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02.15.16

Links 15/2/2016: Zorin OS 11 Lite and Business, Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 6:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Windows 10 calls home a lot; Russia hikes tech tax and intends to switch to Linux

    When it comes to high tech, American companies dominate the Russian market and, perhaps not surprisingly, that doesn’t site well with the Russian government which would prefer to see homegrown offerings such as Yandex and Mail.ru get more market traction. The consequence, according to Bloomberg, is a plan by the Russian government to increase the taxes the American tech giants by 18 percent.

  • Unixstickers sent me a package!

    There’s an old, popular saying, beware geeks bearing gifts. But in this case, I was pleased to see an email in my inbox, from unixstickers.com, asking me if I was interested in reviewing their products. I said ye, and a quick few days later, there was a surprise courier-delivered envelope waiting for me in the post. Coincidentally – or not – the whole thing happened close enough to the 2015 end-of-the-year holidays to classify as poetic justice.

    On a slightly more serious note, Unixstickers is a company shipping T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, posters, pins, and stickers to UNIX and Linux aficionados worldwide. Having been identified one and acquired on the company’s PR radar, I am now doing a first-of-a-kind Dedoimedo non-technical technical review of merchandise related to our favorite software. So not sure how it’s gonna work out, but let’s see.

  • Linux goes to Washington: How the White House/Linux Foundation collaboration will work

    No doubt by now you’ve heard about the Obama Administration’s newly announced Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP). You can read more about it on CIO.com here and here.

    But what you may not know is that the White House is actively working with the Linux and open source community for CNAP. In a blog post Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation said, “In the proposal, the White House announced collaboration with The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) to better secure Internet ‘utilities’ such as open-source software, protocols and standards.”

  • Why Linux?

    Linux may inspire you to think of coders hunched over their desks (that are littered with Mountain Dew cans) while looking at lines of codes, faintly lit by the yellow glow of old CRT monitors. Maybe Linux sounds like some kind of a wild cat and you have never heard the term before. Maybe you have use it every day. It is an operating system loved by a few and misrepresented to many.

  • These 3 things are trying to kill Linux containers

    For nearly two years, Linux containers have dominated the world of enterprise IT, and for good reason — among others, they take on issues that virtualization simply cannot within application development and computing at scale and allow for the enterprise world to truly embrace concepts like devops and microservices (the Service Oriented Architecture dream from years gone by). That sound you hear is IT vendors stampeding towards the container bandwagon, but, as with every emerging tech trend, this isn’t always a good thing, as not everyone is walking the walk, regardless of what the business might actually say.

  • Desktop

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux kernel bug delivers corrupt TCP/IP data to Mesos, Kubernetes, Docker containers

      The Linux Kernel has a bug that causes containers that use veth devices for network routing (such as Docker on IPv6, Kubernetes, Google Container Engine, and Mesos) to not check TCP checksums. This results in applications incorrectly receiving corrupt data in a number of situations, such as with bad networking hardware. The bug dates back at least three years and is present in kernels as far back as we’ve tested. Our patch has been reviewed and accepted into the kernel, and is currently being backported to -stable releases back to 3.14 in different distributions (such as Suse, and Canonical). If you use containers in your setup, I recommend you apply this patch or deploy a kernel with this patch when it becomes available. Note: Docker’s default NAT networking is not affected and, in practice, Google Container Engine is likely protected from hardware errors by its virtualized network.

    • Performance problems

      Just over a year ago I implemented an optimization to the SPI core code in Linux that avoids some needless context switches to a worker thread in the main data path that most clients use. This was really nice, it was simple to do but saved a bunch of work for most drivers using SPI and made things noticeably faster. The code got merged in v4.0 and that was that, I kept on kicking a few more ideas for optimizations in this area around but that was that until the past month.

    • Linux 4.5-rc4

      It’s Valentine’s day, so here I am, making a valentine for everybody in the form of the usual rc release.

      Things look fairly normal – there’s some pending and yet unexplained problem with some of the VM changes in this release cycle (the transparent huge-page cleanups in particular), but at least for now it seems to be s390-specific, so it shouldn’t hold up testing for anybody else.

    • Linus Torvalds Announces a Valentine’s Day Linux Kernel 4.5 Release Candidate 4

      Another week has passed and it’s once again Sunday afternoon here in the US, which means that Linus Torvalds has prepared yet another RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel.

    • Linux 4.5-rc4 Is A Valentine’s Day Kernel

      Linus Torvalds has announced the release today of the Linux 4.5-rc4 kernel.

      Linux 4.5-rc4 remains rather a normal release and comes with a number of AMDGPU DRM fixes, Btrfs fixes, audio tweaks, and more.

    • Linux Kernel 3.2.77 LTS Has Crypto, x86, and CIFS Improvements, Updated Drivers

      Linux kernel maintainer and developer Ben Hutchings was happy to announce this past weekend the release and immediate availability for download and update of the seventy-seventh maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 3.2 kernel.

    • New FD.io Open Source Project Offers IO Services Framework for Network and Storage Software

      The newly launched FD.io (“Fido”) initiative is an open source project to provide an IO services framework for the next wave of network and storage software. The project is also announcing the availability of its initial software and formation of a validation testing lab.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Compute Shader Code Begins Landing For Gallium3D

        Samuel Pitoiset began pushing his Gallium3D Mesa state tracker changes this morning for supporting compute shaders via the GL_ARB_compute_shader extension.

        Before getting too excited, the hardware drivers haven’t yet implemented the support. It was back in December that core Mesa received its treatment for compute shader support and came with Intel’s i965 driver implementing CS.

      • Libav Finally Lands VDPAU Support For Accelerated HEVC Decoding

        While FFmpeg has offered hardware-accelerated HEVC decoding using NVIDIA’s VDPAU API since last summer, this support for the FFmpeg-forked libav landed just today.

        In June was when FFmpeg added support to its libavcodec for handling HEVC/H.265 video decoding via NVIDIA’s Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix interface. Around that same time, developer Philip Langdale who had done the FFmpeg patch, also submitted the patch for Libav for decoding HEVC content through VDPAU where supported.

      • More Nouveau GL4 Feature Patches Published
      • It Looks Like AMD Will Support FreeSync With Their New Linux Display Stack

        While NVIDIA has long supported G-SYNC on Linux as their adaptive sync technology for eliminating screen tearing, AMD hasn’t supported their FreeSync tech via their open or closed-source Linux drivers. Fortunately, it’s looking like that will change.

      • Got tearing with proprietary NVIDIA? Try this.

        If you’re using a reasonably modern NVIDIA graphics card on your Linux box with the proprietary driver, there’s a fair chance you may encounter that nasty thing called ‘screen tearing’. There is a little setting worth trying in NVIDIA’s blob driver called ‘ForceCompositionPipeline’ that can severely reduce tearing to a minimum, perhaps even completely. Here’s how to do it.

      • R600g+SI Dota 2 Benchmarks With Mesa 11.2, Linux 4.5 Show Open Driver Progress

        With now having a workaround for Dota 2 for my benchmarking needs, here are some benchmarks finally of this popular multiplayer online battle arena under Linux when using the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers with the latest Linux 4.5 and Mesa 11.2 components.

      • Prevent Horizontal Tearing for NVidia GPUs on KDE Plasma
      • AMDGPU’s xf86-video-amdgpu vs. Mode-Setting DDX Performance
      • VIA OpenChrome X.Org Driver Getting Ready For First Release In Over Two Years

        With a new developer stepping up to the plate, it’s looking like the OpenChrome DDX driver will see its first release in more than two and a half years.

        For those still relying upon the OpenChrome X.Org driver for VIA x86 graphics hardware support, Kevin Brace is hoping to soon release a new version. Kevin started a new mailing list thread to encourage interested VIA hardware enthusiasts to begin testing the latest driver code and reporting their feedback.

    • Benchmarks

      • Radeon vs. Nouveau Gallium3D Driver Performance On Mesa 11.2-dev, Linux 4.5

        Here are some fresh comparison benchmarks on Linux 4.5 and Mesa 11.2 when comparing the Radeon and Nouveau (NVIDIA) open-source Linux driver performance.

        Following on from the Nouveau vs. NVIDIA comparison using the latest code and the AMDGPU/Radeon vs. Proprietary Driver benchmarks on the latest code, here are some Radeon vs. Nouveau results using the Linux 4.5 kernel with Mesa 11.2 Git code for a bleeding-edge experience. The NVIDIA hardware tested for this article included the GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 650, GTX 680, and GTX 780 Ti. With all of the NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 Kepler graphics cards, they were re-clocked to their highest power-state manually prior to testing. Unfortunately, there still isn’t any working GeForce 400/500 Fermi re-clocking support with this open-source driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME: Maps shaping up for 3.20

        So, we’re soon approaching the UI freeze for GNOME 3.20. It’s looking quite good when it comes to OpenStreetMap editing in Maps (among other things).

        But first I thought I was going to show-case another improvement, namely the expanded place bubbles (show information about places you search for on the map).

      • GNOME Maps Is Looking Better In GNOME 3.20

        While not yet as versatile as say Google Maps, GNOME Maps for GNOME 3.20. is looking to be a nice upgrade.

        Maps in GNOME 3.20 is making progress with OpenStreetMap editing, expanded place bubbles, adding new places to OSM, support for printing routes, and more.

      • GNOME Maps 3.20 to Allow for OpenStreetMap Editing

        GNOME 20 is almost upon us, and it’s going to be a really impressive release, especially since many of its components are getting important upgrades, like GNOME Maps, for example.

      • My Updated 3.18 Packages for GNOME Extensions

        I started releasing extension updates in 2014 due to a lot of extensions being unmaintained and seemingly break every time GNOME releases a new version of the Desktop Environment (DE). This is my third batch release post for GNOME extensions and these extension packages are for GNOME 3.18.

  • Distributions

    • Distro Wars: It’s All Linux

      This is likely a topic covered plenty of times, and as such I won’t make this a too in-depth article, but I feel it’s something always worth reiterating and remembering that no matter what distribution of Linux (or GNU/Linux if you prefer) you use… it’s all Linux.

      You only have to whiz around the internet in message boards, YouTube comments and the like in regards to any Linux topic and you’ll probably come across a “distro war” often enough. It can happen easy enough – someone mentions their distro of choice, someone else then mentions theirs and then comparisons start. From there, with personal experiences being shared, which quite frankly can differ quite a bit depending on one’s hardware, software choices (or sometimes even luck) a discussion can quite quickly descend into a flame war over ‘my distro is better than your distro’.

    • Reviews

      • RebeccaBlackOS 2016-02-08 Review. Why? Because it’s Friday.

        These are the types of problems found in an independent distro build from scratch. I cannot understand how a system built on Debian could be this buggy and apparently have zero VM support which Debian comes with by default. I can take some solace in the fact that it was built by one person and that one person is a Rebecca Black fan but as far as a Linux Distribution is concerned there is not much here. Some could say “Well its not supposed to be taken as a serious Distribution.” True except it is listed and kept up with on DistroWatch therefor it should be held as a system ready distribution especially when it was not released as a beta or an RC. If this distribution is ever going to be considered a real platform it has a long way to go. I give it about as many thumbs down as the Rebecca Black Friday video.

    • New Releases

      • Welcome to Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5r0 Release Notes

        Parsix GNU/Linux is a live and installation DVD based on Debian. Our goal is to provide a ready to use and easy to install desktop and laptop optimized operating system based on Debian’s stable branch and the latest stable release of GNOME desktop environment. Users can easily install extra software packages from Parsix APT repositories. Our annual release cycle consists of two major and four minor versions. We have our own software repositories and build servers to build and provide all the necessary updates and missing features in Debian stable branch.

      • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 (Atticus) Officially Released, Based on Debian 8 “Jessie”

        The development team of the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux computer operating system has announced today, February 14, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5r0.

      • 4MParted 16.0 Distrolette Ships with GParted 0.25.0, Now Ready for Beta Testing

        Zbigniew Konojacki, the developer of the 4MLinux project, has sent us an email earlier today, February 14, 2016, informing Softpedia about the availability for download and testing of his 4MParted 16.0 Beta Live CD.

      • Zorin OS 11 Lite & Business Get Valentine’s Day Release for Windows Refugees

        Only ten days after the release of the Zorin OS 11 Core and Ultimate editions, the development team of the Windows lookalike Linux-based operating system are proud to announce the release of the Lite and Business flavors.

        While the Zorin OS 11 Lite Edition is based on the Lubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system and built around the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, Zorin OS 11 Business is pretty much the same as the Ultimate Edition, but with more advanced tools and improved hardware support.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Sound problems in Mageia 5

        Long time ago, I experienced a problem with the sound in Mageia 5. Some videos would play without sound after I applied an update.

        Back then, I discovered the problem was caused because ffmpeg had been updated but, I never found out why, the tainted repository did not pick up the correct package, so I was using the common ffmpeg package, not the tainted version that allows me to play sound for the videos.

    • Arch Family

    • Slackware Family

      • LibreOffice 5.1.0 for slackware-current

        The Document Foundation statement about this release: “LibreOffice 5.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For enterprise class deployments, TDF maintains the more mature 5.0.x branch (soon at 5.0.5)“.

      • taper.alienbase.nl mirror will lose rsync access

        For the sixth time in just 5 days I had do a system_reset on my virtual machine which runs “taper.alienbase.nl” as well as “docs.slackware.com“. The virtual machine is crashing under the load that is put on it by demanding rsync processes. According to my pal who donated the use of this VM to me for free, the rsync download rate is at a continuous 100 Mbit/sec for most of the time. This is apparently too much for the server, as well as for my pal who had not anticipated this kind of bandwidth consumption. He has been paying quite a bit of extra money for the excess bandwidth during the past months.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Position Raised by Chevy Chase Trust Holdings

        Chevy Chase Trust Holdings raised its stake in shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) by 4.9% during the fourth quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the SEC. The fund owned 407,946 shares of the open-source software company’s stock after buying an additional 19,132 shares during the period. Chevy Chase Trust Holdings’ holdings in Red Hat were worth $33,782,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

      • Market View On Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

        Few brokerages covering Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) have recently released its earnings and stock price target. As per the experts, the stock can touch 89.63 in the coming twelve months. The company’s earnings in the past one year was recorded at 1.03 per share. Now, in the coming quarter, First Call anticipates the company to deliver EPS of 0.50. The EPS estimates for the ongoing fiscal and the next year is reported to come at 1.86 and 2.19 respectively.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian LTS Work January 2016

        This was my ninth month as a Freexian sponsored LTS contributor. I was assigned 8 hours for the month of January.

        My time this month was spent preparing updates for clamav and the associated libclamunrar for squeeze and wheezy. For wheezy, I’ve only helped a little, mostly I worked on squeeze.

      • Reproducible builds: week 42 in Stretch cycle

        What happened in the reproducible builds effort between February 7th and February 13th 2016:

      • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2016

        Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

      • I love Free Software Day 2016: Show your love for Free Software

        Today February 14th, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrates the “I Love Free Software” day. I Love Free Software day is a day for Free Software users to appreciate and thank the contributors of their favourite software applications, projects and organisations.

      • Derivatives

        • Tails 2.0 Debian-Based Linux OS Will Keep You Anonymous Online

          Tails, a Live operating system that is built for the declared purpose of keeping users safe and anonymous while going online, is now at version 2.0.1 and is ready for download.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Early Ubuntu 14.04 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Xeon E5 Benchmarks

            This morning I posted some Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 LTS Radeon graphics benchmarks while if open-source AMD graphics driver evolution doesn’t get you excited, in this article are results from other non-graphics benchmarks in comparing the Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 performance for these long-term support releases in their current form.

            For getting an idea how the overall Ubuntu Linux performance has evolved over the past two years for those solely riding Long-Term Support releases, I compared the performance of Ubuntu 14.04.0 to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in its current daily ISO form. The tests were done on the same Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 (Haswell) system with MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard, 16GB of RAM, and AMD FirePro V7900 graphics.

          • ‘Android OEMs Will Ship Ubuntu Phones This Year’, Say Canonical

            Several Android phone makers will release Ubuntu phones this year, Canonical’s CEO has revealed.

          • Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu prospect for February 22 launch

            In September last year Meizu officially introduced the Pro 5 flagship, an Android smartphone running the 5.1 Lollipop-based Flyme OS 5.0. Although Android and iOS are the dominant operating platforms there are always those who want to try something different. Now there’s a Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu prospect for a February 22 launch.

          • Meizu teases new Ubuntu device for MWC 2016

            Chinese smartphone manufacture Meizu will likely unveil a new Ubuntu-powered phone at the Mobile World Congress next week. The company recently released a teaser that suggests the same, although it doesn’t reveal anything specific about the device.

          • Meizu Might Unveil a New Ubuntu Phone Device at MWC 2016

            Meizu, the popular Chinese consumer electronics company, which most Ubuntu users better know for its awesome Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition smartphone, has teased us earlier on Twitter with what it would appear to be the launch of a new device.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • A Selection of Talks from FOSDEM 2016

      It’s that time of the year where I go to FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting). The keynotes and the maintracks are very good, with good presentations and contents.

    • Tech experts guide workshop on open source software

      “The potential of open-source software is huge. For instance, a lot of people in our country cannot afford to purchase MS Office because they are very expensive. OSS can be a boon to people in software development and even in the field of education in general,” said Lalit Kathpalia, director of Symbiosis Institute of Computer Science and Research (SICSR), which organised the seminar along with the Pune Linux Users Group.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

  • Education

    • Open source is now ready to compete with Mathematica for use in the classroom

      When I think about what makes SageMath different, one of the most fundamental things is that it was created by people who use it every day. It was created by people doing research math, by people teaching math at universities, and by computer programmers and engineers using it for research. It was created by people who really understand computational problems because we live them. We understand the needs of math research, teaching courses, and managing an open source project that users can contribute to and customize to work for their own unique needs.

    • The scarcity of college graduates with FOSS experience

      In the education track at SCALE 14x in Pasadena, Gina Likins spoke about the surprisingly difficult task of getting information about open-source development practices into undergraduate college classrooms. That scarcity makes it hard to find new college graduates who have experience with open source. Although the conventional wisdom is that open source “is everywhere,” the college computer-science (CS) or software-engineering (SE) classroom has proven to be a tough nut to crack—and may remain so for quite some time.

      Likins works on Red Hat’s University Outreach team—a group that does not do recruiting, she emphasized. Rather, the team travels to campuses around the United States and engages with teachers, administrators, and students about open source in the classroom. The surprise is how little open source one finds, at least in CS and SE degrees. Employers expect graduates to be familiar with open-source projects and tools (e.g., using Git, bug trackers, and so forth), she said, and incoming students report expecting to find it in the curriculum, but it remains a rarity.

  • BSD

    • Our 2016 Fundraising Campaign

      The OpenBSD Foundation needs your help to achieve our fundraising goal of $250,000 for 2016.

      Reaching this goal will ensure the continued health of the projects we support, will enable us to help them do more, and will avoid the distraction of financial emergencies that could spell the end of the projects.

      2015 was a good year for the foundation financially, with funding coming almost equally from corporate and community donations. While the total was down significantly after 2014′s blockbuster year, we again exceeded our goal.

      [...]

      If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Winning the copyleft fight

      Bradley Kuhn started off his linux.conf.au 2016 talk by stating a goal that, he hoped, he shared with the audience: a world where more (or most) software is free software. The community has one key strategy toward that goal: copyleft licensing. He was there to talk about whether that strategy is working, and what can be done to make it more effective; the picture he painted was not entirely rosy, but there is hope if software developers are willing to make some changes.

      Copyleft licensing is still an effective strategy, he said; that can be seen because we’ve had the chance to run a real-world parallel experiment — an opportunity that doesn’t come often. A lot of non-copyleft software has been written over the years; if proprietary forks of that software don’t exist, then it seems clear that there is no need for copyleft; we just have to look to see whether proprietary versions of non-copyleft software exist. But, he said, he has yet to find a non-trivial non-copyleft program that lacks proprietary forks; without copyleft, companies will indeed take free software and make it proprietary.

    • The Trouble With the TPP, Day 27: Source Code Disclosure Confusion

      Another Trouble with the TPP is its foray into the software industry. One of the more surprising provisions in the TPP’s e-commerce chapter was the inclusion of a restriction on mandated source code disclosure. Article 14.17 states:

      No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory.

    • I love Free Software Day 2016

      In the Free Software society we exchange a lot of criticism. We write bug reports, tell others how they can improve the software, ask them for new features, and generally are not shy about criticising others. There is nothing wrong about that. It helps us to constantly improve. But sometimes we forget to show the hardworking people behind the software our appreciation. We should not underestimate the power of a simple “thank you” to motivate Free Software contributors in their important work for society. The 14th of February (a Sunday this year) is the ideal day to do that.

  • Programming

    • Why I am not touching node.js [Ed: from Ferrari]

      Dear node.js/node-webkit people, what’s the matter with you?

      I wanted to try out some stuff that requires node-webkit. So I try to use npm to download, build and install it, like CPAN would do.

      But then I see that the nodewebkit package is just a stub that downloads a 37MB file (using HTTP without TLS) containing pre-compiled binaries. Are you guys out of your minds?

      This is enough for me to never again get close to node.js and friends. I had already heard some awful stories, but this is just insane.

    • The next Generation of Code Hosting Platforms

      The last few weeks there has been a lot of rumors about GitHub. GitHub is a code hosting platform which tries to make it as easy as possible to develop software and collaborate with people. The main achievement from GitHub is probably to moved the social part of software development to a complete new level. As more and more Free Software initiatives started using GitHub it became really easy to contribute a bug fix or a new feature to the 3rd party library or application you use. With a few clicks you can create a fork, add your changes and send them back to the original project as a pull request. You don’t need to create a new account, don’t need to learn the tools used by the project, etc. Everybody is on the same platform and you can contribute immediately. In many cases this improves the collaboration between projects a lot. Also the ability to mention the developer of other projects easily in your pull request or issue improved the social interactions between developers and makes collaboration across different projects the default.

    • Choose GitLab for your next open source project

      GitLab.com is a competitor of GIthub. It’s a service provider for git-based source code repositories that offers much more than it’s bigger brother. In this post I will try to convince you to try it out for your next project.

      GitLab is not only a simple git hosting; its features impact the whole development process, the way of contributing to a project, executing and running tests, protecting source code from changes, more and more.

    • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.

      Every line of code written comes at a price: maintenance. To avoid paying for a lot of code, we build reusable software. The problem with code re-use is that it gets in the way of changing your mind later on.

      The more consumers of an API you have, the more code you must rewrite to introduce changes. Similarly, the more you rely on an third-party api, the more you suffer when it changes. Managing how the code fits together, or which parts depend on others, is a significant problem in large scale systems, and it gets harder as your project grows older.

Leftovers

  • Billion-dollar mistake: How inferior IT killed Target Canada

    Additionally, the idea of trying to open an entire nation of stores, rather than opening them incrementally, was bound to fail. Scaling everything at once doesn’t allow for flaws to be discovered and mediated, but instead leads to cascading failures like the ones that overtook Target Canada’s supply chain.

  • Science

  • Data Loss

    • Vellum: UK’s last producer of calf-skin parchment fights on after losing Parliament’s business

      In the company’s original office, with its 1855 safe, overlooked by a photograph of the firm’s founding father, the general manager of parchment and vellum makers William Cowley receives a steady stream of phone calls from sympathisers and customers.

      Paul Wright tells them how parchment and vellum are “the earliest writing materials, in use since man stepped out of a cave, wrapped some skins round a few sticks to make a tepee, and started scribbling on his tent walls”. He added: “All of humankind’s history is on parchment and vellum. Magna Carta was written on parchment. The Dead Sea Scrolls: parchment, in 435BC.”

    • Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Photos

      The Picasa desktop app will continue to function, but after March 15th, you shouldn’t expect any more updates. It also sounds like the download link will be going away, so you might want to also keep the install file stashed somewhere safe.

    • Google Is Shutting Down Picasa On May 1, 2016

      Google has finally decided to kill Picasa Web albums on May 1, 2016. This step was expected by many as it doesn’t make sense investing time and resources in a product similar to Google Photos.

    • Changing your iPhone settings to this date will kill it

      Don’t try this at home. Changing the date on recent models of the iPhone to January 1 1970 will render it completely useless and unable to reboot.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Jeremy Hunt ‘misrepresenting’ data on weekend death rates at NHS hospitals, says research surgeon

      A doctor who was part of a study on links between staffing and deaths in the NHS has accused the Government of “continually misrepresenting” the findings to support its push to change junior contracts.

      Dr Peter Holt, a vascular surgeon at St George’s University of London, said he had written to Jeremy Hunt, the Health Select Committee and shadow Health Secretary Heidi Alexander raising his objection.

      In a post on the Junior Doctors contract forum Facebook group, he wrote that the research published in December “could never have shown that higher staffing on weekends reduced mortality”.

    • The “tough nerd” owns this calamity: Rick Snyder’s anti-government, authoritarian ideology has been nothing but bad news for Flint

      Snyder has since won two general elections. As the world now knows, turning our state government over to a business executive who never held public office before hasn’t turned out so well. The “tough nerd” is the man who presided over a colossal, avoidable and entirely man-made public health disaster. For more than a year, more than 100,000 citizens of Flint have been exposed to a toxic water supply, laced with lead and other contaminants.

      Eight thousand children under the age of 5 who live in the city are most at risk; even at low levels, exposure to lead can cause irreversible damage to their brains. That translates, over time, into reduced intellectual capacity and higher incidence of multiple problems: attention deficit disorder, hypertension, aggressive and impulsive behavior – eventually, according to some researchers, higher rates of violent crime.

      Lead poisoning is no picnic for adults. The substance is a neurotoxin, linked to anemia, brain damage, kidney failure and reproductive disorders for both genders.

      This scandal has bodies, too. There’s been a spike in cases of Legionnaires’ disease – including 10 deaths – in and around Flint since the city’s water troubles began, nearly two years ago. The syndrome can be transmitted through mist or vapor from a contaminated water supply. High-ranking state officials knew about the outbreak in March of 2015, but Snyder didn’t say anything publicly until January 2016. “We can’t conclude the increase is related to the water switch in Flint,” said a state health department spokesperson on Feb. 3, “nor can we rule out a possible association.”

      Trust me: Nobody in Flint now trusts a word state officials have to say about water quality.

    • Flint water crisis: governor’s aides knew of issues within weeks, records suggest

      Among 21,000 documents released by Michigan’s governor one shows officials due to discuss Flint ‘water issues’ in June 2014, within weeks of supply switch

    • Flint: The Legionnaires Will Be What Brings Criminal Charges

      In my discussions about Flint’s water crisis, I keep pointing out that Rick Snyder was largely just making a show of responding until the US Attorney revealed it had started an investigation on January 5.

      The Detroit News has an utterly damning report today about the part of the story that gets less national attention: local and state officials started discussing an outbreak of Legionnaires disease back in October 2014, and national experts offered help as early as March 2015, but the state did not accept assistance offered by both the EPA and CDC until January.

    • Detroit has highest number of abandoned homes, Flint second, website reports

      Flint, the Michigan city that is struggling with a public health crisis involving its water supply, has another issue that is threatening its future: abandoned homes, the Huffington Post reports.

      Flint had the highest rate of vacancy in February at 7.5 percent, according to a report released by RealtyTrac.

      “The real estate data company broke down the data by individual city for The Huffington Post, revealing a more extreme picture of abandonment: 9,800 homes are empty in Flint, 16.5 percent of all residential properties. At the city level, Detroit had the highest vacancy rate, with 53,000 empty houses, nearly one in five. Nationally, close to one of every 63 residential properties that RealtyTrac analyzed are vacant.”

    • Flint’s problems didn’t start with water

      A third of the property in the city of Flint is vacant.

      That’s according to the Genesee County Land Bank, the organization charged with pushing back against the encroaching wave of blight that touches nearly every neighborhood in this struggling city — of 56,000 parcels in Flint, about 20,000 are empty or blighted.

      And it’s going to get worse.

  • Security

    • Fysbis: The Linux Backdoor Used by Russian Hackers

      Fysbis (or Linux.BackDoor.Fysbis) is a new malware family that targets Linux machines, on which it sets up a backdoor that allows the malware’s author to spy on victims and carry out further attacks.

    • Russian Hackers Spying On Your Linux PC Using Sophisticated Malware “Fysbis”

      A new malware family known as Fysbis (or Linux.BackDoor.Fysbis) is aiming Linux machines by setting up a backdoor that allows the malware’s author to snoop on victims and perform further attacks.

    • Warning: Bug in Adobe Creative Cloud deletes Mac user data without warning

      Adobe Systems has stopped distributing a recently issued update to its Creative Cloud graphics service amid reports a Mac version can delete important user data without warning or permission.

      The deletions happen whenever Mac users log in to the Adobe service after the update has been installed, according to officials from Backblaze, a data backup service whose users are being disproportionately inconvenienced by the bug. Upon sign in, a script activated by Creative Cloud deletes the contents in the alphabetically first folder in a Mac’s root directory. Backblaze users are being especially hit by the bug because the backup service relies on data stored in a hidden root folder called .bzvol. Because the folder is the alphabetically top-most hidden folder at the root of so many users’ drives, they are affected more than users of many other software packages.

      “This caused a lot of our customers to freak out,” Backblaze Marketing Manager Yev Pusin wrote in an e-mail. “The reason we saw a huge uptick from our customers is because Backblaze’s .bzvol is higher up the alphabet. We tested it again by creating a hidden file with an ‘.a’ name, and the files inside were removed as well.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • U.S. Supported Shia Militias in Iraq Lead Ethnic Cleansing

      Oh, yes, and also civil war. Here’s a preview of what to expect in Iraq after ISIS is mostly run out of the country.

      Set the scene: the country formerly known as Iraq was basically an steaming pile of ethnic/religious tension in 2003 when the U.S. invaded. It was divided among three broad groups we didn’t seem to know much about then, but damn well do now: Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. The Kurds, who always wanted to be independent, like from nearly the time of the dinosaurs always, saw their opportunity and broke away and are now essentially their own country. The Sunnis and Shia both wanted the same land and resources and freaking hate each other, and so have been fighting one another since 2003 when the post-U.S. invasion chaos unleashed them.

    • “Where to Invade Next” Is the Most Subversive Movie Michael Moore Has Ever Made

      I CAN’T CLAIM this is a neutral review of Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore’s latest movie. Beyond the fact that I worked for Moore for six years, including on his previous documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, I may literally owe my life to the high-quality, zero-deductible health insurance he provides employees.

      What I’ve lost in objectivity, I’ve gained in knowledge of Moore’s career. I even know his darkest, most closely guarded secret: the original name of the 1970s alternative newspaper he started in Flint, Michigan. So I can say this for sure: Where to Invade Next is the most profoundly subversive thing he’s ever done. It’s so sneaky that you may not even notice exactly what it’s subverting.

    • Deconstructing America’s ‘Deep State’

      Americans perceive what has happened to their democratic Republic only dimly, tricked by rightists who call all collective government actions bad and by neoliberals who make “markets” a new-age god. But ex-congressional budget official Mike Lofgren shows how this “Deep State” really works, writes Chuck Spinney.

    • Long live Empire!

      Indians don’t care whether the statue of Queen Victoria stays put or is consigned to a junkyard. Many agree with Ferguson that the British Empire had some plus points.

    • Hillary’s Admission Diplomacy Couldn’t Get Pakistan To Hand Over Bin Laden

      In last night’s debate, Sanders responded — after talking about what good friends he is with the woman who just claimed he had supported regime change — that he had supported more democracy in Libya, not regime change.

    • The anti-US military base struggle in Okinawa, Japan

      Kamoshita and Aihara at their talk in London on 1 February jointly organised and hosted by Voices for Creative Non-Violence UK (VCNV), Nipponzan Myohoji and SOAS CND Society. Native Nomad Pictures Ltd./ Jason Verney. All rights reserved.Not many people outside Japan have even heard of the place called Okinawa, a semi-tropical archipelago of numerous islands with unique and invaluable biodiversity situated in the East China Sea – let alone have any knowledge of its modern history, dominated by the sequence of invasion, colonisation, war and militarisation.

    • ‘ISIS militants shave beards, dress as women to escape Ramadi’

      has arrested a group of ISIS fighters when they tried to escape from the fallen city of Ramadi after shaving their beards and dressing up as women.

      “The terrorists had shaved their beards and dressed as women in a bid to fool our forces and escape the liberated city of Ramadi. However, they were all arrested before escaping the city,” the Iraqi security command was quoted as saying by ARA News.

      The Iraqi army announced on Tuesday the “full liberation” of Ramadi city, capital of Anbar province, from ISIS militants.

    • The Neoconservatives Are Brewing A Wider War In Syria

      Their invasion plan frustrated, the neoconservatives sent the jihadists they had used to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya to overthrow Assad. Initially known as ISIS, then ISIL, then the Islamist State, and now Daesh, a term that can be interpreted as an insult. Perhaps the intention of the name changes is to keep the Western public thoroughly confused about who is who and what is what.

    • Democrats Use Debate To Embrace History’s Warmongers

      With some important exceptions, such as the issue of regime change, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s foreign policies were largely on the same page, as they have been throughout the campaign. Sanders joined in with the prevailing fear of Russia, praising NATO’s recent provocative amassing of troops along Russia’s border, its largest deployment since the Cold War. The candidates then went on to separately embrace two of history’s worst war mongers.

      Clinton went first. After Sanders criticized her earlier embrace of her predecessor Henry Kissinger, calling him “one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country,” Clinton doubled down, arguing that whatever complaints one may have of Kissinger, “his opening up of China and his ongoing relationships with the leaders of China is an incredibly useful relationship.”

      Clinton’s earlier mention of Kissinger wasn’t just name-dropping. She appears to genuinely view him as a role model while serving as Secretary of State.

    • The 10 most ghoulish quotes of Henry Kissinger’s gruesome career

      Henry Kissinger’s quote released by Wikileaks, “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer,” likely brought a smile to his legions of elite media, government, corporate and high society admirers. Oh that Henry! That rapier wit! That trademark insouciance! It is unlikely, however, that the descendants of his more than 6 million victims in Indochina, and Americans of conscience appalled by his murder of non-Americans, will share in the amusement. His illegal and unconstitutional actions had real-world consequences: the ruined lives of millions of Indochinese innocents in a new form of secret, automated U.S. executive warfare. (Read Branfman’s extended related essay on Kissinger.)

    • Sanders proudly declaring “Kissinger is not my friend” totally destroys notion that Clinton’s better on foreign policy

      “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger,” Bernie Sanders declared in the Milwaukee presidential debate Thursday night.

      “Where the secretary and I have a very profound difference,” Sanders explained, “in her book and in this last debate, she talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger. Now, I find it rather amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”

      These are some of the most important words Sanders has ever uttered about foreign policy. And they show he is appreciably better on the issue than Hillary Clinton, in all the ways that matter.

      The historical facts make it clear that Sanders is absolutely correct; Kissinger was, hands down, one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of the U.S.

    • Should Henry Kissinger Mentor a Presidential Candidate?

      At the February 11 Democratic Debate, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had a spirited exchange about an unlikely topic: the 92-year old former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Sanders berated Clinton for saying that she appreciated the foreign policy mentoring she got from Henry Kissinger. “I happen to believe,” said Sanders, “that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”

      In one of Sanders’ rare outbursts of enmity, he added, “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some three million innocent people, was one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Coal mining has flattened Appalachia by 40%: Scientists reveal dramatic extent of damage done by mountaintop removal

      For more than forty years, mining companies have been destroying entire mountain peaks in West Virginia, Kentucky and other areas of Central Appalachia.

      The technique, known as mountaintop mining, practice provides much-needed jobs and the steady supply of coal that America relies on for more than half of its electricity needs.

      But residents say they are paying a high price, with the practice destroying forests, polluting streams and flooding communities – and now a new study has backed up their claims.

      Scientists have found mountaintop coal mining has made parts of Central Appalachia 40 per cent flatter than they were before excavation.

  • Finance

    • Watch Carrier Workers Find Out Their Jobs Are Moving to Mexico

      Workers at a Carrier Air Conditioner plant in Indianapolis were summoned to a group assembly this week to be told their jobs would soon be moving to Monterrey, Mexico. In all, 1,400 jobs are expected to be lost.

      [...]

      “Now the promise of America has always been you work hard, you do your job, you help your company be profitable and then in return, you hope to have a decent retirement,” he said. “So how do we tell workers who have put their whole heart and soul into a company, who have provided them with over $6.1 billion in sales, that it is not enough? I mean, the reason folks are here is because there has always been a promise: If you work hard, the company in return will stand up and do right by you. So, how is doing right having $6.1 billion in earnings and shipping 2,100 Indiana jobs off to Mexico?”

      Yellen, who has come under fire for rate hikes many fear will undermine the unemployment situation, replied: “This is a miserable and burdensome situation that many households have faced.”

    • Hillary Is a High-Ranking Member of the DC Power Elite — and That’s Why She Can’t Comprehend Bernie’s Revolution

      Let me figure this out. Last year, the Clintons couldn’t believe their good fortune. They were going to face a “democratic socialist” from the marginal state of Vermont and cruise to victory. It would be a romp, with Hillary winning the primaries and then going full mainstream against a reactionary, out of touch Republican opponent on the way to the White House.

      As many commentators are saying now, a serious miscalculation was at the heart of Hillary’s plan. Clinton, Cruz, Bush, Rubio and others are all part of the wealthy elite. Although Trump is as well, he is channeling the anger of the working class American. Bernie Sanders also gets it. He knows what happened to the American dream.

      Hillary Clinton thinks, in her gut, that America is a prosperous country, and that the policies that led to our prosperity should simply be continued, that they work. But this hasn’t been true since the 1970’s, back when America was the world’s economic powerhouse, with a manufacturing base that was the envy of the world, highly paid unionized workers and a booming housing market.

    • John Kasich and the Clintons Collaborated on Law That Helped Double Extreme Poverty

      Republican presidential candidate John Kasich has promoted himself both as a friend of the working poor and as a foe of Hillary Clinton, but as House Budget Committee chairman in the 1990s, he worked with the Clintons to roll back welfare programs, helping double extreme poverty in America.

      In 1996, the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans worked hand in hand to pass what they called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, colloquially known as “welfare reform.”

      The legislation famously “ended welfare as we know it,” replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The newly-created TANF placed a time limit on how long the federal government would extend financial assistance to poor families.

    • 7 Reasons I’m Not On Board With Uber

      It’s common practice in the tech world to rush your product to market, picking up the pieces as you go. This works fine when you’re in the business of selling ideas, or soft-serve ice cream delivery (somebody do this, please), or artisanal organic laundry service. Get it out there, apologize in advance that nothing’s perfect, do better next time. No harm done.

      Then there’s a product like Uber. Uber, if you’re just joining the conversation, is supposed to change the way city dwellers think about transportation. It’s supposed to put taxis out of business, or at least make them change their wicked ways.

    • Taxes on trial

      Demands for tax justice have resounded worldwide, with inequality at historic and unsustainable levels and increased attention towards the tax practices of major multinational corporations from Google to Starbucks.

      Governments must be able to change their tax systems to ensure multinationals pay their fair share and to ensure that critical public services are well funded. States must also be able to reconsider and withdraw tax breaks previously granted to multinationals if they no longer fit with national priorities.

      But their ability to do so, to change tax laws and pursue progressive tax policies, is limited, thanks to trade and investments agreements. In rapidly developing ‘corporate courts’, formally known as investor-state dispute settlement system (or ISDS), foreign investors can sue states directly at international tribunals.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Donald Trump Blames George W. Bush for 9/11

      “I lost hundreds of friends, the World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush,” Trump said, while the crowd’s boos nearly drowned him out. “That is not safe, Marco, that is not safe,”

      Trump has made this claim before, but this time Bush’s brother Jeb pushed back. “This is a man who insults his way to the nomination,” he said. “I am sick and tired of him going after my family.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Congressional Black Caucus PAC Endorsement Approved By Board Awash in Lobbyists

      Ben Branch, the executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC told The Intercept that his group made the decision after a vote from its 20-member board. The board includes 11 lobbyists, seven elected officials, and two officials who work for the PAC. Branch confirmed that the lobbyists were involved in the endorsement, but would not go into detail about the process.

      Members of the CBC PAC board include Daron Watts, a lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, the makers of highly addictive opioid OxyContin; Mike Mckay and Chaka Burgess, both lobbyists for Navient, the student loan giant that was spun off of Sallie Mae; former Rep. Al Wynn, D-Md., a lobbyist who represents a range of clients, including work last year on behalf of Lorillard Tobacco, the makers of Newport cigarettes; and William A. Kirk, who lobbies for a cigar industry trade group on a range of tobacco regulations.

      And a significant percentage of the $7,000 raised this cycle by the CBC PAC was donated by white lobbyists, including Vic Fazio, who represents Philip Morris and served for years as a lobbyist to Corrections Corporation of America, and David Adams, a former Clinton aide who now lobbies for Wal-Mart, the largest gun distributor in America.

    • Why Brother Bernie Is Better for Black People Than Sister Hillary
    • Bernie Sanders is a Candidate for, Not of, Today’s Movements

      Yesterday, The Atlantic’s Eric Liu asked what it would take to move presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s ambitious proposals from “we’re gonna” to “we’ve done it,” outlining seven steps to bridge the gap. First among Liu’s recommendations is a call for a “Bernie’s 30” of progressive congressional Democrats to oust Republican incumbents, throwing the weight of the Sanders campaign’s small donor base into strategic races around the country.

    • ‘Bomb the Sh*t out of ‘Em’: Inside the Madness of a Donald Trump Rally

      After Roy Wood Jr., skipped out on a Donald Trump rally on Wednesday night’s “Daily Show,” I felt as if I had an itch left unscratched. So you can imagine how excited I was when another correspondent, Jordan Klepper, made the “the circus that is Donald Trump” the centerpiece of his profile on last night’s “Daily Show.” (And by some divine stroke of luck, Klepper ended up at the now-infamous rally at which Trump almost-kinda-sorta called Ted Cruz a “pussy.”)
      To build a contextual foundation, Klepper spoke to a Adam Realman (not to be confused with John Q. Sample), a Coney Island sideshow performer about the proper elements of a compelling circus act.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Why I don’t like smartphones

      They have led to massive centralization. Part of the “cloud” movement is probably driven by the fact that while smartphones have substantial computational resources, you can’t actually use them because of battery life. So instead the computation is done in the cloud, creating a dependency on a centralized entity.

      How many of these smartphone applications being sold would still work if their makers went bust? By comparison, there is much PC software no longer sold but which is still cherished and used.

    • For Analysts, Loving LinkedIn Was Wrong

      LinkedIn is unlikely to be the last company hit by a pitch, says Sanwal. Investors in private companies often base their valuations on publicly traded stocks like LinkedIn. With even Apple and Amazon.com being punished mightily for their recent quarterly disappointments, companies in the spotlight can’t afford many missteps, says SunTrust’s Peck. As for his own line of work, he says: “At the end of the day analysts need to rely on their research, not what the company says.”

    • How Google Searches Pretty Much Nailed the New Hampshire Primary

      Google’s ability to look into the future of political contests just notched another win: New Hampshire.

      Searches of presidential candidates conducted by Google users in New Hampshire on Feb. 9 corresponded closely with the voting results of the state’s primary. The top-searched Democratic candidate was Bernie Sanders, who won with 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, according to the Associated Press. He got 72 percent of the searches, according to Google, while Hillary Clinton got 28 percent of the queries and 38 percent of the vote.

    • Google isn’t your diary – stop trusting it with your secrets

      If you have a problem in the 21st century, the typical first port of call is Google. It doesn’t matter if it’s about your health or your embarrassing crush – the search engine will be there to answer your questions.

      My recent search history varies from ‘my iPhone won’t charge abroad’ to ‘do I have cystitis’? But that’s nothing compared to what I’d pour out to Google as a teenager. Back then, the search engine wasn’t just a substitute for rubbish PSHE lessons at school – it was the big sister I never had.

    • Four men—including a pair of pastors—sue Tacoma police over stingray documents

      The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state has sued the Tacoma Police Department (TPD) on behalf of four community leaders, claiming that TPD has not adequately responded to their public records requests concerning the use of cell-site simulators, or stingrays.

      The Thursday lawsuit comes nine months after Washington imposed a new warrant requirement for stingray use in the state and about 15 months after local Pierce County judges imposed stricter guidelines for their use.

      Stingrays are in use by both local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide. The devices determine a target phone’s location by spoofing or simulating a cell tower. Mobile phones in range of the stingray then connect to it and exchange data with the device as they would with a real cell tower. Once deployed, stingrays intercept data from the target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity—up to and including full calls and text messages. At times, police have falsely claimed that information gathered from a stingray has instead come from a confidential informant.

    • Austrians Need Constitutional Right to Pay in Cash, Mahrer Says

      Austrians should have the constitutional right to use cash to protect their privacy, Deputy Economy Minister Harald Mahrer said, as the European Union considers curbing the use of banknotes and coins.

      “We don’t want someone to be able to track digitally what we buy, eat and drink, what books we read and what movies we watch,” Mahrer said on Austrian public radio station Oe1. “We will fight everywhere against rules” including caps on cash purchases, he said.

    • New York Police Have Used Stingrays Widely, New Documents Show

      The NYPD has used cell-site simulators, commonly known as Stingrays, more than 1,000 times since 2008, according to documents turned over to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The documents represent the first time the department has acknowledged using the devices.

      The NYPD also disclosed that it does not get a warrant before using a Stingray, which sweeps up massive amounts of data. Instead, the police obtain a “pen register order” from a court, more typically used to collect call data for a specific phone. Those orders do not require the police to establish probable cause. Additionally, the NYPD has no written policy guidelines on the use of Stingrays.

    • Lawyers Speak Out About Massive Hack of Prisoners’ Phone Records

      Last fall, Bukowsky received an unexpected phone call related to McKim’s case. The call came from The Intercept, following our November 11, 2015, report on a massive hack of Securus Technologies, a Texas-based prison telecommunications company that does business with the Missouri Department of Corrections. As we reported at the time, The Intercept received a massive database of more than 70 million call records belonging to Securus and coming from prison facilities that used the company’s so-called Secure Call Platform. Leaked via SecureDrop by a hacker who was concerned that Securus might be violating prisoners’ rights, the call records span a 2 1/2-year period beginning in late 2011 (the year Securus won its contract with the Missouri DOC) and ending in the spring of 2014.

    • Apple: Dear judge, please tell us if gov’t can compel us to unlock an iPhone

      In a new letter, Apple has asked a judge to finally rule in a case where the government is trying to force the company to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7. Currently, United States Magistrate Judge James Orenstein has been sitting on the case for nearly three months.

      In the Friday letter, Apple attorney Marc Zwillinger says that ruling now is important, as the government plans to make similar requests of Apple in the future. Prosecutors have invoked the All Writs Act, an 18th-century federal law that simply allows courts to issue a writ (or order) that compels a person or company to do something. For some time now, prosecutors have turned to courts to try to force companies to help in situations where authorities are otherwise stymied.

    • At Berkeley, students learn ins and outs of NSA surveillance

      This spring, computer science lecturer Nicholas Weaver will give a class of UC Berkeley undergraduates a novel yet practical assignment: build a National Security Agency-style surveillance system.

    • House bill would kill state, local bills that aim to weaken smartphone crypto

      On Wednesday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) introduced a new bill in Congress that attempts to halt state-level efforts that would weaken encryption.

      The federal bill comes just weeks after two nearly identical state bills in New York state and California proposed to ban the sale of modern smartphones equipped with strong crypto that cannot be unlocked by the manufacturer. If the state bills are signed into law, current iPhone and Android phones would need to be substantially redesigned for those two states.

    • UK Privacy Campaigners Lose Hacking Case Against GCHQ

      Handed down by the Investigative Powers Tribunal (IPT), the ruling dismissed complaints from campaign group Privacy International. The group had teamed up with seven internet service providers to challenge GCHQ’s surveillance of phones and other electronic devices both within the U.K. and internationally.

      Privacy International said it was “disappointed” with the ruling, but said the case had raised public debate on some of the GCHQ’s most controversial practices.

    • GCHQ hacking does not violate the UK’s human rights laws, rules tribunal

      Hacking of smartphone, computer and network by the British security and intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is legal, says a security tribunal. The investigatory power tribunal (IPT) has recently ruled the computer network exploitation (CNE) technique, which might include remotely activating microphones and cameras on electronic devices without the owner’s knowledge, is legal.

  • Civil Rights

    • Justice Antonin Scalia dead

      There is likely to be significant pressure on the Senate, which is in Republican hands, to hold off on confirming anyone nominated by President Obama, who is in his last year in office.

    • Justice Scalia Unexpectedly Dies, Scrambling Balance Of U.S. Supreme Court

      Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at a West Texas ranch on Saturday. He was 79 years old. Scalia died in his sleep during a hunting trip, apparently of natural causes.

      The sudden death of Scalia, one of the Court’s most outspoken conservatives, potentially shifts the balance of the Supreme Court, currently 5-4 in favor of conservatives, setting up an enormous battle in the Republican-controlled Senate that will play out simultaneously with the presidential campaign.

    • Conservatives: GOP Senate Should Block Any Obama Selection For Supreme Court

      Scalia was part of a conservative bloc on the Supreme Court that regularly overturned progressive legislation and precedent, making any replacement a contested issue in both the Senate and the 2016 presidential election with major national implications.

    • Why Scalia’s Death Is a Huge Blow to the Right-Wing Agenda in Washington

      Justice Antonin Scalia is dead, and his passing is nothing less than a legal and political earthquake. It will have a huge impact, not only on the court’s present term but on the course of constitutional law.

      Beginning with his appointment to the high court in 1986, Scalia was the intellectual leader of what I and many other legal commentators have termed a conservative “judicial counterrevolution,” aimed at wresting control of the nation’s most powerful legal body from the legacy of the liberal jurists who rose to power in the 1950s and ’60s under the leadership of then-Chief Justice Earl Warren.

    • CNN Analyst: Potential SCOTUS Nominees “Have Impeccable Qualifications,” But GOP Doesn’t Want To Vote For “An Obama Nominee”
    • Iran says it is cracking down on Valentine’s Day celebrations and shops engaging in them will be guilty of a crime

      Iran says it is cracking down on Valentine’s Day celebrations and shops engaging in them will be guilty of a crime.

      Iranian news outlets reported the police directive Friday warning retailers against promoting “decadent Western culture through Valentine’s Day rituals.” Police informed Tehran’s coffee and ice cream shops trade union to avoid any gatherings in which boys and girls exchange Valentine’s Day gifts.

      The annual Feb. 14 homage to romance, which tradition says is named after an early Christian martyr, has become popular in recent years in Iran and other Middle East countries.

    • Amid Anti-Semitism Controversy, NRA’s Nugent Attacks His “Mentally Challenged” “Devil” Critics

      National Rifle Association (NRA) board member Ted Nugent participated in a softball interview to attack his critics as “mentally challenged” and “the devil” following outrage over his promotion of an anti-Semitic image.

      On February 8, Nugent posted an anti-Semitic image to his Facebook page alleging that Jews were behind a conspiracy to enact gun regulations. After being condemned by civil rights organization the Anti-Defamation League, Nugent doubled down by posting more inflammatory content, including an image of Jews being rounded up by Nazis alongside his comment “Soulless sheep to slaughter. Not me.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Republican Anti-Net Neutrality Crusade Advances in Congress

      The Republican crusade to sabotage federal net neutrality protections took a significant step forward on Thursday when a key House subcommittee approved a bill that could severely limit the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to police the nation’s largest cable and phone companies.

      Under the guise of prohibiting the FCC from regulating broadband internet prices, the legislation could ultimately kneecap the FCC’s authority over a variety of potentially abusive industry practices, according to open internet advocates.

      The bill, innocuously titled the “No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act,” is just the latest effort in a multi-pronged Republican campaign to undermine the FCC’s ability to protect net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • 82-Year-Old Great-Grandmother is a Pirate, Trolls Say

        People who’ve managed to live for more than eight decades should be enjoying a peaceful and uncomplicated existence but for UK-based Sky customer Sheila Drew things are not so straightforward. She’s being accused of being an Internet pirate – and has two letters and a £600 bill to prove it.

02.13.16

Links 13/2/2016: Debian 6.0 EOL

Posted in News Roundup at 12:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Pinterest open-sources its Teletraan tool for deploying code

    As promised last year when the company introduced it, Pinterest today announced that it has released its Teletraan tool for deploying source code on GitHub under an open source Apache license.

    “Teletraan is designed to do one thing, deploy code,” Pinterest software engineer Baogang Song wrote in a blog post. “Not only does it support critical features such as zero downtime deploy, rollback, staging and continuous deploy, but it also has convenient features, such as displaying commit details, comparing different deploys, notifying deploy state changes through either email or chat room, displaying OpenTSDB metrics and more.”

  • Split Emerges in Open Source MANO Efforts

    A broad attempt to create a single open source effort around managing and orchestrating NFV is now bifurcating into two separate groups, based on irreconcilable views of how to best standardize the MANO going forward.

  • Events

    • Share your love for free software

      Yes, we love Free Software and this readily means that we love technology, people, social equanimity, and the various meanings one may take on for the word “freedom”. We care about it and we all want to bear witness of the growth and consolidation of new projects, and the progress of elder ones into full-fledged solutions driven by healthy and thriving communities. Free Software communities are inherently diverse and put together people with different motivations, expectations, and interests. Some are there to make friends and advance their technical and social skills, while others want to pursue the dream of an open world or even have Free Software as their daily paid job. In spite of such a diversity, one thing unite all of us in this Free Software odyssey: we love what we do.

    • Encryption: probably better than a box of chocolates

      This is a fun activity, but it can also make a difference. The right to encrypt is endangered around the world, with governments threatening our security and freedom by demanding legal or technological crippling of encryption. Resist with the power of love — encrypt with your valentine, and tell the world!

      And as we’ve discussed at length, free software is necessary for privacy online. Because nonfree software’s code can’t be audited publicly, we can never trust it to be free of back doors inserted by accident or by design. We’re thankful to all the hardworking free software developers who give us a fighting chance at digital privacy. It goes without saying, but we do love FS.

    • Sharing the free software love #ilovefs

      I like to think of every day on Opensource.com as I love Free Software Day, but we couldn’t miss celebrating the official I love Free Software Day 2016, too. Granted, the official day to say “thank you” is on February 14th, so we’re showing our love a little early to make sure you don’t miss it.

    • OpenStack Summit Austin 2016 Presentation Votes (ends Feb. 17th, 2016)

      Open voting is available for all session submissions until Wednesday, Feb 17, 2016 at 11:59PM PST. This is a great way for the community to decide what they want to hear.

      I have submitted a handful of sessions which I hope will be voted for. Below are some short summary’s and links to their voting pages.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 44.0.2 Arrives for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X

        Mozilla launched a second update for the Firefox 44.0 branch, but this is a smaller release with just a couple of smaller fixes, albeit the security issue is quite important.

      • Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 to Finally Bring GTK3 Integration for Linux, Sort Of

        Earlier today, Mozilla has come out with the sixth point release of the stable 38.0 branch of its Thunderbird e-mail, news, and chat client, fixing a few minor issues reported by users since the 38.5.x series.

      • Make your own Firefox OS TV

        Mozilla may not be actively developing Firefox OS for smartphones anymore… but the company is still pushing the operating system as an option for smart TVs and Internet-of Things products.

        Don’t want to spend money on a TV that comes with Firefox OS? You can build your own Firefox-based smart TV device… sort of.

      • Mozilla refocuses Firefox OS on connected devices

        One by one, the promising new smartphone operating systems, which hoped to chip away at the Android/iOS duopoly, are admitting defeat and refocusing on the less entrenched world of wearables and the Internet of Things. Mozilla has joined that sad procession, in the wake of Samsung Tizen, webOS and Baidu Cloud OS, and perhaps just ahead of Windows Phone, to judge by that platform’s increasingly tiny showing in Microsoft’s results.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • Feedback on teaching open source usability

      I was pleased that ten students signed up for the elective. This may seem small, but it is a significant number for a campus of some 1,900 students and a small computer science department. The same number of students also signed up for other electives that semester, including a course on databases. I organized the class similarly to the usability projects I mentor for Outreachy. Over thirteen weeks, students learned about open source software and usability testing. Most weeks included two assignments: summarizing several assigned articles, and exercising their knowledge of that week’s topic. Later in the semester, students moderated two in-person usability tests; the second was their final project.

      At the end of each semester, students responded to a course evaluation, called the Student Rating of Teaching. The evaluation is totally anonymous. I don’t know which students made which comments, or indeed which students chose to respond to the survey.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Swift’s Benchmarking Suite is Now Open Source [Ed: to help Apple lock-in]

      Apple has open sourced Swift’s benchmarking suite, a key piece in tracking Swift performance and catching performance regressions when adding new features to the language.

      Swift’s benchmarking suite is a collection of Swift source files that implement test suites and benchmarking helper functions, plus a number of Python scripts that implement a test harness and facilities for metrics comparison.

  • Funding

    • Faking Open, Debian Influence, Da Linux

      Matt Asay today said that there is no money in Open Source software because the “open source companies” that get rich don’t do it with Open Source software. The big story today must be the Russian government’s plan to dump Windows for Linux. Debian 6.0 will reach its end-of-life at the end of the month and Tecmint.com recently looked at the influence Debian has had on the Linux community. A new website helps you decide what you can do for Fedora and I Love Free Software day approacheth. New openSUSE Board member Bryan Lunduke sees some problems in KDE Neonland and Swapnil Bhartiya shared his picks for best distros of 2016.

    • Face it: There’s no money in open source [Ed: says Asay from Adobe]

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Open-Source Textbooks Gain Support to Improve College Affordability

        Universities and state governments are supporting open-source textbooks as a way to make college more affordable.

        The open textbooks are produced with publicly available material. They are issued to students for free or a small fraction of the hundreds of dollars they typically spend annually on books.

      • OUR VIEW: Making college texts — if not college — affordable

        We’re all familiar with the high cost of a college education: estimated expenses for a year at the University of Connecticut, including on-campus housing, is, according to the school’s website, $25,802. So that’s a little over $100,000 for a four-year education. And that’s only the beginning.

        If a student takes four courses each semester and each requires one or more textbooks, the annual cost for books and supplies could be as much as $1,200, according to the College Board. Of course, if more than one book is required or if the student selects one of the high-cost majors, it could be far more. The standard textbook for Fundamentals of General Chemistry I at the University of Connecticut has a list price of $303.

      • Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge

        A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles – almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published – freely available online. And she’s now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest publishers.

        For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court – a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

      • WHO Full Speed On Zika R&D, Two Candidate Vaccines Emerging; Funders, Journals Commit To Sharing Of Data

    • Open Hardware

      • $99 CowTech Ciclop Open Source 3D Scanner Hits Kickstarter (video)

        So if you think CowTech Ciclop 3D scanner is something you could benefit from, visit the Kickstarter website now to make a pledge and help this awesome $99 open soruce 3D scanner become a reality.

      • Faircap Project: Open source 3D printed water filter aims to solve global crisis for just $1

        The Faircap Project is a collaborative, clean water initiative, whose aim is to create an affordable open source 3D printed water filtration device that could provide clean, safe, drinkable water to those in need. The startup has already created a working prototype, but is now calling on engineers, designers, microbiologists, or anyone interested in helping to pitch their own open source ideas and make the Faircap filter as low cost and accessible as possible.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Is the vinyl LP an open music format?

      This is my first article for a new column here on Opensource.com about music from an open point of view. Some things I won’t be doing: I won’t be concentrating solely on music released under an open license. I won’t be writing (much) about making one’s own music. I won’t be writing (much) about music theory or professional matters, or probably really very much of anything of interest to professional musicians.

      I will write about music I encounter that interests me for one reason or another. I’ll tell you about how to enjoy music in an open environment, like on a Linux-based laptop, desktop, or server. I’ll share hardware I’ve purchased or tried out that works well, and some that doesn’t, in an open environment. I promise to write about good places to buy music that are Linux-friendly (that is, those that don’t require installing downloaders that only run on other operating systems). And I will point out some other websites, and occasionally print media, that increases my enjoyment of music.

Leftovers

02.12.16

Links 12/2/2016: Russian’s Government With GNU/Linux, India’s Wants FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Facebook-squishing Indian regulator’s next move: Open source code

    Fresh from squashing Facebook’s effort to grab the enormous India market, the sub-continent’s regulator has another goal in mind: open source software.

    Speaking at the India Digital Summit this week, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Ram Sewak Sharma, told attendees: “No service can be hostage to a particular technology.”

    He then went on to explicitly support the broader adoption of open source software, arguing that it would help the booming digital economy in India from being locked into buying from a specific company and enable a broader and more equitable internet for all.

    “Any technology that is deployed for connectivity must be interoperable and the open standards framework and the principles it entails are extremely important,” he argued.

  • India Asks Tech Companies To Use Open Source Technologies For Connectivity

    A day after taking a tough stand on Facebook’s Free Basics and banning it from India, TRAI (Telecom Regulator Authority of India) has also given a cue to the tech giants like Facebook and Google over the use of open source software. TRAI has hinted to these companies that their connectivity framework would only be accepted in India if they followed an open source approach.

    [...]

    Ram Sewak Sharma, who is the current chairman of TRAI, has clearly put a stress on using open source technology over a company specific product in making the internet reach to the remote areas. In a recent summit hosted by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, he said,
    “I don’t like to comment on a specific product. But India has adopted an open source policy and open API [application program interface] policy. The whole objective is that there should not be a situation of a vendor lock-in.”

  • Events

    • Vote for Presentations – OpenStack Summit Austin 2016

      The first OpenStack Summit this year will take place in Austin (TX, US) from April 25-29, 2016. The “Call for Speakers” period ended some days ago and now the community voting for presentation started and will end 17th February, 11:59 PST (18th February 7:59 UTC / 08:59 CEST).

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • 6 reasons to blog in Markdown with Jekyll

      GitHub pages is a free offering that can host your Jekyll blog for free. It also takes care of generating static HTML files from your Markdown text files, so there’s no need to install anything on your computer. You can also use Jekyll with your own domain name (if you have one).

    • Bluehost Develops Open Source Script To Update Two Million WordPress Sites

      The cloud-based solutions provider’s custom script reduced WordPress-related technical issues by 18 percent.

    • What’s New in February ’16 in Open Source CMS

      By any measure, WordPress is the most popular content management system on the planet. But that distinction also makes it especially popular with hackers and attackers.

      Early this month Menifee, Calif.-based security company Sucuri reported a spike in WordPress infections, with a large number of sites getting injected with the same malicious scripts. Sucuri called it “a massive admedia/adverting iframe infection” characterized by the injection of encrypted code at the end of all legitimate .js files.

  • Education

    • UNICEF Seeks World-Changing Open Source Technologies

      United Nations to fund startups to develop open source tech to improve the lives of vulnerable children and civilians

    • UCLA just open-sourced a powerful new image-detection algorithm

      Image recognition has become increasingly critical in applications ranging from smartphones to driverless cars, and on Wednesday UCLA opened up to the public a new algorithm that promises big gains.

      The Phase Stretch Transform algorithm is a physics-inspired computational approach to processing images and information that can help computers “see” features of objects that aren’t visible using standard imaging techniques. It could be used to detect an LED lamp’s internal structure, for example — something that would be obscured to conventional techniques by the brightness of its light. It can also distinguish distant stars that would normally be invisible in astronomical images, UCLA said.

  • BSD

    • Lumina Desktop Getting Ready for FreeBSD 11.0

      Ken Moore, the lead developer for the BSD-based Lumina Desktop Environment, announced that another step towards the release of a full-fledged desktop environment for BSD variants (and Linux distros, for that matter) has been achieved with the release of version 0.8.8 yesterday.

      For those of you keeping score at home, the Lumina Desktop Environment — let’s just call it Lumina for short — is a lightweight, XDG-compliant, BSD-licensed desktop environment focusing on getting work done while minimizing system overhead. Specifically designed for PC-BSD and FreeBSD, it has also been ported to many other BSD variants and Linux distros. Lumina is based on the Qt graphical toolkit and the Fluxbox window manager, and uses a small number of X utilities for various tasks.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Liberty Eiffel wrapper for IUP toolkit

      Since a couple of months ago I’m working in a Liberty Eiffel wrapper to the IUP toolkit. IUP is a multi-platform toolkit for building graphical user interfaces. This is still under development, but I think the current state is enough to start playing with it. Here some screen shots:

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Science

    • It’s Official: Einstein’s Most Incredible Prediction Proved Right, Gravitational Waves Discovered

      Gravitational waves are ripples created in the curvature of spacetime. These waves propagate in the space travelling outward from the source. The theory of gravitational waves was predicted first by Albert Einstein in 1916 which was a part of of his theory of general relativity. Theoretically, gravitational waves transport energy as gravitational radiations.

    • Space debris: How dangerous is it to people on Earth?

      Over the past few months, people have captured footage of space debris burning up in our atmosphere. While certainly startling, the truth is, there’s been a lot of junk up there for a long time and so far no one has been hurt here on Earth.

      Since the first satellite went into orbit — the Soviet Union’s Sputnik, launched on Oct. 4, 1957 — we have steadily increased the amount of objects encircling our small planet.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Timeline: Flint’s Water Crisis

      This is a work in progress. Not all dates and events between the end of 2015 and current date have been added as of publication. This timeline will be updated periodically, as events unfold and as key information is revealed about Flint’s ongoing water crisis. Some information is incomplete or in need of validation. Links to sources will be added over time. If you have content you believe is relevant and should be added, please share in comments.

    • ‘Cases Are Sometimes Stuck in Limbo for a Very Long Time’
    • How National Media Failed Flint

      The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, in which thousands of residents have been exposed to everything from cancer-causing chemicals to lead in their drinking water, dates back nearly two years. But the unfolding story had received scant coverage from the national media until a month ago, when Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) declared a state of emergency for Flint.

      Why did it take so long for major national outlets to focus closely on the story, even as local outlets had been doggedly covering it for well over a year?

      In interviews with Media Matters, media observers and the journalists who have been covering the story in Michigan cite a wide range of factors, including continued newsroom cutbacks, the complexities of a story that combines government mismanagement with detailed science, and competition from the presidential primary campaign, breaking news events, and click-bait like celebrity gossip.

    • Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element

      When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege.

      Throughout the campaign, Giuliani embraced a theory of crime fighting called “broken windows,” popularized a decade earlier by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an influential article in The Atlantic. “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired,” they observed, “all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” So too, tolerance of small crimes would create a vicious cycle ending with entire neighborhoods turning into war zones. But if you cracked down on small crimes, bigger crimes would drop as well.

    • ‘This “Independent” Academic Is Promoting Public Policy Issues for a Private Corporation’

      Janine Jackson interviewed Carey Gillam on the conflicts of interest of food science experts for the February 5, 2016, CounterSpin.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Thursday
    • These Vigilante Hackers Aim To Hack 200,000 Routers To Make Them More Secure

      Remember the white hat hackers — The White Team — responsible for creating the Linux.Wifatch malware last October? The same hackers are now planning to take over Lizard Squad’s botnet of infected IoT devices in an attempt to shut down their operations.

    • Skimmers Hijack ATM Network Cables

      If you have ever walked up to an ATM to withdraw cash only to decide against it after noticing a telephone or ethernet cord snaking from behind the machine to a jack in the wall, your paranoia may not have been misplaced: ATM maker NCR is warning about skimming attacks that involve keypad overlays, hidden cameras and skimming devices plugged into the ATM network cables to intercept customer card data.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Airport workers seen with laptop used in Somalia in-flight jet blast

      Somali intelligence officials say two airport workers handled a laptop containing a bomb that later exploded in a passenger plane.

      In a video made public on Sunday by officials, one airport worker takes the laptop and hands it to another employee.

      The employees then hand it over to a man who was killed when the laptop explosion blew a hole in the plane’s fuselage, said Abdisalam Aato, a spokesman for the Somali Prime Minister.

      [...]

      Investigators believe the attack was orchestrated by Al-Shabaab, although they are not certain Borleh was a direct member of the group, according to the source. No group immediately claimed responsibility.

    • Techdirt Crowdsourcing: How Will The TSA Idiotically Respond To The Laptop Terror Bomb?

      The terrorism arms race marches on, apparently. You may have heard of the recent attack on a passenger plane taking off from Somalia. By all accounts, the attacker managed to get onto the plane with a laptop that contained a bomb, which he detonated during takeoff. The result? The bomber was sucked out of the hole he created in the plane and died, while a couple of other passengers were mildly wounded. The universe, it seems, is not without either a sense of justice or humor.

      Still, you absolutely know that this will create a typical shitstorm at the TSA. Security theater stops for nobody, after all, and this latest attempt is sure to put a focus on any computer devices passengers are bringing with them on flights. Laptops and tablets are already screened by the TSA, of course, but somehow this guy got on the plane with his bomb-filled notebook. Even though it happened outside the US (so not directly a TSA failing), it’s not difficult to expect that things are predictably and stupidly going to get more strict on the rest of us.

    • These Quakers Are Asking Tougher Questions Than Many in the Press

      For all the talk about this election revolving around national security and government spending, the AFSC group is the only one dedicated to asking candidates about President Barack Obama’s planned $1 trillion nuclear arms program, bloated military programs such as the Pentagon’s F-35, and how to diminish the influence of lobbying by military contractors. Activists trained with the group have also asked about fracking, ethanol subsidies, and other issues they say are clouded by the pervasive role of money in politics.

    • U.S. Allies Have No Interest in Anti-ISIS Coalition

      Over the course of a decade and a half of coalition warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials have frequently found themselves pleading and cajoling with the Europeans to contribute more, and they generally have responded with pledges to do just a little bit more. The pattern may be repeated in Brussels.

    • Israeli extremist detained for death threats against Palestinian MK

      Israeli police on Thursday detained a far-right Israeli extremist who reportedly threatened the life of Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset Ayman Odeh.

      The MK, member of the Joint List party, told Ma’an that the extremist was detained by Israeli police who carried out investigations into comments left by the Israeli on social media.

    • The researched-based responses to troublemaking MKs

      News from the Knesset in the last week raises myriad questions about democracy, and Israel Democracy Institute president Yohanan Plesner tries to provide answers.

    • Condemnation, not censorship

      Israel is not a merchant of corpses. Perhaps in the past Israel has traded the bodies of terrorists (or, worse, live enemy combatants) in exchange for the bodies of Israelis, but this policy was dangerous and wrong. The point of armed conflict is to take as take those who would hurt us out of the game. The dead, ours and theirs, are out of the game. Humanity obligates giving them to their families for a proper burial. This is true of the enemy’s dead and of our dead.

    • Syria civil war: Prospect of Saudi incursion raises fears of a conflict without end

      The first fateful steps have been taken for Saudi-led troops to enter Syria’s civil war, a move that has raised fears of powers across the region being drawn into a bloody conflict without end.

      Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Defence Minister and heir apparent to the throne, presented his country’s military plans to a summit organised by a US-led coalition on Syria at Nato headquarters in Brussels. Ashton Carter, the US Defence Secretary, reported afterwards that a “wide variety of things” had been discussed with the Saudis on the use of ground forces.

    • Anguish as North Korea Marches Into 1955

      We need Trident, they say, to deter rogue nuclear states like North Korea.

      Extraordinary, isn’t it.

      [...]

      Now they throw in Russia. In all the reams of analysis of Putin’s Russia, nobody has ever been crazy enough to argue that nuclear attack on the UK (or even conventional invasion of the UK) is something Putin would wish to do. Because to claim that would look absolutely stupid. Plainly the desire of Russia to attack with nuclear weapons is at absolute zero. Anybody writing otherwise would rightly be written off as crazed.

    • Hillary Clinton IS The Guardian

      Hillary Clinton is American, owned by financial interests to whom she is completely in thrall, a rabid neo-conservative warmonger, completely uncritical of Israel and focused for any claim to be progressive entirely on identity politics. Which is also a precise description of today’s Guardian newspaper. The once august and intellectual title is now a shrill cheerleader for far right Blairites and wealthy American feminists.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Branded a rapist for daring to be an NHS whistleblower: How brave surgeon sacked for exposing needless deaths was smeared as sex attacker by bosses

      A surgeon has revealed he was smeared by NHS bosses and left with his career in ruins after he spoke publicly about dangerous overcrowding at a hospital.

      Doctor Raj Mattu, who has been left with a £1.4million legal bill following the dispute, has warned against whistleblowing as he revealed the shocking practices he reported at Walsgrave hospital in Coventry still haven’t been investigated.

      In this interview, the 56-year-old describes the ‘terrible’ and ‘humiliating’ experience of being labelled a sexual pervert by bosses desperate to quash his claims as he reveals his life will never be the same.

    • California Department of Justice Agrees to Stop Skirting Open Meeting Rules

      The California Department of Justice (CADOJ) is ending its practice of holding meetings in ways that impede the public’s ability to meaningfully participate in oversight of the state’s sprawling network of police databases. The new reforms, announced in response to EFF advocacy, will allow greater opportunity for Californians to review and comment on policy changes that impact their privacy and civil liberties.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Satellites and Tide Stations, Working Together

      This is an illustration of the Jason-3, launched into orbit in January 2016. Measuring sea surface heights is a primary mission of the new satellite. The accuracy of these space-based sea surface measurements are validated by comparing them with real-time observations of water levels made by tide stations in the ocean.

  • Finance

    • Elizabeth Warren Catches Investment Advisors Fibbing

      Glass’s company and other are pouring millions of lobbying dollars into opposing the rule. President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers estimates that “conflicted” advice costs individual investors $17 billion a year in retirement savings.

    • TTIP: A locked room, no internet access, two hours, 300 pages and lots of typos

      A German MP has given an insight into the surreal restrictions imposed around the upcoming US-EU trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

      Katja Kipping has written a personal account of her visit to a special reading room at the German Ministry of Economics that was set up after Parliamentarians fought and won the right to see the text being negotiated on their behalf by bureaucrats.

      In it, she describes the extraordinary lengths that the German government has gone to in order to prevent any useful information on the trade deal being made public.

    • It Takes a Greek to Save Europa

      This past Tuesday, at the Volksbühne Theater in Berlin, Varoufakis launched a new project: the DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), whose aim is to ultimately transfer power from Europa’s unaccountable, fiercely authoritarian elite and distribute it – fairly – among European citizens.

    • Are Americans Too Insouciant To Survive? — Paul Craig Roberts

      Whether you agree with Thomas Frank’s answer or not, Americans do, on a regular basis, harm themselves by voting for people who are agents of vested interests diametrically opposed to the interests of American citizens.

      How is it possible, if Democrats are informed people, that half of them prefer Hillary Clinton? Between February 2001 and May 2015 Bill and Hillary collected $153 million in speaking fees. The fees averaged $210,795 per speech.

    • Uber-Unionist Deutsche Bank Tanks

      Deutsche Bank was the central pivot of the LIBOR fixing scandal. In the great banking crash it wrote off 92 billion dollars of junk assets that Folkerts-Landau had failed to notice was a liability. Today its share price has fallen even below the 2008 levels it reached after that write-off, and the German Finance Minister has just announced his full confidence in the bank and that there is nothing to worry about. Deutsche Bank shares have fallen 40% in a month.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Missing the Days When Candidates Pretended We Had No Big Problems

      If that’s your idea of the kind of problems you face, then resigning yourself to the “limits of the situation” makes sense. If, on the other hand, you’re in the large majority that’s gotten the short end of the stick on income inequality, if you have one of the working-class jobs that’s been subject to being shipped overseas, if your health insurance is unaffordable or nonexistent, if you’re part of a community that’s subject to being shot by police or driven to an early grave by despair—then maybe a little “epic social disruption” doesn’t sound so unappealing.

    • Sanders a Bourgeois Deviationist, Washington Post Declares

      Of course, that was last month, before Sanders nearly tied Hillary Clinton in Iowa and beat her by 22 percentage points in New Hampshire—which clearly has Milbank worried that maybe Democrats are insane enough to nominate a socialist, after all. So now Sanders’ problem isn’t that he’s too radical; it’s that he’s not radical enough.

    • An open letter to older women voting for Hillary, from a younger woman voting for Bernie

      Everything you’re telling us now goes against everything you’ve taught us before, everything you seemed to stand for when you were young. Asking women to vote for Hillary based on her gender rather than policy is sexist. Telling women they’ll to go to hell if they don’t vote for Hillary is evil. Telling women that they are only voting for Bernie to impress guys tells us you no longer respect women.

      We know the fight is uphill, but understand that this rhetoric makes you part of that uphill battle we are now fighting, part of the uphill battle that you fought, too. We understand the allure of a woman president after everything you’ve been through in your lifetime. But understand that based on the principles you’ve taught us, we know having a female presidency is less important than gaining true gender equality. Understand that we’re not willing to give up the values you’ve instilled in us for a trophy, even at your request.

    • Pro-Trump Alex Jones Threatens Violence Against Supporters Of “Inhuman, Parasitical Maggot,” “Hitler” Bernie Sanders

      Conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones, who is being courted by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, is smearing Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as “a dangerous, evil,” man comparable to Hitler and Lenin, and falsely claiming he wants to put people in “forced relocation” camps. Jones has also launched unhinged attacks against “stupid” and “self-propelled trash” Sanders supporters, suggesting they need to have their “jaws broken” and their “moron heads” slapped.

    • IRS Gives Up, Grants Karl Rove’s Dark Money Group “Social Welfare” Certification

      In the face of the Republican-led Congress’ hostility to the IRS clarifying the rules for nonprofit political activity, the tax agency has apparently given up.

      The IRS has granted nonprofit status to Karl Rove’s dark money political operation, Crossroads GPS, which for the past five years has pushed the legal envelope in order to influence elections but keep its donors secret.

      Formed in the wake of Citizens United, Crossroads GPS has been one of the biggest secretly-funded political players, raising and spending $330 million on election-related ads attacking Democratic candidates or praising Republicans, but without doing anything that might be described as advancing “social welfare.” Although the majority opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision endorsed disclosure of donors, in the five years following the decision, spending by secretly-funded 501(c)(4) nonprofits has exploded.

    • Biased Pluralism and the Defense of “Reality” in the Democratic Primary

      Last week, I pointed to a problem with Jonathan Chait’s defense of Hillary Clinton’s “pluralistic” approach to governance, noting that in an era of weak labor organization, such an approach leaves out the views of the great majority of working people, precisely the kinds of people Bernie Sanders is attracting.

      I didn’t think of it at the time, but since got reminded of an important paper by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, released in 2014. It used a dataset matching polling data to policy outcomes to test four theories for how our political system works: Majoritarian Democracy (meaning policies adopted reflect what most people want), Dominance by Economic Elites (meaning the rich get what they want), Majoritarian Pluralism (meaning interest groups, including those that represent the non-wealthy, get what they want), and Biased Pluralism (meaning interest groups that represent the views of the economic elite get what they want).

  • Censorship

    • Censorship rules at Croydon Council

      On Monday 25th January 2016, a decision was taken by Croydon Council to limit democratic scrutiny, to restrict the views of the people and to limit the voices of elected representatives. Did you notice?

    • Judge Changes Mind, Says James Woods Can Likely Unmask Guy Who Made Fun Of Him On Twitter

      As the lawsuit noted, Abe List had also mocked Woods in the past, such as calling him a “clown-boy.” Of course “clown-boy” is not something than a statement of fact and thus can’t be defamation. The real issue is whether or not saying “cocaine addict James Woods” is a statement of fact that is defamatory. Of course, considering that Woods is a public figure, this seemed like a really high bar to cross. With a public figure, the statements need to be made “with actual malice” or a “reckless disregard for the truth.” In other words, it needs to be a case where Abe List knew those things weren’t true, but said them anyway. That seems unlikely here. Oh yeah, and also, hyperbolic statements that are obviously hyperbole are not considered defamation, and this one seemed to qualify.

    • Don’t Trash Your Old Flash Drives, Send Them to North Korea
    • Your Outdated Flash Drive Could Help Fight North Korea’s Censorship
    • The mute button called self-censorship

      In his book The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom (2014), Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), writes, “Deluged with data, we are blind to the larger reality. Around the world new systems of control are taking hold. They are stifling the global conversation and impeding the development of policies and solutions based on an informed understanding of the local realities. Repression and violence against journalists is at record levels, and press freedom is in decline.”

    • Apple Rejects Game Based On Bible Story Due To Content Including Violence Against Children

      Apple has a long and annoying history of trying to keep the content within its app store as pure as the driven snow. To do this, Apple employs an arbitrary and downright stupid sense of morality. That’s how you end up with Apple banning a VR representation of the Ferguson shooting, for instance, despite the fact that it was non-graphic. Or that time the company killed off a Civil War simulation because the game contained historically accurate representations of the Confederate flag. Or when it removed an image-searching app from the store because, hey, somebody somewhere might use it to see naughty-bits.

    • Battling State Censorship In The Westport Independent

      Of course, as with any game, there are rules in place. Although the censorship bill has yet to be passed, the state will look disapprovingly upon stories which cite their apparent corruption and impropriety. In response, they’ll send strongly-worded letters to your paper, encouraging you to desist unless you’re prepared to face to the consequences.

    • Google Expands Right-to-Be-Forgotten Removals Under Europe Rules

      Google will take more steps to comply with Europe’s right-to-be-forgotten rule by removing links from all of its search websites across the globe, a person with knowledge of the matter said.

      Google, part of Alphabet Inc., is taking the steps to better embrace a landmark ruling in 2014 by the European Union’s top court, which granted the region’s citizens the right to ask Web-search engines to remove personal information about themselves. Implementation can be tricky, because of the different versions of search sites operating in different countries, leading to questions about how far Google must go to make sure that it doesn’t fun afoul of the right-to-be forgotten rule.

  • Privacy

    • The French data protection authority publicly issues formal notice to FACEBOOK to comply with the French Data Protection Act within three months

      The Chair of the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) issued formal notice to FACEBOOK to fairly collect data concerning the browsing activity of Internet users who do not have a FACEBOOK account. FACEBOOK must also provide account holders with the means to object to the compiling of their data for advertising purposes.

    • Open Letter to Věra Jourová: From Safe Harbor to Privacy Shield, Words in the Wind

      We will remain wary of the negotiation’s outcome. This landmark ruling of the ECJ repealing the Safe Harbor must not result in discarding our civil liberties. A watered-down agreement would most likely be repealed again by the Court and would have serious consequences for the confidence of both Europeans and European and American companies involved with the “Privacy Shield”. Europe’s credibility in the world is at stake, in an era of globalization driven by digital transformation.

    • Data Retention: Will the French Council of State Defy the ECJ?

      As the French Council of State is set to render a first decision on this burning issue this Friday1, Privacy International (PI) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) have submitted a third party intervention aiming to support the legal challenges brought by FDN, the FDN Federation and La Quadrature du Net. The goal: repeal the provisions enforcing the generalised retention of metadata in France and allow the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to play its role of guardian of fundamental rights.

    • NYPD Used Cell Phone Spying Tools Over 1,000 Times Since 2008: NYCLU

      The New York Police Department (NYPD) has used the covert cell phone spying devices known as Stingrays more than 1,000 times since 2008, including for the investigation of low-level crimes and typically without a warrant, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) revealed on Thursday.

    • NSA’s spy-on-Americans plan goes before judge, again

      U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has scheduled a status hearing for several of the ongoing cases naming the NSA – or the CIA – for allegedly violating the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.

      “As Judge Leon observed, these cases are at the ‘pinnacle of national importance,’” said Larry Klayman of Freedomwatch, who is a plaintiff in one case as well as a lawyer.

      “Mass surveillance of the citizenry cannot be permitted when it is likely based on reasons that go far beyond catching terrorists. Indeed, as Judge Leon found on two occasions in issuing his prior preliminary injunctions, Obama and his agents at the spy agencies have not been able to cite one instance when the unconstitutional mass surveillance caught even one terrorist.”

    • DC Federal Court To Hold Hearing On Status Of Three NSA Mass Surveillance Cases

      The Honorable Richard J. Leon will hold a hearing to discuss the status of three on-going cases against the NSA and the CIA from violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution through its various “programs” which have been spying on virtually all American citizens.

    • A How-to for Tech Firms: Doing the Right Thing on Privacy & Free Speech

      Good practices aren’t just the right thing to do, they’re good for the bottom line.

      Last year, the privacy and free speech mistakes of tech companies led to tons of embarrassing and costly stories. Often, these missteps would have been avoidable with good planning and processes in place, but many companies lack the resources to navigate this increasingly thorny terrain.

    • White House Executive Order on Privacy Falls Short

      This morning, the White House announced an Executive Order establishing a federal interagency privacy council composed of senior privacy officials from two dozen federal agencies. While seeming to offer some promise, however, the council has a limited mandate, and ultimately represents an overdue nod to privacy principles the administration has repeatedly abused in practice.

      If the Obama administration wants to support privacy, it can start by finally offering straight answers to Congress on surveillance and intelligence practices that offend privacy. Instead, Congress has legislated surveillance policy in the dark while enduring a long series of executive misrepresentations.

      Last week, mere days after an independent panel (notably including current U.S. intelligence officials) refuted recent FBI claims about encryption tools, Congress began examining surveillance powers set to expire next year in a closed hearing, enabling a familiar pattern of executive obfuscation and congressional confusion.

      As we wrote over two years ago, “It’s time for Congress to reassert its oversight role and begin a full-scale investigation into the [government's] surveillance and analytic activities….Congress cannot rely solely on mandating more reports from [intelligence agencies] as a solution.”

    • The NSA’s Credibility Takes Another Hit

      To be honest, I’m surprised the crypto community—especially overseas—is willing to cooperate with the NSA at all, given what we now know. They are plainly pretty obsessed with sneaking backdoors into both crypto standards and network devices. If the Snowden leaks didn’t destroy their credibility on this subject forever, I’m not sure what would.

    • Marsh recruits ex-GCHQ director for cyber role [Ed: Time for profit in the private sector]
    • Marsh brings in ex-GCHQ chief as cyber consultant
    • Marsh Appoints Lobban as Senior Adviser on Cyber Risk
    • Former spymaster to help fight City cyber crime
    • ‘Think harder’ about new GCHQ powers MPs and Peers tell Home Office [Ed: How the GCHQ's mouthpiece ('press') responded to outrage over GCHQ wishlist approved,]

      MPs and Peers are concerned that proposals to force communications companies to keep records on individuals internet activity for up to a year to allow GCHQ to catch terrorists and criminals are not properly thought through.

  • Civil Rights

    • A Fashion (and Civil Liberties) Faux Pas: Don’t Profile Passengers Based Solely on Their Religious Headwear

      Waris Ahluwalia, a Sikh-American fashion designer and actor, was refused boarding in Mexico because of his turban.

      As we all know from the famous “Project Runway” tagline, “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day you’re out.” But no one told Mexico City airport officials that acclaimed fashion designer and actor Waris Ahluwalia, a Sikh-American who wears a turban and beard, is still very much in and that news of the airport’s profiling of him would spark outrage worldwide.

      On his way home to New York City for Fashion Week, Ahluwalia’s boarding pass was marked for additional screening before he even went through the initial security protocol. During the secondary screening, airline officials demanded that Ahluwalia remove his turban. A Sikh’s turban is a sacred head covering that shows devotion to God, and, like many Sikhs, Ahluwalia never removes it in public, so he refused the demand. That’s when Aeromexico officials told him that he would be banned from boarding the flight.

    • Why I Have Hope For American Muslim Equality

      Blaming the bad acts of a few on any religious or racial community is the essence of bigotry. Sadly, it’s not new in our country. At various times in U.S. history, Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, and Japanese-Americans — to name just a few — have all been scapegoated as national security threats, and suffered as a result. I’m glad that the president reminded Americans of that past and talked about the history and diversity of American Muslims, starting from those brought here as slaves in colonial times, to the generations who helped build this nation, to all who are part of our rich, pluralistic society today.

    • To Annoy or Not To Annoy: That Was The Question

      But amidst the intense focus on Reno v. ACLU, a less noticed provision of the CDA criminalized any “indecent” computer communication intended to “annoy” another person. It wasn’t surprising that it attracted little attention. The clause was hidden among a string of words—“lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and obscene” communications intended to “threaten, abuse, annoy or harass” another person.

    • The Stories Behind the Government’s Newly Released Army Abuse Photos

      The photos we did get mostly show close-ups of body parts — arms, legs, and heads, many with injuries. There are also wider shots of prisoners, most of them bound or blindfolded. The government didn’t provide any information about the human beings depicted or the contexts in which they were photographed.

      But with a little digging, we were able to learn about the stories behind them. Sixty of the 198 photos have legible Army criminal investigation file numbers printed on them. We used those numbers to search our Torture Database, which contains some 6,000 reports, investigations, emails, and other documents the government has been forced to release to us in the course of our 11-year-old FOIA suit.

      We found 14 separate cases of alleged or proven detainee abuse relating to 42 of the photos. Here’s what we learned.

    • The Danish refugee bill and what happens when you treat everyone the same

      The seizure of asylum seekers’ assets in Denmark confirms that the state sees refugees as economic burdens by default, but this new bill makes them dependent by design.

    • WI Supreme Court Again Tries Thwarting SCOTUS Review of Its Conflicts of Interest

      Last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s majority took another step to insulate itself from review by the U.S. Supreme Court, the latest twist in the long-running “John Doe” legal saga that has brought national attention to dysfunction on the state’s highest court.

      “It is hard to imagine how a state Supreme Court could throw more roadblocks in front of an attempt to file [an appeal] with the U.S. Supreme Court than this court has,” said former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske, who is now a professor at Marquette Law School.

    • How Police Use a Dangerous Anti-Terrorism Tactic to End Pursuits

      If Calhoun had been alone in the car, he might have received little or no prison time, as he had with all his previous arrests for minor crimes. He was driving with a suspended license — and some counterfeit currency was later found in the wreckage — but his most serious offense was running from the police. That Tuesday, however, he had two friends as passengers, 20-year-old Relpheal Morton and 19-year-old Marion Shore. In court, Trooper Saddler described seeing Morton at the scene. “He was still in the back seat,” Saddler said. “He was kind of just looking around … I will never forget it. He just kept looking around.”

      Morton, whom I was not able to interview for this article, must have been stunned to be alive and relatively unharmed. The crash was so violent that the car’s roof was ripped completely off. The car looked flattened, like a tank had ridden over it. In one of the police dashcam videos that shows the crash, pieces of the car fly dozens of feet in the air toward the camera. According to a report by the Georgia State Patrol’s Specialized Collision Reconstruction Team, “The damage to the Toyota Corolla was too extensive to describe all the damage.” It seems almost impossible that two people survived.

      Marion Shore was not so lucky. She was sitting in the passenger seat, wearing her seatbelt, but the force of the crash was so strong that she was partially ejected from the car while it was flipping and rolling. Shore, the mother of a 3-year-old boy, was trapped halfway inside the car, in an in-between place where death was certain. The car rolled over her several times. The chief medical examiner for the state of Georgia examined Shore’s body and said in court that, as the car was rolling, the forces propelling it “literally bent her body almost in half.”

    • 10 Secret CIA Prisons You Do Not Want To Visit

      The US Central Intelligence Agency has, according to multiple investigative reports from both mainstream media outlets and human rights organizations, operated numerous “black sites” across the world. These locations, according to the reports, are secret prisons used to house “ghost prisoners.” Those sent to these places are held captive without being charged with any crime and are not allowed any form of legal defense.

      Ghost prisoners are subject to what the CIA calls “enhanced interrogation tactics”; most others call it torture. The CIA and their operatives’ methods allegedly include waterboarding, sleep deprivation, humiliation, physical beatings, electric shocks, and worse.

    • U.S. Passports of Sex Offenders to Be Marked

      In addition to the new law being the first time in U.S. history that a special class of Americans would be marked on their passports, a chilling event of its own, the law ignores the reality that the sex offender registry is another government “list,” such as no fly, that is relatively easy to get on and very hard to leave.

    • Assange’s UN Victory and Redemption of the West

      Last week, the United Nations Working Group (UNWG) on Arbitrary Detention ruled that journalist Julian Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the Swedish and British governments and that it must end. The Center for Constitutional Rights noted the significant precedent in the law of detention and the larger implications this has, not only for Assange’s case, but also for the protection of whistle-blowers and refugees around the world.

    • Lawsuit Demands Information on Shadowy “Countering Violent Extremism” Programs in U.S.

      Last February, the White House held a three-day summit on the topic of “Countering Violent Extremism.” At the summit, government officials announced the launch of pilot programs in Boston, Los Angeles, and Minnesota to explore “the preventative aspects of counterterrorism as well as interventions to undermine the attraction of extremist movements.”

      One year later, it’s still unclear what that entails, exactly. The government has provided few details on how it actually intends to “counter extremism” in the U.S., despite calling CVE an “administration priority” in the 2017 fiscal budget and allocating tens of millions of dollars in spending. In an indication of how these efforts are ramping up, this week a Senate subcommittee on Homeland Security approved a bill to create of an “Office for Partnerships Against Violent Extremism,” which will soon head to the full Senate for approval. A 2017 budget submission for the Office of Justice Programs also mentions “$69 million for CVE programs” proposed for the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice.

    • Beyonce’s Super Bowl Touchdown for Black Lives Matter

      The video of “Formation” includes images of a flooded city, reminiscent of New Orleans after Katrina, with Beyoncé singing atop a partially submerged police car. The video ends with a camera panning to a wall graffitied with the words “Stop shooting us.” Zirin lauded Zandria Felice Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Memphis, for her explanation of the imagery in the video: “Layered in and through the landscape of a black New Orleans still rigorous and delightful, past and present, the black southern signifiers and simulacra are unrelenting here,” Zandria wrote in “New South Negress,” her blog. Beyoncé, she continues, “becomes every black southern woman possible for her to reasonably inhabit, moving through time, class, and space.”

    • First Circuit ruling affirms accountability for wrongful police killings

      The lawsuit at issue stems from the 2011 Framingham, Massachusetts SWAT police killing of 68-year-old African American grandfather Eurie Stamps. In the early morning hours of January 5, 2011, the Framingham SWAT team raided Mr. Stamps’ home with a search warrant because they suspected his stepson of selling drugs there. Mr. Stamps, whom officers knew would be in the home and posed no known threat, ended up dead.

    • Brendan Dassey, Max Soffar, and the False Confession Playbook

      How police extract false confessions from the innocent, with horrific consequences.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Should India’s Internet Be Free Of Charge, Or Free Of Control?

      In a far-reaching ruling, India has prohibited telecom service providers from charging different prices to consumers to access content on the Internet — a blow to Facebook and its aggressive bid to offer a free but stripped-down version of the Internet aimed at India’s poor.

    • Zuckerberg Admits His Defeat, Facebook Shuts Down Free Basics In India

      The world’s biggest social network Facebook has decided to shut down its controversial Free Basics service in India. This decision is being seen as a big win for the net neutrality advocates, who were opposing the service as it promoted differential data pricing.

    • One Year Later, ISP Claims That Title II Would Demolish Broadband Investment Found To Be Total, Indisputable Bullshit

      In late 2014, the Obama Administration and the FCC shocked everybody by announcing that the government would be uncharacteristically ignoring telecom lobbyists and reclassifying broadband service under Title II — ensuring it had adequate legal foundation for tougher net neutrality rules. As you might expect, the cable and phone companies immediately set to work with a blistering public relations barrage, with think tankers, editorials, industry consultants and thousands of industry mouthpieces all making one common refrain: Title II would utterly decimate broadband sector investment and crush innovation.

    • Facebook Board Member Offends 1 Billion Indians, Suggests British Rule Was Good For India

      Facebook board member and Silicon Valley luminary Marc Andreessen offended India with his colonialism tweet. He suggested that India should embrace Free Basics as the denial will harm the country is a big manner. He suggested that India’s anti-colonialism mindset has hurt the country’s economy and the government is repeating the same mistake by opposing Free Basics.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • US Industry IP Index Rates Nations

      The United States Chamber of Commerce has released an index rating countries on their use and treatment of intellectual property and innovation, finding the United States to be top in the world. The report scores the largest emerging economies relatively low, including China, despite that country’s dominance in rates of IP filings in recent years, far outstripping the United States.

    • Discussions On Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge Resume At WIPO Against Stormy Background

      After a hiatus of one year, the WIPO Committee working on the protection of genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore against misappropriation resumes its work next week. The subject is touchy, with most developing countries asking for legal protection, while some developed countries do not want to consider binding rules. Disagreement already arose at the end of 2015 over interpretation of the committee’s mandate, freshly approved in October.

    • Trademarks

      • Not Mormon®, But Still Mormon

        Who is a Mormon? This is a fundamental question of self-identity, religion, and even Wikipedia. One would think, however, that that answer would not be found in trademark law.

        Intellectual Reserve, Inc. (IRI), which owns and manages the trademarks of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has made a series of trademark claims against small startups and organizations using the term “Mormon” in their names and URLs, including our client, the Mormon Mental Health Association (MMHA).

        We first heard of IRI making claims to own the word “Mormon” when they got into a legal dispute with a company called “Mormon Match.” IRI claimed that both the company name and the associated URL infringed on IRI’s trademarks in the terms “Mormon” and “Mormon.org” (among others).

      • Navajo Nation’s Trademark Suit Against Urban Outfitters Proceeds; But Should It?

        Alright, this one has me more than a bit puzzled. We’ve written here before about Urban Outfitters, which has previously been on the receiving end of intellectual property disputes in the form of the company’s use of famous Obama iconography and for trying to inject a bit of humor into its coffee offerings. This time around, however, the clothing retailer is facing a lawsuit from the Navajo Nation for selling clothing and merchandise with patterns inspired by Native American designs and including the word “Navajo” or “Navaho” in the offerings.

    • Copyrights

      • U.S. Copyright Law Forces Wikimedia to Remove “Public Domain” Anne Frank Diary

        This year The Diary of Anne Frank entered into the public domain in the Netherlands, allowing millions of people around the world to read it for free. However, under U.S. law the book remains copyrighted, which prompted the Wikimedia Foundation to remove a copy of the book from its servers, under protest.

      • Law Students Line Up Behind ‘Baby Blue’ — Will Harvard Law Review Sue?

        Back in 2014, we wrote about a crazy story, where the Harvard Law Review was claiming copyright over legal citation standards. It’s true that the Harvard Law Review Association has published the famous “Bluebook” of legal citation standards for many years, but the idea that such citations are copyrightable is crazy. In response to this, law professor Chris Sprigman and open records guru Carl Malamud alerted the world of their intention to publish “Baby Blue” — a competing legal citations publication. They noted that the 10th edition of the Bluebook, which as published in 1958, had clearly fallen into the public domain, and they were going to use that as the starting point for their competing product. Late in December, we pointed out that Harvard Law Review freaked out after its expensive Ropes & Gray lawyers saw a few tweets from Malamud suggesting Baby Blue was almost ready for publication. On Christmas Eve, a pricey lawyer sent off a nastygram, threatening a copyright infringement lawsuit if Baby Blue were published.

      • US Congress Passes Customs Bill With Strong IP Enforcement Provisions

        The United States Congress today passed the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, establishing clearer rules on customs officials’ work to stop infringing goods from entering the US. The Act creates a new National IP Coordination Center for coordinating investigations, training and other activities.

      • Years Later, White House Sends Two Copyright Treaties To Senate For Ratification: One Good, One Bad

        It’s not clear why it’s taken this long, but late Wednesday, the White House sent two WIPO treaties over to the Senate for ratification: The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled — usually just called “The Marrakesh Treaty” or “The Marrakesh Treaty for the Blind” — and the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances, usually just called “The Beijing Treaty.” The Beijing Treaty was completed in 2012. The Marrakesh Treaty in 2013. It’s not clear why it took the White House until 2016 to move on them, but such is life.

02.11.16

Links 11/2/2016: LibreOffice 5.1, HMRC and FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 8:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • SourceForge Loses DevShare
  • SourceForge Acquisition and Future Plans

    Our first order of business was to terminate the “DevShare” program. As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated. The DevShare program delivered installer bundles as part of the download for participating projects. We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that. We’re more interested in doing the right thing than making extra short-term profit. As we move forward, we will be focusing on the needs of our developers and visitors by building out site features and establishing community trust. Eliminating the DevShare program was just the first step of many more to come. Plans for the near future include full https support for both SourceForge and Slashdot, and a lot more changes we think developers and end-users will embrace.

  • Stealth Company Datawise Makes Contributions to Kubernetes

    This year is shaping up to be a big one for container technology, and the Container Summit conference is going on this week in New York. At the event, Datawise, a stealth company developing network and storage solutions for Linux containers, announced that its contributions for container networking and storage have been accepted for the upcoming release of Kubernetes. Kubernetes, of course, is the open source container management system pioneered by Google and now supported by many leading open source vendors.

    Here is more on what Datawise intends to bring to Kubernetes.

  • Google Releases ION OpenGL Open-Source Library

    Google engineers have open-sourced today a new suite of libraries and tools relating to OpenGL called ION.

    Details are limited thus far and without yet diving into the source code, ION is described as “a portable suite of libraries and tools for building client applications, especially graphical ones. It is small, fast, and robust, and is cross-platform across many platforms and devices, including desktops, mobile devices, browsers, and other embedded platforms.”

  • San Francisco prepares to open source its voting system software

    San Francisco, home of the tech startup, is trying to show its tech credentials by becoming the first city to use open source software for elections.

    The proposal to adopt a solution in time for the end of the current contract on January 1, 2017 reappeared at the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday when Supervisor Scott Wiener called for a hearing on how the city is progressing with the plan to use standard hardware and open-source software to carry out future balloting.

  • Open source demonstrates the future of work

    Open source communities and projects are examples of non-standard work structures that are successfully productive while existing outside typical paradigms for “work.” OpenSSL, for example, is an incredibly important software library that serves a large majority of websites across the web. The authors of the software, ranging from one time collaborators to continuous contributors, have collectively forged arguably the most important networking encryption library to date, and they’ve done it outside traditional business models. The software is a the result of effort from a diverse community of volunteers working on “their own time,” rather than on the rigid production model of a proprietary software development firm.

  • Open source in the enterprise brings opportunities and challenges

    The final challenge open source presents relates to staff skills. Simply put, open source requires a higher level of technical talent than traditional proprietary solutions, because there’s a world of difference between building a solution and operating someone else’s solution. The latter is the world of certifications and cookie-cutter solutions; the former requires creativity, self-reliance, and technical chops. Newly-hired technical employees tend to come with open source experience and an inclination toward self-generated solutions, while many long-term IT employees are much more comfortable with a vendor-centric world. However, most organizations can’t (and shouldn’t) do a wholesale replacement of personnel. So IT organizations face the task of reskilling existing employees, integrating new staff, all while architecting new systems and ripping out old ones.

  • UCLA researchers release open source code for powerful image detection algorithm

    A UCLA Engineering research group has made public the computer code for an algorithm that helps computers process images at high speeds and “see” them in ways that human eyes cannot. The researchers say the code could eventually be used in face, fingerprint and iris recognition for high-tech security, as well as in self-driving cars’ navigation systems or for inspecting industrial products.

    The algorithm performs a mathematical operation that identifies objects’ edges and then detects and extracts their features. It also can enhance images and recognize objects’ textures.

  • Events

    • My first travelling experience to Myanmar

      We were instructed to go very early at 8:30AM in the morning at the Myanmar ICT (MICT) Park to be able register our topics that we wish to talk for the BarCamp Yangon. Finally we arrived early as the hotel and venue is very closer and on the time of the event opening ceremony and everything were spoken in Burmese.

    • First timer’s guide to FOSS conferences

      I’ve been going to FOSS (free and open source) conferences since 2006. My first open source conference was FreedomHEC in Seattle, a little 30-person conference for Linux users to protest Microsoft’s WinHEC. My next open source conference was OSCON, which had over a thousand attendees. They were both very different conferences, and as a college student, I really didn’t know what to expect. Going to your first open source conference can be intimidating, so I’ve complied ten tips for people who are new to the conference circuit.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome on Android communicates with smart devices around you

        Folks running Chrome on iOS have had a chance to tap into the Physical Web devices around them since last July, but Google’s finally opened that functionality up to its own ecosystem. To that end, Chrome 49 on Android will support the objects (like parking meters, for instance). The first time you encounter one there will be a push notification alerting you one is nearby, and future run-ins will populate a list of the gadgets nearby. It’s starting in the beta channel, a post on the Chromium Blog notes, with wider support rolling out soon. In case you’re curious of how it all looks in action, the GIF below should give you a good idea.

      • Google issues Chrome update to fix Windows, Mac, and Linux bugs

        Google issued a Chrome update to address Windows, Mac, and Linux vulnerabilities that, if exploited, would allow remote attackers to take control of affected systems.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Why open source can save companies from drowning in the data lake

      The end goal of any big data initiative is to deliver key insights very quickly, if not in real-time. While the first step of gathering data is challenging, today’s technology is more than capable of this.

      What comes next – extracting accurate insights in real-time and gaining foresight from it – is something enterprises have yet to nail.

      When put to good use, data can provide endless opportunities for innovation and growth, saving money and time, while also expediting services. Despite the opportunity to yield big insights from big data, many businesses are struggling with one of two challenges: those unable to tap their big data reserves and those drowning in data overload.

    • OpenStack Keystone Q and A with the Boston University Distributed Systems Class Part 1
    • How Open Source is Driving New Innovations in Data Analytics

      It wasn’t long ago when open source software was on the fringe of cutting edge technology. The software then was rough, untested and insecure. No longer is this the case. From tiny startups to the largest Fortune 20 companies, open source technology is permeating every corner of the business world.

  • Cisco

  • LibreOffice

  • HMRC

  • Education

  • Apple/Openwashing

  • Funding

    • VCs who miss the point of open source shouldn’t fund it

      The errors highlighted here are not merely mistakes; rather, they reveal a worldview. People who believe that Apache is a competitor, OSI approves licenses that permit monopolization, Red Hat is a business that’s succeeded through artificial scarcity, and open source communities with diverse agendas are “broken” are not the people you want in your new open source business.

      They will try to persuade you to secure software patents so that they have an asset to trade when you fail; they will eject you from your own company when you try to hold true to software freedom principles; and they will treat your business as a failure if all it does is earn a decent living for you and your employees. You may want to grow your open source-based business another way.

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

    • U.S. Cyber Effort Targets Open Source Software

      A growing list of cyber attacks targeting U.S. government employees has prompted the Obama administration to launch a high-profile cyber security effort that among others things will target Internet “utilities” such as open source software.

      The Cybersecurity National Action Plan announced by the White House on Tuesday (Feb. 9) as part of its annual budget submission to Congress gives the Internet and its components equal status with other critical infrastructure. The initiative responds to massive data breaches such as last year’s hack of the Office of Personnel Management. The personal data of 21.5 million federal employers may have been stolen in the breach.

    • UNICEF Is Launching A Venture Fund For Open-Source Civic Technology

      From unmanned aerial vehicles to 3-D printing, new technology has a lot of potential to “flatten” the world and spread social good. And now, by launching its first venture capital-type fund for civic technology, the United Nations wants to accelerate the development of those ideas.

    • UNICEF innovation fund is looking for open source tech

      “We’ll be identifying opportunities from countries around the world including some that may not see a lot of capital investment in technology start-ups. We are hoping to identify communities of problem-solvers and help them develop simple solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing children,” says UNICEF Innovation co-lead, Christopher Fabian in a recent statement.

  • Licensing

    • Confused by license compatibility? A new article by Richard Stallman may help

      Richard Stallman has published a new guide on gnu.org titled License compatibility and relicensing. Gnu.org is home to a whole host of resources on free software licensing, including frequently asked questions about GNU licenses and our list of free software licenses. Our license list contains information on which licenses are compatible with the GNU General Public License as well as a brief description of what it means to be compatible. This latest article by Stallman provides a more in–depth explanation of what compatibility means and the different ways in which it is achieved.

    • The most important part of your project might not even be a line of code

      What is licensing? Why does it matter? Why should you care? There are many reasons that licensing is an important part of a project you are working on. You are taking the time to write code and share it with the world in an open way, such as publishing it on GitHub, Bitbucket, or any number of other code-hosting services. Anyone might stumble across your code and find it useful.

      Licensing is the way that you can control exactly how someone who finds your code can use it and in what ways.

    • Happy GPL Birthday VLC!

      The ever-popular VLC turned 15 a few days ago–that’s 15 years since the project was GPLed and released to the world. If we were pedants, we might point out that the project actually came into existence in 1996, but that was a different lifetime.

      VLC originally was a very different application. For one thing, it was a closed-source project, and its original purpose was to stream videos from a satellite receiver to a computer science lab.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Unity Getting Native Cardboard Support, Design Lab App Going Open Source

    • Open Access/Content

      • SGA, MassPIRG work together on open source textbook initiative

        Members of the Student Government Association and MassPIRG are seeking further support from the University of Massachusetts Provost of Academic Affairs Katherine Newman for the W.E.B. Du Bois Library’s Open Education Initiative.

        The OEI, which has been operating for six years, provides UMass professors with $1,000 grants to write their own textbooks and syllabi using information which has an open copyright license.

        “Our goal this semester is to get 10 to 15 professors to sign onto Open Education,” said Chris Earls, the SGA’s secretary of University policy and a senior political science and economics major.

        Earls and Matthew Martin, coordinator of MassPIRG’s Affordable Textbooks Campaign, wrote an open letter to Newman in which they argued that open source textbooks were an affordable solution to the rising costs of college textbooks.

    • Open Hardware

      • Turning Open Source into a Multicore Standard

        Hoping to forestall potential compatibility issues, the Multicore Association is looking to build an API standard on the shoulders of open-source OpenAMP.

      • France Craft Pixel: an Open Source Electric Car

        The all-electric Chevy Bolt was the automotive star of the 2016 CES show, for sure- but there was more to the electric vehicle side of the Las Vegas show than just the efforts of Tesla and the Big Three. Meet the Pixel, a modular, “open source” electric hybrid vehicle designed by France Craft.

  • Programming

    • GitHub’s Atom 1.5 Hackable Text Editor Out Now, Atom 1.6 Enters Beta Testing

      On February 9, 2016, GitHub’s devs made some big announcements for its awesome and acclaimed Atom open-source hackable text editor, which reached stable version 1.5 for all supported operating systems.

    • Big? GitHub Enterprise 2.5 thinks massive

      Keeping up its push to be an enterprise presence, GitHub has announced the latest version of the for-pay, enterprise edition of its code-hosting platform.

      The company says GitHub Enterprise 2.5′s focus is “companies operating at massive scale” — enterprises with more than 10,000 developers and exponential year-over-year growth. The new toolset for GitHub Enterprise 2.5 helps large teams add new users, collaborate safely on large projects, and deal with GitHub-related performance issues that can crop up around such large projects.

Leftovers

  • Don’t Spam, Don’t Spy; Ask Permission and Satisfy – Musings on media, advertising and big data

    Zero point five-six percent. Just over one half of one percent? And this they think is good news? To borrow the phrase from Monty Python and the Holy Grail – “I fart in your general direction!” If you are doing under 1% reactions for your advertising on mobile, you are FAILING. Get out of the business. You are a waste. You are polluting the gene pool. Its exactly what I have preached forever in mobile: Don’t spam !!! Its spam !!! Don’t spam !! (Recently I’ve evolved that even further so now I say: Don’t spam, don’t spy; ask permission and satisfy!)

  • Here’s How Well Twitter’s Execs Use Twitter—Or, Um, Not

    The company has struggled to attract new tweeters to join its free-wheeling service, and its stock has spiraled to an all-time low this year. Despite Twitter’s efforts, many users continue to face abuse and harassment, and terrorists have disseminated propaganda on the service. In a somewhat self-conscious move, the company rolled out a set of new features this week ahead of its quarterly earnings report , including a new Trust & Safety Council as well as changes to how the Twitter feed works.

  • Science

    • Prominent scientist: “One-fifth of people will believe anything”

      Emeritus Professor Esko Valtaoja says the internet is like an endless ocean of knowledge – but there is plenty of rubbish to be found in the deep. In a television appearance Wednesday morning, the recently retired quasar researcher and award-winning writer encouraged everyone to take a month-long break from social media.

      [...]

      The information revolution has now made more data available in contemporary society than people have time to consume in a lifetime. Valtaoja says that for a long time, it was easy to believe that there were certain absolute truths, because information was much harder to find.

      There are still people who believe in absolutes, he says, but they are quickly becoming the minority.

      “We jump about rather nervously trying to ascertain the truth, even in this matter,” he says.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Flint e-mails: CDC voiced concerns over Legionnaires’ actions

      More than eight months before Gov. Rick Snyder disclosed a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in the Flint area, federal health officials worried a lack of cooperation in Michigan could be hampering the public health response.

      Thousands of pages of e-mails obtained by the Detroit Free Press through the Freedom of Information Act on Monday show increasing concern about the quality of the Flint’s drinking water as tensions grew over a lack of coordination to combat the waterborne disease.

      County health officials were warned for reaching out to federal experts for help while they struggled to persuade Flint city officials to provide needed information, the e-mails show. Others in e-mails wondered about ethical breaches and the possibility of a cover-up.

    • Dems accuse Mich. governor of ducking accountability in Flint

      House Democratic leaders are heaping new scorn on Gov. Rick Snyder, accusing the Michigan Republican of ducking his responsibilities to the victims of the Flint water crisis.

      “If you have it within your power to correct your mistake, to make it up to those whom you wronged, you have a moral obligation to do that,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), who represents Flint, told reporters Wednesday. “He hasn’t done that. The governor of Michigan has treated this as … a public relations problem for him, not a public health crisis for 100,000 people.”

    • Too many Flints to count: America’s infrastructure is rotting — and poisoning our children

      “I know if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself if my kids’ health could be at risk,” said President Obama on a recent trip to Michigan. “Up there” was Flint, a rusting industrial city in the grip of a “water crisis” brought on by a government austerity scheme. To save a couple of million dollars, that city switched its source of water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a long-time industrial dumping ground for the toxic industries that had once made their home along its banks. Now, the city is enveloped in a public health emergency, with elevated levels of lead in its water supply and in the blood of its children.

    • Flint fuels finger pointing, political maneuvering

      As the Flint water crisis evolves from ongoing public health crisis to the search for a costly solution, the situation also has taken on the air of a football game, a political football game, that is.

      “Some of the actions seem to be more about the people making the statements rather than helping the people of Flint,” said Lansing political consultant Tom Shields, of Marketing Resource Group. “It’s tough not to be cynical because it has become such a political football.”

      The crisis over lead-tainted water has become fodder for local, state and national politics where Democrats are assigning blame to the Republican-led administration of Gov. Rick Snyder and Republicans are pointing the finger at Democrats in Flint as well as the Environmental Protection Agency under the control of President Barack Obama.

    • Remember 11th February 2016. It’s the day Jeremy Hunt tried to kill the NHS

      We joke about Mr Hunt having shares in Australian emigration, but really this is no laughing matter. Record amounts are leaving the country – or the medical profession altogether

    • Jeremy Hunt imposes contract on junior doctors in brutal end to “damaging” pay row

      He was given the green light in a letter last night from NHS chief negotiator Sir David Dalton, after his 11th-hour “final offer” to doctors’ union the British Medical Association was rejected.

  • Security

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Government Lawyers Think Open Records Reform Proposal Hands Over Too Much Power To The People

      The state of Massachusetts has some of the worst open records laws in the nation, which have not been updated since the 1970s. The main problem is the statutes provide no deterrence for abusive behavior by government agencies and very little in the way of recourse for public records requesters.

      The laws — as they stand now — operate on the presumption of secrecy, which is completely antithetical to the purpose and spirit of the statutes. There’s really no reason the state’s public record laws should contain this much secretive bloat. Here’s Allison Manning of Boston.com detailing just one of the many problems with the laws.

    • Here’s how bad public records laws are in Massachusetts

      I spent the last five years as a police reporter in Columbus, Ohio, before moving back home to Boston a few months ago. What I’ve rediscovered about my home state: Our public records laws are abysmal, especially compared to those elsewhere.

    • Will Swedish prosecutors question Assange in London?

      A Swedish prosecutor still aims to question Wikileaks founder Julian Assange over a rape allegation in Sweden, despite a UN report condemning Sweden for his ‘arbitrary detention’.

    • The Continuing Saga of Julian Assange

      The Swedish prosecutor’s office says it is working on a renewed request to interview the Wikileaks founder at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

    • Lies about Assange and UN human rights jurists imperil us all

      The defence secretary, ‘comedians’ on BBC Radio’s News Quiz, and the entire media commentariat have ganged up this weekend up to pour mockery and poisonous lies over Julian Assange and the UN’s human rights jurists, writes Jonathan Cook. As they attempt to fight off the UN’s ‘guilty’ verdict against the British state, they are putting dissidents at risk everywhere.

    • Federal Judge Not Amused By State Department’s Continued Withholding Of Hillary Clinton’s Emails

      Contreras undersells the public interest — which has been high ever since it was discovered Clinton had been conducting official (and sensitive) business using a private email server. Now that Clinton is a presidential candidate, the release of the emails could adversely affect her campaign.

      I don’t believe the State Department has a personal stake in Clinton’s potential presidency, but it’s operating in a way that would encourage people to come to that conclusion. Instead, this is likely business as usual for the agency.

      For one, government agencies protect their own. Clinton’s use of a private server makes the State Department look bad because no one with the power to do so ever made an effort to shut her down. Released emails show Clinton dealt with classified material, something that should never have been routed to a private email account. The State Department’s lackadaisical handling of this matter would only be highlighted further by additional releases.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Indonesia’s Anti-Corruption Fight

      Corruption has once again taken center stage in Indonesia, following the resignation in December of House Speaker Setya Novanto for being caught attempting to extort Indonesia’s largest taxpayer, U.S. mining giant Freeport McMoRan’s subsidiary PT Freeport Indonesia, and mounting evidence that the devastating fires that negatively impacted the country late last year, to the tune of $30 billion, were fueled by local corruption. Political infighting has meant that Indonesia’s long-simmering, critically important fight against corruption has been in limbo for nearly a year, and soon President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo will face a decision whether or not to make fighting corruption the centerpoint of his administration, or its downfall.

      To the surprise of many, Indonesia actually improved in the recently released Corruption Perception Index, moving up from 107th last year to 88th this year, which the organization credited to improvements in the country’s bureaucracy and public services – initiatives pushed forward by Jokowi – but also partly to increasing corruption in other countries. However, the report noted that Indonesia could take a huge step forward if it empowered its once famous, internationally renowned anti-corruption agency.

      That would be Indonesia’s most trusted public institution, the Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK). The KPK has made a reputation for itself globally for thoroughly investigating, researching, and trying high-level targets, and, in its first 13 years, achieving an astounding 100% conviction rate.

    • Indonesian forest fires ‘most expensive disaster in 2015′

      The biggest economic disaster in 2015 was the Indonesian forest fires that cost $16.1bn, according to a report.

      The fires, caused mainly by illegal slash and burn clearing of forest areas for crops including palm oil, cost the country around 1.9% of its GDP, said Aon Benfield.

      In its annual catastrophe report the company said that while 2015 replaced 2014 as the warmest year on record, global economic losses from natural catastrophes stood at $123bn – 30% below the 15-year average of $175bn.

      The report said 300 separate global natural disasters occurred in 2015, above the 15-year average of 269 events.

    • 5 Realities Of Smog So Bad It Blots Out The Sun

      Beijing, we’re finding out, has the kind of pollution that makes it seem like you’re downwind from a freaking volcano eruption. But, a picture like that doesn’t get across the reality of life in a place where the air actively hates you. We sat down with an anonymous source who works as a magazine editor in Beijing, who told us …

    • Palm oil is in everything and it’s killing rain forests, endangered species and people. Here’s how.

      In September and October 2015, one of the worst environmental disasters of the 21st century happened in Indonesia. And despite its apocalyptic consequences, the story was largely ignored by the western media.

      In order to clear the Indonesian rain forest for a palm oil, it was lit completely on fire. A toxic cloud of haze resulted, hanging over Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore for weeks. The haze killed people and endangered wildlife, and put the lives of millions of others at risk -– all for the benefit of a selected few.

  • Finance

    • Yanis Varoufakis: Europe is sliding back into the 1930s and we need a new movement

      Former Greek finance minister says Europe is disintegrating, run by a cartel and in dire need of reform.

    • First Report From Inside Germany’s New TAFTA/TTIP Reading Room Reveals Text’s Dirty Secret

      Last week we wrote about the only place that German politicians are currently allowed to view the latest texts of TAFTA/TTIP: a tiny room, guarded at all times, and involving all kinds of humiliating restrictions for visitors. Katja Kipping was one of the first to enter, and she has written up her experiences for lesser mortals like you and me, who are not permitted to besmirch this sacred place with our unworthy presence.

    • Labour furious as 83% of fund to ease council cuts will go to Conservative authorities

      Labour MPs have expressed their fury after Tory rebels dropped their objections to council cuts because of a new £300m government fund to ease funding difficulties in mostly wealthy Conservative-run areas.

      Greg Clark, the communities secretary, insisted the new cash was not a “political bung” to stop up to 30 Tories revolting against the local government settlement.

      However, several Tory MPs openly acknowledged they were persuaded to back the government only after the new “transitional relief” was announced, of which about 83% will go to Conservative councils.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • A map of the world according to Donald Trump
    • YIKES: We just found out what Hillary said in her Goldman Sachs speeches

      As both Democrat candidates like to portray themselves as an enemy of the financial industry, Bernie Sanders appears to have more leverage (to borrow a finance term). He’s blasted Hillary Clinton for taking over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in early debates, and has continued his criticism into the Democrat town hall debates.

      We don’t know exactly what was said in those speeches because Hillary refuses to release the transcripts, but the attendees at those speeches haven’t forgotten. They’re speaking out, and it doesn’t bode well for Hillary.

    • Is Britain full? Home truths about the population panic

      The northern ticket hall of King’s Cross St Pancras tube station is supposed to be a wonder of the London underground, with its expanses of gleaming floor and high-ceilinged walkways that would be wide enough for cars. In 2008, the tube’s then managing director, Tim O’Toole, assured the London Evening Standard that, with the new hall, which cost £395m, “the underground station complex will … be capable of handling all the extra demand predicted for years ahead”.

  • Censorship

    • Now, filmmakers turn to Youtube to beat censorship

      With censorship issues plaguing the film industry, filmmakers are now looking to release movies on Youtube and other internet sites that do not create hurdles to their creative freedom. In fact, as if to cock a snook at the issue of censorship, director Ram Gopal Varma has announced a film titled `Single X’, which would be dedicated to the censor board.

    • Ram Gopal Varma says goodbye to Telugu films
    • Index unveils 2016 Freedom of Expression Awards shortlist

      An Aleppo-based journalist training women to report on the crisis in war-torn Syria, an Indonesian comic who jokes about Islamic extremism and a 19-year-old campaigner against repression in Eritrea are among those shortlisted for the 2016 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards.

      Drawn from more than 400 crowdsourced nominations, the Index awards shortlist celebrates artists, writers, journalists and campaigners tackling censorship and fighting for freedom of expression. Many of the 20 shortlisted nominees are regularly targeted by authorities or by criminal and extremist groups for their work: some face regular death threats, others criminal prosecution.

    • Méxicoleaks recognized by the Index on Censorship for digital activism

      Méxicoleaks, a digital platform that accepts anonymous information from the public, has made the shortlist for the 2016 Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards in the category of digital activism.

      “In a country where, between drug cartels and the government, censorship and self-censorship is rife, Méxicoleaks is on the forefront of the fight against corruption,” said the Index on Censorship website.

    • Twitter’s Most Harmlessly Charming Account Was Mysteriously Suspended

      The account was so simple it’s kind of a miracle that it wasn’t done before. That reasoning, however, is the most probable explanation we have for why it got banned.

    • For Israeli bloggers, the rules are the same but different

      That changed last week when reports emerged indicating as many as 30 well-trafficked Israeli blogs and popular Facebook users would henceforth be required to submit copy to the military censor prior to publication. As the news spread, some of those affected by the new rules lashed out online, questioning whether the military – and, by extension, the state – was actively trying to limit freedom of expression. A few even vowed to circumvent censorship, though, given that the office of the military censor already possesses algorithmic technology to root out problematic web posts, this seems easier said than done.

    • Israel Censoring Bloggers

      Israel is like other fascist police states, wanting criticisms of its ruthless policies suppressed.

      Its new military censor, Col. Ariela Ben-Avraham, demanded bloggers and social media users submit their material for screening before posting.

      Failure will be considered a crime. Regime critics risk prosecution, censorship now elevated to a higher level.

      Israel wants control over pre-published material relating to its policies – vetted so anything it disapproves of gets trashed, the right of free expression abolished.

    • University of Calgary student art show cut short after censorship confusion

      A student took down their show after they weren’t happy with the University of Calgary’s treatment of the art show

    • Twitter launches Trust and Safety Council to help put end to trolling

      The Twitter Trust & Safety Council will initially be formed of around 40 bodies, including the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, EU Kids Online, ICT Watch, National Cyber Security Alliance, NetSafe, and Samaritans.

      These organisations, along with safety experts, academics and security researchers, will work to ensure a safe and secure platform for users to express themselves freely and without fear.

      The company said in a release that the Council’s main focus will be to protect minors, encourage ‘greater compassion and empathy on the internet,’ and promote efforts in media literacy and digital citizenship. It added that community groups will also participate to help prevent online ‘abuse, harassment, and bullying,’ as well as mental health problems and suicide.

    • Twitter forms anti-troll team to tackle online torment and threats

      MICROBLOGGING WEBSITE Twitter has put together an anti-troll squad to help protect users from abuse and threats.

    • Say Hello To Twitter’s Tweet Police

      Now Twitter is going to tell us all how to express ourselves by forming a ‘Trust and Safety Council.’ That’s not intimidating or anything.

    • Censorship incoming? Twitter partners with Islamists and radical feminists to create ‘safe space’

      Social media website Twitter is creating a “Trust & Safety Council” to stop and censor opinions that might upset Islamists and radical feminists such as Anita Sarkeesian.

    • Twitter forms safety council to help prevent abuse
    • Twitter’s latest social justice brainwave is to implement an Orwellian “Trust & Safety Council”

      The move by Twitter to further police speech which doesn’t agree with its social justice worldview doesn’t come as a surprise and follows on from the possible news earlier this week that they were planning to control what content appears in people’s timelines by implementing an algorithmic timeline, ostensibly to censor speech that they don’t want people to read.

    • EDITORIAL: Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council won’t halt cyberbullying

      Facebook allows users to report offensive posts and follows through on investigating and disabling hateful accounts. Instagram immediately takes down photos that violate its community guidelines, and it has sometimes even gotten carried away in doing so.

    • Twitter Unveils New ‘Trust and Safety Council’ Featuring Feminist Frequency

      Among the members are the Anti-Defamation League, Childnet International, Thorn, Family Online Safety Institute, the Dangerous Speech Project, and the University of California-Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

    • Twitter Forms A “Trust and Safety Council” to Balance Abuse Vs Free Speech

      Twitter has taken the steps for balancing free speech without also handing a free pass to orchestrated harassment via its platform. According to the announcement, the company is establishing a “Trust & Safety Council”.

    • Twitter Announces Safety Panel Then Bans an Account Critical of Twitter Safety

      On the day Twitter announced a new “Trust and Safety Council,” the social network again suspended an account that calls attention to the plight of people who have been harassed on Twitter.

      My colleague Sarah Jeong followed the saga of Trusty Support, a Twitter Support parody account that has been, as she wrote, “lampooning the absurdities of the Report Abuse system” by tweeting about the network’s canned and automated responses to harassment and death threats.

    • Twitter announces ‘trust and safety’ panel to police content

      Twitter on Tuesday announced the formation of a new “Trust and Safety Council,” which will work to develop policies censoring speech on the site. The group will be comprised of more than 40 organizations from 13 regions around the world. “With hundreds of millions of tweets sent per day, the volume of content on Twitter is massive, which makes it extraordinarily complex to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power,” Twitter said in a statement.

    • New ‘Trust and Safety Council’ Is Twitter Version of 1984’s Ministry of Truth

      In order for users to feel confident expressing themselves “freely and safely,” Twitter is debuting a new advisory group dubbed the “Trust & Safety Council.” But a quick glance at its membership roster suggests the council is almost as Orwellian as it sounds—and overwhelmingly biased in favor of speech suppression.

      If you thought Milo Yiannopoulos losing his blue checkmark was the opening salvo in the next great culture war (I tended to agree with Popehat’s Ken White that the controversy was overblown), then this might be your virtual invasion of Poland.

    • Twitter’s growth screeches to a halt

      Twitter’s growth stalled at the end of last year as the number of people using the service flatlined, raising yet more questions about the troubled service.

      The social network announced that monthly users had stubbornly remained at 320 million in the fourth quarter of 2015, the first time it has reported no growth in active members.

    • Jewish Group Lauds Twitter Council Established to Combat Extremism

      The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) applauds Jack Dorsey and Twitter for the company’s efforts to combat violent extremism, and we congratulate it on the formation of the Trust & Safety Council, an important step forward to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and hate, and protecting free speech.

    • Twitter Inc. forms Trust & Safety Council to fight hate speech and harassment

      The aim of the council is to be able to come up with specific conditions that would allow the company to filter more than hundreds of millions of posts every day to spot any kind of misconduct, and judge whether any of the content protrudes beyond ethical boundaries of free speech.

    • Honda Tried To Get Jalopnik To Dox Commenter, Delete Posts, Meets The Streisand Effect Instead

      Criticism is part of life, of course, and I tend to believe that people show their true selves most transparently when they show how they deal with criticism. Unfortunately, we’ve covered entirely too many stories involving people and companies responding to online criticism poorly here at Techdirt. Typically, these unfortunate responses amount to trying to censor the criticism, but it can more dangerously involve the attempted silencing of journalism as well as threats of legal action against those making the critical comments.

      Too many times, websites and web services cave to this sort of censorship. But not everyone. Gawker Media, about whom I could fill these pages with criticism, appears to be pushing back on once such attempt levied against its site Jalopnik. Apparently, car-maker Honda took a negative view of some comments made at the site, purportedly by a Honda employee. For some reason, Honda decided that this distinction meant that it could not only silence the comments, but that it should receive help from the site in outing the commenter. The whole thing starts off, as seems so often the case, with some rather mild criticism in the form of a comment.

    • These charities want to send your old USB sticks to North Korea

      Human Rights Foundation and Forum 280 seek to counter North Korean censorship with USB sticks full of banned content

    • Fighting Censorship With ‘Friends,’ ‘Desperate Housewives’

      Free speech advocates are fighting censorship in North Korea by illegally importing popular American TV shows. The goal: To undermine propaganda, give people a taste of freedom and eventually fuel the fall of the regime.

      Pyongyang’s government insists that its dictator Kim Jong-un is a heavenly superhero, Americans are evil, South Korea started the region’s civil war in the 1950s and that the rest of the world is not as free or prosperous as North Korea. In order to support these teachings, nearly all media from outside North Korea is banned and citizens are discouraged from questioning the government about problems such as famine or its use of slave labor.

    • [Far right site] San Francisco Federal Judge Who Rules For Government Censorship Should Be Impeached

      This is also the clown who ruled against investigative reporting in the case of The National Abortion Federation versus the Center for Medical Progress by issuing a preliminary injunction barring the anti-abortion group from releasing undercover videos taken at annual conferences of the National Abortion Federation.

    • China’s ‘black box’ of mutinous secrets

      Also mentioned as plotters in the scheme were General Xu Caihou, vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission who was expelled from the party and was being investigated for corruption when he died of cancer in March 2015; and Su Rong, a longtime regional chief who was accused of corruption as party chief in Jiangxi province. Su was also blamed for showing “blatant disregard for party political rules” and having “poisoned the local political environment.”

    • China Communist Party Elder Speaks Out Against Censorship

      Censorship has gone too far, contends Zhou Ruijin, 76, in an essay published in China in January and on Phoenix TV’s ifeng.com early this month. “To be frank, some leaders in the party’s propaganda department were managing the press like how they would manage a train schedule, directly intervening in the approach and procedure of news reporting,” he wrote.

      Zhou, a leading liberal writer in the 1990s, attacked today’s propaganda chiefs for taking down offending websites and deleting postings, calling these actions contrary to the concept that the Communist Party govern the country according to law. Moreover, he condemned “waves of campaigns, strict clampdowns, and public shaming,” the last a reference to the parading of people making Cultural Revolution-style confessions on television.

    • Criteria behind censorship

      Is there any logic or coherence in the way the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has tried to block objectionable online content? The short answer is ‘no’. Last month, the PTA had provided internet service providers with a list of over 400,000 domains that needed to be blocked for pornographic content. According to the PTA, it had been asked by the Supreme Court to “take remedial steps to quantify the nefarious phenomenon of obscenity and pornography that has an imminent role to corrupt and vitiate the youth of Pakistan”. It has now emerged that among the hundreds of thousands of websites on the list provided by the PTA, there are countless websites whose content cannot be considered obscene by any stretch of the imagination. Among these is the microblogging website ‘Tumblr’ as well as websites for photography, ecommerce, blogging and business.

    • Facebook Prude-Patrol Nixes Another Work Of Art By A Feminist, Entirely Proving Her Decades-Old Point

      We’re still fresh on the heels of Facebook’s overly broad and prudish decency rules resulting in the takedown of a bronze piece of artwork in the form of a mermaid statue that features bare metal breasts. Womens’ breasts, as we all know, are shameful things to be hidden from view, lest they corrupt the minds of the young children that were so nourished by them in their youth. Sigh.

      Still, as dumb as that story was, and as indicative as it was of the problem of overly broad censorship guidelines employed in the name of decency, at least there were breasts. Metallic breasts, but breasts nonetheless. I have no idea how Facebook keeps this recent story from looking even more silly, in which it takes down a piece of artwork shared by Philidelphia Museum of Art that was constructed specifically to show how objectified women were in the 1960s.

    • Enough censorship by the majority

      I would further question the supposed centrality of free speech and intellectual discourse in combatting oppression and bigotry. Too often, “debate” is merely smokescreen. For example, there exists an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists and the international community that climate change is caused by humans. Despite this general agreement, the U.S. continues to “debate” (really, deny) this fact. This is not a debate in which all sides are seeking to move towards the truth. This is a debate constructed because massive corporate interests will cling onto the idea that climate change isn’t real for as long as possible. The debate is merely for show. On the individual level, the problem with bigots who use slurs (or commit other acts of oppression) isn’t that they haven’t heard a good argument about why using slurs is wrong. The problem is, in spite of hearing those arguments and the continuous requests of marginalized groups, they don’t care. And if people don’t care whether or not they’re a bigot, what’s the point in arguing with them?

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Donald Trump Praises Sean Hannity For Their Indistinguishable Views on Torture
    • CIA Director Freaks Out After Senator Wyden Points Out How The CIA Spied On The Senate

      If you’re a CIA Director, one would assume that you know how to be cool under fire, right? Apparently that’s not the case for current CIA Director John Brennan who seemed to completely freak out when Senator Ron Wyden started asking questions about the CIA’s infamous decision to spy on the network and computers of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers who were compiling a report on the CIA’s torture program. The details are a bit complex, but the short version is that the Intelligence Committee, which has oversight powers over the CIA, had been set up in a CIA building, with special access to CIA documents, and a special search tool. Apparently, at some point, that search tool returned a document which the CIA had never intended to share with the intelligence committee staffers. That document, called “the Panetta Review” was a draft document that then-CIA chief Leon Panetta had tasked people internal at the CIA to prepare on what the Senate Intelligence Committee staffers were likely to find as they went through the documents.

    • Drug Dogs Don’t Even Have To Be Right Half The Time To Be Considered ‘Reliable’ By The Courts

      All in all, this motion to suppress evidence worked out for the plaintiff, but it does little to address concerns that drug dogs are basically blank permission slips for inquisitive cops.

      The defendant — Emile Martin — was in a vehicle driven by another person (simply referred to as “Montgomery” in the opinion). This vehicle crossed the centerline multiple times and was pulled over by Deputy Brandon Williams. The driver could not produce registration or proof of insurance, which led to the issuance of a citation… eventually. But the citation process was unnecessarily prolonged to provide the deputy with a chance to have a K9 unit brought in to sniff the car for drugs.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Google Decides To Kill Flash Ads, Goes 100% HTML5

      Google today told the world that its ad service is ditching the notorious Flash for HTML5 in upcoming months. The company will stop accepting ads based on this security nightmare, starting on June 30, 2016, and will complete drop them on January 2, 2017.

    • Congressmen Upton, Walden Latest To Insist Nobody Needs Faster Broadband

      A little over a year ago, the FCC voted to raise the minimum definition of broadband from 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream — to 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. The standard better reflects household usage in the gigabit connection and Netflix binge watching era. However, the broadband industry has been whining like a petulant child ever since, largely because the change highlights how a lack of competition and the resulting failure to upgrade networks means a huge swath of the country doesn’t technically have broadband.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • President Obama Sends Two WIPO Copyright Treaties To US Senate For Ratification

      Today, United States President Barack Obama sent two signed multilateral copyright treaties negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organization to the US Senate for ratification.

      The treaties are the 2012 Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances and the 2013 Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired.

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • “Happy Birthday” is public domain, former owner Warner/Chapell to pay $14M

        Music publisher Warner/Chappell will no longer be allowed to collect licensing royalties on those who sing “Happy Birthday” in public and will pay back $14 million to those who have paid for licensing in the past, according to court settlement papers filed late Monday night.

        The settlement is a result of a lawsuit originally filed in 2013 by filmmaker Jennifer Nelson, who challenged the “Happy Birthday” copyright. “Happy Birthday” has the same melody as “Good Morning to You,” a children’s song dating to the 19th Century. But despite the song’s murky early history, music publisher Warner/Chappell has stuck to its story that the song was copyrighted in 1935, and a royalty had to be paid for any public use of it—until now.

      • Warner Pays $14 Million For Illegitimate “Happy Birthday” Claims

        After raking in dozens of millions in licensing fees, Warner/Chappell has admitted that it doesn’t own the rights to the song “Happy Birthday”. The music company has agreed to set aside a $14 million settlement fund for people who paid to use Happy Birthday in public. In addition, the court has been asked to enter the song into the public domain.

      • MPAA May Like Donuts, but They Shouldn’t Be the (Copyright) Police

        The companies and organizations that run the Internet’s domain name system shouldn’t be in the business of policing the contents of websites, or enforcing laws that can impinge on free speech. The staff of ICANN, the organization that oversees that system, agrees. That’s why it’s not surprising that the Motion Picture Association of America, which has consistently sought power to edit the Internet, is now bypassing ICANN and making private deals with domain name registries.

      • Inside MPAA’s Piracy Deal With the Donuts Domain Registry

        The MPAA and the Donuts domain registry have announced a new partnership aimed at curtailing movie and TV show piracy. Donuts controls the .movie gTLD so the arrangement is symbolic for the MPAA, but how will it work in practice? TF has obtained details of the deal which could act as a blueprint for future voluntary agreements.

      • Kenyan Musicians Escalate Fight For Royalties

        The battle for music royalties in Kenya has spurred musicians and artists to demand transparency and accountability in the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK), the body that collects and distributes the fees.

      • Artist Sues Wu-Tang Clan Member, Martin Shkreli, Vice Magazine For Copyright Infringement

        In the continually developing saga that is the Wu-Tang Clan’s unexpected entanglement with the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the pharmaceutical industry, it is now apparently time for the bogus lawsuits to begin.

        Artist Jason Koza, a Wu-Tang Clan fan, is suing Tarik Azzougarh, a rapper, producer and manager “associated” with the group, along with one of its members (RZA) and pharma supervillain Martin Shkreli, last seen pleading the smirk in front of a Congressional hearing.

      • Kim Dotcom’s Extradition Appeal Set For August

        The United States government will have to wait another six months for the appeal in the Kim Dotcom extradition case to be heard. A judge in the High Court in Auckland has just denied US requests for Dotcom’s appeal to be fast-tracked, instead setting a date for this coming August.

      • Canada Is a Hotbed for Online Piracy, Rightsholders Claim

        The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups are unhappy with how the Canadian Government is approaching the problem of online piracy. The country remains very appealing to pirate sites, they claim, while ISPs often fail to warn infringing subscribers effectively.

      • NHL Streaming Service Descends Into Blackout Hell; NHL Threatens Anyone Trying To Circumvent Blackouts

        While we have written quite a bit about major professional sports leagues marching towards expanded streaming options for viewers, and while each league is making progress in that direction, not all of the leagues are equal in how they’re going about it. The NHL has been by far the least progressive in this arena, which is somewhat strange given how much more progressive it has been on other issues of modernity. On streaming, however, there seems to be some flip-flopping, with the league banning the use of services like Periscope by journalists, but then seeking to piggyback on baseball’s fantastic MLB Advanced Media product to get better streaming to its viewers. The entire point of increased streaming options is to get the product out to as many people as possible, grow the fanbase, and ultimately rake in more money via increased viewership.

02.09.16

Links 9/2/2016: Linux in Robotics, Hyperledger Project

Posted in News Roundup at 8:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Building a culture of more pluggable open source

    If there is one word that often percolates conversations hailing the benefits of open source, it is choice. We often celebrate many of the 800+ Linux distributions, the countless desktops, applications, frameworks, and more. Choice, it would seem, is a good thing.

    Interestingly, choice is also an emotive thing.

  • IT sector: Promote open source, bring enabling provisions for Start-up India

    The IT/ITeS sector, one of the largest contributors to exports in the country, has played a vital role in shaping the overall growth story of India. In view of the challenging business environment, the sector has significant expectations from the ensuing Union Budget 2016 on the tax and policy initiatives front.

  • S.F. Officials Push for Adoption of Pioneering Open-Source Voting System [Ed: Beware Microsoft]

    San Francisco could launch a major makeover of its voting systems this year, an effort that supporters say will lead to cheaper, more transparent elections in the city.

    On Tuesday, Supervisor Scott Wiener will call for a Board of Supervisors hearing into the city’s efforts to adopt a voting system that would use off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software. Elections officials, politicians and voter-participation activists have all touted such publicly owned balloting systems as cheaper and more trustworthy than using products supplied by private vendors.

    “We want to set a trend here and around the country toward more open and transparent voting systems,” Wiener said in an interview.

  • Open Source Assignments for Non-Programming Classes

    I’ve been flirting with the idea of asking students in my Educational Game Design module to make their projects “open source”.

    I am wary of the way non-computer scientists use the term “open source”. I often hear people mistakenly refer to free software as “open source”, when its code is not at all open source. I have also heard people in open education talk about how we can learn from open source, but I always felt cautious about this because the contexts are usually different.

  • What Have We Learned From This Open Source Project?

    Start an open source project if you want to learn all you can about software design, development, planning, testing, documenting, and delivery; enjoy technical challenges, administrative challenges, compromise, and will be satisfied hoping that someone out there is benefitting from your work. Do not start an open source project if you need praise, warmth and love from your fellow human beings.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Mon 2016/Feb/08

        After a couple of months of work and thanks to the kind code reviews of the folks at Google, we got the feature landed in Chromium’s repository. For a while, though, it remained hidden behind a runtime flag, as the Chromium team needed to make sure that things would work well enough in all fronts before making it available to all users. Fast-forward to last week, when I found out by chance that the runtime flag has been flipped and the Simplify page printing option has been available in Chromium and Chrome for a while now, and it has even reached the stable releases. The reader mode feature in Chromium seems to remain hidden behind a runtime flag, I think, which is interesting considering that this was the original motivation behind the dom distiller.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Firefox 44.0.1 Patches Graphics Startup Crashes on Linux, Adds Gecko SDK

        Mozilla released just a few hours ago the first hotfix for the latest stable and most advanced branch of the popular Firefox web browser for all supported operating systems.

        Mozilla Firefox 44.0.1 is now available for download (see download links in the last paragraph), and according to the release notes that popped up minutes ago, it adds quite a few improvements, a couple of new features, and fixes for several issues reported by users since the release of Firefox 44.0.

      • Firefox 44.0.1 Has Been Released

        As you may know, Mozilla Firefox is among the most popular internet browsers available, being very appreciated by FOSS users.

      • The Internet is a Global Public Resource

        I committed myself to the idea that the Internet is a global public resource that we all share and rely on, like water. I committed myself to stewarding and protecting this important resource. I committed myself to making the importance of the open Internet widely known.

        When we say, “Protect the Internet,” we are not talking about boosting Wi-fi so people can play “Candy Crush” on the subway. That’s just bottled water, and it will very likely exist with or without us. At Mozilla, we are talking about “the Internet” as a vast and healthy ocean.

      • Martin Thomson Appointed to the Internet Architecture Board

        Martin’s appointment recognizes a long history of major contributions to the Internet standards process: including serving as editor for HTTP/2, the newest and much improved version of HTTP, helping to design, implement, and document WebPush, which we just launched in Firefox, and playing major roles in WebRTC, TLS and Geolocation. In addition to his standards work, Martin has committed code all over Gecko, in areas ranging from the WebRTC stack to NSS. Serving on the IAB will give Martin a platform to do even greater things for the Internet and the Open Web as a whole.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Impetus’ Analytics Platform Extends to Work with Multiple Apache Projects

      Impetus Technologies, a big data solutions company, has announced StreamAnalytix 2.0, featuring support for Apache Spark Streaming, in addition to the current support for Apache Storm. Streaming data analytics has become a big deal, especially with the Internet of Things and other emerging technologies helping to produce torrents of streaming data that enterprises need to make sense of.

      Impetus’ platform is open source-based, and here are more details on how enterprises can leverage it along with tools like Spark.

  • Databases

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • The Money In Open-Source Software

      It’s no secret that open-source technology — once the province of radicals, hippies and granola eaters — has gone mainstream. According to industry estimates, more than 180 young companies that give away their software raised roughly $3.2 billion in financing from 2011 to 2014.

      Even major enterprise-IT vendors are relying on open-source for critical business functions today. It’s a big turnaround from the days when former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously called the open-source Linux operating system “a cancer” (and obviously a threat to Windows).

  • Licensing

    • GNU social and #RIPTwitter

      What a weekend! Buzzfeed sent rumours soaring that Twitter was going to stop displaying tweets in order and instead have an “algorithm” optimise it. Scary, right? I have no idea if it’s true but the possibility hit a nerve. #RIPTwitter was trending globally and it encouraged a small fraction of Twitter users to wonder “what could I use instead?” That is, one heck of a lot of people.

      Next minute, thousands of new users are pouring into GNU social—a social network whose existing users only numbered in the thousands to begin with. It’s free software’s decentralised answer to Twitter and to date it has a fairly niche following. Not any more. The admin of the largest server, quitter.se, reported 1200 new signups in two days.

    • License Compatibility and Relicensing

      Only the GNU licenses give authors a choice about whether to permit upgrades to future license versions. When I wrote the first version of the GNU GPL, in 1989, I considered including a license upgrade option as is found now in CC licenses, but I thought it more correct to give that choice to each author. Thus, the author could release a program either under “GPL 1 only” or “GPL 1 or later.”

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Students, librarians urge professors to use open-source textbooks

        A student advocacy group, along with one of the University of Washington’s top librarians, is urging faculty members to take a good look at using more free online textbooks.

        And two bills in the state Legislature would promote and facilitate the use of such open-source textbooks and course materials.

      • Student Group Releases New Report on Textbook Prices

        Earlier today, U.S. PIRG released a new report investigating the real impact of high textbook prices on today’s students. The report, titled “Covering the Cost,” is based on a survey of nearly 5,000 students from 132 institutions.

        Over the last decade, the price of college textbooks has soared. Since 2006, the cost of a college textbook increased by 73% – over four times the rate of inflation. Today, individual textbooks often cost over $200, sometimes as high as $400.

  • Programming

    • GHC performance is rather stable

      Johannes Bechberger, while working on his Bachelor’s thesis supervised by my colleague Andreas Zwinkau, has developed a performance benchmark runner and results visualizer called “temci”, and used GHC as a guinea pig. You can read his elaborate analysis on his blog.

    • Ready for a nostalgia kick? Usborne has put its old computer books on the web for free

      UK publishing house Usborne is giving out its iconic 1980s programming books as free downloads.

      The books, which are available for free as PDF files, include Usborne’s introductions to programming series, adventure games, computer games listings and first computer series. The series was particularly popular in the UK, where they helped school a generation of developers and IT professionals.

    • LLVM Patches Confirm Google Has Its Own In-House Processor

      Patches published by Google developers today for LLVM/Clang confirm that the company has at least one in-house processor of its own.

      Jacques Pienaar, a software engineer at Google since 2014, posted patches today seeking to mainline a “Lanai” back-end inside LLVM. He explained they want to contribute their Lanai processor to the LLVM code-base as they continue developing this back-end with a focus on compiling C99 code. He mentions Lanai is a simple in-order 32-bit processor with 32 x 32-bit registers, two registers with fixed values, four used for program state tracking, and two reserved for explicit usage by user, and no floating point support.

Leftovers

  • Judge Blocks Release Of Anti-Abortion Videos As The Arbiter Of Journalism

    In other words, whatever your opinion on abortion might be, these people suck. Editing videos to make it seem like something that isn’t happening is happening isn’t virtuous. It’s called lying, and it’s a no-no.

  • Apple Bye Bye

    I was clumsy, and I spilled some beer on the keyboard of my Mac Air laptop, bought July 9, 2014. I immediately started drying my precious computer, overturning it, and my greedy Mac didn’t gulp all that much beer, but….

    I knew that liquid spills can easily kill a laptop. However, this beer fatality was a first time for me. I realized that only luck has saved me in dozens of my plane trips and train trips, where a few seconds of air bumps or rail vibration might tip a plastic cup and immediately drown a precious machine, the ally and partner in my everyday life.

    The Mac Air immediately went dark. In bitter days to follow I struggled to get it back on its feet from its alcoholic overdose. But the battery had shorted out and the motherboard was fouled beyond repair. The screen misbehaved like delirium tremens. Beer is not so fatal to laptops as sugary Coca-Cola, but even pure water can drown delicate microelectronics.

    I managed to retrieve my precious files from the faltering hard disk and I migrated promptly to a new Mac Air, the same model, but running the latest version of the OSX operating system. The machinery was the same, but in the meantime Apple had “upgraded,” or rather transformed, its software.

  • Tim Cook just tweeted the worst iPhone camera advert ever

    APPLE SUPREMO Tim Cook has brought shame on his company, its hardware and its status as a camera option by tweeting one of his own photos.

    The problem is with the photo and the photographer, but there is no schadenfreude in that. Cook took his photo during a leisurely night out. He didn’t take it for one of those ‘taken on the iPhone’ promotional efforts or to show off.

  • How WIRED Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

    Over the past several years, there’s been a significant increase in the number of people using ad-blocking software in their web browser. We have certainly seen a growth in those numbers here at WIRED, where we do all we can to write vital stories for an audience that’s passionate about the ongoing adventure of our rapidly changing world.

    On an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads. We know that you come to our site primarily to read our content, but it’s important to be clear that advertising is how we keep WIRED going: paying the writers, editors, designers, engineers, and all the other staff that works so hard to create the stories you read and watch here.

  • Wired Is Launching an Ad-Free Website to Appease Ad Blockers

    More than 1 in 5 people who visit Wired Magazine’s website use ad-blocking software. Starting in the next few weeks, the magazine will give those readers a choice: stop blocking ads, pay to look at a version of the site that is unsullied by advertisements, or go away. It’s the kind of move that was widely predicted last fall after Apple allowed ad-blocking in the new version of its mobile software, but most publishers have shied away from it so far.

  • Microsoft defends new Windows Server licensing

    After Texas law firm Scott & Scott issued its analysis of the changes to Windows Server licensing, Microsoft responded by addressing each of Scott & Scott’s points in an email. The issues described by Scott & Scott, Microsoft contends, would be limited to a very small customer segment, and even then wouldn’t be as significant an issue as claimed.

  • Ballmer: Hardware, mobile strategy essential for Microsoft’s future

    Microsoft’s hardware—Surface, HoloLens, and Xbox—is “absolutely essential” to its future, according to former CEO Steve Ballmer in a new interview with Business Insider. That’s because of the interrelationship between devices and the cloud: so many devices are supported by and dependent on cloud software, Ballmer feels that the company needs to participate both on the cloud side and on the device side.

  • Two killed & 150 injured in head-on train crash in Bavaria as medics rush to save trapped

    A fleet of emergency helicopters has been scrambled to take injured passengers to hospitals after the crash at Bad Aibling, an hour from Munich.

    Police say at least four people have died and around 150 have been injured – 15 critical and 40 seriously – in the smash in southern Germany.

    It is feared that of the four dead, one is a train driver. The other train driver is missing, with local fire services hunting for him.

  • Twidiots rage on Twitter about new algorithmic timeline

    Twidiots around the world are very angry right now. Twitter has decided to follow in the footsteps of Fakebook and introduce an algorithmic timeline. When the news of this hit Twitter, there was a twidiot storm the likes of which has seldom been seen on the service. They went on a rage-filled tweet rampage, vowing that Twitter was dead to them, they would never tweet again (the world should be so lucky), and other hysterical dramatics.

  • Worst tech mergers and acquisitions: Novell and Unix, Borland and Ashton-Tate

    In 1991, if you were running a personal computer network in your business or enterprise, there was a good chance it was running on Novell’s NetWare, which was the predominant server-based network operating system at the time.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Water War Against the Poor: Flint and the Crimes of Capital

      If ever one wondered about the efficacy of a state government agency imposing officials on local governments, Flint has answered that question forever.

      In April, 2014, the state-appointed emergency manager, in order to save money, ordered that the city’s water source be changed from Lake Huron to the notoriously polluted Flint River.

    • Sanders Blasts Michigan Officials for Denying Undocumented People Clean Water

      Senator Bernie Sanders blasted the state of Michigan after reports circulated that undocumented immigrants living in Flint, Michigan have been denied clean drinking water. “This is a humanitarian crisis,” the presidential candidate declared.

      The comments came after the Detroit Free Press reported earlier this week that Flint’s roughly 1,000 undocumented immigrants have faced significant barriers accessing the bottled water now being distributed throughout the city. According to both immigrants and advocates, some people have been turned away because they lacked proper identification, while many others do not even bother because they don’t speak English and fear being deported.

    • The world’s forests will collapse if we don’t learn to say ‘no’

      An alarming new study has shown that the world’s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but that areas of “core forest” — remote interior areas critical for disturbance-sensitive wildlife and ecological processes — are vanishing even faster.

    • UPOV Works To Improve Breeders’ Applications, Civil Society Calls For Alternative System

      The Geneva-based International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) provides intellectual property rights protection for plant breeders. In 2016, the organisation is planning to work on systems to facilitate breeders’ applications for new varieties. Meanwhile, civil society is calling for ways to protect plant varieties other than through UPOV, which they see as hindering farmers’ rights.

    • Plant Treaty In 2016: Sustainability Solutions, Farmers’ Rights, Global Information System

      Civil society has been concerned with the interrelations between the ITPGRFA, UPOV and WIPO, in particular on the implementation of farmers’ rights, which they say are undermined by the last version of the UPOV Convention (1991) (IPW, WIPO, 2 April 2015).

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Iraq Goes Medieval: Will Build Wall Around Baghdad to Stop ISIS

      In medieval times, cities were walled. At night the gates were locked, the towers guarded, and thieves and brigands were kept outside. At least in theory, because walls could be scaled, or blown up, or tunnels dug, or guards bribed.

      And so in what may turn out to be the ultimate 21st century Renaissance Faire, the Iraqi government, no doubt with the support of, if not the checkbook of, the United States, is building a wall around the city of Baghdad in hopes that that will stop ISIS where nothing else has.

    • Opposing the Plutocracy Means Opposing the Warfare State

      Bernie Sanders wants to stay on message. So his presidential campaign has focused on economic issues. The American economy is rigged, Sanders says, in the interests of the wealthy and well connected. Banks and Wall Street brokerage houses get what they want at the expense of everyone else. The government should step in on the side of ordinary people.

      It’s hard not to resonate with Sanders’s message that the rules of the game are designed to benefit those best positioned to shape them. When power is concentrated in the hands of a few people, when there’s one ultimate rule-making authority, politicians and their cronies can engage in self-dealing with relative impunity. Eliminating the privileges that prop up the crony class would likely prove more efficient and just than Sanders’s proposals to increase the power of the state – which tends persistently to favor the well-connected. But you can find his prescription unappealing while appreciating his diagnosis.

    • In the 2016 Campaign, US Foreign Policy Establishment Not Faring Well Either

      This underlying reluctance of large swaths of the American electorate of both parties to continue such long-standing US meddling in faraway conflicts – which it intuitively, if vaguely, realizes is the major cause of blowback terrorism – is reflected by the better-than-expected standing of antiestablishment candidates, such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz on the Republican side and Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side. Although Trump and Cruz have made some over-the-top comments about bombing ISIS into smithereens, in general they are less hawkish than the mainstream candidates, with their traditional Republican jingoistic foreign policy: Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush. Moreover, the pall of George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War still hangs over the 2016 election to such an extent that so far, the candidacy of Bush #3 – who the at the beginning of the campaign in 2015 the media was trying to anoint as the Republican frontrunner – has done abysmally.

    • The Might of the American Empire Was on Full Display at Super Bowl 50: A Bizarre War Spectacle Extraordinaire

      From the fighter jets soaring overhead to the armed troops patrolling Levi Stadium, Super Bowl 50 was a highly militarized event, its 70,000 spectators and millions of television viewers subject to a showcase of war propaganda and heavy security crackdown.

      To much fanfare, the Armed Forces Chorus, comprised of 50 men and women from the Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, and Air Force, kicked off the massive sports event by singing “America the Beautiful” from the field. CBS’ broadcast of the song cut away to footage of uniformed troops standing at attention, with text on the screen reading, “United States Forces Afghanistan.” The clip was a nod to a brutal war and occupation, now stretching into its 15th year, as top generals press for an even slower withdrawal.

      Following the national anthem, the U.S. Navy flew its signature Blue Angels Delta formation over the cheering stadium, located in Santa Clara, Calif. The Navy is open about the propaganda purposes of such flights, stating in a press release they are intended to demonstrate “pride” in the military. In a country that dropped 23,144 bombs on Muslim-majority countries in 2015 alone, the war planes are not just symbolic.

    • Israel frets about “Iran as Neighbor” if Aleppo falls & al-Assad Regime Wins

      An Arabic site that aggregates Facebook and other social media postings reports that Israeli officials are filled with anxiety and consternation about the possibility that the regime of Bashar al-Assad will conquer Aleppo with Russian and Iranian help, and will go on to reconstitute itself. It would be, in the view of Israeli hardliners, an Iranian puppet and would give Lebanon’s Hizbullah a free hand in the region. Yuval Steinitz, a cabinet member with a portfolio for strategic affairs, warned that the victories of the Syrian Arab Army in the Aleppo area constitute a long-term threat to Israel.

    • Erdogan Threatened Europe with Refugees, now Demanding US abandon Syrian Kurds

      Reuters reports that Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan allegedly bullied European leaders and threatened to drown Europe in refugees if his terms were not met. He wanted 6 Bn Euros to keep the 2.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey happy enough in that country to discourage them from moving to Europe.

    • Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton Fight for Feminist Crown

      One would be the first woman to get the Democratic presidential nomination and, if successful, go on to become the first female president of the United States. The other is an old, white man. Yet the question of who’s more of a feminist, Hillary Clinton or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, has provoked surprisingly impassioned debate and a volatile divide on the left.

      Since the Sanders campaign started, female fans have had to fend off accusations that their support is anti-feminist. Last week, women’s rights icon Gloria Steinem even suggested that young women only support Sanders to attract boys, and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright opined to Democratic voters that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” Meanwhile, Bill Clinton accused “Bernie Bros”—a term that seems to have become a derogatory catchall for Sanders supporters of any gender—of “vicious” and “profane” sexism. Since then, an array of feminists for Bernie have come out swinging, challenging the idea that XX-chromosomes a feminist candidate makes.

    • Dear Hillary, Madeleine and Gloria: Full Feminism Demands We Say No to America’s Deadly Imperial Wars

      Two powerful backers of Hillary Clinton attracted headlines—and outrage—this weekend when they uttered sweeping statements under the banner of “feminism,” calling on young women to back the former Secretary of State’s presidential bid.

      Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of Sate, introduced Clinton in New Hampshire on Saturday by declaring, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”

    • GOP Candidates Compete Over Who Will Commit Most War Crimes Once Elected

      At a rally in New Hampshire on Monday night, Donald Trump was criticizing Ted Cruz for having insufficiently endorsed torture – Cruz had said two nights earlier that he would bring back waterboarding, but not “in any sort of widespread use” – when someone in the audience yelled out that Cruz was a “pussy”. Trump, in faux outrage, reprimanded the supporter, repeating the allegation for the assembled crowd: “She said he’s a pussy. That’s terrible. Terrible.”

    • The US Military Bombs in the Twenty-First Century

      Maybe Washington should bluntly declare not victory, but defeat, and bring the U.S. military home.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Could a President Hillary Clinton Be Impeached Over Her Emails?

      If Hillary Clinton is elected president, could her slow-bleeding email scandal lead to her impeachment?

      The question has been percolating in right-wing circles since last October, when Republican Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama broached the subject in an interview with conservative talk-radio host Matt Murphy. If Clinton makes it to the White House, Brooks declared in no uncertain terms, “the day she’s sworn in is the day that she’s subject to impeachment because she has committed high crimes and misdemeanors” arising from her use of a private email server to discuss matters of national security during her tenure as secretary of state.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Sanctuary Ocean Count

      Every year in January, February, and March, volunteers count whales from the shores of O‘ahu, Kaua‘i, and the Big Island for the annual Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary Ocean Count.

    • Iowa Will Soon Decide Whether To Allow An Oil Company To Seize Residents’ Land

      The thought of a massive pipeline moving crude oil some 60 inches underneath his farmland troubles Richard Lamb. It isn’t just the risk of an accident or the burden of clashing with the powerful oil industry. It’s the helplessness of facing Iowa’s eminent domain.

    • No, Poor Countries Aren’t The Only Ones That Will Suffer From Climate Change

      A well-meaning but ultimately flawed new study tries to argue that climate change is even more unfair than we thought. It has long been understood that climate change is uniquely inequitable and immoral since most of the world’s poorest countries will suffer greatly from its impacts, even though they have contributed little or nothing to the problem because they are historically low emitters of carbon pollution.

      A study released Friday by The University of Queensland and the Wildlife Conservation Society goes even further, however, arguing that the world’s big carbon polluters won’t suffer greatly from climate change.

  • Finance

    • David Cameron’s MUM joins the fight against Tory cuts in campaign to save children’s centres

      They say mother knows best – and in David Cameron’s case it certainly seems to be true.

      The Prime Minister’s mum Mary has signed a petition aimed at stopping Tory cuts.

      Jill Huish, who runs the campaign that Mary backed, said: “It shows how deep austerity is cutting our most vulnerable when even David Cameron ’s mum has had enough.”

    • Record Number of Investor-State Arbitrations Filed in 2015

      Geneva, 2 February 2016 – UNCTAD has updated its recently launched Investment Dispute Settlement Navigator. The ISDS Navigator is now up to date as of 1 January 2016.

      The update reveals that the number of investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) cases filed in 2015 reached a record high of 70. Spain was by far the most frequent respondent in 2015, with 15 claims brought against it. The Russian Federation is second on this list with 7 cases.

    • PayPal blocks VPN, SmartDNS provider’s payments over copyright concerns

      PayPal has stopped accepting payments for Canadian outfit UnoTelly—a provider of VPN and SmartDNS services—because these might be used to facilitate copyright infringement.

      UnoTelly said in an update on its website that Paypal had “severed payment processing agreement unilaterally and without prior warning.” It added: “Paypal indicated that UnoTelly is not allowed to provide services that enable open and unrestricted Internet access.”

      Ars sought comment from PayPal on this story, however, it had not immediately got back to us at time of publication. We’ll update this story, if the online payments giant does get in touch.

      UnoTelly told its customers that it had no control over PayPal’s decision, and apologised for the inconvenience.

    • Privatization Is the Atlanticist Strategy to Attack Russia — Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson

      Two years ago, Russian officials discussed plans to privatize a group of national enterprises headed by the oil producer Rosneft, the VTB Bank, Aeroflot, and Russian Railways. The stated objective was to streamline management of these companies, and also to induce oligarchs to begin bringing their two decades of capital flight back to invest in the Russia economy. Foreign participation was sought in cases where Western technology transfer and management techniques would be likely to help the economy.

      However, the Russian economic outlook deteriorated as the United States pushed Western governments to impose economic sanctions against Russia and oil prices declined. This has made the Russian economy less attractive to foreign investors. So sale of these companies will bring much lower prices today than would have been likely in 2014

    • Top German Judges Tear To Shreds EU’s Proposed TAFTA/TTIP Investment Court System

      As Techdirt has repeatedly pointed out, one of the most problematic aspects of the TAFTA/TTIP deal being negotiated between the US and the EU is the inclusion of a corporate sovereignty chapter — officially known as “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS). Techdirt isn’t the only one worried about it: no less a person than the EU’s Trade Commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, said last year that she “shares” the concerns here. Her response was to draw up the new “ICS” — “Investor Court System — as an alternative. US interest in ICS is conspicuous by its absence, but Malmström keeps plugging away at the idea, evidently hoping to defuse European opposition to TTIP by getting rid of old-style corporate sovereignty.

    • Australia’s Arrogant, Irresponsible Trade Minister Rejects Calls For Cost-Benefit Analysis Of TPP

      Mike has just written about the way the US public is being short-changed over the promised “debate” that would follow the completion of the TPP negotiations. That broken promise is just part of the general dishonesty surrounding the whole deal. For example, the public was told that it was not possible for it to make its views known during the negotiations, because they had to be secret — even though many other trade deals aren’t — but that once everything was agreed there would be ample time for a truly democratic debate. Of course, at that point nothing could be changed, so the debate was little more than a token gesture, but now it seems the US public won’t even get that.

    • Austerity Ireland: Europe open your eyes

      Some rights reserved.On a wet and windy winter evening in December 2015, a crowd of 1,000 people gathers around a doorstep in Dublin’s city centre, a stone’s throw from the Irish parliament. A representative of the Irish traveling community, a group of under 65,000 people that has long been fighting unsuccessfully for official recognition as an ethnic minority, enters the stage. The woman reluctantly explains that she is not a good public speaker. The crowd nonetheless breaks into cheer when she emphatically declares: “Europe has to see now what’s going on, they really do have to see what’s going on.”

      [...]

      Nominal income exceeds that of 2014 by €20billion and public debt is predicted to sink below the 100% GDP mark. The American Chambers of Commerce announced in December 2015 that US multinationals are expected to create an additional 14,000 jobs in Ireland over the next two years. Those relying on government statistics and mainstream media reports might ask “What’s not to like?”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Ordinary Americans Fought Big Money and Won in 2015

      Americans believe in democracy—and they’re ready to reclaim it from the wealthy special interests that have grown ever-more dominant since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

      The overwhelming majority of Americans agree that money has too much influence over elections, and that the system for financing political campaigns needs a radical overhaul.

      Over 90 percent of Iowa caucus voters—in both parties—recently told pollsters they are unsatisfied or “mad as hell” about the role of money in politics.

    • Top Hillary Clinton Advisers and Fundraisers Lobbied Against Obamacare

      Hillary Clinton is campaigning as a guardian of President Barack Obama’s progressive policy accomplishments. In recent weeks, she has called the Affordable Care Act “one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party, and of our country,” and promised that she is “going to defend Dodd-Frank” and “defend President Obama for taking on Wall Street.”

      Meanwhile, however, Clinton’s campaign has been relying on a team of strategists and fundraisers, many of whom spent much of the last seven years as consultants or lobbyists for business interests working to obstruct Obama’s agenda in those two areas.

    • Why Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein Called Bernie Sanders “Dangerous”

      Lloyd Blankfein, longtime CEO of Goldman Sachs, didn’t like what Bernie Sanders said about him in early January, and he fired back on CNBC’s “Squawkbox” last week, saying Sanders’ critique “has the potential to be a dangerous moment.”

      But there’s more to that story than it appears. It’s not simply that Sanders uses Blankfein as a symbol of the “greed of Wall Street” — it’s that Sanders does so while highlighting the evocative contrast between the 2008 bailout of Wall Street and Blankfein’s public advocacy for cuts to entitlements.

    • Taxpayers Give Big Pensions to Ex-Presidents, Precisely So They Don’t Have to Sell Out

      “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” Hillary Clinton complained in an interview in 2014, justifying her spree of paid speeches on Wall Street and elsewhere.

      Those speeches have now turned into a major political controversy, with the campaign refusing to agree to release the transcripts of what was said.

      Despite Clinton’s protestations, however, the reality is that this country does not allow its former presidents to live “dead broke.” Running the country has great retirement benefits. Ex-presidents are given pensions of nearly $200,000 annually as well as funding for office space and custodial staff.

    • NRA’s Ted Nugent: Jewish Supporters Of Gun Safety Laws Are “Nazis In Disguise”
    • Key Members of Hillary Clinton Team Lobbied Against Bills She Now Touts as National Accomplishments

      As she campaigns for the presidency, Hillary Clinton is heralding the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, yet she has infused her staff with former lobbyists and consultants who did all they could to block the two reforms.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Populist Charade

      In the ‘80s and ‘90s, she served on the board of Wal-Mart — a company notorious for its horrendous treatment of workers and union-crushing efforts — and, while the corporation waged a war against its labor force, Clinton said nothing, did nothing, and fought nothing.

      In 1990, she made the statement: “I’m always proud of Wal-Mart and what we do, and the way that we do it better than anybody else.”

      This is a company that has used foreign labor (including child workers), stolen its worker’s wages by forcing them to work while off-the-clock, and discriminated against elderly and disabled employees.

    • The Failed Record of the Establishment: Why Talk Is Cheap in 2016

      Clinton, meanwhile, has zigzagged sharply to the Left to try to tap into the energy of Sanders.

    • I’m a Woman and I Will Vote for the Best Feminist for President: Bernie Sanders

      I won’t vote against Hillary Clinton because she’s female, but I don’t intend to vote for her because I am. We need more fundamental changes in this country

  • Censorship

    • Protesting does not equate to censorship

      Campus is rife with controversy over an event hosted by the Young Americans for Liberty set for Jan. 9. The event titled, “How the Progressive Left is Destroying American Education,” will feature the very loud personality Milo Yiannopoulus. For those who are not familiar with Yiannopolous, otherwise known and self-labeled as “The Most Fabulous Supervillain on the Internet,” he allegedly stands to reclaim free speech from social justice activists. Yiannopolous has garnered strong opposition as his planned tours across campuses stand to continue. Opposition stems from Yiannopolous’s incendiary, often sexist, racist and homophobic comments and tweets. One such example is Yiannopolous’s tweet stating, “Feminists want to do away with gender pronouns in that they’re all so disgustingly fat no one can tell what sex they are anyway.” Posters around campus advertising the event write, “Feminism is cancer” and “Prepare to get triggered.” Despite the frustration and anger over Yiannopolous, I think we must all remember that his comments, and the ideology that it stands for, is simply not worth engaging with.

    • Historical censorship can’t change the past

      Censorship is a dirty word in a country where the liberty to say and print what we want is the very lifeblood of not just our government and legal system, but our lives.

      On Jan. 14, the Houston Independent School District board voted to rename four schools bearing the names of known Confederate figures. One of those schools bore a name familiar to University of Georgia students: Henry W. Grady — the very man after whom our college of journalism is named.

    • The campus court of Versailles

      Debates on abortion are cancelled because having two people without uteruses discuss the issue is apparently harmful to students’ ‘mental safety’. Trashy pop songs like ‘Blurred Lines’ have been banned for similar reasons. And, more recently, there was an attempt to bar Germaine Greer from speaking at Cardiff University. Groupthink and censorship are the order of the day.

    • Campus censorship is a dangerous trend that has to stop

      Censorship is having a devastating impact upon freedom of speech on university campuses and is a threat to the freedoms and liberty of us all.

    • How censorship works in Vladimir Putin’s Russia

      Russia can be a murderously difficult place to do independent journalism; the killing of reporter and activist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 ought to have made that manifestly clear. But journalism isn’t the only kind of speech that’s under threat in Russia. A new report from PEN America makes it clear how a confluence of laws ostensibly aimed at combating terrorism and religious hatred and protecting children have created an environment in which it’s increasingly hard to publish fiction, broadcast independent television or put on theatrical and musical productions that don’t toe an ever-shifting party line.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Proposed Utah law would make doxing a six-month jail crime

      A bill proposed in the Utah State House of Representatives on Monday would update and amend passages in the state’s criminal code regarding “offenses committed by means of electronic or computer functions.” However, in attempting to address the issue of “doxing”—meaning, publishing personally identifying information on the Internet as a way to harass or attack someone—the bill’s language may consequently target free online speech.

      Utah HB 255, titled “Cybercrime Amendments,” counts State Representative David E. Lifferth as its lead sponsor, and it includes amendments that would penalize denial-of-service attacks and false emergency reports at specific locations (i.e. swatting). Utah state criminal code already punishes certain kinds of electronic communications “with intent to annoy, alarm, intimidate, offend, abuse, threaten, harass, frighten, or disrupt the electronic communications of another,” and HB 255 would append that specific passage to count the act of “distributing personal identifying information” as actionable, should that be done with any of the aforementioned intent.

    • Dangerous Speech: Would the Founders Be Considered Domestic Extremists Today?

      Not only has free speech become a four-letter word—profane, obscene, uncouth, not to be uttered in so-called public places—but in more and more cases, the government deems free speech to be downright dangerous and in some instances illegal.

      The U.S. government has become particularly intolerant of speech that challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

      Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, extremist speech, etc.

    • Law and policy round-up: three points about Cameron’s prisons speech

      First, prisons are expensive even if “law and order” rhetoric is cheap. Wise politicians realise this and know that the current approach to prisons policy is financially unsustainable, regardless of what lines voters and tabloids clap along with. The current policy also makes no real sense from a crime prevention perspective and is best seen as one devised by a mischievous demon.

    • The Power of Pictures

      This is the power of imagery. It often captures what words can’t. It angers, it frustrates, it provokes. And it is the reason that the American Civil Liberties Union has been fighting in court for more than 10 years for the release of photographs documenting the maltreatment of prisoners in U.S. military custody in the so-called “war on terror.”

    • Documents Show Chicago Cops Routinely Disabling Recording Equipment

      When the dashcam footage of the shooting of Laquan McDonald was finally released by the city of Chicago, it was notably missing the audio. In fact, no surviving footage of the shooting contains any audio. It’s 2016 and the Chicago PD is still producing silent films.

    • What role were you born to play in social change?

      In California, Moyer went to graduate school to study social movement theory and indulge his love of analytical thinking. He became best known for identifying eight stages of successful social movements, which he named the Movement Action Plan, or MAP. I found activists using MAP as far away as Taiwan, where they had already read it in translation before I got there.

    • Officials Outraged After ‘Shocking’ Report on NYPD Kicking People Out of Homes

      A wide swath of public officials are calling for change in response to a Daily News and ProPublica investigation about the NYPD’s use of an obscure type of lawsuit to boot hundreds of people from homes. The cases are happening almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods.

      Several city council members said they were considering amendments and other reforms to safeguard abuses.

      Council Member Vanessa L. Gibson said the statistics included in the story are “shocking.”

    • There are 72 DHS Employees on Terrorist Watch List

      Either the terror watch list is complete bull, or the Department of Homeland Security has a big problem. Come to think about it, maybe you can read it both ways.

    • France: Abuses Under State of Emergency

      France has carried out abusive and discriminatory raids and house arrests against Muslims under its sweeping new state of emergency law. The measures have created economic hardship, stigmatized those targeted, and have traumatized children.

      In January 2016, Human Rights Watch interviewed 18 people who said they had been subjected to abusive searches or placed under house arrest, as well as human rights activists and lawyers working in affected areas. Those targeted said the police burst into homes, restaurants, or mosques; broke people’s belongings; terrified children; and placed restrictions on people’s movements so severe that they lost income or suffered physically.

    • Part 2: Seth Freed Wessler on Uncovering the Deaths of Dozens at Privatized Immigrant-Only Jails

      A shocking new investigation about private prisons has revealed dozens of men have died in disturbing circumstances inside these facilities in recent years. We continue our conversation with journalist Seth Freed Wessler, who spent more than two years fighting in and out of court to obtain more than 9,000 pages of medical records that private prison contractors had submitted to the Bureau of Prisons.

    • Donald Trump called Ted Cruz a “pussy” — and the media won’t repeat it

      Trump was criticizing the Texas senator’s unwillingness to support widespread uses of torture when a woman in the audience called Cruz, Trump’s chief rival for more conservative voters, a “pussy.”

      Then, amazingly, Donald Trump repeated it so the entire crowd could hear.

      “She said — I never expect to hear that from you again!,” he told the crowd, in mock disapproval. “She said: ‘He’s a pussy.’ That’s terrible.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Adopt open source for connectivity: TRAI

      In a visit to India in December 2015, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said the company had ‘tonnes of data’ from its tests in Sri Lanka and Indonesia to demonstrate that Project Loon created no such interference and would be sharing it with the government.

    • Adopt open source technology for unbiased internet connectivity: Regulator tells telcos
    • Net Neutrality Again Puts F.C.C. General Counsel at Center Stage

      Every day for one month last fall, Jonathan Sallet, the general counsel at the Federal Communications Commission, sneaked into a small, windowless office at the agency, its location undisclosed except to senior staff.

      From 6 a.m. until early evening, with Bach streaming in the background, he worked mostly alone, marking up stacks of law books and standing in front of a lectern. His job: Defend in court the F.C.C.’s most contentious policy — rules to classify broadband Internet providers as utilities, widely called net neutrality.

      “I did nothing for one month but prepare,” Mr. Sallet said in an interview. “I talked a lot to the wall.”

      His arguments, though — like nearly all of his actions for the agency — have had far-reaching reverberations.

    • The Tragedy of Ethiopia’s Internet

      Nafkot Nega thinks journalists are terrorists. When I visited him and his mother, Serkalem Fassil, at their tiny apartment in the outskirts of Washington, DC, in early January, 9-year-old Nafkot intermittently murmured and jabbed his hands, pretending to be a superhero fighting criminals.

      Perhaps some of those criminals were journalists like his father, Eskinder Nega, who was convicted of violating Ethiopia’s anti-terror law in July 2012. Eskinder is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence.

      “Journalism is a crime or a terrorist act in his mind because what has been portrayed about [his dad],” Serkalem explained to me through a translator. “Not only his dad, but if you mention any journalist he will scream and say ‘I don’t like journalists!’”

    • Facebook’s free Internet app banned by India’s new net neutrality rule

      Facebook’s attempt to provide free access to a selection of websites in developing countries was dealt a blow today when India’s telecom regulator banned arrangements that charge different amounts for access to different parts of the Internet. The move effectively prevents “zero-rating” schemes in which certain Web services count against data caps while others do not.

    • India deals blow to Facebook in people-powered ‘net neutrality’ row
    • India Shuts Down Zuckerberg’s ‘Free Basics’
    • Zuckerberg Says Banning Free Basics Won’t Keep Internet.org Away From India
    • TRAI rules in favour of Net neutrality
    • India Blocks Facebook’s Free Basics, Other Zero-Rated Mobile Services Over Net Neutrality
    • Take your digital media abroad

      At the moment, if you travel abroad you often can’t access digital media that you’ve paid for at home. The European Commission is proposing draft legislation that would let people who have paid for digital media in their country of residence watch that media while they’re temporarily in another EU country.

    • Does Cyberspace Exist? Is It Free? Reflections, 20 years Later, on A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

      Twenty years ago tonight, I was at a staff party for the closing of the World Economic Forum, lured there by a coven of the contemporary geishas that staffed the Forum in those days, composed largely of doctoral students in Foreign Affairs at the University of Geneva. But I had also agreed to write something about that moment for a book called 24 Hours in Cyberspace. This was a slightly silly proposition, given that it was largely a book of photographs, and a photograph has yet to be taken of anything in Cyberspace.

    • Comcast Using Minority Astroturf Groups To Argue Cable Set Top Box Competition Hurts Diversity

      For years one of the greasier lobbying and PR tactics by the telecom industry has been the use of minority groups to parrot awful policy positions. Historically, such groups are happy to take financing from a company like Comcast, in exchange repeating whatever memos are thrust in their general direction, even if the policy being supported may dramatically hurt their constituents. The tactic of co-opting these groups helps build the illusion of broad support for awful policy, and was well documented during AT&T’s attempted takeover of T-Mobile, and Comcast’s attempted takeover of Time Warner Cable.

    • T-Mobile urges FCC to “tread lightly” on video throttling and zero-rating

      A T-Mobile USA executive yesterday urged the Federal Communications Commission not to take any action against the carrier’s “Binge On” program, which throttles nearly all video content and exempts certain video services from data caps.

    • States Wake Up, Realize AT&T Lobbyists Have Been Writing Awful Protectionist State Broadband Laws

      For more than fifteen years now companies like Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink have quite literally paid state legislatures to write protectionist broadband laws. These laws, passed in around 20 states, protect the incumbent duopoly from the faintest specter of broadband competition — by preventing towns and cities from either building their own broadband networks, or from striking public/private partnerships to improve lagging broadband networks. They’re the worst sort of protectionism, written by ISPs and pushed by ALEC and ISP lobbyists to do one thing: protect industry revenues.

      Despite the fact the laws strip away citizen rights to decide local infrastructure matters for themselves (because really, who better to decide your town’s needs than AT&T or Comcast executives), ISPs for more than a decade managed to forge division by framing this as a partisan issue. But then something changed: companies like Google Fiber and Tucows began highlighting how public/private partnerships are actually a great way to fill in the broadband gaps left by an apathetic, uncompetitive broadband duopoly.

    • The Battle for the Web: Five Years After Egypt’s #Jan25 Uprising

      Behind the Western-supported government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s lies a troubling trend threatening free speech in Egypt. CPJ’s latest figures list Egypt as the second highest jailer of journalists, second only to China. Eighty-two percent of all journalists in prison in Egypt used the Internet as a medium, according to the organization’s 2015 prison census. A recent report [PDF] from the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression found 366 violations of freedom of the press in the latter six months of 2015, 36 of which related to “news networks or websites.”

  • DRM

    • Dismantling The Repair Monopoly Created By The DMCA’s Anti-Circumvention Rules

      One of the biggest victories of the copyright maximalists was the successful adoption of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, implemented by the DMCA in the US, and the Copyright Directive in the EU. Its key innovation was to criminalize the circumvention of copyright protection mechanisms. That strengthens copyright enormously by introducing yet another level of legal lockdown, and thus yet another powerful weapon for copyright holders to wield against their customers. But as Techdirt has reported, the anti-circumvention laws are now being used to prevent people from exploring or modifying physical objects that they own.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Performer Lady Gaga (And Mom) Defend Internet Domain

        A cease-and-desist letter was sent on 1 December, to which the respondent replied that the website was for sale, that two offers had already been received (for $7000 and $4000) but that she would prefer to sell it to the Lady Gaga foundation itself.

    • Copyrights

      • ‘Historic result’: Happy Birthday public domain deal agreed

        Music publisher Warner/Chappell has agreed that “Happy Birthday to You” can enter the public domain and will pay out $14 million in damages, in what has been described as a “historical result” by the film makers that brought the case.

        Good Morning to You Productions submitted its settlement deal to the US District Court for the Central District of California on Monday, February 8. The deal will need to be signed off by Judge George King in a hearing scheduled for March 14.

        The case stemmed from a class action lawsuit filed against Warner/Chappell in 2013 that said it was not the owner of the copyright to the lyrics in the popular song and had unfairly collected royalties.

      • Warner To Pay $14 Million In ‘Happy Birthday’ Settlement; Plaintiffs Ask For Declaration That Song Is In Public Domain

        This is indeed a large payoff, one that indicates Warner/Chappell is not willing to test the merits of its case in front of a jury. The merits of the case, of course, are pretty much some random assertions with little documentation to back them up, but assertions that have, nonetheless, allowed Warner to obtain an estimated $50 million in licensing fees over the years. The $14 million Warner will pay is roughly in line with what it expected to make during the remaining years of the copyright term.

02.08.16

Links 8/2/2016: Vista 10 Nags Help GNU/Linux, Nautilus Updated

Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • OpsClarity Extends Monitoring to Open Source Suites

    OpsClarity’s intelligent monitoring solution now provides monitoring for a growing and popular suite of open source data processing frameworks, including Apache Kafka, Apache Storm, Apache Spark as well as datastores such as Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MongoDB. The solution is intended to enable DevOps teams to gain visibility into how these technologies are dependent on each other and troubleshoot performance issues.

  • The future of the network is open source and programmability, says industry expert

    Network technology has changed considerably in the last 20 years, but most of the changes have been incremental – particularly as they relate the roles and responsibilities of network engineers and administrators.

  • HFOSS: Reviewing “What is Open Source?”, Steve Weber

    This blog post is part of an assignment for my Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development course at the Rochester Institute of Technology. For this assignment, we are tasked with reading Chapter 3 of Steve Weber’s “The Success of Open Source“. The summary of the reading is found below.

  • Events

    • Linux.Conf.Au 2016 Videos Now Online

      Linux.Conf.Au 2016 ran last week from 1 to 5 February in Geelong, Australia. If you weren’t able to go to this annual Linux conference down under, the videos from all of the presentations have now been uploaded.

    • First Open Source Scholarship recipients

      Catalyst is delighted to announce the first two recipients of the Catalyst Open Source Scholarship. Recipients Liam Sharpe and Aleisha Amohia will receive $2000 towards study costs each year for the next three years, while they complete their Bachelor of Science degrees. Both are majoring in computer science.

    • coala at FOSDEM 2016

      coala was present at FOSDEM 2016 – it was a pleasure for us to be able to show you what we created at our stand and in the talk.

    • LowRISC

      As well as being open, there are a couple of key features that make LowRISC stand out. According to Alex Bradbury, co-founder of the LowRISC project: “I guess the notable features that we’re looking at adding are tagged memory support and minion cores. Tagged memory gives you the ability to annotate memory locations to, say, limit access for security purposes, and minion cores are very small, simple RISC-V processor.”

    • DevConf 2016 is over

      I have also some notes to android mobile apps. First, I have received some negative comments. I must admit I am not Android user and I am not very familiar with Android UX practices. I can fix something, but you must give me detailed description of it.

      The app required Internals privileges. I am sorry for that mistake, I must check AndroidManifest settings.

      I will try to add some features for DevConf 2017. I hope, I will find some time for that.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Apache Spark rises to become most active open source project in big data

      A healthy interest is not a surprise. In Apache Spark’s relatively short life, there’s been much discussion of its ascendancy. In September, Databricks, the company behind Spark, released results from a survey showing that Spark is the most active open source project in big data with more than 600 contributors within the past year, which is up from 315 in 2014. Plus, Spark is in use not just in the IT industry, but areas like finance, retail, advertising, education, health care, and more. That survey also showed that 51% of Spark users are using three or more Spark components.

    • IBM Provides New Analytics Tools, and Big Datasets for Testing

      IBM has already made many big commitments to data analytics and the cloud. It is committing huge finanical resources to Apache Spark for example, and expanding its cloud portfolio. Now IBM has announced four new data services: Analytics Exchange, Compose Enterprise, Graph, and Predictive Analytics.

    • Free RightScale Tool Lets You Compare Public Clouds
    • Eclipse Che Open Source Cloud IDE Now Available in Beta

      Eclipse Che, an open source cloud IDE with RESTful workspaces and Docker-based machines, is now available in beta.

      Che offers a workspace that is composed of projects and its associated runtimes, making its state distributable, portable and versionable. The platform use VMs, containers, and Web services to bring repeatability, consistency, and performance to workspaces.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • a lambda is not (necessarily) a closure

      But if you said “it’s a closure” — well you’re right in general I guess, like on a semantic what-does-it-mean level, but as far as how Guile represents this thing at run-time, hoo boy are there a number of possibilities, and a closure is just one of them. This article dives into the possibilities, with the goal being to help you update your mental model of “how much do things cost”.

      In Guile, a lambda expression can be one of the following things at run-time:

      Gone

      Inlined

      Contified

      Code pointer

      Closure

      Let’s look into these one-by-one.

  • Public Services/Government

Leftovers

  • Brexit will make Britain less safe: police chief

    Leaving Europe will make it harder for the U.K. to protect itself against terrorists, according to the director of the European law enforcement agency, Europol.

    “I think it will make Britain’s job harder to fight crime and terrorism because it will not have the same access to very well-developed European cooperation mechanisms that it currently has today,” Rob Wainwright told the BBC in an interview.

  • Sorry EC2 Amazon Visitors

    I’d like to apologize to people using Amazon EC2 to visit this blog. Sadly, a few hundred of your peers decided to be abusive, so I was forced to block most of EC2 subnets from access.

    Having hundreds of IPs in the EC2 IP range crawling this site constantly just cannot be allowed. It isn’t like we post articles more than once a day – sometimes not even once a month.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • America Is Flint

      WE have been rightfully outraged by the lead poisoning of children in Flint, Mich. — an outrage that one health expert called “state-sponsored child abuse.”

      But lead poisoning goes far beyond Flint, and in many parts of America seems to be even worse.

      “Lead in Flint is the tip of the iceberg,” notes Dr. Richard J. Jackson, former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Flint is a teachable moment for America.”

      In Flint, 4.9 percent of children tested for lead turned out to have elevated levels. That’s inexcusable. But in 2014 in New York State outside of New York City, the figure was 6.7 percent. In Pennsylvania, 8.5 percent. On the west side of Detroit, one-fifth of the children tested in 2014 had lead poisoning. In Iowa for 2012, the most recent year available, an astonishing 32 percent of children tested had elevated lead levels. (I calculated most of these numbers from C.D.C. data.)

      Across America, 535,000 children ages 1 through 5 suffer lead poisoning, by C.D.C. estimates.

    • The Water Next Time: Professor Who Helped Expose Crisis in Flint Says Public Science Is Broken

      Working with residents of Flint, Mr. Edwards led a study that revealed that the elevated lead levels in people’s homes were not isolated incidents but a result of a systemic problem that had been ignored by state scientists. He has since been appointed to a task force to help fix those problems in Flint. In a vote of confidence, residents last month tagged a local landmark with a note to the powers that be: “You want our trust??? We want Va Tech!!!”

      But being right in these cases has not made Mr. Edwards happy. Vindicated or not, the professor says his trials over the last decade and a half have cost him friends, professional networks, and thousands of dollars of his own money.

  • Security

    • Docker Engine Hardened with Secure Computing Nodes and User Namespaces

      Enterprise systems need enterprise-grade security. With this in mind, Docker Inc. has updated its core container engine with some potentially powerful security measures.

      Docker Inc. has described this release as “huge leap forward for container security.” The company also added a plethora of networking enhancements to Docker 1.10, released Thursday.

    • USENIX Enigma 2016 – Defending, Detecting, and Responding to Hardware and Firmware Attacks
    • Vulnerabilities in Font Processing Library Impact Firefox, Linux: Report

      Security researchers have found vulnerabilities in Graphite, also known as Libgraphite font processing library, that affects a number of systems. The vulnerabilities, if exploited, allow an attacker to seed malicious fonts to a machine. The Libgraphite library is utilised by Linux, Thunderbird, WordPad, Firefox, OpenOffice, as well as several other major platforms and applications.

      Security researchers from Cisco have posted an advisory to outline four vulnerabilities in the Libgraphite font processing library. One of the vulnerabilities allows the attackers to execute arbitrary code on the machine, and among other things, crash the system.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Jack Straw’s ministries among worst on freedom of information requests

      The former cabinet minister Jack Straw, who has been tasked with considering how to tighten up the Freedom of Information Act, led two of the Whitehall departments most likely to reject public requests for information.

      Straw’s ministries never ranked higher than 15 out of 21 government departments in terms of releasing information in full, according to a Guardian analysis of government-wide figures.

      In 2010, his final year as lord chancellor, the Ministry of Justice was the worst ranked government department, providing none of the information requested more often than any other ministry.

    • Leaked police files contain guarantees disciplinary records will be kept secret

      Guardian analysis of dozens of contracts revealed by hackers shows more than a third allow or require destruction of civilian complaint records

  • Finance

    • The Trouble With the TPP, Day 26: Why It Limits Canadian Cultural Policies

      The intersection between the TPP and Canadian cultural policies is likely to emerge as one of the more controversial aspects of the TPP, particularly given the government’s emphasis on a stronger cultural policy in its election platform. Earlier in the Trouble with the TPP series, I wrote that the TPP fails to protect Canadian cultural policy. I pointed to U.S. lobby pressure to limit Canadian protection of cultural policies as well as provisions that restrict Canada’s ability to consider expanding Cancon contributions to entities currently exempt from payment. I have not been a supporter of mandating Cancon contributions to online video provides such as Netflix, but restricting Canada’s right to do so in a trade agreement is shortsighted, bad policy.

    • What I didn’t read in the TTIP reading room

      TTIP, the EU-US free trade deal, has secrecy written all over it. Those responsible for it live in dread of any public scrutiny. If it was up to me, I would give everyone who’s interested the chance to make up their own minds on the text of the agreement in its current form. Sigmar Gabriel, Minister for Economic Affairs and a top cheerleader for TTIP, has now set up a reading room in his ministry where since the beginning of February German MPs can each spend two hours looking at those texts on which consensus has already been reached.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • How dark money stays dark: The Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and the right’s biggest, most destructive racket going

      How do you stop states and cities from forcing more disclosure of so-called dark money in politics? Get the debate to focus on an “average Joe,” not a wealthy person. Find examples of “inconsequential donation amounts.” Point out that naming donors would be a threat to “innocents,” including their children, families and co-workers.

      And never call it dark money. “Private giving” sounds better.

      These and other suggestions appear in internal documents from conservative groups that are coaching activists to fight state legislation that would impose more transparency on the secretive nonprofit groups reshaping U.S. campaign finance.

      The documents obtained by ProPublica were prepared by the State Policy Network, which helps conservative think tanks in 50 states supply legislators with research friendly to their causes, and the Conservative Action Project (CAP), a Washington policy group founded by Edwin Meese, a Reagan-era attorney general.

    • Fox & Friends Slam Beyonce’s Super Bowl Performance: She Saluted Black Lives Matter And Attacked Police Officers

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • India blocks Facebook Free Basics internet scheme [Ed: it was a huge danger]

      India’s telecoms regulator has blocked Facebook’s Free Basics internet service as part of a ruling in favour of net neutrality.

      The scheme offered free access to a limited number of websites.

      However it was opposed by supporters of net neutrality who argued that data providers should not favour some online services over others.

      The free content included selected local news and weather forecasts, the BBC, Wikipedia and some health sites.

    • No discriminatory tariffs for data services in India

      Finally we have won. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has issued a press release some time ago telling that no one can charge different prices for different services on Internet. The fight was on in an epic scale, one side spent more than 100million in advertisements, and lobbying. The community fought back in the form of #SaveTheInternet, and it worked.

    • India Bans Zero Rating As The U.S. Pays The Price For Embracing It

      As expected, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has passed new net neutrality rules (pdf) that specifically ban the practice of zero rating. The rules are relatively clear in that they prevent either content companies or ISPs from striking deals that exempt select content from usage caps.

    • Verizon Gives Net Neutrality A Giant Middle Finger, Exempts Own Video Service From Wireless Usage Caps

      In 2010, Verizon successfully sued to demolish the FCC’s original net neutrality rules. In 2015, Verizon joined the rest of the industry in helping launch a barrage of lawsuits to try kill and kill a more legally-sound and updated version of those same rules. While that case continues through the courts, Verizon has made it clear that 2016 will be the year the telco raises a giant middle finger to the FCC and net neutrality supporters alike.

    • 20 Years Ago Today: The Most Important Law On The Internet Was Signed, Almost By Accident

      The internet as we know it would be a very, very different place if 20 years ago today, President Clinton hadn’t signed the Communications Decency Act. To be fair, nearly all of the CDA was a horrible mess that was actually a terrible idea for the internet. A key part of the bill was about “cleaning up” pornography on the internet. However, to “balance” that out, the bill included Section 230 — added by two Congressmen in the House of Representatives: Ron Wyden and Chris Cox. They had pushed this clause as a separate bill, the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act, but it didn’t get enough traction. It was only when they attached it to the Communications Decency Act (which had passed the Senate without it), that it was able to move forward. And thus, 20 years ago today, when President Clinton signed the CDA, most of the attention was on the “stopping indecency” part, and very little on the “throw in” of Section 230. And yet, there’s a strong argument that Section 230 may be one of the most important laws — perhaps the most important — passed in the past few decades.

    • It’s Been 20 Years Since This Man Declared Cyberspace Independence

      When digital dystopians and critics of Internet libertarians need a rhetorical dart board, they often pull out a document written by John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, a former cattle rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist. On this day in 1996, Barlow sat down in front of a clunky Apple laptop and typed out one very controversial email, now known as the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” a manifesto with a simple message: Governments don’t—and can’t—govern the Internet.

    • Also Turning 20 Years Old Today: John Perry Barlow’s Declaration Of The Independence Of Cyberspace
    • Sweden Telecom Official Göran Marby Named To Lead ICANN

      Senior Swedish official Göran Marby today (8 February) was announced as the new president and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, succeeding Fadi Chehade who leaves the ICANN to join the World Economic Forum in mid-March. Marby will be the first European to lead ICANN, the internet domain system technical oversight body founded in 1998.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Ikea loses trademark in Indonesia

        Ikea has lost the right to use its name in Indonesia after a local furniture company was handed victory by the country’s Supreme Court.

        The court said that the trademark belonged to PT Ratania Khatulistiwa, a company based in the city of Surabaya, which manufactures rattan furniture. Rattan is made from palm.

        Although Ikea registered a trademark for its name in Indonesia in 2010, it did not open its first store until 2014.

      • 2015 in Canadian IP cases: trade mark

        Managing IP is rounding up important intellectual property decisions coming out of Canadian courts last year. Trade mark cases included a rare interlocutory injunction in a trade mark case and a ruling on the use of a competitor’s mark in metatags

      • Fox loses appeal over Glee TV series

        But the Court has said it will hear further arguments on the question of whether the trade mark at issue is invalid on the ground that series trade marks are incompatible with EU law.

        The decision, published today, is largely a victory for Comic Enterprises, which operates entertainment venues in the UK featuring comedy and music. It owns a UK trade mark for The Glee Club in class 41, which was registered in 2001 (pictured).

Links 8/2/2016: Zenwalk 8.0 Beta 2, Q4OS 1.4.7

Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • Chemnitz Linux Days 2016 Is Happening In Just Over One Month

      Alongside FOSDEM, the Czech events like this week’s DevConf.cz, one of the interesting and longstanding German Linux events that pairs open-source/Linux with beer is the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage that’s happening next month.

      Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (Chemnitz Linux Days) is happening this year from 19 to 20 March 2016. There are both German and English tracks with this year being around 90 lectures and 15 workshops.

    • DevConf.cz 2016 Videos Now Available

      Happening the past few days in Brno, Czech Republic has been the Red Hat sponsored DevConf.cz developers conference. For those that missed it and the live streaming, the videos are available to watch on YouTube.

      DevConf featured a variety of open-source / Linux talks particularly around Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and CentOS. If you wish to watch this year’s videos, you can find the RedHatCzech playlist or start from the embedded player below.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Open Source and .NET — Why It’s Not Picking Up

      Open-source in .NET is not picking up. Despite good efforts from many good people and companies, it seems as if the Microsoft developers scene is far from embracing open-source. Why is this happening, and is there still hope for change?

      [...]

      But, this doesn’t seem to be enough. OSS projects in .NET are not striving; there is not much innovation happening in this space; and OSS communities aren’t being formed. It is all left as a dream we keep dreaming, but never actually getting to fulfil.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 10.3 Now In Beta

      FreeBSD developers have released today their first official development media for the upcoming FreeBSD 10.3.

      FreeBSD 10.3 Beta 1 is now available from their FTP server.

    • LLVM Clang 3.8 Compiler Optimization Benchmarks With -Ofast

      A few days ago I posted a number of LLVM Clang optimization level benchmarks using the latest code for the upcoming Clang 3.8 release. Those tests went from -O0 to -O3 -march=native, but many Phoronix readers wanted -Ofast so here are those results too.

      I didn’t include -Ofast in the original tests since I don’t know of many using this optimization level within a production capacity considering it has the potential of doing unsafe math as it disregards standards compliance in the name of performance. However, since several readers requested it and I still had this LLVM/Clang 3.8 build around in the same system configuration, I added in extra runs with -Ofast and -Ofast -march=native.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Why I fought for open source in the Air Force

      I wanted an open source solution and faced a fair amount of resistance from our lawyers, management, users, and proprietary vendors. It was a difficult struggle at times, and it wasn’t until the DoD published their first official guidance on the use of open source software that we started to gain traction. Finally, in the middle of all of the drama, the DoD leadership issued a policy update explicitly stating that open source software was acceptable as long as there was support for it, and that the support could come in the form of government programmers, if necessary.

      This memo was a game changer, but it took more than just a policy update to get momentum to shift toward open source.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Apple error 53 foils low cost repairs – bricks iPhone

      If you have an iPhone or iPad repaired by a company other than Apple, you are likely to encounter Error 53 that only it can fix – at a considerable cost.

      The error usually occurs if you save a few [hundred] dollars by having a third party replacement of the glass, screen, home button, or touch ID sensor regardless of whether genuine parts are used. The iPhone goes into a continual boot loop after attempting a future iOS software update.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Washington Post’s Food Columnist Goes to Bat for Monsanto–Again

      I pointed out that her columns are biased in favor of those industry groups, particularly on the topic of GMOs, even though her column is presented to readers as an unbiased effort to find middle ground in debates about our food system.

      My article was met with crickets of silence from Haspel, her Post editor Joe Yonan and the band of biotech promoters who prolifically praise Haspel on Twitter. I figured that, soon enough, Haspel might write another column that would warrant raising the concerns another notch up the pole. She didn’t disappoint.

    • Female Genital Mutilation Is Not a Uniquely Muslim Problem

      The Independent reports that about 5,000 girls and women in Britain are subjected to female genital mutilation each year: “FGM is carried out for cultural, religious and social reasons within families and communities where it is believed to be a necessary preparation for adulthood and marriage.” Ian Tuttle is exasperated by their kid-glove treatment of the practice:

    • Flint’s Crisis Is About More Than Water

      What is in the mind of someone who knowingly poisons children and impairs their lives? Why did the politicians, regulators and bureaucrats who knew the water in Flint, Mich., was toxic lie about the danger for months? What does it say about a society that is ruled by, and refuses to punish, those who willfully destroy the lives of children?

      The crisis in Flint is far more ominous than lead-contaminated water. It is symptomatic of the collapse of our democracy. Corporate power is not held accountable for its crimes. Everything is up for sale, including children. Our regulatory agencies—including the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality—have been defunded, emasculated and handed over to corporate-friendly stooges. Our corrupt courts are part of a mirage of justice. The role of these government agencies and courts, and of the legislatures, is to sanction abuse rather than halt it.

    • Hillary’s Flint Gambit

      I’m completely agnostic about whether this particular trip will hurt or help (it’s very clear that Hillary’s focus on Flint two debates ago helped draw attention, though of course that came months after the lead poisoning was first revealed in October).

      It could be that next week Democrats in the Senate will be able to get Republicans to relent to their demand for Flint funding. But it could also be that Republicans will dig in, given that denying Flint funding becomes a way to deprive the presumptive Democratic nominee a win. That’s true, especially since John Cornyn already accused Democrats of trying to embarrass Republicans on this issue.

    • Why Is the Postal Inspection Service Investigating the Flint Water Crisis?

      They often get brought in as an investigative partner if the government needs to track what has been mailed, and mail fraud charges can serve as hand add-on charges in cases where someone used the mail to help commit a crime.

      I can imagine a lot of things the FBI might be investigating. But I know of no facts, thus far, that involve mail-related crimes.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Flint Strategy

      Clinton needs that firewall of African-Americans voters if she’s going to fend off Sanders’s surge. A clean water campaign—one that elevates the inequities that make African-Americans twice as likely to rely on substandard plumbing as non-Hispanic whites—helps her do that. But her clean water campaign isn’t just a narrow primary tactic to edge out Sanders. Flint is also a prime example of what happens when the government, on all levels, fails to do its job.

    • Flint Crisis: Harvey Hollins Not Giving Task Force Information that Implicates Harvey Hollins

      Some weeks ago, I noted that Rick Snyder had picked his Director of Urban Initiatives, Harvey Hollins, to coordinate response with his hand-picked Task Force to respond to Flint, in spite of the fact that Hollins was intimately involved in all his prior decisions involving Flint.

    • “Lies, Lies and More Lies” – GMOs, Poisoned Agriculture and Toxic Rants

      Have you ever read all of those pro-GMO scientists-cum-lobbyists professing their love of science? They are always talking about how science must prevail over ignorance and ideology then they play on the public’s ignorance by using ideology and sloganeering to try to get their points across.

      As as been well documented (see here and here), it is the pro-GMO lobby/industry that distorts and censors science, captures regulatory bodies, attacks scientists whose findings are unpalatable to the industry and bypasses proper scientific and regulatory procedures altogether.

    • Corporations Killed Medicine. Here’s How to Take It Back.

      For most of human history, life-saving drugs were a public good. Now they’re only good for shareholders.

  • Security

    • ‘White hat’ then, Red Hat now

      “From white hat to Red Hat,” was the joke a senior executive of Red Hat quipped to Alessandro Perilli, after hearing excerpts from The Manila Times interview with him, to which Perilli answered back with a wink, and a seemingly knowing smile. In the vast world of technology, a “white hat” is an internet slang, which refers to an ethical computer hacker or a computer security expert who hacks with the intention of improving security systems.

      Perilli is currently the general manager for Cloud Management Strategy for Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions. The technology company recently hosted a full-house Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific in Manila, where key senior executives were in attendance.

    • Vulnerability in Font Processing Library Affects Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox

      Four vulnerabilities in the Graphite (or libgraphite) font processing library allow attackers to compromise machines by supplying them with malicious fonts.

    • Air Force to develop cyber-squadrons, Gen. Hyten says at Broadmoor symposium

      The Air Force plans to revolutionize how it handles computer warfare by beefing up its force of cyberspace experts while contracting out easier jobs, like running the service’s network.

    • USENIX Enigma 2016 – Usable Security–The Source Awakens

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Thousands take part in anti-Islam Pegida protests across Europe

      Protesters from the anti-Islam PEGIDA movement marched in cities across Europe today.

      With around 2000 attendees, the largest was in Dresden, the home town of the group, the Daily Mail reported.

      There were also far right demonstrations in the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Poland, France, Czech Republic, Slovakia and even Australia.

    • Clashes in Calais as anti-migrant Pegida calls for protests across Europe
    • Virginia Man Is Accused of Trying to Join ISIS

      Another day, another faux-terrorism arrest by the FBI. Who do we really need to be protected from anyway?

    • Deadlock: North Korea’s Nuclear Test and US Policy

      The longstanding US approach to North Korea’s nuclear weapons is way off the mark.

    • America’s Myth of a Peaceful Nation

      A survey of history shows that America has either been involved in armed conflict or conducted some form of military operations during 223 years of its 240 years of existence as a nation. This is over 90 per cent of the time.

    • What we’ve learned from fifty years of Saudi arms deals

      Aside from the financial gains that al-Yamamah provided for the British government, BP, Shell and above all BAE, there is substantial evidence that Saudi Prince Turki bin Nasser was also a beneficiary of a specially-created BAE “slush fund.”

      Peter Gardiner, one of the men “who lavished luxury on Prince Turki for more than a decade” through his travel agency, revealed to the BBC in 2004 how “on BAE’s instructions, he would lay on a seemingly endless stream of five-star hotels, chartered aircraft, luxury limousines, personal security and exotic holidays for Prince Turki and his entourage”, initially costing BAE “two hundred thousand pounds or three hundred thousand pounds” a year, before increasing “to about a million pounds a year and quickly to two and three and by the time it was completed it was moving up towards seven million pounds a year.”

    • Hillary Clinton, Conscription, and Militarized Feminism

      For hundreds of years in America, women did not have the same rights as men. They – more or less – do now and for some, the final flourish of equality is seen in decisions such as the Pentagon’s 2015 choice to open up all combat jobs to females. While the military exist, it makes practical sense to admit anyone who can hack it.

      However, this week the logical consequences of equality in all things, good and bad, came up in a news item. Turns out there are several important officials who believe that women should be required to register for the Selective Service if they are let into any branch of the military. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Marine Gen. Robert Neller said they supported this plan, and other high-up military guys said they wanted the matter discussed.

      The proper feminist – or anyone who supports women’s equality, no matter how they label themselves should support this, right? After all, the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment would have included a mandate. And yet, this is insane. The draft is wrong. Expanding a sexist evil does not alleviate it.

      Civil rights movements can always be co-opted. The San Francisco Pride Parade decided back in 2013 that Chelsea Manning was not worth honoring after all. Feminism just happened to start pretty early in terms of picking and choosing who matters, and how willing it is to be assimilated into the militarized whole.

      [...]

      Walsh, it seems, was much more tepid about Clinton in 2008. But darn it, today she is “With Joy, and Without Apologies” in her support. Sen. Bernie Sanders is getting all the youth vote momentum – and even The Nation endorsed him – but Walsh argues that Clinton is “the right and even radical choice” today. She writes line after line about sexism, reproductive freedom, and then this teeny, laughably qualified truth finally appears: “I continue to wonder whether she’ll be more hawkish on foreign policy than is advised in these dangerous times.”

    • Obama Readies To Fight in Libya, Again

      No one is laughing in Washington now. President Obama came, saw and created the very opposite of what he sought, a hardly unusual outcome for the Obama and Bush Administrations in the Middle East. Instead of a pliable dependent government willing to do the bidding of Washington and its NATO foreign legion, there has been an explosion of civil war and Sunni jihadism.

    • Controversial Israel Supporter Funneling Millions Into Clinton Campaign

      Recent disclosures show media mogul and controversial Israel supporter Haim Saban is pouring millions of dollars into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

      Haim Saban and his wife Cheryl together contributed $5 million to the Hillary Clinton Super PAC—Priorities USA Action—between 2015 and 2016 alone, according to disclosures available on OpenSecrets.org, affiliated with the Center for Responsive Politics.

    • Cruz and Rubio: Heirs to Bush-Obama Militarism

      I see no point splitting hairs over whether Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio is the more egregious warmonger. Both love the bloody and costly U.S. empire. Both believe in American exceptionalism. (Rubio arrogantly calls for a “New American Century.”) Both want to make war in the Middle East (and beyond) and “stand behind Israel,” though such policies provoked the 9/11 attacks. Both want to pour money into the military, as though America were militarily threatened. (The US military budget equals the budgets of the next seven highest spending nations.) Both want to prevent détente with Iran, which poses no danger. Both hype terrorism as an existential threat. Both want the government to spy on Americans, especially Muslim Americans. Both want to “control the border,” code for violating the natural right of people to move freely and make better lives without government permission.

    • Capitalism, cronyism and Clinton

      A similar dilemma is at hand in any critical examination of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for this year’s US presidential election. Doug Henwood, an American journalist and a contributing editor at The Nation, has written a short, punchy book challenging Clinton’s campaign narrative, particularly her self-identification as a plucky underdog, by highlighting her cosy relationship with big business and her dubious track record on policy.

    • Hillary Is the Candidate of the War Machine

      Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down for six consecutive television interviews in Kabul, Afghanistan on October 20, 2011. Clinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had been killed. “We came, we saw, he died,” she joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi’s death by an aide in between formal interviews.

      There’s no doubt that Hillary is the candidate of Wall Street. Even more dangerous, though, is that she is the candidate of the military-industrial complex. The idea that she is bad on the corporate issues but good on national security has it wrong. Her so-called foreign policy “experience” has been to support every war demanded by the US deep security state run by the military and the CIA.

      Hillary and Bill Clinton’s close relations with Wall Street helped to stoke two financial bubbles (1999-2000 and 2005-8) and the Great Recession that followed Lehman’s collapse. In the 1990s they pushed financial deregulation for their campaign backers that in turn let loose the worst demons of financial manipulation, toxic assets, financial fraud, and eventually collapse. In the process they won elections and got mighty rich.

    • More Bombs, More Boots: The US War on ISIS Is Heating Up

      The intensified effort against ISIS won’t come cheap. The Obama administration is asking for more than $7 billion—a 35 percent increase—in the 2017 budget for the fight against ISIS. Despite the sudden military and financial push, Lt. General MacFarland assured reporters earlier this week, “We are closer to the end of the beginning of this campaign…The beginning of the end would be when we get Raqqa back.”

    • Close-Fisted Wealthy Nations Are ‘Failing the People of Syria’: Oxfam

      While some small European countries are donating more than their fair share to aid Syrians, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Russia are still far behind

    • Dragon & Phoenix: Khamenei Lauds New Sino-Iranian ‘Strategic Partnership’

      Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Iran this weekend, pledging new bilateral of $600 bn. Over 10 years.

    • Netanyahu demands more billions from US after Iran Deal, insults US Envoy, Steals more Land

      Netanyahu made the claim on the US taxpayer in the wake of his harsh words for the US ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro.

      Shapiro had addressed a conference earlier this week in which he said that the Obama administration now questions the commitment of Netanyahu’s government to peace with the Palestinians. Shapiro said that Israel wasn’t acting credibly to curb the violence of Israeli squatters on the Palestinian West Bank against Palestinians, and that it should open more land to the Palestinians: “Too much vigilantism goes unchecked, and at times there seems to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law, one for Israelis, and another for Palestinians. . . Hovering over all these questions is the larger one about Israel’s political strategy vis-a-vis its conflict with the Palestinians.” He also criticized Palestinian violence.

    • Suicide Bomber Strikes near US Base; 125 Killed Across Iraq

      Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi rejected plans for building a concrete barrier and trench around Baghdad. Instead, Abadi said, checkpoints would be reorganized to provide added security and easier transit.

    • Optimism of the Will

      So now we have another anti-Semite. Mazal Tov (“good luck”) as we say in Hebrew.

      His name is Ban Ki-moon, and he is the Secretary General of the UN. In practice, the highest international official, a kind of World Prime Minister.

      He has dared to criticize the Israeli government, as well as the Palestinian Authority, for sabotaging the peace process, and thereby making Israeli-Palestinian peace almost impossible. He emphasized that there is a worldwide consensus about the “Two-state Solution” being the only possible one.

    • “Bandage Me Quickly!” The Death of a Journalist in Yemen

      On January 17, Yemeni journalist Almigdad Mojalli was killed in a Saudi-led airstrike while reporting on civilian casualties in Jaref, a resort about 32 miles south of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. Mojalli was on assignment for Voice of America. Bahir Hameed, a photojournalist who accompanied Mojalli that day, was injured in the attack. The following is Hameed’s account of what happened, as told to Mohammed Ali Kalfood, a journalist in Sana’a.

    • Hands Up, Don’t Execute

      Many liberals passed sentence on the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (CCF) weeks ago. The cowboys occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Oregon were criminals. Even worse, they were culturally unsympathetic criminals. “Y’all Qaeda,” was the taunt of choice for the smart set, which rocked with laughter when enterprising wags delivered sex toys to the squares.

      Yet when they put joking aside, many progressives called for these “militants” to be dealt with as “the terrorists they were”: lethally and with extreme prejudice. Besides, many said, the right-wing nuts were probably a bunch of Islamophobic racists.

      [...]

      During the Ferguson unrest however, the law-and-order right would have none of it. To them, Michael Brown was just a “thug,” a known criminal who had recently shaken down a store. If he didn’t want to get shot, he shouldn’t have resisted a cop, thought many of the same conservatives now outraged over the bloody government response to CCF’s armed defiance.

      Both sides reduce all questions of justice to identity politics, and effectively treat rights as a sympathy-based concept.

      For the left, Michael Brown was a sympathetic figure (an underserved youth of color), so he had Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights which were violated by Officer Darren Wilson. On the other hand, LaVoy Finicum was an unsympathetic figure (a right-wing, gun-owning good ‘ol boy), and a potential threat, so he was fair game to be gunned down in the snow.

    • U.S. Air Force Veteran, Smeared as “an ISIS Fighter,” Just Returned to the U.S.

      The smearing of Long as an “ISIS fighter” by the rabidly anti-Muslim website “Pajamas Media,” based on anonymous government officials, was a sham. From the start, Long and his family were held only in a deportation center after the Turkish government claimed he intended to stay in the country without the proper visa — largely due to the fact that he was on the U.S.’s no-fly list — and he was never charged with (let alone convicted of) anything remotely to do with terrorism or ISIS.

    • Danger Ahead

      The prospects for peace are dimming

      [...]

      The US military is preparing another invasion of Libya – Yes, they want to go back to the scene of their crime. Because more violence is going to “fix” the problems they created in the first place! Without congressional authorization, and without debate, US troops are getting ready to occupy Libya and put us in the middle of yet another war.

      More US troops are pouring into Iraq – So you thought the Iraq war was over? Think again! They’re not only sending as many as 800 more American soldiers on to Iraq, but they’re just now admitting that there are 4,000 already there – a lot more than they led us to believe. So much for President Obama’s pledge of “no boots on the ground”! This is just the first step toward Iraq War III.

    • Peace is the Keystone of Liberty

      The anti-war movement desperately needs libertarian leadership. And the libertarian movement urgently needs to be strongly anti-war. So in this essay I will offer some chief reasons for every libertarian to be 100% non-interventionist and actively engaged in the cause of peace.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • One Reason CIA Is Claiming Drone Emails Are Top Secret: ACLU’s FOIA

      The NYT has a really helpful description of the emails to Hillary that intelligence agencies are claiming are Top Secret. It explained how several of the emails almost certainly couldn’t derive from the intelligence the agency claimed they came from, such as this one on North Korea.

    • Pentagon Releases 200 Photos of Bush-Era Prisoner Abuse, Thousands Kept Secret

      The Pentagon on Friday was forced to release nearly 200 photographs of bruises, lacerations, and other injuries inflicted on prisoners presumably by U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

      The record-dump was the result of a Freedom of Information Act request and nearly 12 years of litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which fought to expose the Bush-era torture.

    • 11 Million Pages of CIA Files May Soon Be Shared By This Kickstarter

      Millions of pages of CIA documents are stored in Room 3000. The CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), the agency’s database of declassified intelligence files, is only accessible via four computers in the National Archives Building in College Park, MD, and contains everything from Cold War intelligence, research and development files, to images.

      Now one activist is aiming to get those documents more readily available to anyone who is interested in them, by methodically printing, scanning, and then archiving them on the internet.

    • Pentagon Releases Photos of Detainee Abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan

      These photos appear to be the most innocuous of the more than 2,000 images that the government has fought for years to keep secret. Lawyers for the government have long maintained that the photos, if released, could cause grievous harm to national security because they could be used for propaganda by groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The legal case has stretched on for more than a decade, since 2004, when the American Civil Liberties Union first sued to obtain photos beyond the notorious images that had been leaked from the prison at Abu Ghraib.

    • Establishment Family Values

      Joanna Gosling of BBC News won my prize for the news presenter who exuded the highest level of shrill indignation that the UN should dare to query the actions of the British Government. There was not, of course, any acknowledgement by the BBC that she is married to Craig Oliver, Cameron’s spin doctor in chief.

    • When in Rome: ‘Criminal Consequences’ for Assange’s Tormentors?

      When we consider the context and background – namely that Sweden and the UK have served and continue to serve as proxies for the United States in its pursuit of Assange for his role in exposing US war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere – an array of possible charges before the International Criminal Court quickly begin to look quite plausible.

    • Philip Hammond’s Astonishing Lie

      The official statement by the UK Foreign Secretary, Phillip Hammond:

      “I reject the decision of this working group. It is a group made up of lay people and not lawyers. Julian Assange is a fugitive from justice. He is hiding from justice in the Ecuadorian embassy.”

      These are the cvs of the group (including the ex-chair who started the work). Hammond’s statement that they are lay people and not lawyers is a blatant, a massive, an enormous, a completely astonishing lie. Yet nowhere has the media called him on this lie.

    • Kafka 2016

      To my astonishment, the FCO Official Spokesman has just confirmed to me that the FCO stands by Phillip Hammond’s statement that the members of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention are lay persons, and not lawyers. Even though every single one of them is an extremely distinguished lawyer.

      I confess I am utterly astonished. I know there is nothing more dull than an old buffer like me droning on about falling standards in public life. But when I was in the FCO, the vast majority of colleagues would have refused to advance what is a total and outright lie, about which it cannot be argued there is an area of interpretation, doubt or nuance.

    • Why the Assange Allegation is a Stitch-up

      I am slightly updating and reposting this from 2012 because the mainstream media have ensured very few people know the detail of the “case” against Julian Assange in Sweden. The UN Working Group ruled that Assange ought never to have been arrested in the UK in the first place because there is no genuine investigation are and no charges. Read this and you will know why.

      The other thing not widely understood is there is NO JURY in a rape trial in Sweden and it is a SECRET TRIAL. All of the evidence, all of the witnesses, are heard in secret. No public, no jury, no media. The only public part is the charging and the verdict. There is a judge and two advisers directly appointed by political parties. So you never would get to understand how plainly the case is a stitch-up. Unless you read this.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • No Questions About Climate Change at GOP Debate Sponsored by Big Oil

      The Republican presidential candidates were asked about the Super Bowl but not the future of the planet Saturday night — there were no questions about climate change or global warming in the debate in St. Anselm College in New Hampshire.

    • Beyond Paris: avoiding the trap of carbon metrics

      Instead of changing our economic system to make it fit within the natural limits of the planet, we are redefining nature so that it fits within the economic system.

    • Useful waste offers win-win benefits

      The future is increasingly bright for renewable energy, with the US aiming to cut the price of solar photovoltaics by 75% between 2010 and 2020. Denmark plans to obtain 50% of its energy from wind just five years from now.

    • DEQ Employees Seem Unwilling to Take the Fall for Flint

      In the email, the supervisor noted that a spike in Legionnaires coincided with the switch to Flint’s water. Jerry Ambrose was then the Emergency Manager of Flint; it’s unclear why he was using a GMail address as EM.

    • The Republican Refusal to Aid Flint

      A House oversight committee held a hearing on Wednesday whose purpose was purportedly to identify those responsible for the Flint crisis and determine what could be done to alleviate it. But the committee failed to summon Rick Snyder, the Republican governor of Michigan, whose environmental officials and emergency managers were the ones who made monumental blunders that led the city to draw water from the polluted Flint River without treating it properly. Instead, Republicans heaped blame on the Environmental Protection Agency, which made mistakes but was a bit player in this drama.

    • Rick Snyder Wasn’t Asked To Testify At Congressional Hearing About Flint Water Crisis

      On Wednesday, Congress will hear testimony from government officials and Flint residents about the years-long problem of contaminated water. Missing from the event, however, will be Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) as well as all of the emergency managers who were appointed to run the city over recent years.

      The Republicans who run the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed Darnell Earley late Tuesday night, the former emergency manager who served during the water switch and ensuing contamination issues, after he refused an earlier call to testify. They also invited the director of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. But no one else in state or city leadership was called to testify.

    • FBI is Now Involved in the Investigation Into the Flint Water Crisis

      The FBI is joining the investigation into the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan, the Detroit Free Press reported on Monday.

      Gina Balaya, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit, told the Free Press that federal prosecutors are “working with a multi-agency investigation team on the Flint water contamination matter, including the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, EPA’s [Environmental Protection Agency] Office of Inspector General, and EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division.”

    • Can Burning Forests To Power The Grid Be Carbon Neutral? The Senate Just Said ‘Yes’

      When the first major update to the nation’s energy laws in nearly a decade began last week in the Senate, environmentalists were cautiously sympathetic to it. The bill didn’t open new land for oil and gas drilling, coal was mostly ignored and the Obama administration’s recent climate change policies were left unscathed.

      But environmentalists around the country are now incensed over an approved amendment categorizing bioenergy as carbon neutral — a move that groups say puts forests and even portions of the Clean Power Plan at risk.

      “I think it’s a very dangerous amendment,” said Kevin Bundy, senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, in an interview with ThinkProgress. “It tries to dictate that burning forests for energy won’t affect the climate, that’s what the term carbon neutral is supposed to mean and that’s just not true. You can’t legislate away basic physics.”

    • New Study Ties Fracking Water Disposal To California Earthquakes

      Injecting old, used water from oil and gas drilling in California has been tied to earthquakes for the first time, according to a new study released Thursday. Wastewater injections have already been tied to earthquakes in Colorado and Oklahoma.

    • NY Governor Sounds Warning After Radioactive Water Leaks from Indian Point Nuclear Plant

      Radioactive water has reportedly contaminated the groundwater surrounding the Indian Point nuclear power plant, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Saturday.

      A statement issued from Cuomo’s office reported evidence that “radioactive tritium-contaminated water leaked into the groundwater” beneath the facility, which sits on the bank of the Hudson River, just 25 miles north of New York City in Buchanan.

    • The Pipeline Strikes Back: the audacity of TransCanada’s $15b suit against the U.S.

      But as any good Star Wars fan knows, the Empire strikes back. True to form, TransCanada filed a $15 billion legal action against the U.S. government on January 6. The company is demanding that U.S. taxpayers compensate it for the profits it had hoped to make from a pipeline it won’t get to build.

      How can the company do this? TransCanada is making use of a legal weapon so powerful that even Darth Vader would be envious—international trade rules.

      Here is how the system known as “Investor State Dispute Settlement” works. Tucked neatly away inside the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and more than 90 percent of the thousands of other international trade agreements in force around the world are provisions that allow foreign corporations to sue governments whenever a change in policy interferes with the company’s profit-making plans. Companies are allowed to drag governments before closed-door tribunals operated by the World Bank, the International Chamber of Commerce, and others. Companies can force compensation not only for the funds they actually invested, but for many, many times more than that for supposed “lost profits.”

      Who uses these secretive tribunals? The San Francisco-based engineering giant Bechtel sued Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, after the Cochabamba Water Revolt of 2000. This was a massive public uprising against the privatization of the city’s water and subsequent rate hikes for residents. After protests pushed Bolivia’s leaders to reverse the privatization, Bechtel sued Bolivia for $50 million, although it had invested just $1 million in the project.

  • Finance

    • Young Women For Sanders Not to Be Underestimated

      Normally, I would just stay silent if Gloria Steinem said something with which I did not agree. I admire her so much. She has shown so much courage on behalf of women’s issues throughout the years that it is a bit absurd for someone such as me to even consider challenging any comment she makes regarding women.

    • Are The Payroll Jobs Reports Merely Propaganda Statements?

      US economics statistics are so screwed up that they do not provide an accurate picture.

      Consider the latest monthly payroll jobs report. According to the report, in January 151,000 new jobs were created. Where are these jobs? According to the report, 69% of the new jobs are accounted for by retail employment and waitresses and bartenders. If we add in health care and social assistance, the entirely of the new jobs are accounted for. This is not the employment picture of a First World economy.

      According to the report, in January the retail sector added 57,700 jobs. Considering that January is the month that followed a disappointing Christmas December, do you think retailers added 57,700 employees? Such a large increase in retail employment suggests an expected rise in sales, but transportation and warehousing lost 20,300 jobs and wholesale trade added only 8,800.

      Perhaps it is mistaken to think that employment in these sectors should move together. Possibly the retail jobs, if they are real, are part-time jobs replacing a smaller number of terminated full-time jobs in order that employers can avoid benefits costs. If this is the case, then the retail jobs are bad news, not good news.

      The reported unemployment rate of 4.9% is misleading as it does not count discouraged workers. When discouraged workers are added, the actual rate of US unemployment is about 23%, a number more consistent with the decline in the labor force participation rate. In January 2006 the labor force participation rate was 66%. In January 2016 the labor force participation rate is 62.7%.

    • Sanders Argues for “Yes We Can” While Clinton Counters “No We Can’t”

      Who is the establishment? And why does it think people supporting Bernie Sanders are asking for too much?

    • Rebuke Swift After Albright Declares: ‘Special Place in Hell’ for Women Who Don’t Vote Clinton

      During a campaign event in Concord on Saturday, the former Secretary of State declared: “Young women have to support Hillary Clinton. The story is not over!”

      “They’re going to want to push us back,” she continued. “It’s not done and you have to help. Hillary Clinton will always be there for you. And just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”

    • The “Bernie Bros” Narrative: a Cheap Campaign Tactic Masquerading as Journalism and Social Activism

      The concoction of the “Bernie Bro” narrative by pro-Clinton journalists has been a potent political tactic — and a journalistic disgrace. It’s intended to imply two equally false claims: (1) a refusal to march enthusiastically behind the Wall Street-enriched, multiple-war-advocating, despot-embracing Hillary Clinton is explainable not by ideology or political conviction, but largely if not exclusively by sexism: demonstrated by the fact that men, not women, support Sanders (his supporters are “bros”); and (2) Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive and misogynistic in their online behavior. Needless to say, a crucial tactical prong of this innuendo is that any attempt to refute it is itself proof of insensitivity to sexism if not sexism itself (as the accusatory reactions to this article will instantly illustrate).

      It’s become such an all-purpose, handy pro-Clinton smear that even consummate, actual “bros” for whom the term was originally coined — straight guys who act with entitlement and aggression, such as Paul Krugman — are now reflexively (and unironically) applying it to anyone who speaks ill of Hillary Clinton, even when they know nothing else about the people they’re smearing, including their gender, age, or sexual orientation. Thus, a male policy analyst who criticized Sanders’ health care plan “is getting the Bernie Bro treatment,” sneered Krugman. Unfortunately for the New York Times Bro, that analyst, Charles Gaba, said in response that he’s “really not comfortable with [Krugman’s] referring to die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters as ‘Bernie Bros’” because it “implies that only college-age men support Sen. Sanders, which obviously isn’t the case.”

    • Is Bernie Sanders a “Socialist”?

      “Self-described socialist” … How many times have we all read that term in regard to Vermont senator Bernie Sanders? But is he really a socialist? Or is he a “social democrat”, which is what he’d be called in Europe? Or is he a “democratic socialist”, which is the American party he has been a member of (DSA – Democratic Socialists of America)? And does it really matter which one he is? They’re all socialists, are they not?

      Why does a person raised in a capitalist society become a socialist? It could be because of a parent or parents who are committed socialists and raise their children that way. But it’s usually because the person has seen capitalism up close for many years, is turned off by it, and is thus receptive to an alternative. All of us know what the ugly side of capitalism looks like. Here are but a few of the countless examples taken from real life:

      * Following an earthquake or other natural disaster, businesses raise their prices for basic necessities such as batteries, generators, water pumps, tree-removal services, etc.

      * In the face of widespread medical needs, drug and health-care prices soar, while new surgical and medical procedures are patented.

      * The cost of rent increases inexorably regardless of tenants’ income.

      * Ten thousand types of deception to part the citizens from their hard-earned ages.

    • Smash Clintonism: Why Democrats, Not Republicans, are the Problem

      What was not clear until now is potentially as important. In Iowa it was demonstrated, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it is possible, here and now, to stave off a Clintonite Restoration – possible, that is, to free the country and the world from the thrall of neoliberal-neoconservative politics.

    • Canada and the TPP

      What are we to make of the Trudeau government’s schizophrenic attitude towards the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)? Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland formally signed the agreement yesterday in New Zealand but repeated her assurances that critics shouldn’t worry – the government hasn’t committed to ratifying it and consultations and a full Parliamentary debate will precede any ratification. Fair enough – ratification is at least two years away. Yet so far the consultation process has not penetrated the ideological bubble created by her trade department officials. In spite of the fact that by far the biggest concern of critics of the deal (including Joseph Stiglitz and a United Nations report) is the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) feature (the one that allows corporations to sue governments for regulating), she seems to be either ill-informed or misled about its impact. At a panel discussion in Vancouver in January she seemed unaware of the ISDS. Her fellow panelists, both economics professors, actively downplayed the threat of ISDS.

    • TPP ‘fundamentally flawed,’ should be resisted – UN human rights expert

      The top United Nations expert on human rights has called on the 12 nations considering the Trans-Pacific Partnership to reject the massive trade agreement since in its current form it “is out of step with today’s international human rights regime.”

      Acknowledging global opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) because of the agreement’s “undemocratic pedigree,”Alfred de Zayas, the UN’s independent expert on the promotion of democratic and equitable international order, said the largest trade agreement in decades “is fundamentally flawed and should not be signed or ratified unless provision is made to guarantee the regulatory space of States.”

    • Sanders Vows To Kill TPP If Elected. Will Clinton?

      As the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free-trade” agreement was signed in New Zealand by representatives of the 12 participating countries, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders strongly voiced his opposition and committed to doing what he can to kill the deal if he is elected president.

      Rival Hillary Clinton has also stated opposition to the TPP, but will she also vow to kill it if elected?

    • New Yorker Shooting Blindly at Bernie Sanders

      It’s clear that Bernie Sanders has gotten many mainstream types upset. After all, he is raising issues about the distribution of wealth and income that they would prefer be kept in academic settings, certainly not pushed front and center in a presidential campaign.

    • Credit Occupy in Bernie Sanders’ Surge

      For insight into Bernie Sanders’ unexpected surge, go back to 2011, to the then-scorned Occupy Wall Street movement and its drive against the 1 percent and income inequality.

      Written off that year as disorganized and ineffective, the Occupy movement has contributed volunteers and—even more important—its powerful message to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. The combination of progressive volunteers and a powerful attack on economic injustice helped Sanders come extremely close to beating Hillary Clinton in Iowa and could be of great help to him in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.

    • WATCH: Bill Maher Doubles Down on Bernie Endorsement: ‘F*ck Yeah’ He’s Ready

      On Friday night’s Real Time Bill Maher made his love of Bernie Sanders even clearer and more unequivocal than before, issuing his most enthusiastic endorsement of the Vermont Democratic Socialist yet.

    • Yanis Varoufakis – the origins of the European and global economic crisis

      In this video, acTVism Munich interviews Yanis Varoufakis, a world renowned economist who was a former member of the Greek parliament. He gained immense popularity when he served as finance minister (27 January 2015 – 6 July 2015) for the Greek government, a post that he left shortly after he found out that Greek government made the decision to i mplement the austerity package of the Troika against the popular vote (OXI) of the Greek people.This interview focuses on the history of the global economic system, the transformations that it underwent after World War II and attempts to connect it to the current economic crisis that is sweeping throughout Europe and the globe.

    • VIDEO: Jeremy Corbyn Takes Down Big Banks During Surprise Appearance

      Corbyn began and ended his rousing speech by thanking his supporters and reminding them of the work they have cut out for them in the years leading up to the 2020 election, when he plans to run for prime minister of the United Kingdom. Reflecting on his campaign for Labour leadership in 2015, the British politician said, “The bankers created a crisis, the government’s responded by cutting services, increasing the costs of the poorest people and making the richest even richer. And we said, ‘No, that is the wrong way around.’ ”

    • We Can’t Afford These Billionaires

      In its 2015 report the World Economic Forum, aka the globe-grabbing business elite, pronounced from its opulent mountain fastness in Davos that, “Inequality is one of the key challenges of our time.” Paying $25,000 to attend this billionaires’ bash, and that’s after shelling out the compulsory $52,000 WEF membership fee, the said elite isn’t pronouncing on inequality out of any empathy for the poor and oppressed. This becomes perfectly clear on page 38 of the Global Risks Report 2016 where the reader is informed that inequality has consequences:

    • No ‘Artful Smear.’ Clintons Paid $153 Million in Speaking Fees, Analysis Shows

      There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks about the speaking fees paid to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and an analysis published Saturday sheds some light on exactly how much Wall Street and other major corporate powers ponied up for the former Secretary of State and her husband, President Bill Clinton.

      $153 million, CNN concludes, is the amount the power couple raked in between February 2001 and the launch of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in May 2015. What’s more, the Clintons received an average pay of $210,795 for each of the 729 addresses given during that time period.

    • California’s Deep Debt Problems

      For those who wonder about the practical importance of transparency, I offer as evidence the latest result of a modest rule change in California from a mind-numbingly named organization—the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, or GASB (pronounced Gaz-bee). The group’s stated goal is to promote accountability through “excellence in public-sector financial reporting.” This is exciting stuff for people who wear green eyeshades.

    • Clinton’s Pitch to New Hampshire: Electing a Woman Is the Real Revolution

      The presence of Klobuchar, Stabenow, and Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire had another effect: It reminded voters that, notwithstanding her claim to not be a member of the Democratic establishment, Clinton has the backing of almost all of Sanders’ colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus. And they’re not shy about explaining why.

    • Here’s What Hillary Clinton’s Paid Speaking Contract Looks Like

      So what exactly does Hillary Clinton ask for when she gives a paid speech, like the ones she gave at Goldman Sachs? A contract for a speech she gave at the University of Nevada Las Vegas provides some answers. The contract was obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal in August, through the state public records law.

    • On Pluralism, Bernie Sanders, and the Fight for 15

      But having set the table like that, there’s little prospect the large numbers of workers who haven’t been as active in Democratic politics of late will have much sway in face of the powerful banks who don’t appear to have traded away key issues for their time with Hillary.

      Notably: these lower income voters, along with the more widely noted younger voters, are precisely those whom Bernie is winning (though as the primary moves to more racially diverse states, that is expected to change).

    • Ahead of Primary, NH Workers Declare: Want My Vote? Raise the Wage!

      Want my vote? Then raise the wage.

      That’s the message that low wage workers in New Hampshire sent to the presidential contenders on Saturday when fast food employees and others walked off the job days before the state’s pivotal primary election.

      “I’ve never walked off the job before, but I can’t wait any longer for fair pay,” said Megan Jensen, a mother and KFC employee who lives off of $8 an hour. Jensen said that this is also the first year she plans to vote in the state’s February 9th primary.

      “Everyone deserves at least $15 an hour and the right to a union,” Jensen continued, “and candidates who are flying into New Hampshire this week need to know that we are taking this demand to the polls.”Want my vote? Then raise the wage.

      That’s the message that low wage workers in New Hampshire sent to the presidential contenders on Saturday when fast food employees and others walked off the job days before the state’s pivotal primary election.

      “I’ve never walked off the job before, but I can’t wait any longer for fair pay,” said Megan Jensen, a mother and KFC employee who lives off of $8 an hour. Jensen said that this is also the first year she plans to vote in the state’s February 9th primary.

      “Everyone deserves at least $15 an hour and the right to a union,” Jensen continued, “and candidates who are flying into New Hampshire this week need to know that we are taking this demand to the polls.”

    • Eric Holder Makes Ads for Hillary Clinton While Making Deals for Corporate Clients

      Former Obama administration attorney general Eric Holder is prominently featured in a Hillary Clinton campaign ad running in South Carolina. “If you want to make sure Republicans don’t take us backward, help Hillary move us forward,” Holder says.

      Meanwhile, in his post-public service life as a partner with white-collar defense firm Covington & Burling, Holder is upholding his Justice Department’s tradition of negotiating lower fines for corporate offenses, albeit from the other side of the negotiating table.

    • Hillary Clinton Won’t Say if She’ll Release Transcripts of Goldman Sachs Speeches

      During the Democratic presidential debate Thursday evening, MSNBC moderator Chuck Todd picked a question offered by a viewer and pointedly asked Hillary Clinton if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to giant investment bank Goldman Sachs. Todd then broadened the question, asking: “Are you willing to release the transcripts of all your paid speeches?”

      It was the second time Clinton has been asked if she would release transcripts of the paid speeches she gave behind closed doors. When I asked her in Manchester, New Hampshire, two weeks ago, Clinton simply laughed and turned away.

    • Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Brawl Over His “Insinuation” That She’s Corrupt

      Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had a series of momentous exchanges Thursday night over what Clinton called Sanders’ “artful smear” — the suggestion that taking massive amounts of money from corporate special interests had corrupted her.

      Clinton told Sanders during Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate that he would not find a single example of money changing her mind or her vote, and she attacked him for his criticism “by innuendo, by insinuation” that “anybody who ever took donations or speaking fees from any interest group has to be bought.”

    • Bernie Sanders Said Hillary Clinton Is Not A Real Progressive. Here’s How She Responded.
    • Michael Bloomberg’s Possible Entry Into the Race for President Is No Surprise

      Just what this presidential campaign needs, another know-it-all billionaire. Whip out your checkbook, Michael Bloomberg, and come on in.

    • Remember ‘Liar Loans’? Wall Street Pushes a Twist on the Crisis-Era Mortgage

      These mortgages, which are given to borrowers that can’t fully document their income, helped fuel a tidal wave of defaults during the housing crisis and subsequently fell out of favor.

    • An Idiot’s Guide to Prosecuting Corporate Fraud

      A new group called Bank Whistleblowers United have just pushed out a comprehensive plan they think would put the executive branch back in the business of enthusiastically identifying, indicting, and convicting financial fraudsters — restoring accountability while protecting the public.

    • Anti-Corruption Crusader Zephyr Teachout Running for Congress

      Anti-corruption activist and law professor Zephyr Teachout announced this morning that she will be running for the U.S. House of Representatives to represent New York’s 19th congressional district.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • On Hillary, Lloyd, Us and Them

      For those puzzled by the rancor and mistrust so many feel towards Hillary Clinton – and no it’s not mindless misogyny – the ever lucid Matt Taibbi offers a clear-eyed look at the cool millions Clinton made speechifying to big banks and corporations, her hypocrisy on the subject of being tough on them, her longtime allegiance to and support from them, and bearing it all out, just what she said in those now-infamous, $675,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs. His analysis, coupled with her constant egregious shifts on issues even as she denies the shifts, provides solid grounds for the memorable time Anderson Cooper asked the cagey candidate who now brashly proclaims herself a progressive, “Will you say anything to get elected?”

    • Did Hillary’s Machine Rig Iowa? The Highly Improbable Iowa Coin Tosses
    • Hillary May Be in Serious Trouble: This Election So Far Is an Insurrection Against a Rigged System
    • Trump Visit To College Campus Sparks Protest

      Fewer than a dozen people showed up to Sunday’s protest, huddled together as temperatures hovered just above freezing. Connors said some were afraid to come, while Dutton added that many more students wanted to come, but chose instead to spend the day canvassing for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

    • Bernie Sanders Tells Berniebros To Knock It Off — ‘We Don’t Want That Crap’

      The “Berniebro” phenomenon, where a mob of online Sanders supporters attack politicians and writers who express views critical of the Vermont senator or supportive of his Democratic rival Secretary Hilary Clinton, launched numerous thinkpieces from journalists unfortunate enough to encounter them online. At their worst, Berniebros have accused Clinton supporters of voting “based on who had the vagina” and have invented novel sexist terms such as “clitrash.”

    • Koch Brothers’ Propaganda Pushes Economic Pain on All But the Very Rich

      Last week, Steve Inskeep of NPR’s “Morning Edition” sat down with Charles Koch, co-owner and CEO of Koch Industries and the more vocal half of the infamous Koch brothers duo, to talk to him about his unprecedented political campaign spending.

      One year ago, the Koch brothers announced that they were budgeting nearly $900 million for campaign spending for the 2016 election year, a figure that was on par to match the spending of both major political parties. And according to Koch’s interview with NPR, he’s behind on that budget, and plans to really lay on the moola as the poltical battles start to heat up, especially those in Congress, prompting Inskeep to aptly label the Kochs as “a political force unto themselves.” But it’s not only for reasons of money that the Kochs might be seen as the third major party in American politics. Once the shock and awe at the depth of their wallets subsides, the reasons behind their spending habits become the real topic of interest

    • “Millennials Rising” Super PAC Is 95% Funded by Old Men

      According to recent FEC filings, 95 percent of the donations to the Super PAC “Millennials Rising” — originally called “Millennials for Jeb” — comes from men 60 years and older.

      Of the $54,960 total raised by the Super PAC, $50,000, or 91 percent, comes from the snowy-haired 72-year-old billionaire Robert A. Day. He is the grandson of Superior Oil founder William Myron Keck and a former investment manager. Day has also given $1 million to the pro-Bush Super PAC Right to Rise.

      The twitter account of Millennials Rising describes Millennials Rising as “started and run by Millennials.” Its website calls for “limited government” and simultaneously decries both the national debt and taxes as too high.

    • FBI Arrests Nearly Every Single Elected Official In A Texas Town

      Only two of the elected officials in a remote Texas town were left unscathed after the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) arrested six members under a federal indictment that accuses them of taking bribes and helping an illegal gambling operator in exchange for favors, the Associated Press reported. Those arrested in Crystal City, Texas include the mayor, the city attorney who is also the city manager, two current councilmen, and a former councilman.

      “The indictment alleges that these public officials and this businessman solicited and accepted bribes in exchange for official action, such as voting to award city contracts to, waive certain tax payments by, and conduct certain inspections to give unfair advantage to those paying bribes,” Richard Durbin, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, said in a press release. One of the two remaining top officials was previously arrested on federal charges of smuggling immigrants across the southern U.S. border.

    • Ted Cruz’s Promise That Big Donors Will Match Campaign Donations Could Break Rules

      Taken at face value, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s latest fund-raising pitch to supporters is either impossible, illegal, or a scam.

      In an email his campaign blasted out on Tuesday, Cruz wrote: “I just got off the phone with a few very generous supporters who — after our big win in Iowa last night — have pledged huge support for my campaign.”

      The donors “have agreed to match all online donations to my campaign made through the links below,” he said. The page he linked to allowed supporters to give up to $5,400 ($2,700 for the primary election; $2,700 for the general election) and, for a 48-hour period, have their donations matched dollar for dollar.

      The email did not say exactly how that would work.

    • Democrats Have Wasted No Time Trolling Marco Rubio for His Debate Malfunction

      Dressed in cardboard and tinfoil robot costumes, two reps from Democratic super-PAC American Bridge greeted Rubio fans at his first rally of the day, a pancake breakfast in Londonderry, New Hampshire. The two Rubio-bots handed out broken gaskets and mechanically repeated barbs about Rubio’s repetition of the line, “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.” As Rubio sparred with Chris Christie during last night’s debate, the New Jersey governor finally called him out for reciting the same talking point. “There it is,” Christie bellowed. “The memorized 25-second speech.” By night’s end, the Rubio-as-robot-meme was born.

      “We weren’t planning to do any stunts, but Chris Christie gave us a good idea,” said one of the bots, Kevin McAllister, deputy communications director for the super-PAC. “We could all see last night that Marco Roboto has lots of talking points but there’s not a lot of substance.”

    • Did Fox News Help the GOP Establishment Get Its Groove Back?

      And those big donors who went ahead and poured over $100 million into Jeb’s empty vessel campaign just watched it get spent with an almost unprecedented ineffectuality. They’re ready to jump to a viable alternative. And Rubio—who may have gotten a little bankshot help from Roger Ailes and even from his campaign’s part in ginning up the Dr. Ben Carson rumor-mill—is certainly the guy with the demonstrated willingness to soak-up cash from billionaires and toe the Neoconservative lines they want to draw in Middle Eastern sand. And his team is adept at playing fast and loose with IRS restrictions on non-profit status to wash campaign cash through their well-developed laundry machinery.

    • Donald Trump Tweets That Cruz ‘Illegally Stole’ Iowa

      Trump has been able to dominate the political conversation by advancing outrageous claims that attract the attention of the media and the public.

    • Donald Trump’s Russian cousins

      The current media frenzy over the darling of the Republican anti-establishment, Donald Trump, seems to fit particular American stereotypes about our political propensities. We Americans like a scrapper, a stubby, come-from-behind, up-by-the-bootstraps, half-Rocky Balboa, half-Horatio Alger amalgam of anti-establishment and egalitarian tropes. In this iteration, Donald Trump is the self-made man that he wants to appear as, and we appreciate how compulsively he weaves this ostentatious narrative.

    • WATCH: The Trump Interview That Should Have Ended His Candidacy Once and for All

      The topic turns to President Obama’s recent nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump unwittingly displays for all to see that he simply does not understand the most basic elements of the agreement.

      Trump proclaims his familiar boast that he is the best deal-maker ever and the best negotiator ever, and that the Obama administration completely botched the negotiation with Iran. And then Trump graced us with an inside account of how he, as a master deal-maker, would have negotiated the agreement with Iran and obtained a much better outcome for America.

    • Big bucks, shadowy companies: Election mystery money returns
    • Hillary Clinton: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

      She says she’s been fighting for progressive causes for years, but when? Where? Even on the micro-bore social “wedge” issues that her husband relied upon as president, she’s in trouble. Gays won’t forget her support of the Defense of Marriage Act. Straights think she’s a reed in the political wind.

    • Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Pack New Hampshire Arena For Democratic Lovefest

      When Clinton took the stage around 930 p.m., she noted the significant lead Sanders holds on her in the polls for New Hampshire’s primary (which drew boos from the remaining Sanders supporters), but said she refused to give up on trying to win the state. Like Sanders, she also stuck closely to her typical stump speech, but her supporters (a good number of whom were applauding while seated in the media section) lapped it up and applauded with the thunder stix passed out by the campaign.

    • Ted Cruz’s Logo Is Hilariously Appropriate

      “A transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) is an ultrasound technique that is used to view a man’s prostate and surrounding tissues. The ultrasound transducer (probe) sends sound waves through the wall of the rectum into the prostate gland, which is located directly in front of the rectum.”

      Yup, that’s the very top Google result. Basically, it’s an anal probe.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Elliot D. Cohen

      Peter and Mickey spend the hour in coversation with Elliot D. Cohen. In his latest book, “The Technology of Oppression,” Cohen explores the many ways that federal agencies are spying on Americans, and offers proposals to rein in these invasions of privacy.

    • NSA reorganization to combine offense, defense

      The plan, which the agency calls NSA21, is expected to be detailed publicly next week. A congressman who has been briefed and a former intelligence official described the outlines to The Baltimore Sun.

    • Windows 10 telemetry network traffic analysis, 30-hour update

      In 30 hours of idling on the default installation, there are a total of 113 non-private network ip addresses that this installation of Windows 10 Enterprise wants to connect to.

      Requests for anti-telemetry app/operating system testing: There have been several requests for different tests of various anti-telemetry apps, system configurations, and different operating systems. I would like to test these ideas out, and indeed I will do some testing, but I do not have the resources to test everything. If you have a specific request of testing that I can setup and walk away from until its time to compile the traffic data, let me know, and I’ll consider it.

      Firewall considerations: Many have taken the idea to incorporate these results into their own firewalls. Keep in mind that these results are ALL traffic from this test, including innocent connection attempts to the private network 192.168.1.0/24 as well as innocent connection requests to NTP. If you were to outright ban all the resulting traffic, you might lose some necessary functionality that you did not anticipate.

      Keep in mind that this is simply a hobby of curiosity of mine, and the results are the unscientific results of a hobbyist. If it’s useful to you, I’m glad to have helped.

  • Civil Rights

    • Rubio Takes A Trump-Like Tone On Immigration In New Hampshire

      Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has been offering increasingly tough talk on immigration as he steadily gains on Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s first-in-the-nation primary on February 9.

      As Trump has won over angry crowds across the state with speeches linking immigration to crime and terrorism, Rubio has begun to mimic his hard-line stance.

    • A Nice Paragraph About Why Humans Are So Damn Paranoid

      This is just another way of saying that human intelligence evolved too fast for human emotions and morals to keep up. Either way, though, it sure rings true. Just take a look at the current presidential race. If any country should feel self-confident and safe, it’s the United States. But boy howdy, we sure don’t, do we?

    • Refugee Camps Are Factories for Terrorists? Not Really.

      Rawlence writes that no evidence emerged that Westgate was plotted in Dadaab. Yet Kenya used the attack to try to shut down the camp. The international community, especially the United States, reiterated its support for the Kenyan government and largely ignored the abuses committed in its war on terror.

    • When Chivalry Fails: St. Bernard and the Machine

      Did Hillary Clinton really win the diversionary spectacle known as the Iowa Caucuses by two-tenths of a percent? Probably not. But we will never know. Why? Because Bernie Sanders refuses to call the results into question and demand the release the raw vote totals, which would likely show the senator won the actual vote by a decisive margin.

    • Let’s End Torture in U.S. Prisons

      Solitary confinement is exactly what it sounds like.

      A prisoner is kept in a small cell — usually 6 feet by 10 — alone, for 23 hours a day.

      For one hour a day, he or she may be taken into a small cage outside, with the opportunity to walk in circles before being taken back in. Even the outdoor cage can usually be opened and closed remotely.

      The idea is to keep the prisoner from having any human interaction. Those who’ve been through it call it a “living death.” The United Nations calls it torture.

    • Immigrant Mom Finally Released From Detention Center After Suffering 7 Seizures

      A Salvadoran woman who suffered seven seizures while being held in an immigration detention center has finally been released, according to officials in Texas. The woman’s release follows weeks of outcry from advocates who were concerned her health was deteriorating in detention without proper medical care.

      Susana Arévalo was arrested at the beginning of the new year in the first round of controversial immigration raids authorized by the Obama administration. Ever since, she’s been detained at the Dilley family detention center in Texas.

    • The Guantánamo in New York You’re Not Allowed to Know About

      Yet most of Hashi’s time in solitary confinement occurred before he had been deemed guilty by the justice system. Prolonged isolation prior to or in the absence of trial, sensory deprivation, and a lack of independent monitoring are normally associated with the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and CIA black sites overseas. But the MCC’s 10-South wing, which houses terrorism suspects, is no different in these respects. A former MCC prisoner and a psychologist specializing in trauma told The Intercept that the kind of extreme isolation imposed on defendants there can pressure them to accept a guilty plea, irrespective of actual guilt.

    • The Logic of Hunger Striking Palestinians: When Starvation Is a Weapon

      Under the “administrative detention” law, Israel has effectively held Palestinians and Arab prisoners without offering reasons for their arrests, practically since the state was founded in 1948. In fact, it is argued that this law which is principally founded on “secret evidence” dates back to the British Mandate government’s Emergency Regulations.

    • What Would It Take for the Government to Obtain Google’s Counter-Terror Ads Algos?

      Congress hasn’t passed legislation requiring tech companies to report their terrorist users. But does having Google use its algorithms to determine who is an extremist give the government a way to find out who Google thinks is an extremist?

    • Satanists Have Trolled A Major City Into Submission

      The move follows a 2014 Supreme Court decision that, ironically, was widely viewed as a huge blow to the separation of church and state when it was handed down. That impression, however, did not anticipate the Satanic Temple’s efforts to troll lawmakers who wish to begin their meetings with an endorsement of religion.

    • Bundy Militants Could be Forced to Repay $3.4 Million to Taxpayers Over Illegal Stunt

      An Oregon Democrat introduced legislation that would require Ammon Bundy and other out-of-state militants to repay taxpayers for the cost of their armed takeover of a wildlife sanctuary.

    • Terrifying Ted and his Ultra-Conservative Vision for America

      According to Cruz, he will have the right as president to dictate to the rest of the world how they should live because, as his campaign states, “The United States of America is the exceptional nation, the nation other countries aspire to be like. We should stand as a shining beacon of what free people enjoying a free market and system of government can achieve.” And if the “free people” of other nations should decide that they don’t want to live in a free market under a US-style liberal democratic government then we will just have to force them to because they simply don’t know what’s best for them. In actuality, Cruz doesn’t really care about their freedom anyway. Upon assuming office he intends to “prioritize American national security interests in every instance” by strengthening the military to ensure the continuation of US imperialism throughout the globe.

    • NYPD Throws People Out of Their Homes Without Ever Proving Criminal Activity

      It is not unusual for cities (both large and small) to have nuisance abatement laws that allow for landlords or government officials to evict people from residences when there’s chronic illegal behavior taking place there. Often it’s tied to the relentless, doomed war against drugs and vice, trying to shut down drug dens and brothels (that exist because of the black market the bans create in the first place, but never mind).

    • The only plan B for Europe is rebuilding power for change

      Europeans today are caught between a failing and undemocratic EU and equally failing and undemocratic national states. As Yanis Varoufakis prepares to launch a new movement for the democratisation of the EU, what’s the way out of the impasse?

    • A different Europe or bust

      As David Cameron’s renegotiation nears its uneventful conclusion, the big picture of what kind of Europe we want to live in is in danger of being lost. What can we do to change it?

    • After Brexit: the Eurosceptic vision of an Anglosphere future

      In the last couple of decades, eurosceptics have developed the idea that Britain’s future lies with a group of “Anglosphere” countries, not with a union of European states. At the core of this Anglosphere are the “five eyes” countries (so-called because of intelligence cooperation) of the UK, USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Each, it is argued, share a common history, language and political culture: liberal, protestant, free market, democratic and English-speaking. Sometimes the net is cast wider, to encompass Commonwealth countries and former British colonies, such as India, Singapore and Hong Kong. But the emotional and political heart of the project resides in the five eyes nations.

    • Someone in New Hampshire Is Leaving These Anti-Immigration Fliers on Cars

      At some point during Hillary Clinton’s rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Saturday night, I got a note on my car. Thankfully it was not a parking ticket—closer inspection revealed that it was single-page double-sided leaflet hitting both Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders for their position on immigration. It accuses Sanders of choosing “to value current and future Hispanic votes over progressive principles” by supporting a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. And it asks Clinton, “Should the President of the United States primarily represent the interests of American families or the interests of families of other countries who have entered the United States illegally?”

    • LKY’S VINDICTIVE LEGACY: A S’POREAN POLITICAL REFUGEE DIES IN THE U.S.

      Francis Seow, once a high-ranking Singaporean official, died on Jan. 21 in the United States, where he had spent the past 25 years as a refugee from the late Lee Kuan Yew’s petty vindictiveness. He died at the age of 88 in Boston, where he was an adjunct professor at Harvard University.

      Singapore has supposedly loosened up in its treatment of dissidents. However, the cases of Roy Ngerng, who dared to question the operation of Singapore’s Central Provident Fund earned him a libel suit that bankrupted him from Lee’s son, the current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and teenager Amos Yee, who was temporarily committed to a mental ward for an obscenity-filled video criticizing the country, show that it hasn’t lightened up that much.

      But what Lee ordered up for Seow is a prime example of just how far the elder Lee would go to crush his enemies.

      After two years as the island republic’s solicitor general, Seow quit in 1972 and went into private practice. He was also appointed senior counsel to a Commission of Inquiry after Chinese students boycotted an examination in 1963. He had the cheek to challenge Lee on several different fronts, and he paid for it by losing his country.

    • GOP chairman warns Obama of deadline for Gitmo plan

      The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is pressing President Obama to share his plan for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility ahead of a February deadline.

      The 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requires the administration to send Congress a “comprehensive strategy” by Feb. 23 on how to detain current and future prisoners.

      “So far, the only communication Congress has received regarding the administration’s intention to comply with its legal obligations is [Defense] Secretary [Ash] Carter’s recent public statements,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) wrote in a letter to Obama released publically Thursday.

    • Overnight Defense: Bill would require women to register for draft

      Women would be required to register for the draft under a bill introduced Thursday by Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), two veterans.

      Hunter said he introduced the bill to force Congress to consider the ramifications of the Pentagon’s recent decision to open all combat jobs to women. The Marine veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and member of the House Armed Service Committee has been a vocal opponent of that move.

    • Guantanamo’s Last Year
    • UN rights experges urge US to close Guantanamo
    • The National Shame Still Remains, Guantanamo’s 14th Birthday
    • The Racial Subtext To The GOP’s Immigration Policies

      There is a strong racial context and subtext to the debate about immigration reform taking place in the GOP presidential primary.

      Frontrunner Donald Trump rocketed to the top of the polls after saying Mexican immigrants were “rapists,” “drug dealers,” and “criminals,” and as his campaign has gotten stronger and stronger, his opponents have raced to keep up and show just how tough they are on the immigration issue.

    • The impossibility of the citizen terrorist

      The goal, in the words of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, is to make a “strong symbolic act against those who have excluded themselves from the national community.”

    • The Rule of Law Enforcement

      THE VITAL STATISTICS of my stomping grounds here at Three Rivers, then, are as follows. The prison is home to a bit more than 1,000 inmates, of whom about 60 percent are Mexican nationals, another 20 percent are U.S. Hispanics, 10 percent are black, 5 percent are Latin American, and 5 percent are white (the ofay percentage of 15 percent I cited last time appears to have been out of date). About half of the Mexicans “run with” (institutional slang for “are affiliated with”) the Paisas, a relatively amorphous prison gang that draws its ranks almost exclusively from Mexican nationals; a smaller percentage of U.S. Hispanics run with Tango Blast, a more organized gang with a much cooler name; while blacks and whites for purposes of prison riots and dining arrangements both act mostly as race-based units.

    • VIDEO: Bernie Sanders and Larry David on SNL Together Was as Hilarious as You’d Imagine

      Comedian David dedicated a long bit on “Saturday Night Live” to a mashup of his character on his HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and the Sanders presidential campaign.

      And that’s not all that happened: The Vermont senator joined his doppelgänger on stage in a comical sketch about inequality.

    • British press ‘most right-wing’ in Europe

      It’s a common criticism of the British press that journalists are too biased, although it can be hard to tell which side they are supposed to favour. The BBC is a case in point – in the run up to the election Labour criticised it for giving such prominence to fears over a deal with the SNP, and at a similar time Nigel Farage became outraged after being booed on Question Time. It was a “remarkable audience even by the left-wing standards of the BBC”, he said.

    • Ex-CIA chief Petraeus’ former lover escapes probe in leaked military secrets case
    • ‘Eyewash’: How the CIA deceives its own workforce about operation
    • ‘Playing with fire’: CIA intentionally misled employees with ‘eyewash’ practice
    • How the CIA deliberately misleads its own employees by spreading false information in internal memos

      The CIA misleads its own staff by sending its employees false memos known as ‘eyewash’ that deliberately mask details about killings, drone strikes and other clandestine activities, it is claimed.

      The practice begins when a regular internal memo is distributed to wider groups of staff containing false advice about operations or agency sources.

      A second memo is then sent to a much smaller, select group, explicitly telling them to disregard the previous instructions and passing on the real information.

    • FBI creates Facebook page in Farsi for case of missing CIA agent who has a $5million recovery reward after he vanished in 2007
    • CIA’s ‘Queen of Torture’ who was inspiration for Jessica Chastain’s character in Zero Dark Thirty secretly married her former supervisor who openly calls for war between Sunnis and Shias

      A CIA official nicknamed the ‘Queen of Torture’ secretly married a former supervisor who openly called for war between the Sunnis and Shias.

      Alfreda, whose last name authorities are taking pains to protect, is believed to have married Michael Scheuer, who was her boss in the 1990s, more than a year ago.

    • Secrets of Donald Trump’s Cult: This Is Why the Angriest White Voters Will Not Leave His Side

      Donald Trump is a political cult leader. In that role, he is also a political necromancer, beating a drum of nativism and fear to control the right-wing political zombies that follow him.

      The Republican Party’s base of voters is rapidly shrinking. Contemporary conservatism is a throwback ideology that is unpopular with a large and growing segment of the American public. The result of these two factors is a Republican Party and American conservative establishment that is under threat, obsolescent and in a deep existential crisis.

    • 5 Worst Foreign Policy Moments of GOP New Hampshire Debate

      Virtually the only good thing anyone knows about the sleazy Ted Cruz is that he came out against torture.

    • Obama Condemns hatred of Muslim-Americans, Affirms their Importance to Nation

      President Obama spoke Wednesday at a Baltimore mosque in an explicit pushback against the hatred for Muslims being promoted by billionaire real estate developer Donald J. Trump and others among the Republican presidential candidates.

    • Number of Victims of Female Genital Mutilation Is 70 Million Higher Than Thought

      The real scale of female genital mutilation (FGM) worldwide has been revealed in alarming new statistics on the eve of International Day of Zero Tolerance of FGM. At least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone ritual cutting, half of them living in just three countries, according to UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency.

    • Facing Execution at 72, Georgia’s Oldest Death Row Inmate Exposes Death Penalty’s Racist Roots

      Evidence that the state’s death penalty was racially biased was a major contributing factor that led to Furman v. Georgia, the landmark Supreme Court case that in 1972 suspended the death penalty across the country. (The plaintiff, William Henry Furman, was a black man deemed “mentally impaired” by a state psychiatrist, who had been convicted in a one-day trial in Savannah.) Furman forced states to amend their death penalty statutes to avoid the “arbitrary and discriminatory” imposition of capital punishment.

      Just four years later, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s new death penalty law in Gregg v. Georgia. Yet the law showed clear continuity with decades past: Of the first dozen people to die in the electric chair following Gregg, nine were black.

    • Overwhelmingly White Maryland County Bans All School Field Trips To Baltimore

      Elected officials in Baltimore blasted the decision. “When I heard about this continuing ban on school travel to Baltimore, I was, frankly, totally flummoxed. It seems so outrageous as to be actually sad,” said Brooke Lierman, a Maryland delegate who represents Baltimore.

      Harford schools did modify the ban to allow students to compete in sporting events in Baltimore saying such activities take place in “more controlled environments” and may have “playoff implications.”

    • Jeb Bush, Debate Audience Destroy Donald Trump for Loving Eminent Domain

      Donald Trump still supports eminent domain—the government-backed confiscation of private property—but his stance earned a harsh rebuke from Jeb Bush and a round of boos from the audience at the Republican debate.

    • Lies, Correctness and Oliver Kamm

      In this interview with LBC Oliver Kamm went on to insult and lambast me and say that I claimed that the rape charges were founded on political correctness. I tried to point out that I said no such thing, but LBC had cut me off. LBC later put up the version you hear on that link in which Kamm’s remarks are given in full and my own are edited. But it is very plain indeed that I did not say what Kamm goes on to accuse me of saying.

      [...]

      Kamm’s reactionary friends can congratulate him all they like. What he is doing is spreading a deliberate lie about me. But it may just lead to a few more people researching what is really happening in the Assange case, and that would be karma.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Pharma Executives Worry About Presidential Candidates Demanding Reform

      Pfizer, since the beginning of last month, has raised prices an average of 10.6 percent for more than 60 branded products. Bloomberg reports that prices have doubled over the last year for over 60 brand-name drugs.

      Meanwhile, PhRMA has reportedly invested in a new marketing campaign to boost the image of the industry.

    • Copyrights

02.06.16

Links 6/2/2016: CoreOS Rocket 1.0, Scientific Linux 7.2

Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Create Your Own Free Software Project

    Free software is tremendously democratic. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can get involved – there are no barriers of wealth or social status. Being educated
    in computer science helps, but there are plenty of people working on free software at Red Hat, Canonical and Intel who’ve never been to university, and who acquired their positions simply by writing great code.

    So anyone can contribute to free software, and anyone can start a new project as well. But how do you turn that great idea in your head into a real-life success? The likes of SourceForge and GitHub are littered with now-abandoned projects with barely 50 lines of code, which initially started as grand ideas to create the next killer music player, email client or game. Yes, free software is awesome, but 95% of projects never get off the ground or are abandoned after a few weeks.

  • Because You Don’t Need Eyes To Have A Vision

    Continuing the MyStory series on It’s FOSS, today I am sharing with you the story of a blind computer programmer from Iraq who goes on the internet by the name of Ali Miracle. By the time you finish reading this article about Ali and his works, I am sure you would agree with his nickname ‘miracle’.

    I came to know about Ali when he contacted me to contribute to It’s FOSS. This was also the time when I come to know about his inability to see. I was amazed to know that despite being blind, Ali contributed to a number of open source projects.

  • What success really looks like in open source

    Linux, and the related open source projects making up the LAMP stack, were the underdogs. Essays like Raymond’s helped legitimize Linux and galvanize support for open source in a world where closed source was still the norm.

  • Events

    • FOSDEM video recordings
    • foss-gbg goes foss-north

      As some of you might know, I run a group that meet and learn new stuff about foss month – foss-gbg. Today it’s official that this summer foss-gbg goes foss-north and it is going to be awesome. So I welcome you all to the wonderful city of Gothenburg to a day filled with talks on a wide variety of topics around free and open source technology. It is going to be awesome!

    • FOSDEM 2016 and ownCloud, Kolab, KDE and more

      After rocking SCALE, FOSDEM was next and a great event. Killing, too – two days with about 8000 people, it was insane. Lots of positive people again, loads of stuff we handed out so we ran out on Sunday morning – and cool devices at the ownCloud booth.

    • Look over the fence – StartUp Weekend Phnom Penh

      Linux and Free Software plays in South East Asia not that role as in Europe or North America. To change that at least a bit, I came here. The asian culture plays definitely a role and this was often discussed. But it plays lesser the vital role as we think and as the linked article shows, we will not find an easy an solution for the cultural differences. From my perspective it is lesser necessary that we adopt, the most asians I met are willing to accept the differences and can live with them.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • The Surprising Truth about Big Data

      Big Data gets a lot of headlines. If any technology can be called heavily hyped, Big Data earns the prize for most breathless predictions of enterprise influence.

      Typical of the rosy predictions is this from IDC: spending on Big Data-related infrastructure, software and services will grow at a torrid compound annual rate of 23.1 percent between 2014 and 2019, reaching a hefty $48.6 billion in 2019.

    • 80 percent of UK IT professionals plan to move to OpenStack cloud

      The report also suggested that the biggest concerns facing those advocates centre around security and the challenge of installing the cloud in their business.

      “There is no question that private clouds are seen as the future for many enterprise workloads, including many that are considered to be business-critical,” said Mark Smith, senior product marketing manager of cloud solutions at Suse, in a not at all brazen plug for his business.

    • Hadoop vs. Spark: The New Age of Big Data

      A direct comparison of Hadoop and Spark is difficult because they do many of the same things, but are also non-overlapping in some areas.

      For example, Spark has no file management and therefor must rely on Hadoop’s Distributed File System (HDFS) or some other solution. It is wiser to compare Hadoop MapReduce to Spark, because they’re more comparable as data processing engines.

    • OpsClarity Promises Easier Big Data Management for DevOps

      What will it take to make open source big data tools truly useful for the enterprise? OpsClarity thinks the answer is a one-stop solution for monitoring everything from Spark to Elasticsearch to MongoDB. That’s what it rolled out this week in a new platform targeted at DevOps teams.

  • Databases

    • Bug squashing in Gammu

      I’ve not really spent much time on Gammu in past months and it was about time to do some basic housekeeping.

      It’s not that there would be too much of new development, I rather wanted to go through the issue tracker, properly tag issues, close questions without response and resolve the ones which are simple to fix. This lead to few code and documentation improvements.

    • Deep Introduces deepSQL and Combines SQL with Cloud

      Called deepSQL, the solution aims to help companies meet real-time customer demands while providing the automated scalability to capitalize on unforeseen business surges.

      “We took control of our destiny by making this our own distribution. It is fully 100% MySQL compliant, there are now application changes but it’s the best of Maria, Percona, MySQL, our own stuff and the machine learning open source worlds together,” said Chad Jones, chief strategy officer at Deep.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • OpsClarity Provides Monitoring for Open-Source Data-First Apps

      OpsClarity Intelligent Monitoring provides automated discovery, configuration and rapid troubleshooting for Apache Kafka, Apache Spark and Apache Storm.

      OpsClarity, which provides Web-scale application monitoring solutions, has announced that its Intelligent Monitoring offering now provides monitoring for a growing suite of open-source data processing frameworks.

    • Walmart has made its application development cloud platform to open source

      Customers that think of Walmart as the place to get toiletries, groceries and more can now add cloud to the list.

      Perhaps taking a page out of Amazon’s success with AWS, the retail giant has announced it is releasing its internally-developed cloud and application lifecycle management platform, called OneOps, open source to the public.

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

    • EC accepts XBRL as standard for procurement

      The freely-available standard, developed by the not-for-profit XBRL Consortium, was accepted by the Commission after consulting the European multi-stakeholder platform (MSP) on ICT standardisation and other experts.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Reclaiming the Computing Commons

      Software freedom — the core commitment of the free software movement — does represent at least the rudiments of a better system. Resisting and reversing enclosure will not come about through “sustainable growth” or the “sharing economy,” which preserve the logics and structures of the status quo. “Openness,” or the conviction that norms of transparency and publicity will clarify (and thereby equalize) power relations, is also no solution at all.

    • New web office suite, UNICEF’s innovation fund, and more news

    • Open Data

      • City of Riga to renew its ICT strategy

        The city of Riga (Latvia) will soon begin an overhaul of its approach to IT, focussing on making its data open by default, and giving companies and software developers access to some of the city’s eGovernment services through APIs. The city’s current IT architecture was designed about a decade ago, when “no one foresaw the growth of data”, says city council member Agris Ameriks.

    • Open Hardware

      • Adding Position Control To An Open Source Brushless Motor Driver

        Brushless motors are everywhere now. From RC planes to CNC machines, if you need a lot of power to spin something really fast, you’re probably going to use a brushless motor. A brushless motor requires a motor controller, and for most of us, this means cheap Electronic Speed Controllers (ESC) from a warehouse in China. [Ben] had a better idea: build his own ESC. He’s been working on this project for a while, and he’s polishing the design to implement a very cool feature – position control.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • ‘Error 53′ will kill your iPhone 6 but it’s for the best, says Apple

    Apple’s iOS 9 update has a little-known feature that disables iPhone 6 and 6 plus handsets that have been repaired by non-Apple technicians.

    Users have found their iPhones rendered obsolete after they had their screen or home buttons repaired and then tried upgrading the software. The software issue has been called the “Error 53″ problem, and it doesn’t have a quick fix.

  • Microsoft Kidnaps Windows, Malware Everywhere & More…

    If you’re a Windows user, which most of you reading FOSS Force aren’t, then Microsoft wants to hijack your machine. It seems that the company that’s been spending millions — and has been buying into every free and open source conference it can find and a few it can’t — to get the word out that “Microsoft has changed,” hasn’t. If you happen to be unlucky enough to be using Windows 7, 8 or 8.1, you’re probably beginning to realize this right about now.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Rootkit Security: The Next Big Challenge

      Combining this with the Juniper issue, where VPN communication could have been hacked, got me thinking about how firmware can be verified and how to ensure that it’s doing what we think it should be doing and not what someone else wants it to do.

    • What Are Your Container Security Options?

      When virtual machine technology emerged, many organizations’ initial approach to security was to apply the same security measures to virtual machines as they did to physical machines. Only later did more specialized software emerge that was specifically designed to meet the security requirements of virtual machines.

      That process is now beginning to repeat itself, with software specifically designed to meet the security requirements of containers now starting to emerge. Some examples of specialized container security software include Clair and Twistlock.

    • In the shadows of the cyber colossus

      It might come as a surprise that South Africa is not always rated near the bottom in international surveys. According to various reports, the country comes out either third or sixth in the world of top cyber crime hotspots.

    • Mysterious spike in WordPress hacks silently delivers ransomware to visitors

      It’s still not clear how, but a disproportionately large number of websites that run on the WordPress content management system are being hacked to deliver crypto ransomware and other malicious software to unwitting end users.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Remember Kosovo?

      In Pristina, the capital of the make-believe country of Kosovo, there is a street named after Bill Clinton, and a statue of Bill – done in the Socialist Realist style – towers over the main square. They also named a boulevard after George W. Bush, perhaps to hedge their bets after the Republicans took the White House. You couldn’t ask for a more “pro-American” country than this one: but that’s just on the surface. Undercurrents of rabid nationalism – and real resentment of the Americans and Europeans who have been baby-sitting the Kosovars all these years – is now breaking out that threatens whatever modicum of stability Kosovo has ever known.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Who is Chelsea Manning?

      She has informed the public of United States military activities across the globe and continues to speak out against government secrecy and in defense of transgender rights. Her words and actions have powerfully transformed national conversations, but since her arrest in 2010 on charges related to her release of information to WikiLeaks, few have had a chance to actually see and hear from Chelsea herself.

    • Julian Assange Remains “Deprived of Liberty” After U.K. Rejects U.N. Ruling

      A United Nations panel ruled on Friday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being “arbitrarily detained,” but British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond rejected what he called “a ridiculous finding.”

      Although he claimed “sweet” vindication, Assange nevertheless remains confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has lived since 2012.

    • Julian Assange: British government to fight UN ruling that it ‘arbitrarily detained’ WikiLeaks founder

      The British Government is fighting a United Nations ruling that accused it of “arbitrarily detaining” Julian Assange in violation of his fundamental human rights.

      The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called on the UK and Sweden to immediately end the WikiLeaks founder’s “deprivation of liberty” and compensate him.

      But a spokesperson for the British Government said it would “formally contest” the findings and denied that Mr Assange’s stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London constituted arbitrary detention.

    • UK wants authority to serve warrants in U.S.

      British and U.S. officials have been negotiating a plan that could allow British authorities to directly serve wiretap orders on U.S. communications companies in criminal and national security inquiries, U.S. officials confirmed Thursday.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Former USTR Comes Out Against TPP — Though Not Necessarily For The Best Reasons

      People who have worked for the USTR tend to pretty religiously support any and all new trade agreements, so it seems somewhat noteworthy that the former USTR, and now Senator, Rob Portman, has come out against the TPP agreement, saying that he doesn’t think that it’s a good deal.

    • PayPal Continues To Drive People To Bitcoin And Other Solutions As It Starts Cutting Off VPNs & Open Internet Solutions

      There’s a fairly long history of Paypal being completely obnoxious in shutting down the accounts of basically anyone challenging the status quo in any way.

    • The Story Behind Clinton’s Jab At Sanders’ One Wall Street Vote

      In the latest Democratic primary debate Thursday night, Hillary Clinton went after the core of Bernie Sanders’ appeal to the progressive base. The Wall Street-hating Senator’s hands aren’t as clean on financial policy as he claims, Clinton said, citing his support 16 years ago for a key favor to the banking business.

      “While we’re talking about votes, you’re the one who voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives in 2000, which contributed to the overleveraging of Lehman Brothers, which was one of the culprits that brought down the economy,” Clinton said. “I’m not impugning your motive because you voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives. People make mistakes.”

      Unlike stocks and business debts, derivatives are a category of investments that provide no tangible value to the real economy where workers sell their time to bosses so they can feed their families. They are contracts between investors that function almost exactly like betting tickets at a race track: People who have contributed nothing to the business of raising and training horses get a chance to win or lose money based on how those horses perform in the near future.

      [...]

      But the story of Sanders’ votes for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) isn’t quite as straightforward as Clinton depicted Thursday. And it implicates Bill Clinton’s trusted financial policy advisors far more deeply than it does Sanders.

    • Azerbaijan’s 2016: sink or swim?

      Protests have broken out in Azerbaijan against rising prices and falling living standards.

    • Exposé: Undocumented Newspaper Delivery Drivers Treated as Slave Labor

      The issue of long hours, little pay and no vacation for delivery drivers is finally out of the shadows.

  • Censorship

    • Tollywood demands `equal’ censorship rules

      Hyderabad: The Centre’s move last month to constitute a committee led by acclaimed filmmaker Shyam Benegal to refurbish the controversy-stricken Censor Board has led to Tollywood rooting for equal censorship rules on par with those applicable to Bollywood and Hollywood. Incidentally, while the Union ministry of information and broadcasting has called for opinions from Ttown on ways to overhaul the Board, observers rue how there’s no representa tion of the local industry on the newly set up committee. This, despite the Telugu filmdom producing the most number of movies in the country annually .

    • The quaint Hyderabad I grew up in is destroyed due to mindless development

      As the head of the government appointed expert panel entrusted with the task of proposing recommendations for restructuring the Censor Board, filmmaker Shyam Benegal has his hands full. From studying suggestions/demands from the film industry, to analysing concerns raised by NGOs working on children’s welfare and women’s rights organisations, and brainstorming on the changes needed to modernise the Cinematograph Act, the panel has its task cut out. “It’s not an easy job,” says Benegal, with a smile, adding, “We are still in the process of taking stock of the feedback we have received from all stakeholders. I’m in no position to talk about what changes we intend to propose.”

    • Cologne rape censorship: Here’s why Breitbart London was able to scoop the German press

      He confirms the cover-up by Germany’s state broadcaster and how his organization is able to get and disseminate politically incorrect news stories in Europe due to both self-censorship and state ordered censorship of the main-stream media.

    • Sexist censorship on social media

      Immediate outrage followed, and rightfully so. Her situation, which supporters of Kincaid have called “Boobgate,” demonstrates how sexist social media censorship can be. Women can post photos of their entire breast without violating Facebook’s anti-nudity policy, so long as the nipple is covered. Men can freely post photos of themselves shirtless and no one bats an eye.

    • Facebook Censorship and the War on Free Speech

      Writing at the Gatestone Institute, British journalist Douglas Murray looked at Facebook as a battleground in the war on free speech Friday, recalling a recent case in which the social media giant was “forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.”

      To this, Murray adds the disturbing September incident in which German chancellor Angela Merkel was caught on an open mike, asking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg if he would help suppress “anti-immigration” postings… and he replied that he was already working on it.

    • Twitter deletes 125,000 Isis accounts and expands anti-terror teams [Ed: they start with terror, and then…]

      Building confidence in its anti-terror policies, the social media company is expanding its specialist teams in the US and Ireland to monitor extremist content

  • Privacy

    • Prosecutors Argue Cell Site Location Data Is Something Every User Shares With ‘The Rest Of The World’

      The state of Maryland’s defense of the Baltimore PD’s warrantless use of Stingray devices continues, taking the form of a series of motions unofficially titled Things People Should Know About Their Cell Phones.

      The last brief it filed in this criminal prosecution claimed “everyone knows” phones generate location data, therefore there’s no expectation of privacy in this information. As commenters pointed out, people may know lots of stuff about records they’re generating, but that doesn’t mean law enforcement should have warrantless access to those records.

    • NSA Gives Itself High Marks for Handling of U.S. Internet Records

      The American Civil Liberties Union is representing the Wikimedia Foundation – which operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia – and several other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the upstream collection program, claiming the collection is unconstitutional.

      “The PCLOB’s status report offers little comfort, and only underscores that the NSA continues to copy and search Americans’ international Internet communications en masse,” says ACLU staff attorney Ashley Gorski.

    • NSA Plans To ‘Act Now’ To Ensure Quantum Computers Can’t Break Encryption [Ed: When the world's biggest quantum computers utiliser (to crack encryption) warns about "those Chinese"]
    • When the NSA Merges Its Offense and Defense, Encryption Loses

      How do you create strong encryption standards when the organization tasked to build them finds itself absorbed into an organization that dedicates huge quantities of resources to break them? The recently announced reorganization of the National Security Agency this week brings this question to the forefront. As part of the reorganization, the defensive arm of the NSA (the Information Assurance Directorate, or IAD) will be subsumed by the intelligence-gathering program (which collects signals intelligence, or SIGINT). The IAD will effectively cease to exist, which raises questions about both the privacy and security of the nation’s data. We need to make sure that we have something that replaces it.

  • Civil Rights

    • Gitmo Prosecutor Defends Censorship of Public Hearing in 9/11 Case

      The war court prosecutor is arguing that public disclosure of a transcript of a public hearing held at Guantanamo last year could endanger national security in response to a legal motion brought by 17 news organizations protesting pick-and-choose secrecy in the Sept. 11 pretrial hearings.

      Army Brig. Gen Mark Martins makes the argument in a filing obtained by the Miami Herald that was still being reviewed for sensitive information on Thursday and not publicly released. At issue is the Pentagon’s decision to black out large portions of a 379-page transcript of an Oct. 30 hearing that included testimony from two soldiers who work at Guantanamo’s most clandestine prison, called Camp 7.

    • TV Station Educates Public On Dangers Of Teen Sexting By Exposing 14-Year-Old’s Name… And Penis

      Since law enforcement largely seems to feel sexting = child porn, the station should have found itself under investigation for distributing child porn. Instead, the only negative result of its allegedly terrible editorial practices so far is Holden’s lawsuit.

      Holden is seeking damages related to the outing of his name and sexual organs, with damages sought clearing the $1 million mark.

    • Pentagon Releases 198 Abuse Photos in Long-Running Lawsuit. What They Don’t Show Is a Bigger Story.

      Six months before media organizations published the notorious Abu Ghraib photos, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records, including photos, relating to the abuse and torture of prisoners in U.S. detention centers overseas. Since we sued to enforce our request in 2004, the legal battle has focused in part on a set of some 2,000 pictures relating to detainee maltreatment. The photos released today are part of that set, and they are the first photos the government has released to us in all these years of litigation. (The court hearing our lawsuit ordered the government to release the Abu Ghraib photos in 2004, but the photos were leaked, and posted online by Salon, while the government was appealing the decision.)

    • Pentagon Publishes 200 Bush-Era Torture Pictures After ACLU Lawsuit

      The ACLU filed the lawsuit in 2004 following the leak of photos from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Lawyers for the US government argued in court to keep the photos hidden, claiming that a release could cause “grievous harm to national security,” as terrorists could use the images as propaganda for recruiting.

      The majority of the released photographs are close-ups of bruising, cuts, and scrapes, and have the faces of the detainees blacked out. Some of the images are graphic and highly disturbing. All have been posted on the ACLU website.

    • Chicago cops avoid punishment by retiring with generous pensions

      After coming under internal investigation over involvement in a scandal that resulted in a man’s death at hands of police, three Chicago police officers are retiring. Some of them will receive pensions in excess of $100,000 annually.

      Six officers of the Chicago Police Department were accused of covering up a 2004 manslaughter incident, in which one of their own punched David Koschman in face. The 21-year-old fell into a coma and died 11 days later.

    • The Privatization of Terrorism Blacklists Will Damage Innocent Lives

      A private service that banks, employers, and government agencies use to screen customers and clients is blacklisting thousands of people as terrorists, sometimes based on nothing more than inaccurate and bigoted materials online, according to a VICE News article.

      Thomson-Reuters’ “World-Check” database slaps a “terrorism” designation — and a picture of a red balaclava — on the profiles of individuals, charities, and religious institutions. Many of them are Muslims who have never been charged or even accused of terrorism-related offenses. The results are far-reaching and can include closure of the blacklisted individuals’ bank accounts, inability to get a job, or denial of government benefits. (And World-Check isn’t the only company chasing billions of dollars in the risk mitigation industry.)

    • Giving up democracy to get it back

      Most recently, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced plans to found a movement (not a political party) that claims to “democratise” the EU by 2025. Ironically, one of his first steps has been to create a web site directing supporters to Facebook and Twitter. A groundbreaking effort to put citizens back in charge? Or further entangling activism in the false hope of platforms that are run for profit by their Silicon Valley overlords? A Greek tragedy indeed, in the classical sense.

      Varoufakis rails against authoritarian establishment figures who don’t put the citizens’ interests first. Ironically, big data and the cloud are a far bigger threat than Brussels. The privacy and independence of each citizen is fundamental to a healthy democracy. Companies like Facebook are obliged – by law and by contract – to service the needs of their shareholders and advertisers paying to study and influence the poor user. If “Facebook privacy” settings were actually credible, who would want to buy their shares any more?

    • UN Group Calls for Slavery Reparations, but Few in Media Are Listening

      But when, right on the heels of that, a UN human rights group released a report saying African-Americans face “systemic racial discrimination” and deserve “reparatory justice,” that was not so newsworthy. The UN’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent cited “the persistent gap in almost all the human development indicators, such as life expectancy, income and wealth, level of education, housing, employment and labor, and even food security, among African-Americans and the rest of the US population,” and pointed to police killings, zero tolerance policies in schools, the criminalization of poverty, environmental racism, discriminatory voter ID laws and schools’ insufficient teaching about the history of slavery as constituting a human rights crisis that must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Verizon’s mobile video won’t count against data caps—but Netflix does

      Verizon Wireless is testing the limits of the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules after announcing that it will exempt its own video service from mobile data caps—while counting data from competitors such as YouTube and Netflix against customers’ caps.

      The only way for companies to deliver data to Verizon customers without counting against their data caps is to pay the carrier, something no major rival video service has chosen to do. While data cap exemptions are not specifically outlawed by the FCC’s net neutrality rules, the FCC is examining these arrangements to determine whether they should be stopped under the commission’s so-called “general conduct standard.” The FCC is already looking into data cap exemptions—also known as zero-rating—implemented by Comcast, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA.

  • DRM

    • Cory Doctorow on the game plan to crush DRM

      Author and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) activist Cory Doctorow presented the opening keynote at SCALE 14x in Pasadena on January 22, using the opportunity to highlight the project that brought him back to the EFF after a decade. That project is Apollo 1201, an effort to challenge the ever-expanding problem of “digital rights management” (DRM)—now built into all manner of mass-produced products, not just entertainment media—that threatens the rights of individuals. The dangers of DRM are even greater than those posed by traditional proprietary software, Doctorow said, precisely because the rise of “smart” devices is putting DRM-locked software everywhere around us.

    • The Trouble With Intel’s Management Engine

      Something is rotten in the state of Intel. Over the last decade or so, Intel has dedicated enormous efforts to the security of their microcontrollers. For Intel, this is the only logical thing to do; you really, really want to know if the firmware running on a device is the firmware you want to run on a device. Anything else, and the device is wide open to balaclava-wearing hackers.

      Intel’s first efforts toward cryptographically signed firmware began in the early 2000s with embedded security subsystems using Trusted Platform Modules (TPM). These small crypto chips, along with the BIOS, form the root of trust for modern computers. If the TPM is secure, the rest of the computer can be secure, or so the theory goes.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Pfizer’s Vision of R&D

      Remember that Read is magnificently compensated for running this business, but what does he bring to the table? It has nothing to do with drug creation and manufacture. His contribution is measured by how little Pfizer pays in taxes, and how well he engineers earnings, and certainly not by any contribution to the well-being of humans.

      We don’t have to allow this business model to flourish with tax cuts and benefits. It’s corrupt to the bone.

    • Trademarks

      • NFL Edging Towards Claiming A Trademark On ‘The Big Game’ Again

        We all know that the NFL doesn’t want anyone to use the term “Super Bowl” without having paid the NFL first (and paid lots and lots of money). As we’ve pointed out in the past, most of this is pure bullshit. In most cases, people and companies totally can use the term “Super Bowl” but few people want to deal with any sort of legal fight, so they just don’t.

      • Moosehead Vs. Mus Knuckle: The Most Canadian Trademark Spat Ever

        We’ve been talking about the insanity occurring in the beer industry regarding trademark for quite some time now. If you haven’t been following along, the short version of this is that as the craft beer revolution has exploded the number of breweries taking part in the industry, so too has it exploded the number of trademark spats within it. In some senses, we should have seen this coming. Given the number of new players in the market with the limited linguistic resources available with which those players could name their companies and products, perhaps it was somewhat inevitable that some of the companies involved would try to lean on trademark law to fend off what they saw as impeding competition with too-close brand names. That said, many of these conflicts fail to live up to the purpose of trademark law, many of them giving barely even a nod towards an actual concern over customer confusion. Instead, protectionism reigns.

    • Copyrights

      • Movie Industry Demands €1.2 Billion Piracy Damages from Dutch Govt

        The Dutch movie industry is holding the local government responsible for the country’s high piracy rates, claiming it tolerated and even encouraged unauthorized downloading for years. In response, a coalition of movie companies is demanding damages for the losses that they’ve suffered over the past decade, totaling more than a billion euros.

      • EU’s Highest Court to Weigh Whether Hyperlinking Will Remain Legal in Europe

        Tomorrow, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in Luxembourg will hear arguments in a case about one of the most fundamental online activities: hyperlinking. The case may decide the fate of the World Wide Web in Europe. This isn’t hyperbole. Let us explain.

        As any Internet user knows, linking is the lifeblood of the web. By connecting webpages together, links are what enable the interconnected nature of the web; they’re why we call it a “web” in the first place. It turns out that under current EU copyright law, hyperlinking may have (far-reaching) legal consequences, as the CJEU has been asked yet again how to apply copyright law to hyperlinking on the web.

      • It’s 2016 And The EU Is Just Now Getting Ready To Decide If Hyperlinking Is Legal

        Earlier this week, we wrote about a legislative attempt in France to outlaw hyperlinking without a license (really), but would you believe that whether or not you can link without a license is still an unsettled matter of law in the EU? As is described in great detail over at the Disruptive Competition Project blog, just this week the Court of Justice of the EU heard a case concerning whether or not linking is legal. We wrote about this case last year, but the court has finally heard the case, with an Advocate General recommendation in early April, and a final ruling in the summer. There was a similar earlier case, the Svensson case, which the EU Court of Justice got right, but there’s some concern about this new case.

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