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06.20.15

Links 20/6/2015: Mageia 5, Saudi Leaks

Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Plane stowaway falls to his death from British Airways flight as another survives

    A man is in hospital recovering after clinging onto a flight from South Africa for 11 hours while another has died after he landed in south west London

  • Science

    • Russia, US competing for space partnership with Brazil

      The United States and Russia are competing for a strategic role in Brazil’s plan to launch commercial satellites from its base near the equator, opening up a new theatre in their rivalry for allies and influence.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • NSA Contributes Security Tools For Puppet

      Puppet Labs said Friday (June 19) that NSA is releasing to the open source community a set of tools based on Puppet Labs’ technologies called Systems Integrity Management Platform, or SIMP. The framework is intended to automatically enforce compliance with various profiles called the Security Content Automation Program.

    • Does NSA Spying Leave the U.S. Without Moral High Ground in China Hack?

      All signs point to China being responsible for one of the worst hacks in U.S. history, exposing sensitive records of millions of federal employees.

      But the U.S. is an awkward position in deciding how to respond to the humiliating blow. That’s partially because in the two years since Edward Snowden’s leaks about U.S. surveillance, the Obama administration has repeatedly argued that hacking into computer networks to spy on foreigners is completely acceptable behavior.

    • Experts: NSA Spying May Leave the U.S. Without Moral High Ground in OPM Hack
    • OPM Official: Agency Has History of Problems with Security

      By exposing the names and addresses of foreign relatives, the cybertheft of private information on U.S. security clearance holders by hackers linked to China will complicate the deployment and promotion of American intelligence professionals with special language skills and diverse backgrounds, current and former U.S. officials say.

    • Sex, lies and debt potentially exposed by U.S. data hack

      When a retired 51-year-old military man disclosed in a U.S. security clearance application that he had a 20-year affair with his former college roommate’s wife, it was supposed to remain a secret between him and the government.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Transparency Reporting

    • MEPs back changes to proposed EU trade secrets rules

      Disclosing a trade secret on public interest grounds would not be an offence under new laws backed by a committee of MEPs.

    • Buying Silence: How the Saudi Foreign Ministry controls Arab media

      On Monday, Saudi Arabia celebrated the beheading of its 100th prisoner this year. The story was nowhere to be seen on Arab media despite the story’s circulation on wire services. Even international media was relatively mute about this milestone compared to what it might have been if it had concerned a different country. How does a story like this go unnoticed?

      Today’s release of the WikiLeaks “Saudi Cables” from the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs show how it’s done.

    • WikiLeaks ‘Saudi Cables’ reveal secret Saudi government influence in Australia

      WikiLeaks has revealed secret Saudi Arabian influence in Arabic media and Islamic religious groups in Australia as well as covert monitoring of Saudi students studying at Australian universities.

      More than 61,000 leaked Saudi diplomatic documents have been released by WikiLeaks in what the international transparency group says will be the first instalment of the publication of more than half a million secret papers in batches over coming weeks.

      “The Saudi Cables lift the lid on an increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year, but which has also become a menace to its neighbours and itself,” WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange said in a statement released on Saturday.

    • The Injustice Handed out to Julian Assange Must End

      Julian Assange, founder and editor of WikiLeaks, has now been a refugee in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for three years. The key issue in his extraordinary incarceration is justice. He has been charged with no crime. The first Swedish prosecutor dismissed the misconduct allegations regarding two women in Stockholm in 2010. The second Swedish prosecutor’s actions were and are demonstrably political. Until recently, she refused to come to London to interview Assange. Finally, when the British government almost pleaded with her to come, she agreed. She has now cancelled her trip. It is a farce, but one with grim consequences for Assange should he dare step outside the Ecuadorean embassy.

    • Assange ‘was to be quizzed this week’

      Julian Assange has accused Swedish prosecutors of being “reckless” by cancelling plans to interview him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London this week.

    • #3years2long Message From Christine Assange

      Welcome!…and many thanks to supporters old and new for being here today, to stand up for justice for Australian journalist Julian Assange, and his work as Editor in Chief of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

      Although uncharged with any crime, anywhere in the world, at the request of the US , the UK Govt has detained Julian for nearly 5 years now, under constant 24 hour surveillance and house arrest.

      Today marks 3 yrs of his refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Ecuador granted Julian political asylum due to threats on his life and liberty by the US Govt and its agencies.

    • Julian Assange: Swedish prosecutor cancels appointment to interview Wikileaks founder

      The Swedish prosecutor has cancelled an appointment to interview Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, according to the WikiLeaks founder.

      Speaking on the third anniversary of his entering the embassy to avoid extradition over allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, Mr Assange said that the move by Marianne Ny was “reckless”.

    • Frustrated Assange marks three years in Ecuadoran embassy

      The Australian activist said a long-awaited interview with the prosecutors fell through in what he labelled a “public relations exercise”, although the prosecutor’s office declined to comment.

    • London: WikiLeaks founder Assange marks three years in Ecuador’s embassy, as new cables released

      Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have gathered outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, to mark the third anniversary of the 43-year-old Australian seeking refuge there.

      Assange has been in the building since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual assault against two women in 2010. He denies the accusations.

    • Ecuador to Reply to Swedish Prosecutors’ Assange Interview Request in Weeks

      Ecuador will reply in the coming weeks to the Swedish prosecutors’ request to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who today marked his third year in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the country’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, said Friday.

    • Assange™ celebrates third year in Ecuadorian embassy broom closet

      Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa said Assange hadn’t overstayed his welcome, but that the situation could easily be resolved if Assange was granted immunity. Correa was scathing about the police guard that is keeping Assange inside the London embassy’s grounds.

    • WikiLeaks: Julian Assange releases Saudi diplomatic cables to mark third year in London embassy

      WikiLeaks has published more than half a million secret documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry to mark Julian Assange’s third year of asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy on 19 June.

    • WikiLeaks marks three years since Assange’s flight to Ecuador’s UK embassy

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will on Friday mark three years stuck in Ecuador’s London embassy where he took refuge to avoid extradition to Sweden over alleged sex crimes and what he believes would be his eventual handover to U.S. authorities.

    • Leaks from Saudi ministry appear to show extent of influence over regional media

      A new cache of documents reportedly leaked from Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry appears to reveal the extent of the Gulf giant’s funding of regional media outlets. The documents also disclose information about Saudi Arabia’s external affairs and could prove embarrassing to the kingdom and its allies.

      WikiLeaks, the transparency advocacy website responsible for publishing leaked documents from various world powers, said on Friday that the 61,000-plus documents published on Friday were the first of around half a million to be released over the coming weeks.

    • WikiLeaks documents provide insight into Saudi diplomacy

      One of the most inflammatory memos carries the claim that Gulf countries were prepared to pay $10 billion to secure the freedom of Egypt’s deposed strongman, Hosni Mubarak. The memo, written on a letterhead bearing only a single palm tree and crossed scimitars above the words “top secret,” quotes an unnamed Egyptian official as saying that the Muslim Brotherhood would agree to release Mubarak in exchange for the cash “since the Egyptian people will not benefit from his imprisonment.”

    • Wikileaks: Saudi top secret memo says Iran bombed South Sudan

      Another top secret memo says Gulf countries were prepared to pay $10 billion to secure freedom of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak.

    • Bin Laden Son Asked U.S. For Father’s Death Certificate, Wikileaks Says
    • Saudi Arabia WikiLeaks: US refused Osama bin Laden’s son certificate for father’s death

      The son of the late al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden sent a letter to the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia to ask for his father’s death certificate – a request that was refused by the diplomatic mission.

    • Wikileaks: US ‘refused to give’ Osama Bin Laden’s son his death certificate

      Osama Bin Laden’s son reportedly asked the US for his death certificate and was refused, it has been reported.

      A letter addressed to Abdullah bin Laden, claiming to be from a US embassy official in Saudi Arabia, was published online by Wikileaks.

    • Bin Laden’s son asked US for father’s death certificate – WikiLeaks

      WikiLeaks has released a letter revealing how one of Osama bin Laden’s sons had asked Washington for a death certificate after US Navy SEALS said they had taken him out.

    • Wikileaks: Bin Laden’s son ‘asked for father’s death certificate’

      A son of Osama Bin Laden reportedly asked the US for a death certificate for his father, according to the whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks.

    • Julian Assange and Wikileaks on news again

      “The Saudi Cables lift the lid on an increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year, but which has also become a menace to its neighbours and itself,” WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange said in a statement.

    • Hillary’s passport info released by Wikileaks

      Saudi Arabia was one of the countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, which came under recent scrutiny amid Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.

      The documents published Friday include reports from Saudi Arabia’s interior and intelligence arms, as well as emails between the diplomatic branch and other foreign entities.

    • WikiLeaks follows up its Sony post with Saudi cables
    • WikiLeaks publishes diplomatic cables from Saudi Arabia

      More than 60,000 diplomatic messages from Saudi Arabia have been published by WikiLeaks. It said it would release half a million more in the coming weeks. The group also released additional Sony Pictures documents.

    • WikiLeaks publishes Saudi documents

      WikiLeaks is in the process of publishing more than 500,000 Saudi diplomatic documents to the internet, the transparency website says.

      In a move that echoes its famous release of US State Department cables in 2010, WikiLeaks said it had already posted about 60,000 files. Most of them appear to be in Arabic.

    • WikiLeaks is about to release a mammoth load of new secret files

      And another document from the same year, sent from the Saudi embassy in Abu Dhabi, said the United Arab Emirates was putting ‘heavy pressure’ on the Egyptian government not to try former president Hosni Mubarak.

    • WikiLeaks spills ‘Saudi secrets’

      The Saudi embassy in Washington did not immediately return repeated messages seeking comment.

    • WikiLeaks posts Saudi cables

      WikiLeaks is in the process of putting more than 500,000 Saudi diplomatic documents online, in a move that echoes its infamous release of US State Department cables in 2010.

      WikiLeaks said in a statement that it had already posted roughly 60,000 files. Most are in Arabic and they are now being examined by The Associated Press.

    • Saudi Arabia warns citizens against sharing “faked” documents after Wikileaks release

      Saudi Arabia on Saturday urged its citizens not to distribute “documents that might be faked” in an apparent response to WikiLeaks’ publication on Friday of more than 60,000 documents it says are secret Saudi diplomatic communications.

      The statement, made by the Foreign Ministry on its Twitter account, did not directly deny the documents’ authenticity.

      The released documents, which WikiLeaks said were embassy communications, emails between diplomats and reports from other state bodies, include discussions of Saudi Arabia’s position regarding regional issues and efforts to influence media.

    • Sony execs worried about stars spreading herpes

      In new leaked emails released on June 19, it seems Sony executives were worried about the spread of herpes.

    • Wikileaks: Sony Asked Stars About Herpes During Film Productions
    • Wikileaks’ new batch of Sony files reveals a survey asking stars if they’ve had oral herpes

      Following the Sony hack last winter, Wikileaks has uploaded a second batch of files containing 276,000 more documents obtained from the incident this week. Although most of the documents are related to legal and financial affairs, Radar Online uncovered a set of unusual questionnaires asking whether or not stars have had oral herpes.

    • WikiLeaks spills second huge cache of Sony docs

      Sony is yet to comment on the latest revelations, and it’s likely to take some time before details from the huge stack of digitized documents begin to make headlines.

    • WikiLeaks Drops More Sony Documents

      WikiLeaks has published a second giant cache of documents — 276,394 in all — that it claims hackers stole from the studio in one of the most devastating corporate computer breaches in history.

    • WikiLeaks Unloads Second Batch Of Sony Files Into Its Database
    • Sony hack: WikiLeaks releases new batch of 270,000 documents
    • WikiLeaks Dumps More Sony Docs, Include Secret Apple Deal
    • National security suppression order lifted after uploaded by WikiLeaks

      A SUPREME Court judge has revoked a suppression order made to protect Australia’s national security and international relations after it was published by WikiLeaks.

      But Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth today granted a temporary stay on lifting the orders until next month to give the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade time to consider whether it will appeal the decision.

    • Revealed: How DOJ Gagged Google over Surveillance of WikiLeaks Volunteer

      Newly unsealed court documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Justice Department won an order forcing Google to turn over more than one year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above), a developer for the Tor online anonymity project who has worked with WikiLeaks as a volunteer. The order also gagged Google, preventing it from notifying Appelbaum that his records had been provided to the government.

    • Should Julian Assange face “justice”?

      Anyone stupid enough to think Assange has actually committed a crime should hang his head in shame. You are a dog, a slave, a puppet, a fool. You are utterly, deplorably, insane.

      Yes, more interesting than the details of any charges accusations against Assange, is the fact that they were invented for the sole purpose of arresting a dissident. It is a story that has been heard so many times that I don’t know why everyone can’t recognize this farce immediately. Dissident criticizes government, dissident suddenly has some strange and elusive criminal charges like embezzlement or sexual assault to answer for.

      Should we, even for a brief moment, overlook our scumbag politicians – who consorted with pedophiles and tried to cover up their crimes – and instead look at the supposed moral deviations of one dissident who tried to subject them to greater scrutiny? If someone accuses a top politician of being the pedophile he is, the result will be libel charges being brought against the accuser. If some liar accuses of Assange of rape, the result is a case being brought against Assange.

      In reality, the only ones who deserve to be on trial are not Assange but his accusers and, ultimately, the regime that has fabricated this case against an innocent man. They are, each and every one of them, liars, fabricators, and vicious enemies of democracy who deserve to suffocate in their own filth and hypocrisy just for consenting to be part of this offensive spectacle.

    • Ecuador Accuses Sweden of Violating Assange’s Human Rights

      Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño says someone in Sweden must be held responsible for human rights violations.

    • WikiLeaks Decries UK Media’s Eyes Wide-Shut in Trident Safety Leaks

      In a 18-page report posted by WikiLeaks earlier this month, William McNeilly, a 25-year-old former engineer employed at the Trident facility in Scotland, described the nuclear deterrent’s safety procedures and general state as a “disaster waiting to happen.”

    • ‘Thank goodness for Wikileaks’: Greens

      Greens Co-Deputy Larissa Waters slams the secrecy surrounding the Trade In Services agreement, and says important details have only been made public because of Wikileaks.

    • Greens senator urges support for Assange

      Greens senator Scott Ludlam says Julian Assange’s work needs support, three years after the WikiLeaks founder sought asylum in a London embassy.

    • Greens condemn Coalition and Labor hostility towards Julian Assange as the WikiLeaks publisher marks three years in Ecuador’s embassy
    • WikiLeaks trolls Alan Rusbridger on last day as The Guardian editor

      Assange has been unable to leave Britain, living in the Ecuadorean embassy’s quarters in central London over fear of extradition to Sweden or the United States, where authorities are investigating his disclosures of secret information.

      Sarah Tisdall, a former Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) clerical officer, was jailed after she leaked classified British government documents to The Guardian.

      WikiLeaks also posted the link to an article written by Assange titled “How The Guardian Milked Edward Snowden’s Story”. The website did not immediately respond to Hindustan Times’ request for a comment on its tweets.

      The Guardian newspaper has appointed Katharine Viner, currently editor of Guardian US, its 12th editor-in-chief after Rusbridger.

    • WikiLeaks Releases 500K U.S. Cables from 1978 on Iran, Sandinistas, Afghanistan, Israel & More

      On Wednesday, WikiLeaks added more than half a million U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 to its Public Library of US Diplomacy database. The documents include diplomatic cables and other diplomatic communications from and to U.S. embassies and missions in nearly every country. “1978 actually set in progress many of the geopolitical elements that are playing out today,” Assange said. “1978 was the beginning of the Iranian revolution … the Sandinista movement started in its popular form … the war period in Afghanistan began in 1978 and hasn’t stopped since.”

    • Wikileaks releases 7000 new cables on Colombia

      Wikileaks released 500,000 US diplomatic cables from during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, more than 7,000 of which are related to Colombia.

      [...]

      In Colombia, the US at the time was concerned about the 1978 presidential election race, kidnapping and drug trafficking.

    • WikiLeaks founder still in limbo

      Ecuador granted him political asylum, but the United Kingdom refuses to grant him safe passage to leave the country. Instead, the U.K. wants to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions about allegations of sexual misconduct, although charges have never been filed.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • CBS Evening News Provides False Balance On Climate Science In Report On Pope’s Encyclical
    • Energy Storage Is The Real Target Of Spain’s New Tax On The Sun

      The Spanish government wants to impose new fees on consumers that use batteries to store electric power produced by their own solar panels.

      In early June, the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism released a draft of proposed legislation designed to discourage the use of solar charged batteries by people who produce their own electricity.

    • A child born today may live to see humanity’s end, unless…

      Humans will be extinct in 100 years because the planet will be uninhabitable, according to Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, one of the leaders of the effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. He blames overcrowding, denuded resources and climate change.

      Fenner’s prediction is not a sure bet, but he is correct that there is no way emissions reductions will be enough to save us from our trend toward doom. And there doesn’t seem to be any big global rush to reduce emissions, anyway. When the G7 called on Monday for all countries to reduce carbon emissions to zero in the next 85 years, the scientific reaction was unanimous: That’s far too late.

    • How Pope Francis just destroyed the GOP’s religious con artists

      Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard the initial cannon volleys from the parapets of the GOP hurled in the direction of Pope Francis. But as of yesterday, when the Pope delivered a major encyclical on the climate crisis, there was a thermonuclear freakout, from not just Fox News and AM talk radio, but nearly every Republican with internet access. Already, Greg Gutfeld from Fox News Channel’s The Five referred to the Pope as the “most dangerous man in the world.”

    • Washington State’s Oil Train Traffic Is Shrouded In Secrecy

      Derailments and explosions have occurred around North America since the oil boom began, including a 2013 catastrophe that killed 47 people in rural Quebec.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Why Carly Fiorina can’t lose

      Misleading headline alert: Carly Fiorina is not going to be the GOP presidential candidate. She’s polling at 1.8 percent in the most recent Fox News poll. That puts her in a solid 13th place. It would take every Sherpa in Nepal to guide her to the top against those odds.

      But she will win, in one sense, because she’s positioned herself perfectly for the right side of the slash. As in, Rubio/Fiorina, Walker/Fiorina or Bush/Fiorina.

    • The Parallel Universes of the Cuban Press

      In several countries in the region, there are groups that control most of the local press and attack governments when these undertake social programs. There, digital media and networks have become the only hope of countering the propaganda of the Right.

  • Censorship

    • Censorship helped create environment that allowed collusion to flourish

      THE revelations contained in RTÉ’s Collusion documentary aired on Monday – which highlighted yet more widespread and systemic collusion between British military and RUC forces with unionist death squads – will not have come as a surprise to most An Phoblacht readers or Sinn Féin activists.

    • Podcast: Are religious freedom and free speech intertwined?

      Does freedom of religion and freedom of speech come as a package or can you pick and choose? Do those suggesting freedom of expression should be “civilised” and that we should be wary of causing offence to people’s religious sensibilities have a point? Or are there too many people who are easily offended? Are our attempts to be polite actually significant obstructions to the discussion of important issues? These were just some of the questions tackled at “The new civility: are religious freedom and freedom of speech intertwined?” the 10 June event organised as part of the Leeds Big Bookend festival.

    • Why Facebook Failed Our Censorship Test

      If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.

    • U.K. Newspaper Tries To Silence Glenn Greenwald Criticism With Copyright Claim

      Accused of publishing government propaganda against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times is using copyright to hit back at its strongest critic.

    • Sunday Times fires off copyright complaint at Snowden story critics

      The Sunday Times has apparently sent a copyright complaint to critics of its article that claimed British and American overseas spies have had their covers blown by Edward Snowden.

      The London-based newspaper unquestioningly parroted the UK government’s spin at the weekend, claiming that classified files obtained by the NSA whistleblower and leaked to journalists had somehow made their way into the hands of China and Russia. The piece quoted anonymous government sources in Blighty.

    • Sunday Times levels copyright charges at Greenwald after he debunks Snowden report

      The UK newspaper Sunday Times is accusing US journalist Glenn Greenwald of copyright violations after he debunked the paper’s report on Russian and Chinese spies allegedly accessing Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks.

    • Art of diplomacy: how French schools abroad cope with censorship

      It is one of the great allegorical paintings celebrating the French revolution: Liberty Leading the People, by Eugène Delacroix, shows a barefoot, bare-breasted woman – representing Marianne, the female symbol of the republic – brandishing a tricolour in one hand and a bayonetted musket in the other, leading the people over the bodies of the fallen.

    • France Wants Google To Target French Citizens Worldwide & Censor Their Search Results

      The French data privacy regulator CNIL wants Google to somehow identify French citizens wherever they are in the world and block them from seeing material removed under the Right To Be Forgotten.

    • Australian Lawmakers Rush Through Copyright Censorship Bill That Won’t Work, And Will Do Harm

      Scarcely a week after the release of a legislative committee report on Australia’s copyright censorship bill, the bill is gathering speed on its roll through Parliament. Although reports that the law has already passed are premature—it has only passed the lower house so far, and is scheduled to be debated in the Senate on Thursday, Australian time—it is clear that the bill is being rushed through, in an effort to get it out of the way ahead of the Parliament’s mid-winter break.

      We addressed some of the serious shortcomings of the bill, which would allow courts to block overseas websites that either infringe copyright, or are merely judged to be “facilitating” infringement…

    • Censorship tourism in British Columbia?

      But the real problem, of course, lies with the courts’ attempt to control, by application of its view of the law, the content that appears on websites operated by a US corporation outside the boundaries of the court’s lawful jurisdiction. [Google actually offered to remove offending sites from searches that were viewable at Google.ca, but the plaintiffs were not satisfied with that outcome].

    • Canadian Court asks Google to block its Websites Globally

      It all began a year ago where a lower court ruled that Google needed to block access to a website globally in a troublesome lawsuit filed against them. The case involved one company charging another of selling copied equipment or counterfeit, and even though Google was not even a party to the case, was directed by the court to make sure no one could find the site in question via Google anywhere in the world.

    • Canadian Court Forces Google to Take One Step Closer to Internet Censorship

      A dangerous precedent has been set in Canada where a court rejected Google’s appeal in a case the company has been fighting for years, and now it has to remove links to particular pages from its worldwide search results.

    • This Unbelievable Nurse Sex Story Is Causing A Lot Of Trouble At Northwestern

      In response to the school’s meddling, Atrium’s editors took down all of Atrium’s online content, initiating a yea-long standoff. The controversy remained in the shadows until recently, when another censorship controversy erupted at Northwestern. Prof. Laura Kipnis faced a formal Title IX investigation over an essay she wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the sexual politics of American universities. Following this incident, Dreger threatened to go public, and Northwestern allowed all of Atrium’s content to go back online. According to Dreger, though, the school says future issues of Atrium will have to be approved by a group of administrators and public relations staff to make sure they are acceptable.

    • Northwestern Faculty Magazine Censored Over Article About Nurse Blow Job
    • Story of sex with nurse prompts censorship claims at Northwestern
    • Censoring ISIS’s online propaganda isn’t working out very well

      As Fidler indicates politely, this has created a terrible mess. There is very little transparency around government requests for censorship (by coincidence, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has just published a short piece complaining that Facebook does not provide any information on U.S. government censorship requests). In addition, different private actors, with different codes and standards, engage in private forms of censorship on their own behalf that generate confusion and inconsistency. Companies have to make complicated judgment calls. For example, I’m aware from my own conversations that YouTube initially censored footage from pro-democracy protests in Iran in 2009 showing the violence perpetrated against the protesters, on the grounds that this violated its code of conduct. After thinking through the political implications of this censorship, YouTube changed its mind — but it could (with different leadership) have opted for the opposite choice.

    • 2,000 Israeli Artists Sign Petition Accusing National Government of Censorship

      Signatories of the petition said the government’s actions in withdrawing funding from the school play A Parallel Of Time, by the al-Midan Theatre, are anti-democratic. The play tells the story of the Palestinian Walid Daka’s time in prison for torturing and murdering the Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984.

    • Israeli artists sign petition against ‘anti-democratic’ censorship

      Pledging to fight for artistic freedom, cultural figures defiantly offer their names for a government ‘blacklist’

      [...]

      It concludes with the hope that Israel will not stoop to becoming a state that blacklists artists who express their opinions. “But should that happen,” the petition defiantly states, “here is the list.”

    • Why is a festival of Israeli film fighting for censorship in London?

      Its screening had been due to take place at the Odeon Swiss Cottage. But the director, Rechy Elias, insisted that only women could attend. Elias is from the ultra-conservative Haredi sect of Judaism, which, like extreme movements in all the world’s major religions, is flourishing with a depressing vigour. As with so many other fundamentalist creeds and cults, sex is an obsessive source of interest to the Haredis. A Haredi school in Stamford Hill recently announced that, Saudi–style, it would not allow women to drive children to its gates. With similar reasoning, Ms Elias said her film was controversial because it contained scenes of women dancing. No man could see them, for lord knows what they would do if they did.

    • Wikipedia official criticizes increasing censorship against Turkish Vikipedi

      A high-ranking official from the world’s largest free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has criticized Turkey over increasing censorship that its Turkish version — Vikipedi – has been exposed to, vowing to take legal action to stop this censorship.

    • Wikipedia releases warning on Turkey’s censorship, monitoring

      Wikipedia has warned its users that Turkey “blocks” a number of its articles and is also monitoring contributors to the site.

      “Did you know that some articles on Turkish Vikipedi have been blocked to users in Turkey?” Wikipedia’s Turkish homepage warns, giving a list of censored articles.

      As of June 19, Turkey blocks a total of five Wikipedia articles: “Human penis,” “Female reproduction organs,” “Scrotum,” “Vagina” and “Opinion polling for the Turkish general election, 2015.”

    • Why Facebook Failed Our Censorship Test

      If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.

    • ‘This Week In Unnecessary Censorship’ Takes Aim At Donald Trump
    • How Facebook Is Censoring Content In The United States

      Facebook vows to be transparent, and yet the Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered that the company is hiding all the ways that it blocks access in the United States, on behalf of law enforcement.

    • If Facebook wants our trust, it needs to explain when and why it censors things

      Almost every major digital platform, including Google and Twitter, publishes a so-called “transparency report,” in which the company in question lists the number of requests it has gotten from government authorities and legal entities to take down information. Facebook does this too, except that its version isn’t nearly as forthcoming on what exactly it has been asked to remove, and by whom.

    • Reddit refugee camp Voat dropped by German webhost for ‘political incorrectness’

      It is interesting to note the reasons for the termination of the contract. There is no mention of illegal content, just content which has been deemed politically incorrect. This is clearly a very subjective matter, and Atko says that the hosting provider shut down the server “without issuing a warning or trying to talk to us”. It is something of a blow for freedom of speech if webhosts start to police the content of the sites they power not because they are breaking the law, but because they just don’t like the content.

    • Reddit-clone Voat booted by its German webhost

      The Reddit-clone Voat announced Friday that its hosting provider shut off its servers and terminated its contract.

    • Amid censorship brouhaha, Reddit clone Voat has its servers closed by hosting provider

      Switzerland-based Reddit clone Voat says its servers have been closed down and contracts terminated by its hosting provider, which comes less than two weeks after it saw a surge in signups following a clampdown in online harassment by Reddit.

    • Anti-censorship community Voat dropped by hosting service over ‘political correctness’

      European hosting service hosteurope.de recently terminated its contract with Voat, a Reddit clone that promises not to censor users. Voat managed to move its database to an unnamed cloud platform hours ahead of the shutdown to avoid service interruption.

  • Privacy

    • John McAfee: NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden is a man of soft character

      Even the most casual observer must see that the Sunday Times anonymous leak is an effort to distract attention from the utter failure of the US government, as a government, to act responsibly in the task of protecting it’s citizens and the citizens of its allies. It is an attempt to shift blame – pure and simple.

      Is Snowden a good man or a bad man? I have no clue and even less interest. Are we as citizens of this new cyber age, ever going to get a clue? That is the real question.

    • ‘No evidence’ Snowden was working for foreign power says ex-NSA boss

      When asked if Snowden was working for a foreign power, Hayden replied that, thinking inductively as intelligence operatives are supposed to do, there was “no evidence” Snowden had defected.

    • Hayden Mocks Extent of Post-Snowden Reform: “And This Is It After Two Years? Cool!”

      Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden on Monday marveled at the puny nature of the surveillance reforms put in place two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a vast expansion of intrusive U.S. government surveillance at home and abroad.

    • VIDEO: Former NSA Director Hayden Dismisses Snowden’s Impact

      At The Wall Street Journal’s CFO conference, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden disparaged the idea that the leaking of data collection documents by Edward Snowden was a two-year “nightmare” for the agency.

    • Ex-NSA chief celebrates two years of failed reform after Snowden leaks
    • Even former NSA chief thinks USA Freedom Act was a pointless change

      The former director of the National Security Agency isn’t particularly concerned about the loss of the government’s bulk metadata collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

    • Fight the snoopers’ charter

      “We kill people based on metadata” said General Michael Hayden, former director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA.

      A government commissioned report says that UK intelligence agencies should be allowed to keep their powers to gather bulk communications data on a massive scale – records of emails, phone calls and social media (metadata).

      This is in addition to eavesdropping and reading of the content of communications.

      David Anderson QC, the report’s author, has, however, argued that the power to authorise surveillance warrants should be removed from government ministers and given to a new judicial body. The government is resisting this proposal.

    • Spy court clears path to renewing NSA powers

      The secretive federal court that oversees the nation’s spies is laying the groundwork for temporarily reauthorizing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) sweeping collection of U.S. phone records.

      In an order released on Friday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said that a brief lapse in some Patriot Act provisions would not bar the court from renewing the NSA’s powers. Although the court asserted its ability to renew the controversial NSA program, it has yet to issue an order giving a green light to the spy agency.

    • Secretive Surveillance Court Skips Talking to Privacy Advocates

      The secretive court that oversees U.S. spying programs selected to not consult a panel of privacy advocates in its first decision made since the enactment earlier this month of major surveillance reform, according to an opinion declassified Friday.

    • Surveillance court moving toward renewal of NSA spying program for 6 months

      The secretive court that oversees US government spying requests has indicated that it will temporarily renew the National Security Agency’s bulk phone records collection authority despite a new reform law that ended the dragnet.

      The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) – often seen as a compliant “rubber stamp” for US government spying requests – released an order on Friday positing that lapsed spying powers vested in the Patriot Act – which expired without renewal on June 1 — would not restrict the court from reauthorizing for six months the phone metadata collection program. The FISC order, though, is not yet an official revival of the NSA’s surveillance program.

    • The Gov’t Really, Really Wants You to Visit These Websites (Op-Ed)

      In a campaign that’s received nearly as much effort and funding as presidential elections themselves, the U.S. federal government is trying to steer people toward visiting sites that give step-by-step instructions on how to encrypt digital communications.

      The passage of the USA Freedom Act, the declassified documentation about the NSA’s secret sister agency NSAC, and the passage of “net neutrality” have all been cleverly orchestrated to deliver one resounding message: “Just a friendly reminder, citizen: it’s time to protect yourself from our fascist predations.”

    • ‘Sunday Times’ story branded ‘journalism at its worst’

      An exposé claiming that the top-secret files leaked by Edward Snowden have been obtained by Russia and China has come under fire.

      The story in ‘The Sunday Times’ claimed Western intelligence agencies were “forced into rescue operations” to mitigate the damage, and one UK government source claimed that Mr Snowden had “blood on his hands”.

      But Snowden confidante Glenn Greenwald has attacked the report as “journalism at its worst”.

    • Greenwald Says the Sunday Times Report on Snowden’s Files is a Lie
    • Britain pulls out spies as Russia, China crack Snowden files – report

      Describing the report as “the very opposite of journalism” Miranda’s partner and the man who was central to the publication of the Snowden documents, Glenn Greenwald, has written a scathing review of the Sunday Times report.

    • “Reporter” who wrote ridiculous story about Snowden leaks in China admits he was just acting as a government stenographer

      Tom Harper wrote the ridiculous cover story in the Sunday Times in which anonymous government sources claimed that the Russians and Chinese had somehow gained the power to decrypt copies of the files Edward Snowden took from the NSA, depite the fact that these files were never in Russia and despite the fact that the UK government claims that when criminals use crypto on their communications, the state is powerless to decrypt them.

    • Sunday Times reporter tells CNN everything you need to know about Snowden story

      There has been a fair amount of criticism of last weekend’s Sunday Times story claiming that sensitive NSA files taken by Edward Snowden have ended up in the hands of the Russian and Chinese governments – and that British intelligence staff have been put at risk as a result.

    • CNN interview with author of discredited Sunday Times story on Snowden is painful to watch

      If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to watch this video. It’s CNN’s George Howell interviewing Sunday Times buffoon Tom Harper about his now-discredited report that said the governments of Russia and China have decrypted files leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • Op-Ed: The govt. made me do it: Reporter defends anti-Snowden story
    • ‘We Just Publish What We Believe to Be the Position of the British Government’

      Harper made that statement during a CNN interview during which he was pressed on why British authorities believe that their Chinese and Russian counterparts have accessed the files. It was an ugly defense for what was always going to be a thinly-sourced story. Since the Snowden story first broke two years ago, press reporting about his revelations have been riddled with claims by various officials — both named and not — claiming that the leak had undermined vital intelligence powers and cost lives. These reports share a common characteristic: a lack of hard evidence.

    • This interview encapsulates why everyone is outraged about the controversial Sunday Times’ Snowden story

      In case you missed it, a front page story in the UK-based Sunday Times magazine generated a furor this weekend. It covered the purported repercussions of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks for western intelligence agencies. The report—which relied heavily on unnamed “senior officials” and “senior government sources”—parroted a number of unsubstantiated claims, according to its critics, hammering home a single point of view: that of the British government.

    • “Sunday Times” Reporter On Source For His Snowden Story: “We Just Publish What We Believe To Be The Position Of The British Government”

      CNN’s George Howell speaks with Sunday Times correspondent Tom Harper about reports that Russia and China have decrypted files stolen by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Harper explains the process of how he and his paper source news stories based on what the British government tells them, without independently checking facts; they even submitted the final draft of the story to the Home Office for approval.

    • Snowden files ‘read by Russia and China’: five questions for UK government

      The story is based on sources including “senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services”. The BBC said it had also also been briefed anonymously by a senior government official.

      Anonymous sources are an unavoidable part of reporting, but neither Downing Street nor the Home Office should be allowed to hide behind anonymity in this case.

    • Bruce Schneier: Russia hacked NSA for Snowden docs

      China and Russia have copies of Edward Snowden’s leaked documents by hacking the NSA itself before the whistleblower even arrived in Russia, according to security expert Bruce Schneier.

      He believes lax security controls at the US spy agency, rather than Snowden residing in Russia, being responsible for allowing foreign countries to get their hands on top secret documents.

    • Bruce Schneier: China and Russia had top secret files long before Snowden stole them
    • Russia and China have cracked encrypted Snowden files, report says
    • Bruce Schneier: China and Russia do have Snowden docs

      Bruce Schneier has claimed that China and Russia have laid hands on the intelligence documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in a further twist to a controversial story run by the Sunday Times last weekend.

    • Russians and Chinese Got Snowden Documents the Old-Fashioned Way

      British surveillance functionaries placed a story over the weekend in the Sunday Times (London) claiming that the Russians and Chinese had gotten hold of the documents that Edward Snowden sneaked out of the NSA computers and had broken their encryption. As my colleague Scott Shackford points out the Sunday Times offered nothing more than the assertions of unnamed British spy agency sources as evidence. He noted that one of the Sunday Times’ reporters actually admitted on CNN: “We just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government at the moment.”

    • China and Russia had Snowden docs before he took them – Schneier

      The Edward Snowden documents were in China and Russia’s possession before he even took them and went on the run, believes renowned security specialist Bruce Schneier.

      Writing in Wired, the cryptographer, entrepreneur and former chief technology officer of BT Counterpane, part of telecoms giant BT, added that the documents were already “certainly” in the possession of China and Russia – but not due to Snowden, who has become a convenient scapegoat for security services’ failings.

    • Journalist who met Snowden in Hong Kong rebuts claim that files were breached

      A journalist who published the first reports from Edward Snowden’s leaked documents offered a detailed rebuttal Monday to allegations that Russian and Chinese spies accessed the former intelligence contractor’s files.

      Glenn Greenwald, writing on the online news website The Intercept, said the reports by the Sunday Times and BBC were based on the false premise that Snowden kept possession of the files he took from the US National Security Agency.

    • Snowden’s lawyer slams Times story claiming leaks ‘betrayed’ British spies

      Robert Tibbo could not be more straightforward. “There was no possibility of interception. Zero,” says the Canadian lawyer from Montreal who has represented Edward Snowden in Hong Kong since June of 2013. That was when the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor leaked classified documents on America’s mass surveillance programs to members of the press. Mr. Tibbo’s client came under pressure after British sources revealed last weekend that spies were pulled out of operations because China and Russia have cracked Mr. Snowden’s files.

      “He left this place [Hong Kong] with no data on him”, Mr. Tibbo claimed in a telephone interview from Hong Kong on Monday. He was one of the only two people, along with solicitor Jonathan Man, who had any knowledge of Mr. Snowden’s whereabouts in the city at the time. In an interview Mr. Tibbo was with Mr. Snowden when the whistleblower left Hong Kong for Russia.

    • Glenn Greenwald denies reports Russia, China accessed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s files

      The American journalist said the Sunday Times had “quietly deleted” from its online report the claim that Mr Miranda had met with Snowden in Moscow before being detained.

      Greenwald also said the Sunday Times “mindlessly” repeated a claim that Snowden downloaded 1.7 million documents, when there was no evidence to support the number.

    • Norway denies Snowden entry for freedom prize

      Norway’s government has refused to allow the NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden to cross over the border from Russia to to collect a freedom of speech prize, warning that he may be at risk of arrest.

    • Surveillance Reform: The Congressional-Intelligence Complex Strikes Back

      House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) clearly hates being on the end of a losing vote. He is now working overtime to reverse his most recent policy and legislative loss.

      [...]

      Clapper also claimed that the ban on mandating that American tech companies build in encryption “back doors” to their products would prevent the FBI and the Intelligence Community from working with tech companies “even with their consent”. Also false. The amendment simply prohibits the government from forcing companies to make defective products. Nowhere does the amendment prohibit voluntary cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies.

    • Why Mass Surveillance Violates International Law

      Around the world repressive governments are trying to stop Internet users from either posting anonymously or using encryption to communicate securely. Russia requires bloggers with more than 3,000 visitors to register with the state and identify themselves; pseudonyms are outlawed in Vietnam; Ecuador requires commenters on websites to use their real name; Pakistan’s government must grant approval for the use of encryption; and Ethiopia convicted members of the dissident blogging collective Zone 9 on terrorism charges based in part on participation in an online encryption workshop.

    • Germany Warns Of Cyber-Attack Threat

      Cyber-threats ‘one of the biggest challenges’ in the coming years, according to Germany’s defence minister, as Bundestag reportedly hacked

    • ​Germany BND chief to restructure agency following NSA spying scandal – report

      The head of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service is reportedly aiming to bring more oversight to the agency and hire external advisers, in an effort to prevent a repeat of the NSA spying scandal that engulfed it this year.

    • German intelligence ‘to be reorganised in response to spy scandal’

      German intelligence is reportedly facing a major overhaul in response to a damaging scandal after it emerged it had spied on European partners at the request of the US.

      Gerhard Schindler, the head of the BND intelligence service, wants to bring all 6,500 of its field officers back under central control, according to Süddeustche Zeitung newspaper.

    • Spy chief seeks to bring field officers to heel

      The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has decided to reorganize the agency to stop a repeat of the US National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal that has engulfed it this year.

    • Germany’s Spy Agency Monitored Own Branch Tied to US

      Germany’s foreign intelligence agency BND spied on its own branch, gathering information at the US request, the German Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported Sunday.

    • German Investigation Into NSA Surveillance Of Angela Merkel Dropped

      Moreover, as Techdirt noted back in 2013, the refusal by the US authorities to address these and other allegations of surveillance is contributing to the German public’s jaundiced view of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, which are increasingly in trouble. That skepticism is reflected by the fact that among the 2 million signatures gathered so far by the pan-European Stop TTIP online petition, fully one half come from Germany. The decision to drop the investigation into claims that the NSA listened in on Merkel’s phone calls is unlikely to make things better.

    • Probe Against Alleged NSA Wiretapping of Merkel’s Phone Calls Dropped
    • Merkel’s office suggests special investigator see U.S. spy list
    • German BND Reform Should Reduce Agency’s Dependence on NSA – Lawmaker

      German member of the European Parliament Udo Voigt claims that the reform of the German intelligence service BND should make the body less dependent from NSA.

    • German parliament’s NSA probe enters ‘neutral’ stage

      German Chancellor Angela Merkel has proposed that a third-party investigator be appointed to inspect a list of targets that German intelligence tracked on behalf of the US National Security Agency.

    • Congress seeks to block U.S. intel from German NSA probe

      President Obama wants to share U.S. secrets with a German parliamentary committee investigating the National Security Agency’s spying in Germany. The move is in direct opposition to Congressional restrictions, which were added to the fiscal 2016 intelligence authorization bill that would block intelligence sharing.

      In a notice sent to Congress Tuesday, the Office of Management and Budget outlined a series of objections to the current House intelligence bill, including a section of the bill that would prevent sharing classified U.S. intelligence in response to requests by foreign governments.

    • Congressional Intel Sharing Ban Would Prevent German NSA Probe

      A new notice from the Office of Management and Budget is objecting strongly to language in the newest intelligence funding bill which would ban any intelligence sharing with foreign countries, saying the language imperils foreign relations on several fronts.

    • Senate rejects US ruling on metadata, Snowden investigation

      The federal government has refused to recognise a decision by a US appeals court which ruled that mass collection of telecommunications metadata.

      Parliament today rejected a motion by Greens communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam that the senate take note the ruling and recognise that “Australians and the global community have legitimate and ongoing concerns about the erosion of privacy caused by the unchecked growth of government electronic surveillance programs”.

    • Oregon Bill to Take on Warrantless Collection of Cellphone Data Passes State House

      A bipartisan Oregon bill that would prohibit law enforcement from obtaining information from electronic devices without a warrant in most cases overwhelmingly passed the state House last week. The proposed bill would not only protect privacy in Oregon, but would also address a practical effect of NSA spying.

      Sen. Chip Shields (D-Portland), Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland), Sen. Tim Knopp (R – Bend) and Rep. John Huffman (R-The Dalles) introduced Senate Bill 641 (SB641) in February. The bill prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from using forensic imaging to obtain information contained in a portable electronic device except with a warrant, or by consent. “Forensic imaging” means “using an electronic device to download or transfer raw data from a portable electronic device onto another medium of digital storage,” but does not include photographing or transcribing information “observable from the portable electronic device by normal unaided human senses.”

    • U.S. losing battle for top tech talent in wake of Snowden revelations

      The government agencies that defend America are in the midst of a charm offensive — trying to win the hearts and minds of Silicon Valley’s tech workers.

      The move is evoking considerable skepticism from the U.S. tech community.

      In recent months, the U.S. Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security have announced the opening of Silicon Valley offices as part of an effort to mend fences.

    • Where’s Cromwell? Edward Snowden has been neutralized

      While ensconced in safety and security in Russia, the likelihood of Snowden being the spark that lights the fuse for real change in governments’ accountability around the globe dims with each passing day. Still, Snowden’s role in exposing the villainous plot in charge of Washington was a pivotal decision; on his part, a real personal sacrifice; but for the rest of the West, a good starting point.

    • Editorial: Freedom Act should make you shake your head

      The USA Freedom Act is literally as much an oxymoron as its parallel predecessor — the Patriot Act.

    • Will the “Freedom Act” Bring Real Freedom to Americans?

      To sum it up, be it a real move or a temporary fix to keep up appearances, the fact is that monitoring and tracking activities by US intelligence services are continuing at full speed. Furthermore, these laws pertain only to the intelligence activities regarding US citizens and do not include any articles on restricting intelligence activities regarding non-US citizens or US citizens abroad.

    • Privacy fight far from finished

      The cost to the tech industry as a result of NSA spying is estimated to reach $200 billion by 2016…

    • The USA Freedom Act: what it changes and (mostly) doesn’t for cloud services–and is it really the issue

      The recent showdown over renewal of certain provisions of the USA Patriot Act (often called simply the Patriot Act) and the subsequent enactment of the USA Freedom Act have raised a number of questions about the ongoing impact of these laws on data traversing or being stored in the United States. While the new law takes the NSA out of the direct business of maintaining metadata (which includes phone number called, the time and duration of the call, and location information) on all phone calls originating or terminating in the US (with a declared intent of transitioning instead to a program that will allow court-moderated access to phone company data) and reinstates provisions that enable so-called “roving wiretaps” and monitoring of “lone wolves,” it essentially leaves unchanged the underlying laws that govern the US authorities access to data stored in the cloud.

    • Spy law looks the same

      Libertarians and constitutionalists feel betrayed by the long hated extreme surveillance measures implemented in the misnamed Patriot Act (should be named Surveillance of Americans Act) of October 2001, six weeks after 9/11. Authors of the bill knew at the time such measures meant an unprecedented expansion of government and loss of privacy for most Americans — hence the five year renewal provisions of the more Draculan parts. Both recent presidents have requested its continuance in 2005 and again in 2010.

      Sen.Rand Paul’s heroic June 1 Senate filibuster helped prevent the Senate from extending the Patriot Act, as wanted by most Republicans, and as had happened twice before. Thank God, Paul and the Democrats for its defeat. The five-year renewal of the Patriot Act did not have the votes. Instead, we got virtually the same thing in the so-called USA Freedom Act, again misnamed. How can freedom be enhanced by the government’s enhanced surveillance of its own citizens? Thanks to President Barack Obama and the Republicans, government’s unwarranted and indefinite storage of private records and communications continues.

    • Will GOP stop NSA? Well, that depends

      A former U.S. Justice Department attorney predicts some Republicans seeking the White House would continue the controversial collection of Americans’ information.

    • NSA Celebrates Passage of USA ‘Freedom’ Act, While Skype Keeps Its Spying Eyes on You

      Both privacy advocates and the NSA are celebrating the USA Freedom Act that passed the Senate on June 2. The act legalized and simplified the collecting of phone metadata for the NSA. Meanwhile Skype continues to collect voice, chat, video and other data, and deliver it to the Five Eyes international spy coalition.

      The passage of the USA Freedom Act — penned by General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA — was followed by general celebration over what is considered a small victory for privacy advocates, and the biggest surveillance reform since the 1970s.

    • NSA Surveillance: Things to know about newly approved USA Freedom Act
    • French Surveillance Bill: a Major Defeat for Liberties

      The Commission Mixte Paritaire — a joint parliamentary committee responsible for reaching a compromise between the lower and upper house — met on 16th June to reach an agreement on the final version on the Surveillance Bill, between the version approved by the National Assembly on 5th May, and the one approved by the Senate on 9th June. However, a last minute change modified deeply the spirit of the Bill and its application on French territory. La Quadrature du Net regrets this umpteenth anti-democratic procedure and renews its call to French representatives to reject this text during the final vote on the 23rd and 24th June.

    • Assange: Google’s dominant position should be broken up

      Assange: In some ways the higher echelons of Google always seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. When my colleague told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his entourage had gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.

    • Julian Assange: ‘Western Civilization Has Produced a God, the God of Mass Surveillance’

      Now finally, Western civilization has produced a god, the god of mass surveillance. How is it like a god? It’s a little bit Abrahamic. If you look at most definitions, a god is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. In particular, god knows when you are doing something that you shouldn’t be doing and whether you are playing according to god’s rules. The conception of national security agencies and mass surveillance is that the overwhelming majority of communications are surveilled upon. Even conversations happening in person may be recorded through an Android phone, or through other electronic gadgets that are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Maybe your friend, although you just talked to them in person, can gossip over electronic media about what you said.

    • Obama Asks for 6 more Months of NSA Bulk Surveillance Collection

      It’s the oldest trick in the book—when Dad tells you no, ask Mom if you can do it. Now President Barack Obama is playing that game with the surveillance of Americans’ phone records.

      The Obama administration, on the same day the USA Freedom Act became law on June 2, went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) with a request (pdf) to continue sweeping up phone records during a six-month “transition” period before the Freedom Act provisions take effect.

      The USA Freedom Act specifies that call records be maintained by the phone companies, and the government may access them only with a warrant from the FISA court. That’s evidently not good enough for the Obama administration.

    • Under the radar, secret NSA database open for business

      NSA isn’t commenting on its plans for retaining these phone call records.

      But with nothing forcing the Corporate Store to close for business, ACLU attorney Patrick Toomey said, “This NSA database may grow even more quickly than ever before.”

    • New Snowden documents show NSA has expanded U.S. web spying

      Most of the Snowden disclosures have shed light on the NSA’s basic mission of gathering foreign “signals intelligence”, but the way the agency does its job in the Internet age by necessity involves exploiting weaknesses in the same technology the rest of United States use. He also cited laws in Europe and in South America protecting citizens from mass surveillance. Until now, this program was never disclosed to the public. What gives this protocol another layer of security is the fact that Apple has no access to all the encryption keys which means that the company can’t produce any data stored on their own devices even if issued by a warrant from a government agency. In the wake of 9/11, the government dismantled this protection, arguing that it would impede the investigation of terrorists.

    • As Senate rejects cyber bill, privacy trumps security concerns

      Taken together, those measures could amount to a new backdoor for government surveillance, according to some experts. The revelation earlier this month that the NSA monitors Americans’ Internet traffic in its hunt for foreign cybersecurity threats has only heightened those fears, according to Jennifer Granick of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society.

    • Shami Chakrabarti: Let me be clear – Edward Snowden is a hero

      The hyperbole that followed yesterday’s story was astonishing – Professor Anthony Glees reportedly branded Snowden “a villain of the first order” – Darth Vader eat your heart out.

      So let me be completely clear: Edward Snowden is a hero. Saying so does not make me an apologist for terror – it makes me a firm believer in democracy and the rule of law. Whether you are with or against Liberty in the debate about proportionate surveillance, Anderson must be right to say that the people and our representatives should know about capabilities and practices built and conducted in our name.

      For years, UK and US governments broke the law. For years, they hid the sheer scale of their spying practices not just from the British public, but from parliament. Without Snowden – and the legal challenges by Liberty and other campaigners that followed – we wouldn’t have a clue what they were up to.

    • Encrypted email service with MIT ties opens to general public

      Protonmail, the easy-to-use encrypted mail service that launched in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA spying and was built in part by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, opened to the general public Sunday evening.

      The founders of the Switzerland-based service announced the news on its website and released a link for easy sign-up. They also said Protonmail now has 500,000 users. Financial contributors have been able to get accounts for about a year.

    • [Reposted] NSA whistleblower speaks in Eden Prairie
    • Anonymous Carries Out Massive Cyber-Attack In Retaliation Of NSA Style Canadian Bill C-51

      The hacker collective Anonymous is taking credit for a massive cyber-attack on the federal government that made multiple government websites go dark this afternoon — apparently in protest against the Harper government’s controversial security legislation, C-51.

  • Civil Rights

    • German police arrest Al Jazeera journalist in Berlin: lawyer
    • Nicola Corbyn and The Myth of the Unelectable Left

      There was only any public enthusiasm for Blair in 97 – and to put that in perspective, it was less than the public enthusiasm for John Major in 1992.

    • The Invasion Of Privacy

      Radack was not part of the original criminal defense team that represented Drake during 2010 and 2011, and she has said that she found out about the alleged destruction of records relating to Drake’s case via the OSC. The information she has comes from secret complaints that were filed by officials from the Pentagon inspector general’s office, some of whom still work there. It is not known who they are as they formally requested the OSC respect their anonymity for fear of retaliation.

      It is understood that the Justice Department claimed prior to Drake’s impending 2011 trial that some documents had been destroyed, but that this has been done according to “a standard document destruction policy.” Radack maintains that there is no such policy, and that rather the inspector general’s office has a Records Management Program that demands documents are kept on file.

      Drake has been quoted as saying these allegations are his last chance to hold the NSA accountable for “illegal retaliation” against whistleblowers.

    • Possible Pentagon destruction of evidence in NSA leak case probed

      Two government watchdog agencies are investigating whether the Pentagon inspector general destroyed evidence improperly during the high-profile leak investigation of former National Security Agency senior official Thomas Drake.

      The Justice Department acknowledged the probes in a letter last week to a federal magistrate judge who recently received the allegations from Drake’s lawyers. The judge is determining whether she should take further action in a case that ended in 2011 when Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge.

    • Destroyed Documents In NSA Surveillance Case Under Investigation

      Government watchdog agencies are looking into whether officials at the Pentagon improperly destroyed evidence documenting whistleblower cases, McClatchy reported Monday. The documents in question involve the 2011 prosecution of Thomas Drake, who was charged under the espionage act with leaking documents about National Security Agency surveillance to the media.

      The investigation centers on whether Pentagon officials were right to destroy documents related to Drake’s case in 2011. At the time, officials said they were destroyed “pursuant to a standard document destruction policy.” Most federal agencies are required to keep schedules that detail which documents should be retained and which can be destroyed.

    • Has the U.S. Learned Anything From Edward Snowden’s NSA Revelations?

      For instance, a draft Inspector General report found that CIA Director Leon Panetta disclosed such information about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Similarly, former CIA director David Petraeus provided classified information to his biographer. Panetta was never charged, and Petraeus was let off with a misdemeanor.

    • America hates its whistle-blowers: The tortured legacy of Edward Snowden

      Snowden, meanwhile, sits in exile — a fugitive for exposing his own government’s unprecedented system of surveillance. While Snowden’s critics say he should come back to the United States to air out his grievances in open court, journalist Glenn Greenwald notes: “He’s barred under the Espionage Act even from arguing that his leaks were justified; he wouldn’t be permitted to utter a word about that.”

    • Bureau of Prisons Puts CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling in Prison Around 900 Miles from Wife & Family

      CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling was notified at the end of last week that he will serve his prison sentence of three and a half years at Federal Correctional Institution Englewood, a medium-security facility in Littleton, Colorado, that is around 900 miles away from where his wife and family live in St. Louis. That is at least a 12-hour drive.

    • Potential Impact, Reprisal Called Foremost to Whistleblowers

      In addition, agencies “are motivated to continue retaliation indefinitely because it creates a chilling effect that silences others,” testimony said.

    • Why Are Persons Unknown More Likely to Be Called ‘Terrorist’ Than a Known White Supremacist?

      In the wake of mass violence, a nation struggling to understand turns to its news outlets to see how they frame events. The language journalists use in the immediate aftermath of a bloodbath helps form public attitudes and has a major impact on official reactions.

      When two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, killing three and injuring hundreds, it was inevitably a huge story: A search of the Nexis news database for US newspapers on the next day turns up 2,593 stories mentioning the marathon, virtually all of them about the bombing. Of these, 887, or 34 percent, used the word “terrorism” or a variant (“terrorist,” “terroristic” etc.)–even though the bombers, let alone the bombers’ motivations, would not be known until days later.

    • Despite Soaring Popularity, Women’s Sports Got More Coverage a Generation Ago

      If someone told you that there is less coverage of women’s sports on televised news programs today than there was in 1989, would you believe them? It would be reasonable if your response was “no.”

      Certainly, girls and women’s participation in sport has dramatically increased over the past 25+ years, and there are a number of professional women’s leagues today that did not exist in 1989. There’s also been a tremendous growing interest in and fan base for women’s sports over the last quarter century.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Music industry wins against UK government over private copying of music

        The UK’s music industry has successfully landed a significant judgement from the UK’s High Court, countering a copyright exception that was brought in by the UK government last year. Since last October, there was a law that allowed you to make private copies of your own music; now the future of that law is uncertain.

        The exception finally legalised what everyone has been doing for decades: making copies for personal, private use of copyright works they had bought, including format-shifted versions. Despite the marginal nature of the exception—it did not extend to making copies for family and friends, for example—the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, the Musicians’ Union, and UK Music successfully applied to the High Court for a judicial review of the change to UK law.

      • UK’s Legalization of CD Ripping is Unlawful, Court Rules

        Several music industry organizations in the UK have won a judicial review which renders the Government’s decision to allow copying for personal use unlawful. According to the High Court, there’s insufficient evidence to prove that the legislation doesn’t hurt musicians and the industry at large.

      • Lack of fair compensation requirement in UK private copying exception not supported by sufficient evidence, High Court rules

        What may happen now is that a reference to the CJEU is made, seeking further clarification about questions yet to be determined.

06.19.15

Links 19/6/2015: ‘Rebasing Ubuntu on Android’ Suggestion, Red Hat Profit Rises 28%

Posted in News Roundup at 5:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Go beyond Bootstrap with PatternFly

    Design and user experience (UX) can often be an afterthought for open source projects. But that’s changing. PatternFly is a project helping to bridge the gap between developers and designers.

    PatternFly is an open source project that promotes design commonality and improved user experience. It’s a place where open source developers and designers can collaborate, create, and share user interface (UI) components and widgets. PatternFly is based on Bootstrap, a mobile-first front-end framework for creating web sites and applications.

  • Advancements in Open Source Assistive Technologies

    Open source software (OSS) positively impacts many large industries from healthcare to education—these effects are now being felt at the individual level as well. The speed of delivery and cost efficiency of OSS enables developers to provide multi-use, flexible and readily available software as opposed to proprietary options. OSS allows software developers to create assistive technologies using open source interfaces that directly improve the day-to-day lives of members of the special needs community or individuals who have physical disabilities.

  • The UX of open source content management

    I have to solve this issue for the user. We make a point to distinguish PencilBlue from the competition through our user experience, even if we have no control over who uses our product.

    Ultimately, that’s what makes UX in open source content management such a daunting task. The limitless, unpredictable variance in use cases, combined with an ever-increasing demand for multi-language, “easy to understand” interfaces is difficult to keep up with.

  • AT&T to Open Source Network Hardware, NFV Software
  • AT&T open sourcing gigabit network components
  • AT&T talks ‘disaggregation,’ going open source

    AT&T (NYSE: T) says the future of its network is all about software, and it’s blazing a trail to virtualize 75 percent of its network by 2020. This week, John Donovan, senior EVP for technology and operations at AT&T, said the operator’s engineers have figured out how to turn complex appliances into software running on commodity servers and other hardware.

  • Jenkins All-In With Docker Containers to Enhance DevOps Workflow

    CloudBees is leading the Docker integration effort with plug-ins that enable the use of containers as part of a Jenkins continuous integration workflow.

  • Project mirroring policies will be revisited with our Community Panel, existing mirrors removed

    Recent community concerns have triggered an extensive internal review of our mirroring program and how mirrored content is used on SourceForge. In light of this review, third-party bundling of mirrored content was discontinued May 27th. As of June 18th, we have taken a further step in removing SourceForge-maintained mirrored projects, and are engaging our newly-formed Community Panel to discuss site features and program policies including a redesigned mirror program.

  • New open-source platform for building corporate PBX networks

    A new open-source, Web-based platform for building corporate PBX (private branch exchange) telephone networks has been released by Duxbury Networking.

  • Major Contributor To Open Source Technologies, Julian Shapiro, Pulls Back the Curtains on SAAS Usage

    Julian Shapiro is a leading web developer and a major contributor to open source technologies. He is the creator of Velocity.js, the most popular open source Web animation engine that powers the user interface animations for WhatsApp, Tumblr, Yahoo!, HTC, and thousands of other companies.

  • Linux, the most popular open source project of all time and widely used in just about every data center there is, got its start in 1991 when creator Linus Torvalds decided to write an operating system just for fun.

    Linux, the most popular open source project of all time and widely used in just about every data center there is, got its start in 1991 when creator Linus Torvalds decided to write an operating system just for fun.

  • Google

    • Watch This Open Source AI Learn to Dominate Super Mario World in Just 24 Hours

      Recently, Google’s DeepMind—an artificial intelligence firm acquired for over $400 million in 2013—has been widely featured for demonstrations of an algorithm that teaches itself to play video games. In a paper, the DeepMind team said the software had learned to play Atari Breakout, and some 48 other games, as well as any human gamer.

    • GSOC: new unified KCM for mouse and touchpad

      This year I’m participating in Google Summer of Code with a project called “Pointing Devices KCM”. It is about creating new unified KCM for both mouses and touchpads (and maybe some other devices like ThinkPad’s pointing stick later).

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • WebAssembly

        I’m happy to report that we at Mozilla have started working with Chromium, Edge and WebKit engineers on creating a new standard, WebAssembly, that defines a portable, size- and load-time-efficient format and execution model specifically designed to serve as a compilation target for the Web.

      • WebAssembly LLVM Backend Being Discussed

        A WebAssembly back-end has been proposed for LLVM. WebAssembly is a new virtual ISA designed to run compiled code within web browsers.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • ClusterHQ Ships Flocker 1.0, Strikes Partnership with EMC

      Container technology remains very big news, and if you bring up the topic almost everyone immediately thinks of Docker. But there are tools arriving that can compete with Docker, and tools that can extend it and make it more flexible. We’ve covered Rocket, which comes from the CoreOS team, and is a command line tool for running app containers. And then there is ClusterHQ which has an open source project called Flocker that allows developers to run their databases inside Docker containers and make them highly portable.

    • ClusterHQ picks EMC as friend with benefits for Flocker release

      ClusterHQ has inked an agreement that will see its Flocker container management code integrate with EMC’s flashy fare.

    • Breqwatr Offers Cloud Appliance Based on OpenStack

      Throughout the history of networking, appliances that bundle key components of the network stack have helped make network configuration and deployment easier. Now, a company called Breqwatr, which focuses on making private clouds more accessible to the enterprise, has announced that it is pursuing the appliance path with OpenStack.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • Healthcare

    • Healthcare trade group to validate open source solutions

      The Dutch Association of Research Quality Assurance, a trade group representing about 600 health care institutions and suppliers, is to assist in validating open source software solutions for use in health care. Approved solutions will be given so-called vendor compliance statements, asserting compliance with European and global health care ICT standards.

  • Business

    • Open source, third party codes on the rise

      Many programmers are not writing their own original source code anymore because of market pressure to produce software quickly and cheaply.

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Secrets of the vault: Backblaze open-sources key sections of its data preservation software

        Of all the various backup companies on the market, few have documented their work and research as thoroughly as Backblaze. The company has previously made headlines for open-sourcing both the underlying hardware design that it uses for its Storage Pods and its hard drive reliability data (the latter early this year). Now, Backblaze is opening up another facet of its operation — the implementation of its Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes.

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • signify shortcomings

      Secret key files contain a 64-bit hash (truncated SHA512) of the secret key data which is used to verify the user’s password. You wouldn’t want to enter the wrong password and accidentally sign something with a bogus key. Unfortunately, this creates something of an oracle. If you steal somebody’s secret key, instead of guessing passwords which will be terribly slow because of the KDF, you can just guess keys and compute hashes until you get a match. The good news is that the key space is fairly large; you won’t have much luck guessing one. Harmless as this may be, it’s bothered me quite a bit because it’s plainly wrong. (The rationale for this decision was that encrypting the hash as well would require another iteration of the KDF.)

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Tux Paint’s Birthday, RMS Keynotes SeaGL & More…
    • Who will build the Government-as-a-Service platform?

      There is much to be said about open government. While there are many different open government movements, I’ve not yet seen a “platform” that is available for local governments to use. There is a company called OpenGov which does address local government financial transparency, and that is a start, but falls woefully short if you want a fully transparent local government.

    • Open Hardware

      • Razer and Valve Boost Open Source Virtual Reality at E3

        At this week’s E3 show in Los Angeles, virtual reality took another step toward becoming the real deal as companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Facebook’s Oculus showed off VR headsets. More significantly for the never-say-die Linux gaming community, as well as others looking for an open VR platform for immersive applications, up-and-comer Razer announced upgrades for its own Linux-compatible, fully open source VR Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) headset. In addition, Valve had updates on its SteamVR platform, and HTC showed off its SteamVR-based Vive headset, which can similarly be controlled from a Linux desktop.

      • Open Source Wireless LED Strip Controller (video)

        Michiel Brink based in Almelo, Netherlands has created a new wireless LED strip controller called EspLight, that is capable of using both analog and digital strips.

        The wireless LED strip control board is perfect for makers, developers or hobbyists that would like to control their projects via smartphones or computers.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Heinz forced to apologise after QR code on ketchup bottle linked to hardcore porn site

    When a German man scanned the QR code on a bottle of ketchup, he expected to land on a page about designing his own label. Instead, he was taken to a hardcore porn website.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Scapegoating Labor for Fast Track’s Defeat

      Corporate media have a storyline ready to explain the defeat (for the time being, anyway) of the Trans Pacific Partnership : Big Labor is to blame.

    • David Brooks Declares War on ‘Democratic Tea Party’–Unarmed With Facts

      The Washington chattering class is really upset that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) looks like it’s going down. David Brooks pulled out all the stops, using his New York Times column (6/16/15) to yell at “Tea Party” Democrats for not supporting the fast-track authority that would facilitate passage of the TPP.

    • How TTIP, TPP, TISA, CETA and other trade deals should be negotiated

      A lot has been written on what is bad about TTIP, CETA, TISA, TPP, etc. Some people accuse us about being opposed to any trade deal at all. To repute this let us imagine for a moment on how such trade deal would ideally look like and how they should have been negotiated.

    • Charter Program Expansion Looms Despite Probes into Mismanagement and Closed Schools

      As Congress stands poised to increase funding for the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year federal Charter Schools Program by a whopping 48 percent, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has uncovered that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General has major nationwide probes underway into closed charter schools and suspected waste and financial mismanagement within the program.

    • Robert Reich: Elites are waging war on public education

      It’s no secret that former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich has some misgivings about the direction of the American economy. But the prolific writer, radio commentator and longtime University of California, Berkeley professor isn’t thrilled about how we are educating our kids, either.

      As part of a new project with the activist group MoveOn.org, Reich recently released a video that described our education system as “squashing passion for learning, eroding the love of teaching and grinding up generations of young people.” The critique is accompanied by a set of proposals to reinvent American education – one of 10 planks in a broader agenda titled “10 Ideas to Save the Economy.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Apotheosis of Murdochian Corporatism – Martin Ivens

      When called out on the lie that David Miranda had been arrested at Heathrow after visiting Snowden in Moscow – a lie crucial to the fabric of deceit they had twisted into a story to justify the “snoopers’ charter” – Ivens did not apologise or explain, he merely had the lie excised from the online edition with no explanation. The print edition was already out, and despite the fact that the online “story” which had already been full of holes, now made no sense at all, they continued with it.

  • Privacy

    • Encryption “would not have helped” at OPM, says DHS official

      During testimony today in a grueling two-hour hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Katherine Archuleta claimed that she had recognized huge problems with the agency’s computer security when she assumed her post 18 months ago. But when pressed on why systems had not been protected with encryption prior to the recent discovery of an intrusion that gave attackers access to sensitive data on millions of government employees and government contractors, she said, “It is not feasible to implement on networks that are too old.” She added that the agency is now working to encrypt data within its networks.

    • Promote Strong Encryption and Anonymity in the Digital Age

      The undersigned civil society organizations (including La Quadrature du Net) and independent experts work to promote human rights and press freedom online. We welcome the report of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression on the use of encryption and anonymity in digital communication (A/HRC/29/32), which was presented at the UN Human Rights Council on June 17.

    • Belgium sues Facebook over illegal Privacy Violations of Users and Non-Users

      The Belgian government will be suing Facebook. The Commission for the Protection of Privacy states that Facebook violates Belgian and EU law by tracking systems that target both Facebook users as well as non-Facebook users. Facebook is known for cooperating with the U.S.’ National Security Agency.

      [...]

      Facebook failed to comply, and the Commission has no power to enforce the law; hence the decision to sue Facebook to attain a a court ruling.

    • Merkel NSA phone tapping

      My interview today for RT about the German prosecutor’s decision to stop the investigation of the NSA tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, and much more…

    • Let’s Encrypt Launch Schedule

      We will issue the first end entity certificates under our root under tightly controlled circumstances. No cross-signature will be in place yet, so the certificates will not validate unless our root is installed in client software. As we approach general availability we will issue more and more certificates, but only for a pre-approved set of domains. This limited issuance period will give us time to further ensure that our systems are secure, compliant, and scalable.

    • DOOMED TO REPEAT HISTORY? LESSONS FROM THE CRYPTO WARS OF THE 1990s

      In the past year, a conflict has erupted between technology companies, privacy advocates, and members of the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities over the right to use and distribute products that contain strong encryption technology. This debate between government actors seeking ways to preserve access to encrypted communications and a coalition of pro-encryption groups is reminiscent of an old battle that played out in the 1990s: a period that has come to be known as the “Crypto Wars.” This paper tells the story of that debate and the lessons that are relevant to today. It is a story not only about policy responses to new technology, but also a sustained, coordinated effort among industry groups, privacy advocates, and technology experts from across the political spectrum to push back against government policies that threatened online innovation and fundamental human rights.

    • Free SSL/TLS certificate project moves closer to launch

      Let’s Encrypt, a project aimed at increasing the use of encryption across websites by issuing free digital certificates, is planning to issue the first ones next month.

      Digital certificates are used to encrypt data traffic between a computer and a server using SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) and for checking that a website isn’t a spoof.

    • The Dark Web as You Know It Is a Myth

      Read nearly any article about the dark web, and you’ll get the sense that its name connotes not just its secrecy but also the low-down dirty content of its shadowy realms. You’ll be told that it is home to several nefarious things: stolen data, terrorist sites, and child porn. Now while those things may be among what’s available on the dark web, all also are available on the normal web, and are easily accessible to anyone, right now, without the need for any fancy encryption software.

      [...]

      Terrorist forums are also hiding in full view of anyone with an Internet connection. Regular websites allow extremist supporters and prominent jihadis alike to communicate with one another and post brutal propaganda videos. Al Qaeda’s first forum was launched way back in 2001, and although that site was shut down, a handful of other violent Islamic extremist sites continue to exist on the normal web and are used heavily today. Shutting these sites down is “like a game of whack-a-mole,” Evan Kohlmann from Flashpoint, an intelligence company, told me last year.

      [...]

      And yes, child porn is accessible on the normal web. In fact, it is rampant when compared with what’s available from hidden sites. Last year, the Internet Watch Foundation, a charity that collates child sexual abuse websites and works with law enforcement and hosting providers to have the content removed, found 31,266 URLs that contained child porn images. Of those URLs, only 51 of them, or 0.2 percent, were hosted on the dark web.

      [...]

      Instead, the dark web is a small collection of sites that reflect the limited number of good, bad, and downright weird humans that use it. Doctors can give impartial advice to drug users, who come out of the woodwork because of the anonymity awarded to them by Tor; Chinese citizens can discuss whatever they like and circumvent The Great Firewall, and, yes, the dark web is also used to host some seriously depraved sites, such as extreme pornography. At the moment, the space is probably used mostly for criminal purposes, but its relevance to the world of cybercrime and other domains has been grossly exaggerated.

    • Surprising EFF privacy report gives Apple and Dropbox a clean bill of health

      THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION (EFF) has published its annual league table of tech companies and their use of customer data.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate Bay Domains No Longer Accessible Through ‘WWW’

        The Pirate Bay has dropped the www prefix for all of its domains. The changes occurred earlier this week and were made without a redirect, which is causing some visitors to believe that the site is currently offline.

      • OFE Press Release – A big step ahead in the EU Copyright reform

        The long awaited own initiative report of the European Parliament, on the evaluation of the Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC), has passed the vote in JURI committee today, with 23 votes in favour and 2 against. All 30 compromise amendments have been adopted with a rather large majority every time, showing both the ongoing effort of the rapporteur to find a suitable wording for all political parties, and the MEPs’ willingness to find a common ground for the ongoing EU copyright reform. OFE welcomes this milestone in the reform process, while waiting for the Commission’s legislative proposal later in 2015. Although the final report is less ambitious than the initial proposal, it still goes further than the proposals made by the Commission in its Digital Single Market strategy.

06.18.15

Links 18/6/2015: Red Hat Results Imminent, Tor Browser 4.5.2

Posted in News Roundup at 7:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Small is beautiful – free software column

    Free software, like the web, is promoted by corporations when it is useful to their profit margins. Many disparate organisations collaborate and contribute to GNU/Linux and other free and open source software projects, because they are beneficial to their bottom lines and seldom for altruistic reasons. Contributing to GNU/Linux reduces development costs and encourages open standards. open standards are useful because they reduce barriers to entry for technologies that were ‘not invented here’.

  • Server

    • Mi Amiga: One Michigan School District’s Three-Decades-Old Hero Computer That Still Manages HVAC Today

      As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve worked most of my professional life in the tech industry, specifically working for a managed services consultant in Chicago. One of the things we do is advise our clients on hardware rotations. Client machines, like desktops and laptops for instance, are typically recommended on a four to five year rotation. Because, let’s face it, a five year old computer is either functionally worthless or is probably hanging onto a single strand of twisted copper before crapping out entirely, amirite?

    • 1980s computer controls GRPS heat and AC

      A 30-year-old computer that has run day and night for decades is what controls the heat and air conditioning at 19 Grand Rapids Public Schools.

    • 5 steps to becoming a quality Docker contributor

      But getting started on a new codebase can be daunting. Docker has many, many lines of code. Fixing even the smallest issue can require reading through a lot of that code and understanding how the pieces all fit together.

    • LUCI4HPC

      The software described in this article is designed for a Beowulf-style cluster. Such a cluster commonly consists of consumer-grade machines and allows for parallel high-performance computing. The system is managed by a head node and accessed via a login node. The actual work is performed by multiple compute nodes. The individual nodes are connected through an internal network. The head and login node need an additional external network connection, while the compute nodes often use an additional high-throughput, low-latency connection between them, such as InfiniBand.

    • Linbit Launches New Synchronous Server Storage Software

      DRBD9 provides enterprise Linux users with synchronous server storage replication including support for native remote direct memory access, or RDMA, and OpenStack integration.

    • Linode introduces KVM to help it move away from Xen

      The upgrade to KVM is very easy to carry out, on a Xen Linode’s dashboard, there is a link on the right sidebar titled ‘Upgrade to KVM’. Once you do the upgrade you should then be switched over to KVM. If you want to set your account to default to KVM for new Linodes just go to your Account Settings and set the ‘Hypervisor Preference’ to KVM, any new Linodes you create will be KVM. On a 1GB instance, one user reported the downtime to be between 8-9 minutes while he switched to KVM.

  • Kernel Space

    • The Creator of Linux on the Future Without Him

      The conversation, combined with Linus Torvalds’s aggression behind the wheel, makes this sunny afternoon drive suddenly feel all too serious. Torvalds—the grand ruler of all geeks—does not drive like a geek. He plasters his foot to the pedal of a yellow Mercedes convertible with its “DAD OF 3” license plate as we rip around a corner on a Portland, Ore., freeway. My body smears across the passenger door. “There is no concrete plan of action if I die,” Torvalds yells to me over the wind and the traffic. “But that would have been a bigger deal 10 or 15 years ago. People would have panicked. Now I think they’d work everything out in a couple of months.”

    • Linus Torvalds: Linux Kernel Would Be OK in a Couple of Months If I Die
    • Linux Kernel 3.12.44 LTS Brings Many Updated Drivers, EXT4 and x86 Improvements

      On June 16, Jiri Slaby informed us about the immediate availability for download of the forty-fourth maintenance release of the Linux 3.12 kernel, a long-term supported (LTS) branch.

    • The Linux Foundation opens scholarship program — will you apply?

      Are you happy with your life? Maybe you are stuck in a dead-end job. Maybe you are unemployed and living on your mom’s couch. Hell, maybe you just need to enhance your skills for your current job. You know you need to make a change, but you keep putting it off. What is a smart path to take?

      Linux. Yes, careers involved in Linux are in high demand. Getting certified in some way is not only personally rewarding, but also improves your employment potential by bolstering your resume. If you do not have money for such a thing, I have good news — you could get a scholarship from The Linux Foundation. In other words, you can get a free education and certification. Will you improve your life by applying?

    • Learn KVM and Linux App Development with Linux Foundation Instructor Mike Day

      Linux Foundation instructor Mike Day is an expert in Linux hypervisors and led IBM’s work on the Xen and KVM hypervisors as a Distinguished Engineer. But he came upon his calling almost by accident, having been “thrown into the project with colleagues who had worked on hypervisors for more than a decade,” he said.

      “It was a real challenge for me but not too long after that I became viewed as an expert on the subject,” said Day, who now teaches KVM and Linux developer courses for Linux Foundation Training.

    • diff -u: What’s New in Kernel Development

      When you run a program as setuid, it runs with all the permissions of that user. And if the program spawns new processes, they inherit the same permissions. Not so with filesystem capabilities. When you run a program with a set of capabilities, the processes it spawns do not have those capabilities by default; they must be given explicitly.

    • Linux Foundation Beefs Up Scholarship Program

      The Linux Foundation Training Scholarship Program provides funds to applicants who otherwise would not have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses. It attempts to help developers, IT professionals, and promising students to build Linux careers and contribute to shaping the future of the operating system and the enterprise.

    • Linux Foundation Calls for Submissions for Expanded 2015 Linux Training Scholarship Program
    • 2015 Linux Training Scholarship Program is now Accepting Applications
    • Who’s Afraid of Systemd?

      Last year, the free software community was full of debates about systemd, the system manager that replaces init, the process that boots a Linux system. Now that systemd is uneventfully running the latest releases of major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, you might imagine that opposition to it is melting away — but you’d be wrong.

      Instead, casual references on social media show that the rumors are as common as ever. And while you don’t hear much recently about Devuan, the anti-systemd fork of Debian, it is still trudging towards a release while making the same arguments as ever.

      The situation is not unique. Some free software circles have always seemed to require an enemy. For instance, in the first decade of the millennium, it was Mono, an adaptation for Linux of Microsoft’s .Net. Hundreds of thousands of words were written denouncing Mono, yet today it attracts no attention, although it is still available in repositories.

      Perhaps, too, free software users are becoming conservative as they age, as indicated by the user revolts against GNOME and KDE. Yet no precedent comes close to the viciousness of attacks on systemd, or had so little foundation, either.

    • Understanding Systemd
    • What will be the future of Linux without Linus?

      Linus: I’ve never been much of a visionary — instead of looking at huge plans for the future, I tend to have a rather short time frame of ‘issues in the next few months’. I’m a big believer in that the ‘details’ matter, and if you take care of the details, the big issues will end up sorting themselves out on their own.

    • [Reposted] The creator of Linux OS is calm about the future
    • If I get hit by a bus, Linux will go on just fine says Linus Torvalds

      Just a few days after asking the Linux community to let him take a break, Linus Torvalds has said the project he kicked off 1991 can now get along without him.

      He was, characteristically, blunt in his recent interview with Bloomberg, saying Linux would survive his death.

    • Another angle… Linux: a future without Torvalds [reposted in Ireland]
    • Will Linux survive the death of Linus Torvalds?
    • Linus Torvalds Says Linux Can Move On Without Him
    • Linux Top 3: Linux 4.1 delayed 1 Week, Kaos and Clonezilla Update

      Linux 4.1 is going to take a little longer than some of its predecessors, with Linus Torvalds release a rare eighth release candidate on June 14.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Cinnamon 2.6 – a Linux desktop for Windows XP refugees

      Cinnamon is best known as one of the two default desktops for Linux Mint, which is fast approaching its next major update. Mint 17.2 will include the brand new Cinnamon 2.6, just released, when delivered later this year.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME’s Music Is Getting Some Major New Features

        There is more to GNOME than just the desktop environment. GNOME is a stack of apps, and many of those applications are constantly improved and worked on. Allan Day, one of GNOME’s designers and developers, detailed some of the changes that are being made to the Music app.

      • Examining the design patterns

        I wanted to share a brief update on the Outreachy project that Gina and I are working on, where Gina is preparing for a usability test in GNOME.

        So far, we’ve been in an “information gathering” mode, where she has been learning about some of the basics of usability testing. In our next step, Gina will now start doing an analysis in preparation for a usability test.

      • Plans for GNOME’s apps

        I’ve been a bit quiet about GNOME’s applications of late. This isn’t because nothing has been happening, though – quite the opposite. We’ve been steadily working away behind the scenes, and our application designs have evolved considerably.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Further Adventures in Calculate Linux

        I’ve been experimenting in Calculate Linux lately because it offered a modern KDE without systemd or selinux installed by default, and perhaps a bit because of my nostalgia for Gentoo. Things got off to a rocky start, but after ironing out most of wrinkles and I’m finding myself right at home. I think you could too.

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

      • Why I use Gentoo Linux (and if you develop software you should too)

        I first discovered Gentoo Linux when I left Oracle/Sun in 2010, gave up my Mac and decided to experiment with creating a mac-like desktop experience on Linux. The initial reason was the optimizations you can do to squeeze every bit of performance out of your hardware (I’d bought a cheap Lenovo laptop).

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Switching Over To GCC 5.1.1

        The current stable version of GCC 5, GCC 5.1.1, has been added to openSUSE Factory and in turn will see all packages rebuilt against this new compiler and this will become the default compiler in the openSUSE Tumbleweed snashot due out later in the week.

      • Default compiler for Tumbleweed updating to GCC 5

        The newest GNU Compiler Collection was checked in today to openSUSE Factory, which is the rolling development code base for Tumbleweed, as the default compiler, so all packages will be rebuilt against GCC 5 and the next Tumbleweed snapshot will include GCC 5.1.1

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux Switches to GCC 5 as Default Compiler

        On June 16, the openSUSE Project, through Douglas DeMaio, had the great pleasure of announcing that the Tumbleweed version of the openSUSE Linux operating system has moved to the 5.x branch of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection).

    • Red Hat Family

      • Minio Lands $3.3M Seed Round To Build Out Open Source Storage Project

        When venture capitalists open their wallets and hand out $3.3 million for a seed round, you have to figure the new company has some industry veterans with startup experience, and such is the case with Minio, an open source cloud storage product being built by veterans from Gluster.

        Gluster was purchased by Red Hat in 2011 for $136 million.

      • Ravello Empowers Open Source Community With Free Smart Labs on AWS and Google for Red Hat Certified Engineers
      • Rackspace’s Carl Thompson Named 2015 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year
      • Red Hat (RHT) to Release Quarterly Earnings on Thursday
      • Rite Aid, Red Hat, Smith & Wesson earnings in focus
      • Red Hat Earnings Expected to Rise

        Optimism surrounds Red Hat, as it gets ready to report its first quarter results on Thursday, June 18, 2015. Analysts are expecting the company to book a profit of 27 cents a share, up from 24 cents a year ago.

      • Is Red Hat’s (RHT) Q1 Earnings Likely to Surprise Estimates?

        Red Hat reported strong results in the last quarter with both earnings and revenues surpassing the respective Zacks Consensus Estimate.

      • Fedora

        • antiX, Debian, Fedora, and More

          The Fedora Wiki got a new entry last month that makes one wonder if Fedora really wants users at all. If folks complain it’s because they didn’t read the information provided or don’t understand what they’re reading. Users are too dumb or lazy to file bugs reports and would rather complain than test “every possible feature and/or configuration switch.” Hardly anyone bothers to read the source code or its license and, if they do, they’d rather complain than write the code to fix whatever their complaint is themselves. If they do write the fix and it’s not committed, then they’ll complain rather than learn from it. Folks are going to complain, so just ignore it.

        • Fedora 22 review – Fiascoed

          And so, without any application testing, any customization, desktop effects, resource usage testing, and some other bits and pieces, we must bring the Fedora Twenty-Two KDE review to a halt. Because the distro is dead, and it can’t cope with some simple updates and installs. Really a shame. It reminds me that Fedora is a testbed. But it used to be quite stable recently, and now, we’re back in 2010.

          I really am disappointed. I wish I had some better news for you, but this release simply doesn’t cut it. It’s riddled with bugs, even when it works, and then it stops working. Slow, laggy, average hardware compatibility including Nvidia problems, a less than ideal presentation layer, all in all, a rushed edition with no soul or passion. You can’t fake those. Grade we must, and so Fedora 22 gets a very feeble 2/10. See you around.

        • A Quick Look At Fedora 22 “XFCE” | What’s New
        • Fedora 22 – workstation – Gnome – Do not disturb

          Fedora 22 comes with the newest version of Gnome – 3.16. You’ve probably heard about this already. The new version brought quite a few shiny changes, a major one of which was a brand new notification area. You don’t have a notification bar at the bottom any more, your notifications now come up at the top with the calendar. It’s really neat! More information can be found in the release notes here.

        • Testing rawhide apps using xdg-app

          An important aspect of xdg-app is application sandboxing, which will require application changes to use sandbox-specific APIs. However, xdg-app is also a good way to deploy and run non-sandboxed (or partially sandboxed) regular applications.

        • Contribute to pkgdb2

          Pkgdb2 is the application managing in Fedora, who is allowed to access which git repo containing the files necessary to build the packages present in the distribution.

        • IRC on Hubs

          Still, since the idea for hubs is also to help new contributors get integrated more smoothly into the Fedora community, an effective way to message people did seem like it would be valuable. Since the team/project hubs will have the ability to include an embedded IRC channel, using IRC to send private messages seemed logical. But Fedora Hubs is not an IRC client – it will use IRC to send private messages between users and to enable the channel discussions, but every channel must be directly associated with a hub and the messaging interface will only support messages between Hubs users, not to anyone external. This is an active design choice that Mo and I made, based on the concept of keeping the hub as the central organizing principle of this app in order to help fend off scope creep.

    • Debian Family

      • Chrome, Debian Linux, and the secret binary blob download riddle

        “Anyway, I haven’t said that banning such software from Debian would be the only solution… but at least these incidents come far too frequent recently, so apparently something needs to be done at Debian level to pro-actively prevent future cases/compromises like this.”

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Portable wireless speakers run Linux on a Raspberry Pi

      Axiom’s portable wireless 150W speakers stream music from the web, mobile devices, or USB, and include a WiFi access point and a 9- or 18-hour battery pack.

      Speaker and home theater manufacturer Axiom has found Kickstarter success with its AxiomAir wireless speaker system, which has surpassed its $75,000 goal to reach $121,000, with 25 days to go before the July 12 deadline. Two dozen $475 packages were still available at publication time. Other packages go for $497, said to be more than $300 under the retail price, or $950 for a two-pack, among other discounted combo packs.

    • PowerPC based IoT gateway COM ships with Linux BSP

      The rugged Arcturus “uCP1020″ COM for IoT/M2M gateways runs Linux on Freescale’s QorIQ P1020, with up to up to 64GB eMMC, three GbE ports, and a baseboard.

    • Official Raspberry Pi Case starts at $8.59

      The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the first official case for the Raspberry Pi, which exposes all ports and features a clip-on lid for adding HATs.

      A variety of third-party enclosures for the Raspberry Pi have become available over the years, but the vendors no doubt realized the Raspberry Pi Foundation would eventually build one of their own. The time has come, with the unveiling of the “Official Raspberry Pi Case.”

    • Linux-based Sierra Wireless IoT module has 3G or 4G radios

      Sierra Wireless unveiled a Cortex-A5 based “AirPrime WP” IoT module with 3G or 4G radios, plus a modularly expandable, open-source “mangOH” carrier board.

      We’ve seen plenty of low-power, Linux-ready Internet of Things computer-on-modules, mostly based on Qualcomm’s MIPS-based Atheros SoCs. The Linux-based AirPrime WP modules from Sierra Wireless instead tackle IoT and industrial M2M with integrated cellular radios. A 3G HSPA+/EDGE/GPRS/GSM version called WP75xx is due in the fourth quarter while a WP8548 version that adds 4G LTE is due in Q1 2016.

    • Finally, an official Raspberry Pi case has been released!

      Rejoice Pi fans! The team behind Raspberry Pi have announced an official case for the Pi 2 Model B and the Pi Model B+. The case was announced today on their blog and is available from all the main Pi retailers for a cheap £6 (which works out to about $9).

    • Raspberry Pi Open Source Wireless Speakers Hit Kickstarter (video)

      Axiom Audio has this week unveiled a new range of wireless speakers they have added to their existing range that are powered by the awesome Raspberry Pi mini PC.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Stockmann to sell Academic Bookstore

    Stockmann announced on Thursday a plan to sell off its Academic Bookstores to Swedish media conglomerate Bonnier Books. In accordance with the newly inked letter of intent to sell, the bookstore will continue to operate in connection with the department store chain after the acquisition.

  • UK Anti-Doping agency to issue statement over Mo Farah

    UK Anti-Doping are to issue a statement on Thursday, which will respond to newspaper claims that Mo Farah missed two drugs tests leading up to the London Olympic Games in 2012.

    A report in the Daily Mail says the double Olympic champion missed one test in 2010 and another after joining forces with coach Alberto Salazar the following year.

    Salazar, who manages the Nike Project in Oregon, is currently under suspicion after a TV documentary made allegations against the 56-year-old with regards to doping abuse.

  • Science

    • The 100-year-old scientist who pushed the FDA to ban artificial trans fat

      No one was more pleased by the Food and Drug Administration’s decision Tuesday to eliminate artificial trans fats from the U.S. food supply than Fred Kummerow, a 100-year-old University of Illinois professor who has warned about the dangers of the artery-clogging substance for nearly six decades.

      “Science won out,” Kummerow, who sued the FDA in 2013 for not acting sooner, said in an interview from his home in Illinois. “It’s very important that we don’t have this in our diet.”

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • US Navy Soliciting Zero Days

      The National Security Agency may find and purchase zero days, but that doesn’t mean it’s sharing its hoard with other government agencies such as the U.S. Navy, which apparently is in the market for some unpatched, undisclosed vulnerabilities of its own.

      A request for proposal posted last Wednesday—which has since been taken down—to FedBizOpps.gov was a solicitation by the Naval Supply Systems Command seeking a CMMI-3 (Capability Maturity Model Integration) contractor capable of producing operational exploits that integrate with commonly used exploitation frameworks, the RFP said.

    • Tuesday’s security advisories
    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Your data is at risk if you are running iOS or Mac OS X

      Six university researchers from Indiana University have revealed that Apple’s password manager, Keychain, is susceptible to hackers. If exploited, the flaw would give a hacker access to the users passwords. The really worrying thing here is that Apple has known about the issue for months and still hasn’t managed to issue a fix.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Superabundant bird decline mirrors Passenger Pigeon

      One of Eurasia’s most abundant bird species has declined by 90% and retracted its range by 5000 km since 1980 a new study shows.

      Yellow-breasted Bunting Emberiza aureola was once distributed over vast areas of Europe and Asia, its range stretching from Finland to Japan. New research published in the journal Conservation Biology suggest that unsustainable rates of hunting, principally in China, have contributed to not only a catastrophic loss of numbers but also in the areas in which it can now be found.

  • Finance

    • Jeb Bush: Next President Should Privatize Social Security

      Jeb Bush thinks the next president will need to privatize Social Security, he said at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Tuesday — acknowledging that his brother attempted to do so and failed. It’s a position sure to be attacked by both Republicans and Democrats.

    • RBS payment failure could last days

      About 600,000 payments that failed to enter the accounts of RBS customers overnight may not be completed until the end of the week, the bank has said.

      Payments of wages, tax credits and disability living allowance were among those that failed to be credited to accounts.

      RBS initially said some payments were “missing”, but it had now identified and fixed the underlying problem.

      Delayed payments would be processed “no later than Saturday”, it said.

    • Why Obama’s Trade Deal May Come Back From the Dead | Interview with Richard Wolff

      Tyrel Ventura and Tabetha Wallace from Watching the Hawks interview Professor Richard Wolff about the House vote to reject the Trans Pacific Partnership and where this massive trade deal will go from here.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Truth Avoided by Mainstream Media Liars

      So here is a challenge to the Sunday Times, BBC and rest of the mainstream media.

    • Typography Is Why Jeb’s Logo Is Worse Than a Piece of Crap

      Jeb! is fine, as far as logos go. It’s uninspired, sure, but it gets the job done. But as a piece of typography, it’s crap.

    • British attack on Edward Snowden foiled by real journalists

      I woke up on Sunday and checked the news as I usually do. “British spies ‘moved after Snowden files read’” exclaimed the BBC, probably hoping to whip up anti-Russian/Chinese sentiment, immediately I rolled my eyes, surely revealing mass spying to the billions being spied upon is more important than a few spies having to be moved.

      After reading the headline, I was left puzzling, I was sure that Snowden handed everything he had over to journalists. A day later my understanding of the issue had been confirmed, Glenn Greenwald said that Snowden doesn’t have access to the documents anymore and hasn’t been able access them since they were handed over in 2013.

  • Censorship

    • European Court strikes serious blow to free speech online

      The Estonian courts had found that Delfi AS, the news portal, should have prevented clearly unlawful comments from being published in the portal’s comments section, even though Delfi had taken down the offensive comments as soon as it had been notified about them. When Delfi lodged a complaint with the European Court, the Court concluded unanimously that the domestic courts’ findings were a justified and proportionate restriction on Delfi’s right to freedom of expression.

    • Shock European court decision: Websites are liable for users’ comments

      In a surprise decision, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg has ruled that the Estonian news site Delfi may be held responsible for anonymous and allegedly defamatory comments from its readers. As the digital rights organisation Access notes, this goes against the European Union’s e-commerce directive, which “guarantees liability protection for intermediaries that implement notice-and-takedown mechanisms on third-party comments.” As such, Peter Micek, Senior Policy Counsel at Access, says the ECHR judgment has “dramatically shifted the internet away from the free expression and privacy protections that created the internet as we know it.”

    • UAE man faces $68,000 fine for swearing on WhatsApp

      Swearing at someone via WhatsApp in the UAE could land you with a $68,000 (£45,000) fine, under a new law.

      Those living in the country could also face jail, and foreigners deportation.

      The new law was brought to light when the UAE’s supreme court ordered the retrial of a man fined $800 for the offence, arguing the fine was too lenient.

  • Privacy

    • Belgian privacy watchdog sues Facebook ahead of summit

      Privacy will be on the docket at a Belgian court on Thursday — and Facebook will be the defendant.

      The Belgian Privacy Commission has sued Facebook and will take the world’s largest social network to court on Thursday for allegedly violating privacy laws both in Belgium and in the European Union. Speaking to Belgian news outlet DeMorgen, the country’s chairman of the Privacy Commission William Debeuckelaere said that Facebook’s behavior “cannot be tolerated.” He added that he hopes the court will force Facebook to change its privacy practices.

    • Adjusting to a World Where No Data Is Secure

      Imagine a piece of information that would be useful to store digitally if it could be kept secure, but that would do more harm than good if it ever fell into the wrong hands. With Friday’s news that “hackers have breached a database containing a wealth of sensitive information from federal employees’ security background checks,” just that sort of fraught information has arguably been exposed to hackers.

    • UK Police Carry Out Facial Scans Of 100,000 People Attending Music Festival

      The ostensible reason for this massive surveillance is to catch people who steal mobile phones, but that really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The database that the 100,000 faces were matched against was “custody images from across Europe”, but it seems improbable that criminals would travel all the way across Europe to this particular music festival in the hope that they might be able to relieve a few spaced-out musicgoers of their phones. Nor was general criminal behavior an issue: apparently, last year there were just 91 arrests with 120,000 people attending. It’s more likely that the facial scans were born of a desire to see if the hardware and software were capable of capturing such large numbers and comparing them with the pan-European database.

      [...]

      It’s easy to see this kind of technology being rolled out ever-more widely. First at other music festivals — purely for safety reasons, you understand — and then, once people have started to get used to that, elsewhere too. Eventually, of course, it will become routine to scan everyone, everywhere, all the time, offering a perfect analog complement to the non-stop, pervasive surveillance that we now know takes place in the digital world.

    • Strong Encryption and Anonymity Are The Guardians Of Free Expression

      EFF has signed on to a joint civil society statement welcoming the groundbreaking report supporting encryption and anonymity by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, David Kaye. The Special Rapporteur will present the report on June 17th at the 29th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

    • Bruce Schneier: Sure, Russia & China Probably Have The Snowden Docs… But Not Because Of Snowden

      Given all the fuss over the ridiculous article this past weekend — which has since been confirmed as government stenography rather than actual reporting — security maven Bruce Schneier has written up an article making a key point. It’s quite likely that the underlying point in the article — that Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies have access to the documents that Snowden originally handed over to reporters — is absolutely true. But, much more importantly, he argues, the reason likely has almost nothing to do with Snowden.

    • China and Russia Almost Definitely Have the Snowden Docs

      Last weekend, the Sunday Times published a front-page story (full text here), citing anonymous British sources claiming that both China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents. It’s a terrible article, filled with factual inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims about both Snowden’s actions and the damage caused by his disclosure, and others have thoroughly refuted the story. I want to focus on the actual question: Do countries like China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents?

      I believe the answer is certainly yes, but that it’s almost certainly not Snowden’s fault.

    • Government faces call to review ‘self-destruct’ email policy

      The Government is facing calls to review a little-known policy under which Downing Street emails “self-destruct” after three months.

      Any messages which David Cameron’s aides fail to save and store are automatically deleted – a practice that campaigners claim is designed to thwart later freedom of information requests.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Amazon Bans Kodi/XBMC App Over Piracy Concerns

      Amazon has removed the popular media center Kodi from the app store claiming it facilitates piracy. The software, formerly known as XBMC, doesn’t link to or host any infringing content, but third-party add-ons are giving the software a bad reputation.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Big changes coming to IKEAHackers

        Some months ago I received a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter from the agent of Inter IKEA Systems B.V., citing that my site IKEAhackers.net has infringed upon its intellectual property rights. In that letter they asked that I agree to voluntarily transfer the domain name IKEAhackers.net to them, failing which they reserve the right to take any legal action it deems necessary against me.

    • Copyrights

      • BMI song lawsuits make rounds in Jersey bars

        That mistake could cost this restaurant to the tune of several thousands of dollars for each of the four songs that Broadcast Music Inc. claims the venue played one Friday night in May 2014.

      • Publisher Strips Hergé’s Heirs of Millions of Dollars in Rights to Tintin Drawings

        The heirs of Hergé, the creator of the popular Tintin comics, were dealt a crushing blow in Dutch court this week. In a shocking decision, the court ruled that they do not have the rights to the iconic boy reporter character.

        The ruling hinged on the unexpected production of a long-lost 1942 document in which Hergé, whose real name was Georges Remi, transferred the Tintin rights to his publisher, Casterman.

      • MPAA: Google Assists and Profits from Piracy

        The MPAA is refusing to hand over documentation discussing the legal case it helped Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood build against Google. According to the Hollywood group, Google is waging a PR war against Hollywood while facilitating and profiting from piracy.

      • Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm Loses Hacking Appeal

        Following the largest case of its type in Denmark, in October 2014 Gottfrid Svartholm was found guilty of hacking IT company CSC. The Pirate Bay founder immediately appealed but after a technically complex hearing a jury at the High Court today unanimously upheld the decision of the lower court.

      • Neil Young, Donald Trump Spar Over ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ Use

        When Neil Young released his anthemic track “Rockin’ in the Free World” off 1989′s Freedom, the song quickly became a rallying cry in post-Reagan America for “American values” and the fall of communism. With George H. W. Bush still settling into his presidency, Young criticized the president’s ideology, specifically referencing Bush’s “thousand points of light” comment and blasting Republicans for what he felt was a disregard toward the lower-class.

06.16.15

Links 16/6/2015: Cinnamon 2.6 Released, Chromixium OS 1.0 Review

Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Is there a civic hacker in you?

    There is a civic hacker in you! He or she is in there… I promise! Today, technology has evolved into a perfect storm of open source tools, code, social networks, and lots of data. Civic technologists thrive on all of these getting together with like-minded hackers and turning all these sources into useful applications, websites and visualizations.

  • DevOps is 90% change and 10% technology

    Jen Krieger used her first computer in the early 80s and maintained a strong interest in technology ever since. She started her career as a financial analyst and eventually moved into IT where she gained expertise in software development and releases. Jen has worked with many development methods, from waterfall to Agile.

  • Open Source Initiative & LibreItalia Partner to Raise Adoption of Free and Open Source Software

    The Open Source Initiative® (OSI) announced today that Associazione LibreItalia, a non-profit organization working to reduce the digital divide and tear down barriers to digital citizenship throughout Italy, has joined the internationally recognized steward of open source as an Affiliate Member.

  • Struggling With Facebook Organic Reach Decline? Try This New Open Source Social Networking App

    If you have been burnt by the decline of the organic reach of your Facebook pages, you may consider trying something different, although of course it’s hard to replace a website that has become such an integral part of our lives.

  • Events

    • Deutsche OpenStack Tage 2015

      The presentations are conducted in German, so it’s mainly interesting for German people. There are several OpenStack and also Ceph related talks on the schedule, including a work shop on Ceph. As far as I know there are still tickets available for the conference.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Why open source cloud is ready for prime time

      With open-source cloud endeavours, it’s not so much a question of maturity as it is figuring out which offering is the best fit for your organisation. As Amanda McPherson, chief marketing officer at the Linux Foundation points out, “Open source and collaboration are clearly advancing the cloud faster than ever before. Just consider the many OpenStack distributions and ecosystem emerging around Linux containers that didn’t even exist a year ago. Yet, as the open source cloud evolves so quickly, it can sometimes be difficult for enterprises to identify the technologies that best fit their needs.”

    • Nutanix: The Move From a VM to a Container is Unnatural, a Challenge of New Platforms

      If a new stack is to take root in the modern enterprise, then something has to give. Not only must an old infrastructure make room for a new way of work, but the new stack must open itself up to the prospect of interoperability and co-existence with something that, at least in our frame of reference, is no longer new.

    • Mesosphere and Typesafe Align Behind New Spark Distribition for DCOS
    • How to have a successful OpenStack project

      It’s no secret that OpenStack is becoming the de-facto standard for private cloud…

    • Datto SIRIS customers can now use ownCloud

      Datto, a company that offers data backup and recovery solutions are teaming up ownCloud which will allow Datto customers to securely sync and share enterprise files. Initially the ownCloud secure file sync and share capabilities will come to Datto’s SIRIS product line.

    • What you missed in Big Data: Open-source power

      The central role of the open-source movement in analytics rose back to the surface last week after LinkedIn Inc. released another one of its internally-developed data crunching technologies under a free license to help promote emerging use cases. And in particular, performing real-time business intelligence at the kind of scale where the traditional databases typically used for the task fall short.

  • Databases

    • Open Source No Threat To Oracle Corporation, Deutsche Bank Says

      Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) won’t experience a risk any time soon from open-source software vendors, an analyst said Monday.

      Deutsche Bank’s Karl Keirstead said vendors, like privately held MongoDB Inc., “don’t represent a near-term threat” to Oracle, which is set to post results Wednesday.

    • How open source is eating into Oracle et al revenue pie

      Bloomberg recently reported how Oracle is heavily leaning on its existing customers as it sees a slump in new product sales. Not just the smaller companies, big players are also moving away from fancy products with big price tags and choosing open source software. As open source becomes increasingly reliable, the threat looms large for Oracle and the likes. The report shows that Oracle’s sales of new software licenses have declined for seven straight quarters compared with the same period a year earlier. It heavily relies on revenue from update and maintenance contracts more than from new business.

  • Licensing

    • Why Greet Apple’s Swift 2.0 With Open Arms?

      Apple announced last week that its Swift programming language — a currently fully proprietary software successor to Objective C — will probably be partially released under an OSI-approved license eventually. Apple explicitly stated though that such released software will not be copylefted. (Apple’s pathological hatred of copyleft is reasonably well documented.) Apple’s announcement remained completely silent on patents, and we should expect the chosen non-copyleft license will not contain a patent grant. (I’ve explained at great length in the past why software patents are a particularly dangerous threat to programming language infrastructure.)

    • I Do Not Agree To Your Terms

      Let me get this straight, Apple: you send me an e-mail outlining the terms under which you will redistribute my content, and you will just assume that I agree to your terms unless I opt out?

      This makes typical clickwrap EULA nonsense look downright reasonable by comparison. You’re going to consider me bound to terms you just declared to me in an e-mail as long as I don’t respond? That’s completely crazy. You don’t even know if I received the e-mail!

      I’m conflicted about this. On one hand, the whole reason I have an RSS feed for this blog is to make it easy to access it in a variety of ways. The RSS feed exists precisely so it can be used by programs like this, which take the content and display it to the user. I don’t like the idea of showing ads next to my content in this situation, but I’m pretty sure I have no right to control that. If I didn’t want people taking my blog and putting it in an app and showing it to people that way, I wouldn’t have a feed.

      On the other hand, Apple isn’t just taking my feed and displaying it. They’re shoving terms and conditions at me, and unilaterally assuming that I agree to them unless I take explicit steps to respond and say that I don’t.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Best practices to build bridges between tech teams

      Robyn Bergeron makes life awesome for people participating in the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana communities. Passionate about improving ease of development and deployment of infrastructure and applications, she tirelessly advocates for end-users of open source projects, which why her current title is Operations Advocate at Elastic.

      She has been a sysadmin, program manager, and business analyst, and has an ongoing role as mother of two stellar kids. Her most recent gig was as the Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat, where she herded cats through several releases of the Linux distribution.

    • #BIO2015: Open-source biopharma R&D improves late-stage success

      The open-source model for biopharma R&D yields better results when it comes to late-stage success, according to a new report released by Deloitte at this week’s BIO convention in Philadelphia. Collaboration, even with competitors, helps usher a drug into successful development.

    • Open Data

      • High hopes for open web portal for NY State

        On March 11, 2013 New York State launched open.ny.gov which is dedicated to increasing public access to data. The state hopes to spark innovation, foster research, provide economic opportunities, and increase public participation in state government. Officials hope this increase in transparency will better inform decision making throughout the state.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • NY Times Disregards Times Staffers’ Advice On Avoiding Term “Climate Change Skeptic”

      A June 13 New York Times article about the pope’s forthcoming climate change encyclical failed to follow leading Times staffers’ recommendations by using the term “climate skeptic” to refer to those who blatantly deny established climate science.

      The Times article stated that the Vatican’s stance on climate change has “rankled … climate change skeptics, who have suggested that Francis is being misled by scientists[.]” It added that “a group of self-described climate skeptics, led by the Heartland Institute” organized a protest of the Vatican’s position in Rome, and described Marc Morano, a member of the Heartland delegation to Rome, as a former “aide to Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and climate change skeptic.”

  • Finance

    • The American middle class isn’t coming back — it’s going to die with the Baby Boomers

      It’s no secret that the American middle class has been on the ropes for a while now. The problem isn’t just a crippling recession and an economic “recovery” that has mostly gone to the richest one percent, but the larger shifting of wealth from the middle to the very top that’s taken place since the late ‘70s. Add in things like the dismantling of unions that has accelerated apace since Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic controllers, and we’ve seen the middle class more solid in places like Canada, Germany, and Scandinavia, and begin to grow in a number of nations even while it shrinks here. Economists like Thomas Piketty thinks the process is inevitable with global capitalism, while others – the equally wise Joseph Stiglitz, for example – think the balance can be restored if we can find the political will.

  • Censorship

    • ‘Sunday Times’ Files DMCA Takedown Against ‘The Intercept’

      The Rupert Murdoch controlled Sunday Times of London finds itself embroiled in controversy today, over both a front page article that appeared in the paper yesterday and a related DMCA Notice it issued against the U.S. based political website The Intercept.

      The Sunday Times article, with the headline “British Spies Betrayed to Russian and Chinese,” carries the byline of Tom Harper, Richard Kerbaj and Tim Shipman and expands on a news story spreading across the UK on the pulling of some intelligence operators from Russia and China by the UK government over fears that they might have been compromised by information leaked by Edward Snowden.

      This article prompted an article published last night on The Intercept by Glenn Greenwald: “The Sunday Time’ Snowden Story is Journalism at It’s Worst — and Filled With Falsehoods.”

      The Intercept article, which attempts to detail alleged inaccuracies in The Sunday Times article, has prompted Times Newspapers Ltd., the owner of the Times, to circle the wagons and issue a DMCA takedown notice in the U.S. The notice indicates that The Times takes exception to the posting of a photograph of yesterday’s Times front page, as well the inclusion of a handful of quotes from the Times article — all of which would appear to be covered under U.S. “fair use” copyright provisions.

  • Privacy

    • Mega Publishes First Transparency Report

      After 2.5 years of operations the Mega cloud storage service has published its first transparency report. Aimed at inspiring confidence in how the company deals with complaints and protects privacy, the document reveals that Mega takes content down faster than Google and a maximum of 0.165% of users have been suspended.

    • The Pulitzer Prize In Bullshit FUD Reporting Goes To… The Sunday Times For Its ‘Snowden Expose’

      None of it was true, but it was part of a concerted effort by administration officials to smear Ellsberg as a “Soviet spy” and a “traitor” when all he really did was blow the whistle on things by sharing documents with reporters.

      Does that sound familiar? Over the weekend, a big story supposedly broke in the UK’s the Sunday Times, citing anonymous UK officials arguing that the Russians and Chinese got access to all the Snowden documents and it had created all sorts of issues, including forcing the UK to remove undercover “agents” from Russia. That story is behind a paywall, but plenty of people have made the text available if you’d like to read the whole thing.

      There are all sorts of problems with the report that make it not just difficult to take seriously, but which actually raise a lot more questions about what kind of “reporting” the Sunday Times actually does. It’s also worth noting that this particular story comes out just about a week or so after Jason Leopold revealed some of the details of the secret plan to discredit Snowden that was hatched in DC. Even so, the journalism here is beyond shoddy, getting key facts flat out incorrect, allowing key sources to remain anonymous for no reason, and not appearing to raise any questions about the significant holes in the story.

    • Reporter Who Wrote Sunday Times ‘Snowden’ Propaganda Admits That He’s Just Writing What UK Gov’t Told Him

      So we’ve already written about the massive problems with the Sunday Times’ big report claiming that the Russians and Chinese had “cracked” the encryption on the Snowden files (or possibly just been handed those files by Snowden) and that he had “blood on his hands” even though no one has come to any harm. It also argued that David Miranda was detained after he got documents from Snowden in Moscow, despite the fact that he was neither in Moscow, nor had met Snowden (a claim the article quietly deleted). That same report also claimed that UK intelligence agency MI6 had to remove “agents” from Moscow because of this leak, despite the fact that they’re not called “agents” and there’s no evidence of any actual risk. So far, the only official response from News Corp. the publisher of The Sunday Times (through a variety of subsidiaries) was to try to censor the criticism of the story with a DMCA takedown request.

      Either way, one of the journalists who wrote the story, Tom Harper, gave an interview to CNN which is quite incredible to watch. Harper just keeps repeating that he doesn’t know what’s actually true, and that he was just saying what the government told him — more or less admitting that his role here was not as a reporter, but as a propagandist or a stenographer.

    • The Police Are Scanning the Faces of Every Single Person at Download

      For most of us, festivals are a way to escape our invisible prisons of technology. “I’m not taking my iPhone to Glasto,” you mutter to your pal, “I’m going off the grid.” Who can blame you? For just a few days, you want to enjoy yourself in a priceless disconnected moment of Gaymers fuelled euphoria. Up until very recently, you could be granted that small civil liberty, but this weekend at Download, new technology is being trialled by Leicestershire Police that could change the way your carry yourself at major events.

    • I read all the small print on the internet and it made me want to die

      So why do we spend so much of our time ignoring the thousands of words of legally binding “end-user licence agreements” (EULAs, if you like) legally-binding contracts we agree to every day? Is it even possible to read the T&Cs for everything a typical person does? Is there any value in reading all this anyway?

      “The biggest lie on the internet is ‘I have read and agree to the terms and conditions’,” says security expert Mikko Hyppönen. Setting out to prove his point, Hyppönen’s company F-Secure set up a free WiFi hotspot in the heart of London’s financial district in June 2014.

    • White House’s internal encryption struggle is hypocrisy at its finest

      Ask any two people in government today their stance on encryption and you’ll almost certainly get very different (and often opposing) answers.

      As the White House pushes for greater encryption across federal sites to help better protect data flowing between a user’s computer and the federal agency, other factions in government want to weaken the encryption used by installing “backdoors” for law enforcement uses.

    • Encrypted connections coming soon for all Wikipedia readers

      As of right now, the data that moves between Wikipedia.com and most users is unencrypted, which increases the chances that someone else may be eavesdropping on you. That, however, is about to change: On Friday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that it’s moving its sites toward HTTPS by default, so that all data transferred between you and its servers will be encrypted.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • From Piracy to Prosperity: Inside the New Artist’s Toolbox

        For years artists had grumbled about record labels, cable networks and distributors controlling them, restricting their artistic freedom, and taking more than their fair share of the coffers. Napster offered a new way for artists to reach their fans. While the labels and networks condemned this as “piracy,”many artists detected the first ripple of a new revolution.

      • Innocent Cox Subscribers Dragged into Piracy Lawsuit

        As the result of a rather broadly interpreted court order, many innocent Cox Communications subscribers have been dragged into a piracy lawsuit. The account holders are involved because their current IP-addresses were used to download infringing content in the past, but some weren’t even a Cox subscriber at the relevant time.

06.15.15

Links 15/6/2015: Linux Final RC, Kodi Beta 2

Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

06.13.15

Links 13/6/2015: IPFire 2.17 is Out, OpenMandriva Plans

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Top 5 Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Exchange

    Choosing an open source messaging server can save you money and admin time without losing out on features. Take a look at what our favorite alternatives to Microsoft Exchange have to offer.

  • Enterprises Flocking to Open Source Software

    Open source software is not a trend; it is here to stay. Debating the value of open source software (OSS) on technical considerations is a moving target. Determining the costs of implementing and using open source makes for a more stable argument. The initial software may be free, but learning, implementing, improving, connecting to, and operating it is not free. When you acquire OSS you will have more responsibilities than if you acquired closed product software from a vendor.

  • We Is Us — OPNFV & ETSI Accelerate NFV Adoption

    One question increasingly raised throughout the SDN/NFV community is, “Why are there so many groups associated with NFV/SDN?” While the answer is subject to debate, no one should be surprised that NFV and SDN are far too pervasive for any single organization and/or industry body to control.

  • How OPNFV and ETSI NFV are Advancing NFV Adoption

    ETSI was the birthplace of the NFV concept in 2012, and OPNFV was launched just two years later with many of the same members to help bring NFV from specs to reality using open source methodologies. Marc Cohn, who is an active participant in many open communities including OPNFV, OpenDaylight and the Open Networking Foundation, recently published an article for SDxCentral about how OPNFV and ETSI continue to work in tandem to accelerate NFV adoption.

  • LinkedIn Open Sources “Pinot” for Powerful Data Analytics

    When it comes to new open source tools that can make a difference, it’s wise to look to some of the tech companies that regularly open source their own in-house platforms and tools. Just witness Netflix, which has open sourced troves of useful cloud utilities. Facebook and Google have release a lot of useful tools as well.

  • Los Angeles County voting to shift from inkblots to open source

    Los Angeles County is home to a burgeoning technology industry. It boasts a roster of high-profile companies including Hulu, Snapchat, and Tinder. As of 2013, it offered more high-tech jobs than other major markets in the country, including Silicon Valley and New York City. Come election time, however, its residents cast their votes by marking inkblots on ballots that resemble Scantron forms.

  • Events

    • CFP Jam & LinuxFest Northwest Goes Hollywood

      Linux and FOSS make cameo appearances throughout the TV and film world, and lately we’ve been treated to the GNOME vs. KDE tête-à-tête in the USA Network’s pilot of a show called “Mr. Robot.” This scene piqued my interest enough to watch the pilot, which was a mix of downright scary and mildly interesting portrayals of tech types at various levels in the overt and covert tech-company hierarchy, wrapped in painfully mediocre dialog (why can’t Aaron Sorkin just write everything? Is that too much to ask?). SPOILER ALERT: The subtext of a psychologically wrecked, socially castrated hacker protagonist — the one using GNOME — is grating enough, but this stereotype is far and away eclipsed by the world domination seemingly at the fingertips of the suit using KDE, which he displayed at the end of the pilot. And we though it was Redmond seeking to take over the world when it’s really…KDE?

    • In Search of SELF in the Queen City

      Right away I ran across Brian Proffitt, whom many of you will remember from his days covering Linux and FOSS for news sites or from the time he spent at Linux Today. These days he’s all but given up journalism for real work, at Red Hat. However, the presentation he’s giving on Sunday here at SELF has a writerly ring to the title: “It’s Metaphors All the Way Down.”

      I also had a chance to talk with Deb Nicholson with the Open Invention Network, who’ll be giving a talk on Saturday about software patent litigation. Funny thing, patents were hardly mentioned in our conversation. Mainly we talked about tech corporations under the headings: the good, the bad and the pure evil. If anyone sees Clint Eastwood, tell him I have a movie idea…

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • My Frustration with Mozilla

        I recently decided to stop using Firefox as my main Browser. I’m not alone there. While browser statistics are notoriously difficult to track and hotly debated, all sources seem to point toward a downward trend for Firefox. At LQ, they actually aren’t doing too badly. In 2010 Firefox had a roughly 57% market share and so far this year they’re at 37%. LQ is a highly technical site, however, and the broader numbers don’t look quite so good. Over a similar period, for example, Wikipedia has Firefox dropping from over 30% to just over 15%. At the current rate NetMarketShare is tracking, Firefox will be in the single digits some time this year. You get the idea. So what’s going on , and what does that mean for Mozilla? And why did I choose now to make a switch personally?

      • Get bug squashing, Mozilla increases bounty payments: Linux Wrap

        Mozilla have decided to shake up the way they make payments with regard to bug squashing, in the statement they said “The bounty for valid potentially exploitable critical and high security rated client security vulnerabilities will be between $3000 and $7500 (USD) cash reward. The bounty program encourages the earliest possible reporting of these potentially exploitable bugs. A bounty may be paid for some moderate rated client security bugs at the discretion of the Bug Bounty Committee. If a bounty is paid for a moderate rated security issue, the amount will be between $500 and $2000 (US), depending on the severity of impact for the issue as determined by Bug Bounty Committee.”

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Building a platform

      From the very beginning ownCloud has had bigger ambitions then just being a file sync and share tool. This is apparent from the name ownCloud. Today, we have more than our documents and photos online. Our social networks and shared thoughts, our appointments and shopping lists, audio and video conversations all happen and are stored somehwere ‘in the cloud’, all connected. You can comment on a song you like for others to see or share an appointment with co workers. ownCloud means to give you a chance to bring all that back under your control!

  • Databases

    • Oracle’s rising open source problem

      While a number of factors are at play in Oracle’s stumbles, one of the most persistent is the rise of open-source databases, both relational and non-relational (NoSQL), as a recent Bloomberg article posits. As Powa Technologies CEO says, “They scale and operate extremely well, and they don’t cost anything.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • BSD

    • Securing OpenBSD From Us To You

      I’m going to talk today about signify, a tool I wrote for the OpenBSD project that cryptographically signs and verifies. This allows us to ensure that the releases we ship arrive on your computer in their original, intended form, without tampering.

    • Smallwall 1.8.2 Released To Let Monowall Live On

      This past February, Monowall announced the end of development as one of the most popular FreeBSD-based network/firewall focused distributions. For those still searching for a new replacement, Smallwall 1.8.2 has been released as the successor to Monowall 1.8.1.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Swift 2.0 is open source, ApacheCon: Big Data, and more open source news
    • 3DPrinterOS Goes Open Source for Their Cloud Client

      If you’re that kind of development monster, you can now find the source code for the cloud client here on GitHub.

      This cloud client already sports support for the majority of desktop 3D printers, and through the GNU Affero General Public License, it’s being shared.

    • Create a ‘soft’ 3D printer with the open source Circular Knitic

      While the uses for additive manufacturing at home seem to be increasing on a seemingly daily basis, there are still some items in the home that haven’t been able to be created due to the lack of suitable technologies. Among others is the ability to fabricate soft objects using digital fabrication tools.

    • Bristol creatives create an open source, portable, WiFi-enabled Kinect
    • Ouya’s potential acquisition, Steam’s Summer Sale, and more open gaming news

    • Open Data

      • The Citadel reveals open data findings

        The United Nations has proactively researched and promoted open government data across the globe for close to five years now. The Open Data Institute maintains that open data can help “unlock supply, generate demand, and create and disseminate knowledge to address local and global issues.” McKinsey & Company report that “seven sectors alone could generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value as a result of open data.”

        There is no doubt that open data is an important public policy area—one that is here to stay. Yet, for all the grand promises, scratch beneath the surface and one finds a remarkable paucity of hard empirical facts about what is and isn’t happening on the ground—in the real world of cities where most of us increasingly live and work.

      • “Dutch government hampers re-use of Chamber of Commerce data”

        The Dutch government has prepared a new Trade Register Law that will effectively forbid free re-use of the register data of its Chamber of Commerce (Kamer van Koophandel, KvK). In response to an internet consultation, Stefan de Konink, open data proponent and founder of the OpenGeo Foundation, wrote an open letter to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Security and Justice, asking the Dutch government to reconsider its new policy.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo to step down

    Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo is to step down after coming under pressure following lacklustre results.

    Mr Costolo will remain on the social network’s board after the move on July 1, the company said on Thursday night.

    Twitter’s shares jumped 7.8pc in after-hours trading following the announcement, after closing flat at $35.84 during the day.

    Mr Costolo will be replaced in the interim by co-founder Jack Dorsey, chairman of Twitter and chief executive of Square, the mobile payments company he founded in 2009. He will also continue in both those roles.

  • Twitter’s Strategy Remains Unclear Even After CEO Resigns

    Investors applauded Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s resignation. But did they jump the gun?

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto and the Subjugation of India

      After a study of GMOs over a four-year plus period, India’s multi-party Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture recommended a ban on GM food crops stating they had no role in a country of small farmers. The Supreme Court appointed a technical expert committee (TEC), which recommended an indefinite moratorium on the field trials of GM crops until the government devised a proper regulatory and safety mechanism. As yet, no such mechanism exists, but open field trials are being given the go ahead. GMO crops approved for field trials include rice, maize, chickpea, sugarcane, and brinjal.

  • Security

    • OpenSSL Patches Logjam Flaw to Foil NSA Snoopers
    • OpenSSL releases seven patches for seven vulns
    • Who’s afraid of DNS? Nominet’s new ‘turing’ tool visualises hidden security threats

      UK domain registry Nominet has shown off a striking new visualisation tool called ‘turing’ that large organisations can use to peer into their DNS traffic to trace latency issues and spot previously invisible botnets and malware.

    • “Don’t Hack Me! That’s a Bad Idea,” Says Eugene Kaspersky to APT Groups
    • Russian Software Security Lab Hacked, Indirectly Links Attack To NSA
    • Israel, NSA May Have Hacked Antivirus Firm Kaspersky Lab

      Moscow-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, famous for uncovering state-sponsored cyberattacks, today dropped its biggest bombshell yet: Its own computer networks were hit by state-sponsored hackers, probably working for Israeli intelligence or the U.S. National Security Agency. The same malware also attacked hotels that hosted ongoing top-level negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

    • The Massive Hack on US Personnel Agency is Worse Than Everyone Thought

      Last week, the human resources arm of the US government, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) admitted that it had been victim of a massive data breach, where hackers stole personal data belonging to as many as 4 million government workers.

    • Feds Who Didn’t Even Discover The OPM Hack Themselves, Still Say We Should Give Them Cybersecurity Powers

      We already described how the recent hack into the US federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) appears to be much more serious than was initially reported. The hack, likely by Chinese state hackers, appear to have obtained basically detailed personal info on all current and many former federal government employees.

    • China-linked hackers get data on CIA, NSA personnel with security-clearance: report

      China-linked hackers appear to have gained access to sensitive background information submitted by US intelligence and military personnel for security clearances that could potentially expose them to blackmail, the Associated Press reported on Friday.

      In a report citing several US officials, the news agency said that data on nearly all of the millions of US security-clearance holders, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA) and military special operations personnel, were potentially exposed in the attack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

    • Second OPM Hack Revealed: Even Worse Than The First

      And yet… this is the same federal government telling us that it wants more access to everyone else’s data to “protect” us from “cybersecurity threats” — and that encryption is bad? Yikes.

    • Dossiers on US spies, military snatched in ‘SECOND govt data leak’

      A second data breach at the US Office of Personnel Management has compromised even more sensitive information about government employees than the first breach that was revealed earlier this week, sources claim. It’s possible at least 14 million Americans have chapter and verse on their lives leaked, we’re told.

      The Associated Press reports that hackers with close ties to China are believed to have obtained extensive background information on intelligence-linked government staffers – from CIA agents and NSA spies to military special ops – who have applied for security clearances.

      Among the records believed to have leaked from a compromised database are copies of Standard Form 86 [PDF], a questionnaire that is given to anyone who applies for a national security position, and is typically verified via interviews and background checks.

    • Officials: Second hack exposed military and intel data
    • Senate Quickly Says ‘No Way’ To Mitch McConnell’s Cynical Ploy To Add Bogus Cybersecurity Bill To NDAA

      Earlier this week, we noted that Senator Mitch McConnell, hot off of his huge flop in trying to preserve the NSA’s surveillance powers, had promised to insert the dangerous “cybersecurity” bill CISA directly into the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). As we discussed, while many have long suspected that CISA (and CISPA before it) were surveillance bills draped in “cybersecurity” clothing, the recent Snowden revelations that the NSA is using Section 702 “upstream” collection for “cybersecurity” issues revealed how CISA would massively expand the NSA’s ability to warrantlessly wiretap Americans’ communications.

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Protocols of the Hackers of Zion?

      When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Tuesday afternoon, he boasted about Israel’s “robust hi-tech and cyber industries.” According to The Jerusalem Post, “Netanyahu also noted that ‘Israel was making great efforts to diversify the markets with which it is trading in the technological field.’”

      Just how diversified and developed Israeli hi-tech innovation has become was revealed the very next morning, when the Russian cyber-security firm Kaspersky Labs, which claims more than 400 million users internationally, announced that sophisticated spyware with the hallmarks of Israeli origin (although no country was explicitly identified) had targeted three European hotels that had been venues for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

      Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, one of the first news sources to break the story, reported that Kaspersky itself had been hacked by malware whose code was remarkably similar to that of a virus attributed to Israel. Code-named “Duqu” because it used the letters DQ in the names of the files it created, the malware had first been detected in 2011. On Thursday, Symantec, another cyber-security firm, announced it too had discovered Duqu 2 on its global network, striking undisclosed telecommunication sites in Europe, North Africa, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. It said that Duqu 2 is much more difficult to detect that its predecessor because it lives exclusively in the memory of the computers it infects, rather than writing files to a drive or disk.

    • US wronging of China for cyber breaches harm mutual trust

      Out of ulterior motives, some US media and politicians have developed a habit of scapegoating China for any alleged cyber attack on the United States. Such groundless accusations would surely harm mutual trust between the two big powers of today’s world.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • WaPo Thinks if You Knew What You Wanted, You’d Want Lindsey Graham

      In a column headlined “The most interesting presidential candidate you’re not paying any attention to,” Cillizza bemoans the fact that “Graham is an asterisk—or close to it—in polling in every early state (except for his home state of South Carolina) and nationally.” Graham, he writes, is “generally regarded as a cause candidate, with that cause being to represent the most hawkish views on foreign policy and national security against attacks by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.”

    • Germans conflicted about the Bush brand

      Jeb Bush, kicking off a six-day European tour, will pay tribute on Tuesday to America’s alliance with Western Europe, calling it “as relevant as the day it was founded” and arguing that our long-time allies want a more engaged United States.

      Only here in Germany, that is not exactly so.

      Germans are conflicted about the Bush brand. While Jeb’s father is still lionized for helping to unify the country after the Cold War, his brother remains tremendously unpopular due to the Iraq War, viewed by most here as a singly American disaster.

      But more than that, Germany is increasingly indifferent to the United States as a whole; uncertain whether these two world powers have much in common any more or even still really need one another.

    • Report: CIA Director Secretly Briefed Israeli Intelligence Officials on Iran Nuclear Deal

      Relations between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been increasingly chilly, with Netanyahu appearing in March before Congress in Washington D.C. to denounce U.S. negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Making tiny earthquakes to understand fracking-driven quakes

      In some places, notably Ohio and Oklahoma, the injection of used fracking fluid in deep disposal wells appears to have produced a significant uptick in earthquake activity. The earthquakes are mostly much too small to be felt at the surface, but a magnitude 5.6 quake in Oklahoma was large enough to cause some damage in 2011.

      This has made lots of news because of its scale, but it’s not our first experience with injection-triggered earthquakes. It’s a concern for geothermal power designs that inject water to depths where it can turn to turbine-driving steam, for example. And in the future, it could be a concern for efforts to store carbon dioxide in underground reservoirs.

    • California drought: Largest water cuts in state’s history ordered by state regulators

      California state regulators have ordered farmers and others to reduce their water consumption, with the largest cuts in the state’s history.

      The State Water Resources Control Board ordered over 100 water rights holders to stop all pumping from three major waterways in one of the country’s prime farm regions.

      Economists and agriculture experts say that the cuts are expected to have little immediate impact on food prices, with the growing of some crops to shift to regions with more water in the short-term.

  • Finance

    • Why Does Obama Want This Trade Deal So Badly?

      The political battle over the enormous, twelve-nation trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership keeps getting stranger. President Obama has made the completion of the deal the number-one legislative priority of his second term. Indeed, Republican opponents of the T.P.P., in an effort to rally the red-state troops, have begun calling it Obamatrade. And yet most of the plan’s opponents are not Republicans; they’re Democrats.

      Obama’s chief allies in his vote-by-vote fight in the House of Representatives to win “fast-track authority” to negotiate this and other trade deals are Speaker John Boehner and Representative Paul Ryan—not his usual foxhole companions. The vote may come as soon as Friday. The House Republican leaders tell their dubious members that they are supporting Obama only in order to “constrain” him. Meanwhile, Obama is lobbying members of the Black Congressional Caucus, whose support he can normally count on, tirelessly and, for the most part, fruitlessly. “The president’s done everything except let me fly Air Force One,” Representative Cedric Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana, told the Christian Science Monitor this week. Nonetheless, Richmond said, “I’m leaning no.”

    • What Big Pharma wants from the big trade deal

      On Wednesday, a few pages from the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement were published by Wikileaks and reported on by the New York Times. They seemed to indicate changes that go against the wishes of the pharmaceutical industry, eliminating language that sought to guarantee drug companies “competitive market-derived prices” when they sell overseas.

      But the pharmaceutical industry has been lobbying lawmakers on the TPP since the beginning, and shaping far more than this one section of the agreement, according to Lee Drutman, senior fellow at the New America foundation and author of “The Business of America Is Lobbying.”

    • Revealed: The true scale of Tony Blair’s global business empire

      The scale of Tony Blair’s globe-trotting is exposed for the first time in secret documents that suggest the taxpayer is paying up to £16,000 a week to help the former prime minister build his business empire.

      Documents seen by The Telegraph contain details of Mr Blair’s travels around the world, accompanied by a squad of police bodyguards, flying on private jets and staying in five-star hotels.

      The files suggest Mr Blair has used identical trips to carry out both private business meetings and talks in his capacity as Quartet Representative to the Middle East – leaving him open to accusations of a potential conflict of interest.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Murdochs’ Generational Culture Of Corruption

      In announcing that his sons James and Lachlan will be largely taking control of his sprawling media company, press baron Rupert Murdoch did what observers always knew he wanted to do: pass on to his children the worldwide conglomerate that he’s built over the last five decades. In the United Sates, of course, that means handing over to his sons one of most important and influential voices in right-wing media and far-right politics, Fox News.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Israel exonerates itself over Gaza beach killings of four children last year

      Israeli investigation says missile attack that killed boys aged between nine and 11 was ‘tragic accident’ in findings contradictory to journalists’ reports from scene

    • The Killing of Children

      This denial of the truth and claim of victimhood extends to the accusation of anti-Semitism trumpeted at every critic, including this one, despite the fact that I have the highest respect for the immense cultural and scientific achievements of the Jewish people. Israel is a different question entirely.

      It is this absolute divorce of propaganda from reality that makes Tony Blair an ideal figurehead. Blair has now become head of a Council of Europe (loosely) linked body which claims to exist to promote tolerance, but in fact exists entirely to promote extreme Islamophobia and to shut down criticism of Israel. And it is a further sign of the estrangement from reality of the influential Israelis behind Blair’s appointment that they believe Tony Blair will influence public opinion positively in their favour. A remarkable example of confirmation bias.

    • Criminally Yours: Safety, But At What Cost?

      For years, just being a young African-American or Hispanic male in New York meant getting stopped randomly. Most of the people stopped not only had committed no crime to justify the stop, but, once frisked, had no contraband, weapons, drugs, etc. A few fish may have been caught in this over-inclusive net, but (to extend the metaphor), of the ones thrown back, how many were affected by the intrusion? My guess — all of them.

      Getting stopped by police for no reason hurts. Not only your time, but your sense of security. Bad feelings well up, suspiciousness of cops, a sense of insecurity when you walk down the street, a feeling that anything can happen at any time by the people posted there to protect you.

    • Trouble Not Over for Florida Parents of 11-Year-Old Taken in CPS Dispute

      Yesterday I ran an interview with the Florida mom whose children were removed from their home for a month after a neighbor reported the family to Child Protective Services because their 11-year-old son was left outside by himself for 90 minutes.

    • Court: Iowa Residents Have Right to Be Drunk on Front Porch

      The right to be drunk on the front porch of a private home was endorsed Friday by the Iowa Supreme Court, which said a woman can’t be convicted of public intoxication while standing on her front steps.

      Patience Paye, 29, of Waterloo based the appeal of her 2013 case on the contention that her front steps are not a public place so she can’t be charged with public intoxication.

    • Fast Track

      I am delighted that a judge yesterday ruled that the Fast Track asylum appeals system is illegal. It is the most appalling abuse, specifically designed to limit the capacity of individuals in life threatening circumstances to properly develop and present their legal case and put it before a judge. The system of putting law-abiding people, often families, into detention harsher than our harshest maximum security prisons, allowed just one hour a day out of a tiny cell for exercise, is a minor inconvenience compared to the fundamental denial of proper right to justice. The recent unjust deportation of Majid Ali was just the latest of a series of fast track cases I have encountered. Nadira has finished the script of a short film about a tragic couple, based on substantial research of true stories of fast track detention, and is developing the production.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Court Denies Requests to Keep New Net Neutrality Rules From Taking Effect on Friday

      In the months since the Federal Communications Commission voted to regulate the Internet like a public utility, opponents of the new rules have clamored to keep them from taking effect this Friday.

      On Thursday, those opponents were disappointed as a federal judge denied their requests to stay the rules while litigation proceeds against them. The court did grant an expedited hearing of the case, meaning it could be argued as soon as the fall or early winter.

    • Sneak attack! Congress’ plan to kill Net neutrality

      The FCC’s Net neutrality rules are slated to go into effect today, but the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday launched a sneak attack that could strip the agency of its ability to actually enforce the regulations that protect an open Internet.

      The rules approved by the FCC in February and published to the Federal Register in April reclassify broadband as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act and prohibit ISPs from throttling content or implementing paid prioritization schemes that would create Internet fast lanes.

    • Facebook will favor posts in News Feed based on time friends spend looking at them

      Facebook is about to get a much better idea of what you do and don’t like in your News Feed — even if you don’t click the like button. The company is about to start measuring how long you look posts, photos, and comments in your feed. The thinking is, if you linger on a status update and read a couple of comments, you probably are interested in that content. And if you’re interested in that update, your friends would probably like to see it as well.

06.11.15

Links 11/6/2015: Linux in DARPA Robotics Challenge, Fedora 22 Scientific

Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux vs GNU/Linux – A Reader’s Response

    What’s in a name? I think it is bigger than a name. Whatever the name might or might not be, I for one am very grateful to everyone involved. One small plea, I get an impression that not enough people make donations to software producers. I suspect even small donations would be appreciated from time to time. Whatever the name it is a remarkable movement.

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • StackIQ Has New Open Source Linux Server Provisioning Tool

      StackIQ is now offering an open source version of Stacki (short for “Stack Installer”), a Linux server provisioning tool. StackIQ initiated the open source project with the goal of providing systems administrators with a tool to install Linux at high speed. Stacki is a streamlined version of the base installer from StackIQ’s flagship product StackIQ Boss.Z

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • FLOSS Weekly 340: VeraCrypt

      Randal and Aaron are joined by Mounir Idrassi to talk about VeraCrypt. VeraCrypt is a free disk encryption software brought to you by IDRIX and is based on TrueCrypt 7.1a.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Call For Translators: coala!

        coala is a code analysis framework designed to ease the task of static code analysis for both users and developers. In the last months the coala community has been growing more and more active so we’re able to get even better code out to the world of free software.

      • Outreachy week 2 – personas

        I am honored to work with Gina this cycle on usability testing, as part of Outreachy and GNOME. We are off to a great start. I wanted to share Gina’s excellent description of personas, and how they are used in usability testing.

  • Distributions

    • Calamares 1.1-RC1 Distribution Installer Released

      Version 1.1-RC1 of the Calamares Linux distribution installer framework is now available. This distribution-independent installer has garnered the interest of Manjaro, Kubuntu, and others seeking to make a more unified, better Linux installer. With Calamares 1.1, more features are coming.

    • New Releases

      • Calculating the Test Drive

        I’ve been thinking of looking around for a new distribution, not that Mint hasn’t been a wonderful and stable system. Sabayon 15.06 was released last week and looked attractive in Jeremy Garcia’s screencast and screenshots. Neil Rickert tempted me with his notes on Tumbleweed 20150608 and the IgnorantGuru made OpenBSD sound doable. But I think I’ll check out Calculate Linux.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • My install for June

        I have been doing monthly installs of Tumbleweed, mainly to test out the installer. For June, I installed the 20150608 snapshot. I used the DVD installer (written to a USB), and this was for the 64-bit version.

    • Red Hat Family

      • CEO: Red Hat could outgrow Red Hat Tower in two years

        “It’s been fast,” says CEO Jim Whitehurst, adding that, at this pace, Red Hat Tower will be at capacity in two years. “We thought it would take a lot longer than that.”

      • CentOS 7 Linux 64-bit Vagrant Box Available Now

        Karanbir Singh had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of 64-bit (x86_64) images for the Vagrant open-source and cross-platform virtual development environment creation software.

      • Red Hat Updates JBoss Enterprise App Platform for Faster, Simpler DevOps and Hybrid Cloud Projects

        To help companies get the most from their cloud adoption, the latest upgrade to Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform adds features across the lifecycle to make it far easier to bring Java apps – and Java skillsets – to the world of hybrid clouds.

        The release of the latest edition of JBoss EAP (version 6.4) comes as the cloud is triggering big changes in how Red Hat’s customers are developing and deploying applications, Mike Piech, Red Hat’s vice president for middleware told IDN.

      • Red Hat: Beware of scary OpenStack support

        A SENIOR MANAGER at Red Hat has warned the community of the importance of ensuring that OpenStack users have sufficient, qualified support for their infrastructure.

        Alessandro Perilli, general manager for cloud management strategy at Red Hat, made the point in a blog post this week entitled Beware scary OpenStack support.

      • The hidden costs of embargoes

        It’s 2015 and it’s pretty clear the Open Source way has largely won as a development model for large and small projects. But when it comes to security we still practice a less-than-open model of embargoes with minimal or, in some cases, no community involvement. With the transition to more open development tools, such as Gitorious and GitHub, it is now time for the security process to change and become more open.

      • Red Hat Summit, syslog-ng, Docker containers

        Based on user feedback and website stats a large part of syslog-ng users are running it on the Red Hat family of operating systems: Fedora, RHEL, CentOS and other RHEL derivatives. This is true both for the syslog-ng Open Source Edition and the syslog-ng Premium Edition. This is only one of the reasons that this year BalaBit is a sponsor of the Red Hat Summit and will be present with a booth. You will be able to ask BalaBit engineers about syslog-ng or any other software from our IT security portfolio: Shell Control Box, our privileged activity monitoring software and even our upcoming user behavior analytics software, Blindspotter. There are several interesting new features in syslog-ng to discuss: language bindings to Java and Python are coming to syslog-ng OSE 3.7, while Perl and Lua will stay in the syslog-ng incubator. The new, Java-based Elasticsearch destination helps to create a high performance Elasticsearch syslog-ng Kibana (ESK) stack. Kafka support is also coming, which is a high-performance distributed messaging system. It is gaining popularity as a centralized interface because it can consolidate a wide range of enterprise log data for downstream processing.

      • Change is brutal, even in an open organization

        Change management is one of the most popular topics in business literature, and something I first encountered during my evening MBA studies while I was working at Red Hat. The most surprising thing that I learned in business school, which I continue to think of often, is the fact that so many organizational change initiatives fail (some say more than 70%; my professor said 90%), despite the fact that we have a well documented and proven formula for their success. Do 70% of leaders of change initiatives forget to read the book?

      • Notable Session Mover: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

        A notable mover in today’s trading session is Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) as the stock opened the most recent session at 78.82 and at the time of writing the last Bid was at 78.30. In the current trading session the stock reached as high as 78.97 and dipped down to 78.11. Red Hat, Inc. Common Stock, a NYQ listed company, has a current market cap of 14.35B and on average over the past 3 months has seen 1358910 shares trade hands on a daily basis.

      • Red Hat: Don’t Cloud Over the Importance of Support

        A few months ago when Nebula folded, and then again this month when tech titans IBM and Cisco announced high-profile purchases of OpenStack-focused companies, we drove home the point that the OpenStack scene is starting to consolidate. Eventually, there will only be a few players of any significance, and I’ve made the point before that support will be the big differentiator as enterprises increasingly deploy OpenStack.

      • Fedora

        • HP Linux Imaging and Printing 3.15.6 Adds Support for Fedora 22

          HP was happy to announce earlier today, June 10, the immediate availability for download of the sixth maintenance release of its HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging and Printing) 3.15 software.

        • Fedora 22 Scientific

          As you can see, the new home for Fedora Scientific looks amazing. The “Featured Applications” section features the most important and useful tools in Fedora Scientific. I think that is a great idea. Everyone associated with it, thank you very much.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian-branded USB keys

        I’ve had some 8GB USB keys made, with the Debian swirl and text. By buying a reasonable number, I’ve got what I think is a good price for nice high-quality keys (metal body with a solid loop for attaching to a keyring). I’m now selling these for 7 pounds each, and I’m planning on bringing some to DebConf 15 too, where they’ll be 10 EUR.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) Is Now Rebased on Linux Kernel 4.0.5

            Canonical, through Joseph Salisbury, has announced the summary of the Ubuntu Kernel Team meeting that took place on June 9, 2015, which concerns their activity on the Linux kernel packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.

          • Canonical Patches Five Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

            After releasing kernel updates for the Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems, Canonical announced on June 10 the immediate availability of a new kernel update of its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) distro.

          • Ubuntu’s MAAS (Metal as a Service) 1.7 Update to Arrive Soon with Many New Features

            Canonical, through Andres Rodriguez, has recently announced that the 1.7 version of their MAAS (Metal as a Service) software that brings the language of the cloud to physical servers will arrive soon with multiple new features.

          • New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in Ubuntu 15.04, 14.10, and 14.04 LTS

            After having announced the immediate availability of a new and important kernel update for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system, Canonical has announced that the Ubuntu 15.04, 14.10, and 14.04 LTS distros have also received new kernel updates.

          • First Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 Stable Version Is Out

            Snappy Ubuntu Core is a new version of Ubuntu, designed to work with transactional updates and aimed at clouds and embedded devices at least for now. A stable version, this new OS has been released by Canonical and joins the other flavors in the 15.04 cycle.

          • Unity 8 to Correct the Online Search Features from Unity 7

            The search in Unity has been the source of serious debates in the past few years, but that should change dramatically with the new Unity 8, which no longer needs the current privacy tab that is available in the options.

          • Ubuntu 15.10 Is Now Based on Kernel 4.0.5, But the System’s Final Version Will Use Kernel 4.1

            Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury has recently announced that Kernel 4.0.5 has been made the default kernel of Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, being already used on the daily images.

          • Vimix Icons Another Great Lightweight Icon Set for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

            Vimix icon set is elegant, modern, lightweight designed for Linux desktop. It offers flat type style with a minimal use of shadows for depth. This icon theme is based on two icon sets are Numix Circle and Paper icons by snwh. Since this icon theme based on two icon sets, the creator recommends that install those icons as well to get enhanced and greater experience. Vimix icons offers two panel theme so if you are using dark theme then you can select Vimix dark and if you are using light theme then you can select light version. It is compatible with most of the Linux desktop environments such as Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, Lxde, and others. For this icon theme most of the application icons available, still if you found any missing icon or bug in this set then report it. Ambiance Blackout Colors theme used in following screenshots. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool or Ubuntu-Tweak to change themes/icons.

          • System76 unveils hardcore Serval WS laptop running Ubuntu Linux

            If you are a Linux user looking to buy a computer, System76 is one of the best manufacturers to target. Rather than buy a Windows machine and formatting the drive to install your favorite distro, the company’s machines come pre-loaded with Ubuntu. Even cooler, its laptops do not have the Windows logo on the super key, instead having the Ubuntu logo. Even if you are a fan of a different distro such as Fedora, supporting a Linux-focused seller is good for the overall community.

          • WIN! The Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition

            The Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition’s slim design and 4.5 inch screen are perfect to experience Ubuntu’s edge interactions and Scopes.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux powers DARPA Robotics Challenge winner

      A Xenomai Linux based robot from Korea’s Team KAIST called the DRC-Hubo won the $2 million DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, one of only three bots to complete the course on time.

      Judging by Silicon Valley’s reigning “Failure rocks!” mantra, this week’s DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals held earlier this week in Pomona, California, was a resounding success. Of the 23 teams that entered the event, which simulated a disaster response scenario, only three accomplished all eight major tasks in the allotted eight hours. The pit crews were kept busy with a field littered with falling robots.

    • Logic Supply Announces Linux-Compatible Fanless PC with Unparalleled Features

      Logic Supply, a renown industrial and embedded computer manufacturer, which you might remember from an article we wrote last week that the company sells Ubuntu-powered industrial and embedded systems, has announced recently that they will release a new series of ventless and fanless PCs with unmatched mix of performance, reliability, and I/O.

    • Raspberry Pi stays sky high in 2015 Hacker SBC Survey

      Last month, LinuxGizmos.com and the Linux Foundation’s Linux.com community website sponsored a 10-day SurveyMonkey survey that asked readers of both sites to choose their favorite three Linux- or Android-based open-spec single-board computers. This year, 1,721 respondents — more than twice the number from the 2014 survey — selected their favorites from a list of 53 SBCs, compared to last year’s 32.

    • DRC-HUBO Run Linux and It Just Won the DARPA Robotics Challenge

      The DARPA Robotics Challenge is now over, and the competition has been won by a team from South Korea with a robot called DRC-HUBO. It’s not hard to imagine that the robot is actually running a modified Linux distribution.

    • Top 10 Linux and Android Hacker SBCs of 2015
    • Top 10 Best Hacker SBC Boards of 2015

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Corporate Russia to have a Secure Tizen Smartphone by the end of 2015

          The Tizen Smartphone has been released in India, Bangladesh and soon Sri Lanka, but there is another country that has firm Interest in Tizen, Russia. The federation has a historical mis-trust of Google & Apple and could find a new alternative to BlackBerry for its secure Corporate needs.

      • Android

Free Software/Open Source

  • DT Exec Pressures Vendors on Open Source

    One of Deutsche Telekom’s virtualization experts has said operators must pressure vendors into adopting open source practices or face the risk of depending on a single supplier for critical infrastructure.

  • SourceForge Not Making A Graceful Exit

    If SourceForge were a person and I were the New York Times, I’d make certain I had an obituary on file right about now. It’s obvious that the once essential code repository for open source projects is terminally ill, although it’s just as obvious that Dice Holdings, which took over ownership of the site nearly three years ago, has no plans of letting SourceForge go gently into the good night, so we’ll probably see more kicking and noise-making until the lights are inevitably extinguished.

  • SourceForge under fire again for Nmap page [Ed: SourceForge says that's not the case]
  • Open Sourcing Pinot: Scaling the Wall of Real-Time Analytics

    Last fall we introduced Pinot, LinkedIn’s real-time analytics infrastructure, that we built to allow us to slice and dice across billions of rows in real-time across a wide variety of products. Today we are happy to announce that we have open sourced Pinot. We’ve had a lot of interest in Pinot and are excited to see how it is adopted by the open source community.

  • Facebook open sourcing mobile bug analyzer Infer

    Among the apps within Facebook’s portfolio already using Infer include the standard Facebook apps for Android and iOS, Facebook Messenger and Instagram.

  • Facebook Open-Sources Infer To Help Developers Identify Bugs Before They’re Shipped

    Facebook today announced that it is open sourcing Infer, a static program analyzer the company uses to find bugs in mobile code before it’s shipped. Internally, the company uses this tool to analyze the Facebook apps for Android and iOS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and others.

  • Open Source Groups Release SDN and NFV Software

    Things are moving smartly forward in the world of upstart, disruptive networking technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), as open source stewards in both camps have come out with new software releases.

  • Events

    • How TYPO3 meetups help improve the technology, community, and business

      Peer-production is one of the strengths of open source projects. TYPO3, a self-organized project without corporate backing, always lived from the spirit of sharing ideas, work, and values. It’s not by accident that one of our core values is, “Inspire people to share.” Over the years, as a result of the massive success of TYPO3 as a product, core team members became increasingly decoupled from the work with clients. Instead, they focused on the core development. On one hand, this transition was great because it means a lot of people have contributed their time and passion into the product. But on the other hand, the change brought disadvantages.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • ownCloud 8.0.4 Brings Better Support for Internet Explorer 8 and 9

      ownCloud had the pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release of the ownCloud 8.0 DIY (Do It Yourself) open-source self-hosting cloud storage solution.

    • Bright Computing Offers Guided Private OpenStack Deployment Solution

      Are you looking for an automated, guided way to deploy OpenStack? Some people feel daunted relying on nothing but documentation, and want a wizard-style approach to a new software installation. That’s exactly what the folks at Bright Computing are banking on. At the recent OpenStack Summit, they showed off Bright OpenStack, billed as a complete, standalone OpenStack private cloud solution. It even features a wizard to guide you through installation.

  • Databases

    • Dutch land registry opens up to Postgresql

      The Dutch Kadaster (Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency) has switched to using Postgresql for four of its major business solutions. “Open source allows us to deliver services at lower costs”, says Paul Schluck, one of the database administrators at the land registry.

    • Postgresql to detect nuclear explosions

      France’s nuclear energy and defence research institute CEA is looking for help with maintenance of Postgresql, an open source relational database management system. The institute this week published a call for tender, aiming to design a seismic, infrasound, hydroacoustic and radionuclide monitoring system, as part of its task to monitor compliance to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

    • The NoSQL and Hadoop disruptive open source dividend

      Beyond the LAMP stack, open source technology for development of enterprise class applications has arguably become mainstream, especially in modern databases like NoSQL and Hadoop based systems. They are unlocking huge value.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Enables GTK3 VCL Plug-In Building By Default

      With the newest LibreOffice Git code, the GTK3 support code compiling is enabled by default. However, this is just building for the GTK3 VCL plug-in. At run-time, the GTK3 usage is still disabled by default. A –disable-gtk3 option is available for those not wanting to build with the GTK3 support.

  • Business

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD As A Linux Desktop Replacement

      I recently tried out OpenBSD as a possible answer to recent Linux engineering. I thought I’d share my notes here on my results, from a beginner’s and Linux user’s perspective. (I tried FreeBSD briefly before as well.) If you’ve used OpenBSD more extensively on the desktop, your feedback on any of this is welcome too – I’d like to know what you think of my opinions, you being a longer-term user.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • European Union’s 5-year roadmap for IT and open source

      While the DSM does not explicitly state it, to achieve a lot of these objectives, open standards will be essential. While many parts of the strategy are explicit in their proposed actions, this section has been written in broad strokes. For this reason, open source/open standards proponents must stay engaged both to help steer the DSM toward a positive outcome and for fear that the DSM may instead seek to secure the “free flow of data” via mandating contractual requirements and cumbersome and problematic data ownership definitions.

  • Licensing

    • Wayland’s MIT License To Be Updated/Corrected

      Bryce Harrington sent out the patches today for the in-tree license text to be updated. He clarified the situation a few weeks after the matter was brought to the attention of Wayland developers with the FAQ and license text not matching.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Google Made Its Secret Blueprint Public to Boost Its Cloud

      Craig McLuckie took the idea to Urs Hölzle, the man who oversees Google’s global network of computer data centers, and Hölzle didn’t like it.

      Together with two other engineers in Google’s Seattle office, McLuckie wanted to recreate Borg as an open source project. Borg is the sweeping software tool that drives everything from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps, letting the company carefully parcel computing tasks across that global network. For years, it was one of the company’s best kept secrets. And McLuckie wanted to share its blueprint—or at least some of it—with the rest of the internet.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • W3C Adopts new Software and Document License

      W3C today adopted a new Software and Document License, an update to the W3C Software License, as the default permissive license in cases such as relicensing of unfinished specs where W3C has decided to use a permissive license. The Software and Document License, compatible with the GPL, permits copying and modification with attribution (by inclusion of a reference to the original W3C document), and can be used in W3C Community Groups, among other venues. All work that W3C has previously made available under the prior W3C Software License is also made available under the new Software and Document License.

Leftovers

  • Mesosphere Datacenter OS available on AWS, coming to Azure soon

    DCOS is designed to help enterprises unlock the next generation of scale, efficiency and automation. The Mesosphere DCOS pools datacenter and compute resources, givesIT operators a much simple administration model, and improves developer velocity with more modern abstractions and APIs for writing distributed system.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • VIDEO: Making Polluters Pay Us Is Step 9 to Save the Economy

      Instead of investing in dirty fuels, let’s start charging polluters for poisoning our skies – and then invest the revenue so that it benefits everyone.

      Each ton of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere costs our nation between $40 and $100, and we release millions tons of it every year.

      Businesses don’t pay that cost. They pass it along to the rest of us—in the form of more extreme weather and all the costs to our economy and health resulting from it.

      We’ve actually invested more than $6 trillion in fossil fuels since 2007. The money has been laundered through our savings and tax dollars.

  • Finance

    • ‘Say Anything’ Time to Pass Fast Track

      Yes, folks, it’s desperation time for the supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). To get this sucker through, they will say anything, because, hey, making stuff up for the cause always sells in official Washington.

    • Thoughts on Greece

      I have witnessed IMF prescriptions in developing countries which have had abysmal results. Forcing African countries to break up their electricity utilities between producers and distributors in order to favour private electricity producers, has been an absolute disaster. It has simply meant that disproportionate percentages of electricity revenue – and effective tax subsidy of electricity prices for the majority population – has been diverted into the capacious pockets of international financiers and bankers. I have no doubt the result has been less electricity generated. I don’t even want to discuss the IMF’s immoral insistence that in Africa the very poor have to pay for clean drinking water.

    • As currency dies, Zimbabweans will get $5 for 175 quadrillion local dollars

      Zimbabweans will start exchanging ‘quadrillions’ of local dollars for a few U.S. dollars next week, as President Robert Mugabe’s government discards its virtually worthless national currency, the central bank said on Thursday.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Rupert Murdoch Reportedly Stepping Down As 21st Century Fox CEO

      Rupert Murdoch is preparing to step down as the CEO of 21st Century Fox, according to CNBC, planning to hand control of the media conglomerate to his son, James.

      CNBC, citing unnamed sources in the mogul’s family, said the announcement will come soon though it’s not clear when Murdoch would step aside.

    • James Murdoch Reportedly Taking Over As CEO Of Fox News’ Parent Company

      Rupert Murdoch is reportedly planning to step down as CEO of Fox News parent company 21st Century Fox “and hand that title to his son James,” according to CNBC. James Murdoch previously resigned his role as the head of News International — which published several tabloids and newspapers abroad — amid the widespread scandal over phone hacking at News of the World, a since-shuttered UK tabloid he oversaw. As part of the fallout from that scandal, Murdoch also resigned his position as chairman of UK satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

    • Rupert Murdoch preparing to step down as Fox CEO: reports

      Rupert Murdoch, the 84-year-old chief executive of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc, is preparing to step down and name his son James as successor, CNBC reported on Thursday, citing sources close to the Murdoch family.

  • Censorship

    • Reddit censorship results in mass exodus to Voat.co

      Reddit, which has long billed itself as “the front page of the Internet” is facing a massive revolt by its members due to perceived censorship. The folks running Reddit have removed a number of subreddits and that’s what sparked the revolt and the mass exodus to Voat.co.

    • Will Reddit Revolt Against Ellen Pao?

      There are early indications that the Reddit admins may have finally crossed the Rubicon on the road to alienating their user base. User activity on their main competitor, Voat.co had been rising steadily since social media censorship became an issue during the #GamerGate controversy, but in the past few hours their figures have skyrocketed. At the time of writing, there are over 3,700 active users on Voat’s alternative to /r/fatpeoplehate —almost double its number of subscribers.

  • Privacy

    • UK intelligence agencies should keep mass surveillance powers, report says

      UK intelligence agencies should be allowed to retain controversial intrusive powers to gather bulk communications data but ministers should be stripped of their powers to authorise surveillance warrants, according to a major report on British data law.

      The 373-page report published on Thursday – A Question of Trust, by David Anderson QC – calls for government to adopt “a clean-slate” approach in legislating later this year on surveillance and interception by GCHQ and other intelligence agencies.

      However, Downing Street hinted that David Cameron was unlikely to accept one of his key recommendations: shifting the power to agree to warrants from home and foreign secretaries to a proposed new judicial commissioner.

      The prime minister’s spokeswoman said the authorities needed to be able “to respond quickly and effectively to threats of national security or serious crime”, which appears to suggest ministers are better positioned to do this than judges.

    • Fake mobile phone towers found to be ‘actively listening in’ on calls in UK

      More than 20 “intrusive” fake mobile phone towers that eavesdrop on public conversations have been found active in the UK, the first time the technology has been detected in the country.

      The IMSI catchers, also known as Stingrays, have been found to be operating in London, but the Metropolitan Police have refused to say who is controlling them or what is being done with the information they are gathering.

    • Fake mobile phone towers discovered in London: Stingrays come to the UK

      Fake mobile phone masts that can be used to eavesdrop on telephone conversations without users being aware have been discovered in London by Sky News. IMSI catchers, also known as “stingrays” after a US company that makes such devices, have been widely used in the US for years. They work by sending out a signal that tricks a mobile phone into connecting with the stingray, rather than a legitimate base station, allowing information to be gathered about the device and its conversations by carrying out a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.

    • Anderson review: “It is time for a clean slate”

      The UK’s Independent Review of Terrorism Legislation has said, “it is time for a clean slate” when it comes to surveillance law in the UK. In his report published today, David Anderson QC condemned the current legislative framework as, “fragmented, obscure, under constant challenge and variable in the protections that it affords the innocent”.

    • Study: Surveillance will cost US tech sector more than $35B by 2016

      A new study says that the U.S. tech industry is likely to lose more than $35 billion from foreign customers by 2016 because of concerns over government surveillance.

      “In short, foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies,” the authors of a new study from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation write.

    • Exclusive: U.S. tech industry appeals to Obama to keep hands off encryption

      As Washington weighs new cybersecurity steps amid a public backlash over mass surveillance, U.S. tech companies warned President Barack Obama not to weaken increasingly sophisticated encryption systems designed to protect consumers’ privacy.

      In a strongly worded letter to Obama on Monday, two industry associations for major software and hardware companies said, “We are opposed to any policy actions or measures that would undermine encryption as an available and effective tool.”

      The Information Technology Industry Council and the Software and Information Industry Association, representing tech giants, including Apple Inc, Google Inc, Facebook Inc, IBM and Microsoft Corp, fired the latest salvo in what is shaping up to be a long fight over government access into smart phones and other digital devices.

    • The Computers Are Listening: NSA Won’t Say If It Automatically Transcribes American Phone Calls in Bulk

      When it comes to the National Security Agency’s recently disclosed use of automated speech recognition technology to search, index and transcribe voice communications, people in the United States may well be asking: But are they transcribing my phone calls?

      The answer is maybe.

      A clear-cut answer is elusive because documents in the Snowden archive describe the capability to turn speech into text, but not the extent of its use — and the U.S. intelligence community refuses to answer even the most basic questions on the topic.

      Asked about the application of speech-to-text to conversations including Americans, Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said at a Capitol Hill event in May that the NSA has “all sorts of technical capabilities” and that they are all used in a lawful manner.

      “I’m not specifically acknowledging or denying the existence of any particular capability,” he said. “I’m only saying that the focus needs to be on what are the authorities the NSA is using, and what are the protections around the execution of those authorities?”

      So what are those authorities? And what are the protections around their execution?

  • Civil Rights

    • Veteran police officer in Des Moines, Iowa, shoots unarmed Ryan Bolinger through car window

      A police officer in Des Moines, Iowa, shot an unarmed man dead on Tuesday evening, after he got out his vehicle and started “walking with a purpose” towards her car.

      Police officer Vanessa Miller, who has seven years’ experience, shot 28-year-old Ryan Keith Bolinger, after he led her and Ian Lawler, another senior officer, on a slow chase through the city streets.

    • Concocting a Crime-Ageddon to Promote Police Power

      The New York Post, the notorious right-wing tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, inspired a media stampede of stories highlighting increases in New York City’s crime statistics. The hysterical headline “You’re 45% More Likely to Be Murdered in de Blasio’s Manhattan” (5/26/15) served as a springboard for other local media outlets to question if the city was suddenly a crime-ridden hellhole under Mayor Bill de Blasio–presented by the Post as a liberal on policing.

    • Tolerance and Tim Hunt

      You can’t tolerate that which to you is inoffensive. Toleration necessarily implies putting up with people who hold views or exhibit behaviour which you do not like. The hounding of Professor Tim Hunt from his University position is an exhibition of extreme intolerance.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • House Tries To Use Appropriations Bill To Kill Neutrality Rules, Strip FCC Authority And Funding

      For most of the last few months the House has been holding a series of “investigative” hearings into the FCC’s passage of net neutrality rules. On the surface, the hearings claim to be aimed at ensuring the FCC is operating transparently and within the confines of its authority, but in reality the hearings have been about one thing: publicly shaming the FCC for standing up to deep-pocketed campaign contributors like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Of course this never-ending “fact finding mission” has accomplished absolutely nothing in relation to finding notable facts, but it has proven useful in riling up a base utterly convinced that net neutrality rules destroy the Internet. All on the taxpayer dime, no less.

      [...]

      Obviously these lawsuits could go on for several years, and well into the term of a new Administration, one many House members hope would then strike the rules from the books. Of course much like the never-ending hearings shaming the FCC, this is largely a partisan patty cake show pony, since it won’t be signed by the President. Still, it’s very sweet of the House to be so incredibly worried about consumers and the health of the Internet that they’ll work tirelessly to protect ISPs’ god-given right to abuse the lack of last mile broadband competition.

    • Net neutrality rules to go into effect after court rejects bid to block them

      In what FCC chairman Tom Wheeler calls ‘a huge victory,’ the rules will go into effect Friday despite a handful of lawsuits challenging them

  • DRM

    • EC opens antitrust probe into Amazon’s iffy e-book agreements

      THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION (EC) has opened yet another investigation into Amazon and is this time probing the company’s allegedly questionable e-book distribution agreements.

    • Antitrust: Commission opens formal investigation into Amazon’s e-book distribution arrangements

      The European Commission has opened a formal antitrust investigation into certain business practices by Amazon in the distribution of electronic books (“e-books”). The Commission will in particular investigate certain clauses included in Amazon’s contracts with publishers. These clauses require publishers to inform Amazon about more favourable or alternative terms offered to Amazon’s competitors and/or offer Amazon similarterms and conditions than to its competitors, or through other means ensure that Amazon is offered terms at least as good as those for its competitors.

06.10.15

Links 10/6/2015: New Krita/Calligra and Clonezilla

Posted in News Roundup at 4:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Blockstream to Release First Open Source Code for Sidechains

    Blockstream has announced it will release an open source codebase and testing environment for its signature sidechains project.

  • Huawei Certified to Offer Apache Spark Open Source Big Data Processing Framework

    Huawei, this week announced that it has become the first global ICT vendor to obtain certification by Databricks for distribution of the Apache Spark open source big data processing framework. Databricks, a company founded by the creators of Spark, has developed the “Certified Spark Distribution” program to highlight and recognize third party vendors distributing Spark. Leveraging the high-performance big data computing architecture and the complete ecosystem of Spark, the Huawei-Spark platform is designed to help customers realize the full potential of data assets to drive agile operation and business innovation.

  • Teradata to Advance Big Data Analytics with Support for Presto Open Source SQL Query Engine

    To help users extract insights from data lakes,Teradata has made a multi-year commitment to contribute to Presto’s open source development. Based on a three-part roadmap, Teradata’s says its contributions will be 100% open source under the Apache license and will advance Presto’s code base, scalability, iterative querying, and ability to query multiple data repositories.

  • Why an open web is important for India

    Priyanka Nag is a technical writer for Red Hat and Mozilla Rep from India. Priyanka has been contributing to open source projects for the past four years. She started by editing Wikipedia pages, and then was introduced to Mozilla during an event at her college. She says that Mozilla was love at first sight, and soon after she became a Mozillian, she was hooked on the project. Now Priyanka is also a regular speaker at community events in India. I recently caught up with Priyanka to learn more about her work in the Mozilla Community and her thoughts on the importance of the open web in India.

  • What TODO means for open source community

    Open source software is not just meant for still-struggling start-ups that can’t afford to pay the licensing fees for proprietary software, and budget-conscious, modest small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) hoping to cut down on IT costs. This was proven in late September when several major companies – running the gamut from technology, right through to retail and media – came together to form the TODO project.

  • 8 excellent open source data visualization tools

    Data visualization is the mechanism of taking tabular or spatial data and conveying it in a human-friendly and visual way. There are several open source tools that can help you create useful, informative graphs. In this post we will take a look at eight open source, data visualization tools.

  • Wine Will Migrate Away from SourceForge

    If you’re reading the news lately, you might know that the SourceForge project hosting website has been accused of hijacking open-source software that have been abandoned by their maintainers or did not have some activity for an extended period of time.

  • The Cloud vs. Open Source

    For years, Linux and free software were perceived as threatened by cloud computing, the online storage of data. However, over the last few years, something ironic happened — free software became a major player in cloud computing.

  • Events

    • Graphics Microconference Accepted into 2015 Linux Plumbers Conference

      Although the Year of the Linux Desktop has yet to arrive, a surprising number of Linux users nevertheless need graphics support. This is because there have been a number of years of the Linux smartphone, the Linux television, the Linux digital sign/display/billboard, the Linux automobile, and more. This microconference will cover a number of topics including atomic modesetting in KMS, buffer allocation, verified-secure graphics pipelines, fencing and synchronisation, Wayland, and more.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla responds to Firefox user backlash over Pocket integration

        Pocket is a service for managing a reading list of online articles (it allows you to save stories, videos, and websites to check out later). Pocket is already offered as a Firefox add-on, and although Mozilla was developing a homegrown Reading List feature for the browser, the company decided to simply integrate Pocket directly into Firefox.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Cisco, IBM Bet Big on OpenStack

      Cisco and IBM are doubling down on OpenStack, hoping “the result lets them develop a solution that will scale. Neither company is yet willing to abandon OpenStack, and both feel there’s still a solution in it someplace,” said tech analyst Rob Enderle. By acquiring Piston Cloud Computing and Blue Box Cloud, they “may correct some of the problems with OpenStack, which should improve penetration.”

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Rancher Labs is the Latest to Cash in on Container Technology

      Container technology remains red hot and VC money is flowing toward it. Rancher Labs, a startup developing Docker infrastructure software, has announced $10 million in Series A funding from Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners. “With the rapid adoption of container technology, the company’s open source software has grown in popularity by allowing organizations to run containers in production, across any cloud,” Rancher Labs’ leaders have stated.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Dutch government agency switches core services to open source

      Public administrations that switch to open source regain financial scalability, says Jan-Taeke Schuilenga, IT architect at DUO, the Dutch government agency managing the financing of the country’s educational institutions. “We had reached the limit of proprietary licence possibilities. Switching to open source gave us freedom of choice.”

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Licensing Standards that Include Code: Heads or Tails?

      Once upon a time, standards were standards and open source software was open source software (OSS), and the only thing people worried about was whether the copyright and patent rules relating to the standards would prevent them from being implemented in OSS. Actually, that was complicated enough, but it seems simple in comparison now that OSS is being included in the standards themselves. Now what?

      If this sounds unusual and exotic, it isn’t. In fact, code has been creeping into standards for years, often without the keepers of the intellectual property rights (IPR) Policies governing the standards even being aware of it.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Republicans Trashed Democracy in Michigan. Now They Want To Trash It in Your State, Too.

      One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit. Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single, state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigan’s austerity-promoting governor. This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but gives Snyder’s appointee the power to do just about anything, including dissolving the city itself—all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

    • 5 Ways Powerful People Trick You Into Hating Protesters

      Let’s say that tomorrow you are elected Secret Ruler of the USA, a position that gives you total power over the government, economy, and the culture at large — everything that hippies refer to as “the system.” Now, your first job is to not get beheaded by rioting peasants, which means your first job is really to maintain “stability” (i.e., “keeping things mostly the way they are”).

      Immediately you’ll find that you’re facing a never-ending stream of protests from disgruntled groups who say they’re being treated unfairly or otherwise getting left out — this group over here is upset that somebody got abused by the police; this other bunch is demanding better wages or something. How do you handle it? Sure, you could crush their movements with an iron fist, using violence to kill, intimidate or arrest their most vocal members. But that can backfire, often turning them into martyrs and proving them right in the process — you’ve seen Star Wars; somebody always finds the exhaust port.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Why Did It Take the Pentagon a Month to Figure Out Its Files Were Compromised?

      Edward Snowden’s leaks exposed a federal government unable to protect its most sensitive secrets.

    • Feds Must Encrypt Government Websites by Dec. 2016

      The White House now requires all publicly accessible federal websites and services to use a secure HTTPS connection.

      Government agencies have until Dec. 31, 2016 to comply with the new HTTPS-Only Standard directive.

      Unencrypted HTTP connections “create a vulnerability and expose potentially sensitive information about users,” U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott said in this week’s announcement. That includes data like browser identity, website content, search terms, and other user-submitted details.

    • Obama lawyers asked secret court to ignore public court’s decision on spying

      The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.

      The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

    • French Surveillance Bill: Public Liberties Abandoned as Senators Cast Disastrous Vote

      The Surveillance Bill was adopted today by the French Senate with 251 votes for, 68 against and 26 abstentions. This bill was fast tracked and discussed under the pressure of a government wielding the argument of an extreme terrorist risk to impose massive spying of the French population with expansive purposes. It will put France under a surveillance all at once diffuse, intrusive, indiscriminate and without effective control. La Quadrature du Net bitterly regrets the blindness of the French Parliamentarians and calls on citizens not to give up on their liberties.

  • Civil Rights

    • Six lies they told me about the anti-Israel boycott

      The bulk of recent incidents concerning the anti-Israel boycott, which are mainly symbolic for now, could have served as a warning sign. But a mixture of nationalistic and false statements is blinding the Israeli public and preventing a real discussion of the issue. Here are a few examples.

    • British tourist Eleanor Hawkins arrested for naked photo on top of Malaysian mountain

      A British woman arrested in Malaysia for posing naked on top of a sacred mountain has been named as Eleanor Hawkins.

      The 24-year-old Southampton University graduate from Derby was detained on Tuesday at Tawau airport, as she was flying out from the island of Borneo to the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

    • Theresa May Condemns Majid Ali and Defies Scotland

      Despite numerous representations and an Early Day Motion signed by the large majority of Scotland’s MPs, Theresa May has ordered that Majid Ali, a Glasgow City College student, be deported back to almost certain torture and probable death in Pakistan in just twenty minutes from now. I attended the demonstration on his behalf yesterday at the Scottish Office.

      Majid is a member of the much persecuted Baloch minority. Two of his immediate family have been “disappeared” by the Pakistani military since his asylum application was submitted. There is no doubt that given the numerous MP’s who have raised his case, and the well-supported early day motion, civil servants will have put the decision to May personally. She was however not even prepared to grant a delay for a look at the evidence. May is very likely not merely pandering to the racist UKIP voting electorate – she is on the far right of politics herself. The callous sacrifice of Majid Ali is proof, if any more were needed, that this Conservative administration is nothing to do with Cameron’s purported “compassionate conservatism.” They are the nasty party indeed.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EU Commission Tries to Rip Citizens Off Net Neutrality

      The European Commission attacks Net Neutrality again, by introducing a “compromise document” that refuses to enshrine a definition of this crucial principle into the law. A strong coalition including the EU Council, the European Commission and a handful of MEPs is working against the general interest by including loopholes that will be used by the telecom lobby to circumvent the proposed protections against discrimination, thereby undermining fundamental rights and innovation.

    • EU digi-chief to meet ministers and sort out the net neutrality thing

      Gaffe-prone Gunther H-dot, Europe’s digital chief, has waded into the net neutrality debate once again, but has vowed to sort everything out in a meeting with national ministers next Friday.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • EU vice-president: Copyright legislation is “pushing people to steal”

        Andrus Ansip, the European Commission’s Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, has admitted that EU copyright law is “pushing people to steal,” because they seek out illegal copies of works that are not available to them legally because of the widespread use of geoblocking in Europe.

      • Elsevier Cracks Down on Pirated Scientific Articles

        Academic publishing company Elsevier has filed a complaint at a New York District Court, hoping to shut down the Library Genesis project and the SciHub.org search engine. The sites, which are particularly popular in developing nations where access to academic works is relatively expensive, are accused of pirating millions of scientific articles.

      • Kim Dotcom’s MegaNet Preps Jan 2016 Crowdfunding Campaign

        Kim Dotcom’s dream of a people-powered, censorship-resistant Internet will rely on the goodwill of supporters to get off the ground. In an announcement this morning, the entrepreneur confirmed that his MegaNet project will seek equity via a crowd-funding campaign set to launch on the January 2016 anniversary of the raid on Megaupload.

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