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04.11.16

Links 11/4/2016: Krita 3.0 Alpha, New Linux RC

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • GNU/kWindows

    There has been a lot of talk lately about a most unique combination: GNU—the fully free/libre operating system—and Microsoft Windows—the freedom-denying, user-controlling, surveillance system. There has also been a great deal of misinformation. I’d like to share my thoughts.

    [...]

    Free software is absolutely essential: it ensures that users, who are the most vulnerable, are in control of their computing—not software developers or corporations. Any program that denies users any one of their four freedoms is non-free (or proprietary)—that is, freedom-denying software. This means that any non-free software, no matter its features or performance, will always be inferior to free software that performs a similar task.

    Not everyone likes talking about freedom or the free software philosophy. This disagreement resulted in the “open source” development methodology, which exists to sell the benefits of free software to businesses without discussing the essential ideological considerations. Under the “open source” philosophy, if a non-free program provides better features or performance, then surely it must be “better”, because they have outperformed the “open source” development methodology; non-free software isn’t always considered to be a bad thing.

    [...]

    Secondly, when you see someone using a GNU/kWindows system, politely ask them why. Tell them that there is a better operating system out there—the GNU/Linux operating system—that not only provides those technical features, but also provides the feature of freedom! Tell them what free software is, and try to relate it to them so that they understand why it is important, and even practical.

    It’s good to see more people benefiting from GNU; but we can’t be happy when it is being sold as a means to draw users into an otherwise proprietary surveillance system, without so much as a mention of our name, or what it is that we stand for.

  • Good bye “open source”; hello “free software”

    Everyone has at least a good reason to prefer software freedom over non-free software products.

  • Rancher Labs Release Rancher 1.0, An Open Source Cross-Cloud Container Management Platform

    Rancher Labs have released version 1.0 of their open source Rancher container management platform, which allows the deployment of Docker containers via Docker Swarm, Kubernetes or Rancher Labs’ Cattle across a range of underlying infrastructure. Rancher manages the underlying compute fabric, exposing control via a web-based UI that can be secured via RBAC/ACL, and can be deployed across a combination of multiple public cloud vendors, private virtualised clouds and bare metal. The platform also includes integrated load balancing and persistent storage services.

  • Events

    • OSCAL ’16 | Open Source Conference Albania 2016

      OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) is the major international tech conference in Albania organized by Open Labs Hackerspace, the open source and free software community in Albania. The conference promotes software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge, global movements which originally started more than 30 years ago.

      The third edition of the the annual OSCAL conference will take place once again in Tirana on 14 & 15th of May and will gather more than 400 free libre open source technology enthusiasts, developers, students, academics, governmental agencies and people who share the idea that software should be free and open for the local community and governments to develop and customize to its needs; that knowledge is a communal property and free and open to everyone.

    • Document Freedom Day 2016: Singapore

      Document Freedom Day is a day where we celebrate and raise awareness of Open Standards. It is held annually, on the last Wednesday of March. However, this year, the Ambassadors in Singapore decided to celebrate it on 24 March, 2016.

    • KubeCon part 2: 1.3 and the CNCF

      In the “State of The Union”, David Aronchik, Kubenetes Project Manager for Google, brought folks up to date with what’s happened in the Kubernetes community and what’s ahead for version 1.3 and beyond.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Is your open source community optimized for contributors?

        Josh Matthews is a platform developer at Mozilla. He’s a programmer who writes Rust code and is active in the development of Firefox. His development experience has led him to enjoy mentoring new contributors in open source projects.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • What’s new in MySQL?

      This year at the Percona Live Data Performance Conference I’ll be talking about MySQL. MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database, enabling the cost-effective delivery of reliable, high-performance and scalable web-based and embedded database applications, including all five of the top five websites.

      My interest in databases grew while working in banking in the late nineties. Back then I implemented back-end ATM servers using HP-UX and Sybase as the development platform. I remember we had an allowed maintenance window from 2am-5am, and struggled with finishing a blocking create index operation on our main table with 30 million rows. I remember thinking “Why can’t this be done while the database is online?”

    • Open Source Leader MariaDB Rockets into Analytics Market

  • Education

    • Mining for Education

      Students are not taught word processing, they are taught Microsoft Word. They are not taught presentation skills, they are taught Microsoft Powerpoint. They are required to present their work, be it essay, slideshow, or graph, in Microsoft-owned proprietary formats, recorded onto thumb-drives formatted with a Microsoft-patented file systems. Nothing else will do.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • MediPi open source telehealth kit piloted in NHS

      An open source telehealth kit built using a Raspberry Pi will be piloted with heart patients at a southern NHS trust this financial year.

      Richard Robinson, a technical integration specialist at HSCIC, developed the telehealth prototype called MediPi to prove that “telehealth is affordable at scale”.

      He said eight months ago his wife, who works for a charity helping socially isolated older people, was asked to find volunteers for a telehealth pilot.

      “She came home with the kit and it was all high-end tablets, 3G and Bluetooth enabled devices and I was really shocked by what I thought would cost,” explained Robinson.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • 6 steps to calculate ROI for an open hardware project

        Free and open source software advocates have courageously blazed a trail that is now being followed by those interested in open source for physical objects. It’s called free and open source hardware (FOSH), and we’re seeing an exponential rise in the number of free designs for hardware released under opensource licenses, Creative Commons licenses,or placed in the public domain.

  • Programming/Development

    • What’s awful about being a {software engineer, tech lead, manager}?

      I’ve been building software professionally for over 10 years now. I love what I do and I hope to be an old programmer someday. But along the way, I’ve encountered many terrible things that have made me hate my job. I wish that someone had given me a roadmap of what to expect earlier in my career, so when some new and unfortunate awfulness occurred that I wouldn’t have felt so alone and frustrated.

      This post is meant to be such a guide. I have three goals.

    • FAQ: Node.js

      We still have nightmares about GeoCities too, and yes, JavaScript has historically been used for things like that. It originated at Netscape in the mid 90s as a lightweight scripting language to add interactive properties to web pages, but it has come a long way since then. Sure, many programmers look down on JavaScript, and it’s massively overused on some websites, but it also has plenty of fans.

    • A single Node of failure

      The web-development community was briefly thrown into chaos in late March when a lone Node.js developer suddenly unpublished a short but widely used package from the Node Package Manager (npm) repository. The events leading up to that developer’s withdrawal are controversial in their own right, but the chaotic effects raise even more serious questions for the Node.js and npm user communities.

      npm itself is a module repository for Node.js code, akin to the Python Package Index or similar repositories for other languages and frameworks. Users can install a package with a simple npm install foo, but the service is also widely used by Node.js developers to automatically fetch and install dependencies: projects list their dependencies in the package.json file, and they are recursively fetched from npm and installed when the package is built. Using npm in this manner is standard operating procedure, allowing complex JavaScript applications to be written on top of multiple third-party frameworks in minimal lines of code. The service, however, is run by a private company called npm, Inc., rather than by the Node.js project.

Leftovers

  • Google Is Interested In Buying Its Rival Yahoo’s Web Business — Report
  • What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Negotiation

    The next president of the United States will need to be an extremely effective negotiator. Armed conflict, political deadlock, and diplomatic crises abound. The president will be called upon to resolve the war in Syria, manage complex relationships with Russia and Iran, handle hot spots such as North Korea, Libya, and Ukraine, navigate competitive tensions with China, and revive a modicum of bipartisanship in Congress. Ironically, the only presidential candidate who has been asserting his prowess as a great negotiator is someone who has precisely the wrong instincts and experience for the types of conflicts the president will face. The Donald Trump approach to negotiation would be not only ineffective but also disastrous — and there are clearly identifiable reasons for this.

  • Typing on a MacBook Could Soon Be as Awful as Typing on an iPad
  • Apple Patent Imagines a Keyboard without Keys
  • Apple patented a MacBook design that is all touchpad and no keys
  • Apple files patent for a ‘keyless’ touchpad keyboard

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Children Wrongfully put on ADHD Medication

      A recent study showed that 1 in every 4 children in preschool is taking medication for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The majority of kids that age have a tough time paying attention to extended periods of time because their brain and body is nowhere close to being fully developed. Medication shouldn’t be the first option when it comes to treating kids who have ADHD or who we think have ADHD.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Britain’s top secret kill list: How British police backed by GCHQ fed names of drug lords to a US assassination unit, which – under cover of the war on terror – wiped out an innocent family with a missile strike

      British law enforcement and intelligence services have helped draw up an extra-judicial ‘kill list’ to assassinate the world’s most wanted terrorists and drug smugglers in foreign countries.

      The sensational claims, which raise disturbing questions about Britain’s involvement in the targeting of aircraft and drone strikes, will be revealed in a 50-page report by the Reprieve human rights charity to be published tomorrow.

      It will state that the UK has been a key, long-standing partner in America’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, targeting not only alleged terrorists, but also supposed drug traffickers, and earmarking them for drone and missile strikes – often on the basis of unsubstantiated ‘intelligence’ which has never been tested in court.

      Although the top secret ‘kill list’ has been in existence for years and is continually revised, Britain’s contribution has never been sanctioned by Parliament.

      The startling evidence, drawn from leaked official documents, reveals the two agencies involved are the electronic eavesdropping organisation GCHQ, and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), now rebranded as the National Crime Agency (NCA).

    • Top secret “28 pages” may hold clues about Saudi support for 9/11 hijackers

      Current and former members of Congress, U.S. officials, 9/11 Commissioners and the families of the attack’s victims want 28 top-secret pages of a congressional report released. Bob Graham, the former Florida governor, Democratic U.S. Senator and onetime chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says the key section of a top secret report he helped author should be declassified to shed light on possible Saudi support for some of the 9/11 hijackers. Graham was co-chair of Congress’ bipartisan “Joint Inquiry” into intelligence failures surrounding the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that issued the report in 2003. Graham speaks to Steve Kroft for 60 Minutes report to be broadcast Sunday, April 10 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

    • U.S. Bombs Were Used in Saudi-Led Attack on Market in Yemen, Rights Group Finds

      ONE OF THE deadliest airstrikes in Yemen since a Saudi Arabia-led coalition began bombing the country used munitions supplied by the United States, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

      The March 15 attack targeted a crowded market in the village of Mastaba in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 97 civilians, including 25 children. HRW said it found remnants of a “GBU-31 satellite-guided bomb, which consists of a U.S.-supplied MK-84 2,000-pound bomb mated with a JDAM satellite guidance kit, also U.S.-supplied.” The group said it also reviewed evidence provided by British news channel ITV, which found remnants of an “MK-84 bomb paired with a Paveway laser guidance kit.”

      The report provides yet more evidence of U.S. complicity in the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Yemen. The Obama administration has been a key military backer of Saudi Arabia in its yearlong campaign against a rebel movement in Yemen known as the Houthis. In addition to billions of dollars in arms sales, the Pentagon has provided the Saudi-led coalition with logistical and intelligence support. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. role may make it “jointly responsible” for war crimes.

    • GCHQ working on joint ‘shoot to kill list’

      According to the article in the paper, one Afghan family were killed by a missile strike after they were mistaken for a member of the Taliban.

    • Covering Up Hillary’s Libyan Fiasco

      Despite Libya’s bloodshed and chaos, ex-Secretary of State Clinton still defends her key role in the 2011 “regime change,” but her reasons don’t withstand scrutiny, as Jonathan Marshall explains.

    • Tomgram: William Hartung, What a Waste, the U.S. Military

      From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represents chump change in the Pentagon’s wastage sweepstakes and in the context of its $600-billion-plus budget, but think of it as indicative of the absurd lengths the Department of Defense will go to when what’s at stake is throwing away taxpayer dollars.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study

      Climate change could cut the value of the world’s financial assets by $2.5tn (£1.7tn), according to the first estimate from economic modelling.

      In the worst case scenarios, often used by regulators to check the financial health of companies and economies, the losses could soar to $24tn, or 17% of the world’s assets, and wreck the global economy.

      The research also showed the financial sense in taking action to keep climate change under the 2C danger limit agreed by the world’s nations. In this scenario, the value of financial assets would fall by $315bn less, even when the costs of cutting emissions are included.

    • What Will Happen When Genetically Engineered Salmon Escape Into the Wild?

      In late 2015, the Food and Drug Administration gave the greenlight to AquaBounty, Inc., a company poised to create, produce and market an entirely new type of salmon. By combining the genes from three different types of fish, AquaBounty has made a salmon that grows unnaturally fast, reaching adult size twice as fast as its wild relative.

      [...]

      Unfortunately, outside of Alaska, our poor management of an enormous fishing industry and important habitat has depleted fish stocks all along our coasts. Salmon species, in particular, are sensitive to environmental changes. The development and industrialization of our coast has polluted and dammed the rivers they depend on to breed. Although salmon used to be abundant on both the east and west coasts, large, healthy populations of salmon now exist mostly in Alaska.

  • Finance

    • Tory donor was trusted middleman for oil firm involved in bribes inquiry

      David Cameron’s troubles deepened on Saturday night as a Tory donor named in the Panama Papers was revealed as a trusted middleman for a company raided by the Serious Fraud Office, which is investigating what has been described as the world’s biggest bribery scandal.

      [...]

      Unaoil is at the centre of allegations that the business “systematically corrupted the global oil industry” by delivering millions in bribes on behalf of well-known multinationals to secure contracts.

      A week ago, authorities in Monaco raided the headquarters of the company, as well as the homes of some of its bosses, as part of a British-led investigation into a corruption scandal implicating businesses all over the world.

    • Still in the Dark on TTIP: Trade Agreement with the European Union Is a Black Box

      Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have been concluded. Citizens now have access to the 30-chapter agreement that is several thousand pages long. The TPP has been opposed by four major presidential candidates, and faces criticism in Congress. Nevertheless, it is likely that the trade deal will get a vote sometime this year.

    • Hillary Clinton Fundraiser Hosted by All-Star Cast of Financial Regulators Who Joined Wall Street

      As Hillary Clinton questions rival Bernie Sanders over the depth of his financial reform ideas this week, a group of former government officials – once tasked with regulating Wall Street and now working in the financial industry or as Wall Street lobbyists — are participating in a fundraiser for her in the nation’s capital.

      The invitation for the April 6 fundraiser, obtained by Sunlight Foundation’s Political Party Time, describes a “conversation” with Hillary finance chair Gary Gensler and Senators Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Carl Levin, D-Mich.

    • Texas nurses supersizing salaries for more money at McDonald’s

      “You know, you can start off at McDonald’s at $13-$14 an hour in some cases, you could certainly find easier jobs for more money and that’s a real problem when you’re trying to keep good people in your facilities,” said Scott Kibbe with the Texas Health Care Association.

    • Bitcoin and Ethereum are Driving Factors of Open Execution Initiative

      The Bitcoin network has been supporting the Open Execution principle for quite some time now, as services owners can’t run away with people’s bitcoins, and no one else can use your coins and send them to somebody else. Moreover, no additional money can be created out of thin air.

    • No, Bill Clinton, You Can’t Blame Welfare Reform’s Failures On Republicans

      While speaking to a crowd in Philadelphia on Thursday, former president Bill Clinton was interrupted by protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement carrying signs criticizing the crime bill and welfare reform bill that he signed into law in the 1990s.

      In response, Clinton gave a misleading defense of welfare reform. “They say the welfare reform bill increased poverty,” he said of the protesters. “Then why did we have the largest drop in African-American poverty when I was president?”

    • “Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First”

      For as long as people have yearned for more stuff, intellectuals have chastised them for that desire. Even Plato’s “Republic” followed the “decline of a virtuous, frugal city as it was corrupted by the lust for luxurious living,” Trentmann reminds readers. But his true nemesis is more recent: John Kenneth Galbraith, author of “The Affluent Society” (1958), in which the late economist argued that modern society seeks not only to fulfill our needs but also to create new ones, propelling us to live beyond our means, go into debt and thus strengthen the power of business. Though Trentmann acknowledges that the book has been enormously influential in cementing popular notions of consumerism, he dismisses it as “not a sober empirical study but a piece of advocacy to justify greater public spending.”

    • The Pillaging of America’s State Universities

      America’s great public research universities, which produce path-breaking discoveries and train some of the country’s most talented young students, are under siege. The result may be a significant weakening of the nation’s preeminence in higher education. Dramatic cuts in public spending for state flagship universities seem to be at odds with widespread public sentiment. Americans say they strongly believe in exceptional educational systems; they want their kids to attend excellent and selective colleges and to get good, well-paying, prestigious jobs. They also support university research. After 15 years of surveys, Research! America found in 2015 that 70 percent of American adults supported government-sponsored basic scientific research like that produced by public universities, while a significant plurality (44 percent) supported paying higher taxes for medical research designed to cure diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s. Nonetheless, many state legislators seem to be ignoring public opinion as they essentially starve some of the best universities—those that educate about two-thirds of American college students.

    • Wall Street Should Pay a Sales Tax, Too

      In case there was any doubt, the presidential election fight has confirmed that blasting Wall Street, even eight years after the financial crisis, is still a vote-getter.

      Hillary Clinton has said she’d like to jail more bankers. Donald Trump has skewered the hedge fund managers who are “getting away with murder.” And Bernie Sanders has made Wall Street accountability a centerpiece of his campaign.

      Of course, financial industry lobbyists aren’t about to take this lying down. In recent weeks, they’ve turned up the heat on lawmakers to block one particular measure that Sanders has mentioned in nearly every stump speech: taxing Wall Street speculation.

      Americans are used to paying sales taxes on basic goods and services, like a spring jacket, a gallon of gas, or a restaurant meal. But when a Wall Street trader buys millions of dollars’ worth of stocks or derivatives, there’s no tax at all.

      Sanders has introduced a bill called the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would correct that imbalance by placing a small tax of just a fraction of a percent on all financial trades. It wouldn’t apply to ordinary consumer transactions such as ATM withdrawals or wire transfers.

    • NY Daily News Claims FDR Unfit to Be President: “No Concrete Plans, Only Platitudes”

      [The following is an imagined 1932 New York Daily News editorial board interview with Franklin Roosevelt during his presidential campaign. The Daily News comments below derive from the editorial board’s interview with Bernie Sanders on April 1, 2016. The Roosevelt statements are taken primarily from his 1933 inaugural address and his 1936 campaign speech at Madison Square Garden.]

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Sanders Takes 30-Point Bite out of Clinton Lead in NY

      A poll released Friday shows that Bernie Sanders has significantly narrowed the lead Hillary Clinton once claimed in New York.

      The new Emerson College poll (pdf) shows Clinton leading Sanders among Democratic primary voters in the state by 18 points—56 percent to 38 percent. That marks a significant drop in support for the former secretary of state since the same poll was taken less than one month ago.

    • GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, Now Slamming Sanders, Once Said It Was His “Task to Outsource”

      BACK IN 2014, in an interview with the magazine Chief Executive, General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt explained that starting in the 1980s, “most of us” — i.e. GE executives — “saw it as our task to outsource manufacturing, to move it to low-cost countries. This continued through the 1990s and into the very early 2000s.”

      Immelt’s statement of the obvious is relevant because Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said essentially the same thing about GE this week, which triggered an angry response from Immelt.

      In a meeting on Monday with the New York Daily News editorial board, Sanders was asked to name a corporation that he believed was “destroying the fabric of our nation.” Sanders said that GE was a “good example” because it had shut down “many major plants in this country. Sending jobs to low-wage countries. … That is saying that I don’t care that the workers, here have worked for decades. … The only thing that matters is that I can make a little bit more money. That the dollar is all that is almighty.”

    • Activists Launch Fight for Media Fairness for Sanders in Tight New York Primary
    • Grassroots revolt against Hillary: Occupy activists launch “Battle of New York” to fight Clinton machine, anti-Sanders bias in belly of beast

      “The corporate media and establishment keep counting us out, but we keep winning by large margins,” the Bernie Sanders campaign tweeted triumphantly, after the Vermont senator won the Wisconsin primary by a large margin this week.

      Journalists and activists in New York — the site of what may be the most important primary in the election — have noticed. And they are organizing in response.

      Enter Operation Battle of New York.

      It is the name of a new campaign launched by the editorial groups of The Indypendent and The Occupied Wall Street Journal, left-wing citizen journalist publications that have served as important voices for American social movements for more than a decade.

      “We can expect corporate media to do everything it can to prop up Clinton and ignore or mischaracterize Sanders and the increasingly broad and diverse movement that supports him,” Operation Battle of New York writes in the description accompanying its Indiegogo campaign.

    • We’re speeding toward a climate change catastrophe — and that makes 2016 the most important election in a generation

      Before dropping out of the presidential race last month, Marco Rubio repeatedly declared that the 2016 presidential election is “the most important in a generation.” Such language is, of course, not uncommon to hear during election seasons. Politicians have been assuring the public for decades that the “next election” will be more significant than ever before, and that if the opposition party wins, the consequences will be catastrophic. As Rubio once stated in overtly apocalyptic language, “if we don’t get this election right, there may be no turning back for America.”

    • Hillary’s Inability to Grapple With Inequality Is Making Her Vulnerable to Bernie in New York

      Establishment politicians running for high office live and breathe elaborate focus group-tested lines. In time, they become those lines. But every now and then, extreme political pressures can force a few unscripted words to slip through. And when that happens, we gain a rare glimpse of the candidate’s deeper understanding of their world and our world, and the gap between the two.

      Hillary Clinton suffered such a moment on Tuesday afternoon while speaking at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Before taking the podium she already knew from internal polling that Sanders was going to win handily in Wisconsin. That meant she would be a loser in six of the last seven states, and by landslides, no less. Her staff is telling her not to worry; all the math on her side. Her delegate lead is so large Sanders can’t possibly overtake her.

      But Hillary is not stupid. She saw Sanders draw 18,000 people in the Bronx, virtually all people of color, and that was before his latest Wisconsin victory. She knows that nothing is set in stone if your opponent is clobbering you in primary after primary. Political momentum is something to fear and could infect the big states like New York and California.

      On top of that, young people are giving Bernie more than 80% of their votes. Even large majorities of young black and Latino voters are flocking to Sanders. How can that be?

    • Sanders Catches Clinton

      Sanders had the support of 47 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters while Clinton had 46 percent—a narrow gap that fell within the poll’s 2.5 percent margin of error. The national survey was conducted in the days before the Vermont senator handily defeated the former secretary of state in the Wisconsin primary, and it tracks other polls in the last week that found Sanders erasing Clinton’s edge across the country. In a poll that PRRI conducted in January, Clinton had a 20-point lead.

    • US government, Soros funded Panama Papers to attack Putin – WikiLeaks

      On Wednesday, the international whistleblowing organization said on Twitter that the Panama Papers data leak was produced by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), “which targets Russia and [the] former USSR.” The “Putin attack” was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and American hedge fund billionaire George Soros, WikiLeaks added, saying that the US government’s funding of such an attack is a serious blow to its integrity.

    • ‘Chalking’ officially a problem as pro-Trump messages set off new storms

      If three is officially a trend, chalking is now a trendy — and highly controversial — way for Donald Trump fans to show their love.

      This week, two schools — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — jumped into the chalking fray, joining the headlines made in March at Emory University with pro-Trump messages scrawled on campus grounds.

      Following a now-familiar timeline, the chalked messages appeared and the storms followed. At UTC, it hit the student government.

    • Paul Krugman Is Annoying

      Krugman being Krugman, that means he’s been flooding the zone with anti-Bernie columns and blog posts.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • China’s “Panama” Censorship & The Implications For Encryption, Bitcoin

      The Panama Papers will have political and social fallout for months and years to come, much like the Libor scandal or the Edward Snowden leaks. A vote of no confidence for Iceland’s prime minister and Internet censorship in China are likely but the beginning.

    • Easier film censorship norms ahead?

      Is the government considering to relax the process of film certification? Also will filmmakers be able to get certification online instead of going through a long and winding process as is the case now?

    • When Pennsylvania was the censorship capital of America

      Can media affect behavior? Can a violent movie or video game provoke violence? Can visiting obscene, racist or misogynistic websites breed anti-social behavior? Should government step in to stop or regulate them?

      While the Internet now provides easy access to the darkest corners of the imagination, these concerns are not new. Even when the first films unspooled a century ago, authorities worried that the cinema would corrupt our communities. Pennsylvania became the first state to pass a law regulating motion pictures.

    • The architect of China’s Great Firewall embarrassed after needing to use VPN in front of live audience

      Fan Binxing, architect of the China’s infamous Great Firewall, was put in the embarrassing position of having to use a VPN in front of a live audience when trying to access a blocked web page.

      On April 3 Fang Binxing was giving a speech on internet safety at his alma mater, the Harbin Institute Technology. During the speech, he presented a defense for internet sovereignty and used North Korea’s own version of the system as a talking point.

    • Majome blasts censorship board

      Harare West legislator Jessie Majome says the censorship board is concerned with controlling political space, leaving information considered immoral and misappropriate finding its way into national radio and television.

    • The Naked Truth About Censorship In Uzbekistan

      Censorship was a key instrument for controlling the masses during Soviet times. These days Uzbekistan’s ageing President Islam Karimov — who served as the First Secretary of Soviet Uzbekistan’s Communist Party before independence — regularly rages against anything and everything connected to the old Union.

      Nevertheless, the system he has fashioned in the Central Asian country of 30 million remains remarkably similar to the one it emerged from in 1991.

    • Campuses are places for open minds – not where debate is closed down

      Last month, in the early hours, an act of traumatising racist violence occurred on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Students woke up to find that someone had written, in chalk, the words “Trump 2016” on various pavements and walls around campus. “I think it was an act of violence,” said one student. “I legitimately feared for my life,” said another; “I thought we were having a KKK rally on campus”. Dozens of students met the university president that day to demand that he take action to repudiate Trump and to find and punish the perpetrators. Writing political statements in chalk is a common practice on American college campuses and, judging from the public reaction to the Emory event, most Americans consider the writing to be an act of normal free speech during the national collective ritual of a presidential election. So how did it come to pass that many Emory students felt victimised and traumatised by innocuous and erasable graffiti?

    • A global guide to using Shakespeare to battle power

      Hitler was a Shakespeare fan; Stalin feared Hamlet; Othello broke ground in apartheid-era South Africa; and Brazil’s current political crisis can be reflected by Julius Caesar. Across the world different Shakespearean plays have different significance and power. The latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, a Shakespeare special to mark the 400th anniversary of his death, takes a global look at the playwright’s influence, explores how censors have dealt with his works and also how performances have been used to tackle subjects that might otherwise have been off limits. Below some of our writers talk about some of the most controversial performances and their consequences.

    • China Internet regulator says Web censorship not a trade barrier
    • China Internet Regulator Says Web Censorship Not a Trade Barrier

      China’s online censorship system protects national security and does not discriminate against foreign companies, the country’s Internet regulator said, after the United States labelled the blocking of websites by Beijing a trade barrier.

      The US Trade Representative (USTR) wrote in an annual report that over the past year China’s web censorship has worsened, presenting a significant burden to foreign firms and Internet users.

    • Blizzard Erases Gaming History By Axing a Fan-Made ‘World of Warcraft’ Server

      Last week attorneys representing Blizzard Entertainment sent a cease-and-desist letter to the administrators of Nostalrius Begins, a private “legacy” server that had been running a version of World of Warcraft as it existed between 2004 and 2005 since February 28 of 2015. As of last night a Change.org petition to Blizzard CEO and co-founder Michael Morhaime had garnered more than 55,000 signatures in protest, but the plea for survival went unanswered, and the server shuts down forever effective today.

      Blizzard, of course, is acting within its rights. Nostalrius’ existence essentially amounts to piracy (particularly since the game proper is still going strong), and such things are expressly forbidden by Blizzard’s own terms of use. In a sense, this was inevitable, and it’s frankly surprising that Blizzard let it thrive for so long without taking action.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Leaked Encryption Draft Bill ‘Ignores Economic, Security, and Technical Reality’

      “This bill makes effective cybersecurity illegal.”

    • Edward Snowden Shows How To Tweet Like A Boss After Panama Papers Leak

      In a short span of time, Edward Snowden has built an impeccable reputation on Twitter.

    • Surveillance Debate Gets a Needed Dose of Racial Perspective

      ALVARO BEDOYA HAS been working on surveillance, privacy, and technology in Washington for years now. Before founding Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, he served as chief counsel to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law.

      But as surveillance became a major national issue thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Bedoya saw something disturbing amid the Washington wonkery: a huge gulf between the discussions of government spying, on the one hand, and aggressive policing tactics in minority communities on the other.

    • The Internet of Things has a dirty little secret

      A year ago when the Internet of Shit account was spawned, it started as a personal joke: I was hearing a lot about internet-connected smart devices, but they all sounded like terrible ideas.

      In recent times, however, we’ve seen a new slew of devices pouring onto the market with no real specific purpose, as far as anyone can tell. At first I was just making jokes about these things, but the situation is worse than I initially thought.

      [...]

      The opportunities are delicious for bloated internet companies: now a software company could know how warm your home is, what times of day are noisy, whether you have a pet, when you turn on your lights or if you listen to music while having sex.

      Smart devices are sold as a way to improve your life — and in many ways, they do to an extent — but it also means those gadgets are incredible troves of data that could eventually turn into Software-as-a-Service money makers, just like Nespresso did to coffee.

    • A cashless society as a tool for censorship and social control

      The Atlantic had the excellent idea of commissioning Sarah Jeong, one of the most astute technology commentators on the Internet (previously), to write a series of articles about the social implications of technological change: first up is an excellent, thoughtful, thorough story on the ways that the “cashless society” is being designed to force all transactions through a small number of bottlenecks that states can use to control behavior and censor unpopular political views.

      Even if you like the idea of racists and jihadis and human traffickers being limited in their crowdfunding and financial ambitions, the power to control commerce at a fine-grained level, combined with the scale at which transactions flow, means that these restrictions end up being a dragnet, not a speargun. When you fish with a dragnet, you always catch some dolphins along with your tuna.

    • College Grad Looking For a Job? The NSA Wants YOU!

      If you want an indication as to how the surveillance state is growing, take a look at college recruitment by the National Security Agency (NSA). The agency routinely recruits students with internships and scholarships around the United States but now the NSA is looking for employees in the backyard of its controversial Utah Data Center.

    • Senate encryption bill draft mandates ‘technical assistance’

      A long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee encryption bill would force companies to provide “technical assistance” to government investigators seeking locked data, according to a discussion draft obtained by The Hill.

      The measure, from Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), is a response to concerns that criminals are increasingly using encrypted devices to hide from authorities.

      While law enforcement has long pressed Congress for such legislation, the tech community and privacy advocates warn that it would undermine security and endanger online privacy.

    • Fierce legal battle over data retention in Sweden

      There is a rather interesting legal battle concerning data retention going on in Sweden. Parties are the ISP Bahnhof and the government oversight authority Post- & Telestyrelsen (PTS).

      Two years ago, to the day, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) invalidated the EU data retention directive — stating that it is in violation of human rights, especially the right to privacy.

    • Facebook Opens The Floodgates to ‘Sponsored Content’

      That’s because Facebook has changed its rules around sponsored content. On Friday, the social network announced that it will now let publishers, celebrities, and brands post sponsored or branded content on their Facebook pages as long as they follow a couple of rules, including getting a verified by Facebook and using a special tag for each of these posts.

    • GCHQ wizards kept Harry Potter’s secret [Ed: grooming and whitewashing GCHQ for Sunday]
    • Defence Against the Dark Arts: British spies guarded against Harry Potter leak
    • Defense Against the Dark Arts: UK spies guarded against Harry Potter leak
    • Harry Potter and the Spooks of GCHQ: Bizarre story of how British spies battled to stop internet leak of JK Rowling book
    • How GCHQ was called in to keep Harry Potter under wraps
    • Harry Potter and the curious tale of GCHQ
    • Facebook Users Are Sharing Fewer Personal Updates and It’s a Big Problem

      If you haven’t posted anything personal on Facebook FB in awhile, you’re not alone. A damning report published by The Information on Thursday revealed that Facebook has been struggling to reverse a 21% decline in “original sharing,” or personal updates, from its 1.6 billion monthly active users.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Innocent 60-year-old man free after 30 years in prison

      A man who spent more than three decades serving time for crimes he did not commit was finally released from a Virginia correctional facility.

      60-year-old Keith Allen Harward got his first taste of freedom Friday afternoon, thanking his lawyers, whom he called “heroes,” and lamented the fact that his parents could not see him walk free.

      “That’s the worst part about this, is my parents,” said Mr Harward, holding back tears as he addressed media outside the prison. “It killed them. It devastated them.” He added that he was not allowed to attend their funeral because of the sentence.

    • AP Analysis: Arab Democracies? Not So Fast, Say Some

      A new-old idea is rattling around the Middle East five years after the Arab Spring stirred democratic ambition: that restoring stability, especially if accompanied by some economic and political improvements, should be reform enough for the moment.

      This discourse appears to be taking front and center these days, most obviously in Egypt — the region’s most populous country and the one that raised the highest hopes for democracy advocates when the military in 2011 removed longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak as millions rallied against him and his Western support collapsed.

    • Canada’s Blackwater

      Last week students at L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) disrupted a board meeting after learning administrators planned to sign a $50 million, seven-year, contract with security giant GardaWorld. Protesters are angry the administration has sought to expel student leaders and ramp up security at the politically active campus as they cut programs.

    • Convicted of a Crime That Never Happened: Why Won’t Texas Exonerate Fran and Dan Keller?

      THE 1992 PROSECUTION of Fran and Dan Keller was based on a trifecta of credulousness, hysteria, and bad evidence.

      The middle-aged couple was living quietly in Austin, Texas, where they ran a small drop-in day care out of their home, when the unimaginable happened: A little girl occasionally left in the Kellers’ care made a claim of abuse at the hands of the couple. At first, the allegation was simple: Dan Keller had spanked her, the 3-year-old told her mother in the summer of 1991. But rather quickly — in part due to repeated questioning by her mother and a therapist who had treated the girl for behavioral problems before she’d ever visited the Kellers — the allegation morphed into accusations far more lurid.

    • SCOTUS Declines Opportunity to Limit Random Border Patrol Stops

      Today the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to impose limits on a disturbing exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows random detention of motorists within 100 miles of a border—a zone that includes two-thirds of the U.S. population. Since the rationale for these stops is immigration enforcement, they are supposed to be very brief. Yet in 2010 Richard Rynearson, an Air Force officer who brought the case that the Court today declined to hear, was detained at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Uvalde County, Texas, for a total of 34 minutes, even though there was no reason to believe he was an illegal alien or a criminal.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • (Legal) Moonshiner and University Battle Over Rights to ‘Kentucky’

        Moonshine packs a punch in this corner of Appalachia, where making hooch is steeped in local lore. But when Colin Fultz, the grandson of a bootlegger, opened a gourmet distillery here last fall, he ran afoul of a spirit even more potent than white lightning: University of Kentucky basketball.

        With his outlaw grandfather — who spent 18 years behind bars for smuggling — very much on his mind, Mr. Fultz, a businessman and onetime coal miner, set out to carry on his family’s tradition in a legal, and thoroughly modern, way.

        He tinkered with recipes, blending peaches and blackberries into mash brewed in his garage. He hired a lawyer — “My wife got on me, said I was going to get into trouble,” he said — and renovated an old car dealership, where he now distills and sells fruit-infused whiskey, serving it in thimble-size cups from an exposed-brick tasting bar.

    • Copyrights

      • Netflix Disappears From MPAA’s ‘Legal’ Movie Search Engine

        Less than two years ago the MPAA launched its search engine WhereToWatch, offering viewers a database of alternatives to piracy. However, those who try the search engine today will notice that results for Netflix, the largest entertainment platform in the United States, are no longer listed. Is there a feud going on behind the scenes?

      • UK government warns about piracy shakedown letters

        THE UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published information on what people should do if they receive one of those scary shakedown letters from firms accusing them of breaching piracy laws and owing money.

        Take them with a pinch of salt is the very short version of this, but the IPO has a bit more information.

        The organisation is alerting people to the sort of missives sent by companies like Goldeneye that have a very fishy smell and a bad reputation. The messages are sometimes described as speculative invoices.

      • BPI Buys Up ‘Pirate’ Domains To Foil Pro-Piracy Activists

        Internet pirates are a swarthy bunch that have been known to hijack anti-piracy projects to further their own aims. The BPI is aware of these kinds of efforts and has registered a whole heap of ‘pirate’ domains to avoid a similar fate befalling the UK’s Get it Right From a Genuine Site campaign.

04.09.16

Links 10/4/2016: MATE 1.14, LibreOffice 5.1.2

Posted in News Roundup at 2:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source geeks in a world of silos

    Bryan Lunduke is well known in free software circles. He’s a writer of books and Network World articles. He co-founded the Linux Action Show and is a co-host of the Bad Voltage podcast. In between hobbies, he has a day job doing marketing for SUSE and serving on the openSUSE board. Perhaps his longest-lasting contribution, though, is the Linux distro building simulator game Linux Tycoon.

    At LinuxFest Northwest, Bryan will be debating James Mason on the subject of Open source geeks in a world of silos. We asked him some questions and turned him loose.

  • Qubole releases SQL optimizer as open source

    Big data-as-a-service provider Qubole Inc. has open-sourced its Quark cost-based SQL optimizer that simplifies and optimize access to data across multiple hosts.

    Quark essentially chooses between popular big data open source query systems such as Hive, RedShift and Presto/Impala to select that which will deliver the best query results. “All of these query engines are good at some things and bad at others,” said Ashish Thusoo, co-founder and CEO of the 90-employee Qubole. “Subsuming that intelligence allows the machine to decide what engine is best used for that query.”

  • Building Bonobo, the Guardian’s open source API key management tool

    We built the application using the Play Framework and Scala – the programming language that the Guardian widely uses for backend development. This required a lot of patience as the community for these technologies is still quite small and the documentation can be rather limited. However, having very talented Scala developers in our team allowed us to make mistakes and guided us in the right direction. They made a big difference.

  • Signal desktop app with end-to-end encryption now open to all
  • Signal, the open-source encrypted messaging app, is now available for desktop
  • Open-source software provides new opportunities

    Crashes happen. Open-source software can remedy that. It’s known for higher security and fewer code errors. The numbers speak for themselves: Linux, a major developer of open-source software has an average of 0.17 bugs per 1000 lines. Proprietary software has an average of 20 to 30 bugs per 1000 lines.

  • Events

    • ELC 2016

      I got home from ELC on Wednesday night. I’m not doing embedded work on a day to day basis as much anymore but I gave a talk on Ion which was my primary reason for attending. IoT was unsurprisingly a big theme of the conference. I was amused to hear other people referring to IoT as “embedded Linux plus the cloud” which is what my mental model has always been. I didn’t go to many (any?) of the sessions about various IoT solutions mostly because there are too many to choose from. I’m not in a position right now where I’m directing IoT strategy and if that ever were to change my information would be out of date anyway. The useful sessions were mostly covering specific aspects of IoT or general Linux.

    • FOSDEM 2016 notes

      While being on the committee for the FOSDEM MySQL & friends devroom, I didn’t speak at that devroom (instead I spoke at the distributions devroom). But when I had time to pop in, I did take some notes on sessions that were interesting to me, so here are the notes. I really did enjoy Yoshinori Matsunobu’s session (out of the devroom) on RocksDB and MyRocks and I highly recommend you to watch the video as the notes can’t be very complete without the great explanation available in the slide deck. Anyway there are videos from the MySQL and friends devroom.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Introducing Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map, Our New Blueprint for Teaching People About the Web

        Within the next decade, the number of individuals with access to the Internet will rise to five billion. These billions of new users, many from emerging markets, have the potential to experience unprecedented personal, civic and economic opportunity online — but only if they have the necessary skills to meaningfully wield the Internet.

        To this end, Mozilla is dedicated to empowering people with the knowledge they need to read, write and participate online. We define this knowledge as “web literacy” — a collection of core skills and competencies like search engine know-how, design basics, online privacy fundamentals, and a working understanding of sharing, open source licensing and remixing.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.1.2, Ubuntu Numbers, OS is Dead

      The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1.2, the second update in the 5.1 Fresh branch. Nearly 90 bugs were squashed this cycle dealing heavily with rendering and placement issues. In other news, Red Hat touts a new client and Canonical is still trying to convince folks of their hundreds of millions of users. Matt Asay said today that the OS is dead thanks to the cloud and that “developers are becoming babies.”

    • LibreOffice 5.1.2 available for download

      Berlin, April 7, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.1.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family.

    • LibreOffice Receives Better OpenGL Rendering Support

  • Education

    • Teaching teachers to teach open source

      This seems obvious, but the ability to learn independently is very important to successful student participation in HFOSS projects. Students have to be able to learn in a variety of manners from a range of different sources, and they need to take ownership of their learning in order to flourish in an open source community.

      Communication, teamwork and the ability to problem solve are also critical skills. While understanding technologies such as version control is emphasized by most open source communities, students who don’t understand how to navigate a professional environment by communicating clearly or who can’t work on a team won’t even get to the point of using those technologies. These process skills can sometimes be more difficult to teach than teaching a student Java.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.3 vs. Linux Benchmarks

      With FreeBSD 10.3 having been released followed by the desktop-oriented PC-BSD 10.3 release that’s running rather nicely, I decided to run some open-source performance benchmarks atop PC-BSD 10.3 x64 compared to various Linux distributions.

      Originally I also aimed to run some PC-BSD vs. Linux gaming tests using the updated Linux binary compatibility layer in FreeBSD 10.3′s kernel, but sadly, that didn’t pan out. As noted in the aforelinked article, I’ve been running into a variety of issues that made my usual test candidates not run on PC-BSD 10.3 with either the x86 or x86_64 Linux binaries. If you want to see my old tests, there is FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux? from a few years ago.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: April 8th
    • When Free Software Depends On Non-Free

      When a program is free software (free as in freedom), that means it gives users the four freedoms (gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) so that they control what the program does. In most cases, that is sufficient for the program’s distribution to be ethical; but not always. There are additional problems that can arise in specific circumstances. This article describes a subtle problem, where upgrading the free program requires using a nonfree program.

  • Public Services/Government

    • GSA’s 18F Assembles Open Source Code Repositories on GitHub

      The General Services Administration‘s 18F organization has assembled repositories that contain open source code on its GitHub account in an effort to help federal government employees reuse the code for their work and personal use.

      Britta Gustafson, content designer at 18F, wrote in a blog post published Wednesday that the code repositories include client projects, guides, prototypes and open source tools 18F plans to adapt.

    • 18F surfaces code for 35 useful projects

      Although the General Services Administration’s 18F digital services shop publicly shares code from its projects as a matter or course, finding useful code among the hundreds of entries in the 18F GitHub repository can be time consuming.

    • Talend latest firm to back open source training network in France

      Talend, a specialist in Big Data integration software, has joined Acquia, Open Wide, OW2 and Red Hat as a Founding Partner of France’s national Open Source School, an institution dedicated to higher education training and continuing education for open source solutions (OSS).

    • Make your voice heard: take part in an open public consultation on Interoperability in Europe

      As of this week, through this public consultation, administrations, businesses and private organisations, research centres, academic institutions, standardisation organisations and others can all have their say in setting up an interoperability framework and strategy in Europe.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • OpenTraffic for Manila, US agencies to release 20% code as open source, and more news
    • FABrics: Open Source Furniture

      FABrics are open source chairs designed to be manufactured locally by the user. The chairs consist of CNC routed plywood and laser-cut leather. They are assembled together using 3D printed connectors.

      The aim of this project was to create a collection of lounge furniture that can be made anywhere in the world using universal materials and technologies. These digital processing technologies can be found in local facilities and in Fab Labs or Maker Spaces around the world. The manufacturing process is designed to be simple and straightforward in order to accommodate a large variety of users.

    • Open Access/Content

      • A letter to Carlos Moedas on open science

        “I’m offering to come to Brussels and demonstrate on my (or your) laptop the value of text and data mining for open science,” says Peter Murray-Rust of Cambridge University, as he presses the EU to go further on copyright reform

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Happy Hardware Freedom Day!

        Today is the new selected date for Hardware Freedom Day. We did a community survey a few months back and that was by far the most popular time. While our website is back up the wiki and registration are still down though. Considering the status we’re hoping to get things back up and encourage people who missed the date to celebrate a HFD on their schedule. Following up our mail list you may know there are events in Barcelona and India or can simply ping us there.

      • An Open Source Two Stroke Diesel

        With a welder and a bunch of scrap, you can build just about anything that moves. Want a dune buggy? That’s just some tube and a pipe bender. Need a water pump? You might need a grinder. A small tractor? Just find some big knobby tires in a junkyard. Of course, the one thing left out of all these builds is a small motor, preferably one that can run on everything from kerosene to used cooking oil. This is the problem [Shane] is tackling for his entry to the 2016 Hackaday Prize. It’s an Open Source Two-Stroke Diesel Engine that’s easy for anyone to build and has minimal moving parts.

  • Programming/Development

    • Which Is The Most Complex Programming Language?

      Very often we talk about the most popular and most loved programming languages, but we skip the discussion dealing with the most complex programming languages. Here’s an infographic that outlines the complexities in JavaScript and other modern programming languages.

    • Face it: Developers are becoming babies

      Way back in the dawn of the open source era, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) uncovered an interesting fact: Open-source developers weren’t anarchists and didn’t sport purple mohawks (usually). Typically, developers in the open source community were comfortably middle-aged (30 years old, on average), generally bringing 11 years of experience to their craft.

    • Software ‘developer fatigue’, it’s now a thing

      JNBridge’s core message is as follows: it’s not Java OR Microsoft .NET, it’s Java AND .NET — working on this premise, JNBridge has become a supplier of Java/.NET interoperability tools for software developers.

Leftovers

  • ‘Taxi Driver’ Oral History: De Niro, Scorsese, Foster, Schrader Spill All on 40th Anniversary
  • Yahoo’s once-great website eyed by Google, Verizon
  • Verizon to plan Yahoo bid, Google weighs offer
  • Verizon, Google said to be planning bids for Yahoo

    Verizon Communications Inc. plans to make a first-round bid for Yahoo Inc.’s Web business next week, and is willing to acquire the company’s Yahoo Japan Corp. stake to help sweeten the offer, according to people familiar with the matter.

  • Mashable mixes it up, lays off staff as it shifts focus

    Hot on the heels of snagging $15 million in funding from Turner/Time Warner, Mashable Inc. decided to put a number of its employees on the chopping block.

    The tech and lifestyle site now wants to be an online video and TV production company. As part of that reorganization, New York-based Mashable is laying off a number of staffers. It is also deemphasizing its world news and politics coverage, preferring to focus more on technology, science, social media, entertainment and lifestyle.

  • The executive deficit of the European Union

    The oft-repeated mantra of ‘more coordination’ won’t provide a real solution to Europe’s political crises unless the EU’s dual executive architecture is first rationalized and democratized.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • 20 million people in Bangladesh are drinking water laced with arsenic, Human Rights Watch survey finds

      Each year, 43,000 Bangladeshis die as a result of drinking arsenic-contaminated water, a figure which has not significantly altered since steps were taken to clean up Bangladesh’s water supply at the turn of the century.

      Corruption and international neglect are to blame for the fact 20 million people in Bangladesh are still drinking water laced with arsenic, more than a decade after the extent of the problem was made clear, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

    • VA bosses in 7 states falsified vets’ wait times for care

      Supervisors instructed employees to falsify patient wait times at Veterans Affairs’ medical facilities in at least seven states, according to a USA TODAY analysis of more than 70 investigation reports released in recent weeks.

      Overall, those reports — released after multiple inquiries and a Freedom of Information Act request — reveal for the first time specifics of widespread scheduling manipulation.

      Employees at 40 VA medical facilities in 19 states and Puerto Rico regularly “zeroed out” veteran wait times, the analysis shows. In some cases, investigators found manipulation had been going on for as long as a decade. In others, it had been just a few years.

      In many cases, facility leaders told investigators they clamped down the scheduling improprieties after the Phoenix scandal, but in others, investigators found they had continued unabated.The manipulation masked growing demand as new waves of veterans returned from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as Vietnam veterans aged and needed more health care.

  • Security

    • ‘BillGates’: Linux botnet is launching DDoS attacks on online gaming services

      IRONY ALERT: Bill Gates-themed software wants to get on as many computers as possible and not budge.

      Not Windows, of course, but a botnet called BillGates. The malware has been around since 2014 but now seems to be leaping forwards (not over a chair) and making a nuisance of itself, according to Akamai.

    • Mumblehard spam-spewing botnet floored

      Security researchers have teamed up with authorities in Ukraine to take down a spam-spewing Linux-infesting botnet.

      Security firm ESET teamed up with CyS-CERT and the Cyber Police of Ukraine to take down the Mumblehard botnet.

    • Authorities Shut Down Botnet of 4,000 Linux Servers Used to Send Spam

      The six-year-old Mumblehard botnet is no more, ESET reports, explaining that a joint effort with CyS Centrum LLC and the Cyber Police of Ukraine has finally allowed them to sinkhole the botnet’s main C&C (command and control server).

    • Mumblehard Linux Spamming Botnet Finally Taken Offline

      Thousands of servers running Linux and BSD had been affected by one of world’s most damaging botnets

    • Academics claim Google Android two-factor authentication is breakable

      Computer security researchers warn security shortcomings in Android/Playstore undermine the security offered by all SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA).

    • Google adds Cloud Test Lab integration to new Android Studio 2.0

      Google has updated its key Android development tool, Android Studio, to version 2.0 and added cloud test integration, a GPU debugger, and faster emulation and resource allocation.

      Mountain view touts the instant run feature as just about the most important new feature in the upgrade, as it analyses Android app code as it runs and determines ways it can be deployed faster, without requiring app re-installation.

    • Heartbleed Remains a Risk 2 Years After It Was Reported

      A vulnerability publicly disclosed in the open-source OpenSSL project two years ago continues to have an impact today.
      On April 7, 2014, CVE-2014-0160, better known as Heartbleed, was publicly disclosed by the OpenSSL project, affecting millions of users and devices around the world. Today, two years to the day it was first reported, the vulnerability remains a risk, and the trend of branded vulnerabilities it created continues to have an impact.

    • Friday’s security advisories
    • Thursday’s security updates
    • Nation-wide radio station hack airs hours of vulgar “furry sex” ramblings

      Some Tuesday morning listeners of KIFT, a Top 40 radio station located in Breckenridge, Colorado, were treated to a radically different programming menu than they were used to. Instead of the normal fare from Taylor Swift, The Chainsmokers, or other pop stars, a hack by an unknown party caused one of the station’s signals to broadcast a sexually explicit podcast related to the erotic attraction to furry characters. The unauthorized broadcast lasted for about 90 minutes.

      KIFT wasn’t the only station to be hit by the hack. On the same day, Livingston, Texas-based country music station KXAX also broadcast raunchy furry-themed audio. And according to an article posted Wednesday by radio industry news site RadioInsight.com, the unauthorized broadcasts from a hobbyist group called FurCast were also forced on an unnamed station in Denver and an unidentified national syndicator.

    • Maryland hospital: Ransomware success wasn’t IT department’s fault

      MedStar refused to respond to Ars Technica’s inquiries about the attack. In the statement released to media, MedStar’s spokesperson said, “As we have said before, based on the advice of IT, cybersecurity and law enforcement experts, MedStar will not be elaborating further on additional aspects of this malware event. This is not only for the protection and security of MedStar Health, its patients and associates, but is also for the benefit of other healthcare organizations and companies.” The spokesperson claimed the hospital had “no evidence of any compromise of patient or associate data… furthermore, we are pleased that we brought our systems back up in what can only be viewed as a very rapid recovery led by dedicated MedStar and external IT expert partners.”

    • Its a good thing SELinux blocks access to the docker socket.

      I have seen lots of SELinux bugs being reported where users are running a container that volume mounts the docker.sock into a container. The container then uses a docker client to do something with docker. While I appreciate that a lot of these containers probbaly need this access, I am not sure people realize that this is equivalent to giving the container full root outside of the contaienr on the host system. I just execute the following command and I have full root access on the host.

    • New Malware Headlines, Fedora Stickers, New RMS Article

      A new Linux botnet named BillGates is making headlines today. The Russian-based Asian designed malware seems to be focusing on gaming sites. Elsewhere, Richard Stallman posted a new article today explaining the problem when free software requires non-free to function and Matt Hartley explained the difference between GNOME, Unity, and MATE. Then, for some fun, the new Plasma 5.7 wallpaper was revealed, a new Linux poll beckons, and Fedora announced a partnership with UnixStickers.com.

    • A perfect storm of broken business and busted FLOSS backdoors everything, so who needs the NSA?

      In 2014, Poul-Henning Kamp, a prolific and respected contributor to many core free/open projects gave the closing keynote at the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Belgium, and he did something incredibly clever: he presented a status report on a fictional NSA project (ORCHESTRA) whose mission was to make it cheaper to spy on the Internet without breaking any laws or getting any warrants.

    • Researchers help shut down spam botnet that enslaved 4,000 Linux machines
    • Mumblehard Linux botnet eliminated as a threat: ESET

      Security researchers at ESET reported that the spam-dispensing Mumblehard Linux botnet is no longer active due to the combined efforts of ESET, the Cyber Police of Ukraine and CyS Centrum.

    • OSVDB Shuts Down, Firefox Add-ons Unsafe & More…

      Speaking of vulnerabilities: We lost an open source security asset this week. On Tuesday we received word that OSVDB, or the Open Sourced Vulnerability Database project, an organization that’s cataloged computer security flaws since 2002, is closing up shop. The news came by way of an OSVDB blog that said, “We are not looking for anyone to offer assistance at this point, and it [the database] will not be resurrected in its previous form.” As for why the database is being shut down, the post went on to somewhat cryptically explain, “The industry simply did not want to contribute and support such an effort.” A good analysis of the details by Jon Gold was published Thursday on Network World.

    • Do You Think Linux Is More Secure Than Other OS?

      There’s an old school of thought that says that Linux is more secure than other operating systems. This topic has been hotly debated over the years. What’s your opinion? Do you think Linux is more secure than other OS?

    • Adobe Issues Emergency Update to Flash After Ransomware Attacks
    • FBI: $2.3 Billion Lost to CEO Email Scams

      The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week warned about a “dramatic” increase in so-called “CEO fraud,” e-mail scams in which the attacker spoofs a message from the boss and tricks someone at the organization into wiring funds to the fraudsters. The FBI estimates these scams have cost organizations more than $2.3 billion in losses over the past three years.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Pulling the Trigger: An Interview With the ‘Eye in the Sky’ Filmmaker Gavin Hood

      I had the opportunity recently to see Gavin Hood’s new film, “Eye in the Sky,” at a screening hosted by Reprieve. The film weaves together the lives of ordinary people in Nairobi living in the shadow of a largely secret drone war, the high-level deliberations between British and American officials concerning a fictional drone operation, and the individual moral responsibility of a U.S. drone operator sitting safely in Nevada who must ultimately decide whether or not he will pull the trigger. Although some of the technology shown in the film is more advanced than what we know to be available today, the questions it explores are starkly contemporary: What are the costs of conducting a secret war with ambiguous boundaries and goals? Who gets to decide when civilians are to be put in danger? What is the lived experience of those people who live below the buzz of drones, and the pilots half a world away who are charged with pulling the trigger?

    • The Revolt Against NATO

      This has the foreign policy Establishment in a panic, with legions of “experts” rising up to denounce Trump’s heresy as misguided, absurd, and – of course! – “isolationist.” Yet the politicians can’t afford to be so dismissive: after all, they have to listen to their constituents, at least to some extent. And it’s quite telling what Sen. Corker – who has warned the “Never Trump” crowd to back off – had to say to Stoltenberg:

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • 77% of Freedom of Information Act Requests Not Fully Answered

      On his election, President Obama promised greater governmental transparency to the American people. In practice, the Obama administration has set a record for failures to find and produce government documents in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. Signed into law by President Johnson in 1966, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) encourages and enforces government disclosures to the people with only nine specific exemptions. As Ted Bridis and Jack Gillum reported for the Associated Press’s Big Story, in response to the public’s FOIA requests, 129,825 times (or more than one in every six cases), government searchers said they came up empty-handed last year. Bridis and Gillum write, “People who asked for records under the law received censored files or nothing in 77 percent of requests, also a record.” The 77% figure represents a twelve percent increase, compared with the first full year after President Obama’s election.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Bruce Stanley on Coal-Industry Crime

      When Massey Energy, the biggest coal company in Appalachia, polluted the groundwater of the community Massey CEO Don Blankenship lived in, he had employees run a private water line direct to his mansion, while fighting off the lawsuit from his poisoned neighbors. That’s just the kind of guy he is, and it’s decades of that behavior, as much as the 2010 explosion that killed 29 people at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine, that led to Blankenship’s sentencing this week to a year in prison on a charge of conspiracy to violate mine safety standards.

    • Australia Is Letting the Great Barrier Reef Die Over a Lot of Coal

      If there was one thing Australia could’ve done to save the Great Barrier Reef, it would’ve been to block the development of the country’s largest coal mine, which its state government approved with resounding confidence this week.

      The Great Barrier Reef, true to its name, is the most expansive reef ecosystem in the world. It’s the largest living organism on the entire planet, and is so big we can actually see it from outer space. Remember the Seven Natural Wonders of the World? It’s one of those, too.

      But its vast size will not keep it from dying—which it is—at an astounding rate, thanks to humans.

  • Finance

    • EU trade secrets law under fire in wake of Panama papers

      In the light of the Panama papers scandal, a soon-to-be adopted EU law on trade secrets has come under renewed scrutiny over fears it will hamstring journalists and whistleblowers.

      New EU rules to protect trade secrets could prevent leaks like the Panama papers from coming to light in future, member of European Parliament (MEPs) and activists fear.

      According to MEPs and activists, a draft EU directive on the “protection of undisclosed know-how and business information (trade secrets)” focuses on protecting companies over private individuals and freedom of expression.

    • Labour says PM ‘losing trust’ over offshore fund row

      Labour has said David Cameron’s admission that he owned shares in an offshore fund set up by his late father has undermined public trust in him.

      On Thursday, the PM said he sold the shares before he entered Number 10 in 2010 and had paid all UK taxes due on profits from the £30,000 sale.

      He said the firm, Blairmore Holdings, had not been set up to avoid tax.

      But Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the PM had “misled the public” and “lost the trust of the British people”.

    • In recent test, blockchain brings transparency to notorious credit default swaps

      On Thursday, Wall Street’s bookkeeper announced that it had successfully tested blockchain technology to manage single-name credit default swaps (CDS) among four big banks: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan.

    • ‘Please do not feed the animals’: Oklahoma GOP Compares Food Stamp Recipients to Park Animals

      In America, we have a very crude understanding of social welfare programs. For most Americans, anything the government gives to its people (i.e., us) to keep us healthy, fed and educated, is a “handout” to lazy people who don’t deserve it.

      Helping each other, using our tax money for us, as does most of the civilized world, is somehow wrong. In America, we’d prefer you starve to death, quietly if possible, as the rest of us are binge watching Netflix whilst eating Doritos.

    • Predatory Tactics by For-Profit Colleges Affecting Students Nationwide

      In March 2016, Annie Waldman, writing for ProPublica, reported how Corinthian College used disingenuous recruiting tactics to mislead impoverished, prospective students to sign up for programs they offered, with the intention to make a profit. Legal documents have been filed against the school for misconduct and there are several suits pending. The college allegedly coerced students who were homeless and/or had low self-esteem to enroll. They encouraged students to take out federal student loans, despite their financial position.

    • Downing Street Protest Attracts Attention Of Anarchist Group Class War

      The Metropolitan Police say that appropriate plans are in place ahead of a protest outside Downing Street due to take place on Saturday.

      Facebook events for the Panama-themed demonstration show over two thousand people as attending, including the singer Lily Allen, inspired by the Panama Papers revelations.

      Abi Wilkinson, one of the event’s organisers, said: “We’re hoping to have a fun, tropical party vibe and to get ordinary people out rather than committed activist types.”

    • What time is the David Cameron tax havens protest and where does it start?

      Thousands are expected to take to the streets of London on Saturday to demand David Cameron resign as Prime Minister.

      It follows the Prime Minister’s admission that he trousered thousands of pounds in profits from an offshore firm owned by his father.

      He and his wife finally admitted to having owned 5,000 shares in Blairmore Holdings, a firm set up Dave’s stockbroker dad Ian Cameron.

      The fund was set up in Panama to avoid paying UK corporation and capital gains tax.

      The protest gained a boost in interest last night, after fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden retweeted it to his 1.9m followers, urging Brits to rise up against Mr Cameron’s leadership.

    • Edward Snowden: ‘Demand Cameron’s resignation over tax dodging’

      Cameron came clean about his tax affairs on Thursday evening, admitting that between 1997 and 2010 he and his wife, Samantha Cameron, owned shares in his father’s Blairmore Investment Trust – a multimillion-pound offshore trust fund.

    • Cameron odds-on to step down

      BOOKIES rushed to cut David Cameron’s odds to step down to 11/2 yesterday after the PM admitted he had profited from his father’s offshore dealings.

      Paddy Power labelled the dramatic shortening of its original 20/1 odds “the equivalent of a first fence faller” in the Grand National.

      A spokesman for the betting agency said: “Forget Many Clouds in the Grand National tomorrow, this is the real one-horse race right now.”

    • Timeline of David Cameron’s scathing attacks on those who evade tax

      After four days of dodging ­questions about his tax affairs, David Cameron finally cracked and admitted he did profit from his dad’s offshore investment fund.

      The embarrassed PM revealed he and his wife Samantha held £30,000 of shares in Bahamas-based Blairmore Holdings, one of the firms named in the explosive Panama Papers .

      Mr Cameron is facing calls to quit over his bombshell confession, which after intense pressure from the Mirror.

      He had arrogantly brushed off his tax affairs as a private matter then insisted he had not benefited from any offshore funds, before finally coming clean in a TV interview.

    • The Conservatives may live to regret this shameless generational discrimination

      How broke is the Government? It depends who’s asking. If you’re unemployed, then things are impossibly tough: far more cuts are needed from the welfare budget because there is no alternative. If you’re at school, then things are not quite so bad. The school budget is being “protected,” which is a nice way of saying “frozen”. But if you’re a pensioner, then David Cameron has some great news for you. Thanks to the “difficult decisions” his government has taken, he can now afford the largest increase to the state pension in 15 years. The new, enlarged cheque will be in the post this week.

    • Why Cameron went public over Blairmore shares

      When a politician is under pressure, facing questions about their family and their finances, their natural instinct is to protect their privacy and say as little as possible.

    • ‘Resign Cameron’ protests: Thousands to gather at Downing Street to ask Prime Minister to step down

      Thousands of protersters are expected to move on Downing Street to call for tough action on tax avoidance – or David Cameron’s resignation.

      Following the revelations about his tax affairs in the Panama papers, demonstrators are asking Mr Cameron to either “close tax loopholes or resign”. The protests are being organised around the hashtags “Resign Cameron” and “Close tax loopholes”, and have gained support from high-profile figures including Edward Snowden and Lily Allen.

    • UK ministers humiliated after Cayman and BVI leaders repeatedly ignore requests for meetings

      The governments of two notorious tax havens have repeatedly ignored UK ministers’ requests to meet about cracking down on corporate tax avoidance of the kind detailed on the so-called Panama Papers, The Independent can reveal.

      Official letters obtained using freedom of information rules show humiliated ministers “disappointed” at being stood-up after “numerous attempts” to meet with the premiers of the British Virgin Island and Cayman Islands.

      Campaigners reacted to the letters by berating the Government’s “meek” and “softly-softly” approach towards the havens, while Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has accused the Government of “pussyfooting” around the issue.

    • David Cameron protest: Live updates as thousands call for PM’s resignation after Panama Papers scandal
    • Law to make all company ownership transparent in UK dependencies & territories

      As the Panama Papers prove the British Virgin Islands is one of the world’s capitals of tax avoidance, evasion and money laundering. The territory has 600,000 companies registered there with a population of around 30 thousand.

    • David Cameron: I could have handled tax row better

      Prime Minister David Cameron has said he could have handled the row over his financial affairs “better”, admitting it had “not been a great week”.

      Addressing the Tories’ spring forum, he said he was to blame for the handling of revelations about his holding in his late father’s offshore fund.

      Days after questions were first raised, the PM admitted this week he had owned and later sold units in the fund.

    • VIDEO: ‘Thousands’ descend on Downing Street for ‘Resign Cameron’ protest
    • Crowds march in London to demand Cameron resignation following Panama Papers leak (IMAGES)

      A massive protest has gathered in front of PM David Cameron’s residence at Downing Street 10, calling for his resignation. The rally follows the so-called Panama Papers leak, which among others exposed the offshore dealings of Cameron’s late father.

      “Cameron must go!” and “Tories out!” read the placards held by the demonstrators, RUPTLY’s live feed showed. A huge paper pig was erected by the protesters, with Cameron’s image pinned to its face.

    • Thousands gather outside Downing Street calling on David Cameron to resign

      Thousands of people were expected to march through London this morning calling on David Cameron to close tax loopholes or resign.

      We went along to the protest in Whitehall – watch our live feed here and see if you can spot the Hawaiian shirts, pig pinatas and shouts of ‘We hate you Cameron, we do!’

      Our reporters have been talking to people both for and against David Cameron to see why some feel so strongly that he needs to go.

    • Hold a General Election in 2016

      The General Public were purposefully misguided before the 2015 election.The lies David Cameron told before the election have now been widely acknowledged as such, and it is only reasonable that the public should be allowed to vote with full knowledge about his true agenda in 2016.

    • David Cameron: blame me for mishandling Panama Papers revelations

      Addressing the Conservative party spring forum, the prime minister admitted it had “not been a great week”, to laughter from the gathered supporters.

      Cameron said he would publish details of his tax return “later on” as he attempts to assuage calls for further transparency about his financial dealings.

      “I know I should have handled this better,” he said. “I could have handled this better. I know there are lessons to learn and I will learn them. And don’t blame No 10 Downing Street, or nameless advisers, blame me. And I will learn the lessons.”

    • “Resign Cameron” Protest Targets Conservative Spring Forum As PM Tells Party To Blame Him For Tax Fallout

      Thousands of protesters in London called on prime minister David Cameron to resign on Saturday, after he admitted owning shares in his father’s offshore fund that avoided paying corporation tax in Britain.

    • Defence Secretary blames journalists for not asking Cameron the right questions

      Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, has provided the most bizarre defence yet of David Cameron and Downing Street taking five attempts before admitting the Prime Minister had benefited from the offshore fund created by his father, impying it was journalists’ fault for failing to ask the right questions.

    • Downing Street protesters call for Cameron to resign
    • David Cameron did not declare his earnings from the offshore fund either

      It would be reasonable to say that benefitting from an offshore trust may influence Cameron’s view on whether such trusts should be tightly regulated or not.

    • Pyramid vs. obelisk

      Doctors and attorneys have employer-independent credibility, being vouched-for by their professional associations…

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • CIA’s Work With Filmmakers Puts All Media Workers at Risk

      The CIA’s history of producing or helping to produce films goes back decades. The Agency, for example, secretly bought the rights to Animal Farm after Orwell’s death in 1950 and produce an animated adaptation centered on demonizing the Soviet Union rather than capturing Orwell’s broader critiques of power.

      And as the CIA got involved in film production, Hollywood players have likewise taken part in covert operations. For years, legendary film producer Arnon Milchan (Pretty Woman, Fight Club, back-to-back Oscar winner for Best Picture in 2014 and 2015) worked for Israeli intelligence to deal arms and obtain technologies Israel needed to make nuclear weapons. “At the peak of his activities,” according to the Guardian, he was “operating 30 companies in 17 countries and brokering deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” an arrangement that, Milchan told the BBC (11/26/13), involved Sydney Pollack—director of Sabrina, Tootsie and, ironically enough, Three Days of the Condor.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EU-US Privacy Shield may not pass muster, according to leaked extract

      Leaked extracts from an imminent assessment of the EU-US Privacy Shield replacement for Safe Harbour suggests that a key group of EU data protection authorities will not support it in its present form.

      It is expected that the Article 29 Working Party will say that it is “not yet in a position to confirm that the current draft adequacy decision does, indeed, ensure a level of protection [in the US] that is essentially equivalent to that in the EU.” Any transatlantic data transfer scheme that does not provide an “essentially equivalent” level of protection is unlikely to withstand a legal challenge in the EU courts.

    • How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother

      In 2014, Cass Sunstein—one-time “regulatory czar” for the Obama administration—wrote an op-ed advocating for a cashless society, on the grounds that it would reduce street crime. His reasoning? A new study had found an apparent causal relationship between the implementation of the Electronic Benefit Transfer system for welfare benefits, and a drop in crime.

    • The Burr-Feinstein Proposal Is Simply Anti-Security

      Sens. Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein recently released a draft bill forcing nearly all U.S. companies to decrypt any encrypted data they may handle. Specifically, it would place a new, sweepingly broad duty on device manufacturers, software developers, ISPs, online services and others to decrypt encrypted data or offer “such technical assistance as is necessary” if ordered to do so by any court anywhere in the country.

      The draft reflects an ignorance of everyday computer security practices that safeguard your devices and information from criminals. As currently written, the draft likely even outlaws forward secrecy, an innovative security feature that many major tech providers, including WhatsApp, have implemented to limit the damage to user privacy in the event encryption keys are compromised.

    • The California Bill to Undermine Smartphone Encryption Actually Got Worse

      State lawmakers recently introduced some misguided changes to California’s Assembly Bill 1681, which would require that manufacturers and operating system providers be able to decrypt smartphones sold in the state. On first glance, the amendment to A.B. 1681 might seem to address some of EFF’s previous criticisms, but the new version actually makes an already bad bill even worse. EFF has signed on to a new letter in opposition to the bill, and you can still join our action calling on lawmakers to vote against it.

    • Bill That Would Ban End-to-End Encryption Savaged by Critics

      A LONG-ANTICIPATED DRAFT of anti-encryption legislation written by the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee circulated late Thursday night and left may critics apoplectic.

    • HTTPS Everywhere: Encryption for All WordPress.com Sites
    • WordPress Upgrades All Websites To HTTPS Encryption For Free

      WordPress.com is enabling HTTPS encryption for all of its websites. This change is an automatic one and the website owners don’t have to do anything to enable HTTPS redirect on their websites. This new step will benefit millions of websites on the web and help to make it a more secure place.

    • “The Internet of Broken Things”

      Third, resist the temptation for gee-whiz devices. Do you really need a refrigerator that can talk to the Internet? Do you really need a “smart” thermostat that can fail due to a software bug and leave you freezing, with no way to fix it? Prefer simple, autonomous devices over complex, networked gadgets.

    • Maryland Court Says Cops Need Warrants To Deploy Stingray Devices

      The Baltimore Police Department’s warrantless deployment of Stingray devices has come to an end. It may have gotten away with more than 4,300 times so far, but the Maryland Special Appeals Court has declared these devices operate as searches under the Fourth Amendment.

      The 74-page opinion — which belatedly follows its two-page order from nearly a month ago, indicating which side it had taken in this dispute — dives into every issue implicated by the warrantless use of Stingray devices and examines them alongside a long list of Fourth Amendment-related Supreme Court decisions and the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court’s precedent-setting US v. Graham opinion on cell site location info.

    • New Reports On Terror Attacks Underline Why Crypto Isn’t A Serious Problem: It’s Hard To Use And Easy To Get Wrong

      The picture that emerges from these two reports is of a large, well-established network of terrorists located across several European countries. Many of them were known in multiple ways to the authorities, which repeatedly failed to bring all this crucial information together, probably because there was too much, not too little, to sift through. What is conspicuous by its absence is any suggestion that the would-be attackers escaped arrest by using encrypted communications. Both stories do, however, reveal that ISIS-trained terrorists have used encryption tools, but in a non-standard way.

      @thegrugq has written a good piece on Medium analyzing the system. It seems the discontinued encryption program TrueCrypt was provided by ISIS on a USB drive. The program was used to place one or more messages inside an encrypted volume, which was then uploaded to an inconspicuous online site. By employing a shared password to encrypt the volume, more than one person could read the messages in a relatively secure and anonymous way. The system creates a kind of digital dead letter drop that can’t be addressed simply by mandating crypto backdoors.

    • Coalition opposes allowing NSA to share surveillance data

      “Considering the extent and scope of the information collected under EO 12333, the policy changes under consideration could allow agencies like the FBI to circumvent constitutional protections and will pose new threats to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans,” the letter stated.

    • Juniper Completes Removal of Dual_EC

      Juniper Networks hopes to remove any clouds of uncertainty that its networking gear might still have a backdoor that could allow the NSA or hackers to snoop on traffic running through its hardware.

      On Thursday, Juniper completed an update to the way its ScreenOS software handles encryption. Juniper said it has integrated the company’s widely used random number generator component into the ScreenOS software, abandoning older controversial methods.

    • Are Pins, Posts, Tweets and Likes Appropriate for Use in Selecting Jurors?

      When you hear the name of someone you can’t place or don’t know much about, what do you do? Chances are, you “Google” them. Well that is what attorneys are doing to learn more about prospective jurors too! But they are not stopping there. They are looking at a number of social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to learn about the profiles, likes, dislikes, friends, hobbies, biases, religion, and preferences of individuals in the jury pool. This practice has raised a number of issues related to ethics, privacy, and responsibility. To date, courts have taken positions ranging from banning these searches to practically requiring them.

    • Illinois Law Requiring Sex Offenders To Report All Internet Activity Violates Free Speech Rights

      With the goal of keeping tabs on sex offenders, the state of Illinois has veered way off course. Its offender registration statute requires individuals to report every nook and cranny of their online activities to law enforcement—or face jail time. Every Internet site they visit, every online retailer account they create, and every news story comment they post must be reported to police.

    • Richard Burr’s Encryption (AKA Cuckoo) Bill, Working Thread

      A version of Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein’s ill-considered encryption bill has been released here. They’re calling it the “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016,” but I think I’ll refer to it as the Cuckoo bill. This will be a working thread.

      (2) Note the bill starts by suggesting economic prosperity relies on breaking encryption. There are many reasons that’s not true, most obviously that it will put US products at a disadvantage in other countries.

      (2) Note this only applies to “providers of communications services and products (including software).” Does it apply to financial companies? Because they’re encrypting data between themselves that should be accessible to law enforcement. Does it apply to car companies? IoT companies?

      (2) Note they mention “judicial order” and “court order” here. It’s clear (and becomes clearer later) that this includes orders that aren’t warrants, so FISA orders. Which suggests they’re having a problem with encryption under FISA too.

      (3) The Cuckoo Bill builds in compensation. That’s one way companies could fight this: to make sure it would take a lot to render data intelligible.

      (4) I suspect this license language would expand to do scary things with other “licensing” products.

      (4) Note that they’ve expanded the definition of metadata to include “switching, processing, and transmitting” data. I bet that has already been done in secret somewhere.

      (5) The language on destination and switching suggests they’re trying to include location data in metadata.

    • Burr And Feinstein Release Their Anti-Encryption Bill… And It’s More Ridiculous Than Expected

      They’ve been threatening this for months now, but Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have finally released a “discussion draft” of their legislation to require backdoors in any encryption… and it’s even more ridiculous than originally expected. Yesterday, we noted that the White House had decided to neither endorse nor oppose the bill, raising at least some questions about whether or not it would actually be released. Previously, Feinstein had said she was waiting for the White House’s approval — but apparently she and Burr decided that a lack of opposition was enough.

      The basics of the bill are exactly what you’d expect. It says that any “device manufacturer, software manufacturer, electronic communication service, remote computing service, provider of wire or electronic or any person who provides a product or method to facilitate communication or the processing or storage of data” must respond to legal orders demanding access to said information. First off, this actually covers a hell of a lot more than was originally expected. By my reading, anyone providing PGP email is breaking the law — because it’s not just about device encryption, but encryption of communications in transit as well. I wonder how they expect to put that genie back in the bottle.

    • Former NSA Chief Urges U.S.-Silicon Valley Deal on Encryption
    • Former NSA Chief Urges U.S.-Tech Deal on Encryption
    • Liberty advocates warn of NSA’s massive new threat to privacy

      In a letter to Defense Intelligence Agency head James Clapper, the groups said the NSA is making policy changes that “would fatally weaken existing restrictions on access to the phone calls, emails, and other data the NSA collects.”

    • Here’s the latest travesty of secrecy from the NSA

      Now, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Security Agency is withholding its own ethical and legal guidelines, calling them “top secret.” This is ridiculous.

    • GCHQ is having problems meeting Osborne’s 2020 recruitment target

      Blighty’s surveillance and security agency GCHQ is facing significant challenges in meeting the government’s targets for recruitment over the next four years.

      Last year the chancellor promised that 1,900 new recruits would be hired by the intelligence agencies by 2020 – with the lion’s share expected to head to GCHQ in Cheltenham, as total “cyber spending” rises to £3.2bn (by Osborne’s maths).

      However, independent sources close to GCHQ have complained to The Register that the agency would struggle to land the best candidates, with one Cheltenham staffer telling us that they simply didn’t know where the new talent was going to come from.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Leveraging Shame And The Presumption Of Guilt To Destroy Lives And Punish Consenting Adults

      The criminal justice system theoretically operates on a presumption of innocence. An arrest booking is hardly an indicator of guilt, but try telling that to millions of people who believe being accused is no different than being found guilty by a jury. Everyone knows this presumption of guilt exists, despite it being wholly contrary to the basis of our justice system.

      Cops know this best. A high-profile bust is as good as a guilty verdict. So it’s no surprise that they’ve increasingly turned to the greatest shaming mechanism known to man: the internet.

    • NYPD Raises Middle Finger To Public, Oversight In Inspector General’s Year-End Roundup

      The NYPD’s Office of the Inspector General has just released its year-end report summarizing its 2015 oversight work. We covered its use of force report late last year — a report which found the NYPD completely uninterested in policing itself. The report noted the NYPD has “historically… failed to discipline officers who use force without justification.”

      This report points to the OIG’s investigation of chokehold use by NYPD officers — the tactic that ended Eric Garner’s life during his arrest. As is the case with most other excessive uses of force, this tactic — which has been forbidden by department policy — tended to be greeted with shrugs from PD supervisors and a middle finger raised to the general public.

    • Chokehold Audit Paints Grim Portrait of NYPD

      In a report prompted by the death of Staten Island resident Eric Garner, city investigators found the New York City Police Department failed to put officers on trial for using chokeholds in 10 substantiated cases.

    • Stand Your Ground, Unless You’re a Battered Woman

      When victims defend themselves, they put themselves at risk of becoming doubly victimized—first by their abusers, then by the criminal justice system.

    • When Hatred Is Just Around the Corner

      Escaping civil war in Lebanon, my family landed in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1986. Like many immigrants, my parents still speak of Lebanon with the same familiarity they did in the weeks after my aunt opened her doors to her brother, his wife, and their four kids — including me, their clever but slightly odd four-year-old.

      I had one friend, a cousin, and spoke only a few words of English (the necessities: food-related words, “no,” and “dude”). During this time, my social butterfly of a mother tried to convince me through broken English, “You don’t need friends; you have family.” I wasn’t helping my cause. I often wore a cheap red pleather jacket and pants suit with frayed fingerless gloves painted with glitter and told everyone I was Michael Jackson from the Thriller music video.

    • Sharia Villages: Bosnia’s Islamic State Problem

      Radical Islamists have found a new refuge in Bosnia. They recruit fighters, promote jihad and preach a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam — just across the border from the European Union.

    • Bangladeshi student blogger known for secular views hacked to death

      Three motorcycle-riding assailants hacked and shot a student activist to death as he was walking with a friend in Bangladesh’s capital, police said Thursday.

      The killing on Wednesday night follows a string of similar attacks last year, when at least five secular bloggers and publishers were killed, allegedly by radical Islamists.

      Police suspect 28-year-old Nazimuddin Samad was targeted for his outspoken atheism in the Muslim-majority country and for supporting a 2013 movement to demand capital punishment for war crimes involving the country’s independence war against Pakistan in 1971, according to Dhaka Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Nurul Amin.

    • The Body-Worn Camera As State’s Witness: How Cops Control Recordings

      Abusive conduct by police officers — up to and including killing someone for, say, holding a plastic bucket — has always flown under the “your word against ours” radar. But now everyone has a camera, even the cops.

      The push for body-worn cameras is still a good idea, but it has many, many flaws. It won’t save the nation from police misconduct but it will put a dent in it. Back when the NYPD was ordered to begin a body camera pilot program, then-Mayor Bloomberg said the devices would become nothing more than another way to play “gotcha” with good cops.

      [...]

      Officers are actors and directors in their own scenes. Even when performances are captured by bystanders and their cell phones, there’s still plenty of “drama.” Multiple cops swarm the same suspect, blocking the body from view. Officers shout “Stop resisting!” even when subjects are prone with hands behind their back and under the weight of four or five cops. This allows officers to deliver extra amounts of force, instantly justified by the repeated shouts about resistance.

      This scenario has played out again. Footage captured by police body cameras appears to show a tough, physical struggle to subdue a suspect. Shouts of “stop resisting” continue throughout the recording. The up-close-and-personal body cam footage gives every appearance that officers are wrestling with a highly-combative suspect. But footage captured by another camera shows an entirely different scenario.

    • Wrongly-convicted Virginia inmate released from prison

      A man has been released from a Virginia prison after serving more than three decades for crimes authorities now say he didn’t commit.

      Keith Allen Harward walked out of the Nottoway Correctional Center on Friday after the Virginia Supreme Court agreed that DNA evidence proves he’s innocent of the 1982 killing of Jesse Perron and the rape of his wife in Newport News.

      Harward was a sailor on the USS Carl Vinson, which was stationed close to the victims’ home. The prosecution in Harward’s case leaned heavily on the testimony of two experts, who said Harward’s teeth matched bite marks on the woman’s leg.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • The FCC Is Pushing A ‘Nutrition Label’ For Broadband Connections

      A report last year by the GAO (pdf) found that most consumers have no real idea what kind of a broadband connection they’re buying. The report argued that caps, interconnection squabbles, throttling, and other line limitations make it virtually impossible for many consumers (especially the more Luddite-inclined among us) to understand what they’re buying, or compare it with competing services. As a result, the FCC this week proposed a new “nutrition label” (pdf) for broadband that would include not only connection speed — but any network management, latency, usage caps, overage fees, or other conditions impacting the line.

    • Tennessee Man Builds His Own Gigabit Network Thanks To State’s Protectionist Broadband Law

      We’ve noted how Tennessee is one of twenty states that has passed state laws, quite literally written by companies like AT&T, prohibiting towns and cities from wiring themselves with broadband — even if nobody else will. When the FCC announced it would be taking aim at these protectionist broadband laws last year, Tennessee politicians threw a hissy fit, suing the FCC for “violating states rights.” That incumbent ISPs are being allowed to write awful state law that’s hampering a generation of business development in the state? Not apparently much of a concern.

  • DRM

    • 80% of people have no idea about the Netflix price hike that’s coming next month

      Netflix is going to raise prices on around 17 million of its standard accounts next month, and most people have no idea.

      In May of 2014, Netflix raised the price of its standard streaming plan, for new subscribers, to $9.99 per month. Existing subscribers, however, were grandfathered into the plan at $7.99 per month for the two-stream, “HD” quality plan.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • ‘Corn Thins’ trade mark found to be descriptive

        The Cancellation Division also found that the evidence submitted, showing that ‘Thins’ had been used descriptively on many other products, was not relevant because they either post-dated registration or were undated. The Division asserted that evidence regarding descriptive use of the word in the food sector had to be prior to the date of registration. They found that the arguments asserting distinctiveness under Article 7(1)(b) were also based on the arguments asserting descriptiveness and thus failed for the same reasons.

      • Trademark For ‘Square Donuts’ At Heart Of Trademark Dispute Despite It Being Entirely Descriptive

        One of the rules that is supposed to keep trademark law from creating language-lock insanity is the prescription against trademarking purely descriptive terms. That’s why you get a trademark on Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but not on “soda.” It’s why “computer” is not a valid trademark term. Were this not the case, companies could simply lock up the language of their marketplaces, restricting terms not to the benefit of the consumer, but purely as a monopolizing strategy.

      • English Brewer And French Wine Group In Trademark Dispute Over ‘Champ’

        The Comite Champagne, or CIVC, has never bothered to pretend it is anything other than a jealous protector of the word “champagne.” The trade group and its winery members have made quite a name for themselves ensuring that nobody else anywhere could possibly market a product that in any way suggests it is champagne. This is supposedly done to ensure the reputation of wine from the Champagne region of France remains as sparkling as the product, but predictably devolves into the kind of protectionist racket too often seen in trademark cases.

    • Copyrights

      • The FCC’s Plan To Unlock Your Set-Top Box Is About Competition, Not Copyright

        This isn’t about control over copying, but c of TV watching, from the studio to your eyeballs, and over search and discovery as well as viewing. Open competition could bring many more options, like new TV interfaces that present recommendations from various critics and tastemakers, or from your friends. New video devices could take you straight to those shows and movies in one step, no matter which of your pay-TV or Internet video services they appear on. This could be a boon for niche and non-mainstream programs of all kinds.

      • The Ultimate In CwF: How Lovers Of Stardew Valley Fought Piracy By Buying The Game For Pirates

        Our advocating for the Connecting with Fans and giving them a Reason to Buy equation (CwF+RtB) being a solution to piracy has become something of a mantra for us here at Techdirt. And we’ve seen an absolute ton of success stories of people implementing some version of it. But, really, if you want a recent story of a creator going about this in a way that appears to hit every single note just about perfectly, you need only look toward the latest PC gaming hit: Stardew Valley.

      • Linking to Pirated Content Is Not Copyright Infringement, Says EU Court Adviser

        Linking to pirated content that is already available to the public can not be seen as copyright infringement under the European Copyright Directive. This is the advice Advocate General Melchior Wathelet has sent to the EU Court of Justice, in what may turn out to be a landmark case.

      • UK Govt Issues Advice on Dealing With Copyright Trolls

        The UK government has just published advice for people receiving cash demands from so-called copyright trolls. The Intellectual Property Office says that bill payers who are not necessarily infringers are receiving these letters and it is for the copyright holder to prove who committed the alleged offenses.

      • EU Consults On “Neighbouring Rights” For Publishers And “Panorama” Copyright Exceptions

        The European Commission is considering giving publishers the same “neighbouring” rights currently available to broadcasters and producers of someone else’s copyrighted content, it said in a 23 March consultation document. The inquiry is part of the EC’s digital single market initiative to boost Europe’s digital economy.

04.08.16

Links 8/4/2016: OpenMandriva Lx3 Beta 1, ubuntuBSD 15.10 Beta 4

Posted in News Roundup at 4:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Free Software’s ultimate irony is its pretended lack of credibility

    Fortunately, this issue is evolving in a more positive way as the industry realizes the ubiquity of Free Software and the existence of FOSS successful businesses; change is a bit too slow to my taste however. I’ve already written this many times and I’ll write it again: FOSS is here to stay, and no amount of proprietary offers will pose a true existential threat to it. What threatens Free Software is neither bad licensing, compliance or failed projects. It’s the twisted attitude of some who refuse to consider Free Software as a viable choice while using it to generate revenue without fairly compensating its authors. A sad irony, in the end.

  • Signal: Now You Can Use Snowden’s Favorite Open Source And Encrypted Chat App

    Snowden’s favorite messaging app Signal is now available to public as there is no more invite-only option. Signal works in Chrome and can be downloaded from Chrome app store. This app is also an open source software and its code is available to view on GitHub. It biggest strength is the end-to-end encryption feature.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • OpenStack Mitaka, the 13th Version, Arrives

      The evolution of OpenStack continues. The OpenStack community has released Mitaka, the 13th version of the open cloud platform, with a focus on manageability, scalability and end-user experience. The latest version is positioned as “an integration engine that can manage bare metal, virtual machines, and container orchestration frameworks with a single set of APIs.”

    • Hadoop Player MapR Wraps in SQL and JSON with Apache Drill 1.6

      MapR Technologies, which offers a popular distribution of Apache Hadoop that integrates web-scale enterprise storage and real-time database capabilities, announced the availability of Apache Drill 1.2 in its distribution back in Octobrer of last year. The company also announced a new Data Exploration Quick Start Solution, and had previously wrapped Apache Spark into its platform. Steadily, primarily through embracing cutting-edge open source tools, MapR has building out what it refers to as a fully “converged data platform.”

  • Databases

    • Customers no longer “at the mercy” of Oracle with release of ColumnStore open source analytics engine – says MariaDB CTO ’Monty’ Widenius

      After making SQL databases accessible and affordable with its open source solution MariaDB has added a big data analytics tool to its portfolio

      The godfather of the open source MySQL database Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius and CTO at MariaDB says customers no longer have to be “at the mercy” of vendors like Oracle following the announcement of its ColumnStore big data analytics engine.

    • MariaDB continues assault on competitors

      Open Source database vendor MariaDB has announced its latest update a big data analytics engine called MariaDB ColumnStore. The company claims that this is a significant milestone for the MariaDB open source community and that the release is: “… the industry’s first to enable transactional and massively parallelized analytic workloads under the same roof.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • IceCat 38.7.1 release

      GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.

      https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

    • GNUnet und Informationsmacht: Analyse einer P2P-Technologie und ihrer sozialen Wirkung

      This thesis studies the GNUnet project comprising its history, ideas and the P2P network technology. It specifically investigates the question of emancipatory potentials with regard to forms of information power due to a widely deployed new Internet technology and tries to identify essential suspensions of power within the scope of an impact assessment. Moreover, we will see by contrasting the GNUnet project with the critical data protection project, founded on social theory, that both are heavily concerned about the problem of illegitimate and unrestrained information power, giving us additional insights for the assessment. Last but least I’ll try to present a scheme of how both approaches may interact to realize their goals.

  • Public Services/Government

    • US Federal Source Code Policy: embrace more open source to save taxpayer dollars

      The United States White House and the federal government have already been widely reported to have adopted a degree of open source software, tools and platforms — but this trend is now officially set to increase.

    • White House wants agencies to open source their code

      The US government is deepening its commitment to open source principles, proposing that federal agencies share software tools and release their code to developers.

      By the start of July, all federal agencies will be required to release at least 20 per cent of the software they have had specially developed.

    • Talend Announces Support for France’s Inaugural Open Source School

      “We are very proud to support the open source community by participating in this public/private partnership and contributing to the establishment of the first school dedicated to open source,” said Laurent Bride, CTO, Talend. “Talend and its staff will lend their technical expertise to help develop the next generation of leaders in the field of open source, who will help further the advancement of major initiatives such as Big Data, IoT, and machine learning.”

      Recruitment for the school has already begun and its six campuses located in Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Montpellier, Nantes and Paris will open in September.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Linux botnet attacks increase in scale

      Hackers are using malware which targets Linux to build botnets to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS attacks) security researchers have warned.

      The so-called BillGates Trojan botnet family of malware – apparently so named by the virus writers because it targets machines running Linux, not Windows – has been labelled with a “high” risk factor in a threat advisory issued by Akamai’s Security Intelligence Research Team.

    • Mumblehard takedown ends army of Linux servers from spamming

      One year after the release of the technical analysis of the Mumblehard Linux botnet, we are pleased to report that it is no longer active. ESET, in cooperation with the Cyber Police of Ukraine and CyS Centrum LLC, have taken down the Mumblehard botnet, stopping all its spamming activities since February 29th, 2016.

      ESET is operating a sinkhole server for all known Mumblehard components. We are sharing the sinkhole data with CERT-Bund, which is taking care of notifying the affected parties around the world through their national CERTs.

    • Ubuntu patches Linux kernel security bugs
    • Linux Kernel Security Bugs Patched

      Ubuntu users can install the update via the Unity Dash. To update, search the Unity Dash for the Software Updater utility and allow the program to reload the software repositories and search for new drivers. Once the Software Updater has found the updates, simply click on the “Install All” button to install them on your machine. Since this is a kernel update, you will need to reboot your device after the update. Canonical notes that the kernel updates have been given a new version number, which may require some users to recompile and reinstall all third party kernel modules.

    • Google reveals its shift to an open security architecture

      Google has revealed how it completely changed its security architecture, shifting from a traditional infrastructure to a more open model in which all network traffic is treated with suspicion.

      The project, called BeyondCorp, shifted the company from a perimeter security model to one where access to services and tools are not gated according to a user’s physical location or their originating network, but instead deploys access policies based on information about a device, its state and associated user.

    • Several Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in Ubuntu

      Several patches have been released for Ubuntu, addressing vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, including a use-after-free and a timing side-channel vulnerability.

    • DDoS Attacks with BillGates Linux Malware Intensify

      Over the past six months, security researchers from Akamai’s SIRT team have observed a shift in the cyber-criminal underground to using botnets created via the BillGates malware to launch massive 100+ Gbps DDoS attacks.

    • Cisco Pushing Open-Source Snort and ClamAV Forward

      Martin Roesch, started the open-source Snort network intrusion prevention system project in 1998, eventually evolving into the base of SourceFire which he sold to Cisco for $2.7 billion in 2013. Now Roesch is the Chief Architect for the Cisco Security Business Group and Snort is still very much on its mind.

    • OSVDB shutdown leaves questions for vulnerability databases
    • Open-source vulnerabilities database shuts down
    • Vivaldi 1.0.435.42 Update Now Live to Patch Address Bar Spoofing Vulnerability

      We’ve just been informed by Ruarí Ødegaard of Vivaldi about the immediate availability for download of the first minor point release in the stable branch of the web browser.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Introducing the Open Source Policy Center

      Wikipedia’s content and the Android phone software are examples of the open source philosophy. Open sourcing policy analysis means that the public is empowered to contribute its skills, expertise, and passion to make government better.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Two widely used pesticides likely to harm 97% of endangered species in US

      Almost all of the 1,700 most endangered plants and animals in the US are likely to be harmed by two widely used pesticides, an alarming new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis has found.

      Malathion, an insecticide registered for use in the US since 1956, is likely to cause harm to 97% of the 1,782 mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and plants listed under the Endangered Species Act. Malathion is commonly used to treat fruit, vegetables and plants for pests, as well as on pets to remove ticks.

      A separate pesticide, chlorpyrifos, is also a severe risk to 97% of America’s most threatened flora and fauna. Chlorpyrifos, which smells a little like rotten eggs, is regularly deployed to exterminate termites, mosquitoes and roundworms.

      A third pesticide, diazinon, often used on cockroaches and ants, threatens 79% of endangered species. The EPA study is the first of its kind to look at whether common pesticides harm US wildlife.

    • Volkswagen Picks Mirantis to Build Massive OpenStack Cloud

      Mirantis on Wednesday announced that Volkswagen Group has selected Mirantis OpenStack to power its cloud applications.

      The selection process involved a series of cloud-to-cloud performance trials between Red Hat and Mirantis, one of the last pure-play OpenStack companies that hasn’t been shut down or acquired. It’s ideally positioned to pursue and win large-scale deals like the Volkswagen project, according to Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

  • Finance

    • Strauss-Kahn’s LSK Set Up Offshore Firms in Tax Havens: Le Monde

      Leyne, Strauss-Kahn & Partners, the bankrupt Luxembourg investment company tied to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s name, helped several clients open offshore firms in tax havens, according to French daily Le Monde.

      The names of as many as 31 offshore firms set up by a LSK subsidiary were found in the registers of Mossack Fonseca, the Panama-based law firm at the center of the Panama Papers scandal, Le Monde reported Wednesday. The subsidiary’s offshore activity began before Strauss-Kahn became board chairman at LSK, according to Le Monde.

      Offshore companies can created for legitimate purposes. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer, Jean Veil, didn’t reply to requests for comment.

    • Job Totals Trail Pre-Recession Levels in 10 U.S. States

      Every candidate shouts about job creation, and some talk about the recovery from the last recession. Every month the Department of Labor releases new statistics about how many jobs have been created, improvements in the unemployment rate, and on and on.

    • DC Press Corps Spins Itself Silly Over Sanders’ Specifics

      The Washington press corps has gone into one of its great feeding frenzies over Bernie Sanders’ interview with New York Daily News. Sanders avoided specific answers to many of the questions posed, which the DC gang are convinced shows a lack of the knowledge necessary to be president.

      Among the frenzied were the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, The Atlantic‘s David Graham and Vanity Fair‘s Tina Nguyen, with CNN‘s Dylan Byers telling about it all. Having read the transcript of the interview, I would say that I certainly would have liked to see more specificity in Sanders’ answers, but I’m an economist. And some of the complaints are just silly.

      When asked how he would break up the big banks, Sanders said he would leave that up to the banks. That’s exactly the right answer. The government doesn’t know the most efficient way to break up JP Morgan; JP Morgan does. If the point is to downsize the banks, the way to do it is to give them a size cap and let them figure out the best way to reconfigure themselves to get under it.

    • David Cameron admits he profited from father’s offshore fund

      After three days of stalling and four partial statements issued by Downing Street he confessed that he owned shares in the tax haven fund which he sold for £31,500 just before becoming prime minister in 2010.

      In a specially arranged interview with ITV News’ Robert Peston he confirmed a direct link to his father’s UK-tax avoiding fund, details of which were exposed in the Panama Papers revelations in the Guardian this week.

      Admitting “it has been a difficult few days”, the prime minister said he held the shares together with his wife, Samantha, from 1997 and during his time as leader of the opposition. They were sold in January 2010 for a profit of £19,000.

    • David Cameron Offshore Fund Admission Prompts Inventive ‘Curses’ From Critics

      Cameron’s admission over the fund, which was revealed in the leaked Panama Papers, prompted commenters to curse him with diabolical plagues, from having unevenly-flavoured crisps, to broken biscuits, and permanently crinkly shirts.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • FAIR Activists Get Two Responses From NPR on Fossil-Fuel Funding Controversy

      FAIR.org readers took action in response to “Did Sanders Lie About Clinton’s Oil Money? NPR Factchecker Can’t Be Bothered to Check” (4/1/16). They got a response from NPR ombud Elizabeth Jensen (4/5/16) and a do-over from NPR factchecker Peter Overby (4/6/16)—but NPR’s coverage still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of forthrightly addressing the issue of fossil-fuel funding in the Democratic presidential race.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Texas Electric Grid Security Summit Ignores Threat of NSA

      The threat posed to our liberty by the NSA is very real.

    • FBI Plays It Coy Regarding Their iPhone Exploit

      Every since the FBI announced that it had found its own way into Syed Farook’s iPhone, people have been wondering exactly how it managed to do so, and how many people the exploit puts at risk. Unsurprisingly, the agency declined to share any details with Apple and tried to downplay the possibility that they’d be breaking into phones left and right — despite pretty quickly entertaining the idea of doing exactly that.

    • What WhatsApp is not encrypting

      WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned popular messaging service, has turned on end-to-end encryption for its 1 billion users globally. This monumental move was announced on Tuesday in a blog post by company founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton: “From now on when you and your contacts use the latest version of the app, every call you make, and every message, photo, video, file, and voice message you send, is end-to-end encrypted by default, including group chats.

    • FBI crack could hit iPhone sales

      According to a poll carried out by Fortune, the FBI’s cracking of the San Bernardino attacker’s iPhone could have a knock-on effect on sales at a critical time for Apple.

    • Poll: Don’t Help Government Unencrypt Devices

      The results of our “Apple vs. the FBI” encryption poll are in. Most of our readers agree with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s decision to stand up to the FBI.

      Often when we run a poll on FOSS Force, the results only go to confirm what we already know. Our latest completed poll is an example. What we got was exactly what we expected. You don’t think the makers of encrypted devices, or encryption software, should help the G-Men get inside — not even with a warrant.

      The poll was our effort to check the pulsebeat of our readers during the recent attempts by the feds to force Apple to crack open the iPhone used by alleged terrorist Syed Farook, who killed 14 and wounded 27 coworkers in San Bernardino in December. Although the FBI’s actions, both their botched attempts to open the device and their ever shifting legal claims, seemed much like something out of a Keystone Cops flick from 100 years ago, the implications were too chilling for most of us to be disposed to do much laughing.

    • Open Letter from the OLN to the WP29 and the European Parliament on the Privacy Shield

      The Privacy Shield, a framework for personal data transfers towards US-based companies, is currently under negotiation. This new agreement follows the invalidation of the Safe Harbor by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), who ruled that it did not uphold a substantially equivalent protection for personal data of people protected under European law, and suggested new measures to address it. Since the draft Privacy Shield does not take these measures into account, the resulting agreement is bound to reduce the fundamental rights of Europeans.

    • Opposition mounts to NSA’s data-sharing plans

      Civil liberties and government transparency groups are rallying to oppose a new plan that would allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to share more of the information that it collects about people’s communications and activity on the Internet with other federal agencies.

      On Thursday, 33 advocacy groups signed on to a letter insisting the changes “could allow agencies like the FBI to circumvent constitutional protections and will pose new threats to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans.

      “Moreover, the reported changes would fatally weaken existing restrictions on access to the phone calls, emails, and other data the NSA collects,” they added.

      The changes, which top intelligence community lawyer Robert Litt attempted to outline last month, will give more agencies access to the reams of data the NSA picks up as part of its work.

    • California Lawmakers Manage To Turn Encrypted Phone Ban Legislation Into Encryption Backdoor Legislation

      The California Assembly has been tinkering with Assemblyman Jim Cooper’s smartphone encryption ban… and for the worse. First noticed by EFF Staff Attorney Andrew Crocker, legislators have turned the proposed ban into something that accomplishes the same goals without actually “banning” anything.

    • Back Door Legislation Won’t Have The White House’s Support (Nor Its Opposition, Most Likely)

      Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr have been talking about legislation that forces tech companies to help law enforcement break into encrypted devices for quite a while now. Nearly a month ago, they suggested it was almost ready to be formally introduced, but indicated that the White House’s response would determine when exactly that happened.

      Now, Reuters is reporting that sources in the administration told them backdooring encryption will not have the President’s support, adding another question mark to when we’ll actually see this bill (though there’s a chance it will show up this week).

    • Adding End-To-End Encryption To WhatsApp Is Great…But Not Quite As Secure As People May Think

      Der Spiegel notes that end-to-end encryption is only available if all the participants in a conversation are using the latest version of the software. If one of them isn’t, group chats will be unencrypted. That lack of consistency will make it very easy to communicate in the mistaken belief that everything is hidden, when in fact it is taking place out in the open.

    • NSA data-sharing plan opens door to mass surveillance, say rights groups

      A coalition of more than 30 civil liberty groups says that a potential change in how the National Security Agency shares data with other US agencies could jeopardize millions of Americans’ privacy.

      The group that includes the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging the NSA not to pursue efforts to more widely distribute intelligence information it gathered for fear it would give law enforcement agencies access to warrantless domestic surveillance.

      “Sharing such information with US law enforcement agencies would allow them to circumvent the strict, constitutionally mandated rules of evidence gathering that govern ordinary criminal investigations,” according to a letter sent Thursday to NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • FOIA Documents Expose Details On TSA’s $47,000 Coin Flipping App

      Time for yet another episode of “Your Tax Dollars Faffing About.” According to documents liberated by Kevin Burke, the TSA spent a ridiculous amount of money on an iPad app that randomly generates a left or right arrow.

    • The TSA Randomizer iPad App Cost $1.4 Million

      You may have seen the TSA Randomizer on your last flight. A TSA agent holds an iPad. The agent taps the iPad, a large arrow points right or left, and you follow it into a given lane.

      How much does the TSA pay for an app that a beginner could build in a day? It turns out the TSA paid IBM $1.4 million dollars for it.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Verizon’s Attempt To Woo Millennials Is Equal Parts Creepy, Expensive And Sad

      For some time now Verizon’s made it very clear it wants nothing to do with its core fixed-line broadband business. Instead, Verizon’s taking a huge bet that it can transform ye olde phone company into a huge advertising and streaming media empire, with a focus on wooing (read: selling ads to) Millennials. To that end Verizon acquired AOL and its ad technology for $4.4 billion last year. It developed a highly-controversial stealth ad tech that can track these youngsters around the Internet without their consent, and it created its own “Go90″ streaming video service specifically aimed at Millennials.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • South African Trade Minister Opens WIPO Conference With Call For Appropriate IP

      A two-day international conference on intellectual property and development opened today at the World Intellectual Property Organization with calls from speakers for the IP system to be applied by nations in ways appropriate to their economies, even if it means allowing copying – just as the biggest IP-holding nations did when they were developing years ago. The theme was set by the opening keynote speaker, South African Trade Minister Rob Davies.

    • Copyrights

      • Hollywood Forced SlySoft DVD Ripping Software Out Of Business, Only To Have It Return As RedFox

        It never made much sense that ripping CDs in the US is considered legal, while ripping DVDs is somehow horrible piracy. If anything, it seemed to be an artifact of history. Either way, it was much more difficult for people to rip DVDs. However, whenever the issue would come up, most people would point to SlySoft’s AnyDVD product, which was a clunky, but functional bit of software for getting around DRM and ripping DVDs. The company was based in Antigua and had been around for years. So it took some people by surprise when it announced it was shutting down due to regulatory changes earlier this year. It looked like Hollywood had done what it normally does and scared an innovative company it didn’t like out of business. But, as reader Derek points out to us, it looks like it only took a week or so before former SlySoft employees resurfaced in Belize with a new offering called RedFox, using a somewhat similar logo.

      • Copyright Troll Tries To Silence Anti-Troll Blogger With Law Enforcement Threats

        Okay, let’s dive right into this one, because there are some details that need to be summarized before we get into the meat of this story. TCYK is a a company named after a Robert Redford film, The Company You Keep, which the company attempted to use as as a profit center by sending out threat letters to suspected copyright pirates in the UK, including to an 82 year old woman, because why the hell not? Copyright trolling and threat and settlement letters from folks like these aren’t especially news-worthy, but what makes TCYK interesting is the convoluted shell-game it plays by operating from the United States and partnering with local UK businesses that barely exist just to extort money out of the public.

      • AG Wathelet: linking to unlicensed content should not be a copyright infringement per se

        GS Media was successfully sued before the Amsterdam District Court and the Amsterdam Court of Appeal, although these courts considered different aspects. The former held that by posting those hyperlinks, GS Media’s conduct had been unlawful because it encouraged visitors to GeenStijl to view the photographs illegally posted on Filefactory.com which, without those hyperlinks, would not have been easy to find. In contrast, the Court of Appeal held that, on the one hand, GS Media had infringed copyright by posting a cut-out of one of the photographs on the GeenStijl website but, on the other hand, had not made the photographs available to the public by posting the hyperlinks on its website.

04.07.16

Links 7/4/2016: Ubuntu Touch OTA-10, MariaDB Improvements

Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Exactly How Much Does It Cost in Electricity To Keep Our Mobile Addiction Going

      Found a really cool study by ZD Net that has occasionally no doubt made all of us ponder. I’ve had a thought that the total electricity consumed by a mobile phone from its recharging is worth less than one dollar (or one Euro actually) per year but that was an ancient number from very hazy sources. Now we have a fresh study by ZD Net who did it on a phablet-screen iPhone 6 Plus. They measured that it consumes 19.2 wh (watt hours) per night of recharging. In a year it amounted to 7 kwh (kilowatt hours). And by current US electricity costs that amounts to 84 US cents ie $0.84 to keep the iPhone on for a year in electrical costs.

  • Hardware

    • NVIDIA DGX-1: World’s First Supercomputer For Deep Learning And AI

      NVIDIA, the leading maker of GPUs, has announced DGX-1 — the world’s first dedicated supercomputer for deep learning AI applications. This beast delivers 170 teraflops performance, thanks to 8 Tesla P100 deep learning GPUs and high-end Intel Xeon processor.

    • Inside Nvidia’s Pascal-powered Tesla P100: What’s the big deal?

      So there it is: the long-awaited Nvidia Pascal architecture GPU. It’s the GP100, and it will debut in the Tesla P100, which is aimed at high-performance computing (think supercomputers simulating the weather and nuke fuel) and deep-learning artificial intelligence systems.

      The P100, revealed today at Nvidia’s GPU Tech Conference in San Jose, California, has 15 billion transistors (150 billion if you include the 16GB of memory) and is built from 16nm FinFETs. If you want to get your hands on the hardware, you can either buy a $129,000 DGX-1 box, which will gobble 3200W but deliver up to 170TFLOPS of performance when it ships in June; wait until one of the big cloud providers offers the gear as an online service later this year; or buy a Pascal-equipped server from the likes of IBM, Cray, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or Dell in early 2017. The cloud goliaths are already gobbling up as many of the number-crunching chips as they can.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Assad-Oriented Shia Militia May Have U.S. M-1 Abrams Tank

      Perhaps the most fundamental flaw in the flailing U.S. anti-ISIS strategy is the belief that any group willing to fight ISIS must support at least some U.S. goals, and that any group not ISIS is better in the long run than ISIS.

    • All Those Evil Violent Video Games Apparently Failed At Turning Kids Into Deviant Murder-Terrorists

      We all know that society is going straight down a hellish toilet bowl. We know this mostly because everyone says so. Violence is rampant, sex is carried out with all the care of discussing the weather, and generally we’re squashing morality like it was a bug walking across the concrete. And we all know who the real culprits of all this immorality are: teenagers.

      [...]

      Huh. Turns out we were the little shits and today’s kids are better on lots of moral questions. It’s almost like societal progress produces tangible results. But the really interesting part is in the wider table that compares all kinds of questions and results for today’s youth with the youth of yesteryear.

    • The Wacko Right Nexus

      The Quilliam Foundation is a group led by people who claim to be former Islamic jihadists who have now reformed. It is the go-to organisation for the BBC and Murdoch’s Sky News whenever Islamic matters, and particularly terrorism, are aired on the media. It is presented, quite falsely, as a neutral and technocratic organisation.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Edward Snowden lambasts Cameron for sudden privacy u-turn
    • Snowden mocks British PM for terming Panama Papers leak ‘private matter’

      Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower, has expressed surprise at British prime minister’s statement that his father’s implication in the list of high-profile tax avoiders was “a private matter”.

      According to Panama Papers, the late Ian Cameron’s Blairmore Holdings Inc company, set up in the 1980s, managed tens of millions of pounds for the wealthy but has never paid tax on UK profits.

    • Private matter? That’s rich! Edward Snowden deals Cameron a Twitter takedown

      David Cameron has been called out for hypocrisy by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden after the PM, who has presided over a raft of new surveillance powers, claimed his late-father’s tax affairs are “a private matter.”

      In response, Snowden, who exposed the extent of GCHQ and NSA mass surveillance, tweeted: “Oh, now he’s interested in privacy.”

      Leaks suggest Ian Cameron did not pay British taxes on his estate for 30 years.

    • Panama Papers: Edward Snowden ridicules David Cameron over privacy

      Edward Snowden has drawn attention to David Cameron’s apparently new interest in privacy, in the wake of questions about his family’s tax affairs.

      The Prime Minister avoided questions about his tax situation, following mentions of his father Ian Cameron in the “Panama papers”. Mr Cameron has looked to argue that his tax affairs are not public and so shouldn’t be discussed.

    • Why the Panama Papers Matter

      In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers. His position as a United States military analyst gave him access to information that he felt should not be hidden from the public. The papers he copied and distributed to the New York Times contained evidence showing that what the government was telling the public it was doing in Vietnam was not true. They sent more troops than they said they were sending. They told the public that the war was winding down when in fact they were broadening their reach in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers had proof that more than one administration during the Vietnam War put their desire for reelection ahead of ending the war.

    • Recent Global Leaks, From Snowden To The Panama Papers

      Founded in 2006 and launched a year later by Australian ex-hacker Julian Assange, WikiLeaks begins releasing secrets such as operating procedures at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, and the contents of US politician Sarah Palin’s personal e-mails.

      In April 2010, the video of a US helicopter strike in Baghdad that killed two Reuters staff and others puts WikiLeaks back in the headlines.

      It follows up in the summer with two massive releases of tens of thousands of internal US military documents relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, detailing cases of abuse, torture and civilian deaths.

    • Panama Papers leaks show change doesn’t happen by itself, says Edward Snowden

      A trove of leaked data about offshore tax havens in Panama highlights more than ever the vital role of the whistleblower in a free society, says one of the tech era’s most prominent figures to expose state secrets, Edward Snowden.

      The former U.S. intelligence contractor said Tuesday that the so-called Panama Papers, which were given to journalists by an anonymous source, demonstrate that “change doesn’t happen by itself.”

      “The media cannot operate in a vacuum and … the participation of the public is absolutely necessary to achieving change,” the ex-National Security Agency analyst said during a video conference from Moscow.

      Snowden was speaking from exile on a panel organized by Simon Fraser University examining the opportunities and dangers of online data gathering.

    • Information Wants to Be Free: Famous Leaks Through the Ages

      At 2,600 gigabytes, the Panama Papers were the biggest data leak in history — a massive information dump that exposed the shady dealings of billionaires, celebrities , sports stars and world leaders.

      In this case, it was somebody with access to the records of the Panama City-based Mossack Fonseca law firm who steered some the 11.5 million records to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which then shared them with the U.S.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

    • Snowden says Panama Papers show whistleblowers ‘vital’ to society

      Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor responsible for the release of thousands of classified documents detailing the American government’s use of mass surveillance, says the Panama Papers show the role of the whistleblower in a free society has become “vital.”

      Mr. Snowden, who is living in Russia under political asylum, made the comments via video link during a sold-out event hosted by Simon Fraser University on Tuesday night.

      Mr. Snowden said the Panama Papers reveal “the most privileged and the most powerful members of society are operating by a different set of rules.”

    • Highlights from Edward Snowden’s Vancouver address

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden brought a rousing call to arms to Vancouver Tuesday night, when he spoke live via weblink to a captivated audience at Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

      “Technology has been used as a sword against people but it can also be used as a shield,” he told the sold-out theatre.

    • Edward Snowden says Panama Papers show whistleblower role is ‘vital’

      The release of the Panama Papers shows that the role of whistleblowers is more important than ever, Edward Snowden told a sold out crowd in Vancouver Tuesday night.

      The NSA whistleblower appeared via live weblink at the SFU-hosted event, which took place at Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

      Although the event was scheduled months ago, Snowden’s speech in Vancouver was timely, coming on the heels of the release of the Panama Papers that has embarrassed politicians and businessmen, exposed global corruption and tax evasion, and led to the resignation of the prime minister of Iceland.

    • The Panama Papers: leaktivism’s coming of age

      The theory that leaking information is an effective form of social protest is being put to the test like never before. It could give rise to capitalism’s greatest crisis yet

    • Leaks that shook the world

      The Panama Papers are the latest in a long line of leaks that have had political repercussions across the globe.

      Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked what became known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971. They detailed how war in Vietnam had been escalated by the US from 1945 to 1967.

      The Watergate scandal was one of the biggest political controversies of the 20th century, prompting President Richard Nixon to resign in 1974. A source known as “Deep Throat” helped bring the burglary of the Democratic National Committee to light, which the Nixon administration tried to cover up.

      In 2010, whistle-blowing website Wikileaks released US State Department cables that the American government considers critical for its national security.

    • Snowden tells Vancouver audience Panama Papers leaker hasn’t contacted him

      Like most tech wizards, Edward Snowden says he’s more of a night person.

      But the famed U.S. whistleblower was pushing that stereotype to its outer limits Tuesday (April 5) when he addressed a Vancouver audience via live-stream from Russia, where it was about 5:20 a.m. local time.

    • Edward Snowden is touring Australia (sort of)

      Edward Snowden, the most controversial whistle-blower not to don an umpires uniform, is set to embark on a speaking tour of Australia. He will, however, not be present in the flesh.

    • NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks to Vancouver crowd via videolink
    • Edward Snowden appearing via video link at Queen Elizabeth Theatre tonight
    • Panama Papers: Could Pirate Party Co-Founder Birgitta Jónsdóttir Become Iceland’s Next PM?

      Iceland’s Pirate Party has seen a surge of support following the publication of the Panama Papers, which led to the resignation of the country’s prime minister.

      Leaked documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca revealed that Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson owned an offshore company with his wife, which he failed to declare when he entered Parliament. He is accused of concealing millions of dollars’ worth of family assets. We speak to the group’s co-founder, former WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who is now a member of the Icelandic Parliament.

    • Iceland government appoints new PM, to call early elections

      Iceland’s government named a new prime minister and called for early elections in the autumn on Wednesday, a day after Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson quit to become the first global politician brought down by the “Panama Papers” leaks.

      It was unclear whether the naming of Fisheries Minister Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson to head the government or the call for early elections would satisfy the thousands of Icelanders who in street protests this week demanded the government resign immediately for early elections.

      Gunnlaugsson quit as prime minister on Tuesday after leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm showed his wife owned an offshore company that held millions of dollars in debt from failed Icelandic banks.

    • A rerun of 2009? No, we Icelanders are much angrier this time

      The farce currently playing out in Icelandic politics hit new heights yesterday.

      Tuesday began well. The leaders of the two coalition parties met for the first time after the notorious broadcast in which the Icelandic people watched their prime minister’s hypocrisy exposed.

      Bjarni Benediktsson, the leader of the Independence party – the coalition partner of the ruling Progressive party – had strongly intimated before the meeting that his party would pull out of the coalition agreement, which would lead to new elections. The nation held its collective breath.

      Shortly after that meeting ended the prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, wrote a cryptic status on his Facebook page that appeared to be a veiled threat to his coalition partner. Paraphrased, it went something like this: “If you do not continue to support me in the good works I have performed for this nation I will make the president dissolve the parliament nyah nyah.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Finance

    • Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption

      They also include at least 33 people and companies blacklisted by the U.S. government because of evidence that they’d been involved in wrongdoing, such as doing business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.

    • Trump reveals plan to finance Mexico border wall with threat to cut off funds

      Republican says the key to wall’s financing is forcing Mexico to make a one-time payment of $5-10bn or halt money transfers from immigrants to family at home

    • Here’s the Price Countries Pay for Tax Evasion Exposed in Panama Papers

      READING THE many stories based on the giant leak of documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca — notorious for its prolific creation of shell companies to hide assets of wealthy malefactors — you might well ask: How much tax revenue do the world’s governments lose thanks to this kind of financial engineering?

    • ‘Panama Papers’ Law Firm Helped CIA Operatives, Gun-Runners Set Up Shell Companies

      After journalists started naming names in the massive document dump known as the Panama Papers, which details the shadow networks of shell companies and tax havens used by the super-rich, many wondered why Americans went unmentioned in the international scandal. Now, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has implicated the CIA as one of the players of this secret — if technically legal — game of hiding money from tax collectors.

    • Panama Papers vs NSA: How big is the latest leak?

      The Panama Papers created a global stir, not only for detailing how rich and powerful people hide their wealth, but for the sheer size of the data involved.

      But is it, as Edward Snowden claims, bigger than his leaked NSA data? And how does it compare to the fallout from U.S. diplomatic information released by Chelsea Manning via WikiLeaks?

    • Panama Papers Reveal How the Well-Connected Wage Economic War

      It has been 45 years since Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers revealed unknown details of how the U.S. was waging war in Vietnam. This week, the release of what are known as the Panama Papers is showcasing how some of the world’s wealthiest and most corrupt leaders in business and government are, in their way, declaring an economic war on the world’s citizens.

    • The Panama Papers: public interest disclosure v the right to private legal advice
    • FT post on the Panama Papers: public interest disclosure v the right to private legal advice
    • David Cameron’s father sought legal advice on best tax havens

      David Cameron’s father took detailed legal advice about the pros and cons of different tax havens before the fund he had helped set up was transferred to Ireland, the Guardian can reveal.

      A leading international law firm wrote an analysis of the Cayman Islands and Bermuda as possible places to host Blairmore Holdings Inc, as it considered whether to “migrate” the investment fund from Panama.

      Blairmore was moved in June 2012 to Ireland – another tax haven with many of the advantages of offshore jurisdictions.

    • Cameron stepped in to shield offshore trusts from EU tax crackdown in 2013

      David Cameron intervened personally to prevent offshore trusts from being dragged into an EU-wide crackdown on tax avoidance, it has emerged.

      In a 2013 letter to the then president of the European council, Herman Van Rompuy, the prime minister said that trusts should not automatically be subject to the same transparency requirements as companies.

    • Where does David Cameron’s money come from?

      Downing Street has had a torrid week fending off questions about David Cameron’s finances in the wake of the Panama Papers leak. At first, No10 said it was a private affair – a knockback that provoked even further scrutiny of his family’s wealth and how it was earned. The prime minister now says neither he nor his family will benefit from any offshore funds now or in the future. But what of the past? Here, the Guardian sets out how the Camerons made a fortune from inherited wealth and family companies.

    • David Cameron ‘argued to water down transparency rules over trusts’

      Downing Street has defended a move by David Cameron to water down the effect of EU transparency rules on trusts despite warnings it could create a loophole for tax dodgers.

      The Prime Minister successfully argued in 2013 for trusts to be treated differently to companies in anti-money laundering rules, The Financial Times revealed.

      It comes after Mr Cameron came under intense pressure over his family’s tax arrangements following the Panama Papers data leak, which reportedly included details about his late father Ian’s tax affairs.

    • David Cameron challenged on benefits from father’s tax haven money #PanamaPapers

      DOWNING STREET are refusing to provide transparency surrounding David Cameron’s financial interests amid the widening scandal over the global tax haven industry.

    • Panama Papers: David Cameron faces questions over father’s off-shore fund in Jersey

      David Cameron is facing further questions over his links to offshore investment funds, after it emerged that his late father was involved in a second company based in a tax haven.

    • David Cameron personally intervened to prevent tax crackdown on offshore trusts

      David Cameron personally intervened to prevent EU transparency rules affecting offshore tax trusts despite warnings it could create a loophole for tax dodgers, it has emerged.

      The Prime Minister sent a letter that successfully argued for trusts to be treated differently to companies in anti-money laundering rules.

    • No 10 defends timing of pro-EU leaflets announcement amid pressure on PM

      Vote Leave campaigners accuse Downing Street of trying to deflect attention from Panama Papers revelations

    • David Cameron avoids question on benefiting from father’s tax affairs

      David Cameron has ducked a question about whether his family stands to benefit from offshore assets linked to his late father, after his tax affairs came under scrutiny following the Panama Papers data leak.

      The prime minister gave a carefully worded reply saying he had no offshore trusts, funds or shares, after giving a speech about the EU in Birmingham.

      Dowing Street later revealed that his wife, Samantha, benefits from shares related to her father’s land, but insisted that neither she nor the Camerons’ children currently benefit from Blairmore, an offshore investment fund set up by the prime minister’s late father.

      Cameron’s first direct intervention into the controversy came in response to a question posed by Sky News.

    • Immigrants Shouldn’t Be Locked Up for Being Poor

      In the federal criminal bail system, judges are required to consider someone’s financial ability to pay a bond and determine if alternative conditions of supervision — check-ins, travel restrictions — are enough to get the person to show up for court.

    • Microsoft, Amazon, others excel at offshore tax dance [Ed: IRS is after Microsoft]

      The invisible web of connections by which the rich get a sweeter deal is starting to be exposed. How America reacts is huge — especially for one of the top users of offshore tax havens, Microsoft.

    • Nokia to cut thousands of jobs following Alcatel deal [Ed: Microsoft killed Nokia]

      Telecom network equipment maker Nokia NOKIA.HE is planning to cut thousands of jobs worldwide, including 1,400 in Germany and 1,300 in its native Finland, as part of a cost-cutting program following its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent.

      Finland’s biggest company has cut thousands of Finnish jobs over the past decade as its once-dominant phone business was eclipsed by the rise of smartphone rivals. The phone business was eventually sold to Microsoft MSFT.O, which has continued cutting jobs in the recession-hit country.

    • U.S. readies bank rule on shell companies amid ‘Panama Papers’ fury

      The U.S. Treasury Department intends to soon issue a long-delayed rule forcing banks to seek the identities of people behind shell-company account holders, after the “Panama Papers” leak provoked a global uproar over the hiding of wealth via offshore banking devices.

    • U.S. readies bank rule on shell companies amid ‘Panama Papers’ fury

      F. Scott Fitzgerald apparently never told his Parisian drinking buddy Ernest Hemingway, “Ernie, the rich are different from us,” only to be rebuffed by the legendary comeback, “Yes, they have more money.” Like so many famous anecdotes, that one was cooked up years after the fact (probably by Fitzgerald’s posthumous editor, the literary critic Edmund Wilson). One reason that apocryphal exchange possesses such enduring cultural resonance is that both observations are true, and what sounds like a contradiction is not a contradiction after all.

      [...]

      Those are explosive charges, and one should of course be cautious in characterizing a powerful law firm that has tried to deny or deflect most of these allegations in a vigorous if laborious rebuttal, published in full on the Guardian’s website. In a long-winded letter signed by Carlos Sousa, the firm’s public-relations director, Mossack Fonseca insists it “does not foster or promote illegal acts,” respectfully disagrees with the conclusion that it sought to help anyone avoid paying taxes or launder dirty money, and claims to “have operated beyond reproach in [its] home country and in other jurisdictions” for 40 years. Furthermore, if any of its clients misused its services or did anything illegal, the firm professes itself deeply shocked and distressed (I am paraphrasing, but not by much). In short, Mossack says it did nothing wrong or at least didn’t mean to, and has recently added 26 new hires to its “compliance department” to ensure it continues to do nothing wrong in the future.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Sanders Wins Wisconsin Primary, Extending Streak

      Meanwhile, Sanders was whipping up crowds across Wisconsin. On Sunday, he was back in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin’s basketball arena. He couldn’t fill the entire arena this time around, but he still managed to draw 4,400 people—even though he’d just been in town a week prior. He brought in a host of national talent to whip up the crowd: Actors Shailene Woodley and Rosario Dawson spoke, while indie-rock band Best Coast played a short set. But perhaps more telling was a band of local singers, who regularly protest Gov. Scott Walker through song in the state capital and who performed pro-union songs before the national acts on Sunday.

    • Hedge Funds are Part of a Tricky Money Maneuver to Put Hillary in the White House

      But two hedge fund billionaires backing a Republican candidate pales in comparison to the tens of millions of dollars flooding into Hillary Clinton’s campaign from other hedge fund billionaires – including money flowing into a joint fundraising committee called the “Hillary Victory Fund” that is sluicing money to both Hillary’s main candidate committee, Hillary for America, as well as into the Democratic National Committee and 33 separate state Democratic committees, which has some observers crying foul.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Chinese censors spring into action to erase mentions of Panama Papers from the web

      The leaked 11.5 million files, spanning 2.6 TB of data, include references to the relatives of at least eight current or former Chinese officials, says the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Chinese censors have now gone into overdrive, working overtime to eliminate all mentions of this from Chinese websites.

    • LATEST VIDEO – York webcast video censorship row resolved – deleted scenes will be restored

      The deleted scenes from a City of York council webcast will be put back into a recorded version that sits on the council website. It follows a huge row where a group of councillors have accused council officers of censorship.

      The leader of the council, Chris Steward, has been informing everyone tonight that the webcast should be reinstated in full tomorrow.

    • China ramps up Panama Papers censorship after leaders’ relatives named

      Chinese censors have stepped up their censorship of websites, ordering all content related to the Panama Papers to be scrubbed as new revelations emerged of how relatives of some of the country’s top leaders had used secretive offshore companies to store their wealth.

    • Egypt arrested people for their Facebook comments. Now it’s trying to block Facebook itself [“Blocking all of Facebook is not all bad, selective blocking though is censorship.” -iophk]

      In recent months, the Egyptian government has arrested or jailed several people for posting comments on Facebook that it considered inflammatory. Now, it seems, the government and some lawmakers are going after Facebook itself.

      Parliamentary speaker Ali Abdel-Al has called for new legislation to “control the excesses” of Facebook. Another lawmaker, Gamal Abdel Nasser, wrote in a statement this week that “people who use Facebook to write highly dangerous things to our national security should be arrested.”

    • Steam Censors Pirate Bay Links in Chat Client

      Steam users who want to share a link to The Pirate Bay from the built-in chat client will be disappointed, as mentions of the popular torrent site are being censored. Links to various torrent and file-sharing sites are actively stripped from discussions, presumably because Valve doesn’t appreciate some of the content that’s shared through the site.

    • US trade secrets bill passed unanimously in Senate [Ed: Shock horror! Rich politicians pass laws that protest rich people]
    • Apple granted patent on real-time censorship technology

      According to Business Insider, Apple has been granted a patent on a new technology that would allow for audio streams to be audited and edited for explicit content in real-time, as outlined in a recently published patent application.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Panama Papers Endanger Anonymity of ‘Pirate’ Sites

      Described as one of the largest leaks in history, the Panama Papers reveal where some of the wealthiest people in the world hide their fortunes. However, offshore companies are also widely used for anonymity, as the listing of two Megaupload defendants reveals. This could spell trouble for quite a few file-sharing sites and services that hide behind offshore companies.

    • Another Privacy Canary in the Coal Mines?

      That speculation seems appropriate given how we learned of the opinion in the first place. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has repeatedly warned that the OLC’s opinion on common commercial service agreements is critical to understanding the ongoing cybersecurity debate and contains a legal interpretation that is “inconsistent with the public’s understanding of the law.” Sen. Wyden has a history of alerting the public to the government’s reliance on secret law. The last time the senator warned that the executive branch’s secret legal interpretation would shock the public, it turned out he was referring to the NSA’s unlawful bulk collection of call records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The facts underlying his warnings roared into public consciousness with the first Snowden disclosure publicized in June 2013.

    • Law Enforcement Raids Another Tor Exit Node Because It Still Believes An IP Address Is A Person

      An IP address is not a person, even less so if said IP address traces back to a Tor exit relay. But that’s not going to stop the “authorities” from subjecting people with no knowledge at all of alleged criminal activity from being subjected to raids and searches.

      It happened in Austria. Local police seized a bunch of computer equipment from a residence hosting a Tor exit node. ICE — boldly moving forward with nothing more than an IP address — seized six hard drives from Nolan King, who was also running a Tor exit relay.

      Those more familiar with Tor suggested ICE’s “upon information and belief” affidavit statements should probably include at least a little “information” and recommended law enforcement check publicly-available lists of Tor exit nodes before conducting raids based on IP addresses. ICE, however, vowed to keep making this same mistake, no matter what information was brought to its attention.

    • Destroying Reputations And Hacking Elections For Fun And Profit

      Although rather forgotten now, one of the most troubling Snowden revelations appeared in 2014, and concerned GCHQ’s “dirty tricks” group known as JTRIG — the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group. Put simply, its job is to “manipulate, deceive and destroy” reputations. Of course, it would be naïve to think that GCHQ is alone in using these techniques. We can safely assume all the major spy agencies engage in similar activities, but what about other players? To what extent might ambitious politicians, for example, be using these dirty tricks to slime their opponents — and to win elections unfairly?

      If a long and fascinating feature in Bloomberg is to be believed, the outcome of presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela were all influenced and possibly even determined by the work of one man, a certain Andrés Sepúlveda, using similar methods to those employed by JTRIG. It’s a great story, and well-worth reading in full. What follows are some of the details that are likely to be of particular interest to Techdirt readers.

    • OnionScan: Tool To Check If Your Dark Web Site Really Is Anonymous

      Sarah Jamie Lewis is an independent security researcher who has devised a tool called OnionScan to locate the loopholes in dark web sites. This will allow system admins to find flaws in their websites and minimize the chance of the leakage of their server’s real IP address.

    • Highlights from Edward Snowden’s Vancouver address

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden brought a rousing call to arms to Vancouver Tuesday night, when he spoke live via weblink to a captivated audience at Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

      “Technology has been used as a sword against people but it can also be used as a shield,” he told the sold-out theatre.

      “To what do we owe a greater loyalty – to the law or to justice?”

      Addressing everything from the recently leaked Panama Papers to the best way to keep your personal data private, Snowden was certainly hard-hitting and at times felt radical.

      But his sense of humour and candour was also clear from the start, when host CBC senior correspondent Laura Lynch thanked him for getting up early at around 5 a.m. Moscow time.

    • Snowden: Surveillance is about “social control,” not terrorism

      “To whom do you owe a bigger loyalty: to the law, or to justice?”

      Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who gained international fame after leaking classified documents to journalists at The Guardian, reflected on his choice to risk his safety and his life to expose the actions of the American government, which included monitoring private phone calls and emails. “Eventually, you have to make an individual decision, a moral decision, a decision of conscience,” he said.

      As the last entry in the Spring 2016 President’s Dream Colloquium on Big Data, Snowden spoke to a crowd of roughly 3,000 people at a packed Queen Elizabeth Theatre, with even more watching via live webstream. Charged with three felonies and unable to return to his home in the United States, Snowden is currently living in Russia on a three-year temporary asylum.

    • NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks to Vancouver crowd via videolink

      NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden is speaking about the Panama Papers, an unprecedented leak of files showing how the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax havens, via video link in Vancouver.
      Snowden is giving a keynote speech called “Big Data, Security and Human Rights” at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver, hosted by Simon Fraser University.

    • UK Police Flagging Uncharged Arrestees As Possible National Security Threats To Keep Their Biometric Data From Being Deleted

      Rules are rules, except when they aren’t. UK law enforcement’s biometric database has strict rules governing the retention of data not linked to suspects facing charges. The system automatically deletes the data when a file is flagged as closed, which happens automatically when a person is released without bail. At this point, “problems” develop, as The Register’s Alexander J. Martin explains.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Using The All Writs Act To Route Around The Fifth Amendment

      USA Today’s Brad Heath has dug up another use for the FBI’s now-infamous All Writs Act orders: skirting the Fifth Amendment. In a 2015 case currently headed to the Appeals Court, the government is attempting to use All Writs to force a defendant to unlock his devices.

      The order finding Francis Rawls guilty of contempt contains a footnote pointing to the government’s use of an All Writs order to force Rawls to unlock his devices — and, one would think — allow the government to dodge a Fifth Amendment rights violation.

    • Former CIA/NSA Chief Hayden Fantasized About Assassinating Edward Snowden

      The spy chief under the George W. Bush administration says that assassinating the whistleblower was something he considered during his ‘darker moments.’

    • Using The All Writs Act To Route Around The Fifth Amendment

      USA Today’s Brad Heath has dug up another use for the FBI’s now-infamous All Writs Act orders: skirting the Fifth Amendment. In a 2015 case currently headed to the Appeals Court, the government is attempting to use All Writs to force a defendant to unlock his devices.

    • ‘There’s Never Been a Drug Law That Wasn’t Tied to Race’
    • John Yoo’s Two Justifications for Stellar Wind

      Because I’m a hopeless geek, I want to compare the what we can discern of the November 2, 2001 memo John Yoo wrote to authorized Stellar Wind with the letter he showed FISA Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on May 17, 2002. The former is almost entirely redacted. But as I’ll show, the two appear to be substantially the same except for small variations within paragraphs (which possibly may reflect no more than citations). The biggest difference is that Yoo’s memo appears to have two pages of content not present in the letter to Kollar-Kotelly.

      What follows is a comparison of every unredacted passage in the Yoo memo, every one of which appear in exactly the same form in the letter he wrote to Kollar-Kotelly.

      The first unredacted line in Yoo’s memo — distinguishing between “electronic surveillance” covered by FISA and “warrantless searches” the President can authorize — appears in this paragraph in the letter.

    • Citizens On Terrorist Watchlist – Including A 4-Year-Old Boy – Sue Government For Violating Their Rights

      A class-action lawsuit has been filed in Virginia challenging the government’s terrorist watchlist. Eighteen plaintiffs — including a 4-year-old boy who was placed on the watchlist at the age of 7 months — claim their placement on the watchlist is discriminatory and has deprived them of their rights.

      The government’s super-secret watchlist for suspected terrorists is, for the most part, the end result of the collective hunches of hundreds of intelligence and law enforcement employees. Despite the lack of anything approaching evidence, people are shrugged onto the watchlist at an alarming rate. The lawsuit points out that only 16 people were on the government’s “No Fly” list in 2001. By 2013, the list had 47,000 names on it.

    • US among world leaders in death penalty, surpassed only by Saudi, Iran & Pakistan – Amnesty

      With 28 killings in 2015, the US is the only country in the Americas and among OSCE members to be on the list of top executioners published by Amnesty International, coming right after Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan.

      At least 1,634 people were put to death in 25 countries in 2015, Amnesty International said. Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan account for nearly 90 percent of those.

      The US, it appears, had more executions than Iraq last year – 28 in six states: Texas (13), Missouri (6), Georgia (5), Florida (2), Oklahoma (1) and Virginia (1).

    • Death rows: the toll of the ultimate punishment

      THERE was an alarming increase in the use of capital punishment across the world last year. At least 1,634 people were put to death by shooting, beheading, lethal injection or hanging according to figures from the human-rights organisation Amnesty International. This is a 50% increase on 2014 and is the highest number for 25 years, mainly due to a surge in three countries: Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, in which 90% of all executions took place. Actual figures are likely to be much greater. China is believed to execute thousands of people, but the numbers are kept a state secret.

    • U.S. executions down in 2015, but nation remains in global top five

      Capital punishment continued its steady decline in the United States last year, with death sentences and executions dropping to levels unseen for decades. But despite this shift, the country remains among the world’s leaders in the death penalty, putting more inmates to death in 2015 than most other nations.

    • Court’s Decision on Recording Police Erodes First Amendment Rights and Transparency While Inviting Violence

      A federal district court in Pennsylvania recently issued a terrible joint decision in Fields v. City of Philadelphia and Geraci v. City of Philadelphia, holding for the first time that “observing and recording” police activities is not protected by the First Amendment unless an observer visibly challenges police conduct in that moment. The right to record police activities, under both the First and Fourth Amendments, is an increasingly vital digital rights issue. If allowed to stand, Fields would not only hamstring efforts to improve police accountability, but—given disturbing patterns across the U.S.—could also lead to unnecessary violence.

      Criticism of the Fields decision emerged quickly, but focused mostly on its artificial distinction between what counts as protected “expression” under the First Amendment and what does not. Unfortunately, that fallacy is merely one among several that pervade the decision.

    • Court Says Prosecutor’s Lies Means Man Can Have His Money Back, But Not His Life

      Not only did the government not disclose this close working arrangement between prosecutors and Dvorin’s co-defendant, but it allowed him to perjure himself by affirming under oath that no such agreement was in place.

      The government did the right thing… as far as that went. It admitted to the Brady and Napue violations and allowed the sentence to be vacated. But that didn’t take Dvorin off the hook. All it did was set him up for a second trial.

      It was at this point that the district court decided to get to the bottom of the prosecutorial misconduct.

      [...]

      In the end, everything Sauter did and everything the government attempted to vindictively pile on was left mostly intact. Dvorin may have gotten his money back, but he’s still in prison. Sauter and the other government prosecutors are still free to abuse the system to the extent the courts will let them get away with it. This district has shown it’s willing to permit a number of violations before it will even consider tossing convictions. Those are pretty good odds, if you’re the sort of prosecutor who thinks breaking the rules is perfectly acceptable when pursuing “justice.”

    • Man says undercover cops beat, choked him unconscious

      A 23-year-old man says he was tackled and choked unconscious by two undercover officers, and that another officer ordered bystanders to delete video of the incident.

      James King claimed he thought he was being mugged when a plainclothes Grand Rapids Police detective and FBI special agent asked for his identification and held him against an unmarked SUV on July 18, 2014. He said didn’t know the men were law enforcement.

    • Video shows SAISD officer slamming middle school girl to the ground

      A police officer for the San Antonio Independent School District was placed on paid administrative leave Wednesday after cellphone video emerged of the officer slamming a 12-year-old female student to the ground.

      The incident happened March 29 at Rhodes Middle School.

      In the 33-second video, posted online by ghost-0.com, Officer Joshua Kehm is seen slamming sixth-grader Janissa Valdez to the ground.

    • Italian Official Warns Egypt Over Inquiry Into Student’s Death

      The foreign minister of Italy said Tuesday that his government would take “immediate and proportional” measures against Egypt if it failed to help uncover the truth behind the death of an Italian graduate student in Cairo two months ago.

      “We will stop only when we will find the truth, the real one,” Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told Parliament, adding that he would not accept any “fabrication.”

      The threat by Mr. Gentiloni came the day before a team of Egyptian investigators was scheduled to land in Rome for meetings on the case of the student, Giulio Regeni, 28, a doctoral candidate, whose brutalized body was discovered on a roadside in February in Cairo.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality/TV/Radio

    • ISPs Now Charging Broadband Users A Steep Premium If They Want To Avoid Usage Caps

      Thanks to the lack of broadband competition, the ISP push to impose unnecessary and arbitrary usage caps shows no sign of slowing down. Comcast continues to expand its “trial” of usage caps and overage fees, while AT&T has followed suit. And both companies have now started adding a new wrinkle to the mix, charging consumers $30 to $35 more per month if they want to avoid usage caps entirely. That’s right, despite broadband getting cheaper than ever to provide, ISPs are now charging you a massive monthly premium if you want the same unlimited broadband service you enjoyed yesterday.

    • Canadian Government Fails To Force Cheaper TV Options, Blames Consumers For Not Trying Harder

      Last month we noted how Canadian regulator the CRTC tried to do something about the high cost of TV service by forcing Canadian cable operators to provide cheaper, more flexible TV bundles. Under the new CRTC rules, companies had to provide a $25 so-called “skinny bundle” of discounted TV channels starting March 1, and the option to buy channels a la carte starting December 1.

    • Radio Directive – Open letter to the French Ministry of Budget and to the French Telecom Regulator

      The Directive on the harmonisation of the laws of Member States relating to the making available on the market of radio equipment (or Radio Directive) was adopted in April 2014, with the aim to improve the management of the radio spectrum. The Directive must now be transposed and implemented in Member States before 12 June 2016. Although its goals are laudable, it establishes standards for software installed on radio equipment, thus becoming an unprecedented threat to the use of free software. It is dangerous for innovation and for users’ rights, and results in considerable legal insecurity for associations around the country that develop wireless citizen Internet networks. The French government is currently working on transposing this Directive, and must urgently tackle the situation and guarantee the right to install free software on radio equipment.

    • Would you like this hypothetical telecom regulator to head up ICANN?

      Let’s imagine a hypothetical telecom regulator getting picked as a new head of ICANN, and the consequences it might have. ICANN is the organization regulating much of the Internet’s crucial infrastructure, and there has been a continuous power struggle between the Internet’s values of transparency and openness against the dinosaur telecom values of walled gardens, monopolization, and surveillance.

  • DRM

    • Sony Finally Releases PS4 Remote Play For PC App That Isn’t As Good As A Modder’s App Is

      Late last year, we discussed how an application modder named Twisted had managed to push Sony, the megalith corporation, into producing a remote play PC application for its Playstation 4 console. Twisted had previously managed to crack open Sony’s Android remote play application, originally designed to work only on Sony brand smartphones, so that any Android user could play the PS4 on the go. This, of course, made the PS4 product more useful and added a feature to potential console buyers that Sony had, for some reason, decided to restrict. Xperia phones, it should be noted, aren’t exactly jumping off the shelves at stores, but Playstation 4 consoles certainly are. Then Twisted announced he was going to release a PC version of the app. Sony had not released any PC version of its remote play functionality. But shortly after Twisted’s announcement, Sony too announced it would be releasing a remote play for PC application.

    • the future is arriving too fast

      Is this what it was like when Apple killed the floppy? Not exactly, I think. Floppies were already inadequately sized to transfer many files of the time. Plastic circles were not just the preferable but practically only means of distributing data. Streaming may be preferable in some cases, but it’s clearly not the only means of distributing some movies. That remains the plastic circle.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • MIP Africa Roadshow 2016 – live updates

      Nicky explains how Chinese investment fuelled this growth, but notes that there has been a drop since 2012. She predicts “three tough years ahead”, but says beyond that there is great potential in the continent – partly due to under-utilised arable land and reserves of commodities. “But there is also more to Africa,” she says, as many governments are seeking to diversify their economies, for example by investing in manufacturing.

      Conflicts and corruption still present challenges, she says, but things are improving. “We’ve seen significant improvements in places like Rwanda where you can now start a business online at virtually no cost.” Telephone and internet use are growing rapidly.

      There are lots of questions, many asking Nicky to expand on some of the many charts she has presented on African economic data.

    • IP Valuation For Universities, Patent Flexibilities On Tap At WIPO

      The guide provides practical advice to assist universities and publicly-funded research organisations to identify their valuable intangible assets, rank them by using different valuation approaches, manage, and commercialise those with potential market value.

    • Copyrights

      • Swedish Court: Wikipedia Hosting Photos Of Public Artwork Is Copyright Infringement For Some Reason

        Wikimedia has, of course, a somewhat tortured history when it comes to copyright and artwork that appears on Wikipedia. Whether it’s political logos, German museum art, and this goddamned monkey, Wikipedia often finds itself targeted over uploaded photos of artwork and copyright claims that too often appear to be either baseless or at cross-purposes with the world of art more generally. When you mix all of this up with a strange sense of entitlement by those who produce public art over how that art is photographed, the result is a Swedish court declaring that Wikipedia has violated copyright by hosting pictures of public Swedish statues.

      • Swedish Supreme Court uses three-step test to interpret restrictively freedom of panorama

        As readers will remember, Article 5(3)(h) of the InfoSoc Directive allows Member States to adopt a national exception/limitation to the rights harmonised by that directive to permit the “use of works, such as works of architecture or sculpture, made to be located permanently in public places”.

04.06.16

Links 6/4/2016: KDE Vision for the Future, Vivaldi 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Replacements for Expensive Applications

    In recent years, cloud computing has transformed the ways that people purchase software, but it hasn’t necessarily made it more affordable.

    Today, many applications are available on a software as a service (SaaS) basis and require a monthly fee. Over time, these fees add up, and in many cases, software companies earn more from these subscriptions than they did from boxed or downloadable software. In fact, IDC estimates that by 2018, just the enterprise portion of the SaaS market will generate $22.6 billion in annual revenue.

  • 12 memes of open source software

    What does open source software mean? When you are explaining it to someone else, how do you convey the value and essense of open source without reinventing it? There have been many hard won lessons in open source since the phrase was first coined in 1997, and we should not forget those lessons.

    To help with that, I’ve collected 12 memes that are meaningful to me to help share the history, set the stage, and provide context for what open source software is and what it means to the software industry at large.

  • Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Open or closed?

    Unlike other solutions to the problem of a slow mobile web, AMP is an open source project. The code for the project resides on GitHub. It’s an active community with lots of open issues and thus far includes contributions from well over 100 people. The project provides clear information about governance, as well as a code of conduct (based on the Hoodie Community Code) that describes the project as a “positive, growing project and community” that aims to provide a “safe environment for everyone.”

  • Google Open Sources Tool for Gauging Touch and Voice Latency

  • Events

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Ouch, Red Hat gets a slapping. Volkswagen chooses Mirantis for its OpenStack needs

      Big news for a number of reasons. VW is, after all, a Red Hat shop (or historically has been, anyway). Big news because this is a fantastic proof point for OpenStack, in particular, heading into the OpenStack summit next month in Austin. And big news because, according to sources, Red Hat once again used the “we don’t support RHEL on Mirantis” line with VW who reportedly ignored that thinly-veiled threat and went for Mirantis anyway. And finally, big news because VW’s intention is to connect all of its cars to the internet within a couple of years. What that means is that the cloud, OpenStack and, ultimately, Mirantis, will power VW’s connected and self-driving cars.

    • Open Network Insight Project Builds on Big Data to Improve Security

      The open-source effort, which is backed by Cloudera, Intel, eBay and others, is seeing early adoption, as organizations aim to gain the upper hand on attackers.

  • Databases

    • Open source database targets the big data analytics market

      Leader in open source databases MariaDB is announcing the release of its new big data analytics engine, MariaDB ColumnStore.

      It unifies transactional and massively parallelized analytic workloads on the same platform. This is made possible because of MariaDB’s extensible architecture that allows the simultaneous use of purpose built storage engines for maximum performance, simplification, and cost savings. This approach sets it apart from competitors like Oracle, and removes the need to buy and deploy traditional columnar database appliances.

    • How MongoDB motivates and inspires its developer community

      It’s a team effort, with contribution across many internal departments as well as our ecosystem of 1,000+ partners. The community has grown over the years. The software has been downloaded over 10 million times, and we have more than 40,000 MongoDB User Group members and more than 600 advocates on our Advocacy Hub. These users demand nurturing—whether through educational content or networking opportunities—and we are proud that our integrated team across engineering, support, and marketing can help scale to meet the community needs.

    • Is NoSQL Database Storage Ready for the Enterprise? Survey Says Yes

      The report, which was released Tuesday, compares how companies of different sizes are using traditional databases — think Oracle MySQL — and “next-generation” alternatives. The latter category consists of databases that discard the rigid SQL-style storage and retriveal process in favor of more flexible ways to store data. Next-generation databases, notably ones called NoSQL because they are the opposite of SQL-based platforms, are designed to perform well in an age when data tends to be stored on massive scales in the cloud.

  • Education

    • There’s a new standard in higher ed: Open Summit launches

      With all these conversations happening amongst many disparate groups of stakeholders, the Open Source Initiative and the Apereo Foundation both saw an opportunity to break down silos and bring everyone together to collaborate, share lessons learned, and form stronger bonds to advance open in education. The first step is the upcoming Open Summit in New York City, a one-day event taking place May 23 at New York University.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open source initiative taps analytics to solve Asia’s traffic jams

      Joint agreement between Grab, The World Bank, and Philippines Department of Transportation and Communications aims to analyse real-time traffic data including speeds and intersection delays.

    • Open Data

      • German City of Potsdam to present its open data concept

        This month the German City of Potsdam will present its open data concept to the City Council for approval. The strategy serves two main goals: to provide information to citizens, and to allow third parties to reuse and link administrative data in their applications. The city will start implementing an open data portal on its municipal website, which will then be gradually developed into a fully-fledged repository.

  • Programming/Development

    • Most Loved Programming Languages Of 2016 — Rust, Swift, F#, Scala, Go
    • PHP’s Composer 1.0 Released

      For anyone developing with PHP for any length of time you’ve likely encountered Composer as a dependency management solution for PHP.

    • Meet the PHP developer behind monitoring tool JaM

      Jess Portnoy is a prolific PHP developer and open source geek with lots of helpful data and web data utilities on SourceForge and GitHub.

      I was vaguely familiar with Jess’s work from various tech talks that she’s given, which usually attracted my attention because of her affiliation with the web multimedia platform Kaltura.

      Her upcoming talk at LinuxFest Northwest is all about PHP monitoring, and given the kind of traffic Kaltura deals with, there are likely few people as familiar with the subject as Jess.

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • UK Health Service May Harvest Organs from Infants with Lethal Birth Defects

      At an annual conference for the British Transplantation Society, the National Health Service (NHS) announced that it wants to encourage women who have babies that would be born with life threatening birth defects, to carry them to term so that their organs can be used to help another infant who needs a transplant. Transplant surgeon Niaz Ahmad from St James’s University Hospital said, “we are looking at rolling it out as a viable source of organ transplantation nationally. A number of staff in the NHS are not aware that these organs can be used. They need to be aware. These can be transplanted, they work, and they work long term.” The ideal candidates are anencephalic babies who are born without a brain or little brain tissue and will not survive. Currently, this is legal in the United States, but in the UK, it is not legal to pronounce an infant as brain dead and harvest their organs. If babies in the UK need a transplant, they would have to get donor organs from Europe.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • WordPress, Joomla domains under attack through jQuery JavaScript library

      Abuse of the JavaScript library has led to over 4.5 million recent exposures to infection.

    • Developer Warns Of “Uncorrectable Freedom & Security Issues” For x86

      A developer long involved in Coreboot/Libreboot development is trying to call attention to “uncorrectable freedom and security issues” on x86 platforms with nearly all post-2009 Intel systems and post-2013 AMD systems.

    • Google Patches 39 Android Vulnerabilities in April Update
    • FBI Says a Mysterious Hacking Group Has Had Access to US Govt Files for Years

      The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard.

      The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for more than a year infiltrated the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM. In the process, they stole highly sensitive data about several millions of government workers and even spies.

    • Sources: Trump Hotels Breached Again

      Banking industry sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that the Trump Hotel Collection — a string of luxury properties tied to business magnate and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — appears to be dealing with another breach of its credit card systems. If confirmed, this would be the second such breach at the Trump properties in less than a year.

    • Shodan2Sheets

      After spending last night working on a Reverse DNS Function for Google Sheets I couldnt leave well enough alone and wrote Shodan2Sheets tonight using the shodan.io api.

    • Security is a process, not a reaction

      If this sounds familiar, you are probably running a web application of some kind. Maybe your whole business depends on it. Maybe you didn’t hear about the latest world-on-fire vulnerability. Panic.

      How do you keep up with security issues when everything is happening so fast? Which parts of your technical stack are the most at risk? Is the customer data safe? Do you really need to care?

    • Three-year-old IBM patch for critical Java flaw is broken

      Attackers can easily bypass the patch to exploit a vulnerability that allows them to escape from the Java security sandbox

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The President’s Blank Check for War

      Let’s face it: in times of war, the Constitution tends to take a beating. With the safety or survival of the nation said to be at risk, the basic law of the land — otherwise considered sacrosanct — becomes nonbinding, subject to being waived at the whim of government authorities who are impatient, scared, panicky, or just plain pissed off.

      The examples are legion. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln arbitrarily suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ignored court orders that took issue with his authority to do so. After U.S. entry into World War I, the administration of Woodrow Wilson mounted a comprehensive effort to crush dissent, shutting down anti-war publications in complete disregard of the First Amendment. Amid the hysteria triggered by Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order consigning to concentration camps more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, many of them native-born citizens. Asked in 1944 to review this gross violation of due process, the Supreme Court endorsed the government’s action by a 6-3 vote.

    • Killing the US Republic — and Empire

      Through its dysfunctional politics and over-reliance on military force, the United States is destroying both its Republic and its imperial reach, a problem made in the USA, said former Ambassador Chas W. Freeman Jr. in a recent speech.

    • Vietnam War at 50: Have We Learned Nothing?

      Last week Defense Secretary Ashton Carter laid a wreath at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in commemoration of the “50th anniversary” of that war. The date is confusing, as the war started earlier and ended far later than 1966.

    • Imperial Human Sacrifice in Yemen

      The bit is really funny and perceptive. But in actuality, the average American would respond with, “We’re bombing Yemen? What’s Yemen?” While the average American foreign policy official wouldn’t cite 9/11, but would feign innocence. “We’re not! That war belongs to Saudi Arabia. Whaaatt? I didn’t do anything!”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Defend Trade Secret Act Moving Forward

      I am always amazed how gridlock is pushed aside to implement intellectual property laws. In a unanimous vote yesterday, the Senate passed the Defend Trade Secret Act (DTSA, S. 1890) that would create a federal cause of action for trade secret misappropriation and provides for damages and injunctive relief (including a seizure order to prevent dissemination). Neither Senators Ted Cruz nor Bernie Sanders voted. The identical bill H.R. 3326 is pending in the House of Representatives and includes 127 co-sponsors (mostly Republican). President Obama has announced his support as well.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Food Production and Distribution Will Decline Due To Climate Change

      “Global food system faces threats from climate change,” is a report from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and was issued at the United Nations Climate Conference (COP21). The report warns that exceedingly warmer temperatures and altered patterns of precipitation can threaten food production, distribution efforts, degrade food safety, as well as have other impacts. As a result, international progress in the past few decades toward improving food security will be difficult to maintain. The report was led by the US Department of Agriculture. It included contributors from nineteen federal, academic, nongovernmental, intergovernmental, and private organizations in the United States, Argentina, Britain, and Thailand. This is a critically important news story of 2015 that will impact all populations around the world. However, some will be affected in worse ways than others, particularly tropical and subtropical regions.

    • As the climate changes, risks to human health will accelerate, White House warns

      More deaths from extreme heat. Longer allergy seasons. Increasingly polluted air and water. Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and ticks spreading farther and faster. Those are among the health risks that could be exacerbated by global warming coming decades, the Obama administration warned in a new report Monday.

  • Finance

    • Why Do They Call It Panama Papers, Anyway?

      Over the weekend, a bunch of media outlets let loose shock and awe in bulk leak documents, PanamaPapers, with project leaders ICIJ and Sueddeutsche Zeitung — as well as enthusiastic partner, Guardian — rolling out bring spreads on a massive trove of data from the shell company law firm Mossack Fonseca.

      If all goes well, the leak showing what MF has been doing for the last four decades will lead us to have a better understanding of how money gets stripped from average people and then hidden in places where it will be safe from prying eyes.

    • Skeptics Said $15 Minimum Wage Movement Was Unrealistic — 60 Million People Are Now Slated to Get It

      THE PUNDITS said it would never happen. But both California and New York on Monday implemented legislation that moves them toward a tiered minimum wage of $15 an hour, covering 60 million Americans.

      The hikes come as a direct result of organizing by thousands of people in the union-backed “Fight for 15” movement that kicked off in 2012 — organizing that was quickly decried by pundits and opponents as unrealistic and unlikely to ever succeed.

    • China limits coverage and denounces Panama Papers’ tax haven revelations

      China on Tuesday denounced accusations arising from a massive leak from a Panamanian law firm as “groundless” and moved to limit coverage of documents that may have exposed financial wrongdoing by some of the world’s rich and powerful.

      The “Panama Papers” revealed financial arrangements of politicians and public figures including friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin, relatives of the prime ministers of Britain, Iceland and Pakistan, and the president of Ukraine.

      The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which has published some of the information from the documents, said the files also revealed offshore companies linked to the families of Chinese President Xi Jinping and other powerful current and former Chinese leaders.

    • China’s Censors Scramble to Curb ‘Panama Papers’ News
    • Panama papers: China censors online discussion
    • Beijing is censoring searches about the Panama Papers
    • Censorship, CIA and no US citizens: Panama Papers conspiracy theories
    • Iceland’s Prime Minister Resigns, First Casualty of #PanamaPapers

      The prime minister, who was elected to parliament as a reformer in 2009, promising transparency following the ruinous collapse of three Icelandic banks the year before, failed to disclose that his family secretly held bonds worth millions of dollars in the same banks, through a shell company in the British Virgin Islands.

    • Five donors who have handed £16million to the Tories named in tax haven leak including billionaire former party treasurer, JCB heir and ‘shady financier’ property developer
    • Panama Papers: how do you feel about the hidden fortunes of the global elite?
    • Panama Papers: Jeremy Corbyn Calls For Investigation Into David Cameron’s Family

      Jeremy Corbyn is calling for an independent investigation into the tax controversies revealed in the Panama Papers leak — that includes David Cameron’s family, of which his late father Ian was implicated.

    • Monday Morning: Welcome to BVI – Have a Tax-Free Day

      The UK’s PM David Cameron was pressed in 2013 to do something about BVI’s tax laws. He said he would work with the G8 to tackle tax evasion. Of course, we now know why he sat on his hands; he had highly-rewarding and substantial familial interest in doing nothing but continue his family’s tax avoidance scheme. And yet he still managed to get reelected last year, the corrupt pig fucker.

    • Panama Papers: Pirates Prepare to Takeover Iceland (Update)

      Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson is facing calls for early general elections after it was revealed he is among many politicians linked to companies named in the Panama Papers. Dramatically the Pirate Party is leading in the latest Gallup poll, raising the astonishing prospect that a Pirate-led coalition government could rule Iceland.

    • Panama Papers: mass protests in Iceland call for PM to quit – as it happened

      The biggest-ever leak of secret information involves 11m documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Here’s how the story is being covered around the world.

    • Panama Papers whips up Iceland politics into a frenzy

      Head of Iceland’s Pirate Party Birgitta Jónsdóttir has publicly advised the country’s Prime Minister to resign today, in the wake of last night’s ‘Panama Papers’ revelations.

      Opposition MPs met this morning and unanimously agreed upon a motion of no confidence against the government. The text, which will be distributed today, demands the dissolution of the current parliament and early general elections.

    • Iceland’s Prime Minister Steps Down Amid Panama Papers Scandal

      The revelation of vast wealth hidden by politicians and powerful figures across the globe set off criminal investigations on at least two continents on Tuesday, forced leaders from Europe to Asia to beat back calls for their removal and claimed its first political casualty — pressuring the prime minister of Iceland to step down.

      Public outrage over millions of documents leaked from a boutique Panamanian law firm — now known as the Panama Papers — wrenched attention away from wars and humanitarian crises, as harsh new light was shed on the elaborate ways wealthy people hide money in secretive shell companies and offshore tax shelters.

      [...]

      In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron faced calls for a government inquiry and accusations of bald hypocrisy by championing financial transparency — when the leaks showed that his family held undisclosed wealth in tax havens offshore.

    • Panama papers: David Cameron had little interest in privacy before tax leaks, Edward Snowden points out

      Edward Snowden has drawn attention to David Cameron’s apparently new interest in privacy, in the wake of questions about his family’s tax affairs.

      The Prime Minister has looked to avoid questions about his tax situation, following mentions of his father Ian Cameron in the “Panama papers”. Mr Cameron has looked to argue that his tax affairs are not public and so shouldn’t be discussed.

    • David Cameron left dangerously exposed by Panama Papers fallout

      David Cameron was left dangerously exposed on Tuesday after repeatedly failing to provide a clear and full account about links to an offshore fund set up by his late father, as the storm over the Panama Papers gathered strength in both the UK and elsewhere around the world.

      The prime minister and his office have now offered three partial answers about the fund set up by his father Ian, which avoided ever paying tax in Britain. The key unanswered question is whether the prime minister’s family stands to gain in the future from his father’s company, Blairmore, an investment fund run from the Bahamas.

    • David Cameron LIED in his post-Panama Papers speech. And here’s the proof.

      The Daily Mail report that since moving into 10 Downing Street in May 2010, Cameron has been letting out his home in the luxury London district of Notting Hill, and in doing so has made in excess of £500,000 from rental payments.

      So what is the truth? Are we supposed to believe the claims of a man who today argued that he ‘does not gain from offshore funds’ – despite having received a public school education and a £300,000 bequest from his father who used Mossack Fonseca’s services to run an offshore fund which paid not a penny in UK tax? Is his education, and subsequent status not a ‘benefit’ of this money?

      Today’s claims from Cameron are at least disingenuous. His failure to be open and honest just adds to the secrecy surrounding the Panama Papers scandal.

    • Bernie Sanders Sort of Saw This Whole Panama Papers Thing Coming

      While I haven’t seen any proof that the free trade deal exacerbated the problems with Panama—the recent leaks cover 40 years of history, after all—Sanders was broadly on point. The U.S. could have forced Panama to significantly reform its secretive banking sector before rewarding it with a trade deal that was probably a tad more important to them than to us. Instead, it inked a relatively weak side deal on tax transparency, making it somewhat easier, theoretically, to uncover instances of evasion. But years later, Panama is still marketing its services as a well-hidden safety deposit box for the world’s rich. You don’t have to think the whole effort was a conspiracy on behalf of American billionaires—which Sanders sort of lightly implies here—to agree that, at the very least, this was a botched opportunity that demonstrated the U.S.’s lack of commitment to dealing with these issues. If you’re going to sign a trade pact with a tiny, economically marginal tax haven and don’t use it as an opportunity to clamp down on hard on its worst behavior, what, exactly, is the point?

    • Did Bernie Sanders Predict the Panama Papers When He Opposed Clinton-Backed U.S.-Panama Trade Deal?

      The Panama Papers leak, that reveals how the rich and powerful rely on a secretive law firm to hide their wealth in tax havens, has drawn attention to a 2011 speech by Senator Bernie Sanders against the Panama-United States Trade Promotion Agreement, which became law in 2012. He noted that Panama’s entire economic output at the time was so low that the pact seemed unlikely to benefit American workers. The real reason for the agreement, Sanders argued, is that “Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade taxes.” Sanders said the trade agreement “will make this bad situation much worse.” We get reaction from Michael Hudson, senior editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which published the Panama Papers, and Frederik Obermaier, investigative reporter at Germany’s leading newspaper, the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung. He is co-author of the book “Panama Papers: The Story of a Worldwide Revelation.”

    • Panama Papers: Why Aren’t There More American Names?

      A more convincing explanation is that the journalists who are researching the leaks are still pursuing American clients of Mossack Fonseca. In fact, we now know this to be the case. On Monday, a piece published by Fusion, one of the U.S. media organizations that has access to the leaked material, said, “So far, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has only been able to identify 211 people with U.S. addresses who own companies in the data (not all of whom we’ve been able to investigate yet). We don’t know if those 211 people are necessarily U.S. citizens. And that figure covers only data from recent years available on a Mossack Fonseca internal database—not all 11.5 million files from the leak.”

      [...]

      So much for individuals. What about U.S. banks, financial advisers, law firms, and other intermediaries? Data compiled by the I.C.I.J. consortium indicates that, of the roughly fourteen thousand intermediaries—banks, law firms, company-incorporation firms, and other middlemen—with which Mossack Fonseca worked over the years in order to set up companies, foundations, and trusts for its customers, six hundred and seventeen were based in the United States. That’s a lot.

      [...]

      There are several reasons why the United States might not have been a major source of clients for the Panamanian law firm, relatively speaking. Perhaps it deliberately avoided having a large presence in the United States, so as not to attract the attention of U.S. authorities. Or perhaps there was too much competition. An article published in The Economist in 2012 pointed out that the business of setting up shell companies in tax havens is competitive and includes a number of well-established firms, such as the Hong Kong-based Offshore Incorporations Ltd., the Isle of Man-based OCRA Worldwide, and Morgan & Morgan, of Panama. In other words, wealthy Americans have many options for structuring their offshore holdings.

    • Revealed: the tycoons and world leaders who built secret UK property empires

      The president of the United Arab Emirates has secretly built one of the single biggest offshore property empires in Britain, the Panama Papers reveal.

      Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan owns dozens of central London properties worth more than £1.2bn through offshore companies supplied by Mossack Fonseca.

      His property portfolio runs from the BHS building on Oxford Street to the designer outlets of Bruton Street and Mayfair’s Berkeley Square estate, where his tenants include Hermès, Stella McCartney and Annabel’s nightclub.

      World leaders, business people and celebrities are among those whose anonymous ownership of London property has been exposed by the massive leak of the Panama law firm’s data on offshore companies.

      The prime minister of Pakistan, Iraq’s former interim prime minister and the president of the Nigerian senate are among those whose links to London property are detailed by the files.

    • A Chink of Aussie Light

      The Australian Broadcasting Corporation shamed the BBC by putting out a Four Corners documentary on the Panama leak that had real balls.

      In stark contrast to the BBC, the Australians named and shamed Australia’s biggest company and Australia’s biggest foreign investor. BBC Panorama by contrast found a guy who sold one house in Islington. The Australians also, unlike the BBC who deliberately and knowing hid it, pointed out that the corruption centred on the British Virgin Islands, and even went there. All in all an excellent job.

      Four Corners of course has a history of this. Their absolutely excellent documentary Sex, Lies and Julian Assange told vital truths about the concoction of the allegations against Julian Assange, which to this day have been hidden by the BBC and entire British corporate media. I implore anybody who has not yet seen it, to watch it now.

      In this dreadful situation where the corporate media have monopoly access to the Mossack Fonseca database, there is going to be a little chink of light here and there, where old fashioned notions of journalistic integrity still cling to life in isolated pockets. But those chinks of light only serve to highlight the abject servitude of outlets like the BBC and Guardian to the official neo-con narrative.

    • Disgraceful BBC Panorama Propaganda Hides Grim Truth About Britain

      In a BBC Panorama documentary entitled Tax Havens of the Rich and Powerful Exposed, they actually did precisely the opposite. The BBC related at length the stories of the money laundering companies of the Icelandic PM and Putin’s alleged cellist. The impression was definitely given and reinforced that these companies were in Panama.

      Richard Bilton deliberately suppressed the information that all the companies involved were in fact not Panamanian but in the corrupt British colony of the British Virgin Islands. At no stage did Bilton even mention the British Virgin Islands.

      Company documents were flashed momentarily on screen, in some cases for a split second, and against deliberately unclear backgrounds. There is no chance that 99.9% of viewers would notice they referred to British Virgin Islands companies. But instantly reading a glimpsed document is an essential skill for a career diplomat, and of course I happen to know immediately what BVI or Tortola mean on a document. So I have been back and got screenshots of those brief flashes.

      [...]

      In deliberately obscuring the key role of the British money-laundering base of British Virgin Islands in these transactions, the BBC have demonstrated precisely why the entire database has to be released to the scrutiny of the people, rather than being filtered by the dubious honesty of state and corporate journalists. The BBC targeting of two very low level British minions at the end of their programme does not alter this.

    • Are Trade Deals Like NAFTA and TPP Good, or Bad, for America?

      But if one is asking whether or not international trade agreements are good, or bad, for America, one needs to think bigger. On a whole-of-society level, economics is about people. We all want American companies to make money. It’s also great that Walmart is full of low-cost consumer electronics from Asia, or Carrier air conditioners fresh from Mexico, but you need money — a job — to buy them.

    • Highlights of Luntz Poll of American CEOs Shows Broad Support for Progressive Policies

      CMD was provided with a copy of the poll which was shared with business lobbyists, who were instructed on how to manipulate the public debate over those policies rather than implement the views of the business executives who were polled. Below are some of the surprising highlights of the full poll, which you can access here. New materials about this are available here.

    • From tourist dream to existential threat, it’s time to bid farewell to Club Med

      The Club Med hotel chain, which still owns properties on both sides of the Mediterranean is now, tellingly, a Chinese company, although led by the son of France’s former president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing: a committed EU supporter who served in a number of positions in Brussels after being ousted from the presidency in 1981.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Chambers of Commerce Exposed by CMD

      Breaking–New materials provided to the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch reveal that a top GOP polling firm instructed state Chamber of Commerce lobbyists how to try to defeat popular measures like increasing the minimum wage, despite polling data from business leaders that shows overwhelming support for such progressive workplace policies.

      California just passed a statewide measure to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next few years, as other cities have also embraced this and other key workplace reform measures, such as paid sick days.

    • Exposed: Most CEOs Support Paid Sick Leave, Increased Minimum Wage, and More But Chamber Lobbyists Told How to “Combat” These Measures

      Madison, WI–Video footage of a closed-door webinar provided to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reveals top GOP pollsters instructing Chamber of Commerce lobbyists to ignore internal survey data showing that Chamber members across the country overwhelmingly support progressive workplace policies including raising the minimum wage, providing paid sick days, and increasing paid family leave. (These and other materials are available here.)

    • Donald Trump is the pinnacle of American stupidity: Why his campaign consummates decades of rising anti-intellectualism

      During Tuesday’s Republican town hall in Milwaukee, it was not a candidate, but the host, Anderson Cooper, who had the best line of the night, when he told Donald Trump — in the politest way possible — that he was acting like a fatuous little boy. “Sir, with all due respect, that’s the argument of a 5-year-old,” said the CNN anchor, after Trump defended his attack on Ted Cruz’s wife by saying that he “didn’t start it,” in just the same manner a child who is unable to admit any wrongdoing (or someone with narcissistic personality disorder) might.

    • Panama Papers’ Publishers Don’t Need to Sell Out WikiLeaks

      When it’s all said and done, there’s no doubt that the hundreds of stories exposing the intricate web of tax avoidance and laundering, also known as the Panama Papers, will be an important blockbuster feat of journalism. The sheer size of the leak (11.5 million documents) and scope of the project led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (which brought together over 100 news outlets) is as staggering as it is impressive. The implications—the prime minister of Iceland has resigned, and dozens of investigations are allegedly underway around the world—will be felt for years.

      Why then, in this moment of well-earned glory, would the primary party responsible for this act of journalism go out of its way to take a swipe at WikiLeaks, and, by extension, a prisoner of conscience?

    • Why the Establishment Hates Trump

      On the face of it, Trump is Reagan on steroids. His towering size, his nativist US supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show confidence make him ideal for the role of bullying and big lies from the oval office. He is America come to meet itself in larger-than-life image to rejuvenate it as its pride slips away in third-world conditions and a multi-polar world.

    • Wisconsin Berns: ‘We’re Going to Shock Them All and Win This Nomination’

      As of this writing, with approximately 88% of precincts reporting, CNN reported Sanders winning with 56.2 percent of the vote compared to rival Hillary Clinton’s 43.5 percent – a double-digit margin.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Local Police Departments To Get The FBI’s iPhone-Cracking Tool, Agency Says

      The technology used to crack the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters is coming to a local police department near you. The FBI told local law enforcement agencies that it would teach them to unlock iPhones and other mobile devices, according to an advisory letter issued late last week in response to inquiries about the new technique.

      According to Buzzfeed, which first reported the news, the FBI did not expressly state the unnamed third-party used to unlock the iPhone would be available to local law enforcement agencies, but would “consider any tool that might be helpful to our partners,” FBI assistant director Kerry Sleeper wrote in the advisory letter.

    • Former NSA chief warns of cyber threats to business
    • Photos Show How NSA Implants Trojan In Routers For Hidden Access And Spying

      In the picture, you can clearly see NSA employees opening the shipping box for a Cisco router and installing beacon firmware with a “load station” designed specifically for the task.

    • Lawmakers mull full command status for Cyber Command
    • Senators consider splitting NSA/CyberCom director position
    • NSA head: China still spying on US companies [Ed: Hypocrite in chief]
    • NSA director: China still hacking U.S., but motive unclear

      Hackers in China haven’t retired their assaults on American targets, but U.S. intelligence officials aren’t certain if Beijing has fully breached the terms of a cyber pact reached last year between President Obama and his Chinese counterpart, NSA Director Navy Admiral Mike Rogers testified on Tuesday.

    • Court considers when police need warrants to track suspects through cellphones

      A federal appeals court on Wednesday considered how easily investigators should be able to track criminal suspects through their cellphones, becoming the latest front in the debate over how to balance public-safety interests with digital privacy.

      The issue before a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Maryland and Virginia, was whether law enforcement officials need search warrants to pull cellphone records to trace the long-term movements of suspects.

      The case, argued in Richmond, arose after investigators in Maryland obtained seven months of phone records to map the movements of two men later convicted in armed robberies around Baltimore.

    • For The Fifth Time Now, German Court Says Adblocking Is Legal

      The judge clearly recognized the issues, noting that there’s no contract between users and a site that requires them to view ads, no matter how much publishers may want to pretend that what they refer to as a “social contract” is somehow a legal contract. The court also, rightly, noted that the law is not designed to pump up a business model that is failing, and that it’s up to the publishers themselves to create better business models.

      Even though we’re a publisher who relies on ads for some of our revenue, we’ve never been shy about recognizing that ad blockers are an essential form of freedom for users, to control what goes into their computers, and an important security tool as well. Would our own lives be easier if ad blockers didn’t exist? Perhaps. But, as always, the onus needs to be on us to build business models that work, and not rely on forcing people into doing things they’re not comfortable doing.

      The sooner more publications realize this, the sooner we can get past the broken system we have of online advertising today.

    • WhatsApp Finishes Rolling Out End-To-End Encryption; Now Covers Group Messages, Media

      More good news on the secure communications front: WhatsApp has finally implemented full end-to-end encryption — for everyone. Late in 2014, WhatsApp began rolling out its end-to-end encryption, but it was limited to one-to-one communications and did not cover messages containing media. Now, it’s everything, including group messages.

    • Another Federal Judge Says No Expectation Of Privacy In Cell Site Location Info Because Everyone Knows Phones Generate This Data

      In the Seventh Circuit — where there’s currently no Appeals Court precedent on cell site location info (CSLI) — federal judge Pamela Pepper has decided only about half of what other courts have said about this info’s expectation of privacy applies. That would be the half that finds the Third Party Doctrine covers cell phones’ constant connections to cell towers. (via FourthAmendment.com)

    • AT&T Tries To Claim That Charging Users More For Privacy Is A ‘Discount’

      Last year, AT&T launched the latest sexy trend in broadband — charging users significantly more money if they want to opt out of their ISP’s snoopvertising. It basically works like this: users ordering AT&T’s U-Verse broadband service can get the service for, say, $70 a month. But if you want to opt out of AT&T’s Internet Preferences snoopvertising program (which uses deep packet inspection to study your movement around the Internet down to the second) you’ll pay at least $30 more, per month. With its decision, AT&T effectively made user privacy a premium service.

      As the FCC has started pushing for new privacy rules (precisely because of ISP moves like this), AT&T’s luxury-privacy option has been under heightened scrutiny.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Nothing To Hide (And Nowhere To Hide It) But Everything To Fear: The Police Vs. The Unarmed And Naked

      “Naked” is synonymous with “vulnerable.” And yet, plenty of naked people continue to be shot and killed by police officers, despite having nowhere to hide weapons and nothing standing between them and the bullets headed their way.

      Of course, naked people are far more prone to find themselves in confrontations with police. In almost every case, substance use/abuse or mental illness will be the reason for the person’s nudity. Despite being handicapped by both limited mental faculties and lack of any protection, naked people are often considered inherently “threatening,” and thus, worthy recipients of any level of force that allows responding officers to feel “safe” again.

      17-year-old David Joseph was shot to death by Austin police officer Geoffrey Freeman, who was responding to reports of a naked man acting erratically. Freeman said he feared for his life, even though Joseph had no clothing and no weapons.

      Of course, the first response from the police union was to assume Joseph was under the influence of a “drug like PCP.” PCP is the go-to guess for officers trying to explain how they felt overwhelmed by a person smaller than them… or carrying no weapons… or wearing no clothes. It supposedly gives even unarmed, naked people superhuman strength and increased resistance to less-lethal force. How many people officers feel are using PCP is miles away from how many people are actually using PCP.

    • How Constitutional Change Happens: Q&A With David Cole

      The following is a Q&A with David Cole, civil liberties litigator, law professor, recipient of the ACLU’s inaugural Norman Dorsen Presidential Prize, and author of the just-published book, “Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law” (Basic Books). The book tracks three campaigns — one relating to marriage equality, another relating to gun rights, and another relating to human rights in the context of the “war on terror” — to examine, as the title suggests, how constitutional law gets made.

    • Trial set for woman charged with felony in Facebook posts

      Trial dates have been set for a 35-year-old Bay City woman accused of posting vulgar status updates on Facebook and committing a felony in the process.

      Jury selection in the trial of Rene K. Kolka is to begin the morning of Tuesday, May 10, before Bay County Circuit Judge Joseph K. Sheeran. In the event proceedings are delayed, the trial is instead slated to commence the morning of Tuesday, June 14.

    • School defends exempting Muslim students from handshake

      A school district in canton Basel Country stands behind its decision to allow some Muslim students to not participate in a ritual of shaking their female teacher’s hand before and after class, despite the controversy the move has unleashed across Switzerland.

    • Islamic extremist issue death threats against Scotland’s top human rights lawyer

      SCOTLAND’s leading human rights lawyer has received death threats from Islamic extremists over his calls for unity within the country’s Muslim community.

      Though unable to give details due to an ongoing police investigation, Aamer Anwar said the threats came from individuals who have taken issue with his call for Muslims of all backgrounds and denominations to stand up together against Islamic extremism.

    • Watch: Ex-Death Row Prisoner Moreese Bickham on WBAI in 1996 Days After Being Freed

      Former death row prisoner Moreese Bickham has died at the age of 98. In 1958, Bickham, an African American, was sentenced to death for shooting and killing two police officers in Mandeville, Louisiana, even though Bickham said the officers were Klansmen who had come to kill him and shot him on the front porch of his own home. Multiple other people in the community also said the officers worked with the Ku Klux Klan, which was a common practice in small Southern towns. Bickham served 37 years at Angola State Penitentiary, in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.

    • Prisoners in Multiple States Call for Strikes to Protest Forced Labor

      PRISON INMATES around the country have called for a series of strikes against forced labor, demanding reforms of parole systems and prison policies, as well as more humane living conditions, a reduced use of solitary confinement, and better health care.

      Inmates at up to five Texas prisons pledged to refuse to leave their cells today. The strike’s organizers remain anonymous but have circulated fliers listing a series of grievances and demands, and a letter articulating the reasons for the strike. The Texas strikers’ demands range from the specific, such as a “good-time” credit toward sentence reduction and an end to $100 medical co-pays, to the systemic, namely a drastic downsizing of the state’s incarcerated population.

      “Texas’s prisoners are the slaves of today, and that slavery affects our society economically, morally and politically,” reads the five-page letter announcing the strike. “Beginning on April 4, 2016, all inmates around Texas will stop all labor in order to get the attention from politicians and Texas’s community alike.”

  • DRM

    • You Don’t Actually Own What You Buy Volume 2,203: Google Bricking Revolv Smart Home Hardware

      Google isn’t making any friends on the news that the company is effectively bricking working smart home hardware for a large number of users. About seventeen months ago Google acquired Revolv, rolling the smart-home vendor’s products in with its also-acquired Nest product line. Revolv hardware effectively lets users control any number of smart-home technologies around the home, ranging from home thermostats and garage door openers, to outdoor lights and security and motion detection systems. But according to an updated Revolv FAQ, all of these systems will no longer work as of May 15, 2016.

    • What Nest’s product shutdown says about the Internet of Things

      Nest is dropping support for one of its products on May 15. More than just dropping support, the product will cease to work entirely.

    • Nest Reminds Customers That Ownership Isn’t What It Used to Be

      Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers’ home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices—customers who reasonably expected that the promised “lifetime” of updates would enable the hardware they paid for to actually work, only to discover the manufacturer can turn their device into a useless brick when it so chooses.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Golden age for foreign trade name protection

        Xiaopeng Zhao argues that recent court decisions in China provide a boost for overseas companies whose names have been registered by counterfeiters

      • Baseball Equipment Makers In Trademark Spat Over The Word ‘Diamond’

        Everyone should know by now that language is ever evolving. New, cultural, or colloquial words get added to the dictionary. In addition, existing words attain new definitions, typically contextual definitions. Like the word “diamond”, for instance, which has a different definition when spoken in the context of baseball. In baseball lingo, the diamond is in the filed, or infield, and the term is as common as “bat”, or “ball”, or “single.” And, yet, two makers of baseball equipment are now in a trademark legal spat over the word “diamond.”

    • Copyrights

      • Rightscorp Wants To Lock Your Web Browsers If You’re Downloading Illegal Torrents

        Sending legal notices to users for downloading illegal torrents is nothing new. But, taking things to a whole new level, Rightscorp, a struggling anti-piracy group, is working on a new method to lock down the web browsers of the copyright infringers.

      • Head Of British Rights Group: Piracy Is Google’s Fault Even If It’s Not Actually Google’s Fault

        As the DMCA heads towards possible reform, critics on both sides have been airing their complaints with the current system. For far too many people, though, the problem is apparently Google, rather than the law or the DMCA process itself. Rights holder groups have been especially vocal about Google’s supposed participation in copyright infringement, despite the fact it processes tens of millions of DMCA takedown notices every day.

        This is a lot of work and it’s being done by Google to handle DMCA complaints about content it’s not even hosting. To make rights holders happy (except that many of them are not), Google delists millions of URLs every day. It also vets each DMCA notice to make sure the URLs should actually be delisted. The rise of bot-generated DMCA takedown notices has increased the workload as well as the likelihood of error. It’s an ugly process all around and the law itself is in need of some serious repairs.

      • EA DMCAs Trump/Mass Effect Mashup Video Claiming Trump Re-Tweeting It Made Its Use ‘Political’

        The political season lingers upon us, for all the world appearing to be less democracy in action and more likely some kind of test initiated by aliens to see exactly how much mind-numbing stupidity a populace can handle. In any case, for some reason presidential politics brings out the touchiest behavior amongst us. For instance, take a quick look at this brilliantly, if unintentionally, hilarious “trailer” a Donald Trump Supporter put together.

04.05.16

Links 5/4/2016: Linux Civil Infrastructure Project, SUSE’s New CTO

Posted in News Roundup at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Maybe it’s time to trust Microsoft. Maybe not.

    Is this truly a changed Microsoft? Personally, I don’t believe it is. The day they stop this silly 235 patent BS, then we might talk about it. But you know as well as I do, if they pull the covers back on their lie-of-the-century, then they may stand to lose billions in paying back those companies they extorted in the past.

    “Oh those patents. Yeah, that was silly wasn’t it. Well, we’re sorry your company lost share holder value due to having to pay us all that money. But let’s just let bygones be bygones…whaddaya say?

    Stick it all up in your bygones Microsoft. You’re a liar and a thief and the only reason most of your higher execs aren’t in prison is that U.S. law and your good ol’ boy network protected you. You aren’t fooling anyone. You don’t love Linux any more than I love liver and onions. You have merely realized that the only way you are going to survive into the next decade is to integrate Linux into your strategies…and integrate it deeply.

    Let’s face it. You need us. More than we need you.

  • Server

    • Five key legal considerations when negotiating cloud contracts

      Watch out for some cloud providers’ complex, multi-document contract structures that may be poorly updated and oddly worded. In particular, don’t assume that you know what’s in a provision based on its heading. For example, in some terms, ‘force majeure’ seems to be elastic-sided enough to capture “changes in the taxation basis of services delivered via the Internet” as a force majeure event!

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma Wayland Image Update

        It’s your fortnightly update to the Plasma Wayland image. Rather pleasingly window decorations are the right colour and I can resize windows.

      • QtCon Call for Papers

        QtCon 2016 Call for Papers is open. The event will assemble KDE Akademy, VideoLAN Developer Days, Qt Contributors’ Summit, FSFE Summit and KDAB Qt training day. We invite contributors to these projects to present their work and insight at QtCon 2016. The conference will take place from 1st to 8th September in Berlin, Germany. The talks will be from 2nd to 4th with KDE continuing with BoFs till the 8th

  • Distributions

    • Five Linux Distros that Break the Mold

      One of the complaints we hear sometimes about the plethora of GNU/Linux distributions is that they’re all “cookie cutters.” One is just like the other, we’re told, so why have so many versions of the same thing? For starters, except for a couple of rare instances, no two Linux distros are exactly alike, not even when they start with the same base. The most obvious example here would be Ubuntu, which although based on Debian, offers the user an experience completely different from the parent distro. Likewise, Linux Mint is built with Ubuntu under the hood, but as many Mint users will attest, the distro is hardly just a rebranded *buntu.

    • Reviews

      • Matriux Linux Operating System For Hackers — An Alternative To Kali Linux

        Matriux is an open source Linux-based operating system that’s designed in accordance with the needs of security researchers and professionals. The OS comes with more than 300 hacking tools that include the likes of Wireshark, Aircrack-ng, Nmap, Vidalia, TrueCrypt and more. Matriux hacking OS features a traditional desktop environment that’s powered by GNOME Classic

    • New Releases

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 Lands with Linux Kernel 4.4.4 LTS, Software Updates

        Hot on the heels of Manjaro Linux JWM 16.04 Community Edition, the Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 Community Edition operating system has been released earlier, April 4, 2016, and it is now available to download.

        According to the release notes, Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 Community Edition is now powered by Linux kernel 4.4.4 LTS, includes a 64-bit version of the Chromium web browser, and the 32-bit flavor of Mozilla Firefox, a new screen capture tool that can be activated with the Print Screen button.

        As expected, the stable branch of the Manjaro Linux operating system has been used to generate the Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 release, which comes with the multilib repositories enabled by default for 64-bit systems, as well as the latest version of the advanced Calamares graphical installer.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • SUSE Linux Gets a New CTO

        SUSE named a new CTO today, with Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo taking on the the role of Chief Technology Officer, reporting to CEO Nils Brauckmann.

        The last time I personally ever spoke to a SUSE CTO was way back in 2009, when Markus SUSERex (now CEO of OwnCloud) held the job, and SUSE was still part of Novell.

        Giacomo joins SUSE from Swisscom Hospitality Services, where he was CTO and vice president of innovation. Giacomo has as a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Geneva, where he was a senior researcher

      • SUSE Expands Executive Leadership, Naming New Chief Technology Officer
      • Suse expands distributor network in Mideast
      • Turris Omnia and openSUSE

        About two weeks ago I was on the annual openSUSE Board face to face meeting. It was great and you can read reports of what was going on in there on openSUSE project mailing list. In this post I would like to focus on my other agenda I had while coming to Nuremberg. Nuremberg is among other things SUSE HQ and therefore there is a high concentration of skilled engineers and I wanted to take an advantage of that…

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” Live DVD ISOs Are Now Available to Download

        We reported the other day on the immediate availability for download of the installation-only ISO images of the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” operating system.

        It took one more day for the Debian Project team to generate all the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 Live flavors, and as promised, we’re informing you today about their availability for download, just in case you want to showcase them to your friends or deploy them on new computers.

      • There’s more than one way to exploit the commons

        Debian ships an operating system that prides itself on stability. The Debian definition of stability is a very specific one – rather than referring to how often the software crashes or misbehaves, it refers to how often the software changes behaviour. Debian is very reluctant to upgrade software that is part of a stable release, to the extent that developers will attempt to backport individual security fixes to the version they shipped rather than upgrading to a release that contains all those security fixes but also adds a new feature. The argument here is that the new release may also introduce new bugs, and Debian’s users desire stability (in the “things don’t change” sense) more than new features. Backporting security fixes keeps them safe without compromising the reason they’re running Debian in the first place.

      • Derivatives

        • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5

          Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 is desktop-friendly distribution based on Debian. Built on Debian’s Stable branch, Parsix comes with a useful selection of applications and some nice customizations, but so do many of the other Debian-based and Ubuntu-based distributions. So what exactly is Parsix’s niche? What does it do better than its competition? I downloaded the 1.3GB 64-bit ISO and gave Parsix 8.5 a trial run in order to try to find out.

          Booting from the Parsix ISO provides six options: “Boot or Install Parsix” with text mode, failsafe video, and failsafe alternative boot/install options; “Test CD for Defects”; and “Boot from First Hard Disk.” After using the “Test CD for Defects” option to check the ISO for errors, I selected the standard “Boot or Install Parsix” option, which resulted in a fairly quick load time. The GNOME desktop was ready to use and the installer was readily available on the desktop.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Another Ubuntu Linux Tablet? Yes, But This Time, It’s not ARM-Based

            Want an x86 tablet that can run GNU/Linux? If a new crowd-funding campaign succeeds, it could be yours.

            MJ Technology has launched an Indiegogo fundraising campaign to develop what it says will be the “world’s [sic] first true made for Linux/Ubuntu x86/x64 tablet.” In non-geek terms, that means a tablet that comes with a 64-bit x86 processor — the same type used in most desktop and laptop computers — rather than an ARM chip, the architecture common in tablets and other mobile devices.

          • Ubuntu 15.10: Changing the Linux game

            I’m not new to Linux operating systems. I have tried and reviewed earlier versions of Ubuntu as well as experimented with other Linux distributions but I have to admit that none of my earlier reviews have been positive. There were always inherent problems, graphical or systematic, that I have had to spend time trying to fix, something that I did not have time for. I expected Ubuntu to work right out of the box, much like how I deal with a fresh install of Windows where I set it up and install the applications that I want. But this was never the case with Ubuntu; the operating system always pushed me to give it more time and manually fix operating system problems.

            Linux is often used by power-users who love the operating system for its stability and ease of use, but here I will be talking about how user-friendly the system is for normal users who don’t code or use terminal commands.

          • Ubuntu Budgie Could Be the New Flavor of Ubuntu Linux, as Part of Ubuntu 16.10

            Last month we told you about a new GNU/Linux distribution called Budgie-Remix, whose ultimate goal is to become an official Ubuntu Linux flavor, possibly under the name of Ubuntu Budgie.

            Today, Budgie-Remix developer David Mohammed informs Softpedia about the progress made with the project, which Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said that it would definitely support if there were a community around the packaging, as well as the availability of the second Beta build for the upcoming 16.04 release.

          • Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 Update Brings VPN Support, New Out-of-the-Box Experience

            We told you yesterday that the Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices has officially received a release date of April 6, 2016, from Canonical.

            And we promised to inform you about the new features that landed in the anticipated OTA-10 software for Ubuntu-powered devices. Therefore, it looks like Ubuntu Phone/Tablet owners will finally get VPN support, but without the ability to connect to PPTP VPN servers, Japanese keyboard support, and per-application download queues.

          • Ubuntu Touch’s Web Browser Lets Users Copy/Paste Selected Web Content in OTA-10

            We reported earlier that Canonical finally decided on a release date for the next major software update of its Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, OTA-10, due for release on April 6, 2016.

            Today, April 4, 2016, Ubuntu developer Olivier Tilloy reports on the major new features that have been implemented in the Web Browser app of the Ubuntu mobile OS, which will be pushed to Ubuntu Phone users on April 6 as part of the OTA-10 software update.

          • Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 Launches April 6 for All Ubuntu Phones and the Ubuntu Tablet

            Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical has just informed the community about the release date of the forthcoming OTA-10 software update for the Ubuntu mobile operating system.

            Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 has been in development for quite some time now, and we covered its development cycle during the past month, during which we told you about some of the new features and improvements that the update would bring to all supported Ubuntu Phone devices, as well as the brand new Ubuntu Tablet.

          • Five hundred days using Ubuntu Phone

            Today is my five hundredth day of using the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition exclusively as my mobile phone. This is a nice piece of hardware (good power, good camera and simple but elegant design).

            Here’s what I’ve learnt.

            I have written a bunch of phone apps you can install and blogged it. Writing for the Ubuntu phone is by far the easiest platform I’ve developed for. Click packaging works really well and the speed at which you can release to the Ubuntu store and get the update on your phone is incredible. QML allows you to build beautiful apps quickly however can be a challenge when apps get more complicated. Qt / C++ is functional, but feels lacking compared to more modern languages. If I could get Swift and an improved QML working together I’d be very happy. I initially used the Ubuntu SDK for building and deplying the apps but have now switched to doing everything on the command line (I’ve never found an IDE that doesn’t feel over-engineered).

          • Ubuntu on Windows?

            Then there are tools like Cygwin that create a Linux-like environment for the Windows command line. But although the environment is familiar, it falls short of supporting the full array of commands and features that would work on a normal Linux environment.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • REVIEW: Linux Mint 17.3 delivers better interface plus long-term support

              The latest version of Linux Mint, dubbed “Rosa,” offers long-term support and in our tests we found that it delivers an improved user experience no matter which interface is selected.

              Linux Mint is a desktop operating system for non-tablet, Intel/AMD-powered systems, in 32- or 64-bit processor families, based on Ubuntu core components, but without Ubuntu’s Unity UI.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

04.04.16

Links 4/4/2016: Linux 4.6 RC2, Wine-Staging Release 1.9.7

Posted in News Roundup at 6:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 1btn: A Powerful, Open Source, And Hackable Button For The Internet
  • 11 Excellent Open Source Solutions for Home Automation

    Home Automation software is software that lets you control and monitor common home and office appliances using a computer. Home automation used to be confined to turning on and off lights and appliances. But the possibilities are much wider letting users build a wireless network, automate TV and hi-fi, monitor pets when you are away, set up an answering system, create a weather station – integrating an abundance of different home automation technologies into one.

    Many home automation systems use proprietary networking protocols. The protocols used will be specific to the company that developed the system. The software company may favor such an approach as it ties the customer to their products only. However, this can only be detriment to the user of the home automation system. It is therefore important to evaluate a home automation system to ensure that it is built on open protocols. All of these solutions are released under an open source license.

    Do not think home automation is just for geeks. It is now mainstream and a burgeoning industry. Become an home automation expert and try out these finest open source software for home automation. There are some real gems here. Many users flock to Domoticz and openHAB, but one of the others listed here may be a better fit for your requirements.

  • eBay Joins FIDO, Contributes Open-Source Authentication Server

    The FIDO Alliance, which is working to deliver stronger forms of authentication for online access, expands such efforts with eBay’s help.
    The FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance is gaining momentum, with eBay joining the effort and contributing a new open-source Universal Authentication Framework compliant server.

    FIDO is a multistakeholder initiative whose aim is to enable stronger forms of authentication for online access. The big milestone event for FIDO occurred in December 2014 when the group announced the Universal Second Factor (U2F) and UAF 1.0 specifications.

  • Education

    • Studying the relationship between remixing & learning

      With more than 10 million users, the Scratch online community is the largest online community where kids learn to program. Since it was created, a central goal of the community has been to promote “remixing” — the reworking and recombination of existing creative artifacts. As the video above shows, remixing programming projects in the current web-based version of Scratch is as easy is as clicking on the “see inside” button in a project web-page, and then clicking on the “remix” button in the web-based code editor. Today, close to 30% of projects on Scratch are remixes.

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

    • The French Revolution Is In Doubt In 2016

      The basic concepts of FLOSS are now in the public eye. The public has been using FLOSS browsers and operating systems for a decade or longer and they know it. Will they be fooled? Will they be afraid? I don’t think so. Further, any politician who thinks this is a non-issue is about to receive an education.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • A Space Archaeologist May Have Found a Second Viking Settlement In Canada [iophk: free Vinland from the yoke of Canadian oppression]

      A thousand years before East Coast hosers went for the first rip in history, vikings may have walked the same land in Newfoundland.

      This discovery comes courtesy of “space archaeologist” Sarah Parcak, who used satellite imagery taken from space to pick out possible man-made shapes in Newfoundland, south of L’Anse aux Meadows. Parcak’s team, which includes Canadians, did some digging and found evidence of iron-working, which suggests that vikings might have made it all the way to the land of the donair.

      It’s not a sure thing, but if it’s true, then the Newfoundland site will be the second confirmed viking settlement in Canada, and in all of North America.

    • [Older] The man who studies the spread of ignorance

      In 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces”.

      In one of the paper’s most revealing sections, it looks at how to market cigarettes to the mass public: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

  • Security

    • My first DSA
    • Linux Ransomware and why everyone could be affected [Ed: Bitdefender ad as ‘article’]
    • Kaiten targets Linux routers, gateways, access points and now IoT

      Change default passwords on network equipment even if it is not reachable from the Internet.

    • Security is really about Risk vs Reward

      Every now and then the conversation erupts about what is security really? There’s the old saying that the only secure computer is one that’s off (or fill in your favorite quote here, there are hundreds). But the thing is, security isn’t the binary concept: you can be secure, or insecure. That’s not how anything works. Everything is a sliding scale, you are never secure, you are never insecure. You’re somewhere in the middle. Rather than bumble around about your risk though, you need to understand what’s going on and plan for the risk.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Greenpeace reveals Indonesia’s forests at risk as multiple companies claim rights to same land​

      Compiled over almost a decade by Greenpeace using data from provincial governments, resource companies and others, the interactive maps highlight the vast scale of the concession overlap. Across more than 7m hectares – an area equivalent to the Republic of Ireland – licences for the same concessions have been allocated to as many as four palm, pulpwood, logging or coal mining companies at a time.

      With no central land registry in Indonesia, campaigners say the result is a mess of competing claims. Companies may end up thinking they have the right to clear land that another company or government body has pledged to protect from deforestation.

      The federal ministry of environment and forestry grants the rights to develop land for pulpwood and selective logging, whereas coal mining and palm oil concessions are granted by local and provincial officials.

    • Lost in Nicaragua, a Chinese Tycoon’s Canal Project

      There are also concerns about the seismic activity in the area, or the many volcanos. Some analysts point to China’s poor record on environmental matters and Mr. Wang’s inexperience in building anything, let alone a $50 billion (some say $80 billion) canal carving through miles of protected areas that are home to many endangered species, including the jaguar, and legally recognized indigenous lands. The little-known Mr. Wang made his fortune in telecommunications, not in construction.

    • Future for Oil As World Shifts to Combat Climate Change

      Carbon Tracker Initiative advisor Paul Spedding discusses why this oil price drop is different with Alix Steel on “Bloomberg Markets.”

  • Finance

    • Panama Papers: Ex-MPs, Lords And David Cameron’s Father ‘Named In Offshore Finance Leak’

      Former Conservative MPs, peers and David Cameron’s late father are among scores of people and politicians whose financial affairs have been exposed by a massive leak of data about offshore investments.

      The leak of more than 11 million documents from the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, casts an unprecedented light on the way the rich and powerful are able to use tax havens to shield their wealth.

      Ian Cameron, the prime minister’s father who died in 2010, is reportedly named as a client of the firm. Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and “dozens” of donors to UK political parties who have been shown to have had offshore assets – although none have so far been named.

    • Iceland’s prime minister walks out of interview over tax haven question – video

      Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the prime minister of Iceland, walks out of an interview with Swedish television company SVT. Gunnlaugsson is asked about a company called Wintris, which he says has been fully declared to the Icelandic tax authority. Gunnlaugsson says he is not prepared to answer such questions and decides to discontinue the interview, saying: ‘What are you trying to make up here? This is totally inappropriate’

    • The Panama Papers: what you need to know

      It is a Panama-based law firm whose services include incorporating companies in offshore jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands. It administers offshore firms for a yearly fee. Other services include wealth management.

    • US companies holding $2.1 trillion offshore profits

      There’s enough cash sitting in offshore bank accounts to wipe out the federal deficit — if only it was subject to U.S. taxes.

      That’s because U.S. companies are saving some $620 billion by parking profits outside the country, according to the latest accounting from Citizens for Tax Justice and U.S. PIRG Education Fund.

      At least 358 large U.S. companies collectively maintain 7,622 separate overseas subsidiaries holding $2.1 trillion in profits, the group said in a report Tuesday. (The estimated tax bill comes from corporate regulatory filings.)

    • #PanamaPapers breaks the Internet with revelations of global corruption
    • Leak boosts Panama’s image as money-laundering hub

      A huge data leak from a law firm in Panama suggesting it hid billions of dollars in assets of global politicians, sports stars and entertainers threatened Sunday to dramatically boost the country’s reputation as an offshore haven for money laundering.

    • Iceland’s PM faces calls for snap election after offshore revelations

      Iceland’s prime minister is this week expected to face calls in parliament for a snap election after the Panama Papers revealed he is among several leading politicians around the world with links to secretive companies in offshore tax havens.

      The financial affairs of Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson and his wife have come under scrutiny because of details revealed in documents from a Panamanian law firm that helps clients protect their wealth in secretive offshore tax regimes. The files from Mossack Fonseca form the biggest ever data leak to journalists.

    • Brazil’s former top judge hid price he paid for Miami condo

      When Brazilian news outlets found out then-Supreme Court chief justice Joaquim Barbosa had bought a Brickell condo in 2012, they asked the well-respected jurist how much he paid.

      Barbosa refused to say.

      The problem? In Florida, real-estate sales are public.

      But not Barbosa’s.

      Miami-Dade County property records seemed to suggest the 61-year-old paid a big, fat zero for his one-bedroom condo at Icon Brickell, one of the trendy neighborhood’s best-known condo towers.

    • Enormous document leak exposes offshore accounts of world leaders

      ….40 years of records and information about more than 210,000 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions.

    • Panama Papers Q&A: How assets are hidden and taxes dodged

      The revelations in the millions of papers leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca uncovering a suspected money laundering ring run by close associates of Vladimir Putin may leave readers drowning in a sea of confusing terms and phrases.

      Although there are legitimate ways of using tax havens, most of what has been going on is about hiding the true owners of money, the origin of the money and avoiding paying tax on the money.

      If you are a wealthy business owner in Germany who has decided to evade tax, an international drugs dealer or the head of a brutal regime, the methods are all pretty similar.

      Mossack Fonseca says it has always complied with international protocols to ensure the companies it incorporates are not used for tax evasion, money-laundering, terrorist finance or other illicit purposes.

    • Massive leak reveals money rings of global leaders

      A massive, anonymous leak of financial documents from a Panamanian law firm has revealed an extensive worldwide network of offshore “shell” companies — including ones with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin — that allow the wealthy to hide their assets from taxes and, in some cases, to launder billions in cash, a German newspaper alleges.

      The documents, combed through in the past year by dozens of journalists worldwide, show links to 72 current or former heads of state, including dictators accused of looting their own countries.

    • Panama Papers: Jurgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca – the lawyers whose firm is at the centre of global controversy

      John le Carre’s 1996 novel, The Tailor of Panama, tells the story of Harry Pendel, a British tailor who serves the great and good but whose refusal to come clean about his past almost leads to his downfall. In Panama, he believes, discretion is the only way.

      For more than four decades, the law firm Mossack Fonseca – whose twisting saga may even have been beyond the imagination of le Carre – has adopted a similar strategy of discretion and survival.

      If the documents obtained and analysed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) are to be believed, the firm that has its headquarters not far from those of the fictional Harry Pendel, has had financial dealing with a total of 128 politicians and public officials around the world. The company has denied any wrongdoing.

    • Panama vows to cooperate if legal fallout from ‘Panama Papers’ leak

      Panama’s government vowed Sunday to “vigorously cooperate” with any legal probe that might be launched in the wake of the “Panama Papers” data leak.

      “The Panamanian government will vigorously cooperate with any request or assistance necessary in the event of any legal action occurring,” it said in a statement.

    • The Panama Papers: how the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore

      The hidden wealth of some of the world’s most prominent leaders, politicians and celebrities has been revealed by an unprecedented leak of millions of documents that show the myriad ways in which the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax regimes.

      The Guardian, working with global partners, will set out details from the first tranche of what are being called “the Panama Papers”. Journalists from more than 80 countries have been reviewing 11.5m files leaked from the database of Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm.

    • Who’s involved
    • Documents leaked from a Panamanian law firm reveal a global web of corruption

      German authorities had known about the connection between Mossack Fonseca and some criminal elements for at least two years. A whistleblower at the firm had sold information to the authorities, according to the story in the Suddeutsche Zeitung on the history of the Panama Papers’ leak.

    • About the Panama Papers

      Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world. These shell firms enable their owners to cover up their business dealings, no matter how shady.

      In the months that followed, the number of documents continued to grow far beyond the original leak. Ultimately, SZ acquired about 2.6 terabytes of data, making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with. The source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures.

    • A storm is coming

      At the time, the country’s three biggest banks folded within just three days, in part because their senior executives had illegally doctored the stock listings of their own banks. “Market manipulation”, as Hauksson curtly calls it.

    • Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak

      The Suddeutsche Zeitung, which received the leak, gives a detailed explanation of the methodology the corporate media used to search the files. The main search they have done is for names associated with breaking UN sanctions regimes. The Guardian reports this too and helpfully lists those countries as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Russia and Syria. The filtering of this Mossack Fonseca information by the corporate media follows a direct western governmental agenda. There is no mention at all of use of Mossack Fonseca by massive western corporations or western billionaires – the main customers. And the Guardian is quick to reassure that “much of the leaked material will remain private.”

      What do you expect? The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include

      Ford Foundation
      Carnegie Endowment
      Rockefeller Family Fund
      W K Kellogg Foundation
      Open Society Foundation (Soros)

      among many others. Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. The dirty secrets of western corporations will remain unpublished.

    • Oxfam reaction to Panama Papers tax leak

      “Tax avoidance is a local problem, as well as a global one – and the Australian Government must act now.

    • Mossack Fonseca: The Nazi, CIA And Nevada Connections… And Why It’s Now Rothschild’s Turn

      These include the Nazis, the CIA, Mexican drug lords, and of course, the U.S.

    • Massive Document Leak Details Offshore Accounts Connected to Putin and Other Leaders
    • Panama Papers: Vladimir Putin associates, Jackie Chan identified in unprecedented leak of offshore financial records
    • 5 things to know about the Panama Papers

      A massive data leak of files from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca went online Sunday, in a collaboration by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, exposing how the world’s ultra-rich manage their offshore accounts.

    • What you need to know about the #PanamaPapers investigation

      Eleven million leaked documents published on Sunday reveal how a secretive law firm based in Panama may have helped world leaders such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak move money.

      The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung acquired the Panama Papers, of the firm Mossack Fonseca, through an anonymous source and shared it with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which distributed them to more than 100 media organizations worldwide.

    • Transparency International calls for immediate action by world leaders to stop secret companies
    • Want to hide your cash? This PanamaPapers game tells you how

      The Panama papers ICIJ website has created a flash game giving players tips to create offshore accounts and evade taxes. Titled ‘StairWay to Tax Heaven,’ it essentially shows three characters which include a soccer player, a politician, and a business executive.

      “Welcome to the secret world of offshore. Your goal is to navigate this parallel universe and hide your cash away. Don’t worry! Lawyers, wealth managers, and bankers are there to help you.

      Pick a character and don’t get caught,” reads the page.

      Each character you select puts you in a hypothetical situation where you’re asked to pick up an option. Depending on what you click, you’ll be given a final option which will determine whether you made the right move or is it game over for you.

    • Failing to provide the resources HMRC needs to tackle tax abuse is in itself a form of corruption

      Let’s be clear that corruption takes many forms. Failing to provide the resources needed to tackle corruption is, in itself and in my opinion, a form of corruption. The turning of the blind eye that it both implies and even endorses helps these corrupt practices take place with, at most, limited risk. That has to be a corrupt practice.

    • Panama tax leak reaction
    • Panama Papers: Huge leak alleges elites hiding money

      Several major media outlets have published the results of an investigation into the financial dealings of the rich and powerful, based on a vast trove of documents handed over by an anonymous source.

      The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), a nonprofit group in the US, said the cache of 11.5 million records detailed the offshore holdings of a dozen current and former world leaders, as well as businessmen, criminals, celebrities and sports stars.

    • Jobs Report Blues

      In short, corporations maximized short-run profits by ruining their domestic consumer market along with the personal income and sales tax base for government. It is unclear that this extraordinary mistake can be unwound.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • How Israeli Propaganda Succeeds

      The United States is one gentile culture where the Zionist narrative dominates. Key to this is control of language, controlling thought. U.S. pollster Frank Luntz was commissioned to maintain this, producing a “dictionary” of language to use — a playbook for shading domination as defense.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Oculus Rift has some shady stuff in their terms & privacy policy

      Shocker, the Facebook owned Oculus Rift VR device has some pretty concerning stuff in its terms and conditions.

      Starting note: I’m really not surprised by any of this since Facebook own it, but it’s still not good.

    • We’ve streamlined the fight against Big Brother!

      You’ll now receive private StartPage search results on Ixquick.com. We’ve merged our two search engines so we can focus on fighting Big Brother, rather than maintaining two different brands.

      StartPage by Ixquick gives you actual Google search results with the full privacy guarantees of Ixquick. Google never sees you – and, of course, neither do we.

    • Who, What, Where, and Why: The FBI/NSA Mass Surveillance Collaboration

      Dragnet surveillance: Need to make a bust? Doesn’t matter for what. Just listen in!

      That pretty much sums up what could soon become the status quo for law enforcement in America.

      Executive action by the Obama administration is expected to authorize direct sharing of information collected by the NSA with the FBI. In other words, the FBI will be able to directly access unfiltered streams of NSA data. It will basically allow the NSA to spy for local cops.

    • Senator: let’s fix “third-party doctrine” that enabled NSA mass snooping

      This past week hundreds of lawyers, technologists, journalists, activists, and others from around the globe descended upon a university conference center to try to figure out the state of digital rights in 2016. The conference, appropriately dubbed “RightsCon,” featured many notable speakers, including Edward Snowden via video-conference, but relatively few from those inside government.

    • Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry’s Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

      A commissioner at the US Federal Trade Commission who is leaving the agency after six years of working on consumer privacy issues has some critical words for the ad industry.

      Speaking with Ad Age, departing FTC commissioner Julie Brill lamented the current state of consumer tracking and data collection on the web, linking the rampant rise of ad blockers with the ad industry’s foot-dragging and non-cooperation in the commission’s efforts to create privacy systems based on user consent.

      “We’ve seen an incredible rise in consumers taking matters into their own hands, which is precisely what I said would happen back then,” said Brill, who has tackled a host of consumer privacy issues during her tenure at the FTC.

    • FBI fights back against court order demanding Tor exploit source code

      The FBI is dragging its heels on a court order which requires the agency to reveal how an exploit was used against the Tor network to find a suspected child pornography viewer and their true IP address.

      US law enforcement says that revealing the source code of the Tor exploit, used to infiltrate the surveillance-thwarting network, is not necessary to the case, while the judge behind the order, Robert Bryan, considers it a “fair question” to ask how the defendant was caught.

      Jay Michaud, a school administrator from Vancouver, Washington, is the focus of the criminal case. Michaud was arrested on charges of downloading child pornography in July, 2015.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • How many H-1B workers are female? U.S. won’t say

      When the U.S. begins accepting applications for new H-1B skilled-worker visas today, we can be certain that tech workers from India will make up a large portion of the requests.

      What we probably won’t know, though, is how many of those applicants are female.

      While program data shows which job categories, countries and companies are awarded the most visas, the federal government says it is not tracking applicants’ gender — although the question is asked on the visa application form. The U.S. begins accepting H-1B visa applications on April 1 for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

      The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) will not release the gender data. It has rejected a Senate request for the information, as well as public records requests from the IEEE-USA and Computerworld.

    • Fordham 2016: Without disclosure mechanisms or criminal sanctions is the EU Trade Secrets Directive a poor cousin to US trade secrets law?

      On the first, the draft DTSA included language taken directly from the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, allowing judges to issue injunctions against “threatened” misappropriation. Opponents expressed concern that this might be used by federal courts to apply the so-called “inevitable disclosure doctrine” to prevent employees from moving to a competitive job simply because they knew too much. The ultimate solution to this concern was specific and narrow: in concluding the existence of a “threat,” courts had to have evidence of untrustworthy behavior and could not rely simply on what someone knows. The DTSA whistleblower provision is similarly specific and narrow, providing immunity to individuals who reveal confidential information about wrongdoing, but only for communication in confidence to law enforcement officials. The EU Trade Secrets Directive is of course a step forward in European harmonization of definitions and remedies, but it mostly re-states the language and standards already required by TRIPs. It does add provisions covering confidentiality of information in judicial proceedings, but there is a requirement that at least one party representative always be given access, so the common U.S. practice of “attorneys eyes only” protective orders appears to be unavailable under the EU Trade Secrets Directive. In addition, the Directive does not require countries to provide criminal remedies, and it fails to address the fundamental challenge of every trade secret case: how can the trade secret owner get access to information to prove the misappropriation? This probably reflects the tension between common law and civil law systems, but the need is real. James is even more concerned about the broad and undefined “exceptions” of the Directive, allowing the use or disclosure of information for “exercising the right to freedom of expression” or “for the purpose of protecting a legitimate interest recognized by Union or national law.” As for whistleblowers, the exception broadly applies to any disclosure to anyone, so long as this is done “for the purpose of protecting the general public interest.” What James concludes from all of this is that the U.S. remains the leading jurisdiction in meeting customer needs and expectations for the protection of trade secrets. With the EU Trade Secrets Directive, we will need to wait for rulings from the CJEU to see whether the exceptions will present serious problems for trade secret owners.

    • Saudi Arabia executions reach record high as beheadings set to double this year

      Saudi Arabia has already executed 82 people this year and is on course to behead twice as many prisoners as it did in 2015, according to new statistics compiled by a leading human rights organisation likely to raise fresh concerns about the UK’s close ties to the Kingdom.

      The British Government has been urged to do more to put pressure on its Gulf allies to halt the bloodshed in light of the figures, which would see the total death toll in Saudi Arabia reach a record high of more than 320 by the end of the year if the current rate is maintained.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Reclaiming the Web

      Self hosting does not mean getting webspace with a provider. This is not enough. There are at least two serious options available to us that will allow us to be self-hosting we require. Running a Raspberry Pi plugged into your home router or hiring a droplet from Digitial Ocean. Both these offer a chance to both serve out your pages and also run software to pull in other content.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Perpetual image rights for the good: the proposed Dutch Cruyff provision

        As UK-based readers will know, in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 there is a peculiar provision [s301] that provides the trustees of London pediatric Great Ormond Street Hospital with a (perpetual) right to a royalty in respect of the public performance, commercial publication or communication to the public of Sir James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan, as well as any adaptation thereof, notwithstanding that – technically speaking – copyright in that work expired a while ago (31 December 1987).

        Now something similar to the Peter Pan provision under UK law is being advanced in The Netherlands, though the proposal has to do with image rights (or portrait right) rather than copyright.

      • Digital Rights Groups: DMCA Reform Should Target Takedown Abuse, Errors

        Advocacy groups supporting digital rights and access online joined rights holders and artists in calling for reform to the United States law intended to balance copyright protection with the free flow of information on the internet. But the advocacy groups say the problem may be rights holders’ improper takedowns of online content and errors in the system.

        At issue is the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is being reviewed for reforms. Stakeholders submitted comments on the reform (focused on DMCA Section 512) by the 1 April deadline.

        Rights holders, artists and managers called for the DMCA protections to be made stronger as the “notice-and-takedown procedure is not working (IPW, North American Policy, 1 April 2016).

      • Rightscorp Plans to Hijack Pirates’ Browsers Until a Fine is Paid

        Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp says that it’s working on a new method to extract cash settlements from suspected Internet pirates. The company says new technology will lock users’ browsers and prevent Internet access until they pay a fine. To encourage ISPs to play along, Rightscorp says the system could help to limit their copyright liability.

      • Copyright Troll Partner Threatens to Report Blogger to the Police

        A company assisting US-based copyright troll outfit TCYK LLC has just threatened to report a blogger to the police. Joe Hickster, an anti-troll activist who has helped dozens of wrongfully accused individuals avoid paying settlement fees, was threatened after describing troll services company Hatton and Berkeley as being involved in a smoke-and-mirrors operation.

04.03.16

Links 3/4/2016: LabPlot 2.2.0, NixOS 16.03

Posted in News Roundup at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Crowdsourcing code: why startups are turning to open-source software

    A startup wants a mobile menu for their new app. It’s going to cost them time and money to build one from scratch, so they search on Google to find one that is ready-made, a template if you will.

    It is because of publicly available ‘open-source software’ (OSS) that finding such a component is relatively easy. Simply put, OSS is when a product, and the source code that accompanies it, is made available for others to use and even change, or add on to, as they see fit.

  • Events

    • Tickets are live for foss-north

      I’ve written about foss-north earlier. From now, tickets are available. What we are looking at is a free and open source one day conference in Gothenburg. Great speakers already now, and the CfP isn’t even closed.

    • Talking at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore

      This year I was able to attend this year’s FOSSASIA in Singapore. It’s quite a decently sized event with more than 150 speakers and more than 1000 people attending. Given the number of speakers you can infer that there was an insane number of talks in the two and a half day of the conference. I’ve seen recordings being made so I would expect those to show up at some stage, but I don’t have any details. The atmosphere was very friendly and the venue a-maze-ing. By that I mean that it was a fantastic and huge maze. We were hosted in Singapore’s Science Museum which exhibits various things around biology, physics, chemistry, and much more. It is a rather large building in which it was easy to get lost. But it was great being among those sciency exhibits and to exchange ideas and thoughts. Sometimes, we could see an experiment being made as a show to the kids visiting the museum. These shows included a Tesla coil or a fire tornado. Quite impressive.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox and cookie micromanagement

        For most of its existence, Firefox has provided users with the ability to manage how cookies are stored with a rather high degree of granularity: users can block specific cookies, create site-wide exceptions to the accept/block policy, and configure behavior for third-party cookies. Up until Firefox 44, there was an additional option as well, one that allowed users to choose the expiration point (that is, expiring them at the end of the session or letting them persist) for every cookie they encounter. That option was removed in the Firefox 44 release, which has made some users rather unhappy.

        The option in question was found in the Privacy preferences screen, labeled “Ask me every time” on the “Keep until:” selector. When enabled, the option raised a dialog box asking the user to accept or reject each cookie encountered, with a “accept for this session only” choice provided. Removing the option was proposed in 2010, although the patch to perform the removal did not land until 2015. It was released in Firefox 44 in January 2016.

      • How Safe Browsing works in Firefox

        If you want to learn more about how Safe Browsing works in Firefox, you can find all of the technical details on the Safe Browsing and Application Reputation pages of the Mozilla wiki or you can ask questions on our mailing list.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Testing ODF on Document Freedom Day

      Because OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the open standard that I am involved in most, I want to write a few words about it.

      Since last autumn, I’m working on the ODF standard for the Dutch government. Supporting standards in government is an important task: new software comes and goes, but documents, once created, should be readable and reusable into the future.

    • LibreOffice Logic

      When you switch to LibreOffice, you can usually assume that all the features available in other office suites are available. They might have a slightly different name, or be placed in another menu, but the basic functionality should be the same in both. If you make a note of the features you use most often, and systematically learn how to do each one, you can often cope with the transition.

  • BSD

    • Book Review: FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystem

      A filesystem is nothing but the data structures that an operating system uses to keep track of files on a disk. The filesystem stores pictures, music, videos, accounting data and more. The different operating system comes with various filesystems. One may need to move data between FreeBSD and other Unix-like systems like OS X or Linux based devices. Knowing all about filesystem help us to archive or move data between system. The “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystem” is an essential, practical and well-written book.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Inessential weirdnesses in free software

      I’ll discuss aspects of our behavior and jargon that stop or slow down some new users and contributors in free software, so that in outreach efforts, we can be better at bridging the gap. These include git’s terrible UI, our in-person conference structures, and widespread scorn of and dismissiveness towards team sports, Top 40 music, patriotism, religion, small talk, and Microsoft Windows. In getting rid of unnecessary barriers, we need to watch out for disrespectful oversimplification, so I’ll outline ways you can know if one of our weirdnesses is necessary. And I’ll talk about how to mitigate the effects of an inessential weirdness in your outreach efforts.

    • PSPP 0.10.1 has been released

      I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Is Source Code covered by the PSI Directive?

      Concerning France, the court decision may have a considerable impact, as the source code of any software produced by or for the various national or local administrations becomes legally “libre” or open source under no or very permissive conditions. Therefore the interest to clarify the applicable licence: when communicating it, relevant administration should then apply the EUPL or the French CeCILL, according to the 12 September 2012 prime minister Ayrault circular.

    • MIT Media Lab Changes Software Default to FLOSS*

      The MIT Media Lab is part of an academic ecosystem committed to liberal sharing of knowledge. In that spirit, I’m proud to announce that we are changing our internal procedures to encourage more free and open-source software.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • BMW *are* complying with the GPL

      Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW’s compliance with the licence terms.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • Atom reaches one million active users

      We have reached an exciting milestone: one million people have launched some version of Atom in the last month. That’s three times the number of active users we had under a year ago at the one-year anniversary of Atom becoming completely open-source.

    • Here’s A New Programming Language That Talks To Living Cells And DNA

      The genius minds at MIT have created a new system that uses a programming language to design complex DNA circuits and control the living cells. As a part of their research, MIT researchers have programmed 60 circuits with a variety of functions.

    • JavaScripthon — A Simple Python To ES6 JavaScript Translator

      So many, Python and JavaScript seem like similar languages — object oriented, functional hybrid, dynamically typed and a rich library. Keeping the same in mind, probably, a coder has created a small and simple Python to JavaScript translator.

Leftovers

  • Here’s What Happened to Apple’s Third Co-Founder

    “WHEREAS,” it read, “Mr. Stephen G. Wozniak (hereinafter referred to as WOZNIAK), Mr. Steven P. Jobs (hereinafter referred to as JOBS), and Mr. Ronald G. Wayne (hereinafter referred to as WAYNE), all residents of the County of Santa Clara, State of California, have mutually agreed to the formation of a company to be specifically organized for the manufacture and marketing of computer devices, components, and related material, said company to be organized under the fictitious name of APPLE COMPUTER COMPANY.”

  • Can Premier League leaders Leicester City hold their nerve? [Ed: off topic]

    It was a year ago, on 4 April 2015, when the great recovery to survival started as bottom-of-the-table Leicester beat West Ham United 2-1. With the pressure to avoid relegation at its height, Leicester won seven of their last nine games to stay up.

  • Southampton boss: Jamie Vardy’s rise from non-league to Leicester and England is crazy

    Vardy has helped push Leicester City to the verge of the Premier League title, and forced his way into England’s Euro 2016 reckoning just four years after plying his trade in non-league football.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Libyan Enterprise: Hillary’s Imperial Massacre

      In fact two documents strongly backed Qaddafi on this issue. The first was a secret cable to the State Department from the US embassy in Tripoli in 2008, part of the Wikileaks trove, entitled “Extremism in Eastern Libya,” which revealed that this area was rife with anti-American, pro-jihad sentiment.

      [...]

      By October of that year, Muammar Qaddafi was dead and stuffed in a meat locker. Denied post mortem imagery of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the world was presented with photographs of Qaddafi, dispatched with a bullet to the head after being wounded by NATO’s ground troops outside Sirte.

    • Cleaning Up Hillary’s Libyan Mess

      U.S. officials are pushing a dubious new scheme to “unify” a shattered Libya, but the political risk at home is that voters will finally realize Hillary Clinton’s responsibility for the mess, writes Robert Parry.

    • Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit Neglects 98 Percent of the World’s Bomb-Ready Uranium

      But critics have pointed out that the summits have only focused on highly enriched uranium in civilian possession, which, according to the Department of Energy, only accounts for 2 to 3 percent of the world’s supply. That small percentage is used mostly by academics for research and medical isotope production.

      The remaining 97 to 98 percent is held in military stockpiles, which the security summits have largely ignored. Countries keep the safeguards on these stockpiles secret, and military material falls outside the scope of international security agreements.

    • A ‘Silent Coup’ for Brazil?

      Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments are on the defensive as U.S.-backed political movements employ “silent coup” tactics to discredit and remove troublesome leaders, writes Ted Snider.

    • Iraq is Broke. You Have to Pay for It.

      The next time a candidate or reporter asks during a debate about education or healthcare “But how are you going to pay for that?” I would like the person being questioned to respond “The same way we find money to pay for Iraq.”

      So maybe it would just be better for Flint, Michigan to claim it is under attack by ISIS instead of just being poisoned because no one has the money to fix America’s infrastructure.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me’: Clinton snaps at Greenpeace activist

      A question about fossil-fuel-industry donations to her campaign unleashed a rare flash of anger from Hillary Clinton on the rope line in New York on Thursday.

      The moment was recorded by an activist, whom Greenpeace identified as Eva Resnick-Day, who sought to pressure Clinton about the roughly hundreds of thousands of dollars her campaign has received from individuals with ties to fossil-fuel industries.

    • Unilever ditches major palm oil trader after its sustainability certification is revoked

      Unilever has cancelled its contracts with the IOI Group, after the major Malaysian palm oil trader was suspended by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for destroying forests and peatlands in Indonesia.

      The IOI Group – whose customers include Kellogg’s and Mars – is one of the largest companies to have lost RSPO certification since the roundtable was formed in 2004.

      The decision will be seen as a test of consumer company policies on responsible sourcing of palm oil, which commit major brands to excluding suppliers responsible for deforestation and peatland drainage.

    • The Danger of a Runaway Antarctica

      The startling new finding was published Wednesday in the journal Nature by two experts in ice-sheet behavior: Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University. It paints a grimmer picture than the one presented only three years ago by a United Nations panel that forecast a maximum sea level rise of three feet by 2100. But that projection assumed only a minimal contribution from the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. And things could get worse in the centuries to come — the melting from Antarctica alone, not counting other factors like thermal expansion, could cause the seas to rise by nearly 50 feet by 2500, drowning many cities.

    • Saudi Arabia Plans $2 Trillion Megafund for Post-Oil Era: Deputy Crown Prince

      Saudi Arabia is getting ready for the twilight of the oil age by creating the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund for the kingdom’s most prized assets.

      Over a five-hour conversation, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman laid out his vision for the Public Investment Fund, which will eventually control more than $2 trillion and help wean the kingdom off oil. As part of that strategy, the prince said Saudi will sell shares in Aramco’s parent company and transform the oil giant into an industrial conglomerate. The initial public offering could happen as soon as next year, with the country currently planning to sell less than 5 percent.

    • Norway Is Killing Whales To Feed Animals Raised For Fur

      Norway has killed more whales than any other nation over the past four years, and some of that meat has become animal feed for the Norwegian fur industry, according to new documents unveiled by two environmental organizations.

      Revelations from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) come as Norway opened up its whaling season Friday, and a week after Japan reported killing more than 300 minke whales — including pregnant females — for what it labeled as research. Now, groups are once again calling for an end to whaling — though this time the attention is placed on Norway, which along with Iceland and Japan, ignores a 30-year-old international moratorium on whale hunting.

    • With Coal Crashing, Will Polluted Communities Be Left Holding the Bag?

      Federal law requires coal companies to clean up and reclaim toxic mining sites. But what happens when a coal company’s gone bankrupt?

    • Flesh Vs Fossil: Let’s shut down the UK’s largest opencast coal mine in May

      2016 has got off to an even worse start. The United States’ second largest coal company – Arch Coal –­ filed for bankruptcy. The Chinese government announced the closure of more than 5,000 coal mines, with 1,000 to go this year. Almost half the UK’s coal power stations have announced closure in the last 12 months.

    • Did Sanders Lie About Clinton’s Oil Money? NPR Factchecker Can’t Be Bothered to Check

      So the factchecker’s job is to determine whether Clinton is right to say that she just gets money from people who work for fossil fuel companies, and that the Sanders campaign is lying about this, or whether the Sanders campaign is actually correct in saying that she relies heavily on funds from fossil-fuel lobbyists—right?

      See, that’s why you don’t have a job at NPR.

    • Bernie Sanders Took Money From the Fossil Fuel Lobby, Too — Just Not Much

      The Bernie Sanders campaign countered by pointing to a Greenpeace tally that says she has collected “$1,259,280 in bundled and direct donations from lobbyists currently registered as lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.”

      Additionally, Greenpeace found “$3,250,000 in donations from large donors connected to the fossil fuel industry to Priorities Action USA,” the main Super PAC backing Clinton’s campaign.

    • Flint Moves to Sue Michigan Over Water Contamination Fallout

      Flint has made moves to sue the state of Michigan, citing “grossly negligent oversight” that led to the city’s ongoing water contamination crisis.

      The city filed a notice of intent to sue with the Court of Claims on March 24, and it was reported on by various Michigan news outlets on Friday.

      It names the state, the Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), and four MDEQ employees as defendants.

      Flint mayor Karen Weaver wrote in the notice of intention to file claim, which the Flint Journal has posted here (pdf), that “the damage to the water system infrastructure caused by the MDEQ employees’ grossly negligent oversight is irreversible.”

  • Finance

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • You’re not a farm animal: A plea to journalists to release themselves from Trump’s press pens

      Covering the Trump campaign on a daily basis today appears to be a rather miserable media existence. Reporters are threatened by staffers, and the Trump communications team seems to be utterly nonresponsive to media inquires. (“There is no Trump press operation,” one reporter told Slate.)

    • “It’s a Revolution”: Actress Rosario Dawson on Why She Supports Sanders for President Over Clinton

      As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders campaign in New York ahead of the state’s primary later this month, more than 16,000 people gathered in St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx for a Sanders rally on Thursday. He spoke alongside film director Spike Lee and actress and activist Rosario Dawson, known for her roles in “Kids” and many other films, including “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.” Amy Goodman caught up with Dawson after the rally to discuss why she supports Bernie Sanders. “It’s a revolution,” Dawson says, noting the corporate media has failed to fairly cover his platform. She also discusses the rise of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. “He isn’t the problem,” she says. “There is a lot of stuff been going on for many years that has gotten out of control.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • German Television Pulls Satire Mocking Turkey’s Erdogan

      GERMANY’S STATE BROADCASTER, ZDF, apologized on Friday for what it called satire that had crossed the line into slander and removed video of a comedian reading an obscene poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from its website and YouTube channel.

      The poem, which was read by the German satirist Jan Böhmermann on Thursday’s edition of his late-night show “Neo Magazin Royale,” described Erdogan in vile, obscene terms — even comparing him, at one stage, to Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man who fathered seven children with a daughter he held in a cellar for 24 years — but the text was presented as part of a comic demonstration of the difference between satire and slander.

    • For Israel’s Sake The Israel Lobby Must Be Held To Account

      It was ten years ago that the London Review of Books published an article on the Israel Lobby by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, distinguished scholars at two of America’s top universities. The following year the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux found the courage to publish The Israel Lobby, a book with 357 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews.

      The Israel Lobby is an understated critique of the enomous influence that the tiny state of Israel, which consists of land stolen by fire and sword from the helpless Palestinians, exercises over United States foreign policy. The crazed Israel Lobby went berserk. Mearsheimer and Walt were demonized as anti-semetics who wanted to bring back Hitler.

      Also in 2006 former President Jimmy Carter’s book, Peace Not Apartheid, was published by Simon & Schuster and became a New York Times bestseller with 846 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews. Carter, who as US president did his best to bring Israel and Palestine to a settlement, truthrully explained that Israel was the barrier to a settlement. The Israel Lobby demonized Carter as an anti-semite, and the Jews on the board of the Carter Center resigned.

    • Espousing freedom of speech, and practising censorship

      Have you noticed how people you are eager to meet often prove to be disillusioning? Perhaps anticipation builds up huge expectations but they end up less than they originally seemed. Rather than their perceived star qualities it’s their faults and flaws you notice. Consequently, heroes end up with feet of clay.

    • Bonnici wants criminal libel removed, but censorship law comes first

      Justice minister says government is discussing the removal of criminal libel but the pending censorship and freedom of expression law takes precedence

    • Criminal libel should have been abolished in 2011 – Law Commissioner Franco Debono

      Law Commissioner Franco Debono yesterday told The Malta Independent that the whole criminal libel controversy involving shadow Justice Minister Jason Azzopardi could have been avoided if criminal libel was abolished in 2011, as he had proposed in a private members bill.

      The ‘controversy’ that Dr Debono spoke of is the 6 April criminal libel case against Shadow Minister for Justice, Dr Jason Azzopardi which was instituted through a criminal complaint by former police Commissioner Peter Paul Zammit.

    • Busuttil insists police ‘in Muscat’s grip’ over Azzopardi arraignment

      Opposition leader Simon Busuttil insisted that the police, who are instituting criminal defamation charges against PN MP Jason Azzopardi, are “state apparatus in the grip of Joseph Muscat”.

      Busuttil told MaltaToday that criminal defamation is a perfectly acceptable legal tool unless “manipulated by government to intimidate the Opposition” and that Opposition MPs are only charged in court with criminal defamation in banana republics and dictatorial regimes.

    • Some prominent Chinese are chafing against censorship

      The editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times, a tabloid closely tied to the Communist Party and known for its often-rabid nationalism, isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to be calling publicly for more freedom of speech and less censorship.

    • China Party journal denounces critics seeking to discredit anti-graft drive

      A top magazine of China’s ruling Communist Party lashed out at critics of its ongoing anti-corruption campaign, saying foreign media and individuals from home and abroad were intentionally trying to discredit the effort as a political “power struggle”.

      Chinese President Xi Jinping has pursued a sweeping campaign to root out corruption since assuming power about three years ago, and has promised to strike hard at both senior and low-level officials, the “tigers” and “flies”.

      Nonetheless, there has been persistent speculation that the graft crackdown is also about Xi taking down his rivals.

    • It’s time for America’s lawyers to come to the aid of their Chinese counterparts

      Last summer, the Chinese Communist Party regime began a nationwide crackdown on human rights activists and attorneys. It’s time that the American Bar Association, the largest attorneys organization in the world’s most powerful democracy, took a clear, unequivocal stand on the crackdown in defense of universal values and the rule of law.

    • China’s tight control of speech
    • Norwegian band Slutface change name to Sløtface due to ‘social media censorship’
    • Slutface change name to Sløtface due to “social media censorship”
    • Slutface changes name to SLØTFACE, shares new single “Sponge State” — listen

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Bringing Signal to the desktop

      The non-profit Open Whisper Systems (OWS) organization is best known for its smartphone apps: first TextSecure and, more recently, Signal. Lately, however, the project started branching out by developing a desktop front-end for Signal, thus allowing users to take advantage of verifiable, end-to-end encryption for instant messages and group chats from the comfort of a full-size keyboard. The desktop version remains linked to the smartphone edition, although opinions certainly may vary as to whether that constitutes a plus or a minus.

      TextSecure was released as open-source software in 2011, followed by an encrypted voice-calling app named RedPhone in 2012. OWS then merged the functionality into a single iOS app called Signal in March 2015; the Android version was released in November of the same year. Signal Desktop was announced in December, via a beta program for which potential users had to sign up and wait to receive an invitation. As with all of OWS’s projects, of course, the source code for Signal Desktop is available on GitHub.

    • Decentraleyes Addon Fixes Browser Privacy, Circumvents CDNs

      Widespread CDN acceptance has been a security flaw that sacrifices privacy simply because it breaks web pages on anything put a text-based browser, which is a sacrifice few are willing to make for the sake of their information remaining local.

    • Remember that California bill to ban the sale of encrypted phones? It just got worse

      The assemblyman, who decried Apple for “risking our national security and the safety of our kids” by using encryption, also uses an iPhone.

    • RAF’s new ‘GCHQ in the sky’ spy planes which can hack enemy emails and phone calls

      Air chiefs have bought nine spy planes, each one like a flying GCHQ.

      The Boeing P-8 Poseidon is as effective at information ­gathering as the Government’s eavesdropping headquarters.

    • Sure, why not? FBI agrees to unlock iPhone for Arkansas prosecutor

      The FBI, which just a few days ago was attempting to convince the country of its helplessness in the face of encrypted iPhones, has generously offered its assistance in unlocking an iPhone and iPod for a prosecutor in Arkansas, the Associated Press reports.

      TechCrunch has contacted the prosecutor’s office for details, which for the moment are thin on the ground — but the timing seems unlikely to be a coincidence. It was only Monday that the FBI announced it had successfully accessed a phone after saying for months that it couldn’t possibly do so — and that Apple was endangering national security by refusing to help.

    • British Authorities Demand Encryption Keys in Case With “Huge Implications”

      BRITISH AUTHORITIES are attempting to force a man accused of hacking the U.S. government to hand over his encryption keys in a case that campaigners believe could have ramifications for journalists and activists.

      England-based Lauri Love (pictured above) was arrested in October 2013 by the U.K.’s equivalent of the FBI, the National Crime Agency, over allegations that he hacked a range of U.S. government systems between 2012 and 2013, including those of the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and NASA.

      The U.S. Justice Department is seeking the extradition of Love, claiming that he and a group of conspirators breached “thousands of networks” in total and caused millions of dollars in damages. But Love has been fighting the extradition attempt in British courts, insisting that he should be tried for the alleged offenses within the U.K. The 31-year-old, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, has argued that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S., where his legal team says he could face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail.

    • ODNI Lawyer Bob Litt Says There’s No NSA Data Sharing With Law Enforcement… If You Don’t Count The FBI, DEA, Etc.

      Just when we thought some surveillance reforms might stick, the administration announced it was expanding law enforcement access to NSA data hauls. This prompted expressions of disbelief and dismay, along with a letter from Congressional representatives demanding the NSA cease this expanded information sharing immediately.

    • The Trouble with CloudFlare

      Wednesday, CloudFlare blogged that 94% of the requests it sees from Tor are “malicious.” We find that unlikely, and we’ve asked CloudFlare to provide justification to back up this claim. We suspect this figure is based on a flawed methodology by which CloudFlare labels all traffic from an IP address that has ever sent spam as “malicious.” Tor IP addresses are conduits for millions of people who are then blocked from reaching websites under CloudFlare’s system.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Video shows white cops performing roadside cavity search of black man

      For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on an investigative series about police abuse in South Carolina. I’ve found a dizzying number of cases, including illegal arrests, botched raids, fatal shootings and serious questions about how all those incidents are investigated. Many of these cases were previously unreported, or if they were reported, the initial reports were a far cry from what actually happened. The series will run at some point in the next week. But in the meantime, I want to share one particularly horrifying incident that I came across this week while researching the series.

    • asha bandele and Laura Carlsen on the War on Drugs

      What this country calls a War on Drugs has never been indiscriminate in its victims. The punitive, interventionist drug policies embraced by a succession of US administrations have hit hardest in communities of color, and, in Latin America, it has been the poor, the indigenous and those outside of power that have borne the brunt of practices, nominally aimed at stopping drug-trafficking, that have only driven corruption and horrific violence.

    • DOJ Reopens Asset Forfeiture Sharing Program After Temporary, Budget-Related Shutdown

      Right before the end of last year, the DOJ — facing budget cuts — announced it would be ceasing its “equitable sharing” program with local law enforcement agencies. These agencies complained loudly about the unfairness of being decoupled from the asset forfeiture money train, as this partnership often allowed them to route around more restrictive state laws.

    • The feds have resumed a controversial program that lets cops take stuff and keep it

      The Justice Department has announced that it is resuming a controversial practice that allows local police departments to funnel a large portion of assets seized from citizens into their own coffers under federal law.

    • ‘They Want South America Back the Way They Used to Have It’

      Mark Weisbrot: “They’ve been trying to get rid of all the left governments, really, for the whole 21st century.”

      [...]

      “In a flash, Argentina has become pro-American,” CBS’s 60 Minutes told viewers, and Leslie Stahl shared that watching Macri and his wife play with their daughter, “you can’t help but think of the Kennedys and Camelot.” US corporate media seem to concur: Macri is a pragmatist, and though they aren’t certain he can lift Argentina from what CBS called “a morass of debt, inflation and international isolation,” it’s clear we’re meant to wish him well.

    • Houston Federal Marshal Tries to Snatch Camera from Citizen Journalist Who Was Assaulted by 2nd Agent

      “You’re about to go to jail for being a dumb-ass,” said a Houston Federal Agent Calderon to PINAC citizen journalist David Warden.

      Boy, was he wrong.

      The Houston Federal Court Security Agent assaulted PINAC correspondent David Warden when he lawfully recorded outside of a Federal Courthouse on its sidewalk.

    • Texas Cops’ Complaint Censorship Attacks YouTube Videos of Public Officials in Public

      Texas police launched a “complaint censorship” attack on David Warden’s YouTube channel News Now Houston, claiming his videos violate their privacy.

    • Houston Prosecutors Exonerate PINAC Correspondent Recording Near Shell Oil Refinery

      Texas prosecutors admitted they can’t prove their contempt of cop case “BARD” against PINAC correspondent David Warden, who recorded video near a Shell Oil Refinery on the outskirts of Houston.

      In other words, state attorneys had no way to prove that David Warden interfered with public duties of an officer last December, as charged, because BARD stands for ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ and officers couldn’t conceive of a single illegal thing Warden did while recording near the oil refinery as you can see in the legal document below.

  • DRM

    • Fighting DRM in HTML, again

      In 2013, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) raised the ire of many in the free-software community (and elsewhere) by adopting an API that adds support for DRM modules within web content. Now, the working group that produced the API in question has come up for renewal, and a number of high-profile parties—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Free Software Foundation (FSF)—are using the occasion to push back against the DRM camp, in hopes of regaining some of what was lost.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Awesome Stuff: Putting Nature In The Public Domain

        This week, we’ve got one standout project that seems worth highlighting here at Techdirt because of its commitment to things we all care about: cutting-edge media technology, the planet we all live on, and the public domain. Catalog.Earth is a project to use the first to capture the second and dedicate it to the third.

      • EFF to Copyright Office: Improper Content Takedowns Hurt Online Free Expression

        Safe Harbors Work for Rightsholders and Service Providers

        Washington, D.C. – Content takedowns based on unfounded copyright claims are hurting online free expression, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told the U.S. Copyright Office Friday, arguing that any reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) should focus on protecting Internet speech and creativity.

        EFF’s written comments were filed as part of a series of studies on the effectiveness of the DMCA, begun by the Copyright Office this year. This round of public comments focuses on Section 512, which provides a notice-and-takedown process for addressing online copyright infringement, as well as “safe harbors” for Internet services that comply.

        “One of the central questions of the study is whether the safe harbors are working as intended, and the answer is largely yes,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “The safe harbors were supposed to give rightsholders streamlined tools to police infringement, and give service providers clear rules so they could avoid liability for the potentially infringing acts of their users. Without those safe harbors, the Internet as we know it simply wouldn’t exist, and our ability to create, innovate, and share ideas would suffer.”

      • Today [Friday] is your last day to comment on Internet censorship through copyright abuse
      • Music Industry: DMCA Copyright Law is Obsolete and Harmful

        A coalition of 400 artists and various music groups including the RIAA are calling on Congress to reform existing copyright law. The DMCA is obsolete, dysfunctional and harmful, they claim, calling for stronger measures against the ongoing piracy troubles they face.

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