointed to the enormity of the Linux project by citing numbers, like its 53,000 source files and 21 million lines of code, and the fact that each day 10,800 lines of code are added to Linux, 5,300 lines of code removed and 1,800 lines of code modified.

      “This pace is only accelerating,” he said. “Linux now changes seven [or] eight times an hour. There is no single software project by any single person or organization that rivals the breadth, pace, depth and adoption of Linux. What an incredible run.”

      As with any good pep rally, Zemlin gave the fans plenty of reason to be happy to support the home team by pointing to Linux’s wins. Trouble is, all of those wins had to do with making “billions of dollars” — a phrase he used often — for the enterprise.

      “Linux has become the world’s most widely adopted software,” he said and rattled off a list of uses that included high performance computing, weather forecasting, climate modeling, economic modeling, mobile devices and embedded systems. “It runs the global economy. Quite literally, it runs the vast majority of stock exchanges. It runs the vast majority of the Internet and powers things like Google, Facebook, Amazon and much, much more.”

    • Why Google plans to stop supporting your Chromebook after five years

      It’s worth noting that end-of-life doesn’t have to mean the end of useful hardware. If you have the know-how, you can install Linux on your Chromebook to extend its lifespan. Otherwise, users whose Chromebooks are still in fine working order just have to hope that end-of-life notification never comes.

    • EFF slams Microsoft’s ‘blatant disregard’ for user privacy with Windows 10 [Ed: It’s textbook definition of malware]

      THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION (EFF) has lashed out at Microsoft over the company’s “blatant disregard” for user privacy with the pushy, data-slurping Windows 10 operating system.

      Following the launch of a petition in June, EFF has heard from thousands of pissed off people who are asked it to take action against Microsoft, and the privacy campaigners are doing just that. EFF is calling on Microsoft to listen to its users, of which more than 6,000 have signed the online petition, and incorporate their complaints into its operating system.

      “Otherwise, Microsoft may find that it has inadvertently discovered just how far it can push its users before they abandon a once-trusted company for a better, more privacy-protective solution,” EFF’s Amul Kalia said in a blog post.

      First on EFF’s radar is Microsoft’s backhanded tactics to get people to upgrade to Windows 10, which we here at the INQUIRER know about all too well.

  • Server

    • How IBM’s LinuxONE Has Evolved For the New Open Source Cloud

      LinuxONE is IBM’s Linux Server. The LinuxONE server runs the major distributions of Linux; SUSE, Red Hat and Canonical’s Ubuntu. The server also runs open source databases like Mongo DB , PostgreSQL and MariaDB allowing for both horizontal growth and vertical scale, as demonstrated by running a 2TB Mongo database without sharding. Several of the features built into this system support the constant innovation inherent in the open source movement while maintaining the performance and reliability required by Enterprise clients; for example, Logical Partitions (LPARs) allow clients to host a development environment on the same system as production with zero risk.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Linux Mint Rounds Out 18 ‘Sarah’ Releases With Beta KDE Edition

        Earlier this month, the Linux Mint developer team released the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 18 ‘Sarah’, which followed the main release at the end of June. But now it’s time for some Plasma action, with a beta release of the upcoming Linux Mint 18 KDE edition.

        It’s worth noting that all three Linux Mint 18 editions are LTS releases (long-term support), with a promise to be supported until 2021. For that reason, these releases don’t include bleeding-edge software, but instead software that can be assured to be stable right-out-of-the-box.

      • KDevelop 5.0 Appears Ready For Release

        We haven’t yet seen any official release announcement, but since yesterday a source package and AppImage binary have been out in the wild for KDE’s KDevelop 5.0 integrated development environment…

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Maps is fast again!

        Once your distro of choice picks up one of these stable releases you should be back to at least the old Mapquest speed of Maps. And if your distro upgrades to latest libchamplain when it arrives you will see even greater speeds.

      • GTK Scene Kit Isn’t Happening In Time For GNOME 3.22

        With GNOME 3.19 there were plans for a GTK scenegraph and this GTK Scene Kit (GSK) was then planned for 3.20 and then most recently hoped for 3.22. But it’s not happening.

        One of the big user benefits to the GTK Scene Kit will be offloading more work to the GPU and while it looked like GSK may finally be a reality for GNOME 3.22, this morning we found out it’s not going to be merged in time.

      • GSoC: final evaluation

        This blog-post contains the final evaluation of my Google summer of Code 2016 project for the GNOME organization. More precisely, I’ve been working in the Games application under the mentorship of Adrien Plazas implementing multi-source/multi-disc games and offer support to the PlayStation platform.

      • GUADEC

        I arrived at GUADEC a few days early to participate in the Board and AdBoard meetings.

      • GSoC Summary

        The goal to be achieved was to be able to play both single player and multiplayer emulated games using a gamepad in GNOME Games

      • GNOME 3.22 “Karlsruhe” Desktop Environment Gets Its First Public Beta Release

        GNOME Project’s Frederic Peters informs us a few minutes ago about the availability of the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 “Karlsruhe” desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.

      • GNOME 3.22 Beta Released

        The first beta of GNOME 3.22 beta is now available for testing ahead of the planned official desktop release around this time next month.

        Some of the recent package changes for the GNOME 3.22 Beta include sharing support for GNOME Photos, various Mutter and GNOME Shell improvements (including Wayland improvements!), and GTK improvements.

      • GUADEC Experience

        In this blog post, I will be sharing my GUADEC experience which recently held from 11-Aug-2015 to 17-Aug-2016 in Karlsruhe, Germany. I actually got to see the faces behind IRC nicks, met most of developers and people from GNOME community and also most importantly, GUADEC helped me to meet my Google Summer of Code mentor Debarshi Ray in person which was just great.

      • GNOME Usability Test Results (Part 1)

        This is the first part of analysis for the usability test I recently conducted, with the purpose to uncover usability flaws of two GNOME applications: Photos and Calendar.
        For this part I am focusing on visualizing the results, demographics and talk more about the methodology I used for testing. We will take a closer look on how testers performed on every task given, using a heat map. Hopefully this will create a clear picture of the testing process and help to “get to know” the participants and understand them better!

  • Distributions

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Linux live DVD “Choice Edition

        Gentoo One of the wonderful things about Linux is the diversity of the distributions available. Some distributions are very beginner friendly with installers that offer only a few basic options. Others are more complex, requiring knowledge of Linux and skills with the command line to install. Gentoo falls into the more complex category. There is no installer per se, the user just needs to follow instructions to perform several steps leading to a fully installed and configured system. This process is certainly harder than using Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer, but it is not that hard. The instructions are clear and do require previous experience with Linux, or the tenacity to keep going (or start over) when things go wrong when Gentoo is used in a “dive in head first” learning experience. Below, I take a look at the latest Gentoo Linux live DVD, the “Choice Edition,” and briefly explore how Gentoo gets installed on a system by using a step by step set of instructions instead of an installer that takes care of most of the steps automatically.

      • Why did Gentoo Linux fade into obscurity?

        Gentoo Linux was fairly well known at one point, with many tech-savvy Linux users opting to run it on their computers. But Gentoo Linux slowly lost popularity over time and is now a pale shadow of its former self in terms of usage and mind-share among Linux users (though there are still some die-hard Gentoo users left on Reddit).

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Slackware Family

      • Latest Slackware Version Doesn’t Cut Newbies any Slack

        Slackware is a throwback to the early days of the Linux OS, and it may not have much relevance to anyone but diehard Slackware fans. Still, experienced Linux users looking for a change of pace might enjoy setting up a Slackware system.

        The documentation and user guides are fairly detailed, but they are heavy reads that will frustrate the typical new user. Those without a strong technical background will see a big disconnect in going from the live session “Slackware demo” to a functioning Slackware installation.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Most companies worried about coping with increasing data volumes, says Red Hat

        Storage has become a complicated animal within the IT stack, and according to a recent Vanson Bourne survey commissioned by Red Hat, there’s growing evidence that ignoring the critical role storage plays across physical, virtual, container and both public and private cloud environments is a recipe for disaster.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • DNF 1.1.10 and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE 0.1.21-3 Released

          Another stability release of DNF and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE has been made. This release should eliminate the most critical bugs, especially the Unicode tracebacks and COPR plugin should work in Korora again. More information about the release can be found in DNF and plugins release notes.

        • Trying Out Fedora 25 With Wayland, Early Benchmarks Included

          With the news from Friday that Fedora 25 will run Wayland by default I loaded up the current Fedora 25 development packages on a test system this weekend and I used that as my primary system for all of my business/production work this weekend. It went well and included are some early gaming benchmarks of Fedora 25 Workstation GNOME on Wayland and X.Org.

        • Fedora 25 Linux OS to Arrive on November 15, Ship with Wayland by Default

          The Fedora Project is currently working very hard on the next major version of the popular GNU/Linux computer operating system, Fedora 25, bringing you all the latest and modern technologies.

          Wayland is a modern technology, the next generation display server designed as a drop-in replacement for the old X.Org Server or X11 as many of you out there might want to call the display server almost all GNU/Linux distributions are currently using by default. But there are many security-released issues with X11 that for some reason can’t be fixed, so it’s time for the open-source ecosystem to adopt Wayland.

        • New role as Fedora Magazine editor in chief

          Today, I am pleased to announce my new role as the Fedora Magazine editor-in-chief. After deciding to shift focus to other areas of the Fedora Project, I am receiving the torch from Ryan Lerch. Ryan has helped lead the Magazine, edit pieces from other contributors, contribute his own pieces, and decide strategic direction for the Magazine.

          He leaves big shoes to fill, but I hope to offer my own leadership, creativity, and direction in coming years as well. I’d like to thank both Ryan, Paul Frields, and Remy DeCausemaker for their mentorship and guidance towards becoming involved with Fedora and the Magazine. I’m excited to have the opportunity to help guide the Fedora Magazine in how it fits with the rest of Fedora.

        • FOSS Wave: Delhi, India

          After the introductory session on FOSS, we went ahead with our agenda and introduced the Fedora Project and the community behind it: what the Fedora Project is, what its mission is, and how the participants can get started with Fedora. The participants were guided upon how they can create their identity on the Fedora Project by signing up on FAS. They could then use that identity to get access to various Fedora applications and resources. The session on Fedora moved on with the introduction on how the contributors can get to the mailing list and introduce themselves to the community. There, they can get help about starting their contributions. The main focus during the session on Fedora was to introduce the participants to the Fedora Quality Assurance (QA) team and release validation testing.

    • Debian Family

      • Reproducible Builds: week 69 in Stretch cycle

        Daniel Stender blogged about python packaging and explained some caveats regarding reproducible builds.

      • Proposing speakers for DebConf17

        As you may already know, next DebConf will be held at Collège de Maisonneuve in Montreal from August 6 to August 12, 2017. We are already thinking about the conference schedule, and the content team is open to suggestions for invited speakers.

      • Google Summer of Code 2016 : Final Report

        This project aims to improve diffoscope tool and fix Debian packages which are unreproducible in Reproducible builds testing framework.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Now in Feature Freeze, First Beta to Land August 25

            Ubuntu and Debian developer Iain Lane informed the Ubuntu community that the upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system is in Feature Freeze as of August 18, 2016.

          • Artist Sylvia Ritter Painted All 25 Ubuntu Linux Mascots and They’re Astonishing

            Artist Sylvia Ritter happily informs Softpedia about the availability of 25 wallpapers for mobile phones and tablet devices illustrating her vision of the mascots used for all the Ubuntu Linux operating system releases.

          • Canonical and QTS Team on Private, Managed OpenStack Cloud Solution

            For several years running, OpenStack Foundation surveys have revealed that Ubuntu is the most common platform for OpenStack deployments to be built on. Organizations report that they choose OpenStack and Ubuntu to save money and avoid vendor lock-in. These themes have been emphasized by Canonical at OpenStack Summit.

            Now, responding to what they describe as “increasing demand for flexible, open source and cost-predictable cloud solutions, QTS Realty Trust, Inc. and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, have announced a private, fully managed OpenStack cloud solution. It will be available from any of QTS’ secure data centers in mid-September.

            Built on Ubuntu OpenStack and using Canonical’s application modeling service Juju as well as Canonical’s Bare Metal as a Service (MaaS), QTS’ OpenStack cloud will be fully managed. Essentially, organizations can treat it as a turnkey cloud solution.

          • Rotate Screen on Ubuntu Easily With This Indicator Applet

            Sam, our backend web hamster, makes occasional use of a portrait monitor. He says it makes reading long terminal sessions easier.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Peppermint OS explained

              In the childhood many of us must have eaten peppermint tablets. Well, just the name gives us some nostalgic moments. So today on the 12th segment of “Introduction with Linux Distro” we are having Peppermint OS as our guest. Peppermint OS is a lightweight option for those with old machines or those who loves fast and light OS.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Software for Business: 12 Leading Apps

    These are some of the best ERP, CRM, small business server, project management and business intelligence applications available under an open source license.

  • Digital Asset to Open Source Smart Contract Language

    Digital Asset Holdings has announced it intends to open-source DAML, the smart contracting language it acquired from startup Elevence earlier this year.

    Though no date has been set for the transition, the Blythe Masters-led blockchain startup credited its bid to “advance industry adoption” of the tech as the impetus for the move.

  • Reasons behind Enterprises’ Appeal towards Open Source Analytics Frameworks

    Big Data might be a relatively new term but not an entirely new concept. It has been around for millennia. Even in the Paleolithic age, the cavemen of Africa etched markings into bones or sticks to monitor their food supplies. Then came the abacus, the library of Alexandria, the Antikythera Mechanism (the world’s first computational device), and the list goes on. As time passed by, the art of data analysis or deduction evolved giving rise to new sciences and technologies– statistics, data storage, business intelligence, and data centers.

    When the internet storm took over the human world in the latter part of the 20th century, analog storage systems made way for digital storage and cloud services. In another ten years or so, the total storage information processed in the world grew from 1.5 billion gigabytes to 9.57 zettabytes (9.57 trillion gigabytes to be specific). In the meantime, Wired gave a name to this vast ocean of information– Big Data, (quite undervalued if you ask me, how about Cosmic Data!). At the same time, something else also passed under the radar. It was Hadoop, an open source framework for Big Data analysis, developed by the Apache Software Foundation, the open source advocates. Soon, Hadoop was extensively adopted by businesses for two reasons; firstly, it was cost-efficient, secondly, it was fast.

    Since then, open source has been the buzzword for Big Data analytics. But, what makes open source analytics platform attractive for enterprises even though there is no guarantee about security or the quality of the software?

  • Events

    • Updates from LinuxCon and ContainerCon, Toronto, August 2016

      The first 25 years of Linux has transformed the world, not just computing, and the next 25 years will continue to see more growth in the Open Source movement, The Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said during the opening keynote of LinuxCon/ContainerCon in Toronto on Monday, August 22, 2016.

      “Linux is the most successful software project in history”, Zemlin said, noting that the humble operating sytem created by Linus Torvalds 25 years ago this week is behind much of today’s software and devices.

    • 2016 SFD Registration is on!

      The Digital Freedom Foundation is very happy to announce that registration of its thirteenth edition of Software Freedom Day has just opened. While the wiki has been back online for about a week we were still lagging on the registration. Fear no more, it is now fixed and you can all register your events!

    • Advanced Linux System Administration and Networking is designed for IT professionals

      This Course includes some of the course materials, with access to LFS211 Linux operating system and networking and administration for 1 year, also registration includes a printed course manual.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Johnson Banks reveals first designs for “open-source” Mozilla rebrand

        Johnson Banks has unveiled seven potential brand identities for Mozilla, as part of its ongoing “open-source” rebrand.

        The search for the not-for-profit software company’s new identity was first announced in June, and it has been taking feedback from the Mozilla community and members of the public since then.

        Seven initial themes were created by Johnson Banks, all exploring different facets of Mozilla’s advocacy for shared and open-source internet access and software.

      • Mozilla’s new logo ideas

        The folks over at Mozilla (makers of Firefox) are redesigning their logo—because apparently just having a wordmark isn’t good enough. That said, maybe it’s time to retire the dinosaur head.

        In the spirit of openness, Mozilla has posted a series of logo concepts to their blog and invited the public to review and share their opinions. I am doing so here.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Walmart’s OneOps open source cloud management platform could become part of OpenStack

      The retailing giant is pondering a move where its OneOps open source platform could be lumped under OpenStack.

    • Apache CloudStack Still Going, Arrives in New Version

      In case you don’t know its history, CloudStack had more momentum a few years ago as an open cloud platform than OpenStack has now. Citrix, which owned it, passed the open source CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, and CloudStack continues to advance and is widely used. It has even inspired a popular forked version.

      Now, the Apache CloudStack project has announced the availability of Apache CloudStack v4.9, the latest version of the cloud platform used for creating private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Apache remains a steady steward for CloudStack, even as OpenStack has overtaken it in popularity.

  • Databases

    • Does MariaDB’s latest move show how hard it is to make money with open source?

      It turns out that selling open source software is really, really hard. So hard, in fact, that only one company has proven the ability to do so profitably at scale: Red Hat. Everyone else is either swimming in red ink or a rounding error.

    • MariaDB MaxScale: at scale yes, but at a proprietary license cost

      MariaDB is a database that was created as a community-developed ‘fork’ of the MySQL relational database management system and, as such, has always been free to use under the GNU General Public License.

    • Proprietary licences both frustrating and pushing move to PostgreSQL

      Proprietary licences that are very complex, impossible to comply with, and abused to squeeze customers are frustrating public agencies in their effort to make IT infrastructures more open and interoperable. On the other hand, these licensing problems are motivating the same agencies to move to open source software. The Swedish National Heritage Board, the Dutch City of Ede, and the Dutch DUO agency all mention complex licences from their traditional proprietary suppliers as an important reason to deploy PostgreSQL as an open alternative for their database systems. At the same time, suppliers are abusing their inscrutable licensing models to hinder public agencies in their migration and consolidation efforts.

    • Time To Move To PostgreSQL

      Sigh… I understand that businesses need to make money but proper businesses don’t jerk their customers around in the process. That drives them away.

      Large businesses that use MySQL/MariaDB depend on the MaxScale component and changing the licence for that jerks them around. In the process, MariaDB is preventing a larger community from sharing in the development, a major plus of FLOSS. So, this is essentially kicking a large segment of the market for SQL databases to a non-Free solution. It really is time to go to PostgreSQL, a truly Free/Libre Open Source database from top to bottom.

  • Education

    • Out of the Trash and into the Class: Building a STEM Program by Re-Building Computers.

      The FLOSS Desktop for Kids initiative refurbishes surplus and discarded school computers, allowing students to learn (hands-on) about computers and technology by diagnosing, breaking-down and repairing hardware components. Students acquire, install and configure open source software including Linux operating systems, LibreOffice, GIMP, Pidgin, etc.—not just run “apps” on a tablet. The program, is designed to teach engineering and technology by doing, failing, fixing, frustration, and finally achieving—that’s how Science, Technology, Engineering and Math really happen, and that aligns perfectly with STEM’s goals: “knowledge and skills to solve tough problems, gather and evaluate evidence, and make sense of information.”

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 6.2 Compiler Released

      GCC 6.2 is now available as the first stable update to this year’s GCC 6/6.1 compiler release.

      GCC 6.1 shipped earlier this year as their first stable version of GCC 6 (per their unique versioning scheme…) while GCC 6.2 is out this morning as the first point release.

  • Public Services/Government

    • New US Government Source Code Policy Could Provide Model For Europe

      The United States government this month published its new federal source code policy to allow government-wide access to custom source code developed by or for any agency of the federal government. The policy, which aims to reduce duplication, avoid technology “lock-in,” and tap the best minds in or outside government, has caught the attention of free software developers in Europe who are hoping to use it as a basis for change there too.

      “We plan to use that in the next months as an example for European countries,” Matthias Kirschner, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), said in a recent email discussion on the new US policy.

    • Open Source at work, Open Society working in Taiwan

      There was striking evidence that Open Source can lead to Open Society at the first day of OS//OS at Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre on Monday August 22.

      One of the keynote speakers, Audrey Tang from Taiwan, outlined how a quiet (and unheralded, at least in New Zealand) revolution has completely changed how democracy is practiced in the 23 million people nation sitting off China’s coast.

      It started with a parliamentary sit-in in 2014 – aided and abetted by Taiwan’s digital wizards as informal representatives debated how to use internet tools to ensure that all voices are heard before any new legislation is put in place.

      Eventually parliamentarians agreed that what was proposed by the ‘Sunflower Movement’ was valid.

      Now, the feelings and opinions of many different people (and animals and the environment) are considered. The role of parliament is to enact this debate outcome through legislation.

    • Up to EUR 200,000 for Austria open source projects

      The Austrian government will award up to EUR 200,000 for open source projects on eGovernent, eHealth, eLearning, eInclusion, or commercial products and services. “Open source has beneficial macroeconomic effects, improving possibilities for use and development”, explained Muna Duzdar, State Secretary for Digitisation, in a statement.

    • Ministry of ICT and NITA Uganda Urge on Adoption of Open Source Software

      Increased awareness, integration and adoption of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Uganda, both by government and the private sector is key to improved service delivery by government, reduced cost of public service deliver as well as improve competitiveness of Uganda’s ICT and ICT Enabled Services (ITES), Hon. Frank Tumwebaze, Uganda’s ICT and National Guidance Minister has said.

    • UK Government Digital Service looking for a “Chief Penguin”

      According to the job description on LinkedIn, the new role has been created as part of a change of course to “a more concerted approach to open source, building collaboration and reuse internally and making higher impact contributions to the wider open source community”. The new Lead will “work with teams in GDS and across government to help build their open source community, both through driving specific, focused projects and by providing tools and an environment that allow the work to grow and thrive”. At the same time, the job requires technical hands-on capabilities as well: “day to day responsibilities will alternate between programming, liaising with colleagues from other professions (eg. communications, legal and delivery management), community building and leading projects”.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Dutch Accountability Hack set for week before Little Prince’s Day

        On Friday 9 September, an Accountability Hack will be organised at the Dutch Court of Audit in The Hague. Developers and open data adepts are asked to participate and work on innovative (mobile) apps that allow people to check on government spending and returns. Increased transparency helps strengthen democracy, fight corruption and waste, and improve efficiency and accountability.

    • Open Access/Content

      • 7 resources for open education materials

        Shrinking school budgets and growing interest in open content has created an increased demand for open educational resources. According to the FCC, “The U.S. spends more than $7 billion per year on K-12 textbooks, but too many students are still using books that are 7-10 years old, with outdated material.” There is an alternative: openly licensed courseware. But where do you find this content and how can you share your own teaching and learning materials?

      • Open education is more than open content

        The famous playwright George Bernard Shaw once said: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

        I love that quote, and in May I shared it with a room full of educators, administrators, and open source advocates at New York University during the Open Summit, an open conversation about education. I believe it reveals something critical about the future of education and the positive role openness can play in the future, if we embrace it.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • Yahoo Ad Partner Media.net Sells to China Group for $900 Million

    A group of Chinese investors said it’s acquiring ad-tech startup Media.net for about $900 million in cash, with plans to eventually sell the company to an obscure telecommunications firm whose shares have been suspended from trading since last year.

    Media.net, which is based in Dubai and New York, is touting this as the third-largest ad-tech acquisition in history. However, the complex deal more closely resembles a reverse merger, where a private company takes over a public one and bypasses the formalities of an initial public offering.

    Technology entrepreneur Divyank Turakhia started Media.net in 2010 and bootstrapped the business. The company provides the technology powering contextual ads offered by Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine. The system is similar to one offered by Google, choosing which ads to show based on the content of the web page they appear on.

  • Hardware

    • The Story of How the Apple I Computer Could Fetch $1 Million at Auction

      In the summer of 1976, Daniel Kottke was looking for a job while off from college. He found one from his old buddy and the man he spent time with in India just years prior: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

      During that summer, Kottke had a somewhat tedious job. He was to sit in a garage and put together Apple I computers, the devices his old college friend and his co-founder Steve Wozniak had designed and built. Now, nearly 40 years later, one of those Apple I computer boards that Kottke helped assemble is up for auction—and it could be worth as much as $1 million, according to a listing on auction site CharityBuzz.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Pfizer to pay $14 billion for Medivation, whose drug Xtandi was discovered by UCLA [Ed: the public pays for research! The public subsidises development of cures. Some private firms then patent it and make a killing. Prices soar. At whose expense? The public!]

      Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. is paying $14 billion to buy Medivation Inc., a San Francisco biotech company that sells a high-priced prostate cancer medication discovered by UCLA.

      A year’s worth of the drug, Xtandi, sells for about $129,000, and the medicine has generated about $2.2 billion in net sales worldwide over the last year, the companies said Monday in announcing the deal.

      Medivation had become a prime target of larger pharmaceutical companies, largely thanks to Xtandi, which is also being tested for breast cancer treatment.

    • WHO Africa Region Addresses Strategies On Counterfeits, Malaria, Hepatitis

      The 47 members of the World Health Organization African region this week adopted or considered a series of measures aimed at fighting substandard and counterfeit medical products, eliminating malaria and viral hepatitis, and setting a global strategy and plan of action on ageing and health that includes a focus on non-communicable diseases. They also addressed a plan for disease outbreaks and health emergencies.

    • NHS could struggle post-Brexit without EU citizen staff, Department of Health officials admit

      A 7-day week NHS may no longer be possible following Brexit because so many healthcare professionals come from EU countries, Department for Health officials have warned.

      The NHS employs around 55,000 staff who are EU citizens, amounting to a tenth of the overall workforce. It is currently unknown whether freedom of movement and employment rights will change for EU citizens following the referendum vote, prompting uncertainty over future staffing levels.

    • Drug and Device Makers Pay Thousands of Docs with Disciplinary Records

      Physicians whose state boards have sanctioned them for harming patients, unnecessarily prescribing addictive drugs, bilking federal insurance programs and even sexual misconduct nonetheless continue to receive payments for consulting, giving talks about products, and more.

    • Why a Single-Payer Healthcare System is Inevitable

      The best argument for a single-payer health plan is the recent decision by giant health insurer Aetna to bail out next year from 11 of the 15 states where it sells Obamacare plans.Aetna’s decision follows similar moves by UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, and by Humana, another one of the giants.

      All claim they’re not making enough money because too many people with serious health problems are using the Obamacare exchanges, and not enough healthy people are signing up.

      The problem isn’t Obamacare per se. It lies in the structure of private markets for health insurance – which creates powerful incentives to avoid sick people and attract healthy ones. Obamacare is just making this structural problem more obvious.

    • What the UN must do to wipe out cholera in Haiti

      It is not enough that the United Nations is finally beginning to acknowledge its involvement in the lethal cholera epidemic in Haiti. Now it must urgently do everything in its power to eliminate cholera in Haiti before thousands more die.

      Cholera was brought to Haiti in October 2010 by UN peacekeepers from Nepal. Some of the Nepalese peacekeepers had been infected with the disease in their home country. And due to close quarters and poor sanitation practices, the disease quickly spread throughout the Nepalese camp near the interior town of Mirebalais.

      Early on, some contaminated fecal waste from the Nepalese camp leaked into a nearby stream, infecting a few Haitians. Then the accumulated camp waste was dumped into the local river by a poorly supervised UN vendor. This local river flowed on to the mighty Artibonite River, which runs through the breadbasket of Haiti before emptying into the Caribbean Sea.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • A Congressman Campaigns to “Stop the Madness” of U.S. Support for Saudi Bombing in Yemen

      For months, a California congressman has been trying to get Obama administration officials to reconsider U.S. backing for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. And for months, he has been given the runaround.

      Ted Lieu, a Democrat representing Los Angeles County, served in the Air Force and is a colonel in the Air Force Reserves. The brutal bombing of civilian areas with U.S.-supplied planes and weapons has led him to act when most of his colleagues have stayed silent.

      “I taught the law of war when I was on active duty,” he told The Intercept. “You can’t kill children, newlyweds, doctors and patients — those are exempt targets under the law of war, and the coalition has been repeatedly striking civilians,” he said. “So it is very disturbing to me. It is even worse that the U.S. is aiding this coalition.”

      But he and a very few other lawmakers who have tried to take bipartisan action to stop U.S. support for the campaign are a lonely bunch. “Many in Congress have been hesitant to criticize the Saudis’ operational conduct in Yemen,” Lieu said. He didn’t say more about that.

    • Congress Must Take Action to Block Weapon Sales to Saudi Arabia

      Last week, the Pentagon announced the approval of the sale of an additional $1.15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia. The callousness of this announcement – just days after Saudi Arabia rebooted its devastating bombing campaign in Yemen – is breathtaking. The Saudi-led coalition has used American-made fighter jets, bombs and other munitions in a relentless onslaught against Yemen that has left thousands of innocent civilians dead and created a humanitarian crisis that the United Nations characterizes as a “catastrophe.” In just the last few days, the Saudi-led coalition has killed at least 35 people – most of them women and children – in three airstrikes against a school, a residential neighborhood and a hospital in northern Yemen.

      Congress has thirty days to block the sale of these weapons. It is a moral imperative that they do so.
      The internal crisis in Yemen spiraled out of control when the Saudis intervened in March 2015. The BBC has reported that nearly all of the more than 3,000 civilian deaths reported in the conflict have been caused by airstrikes from the Saudi-led coalition. Saudi air strikes have also decimated Yemen’s infrastructure, leaving more than 21 million people desperately in need of humanitarian assistance.

    • US Guilty of ‘Basically Unconditional Support’ for Saudi War Crimes in Yemen

      The United States and other governments that continue to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia are guilty of “the worst kind of hypocrisy,” an international watchdog charged on Monday, as the arms trade continues despite mounting evidence of civilian causalities, war crimes, and other atrocities being committed by the kingdom in Yemen.

      “It is extremely concerning that many transfers are still continuing, in particular the governments of the United States, the U.K., and France have authorized and are continuing to export very large quantities of weapons, including explosive weapons, bombs which are being used daily against civilians in Yemen,” said Anna Macdonald, director of Control Arms Coalition.

      The statement was made as governments convened in Geneva, Switzerland at the World Trade Organization’s second conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which stipulates that signatories block any arms deal if there is evidence that the weapons will be used against civilians.

      “At the heart of the ATT is the obligation on countries that have joined it to make an assessment of how the weapons they want to transfer will be used,” states the Control Arms website. “They must determine if the arms would commit or facilitate genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and serious human rights violations.”

      Both France and the U.K. have ratified the agreement. While the U.S. has signed on, Congress has failed to approve it.

    • Syrian boy’s image shamelessly exploited for West’s war agenda

      How many times have we seen this before? Western media selectively focusing on, or distorting, human suffering in order to fulfill a base political agenda – war – for powerful interests.

      It is no coincidence Western media fevered with images of a five-year-old boy, pulled from rubble in Aleppo after an alleged air strike by Syrian government or Russian forces – and the very next day US warplanes were scrambled over northern Syria reportedly to ward off Syrian Su-24 fighter bombers.

    • Nearly 15 Years and $70 Billion Later, US Troops Still Endlessly Fighting Taliban

      More than a hundred U.S. troops were sent to Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan on Monday to continue fighting the Taliban, in the first deployment of forces to the area since the drawdown in 2014—offering another signal that the U.S. military presence there is expanding, not decreasing, as President Barack Obama has promised.

    • Over a hundred US troops sent to Lashkar Gah to battle Taliban
    • Soldier dies in live firing training exercise in Northumberland

      A soldier has died after being shot at a military training area in Northumberland, police have said.

      The male soldier, serving with the Royal Regiment of Scotland, was shot on the military ranges in Otterburn during a live firing exercise at about 23:15 BST on Monday.

      Northumbria Police said the soldier sustained a “serious head wound” and was pronounced dead at the scene.

      He has not been identified by the Ministry of Defence.

    • Near-War: US Planes almost tangle with Syrian MiGs, which bombed area of US troop Embeds

      The fighting that has broken out between Kurdish YPG fighters and the Syrian Arab Army in Hasaka, northeast Syria, is hardly a new thing. There were clashes in April.

      Syria says that the Kurds brought it on themselves by trying to expand into government-held territory.

      As the US has deepened its involvement in Syria, this round of fighting could drag the US into war.

      The People’s Protection Units or YPG is a Syrian Kurdish militia that now holds large swathes of northern Syria. These leftist Kurds are in conflict with Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) and with the fundamentalist rightwing Arab guerrillas such as the al-Qaeda-linked Army of Syrian Conquest and the Saudi-backed Army of Islam.

    • US-Allied Kurds advance in Hasaka City, NE Syria

      Clashes continued on Sunday between the Kurdish YPG [People’s Protection Units] and the Syrian Arab Army in Hasaka, according to the Egyptian press . Surveying Syrian social media, Misr24 said that the Kurds had apparently advanced into Hasaka and driven the Syrian army from some districts, including al-Nashwa and Ghuwayran.

    • Destroying history is now being charged as a war crime

      An Islamist fighter has pleaded guilty in the Hague for destroying parts of the fabled West African trading city of Timbuktu, in the International Criminal Court’s first case based on the destruction of cultural artifacts.

      Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi has admitted today (Aug 22) to razing all but two of the city’s 16 mausoleums as well as a mosque dating back to 1400 during a raid by Islamist radicals in 2012. Ahmad told the tribunal in the Netherlands that he regretted “the damage [his] actions have caused.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • EXCLUSIVE Jill Stein op-ed: In praise of Wikileaks

      Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a hero. Like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and other whistleblowers facing government persecution, Assange has sacrificed his personal comfort and safety to bring us the truth.

      George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Thanks to Wikileaks, we know that powerful institutions have been abusing their power and lying to the public. For example, redacted State Department communications published by Wikileaks revealed that Secretary Clinton identified Saudi Arabia as a leading funding source for terrorist groups around the time she approved a whopping $29 billion arms deal with the Saudi dictatorship.

      Wikileaks courageously published the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing an American helicopter gunning down Iraqi civilians, Viewed over 15 million times on Youtube alone, it revealed just one of the many shocking war crimes whitewashed as “collateral damage” by the US government.

      Wikileaks’ stunning revelations of how top Democratic National Committee officials conspired to sabotage Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, in collusion with the media, shattered the illusion of a fair electoral process and confirmed what millions Americans already knew in their gut: we live under a rigged political system.

      What Wikileaks actually does — to political parties, the military, and other powerful entities — is pull back the curtain of censorship, spin, and deception to show the public what’s really going on. Unlike pundits in the mainstream media, Wikileaks doesn’t tell us what to think. They invite us to read the emails, watch the footage, and decide for ourselves.

      The political and economic elite, used to controlling information, see this unprecedented transparency as a tremendous threat. They have mercilessly persecuted a series of heroic whistleblowers. Chelsea Manning, convicted of leaking the Collateral Murder video among other revealing materials, was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Jill Stein Speaks With Victims of Louisiana’s Catastrophic Flood—and Those Trying to Help Them

      In a concluding clip, Stein thanked everyone who had shown up to help the people of Denham Springs recover. Local activist Le’Kedra Robertson said local children won’t be able to return to school until December and invited viewers to come to Denham Springs and contribute physical labor to help residents get back on their feet.

      “If you walk through these streets of Denham Springs, where I grew up, there aren’t any FEMA or other resources that are coming except for people who have compassionate hearts who are fixing lunches and putting boots on the ground.”

    • Forest restoration can turn the clock back

      The ecological and carbon cost of rainforest destruction goes on accumulating for years after nations halt the conversion of canopy into farmland, scientists have found.

      This implies that to meet ambitious targets, global strategies to combat climate change – including forest restoration – should have started years ago.

      Tropical forests soak up vast quantities of carbon dioxide released by industrial combustion of fossil fuels, limiting global warming. Burning, clear-felling and ploughing of forest lands release centuries of stored carbon back into the atmosphere to accelerate global warming and climate change. So forest conservation and carbon emissions reduction are both vital parts of any strategies to contain global temperature rises.

    • Katrina Pain Index 2016 by the Numbers: Race and Class Gap Widening

      Hurricane Katrina hit eleven years ago. Population of the City of New Orleans is down by over 95,000 people from 484,674 in 2000 to 389,617 in 2015. Almost all this loss of people is in the African American community. Child poverty is up, double the national average. The gap between rich and poor in New Orleans is massive, the largest in the country. The economic gap between well off whites and low income African Americans is widening. Despite receiving $76 billion in assistance after Katrina, it is clear that poor and working people in New Orleans, especially African Americans, got very little of that help. Here are the numbers.

    • New Study Shows How Clinging to Nuclear Power Means Climate Failure

      While it’s been touted by some energy experts as a so-called “bridge” to help slash carbon emissions, a new study suggests that a commitment to nuclear power may in fact be a path towards climate failure.

      For their study, researchers at the University of Sussex and the Vienna School of International Studies grouped European countries by levels of nuclear energy usage and plans, and compared their progress with part of the European Union’s (EU) 2020 Strategy.

      That 10-year strategy (pdf), proposed in 2010, calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by least 20 percent compared to 1990 levels and increasing the share of renewable energy in final energy consumption to 20 percent.

      The researchers found that “progress in both carbon emissions reduction and in adoption of renewables appears to be inversely related to the strength of continuing nuclear commitments.”

      For the study, the authors looked at three groupings. First is those with no nuclear energy. Group 1 includes Denmark, Ireland, and Portugal. Group 2, which counts Germany and Sweden among its members, includes those with some continuing nuclear commitments, but also with plans to decommission existing nuclear plants. The third group, meanwhile, includes countries like Hungary and the UK which have plans to maintain current nuclear units or even expand nuclear capacity.

    • Report Shows Whopping $8.8 Trillion Climate Tab Being Left for Next Generation

      “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children,” is an oft-quoted proverb, frequently used to explain the importance of environmental preservation. Unsaid, however, is how much it will impact the next generation if the Earth is bequeathed in a lesser state.

      Environmental campaigners NextGen Climate and public policy group Demos published a new study that attempts to quantify the true cost of not addressing climate change to the millennial generation and their children.

      The Price Tag of Being Young: Climate Change and Millennials’ Economic Future (pdf) compares some of the high costs millennials will face in the “new inequality economy”—such as student debt, child care costs, stagnant wages, as well as financial and job insecurity—against the fiscal impacts of unmitigated global warming.

      “The fact is,” the report states, “unchecked climate change will impose heavy costs on millennials and subsequent generations, both directly in the form of reduced incomes and wealth, and indirectly through likely higher tax bills as extreme weather, rising sea levels, drought, heat-related health problems, and many other climate change-related problems take their toll on our society.”

    • Water Is Life, Oil Is Death: The People vs. the Bakken Pipeline in Iowa and the Dakotas

      The American version of democracy focuses on elections and candidates. As the venerable left intellectual Noam Chomsky observed in June, “Citizenship means every four years you put a mark somewhere and you go home and let other guys run the world. It’s a very destructive ideology … a way of making people passive, submissive objects.” Chomsky added that we “ought to teach kids that elections take place, but that’s not [all of] politics.” There’s also the more urgent and serious politics of popular social movements and direct action beneath and beyond the election cycle.

      We might refine Chomsky’s maxim to read “and let rich guys run the world into the ground” or “let rich guys ruin the world.” With anthropogenic (really “capitalogenic”) global warming, the nation and world’s corporate and financial oligarchs are bringing the planet to the brink of an epic ecosystem collapse.

      We might also put some meat on the bones of Chomsky’s pedagogical advice by “teach[ing] kids” about the people’s politics being practiced in the upper Midwest and northern Great Plains by citizen activists fighting to help avert ecological calamity by blocking construction of what North Dakota Sioux leader David Archambault II calls “a black snake” of “greed.” The snake in question is the planet-baking Dakota Access/Bakken pipeline, what Iowa activists call “The Next Keystone XL.”

    • Fire crews battling late summer blazes

      A fire swept through a pine forest in Moura, just over the Algarve border in the Alentejo on Saturday morning.

      Pine, grassland and scrub were consumed before 82 firefighters brought the blaze under control and extinguished it.

      Two aircraft were used to dump water on the fire with 26 vehicles supporting ground operations.

      Last week there was a fire in the Algarve at Luz da Tavira in which a pasture area and an orchard were damaged before Tavira and Olhão fire teams prevented the fire from spreading.

      Portugal’s weather service has kept 13 municipalities in the districts of Castelo Branco, Faro, Guarda, Leiria and Santarém on high fire risk.

  • Finance

    • Brexit Diary: the clash of political will and reality, continued

      The story of Brexit is about the clash of political will (the referendum result and express government policy) and the realities of trade, devolution, and government capability. All because the government wants something to happen, it cannot just be made to happen.

    • National borders are ‘the worst invention ever’, says EC chief Jean-Claude Juncker

      National borders are “the worst invention ever”, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has claimed.

      The comments by Brussels’ top official were dismissed by Theresa May, whose spokeswoman said “it is not something that the Prime Minister would agree with”.

    • Brexit latest: UK Government asserts right to set tax rates after Swedish Prime Minister warns against EU ‘tax war’

      Downing Street has asserted its right to set tax rates after an EU leader warned Britain against “aggressiveness” in slashing business levies during Brexit talks.

      A Number 10 spokeswoman said it is up to each member state how they set their taxes, following the comments made by Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Loefven.

      The exchange highlights a potential conflict point in EU negotiations, with Britain seeking to boost growth through lower corporate levies while also trying not to aggravate EU states concerned about a ‘tax war’.

      Chancellor Philip Hammond has already said he is ready to bolster the British economy with corporate tax cuts and other measures if need be.

    • With Both Presidential Candidates Claiming To Be Against The TPP, President Obama Kicks Off Campaign To Ratify It

      Even as the candidate that President Obama is supporting, Hillary Clinton, has been increasingly insisting that she really (no, really) is against the TPP (despite being for it prior to this campaign) — and even as Donald Trump has been vehemently against it, despite trade agreements usually getting strong support from the GOP — President Obama is making a big push to get the TPP ratified by Congress. It needs a majority vote in both houses of Congress to be ratified in the US. Last week, we noted the weird situation where everyone’s position on the agreement appeared to be wishy-washy, though mostly for all the wrong reasons.

    • Obama Is Pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership So Clinton Won’t Have To (Video)

      President Obama is rushing to pass the sovereignty-crushing Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in the lame duck session of Congress in order to save Hillary Clinton from revealing that she supports it, which she’ll have to do if she wins the White House, says Cenk Uygur of “The Young Turks.”

    • Virgin Trains East Coast strikes to be held in August

      Workers on Virgin Trains East Coast are to stage three 24-hour strikes this month, including one on Bank Holiday Monday, the RMT union has said.

      Members will walk out from 03:00 BST on 19, 26 and 29 August and ban overtime for 48 hours from 27 August, in a row over cuts, work conditions and safety.

      The RMT said the dispute involved about 1,800 members, saying Virgin Trains was trying to “bulldoze” through changes.

    • Time to End “Welfare as We Know It”

      August 22, 2016, was the twentieth anniversary of the day President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced the income safety net for poor single mothers and their children with temporary, disciplinary, punitive relief. While this so-called reform of welfare did reduce the welfare rolls, it did not stanch the poverty of single mothers or improve the well-being of their children. The failure of 1990s welfare reform to enhance economic security and opportunity is reason to dedicate this anniversary to rethinking and revising our national approach to poverty.

      It is time to end this version of “welfare as we know it” by creating a system of income support that makes the dignity and equality of low income mothers a preeminent policy value, while respecting and supporting the role of caregiving in family well-being.

      Future policy should restore income support for low-income caregivers by renovating welfare policy in a way that restores the right of each caregiving parent to figure out her own balance between family work and wage work. We need not catalog here the numerous and familiar ways the key features of welfare 1990s reform — work requirements, time limits, family sanctions, fertility control pressures, and marriage promotion — suppress the economic empowerment and wellbeing of low-income single-mother families.

    • Clinton’s Transition Team: A Corporate Presidency Foretold

      Like other Bernie Sanders delegates in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, I kept hearing about the crucial need to close ranks behind Hillary Clinton. “Unity” was the watchword. But Clinton has reaffirmed her unity with corporate America.

      Rhetoric aside, Clinton is showing her solidarity with the nemesis of the Sanders campaign—Wall Street. The trend continued last week with the announcement that Clinton has tapped former senator and Interior secretary Ken Salazar to chair her transition team.

      After many months of asserting that her support for the “gold standard” Trans-Pacific Partnership was a thing of the past—and after declaring that she wants restrictions on fracking so stringent that it could scarcely continue—Clinton has now selected a vehement advocate for the TPP and for fracking, to coordinate the process of staffing the top of her administration.

      But wait, there’s more—much more than Salazar’s record—to tell us where the planning for the Hillary Clinton presidency is headed.

    • The Scourge of Neoliberalism: Why the Democratic Party Is Failing the Poor

      When Democrats began their rightward lurch in the late 1960′s, they were not content to merely broaden their coalition in order to quell the rise of the ultra-reactionary right; they have been concerned, also, with preventing left-wing insurgencies that could spook their patrons and push the party left.

      After Ronald Reagan’s decisive victories — first in 1980 against an incumbent president whose administration had, in many ways, fueled the neoliberal turn, and again in 1984 — the efforts of Democrats eager to transform the party, both superficially and ideologically, intensified.

    • Escalating the War on Low-Income Families

      Illinois Governor Rauner recently cut “Meals on Wheels” for seniors and at-risk youth services. Chicago residents were hit with a nearly 13% property tax increase. Some Chicago public schools could face 2017 cutbacks of an incredible 20 percent.

      But six of Illinois’ largest corporations together paid ALMOST ZERO state income taxes this year. Full payment of their taxes would have exceeded the $1.1 billion Chicago Public School deficit.

      It’s much the same around the nation, as 25 of the largest U.S. corporations, with over $150 billion in U.S. profits last year, paid less than 20% in federal taxes, and barely 1% in the state taxes that are vitally important for K-12 education.

    • ‘I wasn’t crazy.’ A homeless woman’s long war to prove the feds owe her $100,000.

      If you’ve spent any time in downtown Washington, you’ve probably seen 80-year-old Wanda Witter.

      Shock white hair, a determined, unsmiling set to her mouth, jeans. She may have asked you for some change and probably didn’t smile if you gave her some. This month you may have also been taken aback by the black eye and stitches across her face.

      For years, Witter bedded down for the night at 13th and G streets NW, on the concrete in her blue sleeping bag, pulled up tight to keep the rats and cockroaches out. Her tower of three suitcases was stacked on her handcart and bike-locked to the patio chairs next to her.

      She may have even told you that inside those bags is all the paperwork to prove the government owes her more than $100,000. And she was right.

    • John Oliver on How Charter Schools Around the Country Have Been Allowed to Run Wild (Video)

      “The problem with letting the free market decide when it comes to kids,” the “Last Week Tonight” host said in his commentary on publicly funded, privately run schools, “is that kids change faster than the market. And by the time it’s obvious a school is failing, futures may have been ruined.”

    • Students across Finland protest cuts to vocational education

      Students across the country took to the streets Monday to protest government cuts to education programmes. Organisations representing institutions, students and teachers are calling on the government to postpone or soften plans to slash up to 190 million euros from funding for the schools next year.

    • Wall Street’s Latest Public Sector Rip-Off: Five Myths About Pay for Success

      Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan, philanthropies such as the Rockefeller Foundation, politicians such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Massachusetts former governor and now Bain Capital Managing Director Deval Patrick, and elite universities such as Harvard have been aggressively promoting Pay for Success (also known as Social Impact Bonds) as a solution to intractable financial and political problems facing public education and other public services. In these schemes investment banks pay for public services to be contracted out to private providers and stand to earn much more money than the cost of the service. For example, Goldman Sachs put up $16.6 million to fund an early childhood education program in Chicago yet it is getting more than $30 million (Sanchez, 2016) from the city. While Pay for Success is only at its early stages in the United States, the Rockefeller Foundation and Merrill Lynch estimate that by 2020, market size for impact investing will reach between $400 billion to $1 trillion (Quinton, 2015). The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2016, the latest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, directs federal dollars to incentivize these for profit educational endeavors significantly legitimizing and institutionalizing them.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Green Party’s Jill Stein visits Baton Rouge amid presidential campaign

      Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein arrived in Baton Rouge on Sunday (Aug. 21) to visit the flood-struck region and assist with relief efforts for residents, according to a news release. She planned to stay through Monday (Aug. 22) and said via Twitter that she would live-stream her activities in Denham Springs that morning from 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. on Facebook.

      On Sunday, Stein said she was scheduled to meet with Louisiana Green Party officials to receive an update on the flooding’s impacts and discuss how her campaign might help mobilize more aid resources. For Monday, she pledged to help Green Party volunteers gut houses and stave off water damage in affected areas.

      The news release also said Stein would discuss her experiences later in the week at a press conference in Washington DC, highlighting the need for emergency action on climate change.

    • Louisiana floods a ‘crisis of climate change’ say Greens

      The Green Party presidential candidate has described the flooding in the US state of Louisiana as “a crisis of climate change”.

      Dr Jill Stein spoke as she surveyed the wreckage from the disaster, which has killed at least 13 people and displaced thousands more.

      A week on, more than 2,800 people remain in shelters unable to return to their wrecked homes.

      Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump also visited this week.

      President Barack Obama has been criticised for not breaking off his holiday last week but he will come on Tuesday.

      Dr Stein stood in front of a home gutted by the rains in Denham Springs to deliver her message on global warming.

      “We see the Louisiana flood as further evidence of the global crisis posed by climate change,” the Green Party released in a statement.

    • New York Times Edited Bernie Sanders Article For Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

      Emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee reveal that Nicholas Confessore suppressed information about Hillary Clinton’s victory fund in an article he wrote about Bernie Sanders. The New York Times political correspondent made the omissions at the request of Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, Marc E. Elias, and DNC officials.

      The emails, published by Wikileaks, also appear to show that Confessore made other edits to the article at the request of former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz. After Confessore’s revisions, DNC National Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach suggested that the DNC Chairwoman grant an off-the-record interview to a group of New York Times writers.

      In an email to Paustenbach, Miranda writes, “We were able to keep him from including more on the JVF, it has a mention in there, but between us and a conversation he had with Marc Elias he finally backed off from focusing too much on that.”

    • Consultant Raised Cash for Hillary Clinton, Used Access to Seek Meeting for Coal Giant, Emails Reveal

      In 2009, when St. Louis-based coal company Peabody Energy was aiming for rapid expansion into Mongolia, China, and other international markets, it sought an audience with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss its global vision.

      In April of that year, an official with Peabody reached out to the State Department to request a formal meeting. The request was denied, so Peabody leaned on its lobbying team to intervene on the issue. In June, two months after Peabody’s formal request, Joyce Aboussie, a political consultant working for Peabody, wrote to Clinton aide Huma Abedin to ask that Clinton meet with Peabody executives as a personal favor.

      “Huma, I need your help now to intervene please. We need this meeting with Secretary Clinton, who has been there now for nearly six months,” Aboussie wrote. “It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s,” she added.

    • Hillary Clinton’s ‘Pivot’ or ‘Spin’?

      To stave off Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton became a born-again progressive, critical of trade deals and tough on fracking, but her preparations for a presidential transition presage a pro-corporate and hawkish administration, says Norman Solomon.

    • ‘It’s a Kind of Original Sin of the Modern Democratic Party’

      Looking back, a New York Times “Retro Report” this May treated as novel the recognition that though welfare rolls were reduced in the wake of the Act, poverty was not, that for those who could find jobs, wages were insufficient to lift them from poverty, and that “all too often they had a hard time staying employed when the economy soured.” The piece also says that those using assistance “found themselves…characterized as loafers and cheats”—with no hint of just who was broadcasting such characterizations.

      Well, none of this is news to the many who criticized the Act, at the time and ever since. The question is what will we do about it. Those who remember the welfare reform debate remember that it centered on unmarried women with children, overwhelmingly depicted as women of color. Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter said that to this group of poor mothers could be traced “every threat to the fabric of this country.” Diane Sawyer said, “To many people, these girls are public enemy No. 1.” Low-income women were and are the target of so-called reform, so if we’re really reconsidering it, shouldn’t we start with them?

    • Nicholas Schou, Alexander Zaitchik, and David Talbot

      Mickey speaks with two authors in the new “Hot Books” series. First, Nicholas Schou discusses “Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood.” Then Alexander Zaitchik describes his study of Trump voters, “Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride Through Donald Trump’s America.” Also on hand for the hour is author David Talbot, the founder and editorial director of Hot Books; he explains its mission, and describes some of the other titles in the Hot Books series.

    • Trump’s White Supremacist Factor

      America has been a nation of white male supremacists from Day One. They “bought” Manhattan Island from the Indians for $24. They safeguarded slavery in the Constitution. They bought the Louisiana Purchase from the French but stole the land from the Indians, and then took the Southwest from the Mexicans. They settled what was left of the Indians on reservations in the most uninhabitable land on the continent where they live in poverty inconceivable to the rest of us.

      White males have nonetheless done some great and noble things. When they declared our independence from England, they could have said, “Get out of our hair; we can make more money without you.” Instead, they wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

    • Donald Trump’s undocumented deportation pledge called into question

      A central promise of Donald Trump’s campaign – to deport 11 million undocumented people – came into question on Sunday, with a series of conflicting reports and equivocations on the Republican nominee’s long-held, hardline stance on immigration.

    • Hillary and the Glass Ceilings Illusion

      Meryl Streep must be a very intelligent woman to be such a good actress. So it was embarrassing to see her dressed in an American flag playing cheer leader for Hillary Clinton at the Democratic Convention. One must suppose that she is too busy studying for all her varied movie roles to have learned much about the sinister nature of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy. She proclaimed that President Hillary Clinton would be “making history” simply by being a woman. That means symbolic history. The fact that President Hillary Clinton is more likely to make real history by starting another war even more disastrous than those she has already helped get us into seems not to have occurred to Meryl Streep.

      Nor does it occur to millions of other American women who share the same illusion.

      Those women are thinking too much in terms of symbols and images. They are ignoring the major issue facing the United States: whether to make peace or war. They don’t worry that the imminent conflict with the other major nuclear power, Russia, might affect themselves, their families, the world and the future. They feel that they will somehow personally benefit from the election of a woman to the U.S. Presidency.

    • Trump vs. Clinton: It’s All About the Debates

      Conventional wisdom says Donald Trump is going to lose, and lose big.

      You see it everywhere in corporate media. Republican Party insiders are bereft and in denial, simultaneously refusing to accept the reality that their party is facing the possibility of catastrophic defeats in races all over the country this fall; indeed, some pundits say Trump marks the beginning of the end of the GOP. The New York Times is running a 24-7 odds placement that puts Hillary Clinton’s chances of victory at 86% against his 14%.

    • Hillary Clinton: The Anti-Woman ‘Feminist’

      Although Hillary Clinton selected Tim Kaine as her Vice President in this campaign, her true running mate might very well be her vagina. Indeed, while Clinton’s support continues to be among the lowest for any Democratic nominee in recent memory, she has managed to position her gender as a focal point of her campaign, a move intended to capture the women’s vote among liberals and conservatives alike. And, considering her opponent is Donald Trump, a man seen by millions of women as a misogynistic loudmouth, she has done this quite successfully.

      But beyond the political window-dressing and empty rhetoric, Clinton’s record on women and families should not only lose her the support of American women, it should qualify her as one of the most anti-woman candidates in history. For while modest progress has been made toward some semblance of gender equality, it is the actions of Clinton herself that have done more than any other single individual to harm women and families. Slick public relations aside, Hillary Clinton may very well be the most anti-woman candidate in generations.

    • What Does It Mean When War Hawks Say, “Never Trump”?

      Keep in mind that this is just a taste of the CVs of this list of 50 Republican foreign policy and national security luminaries who took out after The Donald.

      With any luck, between his indirect call to assassinate his opponent and the latest news about his campaign director Paul Manafort’s shady Ukraine connections, we have now reached Peak Trump. With supporters bolting on all sides, it’s just possible that we won’t have Trump to kick around forever.

      But we shouldn’t forget that the party that made Trump possible is also the home of the crooks, liars, and war criminals now eager to disown him. The enemies of our enemy are not our — or the world’s — friends.

      Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (Hot Books). Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

      Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

    • A Slow River Flows Through the Campaigns

      That’s pretty extreme for elite academics—to say that science is pointing us back toward religion. The Ehrlichs believe that we are stuck in the essential inaction of right-thinking, spinning speeches, wonkyness, clicktavism, lobbying and marketing, i. e. modern politics—as the Earth heats up. In the Church of Stop Shopping we agree, we need to break out of these repetitions. And cut out the patriarch and invite in the Earth. Amen?

      The Ehrlichs bold move reminds me of Dr. Cornel West’s stop-everything sermons at the last months’ Democrat platform hearings. He froze the Clinton professionals with dread. Dr. West spoke openly of the soul, prophecy, the agony of Gaza, and what it means to hesitate with your morals, as if to warn the Clinton professionals that they would be depressed by their hack work.

      The video footage of that panel is fascinating. I felt like the Earth was to about crush the room in the triangle between the preacher and Deborah “water is sacred to my people” Parker and Bill “we need bicycles in the suburbs” McKibben. Debbie Wasserman retired to a back room behind her staring eyes as Gaia’s wind and waves and wildfires seemed to sing to her from multiple faces. And then she voted for fracking, Monsanto, and TPP.

    • Why These Latinas are Voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in the Presidential Election

      Despite what mainstream media might have you believing, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton aren’t the country’s only presidential options. This is good news, considering Americans nominated the two most-disliked candidates for commander in chief in U.S. history. Among those frustrated are Latinxs, who definitely can’t support Trump’s blatant racism and xenophobia but are also side-eyeing Clinton for her perpetuation of systemic violence, particularly impacting communities of color at home and abroad.

      That’s why these Latinas are planning to vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in the November election. Ahead, they share why they are supporting the physician-activist-politician.

    • Hillary Clinton Should Follow Jill Stein’s Lead In Louisiana

      On Sunday, Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein traveled to Baton Rouge to help out with relief and rebuilding efforts following more than a week of intense flooding in Louisiana. She joined local Green Party members to visit displaced residents in and around Baton Rouge, and posted videos online explaining how her supporters could help with disaster relief efforts. President Obama is also expected to arrive in Louisiana on Tuesday after Donald Trump’s recent high-profile visit to Baton Rouge, but Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced that the Democratic nominee would only travel to Louisiana “at a time when the presence of a political campaign will not disrupt the response.” However, Clinton should follow Stein’s lead in helping with relief efforts on the ground.

      That’s not to say that Clinton hasn’t addressed the situation in Louisiana. She reportedly called Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards late last week, and a post on her official Facebook page urged her supporters to donate to the Red Cross and the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. “My heart breaks for Louisiana, and right now, the relief effort can’t afford any distractions,” the post read. “The very best way this team can help is to make sure Louisianans have the resources they need.”

    • I’m a Bernie backer and I refuse to support Hillary

      I mean, why pick a pro-life, pro-offshore-drilling, pro-TPP white male as your vice president if you want to unify with Sanders supporters?

      It’s clear why: Because Clinton cannot represent the progressive vote and, guess what? Neither can the Democratic Party. Not anymore.

      Now, maybe you’re thinking that it’s Clinton and her crony politics that are the problem, not the entire Democratic Party. I’ll give you that. It’s not the entire party. It’s just too much of the party to make staying and fighting worth it.

      It’s like a good friend of mine says: It’s an abusive relationship. You know it is so unhealthy to stay with this abusive person and that you deserve better. You know in reality that this person are not going to change. Yet, you stay.

      Why? Fear is at the core.

      You stay, that is, until that magical day when enough is enough. Well guess what, my friends? That day has come. Hope can be a beautiful thing. Hope can also be extremely destructive and blinding.

      For me, that moment came when the DNC and Wasserman Schultz colluded against Sanders, stacking the deck against him and manipulating the odds in favor of Clinton during the Democratic primary. That was the moment when enough really became enough. Clinton and the entire Democratic establishment are antithetical to the foundation of the United States and to true progressive values.

      Now, don’t get me wrong. By all means, support your down-ticket Berniecrats and progressives. However, I really think it’s time that we revolutionaries shift away from the two-party system, because honestly, both parties are just destructive tidal waves of corruption — tidal waves that, this time, climate change is not responsible for.

    • As She Rakes in the Cash, Clinton Fundraisers Still Shrouded in Secrecy

      Hillary Clinton spent the weekend fundraising in affluent New England communities, speaking to more than 2,200 donors at private brunches and gatherings in Nantucket and Cape Cod—but what she told them “remains a mystery,” the Associated Press reported Monday.

      The fundraising effort—which follows her campaign’s most lucrative month so far with a $63 million gain in July—underscores Clinton’s continued evasion of transparency over her ties to wealthy elites. In fact, of the roughly 300 fundraising events she has held since announcing her White House run in April 2015, only five have allowed any press coverage, and Clinton has attempted to ban the use of social media among guests, according to the AP.

    • The Populist Uprising Isn’t Over; It’s Only Just Begun

      But Frank is waving the white flag when the struggle has only just begun. One needn’t have illusions or hopes about a Hillary Clinton presidency to think that the old order can’t be sustained. Both elites and dissenters tend, I believe, to underestimate the scope and the devastation of the establishment failure both at home and abroad.

      America is a rich country, awash in entertainment. People have little time and few outlets for real political education. Labor and the left are weak. The Democratic Party is a fundraising and recruitment machine, not a source of political education. The truly desperate tend to be isolated, locked up and kept out of sight.

      But what we’ve seen in this election — and in the elections of 2008 and 2012 – is that Americans are catching onto the game. They are working harder and losing ground. They suffered through the Great Recession, and have witnessed the wars without end and without victory. They’ve seen their kids graduate from college and come back home burdened by debt. Poor people of color are in many cities more segregated and in worse condition than they were in the Jim Crow South. They are casting about for a change.

    • Missing: FBI files linking Hillary Clinton to the ‘suicide’ of White House counsel Vince Foster have vanished from the National Archives

      Documents describing Hillary Clinton’s role in the death of White House counsel Vince Foster have vanished, Daily Mail Online has learned after an extensive investigation

    • Trickle Down Election Economics: How Big Money Can Affect Small Races

      At a press event in Kingston, New York, a Hudson Valley community about 90 miles north of Manhattan, the local Democratic congressional candidate, Zephyr Teachout, earlier this month called for a debate. But not with her Republican opponent, John Faso.

      Instead she issued the challenge to two high-rolling hedge fund bosses who back him.

      [...]

      “When someone writes a $500,000 check they don’t do it out of the goodness of their heart, continued Teachout, a Fordham University law professor who literally wrote the book on political quid pro quos: In 2014, her Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, laid out a strong argument for what she calls “prophylactic” anti-corruption laws that focus on preventing the circumstances that give rise to corruption rather than prosecuting it after the fact.

    • Powell talks Clinton emails: ‘Her people are trying to pin it on me’
    • Why Colin Powell is a bad enemy for Hillary Clinton to make
    • The FBI found 15,000 emails Hillary Clinton didn’t turn over. Uh oh.
    • Clinton emails recovered by FBI to be released just before election day

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • KickassTorrents ‘Front Company’ Disappears From Web

      According to the United States Government, KickassTorrents was operated through Cryptoneat, an alleged “front company” located in Ukraine. Now, however, Cryptoneat’s web’s presence is no more. In addition to the disappearance of its website, the company’s main domain has just expired.

    • How Facebook censors your posts (FAQ)

      Facebook doesn’t disclose how many times people post, how many live videos are streamed or how many posts it’s deleted. It has said it’s responded to about 20,000 law enforcement requests over a five-month period last year.

      Activists say Facebook needs to more clearly spell out policies, particularly after what happened with Gaines.

    • Groups question Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on why Korryn Gaines’ account was shut down

      The following video depicts a confrontation between Baltimore County Police and Korryn Gaines during a standoff on Monday, August 1.

    • Police Continue to Withhold Information in Case of Korryn Gaines

      In Maryland, Baltimore County police say they will continue to withhold the names of the officers involved in the August 1 shooting of Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old African-American mother shot by police in her apartment after an hours-long standoff. The officer who shot Gaines has been assigned to administrative duties. There is body camera footage of the standoff prior to the shooting, but police claim there is no footage of the shooting itself. Gaines live-streamed the beginning of the standoff on Facebook, before Facebook responded to a police request to shut down Gaines’s account. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and activists have both questioned official police accounts of the shooting. Gaines’s five-year-old son, Kodi, was also injured by police gunfire. This is Gaines’s cousin, Creo Brady, speaking last week at her funeral.

    • India Criminalizes Merely Visiting A Copyright Infringing ‘Blocked’ Site

      The Indian film industry has long had a complicated relationship with piracy. After all, India’s Bollywood regularly produces the most films of any other country in the world (it’s often neck and neck with Nigeria). That seems to be a sign that the market is pretty healthy. After all, filmmakers keep telling us that piracy is going to destroy their reasons for making films… and yet here’s a market that’s making tons and tons of films (many of which are excellent). And, as we’ve noted in the past, the film studios in India are making lots of money, in part because they’re competing effectively against piracy. And, then you even have some Indian filmmakers who recognize that piracy helps spread the message of their films to a wider audience.

      And yet… because it’s (oooooh! scary!) “piracy,” there will always be some who freak out and come up with bad ideas. Apparently, one of those bad ideas is now the law. After already putting in place dumb site blocking laws that force ISPs, under court order, to block access to sites deemed hubs of infringement, the Indian government now says that getting around one of those blocks (hi there, VPN user!) is a criminal act that could get you three years in jail.

      “What are you in for?” “Me? I used a VPN to access Archive.org.”

      Think I’m joking? The Internet Archive was included in the ban list. As was GitHub and Vimeo.

    • Turkish journalists honour international organisations

      The Journalists Association of Turkey (TGC) on Thursday gave a 2016 Press Freedom Award to a coalition of international organisations, including Index on Censorship, that have worked in concert since last year to support journalists in the country and fight an ongoing deterioration in the state of press freedom.

      “Press freedom cannot be taken for granted in any country and requires us to be constantly vigilant. As the post-coup crackdown continues, Index’s project Mapping Media Freedom is registering threats to the media, as well as publishing work from censored journalists, to help bring international attention to the issues. Index is grateful to be recognised for its work on behalf of the journalists of Turkey,” Rachael Jolley, deputy chief executive of Index on Censorship said.

    • Donald Trump Has Freed Up Journalists’ Ability To Call Bullshit; But It Won’t Last, Nor Extend To Others

      The question is what does this actually mean for journalism? Goodwin, at the Post, sees this as the downfall of journalism. The fact that the media will actually call someone out on their lies is seen as “bias” because it’s not done equally to other candidates. Klein sees this as a temporary state of being — because most other candidates will return to their truthy wrongness with the press happy to eat that up, with nothing more than a “he said/she said” type of false equivalency when there’s some question about the facts.

      Another writer, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, more or less agrees with Goodwin that this is somehow freeing the press up to be biased, after noting how much he disagrees with Trump — but worries about the press feeling emboldened.

    • Did The NY Times Give Up Its Journalism Standards The Second Facebook Threw A Few Million Its Way?

      Last month, we discussed how Facebook was apparently forking over truckloads of cash to various media companies to get them to use Facebook Live, the company’s new livestreaming video platform. This arrangement struck us as odd — and potentially an FTC violation, in that these media companies are basically promoting and endorsing Facebook’s product, after getting paid millions of dollars, without ever disclosing the payments and the relationship. That seems… questionable. Apparently the two largest recipients of the cash were Buzzfeed and the NY Times, who each got over $3 million to stream these videos. Buzzfeed, for its part, has embraced the ridiculousness of this situation with Buzzfeedian gusto, putting on stunts like livestreaming exploding a watermelon with rubberbands. But that’s kind of what you’d expect from Buzzfeed.

      The NY Times, on the other hand, is a bit of a different beast. The newspaper likes to pride itself on being serious, careful, thoughtful journalism. And while that’s often a lot more what the people there tell themselves than reality, it does raise some questions about what the NY Times is doing with that $3+ million and how journalistic it is. Apparently, I’m not the only one to wonder about this, as the NY Times recently appointed public editor, Liz Spayd, is concerned about what the NY Times is doing here as well.

    • Anti-Piracy Operations Are Fabricating Links To Non-Existent Torrents In DMCA Notices

      Okay, so you can see how this happened. The anti-piracy groups understood just enough about how the torrent cache sites worked, that they automated sending takedowns based on torrent hashes on the assumption that those torrents would also show up via the cache sites. Okay, understandable. But here’s the problem: they never checked to see if those links ever existed. Hell, it sounds like they never even visited Zoink.it again for at least the past two years.

      And yet they sent takedowns for links there.

      So how can these companies actually claim that they know these “files” are infringing, when they clearly never even checked the links, let alone the fact that the site they’re accusing of infringement, hasn’t even been up for two years?

      The TorrentFreak article notes that this is not a one-off thing. They found other anti-piracy groups sending takedowns for more non-existent torrents on the same non-existing sites. We know that these fly-by-night operations don’t bother to check the files to see if they’re actually infringing material, but now we know they don’t even seem to check to see if sites or links ever actually existed in the first place.

    • Gawker to Shut Down Next Week

      In media news, the digital outlet Gawker will shut down next week. Gawker was ordered to pay $140 million in a lawsuit for publishing a sex tape of wrestler Hulk Hogan. Hogan’s lawsuit was financially backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who was outed as gay by a now-defunct Gawker blog.

    • Conflating abuse with criticism of Islam risks a return to a UK blasphemy law

      The BBC has made much of a report from Demos warning that thousands of ‘Islamophobic’ tweets are sent in English every day. But the researchers, like everybody else who uses the term, have totally failed to define what ‘Islamophobia’ actually means.

      The research by Demos into ‘Islamophobia’ was reported by the BBC under the headline “Islamophobic tweets ‘peaked in July’”. From reading the BBC report you might imagine that 7,000 bigoted and anti-Muslim tweets were sent every day in July.

      In fact, Demos have inadvertently set out what has been warned of for many years; that ‘Islamophobia’ is a nonsense word with sinister implications.

      On reading the report it is clear that the Demos research isn’t just focused on anti-Muslim tweets, or bigotry against Muslims, but, as they define it in their research paper, “anti-Islamic ideas”.

      [...]

      Anti-Muslim bigotry and criticism of Islam are separate phenomenon, they may overlap, there are some who engage in both, but it is methodologically meaningless to consider both of these things in one term. That is why Demos’ researchers found ‘Islamophobia’ “challenging” to define.

      What they have produced is therefore subjective, as Demos admit: “Ultimately, this research comes down to the judgement of the researchers involved.”

      Demos argue that Islamic terror attacks drive ‘Islamophobic’ tweets. Perhaps challenging Islamism would therefore be a good place to start if you want to cut anti-Muslim bigotry off at the source?

      The implications of this term’s use are very unsettling. The moral equivalence that is being drawn, increasingly, between abuse against Muslims, and the robust criticism of an idea (Islam), poses an immense threat to freedom of speech.

    • Nation Mirror calls on authorities not to censor their work

      The Nation Mirror newspaper has issued a statement complaining of “censorship and repression” after authorities in Juba on Thursday demanded that an article be removed from the paper, leading to suspension of printing in order to avoid confiscation of papers the following morning.

      The newspaper did not appear on news stands on Sunday. Censors in Juba had deemed a report about Riek Machar’s escape from South Sudan to Congo to sensitive for publication.

    • How To Escape The Challenges Of Internet Censorship

      Internet censorship is a barrier while enjoying the benefits of internet technology. This censorship is for the safety and welfare of the internet users. Yet, you cannot ignore that the process is a distraction. This article will discuss the probable ways as how to avoid censorship on the Internet.

    • Defeating Turkey’s censorship is a US national security interest
    • Wikipedia co-founder gets his Twitter account hacked
    • Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ Twitter account hacked
    • Wikipedia co-founder’s Twitter account hacked
    • Hacking group OurMine strikes next victim taking over Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ Twitter account
    • Twitter account of WikiPedia Founder Jimmy Wales Hacked by OurMine
    • Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales’ Twitter Account Hacked By OurMine
    • OurMine Hacks Twitter Account of Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales
    • Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Hacked
    • Hackers Hit Twitter Account of Wikipedia Co-Founder
    • OurMine hacks Wikipedia co-founder
    • Why the internet thought Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was dead

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • The NYPD’s Third ‘Forfeiture’ Option: Call Seized Items ‘Evidence;’ Never Give Them Back

      Clavasquin’s iPhone was seized in the summer of 2015. His case was dismissed in December. The phone is still in the possession of the NYPD while Clavasquin has continued making monthly service contract payments for a phone he can’t use.

      The article points out that this noxious blend of asset seizure and bureaucratic malaise affects “hundreds, if not thousands” of New York City arrestees. The city is now facing a class-action lawsuit over this process, filed by Clavasquin and two others with the help of Brooklyn Defenders. In these cases, neither form of asset forfeiture — civil or criminal — is being used. Instead, the NYPD is tying up possessions seized during arrests in miles of red tape, subverting what would appear from the outside to be a straightforward, two-step process: case dismissed, items returned.

      Even if someone is able to move heaven, earth, and the District Attorney’s office, that’s not the end of the frustration. One thing most arrestees carry often disappears into the evidence locker as well, greatly increasing the difficulty of retrieving possessions.

    • Uncovering a $1 Billion Deal to Detain Unauthorized Immigrants

      Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it would phase out its use of private prisons. While significant, the move will not put an end to the booming immigrant detention industry. Private prison companies will continue to receive millions in government contracts to detain unauthorized immigrants.

      Even though private prison companies play a central role in the government’s immigration strategy, the financial dealings between the two are often opaque. In his piece for the Washington Post, reporter Chico Harlan sheds light on one of these secretive arrangements, detailing a $1 billion deal between the Obama Administration and Corrections Corporation of America, also known as CCA, the largest private prison company in the country.

    • Shoot First

      Coast Guard Fired at Migrant Boats, European Border Agency Documents Show

    • KING: North Carolina police kill unarmed deaf man using sign language

      A North Carolina state trooper shot and killed 29-year-old Daniel Harris — who was not only unarmed, but deaf — just feet from his home, over a speeding violation. According to early reports from neighbors who witnessed the shooting this past Thursday night, Harris was shot and killed “almost immediately” after exiting his vehicle.

      He appeared to be trying to communicate with the officer via sign language.

      “They should’ve de-escalated and been trained to realize that this is an entirely different situation,” neighbor Mark Barringer said. “You’re pulling someone over who is deaf, they are handicapped. To me, what happened is totally unacceptable.”

    • Muslim, American, & Intersectional: The Activism of Linda Sarsour

      TO THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW HER, Linda Sarsour might seem out of place in the lobby of the Public Theater on a blustery January night.

      Sarsour, head of the Arab-American Association of New York, waits patiently to enter the theater’s concert venue, where the folk-and-blues musician Toshi Reagon is to play. A radical lesbian icon, Reagon boasts an incredibly wide-ranging and diverse following. But Sarsour stands out in her brightly colored hijab, the head covering associated with her Muslim faith.

      Anyone familiar with her, though, would not be surprised at all, nor would they be surprised that tonight’s concert is a benefit for Sarsour’s group.

      “One of the reasons I want to support this organization,” Reagon says between songs, donning a “Stop Profiling Muslims” T-shirt, “is that this organization is inclusive. I see them reaching out to all kinds of people.”

    • Police Unions To City Officials: If You Want Good, Accountable Cops, You’ll Need To Pay Them More

      Three police unions in different cities have come forward to insert their feet in their mouths following changes to department policies. The thrust of their terrible arguments? Cops should be paid more for doing their job properly.

      In Cincinnati, officers are being outfitted with body cameras. This, of course, has sent the local Fraternal Order of Police into defense mode. The FOP sent a letter to the city stating that officers won’t be wearing the cameras until they’re given more money. The union apparently believes any increase in officer accountability should be accompanied by an increase in pay.

    • Ramen is displacing tobacco as most popular US prison currency, study finds

      Ramen noodles are overtaking tobacco as the most popular currency in US prisons, according a new study released on Monday.

      A new report by Michael Gibson-Light, a doctoral candidate in the University of Arizona’s school of sociology, found the decline in quality and quantity of food available in prisons due to cost-cutting has made ramen noodles a valuable commodity.

    • Justice Department Plans to Stop Using Private Prisons

      The Department of Justice will stop contracting with private prisons, the department announced Thursday morning. The decision comes a week after the DOJ inspector general released a damning report on the safety, security, and oversight of private prisons, which incarcerate 12 percent of federal inmates.

      The announcement comes on the heels of a Mother Jones investigation of a private prison in Louisiana that found serious deficiencies in staffing and security. It also documented a higher rate of violence than the prison reported. Last week’s DOJ report found that private prisons are more violent than federal prisons.

    • Hats Off To Mother Jones

      The road to Social Security privatization is the “reform” of the consumer price index, which under-measures inflation in order to deny Social Security recipients cost-of-living-adjustments. The continuing decline in the real value of Social Security benefits will result in large-scale economic distress. This distress will be used to discredit the Social Security system and to privatize it.

      Whenever you hear “privatization,” you are hearing the formation of a scam that will create riches for insiders while taking the public to the cleaners.

    • Team GB’s Olympic triumph is testament to the benefits of social democracy

      Team GB’s second place in the Rio medals table is nothing less than staggering. It is only 20 years ago that the squad returned with a solitary gold from Atlanta ’96 clinging on to 36th in the table. This sporting nation is now ranked alongside the Olympian superpowers of USA and China. If it hadn’t been for the partial International Olympic Committee ban on their competitors, Russia would have been in the mix too, but this still remains a remarkable Team GB medal haul.

      Unlike the football World Cup, the Olympics medal table is by and large an indicator of global economic and political power. When it comes to the Olympics, the more you have to plough into sport facilities and training for promising young athletes, the better you’re likely to do. Conversely, the superpower nations of USA, China and Russia have not come close to claiming a single men’s Football World Cup title between them. The Olympics is a different story. So how has Great Britain, not a superpower in the same league, ended up on top of the olympic pile?

    • The Right To Draw Air

      Less than two months after he was filmed hysterically waving his gun and screaming expletives at a bloodied dying Philando Castile, having just killed him for pulling out his ID as instructed during a traffic stop, St. Anthony’s police officer Jeronimo Yanez has returned to work on desk duty. With the shooting still under review, Yanez, 28, was praised by St. Anthony Police Chief Jon Mangseth as a good officer with “a real sound ability when it comes to communicating and relating to people.”

      Outside the St. Anthony’s Police Department last week, Castile’s still-grieving family and friends protested Yanez’ return as “another slap in the face”and “the wrong signal” to send to a black community reeling both locally and nationwide from too many deaths at the hands of racist police. Castile’s mother Valerie charged that police were “trying to sweep (another unjust death) under the rug” but vowed, “We’re not going to let this one go.” Meanwhile, the community has sought to channel their grief and rage by fundraising for a scholarship in Philando’s name at the school where he worked.

    • Virginia Just Took Step to Uproot ‘Tragic History of Voter Suppression’

      Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe on Monday restored the voting rights of roughly 13,000 felons—a development aimed at stopping his state from being “an outlier in the struggle for civil and human rights.”

      “The Virginia Constitution is clear,” he said in his announcement at the Civil Rights Memorial on Capitol Square in Richmond. “I have the authority to restore civil rights without limitation.”

      In April, McAuliffe issued an order restoring voting rights to roughly 200,000 convicted felons. The move was widely heralded by civil rights organizations, and it was supported by 61 percent of Virginians. But in July the Supreme Court of Virginia sided with Republican lawmakers and struck down that order, finding that McAuliffe had overstepped his authority.

    • Virginia Restores Right to Vote to Thousands of Ex-Felons

      Nearly 13,000 former felons in Virginia had their right to vote restored Monday—and more could be re-enfranchised in time for the November election.

      Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced the rights restoration at a civil-rights memorial in Richmond.

      “Restoring the rights of Virginians who have served their time and live, work and pay taxes in our communities is one of the pressing civil rights issues of our day,” McAuliffe said in a statement. “I have met these men and women and know how sincerely they want to contribute to our society as full citizens again.”

    • The Idea of Peace in the Quran

      Perhaps because it arose during a great seventh-century war between the Byzantine and Iranian empires, peace (al-salam) was a profound concern for the Qur’an. An early chapter (97) of the Qur’an comments on the first revelation given to the prophet, in 610, while he was meditating at a cavern at Mt. Hira near Mecca. It speaks of a descent of angels and of the Holy Spirit on the night of power when the revelation was sent down, ending with the verse “And peace it is, until the breaking of the dawn.” This verse identifies the night of revelation, and therefore the revelation itself, with peace. Peace in Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic is not only conceived of as an absence of conflict, but as a positive conception, of well-being. The revelation and recitation of scripture, Chapter 97 is saying, brings inner peace to the believer.

    • Where the Death Penalty Still Lives

      On a Saturday evening in July 2013, just before 6:30, James Rhodes was recorded on a surveillance camera walking into a Metro PCS cellphone store in Jacksonville, Fla. He was wearing a black do-rag and a blue bandanna, which he pulled over his nose and mouth. Shelby Farah, the store manager, stood behind the counter. Rhodes pointed a gun at her and demanded the money in the cash register. Shelby gave it to him. Then Rhodes shot her in the head. She was 20 years old. He was 21.

    • Turkish Journalist Jailed for Terrorism Was Framed, Forensics Report Shows

      Turkish investigative journalist Barış Pehlivan spent 19 months in jail, accused of terrorism based on documents found on his work computer. But when digital forensics experts examined his PC, they discovered that those files were put there by someone who removed the hard drive from the case, copied the documents, and then reinstalled the hard drive.

      The attackers also attempted to control the journalist’s machine remotely, trying to infect it using malicious email attachments and thumb drives. Among the viruses detected in his computer was an extremely rare trojan called Ahtapot, in one of the only times it’s been seen in the wild.

      “We have never seen a computer attacked as ferociously as Barış’s. The attackers seemed to pull everything out of their bag of tricks,” Mark Spencer, digital forensics expert at Arsenal Consulting, said.

    • RAMADAN TRAIN WRECK Muslim train driver crashed after going without food or drink for 15 hours during Ramadan

      The Great Western driver went through a double red light at London’s Paddington Station in June.

      He made an emergency stop after realising his error but the empty train left the tracks, hit a gantry and brought down power lines at 6.12pm.

    • ‘Belmarsh HERO’ Hate preacher Anjem Choudary ‘raising an army of extremists’ behind bars

      The news comes as the Government prepares to launch a crackdown on radicalisation behind bars.

      Choudary, 49, is being held in a single cell inside the most secure part of Belmarsh Prison.

      He has been isolated from the bulk of the jail’s 900 inmates for several months to prevent him from spreading his poisonous ideology.

    • Boy, 8, dies in Swedish hand grenade blast

      Emergency services were called to the building at around 3am when a large explosion was heard from its third floor. At least five children and several adults were inside at the time, said police, and an eight-year-old child who had suffered serious injuries later died in hospital.

      “It could have ended much worse,” said police spokesperson Thomas Fuxborg.

      The incident has been given a preliminary classification of murder/manslaughter by authorities, who also said that individuals convicted of serious violent crimes were living in the residence.

      Police have confirmed that one of the men convicted over a fatal shooting at a restaurant in the area last year was registered at the address. They are investigating revenge as a potential motive.

      “We’ll have to see if the motive is linked to that. Our theory is that it may be,” said Fuxborg.

    • Muslim convert, 35, ‘jumped out of his car to knock out a schoolboy for hugging his girlfriend in the street’

      A Muslim ‘bully’ grabbed a schoolboy by the throat and threw him to the ground because he saw him hugging a girl in the street, a court heard today.

      Michael Coe, 35, was driving through Newham in East London when he spotted the two 16-year-olds cuddling on the pavement, it is claimed.

      He allegedly confronted the pair, demanding to know if they were Muslims, before calling the girl a ‘whore’.

      Coe was said to have grabbed the boy by the throat, causing him to black out, before he woke up bleeding on the floor.

    • Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte Fires ‘Thousands’ of Government Officials

      Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced on Sunday that he would be sacking every member of his administration who was appointed by a previous President. The move — the latest in what Duterte calls a campaign against corruption — is one of several that have left critics troubled over what they say is an excessive wielding of executive power.

      “Until now, in my provincial visits, I still hear that corruption is being committed,” he said in a long press conference in the earliest hours of Sunday morning, according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “My mouth is, as they say, lousy. If you are there because of a presidential appointment, I will declare all your positions, all throughout the country, vacant.”

      As for the number of government employees to be sacked: “It will number in the thousands.”

      Duterte, formerly the tough-on-crime mayor of the city of Davao, has long been known as a bombastic firebrand, but in the less than two months since he was inaugurated as President of the Southeast Asian nation, many there have expressed concern over what that zeal means at the level of federal politics. He has in recent weeks threatened to impose “martial law” if the country’s judiciary infringes upon his campaign to eradicate drugs from the country — an exercise that has left hundreds dead.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Romania’s telecom regulator to boost competition

      Romania’s Telecom Regulator ANCOM wants to increase competition in the country’s mobile and fixed telecommunication services, the agency announced in August. ANCOM published its “Strategy for digital communications up to 2020”, “diagnosing the current status of the communications sector in Romania, as well as the future trends.”

    • T-Mobile, Sprint Tap Dance Over, Under, And Around Net Neutrality

      For some time now T-Mobile has been accused of violating net neutrality by exempting the nation’s biggest video services from its usage caps, and throttling all video on the network by default to 1.5 Mbps or 480p. Net neutrality advocates have repeatedly warned that giving some content or companies a leg up and fiddling with service quality sets a horrible precedent, and research has shown T-Mobile’s system to be unreliable and exploitable. Still, T-Mobile has so far received applause from many regulators, media outlets and customers operating under the belief consumers are getting something for free.

      As such, however bad the precedent being set here, there’s no real political pressure on the FCC to act since consumers are effectively applauding what many believe to be a net neutrality violation. The FCC’s net neutrality rules don’t specifically prohibit zero rating, something we’ve long argued opens the door to creative abuses of net neutrality to thunderous applause, which is effectively what’s happening here. The rules do require the FCC to explore whether zero rating is anti-competitive on a “case by case” basis, but so far, outside of a few letters, the FCC doesn’t seem particularly pressed to take action.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Appeals Court Tosses Lawsuit Against Broadcasters For Violating Publicity Rights During Football Game Broadcasts

      Javon Marshall — a former college athlete spearheading a putative class action against several broadcasters for uncompensated use of his likeness — has just seen the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court send him (and everyone “similarly situated”) back home without a parting gift.

      Marshall — like many others who believe the mere existence of intellectual property protections entitles them to a paycheck — sued a long list of broadcasters for allegedly violating the Lanham Act and the Tennessee “right of publicity” law by not paying him and other athletes for using his name and “image” in game broadcasts and advertising. Marshall also claimed the NCAA’s waiver student-athletes sign is “vague and unenforceable.” That may very well be, but that claim was never addressed by the plaintiff and the NCAA was never a defendant. It only served as an introduction to a long list of alleged violations [PDF] that the lower court determined to be baseless accusations.

    • Trademarks

      • A Test He Couldn’t Pass: College Admissions Expert Loses Domain

        Get into Harvard? Not this way. That’s the message of a World Intellectual Property Organization dispute panel after ruling the website harvard-review.com confusingly uses the name of a famous university in promoting skills training for college admissions tests, without authorisation.

    • Copyrights

      • New IP law titles: from EU copyright to ISP liability

        For some odd reasons, it seems that many good IP titles are being released at a time of the year when – at least in the Northern hemisphere – the attention for anything that relates to IP is increasingly and acutely replaced by a slightly stronger interest for holidays, sunshine, and the outdoors.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/23/android-7-0-nougat/feed/ 0 Links 18/8/2016: EFF Slams Vista 10, Linux Foundation Makes PNDA http://techrights.org/2016/08/18/linux-foundation-makes-pnda/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/18/linux-foundation-makes-pnda/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2016 10:22:57 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94973

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • With Windows 10, Microsoft Blatantly Disregards User Choice and Privacy: A Deep Dive

      Microsoft had an ambitious goal with the launch of Windows 10: a billion devices running the software by the end of 2018. In its quest to reach that goal, the company aggressively pushed Windows 10 on its users and went so far as to offer free upgrades for a whole year. However, the company’s strategy for user adoption has trampled on essential aspects of modern computing: user choice and privacy. We think that’s wrong.

      You don’t need to search long to come across stories of people who are horrified and amazed at just how far Microsoft has gone in order to increase Windows 10’s install base. Sure, there is some misinformation and hyperbole, but there are also some real concerns that current and future users of Windows 10 should be aware of. As the company is currently rolling out its “Anniversary Update” to Windows 10, we think it’s an appropriate time to focus on and examine the company’s strategy behind deploying Windows 10.

  • Server

    • How Twitter Avoids the Microservice Version of “Works on My Machine”

      Apache Mesos and Apache Aurora initially helped Twitter engineers to implement more sophisticated DevOps processes and streamline tooling, says software engineer David McLaughlin. But over time a whole new class of bespoke tooling emerged to manage deployment across multiple availability zones as the number of microservices grew.

      “As the number of microservices grows and the dependency graph between them grows, the confidence level you achieve from unit tests and mocks alone rapidly decreases,” McLaughlin says, in the interview below. “You end up in the microservice version of “works on my machine.”

  • Kernel Space

    • The Linux Foundation Awards 14 Training and Certification Scholarships
    • The Linux Foundation Announces 2016 LiFT Scholarship Recipients

      14 Scholarship Recipients From 11 Countries to Receive Advanced Open Source Training to Help Advance Their Careers and Communities

    • Linux kernel 4.6 reaches end of life

      Those using a GNU/Linux operating system powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.6 branch have been urged to move to Linux kernel 4.7.

      According to a report by Softpedia, users have been advised to install the new Linux kernel 4.7.1 build.

    • It’s time to say goodbye to Linux 4.6

      If you’re using a version of Linux based on the 4.6 series of the kernel, the software’s lead maintainer has a message for you: It’s time to upgrade.

      Greg Kroah-Hartman on Tuesday announced the arrival of Linux 4.6.7 and made it clear that it will be the last in the kernel’s 4.6 series. Version 4.7.1 made its debut on Tuesday as well, and that’s where the future lies, Kroah-Hartman said.

    • Linux Foundation touts open-source PNDA for network analytics

      The Linux Foundation has taken another open-source project under its wing, one that’s focused on the architecture, implementation and support of digital networks.

      Called the Platform for Network Data Analytics (or “PNDA” for short), the initiative aims to better integrate and manage massive amounts of network information, and deploy analytics applications and services.

      “PNDA addresses a critical need for a scalable platform that fosters innovation in reactive network analytics for both service providers and enterprises,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, in a statement.

      To coincide with the announcement, the PNDA community has just shipped out its first version of the software, which is described as a production-ready solution for platforms based on OpenStack.

    • Linux Kernel 4.4.18 LTS Has Lots of x86 Improvements, Security Updates and Fixes

      After announcing the end of life for the Linux 4.6 kernel series with the release of Linux kernel 4.6.7 as the last maintenance update, as well as the availability of the first point release of Linux kernel 4.7, Greg Kroah-Hartman now informs us about Linux kernel 4.4.18 LTS.

      Linux kernel 4.4 is an LTS (Long Term Support) one, the latest and most advanced, currently used by many popular GNU/Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and all of their derivatives, such as Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu MATE, etc., and the Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” series of distributions.

    • Benchmarks

      • AMDGPU-PRO Radeon RX 460/470/480 vs. NVIDIA Linux GPU Benchmarks

        Last week I published an 18-way GPU Linux comparison featuring the new Radeon RX 460 and RX 470 graphics cards along with other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. The Radeon tests were done using the very latest open-source Linux driver stack while in this article are similar benchmarks done but using the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver stack.

      • Btrfs RAID Tests On Linux 4.8

        Recently I’ve been carrying out a number of Btrfs RAID tests on Linux 4.7 while this past weekend I ran some comparison tests using the Linux 4.8 Git kernel.

        The Btrfs feature updates in Linux 4.8 has the big ENOSPC rework as well as other clean-ups and improvements.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • A quick look at using JSX in GNOME

        Thanks to a travel sponsorship from the GNOME foundation, I was able to attend the GTK+ hackfest in Toronto recently. The discussions and energy there inspired me to work on a prototype of something I had been thinking about for a while: using JSX to create GtkWidgets.

      • GSoC: final week and results

        Hello everyone, I’m very glad to announce that my GSoC project about implementing games with multiple medias is being finished this very week. Although the code is still being tested, it won’t have big changes. With that said, I’ll show and explain the results.

      • Using the GtkSourceView API to write scripts that manipulate text

        In the gnome-c-utils repository, I wrote some scripts that use the GtkSourceView library.

        When a script needs to read some text, search something in it, and possibly edit the content, then having a GtkTextBuffer is really convenient.

      • The Meson build system at GUADEC 2016

        For the third year in a row, Centricular was at GUADEC, and this year we sponsored the evening party on the final day at Hoepfner’s Burghof! Hopefully everyone enjoyed it as much as we hoped. :)

        The focus for me this year was to try and tell people about the work we’ve been doing on porting GStreamer to Meson and to that end, I gave a talk on the second day about how to build your GNOME app ~2x faster than before.

      • GNOME Developers Continue Working On Meson Build System, Much Faster Build Times

        GNOME developers and others in the free software ecosystem continue working on Meson, a promising next-gen build system that’s superior to the commonly-used Autotools.

        Meson has been in the works for a few years now but routinely see people unfamiliar with it. More and more GNOME packages though are beginning to support Meson.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • The Positives and Negatives of Arduino

      My introduction to the world of single board computers started with the Raspberry Pi and an attempt to spin up a media server. Once the media server was established, the GPIO pins began to peek my interest and other projects were born. As I learned more about GPIO and electronics, I discovered there existed boards other than the Raspberry Pi that I could program to take my projects to another level.

    • Intel’s Project Euclid is a tiny Linux-powered PC for robot makers

      INTEL has unveiled Project Euclid, a pint-sized RealSense PC aimed at robotics makers and developers.

      Project Euclid (below) was announced during the firm’s Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and makes it dead simple to create applications, such as self-driving go-karts and 3D printing robots, using Intel’s depth-sensing RealSense cameras, the firm said.

      Intel has kicked its Atom chips to the curb in terms of mobile, but Project Euclid comes with an integrated Atom processor, suggesting that that the once-defunct chip still has a future in the world of robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT).

    • Intel “Aero” drone board runs Yocto on Cherry Trail

      Intel has launched a Linux-on-Atom powered “Aero Compute Board” and quadcopter, promising improved obstacle navigation based on Intel RealSense.

      Even more than last year’s Intel Developer Forum, this week’s IDF is focusing relentlessly on Intel RealSense. The 3D depth sensing camera technology is everywhere at IDF, including the new Windows-focused Project Alloy VR helmet and several Linux-infused drone, robotics, and camera kits. In fact, even the new Kaby Lake and Apollo Lake processors expected to be announced today include built-in support for RealSense. Here, we take a look at the Intel Aero Platform drone products: the Atom-based Intel Aero Compute Board and an Aero Ready To Fly quadcopter based on it.

    • Intel unveils its Joule chip module for the Internet of Things

      Joule is the latest product in Intel’s family of all-in-one chip modules for the Internet of Things.

      Intel CEO Brian Krzanich showed off the new Joule module during a keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The module is a follow-up to Edison, the prior IoT module introduced in 2014.

    • Review: 6 slick open source routers

      Hackers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the lousy stock firmware your routers shipped with.

      Apart from smartphones, routers and wireless base stations are undoubtedly the most widely hacked and user-modded consumer devices. In many cases the benefits are major and concrete: a broader palette of features, better routing functions, tighter security, and the ability to configure details not normally allowed by the stock firmware (such as antenna output power).

    • i.MX6 Pico-ITX and mini-PC run Android, Ubuntu, and Yocto

      Logic Supply’s Embux-made Pico-ITX SBC runs Android and Linux on an i.MX6 DualLite, and is also available in a mini-PC.

      Logic Supply is reselling an Embux-manufactured Pico-ITX form-factor “ICM-2010 2.5”” SBC and “ICS-2010” mini-PC. The SBC starts at $193, plus $29 for an 8GB SD card equipped with Android, Ubuntu, or Yocto Project based Linux. A power adapter adds another $30. The products are designed for applications including industrial control, home automation, kiosk, digital signage, or robotics applications.

    • ArcherMind Joins 96Boards and Launches Deci-Core ARMv8 Product

      Linaro Ltd, the collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM® architecture, today announced that ArcherMind Technology (Nanjing) Co., Ltd has joined the 96Boards initiative as a Steering Committee Member and Manufacturing Partner and they are preparing the launch of their first 96Boards product.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • More News Arrives on Fuchsia, Google’s Mystery Open Source OS

    Everyone loves a mystery and if you’re a mystery fan you have to be paying attention to Google’s mysterious new open source operating system, which is dubbed “fuchsia,” alluding to what you get when you mix purple with pink. While you’ll read many reports saying that nothing has been said about fuchsia officially, Google engineers actually have popped up in various online forums descrbing the new OS.

  • Google updates Santa Tracker open source code with changes from last Christmas

    Is it Christmas time already? Not quite, but we don’t have long before kids start counting down the days to Santa’s visit. When they ask, Google is again ready to provide an answer.

    Last April, Google open sourced Santa Tracker and its various components. Then it developed new experiences to show off around Christmas time. Eight months later, that code is now open source as well.

  • Google Makes Santa Tracker 2015 Code Open Source
  • What People Don’t Get About Open Source

    Open source is making its way into the mainstream, driven by Linux, OpenStack, SDN, and other cloud, networking and computing. But a lot of people still have misconceptions about the open source process and how it fits into business.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Back End

    • How open source helps startups get a big data boost

      Big data isn’t new. We’ve actually had fairly sophisticated data infrastructure long before Hadoop, Spark, and such came into being. No, the big difference in big data is that all this fantastic data infrastructure is open source software running on commodity servers.

      Over a decade ago, entrepreneur Joe Kraus’ declared that “There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it’s never been cheaper to be one,” and he was right, though he couldn’t have foreseen how much so. Though Kraus extolled the virtues of Linux, Tomcat, Apache HTTP server, and MySQL, today’s startups have access to a dazzling array of the best big data infrastructure that money doesn’t need to buy.

    • Pepperdata: Carving Out a Niche in the Big Data Arena

      In the data analytics and Hadoop arena, the folks at Pepperdata have an interesting story to tell. Pepperdata’s cofounders ran the web search engineering team at Yahoo during the development of the first production use of Hadoop and created Pepperdata with the mission of providing a simple way of prioritizing Hadoop jobs to give resources to the ones that need them most, while ensuring that a company adheres to its SLAs.

      The company’s software installs in under 30 minutes on an existing Hadoop cluster without any modifications to the scheduler, workflow, or jobs, delivering visibility into Hadoop workloads at the task level. This week, Pepperdata announced that former CTO of Yahoo, Ashfaq Munshi, is taking over as CEO. Here are more details on this company from an interview we did recently with co-founder Chad Carson.

  • Databases

    • Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W32

      Tonight phpMyAdmin 4.0.10.17, 4.4.15.8, and 4.6.4 were released and you can probably see that there are quite some security issues fixed. Most of them are not really exploitable unless your PHP and webserver are poorly configured, but still it’s good idea to upgrade.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • The trouble with open source research on the web

      Every open source research project — no matter how simple or complex — starts with browsing the internet. But researchers should know that their identity can be obtained through a number of basic techniques, which could have consequences ranging from modified data to directed cyber attacks or worse.

      Even the simplest of website visits will expose significant details about your location and your device, and pretty much any site you visit will drop code on your computer to track what you’re doing as you traverse the internet. Most of the time, this exchange is benign, but there can be times when content will be modified or attacks launched based on the identity of the user.

      When Tim Berners-Lee released his building blocks for the modern internet, they were designed for the academic research community. Like other initiatives of the time, web protocols (and the browsers to support them) were built to easily share information, not for privacy or security. In order to minimize or even prevent counter-surveillance while conducting open source research, it is important to understand how the underlying protocols exchange information when you visit a web page.

    • Endurance Robots launches fully roboticized open-source platform [Ed: That's not FOSS. Using OpenCV to make a proprietary and Windows-only platform?]

      Finally, we used the standard Microsoft SAPI. This product with various language sets is distributed free of charge.

    • Intel claim open source driven by ‘enthusiasts’ is ‘complete rubbish’ says Weaveworks founder [Ed: Intel is badmouthing FOSS while putting secret/proprietary back doors in its chipsets]

      Weaveworks founder and CEO Alexis Richardson delivered a verbal drubbing to an Intel senior architect yesterday after he suggested open source software is still driven by “enthusiasts” who alone don’t produce “enterprise-capable product” without distributors ‘professionalising’ parts of it themselves.

      Richardson, speaking at an open source panel debate hosted by Rackspace, described Markus Leberecht’s claim as “complete rubbish”, leaving the solutions architect floundering.

      When discussing the increasing relevance of open source software to the enterprise, senior data centre solutions architect Leberecht volunteered the notion that “open source has become a natural thing for enterprise to consume when distributors have professionalised certain parts of [it]“.

      “So just to re-emphasise the role that some of the companies on the panel here [companies included MongoDB, Red Hat, and Rackspace, as well as Weaveworks] are taking in this particular way of getting open source to market: by itself open source is attention-driven, enthusiasts driving a certain topic, but that doesn’t give us enterprise-capable product.”

    • Intel Launches Project Alloy — An Open-source VR Headset That’s A Full PC [Ed: That’s a lie (even the headline). It’s not “Open Source”, it’s Microsoft rubbish.]
    • Microsoft announce open-source UWP Community Toolkit to make UWP app development easier [Ed: Microsoft is just hilarious. In its propaganda site it is openwashing some of its biggest lock-in (‘community’)]

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Rust implementation of GNUnet with GSoC – Final-term

      This is the final week of the gnunet-rs project with Google Summer of Code. It has been challenging but also exceptionally rewarding. I hope to explain the final product and then touch on the future work. The repository can be found here, and my previous blog post here.

      During the first half of GSoC working period, I changed the peerinfo service to use asynchronous IO (using gjio). I continued on that path and added two more services to make use of asynchronous IO – identity and GNS. I won’t cover the complete API in this blog post since their usage can be found in the documentation comments in the code (cargo doc can be used to generate html docs); there are also a lot of examples. But I will highlight one of them because it demonstrates the strengths of a promise based API.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Federal open-source policy isn’t open enough, says tech group

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation has praised new federal guidelines aimed at improving the sharing of federally developed software code but complained that the government’s 20 percent release goal does not go far enough.

      The policy, announced by U.S. CIO Tony Scott on Aug. 8, seeks to makes federal source code more accessible while increasing sharing across government and reducing duplicative software purchases.

  • Programming/Development

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Witchcraft shop refuses to serve Harry Potter fans because it sells ‘spiritual tools’ not toys for young Muggles

    A shop which makes magic wands for real life witches and wizards has been blasted by Harry Potter fans for refusing to serve them.

    The business, called Mystical Moments, is making a name for itself in the wizarding world by supplying wands to cast healing spells and charms for good luck.

    But wand-maker Richard Carter says he is selling “spiritual tools” – not toys for young Muggles – and he is barring Hogwarts fans.

  • As A-level results come out, it’s time to look again at our education system

    Jeremy Corbyn is right – England needs to repurpose its education system.

    [...]

    Today, the annual cycle of the education system cranks round, as another cohort of nervous school leavers discover their A Level results. If their route ahead of them looks like a debt-ridden treadmill, that’s because it is one. University debt repayment operates as a tax on those unable to afford fees upfront – so almost everyone – and erects a barrier to any repurposing of higher education beyond servicing the needs of a narrow, centuries-old elite.

    More than ever, we are in need of an alternative vision for the education system, and, at last, someone is providing one. This week is also witnessing a series of detailed policy announcements which form the backbone of a vision which is daring and absolutely necessary. The National Education Service which is being announced by Jeremy Corbyn goes far beyond the abolition of tuition fees, venturing to equip everyone with skills that the Conservatives have spent their years in office draining and wasting.

    At the moment, tuition fees are breeding an insidious psychology. Transforming education into an item that one may ‘purchase’ cultivates a logic in which the university is a private investment through which we buy our dream jobs. ‘Employability’ takes precedence over the nourishment of learning and skills, both eroding the public utility yielded from higher

  • When your IT talent shortage is global

    In some cases, you might be at a company with a super strong brand, which makes hiring a bit easier as you don’t need to explain what the company does. In either case, it is important to focus your hiring practices to fully explain three key areas:

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Maternal Mortality a Growing Threat in the US

      Each year, over 65,000 women in the United States suffer life-threatening complications, including physical and psychological conditions aggravated by pregnancy, and over 600 die from pregnancy related causes. Elizabeth Dawes Gay reports the vast impact of the health care system collapse on rural areas, and the racial disparity underlying the United States’ maternal health crisis. African-American women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes. Health officials report the state of Georgia to have the highest rate of maternal deaths and significant racial disparity.

    • Aetna Proves That Single-Payer Health Care Is the Only Way to Go

      It’s been over two years since the bulk of Obamacare went into effect, and US health insurance companies are (inadvertently) making a great case for why it’s time to adopt a single-payer system and take the profit motive out of how health care is paid for once and for all.

      On Monday, Aetna, the United States’ third-largest insurance company, announced that it will withdraw from Obamacare exchanges in 11 states, and that it will only offer insurance through the state-level Obamacare marketplaces in four states in 2017.

      Obamacare has, overall, been a huge success, especially among the less visible and more marginalized populations in the US.

    • Sanders: Aetna’s Obamacare Threat Shows What “Corporate Control Looks Like”

      Healthcare giant Aetna directly threatened the federal government by vowing to pull out of Obamacare if its proposed merger to Humana was not approved, revealed a letter by the company’s CEO sent in July and reported on Wednesday.

      The letter, obtained by the Huffington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request, proves what many observers have suspected and what the company has been denying: that its decision to pull out of most of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health exchanges was a bargaining chip in its effort to achieve the controversial merger.

      Aetna’s threatening letter was authored by Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, who would have “personally [made] up to $131 million” if the Humana merger had gone through, as International Business Times reporter David Sirota observed last month.

      The Justice Department sued to block the merger last month.

    • Aetna’s Greed Proves That Medicare-for-All Is the Best Solution

      Sen. Elizabeth Warren skewers insurance giant for Obamacare withdrawal, saying: ‘The health of the American people should not be used as bargaining chips’

    • Aetna Shows Why We Need a Single Payer

      The best argument for a single-payer health plan is the recent decision by giant health insurer Aetna to bail out next year from 11 of the 15 states where it sells Obamacare plans.

      Aetna’s decision follows similar moves by UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurer, and Humana, one of the other giants.

      All claim they’re not making enough money because too many people with serious health problems are using the Obamacare exchanges, and not enough healthy people are signing up.

      The problem isn’t Obamacare per se. It’s in the structure of private markets for health insurance – which creates powerful incentives to avoid sick people and attract healthy ones. Obamacare is just making the structural problem more obvious.

    • Neonic pesticide link to long-term wild bee decline

      The large-scale, long-term decline in wild bees across England has been linked to the use of neonicotinoid insecticides by a new study.

      Over 18 years, researchers analysed bees who forage heavily on oilseed rape, a crop widely treated with “neonics”.

      The scientists attribute half of the total decline in wild bees to the use of these chemicals.

      Industry sources say the study shows an association, not a cause and effect.
      Weighing the evidence

      In recent years, several studies, conducted in the lab and in the field, have identified a negative effect on honey bees and bumble bees from the use of neonics.

      But few researchers have looked at the long term impacts of these substances.

      This new paper examined the impacts on populations of 62 species of wild bees across England over the period from 1994-2011.

    • Russia’s Stepanova: ‘No accident’ if something happens to me

      The Russian runner who helped expose a system of state-backed doping in her country says she fears for her life and has been forced to move after hackers tried to find her location.

      The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said on Saturday Yulia Stepanova’s online doping management account had been illegally accessed. The doping scandal she lifted the lid on has rocked sport and cost over 100 Russians their place at the Rio Games.

      Stepanova has been in hiding in the United States with her husband Vitaly, a former Russian anti-doping official, after giving evidence that the Russian government for years facilitated widespread cheating across nearly all Olympic sports.

    • Aetna Drops Obamacare In Most States

      Aetna Inc, the No. 3 U.S. health insurer, on Monday said that due to persistent financial losses on Obamacare plans, it will sell individual insurance on the government-run online marketplaces in only four states next year, down from the current 15 states.

      Aetna’s decision follows similar moves from UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Humana Inc., which have cited similar concerns about financial losses on these exchanges created under President Barack Obama’s national healthcare reform law.

      Aetna is also trying to buy Humana and is currently fighting a U.S. government lawsuit aimed at blocking the $34 billion deal.

      Aetna, which earlier this year said it was too soon to give up on the exchanges despite its challenges, this month signaled it was reconsidering. On Aug. 2, the company said it would not expand in 2017 and would review all its individual business.

    • Lawsuit Alleges Monsanto Intentionally Mislabeled Dangerous “Inert” Ingredients
    • Lead Contamination at Indiana Low-Income Housing Site Is Being Addressed After Decades of Inaction

      The West Calumet Complex, an affordable-housing complex in East Chicago, Ind., was built in 1972—but it took over four decades for city officials and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to alert residents of a potential lead crisis. The Young Turks news team recently went to East Chicago to interview residents and activists in the area to see how they are responding to news of the contamination.

      “We had no idea what we’ve been living in,” Akeesha Daniels, a resident since 2004, told TYT reporter Jordan Chariton. Daniels said she “never was sick a day in [her] life” before moving into the West Calumet Complex.

      Lonnie M. Randolph, a Democratic state senator, explained that several weeks ago, over 1,000 residents received letters from East Chicago’s mayor telling them they had between 30 and 90 days to evacuate their homes because of lead and arsenic levels in the soil surrounding the complex.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Bombing of a Hospital in Yemen

      An air strike struck a hospital in northern Yemen on Monday, killing 11 and wounding at least 19, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) said in a statement.

      The strike, which news outlets say was conducted by Saudi-led coalition forces, partially destroyed Abs Hospital, a facility in Hajja province, which MSF has run since July 2015. More than 4,000 patients have been treated in the facility over the past year.

      “This is the fourth attack against an MSF facility in less than 12 months,” said Teresa Sancristóval, the MSF emergency program manager for Yemen. “Once again, today we witness the tragic consequences of the bombing of a hospital. Once again, a fully functional hospital full of patients and MSF national and international staff members was bombed in a war that has shown no respect for medical facilities or patients.”

      A day before the strike, MSF tweeted saying access to health care is increasingly limited in the country, where the humanitarian situation has deteriorated since hostilities between the Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels resumed last week following the collapse of United Nations-facilitated peace talks.

    • How Immigration Status Matters in the Orlando Shooting

      Jorge Rivas and Rafa Fernandez de Castro of Fusion reported that, following the horrific Pulse Nightclub massacre on June 12, 2016 in Orlando, Florida, victims without legal status now face “a whole additional set of challenges in the wake of the horrible mass-shooting.”

      Their report describes the cases of an undocumented 24-year-old Salvadorian survivor named Victor and an undocumented 33-year-old Mexican survivor named Javier (whose names have been changed to protect their identities). Each faces uncertainty of qualification for federal and state assistance programs beyond immediate emergency care, due to their illegal immigration status. After being hospitalized for gunshot wounds, each is facing overwhelming medical bills.

    • NYT Touts Honduras as Ad for ‘American Power’–Leaving Out Support for Murderous Coup Regime

      She offered the results of this and similar programs as evidence that “smart investments in Honduras are succeeding” and “a striking rebuke to the rising isolationists in American politics,” who “seem to have lost their faith in American power.”

      But Nazario failed to explain how American power paved the way for the shocking rise in violence in Honduras. In the early 2000s, the murder rate in Honduras fluctuated between 44.3 and 61.4 per 100,000—very high by global standards, but similar to rates in neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala. (It’s not coincidental that all three countries were dominated by violent, US-backed right-wing governments in the 1980s—historical context that the op-ed entirely omitted.) Then, in June 2009, Honduras’ left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup, kidnapped and flown out of the country via the joint US/Honduran military base at Palmerola.

      The US is supposed to cut off aid to a country that has a military coup—and “there is no doubt” that Zelaya’s ouster “constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup,” according to a secret report sent by the US ambassador to Honduras on July 24, 2009, and later exposed by WikiLeaks. But the US continued most aid to Honduras, carefully avoiding the magic words “military coup” that would have necessitated withdrawing support from the coup regime.

      [...]

      With a corrupt, drug-linked regime in place, thanks in large part to US intervention, murder in Honduras soared, rising to 70.7 per 100,000 in 2009, 81.8 in 2010 and 91.4 in 2011—fully 50 percent above the pre-coup level. While many of the murders involved criminal gangs, much of the post-coup violence was political, with resuscitated death squads targeting journalists, opposition figures, labor activists and environmentalists—of whom indigenous leader Berta Cáceres was only the most famous.

    • Pentagon Cannot Account For $6.5 Trillion Dollars

      Adding to the appearance of impropriety is the fact that thousands of documents that should be on file have been removed and disappeared without any reasonable explanation.

      A new Department of Defense Inspector General’s report, released last week, has left Americans stunned at the jaw-dropping lack of accountability and oversight. The glaring report revealed the Pentagon couldn’t account for $6.5 trillion dollars worth of Army general fund transactions and data, according to a report by the Fiscal Times.

    • Will Human Evil Destroy Life On Earth?

      The World Wildlife Fund tells us that there are only 3,890 tigers left in the entire world. Due to exploitative capitalism, which destroys the environment in behalf of short-term profits, the habitat for tigers is rapidly disappearing. The environmental destruction, together with hunting or poaching by those who regard it as manly or profitable to kill a magnificent animal, is leading to the rapid extermination of this beautiful animal. Soon tigers will only exist as exhibits in zoos.

      The same is happening to lions, cheetahs, leopards, rhinos, elephants, bobcats, wolves, bears, birds, butterflies, honey bees. You name it.

      What we are witnessing is the irresponsibility of the human race, a Satan-cursed form of life that does not belong on the beautiful planet Earth. The cursed humans are even capable of launching a nuclear war which would destroy the livability of Earth.

    • Washington’s Outrage and Excuses

      What is behind Washington’s double standards – its contrasting reactions to one set of regimes as against another? Often American politicians will talk about promoting democracy and claim that the dictators they support have a better chance of evolving in a democratic direction than those they oppose. It might be that these politicians actually believe this to be the case, at least at the moment they make these declarations. But there is no historical evidence that their claims are true. This argument is largely a face-saving one. Other underlying reasons exist for the choices they make.

    • A botched coup and Turkey’s future in western institutions

      Western interpretations of the botched coup in Turkey and its aftermath are varied. Nevertheless, if one draws a vector that represents the divergent arguments a consensus view with two components can be detected: (i) a readiness to accept the Turkish government’s argument that the coup was staged by the Islamic Gülen Movement that infiltrated the Turkish state institutions, including the military; and (ii) expressions of concerns about the future of democracy in Turkey given the announcement of a state of emergency and the extent of the post-coup purges.

      In terms of policy recommendations, there is only one recommendation in the market place: the west should try to appease Turkey, a key strategic partner in NATO and in the fight against ISIS.

    • Turkey’s Sensible Détente with Russia

      Official Washington is so set on making Russia the new boogeyman that Turkish President Erdogan’s visit there is setting off alarms, but the easing of Moscow-Ankara tensions is really a positive sign, says ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

    • How ‘Think Tanks’ Generate Endless War

      U.S. “think tanks” rile up the American public against an ever-shifting roster of foreign “enemies” to justify wars which line the pockets of military contractors who kick back some profits to the “think tanks,” explains retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce.

      [...]

      It is readily apparent now that Russia has taken its place as the primary target within U.S. sights. One doesn’t have to see the U.S. military buildup on Russia’s borders to understand that but only see the propaganda themes of our “think tanks.”

    • US Soldiers Are Relying on Millions of Dollars in Food Stamps to Survive

      Military service members on active duty spent $24 million in food stamps at military commissary shops from September 2014 to August 2015, and 45 percent of students in schools run by the military are eligible for free or reduced-price meal programs.

      For years, the military has been embarrassed by reports showing that some active-duty service members struggle to feed their families and use government benefits to get by. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Department of Defense (DoD) does not fully understand the scope of the problem.

      The USDA runs the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the benefits of which are commonly called food stamps. Neither the military nor the USDA tracks how many active-duty service members receive SNAP benefits, according the report.

    • Does this Change Everything? Russia’s first strikes on Syria from Iran Airbases

      Russian bombers for the first time have taken off from bases in Iran to carry out air strikes on rebel targets in Syria.

      The US military is complaining that under a Russian agreement with the US, it was supposed to get a timely notification of Russia air strikes so they could avoid any conflicts. The Russians appear to have given the Americans last-minute notice– enough so that the US could make the necessary arrangements, but only barely so. Likely Russia did not want to give the US time to complain about the basing in Iran or to try to pressure Moscow back out of this plan.

      According to Russian sources, this procedure is a matter of saving money on logistics. But the move will inevitably be seen in the light of grand strategy. A tightening of Russian-Iranian security cooperation will be seen by Saudi Arabia and Israel as a threat, and since those two countries have the most powerful lobbies in Washington, it will view the development as threatening, as well.

    • Ron Jacobs: Media spends time and money to make terrorists as celebrities
    • Rights Groups Sound Alarm Over Devastating Use of Incendiary Weapons in Syria

      News of Russia’s use of incendiary weapons comes at the same time that joint U.S.-Russia airstrikes against rebel groups are being proposed. An aid worker interviewed by The Intercept said that such a collaboration would be “ludicrous and diabolical.”

      The Intercept explains that in the past several months, “the United States has repeatedly signaled plans to strike opposition forces in Syria, largely due to fears that al Qaeda-linked groups were making gains in the conflict.”

    • Fire deaths rise in England prompts ‘postcode lottery’ claim

      The number of people dying in fire-related incidents in England has seen its biggest percentage increase in 20 years.

      Data published by the Home Office shows 303 people died in fires in 2015-16, a 15% increase on the previous 12 months.

      Fire services in Cambridgeshire and Cumbria had the highest fatality rates.

      Fire Service Minister Brandon Lewis said there had been “a long term downward trend” in fire deaths.

    • Complicit in Civilian Carnage, US Support for War in Yemen Called ‘Indefensible’

      Amid an escalation of violence, increasing numbers of civilian casualties, and a nearly unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the New York Times editorial board on Wednesday called the United States “complicit in the carnage” and demanded the Obama administration end its support for the Saudi-led coalition which has repeatedly been accused of war crimes by critics.

    • America Is Complicit in the Carnage in Yemen

      A hospital associated with Doctors Without Borders. A school. A potato chip factory. Under international law, those facilities in Yemen are not legitimate military targets. Yet all were bombed in recent days by warplanes belonging to a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, killing more than 40 civilians.

      The United States is complicit in this carnage. It has enabled the coalition in many ways, including selling arms to the Saudis to mollify them after the nuclear deal with Iran. Congress should put the arms sales on hold and President Obama should quietly inform Riyadh that the United States will withdraw crucial assistance if the Saudis do not stop targeting civilians and agree to negotiate peace.

    • War to ‘Stop’ War: Why the Obama Doctrine is Ravaging the Middle East

      Now that the Americans have launched yet another aerial war against Libya, purportedly to target ‘Daesh’ positions there, the discussion is being carefully geared towards how far the US must go to defeat the militant group?

      In fact, “can airstrikes alone win a war without ‘boots on the ground’?” has morphed, somehow, to become the crux of the matter, which has engaged a large number of intellectuals on both sides of the debate.

    • While Beijing and Manila Talk, Washington Spoiling for a Fight

      As much as Washington may hate it, the fact is Beijing and Manila are diplomatically discussing the situation in the South China Sea.

      Champagne bottles are not popping yet, but Special Philippine envoy, former President Fidel Ramos, did go to Hong Kong, and on behalf of President Rodrigo Duterte, got together with Fu Ying, the chairwoman of the foreign affairs committee of the National People’s Congress. On the record, Ramos made sure that Manila is all in for formal negotiations.

      The starting block concerns some fishy business – literally. Beijing and Manila may be on their way already to open the highly disputed Scarborough shoal, which falls right into what Manila describes as the West Philippine Sea, to both Chinese and Filipino fishermen, as in the joint development of fish farms.

      Wu Shicun, president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, let it be known that Ramos’s visit to Hong Kong was just an opener. Of course his next step will have to be a trip to Beijing to talk to the high-stakes power players. Then the way will be paved for a formal Duterte state visit.

      So, for the moment, everyone is behaving in a very Asian “win-win” way, with no loss of face involved. And yet, in parallel, there’s been speculation that Beijing has identified a unique widow of opportunity between the G-20 in Huangzhou, next month, and the US presidential election in early November, to come up with extra “facts on the sea” in the form of added reclamation and building of naval installations.

      What Beijing wants in the long term is clear. Scarborough shoal in particular is a key piece in the larger puzzle. A Chinese airstrip is all but inevitable because it extends the reach of the PLA’s air force by over 1,000km, and positions it to be active off Luzon, no less than the gateway to the Western Pacific.

      With the airstrip in Scarborough shoal and an early warning system on Macclesfield Bank – just east of the Paracel Islands – Beijing will be finally able to “see” all the action, friendly but mostly unfriendly, emanating from the sprawling US naval base at Guam.

    • Ten Times Worse Than Hell: A Syrian Doctor on the Humanitarian Catastrophe in Aleppo

      In the latest escalation of the war in Syria, Russia has begun launching airstrikes from an Iranian air base. The New York Times reports this marks the first time since World War II that a foreign military has operated from a base on Iranian soil. The move comes as fighting has intensified around Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. Earlier this month, rebels fighting the Syrian government began a new offensive to break an ongoing government-backed siege of the city. The rebels have been led in part by an offshoot of the Nusra Front, which up until last month had been aligned with al-Qaeda. The International Committee of the Red Cross has described the fight for Aleppo as “beyond doubt one of the most devastating urban conflicts in modern times.” The United Nations is warning of a dire humanitarian crisis as millions are left without water or electricity. For more on the humanitarian and medical crisis in Syria, we speak with Dr. Zaher Sahloul, founder of the American Relief Coalition for Syria and senior adviser and former president of the Syrian American Medical Society. He has visited Aleppo five times since the war began.

    • “What Would She Do in Iraq?”: As Clinton Slams Trump for ISIS Speech, We Look at Her Own Positions

      On Monday, while Trump was speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden held a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Scranton is Biden’s hometown. During her speech, Hillary Clinton slammed Trump’s foreign policy positions on Syria and fighting ISIS. But what about her own positions? For more, we speak with Phyllis Bennis, author of “Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror.” We also speak with co-founder of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York Linda Sarsour.

    • Amnesty law nullifyed in El Salvador: knowing the truth and taking the victims into account

      The Truth Commission’s report “From Madness to Hope: The Twelve Year War in El Salvador” was published on the 15th of March, 1993, 26 months after the signing of the Chapultepec Accords. The report stated that over 75,000 people were tortured, extrajudicially executed or disappeared during the war. State agents, paramilitary groups and death squads are responsible for 90% of crimes and 3.3% are attributed to guerrillas and other armed unidentified people. With the intention of understanding the letter and spirit of the Truth Commission’s report, we spoke with one of the three assigned commissioners from the United Nations, former Foreign Minister of Venezuela, Reinaldo Figueredo Planchart.

    • Medea Benjamin’s Kingdom of the Unjust

      For years and years, activists demanded that the U.S. government make public 28 (turned out to be 29) pages it had censored from a report, because it was suspected they would show a Saudi Arabian role in funding and facilitating the crimes of September 11, 2001. When the pages were finally made public, they showed a great deal of evidence of exactly that. But the U.S. government and its pet media outlets buried the story on a Friday evening, declared that verily this is that, and moved on.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • NPR Host Demands That Assange Do Something Its Own Reporters Are Told Never to Do

      In a ten-minute interview aired Wednesday morning, NPR’s David Greene asked Wikileaks founder Julian Assange five times to reveal the sources of the leaked information he has published on the internet.

      A major tenet of American journalism is that reporters protect their sources. Wikileaks is certainly not a traditional news organization, but Greene’s persistent attempts to get Assange to violate confidentiality was alarming, especially considering that there has been no challenge to the authenticity of the material in question.

      In the interview, conducted over Skype, Greene pressed Assange to verify the theory that the 20,000 leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee that Wikileaks published came from Russia.

      “Did those hacks that Wikileaks released, did those emails come from Russia?” Greene asked.

      “Well we don’t comment as to our sources,” Assange replied. He remains confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has lived since 2012, despite a U.N. panel’s ruling that he has been “arbitrarily detained.”

    • WikiLeaks Game Can Turn Kremlin Fortress Into Glass House

      For the first time since the 1950s, Russian subversion of the American political process has become a presidential campaign issue.

      The Kremlin’s latest act of espionage-driven propaganda–document dump of Democratic National Committee emails via WikiLeaks–achieved its desired effect of immediate politicization. We should step back to learn two lessons, and creatively fight back.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Burning in Indonesia may bring in transboundary haze

      The number of hotspots in Sumatra, Indonesia increased yesterday while Kalimantan recorded fewer hotspots, said Natural Resources and Environment Minister Dato Sri Dr Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar.

      “Under these unpredictable circumstances, it is clear that fires are burning in Indonesia but substantially less than what we saw in 2015.

      “But (it is) still too early to tell as now it is only August. Last year, it began in August (and) peaked in September and early October,” he told The Borneo Post when contacted yesterday.

    • VW in talks to settle US criminal probe over Dieselgate

      Embattled German carmaker Volkswagen has reportedly held preliminary talks with the US Justice Department aimed at resolving a criminal probe into its diesel emissions scandal.

    • August 2016: Louisiana Flooding

      National Geodetic Survey collects damage assessment images in aftermath of severe storms and flooding

    • NASA Study Nails Fracking as Source of Massive Methane ‘Hot Spot’

      A NASA study released on Monday confirms that a methane “hot spot” in the Four Corners region of the American southwest is directly related to leaks from natural gas extraction, processing, and distribution.

      The 2,500-square mile plume, first detected in 2003 and confirmed by NASA satellite data in October 2014, is said to be the largest concentration of atmospheric methane in the U.S. and is more than triple a standard ground-based estimate. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a highly-efficient greenhouse gas—84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and a significant contributor to global warming.

      The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and funded primarily by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), surveyed industry sources including gas processing facilities, storage tanks, pipeline leaks, and well pads, as well as a coal mine venting shaft.

      It found that leaks from only 10 percent of the individual methane sources are contributing to half of the emissions, confirming the scientists’ suspicions that the mysterious hotspot was connected to the high level of fracking in the region.

    • Clinton Transition Team Headed by Anti-Climate ‘Powerbroker’

      Hillary Clinton has named her transition team should she be elected in November, and the roster—as many feared—is a who’s-who of establishment figures, including former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who has a maligned track record on climate.

      The team will also include former national security adviser Tom Donilon, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, president of the Center for American Progress (CAP) Neera Tanden, and director of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics Maggie Williams. Two of the campaign’s policy advisers, Ed Meier and Ann O’Leary, will also serve as co-executive directors.

      Salazar, whose career includes positions both in government and corporate Washington, D.C. firms, has previously pushed for projects that are reviled among environmental activists, such as fracking, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Keystone XL pipeline.

      Just a year ago, Clinton and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) penned an op-ed for the Huffington Post decrying the cyclical nature of Capitol Hill institutions that enable lawmakers and lobbyists to jump in and out of the private and public sectors.

    • As Renewables Soar, Oil Industry Launches New PR Offensive

      As the renewable revolution gathers a pace, the oil industry has launched yet another PR offensive trying to rebrand fossil fuels as sustainable.

      So first the good news. The percentage of electricity generated by renewables in the world’s largest economies has soared by 70 per cent over the last five years, according to new research.

      Data compiled by the Bloomberg New Energy Finance research group for the Financial Times reveals that a real “shift away from fossil fuels is starting to take hold in some regions”.

      The data reveals that G20 countries collectively produced 8 per cent of their electricity from solar, wind and other renewable sources in 2015, up from 4.6 per cent in 2010.

      Germany now tops the list of seven G20 members who generate over 10 per cent of their electricity from renewables, with the country producing over a third of its electricity from renewables.

      Despite Obama’s efforts to cut fossil fuels from the country’s generation mix, the US still lags behind, generating only about 8 per cent of power from renewables.

    • Dakota Pipeline Would Make Water the New ‘Oil,’ Devastating All but the Rich

      Our protest against the destruction of Ina Maka (Mother Earth) started when the first European set foot on Turtle Island [North America] over 400 years ago. We Dakota believe we are related to everything in the universe. We say Mitákuye Oyás’in. The phrase translates in English as “all my relatives,” “we are all related” or “all my relations.” It is a prayer of oneness and harmony with all forms of life: other people, animals, birds, insects, trees and plants, and even rocks, rivers, mountains and valleys. We respect all living creatures, especially Mother Earth. Why would we destroy our own mother who feeds us, who provides us shelter, who embraces the remains of our ancestors?

    • Tribal Activists Defy Lawsuit, Vow Continued Resistance Against Dakota Pipeline

      An epic battle over land rights is being waged in the Dakotas, as a local Indigenous community, facing arrests and litigation, is standing firm in its resistance to a massive Bakken crude pipeline project.

      Developers of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access (also known as the Bakken) Pipeline filed suit in federal court on Monday against members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose days-long civil disobedience campaign last week stalled construction of the 1,200-mile pipeline.

      Dakota Access LLC is “seeking restraining orders and unspecified monetary damages,” the Associated Press reports. In court papers, the companies argues that the tribal activists “have created and will continue to create a risk of bodily injury and harm to Dakota Access employees and contractors, as well as to law enforcement personnel and other individuals at the construction site.”

    • Disasters like Louisiana floods will worsen as planet warms, scientists warn

      The historic and devastating floods in Louisiana are the latest in a series of heavy deluges that some climate scientists warn will become even more common as the world continues to warm.

      On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) is set to classify the Louisiana disaster as the eighth flood considered to be a once-in-every-500-years event to have taken place in the US in little over 12 months.

      Since May of last year, dozens of people have been killed and thousands of homes have been swamped with water in extreme events in Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina, West Virginia and Maryland. Noaa considers these floods extreme because, based on historical rainfall records, they should be expected to occur only once every 500 years.

    • Scientists Say Expect More 1,000-Year Events Like Louisiana Flood

      The flooding has caused the death of eight people and affected 40,000 homes and businesses, according to the Associated Press.

    • Louisiana left stunned by damage from ’1,000-year’ flood: ‘It just kept coming’

      An enormous and slow-moving rainstorm has laid waste to much of southern Louisiana, which the National Weather Service has called a “1,000-year” disaster.

      By Monday afternoon, more than 20,000 residents had been rescued from the historic floodwaters, and as many as seven had died.

      People here stay prepared for hurricanes, and all the cataclysm they bring. But this storm did not arrive with noise and velocity; instead it unfolded over several days, sneaking up almost without notice. Then the rivers topped their banks.

      In Tangipahoa parish, Louisiana, Donnie Prince woke up Thursday morning to the sound of police on a bullhorn.

    • Wildfires Are Getting Worse: Time to Rehydrate Our Landscapes

      The west is still in the thick of wildfire season and 2016 is already one to leave Smoky the Bear in tears. California is seeing a 20 percent uptick in fires compared to 2015—itself a rough fire year—while a fast-moving blaze has virtually destroyed the California town of Lower Lake. A story in today’s Washington Post grimly begins: “California is burning.”

      While fire is always part of nature, many attribute its increased frequency and intensity to climate change. Certainly, that makes sense: longer stretches of warm weather and earlier snowmelt create a fire-friendly scenario. But what does this connection do for us, beyond providing another reason to rue the continued assaults on our climate? For the terms “climate change” and “global warming” elide the dynamics that create the constellation of factors that, collectively, we call climate. However, by zeroing in on the ecology of fire-prone regions, we can find ways to minimize the risk and severity of the fires that threaten homes and wilderness areas—not to mention the lives of firefighters.

    • The Axis Of Destruction And Hope

      If you want to understand the climate crisis today, you need to journey roughly along the 95th parallel, from Louisiana in the south to the the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas.

      In the Bayou State, there’s great courage, as local people work to rescue their neighbors from rising waters. So far, 20,000 people have been snatched to safety from homes, offices, hospitals, schools in the wake of a three-day siege of endless rain that broke flood records on river after river. The images are astonishing, like something from Mad Max: a thousand cars trapped on an interstate as helicopters dropped food to keep people alive.

    • Impacts of neonicotinoid use on long-term population changes in wild bees in England
    • 18 Years of Data Links Neonics to Bee Decline

      A new study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, looks at wild bee populations relative to the use of neonics on the oilseed rape plant in England over 18 years, from 1994-2011. The researchers found that population extinction rates went up along with the pesticide use on the plants, which are widespread throughout the country.

      “The negative effects that have been reported previously do scale up to long-term, large-scale multi-species impacts that are harmful,” Dr. Nick Isaac, a co-author of the report, told the BBC. “Neonicotinoids are harmful, we can be very confident about that and our mean correlation is three times more negative for foragers than for non-foragers.”

      Across the 34 species analyzed in the study, there was a 10 percent decline in populations attributable to neonic use, the BBC said. Five of the species dropped off by 20 percent or more, and the most affected group went down by 30 percent. In total, half of the population decline in wild bees could be linked to the pesticides, the researchers said.

    • Koch Brothers Waging War Against Local Effort to Expose Dark Money

      A state ballot measure seeking to end political corruption has won the ire of the billionaire Koch Brothers, who have relied on secret donations to conservative interest groups to influence elections coast to coast.

      South Dakota’s Initiated Measure 22 (pdf), dubbed the Government Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act, seeks to “ensur[e] that special interest lobbyists and their cronies aren’t buying influence with our elected officials,” according to proponents South Dakotans for Integrity.

      Specifically, it calls for public disclosure of donors to campaigns and advocacy groups; lowers contribution amounts and imposes limits on political action committees, political parties, and candidates; and it creates an ethics commission to enforce campaign finance and lobby rules. Further, it establishes a publicly funded campaign finance program for state and legislative candidates.

      State residents will have the chance to vote on the measure in November and, apparently, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is hoping to quash this effort before it gains traction in South Dakota, or anywhere else.

    • Forced to Reckon with Rising Seas, Alaskan Village Votes on Relocation

      Residents of a remote Alaskan village will find out Wednesday if they are to become the first American community to become climate refugees.

      Rapidly rising sea levels are forcing the 650-person village of Shishmaref, which lies just north of the Bering Strait, to consider relocating. Residents voted Tuesday and the city clerk said that results will be announced Wednesday.

      As for where they will go, the community will decide later at a town meeting. The move is estimated to cost $180 million.

      “The sea ice used to protect Shishmaref, which is built on a barrier island and largely inhabited by members of the Inupiat Inuit tribe,” wrote the Guardian. “But now that the ice is melting, the village is in peril from encroaching waves, especially as the permafrost on which it is built is thawing, and crumbling beneath the mostly prefabricated houses. Barricades and sea walls have had little effect.”

    • Alaskan village votes on whether to relocate because of climate change

      If they vote to move, the village of Shishmaref, just north of the Bering Strait, and its population of 650 people, could be the first in the US to do so because of climate change.

      The village would be relocated at an estimated cost of $180m to a new location less threatened by rising waters and melting sea ice. Where it would move would be decided later in a town meeting, according to the city clerk’s office.

    • [Older] Unable to Endure Rising Seas, Alaskan Villages Stuck in Limbo
    • Rethink needed on Paris emissions targets

      The historic international agreement to limit global warming to a global average rise of 1.5°C may be a case of too little, too late.

      In December last year, 195 nations at the Paris climate summit promised a programme of action to contain greenhouse gas emissions and limit climate change. But UK scientists now warn that humans may have already emitted enough carbon dioxide into the planetary atmosphere to take air temperatures over land to above 1.5°C.

      And that means nations may have to think again about what constitutes a “safe” global temperature threshold.

      Chris Huntingford, climate modeller at the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and Lina Mercado, senior lecturer in physical geography at the University of Exeter write in the Scientific Reports journal that even supposing humans stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere – and although action has been promised, far more has to be achieved before that could happen – temperatures over land are very likely to go beyond the proposed limit.

    • New Koch-Funded Group ‘Fueling US Forward’ Aims to Promote the “Positives” of Fossil Fuels

      A long-awaited campaign to rebrand fossil fuels called Fueling U.S. Forward made its public debut at the Red State Gathering 2016 on Saturday, where the organization’s President and CEO Charles Drevna gave attendees the inside scoop on the effort, and confirmed that the campaign is backed financially by Koch Industries.

      Back in February, Peter Stone first reported in the Huffington Post that a $10 million-a-year effort was proposed by a Koch Industries board member, James Mahoney, and Mr. Drevna, aiming “to boost petroleum-based transportation fuels and attack government subsidies for electric vehicles.” In early August, the Fueling U.S. Forward website launched, and on Saturday, the first public comments were made about the campaign by Mr. Drevna, and they revealed a lot about how the Koch-backed initiative is working to re-frame fossil fuels.

      “We need a sustainable energy to ensure the future of the country,” Mr. Drevna told the audience.

      The source of that energy? That which Mr. Drevna labeled “reliable, abundant, efficient and sustainable fuels.”

      “Folks, that’s of course the fossil fuels,” he immediately added.

      Never mind that fossil fuels don’t align with any dictionary definition of “sustainable,” as oil, gas and coal reserves are limited to what’s buried in the ground, unlike renewable sources of energy. Technically speaking, fossil fuels are the opposite of sustainable energy sources — but that fact did little to slow Mr. Drevna down as he made what he called the “pro-human” case for burning fossil fuels.

    • How to Change Our Pathetic Green Infrastructure

      The United Kingdom, which is already world famous for its green gardens and even greener countryside, is about to get even greener. That’s because according to a new report from Japanese car maker Nissan, it could soon have more electric car charging stations than traditional gas stations.

      The UK is currently home to around 4,100 electric charging stations and 8,400 gas stations, but if currents trends continue, it will have more than 7,900 charging stations and just 7,870 gas stations by 2020.

      Once again our European friends are leaving us in the dust.

      With about 12 gas stations for every one electric charging station, it’s going to take a long time for the United States to catch up with the United Kingdom’s all-out embrace of the electric car revolution. So why is that?

  • Finance

    • An Olympic Event Where 1st Prize Is the Chance to Lose Billions

      Behind the scenes of the Olympic matchups and rivalries that draw large crowds here, there is stealth competition taking place in the hallways and hotels of this beach town worth tens of billions of dollars. It is a bidding war that could rival the most ferocious auction on Wall Street.

      Armies of delegates from four cities — led by a series of moguls, bankers, businessmen and government officials — have been quietly battling one another here to court the leadership of the International Olympic Committee in hopes of being awarded the 2024 Summer Games. The delegates, representing Los Angeles, Paris, Rome and Budapest, have been scoping out the venues, receiving briefings on the massive security operation and taking meetings with just about anyone who can conceivably influence the outcome.

    • India: Kerala’s Stalinist-led government pursuing pro-business agenda

      Kerala’s three month-old, Stalinist-led, Left Democratic Front (LDF) state government is eagerly pursuing a rightwing agenda aimed at wooing domestic and international big business.

      Led by Kerala Chief Minister and Communist Party of India (Marxist) Politburo Member Pinarayi Vijayan, the LDF is a hodgepodge of Stalinist and smaller regional parties. It is led by the Communist Party (Marxist) or CPM and its older, smaller twin, the Communist Party of India (CPI). It includes various split-offs from the Congress Party, the Indian bourgeoisie’s traditional party of government and the LDF’s main electoral rival in Kerala, a southwestern state with a population of almost 35 million.

      So forthright have been the pro-business policies Vijayan has pursued during his brief tenure in office, sections of the corporate media are comparing him favorably with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. An arch-right winger and rabid Hindu communalist, Modi has slashed social spending, lifted numerous caps on foreign investment, and accelerated “disinvestment,” that is, the sell-off of state-owned companies.

    • Gimme a Break! IRS Tax Loophole Can Reward Excessive Water Use in Drought-stricken West

      ProPublica’s reporting on the water crisis in the American West has highlighted any number of confounding contradictions worsening the problem: Farmers are encouraged to waste water so as to protect their legal rights to its dwindling supply in the years ahead; Las Vegas sought to impose restrictions on water use while placing no checks on its explosive population growth; the federal government has encouraged farmers to improve efficiency in watering crops, but continues to subsidize the growing of thirsty crops such as cotton in desert states like Arizona.

      Today, we offer another installment in the contradictions amid a crisis.

      In parts of the western U.S., wracked by historic drought, you can get a tax break for using an abundance of water.

    • New Clinton Transition Head Has Some TPP ‘Splainin To Do

      Salazar was also a member of the pro-TPP corporate front-group “Progressive Coalition for American Jobs”. Two March, 2015 posts, “A Trade Campaign Built On Four Pinocchios” and “Deval Patrick, Others To Advise AstroTurf Pro-TPP/Fast Track Group” exposed this group as a pro-TPP front.

      Someone needs to ask Salazar and Clinton to explain what this says about Clinton’s support/opposition to a lame-duck vote on TPP – as well as future job-killing trade deals.

    • Rock Against the TPP heads to Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco

      As the Rock Against the TPP tour continues its way around the country, word is spreading that it’s not too late for us to stop the undemocratic Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in its tracks. The tour kicked off in Denver on July 23 with a line-up that included Tom Morello, Evangeline Lilly, and Anti-Flag, before hitting San Diego the following week where Jolie Holland headlined. You can check out the powerful vibe of the kick-off show below.

    • Obama Provokes Progressive Outrage with All-Out TPP Push

      In defiant opposition to this election’s anti-trade sentiment, President Barack Obama is provoking progressive outrage with events around the country in an “all-out push,” as Politico puts it, to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress.

    • Obama to take trade battle to the heartland

      And there have been defections since then: At least nine House GOP lawmakers who supported fast-track authority oppose TPP itself. Those include Frank Guinta, Mike Bost and Tom Reed, who have independently come out against the deal. It also includes House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster and House Administration Chairwoman Candice Miller, both of whom signed a letter this month with four other lawmakers saying they could not support TPP in the lame duck because it doesn’t include enforceable rules on currency manipulation. Meanwhile, the Republican platform approved in Cleveland last month said no “significant” trade deals should get votes during the lame-duck session.

    • Fight for $15 plans next steps forward at national convention

      Thousands converged in Richmond, Virginia over the weekend to participate in the Fight For $15’s first-ever national convention. Central to the two-day gathering was the historic Richmond Resolution, a statement of purpose and strategy that members approved unanimously on August 13. The convention culminated on Saturday, as 8,000 people marched in sweltering heat to demonstrate their support for the resolution and their determination to see their agenda through the remainder of election season.

      From the start, it was clear that organizers would emphasize the intersectionality of racial and economic justice. According to Fight for $15 national organizer Kendall Fells, the choice of Richmond for the convention underscored this framework. “We chose Richmond because it’s the onetime capital of the Confederacy,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “and we want to draw links between the way workers are treated today and the racist history of the United States.”

    • A Victory for Postal Banking

      Underbanked and Overcharged found that over one in five households (mostly Black, Latino, or Native American) are underserved by the banking industry, costing these households an average of $3,029 per year in fees and interest just to access their own money. This additional cost takes a total of $103 billion per year out of the communities that need it most.

    • Is it time for universal basic income in the UK?

      Universal basic income is not a new idea. It was way back in 1795 that Thomas Paine, an American revolutionary, first talked about the citizen’s dividend. The idea was to pay all US citizens a regular payment as compensation for “loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property”.

      This ground breaking idea lay fairly dormant for a hundred years until the beginning of the 20th Century. Since then the idea has come in and out of fashion in three times, each time getting closer to becoming a political reality.

      In the early 1900s a broad selection of philosophers, writers, politicians and social movements began writing about and pushing for the idea. It grabbed the attention of many but failed to become a full movement, losing momentum when the welfare state was introduced.

      The second wave emerged in the USA in the 60s as the focus of the social movements of the day turned from civil to welfare rights culminating in 1972 Presidential election when candidates of the day backed the idea. Although it did not become a political reality due to disagreements in how the idea should be implemented, it paved the way for a number of social policies such as food stamps still present in the USA today.

    • Socialism is obvious

      As it turns out, socialism is increasingly obvious for folks on this side of the pond. Like Bernie Sanders. And Mark Workin and Melissa Young, who made the film Shift Change. And Richard Wolff, through Democracy at Work.

    • It’s time for development banks to start listening

      Almost a year ago, the United Nations set the Sustainable Development Goals, an ambitious blueprint for governments and financiers to use their political power and resources to end poverty, hunger, and disease.

      But the success (or failure) of this effort won’t depend on just the usual big players. Far more important than governments and international donors are the individuals and civic organizations that will help design, carry out, and monitor the development projects on which the whole scheme depends. Without vibrant civil societies, the Sustainable Development Goals are dead in the water.

      Only the individuals and communities meant to be the beneficiaries of development know best what their needs are and how they can be met. And it is the civil society groups and activists who can make sure that development resources reach their intended destinations and achieve their objectives. It’s the women’s cooperative in Senegal that will show how to design an effective irrigation system. It’s the community group in Bangladesh that will ensure that the schools promised in the government’s education budget are actually built.

      But the whole project of sustainable, participatory development is in danger. Around the world, groups and activists who work to improve development proposals, or speak out about problems with infrastructure or energy projects, increasingly find themselves threatened, intimidated, and even violently attacked by governments, investors, private security forces, and others who want to avoid scrutiny.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Serb Who Inspired Ethnic Cleansing of Bosnia Leads “Vote Trump” Rally in Belgrade

      The activists, led by the head of Serbia’s ultranationalist Radical Party, Vojislav Seselj, chanted “Donald Trump!” and marched outside the country’s Parliament wearing T-shirts bearing the name and likeness of the American candidate.

    • Donald Trump Proposes Banning Immigrants Based on Ideology, But Bush and Obama Got There First

      Donald Trump’s plan to apply an “ideological screening test” on would-be immigrants has been denounced as “un-American,” and “a nonstarter.” But the U.S. government already can and does bar immigration on ideological grounds – and has abused that power.

      In addition to dramatically expanding government surveillance, the Patriot Act passed by Congress soon after the 9/11 terror attacks allows the State Department to exclude anyone who it determines “undermines the United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorist activities.”

      The Bush administration used that power to deny entry to leftist activists and administration critics. The list of those denied visas includes South African anti-apartheid activist Adam Habib, Greek economist Yoannis Milios, Nicaraguan reformist and academic Dora Maria Tellez, Bolivian scholar Waskar Ari, and English hip-hop singer M.I.A, — just to name a few.

    • DC Cooties

      There have been a series of stories fed to the press this week intended to heighten concerns about Trump advisor Paul Manafort’s ties to Russian thugs (but not his numerous ties to other thugs). The NYT had a story about Manafort receiving cash payments from 2007 to 2012 (that is, well before Trump decided to run for President). And the AP has a story headlined, “AP Sources: Manafort tied to undisclosed foreign lobbying” that describes how Manafort’s partner, Rick Gates, funneled funds from a pro-Yanukovych non-profit to two DC lobbying firms.

      [...]

      In other words, the headline and lead of this story should say something to the effect of, “Trump’s campaign manager’s partner funneled potentially illegal funds to Hillary’s campaign manager’s brother.”

      Or more succinctly: “DC is a corrupt, incestuous cesspool.”

      But it doesn’t. Instead of telling the story about the broken foreign registry system that permits elites of both parties to take funding from some unsavory characters — some we like, some we hate — the story instead spins this as a uniquely Trump and Manafort problem.

      Sure. Vladimir Putin is one scary bastard. But there are a lot of scary bastards, and they’re feeding both sides of the DC pig’s trough.

    • Where the Green Party’s Jill Stein stands on jobs, taxes and more

      Green Party candidate Jill Stein doesn’t command the kind of crowds and headlines that rivals Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do. So many voters may not know where she stands on the issues.

    • Why Not Expand the Presidential Debates?

      Amid unprecedented dissatisfaction with the two major party candidates, public interest in opening the presidential debates to the Libertarian and Green party nominees should be honored, says Jeff Cohen.

    • America’s Journalistic Hypocrites

      The U.S. news media flip-flops on whether international law is inviolate or can be brushed aside at America’s whim – and similarly whether killing civilians is justified or not depending on who’s doing the killing, says Robert Parry.

    • Ignorance Is Not a Virtue, and Knowledge Is Not a Vice

      Ignorance is not a virtue. Knowledge is not a vice. Pointy-heads who spend years gaining expertise in a given field may make mistakes, but the remedy is to replace them with pointy-heads who have different views—not with know-nothings who would try to navigate treacherous terrain on instinct alone. (See: Trump’s policy positions on, well, anything.)

      As for the much-disparaged media, I get emails every day from people who demand to know why we in the “MSM” or “corporate media” are covering up some scandal. The emails then go on to describe said scandal at great length and in microscopic detail, often quoting stories from The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC News or other leading media outlets. I often write back that if we’re trying to cover up the outrage in question, we’re obviously doing a lousy job.

    • Trumpism: Made in the United States by Republican Hate and Democratic Hypocrisy

      The Republican, white-nationalist Donald Trump slanders and insults Latinos, Muslims and women. He promotes violence. He mocks the disabled. He refers to himself as brilliant, citing his fortune—obscenely accumulated over decades of predatory business practices that cheat workers and consumers—as “proof.”

      He feuds with the gold star parents of a Muslim U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, claiming that he too has “sacrificed” (like the dead soldier and his parents) by employing “thousands and thousands of people.” It was a remarkable comment: Being born into wealth and in a position to hire a large number of people is not a “sacrifice.” If Trump isn’t reaping profits from all those workers under his command, he must not really be the brilliant, capitalist businessman he claims to be.

      A military veteran gives the Republican presidential candidate his Purple Heart medal, bestowed on soldiers injured in battle. Trump quips, “I always wanted a Purple Heart. This was a lot easier.” Unreal. Donald Trump, Mr. Sacrifice, used college deferments to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War.

      How is this noxious candidate even within shouting distance of Hillary Clinton? Let’s separate the fact from the fiction.

    • Jill Stein: ‘There Should Have Been a Full Investigation’ of Clinton’s Email Server (Video)

      On Monday, news broke that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is turning over to Congress information from its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. It’s expected that the agency will hand over “notes from the interviews of Clinton and other witnesses in the investigation.”

      In a CNN interview with Carol Costello on Monday, Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein explained her stance on the email scandal. “I think there should have been a full investigation,” she said. “I think the American people are owed an explanation for what happened and why top-secret information was put at risk.”

      “Do you think that that [congressional] oversight committee should open up an investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server?” Costello asked.

      “Yes, I do, because we’re talking about state secrets,” Stein replied. “If [Clinton] wasn’t aware that she was violating State Department rules, it raises real issues about her competency.”

    • A Still Uncertain Election

      In recent weeks the billionaire businessman has generated extreme turmoil within his own party by mocking the Muslim parents of a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq, refusing to support the re-election of key Republicans (such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan), questioning why he shouldn’t use nuclear weapons, and — to top it off — seeming to call for gun owners to protect the 2nd Amendment by, well, shooting Clinton. There’s no telling what absurdity he will utter next.

    • Trump Campaign Blames “Scammers” After Being Busted (Again) For Soliciting Foreign Donations

      An Australian Member of Parliament is still receiving messages from the Donald Trump presidential campaign asking for money, more than a month after the illegal solicitations were first reported to the Department of Justice and the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).

      MP Terri Butler informed The Hill that she received a Trump fundraising email on August 14. It was the latest in a series of automated fundraising messages from the GOP nominee’s campaign that Butler and other foreign lawmakers have received, dating back to June.

      It is against the law for campaigns to receive or even seek out foreign donations. The Trump campaign’s repeated violations suggest that it is either flouting federal election rules or that it lacks internal controls to maintain compliant mailing lists.

      A Trump campaign official, however, blamed outside agitators. They told The Hill that the campaign “routinely checks” their mailing lists for foreign nationals, but that sometimes “scammers will continue to try to add them to our system.”

    • Why Did Clinton Just Tap a Pro-TPP, Pro-KXL, Pro-Fracking Politician to Head Her Transition Team?

      Hillary Clinton has announced former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as the head of her transition team. Salazar is a former U.S. senator from Colorado who now works at WilmerHale, one of the most influential lobbying firms in Washington. Some groups have criticized Salazar’s selection due to his vocal support of fracking, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Keystone XL pipeline. In addition to Ken Salazar, other leaders of the transition team include former Obama National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden, former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and Maggie Williams, the director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics. For more, we speak with David Sirota, senior editor for investigations at the International Business Times.

    • The phony populism of Donald Trump

      Last week, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested that “Second Amendment people” could rise up against Hillary Clinton if she wins the election and called President Obama “the founder of ISIS.” He also delivered a policy speech at the Detroit Economic Club that, understandably, received much less attention.

      Given Trump’s near-constant breaches of common decency, many people have given up on parsing the details of his policies, which can feel at times like complaining about the music in a crashing car. Yet while Trump’s affinity for regressive economics is nowhere near the top of the list of reasons to oppose him, there is still a real possibility that he could become the nation’s chief policymaker, and the policies he outlined last week counteract one of the prevailing narratives of the election — that Trump is a “populist.”

      Over the course of the campaign, Trump has been consistently portrayed as a populist candidate, the Republican counterpart to Bernie Sanders in a race shaped by widespread anger toward the political and economic elite. This perception has been reinforced by Trump’s ritual humiliation of the Republican Party establishment in the primaries, as well as his overwhelming reliance on the support of working-class whites.

    • Addressing White Privilege Is Only a Small Step in Combating Systemic Racism

      Clinton has had trouble in the past for failing to listen to the concerns of people of color. Take, for example, the time she shut down Black Lives Matter protesters at one of her speaking events (something her husband is also guilty of doing). And Kaine has faced criticism for his support of Project Exile when he was mayor of Richmond, Va. The project “was to literally live up to its name by making illegal gun possession a federal, not a state, crime, which allowed prosecutors to send convicted felons, most of them black, to a distant federal penitentiary for at least five years,” writes James Oliphant of Reuters.

    • Libertarians Love Civil Liberties—but Won’t Use Government to Protect Them From Capitalists

      So-called libertarianism sounds like a good idea, and many who claim the ideology are sincerely interested in defending otherwise-defenseless groups and individuals from predatory or indifferent government.

      But in this forum hosted by Fusion, presidential candidate Gary Johnson and running mate Bill Weld revealed the limitations of their commitment to civil liberties—even if the journalists who questioned them did little to highlight the discrepancy.

      “Gov. Johnson, you’ve voiced your support for same-sex marriage, saying it’s a matter of freedom and liberty,” said Fusion fellow Anna Sterling. “But under the guise of religious freedom—as you mentioned earlier, Gov. Weld—there’s been a wave of legislation across the country that’s essentially legalizing discrimination against LGBT people. How do you reconcile these two issues?”

      Shifting in his chair, Johnson replied: “Well— uh— by rec— I’m opposed to that legislation. I am outright opposed to that legislation, recognizing exactly what it is that you’re saying, that it is discriminatory against the LGBT community. And we refuse to be a part of any sort of discrimination. And, yes, that is happening. It’s happening! Stop!”

      So there you have it. Johnson and Weld dislike discrimination, but they’re not going to use the power of government to stop legislation that fosters it.

    • Green Party candidates to make their case at CNN town hall

      Hoping to reignite the “political revolution” of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, are set to participate in a live town hall event Wednesday on CNN at 9 p.m. ET.
      The two will face questions from voters and CNN’s Chris Cuomo during the hour-long event as they seek to make their liberal platform known to the public.

      Stein, a retired medical doctor, environmental activist and musician, made a filed bid for the presidency in 2012, but this time around, she has said things are different.

    • Hillary Used the Word “Assassination” in 2008 Anti-Obama Campaign

      The Main Stream Media (MSM) is once again slinging mud at Donald Trump over his comments at a South Carolina rally. Hillary’s campaign joined in the claim that he encouraged violence against her. But Trump said nothing about violence. Absolutely nothing.(1)

      On the other hand in 2008, Hillary Clinton used the term “assassination” directed at Barack Obama. She used it to justify remaining in the race long after her chances had evaporated. That is “forgotten” now by the MSM amidst their unremitting attacks on Trump.

      Let us remind ourselves. It was May of 2008. Hillary had no hopes of winning the nomination since Obama had secured the delegates he needed. Many in the media were asking why she insisted on staying in the race.

      In an interview with the editorial board of a South Dakota paper, the Argus Leader, on May 23, she was asked why she was hanging on. It made no sense said the editors. In answer Clinton said that she was being pressured to drop out and that it was “ a mystery” to her why that pressure was being applied.

      She went on to say that assassination might yet occur in the presidential race, referring to Robert Kennedy, thus: ““My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

    • Through the Venal Looking Glass, the Donald’s Doing Swell

      Still, Trumpsters are a hardy if deluded lot – 70% reportedly believe that a Clinton win would be a rigged win – so they are making up new numbers, sources and claims of media bias to explain the debacle. Their Mainstream Media Accountability Survey offers a startling peek into their alternate universe, with 25 leading questions to prove that, yes, the media unfairly characterizes people of faith, ignores the failure of Obamacare, believes social justice activists are re-writing American history, takes their great leader’s statements out of context, turns a blind eye to Planned Parenthood’s worst actions, “wrongly attributes gun violence to 2nd Amendment rights” and does other bad stuff. Seeking to combat the obviously skewed polls, the right-wing Breitbart.com also did their own unassailable poll; alas, it likewise found that Clinton really is winning.

    • Ain’t no party like a Green Party: Jill Stein answers questions in townhall

      The Green Party’s presidential nominee, Jill Stein, went on CNN to directly address voters and their questions. Along with her running mate Amaju Baraka, Stein attempted to pitch her platform to those still undecided.

    • NYT: Trump Being “Advised” for Clinton Debates by Disgraced Roger Ailes

      Though Roger Ailes resigned his top seat at Fox News last month following accusations and lawsuits over sexual harassment of female employees, the New York Times reports Tuesday that Donald Trump has brought the disgraced executive aboard his campaign to “advise” him ahead of upcoming presidential debates.

    • Is Trump Sabotaging His Campaign Because He Never Really Wanted the Job in the First Place?

      Donald Trump never actually wanted to be President of the United States. I know this for a fact. I’m not going to say how I know it. I’m not saying that Trump and I shared the same agent or lawyer or stylist or, if we did, that that would have anything to do with anything. And I’m certainly not saying that I ever overheard anything at those agencies or in the hallways of NBC or anywhere else. But there are certain people reading this right now, they know who they are, and they know that every word in the following paragraphs actually happened.

      Trump was unhappy with his deal as host and star of his hit NBC show, “The Apprentice” (and “The Celebrity Apprentice”). Simply put, he wanted more money. He had floated the idea before of possibly running for president in the hopes that the attention from that would make his negotiating position stronger. But he knew, as the self-proclaimed king of the dealmakers, that saying you’re going to do something is bupkus — DOING it is what makes the bastards sit up and pay attention.

    • Donnie’s Little Lies are Huuuuuge

      An old saying asserts that falsehoods come in three escalating levels: “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Now, however, we’ve been given an even-higher level of intentional deception: Policy speeches by Donald Trump.

      Take his recent highly publicized address outlining specific economic policies he would push to benefit hard-hit working families. It’s an almost-hilarious compilation of Trumpian fabrications, including his bold, statesmanlike discourse on the rank unfairness of the estate tax: “No family will have to pay the death tax,” he solemnly pledged, adopting the right-wing pejorative for a tax assessed on certain properties of the dearly departed. Fine, but next came his slick prevarication: “American workers have paid taxes their whole lives, and they should not be taxed again at death.” Workers? The tax exempts the first $5.4 million of any deceased person’s estate, meaning 99.8 percent of Americans pay absolutely nothing. So Trump is trying to deceive real workers into thinking he’s standing for them, when in fact it’s his own wealth he’s protecting.

      What a maverick! What a shake-’em-up outsider! What an anti-establishment fighter for working stiffs!

    • Enhancing Turnout: A Primary Concern

      In some states — Minnesota, for example — an eligible citizen can both register and vote on the date of the primary, thereby permitting those who aren’t as politically involved to still choose a nominee. Most states, though, don’t permit that option, and most impose deadlines by which a registered voter must change his or her affiliation in order to vote a different ticket in the primary. New York state, taking that rule to the extreme, requires an individual to make such a change 193 days before its April primary, so it’s no surprise that turnout in New York hovered at around 20 percent. Few people pay attention to the election that far out, and fewer still have chosen a candidate by the deadline. This is especially troubling for the growing number of Americans who identify as independent, aligning themselves with a candidate rather than a party.

    • Voter ID Laws Are Finally Being Outed for Their Discriminatory Intent

      Over the last five years, there has been a dramatic rise in states enacting or strengthening laws that require voters to show ID at the polls. Supporters of voter ID laws claim that they are necessary to prevent voter fraud — but studies have consistently shown that this type of fraud is exceptionally rare. And in fact, laws like this disproportionately affect minority, elderly, and low-income groups that tend to vote in favor of progressive causes.

    • Green Party Town Hall to Make Case Against ‘Same Old Political Duopoly’

      Stein and her running partner, human rights activist and writer Ajamu Baraka, will hold the event on CNN at 9:00pm EDT. It will be moderated by the network’s Chris Cuomo, in what is poised to be Stein’s “most high-profile moment” in her bid to shake up the 2016 election, CNN writes.

    • What to watch at CNN’s Green Party town hall

      The Green Party is about to have a chance to show voters it is worth casting a ballot for.
      CNN on Wednesday evening is set to hold another of its live town hall events, this time with Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka.

      The prime-time event moderated the CNN’s Chris Cuomo is set to be Stein’s most high-profile moment in her bid to upset the 2016 election, four years after she first ran and failed to gain enough traction to make it into the general election debates.

      [...]

      Polls have consistently shown majorities of voters have unfavorable views of Clinton and many have said she is dishonest. In an interview on CNN this Monday, Stein appealed to these sentiments, slamming Clinton’s email practices as secretary of state and saying the issue raised “real questions about her competency.”

    • In Major Shake-Up, Trump Hires Breitbart Exec and Citizens United Propagandist Bannon to Lead Campaign

      In what is being billed as a major campaign shake-up, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump has hired Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon as his campaign’s chief executive, according to the New York Times.

    • “Extreme Vetting”: Trump Vows Ideological Test for Immigrants & Return to McCarthy-Era Repression

      Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump invoked the Cold War as he pledged to wage war against what he described as the “ideology of radical Islam” during a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday. Trump also vowed to institute “extreme vetting” of visa applicants. He also said he’d create a commission on radical Islam, keep Guantánamo Bay open and stop trying people accused of terrorism in civilian courts. For more, we speak with Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine. We also speak with Phyllis Bennis, author of “Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror.” And we speak with Linda Sarsour, director of the first Muslim online organizing platform, MPower Change, and co-founder of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York.

    • 2016 From the Top Down: Trump Looms Over Down-Ticket Races

      This is what the corporate “news” media wanted when they put Bernie Sanders on mute while talking about what a card Trump was as he tore a wide swath through the concept of decency. They wanted bedlam, and now they have it. Republicans are making for the exits of Trump Tower by the score. They’re talking about his extreme recklessness, about the risk of giving him control of the nukes, and most prominently, about replacing him at the top of the ticket. Sorry, folks: Unless God Herself boils out of Heaven and makes it so, you’re stuck with the yam ham sweet potato man until they sweep the rubble off the floor in November. Turn off the lights when you leave.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Donald Trump Says He’ll Turn Off The Internet For Terrorists [Ed: Not a new plan, with Bill Gates named]

      Almost no one covered this because everyone was focused on other stuff in the speech about his new “tests” for letting foreigners into the country. But this still remains a pretty big concern, in part because of just how technically clueless this is. Sure, we’ve seen some others suggest similarly dumb ideas, but no one seems to bother to think through how this might be done and what a mess it would create.

      There’s no way you can “disrupt” or block them from using the internet without also cutting off millions of innocent people — many of whom almost certainly rely on the internet for all sorts of important things. And, on top of that, any solution would be of only limited effectiveness in the long run anyway. There are increasingly new ways and new paths to get online — whether through wireless mesh networks or, eventually, from things like drones and satellites. Thinking that you can magically take an entire group of people off the internet is profoundly silly.

    • Former UC Davis Chancellor Katehi Way More Obsessed With Her Online Reputation Than Initially Thought

      Earlier this year, we discussed how UC Davis detailed in a report that it spent $175k with a reputation management firm to try bury the 2011 pepper-spraying incident that has become so infamous, as well as to bolster the positive reputation and search results of its former Chancellor, Linda Katehi. While Katehi was still Chancellor, she had issued something of a mea culpa that was unfortunately riddled with excuse-making and vendor-blaming, but in which she also appeared to take responsibility for the report’s contents. Students protested anyway, as they should have, given how the report detailed that Katehi was far more interested in her own reputation online than she was in any kind of reform of campus police. Which, if you’ll remember, was what kicked off all of the negative reporting starting in 2011 to begin with.

      But now a new report has been issued that makes it clear that the $175k with the one reputation management vendor was just the tip of the iceberg, and that Katehi’s obsession with her own online reputation was far more serious than anyone had known. Indeed, her attempts to meddle in her own online search results started long before the 2011 pepper-spraying incident.

    • NPR The Latest Website To Prevent You From Commenting Because It Simply Adores ‘Relationships’ And ‘Conversation’

      For several years now we’ve documented the rise in websites that shutter their comment sections, effectively muzzling their own on-site communities. Usually this is because websites are too lazy and cheap to moderate or cultivate real conversation, or they’re not particularly keen on having readers point out their inevitable errors in such a conspicuous location. But you can’t just come out and admit this — so what we get is all manner of disingenuous prattle from website editors about how the comments section is being closed because they just really value conversation, or are simply trying to build better relationships.

    • Enigma Software Countersued For Waging A ‘Smear Campaign’ Against Site It Claimed Defamed It

      Enigma Software — creator of the SpyHunter suite of malware/adware removal tools — recently sued BleepingComputer for forum posts by a third-party volunteer moderator that it claimed were defamatory. In addition, it brought Lanham Act trademark infringement claims against the site — all in response to a couple of posts that portrayed it in a negative light.

      The posts pointed out that the company had a history of threatening critics with litigation and had engaged in a variety of deceptive tactics, including triggering false positives to promote its spyware-cleaning products and placing paying customers on a periodic payment plan that ran in perpetuity under the guise of a one-time “removal” payment.

      A somewhat bizarre decision by the judge presiding over the case allowed Enigma’s questionable complaint to survive BleepingComputer’s motion to dismiss. In doing so, the decision also suggested the judge was willing to poke holes in Section 230 protections — something that’s been happening far too frequently in recent months.

      This bogus lawsuit should never have gotten this far. Enigma’s original defamation claims contained wording found nowhere in the posts it didn’t like, and the company had to make several inferences on behalf of the website it was suing to cobble together its complaint. The lack of a decent anti-SLAPP law in New York kept its defamation claims from being ejected on arrival. Faced with having to litigate its way out of this stupid mess, BleepingComputer has gone on the offensive.

      The assertions made in its countersuit suggest Enigma Computer has been — for quite some time — fighting speech it doesn’t like (the forum posts it sued over) with more speech. Unfortunately, if the “more speech” deployed is just shadiness and bogus claims (the same sort of thing it’s suing BC for), then “more speech” isn’t really a remedy.

    • The ‘Lolita’ test: Lawsuit alleges censorship at the Minnesota Fringe Festival

      One of the most compelling dramas at the Minnesota Fringe Festival didn’t play out under the lights. Two actors with minor parts performed entirely through off-stage narration. Reviews were mixed.

      Over several years of entries at Fringe, writer/performer/provocateur Sean Neely has forged a reputation. To some, he’s a daring artist whose bold entries stand out at a festival dedicated to challenging pieces. To others, he’s a publicity-hungry miscreant whose foul “art” doesn’t fit the term.

      Neely specializes in plays that star him telling a first-person story. A couple years ago, an unsuspecting audience watched him read from a “journal,” dropping racial epithets and sketching a plan for a mass shooting.

      At 2015’s festival, Neely acted the part of a man who confessed to his dying mother that he’d raped two women, and announced his desire to assault a third. He started each performance assuring the crowd the whole story was true.

      When it was over, audience members staggered out, many wondering aloud if they’d just witnessed the confession of a serial rapist.

      At one performance, police investigators sat in the crowd. Afterward, they met Neely backstage and told him someone had reported the show, but said they’d seen nothing criminal.

      Neely wants his performances to convey “the horror” of despicable acts by bringing audiences into the mind of the “actual perpetrator.”

    • #PowerShift Docu-Series Explores The Importance Of Social Media In Countries Where Censorship Is Rife

      In countries like Turkey, Iran, China and North Korea the local population are facing a new form of censorship: the censorship of the web.

      By controlling the flow of traffic on the internet, censorship of varying degrees has allowed these countries to block websites like YouTube, effectively ban certain hashtags on Twitter and then promote their own political agenda.

    • Activist group in bid to force Facebook change

      The activist group SumOfUs has stepped up pressure on Facebook after the social media giant censored the account of a black woman who, along with her five-year-old son, was caught in a standoff with police in Maryland in the US.

      The woman, 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, was later shot dead by the police. On her account, she was recounting the standoff that led to the injury of her son and, ultimately, her death.

      The incident occurred on 3 August and police claimed they made their request to Facebook after Gaines’ followers urged her not to comply with negotiators’ bids to make her surrender peacefully, according to NBC News.

    • Univision buys Gawker Media for $135 million

      Univision, which owns the largest Spanish-language television network in the United States, has recently been expanding its online holdings. Earlier this year it bought out Disney’s stake in the Fusion network and website. Univision also expanded investments in The Onion, a humor site, and The Root, a site that focuses on African-American news.

    • Peter Thiel: The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End With Gawker

      Last month, I spoke at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland because I believe our country is on the wrong track, and we need to solve real problems instead of fighting fake culture wars. I’m glad that an arena full of Republicans stood up to applaud when I said I was proud to be gay, because gay pride shouldn’t be a partisan issue. All people deserve respect, and nobody’s sexuality should be made a public fixation.

    • Infamous hacker Guccifer bounces back with leaked docs after Twitter ban

      INFAMOUS AND undeniably busy hacker Guccifer 2.0 was briefly banned from Twitter this weekend, but emerged unabashed with boasts about the leaking of contact details on 193 current and former members of Congress.

      Guccifer 2.0 had already made a name for himself, but won a lot of attention when he released the details of US Democrat politicians late last week.

      Affected potential candidates for Congress were shocked and appalled, and Guccifer somehow had his Twitter account suspended and some elements of his WordPress blog removed.

    • London police to create a troll-hunting social media unit

      In a bid to tackle rising levels of abuse on social media, London’s Metropolitan Police is to set up a five-person team of specialist officers tasked with targeting online trolls. Scotland Yard will spend £1.7 million on the unit, called the Online Hate Crime Hub, which will provide “targeted and effective services for victims”, offer advanced intelligence on offenders and strengthen links between police, communities and social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.

      Although UK authorities have taken steps to outlaw online abuse, victims have complained that police forces have been slow to act or been left feeling like their voices haven’t been heard. The Online Hate Crime Hub aims to better support those targeted by trolls, unmasking perpetrators who have operated under “veil of anonymity” provided by social media services.

    • London’s Met Police to set up an anti-troll brigade

      LONDON’S BOYS and ladies in blue will soon go on the virtual beat in a bid to seek out and destroy, or probably discourage, online trolls.

      Yes, the desk-based Metropolitan Police resource will be there to look out for hateful speakers and anyone who has things to say that are designed to be offensive and hurtful to others.

      Trolls are a problem, and not in the under the bridge sense, and can cause people to be upset and, on occasion, to actually leave social media networks.

      The Online Hate Crime Hub will deal with the trolling problems, just like Twitter is doing, and with the victims, according to the London Mayor’s Office and a range of reports.

    • Metropolitan Police to target online hate crime and abuse

      A new team of specialist police officers is being set up to investigate online hate crimes, including abuse on Twitter and Facebook.

      The London-based hub will include a team of five officers who will support victims and identify online abuse.

      The two-year pilot will cost £1.7m and has received £452,000 from the Home Office, the London Mayor’s office said.

    • Adoor Gopalakrishnan completes 50 years in cinema; criticises censorship and piracy
    • Adoor Gopalakrishnan against all kinds of censorship
    • Adoor Gopalakrishnan: I don’t believe in censorship
    • Misa critises media censorship
    • Amos Yee back in court over offensive videos
    • Amos Yee invokes court process to decide on trial position
    • Teenage blogger Amos Yee back in court
    • Trial of Singaporean vlogger Amos Yee ‘deeply worrying’ for speech freedom – UN expert
    • Singaporean teen blogger heads back to court to face fresh charges
    • Now Reading U.N. Backs Singaporean Blogger as More Jail Time Looms
    • Foul-Mouthed Teenager Challenges Singapore’s Puritanism
    • Amos Yee represents himself in court to stand trial against 8 charges

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Alleged NSA data dump contain hacking tools rarely seen

      A stolen cache of files that may belong to the National Security Agency contains genuine hacking tools that not only work, but show a level of sophistication rarely seen, according to security researchers.

      That includes malware that can infect a device’s firmware and persist, even if the operating system is reinstalled.

      “It’s terrifying because it demonstrates a serious level of expertise and technical ability,” said Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, an assistant professor at New York University’s school of engineering.

      He’s been among the researchers going over the sample files from the cache, after an anonymous group called the Shadow Brokers posted them online.

      Allegedly, the files were stolen from the Equation Group, a top cyberespionage team that may be connected with the NSA.

    • Hack of NSA tools delivers another blow to encryption bill backers

      The disclosure that hackers stole some of the National Security Agency’s most valuable hacking tools is reinforcing arguments made by the tech industry and digital privacy community against legislation that would mandate “back doors” into encrypted tech products.

    • Analyzing the NSA code breach in the context of recent cybersecurity events

      On Saturday, programming code for National Security Agency hacking tools was shared online. The content appears to be legitimate, but it is not clear if it was intentionally hacked or accidentally leaked. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and Paul Vixie of Farsight Security about where this development fits in the context of other recent cybersecurity breaches.

    • Is VA.gov Website Outage Linked To NSA Website Hack?

      Tuesday carried a curious coincidence when reports surfaced that there was a systemwide VA.gov website outage at the same time the NSA website was reportedly hacked.

    • Bad weather blamed for knocking NSA’s website offline for two days

      Mystery solved.

      The NSA says the weather was at fault for bringing down its website for almost two days.

      The shadowy intelligence agency tweeted mid-afternoon Wednesday that it was a “tech issue” related to Monday’s storm in the area of the government agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

      Issues with the NSA’s website were first noted around the same time on Monday.

      Kevin Beaumont, a security architect, said on Twitter that the NSA’s external services — including its website and other web-facing non-internal services — were brought offline, though he suspected that the agency itself “pulled [the] plug.”

    • What Exactly Are the NSA Hackers Trying to Accomplish?

      It’s old news by now that all of our most secret data is vulnerable, no matter how hard we try to protect it. If you’re surprised that the Russian government was apparently able to steal code developed by the National Security Agency, then you haven’t been paying attention to how consistently every level of computer security, in pretty much every sector of the government and in the private world, has been breached over and over again.

    • ShadowBrokers’ Leak Has ‘Strong Connection’ to Equation Group

      A high-stakes game of attribution started by a group claiming to have a cache of exploits belonging to the Equation Group took a somewhat definitive turn Tuesday afternoon. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab yesterday confirmed a connection between the tools currently up for auction by the ShadowBrokers and Equation Group exploits and malware that researchers at the security company uncovered and disclosed in February 2015.

    • Kaspersky confirms connection between ShadowBrokers’ malware and NSA-linked Equation Group

      Identical implementations of RC5 and RC6 encryption key-block ciphers confirm link between malware cache and Equation Group

    • Cisco confirms two of the Shadow Brokers’ ‘NSA’ vulns are real

      It’s looking increasingly likely that the hacking tools put up for auction by the Shadow Brokers group are real – after Cisco confirmed two exploits in the leaked archive are legit.

      The two exploits, listed in the archive directory as EPICBANANA and EXTRABACON, can be used to achieve remote code execution on Cisco firewall products. A vulnerability exploited by one of the tools was patched in 2011 but the other exploit’s vulnerability is entirely new – and there is no fix available at the moment.

      What’s worse is that the unpatched programming blunder has been lingering in Cisco hardware for years, since at least 2013. Whoever knew about the hole obviously didn’t tell the manufacturer of the vulnerable gear.

    • Cisco Acknowledges ASA Zero Day Exposed by ShadowBrokers

      Cisco has quickly provided a workaround for one of two vulnerabilities that was disclosed in the ShadowBrokers’ data dump and issued an advisory on the other, which was patched in 2011, in order to raise awareness among its customers.

      The networking giant today released advisories saying that it had acknowledged both flaws in its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), the newest of which was rated high severity; both of the vulnerabilities enable remote code execution.

    • The Situation Report: The Driving Forces Behind NSA’s Reorganization [Ed: So much bad news for the NSA this week. Quick! Push some puff piece out through a - cough cough - ‘journalist’]

      The National Security Agency has operated for decades under a well-defined mission: conduct foreign signals intelligence, support military operations, and defend national security systems from attacks. But major changes in the cyber threat landscape during the last few years have forced the agency to embrace a new reorganization strategy that officials argue is urgently needed to defend the nation from an onslaught of state-sponsored hacking attacks.

    • Was NSA Hacked? Leak from ‘Shadow Brokers’ suggests so, Russian intelligence suspected

      As our Cory Doctorow reported previously, a previously unheard of hacker group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers announced this week it had stolen a trove of ready-to-use cyber weapons from The Equation Group (previously), an advanced cyberweapons dealer believed to be operating on behalf of, or within, the NSA.

      The Shadow Brokers are auctioning the weaponized malware off to the highest bidder.

      From Moscow on Twitter today, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden laid out his theory for how the exploits were captured, and what relation that has to the revelations he made when he blew the whistle on illegal NSA spying in 2013.

    • News Sites Realizing That Relying On Facebook For Traffic Might Not Have Been Wise

      Over the years, we at Techdirt have tended to resist the kinds of “audience growth strategies” that many other news publications have taken — perhaps to our own detriment. I remember when Digg was the new hotness and generating lots of traffic for news sites. Someone approached us about getting our stories highly promoted on Digg and I told them I didn’t want to game the system, and would rather let people find us organically. I know plenty of other news sites did play plenty of games. The same thing happened once everyone (and more) left Digg for Reddit. Reddit did drive a lot of traffic to us for a few years, though it’s tapered off in the past few years. And, obviously, over the last couple of years, all the publications have been talking about Facebook and how it drives so much traffic.

      A year or so ago, I was at an event and chatting with a guy from another news site who nonchalantly tossed off the claim that “well, every news site these days now knows how to game Facebook for an extra 10 to 20 million views…” and I thought “huh, actually, I have no idea how to do that.” All of this might make me very bad at running a media site (I certainly know of some other news sites that used gaming social media to leverage themselves into massive acquisition offers from legacy media companies). But, to me, it meant being able to focus on actually creating good content, rather than figuring out how to game the system or who I should be sucking up to for traffic. I’ll admit to struggling with this issue at times — sometimes wondering if we’re missing out on people reading our stuff that would like it. And, every once in a while, we’ll do little things here or there to focus on “optimizing” our site for this or that source of traffic. But it’s never been a huge focus.

    • Civil Rights Coalition files FCC Complaint Against Baltimore Police Department for Illegally Using Stingrays to Disrupt Cellular Communications

      This week the Center for Media Justice, ColorOfChange.org, and New America’s Open Technology Institute filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission alleging the Baltimore police are violating the federal Communications Act by using cell site simulators, also known as Stingrays, that disrupt cellphone calls and interfere with the cellular network—and are doing so in a way that has a disproportionate impact on communities of color.

      Stingrays operate by mimicking a cell tower and directing all cellphones in a given area to route communications through the Stingray instead of the nearby tower. They are especially pernicious surveillance tools because they collect information on every single phone in a given area—not just the suspect’s phone—this means they allow the police to conduct indiscriminate, dragnet searches. They are also able to locate people inside traditionally-protected private spaces like homes, doctors’ offices, or places of worship. Stingrays can also be configured to capture the content of communications.

    • Complaint Says Baltimore Cops’ Use of Stingray Spy Tool Violates Civil Rights

      Civil rights groups filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Tuesday, alleging that the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) unlicensed use of the controversial cell phone surveillance tool known as Stingray violates the law through racial discrimination and willful interference with cell phone calls.

      The complaint, filed by the Center for Media Justice, Color of Change, and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, calls on the FCC to “address harms caused by BPD’s unauthorized use” of Stingrays, also known as cell site (C.S.) simulators.

      “The FCC has legal obligations to protect against harmful interference caused by unauthorized transmissions on licensed spectrum, to manage spectrum to promote the safety of life and property, to ensure availability of emergency calling services, and to strive to make communications networks available to the public without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex,” the plaintiffs write.

    • Snowden Calls ‘Shadow Brokers’ Hack of NSA Hackers ‘Significant’ Turn in Spy Wars
    • Demand California Fix CalGang, A Deeply Flawed Gang Database

      California’s gang database contains data on more than 200,000 people that police believe are associated with gangs, often based on the flimsiest of evidence. Law enforcement officials would have you believe that it’s crucial to their jobs, that they use it ever so responsibly, and that it would never, ever result in unequal treatment of people of color.

      But you shouldn’t take their word for it. And you don’t have to take ours either, or the dozens of other civil rights organizations calling for a CalGang overhaul. But you should absolutely listen to the California State Auditor’s investigation.

    • NSA cyber weapons ‘hacked’ by mysterious Shadow Brokers
    • Edward Snowden: Russia probably behind NSA leak

      On Monday, the security world was rocked by a sensational claim: A mysterious new group calling itself “Shadow Brokers” claimed it had hacked into an elite NSA-linked hacking group and was auctioning off cyberweapons.

    • Edward Snowden: Russia probably behind NSA leak
    • Privacy lawsuit over Gmail will move forward

      Thanks to a judge’s order, Google must face another proposed class-action lawsuit over its scanning of Gmail. The issue is a lingering headache for the search giant, which has faced allegations for years now that scanning Gmail in order to create personalized ads violates US wiretapping laws.

      In a 38-page order (PDF), US District Judge Lucy Koh rejected Google’s argument that the scanning takes place within the “ordinary course of business.”

      “Not every practice that is routine or legitimate will fall within the scope of the ‘ordinary course of business’,” Judge Koh wrote.

    • LinkedIn sues 100 individuals for scraping user data from the site

      Professional social network LinkedIn is suing 100 anonymous individuals for data scraping. It is hoped that a court order will be able to reveal the identities of those responsible for using bots to harvest user data from the site.

      The Microsoft-owned service takes pride in the relationship it has with its users and the security it offers their data. Its lawsuit seeks to use the data scrapers’ IP addresses and then discover their true identity in order to take action against them.

      LinkedIn says that a botnet has been used to gain access to user data which is then passed on to third parties. The site has a number of measures in place to prevent this type of data harvesting, but it seems that scrapers have found a way to circumvent these security restrictions. A series of automated tools — FUSE, Quicksand, Sentinel, and Org Block — are used to monitor suspicious activity and block scraping.

    • The Detectives Who Never Forget a Face

      A predator was stalking London. He would board a crowded bus at rush hour, carrying a Metro newspaper, and sit next to a young woman. Opening the newspaper to form a curtain, he would reach over and grope her. The man first struck one summer afternoon in 2014, on the No. 253 bus in North London, grabbing the crotch of a fifteen-year-old girl. She fled the bus and called the police, but by that time he had disappeared. A few months later, in October, he assaulted a twenty-one-year-old woman on the upper level of a double-decker as it approached the White Hart Lane stadium. She escaped to the lower level, but he followed her, and he continued to pursue her even after she got off the bus. She flagged down a passerby, and the man fled. In March, 2015, he groped a sixteen-year-old on the No. 168. On each occasion, the man slipped away from the crime scene by blending into a crowd of commuters. But, each time, he left a trace, because public buses in London are monitored by closed-circuit-television systems.

      When transit police played back the footage of each sexual assault, they saw the same middle-aged man in spectacles and a black parka. He had thinning hair and a dark mustache that was going gray. After consulting the electronic readers on each bus, investigators isolated one fare card that had been used on all three. If the pass had been bought with a credit card, it could be linked to the perpetrator. But the man had paid for it in cash.

      The transit police found themselves in a familiar predicament: a case in which a crime is captured on video but no one can identify the perpetrator. London has more than eight million residents; unless somebody recognizes a suspect, CCTV footage is effectively useless. Investigators circulated photographs of the man with the mustache, but nobody came forward with information. So they turned to a tiny unit that had recently been established by London’s Metropolitan Police Service. In Room 901 of New Scotland Yard, the police had assembled half a dozen officers who shared an unusual talent: they all had a preternatural ability to recognize human faces.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Third French city bans ‘burkini’ after brawl at beach

      A third French mayor has banned women from wearing “burkinis” after a brawl over the swimsuit broke out between residents of a Corsican village and beachgoers of North African descent.

      Around 100 police were called to a beach in the village of Sisco, near the island capital Bastia, on Saturday.

      The details of the fight itself are murky. Local press reported that it began when a group of teenagers and their families took photographs of women swimming in so-called burkinis — bathing suits that cover most of the body except for the face, feet and hands, which satisfy Islamic standards of modesty for women.

      A girl who witnessed the altercation told a slightly different version of the story: Three men started arguing with a tourist they accused of taking pictures of the women in burkinis. She recounted that version of events at an impromptu rally the following day in Bastia. French media that covered the event did not name her, identifying her only as “a minor.”

    • Tribes watch GOP effort to wrest control of federal land

      Two years after a Nevada cattle rancher and his allies took up arms in protest of U.S. government grazing fees, Republican Party activists are asking that the feds return certain lands to the states. The proposal was included this July in the 2016 GOP platform — essentially a wish-list of legislation, a vision for the next president and Congress.

      That’s a big deal in the West, where nearly half of the land is owned by the federal government. As of 2015, the Bureau of Land Management oversaw 248 million surface acres and approximately 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estates throughout the country.

      The Republican proposal hasn’t gotten as much attention in California as in other states, but is certainly on the minds of some Golden State officials and tribal leaders as the presidential election approaches.

    • Girls as young as NINE forced into marriage by Imams – and authorities are POWERLESS

      Forced marriages are supposed to be illegal in Angela Merkel’s nation – but a loophole in the law means officials cannot interfere in religious marriages – which sees hundreds of vulnerable children walk down the aisle.

      Shocking figures reveal how underage girls are forced by Imams into marriages and disappear from schools because they have to do household chores for their mother-in-laws or even move abroad.

      The Romani community sometimes marry off 13-year-old girls to 17-year-old boys in ancient ceremonies – in the middle of Germany.

      Although the exact figures remain a mystery, authorities in Bavaria counted 161 cases of marriage applicants under the age of 16 and 550 cases under the age of 18 by the end of April.

    • Police chiefs want new law that would compel people to reveal passwords

      Canada’s police chiefs want a new law that would force people to hand over their electronic passwords with a judge’s consent.

      The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has passed a resolution calling for the legal measure to unlock digital evidence, saying criminals increasingly use encryption to hide illicit activities.

      There is nothing currently in Canadian law that would compel someone to provide a password to police during an investigation, RCMP Assistant Commissioner Joe Oliver told a news conference Tuesday.

    • Michael Weiss and the Iran-U.S. Hardline Nexus That Led Iranian-American to Evin Prison

      It’s a long way from the campus of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire’s Great North Woods in 2003 to Tehran’s Evin Prison in 2016. But the path between them led to a fateful intersection of the lives of Michael D. Weiss (the Dartmouth student) and Siamak Namazi (a jailed Iranian-American). It was Weiss who helped put him there.

      Weiss, age 36, has been an itinerant freelance journalist and military interventionist gun-for-hire, plying his trade from Washington DC, to London, to the outlying lands of former Russian empire, to the ruins of Syria.

      With his role as CNN commentator and senior editor at the Daily Beast, he is a leading light among a new young generation of neoconservative intellectuals. These positions offer him the opportunity to shape American political discourse in much the same way Bill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century, shaped U.S. militarist- interventionist foreign policy for a decade or more after its famous 1998 letter to Bill Clinton.

    • U.S. Jails Fail to Meet Basic Needs of Growing Population of Women

      As incarceration rates nationwide begin to slowly fall after decades of growth, one group stands in stark opposition to the trend: women, whose imprisonment in jails is growing at alarming rates, often with devastating impacts extending to their children and families.

      Jails — where individuals are held in pretrial confinement, when they fail to meet probation requirements, or simply when they cannot afford bail — have become the country’s single largest driver of mass incarceration for both men and women, with some 11 million admissions annually. And while as a whole, men in jail continue to far outnumber women, the number of women has grown 14-fold since 1970, when three-quarters of the country’s counties had not a single woman in jail. That year, women accounted for 11 percent of all arrests — but they accounted for about 26 percent in 2014.

    • ‘On Contact’: Chris Hedges and Professor Eddie Glaude Discuss ‘The Great Black Depression’ (Video)

      “From housing to jobs to poverty levels, black America is struggling,” Princeton professor Eddie Glaude tells Chris Hedges in the Truthdig columnist’s “On Contact” show. “In so many ways since 2008, our communities have been in ruins.”

    • Alan Dershowitz’s “Advice” to Black Lives Matter

      The Boston Globe recently ran an article by Alan Dershowitz that was full of imperatives for the membership of Black Lives Matter, telling them in what they “must” do to make things right with supporters of Israel and to avoid being cast into the “dustbin of history”.

      Well I’ve got news for Mr. Dershowitz.

      Those of us that support Black Lives Matter are not particularly interested in anything that he—a serial bully, sycophant to the rich and famous and arch-apologist for Israel’s long and constant history of ethnic cleansing—says to us.

      Indeed, many us of find the pose he adopts, the all-too-familiar one of the Zionist—which is to say a person beholden to an ideology that grants civil rights on the basis of a person’s bloodlines—telling us what we can and cannot say about this or that subject to be not only offensive, but borderline comical.

    • America’s Criminal Injustice System

      Once upon a time, I was a journalist, covering war in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East. I made it my job to write about the victims of war, the “civilian casualties.” To me, they were hardly “collateral damage,” that bloodless term the military persuaded journalists to adopt. To me, they were the center of war. Now, I work at home and I’m a private eye — or P.I. to you. I work mostly on homicide cases for defense lawyers on the mean streets of Oakland, California, one of America’s murder capitals.

      Some days, Oakland feels like Saigon, Tegucigalpa, or Gaza. There’s the deception of daily life and the silent routine of dread punctured by out-of-the blue mayhem. Oakland’s poor neighborhoods are a war zone whose violence can even explode onto streets made rich overnight by the tech boom. Any quiet day, you can drive down San Pablo Avenue past St. Columba Catholic Church, where a thicket of white crosses, one for every Oaklander killed by gun violence, year by year, fills its front yard.

      Whenever I tell people I’m a private eye, they ask: Do you get innocent people off death row? Or: Can you follow my ex around? Or: What kind of gun do you carry?

      I always disappoint them. Yes, I do defend people against the death penalty, but so far all my defendants have probably been guilty — of something. (Often, I can only guess what.) While keeping them off death row may absolve me of being an accessory after the fact to murder, it also regularly condemns my defendants to life in prison until they die there.

    • US Transfers 15 Guantánamo Detainees as Rights Groups Push for Full Closure

      The Pentagon on Monday announced that 15 men would be transferred from Guantánamo Bay to the United Arab Emirates, in the largest single detainee shuffle under President Barack Obama’s administration.

      The transfer means there are now just 61 people left in the U.S. military prison in Cuba. The 15 men include 12 Yemenis and three Afghans.

      Amnesty International hoped the move indicated that the Obama administration would step up its efforts to close the controversial site.

      “This is a powerful sign that President Obama is serious about closing Guantánamo before he leaves office. With these transfers, Guantánamo’s population will be reduced by one-fifth,” said Naureen Shah, Amnesty International USA’s security and human rights program director.

      “It is vital he keep the momentum. If President Obama fails to close Guantánamo, the next administration could fill it with new detainees and it could become permanent. It would be an extremely dangerous legacy of allowing people to be detained without charge, in an endless global war, practically until they die,” Shah said.

    • Behind the Scenes at the Lutheran Vote Against the Israeli Occupation

      For all their worry, Wacker-Farrand and her fellow organizers had some reason to hope for a favorable vote on C2. Days earlier, the assembly had voted by an overwhelming majority (82 percent) to adopt another Memorial regarding Palestine. According to that Memorial, the ELCA must urge “U.S. Representatives, Senators and the Administration to take action requiring that, to continue receiving U.S. financial and military aid, Israel must comply with internationally recognized human rights standards.” Such standards include putting a stop to Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.

    • Is Another Cheney Headed to Washington?

      Following surely in the footprints of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney won a solid victory in the Wyoming Republican primary on Tuesday and will now be in contention for the U.S. House seat that he once held.

      “I look forward very much to moving forward in the general election, unified and focused on making sure we send the strongest conservative voice to Washington,” declared Cheney, a fierce neoconservative and war hawk, after defeating her 8 primary opponents.

      According to the Casper Star Tribune, with 82 percent of precincts counted, Cheney took 40 percent of the vote.

      She now faces Democrat Ryan Greene in the general election. According to the Tribune, “She will campaign on a platform of repealing regulation deemed harmful to Wyoming, such as the Clean Power Plan, and in support of a strong national defense.” Her website also lists Wyoming coal as a major priority and the candidate strongly opposes women’s right to an abortion.

    • This Dream That Came True

      Wednesday marked the final day of the 47th anniversary of Woodstock, that iconic celebration of peace, love, mud, music and community in upstate New York whose promise still resonates for those of a certain age. Over 400,000 people gathered in the summer of 1969 in a massive muddy field at Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel – not Woodstock, which turned it down – for an event originally aimed at raising money for a recording studio, not making cultural history. Amid fears no one would come, it was advertised as open to the public for a $6.50 ticket – until the fences came down and the crowds surged in for free.

    • A Good Cop

      In the 1990s, cop reporting was not a strength of the New York Times, and I’d often get calls from the Metro desk asking if I could help match something or other that had been in the tabs. I was Irish and Catholic and had grown up in Brooklyn along with other kids who wound up “on the job.” Oh, and I was an ex-sportswriter, too. I guess I had the pedigree of a cop reporter, if not any demonstrated talent.

      I got a call at home one night in March of 1996. Earlier that day, John Timoney, the outgoing first deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department, had been given a hero’s reception during a promotion ceremony at Police Headquarters. It amounted to an act of collective insubordination, for Timoney was exiting the department after having been passed over by Mayor Rudy Giuliani to succeed Bill Bratton as commissioner.

      The Times, I guess, hadn’t had anyone at the ceremony, and now we needed to catch up. No one had a number for Timoney, and the next edition closed in 40 minutes. It so happened that I’d once been introduced to Timoney, by Mike McAlary of the Daily News (Irish, Catholic, a former sportswriter, and a great cop reporter). I managed to track down Timoney’s home number.

      Timoney took my call. He was great, and, miracle of miracles, he was on the record. Timoney had been born in Dublin and raised in Northern Manhattan, his dad a New York City doorman. He’d been a beat cop, but had also earned master’s degrees in American history and urban planning. He was a reader of literature and an expert in police shootings. He’d been the youngest four-star chief in the history of the department.

    • Ultra-Orthodox paper ‘makes history’ with partial photo of Hillary Clinton

      The photo was first picked up by a Jewish blog, Only Simchas, which wrote about it under the headline: “History Made: Yated Ne’eman Publishes a Picture of Hillary Clinton. A Woman!” The photo shows only Clinton’s hairdo and raised arm, but it goes further than other images used to illustrate articles about Clinton in the ultra-Orthodox press. In the past, editors of Yated Ne’eman and other papers have instead used political cartoons or photos of Clinton’s husband, Bill.

    • 1999 Rape Case Swirls Around Nate Parker and His Film ‘The Birth of a Nation’

      “The Birth of a Nation,” a drama about the Nat Turner slave rebellion, upended the Sundance Film Festival, selling for a record $17.5 million and instantly vaulting to front-runner of next year’s Oscar race.

      Scheduled to be released Oct. 7, the film is now attracting unwanted attention because of renewed interest in a 17-year-old case in which the film’s director, writer and star, Nate Parker, was accused — and later acquitted — of rape when he was a student at Penn State.

      His college roommate, Jean McGianni Celestin, who received a credit on the movie, was also charged. Last week Deadline.com and Variety asked Mr. Parker about the case, and on Tuesday, Variety reported that his accuser committed suicide in 2012 at age 30.

    • Soul-Searching in Germany

      The elections are complicated. The vicious Alternative for Germany (AfD), based on anti-foreigner feelings, will now make it into the local parliament and all twelve borough councils, a frightening perspective. The other parties will have nothing to do with them (as yet, anyway). Since the Free Democrats and Pirates have scant hope of meeting the 5% requirement for the parliament, four main parties will compete. The necessary mating this will require to reach a ruling 50% majority recalls the old riddle about how to cross a river with a wolf, a goat and a head of cabbage. Who with whom? The SPD, polling best in Berlin with 23%, doesn’t want to keep on with the Christian Democrats (CDU), now standing at just 18%. And the sum of those numbers would no longer win half the seats.

    • Washington Post Reveals Immigrant Family Detention Center Made for-Profit Prison Company $1 Billion, in No-Bid Deal

      The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) used an existing contract with a private prison company to reach a separate deal with the firm, without having to publicly solicit bids for a new detention center.

      ICE and the Corrections Corporation of America agreed on the four-year, $1 billion no-bid deal in 2014, to rapidly implement an Obama administration initiative designed to deter the arrival of asylum seekers from Central America.

      The terms of the agreement were reported on Monday in an investigation published by The Washington Post.

      The paper said that the deal was hastily struck after Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson determined that the US “could cut down the surge [of migration] only by demonstrating that asylum seekers wouldn’t receive leniency.”

      “This whole thing [was] building and reaching an unsustainable level,” former Johnson chief of staff, Christian Marrone, told the Post. “We had to take measures to stem the tide.”

      The paper noted that those seeking asylum in the US, “until two years ago, had rarely been held in detention.”

    • Pentagon Issues First Update To Domestic Surveillance Guidelines In 35 Years, Not All Of It Good

      Cody Poplin at Lawfare points out that the Defense Department has just issued an update on rules governing its intelligence collection activities — the first major update in over 30 years. These would directly affect the NSA, which operates under the Defense Department.

      The most significant alteration appears to be to retention periods for US persons data. While everything is still assumed to be lawful under Executive Order 12333 and DoD Directive 5240.1, the point at which a record is deemed to be “collected” — starting the clock on the retention period — has changed.

    • America’s Cult of the Police

      It didn’t used to be this way. From the first whispers about freedom from Britain, America’s DNA has included a healthy distrust of government authority. It is a distrust enshrined in our constitution with its checks and balances and, specifically regarding police, in the Third and Fourth Amendments.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • The FCC Keeps Running Into Opposition With Its Plan to Open Up Cable Boxes

      These days, one item jumps out more than any other; after all, it’s not necessarily the service itself that’s overpriced these days if you get a bundle (and you use your landline phone plan). Cable box rental fees, however, are out of control. Some providers have even hiked rates past the $10 per box per month mark, so the hardware costs more than a Netflix subscription. And that doesn’t even include DVR fees! If you buy a TiVo or build a home theater PC, you can buy a tuner that uses a CableCARD, but the card itself still has to be rented from the cable company, even if the price may be less than that of a box.

      There has to be a better way to do this.

      The FCC agrees, and in February, it started to make the steps to push forward a proposal for an alternative. “Instead of mandating a government-specific standard that might impede innovation,” its statement explained, “the Commission recommends that these three streams be available to the creators of competitive solutions using any published, transparent format that conforms to specifications set by an independent, open standards body.” The cable companies, not wanting to abandon a source for $19.5 billion inannual revenue, have their own proposal, as well. Their proposal is built around “enforcing an industry-wide commitment to develop and deploy video ‘apps’ that all large MVPDs would build to open HTML5 web standards.”

    • Cutting the Cord With Playstation Vue

      We have a Roku that provides the streaming channels (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crackle, Spotify, and Pandora).

      [...]

      Overall, we love the new setup. The Playstation 4 is a great center-point for our entertainment system. It is awesome having a single remote, everything on one box and in one interface. I also love the higher-fidelity experience – the Roku is great but the interface looks a little dated and the apps are rather restricted.

    • Comcast Fancies Itself The Tesla Of Cable

      Despite offering some of the worst customer service ever documented, Comcast has been busy lately trying to convince anybody who’ll listen that it’s on the cusp of becoming a Silicon-Valley-esque innovation giant. That’s an uphill climb for those familiar with the company’s often biannual TV rate hikes, attacks on net neutrality, or the company’s ongoing quest to sock uncompetitive markets with usage caps. High prices aren’t just a result of Comcast’s monopoly domination, you see, they’re reflections of the incredible value being delivered unto consumers by an innovation engine, the likes of which the universe has never seen.

    • US Government Announces Go-Ahead For IANA Transition By October

      The United States Commerce Department National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) this week confirmed it will hand over oversight of the internet domain name system root zone and other core internet infrastructure registries to the semi-private Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • In the fight for our genes, could we lose what makes us human?

      In the last 70 years we’ve come a long way towards unraveling the building blocks of human life. The human genome has been identified, sequenced, mapped, decoded, and interfered with. We’ve used this knowledge to clone Dolly the sheep, discover breast cancer-causing genes and create stem cells from our own skin. And now we stand on an exciting precipice: perfecting technologies that allow us to edit our genes with precision.

      But as we embark further on the gene revolution and allow corporations and governments to deconstruct human beings down to their most basic parts, we have to question whether we may lose not just some of those parts in the process but something much greater and more important—what it means to be truly human.

      Let’s start with the technology. At the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel called Humankind and the Machine brought together leading experts in technology, governance, and bioethics to discuss new technologies that are sure to have a major impact on humanity: artificial intelligence, cyber-security, genetics, and space colonization.

    • End Price-Gouging on Drugs Developed With Public Dollars

      The U.S. invests more than $32 billion each year in drug and biomedical research. This major public investment in drug research empowers the government to make drugs affordable under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. But, even when drug companies price critical drugs at staggeringly high prices, the government has never used this authority. Why doesn’t the federal government ensure reasonable prices for drugs developed with public funds—an appropriate return on the public’s investment?

      According to Peter Arno and Michael H Davis, Bayh-Dole revises the U.S. patent law so that the federal government can ensure new drugs developed in part or whole with federal dollars are priced reasonably. Put differently, when federal dollars support research on a new drug, the drug manufacturer is supposed to price the drug reasonably. If the manufacturer does not, the federal government has the right to authorize another manufacturer to license the drug and sell it at a reasonable price.

    • US Agencies Seek Comment On Updated Antitrust Guidelines For IP Licensing

      In an age when licensing of intellectual property plays a critical role in business strategy, the United States Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are seeking public comment on a proposed update of the antitrust guidelines for IP licensing.

      “The IP Licensing Guidelines, which state the agencies’ antitrust enforcement policy with respect to the licensing of intellectual property protected by patent, copyright and trade secret law and of know-how, were issued in 1995 and are now being updated,” the agencies said in a release.

      The proposed update and related information is available here.

      Changes include consideration of key court case outcomes, incorporating the recent US Defense of Trade Secrets law, and the change from a 17-year to a 20-year patent term agreed in the 1994 World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Enforcement aspects of the guidelines are unchanged in the proposed update, the agencies said.

    • Trademarks

      • Citigroup Gets First Loss In Trademark Suit Against AT&T For Saying ‘Thanks’

        A couple of months back, I brought to you a trademark suit initiated by Citigroup against AT&T that amost perfectly distilled both how ridiculously litigious trademark law has become and exactly how facepalm-inducingly lax the standards for trademark approval are with our friends over at the USPTO. The summary of the lawsuit can be described thusly: Citigroup has sued AT&T because the latter has branded messaging that says “thanks” and “thank you,” and Citigroup has a trademark on the term “thankyou.” And if your forehead hasn’t smacked your desk yet, you have a stronger constitution than this author.

        Included within Citigroup’s hilarious filing was a request for an injunction by the court barring AT&T from continuing any of this gratitude towards its customers over the immense harm it was doing to the bank. Well, the court has ruled on that request by refusing to issue the injunction, all while patiently laying out within the court document all of the reasons why the court will almost certainly eventually dismiss this suit entirely.

    • Copyrights

      • Nintendo Shuts Down Fan Remake Of 25 Year Old Metroid 2 Game Because It Can’t Help Itself

        For gamers who are fans of Nintendo, it’s always helpful to remember that Nintendo hates you. The general idea behind that mantra is that Nintendo, when faced between embracing the creativity and love that comes from its fans and acting like over-protective toddlers when it comes to any sort of its intellectual property, will always choose the latter. The company has issued takedowns for fan-made Mario Bros. levels just as it released Mario Maker, it as made a habit of shutting down fan-films depicting Nintendo characters, and it has even shut down fan get-togethers centered around beloved Nintendo properties just because they aren’t “official.” To be clear, Nintendo certainly can ensure that all of this free advertising for its products is never seen or enjoyed by the public legally, but it doesn’t have to. It could instead embrace the love of its fans and work out an arrangement that would protect its IP while still allowing its fans to be fans.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/18/linux-foundation-makes-pnda/feed/ 0 Links 15/8/2016: Linux 4.8 RC2, Glimpses at OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 http://techrights.org/2016/08/15/glimpses-at-openmandriva-lx-3-0/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/15/glimpses-at-openmandriva-lx-3-0/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2016 23:59:30 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94931

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • One Of The Best Note-Taking Apps ‘Simplenote’ Is Now Open Source

    Simplenote, a lean but powerful note-taking app, has been made open source by its owner Automattic. Released under the GPLv2 license, developers can use its code for different platforms and take the app in new directions. But, it seems like the server-side code of the app is not yet released.

  • Research reports explore the open-source software market

    The mantra “you get what you pay for” doesn’t always to software. Because sometimes the best software really is free.

  • Events

    • Where in the World is the OSI?

      If you’re out and about at conferences this month, we hope that you’ll have a chance to attend one of these talks by OSI Board Members. If you’re an OSI member and you’ll be giving at talk about open source topics, please get in touch. We’d love to let folks know about your talk!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 49 for Linux gains plugin-free support for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video

        The Linux version of Firefox 49 is due for a proper release in September, although preview versions are currently available for those who want to try it out. With Widevine being free for anyone to use, Firefox’s adoption of plugin-free support for it could well mean that the standard is embraced by a larger number of sites. Support for DRM makes the protocol particularly appealing to content providers, as does the lack of license fee.

      • Firefox 49 for Linux Will Let You Watch Netflix Without Plugins

        Firefox is to begin supporting the Google Widevine CDM on Linux from next month, allowing native, plugin-free playback of encrypted media content like Netflix.

      • Firefox 49 To Offer Linux Widevine Support, Firefox Also Working On WebP Support

        There are two exciting bits of Mozilla Firefox news to pass along today: Winevine support on Linux out-of-the-box to handle Netflix and friends. Separately, WebP image support is being worked on.

        Trailing the Windows and OS X support, Winevine is being advertised as supported out-of-the-box now on Firefox for Linux. This change will happen for the upcoming Firefox 49 release.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • This Theme Pack Makes GIMP Look and Behave like Photoshop

      We’re all aware The GIMP is the best free alternative to Photoshop — but is there a way to make it look like Photoshop, too? This is open-source software we’re talking about, of course there is a way! Why Use a GIMP Photoshop Theme?

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing/Legal

    • VMware survives GPL breach case, but plaintiff promises appeal

      Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig’s bid to have VMware’s knuckles rapped for breaching the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) has failed, for now, after the Landgericht Hamburg found in Virtzilla’s favour.

      The Software Freedom Conservancy backed Hellwig when he alleged that some of his contributions to the Linux kernel have found their way into VMware’s very proprietary flagship ESXi product, in a component called “vmklinux”. Hellwig and the Conservancy believe that as ESXi includes code licensed under the GPLv2, ESXi should itself be released as open source code under the same licence.

    • Linux developer loses case against VMware

      Hellwig claimed the outfit had violated version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence and says he will appeal against the verdict.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Open data on open data portals

        The Open Data Inception project presents a comprehensive list of more than 2600 open data portals all over the world. The information is geotagged so it can be searched by topic as well as country.

        The list has been compiled by the Open Data Soft company as a showcase. They wanted to bring together as many open data resources as they could, and present these on a map per country for easy browsing.

        The creators aim to maintain the list and ask visitors to contribute links to portals and datasets that are currently not yet in the list. The dataset itself has also been made available as open data.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Chemists to get their own service for preprint sharing

        Physics researchers have a long history of sharing work they’re preparing for publication in order to solicit suggestions and comments from their peers. Like so many things, this behavior migrated to the Internet: Cornell University’s arXiv server hosts over 1.1 million documents, many of which later appeared in formal peer-reviewed literature.

        The physics and astronomy communities see arXiv as beneficial, and biologists put together their own database called The BioRxiv. Now it appears that chemists are going to get their own equivalent. The American Chemical Society is asking for input from the research and publishing communities about what they’d like to see in a ChemRxiv.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Amazon Announces Application Load Balancer for the Cloud

        Load balancers have been part of the networking landscape for decades, more often than not in recent years being lumped together under the category of Application Delivery Controllers (ADC). Various load balancing services have been available in the cloud, but this week Amazon announced a significant new entrant – the Application Load Balancer for Elastic Load Balancing.

      • Carnegie Mellon U aims to unlock industrial 3D printing potential with new consortium that includes GE, Alcoa and United States Steel

        You don’t need to be an expert to see that 3D printing is slowly finding its way into the hands of designers throughout the world. From prototype airplane parts to hip replacements and implantable organs; 3D printing is appearing everywhere. But for the 3D printing revolution to really pick up steam, a major push or technological breakthrough is needed to make this a truly accessible and affordable large-scale manufacturing option. In an attempt to realize that breakthrough, Carnegie Mellon University has announced a new consortium that brings together major companies, nonprofit institutes and the US government. Together, they will be working to fully unlock the potential of industrial 3D printing.

Leftovers

  • Kenny Baker, ‘Star Wars’ Actor Behind R2-D2, Dead at 81

    Kenny Baker, the actor who portrayed the robot R2-D2 in six Star Wars films, died Saturday after a long illness. He was 81.

  • Orkut, once India’s social media darling, is back

    In 2004, a Turkish engineer at Google, Orkut Buyukkokten, started the social network Orkut.com. According to a Forbes report, it gathered 27 million users by 2009. Most of them were from India and Brazil. With time, its sheen wore off as Facebook and Twitter got ahead in the race. When Google finally shut it down in September 2014, the internet saw nostalgic tributes. For many, Orkut was their introduction to social networking. Now, 41-year-old Buyukkokten is back in the game. His new social network, Hello, is already off the ground and active in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Ireland, among other countries. The location-based social network is due for launch in India by September. Buyukkokten spoke to TOI over a video call from San Francisco and discussed his time spent at Google, building Orkut, and the way we are online.

  • Kenyan Start-Ups Make The Ride Tough For Uber

    After making a dramatic entry into the African market late last year that was marked by as much drama as elsewhere in the world, global taxi hailing service Uber is facing tough times in the Kenyan market, thanks to a number of innovative tech start-ups that are giving the company a run for its money.

    Local start-ups in the East African country have come up with innovative apps similar to that of Uber, but which have additional features suited to the local market situation and demands.

    While Uber in Kenya has a provision for cash payments in a country where electronic payments remain a preserve of the elite, local firms have come up with a payment feature where fares can be paid by use of the popular and ever-growing mobile money service M-Pesa, a Kenyan creation that has caught the attention of the entire world of money transfers.

  • Population projections reveal shocking future trends

    Finland is home to fewer children now than at anytime in the last century. In a decade the number of pensioners will exceed the number of working-aged adults. The latest projections from Statistics Finland paint a sparse and elderly future.

  • Science

    • Switzerland Stars, China In Top 25, Innovation Rating Finds

      A global innovation rating has found Switzerland to be the most innovative nation in the world for the sixth consecutive year even if some other countries are on its heels. The lead group of countries continued to be mainly composed of most economically advanced nations, while innovation is lagging in many developing countries, but China and India made notable leaps up the list this year. The rankings stirred a broader discussion today of the shifting global economy and the role of innovation, including a call for a new approach to global innovation governance.

    • Is 5G technology dangerous? Early data shows a slight increase of tumors in male rats exposed to cellphone radiation

      As wireless companies prepare to launch the next generation of service, there are new questions about the possible health risks from radiation emitted by cellphones and the transmitters that carry the signals.

      Concerns about the potential harmful effects of radiofrequency radiation have dogged mobile technology since the first brick-sized cellphones hit the market in the 1980s.

      Industry and federal officials have largely dismissed those fears, saying the radiation exposure is minimal and that the devices are safe. Incidences of and deaths from brain cancer have shown little change in recent years despite the explosion in cellphone usage, they note.

    • Vikings Possibly Spread Smooth-Riding Horses Around the World

      This week, equestrian athletes at the Rio Olympics are competing in an event called “dressage,” in which they guide their horses to perform complex combinations of different gaits, including the walk, trot and canter.

      One type of footwork (or hoofwork, if you will) you likely won’t see is an “amble,” a sometimes comical four-beat gait that’s faster than a walk, slower than a gallop and well-suited for smooth, long rides.

  • Hardware

    • Storage Solutions – All You Need To Know

      Being a computer user, at some point of time we all were introduced to the fear of losing our data. I know it sounds familiar because we all love our data. The data can be of many types but most importantly you would not like to know that your precious pictures have been deleted due to new operating system installation or hard drive has been damaged. In this article, I’ll discuss the importance of cloud storage and different popular cloud storage that provide more free space.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Social costs of Flint’s lead drinking water crisis equal $395 million

      The social costs stemming from dangerous levels of lead in the drinking water of Flint, Mich., such as the effect on children’s health, amount to $395 million, according to an analysis by a professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

    • Patient groups that backed new cancer drug received £60,000 from pharma firm

      THREE patient groups that successfully lobbied for a new leukaemia drug to be on the NHS received over £60,000 from the pharma firm behind the product.

      One of the charities relies on Big Pharma for 70 per cent of its funding and has a trustee with financial links to Janssen-Cilag, which manufactures the Ibrutinib drug.

      Professor David Miller, an academic who is also a transparency campaigner, said the practice of healthcare giants funding these groups “distorts” the decision-making process.

    • Grizzly Delisting and the Irony of Public Comments

      When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asks for public comments, they don’t mean you, and they don’t mean me. In fact, they don’t mean the public at all.

      Dan Ashe, the Director of the USFWS, highlighted the public’s ability to make public comments in his March 3rd announcement of the agency’s proposal to delist grizzlies from the endangered species list and he made much ado about the importance of the public’s input.

      Did he mean it? In a word, no.

    • Florida Keys Residents Resist Controversial GMO Mosquito Trial

      Residents of the Florida Keys are up in arms over a plan to release genetically-modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Key Haven neighborhood and are trying to get the word out about the trial, which they say would make them “lab rats” in their own community.

      The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the controversial study by U.K.-firm Oxitec earlier this month, amid renewed fears over mosquito transmission of the Zika virus.

      “We need to help educate the public about the very real, scientifically based problems with this genetically modified mosquito release,” Mara Daly, who has been helping organize a protest at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control Board meeting Tuesday afternoon, told the Miami Herald.

    • Protest planned at bug board over genetically modified mosquitoes

      A Keys woman says a protest Tuesday at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control Board will target the release of genetically modified mosquitoes.

      “We will be outside with signs protesting peacefully. I think this will be the opportunity for moms, teachers, nurses to have a voice. I just wanted to give people a little push to do it,” said Mara Daly, who works at a Key Largo salon. “It’s to let them know there are concerns from people they have not heard from. Maybe the fat lady has already sung, I don’t know.

      The meeting starts at 3 p.m. at the board’s building, 503 107th St. in Marathon. Agenda items include an update on the Zika virus and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Aug. 5 approval to allow a test release of GM Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the Lower Keys neighborhood of Key Haven. Aedes aegypti spread Zika, which can cause birth defects in the children of pregnant women, and whose symptoms include fever and pain in the joints, bones and muscles.

    • Holding Monsanto to Account: the People’s Tribunal in The Hague

      As one of the world’s leading seed and chemical companies, Monsanto’s activities affect us all.

      Its best-selling weedkiller is made from a chemical called glyphosate that the World Health Organisation has found to probably cause cancer. Yet its use is now so widespread that traces are found in one out of every three loaves of bread in the UK.

      That’s why earlier this year, in the lead up a EU decision about whether to relicense glyphosate, we mounted public pressure on decision makers through our Monsanto honest marketing campaign.

  • Security

    • Hacker demonstrates how voting machines can be compromised [Ed: Microsoft inside]

      Concerns are growing over the possibility of a rigged presidential election. Experts believe a cyberattack this year could be a reality, especially following last month’s hack of Democratic National Committee emails.

      The ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee sent a letter Monday to the Department of Homeland Security, saying in part: “Election security is critical, and a cyberattack by foreign actors on our elections systems could compromise the integrity of our voting process.”

      Roughly 70 percent of states in the U.S. use some form of electronic voting. Hackers told CBS News that problems with electronic voting machines have been around for years. The machines and the software are old and antiquated. But now with millions heading to the polls in three months, security experts are sounding the alarm, reports CBS News correspondent Mireya Villarreal.

    • Another Expert Weighs in on Election Hacking

      Today the old Gray Lady, the New York Times, no less, weighed in on election hacking in an Op/Ed piece titled The Election Won’t be Rigged. But it Could be Hacked. Of course, anyone who’s read my second cybersecurity thriller, The Lafayette Campaign, a Tale of Election and Deceptions, already knew that.

      The particular focus of the NYT article is that since voting can be hacked, it’s vital to have a way to audit elections after they occur to see whether that has been the case, and to reveal the true electoral result.

    • Linux.Lady Trojan Turns Redis Servers to Mining Rigs
    • New release: usbguard-0.5.11
    • New release: usbguard-0.5.12
    • New FFS Rowhammer Attack Hijacks Linux VMs

      Researchers from the Vrije University in the Netherlands have revealed a new version of the infamous Rowhammer attack that is effective at compromising Linux VMs, often used for cloud hosting services.

    • Minica – lightweight TLS for everyone!

      A while back, I found myself in need of some TLS certificates set up and issued for a testing environment.

      I remembered there was some code for issuing TLS certs in Docker, so I yanked some of that code and made a sensable CLI API over it.

    • Guy Tricks Windows Tech Support Scammers Into Installing Ransomware Code

      A man named Ivan Kwiatkowski managed to install Locky ransomware on the machine of a person who was pretending to be a tech support executive of a reputed company. Ivan wrote his experiences in a blog post tells that how the tech support scammer fell into the pit he dug for innocent people.

    • Fixing Things

      Recent reports that TCP connections can be hijacked have kicked an anthill at Kernel.org. Linus and others have a patch.

    • Linux TCP flaw fix likely in next stable release

      A patch to fix a weakness in the transmission control protocol used in the Linux kernel since 2012, which could lead to remote hijacking of Internet connections, is available in the public stable queue tree and is likely to be included in the next stable release.

    • Linux Has a TCP Flaw, Researchers Find
    • Can’t Trust This!
    • Monday’s security advisories
    • Running a Hackathon for Security Hackers

      H1-702 was one piece in a picture to ensure HackerOne is the very best platform and community for hackers to hack, learn, and grow.

    • It’s the Year of Application Layer Security in Public Clouds

      The cloud continues to be a significant force in enterprise computing and technology adoption. Enterprises that have adopted cloud have seen slashes capital expenses, increased agility, centralized information management, and scaled their businesses quickly.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Isis ranks dwindle to 15,000 amid ‘retreat on all fronts’, claims Pentagon

      A top US commander has claimed the military campaigns in Iraq and Syria have taken 45,000 enemy combatants off the battlefield and reduced the total number of Islamic State fighters to as few as 15,000.

      Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland said both the quality and number of Isis fighters was declining, while warning that it was difficult to determine accurate numbers. Earlier estimates put the number of Islamic State fighters at between 19,000 and 25,000 but US officials say the range is now roughly 15,000 to 20,000.

    • ISIL fighter number falls to 15,000 as Manbij capture Cuts off Route to Europe

      Without Manbij, Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) will find it more difficult to import weapons and foreign fighters to al-Raqqa. Other routes still open to it, such as Jarabulus, are also under pressure and could be the next target of the Syrian Democratic Forces. It is much further to import foreign munitions.

      Daesh as a territorial power is coming to a slow end; Daesh as a source of terrorism still has a good long run.

    • No, Obama did not found ISIL, Mr. Trump: That was the GOP

      There had been no al-Qaeda in Iraq before Bush invaded. Operatives flocked there to fight the US troops, and gathered under the rubric first of al-Tawhid of the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But al-Zarqawi initially had bad relations with Usama Bin Laden. In order to fight the US presence, he made up and joined al-Qaeda and formed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. AFter he was killed by the US in 2006, the new, Iraqi leadership declared itself the Islamic State of Iraq and deepened their al-Qaeda affiliation.

    • Jeremy Corbyn interview: ‘There are not 300,000 sectarian extremists at large’

      I have just heard the result. Very disappointed. People joined the Labour party in order to take part in the party and were specifically told that they were able to vote in the leadership election and that was decided by the high court that they could. The appeal court has said they can’t and I would imagine that those who brought the case will be considering whether or not to take it to the supreme court.

    • Trashing Nicaragua’s Success

      The New York Times is the best old-style, broad-sheet newspaper in America; it still covers the world with resourceful and enterprising reporters and commentators. But, then, there’s the other New York Times, the imperial rag that prints editorials like the one on August 5 titled “ ‘Dynasty,’ the Nicaraguan Version.” It’s not that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is a saint or even a model democrat; it’s that the editorial department and the writer who penned this sloppy embarrassment are still playing a version of the Reagan Cold War game of the 1980s. Those days are over; one hopes for something a bit more worldly.

    • Seymour Hersh on White House Lies About bin Laden’s Death, Pakistan and the Syrian Civil War

      In The Killing of Osama bin Laden, Seymour Hersh offers a compelling alternative version to the details that led to bin Laden’s death. He also investigates unproven assertions justifying the US’s thus far disastrous involvement in the Syrian civil war. Truthout recently interviewed Hersh about the book.

    • Hillary Clinton Donors and Jeb Bush Donors Are the Same People

      It seems that Hillary Clinton donors and Jeb Bush donors don’t care much which of the two of them wins, as long as one of them does.

      Mark Horne has written about how easily George Bush and Bill Clinton get along. We also find that Hillary Clinton is perfectly acceptable to the financial elite as a speaker when George Bush can’t make a scheduled (and highly paid) speaking event.

      If you needed confirmation for what you might guess on the basis of such stories, here it is from the Daily Beast: “Hillary Clinton’s Mega-Donors Are Also Funding Jeb Bush.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Mega-Donors Are Also Funding Jeb Bush

      For some wealthy donors, it doesn’t matter who takes the White House in 2016—as long as the president’s name is Clinton or Bush.

      More than 60 ultra-rich Americans have contributed to both Jeb Bush’s and Hillary Clinton’s federal campaigns, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by Vocativ and The Daily Beast. Seventeen of those contributors have gone one step further and opened their wallets to fund both Bush’s and Clinton’s 2016 ambitions.

      After all, why support just Hillary Clinton or just Jeb Bush when you can hedge your bets and donate to both? This seems to be the thinking of a group of powerful men and women—racetrack owners, bankers, media barons, chicken magnates, hedge funders (and their spouses). Some of them have net worths that can eclipse the GDPs of small countries.

    • The bombing comes just as the U.S. announced a $1 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia

      A Saudi-led coalition airstrike has hit a hospital in Yemen on Monday, killing at least seven and injuring at least 13, Reuters reports.

      A witness said the attack on the clinic, located in the Abs district in Yemen’s northern Hajja province and supported by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), could not be immediately evacuated because rescue crews feared more bombings were coming as warplanes continued flying over the area.

    • 10 Children Killed in US-Backed Coalition Strike: Yemeni Officials

      Ten children were killed and 28 other children were wounded on Saturday when an airstrike struck a school in northern Yemen, medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders said.

      All the casualties were 8-15 years old, the group, which uses its French acronym, MSF, posted on Twitter.

      Yemeni officials say that the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition was responsible for the attack, the Associated Press reports.

      As Reuters explains, “Saudi Arabia and its allies have launched thousands of air strikes against the Houthis since they drove the internationally recognized government into exile in March 2015.”

    • Airstrike on Yemen school kills 10 children, wounds dozens

      Yemeni officials and aid workers say an airstrike on a school purportedly carried out by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen has killed at least 10 children and wounded dozens more.

      The Islamic school says in a statement that the Saturday strike in Saada, deep in the Houthis’ northern heartland, was part of raids that have resumed against the rebels after peace talks collapsed earlier this month.

    • As ISIS Brewed in Iraq, Clinton’s State Department Cut Eyes and Ears on the Ground

      An investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post finds that Secretary of State Clinton initially pressed to keep civilian programs and listening posts after the U.S. troop pullout in 2011, but then her State Department scrapped or slashed them at the behest of the White House and Congress.

    • People in Syria’s Manbij Rejoice by Shaving, throwing off Veil as ISIL fighters Flee

      People in Syria’s norther town of Manbij, now entirely liberated from the rule of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), rejoiced on Saturday. Men shaved their beards (which had been imposed on them by the fundamentalists) and women threw off their burqas (full-face veils) and burned them. The burqa is a Gulf custom, not a Muslim one, and many Muslim countries frown on it, including Egypt. In 2010 it was banned in Syrian schools.

      People were also happy in the city that Daesh fighters, who had taken 2,000 hostages, released some of them as they escaped for Jarabulus, the last major border town they hold.

    • Liberals rally to sink Obama trade deal

      Liberals are amping up their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on and off of Capitol Hill, amid escalating concerns that the package will get an 11th hour vote after the November elections.

      Republican leaders in both chambers have said it’s unlikely the mammoth Pacific Rim trade deal will reach the floor this year. But the accord remains a top priority for President Obama in the twilight of his final term, and the critics — leery of pro-TPP members in both parties — aren’t taking anything for granted.

      Liberal TPP opponents this month have launched a new wave of petition campaigns and fundraising drives; a free concert series is touring the country through the summer; and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are vowing to do “everything we possibly can,” in the words of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), to block a vote this year.

      “Make no mistake about it, Speaker [Paul] Ryan and the administration are working hand-in-hand to plot a path for the TPP in a lame duck session of Congress,” DeLauro, who’s among the loudest TPP critics, said this week in an email. “They will do everything possible to try to pass the TPP after the election.”

    • How Blocking the Saudi Arms Deal Could Help Stop Lame Duck TPP

      In this strategy memo on why progressive Democrats and Empire-skeptic Republicans should do what they reasonably can to assist efforts to block the recently proposed Saudi arms deal, I will cover four points.

    • Amid More Civilian Deaths, Lawmakers Push to End Saudi Arms Flow

      U.S. senators are attempting to block the State Department’s deal to sell Saudi Arabia nearly $1.5 billion in weapons, just days after the move was announced by the Obama administration.

      Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told Foreign Policy that he would “work with a bipartisan coalition to explore forcing a vote on blocking this sale. Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally with a poor human rights record. We should not rush to sell them advanced arms and promote an arms race in the Middle East.”

      Congressional opposition to the arms sale came as the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed military coalition broke an unsteady five-month ceasefire in Yemen last week and resumed bombing in the capital city of Sana’a—prompting immediate reports of civilian deaths. On Saturday, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported that an airstrike on a school in northern Yemen killed 10 children and wounded 28 others.

      Paul and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), both of whom sit on the Foreign Relations Committee, are outspoken critics of the coalition.

      “If you talk to Yemeni Americans, they will tell you in Yemen this isn’t a Saudi bombing campaign, it’s a U.S. bombing campaign,” Murphy said in June. “Every single civilian death inside Yemen is attributable to the United States.”

    • New Hacks Threaten Chaos for Soros and Democratic Party

      Online hacktivists have thrown the Democratic elite into complete chaos after a pair of websites, Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks, posted a series of leaks this weekend exposing the personal data of federal lawmakers and the internal records of party donor and influencer George Soros.

      Purporting to “shed light on one of the most influential networks operating worldwide,” DCLeaks on Saturday published more than 2,500 documents, which included “workplans, strategies, priorities, and other activities” related to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

      The Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist a major donor to the Democratic Party and, predictably, conservative and other ideological websites are having a field day with the data drop.

      Less than 24 hours before that leak, the infamous Democratic National Committee (DNC) hacker Guccifer 2.0 late Friday published a spreadsheet containing the personal cellphone numbers and email addresses of nearly 200 current and former members of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and their staff.

    • DNC creates cybersecurity advisory board following hack

      The Democratic National Committee is creating a four-member cybersecurity advisory board, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO on Thursday.

      The advisory board is a response to the recent DNC hack and subsequent email leak that led to the resignation of former Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other top DNC officials.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Watch Your Coastal Property. Here Comes the Sea

      Climate scientists have long warned of a rise in sea level as global warming melts the world’s glaciers. But while the level has been increasing at about 3.5 millimeters a year, the rate of increase itself has fluctuated, leading some people to doubt the warnings and the broader impact of rising carbon emissions.

      Fresh evidence, in a study published today in Scientific Reports, suggests the scientists were right, and that satellite measurements have been distorted by the eruption in 1991 of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.

      The volcanic eruption, the second-largest of the 20th century, is estimated to have spewed almost 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, lowering global temperatures by about 1 degree Fahrenheit from 1991 to 1993, as gas and dust particles blocked solar radiation, and causing sea levels to drop. The researchers, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Old Dominion University, used models to calculate the impact of the Pinatubo eruption and found that sea levels fell about six millimeters.

    • McKibben: Time to Declare a War (Literally) on Climate Change

      We’re under attack, says author and climate campaigner Bill McKibben, and the only way to defeat the enemy is to declare a global war against the destructive practices that threaten the world’s imperiled ecosystems and human civilization as we know it.

      In a new piece published Monday in The New Republic, the co-founder of the global climate action group 350.org says there is simply no more time to waste and that a full-scale mobilization, like the one orchestrated by the U.S. government during World War II, is now necessary if the adversary—human-caused global warming and the climate change that results—is to be vanquished.

      “World War III is well and truly underway,” writes McKibben. “And we are losing.”

    • We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.

      In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”

    • ExxonMobil’s Latest Campaign to Stonewall Federal Climate Action

      Recent press accounts report that ExxonMobil is now actively promoting a carbon tax. If true, that’s big news. It would mean that, after nearly 20 years of blocking action on climate change, the world’s biggest energy company has finally come to its senses.

      But wait a minute. If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So one might well ask: Is this anything more than a PR ploy?

    • Hunger Strike Pushes South Korea to Defer Coal Plant Plan

      Finally, on the afternoon of July 26, the Ministry announced the proposed plant would be delayed indefinitely.

    • If It Hadn’t Been for Those Meddling Climate Kids

      In 1962, Diane Arbus took a photo of a lanky young boy in Central Park holding a hand grenade. He stands before the camera, a deranged look on his face, his free hand contorted into a menacing claw. It’s an iconic image that captured the generational tension around the Vietnam War and, according to songwriter of that time Graham Nash, one that questions the lessons we teach our children.

    • “Don’t Rely on Your Past Experiences:” La. Battles “Unprecedented” Flooding

      Louisiana continues to battle “unprecedented” flooding on Sunday, as experts warn that the historic rainfall that sparked the rising waters is the kind of extreme weather event to expect on a warming planet.

      Over 7,000 people have been rescued, at least three people have died, and a state of emergency has been declared.

      “This is unprecedented,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said Saturday. “Please don’t rely on your experiences in the past.”

    • Louisiana Flooding: At Least Three Dead, 7,000+ Rescued

      More than 7,000 people have been rescued from their homes after massive floods swept across Louisiana, and officials warned Sunday that even though the rain had subsided, dangers loomed.

      “It’s not over,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said Sunday. “The water’s going to rise in many areas. It’s no time to let the guard down.”

    • Is Undead Smallpox Reemerging From Siberian Graves?

      As if the news that resurrected anthrax from thawed-out reindeer wasn’t bad enough, increasingly warming temperatures are prompting renewed fears that permafrost could thaw enough to unleash smallbox from remote Russian cemeteries.

      As The Siberian Times reports, this year the permafrost melt has been three times more extreme than usual above the Arctic Circle, causing erosion near graveyards of a town where smallpox wiped out 40 percent of the population decades ago.

      Yet, some scientists argue that it’s not the graves we should be worried about.

      Scientists from Russia’s Virology and Biotechnology Center (or Vector) in Novosibirsk are investigating the bodies, some of which show bone sores associated with smallpox. Fortunately, only fragments of the strain’s DNA were found, rather than any evidence of surviving smallpox. However, the center plans to conduct more research on “deeper burials” in the future, just to make sure. So far, luckily, that’s been the case for years, as another expedition in 2012 found only “fragments” as well.

    • Anthrax Strikes Wildlife in Rapidly Thawing Arctic

      A full-scale medical emergency has broken out in the Yamal region of Siberia, with troops from the Russian army’s special biological warfare unit spearheading efforts to contain an outbreak of anthrax.

      A 12-year-old boy died after consuming infected venison, other people are believed to have died or become infected with the disease, and thousands of reindeer suspected of carrying it have been killed and incinerated.

      One of the main reasons cited for the outbreak of anthrax – one of the world’s most deadly pathogens – is an unprecedented heatwave experienced in the north Siberia region in recent weeks. Temperatures have been between 25°C and 35°C, which is way above the average for the time of year.

      Anthrax, an infection caused by the bacterium Bacillum anthracis, can occur naturally in certain soils, with infection usually spread by grazing animals. It has also been developed for use in chemical warfare.

    • Are Climate-Related ‘Hot Blobs’ Spreading and Killing Marine Life Worldwide?

      A massive swath of hot water off the West Coast of North America devastated marine life for years—killing sea lions, whales, starfish, birds, and more—and new research finds that such marine heatwaves are growing more and more frequent.

    • ‘The blob’: how marine heatwaves are causing unprecedented climate chaos

      First seabirds started falling out of the sky, washing up on beaches from California to Canada.

      Then emaciated and dehydrated sea lion pups began showing up, stranded and on the brink of death.

      A surge in dead whales was reported in the same region, and that was followed by the largest toxic algal bloom in history seen along the Californian coast. Mixed among all that there were population booms of several marine species that normally aren’t seen surging in the same year.

      Plague, famine, pestilence and death was sweeping the northern Pacific Ocean between 2014 and 2015.

    • The Blob That Cooked the Pacific

      The first fin whale appeared in Marmot Bay, where the sea curls a crooked finger around Alaska’s Kodiak Island. A biologist spied the calf drifting on its side, as if at play. Seawater flushed in and out of its open jaws. Spray washed over its slack pink tongue. Death, even the gruesome kind, is usually too familiar to spark alarm in the wild north. But late the next morning, the start of Memorial Day weekend, passengers aboard the ferry Kennicott spotted another whale bobbing nearby. Her blubber was thick. She looked healthy. But she was dead too.

      Kathi Lefebvre is talking about the whales as we crunch across a windy, rocky beach, 200 miles north of Kodiak. In a typical year eight whales are found dead in the western Gulf of Alaska. But in 2015 at least a dozen popped up in June alone, their bodies so buoyant that gulls used them as fishing platforms. All summer the Pacific Ocean heaved rotting remains into rocky coves along the more than 1,000-mile stretch from Anchorage to the Aleutian Islands. Whole families of brown bears feasted on their carcasses.

      Lefebvre, a research scientist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Washington, had examined eye fluid from one of the carcasses in a failed attempt to winnow the cause of death. Now the two of us are on Kachemak Bay in Homer, Alaska, inching toward a wheezing, dying sea otter sprawled out on the shore. Otter deaths are skyrocketing on the shoreline beneath the snowcapped Kenai Mountains, so Lefebvre is here to see whether the fates of these otters and whales are somehow intertwined.

    • The Earth Just Experienced the Hottest Month on the Books. Period.

      On Monday it was confirmed that the Earth has broken an ominous climate milestone amid a wave of troubling records: July 2016 was the hottest recorded month—ever.

      According to new NASA data, the global mean surface temperatures last month were 0.84° Celsius (1.51° Fahrenheit) above average and was the warmest July in their data set, which dates back to 1880.

      This marks the 10th straight month to set a new monthly warming record, based on NASA’s analysis. “Every month so far this year has been record hot,” reported Climate Central’s Andrea Thompson. “In NASA’s data, that streak goes back to October 2015, which was the first month in its data set that was more than 1C hotter than average.”

      The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) releases its monthly temperature report on Wednesday and it is likely theirs will reflect a 15-month streak of record-shattering heat. (Some previous reporting on monthly records here, here, here, and here.)

      What’s more, because July is typically the hottest month of the year, it stands that July 2016 was “the warmest month of any in a data record that can be extended back to the nineteenth century,” according to the U.K.-based Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS), which last week published similar temperature results.

    • Spotting the Havoc Wreaked by Climate Change

      I returned home angry. How can we, as Americans, be even contemplating the idea of installing at such a moment of crisis in mankind’s history, either of two candidates who don’t really give a damn that we are destroying the earth’s ability to sustain human life, or for that matter, most of the astonishing ecosystem that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years of evolution? Trump denies that climate change is real, while Clinton, vastly funded by a banking industry that finances the industries that are destroying the earth, by energy companies, power companies and automotive companies that are doing the actual destruction, has no intention of taking dramatic action to halt the pumping of more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

    • Evidence Suggests the Oil Industry Wrote Big Tobacco’s Playbook, Then Used It to Lie About Climate Change

      A recent analysis of more than 100 industry documents conducted by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a Washington, DC-based advocacy group, has revealed that the oil industry knew of the risks its business posed to the global climate decades before originally suspected.

      It has also long been assumed that, in its efforts to deceive investors and the public about the negative impact its business has on the environment, Big Oil borrowed Big Tobacco’s so-called tactical “playbook.” But these documents indicate that infamous playbook appears to have actually originated within the oil industry itself.

      If that is true, it would be highly significant — and damning for Big Oil — because the tactics used by the tobacco industry to downplay the connection between smoking and cancer were eventually deemed to have violated federal racketeering laws by a federal court. The ruling dashed efforts by Big Tobacco to find legal cover under the First Amendment, which just happens to be the same strategy that ExxonMobil and its GOP allies are currently using to defend the company against allegations of fraud. If the playbook was in fact created by the oil and gas industry and then later used by ExxonMobil, it ruins the company’s argument of plausible deniability, making it highly likely that the company violated federal law.

    • How Bad Is Your Air-Conditioner for the Planet?

      As of 2009, nearly 90 percent of American homes have air-conditioners, which account for about 6 percent of all the country’s residential energy use…

  • Finance

    • Housing official in Silicon Valley resigns because she can’t afford to live there

      Once Kate Downing and her husband Steve did the math, it was obvious that if they wanted to raise a family, staying in Palo Alto, California, was not an option. Although Steve, 33, works as a software engineer at a nearby Silicon Valley technology company and Kate, 31, is a product attorney at another tech firm, the cost of owning a home near their jobs has simply become too steep for them.

      If they wanted to purchase their current house – which they rent with another couple for $6,200 a month total – it would cost $2.7m plus monthly mortgage and tax payments of $12,177, adding up to more than $146,000 a year.

      Instead, the couple will soon relocate 45 miles south to Santa Cruz, a city by the beach where they can afford to purchase a home and eventually raise children.

    • Raise America inspires a new generation of organizing for low-wage workers

      While the Fight for $15 raises headlines and wages across the United States, June 15 saw a national day of action in cities around the country for the annual anniversary of the Justice for Janitors campaign. For SEIU Local 32BJ, which handles 155,000 property service workers along the East Coast from New Hampshire to Florida, this was a chance to reclaim the history of a campaign that did the unthinkable in the early 1990s.

    • The ‘Big Lie’ Behind the Rosy Unemployment Rate

      When Donald Trump on Monday questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s glowing employment reports, it may have seemed like another unsubstantiated outburst from a famously loose-with-the-facts candidate. But in this case, he was joining a bipartisan chorus of businesspeople, economists and lawmakers who say the monthly employment report is an artificial portrait deliberately airbrushed by statisticians to make the jobs picture look better than it really is.

    • How labor’s decline opened door to billionaire Trump as ‘savior’ of American workers

      Out of the economic maelstrom of the last decade, Donald Trump has emerged as the improbable, and self-proclaimed, champion of American workers.

      And that’s despite the fact that Trump has failed to articulate substantive policy positions regarding labor issues, other than generic railing against foreign competition and bad trade deals. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, for one, has attacked him by tweeting a number of examples in which Trump’s past behavior shows that he is no friend to working people.

    • Are You Sure You Want to Eat That?

      Whether we shop for sustenance at a chain grocery store, the corner bodega or even at a farmers market, we all share a basic desire—to not get sick from the food that is supposed to nourish us. In fact, much of the time, most of us don’t think twice about the safety of our food.

      But not all nations have the same food safety standards as ours, and if the controversial trade deal known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) goes into effect, some of the food in our stores may not be safe to eat.

      The TPP puts the interests of Big Food ahead of yours and mine. That’s because it wasn’t negotiated in the public’s interest. The TPP is instead intended to allow corporations to expand into new markets and make more money. If passed, it will overwhelm already overtaxed border inspectors, flood our food system with potentially unsafe imports and even empower other countries to challenge our common sense food safety protections as illegal trade barriers.

    • Social Security and the 1 Percent

      Between 1982 and 2014, the percentage of wage income escaping taxation went from 10.0 percent to 17.3 percent, an increase of 7.3 percentage points; the top 1 percent of wage earners saw their share of total wage income go up 5.1 percentage points during the same time period. This means that the greater share of wages going to the top 1 percent of wage earners accounts for over 70 percent of the increase in untaxed earnings.

    • The Brexit Hangover Just Got Worse

      Those who supported a departure from Europe are only now coming to terms with the crippling economic realities—including the fact that many didn’t quite understand the rules and the whims of their neighbors.

    • Economists have worked out how much Brexit could cost us

      Or at least that is the theory put forward by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, which has calculated the cost of leaving the single market.

      Not being a member (which is a possible scenario) could see the UK lose out on an additional 4% of GDP by 2030, the IFS has said.

      That 4% is equivalent of two years worth of growth, and equates to around £70 billion in today’s money – or £2,900 for each household.

      It said that loss would outweigh the benefit of no longer paying in a net £9bn a year into the European Union budget.

      The gloomy forecast comes after senior European politicians made it clear Britain can’t keep its membership of the single market unless its makes sizeable contribution to the EU budget and allows the free movement of EU workers.

    • Sports Direct will pay back thousands of workers after giving them less than minimum wage

      Sports Direct has agreed to pay money back to thousands of workers who lost out after being effectively paid less than minimum wage by the company while employed in its warehouses, according to a report from The Guardian.

      The payments centre around an investigation into Sports Direct’s working and employment practices by the House of Commons Business Select Committee, which found that conditions in some of the company’s warehouse facilities were akin to those in a “Victorian workhouse.”

    • Post-war fantasies and Brexit: the delusional view of Britain’s place in the world

      Claims about Britain’s past are made regularly in the referedum debate. But claims about Britain’s historical place in the world – courageously standing alone, being outnumbered and outgunned but in the end outperforming everyone – are not based on fact, writes Mike Finn. These myths could nonetheless have very real consequences: this is the self-image that the Brexit campaign portray and which many think they will revive by voting to Leave.

    • John Oliver: We Should Be Worried About the Subprime Car Loan Bubble That’s About to Burst (Video)

      In a scary and important episode, the “Last Week Tonight” host sounds a warning about a boom in subprime automobile loans that promises to make “your eye twitch with flashbacks to the mortgage crisis.”

    • Three More Reasons Why We Need to Stop CETA

      Last week I joined activists and campaigners from across the globe who came to Canada for the World Social Forum. A major topic of discussion was the problems with TTIP-style free trade agreements and how we can stop them.

      For us in Europe the big one is now CETA – the Canada-EU trade deal (formally the Comprehensive Economic & Trade Agreement) which could become law as early as next year. Unless we stop it.

      Our allies from across Europe and Canada gave some strong reasons for us to get more active on CETA.

    • Congress: AWOL and Out of Control

      Taken as whole, with exceptions, the American people have the strangest attitude toward the Congress. Our national legislature spends nearly a quarter of our income and affects us one way or another every day of the year. Yet too many people withdraw in disgust instead of making Congress accountable to them. Warren Buffett once said, “It’s time for 535 of America’s citizens to remember what they owe to the 318 million who employ them.”

      People have a low regard for Capitol Hill. Polls show less than 20% of people approve of what Congress does and does not do. In April a poll registered a 14% approval rate. People know that Congress takes a lot of days off – all with pay. Senators and Representatives work over 100 fewer days than average Americans do. Specifically, members were in session 157 days in 2015 and 135 in 2014. This year the House is scheduled to be in session for only 111 days, with the August recess alone stretching nearly six weeks.

    • Unruly Britannia: Why we can no longer call our kingdom ‘united’

      This is what shrunken dreams look like. This Britain post-Brexit contained not one reference to Scottish independence and the prospect of any future referendum. Worse, there wasn’t one mention of the threat to the Northern Irish peace process, which has been dealt a severe blow by the hauling out of Europe of the UK. Many people, particularly in London elites, will say that these divisions have always existed as they currently do. But that’s not true; they are in fact getting worse. Two conceptions of ‘Britain’ characterise and feed into this spiral of deepening divisions. One is the vision held by ‘winner Britain’: the view of those who have made it, think they can make it, or hang on the coat tails of this class. They tell themselves they are a cosmopolitan, outward focused group – but only with time for similar minded people. This was one of the defining features of the Brexit debate – that the Remain side and the large parts of the London media couldn’t understand anything beyond this class. Any opposition, from places such as ‘the North’ was about handing on to the past, or worse, about being losers. The second factor is the emergence of an English nationalism – which in large part presents itself in opposition to the above. It claims that in recent decades we have ‘lost’ control of our country – to immigrants, the PC brigade, and Europe – and now is the time to ‘take it back’.

    • The “$500 million club” of colleges tends to be stingy with aid to low-income students

      Call them the top four percent: elite private colleges and universities that together sit atop three-quarters of the higher education terrain’s endowment wealth.

    • Trade, Truth and Trump

      Donald Trump is a hateful bigot, but that doesn’t mean that everything he says is wrong. It would be a huge step forward if his critics could acknowledge that the recent pattern of trade has been harmful to large segments of the population. Furthermore, this is due to the way trade policy was designed, not the uncontrollable forces of globalization.

      If respectable leaders in politics and the media continue to repeat glib clichés rather than taking the economic reality of trade policy seriously, it should not be surprising that the victims of trade will look to demagogues like Trump. It is unfortunate when we get a more honest discussion of a major policy issue from Donald Trump than the New York Times.

    • The medical debt crisis: The prognosis is still dire for Americans struggling to pay off massive health care bills

      Recent evidence suggests that the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce the burden of medical debt for American consumers. Yet, especially in states that have not expanded Medicaid, millions of Americans still lack insurance and many plans offer thin coverage. The result is that in 2014, 64 million people were struggling with medical debt, the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. In my latest Demos report, “Enough to Make You Sick: The Burden of Medical Debt,” I explore how medical debt affects household finances and why we need more aggressive policies to reduce medical debt.

      My report details the results of two surveys (in 2008 and 2012) Demos commissioned to explore the finances of lower to middle-income households carrying credit card debt. I find that households carrying medical debt on their credit card are more likely to take extreme measures to pay off their debts and forgo care. Medical debt has significant negative impacts on household finances, even when people are insured. A public option could help reduce the chances of people taking on medical debt, and that more rigorous consumer protection could mitigate the consequences.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • ¡Fuera Trump!: Our Writer Traveled to Mexico City, Where People Definitely Had Choice Words for ‘The Donald’

      Responses varied. While the organillero didn’t believe Trump would win the election, some predicted that Trump would take it all in November. Others hinted at a conspiracy between Trump and Mexico’s president. A few bluntly compared Trump to Hitler. And some likened his campaign to a stunt, instead of an honest attempt to win the White House. Lots of people described the man with the darkest of humor: His campaign is a joke, but not a funny one.

    • The Summer of the Shill

      Campaign 2016 won’t just have lasting implications for American politics. It’s obliterated what was left of our news media

    • The BBC must improve how it reports statistics

      How much does the UK contribute to the EU each week? How tired did you get of hearing that question, and of the inaccurate answer that it’s £350 million?

      Even if you didn’t watch the debates or read the op-eds, it was hard to miss the pictures of Boris Johnson and other high profile Vote Leave campaigners standing in front of a big red bus with the inaccurate £350 million statistic emblazoned across the side.

      Misleading claims supported by murky statistics were used on both sides of the EU referendum debate. But the £350 million claim became the iconic slogan of the Leave campaign, and helped to show why the BBC needs to be braver in challenging statistical assertions if it is to be a useful public service.

    • The Racial Wealth Gap Will Persist Until Neoliberalism and Its Peddlers Are Defeated

      For the leaders of the fight for racial equality throughout the twentieth century, anti-discrimination and anti-capitalism went hand in hand; the struggle for economic justice was always viewed as integral to and inseparable from the struggle for racial justice.

      “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community,” Martin Luther King Jr. said at an AFL-CIO convention in 1961, expressing the prevailing sentiment among the socialist leaders of the civil rights movement.

      Bayard Rustin, the key organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, emphasized the importance of organized labor in advancing the rights and material conditions of black Americans in a 1971 essay, in which he asserted both the centrality of unions and the need for a radical approach to inequality.

      He urged that “only a program that would effect some fundamental change in the distribution of America’s resources for those in greatest need of them” would be enough “to meet the present crisis.”

    • TV Networks Should Open Up the Presidential Debates

      If ten major TV networks got together and decided to nationally televise a presidential debate restricted to Republican nominee Donald Trump and right-leaning Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, while barring other candidates including Democrat Hillary Clinton, it would be recognized as an act of media bias or exclusion.

      But what if the televised debates this fall are restricted to just Trump and Clinton? That, too, needs to be recognized as an intentional act of media exclusion.

      In the coming weeks, we need to generate a debate about the debates – who controls them and which candidates are included. That’s the goal of a new petition launched by RootsAction.org, a group I co-founded.

      Beginning in 1988, major TV networks granted journalistic control over the debates to a private organization with no official status: the Commission on Presidential Debates. The CPD is often called “nonpartisan.” That’s absurdly inaccurate. “Bipartisan” is the right adjective, as it has always carried out the joint will of the Republican and Democratic parties. (See George Farah’s meticulously reported book, “No Debate.”)

    • The Pro-Nuclear War Party

      According to a Wall Street Journal report, the following people and entities would like the United States to begin a nuclear war: Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, the U.K., France, Japan, South Korea, and Germany. If any of those people or entities believe they can prove a case of libel, it might be a huge one. (Are you listening, Rupert?)

      According to Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper, the White House has been discussing the possibility of declaring that the United States no longer has a policy of engaging in the first use of nuclear bombs. The trouble is that those individuals and nations named above object. They insist, we are told, that the United States should have the policy of beginning a nuclear war.

      Have the people of the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, Germany, or the United States itself been polled on this? Has any legislature pretending to represent any of those populations voted on this? Of course not. But what we could do, perhaps, is amend the policy to read: “When the United States begins the nuclear war, it shall announce that it is doing so in the name of democracy.” That should be good.

      Has Mr. Kerry, Mr. Carter, or Mr. Moniz been evaluated by a psychiatrist? Was Mr. Kerry against this before he was for it? The important question, I believe, is whether they want to start the nuclear war with any hatred or bigotry in mind. If what they intend is a loving, tolerant, and multicultural nuclear war, then really what we ought to be worrying about is the unfathomable evil of Donald Trump who has said that he’d like to kill families — and particular types of families.

      Now, I am not claiming to have fathomed the evil of Mr. Trump, but it has been U.S. policy since before there was a United States to kill families. And it is my strong suspicion that a nuclear war and the nuclear winter and nuclear famine it would bring to the earth would harm at least some families of every existing type.

    • ‘Bipartisan Fraud’: Debate Rules Shut Out Third-Party Candidates

      As of Monday, neither Libertarian Gary Johnson nor the Green Party’s Jill Stein had enough support to get a spot onstage alongside Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, which open debate advocates say amounts to a fraud of bipartisanism.

      One such advocacy group, RootsAction, launched a petition on Monday calling for the executives at ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox Broadcasting, PBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Univision, and Telemundo to present debates including all four candidates, even if the commission—or Trump or Clinton—wants otherwise.

      “If Trump or Clinton balk, let them know you’re happy to leave their podium empty,” the petition states.

    • Third-party candidates on outside as debate criteria released

      The Commission on Presidential Debates has released the polls it will use to decide the participants of September’s first presidential debate as third-party candidates struggle to make the stage.
      Candidates will need to hit an average of 15 percent in polls conducted by ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, CNN/Opinion Research Corporation, Fox News, and NBC/Wall Street Journal. The 15 percent threshold had been announced months ago, but the commission released its polling selections on Monday after consultation with Frank Newport, the editor-in-chief of Gallup.

      Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump are virtually assured a slot each on the stage for the Sept. 26 debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. But it remains unlikely that a third-party candidate will join them, despite voters’ historic dislike of both Clinton and Trump.

      As of Monday, neither Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson nor Green Party nominee Jill Stein would qualify, and neither has come close to hitting 15 percent in any qualifying poll.

    • Political Word Games

      Understandably Mr. Trump took umbrage at the suggestion he had sacrificed nothing, and to prove his point, gave us all a new understanding of the word “sacrifice.” Mr. Trump said: “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of job. . . built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.” Thus, the new meaning for sacrifice is being very successful in whatever you undertake.

      Hillary Clinton has imparted new meaning to words that were commonly associated with things electrical. The words are “Short Circuit.” “Short circuit” first entered the lexicon in its new incarnation when Ms. Clinton was discussing her use of email while serving as Secretary of State. Although the use or misuse of her email is of no substantive importance, her attempts to consistently explain her email procedures, while serving as Secretary of State, has given the question a life of its own that far overshadows any substantive concerns over her practices.

    • Inside the administration’s $1 billion deal to detain Central American asylum seekers

      As Central Americans surged across the U.S. border two years ago, the Obama administration skipped the standard public bidding process and agreed to a deal that offered generous terms to Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison company, to build a massive detention facility for women and children seeking asylum.

      The four-year, $1 billion contract — details of which have not been previously disclosed — has been a boon for CCA, which, in an unusual arrangement, gets the money regardless of how many people are detained at the facility. Critics say the government’s policy has been expensive but ineffective. Arrivals of Central American families at the border have continued unabated while court rulings have forced the administration to step back from its original approach to the border surge.

      In hundreds of other detention contracts given out by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, federal payouts rise and fall in step with the percentage of beds being occupied. But in this case, CCA is paid for 100 percent capacity even if the facility is, say, half full, as it has been in recent months. An ICE spokeswoman, Jennifer Elzea, said that the contracts for the 2,400-bed facility in Dilley and one for a 532-bed family detention center in Karnes City, Tex., given to another company, are “unique” in their payment structures because they provide “a fixed monthly fee for use of the entire facility regardless of the number of residents.”

    • With Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton

      His chances, as measured in the polls, went almost overnight from fairly decent to utter crap. For much of this year, populism had the gilded class really worried. There was Bernie Sanders and the unthinkable threat of a socialist president. There was the terrifying Brexit vote. Just a short while ago the American national newspapers were running page-one stories telling readers it was time to take seriously Trump’s followers, if not Trump himself. And on 3 August, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman actually typed the following: “It scares me that people are so fed up with elites, so hate and mistrust [Hillary] Clinton and are so worried about the future – jobs, globalization and terrorism” that they might actually vote for Trump.

      Yes, it scared Friedman that the American people didn’t like their masters any longer. As it has no doubt scared many of his rich friends to learn over the past few years that the people formerly known as middle class are angry about losing their standard of living to the same forces that are making those rich people ever more comfortable.

    • Robert De Niro Compares Donald Trump to His ‘Taxi Driver’ Character: He’s ‘Totally Nuts’

      Robert De Niro compared Donald Trump to Travis Bickle, the mentally disturbed character he played in the 1976 movie “Taxi Driver.”

      “What he has been saying is totally crazy, ridiculous, stuff that shouldn’t be even… he is totally nuts,” De Niro said.

      His comments came during a Q&A at the Sarajevo Film Festival on Friday, according to the AP.

      Elaborating on the character which earned the actor an Oscar nomination, De Niro said, “One of the things to me was just the irony at the end, [Bickle] is back driving a cab, celebrated, which is kind of relevant in some way today too.”

      He then drew a comparison to the current presidential candidate for the Republican party: “People like Donald Trump who shouldn’t be where he is so… God help us.” The AP reports that De Niro’s comments were met with applause.

    • Trump: I’m running against media, not Clinton

      Donald Trump said Saturday that his true opponent in the general election is the media.

      “I’m not running against crooked Hillary, I’m running against the crooked media,” Trump said at a rally in Fairfield, Conn. “That’s what I’m running against, I’m not running against crooked Hillary.”

      Trump has repeatedly lashed out at media that he calls “dishonest” over the course of his campaign.

      Earlier Saturday, he bashed the New York Times after a report came out in which sources characterized Trump as “sullen” and struggling to recover in light of lagging poll numbers.

      He renewed those attacks on the Times at the rally Saturday, saying he’s considering revoking their credentials to cover his rallies.

      “I’ll tell you in particular lately we have a newspaper that’s failing badly, its losing a lot of money, its gonna be out of business very soon: the New York Times,” he said.

      Trump blasted the use of anonymous sources in the Times report, saying “I don’t think they have any names.”

      “They never call me,” he added. “It’s going to hell.”

      “Maybe what we’ll do,” Trump continued, “we’ll start taking their press credentials away from them.”

    • Pirates Looking Into “Election Pokéstops”

      The Pirate Party is looking into the idea of setting up “election Pokéstops” to attract more young people to take part in the vote.

      Kjarninn reports that in the most recent election – the municipal elections of 2014 – voter turn-out for those aged 18 to 29 was only at about 50%. To help improve this situation, Birgitta Jónsdóttir and other Pirates are currently looking into an unconventional way to get young people to the polls: namely, by setting up Pokéstops at polling places.

      To this end, Birgitta is hoping that the company Unity Technologies could take part in the project. The company, which amongst other things takes part in designing the Pokémon Go environment in Iceland, is partially owned by Icelander Dav­íð Helga­son.

    • new shadow passwd functions

      Long, long ago, password hashes were kept in the /etc/passwd file. This is obviously bad because it allows users to pry into other users’ hashes, attempting to crack them. The solution was to move the real hashes to another file, called master.passwd on OpenBSD. BSD systems also turn the text passwd files into a database file so that calling getpwnam is fast even with thousands of users on a 10MHz vax.

      On some systems, e.g. Linux, there are two sets of functions. Normal functions like getpwnam that open the regular passwd files, and shadow functions like getspnam that open the files with password hashes. The problem is that struct passwd and struct spwd are not the same, making it difficult to write code that can work with both variants. Everything must be written twice, even though the code will be identical except for a few characters difference.

    • Found: A New Major Opposition Party

      Imagine what a Commons party could achieve with this menu! It could also blacklist Congressional members and Administrations ignoring these demands, despite their swearing to “promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Or cut the Pentagon’s allocation in half and put the remainder into domestic needs.

      Such movements also taught veteran campaigners and newbies to put principles before personalities in everything from fundraising, canvassing, creating media and overpass signs, phonebanking, fliering, street theatre and demonstrations and running those “huuuuge” rallies around the country.

      Meetings usually weren’t held in plush quarters or rented halls, but in homes, warehouses, libraries, schools, pizza parlors, pubs and backyard potlucks. Leadership generally followed Napoleon’s guideline: “Every French soldier carries a [general’s] baton in his knapsack.” So leaders were rotated from the ranks instead of bossy, ambitious wannabe “generals.”

      Occupy’s democratic meeting methods reappeared: timed agenda items, fair input by “stacking,” “twinkling” fingers for approvals, and projects assigned to initiators.

      In his latest major interview, Sanders spoke for the fearful, the despairing, and the angries about what those in other times and other places did to change their countries, and to follow their example unless we want to be ruled by lesser evils preferring we vanish.

    • Stark New Evidence on How Money Shapes America’s Elections

      Outrage over how big money influences American politics has been boiling over this political season, energizing the campaigns of GOP nominee Donald Trump and former Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders alike. Citizens have long suspected that “We the People” increasingly means “We the Rich” at election time.

      Yet surprisingly, two generations of social scientists have insisted that wallets don’t matter that much in American politics. Elections are really about giving the people what they want. Money, they claim, has negligible impact on elections.

      That was a good line for Cold War propaganda, and good for tenure, too. Corporate titans seized upon it to argue that their money should be freer to flow into political campaigns. Not only billionaires, but academics, too, argued that more money in elections meant more democracy.

      Even today, many academics and pundits still insist that money matters less to political outcomes than ordinary citizens think, even as business executives throw down mind-boggling sums to dine with politicians and Super Pacs spring up like mushrooms. The few dissenters from this consensus, like Noam Chomsky, are ignored in the U.S. as “unpersons,” though they are enormously respected abroad.

    • Thousands of Pages of Confidential Think Tank Documents Detail Corporate Ties, New York Times Reports

      Thousands of pages of confidential internal think tank emails and documents published by the New York Times yesterday shine a revealing spotlight on how some of the nation’s most prominent think tanks are used by corporate donors to promote specific policies — while concealing the financial interests involved.

      The emails provide a “smoking gun” of evidence that corporations that donated to non-profit think tanks like The Brookings Institution were promised specific receivables in return.

      For example, Lennar Corp., a home building company and Brookings donor was offered a spot as a Brookings senior fellow for one of its executives. “’He would be a trusted adviser,’ an internal Brookings memo said in 2014 as the think tank sought one $100,000 donation from Lennar,” the Times reported.

      While critics of the institutions may have long suspected that corporate donors receive special treatment from the think tanks they back, think tanks have managed to maintain an air of independence and the respect of many policy makers in Washington D.C.

      The newly revealed emails are striking in part because they reveal how corporate interests have affected left-wing think tanks like Brookings, which are sometimes regarded as less under the corporate thumb than right-wing overtly pro-corporate think thanks like the American Enterprise Institute or The Heartland Institute.

      The documents show the precise ways that corporate donors are able to control the messages coming out of the think tanks they fund behind the scenes, while still preserving a public veneer of independence.

      “The likely conclusions of some think tank reports, documents show, are discussed with donors — or even potential ones — before the research is complete,” the Times reported. “Drafts of the studies have been shared with donors whose opinions have then helped shape final reports. Donors have outlined how the resulting scholarship will be used as part of broader lobbying efforts.”

    • For millennial voters, the Clinton vs. Trump choice ‘feels like a joke’

      Jo Tongue doesn’t have much time for politics, but the Hillary and Trump show is hard to tune out. And even harder to take. To this 31-year-old mother of two, with a third on the way, the presidency should be an honorable office, but instead she feels “bummed that we’re at a place where it all feels like a joke.”

      “Watching Jimmy Fallon, I feel like, ugh, is this how we should start out? We’re already mocking our president?”

      Tongue says she is both “sad” and “defeated” and — in a world filled with shootings, bombings and financial strain — maintains scant hope that a new president will change any of it.

      At a sports bar 1,800 miles away in Goldsboro, N.C., Aaron Stewart is shooting pool with a buddy and thinking the same thing. The pair doesn’t just feel cut off from the current campaign, but from a political system they see as controlled by mysterious networks, greased by money and off-limits to people like them.

      “I’m not really a conspiracy theo rist, but the system is corrupt,” says Stewart, 21, who works at a convenience store. He draws a $1 bill from his wallet, holds it up to the bar’s faint light and declares, “This little piece of paper tells me what I can and cannot do.”

      At the Panetta Institute for Public Policy in California, the summer interns are up on the issues. But Dominic Cicerone has a similar sense of foreboding. For him, the big issue is his own safety — he was afraid to go to the July 4 fireworks at Fisherman’s Wharf because the Islamic State had released a video claiming San Francisco as a target — and neither candidate is easing his concerns.

    • The Real Reason They Attack Jill Stein

      The attacks on Jill Stein’s blossoming supporter base from establishment Democrats have continued as frantically and aggressively as ever, despite Hillary Clinton enjoying a comfortable and enduring lead in the polls over Donald Trump. Numbers have stabilized, and it looks like Hillary will win without the support of the Bernie-or-Bust crowd.

      So why continue the vitriol? It hasn’t lessened. In fact, it’s ramped up, and our social media news feeds are teeming with false accusations of Stein being anti-vaccination, anti-science, anti-Bernie Sanders, and now, surprise surprise, an anti-American Putin sympathizer.

      Yes, the old red under the bed tactic. Clinton ally John Aravosis has continued the Democrats’ bizarre resurrection of the time-honored McCarthyist tradition of red-baiting their critics and political opponents, joining the Democrats’ diversionary tactic of pointing indignantly at Russia and its ties to Trump for the DNC hacks in the hopes that it will make everyone forget about the content of the leak itself. Over the weekend, Aravosis wrote an attack editorial, casting suspicion on Stein for attending a convention for alternative media outlet RT last winter, which Aravosis laughably tries to spin as evidence that the anti-war Green party candidate is a traitor in league with “the Kremlin’s propaganda agency.”

    • The U.S.: a four- or five-party country jammed into a two-party system

      Years ago, when Boris Yeltsin came to town, I had a chance to ask him one question. Through a translator, I asked this: “You call yourself a Communist, but you disagree with the Communist Party’s ideology on most subjects. What makes you a Communist?” He replied: “Party card.”

      By the time Yeltsin became president, opposition parties were still banned. But being a Communist didn’t require you to believe anything in particular. Yet the system still required you to be a card-carrying Communist to run for office. I don’t favor a one-party system.

      Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. Never really was. Never really claimed to be.

      Donald Trump is not a Republican. Not in any meaningful sense.

      But in America, since the Dem-Repub duopoly took over our system in 1856, if you want to be president, you have to be the nominee of one of the two major parties.

    • The Perfect G.O.P. Nominee

      All these woebegone Republicans whining that they can’t rally behind their flawed candidate is crazy. The G.O.P. angst, the gnashing and wailing and searching for last-minute substitutes and exit strategies, is getting old.

      They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up — unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else.

      The Republicans have their candidate: It’s Hillary.

      They can’t go with Donald Trump. He’s too volatile and unhinged.

      The erstwhile Goldwater Girl and Goldman Sachs busker can be counted on to do the normal political things, not the abnormal haywire things. Trump’s propounding could drag us into war, plunge us into a recession and shatter Washington into a thousand tiny bits.

    • WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: Attacks Against Jill Stein Are “Going to Go Through the Roof”

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke via video stream to the Green Party convention in Houston, Texas, about the corporate control of information during the 2016 election. He also predicted that attacks against Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein would surge ahead of November’s election.

    • Jill Stein Smeared As Anti-Vaccine Crank As Sanders Supporters Consider Alternative To Clinton

      As Hillary Clinton officially became the Democratic Party’s nominee, interest in Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein grew exponentially. Several establishment journalists, including those known for their open contempt for dissent, turned their attention to Stein to marginalize her campaign before it picked up more than a small amount of support from disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters.

      One false and slanderous claim against Stein has picked up a huge amount of traction in the press: the idea that Stein is an “anti-vaxxer,” opposes vaccines, or has pandered to individuals who believe vaccines cause autism.

      The Washington Post is primarily responsible for this smear. It had two of its reporters, Sarah Parnass and Alice Li, interview Stein. David Weigel, another Post journalist, wrote about the interview, and a Post editor gave it the following headline, “Jill Stein on vaccines: People have ‘real questions,’” which was extremely misleading.

      At the moment, over a dozen media outlets have picked up the interview and chastised Stein for supposedly having anti-science views. Some of the pieces on Stein’s interview are mean-spirited, written by journalists who would have found something to make her look like a crank even if the Post had not spoken with her about vaccines.

    • Stein hits Clinton on emails: Voters “owed an explanation”

      Green Party candidate Jill Stein attacked Hillary Clinton on Monday for her use of a private email server as Secretary of State, amid reports that notes from Clinton’s interview with the FBI during its probe of the matter would be turned over soon to Congress.
      Declining to say whether she thought Clinton should have faced criminal charges from the FBI after its probe, Stein said that the issue “raises real questions about her competency.”

      “I think there should have been a full investigation. I think the American people are owed an explanation for what happened, and why top secret information was put at risk, why the identity of secret agents were potentially put at risk,” Stein told CNN’s Carol Costello.

    • Why Latinos Support Donald Trump

      No amount of semantic somersaulting can whitewash the racist overtones of Donald Trump’s campaign.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • How to Make YouTube Stop Watching What You Watch

      A. When you are logged in to your Google Account, YouTube keeps a running list of everything you watch on the site for a few reasons. For one, YouTube uses your viewing history to suggest other videos it thinks you may like, similar to the way Netflix makes recommendations for its members.

      [...]

      Next, click the Pause Watch History button. If you would also like to wipe out the collected list of clips, click the Clear All Watch History button next to it. If you do not want to clear all videos from the list — but want to remove some of them — click the “X” on the right side of the screen next to a listed clip.

    • New law targets people who leak classified information

      People who leak Government information will be targeted with a new offence that carries a maximum sentence of five years in jail.

      Prime Minister John Key has announced legislation that will also let the Government Communications Security Bureau spy on New Zealanders’ private information.

      The bill comes in the same week that information leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden resulted in media reports about the GCSB’s monitoring of a Fiji democracy activist.

      The Government denied the new power to target whistle blowers was related to the Snowden leaks.

      Its introduction is a response to a broad-sweeping intelligence review by Sir Michael Cullen and Dame Patsy Reddy, released in March with 107 recommendations.

    • Report: Target of NSA’s online surveillance identified

      Tony Fullman was targeted from July through August 2012…

    • NSA is everywhere: New Zealand peace activist victim of ‘illegal’ PRISM snooping program

      A new report by The Intercept and Television New Zealand reveal the National Security Agency (NSA) worked with New Zealand’s government to illegally spy on one of its citizens in a failed terrorism investigation.

      A group of “democracy and freedom” activists were thought to be plotting the overthrow of Fiji’s military regime in 2012, according to the Kiwi snoops at the Security Intelligence Service (SIS).

      With help from the NSA via the Five Eyes alliance, which Edward Snowden called a “supra-national intelligence organization that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries,” they staged a covert operation to catch the alleged terrorist group.

      Snowden’s leaked documents show the NSA intercepted Facebook communications and emails between associates of the Fiji Democracy and Freedom Movement campaign, using the PRISM surveillance system, before passing the information onto New Zealand on the other side of the globe. More than 190 pages of documents between May and August 2012 reveal the scale of the NSA’s spying.

    • After NZ spooks misidentified pro-democracy activist, NSA spied on him for them

      Tony Fullman is one of the only people that we know to have been targeted by Prism, the NSA’s signature mass-surveillance tool: he’s a Fijian-born expatriate with New Zealand citizenship, and had his passport seized and his name added to terrorism watchlists after the NSA helped their New Zealand counterparts spy on him, intercepting his bank statements, Facebook posts, Gmail messages, recorded phone conversations, and more.

      Fullman is one of the organisers of “thumbs up for democracy,” a peaceful online campaign that questions the legitimacy of Frank Bainimarama, an authoritarian military dictator who seized control of Fiji in a coup. An internal NZ investigation revealed that the New Zealand government mistook a group of NZ-based Fijian pro-democracy activists for terrorists and illegally spied on 88 of them between 2003 and 2012, including Fullman.

      Fullman was naturalised into NZ citizenship after moving there when he was 21, and worked for 20 years as a civil servant in the tax department, while volunteering at a soup-kitchen and completing two Master’s degrees (one in public management, the other in IT). He moved back to Fiji in 2009 to run the country’s water authority.

    • Report reveals identity of NSA and PRISM surveillance target

      It’s been over three years since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a trove of documents detailing the extent to which the American government was able to spy on its citizens. A big part of those revelations was PRISM, a system that allowed the government to expediently request and collect data from a variety of huge internet companies including Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and more. Today, a new report from The Intercept contains details on the first person to be identified as a target of PRISM.

      Tony Fullman of New Zealand was targeted in 2012 by the NSA in cooperation with the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The NSA was able to intercept his Facebook chats and Gmail messages and passed them along to the GCSB, which itself did not have the authority to monitor Fullman’s communications. Fullman was apparently targeted because New Zealand believed that he was planning an act of terrorism, but it turns out that intelligence was incorrect. That didn’t stop the New Zealand government from raiding his home and revoking his passport, however.

    • This Was the First Confirmed Prism Surveillance Target

      A new report based on the leaks of former U.S. National Security Agency worker Edward Snowden has for the first time named a target of the NSA’s controversial Prism program—a civil servant and pro-democracy activist named Tony Fullman.

    • What it looks like when the NSA hacks into your Gmail and Facebook

      For the first time, a target of the National Security Agency’s controversial Prism program has been identified.

      Tony Fullman, a New Zealand citizen who was born in Fiji, had the contents of his Facebook and various Gmail accounts intercepted by the NSA, The Intercept reports, based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • ViaSat’s encryptors NSA-certified [Ed: ViaSat really wants us to know it’s in bed with the NSA; assume “golden key”?]
    • Special investigation: Inside one of the SIS’s biggest anti-terrorism operations

      One of the Security Intelligence Service’s biggest ever anti-terrorism operations – conducted between July and August 2012 – targeted a group of pro-democracy campaigners who it mistakenly thought were planning to overthrow the military government in Fiji.

      A New Zealand man had his communications monitored, probably illegally, his home raided and his passport cancelled by the SIS. But there were no guns or bombs. He was not part of a plot.

      The man, Tony Fullman, was a long-time public servant and peaceful pro-democracy campaigner who, like the New Zealand and Australian governments at that time, was opposed to the Bainimarama military government.

    • BRITISH PM CAMERON HOAXED BY DRUNK PRANK CALLER AS GCHQ BOSS
    • Did The FBI Get Confused And Arrest One Of Its Own Informants For Helping Create One Of Its Own Plots?

      For a few years now, we’ve been writing about how the FBI has been arresting a ton of people for “terrorism” who were really guilty of little more than being gullible and naive and pushed by FBI undercover agents and informants into taking part in a plot that wouldn’t exist but for the FBI itself. These so-called own plots seem to be a huge part of what the FBI does these days. Somewhat ridiculously, courts have (mostly) allowed these, claiming that if, eventually, the accused person expressed some support for terrorism or terrorist groups, it shouldn’t be considered entrapment. But, over and over again, you see cases where it’s clearly the FBI doing not just the majority of the plotting, but also pushing and pushing targets to “join” the plot, even when they show sustained resistance. The more details you read about these cases, the more ridiculous they get.

      However, in just the latest example of this — the arrest of Erick Hendricks for supposedly trying to recruit people to carry out attacks for ISIS — there’s been something of an odd twist. Hendricks claims he has no idea why he was arrested because he’s been an FBI informant for years, helping the FBI find other gullible souls to entrap in these “own plots.” As Marcy Wheeler notes, it’s possible the FBI lost track of one of its own informants and ended up having him “caught” in one of the plots where he thought he was helping the FBI find possible terrorists. Wouldn’t that be something.

    • In Bungled Spying Operation, NSA Targeted Pro-Democracy Campaigner

      As part of the spy mission, the NSA used its powerful global surveillance apparatus to intercept the emails and Facebook chats of people associated with a Fijian “thumbs up for democracy” campaign. The agency then passed the messages to its New Zealand counterpart, Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB.

    • Snowden Docs Show NSA, New Zealand Spied On Pro-Democracy Activists [Ed: Snowden’s remark]

      The “act of terrorism” claims were odd, considering Fullman’s activism was aligned with the New Zealand government’s own views: opposition to neighboring Fiji’s authoritarian ruler, Frank Bainimarama. Utilizing PRISM, the NSA intercepted Fullman’s Gmail and Facebook messages, along with gathering everything it could from his public postings — including this data on his apparently terrorism-related personal vehicle.

    • NSA Hacked? ‘Shadow Brokers’ Crew Claims Compromise Of Surveillance Op
    • Hackers claim to be selling NSA cyberweapons in online auction
    • Hacking group purportedly hacked NSA-linked Equation Group, auctioning cyber weapons
    • Hackers Say They Hacked NSA-Linked Group, Want 1 Million Bitcoins to Share More
    • Hackers Claim to Auction Data Stolen From NSA-Linked Spies
    • Hackers claim to auction NSA source code
    • Group claims to have hacked the NSA, wants $500 million to release files
    • NSA offshoot ‘The Equation Group’ has been hacked
    • So, Uh, Did The NSA Get Hacked?
    • The Tools The NSA Uses To Snoop Are Allegedly Being Auctioned Off By Hackers

      We’ve known for a while, thanks to the Snowden leaks and the ensuing investigations, that the NSA has both broad authority to breach and investigate the communications of innocent Americans and the tools to get into your private business with ease. It’s been an ugly chapter in American history, and it’s about to get a lot uglier with the news that the NSA has been hacked, and all its spying tools might soon be online for anybody to use.

    • ‘Shadow Brokers’ claim to have hacked an NSA-linked elite computer security unit

      Cybersecurity experts are searching for answers after an unidentified group claimed on Monday to have hacked into “Equation Group” — an elite cyber-attack group associated with the NSA.

      The “Shadow Brokers” claimed in a post on blogging service Tumblr to have hacked Equation Group, and say they are holding an “auction” to sell off the “cyber weapons” they were able to steal. Shadow Brokers have also provided a sample of files, free to access, to “prove” their legitimacy.

    • Should cloud vendors cooperate with the government?

      35 percent believe cloud app vendors should be forced to provide government access to encrypted data while 55 percent are opposed. 64 percent of US-based infosec professionals are opposed to government cooperation, compared to only 42 percent of EMEA respondents.

      “Forcing cloud app vendors to comply with government or law enforcement access requests to data has provided a real mixed bag of responses, with everything to no way, to help yourself, and even to I don’t care. This really makes no sense because surely with so much debate about the challenges facing law enforcement, to the privacy considerations that have dominated the press we would have expected at least some common consensus. This of course creates a challenge for app vendors, because it will not be possible to create models to suit all opinions. It therefore demands some form of open debate on the best approach to take in terms of addressing this most challenging issue,” Raj Samani, CTO EMEA at Intel Security, told Help Net Security.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Muslims Are Celebrating Murderer Of The Glasgow ‘Apostate’ Shopkeeper

      Muslims around the world are celebrating a British man, who murdered an innocent shopkeeper who they considered an “apostate”, as an Islamist hero.

    • Russia Provides Two Be-200 Aircraft on Portuguese Fire-Fighting Mission

      Russia Provides Two Be-200 Aircraft on Portuguese Fire-Fighting Mission

      Portugal has asked Russia for help in extinguishing forest fires, head of the press service of the Russian Emergencies Ministry, Alexei Vagutovich, told Sputnik, and Russia is happy to help out.

    • In Zambia’s contentious election, the EU finds a new challenge

      Supporters of the United Party for National Development opposition party attend election rally in Lusaka, Zambia, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016 amid concerns about political violence. Moses Mwape / Press Association. All rights reserved.Zambians went to the polls on August 11 in presidential and parliamentary elections in what is expected to be a tight race between President Edgar Lungu’s governing PF party and the opposition UPND led by Hakainde Hichilema. The EU on the ground, along with other international observers, can exert a positive influence in what has been a tense and sometimes violent campaign. In its new Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy the EU commits to supporting democracies where they emerge, for “their success […] would reverberate across their respective regions” – Zambia presents an opportunity for the EU to show it still has serious clout as a foreign policy actor.

    • Your Parents Aren’t Your Parents, an Announcer Tells an Olympian

      Many eyes were watching, then, as NBC learned a lesson, maybe. Biles has been open about her family; she and her sister were adopted at a young age by her maternal grandfather and his wife. “I call them Mom and Dad. Everything’s just been so normal,” she’s been quoted. But NBC announcer Al Trautwig seemed to feel he knew better, referring repeatedly to Biles’ “grandparents.” When someone on Twitter noted that was incorrect, Trautwig responded, “they may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents.”

      After, one imagines, a call from PR, Trautwig declared he regretted that he “wasn’t more clear in my wording,” though he didn’t explain what it was he was trying to “word” or why. (USA Today wrote that he had apologized “for suggesting that Simone Biles’ parents through adoption are not really her parents.” If saying “they are NOT her parents” is “suggesting” they are not her parents, then sure.)

      Olympics coverage involves a lot of storytelling; commentators create narratives for athletes, and no doubt some feel it’s “humanizing” when, faced with one of the best athletes in the world, they focus on what one called her “broken home.” Of course, what they’re really revealing is just the narrowness of their vision.

    • Recent court decisions fuel renewed push for restoring the Voting Rights Act

      In an op-ed for Time magazine, Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said these decisions “have been a triumphant win for voting rights advocates, but they are not the long-term answer.”

      “As we face the first presidential election without a fully functioning VRA,” he wrote, “it is more critical than ever to restore the full powers and protections of the law.”

      Greenblatt observed that “the backdrop of the latest set of rulings paints a bleaker picture — one of legislatures around the country passing laws that discriminate against voters of color.”

    • One Quote Predicts Today’s Police Brutality Nearly 50 Years Ago

      The violence of last week conjures up the history and memory of the violence and racial tension of 1968, and a quote from a famous author and cultural critic makes the comparison seem all too apt.

    • Online crime: UK cops to use law firms to tackle fraud in civil courts

      A pilot scheme run by the City of London police will use law firms working for profit to tackle online crime and fraud cases.

      Cops will pass details of cases to companies involved with the scheme. They will be tasked with attempting to seize the assets of suspects—and, if successful, receive a share.

      The advantages for the police are twofold: more cases can be tackled, since some will be handled by the law firms, and suspects will be pursued in civil courts, whereas police have to go through the criminal court system in order to use provisions from the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA).

    • DEA Accessing Millions Of Travelers’ Records To Find Cash To Seize

      The monster is insatiable. The DEA loves taking cash from travelers so much it has hired TSA screeners as informants, asking them to look for cash when scanning luggage. It routinely stops and questions rail passengers in hopes of stumbling across money it can take from them.

      But it goes further than just hassling random travelers and paying government employees to be government informants. As the USA Today’s article points out, the DEA is datamining traveler info to streamline its forfeiture efforts.

    • Documents Confirm CIA Censorship of Guantánamo Trials

      In January 2013, during the military trial of five men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, a defense lawyer was discussing a motion relating to the CIA’s black-site program, when a mysterious entity cut the audio feed to the gallery. A red light began to glow and spin. Someone had triggered the courtroom’s censorship system.

      The system was believed to be under the control of the judge, Col. James Pohl. In this case, it wasn’t.

    • Election Meddling: Bad if Done to USA, Bad to Complain About if Done by USA

      When US media—to say nothing of the leading contender to be the next president of the US—allege that foreign elements are steering our politics, that’s rational, serious discourse. When others do it, it’s laughable, unhinged blabbering.

      [...]

      If the Washington Post had to argue that US meddling was the good kind of meddling, because it’s a necessary balance to Putin’s autocratic rule, this nuance would get in the way of the Post’s simplistic “paranoid strongman vs. good, clean US democracy” dichotomy, so the reader is left with the ahistoric and childish impression that the US doesn’t interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries.

      [...]

      To omit the endless string of examples of US interfering in other countries in an editorial about fears of US interfering in other countries is at best negligent and at worst deliberately obtuse. It’s hard to describe foreign leaders as being paranoid about US meddling and coups if you acknowledge that the US has been involved in meddling and coups for more than a century.

    • Humanitarian Nightmare for Colombia’s Wayuu Fails to Awaken Corporate Media

      Colombia’s Supreme Court has ordered the government to ensure that the Wayuu, the largest indigenous community in the country, have access to basics of survival, including drinkable water. Last year, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights called attention to the crisis, noting the documented deaths of more than 4,700 Wayuu children in just the last eight years—although the Wayuu themselves say the number is closer to 14,000 children who have died from preventable disease, thirst and malnutrition. It’s a humanitarian nightmare, but as human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik noted in a piece for Huffington Post, corporate media appear unmoved.

      The Wayuu are suffering not just from climate change–driven drought, but from the loss of access to the Rancheria River, drained by a dam built in 2011 for the coal mining company Cerrejon. Cerrejon Mine, at first a joint venture between Colombia and Exxon, opened in 1983 and has been displacing indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities ever since. Kovalik reports that Cerrejon now uses 17 million liters of water a day, while residents of the region have an average of 0.7 liters a day to live on.

    • When USA Gymnastics Turned a Blind Eye to Sexual Abuse

      With the summer Olympics in full swing, three reporters at the Indianapolis Star newspaper have been investigating painful secrets kept by some of the nation’s young gymnasts-in-training.

      For this ProPublica Podcast, I talked with Marisa Kwiatkowski, Mark Alesia and Tim Evans about their incredible report on sexual misconduct by coaches affiliated with USA Gymnastics, the nonprofit responsible for developing the United States’ gymnastics team for the Olympics and training thousands more children and young adults.What the reporters discovered was that the organization had policies on reporting sexual abuse that were likely to discourage people from speaking up.

    • The Right-Wing Legacy of Justice Lewis Powell, and What It Means for the Supreme Court Today

      The memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was breathtaking in its scope and ambition, and far more right-wing than anything Scalia ever wrote. It was, as writer Steven Higgs noted in a 2012 article published by CounterPunch, “A Call to Arms for Class War: From the Top Down.”

      Back in 1971, when the memo was prepared, Powell was a well-connected partner in the Richmond-based law firm of Hutton, Williams, Gay, Powell and Gibson and sat on the boards of 11 major corporations, including the tobacco giant Philip Morris. He also had served as chairman of the Richmond School Board from 1952 to ’61 and as president of the American Bar Association from 1964 to ’65. In 1969, he declined a nomination to the Supreme Court offered by President Nixon, preferring to remain in legal practice, through which he reportedly had amassed a personal fortune.

    • Man Claiming that He is the Brother of Man Shot by Officers Speaks to CBS 58 During the Violence

      CBS 58′s Evan Kruegel spoke exclusively to a man claiming to be the brother of the man shot and killed by police yesterday.

      He was with a crowd of people at the O’Reilly Auto Parts as it burned last night.

      “There is riot going on because once again the police have failed to protect us like they said they would. They failed to be here like they say like they sworn in to do. Us as a community, we are not going to protect ourselves. But, we don’t have anyone to protect us than this is what you get. So you got riots. We got people right here going crazy. We are losing loved ones everyday to the people that are sworn in to protect us,” said the man.

    • “This is the Madness They Spark”: Uprising in Milwaukee After Police Kill 23-Year-Old Black Man

      Protests are continuing in Milwaukee two days after police shot dead a 23-year-old African-American man named Sylville Smith. On Sunday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker activated the National Guard after local residents set fire to police cars and several local businesses, including a gas station, on Saturday night. Seventeen people were arrested. Four police officers were reportedly injured. Milwaukee police say Smith was shot while trying to flee from an officer who had stopped his car. Police Chief Edward Flynn said he had viewed video from the officer’s body camera, and it showed Smith had turned toward him with a gun in his hand after the traffic stop. Many local residents said the tension between their community and the police has been rising for years. Milwaukee is considered to be one of the most segregated cities in the country. We speak with Muhibb Dyer, community activist, poet and co-founder of the organization Flood the Hood with Dreams.

    • Milwaukee Sheriff Provokes Outrage, Blames ‘Urban Pathology,’ ‘War on Police’ for Police Brutality

      Days of demonstrations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin following Saturday’s fatal police shooting have shined a national spotlight on the city’s segregation and police practices—and the city’s infamous right-wing sheriff provoked further outrage Sunday when he blamed the community of the shooting victim for the police violence that ended his life.

      Clarke decried “urban pathologies” and a “war on police”—popular right-wing catchphrases—in impoverished, largely black communities for the demonstrations and the shooting that provoked them.

      “The urban pathologies have to be addressed to shrink the growth of an underclass,” he said, referring to the community which has suffered through the deaths of many of its members at the hands of police.

    • Black Americans and Police State Fascism

      Korryn Gaines was shot to death by police in her own home near Baltimore, Maryland. Her five year-old son was also shot and injured. Ms. Gaines came into contact with police initially because of a traffic violation and a dispute with her boyfriend. Every day thousands of people are given tickets or make accusations against one another but rarely do they have an expectation of ending up dead as a result.

      Arrest warrants are the first line of defense for the police, who are the 21st century embodiment of the slave patrol. If black people are lucky they may have to pay a fine or suffer some inconvenience, if unlucky they are killed.

    • Justice and accountability for war related sexual violence in Sri Lanka

      As the testimonies of survivors of sexual violence in Sri Lanka’s long war enter the public domain and the government designs transitional justice mechanisms, is an end to impunity in sight?

    • The Dark Secret of Israel’s Stolen Babies

      According to campaigners, as many as 8,000 babies were seized from their families in the state’s first years and either sold or handed over to childless Jewish couples in Israel and abroad. To many, it sounds suspiciously like child trafficking.

      A few of the children have been reunited with their biological families, but the vast majority are simply unaware they were ever taken. Strict Israeli privacy laws mean it is near-impossible for them to see official files that might reveal their clandestine adoption.

      Did Israeli hospitals and welfare organisations act on their own or connive with state bodies? It is unclear. But it is hard to imagine such mass abductions could have occurred without officials at the very least turning a blind eye.

      Testimonies indicate that lawmakers, health ministry staff, and senior judges knew of these practices at the time. And the decision to place all documents relating to the children under lock untl 2071 hints at a cover-up.

      [...]

      Ben Gurion needed not only to destroy Palestinian society, but to ensure that “Arabness” did not creep into his new Jewish state through the back door.

      The large numbers of Arab Jews who arrived in the first decade were needed in his demographic war against the Palestinians and as a labour force, but they posed a danger too. Ben Gurion feared that, whatever their religion, they might “corrupt” his Jewish state culturally by importing what he called the “spirit of the Levant”.

    • Eliminate Profit from Punishment

      In July 2010, Marissa Alexander, a young Black woman from Florida, faced the fight of her life only nine days after giving birth to her youngest daughter. Her estranged husband, Rico Gray, attacked, strangled, and threatened to kill Marissa in her own home. To get rid of Rico, Marissa fired a warning shot into the ceiling. The single shot injured no one. And yet she was subsequently charged with several criminal charges and incarcerated for a victimless crime.

      Marissa’s story is just one example of how prisons, profit, policing, and poverty are intimately connected. Prisons have long been warehouses for the poor and individuals who are unable to defend themselves in a vicious legal system. Undue profiling by law enforcement has long been the gateway into the incarceration system. And increasingly rich people and the multi-billion dollar security industry make money off of mass incarceration.

      Marissa Alexander fought a long battle in the Florida courts to appeal her conviction on the basis of her right of self-defense. She eventually was successful and in 2015 she was released from jail and put on probation. But in the meantime, she paid a high cost. Throughout her entire ordeal, she not only missed irreplaceable time with her children. She also had to pay $105 every week for the use of an ankle monitor while she was under house arrest and an additional $500 every other week for a bond cost.

    • Doncaster girl raped at gunpoint in Pakistan so cousin could get British visa

      But for Tabassan Khan, it marked the beginning of a very different life. British-born Tabassan, given a new name to protect her identity, was told she was going on a summer holiday.

      Instead, she was forced at gunpoint to marry a cousin six years her senior in Pakistan. She was held captive and abused over the next three years.

      Now, having found a way back to safety, she wants to share her story and shine a light on the plight of thousands of young British victims.

      Her life had already been difficult. Her father had murdered her mother when she was 12, leaving her and three brothers in the care of an aunt in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

      The now 26-year-old said: “I thought I was going to Pakistan on holiday. I was excited. Then two months passed and it was time to start the school year. I asked my uncle when I should go back and he just kept saying, ‘Stay a bit longer’ for weeks. After four months, he came up to my room with a gun and told me I had to marry my cousin.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • The FCC Can’t Save Community Broadband — But We Can

      Last year, while most of us were focused on the FCC’s Open Internet Order to protect net neutrality, the FCC quietly did one more thing: it voted to override certain state regulations that inhibit the development and expansion of community broadband projects. The net neutrality rules have since been upheld, but last week a federal appeals court rejected FCC’s separate effort to preempt state law.

      The FCC’s goals were laudable. Municipalities and local communities have been experimenting with ways to foster alternatives to big broadband providers like Comcast and Time/Warner. Done right, community fiber experiments have the potential to create options that empower Internet subscribers and make Internet access more affordable. For example, Chattanooga, Tennessee, is home to one of the nation’s least expensive, most robust municipally-owned broadband networks. The city decided to build a high-speed network initially to meet the needs of the city’s electric company. Then, the local government learned that the cable companies would not be upgrading their Internet service fast enough to meet the city’s needs. So the electric utility also became an ISP, and the residents of Chattanooga now have access to a gigabit (1,000 megabits) per second Internet connection. That’s far ahead of the average US connection speed, which typically clocks in at 9.8 megabits per second.

  • DRM

    • Why Apple Removing The Audio Jack From The iPhone Would Be A Very, Very, Very, Bad Move

      It’s been rumored for months now that the next iPhone will be removing the standard analog headphone jack — the same jack that’s existed on portable audio devices for ages. It would immediately make a whole bunch of headphone and microphone products obsolete overnight for those who use iPhones. And while some have compared it to when Apple surprised everyone nearly two decades ago in removing the floppy drive from the iMac, this is quite different. The floppy drive really was pushing the end of its necessary existence, and with the internet and (not too long after) the rise of USB, the internal floppy drive seemed less and less important. But that’s not the case with the standard audio jack.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • More examples of how licensing kills progress: the stories of Gopher and GIF

      At Private Internet Access, we’re dependent on – and celebrating – the existence of free and open strong cryptography. Time and again, people proclaiming the virtues of monopolies and exclusive rights – copyrights, patents – are trying to push their model of closedness and permissioned gates onto the Internet. And time and again, the Internet rejects the notion wholesale.

      Without free and open cryptography, we would not have strong privacy today – and without strong privacy, we no longer have Freedom of Speech at all, in the wider social context. Numerous commissions have looked at the possibility of outlawing private encryption altogether today, like private encryption was banned in France before the first crypto wars, with the usual scapegoat of “because terrorism”. However, they all concluded that because of the mere existence of free and open cryptography, which fall under free speech laws since the first crypto wars, terrorists will always have access to strong cryptography – unlike with gun regulation, there are no per-item sales you can regulate.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/15/glimpses-at-openmandriva-lx-3-0/feed/ 0 Links 11/8/2016: Linux 4.6.6, KDE Kirigami UI Framework http://techrights.org/2016/08/11/kde-kirigami-ui-framework/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/11/kde-kirigami-ui-framework/#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2016 11:14:21 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94855

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Be Cautious With Containers Says FutureAdvisor’s DevOps Director

      Docker is a fantastic technology, but it’s not one that’s well understood. If we take a look at the lessons of the past, there was more hype than understanding around cloud as well — and before that, around virtualization. I’m seeing the same patterns repeat themselves here, and in some circles this is a far from popular viewpoint.

    • A brief introduction to Linux containers and image signing

      Putting software inside of containers is basically a platform migration. I’d like to highlight what makes this difficult to migrate some applications into containers.

    • How the CORD Project Will Change the Economics of Broadband

      On July 29 at the Sunnyvale Tech Corner Campus in Calif., Google hosted the open source community for the inaugural CORD Summit. CORD, or Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter, launched last week as an independently funded On.Lab software project hosted by The Linux Foundation. The sold-out event featured interactive talks from partners and leading stakeholders of the newly formed CORD Project, including AT&T, China Unicom, Ciena, Google, NEC, ON.Lab, ONF, The Linux Foundation, University of Arizona, and Verizon.

      CORD is the biggest innovation in the access market since ADSL and the cable modem. Considering the broad scope of the access network, and the technical roadmap the growing open source CORD community laid out at the Summit, CORD has the potential to redefine the economics of access.

    • Midokura Embraces Kubernetes Container Networking

      Midokura CTO Pino de Candia explained that the new Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) 6.2 update is based on Open Source MidoNet 5.0. Midokura first open-sourced its MidoNet platform in November 2014 at the OpenStack Summit in Paris.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE’s Kirigami UI Framework Gets its First Public Release

        Kirigami, KDE’s lightweight user interface framework for mobile and convergent applications, which was first announced in March, is now publicly released! This framework allows Qt developers to easily create applications that run on most major mobile and desktop platforms without modification (though adapted user interfaces for different form-factors are supported and recommended for optimal user experience). It extends the touch-friendly Qt Quick Controls with larger application building blocks, following the design philosophy laid out in the Kirigami Human Interface Guidelines.

      • KDE Kirigami UI Framework Makes First Debut
      • KDE Announces the First Public Release of Their Kirigami UI Framework for Mobile

        Today, August 10, 2016, KDE’s Thomas Pfeiffer has had the great honor of announcing the availability of the first public release of the Kirigami UI (User Interface) framework for building mobile and convergent applications.

        Work on the Kirigami user interface framework started back in March 2016, when the KDE development team announced their plans for creating one of the most powerful and sophisticated tool that would allow application developers to build cross-platform Qt-based apps for mobile platforms.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Getting ready for GUADEC!

        I have already attended at GUADEC 2015 and it was a great, motivating experience with nice people having the same interest as mine.

      • GUADEC

        I’m going to talk about the evolution of GTK+ rendering, from its humble origins of X11 graphics contexts, to Cairo, to GSK. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, you can either attend my presentation on Saturday at 11 in the Grace Room, or you can just find me and have a chat.

        I’m also going to stick around during the BoF days — especially for the usual GTK+ team meeting, which will be on the 15th.

      • See you in GUADEC!
      • Going to GUADEC 2016
      • GUADEC in Karlsruhe Awaits

        On Thursday I’m taking a plane to Germany. I’m also accompanied by a friend who’d like to know more about GNOME and get involved in GNOME. Again this year I’m also volunteering – so far I have worked on t-shirts and streaming artwork for GUADEC.

      • The much awaited GUADEC, 2016

        Well the time has come to catch up with the smart peeps behind IRC nicks. \o/ This time GUADEC is organized in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany and I am all set for it. Oops forgot to mention about GUADEC. So GUADEC is annual conference of GNOME (FOSS) Organization where all users, contributors and developers meet together and have an amazing time discussing about future prospects of building the community stronger and better. Also there is good discussion on various projects and applications. Besides that, there are many interesting workshops and talks scheduled.

      • gnome-boxes: Coder’s log 2
      • gnome-boxes: Coder’s log 3
      • GSK Demystified (II) — Rendering
      • Debugging GNOME Online Accounts

        I spent some time today documenting how to debug various problems with online account integration in GNOME. It is also linked from the main GNOME Online Accounts wiki page. So, you can find it via the usual click-stream and don’t need to rely on this blog.

      • GSoC progress part #5

  • Distributions

    • Bedrock Linux Is Working To Combine Different Linux Distributions Into One

      Bedrock Linux is a unique Linux distribution that offers the best elements of different distros. The users are allowed to build a rock-solid base derived from Debian, RHEL etc. After that, one has the choice to add different packages from multiple Linux distributions according to the need. Bedrock Linux is able to perform this trick by manipulating the virtual file systems.

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Linux: Should You Trust Love at First Sight?

        My first impression of Manjaro is just the opposite. The power and performance are obvious, but it feels as if it’ll run with the dependability of a well oiled sewing machine. I think that if I were a gamer, which I’m not, I would try this one on for size. Out of the box, it comes Steam ready, and gaming would offer an ultimate test on how it performs under pressure.

        The trouble with impressions is that they come from a place that’s devoid of any experiences other than the educated guess, a lesson I learned back in the ’70s when I blew every dime I had on a cute little underpowered Opel Kadett. Because I knew the Germans’ reputation for building fine automobiles, I had the impression that this would be a car that would keep me going for a while. The day after I bought it, I ran across a friend — a mechanic friend, I might add — who’d once owned the very same make and model. “Get rid of it,” he said. “Now, while you can. They’re junk.” I didn’t listen; I’d already fallen in love with the car. A week later I was walking.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Porting APT to CMake

        I have not yet tested building on exotic platforms like macOS, or even a BSD. Please do and report back. In Debian, CMake is not up-to.date enough on the non-Linux platforms to build APT due to test suite failures, I hope those can be fixed/disabled soon (it appears to be a timing issue AFAICT).

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tough, expandable Bay Trail SBC measures just 95 x 55mm

      Versalogic’s sandwich-style “Osprey” SBC offers Atom E3800 SoCs, dual GbE ports, dual mini-PCIe slots, MIL-STD-202G ruggedization, and -40 to 85°C support.

      Like Versalogic’s recent BayCat and earlier Bengal single-board computers, the Osprey is based on Intel’s “Bay Trail” Atom E38xx family of SoCs. Unlike those boards, which conform to 4.2 x 3.8-inch (107 x 97mm) PC/104 family specs, the Osprey has a considerably smaller, 95 x 55mm footprint and omits stackable PC/104-style expansion.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Kyocera ‘DuraForce PRO’ rugged Android smartphone has integrated HD action camera

          Today, Kyocera announces an interesting smartphone that stands out among the others. The ‘DuraForce PRO’ is super-rugged, and has both an octacore processor and large 3,240mAh battery. The stand-out feature, however, is the integrated wide-angle HD action camera.

          “DuraForce PRO was designed by Kyocera to be rugged for a reason — to provide businesses and consumers with a dependable smartphone that can withstand the harshest environments and mishaps, all with the peace of mind of a 2-year manufacturer’s warranty. For an industrious worker, an adventurous thrill-seeker or a parent on the go, DuraForce PRO incorporates cutting-edge technology and features designed to function in life’s most demanding moments. It is equipped with a large 5-inch Full HD display and a Qualcomm Snapdragon octa-core processor (1.5GHz x 4/1.2GHz x 4) with X8 LTE and multi-mode to ensure fast connections on diverse global networks”, says Kyocera.

        • Bang & Olufsen’s new 4K TV runs on Android TV

          Bang & Olufsen is known for making some beautifully designed TVs, and its latest creation, the BeoVision 14, is no exception. The newest addition to the BeoVision lineup features aluminum piping and oak wood lamellas, making it feel like a piece of furniture versus the minimalistic displays we’ve grown accustomed to.

        • Survey: Android’s Lead is Consolidated

          According to the latest Developer Nation Q3 2016 survey from VisionMobile, Android’s lead over iOS as primary platform and developer mindshare has been consolidated. Also, Windows developers prefer C# in the cloud while Linux ones stay with Java.

        • Hyundai’s DIY Android Auto update system expanded to four new cars, including the Sonata Hybrid and Veloster

          It must be nice to have a car with a media system that can be updated – some of us are lucky just to get Bluetooth. Some Hyundai owners can actually upgrade their in-car entertainment systems to give them Android Auto support, and today that list expands by four according to Cnet. Owners of the 2016 Sonata Hybrid (standard and plug-in), 2016 Veloster, and 2015/2016 Azera can now get some sweet, sweet Android Auto action with a download and a bit of legwork.

          To get started, head over to MyHyundai.com and put in your car’s Vehicle Identification Number. You’ll need a standard-sized SD card and a few hours of time, first to download the package via a standard PC, then to transfer it to the card, then to run the update program on your car. It’s not exactly a streamlined process, but anyone who’s ever rooted an Android phone and installed a custom ROM can probably handle it. And the end result – shiny new Android Auto goodness for your vehicle – is certainly worth it.

        • How to test drive the Andromium OS with your Android device
        • $99 Superbook Turns Android Phone Into Laptop — Sort Of

          If you’re looking to converge your laptop and smartphone experience, at a fair price, you might only have to wait for the release of the Andromium Superbook in early 2017.

          The Superbook is basically a laptop shell that uses your smartphone’s brains to operate. It looks more or less like a laptop, but instead of having the usual software that laptops use, the Superbook allows you to connect your Android smartphone for a full laptop experience. Essentially, the Superbook turns your phone into a computer.

        • 15 Android Apps Actually Worth Paying For

          Android’s poly-manufacturer ecosystem has long since eclipsed iOS as the world’s most popular mobile operating system. However, app developers still tend to fare better in the Applesphere—financially speaking. Even though Google Play regularly outshines the App Store in total number of downloads, Apple users are far more willing than their Android counterparts to actually plunk down cash for their apps.

          This is not surprising, given what we know about users of each ecosystem. Speaking very broadly, Apple is a premium brand that appeals to users who will spend extra for what they believe (rightly or wrongly) to be a superior experience, while Android is the mass appeal brand for those who are fine with the basics.

        • Vulnerability Exposes 900M Android Devices—and Fixing Them Won’t Be Easy
        • Netflix publishes a dedicated Android app for its FAST Speed Test
        • Google Nexus Sailfish goes through AnTuTu and Geekbench with Android 7.0 Nougat, Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM
        • 4 essential Android add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets
        • How to create more powerful Android notifications

Free Software/Open Source

  • Mattermost — The Open Source Slack Alternative You’ll Love

    Slack has exploded in popularity among a wide variety of teams for coordination and planning. It has especially become notable in infrastructure and information technology on both the development and operations sides. One of the biggest and most crucial aspects of working in a team is communication, and this is where Slack, and now Mattermost, shine.

  • If you build it, they won’t come: Why your project needs better marketing

    FOSS (free and open source software) conferences are full of talks about how to improve your code, or how you manage your code, or what the latest and greatest languages and tools are. But a successful open source project is about more than good code. First, let’s talk about what success is, because success isn’t a guarantee.

    University of Massachusetts faculty members Charles Schweik and Robert English have studied open source projects and their success extensively. In a study of 174,333 projects through 2009, they were able to declare success or abandonment for only 145,475. (Although this specific data is aging, I believe it is still accurate to prove the point.) Almost half of those were abandoned before a first release. Another third were left behind after that first release. Success also doesn’t have to mean becoming a household name or having thousands of contributors. It’s your project, which means you get to define what success means. But that also means that for your first step, you need to establish what your goals are.

  • Development Democracy: How IoT Innovation Grows from Open Source

    The history of the Internet is a story of innovative development coming from the bottom and working its way into the commercial and then consumer spaces along a pretty clear upward trajectory. Not so, it seems with the IoT. It seems like all the development news we hear these days comes from the enterprise players and the vendors that service them.

  • XtraLife unveiled as a rebranded Gaming Back End, now gives Devs Open Source access
  • Clan of the Cloud rebrands as XtraLife, goes open source

    Formerly known as Back End as a Service (BaaS) Clan of the Cloud, XtraLife gives developers access to an Open Source Back End in response to developer frustration over insufficient transparency and sustainable back end technology in the market.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome to make Flash mostly-dead in early December [Ed: but do we replace one blob with another? (Chrome is proprietary)]

        Google yesterday set an early December deadline for purging most Flash content from its Chrome browser, adding that it will take an interim step next month when it stops rendering Flash-based page analytics.

        In a post to a company blog, Anthony LaForge, a technical program manager on the Chrome team, said the browser would refuse to display virtually all Flash content starting with version 55, which is scheduled for release the week of Dec. 5.

        Previously, Google had used a broader deadline of this year’s fourth quarter for quashing all Flash content except for that produced by a select list of 10 sites, including Amazon, Facebook and YouTube.

      • Google Chrome’s plan to kill Flash kicks into high gear

        Google is getting serious about ending the reign of Adobe Flash on the web.

        The company recently detailed a timeline for bringing Flash on Chrome to an end—kind of. Even in these late stages of Flash’s life on the web you still can’t kill it off entirely. Instead, Google says it will “de-emphasize” Flash to the point where it’s almost never used except when absolutely necessary.

      • HTML5 Wins: Google Chrome Is Officially Killing Flash Next Month

        With an aim to bring security, better battery life, and faster load times, Google is de-emphasizing Flash next month. After this change in Chrome 53, the behind-the-scenes Flash will be blocked in favor of HTML5. Later, with Chrome 55, HTML5 will be made the default choice while loading a web page.

    • Mozilla

      • Help Mozilla build out their Location Service while walking about with your phone

        You can help build a free geolocation service while you’re out wandering around your neighborhood with your Android device. Install the Mozilla Stumbler app and let it run continuously in the background to help improve the Mozilla Location Service. The app registers the Wi-Fi signals around you and their estimated GPS coordinates, and then sends this off to Mozilla.

        Psst: There is also an optional competitive element to the app for those who’ve gotten hooked on augmented reality games like Pokémon GO and Ingress.

  • Databases

    • Open Source Tool ‘Rethinks’ Databases

      An open source tool for writing queries and modeling data designed for use with the RethinkDB query language is being positioned as an alternative to developing applications using the ReQL query language.

      Compose, a provider of hosted databases founded in 2010, acquired by IBM (NYSE: IBM) last year and incorporated into its Cloud Data Services unit, is pitching the ReQL alternative dubbed “Thinky.” The tool is described as an open source object relational mapper (ORM) designed for RethinkDB. IBM is offering RethinkDB and a batch of other hosted database services through its Compose Enterprise platform.

    • Where the Database Market Goes From Here

      It’s hard to remember now, but a decade ago the idea of non-relational databases was a foreign one. Outside of successful and widely adopted alternatives such as Berkley DB, generally the word database could reasonably be assumed to mean relational database. When we wrote about the possibility of non-relational alternatives then eleven years ago last March, the general reaction was a shrug, consternation or both.

      As developers increasingly took control of the decision making processes around technology selection, however, they looked outside the enterprise to the likes of Google for architectural inspiration, and non-relational databases first emerged and then exploded. From a consolidated handful of enterprise-oriented relational databases which are still the backbone for millions of existing applications, the database market added a wide variety of new specialized database types: columnar, distributed storage and process, document, graph, in-memory, key-value and more.

      Each of these categories began with the creation of specialized engines that excelled at a particular task, but that also involved tradeoffs traditional database buyers were unfamiliar with. Hadoop’s Map Reduce, for example, was less accessible to traditional DBAs (at least until companies such as Facebook wrote SQL-like interfaces such as Hive), but it could attack larger scale datasets than was practical with traditional relational databases, and it could do so far more efficiently.

      The database market today, then, looks very different than the database market of a decade ago. The traditional relational databases are all still around, but they are increasingly one of many databases employed in a given business rather than the database employed.

    • Couchbase: data shapes in the new digital economy [Ed: is it a paid-for marketing piece?]

      This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog written by Luke Whitehead in his capacity as head of EMEA marketing for Couchbase — the firm is am an open source, distributed (shared-nothing architecture) multi-model NoSQL document-oriented database specialist.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Reactive? Serverless? Put to bed? What’s next for Java. Speak up, Oracle

      The future of Java Enterprise Edition is on many developers’ minds. After the community came to the conclusion that the platform’s progress has come to a standstill, a plethora of initiatives has arisen with the goal of encouraging Oracle to pick up the work on Java EE 8 again.

      It’s time to take inventory.

      The bone of contention was Josh Juneau’s unsparing analysis of concrete activities in the Java EE specifications since 2015 in April this year. As an Expert Group Member of JSRs 372 (JavaServer Faces 2.3) and 368 (Java Message Service 2.1), he took a close look at Oracle’s participation in the development by examining mailing lists and GitHub activities.

    • Oracle Java patch problem? Browsium rolls management fix

      Released in 1995, Java went from a language running in a browser to the ubiquitous platform of today, one which underpins the entire industry and with deep tentacles in enterprise IT.

      After more than 20 years, Java remains one of the world’s most popular programming languages and employed by nine million devs.

      Java runs on 97 per cent of PCs in the enterprise and 89 per cent of US desktops and, somehow, three billion mobile phones. There’s no count on servers but it is huge thanks to the tireless work over the years in tools and middleware of IBM, Oracle and the deceased BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems.

      Yet with ubiquity and history has come risk, and Java now dances with Adobe’s Flash to get ahead in terms of number of vulnerability warnings and fixes.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • Here’s why Andreessen Horowitz is looking to invest in open source

      If you look strictly at declining information technology budgets, it might look like tech’s traditional mainstay “infrastructure” market — computing hardware, software and networking gear — is spiraling into insignificance.

      Indeed, it even looked that way to Martin Casado (pictured above), who cofounded the networking software startup Nicira Networks in 2009 before selling to VMware in 2012 for $1.3 billion and becoming general manager of its networking and security portfolio. “I was caught in this malaise for awhile,” said Casado, now a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

      No more. Speaking at the OpenStack Days conference today in Mountain View, CA, Casado declared, “We’re at the cusp of one of the biggest renaissances in infrastructure.”

  • BSD

    • Lumina Desktop Environment Hits 1.0 Milestone After Four Years of Development

      PC-BSD developer, Ken Moore, is extremely happy to announce that after being in development for more than four years, his unique Lumina desktop environment has hit the 1.0 stable milestone.

    • GhostBSD 10.3 RC1 is ready for testing

      This first RC release is ready for testing new feature in GhostBSD 10.3, MATE and XFCE is available on SourceForge for the i386, amd64, and amd64-uefi architectures.

    • GhostBSD 10.3 RC1 Is Out, but ZFS Disk Encryption Was Pushed Back to GhostBSD 11

      The GhostBSD developers are announcing on August 10, 2016, the general availability of the first RC (Release Candidate) development milestone towards the upcoming GhostBSD 10.3 operating system.

      GhostBSD 10.3 has been in development for quite some time now, since Spring 2016, and it looks like the final release gets closer and closer now that the Release Candidate 1 build is available for public testing. This time, both the MATE and Xfce editions have been made available for download to early adopters.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

  • Programming/Development

    • App dev silos are DevOps killers: Start by tearing them down

      The road to DevOps can be rocky. Larger enterprises often cite cultural barriers such as the “developers vs. operations” mentality as the biggest obstacles to achieving DevOps, and much has been written about how to break down those barriers.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • After debate, ABA House calls for publication of privately drafted standards used in legislation

      A resolution calling on Congress to make privately drafted parts of the law freely available attracted accusations in the House of Delegates that the ABA was trying to give away other people’s intellectual property.

      When federal agencies incorporate privately drafted standards into their rules by reference, Resolution 112, passed by the ABA House on Tuesday, asks Congress to make the relevant portion of those privately drafted standards available to the public online. The measure, sponsored by the Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice, was intended to advance the idea that the American public should have access to laws that regulate things like food additives, windshield safety standards and toy safety. (This was the subject of an ABA Journal feature in 2014.)

Leftovers

  • State of the Art: Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick? Think Again

    Amazon is the most obscure large company in the tech industry.

    It isn’t just secretive, the way Apple is, but in a deeper sense, Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce and cloud-storage giant is opaque. Amazon rarely explains either its near-term tactical aims or its long-term strategic vision. It values surprise.

    To understand Amazon, then, is necessarily to engage in a kind of Kremlinology. That’s especially true of the story behind one of its most important business areas: the logistics by which it ships orders to its customers.

  • Looks Can Kill: The Deadly Results of Flawed Design

    Earlier this summer, 27-year-old actor Anton Yelchin was crushed to death when his Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled downhill, pinning him against the security gate in front of his Los Angeles home. No one will ever know exactly what happened in the moments before the accident. But we know that his car is one of more than 1.1 million Jeep and Dodge vehicles that are part of a recall by Fiat Chrysler. The problem? Flawed design.

    Specifically, it’s the unintuitive automatic shifter, which can make drivers think they’ve put the car in park when they haven’t. If a driver were to exit the car with the engine not in park, all 5,000 pounds of the vehicle could roll away, crashing into any objects (or people) in its path.

  • Bipartisan Panel of State Lawmakers Agree: NCLB Has Failed US Kids

    Confirming what many public education advocates have been saying for years, a new report from a bipartisan panel of state lawmakers declares that the United States has little to show for more than a decade of reform efforts inspired by the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

    The report released Tuesday from the National Conference of State Legislatures, No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State (pdf), charges that “[s]tates have found little success” in developing an effective education system. Indeed, the executive summary reads, “Recent reforms have underperformed because of silver bullet strategies and piecemeal approaches.”

  • Italian administrations rapidly embrace ePayment

    The number of Italian public administrations and public organisations offering online payment is increasing rapidly, according to the Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale (AGID), the country’s Agency for the Digitalisation of the Public Sector. Just over 60% of all public administrations and organisations have implemented PagoPA, the electronic payment system developed by AGID.

  • Science

    • Online gaming may boost school scores but social media is wasted time, study suggests

      In what could be music to the ears of many parents, teenagers who regularly play online games are more likely to get better school scores, an Australian study suggests.

    • Millions of people might be ingesting a potentially harmful toxin in drinking water

      A new study out Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters looked at a national database that monitors chemical levels in drinking water and found that 6 million people were being exposed to levels of a certain chemical that exceed what the Environmental Protection Agency considers healthy.

      The chemicals, known as poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, are synthetic and resistant to water and oil, which is why they’re used in things like pizza boxes and firefighting foam. They’re built to withstand the environment.

      But PFASs also accumulate in people and animals and have been observationally linked to an increased risk of health problems including cancer. And they can’t be easily avoided, like with a water filter, for example.

      The kind of PFASs that are considered the most harmful are rarely used in the US, but other countries like China still use them, and that could have effects elsewhere, experts say.

    • High school price tag: 2,000 euros

      The Union of Upper Secondary School Students calculates the average cost to a student of three years of high school education at around 2,000 euros.

      The organisation’s chair, Elli Luukkainen, says the estimate includes equipment costs. As matriculation examinations will be completely electronic by 2019, each high school student must have the use of an up-to-date laptop that meets certain specifications.

      “The overall cost has specifically been raised by the need to buy a computer. The total cost of books may be 1,700-1,800 euros, depending on which titles are required by the curriculum,” says Luukkainen, 19-year-old Helsinki art student. Secondary schooling in Finland usually lasts three years, although some students graduate in two or four years depending on their field of study.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • DEA Reaffirms ‘Flat Earth’ Position With Regard To Marijuana Scheduling

      Although the DEA’s ruling continues to classify marijuana in the same category as heroin, the agency is also anticipated to advocate for regulatory changes that could expand the production of research-grade cannabis for FDA-approved clinical studies. Presently, any clinical trial involving cannabis must access source material cultivated at the University of Mississippi — a prohibition that is not in place for other controlled substances. Tomorrow, the agency is expected to take steps to permit, for the first time, multiple parties to apply for federal licenses to grow marijuana for FDA-approved trials — thus ending the U-Miss/NIDA monopoly on the production of material. This change was initially recommended by the DEA’s own administrative law judge in 2007, but her decision was ultimately rejected by the agency in 2011.

    • Filleting the Lion

      Fortunately for our coral reefs, the flashy lionfish has caught the attention of the hungriest predators of all: people! Once stripped of its venomous spines, cleaned, and filleted like any other fish, the lionfish becomes delectable seafood fare. NOAA scientists researching the lionfish’s spread and impact are now encouraging a seafood market as one way to mitigate the species’ impacts on reef communities.

    • Healthy Snack Invented on Indian Reservation Now Faces Stiff Corporate Competition

      The Pine Ridge Indian reservation is not the first place you’d look for good news about creating a new kind of economy that works for everyone.

      This corner of South Dakota includes several of the poorest counties in America, according to census figures. Ninety-seven percent of Pine Ridge’s Lakota Indian population lives below the federal poverty line, reports the American Indian Humanitarian Foundation. The unemployment rate is well over 50 percent.

      Yet these dire conditions—compounded by public health problems like diabetes and addiction—have not snuffed hope. Growing numbers of Pine Ridge residents are embracing their own traditions as a path toward healing and economic self-sufficiency.

      The Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, for instance, is moving forward on an ambitious set of projects, including a worker-owned construction company, a worker-owned IT firm and a farm to combat lack of access to nutritious food.

    • At Least Six Million Americans Are Drinking Toxic ‘Teflon Chemicals’ With Their Water

      PFOA and PFOS chemical compounds—including C8, popularly known as the Teflon chemical—are extremely dangerous to human health, and despite an EPA advisory released earlier this year and increasing calls for action, research shows they are near-ubiquitous in the United States.

      “Virtually all Americans are exposed to these compounds,” said Xindi Hu, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student at Harvard’s Department of Environmental Health, to the Post. “They never break down. Once they are released into the environment, they are there.”

      Moreover, the study also notes that research suggests “that exposure to these chemicals can make people sick, even at or below the concentration recommended as acceptable under the EPA health advisory,” according to the Gazette-Mail.

    • Researchers find unsafe levels of industrial chemicals in drinking water of 6 million Americans

      Drinking water supplies serving more than six million Americans contain unsafe levels of a widely used class of industrial chemicals linked to potentially serious health problems, according to a new study from Harvard University researchers.

      The chemicals — known as polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs — have been used for decades in a range of industrial and commercial products, including non-stick coatings on pans, food wrappers, water-repellent clothing and firefighting foam. Long-term exposure has been linked to increased risks of kidney cancer, thyroid problems, high cholesterol and hormone disruption, among other issues.

    • Experiments Involving GMO Animals Are Skyrocketing, Study Finds [Ed: In practice, as Monsanto makes abundantly evident, GMO is like a ploy for 'privatising' life (fauna after the flora experiment) for profit; a passageway to monopoly on life with patents]

      Experiments involving genetically engineered animals have nearly tripled in Germany in the past 10 years, driven by a burgeoning global industry that involves inventing and patenting genetically altered species for scientific research, says a new study commissioned by Germany’s Green Party and conducted by the research group Testbiotech.

      [...]

      Ebner also told Süddeutsche Zeitung that he fears so-called “free trade” deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) will lead to the worldwide dispersal of products from genetically modified animals.

      The newspaper observes that “meat and other products from genetically modified animals cannot be sold in Germany. [...] In other countries, however, among other things scientists are experimenting with altering the ingredients of milk by changing the genes of cows. For such experiments, embryos must be genetically altered and then implanted in a surrogate. The Testbiotech study notes that these experiments often involve pain and suffering, as such laboratory animals are frequently killed in order to remove cells or the genetically modified embryo.”

      It seems other countries have reason to worry, as the U.S. government continues to fight for pro-GMO legislation. Indeed, when President Obama last week signed into law a corporate-friendly GMO labeling bill, he “scratched out the laws of Vermont, Connecticut, and Maine that required the labeling of genetically engineered foods,” reports AlterNet.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Sultan and the Tsar: Erdogan Travels to Russia

      So the Sultan travels to see the Tsar at the royal seat of St Petersburg. And the Caliph of Damascus will watch from Syria with the conviction that Ba’ath Party policy has once again proved its worth. The policy? Wait. And wait. And wait.

      For just as Turkey’s power over Syria – its Pakistan-like role of conduit for Arab Gulf money and arms to the civil war, its smuggling routes to Isis, al-Qaeda (or Jabhat al-Nusra or Fatah el-Sham or whatever) – seemed an overwhelming threat to Damascus, along comes Turkey’s mysterious coup, its army neutered, and Sultan Erdogan scurrying off to St Petersburg to move his country from Nato to Mother Russia.

    • Will Nagasaki be the last use of nuclear weapons?

      Today is the 71st anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Last week I was in Nagasaki, participating in a symposium on nuclear issues organised by Asahi Shinbun, Japan’s second largest national newspaper. I met several survivors of the Nagasaki bombing (known as Hibakusha), including Michiko Kano, whose son has just published a book about her experiences “15 year old Hibakusha: So as not to erase history”.

    • 71 Years Ago: When Truman Failed To Pause — And The Nagasaki War Crime Followed

      Seventy-one years after the twin atomic attacks on Japan, historians continue to debate whether the first bombing, over Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945, was justified, and whether it was even the most important factor in the country’s swift surrender. Many of those who still defend President Truman’s decision on that assault, however, consider the bombing of Nagasaki three days later completely avoidable, even a crime of war.

    • Planes land at Brussels, Toulouse after reported bomb alerts – Belgian media

      Two airplanes which were heading to Zaventem Airport in the Belgian capital, Brussels, had reported bomb alerts on Wednesday, according to national broadcaster VRT.

      Emergency services had been deployed at the airport, VRT reported.

      According to VRT, which cites the Belgian federal prosecutor, the threat was “serious enough to take action.”

    • ‘Kill Russians and Iranians, threaten Assad,’ says ex-CIA chief backing Clinton

      Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell, who supports Hillary Clinton and insists that Donald Trump is being manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, said that Russians and Iranians in Syria should be killed covertly to “pay the price.”

    • The Stench of Raw Propaganda

      Washington was caught in a bind. In Iraq Washington was fighting ISIS, because ISIS was overthrowing Washington’s puppet in Iraq. However, in Syria Washington was supporting ISIS, often characterizing ISIS as “moderates” fighting to bring democracy to Syria. Now that ISIS is on the verge of total defeat in Syria, Washington’s whores among the “experts” want Russia punished for blocking Washington’s overthrow of Syria.

    • Shocking audio surfaces: Khomeini’s ex-heir acknowledges massacre of PMOI by Iran regime

      A shocking audio recording has been published for the first time of Khomeini’s former heir-apparent, Hossein-Ali Montazeri, acknowledging the brutal nationwide massacre in Iran in 1988 of activists of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK).

      Montazeri, who was subsequently dismissed as the heir by then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini, is heard addressing a meeting with the “death committee,” comprised of Hossein-Ali Nayeri, the regime’s sharia judge; Morteza Eshraqi, the regime’s prosecutor; Ebrahim Raeesi, deputy prosecutor; and Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, representative of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). He tells the death committee members: “The greatest crime committed during the reign of the Islamic Republic, for which history will condemn us, has been committed by you. Your (names) will in the future be etched in the annals of history as criminals.” He also added, “Executing these people while there have been no new activities (by the prisoners) means that … the entire judicial system has been at fault.”

      In the summer of 1988, the Iranian regime summarily and extra-judicially executed 30,000 political prisoners held in jails across Iran. This massacre was carried out on the basis of a fatwa by Khomeini. The Iranian regime has never acknowledged these executions or provided any information as to how many prisoners were killed.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Eight Years After a Mercaptan Spill, Residents of Eight Mile, Alabama, Call For Evacuation

      Eight years after a mercaptan spill at a Mobile Gas facility in Eight Mile, Alabama, residents still affected by the spill are fighting back. “For years we have been told there is not a problem anymore, though the smell of gas never really goes away,” Eight Mile resident Geraldine Harper told DeSmog, “and I’m sure breathing that stuff is making my health worse.”

    • To Stop Climate Change, Don’t Just Cut Carbon. Redistribute Wealth.

      This year’s Democratic platform has the fingerprints of progressive movements all over it. A $15 minimum wage, a pathway to cannabis legalization, improvements to Social Security, police accountability, and financial reforms — including a tax on speculation — all make an appearance.

      The platform also highlights the critical link between climate and the economy. In particular, it argues that “carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases should be priced to reflect their negative externalities.”

      That’s a complicated way of saying that the cost of the harm done to people and the planet should be calculated into the price of energy generated by burning coal, oil, and gas. If these costs were factored into the price consumers pay at the pump or in their utility bills, it could make dirty energy expensive enough to change both consumer and industry behavior. And that, in turn, would make renewable energy much more cost-competitive.

    • Warren and Whitehouse: Exxon Climate Scandal a ‘Master Class’ in Corporate Rigging

      Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) have a thing or two to say to about efforts by Exxon, and their Republican henchmen, to shut down state probes into whether the oil giant deliberately misled the public about the connection between fossil fuels and climate change.

      “Let’s call this what it is: a master class in how big corporations rig the system,” the pair wrote in a searing op-ed published in the Washington Post late Tuesday.

      The senators lay out how the ongoing investigation by Massachusetts and New York attorneys general (AG) into potential crimes committed by ExxonMobil is “something state AGs do every day. Sometimes AGs uncover fraud and sometimes they don’t, but if the evidence warrants it, the question of fraud will be resolved in open court, with all the evidence on public display.”

      “But instead of applauding the AGs for doing their jobs,” Warren and Whitehouse continue, “this particular investigation against this particular oil company has brought down the wrath of congressional Republicans—and a swift effort to shut down the investigation before any evidence becomes public.”

    • Grounded 17,000-Ton Oil Rig Leaking Diesel Near Rare North Sea Habitat

      A 17,000-ton drilling rig had broken lose and was blown ashore on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis and officials warned on Wednesday that it is now leaking oil.

      According to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), two of the four holding tanks aboard the Transocean Winner have been damaged and are releasing an unknown amount of diesel oil. The rig was reportedly carrying 280 metric tonnes of oil.

      Environmentalists say that the accident, which occurred in the North Sea off Scotland’s outer Hebrides, highlights why offshore oil drilling is so risky and controversial, as it poses a grave threat to local ecosystems and economies.

      “Leaking diesel oil could create a serious problem for wildlife in such a sensitive area, which is often home to whales, dolphins and important seabirds,” said Friends of the Earth Scotland director Dr. Richard Dixon. “The local community is dependent on tourism and fishing, both of which would be badly impacted by a serious spill.

    • Diesel oil leak from grounded rig Transocean Winner

      Two fuel tanks on the grounded drilling rig Transocean Winner have been breached, releasing an unknown amount of diesel oil.

      The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) said the rig at Dalmore beach, a beauty spot on the Isle of Lewis, was carrying 280 metric tonnes of the oil.

      It said two out of four tanks holding the oil appeared to have been damaged.

    • Humans Have Used All the Earth’s Resources for the Year

      As of yesterday, we’ve officially overspent nature’s resource budget, according to the Global Footprint Network, an international climate research organization. Metaphorically speaking, if Earth were a bank, we’d be in over our heads with overdraft fees.

      This year, “Earth Overshoot Day” fell on August 8, based on measurements of each nation’s withdrawal of natural capital. From carbon sinks to fisheries, humanity has taken more from nature than it’s been able to reproduce. Quite simply, we’re in environmental debt.

  • Finance

    • Little Britain, After Brexit: UK Plunges into the Deep End of the International Market

      There are many problems with this story, not the least being the very meaning of the word sovereignty. Indeed, in many senses, Brexit substantially reduces the sovereignty of the UK. Not only will the new everyday situation be a more costly version of business-as-usual, but Britain itself will also exist in a more dangerous environment of risk.

      Contrary to the tale of an independent, prosperous Britain is that of an isolated and exposed Britain – a vulnerable Britain, awash amid the harsh reality of the international market. This avoidable self-exposure gives the UK very little moreover as much of the regulatory regime, for instance, will continue as is or slightly rebranded since it is underwritten by WTO trade rules and EU market entry requirements (55% of UK exports).

      The challenges of globalism have been met by nations through regional and inter-regional associations, from Asia, the Americas, Africa and, of course, Europe.

      Russia and China continue to integrate their economies and have developed a cooperative network of nations in Asia and around the globe through groupings such as BRICS and its fledgling New Development Bank. This network was meant to include cooperation between China and the UK, viewed as the gateway to Europe, especially in financial services. Yet, with Brexit, China is re-assessing its investment strategy and commitments in the UK.

      With strength in numbers, nations have achieved a more tangible sovereignty, an existential security, if you will, through peaceful cooperation and sustainable development. Stronger and better trade deals have been negotiated, by the EU, for example, providing members with greater discretion for democratic self-governance.

      Of course, the UK could attempt to strengthen its own global network of nations, as with the Commonwealth and the Anglosphere. Yet, such fantastic hopes fly in the face of the reality of the current international order.

    • While in the White House, Economist Received Personal Loans From Top Washington Lawyer

      In 2011, Gene Sperling had a problem. He was working as President Obama’s chief economic advisor but his government salary did not cover his expenses. He and his wife lived in a Georgetown townhouse valued today at around $2 million, but did not have enough equity to qualify for a second mortgage or credit line. He didn’t want to sell the house and he wanted to keep working at a prestigious but relatively low-paid public service job.

      And so Sperling turned to a close friend from law school: Howard Shapiro. A top partner at the Washington powerhouse law firm WilmerHale, Shapiro had loaned Sperling money before and was willing to do so again. Sperling asked the White House Counsel’s office and the Office of Government Ethics for permission to borrow from Shapiro, whose firm frequently negotiates with the government on behalf of some of the nation’s leading corporations. Officials approved the transactions.

      So in 2011, Sperling borrowed between $100,000 and $250,000 from Shapiro at 5 percent, a rate that appears to be well below the interest banks charged at the time for comparable loans. Sperling listed his borrowing on his financial disclosure forms.

      In each of the next two years, Sperling went to Shapiro again, taking out two more loans that brought his debt to a total of between $300,000 and $600,000. (The forms require disclosure of a range, not specific figures.) The loans are unsecured. Sperling consolidated earlier loans from Shapiro, one made in 2006 and the 2011 loan, into the later ones.

    • Russia’s Weakness Is Its Economic Policy

      According to various reports, the Russian government is reconsidering the neoliberal policy that has served Russia so badly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If Russia had adopted an intelligent economic policy, Russia’s economy would be far ahead of where it stands today. It would have avoided most of the capital flight to the West by relying on self-finance.

    • The State of Missouri Was Right to Say No Church Playground Renovations on the Taxpayers’ Dime

      In Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley, the Supreme Court will consider whether the state of Missouri violated the U.S. Constitution when it denied the church’s application for a cash grant to subsidize the cost of resurfacing its playground with recycled scrap-tire material. While, at first blush, this may appear to be a simple dispute about payments for playground improvements, it implicates one of our most essential, enduring constitutional commitments: the ban on direct government funding of houses of worship.

    • How Long Can Economic Reality Be Ignored?

      Yesterday I listened to the NPR presstitutes say how Trump pretends to be in favor of free trade but really is against it, because he is against all the free trade agreements such as NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic partnerships. The presstitutes don’t know that these are not trade agreements. NAFTA is a “give away American jobs” agreement, and the so-called partnerships give away the sovereignty of countries in order to award global corporations immunity from laws.

      As I have reported on many occasions, the Oligarchs’ government lies to us about everything, including economic statistics. For example, we are told that we have been enjoying an economic recovery since June, 2009, that we are more or less at full emploment with an unemployment rate of 5% or less, and that there is no inflation. We are told this despite the facts that the “recovery” is based on the under-reporting of the inflation rate, the unemployment rate is 23%, and inflation is high.

    • Rampaging Debt Collectors are Committing Highway Robbery

      Some corporations engage in such abusive consumer rip-offs that they’re just plain evil. But then there are some profiteers that dig even deeper into the dark void of their corporate souls to achieve the ultimate status: TRULY EVIL.

      Consider the gang of debt collection firms that are thugglishly and lawlessly rampaging across the country ruthlessly abusing consumer rights and common decency. Susan Macharia, a California administrative employee, is one of thousands of middle-income and low-wage workers each year who get robbed by these relentless money grabbers. Out of the blue, she got a rude call in January from a collector demanding she pay $10,000 for a credit card debt she ran up in 2003.

      Only, Ms. Macharia had no such debt. In fact, as she told the New York Times, she didn’t even have a credit card until 2013. Yet, the collection agency declared that it had a copy of a 2006 court judgement for non-payment filed against her, addressed to her California residence — so, pay up, or else! But wait, she lived in Atlanta in 2006, not California. Nonetheless, ignoring facts, the callous collection outfit got a court to rubber stamp an order to let the creditor garnish Macharia’s paycheck, effectively stealing $800 a month from her.

    • Free people from ‘dictatorship’ of 0.01%

      The only way to counter globalisation just a plot of land in some central place, keep it covered in grass, let there be a single tree, even a wild tree.” This is how dear friend and eminent writer Mahasweta Devi, who passed away on July 28, at the age of 90, quietly laid out her imagination for freedom in our times of corporate globalisation in one of her last talks.

      Our freedoms, she reminds us, are with grass and trees, with wildness and self-organisation (swaraj), when the dominant economic systems would tear down every tree and round up the last blade of grass.

      From the days we jointly wrote about the madness of covering our beautiful biodiverse Hindustan with monocultures of eucalyptus plantations, which were creating green deserts, to the work we did together on the impact of globalisation on women, Mahaswetadi remained the voice of the earth, of the marginalised and criminalised communities.

      She could see with her poetic imagination how globalisation, based on free trade agreements (FTAs), written by and for corporations, was taking away the freedoms of people and all beings. “Free trade” is not just about how we trade. It is about how we live and whether we live. It is about how we think and whether we think. In the last two decades, our economies, our production and consumption patterns, our chances of survival and the emergence of a very small group of parasitic billionaires, have all been shaped by the rules of deregulation in the WTO agreements.

      [...]

      The TPP requires all its signatories to join UPOV 91. It allows patents on “inventions derived from plants” which would open the floodgates of bio-piracy, as in the case of neem, basmati and wheat. The TPP has sections on “biologicals” which covers biological processes and products, thus undoing the exclusions in the WTO TRIPS agreement. Given how there is a rush to patent and impose untested and hazardous vaccines, and new GMO technologies like gene editing and gene drives, it is clear that the TPP is the instrument for the next stage of bio-imperialism.

    • Trump Taj Mahal workers continue strike despite impending closure

      On a recent scorching Sunday afternoon in Atlantic City, New Jersey, more than two dozen striking workers from UNITE HERE Local 54 walked in a tight circle on the boardwalk in front of the Trump Taj Mahal chanting “Taj Mahal, on strike! If we don’t win, shut it down!”

      Casino workers walked off the job early on the morning of July 1 after contract negotiations between Local 54 and owner and multi-billionaire Carl Icahn failed.

      Last week, the strike, which is now the longest in Atlantic City since the first casino opened almost 40 years ago, was dealt a fatal blow. Taj Mahal Entertainment, the company that runs the casino, announced that it will close this fall due to lackluster profits and the negative impact of the strike on the casino’s bottom line.

      The struggle between Local 54 and Icahn over a number of worker concerns — including the lack of health care and pension benefits, along with mostly stagnant hourly wages — has been ongoing since Icahn assumed ownership of the casino this past March.

      Employees lost their health care and pension benefits 23 months ago when the casino’s previous owner, Avenue Capital Group, filed for bankruptcy in 2014, making workers at the Taj Mahal the first casino employees to go without heath care since the industry opened shop in Atlantic City in 1978.

    • America’s Racial Wealth Divide Is Nothing Short of Shocking

      The average wealth for white households is $656,000. For Latinos it’s $98,000, and for black households it’s just $85,000. The average wealth of black and Latinos combined still doesn’t come close to half of white wealth.

      And while white wealth continues to grow substantially, any gains in black and Latino wealth pale in comparison. Current estimates show that if nothing changes, the racial wealth divide will grow to $1 million by 2043.

    • ‘Personnel is Policy’: Progressives Urge Clinton to Avoid Wall Street Cabinet

      A coalition of progressive organizations published an open letter to Hillary Clinton on Wednesday, urging her to keep Wall Street veterans out of her administration if she wins the presidency.

      The 15 signatories, which include advocacy groups, a labor union, a political party, and other organizations, wrote the letter to “reaffirm the importance of selecting executive branch appointees with a documented record of fighting for the public interest.”

      “Historically, too many Wall Street executives and corporate insiders have traveled through the revolving door between private industry and government,” the letter states. “The result of this practice is that the interests of elites are over-represented in Washington.”

      Earlier this year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a report which found that Washington’s revolving-door system is part of what allows corporate crime to run rampant.

    • Trump Trade Position Is Opposite Of What People Think It Is

      But Trump is, after all, the Republican candidate. He is, after all, a businessman. He has, after all, openly expressed his wish to bring American wages down in the past and even voiced his plan to pit states against each other to accomplish that.

      So we should, after all, understand that a Republican businessman who has made it clear that he thinks wages need to go down does not suddenly have the best interests of American workers at heart. He is also a politician, and in this one instance he has learned to keep his mouth shut, at least when it comes to his argument that wages are too high. That doesn’t mean his argument has changed.

    • Groundbreaking Lawsuit Targets ‘Extortionist’ Cities Near Ferguson That Lock Poor People In Cages

      Civil rights lawyers sued 13 St. Louis-area cities in federal court on Tuesday, alleging they violated the constitutional rights of poor people by locking them in squalid jail cells in connection with minor traffic infractions ― a practice that contributed to the tension that boiled over in Ferguson two years ago after a police officer shot an 18-year-old to death.

      The lawsuit, filed on the two-year anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown, targets the city of St. Ann and 12 smaller municipalities ― some with just a few hundred residents ― that use St. Ann’s jail to hold municipal debtors under what the lawsuit calls “inhumane” conditions.

    • Ferguson-Area Cities “Terrorizing” Poor Through Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons: Federal Lawsuit

      A new federal class-action lawsuit accuses 13 St. Louis-area municipalities of “terrorizing” poor, primarily African-American people through a “deliberate and coordinated conspiracy” by “creating a modern-day police state and debtors’ prison scheme that has no place in American society.”

      The non-profit ArchCity Defenders and the law firm Arnold & Porter filed the suit Tuesday, the same day as demonstrators were marking the two-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Mo. police officer.

      The U.S. Department of Justice released a report last year into Ferguson’s police practices, concluding that the department engaged in systematic targeting of African-American citizens, and “consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity.”

      As the Guardian reports, “Tuesday’s suit describes how this revenue-focused policing model has continued apace in St. Louis County’s neighboring municipalities.”

    • Right-to-buy reform urged as council leaders fear for social housing

      Council leaders in England have called on the government to make urgent reforms to the right-to-buy scheme, after figures showed that the number of sold-off homes replaced by local authorities fell by more than a quarter last year.

      Analysis by the Local Government Association (LGA) showed that 12,246 council homes were sold to tenants under right to buy in England in 2015-16, but just 2,055 replacements were started by councils – a drop of 27% on the previous year.

      The right-to-buy scheme allows low-income tenants to buy their council-owned home at a sizeable discount to market value. Since it was launched by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, almost 2m properties have been sold by councils across England and the proportion of homes that are social housing has fallen from 31% to 17%. Use of the scheme was slowing until the Conservative government relaunched the scheme in 2012 and quadrupled the discounts available to London tenants.

      Right to buy has been scrapped in Scotland and the Welsh assembly last week confirmed that it planned to do the same. The LGA said the scheme could become a thing of the past in England, too, if councils were not helped to fund replacement homes.

    • Everyone is quitting

      As an Amazon recruiter, I ask you to please believe everything you see on this site about how awful Amazon is as an employer. I read the online reviews before joining here, but I thought that I can overcome any of these situations and work anywhere for 4 years to maximize my stock payout. I was WRONG.

      For a company that prides itself on having smart employees, I reported to some of the worst managers in my entire career. All I learned from them was how to suck-up, lie, blame others, and cheat the performance numbers.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Could crowdfunding – yes, crowdfunding – save journalism in partly free societies?

      For decades, journalists and activists have tried to break the stranglehold that repressive governments or plutocrats hold on media around the globe.

      During the Cold War, outlets such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Marti and Voice of America elbowed their way into the airless media environments of the Eastern bloc, Cuba and elsewhere to report on events censored in those countries and to offer an alternative view of the west.

      With the end (mostly) of the Cold War-era practices of signal-jamming and the expulsion of foreign journalists, free press groups changed their approach. They started training reporters in countries where newly free people and markets, and a newly accountable political class, were expected to lead to a robust, independent media scene.

    • CNN’s Brian Stelter Recalls Dating a Fox News Staffer Who Spied on Him for Roger Ailes

      The avalanche of news regarding Roger Ailes’ sexual harassment of female employees during his reign as chairman and CEO of Fox News includes shocking revelations of corporate coverup and retaliation against the women who reported the abuse. Over the weekend, a report by New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman exposed a Nixon-esque operation headed by Ailes that used Fox News funds to finance public relations and surveillance programs against reporters who threatened the embattled former CEO. And on Monday, CNN’s senior media correspondent Brian Stelter admitted when he was a young reporter fresh on the media beat, he dated a Fox News employee until he realized she was actually spying on him.

    • Former Cult Member Explains How Donald Trump and His Followers Are Just Like a Cult

      Kendal Unruh — a Republican delegate and high school teacher from Colorado — grew up in a religious cult, and that’s why she’s determined to stop Donald Trump from becoming president.

      The 51-year-old Unruh, who was raised among members of The Move cult established by Sam Fife, said she knows what a cult leader looks like, and she said that perfectly describes the Republican presidential nominee.

    • Hillary Emails: Message in Private Server Betrayed Name of NSA Agent

      An email sent through Hillary Clinton’s private sever betrayed the name of the National Security Agency’s representative to the State Department.

    • Green Party candidate Jill Stein says we need a jobs program like the ‘New Deal’

      Green Party candidate Jill Stein told CNBC on Wednesday she is the only 2016 presidential nominee who is free to provide the medicine the economy needs.

      “As the only candidate that is not poisoned by corporate money lobbyists or super PACs, I can actually stand up for what it is we need,” she said in an interview on “Squawk Box.”

      She said the United States needs an emergency jobs program like the New Deal — “a green New Deal” to solve “the emergency of climate change,” and a cancellation of student debt to “liberate a generation to lead us forward to the economy of the future.”

      She said she would also make higher education free and make health care universal through a Medicare for all system.

    • A Conversation With Green Party Nominee Dr. Jill Stein

      As Bernie Sanders was at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia beseeching his backers to throw their support to Hillary Clinton or risk a Donald Trump presidency, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was outside with another message. Don’t compromise, she said. Vote for me. Vote for a green New Deal. Stein wants college debt forgiveness, free tuition, Medicare for all and an emergency transition to green energy, food, transportation. This hour On Point, the Green Party’s Jill Stein.

    • Donald Trump Suggests ‘Second Amendment People’ Could Act Against Hillary Clinton

      Donald J. Trump on Tuesday appeared to raise the possibility that gun rights supporters could take matters into their own hands if Hillary Clinton is elected president and appoints judges who favor stricter gun control measures.

      Repeating his contention that Mrs. Clinton wanted to abolish the right to bear arms, Mr. Trump warned at a rally here that it would be “a horrible day” if Mrs. Clinton were elected and got to appoint a tiebreaking Supreme Court justice.

      “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”

    • State Dept. discussed favor for Clinton foundation donor

      CNN’s Drew Griffin explains the connections between Clinton family and aides, donors named in new emails sent during Clinton’s time as Secretary of State.

    • Debunking the media’s smear campaign against Green presidential candidate Jill Stein

      The surging fundraising and poll numbers for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein since the end of the Bernie Sanders campaign must be hitting a nerve, because Democratic insiders and the mainstream media are resorting to smear tactics.

    • The Great White Hype: No One Is Energizing the White Working Class, Not Even Donald Trump

      It has become an article of faith among political pundits that GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump is energizing the white working class.

      Trump is “rallying white working class voters,” Bill Schneider wrote for Reuters in December.

      The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki wrote last year of Trump’s “popularity among working-class voters,” which has allowed him to appeal to voters former 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt “Romney couldn’t reach.”

      Political scientist Justin Gest wrote for Reuters that Trump “bluntly acknowledges an acute sense of loss that has been uniquely felt by the white working class.”

      This week alone, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Trump could compete in Pennsylvania because of the “sort of white working class bastions that would provide him opportunities to win”; CNN political commentator Matt Lewis declared that Trump’s “populist, protectionist, anti-globalist trade politics … I think plays well with a lot of working class Americans out there”; and conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell “The white poor, the white working class in America feels very cut out by elites like you and me,” but “Trump is tapping into them in a big way.”

    • The Fragility of American Democracy

      A top neocon excuse for invading other countries is to spread American-style “democracy,” but – amid all that carnage – there has been a steady erosion of U.S. democratic values, observes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Donald Trump Under Fire After Hinting Gun Owners Could Assassinate Hillary Clinton
    • Donald Trump and the ‘Banality of Evil’
    • Donald Trump’s Incendiary Language [Video: “Clinton in 2008 saying she won’t drop out of the primaries because if someone assassinates Obama she can still win”]

      Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is taking a P.R. pounding for a sloppy Second Amendment reference interpreted as calling for Hillary Clinton’s assassination, but what was his intent, asks Robert Parry.

    • Hillary Clinton and the Big (Neoliberal) Lie

      Today Hillary Clinton shamelessly presents herself as a friend of working people. She trots out the elites of organized labor, concerned primarily with their own positions atop demoralized and fragmented unions, and trumpets their endorsements of her. And even these working class backstabbers have to grit their teeth and smile as they kneel before the high priestess herself in hopes of eight more years of privileged relations and fine dining.

      But behind closed doors, everyone in America who even casually follows politics knows the truth: Hillary Clinton is a crusader for free trade and neoliberalism.

      And that’s precisely why Hillary’s anti-free trade posture at election time is so deeply cynical, to say nothing of the insult to working people. In 2007-2008, in the midst of a hotly contested primary campaign against then Senator Barack Obama, Clinton repeatedly claimed that she was anti-free trade, and critical of NAFTA. In a debate in late 2007, Clinton admitted that NAFTA had been a mistake “to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would.”

      Of course, these were just the populist sentiments that Clinton knew she needed to utilize in order to deceive organized labor, and the working class in general, that she was an ally, rather than a devout worshiper at the altar of the god of neoliberalism.

      After Obama became president and appointed Clinton Secretary of State she immediately reverted to being the great champion of free trade. Indeed, in her position as America’s top diplomat Clinton traveled the world preaching the gospel of free trade. And by this point she had a new holy scripture to tout: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

      Clinton unabashedly lied during Democratic national debates on the issue of the TPP, saying that she now opposes it, despite having been in favor of it as late as 2012 when she said the TPP “sets the gold standard in trade agreements.” While she now masquerades as a protectionist opposing a deal that would be bad for working people, she has demonstrated her unflagging support for this type of so called free trade in the past.

    • Paul Ryan Won His Primary, but He’s Still the GOP’s Fading Star

      The only time we hear from Ryan anymore is when Donald Trump talks about him.

    • Behind the Booing: A Sanders Delegate Reflects on the DNC Protests

      It all started three weeks before the Democratic National Convention (DNC), which I was attending as a Bernie Sanders delegate from California. I started Los Angeles for Bernie in June of 2015, so going to the convention was the culmination of my year-long journey for Bernie. Little did I know that Sanders’ actions would leave a vacuum for me and my fellow delegates to fill.

      Like most supporters, I was disappointed to see Sanders endorse Hillary Clinton two weeks before the convention. When rumors started flying about this possibility, I lent my voice to try to stop it with an open letter to him. I knew it was in vain. It became clear that he had stopped fighting for the nomination after the primary in Washington, DC, when it was reported that he was not going to send a planned letter to the superdelegates, making the case that he was more likely to beat Donald Trump. Plus, when he decided to run as a Democrat, he had said he would support the eventual nominee. I just wasn’t expecting it to happen before the actual nomination. How many times had he said that it would be a contested convention?

    • From Resentment to Possibility: How Enjoyment Shapes the Political Imagination in Election 2016

      Since the nomination of both Trump and Hillary Clinton, another mode of enjoyment has emerged. With an apocalyptic narrative of a potential Trump presidency in place, some liberals and progressives are expressing outrage and condescension toward presumed allies who dare to support third-party candidates, or who are choosing to abstain from presidential election voting, or who, in some cases, are simply critiquing Clinton’s policies and practices. How can anyone in this moment not do the pragmatic and responsible thing and fully support the only candidate that can defeat pure evil?! How can they risk a Trump presidency?!

    • Russ Feingold Wins Wisconsin Primary to Take Back Senate Seat in November

      Russ Feingold won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat for Wisconsin on Tuesday, setting up a long-awaited face-off with incumbent Republican Ron Johnson in November.

      The Associated Press called the open primary just after 8pm on Tuesday. Feingold defeated businessman Scott Harbach of Kenosha to make it onto the ticket.

      “I’m incredibly grateful for the thousands of Wisconsinites who voted in today’s primary, and I’m proud to accept the Democratic nomination to serve the people of this state in the U.S. Senate,” Feingold said in a statement following the vote.

      Feingold represented Wisconsin in the Senate for 18 years before being ousted during a 2010 Tea Party wave that elected Johnson to his seat. In 2015, however, Politico described Johnson as “one of the most vulnerable incumbents on the 2016 Senate map.”

    • Heated Presidential Primary Lives on as Clinton Stumps for Wasserman Schultz

      “The Democratic presidential primary lives on in Florida’s 23rd congressional district,” the Miami Herald reported Tuesday after Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton paused her campaigning to endorse former party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is in the midst of a close primary fight with the Bernie Sanders-backed Tim Canova.

      Clinton appeared beside the embattled incumbent at her strip-mall campaign headquarters in Davie, Florida, telling supporters: “I have to have her in Congress, by my side, working day after day…And I am committed to doing whatever I can to support her as she returns to the Congress with your support.”

      “I really respect Debbie’s fighting spirit,” Clinton added.

      Indeed, Wasserman Schultz has quite a bit to contend with these days. Not only is her progressive challenger (her first primary opponent in 24 years) gaining traction, the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair was forced to resign from her post last month after leaked emails showed the party improperly favoring Clinton over Sanders during the presidential primary.

      The emails validated accusations Sanders and his supporters made throughout his campaign. Following her resignation from the DNC, Clinton announced that Wasserman Schultz would now serve as her presidential campaign’s honorary chair.

      Those very same emails also prompted Canova’s campaign to file an official FEC complaint (pdf) against Wasserman Schultz on Monday, accusing her of using DNC resources to strategize against his congressional campaign.

      As the Sun Sentinel put it on Tuesday, “The Canova vs. Wasserman Schultz primary is a microcosm of the Sanders vs. Clinton presidential primaries.”

    • The Trump Cult Is One Without A Leader. Trump is Only Its Willing Figurehead

      The Trump phenomenon will be studied for decades. How could someone come out of nowhere, destroy a powerful field of veterans in politics, take the party’s nomination with ease, then go down to lose in one of the biggest election landslides (my current forecast says 18% loss in November, that is based on the situation August 1, before the latest week of more Trumpian madness). But yes, WHY is Trump behaving this way. What is going on. Why is he so bizarre and why are his supporters like they are, etc. Its baffling. So I have a fresh theory. Trump is in front of a cult which he did not create, and he does not lead: he is only their figurehead.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Facebook Deletes ExtraTorrent Official Page And Disables User Accounts

      Facebook has removed the official page of ExtraTorrent. The social network has taken this step against ExtraTorrent after repeated complaints from copyright holders. Facebook has also disabled the accounts of users who were moderating the Facebook page.

    • Censor board ‘cuts’ that made headlines

      Reportedly, two mild cusswords have been deleted from ‘Rustom’ which has been conferred with a UA certificate.

    • Belarus: Government uses accreditation to silence independent press

      Despite repeated calls by international organisations for reform, Belarus’ regime for press accreditation continues to help the government maintain its monopoly on information in one of the world’s most restrictive environments for media freedom.

      The government of president Aleksandr Lukashenko uses the Law on Mass Media to control who reports and on what in an arbitrary procedure that is open to manipulation. While Article 35 sets out journalists’ rights to accreditation, Article 1 of the law defines the process as: “The confirmation of the right of a mass medium’s journalists to cover events organised by state bodies, political parties, other public associations, other legal persons as well as other events taking place in the territory of the Republic of Belarus and outside it.”

      By outlining credentialing as a system providing privileges for journalists, Belarus’ accreditation structure is contrary to international standards. The law allows public authorities to choose who covers them by approving or refusing accreditation. It also denies accreditation to journalists who do not work for recognised media outlets. Even journalists who report for foreign outlets must be full-time employees to be able to be accredited by the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

      In practice, the law blocks freelance journalists or independent media outlets from covering the activities of the government and makes accreditation a requisite for a career in journalism. Only journalists who work for state-run outlets are accredited to report on state ministries, parliament or local governments.

    • NFL Cuts Out Shout-Out To St. Louis In HoF Speech YouTube Upload, Streisand Effect Takes Over

      The NFL is almost a perfect study in how the combination of an attempt at strict control of its content and a complete lack of understanding of the Streisand Effect will produce the opposite of the intended result. Past versions of this have included the NFL’s insane claim of copyright on the only footage that exists of the original Super Bowl, meaning nobody actually gets to see the footage, as well as the league’s attempt to bury an ESPN documentary about head trauma as it relates to football. In both cases, the NFL comes out looking petty at best, and much worse in the case of trying to hide the negative health effects of the game from the parents of children who might otherwise play it.

      But even that kind of evil and petty takes a back seat to the NFL deciding to cut out a portion of Orlando Pace’s Hall of Fame induction speech in which he gives a shout-out to the city of St. Louis, former host of the Rams.

    • Apple Patents Remote ‘Kill Switch’ for iPhone Cameras

      What to do about all those darn videos showing cops murdering people?

      They make it much harder for law enforcement to lie about their own actions, and just get everyone all fired up. Why not ask Apple (for starters) to build in a “feature” on a future generation of iPhones that will allow cameras to be disabled remotely?

      A patent granted to Apple this month details technology that remotely disables iPhone cameras using infrared sensors. Someone you do not know and cannot see will be able, without your permission, to disable the camera on a phone you own and are legally using, perhaps to take video of your son’s Little League game, perhaps to take video of a police officer choking to death an innocent man.

    • Russia Plans Social Media Piracy Crackdown

      Authorities in Russia are planning new legislation that could see a crackdown on users uploading pirated content to social networks. Also under consideration are measures to ban advertising from infringing sites and block subscription-based platforms from processing user payments.

    • Lubdhak Chatterjee: Censorship is supremely regressive which can only take the society backwards

      Hailing from Delhi, engineering student Lubdhak Chatterjee had never dreamt that his first short film ‘In A Free State’ will be screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and will be received so well. In an exclusive interview with the TimesofIndia.com, the aspiring bundle of talent spoke about how he made the cut, censorship issues and much more.

    • Sarah Snook speaks out against censor

      ACTOR Sarah Snook has spoken about her involvement in a controversial documentary that was heavily censored after a politician took court action against the film.

    • Anurag Kashyap Excited to Deliver Master Class on Censorship at Melbourne Film Fest
    • Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s ‘Raman Raghav 2.0′ to be screened at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne
    • Localist Edward Leung gets 24-hour Facebook ban after posting video of men following him
    • Hong Kong Leading Writer’s Dismissal Draws Comments About Censorship
    • Nathan Law: Officials adopting double standards on poll leaflets
    • Why more Hong Kong people are supporting Taiwan independence
    • Why Olympics will no longer serve to promote patriotism in HK
    • Legco elections: Another de facto referendum
    • Spotlight on Hong Kong Independence
    • Hong Kong’s independence movement is also a rebellion against the “old seafood” generation

      Ho concluded that Lu Ting was the perfect symbol for the cultural identity of Hong Kong because of its ability to navigate two different worlds: Hong Kong, as a British colony, was somewhere in between China and Britain. So culturally speaking, the city did not belong to either of them.

      When Hong Kong was ceded to the British after the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, China was an economically backward place, closed off from the rest of the world. Hong Kong successfully harnessed the role of an in-betweener, thriving on the great discrepancies between China and the rest of the world.

      As China plunged into a long period of chaos and darkness, Hong Kong acted as a safe haven for those fleeing the Chinese civil war, and later Mao’s Cultural Revolution—just like the story of Lu Tings. Those who arrived before 1949 brought their capital, talent, and even treasures such as antiques to the city, providing the resources that helped Hong Kong’s entertainment and manufacturing industries take off.

    • Twitter user’s account shut down after posting Olympic videos
    • Twitter user’s account taken out after posting Olympic videos
    • Here Is The End Result Of The USOC And NBC’s Over-Protectionist Olympic Nonsense

      When it comes to intellectual property bullying, the unholy alliance between the USOC and NBC seems to be trying to see exactly how far it can push things. Between NBC’s “most live ever” broadcast of the games that still has unnecessary delays in both its television and streaming product and the USOC’s strange belief that companies that sponsor athletes year-round somehow can’t tweet out factual results or news images of those athletes as it relates the games due to trademark law, it’s enough to make you laugh.

      But it’s not only the antics of the USOC and NBC that is chuckle-worthy. Local sports coverage of the Olympics is too, thanks to the laughable restrictions NBC has put in place. Here’s my hometown sports anchor, for instance, who came up with a creative way to cover the Olympics by not covering them at all in protest.

    • Photographer explores emoji censorship and the artistic nude
    • Donald Trump gets a harsh lesson on self-censorship

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • You don’t have Freedom of Speech without Privacy

      Freedom of Speech is the idea that you can discuss ideas without fear of harassment. But the judicial protection is actually quite weak; it only protects you from repercussions from your government. In order to allow society to discuss forbidden ideas, ideas that may turn out to be in the right, a much wider Freedom of Speech is needed: one that requires Privacy.

      Freedom of Speech comes in two flavors: the strict, judicial definition, and the other definition that actually matters to the development of society.

      The judicial, lexical definition says Freedom of Speech is a right against your government, and not against your peers. It says that your government may not punish you for any opinion you express. It usually comes with a very large list of exceptions, which makes the first statement kind of false: in Germany, you may not express a long list of hate speech, in Turkey, you may not say that the genocide of Armenians was a genocide (or pretend it happened at all), and so on. This definition of Freedom of Speech is the right usually enshrined in constitutions and bills of rights around the world, like the First Amendment in the United States (which has a very strong Freedom of Speech against the government in an international comparison).

    • How did Facebook get my number? And why is it giving my name out to strangers?

      Facebook thrives on data, prodding users to provide it with their memories, cherished moments and relationships. And for years, it has badgered users into handing out their phone numbers.

      More recently, however, it has taken a different tack – taking mobile numbers from other, less direct, sources and adding them to profiles. Users who don’t willingly give the company their mobile number are now asked to verify one that Facebook “thinks” is yours.

      This has shocked some users who, having not given the app permission to see their contacts, wondered how it had got hold of their numbers.

    • Oh well, looks like Facebook just got all anti-user

      Earlier today Facebook announced that it would start trying to circumvent users with ad-blocking software and show them ads. This is an unfortunate move, because it takes a dark path against user choice. But it’s also no reason to overreact: cat-and-mouse games in tech have been around as long as spammers have tried to circumvent spam filters.

      But you kind of have to wonder about the thinking that went into this decision. I mean, let’s also not forget something their blog post said: “When we asked people about why they used ad blocking software, the primary reason we heard was to stop annoying, disruptive ads.” So if that’s true, Facebook apparently agrees that users have a good reason for using ad-blocking software … but yet those users shouldn’t be given the power to decide what they want to block themselves?

      In any case, it’s hard to imagine Facebook or the brands that are being advertised on its site getting any sort of value for their ad dollar here: publishers (like Facebook) alienate their audience and advertisers (the brands) allow their cherished brand name to be shoved down people’s throats. Yikes.

    • Botnet Bill Could Give FBI Permission To Take Warrantless Peeks At The Contents Of People’s Computers

      What would normally be awarded an expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment becomes subject to the “plain view” warrant exception. If a passerby could see into the house via the broken blinds, there’s nothing to prevent law enforcement from enjoying the same view — and acting on it with a warrantless search.

      Of course, in this analogy, the NIT — sent from an FBI-controlled server to unsuspecting users’ computers — is the equivalent of a law enforcement officer first entering the house to break the blinds and then claiming he saw something through the busted slats.

      The DOJ may be headed into the business of breaking blinds in bulk. Innocuous-sounding legislation that would allow the FBI to shut down botnets contains some serious privacy implications.

    • New Cache of 2003 NSA Internal Communications Published in Snowden Archive

      The second batch of articles leaked from the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Signals Intelligence Directorate internal newsletter, SIDtoday, was published by The Intercept.

    • NSA leaks show worries over intelligence gaps, training tips for media leaks

      Among the latest batch of internal NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden are tips for analysts on what to notice about media leaks, playing catch-up over intelligence, and medical surveillance. TrendsNSA leaks.

    • Iraqi Insurgents Stymied the NSA and Other Highlights from 263 Internal Agency Reports
    • How the U.S. Spies on Medical Nonprofits and Health Defenses Worldwide

      As part of an ongoing effort to “exploit medical intelligence,” the National Security Agency teamed up with the military-focused Defense Intelligence Agency to extract “medical SIGINT” from the intercepted communications of nonprofit groups starting in the early 2000s, a top-secret document shows.

    • 263 Internal NSA Documents Published From Snowden Archive

      Two hundred sixty-three internal National Security Agency documents were made public on Wednesday with the publication of articles from the agency’s Signals Intelligence Directorate newsletter leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

    • 4-Star General, Former Director of CIA and NSA on Donald Trump: ‘He has a sense of autocrat envy’

      Four Star General and the only man to hold both the position of Director of the NSA and Director of the CIA, Michael Hayden joins Roe Conn and Anna Davlantes to talk about why he doesn’t believe Donald Trump is right for America.

    • Ex-CIA/NSA Chief Questions Clinton, Trump Fitness to Work With US Intelligence

      The US intelligence community will face challenges working with the next president, whether it is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) Director Michael Hayden said on Wednesday.

    • Tor can be cracked “like eggshells”, warns US judge

      A US judge has put into the public record, during a hearing in Tacoma, Washington, an interesting pair of comments about Tor.

      Tor, of course, is the so-called onion router network, originally designed by the US Navy as a technique for using the public internet in an anonymous way.

      End-to-end encryption, such as you get when you point your browser at an HTTPS site like Naked Security, is good for confidentiality: eavesdroppers can’t keep track of which pages you’re most interested in, or sneakily sniff out your email address when you publish a comment.

      HTTPS is also important for authenticity, so that when you visit Naked Security, you know that you really are reading our site, rather than content provided by a bunch of imposters.

      But anonymity depends on more than that: you might not want an eavesdropper to know that you visited Naked Security at all.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Murdered by a SWAT Team for Traffic Tickets: Inside the Police Killing of Black Mother Korryn Gaines

      In New York City on Monday, more than 100 people marched to protest the recent police killing of 23-year-old African-American mother Korryn Gaines in Maryland after what Balitmore police say was an armed standoff. Police were at Gaines’s apartment to execute an arrest warrant related to a traffic violation. They initially said they entered Korryn Gaines’s apartment with a key obtained from her landlord. But court documents say police kicked down the door. Once the police entered the apartment, Korryn Gaines was live-streaming the standoff via Facebook before her account was shut down. Police say they killed Gaines after she pointed a shotgun at them. Police also say they shot her 5-year-old son, Kodi Gaines, who suffered an injury to his cheek but survived. We speak to protesters in New York and to Charlene Carruthers, the national director of the Black Youth Project 100.

    • Does poverty cause crime?

      Socio-economic determinism is inadequate as an explanation of criminality.

      I was 12 years old when I got a letter from my father saying that he was due to serve a three month prison sentence for getting caught for drunk driving, having already lost his licence for the same thing the previous month. He had done stints of a year or two before, and although I haven’t seen him since, when I try to imagine him today I think of him in jail. Fraud and violence were characteristic of his behavior—whereas my criminal record consists of the £20 fine I got for running a red light on my bicycle.

      Objectively I’m innocent compared to my father, but subjectively it feels like I’m serving a suspended sentence for crimes myself. Like many other people, I need to know that I’m not like my dad, but it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen him. His photographs are bleached, and I don’t know enough about him to know why we are different. So I tell myself that I didn’t have to endure the degree of hardship that he did growing up in Liverpool 65 years ago. Perhaps the scarcity of his early life made transgression seem necessary, whereas living within the law hasn’t caused me any real disadvantage.

      Holding fast to this sort of socio-economic determinism makes me feel a little more immune from inheriting the sins of my father, since if his crimes were borne of a poverty that I haven’t shared then I won’t be part of his sin either, or so goes my own personal lore. Not wanting to be like him has shaped my politics: I believe that if government supported people in poverty more effectively then there would be less people in his situation, and less crime.

    • Judge Says Stash House Sting Operations Allow Prosecutors To Be Judge, Jury, And Executioner

      The question the government doesn’t want to answer is whether we’re better off pursuing fake criminals or capturing the real ones. Law enforcement does both, but sting operations — both of the terrorist and the drug variety — have been increasing over the years, turning officers and agents into actors and stage directors.

      The FBI has been crafting “terrorists” from a collection of outcasts, retirees, and the developmentally disabled for years. Canada’s law enforcement is just as willing to score on unguarded nets, traipsing happily over the line between “highly questionable” and “actual entrapment” in its own terrorist “investigations.”

      The ATF and DEA have combined forces to drag weapons into drug dealing using elaborate sting operations to entice no small number of people to get prepped to rob a nonexistent stash house of imaginary drugs. This would be bad enough, as it often appears the ATF is willing to bust anyone that engages in speculation about stash house robberies. Adding insult to injury, the federal government recommends sentences based on the fake amount of fake drugs not actually found in the fake stash house suspects talked about robbing.

    • Woman accidentally killed during ‘shoot, don’t shoot’ training exercise at police department

      A woman was shot to death during a “shoot or don’t shoot” training exercise Tuesday at the Punta Gorda Police Academy, according to police.

      Punta Gorda police Chief Tom Lewis said the woman was “mistakenly struck with a live round” during a Citizens Academy scenario designed to simulate the use of lethal force. It’s not clear how the apparent fatal ammunition mix-up occurred.

      The woman, identified as Mary Knowlton, was randomly selected to participate in the exercise as roughly 35 people watched.

    • DOJ Report on Baltimore Police Is ‘Stunning Catalog of Discrimination’

      The relationship between Baltimore residents and their police force is “broken,” according to a new U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report that details a pattern and practice of racial discrimination in the Baltimore Police Department (BPD).

      The DOJ civil rights probe, launched in the wake of Freddie Gray’s 2015 killing, found that Baltimore police routinely violated residents’ constitutional rights by using excessive force, making unlawful stops and arrests, and “using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches, and arrests of African Americans.”

      The document—which will be officially released Wednesday and was leaked to news outlets Tuesday night—pinned the blame on “systemic deficiencies at BPD,” including failure to provide officers with sufficient training and to hold officers accountable for misconduct.

    • Justice Department report: Baltimore police routinely violated civil rights

      Baltimore police routinely violated the constitutional rights of residents by conducting unlawful stops and using excessive force, according to the findings of a long-anticipated Justice Department probe to be released Wednesday.

      The practices overwhelmingly affected the city’s black residents in low-income neighborhoods, according to the 163-page report. In often scathing language, the report identified systemic problems and cited detailed examples.

      The investigators found that “supervisors have issued explicitly discriminatory orders, such as directing a shift to arrest ‘all the black hoodies’ in a neighborhood.”

    • DOJ Finally Going To Force Law Enforcement Agencies To Hand Over Info On People Killed By Police Officers

      At long last, the federal government is getting serious about tracking the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers.

      For most of the last two decades, the DOJ has been collecting this information from local law enforcement agencies, but only on a voluntary basis. As a result, the federal numbers have nearly no relation to the real numbers — which have been compiled by a handful of private actors, including The Guardian, a UK-based journalistic entity.

      Last June, legislators introduced a bill (that promptly went nowhere) which would replace voluntary reporting with mandatory reporting. The FBI expressed its concern about the government’s inability to collect accurate information on citizens killed by police officers, offering on multiple occasions to replace its voluntary system with a better voluntary system.

    • 4 Years Later, Sweden Accepts Ecuador’s Offer to Hear Assange

      Sweden made a formal request to interview Assange in Ecuador’s London Embassy in June, a shift in policy that could mark an end to the stalemate.

      More than four years after Ecuador offered Swedish authorities the opportunity to interview Julian Assange in the nation’s London Embassy, a deal appears to have been struck Wednesday after Ecuador’s attorney general responded positively to a request from the Swedish government to interview the WikiLeaks founder in the building.

    • Marvelous City, Militarized City

      Roughly 85,000 personnel, including Army and National Force troops, have been deployed in Rio de Janeiro to maintain — or at least maintain the illusion of — security for the Olympic Games. Assault rifles and armored vehicles, that have long been part of the daily routine in most marginalized and repressed areas, now also occupy the elite, picturesque slivers of the “Marvelous City” frequented by tourists. For foreign visitors, at times, it can be difficult to determine if Rio is currently the host of a massive celebration or a war zone.

    • Vindication for Baltimore Police Critics — But No Action

      There is the woman being publicly strip-searched after being stopped for a missing headlight. There are the officers coercing sex from prostitutes in exchange for avoiding arrest, planting drugs on people they stopped, cursing “shut the fuck up bitch” because they are “the fucking law.” There is the supervisor telling officers “to arrest ‘all the black hoodies’ in a neighborhood.” There are officers using templates for arrests where they only had to fill in dates and names — the words “black male” were already inked in.

      Running to 163 pages, the Department of Justice report on the ongoing abuse inflicted upon African Americans by the Baltimore police is full of stories like these.

      The investigation was started shortly after Freddie Gray died of a severed spine after officers tossed him into a police van following a possibly illegal stop. Just last month, prosecutors dropped all charges against the remaining officers facing trial for Gray’s death after the first cases ended in acquittals.

    • Canadian police “manufactured” terror plot to ensnare couple

      In a damning judgment, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce ruled Friday that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) broke the law and “manufactured” a terrorism plot as part of a months-long entrapment operation that ended in a Vancouver-area couple being arrested and ultimately sentenced to life in prison.

      John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were arrested July 1, 2013 and accused of planting bombs on the grounds of the British Columbia legislature in Victoria.

      But Justice Bruce found that the couple would never have taken any action had it not been for the active encouragement and coercion of undercover RCMP officers. “This was not a situation in which the police were attempting to disrupt an ongoing criminal enterprise,” declared Bruce in her 210-page judgment. “Rather, the offences committed by the defendants were brought about by the police and would not have occurred without their involvement. By any measure, this was a clear case of police-manufactured crime.”

      Undercover officers posing as Islamist extremists, befriended the isolated couple, who were recent converts to Islam, and encouraged them to act on statements they had made decrying the killing of Muslims in US-led wars and threatening to wage jihad and die as martyrs for Islam. Subsequently, the police suggested and facilitated the legislature bomb plot, removing obstacles that the police themselves acknowledged Nuttall and Korody would not have been able to overcome alone, and going so far as threaten them when they appeared reluctant to proceed.

    • These States Wanted to Keep Communities of Color From Voting, but the Courts Said No, That’s Discriminatory

      We assume every American adult has a basic right: to vote. But state legislators in recent years have created barriers that limit that right. They have restricted the forms of ID voters must provide, eliminated same-day registration, and narrowed time periods for voting — mainly affecting people of color.

      Now the tide is changing for voting rights, as judges in cases in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Texas, and North Dakota have ruled that the states’ restrictions discriminate on the basis of race. In Kansas, courts ruled that voters need not provide citizenship documentation.

    • The Government’s Own Rules Show Why Watchlists Make Bad Policy

      Politicians of all stripes have been embracing watchlists lately.

      Legislators in both parties have proposed using the watchlisting system to regulate gun purchases — an approach that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton support. Others have been even less burdened by legal or constitutional concerns. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), for instance, proposed immediately deporting all immigrants who are on watchlists, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani called for forcing Muslims who are on watchlists to wear electronic location monitoring tags.

    • Killer Instincts: When Police Become Judge, Jury and Executioner

      Any police officer who shoots to kill is playing with fire.

      In that split second of deciding whether to shoot and where to aim, that officer has appointed himself judge, jury and executioner over a fellow citizen. And when an officer fires a killing shot at a fellow citizen not once or twice but three and four and five times, he is no longer a guardian of the people but is acting as a paid assassin. In so doing, he has short-circuited a legal system that was long ago established to protect against such abuses by government agents.

      These are hard words, I know, but hard times call for straight talking.

      We’ve been dancing around the issue of police shootings for too long now, but we’re about to crash headlong into some harsh realities if we don’t do something to ward off disaster.

    • World Social Forum in Montreal: “Another world is once again being constructed without Africa”

      After having carefully prepared their applications over the past year, travelled to sometimes distant Canadian embassies and consulates and paid fees to Canada, to the WSF organization (entry fees, site rental fees for their conferences or workshops, equipment charges, interpretation fees, and various other charges), as well as thousands in flight, hotel and other transport and accommodation costs, at least 234 community organization leaders and representatives were denied visitor visas to attend and give presentations at the international conference, including persons who were invited and had Canadian sponsors.

    • Olympics spat as Lebanese stop Israelis joining them on bus

      The Israeli and Lebanese Olympics teams became involved in a heated argument about access to a bus to the opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Games.

      Both sides acknowledged Saturday that Israeli athletes were blocked from boarding a bus packed with the Lebanon team on Friday but they are at odds over the reasons for the actions of the head of the Lebanese delegation.

    • Olympic Tensions Offer a Window Into Lebanese History

      The beginning of this year’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro was marked by a now widely publicized situation in which Lebanese athletes refused to share the same bus with their Israeli counterparts before the opening ceremony. While there are different accounts of how the incident developed, it appears that the Lebanese delegation prevented the Israeli athletes from entering the bus. Competing explanations suggest that the reason for this was that the bus was specifically designated for the Lebanese team, or that there were many other buses, or that the Israeli team was trying to cause trouble, or that the nine Lebanese athletes did not want to share a bus with the 47 Israelis.

    • ‘Not a Good Day for Democracy’: Senate Approves Impeachment Trial for Brazil’s Rousseff

      Brazil’s Senate on Wednesday voted to hold an impeachment trial for suspended President Dilma Rousseff, an effort that could mark the end of 13 years of rule by her leftist Workers’ Party.

      “Today is not a good day for our democracy,” said Senator Paulo Rocha, an ally of the nation’s first female president. He added that “there is a political alliance that smells of a coup” working against her.

      Rouseff is accused of breaking budget laws, though the federal prosecutor last month found that she did not commit a crime.

      The 59-21 vote marks “the final step before a trial and vote on whether to remove her from office,” the Associated Press reports.

      “A verdict is expected at the end of the month and will need the votes of two-thirds of the Senate to convict Rousseff, five votes less than her opponents mustered on Wednesday,” Reuters reports.

      Rousseff has been suspended since May when the senate voted to start an impeachment trial against her. That meant then-Vice President Michel Temer became interim president. If Rousseff is removed, the unelected, right-of-center Temer would serve until 2018, the rest of Rousseff’s term.

    • Brazil Senate sends suspended president Dilma Rousseff to trial

      Brazil’s Senate on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to put suspended President Dilma Rousseff on trial, bringing the nation’s first female president a step closer to being permanently removed and underscoring her failure to change lawmakers’ minds the last several months.

      After some 15 hours of debate, senators voted 59-21 to put her on trial for breaking fiscal rules in her managing of the federal budget. It was final step before a trial and vote on whether to definitively remove her from office, expected later this month. The political drama is playing out while Rio de Janeiro is hosting the Olympic Games, which run through Aug. 21.

    • Each Other’s Keepers: The Right to Record

      With the ongoing police killings of unarmed African-Americans – and the little-reported, all-too-common police targeting, harassment and arrest of those who record them – dozens of high-profile documentary filmmakers have published an open letter calling on their community to defend those citizen journalists who have “shattered America’s myth of racial equality (and) moved white Americans closer to conscience and consciousness.” Signatories to the letter, organized by “(T)ERROR” director David Felix Sutcliffe and published at The Talkhouse, include Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney and many other prize-winning filmmakers, some of whom have won Courage Under Fire awards for making politically explosive works. All stand behind what Sutcliffe calls their “core belief that images have insurmountable power” to create change, and demand accountability.

    • More Than 115,000 Decry ‘Egregious Miscarriage of Justice’ in Manning Case

      Decrying new charges faced by Chelsea Manning related to her July suicide attempt as “sadistic and outrageous,” supporters delivered more than 115,000 petition signatures to the Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning on Wednesday calling for any additional punishment to be dropped.

      As Common Dreams reported, army officials recently informed the imprisoned whistleblower that she is being investigated for new charges related to her July 5th attempt to take her own life. If convicted of these “administrative offenses”—which include “resisting the force cell move team,” “conduct which threatens,” and “prohibited property”—she could be placed in indefinite solitary confinement for the remainder of her decades-long sentence or lose access to the phone and the law library at the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas military prison.

      This comes on top of existing allegations that Manning, a transgender woman, has been denied healthcare and other rights while serving out her sentence in a male prison.

    • Chelsea Manning Supporters Demand Army End Punishment For Surviving Suicide Attempt

      Supporters of United States military whistleblower Chelsea Manning and one of her defense attorneys demanded the Secretary of Army drop administrative charges brought against her. The charges stem from a suicide attempt while in prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

      Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, RootsAction, and Care2 circulated a petition and obtained over 115,000 signatures, which were delivered to the Secretary of Army this morning. They contend the Army is essentially punishing her for surviving her suicide attempt.

    • Qatar wanted a team for the Rio Olympics, so it headhunted one

      Marko Bagaric, a 204 centimetres, shiny-headed barrel of an athlete, stood alongside his teammates before the start of their Olympic opener. The Croatian-born handball player remained silent during the playing of his country’s national anthem.

      That was probably the toughest part, as Bagaric was wearing the uniform of a different country at the time.

    • Twitter is not legally responsible for the rise of ISIS, rules California district court

      A lawsuit accusing Twitter of providing material support to ISIS has been dismissed by a California District Court. First filed in January, the lawsuit argued ISIS’s persistent presence on Twitter constituted material support for the terror group, and sought to hold Twitter responsible for an ISIS-linked attack on that basis.

      Filed by the family of an American contractor named Lloyd Fields, the lawsuit sought damages from an ISIS-linked attack in Jordan that claimed Fields’ life. The plaintiff’s initial complaint alleged widespread fundraising and recruitment through the platform, attributing 30,000 foreign actors recruited through ISIS Twitter accounts in 2015 alone.

      The judge assigned to the case was ultimately not swayed by that reasoning, finding that the plaintiffs had not offered a convincing argument for holding Twitter liable. The plaintiff will have the chance to submit a modified version of the complaint within 20 days of the order, the second such modification ordered by the judge.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Internet access is now a human right: part 3 – Chips with Everything tech podcast

      On 1 July the United Nations resolved that access to the internet is to be considered a basic human right. While this decision may seem straightforward, with the complex nature of human rights law considered, the resolution is far from simple.

      In the face of the UN’s resolution, in part three of our series, we flip the coin and look at the the threats to net neutrality and unrestricted internet access. For this deep dive, we consult with the CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation, Anne Jellema and director of strategy for Free Press, Tim Karr.

    • Appeals Court Strikes Down FCC Attempt To Eliminate Protectionist State Broadband Laws

      For years we’ve discussed how incumbent broadband providers protect their duopoly by writing and lobbying for awful protectionist state laws. These laws, passed in nineteen different states, either significantly hamstring or outright ban towns and cities looking to build their own networks, or strike public/private partnerships with companies like Google Fiber. In most instances, these towns and cities only jumped into the broadband business after being under-served for a decade — if they were able to get broadband in the first place.

      While it was overshadowed by the net neutrality vote at the time, back in February the FCC voted 3-2 to try and take aim at the most restrictive parts of these laws. The FCC argued that it could use its authority under Section 706 of the Communications act — which requires the FCC to ensure “reasonable and timely” deployment of broadband access — to pre-empt these restrictions working in contrast to that goal. But North Carolina and Tennessee quickly sued, arguing that preventing them from letting AT&T and Comcast write awful state laws violated their state rights.

    • U.S. court blocks FCC bid to expand public broadband

      A federal appeals court said on Wednesday the U.S. Federal Communications Commission could not block two states from setting limits on municipal broadband expansion, a decision seen as a win for private-sector providers of broadband internet and a setback for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

      Cities in Tennessee and North Carolina had sought to expand municipal broadband networks beyond current boundaries, but faced laws forbidding or placing onerous restrictions on the expansions.

    • Win for Telecom Giants as Court Puts Dagger in Municipal Broadband
    • States win the right to limit municipal broadband, beating FCC in court

      The FCC in February 2015 voted to block laws in North Carolina and Tennessee that prevent municipal broadband providers from expanding outside their territories. The FCC, led by Chairman Tom Wheeler, claimed it could preempt the laws because Congress authorizes the commission to promote telecom competition by removing barriers to investment.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Norwegian Supreme Court: no “retransmission” without “transmission”

      This judgment has the apparent potential to undermine the position of collecting societies and umbrella groups such as Norwaco. If transmissions of the same intellectual content sent to distributors via fibre optic encryption and then broadcast publicly on usual cable connections are not characterised as retransmissions, revenue could be channelled away from collecting societies, with a shift towards the rightholders negotiating content distribution for themselves.

      There are additional possible considerations of compliance with international obligations including Berne and TRIPS which may arise in a future dispute which speaks to the fundamental aspects of the author’s exclusive rights, but were not examined in detail in this case. What do Kat readers think – will transmission/retransmission disputes rear up in the era of simultaneous internet television transmission?

    • Copyrights

      • As Expected Judge Upholds His Own Problematic Ruling Concerning Cox’s Repeat Infringer Policy & The DMCA

        For nearly two years now, we’ve been following an important DMCA-related case between music publisher BMG and the ISP Cox Communications. While the issues are a bit down in the weeds, what it really comes down to is a question of whether or not internet access providers are required to have a “repeat infringer” policy that removes customers who are seen to have been engaged in too much copyright infringement. Most people had assumed that the DMCA’s requirements for a repeat infringer policy only applied to hosting providers — i.e., those who help people host content — as opposed to transit providers, who are merely providing the connectivity. In this case, though, that important nuance seemed to have gotten lost in the shuffle, mainly because of some stupid behavior on the part of Cox. Amazingly, Cox is basically the only major ISP out there that has a history of actually kicking people off its service for infringement. Most others have historically refused to do so. But Cox’s policy is ridiculously complex, and involves something around 13 steps… and, on top of that, Cox admitted that once it’s kicked people off they can just sign up for new service. Seeing all that, the court basically decided that Cox was acting in bad faith, and thus jumped right over the question of whether or not the repeat infringer policy even applied to Cox.

      • Publishers Association Sends Whiny Complaint Letter To Dean After Academic Librarian Discusses Sci-Hub

        It’s no secret that big publishing companies (especially academic publishing companies) really really dislike Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub, of course, is the quite interesting site that enables academics to access and share PDFs of published scientific research. We’ve written about it a bunch, including Elsevier’s ridiculous legal crusade against the site, which has only served to act as a huge advertisement for the site. As we noted, using copyright to shut down Sci-Hub seemed to go entirely against the purpose of copyright, which was officially designed to promote “learning” and scientific knowledge.

        Nonetheless, the publishers really, really hate it. But even so, it seems pretty ridiculous for the Association of American Publishers (AAP) to freak out so much about an academic librarian just mentioning Sci-Hub while on a panel discussion, that it would send an angry letter to that librarian’s dean. But, that’s exactly what AAP did, in complaining about comments by librarian Gabriel Gardner to his dean, Roman Kochan, at the University Library for California State University.

      • Hulu Ditches ‘Free’ Model Without Giving It A Chance To Succeed

        For years we’ve noted how as a product of the cable and broadcast industry, Hulu has often gone out of its way to avoid being truly disruptive. Owners 21st Century Fox, Disney and Comcast/NBC have worked hard to ensure the service is never too interesting — lest it cannibalize the company’s legacy cable TV cash cow. So Hulu has been doomed to walk the halls of almost but not quite compelling purgatory, a rotating crop of execs for years trying to skirt the line between giving consumers what they actually want — and being a glorified ad for traditional cable television.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/11/kde-kirigami-ui-framework/feed/ 0 Links 8/8/2016: Linux 4.8 RC1, Steam on FreeBSD http://techrights.org/2016/08/08/steam-on-freebsd/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/08/steam-on-freebsd/#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2016 08:00:26 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94812

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • So long, Marianne: Leonard Cohen writes to muse just before her death

    Leonard Cohen penned a poignant final letter to his dying muse Marianne Ihlen, a longtime friend of hers revealed on Canadian radio.

    Ihlen, whom Cohen wrote about in So Long, Marianne and Bird on a Wire, died in Norway on 29 July, aged 81.

  • Science

    • Tim LaHaye Is Gone, But His Gospel of Apocalyptic Christianity Will Plague America for Years to Come

      Tim LaHaye died last week. He was 90. He was best known for co-writing the “Left Behind” series of novels about the battle of Armageddon, which fundamentalists believe will follow the Rapture of Christian believers from earth. The books have sold over 63 million copies—the version of the series for kids has sold 11 million copies alone—and the obituaries led with that. He helped found the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell and sat on its board, and in 1981 began the Council for National Policy, a secretive directorate for religious-right organizations that has been called “the most powerful conservative organization in America you’ve never heard of.” He was so fanatically devoted to what Christians call “the Great Commission”—Matthew 28:19–20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you”—that when he once ran into the Dalai Lama in Israel he shook hands with him and asked, “Sir, has anyone ever explained to you who Jesus Christ really is?”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • HIV community condemns witch-hunt against civil society in India

      As the Government of India, along with other member states made promises at the UN General Assembly Special Session on AIDS underway in New York, it intensified its persecution of civil society organisations in India. Recent instances brings the persecution to the doorstep of the HIV response in India.

      In early June, Lawyers Collective, a civil society organisation that has been at the forefront of legal activism to ensure the rights of people living with HIV, LGBTI groups, sexworkers and injecting drug users in India, received a government order suspending its right to receive funds from foreign agencies. This had the potential to hamper all of Lawyers Collectives work with HIV organisations and the central and state governments in India.

      Among other things, the organisation was accused of utilising foreign funds for raising awareness and conducting workshops/meetings/seminars on issues relating to HIV/AIDS and women’s empowerment. Further, they have been accused of spending foreign funds on advocacy with media and Members of Parliament for raising awareness on legal issues, including discrimination faced by people living with HIV and the need for legislative measures for redress. And also, they have been accused of spending foreign funds on organising protest rallies led by positive people’s networks.

    • Flint official says city lacks direction for water treatment

      Flint’s interim water plant chief said the city is being forced to apply chemicals to the city’s drinking water supply without a written comprehensive strategy, and she is concerned residents could be negatively affected.

      Interim Utilities Director JoLisa McDay wrote a letter, which was posted Thursday, Aug. 4, on the city’s website, to the Environmental Protection Agency and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality claiming the city lacks direction on its water treatment processes.

    • Pittsburgh Joins the List of US Cities with Lead in Drinking Water

      Lead-tainted water isn’t just a problem in Flint, Michigan.

      This week in Pittsburgh, the city’s Water and Sewer Authority reportedly sent 81,000 customers a letter informing them of elevated lead levels in their water.

    • There’s Quite Likely Something Fishy in Your Wine—Maybe Try a Vegan Vintage?

      If you’d rather not know about all the disgusting additives that may be lurking in your favorite Sauvignon blanc, read no further. Marissa A. Ross, wine editor of Bon Appétit magazine, is about to reveal some not-so-tasty secret ingredients in the third episode of her off-the-wall and eye-opening video series Drink Sustainably.

      “So you know when people are like, is this wine vegan, and that sounds crazy?” Ross asks.

      With so many dietary fads (gluten-free, low-carb and beyond) being debunked as soon as they’re popularized, it’s normal to approach vegan wine with skepticism. But Ross explains that vegan wine is “really not that crazy. What’s crazy is that there are plenty of wine companies out there that use these additives like egg whites and gelatins to make wine clearer.”

      Gelatin—a protein made by boiling the skin, tendons, cartilage, ligaments and bones of animals, mostly cows or pigs—has been used as a clarifying agent in the winemaking process since ancient Roman times. To this delicious list of animal-derived fining agents is also added blood, marrow, crustacean shells and fish bladders (which not too long ago underwent scrutiny for being used as an ingredient in some popular beers).

    • How One GMO Nearly Took Down the Planet

      On July 29, President Obama signed bill S.764 into law, dealing a major blow to the movement to require GMO labeling. The new law, which food safety groups call the “Deny Americans the Right to Know” (DARK) Act, has at least three key parts that undermine Vermont’s popular GMO labeling bill and make it nearly impossible for Americans to know what’s in their food.

      The law claims to set a federal labeling standard by requiring food producers to include either a QR barcode that can be scanned with a phone, or a 1-800 number that consumers can call to find out whether a product contains genetically modified ingredients.

      But according to the Institute for Responsible Technology, this bill doesn’t require most processed foods to have a label, defines genetic engineering so narrowly most GMOs on the market don’t qualify, and gives the USDA two more years to come up with “additional criteria”—also known as “loopholes.”

      This is disappointing for American consumers who honestly just want to know what their food contains, but the issue surrounding GMOs isn’t just about what these companies are putting into our food and stocking our stores with. What’s potentially more devastating for the planet is that genetically modified organisms developed by companies like Monsanto and DuPont can escape into our ecosystems and potentially wreak havoc before they are even tested or approved as safe.

      That’s not wild-eyed conspiracy theory or speculation; it’s a matter of fact.

      The same day Obama signed the DARK Act, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed that a farmer found 22 experimental and unapproved wheat plants in one of his fields that had been genetically modified by Monsanto. The reactions to the finding have been swift, despite being ignored by the mainstream media.

  • Security

    • Surveillance video shows a case of high-tech grand theft auto, more than 100 cars stolen [Ed: proprietary software, recall this about Jeep]

      Houston, Texas police announced the arrest of two men accused of stealing about 30 Jeep and Dodge vehicles. Authorities say they did it by using a laptop computer.

      Police tell KTRK they’ve been watching these guys for a while but were never able to catch them in the act stealing Jeeps – until last Friday.

      Police say Michael Arce and Jesse Zelaya stole more than 30 Jeeps in the Houston area over the last six months.

    • Openssh backdoor used on compromised Linux servers

      Some times ago, I have installed honeypot services on one of my servers, in order to see what happens in the real outside world. I especially installed the cowrie ssh honeypot which simulate a Linux shell and gather binaries that people want to install on the server (this tool is awesome, check here to install it).

    • random failures

      Lots of examples of random numbers failing, leading to cryptographic failure.

      The always classic Debian, OpenSSL, and the year of the zero.

      The time Sony signed Playstation code with the same nonce and leaked the keys.

      Samy phpwned session IDS.

      The Bitcoin app Blockchain used random.org for entropy. Bonus giggles for not following the HTTP redirect, but actually using “301 Moved Permanently” as a random number.

      The paper Mining Your Ps and Qs has pretty extensive investigation into weak keys on network devices, many of which result from poor entropy.

      Now here’s a question. How many of these vulnerabilities could have been prevented by plugging in some sort of “true random” USB gizmo of the sort that regularly appears on kickstarter? I’m going to go with not many. USB gizmos don’t prevent inopportune calls to memset. USB gizmos don’t prevent nonce reuse. USB gizmos don’t block utterly retarded HTTP requests.

    • PLC-Blaster Worm Targets Industrial Control Systems [Ed: Remember Stuxnet?]

      PLC-Blaster was designed to target Siemens SIMATIC S7-1200 PLCs. Siemens is Europe’s biggest engineering company and a PLC market share leader. Siemens said in March shortly after the worm was unveiled at Black Hat Asia that the malware was not exploiting a vulnerability in Siemens gear. Maik Brüggemann, software developer and security engineer at OpenSource Security, said that worms like this one are a threat to any industrial network.

      [...]

      When OpenSource Security took its findings to Siemens, the researchers were told there were no flaws in its PLC platforms using its SIMATIC S7-1200 PLC. “We were told these were not vulnerabilities and that everything worked as expected,” Brüggemann said.

    • Security Reseacher explains security issues related to Windows 10 Linux subsystem at Blackhat
    • Def Con: Do smart devices mean dumb security?

      From net-connected sex toys to smart light bulbs you can control via your phone, there’s no doubt that the internet of things is here to stay.

      More and more people are finding that the devices forming this network of smart stuff can make their lives easier.

    • 1 billion computer monitors vulnerable to undetectable firmware attacks

      A team led by Ang Cui (previously) — the guy who showed how he could take over your LAN by sending a print-job to your printer — have presented research at Defcon, showing that malware on your computer can poison your monitor’s firmware, creating nearly undetectable malware implants that can trick users by displaying fake information, and spy on the information being sent to the screen.

      It’s a scarier, networked, pluripotent version of Van Eck phreaking that uses an incredibly sly backchannel to communicate with the in-device malware: attackers can blink a single pixel in a website to activate and send instructions to the screen’s malware.

      What’s more, there’s no existing countermeasure for it, and most monitors appear to be vulnerable.

    • Hackers Could Break Into Your Monitor To Spy on You and Manipulate Your Pixels

      We think of our monitors as passive entities. The computer sends them data, and they somehow—magically?—turn it into pixels which make words and pictures.

      But what if that wasn’t the case? What if hackers could hijack our monitors and turn them against us?

      As it turns out, that’s possible. A group of researchers has found a way to hack directly into the tiny computer that controls your monitor without getting into your actual computer, and both see the pixels displayed on the monitor—effectively spying on you—and also manipulate the pixels to display different images.

    • Computer Expert Hacks Into Common Voting Machine in Minutes to Reveal Shocking 2016 Election Threat

      It took Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel and one of his graduate students just minutes to hack into a voting machine still used in Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, Politico reports.

      Professor Andrew Appel purchased for $82 a Sequoia AVC Advantage, one of the oldest machines still in use. Within 7 seconds, he and his student, Alex Halderman, had picked the lock open. Within minutes, the duo had removed the device’s unsecured ROM chips with their own hardware that makes it easy to alter the machine’s results.

    • Researchers Bypass Chip-and-Pin Protections at Black Hat

      Credit card companies for the most part have moved away from “swipe and signature” credit cards to chip and pin cards by this point; the technology known as EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) which is supposed to provide consumers with an added layer of security is beginning to see some wear, according to researchers.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Obama not only did not pay Iran Ransom, he denied Iran Billions it had Coming to It

      Zack Beauchamp at Vox has a very clear explanation of why the $400 million the US paid to Iran in January was not a ransom for hostages.

      The fact is that the Obama administration dodged a likely ruling by an arbitration court against the United States that could have awarded Iran as much as $10 billion.

      The Iranian government of the Shah had paid the US $400 million for fighter jets before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. After the revolution, the US froze Iranian assets, and after the hostage crisis had no representation in Iran. But by international law the US still owed Iran $400 mn because it never delivered the promised planes. Ultimately a special court was set up to arbitrate the dispute. Iran was asking for $10 billion because of inflation and because of aggravation. It began to look as though Iran might win the $10 bn.

    • Syria: Key ISIL Smuggling city, Manbij, falls to Kurd-Arab Force

      The Syrian War is nowhere near over, but the Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) episode may be drawing to an end. Alarabiya reports that the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which is largely leftist Kurds of the YPG but includes a small Arab auxiliary faction, has taken almost all of the former Daesh stronghold of Manbij. The north Syrian city not so far from the Turkish border had been used by Daesh as a key logistics point in smuggling arms, men and supplies from Turkey down to its capital of al-Raqqa. Only a small number of fighters remain in the city, according to Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

      The fall of Manbij signals a new phase in the struggle against Daesh, as SDF positions itself to blockade al-Raqqa.

      Unfortunately for regional stability, that the Kurds of Syria’s northeast are extending their sway westward will make it look to Turkey as though the Syrian Kurds are consolidating a mini-state. Turkey’s elites are paranoid about secessionist tendencies among Turkey’s own Kurds, about 20% of its population and concentrated in the southwest near Syria.

    • Puerto Rico is a Colony, No Matter How Else You Dress it Up

      The island called Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. This fact means that the rights US citizens assume to be theirs do not necessarily apply to Puerto Ricans living on the island. The history of Puerto Rico since the United States military invaded it in 1898 makes this very clear. Whether one is taking a look at the economic relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, the political relationship, or the military relationship, the blatant nature of the colonial relationship is foremost.

      This becomes very clear in Nelson A. Denis’ 2015 history War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony. Partially a biography of the Nationalist leader and hero Pedro Albizu Campos and partially a history of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement in the early and mid-twentieth century, this text tells a story more people in the United States should know. The racism and just plain disregard for human lives described in Denis’ narrative is a match for the very worst of humanity’s inhumanity to other humans. The fact that it continues in Washington’s current dealings with Puerto Rico is testament to the arrogance intrinsic to colonialism, no matter how it is dressed up.

    • The Rising Death Toll in Indian Kashmir

      Three people were killed and more than 100 injured Friday after security forces opened fire on protesters in Indian Kashmir, bringing the death toll since clashes began in July to 55, Reuters reports.

      Two protesters were killed in western Srinagar, the capital of India’s Jammu and Kashmir States, and one was killed in the north. The protests, which took place amid region-wide curfews, began after Friday prayers.

      Violence first erupted last month following the death of Burhan Muzaffar Wani, a 22-year-old separatist militant credited with reviving militancy in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. He used his active following on social media to encourage youth to join the Hizbul Muhahideen.

    • A Veteran Novel That Finds No Redemption in War

      If your anger about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has lost its edge, Roy Scranton’s debut novel, War Porn, will help you recommit. It takes a while to appreciate the disjointed quality of the plot, which hopscotches back and forth through the lives of two U.S. soldiers, Specialist Wilson (identified only by his rank and last name), whose deployment to Iraq transforms him from a poet nice-guy into something else, and a National Guard military police officer, Aaron Stojanowski, who returns stateside jagged and dangerous. In writing War Porn, Scranton has produced a literary work that doesn’t just describe the outrages of the war, but punches them into the American gut.

      We first meet Stojanowski at a Columbus Day barbecue in the fall of 2004, and watch as detached millennials ask questions about his service in Iraq. “That must have been intense,” one says. Eventually Stojanowski explodes, kicking a pet and harshing the party vibe. The novel then jumps through a set of disjointed scenes from Specialist Wilson’s time in Iraq, which illustrate in alternating fashion: the casual racism of military occupation; the boredom and routine of everyday violence; the sudden fragility of life; the unexpected, fleeting pleasures of the forward operating base.

    • It’s Bombs Away for the USA in Libya

      The United States returned to aerial bomb Libya. The target is Islamic State (IS) positions in the north-central city of Sirte. IS has held Sirte and its surrounding areas since last year. Sirte is the birthplace of Muammar Qaddafi, who was also killed there. After the fall of the Qaddafi government, this central Libyan town languished. It had become the playground of the Libyan Dawn – the militia of the town of Misrata, led by Salah Badi – and later the Libya Shield Force of Benghazi. The latter had close ties to al-Qaeda and is now part of the Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries. When the Islamic State attacked Sirte last year, the various militias had little incentive to stay. They delivered the city to the Islamic State and withdrew to their own hometowns. Attempts to erode the Islamic State by other militias and armies have thus far failed.

    • Why Neocons Can’t Stomach Trump

      Bill Kristol is downright despondent after his failed search for an alternative to Donald Trump. Max Boot is indignant about his “stupid” party’s willingness to ride a bragging bull into a delicate China policy shop. And the leading light of the first family of military interventionism — Robert Kagan — is actually lining up neoconservatives behind the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

    • What’s Best for Children?

      The provocative notion of a “madman” somehow getting into the system and starting a war oversimplifies the reality of our situation, which is that any human being, not just a knowledge-averse demagogue like Mr. Trump, may have the capacity to go “mad” in the tensions leading up to the decision to launch. The historical record shows that past presidents of the U.S. had seriously considered using nuclear weapons, most distressingly Mr. Nixon when he realized we were losing in Vietnam. Even a “no-drama” Obama could be rendered almost psychotic with dread by evidence that missiles were apparently headed for our major cities. This is a situation that is far beyond the psychological endurance of even the sanest and most well-trained leader. Madness is relative in the nuclear world. We would certainly label mad an extremist who set off a nuclear weapon in a city. We do not apply the same label to the whole field of leaders and diplomats who seem to be more or less satisfied, or pretend they are, with a status quo that is patently insane.

    • The Sham Rebrand of al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front

      The Nusra Front’s adoption of the new name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and claim that it has separated itself from al-Qaeda was designed to influence US policy, not to make the group any more independent of al-Qaeda.

      [...]

      Charles Lister, the British expert on Syrian jihadism who is now a fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, observed in May that al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has acquired a huge political stake in Nusra Front’s success in dominating the war against the Assad regime, which it views as the jewel in the crown of its global operation, along with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group’s Yemeni franchise.

      This was not the first time that the issue of possible independence from al-Qaeda had come up in the context of the international politics of the Syrian conflict. A year ago last spring, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the external sponsors of the Nusra Front-dominated military command that had taken over Idlib in April, were concerned about the possibility that the Obama administration would come down hard against their Nusra-based strategy.

    • From World War II to Iraq: Captain Khan and the Citizen Soldier

      One thing Trump tweeted actually spoke to this point: he noted that it was actually Hillary Clinton who had voted for war, not him. That Senator Clinton voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq was obscured in the flag-waving theatrics, but it’s a crucial fact that the politician who has positioned herself as the Khans’ champion also helped send their son into battle. Clinton has since expressed regret over her vote, but she’s gained dubious redemption by embracing a young man’s “sacrifice” despite having played an indirect role in his avoidable death.

    • America’s Top Spies and Analysts Warn of Real Threat of a Trump Presidency: 5 Leaders Who Have Spoken out

      Starting next week, Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States, will begin receiving national security briefings from intelligence officials.

      One senior intelligence official, speaking to the Washington Post on August 3 on the condition of anonymity, contended “he would decline to participate in any session with Trump…citing not only concern with Trump’s expressions of admiration for Russian President Vladi­mir Putin but seeming uninterest in acquiring a deeper or more nuanced understanding of world events.”

    • Lessons from the UK’s Chilcot Report for Turkey’s post-coup response

      On September 24, 2002, the UK government published a fifty page dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction which was discussed in Parliament on the same day. The British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood before a cramped House of Commons and claimed that the ‘…intelligence picture that [the dossier paints] is one accumulated over the last four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative. It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes…’ Tony Blair had penned a foreword to that dossier in which he claimed that he believed the intelligence had ‘established beyond doubt’ that Saddam had continued to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Facing a disbelieving public, the PM went on a public charm offensive by doing a series of TV interviews and shows speaking directly to members of the audience.

      Tony Blair eventually secured the votes to take the UK to war alongside the US and other coalition partners. Hundreds of thousands of lives and many more displaced families later, no WMD were found. The obvious failure of the intelligenc

    • Drone Rule Book, Working Thread

      What ever happened to the inclusions of headers and footers in documents? It used to be, documents would ID what document you were reading on every page, which is really useful if one page walks or gets replaced with a new one. Now even life-and-death documents like the Drone Rule Book liberated by the ACLU lack real headers.

    • 20 Photos That Take You Behind the Miskitu Curtain

      Contrasting the congenial moment on the porch, the outside of the house is covered in bullet holes perpetrated by armed attackers known as ‘colonos’ (settlers). Miskitu communities on the frontier are living in constant fear of these recurring attacks on their villages, and are growing desperate watching their family and friends die or be ‘disappeared’, while many others feel forced to flee the region entirely. The illegal settler attacks are part of a strategic and organized attempt to violently seize control of resource rich, traditional Miskitu territory.

      A popular consensus among some Miskitus is that the Ortega government is tempting the settlers with lucrative loans, enabling them to illegally purchase the land for raising cattle. Beyond all spiraling suspicion and blame, the stark reality remains: the Miskitu are currently victims of an ongoing, large-scale land grab of Nicaragua’s most resource rich, biodiverse – and disappearing – rainforest. The ongoing criminal activity is sure to be a harbinger of devastating, unfolding, environmental impacts to boot.

    • Execution of Iranian Scientist Uncovers Sad, Strange Tale of CIA Spy Games

      Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri, who claimed to have been tortured and imprisoned by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was executed by the Iranian government for alleged espionage on behalf of the U.S..

      State-controlled Iranian media confirmed the death on Sunday. “Shahram Amiri was hanged for revealing the country’s top secrets to the enemy (US),” spokesperson Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejeie was quoted as saying by Mizan Online.

      However, details of the allegations are murky as the scientist disappeared during a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia in spring of 2009 and claimed to have been subject to CIA extradition and torture.

    • Another Ordinary Day in the Empire

      As of yet today, I haven’t seen any articles about children bombed in bits in pieces in the Middle East or elsewhere, but I’m sure there have been devastated parents somewhere, asking why.

    • Still the Political Project Calls to Us

      Not long ago, Obama openly leveled criticism against the political establishment in Cuba. He righteously decried a lack of democracy and political freedom there, indicting the Cuban government for its role in continuing an antidemocratic politics for far too long after the Cold War. Now, however, in the wake of the recent turmoil surrounding the fixed Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, which can be described as anything but democratic or transparent, Obama’s shameless denunciations of Cuba have lost whatever paltry significance they maybe had. And thanks to despotic blemish that stains the Democrats in their march to the White House, the US edges closer to consummate totalitarianism under Obama’s chosen pawn, Hillary.

    • Liberal Antiwar Activism is the Problem

      Every election season, veterans and their families are used as political pawns. During the Democratic National Convention in Philly, the Khans, the mother and father of a Marine Captain who was killed in Iraq, conveniently filled the role for Hillary Clinton and the Neoliberals. At the Republican National Convention, Patricia Smith gladly took the stage for the Neofascists and talked about the death of her son and the non-scandal that is, Benghazi.

      In the meantime, anyone who opposes U.S. Empire is shit-out-of-luck when it comes to presidential elections and the two major parties. Here, we should commend Gary Johnson and Jill Stein for remaining principled in their views surrounding foreign policy, militarism, torture and surveillance. They’re the last of a dying breed.

    • A decade of the Gülen Movement on WikiLeaks: More than meets the eye

      The Gülen Movement, which has been labeled a shadowy organization for constructing parallel societies in various countries, was increasingly a topic in WikiLeaks documents. Diplomatic cables regarding the movement soared in the years between 2003 and 2013 as well as questions and concerns about the movement due to its ambiguous intentions

    • Meaningless Words: Terrorism, Mental Health and the London Knife Attack

      The dosage of such reassurance has been increased by feeding the public the knowledge that a special team will operating to combat the next ISIS-inspired rampage. The Daily Mail does its bit to fan the enthusiasm about the Hollywood styled “C-Men”, those “600 awesomely armed (and masked) Counter-Terrorism firearms officers who hit the streets today in vans, boats and motorbikes.”

      None of this is reassuring on two grounds, the first being the forecast by Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe that an attack was not a question of if but when. Having given ballast to the prospect of a decent protective barrier, he had to also express a view that it might not work. Expertise can always be found wanting.

      The second relates to the frequency of knife attacks as a general point, which has been somehow muddled in the poorly made pie of confusion. Knifing incidents in London remain a serious and growing problem. Epidemic it may well be, but terrorism?

      The less than rosy statistics suggest that knife attacks in England and Wales over 2015 increased by nine per cent, much of it assisted by an increase of dark web sales and types of weapons awash in youth circles. In September 2015, the Met Police claimed that knife crime in London had risen by 18 percent, with 10 youngsters being stabbed to death in the nine months prior.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate Change Could Release Cold War-Era Radioactive Waste In Greenland

      Global warming could release radioactive waste stored in an abandoned Cold War-era U.S. military camp deep under Greenland’s ice caps if a thaw continues to spread in coming decades, scientists said on Friday.

      Camp Century was built in northwest Greenland in 1959 as part of U.S. research into the feasibility of nuclear missile launch sites in the Arctic, the University of Zurich said in a statement.

      Staff left gallons of fuel and an unknown amount of low-level radioactive coolant there when the base shut down in 1967 on the assumption it would be entombed forever, according to the university.

      It is all currently about 35 meters (114.83 ft) down. But the part of the ice sheet covering the camp could start to melt by the end of the century on current trends, the scientists added.

      “Climate change could remobilize the abandoned hazardous waste believed to be buried forever beneath the Greenland ice sheet,” the university said of findings published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

    • Households could get fracking payments under government plans

      Residents affected by fracking could be paid some of the proceeds of shale gas projects, the government has suggested.

      A shale wealth fund was unveiled in 2014 to set aside up to 10% of the tax proceeds from fracking to benefit communities in the UK hosting wells.

      The PM is now considering paying the money directly to individual households instead of councils and local trusts.

      But green campaigners say fracking carries environmental risks and people would not accept “bribes”.

      The government’s plan is one option due to be outlined in a consultation on Monday.

    • Wyoming’s ‘Clean Coal’ Plans Stir False Hopes

      It’s no secret that the U.S. coal industry’s hopes of revival by exporting its product to Asia via West Coast ports—what Platts has called an “export or die” strategy—have been dashed by the structural decline in global coal markets.

    • Kochs’ Ground Game in Election Will Support Trump No Matter What

      Every time Charles Koch indicates his distaste for Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, media types run with a story that says Trump will receive no help from the vast network of non-profits and political donors overseen by Koch and his brother, David.

  • Finance

    • Fighting the politics of confusion

      The lead up to and aftermath of the Brexit vote was and is extremely concerning for multiple reasons, but one in particular has gone unnoticed. When Michael Gove, being interviewed by Faisal Islam, said that “people in this country have had enough of experts”, the first response was to laugh. It turns out, however, that he was right. And that’s terrifying.

      While it’s easy to argue that the IMF, World Bank, Bank of England, ECB, industry leaders and corporate heads who pleaded for a Remain vote merely represent an array of vested interests, that academics, charities, social activists, artists, and independent economists who were also overwhelmingly lined up against Leave shows that the weight of the ‘objective’ Brexit debate fell on the side of the Remain camp. That voters rejected these opinions signals more than a protesting frustration at political elitism or a so-called cosmopolitan condescension: it signals the first major British legitimisation of a dangerous anti-intellectualism.

    • The Critical Link Between Poverty and Health

      Concern for the health of the poor is one of the critical issues in development. Poverty cannot be defined solely in terms of low or no income. Lack of access to health services, safe water, adequate nutrition, and education are also essential components of poverty. Poverty and health are closely linked. Poverty is one of the most influential factors in ill health, and ill health can lead to poverty.

      Poverty drains family savings. In addition, poor people are more exposed to several risks (poor sanitation, unhealthy food, violence, drug abuse and natural disasters) and less prepared to cope with them.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Will the ‘Berniecrats’ Help Progressives Take Power in November?

      At the Green Party national convention in Houston, Green Party candidate for senate Arn Menconi says he choose not to work within the Democratic party because of its record in enabling corporate power and disastrous foreign policy

    • Injecting Radical Politics into the Machinery: Ajamu Baraka

      “It’s imperative that we understand the protracted nature of radical change in the most complex, bourgeois society on this planet,” Ajamu Baraka told teleSUR.

      Joining presidential nominee Jill Stein’s at the top of the Green Party’s ticket, the revolutionary activist, organizer and writer Ajamu Baraka has far larger ambitions that merely winning the White House. What Baraka wants, he says, is nothing less than a reimagining of US democracy.

      “People are beginning to understand they have been trapped in the dead-end politics of this fear-mongering,” Baraka said in an interview with teleSUR, “which every four years reduces the political choice to the lesser of two evils.”

    • Intellectualism Stymies Debate and Objective Ideation

      After the mis-prioritization of values and poor argumentation comes the dreaded observer effect where intellectuals worry how they will be perceived and liked as a result of their findings. They are acutely aware that the messenger is often shot and so begins the even-handed attempt to feign pragmatic conclusions to appear reasonable and avoid being pegged a radical, doom and gloomer, or utopian – What is left is milquetoast conclusions that talk big ideas on the outset and deliver the same results. And it is the capitulation towards desired popular acceptance that is the most damning part of intellectual commentary. The inauthenticity of it all leads to conclusions that are band aids while the populace fails to understand the systemic problems enough to reach the right conclusions on their own.

      All this work done by the tenured and the credentialed to give that glossy polished feel to intellectual work telling us what we already know – We are broken. It’s no surprise we have cultivated a society that when presented with a new thought will quickly run to safety picking up their armaments labeled credentials, stats, and tradition so that they may light the sky ablaze in hellfire to down any foreign aircraft in their conformist skies. We have learned what real intellectual helplessness feels like, and we have accepted its confines.

    • Report: Shawn Lucas, Man Who Served DNC with Lawsuit, Found Dead

      This week, rumors that Shawn Lucas, a Bernie Sanders supporter shown in a viral YouTube video serving the Democratic National Committee (DNC) with a lawsuit over the organization’s favoring of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, has died, according to a report.

      According to Snopes, who spoke to the Washington D.C. Metro Police, Lucas died earlier in August of unknown causes.

      Lucas’ death was “classified as a Death Report, pending the results of an autopsy,” police told the hoax-debunking website. Meanwhile, GoFundMe page was set up for Lucas’ funeral expenses.

      On Reddit and elsewhere, there were rumors he died. Since then, there has been rampant speculation on Twitter about his cause of death, including murder.

    • The New Arrangement on the Game Board of U.S. Politics
    • Trump, the Bad, Bad Businessman

      The greatest scoop of my journalism career started at a poker table with a tip from an agitated banker.

      It was a Thursday night in late May 1990. I was a 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who had written dozens of articles about Donald J. Trump’s business affairs. I was closing in on the biggest one of all — Mr. Trump was on the brink of financial ruin. He was quietly trying to unload his assets. His Atlantic City casinos were underperforming, and prices for his casino bonds were plummeting, suggesting that he would have trouble making interest payments.

      “Donald Trump is driving 100 miles per hour toward a brick wall, and he has no brakes,” the banker told me. “He is meeting with all the banks right now.”

      The next day, I called sources at the four banks I knew had large Trump exposures. The first three calls yielded “no comment,” but the fourth hit pay dirt, and I was invited to visit the bank late that afternoon.

      Behind a large mahogany desk sat the bank’s chief lending officer. He explained that all of the banks would have to agree to a huge restructuring of Mr. Trump’s loans or Mr. Trump would have to declare personal bankruptcy. Unknown to the banks when each had lent him money, Mr. Trump ended up personally guaranteeing a staggering $830 million of loans, which was reckless of him, but even more so for the banks.

      In a front-page Wall Street Journal article on June 4, 1990, I wrote: “Donald J. Trump’s cash shortage has become critical. The developer is now in intense negotiations with his main bank creditors that could force him to give up big chunks of his empire.” One banker said, “He will have to trim the fat; get rid of the boat, the mansions, the helicopter.”

      Amid all the self-made myths about Donald Trump, none is more fantastic than Trump the moneymaker, the New York tycoon who has enjoyed a remarkably successful business career. In reality, Mr. Trump was a walking disaster as a businessman for much of his life. This is not just my opinion. Warren Buffett said as much this past week.

    • The NYT’s Out-of-Control Bias

      The New York Times has shown a blatant bias against Russia and Vladimir Putin for years but it is now merging that animus with its contempt for Donald Trump, a stunningly unprofessional performance, notes John V. Walsh.

    • Platform and Politics: The Change We Made

      As a reflection of the state of play of American politics, we should see this platform not a defeat but an acknowledgment that there has been a change. Change we made possible. We were able to impact the debate. In some instances, we were able to win changes in the platform and, even when we were not, we were able to force debate on critical issues of concern. That is why I was proud to be a part to be a part of the Sanders campaign and why I endorse his call to continue our forward march. We must remain a part of the progressive coalition working with our allies to elect Hillary Clinton, defeat Donald Trump, continue to transform the Democratic Party, and keep progressive ideas in the mainstream, and not on the fringes of American politics. Within this coalition we can continue to fight for progress. Outside of it, we run the risk of marginalizing ourselves and our issues.

    • Revoke Jewish National Fund of Canada’s Charitable Status

      Imagine during Jim Crow a Canadian political party polled its members about pressing Ottawa to stop subsidizing US racism only to be smeared by an organization driving the discrimination. But, instead of relishing the attacks, party leaders sought to placate the racist group by inviting them to address their convention, which the said organization refused, claiming… discrimination.

      This hard to fathom scenario mirrors the Jewish National Fund of Canada/Green Party scrimmage since members put forward a resolution calling for the Canada Revenue Agency to revoke the JNF’s charitable status because it practices “institutional discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of Israel.” In the first round of a multipronged voting process, 62% of party members green lighted the JNF resolution, 24% yellow lighted it and 15% red lighted it. (A similar number green lighted a concurrent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions resolution.)

    • Responding To Post Truth Politics
    • Jill Stein Wins Green Party Nomination, Courting Disaffected Sanders Supporters

      The Green Party officially nominated Jill Stein for president and human rights activist Ajamu Baraka as her running mate on Saturday, at a convention in Houston that attracted many disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters.

      Much of the three-day gathering was an explicit appeal to former backers of the Vermont senator to join their fold, and several speakers argued that Sanders had been treated unfairly by the Democratic Party.

      “I want to thank Bernie Sanders supporters who refused to let the political revolution die,” Stein said in her acceptance speech. “We have a tremendous opportunity before us. The American people are longing for a change. They are ready to do something different, and we have to be the vehicle for that difference.”

    • Jill Stein’s Radical Funding Solution

      Bernie Sanders supporters are flocking to Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential candidate, with donations to her campaign exploding nearly 1000% after he endorsed Hillary Clinton. Stein salutes Sanders for the progressive populist movement he began and says it is up to her to carry the baton. Can she do it? Critics say her radical policies will not hold up to scrutiny. But supporters say they are just the medicine the economy needs.

      Stein goes even further than Sanders on several key issues, and one of them is her economic platform. She has proposed a “Power to the People Plan” that guarantees basic economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities; living-wage jobs for every American who needs to work; an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health insurance program; tuition-free public education through university level; and the abolition of student debt. She also supports the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.

    • As Nominee, Stein Says She Wants to Assume Mantle of Sanders’ Revolution

      The Green Party convention in Houston, Texas reached its climax late Saturday with presidential nominee Jill Stein calling on the American left to turn its back on the “two corporate parties” and “vote for our deeply held beliefs.”

      Vying for the support of those who previously backed former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, Stein championed her vision of “an America and a world…that puts people, planet, and peace over profit.”

      During her acceptance speech, Stein said she was excited “to be running in alliance with the Bernie Sanders movement that lives on outside the Democratic Party.”

      “We owe you such a debt of gratitude, for getting the revolution going. And then for refusing to be shut down,” she said, prompting chants of “Jill not Hill!” from the crowd.

    • The history of the voting rights struggle is still being written

      For African Americans, the struggle to be recognized as human and to assert their rights as such has been a long-fought battle. When the Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were adopted between 1865 and 1870, freeing enslaved Blacks and making them citizens, Blacks were officially humanized in a way that they had not been for hundreds of years in America.

      Indeed, while other amendments would effectively grant groups the right to vote — women by the 19th Amendment, and 18- to 20-year-olds by the 26th — no other amendment enfranchised citizens quite like the 14th Amendment granting citizenship rights to former slaves, or the 15th Amendment giving Black men the right to vote. That’s because no other amendment covered a people who had previously been deemed subhuman and enslaved.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • My 10 Years of Trouble With Tayyip Erdoğan

      It’s amazing to think that it’s ten years since I was arrested and charged with ‘insulting the dignity’ of the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was a mere Prime Minister back then in 2006, and I an English teacher at a private university in Istanbul, where I had been living for 20 years. Despite my antipathy to the state religion, nationalism, censorship, miltary conscription, insult laws, and the headscarf, I kept quiet and got along fine.

    • When censorship goes mad – 16 amazing TV edits of movie obscenities

      Hundreds of people have been shot and that little girl is doing something with the crucifix that she’ll definitely regret, but God forbid that someone should utter a rude word.

      Television has been “thinking of the children” for decades and sanitising – or Bowdlerising – movies for decades, but we’ve got to take our hats off to them and admit that they can get impressively creative at times. Here are our favourite dementedly weird edits.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Department of Justice Official Tells Hundred Federal Judges to Use Tor

      The US government has a complicated relationship with Tor. While the US is the biggest funder of the non-profit that maintains the software, law enforcement bodies such as the FBI are exploiting Tor browser vulnerabilities on a huge scale to identify criminal suspects.

      To add to that messy, nuanced mix, one Department of Justice official recently personally recommended Tor to a room of over a hundred federal judges.

      Ovie Carroll, director for the Cybercrime Lab at the Department of Justice, urged the judges to “use the TOR [sic] network to protect their personal information on their computers, like work or home computers, against data breaches, and the like,” Judge Robert J. Bryan said in July, according to a hearing transcript released on Friday.

      “I was surprised to hear him urge the federal judges present,” Bryan said. Bryan was talking during a hearing on two motions to withdraw guilty pleas in the FBI’s recent mass hacking campaign. In February 2015, the FBI took over a dark web child pornography site called Playpen, and deployed malware in an attempt to identify the site’s visitors. Bryan has resided over several resulting cases from that investigation.

    • How America Rising Ties the GOP Establishment to the Stalkers Harassing Bill McKibben and Tom Steyer

      For the past few months, when they dare venture out to the supermarket, to church, or to a climate rally, Bill McKibben, Tom Steyer, and other climate activists are being stalked by a team of GOP-trained camera operators. The so-called “trackers” with the cameras are working for a group called America Rising Squared (aka America Rising Advanced Research or AR2), and publishing the occasional “embarrassing” display of alleged hypocrisy on a website called CoreNews.org.

      DeSmog first covered this new “creepy” campaign back in May, and since then, the harrassment has only gotten worse, as Bill McKibben writes in Sunday’s New York Times. In his op-ed, “My Right Wing Stalkers” (the web headline is: “Embarrassing Photos of Me, Thanks to My Right-Wing Stalkers”), McKibben describes what it’s like to live under surveillance, and the psychological toll that it takes on him and his family. (One particularly infuriating detail: McKibben’s daughter believes that she, too, is being filmed in public.)

    • FBI Chief Calls for National Talk Over Encryption vs. Safety [Ed: It should be not “Encryption vs. Safety” but “Encryption FOR Safety”. Good luck doing any financial transactions without encryption…]

      The FBI’s director says the agency is collecting data that he will present next year in hopes of sparking a national conversation about law enforcement’s increasing inability to access encrypted electronic devices.

      Speaking on Friday at the American Bar Association conference in San Francisco, James Comey says the agency was unable to access 650 of 5,000 electronic devices investigators attempted to search over the last 10 months.

    • The Internet of Dildos Is Watching You

      As increasingly banal devices come online as the latest additions to the internet of things, it was inevitable that sex toys would get added into the mix. Known as teledildonics, the realm of internet connected sex toys has been heralded as the future of sex for years now, and as with all internet connected devices, these toys are liable to get hacked.

      The legal and ethical risks posed by the internet of dildos was the subject of a presentation by two hackers from New Zealand at DEF CON on Friday, but they were less concerned with third party dildo exploits than the manufacturer settings that come built into the devices.

      “When we started out with this research, we were wondering about the potential exploits and vulnerabilities that a third party hacker could take advantage of,” said one of the presenters, who goes by the name of follower. “But when we looked more closely, it actually turns out that you might be more concerned about what the manufacturer is doing [with your dildo data].”

      Along with his colleague goldfisk, follower reversed engineered the We-Vibe 4 Plus, one of the most popular internet connected dildos on the market. What the duo found was surprising: not only was the device streaming temperature data back to the manufacturer once a minute, but it was also streaming the intensity settings of the device in real time.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Americans Don’t Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Says FCC Official

      Most Americans don’t care about the exorbitant phone charges that the nation’s 2.2 million prison inmates and their families are forced to endure just to stay in touch, a top federal communications regulator said Thursday.

      Inmates in federal and state prisons across the country are forced to pay outrageously high costs for simply making phone calls to their loved ones, which is why the Federal Communications Commission has been trying to ease their financial burden.

      Criminal justice reform advocates have been working to convince the federal government to crack down on exploitative prison phone practices for years, but the issue still receives too little notice on the national stage, according to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, who issued a scathing call to conscience during the agency’s monthly meeting on Thursday.

    • The Xbox One S Still Uses Microsoft’s Illegal Warranty-Void-if-Removed Sticker

      The Xbox One S, Microsoft’s new, sleeker version of the Xbox One has one of the same problems as the original version: It has a tamper-resistant sticker on it designed to alert Microsoft if an owner has opened up the console. And just like with the original Xbox One, Microsoft uses this sticker to void warranties, a practice that is against federal law.

      As I reported in June, electronics manufacturers who void warranties for the mere act of opening a machine are violating the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975, which forbids manufacturers from forcing consumers to use certain parts or authorized repair professionals in order to maintain the warranty.

      Microsoft’s Xbox One warranty states that it “does not apply” if the Xbox is “opened, modified, or tampered with,” or is “repaired by anyone other than Microsoft.” As seen in an iFixit teardown of the Xbox One S, Microsoft placed a sticker on the back of the console above a clip that holds two pieces of the machine together. The sticker must be removed to open the console.

    • How Mosques in J&K are used to spread hatred against India

      The public address systems of Mosques have been used time and again to raise anti India slogans in Jammu and Kashmir. Poems eulogizing, slain terrorist, Burhan Wani are also played out on several public address systems of Mosques. Going by the response filed by the Union Government in the Supreme Court, it becomes clear that the Mosques are clearly used in the state of J&K to spew venom and chant anti India slogans.

      In the Supreme Court of India, the union government had filed a detailed response to the existing situation in J&K. In its reply filed through solicitor general, Ranjit Kumar, it is stated, ” inimical and anti social elements exploited the news of Wani’s death on the social media to inflame passions. Public address systems of some local Mosques were used to raise pro-freedom slogans and incite the youth to indulge in stone pelting,” the reply also read.

    • If You Don’t Feel “Safe” Studying In A University Library Because There Are Men In It…

      So, feminists are aghast at male-only golf clubs — discrimination! — but see no problem with women-only study lounges.

      So, feminism isn’t about equal treatment for all, but special treatment for women, under the guise of wanting equal treatment.

      Got it.

      Does anyone think this constant demand for women to be treated as fragile flowers might make people think they should hire a man, rather than one of these wilting lilies who surely can’t manage to be around male co-workers without suffering a mental health crisis?

    • Watchdog: Dallas woman discovers new Secret Service sex scandals through public information requests

      “A lot of people think I’m nuts to pursue this.”

      The speaker is a self-described Dallas stay-at-home mom who spent $100,000 in legal fees to expose a culture of corruption in the U.S. Secret Service.

      She filed 89 Freedom of Information Acts (89!) and discovered enough Secret Service scandals and cover-ups that even Bob Woodward would be impressed.

      For this, she got very little public attention. Until now.

      Meet Malia Litman. A retired lawyer and wife of noted Internet entrepreneur David Litman, founder of hotels.com and now CEO of getaroom.com.

      She sits at her table in her North Dallas mansion during The Watchdog team visit.

      Hors d’oeuvres were set out before we arrive — something my colleague Marina Trahan Martinez and I are not used to — cucumber slices, cookies, carrots, celery, hummus and pita bread. Her story is so riveting, we don’t touch the food.

      When the first Secret Service sex scandals broke a few years ago, she grew curious. A former senior partner at Thompson & Knight law firm in Dallas, she knew that federal law allows us to see government documents.

    • We must stop suicide attempts among young Latinas

      A youth survey recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that when it comes to rates of teenage suicide attempts, young Latinas continue to outpace girls and boys of other ethnic or racial groups in the U.S.

      Nearly 10 years ago, news stories told of this mostly overlooked national phenomenon among a misunderstood and endangered group but one of the fastest-growing segments of the American population.

      Major city newspaper editorials called for more than research. They called for action.

      We need action now more than ever. But more than that, we need sustained action.

    • The exclusion games: Rio’s human rights deficit on the eve of the Olympics

      I arrived in Rio de Janeiro from my hometown in northern Brazil exactly one month before the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, to help film a campaign about human rights defenders (HRDs) for Front Line Defenders. As I left the airport, welcome signs to the Olympics on a solid plastic wall effectively hid the poverty at the entrance to the city. This was my introduction to the efforts of the government to hide Rio’s problems from international tourists, athletes, and journalists visiting us this month.

    • At Freedom Square, the Revolution Lives in Brave Relationships

      Chicago — Today is Day 17 of occupying Freedom Square, a block party protest in opposition to Homan Square, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) “black site” that is internationally infamous for illegal detention and torture. Set up in a lot adjacent to the Homan Square facility in the North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, the encampment includes an outdoor kitchen, tents to sleep in, a library, play areas, political education and organizing spaces and more.

      On Day 9 of the occupation, the campsite — supplied and staffed entirely by donations and volunteers — experienced its first violent conflict. After a beautiful day including free bike repair workshops and craft projects, free food for the community, and ongoing political engagement, the occupation site devolved into chaos when adults intervened in a disagreement between kids about sharing bikes. Folks felt disrespected, and misunderstandings and continued transgressions raised tensions, even as Freedom Square organizers made their best efforts to de-escalate the situation. One woman emerged from the fight with a black eye, and several others nursed scrapes and bruises once the scuffle was finally calmed. Freedom Square’s medic bandaged folks up in the First Aid tent as I began to gather the 30 or so people at the camp into a circle to debrief about the conflict. We shared collective space with each other, discussing the harms that had occurred within our community. We talked through accountability steps (steps that could be taken to address those harms). Nobody called the police.

    • Black millennials are challenging everyone to “miss them”

      “Miss Me With Your Equality” titles Arielle Newton’s striking response to the US Supreme Court’s landmark 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder. Justices in the case split 5-4 to strike down core provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required certain states to obtain advance federal approval for any changes to their election laws. At the time many, including president Obama, expressed disappointment that this effectively opened the door for states to enact laws that could indirectly disenfranchise black voters. But Newton’s was a different voice with a stronger message.

    • The rise of American fascism — and what humour can do to stop it

      In a short satirical essay ‘A Presidential Candidate’ published in 1879, Mark Twain concludes his litany of transgressions in a pitch for votes by stating, “but I recommend myself as a safe man — a man who starts from the basis of total depravity and proposes to be fiendish to the last.”

      Reading Twain’s essay while immersed in the current political climate in the US, two things leap out. First, the national obsession with personal scandal makes Twain’s essay all the more comic from start to finish. Second, it practically yanks the reader into nostalgic reflection for a time when satire was, well, satire.

      The bright side of the modern political circumstance is the funny part – for the past two decades the cultural landscape has experienced a comedic infusion into public discourse on a scale quite possibly unmatched in US history. We may in fact be living in a golden age of American humour. Like it or not the engagement of contemporary humourists in political and social dialogue has become central to the national conversation on essentially every policy matter of import.

    • Jill Stein: ‘No question’ Julian Assange is a hero

      Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein hailed Julian Assange as a hero Saturday, saying the WikiLeaks founder’s disclosure of Democratic National Committee emails exposed the American electorate to important information.

      Stein’s comments to CNN were made shortly before she was named the progressive party’s official 2016 presidential nominee, with human rights activist Ajamu Baraka tapped as her running mate.

      “Any time that we have efforts to bring information to the American people, to the world, is something worth supporting,” Baraka said in a separate interview with CNN.

      Last month, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 emails that appeared to show the committee favoring presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over progressive challenger Bernie Sanders — an admired figure among many Green Party supporters — during the primary season. The disclosure led to the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the ouster of several top DNC officials.

    • Why allies are welcome to criticise social movements

      Some months later I’m attending a book launch about Jeremy Corbyn and leftist politics in Britain. The panel this time consists of two men—the author of the book and a journalist. The author presents a brilliant and insightful analysis, but when the journalist asks him a difficult question about whether urban graduate leftist activists can know what the working class of Britain wants or thinks, he does something that really makes me cringe: he pulls class on the journalist.

      Instead of acknowledging the difficulty of the question he replies something to the effect of ‘oh yeah, but I’m from a really working class background so who are you, as a toff who went to private school, to question me about the working class?’

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Tired of Waiting for Corporate High-Speed Internet, Minnesota Farm Towns Build Their Own

      Seven years ago, Winthrop, Minnesota, population 1,400, decided it needed an internet upgrade.

      Most local residents were served by companies like Mediacom, which Consumer Reports consistently ranked among the country’s worst internet providers. Slow connection speeds made work difficult in local schools and businesses, but farmers outside of town, who increasingly rely on connectivity to do business, experienced the worst of it.

      Fourteen miles from Winthrop, in Moltke Township, population 330, one soybean- and wheat-farming family reported its sluggish DSL connection often made it impossible to upload reports to business partners.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • As 3D printers break through, EU expands copyright to furniture and extends term by a century

        The UK has just changed its copyright-and-patent monopoly law to extend copyright to furniture and to extend the term of that copyright on furniture with about a century. This follows a decision in the European Union, where member states are required to adhere to such an order. This change means that people will be prohibited from using 3D printing and other maker technologies to manufacture such objects, and that for a full century.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/08/steam-on-freebsd/feed/ 0 Links 5/8/2016: ROSA Fresh R8, GNU C Library 2.24 http://techrights.org/2016/08/05/gnu-c-library-2-24/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/05/gnu-c-library-2-24/#comments Fri, 05 Aug 2016 12:45:18 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94777

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Creating affordable solutions with open source tools

    Open source is often the heart of many civic technology solutions because using open source leverages the minds of many. Small web solution providers, in particular, often turn to open source as a way to deliver services without having to reinvent the wheel. I recently found out about Digital Deployment, a civic web solution provider in Sacramento, that leverages open source, and so I asked them to share their story with me. I chatted on the phone with Chief Operating Officer Sloane Dell’Orto and Lead Software Engineer Dennis Stevense.

  • Cogito, Ergo Sumana

    Advice on Starting And Running A New Open Source Project: Recently, a couple of programmers asked me for advice on starting and running a new open source project. So, here are some thoughts, assuming you’re already a programmer, you haven’t led a team before, and you know your new software project is going to be open source.

    I figure there are a few different kinds of best practices in starting and running open source projects.

  • FCC Settlement Requires TP-Link to Support 3rd-Party Firmware

    In a win for the open source community, router maker TP-Link will be required to allow consumers to install third-party firmware on their wireless routers, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced Monday. The announcement comes on the heels of a settlement requiring TP-Link to pay a $200,000 fine for failing to properly limit their devices’ transmission power on the 2.4GHz band to within regulatory requirements. On its face, new rules about open source firmware don’t seem to have much to do with TP-Link’s compliance problems. But the FCC’s new rule helps fix an unintended consequence of a policy the agency made last year, which had led to open source developers being locked out of wireless routers entirely.

  • Events

    • Why You Should Speak At & Attend LinuxConf Australia

      Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend at FOSDEM 2016, where he and I co-organize the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues, Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).

      Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact, because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning (local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife, sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • 10 reasons you should use LibreOffice and not Microsoft Word

      The Document Foundation just released version 5.2 of its fully open source office suite LibreOffice. This release brings many new features and UI improvements. When I got the press release, I started updating LibreOffice on my MacBook. But here’s the thing: I’m also a user of Microsoft Word.

      That made me pause and consider why I use LibreOffice when I am forking over $99 a year to Microsoft. The flash of introspection surprised me. I’m an unabashed open source and Linux fan, but I am kind of agnostic when it comes to the tools I use. I use what works for me. So I reached out to my followers on Google+ and Facebook to learn about their reasons for using LibreOffice.

      Here are some of the many reasons why people, myself included, love LibreOffice.

    • Finding Alternatives to Microsoft Excel

      For example, if you are looking for software to install on your Windows-, OS X- or Linux-based computer so you can work without an internet connection, consider free, open-source suites like LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice. Along with word-processing and presentation applications, both suites include a spreadsheet program called Calc that uses the .ods format — but can open and save files in Microsoft Excel’s native format.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Embracing Open Source Software: Advantages and Risks

      Many business and government ­organizations rely on open source software (OSS). One of the most common and widely known ­examples is the Linux operating system. While the use of OSS can provide numerous advantages such as inexpensive and particularly robust software that has been debugged and ­optimized by ­numerous ­programmers, there are also attendant risks. This article explores OSS and its use generally in commercial settings. An ­overview of OSS is provided along with a discussion of its ­popularity with programmers and several associated risks. Additionally, a brief description of ­various OSS licenses is provided. A ­follow-up ­article will provide a strategy for developing a policy to ­manage OSS use.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • European countries awarded for their “star” commitments

      IRM attributes “starred” status to selected commitments included in countries’ National Action Plans (NAP). These commitments “represent exemplary reforms that have potentially transformative impact on citizens in the country of implementation”, OGP said.

    • Open Access/Content

      • The largest Wikipedia gathering in South Asia kicks off

        Wiki Conference India 2016 (WCI), the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia, will be held during August 5-7 this year in Chandigarh, India.

        The first iteration of this event was five years ago in 2011. The event is focused around South Asian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects. Hundreds of participants, including over 100 scholarship holders from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, will participate in this three-day event. A team of volunteers representing several Wikimedia communities across the country and three Wikimedia affiliates—Wikimedia India, Punjabi Wikimedians and Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program—are working together to make this event a success.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • EOMA68: > $60k pledged on crowdsupply.com

        crowdsupply.com has a campaign to fund production of EOMA68 computer cards (and associated peripherals) which recently passed the $60,000 mark.

        If you were at DebConf13 in Switzerland, you may have seen me with some early prototypes that I had been lent to show people.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • CP/M Creator Gary Kildall’s Memoirs Released as Free Download

      The year before his death in 1994, Gary Kildall—inventor of the early microcomputer operating system CP/M—wrote a draft of a memoir, “Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry.” He distributed copies to family and friends, but died before realizing his plans to release it as a book.

      This week, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, with the permission of Kildall’s children, released the first portion of that memoir. You can download it here.

      Wrote Scott and Kristin Kildall in an introductory letter: “In this excerpt, you will read how Gary and Dorothy started from modest means as a young married couple, paved a new path for start-up culture, and embraced their idea of success to become leaders in the industry. Our father embodied a definition of success that we can all learn from: one that puts inventions, ideas, and a love of life before profits as the paramount goal.”

    • E-mails show how UK physicists were dumped over Brexit

      UK researchers are suffering because of the country’s vote to leave the European Union — and a British physicist has now gone public with one such tale of woe.

      Paul Crowther, who heads the physics and astronomy department at the University of Sheffield, has shared e-mails from late July that explain why researchers in his department were suddenly dropped from an EU collaboration. The European coordinator for the consortium felt that Brexit put UK-based researchers in a “very awkward position” and that their participation would “compromise the project”.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Why the GMO Labeling Bill Obama Just Signed Into Law Is a Sham—and a National Embarrassment

      It is known as the DARK Act—Denying Americans the Right to Know. It was signed by President Obama last Friday in the afterglow of the Democratic National Convention, without fanfare or major media coverage. The bill’s moniker is apt. With a few strokes of his pen Obama scratched out the laws of Vermont, Connecticut and Maine that required the labeling of genetically engineered foods.

      He also nullified the GE seed labeling laws in Vermont and Virginia that allowed farmers to choose what seeds they wanted to buy and plant. And for good measure he preempted Alaska’s law requiring the labeling of any GE fish or fish product, passed to protect the state’s vital fisheries from contamination by recently approved genetically engineered salmon.

    • Rave On: Music, Ecstasy and the Real Tragedy of Corporate Drugs

      Drug use doesn’t begin at raves, it begins when children as young as three are diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and are placed on Ritalin. As of 2010, according to the National Health Interview Survey, 5.2 million kids between the ages of 3 and 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD. According to the University of Utah’s Genetic Science Learning Center, “Ritalin is a stimulant like cocaine” and “may cause changes in the brain over time.” Further, up to “50% of adolescents in drug treatment centers report abusing Ritalin.” Yet a vague evaluation by a doctor or teacher of too much “squirminess” can lead a youngster to spend an adolescence on meds. The none too subtle message? If you have a problem, pop a pill.

    • The Washington Vaccination Ploy: Puerto Rico and the Zika Quandary

      Should you fear receiving the needle from a stranger? Yes. Should you fear receiving it from a person you know all too well as a historical abuser? Even more so. Empires do it, states do it, and even local agencies do it. Let’s all, as it were, vaccinate for all in this perverted paraphrasing of the Cole Porter song, the assumption that the medical facility cures, and the giver and administrator knows all.

    • Add Russia’s Olympic Doping Scandal to the Rich History of Cheating in Sports

      Of the 387-member Russian team, more than 100 have already been banned, including 67 from the glamour sport of track and field, according to a recent ruling by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.

      Not that cheating is necessarily a communist hallmark. Athletes from capitalist countries do it, too.

      In the most celebrated Olympic scandal, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was disqualified after winning the 100-meter dash at the 1988 Seoul Olympics when he was found to have used the steroid stanozolol.

      The most celebrated Olympian who was never quite caught was the United States’ Carl Lewis, who won nine Olympic gold medals from 1984 to 1996. In 2003, Lewis acknowledged testing positive three times before the 1988 Olympics. He got off with warnings from U.S. officials, although, under the rules, he should have been prevented from competing in Seoul, where he won gold medals in the 100 meters (after Johnson defaulted) and long jump.

      After the scandal, Lewis wasn’t exactly contrite.

      “There were hundreds of people getting off,” Lewis said in 2003. “Everyone was treated the same. … It’s ridiculous. Who cares? I did 18 years of track and field, and I’ve been retired five years, and they’re still talking about me, so I guess I still have it.”

    • Why Florida’s Medical Marijuana System Is Ripe for Corporate Takeover

      In June 2014, the disgraced former CEO of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) signed Florida’s medical marijuana bill into law. It was a fitting beginning to a regulatory process that has been marred by shadowy fraud in the selection of lucrative vertically integrated licenses in what could become one of the largest medical marijuana markets in the country. The state appears poised to double down upon the fraud, and in keeping with Governor Rick Scott’s legacy of putting healthcare profits before people, some of the new law’s provisions could shield corporate revenues at the expense of fragile patients.

      This is the picture painted by Freedom of Information Act requests, Sunshine Law requests and public reports pointing to perjury and fraud on the part of Alpha Foliage and its partner Surterra Therapeutics, one of only five nurseries granted oligopolic power over Florida’s entire medical cannabis market. The corruption may lead all the way to the governor’s office and it seems some of Florida’s powerful agricultural companies have wielded their influence over existing medical marijuana laws to add dangerous provisions in their financial favor.

    • EPA protected Monsanto’s corporate profits by hiding the truth about glyphosate and cancer for decades

      Is it really possible that the EPA – which is supposed to stand for Environmental Protection Agency, by the way – actually hid the truth about the toxicity of one of Monsanto’s top-selling herbicides ?

      According to researcher and consultant, Dr. Anthony Samsel, the answer would be an unequivocal yes. Dr. Samsel claims to have gained possession of EPA documents that reveal the cancer-causing effects of glyphosate. In fact, Samsel states that these documents contain information tying glyphosate to cancer beginning in the 1970s.

      Glyphosate is the primary ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide known as Roundup, which is an extremely popular product that is used across the world in the cultivation of GM crops. Dr. Samsel has been researching the effects of glyphosate for many years, though he notes that much of his work has not been taken seriously and often dismissed.

      Along with fellow researcher, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Dr. Samsel has authored several studies on the potentially negative effects of glyphosate use. Though their work was previously unrecognized, many who initially dismissed their research are now beginning to pay more attention.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Risk From Linux Kernel Hidden in Windows 10 Exposed at Black Hat [Ed: “Alex Ionescu, chief architect at Crowdstrike” – well, enough says. CrowdStrike Microsoft-tied. CrowdStrike are the same chronic liars who recently accused Russia of DNC leaks despite lack of evidence. The corporate press cited them. How can GNU and Linux running under a piece of malware with keyloggers and back doors be the main security concern?]
    • Italian-based Android RAT spies on mobiles in Japan and China, say researchers

      Researchers discover an Italian-based Android RAT designed for spying that is targeting mobile devices using their unique identification codes

    • keysafe

      Have you ever thought about using a gpg key to encrypt something, but didn’t due to worries that you’d eventually lose the secret key? Or maybe you did use a gpg key to encrypt something and lost the key. There are nice tools like paperkey to back up gpg keys, but they require things like printers, and a secure place to store the backups.

      I feel that simple backup and restore of gpg keys (and encryption keys generally) is keeping some users from using gpg. If there was a nice automated solution for that, distributions could come preconfigured to generate encryption keys and use them for backups etc. I know this is a missing peice in the git-annex assistant, which makes it easy to generate a gpg key to encrypt your data, but can’t help you back up the secret key.

      So, I’m thinking about storing secret keys in the cloud. Which seems scary to me, since when I was a Debian Developer, my gpg key could have been used to compromise millions of systems. But this is not about developers, it’s about users, and so trading off some security for some ease of use may be appropriate. Especially since the alternative is no security. I know that some folks back up their gpg keys in the cloud using DropBox.. We can do better.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Colin Powell’s Former Chief of Staff Thinks Hillary Clinton Is Too Eager to Resort to War

      This is a useful conversation that ranges beyond the realm of the lesser-evil cliché, and one that answers these key questions: What exactly is “the playbook,” and why does onetime George W. Bush aide Lawrence Wilkerson say Hillary Clinton comes straight out of it?

      Wilkerson, who served as former Defense Secretary Colin Powell’s chief of staff in the Bush II White House, is the one to whom The Real News Network’s Paul Jay turns, in this TRNN video clip, to gauge Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s approaches to foreign policy issues as well as to potential and actual armed conflicts.

    • Trident in a time warp: party politics vs defence needs

      As Britain and Europe reeled from Brexit Theresa May rushed through the vote on Trident replacement. Was this strong leadership or our human security being sacrificed to expediency?

    • “People’s Tribunal” Launched in Haiti to Commemorate 101 Years of U.S. Occupation

      Thursday, July 28, when Hillary Rodham Clinton took to the stage to accept the Democratic nomination to be the first female candidate of a major political party for president, was also the 101st anniversary of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti that lasted nineteen years.

      Hundreds of people took to the streets and filled a gym named after president Stenio Vincent, who negotiated the departure of the U.S. Marines in 1934, to launch the People’s Tribunal on U.S. Occupation/Domination. The march began at Fort National, of historic significance. Equally significant was the rapprochement of various segments of Haiti’s progressive movements, often fragmented along political lines.

    • Needing an Exit from Afghan Quagmire

      The failure of U.S. policy in Afghanistan has been obvious for years, but neither President Bush nor President Obama wanted the defeat hung on their legacies, so the bloody folly goes on, a test for the next president, says Alon Ben-Meir.

    • Hiroshima: the Crime That Keeps on Paying, But Beware the Reckoning

      The decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a political not a military decision. The targets were not military, the effects were not military. The attacks were carried out against the wishes of all major military leaders. Admiral William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his memoirs that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender…” General Eisenhower, General MacArthur, even General Hap Arnold, commander of the Air Force, were opposed. Japan was already devastated by fire bombing, facing mass hunger from the US naval blockade, demoralized by the surrender of its German ally, and fearful of an imminent Russian attack. In reality, the war was over. All top U.S. leaders knew that Japan was defeated and was seeking to surrender.

    • The Saudi Role in the 9/11 Attacks

      On 27 November 2002 a bipartisan commission was established by Congress to investigate the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. By the time the commission was created, President George W. Bush had characterised the attacks as “acts of war”, adding that “freedom and democracy are under attack”. It was therefore to be expected that anyone who was actually, or even imagined to be, involved in these attacks was going to be labelled as an enemy.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • What we may expect from recent Wikileaks on Turkish politics

      In his latest book, The Uprising, “Bifo” Berardi (2012) borrows some concepts from one of the most important figures in the study of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, in order to describe the prevailing social impasse: instead of engendering a radical transformation or revolutionary upheaval, systemic disruptions in the social field increasingly consolidate and even give a boost to the power of the dominant paradigm, process, or group.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • California to set power regulations on computers

      California, the state where the personal computer business was born and eventually revolutionized society, is about to be home to another change that figures to have a permanent impact on the computer industry.

      By all indications, by the end of this year the California Energy Commission will adopt energy efficiency guidelines for computers, becoming the first state in the nation to do so.

      The agency estimates it will add about $18 to price of a computer but promises it will save customers and businesses much more in energy savings.

    • To Save Energy Or Not, That Is The Question.

      Unless the state is going to run all IT, this just can’t work. Whatever throttle, limit or setting California requires will either have some means of circumvention or be counter-productive.

    • Are We Looking at a Mass Extinction Event?

      If you or someone you know needs proof that global climate change is real and is happening before our very eyes, you could go to the “State of the Climate Report” put together by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

    • Major Amazon dam opposed by tribes fails to get environmental license

      Brazil’s environmental regulator Ibama decided on Thursday to shelve the environmental license request for a hydroelectric dam on the Tapajós river in the Amazon, a project that had been opposed by indigenous tribes and conservation groups.

      Ibama’s licensing office ruled the dam’s backers had not presented information in time to show its social and environmental viability. They halted the 30bn reals (£7.2bn) project. In April, Ibama had suspended the licensing process that began in 2009 after criticism by Brazil’s indigenous affairs department, Funai.

      With installed capacity of about 6.1 gigawatts, the dam proposed by state-run Eletrobras, Brazil’s largest power utility holding, and a group of other electricity companies, would have been one of Brazil’s biggest.

      But it would have flooded 376 sq km (145 sq miles) of Amazon rainforest that is home to some 12,000 Munduruku Indians, according to Greenpeace.

  • Finance

    • Trade Deals Like the TPP Put Corporate Polluters Above the Law

      The Obama administration’s historic rejection of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline marked the first time a major fossil fuel project was denied over climate change concerns. The decision capped a contentious years-long fight, and helped spark a broader grassroots movement aimed at keeping fossil fuels in the ground, which scientists have increasingly warned is necessary if we hope to limit global temperatures to manageable levels.

      But TransCanada would not take no for an answer. Soon after the rejection, the company announced it would sue the United States government for $15 billion in lost profits under a tribunal system in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) called Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). This system, which the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership would dramatically expand, allows foreign investors to bypass U.S. courts and challenge American laws in a corporate-friendly arbitration system. The Keystone XL case shows how the ISDS system puts corporate polluters above the law and threatens global action on climate change.

    • Don’t make crude assumptions about young people’s attitudes to the EU

      It has become a mantra that, as a matter of natural course, younger people are pro-EU and that therefore the future looks bright for the Remain camp. This is not reflected either in the recent history of UK voting or opinion polling, or indeed of current surveys in other EU countries.

      The unmentioned story of the EU referendum is that to win it, the Leave camp had to alienate one surprisingly eurosceptic age group over a very short period. The 18 to 24-year-old voter.

    • IRS Launches Investigation of Clinton Foundation (Video)
    • Why has Britain stopped striking? Workers no longer feel empowered to act

      Striking in Britain has now reached an all-time low. Last year saw the fewest workers go on strike since records began in 1893. Is this a cause for celebration, a victory for partnership between capital and labour? The answer is a firm no.

      Although striking is a last resort for workers on account of the lost wages incurred, the fact that only 170,000 days were lost to strikes in 2015 (compared with 29.5m in 1979) indicates just how weak the vast majority of workers feel they are in today’s labour market. It shows workers perceive themselves as ever more powerless to collectively stand up against the increasingly common employment practices of the likes of Sports Direct, Deliveroo and Hermes. Some companies now require employees to shoulder what were previously employer responsibilities (such as national insurance, pensions and sick pay) and be subject to pernicious performance management targets and monitoring.

    • Mike Pence Loves ALEC and Keeps Pushing Public School Privatization, Despite Lousy Indiana Record With Charters and Vouchers

      Mike Pence is a hardcore right-winger playing the long game, especially when it comes to privatizing public schools.

      It’s not just that the Republican vice-presidential nominee and Indiana governor last weekend told a roomful of deregulation-obsessed executives and lobbyists in Indianapolis, “You are the model for Washington, D.C., after this election. You really are.”

      The nation is “at a fork in the road,” Pence said at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual meeting, referring not only to who would be president for the next four years but who would control the Supreme Court for the “next 40 years.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Spoiler Myth: Clinton Has More Problems Than Jill Stein and the Bernie or Busters

      Now that Hillary Clinton has wrapped up the Democratic Presidential nomination with the endorsement of Bernie Sanders, her supporters have transitioned to denigrating progressives who affirm they are “Bernie or Bust” by supporting Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein over Clinton. Senator Sanders has affirmed the importance of continuing the political revolution, and many of his supporters are choosing to do that outside of the Democratic Party.

      Critics against Stein cite Ralph Nader and his running mate, Native American activist Winona LaDuke, as the spoilers of the 2000 election, in which he received over 90,000 votes in Florida, the state Gore lost by just over 500 votes. Had Gore won Florida, he would have won the general election, but those who smear Nader as a spoiler are ignoring other contributing factors to that election. Bill Clinton’s impeachment in December 1998 inspired helped inspire over 300,000registered Democrats in Florida to vote for Bush in the general election. According to Florida exit polls, only a small percentage of Nader supporters would have voted for Gore instead of Bush, with most citing they wouldn’t have voted at all. The Supreme Court ruled, controversially, to halt the recount in Florida. A study conducted by the Progressive Review in 2002 analyzed whether Al Gore’s polling prior to the general election inversely changed with Ralph Nader’s and no correlation was found. Voter turnout in Florida for the general election in 2000 was 70 percent, according to the Florida Division of Elections, a few percentage points lower than each general election Florida since then. Across the country in 2000, more than 100 million eligible voters didn’t cast a ballot.

    • Did You Know That AARP Is A Paying Member Of ALEC?

      Here is a real shocker. AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) has been a paying member of the notorious right-wing, Koch-tied lobbying organization American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) since at least 2014.

      Yes, that AARP, once known for protecting the interests of senior citizens and fighting to protect Social Security and Medicare. Yes, that ALEC — an organization dedicated to, among so many other things, privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and getting rid of public-employee pensions. AARP apparently joined ALEC even as many corporations were fleeing thanks to exposure of ALEC’s reprehensible actions.

      Just wow.

    • Smearing Stein: Media as Propaganda

      Jill Stein, the Green Party’s nominee for president, has been the sudden target of attacks from all corners of online media since the official end of Bernie Sanders’ campaign at the Democratic National Convention. Outlets like the Washington Post, New York Magazine and Gizmodo have assaulted Stein by using out-of-context quotes to assail her, wrongly, for being anti-vaccination and anti-WiFi, which is a code for being “anti-science.” This allows us a unique opportunity to confirm the structural role of the media as hypothesized by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent: that the media is a propaganda arm for the elite and powerful, and is used to condition us to accept the bounds of socio-political discourse as set by the ruling class. It also shows us the desperate need we have for an alternative media culture to counteract mainstream discourse.

      The attack on Stein (and not, conveniently, on Gary Johnson), is linked to the need by the elite to de-legitimize A.) critics of neoliberal policies and B.) potential alternatives to the political status-quo. Trump and Clinton have had and will have no discussion about thirty years of neoliberalism and austerity. Sanders gave a voice to those within the Democrats who were willing to question, but since his defeat momentum on the left has shifted to Stein and the Green Party. It is, granted, still early, but the outpouring of support means there is a possibility the left could begin to regroup outside the Democratic Party. Real success for Stein could mean a permanent presence on the national stage for the left, to which a president Clinton or Trump would have to answer and which would be able to build an entirely different ideological discourse in the United States.

      What is the role of the media in this scenario, one that explains the current froth about Stein? Although the public is rarely allowed a glimpse behind the curtain, almost all media in the United States is controlled by just a few large corporations. In the era of mass communication, the media has usurped the role formerly played by the Church as a primary source of information and the bounds of discourse. Private corporations are interested in making a profit, and ensuring the economy continues to produce those profits. Marx once opined that “the ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” and in an era of (potential) mass political upheaval, the media plays an active role in silencing dissent to those ideas. Indeed, they are linked to the continued profits generated by the political order. Political candidates and parties that challenge and threaten to upend this are typically subject to vigorous criticism if they threaten to shift the political discourse or take power: witness the barrage of negative stories and editorials on leaders like Hugo Chávez or new political parties like Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain.

    • Could Hillary Lose?

      Could Hillary lose? If she were running against a Republican whom the Party’s grandees and the capitalists behind them liked, someone like Mitt Romney, the answer would be Yes.

      After eight years of President Drone, the Republican would have a clear advantage. It wouldn’t even matter if that Republican were to pander, say, to the Ted Cruz element in the GOP base, the way that Romney pandered to the Tea Party. The smart money would still be on him.

    • I Spent the Day with Trump’s Undying Fans in Maine

      Somehow, my press credentialing e-mails from the Trump campaign keep getting blown off the porch of the Intertoobz.

      So, on Thursday, I decided to be just another face in the crowd at an event at the Merrill Auditorium, a lovely old piece of big government memorabilia attached to City Hall here. I applied through the website, and I got my confirmation that I was invited to be a guest at what the website said was going to be a “town hall” with the Republican candidate for President of the United States. Doors would open at 7 a.m. for a 10 a.m. start. No, wait. The doors would open at 11 a.m. for a 2 p.m. start. Hold on. The doors will open at noon for a 3 p.m. start. Technically, you’re not running late if you keep changing the time.

      I assumed that the last e-mail was the final one, so I got to the venue at 9:30 on Thursday morning. There already was a line. People stood in the shadeless plaza, broiling and being heckled from all over the sky by raucous seagulls. (You’d have sworn Tippi Hedren was in line, wearing a God, Guts, and Guns tanktop.) A lot of the people were elderly, and most of them were white and pale. (For the record, I am both.) You’d have thought the campaign would have kicked in a few pallets of Trump Water for the faithful.

    • For Progressives: a Moment of Grief, Pause and Reorientation

      In this frantic rush for “unity,” the DNC is trying to silence dissent and critical thought about where we are now and how we got here. Even PBS’s Washington Week in Review featured guests this week, who referred to Sanders’ convention delegates as “hecklers” because they dared to show support for their candidate at their party’s convention. The mainstream media’s patronizing tone aims to shame Sanders’ supporters, who it now blames for any division within the Democratic Party, accusing progressives of being “in denial” and “being a baby.”

    • Beyond Clinton vs. Trump, Green Party Convention Kicks Off

      The Green Party kicked off its national convention in Houston, Texas on Thursday, where presumptive nominee Jill Stein will present a third-party challenge to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

      The convention will run from August 4-7. The proceedings are expected to include keynote speeches from scholar and activist Dr. Cornel West, who endorsed Stein over Clinton after Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race, and Philadelphia-based activist YahNé Ndgo. Local Green Party candidates for office will also appear.

      Stein is expected to accept her party’s nomination on August 6.

      On Wednesday, CNN announced it would host a Green Party town hall on August 17—offering the party a rare chance to access the large media platform usually reserved for establishment candidates.

    • 2016 Is the Best and Worst Year to Be Jill Stein

      On a sweaty Sunday afternoon in late July, John Griffin happened upon Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, in his North Philadelphia neighborhood. Joined by a couple dozen people, Stein was pointing out the economic inequality and environmental degradation in the area, which she referred to as an “open-air prison.” Griffin, 37, who works security and facilities maintenance at a church, had a Bernie Sanders button pinned to his white T-shirt. “I love Bernie,” he told Stein.

      “I love Bernie,” Stein repeated. Then she ticked off areas where she was promising more than Sanders had: guaranteeing a living-wage job to every American who wants one; canceling all student debt; cutting military spending in half. “She’s awesome,” Griffin said afterward. “No one else is in the middle of the ghetto, in the middle of the ’hood, trying to campaign.”

    • We The People Tossed Out of Trump Rally For Unspeakable Crime aka Holding Up Our Country’s Founding Document

      So this happened Thursday in Portland: The orange cretin was lying and blathering on to a rapt audience of whoever these racist, ill-educated, uncomprehending people are when a group of protesters stood and mutely held up, echoing Khizr Khan, pocket versions of the U.S. Constitution. Because this was a Trump rally, the crowd booed, hissed, hollered “U.S.A.!”, tried to rip one book from its owner and screamed, “Traitor!” as the miscreants, reportedly members of the progressive Maine People’s Alliance, were hauled out. The ACLU loved it; they responded on Twitter with, “Glad to see people are standing up for constitutional principles using their ACLU pocket Constitutions!” And what’s not to love: Great visuals, unprecedented levels of irony if anyone there knew the meaning of the word. We think Constitution-waving should definitely become a thing.

    • Donald Trump Will Leave a Lasting Stain on the GOP, Even if He Loses

      To Republicans who hope to emerge from the Donald Trump fiasco with any shred of political viability or self-respect, I offer some unsolicited advice: Run, do not walk, to the nearest exit.

      I’m speaking to you, House Speaker Paul Ryan. And you, Sen. John McCain. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—along with so many other elected Republicans and party stalwarts. You are not fools. You are well aware that the erstwhile Party of Lincoln has nominated for president a man wholly unfit to hold the office.

      I realize that puts you in a tough spot politically. Breaking with the party’s standard-bearer, chosen by voters in primaries and caucuses, would surely mean short-term pain. For some of you it could be politically fatal. But sticking with Trump, as far as I can see, will almost surely be worse—for you, for the party, and potentially, heaven forbid, for the country you have sworn to serve.

    • Talking Lawn Sign

      It’s time to make up your mind
      the primary’s over and so is your sign
      You were feeling the Bern
      Now you know it’s her turn-
      put up a sign for Jill Stein

      Can you forgive the DNC
      Faking neutrality
      And putting in the fix
      For their nominatrix
      In the name of D-mockracy?

    • Europe’s “Bought Journalists”

      One day, historians will wonder how it was that the EU, a wealthy and ostensibly unified polity with a population of over 500 million people and an extremely deep and sophisticated history of indigenous intellectual production, came to have its public discourse dominated by the narrow and often quite parochial concerns of the elites of another country (right down to their absurd and largely unconditional devotion to a small and bellicose apartheid state in the Middle East) located halfway around the globe.

    • Waiting on Putin, The Dream Candidate

      Washington really needs an Arch Enemy, a guy who looks like a Bond villain with nuclear weapons he’ll brandish but never use.

      Putin.

      Americans are already well-prepared by the old Cold War to see Russia as an evil empire, and Putin does look the part. A new Cold War will require America to buy more military hardware, plus discover new places like the Baltic states to garrison. It might even straighten out a NATO confused about its role regarding global terrorism.

      Forget Trump and Clinton; Putin is the political-military-industrial complex dream candidate.

    • Clinton Camp Courts Hackers in Vegas

      n 2016, can Hillary Clinton be the candidate of the hacker crowd?

      That was the question posed at a fundraiser Wednesday at the annual Black Hat security conference, an affair that brings thousands of hackers and deep-pocketed security firms to the Nevada desert to learn about the latest and greatest in computer exploits.

      Amid a program packed with technical presentations on computer security, the fundraiser represented an unusual addition and has had a polarizing effect on some long-time attendees of the conference, who consider the event for Clinton out of step with the conference’s hacker ethos. A conference that begins, for example, with a presentation on “Memory Forensics Using Virtual Machine Introspection for Cloud Computing” really shouldn’t end with a partisan political event, some Black Hat veterans privately groused Wednesday. And for these old-timers, who reminisce about the conference’s heyday in the late 1990s, when glitzy corporate sponsorships and booths didn’t dominate the event as they do now, a Clinton fundraiser seems the final deathknell for the event’s counterculture status.

    • Poll: Clinton up 9 points on Trump nationwide

      The Democratic nominee retains her edge over Trump when the race becomes a four-person contest. There Clinton takes 45 percent to Trump’s 34 percent, leaving the GOP’s presidential nominee still trailing her by 9 points. Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson ranks third with 10 percent, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein nabs 5 percent.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Anurag’s masterclass on censorship

      The festival, which will kick-start on August 11 in Melbourne, will see the participation of the filmmaker and other celebrities like Rishi Kapoor, Fawad Khan, Richa Chadha and Radhika Apte. In a statement, Anurag said, “I can put forth my point of view and talk about how censorship is so pointless in the day and age of the Internet. I am really looking forward to interacting with the students.”

    • Pro-independence candidate to send ‘blank’ election mailouts in protest of censorship

      A pro-independence candidate in the upcoming Legislative Council election has said he will send a “blank” election mailout to voters, after reports that the Electoral Affairs Commission censored other mailings.

      Chan Chak-to of the Kowloon East Community group chose to send out mailings with conspicuous blank spaces and phrases like, “You can ban speeches, you can ban candidacies, but ideas are bulletproof,” and “My political view is [blank].”

      Chan was one of the rare pro-independence candidates who were allowed to run in this election, while most other independence advocates were banned for participating.

      “We believe that, according to reports, the election platforms we have made ready have the ‘sensitive phrases’ listed, and they will not be able to be posted,” he said. “We wanted to give up on sending the mailouts, but after the political screening [of candidates], we wished to present the truth to you.”

    • British woman held after being seen reading book about Syria on plane

      Free-speech groups have condemned the detention of a British Muslim woman after a cabin-crew member reported her for “suspicious behaviour” while reading a book about Syrian culture on a flight to Turkey.

      Faizah Shaheen, a psychotherapist in Leeds, was detained by police at Doncaster airport on 25 July, on her return from her honeymoon in Turkey. A Thomson Airways cabin-crew member had reported Shaheen on her outbound flight two weeks earlier, as she was reading the title Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline.

      Police officers questioned Shaheen for 15 minutes under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, under which the police can detain individuals without grounds for suspicion of involvement in criminal activities, including terrorism.

      [...]

      Jo Glanville, director of English PEN – which supported the book’s publication with a grant towards translation – said Thomson Airways should be “highly embarrassed about this gross act of misjudgment”.

      “The current culture of anxiety around extremism now means that even our reading material has become grounds for suspicion of terrorist activity,” she said. “The freedom to read any book, no matter the subject, is a fundamental cornerstone of our liberty.” Glanville also called Schedule 7 a “continuing problem” and said it was overdue for reform.

      Zaher Omareen, the co-editor of Syria Speaks, condemned Shaheen’s detention as a “despicable incident”.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Here’s How Your Facebook Feed Is About to Change [Ed: still a propaganda, surveillance and censorship cesspool. What Facebook labels “clickbait” is excuse for even less neutrality so that they can demote views Zuckerberg and friends dislike. So now Facebook can censor useds [sic] for “hate”, “troll”… and finally… “clickbait”… which is so vague that it’s a broad brush.]

      The company has tried to minimize clickbait before, but this time, Facebook says it has gone farther, categorizing phrases often used in clickbait headlines and looking at which websites publish those stories.

    • Comcast wants to sell your Web history to advertisers
    • Comcast wants its broadband users to pay for their privacy
    • Comcast Thinks It’s Totally Chill to Charge For Privacy
    • Comcast supports higher prices for customers who want Web privacy
    • Comcast Wants to Charge for Privacy

      Ars Technica , Gizmodo, ZDNet, and a host of others are reporting that Comcast claims that the FCC has no authority to limit or prohibit the internet provider from distributing web histories to advertisers.

    • This Engineer Started a Tor-Based Internet Provider to Fight Surveillance

      UK lawmakers are currently closing in on their biggest expansion of government surveillance powers since the Snowden revelations—but one network engineer is determined to not let privacy go down without fight.

      The Investigatory Powers bill—championed by former Home Secretary and current UK prime minister Theresa May and sometimes called the “Snooper’s Charter”—would create an expansive new legal regime for government mass surveillance in the UK, effectively legitimizing many of the programs exposed by Snowden. Among other things, it controversially proposes requiring that all internet service providers in the UK keep tabs on their customers’ internet activity, forcing them to retain so-called Internet Connection Records, or ICRs, for 12 months, and hand that data over to the authorities upon request.

      But as the UK’s upper house prepares to vote on final amendments to the bill, engineer Gareth Llewelyn is readying his own technical countermeasures. Earlier this year, Llewelyn started building his own non-profit internet service provider that runs on the Tor anonymity network. His goal: Design a system that will frustrate the new mass-surveillance regime by making it technically impossible to censor content or comply with government requests for subscribers’ internet records.

    • Labour deputy leader calls on PM to halt plans to wipe old Companies House data

      The Labour party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, has called on Theresa May to intervene to stop the UK government agency Companies House from deleting information about firms that have been shut down. Without older records on dissolved companies, it will be much harder to spot when criminals try to set up new businesses to defraud the public, or to combat money laundering.

      Currently, the details of dissolved companies are kept for 20 years. Companies House, which holds key data on nearly 4 million UK businesses, is considering reducing that to six years according to The Guardian, even though the associated extra costs are minimal, as the price of digital storage continues to fall.

      The mass deletion is in response to an increasing number of requests from business people demanding the “right to be forgotten,” according to The Times. “Individuals and their reputation management firms have contacted Companies House claiming that its retention of records revealing an association with struck-off companies is personally damaging and a breach of data protection laws.”

    • FBI Releases Secret Spy Plane Footage from Freddie Gray Protests

      In response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI has released more than 18 hours of video from surveillance cameras installed on FBI aircraft that flew over Baltimore in the days after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015. The videos, which were released to the ACLU before being posted online by the FBI this week, offer a rare and comprehensive view of the workings of a government surveillance operation. While the release of the footage addresses some questions, it leaves others unanswered.

    • Security Sense: You’re Not as Interesting to the NSA as You Think You Are

      Now having said that, the feds and the cops are not high up the list in my personal “threat model”. There are other people for whom well-resourced state actors are a serious threat. Political dissidents. Free speech proponents in authoritarian countries. Criminal actors. But for these guys, there’s an easy solution: turn off the biometrics, limit login attempts and use a strong PIN or password. There are many other “opsec” steps beyond this they may take too of course, but the point is that these devices can be configured more securely for those who need it by disabling certain usability features.

    • U.S. Cloud Firms ‘Out Innovated’ Competitors in Wake of NSA Leak

      Despite dire predictions of revenue losses in the wake of a leaked U.S. spy agency’s electronic surveillance program three years ago, U.S. cloud providers have instead “out innovated” local competitors to keep a firm grip on the European market, a market watcher says.

      U.S. cloud providers were widely expected to be hurt by local business and regulatory efforts to safeguard European data following the 2013 release of documents linking U.S. tech firms to National Security Agency surveillance programs.

    • Good Ruling In California Protects Anonymity Of Online Critics — Even When The Information Was False

      Over and over again we’ve seen people try to interpret anything someone says about them that they don’t like as defamatory. But just because you don’t like what’s said, that doesn’t make it defamatory — and that can also apply even if the statements actually were false.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • After The Age Of The PC, Welcome To The Age Of The PD — The ‘Personal Drone’

      As that rightly notes, there’s a world of difference between today’s small drones — “consumer” in this context means anything weighing more than 0.5lbs — and traditional aircraft. But in many ways, it’s exactly the same difference between the very first PCs, and the mainframes and minicomputer systems that had existed for decades. In that respect, we can see the 500,000 registered drones as an indication that we are now truly in the age of the PD — the Personal Drone.

      The conference also touched on a key concern raised by Karl Bode last year, who was worried that over-strict regulation of drones might kill off some promising new business models.

    • Sheriff Raids House to Find Anonymous Blogger Who Called Him Corrupt

      After a watchdog blog repeatedly linked him and other local officials to corruption and fraud, the Sheriff of Terrebone Parish in Louisiana on Tuesday sent six deputies to raid a police officer’s home to seize computers and other electronic devices.

      Sheriff Jerry Larpenter’s deputies submitted affidavits alleging criminal defamation against the anonymous author of the ExposeDAT blog, and obtained search warrants to seize evidence in the officer’s house and from Facebook.

      The officer, Wayne Anderson, works for the police department of Houma, the county seat of Terrebone Parish — and according to New Orleans’ WWL-TV, formerly worked as a Terrebone Sheriff’s deputy.

    • Stealing the spectacle

      The new Polish xenophobia cannot be explained only by political economy, but also needs to be understood in terms of political aesthetics.

    • U.S. Human Rights Observers Harshly Interrogated By Israel and Booted For Being Muslim

      Five individuals carrying American passports say they were branded “terrorist” and mistreated by Israeli security, then got no help from their own government.

    • Six books Muslim (and non-Muslim) women should add to their reading list

      These books on faith and feminism will force you to reevaluate your stereotypes of Muslims.

    • What’s Emancipation Day to the Caribbean Working Class?

      On 1 August 1838, enslaved Africans in the British Empire won their emancipation from slavery. Emancipation Day is now commemorated throughout the Anglophone Caribbean as a public holiday or national observance. Emancipation was not a gift from Britain or White abolitionists. It came from the accumulated covert and overt acts of resistance by enslaved Africans.

    • Top 10 Reasons the ACLU Fights for Breastfeeding Rights

      A few weeks ago, a mom named Jessie Maher was breastfeeding her baby in the cafeteria of a Target store in Connecticut when a belligerent man approached and said she was “F*ing disgusting” and “nasty.” Fellow shoppers and Target employees quickly sprang to Maher’s defense, shielding her from the man.

      “You shouldn’t be ashamed of feeding your baby,” one of them said to Maher. “This is a beautiful moment right now. If he doesn’t like it, he can go.”

      Maher posted a video of the incident that quickly went viral, generating more than 8.5 million views and an outpouring of support from fellow nursing mothers.

    • Does DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge Need A Safety Protocol?

      Today, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R&D arm of the US military) is holding the finals for its Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) competition at DEF CON. We think that this initiative by DARPA is very cool, very innovative, and could have been a little dangerous.

      In this post, we’re going to talk about why the CGC is important and interesting (it’s about building automated systems that can break into computers!); about some of the dangers posed by this line of automated security research; and the sorts of safety precautions that may become appropriate as endeavors in this space become more advanced. We think there may be some real policy concerns down the road about systems that can automate the process of exploiting vulnerabilities. But rather than calling for external policy interventions, we think the best people to address these issues are the people doing the research themselves—and we encourage them to come together now to address these questions explicitly.

    • Door to justice finally opens in El Salvador [Ed: complex history there]

      As the door finally opens for war criminals to face justice in El Salvador, the law can start serving the country’s poor.

    • Anarcha-Feminisms

      Every piece in Perspectives offers material for a feminist and anti-racist anarchism that builds solidarity with revolutionaries, activists, and organizers who do not readily identify with the term “anarchist.” There’s plenty in the issue that can expand anarchism’s horizons. Consider Julia Tanenbaum’s U.S. anarcha-feminist history of the 70s decade and Hillary Lazar’s notion of “interlocking oppression”– inspired by Black feminism. Colleen Hackett offers thought-provoking “psy-ence fiction” lessons from teaching in a women’s prison, and Theresa Warburton thinks through different ways we generally relate anarchism to feminism. Laura Hall develops a comprehensive “Indigenist eco-queer anarcha-feminist” vision, and Zoe Dodd and Alexander McLelland offer an imminently practical horizontal Hep C/HIV treatment model cultivated from health crisis work. Romina Akemi and Bree Busk provoke readers with “sexual dissidence” and a multi-sectoral organizing plan, and Kelsey Cham C. develops an account of developing political consciousness (including language’s power) through addiction. Finally, there are some short and informative book reviews tucked in nicely at the issue’s end.

    • Culture Clash: When Violence Against Women Is Accepted, Lawful And Expected

      Last New Year’s Eve it was reported that 2000 men sexually assaulted 1200 women in Cologne, Germany. Immediately, politicians and pundits jumped to make the connection between the rash of violence against women and the influx of refugees. And each time another incident takes place, the battle between political positions is reignited. One liberal politician in Germany noted that the debate must be centered around “no means no” and not around “whether refugees should be deported” or allowed safe haven in Western countries, and I agree with this completely. This is not a refugee issue. It is a case of incongruent cultural practices. Men from societies that reject women’s rights must reform their attitudes and practices if they wish to exist in Western societies in which women are treated as equals. But more broadly, this sort of antiquated thinking must change.

    • Malaysian man charged with rape escapes jail after marrying 14-year-old victim

      A Malaysian man charged with raping a 14-year-old girl has avoided prison after he married her in a case that has sparked anger from rights groups and calls for a ban on child marriage and justice for victims of sexual violence.

      Ahmad Syukri Yusuf, 22, was charged with statutory rape of the girl late last year and faced up to 30 years in jail and whipping for the offense, but he later married the teenager under Islamic law, according to prosecutor Ahmad Fariz Abdul Hamid.

      The prosecutor said a court in Kuching, in Malaysia’s eastern state of Sarawak ruled there was no need to proceed with the case after Ahmad Syukri submitted a marriage certificate and the girl withdrew the complaint.

    • Video: Black lives matter: shutdown

      “1,562 deaths in police custody in my lifetime. 0 convictions”. As Black Lives Matter protesters set up blockades in London, Birmingham and Nottingham, here’s their video explaining why it’s time for a shutdown.

    • How can we change political discourse?

      The day after the referendum Facebook was full of comments like these, only they were less curious and more angry. This is shameful, they said. Why could so many be so stupid. Some even called for ‘un-friending’ the Leavers. The friendly appeal on my news feed just a week before- ‘could you explain your reasons to me?’- had been replaced by bitterness and recrimination “F**k this. I am ashamed to be British”. It felt as though the country had lost its innocence.

    • The Voting Rights Act, 2.0

      The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965, helped enfranchise millions of African-Americans over the decades. Speaking before a bipartisan gathering of members of Congress, his Cabinet, civil-rights leaders and the press, Johnson said of African-Americans: “They came in darkness and they came in chains. And today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds.”

      The Voting Rights Act was renewed and extended several times during the last half-century. Then, in June 2013, a divided U.S. Supreme Court, voting 5-4, gutted the law. Almost immediately, Southern states began passing restrictive voting laws, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters. Three years later, however, this new generation of Jim Crow-style laws is facing federal court challenges, and they are being thrown out or significantly weakened, one by one.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T, Comcast Fight Utility Pole Reform To Slow Google Fiber’s Arrival In Nashville

      We’ve talked a few times about how incumbent broadband providers often use their ownership of city utility poles (or their “ownership” of entire city councils and state legislatures) to slow Google Fiber’s arrival in new markets. In California and Texas, AT&T has often been accused of using the process of pole attachment approval to intentionally block or slow down the arrival of competitors. AT&T also recently sued the city of Louisville for streamlining utility pole attachment rules intended to dramatically speed up the time it takes to attach new fiber to poles.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • When its comes to “deadwood”, leave it in the State of South Dakota and out of Trademark Office policy

        Last month, Guest Kat Mike Mireles published a post— “The USPTO Moves to Clear ‘Trademark Deadwood’.” Mike reported on the latest steps intended by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to clean “deadwood” from the trademark registry. For several years, the claim has been expressed (not just in the U.S.) that there are too many unused registered trademarks, with the result that the registry suffers from trademark clutter. Moreover, it is claimed, unless we get control of the deadwood issue, the task of trademark clearance will one day become well-nigh impossible.

    • Copyrights

      • MPAA Anti-Piracy Cutbacks Lead to “Bullying” Lawsuit

        The ASA, formerly known as the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, is being sued by its former managing director for discrimination and bullying. A decision by the MPAA to reduce funding to the group led to Mark Day, a former MPA legal counsel, being dismissed while he was on sick leave.

      • Getty Sued Again Over Abusing Copyright Law, Licensing Images It Has No Rights To

        Getty hasn’t been having a very good past few weeks. After getting sued last week by famed photographer Carol Highsmith, after a Getty subsidiary demanded money for her posting her own photographs (which she had donated to the Library of Congress), it’s being sued again by independent press agency/wire service Zuma. Zuma claims that Getty was offering 47,048 images of its images for licensing, despite not actually having a license to do so.

        The full lawsuit is pretty short on details, so it’s difficult to assess the legitimacy of the lawsuit. In fact, the lack of detail in the filing makes me wonder if there’s a lot more to this story. Most of the filing focuses on highlighting how Getty has rapidly been buying up other photo licensing/stock photo sites, and using that fact to make the assertion (without further evidence) that Getty does not do enough due diligence to make sure the photos it offers for license are properly authorized. It may very well be that Getty screwed up here, but it seems like the complaint should include a few more details. Instead, there’s a lot of innuendo.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/05/gnu-c-library-2-24/feed/ 0 Links 4/8/2016: Dumping Windows, WARHAMMER Comes to GNU/Linux http://techrights.org/2016/08/04/warhammer-comes-to-gnu-linux/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/04/warhammer-comes-to-gnu-linux/#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2016 23:16:58 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94774

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source reshaping vendor business models – Wikibon

    A new trend among enterprises to make open source software a priority in their criteria for new infrastructure and application use will impact venture capital investments, startups, established IT vendors and cloud providers, writes Wikibon Lead Cloud Analyst Brian Gracely in “Open Source Software: Reshaping Vendor Business Models” on Wikibon.com. In this second part of Gracely’s examination of the impacts of open source, he looks at all four of these aspects of the vendor ecosystem.

    Open source companies, with the exception of Red Hat Inc., have struggled to achieve profitability, making venture capitalists less willing to invest in them. Open source-centric startups that already have achieved their initial funding now must find a way to monetize the business as they approach new funding rounds. An increasing number of established IT providers are becoming heavily involved in open source, while their proprietary solutions face increasing pricing pressure from open source competition.

  • Broadband Forum backs open source SDN

    There has been a stand-off brewing between the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) and OpenDaylight – two open source software defined networking (SDN) platforms pushing for network transformation at a massive scale – attracting membership signatures of operators hungry for next generation broadband services.

    Adding to its growing list of supporters, ON.Lab has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Broadband Forum to extend its collaborative work to the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) Project community – an open source reference implementation combining SDN and NFV to bring datacenter economics and cloud agility to the Telco Central Office.

  • Open Source OVN to Offer Solid Virtual Networking For OpenStack

    Open Virtual Networking (OVN) is a new open source project that brings virtual networking to the Open vSwitch user community and aims to develop a single, standard, vendor-neutral protocol for the virtualization of network switching functions. In their upcoming talk at LinuxCon North America in Toronto this month, Kyle Mestery of IBM and Justin Pettit of VMware will cover the current status of the OVN project, including the first software release planned for this fall. Here, Mestery and Pettit discuss the project and its goals and give us a preview of their talk, “OVN: Scalable Virtual Networking for Open vSwitch.”

  • Sony’s Hero Open Source Developer Title for May-June Awarded to XDA RD Bumble-Bee

    Of the many OEMs that we talk about here on XDA-Developers, only a very few actually work for and with the community. Most are all talk, but actions speak louder than words, and only a handful truly speak.

    Sony is one of those OEMs that continues to foster relationships with the developer community, with several initiatives in place that promote external developers to work on Sony devices. Heck, the Sony Xperia Z3 was the ONLY device outside of Nexus and Android One devices to have had the Android N Developer Preview released for it.

    One of Sony’s pro-Open Source initiatives is the Hero Open Source Developer Program. Under this program, Sony recognizes and rewards developers that contribute to the Open Device projects. The developer with the most accepted commits to the SonyXperiaDev github during the preceding two months stands to win a device from Sony as a reward. The winner for the period of May-June is none other than Shane Francis, aka XDA Recognized Developer Bumble-Bee. Shane has won a Sony Xperia X Performance for his efforts and contributions to the AOSP for Xperia Projects, including helping with the fingerprint scanner on the Z5 on AOSP. We congratulate Shane for his prize from Sony, and thank him for his contributions to open source.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Awards $585,000 to Nine Open Source Projects in Q2 2016

        Last quarter’s Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS)-awarded projects are diverse, but they have one thing in common: they believe in innovation for public benefit. Projects like Tails, PeARS and Caddy are paving the way for the next wave of openness, which is why Mozilla has allocated over $3.5 million to the MOSS initiative in support of these and other open source projects. We’re excited to share the program’s progress this quarter, which includes $585,000 in awards, nine new projects supported and two new tracks launched.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Drug lobby plans counterattack on prices

      Washington’s powerful drug lobby is gearing up to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a post-election ad war pushing back against politicians from both parties who have savaged its members over drug prices.

      The massive campaign by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — expected to start positive by highlighting drugs that save or prolong lives — will dwarf the $20 million that health insurers spent on the iconic “Harry and Louise” campaign credited with sinking Hillary Clinton’s health reform plan in the early 19

    • Big Pharma Plans Massive Ad Blitz to Fight Criticism of Drug Prices

      The pharmaceutical lobby is gearing up for a massive, multi-million-dollar post-election ad blitz to fight the shifting rhetoric surrounding drug prices, Politico reports.

      Skyrocketing drug prices have become a central issue in the 2016 election cycle, bolstered by recent bipartisan legislation that aims to wrangle back control of the market and outspoken criticism from Bernie Sanders and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

      Now, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) is planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to push back on politicians from both sides of the aisle—a campaign that “will dwarf the $20 million that health insurers spent on the iconic ‘Harry and Louise’ campaign credited with sinking…Clinton’s health reform plan in the early 1990s,” reports Politico’s Sarah Karlin-Smith.

    • On Eve of Olympics, Top Investigator Details Secret Efforts to Undermine Russian Doping Probe

      In a blistering public critique on the eve of the Olympics, the former chief investigator for the World Anti-Doping Agency claims his efforts to investigate Russian doping were repeatedly delayed by WADA’s president, who preferred to privately settle matters with Russian officials.

      Jack Robertson, who left the agency in January, said he was forced to leak information to the media in order to pressure WADA president Sir Craig Reedie to act and, even then, he says, the agency sat on credible allegations that suggested Russian doping extended far beyond track and field.

      Ultimately, Robertson says, the investigation delays have allowed the president of the International Olympic Committee — who has reportedly been supported by Vladimir Putin — to claim that the committee didn’t have enough time to determine whether it should ban all Russian teams. The result is that Russia may still have one of the largest delegations in Rio.

    • Law, Order and the Wall: Would Trump and Pence Fuel the Drug War?

      Writing about what drug policy might look like under a Trump administration is not easy. Donald Trump’s views on drugs have changed radically over the years, and the Republican nominee’s rambling statements on the subject suggest that they are shaped by gut reactions and political opportunism, not ideology or a deep understanding of social currents and medical science.

      Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has a clearer track record on drug policy because he has actually held political office, but some of his positions are so archaic that the Trump campaign may wish to keep them off the national stage.

      Let’s try a thought experiment to make this a bit easier. Imagine that I’m 16 years old and Trump and Pence are my parents. Let’s not worry about the circumstances by which they became my two dads; this is my imaginary scenario, and I say it doesn’t matter. All three of us are sitting in a suburban living room, with busts of Ronald Reagan and Mel Gibson peering down from the mantle overhead. Pence has just discovered a small bag of marijuana that I’ve been hiding in a drawer full of soccer socks.

    • Monsanto in India: Meet the New Boss – Same as the Old Boss?

      In capitalism, the state’s primary role is to secure the interests of private capital. The institutions of globalised capitalism – from the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO right down to the compliant bureaucracies of national states or supranational unions – facilitate private wealth accumulation that results in the forms of structural inequalities and violence (unemployment, poverty, population displacement, bad food, poor health, environmental destruction, etc) that have become ‘accepted’ as necessary (for ‘growth’) and taken for granted within mainstream media and political narratives.

    • Philip Morris gets its ash kicked in Uruguay; where will it next blow smoke?

      Philip Morris International just lost a six-year battle to block Uruguay’s strong cigarette warning labels, which cover 80 percent of the front and back of cigarette packs, including graphic photos of the damages of smoking.

      The decision was made by the World Bank’s trade tribunal, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the world’s the leading body to settle international investment disputes.

      Philip Morris became the first tobacco company to take on a country in an international court, and it took on one of the smallest. The company argued that Uruguay had violated terms of an investment treaty with Switzerland by enforcing anti-smoking laws. The operational headquarters for Philip Morris International is in Lausanne.

    • Kazakhstan Suspends Cattle Imports From Russia Over Anthrax Outbreak

      Kazakhstan has suspended cattle imports from Russia amid concerns over an anthrax outbreak in northwestern Siberia.

      The Kazakh Agriculture Ministry says the imports have been suspended as of August 3.

      Russian officials say the anthrax outbreak in Yamalo-Nenets region has killed a 12-year-old boy, and more than 20 local residents have been diagnosed with the bacterial disease.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Donald “Dr. Strangelove” Trump and some of the Times We almost had a Nuclear War

      I have long wondered why no one in Hollywood has remade Stanley Kubricks’s 1964 “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I learned to Stop worrying and Love the Bomb.” They’ve remade almost everything else from the 1960s, but that classic Peter Sellers film languishes in black and white and I’m not sure most Millennials have seen it.

    • [Older] UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria: ISIS is committing genocide against the Yazidis

      The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) is committing genocide against Yazidis, according to a report, “They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis”, issued today by the independent international Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. The report by the Commission of Inquiry also determined that ISIS’s abuse of Yazidis amounts to crimes against humanity and war crimes.

    • Czech president warns of migrants’ ‘barbaric acts’

      Czech President Milos Zeman has said migrants pose a security threat to his country. He also criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies.

    • One Beheaded Child Here and There…

      One incident here and there — up to and including beheading a child — will not make you a terrorist group, but buying $245 of gift cards for an FBI actor will make you a terrorist.

      That’s not to say Young isn’t a dangerous man or that he should work as a policeman in any organization. But even there, it’s not clear what kind of dangerous person he is. He likes military weapons, Nazis, Islamic terrorists, and may beat his spouse. The FBI, of course, chose to focus on the Islamic terrorism rather than the domestic abuse or Nazism. Even then, by far the most frequent “incriminating” details cited in the affidavit against Young describe his unhappiness about FBI surveillance (including that they spoke to his family in 2010 before they interviewed him when the FBI first had concerns about his associations) and his efforts to thwart it. The FBI presented this operational security as incriminating even though they deemed him not to have violated the law in several earlier reviews, the presumption being that every person who has been investigated should therefore be willing to undergo persistent surveillance for the foreseeable future.

      The closest Young actually came to joining a terrorist group was in 2011 when he “had been” with rebels working to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi (the FBI improbably creates the impression that they somehow didn’t monitor his two trips to Libya after investigating him for months leading up to these trips, not even after he was stopped by Egyptian authorities). A description later in the affidavit explains he must have been hanging out with the Abu Salim Martyrs Brigade, a group that arose out of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which the US has variously considered a terrorist group or not as its global interests dictated, though which they treated like rebel partners in 2011. Just as the US now considers Harakat Nour al-Zenki worthy of its financial support, in sums delivered in far greater increments than $245 gift cards.

    • French MPs Visit Crimea: Suggesting Early End to Sanctions

      A delegation of 11 French lawmakers and senators arrived in Crimea on July 28 to take part in celebrating Russian Navy Day in Sevastopol.

      There are no grounds to keep anti-Russian sanctions in place, said the head of the delegation Thierry Mariani, addressing the Crimean Parliament in Simferopol. Republican MP Jacques Myard also emphasized the importance of lifting the sanctions.

      In July 2015, a group of 10 French deputies visited Crimea for the first time despite domestic and European criticism. Back then the lawmakers said that what they saw was completely different from the picture painted by Western media. They say the same thing now after having seen the situation with their own eyes.

    • Fissures in the Empire

      Washington has raised the cost of being a member of its Empire too high. Vassals such as France and Germany are beginning to exercise independent policies toward Russia. Observing the cracks in its Empire, Washington has decided to bind its vassals to Washington with terror. Most liikely what we are witnessing in the French and German attacks is Operation Gladio.

    • Terrorism as a Word and Epithet

      The word “terrorism” – classically defined as violence against civilians for political effect – has become an epithet hurled at despised groups while not against favored ones, a challenge of hypocrisy and propaganda, explains Michael Brenner.

    • Reaching Beyond the Candidates

      What would it take to cause Hillary Clinton to distance herself from the newly launched bombing campaign in Libya? Or call for a congressional debate on it? Or suggest the obvious: that the war on terror isn’t working?

      Of course it won’t happen. But the fact that it sounds so absurd — almost as fanciful as the notion of movie characters stepping off the screen into real life — indicates how illusory, how unglued from reality, American democracy is at the presidential level. It’s a spectator sport — mud wrestling, say — doled out to us as entertainment by the media in sound bites and poll numbers.

    • After the Coup, Turkey is Being Torn Apart

      Coup attempt and purge are tearing Turkey apart. The Turkish armed forces, for long the backbone of the state, are in a state of turmoil. Some 40 per cent of its generals and admirals have been detained or dismissed, including senior army commanders.

      They are suspected of launching the abortive military takeover on 15-16 July, which left at least 246 people dead, saw parliament and various security headquarters bombed and a near successful bid to kill or capture President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

      In response, Erdogan and his government are carrying out a purge of everybody from soldiers to teachers connected in any way to the movement of the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen accused of organising the coup attempt.

    • Brazil Committee Votes for Rousseff Final Impeachment Trial [Ed: completing the coup]

      Brazil’s Senate impeachment committee recommended putting suspended President Dilma Rousseff on trial for illegal financial transactions, paving the way for her permanent ouster within a month.

      A report by Senator Antonio Anastasia accused Rousseff of taking credits without congressional authorization and through state banks, violating the Constitution. The report was approved by 14 senators in favor and 5 against. It now goes to the floor of the Senate for an Aug. 9 vote.

      Acting president Michel Temer has fanned investor confidence with pledges to rein in a near-record budget deficit and adopt more market-friendly policies to pull Latin America’s largest economy out of its deepest recession in decades. Yet he requires Rousseff’s permanent ouster to gain more legitimacy for controversial measures that include cutting pension pay and deregulating labor laws.

    • FBI Had Undercover Agent at Scene of “Draw Muhammad” Shooting in Texas

      When two men opened fire at the “Draw Muhammad” contest in a Dallas suburb in 2015, the FBI had an undercover agent on the scene, newly filed court documents reveal.

      On May 3, 2015, two men from Arizona armed with assault rifles — Elton Simpson and his roommate, Nadir Soofi — attacked a convention center in Garland, Texas, where Pamela Geller had organized the “First Annual Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest.” The two attackers shot a guard outside the convention center and were then killed in the parking lot by Texas police.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Irish agriculture faces emissions dilemma

      Ireland is facing a classic conflict, pitching economic growth targets against the need for action on climate change.

      On one hand, Ireland’s planners want to see significant growth in its food and agriculture industry – a sector that is one of the main pillars of the country’s economy, accounting for about 8% of gross domestic product.

      On the other hand, the country − along with other members of the European Union (EU) − is committed to lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by “at least” 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.

    • The Frackopoly Comes to Power

      In 1964, a group of wealthy funders instigated a radical insurgency that reshaped the political landscape and weakened democracy. Although their ultraconservative presidential candidate in 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater, was defeated in a historic landslide victory by Lyndon B. Johnson, the election spurred the development of a long-term strategy to take back control of the nation.

    • Break the silence on Azerbaijan oil workers’ deaths

      Nine months after 31 workers drowned in Azerbaijan’s worst-ever oil industry disaster, the country’s authorities have still not said a word about how it happened or what mistakes could be avoided in future.

      Most of the victims were thrown into the water when a lifeboat smashed against the side of production platform no. 10 at the Guneshli oil field in the Caspian sea, as they tried to escape a fire during a force 10 gale on 4 December last year.

      The Oil Workers Rights Protection Organisation (OWRPO), a campaign group, says state oil company managers broke safety laws for the sake of keeping production going, and that workers did not even have life jackets on during the attempt to evacuate the platform.

  • Finance

    • Mark Carney: ‘Timely’ measures should stop UK sliding into recession

      Bank of England governor Mark Carney has said today’s (4 August) historic package of measures was put together because the outlook for UK growth has “weakened markedly” since the Brexit vote.

      The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted to cut interest rates to 0.25% from 0.5%, where they have been for seven years. It will also boost its quantitative easing by another £60bn ($70bn), bringing the programme up to £435bn.

      It also announced a new Term Funding Scheme (TFS) to reinforce the pass-through of the cut in interest rates and the purchase of up to £10bn in UK corporate bonds.

      He said: “The banks have no excuse not to pass this cut onto their customers.”

      The Bank did not rule out a further cut if deemed necessary.

    • Carney Quantifies Gloom With BOE Stimulus Debate at Crunch Point

      Mark Carney is about to put numbers on the gloom.

      Six weeks after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union sent shock waves across the nation, on Thursday the Bank of England governor will present a detailed assessment of what it means for the economy as well as his plan of action. With initial reports showing the U.K. may be headed for recession, he’ll need to balance a realistic picture of what’s in store against the prospect of being labeled a doom-monger.

      The Monetary Policy Committee’s first post-Brexit analysis is set to drive its debate over how to tackle weaker growth and faster inflation. With business and consumer sentiment faltering, the pound slumping and industries from airlines to manufacturers warning of a negative fallout, economists expect Carney to unveil a suite of stimulus.

    • Peter Allard vs. Barbados: Investor argues breach of environmental laws

      Peter Allard vs. Barbados: Investor argues breach of environmental laws

      Peter Allard, a Canadian investor who owns a nature sanctuary in Barbados, has brought an ISDS claim against Barbados. In a nutshell, he grounds his claim on the failure of the government of Barbados to enforce its own environmental law which, as a result, has polluted his sanctuary. He is also accusing Barbados of refusing to abide by its international obligations under the Convention on Wetlands and Convention on Biological Diversity.

      The actions and inactions by Barbados, according to the investor, have destroyed the value of his investment in the sanctuary. The claim is brought under Canada – Barbados Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT).

      The sanctuary, which is an eco-tourism facility, consists of almost 35 acres of natural wetlands situated on the Graeme Hall wetlands, a site protected under the Convention of Wetlands of International Importance in the south coast of Barbados. Mr Allard, as written in his notice of dispute, made investment in this sanctuary with the purpose to conserve the environmental heritage of Barbados.

    • Universal Basic Income Will Likely Increase Social Cohesion

      I think we should avoid letting our ideologies inform our opinions on matters of social and economic policy. What matters is scientifically observed evidence. I support the idea of providing everyone with an unconditional basic income not because I just think it’s the right thing to do, and the best way to make ongoing technological unemployment work for us instead of against us, but because such an overwhelming amount of human behavioral evidence points in the direction of basic income.

      In their opinion pieces for the week-long series about universal basic income published in September by the Washington Post, I was struck by how both Oren Cass and Jonathan Coppage expressed a distinct lack of knowledge of the evidence we have available to inform our opinions on giving people money without strings attached, by citing none of it. Science involves testing our hypotheses. They both expressed the shared hypothesis that giving people additional income in the form of a basic income would somehow reduce social cohesion, and that it is growing social inequality that’s leading to economic problems and not the other way around. We can test such a hypothesis by simply looking at what actually happens when people are provided unconditional cash, and comparing it to a control group of those who aren’t.

    • No Walls in the Global Village

      Besides the fact that the misguided working class will not find their salvation in isolationism, the “leave us alone” tendency of the British blue collar populace is ironic, to say the least. Beyond ironic, this sentiment is nothing short of hypocrisy and utter disrespect to millions of people that have been exploited for centuries. A nation that for centuries knew no walls and respected no borders — back when it pillaged four continents, from the riches of Africa to the treasures of Indochina and the entire Indian subcontinent, is now crying foul, demanding a wall and asking to be left alone.

    • Oligarchs Are Feeling Right at Home in the Democratic Party

      In April of 1999, the new leaders of the Democratic Party — or, as the Wall Street Journal called them, the “chief theorists of the Third Way” — came together for a major conference in Virginia.

      The goal of the conference, attended by such prominent figures as President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was to set forth a new agenda for Democratic politics, one that would eschew traditional notions of “tax and spend” liberalism and articulate a way forward, one that held appeal beyond the constituencies fostered by the New Deal coalition and its successors.

      In an introductory speech, Al From, founder of the then-surging Democratic Leadership Council, succinctly worded the fundamental values of the so-called New Democrats.

      “Its first principle and enduring purpose is equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none,” From proclaimed. “Its public ethic is mutual responsibility. Its core value is community. Its outlook is global, and its modern means are fostering private-sector economic growth — today’s prerequisite for opportunity for all — and promoting and empowering government that equips citizens with the tools they need to get ahead.”

    • Jeremy Corbyn Launches Bold Progressive Vision to Transform UK

      Leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn announced a 10-point plan on Thursday designed to “rebuild and transform” the U.K. while undoing the damage wrought by privatization schemes and concerted attacks on the public good.

      Corbyn launched his plan with a series of social media messages, including this short YouTube video explaining the need for a national transition:

      The ten pledges include: An economy that works for all; Secure homes for all; Security at work; Secure our National Health Service and social care; A free national education service; Action to secure the environment; Democracy in our economy; Cut income and wealth inequality; Act to end prejudice and injustice; and Peace and justice abroad

      Corbyn’s announcement comes as he battles to retain his leadership position in the Labour Party, fighting off a challenge from Owen Smith, a more centrist Labour MP and former lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. The two will square off in a debate Thursday night.

      Read the full set of policy pledges here.

      Like Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in the U.S., Corbyn has been seen as a progressive champion fomenting a populist insurgency against entrenched interests of powerful elites represented by the Tories, other right-wing parties like UKIP, and factions of Labour’s own liberal center-left.

    • After Cambridgeshire’s NHS deal collapses, the future of Staffordshire’s similar £1.2billion sell-off is mired in confusion

      Cambridge’s ‘UnitingCare’ deal and its advisors have been discredited, and NHS England promises to investigate a similar planned huge NHS sell-off in Staffordshire – but local bosses seem to have their heads in the sand.

    • The Decline in Homeownership

      The homeownership rate fell again in the second quarter of 2016, hitting the lowest rate in more than 50 years, more than 6 full percentage points below the peak bubble years. This is both good news and bad news.

      It is good news because homeownership is not always good for everyone at all points in their lives. The building, banking and real estate industry have worked hard to make renting seem un-American. While homeownership can be a useful way for families to accumulate wealth, it’s not generally advisable for people not in a stable employment and family situation.

      The transaction costs associated with buying and selling a home are roughly 10 percent of the sales price, which comes to almost $25,000 for a typical home. This is a lot of money to throw away for someone who has to move after a year or two because of losing a job or a family break-up. Of course the lost money to the homeowner is income for bankers and realtors.

      The other reason it might be a good thing to see a declining homeownership rate is that it seems some markets are again rising into bubble territory. The bottom third by sales price of homes in Miami saw a 55.6 percent price increase over the last three years. By contrast, rents have risen just 10.4 percent. In Chicago the price of the bottom third of homes increased by 40.7 percent in the last three years, while rents rose by 6.9 percent.

      There are several other cities in which prices in the less expensive segment of the market are rising precipitously. It would be a good thing if moderate income families didn’t buy into bubble inflated markets yet again.

    • London Falls Behind New York and Hong Kong in Most Expensive City Rankings

      London has been knocked from its perch as the world’s most expensive city to live and work in after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

      The U.K. capital is now third behind New York and Hong Kong, according to research on global cities from property broker Savills. The research examines the costs for an employee to live in rented housing and work in an office for a year.

      London had spent the last 2½ years at the top. But it fell in July because of the drop in sterling against the dollar and cooling U.K. real-estate markets, both of which accelerated after the EU referendum in June.

    • World Bank’s New Rules Condemned for Disregarding People and Planet

      Lending further support to the United Nation’s characterization of the World Bank as a “human rights-free zone,” the notorious lender is expected to approve new policies Thursday that have been widely condemned by rights advocates for endangering human rights and the environment.

    • New World Bank Policies Imperil Environment and Land Defenders

      Just 5 months since the murder of Honduran environmental defender Berta Caceres, the Bank is passing new safeguards that do more harm than good.

    • Why Say No to the TPP? Corporations Already Have Too Much Power

      It took two days for 60 members of the Cowboy and Indian Alliance to plant the heirloom seeds by hand. It was the spring of 2014, and there were prayers, burning of sage and sweetgrass, and, one by one, volunteers pressed the red corn seeds into the earth of Art and Helen Tanderup’s farm in Neligh, Nebraska. There, along the Ponca Trail of Tears, the Ponca people in 1877 were forced to leave their homeland after planting their corn seeds, many dying along the way or starving when they arrived in Oklahoma. But the sacred red seeds were being planted again in Nebraska for the first time in more than 100 years.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • [Older] Top spy: Despite intelligence ‘war’ with Russians, it’s too soon to blame them for DNC hack

      Spy chief James Clapper said Thursday that U.S. intelligence services are facing a “version of war” with Russia — but it’s too soon to blame the old Cold War rival for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails.

      He said it’s also too early to say whether the people who leaked those emails are trying to throw the presidential election to Donald Trump, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign has charged.

      “I don’t think we’re quite ready yet to make a call on attribution,” Clapper said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “There are just a few usual suspects out there.” Additionally, he said, “We don’t know enough to ascribe motivation regardless of who it might have been.”

    • Donald Trump’s Tiff With Paul Ryan Symbolizes Growing Divisions in the GOP Over Corporate Power

      Donald Trump refused to endorse Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary election on Tuesday, drawing attention to Paul Nehlen, Ryan’s insurgent challenger, who has adopted many of the same themes as the real estate mogul.

      While stopping short of endorsing Nehlen, Trump credited him with running a “very good campaign.” The primary is on August 9. The two recently had a warm exchange on Twitter:

      In many ways, Nehlen is evidence that Trump’s messaging has found its footing in down-ticket Republican races.

    • Why Hope Has Power in This Gut-Wrenching Election Year

      No wonder thousands of Americans are supporting third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein and protesting both conventions. In such a challenging time, how do we keep our eyes and energies fixed on our goal of real democracy? Hope is key. It is an essential ingredient for change.

    • Trump’s Ultimate Sacrifice (Video)

      Award-winning animator Mark Fiore is having a tough time following all of the Republican presidential candidates antics, so he condensed a few into his latest animation. Watch the clip and read Fiore’s thoughts on Trump below.

    • The Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing

      The prospect of Donald Trump in the White House alarms many people but bashing him over his contrarian views on NATO and U.S.-Russian relations could set the stage for disasters under President Hillary Clinton, writes Robert Parry.

    • Khizr Khan’s Son Sacrificed His Life for a War That Never Should’ve Happened

      Clinton’s rhetoric on the Muslim world might be friendlier than Trump’s, but her record is much bloodier.

    • Promises of Peace, Realities of War

      With Donald Trump, and with the political habits that engendered his gaining the Republican nomination, these reasons for discrepancy between campaign hopes and in-office performance are present in abundance. Trump illustrates splendidly the clinical definition of the personality disorder known as narcissism.

    • How the GOP’s Cynical Election Strategy Is Imploding

      As Donald Trump enmeshed himself in a bitter fight with the parents of an American Muslim military hero — and Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and John McCain looked to put distance between themselves and their party’s presidential nominee — there’s actually worse news for Republicans.

      Several important court victories for voting rights since Friday could dramatically remake the campaign for Congress and the White House, and this time, GOP leadership may have a harder time distancing themselves from un-American tactics.

    • State of Fear: Trump v. Clinton

      Shudders of fear emanate from the institutions of the United States establishment as Donald Trump claims the leadership of the Republican Party. The Washington Post, one of the leading national newspapers, ran an editorial with a clear headline: “Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy” (July 22). The Post is owned by Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, who had previously run afoul of Trump. The Republican leader had accused Bezos of anti-trust violations; the allegation was that he had used his paper to push for a corporate tax policy that would benefit his retail company. Such behaviour has become normal in U.S. society, where large firms see it as their right to influence state policy. Trump’s unpredictable stances have meant that on occasion he goes after his fellow billionaires for the way they have crafted the system (he has admitted that his real estate deals have also been advantaged by such coziness with elected officials). A characteristic Trump conspiracy theory might now assume that Bezos’ paper is going after Trump only because of this dust-up earlier in the year. Trump, his supporters say, is a “blue-collar billionaire”, a rich man with a poor man’s sensibility. The billionaires do not like him because he is willing to criticise them.

      That unpredictable part of Trump has meant that he has seized upon several criticisms of U.S. policy that have become standard in the U.S. Left. First among these is his position against the kind of free trade agreements—such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—that allow U.S. firms to move to parts of the world where labour costs are lower than in the U.S. Even The Post had to acknowledge that this part of Trump’s appeal “has resonated with many Americans whose economic prospects have stagnated”. This is also why the Democratic Socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders, was able to appeal to so many Americans who had seen their aspirations reduced to dust. This large segment of American —from West Virginia coal miners to Michigan factory workers—“deserve a serious champion”, says The Post, “and the challenges of inequality and slow wage growth deserve a serious response. But Mr Trump has nothing positive to offer, only scapegoats and dark conspiracy theories.”

    • Messages for the Future From the Margins of the DNC

      While covering the Democratic National Convention (DNC) last week, I found myself seeking a community context for the events in Philadelphia — what does this convention mean to the local voters, particularly those not connected to one party or another? Moreover, what does the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton mean for different groups of women around the country — Latina women, working-class women, queer women, single mothers? And of course, what does the convention mean to those who left disappointed, who stood in silent protest and marched outside the DNC gates to protest political elitism, reeling from the knowledge of party bias?

      [...]

      The real power at the DNC was not the spectacle unfolding onstage. It was the messages of these local leaders and activists — messages for the future, messages of continued efforts, relentless energy and a healthy sense of possibility. What follows is the transcript of our interviews with these inspiring messengers of change.

    • Here’s a Terrifying Truth: Trump Could Win

      The strongest single predictor of Trump support is a trait called “authoritarianism.” It’s a mindset that political scientists have only recently found a way to identify and measure, but it will be the key to this election — because the army of Trump authoritarians is large — and it is growing.

    • 20 of Trump’s Blunders that Would Lose the Election for Clinton (If Clinton Had Done Them)

      Trump gets away with a lot. I mean, a lot. He’s made so many mind-blowingly idiotic missteps that it’s hard to remember them all. Some of these missteps are so egregious that I suspect they would completely ruin Clinton’s chances of getting elected if she had made them. Yet Trump’s followers don’t seem to care how much he lies, breaks the rules, and makes a fool out of himself. Perhaps this has to do with Trump’s support base consisting primarily of uneducated white people. Or perhaps it has to do with the zeitgeist of anti-intellectualism that imbues contemporary American conservatism.

    • First Evidence Surfaces of Foreign Money Pouring into U.S. Elections After Citizens United

      Six years ago, President Obama warned the nation that foreign corporations could soon pour money into the U.S. election system thanks to the Supreme Court Citizens United decision. Now, direct evidence has emerged for the first time showing a foreign company has indeed donated money to a federal campaign. Documentation obtained by The Intercept shows a company owned by Chinese nationals donated $1.3 million to Jeb Bush’s super PAC after receiving advice from a prominent Republican lawyer. To talk more about the exposé, we are joined by The Intercept’s Lee Fong, who co-wrote the multi-part series “Foreign Influence.”

    • The Decay of American Politics

      To contrast the virtues and shortcomings of Stevenson and Eisenhower with those of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald Trump is both instructive and profoundly depressing. Comparing the adversaries of 1956 with their 2016 counterparts reveals with startling clarity what the decades-long decay of American politics has wrought.

      [...]

      But let’s not just blame the candidates. Trump and Clinton are also the product of circumstances that neither created. As candidates, they are merely exploiting a situation — one relying on intuition and vast stores of brashness, the other putting to work skills gained during a life spent studying how to acquire and employ power. The success both have achieved in securing the nominations of their parties is evidence of far more fundamental forces at work.

    • My View: Both Trump, Rio Olympics earn gold in hyperbolic hurdles

      Both Trump and the Olympics position themselves as philanthropic, donating to both charities and fulfilling grandiose promises to the host city. But as with Trump, whose donations have proved to be more phantom than opera, the great benefits that the Games supposedly bestow on everyday people in the host city have turned out to be more aspirational than inspirational. Look no further than Rio de Janeiro. Hosting the Olympic Games was supposed to jumpstart the cleanup of the city’s waterways. But today Guanabara Bay and the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, which will soon host Olympic water-events, look more like scenes from the Old Testament, plagued by massive fish die-offs and sludgy carpets of trash clogging the shoreline.

    • The D.N.C. and the Summer of Discontent

      The scheme succeeded only modestly. The D.N.C. chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned, but she was already in trouble: Bernie Sanders supporters believed that her bias toward Clinton had cost their candidate the nomination, even though Clinton won nearly four million more primary and caucus votes. In any event, Bernie-or-Bust delegates streaming into Philadelphia did not require foreign inspiration to agitate against Clinton. Sanders, for his part, made clear that he was over the imbroglio and was committed to unity in order to defeat Trump. “It is easy to boo,” he scolded a catcalling delegation from California on the second day. “It is harder to look your kids in the face who would be living under a Donald Trump Presidency.”

    • New York Times Relentlessly Biased Against Trump, Reports New York Times

      An astonishing piece appeared in the New York Times (NYT) recently. It reported a fierce bias in the Times’s coverage of politics and current affairs, most notably when it comes to Donald Trump. The bias turns up not just in the opinion pages but in the News, reports Liz Spayd, the new “public editor,” a position once called the ombudsman.

      But the surprise does not end there. Spayd’s report is based on letters from liberal readers, which are filling her inbox to overflowing. Here are some examples that she cites:

      “You’ve lost a subscriber because of your relentless bias against Trump — and I’m not even a Republican,” writes an Arizonan.

      “I never thought I’d see the day when I, as a liberal, would start getting so frustrated with the one-sided reporting that I would start hopping over to the Fox News webpage to read an article and get the rest of the story that the NYT refused to publish,” writes a woman from California.

    • Watch a Year’s Worth of Trump Supporters Spouting Vitriol, Racism, Fascist Rhetoric

      It’s no secret that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump fills his speeches with nationalism and xenophobia.

      And in a three-minute video published by the New York Times late Wednesday, a collection of clips from the divisive nominee’s rallies throughout the past year reveals how Trump’s chilling rhetoric is being channeled by his followers.

    • The Kremlin may savor Trump – but still might prefer Clinton

      Is Donald Trump “our man?”

      That’s the question that Komsomolskaya Pravda, a leading Russian tabloid, asked its readers on Wednesday, summing up a debate that has intrigued and exasperated readers from the Capitol Beltway to the Moscow Ring Road.

      In the United States, Trump’s professed affinity for Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, and his offbeat statements, including a call on Russia to release the rest of Hillary Clinton’s emails after a hacking attack on the Democratic National Committee, prompted surprise and some breathless derision of him as the “Siberian candidate.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Police Get Facebook To Kill Livestream Of Standoff Which Ended With Suspect Being Shot To Death

      A 23-year-old woman, and mother of a 5-year-old child, is dead. She was killed by police officers who came to serve a warrant for failure to appear charges stemming from a March 11th traffic stop. That this ever escalated to the point where bullets started flying is incomprehensible. Then again, much of what the woman, Korryn Gaines, did was incomprehensible.

      Gaines apparently considered herself a “sovereign citizen,” which meant she chose not to recognize whatever laws she felt weren’t worth following — like registering her vehicle, insuring it, and equipping it with valid plates. Instead, she chose to make plates of her own out of cardboard that made some sort of statement about her sovereign citizen status. The traffic stop on March 11th escalated into an altercation with officers, resulting in more charges being added to the traffic violations.

      [...]

      While the assertions made here may be true, the fact that law enforcement can make third-party recordings disappear is highly problematic. While the full statement shows the Baltimore County PD has asked Facebook to retain the video as evidence and will be seeking a search warrant to access the recording, the fact is that the recording will now be in the hands of law enforcement, rather than the public.

      If any video of the standoff was captured with body cameras, it will be a long time before it’s made public — if it ever is. While very few recordings are truly objective, the one recording of the standoff whose existence can be confirmed is now (mostly) gone. And the unanswered question is whether or not the situation would have been handled differently if the officers knew the public was watching.

    • Woman Fatally Shot By Police Had Facebook Account Deactivated During Standoff

      Some viewers told Gaines, who had her 5-year-old son nearby, not to listen to negotiators, said Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson. Authorities filed an emergency request to Facebook, successfully petitioning the company to suspend Gaines’ account. About an hour later Gaines’ social media accounts were taken offline.

      “Gaines was posting video of the operation, and followers were encouraging her not to comply with negotiators’ requests that she surrender peacefully,” a spokesperson for the Baltimore County Police Department said. “This was a serious concern; successful negotiations often depend on the negotiators’ ability to converse directly with the subject, without interference or distraction during extremely volatile conditions.”

      By the time the standoff was over Gaines would be fatally shot by police and her son injured by a bullet. The incident highlights the relationship authorities have with social media platforms like Facebook at a time when people are increasingly filming and broadcasting their interactions with police.

    • Rose Must Fall: censorship at UCT

      Rose is foreign affairs editor of Jyllands Posten, the magazine which, in 2005, published a set of cartoons titled ‘The Face of Muhammad’. One of them was a drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. The cartoons, which many Muslims considered blasphemous, sparked international furore as other newspapers around the world reprinted the images. Mobs set fire to the Danish embassies in Syria and Lebanon, protesters clashed with police, and would-be assassins attempted to murder Rose and the illustrator, Kurt Westergaard. Altogether, 139 people were killed in the protests.

      The TB Davie Memorial Lecture celebrates ‘the freedom to explore ideas, to express these and to assemble peacefully’. Previous speakers in the series, which began in 1959, include Howard Zinn (1982), Noam Chomsky (1997), Alan Kors (2006), and Nadine Strossen (2011).

    • Erdogan’s Coup Survival: Don’t Call It Democracy

      Nihad Awad, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) executive director, is in Turkey this week. It isn’t clear why, but Awad is taking advantage of his travels to post upbeat photographs celebrating that country’s recent failed military coup.

      Last month, a faction of Turkey’s military tried to oust Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has consolidated power and steered his country away from the secular ambitions laid out by modern founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and toward a decidedly Islamist state.

    • Turkey’s president ramps up censorship amid post-coup purge

      Since the coup attempt on July 15, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been giving many interviews to international media, trying to defend what the observers named the #TurkeyPurge—the unprecedented scale of mass dismissals and detentions of state employees from all branches of the government.

    • Anurag Kashyap to take a masterclass on movie censorship
    • Anurag Kashyap to Give Master Class on Censorship in Australia
    • Anurag Kashyap to talk censorship in Australia
    • After multiple face-offs with censor board, Anurag Kashyap to give a masterclass on censorship
    • How to access Tor, even when your country says you can’t
    • Pluggable Transports Help Tor Users Go Around State-Level Censorship

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Australians threaten to take leave of their census

      2016 Australian census stores names and addresses, prompting privacy, security outrage.

    • UAE recruiting ‘elite task force’ for secret surveillance state

      Italian security expert Simone Margaritelli divulged details of the project after recently travelling to Dubai for a job interview that turned out to be for what he described as an “extremely shady” surveillance system.

      Margaritelli is a mobile security researcher who lives in Rome and works in the research and development team at the San Francisco-based mobile security company Zimperium.

      He was targeted for recruitment by the UAE partly because of his work on BetterCap, an open source tool that eavesdrops on online communications.

    • Microsoft Pitches Technology That Can Read Facial Expressions at Political Rallies

      On the 21st floor of a high-rise hotel in Cleveland, in a room full of political operatives, Microsoft’s Research Division was advertising a technology that could read each facial expression in a massive crowd, analyze their emotions, and report back in real time. “You could use this at a Trump rally,” a sales representative told me.

      At both the Republican and Democratic conventions, Microsoft sponsored event spaces for the news outlet Politico. Politico, in turn, hosted a series of Microsoft-sponsored discussions about the use of data technology in political campaigns. And throughout Politico’s spaces in both Philadelphia and Cleveland, Microsoft advertised an array of products from “Microsoft Cognitive Services,” its artificial intelligence and cloud computing division.

      At one exhibit, titled “Realtime Crowd Insights” a small camera scanned the room, while a monitor displayed the captured image. Every five seconds, a new image would appear with data annotated for each face – an assigned serial number, gender, estimated age, and any emotions detected in the facial expression. When I approached, the machine labeled me “b2ff,” and correctly identified me as a 23-year-old male.

    • Comcast Tells The FCC It Should Be Able To Charge Broadband Users A Premium For Privacy

      A few years back, we noted how AT&T had begun charging broadband users a significant premium if they wanted to opt out of the company’s Internet Essentials advertising program. Under that program, AT&T uses deep packet inspection to track consumer browsing behavior around the Internet — down to the second. By default, AT&T users are opted in to the program. If they want to opt out of this data collection, consumers need to not only navigate a confusing array of options, but they also need to pay $44 to $62 more per month. AT&T, in typical fashion, has actually claimed this is a “discount.”

      With the FCC’s Title II and net neutrality rules upheld, the agency is now considering new basic broadband privacy protections primarily focused on two things: ensuring ISPs properly disclose what’s being collected and sold, and ensuring that ISPs provide customers with clear, working opt-out tools. But the agency is also considering banning ISPs from turning your privacy into an expensive luxury option.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Australia: Appalling Abuse, Neglect of Refugees on Nauru

      About 1,200 men, women, and children who sought refuge in Australia and were forcibly transferred to the remote Pacific island nation of Nauru suffer severe abuse, inhumane treatment, and neglect, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said today. The Australian government’s failure to address serious abuses appears to be a deliberate policy to deter further asylum seekers from arriving in the country by boat.

      Refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru, most of whom have been held there for three years, routinely face neglect by health workers and other service providers who have been hired by the Australian government, as well as frequent unpunished assaults by local Nauruans. They endure unnecessary delays and at times denial of medical care, even for life-threatening conditions. Many have dire mental health problems and suffer overwhelming despair – self-harm and suicide attempts are frequent. All face prolonged uncertainty about their future.

    • My Mother, Stopped for Driving While Black

      When the police pulled their guns on my mother, I reached for my phone and told her to be calm and do as they say.

      My parents and I had just been swarmed by police cars, sirens blaring, as we drove on I-64 through Virginia. Shock and fear consumed my family as we came to a stop and were ordered out of the vehicle at gun point. A third car even showed up to stop traffic.

      The officers then arrested my mother without any explanation. I felt helpless.

      As I questioned the police about why they stopped us, a family of three just driving along and minding our own business, a passing white motorist stopped his car. He gave the police officers a thumbs-up and told them, “We support the great job you’re doing.”

      I was stunned.

      My parents sought asylum in the United States from Eritrea many years ago. We work hard and obey the rules. But that’s not enough. In a sad twist of fate, our family has stumbled into institutional injustice in a new form.

    • Is democracy incoherent?

      Is democracy illusory and troublingly incoherent? Or is an ideal democracy yet to be fully realised?

    • Woman Livestreams Her Supervisor Asking for Sexual Favors

      Makana Milho, 21, is a transgender woman who was in the process of completing six days of community service on account of a theft charge. During that time, Milho was allegedly assaulted by the city worker who was supervising her community service. According to the Honolulu Star Advertiser, Harold Villanueva Jr., 47, pinched Milho’s buttocks and said he would send her home early in exchange for sex acts. Villanueva also bragged about preying upon other community workers for sex.

      Milho recalled that Philando Castile’s girlfriend had recorded his shooting by a police officer. “I do watch the news,” said Milho, “I saw one lady who Facebook-lived her boyfriend’s death. I just did it.”

      Milho uploaded the video to Facebook and received nearly 200,000 views, before taking it down after she received a flurry of hateful backlash. Before taking it down, she tagged the police department. The video led to an investigation of Villanueva and he was arrested on sexual assault charges.

    • New York Makes Playing Pokemon Go, Other Online Games A Sex Offender Parole Violation

      While I don’t play Pokemon Go, I’ve still found the public hysteria surrounding the game to be endlessly entertaining. I’ve laughed as “get off my lawn” types bitch and moan simply because people are having harmless fun in ways they don’t understand. I’ve chuckled as Pokemon Go players forget that the rules of reality still apply while in augmented reality. And I’ve laughed at the absurd new lawsuits popping up to try and cash in on the phenomenon.

    • Will Bill Bratton’s Resignation Slow Down the Militarization of the NYPD? Not Likely

      NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton, a key architect of “broken windows” policing who hyped so-called terror threats to wrangle big buys of military-style gear, announced Tuesday that he is stepping down from his position as the most powerful law enforcement figure in the country.

      The revelation came as protesters staged an occupation of City Hall Park demanding that Bratton step down. Meanwhile, the FBI is launching an investigation into police corruption in the top ranks of the NYPD and federal prosecutors are considering charges for the police killing of Eric Garner. Grassroots organizations immediately celebrated the ouster

    • New York’s newest protesters are right: it’s time to defund police

      My professor friend AJ and I led a walking tour of college students earlier this week about protest and policing in New York City. Between our stop at One Police Plaza, where “broken windows” policing was unleashed on our city, and the site of Eric Garner’s death on Staten Island, we stopped at the newest occupation in town at City Hall Park.

      Mayor Bill de Blasio had just announced police commissioner Bill Bratton’s resignation as we walked through the park, quickly achieving one of the occupying group’s three ambitious goals when they appeared on Monday. The other two call for defunding the NYPD and using some of that money for reparations for survivors of “police terrorism”.

      The group, Millions March NYC, makes a solid point: it is imperative to defund police departments across the country immediately, redirecting that money instead to black futures and the marginalized. Because while reparations paid to next of kin for police abuse is already a billion-dollar business, there is no need for anyone to be executed in the first place.

    • Wrongfully Convicted Louisiana Man Asks Justice Department to Investigate New Orleans Prosecutors

      Throughout the 1990s, senior New Orleans prosecutor Jim Williams kept a model electric chair on his desk. The chair held photographs of five African-American men his office had helped place on death row. He considered it a major achievement and was pictured with the chair in a 1995 issue of Esquire magazine.

      Years later he was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article, saying of his career as a prosecutor: “It got to the point where there was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty.”

      Of the men photographed, two have since had their sentences commuted to life, one won at a retrial, and two have been exonerated.

      On Tuesday, John Thompson, one of the exonerated men, filed a 29-page complaint with the Justice Department. Thompson, 54, petitioned for a federal investigation of what he and his lawyers call “a pervasive and unapologetic pattern of unethical improper conduct” perpetrated by Williams and his colleagues at the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office.

    • Canada Finally Launches Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women

      Rights groups have long called for such an inquiry, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned on a promise to establish one.

    • Canada unveils inquiry into murdered indigenous women

      For over a decade, indigenous community leaders and human rights advocates across Canada have urged Ottawa to formulate a national strategy to address high rates of violence against indigenous women and girls.

    • In Historic Move, Obama Grants Clemency to 214 Prisoners

      President Barack Obama on Wednesday issued a record-breaking 214 commutations for people serving drug-related sentences in federal prison—the largest single-day granting of clemency in U.S. history.

      The commutations bring the total of people granted early release under Obama’s administration to 562, more than the past nine presidents combined, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). It is Obama’s third use of his clemency powers this year.

      “The president made history today. President Obama granted more commutations today alone than any president has granted during their entire time in office since the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson,” said Cynthia W. Roseberry, project manager for Clemency Project 2014, a working group of lawyers and advocates that provides free legal assistance to people who meet the criteria for early release.

    • 11-year-old Boy Forces Pence to Explain Allegiance to Trump

      Which is why at a political rally featuring Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence in North Carolina on Thursday, it was an 11-year-old boy named Matthew who forced the adult on the stage into an awkward situation by asking him to explain exactly where he stands when it comes to his running mate Donald Trump.

      “I noticed that you’ve been softening up some of Mr. Trump’s policies and words, is this going to be your role in the administration?” asked the young boy when called upon – a question that despite its apparent earnestness drew immediate laughter from the crowd.

    • “Beef with Byron”: the restaurant on the frontlines of the immigration debate

      In comparison with recent actions where cockroaches, locusts and crickets were released into central London restaurants, Monday’s demonstration at the Holborn Byron Burger restaurant was of a more orderly nature. Beneath the front window of the establishment, closed for the day by the impending picket, a crowd gathered to demand justice for those members of Byron staff recently deported to Brazil, Nepal, Egypt and elsewhere. The staff had been summoned to early morning training sessions that transpired to be a Home Office immigration raid. Byron have claimed the training session was not collusion, despite many consistent testimonials to the contrary by deported staff. This seems to be a lie that evidences the wrongdoing the company sense it has committed.

    • Castles in the Sky

      Elena of Avalor is Disney’s new princess. She has been branded as the “First Latina Princess,” and hailed as a milestone for diversifying the Disney brand, and also reaching out to one of the fastest-growing consumer markets (and youngest demographics) in the country. She’s basically a brown-tinted version of the generic template: sparkly dress with baroque-slash-victorian aesthetics, the hint of an hourglass shape without distracting cleavage, wavy brunette hair betraying no ethnic peculiarities, and of course, a tiara. There’s something comforting about seeing an underrepresented group grafted so seamlessly onto the quintessential icon of femininity. But as always, the pages of this fairy tale are slightly frayed around the edges.

      We’re moving past the days when all fairy tales were festooned with lily-white virgins and virile patrarchs, and the oddball side characters aren’t encoded with vile ethnic caricatures masquerading as off-color animals—the cackling crow, the conniving Siamese cats. Now the heroine is a lady of color and in this royal family at least, there’s the lilt of a creole.

    • The Voting Rights Acts in the Era of Jim Crow 2.0

      The appeals court wrote, “The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The judges found that the North Carolina Legislature and governor, under Republican control since early 2011, offered no proof of voter fraud—the primary Republican justification for enacting restrictive voting laws. Or as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump warned with no evidence, “We may have people vote 10 times.”

    • Malware Linked to Government of Kazakhstan Targets Journalists, Political Activists, Lawyers: EFF Report

      Editors Who Exposed Corruption, Political Opponents of Authoritarian Government’s President, and Their Legal Teams Were Sent Malware

      San Francisco—Journalists and political activists critical of Kazakhstan’s authoritarian government, along with their family members, lawyers, and associates, have been targets of an online phishing and malware campaign believed to be carried out on behalf of the government of Kazakhstan, according to a new report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

      Malware was sent to Irina Petrushova and Alexander Petrushov, publishers of the independent newspaper Respublika, which was forced by the government of Kazakhstan to stop printing after years of exposing corruption but has continued to operate online. Also targeted are family members and attorneys of Mukhtar Ablyazov, co-founder and leader of opposition party Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan, as well as other prominent dissidents.

      The campaign—which EFF has called “Operation Manul,” after endangered wild cats found in the grasslands of Kazakhstan—involved sending victims spearphishing emails that tried to trick them into opening documents which would covertly install surveillance software capable of recording keystrokes, recording through the webcam, and more. Some of the software used in the campaign is commercially available to anyone and sells for as little as $40 online.

    • The Propaganda War With Putin
    • ‘We Have to Have Disability as Part of Our Discussion’ – CounterSpin interview with David Perry on disability and police violence

      When behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey asked the Florida police officer why he had shot him, given that he was lying on his back with his hands in the air, the officer’s answer was, “I don’t know.” Later this was amended for what was apparently deemed an acceptable alternative: He’d meant to shoot Arnoldo Soto, the 23-year-old man with autism holding the toy truck, whom Kinsey was trying to help.

      The spotlight that Black Lives Matter and other activists have forced onto police brutality and overpolicing of African-Americans can’t help but shed light on other aspects of the problem as well, including the frequency with which those killed by police are people with disabilities.

      Our next guest’s work, however, suggests that being at risk is not, so far, enough to get them an appropriate role in media’s coverage of the story. David Perry is a disability rights journalist and associate professor of history at Dominican University. He’s co-author, with Lawrence Carter- Long, of a new white paper for the Ruderman Family Foundation on media coverage of law enforcement use of force and disability. He joins us now by phone from Illinois. Welcome to CounterSpin, David Perry.

    • The Left’s Abandonment of Females

      In her first PMQ (Prime Minister’s Questions) last week, Theresa May took aim at Jeremy Corbyn, ironising his welcome to her: “You refer to me as the second woman Prime Minister, in my years here in this House I’ve long heard the Labour Party asking what the Conservative Party does for women—well, just keep making us Prime Minister.” And while May’s comments drew laughter in Parliament, she has put her finger on an issue plaguing the left in the UK and beyond. And the left has a woman problem which extends far beyond the lack of a party leader uniquely, but also involves the elision of women’s voices, especially on issues concerning, paradoxically, women. And this sort of problem within the left runs from the political theatre all the way through academia and publishing. What a woman on the left is allowed to say is still largely administered out by males who either applaud or cast her out of the party. And this elision of women is taking place within government and publishing, both in the UK and the USA.

      There is a pattern among many leftist publications which consider themselves to be “anti-sexist” to engage in patently sexist practices by shifting away from from issues that specifically affect women or by taking sides in debates where women’s bodies and lives are suddenly rendered commodity. Suddenly the tone of what is acceptable historical materialism shifts radically when women are pointing out issues that pertain to their reality. Quite suddenly there is no room for debate and where there is a need for discussion about issues that directly effect women, the left is largely abandoning the voices of women as both political constituents and political thinkers.

    • The Dangerous Fantasies of Jeffrey Goldberg

      In Goldberg’s fantasy, Israel is as enlightened as he is: liberal, democratic and just. Don’t you dare try casting doubt on that – Goldberg’s liberalism won’t tolerate it. He will praise freedom of expression in Israel, as he did at a Haaretz conference in Palo Alto last November, and will say that Israelis’ freedom of the press and lively public debate is what makes Israel so popular in America. But from now on, it will have to be without Haaretz and the lively public debate it fosters about Zionism among Jewish Americans.

      According to Goldberg, Haaretz is doing something unforgiveable: it’s shattering his fantasy. Because of an op-ed piece in which two American-Jewish historians explain why they’ve abandoned Zionism, as well as a piece of my own (“Yes, Israel is an evil state,” July 31), the liberal Goldberg has decided he’s had enough of Haaretz. He tweeted to his 107,000 Twitter followers that these sort of pieces make him sick. Neo-Nazis, he said, have been distributing my op-ed, so he was going to have to “take a break” from Haaretz.

      I would love to know who those neo-Nazis are. After all, neo-Nazis and the radical right are now some of Israel’s best friends. Did Goldberg mean to say that BDS advocates are neo-Nazis? And besides, I’m not sure I understand. What, the pieces are true, but it’s only the way they’re used that angers Goldberg? Should they not be published because neo-Nazis disseminate them? Or are the articles not actually true?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Techdirt Reading List: The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries Of Trans-Atlantic Battle

        Baldwin’s book goes into even more detail on centuries upon centuries of battles around copyright law — what it’s for, what it’s designed to do and the inevitable tensions it runs into as modern technology changes. It also highlights how some of the battles are really cultural and national battles — with ideas around openness and sharing stemming more from the American side, while the stronger focus on making copyright solely about protecting creators coming from a more European tradition. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise — things like the Berne Convention which massively expanded copyrights came from a European push and the US was very late in adopting it. But sometimes people get so focused on the expansion of copyright driven by the US film and recording industries that we forget that they were simply co-opting ideas from Europe. Either way, it’s an excellent read to put more of our copyright wars into context.

      • Even The Usual Defenders Of The RIAA Are Pointing Out They’re Simply Lying About YouTube

        To be clear, looking at the details from Midia itself, it’s not saying that only 2% of the videos are unauthorized, but 2% of music video views on YouTube are of unauthorized videos. And that’s still an important point. It suggests that, contrary to what the industry likes to claim, the kids these days aren’t spending very much time at all using YouTube to watch unauthorized streams. It’s almost non-existent. The same report also found that music represents just 12% of all YouTube viewing time. That kinda shows how the claims of the industry about how YouTube is supposedly only successful because of music uploads is complete hogwash.

      • Copyright Office to FCC: Hollywood should be able to killswitch your TV

        20 years ago, Congress ordered the FCC to begin the process of allowing Americans to buy their pay TV boxes on the open market (rather than every American household spending hundreds of dollars a year renting a trailing-edge, ugly, energy-inefficient, badly designed box that is increasingly the locus of networked attacks that expose both the home LAN and the cameras and mics that are more and more likely to be integrated into TVs and decoder boxes) — now, at last, the FCC is doing something about it.

      • Why Is The Copyright Office Lying To Protect The Cable Industry’s Monopoly Stranglehold Over The Cable Box?

        The FCC’s attempt to bring some much needed competition to the cable box has birthed an absolute torrent of lobbying shenanigans by the cable and entertainment industries. They’ve pushed a flood of misleading editorials in major papers and websites claiming the plan is somehow racist and will unveil a piracy apocalypse. They’ve nudged Congressional campaign contribution recipients to bash the plan as an extreme case of government over-reach. They’ve also managed to convince the press and some FCC staffers the idea is an attack on copyright, when copyright has absolutely nothing to do with it.

        Quick background: under the FCC’s original proposal (pdf), the FCC wants cable companies to provide programming access to third-party hardware vendors without the need for a CableCARD, the goal being to generate competition in the space resulting in better, cheaper and more open cable boxes. Under the proposal cable operators would be able to use any copyright protection or DRM standard they choose to deliver this content to companies like Google, Amazon or TiVO — and the FCC has repeatedly stated any final rules would respect existing copyright and financial arrangements between cable and the customer.

        But because the plan would cost cable providers $21 billion annually in rental fee revenue and result in more open cable boxes (more likely to direct viewers to third party streaming competitors), they’ve been trying to use a false definition of “copyright” to protect its monopoly stranglehold over cable hardware. And now, the cable industry has another ally in their attempt to mislead the press and public on this subject: The United States Copyright Office.

      • Copyright Office Jumps Into Set-Top Box Debate, Says Hollywood Should Control Your TV

        The Federal Communications Commission has a plan to bring much-needed competition and consumer choice to the market for set-top boxes and television-viewing apps. Under the FCC’s proposed rule change, pay-TV customers would be able to choose devices and apps from anywhere rather than being forced to use the box and associated software provided by the cable company, ending cable companies’ and major TV studios’ monopoly in the field.

        But major entertainment companies are trying to derail this effort and keep control over TV technology. Central to their argument is a set of misleading claims about copyright law. Hollywood thinks that copyright holders should be able to use licensing agreements to place whatever restrictions they like on how people can access their content.

        Unfortunately, the Copyright Office has sent a letter to Congress supporting those claims. The letter is wrong as a matter of law, and it’s also bad policy. Rather than promote innovation, the Copyright Office offers ideas that would be hostile to choice and innovation in all kinds of information technology, not just pay TV.

      • China’s Home-Grown Version Of Spotify Shows How To Make Money In A World Of Digital Abundance

        The fact that the best-known music streaming service, Spotify, is still struggling to turn a profit despite its huge popularity, is often held up as proof that making money in a world of digital abundance is almost impossible. Of course, here on Techdirt, we’ve published many posts about people and companies that have adopted various innovative strategies to get around the problem. But what about music streaming as a mass medium: will it ever be possible to make money in this sector?

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/04/warhammer-comes-to-gnu-linux/feed/ 0 Links 3/8/2016: Fedora Flock Starts, ownCloud Hiring, LibreOffice 5.2 Released http://techrights.org/2016/08/03/libreoffice-5-2-released/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/03/libreoffice-5-2-released/#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2016 23:49:31 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94754

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Is Windows 10 Anniversary Update Deleting Linux Partitions? [Ed: Microsoft Loves [to Sabotage] Linux]

      Yikes — if you plan on installing the Windows 10 Anniversary update on your PC you may want to be extra careful.

      It seems that the latest version of Microsoft’s OS has attention issues. Not content with forcing itself on users who didn’t want it, it may be taking even more drastic steps of hosing other operating systems entirely!

      A handful of reports surfacing on social media suggest, anecdotally, that the Windows 10 anniversary may interfere with, affect and even delete other partitions on the same disk.

    • Linux desktop marketshare has grown for three consecutive months [Ed: Net Applications, for the uninitiated, is Microsoft-connected, so expect real numbers to be a lot higher]

      Not strictly gaming related, but we do cover other important or interesting things here and there. According to netmarketshare [Net Applications] for three months straight Linux marketshare has gone up.

      2016
      April: 1.65%
      May : 1.79%
      June : 2.02%
      July : 2.33%

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • Docker 1.12 Advances Mac and Windows Desktop Editions

      Lots of container technology news is rolling in this week. Mesosphere announced support for the Confluent Platform for data streaming management, and heralded that “the time is now for Container 2.0.”

      Meanwhile, many more users are taking to Docker’s recently unveiled version 1.12 of its core software-containerization system today, accompanied by the first full desktop editions of the software for development on Mac and Windows machines.

      Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows have graduated from beta and are now stable and ready for production.

    • ALSA 1.1.2 Released

      The alsa-lib 1.1.2 release adds some improvements to the control API, thread safety to the PCM API, mixer and PCM API changes, topology API improvements, and a range of other changes. Alsa-utils 1.1.2 was also released and it mostly contains changes to its Basic Audio Tester (BAT).

    • Encrypted File Sharing Service Tresorit Offers Linux Desktop Client, But…

      On Thursday I received an email from Eszter Szilva, a PR manager at Tresorit, which is an “end-to-end encrypted file sharing service.” She was offering an invitation to take a peek at the company’s just released client for GNU/Linux. I must admit I was a little excited by this, despite the fact that I already figured the service was also end-to-end proprietary. I was willing to ignore that, thinking it’s about time for companies to start treating Linux users with the same respect given to users of other operating systems.

      A quick gander at the company website told me the service encrypts files client-side before uploading using AES, the Advanced Encryption Standard established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. The company uses servers located in Ireland and the Netherlands, which is an important plus for those trying to stay out of the long reach of the US government. The company is headquartered in Switzerland and user data is protected under Swiss privacy laws, which offer more protection than in the US or even the EU.

    • syslog-ng 3.8 – what changed?

      Almost a year has passed since the last major syslog-ng release. The first beta of the upcoming 3.8 release was published last week. This brought many changes both in terms of new features and in packaging. To encourage testing I would like to highlight some of the most important new features. Most people prefer using packages, so I also collected what changed in packaging.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • ZeMarmot at GUADEC 2016

        We are all happy users of GNOME here, and this is the first time we will be in GUADEC, so this is pretty exciting. Both Aryeom, the film director, and myself, Jehan, are sponsored by the GNOME Foundation to present our film, produced with FLOSS, in room 1, on Sunday, August 14. We will talk about the movie, its current status, about our work on GIMP too, how GNOME and Free Software works in a media creation workflow, and so on. So we hope you will be many to check this out if you are around!

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 7 Essential Open Source DevOps Projects

    This is very short list of projects in the DevOps space; many other projects are available, with each one catering to a certain use case. What’s most impressive is that all of these projects are fully open sourced. It’s more or less become a phenomenon. The success of the Linux development model has made even hard-core proprietary companies comfortable with the idea of open sourcing such projects.

    When you talk about the DevOps movement, open source is the de facto development model. It has become so commonplace that no one even really mentions it. We have started to take it for granted that “it has to be open source.”

  • Why open sourcing your software is a smart business decision

    Proprietary software developers beware: open source has become mainstream with non-tech brands like Nike rushing to prove their open source credentials by publishing open source projects and sharing code on GitHub.

    Meanwhile, Facebook has just open sourced the spec for Surround 360, its 3D-360 hardware and software video capture system. It is therefore a small surprise that the 2016 annual ‘Future of Open Source‘ survey revealed that 65% of respondents have increased their use of open source software compared with 60% in 2015.

  • How-to Video Training: Open Source Component Management and Intelligence

    As a developer I am constantly chasing new tools and enjoy learning new things. I read a lot of blog posts, tutorials, and documentation. And, I listen to podcasts and attend webinars as well. More and more I find that watching videos of conference and webinar presentations is great. But even better are shorter, focused videos that give you a chance to quickly learn something new.

  • ownCloud is hiring!

    After the recent news, we are now back on stage and with this blog we want to point you to our open positions. Yes, we are hiring people to work on ownCloud. ownCloud is an open source project, yes, but ownCloud GmbH, the company behind the project, provides significant people’s power to expand the project to serve the needs for both the community and ownCloud GmbH’s customers. So if you ever dreamed of getting paid for work on open source, read on.

  • Enterprises increasingly joining open source ecosystem – Wikibon

    A new wave of open source participation is growing among large traditional enterprises not normally considered technology developers, writes Wikibon Lead Cloud Analyst Brian Gracely. Companies like Capital One Financial Corp., Nike Inc., Deere & Co. and General Electric Co. are joining open source consortia both as users of and contributors to major initiatives.

    They are doing this for the same basic reason that IT vendors such as IBM, Google and Intel have become major drivers of Apache open source projects – it allows them to participate with outside teams on developing software they need, creating better solutions to their needs faster and at less cost.

  • Comma.ai open-sources the data it used for its first successful driverless trips

    Comma.ai, the startup that George Hotz (aka Geohotz) founded to show that making driverless vehicles could done relatively cheaply using off-the-shelf components and existing vehicles, has open-sourced a dataset of 7.25 hours of highway driving.

    It might not seem like a lot, but in terms of comparative datasets for highway driving out there, it is. And it’s what Hotz used to build the initial successful self-driving demo used to ferry Bloomberg around for comma.ai’s big public debut.

    “When I started this project, I didn’t want to have to put things in cars – I just wanted to play with the machine learning,” explained Hotz in an interview. “But I looked around and there was no good source of data to do that.”

  • comma.ai releases 7 hours of self-driving car data, calls for Tesla, Google and others to do the same

    comma.ai CEO George Hotz recently praised Tesla, Google and Otto for being fairly opened about their self-driving car programs, but he is taking his own company a step further in openness with the release of a dataset of 7.25 hours of comma.ai’s prototype at work.

    We’ve often discussed at Electrek how data will be extremely important in the race to create a fully self-driving car, and also in the race to get such a system approved by regulators, which is why comma.ai’s move here is particularly interesting.

    Back in May, we talked about Tesla adding an impressive ~1 million miles of data every 10 hours due to its important fleet of about 100,000 cars equipped with Autopilot sensors. On the other hand, Google has just over 1 million miles of data since launching its program in 2009 due to its smaller fleet, but it’s arguably collecting more data per mile due to using more sensors than Tesla.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.2 Officially Released with Interface Refinements, New Features

      Today, August 3, 2016, The Document Foundation non-profit organization has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the LibreOffice 5.2 open-source and cross-platform office suite software.

    • LibreOffice 5.2 Released, This Is What’s New
    • LibreOffice 5.2 Officially Released
    • LibreOffice 5.2 released

      LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still” announced, for enterprise class deployments

      Berlin, August 3, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.2, a feature-rich major release of the best free office suite ever created – targeted to early adopters and power users – with several user interface improvements and enterprise grade features.

      At the same time, LibreOffice 5.1.5 has been released, for enterprise class deployments and more conservative office suite users.

    • LibreOffice under the hood: a year of progress from 5.0 to 5.2

      Today we release LibreOffice 5.2.0, the next step in our journey, and what will become the base of the increasingly stable 5.2.x series. There is a fine suite of new features for people to enjoy – you can read and enjoy all the great news about the user visible features from many great hackers, but there are, as always, many contributors whose work is primarily behind the scenes, and a lot of work that is more technical than user-facing.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • Brendan Eich’s Innovative Brave Browser Gets Funding

      Brendan Eich, formerly CEO of Mozilla, has been busy with Brave Software and the new Brave browser, which is getting a lot of notice as an open source browser that blocks online ads and other trackers. As TechCrunch noted: “Unlike traditional web browsers where ad-blocking takes place via a third-party add-on or extension, Brave’s browser has this technology built in, claiming not only to offer users more privacy, but also increased speed and performance – especially when surfing the mobile web.”

      It’s also significant that the Brave browser is a blockchain-enabled browser with hardened security, enhanced speed and micropayment capabilities. Now, Brave Software has announced that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.

    • Patreon

      I’ve been funded for two years by the DataLad project to work on git-annex. This has been a super excellent gig; they provided funding and feedback on ways git-annex could be improved, and I had a large amount of flexability to decide what to work on in git-annex. Also plenty of spare time to work on new projects like propellor, concurrent-output, and scroll. It was an awesome way to spend the last two years of my twenty years of free software.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Poland to boost sharing and reuse of software

      Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs is nudging the country’s public administrations to share and reuse ICT solutions. In July the ministry published draft clauses for contracts and procurement, asking citizens to comment. The clauses do not explicitly stipulate the use of free and open source software licences. However, the ministry emphasises that when developing software, public administrations should own the code and have the right to share and redistribute it.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Is Erdogan really stronger after failed coup?

      The prevailing view among punditry and the media, both Turkish and international, is that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has emerged much stronger from the July 15 coup attempt and is now empowered to steer the country as he likes.

    • Why Do Liberals Keep Calling Donald Trump a Dove?

      While the Democrat made the case for liberal militarism, the Republican attacked the interventionist status quo. “Yeah, I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it’s gotta be,’” he said, as if he’d read his Chomsky. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called ‘nation-building,’” he continued, lashing out at occupations that had killed U.S. troops and civilians alike. “I think what we need to do is convince the people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here.”

      That was in 2000 and that Republican, George W. Bush, put America’s perceived interests first after winning the race for the White House—by ignoring effete international prohibitions against aggressive war, bypassing the United Nations, and unilaterally invading Iraq. Now, 13 years later, there is another Republican, Donald Trump, railing against the “arrogance” of U.S foreign policy in a race against a Democrat whose record is marked by support for war, including the one launched by the last conservative critic of liberals with bombs.

    • Donald Trump asked 3 times in 1 hour why U.S. doesn’t use its nuclear weapons
    • This ‘Morning Joe’ Discussion About Trump And Nuclear Weapons Is Terrifying
    • Trump’s ‘erratic’ behavior could test nuclear protocols, former head of CIA and NSA says
    • The Mystery of Turkey’s Failed Coup

      The failed Turkish coup and President Erdogan’s harsh reprisals have left more questions than answers, including who was really behind the botched putsch and why, reports Joe Lauria.

    • The War That Won’t Go Away

      “Amid ‘Sacrifice’ Debate, a Look at How Trump Avoided War” (New York Times, August 1, 2016), attempts to cast doubt and suspicion on Trump’s motives as a student and young man when he successfully got out of military service during the Vietnam War. The article takes Trump’s statements about his health and deferments during that period and shows the inconsistencies in how Trump describes his history vis-a-vis the draft. But the problems here are twofold. Mr. Trump seems to have a problem in general with inconsistencies and outrageous statements in almost every policy pronouncement he makes on the campaign trail. In the case of Vietnam and the draft, however, he was doing what hundreds of thousands of other young men did during that unpopular war to get out of serving in the military. To judge Trump by the standards of 1968 or 1969 is to take the current views about war and apply them retroactively to that era.

    • As US Attacks Libya Again, Peace Group Tells Obama: ‘Stop the Bombing’

      Citing the disastrous bombing campaign in 2011 that pushed the nation into political chaos and bloody violence, anti-war groups are calling for an immediate end to a new wave of airstrikes on Libya approved by U.S. President Barack Obama.

    • We Refuse To Be Targets in This Nuclear World

      Despite our unsuccessful local efforts, we do not wish be targets any more. We believe the millions of human beings who are tired of dreaming the nuclear nightmare need to be brought into the process. We are not alone in this goal. Mayors of 5300 cities across the world have asked that their cities not be targets any more—targets of national military decisions in which their communities have no voice or role. We are proposing the creation of an international campaign that stands up to say “We refuse to be targets”—to ask governments in the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, India, Israel and other countries having, or contemplating having nuclear weapons across the world, to cease and desist.

      We need a new Nuclear Freeze and then systematic reductions with a protocol for controlling fissionable materials. Our suggestion would be that the campaign advocate for gradual reductions: first of 25% or more (which has at least been proposed for US/Russian bilateral reductions to follow-up the New START agreement), then of 50%, then of 75%, and finally of 95% both in nuclear warheads and in fissionable materials. This would require the creation of infrastructure for monitoring and verifying compliance with agreed reductions.

    • What Khizr Khan Said That Wasn’t About Trump and You Probably Won’t Hear

      On Monday, the same day the U.S. started its new campaign in Libya—a move one antiwar group said will only further “entrench divisions and intensify violence” in the region—the Khans gave an interview on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

      Asked by host Chris Matthews, “What do you think when you, or feel, when you see us attack Iraq or go into Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden, or we go attack with bombs Libya? We’re bombing Syria now—all Islamic countries. What do you feel as an Islamic man?”

      Khizr Khan replied, “As a Muslim-American, not just as Islamic man—as a Muslim American, I feel that these policies are not in the interest of United States of America, and we see the result of it. We are more vulnerable now. We have created a chaos and—for ourselves.”

      “Well, you know you’re speaking to the choir,” Matthews responded. (In fact, “Matthews’ record isn’t entirely consistent” on being against either the war in Iraq or on avoiding a military approach to confronting ISIS, Norton notes.)

      “I wish this country would have listened to Chris Matthews when he was talking, when he was preaching,” Khan said, “we could have saved ourselves from this quagmire.”

      This section of the interview, Norton points out, “is not included in the isolated clips for the episode on MSNBC’s website. One has to watch the full episode to see it.”

      The situation may remind some of how the corporate media chose to portray Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel laureate and children’s education advocate who was attacked by the Taliban. She met with President Barack Obama at the White House and told him that “drone attacks are fueling terrorism.” Yet, as Peter Hart wrote at FAIR in 2013, that “didn’t register in a corporate media that followed Malala’s visit, and her story, very closely.”

    • Dear Trumpists: Khizr Khan is not ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and it wouldn’t matter if he Were

      A Trump adviser is trying to smear Khizr Khan, the Pakistani-American legal consultant who spoke at the DNC, as a “Muslim Brotherhood agent.”

      This ignorant discourse is only possible because people just have no idea what they are talking about. It wouldn’t fly if done about Western Christians. So for instance we would know that most Swedes are fairly liberal Lutherans and most Spanish are Catholic. Among far right wing Catholics in Spain you have the secretive cult, the Opus Dei. What the Trump people are doing is he equivalent of charging that a liberal Swedish Lutheran is an Opus Dei agent. That charge wouldn’t make any sense to anyone who knew about ethnicity and Christianity in the West. A liberal Swedish Lutheran couldn’t be Opus Dei.

      I’m not sure it will do much good, but let me try to explain why a liberal Pakistani wouldn’t be Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood as a movement began in Egypt in 1928. It began as a reassertion of Arab Muslim values in the wake of the 1880-1922 direct British occupation of Egypt, and the subsequent British hidden hand in Egyptian affairs through 1956. The Brotherhood is vague about the kind of government they want, but when they had a chance in 2011-13, they supported democratic elections.

    • My Response to Bill Clinton: On (My) Liberty and (Your) America

      According to the results of a recent Economist/YouGov poll, a majority of Americans believe that Islam, more than any other religion, encourages violence. Republicans are particularity anti-Muslim (74 percent shared these views) but a sizable number of Democrats (41 percent) hold such toxic ideas about Islam and its followers, as well.

    • Justice Department Officials Raised Objections on U.S. Cash Payment to Iran

      Senior Justice Department officials objected to sending a plane loaded with cash to Tehran at the same time that Iran released four imprisoned Americans, but their objections were overruled by the State Department, according to people familiar with the discussions.

      After announcing the release of the Americans in January, President Barack Obama also said the U.S. would pay $1.7 billion to Iran to settle a failed arms deal dating back to 1979. What wasn’t disclosed at the time was that the first payment would be $400 million in cash, flown in as the prisoners were released, as The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • After Louisiana Flooding, the Red Cross Draws a Deluge of Complaints

      Three months after record floods swept through Louisiana in March, the government officials in charge of disaster response set up a post-mortem with area Red Cross staffers.

      The meeting’s purpose: Airing officials’ many complaints with the charity’s performance.

      “Basically, during the Miss. River flooding and the recent severe weather events, most of the Parishes who reached out to the American Red Cross were not happy with the assistance they received or did not get some or any assistance that was requested from them,” a parish emergency manager wrote in an email eliciting the specifics of local officials’ experiences.

      He compiled their responses into a page of talking points for the June 28 meeting. Among the most common gripes: That there had been so much turnover at the Red Cross that government emergency managers didn’t know who to call for assistance; that Red Cross staffers didn’t call emergency managers back; and that the Red Cross didn’t provide enough shelter support.

    • Fracking For President WTF?

      Like your choices weren’t pitiable enough before, now some gas and oil industry pimps in Texas have launched a mock independent bid for the presidency on behalf of – wait for it – fracking. The stunt is part of FrackFeed.com, a new website by the “grassroots” (read astro-turf industry front) group North Texans for Natural Gas (NTNG), which with the support of four energy companies seeks to “give a voice to those who support natural gas.” Aimed at millennials and dedicated to the gonzo proposition that fracking brings you everything good in life – gas, A.C., housing, health care, vacations, burgers, Christmas, celebrity life styles and don’t forget clean water – the site uses laughable memes, quizzes, listicles and other fun stuff to “explain the benefits of fracking to a new generation of Americans.” “Energy is everywhere,” it exclaims, and if you look around you’ll find life itself on God’s green earth, including the toxic water, is “Brought To You By Fracking.”

    • Mega-Utility Dodges $500M ‘Bullet’ as Feds Slash Potential Fine for Pipeline Explosion

      A federal judge on Tuesday night quietly slashed a potential $562 million fine against Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) for the privately owned, publicly regulated utility’s role in a 2010 deadly natural gas pipeline explosion near San Francisco.

      The incident six years ago “sent a giant plume of fire into the air, killing eight people and destroying 38 homes in the San Francisco Bay Area city of San Bruno,” the Associated Press recalls.

      As Common Dreams noted at the time, “In the weeks before the catastrophe, residents had been reporting gas odors and had voiced fears about a leak. But this brought no action from the company. A state assemblyman from the San Bruno area noted that the torn pipeline was over 60 years old, having been installed in 1948. He criticized PG&E for its poor maintenance and lax response. After the explosion, it took the company almost three hours to shut off the gas supply.”

    • Prosecutors in PG&E case abruptly reduce potential fines

      Abruptly and without explanation, federal prosecutors slashed potential criminal penalties for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. from $562 million to $6 million Tuesday while a jury was considering whether the company violated safety laws both before and after the lethal 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno.

      The decision was made public in a court filing as both sides awaited the jury’s verdict in federal court in San Francisco.

      Prosecutors had maintained, in filings before and during the trial, that California’s largest utility could be punished for any convictions with penalties equal to twice the amount it saved by shortcutting safety laws. They said those savings could be measured by the $281 million that PG&E estimated it would cost to comply with safety standards after the San Bruno explosion — leading to a potential fine of $562 million if the federal jury in San Francisco returned guilty verdicts.

    • Missoula Wins Right to Control Its Own Water in Victory Against Privatization

      Missoula, Montana scored a major victory for community ownership of public resources when the state’s supreme court ruled 5-2 on Tuesday that the city’s use of its water system was “more necessary” than its use by a private company.

      The city has been embroiled in a costly, years-long legal battle over control of its water supply. Missoula previously argued it has the right to use its powers of eminent domain to purchase Mountain Water Co. from then-owner the Carlyle Group—which has since sold the water company to Canada-based Liberty Utility—an argument which the Missoula County District Court agreed with last June.

      Now, their argument has been vindicated, as the Montana Supreme Court on Tuesday found the lower court’s “detailed factual findings” supported the eminent domain decision.

    • Montana Supreme Court clears way for city’s Mountain Water purchase

      The city of Missoula won its eminent domain case to buy Mountain Water Co. in a 5-2 decision Tuesday from the Montana Supreme Court.

      In the majority’s opinion, Justice Patricia Cotter said the state high court gave the record an “exhaustive review” and found the lower court’s “detailed factual findings” supported public ownership.

    • Is Solar Energy Really Too Expensive?

      Utilities are lobbying against the expansion of rooftop solar, and that’s no good for anyone.

    • Energy-wise buildings can cut gas imports

      A renovation programme to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from buildings in Europe could create a million jobs, provide warmer homes, more comfortable factories and offices, reduce fuel bills across 28 countries, and cut imports of Russian gas, researchers say.

      This is because buildings are currently the biggest single emitter of GHGs in Europe. Many have inefficient heating and cooling, combined with poor insulation.

      But with existing technology and political will, they could be transformed into energy producers and become carbon-neutral, says a report produced by OpenEXP, an international group of experts helping policymakers to reach sustainable development goals.

    • 6 Signs the Big Global Switch to Solar has already Begun

      China has installed 20 gigawatts of new solar power just in the first half of this year. This achievement beats analysts’ expectations by a wide margin. China wants to add 20 GW of new solar every year for the next four, but apparently could do twice that. At the end of 2015, China had about 40 gigawatts of installed solar power, so in just six months it has added half again as much. It already surpasses the previous solar champ, Germany.

      The Crescent Dunes “concentrating solar power” plant in Nevada, operated by a Santa Monica firm, is using molten salt as a battery so that it can generate electricity 24/7. It is the first such plant to use solar energy to melt the salt directly instead of via oil, e.g,, which is a huge advance in efficiency. All electricity plants are just a way to turn turbines using boiling water. If you can turn the turbines with molten salt heated hours ago by the sun, then you can make electricity all day and all night. The Crescent Dunes plant can power 75,000 homes. All those critics of solar power who maintain that it needs gas or nuclear for baseload generation when it is dark or very overcast can now find some other talking point. Solar can do it all. Concentrating solar power costs as little as 10 cents a kilowatt hour, making it competitive with nuclear both in cost and in non-intermittency. Photovoltaic cells plus battery storage may ultimately be cheaper but this means that at the very least we have a relatively inexpensive solar technology that isn’t intermittent.

  • Finance

    • Let’s Understand Why We’re So Finished Economically

      The myth of the American Dream is the dominating factor in keeping people mostly complacent in the United States. You know it — work hard, and your life will improve. Well, maybe not your life, but your kids’, or at least your grandkids’. If that doesn’t work, it is the fault of the Irish immigrants, or the darn Chinese, or those welfare freeloaders. Ask Donald Trump how it all works.

      The thing that makes the myth so powerful is that the tiny percent that is true sounds better than the 99 percent which is a lie. As long as near-constant growth could be assured, enough pieces would fall to the the lower and middle classes to make the Dream seem real. It helped that a kindly media would promote the heck out of every exception, whether it was the shoeshine boy in the late 19th century who went to college, or the plucky guys who invented some new tech in their garage and became billionaires. See, you can do it too, just like if we run hard enough, everyone can be in the Olympics. It’s just a matter of wanting it, believing in yourself, having passion and grit, right?

    • Our Revolution Marches On as Washington’s Jayapal Nabs Primary Win

      Pramila Jayapal, one of the standard-bearers for Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution movement, won a decisive victory in the primary race for Washington’s 7th Congressional District Tuesday night and will advance to the November general election.

      Jayapal, an Indian-born state senator who was endorsed by Sanders in April, won 38 percent of the vote. The Seattle Times reported late Tuesday that rivals Joe McDermott and Brady Walkinshaw were “neck and neck,” taking—by the latest count—21.5 percent and 20.9 percent respectively. The top two will advance to the fall election.

    • There’s a Hunger Problem in Every County in America—and It’s Solvable

      Loudoun County is a suburban area with colonial roots, nestled about 45 miles northwest of the District of Columbia. It boasts the nation’s highest median household income at nearly $124,000 per year. It also has 14,000 residents who struggle with food insecurity, or a lack of reliable access to affordable and nutritious food.

      Elizabeth and her daughter, Jennifer, are Loudon County residents that struggle with hunger. Both women once had full-time jobs, but Elizabeth was let go from her job as a car mechanic when she injured her wrist. Then, Jennifer had to quit her job to help care for Elizabeth’s four-year-old daughter.

    • In Wealthy Vancouver, Mayor Promises to Turn Tent City into Subsidized Housing

      The mayor of Vancouver, B.C., announced late Tuesday that an empty lot, the site of a tent city of homeless residents and affordable housing activists, will be transformed into subsidized housing for seniors and people on welfare.

      The announcement marked a rare progressive victory in a city marred by rapid gentrification, a years-long housing crunch, and an influx of foreign money that has transformed the coastal community into a “playground for the rich.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Cornel West: Trump Will Be a Neofascist Catastrophe and Clinton a Neoliberal Disaster

      Polls indicate that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got a four-point bounce from the heavily scripted Democratic Party Convention. But it is hard to know the depth and intensity of support from Sanders activists passionate enough to earn themselves a place at the convention. Those are the kinds of activists that could help Clinton the most come November. Yet, an informal survey of dozens of Bernie delegates indicates a lack on enthusiasm for the Clinton cause. No doubt, the decision by prominent Bernie booster Cornel West to go for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein won’t help.

    • Can Jill Carry Bernie’s Baton? A Look at the Green Candidate’s Radical Funding Solution

      Bernie Sanders supporters are flocking to Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential candidate, with donations to her campaign exploding nearly 1000% after he endorsed Hillary Clinton. Stein salutes Sanders for the progressive populist movement he began and says it is up to her to carry the baton. Can she do it? Critics say her radical policies will not hold up to scrutiny. But supporters say they are just the medicine the economy needs.

      Stein goes even further than Sanders on several key issues, and one of them is her economic platform. She has proposed a “Power to the People Plan” that guarantees basic economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities; living-wage jobs for every American who needs to work; an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health insurance program; tuition-free public education through university level; and the abolition of student debt. She also supports the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.

    • Leaked DNC Emails Confirm Anti-Sanders Conspiracy

      The release by Wikileaks of a trove of emails from high-ranking Democratic Party officials has confirmed what many Americans – both progressive and conservative – have suspected throughout this election cycle: that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) actively conspired against Bernie Sanders in an attempt to ensure the nomination for Hillary Clinton.

      But it wasn’t simply party apparatchiks like the disgraced Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the recently resigned Chair of the DNC and close ally of Clinton, but also their trusted cronies in the corporate media who actively collaborated with DNC officials to ensure that nothing too critical of Hillary would make it into the Mighty Wurlitzer of contemptibly ‘respectable’ journalism. Indeed, what the Wikileaks revelations expose to the world is the fact that there’s nothing democratic about the Democratic Party, or America’s alleged democracy in general.

    • China and Africa: handling ‘otherness’

      Take one example. For years, the complaint by many outside China during the era of great enclosure under Mao Zedong was that the place was written about as though it were on another planet. People who managed to enter went to observe, maintaining an outsider’s distance as they gazed in at lives they perceived to be either suffering or deluded. In recent years, however, this example of outsider’s language has undergone a metamorphosis from pity to criticism. Martin Jacques, Frank Dikötter and others have examined how Chinese writings themselves contain deep strains of racial and cultural superiority vis-à-vis ‘the other’. But whilst Chinese mainstream discourse does convey a sense of superiority, that isn’t by any means the full story. Countering the notion of a proud, ancient continuous civilisation is an opposing sense of resentment and victimhood, born in the modern era and currently expressed in narratives of colonial oppression promoted by the Chinese government.

    • The Citizens United Playbook

      How a Top GOP Lawyer Guided a Chinese-Owned Company Into U.S. Presidential Politics

    • Power Couple

      Meet the Chinese Husband-and-Wife Team Whose Company Spent $1.3 Million Trying to Make Jeb Bush President

    • Cracks in the Dam

      Three Paths Citizens United Created for Foreign Money to Pour Into U.S. Elections

    • A “Desperate” Seller

      Gary Locke, While Obama’s Ambassador to China, Got a Chinese Tycoon to Buy His House

    • Trumped

      Well, you can’t, in fact. Claiming that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 primary is like claiming Bush won the 2000 election. It’s one of those things that everyone will say, using it as shorthand, and repeating it until everyone forgets that the thing was stolen. So, let me rephrase: How can you get people to pretend en masse that you won the 2016 Democratic presidential primary despite lugging around the same baggage as 8 years before only now stuffed with putrid rotting flesh?

    • Green Alert: Presidential Hopeful Dr. Jill Stein Taps Human Rights Activist Ajamu Baraka as Her VP Pick

      Green Party presidential hopeful Dr. Jill Stein has tapped Ajamu Baraka as her vice presidential pick for the upcoming 2016 election.

    • Baseless “Anti-Vax” Attacks Against Dr. Jill Stein Distract from Her Call to End the Corrupting Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry Within the FDA

      Dr. Jill Stein has repeatedly articulated her support for vaccinations in interviews and online. The online fact-checking website Snopes.com has debunked accusations claiming Dr. Stein opposes the use of vaccines. The conspiracy theory that Dr. Stein is “anti-science” is becoming a bizarre new counterpart of the “birther”controversy that hounded President Obama’s candidacy in 2008.

      Stein noted, “Anyone who supports vaccinations and wishes to prevent dropping vaccination rates should be concerned about the erosion of public trust caused by the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical industry in regulatory agencies and government in general.”

      Dr. Stein voices widely-shared concerns that the pharmaceutical industry exerts undue influence in our regulatory institutions – as well as on the politicians to whom they donate.

    • Hillary Clinton’s campaign: ‘We’ll have a press conference when we want to have a press conference’

      When is Hillary Clinton going to hold that long-awaited news conference — the first of 2016? Whenever she feels like it.

      This has always been true, of course. The media can’t force her into one. But the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign hasn’t been quite so blunt about it.

      Until now.

      “We’ll have a press conference when we want to have a press conference,” Clinton pollster Joel Benenson said on ABC News on Thursday evening.

      Okay then. This is the Clinton campaign flaunting its control, reminding the media who calls the shots.

    • Green Party candidate Jill Stein names running mate

      Presumptive Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has named Ajamu Baraka, an international human rights scholar and activist, as her running mate.
      “Ajamu Baraka is a powerful, eloquent spokesperson for the transformative, radical agenda whose time has come — an agenda of economic, social, racial, gender, climate, indigenous and immigrant justice,” Stein said in a statement Tuesday. “Ajamu’s life’s work has embodied the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

      Stein, a doctor, is expected to be formally nominated as the Green Party’s presidential candidate Saturday at its national convention in Houston.

    • Mark Crispin Miller

      Peter and Mickey spend the hour in discussion with Mark Crispin Miller, NYU professor, author, and media critic. Their conversation included both critiques of corporate media’s recent performance (such as coverage of the presidential campaign), and ongoing developments that threaten freedom of the press and of thought.

    • What Price Victory?

      Virtually the entire political class has now united to defeat Donald Trump, with Morning Joe today staging a Michael Hayden appearance that served largely to allow Scarborough to tell the story of Trump asking three times in a foreign policy briefing why the US couldn’t use its nukes. As Dan Drezner pointed out on Twitter, Scarborough says the event happened months ago — when the primary was still going on — but has just now staged its telling.

      Beating Donald Trump is important. He’s a racist who aims to win by promising white working class people they can resume persecuting people of color again, and he is dangerously inconsistent. That said, he does want to spend lots on infrastructure and protect workers from the ravages of globalization, something often forgotten in depictions of him as entirely policy free.

      But the transpartisan obsession with beating Trump has largely applauded two developments that, for liberals, for democrats, for those who believe in peace, for progressives, should be a worry.

      First, the Neocon establishment has come out in enthusiastic support for Clinton, with ideologue Eliot Cohen orchestrating serial efforts (one that even includes John Yoo!!) to oppose Trump. They point to Trump’s erratic nature and more recently the theories of Putin’s influence. They do so even in the face of a report that Paul Manafort, through whom any Putin influence would be managed, is checking out.

      [...]

      And even while the focus has been on Russia’s alleged influence with Trump, there has been no focus on Hillary’s unquestioning support of Saudi Arabia (the country that had ties to 9/11) and Israel. Or on Hillary’s equally troubling policy proposals, such as starting a No Fly Zone over Russian planes. As Will Bunch noted in a great column, Democrats have become the party that shuns people who chant No More War.

    • The Populist Insurgency is Ratcheting Up

      “We” being the millions of young people, mad-as-hell working stiffs, independents, deep-rooted progressives, and other “outsiders” who felt The Bern and forged a new, game-changing, populist force of, by, and for grassroots Americans. True, this progressive-populist coalition did not win the White House on its first go ’round behind the feisty Sanders insurgency (which the the smug political establishment had literally laughed at when he began his run). But they are not laughing now, for even they can see the outsider revolt against the power elites won something even more momentous than the 2016 election: The future.

    • Why the Shake-up at the Democratic National Committee Is Doomed

      The shake-up at the Democratic National Committee after an embarrassing breach of its email system continued Tuesday with the departure of three senior officials.

      But purging the DNC of top officials won’t remedy the DNC’s problems. Those problems aren’t attributable to individuals who didn’t do their jobs. To the contrary, those individuals probably fulfilled their responsibilities exactly as those jobs were intended to be done.

      The DNC’s problems are structural.

      The Democratic National Committee – like the Republican National Committee – has become little more than a giant machine designed to suck up big money from wealthy individuals, lobbyists bundlers, and corporate and Wall Street PACs.

    • With Clinton at Helm, Democratic Party Again a ‘Plaything of the Super-Rich’

      It appears that nothing is holding her back now that Hillary Clinton has officially become the Democratic nominee for president. With “cash machine” Tim Kaine by her side, the Democratic ticket’s fundraising operation is in full swing, and the money—Big Money—is pouring in.

      On Tuesday, the campaign announced a record take of $90 million last month for the candidate and the Democratic Party, not including that brought in by the Super PACs supporting her bid. Republican nominee Donald Trump raised a reported $80 million last month.

      According to CNN, “Clinton will look to match her July haul with a series of August fundraisers, including star studded late-August events hosted by Oscar-winning actors and tech billionaires like Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.”

    • Tim Kaine’s other role: Cash machine

      When newly minted vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine first showed his face in Philadelphia at the Democrats’ convention last week, it wasn’t on stage at the Wells Fargo Center. It was in the tony private suites high above the festivities, where he dropped in on a handful of the campaign’s highest-flying fundraisers.

      That was no coincidence. Much has been made of the Virginia senator’s suburban dad-like mien and his Spanish-speaking skills as he’s started to attack Donald Trump, but Kaine also brings to Hillary Clinton’s ticket an under-appreciated resume point: his stealth status as one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful fundraisers.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Study: Trolls Are Even Worse When Using Real Names

      Now, this is just one report on one dataset, and there may be a variety of other factors at play. But it certainly matches with our own experience here as well. The idea that people only act like jackasses because they’re anonymous just doesn’t fit with the pattern we’ve seen in the over 1 million comments we have on this site. Yes, sometimes there are anonymous jerks, just like there are sometimes named jerks. But on the whole, anonymity doesn’t seem to magically lead to worse comments.

    • Censor Boards in India, Pakistan Very Myopic: John Abraham

      Actor John Abraham, whose latest release Dishoom could not release in Pakistan as the country’s censor board members failed to reach a unanimous decision on it, says he is neither disappointed nor surprised as he feels that the censor boards across both the countries have been “very myopic”.

      Asked his opinion on the fate of Dishoom in Pakistan, John told IANS over phone from Mumbai: “Well, I think censorship generally across the board in both countries has been very myopic and consistently myopic. So, I am not disappointed, but I am also not surprised.”

      John, who plays a police officer in the film, shared that Dishoom is neither biased nor an anti-country movie. It is all about entertainment.

    • Anurag Kashyap to conduct masterclass on censorship in Melbourne

      After locking horns with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) recently over ‘Udta Punjab’, Anurag Kashyap’s stock continues to rise. His take-no-prisoners stance on the ‘Udta Punjab’ issue has endeared him to young filmmakers and moviegoers alike. Known for making the right noise at crucial moments, the filmmaker has now been invited to conduct a masterclass on censorship and its impact on Indian cinema in Melbourne as he will be attending the Indian Film Festival there from August 11 to 21.

    • Turkey’s media crackdown has reached the Netherlands

      Following last month’s failed coup, journalists in Turkey are facing the largest clampdown in its modern history. Journalists covering the events from abroad have not escaped unscathed, including a number in the Netherlands who have faced threats and attacks.

      Unusually, the journalists of the Rotterdam-based Turkish newspaper Zaman Today welcomed the increased police presence. Long before the military coup that failed to remove Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan from power, the government had been targeting journalists. But today a Dutch police officer drops by frequently to check if Zaman’s journalists are alright. It makes journalist Huseyin Atasever, who has been working for the Dutch Zaman since 2014, feel safe. Or at least safer than he has felt in a while.

      On the morning of Tuesday 19 July Atasever was on his way to Amsterdam when he received a phone call. A Turkish-Dutch individual had been abused by Erdogan supporters at a mosque in the city of Haarlem. Atasever decided to go there immediately.

    • Canadian Comedian Plans To Appeal $42k For A Joke That Insulted Someone

      Okay, okay, I know that Canada doesn’t have a First Amendment like we do down here — even if people like to joke about it being the 51st state — but it still seems quite bizarre that comedian Mike Ward has been told to pay $42,000 for making an offensive joke about a singer named Jeremy Gabriel. Ward is planning to appeal, but the fact that he’s been found guilty of a “human rights” violation seems ridiculous enough.

    • Comedian Mike Ward ordered to pay $35K to Jérémy Gabriel

      Quebec’s Human Rights Tribunal has ruled that comedian Mike Ward must pay Jérémy Gabriel $35,000 for making jokes that violated his rights.

      Ward has been ordered to pay the former child singer with disabilities $25,000 in moral damages and $10,000 in punitive damages.

      He will also need to pay Sylvie Gabriel, Jérémy’s mother, a total of $5,000 for moral damages and $2,000 for punitive damages.

    • The Summer Blockbuster That’s More About Politics Than You Think

      Meanwhile, the trolls went after not only the movie, but its stars as well. Leslie Jones, a strong black actress and comedian from Saturday Night Live, complained to Twitter that she was being targeted by racist tweets that compared her to an ape and worse. It got so bad that Twitter finally rescinded the accounts of some of the trolls, including that of Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for the extremist, right wing, Trump-supporting Breitbart site.

      Of course, Yiannopoulos complained that he was a victim of political correctness and left-wing censorship. Finally, Jones herself had enough and quit Twitter, saying, “I feel like I’m in a personal hell.” Leaping to her defense, original Ghostbusters star Dan Aykroyd called the trolls “losers” and “insignificant gnats,” adding: “I would say that you’re looking at obese white men between 50 and 60 who are active Klan members or members of the Aryan Nation, and there are millions of them.”

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • New Jersey Man Files Lawsuit Over Pokemon Go After A Few Players Politely Knocked On His Door

      Since Pokemon Go launched last month, we’ve seen an endless stream of players oddly forget that “augmented reality” doesn’t mean the rules of traditional reality no longer apply. Players have spent the last month playing the game in some admittedly “inappropriate” places, while wandering in and out of private property or unsafe areas in a quest to capture virtual monsters.

      [...]

      Apparently fed up with the phenomenon (or just looking for a payday), a New Jersey man last Friday filed a lawsuit in California federal court against Niantic Labs and Nintendo. The 16-page complaint is quick to play up complaints about Pokemon Go players catching monsters in places like the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and says the game makers actively invited “unwanted incursions” on to private property when they populated reality with augmented reality monsters…

    • Massive new study lifts the lid on top websites’ tracking secrets

      So, just how tracked are you? Plenty, according to the largest, most detailed measurement of online tracking ever performed: Princeton University’s automated review of the world’s top 1,000,000 sites, as listed by Alexa.

      But you probably knew there’s a whole lotta trackin’ goin’ on. What’s interesting (and sometimes surprising) are the details. Princeton’s Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan have captured the clearest picture of third-party web tracking that we’ve ever seen.

      To begin, huge numbers of folks are trying to track you: 81,000+ third-party trackers appeared on at least two of the top million sites.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • [Old but relevant today] For CIA, Truth About Torture Was an Existential Threat

      For the CIA officials involved in torture, one thing was clear from the very beginning: The only way they would be forgiven for what they did was if they could show it had saved lives.

      It was the heart of their rationale. It was vital to public acceptance. It was how they would avoid prosecution.

      The executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s grindingly exhaustive torture report released Tuesday indelibly captures CIA officials turning their back on human decency, and it all starts with a “novel” legal defense floated in November 2001 by CIA lawyers – and arguably prompted by their White House masters, lurking offstage – that the “CIA could argue that the torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.”

      Specifically, they pointed out: “states may be very unwilling to call the U.S. to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”

    • Obama’s CIA Director Wants to Stick Around for Clinton

      If Hillary Clinton wins the U.S. presidential election in November, John Brennan would like to continue his post as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

      Current and former U.S. intelligence officials tell me Brennan has signaled in private conversations that he loves the job and would like to keep it if she’s elected. Plus, Brennan does not want to be perceived as a lame-duck director, particularly as he leads an ambitious plan to restructure the agency.

      At the same time, Brennan has all but taken himself out of consideration to serve in a Trump administration. Speaking last month at the Brookings Institution, he said he would not execute an order to torture captured terrorists or target the families of terrorists, as Trump has promised he would authorize if elected president.

    • Eli Lake’s Portrayal of the CIA Director Campaign: Drones, Benghazi, and … ?

      I thought maybe Brennan wanted to stick around to make sure he gets credit for bettering Allen Dulles’ record for regime change (after all, it’s not clear how the regime change conducted while Brennan was at the White House gets counted in these things).

    • Arizona Law Enforcement Charging Innocent Car Owners $2,000 To Reclaim Their Wrongfully-Seized Vehicles

      If you’d like some more evidence on how civil asset forfeiture has become legalized theft, you need only look at this investigative report by Curt Prendergast for Tuscon.com. Not only is it extremely easy for the government to claim assets are tied to criminal activity, but the obstacles placed in front of individuals to reclaim seized assets are numerous and expensive to navigate — sometimes outweighing the value of the items seized.

      On top of that, even when the state loses, it still wins. Arizona residents who have seen their vehicles seized for extremely tenuous connections to criminal activity are still forced to pay an incredible amount of money to reclaim items the state has agreed to return to their owners.

    • Tucson-area seized vehicles are returned — for a price

      The fortunes of a local woman took a disastrous turn when she loaned her car to her son so he could take her granddaughter to school.

      Her son was arrested on suspicion of credit-card fraud in Oro Valley and police seized the woman’s orange 2005 Mini Cooper, which she said in court documents she needed to drive to her $14-an-hour job at Red Lobster.

      She hired a lawyer — the court does not provide lawyers in civil matters — to challenge the seizure and subsequent forfeiture proceedings. Authorities agreed on July 7 to return her car, but first she had to pay $2,000 into the Pima County Anti-Racketeering Fund, with $1,500 going to Oro Valley police and $500 to the County Attorney’s Office.

    • Court Throws Out Terrorism Conviction in Canada, Citing Police Entrapment

      Sting operations — in which an undercover agent or informant provides the means and opportunity to lure otherwise incapable people into committing a crime — have represented the default tactic for counterterrorism prosecutions since the 9/11 attacks.

      Critics believe these stings amount to entrapment. Human Rights Watch, for instance, argues that law enforcement authorities in the U.S. have overstepped their role by “effectively participating in developing terrorism plots.” Nonetheless, U.S. courts have rejected entrapment defenses, no matter how hapless the defendants.

      In Canada, however, the legal standing of counterterrorism stings has suddenly shifted. Last week, a high-ranking judge in British Columbia stayed the convictions of two alleged terrorists, ruling that they had been “skillfully manipulated” and entrapped by an elaborate sting operation organized by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

      “The specter of the defendants serving a life sentence for a crime that the police manufactured by exploiting their vulnerabilities, by instilling fear that they would be killed if they backed out, and by quashing all doubts they had in the religious justifications for the crime, is offensive to our concept of fundamental justice,” the judge wrote. “Simply put, the world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor sufficient motivation to do it themselves.”

      This is the first time that a counterterrorism sting — whose tactics were developed by the FBI through modifying those of undercover drug stings — has been thrown out of court whole cloth in Canada or the U.S.

      Supreme Court Justice Catherine J. Bruce was ruling in the case of John Nuttall and his common-law wife, Amanda Korody, two drug addicts who lived on the streets in British Columbia. As part of sting operation in which the RCMP paid at least 200 officers a total of more than $900,000 Canadian in overtime, law-enforcement agents encouraged the couple to place pressure-cooker bombs at the British Columbia parliament building on Canada Day 2013.

    • 18-Year-Old Arrested on Terrorism Charges Is Mentally “Like a Child”

      An 18-year-old recently arrested on terrorism charges in Arizona has the mental capacity of a child and had been in regular contact with the FBI for years before his arrest, according to family members, former teachers, and medical documents reviewed by The Intercept. Mahin Khan was arrested July 1 on charges of plotting to support the Taliban as well as the militant group the Islamic State and commit acts of terrorism in the local community.

      People close to Khan say that he suffered from serious mental and emotional illnesses and that the FBI was aware of this, having met with him regularly since he was a young teenager. According to medical records and statements from family members, he was first referred to the FBI after sending a threatening email to one of his teachers at the age of 15. After an initial meeting with the FBI, he spent 45 days at an inpatient psychiatric facility for evaluation. His family says this stay at the facility was coordinated with FBI officials. Agents reportedly continued to meet with Khan regularly after he returned home and continued to do so up until the time of his arrest.

    • Black Lives Movement Answers the Question: What Are Your Demands?

      In the midst of an election year in which issues of race and policing have often taken center stage, the most comprehensive and detailed policy platform on how to tackle them has come not from candidates or elected officials, but from a movement that found its voice on the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, and dozens of other cities.

      The Black Lives Matter movement erupted spontaneously in nationwide protests following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In its early days, it was propelled by pain and rage, with little organization, but in the weeks and months that followed it grew coordinated and strategic, while never losing the horizontal, inclusive quality that allowed it to scale up so rapidly.

      As community organizations and individuals operating under the Black Lives Matter principle denounced police violence, racism, and lack of accountability, they also took on broader issues affecting black communities: mass incarceration, access to clean water, economic justice. While the number of mostly black and brown people killed by police continued to grow, street protests have been sporadic. But away from the spotlight, a movement that made its name by way of protest continued to organize, and this week released a comprehensive policy platform, “A Vision for Black Lives,” that is at once an exhaustive indictment of the nation’s systemic racism and a clear-eyed presentation of concrete solutions to the problem.

    • Outcry Swells After Military Threatens to Punish Chelsea Manning ‘Essentially for Living’

      Since news emerged last week that imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning is facing new criminal charges and further punishment from the U.S. Army for attempting suicide, public outcry has been swift.

      Civil liberties group Fight for the Future has received over 30,000 signatures on a petition that demands the new charges be dropped and that Manning be provided with adequate healthcare.

      A separate petition demanding that Manning be spared solitary confinement garnered over 2,000 signatures in a matter of hours.

    • Chelsea Manning Faces Indefinite Solitary Confinement & Extra Prison Time After Suicide Attempt
    • Tell the Army Not to Put Chelsea Manning into Solitary Confinement for Attempting Suicide
    • Petition Demands Army Not Put Chelsea Manning in Indefinite Solitary Confinement for Attempting Suicide
    • From Rio, Olympic Refugee Team Urges Compassion for Displaced People

      It’s hard to imagine good news emerging from environmental chaos in Brazil and warfare around the globe, but a team of refugees competing at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this month stood in the spotlight on Tuesday, and took the opportunity to urge compassion for displaced people worldwide.

      The 10 athletes on the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team (ROT) were given a standing ovation as they joined the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

      “We are ambassadors for the other refugees. We cannot forget this chance that you gave us,” said Yiech Pur Biel, a track and field athlete originally from South Sudan. “We are not bad people. It’s only a name to be a refugee.”

      Yusra Mardini, a Syrian swimmer, said this year’s games make clear that people displaced from their home countries can still contribute to society—countering an argument that has been waged by rightwing opponents of open borders.

    • Amid City Hall Protests, NYPD Chief Bill Bratton Resigns, But “Broken Windows” Continues Nationwide

      New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton has announced he is resigning next month. Bratton was a lead advocate of the so-called broken windows theory that called for officers to crack down on minor infractions in an attempt to decrease more violent crime. Over the past four decades, Bratton has served as New York police commissioner twice as well as the head of the Boston and Los Angeles police departments. Supporters of Bratton credit him with lowering crimes rates, but critics say broken windows policing unfairly targets communities of color. In a statement, Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi told Democracy Now!, “William Bratton is the key architect of programs that have terrorized our communities for decades. His implementation of broken windows theory has wreaked havoc on communities from Los Angeles to New York City and beyond.” Bratton resigned just one day after hundreds of activists gathered outside New York City Hall demanding the defunding of the New York Police Department and his firing. Protests against William Bratton have been escalating ever since the police killing of Eric Garner two years ago. We speak to Trinity College professor Christina Heatherton, Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Nabil Hassein of Millions March NYC.

    • NYPD Chief Bill Bratton’s Next Stop: Private Consulting Firm Tied to the Clintons

      On Tuesday, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton announced he is resigning next month. Bratton has served as the NYPD commissioner twice. He’s also served as head of the Boston and Los Angeles police departments. But Bratton’s resignation doesn’t mean he’s retiring. His next job will be at Teneo Holdings, a global private consulting firm with controversial ties to Hillary Clinton. Bratton will be the chairperson of a new branch of the company called Teneo Risk. For more, we speak with Christina Heatherton, assistant professor of American studies at Trinity College. She’s co-editor of “Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter.”

    • Stop living in denial, Israel is an evil state

      Israel may not be Nazi, nor even a fascist state. Yet it is a member of the same terrible family, the family of evil states. Just consider these acts of evil perpetrated by the state…

      After we’ve cited nationalism and racism, hatred and contempt for Arab life, the security cult and resistance to the occupation, victimhood and messianism, one more element must be added without which the behavior of the Israeli occupation regime cannot be explained: Evil. Pure evil. Sadistic evil. Evil for its own sake. Sometimes, it’s the only explanation.

      Eva Illouz described its signs (“Evil now,” Haaretz Hebrew edition, July 30). Her essay, which challenges the idea of the banality of evil, considers the national group as the source of the evil. Using philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept, she finds a “family resemblance” between the Israeli occupation and history’s evil regimes. This similarity does not mean that Israel is Nazi, nor even fascist. And yet it is a member of the same terrible family, the family of evil states. It’s a depressing and brilliant analysis.

      The evil that Illouz attributes to Israel is not banal, it cannot happen anywhere, and it has political and social roots that are deeply embedded in Israeli society. Thus, Illouz joins Zeev Sternhell, who warned in his impressive and resounding essay about the cultural soil out of which fascism is now growing in Israel (“The birth of fascism,” Haaretz Hebrew edition, July 7).

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Simply not credible: The extraordinary verdict against the body that hopes to run the internet

      In an extraordinary judgment, the organization that hopes to take over running the top level of the internet later this year has been slammed by an independent review as at best incompetent and at worst deliberately mendacious.

      The decision [PDF] by ICANN’s Independent Review Panel (IRP) over the organization’s decision to refuse “community” status for three applications covering business suffixes has exposed a level of double-dealing that many suspected occurred in the non-profit organization but has been difficult to prove.

      The ICANN Board Governance Committee (BGC) in particular comes under fire for having repeatedly failed to carry out its duties.

      Despite serious allegations being made against ICANN’s staff and the “independent” evaluator it had selected – the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) – the panel found that the BGC did not carry out any investigation. Instead it had relied solely on material supplied by ICANN’s legal team – the very people at the center of the complaints.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/03/libreoffice-5-2-released/feed/ 0 List of Academics Who Are Protecting Patent Trolls http://techrights.org/2016/08/02/trolls-friendly-professors/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/02/trolls-friendly-professors/#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2016 14:45:07 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94732 Some, including Adam Mossoff, are associated with Conservative think tanks [1, 2]

Trolls-friendly professors

Summary: In the face of a system that is so abusive and unjust, the above academics oppose a reform that would limit the reach of Eastern District of Texas, capital of patent trolls

TITLES can be misleading. They don’t say much about a person’s affiliation or integrity and when universities are privately-owned and funded by large corporations it’s not enough to interpret the title “professor” as an instant legitimiser or indication of impartiality. There are still academics who promote GMOs, for example, but many are funded (one way or another, directly or indirectly) by the likes of Monsanto. It’s a lucrative business with billions of dollars at stake; throwing some corporate money at universities is ordinary practice, more so in the US than in Europe (where the EPO even pays academic publishers to print what EPO marketers write).

This week, Patently-O wrote about “28 Law Professors” (the term Professor does not mean in the US what it means in the rest of the world, some are just lecturers or RAs) and said they they sent a letter to politicians. “The new letter,” according to Professor Dennis Crouch (who does not agree with them), “argues that the venue limiting proposals are basically serving as a mechanism of weakening the power of patent holders: “The reality is that the major proponents of changing the venue rules are primarily large high-tech companies and retailers with an online presence sued in the Eastern District of Texas that would rather litigate in a small number of more defendant-friendly jurisdictions.””

Well, obviously. Put another way, those who oppose patent trolls want their cesspool, the Eastern District of Texas, to stop its madness. The Eastern District of Texas openly promotes its bias and hopes to promote litigation this way. This is not acceptable. It does not help innovators, it merely hurts them. What kind of academics support such a system? What does that say about such academics and the institutions that pay their salaries?

“The District of Massachusetts ruled that Limelight Networks did not infringe, but one decade later (and millions of dollars in legal fees) there is an outcome that has been favourable mostly to patent lawyers. How typical!”Blockstream, says a new article by Mike Masnick, “Promises Not To Abuse Patents” even though it hasn't got patents. “Over the years,” he writes, “we’ve discussed various examples of tech companies taking a stand against patent abuse. That is, in lieu of actual patent reform to fix a broken system, some companies are doing things on their own (we even had a podcast discussing a bunch of examples). One of my personal favorites was Twitter’s Innovator’s Patent Agreement which effectively lets the named inventors on the patent issue their own licenses to undermine trolls should the patents ever fall into trollish hands. Think of it as something of a poison pill to make the patents worth a lot less to pure trolls. One of the tricks though has been convincing smaller startups to take some of these steps — even the license on transfer network, which is sort of a no brainer for startups. So it’s good to see, as pointed out by EFF, that Blockstream, a fascinating company in the blockchain space that employs a ton of super smart people, take a big commitment to be a good player in the patent realm.”

Perhaps Blockstream has some impending patents and is preparing for backlash when the public finds out about it. Still, what happens if Blockstream gets bought by some hostile company along with its patents? Or worse: what is the patents are sold to trolls? Will the pledge still be applicable? It’s quite chaotic out there as one single company can be compelled to pay $54 million in ‘damages’ over one single patent, as per the Supreme Court‘s ruling in this case (Akamai v Limelight Networks). To quote MIP: “Limelight Networks has entered into a settlement agreement with Akamai Technologies to end the longstanding battle over a global hosting patent. The settlement converts the $51 million judgment into a $54 million license that will be paid in 12 equal quarterly installments starting August 1.”

Where does all of that money go? Surely not R&D. Limelight Networks is based in Arizona and the plaintiff/s included MIT, which produces no products and enjoys funding from taxpayers. The District of Massachusetts ruled that Limelight Networks did not infringe, but one decade later (and millions of dollars in legal fees) there is an outcome that has been favourable mostly to patent lawyers. How typical! █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/02/trolls-friendly-professors/feed/ 0 Links 2/8/2016: Kodi 17 Alpha 3, OpenSSH 7.3, TP-Link Forced to Open Up http://techrights.org/2016/08/02/tp-link-forced-to-open-up/ http://techrights.org/2016/08/02/tp-link-forced-to-open-up/#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2016 11:42:00 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94715

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Middle School Students Aim to Change the World With Linux

    The end of March of 2016 had arrived, and parent teacher conferences were in full swing at Community School of Excellence in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Parents came into the school for their appointments with their children’s teachers, and they sat down and discussed grades, behavior, and classroom activities. This time, however, was a little different. While the teachers were talking with the parents, one additional question was asked by teachers of parents: Do they need a computer at home for their children to use for school work? Parents who said “yes” were then sent down to talk to our school’s Linux club, the CSE Asian Penguins.

  • 10 reasons you shouldn’t upgrade to Windows 10 [iophk: "Mentions Chrome/Linux and Android/Linux but could have used a mention of GNU/Linux too"]
  • August 2016 Issue of Linux Journal

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • Container adoption remains in its infancy – but businesses should get ready for the next wave of virtualisation

      There has been a surge of interest in containers in recent years, particularly in the wake of Docker’s popularity among developers. Many are now suggesting that the virtualisation technology could eventually replace the hypervisors which have become near-ubiquitous in enterprise data centres.

      Simply put, containers offer a lightweight alternative to virtual machines, offering even greater resource utilisation, simplified management and the ability to quickly move applications betwee servers.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Logs Search Provider

        In this post I will be telling you about the search provider for the GNOME Logs as implemented by me in the last two weeks.

      • Looking forward to GUADEC

        GUADEC is approaching quickly and we just spend a whole day finalizing the planning so that everything will go smoothly during the conference. A few announcements for the conference are still in the pipeline including the social events and the complete talk schedule. So watch out for more announcements during the next two weeks.

      • Days Grid

        This is for the progress on the calendar. So far, you have seen a zoomed in version of the header of the calendar. So let’s zoom it out a bit.

      • Rejoice! Arc GTK Theme Will Be Available in Ubuntu 16.10

        If you love the Arc GTK theme, but don’t love needing to hunt down an install package every time you perform a fresh install, you’re going to love Ubuntu 16.10.

      • Beautiful Arc GTK Theme Now Available in the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Repos

        It would appear that the popular and beautiful Arc GTK Theme created by Horst3180 has finally landed in the software repositories of the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

  • Distributions

    • Submit Your Top 5 Linux Distributions

      Last week I wrote a list of the 5 Linux distributions I recommend for the everyday linux user.

      As expected I am receiving comments asking why I didn’t include this distribution or that distribution.

      I am therefore opening the floor to you guys and girls.

    • New Releases

      • 4MRecover 19.0 Data Recovery Live CD Enters Beta, Includes TestDisk 7.0

        Today, August 1, 2016, 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia about the availability of the Beta milestone of the upcoming 4MRecover 19.0 data recovery Live CD.

        Based on the latest Beta release of the 4MLinux 19.0 GNU/Linux operating system, 4MRecover 19.0 is now ready for public testing and it appears to include the usual TestDisk 7.0 and PhotoRec 7.0 utilities for recovering lost partitions and files from damaged disks and removable drives.

      • Simplicity Linux 16.07 out now

        Simplicity Linux is well know for it’s lightweight nature and support for netbooks. The team behind this wonderful distribution has annonced the release of Simplicity 16.07. This distribution is based on Puppy Linux but this time there is a little twist. This time Simplicity Linux is avaialble in Debian based version too. Simplicity 16.07 is released in dektop and mini editions which are based on Puppy Linux and it uses LXDE as default desktop environment. As we said earlier there is X version of Simplicity 16.07 which is based on Debian via AntiX distribution.

    • Arch Family

      • Arch Linux 2016.08.01 Is Now Available for Download, Ships with Kernel 4.6.4

        It’s the first day of August 2016, and, for us, Arch Linux users, it means that we can get our hands on a new ISO respin that can be used to deploy the popular GNU/Linux operating system on PCs without going to all the trouble of downloading lots of updates.

        Yes, you’re reading it right, Arch Linux 2016.08.01 is now available for download today, August 1, 2016, distributed as a dual-arch, bootable ISO image that supports installations on 64-bit and 32-bit computers and includes all the up-to-date core components that have been pushed to the distro’s main software repositories since July 1.

        However, Arch Linux 2016.08.01 ships with a kernel from the Linux 4.6 series, as the distribution’s maintainers have not yet moved to the latest Linux 4.7 kernel branch. Linux kernel 4.6.4 powers the Arch Linux 2016.08.01 ISO image, despite that fact that the latest release from the series is Linux kernel 4.6.5.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Finance

    • Debian Family

      • Retiring as a Debian developer

        This is a repost and update of my retirement letter sent privately to Debian last month, July 10, 2016. At that time I received many notes of appreciation and good wishes which I treasure. Now, I’d like to say goodbye to the broader Debian community and, as well, indicate which of the cleanup items have since been addressed in strikethrough style and with annotations.

      • Debian and Tor Services available as Onion Services

        We, the Debian project and the Tor project are enabling Tor onion services for several of our sites. These sites can now be reached without leaving the Tor network, providing a new option for securely connecting to resources provided by Debian and Tor.

        The freedom to use open source software may be compromised when access to that software is monitored, logged, limited, prevented, or prohibited. As a community, we acknowledge that users should not feel that their every action is trackable or observable by others. Consequently, we are pleased to announce that we have started making several of the various web services provided by both Debian and Tor available via onion services.

      • Doha and the past year in APT

        One of the more interesting topics that I attended was the ‘apt’ talk . There are 3-4 tools in the Debian world i.e. apt, aptitude, apt-get, dpkg and dselect. More often than not people know aptitude and apt-get whereas the rest of the packages are not thought so much about. What I somewhat suspected about the history of apt was revealed to be true today, courtesy David K.

      • Reproducible builds: week 65 in Stretch cycle
      • Free software activities in July 2016
      • Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen

        Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf 16 across an entire country? Or that there is a TV channel broadcasting talks by or about Linus Torvalds, Tor, OpenID, Common Lisp, Civic Tech, EFF founder John Barlow, how to make 3D printer electronics and many more fascinating topics? It works using only free software (all of it available from Github), and is administrated using a web browser and a web API.

      • AppRecommender: A package recommender system

        Hello, my name is Lucas Moura and this post will present AppRecommender. This project is a package recommender system for Debian systems. The intent of this application is to look for packages that users have already installed in their system and recommend new useful packages based on them. This approach is similar as the one seen on Netflix or Amazon, where the movies or goods that a user has already seen determine other items that will be recommended.

      • AppRecommender: My Google Summer of Code project

        AppRecommender is a package recommender system for Debian.

      • Derivatives

        • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” Gets the Latest Debian Security Fixes, Update Now

          The Parsix GNU/Linux development team informs the community about the availability of new security updates for their Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” operating system.

          There’s been a lot of updates released upstream, on the Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 “Jessie” software repositories during the month of July 2016, and Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” users have now received them all, starting with the massive Linux 4.1.28 LTS kernel update.

          Among the packages that received security fixes during the month of July, we can mention Apache2, MariaDB 10.0, PHP5, collectd, Xen, libgd2, libdbd-mysql-perl, NTP, Perl, phpMyAdmin, OpenSSH, Squid3, MySQL 5.5, Pidgin, Horizon, python-django, and mysql-connector-java.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • BQ’s Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition is an underwhelming tablet [Review]

            The Aquaris M10 is very much a first attempt for BQ and you would expect future iterations to have some significant improvements. It’s also hard to find compelling reasons why iOS or Android fans would want to switch over to an Ubuntu tablet, but those familiar with the operating system should be excited to finally have their needs met in the tablet market.

            One positive factor is that switching between tablet and desktop mode works very well for the most part, so can definitely fulfill professional needs as much as casual ones. This could be a viable option for someone who wants that flexibility and isn’t too fussed about some of the more superficial features.

            Aspects such as the cameras, display and build quality could all be improved, but are about right for the price point in this unspectacular but solid device.

            With the HD version costing €229.90 (£187) and the full HD tablet coming in at €279.90 (£227), the M10 offers decent value for money and provides a solid platform for BQ to build on in the future.

          • So Far Ubuntu Phone Hasn’t Tempted Me, But Would Highly Consider A Tizen Device

            With writing this weekend about switching to an S7 Edge powered by Android as my primary smartphone, it generated a flurry of comments in the forums and elsewhere with people wanting to share their two cents.

          • Win an Ubuntu Linux laptop in the System76 ‘Pop Quiz’ giveaway

            The upcoming school year is quickly approaching, meaning many parents and students are busy shopping. While some kids still need old-school things like pens and paper, the really fun thing to buy is a new laptop.

            Understandably, money is tight for many folks, meaning a quality computer might not be in the budget. Luckily, System76 is giving away one of its most popular Linux-based laptops — the Lemur. The pre-installed Ubuntu operating system is absolutely brilliant for education, making it a sweet prize for the winner. If you are interested in entering, you can find out the details below.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Review: Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” MATE

              That is where my time with Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” MATE ended. Overall, I can still give this a good recommendation for people who have at least a tiny bit of experience with Linux and may be looking for a stable, easy-to-use system. However, the usability issues I encountered, while each fairly minor, added up to the extent that I don’t feel as confident recommending this to total newbies (because while I would be able to work through these issues easily by myself, I don’t expect the same of a newbie), unless they have a more experienced friend helping them to install this (though after that, they should be OK on their own). To be able to retake the newbie demographic, I think this distribution needs just a bit more polish; I’d be excited to see what the future point releases hold, and I hope that these issues do get addressed.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Become a Better Open Source Advocate by Becoming a Better Human Being

    The best role models for any cause, open source or otherwise, are people you would admire even if they didn’t support your cause. In other words, your support of open source will be more meaningful if you strive to be a good person.

  • How Open Source is Shaping the Future of Wireless

    Most developers aren’t impressed by the ease of use of wireless protocols – they were originally invented by large corporations and heavily patented, which blocked individual developers from innovation. You had to have very deep pockets to bring any alternative to market.

  • FCC forces TP-Link to support open source firmware on routers

    Networking hardware vendor TP-Link today admitted violating US radio frequency rules by selling routers that could operate at power levels higher than their approved limits. In a settlement with the Federal Communications Commission, TP-Link agreed to pay a $200,000 fine, comply with the rules going forward, and to let customers install open source firmware on routers.

    The open source requirement is a unique one, as it isn’t directly related to TP-Link’s violation. Moreover, FCC rules don’t require router makers to allow loading of third-party, open source firmware. In fact, recent changes to FCC rules made it more difficult for router makers to allow open source software.

  • FCC settlement with Wi-Fi router maker a win for open source advocates
  • TP-Link fined $200k, told to be nice to wireless router tinkers after throwing a hissy fit
  • FCC Demands TP-Link Support Third-Party Router Firmware
  • TP-Link settles with the FCC over risky WiFi router power levels
  • FCC settlement means TP-Link routers might support third-party firmware after all
  • FCC Settles WiFi Router Power Investigation
  • TP-Link to allow third-party firmware on routers
  • TP-Link To Pay Up In Wi-Fi Router Settlement With FCC
  • Apache Mesos turns 1.0, but it’s no Kubernetes clone

  • Events

    • Top Reasons The Open Source Community Attends Events

      It should go without saying that there is no substitute for face to face collaboration. And what is open source if not the ultimate example of collaboration? Open source events provide a wide range of opportunities for the community to connect, and the end result of all of this is good for the community and good for business.

    • 2nd annual Open Source Open Society

      Using open source to improve how business and Government work at 2nd annual Open Source Open Society

    • Last day for SeaGL talk submission

      SeaGL conference in Seattle in November is still looking for speakers and today is the last day to submit talks. This is an all inclusive conference, featuring Allison Randal, President of the Open Source Initiative as the keynote speaker.

    • Last chance to submit linux.conf.au talks

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • In the browser election, Chrome leads by a landslide

        Chrome reached a major milestone last month when it was used by more than half of those browsing from a personal computer, data published Monday showed.

        According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, Chrome’s user share grew by more than 2 percentage points in July, the fourth time in the last six months that its gains were of that size, to end the month at 51%.

        In the last 12 months, Chrome has added 23.1 percentage points to its user share, starting that stretch with less than 30% and ending by owning a majority of the worldwide desktop browser market. Only two browsers have controlled more than half of the global browser share this century: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), which held a majority until December 2015, and now Chrome.

        As throughout 2016, most of Chrome’s July gains came at the expense of Microsoft’s browsers. IE and the newer Edge collectively lost 2.1 percentage points, dropping to 34.7%, a record low. Apple’s Safari shed one-tenth of a point, falling to 4.5%, its lowest level since November 2015.

    • Mozilla

      • Working for Women’s Economic Empowerment with the United Nations High Level Panel

        Mozilla Foundation Webmaker Program, Indonesia (photo credit: Laura de Reynal)

        It is critical to ensure that women are active participants in digital life. Without this we won’t reach full economic empowerment. An explicit focus on women and digital life is necessary for economic empowerment because the statistics are striking: over 1.7 billion women in low- and middle-income countries do not own mobile phones. Women in South Asia are 38 percent less likely to own a phone than men; in Africa, they are 50 percent less likely to use the internet.

        This is the perspective and focus I bring to the UN High Level Panel for Women’s Economic Empowerment, an initiative of the United Nations that aims at unlocking the power of women to work and achieve their financial independence. You can read here about my participation to the Panel.

        I joined fellow Panel members in Costa Rica a few weeks ago for a meeting hosted by Costa Rica President, Luis Guillermo Solis. Many thanks to President Solis for leading the meeting with both commitment and authenticity!

  • SaaS/Back End

  • CMS

    • Govstrap.io enables rapid deployment of UK government websites

      United Kingdom government websites can now be deployed within minutes by re-using the familiar theme produced by Government Digital Services (GDS) in combination with the Bootstrap framework.

      The open source software specialist OpusVL has made it possible to take the official Gov.UK website theme, which is under the MIT license, and reproduce it quickly and easily using Bootstrap, which originated from Twitter. Bootstrap is an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for creating front end websites and applications. With an increase in the variety of devices used to view websites, Bootstrap is a standard tool kit for building responsive design, and enabling websites to be mobile- and tablet-friendly.

    • Concrete5 Releases Version 8 Beta, More Open Source CMS News

      Portland, Ore.-based concrete5 released its version 8 beta for testing and feedback. It’s good for site builders who are comfortable reporting and fixing bugs, and who are prepared to build their test sites from scratch. Just remember: Beta releases are never recommended for production websites.

      Technology evangelist Jessica Dunbar called it “a key milestone and is the work of more than 230 contributors.” To find out about the new features, see what’s in store for version 8.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • OpenSSH

    • OpenSSH 7.3 Released, Adds ProxyJump & IdentityAgent Options

      OpenSSH 7.3 was released today by the OpenBSD camp with some security fixes while also providing a few new options and other features.

    • OpenSSH 7.3 released

      OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support. OpenSSH also includes transitional support for the legacy SSH 1.3 and 1.5 protocols that may be enabled at compile-time.

    • OpenSSH 7.3

      OpenSSH 7.3 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.

    • OpenSSH 7.3 Officially Released, Now Refuses RSA Keys Smaller Than 1024 Bits

      On August 1, 2016, the OpenBSD project proudly announced the availability for download of the OpenSSH 7.3 and Portable OpenSSH 7.3p1 open source software projects.

      OpenSSH is a 100% complete, freely distributed, and open-source Secure Shell (SSH) 2.0 protocol implementation for GNU/Linux and UNIX-like operating systems. It comes pre-installed with SFTP client and server support, as well as transitional support for the legacy SSH 1.3 and SSH 1.5 protocols, which can be enabled during compilation.

  • Public Services/Government

    • France pilots open source-based cloud services

      The French government is trying out various open source-based alternatives for building its own cloud computing infrastructure, writes SGMAP. “Free software enables modernisation of IT systems, including its most important new projects”, writes the government modernisation unit.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • SoldiPubblici one of OGP showcases awarded star status

      SoldiPubblici, an open data portal providing the public with information on Italian government expenditure, has been acknowledged as a “star” commitment by the Open Government Partnership (OGP). In the evaluation report ‘Star Reforms in the Open Government Partnership’ star status is given to a selection of commitments from OGP Action Plans to which the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) awarded star status in their latest reporting cycle. “These showcases represent exemplary reforms that have a potentially transformative impact on citizens in the country of implementation.”

    • UK and Finland Europe’s eGovernment leaders – UNPAN

      The United Kingdom and Finland are Europe’s eGovernment leaders, according to the United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN) 2016 UN eGovernment Survey. The list of top 10 eGovernment countries is completed by Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Estonia, Germany, Austria, and Spain.

    • UNPAN reports improvements for most EU countries

      The United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN) 2016 UN eGovernment Survey shows improvements in most of the lower ranking EU Member States. While in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Romania, eGovernment services improved, these were lower than the European average.

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Obama Signed Into Law Controversial GMO Labeling Bill. Now What?

      What’s an advocate of clear GMO labeling to do now that President Barack Obama has signed into law the food industry-supported measure dubbed the DARK Act?

      One option, according to the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), is to join roughly half a million people who’ve said they will boycott brands that won’t label their products—in a clear way for everyone to see—that have been produced with genetic engineering.

      When Obama on Friday signed the measure “paid for and written by corporations who clearly have something to hide,” said Ronnie Cummins, international director of OCA, the president “succumbed to industry pressure to betray the 90 percent of Americans who want GMOs labeled.”

      Congress passed the measure, which supercedes Vermont’s historic labeling law, last month, and now, as the Associated Press reports, the “Agriculture Department has two years to write the rules.”

    • Rural counties across the US becoming a powder keg for HIV outbreak

      A man was lying sedate after injecting drugs. His fellow users, to amuse themselves, threw needles at him like a human dartboard to see if they would stick, according to a recent police report in Wolfe County, Kentucky.

      “Back in the day, all we had to worry about was people drinking or smoking weed,” said special deputy Gary Smith, who is entering his 25th year with the Wolfe County sheriff’s department.

      But with a growing US opioid epidemic that has escalated the number of injection drug users, the bucolic county has become acutely at risk from another public health problem.

      Wolfe County tops the list of places that are most vulnerable to an HIV outbreak.

      A new alarm for the HIV epidemic sounded early last year when a small, rural town in Indiana was beset with a staggering 188 cases of the hard-to-control disease – and the sirens have been heard in similar towns across the country.

    • New Cold War at the Olympics

      The Western media’s Russia-bashing has become epidemic, creating a dangerous dynamic as the world plunges into a new Cold War, with even sports becoming a propaganda arena, as Rick Sterling explains.

    • Superbugs, Sewage, and Scandal: Are Rio Olympics Poised for Disaster?

      A biology professor has simple advice for athletes and tourists descending on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the Olympics’ start on Friday: “Don’t put your head underwater.”

      Dr. Valerie Harwood, chair of the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of South Florida, remarked on the dangers posed by Rio’s water to AP, which reported Monday that a 16-months-long study revealed that “the waterways of Rio de Janeiro are as filthy as ever, contaminated with raw human sewage teeming with dangerous viruses and bacteria.”

    • Rio 2016: Swimmers need to ingest only three teaspoons of water to be almost certain of contracting a virus

      A report commisioned by the Associated Press has revealed that water in Rio’s Olympic and Paralympic venues holds viral levels 1.7m times what would be considered alarming in the United States and Europe just five days before the Games get underway

    • 40 now hospitalised after anthrax outbreak in Yamal, more than half are children

      The concern among experts is that global warming thawed a diseased animal carcass at least 75 years old, buried in the melting permafrost, so unleashing the disease.

      A total of 40 people, the majority of them children, from nomadic herder families in northern Siberia are under observation in hospital amid fears they may have contracted the anthrax. Doctors stress that so far there are NO confirmed cases.

      Up to 1,200 reindeer were killed either by anthrax or a heatwave in the Arctic district where the infection spread.

      Specialists from the Chemical, Radioactive and Biological Protection Corps were rushed to regional capital Salekhard on a military Il-76 aircraft.

      They were deployed by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu to carry laboratory tests on the ground, detect and eliminate the focal point of the infection, and to dispose safely of dead animals.

    • Use of Dicamba-Resistant Monsanto Crops Leads to Soybean Death
    • Crime In The Fields: How Monsanto And Scofflaw Farmers Hurt Soybeans In Arkansas

      The story starts with Monsanto because the St. Louis-based biotech giant launched, this year, an updated version of its herbicide-tolerant soybean seeds. This new version, which Monsanto calls “Xtend,” isn’t just engineered to tolerate sprays of glyphosate, aka Roundup. It’s also immune to dicamba.

      Monsanto created dicamba-resistant soybeans (and cotton) in an effort to stay a step ahead of the weeds. The strategy of planting Roundup-resistant crops and spraying Roundup to kill weeds isn’t working so well anymore, because weeds have evolved resistance to glyphosate. Adding genes for dicamba resistance, so the thinking went, would give farmers the option of spraying dicamba as well, which would clear out the weeds that survive glyphosate.

      There was just one hitch in the plan. A very big hitch, as it turned out. The Environmental Protection Agency has not yet approved the new dicamba weedkiller that Monsanto created for farmers to spray on its new dicamba-resistant crops. That new formulation of dicamba, according to Monsanto, has been formulated so that it won’t vaporize as easily, and won’t be as likely to harm neighboring crops. If the EPA approves the new weedkiller, it may impose restrictions on how and when the chemical may be used.

      But, Monsanto went ahead and started selling its dicamba-resistant soybeans before this herbicide was approved. It gave farmers a new weed-killing tool that they couldn’t legally use.

      Monsanto says it did so because these seeds weren’t just resistant to dicamba; they also offered higher yields, which farmers wanted. In an email to The Salt, Phil Miller, Monsanto’s vice president for global regulatory and government affairs, wrote that “there’s incredible value in the Xtend technology independent of herbicide applications: There is great demand for strong yield performance and our latest industry leading genetics.” Monsanto says it also made it clear to farmers that they were not allowed to spray dicamba on these dicamba-resistant beans.

      Farmers themselves, however, may have had other ideas. Robert Goodson, an agricultural extension agent in Phillips County, Ark., believes that some farmers were hoping that the EPA would approve the new dicamba weedkiller in the course of the growing season, so they’d get to spray it over their crops.

  • Security

    • Securing Embedded Linux

      Until fairly recently, Linux developers have been spared many of the security threats that have bedeviled the Windows world. Yet, when moving from desktops and servers to the embedded Internet of Things, a much higher threat level awaits.

      “The basic rules for Linux security are the same whether it’s desktop, server, or embedded, but because IoT devices are typically on all the time, they pose some unique challenges,” said Mike Anderson, CTO and Chief Scientist for The PTR Group, Inc. during an Embedded Linux Conference talk called “Securing Embedded Linux.”

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Packt security bundle winner announced!
    • Everyone has been hacked

      Unless you live in a cave (if you do, I’m pretty jealous) you’ve heard about all the political hacking going on. I don’t like to take sides, so let’s put aside who is right or wrong and use it as a lesson in thinking about how we have to operate in what is the new world.

      In the past, there were ways to communicate that one could be relatively certain was secure and/or private. Long ago you didn’t write everything down. There was a lot of verbal communication. When things were written down there was generally only one copy. Making copies of things was hard. Recording communications was hard. Even viewing or hearing many of these conversations if you weren’t supposed to was hard. None of this is true anymore, it hasn’t been true for a long time, yet we still act like what we do is just fine.

    • Android Security Bulletin—July 2016
    • The July 2016 Android security bulletin
    • How To Use Google For Hacking?
    • Securing Embedded Linux by Michael E. Anderson
    • Botnet DDoS attacks in Q2: Linux Botnets on the rise, length of attacks increase

      Kaspersky Lab has released its report on botnet-assisted DDoS attacks for the second quarter of 2016 based on data provided by Kaspersky DDoS Intelligence*. The number of attacks on resources located on Chinese servers grew considerably, while Brazil, Italy and Israel all appeared among the leading countries hosting C&C servers.

    • Cisco Cybersecurity Report Warns of Serious Ransomware Dangers

  • Defence/Aggression

    • MH370 flight was deliberately flown into ocean, crash expert says

      Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was deliberately flown into the sea, an expert air crash investigator has claimed.

      Larry Vance said photos of the plane’s flaperon found on a beach 2,500 miles from the search area show “definite evidence” it was extended at the time of the crash, suggesting the pilot brought the plane down in the ocean.

      “Somebody was flying the airplane at the end of its flight,” Mr Vance told Australia’s 60 Minutes programme.

    • MH370 was flown into water ‘deliberately’, says senior crash expert

      One of the world’s leading air crash investigators says he believes flight MH370 was “deliberately” crashed into the sea by a rogue pilot in a possible murder-suicide bid.

      Larry Vance said erosion on the edges of recovered wing parts suggested the plane was lowered to its doom in a controlled fashion.

      The erosion was caused by a part of the plane’s wing – called a flaperon – being exposed to the elements when it was extended.

    • U.S. Says New Bombing Campaign Against ISIS in Libya Has No “End Point at This Particular Moment”

      The U.S. launched a major new military campaign against ISIS on Monday when U.S. planes bombed targets in Libya, responding to requests from the U.N.-backed Libyan government. Strikes took place in the coastal town of Sirte, which ISIS took in June of last year.

      The strikes represent a significant escalation in the U.S. war against ISIS, spreading the conflict thousands of miles from the warzones in Syria and Iraq.

      All of these attacks took place without Congressional authorization or even debate.

      “We want to strike at ISIL anywhere it raises its head,” said Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook. “Libya is one of those places.” He said the airstrikes “would continue as long as [the Libyan government] is requesting them,” and that they do not have “an end point at this particular moment in time.”

    • US Launches Airstrikes in Libya in ‘Deeply Concerning’ New Offensive

      The U.S. on Monday launched airstrikes against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Libya, expanding its war in the region in what the Pentagon indicated will be a long-term offensive against the militant group and what critics said was a “deeply” concerning move.

      Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said Monday that she was “deeply concerned about the expansion of U.S. airstrikes in Libya. The U.S. military continues to become more engaged in the Middle East, despite the lack of a Congressional debate or specific authorization.”

    • US Airstrikes Hit Libya To Bolster UN-Created Government

      The Pentagon has announced today that the US has begun conducting military airstrikes against Libya with the stated intent of defeating ISIS in that country. According to the Pentagon spokesman, the Libyan “Government of National Accord” requested that the US begin airstrikes against what they claim is an ISIS stronghold in the Libyan town of Sirte, the birthplace of murdered Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

    • Empire’s Chain Reaction

      Donald Trump suggested that his campaign may take away press credentials from The New York Times, his latest attack on the media over the course of his presidential campaign.

      At a campaign event in Columbus, Ohio, Monday, the Republican presidential nominee called the Times’ coverage of him “very dishonest” and suggested adopting the same ban on the newspaper as he has on The Washington Post. Trump revoked the Post’s press credentials in June after the newspaper published an article critical of Trump’s statements about a mass shooting in Orlando, Florida.

      “It’s gotten a little better,” he said about the Post’s coverage. “I should do it with the Times.”

      Over the course of the election, Trump’s campaign has banned nearly two dozen news organizations from campaign events, including POLITICO, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Univision and The Des Moines Register. The bans, which have been criticized on First Amendment grounds, have been enforced unevenly. Trump has told CNN that, if elected president, he would not interfere with the White House press credentialing process.

    • Past Time To Rethink NATO

      On bringing Estonia into NATO, no Cold War president would have dreamed of issuing so insane a war guarantee.

    • “Pow, Pow, Yous Are Dead!”

      And then, of course, there were my kids, my husband, and those “guns.” As a boy, Patrick wasn’t allowed to play with toy guns. Instead, he, his parents, and their friends would go to the mall during the Christmas buying spree to put “Stop War Toys” stickers on Rambo and G.I. Joe action figures. When he went to his friends’ houses, he had to tell them that war toys were verboten.

      I grew up in a similar family of activists. We, too, were forbidden toy guns and other war toys. My brother and I were more likely to play games like “protester at the Pentagon” than cops and robbers. I’ve been thinking recently about why toy guns didn’t have a grip on our imaginations as kids. I suspect it was because we understood — were made to understand — what the big gun of U.S. militarism had done in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Indochina, and throughout Central America. Our dad had seen the big gun of war up close and personal. His finger — the same one he pointed at us when we were in trouble — had pulled the trigger again and again in France during World War II. He was decorated there, but had zero nostalgia for the experience. He was, in fact, deeply ashamed of the dashing figure he had once cut when home from the front. And so, dad screwed up a new kind of courage to say no to war and violence, to killing of any kind. His knowledge of war imbued his nonviolent peace activist mission with a genuine, badass, superhero style swagger.

      Our parents — our community of ragtag, countercultural Catholic peace activists — made that no-violence, no-killing, no-matter-what point again and again. In fact, my early experience of guns was the chilling fear of knowing that, in protest, my father, mother, and their friends were walking into what they called “free fire zones” on military bases, where well-armed, well-trained soldiers were licensed to kill intruders. So we didn’t point toy guns at each other. We didn’t pow-pow with our fingers or sticks. We crossed those fingers and hoped that the people we loved would be safe.

      Our inner city Baltimore neighborhood, where crack cocaine madness was just taking hold, drove that point home on a micro level. Our house was robbed at gunpoint more than once — and we had so little worth taking. We watched a man across the street bleed to death after being stabbed repeatedly in a fight over nothing. People from our house ran to help and were there for far too long before an ambulance even arrived. We knew as little kids that violence was no laughing matter, nor child’s play. It was serious business and was to be resisted.

    • Russian & Iranian Press deplore Hillary Clinton Hawkishness; Israelis complain she’s Dove

      How is the international press responding to the Democratic National Convention and the formalization of Hillary Clinton’s status as the party’s standard-bearer in the presidential campaign?

      BBC Monitoring helped me find these reports, which I’m paraphrasing or quoting from their translation:

      Boaz Bismuth in the Hebrew edition of Yisrael Hayom (Israel Today), which is pro-Netanyahu, criticized the Democrats for their message that the US is unprecedentedly strong. He wrote that polls show Americans to be concerned about terrorism and rising crime. Then he pointed to the Syrian government siege of east Aleppo (with Russian aerial help) as another thing the US has to worry about.

      This newspaper is given away free and is owned by allegedly corrupt US casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, so its talking points are Republican ones. Actually, crime is not rising in the US; violent crime is at historic low. And, while the siege of east Aleppo is troubling from the point of view of human rights (you’re not allowed to starve out civilians), it is hard to imagine most Americans caring, one way or another.

    • Pope and French Muslims try Muslim-Christian outreach instead of ‘War on Terror’ Polarization

      AFP reported from the papal airplane on Pope Francis’s remarks about Islam in the wake of the brutal murder of an elderly priest by two teenagers of North African heritage in Normandy last Tuesday. Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) claimed responsibility.

    • We Can’t Bomb Our Way to Better Schools

      From the left and the right, policy proposals are flying fast and furious. It is an election year, after all. But one topic is completely off the agenda from both sides of the party line: decreasing military spending.

      Today’s political candidates are universally unwilling to discuss the military budget, overseas aggression, nuclear weapons, militarism, or imperialism—except to recommend more of it.

      The problem is, we can’t bomb our way into better schools.

      Year after year, we continue to pour our tax dollars into the war budget at the expense of other social programs. And, even as we overfund the military contractors, we also fail to care for our veterans and renege on our recruitment promises of education and jobs for the youth. Neither of the two major-party presidential candidates will discuss ending the endless war, bringing our troops home, or investing in improving the infrastructure, education, and opportunities here at home.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • 15 fire-linked firms escape prosecution in Indonesia’s Riau

      On July 23 the local police headquarters in the Sumatran province of Riau released SP3 notices related to 15 companies that the Ministry of Environment and Forestry had listed in connection with last year’s fires. A SP3 is an official police document that confirms a case has been closed. No charges will be brought against any of the 15 firms.

      “We are very disappointed with the issuance of the SP3,” said Riko Kurniawan, the executive director of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) in Riau province. It showed the police “lacked seriousness” in their pursuit of errant companies, he told Mongabay.

      “This is one of the indicators to show how serious the government is — particularly law enforcement — to tackle forest fires,” added Greenpeace Indonesia forest campaigner Teguh Surya.

      The El Nino weather event in 2015 prolonged the dry season and fueled annual fires that incinerated more than 2 million hectares in Indonesia. Much of what went up in smoke was highly combustible peat stored within marshes near the coastal areas of Riau, South Sumatra and West Kalimantan provinces.

      The result was a national health emergency and a disastrous spike in Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions. At one point Indonesia’s chief security minister said Indonesia would commandeer ships from the state ferry company to evacuate the helpless in their thousands.

    • NOAA helps save nearly 100 wetland acres for Michigan restoration

      The Great Lakes hold 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water, making habitat restoration critically important for severely degraded industrial areas near their shores. In Michigan, NOAA has moved that goal forward by supporting the recent purchase of 98.8 wetland acres near Muskegon Lake, which feeds directly into Lake Michigan.

    • Forest restoration gets a cutting edge

      Research by scientists from the UK and Tanzania has revealed that assisted ecological restoration can lead to dramatic increases in growth of new and established trees – helping to mitigate climate change and boost biodiversity.

      All that is required, they say, is effective control of lianas, the fast-growing, woody climbing vines that, left to their own devices, quickly take over forest in which most or all of the merchantable timber has been cut, and crowd out emerging tree seedlings.

    • Melting Permafrost Releases Deadly, Long-Dormant Anthrax in Siberia

      A Russian heatwave has activated long-dormant anthrax bacteria in Siberia, sickening at least 13 people and killing one boy and more than 2,300 reindeer.

    • Child, 12, died from anthrax, as nine cases confirmed of the deadly disease

      The boy, Denis, died on Saturday from the virulent intestinal form of anthrax after eating infected venison. His grandmother died a day earlier, but as yet the cause is not established.

      Eight other people are now confirmed to be suffering from anthrax, including three children, according to preliminary diagnoses in the outbreak on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia.

      The dead boy was a member of a reindeer herding family.

      A total of 72 people are now in hospital, a rise of 32 since Friday, under close observation amid fears of a major outbreak. 41 of those hospitalised are children as Russia copes with a full scale health emergency above the polar circle which has also killed thousands of reindeer.

    • Once-in-a-Millenium Rainfall Descends on Maryland, Killing 2

      An entire month’s worth of rain fell on Ellicott City, in Howard County, Maryland, within two hours late Saturday evening, causing catastrophic flash floods that killed two people and forced over 100 others to be rescued.

      The local Patapsco River rose more than 13 feet, according to The Weather Channel. A state of emergency was declared Sunday in Howard County, where the community of 65,000 is located.

      Local resident Joyce Healy told NBC that she was driving on Ellicott City’s Main Street when she saw a Mercedes-Benz “floating back down the road.”

      “I’ve never seen anything like this, ever—the devastation down here,” Healy said.

      Howard County executive Allan Kittleman characterized the flooding as “a terrible, terrible, horrific incident” in comments made to NBC on Sunday afternoon, adding that “it looks like a war zone.”

  • Finance

    • Facebook May Owe $5 Billion to the Internal Revenue Service
    • Donald Trump Ducks Tax Disclosure

      As Donald Trump’s tweets pile one atop another, generating sensational headlines, issues of true substance are tending to get lost in the shuffle. None is more important for voters to keep in mind than the failure of Mr. Trump to disclose his full income tax returns, something he is not likely to do by Election Day.

      He is the first major party candidate since 1976 — since Watergate, essentially — to deny voters that vital measure of credibility. It is not required by law that candidates furnish their returns. But Americans have come to expect it.

      The interest in Mr. Trump’s case is particularly high. He is running for the White House partly as a business wizard, but is he really as rich and talented as he boasts? Is he as philanthropic as he claims with his reputed billions? Has he truly no conflicts of interest in Russia, whose computer hackers he has bizarrely invited to spy on Hillary Clinton, his campaign rival?

      These questions are of Mr. Trump’s own making, and a timely release of his tax returns would provide some answers. “There’s nothing to learn from them,” he tried to insist in May, arguing that he would not make the returns public until after an Internal Revenue Service audit is complete.

      But the I.R.S. says Mr. Trump is free to release the returns at any time and to defend their accuracy, just as President Richard Nixon did while he was undergoing an audit. In the past, Mr. Trump has not hesitated to attack the I.R.S. as “very unfair,” but now he stands before the voters using the agency as a shield against disclosure.

    • Theresa May’s Brexit shake-up of Whitehall sending “mixed messages” to the EU

      Institute for Government says Department for International Trade’s remit is at odds with comments from new prime minister Theresa May

    • Nothing simple about UK regaining WTO status post-Brexit

      In the weeks that preceded the UK’s EU referendum, WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo broke his silence over the UK leaving the EU (Brexit), first with the Financial Times, followed by Reuters, the Guardian, and others. One of his key points was that the UK would face complex talks in the World Trade Organization. What did he mean?

    • Return to the Commonwealth? UK-Africa trade after Brexit will not be straightforward

      In a speech to the Institute of Chartered Engineers in February, David Davis MP – now Secretary of State for Exiting the EU – told the audience: ‘The only Commonwealth country to enjoy a free trade agreement with the EU so far is South Africa.’ In fact, there are free trade agreements either awaiting adoption or in force between the EU and 32 Commonwealth countries. Regardless of its accuracy, Davis’s assertion reflects a broader narrative put forward by the ‘liberal leavers’ in the Brexit campaign. Their argument was that membership of the‘protectionist’ EU constrains the UK’s ability to make trade links with the wider world – and particularly with Britain’s apparently natural partners in the Commonwealth.

    • Leaving the EU customs union: what is involved?

      A key issue from a trade perspective will be whether or not the UK stays in the EU customs union when it leaves the European Union (EU).

      The customs union is an important element of the EU Single Market. Under its rules, the EU operates as a trade bloc, operating common external tariffs and customs barriers, and negotiating trade deals as one. As a member of the customs union, the UK is not allowed to negotiate other bilateral trade deals – which is why Liam Fox has argued that it needs to leave.

    • Don’t listen to the fearmongers: our Brexit negotiations are in safe hands

      When Michel Barnier was appointed EU commissioner for financial services in 2009, I admit I was worried. After all, President Sarkozy could not hide his satisfaction that a Frenchman would be in charge of the City of London, ready to launch an onslaught of new financial regulation. Some of our newspapers called Barnier the “most dangerous man in Europe”.

    • Lords could delay Brexit decision, says Tory peer

      The House of Lords could halt or delay an attempt to activate Article 50 and enact Brexit, a Tory peer has said.

      Baroness Wheatcroft said she felt it was “imperative” to not activate Article 50.

      Speaking to The Times, she said she hoped that delays in the Lords of any potential Brexit legislation would result in a second referendum.

      A legal challenge as to whether the government can trigger Article 50 without the authorisation of Parliament will be heard in the autumn.

    • CNN and Fox News Are Finally Covering the TPP After Ignoring It for Two Years

      Up until recently, cable news outlets almost completely ignored the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — the 12-nation government agreement that would dramatically expand corporate and investor rights at the expense of medical affordability, the environment, and labor rights.

      The impact of this news blackout was devastating on Americans’ ability to understand what the agreement entailed. A June 2015 New York Times poll found that 78 percent of Americans said they had heard or read “not much” or “nothing at all” about the TPP.

    • Is Hillary Double-Talking on Trade Deals?

      Hillary Clinton is promising to take a tougher stand on U.S. trade deals, but is that just campaign talk to appease supporters of Bernie Sanders and steal some backing away from Donald Trump, asks JP Sottile.

    • We need to reach out

      Like many campaigners in Scotland, and up and down the length of the UK, I’m shattered. Exhausted after years of pounding pavements delivering leaflets; spending every waking minute organising meetings; writing post after post trying to persuade friends, colleagues and twitter trolls of the rights and wrongs of our respective positions; even standing for election. Exhausted because after all these years of work, at times I find myself wondering whether any of it was worth it.

      In the Brexit-destined Britain of today, it feels impossible to be inspired and hopeful about the better future we’ve been working for. But whilst giving up and stepping back is as tempting as lying on a beach in the sun for a month, there is a way to build that future without destroying ourselves in the process.

    • Washington State: Charter School Backers Want to Oust Judge Who Authored Anti-Charter Decision

      Voters of Washington State, wake up!

      The billionaires who have been trying to privatize your public schools are up to their old tricks.

      Bill Gates and his pals have been pushing charters schools since the late 1990s. There have been four referenda on charter schools in Washington State. The privatizers lost the first three, but swamped the race with millions in their 2012 campaign and won by a razor-thin margin, defeating the NAACP, teachers, parents, the League of Women Voters, and school board members.

      Defenders of public schools sued to stop public money from going to privately managed charter schools. In 2015, Washington’s highest court agreed with them that charters are not common schools, as required by the state constitution, because their boards are not elected. Funding charter schools with public money, the high court ruled, was unconstitutional.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Clinton Foundation, State and Kremlin Connections

      Hillary Clinton touts her tenure as secretary of state as a time of hardheaded realism and “commercial diplomacy” that advanced American national and commercial interests. But her handling of a major technology transfer initiative at the heart of Washington’s effort to “reset” relations with Russia raises serious questions about her record. Far from enhancing American national interests, Mrs. Clinton’s efforts in this area may have substantially undermined U.S. national security.

    • How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump

      Few political consultants have had a client fail quite as spectacularly as Paul Manafort’s did in Ukraine in the winter of 2014.

      President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who owed his election to, as an American diplomat put it, an “extreme makeover” Mr. Manafort oversaw, bolted the country in the face of violent street protests. He found sanctuary in Russia and never returned, as his patron, President Vladimir V. Putin, proceeded to dismember Ukraine, annexing Crimea and fomenting a war in two other provinces that continues.

      Mr. Manafort was undaunted.

      Within months of his client’s political demise, he went to work seeking to bring his disgraced party back to power, much as he had Mr. Yanukovych himself nearly a decade earlier. Mr. Manafort has already had some success, with former Yanukovych loyalists — and some Communists — forming a new bloc opposing Ukraine’s struggling pro-Western government.

    • Paris strikes astonishing partnership with secret Isis sponsor tied to Hillary Clinton [EXCLUSIVE]

      The City of Paris has struck a corporate partnership with French industrial giant, Lafarge, recently accused of secretly sponsoring the Islamic State (Isis or Daesh) for profit.

      Documents obtained by several journalistic investigations reveal that Lafarge has paid taxes to the terror group to operate its cement plant in Syria, and even bought Isis oil for years.

      Yet according to the campaign group, SumOfUs, Lafarge is the corporate partner and sand provider to the City of Paris for this summer’s Paris-Plages urban beach event. The project run by Office of the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, will create artificial beaches along the river Seine in the centre and northeast of Paris.

      Lafarge also has close ties to Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Apart from being a regular donor to the Clinton Foundation, Clinton herself was a director of Lafarge in the early 1990s, and did legal work for the firm in the 1980s. During her connection to Lafarge, the firm was implicated in facilitating a CIA-backed covert arms export network to Saddam Hussein.

    • Killary
    • DNC Breach extended to systems used by Clinton campaign

      An analytical system hosted by the Democratic National Committee and used by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign team was accessed by hackers. In a statement issued by the Clinton campaign, a spokesperson said that a network intrusion had exposed data on the system maintained by the DNC, but that the campaign organizations’s own systems did not appear to have been breached. No financial or personal identifying data other than voter information was stored on the analytical system.

    • How Hillary Clinton helped create Donald Trump – and how he could destroy her

      Hillary Clinton should have been a safe bet for President. Yet now she is fighting her own shadowy reflection in Donald Trump – a spectre she and her party helped create. With just 100 days until the vote, how did we get here? What happens next? And what does this election show us about America today?

    • NSA whistleblower: The agency has all of Hillary’s deleted emails
    • Did “Another Snowden” Leak Hillary Clinton’s Emails?
    • Former NSA analyst: Clinton email leak may have come from the U.S.
    • Blaming Russia For the DNC Hack Is Almost Too Easy

      A critical look exposes the significant flaws in the attribution. First, all of the technical evidence can be spoofed. Although some argue that spoofing the mound of uncovered evidence is too much work, it can easily be done by a small team of good attackers in three or four days. Second, the tools used by Cozy Bear appeared on the black market when they were first discovered years ago and have been recycled and used against many other targets, including against German industry. The reuse and fine-tuning of existing malware happens all the time. Third, the language, location settings, and compilation metadata can easily be altered by changing basic settings on the attacker’s computer in five minutes without the need of special knowledge. None of technical evidence is convincing. It would only be convincing if the attackers used entirely novel, unique, and sophisticated tools with unmistakable indicators pointing to Russia supported by human intelligence, not by malware analysis.

      The DNC attackers also had very poor, almost comical, operational security (OPSEC). State actors tend to have a quality assurance review when developing cyberattack tools to minimize the risk of discovery and leaving obvious crumbs behind. Russian intelligence services are especially good. They are highly capable, tactically and strategically agile, and rational. They ensure that offensive tools are tailored and proportionate to the signal they want to send, the possibility of disclosure and public perception, and the odds of escalation. The shoddy OPSEC just doesn’t fit what we know about Russian intelligence.

      The claim that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian false flag operation may not hold up either. If Russia wanted to cover up the fact it had hacked the DNC, why create a pseudonym that could only attract more attention and publish emails? Dumping a trove of documents all at once is less valuable than cherry picking the most damaging information and strategically leaking it in a crafted and targeted fashion, as the FSB, SVR or GRU have probably done in the past. Also, leaking to Wikileaks isn’t hard. They have a submission form.

      Given these arguments, blaming Russia is not a slam dunk. Why would a country with some of the best intelligence services in the world commit a whole series of really stupid mistakes in a highly sensitive operation?

    • Hillary Clinton Lies About Emails, Again

      In one of her first post-convention interviews, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Fox News Anchor Chris Wallace that “[FBI] Director Comey said my answers [regarding the email scandal] were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.”

      This is flatly not true and, more to the point, Hillary Clinton knows it is flatly not true.

    • Campaign says Clinton didn’t mean to mislead with her various email explanations

      Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign struggled Monday to square her claims that she told the truth about her secret email account with the sworn testimony of the FBI director last month, as top Clinton aides insisted that Mrs. Clinton didn’t mean to mislead voters with her various explanations.

      [...]

      Media fact-checkers rejected Mrs. Clinton’s explanation Monday. PolitiFact rated it a “Pants on Fire,” and The Washington Post gave it “four pinocchios.” Both of those are the worst ratings on their respective scales.

    • Who Should Bernie Voters Support Now? Robert Reich vs. Chris Hedges on Tackling the Neoliberal Order

      The day after Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the Democratic National Convention and urged his supporters to work to ensure his former rival wins the presidential race, we host a debate between Clinton supporter Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, and Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who backs Sanders.

    • The Audacity of Hope and Hacks

      The conventions underscore that both parties’ identities are shifting rapidly.

    • 20 Reasons Black Women & Men Should Consider #JillNotHill This November
    • Green Party candidate Jill Stein announces VP running mate

      Dr. Stein made it official Monday on Twitter, saying she was “Honored to announce human rights champion Ajamu Baraka as my VP running mate!”

      On Baraka’s personal website, he is described as having “roots” in “the Black Liberation Movement and anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity struggles.” He was, until 2011, the Founding Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network. His work has been primarily in the humanitarian sector, and he has partnered with Amnesty International in the past. He is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

    • Jill Stein Picks Long-Time CounterPuncher Ajamu Baraka as Her VP Running Mate

      Green Party presumptive Presidential nominee Jill Stein has offered her vice-presidential bid to international human rights scholar and activist Ajamu Baraka.

      “I am honored and excited to announce that my running mate in the 2016 presidential election will be Ajamu Baraka, activist, writer, intellectual and organizer with a powerful voice, vision, and lifelong commitment to building true political revolution,” Stein announced.

      “Ajamu Baraka is a powerful, eloquent spokesperson for the transformative, radical agenda whose time has come – an agenda of economic, social, racial, gender, climate, indigenous and immigrant justice. Ajamu’s life’s work has embodied the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Stein continued. “In this hour of unprecedented crisis, we are honored to lift up a unified movement for justice in the only national political party that is not held hostage by corporate money, lobbyists and super-PACs. We look forward to bringing this agenda for justice to the American people in the exciting race ahead.”

    • After Reports to the Contrary, Tim Kaine Says He Still Supports the Hyde Amendment

      In an interview Friday morning with CNN, Vice Presidential candidate Tim Kaine said that he still supports the Hyde Amendment. Kaine said that, despite reports, “I have not changed my position,” on the bill which bans the use of federal money on abortion services.

      At the beginning of the Democratic National Convention, spokespeople for both Clinton and Kaine said that he would support a repeal of the Hyde Amendment. Clinton committed to repealing Hyde early in her campaign, and the Democratic platform reiterated that position. The amendment, which primarily impacts Medicaid recipients, has long been the target of pro-choice activists who argue that it targets the reproductive health care of poor women.

      Kaine has long been vocal about his personal reservations on abortion, but as NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and other pro-choice groups have stressed, his voting record in the Senate is “100 percent pro-choice.” Yet Kaine’s nomination concerned some activists who pointed to his time as Virginia governor. During his tenure, Kaine signed a handful of anti-abortion bills, many of which, as Think Progress notes, are still in effect today. Among other things, Kaine signed a law that provided funding for so-called crisis clinics.

    • No Matter Who Our Next President Is, They Won’t Understand Technology

      Politico has an article with a misleading title — the return of the Luddite president — which discusses how neither of the two major party Presidential candidates are even remotely tech savvy. The headline is an unfortunate oversell. Luddites aren’t just people who don’t know anything about technology. They’re people who actively dislike certain technologies, in the belief that such advances will harm their own livelihoods. In a broader sense, the term is used to discuss people who generally dislike the march of technological progress. Again, that does not appear to be the case with either of the two candidates, who (at best) might just be described as agnostic to/indifferent to new technologies and somewhat ignorant on what that might mean from a policy perspective.

    • Meet Trump’s latest political enemy: Fire marshals

      Even before Donald Trump kicked off his town hall event Monday he gathered reporters to decry “politics at its lowest” — but he wasn’t talking about Hillary Clinton or the latest controversy swirling around his campaign, his feud with the parents of a slain Muslim US soldier.

      Instead, Trump was unleashing on the local fire marshal, accusing the city official of turning away thousands of Trump supporters without cause. It was the second time in three days Trump has lambasted a local fire marshal during a campaign rally.

      “He ought to be ashamed of himself. They turned away thousands of people,” Trump told supporters when he kicked off his rally.

    • Media’s political influence: We can bash Trump and his supporters all we want — but will it work?

      Did the media grasp the importance of the moment Thursday night as the Democratic National Convention concluded? I don’t mean the importance of the first woman major-party candidate being nominated for the presidency. On that score, I think they did pretty well.

      I mean the moment of rescue that the convention constituted — the moment at which this country, now on a fulcrum, could either tip toward authoritarianism, hopeless division and chaos, or toward a more charitable and hopeful vision of the future.

      Did the media understand what’s at stake? As Vox’s Ezra Klein bluntly put it, “This campaign is not merely a choice between the Democratic and Republican parties, but between a normal political party and an abnormal one.”

      The media, like the country itself, have a challenge, and it would not be an easy one even if they wanted to face up to it — which most in the mainstream media do not. They seem perfectly content to broadcast The Donald Trump Show, with all its wild careening and boastful bigotry, because it makes for good entertainment, as well as high ratings and readership. And while the TV convention pundits were quick to comment about how unusual this election is likely to be, they have been slow to point out that the surreal Trump is a threat to this country and to the world — an egocentric charlatan who wallows in his ignorance. We are all at risk.

    • Can mythbusters like Snopes.com keep up in a post-truth era?

      The most scenic way to find truth on the internet is to drive north of Los Angeles on the Pacific Coast Highway, blue ocean foaming to the left, sunlit hills cresting to the right, until Malibu Canyon Road, where you take a sharp right and wind for a few miles through the oak-lined knolls and dips of Calabasas, past gated estates that are home to the likes of Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian and Mel Gibson, and keep going until you reach an odd-looking wood-and-brick house with a US flag on the porch: the home of David Mikkelson.

      It feels like a good jumping off point for a hike, or a pony trek. But really it is the ideal place to explore fibs like whether Hillary Clinton stole $200,000 in White House furnishings, or whether Donald Trump called Republicans the “dumbest group of voters”, or whether Black Lives Matter protesters chanted for dead cops, or whether Nicolas Cage died in a motorcycle accident, or whether chewing gum takes seven years to pass through the digestive system, or whether hair grows back thicker after being shaved, or, if you really, really must know, whether Richard Gere had an emergency “gerbilectomy” at Cedars-Sinai hospital.

      Mikkelson owns and runs Snopes.com, a hugely popular fact-checking site which debunks urban legends, old wives’ tales, fake news, shoddy journalism and political spin. It started as a hobby in the internet’s Pleistocene epoch two decades ago and evolved into a professional site that millions now rely on as a lie-detector. Every day its team of writers and editors interrogate claims ricocheting around the internet to determine if they are false, true or somewhere in the middle – a cleaning of the Augean stables for the digital era.

    • Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees
    • American Horror Story: How the Democrats found a boogeyman in Hillary’s Emails

      Bernie Sanders won the presidential nomination, but he was cheated out of it by the Democratic National Committee which is the operating body for the Democratic Party. They helped Hillary win the nomination by combining vote miscounts and appointing super delegates whom no one elected to vote for Hillary. So, she won this nomination illegitimately. All of Bernie Sanders’ supporters know that. They have turned against Hillary, and it is unlikely that many of them will vote for Clinton. The Democratic National Committee said: “Who do they dislike more than Hillary? The Russians”, as they’ve been demonizing the Russians for the last 3-4 years. So, the Americans are told to dislike the Russians. That’s why they blame Putin for WikiLeaks’ release of the emails that showed how the Democrats were cheating with votes. Hillary is a crook in many ways. But she has escaped prosecution because she is too useful for the oligarchs. So they shift all the blame onto Putin, saying that this is all a Russian plot to get Donald Trump elected. Is that what this is? I don’t think this will fool many people. It will be played with in the media because the media is not honest, not independent. It’s like the old Soviet media – it has to answer to the master and can’t say much independently. It’s not going to fool the American people that all this email thing was done by Putin.

    • NYT Leads With Russia Hack Conspiracy–Despite ‘No Evidence’ (in Next-to-Last Paragraph)

      The 11th-hour detail might send readers, scratching their heads, back to the beginning.

      “Clinton campaign officials have suggested that Russia might be trying to sway the outcome of the election,” Times reporter Eric Lichtblau writes in the second paragraph. Here, one would think, would have been the place to mention that those officials have no evidence for their claim.

      Instead this fact in consigned to the penultimate paragraph—a lonely wilderness where the vast majority of readers don’t tread—of a piece filled with weasel words and caveats like “said to,” “appears to,” “apparently,” etc. The headline of the digital version has two: “Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians.”

    • The Convention Film on Hillary Clinton Lied to America

      Follow the money and it is obvious that the Democratic Party as much as the GOP is now the plaything of the super-rich. GOP nominee Trump is one of the few egomaniacal outliers who think they can game the system on their own. But in this election, for the multinational corporate hustlers who view governance as a means of establishing a convenient world order supportive of their plunder, Clinton triangulation best fits the bill.

    • Election mailouts under censorship as fourth candidate barred from running

      Election mailouts submitted by two different lists containing words such as “self-determination” are being delayed by the election regulatory body. The news came as a fourth candidate was disqualified for the September election.

      Nathan Law Kwun-chung of Demosisto and Eddie Chu Hoi-dick both said the Electoral Affairs Commission (EAC) was consulting the Department of Justice before it can confirm whether any of the mailouts would be allowed to be sent to households for free – a privilege given to candidates.

      Law’s mailouts contained phrases like “civil referendum,” “self-determination movement,” and “autonomy is difficult under Chinese economic pressure.” Those of Chu included policies promoting the idea that Hong Kong people should determine their own political system in a democratic fashion.

    • Government condemns personal attacks against officers responsible for electoral matters

      A spokesman for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) Government said today (August 1) that the Electoral Affairs Commission (EAC), the Returning Officers (ROs), the Registration and Electoral Office and all officers responsible for electoral affairs have been handling election-related matters in strict accordance with the Basic Law and relevant legislation. This is to ensure that elections are conducted in an open, fair and honest manner.

    • Donald Trump Unleashes More Outrages and Lies at Bizarre News Conference

      Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump—I can’t believe I wrote those words—gave a news conference Wednesday. Shall we first count the outrages or the lies?

      I think we need to start at the top of the outrage column. Asked about the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails, which many experts believe was carried out by agents of the Russian government, Trump speculated that Russia might also have hacked into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Then he asked the Russians to release any deleted emails they might have found there.

    • Occupying the DNC

      In an unusual move for a reclusive layabout, last week I took a bus to Philly to advocate for peace, justice and what I supposed was the American Way, and do my little part to make the Democratic National Convention less of a coronation for the Queen of Chaos.

      Of course, now we know—thanks to anonymous sources on wikileaks—that the DNC rigged the whole campaign in her favor, just as Bernie had been saying. She and they quickly intimated that the Rooskies were behind the hack, but they’re just sayin’ because nobody really knows except them what did it. And now we’re starting to learn how they rigged the convention for her highness too, even though they really didn’t need to.

    • Fast-Growing Corporate Evils That Should Be Media Issues…and Campaign Issues

      Corporations are viewed as untouchable by big business media giants like the Wall Street Journal, which blurts out inanities like “Income inequality is simply not a significant problem.” and “Middle-class Americans have more buying power than ever before.”

      In the real world, inequality is destroying the middle class. The following four issues, all part of the cancer of corporatocracy, have grown in intensity and destructiveness in just the last few years. They should be campaign issues, given more than just lip service from corporation-funded candidates like Hillary Clinton, and given more than just passing reference in the news reports of an unresponsive, irresponsible mainstream media.

    • It’s as If They’re Trying to Lose: Democrats’ Optimism Ignores the Struggles of Millions

      Writing in 2008, months before the year’s presidential election, Ezra Klein — an ostensibly clear-headed, data-driven policy wonk — lavished effusive praise upon Barack Obama, praise that verged on the metaphysical.

      “Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate,” Klein informed readers of The American Prospect. “He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.”

      Though they so frequently congratulate themselves for their ability to jettison emotion and opinion in the service of objectivity and respectability, mainstream analysts often, as Klein did above, forget their self-professed role precisely when it would best serve the country.

      For the eventual victory of Obama in 2008 was also — as Noam Chomsky, Adolph Reed, and others noted at the time — a victory for the advertising industry: Obama’s success represented an astounding achievement for the politics of imagery and personality, for a political message that provides a kind of blank slate onto which voters can project their ideological preferences.

    • Sanders Surrogate Nina Turner Considering Green Party’s VP Offer
    • Amid DNC Scandal, Wasserman Schultz Losing Grip on House Race

      The hits keep coming for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the disgraced former chair of the Democratic National Committee, as new polling released on Sunday found that her once-longshot challenger Tim Canova is swiftly closing the gap in the primary race for her House seat.

      According to FloridaPolitics.com, the survey released by the Canova campaign found Wasserman Schultz leading her opponent 46 percent to 38 percent in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District. However, after the pollsters provided more information about the outsider candidate—who has been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders—to likely voters, Wasserman Schultz’s lead plummeted to just three points, 43 percent to 40 percent.

      What’s more, the survey found that 35 percent of district voters regard her unfavorably, which represents “a staggering decline from her popularity in past campaigns,” the pollsters noted. For Canova, the numbers show that he has a “real chance to win” in the August 30th Democratic primary.

      The survey of 400 random voters in Florida’s 23rd district was conducted late last week, amid the Democratic National Convention and in the immediate aftermath of Wasserman Schultz’s resignation as party chair following the damning WikiLeaks revelations that the Democratic party actively worked to undermine Sanders’ bid for the nomination.

      Wasserman Schultz, a longtime friend and ally of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, was accused throughout the primary campaign of tipping the scales in her favor.

    • Populism Even Republicans Can Get Behind

      A new campaign aims to oust every single member of Congress — from either party — who’s backed by Big Money.

    • An open letter to Hillary from a Bernie delegate

      Like most of the other Bernie Sanders delegates at the national convention last week, I don’t trust you. At the same time, we have a common interest in defeating Donald Trump. That ought to be the basis for a tactical alliance during the next 99 days — but you need to make a major course correction.

      The problem can’t be solved by staying on message and telling your pal Terry McAuliffe to keep quiet. (Have you considered gifting him a vacation to a deserted island for the next hundred days?) He let slip what so many Bernie delegates and supporters around the country already figured — we’d be fools, given your record, to believe that your conversion to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership is genuine.

      But here’s my point: Complacency about getting the votes of people who went for Bernie in the primaries is dangerous, wishful thinking. Many of the same pundits who, two weeks ago, were predicting a Democratic convention of tranquility and unity, are still citing polls that say 85 or 90 percent of Bernie voters will go for you in November. Such assessments are dubious.
      You’re in danger of a steep falloff of turnout from Bernie’s primary voters. And crucially, in swing states, turnout will make all the difference. If an appreciable number of those Bernie voters opt to stay home or vote for a third-party candidate in the fall, here comes President Trump.

      A week ago, polling analysts at FiveThirtyEight concluded that you were coming into the convention “with a real problem.” Even before the release of Democratic National Committee emails showing that the supposedly evenhanded DNC was aiding your campaign, “Clinton had about a third of Sanders supporters left to try to win over.” That’s easily a million swing-state voters.

    • Green Party Gains Ballot Access in Six More States as Signature Counts More than Double State Requirements

      Voters will have a chance to cast their ballot for Green Party presumptive Presidential nominee Jill Stein, as well as several local- and state-level Green Party candidates, in six more states as of today. Green Party ballot-access signature drives in Kansas, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, New Jersey, Vermont, and Missouri easily surpassed, and in most cases more than doubled, the required number of signatures to secure a ballot line.

      In Kansas, 10,908 signatures were submitted, double the required threshhold of 5,000 signatures. This is the first time the Green Party will be on the ballot in Kansas since 2000.

      In Pennsylvania, around 22,000 signatures were submitted, several times over the current requirement of 5,000, which had been lowered through a successful court challenge last month.

    • Society Is Failing Our Families: Sister Simone Campbell on Inequality, Donald Trump & Women’s Health

      Last week in Philadelphia, a caravan of Nuns on the Bus pulled up to the Democratic National Convention after visiting 13 states, where they hosted conversations with ordinary Americans on both sides of the political spectrum in an effort to bridge the divide. To learn more about their journey, we sat down with the caravan’s leader, Sister Simone Campbell. She’s a lawyer and poet and the executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice.

    • Popular delusions: Corbynism constructs its people

      The idea of the people is now as pervasive on the left as the idea of class once was. Its pervasiveness owes to a surge in left populism. With Corbynism, the UK caught what swept Europe post-crisis. But continental populism’s successes highlight the divergence. Syriza carefully constructed a popular platform through practical solidarity work. Podemos harnessed media messaging to articulate a popular project around points of popular grievance. Insofar as people power is possible within capitalism at all, these interventions worked.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Black, White, and Blue: Working Class Self-Defeat in Somerville

      According to the Associated Press, roughly 50 police officers and their supporters rallied to protest a Black Lives Matter (BLM) banner that has been hanging outside City Hall in the predominantly white and historically working class Boston suburb of Somerville for a year. The primarily Caucasian haters of the banner chanted “All lives matter!,” “Take it down!,” and “Cops lives matter!” It was part of the “Blue Lives Matter” movement.

      According to the president of the Somerville Police Employees Association, the banner sends an “exclusionary message” and “implies that Somerville police officers are somehow responsible for racially motivated decision-making against minorities.”

      A local white firefighter claimed that BLM had become “almost synonymous with killing cops.” He’s talking the line taken by the decrepit white supremacist Rudolph Guliani (a close Donald Trump ally and adviser) on FOX News.

      But BLM is “almost synonymous with killing cops” only in the minds of people who can’t differentiate between a civil rights movement two lone gunmen. Yes, two mentally unhinged Black military veterans – one in Dallas and one in Baton Rouge – got pushed over the edge by recent videos of Black men being senselessly killed by white police officers. And yes, the ongoing epidemic of such shootings is what drove the rise of BLM. But, no, BLM activists have never advocated “killing cops.” They have gone to great lengths to distance themselves from such actions.

    • Chelsea Manning faces punishment for suicide attempt, highlighting injustice of US prison system

      The ALCU have announced that Chelsea Manning is facing disciplinary action at the military prison where she is serving her 35 year sentence. Incredibly, the military is seeking to punish Chelsea in connection with her attempt to take her own life on 5 July this year. We have written previously about how officials at Fort Leavenworth abused Chelsea’s rights by informing the media about her medical issues before her family, friends or legal team.

      Chelsea has dictated details of her charge sheet to a supporter over the phone. If convicted of these administrative charges, Chelsea potentially faces penalties including indefinite solitary confinement and reclassification out of general population, with all of the social and communicative restrictions that implies. Her chances of being granted parole may also be impacted.

    • Sadly, The Deceased Muslim Army Captain’s Mother Is Wrong: Women Are Anything But Men’s Equals Under Islam

      Sadly, women are anything but “equal” under Islam — and the Quran is supposed to be the words of Allah, brought by the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed. It is thus to be followed unquestioningly and not interpreted as a historical document. (Christians are not going around slaughtering their neighbors for adultery.)

    • Shooting of 76-year-old man by State Police a ‘tragic mistake,’ family friend says

      Sykes’ wife woke him up and he went into the living room. At that point, according to longtime family friend and attorney Rich Kaser, Sykes looked out through the French doors leading to a deck where he saw the shadow of a person outside.

      Kaser said Sykes went back into his bedroom and got his shotgun.

      Sykes “felt intruders were trying to get in and he was yelling to his wife to call 911,” Kaser said.

      What happened next is subject of investigation. Authorities say two state troopers had come to the home after mistakenly being told it was the location of a 911 hang-up call.

      According to authorities, shots were exchanged. One trooper fired four times and Sykes fired his shotgun once.

    • Wife of Raif Badawi, Imprisoned Saudi Blogger, Feels Pain From Afar

      The story of how Ensaf Haidar first encountered her husband, Raif Badawi, is an unusual version of “meeting cute.”

      In 2000, Ms. Haidar was a cloistered young woman studying the Quran in a small town in Saudi Arabia, where she lived with her family and rarely interacted with men.

      It all started with an accidental meeting. Ms. Haidar was using a borrowed phone and mistakenly returned a call from Mr. Badawi. At first she hung up, but he called back, and kept calling.

      Over time she gave in, leading to a secret, phone-based romance and eventually, marriage. Now, 16 years later, the couple’s romance endures under extraordinary circumstances — across thousands of miles, through prison walls and against the backdrop of an international fight over freedom of expression.

      Mr. Badawi, 32, has been in prison in Saudi Arabia since 2012, serving a 10-year sentence for creating and posting in an online forum called Free Saudi Liberals Network. He was also sentenced to 1,000 lashes, delivered 50 at a time.

      The first flogging was carried out in a public square in January 2015, provoking an international outcry. A despondent Ms. Haidar watched a cellphone video of the flogging that circulated online. The second one has been postponed many times.

    • Hungary’s Orban says “every single migrant is a terror risk”

      Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban said “every single migrant represents a public security and terror risk” and made clear his country refuses to accept the quota system that the EU Commission tries to impose.

      Orban, speaking after hosting a meeting with Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern, said Hungary is willing to take back some migrants from Austria under European rules, but would then return them to their countries of origin, mostly Kosovo and Albania

      Orban made it clear that Hungary would take back only those migrants who first entered the European Union by registering in Hungary, in accordance with the so-called Dublin asylum rules. The return of migrants, like those from the Middle East who entered the EU through Greece, would be rejected.

    • Whipped in public just for daring to go on a date: Unmarried couples are flogged for violating Sharia law in Indonesia

      In total, three Acehnese couples were sentenced to receive public lashes for violating Sharia law in a brutal new crackdown in the region.

      Under the law men and women, who are not spouses, are not allowed to get too close due to the ‘khalwat’ offence – and punishment is by public caning.

    • Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

      Slow-motion video replays of crimes shown in courtrooms may be distorting the outcomes of trials, according to a US study.

      Researchers found that slowing down footage of violent acts caused viewers to see greater intent to harm than when viewed at normal speed.

      Viewing a killing only in slow motion made a jury three times more likely to convict of first degree murder.

      The research has been published in the journal PNAS.

      The importance of video evidence in courtrooms has grown in tandem with its supply in recent years.

      As well as the mountains of smartphone recordings, CCTV also routinely captures assaults, robberies and even murders. Some police officers even wear on-body cameras.

      Courts all over the world are willing to accept these recordings in evidence and they are sometimes shown in slow motion, to help juries make up their minds about what really happened within the often chaotic environment of a crime scene.

    • Abuses against Children Detained as National Security Threats

      The rise of extremist armed groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram has brought renewed attention to the plight of children—both as victims of abuses, and as fighters and militants. All too often, the concern and assistance governments offer abuse victims does not extend to those children caught up on the wrong side of the law or front line.

      Human Rights Watch field research around the world increasingly finds that in countries embroiled in civil strife or armed conflict, state security forces arrest and detain children for reasons of “national security.” Often empowered by new counterterrorism legislation, they apprehend children who are linked to non-state armed groups or who pose other perceived security threats, and often hold them without charge or trial for months or even years. Their treatment and conditions of detention frequently violate international legal standards.

    • Human Rights Watch Reports That US Government Tortured Children

      What kind of US government would pay two US psychologists $81 million to help the CIA devise torture techniques? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/cia-torture-contractors_n_6296758.html Only a lawless government with no respect for US law and international law.

    • Ultra-Right Annotated Edition of Pocket Constitution Tops Amazon Charts After Khizr Khan’s DNC Speech

      Following Gold Star father Khizr Khan’s powerful speech at the Democratic convention last week, sales of pocket Constitutions have skyrocketed. But the edition topping Amazon’s charts – right up there with the new Harry Potter book — comes with annotations and right-wing commentary from Glenn Beck’s favorite conspiracy theorist.

      “Let me ask you: have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy,” Khan said last week in Philadelphia, pulling his edition out of his pocket. “In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law’.”

      But the version that Amazon is touting as a best-seller is not the one Khan held up. And readers looking for those words in the edition there will be misled. It’s published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a fringe Mormon group focused on teaching a fundamentalist interpretation of the founding documents.

      The Washington Post, Forbes, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and PBS NewsHour have all noted the extraordinary popularity the NCCS version is enjoying on Amazon — but all failed to note the edition’s unusual features.

      The Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, simply described it as having been “printed by the nonpartisan National Center for Constitutional Studies”

      Some Amazon shoppers expressed their outrage. One reviewer wrote, “please do not get this edition.” Another warned: “tread with caution.” Yet another wrote: “Just give me the document our wise forefathers wrote, not a bunch of excess quotes and jargon to convince me they were right.”

    • An Overdue Examination of Detroit’s Forgotten Rape Kits

      Over 11,000 untested rape kits were found in a Detroit police warehouse in 2009. Some of the kits – many containing the DNA of attackers needed for prosecution — were decades old, leaving hundreds of victims without any hope for justice.

      Detroit is by no means the only city that has faced such a large backlog of rape kits in recent years. Memphis recently uncovered 12,000; Cleveland, 4,000; and Miami, nearly 3,000.

    • We must abandon the idea of legal protest

      On 16th August 1819, some sixty to eighty thousand people assembled in St Peter’s Field, central Manchester. Men and women, young and old. They had gathered to protest for greater suffrage, and for an end to the Corn Laws that had plunged many into poverty, exacerbating the disastrous effects of the famine ushered in by the Napoleonic Wars. The local magistrates, understandably alarmed, read out the following fifty three words to the few who could hear them over the din:

      “Our sovereign lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.”

      This is the infamous Riot Act: a piece of legislation giving local authorities the power to disband groups of twelve or more people, or else. A gesture of slick political magicianship designed to transform a crowd of citizens into a dangerous mob. This particular dangerous mob, of course, did not disperse after the Act was read. So, hundreds of heavily armed militiamen set about the task of preventing tumults and riotous assemblies – with swords, with horses and with guns. Fifteen protesters were killed, and hundreds injured.

    • Scientists and engineers as partners in protecting human rights

      Growing interest in pro bono service among scientists and engineers is generating new opportunities for human rights organizations.

      When the government told residents of Temacapulín in Mexico that—as a result of dam construction—they had to leave their homes or they would drown, the community immediately reached out to human rights lawyers. But where could they turn for help understanding the engineering plans and the environmental impact assessments? How could they develop alternative proposals in their negotiations with the government?

    • The Meaning of BLM

      Police boast frequently about their own bravery. Where is that vaunted courage when they witness one of their own obviously murder an unarmed civilian? We see virtually no bold selflessness in those cases. Instead, our “good” cops act more like good Germans, silent in the face of blatant lawbreaking by their brothers in blue.

    • The European migration crisis – have we lost the moral high ground?

      The scope of the problem is gargantuan. There are more than eighteen million displaced persons and refugees in Africa, the highest this number has been in history. Eight armed conflicts have begun or intensified since 2010, resulting in a seventeen percent spike in the number of refugees and displaced persons in Sub-Saharan Africa, per UNHCR.

    • ACLU Provides Constitutions for All After Khan Disgraces Trump in DNC Speech

      The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is handing out free, pocket-sized U.S. Constitutions to meet a rising demand after Khizr Khan, father of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action, offered to lend his copy to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in an electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention last week.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Trade Groups are Once Again Challenging Net Neutrality Rulings

      The recent court ruling that upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules is still making waves. The rules were upheld after a three-judge panel reviewed them last summer, classifying broadband as a regulated telecommunications service. It’s that classification that is now at issue again, as trade groups CTIA, USTelecom, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and the American Cable Association on Friday asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to rehear their challenge to the ruling.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Florida International University Loses Trademark Appeal Against Florida National University

        It’s too rare that we see courts get trademark questions right on the merits of actual customer confusion, so it’s nice to highlight some examples of when they do get it right. It’s even more fun when the court takes the time to add just a dash of snark and narrow-eyed language into its opinion. Such appears to be the case in an appeals ruling between Florida International University, a public college, and Florida National University, a for-profit institution. FIU sued FNU for trademark infringement and, having lost its initial case, took it to appeal. The claim FIU made is that potential students were confused between the two schools based solely on the similarity of their names.

    • Copyrights

      • Don’t Wrap Anti-Competitive Pay-TV Practices In A Copyright Flag

        The Federal Communications Commission has proposed to break cable and satellite TV companies’ monopoly over the hardware and software used by their subscribers. Those companies are fighting back hard, probably to preserve the $20 billion in revenue they collect every year from set-top box rental fees. Major TV producers and copyright holders are pushing back too. They want to control how you can search for TV shows and discover new ones, and the order in which shows appear to you. And they want to limit the features of your home and mobile TV setups, like how and when you can control the playback.

        One tactic these major media companies are using to try to derail the FCC’s proposal is to claim that allowing customers to buy pay-TV viewing technology from independent vendors (something that Congress actually ordered the FCC to do way back in 1996) somehow violates “principles of copyright law.”

        As we explained to the FCC along with top legal scholars, the plan to break the set-top box monopoly doesn’t change copyright law or allow anyone to get pay-TV content without paying for it. But by crying “copyright,” cable companies and TV producers have rallied opposition to the FCC’s plan from some members of Congress, and possibly from the Copyright Office. It’s a misleading tactic.

        Today, TV studios influence the design and features of home video equipment by specifying them as terms in the deals they make with cable companies. The cable companies have to accept those terms because under copyright law, they need permission from major copyright holders (the TV studios) to transmit programming to subscribers. And because cable companies have a monopoly over the technology on the subscriber’s end—the set-top boxes and apps that can access cable channels—the TV studios effectively have veto power over that technology.

      • Blizzard Allows Release Of Fan-Game It Initially Tried To Shut Down, Reaps Rewards It Should Have Had All Along

        We’ve dinged Blizzard quite a bit in these pages for acting overly protectionist of its intellectual property in the past. And that dinging has been well deserved, with Blizzard doing things like trying to twist copyright law as a way to combat cheat software within its multiplayer games, to use intellectual property as an excuse to shut down a World of Warcraft vanilla fan-server, and has otherwise not always acted in human or awesome ways towards its own fans.

        But sometimes, with much kicking and screaming and the insistence of making many a mistake along the way, even a company like Blizzard can manage to do what game companies like DoubleFine have already done: loosen the leash on its own IP and reap the rewards. StarCraft Universe is a fan-made mod that consists of a full new game in a genre that Blizzard had never taken the StarCraft universe into.

      • Copyright Office Intent On Changing The Part Of Copyright That Protects Libraries & Archives, Even Though No One Wants It Changed

        It’s no secret that the US Copyright Office has been acting pretty nutty lately. For decades, the office has basically carried the water of the legacy copyright/entertainment industries, but at least they would sometimes try to appear marginally balanced. Now it appears that all caution has been thrown to the wind and the entire office is actively looking to suppress and attack user rights and innovation. In just the past few weeks and months, we’ve pointed out a series of really bad ideas on reforming the notice-and-takedown safe harbors of the DMCA, a separate plan that would effectively strip tons of websites of their DMCA safe harbors by requiring them to remember to keep re-registering, and a disturbing willingness to totally misrepresent the copyright issues at play with regards to the FCC’s set-top box proposal.

        So, perhaps, we shouldn’t be all that surprised that the Copyright Office appears to be making a move to screw over libraries now, too. Section 108 of the Copyright Act has explicit carve-outs and exemptions for libraries and archivists. These are stronger than fair use, because they are clear exemptions from copyright, rather than fuzzy guidelines that have to be adjudicated in court. Section 108 is super important for libraries and archives (including the Internet Archive). So why does the Copyright Office want to change it? That’s a bit of a mystery in terms of public explanations, but it’s not hard to take some guesses.

        The Copyright Office started exploring this issue a few years back, insisting that Section 108 was “outdated” for the digital age. And while there are many aspects of copyright law that are obsolete for the digital age, the exemptions for libraries and archives were not among them. And everyone let the Copyright Office know that. And… the Copyright Office has basically ignored them all. Back in June, the Copyright Office announced via the Federal Register that it was moving forward with putting together recommendations on changing Section 108, and anyone who had comments could “schedule meetings in Washington, DC to take place during late June through July 2016.”

      • Getty Makes Nonsensical Statement On Photographer Carol Highsmith’s Lawsuit For Falsely Claiming Copyright

        First of all, huh? “The content in question has been part of the public domain for many years”? Actually, it has not. As Highsmith noted, she retained the copyright to her images, but rather did a deal with the Library of Congress to make the works available royalty free. It was basically a Creative Commons attribution license before Creative Commons existed. She still retains the copyright. So the images are not public domain.

        And, uh, even if they were, what a weird claim for Getty to make, because it was a Getty subsidiary that then threatened Highsmith for posting her own images. If Getty now claims it believes the images were in the public domain why was it shaking her down for money? This makes no sense at all.

        Finally, trying to pawn blame off on Alamy is ridiculous. Alamy is a co-defendant in the lawsuit, but LCS and Piscount are both subsidiaries of Getty, and both sent Highsmith letters demanding payment. It’s almost as if Getty’s PR people have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about.

      • Getty Images Bites Back in $1 Billion Copyright Dispute

        Last week Carol Highsmith filed a copyright complaint against Getty Images after an agent threatened the photographer for using her own photograph without their permission. Now Getty is fighting back, warning that it will defend itself vigorously if the dispute can’t be settled.

      • Peter Sunde’s Pirate Innovation Dream Won’t Happen Anytime Soon

        This week, Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde reiterated his belief that the pirate scene and its sites will need to innovate and collaborate to stay alive. Intrigued, TF spoke with several players in the torrent scene to see if something like this might emerge sometime soon. The upshot: don’t hold your breath.

      • uTorrent Quietly Ditches Rating and Comment Features

        Without alerting its users, the team behind the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has removed the software’s widely used comment and rating functionality. It’s unclear why the functionality was stripped, but it’s possible that spam issues or legal concerns played a role.

      • Anti-Piracy Group Reveals Personal Details of Counter-Notice Senders

        In what appears to be a retaliatory move against DMCA notice archive Lumen Database, anti-piracy outfit Remove Your Media has launched a transparency report of its own. The report lists people who have sent the company DMCA counter-notices but it goes much further than Lumen by publishing their names, addresses, and telephone numbers.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/08/02/tp-link-forced-to-open-up/feed/ 0 Links 31/7/2016: GNOME Maps Datafeed Back, Xen Vulnerability http://techrights.org/2016/07/31/gnome-maps-datafeed-back/ http://techrights.org/2016/07/31/gnome-maps-datafeed-back/#comments Sun, 31 Jul 2016 14:24:12 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=94692

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • ReactOS 0.4.2 Nears With Many Features

    The first release candidate to the upcoming ReactOS 0.4.2 release is now available, the project aiming to be an open-source re-implementation of Microsoft Windows.

  • Events

    • Software Freedom Kosova Conference SFK’16 Call for Speakers

      SKF | Software Freedom Kosova is an annual international conference in Kosovo organized to promote free/libre open source software, free culture and open knowledge, now in its 7th edition. It is organized by FLOSSK, a non governmental, not for profit organization, dedicated to promote software freedom and related philosophies.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Could Equal Pay, Paid Family Leave, and Pregnancy Protections Be the Issues That Bridge the Political Divide?

      The momentum to pass these critical protections for women in the states should serve as both a warning and an inspiration to Congress. Americans – both Democrats and Republicans – care about equal rights for women. So let’s hope the next Congress will pass federal laws mandating equal pay, paid family leave, and pregnancy protections.

    • Olympic Chefs Pledge to Salvage Unused Food and Feed the Hungry With It

      Some of the big-name chefs cooking for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro are also activists for the hungry. Knowing full well there will be tremendous food waste at that massive event, the chefs plan to salvage as much as they can. With it, every night of the games, they will feed the hungry.

      Each day, the food preparation staff for the Olympics will have to feed an incredible 60,000 meals to 18,000 athletes, coaches and other personnel. To do that, they need a specially built kitchen that will be as big as a football field. A whopping 460,000 lbs of food will be delivered every day. Meals will be prepared and served as Brazilian, Asian, Halal, Kosher, International and Pasta/Pizza buffets.

    • Dangerous Liaisons: ChemChina’s Bid for Syngenta

      We all love to hate Monsanto. We also know that Monsanto isn’t the only poison-maker trying to pass itself off as a “farmer-friendly producer of food to feed the world.”

      Monsanto belongs to an exclusive club of dominant pesticide makers. That club, which includes Dow, Dupont, Bayer, Syngenta and BASF, is about to get a lot smaller. And a lot more dangerous.

      Bayer has been trying for months to buy Monsanto. Dow and Dupont are in talks to merge. And Switzerland-based Syngenta may soon be owned by ChemChina.

      It’s bad enough that less than a dozen multinational corporations (including Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta) control nearly 70 percent of the global seed market. If these mergers and buyouts go through, that number will shrink even further.

    • Schuette: Workers hid discovery of lead in blood

      Criminal charges leveled Friday against six current and former state employees center around allegations they altered or concealed alarming reports showing high levels of toxic lead in Flint’s water and the bloodstreams of the city’s children.

      Attorney General Bill Schuette’s prosecutors contend much of the cover-up occurred on or around the same day in late July last year.

      At the Department of Health and Human Services, prosecutors allege employees Nancy Peeler and Robert Scott “buried” an epidemiologist’s July 28, 2015, report showing a significant year-over-year spike in blood lead levels in Flint children.

  • Security

    • Xen patches critical guest privilege escalation bug

      A freshly uncovered bug in the Xen virtualisation hypervisor could potentially allow guests to escalate their privileges until they have full control of the hosts they’re running on.

      The Xen hypervisor is used by cloud giants Amazon Web Services, IBM and Rackspace.

      Inadequate security checks of how virtual machines access memory means a malicous, paravirtualised guest administrator can raise their system privileges to that of the host on unpatched installations, Xen said.

    • Xen Vulnerability Allows Hackers To Escape Qubes OS VM And Own the Host
    • The Security of Our Election Systems [Too much of Microsoft]

      The FBI is investigating. WikiLeaks promises there is more data to come. The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November ­ that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack.

    • Data program accessed in cyber-attack on Democrats, says Clinton campaign [iophk: "Windows still"]

      A data program used by the campaign of the Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, was “accessed” as a part of hack on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that intelligence officials believe was carried out by Russia’s intelligence services, Clinton’s campaign said on Friday.

    • A Famed Hacker Is Grading Thousands of Programs — and May Revolutionize Software in the Process

      “There are applications out there that really do demonstrate good [security] hygiene … and the vast majority are somewhere else on the continuum from moderate to atrocious,” Peiter Zatko says. “But the nice thing is that now you can actually see where the software package lives on that continuum.”

      Joshua Corman, founder of I Am the Cavalry, a group aimed at improving the security of software in critical devices like cars and medical devices, and head of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative for the Atlantic Council, says the public is in sore need of data that can help people assess the security of software products.

      “Markets do well when an informed buyer can make an informed risk decision, and right now there is incredibly scant transparency in the buyer’s realm,” he says.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Ghosts of Direct Action

      In early 2009 I was walking away from a compound a platoon from the Second Ranger Battalion had just assaulted when a staff sergeant I knew held up something in the dark. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was. It was small and he was bragging about it. I tried to make it out but was soon distracted. It wasn’t until I got back to Forward Operating Base Salerno and saw his pictures that I realized that he had been showing me a square piece of flesh that he had cut out of a dead woman’s neck.

      Mutilating the corpse of a female noncombatant was just the final act in a horror show that night put on by this young Ranger. He had killed several people. One was a military-aged male, the rest were women; one looked to be about thirteen.

      Why did they die? Sadly, all too often when people die in Afghanistan that question is a lot harder to answer than it should be. There are as many truths about that mission as there were people on it. But, they didn’t have to die. It could have been avoided. And the war crime that occurred after the deaths gives you an idea of the mentality of the shooter.

    • Trading Places: Swapping the Roles of Police and Military Is Bad for the Republic

      The Dallas police chief defended using the robot-delivered bomb by saying that he would have done anything to avoid more police deaths. That is understandable reasoning but flawed, because although lives of professional law enforcement personnel are very important, the use of such indiscriminate battlefield weapons may unreasonably endanger the lives of the innocent citizens the police are sworn to protect.

      Under the rules of war, militaries are permitted to kill civilians or destroy their property, even if such collateral damage is deemed likely before an attack, if the target is militarily critical. That reasoning is unacceptable for police departments, given their primary mission of protecting the public. The militarization of police with SWAT teams, armored vehicles, etc. is threatening enough to citizens’ liberty without the unnecessary use of military-grade explosives to endanger the civilians whose welfare they are supposed to be safeguarding.

    • New Documentary Pierces the Psychology of Modern Suicide Bombers

      In a scene from Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal’s new documentary Dugma: The Button, Abu Qaswara, a would-be suicide bomber, describes the sense of exhilaration he felt during an aborted suicide attack against a Syrian army checkpoint. “These were the happiest [moments] I’ve had in 32 years. If anyone had felt exactly what I felt at that moment, Muslims would want to go through the same feeling and non-Muslims would convert just to experience it,” he enthuses to the camera, visibly elated by his attempted self-immolation.

      Abu Qaswara’s attack failed after his vehicle was blocked by obstacles on the road placed by the Syrian military. But speaking shortly after he returned from his mission, it was clear that his brush with death had filled him with euphoria. “It was a feeling more than you can imagine,” he says. “Something I cannot describe, it cannot be described.”

      [...]

      Only the few Syrians who appear in the film speak at length about their grievances over the crimes of the Syrian government. In contrast, the foreign volunteers appear largely driven by personal motivations. Liberating the local people from oppression appears at best a secondary concern. Perishing in the conflict and reaping the existential rewards of such an end takes precedence. Both Abu Qaswara and Abu Basir gave up comfortable lives to come to Syria, knowing that certain death would be the outcome of that decision. But rather than deterring them, the prospect of a rewarding death was a primary factor motivating their decision to fight.

    • “Eat, Pray, Starve”: Greg Grandin on Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton & the U.S. Role in Honduras

      On Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, delivered a prime-time speech in which he spoke about the nine months he spent with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras in 1980. To talk more about the significance of Tim Kaine’s time in Honduras, we speak with Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at New York University. His most recent article for The Nation is headlined “Eat, Pray, Starve: What Tim Kaine Didn’t Learn During His Time in Honduras.”

    • Munich shopping centre and train station evacuated after ‘bomb threat’

      A shopping centre and train station in Munich wereevacuated after police received a ‘bomb threat’ this afternoon.

      The Pasing Arcaden shopping centre and Pasing railway station were both cleared and the area sealed off by police.

      Police are understood to have received an anonymous phone call warning a bomb has been placed in the area and officers are now on the scene.

      The area was evacuated at around 5.30pm local time (4.30pm UK time) and train services were also stopped from passing through the station.

      Police searched the area and later confirmed nothing suspicious was found and there was no threat to the public.

    • Turkey coup attempt: Government cancels 50,000 passports as global concern grows over crackdown

      The Turkish government has cancelled the passports of around 50,000 people to prevent them leaving the country as a crackdown continues following a failed coup.

      Efkan Ala, the interior minister, said more than 18,000 have so far been detained over the attempt to oust President Tayyip Erdogan, while thousands of government staff are under investigation.

      The purges have provoked alarm in the international community, presenting a major stumbling block for Turkey’s campaign to join the European Union.

    • Evolution of Capitalism, Escalation of Imperialism

      The new imperialism differs from the old, classical imperialism in at least four major ways.

      First, contrary to the old pattern of colonial/imperial conquests and plunders, which often proved quite lucrative to the imperium, war and military operations under the new imperialism are not even cost efficient on purely economic grounds, that is, on grounds of national interests. While immoral, external military operations of past empires often proved profitable and, therefore, justifiable on national economic grounds. Military actions abroad usually brought economic benefits not only to the imperial ruling classes and war profiteers, but also (through “trickle-down” effects) to their citizens. Thus, for example, imperialism paid significant dividends to Britain, France, the Dutch, and other European powers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. As the imperial economic gains helped develop their economies, they also helped improve the living conditions of their working people and elevate the standards of living of their citizens.

      This pattern of economic gains flowing from imperial military operations, however, seems to have somewhat changed in the context of the recent U.S. imperial wars of choice. Moralities aside, U.S. military expeditions and operations of late are not justifiable even on economic grounds. Indeed, escalating U.S. military adventures and aggressions have become ever more wasteful, cost-inefficient, and burdensome to the overwhelming majority of its citizens.

    • The Iraq War: a Story of Deceit

      On July 28, 2002, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote a memorandum to American President George W. Bush about Iraq. “I will be with you, whatever,” Blair wrote with teenager’s diction. It was a pledge that Blair would keep through the year and into the illegal war against Iraq that the Bush administration prosecuted in 2003. Not only did this war break Iraq—a country weakened by the sanctions regime and its earlier wars—but it also severely threatened the legitimacy of the West in the eyes of the world. It took six years for an inquiry to be opened in Britain.

      Finally, after much delay, the Chilcot Report—all of 2.6 million words—has been released. It tells a great story of deceit. There is no Chilcot inquiry in the United States, where perhaps it is most needed. Both of the major political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are damaged by their unity on this war. Bush led the way, but Democratic front-runner for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, voted for the war in Congress. Controversy over the lead-up to the war remains in the U.S., but none of the major political parties would like a Chilcot inquiry in the U.S.

      In the U.S., the debate over Iraq has been placed on mute. Hillary Clinton’s vote for the war means that Democrats do not want to make this an issue in the presidential election. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, had supported the war in 2003. He now says he opposes it. But his entire party bears culpability for the war. In a primary debate, Trump attacked Bush for the war. It was an unusual moment. Bush’s brother Jeb Bush was on the stage then. He defended his brother, and also stood up for his party. Trump has since been silent on the Iraq war.

    • “No More War”: Protesters Disrupt Ex-CIA Director Leon Panetta’s DNC Speech

      Protests on the floor of the convention continued on Wednesday. They reached a peak when former CIA Director Leon Panetta took the stage. While Panetta was criticizing Donald Trump’s appeal to the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, many delegates started chanting “No more war!” We hear Panetta’s remarks and speak to a Bernie Sanders delegate who took part in the protest.

    • Lessons in Activism: Middle School Students Advocate for Syrian Refugees

      For the campaign around Syrian refugees, students learned about the complexities of history, the realities of ISIS and why Syrians are fleeing their country. An effective activism curriculum doesn’t deny these types of realities. Rather, it helps students find ways to defy reality with actions and in the process, learn that even the smallest acts matter. Students learned that the US announced plans to resettle at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next fiscal year, but that this isn’t enough. After the Paris attacks last November, the House of Representatives immediately passed a bill that could severely limit the acceptance of people fleeing from Syria and Iraq. Students discussed the consequences of that legislation in activism class as they depicted and critiqued the SAFE Act bill. “We’d like the representative to oppose the SAFE Act, which lengthens the process for refugees to apply for asylum. We’d also like you to oppose the Refugee Program Integrity Restoration Act (HR 4731), which gives the government the power to defund certain refugee resettlement agencies,” wrote Carolina, 13, in one of the talking points she prepared for the class’s lobbying trip to D.C. “We’d also like people in Congress to speak out against Islamophobia and bigotry against Muslims and refugees … they already have a tough life fleeing terrorism and oppressive government,” said Vidar, who is 14 years old.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ALEC in Indianapolis: ExxonMobil and the #WebOfDenial

      This month, nineteen U.S. Senators called attention to the Web of Denial, a network of front groups that oppose any productive action to combat climate change. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) led the charge, building upon his weekly “Time To Wake Up” speech series on global warming, flagging the front groups that peddle climate doubt for their clients in the oil, gas and coal industries.

      One of the top groups obstructing any form of progress is the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. ALEC convened its annual meeting in Indianapolis this week, where it hooks state politicians up with lobbyists from Koch Industries (and its many nonprofit tentacles), Peabody Energy, tobacco companies, pharmaceutical companies and other industries looking to put pro-business policies in the hands of state politicians.

    • Executing Children Won’t Save the Tiger or the Rhino

      On Monday July 18, a seven-year-old boy was shot in the legs in Kaziranga National Park in northeastern India, by park guards. Under the park’s long-established anti-poaching policy, guards are trained to shoot intruders on sight, and given total legal immunity for doing so. At least sixty-two people have been executed there in just nine years.

  • Finance

    • America’s Stateless People: How Immigration Gaps Create Poverty

      They came to America in the 1970s and 1980s as child refugees, members of the Hmong minority in Laos fleeing that country’s new communist government and persecution for helping the CIA in its covert war in Southeast Asia.

      America held the promise of safety and a piece of the American dream.

      Many of them chased that dream in California’s Central Valley, slowly, sometimes painfully, building lives in a new country where their language and culture were virtually unknown. Largely from poor rural farming families, they often struggled to adjust to a dramatically different society, with few relevant skills and limited support.

    • How Much Do Shady Financial Practices Cost You, Exactly?

      Average U.S. household loses over $100,000 to destructive activities of bankers and financiers

    • How to pay no taxes at all! (if you’re Apple, Google or Facebook)

      In only 7 minutes, Australian comedy show The Undercurrent explains exactly how companies like Apple, Google and Facebook use offshore registration, transfer payments, debt loading and tax havens to get a lower tax rate than nurses, starving their host countries like Australia of so much money that they’re cutting schools, medicare, public broadcasting, climate change and indigenous services.

    • Ireland jails three top bankers over 2008 banking meltdown

      Three senior Irish bankers were jailed on Friday for up to three-and-a-half years for conspiring to defraud investors in the most prominent prosecution arising from the 2008 banking crisis that crippled the country’s economy.

      The trio will be among the first senior bankers globally to be jailed for their role in the collapse of a bank during the crisis.

      The lack of convictions until now has angered Irish taxpayers, who had to stump up 64 billion euros – almost 40 percent of annual economic output – after a property collapse forced the biggest state bank rescue in the euro zone.

      The crash thrust Ireland into a three-year sovereign bailout in 2010 and the finance ministry said last month that it could take another 15 years to recover the funds pumped into the banks still operating.

      Former Irish Life and Permanent Chief Executive Denis Casey was sentenced to two years and nine months following the 74-day criminal trial, Ireland’s longest ever.

      Willie McAteer, former finance director at the failed Anglo Irish Bank, and John Bowe, its ex-head of capital markets, were given sentences of 42 months and 24 months respectively.

    • Theresa May confirms Crown dependencies will take part in Brexit talks

      Theresa May has written to Britain’s Crown dependencies to assure them they will play a part in negotiations to leave the EU.

    • ‘These Agreements Depend on Secrecy in Order to Pass’ – CounterSpin interviews with Lori Wallach, Peter Maybarduk and Karen Hansen-Kuhn on trade pacts and corporate globalization

      This week on CounterSpin: Few ideas are as hard-wired into corporate media as the notion that so-called “free trade” agreements of the sort we have are, despite concerns, best for everyone—and, anyway, inevitable. Given that the deals are not primarily about trade, and that what freedom they entail applies to corporations and not people, you could say media’s use of the term “free trade” implies a bias—against clarity, if nothing else.

    • Hillary Clinton Talks Tough on Shadow Banking, But Blackstone Is Celebrating at the DNC

      Blackstone, the giant Wall Street private equity firm, will hold an invitation-only reception before the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The event, at the swanky Barnes Foundation art museum, includes the usual perks for attendees: free food, drink, and complimentary shuttle buses to the final night of the convention.

      What’s unusual is that the host is precisely the kind of “shadow banker” that Hillary Clinton has singled out as needing more regulation in her rhetoric about getting tough on Wall Street.

      But Blackstone President and Chief Operating Officer Hamilton “Tony” James doesn’t seem the least bit intimidated.

      James has been a stalwart supporter of Barack Obama, holding fundraisers for him at his home, even while other Wall Street titans criticized him — in fact the co-founder of James’s own company, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, once likened Obama’s push to increase taxes on private-equity firms to a “war,” saying: “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

      Last December, James hosted a high-dollar fundraiser for Hillary Clinton that featured Warren Buffett. He’s made six-figure donations to the Center for American Progress, known as Clinton’s White House in exile, and sits on CAP’s Board of Trustees. And he has made no secret of wanting to hold a high-level position in a future Democratic administration, perhaps even Treasury Secretary.

    • No New Charter Schools – NAACP Draws Line in the Sand

      The resolution goes on to oppose tax breaks to support charter schools and calls for new legislation to increase charter school transparency. Moreover, charters should not be allowed to kick students out for disciplinary reasons.

      This goes against the well-funded narrative of charter schools as vehicles to ensure civil rights.

      The pro-charter story has been told by deep pocketed investors such as the Koch Brothers and the Walton Family Foundation. But the idea that a separate parallel school system would somehow benefit black and brown children goes against history and common sense.

      The Supreme Court, after all, ruled separate but equal to be Unconstitutional in Brown vs. Board of Education. Yet somehow these wealthy “philanthropists” know better.

      People of color know that when your children are separated from the white and rich kids, they often don’t get the same resources, funding and proper education. You want your children to be integrated not segregated. You want them to be where the rich white kids are. That way it’s harder for them to be excluded from the excellent education being provided to their lighter skinned and more economically advantaged peers.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Jill’s Line

      Dr. Jill Stein’s popularity surge during the Democratic National Convention led to rumors that she opposes vaccines, but that isn’t the case.

    • Open Letter to Bernie Sanders from Former Campaign Staffers

      Last summer you said you would not run as a third party candidate if you did not win the Democratic nomination. You said, “the reason for that is I do not want to be responsible for electing some right-wing Republican to be president of the United States.” This was before the unexpected and unprecedented success of your grassroots campaign where you won 22 states and almost half of the delegates in a primary process that was stacked against you every step of the way.

      We take you as a man of your word and we certainly don’t want Trump to be president either. A Trump presidency would be a terrible step backwards for working people, people of color, immigrants, students, retirees, the LGBTQ community, the environment, and the entire world, which is why more than ever we need you to reconsider the situation and make a third party run.

      Polls show that Hillary Clinton, the official Democratic nominee, is an incredibly weak candidate in the general election. Even after spending $57 million in ads (vs. $4 million by Trump) she is trailing slightly, and Trump is actually leading in several important swing states. Frankly, Hillary Clinton does not have the credibility to take on the dangerous appeal of Donald Trump.

      For a variety of reasons, many justified and some not, people don’t trust her. We are now faced with two of the most disliked presidential candidates in the history of the country. Unfortunately, too many people are disillusioned with politics and the lack of inspiring viable candidates will only hurt voter turnout. If there was ever an opportunity to break the corporate two party duopoly, this is it. So, we respectfully ask you to consider Jill Stein’s offer of a united Green Party ticket.

      A Sanders/Stein campaign would be more popular than Hillary Clinton and more successful against Trump. If polling shows you in the lead before the election, we trust that Secretary Clinton would do the right thing and not be a spoiler.

    • Why Trump Supporters Think He’ll Win

      “You people in the Acela corridor aren’t getting it. Again. You think Donald Trump is screwing up because he keeps saying things that you find offensive or off-the-wall. But he’s not talking to you. You’re not his audience, you never were, and you never will be. He’s playing this game in a different way from anybody you’ve ever seen. And he’s winning too, in a different way from anybody you’ve ever seen.

      “Our convention worked. Donald—I’m not on the payroll, I can call him that—Donald energized his voters: people who are afraid of crime and worried about the mass immigration that’s transforming their country and displacing them. We talk a lot about polls, but you ignore the polls that don’t show what you expect to see.

      “Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to run up vote totals like you’ve never seen in places you’ve never been. Not just coal country, either. No, we don’t have what you’d call a proper campaign. What do we need it for? Campaigns spend most of their money on TV ads that do nothing except entertain you on YouTube on your lunch hour—oh, and pay huge commissions to the consultants who make them. It’s all a waste and rip-off. If our message is exciting, our voters will get to the polls on their own. And you have to admit: Our message is exciting!

    • Will Hillary Clinton get a convention bounce in the polls? If not, she’s in deep trouble.

      Last week, halfway through the Republican convention in Cleveland, I wrote that the GOP gathering was so shambolic that it might not give Donald Trump the “bounce” he needed.

      I was right about the convention, but wrong about the bounce.

      Trump undeniably got one. In the average of national polls compiled by RealClearPolitics, Trump was three points behind Hillary Clinton before Cleveland; now he’s one point ahead.

      The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll showed a similar swing with a more striking result: Trump seven points ahead.

      What does that mean for Hillary Clinton, whose convention in Philadelphia was smoother and snazzier? It means she’s virtually certain to get a bounce too.

    • Hillary’s Convention Con

      This immense gap has been the Clinton duo’s con job on America for many years. Sugarcoating phrases, populist flattery, getting the election over with and jumping back into the fold of the plutocracy is their customary M.O.

      An anti-Hillary campaign button sums it up. Imagine a nice picture of Hillary with the words “More Wall Street” above her head and the words “More War” below her head.

      Alert voters could see it coming at the Convention: the militarism for Hillary the Hawk on day four in Philadelphia and the arrival of the corporate fat cats. Or, as the New York Times headlined: “Top Donors Leave Sidelines, Checkbooks in Hand.”

      The best thing Hillary Clinton has going for her is the self-destructive, unstable, unorganized, fact and truth-starved, egomaniacal, cheating, plutocratic, Donald Trump (See my column “How Unpatriotic Is Donald Trump?”).

      That’s where our nation’s two-party political leadership is today. When will the vast left/right majority rise to take over and reverse the eviscerating policies and practices of this political duopoly?

    • She Stoops to Conquer: Notes From the Democratic Convention

      + First things first. I want to apologize to the Sandernistas for any impolite things I may have written about you in the past 10 months. I especially want to apologize to those of you who rose up after your leader abandoned you, after Bernie wiped out your votes and muted your voices, after he turned you over to the DNC’s thuggish floor managers and security guards, after he sat passively as your brave chants of “No More Drones” were drowned out by the fascist war-cry of “USA! USA!!” I want to apologize for doubting your resolve. I want to apologize without qualification. You didn’t cry when Bernie betrayed you. Not for long. You marched right back into the Wells Fargo Center intent on spoiling the party. You didn’t sour on your ideals. You refused to be domesticated. You pissed on their carpet. You shouted down their war criminals. You made this squalid affair fun for a few precious hours. And that ain’t bad. Somewhere Abbie Hoffman is cracking a smile (though perhaps not at the spectacle of Meryl Streep ripping off his wardrobe during her bewildering performance, an act so incoherent it made one long for the Absurdist theater of Clint Eastwood and his empty chair routine.)

    • Long Live the Queen of Chaos

      Bernie Sanders’ program proposals and Mrs. Clinton’s theorized move Left will be but distant memories.

    • Two (Three, Four?) Data Points on DNC Hack: Why Does Wikileaks Need an Insurance File?

      This detail is important because it says Julian Assange is setting the agenda (and possibly, the decision to fully dox DNC donors) for the Wikileaks release, and that agenda does not perfectly coincide with Guccifer’s (which is presumed to be a cut-out for GRU).

      As I’ve noted, Wikileaks has its own beef with Hillary Clinton, independent of whom Vladimir Putin might prefer as President or any other possible motive for Russia to do this hack.

      Now consider this bizarre feature of several high level leak based stories on the hack: the claim of uncertainty about how the files got from the hackers to Wikileaks. This claim, from NYT, seems bizarrely stupid, as Guccifer and Wikileaks have both said the former gave the latter the files.

      [...]

      But then there’s this detail. On June 17, Wikileaks released an insurance file — a file that will be automatically decrypted if Wikileaks is somehow impeded from releasing the rest of the files. It has been assumed that the contents of that file are just the emails that were already released, but that is almost certainly not the case. After all, Wikileaks has already released further documents (some thoroughly uninteresting voice mails that nevertheless further impinge on the privacy of DNC staffers).

    • Meet Some Sanders Delegates Who Plan To Turn Anger Into Positive Action

      Luz Sosa came to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia as a disappointed Bernie Sanders delegate. But she is leaving fired up to take on big political fights in her home town of Milwaukee.

      “This election was never about Bernie Sanders. These elections were about issues the American people care about,” such as “families struggling to put food on the table,” said Sosa, who is Latino outreach organizer for Citizen Action Wisconsin and an economics professor at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

      “Bernie Sanders has been the voice of the movement, but the movement has always been there,” she said, and her advise to her fellow Bernie Sanders supporters “is to get involved in the organizations that are already working on the issues that Bernie had mentioned before.”

      Sosa on Wednesday was among a group of convention delegates, most of whom representing Sanders, who gathered at a reception sponsored by People’s Action and its Pennsylvania affiliate, Keystone Progress.

    • Hillary Clinton Will Be Good for Business, Predicts Chamber of Commerce Lobbyist

      When Jennifer Pierotti Lim strode up to the podium on the final day of the Democratic National Convention, she was identified as the co-founder of Republican Women for Hillary, a group of conservative activists supporting Hillary Clinton.

      Lim focused her brief comments on Donald Trump’s history of sexist comments, telling the audience that “Trump’s loathsome comments about women and our appearances are too many to list and too crass to repeat.”

      But what was even more significant is her day job as a top lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; she’s the Chamber’s director of health policy.

      It was the latest indication that the U.S. big-business community may be preparing to back Hillary Clinton, which would be a truly tectonic shift.

    • In the Hillary Clinton Era, Democrats Welcome Lobbying Money Back Into the Convention

      By quietly dropping a ban on direct donations from registered federal lobbyists and political action committees, the Democratic National Committee in February reopened the floodgates for corruption that Barack Obama had put in place in 2008.

      Secret donors with major public-policy agendas were welcomed back in from the cold and showered with access and appreciation at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.

      Major donors were offered “Family and Friends” packages, including suites at the Ritz-Carlton, backstage passes, and even seats in the Clinton family box. Corporate lobbyists like Heather Podesta celebrated the change, telling Time: “My money is now good.”

      What was going on inside the convention hall was also reflected outside, at costly events sponsored by the fossil fuel industry, technology companies, for-profit colleges, pharmaceutical companies, and railway companies, to name a few.

    • Both Parties Are Playing the Mexico Card

      While it has been cast mainly as the villain, the unexpected spotlight has sent politicians and activists on both sides of the border seeking to get their message out. If they’ve learned anything from the Trump playbook in the past months, it’s that negative attention is still free publicity.

    • Revealed: AARP Is Funding ALEC

      AARP, the non-profit seniors organization that exists to promote the financial security, pensions and healthcare of those over 50, is secretly funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization whose bills have acted against the interests of ordinary Americans, including retirees and their families.

      The Center for Media and Democracy has learned that AARP has recently joined ALEC, and that it is a named sponsor of the ALEC annual meeting taking place in Indianapolis, Indiana from July 27-29, 2016.

    • Patriot Games, From Watergate to Email Hacks

      There has been a break-in at the Democratic National Committee. Documents were stolen with the apparent intention of manipulating the results of a presidential election.

    • Kshama Sawant vs. Rebecca Traister on Clinton, Democratic Party & Possibility of a Female President

      As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton makes history by becoming the first woman to accept a major-party presidential nomination, we speak with Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large for New York Magazine who has covered Clinton for a decade. Her most recent article is headlined “Hillary Is Poised to Make the ‘Impossible Possible’—for Herself and for Women in America.” We are also joined by Kshama Sawant, a Socialist city councilmember in Seattle who helped win a $15/hour minimum wage for all workers in Seattle.

    • Trump Gets His Talking Points From White Supremacist Twitter Accounts

      Donald Trump’s call on Russia to hack and release Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails was one of the stranger moments in what’s been one of the stranger campaigns in US history.

      It was a sign that Trump is either stupid or trying to join the Ronald Reagan/Richard Nixon club of Republicans who have betrayed their country to get elected president.

      But as bizarre as it was, Trump’s “Russian request” wasn’t the most interesting part of his press conference yesterday in Tampa, Florida — that came when he accused Vladimir Putin of calling President Obama “the N-Word.”

    • Assange: ‘We have more material related to the Hillary Clinton campaign’

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is boasting about how his group’s release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails is affecting the US presidential election — and says it has unreleased information about Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

      “We have more material related to the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Assange told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “Anderson 360″ Friday night. “That is correct to say that.”

      Assange has been coy about how WikiLeaks came into possession of internal Democratic party cyber information. The FBI and Justice Department are investigating a computer hack of Democratic nominee Clinton’s presidential campaign in addition to its examination of intrusions of other Democratic Party organizations, two law enforcement officials told CNN.

    • Convention Dissent: There’s Less Than Meets the Eye

      Cast your memory back exactly eight years, to the opening night of the Democratic Convention in Denver: Aug. 25, 2008. The story that night was the threat of the “PUMA” which either stood for “People United Means Action” or Party Unity My Ass.” According to Adam Nathaniel Peck writing in The New Republic, “PUMAs appeared dozens of times on cable news to defend Clinton and to promise mischief at the nominating convention and in the general election. Their anger epitomized a wider unrest that has been mostly forgotten as Obama went on to win two general elections”.

    • Fury as Trump mocks Muslim soldier’s mother Ghazala Khan

      Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump has attracted outrage by mocking a dead US Muslim soldier’s mother.

      Ghazala Khan stood silently next to her husband as he attacked Mr Trump in an emotional speech to the Democratic National Convention on Thursday.

      Mr Trump suggested she may not have been allowed to speak.

      Republicans and Democrats said the Republican candidate’s comments were no way to talk of a hero’s mother. Mrs Khan said she was upset by his remarks.

      Last week her husband Khizr Khan told Democrats Mr Trump had sacrificed “nothing and no-one” for his country.

    • Waving the Constitution at Those Who Ignore It

      Khan was confronting Trump about his campaign in which he had noted that “Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country.” (Quotes come from this copy of Khan’s transcript.) Khan then continued, presumably in reference to banning Muslims from the US: “Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.”

    • Trump – Lowlife Scum Sociopath

      Trump is evil scum without human emotions, like a venomous snake. He is not worthy of any respect, certainly not the office of POTUS. Like a venomous snake, people should avoid Trump and stay very far away.

    • Parade of Speakers at DNC Paint Trump as Unfit for Presidency in Every Way, from Billionaire Bloomberg to an ex-CIA Director

      A parade of speakers at the Democratic Convention painted a devastating picture of Donald Trump as the most unqualified, inexperienced and unpredictable nominee in anyone’s memory, urging Americans—including independents—to vote for Clinton or face dire consequences.

    • Intelligence Chief Suffers Intelligence Failure Over His Own Team’s Willingness to Brief Donald Trump

      The country’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, insisted on Thursday that there has been no hesitation within the intelligence community when it comes to giving classified briefings to the presidential candidates, including Donald Trump.

      “Is there any hesitation in the intel community to brief either of these candidates?” CNN’s Jim Sciutto asked the director of National Intelligence at the Aspen Security Forum, eliciting laughter from the audience.

      “No there isn’t,” Clapper said, going on to describe the briefing as a nonpartisan tradition. “We’ve got a team all prepared,” he said.

      But several news reports over the past several months have indicated there was dissension in the ranks when it comes to telling Trump secrets — culminating in a Washington Post story Thursday night that quoted a senior intelligence official saying, “I would refuse.”

      All of which raises the question: How good can Clapper be at ferreting out secrets from foreign adversaries if he doesn’t even know what his own staff is thinking?

      Then again, he could just have been lying. He’s done it before.

    • [Links corrected] “The Two-Party System Is the Worst Case Scenario” — An Interview With the Green Party’s Jill Stein
    • The banality of Golden Dawn

      Golden Dawn remains Greece’s third most popular party. Since 2012, the party has succeeded in maintaining the solidarity and groupness of its voters intact during a series of electoral contests (local, national, and European).

      Nevertheless, Golden Dawn’s leadership is currently standing trial on criminal accusations and this has complicated the operation of the party. The questions addressed here are: How significant is Golden Dawn as a political actor and what does this imply about Greece’s stateness? Does Golden Dawn still manage to attract voters on the basis of its opposition to immigration and how?

    • Michael Eric Dyson vs. Eddie Glaude on Race, Hillary Clinton and the Legacy of Obama’s Presidency

      On Wednesday night, President Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and implored the nation to vote for Hillary Clinton. As Obama seeks to pass the torch to his secretary of state, we host a debate on Hillary Clinton, her rival Donald Trump and President Obama’s legacy between Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude and Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson. Glaude’s most recent book is “Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul,” and he recently wrote an article for Time magazine headlined “My Democratic Problem with Voting for Hillary Clinton.” Dyson is the author of “The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America” and wrote a cover article for the New Republic titled, “Yes She Can: Why Hillary Clinton Will Do More for Black People Than Obama.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Battling Censorship in Lesotho and South Africa

      A newspaper editor is recovering from surgery after being nearly assassinated in Lesotho for an article he published about a high profile army commander. Meanwhile in South Africa, journalists claim victory in their censorship row with the state broadcaster, the SABC.

      The truth is mightier than the guns of darkness, a top rights group has hit out in condemning an assassination attempt on the editor of the Lesotho Times and Sunday Express.

      Lloyd Mutungamiri was attacked by two unknown gunmen on 9 July, in apparent retaliation for his article about an alleged exit package for the country’s army commander, Lieutenant General Tlali Kamoli.

    • Proposed bill on Contempt of Court will further entrench self-censorship in Singapore

      On 30 July, Community Action Network was invited to speak at an event “Protecting our judiciary and free speech” at the Singapore Management University. This is an excerpt of the speech.

      In the last 5 years, the government has clamped down on freedom of expression in ways which we have not seen since pre-GE (General Elections) 2011. This is no doubt due to the government’s perceived threats of the influence of social media. In the cases where it has relied on case law to deal with contempt of court, it has been arbitrary in how it decided what it was, and what scandalising the judiciary meant. This proposed Bill in our view, codifies this arbitrariness even though it claims it seeks to clarify it.

    • Critics Fear Crackdown on Palestinian Free Speech as Israel Takes Aim at Facebook

      Erdan called Facebook a “monster” because it has become the platform of choice for Palestinians to denounce Israeli rule and broadcast their intention to attack Israelis. Muhammad Tarayra, the 17-year-old Palestinian behind the June 30 knife attack in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, had written on Facebook that “death is a right and I demand my right.” He expressed anger that Israeli soldiers had killed his cousin after he tried to run over them, according to Israeli news reports.

      Now, Israeli officials are seeking to pressure Facebook to take down posts similar to Tarayra’s. On July 13, Erdan and Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s justice minister, submitted a bill to the Israeli Knesset that would empower courts to compel Facebook to remove content deemed violent. And amid Israel’s legislative push against Facebook — including a separate measure that would see Facebook fined if it did not remove content inciting people to terrorism — an Israeli law firm has also filed suit against the social media company in a U.S. court.

      The moves amount to a multi-pronged campaign aimed at Facebook, which has been increasingly drawn into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli ministers have cast Facebook in the role of terror supporter and now want to force the company to police Palestinian speech they say leads to violence.

      But Israeli laws against incitement have also been used to arrest Palestinians whose Facebook posts criticize Israeli rule but do not explicitly support violence. Palestinians say that Facebook does not fuel militant attacks against Israel and that it is Israel’s decadeslong occupation and discriminatory policies against Palestinians that lead to violence.

    • Pakistan decides to contact Facebook over Kashmir posts’ censorship
    • Pakistan to contact Facebook over Kashmir posts’ censorship
    • The Facebook-Kashmir Blocks: Technical Errors, Editorial Mistakes and Invisible Censorship Galore
    • The campaign that ‘shot’ Mark Zuckerberg in the face
    • Abandoning Nuance, Facebook Is Deeming Posts On Kashmir ‘Terror Content’

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • I Con the Record Rolls Out Its 3-Page Intel Collection Efficacy Process

      Screen Shot 2016-07-30 at 2.50.04 PMLast year, PCLOB suggested that the intelligence community formalize its process to assess the efficacy of intelligence collection. While it made the recommendation as part of its 702 report, the recommendation itself came against the background of Congress and the IC having decided that the phone dragnet wasn’t really worth the cost and privacy exposure.

    • Federal Judge Rips Uber Apart Over Dirt-Digging Investigation

      In December of last year, Yale environmental researcher Spencer Meyer filed suit against Uber, alleging price fixing by Uber’s drivers and founder in violation of federal antitrust law. Hardly the first person to accuse Uber of corporate malfeasance, Meyer nonetheless became the target of private investigators, working for a security company hired by Uber, who attempted to dig up derogatory information — an act the district judge hearing the case, Jed Rakoff, has now, in a 31-page order, called “blatantly fraudulent and arguably criminal.”

      Emails turned over by Uber on the judge’s instructions and summarized in the order show that on the day Meyer filed suit, Uber counsel Salle Yoo contacted the company’s chief security officer, asking, “Could we find out a little more about this plaintiff?”

      Uber investigations chief Mat Henley then selected a New York-based private investigative firm called Ergo, also known as Global Precision Research, and began working with one of its executives, Todd Egeland, Henley said in a sworn deposition. Egeland’s online bios state openly that he is a 28-year veteran of the CIA with experience in counterintelligence and cyberthreats.

      From the very start, the Uber-Ergo deal was set up to avoid potential scrutiny: Court-obtained documents reveal that both parties used Wickr, a self-deleting messaging app, and encrypted email “to avoid potential discovery issues,” although, as seen in the email message below, from Henley to two Ergo executives, including Egeland, some of the material was eventually discovered.

    • Brazil Freezes $11 Million in Facebook Assets Over WhatsApp Data Dispute

      A court in northwestern Brazil has frozen more than $11 million worth of assets belonging to Facebook, a public prosecutor said Wednesday, following the social media giant’s failure to provide the court with data on users of its messaging service Whatsapp.

      The $11.7 million in funds was frozen after Facebook declined to provide data on Whatsapp users under criminal investigation, prosecutor Alexandre Jabur told Reuters. The funds relate to fines imposed for failing to comply with the Brazilian court order.

    • ‘Deeply Troubling’: Ex-Ambassador, Intel Officials Blast Trump Russia Comments
    • Pressure Grows on Obama to Name DNC Hackers [Ed: the ‘experts’ are Microsoft-connected]

      But six U.S. officials and security experts have told The Daily Beast that the evidence linking Russia to the hack appears conclusive. Obama himself stepped closer to pinning the hacks on Russia when he told NBC News that “experts have attributed this to the Russians” and that it was “possible” the leak was designed to help the Trump campaign.

    • NSA Whistleblowers Doubt DNC’s Claim of Russian Role in Damaging E-mail Leaks

      Anyone listening to the mainstream media is convinced that Russian hackers released the thousands of Democratic National Committee (DNC) e-mails made public by WikiLeaks. Even Donald Trump mused about the possibility of Putin’s people being behind the breach.

      Those a little more familiar with the workings of the federal government and issues of cybersecurity wonder if the “The Russians did it!” isn’t a ruse concocted by a coterie of collaborators closer to home.

      Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower currently in exile in Russia, claimed that the NSA could solve the mystery because it assuredly knows who hacked the DNC, and he tweeted on July 25 that “Evidence that could publicly attribute responsibility for the DNC hack certainly exists at #NSA, but DNI [Director of National Intelligence] traditionally objects to sharing.”

    • Hack infects Russian government computers

      Hackers struck the Russian government this weekend, reports said.

      Following data breaches on the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic Party servers that sources blamed on the regime of Vladimir Putin, a computer virus infected the networks of at least 20 Russian governmental organizations, officials with the country’s intelligence service told the BBC Saturday.

      Russia’s Federal Security Service did not say who they believe penetrated Russian networks but revealed the hack was “planned and made professionally” and also targeted defense companies and infrastructure, the report said.

      Meanwhile, the US National Security Agency’s elite hacking unit is likely tracking Russian-government cyber-spies to determine if they are responsible for the breach at the Democratic National Committee, ABC News reported.

      Federal intelligence officials said the NSA is able to “hack back” suspected organizations after an attack.

      The Obama administration has not publicly attributed the cyber attacks to Russia, which has denied involvement.

    • The NSA Is Likely ‘Hacking Back’ Russia’s Cyber Squads [Ed: Trying to make it seem reactionary… puff piece]

      U.S. government hackers at the National Security Agency are likely targeting Russian government-linked hacking teams to see once and for all if they’re responsible for the massive breach at the Democratic National Committee, according to three former senior intelligence officials. It’s a job that the current head of the NSA’s elite hacking unit said they’ve been called on to do many times before.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • 911 Tapes Released in Charles Kinsey Shooting, Pokes Massive Hole in Police Narrative of What Happened

      Last week, online video surfaced of an African-American therapist lying on the ground with his hands in the air moments before he was shot by a North Miami police officer.

      Charles Kinsey, 62, was stretched out beside his autistic patient Arnaldo Rios-Soto, who had wandered away from a local group home, before he was shot in the leg by police. Authorities defended the shooting, which was prompted by a 911 call from a neighbor claiming Rios-Soto had a gun and was attempting to kill himself. Recordings of the harrowing 911 call have since been released, revealing key details missing from the original police narrative.

      In the recording, an unidentified woman can be heard telling the dispatcher that the man with the “gun” looked mentally-ill and that the object he was holding might not be a gun at all.

      “There’s this guy in the middle of the road, and he has what appears to be a gun,” the woman said in a 911 tape released late Thursday by Miami-Dade police. “He has it to his head, and there’s a guy there trying to talk him out of it.”

      “I don’t know if it’s a gun,” she continued. “But he has something the shape of a gun, so just be careful. “But he’s sitting in the middle of the road.”

      The caller also described the men in detail, telling the dispatcher “He’s a Spanish guy, young kid. Spanish guy with gray shorts and gray pants. The guy that’s trying to talk him out of it is green shirt and black shorts. But I think the Spanish guy looks like a mentally ill person.”

      A short time later, SWAT officer Jonathan Aledda fired a single shot at Kinsey, hitting him in the leg. Rios Soto, 26, sat cross-legged next to his caretaker and continued to fumble with what turned out to be a toy truck. Video of the shooting quickly went viral and sparked national outrage over yet another Black man shot at the hands of police. Luckliy, Kinsey survived.

    • Chelsea Manning Faces Charges for Trying to Take Her Own Life

      These new charges, which Army employees verbally informed Chelsea were related to the July 5th incident, include, “resisting the force cell move team;” “prohibited property;” and “conduct which threatens.” If convicted, Chelsea could face punishment including indefinite solitary confinement, reclassification into maximum security, and an additional nine years in medium custody. They may negate any chances of parole.

    • In America, the UN Finds the Rights to Peaceful Assembly and Association Are Being Eroded, and Race Plays a Big Factor

      The U.N.’s special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association completed a 17-day mission to the United States this week, and he drew some concerning conclusions about the state of those rights in this country.

      Maini Kiai covered an impressive 10 cities in 17 days. He observed protests at the political conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia and visited cities rocked by the police killings of Black men, like Baton Rouge, Baltimore, and Ferguson.

    • The NYPD Is Already a Small Army—Now It Is Hyping Terror Threats to Militarize Even More

      The NYPD is already the largest and most well-resourced police force in the United States, with more than 34,000 officers on its payroll and a budget that hovers over $5 billion annually.

      But now, the New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio are invoking the specter of ISIS-style terror and the supposed “war on cops” to spend at least another $7.5 million on military-style gear.

    • What Are the DNC Hack(s) Rated on Obama’s New Cyber-Orange Alert System?

      The question is still more problematic if you try to grade the OPM hack, which has to be far closer to a Level 4 (because of the risk it placed clearance holders under). But do you also lump it in with, say, the hack of Anthem, which is understood to be related?

      I will ask the White House tomorrow if it has ranked the DNC hack(s). But for now, where do you think it would rate?

    • Target of Contested National Security Letter Was a Muslim the FBI Wanted to Turn Informant

      The target of a federal investigation that set off a more than decadelong battle over secret subpoenas called national security letters was a Muslim prison reform advocate the FBI wanted to become an informant.

      Nick Merrill, who fought to make the information public, revealed that information for the first time at a hacker conference in New York City.

      Merrill was the head of an internet hosting company when the controversy began. He had launched a small New York-based internet service provider called Calyx Internet Access in the 1990s, and he also consulted on digital security.

      In 2004, the FBI sent him a national security letter demanding extensive records on one of his customers.

      National security letters are secret subpoenas the FBI can send to internet and technology companies to demand various types of records about their customers’ online behaviors without ever getting a court order. In Merrill’s case, that request was particularly broad — for browsing records, email address information, billing information, and more.

    • Who Would Trayvon Have Been? Becoming a Black Man in the United States

      I don’t remember what I was doing when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. I’m sure I was watching the All-Star game, as I had done since I was a kid even younger than Trayvon. I may have even made a snack run to 7-11. I almost certainly was tweeting, or at the very least reading Twitter. I may have been on deadline and convincing myself that watching the game wasn’t procrastinating but all a part of my writing process. I was probably stressing about money. I probably wasn’t thinking about dead black boys.

      I’ve had the opportunity to do a number of things Trayvon will never have the chance to, and the guilt of that weighs heavily on me. Everything Trayvon did that supposedly justified his death — wear hoodies, walk to the store at night, buy Skittles, have tattoos, smoke weed, be suspended from school — I did. I could have been Trayvon. So many of us black boys trying to become black men in America could have been. Knowing that made his death that much harder to stomach.

    • Police Incitement Against Black Lives Matter Is Putting Protesters in Danger

      From the floor of the Republican National Convention to the online pages of the Blue Lives Matter Facebook community, it is now commonplace for public officials, police and first responders to openly declare war on Black Lives Matter — the civil rights movement of our times.

      In some cases, this climate has given way to overt intimidation, with the captain of the Columbia, South Carolina fire department fired earlier this month for threatening to run over Black Lives Matter protesters, followed by the termination of three other first responders for related offenses. According to the count of Sarah Kaplan, reporting for The Washington Post, those South Carolina officials “are among at least a dozen public employees who have lashed out against protesters on social media and been punished for it.” Yet, many more appear to have faced no consequences at all.

    • Buddhist temples attacked in Sumatra

      Indonesian authorities detained seven people in northern Sumatra island on Saturday on suspicion of attacking several Buddhist temples the previous night, officials said.

      A spokeswoman for North Sumatra provincial police said the seven had led a mob that damaged at least three temples and other property in the town of Tanjung Balai, near Indonesia’s fourth-biggest city, Medan. No one was injured.

      Indonesia is a Muslim-majority nation but has a sizable ethnic Chinese minority, many of whom are Buddhist. The country has a history of anti-Chinese violence, most recently in the late 1990s amid the political and economic crisis that brought down Suharto.

      But police officials denied Friday’s attack was aimed at the Chinese community.

    • Make Love Not Porn founder Cindy Gallop: Emma Watson was wrong to call for feminist alternatives to porn

      “Like women in many other endeavours; journalism, publishing, advertising, film-making, television, there are a whole other hosts of feminists and women making amazing work, plugging away who never get showcased in mainstream media, who can’t get people to come to their sites and pay them money for what they’re doing. So when Emma Watson goes, ‘there should be this and there should be this’, no wonder those women feel very, very upset. I completely empathise.”

      Gallop has even tried to get in touch with a contact at the UN (where Watson is a GoodWill Ambassador for women) to meet the Harry Potter actress.

    • Father ‘who kept British daughter in cage in Saudi Arabia for four years’ loses legal bid to gag media

      An academic at the centre of family court litigation after being accused of imprisoning his 21-year-old daughter at their home in Saudi Arabia has failed in a bid to limit reporting of the case.

      Amina Al-Jeffery – who grew up in Swansea and has dual British and Saudi Arabian nationality – says her father, Mohammed Al-Jeffery, locks her up because she “kissed a guy”.

      Lawyers representing Miss Al-Jeffery have taken legal action in London in a bid to protect her.

      They have asked Mr Justice Holman to look at ways of coming to her aid.

    • Security Territory And Population Part 3: Security As The Basis For Governing

      Security is connected to liberalism as a form of government. This last difference helps us see the nature of liberalism as a political ideal. It promises more freedom of action, more freedom of response to realty.

    • Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford on Why the Clintons Won Over Black America

      Despite her dogged support of her husband’s bills on welfare “reform” and mass incarceration—policies that devastated black America—and her past reference to urban black youths as “superpredators,” black Americans favored Hillary Clinton generously in the 2016 Democratic primary.

    • What We Wear: Another Way to “Vote”

      For more than two decades, more and more Americans have become aware of the exploitation and violence associated with much of the globalized garment industry producing more than 95 percent of our clothes. A series of media exposures, including the 1996 revelation that TV host Kathy Lee Gifford had endorsed a clothing line produced by Honduran children in sweatshop conditions, spurred a growing consciousness of labor abuses in many countries.

    • Despite Clinton Endorsement, Bernie Lays Foundation to Carry On “Revolution”

      Sanders has started a “social welfare” 501(c)(4) advocacy organization, to support progressive groups seeking to coach and vet those who want to run for office. He touted the group, called “Our Revolution,” in an email sent to supporters earlier this week.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Google Enchances Its Security By Enabling HSTS Encryption For Google.com

      Google had revealed its latest intentions to enhance encryption level of its domains. The same will be done by enabling HSTS encryption across various products preventing users from being redirected to unsafe links wrapped in the secure shell of HTTPS protocol.

    • If Theresa May wants to improve productivity, she needs to start with our broadband

      We hear a lot of talk from politicians about the urgency of improving the UK’s poor productivity. Upgrading digital connections is plainly a vital element of delivering that. How can we encourage more people to set up businesses if they cannot get reliable and fast broadband?

    • Big Telecom Wants a DC Circuit Net Neutrality Review. Here’s Why That’s Unlikely

      The nation’s largest cable and telecom industry trade groups on Friday asked a federal court for a rare “en banc” review of last month’s decision upholding US rules protecting net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible to consumers.

      The industry petitions come six weeks after a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a landmark ruling affirming Federal Communications Commission rules barring cable and phone companies from favoring certain internet services over others.

      Friday’s petitions, which request a hearing by the full DC Circuit Court of Appeals, were filed by USTelecom, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the American Cable Association, and wireless trade group CTIA, which collectively represent the nation’s largest cable and phone companies.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Top 10 Free Movie Download Websites That Are Completely Legal

        You’ll be surprised to find The Internet Archive sitting at the top of our free movie download websites. It like a goldmine for the fans of movies, music, and books. From The Internet Archive, you can download hundreds of movies for free in the form of torrents.

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