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03.21.16

Links 21/3/2016: Blender 2.77, Libreplanet 2016 Coverage

Posted in News Roundup at 6:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Seriously, the FCC might still ban your operating system

    A few weeks ago Julius Knapp of the FCC responded to the furor in the free, libre and open source software communities related to the agency’s proposed rules on banning WiFi device modification. In his response, he sought to reassure the community that their proposals will not restrict open source firmware on devices.

  • How community building can help an organization’s bottom line
  • 16 resources for measuring open source community ROI
  • Director of Google.org on challenges of unconscious bias

    Their conversation focused on a topic that is near and dear to the open source community: diversity in tech. Google’s workplace is 70% male, so hiring more women and minorities interested in technology is a big issue for them. They know that they will create better products if they have a more diverse team. And, Jacquelline says we’re seeing that companies founded by women are not getting the same results to support their businesses when pitching to venture capitalists. Men are 18% more likely to get funding with the same exact pitch as a woman.

  • Barclays Techstars start-up Seldon drives open source machine learning

    The current “AI summer” is being driven by gargantuan computational power being applied to larger and larger data sets. Housley said that around 2014 he saw a few different market forces at work, “an increasing commoditisation of machine learning and AI technology; popular big data technologies such as Apache Spark and Hadoop were bundling machine learning libraries as part of their systems.”

    He pointed to more of a social trend with consumers expecting smarter apps and increasing automation of work force activities which is driving big data analytics. “Most companies are sitting on massive silos of data. Not just their structured data – their website activities which are very highly ordered – but also all the documents that are flowing through their systems.”

  • Redox: A Rust-Written, Microkernel Open-Source OS

    Redox OS subscribes to a micro-kernel design but part of what makes it so interesting is that it’s written in the Rust programming language. Most features are implemented in Rust for Redox OS and there’s an optional original GUI, Newlib for C programs, drivers are run from user-space, and there’s work underway in supporting the ZFS file-system. Common Unix commands are supported by Redox.

  • Events

    • Day Two of FOSSASIA 2016

      I had to leave early to the venue for day two, as I had a welcome talk in the Python track. The morning started with the “Introduction to GSOC, and GCI” talk from Stephanie Taylor. The room was full with many ex-GSOC and GCI students, and mentors. The students of GCI last year completed more than 4k tasks, among them 1k+ was done by the students under FOSSASIA organization.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Library Freedom Project and Werner Koch are 2015 Free Software Awards winners

      The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life. This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity.

      This year, it was given to the Library Freedom Project, a partnership among librarians, technologists, attorneys, and privacy advocates which aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries. By teaching librarians about surveillance threats, privacy rights and responsibilities, and digital tools to stop surveillance, the project hopes to create a privacy-centric paradigm shift in libraries and the local communities they serve. Notably, the project helps libraries launch Tor exit nodes. Project founders Alison Macrina and chief technology wizard Nima Fatemi accepted the award.

    • Libreplanet 2016: The Last Lighthouse
    • Recapping day zero of LibrePlanet 2016

      …before Daniel could finish the room broke out into clapping and standing ovation. Edward responded with clear emotion by thanking the community for creating free software. Sitting down in front…

      …feeling the energy, emotion and celebration was vibrant in the room. It was a great kick off to the day. Naturally things ran over time and those watching the stream had sound related issues, so Ruben our newest tech team member, made a valiant effort to edit the video to share it amongst all of you.

    • Inessential Weirdnesses in Free Software

      Hi there. I’m Sumana Harihareswara and I’m going to speak with you about “inessential weirdnesses in free software”. Just some housekeeping to start: I am not using any slides today, I will be taking questions at the end, and I’ll be posting the text of my remarks online later today. And there are other good talks happening right now, so to help you decide whether to stay in this room: this talk is going to be more interesting to people who already have been participants in free software for a few years, who can use tools we commonly use in our community, like version control, IRC, mailing lists, bug trackers, and wikis, and who are already familiar with general free software trends and arguments. And this talk is going to be most interesting to people who regularly spend time working to help reach out to new people and get them to use free software and participate in our communities. So if that is not particularly interesting to you then I do encourage you to check out the other talks happening right now — I am particularly jealous that I can’t go to Luis Villa’s talk applying a capability approach to issues of software freedom.

    • autoconf-archive: Noteworthy changes in release 2016.03.20

  • Public Services/Government

    • New York considers tax breaks for developers of open-source software

      Senator Daniel Squadron (D)’s proposed NY senate bill S161, which is also sponsored by Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson (D), will, if enabled, allow open-source software developers to claim back 20 percent of the expenses they incur for building and distributing free software. However, they’d only be able to claim back $200 a year under the proposed rules.

    • White House Seeks Feedback on GitHub for Government-Wide Open Source Software Policy

      The pilot program proposed in the draft policy would require “covered agencies to release at least 20 percent of their newly-developed custom code, in addition to the release of all custom code developed by Federal employees at covered agencies as part of their official duties.”

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Elsevier v. Sci-Hub on the Docket

        While searching for information on the next Elsevier Inc. et al. v. Sci-Hub et al. court date (just rescheduled from March 17 to April 27), I discovered that I — and apparently everyone else — have so far overlooked a big pile of public documents from the case. I’ve been checking PlainSite periodically, which hosts Elbakyan’s defiantly self-incriminating letter to Judge Robert W. Sweet and Sweet’s subsequent preliminary injunction against Sci-Hub and LibGen, but I should’ve noticed sooner that their collection is out of date and far from complete. So I ran a query on PACER, where the search tool for the Southern District of New York is so poorly designed and/or broken I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Fortunately, a site called PacerMonitor provides an alternate interface. $37.80 and many right-clicks later, I’d assembled all 122 PDFs released so far. You can download the full 42MB set here.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Conspiracy theories are for losers: Science explains why conservatives see sneaky cabals in every defeat

      Don’t tell Donald Trump, but conspiracy theories are for losers. Seriously. I mean it. This is huge. And nobody wants to talk about it.

      OK, it’s actually more complicated than that. Other potential explanations paint an even less flattering picture of the current conservative conspiracy craze. But whatever it is, conservatives—at least in the current political moment—are significantly more prone to embrace conspiracy theories, and the more they know, the more they embrace them… at least if the conspiracies make liberals look bad. The same is not true of liberals—at least not now—according to a new paper published in the American Journal of Political Science that takes some major strides toward making sense of conspiracy theories as less of a puzzling black sheep phenomenon than it’s usually taken to be.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • All Eyes on Flint, but Drinking Water Crisis Stretches Nationwide

      While a congressional hearing Thursday focused attention on the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, news reporting from around the country reveals that the problem of lead-contamination afflicts communities nationwide.

      A multi-part USA Today investigation published this week identified almost 2,000 additional water systems in all 50 states where testing has shown excessive levels of lead contamination over the past four years. “The water systems, which reported lead levels exceeding Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] standards, collectively supply water to 6 million people,” according to reporters Alison Young and Mark Nichols.

      The series installment released Thursday details hundreds of educational facilities across the nation “where children were exposed to water containing excessive amounts of an element doctors agree is unsafe at any level.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Efficient answers to climate concerns

      European researchers have identified a new “fuel” that by 2030 will be more important than oil. It’s called energy efficiency − the drive to get more bang from each buck spent on power.

      If the European Union member states adopt a 40% energy efficiency target, the sum of energy savings and power from renewable sources such as wind and photovoltaics together would overtake the sum of all imported coal, oil and gas by 2030, according to a new study from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

      With government encouragement, energy efficiency could become a “niche fuel” for investors at a time when fossil fuel prices are low. The drive to wean the community off carbon-based fuels could also lead to the creation of jobs and economic growth if the right investments were made in low-carbon technologies.

    • Western Europe coasts face a pounding

      The Atlantic seas could be getting rougher, with winter storms capable of causing dramatic changes to the beaches of Western Europe.

      And new research shows that the pounding delivered to the shorelines of the UK and France in the winter of 2013-2014 was the most violent since 1948.

      Gerd Masselink, professor of coastal geomorphology at Plymouth University School of Marine Science and Engineering, UK, and colleagues report in Geophysical Research Letters that they decided to switch focus from sea level rise resulting from global warming.

    • Did X Cause Y? A New Look at Attributing Weather Extremes to Climate Change

      In a world filled with high-impact weather events, it’s only natural to wonder exactly why your town was beset with a heat wave, a destructive flood, or a deadly tornado. Today, such events occur in a different global atmosphere–one with more greenhouse gases than at any time in human history, thanks to human activity. A growing branch of atmospheric research is working to quantify the influence of human-induced climate change on various types of extreme weather, and there is real progress being made. “It is now possible to estimate the influence of climate change on some types of specific weather events,” said Rear Admiral David Titley (Pennsylvania State University) at a press briefing in Washington, D.C., last Friday. Titley chaired a U.S. National Academies committee that has just produced an important report, released on Friday. Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change serves as a very useful guide to how this work is carried out, what it can and can’t do, and where the science is heading.

    • TransCanada dismissed whistleblower. Then their pipeline blew up.

      TransCanada Corp put “substandard materials” — made by Quebec manufacturing company, Ezeflow — in an Alberta natural gas pipeline that blew up in 2013, Canada’s pipeline regulator said on Friday as it finally responded to a four-year old warning from a whistleblower with a new industry-wide safety order.

      The order gives all Canadian pipeline companies under federal jurisdiction 60 days to identify whether any of their pipelines are using specific types of pipeline fittings, made by Ezeflow in Quebec as well as fittings by Canadoil Asia produced in Thailand, that were flagged for safety reasons. The order also requires the companies to submit mitigation plans to address potential weaknesses.

    • By rejecting $1bn for a pipeline, a First Nation has put Trudeau’s climate plan on trial

      Canada’s Lax Kw’alaams show us how we can be saved: by loving the natural world and local living economies more than mere money and profit

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Mysterious, Powerful Lobbying Group Won’t Even Say Who It’s Lobbying For

      The Commercial Energy Working Group (CEWG) is one of the many lobbying organizations in Washington. They make recommendations to federal agencies and try to sway lawmakers on policies. They engage in the basic political work of making the government friendlier to business.

      There’s only one problem: who the Commercial Energy Working Group actually represents is a secret.

      This violates federal lobbying and ethics laws, according to Public Citizen’s Tyson Slocum, who has urged the House and Senate to investigate the matter. “The Commercial Energy Working Group is one of the most active – and secret – organizations seeking to undermine energy market regulations,” Slocum told The Intercept. “The purpose of my complaint is to force the group to start identifying its membership.”

      Under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, all lobbying organizations registered with the federal government must list the names of any business that has contributed more than $5,000 to them in any one quarter. But the CEWG “does not disclose the individual companies or entities that constitute its active membership,” according to Slocum’s letter.

    • Why Bernie’s Revolution Has Just Begun

      Hillary Clinton has always been the favored candidate of the party establishment. And unlike 2008, when the powerful Cook County portion of that establishment broke for Obama, a favorite son, this time the establishment remains unified in the face of the Sanders insurgency. Which would be reason enough for Sanders to carry on his fight all the way to Philadelphia, even if it really were mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination—a point we are still unlikely to reach before California votes on June 7. The strength of Sanders’s challenge, and the enthusiasm of his supporters, have already pulled Hillary Clinton off dead center on police violence, trade policy, access to education, and making the wealthy pay their share of taxes.

    • Bible: 6 Ways Jewish Bernie Sanders is more like Christ, Christian Donald Trump more like anti-Christ

      According to a North Carolina pastor, Bernie Sanders needs to schedule a meeting with Jesus Christ, some people’s lord and savior. When introducing Trump at a rally, televangelist Mark Burns the crowd, “Bernie Sanders… doesn’t believe in God, how in the world (are) we going to let Bernie — I mean, really?” Burns then warned the Senator, “Bernie’s got to get saved, Bernie’s got to meet Jesus. He’s got to have a coming to Jesus meeting.”

    • How Women-Led Movements Are Redefining Power, From California to Nepal

      In her essay “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions,” black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde wrote: “I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.”

    • VIDEO: ‘Days of Revolt’: Chris Hedges, ‘Mr. Fish’ Examine the Power of Political Cartoons

      This week’s episode of teleSUR’s “Days of Revolt” features Chris Hedges in conversation with political cartoonist Dwayne Booth, also known as “Mr. Fish.” They sit down to discuss the “unpleasant truth” revealed by political cartoons.

    • The Head of Jeb’s Super PAC Is Tired of the Endless Conservative Con

      Mike Murphy is a longtime Jeb Bush friend and loyalist, and he’s also the guy who ran Right to Rise, the Super PAC that blew through $100 million in an epically futile effort to sell Bush to the masses. So it’s understandable that he might be a little bitter about the success of Donald Trump, who almost single-handedly destroyed Bush.

    • Bernie never stood a chance: The game was always rigged for a Hillary win

      Did you know that if a given political party already has an incumbent in a particular political post, it’s standard practice in the United States for a political party to prohibit its voter-list to be purchased by anyone who’s not an incumbent office-holder in that party — including by someone who wishes to challenge or contest within that party the incumbent, in a primary election?

      Only incumbents have access to that crucial list — crucial for any candidate in a primary election (unless there is no incumbent who is of that party).

  • Censorship

    • Lobby group claims support for muzzling Wicked Campers
    • Government set to crack down on ‘hugely offensive’ Wicked Camper slogans
    • Wicked Campers slogans face censorship ban
    • Wicked Campers: Public Support For G-Rated Billboards
    • Support to clean-up Wicked Campers welcomed
    • PM: Wicked Campers ‘beyond edgy and downright offensive’
    • Wicked Campers dumped for DoC listing
    • “A bit of sexual violence never hurt anyone” – Facebook user to Paula Bennett
    • Associate Tourism Minister Paula Bennett told ‘bit of sexual violence never hurt anyone’
    • Jack Dorsey: You’re A Liar. Censorship Is Rampant On Twitter

      In Shakespearean times, cuckolds were referred to as “he who has horns” — an issue everyone else can see, that’s not obvious to them. Everyone else sees his shame immediately, but the cuckold can only tell by looking closely in a mirror. Perhaps the same is true for censors, who insist that they adore free speech while mercilessly trampling it at the slightest opportunity.

      Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, whom I wouldn’t even right-swipe on Grindr (ironically one of the few social platforms left without Orwellian speech suppression), recently made a visit to The Today Show where he firmly proclaimed that his site doesn’t censor its users. Dorsey made his extraordinary statement following Matt Lauer’s claim that his Twitter followers named censorship as one of the most important issues facing the social media platform.

    • Censoring Palestinian Maps

      One act of censorship denies facts established by scientific research. The other denies the documented violation of international law (for instance, the Fourth Geneva Convention) and multiple United Nations resolutions. So the answer to the question just asked is – there is no difference.

      [...]

      The maps in question are not new or novel. Nor are they historically inaccurate, despite Zionists’ claims to the contrary. They can be seen individually and in different forms on websites of the BBC and Mondoweiss and are published in a number of history books, such as Mark Tessler’s well-received A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Perhaps what the Zionists can’t abide is lining up the maps together in chronological order.

      In truth, the objections reported to have been used by those who pressured McGraw-Hill are historically perverse – the sort of grasping at straws that reflects a biased and strained rewriting of history. For instance, an objection was made to the labeling of public land in pre-1948 Palestine as “Palestinian.” Why? Because the Zionist claim is that Palestine before 1948 was a British mandate and so the land was British and not Palestinian.

    • Comrade Michael Rubin Demands the Gulag for Col. Wilkerson

      So Comrade Rubin is demanding a thorough denunciation of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell (and academic advisor to the Ron Paul Institute). Rubin took to the website of his luxurious neocon Beltway sinecure, the American Enterprise Institute, to call for Wilkerson’s deportation to the gulag for severe ideological deviationism.

    • Turkey plans to make praising violent acts in media a ‘terror crime’

      AKP legal expert says counter-terror laws will be broadened to target those who ‘ideologically support’ terrorist acts, days after Ankara bombing blamed on PKK

    • Critical of Thailand’s censorship, visionary filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is looking to Latin America

      Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s life changed when his dreamlike fantasy Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival six years ago.

      As well as establishing him as a distinctive voice in cinema – a visionary who blurs reality and fantasy in semi-experimental films that have a meditative pace influenced by an interest in Buddhism – he became his country’s best-known filmmaker internationally.

    • Internet Censorship: Regulating India’s Internet

      Content regulation on the Internet is at the forefront of discussion in India due to a build up of events over the past 12 months. Last August the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) requested the Department of Telecommunications to prevent telecommunication providers from allowing their customers to access 857 pornographic websites. This mandate was immediately appealed and subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court. Then, just a few weeks ago the Supreme Court has provided further clarification about how existing ‘decency’ law could apply in an online context, and requested CIS to assess this further. Though the CIS said initial mandate to block porn was focused on child pornography the Supreme Court has sought a much wider review.

  • Privacy

    • The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism

      Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to. The company is creating a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation we should call surveillance capitalism. Is there nothing we can do?surveillance capitalism

      [...]

      Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010. (Back then each company was worth less than 200 billion. Now each is valued at well over 500 billion.) While Google’s new lead lasted only a few days, the company’s success has implications for everyone who lives within the reach of the Internet. Why? Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior. This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors. While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency. What are the secrets of this new capitalism, how do they produce such staggering wealth, and how can we protect ourselves from its invasive power?

    • The Boaty McBoatface Party

      But domestic politics, especially in Westminster, seem to be in a state of chaos. The Conservative Government, in the days after Duncan Smith resigned, is imploding; Labour provides no effective Opposition; and the post-Coalition Liberal Democrats are a discredited irrelevance.

    • Should the government be able to read your encrypted messages?

      As one of the United States’ largest technology companies is battling with the government over access to its cell phones, the federal prosecutor from New Jersey says Apple is seeking to make their products “warrant-proof.”

      On Friday, U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman discussed the ongoing fight between the tech giant and the federal government over access to a device owned by one of the shooters in the San Bernadino, Calif. terror attacks.

    • Expert Says NSA Can Open the San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone

      Clarke is a former White House official who served as the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism for a period during his 30 year career. In an interview on “Morning Edition” with NPR host David Greene, he said that he thinks if the FBI had asked, the National Security Agency could have already opened the encrypted iPhone belonging to San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, Newsweek reports.

    • GCHQ steps in over fear £11bn smart meters being installed in millions of homes may be hacked – leading to gas supplies being cut off
    • Six arrested in firearms raid at home near GCHQ
    • Six arrested near GCHQ in relation to firearms offences and other stories being shared in Cheltenham
    • Police hold six in Cheltenham in relation to firearms offences

  • Civil Rights

    • A confident UK has nothing to fear from free movement of labour

      From an economic point of view, mobility of labour is advantageous in many respects. Allowing workers to move where they are best rewarded is helpful to productive efficiency. It means that, when skill shortages arise, firms can recruit widely and workers can supply labour where their particular abilities are most in demand. British firms benefit, just as do firms in other countries, from being able to recruit from a broader pool for the particular skills needed in their operations. At the same time British workers gain, just as do workers in other countries, from access to a broader pool of possible employers.

    • McConnell: No New Supreme Court Justice Until The NRA Approves Of The Nominee

      Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and appointed with the advice and consent of the National Rifle Association, according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

      McConnell offered this unusual view of the confirmation process during an interview with Fox News Sunday. In response to a question from host Chris Wallace, who asked if Senate Republicans would consider the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after the election if Hillary Clinton prevails, McConnell responded that he “can’t imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame duck session, a nominee opposed by the National Rifle Association [and] the National Federation of Independent Businesses.”

    • Police In Maryland Routinely Used Tasers When Suspects Posed No Threat To Their Safety

      Police officers in Maryland frequently did not follow safety guidelines when using Tasers, and often discharged the weapon before their safety was actually at risk, according to a six-month investigation by The Baltimore Sun.

      In the first-ever analysis of Taser use in Maryland, the Sun studied three years of Taser incidents in the state. The study found that nearly 60 percent of the people that police hit with Tasers were described as “non compliant and non-threatening.”

    • Many at Guantanamo apparently not ‘too dangerous’ after all
    • Zombie politics: Europe, Turkey and the disposable human

      Before the European debt crisis, the austerity regimes in Ireland, Spain and Portugal and the meltdown of Greece, large parts of the European Union almost felt like the self-ascribed identity discourse of an enlightened, liberal, tolerant polity cognizant of its own dark pasts and its current diversity. Today, we are facing a very different continent. Right-wing populist, neo-fascist and racist parties have moved from the margins into the centre of politics, and so have their ideas.

      Understandable but diffuse anxieties over globalisation, competition over social services and perceived cultural distance to immigrants have solidified into Islamophobic resentment and racialised ideologies of European supremacy.

      Racist populist parties shape political discourses from the most advanced Scandinavian democracies to the illiberal polities of Hungary or Slovakia. Recently, a member of the European Parliament of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn spoke of Turks as “dirty and polluted … wild dogs” in a plenary session. The President, Martin Schulz, immediately understood the strategy behind the diatribe, i.e. to push the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the European Parliament. He expelled the MEP. His deliberate action, however, only reinforces the tragic state of affairs. One has to be courageous and resolute to stand up to an ideology which has been invented in Europe, destroyed much of it and is now being legally represented in one of the centres of European power.

    • Weimar America?

      Forget Trump. It’s the people who paved the way for him who seem uncomfortably familiar to an expert on pre-Nazi Germany.

      [...]

      The lessons to be learned from Weimar Germany are not the ones we hear and read about today. Weimar Germany did not collapse under the weight of its various crises. It was actively destroyed by a conservative elite – noble landowners, high-level state officials, businessmen, army officers – that chose to ally with the Nazi Party. As we watch the Republican establishment’s ineffectual flailings to stop Donald Trump, it’s worth remembering that Weimar Germany’s old-style conservatives never really liked Hitler and the Nazis either. To them, the Nazis were too loud, uncouth, low class. But they admired Hitler’s nationalism, his promise to revive Germany’s great power status, his opposition to democracy, and his anti-communism. And they were either indifferent to or actively supported the Nazis’ anti-Semitism.

      The conservative elite got much more than they had bargained for with their willingness to turn political power over to the Nazis. Some would live to regret their choice, many not until American and British bombs rained down on Hamburg, Berlin and other cities and the Red Army approached the gates.

    • Florida Cuts Ties With Private Prison Company Notorious For Abuse

      For nearly 20 years, a for-profit company called Youth Services International Inc. (YSI) has controlled multiple juvenile facilities in Florida. During that time, YSI workers have been accused of a slew of abuses, from slamming kids’ heads into walls to underfeeding them.

      On Wednesday, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) announced the company is finally getting the boot. According to a DJJ press release, the state will terminate all services and transfer to new providers by August 31, 2016.

    • North Korea sentences US college student to 15 years’ hard labour

      North Korea last year sentenced Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim to life imprisonment with hard labour on sedition charges.

    • Trump Protesters Shut Down Arizona Highway

      Anti-Donald Trump protesters blocked a major highway outside of Phoenix, Arizona Saturday, delaying Trump supporters who were driving to a rally for the presidential hopeful in the state capital.

    • Duncan Smith and the Disabled

      I am prepared to believe that even Iain Duncan Smith has been genuinely sickened by the attack on the disabled in the budget to give yet more tax breaks for higher earners. He is very typical of the officer class of the senior British regiments and while he is instinctively right wing, there is a linit to the amount of suffering he could see unleashed on the poor, because he does have some sense of basic decency. I grant you things had to go very far before it finally took effect, but it has. It should also be remembered that he is not an old Etonian but a real Scot, born in Edinburgh, and state educated.

    • Tennis CEO Makes Waves With Sexist Remarks, Says Women’s Tennis Rides ‘On The Coattails Of The Men’

      Sunday at Indian Wells should have been a day of healing and celebration. Not only were both world’s top-ranked players in action in the men’s and women’s singles finals at the BNP Paribas Open, but for the first time since the racist incident in 2001, both Williams sisters were on hand for the final — Serena on the court, Venus in the stands cheering her on.

      Instead, their return was darkened by a reminder of the ugly sexism that still exists in the sport.

      In a morning meeting with the media, Raymond Moore, the CEO of Indian Wells Tennis Garden, was asked about whether his plans to make the men’s event more prestigious extended to the women’s tournament as well. He clearly found the question amusing.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • CJEU takes moral high ground in copyright row

        Parties asserting copyright claims can also seek compensation for “moral prejudice” suffered from the infringement, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled.

        Writer and director Christian Liffers was seeking damages for copyright infringement and moral prejudice suffered when a Spanish broadcaster aired clips from his 2006 documentary “Dos Patrias Cuba y la Noche” (“Two Homelands: Cuba and the Night”).

        The documentary focuses on six stories of homosexual and transsexual inhabitants of Cuba.

        Mandarina, an audiovisual company, produced a documentary on child prostitution in Cuba containing unauthorised clips from Liffers’ film. The documentary aired on Spanish television channel Telecinco, which is owned by broadcaster Mediaset.

03.20.16

Links 20/3/2016: Clair 1.0, UbuntuBSD

Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Developers, Open Source Software Changing the Face of Networking

    It’s been five years since Marc Andreessen wrote an essay published in the Wall Street Journal that proclaimed “software is eating the world.” By now, we can consider networking just about chewed and swallowed.

    We are beginning to realize how much software-defined networking is changing everything. As ON.Lab Executive Director Guru Parulkar puts it, the “softwarization” of networking is not only changing how users manage networks, but everything the network touches.

  • Digital Video and Dwango “Create” OpenToonz
  • The animation software behind Futurama and Studio Ghibli’s films is going open source
  • Animation Production Software “OpenToonz” To Be Released on March 26
  • Toonz Software Used by Studio Ghibli and ‘Futurama’ Being Made Free and Open Source

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Memory Usage of Firefox with e10s Enabled
      • A WebAssembly Milestone: Experimental Support in Multiple Browsers

        WebAssembly is an emerging standard whose goal is to define a safe, portable, size- and load-time efficient binary compiler target which offers near-native performance—a virtual CPU for the Web. WebAssembly is being developed in a W3C Community Group (CG) whose members include Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple.

      • Advantages of WebExtensions for Developers

        Presently, Firefox supports two main kinds of add-ons. First were XUL or XPCOM add-ons, which interface directly with the browser’s internals. They are fabulously powerful, as powerful as the browser itself. However, with that power comes security risk and the likelihood that extensions will break as the browser changes.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Mitaka RC 1 Milestones Debut

      The first out of the gate is the Glance image project, which released its Mitaka RC1 milestone on March 16. Glance was quickly followed the same day by Heat, Neutron and Nova.

  • Databases

    • Oracle’s letter to Russian IT companies

      It says that Oracle Corp. sent a special Postgres-related letter to at least several big Russian IT companies. In the letter Oracle is suggesting the ways to protect Oracle DBMS from migration to Postgres in government organizations and big Russian companies where many years Oracle was the default DBMS choice.

    • Firebird project repository was migrated to GitHub

      SVN repository is still accessible, but new contributions are expected to be provided as pull requests at GitHub.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LTO’ing LibreOffice With GCC 6

      Upstream GCC developer Jan Hubička has written about his experience compiling LibreOffice with GCC6 — while also making use of Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) — and comparing various criteria against that of other GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler versions.

  • BSD

    • Dutch BSD Desktop Dev Beer Day

      There’s a handful of BSD-oriented, desktop-oriented, developers in the Netherlands that I know of. Koos. Raphael. Perhaps some remnants of KDE-NL, or a wandering GNOME developer. Or other desktop systems. Anyway, I’m launching the idea to have some kind of get-together around mid-april (when the weather is nice) somewhere central(-ish) like Zwolle or Amersfoort. The Dutch BSD Desktop Dev Beer Day, or (DBD)2. The plan would be to occupy a cafe somewhere and talk about BSD on the desktop, and in particular porting and keeping the desktop stack up-to-date on all fronts.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • [GRUB] F2FS support
    • GNU Hurd/ news/ 2016-03-18-gsoc

      The Google Summer of Code 2016 is on! If you’re a student, consider applying for a GNU Hurd project — details to be found on our GSoC and project ideas pages.

    • What you need to know for LibrePlanet 2016, wherever you are

      This year’s program is bursting with something for everyone in the free software movement, from inquisitive newcomers to hardcore developers.

      Keynotes talks will include NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in conversation with the ACLU’s Daniel Kahn Gillmor; Open Source Initiative board president Allison Randal; Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman; and Software Freedom Conservancy executive director Karen Sandler.

    • Guix at LibrePlanet 2016

      GNU hackers Christopher Allan Webber (whom you may know from the GNU MediaGoblin project) and David Thompson will be co-presenting “Solving the Deployment Crisis with Guix” at LibrePlanet 2016 this Saturday, March 19th. Chris and David will be focusing on the hardships and obstacles that users face when trying to exercise their software freedom by self-hosting web applications, offering Guix as a solution. The presentation will be held from 10:55 AM to 11:40 AM in room 32-141 of the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    • 10 Years of Conservancy!

      This April marks the 10 year anniversary of Software Freedom Conservancy’s formation. Formed in New York in 2006, Conservancy’s initial Member Projects included BusyBox, SurveyOS, uClibc and Wine. To celebrate this milestone and thank our Supporters, we will be hosting an exclusive cocktail hour in Cambridge, MA during LibrePlanet on Saturday March 19, 2016. Supporters must rsvp to rsvp-10-years@sfconservancy.org.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Europe is going to kill free software! Have you contacted your state’s rep?

      These rules are bad and already hindering user freedom. The FCC has pulled a fast one and we need to fight back. This is a major security and privacy threat which will lead to even buggier and more insecure wireless hardware. A legal campaign to end this nonsense will require significantly more funding and criticism. Unfortunately the major players on fighting this are burning out. Christopher Waid, of ThinkPenguin, Dave Taht, of BufferBloat, Eric Schultz, Josh Gay of the FSF, and others just don’t have the time or resources to keep fighting this. Don’t let this be the end.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • New open source load balancer, US source code policy draft published, and more news

    • Open Access/Content

      • The Sci-Hubbub

        Sci-Hub is a free, online repository of 48 million academic papers. It was launched by Kazakhstani graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan. Unlike most graduate students, Elbakyan is not pondering Foucauldian discourse and beer prices, but hiding out in Russia. According to a recent New York Times article, Elbakyan’s struggles to access research papers inspired her to set up the site so that other students and researchers would have the same access to knowledge as researchers at well-funded universities. The repository is generated by downloading papers from publisher’s paywalled websites using anonymous ‘donated’ subscription credentials.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Ideas For Change To Global Health And IP System Proliferate

      Public health advocates, academics, patients, governments and others this week presented further ideas to the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines on ways to break the longstanding pattern of expensive medical products around the world as a way to pay for research and development.

      The second public dialogue of the High-Level Panel took place in Johannesburg, South Africa on 17 March, a day after closed-door meetings with a range of experts who submitted written comments to the panel. A first public dialogue was held in London last week (IPW, Public Health, 11 March 2016).

    • This is what the public thinks about genome editing

      At a time when genome-editing technology is still in its infancy, and its uses are yet to be determined, the voices of patients and patients’ carers, and those with disabilities, need to be heard.

    • We Are All Flint

      How America’s moms are leading the battle for clean drinking water

    • Rick Snyder Testified Before Congress On The Flint Crisis. It Didn’t Go So Well.

      Keri Webber got on a plane to fly from her home city of Flint, Michigan to Washington, DC this week in the hopes of finally being able to meet with her governor. “We’ve tried to meet with him in Lansing, we tried to meet with him in Flint,” she said of Rick Snyder. “We came to DC [to] meet on neutral ground. We never got a response.”

      Webber’s family has been through a lot over the last year and a half. One daughter showed lead lines in her bones last July, a sign of lead poisoning, while the other has Legionnaires disease. Her husband has lost half the vision in one eye after an artery exploded, causing permanent damage, and he also has extremely high blood pressure, both of which Webber attributes to the water contamination. He’s had to have a battery of tests and is now taking eight pills a day; his medical costs alone come to $8,000, yet the both of them rely on meager Social Security disability checks to get by. “We are going bankrupt over his medical bills, period,” she said.

  • Security

    • Leopard Flower firewall – Protect your bytes

      Several months ago, I decided to explore a somewhat obscure topic of outbound per-application firewall control in Linux. A concept that Windows users are well familiar with, it’s been around for ages, providing Windows folks with a heightened sense of – if not practical factual – protection against rogues residing in their system and trying to phone home.

      In Linux, things are a little different, but with the growing flux of Windows converts arriving at the sandy shores of open-source, the notion of need for outbound control of applications has also risen, giving birth to software designed to allay fears if not resolve problems. My first attempt to play with Leopard Flower and Douane was somewhat frustrating. Now, I’m going to revisit the test, focusing only on the former.

      [...]

      Leopard Flower firewall is an interesting concept. Misplaced, though, for most parts. It caters to a Windows need that does not exist on Linux, and to be frank, has no place in the Microsoft world either. Then, it also tries to resolve a problem of control and knowledge by requiring the user to exercise the necessary control and knowledge. But if they had those to begin with, they wouldn’t need to dabble in per-application firewalls. Furthermore, the software is still fairly immature. There are at least half a dozen little things and changes that can be implemented to make lpfw more elegant, starting with installation and followed by service and GUI model, prompts, robustness, and a few others.

    • Critical bug in libotr could open users of ChatSecure, Adium, Pidgin to compromise

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Sheldon Adelson’s Israeli Newspaper Has a Crush on Donald Trump

      While Sheldon Adelson has yet to endorse a candidate for president, and refused to let reporters peek at his ballot at last month’s caucus in Nevada, it’s starting to look like the conservative rebellion against Donald Trump will not be bankrolled by the casino operator and Republican donor known for his far-right views.

    • Scott Shane on “Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone”

      In this web exclusive interview, New York Times reporter Scott Shane discusses his new book, “Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone.” It just won the 2016 Lionel Gelber Prize. The book tells the story of the first American deliberately killed in a drone strike, Anwar al-Awlaki, and examines why U.S. counterterrorism efforts since 9/11 seem to have backfired.

    • Drone Warfare’s Ethical Dilemmas Are Focus of Film “Eye in the Sky”

      EYE IN THE SKY is a drone war primer in the form of a thriller. I’m not spoiling anything by laying out the premise, which is quickly established at the start of the film: The British have identified known members of al Shabaab, among them British and American citizens, in the act of preparing a suicide attack from a house in a mostly Somali neighborhood in Nairobi. Taking out the house with a Hellfire missile should be simple enough, but it risks the lives of civilians, including a young girl in the house next door. Then there are the political ramifications: In a war room back in London, an official asks, “Has there ever been a British-led drone attack in a city in a friendly country that is not at war?”

      What follows are two hours of legal, tactical, and political wrangling around the decision to pull the trigger. The film, which is currently in theaters, shifts rapidly between the Nairobi streets; a bunker commanded by a hawkish British colonel (Helen Mirren); a London situation room where politicians, military officers (among them the late Alan Rickman), and lawyers ask ever-higher authorities to approve the strike; and a U.S. drone base in Nevada, where a young pilot and sensor operator gear up for their first kill operation.

    • To Cuba with Hate

      The CIA’s motto might well be: “Proudly overthrowing the Cuban government since 1959.” Now what? Did you think that the United States had finally grown up and come to the realization that they could in fact share the same hemisphere as the people of Cuba, accepting Cuban society as unquestioningly as they do that of Canada?

    • The Murder That Exposed Hillary Clinton’s Grim Legacy in Honduras

      Who murdered Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres?

      While the identities of the killers remain unknown, activists, media observers, and members of the Cáceres family are blaming the increasingly reactionary and violent Honduran government.

      The authorities had frequently clashed with Cáceres over her high-profile campaign to stop land grabbing and mining while defending the rights of indigenous peoples.

    • Hillary’s Link to Honduran Violence

      Little mentioned in the Democratic campaign is Hillary Clinton’s role in supporting a 2009 coup in Honduras that contributed to a human rights crisis, including the recent murder of a renowned environmental activist, writes Marjorie Cohn.

    • My Terrorist, Your Terrorist

      So is Hezbollah a terrorist organization?

      Of course not.

      So why has the Arab League decided that they are?

      Because most of the league’s member states are Sunni Muslims, while Hezbollah is a Shiite organization supporting Shiite Iran and Alawite (quasi-Shiite) Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

      So were Israel’s Arab parties right when they condemned the league’s resolution?

      Right, yes. Wise, no.

      Let’s start with Hezbollah. Surprisingly enough, it is in a way an Israeli creation.

      [...]

      Originally, terrorism just meant a strategy of striking fear to achieve a political end. In this sense, every war is terrorism. But the term is more precisely applied to individual acts of violence, the aim of which is to strike terror into the hearts of the enemy population.

    • One Year On, No Justice for Italian Hostage Killed in U.S. Drone Strike

      This week, the Lo Porto family’s lawyers filed briefs with the Italian state prosecutor investigating Giovanni’s kidnapping and death, arguing that strikes like the one that killed him are illegal under international law, and requesting that the prosecutor ask the U.S. government to hand over information about the operation.

    • The Crazy GOP Establishment

      The Republican establishment likes to pretend that it is the responsible alternative to Donald Trump, but that self-image doesn’t match reality, as Bill Moyers and Michael Winship describe.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Americans’ Concern About Climate Change Is Growing

      If you are concerned about global warming, you are part of a growing majority that hadn’t been this large since 2008, a new Gallup poll has found.

      In fact, 64 percent of adults say they are worried a “great deal” or “fair amount” about global warming, up from 55 percent at this time last year. According to the poll, concerns about global warming have increased among all party groups since 2015, though concerns remain much higher among Democrats than Republicans and Independents.

  • Finance

    • Brazil Is Engulfed by Ruling Class Corruption — and a Dangerous Subversion of Democracy

      THE MULTIPLE, REMARKABLE crises subsuming Brazil are now garnering substantial Western media attention. That’s understandable given that Brazil is the world’s fifth most populous country and eighth-largest economy; its second-largest city, Rio de Janeiro, is the host of this year’s Summer Olympics. But much of this Western media coverage mimics the propaganda coming from Brazil’s homogenized, oligarch-owned, anti-democracy media outlets and, as such, is misleading, inaccurate, and incomplete, particularly when coming from those with little familiarity with the country (there are numerous Brazil-based Western reporters doing outstanding work).

    • Who’s Funding Super PACs This Election Season? Good Question

      Campaign finance reform advocates have rallied against super PACs’ ability to influence elections since their creation in 2010, and new reporting by the Washington Post puts a spotlight on how “ghost corporations” are pumping money into these committees, with their big money contributors hiding behind a veil of secrecy.

      As the Center for Responsive Politics explains: “super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates,” though they “are prohibited from donating money directly to political candidates.” They report their donors to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) monthly during an election year.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Sanders Must Build a Progressive Movement All the Way to the Convention and Beyond

      According to mainstream Democrats and pundits, Sanders’ demise is imminent. His downfall and Clinton’s triumph is now an inevitability. It is a matter of if not when. Sanders has called these political obituaries “absurd” and has vowed to keep fighting all the way to the convention.

    • Bernie Sanders’ Wife Wants to Help Native American Voices Be Heard if She’s First Lady (Video)

      Jane Sanders is the wife of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and her influence on his campaign is increasing. This week in Arizona, she visited a number of Native American communities, supporting Apache protests against mining interests and engaging with the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe, the Indian Country Today Media Network reports. She also sat down for a discussion with Simon Moya-Smith, a journalist from Indian County Today Media Network.

    • CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves Finds New Way to Cheer for Donald Trump

      CBS chief Les Moonves famously cheered “Go Donald!” during an investor call in December, and in February said Donald Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

      Now he’s found a new way to celebrate the Trump run.

      Countering concerns in the media industry that Trump may not spend as much campaign money on TV commercials as a traditional major-party nominee, Moonves is pointing with delight to all the money down-ballot Republicans will spend to distance themselves from their party’s standard-bearer.

    • Noam Chomsky: What Bernie Sanders Should Do Next (VIDEO)

      Noam Chomsky sees a lot more in the Bernie Sanders campaign than just a presidential run. “Bernie Sanders is doing courageous things and organizing a lot of people,” Chomsky told Abby Martin on Telesur’s “The Empire Files.”

      “That campaign ought to be directed to sustaining a popular movement which will use the election as an incentive,” said Chomsky. “And unfortunately, it’s not. When the election’s over, the movements will die. The only thing that’ll ever bring about meaningful change is ongoing, dedicated popular movements which don’t pay attention to the election cycle. It’s an extravaganza every four years but then we go on.”

    • Sanders Stands Alone as Only Candidate Skipping AIPAC

      Announcement follows campaign that urged Sanders to not attend meeting by group that promotes ‘racist, militaristic, and anti-democratic policies’

    • AIPAC Rejects Sanders Offer to Speak via Video, as Romney and Gingrich Did in 2012

      Bernie Sanders confirmed on Friday that he will not attend the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington next week, and his campaign revealed that the candidate’s offer to address the gathering by video link was turned down by the organizers.

      In a letter to Robert Cohen, the group’s president, released on Friday afternoon, Sanders wrote that while he “would very much have enjoyed speaking at the AIPAC conference,” like all of the remaining presidential candidates, his campaign schedule made it impossible for him to attend in person.

      [...]

      Although Sanders promised to send AIPAC a copy of the speech he would have made, it seems possible the group did not really want to hear from him, given that he promised recently to seek a “level playing field” in his approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict if elected president.

    • Donald Trump Welcomed at #AIPAC2016, but Many Journalists and Activists Denied Access

      Donald Trump will be giving an address at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference in the nation’s capital on Monday, a move that has set off promises of protests and boycotts targeting the real estate mogul. But while AIPAC has rolled out the red carpet for the GOP frontrunner, it has moved to block activists from attending the conference and shut down planned protests.

      Immediately following the decision to host Trump, a group of expected AIPAC attendees started a Facebook group called “Come Together Against Hate” to plan protests against his speech. On March 14, a number of the planned attendees involved in organizing the protests received an email from an AIPAC staffer warning them about the ramifications of engaging in a protest against Trump. Among other consequences, the staffer said they’d be barred from the organization’s future events.

    • Will We Miss President Obama?

      President Obama doesn’t take on Official Washington’s powerful neocons head-on, but he does drag his heels on some of their crazy schemes, which is better than America can expect from Hillary Clinton, writes Robert Parry.

    • Could Hillary Clinton be Worse Than Trump?

      Or maybe the explanation is just that corporate media’s malign neglect of the Bernie Sanders campaign is paying off for Hillary. FAIR and other organizations that monitor the press have established beyond a reasonable doubt that The Washington Post and The New York Times might as well be Team Hillary’s Ministry of Propaganda. And, as anyone who can bear to watch MSNBC and CNN can attest, “liberal” cable news outlets are no better. National Public Radio may be the worst of all. Remember that at pledge time!

    • Critics of Israel Boycott Warn of Harm to U.S. Corporate Interests

      Lawmakers this week hosted business groups in a briefing that sought to reframe the movement to boycott Israeli-owned companies as a threat to the American economy.

      At Tuesday’s briefing, organized by the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado opened the event by saying that since the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1985 trade between the countries has “multiplied tenfold to over $40 billion annually.”

      The boycott movement would not only impact the Israeli economy, but also the U.S. economy and “should be confronted by all means,” he said.

      The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a global campaign calling on Israel to end its occupation of internationally recognized Palestinian territory and restore full equality to its Arab and Palestinian citizens.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Internet privacy rules: What you need to know

      The Federal Communications Commission will vote in less than two weeks on whether to consider proposed new privacy rules for broadband providers like Comcast or Time Warner Cable.

      The unveiling of the proposal earlier this month marked the start of an unofficial media tour by Chairman Tom Wheeler to sell the draft rules to the public. Meanwhile, industry groups are doing everything they can to keep harsh regulations at bay.

      If the rules come to fruition, they would create a massive change in the way privacy is policed at broadband providers.

      Here’s what you need to know about the proposal that could, within a year, be coming to an Internet service provider near you.

    • Redaction error reveals FBI did target Lavabit to spy on Edward Snowden

      A redaction oversight by the US government has finally confirmed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s targeting of secure email service Lavabit was used specifically to spy on Edward Snowden.

      Ladar Levison, creator of the email service, which was founded on a basis of private communications secured by encryption and had 410,000 users, was served a sealed order in 2013 forcing him to aid the FBI in its surveillance of Snowden.

      Levison was ordered to install a surveillance package on his company’s servers and later to turn over Lavabit’s encryption keys so that it would give the FBI the ability to read the most secure messages that the company offered. He was also ordered not to disclose the fact to third-parties.

      After 38 days of legal fighting, a court appearance, subpoena, appeals and being found in contempt of court, Levison abruptly shuttered Lavabit citing government interference and stating that he would not become “complicit in crimes against the American people”.

    • It’s official: Lavabit fell on its sword protecting Edward Snowden

      IT’S BEEN a mystery akin to the plot of The Prisoner. Who was it that the feds were after when they served Lavabit with notice that it wanted access to its servers? Information. We want information.

      We know that whoever it was, Lavabit decided it would sooner fall on its own sword than give up the encryption key, very similarly to Apple’s stance on the matter, and folded.

      We all knew it was Edward Snowden. It was fairly obviously Edward Snowden, and now, tickle our snickers, it turns out it was Edward Snowden.

      Even though a gagging order has prevented Ladar Levison who owned Lavabit, or any of his team from spilling, it now appears that the Feds have done it themselves.

      Some recently released federal papers which had been redacted showed that the marker pen had failed to redact a single email address.

    • The FBI Wants Teachers To Go Stasi On American Kids

      While Apple and the federal government duke it out over the encrypted phone of a dead terrorist, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is keeping things old school by advocating that educators start paying close attention to any radical leanings among their students.

      In January, the FBI’s Office of Partner Engagement – a liaison between the FBI, other feds, and local and school law enforcement – released an unclassified paper detailing a plan to keep an eye on any latent anti-American activity in high school youths.

    • SilverPush ‘Redefining TV advertising’ is simply spying on users – FTC.

      SilverPush is called a ‘cross-mapping’ platform that unifies data points from the billions of digital devices around the globe. In the company’s words, “Redefining TV Advertising.”

      Why is the US Federal Trade Commission so worried that is it sending letters to some Android developers?

    • Edward Snowden: Privacy can’t depend on corporations standing up to the government

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden opened the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet 2016 conference on Saturday with a discussion of free software, privacy and security, speaking via video conference from Russia.

      Snowden credited free software for his ability to help disclose the U.S. government’s far-reaching surveillance projects – drawing one of several enthusiastic rounds of applause from the crowd in an MIT lecture hall.

    • The Man J. Edgar Hoover Blamed for Pearl Harbor

      Even after National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless spying was revealed publicly in 2005, and even after Edward Snowden exposed massive governmental surveillance programs in 2013, the instructive example of Fly’s battles with Hoover never registered in public debate. The consensus history skips almost directly from the Supreme Court’s 1928 Olmstead decision legalizing warrantless wiretapping to the FBI’s abuses in the 1960s and the Supreme Court’s 1967 Katz decision, which reversed Olmstead by establishing that wiretapping violated a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard. Paul Starr’s widely lauded 2004 book The Creation of the Media: The Political Origins of Modern Communications, published shortly before the NSA wiretapping story broke, reads back American legal guarantees of private communication to the Post Office Act of 1792. “Lack of popular trust in the privacy of communications,” Starr argues, is a hallmark of “closed or restricted regimes” that should be contrasted with America’s more restrained and successful libertarian model.

    • No, you backoff on backdoors or else

      No, Mr. President, it works the other way around. You’d better backoff on your encryption demands, or else the tech community will revolt, That’s what’s already happen with Apple’s encryption efforts, as well as app developers like Signal and Wickr. Every time you turn the screws, we techies increase the encryption.

      It’s not a battle you can win without going full police-state. Sure, you can force Apple to backdoor its stuff, but then what about the encrypted apps? You’d have to lock them down as well. But what about encrypted apps developed in foreign countries? What about software I write myself? You aren’t going to solve the “going dark” problem until you control all crypto.

      If you succeed in achieving your nightmare Orwellian scenario, I promise you this: I’ll emigrate to an extradition-free country, to continue the fight against the American government.

    • That One Privacy VPN Comparison Chart

      VPN comparison tables can be a great way to find out information about VPNs in a more efficient manner. We’ve created this to be “that one privacy VPN comparison chart” you rely on–a HUGE list of the most important information that you will need.

    • This Massive VPN Comparison Spreadsheet Helps You Choose the Best for You
    • NSA chief: Foreign governments use criminals to hack U.S. systems [Ed: NSA shows its sheer hypocrisy as it does the same thing]
    • Foreign governments use criminals to hack U.S. systems
    • China’s Xi breaks word, continues cyber attacks against U.S. networks
    • CYBERCOM Head: Working More With Private Sector Goal for Command [Ed: destroying trust in US technology firm by saying they should serve the military]
    • Getting Cybercom ready
    • Cybercom Commander: Other Nations’ Cyberspace Ops Intensified
    • Rogers: CYBERCOM staffing more than 90% on track
    • Investments in Cyber Command reflect evolving nature of threats
    • DOD seeks to strengthen cybersecurity
    • Growth in cyber threats reflected in budget
    • YouTube shows Adblock Plus users an error message instead of ads
    • Once Again, Arguments Supporting Warrantless Surveillance Wither When Exposed to Sunlight

  • Civil Rights

    • Student Busted for Saying ‘ISIS’ During Pledge of Allegiance

      Ho, ho, another brainiac goes down as stupidity is mistaken for a real threat, apparently our national pastime.

    • City Employee Fired After Posting ‘Tamir Rice Should Have Been Shot’ On Facebook

      A Cleveland city employee has been fired after posting inflammatory comments about the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice on his Facebook page, lamenting that he didn’t kill the “little criminal” himself.

      “Tamir Rice should have been shot and I am glad he is dead,” wrote Jamie Marquardt, a supervisor for Cleveland’s Emergency Medical Service, according to Cleveland’s Fox 8 TV station. “I am upset I did not get the chance to kill the little criminal.”

      A spokesperson for the city denounced the post and called Marquadt’s comments “egregious.”

    • US Secretly Acting Like China Does in Public

      Contrary to popular belief, the FISA Court does not operate in complete isolation from traditional courts. On several known issues — notably, the access to location data and the collection of Post Cut Through Direct Dial numbers — FISC has taken notice of public magistrate’s opinions and used that to inform, though not necessary dictate, FISC practice. As I have noted, at least until 2014, the FISC used the highest common denominator from criminal case law with respect to location data, meaning it requires the equivalent of a probable cause warrant for prospective (though not historic) data. And FISC first seemed to start tracking such orders during the magistrate’s revolt of 2005-6. That’s an area where FISC seems to have followed criminal case law. By contrast, FISC permits the government to collect, then minimize, PCTDD, though it appears to have revisited whether the government’s current minimization procedures meet the law, the most recent known moment of which was 2009.

    • Hillary’s Double-Standard on Protests

      The protester, Ray McGovern, a retired Army officer and CIA analyst, was wearing a black “Veterans for Peace” T-shirt, when he was set upon within sight of Secretary of State Clinton, who ironically was delivering a speech about the importance of foreign leaders respecting dissent. The assault on McGovern left him bruised and bloodied but it didn’t cause Clinton to pause as she coolly continued on, not missing a beat.

    • Where Is Bassel? Four Years On, We Still Need to Know.

      Bassel Khartabil, open source developer, Wikipedian, and free culture advocate, was taken from his friends and family he loves four years ago this week. On March 15, 2012, Bassel was kidnapped from the streets of Damascus by Syrian military intelligence. Since then, we know that he has suffered torture, solitary confinement, arbitrary detention, dangerously overcrowded prison conditions, and even the bombing of his prison’s neighbourhood by Syrian opposition forces.

      What we don’t know right now is his current location, the state of his health, or even whether he is still alive. Bassel was taken from his civilian prison cell in Adra jail four months ago and was swallowed up by the country’s military field courts. No news of him has emerged since then, though rumors of a death sentence have caused anguish for his many supporters.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Ban Rate Regulation or Attack On Net Neutrality Protections? Congress Seems Confused

      The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently approved H.R. 2666, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act. The legislation attempts to codify Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Wheeler’s pledge not to use the Open Internet Order to regulate broadband rates. This seems like a straightforward task and technically it is a straightforward task. However, some members of Congress want to use this bill to fundamentally undermine the central purpose of the Order itself.

03.19.16

Links 19/3/2016: Slackware 14.2 RC1, ONS 2016

Posted in News Roundup at 7:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • What science fiction technology should be open source?

    Science fiction ranges from complete fabrications to some surprisingly accurate visions for the future. What tool, device, object, or other item from your science fiction library do you hope, or even expect, to one day find an open source version of?

  • Possibilities

    I was amazed at Free Software in 1993, and quickly realized the potential of a group of developers working together to create great software. So in 1994, when Microsoft announced that MS-DOS was “dead,” I realized we could leverage the Free Software concept to create our own free version of DOS for everyone to use. With that, FreeDOS was born.

  • Open-Source Animation Production Software Used By Studio Ghibli Available Next Week
  • Toonz Goes Open Source with Ghibli Edition

    Italian indie developer Digital Video and Japanese publisher Dwango have inked an agreement for the latter to acquire Toonz, a digital animation software solution. The deal goes forward under the condition that Dwango will publish and develop an Open Source platform based on Toonz, OpenToonz. This will be made available for free download on March 26.

  • Open Source Software’s Role in Breach Prevention and Detection

    Security professionals are increasingly acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: No network is secure from a sufficiently skilled and determined attacker. So while every effort should be made to prevent intruders getting on to the corporate network, it’s important that you can quickly spot an intrusion and minimize the damage that can result.

    Anton Chuvakin, a security expert at Gartner, points out that if hackers are made to work hard to find what they are after, intrusion detection systems (IDS) have a far greater chance of spotting them before they can do too much damage.

    “What companies need to be doing is switching away from trying to prevent hackers from getting in to their networks,” Dr Chuvakin said. “Thinking about how they can slow hackers down so they can catch them is much more sensible. If hackers steal your encrypted data but then have to spend three days searching for your encryption keys, then you have a much better chance of detecting them.”

  • Events

    • Business applications demand custom open-source networking solutions | #ONS2016

      Networking is a vital and necessary part of the modern business world, but much as in the real world, the road is not the reason. Networks exist to enable applications, and it’s these programs and systems that companies really want. Given this truth, when building a system, it doesn’t make sense to design apps around a network; rather, it’s much more useful to create a network that fits the programs a company runs. Open-source networking hardware allows a company to do just that.

      To gain some insight into open-source networking, Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to Calvin Chai, head of product marketing at Pica8, Inc., at the Open Networking Summit 2016 conference.

    • Huawei scores SDN Idol award at ONS 2016
    • Huawei at ONS 2016
    • Huawei Crowned Winner of SDN Idol 2016 at Open Networking Summit
    • Open Networking Summit Sees New Open Source ONOS Release, NEC ProgrammableFlow Update
    • FOSSASIA 2016 talk: Virtualization and Containers

      I did a talk earlier today at the wonderful venue of the Science Centre Singapore at FOSSASIA 2016, titled ‘Virtualization and Containers.’ Over the last few years, several “cool new” and “next big thing” technologies have been introduced to the world, and these buzzwords leave people all dazed and confused.

    • FOSSASIA 2016 is on

      FOSSASIA, the premier conference on Free and Open Source Software in Asia is having their 2016 edition in Singapore Science Center, Singapore. Even though the today is the first day of the event, the social part of the conference already started from yesterday.

    • OSS in the Empire State, LibrePlanet 2016 & More…

      It’s LibrePlanet time. It seems like only yesterday — actually, it was only yesterday — that they folded the tents and put the elephants on the trains after a successful run for Great Wide Open down in Atlanta. Now, on the opposite end of the U.S. East Coast, way yonder up north as we say around here, they’re getting ready for the FOSS fest to end all FOSS fests — that being the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet 2016, which opens for a two day run right next door to Bean Town in Cambridge.

  • CMS

    • Open source anniversary: How adopting 10 WordPress plugins changed my life

      This isn’t just a WordPress story, it’s really an open source story. WordPress, as you probably know, is a GPL-based open source project. It supports a wide range of plugins and themes that extend and modify its capabilities and customize its look. Each of the plugins and themes is also GPL.

      Since plugins are smaller open source projects, most have just one or — at most — a few maintainers. That means if the maintainer gets tired of working on the plugin or has life circumstances that make it impossible to keep supporting it, there are two choices: let it wither, or put it up for adoption.

    • New Domain, Old Content, New Platform

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD Is Getting Much Better Network/TCP Performance

      While DragonFlyBSD’s TCP code getting a per-CPU LPORT cache for listen sockets may not sound like an exciting change, it’s a huge performance win.

      The commit by Sepherosa Ziehau explains, “In order to guard against reincarnation of an accepted connection after the listen socket is closed, the accepted socket is linked on to the same global lport hash list as the listen socket. However, on a busy TCP server, this could cause a lot of contention on this global lport hash list. But think about it again: as long as the listen socket is not closed, reincarnation of an accepted connection is _impossible_, since the listen socket itself is on the global lport hash list.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • New York senator proposes tax credit for open-source developers

      A New York state senator says open-source programmers should be able to claim back part of their costs for writing free software.

      NY senate bill S161, proposed by Senator Daniel Squadron (D) and co-sponsored by Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson (D), would allow developers to claim for 20 per cent of the out-of-pocket costs of building and sharing open-source code – although the rebate has a maximum annual benefit of only $200 per person.

      “I represent the tech triangle and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, as well as areas in lower Manhattan where the technology sector has a growing presence – supporting that kind of innovation is key,” Squadron told El Reg in a statement.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source Hovalin Violin is 3D Printed in Wood PLA with More Upgrades to Come!

        It wasn’t too long ago that we reported here on a husband and wife team that added to the growing list of 3D printed musical instruments with their own contribution: an open source 3D printed violin. Yes, there have been other 3D printed violins, like the originally outstanding 3dvarius from France or Unique-3D’s acoustic violin from Russia. While both violins lay claim to incredible design work and acoustics, there’s one thing missing: they are not open source. This was the remarkable contribution of Matt and Kaitlyn Hova, who named their violin after their last name– the Hovalin. Now the Hovalin, being open source and accessible to 3D printing violin fans of all stripes, has been 3D printed in Wood PLA. It just keeps getting better for us 3D printed instrument fans, doesn’t it?

  • Programming

    • JavaScript Most Popular Language: Stack Overflow Report

      According to the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, JavaScript is the most popular programming language and Rust is most loved.
      Stack Overflow, the popular question-and-answer community site for developers, today released the results of its annual developer survey, which indicates, among other things, that JavaScript is the most popular programming language among respondents.

Leftovers

03.18.16

Links 18/3/2016: Slackware 14.2 With Linux 4.5, Remi Repo at 100,000,000 Downloads

Posted in News Roundup at 8:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Is Killing Us

    Garrison is half-right about the fatal nature of open source. Viewed in isolation, these problems are insurmountable.

    But if you put them together, the problems solve each other. Service providers overwhelmed by open source can turn to vendors to solve the problem, and pay the vendors to do it.

    Sure, it’s a tough competitive environment for both service providers and vendors. But that’s what disruption looks like.

  • Scott Brandt appointed to Sage Weil Presidential Chair for Open Source Software

    Brandt is a founding faculty member of CROSS, which was created to bridge the gap between student research and open-source software projects. Weil developed his Ph.D. thesis project into a highly successful open-source software product, the data storage system Ceph.

  • What it really means to be open source

    This week on Ctrl-Walt-Delete, Walt and Nilay take on the long-running dispute of the public opinion on open source tech, and whether there actually is a hard definition of “open” and “closed.”

  • Online ad blocker spat shows strategic power of trademarks in open source ecosystem

    Secondly, the dispute stands out because it provides an example of how a business operating an open-source model can call upon trademarks as a way of creating product differentiation and competitive advantage. I have previously reported on this with regards to the open source Debian and Python projects, which have both leveraged trademarks rights to protect their interests. The open source community typically eschews patent protection and is often characterised as harbouring anti-IP sentiments; but Eyeo’s complaint over Magic AdBlock shows the importance that trademarks can have in open source models.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD Foundation Logo, Website Get New Look

      There’s a new look at the FreeBSD Foundation, with a new logo and website. The changes are intended to highlight “the ongoing evolution of the Foundation identity and ability to better serve the FreeBSD Project,” according to the post announcing the changes.

  • Public Services/Government

    • NY bill would provide tax credit for open source contributors

      For many years, the open source software community has made the distinction between “free as in freedom” (the software can be used or modified as the user sees fit) and “free as in beer” (the software is available at no cost). Some have added a third type of free: “free as in puppy”. Like a puppy, adopting open source software has ongoing cost.

      What many people don’t consider is that developing open source software has a cost, too. Many developers purchase extra hardware for testing or pay for code hosting, a website, etc. A pending bill in the New York Senate aims to help offset those costs.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • DHS Unloads Tons of Open-Source Mapping Data, But Will Startups Rejoice?

        Open-source data—be it a compilation of informative files, a crucial API that bring together different features or downloadable yearly Census Bureau data—can be an important resources for bootstrapped startups looking for a leg up in the development stages. That’s why we spoke with Esri, a mapping technology data firm with a sizable office in D.C., who recently helped the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unload a ton of open-source, mapping datasets for public use.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak criticises the company over the Apple Watch in Reddit AMA

    Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, has said he’s ‘worried’ about the direction the Apple Watch is taking the company.

  • Apple co-founder criticises company over Apple Watch

    Steve Wozniak said device has taken firm into ‘jewellery market’ and that it is no longer ‘the company that really changed the world a lot’

  • Health/Nutrition

    • #FlintWaterCrisis: I Don’t Think That Report Said What You Think It Said, Gov

      Today’s House Oversight Committee hearing into the Flint Water Crisis was a joke. It was partisan — more so than the previous two hearings — because Republicans finally clued in that a Republican state governor’s crisis doesn’t make them look good if they don’t kick up a stink and draw fire away from their role in the mess.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Locky Ransomware Spreading in Massive Spam Attack

      Trustwave said over the last seven days, malware-laced spam has represented 18 percent of total spam collected in its honeypots. Trustwave said malware-infected spam typically represent less than 2 percent of total spam. The recent increase to 18 percent is almost entirely traced to ransomware JavaScript downloaders. Campaigns aren’t continuous, Trustwave reported, but are delivered in hour-long bursts.

    • Considering Docker? Consider Security First

      Containers started making a big splash in IT and dev operations starting in 2014. The benefits of flexibility and go-live times, among many others, are almost undeniable. But large enterprises considering using a container platform for development or IT operations should pause and consider security first.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • NYT: ISIS Uses Birth Control to Maintain Supply of Sex Slaves

      Of course I do not in any way condone ISIS, rape, terrorism, violence, victim shaming or slavery. But I do have what I believe are legitimate questions about a New York Times story involving those topics, and hope I can ask them here without being accused of supporting things I find abhorrent.

      I ask these questions only because while rape is tragically used all-to-often as a tool of war, claims by people or groups in war can sometimes be untrue, exaggerated, or reported erroneously for political aims. Iraqi defectors lied about WMDs to help draw America into the 2003 invasion. Claims in 1991 that Iraqi invaders bayoneted Kuwaiti children in their incubators were completely fabricated. In 2011 Susan Rice announced Libya’s Qaddafi was handing out Viagra, so that his soldiers could commit more rapes, it was a lie.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Indefensible Stance on the Death Penalty

      IF THERE WAS anything surprising about Hillary Clinton’s defense of capital punishment when questioned by an Ohio death row exoneree Sunday night, it was only that she was not better prepared to deliver it. This was no gotcha question, no unscripted ambush like the one carried out last month by Black Lives Matter protesters who confronted Clinton at a fundraiser with her ’90s-era rhetoric about “superpredators.” Although the CNN-sponsored Democratic town hall dictated that candidates do not receive questions in advance, the Clinton campaign almost certainly knew that Ricky Jackson, who spent an incomprehensible 39 years in prison as an innocent man, would be in the audience — and that if called upon, he would probably ask Clinton to justify her support for a policy that sent him to die for a crime he did not commit.

    • “Look like war crimes to me”: Congressman raises concerns over U.S. support for Saudi war in Yemen

      For almost a year, a Saudi-led coalition of Middle Eastern countries, backed and armed by the U.S. and U.K., has been bombing Yemen, the poorest country in the region. Saudi Arabia hopes to destroy Yemeni rebel groups such as the Houthis, and has bombed hospitals, homes, schools and even a refugee camp in the process.

      Civilians have paid a heavy toll for the conflict. Thousands have been killed, and human rights groups have for months accused the coalition of committing war crimes.

    • PR firm accused of helping Saudi Arabia ‘whitewash’ its human rights record

      One of the world’s largest advertising agencies has been accused of helping Saudi Arabia “whitewash” its record on human rights following the kingdom’s largest mass execution for more than 30 years.

      A US subsidiary of Publicis Groupe, the French media conglomerate that owns UK brands such as Saatchi & Saatchi, distributed an article in which the kingdom’s foreign minister Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir implicitly attempted to justify the execution of 47 people.

      A number of political protesters and at least four juveniles are believed to have been among those killed in January. Human rights groups are increasingly worried that three more juveniles – including Ali al-Nimr, who was sentenced to death aged 17 for taking part in a pro-democracy protest – are due to be executed imminently.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • MuckRock’s FOIA Redaction Hall Of Shame

      In 2013, there was controversy abounded when The Times of London alleged that Beyoncé’s perfect rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” during Obama’s second inauguration was the work of lip-syncing. Unperturbed, MuckRock’s founder Michael Morisy seized on this as an opportunity to use FOIA to release those tracks, providing public-domain Bey for all. Sadly, his efforts were thwarted by a combination of FOIA not working that way, and of all things, John Williams. Yes, that John Williams.

      Adding insult to injury (a phrase that will come up more than once in this article), Michael’s follow-up request for the processing notes on his request included a very notable omission.

    • San Francisco Legislators Dodging Public Records Requests With Self-Destructing Text Messages

      Legislators and government employees aren’t allowed to choose which laws to comply with any more than the rest of us. (Theoretically…) Communications between government employees that are subject to open records requests need to be carried out on platforms where they can be searched and archived. This means no use of Telegram, just like it means no setting up your own private email server.

      The irony, of course, is that legislators are currently discussing encrypted communications (including encryption bans) and how law enforcement can no longer obtain communications they used to be able to grab with a warrant. Meanwhile, their own communications are being withheld from the public record… using encryption and automatic destruction. Perhaps the public needs to start issuing statements about how they used to get all these text messages with public records requests but can’t anymore, thanks to the efforts of the government.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Hottest Winter On Record By Far Drives Devastating Weather Disasters Globally

      December to February was the hottest meteorological winter ever by far, topping the previous record by a jaw-dropping half a degree Fahrenheit. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that this winter was a remarkable 2.03°F above the 20th century average.

      This extreme warmth — caused primarily by the accelerating human-caused global warming trend (with a boost from El Niño) — is a key reason a number of countries have already “set records for the all-time most expensive weather-related disaster in their nations’ history” this year, as meteorologist Jeff Masters has explained.

      We already knew from NASA surface temperature data and from the satellite data that this was the hottest February on record by far. Indeed, every database confirms that February was the most extreme deviation from “normal” temperatures ever recorded for any month!

    • Greenpeace Launches Maps Tracking “near real-time” Indonesian Deforestation and Fires

      As a new forest fire crisis builds in the country, with fire hotspots numbering in the hundreds on many recent days, Greenpeace Indonesia today launched a mapping tool allowing the public to monitor fires and deforestation in near-real time, and see to an unprecedented extent who controls the land where they are taking place.

    • Indonesia offers a cool million to whoever can help take the heat off its peatlands

      Last year, fires burned 2 million hectares of peatlands in Indonesia, creating an acrid haze that affected several neighbouring Southeast Asian countries.

      As nations met in Paris late last year to agree a deal to limit global greenhouse gas emissions, the huge carbon pool stored in the peatlands was going up in smoke at an unprecedented rate.

      Big companies have cleared a massive amount of peat forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan and drained the land to establish tree and oil palm plantations. Global Forest Watch estimates that the fires have tripled Indonesia’s entire annual emissions. Peatlands have become an important issue, not only in Indonesia but for the whole world.

  • Finance

    • Beef industry will suffer significantly if TTIP deal between EU and US goes ahead: Michelle O’Neill

      Farming minister Michelle O’Neill says the beef industry in Northern Ireland would “suffer significantly” if a major trade deal between the EU and US gets the green light.

    • Dictator Bling

      President Aliev has wasted billions on “prestige” projects. Hosting the Eurovision song contest, the European Games and now a Formula 1 Grand Prix. But ordinary people are struggling to get by on incomes which were already at third world standards and whose value has fallen still further with the collapse of the manat. None of which matters to the empty-headed bling merchants of Formula 1.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Coming Up: Amy Goodman on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, March 20
    • Fascism: Can It Happen Here?

      “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” goes a saying…

    • Evidence-based policy? Only if it fits with your preconceptions

      The deep irony in this will not be missed by anyone who’s been following UK higher education. Researchers are increasingly being forced to spend their time and money on ‘impact’ activities – defined as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’. Impact activities already count for 20% in the Research Excellence Framework – the assessment exercise that determines central (non-grant) research funding. A recent FOI request suggests that it could rise to 25%. Yet now we’re being told that we must not spend government grant money on anything that will have an effect on public policy. It’s absurd.

    • When Your Media Are ‘Disappointed’ by Opposition to Bigotry

      As the aggressive behavior of his supporters becomes as much of a story as the violence implied in his politics, Donald Trump is bringing together folks who agree on little else to denounce him. It’s true Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have policies in some ways even more regressive than Trump’s, but then neither of them is openly pining for the days when protesters were carried off on stretchers.

      Turnout by thousands of appalled citizens led to the cancellation of Trump’s Chicago rally, and a coalition of public interest groups, including MoveOn, Color of Change, Greenpeace and Jobs with Justice, released an open letter calling for a mass Nonviolent Mobilization to Stand Up to what they called a “five alarm fire” for democracy.

    • This is how Singapore teaches children to stay away from drugs

      The city-state has been distributing morbid anti-drug propaganda in its schools. So we asked an expert what Singapore’s harsh anti-drug policies actually achieve in reality.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • ‘Chilling Effect’ of Mass Surveillance Is Silencing Dissent Online, Study Says

      Thanks largely to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, most Americans now realize that the intelligence community monitors and archives all sorts of online behaviors of both foreign nationals and US citizens.

      But did you know that the very fact that you know this could have subliminally stopped you from speaking out online on issues you care about?

      Now research suggests that widespread awareness of such mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public.

      A paper published last week in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that “the government’s online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion.”

    • Canadian Librarians Must Be Ready to Fight the Feds on Running a Tor Node

      Political dissidents and cyber criminals alike will soon be sending anonymous internet traffic through a library at Western University in Canada, thanks to a new “node” in the encrypted Tor network operated by staff there—the first to open at a library in the country.

      In Canada, the legality of running a Tor node is essentially untested, making the high profile, institutionally-backed node at Western a potential target for the feds.

      Tor is touted as a tool for people, such as journalists, to keep their browsing habits safe from spies and police. But more nefarious traffic, such as drug dealing or child pornography, also passes through the network. A small public library in New Hampshire began operating a Tor node last year, and faced pressure from the Department of Homeland Security to shut it down. The library resisted, and the node is still running.

    • A Government Error Just Revealed Snowden Was the Target in the Lavabit Case

      It’s been one of the worst-kept secrets for years: the identity of the person the government was investigating in 2013 when it served the secure email firm Lavabit with a court order demanding help spying on a particular customer.

      Ladar Levison, owner of the now defunct email service, has been forbidden since then, under threat of contempt and possibly jail time, from identifying who the government was investigating. In court documents from the case unsealed in late 2013, all information that could identify the customer was redacted.

      But federal authorities recently screwed up and revealed the secret themselves when they published a cache of case documents but failed to redact one identifying piece of information about the target: his email address, Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com. With that, the very authorities holding the threat of jail time over Levison’s head if he said anything have confirmed what everyone had long ago presumed: that the target account was Snowden’s.

    • Five Big Unanswered Questions About NSA’s Worldwide Spying

      Nearly three years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave journalists his trove of documents on the intelligence community’s broad and powerful surveillance regime, the public is still missing some crucial, basic facts about how the operations work.

      Surveillance researchers and privacy advocates published a report on Wednesday outlining what we do know, thanks to the period of discovery post-Snowden — and the overwhelming amount of things we don’t.

      The NSA’s domestic surveillance was understandably the initial focus of public debate. But that debate never really moved on to examine the NSA’s vastly bigger foreign operations.

    • NSA ‘Zero Days’ Process to Stay Secret

      EFF’s suit was filed in the wake of news reports claiming the government knew for two years about the Heartbleed Bug, a widespread security flaw affecting an estimated two-thirds of the world’s websites, without disclosing the threat.

    • Sharing baby pictures on social networks is a dangerous game

      Here’s the background: The French Parliament is currently debating a series of regulations on the digital economy and as part of its measures, it has defined a new constraint that basically prohibits parents to upload pictures and videos of their (minor) children on social networks. According to the draft, if parents do upload this content on social networks they may get risk being sued by their own children and may be liable for civil damages and compensation. I do not know what will become of the whole draft nor that specific provision itself. What happened to me, following the news reports about the project, is that several of my friends tweeted and discussed online whether French had lost their sanity.

      [...]

      But to Melissa and I, we do this because we do not want to bring our son at his young age into the nets of marketers, big data, and surveillance. We do not want to put his face out there, despite the fact that we love him so tenderly. We do not want him to be identifiable unless he hasn’t expressed an actual will to do so.

    • Thinking About the Term “Backdoor”

      In a recent Deeplinks post and in some of our other communications about the Apple case, we’ve referred to what the government wants Apple to do as creating a “backdoor.” Some people have questioned the use of the term, but we think it’s appropriate. Here’s why.

      The term “backdoor” has a long history. It was originally used—along with “trapdoor”—throughout the 1980s to refer to secret accounts and/or passwords created to allow someone unknown access into a system. People worried, for instance, that a malicious programmer or system administrator might leave behind a trapdoor that they would be able to use to get into a system long after they were officially working on it. Later, in the first round of the crypto wars, throughout the 1990s, privacy advocates often referred to the government’s key escrow proposals—where the government, or private companies, would keep copies of people’s decryption keys—as a “backdoor” into our encryption.

    • Transatlantic coalition of civil society groups: Privacy Shield is not enough, must return to negotiating tables

      Today, more than two dozen civil society groups sent a letter to European leaders reviewing the “Privacy Shield” data-transfer agreement with a singular message: this arrangement is not enough. The Privacy Shield is intended to allow companies to share data about customers across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the Privacy Shield fails to provide sufficient clarity, oversight, remedy, or protections for the human rights of E.U. citizens against U.S. surveillance practices. The letter specifically calls for legislative reform of U.S. surveillance laws, increased protections for personal data, and additional redress and transparency mechanisms.

    • NSA ‘not interested in’ Americans, privacy officer claims [Ed: Lying again, and there’s so much evidence to show it]

      The National Security Agency’s internal civil liberties watchdog insisted on Thursday that the agency has no interest in spying on Americans under its controversial spying tools.

    • How Apple Could Lose By Winning: The DOJ’s Next Move Could Be Worse
    • NSA refused Clinton a secure BlackBerry like Obama, so she used her own
    • Apple to FBI: Why Don’t You Ask the NSA?

      After weeks of relentlessly negging each other in their legal filings and the press, Apple and the FBI are getting in their final punches before heading to court next week.

    • Former Presidential Cybersecurity ‘Czar’ Slams DOJ/FBI For Its Position On Apple Encryption
    • This is the phone NSA suggested Clinton use: A $4,750 Windows CE PDA [Ed: recommends Windows … because it has back doors to it]

      SME PED devices were only NSA-approved mobile phones for classified communications.

    • Peacefully protesting pensioner arrested outside NSA spy base

      Police arrested a 74-year-old peace activist who refused to leave a protest site outside an NSA spy base in Yorkshire on Wednesday. The force also issued an official dispersal order banning protesters from assembling there.

      Lindis Percy, a founding member of Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB), was arrested by police at the Menwith Hill US listening post.

    • Five Big Unanswered Questions About NSA’s Worldwide Spying

      Nearly three years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave journalists his trove of documents on the intelligence community’s broad and powerful surveillance regime, the public is still missing some crucial, basic facts about how the program works.

      Surveillance researchers and privacy advocates published a report on Wednesday outlining what we do know, thanks to the period of discovery post-Snowden — and the overwhelming amount of things we don’t.

  • Civil Rights

    • I Discovered My Company Was Evil During A Routine Audit

      What’s the worst thing your boss has ever done? Made you work on the weekend? Sexually harassed the secretary? Gave millions of dollars to an infamous dictator? Jack’s boss did that last one, and all of a sudden having to cancel your Saturday BBQ doesn’t sound so bad, huh?

      Jack was an accountant for SNC-Lavalin, a Montreal-based engineering firm that managed to single-handedly disprove every nice stereotype about Canadians. Between 2001 and 2011, SNC bribed Muammar Gaddafi and friends with millions of dollars in exchange for cushy contracts, and Jack discovered it during a routine audit. He told us all about learning that his bosses were secretly funding supervillains.

    • Corruption Smells Like Burning Human Flesh

      Crematoria are profitable private businesses.

    • Police Accountability Doesn’t Stop At the Schoolhouse Door

      On December 16, 2010, the Salt Lake City Police Department and the Safe Streets Violent Crimes Task Force, in coordination with Salt Lake City School District officials, entered West High School in Salt Lake City to conduct a gang raid. Each one of the young people detained during the raid had brown skin. Not one was accused of committing a crime, but it didn’t matter. They were treated like criminals and labeled as gang members.

    • The Public’s Need for the Full Story of CIA Torture Has Gotten Even More Urgent

      Given the recent and re-manufactured debate over torture’s legality, morality, and “effectiveness,” our nation is presented with a stark choice: Do we learn from one of the darkest chapters in our history, or do we repeat our most grievous and heinous mistakes?

      With our core values hanging in the balance, now — perhaps more than ever — it is imperative that the Senate torture report see the light of day.

    • Medical Examiner Sues City Of New York After Being Forced Out Of Her Job For Questioning DNA Testing Techniques

      A lawsuit recently filed by an allegedly ousted New York City medical examiner lends more credibility to the theory that the justice system is more concerned with successful prosecutions than actual justice. At the center of the allegations lies a DNA testing technique apparently used nowhere else in the country.

    • Corporate Media’s ‘Ideal’ Supreme Court Nominee Embraced ‘Legal Black Hole’ Theory

      As a candidate in 2008, Obama praised a Supreme Court ruling that affirmed that prisoners had a right to habeas corpus regardless of where they were held, calling it “a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantánamo” (New York Times, 6/13/08). But that ruling was a reversal of an appeals court ruling that Garland had voted for; if you’re glad that the Supreme Court rejected the legal black hole theory, why put another judge there who embraced it?

    • The U.S. Government Is Still Fighting to Bury the Senate Torture Report

      Government lawyers on Thursday continued their fight to bury the Senate Torture Report, arguing before the D.C. District Court of Appeals that the 6,700-page text could not be released on procedural grounds.

      When the 500-page executive summary of the report was released more than a year ago, it prompted international outcry and renewed calls for prosecution. The summary describes not only the CIA’s rape and torture of detainees, but also how the agency consistently misrepresented the brutality and effectiveness of the torture program.

      But many of the most graphic details are in Volume III of the full report, which former Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein has said contains “excruciating” details on “each of the 119 known individuals who were held in CIA custody.”

    • Exclusive Video: NYPD Arrests Bill de Blasio Adviser for Filming Arrest of Homeless Man

      The New York Police Department is facing criticism after arresting an adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio Tuesday night. Five Mualimm-ak was arrested while attempting to mediate a police confrontation with a homeless man in midtown Manhattan. Five Mualimm-ak had just left an event at George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, where he read his essay in the book “Hell is a Very Small Place,” about his five years in solitary confinement. Since being released from prison in 2012, Five Mualimm-ak has become a prominent advocate for previously incarcerated men and women. He serves on Mayor de Blasio’s Task Force on Behavioral Health and the Criminal Justice System. He was arrested Tuesday along with fellow prison activist Joseph “Jazz” Hayden. Five other people who attended the book reading were later arrested at the police precinct, where they went to inquire about the arrest of Five Mualimm-ak and Hayden. They were charged with “refusal to disperse.” We speak to Five Mualimm-ak and two other activists connected with Incarcerated Nation Corp., Joseph “Jazz” Hayden and Terrence Slater. All three were arrested on Tuesday.

    • Republican leaders quash talk of Supreme Court vote in lame duck

      Senate Republican leaders are tamping down talk in their conference of voting on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court in the lame-duck session after the elections.

      Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, on Wednesday floated the idea of voting on Garland later this year if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. Hatch describes himself as a good friend of Garland’s, and helped move his nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals through the Senate in 1997.

      Behind the scenes, several other Republicans have discussed the lame-duck option and voiced concerns that Clinton might nominate a judge who is even more liberal. They also worry about the selection that Donald Trump, their presidential front-runner, might make, according to one GOP lawmaker.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • US Congress Hearing All Positive On IANA Transition Process

      Witnesses testifying at the United States House Communications and Technology Subcommittee today unanimously reported success of the multistakeholder preparations for the transition of oversight over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) from the US government to the multistakeholder internet community.

      The Director at the Global Internet Policy and Human Rights Project, Matthew Shears, called the proposals delivered by the two-year process at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) “the most successful expression of multistakeholder approaches to internet governance yet.”

    • Comcast Battles Google Fiber In Atlanta — With Threat Of Usage Caps Unless You Sign 3-Year Contract

      With Google Fiber now starting to encroach on some major Comcast territories, the company’s suddenly finding itself in the unfamiliar position of actually having to compete on price. In Atlanta, where Google Fiber is expected to appear later this year or early next, Comcast has been circulating flyers urging locals not to fall for the “hype” of ultra-fast, relatively cheap Google Fiber service.

    • YouTube Flips, Now Thinks T-Mobile’s Abuse Of Net Neutrality Is Ok, Following A Few Small Changes

      Last year you’ll recall that T-Mobile launched its “Binge On” zero rating program, which exempts the biggest video services from the company’s usage caps (aka “zero rating”). Net neutrality advocates quickly complained that the practice violated net neutrality, since the very act of giving some companies an advantage automatically disadvantages some others. After T-Mobile spent some time lying about the nature of the program, the EFF came out with a detailed report noting that T-Mobile was just throttling all video files back to 1.5 Mbps, whether the content was being streamed or directly downloaded.

      Net neutrality advocates like the EFF argued that the program should be opt in instead of opt out, voicing concerns that T-mobile continues to ignore. YouTube similarly initially complained about the program and that video partners were being throttled by default. But in a matter of months, Alphabet/Google appears to have completely changed its mind, issuing a new blog post that says it’s now partnering with T-Mobile to zero rate Google Play Movies and YouTube content traveling over the T-Mobile network.

    • Internet Domain Name Expansion Pushes Dispute Resolution Cases Up At WIPO

      The World Intellectual Property Organization has released data on disputes between trademark owners and third parties who are registering new domain names with the original brand name. Disputes are on the rise and the proportion relating to new generic top-level domain names is growing, it found. Fashion and banking are the prominent areas for disputes.

      [...]

      Asked to describe the relationship between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and WIPO, Gurry said WIPO historically has been charged with the development of a dispute resolution procedure, which was adopted by ICANN in 1998/1999.

    • AT&T Uses Binding Arbitration Mouse Print To Kill Throttling Class Action

      For years, AT&T used contract fine print to prohibit its customers from suing it. Instead, users were forced to participate in binding arbitration, a system whereby company-employed arbitrators weigh the evidence — and unsurprisingly rule in favor of the company employing them a dramatic majority of the time. Initially, lower courts repeatedly derided this behavior as an “unconscionable” curtailing of consumer rights and abuse of the law. But in 2011 the Supreme Court’s AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion ruling declared that what AT&T was doing was perfectly ok, resulting in countless companies now following AT&T’s lead.

    • T-Mobile and YouTube compromise on video throttling and zero-rating

      T-Mobile USA and YouTube have reached a compromise that will bring YouTube into T-Mobile’s Binge On program, which reduces streaming quality but exempts videos from data caps.

      The Google-owned YouTube was the most notable absence from Binge On when T-Mobile launched the program in November. YouTube later said that while reducing data charges can be good for customers, “it doesn’t justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent.”

    • Facebook Moves in to Make the Web a Facebook Monopoly

      There’s a a growing trend to close off publishing platforms by demanding a login in order to view the content. Which is a move away from an open web. In December 2015 Facebook launched its own in-app browser, which is basically a web-view that loads links you tap on using the Facebook app. It may provide convenience for some but the primary goal is to keep users inside the application longer. This opens up more advertising exposure and associated revenue. This poses a challenge to the open web because this overrides the user’s default mobile browser keeps the eyeballs in a closed ecosystem. The feature Instant Articles for publishers is done such that it loads articles available nearly instantly in the app compared to a mobile browser. This opens up for monetizing viewing and privacy invasions by Facebook on users. The in-app browser lack decent privacy controls.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TTIP: Big business and US to have major say in EU trade deals, leak reveals

      The European Commission will be obliged to consult with US authorities before adopting new legislative proposals following passage of a controversial series of trade negotiations being carried out mostly in secret.

      A leaked document obtained by campaign group the Independent and Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) from the ongoing EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations reveals the unelected Commission will have authority to decide in which areas there should be cooperation with the US – leaving EU member states and the European Parliament further sidelined.

    • Trademarks

      • Macy’s Settles With Strategic Marks, Gives Up The Brands It Killed Off Through Acquisition

        About a year ago, we wrote about a somewhat strange trademark dispute between Macy’s and a company called Strategic Marks. The issue in the case was that Strategic Marks was attempting to sell merchandise and create popup stores for brands that had been dissolved through acquisition into larger companies, such as Macy’s. These brands were once staples of the storefront experience, including names like Marshall Field’s, Bullock’s, and Foley’s. All were once well-known regional department stores that Macy’s bought and rebranded as Macy’s stores. Macy’s, despite all of this, claimed it retained trademark ownership over those, despite their being generally unused.

    • Copyrights

      • Dancing Baby Trial Back On? Another Mixed Ruling in Lenz v. Universal

        The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important ruling last Fall in the long-running “dancing baby” case, affirming that copyright holders must consider whether a use of material is fair before sending a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We welcomed that ruling, but the majority decision also set the bar for enforcing that requirement higher than Congress intended. So Stephanie Lenz asked the Ninth Circuit to rehear the case en banc to address those elements of its ruling that risk leaving many victims of improper takedowns without a practical vehicle to vindicate their rights (EFF and the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest, LLP, represent Stephanie Lenz in the case).

        In an amended opinion issued today, the Ninth Circuit declined Lenz’s request for rehearing. At the same time, the appeals court made some interesting changes to its first ruling.

        What hasn’t changed: The court’s new opinion stands by its earlier determination that rightsholders must consider whether a use is a lawful fair use before issuing a takedown notice. It leaves intact its determination that fair use is not just a carve-out of the copyright system but a right on the same level of those described in the rest of the statute. Finally, the new opinion retains its determination that a victim of takedown abuse can vindicate her rights even if she cannot show actual monetary loss.

03.17.16

Links 17/3/2016: 3 Stable Linux Releases, Elive 2.6.18 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Slack smackback: There’s no IRC in team (software), say open-sourcers

    Open-source software is not possible without collaboration and collaboration is not possible without communication. Collaborative communication in open source projects typically means some form of distributed chat.

    In the past, and indeed the present for most projects, that has meant IRC. IRC has some disadvantages, though, and developers love a shiny new toy, which is part of the reason more than a few projects have moved to Slack, the startup attracting crazy amounts of venture investment and equally crazy valuations.

    [...]

    There are ongoing efforts to improve IRC, notably the IRCv3 project, but if you’re looking for a solution right now, IRC comes up short.

    And there’s no question that Slack is a very well designed, easy to use chat system. But it’s closed source, which makes it a questionable choice for open-source projects. Still, if good old IRC really isn’t working any more – and I would suggest your project take some time to really evaluate that question before proceeding – there are open-source Slack imitators that can also solve some of the problems with IRC, but are self-hosted and FOSS licensed.

  • TP-Link blocks open-source router firmware to comply with new FCC rules

    If you’re a fan of third-party software that adds functionality to a Wi-Fi router, your options just got smaller. The Federal Communications Commission has new rules designed to make sure routers operate only within their licensed frequencies and power levels. TP-Link is complying by blocking open-source firmware like the Linux-based OpenWRT and DD-WRT from its routers. That’s the easiest way for router manufacturers to comply.

  • 4 projects for building an open source arcade

    You may have heard the news recently that the MAME project has been licensed under the GPL version 2.

    MAME, which originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, is probably the largest and most complete game emulation systems ever created, with the ability to emulate many original gaming systems, largely from the 80s and 90s. While primarily developed for Windows, MAME also compiles easily for Linux, and can be ported to other operating systems as well.

  • 4 open source tools for writing your next screenplay

    While I was putting together slides for my lightning talk at Great Wide Open (happening March 16-17), Not that Weird: Open Source Tools for Creatives, I remembered that in the last half of 2015 we had a bit of a loss from our open source creative toolbox. I think I was little late to the game in realizing this—after all, the last official stable release of Celtx (the open source, desktop version) was in 2012—but for folks paying attention, it’s been a long time coming.

  • Events

    • Open source is center stage at Open Networking Summit

      Open Networking Summit (ONS) kicked off in Santa Clara this week, the first event since becoming part of the Linux Foundation.

      Guru Parulkar, Nick McKeown and Dan Pitt started the Open Networking summit back in 2011. Yesterday, Parulkar said in his keynote that they started the summit as a small event to highlight the latest developments in software defined networking (SDN), and to accelerate SDN adoption by network operators and service providers.

      But as almost everything is become software defined and adoption is increasing, ONS became an important event for the industry and community. The immense adoption of open source led the team to increase focus on open source and open source platforms.

    • Great Wide Open Day One in Twitter Pics

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Thunderbird’s defective method of enabling anti-virus software to scan incoming POP3 e-mail messages

        Thunderbird’s method of enabling anti-virus software to scan incoming e-mail messages is explained in the mozillaZine article ‘Download each e-mail to a separate file before adding to Inbox‘ and in Mozilla bug report no. 116443 (the bug report that resulted in the functionality being implemented). It is my contention that the design is deficient and is actually not a solution. In this post I explain why I believe this to be the case. Although here I will discuss Thunderbird in Linux, I believe the deficiency applies to Thunderbird in all OSs.

      • User Security Relies on Encryption

        Security of users is paramount. Technology companies need to do everything in their power to ensure the security of their users and build products and services with strong security measures in place to do that.

        At Mozilla, it’s part of our mission to safeguard the Web and to take a stand on issues that threaten the health of the Internet. People need to understand and engage with encryption as a core technology that keeps our everyday transactions and conversations secure. That’s why, just days before the Apple story broke, we launched an awareness campaign to educate users on the importance of encryption.

  • Databases

    • Crate Built a Distributed SQL Database System To Run Within Containers

      Crate Technology has designed a database system for supporting Docker containers and microservices. The technology stresses ease of use, speed and scalability while retaining the ability to use SQL against very large data sets.

      Crate was built to run in ephemeral environments, said Christian Lutz, Crate CEO. It was the ninth official Docker image in the Docker Registry and has been downloaded more than 350,000 times in the past six months. It can be managed with Docker tools, or with Kubernetes or Mesos.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Tips for LibreOffice newbies

      Li Haoyi has written an excellent blog post entitled “Diving Into Other People’s Code” about diving into an unfamilar codebase (HN discussion here).

      I think this is really very helpful for anyone who wants to look at the LibreOffice source for the first time. Many of the things he mentions are directly relatable to LibreOffice – in particular getting your dev environment setup is particularly relatable.

  • CMS

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Share your Insights in the 2016 Future of Open Source Survey

      The interesting thing will be to see if the results continue to accelerate at the same rate or even faster. You can see results of last year’s survey here. Follow the 2016 Future of Open Source Survey on Twitter at #FutureOSS and @FutureOfOSS, and stay tuned to Linux.com for future updates and results.

  • BSD

    • AsiaBSDCon OpenBSD papers

      This year’s AsiaBSDCon has come to an end, with a number of OpenBSD-related talks being presented. Two developers were also invited to the smaller “bhyvecon” event to discuss vmm(4) and future plans.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Open Source Learning

        The U.S. Department of Education’s #GoOpen program is an initiative to use openly licensed educational resources in the classroom. Chesterfield schools have a national reputation as a pioneer in the use of these programs, and is one of six school districts nationwide to be named a #GoOpen Ambassador District, to mentor other school systems in implementing the program.

  • Programming

    • The Deep Roots of Javascript Fatigue

      When I was more active in the frontend community, the changes seemed minor. We’d occasionally make switches in packaging (RequireJS → Browserify), or frameworks (Backbone → Components). And sometimes we’d take advantage of new Node/v8 features. But for the most part, the updates were all incremental.

      [...]

      On the other hand, Brendan Eich, now the Mozilla CTO, argued for the changes. In an open letter to Chris Wilson, he objected to the fact that Microsoft was just now withdrawing support for a spec which had been in the works for years.

Leftovers

  • Yankees’ Dumb Ticket Policy Turns Soccer Match At Yankee Stadium Into A Ghost Town

    You may recall that we discussed the New York Yankees’ bumbling attempt to institute a new ticket policy for Yankee Stadium that disallowed print-at-home tickets. Dressed up as a policy designed to combat fake tickets being sold by scalpers, the policy was actually designed to be a warm hug to the team’s partner Ticketmaster and a slap to Ticketmaster rival StubHub, as well as all of the other secondary market resellers out there. Still, some people probably shrugged, assuming that this would only have an effect on Yankees fans, a group that might find the soil of sympathy barren.

  • Science

    • Why Haven’t We Met Aliens Yet? Because They’ve Evolved into AI

      While traveling in Western Samoa many years ago, I met a young Harvard University graduate student researching ants. He invited me on a hike into the jungles to assist with his search for the tiny insect. He told me his goal was to discover a new species of ant, in hopes it might be named after him one day.

      Whenever I look up at the stars at night pondering the cosmos, I think of my ant collector friend, kneeling in the jungle with a magnifying glass, scouring the earth. I think of him, because I believe in aliens—and I’ve often wondered if aliens are doing the same to us.

    • Ben Goldacre on why a ban on researchers speaking to politicians and policymakers fails the taxpayers who fund them

      Last month it was quietly announced that anyone receiving research grants from the state will be banned from lobbying “government and Parliament” on either policy issues or funding. The rule is said to be aimed principally at charities, but who knows the truth: in any case it covers all government grants “related to research and development”, and that means academics like me.

    • Rather than banning “lobbying” by academics, UK government should encourage it

      The UK government has passed rules banning academics who receive public funding from “lobbying” ministers and MPs about their research, meaning that the people whom the government pays to acquire expertise in matters of public policy aren’t allowed to speak to policy-makers anymore.

      The problem, from the UK government’s perspective, is that it wants to do things that scientists understand to be stupid: impose austerity as a means of stimulating the economy, give tax breaks to the rich as a means of stimulating the economy, limit migration as a means of stimulating the economy, and, of course, deny climate change.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • What Americans Don’t Get About Nordic Countries

      When U.S. politicians talk about Scandinavian-style social welfare, they fail to explain the most important aspect of such policies: selfishness.

    • Another Big Turnout For Second Public Dialogue Of UN High-Level Panel On Medicines Access

      Today in Johannesburg, South Africa, the second of two public dialogues was held by the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, drawing another packed room and many ideas, experiences and suggestions for solutions.

      The archived livestream of the 17 March Johannesburg dialogue is available on the HLP website here. At press time, it appeared part of the webcast might be missing. The agenda of the event is available here [pdf]. Today’s public segment was preceded by a closed session yesterday.

  • Security

    • Big-name sites hit by rash of malicious ads spreading crypto ransomware [Updated]

      Mainstream websites, including those published by The New York Times, the BBC, MSN, and AOL, are falling victim to a new rash of malicious ads that attempt to surreptitiously install crypto ransomware and other malware on the computers of unsuspecting visitors, security firms warned.

      The tainted ads may have exposed tens of thousands of people over the past 24 hours alone, according to a blog post published Monday by Trend Micro. The new campaign started last week when “Angler,” a toolkit that sells exploits for Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and other widely used Internet software, started pushing laced banner ads through a compromised ad network.

      According to a separate blog post from Trustwave’s SpiderLabs group, one JSON-based file being served in the ads has more than 12,000 lines of heavily obfuscated code. When researchers deciphered the code, they discovered it enumerated a long list of security products and tools it avoided in an attempt to remain undetected.

    • VMware fixes XSS flaws in vRealize for Linux

      VMware patched two cross-site scripting issues in several editions of its vRealize cloud software. These flaws could be exploited in stored XSS attacks and could result in the user’s workstation being compromised.

    • VMware patches severe XSS flaws in vRealize software

      VMware has patched two serious vulnerabilities in the firm’s vRealize software which could lead to remote code execution and the compromise of business workstations.

      In a security advisory posted on Tuesday, the Palo Alto, California-based firm said the “important” vulnerabilities are found within the VMware vRealize Automation and VMware vRealize Business Advanced and Enterprise software platforms.

    • Get ready to patch Git servers, clients – nasty-looking bugs surface

      A chap who found two serious security bugs in Git servers and clients has urged people to patch their software.

      The flaws are present in Git including the 2.x, 1.9 and 1.7 branches, meaning the vulnerabilities have been lurking in the open-source version control tool for years.

      It is possible these two programming blunders can be potentially exploited to corrupt memory or execute malicious code on remote servers and clients. To do so, an attacker would have to craft a Git repository with a tree of files that have extremely long filenames, and then push the repo to a vulnerable server or let a vulnerable client clone it from the internet.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Drones, drugs and death

      The war on terror’s methods of mass surveillance and remote warfare are not unique. The US is also addicted to covert tools in its ‘war on drugs’, with disastrous consequences.

    • Russian Anti-Torture Activist Assaulted in Chechnya

      One of Russia’s leading human rights activists, Igor Kalyapin, was assaulted in the Chechen capital, Grozny, on Wednesday night by masked men who beat him and doused him in eggs, cakes and green paint.

      Kalyapin, whose nongovernmental group, the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, is known for investigating abuses in the region, was in the city to meet a member of the Chechen Human Rights Council, Heda Saratova, and some journalists, according to his colleague Dmitriy Piskunov.

      The activist had just checked in to the Hotel Grozny City when “employees of the hotel, accompanied by armed police officers, forced Kalyapin out of his room and onto the street just outside of the hotel,” Piskunov wrote in an email to The Intercept.

    • Evidence Mounts That U.S. Airstrike on ISIS in Libya Killed Serbian Diplomats

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • TPPA at risk as the US political pendulum swings towards trade isolationism

      Whatever the outcome of the United States presidential primaries, let alone the presidential election later this year, there is no doubt that we are watching the strongest challenge to the 30-plus year consensus on the benefits of globalisation.

      That pendulum is swinging, embodied in the strength of the campaigns by two ‘outsider’ candidates – Donald Trump on the mercantilist right and Bernie Sanders on the protectionist left – in the US.

      From New Zealand’s perspective, their most significant impact may be their capacity to push the US back to the isolationist roots that characterised its engagement with the rest of the international community in the first half of the 20th century.

      That isolationism could take many forms, but its greatest appeal to a generation of American workers who feel left behind by globalisation is in its impact on trade policy.

      Both Sanders and Trump are, in their own way, wanting to pull up the drawbridge on the last 30 years of global trade liberalisation.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • When graded on tech issues, 2016 presidential candidates don’t do well

      On the same day that five key states voted in the presidential primaries, startup lobbying shop Engine took a close look at where the candidates stand on important tech issues like privacy, net neutrality, and patent reform. If your views on those issues align with Engine’s, you won’t find their 2016 Candidate Report Card an encouraging read.

      After taking a look at the candidates’ records in four policy areas, Democrat Hillary Clinton got the highest overall grade: a B+. Her challenger Bernie Sanders got a B, while Republican candidates ranked lower: C+ grades for Marco Rubio and John Kasich, a D for Ted Cruz, and straight F’s for Donald Trump.

    • The curse of “inevitability”: After Hillary Clinton’s big wins, the media is already ignoring Bernie Sanders

      Bernie Sanders is still in the Democratic presidential primary race, but Hillary Clinton did her best on Tuesday night to pretend that he isn’t.

      Clinton used her election night rally to bask in her blowout victories over Sanders in Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, and ignore much closer races in Illinois and Missouri. She paid tribute to Sanders’s “vigorous campaign,” the kind of condescending line that translates into “I won and he lost.” She noted that she has won more votes than anybody from either party so far—a valiant, if not particularly successful, attempt to cast her campaign as the kind of mass movement currently mesmerizing both the Democratic and Republican grassroots. And she spent a lot of time going after Donald Trump, the night’s other big victor and the man who will be the Republican nominee if he can avoid being deposed at the GOP convention.

      “Our commander in chief has to be able to defend our country, not embarrass it,” she said. “When we have a candidate for president call for rounding up 12 million immigrants, banning all Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture, that doesn’t make him strong, it makes him wrong.”

      [...]

      Sanders has plenty of money and plenty of support. He has a real base within the Democratic Party. He will keep winning states. He has had a seismic impact on the 2016 race. But his biggest battle now will be to overcome the twin forces of establishment pressure on him to drop out and a loss of media interest in his candidacy. Both forces were in evidence on Tuesday. Sanders and his supporters will be told repeatedly that the time has come to unite behind Clinton, that the primary race is done. Trump is an exceedingly dangerous candidate on just about every level; the clamor to craft an opposing message to him as early as possible will get louder and louder. The lack of media attention will only grow. It will be a very high tide for Sanders to swim against.

    • Remembering Journalist & Media Critic Ben Bagdikian, Author of “The Media Monopoly”

      Journalist John Nichols pays tribute to the investigative journalist, media critic, editor and educator Ben Bagdikian, who has died at the age of 96. Bagdikian wrote the 1983 book “The Media Monopoly,” about how the consolidation of media outlets by a small number of corporate owners threatened free expression and independent journalism. In 1971, as an editor at The Washington Post, Bagdikian received the Pentagon Papers from whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and transferred them to Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, who entered them into the Congressional Record.

    • Adam Johnson in NYT Debate on ‘Sanders Taken Seriously Enough?’

      FAIR contributing analyst Adam Johnson was invited to write a piece for the New York Times‘ “Room for Debate” feature–on the topic “Has Sanders Not Been Taken Seriously Enough?”

    • Bernie Sanders Had to Overcome Media Consensus Around Hillary Clinton

      Who is and isn’t a “serious” candidate in our modern public relations-driven democracy is largely tautological. Whoever the news media say is important early on typically becomes the most important. This leads to a feedback loop that anoints the “frontrunner” in the “invisible primary,” where success is measured by name recognition, money raised, party insider support and a host of “serious” accomplishments, all before the most essential of feedback has been provided: actual voting.

      This dynamic helped create the artificial consensus around Hillary Clinton early on. According to one tally of nightly broadcast network news during the 2015 primary season, Sanders received a total of 20 minutes of coverage, compared to Clinton’s 121 minutes and Trump’s 327. This gap would narrow once Sanders began to gain parity in early primary states, a feat Sanders achieved not because of media coverage but despite it.

      That “frontrunner” status prejudices both viewer and pundit alike when news media presents delegate totals, often including the unearned “super delegates,” despite the fact that their declared preferences are not binding, and could only reverse the will of the voters at the risk of throwing the election. This makes it appear as if Clinton’s lead is more insuperable than it actually is — a vestige of the invisible primary that occurred months before anyone voted.

  • Censorship

    • The real reason all the big social networks have introduced filtered feeds

      First it was Facebook, with the filtered News Feed that shows you as few as one in three of the posts that your friends make.

      Then it was Pinterest, which — a year ago — began displaying pins by “relevance” instead of chronology.

      Just last month, Twitter provoked an outcry of its own when Buzzfeed reported that it too would introduce, though not compel, an algorithmically ordered feed.

    • Interview: Zhao Liang Talks Behemoth and Censorship

      Zhao Liang’s Behemoth blurs the lines between video art and documentary, visually exploring multiple open-pit coal mines in the sparse hinterlands of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The film, loosely inspired by Dante’s Inferno, forgoes the spoken word completely. It stylistically melds poetry and performance art to portray the lives of various coal miners and iron smelters as they struggle to produce raw material fast enough for China’s ever-growing economy. The largely plotless film draws one in through the sheer juxtaposition of its monstrous, inhuman-sized landscapes and the intimate close-ups of miners’ soot-covered faces. Though banned from being screened inside China, the film was shown to a packed house in an underground screening room on the outskirts of Beijing this past February. The next day, we sat down in Zhao’s Beijing art studio, where the filmmaker was as wry in his humor as he was cynical, discussing everything from his views on censorship to the relationship between art and activism.

    • Is there compromise to be had over film censorship?

      I still remember one of the first times I went to watch a movie after I moved back to the country. I went to see an independent film on a whim with friends. After barely an hour and a half in the theatre, we emerged with absolutely no idea what had happened. The actual runtime was supposed to be two hours. The evening left me feeling like I had wasted my time and money.

      My issue is not necessarily with the censorship itself, but rather with the inconsistency of it. For example, I have watched some movies where scenes have been cut for explicit language but heard that same language in other films. I understand that there are cultural sensibilities to be mindful of and I honestly have no problem when, for example, gratuitous nudity that doesn’t add to the plot is cut. But if part of the storyline or dialogue (even minor bits) is gone, it creates a break that is quiet jarring for the viewer.

      When I watched movies at the Abu Dhabi film festival, I noticed the movies were uncut. If it is acceptable for films to be screened in full during festivals, what changes when they go on to be released nationwide?

    • Headless board delays film censorship

      Censorship of as many as 10 films, including the trailer of Goutam Ghose’s ‘Sankhachil’ starring Prosenjit Chatterjee, has got stalled in absence of a regional officer at the Central Board of Film Certification’s (CBFC) Kolkata office.

    • A professor in Iran came up with an ingenious method for criticizing the government without getting imprisoned

      In the final years before the 1979 Iranian revolution, political freedom in Iran was so restricted that professors caught criticizing the Shah’s regime risked imprisonment.

      The repressive environment forced one professor to come up with a very creative way to speak his mind.

      “You couldn’t criticize the regime directly – you had to be discreet about it,” Dr. Abbas Milani, a former assistant political science professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977, told Business Insider. Milani is now the director of Stanford University’s Iranian Studies program.

    • Minds in Malaysia, other Muslim countries ‘under yoke of censorship’, Turkish writer says

      urkish author Mustafa Akyol, whose book on Islamic liberalism was translated into Malay in Malaysia, has criticised censorship here and in other Muslim countries that he said are now languishing intellectually.

      Akyol, who was recently in Malaysia to promote the publication of the Malay edition of his book Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, pointed out that Putrajaya has outlawed more than a thousand books translated into Malay, including Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species and Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Defense Department Agencies Have Been Operating Drones Domestically Without Cohesive Guidelines

      It’s amazing how much stuff government agencies “take seriously” and claim they’re handling in accordance to all sorts of secret, but presumably strict, guidelines… once their actions have been exposed.

    • Pentagon admits it has deployed military spy drones over the U.S.

      The Pentagon has deployed drones to spy over U.S. territory for non-military missions over the past decade, but the flights have been rare and lawful, according to a new report.

      The report by a Pentagon inspector general, made public under a Freedom of Information Act request, said spy drones on non-military missions have occurred fewer than 20 times between 2006 and 2015 and always in compliance with existing law.

    • The Great Certainty

      America will have a President who supports apartheid, land grab and the continual murder of children.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • How a former lobbyist became the broadband industry’s worst nightmare

      After all, Wheeler had been the top lobbyist for both the cable and cell phone industries, having worked for the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1976 to 1984 and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 to 2004. Though he had left those jobs years before, people wondered if a former lobbyist would properly regulate the industries he once represented.

      “Obama’s Bad Pick: A Former Lobbyist at the FCC,” said the headline in The New Yorker on the day after Wheeler’s nomination. Consumer advocacy groups such as Free Press and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute publicly doubted whether Wheeler would be tough on his previous employers.

    • Canadian Cable Companies Make A Mockery Of Government’s Push For Cheaper TV

      So far, the Canadian government’s attempt to force innovation and lower prices on the Canadian TV industry doesn’t appear to be going so well. As previously noted, the government has demanded that all Canadian cable TV operators begin offering a so-called “skinny” bundles of smaller, cheaper channels starting this month, and the option to buy channels “a la carte” starting in December. But this being the cable industry, companies are finding all manner of ways to tap dance over, under and around the requirements.

    • ISPs Are Blocking Google Fiber’s Access To Utility Poles In California

      And while this is generally an idea that would benefit all broadband providers, it would benefit new providers like Google Fiber the most. That’s why companies like AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have been blocking this pole-attachment reform, in some cases trying to claim such policies violate their Constitutional rights. The ISPs figure that if they can’t block Google Fiber from coming to town, their lawyers can at least slow Google Fiber’s progress while they try to lock customers down in long-term contracts.

  • DRM

    • Apple ‘AceDeceiver’ DRM Flaw Allows Malware To Install Itself On Non-Jailbroken iPhones

      Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks uncovered a new iOS malware family that takes advantage of vulnerabilities in Apple’s DRM software and can infect non-jailbroken devices. The researchers called the malware “AceDeceiver.”

      AceDeceiver uses a novel way of attacking iOS devices by managing to install itself without any enterprise certificates. Instead, it exploits design flaws in Apple’s “FairPlay” DRM mechanism that allow the malware to be installed on non-jailbroken devices.

      Apparently, this “FairPlay Man-In-The-Middle” attack was identified for the first time in 2013, but so far Apple still hasn’t fixed it. It’s been used to spread pirated iOS apps so far, but now malware makers seem to be taking advantage of it as well.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Two Brazilian Restaurants Battle Over Trademark For Logos Because Both Include Fire

        For whatever reason, we’ve seen all kinds of trademark actions over logos that are claimed to be very similar, but which aren’t. Most often these disputes center on the use of a single identifying thing within the logo, such as the umbrella in the Travelers Insurance logo, or the apple in the logo of, well, Apple. These disputes take trademark law, chiefly designed to aid the public in discerning between brands, and reduce it to slap-fights over the attempted ownership of images of everyday items.

        But in the trademark spat between two Brazillian restaurants, Fogo De Chao and Espirito Do Sul, we see this sort of thing sink to a new low as the former is threatening to sue the latter over the use of fire in its logo. Yes, fire. You know, one of the first things early mankind was able to manipulate in order to start down the road of societal progress.

      • Bacardi files amended complaint in Havana Club trade mark dispute

        Bacardi has filed an amended complaint with the US District Court for the District of Columbia in the dispute over the Havana Club run brand and trade mark in the US.

    • Copyrights

      • Powerman5000 Takes To Facebook To Complain About Similar Sounding Final Fantasy Song, Fans Rebut Them

        I imagine, as a musician, it must be common to come across other music that sounds somewhat similar to one’s own. I would think that not all genres of music are created equal in this respect. Jazz, for instance, while sharing common elements across the genre, seems to have enough instruments and space within the music for unique expression that perhaps similarities occur less often or are less severe than, say, industrial rock, which seems to have some more rigid common core elements. How much similarity is there in songs from Ramstein and Nine Inch Nails, for instance, or in songs from Nine Inch Nails and Powerman5000? Or in songs from Powerman5000 and Final Fantasy XIV…wait, what?

      • “Open WiFi Operators Are Not Liable for Pirating Users”

        Restaurants, bars and shops that offer their customers free and open Wi-Fi are not liable for pirating users. This is the advice Advocate General Szpunar has sent to the EU Court of Justice in what may turn out to be a landmark case. While there’s no direct liability, the AG notes that local courts may issue injunctions against Wi-Fi operators and long as they are fair and balanced.

      • EU Court Of Justice Advocate General Says Open WiFi Operators Shouldn’t Be Liable For Infringement
      • EU court: Public WiFi providers are not responsible for the actions of their users

        IN A PRELIMINARY OPINION, a bunch of sage European legal bigwigs have decided that public WiFi hotspots are not responsible for the actions of the general public.

        Let’s face it, who would want to be responsible for the actions of the general public?After all, they can get up to all sorts of very silly things, like ride hoverboards or agree with Katie Hopkins.

      • Napster Founder’s Movie Plan Will Fuel Torrent Sites, Theaters Say

        If Napster co-founder Sean Parker’s plans come to fruition, the latest movies will be available for viewing from day one in the home via a set-top box. But despite support from big name directors, not everyone is happy. According to a 600 theater chain, Screening Room will only provide quick, quality content for torrent sites.

      • Pirate Party to Dominate Iceland Parliament, Survey Finds

        The Pirate Party would dominate Iceland’s parliament if elections were held today. That’s the conclusion of a new survey which found that the Pirates appear to be maintaining an impressive lead over their rivals, with around 38% of voters saying they will be voting for the party and kicking the ruling coalition out of power.

03.16.16

Links 16/3/2016: GNU Linux-Libre 4.5, NVIDIA Distro Rumours

Posted in News Roundup at 6:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Productivity Hacks: Multitask smarter … or not at all

    Take a quick scan of any CIO’s list of priorities for the year, and it’s easy to see that they are among the busiest executives in the C-Suite. But driving digital transformation, thwarting cybersecurity attacks, and leveraging the Internet of Things to better understand customers – just a few tasks on CIOs’ to-do lists – don’t come easily if IT leaders are inundated with back-to-back meetings and an out-of-control inbox.

  • Science

    • A Postlude on Pi Day

      It looks like I’ve missed Pi Day by some fraction of a day, but I can’t help but get a little excited when this special day rolls around — especially if pi turns into pie. And, while I can’t remember much past 3.14159 in my head, I know that calculating pi to some outrageous number of digits can be pretty exciting and that we can do that fairly easily on Unix systems.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Barring Plastic Bag Bans, another ALEC Law Takes Aim at Local Democracy

      The pay-to-play model of government advanced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) scored another victory this week. On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Senate voted along party lines to approve a bill that would prohibit local communities from issuing their own rules on plastic bags and other containers.

      This is part of an emerging national trend.

      Preventing local governments from banning, charging a fee for, or otherwise regulating plastic bags is part of a national strategy by corporate interests and groups they fund, like ALEC to override progressive policy gains at the city and county level.

      Similar state “preemption,” or state intervention, measures have gone after popular city measures to increase the minimum wage, require paid sick leave, ban fracking, and bar discrimination.

    • Malta gives go ahead to shooting of 5,000 endangered turtle doves

      Hunters in Malta will be permitted to shoot 5,000 turtle doves this spring despite the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently adding the migratory bird to the “red list” of species at risk of being wiped out.

      The Maltese government, the only EU member to allow recreational spring hunting, said it was taking “special measures” to minimise the impact of its shoot on the bird’s plummeting population, cutting the shooters’ allowance from 11,000 birds.

  • Finance

    • Every English school to become an academy, ministers to announce

      Legislation to turn every school in England into an academy independent of local authority control will be unveiled in the budget.

      Draft leglislation, to be published possibly as early as Thursday, will begin the process of implementing a pledge made by David Cameron in his conference speech last autumn.

      The prime minister said his “vision for our schooling system” was to place education into the hands of headteachers and teachers rather than “bureaucrats”.

      The move follows criticism of the government for going into stasis during the referendum campaign. Cameron and the chancellor, George Osborne, are keen to show that they are in charge of a “reforming” government.

    • Leak shows Commission giving inside information to car lobby on new emissions tests

      As the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the dieselgate scandali begins its work in Brussels, a leaked lobbying document from the European car manufacturers’ lobby, ACEA (European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association), reveals a sophisticated, multi-faceted behind-the-scenes lobbying strategy aimed at weakening new emissions tests.

      Last September’s dieselgate scandal exposed how car manufacturers were meeting legal NOx emissions limits in laboratory tests, but massively exceeding them on the road (by up to 40 times in the case of Volkswagen). While this was news to the general public, the European Commission had known manufacturers were vastly exceeding limits back in 2011 and was designing new on-the-road tests, or ‘Real Driving Emissions’ (RDE) tests, to tackle the problem in diesel cars. But as the leak shows, ACEA and its members had other plans. Their intention: to weaken and delay the new tests, scheduled to be finalised in 2015 and introduced in 2017, which could prevent thousands of premature deaths every year but would most certainly dent profits if implemented in full.

    • Former Swedish PM set to become US banker

      The man who led Sweden between 2006 and 2014 is swapping politics for banking, his new employer confirmed in a press statement on Tuesday.

      Reinfeldt, 50, who also served as president of the European Council in 2006, has been hired as a senior adviser for the bank in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

      Johan Lustig, head of Nordic Corporate and Investment Banking for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, called the ex-PM “one of Europe’s most highly respected politicians in recent years.”

    • Americans Think CEOs Make a Fraction of What They Actually Do

      Overall, respondents believed most CEOs made less than a tenth of what they actually do—on average, they thought CEOs earned nearly $1 million, whereas the real average is about $10 million. Still, 74 percent think those CEOs are overpaid.

    • Analysis: How TPP, TTIP and agriculture are shaping EU Japan trade talks

      The factors that shape EU trade policy are many. But among those that shape most actual and current negotiation dynamics in the EU Japan FTA negotiations, which started in 2013, a few months before the transatlantic TTIP talks, two stand out: United States free trade agreements and the EU agriculture sector, argues Iana Dreyer.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Denouncing Free College in the Name of the Poor

      Although corporate media outlets have blasted presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for “living in an economic fantasy world,” his proposed plan for free tuition in public universities is hardly radical. To be funded by a modest financial transaction tax—0.5 percent on stock transactions and 0.1 percent on bond transactions—it’s essentially an older policy being reinstated to create revenue for a social program.

      Many countries, including the UK, France, Japan, India and Taiwan, already have similar taxes and the US had one until 1966. And a number of industrialized nations, like Germany, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and the Scandinavian countries, have instituted free college tuition without evident chaotic societal breakdown.

      And yet a flurry of media “experts” have rushed to denounce not only the financial tax as a means to fund college tuition, but the prospect of socialized higher education as a concept.

    • Cable News Covers Everyone’s Speech but Sanders–Who Made the Mistake of Discussing Policy

      Bernie Sanders, while well behind, is still a viable candidate and is very much staying in the race. One wouldn’t know this, however, from watching last night’s cable news coverage, because the three major 24-hour news networks–CNN, MSNBC and Fox News–cut away from Sanders’ speech.

      [...]

      Sanders’ major sin appears to have been choosing to discuss policy rather than dishing out the typical hoorah platitudes. His hour-long speech which, according to Talking Points Memo, wasn’t carried even in part, focused on issues like campaign finance reform and the barriers to mass political change. You can watch the whole thing here, courtesy of C-SPAN.

    • Is GCHQ Embedded in Wikipedia?

      I don’t look at my own Wikipedia page, but was told about it yesterday. I therefore googled Philip Cross and was amazed to discover that he is allegedly an alias for Oliver Kamm attacking people online. Furthermore that Kamm has employed lawyers to threaten those who claim that he is Philip Cross, and by Kamm’s own account the Metropolitan Police have even warned off Neil Clark from saying Kamm is Cross. The Kamm/Cross affair was discussed on George Galloway’s show on Saturday.

    • #OpTrump: Anonymous Declares “Total War” Against Donald Trump From April 1
    • Was This the Strangest Weekend in American Political History?

      Things started to go off the rails on Friday, when Clinton, attending the funeral of another former first lady, Nancy Reagan, offered up a startlingly inaccurate account of “how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s” until a national conversation finally began “because of both President and Mrs. Reagan — in particular Mrs. Reagan.”

    • Florida Attorney General Endorses Trump After Taking His Money and Backing Off Trump University Investigation

      Donald Trump just won a key endorsement going into Tuesday’s Florida primary: the state’s attorney general, Pam Bondi.

      But her bigger favor to Trump may have been her decision in 2013 not to pursue an investigation of Trump’s for-profit education chain after he made a big donation to her re-election campaign.

      As Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel reported at the time, Bondi announced in September 2013 that her office was reviewing a series of complaints related to the Trump Institute of Boca Raton, a for-profit education company that is no longer in operation. Three days after the report that Bondi was considering joining other states’ attorneys general in taking action against Trump’s for-profit education chain, the real estate mogul dumped $25,000 into a committee organized for Bondi’s re-election.
      Bondi ended up taking no action.

    • Anonymous collective declares ‘total war’ on Donald Trump, again

      Hackers target ‘deeply disturbing’ presidential candidate and ask for support to dismantle his campaign and expose private details

    • Mo Ansar once admitted he was a liar in formal legal proceedings

      Mo Ansar is in the news again. In particular, there is an article in the current issue of Private Eye about a complaint he was seeking to make to Twitter.

      (For background to Ansar, see this dossier by Jeremy Duns, which details threats made against journalists and bloggers, including me.)

      Ansar has made a great deal of his legal experiences, and often refers to his exploits in courts. I exposed his claims as being a “lawyer” in May 2014.

      [...]

      I have asked Ansar about these passages, but have not yet had a response.

  • Censorship

    • China’s Censors Battle Mounting Defiance

      Yang Jisheng knows all about censorship. His book “Tombstone,” an epic account of Mao Zedong’s great famine, is banned in China.

    • Chinese website publishes, then pulls, explosive letter calling for President Xi’s resignation

      Two weeks after China’s President toured state media offices and called for absolute loyalty from the press, a website with links to the government published an explosive letter asking him to resign “for the future of the country and the people.”

      The letter was reportedly posted in the early hours of March 4 by a website called Wujie News, which is jointly owned by SEEC Media Group, Alibaba and the government of Xinjiang, in China’s far northwest. The Washington Post found a cached version of the document that shows the post live on the site.

    • What’s Driving the Current Storm of Chinese Censorship?

      Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen on a screen above delegates during the second plenary session of the National People’s Congress in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 9, 2016.

    • How China Censors Mass Media in Your World

      The recent censorship crackdown inside China is typically met with a shrug, but now the Chinese are censoring content worldwide. Here’s how.
      The famous Great Firewall of China has been in effect for decades. But in recent months, China’s current authoritarian leader, President Xi Jinping, has been taking domestic censorship to a new level.

      Under Xi’s leadership, Internet police officers have been embedded inside Chinese tech firms, depictions of extramarital affairs and homosexuality have been banned from TV and even news articles that complain about censorship are being censored.

    • Chinese government adviser attacks rise in censorship

      Jiang Hong, whose interview in a Chinese magazine was taken down last week, says ‘mistakes can be made’ if a society listens to only one voice

    • Chinese parliamentary delegate’s rare act of dissent

      Chinese parliamentary delegate Jiang Hong has spoken to the BBC about censorship and the “obstacles” Chinese people still face in being able to speak out.

      Mr Jiang was interviewed on the fringes of the National People’s Congress. Previous interviews to online media outlets have been deleted by the authorities.

      He told the BBC’s John Sudworth, “If a society only listens to one voice, mistakes can be made”.

    • Rare act of dissent at China’s annual parliament

      After 11 days of interminable speeches, followed by ritualistic voting to approve everything put before it, China’s annual parliamentary gathering will, once again, leave little worthy of note in its wake.

      That is precisely the intention of course because it is not meant to hold power to account.

      That is kept tightly in the hands of the ruling Communist Party, and the key policies have long been decided in advance.

    • Missouri House Passes Limits on Student Reporter Censorship

      Lawmakers voted 131-12 Tuesday to limit the power of public schools to censor student media, including publications financed by the school. Administrators would still be able to block content that is slanderous, libelous or otherwise breaks laws.

    • Pressure grows on politicians to relax strict Senate photography censorship

      A campaign to relax strict photography rules in the Senate has now been backed by Communications Minister and Manager of the Government Business in the Senate Mitch Fifield.

    • Mike Gold: Defying Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Appeals Court Says Backpage.com Is Not Liable For Sex Trafficking Done Via Its Site

      Backpage.com has been pretty busy in court. The site, which basically took over the market for “adult” classified ads after Craigslist shut down its ads (after being misleadingly attacked) has been sued a bunch of times, almost always by people misunderstanding Section 230 of the CDA which, as we’ve discussed hundreds of times, says that sites are not liable for the actions of their users. Last year, however, Backpage won a big case in Massachusetts in May, but then lost one in Washington in September. (Separately, it won a different case going after Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart for meddling and getting credit card companies to stop supporting Backpage.com — the company just asked the lower court to dismiss what’s left of that case). The September ruling was surprising, as it’s one of a very, very, very small number of cases that basically says that Section 230 doesn’t apply.

    • “Tyranny will fall”: Son of executed Saudi dissident al-Nimr shares his incredible story

      “I don’t like the name ‘Saudi Arabia,’” Mohammed Nimr al-Nimr said with a smile. “It’s actually called the Arabian Peninsula, not Saudi,” he laughed, noting the country is named after its ruling dynasty.

      The impeccably dressed and amiable 29-year-old Saudi activist and engineer was in Washington, D.C. for the 2016 Summit on Saudi Arabia, the first international conference to call into question the close U.S. relationship with the theocratic absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia.

    • India Denies Visa Request From U.S. Govt Religious Freedom Monitoring Group

      India has denied visas to a team from the United States government responsible for monitoring religious freedom.

      The organization, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, had planned a trip to India to assess religious liberty in the country. But India has not issued visas to members of the commission.

    • Is Donald Trump a Fascist? Part 2 of Interview with Robert Paxton, Father of Fascism Studies

      Part 2 of our conversation on Donald Trump with the father of fascism studies, Robert Paxton, professor emeritus of social science at Columbia University and author of several books, including “The Anatomy of Fascism.”

    • Donald Trump Warns of Riots at Convention if He Is Denied Nomination

      Donald Trump warned on Wednesday that his supporters could riot at the Republican convention in Cleveland if he is not “automatically” made the party’s nominee if he arrives with the most votes but fails to secure a majority of convention delegates.

    • Watch: Obama Nominates Merrick Garland to Supreme Court

      President Obama has nominated federal judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left open by the death of Antonin Scalia. Widely seen as a moderate, Garland is the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

    • The Department of Justice Throws Its Weight Behind Ending the Jailing of the Poor for Unpaid Fines

      Yesterday the department called upon state court leaders to ensure that court rules and procedures on fine and fee collection afford due process and equal protection of the law and align with sound public policy. The timing could not have been better because today the ACLU reached a settlement in our lawsuit against Biloxi, Mississippi, which challenged the jailing of poor people if they could not pay the entire amount of their outstanding court fines and fees up front, in full, and in cash. The agreement provides a critically important model on how to implement the Justice Department’s recommendations and do even more to treat the rich and poor equally and fairly when they step into court.

    • Stop eroding faith in gov’t: DOJ warns courts about fining & jailing poor people

      The US Justice Department cautioned local courts that it is unconstitutional to jail someone for not paying fines without determining whether they are able to pay, and warned against using court fees to generate revenue for cities.

      The warnings came as part of an effort to reform court practices that “perpetuate poverty and result in unnecessary deprivations of liberty,” the Justice Department said.

      “The consequences of the criminalization of poverty are not only harmful – they are far-reaching,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a statement. “They not only affect an individual’s ability to support their family, but also contribute to an erosion of our faith in government.”

    • Is it Okay to Kick People Out of Campaign Rallies? That Depends.

      While there may not be a single policy issue this year’s presidential candidates can agree on, there does seem to be a bipartisan consensus on one thing: Protest will not be tolerated at campaign rallies.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Join Internet Startups In Telling The EU Not To Mess Up The Internet

      We mentioned this a few weeks ago, but wanted to remind folks to help us tell the EU not to wreck the internet with a series of bad regulations. There you can see the letter that we put together, which has already been signed by a wide variety of internet companies, including Reddit, DuckDuckGo, Medium, Automattic, Patreon, Shapeways and more. The issue is a big deal right now. European bureaucrats (who couldn’t even program a web survey to operate properly) are in the midst of putting together plans to regulate internet companies. This is under the umbrella of what they’re referring to as the “Digital Single Market,” but which some Commissioners are using as part of a plan to saddle the internet with a variety of new regulations, which have the potential to wipe out important safe harbors that made the internet what it is today.

    • Closed silo challenges to an open web

      The growing trend of closed content silos—publishing platforms that require a login in order to view the content—is a step away from a more open web. As this trend continues, owners of closed silos will have even more control over published content and traffic that content drives. This is why content producers should also consider ways to publish content openly, and for their users to have the option to access content through their web browsers rather than being driven into closed ecosystems.

    • Moroccan Telcos Block Free VoIP Calls To Protect Their Bottom Lines

      American telcos don’t have a monopoly on monopolies. Foreign telcos can be just as inappropriately (and pehaps illegally) protective of their turf profits.

    • Despite Gigabit Hype, U.S. Broadband’s Actually Getting Less Competitive Than Ever

      Despite government programs, national broadband plans, billions in subsidies and a lot of recent hype paid to gigabit services like Google Fiber, U.S. broadband is actually getting less competitive than ever before across a huge swath of the country. Companies like AT&T and Verizon have been backing away from unwanted DSL networks they simply don’t want to upgrade. In some cases this involves selling these assets to smaller telcos (who take on so much debt they can’t upgrade them either), but in many markets this involves actively trying to drive customers away via either rate hikes or outright neglect.

  • DRM

    • Tell Us Your DRM Horror Stories about Ebooks, Games, Music, Movies and the Internet of Things!

      Have you ever bought music, movies, games, ebooks, or gadgets, only to discover later that the product had been deliberately limited with Digital Rights Management? We want to hear from you!

      We’re preparing a petition to a government agency on fair labelling practices for DRM-restricted devices, products and services. DRM used to be limited to entertainment products, but it’s spread with the Internet of Things, and it’s turning up in the most unlikely of places. As the Copyright Office heard during last summer’s hearings, DRM is now to be found in cars and tractors, in insulin pumps and pacemakers, even in voting machines. What’s more, the manufacturers using DRM believe that they have the right to invoke the “anti-circumvention” rules in 1998′s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to prevent competitors from removing DRM in order to give you more choice about the products you own.

    • DRM Non-Aggression on the Table at W3C

      The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will consider adopting a DRM non-aggression covenant at its Advisory Committee meeting in Boston next week. EFF has attended several of these meetings before as a W3C member, always with the intent to persuade the W3C that supporting DRM is a bad idea for the Web, bad for interoperability, and bad for the organization. By even considering Web standards connected with DRM, the W3C has entered an unusually controversial space. Next week’s membership meeting will be accompanied by demonstrations organized in Boston by the Free Software Foundation, and other cities where the W3C has a presence.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • If college students made the next Angry Birds, who would own the IP?

      Flanagan tries to get the ownership of her game’s IP early documented by the dean or other heads of the school, and also keeps her work separate from the school by creating games under her own company. There’s a balance, as she puts it, asking for permission sometimes, and taking risks the other. And she warns that not only can overthinking IP can halt creativity, but it can set false expectations with universities, who will think video games are often worth millions.

    • SIPO Seeks Comment On Patent Infringement Guidelines
    • Ukraine To Amend Customs Code, Ratify Amendments To TRIPS

      The Ukrainian Parliament is currently drafting an amended Customs Code to introduce a number of changes to the country’s intellectual property legislation. Moreover, in mid-March, local lawmakers authorised Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko to ratify the protocol amending the TRIPS agreement which enables increased exports of pharmaceuticals produced under compulsory licences to countries which are not capable of manufacturing them locally.

    • US Officials Under Pressure To Include Industry In IP Talks With India

      The United States government has increasingly engaged India on intellectual property rights and other trade issues in recent years, and US negotiators are under still more pressure to include industry in this engagement and deliver more results, a recent letter from 14 members of the US Congress shows.

      The congressional letter comes at a time when recent submissions by US industry to the annual US government process for assessing the IP protection of trading partners caused a reaction in India by indicating commitments have been made by India’s government not to use compulsory licensing and other measures to dodge IP rights.

    • Asia On The Heels Of US And Europe In Patent Applications At WIPO; Developing Countries Lagging

      China, Japan and South Korea are among the top five countries filing international patent applications at the World Intellectual Property Organization, while the United States continues to lead in patent and trademark applications. Far behind, developing countries seem to be having a hard time catching up.

    • Copyrights

      • Free Wi-Fi providers not liable for user’s piracy, says top EU court lawyer

        Businesses that provide free and open Wi-Fi to customers are not liable for copyright infringements committed by users of that network, a top legal adviser to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has decided.

        Advocate General Maciej Szpunar’s opinion (PDF) is not binding on the final ruling of the CJEU, but is generally a good guide to what the court will decide when it hands down the definitive judgment.

        However, the Advocate General ruled that national courts may issue injunctions against the provider of free Wi-Fi services in the case of copyright infringement provided they are “particular, effective, proportionate and dissuasive”; and “that they are aimed at bringing a specific infringement to an end, and do not entail a general obligation to monitor.” Moreover, courts must strike a fair balance between “freedom of expression and information and the freedom to conduct business, as well as the right to the protection of intellectual property.”

      • BREAKING: AG Spuznar says that provider of free Wi-Fi is NOT liable for users’ infringements but an injunction can be sought against him

        Can the provider of a password-free free Wi-Fi be liable for infringements – specifically: of copyright – of those who use his/her service?

        This question is not an abstract one, but rather the core of a case currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU): McFadden C-484/14.

        As readers may imagine, should the answer be ‘yes’, this would change quite a few things …

      • Police Arrest Cinema Goers Over “Pirate” Audio Recording

        Two men have been arrested at a cinema in the UK after being found in possession of an audio recording of the movie The Divergent Series: Allegiant. The men, aged 19 and 44, have been released on police bail pending further inquiries and are now banned from all cinemas in England and Wales.

03.15.16

Links 15/3/2016: RapidDisk 4.0, Google Summer of Code 2016 Applications

Posted in News Roundup at 11:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Healthy Open Source

    A walkthrough of the Node.js Foundation’s base contribution policy.

    A lot has changed since io.js and Node.js merged under the Node.js Foundation. The most impressive change, and probably the change that is most relevant to the rest of the community and to open source in general, is the growth in contributors and committers to the project.

  • Open source reveals the value of social norms

    Now, what does this have to do with open source?

    Well, open source projects function on both social and market norms. On one hand, we see corporate sponsors or contributors who are being paid to write code; on the other, we see several highly skilled, intelligent people contributing not for monetary gain, but because they value the community and the goodwill purpose of the project. These people identify with the altruistic ideal of giving back to others and the recognition that comes with it.

  • A template for creating open source contributor guidelines

    One of the most important resources that an open source project can provide to potential contributors is contributor guidelines. When eager new contributors rush over to your project to make their first open source contribution, they rely on your contributor guidelines to be their guiding hand. That means that contributor guidelines should be easy to read, thorough, and friendly.

  • Watch Open Networking Summit This Week via Free Live Video Stream

    ONS has become a recognized forum for major industry announcements and the introduction of open source networking projects. AT&T, Google and The Linux Foundation, among others have announced major networking projects and initiatives at ONS over just the last few years.

  • WhereHows: An Open Source Lineage and Annotation Tool for Data Collections

    Managing the changes made to any given dataset becomes a challenge as the scope of the organization grows, especially at the level of enterprise.

    WhereHows was recently released as open source by its developer, LinkedIn, which manages vast amounts of data (about 50,ooo datasets, 14,000 comments, and 35 million job execution records). The name is a compound of two important attributes of data: “WHERE is the data, and HOW is it produced/consumed.”

  • Chef drills dependency policing into DevOps

    Among the purists is Chef, a firm which in fact describes itself as a player in automation for DevOps.

  • Open source encrypted app is key to security for Facebook

    Moxie Marlinspike, a co-developer of the Signal encrypted mobile messages app, is seeing his security technology used by Facebook’s messaging service, WhatsApp.

    Encryption is a key technology for social media websites such as Facebook, and the technology developed by Moxie Marlinspike (the name is a pseudonym) and now marketed by his company Open Whisper Systems in the Signal app, is playing a big part in online community moves to improve security of user data.

  • Faced with FCC regulations on wireless-router capabilities, TP-Link blocks open-source updates | ExtremeTech
  • TP-Link nixes use of open source firmware on Wi-Fi routers to comply with new FCC regulations
  • Live in the US and are looking for a new router? Don’t buy TP-Link

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Initial Servo+Browser.html Release Planned For June

        Paul Rouget of Mozilla has shared plans for making an initial alpha release of their next-generation Servo Engine and Servo-based Browser.html web browser release for this summer.

        The first version of Servo and Browser.html is planned for release in June. Browser.html is Mozilla’s experimental web browser built atop Servo where the UI itself is built in HTML. While a Servo Alpha release was originally expected in 2015, it’s great to see a release now planned in a few months.

      • Mozilla A-Frame Powers New Amnesty International Virtual Reality Website #360Syria

        Amnesty International today announced a new #360Syria “virtual tour” website showing the devastation brought by Syrian government barrel bombing of the besieged city of Aleppo. The website demonstration, called “Fear of the Sky” (www.360Syria.com), is built using Mozilla A-Frame technology.

        Websites like #360Syria, that allow viewers to take a virtual tour of the devastated city of Aleppo, are a significant new use case for WebVR. Technology gives people a voice where otherwise there is none. It brings a new level of visibility and greater levels of empathy to real-life situations.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • Google now accepting applications for open source Summer of Code 2016

      If you are a college student, you probably look forward to the summer as a relaxing time away from learning. Yeah, I get it — school can be very stressful, but sleeping late and vegetating won’t result in meaningful growth.

      Instead of wasting your summer, why not learn about open source? If that sounds boring, then maybe it isn’t for you. However, if you are excited by the possibility of working on an open source project like Fedora, KDE, LibreOffice or VLC, then you should sign up for Google’s Summer of Code 2016.

  • BSD

    • Sponsoring “PAM Mastery”

      While PAM has a potentially wider audience than FM:AZ, that interest isn’t as deep. I’m expecting nowhere near as many PAM sponsors. If you want to really stand out in a list of sponsors, this is your chance.

    • OpenBSD 5.9 Continues Being Readied With New Features

      OpenBSD 5.9 is gearing up for release at the start of May as the next feature release of this BSD operating system.

      Mike Belopuhov of OpenBSD presented at this weekend’s AsiaBSDCon in Tokyo about the state of OpenBSD 5.9. There are PDF slides available to those interested.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU want (another) free AI package release? Yes. But we should train this puppy

      The GNU free software project has launched version 0.0.1 of its Gneural Network package in response to the “outstanding and truly inspiring” results achieved of late in proprietary artificial intelligence.

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF) describes Gneural Network as a GNU package for a programmable neural network, which as of 0.0.1 is “a very simple feed-forward network which can learn very simple tasks such as curve fitting” – although more advanced features will hopefully be delivered soon.

    • GNU Health security mailing list and team

      GNU Health is growing quite fast, and we take very seriously the security of the implementations around the world that trust us.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Data mining the Votes of Members of the Polish Parliament

        If we take into consideration all the votings, we will notice that the greatest differences exist between the government and the opposition. It turns out that there are two Members of Parliament on the side of the government (Jarosław Gowin and Jacek Żalek) who usually voted as MPs from PO (the colour on the diagram corresponds to the club that a given Member of Parliament belonged to during most votings), yet their profiles differ considerably from the profiles of the remaining MPs. Besides, that pair migrated from one party to another, what may explain their incompatibility with the stance of PO. As far as PiS is concerned, the least compliant voters were Górski Artur and Tomaszewski Jan (who finally transferred to PO at the end of the year).

    • Open Access/Content

      • Should All Research Papers Be Free?

        DRAWING comparisons to Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions of documents. While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology.

        Her protest against scholarly journals’ paywalls has earned her rock-star status among advocates for open access, and has shined a light on how scientific findings that could inform personal and public policy decisions on matters as consequential as health care, economics and the environment are often prohibitively expensive to read and impossible to aggregate and datamine.

        “Realistically only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the developed world have full access to published research,” said Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access. “The current system slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes the ability to do the kind of data analysis” that is possible when articles aren’t “sitting on various siloed databases.”

    • Open Hardware

      • Open-source your face and 3D print your own pirate invisaligns

        Amos Dudley, a broke undergrad, casted a mold of his teeth using “cheap alginate powder, Permastone, and a 3d printed impression tray,” then 3D printed and vacuformed a series of alingment trays for a fraction of what it would have cost to get name-brand invisaligns.

        Obviously, this only works if you have ready access to “knowledge of orthodontic movement, a 3D scanner, a mold of the teeth, CAD software, a hi-res 3D printer, retainer material, and a vacuum forming machine.”

        But if you do, it doesn’t look all that challenging to roll your own alignment trays.

  • Programming

    • Radeon’s HIP 0.82 Compiler Released

      Released a few days back was the newest version of AMD/RTG’s HIP compiler as part of their Boltzmann initiative in porting CUDA code to run on Radeon hardware with their new software stack.

Leftovers

  • Fire destroys roof of historic Wythenshawe Hall in Manchester

    Fire has badly damaged a 16th Century hall in Manchester destroying the roof and causing extensive damage to an upper floor.

    The blaze started in the roof of Wythenshawe Hall at about 03:30 GMT, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) said.

    More than 50 firefighters tackled the “serious blaze” at the Tudor hall.

    Five fire engines are still at the scene as an investigation is under way into the cause.

    The timber-framed hall was built in 1540 and was home to the Tatton family for about 400 years.

  • Science

    • Ida-NO: Gem State Lawmakers Consider Bill to Allow Bible in Science Classes

      Senate Bill 1342, which will be heard this week by the House Education Committee, would authorize the use of the Bible “for reference purposes” in any class where “an understanding of the Bible may be useful or relevant.” Of course, our courts have repeatedly made clear that instruction in the Bible and creationism is neither useful nor relevant nor constitutional in science class. But that didn’t stop the bill’s drafters from explicitly listing astronomy, biology, and geology among the courses into which teachers may incorporate the Bible.

    • The government’s lobbying ban will have a chilling impact on scientists

      One of the many frightening aspects of life under Joseph Stalin was the central direction of science by the Communist party. This led to egregious scientific data, disregarded in the west, but celebrated in the Soviet Union. One of the best examples was the nonsensical doctrine known as Lysenkoism, which rejected concepts such as genes and natural selection in favour of “natural cooperation” and the belief that physical changes imposed on one generation of organisms would pass down to the next – for example that plucking the leaves from a plant would encourage leaflessness in its descendants. Scientists who questioned the official view, such the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, were denounced, exiled and in many cases sentenced to death.

    • Happy Pi Day!

  • Health/Nutrition

    • US Senators Release Public Comments On Sovaldi Report

      Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and senior committee member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, today released comments from the health care and patient community in response to the policy questions raised in their report, “The Price of Sovaldi and Its Impact on the U.S. Health Care System,” released on December 1, 2015.

    • China’s Pharmaceutical Sector And The IP Puzzle

      While US funding for medical research declines, China steadily progresses as shown by a total $1,1 billion investment in new drug development between 2011 and 2015.Despite this growth, China remains, however, far behind countries (such as the US and in the EU) renowned as home to top drug industries simply because the majority of Chinese companies are not competitive with foreign big corporations. As a result, almost all Chinese firms are currently focused on the production of generic medicines (more than 95 percent of chemicals produced in the country are, in fact, generics).

    • Flint water e-mails written to stay secret

      The once quiet city of Flint, Michigan is facing a drinking water crisis that is drawing concern from around the nation. Here’s what you need to know about how the public health crisis has evolved.

  • Security

    • Monday’s security advisories
    • Building a Jenkins Security Realm

      Last week I spent a good while on writing a new security realm for KDE’s Jenkins setups. The result of my tireless java brewing is that the Jenkins installation of KDE neon now uses KDE’s Phabricator setup to authenticate users and manage permissions via OAuth.

    • The Great Linux Mint Heist: the Aftermath

      In a shocking move, cyber criminals recently hacked the Linux Mint Web server and used it to launch an attack against the popular distro’s user base.

    • These Are the Best System Rescue Tools After a Malware Attack

      System rescue tools provided by antivirus makers are often used to clean infected systems after the main antivirus software detects infections.

      Most antivirus makers bundle this functionality in their main products, but a few offer more specialized tools that also repair damaged files, attempting to restore the system to its earlier working point as much as possible.

      Only five of such tools are currently available on the market as free tools. They are AVG Rescue CD, Avira EU-Clean, Bitdefender Rescue CD, ESET SysRescue, and Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool.

    • Documents with malicious macros deliver fileless malware to financial-transaction systems

      Spammed Word documents with malicious macros have become a popular method of infecting computers over the past few months. Attackers are now taking it one step further by using such documents to deliver fileless malware that gets loaded directly in the computer’s memory.

      Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks analyzed a recent attack campaign that pushed spam emails with malicious Word documents to business email addresses from the U.S., Canada and Europe.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Murder of Chávez. The CIA and DEA Cover Their Tracks

      The journalist Eva Golinger (US – Venezuela) has repeatedly questioned the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The website aporrea.org quotes her statement: «Everything that Washington was trying to achieve during the administration of Hugo Chávez is today being realized in his absence. The cancerous illness from which Chávez suffered was unusually aggressive and suspicious, and every day turns up more evidence that it is possible Chávez was murdered».

    • Kerry Sought Missile Strikes To Force Syria’s Assad To Step Down

      Jeffrey Goldberg’s newly published book-length article on Barack Obama and the Middle East includes a major revelation that brings US Secretary of State John Kerry’s Syrian diplomacy into sharper focus: it reports that Kerry has sought on several occasions without success over the past several months to get Obama’s approval for cruise missile strikes against the Syrian government.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • February smashes monthly world temperature records by ‘shocking’ amount as ‘climate emergency’ declared

      ‘In short, we are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2.0°C warming over pre-industrial levels’

    • The Planet Just Obliterated Another Heat Record

      February smashed a century of global temperature records by “stunning” margin, according to data released by NASA.

      The unprecedented leap led scientists, usually wary of highlighting a single month’s temperature, to label the new record a “shocker” and warn of a “climate emergency.”

    • If We Can’t Save Pandas, We Can’t Save Anything

      Bill McShea broke into an infectious belly laugh when I ask him the question I’ve been posing to biologists, conservationists, and zookeepers for months: What is it about the panda?

      “Look at it,” he said, gesturing to snapshots of him jovially clutching baby pandas to his chest, which were tacked in his office at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. “It’s cute as hell. You have to say, ‘Is that real? Does something really look like that?’”

      McShea, a rosy-cheeked, bespectacled research biologist, has spent the last two decades devoting part of his studies to pandas, including annual pilgrimages to China to study the species’s habitat and collaborate with local conservationists. If pressed, he’ll admit a deeper fascination with the lesser-known creatures that share the pandas’ habitat—the Asiatic black bear, the takin, the tufted deer—but McShea has no trouble identifying what it is about pandas that’s so appealing to everyone else. And you really only have to look at one photo, or video, or GIF of a panda to solve the mystery.

      With its round ears, fluffy fur, stub snout, tubby tummy, and those distinctive, big black polka dot eyes, it’s not hard to see why people around the world are enamoured. But there’s a growing group of dissenting voices who openly and actively hate pandas.

  • Finance

    • The Trouble With the TPP, Day 50: The Case Against Ratifying the Trans Pacific Partnership

      Nearly two-and-a-half months ago, I started a daily examination of the Trans Pacific Partnership focused on the intellectual property and digital policy issues raised by the agreement. My initial plan for the Trouble with the TPP series was to write for one month leading up to the planned signing in New Zealand on February 4th. However, the more I dug into the TPP, the more trouble I found. With this final post in the series, I wrap up the key IP and digital policy concerns with links to all the original posts.

      Canadians interested in the TPP now have an opportunity to have their voices heard. The Standing Committee on International Trade has been conducting hearings on the agreement for several weeks and has announced plans for cross-country consultations. Canadians can provide written submissions by April 30th. Alternatively, they can ask the committee to appear as a witness. Details on the committee opportunities can be found here. In addition, Canadians can send their comments directly to Global Affairs Canada, which is managing the government’s consultation. The email address is TPP-PTP.Consultations@international.gc.ca.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • TV heartthrob dubbed ’10 times tougher than Bear Grylls’ rejoins army as major in new elite force the 77 Brigade

      Unit uses psychology and social media to help ‘fight in the information age’

    • Alan Grayson: Why the Sanders Campaign Is Far from Over (VIDEO)

      Since hearing about Hillary and her superdelegate count, many Sanders supporters believed Bernie was automatically doomed. But actually, the superdelegates’ pledge to Clinton isn’t finalized, and each can still change his or her vote prior to the final vote following the last state primaries. Superdelegates generally vote in line with the popular vote when the time comes, but there is nothing requiring them to do so.

      [...]

      So how would that affect Americans?

      “I think the inequality would heighten, I think that would pretty much cinch it,” Grayson told the Young Turks, adding “if you have a billionaire for the leader of the country, then it really is an oligarchy. Game over.”

    • Occupy Activists Return to Zuccotti to Phone Bank for Sanders, Sparking Debate over Political Role

      Ahead of Tuesday’s key primaries, supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City to call voters in Illinois, Florida and Ohio. Many of the phone bankers were former Occupy Wall Street activists who returned to the site of the 2011 encampment because they saw parallels between Occupy and Sanders’ message. “We were really inspired by the incredible amount of grassroots momentum and energy that’s been inspired by the Sanders campaign and its critique of Wall Street, of money in politics and a rigged economy,” said Beka Economopoulos, a former Occupy activist who helped organize the phone bank. But other Occupy activists disagreed with what they saw as the co-opting of the movement; they staged a “mic check,” using Occupy’s signature call-and-response to say the movement should remain independent of political candidates.

    • Anonymous has declared ‘total war’ on Donald Trump, threatening to ‘dismantle his campaign’

      Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous hacktivist collective have vowed to relaunch cyber-operations against US presidential candidate Donald Trump from 1 April. They threaten to ‘dismantle his campaign’ by taking his election websites offline in a large-scale and orchestrated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

    • OpTrump: Donald Trump faces ‘total war’ from Anonymous cyberattacks on April Fools’ Day

      Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous hacktivist collective have vowed to relaunch cyber-operations against US presidential candidate Donald Trump from 1 April. They threaten to ‘dismantle his campaign’ by taking his election websites offline in a large-scale and orchestrated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

      In December 2015, Anonymous officially ‘declared war’ on Trump after a radical speech in which he said Muslims should be banned from entering the United States. The operation at the time resulted in a number of websites being targeted by hackers, but failed to have lasting impact.

    • Trumping Trump

      Despite this news media have given him a free ride saving $millions in advertising expenses and he’s leading in the GOP primaries despite ⅔ or voters voting for anyone but Trump. I hope he gets kicked out at the convention or he’ll just cause an order of magnitude more trouble before being defeated in the general election. In the unlikely event he becomes president, the world, not just USA is in for a Hell of a lot of trouble. So, it may actually be a good thing Anonymous is going after his networks.

    • The Rise of Trump Shows the Danger and Sham of Compelled Journalistic “Neutrality”

      As Donald Trump’s campaign predictably moves from toxic rhetoric targeting the most marginalized minorities to threats and use of violence, there is a growing sense that American institutions have been too lax about resisting it. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan on Sunday posted a widely cited Twitter essay voicing this concern, arguing that “Trump’s rise represents a failure in American parties, media, and civic institutions — and they’re continuing to fail right now.” He added, “Someone could capture a major party [nomination] who endorses violence [and] few seem alarmed.”

  • Censorship

    • Why the TPP does not prevent Malaysia from censoring Achmed the Dead Terrorist

      EFF is basically right: While accurate in some cases, the White House’s assertion is an overly optimistic characterization of TPP’s probable effects. For example, EFF argued that TPP would not prevent potential signatory Malaysia from suppressing, within its own territory, Internet-based political speech relating to alleged governmental misappropriation of hundreds of millions of dollars of development funds. I think that EFF’s analysis is correct.

    • North Korean Censorship Blinds Not Just the People, But Also Their Rulers

      It is possible to argue that North Korea has the world’s strictest media censorship system. North Korean media outlets are, essentially, a branch of the government propaganda bureaucracy. Their goal is not to inform, but to indoctrinate and control common people, to explain to them what they should think about the world. In a sense, North Korean media exists to distort the picture of the world in accordance with the ever-changing demands of the ruling elite.

      North Korean leaders believe that this system is necessary to keep people obedient and controllable, to prevent the rise of criticism about the government. This might be the case, indeed: Being unaware of the alternatives to their lifestyles, people are less likely to dream about a change.

    • Irish Censorship Board Bans First Book in 18 Years

      The Censorship of Publications Board of Ireland has banned The Raped Little Runaway by Jean Martin.

    • Norwegian Police Seize Domain Name For Linking To Sites Offering Popcorn Time

      Over the last couple of years, the increasing popularity of the open source streaming software Popcorn Time has turned into one of the film industry’s biggest nightmares. Not just because it’s free, but also because it provides an extremely easy-to-use service. The fact that it is open source — and therefore essentially impossible to eradicate — just makes things worse. As part of the film industry’s attack on Popcorn Time, a UK judge was persuaded a year ago to order a group of web sites to be blocked purely on the grounds that they were distributing the Popcorn Time software. That was the first step down a slippery slope, and it seems that the second step has now been taken in Norway.

    • Kiss off: James Bond and the Spectre of censorship

      The Spectre of censorship has visited Hollywood’s secret service agent in India, where 007’s kissing scenes have been cut by half. But there’s more than meets the eye. Dennis Hanlon and Shorna Pal explain.

      On 19 November 2015, the day before it was due to be released in Indian theatres, the Times of India announced that the Central Board of Film Censorship (CBFC) had ordered the kissing scenes in the latest James Bond film, Spectre, to be reduced by half.

    • Does Malcolm Turnbull Support Censorship?

      A very active and lively discussion has been taking place on the Prime Minister’s Facebook page regarding the No Jab, No Pay law. I made several posts in response to Dr Patrick Stokes – a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy who supports censorship when it comes to vaccination as evidenced by his article on The Conversation entitled: No, You’re Not Entitled to Your Opinion.

      Dr Stokes is an Australian academic who readily admits that he is not an authority on the this issue. Furthermore, he openly states that he does not WANT to know about the science of vaccination, instead claiming that everyone should defer to doctors and health authorities because they are the only ones capable of understanding the subject.

    • Six facts about censorship in Cuba

      Graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado Machado, known as “El Sexto”, found this out when he was locked up for most of 2015 for painting the names of Raúl and Fidel – the names of the Castro brothers who have been in power since 1959 – on the backs of two live pigs. He had planned to release the animals as part of an artistic performance but, before he could, he was accused of desacato (contempt) and thrown in prison for ten months. He was never formally charged or brought before a judge.

    • The tyranny of censorship: Ireland’s war on ‘evil’ books

      As if it isn’t bad enough that Ireland still has a Censorship of Publications Board, at the weekend we discovered that this archaic outfit is still active. Given that it’s been 18 years since these book-burners in chief forbade publication of a book in Ireland – 1998’s The Base Guide to London, a book about seedy London hangouts – you could be forgiven for thinking they’d done the decent thing of realising it’s the 21st century and calling it a day on their censoring antics. But no – on Saturday it was revealed that the CPB has banned The Raped Little Runaway, a weird novel by Jean Martin, which means it’s an offence to distribute the book anywhere in the Republic of Ireland.

    • Former Xinhua Reporter Takes a Swipe at Chinese Censorship
    • Why China’s clampdown on Ren Zhiqiang matters
    • China’s Censors Denounced in Online Attack
    • Swastikas Removed from High School’s Performance of ‘The Producers’ Because They’re Offensive
    • Springtime for censorship: School targets ‘The Producers’
    • No Swastikas for You!
    • New York Superintendent Bans Swastikas From High School Production of THE PRODUCERS
    • Editorial: Censorship, or judgment?

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • America’s Gestapo: The FBI’s Reign of Terror

      As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force is now recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist.”

    • North Korea Has Doubled Its Hacking Attacks On South Korea

      If you’re thinking that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is busy drinking Cristal champagne and enjoying caviar, take a moment to notice South Korean spy agency’s report that tells that the number of cyberattacks on the South has doubled over the past month.

    • UN rights investigator urges prosecution of North Korean leader
    • North Korea probe calls for Kim Jong Un to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity
    • UN rights expert: North Korean leader should be prosecuted
    • Migrants scramble for way past EU’s closed Balkan door
    • Merkel Misery Deepens as Election Blows Deliver Refugee Rebuff

      German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been left politically damaged after her Christian Democrat (CDU) party suffered significant losses in regional elections, as the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party put on significant gains in regional elections.

    • On Disappearing People

      Yet again the US is simply disappearing people into secret prisons on foreign soil. Obama has in effect maintained the Bush doctrine that “enemy combatants” are neither alleged criminals nor soldiers. They do not get the rights of alleged criminals to decent treatment and a fair trial, nor do they get the Geneva Convention rights of soldiers captured during a war. They are non-persons who can simply be pitched into a black hole.

    • Politicizing Sports — Paul Craig Roberts

      One of the world’s best female tennis players, Maria Sharapova, has been suspended, because a medicine she has been taking legally under a doctor’s prescription for ten years was suddenly retroactively declared to be a prohibited substance that is a “metabolic modulator.”

      The medicine, known as mildronate and also as meldonium in its banned name, has been in medical use for thirty years. Its inventor declared that the prohibition of mildronate “is a crime” and will lead to deaths among athletes. He says that it has not been proven that the medicine enhances athlete performance, but it does protect their hearts from over-exertion.

    • The Lurking Menace of a Trump Rally

      It only took five minutes from the time he began. Donald Trump was in the middle of a riff about “Lyin’ Ted Cruz” when a protester stood up.

      “So early,” Trump said. “Get ’em out.”

      The Republican frontrunner made it through just four more sentences before the next one stood up. “Hello! Go home to mom.”

    • What Are Trump Fans Really ‘Afraid’ to Say?

      RHINESTONES twinkling around the perimeter of her shades, cornsilk curls undaunted by the Pensacola sun, Elizabeth Kemper, a supporter of Donald J. Trump, is all certainty. She is fed up. “You know, this country is so dang political correct,” she tells a CNN reporter. “I’m afraid to say what I really feel, you know?”

      On her shirt, a silhouette of Mr. Trump’s head nestles in the protective crook of the state of Florida, his face turned stalwartly eastward, away from Mexico, his Mordor.

      Ms. Kemper is blazing, passionate, incredulous. “I think this country better go back to some of those values. Some of the values my parents grew up with, my grandparents grew up with,” she says. “Whatever was wrong, they could point it out and tell you.”

    • Sikh Americans Fight for Civil Rights In Donald Trump’s America

      On the morning of December 26th, 2015, as Amrik Singh Bal was waiting near his home for a ride to work, two men in a pickup truck stopped nearby to yell racial slurs at him. Singh, a 68-year old Sikh American who worked at a nearby farm outside Fresno, California, attempted to cross the street to get away from his assailants. As he did so, the men struck Bal with their vehicle, knocking him to the ground before jumping out of the truck and assaulting him. By the time they were done, the elderly Bal was left bleeding in the street with a broken collarbone and cuts across his face. The attack was described by local police in Fresno as a hate crime.

      Unfortunately, assaults against Sikh Americans are nothing new. In the first month after the 9/11 attacks, the Sikh Coalition, an advocacy group, tallied more than 300 cases of violence and discrimination against Sikh Americans. Many additional incidents followed in subsequent years, the most high-profile being a 2012 terrorist attack in which a white supremacist shot and killed six congregants at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, wounding several others. Now, as U.S. politicians, led by Donald Trump, increasingly embrace xenophobia, and as fears of terrorism surge back, Sikh activists say their community is experiencing another spike in discrimination.

    • DEA’s Definition Of Evidence Control Apparently Doesn’t Include Recording Gross Weight Of Seized Substances

      The DEA seems very concerned about controlled substances. Internal control of these substances? Not so much. A recent Inspector General’s audit found multiple problems with the DEA’s handling of seized drugs, the most egregious of which appears to be this particular aspect.

      [...]

      The OIG recommends the DEA start doing the thing it should have been doing 100% of the time already. The DEA concurs and will presumably correct it at the speed of bureaucracy. The problem is that this is obviously a systemic issue that has gone unaddressed for years. This lax handling of evidence should call into question the amounts cited during prosecution, not to mention any statements in court regarding the integrity of the evidence it supplies.

    • CSPD officers face possible lawsuit for beating Alzheimer’s patient

      Just after 5 p.m. on July 29, 2015, two Colorado Springs cops raced with lights and sirens to a burglary in progress. They’d been told 72-year-old Albert Schmeiler, who has Alzheimer’s disease, could be “very violent.”

      But on their arrival, Officers David Isue and Nicholas Ryland found Schmeiler calmly standing in the driveway with his mother-in-law, Margo Alvarez, according to a police report.

    • Hillary Clinton tells man wrongly convicted of murder that she favours death penalty

      Hillary Clinton told a man who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent almost four decades on death row that she was still in favour of the death penalty.

      In the run-up to primaries in five states on 15 March, Ms Clinton said she was “struggling” with the concept of the death penalty but that it should still be applied for “horrific mass killings” under the federal, not the state, system.

      The Democrat was asked a question on the subject by exonerated man Ricky Jackson, who “came perilously close to [his] own execution.” Mr Jackson was convicted at 18 years old for killing a salesman in Cleveland, Ohio in 1975. The key witness was 12 years old at the time and later recanted in court, as reported by CNN.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • From Dingo To Net Neutrality Hero: FCC Boss On Why Everybody Had Him Wrong

      When FCC boss Tom Wheeler was first appointed to head the agency, few expected much. After all, here was yet another FCC revolving door regulator with a history of lobbying for both the cable and wireless industries — now tasked with heading an agency that oversees both. Yet the one-time “dingo” surprised everybody by fighting for tougher net neutrality rules, raising the standard definition of broadband, standing up for municipal broadband and improved broadband competition, and now fighting to unlock the cable industry’s stranglehold over the cable set top box.

    • The Cord Cutting The Pay TV Sector Keeps Saying Isn’t Happening — Keeps Happening

      Several cable operators managed to eek out some modest subscriber gains in the fourth quarter of last year, prompting some renewed claims by the industry that cord cutting was “on the ropes” or was otherwise an unfair hallucination of the media. After all, Comcast saw a net gain of 89,000 pay TV users during the fourth quarter. Time Warner Cable similarly saw its best year since 2006 with a net gain of 54,000 TV subscribers. Charter also saw a net gain in the fourth quarter of 29,000 video subscribers. For some of these companies, this was the best performance they’ve seen since 2006.

    • Quietly, symbolically, US control of the internet was just ended

      It’s early March in Marrakech, and a gleaming conurbation of hotels run in the kind of rare equilibrium of slick organisation and genuine friendliness that Tyler Brûlé might dream about.

      Inside, the people who run the internet’s naming and numbering systems have been meeting with some of the governments who would rather be doing the job themselves. Eventually they cut a deal, and then negotiators from countries mostly in the northern hemisphere staggered blinking into the sunlight and splayed like lizards around the azure swimming pools, almost too tired to drink. Almost.

  • DRM

    • Conspiracy Theories Over Steam Game Suddenly Crashing Wrong; Just More Broken Anti-Piracy Code

      And so another conspiracy theory falls, this times at the hands of faulty DRM. I’ll put this here so nobody has to in the comments: never blame malice when incompetence is just as likely. Or maybe just blame DRM always and for everything. You’re going to be right a decent amount of the time.

    • Demonstration for a Web without restrictions

      We’ll rally in front of the global office of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to oppose a disastrous proposal by Hollywood and proprietary tech companies: adding Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to the HTML standard that undergirds the Web. We’ll hear experts and activists speak on the topic, and distribute flyers, right outside an ongoing W3C event.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • UK Supreme Court finds against Trunki in design case

      The UK IPO will provide updated guidance for design applicants after the Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal’s decision that PMS International’s Kiddee Case does not infringe Magmatic’s registered community design (RCD) for the Trunki suitcase

    • Federal Circuit: Canada Not Best Forum for Enforcing US Intellectual Property Rights

      Halo (a Hong Kong based company) sued Comptoir (a Canadian company) in N.D. Illinois Federal Court for infringing its intellectual property rights associated with its furniture designs. The IP rights here include design patents, copyrights (pending registration) and non-registered trademark rights.

    • Copyrights

      • BREIN Threatens Pirates With High ‘Fines’, Warns VPN Users

        Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN has announced that it will begin pursuing legal action against individual BitTorrent users who share copyright infringing content. These pirates can look forward to settlement demands of several thousands of euros and the group plans to punish VPN users even harder, if they are exposed.

      • Can’t Make This Up: Paramount Says Star Trek Fan Flick Violates Copyright On Klingon And ‘Uniform With Gold Stars’

        Let’s go back just a few months to remind you about two stories that seem fairly unrelated.

      • Harper Lee’s Estate’s First Order Of Business: Kill Off The Cheap Version Of To Kill A Mockingbird

        To Kill a Mockingbird is obviously one of the most well-known and widely read books in American literature. And, of course, there’s been some controversy of late around its author, Harper Lee, who passed away last month. Much of the controversy focused on the decision last year to publish Go Set a Watchman, which was initially described as something of a long lost “sequel” to TKAM, but which it was later admitted was actually an early draft of TKAM. Many argued that Lee didn’t actually intend for the book to be published, and that she may have been taken advantage of by those around her. Either way, the controversy is now growing, following Lee’s death, as what appears to be the first and second orders of business for Lee’s estate was to (1) have the details of her will sealed and (2) stop publishing the mass market paperback version of To Kill a Mockingbird, making sure that the only new versions of the book that will be available will be the noticeably more expensive trade paperbacks.

03.14.16

Links 14/3/2016: Linux 4.5, KaOS 2016.03

Posted in News Roundup at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 15 podcasts for FOSS fans

    I listen to a lot of podcasts. A lot. On my phone’s podcatcher, I am subscribed to around 60 podcasts… and I think that only eight of those have podfaded (died). Unsurprisingly, a fairly sizeable proportion of those remaining alive-and-well subscriptions are shows with a specific interest or relevance to open source software. As I seek to resurrect my own comatose podcast from the nebulous realm of podfadery, I thought it would be great for us as a community to share what we’re listening to.

  • The scripting language that drives 80 Days is now open-source

    Narrative game developer Inkle Studios is capping off the week prior to GDC by releasing its Ink scripting language as open-source software for fellow developers to use in their own projects.

    If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Inkle is the studio responsible for both the Sorcery! and 80 Days narrative-driven games, the latter of which won multiple honors (including an IGF 2015 Excellence in Narrative award) for the quality and scope of its writing.

  • Intense Regulation Forces TP-Link to Ban Open Source Router Firmware in the US

    Hardware vendor TP-Link says it will make changes to its routers so it would prevent US users from loading custom open source firmware on their devices, all in order to comply with current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulation.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Features Of Mozilla’s Firefox 46 Beta Include GTK3 On Linux

        For those sticking to Mozilla’s stable channel, following this week’s release of Firefox 45 was the public beta of Firefox 46.0.

        The Firefox 46.0 Beta marks HTTP sites with login forms as insecure, the JavaScript JIT compiler features greater security, GTK3 integration is again being tried by default for Firefox on Linux, WebRTC performance/stability fixes, HKDF support for the Web Crypto API, and other changes.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • David Graham Provides Glimpse into FOSS in Canada’s Government

      Ordinarily, free and open source software receives little attention in the government of Canada. A rare exception occurred on Thursday, March 10 when David Graham, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Laurentides—Labelle (Québec) began asking questions before the Standing Committee On Government Operations and Estimates (Shared Services). The exchange was less than seven minutes long, but provided the sort of detailed information that is usually unavailable.

      If David Graham sounds familiar, you might know him better as cdlu (short for “confused debian linux user”). For years, cdlu was my colleague at Linux.com and Newsforge and well-known in Debian circles as well. Since then, he has been a presence in the back rooms of the Liberal Party until, in the federal election in October 2015, he was elected for the first time. He now describes himself (no doubt correctly) as “the only Member of Parliament to be in the Debian web of trust.”

Leftovers

  • My business card in LaTeX

    I’ve been meaning to get myself some business cards – they’re really helpful to give out when you meet new people – prospective collaborators and things. People rarely note down contact details – the business card works well as a handy reminder. I don’t know how common it is for people in academia to have them – I’ve seen a few around, and I’ve also seen folks that don’t have them. Anyway, I thought I’d give it a go in LaTeX to see how difficult it is. Turns out, not difficult at all. I found a post that got me started, and after a few hours of tinkering, I’ve come up with this:

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Dangers from Pesticides

      Industrialized Agriculture is addicted to chemistry in the form of pesticides. The addiction was marketed to the American People, along with other post World War Two miracles such as nylon stockings and the ball point pen. The pen and the nylons, of course, ultimately proved much less dangerous than the chemical fix for company profits.

      Between 1947 and 1949, pesticide companies invested nearly $4 billion into expanding their production facilities, and made huge profits. By 1952-53, there were some 10,000 separate new pesticide products registered with the USDA, in what was labeled by journalists and historians as “The Golden Age of Pesticides.”

    • France gathers Eastern allies to take on agricultural crisis

      The EU’s eastern member states could throw their weight behind France’s calls for a temporary suspension of the rules of the internal market to counteract the agricultural crisis. EurActiv France reports.

      Stéphane Le Foll’s efforts to convince the EU to intervene in the agricultural crisis that is gripping Europe have so far borne little fruit. But the French minister for agriculture has looked to the East for new hope.

  • Security

    • Hackers turn to angr for automated exploit discovery and patching

      A team of researchers are battling to trouser the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s US$2m prize to build a system that aims to best human offensive and defensive security personnel at exploitation discovery and patching.

      The Shellphish team, with hackers in the US, France, China, Brazil, and Senegal, is big in the capture-the-flag circuit and won the DEF CON competition in 2006.

      And so it jumped when DARPA in 2014 pinned the word “cyber” to the title of its then decade-old Grand Challenge competition and the quest to automate vulnerability discovery and remediation.

    • How to foil a bank heist

      Essentially, Windows security updates ensure that some zero-day vulnerabilities are fixed as the Microsoft programming team become aware of them and are able to fix them. As a result of Microsoft security updates for Windows XP being discontinued, there is no way for anyone running Windows XP to secure their computer.1

    • Containers are like sandwiches

      There are loads of containers available out there you can download that aren’t trusted sources. Don’t download random containers from random places. It’s no different than trying to buy a sandwich from a filthy shop that has to shoo the rats out of the kitchen with a broom.

    • Do you trust this package?

      But what guarantee is there that no MITM attacker compromised the tarballs when they were downloaded from upstream by a distro package maintainer? If you think distro package maintainers bother with silly things like GPG signature checking when downloading tarballs, then I regret to inform you that Santa is not real, and your old pet is not on vacation, it is dead.

    • Your next car will be hacked. Will autonomous vehicles be worth it?

      Self-driving cars could cut road deaths by 80%, but without better security they put us at risk of car hacking and even ransom demands, experts at SXSW say

    • Microsoft: We Store Disk Encryption Keys, But We’ve Never Given Them to Cops [Ed: just to spies. The following page includes several clear examples where Microsoft is caught giving crypto keys to spies. Microsoft is answering/addressing concerns not as they were raised. This is a non-denying denial.]

      Microsoft says it has never helped police investigators unlock its customers’ encrypted computers—despite the fact that the company often holds they key to get their data.

      If you store important stuff on your computer, it’s great to have the option to lock it up and encrypt your data so that no one can access it if you ever lose your laptop or it gets stolen. But what happens if, one day, you forget your own password to decrypt it? To give customers a way to get their data back in this situation, Microsoft has been automatically uploading a recovery key in the cloud for Windows computers since 2013.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Hillary Clinton Has Long History of Collaboration with GOP on Foreign Policy

      Several members of the Republican foreign policy elite recently announced they’ll refuse to vote for Donald Trump if he’s the Republican nominee – with some going so far as to say they’d rather vote for Hillary Clinton.

      And while you may be shocked to see ideology so easily trump party affiliation, you shouldn’t be. Take a look, for instance, at this New York Times article from 2014.

      Back then, much of the GOP establishment was filled with trepidation about a frontrunner in the 2016 Republican presidential campaign. Mark Salter, John McCain’s former chief of staff, said that if this particular candidate won the nomination, “Republican voters seriously concerned with national security would have no responsible recourse” other than to vote for Clinton.

    • Chemical Attacks Continue; 218 Killed in Iraq

      Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to stage a massive, days-long sit-in next weekend outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, with the hope that the demonstration will force lawmakers to stop resisting reform.

      Turkey reported killing 67 Kurdish guerillas in airstrikes across northern Iraq. Turkey frequently, and without Baghdad’s permission, launches strikes on suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.) targets in Iraq.

    • Donald Trump: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

      It isn’t pacifism, that’s for sure. What Trump represents – in his crude, inconsistent way – is the traditional American antipathy for getting involved in overseas adventurism. And yet once we are involved, the American isolationist wants to win. Blinded by the illusion that a quick victory is possible, he forgets his objections to the interventionist regime-change panacea once his Jacksonian fury is provoked. Trump’s critique of our present policy – “Now we fight for no reason whatsoever. We don’t even know what we are doing” – could apply equally to his own inchoate vision.

    • Russian Prime Minister Says No Excuse for Terrorism After Ankara Bombing

      Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Monday extended condolences to the people of Turkey over a recent bombing in Ankara that claimed 34 lives, saying there was no excuse for terrorism.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Clinton’s Email Hypocrisy

      Hillary Clinton imposed a double-standard on emails as Secretary of State, one for her underlings and one for herself, and now she’s using double-talk to excuse her behavior, writes Bart Gruzalski.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • More hotspots found in Indonesia

      Jakarta, March 13: A satellite observation on Sunday detected more hotspots on Indonesia’s Sumatra and Borneo Islands.

      On Sunday morning, the satellite detected 151 hot spots across the nation, comprising mostly of islands, significantly rising from 59 hotspots found nine days ago, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman of the national disaster management agency.

      [...]

      Last year, the Indonesian government launched the biggest ever battle against massive forest fires occurring across the country, involving thousands of soldiers and scores of aircraft with assistance from foreign countries.

    • Science can now link climate change with some extreme weather events

      Extreme weather events like floods, heat waves and droughts can devastate communities and populations worldwide. Recent scientific advances have enabled researchers to confidently say that the increased intensity and frequency of some, but not all, of these extreme weather events is influenced by human-induced climate change, according to an international National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report released today (March 11).

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • What are the BBC guidelines on the EU referendum?

      The BBC’s 2016 EU Referendum Guidelines were devised following a public consultation and are intended to ensure impartiality of its broadcasts during what will be an unusually intense period of scrutiny. They will come into force at the official launch of the referendum campaign via parliamentary legislation, and this date has yet to be determined. However, it is plain for all to see that campaigning has already begun, necessitating careful thought by the BBC about how to cover developments in the ‘phony war’. Hence, the Referendum Guidelines are already operational in all but name.

    • The Koch-Fueled Plot to Destroy the VA

      If you’re a hardcore libertarian, which program would you be most eager to privatize? The VA, of course, which is America’s only genuine example of purely socialized medicine. In the past, the VA’s status as health care provider to military vets has protected it from attack, but that’s changed over the past few years. Why? Because of a carefully orchestrated smear campaign by a Koch-funded activist group called Concerned Veterans for America.

    • Bernie Sanders Sees Michigan Win as a Springboard to the Nomination

      Convinced that his surprising victory in Michigan represented a turning point, Senator Bernie Sanders and his advisers are maneuvering and spending aggressively to pull off a huge upset on Tuesday — a victory in the Ohio primary — by focusing on Hillary Clinton’s past support for trade deals that are deeply unpopular in the Midwest and other key states in his updated battle plans.

      Mr. Sanders seemed newly energized and tactical as he sat by a pool at his Miami hotel and predicted that Tuesday’s win was just the beginning of a phase of the campaign that he would dominate. Saying that coming primaries and caucuses looked unusually promising for him, he described plans to crisscross the country arguing that Mrs. Clinton championed policies that wrecked lives. He also said he would tell voters that he was the strongest candidate to put up against Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner.

  • Censorship

    • Anti-violent games senator Leland Yee sentenced to five years in prison

      Former California State Senator and gun control advocate Leland Yee (D), who tried to pass a bill banning the sale of violent games to children, has been sentenced to five years in prison for racketeering, weapons smuggling and other charges.

    • Cartoon: Heng on Media Censorship in China
    • Six facts about censorship in Cuba

      To mark the World Day against Cyber Censorship on 12 March, here are six things about free speech, the internet and online censorship in Cuba.

    • Malaysia detains Australian reporters who questioned PM

      An Australian reporter and camera operator have been briefly detained in Malaysia after attempting to question Prime Minister Najib Razak.

      Linton Besser and Louie Eroglu approached Mr Najib in Kuching on Saturday to ask him about corruption allegations, which he denies.

      The pair, filming for ABC’s Four Corners, were released without charge but cannot leave Malaysia.

      Australia’s foreign minister said it raised concerns about press freedom.

      Julie Bishop said Australia had raised the matter with the Malaysian authorities.

    • Full interview: Lars Hedegaard on the new wave of social media censorship — and why he’s on trial again

      Even before the 2005 publications of the so-called “Mohammed cartoons,” Danish historian Lars Hedegaard was sounding the alarm about creeping sharia and the Islamification of the West.

      Having survived an assassination attempt a few years ago, Hedegaard now lives in a high security home and can’t venture out without bodyguards.

      He explains why this arrangement actually makes him feel more free than he did before.

      Having been found not guilty of “hate speech” by the Supreme Court, Hedegaard is currently on trial for the “crime” of mentioning his would-be assassin’s name in public!

  • Privacy

    • NSA’s data to be shared with police

      Data collected by the National Security Administration on the private communications of U.S. citizens will now be shared with law enforcement agencies, writes Radley Balko in the Washington Post. So the information collected “for purposes of so-called ‘national security’ will be used by police to lock up ordinary Americans for routine crimes,” he writes, and the victims of this ‘unconstitutional indignity’ are more likely to be minorities, Muslims and dissident Americans – “the same people who are always targeted by law enforcement for extra ‘special attention.’”

    • DOJ Officials Hint Whatsapp Likely Next In Line For The Apple Treatment

      You’d think that access to prisoner wiretaps would somewhat negate the need to break encryption, but maybe these mouthy inmates spend more time chatting about encryption than the allegations against them. And while I understand law enforcement’s complaint that they used to be able to get all of this data with a warrant, they also used to have to run license plates by hand and perform stakeouts in person. So, it’s not as though advances in technology have delivered no concurrent benefits.

      Make no mistake about it: given the multitude of choices, the DOJ would rather have unfettered access to phones and all they contain. Whatsapp may have a billion or so users — all protected by end-to-end encryption — but if the FBI can crack open a phone, it can likely get to the content of the messages.

    • The Next Front in the New Crypto Wars: WhatsApp

      In Saturday’s edition of the New York Times, Matt Apuzzo reports that the Department of Justice is locked in a “prolonged standoff” with WhatsApp. The government is frustrated by its lack of real-time access to messages protected by the company’s end-to-end encryption. The story may represent a disturbing preview of the next front in the FBI’s war against encryption.

  • Civil Rights

    • Chaos From Trump Rallies Spills Out Onto The Streets

      Before Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took the stage in Cleveland on Saturday, a voice blared over the P.A. system: “If a protester starts demonstrating in the area around you, please, do not harm or touch the protester. This is a peaceful rally.”

      Little more than an hour later, 17-year-old Miles Wilson stood outside, visibly shaken. He had been kicked out of the rally for holding up a protest sign, but when he got outside, the shouts and slurs from the Trump supporters followed.

    • ‘F*ck You, You Whore!’: Watch Angry White People Go Berserk Outside Trump Rally in St. Louis

      Videos taken of Donald Trump supporters outside a rally in St. Louis, Missouri, show demonstrations of extreme anger, provocation and aggression as the GOP front runner tries to defend himself against criticism that his rallies are becoming dangerous.

    • The Donald Can Happen Here: Trumpenstein’s Neo-Weimar Creators

      What are we to make of the arch-authoritarian, white-nationalist Donald Trump phenomenon? We should not fool ourselves about its dangerous nature.

    • Muslim Americans Grapple With Implications of Donald Trump Victories

      In recent months, Trump has proposed shutting down mosques and banning non-citizen Muslims from the country, and he endorsed creating a national database of Muslims (even if he later claimed, dubiously, that he was merely open to the idea). Exit polls conducted in the aftermath of his primary victories show that huge numbers of voters actually support these discriminatory and likely unconstitutional proposals.

    • ‘This Violence Is Nothing’: Trump Supporters React To Atmosphere At Rallies

      Once again, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is at the top of the national news cycle. And this time, the topic is violence.

      Trump canceled his Chicago rally on Friday, apparently over safety concerns from a mass of protesters who had gathered outside and inside the venue. Clashes between demonstrators and Trump supporters reportedly turned violent, and at least one Chicago police officer was wounded. It’s unclear who was responsible for the injury.

    • VIDEO: Donald Trump Resembles Far-Right Fanatic Barry Goldwater in 1964 Race With LBJ

      Thanks to some quality Internet sleuthing by Quartz, a television ad for Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign resurfaced online this week and draws striking similarities to the GOP upheaval in the 2016 presidential race.

    • Donald Trump Jr. Cites White Nationalist To Push Anti-Sanders Conspiracy Theory

      The incident occurs shortly after Donald Trump garnered criticism for declining multiple opportunities to disavow an endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, saying he needed to do more research. He later said he did, in fact, disavow Duke.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

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