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08.19.15

Links 19/8/2015: LinuxCon Everywhere

Posted in News Roundup at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • News Corp.’s Amplify education experiment: What went wrong?

    That write-down comes nearly five years after it purchased Wireless Generation for $360 million in 2010 and renamed it Amplify. At the time, News Corp. was going to bet about $500 million on Amplify to dominate the market. Amplify was led by Joel Klein, the former head of the New York City Department of Education.

  • Avoiding Amazon? The 5 best alternatives to the online bookseller giants
  • You probably don’t want to work for Amazon

    ‘Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.’

  • The Missing ‘Leadership Principle’ at Amazon
  • Amazon’s 24/7 Hell Is the Future of Work

    Working at Amazon may be hell, but so is working everywhere else. Or at least it will be soon. The blockbuster New York Times report documenting Amazon’s “bruising” white collar culture is a fine piece of labor reporting, yet its revelations shouldn’t be too surprising. Amazon is revealed to be a more efficient and more unpleasant formulation of the standard modern workplace; one shaped by globalization, digitalization, and increasingly limitless expectations placed on the plugged-in worker.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • DDoS attacks on the rise as Akamai warns that ‘mega attacks’ are coming

      THIS IS THE DAWN of the mega denial-of-service (DoS) attack, according to security firm Akamai and its second quarter threat report.

      We wait every three months for the Akamai State of the Internet report, and we are never disappointed. Its content is pretty good too, and allows for a summary of the past quarter and a reminder about things like Shellshock and web perennials like Flash, WordPress themes and application attacks.

    • Ransomware goes open source

      Turkish security bod Utku Sen has published what seems to be the first open source ransomware that anyone can download and spread. The ‘Hidden Tear’ ransomware, available at GitHub, is a working version of the malware the world has come to hate. It uses AES encryption to lock down files and could display a scare warning or ransom message to get users to pay.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Julian Assange and the Value of WikiLeaks: Subverting Illusions

      Above and beyond Assange’s personal freedom, what’s at stake includes the impunity of the United States and its allies to relegate transparency to a mythical concept, with democracy more rhetoric than reality. From the Vietnam War era to today — from aerial bombing and torture to ecological disasters and financial scams moving billions of dollars into private pockets — the high-up secrecy hiding key realities from the public has done vast damage. No wonder economic and political elites despise WikiLeaks for its disclosures.

  • Finance

    • Richard D. Wolff | Déjà Vu: Germany Tightens Its Economic Power Over Europe

      Germany’s leaders herded their European counterparts into imposing harsh austerity on Greece. It was the price, they insisted, that Greece had to pay to receive bailout credits from the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Europeans required those bailout credits to be used mostly to pay back loans the Greek government had gotten earlier from private banks (chiefly German, French and Greek). Those credits could not be used to get Greece out of the 2008 crash that afflicted all of Europe.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Scott Walker’s False Promise of Racial Unity

      When asked about race relations on the first anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Walker replied:

      “I think in general if anyone focuses on racial discord we’re going to get more,” he said. “If we focus on unity we’re going to get more of that.”

      In other words, acknowledging systemic problems like the documented wave of police killings of unarmed black men, or the racial wealth gap, or disparities in sentencing and incarceration, creates “discord.” During the GOP debate, he similarly dodged a question about the Black Lives Matter movement, which even Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly called “the biggest civil rights issue of our time.”

    • 70 Awful Displays Of Sexism On Fox News

      On the 95th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, Media Matters looks back at Fox News’ many displays of sexism, ranging from hosts suggesting young women should not exercise civic duties like participating in jury duty because they “don’t get it,” to Erick Erickson’s claim that “the male typically is the dominant role.”

    • Who Is Intimidating Who?

      The cheerful cheddarheads who showed up at the Iowa State Fair “Soapbox” to razz Scott Walker got a rude reception. The Soapbox is a Des Moines Register tradition and peaceful protesters have long been a part of this exercise in free speech. But after Walker was punked by two young people with a fake $900 million Koch check weeks ago, Team Walker seems a bit tense. At the Soapbox, Walker supporters ripped a sign out of one protester’s hand which read “WARNING Don’t let him do to America what he did to Wisconsin.” Another protester told CNN ”I got pushed into a disabled woman. I fell on her wheelchair. She started screaming at me.”

    • Donald Trump Praises Bill O’Reilly For His Focus On Immigrant “Crime Wave”

  • Censorship

    • MPAA Ducks Censorship Battle With Google, Twitter and Facebook

      The MPAA has dropped its request for a preliminary injunction that would require search engines, ISPs and hosting companies to stop linking or offering services to MovieTube. The decision comes a few days after prominent tech firms including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Yahoo branded the request as a broad censorship attempt.

    • U.S. Government Grabbed Dotcom’s Millions “As a Last Resort”

      The U.S. Government has informed the Court of Appeals that the civil forfeiture case against Megaupload and Kim Dotcom was launched as a last resort. The authorities feared that Dotcom and his colleagues would regain possession of the millions in seized assets and argue that they are properly labeled as “fugitives.”

  • Privacy

    • Warrantless airport laptop search dooms Iran arms sales prosecution

      Federal prosecutors asked a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday to dismiss the government’s prosecution of a South Korean businessman accused of illegally selling technology used in aircraft and missiles to Iran.

      The move comes three months after a judge ruled that the government unlawfully seized and searched the suspect’s computer at Los Angeles International Airport as Jae Shik Kim was to catch a flight home in 2012. The government decided not to appeal and said it was “unable to continue prosecuting this matter.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Desperate Rightscorp Burns Through More Piracy Millions

        Piracy monetization company Rightscorp has published its results for Q2 2015 and it’s yet another three months of misery for the company. At the same time as paying out just $117K to its copyright holder clients, Rightscorp managed to run up $1.95m in expenses, leaving the company with operating losses in excess of $1.72m.

      • Universal Music and Kim Dotcom Prepared a Deal to Tax Google

        A recording of Kim Dotcom and several Universal Music executives captured two days before the Megaupload raids has revealed the label planning to do a deal with the entrepreneur. Amid discussion of ‘taxing’ Google by diverting its ad revenue to the label, the execs offered to downgrade Dotcom from “evil” to “neutral” in return for dropping legal action over the “Mega Song”.

      • Hollywood Keeps Breaking Box Office Records… While Still Insisting That The Internet Is Killing Movies

        Hollywood is still 100% focused on trying to blame the internet for any of its woes, mostly with bogus attacks on internet companies it doesn’t like. And yet… it seems to keep on setting box office records. The latest is that Universal Pictures has broken a new record in bringing in $2 billion in box office revenue faster than any other studio in history, pushed over the top by the successful opening weekend of “Straight Outta Compton” (a movie that seems to have some big fans in Silicon Valley).

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