• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Linux Containers Will Disrupt Virtualization Incumbents

  The next wave of virtualization on servers is not going to look like the last one. That is the thinking of Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux project more than a decade ago and head of strategy and user experience at Canonical, the company that provides support services for Ubuntu.

Kernel Space

• Many Network, WiFi, & eBPF Changes For The Linux 4.4 Kernel

  The networking subsystem update landed earlier this week in the Linux 4.4 Git code and it comes with several new features.

• Linux Foundation wants to extend Swagger in connected buildings

  Members of the Linux Foundation have met in San Francisco to push its newly announced Open API initiative. The collective want to harmonise efforts in the development of connected building technology.

  Founding members of the Open API Initiative, including Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and PayPal, want to extend the range of Swagger, the popular framework for building application programming interfaces (APIs). Their collective ambition is to create a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for APIs based on the representational state architecture (REST).

• Graphics Stack

  • Nouveau NVC0 Enables Compute Support For Fermi GPUs

    The latest Nouveau Gallium3D driver work enables compute support for GeForce GTX 400/500 “Fermi” graphics cards.

    But before getting too excited, this isn’t complete support nor is it good enough yet for executing your complex OpenCL kernels. The current state just handles simple compute kernels like for reading MP performance counters.

  • Have Troubles With 4K Displays On Intel Linux? Try The Linux 4.3 Kernel

    At least for the Dell P2415Q 4K monitor that I bought a few weeks ago as the latest 4K test-bed, the Intel mode-setting support tends to be flaky unless using the new Linux 4.3 kernel. If booting Ubuntu 15.10 out-of-the-box, you may not have any luck getting a GUI. This has happened on both my Skylake systems and I believe a Haswell system too (it’s been going on for a few weeks but have just got around to writing this word of caution).

• Benchmarks

  • Intel Skylake Graphics: Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance

    This article is an OpenGL performance comparison between Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 15.10 when upgrading to the very latest open-source graphics driver stack. Atop Ubuntu 15.10 was the upgrade to the Linux 4.3.0 stable kernel and also switching to Mesa 11.1-devel Git using the Padoka PPA. On the Windows side, the latest Intel 20.19.15.4300 graphics driver was used for benchmarking this Skylake system.

Applications

• Dekko 0.5.8 Beta (Email Client For Ubuntu Touch) Works On Ubuntu Desktop Also

  As you may know, Dekko is an open-source email client developed for Ubuntu Touch by one of the community members. For now, it is still a beta application and does not run flawless, but it has the basic features of a modern email client.

  I have managed to install Dekko 0.5.8 Beta (the latest version available, so far) on Xubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet and Xubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.

• Rapid Photo Downloader 0.4.11 Has Been Released

  As you may know, Rapid Photo Downloader is a free, open-source, software developed by a photography enthusiast. It has configurable file and folder names, the photos and videos can be backed up as they are downloaded, the software permits multiple download simultaneously, has support for many languages and supports GNOME, KDE and other DE.

• Plank 0.10.9 (Dock App) “Bartonschmeer” Has Been Released

  As you may know, Plank is the default dock app on Elementary OS 0.2 Luna, but it can be easily installed on other Ubuntu based systems, enabling the users to place their favorite apps in the dock, for an easier usage.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux Kernel Library backend for libguestfs

  • Adding as a remote to a local git repository, a pushable remote repository residing on a sshable server =

  • Updating Fedora to version 23 – how to workaround some issues

  • Virtualization: virsh basic commands

  • Fedora Cloud Vagrant Boxes in Atlas

  • How To Install Subsurface on Linux Systems

• Wine or Emulation

  • Tomb Raider Chronicles: Those Unexpected Findings…

    I will go back to the game on vacations. Right now, and after all this time without playing Tomb Raider, I was satisfied with having Lara run around, walk, climb, jump, and shoot—on Linux!

• Games

  • Three Years Ago Valve Put Steam Into Beta For Linux, A Look At It All

    It has been a day over three years since Steam was initially put into a limited beta for Linux, and since then things have never quite been the same for Linux gaming thanks to SteamOS as well.

    When it launched for Linux initially we had well under 100 games available on Steam, and look at the difference with a bit of influence from Valve. Checking on Steam there’s now 1607 games available for Linux, but as I’ve said it before it’s just a number. We need to keep up the push, and gain some more high quality games to bring people over to our platform.

  • Steam for Linux Passes 1600 Games Exactly Three Years After Launch

    Steam for Linux has been around for three years, and it completely changed the landscape, bringing a lot of games to Linux and signaling to the industry that this OS is ready to become a gaming platform.

  • ROOT, A Cyber Espionage Themed Stealth FPS Coming To Linux This November

  • Trine 3: The Artifacts Of Power Officially Available On SteamOS/Linux

  • Over 1600 Windows Games Are Now Available For Linux Via Valve’s Steam

  • Linux Support Appears For Another Logitech Racing Wheel For Gamers

    With the Linux 4.4 HID update came support for the Logitech G29, a racing wheel for gamers, while just missing that pull are patches for another Logitech Driving Force Racing Wheel.

    Simon Wood, who worked on the Logitech G29 support for Linux 4.4, published patches today on the kernel mailing list for the Logitech G920 Driving Force Racing Wheel. This racing wheel is currently the number one new release for PC Game Racing Wheels on Amazon and has a four-star rating from 21 customer reviews.

  • GoD Factory: Wingmen Space Combat Game Released For SteamOS & Linux

    It’s great to see it get a Linux release, as they originally tried funding on Kickstarter and failed, then they found a partner in Bandai Namco for funding. This new update uses Unity 5.1, and they decided to publish it for Linux after a beta test I was part of.

  • 2Dark – A Survival Horror Game Coming To Linux

    2Dark is a Stealth Horror Adventure game in which you have to find and rescue kidnapped children from various serial killers.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • 3D View: Challenge that makes me crazy

    But I spent a few grips, I could not make the Qt link with VTK. At that time I had very little experience with Linux environment, which made me give up using VTK and and tried to use pure OPenGl with QOpenGLWidget, that Qt provides.

  • KDE at FOSDEM 2016

    FOSDEM is the biggest free software conference and KDE will have a stall and help organise the Desktop devroom for talks. If you have something interesting to talk about the call for talks in the devroom is open now. We should have a stall to promote KDE, the world best free and open source community. I’m organising the KDE party on the Saturday. And there are thousands of talks going on. Sign up on the wiki page now if you’re coming and want to hang around or help with KDE stuff.

  • KActivities library no longer requires Boost

    There were some complaints from our Windows people that it is difficult to build KActivities (on Windows) due to its usage of boost.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Solus to Support GNOME Shell by Default

    The Solus operating system is moving closer to a stable release and developers continue to make important updates to the Linux distro.

  • Solus OS Has Adopted Kernel 4.3 And Will Switch To The GNOME 3.18 Stack Soon

  • Gnome Concept

Distributions

• New Releases

  • MX-15 beta1 available for testing

    We are pleased to announce the first public beta of MX-15 (codename ‘Fusion’)
    based on the reliable and stable Debian Jessie (8.2) with extra enhancements from our packaging team.
    Just like MX-14, this release defaults to sysVinit (though systemd is available once installed for those that prefer to use it).

• Arch Family

  • Disk I/O Scheduler Tests On Manjaro Linux

    With having an Arch-based Manjaro Linux installation around from the recent large Linux distribution comparison / performance showdown I carried out some extra tests this weekend.

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • How to make live-patching Linux really cool

    When it comes to numbers, SUSE Linux is a long, long way behind Red Hat, the 800-lb gorilla of commercial Linux companies.

    Now that gap may widen even further after Red Hat signed a deal with Microsoft to collaborate on cloud installations.

    But when it comes to making technology cool, SUSE does appear to have a better handle on things.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Announces The Availability Of Gluster On Azure

    Red Hat Inc. announced that its Gluster Storage is available in Microsoft Azure as a fully supported offering. Through Gluster, Azure users will have a scale-out, POSIX compatible, massively scalable, elastic file storage solution with a global namespace. This announcement also means that existing Gluster users will have another public cloud environment to run Gluster in.

  • William Blair Expects Red Hat (RHT) to Earn Q1 2016 Earnings of $0.30 Per Share

    Stock analysts at William Blair dropped their Q1 2016 earnings per share (EPS) estimates for Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) in a research report issued to clients and investors on Wednesday, Zacks reports. William Blair analyst J. Ader now expects that the brokerage will post earnings per share of $0.30 for the quarter, down from their previous forecast of $0.33. William Blair has a “Buy” rating on the stock. The consensus estimate for Red Hat’s Q1 2016 earnings is $0.32 per share.

  • William Blair Reduces Q2 2016 EPS Estimates for Red Hat (RHT)

    A number of other brokerages also recently weighed in on RHT. Mizuho reiterated a “buy” rating and issued a $88.00 price target on shares of Red Hat in a research note on Friday. Deutsche Bank upgraded Red Hat from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and lifted their price target for the company from $75.00 to $90.00 in a research report on Tuesday. Cowen and Company lowered Red Hat from an “outperform” rating to a “market perform” rating and set a $82.00 price objective on the stock. in a report on Thursday, October 22nd. Drexel Hamilton began coverage on Red Hat in a research note on Friday, October 9th. They issued a “buy” rating and a $90.00 price target on the stock. Finally, Pacific Crest reissued an “equal weight” rating on shares of Red Hat in a research note on Wednesday, September 23rd. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have given a hold rating and twenty-six have assigned a buy rating to the stock. Red Hat currently has an average rating of “Buy” and an average target price of $83.52.

  • Fedora

    • Korora 23 (Coral) Beta – Now Available

      The Korora Project is very pleased to announce that the beta release of version 23 (codename “Coral”) is now available for download.

    • Fedora Core 1 Computer Reaches 1 Year Uptime

      The server was built in 1998 and Fedora Core 1 was installed on May 12th 2004. I wish I could say that I always ran Linux or BSD on this box but the truth is it was originally a Windows 95 box and later on a Win2K box. One of the reasons why the uptimes weren’t longer was due to utility power failures. Currently the server has a decent APC ES 725 UPS connected via USB cable, but this will be upgraded in the near future.

• Debian Family

  • Problems observed during Cambridge mini-DebConf RTC demo

    A few problems were observed during the demo of RTC services at the Cambridge mini-DebConf yesterday. As it turns out, many of them are already documented and solutions are available for some of them.

  • MiniDebconf Cambridge – ARM, Cambridge 1115 8 November

    Then a 2 minute silence at 11.00 as is customary in the UK on this date.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Update to Bring Important Unity 8 Upgrade

        The Ubuntu Touch platform is preparing for a new OTA update, and a large number of fixes have landed in the past few days.

      • The Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Will Be Released On November 18

      • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Replace Ubuntu Software Center With GNOME Software

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Why Google Might Want to Design Chips for Android Phones

      Google may be trying to exert control over the Android ecosystem. Analysts suggest reasons Google might want to design chips for Android smartphones.

      Google is reportedly seeking to design its own smartphone chips in a bid to gain more control over what it sees as a rapidly fragmenting Android ecosystem.

      Earlier this year, Google spoke with some chip manufacturers apparently to gauge their interest in developing chips based on Google’s designs, The Information reported Nov. 5.

    • Mlais Smartwatch Surfaces, Might Ship With Android Wear

      Mlais is a Hong Kong-based company which has released a handful of smartphones thus far. We’ve reviewed a number of those devices, including Mlais MX Base, M7, M52 Red Note and M4 Note. Most of these devices managed to surprise us as far as quality and general performance goes, Mlais did a really good job overall. That being said, It seems like Mlais is getting ready to release a smartwatch, and it could be Android Wear-powered, which is very interesting. Anyhow, let’s see what’s what.

    • Google Offering Android Auto Support Through Twitter

      Smart in-car infotainment systems are becoming a reality with various smartphone projection standards like Android Auto and Apple Carplay starting to see support from car makers, although the pace of uptake leaves a lot to be desired. The Android Auto project was announced at Google I/O 2014, and the mobile app for the same was released to the Google Play Store in March this year. For the uninitiated, what Android Auto does essentially is that it makes your phone’s apps and data available through the built-in touchscreen head-unit of a vehicle that supports the standard. Meaning, no more having to pick up the phone to access your contacts, text messages, calls, GPS navigation, internet access etc. What’s more, the calling and texting features are voice-controlled by default, which promises to cut down on the would-be distractions, thereby improving safety.

    • Android 6.0 Marshmallow is Coming to Motorola Devices With the Exception of Moto E, Moto G, and Moto X First Gen!

    • BlackBerry Priv Android slider phone will be available on Verizon, too

      It looks like AT&T won’t have a domestic exclusive on the BlackBerry Priv after all. Verizon Wireless has hinted on Twitter that it, too, will offer the keyboard-equipped Android phone to its customers. No other information is available on Verizon’s website, but the carrier does say that the phone is “coming soon.”

    • Apple TV (2015) vs NVIDIA Shield Android TV – Comparison [Video]

      Today we’re comparing the forth generation Apple TV to the NVIDIA Shield. These are quite possibly the two best set top boxes out right now. I won’t be going into every little detail here, but instead the things that are most important for myself. But before we get in-depth with either option, let’s take a look at specifications between the two…

    • Fly Labs acquisition means Google Photos could finally bring robust video editing to Android

    • Review: 3 Android phones that offer something different

      New Android phones appear with regularity, but far too few of them really seem … new.

      Sure, cameras keep getting better and phones keep getting faster. For the most part, though, you’d be hard-pressed to single out many new features that aren’t just tweaks for the sake of tweaking. Though manufacturers frequently customize Google’s Android software to set their phones apart, those alterations often just make things worse by hiding features or breaking some apps.

    • BlackBerry could solve Android’s security issues

      BlackBerry is still around, though, and that is a good thing. At least it is if you’re concerned about security and your privacy. BlackBerry has long been among the most secure devices available.

      That will likely include its new PRIV (short for private), its first Android phone. In fact, the company’s security chief says PRIV will be the most secure Android device available, saying “it’s second to none in the industry.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Smalltalk 3.2.91

  I am happy to announce the second alpha release on the way to GNU Smalltalk 3.3.

Manchester Christmas lights switch on: Replay all the action from Albert Square

The countdown to Christmas in Manchester began tonight as the city’s lights were switched on.

Thousands of families filled Albert Square to watch Coronation Street’s Catherine Tyldesley and Kym Marsh flick the switch, with a spectacular 10-minute firework finale adding to the sparkle.

The soap stars were joined on the line-up by Scouting for Girls and Lemar, and there were also appearances from the cast of the Opera House’s Cinderella and The Lowry’s Sound of Music.

Pictures: Manchester Christmas lights switch on finishes with spectacular fireworks display in Albert Square

Native American Students Left Behind

Native American students have writhed for decades in a bureaucratic school system bogged down by a patchwork of federal agencies responsible for different aspects of their education.

Today, native youth post the worst achievement scores and the lowest graduation rates of any student subgroup. Last school year 67 percent of American Indian students graduated from high school compared the national average of 80 percent. And many of their school facilities have been equally neglected, lacking even basic essentials such as heat and running water.

PC tech support tell customers to avoid Windows 10 [Ed: as covered here before]

While Microsoft might be revved up about getting people onto Windows 10 as fast as possible, if you call your PC maker’s tech support line, you might be advised to roll back to older versions.

Security

• Linux Security – How Can Your Linux Be Hacked Using Malware, Trojans, Worms, Web Scripts Etc.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• ‘No force can pull us apart’: China’s Xi says in historic China-Taiwan summit

  Mr Ma’s Nationalists – who are also known as the Kuomintang (KMT) – fled to Taiwan in retreat from Mao Zedong’s Communists at the end of the civil war. China maintains it will eventually reunify the island, by force if necessary.

• The leaders of China and Taiwan just had their first meeting since 1949

  The mainland has never renounced the use of force to bring what it considers a breakaway province under its control.

• Open Letter to President Ahtisaari Re Jim Murphy

  What shocks many people here is that Mr Murphy is by any standards a dedicated warmonger. He was a major and important proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and is the strongest of supporters of the massive increase of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, in breach of the Non Proliferation Treaty.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Environmentalists on Trial for Defending Palm Beach Gardens Forest

  A trial taking place today brings attention once again to the plight of the 700-acre Briger Forest, a rare tract of pristine land in Palm Beach County that environmentalists have been trying to protect for years. Developers have begun to clear trees and build roads to construct homes, stores, and laboratories for the private, nonprofit Scripps Biotech Institute.

• Bill Gates gives Exxon cover: The Gates Foundation is deadly wrong on climate change, fossil fuels

  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s wealthiest charitable foundation, has been under an unprecedented amount of scrutiny regarding their investments in the fossil fuel industry lately.

  Alongside a persistent and growing local Seattle-based campaign, about a quarter of a million people joined the Guardian in calling on the Foundation to join the $2.6 trillion worth of investors who have committed to divest from fossil fuels.

  In response, Bill Gates has proffered two public rejections of fossil fuel divestment, the most recent in a lengthy interview on climate change in this month’s edition of the Atlantic. Both rejections were based on misleading accounts of divestment which created straw men of the divestment movement, and downplayed the remarkable prospects for a clean energy revolution.

• What you should know about Indonesia’s devastating fires

  For the past two months, enormous forest fires have been raging across large swaths of Indonesia. So far, 120,000 active fires have been detected in the country. The smoke has been so bad it could be seen from space. Below is a guide to the basic facts you should know about the disaster.

• Setting a country alight: Indonesia’s devastating forest fires are manmade

  Thousands of the fires raging through the forests of Indonesia were deliberately started to clear land for industrial use. The results have been deadly

• Indonesian fires: Forget the orangutans, is the blaze a tipping point for carbon emissions?

  The fires in Indonesia are more than just a threat to endangered orangutans. They have shortened by up to two years the window to reduce carbon emissions and avoid runaway climate change, according to one of the CSIRO’s leading climate scientists.

Finance

• Reddit Bitcoin Censorship in Focus as 30 CEOs Join Roger Ver’s AMA

  Yesterday, Roger Ver and the Bitcoin.com team hosted the largest bitcoin AMA, with the participation of prominent bitcoin entrepreneurs, startups and developers including Gavin Andresen, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, Xapo CEO Wences Casares, Overstock CEO Patric Bryne and bitcoin core developer Mike Hearn, which will continue until december, with over 70 respected figures from the bitcoin scene hosting Q&A sessions on forum.bitcoin.com.

• Bill Gates-owned Corbis photo company cutting 15 percent of workers

  The Seattle-based company has been stockpiling a trove of historic photos since Gates founded Corbis in 1989. But recently, it has seen an “accelerated decline” in its ability to license its images, according to a memo CEO Gary Shenk sent employees this week that was obtained by Bloomberg.

  [...]

  A source with knowledge of the situation told Bloomberg the cuts will affect 15 percent of Corbis workers.

• Bill Gates spent a fortune to build it. Now a Florida school system is getting rid of it.

  Here we go again. Another Bill Gates-funded education reform project, starting with mountains of cash and sky-high promises, is crashing to Earth.

  This time it’s the Empowering Effective Teachers, an educator evaluation program in Hillsborough County, Florida, which was developed in 2009 with major financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A total of more than $180 million has been spent on the project since then — with Gates initially promising some $100 million of it — but now, the district, one of the largest in the country, is ending the program.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Rupert Murdoch’s Already Destroying National Geographic

Censorship

• There’s Method To The Mad Satire Of ‘Censorship Now!!’

  Ian Svenonius is a strange man. Anyone who’s followed his career over the past 25 years knows he has a knack for incendiary sloganeering that often borders on the surreal, first as the singer in the legendary Washington, D.C. punk band The Nation of Ulysses (he currently leads the “crime rock” group Chain and the Gang) then as the author of the nonfiction books The Psychic Soviet and Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group. In his stylish, suit-and-tie persona as a pop-culture gadfly and revolutionary rhetorician — which may or may not be a self-caricature; part of his appeal is his Andy Kaufman-like commitment to character — he’s put forth ideas as bizarre as comparing Fidel Castro to The Velvet Underground. Favorably, of course.

• Textbook takes a comical approach to censorship

  But instead of including the awful word “fuck,” which may corrupt the minds of psychology students, Weiten takes a comical approach by just changing the word to “mating.” He of course could have used the word “fornicating,” but that just wouldn’t be funny at all.

• China Seeks to Export Censorship to Overseas-Registered Domain Names: Report [Ed: like in the West. “Radio Free Asia” is probably like “Radio Free Europe”]

  China has compiled a “blacklist” of keywords banned by its complex Internet censorship regime, known as the Great Firewall, and is now seeking to apply them well beyond its physical borders via a domain-name registry based in the United States, according to recent reports.

  U.S.-based domain-name registry XYZ.com recently made a deal with the Chinese government requiring it to enforce Beijing’s censorship globally based on a list of banned words, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.

  The registry will let China ban domain names based on a list of “sensitive words” including “freedom,” “democracy,” and a multitude of words seen as referring to the Tiananmen Square massacre, including the title of singer Taylor Swift’s 1989 album and tour.

• Google’s Move Toward China Littered With Censorship Challenges

  Google’s move back into China might not be as welcome as initially expected — not by China’s citizens, but the United States. The Web site for Google’s holding company is registered with a company that is helping China censor thousands of top level domain names, according to one report.

• Google Faces New China Censorship Problem

  Meanwhile, the .XYZ registry is not owned by a Chinese company but by Daniel Negari, a young American entrepreneur from Beverly Hills. Negari said by email that XYZ will formally address the issue on Wednesday afternoon.

• China Censors Your Internet

• China, Working with a U.S. Company, Aims to Censor Online Content

  China is already famous for massive Internet surveillance and censorship inside its borders. Now, through a partnership with American company XYZ.com, Chinese authorities are also aiming to censor online content around the world in an unprecedented suppression of Internet privacy and freedom.

• China just banned 12,000 words from the internet

• EFF Challenges Informal Government Censorship

  EFF, along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the case of Backpage.com v. Dart.

  Backpage.com sued Thomas Dart, the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, arguing that the sheriff’s successful campaign to get Visa and MasterCard to cease providing financial services to the website amounted to informal government censorship in violation of the First Amendment.

• Unionist parties in censorship row after demanding removal of painting showing ‘Orangemen in KKK clothing’

  More than 300 works are on display in Northern Ireland’s biggest visual arts show, but a controversy erupted this week over a square inch of canvas.

• Ku Klux Klan painting ‘feeds into climate of bitterness’

  A leading Orangeman has hit out at media backing for Orange Order brethren being depicted as Ku Klux Klan members.

• Controversy over Orange Order ‘KKK’ artwork

• Warning sign erected near Joseph McWilliams painting

  A WARNING notice has been placed beside a painting at a Belfast museum amid claims it shows members of the Orange Order dressed in Ku Klux Klan clothing.

  The 7ft oil canvas entitled `’Christian Flautists Outside St Patrick’s’, was the last major work by renowned Belfast artist Joseph McWilliams before his death last month.

  The painting depicts loyalist bands men marching in circles outside St Patrick’s Church in the city in 2012.

• Orange Order to meet Ulster Museum chiefs over ‘KKK’ painting

  Staff at the Ulster Museum have erected a sign to warn visitors that some images – including one linking Orange Order supporters with the racist Ku Klux Klan – are “potentially offensive”.

• Leaked Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal Censorship of Staff on Israel, AIPAC Pandering, Warped Militarism

  LEAKED INTERNAL EMAILS from the powerful Democratic think tank Center for American Progress (CAP) shed light on several public controversies involving the organization, particularly in regard to its positioning on Israel. They reveal the lengths to which the group has gone in order to placate AIPAC and long-time Clinton operative and Israel activist Ann Lewis — including censoring its own writers on the topic of Israel.

• Ann Lewis and AIPAC pressured Democratic thinktank to censor writers deemed ‘anti-Israel’

  Three years ago two writers got run out of the Democratic thinktank the Center for American Progress by the Israel lobby. We wrote a lot about it at the time. Rightwing Republican Israel supporters smeared the writers for stuff they were writing about Israel at Think Progress; and lo and behold they were gone in months. Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton–all moved on to more independent pastures after they were censored by CAP.

• We’re obsessed with ‘no platforming’ but aren’t resisting the return of harder censorship

  In the preface to his classic 1961 book about censorship, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition, the conservative journalist Peter Coleman struck an unexpectedly elegiac note.

  “It is still too soon,” he wrote, “to write an autopsy of Australian censorship, but nevertheless the censorship of morals, blasphemy and sedition has almost entirely disappeared, and the remaining cases of literary censorship, while irritating to many, are few in number.

  “At the same time, since the new freedom of censorship has been accompanied by the emergence of ‘mass culture’, of a debased literature, and of a general attitude of indifference to cultural standards, the spirit of crusade has gone out of the old cause.”

• Australia urges Nauru to uphold rule of law and stop censorship

  Australia says it is concerned at the erosion of the rule of law in Nauru, and has urged the Pacific nation to allow journalists to visit, stop censoring the internet and decriminalise same-sex relationships, in a frank assessment at the United Nations.

  Nauru is being assessed before the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a quadrennial assessment of countries’ human rights record by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

• Burma’s journalists battle censorship and inexperience ahead of ‘relatively’ free elections

  Their predecessors suffered torture, imprisonment and death at the hands of a diehard military regime for more than half a century. Now, Burma’s journalists — newly fledged, muscle-flexing but also still apprehensive — are challenged with the first general election since 1960 to be covered with relative freedom.

  The independent press for months has been girding itself with training and strategy sessions, figuring out how to breach barriers to polling access and expose cheating and other irregularities — both widely anticipated during what is heralded as a historic showdown Sunday between the ruling party, backed by the still-powerful military, and one headed by pro-democracy opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

  “It’s a milestone in my career and that of everyone here,” says Kyaw Zwa Moe, editor of The Irrawaddy, earlier imprisoned for eight years for publishing a political journal and participating in the pro-democracy movement. “I told my reporters, ‘You have to have passion to cover these elections. You are not only doing your duty as journalists but serving your country. You are opening people’s eyes.’”

• Censorship in paradise

  Thus, it was very good news when the festival made the decision to host several sessions as a platform for discussing the controversial events that occurred between Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 1965 and the subsequential mass killings of alleged leftists.

• This week in Jakarta: Censorship, polls, and rain at last

  Censorship in Indonesia became a topic of public debate this week after local authorities moved to silence discussions on the 1965 anti-communist killings. Meanwhile, polls weighed in on Jokowi’s first year as president, and the first rains of the season offered some relief to areas affected by haze.

• Singapore Writers Festival: Indonesia’s Goenawan Mohamad on how to write under censorship

• Writers continue to resist, navigate censors

• Indonesia writers fear censors over the 1965 communist purges

  Endy Bayuni was one of four panellists whose identities were overtly recorded last Thursday. Attendees were also photographed, and other events on Indonesia’s 1965 communist purges were cancelled.

• Southeast Asia’s forgotten genocide

  October marked 50 years since the Indonesian military launched one of the twentieth century’s worst mass murders. Yet the anniversary passed almost unnoticed. The massacre of some 500,000 members or sympathisers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) during 1965-1966 is the least talked-about genocide of the last century.

• Meet the website Facebook is censoring from your News Feed

  Facebook, which just announced it averages 1 billion daily users, is actively censoring any mention of Tsu.co. The social media giant has accused the brash young startup of not complying with its spam policies and now cites every mention of the site made on Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram as spam, censoring any post that includes the site’s URL (Tsu, the popular Chinese name, is still permissible).

• Facebook deletes and blocks all links to small social media site Tsu.co

  The social media giant has deleted more than one million posts which mention small social media platform Tsu.co

• Facebook is censoring links to competitor social network Tsu and deleting old mentions

  Log in to Facebook, create a post, and type in “Tsu.co.” Facebook will censor the link on all its platforms. That means facebook.com, as well as Messenger, Instagram, and the Facebook apps for iOS and Android.

  Facebook did something a lot scarier, too. The retroactively censored over a million Facebook posts which mentioned Tsu.co. So those Facebook posts, and associated images, videos, or comments? All deleted by Facebook. Gone.

  The word “Tsu,” which is a competing social network, is okay. But “Tsu.co,” or any links from the domain, are automatically censored.

• #KillAllWhiteMen? What about #KillAllMuslims?

  Yes, it is all well and good to defend Bahar Mustafa, the Goldsmiths student diversity officer arrested and charged under UK communications law. As the free-speech lobby English PEN claims, noting that the hashtag #KillAllWhiteMen ‘was clearly a joke’ rather than a real threat: ‘It was a political statement, however inadvisable it was for an elected students’ union official to post it.’

• Commissioners urged to alter policy seen as censorship

  Toledo-based attorney Terry Lodge accused the commissioners of violating his client’s First Amendment right to free speech. The policy, which has been listed in writing on the commissioners’ agendas for several weeks, requires would-be speakers at weekly commissioner meetings to disclose the subject of their comments prior to speaking.

• Risk of censorship of Chilcot report

  I, too, am disgusted by the delay in publishing the results of the Chilcot inquiry about the causes and consequences of the second Iraq War, which should have been unnecessary if George Bush senior had not lost his nerve, following the US massacre of retreating Iraqi troops on the Basis Road, after the liberation of Kuwait.

  I doubt we will ever get the whole truth, because it is probably inconsistent with the whole idea of democratic government.

• A question of censorship: 25 years after the Mapplethorpe trial

• Oregon officials must justify their censorship

  Censorship of public information needs to justify itself, not the public’s right to know.

• Filmmaker Sees Online Censorship as Danger to Cambodian Democracy

  Recently, a video of two opposition lawmakers being beaten by an angry mob went viral on social media. How do you think this speaks to cyber-democracy in Cambodia?

• The TPP and Internet censorship

  For an example of just how bad the TPP is for Canadians, let’s take a look at the Intellectual Property (IP) chapter. For years, digital rights experts the world over have been calling it “one of the worst global threats to the Internet.”

• The TPP, Internet censorship, and Trudeau’s first big test as prime minister

• Books for book fair not censored: Official

  A deliberation on the contribution of the freedom to publish in guaranteeing freedom of expression was one of the first sessions on the second day of the 3rd Arab Publishers Conference. The debate was moderated by Sheikh Sultan Sooud Al Qasimi, an Emirati activist, writer, and former board chairman of the UAE branch of the Young Arab Leaders (YAL), with Ibrahim Al Moallem, Ola Wallin, and Ibrahim Al Abed as panellists.

• Official says ‘no censorship’ of books entering UAE for book fairs

  National Media Council adviser Ebrahim Al Adel says UAE open to all opinions and criticism

  There is no censorship of books of any kind at UAE book fairs, a senior official told the third Arab Publishers Conference in Sharjah on Tuesday.

  Ebrahim Al Abed, adviser to the chairman of the National Media Council (NMC), also said the UAE never rejects constructive criticism, even if it is about politics.

• The TPP: A Time Bomb That Could Blow Up a Free Internet

  The copyright provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership could curtail Internet users’ basic access to information and right of self-expression on the Web, criminalizing common online activities and enforcing widespread Internet censorship, writes digital rights campaigner Evan Greer at The Guardian.

• Lego should not censor: Chinese artist should be free to use any medium

  Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, intended to create political art with the use of Legos, and was denied the bulk use of Lego’s products to make his piece.

  Lego’s spokesperson claimed that they “refrain, on a global level, from actively engaging in or endorsing the use of Lego bricks in projects or contexts of a political agenda.”

• Apple Is Self-Censoring in China. Is Facebook Next?

  Larry Salibra was traveling across China last month when he noticed something strange with his iPhone. Apple’s news aggregation app News and its Beats 1 radio station had worked fine in Hong Kong, where he began his trip and where there is basically no internet censorship, but became unavailable as he entered mainland China, where the internet most definitely is censored.

• Malaysia: Zunar mounts constitutional challenge to Sedition Act

  In a surprise turn, the Malaysian cartoonist and his lawyers have applied to the country’s high court to consider whether the Sedition Act is constitutional

• Michael Moore’s new film gets ‘R’ rating for images of Eric Garner’s death

  Gadfly documentarian Michael Moore has chased down the chief executive of General Motors, annoyed President George W. Bush and stormed Wall Street with Rage Against the Machine.

• Michael Moore on ‘Where to Invade Next’ censorship row: ‘I will make no cuts’

• Michael Moore: documentary’s R rating from footage seen on ‘any news show’

• Michael Moore challenges R rating given to his new documentary, Where To Invade Next

• Michael Moore rants against MPAA for giving his new film that shows footage of Eric Garner’s death an ‘R’ rating

• Michael Moore: ‘I won’t make cuts in new film’

• Defy censors, Moore says

• Hacktivists Create a Revolution in Censorship

• OAS Secretary General Urges to Combat Violence against Journalists: “the Most Extreme Form of Censorship”

• Journalists should not have to engage in self-censorship because they fear for their life: UN Sec. Gen.

  The Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon issued a message today on the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. The message reads:

  “Today we remember the journalists and media workers who have been killed in the line of duty.

  More than 700 journalists have been killed in the last decade — one every five days — simply for bringing news and information to the public.

• Samira Shackle: Little comfort for Bangladesh’s secular bloggers

  Facing the double threat of extremist violence and state repression, Bangladeshi bloggers daring to speak up for secular values are fighting for their lives

• Magazine accuses Boudreaux of censorship

  The publishers of a magazine catering mostly to inmates has filed a lawsuit against Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux, claiming he violated county inmates’ First Amendment rights by not allowing them to receive the magazine.

• Pittsburgh’s censorship battle heats up as ADF speaks out against free speech violations

  Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman spoke before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit against a Pittsburgh censorship zone ordinance. In March, ADF attorneys appealed a district court decision that upheld the ordinance.

• Turkey: Increased pressure on journalists jeopardises public interest

  The International Press Institute (IPI) released a report on the Joint International Emergency Press Freedom Mission to Turkey undertaken last week by a broad coalition of international free expression and press freedom groups.

  The report builds on mission participants’ finding that escalating pressure on media in the period between parliamentary elections in June and repeat polls set for Sunday has significantly impacted journalists’ ability to report on matters of public interest and is likely to “have a significant, negative impact on the ability of voters in Turkey to share and receive necessary information, with a corresponding effect on Turkey’s democracy”.

• Syria: No word on Bassel Khartabil’s whereabouts

  Syria’s authorities have yet to disclose the whereabouts of Bassel Khartabil, a software developer and defender of freedom of information, one month after his transfer to an undisclosed location, 22 organizations said today. Syrian authorities should immediately reveal his whereabouts and release him.

  Military intelligence detained Khartabil on March 15, 2012. On October 3, 2015, Khartabil managed to inform his family that security officers had ordered him to pack but did not reveal his destination. His family has received no further information. They suspect that he may have been transferred to the military-run field court inside the military police base in Qaboun.

  “Each day without news feels like an eternity to his family,” a spokesperson for the organizations said. “Syrian authorities should immediately reveal his whereabouts and reunite him with them.”

• Quick Takes: Police Censorship

  When, according to a Gallup poll, almost half of the U.S. population mistrusts the police’s ability to enforce laws appropriately, one director voicing his negative opinions at a rally is irrelevant. This recent boycott by the NYPD and LAPD of their negative portrayal in the media is just a pathetic attempt to salvage their pride and does nothing to take actual responsibility for their public reputation.

• Why are student-union officials censoring criticism of Islamic State?

  It’s true there are two sides in the YPG v Isis conflict. One side has both men and women fighting hard to protect their homeland and people from falling to brutal Islamist rule; the other pushes gay people off buildings, stones adulterers, sets fire to its prisoners of war, and mows down anyone who stands in the way of the growth of its creepy Caliphate. If you can’t ‘take sides’ in a conflict like that, then your moral compass is in serious need of repair.

• Sex, violence and religion: The films banned by councils

  Monty Python’s Life of Brian has finally had its first public screening in Bournemouth after almost 35 years of being banned in the town. But it’s not the only film to suffer the shackles of local censorship.

Privacy

• What Shall We Love?

  The Moscow Un-Summit wasn’t a formal interview. Nor was it a cloak-and-dagger underground rendezvous. The upshot is that we didn’t get the cautious, diplomatic, regulation Edward Snowden. The downshot (that isn’t a word, I know) is that the jokes, the humour and repartee that took place in Room 1001 cannot be reproduced. The Un-Summit cannot be written about in the detail that it deserves. Yet it definitely cannot not be written about. Because it did happen. And because the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversations. And this, certainly, was a real one.

  [...]

  I asked Ed Snowden what he thought about Washington’s ability to destroy countries and its inability to win a war (despite mass surveillance). I think the question was phrased quite rudely—something like “When was the last time the United States won a war?” We spoke about whether the economic sanctions and subsequent invasion of Iraq could be accurately called genocide. We talked about how the CIA knew—and was preparing for the fact—that the world was heading to a place of not just inter-country war but of intra-country war in which mass surveillance would be necessary to control populations. And about how armies were being turned into police forces to administer countries they have invaded and occupied, while the police, even in places like India and Pakistan and Ferguson, Missouri, in the United States—were being trained to behave like armies to quell internal insurrections.

• Insight – NSA says how often, not when, it discloses software flaws

• The NSA keeps 9% of the vulnerabilities it discovers to itself

  Openness and the NSA are not happy bedfellows; by its very nature, the agency is highly secretive. But in recent years, post-Edward Snowden, the organization has embarked on something of a PR campaign in an attempt to win back public trust.

  The latest manoeuvre sees the NSA promoting the fact that when it discovers security vulnerabilities and zero-days in software, it goes public with them in 91 percent of cases… but not before it has exploited them. No information about the timescale for disclosures is given, but what most people will be interested in is the remaining 9 percent which the agency keeps to itself.

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden notes ‘extraordinary change’ in attitudes toward him during Democratic primary debate

  Edward Snowden has described the Democratic presidential debate last month as marking an “extraordinary change”in attitudes towards him.

  In a lengthy interview with Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter published on Friday, Snowden said he had been encouraged by the debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, her main challenger for the Democratic nomination.

  During the televised encounter, both candidates called for Snowden to face trial , but Sanders said he thought the NSA whistleblower had “played a very important role in educating the American people”.

• Snowden Says Clinton And Sanders Are ‘Refreshing,’ Give Him Hope To Return

• Edward Snowden Still Has Influence: ‘Exile as a Strategy Is Beginning to Fail’

  Even his separation from his girlfriend, whom he left in Hawaii when he fled the country, has been resolved. She has been living with him in Moscow for just over a year.

• Only ‘tiny handful’ of ministers knew of mass surveillance, Clegg reveals

  The majority of the UK cabinet were never told the security services had been secretly harvesting data from the phone calls, texts and emails of a huge number of British citizens since 2005, Nick Clegg has disclosed.

  Clegg says he was informed of the practice by a senior Whitehall official soon after becoming David Cameron’s deputy in 2010, but that“only a tiny handful” of cabinet ministers were also told – likely to include the home secretary, the foreign secretary and chancellor. He said he was astonished to learn of the capability and asked for its necessity to be reviewed.

• Theresa May’s recent internet history

• Seven Major Takeaways From the U.K.’s Proposed Surveillance Rules

  THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT on Wednesday published a proposed new law to reform and dramatically expand surveillance powers in the United Kingdom. The 190-page Investigatory Powers Bill is thick with detail and it will probably take weeks and months of analysis until its full ramifications are understood. In the meantime, I’ve read through the bill and noted down a few key aspects of the proposed powers that stood out to me — including unprecedented new data retention measures, a loophole that allows spies to monitor journalists and their sources, powers enabling the government to conduct large-scale hacking operations, and more.

• ProtonMail Learns That Paying Ransom Doesn’t Stop Attacks

  When confronted by a cyber-extortionist, do you pay the ransom or do you stand firm and not negotiate? It’s both an ethical and a procedural dilemma.

  By paying the ransom, in some respects, the victim is enabling and perhaps encouraging the extortionist to commit future acts since after all, if it worked once, it might well work again. In giving extortionists what they want, the general idea is that the victim will get back what they want and it could well be the quickest route to resolving a ransom situation.

• Security News This Week: 9 Out of 10 Websites Leak Your Data to Third Parties

  This week, hackers won a million dollar bounty for discovering a long-sought iOS zero-day. Federal lawmakers introduced the Stingray Privacy Act, a new bill that would require state and local lawmakers to get a warrant before using the invasive surveillance devices. The world got its first look at the full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. We found out the UK’s TalkTalk telecom hack may not be as bad as it looked. Android users can finally use Open Whisper Systems’ RedPhone app and TextSecure messaging app in one app, called Signal. And Crackas With Attitude, the teens who hacked CIA Director John Brennan, are back with a new hack.

• Theresa May’s threat to the privacy of reading

  Reading through the draft investigatory powers bill on Wednesday evening, one name came to mind, that of Frederick Douglass. He was an African American former slave who became one of the most eloquent campaigners for the abolition of slavery and was the living refutation of plantation owners’ contention that their “property” lacked the intelligence to function as independent citizens.

  Douglass was a remarkable orator and at least as remarkable a writer. His autobiography is one of the glories of the 19th century. In it, he records how, as a slave, he managed to learn to read, partly due to the initial kindness of his owner’s wife. But when her husband learned of this, he forbade her to continue. “The first step in her downward course,” recalls Douglass, “was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband’s precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger.”

• In ‘Spectre,’ James Bond becomes Edward Snowden

  In the terms of the intelligence world, “Spectre” is an argument between old-fashioned human intelligence (Humintel) and signals intelligence (SIGINT). The script imagines an expansion of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing program of the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to “Nine Eyes,” adding in countries such as China and South Africa. This expansion is spearheaded by a mole within MI6, “C” (Andrew Scott), though it seems clear that “C” is a stand-in for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Although the US National Security Agency became notorious for its lawlessness and massive reach after the Snowden revelations, GCHQ is even more unconstrained. Because internet communications bounce around the world before arriving at the recipient, many are routed through undersea cables across the Atlantic. These cables come up out of the water on the west coast of Britain, and GCHQ has put sniffers on them, scooping up petabytes of our information and data-mining it.

  The government of David Cameron, and especially the crypto-fascist Home Minister Theresa May, have long engaged in massive domestic surveillance and now intend to the bulk collection and storage of information on all the websites a Briton visits. In addition, Cameron wants to outlaw consumer encryption of the sort Apple is now increasingly offering its customers (Apple can’t turn over information to the FBI or NSA because even it doesn’t have the encryption keys). It seems a little unlikely that any such encryption ban is possible.

Civil Rights

• Cult Movie Inspires Global Protest Against Internet Censorship

• What’s It Like In The Middle Of The Million Mask March?

  Hundreds gathered — many wearing Guido Fawkes masks made popular through the film V for Vendetta — all with an axe to grind with the establishment.

• Million Mask March protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks take city centre protest to McDonalds during Bonfire Night.

  A group of activists from the Anonymous hacktivist group invaded the Oxford Road restaurant on Thursday night.

• Million Mask March: Around 1,000 activists in Guy Fawkes masks expected to march through city centre streets tonight

  Around 1,000 activists disguised as Guy Fawkes are expected to march through the streets of Manchester city centre in a protest against austerity, corruption and censorship.

• Million Mask March: 55-year-old arrested as Anonymous protesters clash with police in London

  Thousands of protesters took part in the Million Mask March in central London on Thursday (5 November), which ended amid violent clashes with the police. Many of the protestors wore the Guy Fawkes mask that has become synonymous with the Anonymous activist group.

• Violence erupts on anarchists’ Million Mask March in London

• Anonymous Holding Largest Global Protest in History

• Million Mask March: What the devil is it? Where did it come from? What happened?

• Anonymous “Million Mask March” Draws Crowd in Phoenix

• 2015 Million Mask March: Anonymous readies for global day of action in over 650 cities

• Million Mask Marchers Hurl Fireworks and Smoke Bombs in London

• London police horses injured in Anonymous’ Million Mask March

• Thousands gather around the world for Anonymous’s Million Mask March

• Anonymous expects thousands to attend ‘Million Mask’ marches across the globe

• Reformat the gov’t: Yaya Dub hackers hold Million Mask March

• Anonymous Launches Global Protests, Outs Hundreds Of Alleged KKK Members

• At least 50 arrests made after ‘Anonymous’ protest in London

• Anonymous readies for global day of Million Mask March

• Masked protestors take to city streets around the world in support of Anonymous’ ‘Million Mask March’

  More than 600 cities saw crowds of masked protestors rage against issues including censorship, corruption, war and poverty.

• How impartial are the Sweden/ Ecuador Mutual Legal Assistance talks?

  On 31 August 2015, Ann Linde, State Secretary for Home Affairs, announced on Twitter that “constructive negotiations started today with my State Secretary colleague from Ecuador on an agreement on mutual legal assistance”. Since then, however, a question of partisanship has arisen in terms of how influential the UK and US could be on a process brought about by the diplomatic standoff over Julian Assange’s asylum status. A series of tweets (see below) has revealed Linde’s schedule to have included a curious number of senior figures from the UK / US security establishments. Whilst these meetings could be coincidence, an opportunity for Assange’s political opponents to project their interests into the negotiations has arisen. Linde has also acted as a confidante to Robert Silverman, a diplomat at the US Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden.

  Further, Secretary Linde’s advocacy of a “feminist foreign policy” has brought her into contact with Anna Ardin, a feminist and one of the complainants in the Assange case. Ardin and Linde have served together at the 2008 Stockholm Pride’s “We Are Family!” tents, have spoken at the 2008 Sweden-Asia Forum in Manila, Philippines, and Linde attended a 2009 book seminar organised by Ardin. It is therefore unlikely that Linde can be expected to conduct the negotiations in a truly impartial manner.

• Censorship and conspiracy theories rule the day in post-election Turkey

  The internet, while often associated with connectedness and information flow, is split, too. One factor is the set of information management techniques that construct a ‘clean’ and ‘safe’ internet. Filters that are voluntary in private use and mandatory in places such as schools and libraries work with blacklists of banned websites and whitelists of permitted ones. Amendments in 2014 and 2015 to the law regulating access to information on the internet enabled the swift temporary banning of websites by the prime minister and other ministers.

• Turkey: the Phantom Election

  The discrepancy between the opinion polls and the electoral results need not detain us here. What really matters is to explain the stunning volatility observed in the space of five months. Short of an apologetic cover-up for the AKP, the answer to the question of how the AKP rose from its ashes in such a short time should start with the characteristics of the electoral process that culminated in the polling of 1st November. Simply put, what took place cannot be characterised as an election. There was, to be sure, polling on election day and, judging from information so far available, the voting process conformed to internationally acceptable standards, barring certain exceptional but serious irregularities in the Kurdish region. The trouble is that electoral campaigning and propaganda had been rendered almost impossible for all parties except the AKP! These elections were unrecognisable in concrete experiential terms to anyone who has gone through a couple of electoral processes in Turkey. There were no such elections in living memory where the streets were empty during the period set aside legally for electioneering, where there were almost no rallies organised by even the major parties except for the AKP, where the only thing that reminded the populace of the existence of coming elections was television and … the state of media freedom was abysmal as we will see in a moment. These were phantom elections and therefore the results are only worth celebrations for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his cohort, but cannot serve as a loyal indicator of where Turkey is going.

• Police use anti-terrorism powers to detain UK volunteers taking aid to Calais refugee camp

  British volunteers on a humanitarian aid run to refugees in Calais were detained by police under legislation meant to be used against suspected terrorists, an aid group has told the Independent.

  Two people working with the London2Calais group said they were stopped and held for three hours under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 while returning to the UK at Calais.

  One of the pair, who were travelling in the same vehicle, said Kent Police counter-terror officers carried out the detention on the Calais side of the channel.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• In leaked document, Comcast admits data caps are not about congestion

  The internet service provider has often complained (such as when lobbying against net neutrality) that it must impose limits on service to prevent network congestion. The argument suggests that these measures are required for the public good: to manage traffic, to give everyone fair access to the “road,” to stymie abusive or selfish “drivers,” you shouldn’t be using more than 250 gigabytes of data each month.

Intellectual Monopolies

• White House may have to renegotiate Pacific trade pact-senator

  A key U.S. senator said on Friday the Obama administration may have to renegotiate parts of a Pacific trade pact, heralding a tough battle to win support in Congress.

  The administration notified lawmakers on Thursday it plans to sign the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, starting a countdown to a congressional vote that could come in the middle of next year’s election campaign.

• We made President Obama’s big TPP trade deal searchable

  On Thursday morning, after months of questions about the contents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal negotiated and championed by President Obama, his administration released the agreement in its complex entirety.

  The problem, though, is that it was released as a series of posts on Medium — and, worse, a collection of PDFs — making it hard to search for topics across the entire document.

• Copyrights

  • Ancillary Copyright 2.0: The European Commission is preparing a frontal attack on the hyperlink

    The European Commission is preparing a frontal attack on the hyperlink, the basic building block of the Internet as we know it. This is based on an absurd idea that just won’t die: Making search engines and news portals pay media companies for promoting their freely accessible articles.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Locked Up with Linux

The sheer versatility of the Linux kernel truly knows no bounds. It can be found, literally, everywhere. From your local library to your local big box retailer, Linux is barely a stone’s throw away. There are very few places in the world that can be considered Linux-free. A small tribal village? Maybe. A shade tree mechanic? Possibly. A Prison? Well … not really. That’s right. It seems that Linux has been sent to the joint, and it poised to be there for a very long time.

The Future of the Bloomberg Terminal is Open Source

The technology has withstood the test of time by continuously evolving to meet the needs of financial traders – though until recently new features have been largely developed with in-house, proprietary code.

The way Bloomberg keeps up with users’ expectations is changing, however, McCracken writes. The company is adopting open source technologies such as Linux, Hadoop, and Solr and contributing code back upstream.

Croatia publishes Linux & LibreOffice manual

Croatia’s Ministry of Veterans has published a manual on how to use Linux and LibreOffice. The document is part of a feasibility pilot in the Ministry. “The text is intended for public administrations, but can be useful to others interested in using these tools”, the Ministry writes in its announcement on 5 November.

Kernel Space

• Linux 4.4 HID: Better Skylake Touchpads, Corsair K90 & Logitech G29 Support

  The HID driver updates were mailed in on Friday for the Linux 4.4 merge window.

• Linux 4.4 Sound: Better Firmware Support, Adds Intel Lewisburg

  Takashi Iwai has lined up the sound driver updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.

  Highlights in the sound/audio realm for Linux 4.4 include new device support for some Firewire sound devices along with MIDI functionality, more ASoC updates around the Intel Skylake support added to Linux 4.3, and Intel’s Lewisburg controller has been added to the HD Audio driver.

• Btrfs In Linux 4.4 Has Many Improvements/Fixes

  Chris Mason sent in the pull request today for updating the Btrfs file-system for Linux 4.4.

  The Btrfs file-system in Linux 4.4 has a number of sub-volume quota improvements, many code clean-ups, and a number of allocator fixes based upon their usage at Facebook. The allocator fixes should also help improve the RAID 5/6 performance when the file-system is mounted with ssd_spread as previously it hit some CPU bottlenecks.

• Linux 4.4 To Support Google Fiber TV Remote Controls & More

  Dmitry Torokhov sent in the input driver updates today for the Linux 4.4 merge window.

  New input driver support with Linux 4.4 includes handling the remote controls for the Google Fiber TV Box, FocalTech FT6236 touchscreen controller support, ROHM BU21023/24 touchscreen controller.

• EXT4 In Linux 4.4 Brings Fixes, Particularly For Encryption Support

  Besides the Btrfs pull request being sent in today for the Linux 4.4 merge window, the EXT4 updates were also sent in today by Ted Ts’o.

  The EXT4 changes for Linux 4.4 largely come down to a smothering of bug-fixes for this stable Linxu file-system. In particular, there’s also fixes around the EXT4 encryption support and Ted is encouraging any EXT4 encrypted users to update their patches against Linux 4.4 to avoid a memory leak and file-system corruption bug.

• Open APIs, Microsoft Loves Red Hat & More…

  One more thing: You know how many of us in FOSS consider the whole Linus Torvalds rant thing as a in-family squabble? Well, thanks to our friends at the Washington Post, now it’s out there for everyone to see — “everyone” meaning the general public and, worse, the non-tech parrots who will now say Linux is insecure (as an operating system, not as an idea). The article also operates under the subtext that because security is not Linus’ main focus, somehow Linux may be lacking in the security department. Internally we know better. Externally this is what the public sees.

• The Washington Post questions the security of the Linux kernel

  The Washington Post has been doing a series on the vulnerabilities of the Internet. Part five of the series focuses on Linus Torvalds and the state of security in the Linux kernel. Does Linus need to focus more on security?

• The Linux Foundation Launches the Open API Initiative, with Big Backers

  The Linux Foundation has announced the Open API Initiative, and some mighty powerful backers are on board. Founding members of the Open API Initiative include 3Scale, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, PayPal, Restlet and SmartBear.

  “The Initiative will extend the Swagger specification and format to create an open technical community within which members can easily contribute to building a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for RESTful APIs,” the announcement notes. The new open specification is targeted to allow both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of respective services without a lot of implementation logic. The Initiative is also aimed to promote and facilitate the adoption and use of an open API standard.

• Trinity 1.6

  Don’t send me feature requests. I’ve got more than enough ideas for stuff *I* want to implement. Diffs speak louder than words.

• Graphics Stack

  • An AMD GCN Assembler For Linux That Supports The Open & Closed Drivers

    This CLRadeonExtender project has complete GCN assembler/disassembler support for all GCN GPUs from GCN 1.0 through GCN 1.2, including full Fiji support. The assembler supports the binary formats of the AMD Catalyst driver with OpenCL 1.2 as well as Gallium3D compute for using the RadeonSI open-source driver.

• Benchmarks

  • Antergos, Manjaro, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora & OpenSUSE Performance Showdown

    This is a larger and more interesting comparison than the Linux distro comparison of September plus the fact that all stable Linux distributions are now in use thanks to a lot of distributions having put out their Q4 updates recently.

    OpenSUSE 42.1, Fedora Workstation 23, Ubuntu 15.10, Antergos 2015.10-Rolling, Debian 8.2, CentOS 7, and Manjaro 15.11 were all cleanly installed on the same system and carried out a variety of benchmarks to measure their out-of-the-box performance across multiple subsystems.

Applications

• Rendera 0.2.0 (Open-Source Painting And Photo-Retouching Software) Has Been Released

  As you may know, Rendera is an open-source painting and photo-retouching software for Linux,

• Recoll 1.21.3 Has Been Released

• PyCharm 5.0 Has Been Released

  As you may know, PyCharm is a Python IDE, having some interesting functions like: code completion, error highlighting, customizable UI and key-bindings for VIM, VCS integrations or automated code refactorings and good navigation capabilities.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Using LXD with a file-based ZFS pool on Ubuntu Wily

  • Install Calibre 2.43 (Open-Source E-book Management Software) on Linux

  • How To Install Clementine 1.2.3 On Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • MATE Desktop 1.12 Has Been Released. How to Install it on Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf

  • Installing Nginx with PHP and MariaDB (as MySQL replacement) on Ubuntu 15.10 (Wiley Werewolf)

  • 20 Command Line Tools to Monitor Linux Performance

  • How To Install Filezilla 3.14.1 On Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04 And Ubuntu 14.04 Via PPA

  • How to Install FreeFileSync 7.6 on Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf

  • How To: Install/Upgrade to Linux Kernel 4.3 in Ubuntu/Linux Mint Systems

  • How to Manage User Permissions From the GUI on Linux

  • Importing include paths in Eclipse

• Games

  • SteamOS/Linux Support and New Level Added to Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power

    Frozenbyte has issued a content update for Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power adding a free new level, as well as official support for SteamOS and Linux. Also included are various minor fixes and improvements, such as mid-level checkpoints for the Lost Page levels.

  • SteamOS updated with Linux kernel 4.1, Nvidia adds Vulkan support, and more

    Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at a Linux Kernel 4.1 update for SteamOS, Nvidia support for Vulkan, Objects in Space and open hardware, and more.

  • It’s Been 3 Years Since Valve Launched The Steam Linux Beta, Now At 1,600+ Linux Games

    Obviously, it’s been quite a while now since leaving beta and in just a few days (10 November) is when the Steam Machines are officially out and powered by Valve’s Debian-based SteamOS. Over the past three years we’ve seen Valve make significant investments into the open-source graphics stack and other areas of Linux (in part through their sponsorship of Collabora and LunarG), Valve developers are significantly pushing SDL2, seen more mainstream interest in Linux gaming, have tons more games available natively for Linux, they have been heavily involved in the creation of the Vulkan graphics API, they have given away their entire game collection to the Mesa/Ubuntu/Debian upstream developers, and much more.

  • Running Some Fresh Windows 10 vs. Linux Graphics/Gaming Benchmarks

  • Left 4 Dead 2 Adds Native Steam Controller & Surround Sound Support On SteamOS

    Left 4 Dead 2 looks like one I will be trying out soon when my Steam Controller arrives next week. Also great to see surround sound in more games!

    It would be good to see Valve add native support for the Steam Controller to all of their games, but I am sure they are working on it bit by bit.

  • A Story About My Uncle, A Fancy Looking First Person Platforming Adventure Looks Set For Linux

    A Story About My Uncle is a rather good looking first person adventure from Gone North Games and published by Coffee Stain Studios (think Sanctum 2 and Goat Simulator). It looks like it’s heading to Linux too, which is obviously awesome.

  • Turn Based Strategy Rise: Battle Lines Now On Linux!

    Rise: Battle Lines is a quick and accessible multiplayer-focused battle game that delivers meaty strategy in a bite-size format. It’s just been released on Linux (via Steam) for the princely sum of $4.99/£3.99!

  • Rocket League Linux Port Is Almost Ready

    The Rocket League developers recently did a reddit “ask me anything” and in it they stated the Linux port was almost ready.

    This is really great news, as people seem to be falling over themselves playing this game. Checking on it today the peak player count was “26,428″, so it looks like it will still be just as popular when we get it.

  • Darksiders & Darksiders II Linux Ports Have Not Been Forgotten About

    A fellow from Nordic Games has commenting about the disappearance of the announced Darksiders and Darksiders II Linux ports.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • October Plasma on Wayland Update: all about geometry

    Last month our Wayland efforts made a huge step forward. In KWin we are now at a state where I think the big underlying work is finished, we entered the finishing line of the KWin Wayland porting. The whole system though still needs a little bit more work.

    The big remaining task which I worked on last month was geometry handling. That is simplified: moving and resizing windows. Sounds relatively easy, but isn’t. Moving and resizing windows or in general the geometry handling is one of the core aspects of a window manager. It’s where our expertise is, the code which makes KWin such a good window manager. Naturally we don’t want to throw that code out and want to reuse it in a Wayland world.

  • KDE 4.14.3 Bugfix release for Kubuntu Trusty (14.04.3 LTS) is now available.

    Packages for the release of KDE’s Applications and Platform 4.14.3 are available for Kubuntu 14.04.3. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

  • Handling Screen Management With KDE’s Plasma Wayland

    For KDE users interested in the latest Wayland porting process, one of the big tasks currently being tackled is on Plasma’s screen management handling.

    KDE’s Sebastian Kügler has written a blog post about screen management in Wayland. The lengthy post goes over the good and bad of screen management in the Wayland world and how it’s going to be implemented within KDE Plasma’s Wayland support.

  • KDE Plasma 5.5 On Wayland May Be Ready For Early Adopters

    KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin has written a monthly status update concerning the state of KWin and KDE Plasma on Wayland.

    The German open-source developer explained that most of the underlying work is finished as is most of the KWin Wayland porting, but the complete stack still needs more time to bake with Wayland. Much of October was spent working on the geometry handling with Wayland and still dealing with X11-specific KDE code.

Distributions

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • CAINE 7.0 Screenshot Tour

  • Vinux 5.0 Screencast and Screenshots

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

  • The November 2015 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

    With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • Mom & Me Grows Its Business With SUSE Linux

    Fashion retailers are constantly investing in new technologies to keep pace with the ever-changing market demand. Mahindra Retail, part of the $6.3 billion Mahindra Group that operates the Mom & Me chain of stores in India, was looking to grow its business. However, its existing ERP system was posing a major challenge. The Bangalore-based fashion retailer implemented SAP ERP, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the operating system – a move that has helped them to lower operational costs and boost business productivity.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Given Buy Rating at Mizuho (RHT)

    Mizuho reaffirmed their buy rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) in a research report report published on Friday, AnalystRatings.Net reports. They currently have a $88.00 target price on the open-source software company’s stock.

  • Red Hat (RHT): Moving Average Crossover Alert

  • Fedora

    • Lenovo Yoga 900 and Fedora Review

      A few weeks ago, Lenovo came out with the Yoga 900, which was the successor to last years Yoga 3 pro and it in turn my Yoga 2 pro. The stats and early reviews looked pretty nice, so I ordered one.

      I was hoping for a smooth Fedora experience, but sadly I ran into two issues right away after booting from a Fedora Live USB.

    • Fedora 23: In The Ocean Again

      This week was the release week for Fedora 23, and the Fedora Project has again worked together with the DigitalOcean team to make Fedora 23 available in their service. If you’re not familiar with DigitalOcean already, it is a dead simple cloud hosting platform which is great for developers.

    • Fedora 23 – Mate Desktop – Sticky Windows

      One of the things I like about windows is the way the windows snap as you move the actual windows to the left or right of the screen. By default Mate in Fedora 23 doesn’t have this enabled, but it’s an easy fix

    • F23, Developer Portal, internships, G11N, and conferences!

      On Monday, the Fedora Developer Portal was released to the public. This is for developers using Fedora, not about developing Fedora itself. It’s a central hub for numerous resources to help both new and current developers set up their workspaces for new projects. Interested? Read more in the announcement post — and please share with your software developer friends!

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • The status of Devuan Project by Alberto Zuin – Devuan Project

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • It Was Five Years Ago Since Ubuntu Thought They Would Switch To Wayland

        This week marks five years since Mark Shuttleworth shared with us Ubuntu intended to eventually switch to a Wayland-based environment for their Unity desktop rather than an X.Org Server… Most Phoronix readers know how that turned out.

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 to Bring Better Telephony and SMS Apps

        The Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update continues to receive all kinds of new packages and fixes, and it looks like the developers have had a really busy week.

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Bringing New SMS, Telephony Apps

      • Ubuntu 16.04 Will Ship With A Redesigned USB Startup Creater Tool

        As you may know, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, code named Xenial Xerus will be the next big Ubuntu release, a lot of changes being scheduled for it.

        Among the changes, there will be a brand new tool for writing ISO images to USB disks, the good old Startup Creator being completely redesigned. While the software has been ignored a lot lately, the developers are porting it to QML, in order to make it easier for them to maintain and update it.

Devices/Embedded

• COM/baseboard duo play Linux on Cortex-A9 Sitara SoC

  MYIR’s “MYC-C437x” and “MYD-C437X” COM and baseboard pair run Linux on TI’s Cortex-A9 Sitara AM437x SoC, and offer dual GbE ports and touchscreen options.

  MYIR first tapped the Sitara AM437x SoC from Texas Instruments earlier this year with its Rico Board. While the Rico had an integrated SBC design, the new MYD-C437X development board is one of MYIR’s sandwich-style concoctions featuring a separately available MYC-C437X computer-on-module. Similarly, MYIR’s Zynq-based MYD-C7Z010/20 offers a sandwich-style alternative to its Z-turn Board SBC.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Pro tip: Add a printing service to your Android device in a flash

    • Marshmallow debuts in less than one percent of Android devices

      Google’s latest version of Android, Marshmallow, only started rolling out last month. As such, it shouldn’t come as surprise to see that the current adoption numbers for it are extremely low.

    • Android, Chrome OS Merger: Why It Makes Sense

      Google has not confirmed reports that it intended to merge Chrome OS and Android. Is the idea really that far-fetched? Here’s how the resulting products of such a marriage would be beneficial to users and the enterprise.

    • Six reasons the LG V10 Android smartphone is good for business

      LG’s new V10 smartphone is a compelling device that remains one of the last remaining modern smartphones with a removable battery and microSD card. There’s more for the road warrior too.

    • BlackBerry ships its Android phone…is it a comeback?

      The fall from grace of the Canadian technology firm BlackBerry has been well documented, but a new release on Friday featuring some Google-developed software has won over critics who are calling it the “best BlackBerry in a decade.”

      Officially launched in the U.S and the U.K. Friday, industry websites have been beaming out favorable reviews for the new Blackberry Priv. Thenextweb.com called it probably one of the best Android phones it has ever used and the U.K.’s Daily Mirror newspaper described it as “the comeback that gadget fans have been waiting for.” Technology website AndroidCentral stated that “BlackBerry can make one hell of an Android phone.”

    • Google’s Lollipop now lives on one in four Android devices

    • Google offers a free Nexus 5X to companies who try Android for Work

      Google is hopeful that a shiny new phone will entice companies to give Android for Work a try. The first 3,000 companies to set up Android for Work with a participating enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution by December 31, 2015, will get a brand new Nexus 5X smartphone.

How a better understanding of open source can lower the risks

The advantages of open source are well known: lower costs, the security and higher quality that arise from a large developer community and the absence of ties to one manufacturer are powerful arguments. In some areas open source products are already leaders in their field.

​Etsy: Here’s how we add and retire software tools in our engineering stack

As part of the company’s regular engagement with the wider coding community, Etsy engineers Maggie Zhou and Melissa Santos recently told an audience at O’Reilly’s OSCON open-source programming conference in Amsterdam exactly how Etsy successfully updates its technology to meet growing data demands.

[...]

The Etsy team uses open-source software and is committed to keeping its coding practices transparent.

Leadership in Software Development Part 1

Leadership in Software Development Part 2

Leadership in Software Development Part 3

Leadership in Software Development Part 4

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack Building a Developer Story for Mitaka

  OpenStack is finding its way into carriers and enterprise deployments around the world, but what about developers? At the recent OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, Japan, developers gathered to discuss the Mitaka release of OpenStack, set to debut in 2016. One of the themes that is emerging in OpenStack is the idea of focusing on a developer story, according to Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski.

  Mirantis is one of the largest contributors to OpenStack and has raised $200 million in equity to help fuel its efforts. Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski also sits on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors, giving him particular insight into the open-source cloud project.

• Cask Data, Focused on Simplifying Hadoop, Gets $20 Million in Funding

  Large funding rounds by Hadoop-focused startups seem to be par for the course these days, as the open source big data framework becomes more of an attraction for businesses everywhere. The concept of making Hadoop easier to use is also not new. We’ve reported on the new front-ends and connecting tools that are appearing for the platform.

  Now, Cask Data, an open source software company that helps developers deliver enterprise-class Apache Hadoop solutions for simplifying its use, has announced that it’s raising a $20 million Series B financing round led by Safeguard Scientifics, with participation from Battery Ventures, Ignition Partners and other existing investors.

Databases

• Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers

  Pretty much every name offers some possibility for being turned into a schoolyard taunt. But even though I’m an adult who left the schoolyard decades ago, my name still inspires giggles among the technologically minded. My last name is “Null,” and it comes preloaded with entertainment value. If you want to be cheeky, you will probably start with “Null and void.” If you’re a WIRED reader, you might move on to “Null set.” Down-the-rabbit-hole geeks prefer the classic “dev/null.”

  As a technology journalist, being a Null has served me rather well. (John Dvorak, you know what I’m talking about!) The geek connotations provide a bit of instant nerd cred—to the point where more than one person has accused me of using a nom de plume to make me seem like a bigger nerd than I am.

  But there’s a dark side to being a Null, and you coders out there are way ahead of me on this. For those of you unwise in the ways of programming, the problem is that “null” is one of those famously “reserved” text strings in many programming languages. Making matters worse is that software programs frequently use “null” specifically to ensure that a data field is not empty, so it’s often rejected as input in a web form.

  In other words: if lastname = null then… well, then try again with a lastname that isn’t “null.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Bitnami Helps to Enable Oracle’s Cloud Aspirations

  Brescia explained that the Bitnami cloud launchpad is now available to Oracle Cloud users, providing over one hundred different open-source applications and development environments. Bitnami is no stranger to cloud deployments and is also available on the Google Cloud as well as other cloud environments. Bitnami’s core promise is that it enables users to rapidly deploy applications, which is a mission the company has been on since 2011.

Business

• FUD/Openwashing

  • Synopsys Inc.: Synopsys Extends Software Integrity Platform with Acquisition of Open Source Software Management Company Protecode [Ed: see Protecode’s track record]

BSD

• pfSense 2.2.5-RELEASE Now Available!

  pfSense® software version 2.2.5 is now available. This release includes a number of bug fixes and some security updates.

  Today is also the 11 year birthday of the project. While work started in late summer 2004, the domains were registered and the project made public on November 5, 2004. Thanks to everyone that has helped make the project a great success for 11 years. Things just keep getting better, and the best is yet to come.

• OpenBGPd and route filters

  Many moons ago, OpenBGPd was extensively used throughout the networking world as a Route Server. However, over the years, many have stopped using it and have migrated away to other implementations. Recently, I have been getting more involved with the networking community, so I decided to ask “why”. Almost exclusively, they told me “filter performance”.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Recap of Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: November 6

  In today’s Friday Free Software Directory IRC Meeting we started things off by getting some tips from Yaron Koren of WikiWorks related to improving our Approved Revisions process, which should be completed over the next week.

Public Services/Government

• Free software gains ground in the Italian public administration

  Italy’s Ministry of Defence is pioneering the use of open-source office productivity tools with the migration of 150,000 PCs to LibreOffice

Openness/Sharing

• New release of Docker, R-Hub for R packages, and more news

• Open Data

  • UK government looks to harness the potential of open data through APIs

    In a speech earlier this week, Matt Hancock, minister for the Cabinet Office, referred to data as being “no longer just a record” but a “mineable commodity, from which value can be extracted” and outlined how the UK government intends to improve its use of the information at its disposal and help others exploit the data too.

    “Government data is no longer a forgotten filing cabinet, locked away in some dusty corner of Whitehall,” Hancock said. “It’s raw material, infinite possibility, waiting to be unleashed. No longer just a record of what’s happened, but a map of what might be.”

Programming

• Eclipse IoT Announces the Second Edition of the Open IoT Challenge

  Eclipse IoT, a working group of the Eclipse Foundation, has launched a challenge to encourage IoT developers to create innovative IoT solutions based on open source and open standards.

Lawyer: Blatter in hospital for checkup but is ‘fine’

His statement came shortly after Blatter’s spokesman, Klaus Stoehlker, said the 79-year-old Swiss official was under “medical evaluation” for stress-related reasons and had been told by doctors to relax.

Sepp Blatter under medical evaluation after suffering from stress

Sepp Blatter has been ordered by doctors to take five days off work after having a medical evaluation for stress.

The 79-year-old, currently suspended from his role as Fifa president, consulted a doctor after feeling unwell, and although no underlying problem was discovered he has been ordered to rest.

They don’t make them like Ralph Bakshi anymore: “Now, animators don’t have ideas. They just like to move things around”

If you grew up in the ‘70s or ‘80s, the name Ralph Bakshi got your blood pumping. His films were bold and profane, hysterical, politically incorrect, gothic and gorgeous to look at. They were shot through with a real sense of rock and roll and street smarts — see the dirty satire “Fritz the Cat” (a take on R. Crumb’s famously horny feline, which was the first animated film to be rated X).

Health/Nutrition

• The CIA’s experiments with psychedelic drugs led to the Grateful Dead

  “Earlier this year, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead played sold-out ‘Fare Thee Well’ concerts in Santa Clara and Chicago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of their band,” says Ben Mark of Collectors Weekly. “But Jerry Garcia and company did not start using the name Grateful Dead until December of 1965. The exact date is surprisingly hard to pin down, as my story for Collectors Weekly reveals, but we do know that the Grateful Dead’s sound grew out of its experiences as the house band at the Acid Tests of 1965 and 1966, which were organized (if that’s even the right word…) by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

• Did the CIA’s Experiments With Psychedelic Drugs Unwittingly Create the Grateful Dead?

  Trying to write a definitive history of the Acid Tests, a series of multimedia happenings in 1965 and 1966, in which everyone in attendance was stoned on LSD, is like trying to organize an aquarium’s worth of electric eels into a nice neat row, sorted by length. You will never get the creatures to stop writhing, let alone straighten out, and if you touch them, well, they are electric eels.

• End the DEA

  The DEA is a bloated, wasteful, scandal-ridden bureaucracy charged with the impossible task of keeping humans from doing something they’ve been doing for thousands of years – altering their consciousness. As states legalize marijuana, reform sentencing laws, and treat drug use more as a health issue and less as a criminal justice issue, the DEA must change with the times. Federal drug enforcement should focus on large cases that cross international and state boundaries, with an exclusive focus on violent traffickers and major crime syndicates. All other cases should be left to the states.

Security

• Friday’s security updates

• ProtonMail Pays Crooks $6,000 In Bitcoin To Cease DDoS Bombardment

  ProtonMail is getting its first taste of life as an entity known to criminals looking for a quick, easy payday.

  Throughout most of yesterday and through to this morning, the encrypted email service, set up by CERN scientists in Geneva last year to fight snooping by the likes of the NSA, was offline. The company had to use a WordPress blog to disclose what was happening to customers.

  Its datacenter was effectively shut down by waves of traffic thanks to two separate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. One of the groups responsible for flooding the servers demanded ProtonMail cough up 15 Bitcoin (currently worth around $6,000), or the attack would continue.

• Ransomware Found Targeting Linux Servers and Coding Repositories

  A newly discovered ransomware is attacking Linux Web servers, taking aim at Web development environments used to host websites or code repositories.

• Linux Ransomware Is Now Attacking Webmasters

  A new bit of ransomware is now attacking Linux-based machines, specifically the folders associated with serving web pages. Called Linux.Encoder.1 the ransomware will encrypt your MySQL, Apache, and home/root folders. The system then asks for a single bitcoin to decrypt the files.

• Auto-Hacking Class Action Likely to Die

  A federal judge Tuesday indicated he will dismiss with leave to amend a class action claiming Ford, Toyota and General Motors made their cars vulnerable to hackers.

• Volkswagen and the Real Insider Threat

  Over the last several weeks, reporting has revealed a coordinated insider effort at Volkswagen to insert a malicious piece of software—a defeat device—into the car’s electronic control module. The device was able to sense when emission tests were being conducted by monitoring things like “speed, engine operation, air pressure and even the position of the steering wheel,” and triggered changes to the car’s operations to reduce emissions during the testing process so that those cars would pass the tests. When the malicious software remained dormant, the emission controls were disabled and the cars spewed up to 40 times the EPA-mandated emissions limits. Through the defeat device, Volkswagen was able to sell more than half a million diesel-fueled cars in the U.S. in violation of U.S. environmental laws.

• Encrypted resistance: from digital security to dual power

  Digital technology is often seen as a curiosity in revolutionary politics, perhaps as a specialized skill set that is peripheral to the hard work of organizing. But the growing trend of “cyber-resistance” might hold more potential than we have given it credit for. Specifically, the popularized use of encryption gives us the ability to form a type of liberated space within the shifting maze of cables and servers that make up the Internet. The “web” is bound by the laws of math and physics before the laws of states, and in that cyberspace we may be able to birth a new revolutionary consciousness.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• U.S. Plane Shot Victims Fleeing Doctors Without Borders Hospital: Charity

  A U.S. warplane shot people trying to flee a burning hospital destroyed in airstrikes last month, according to the charity that ran the facility.

  “Thirty of our patients and medical staff died [in the bombing],” Doctors Without Borders General Director Christopher Stokes said during a speech in Kabul unveiling a report on the incident. “Some of them lost their limbs and were decapitated in the explosions. Others were shot by the circling gunship while fleeing the burning building.”

  The hospital in Kunduz was bombed on Oct. 3 as Afghan government forces fought to regain control of the city from Taliban insurgents.

  After the U.S. gave shifting explanations for the incident — which Doctors Without Borders has called a war crime — President Barack Obama apologized to the charity. The U.S. and Afghan governments have launched three separate investigations but the charity, which is also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is calling for an international inquiry.

• The Most Militarized Universities in America: A VICE News Investigation

  An information and intelligence shift has emerged in America’s national security state over the last two decades, and that change has been reflected in the country’s educational institutions as they have become increasingly tied to the military, intelligence, and law enforcement worlds. This is why VICE News has analyzed and ranked the 100 most militarized universities in America.

  Initially, we hesitated to use the term militarized to describe these schools. The term was not meant to simply evoke robust campus police forces or ROTC drills held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance in the United States.

• Meet the drone defender who hates neo-cons, attacks Glenn Greenwald — and may have conflicts of her own

  The U.S. drone program creates more militants than it kills, according to the head of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the U.S. military unit that oversees that very program.

  “When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good,” remarked Michael T. Flynn. The retired Army lieutenant general, who also served as the U.S. Central Command’s director of intelligence, says that “the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict.”

  Not everyone accepts the assessment of the former JSOC intelligence chief, however. Still today, defenders of the U.S. drone program insist it does more good than harm. One scholar, Georgetown University professor Christine Fair, is particularly strident in her support.

• CIA, Saudis To Give “Select” Syrian Militants Weapons Capable Of Downing Commercial Airliners

  First there was an audio recording from ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate reiterating that they did indeed “down” the plane. Next, the ISIS home office in Raqqa (or Langley or Hollywood) released a video of five guys sitting in the front yard congratulating their Egyptian “brothers” on the accomplishment.

• US and Saudis go Full Retardo – to arm Good Terrorists with weapons to down Commercial Jets

  Wednesday brought a veritable smorgasbord of “new” information about the Russian passenger jet which fell out of the sky above the Sinai Peninsula last weekend.

  First there was an audio recording from ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate reiterating that they did indeed “down” the plane. Next, the ISIS home office in Raqqa (or Langley or Hollywood) released a video of five guys sitting in the front yard congratulating their Egyptian “brothers” on the accomplishment.

• US Should Offer Assistance to Russia in A321 Crash Probe – Keith Alexander

• Morell: U.K. “overstating” likelihood of bomb on Russian jet

• What we know and don’t know about downed Russian jetliner

• Cameron’s comments on Egypt crash ‘un-British’ – ex-CIA boss

  David Cameron has said it is increasingly likely a “terrorist bomb” brought down the Airbus jet on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board.

• Rocket which came ‘within 1,000ft’ of Thomson flight fired during Egyptian military training exercise, Government says

  The rocket which reportedly came “within 1,000ft” of a British aircraft as it approached Sharm el-Sheikh in August was fired by the Egyptian military during a routine training exercise, the Government has said.

  The Thomson flight took evasive action after the pilot spotted the missile, The Daily Mail reported.

  Their source said: “The first officer was in charge at the time but the pilot was in the cockpit and saw the rocket coming towards the plane.

  “He ordered that the flight turn to the left to avoid the rocket, which was about 1,000ft away.”

  They reportedly went on to say that the staff were offered the chance to stay in Egypt, but chose to head back to the UK on a flight which took off with no internal or external lights.

• Sudanese citizen tried to kill Israeli on int’l flight

  Arik, 54, works in an Israeli communications company that operates in Africa. He had intended to travel on to Israel after landing in Addis Ababa.

  “About 20 minutes before the plane started its descent the passenger sitting behind me identified me as Israeli and Jewish,” Arik told Ynet.

  “He came up behind my seat and started to choke me with a lot of force,” he continued, “and at first I couldn’t get my voice out and call for help.

  “He hit me over the head with a metal tray and shouted ‘Allah akbar’ and ‘I will slaughter the Jew.’ Only after a few seconds, just before I was about to lose consciousness, did I manage to call out and a flight attendant who saw what was happening summoned her colleagues,” Arik added.

  According to Arik, most of the passengers on the half-empty flight refrained from getting involved. “After they pulled him off me he hit me and shouted in Arabic. Some of the flight staff took me to the rear section of the plane and two guarded the attacked during the last part of the flight.”

• Washington prepares for World War III

  The US military-intelligence complex is engaged in systematic preparations for World War III. As far as the Pentagon is concerned, a military conflict with China and/or Russia is inevitable, and this prospect has become the driving force of its tactical and strategic planning.

  Three congressional hearings Tuesday demonstrated this reality. In the morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a lengthy hearing on cyberwarfare. In the afternoon, a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee discussed the present size and deployment of the US fleet of aircraft carriers, while another subcommittee of the same panel discussed the modernization of US nuclear weapons.

• The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual: Part one

  The new US Department of Defense Law of War Manual is essentially a guidebook for violating international and domestic law and committing war crimes. The 1,165-page document, dated June 2015 and recently made available online, is not a statement of existing law as much as a compendium of what the Pentagon wishes the law to be.

• Roger That: Pentagon to send special ops teams to Syria

  As part of a major overhaul of the U.S. government’s strategy against the Islamic State, President Barack Obama last week authorized the deployment of “fewer than 50” U.S. special operations troops to northern Syria, where they will work with local forces in the fight against the militants, according to Military Times.

• There’s tyranny aplenty

  When Cheney and Bush used the NSA to institute flagrantly, unabashedly unconstitutional surveillance on American citizens, I didn’t see you guys pulling out your side-arms. Were you protecting the constitutionally guaranteed right to assembly and redress of grievances against armed police in Ferguson, Missouri, or Baltimore, Maryland?

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Ford Revealed as Funder of Climate Denial Group ALEC

  Ford Motor Company, despite its much-hyped commitment to the environment, has been quietly funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group widely criticized for its promotion of climate change denial and for its opposition to the development of renewable alternatives to fossil fuels.

  A Ford spokesperson, Christin Baker, confirmed the ALEC grant to the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch, but said that the funding was not intended to be used by ALEC to block action on climate change.

  “Ford participates in a broad range of organizations that support our business needs, but no organization speaks for Ford on every issue. We do not engage with ALEC on climate change,” said Baker.

• Secrets of the climate deniers exposed: Exxon Mobil and the plot to keep the public in the dark

  And it gets worse. “From 1998 to 2005,” Egan writes, Exxon contributed “almost $16 million to organizations designed to muddy the scientific waters.” I suppose it isn’t shocking that a titan of the decaying industrial economy would seek to distort the science and profit from our collective predicament. What is shocking, however, is that such a campaign would be so successful.

• Iowa Democrats Call for a ‘WWII-Scale Mobilization’ to Fight Climate Change

  Today, three Iowa politicians signed a pledge calling for “a World War II-scale mobilization” to fight climate change. Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie, State Rep. Dan Kelley, and State Senator Rob Hogg, a leading candidate for US Senate, all Democrats, signed a document calling on the US government to reduce emissions 100 percent by 2025 by “enlisting” tens of millions of Americans to work on clean energy projects—creating full employment in the process.

  It’s likely the most ambitious pledge to fight climate change put forward this election cycle, even if right now, it’s a symbolic gesture aimed at drawing attention to climate policy during the high season of presidential campaigning.

• Illegally planted palm oil already growing on burnt land in Indonesia

• Indonesia fires are a world crisis

  The timing is accidental but impeccable. Just as governments are about to launch an unprecedented effort to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions, one of the biggest carbon-dioxide gushers ever known has erupted with record force. At times during the past several weeks, fires in Indonesia have released as much carbon as the entire U.S. economy, even as they have destroyed millions of acres of tropical forest, a natural carbon sink. Neighboring countries, along with economic giants such as the U.S., China and Europe, have to join forces to turn off this tap.

Finance

• Bitcoin: Discussing Code Changes Is Half The Battle

  Discussions about changing the dynamic code that runs the Bitcoin blockchain should constantly be happening. Over the course of the past year, the talks of changing the block size have been an overwhelming topic of conversation. There have been some pretty stubborn people when it comes to changing the protocols code, and this is not to say that forking the code is the right step. There has been censorship and subsequently has created a rift between people who want to raise the block size and those that don’t. In time, other discussions may have to occur regarding the underlying hash functions involved with the Bitcoin protocol and to assume things will always stay the same may be naive.

• JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Says The Government Will ‘Stop’ Bitcoin

  Of course, that confidence that the US government will kill the innovation is perhaps the biggest weakness of Dimon’s argument. We have no doubt that governments are already trying their damnedest to kill off innovation around cryptocurrencies, but the larger question is really whether or not that’s even really possible.

  Here’s the problem for Dimon: should Bitcoin really reach the point at which Wall Street really views it as a true threat, then it’s probably too late for it to be stopped. That’s one of the (many) interesting parts about cryptocurrencies. The ability to stop them as they get more and more successful becomes significantly more difficult, to the point of reaching a near impossibility. But, it sure will lead to some amusing and ridiculous regulatory fights.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Lobbying World

  Israel “Izzy” Klein has left the Podesta Group for a small lobby shop, which is rebranding itself as Roberti Global: Irizarry-Klein-Roberti. He will serve as a managing partner at the firm, which has offices in Washington and New York. Prior to joining Podesta in 2009, Klein served as a senior aide to Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Ed Markey (Mass.).

• ‘The Occupation Doesn’t Stop’

  You hear a lot in the US media about a “clash of narratives” in the fighting between Palestinians and Israelis. But the truth is US news is shaped much more by one perspective than the other.

• CNN Commentator Slams NBC’s Hypocrisy In Inviting Trump To Host SNL After Previously Cutting Ties Over His Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

Censorship

• Movie on Amos Yee seeks USD$25,000 from crowdfunding

  In July this year, 16-year-old blogger was given a four-week backdated jail sentence after being found guilty of making offensive remarks against Christianity, and for circulating an obscene image.

• Internet Freedom? Singapore’s Not Faring Too Well

  Well, well, well. It looks like there’s something perfect little Singapore is not excelling in: Freedom on the net.

  We may be a powerhouse in a lot of areas — trade, commerce, economy, health, education and anti-corruption — but when it comes to freedom on the Internet, our results are pretty dismal. This was revealed in the report ‘Freedom on the Net 2015’, an annual study by the group Freedom House, an independent watchdog organisation dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world.

• Singapore sees slight dip in Internet freedom: Report

  The level of Internet freedom in Singapore declined this year, according to an annual report by US-based NGO Freedom House.

  Singapore scored 41 on a scale of 0-100, with 0 indicating the most free and 100 indicating the least, up from 40 last year.

• Myanmar and Australia see biggest declines in internet freedom in Asia Pacific finds report

  Myanmar, Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Thailand and South Korea all saw declines in internet freedom over the last year, according to a report by US-based think tank Freedom House released this week.

  Despite the introduction of mobile carriers Telenor and Ooredoo to the market, Myanmar saw the biggest decline in internet freedom in the region, followed by Australia, which is considered to have the freest internet in Asia Pacific (New Zealand was not measured).

• Facebook Bans Tsu Links Entirely, Choosing Control Over User Empowerment

  Facebook has brought out the ban-hammer on its competitors in the past. Most notably, the social media giant banned advertisements from users for links to Google+, when that was still a thing. That said, the most recent example of Facebook banning what can be seen as a competitive product has gone even further, preventing users from linking to Tsu.co in status updates or on its messaging service.

Privacy

• UK Home Secretary Says Don’t Worry About Collection Of Metadata; FOIA Request Made For Her Metadata

  But, in response to Vaz, May apparently insisted that there was nothing at all in her records that anyone might find surprising — leading some to question whether this was May agreeing to release her phone and internet records. Apparently Chris Gilmour decided to find out for sure, and has filed a Freedom of Information request in the UK for a bunch of May’s records (found via Ryan Gallagher).
  

  Dear Home Office,

  Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I hereby request the following information from and regarding the Rt Hon Theresa May MP (Con), Secretary of State for the Home Department (the “Home Secretary”):

  1) The date, time, and recipient of every email sent by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

  2) The date, time, and sender of every email received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

  3) The date, time, and recipient of every internet telephony call (e.g. “Skype” call) made by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

  4) The date, time, and sender of every internet telephony call (e.g. “Skype” call) received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

  5) The date, time, and domain address of every website visited by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

  Yours faithfully,

  Chris Gilmour

• US Officials Have No Problem Leaking Classified Surveillance Information… As Long As It Fits Their Narrative

  In the past few days there have been a flurry of stories about the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai peninsula, which investigators reportedly think may have been caused by a bomb. Notably, anonymous US officials have been leaking to journalists that they believe ISIS is involved, and it’s actually a perfect illustration of the rank hypocrisy of the US government’s position on the Edward Snowden disclosures.

  Why do US officials allegedly have a “feeling” that ISIS was involved? According to multiple reports, US intelligence agencies have been intercepting ISIS communications discussing “something big” in the region last week.

• ‘I’m comfortable with my choices’: Snowden on CIA torture, ISIS and surveillance

  In an interview with Swedish media, whistleblower Edward Snowden opened up about CIA torture, ISIS, and mass surveillance. Two-and-a-half years after revealing the NSA’s mass surveillance tactics, he says he’s “very comfortable” with his choices.

  The interview, conducted by journalists Lena Sundström and Lotta Härdelin for Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper, took place at a Moscow hotel. Just as you might expect at the beginning of an interview, the two reporters began by asking Snowden how he’s doing.

  “It’s hard for me to talk about what it’s like, because anything I say is going to be used by US critics. If I say good things about Russia, you know, like ‘it’s not hell,’ then they’ll be like ‘he fell in love with the Kremlin’ or something like that. If I say something terrible, then it’s the same thing. Then they’ll go ‘oh, he hates it in Russia, you know he’s miserable,’” Snowden told the journalists.

• Facebook’s New Name Policy Changes are Progress, Not Perfection

  The Nameless Coalition letter was signed by over 80 individuals and organizations. The signatories, which include US-based groups like the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the ACLU as well as digital rights and human rights groups from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia such as the Internet Democracy Project, India, serve different populations and work on different issues. But we all agree on one thing: Facebook should get rid of its names policy altogether.

• Understanding the Deeper History of FISA and 702: Charlie Savage’s Power Wars on Fiber Optic Cables and Transit Authority

  In this post, I want to focus on a narrow slice of Charlie Savage’s much-anticipated book Power Wars (published today…go ahead, order it now!), one that might not generate as much attention as the material covering more recent national security law episodes. In particular, I want to highlight the book’s discussion of an area of NSA surveillance activity sometimes labeled “transit authority.” It is a very useful case study of the way in which legal and policy questions may be impacted by technological change (and also a handy illustration of why it is significant that the private sector owns telecommunications infrastructure in the United States).

• Why Avast won’t show source code to the government, but others do

  Antivirus and security firms that serve enterprise and government customers on occasion disclose their source code to acquire lucrative contracts.

• The Triumph of the UK Surveillance State

• Surveillance, the British and US debates compared

  In Britain, allegedly, no one cares that the state is collecting vast data on all of us. In the US things are clearly very different.

• Retrotechtacular: Cold War-Era Hardware Keyloggers

  As Cold War tensions increased throughout the 1970s, the Soviets pulled out all the stops when it came to digging up information from US diplomats. This NSA memo from 2012 explains how several IBM Selectric typewriters used in the Moscow and Leningrad offices were successfully bugged with electromechanical devices that could possibly have been the world’s first keyloggers.

• De-escalation Is The Answer To Today’s Growing Cyber Tension

  Leading up to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States, media buzzed with talk of an unprecedented cybersecurity agreement on par with previous governance around the creation and handling of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

  But what was built up to be the first arms control accord for cyberspace actually turned out to be quite anticlimactic.

• Chinese Hackers? US Propagandists Should Look in the Mirror

  Like millions of Americans, this past week I was sitting on my couch, drinking a cold beer, watching Game 1 of the World Series – professional baseball’s hallowed championship. Suddenly the satellite feed went out, the screen went dark. Naturally, as FOX Sports scrambled to get their live feed fixed, many of my fellow Americans took to twitter to speculate as to what had caused the outage. I was, sadly, unsurprised to see that the most common joke people were making was that China must have hacked the World Series.

  On the one hand, it is understandable given the barrage of propaganda about Chinese hackers as a threat to corporate and national security; seemingly every week there is a new news item highlighting the great red cyber-menace. On the other hand, it is a perfect illustration of the hypocrisy and ignorant arrogance of Americans who, despite being citizens of unquestionably the most aggressive nation when it comes to both cyber espionage and surveillance, see fit to cast China as the real villain. It is a testament to the power of both propaganda and imperial triumphalism that a proposition so disconnected from reality, and bordering on Orwellian Doublethink, is not only accepted, but is ipso facto true.

• USTR wins the Crypto War

  The TransPacific Partnership trade agreement has been released, and it goes way beyond resolving a few trade and tariff disputes. US and other trade negotiators leaped into a host of policy and legal matters, including the fight over when governments can demand access to encryption keys.

• ACLU attorney for Edward Snowden speaks on privacy at Lake Forest College

• Edward Snowden’s Attorney Talks Privacy at Lake Forest College

• Profile: Chelsea Manning

• Leaker Chelsea Manning Releases ‘Bill’ to Get Rid of Secretive Surveillance Court

• Chelsea Manning drafts 139-page surveillance reform bill from prison

  Edward Snowden isn’t the only government leaker gunning to reform the nation’s surveillance laws: The former NSA contractor is credited with getting the USA Freedom Act passed earlier this year, but WikiLeaks source Pvt. Chelsea Manning now has a proposal of her own, which she revealed on Tuesday.

• Arthur Tange and Gough Whitlam spy mystery: was there a crucial information gap?

  Security seemed foolproof at the windowless vault in TRW corporation’s compound in Redondo, California. Understandably so – it was a core component of the Rhyolite eavesdropping satellite system that TRW built and operated for the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-1970s. One of the vault’s key functions was to handle communications from the Rhyolite satellite ground station TRW operated under CIA guidance at Pine Gap near Alice Springs. But Redondo’s security measures did not stop Christopher Boyce, a young, dope-smoking, high school dropout, from stealing large quantities of classified information from the vault in 1975 and 1976, and selling it to the Soviet Union.

• Congress Is Finally Paying Attention To Data Security But Misses The Key To Protecting Privacy Rights

• CISA: Did Your Senators Vote to Protect Your Privacy?

• Congress’ Cybersecurity Bill Protects Corporations and Sacrifices Customer Privacy

• Is Cybersecurity Bill a Guise for Government Data Sharing?

• Implications of CISA

• CISA Systemic Domestic Spying, U.S. Police State is Here

• The Lesson of CISA’s Success, or How to Fight a Zombie

• Edward Snowden’s favourite messaging app comes to Android: Encrypted Signal offers secure texts and calls to everyone

• Snowden’s favorite secure chat services unite in one Android app

• Signal encryption app released for Android

• TextSecure, RedPhone Private Communications Apps Now Combined Into ‘Signal’ App

• Snowden-Blessed ‘Signal’ Encrypted Calling, Messaging App Comes to Android

• Messaging app that Edward Snowden uses ‘every day’ now available for Android

• ​Now Android gets Signal, Snowden’s preferred secure messaging app

• Ultra-Private Communications App ‘Signal’ Launches on Android

• Snowden’s Preferred Messaging App Signal Now Available On Android

• Edward Snowden-approved encrypted messenger app Signal has come to Android

• Edward Snowden’s Favorite Encrypted Communication App Is Coming to Android

• Edward Snowden’s Favorite Messaging App: How It Works

• FBI official: It’s America’s choice whether we want to be spied on

  FBI General Counsel James Baker today spoke about how encryption is making it increasingly difficult for law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance. While the FBI has previously argued in favor of backdoors that let authorities defeat encryption, Baker said the issue must ultimately be decided by the American people.

• Expert Panel Discusses Shadowy Spy Authority, Sidesteps How It’s Used

  An executive order may allow the collection of American electronic communications that routinely cross international borders, a panel of experts appeared to agree Friday. But what exactly is being done under Executive Order 12333? The experts wouldn’t say.

• Guardian columnist accuses Glenn Greenwald of snooping double standards

  When it comes to snooping and surveillance, Glenn Greenwald is one of the most vocal advocates of the dangers of such services. In fact up until 2014, the anti-NSA crusader wrote a column for the Guardian on the ‘vital issues of civil rights, freedom of information and justice’.

• Europe, Still Angry at U.S. Spying, Prepares to Increase Its Own

  Just as the United States is taking a first step toward placating European privacy concerns about U.S. surveillance, several European countries are passing laws dramatically expanding their own spy programs.

• Under Attack: An interview with a hacker

  GCHQ and the other five eyes agencies have a large array of tools, as disclosed through the Snowden and other leaks. They also have internally developed tools, with funny names like SWAMP DONKEY and ANGRY PIRATE. We don’t know exactly what GCHQ can and can’t do. But every time there’s a leak, the details are often both impressive and scary from a hacker’s perspective.

• UK Government backtracks on ‘snoopers charter’ plans

• UK Government aims to enforce unprecedented mass surveillance of internet in #SnoopersCharter

• U.K. Government Proposes More, Not Less, Electronic Snooping

  Two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the vast reach of U.S. and U.K. surveillance, the U.S. Congress rolled back the most manifestly unconstitutional element: the bulk collection of domestic phone data.

• Britain Wants to Record Which Websites People Visit

• Guy Fawkes Bonfire Night Story Would Be Very Different If He Had To Contend With The Snooper’s Charter

  In honour of Bonfire Night, The Huffington Post UK has imagined two possible outcomes if it came down to an epic battle between Guy Fawkes and Theresa May.

• Dropbox creates its own Google for Work rival but raises privacy concerns again

  Despite all this, Dropbox has been heavily criticised for its attitude to privacy. The company has Condeleezza Rice on its board of directors, regarded as one of the architects of the NSA PRISM snooping programme, leading whistleblower Edward Snowden to describe it as “hostile to privacy”.

• 90 Percent of Websites Leak User Data to Third Parties: Study

  Timothy Libert, a researcher with the University of Pennsylvania, has published a study that provides an analysis of the privacy compromises on one million popular websites. In his findings, the study adds that almost nine in ten websites leak user information to third-parties and claims that the “users are usually unaware of.” Further, the study suggested that over six websites in ten spawn third-party cookies and over eight in ten load Javascript code from an external party onto a user’s system.

• Data protection is complex and costly, finds Obfuscation

  Exasperated by the widening chasm between security theatre and reality, they wondered if there was another way to resist the industrial spying/marketing/data-siphoning complex, one that didn’t require major policy or technology overhauls. The resulting book bills itself as “a user’s guide for privacy and protest”, and as an encyclopedia of the various ways people have covered their tracks, it’s both intriguing and instructive. But if you were looking for something “for dummies”, it falls somewhat short as many of its best exemplars are has-beens or never-weres.

• Trevor Paglen and Jenny Holzer To Speak at Art Basel in Miami Beach

• Do not let the spies weaken encryption

• Safe Harbour and its impact on web-based services in Europe

• Fallout continues from EU’s Schrems decision

• Seeking a Safe Harbor in a Widening Sea

• Safe Harbor 2.0? An update on EU Privacy Law

• EU-USA data deal a way away

• EC calls for Safer Harbour agreement – issues new guidance

• European Court of Justice Invalidates Safe Harbor

  On October 6, 2015, the European Court of Justice invalidated “Safe Harbor”, a pact which for nearly fifteen years allowed United States companies to transfer electronic data from European companies and satisfy accompanying European privacy standards by self-certifying that the American companies do, in fact, offer adequate privacy protections. European Union prohibits data from being transferred and processed to parts of the world that do not provide “adequate” privacy protections.

  Legal challenges to Safe Harbor came after Edward Snowden leaked details about the National Security Agency’s (“NSA”) surveillance program known as the Prism, which allegedly resulted in NSA accessing, inter alia, Facebook data.

• EC Tells US To Sort Out Safe Harbour Deal

  The European Commission (EC) has effectively told the United States the ball is in their court regarding the future progress of the Safe Harbour data agreement.

• Q&A: Guidance on transatlantic data transfers following the Schrems ruling

  The 1995 EU Data Protection Directive sets out rules for transferring personal data from the EU to non-EU countries. Under these rules, the Commission may decide that a non-EU country ensures an “adequate level of protection”. These decisions are commonly referred to as “adequacy decisions”.

• British Spies Collected Phone Data For 14 Years

  Just a “handful” of senior cabinet ministers were aware the security services had powers to collect the phone records of British citizens in bulk, Nick Clegg has claimed.

  Earlier, the Home Secretary Theresa May admitted that United Kingdom spy agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ secretly collected communications data for decades to protect “national security”.

• How and why MI5 kept phone data spy programme secret

  Home Secretary Theresa May has revealed the existence of an MI5 programme to collect vast amounts of data about UK phone calls – how and why was it kept secret?

• Encryption for the working journalist: Communicating securely

  Journalists, not usually known for their computing skills, may be unsure how to go about familiarising themselves with the various techniques for encrypting their communications and data. This section, therefore, hopes to introduce a number of tools and concepts, together with resources for continued learning; hopefully, it can provide the basis for journalists to begin the journey.

  All the tools detailed below, unless stated otherwise, are open-source and freely available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Given the high chance that Windows and Mac OS X are compromised, it is recommended to use Linux in situations where security is critical.

  Naturally, as with all software, bugs and security problems are constantly being found (and hopefully fixed); it goes without saying that the latest (stable) version of all the following tools should always be used, and security warnings on the developers’ websites checked regularly.

  For critical applications, one should already be familiar with the tools in question to avoid potential errors that could compromise security. Most of the tools described below provide comprehensive guides that should be studied carefully.

• Encryption for the working journalist: Accessing the internet anonymously

  In addition to encrypting communications, journalists will often need to encrypt documents they are working on, such as articles in progress or documents passed to them in confidence. Commonly used compression tools often provide encryption support; though commercial tools are potentially compromised and should not be trusted.

  A reliable open source compression tool is 7zip, which supports the AES-256 encryption standard. As noted previously, the strength of the encryption will be compromised by a trivial password. The full set of US diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks was distributed as a 7zip-encrypted file; it was decrypted only after Guardian journalist David Leigh published the password in a book by mistake.

  Another popular tool is Truecrypt (not strictly open-source, though the source code is available), which offers a wider range of cryptographic functions, such as encrypting entire file systems.

• The spooks will keep spying on us Brits: we clearly don’t care

  If you were German, on the other hand, I’d adjust my expectations. There, I learned this week, it’s quite common for a suggested Skype video chat to founder on the discovery that your friend blocked up the little eye on their laptop long ago. Once it emerged, via Edward Snowden, that the snoopers of the National Security Agency had access to supposedly encrypted Skype calls, Germans reached for the duct tape. They wanted Big Brother to wear a blindfold.

• Reasons to be fearful about surveillance

  Do the British public, especially the younger generation, care about privacy? Are they apathetic, or is it that they just regard security in at time of Islamist threats as the overriding concern?

  Polls suggest the UK, in contrast with countries such as the US or Germany, tends to be largely apathetic about privacy.

  And yet the whistleblower Edward Snowden, sitting in exile in Russia, has attracted 1.6 million followers on Twitter, many of them from the UK. Scepticism about the pervasiveness of government surveillance has seeped into public conscious and culture, with people routinely joking about GCHQ or other agencies listening in on iPhones.

  So privacy-v-secrecy has become a staple of in spy thrillers, from Homeland to Spectre. But there are big some big reasons to be concerned about the issue in real life.

• Snowden: Democratic debate showed major shift in how I am perceived

  The former National Security Agency analyst said it had taken 30 years for Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam war, to shift from being described regularly as a traitor.

  But not once in the debate had Snowden been referred to as a traitor.

• Snowden: Dem debate was ‘extraordinarily encouraging’ for me

  “When eventually I wanted to do something about it — I knew these programs were wrong and I was thinking about coming forward — I wanted to make sure I wasn’t a crazy person,” he said, noting he revealed his reservations to colleagues.

  “Everybody has their shop talks,” Snowden added. “It’s not like anybody at the NSA is a villain. No one’s sitting there thinking ‘how can I destroy democracy?’

  “They’re good people doing bad things for what they believe is a good reason. They think the end justifies the means.”

  Snowden said the policies of the U.S. government often end up creating unintentional harm.

• If the NSA & GCHQ want to listen to us, lets talk to them

  In 2013, the world learned that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government. Amid the outrage, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter thought: Well, if they’re listening … let’s talk to them.

• Wallhack! New see-through-wall scanner perfect for firefighters, smart homes… and the NSA?

• Edward Snowden speaks about surveillance and cybersecurity at Bishop’s University

  Former NSA contract worker and whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke about online surveillance and cybersecurity via Google Hangout to students and the public at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville on Tuesday.

• Edward Snowden to Speak at Queen’s University Conference

  The talk runs from 6:30 pm to 8pm – doors open at 6pm – with a 45 minute keynote address by Snowden about the changing nature of surveillance and current state of espionage, followed by a 35 minute question period moderated by Dr. David Lyon of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s.

• Ben Carson Praises NSA Whistleblowing But Says Pardoning Snowden Goes Too Far

  Neurosurgeon, author, and new GOP frontrunner Dr. Ben Carson weighed in this week about the future of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

  When ThinkProgress asked Carson during a book signing on Tuesday outside of Tampa whether he would be open to pardoning Snowden, he replied: “It would set a very bad precedent. There are appropriate ways to reveal things, and that was an inappropriate way, because it jeopardized our country.”

• Carson Supports Edward Snowden’s Work But Not Edward Snowden

• For Ms May, 1984 is tame

  WHEN former US spook Edward Snowden leaked masses of classified National Security Agency (NSA) data two years ago, he did something heroic.

  This is not because leaking classified intelligence is inherently virtuous or even because of the huge personal sacrifices Snowden made — giving up his well-paid job and his relationship and being forced to live in exile.

• NSA says how often, not when, it disclosures software flaws

  The U.S. National Security Agency, seeking to rebut accusations that it hoards information about vulnerabilities in computer software, thereby leaving U.S. companies open to cyber attacks, said last week that it tells U.S. technology firms about the most serious flaws it finds more than 90 percent of the time.

  The re-assurances may be misleading, because the NSA often uses the vulnerabilities to make its own cyber-attacks first, according to current and former U.S. government officials. Only then does NSA disclose them to technology vendors so that they can fix the problems and ship updated programs to customers, the officials said.

• UK to make tech companies retain crypto keys

  Britain is working to push through new laws that will effectively ban the use of strong encryption in the country, forcing companies to provide unscrambled content if served with a court warrant.

• Theresa May Will Be Able to Identify Journalists’ Sources

  Given the widespread abuse of RIPA by the police, and coppers then covering it up, this is a concerning attack on the most fundamental basics of press freedom. They’ll be entering newsrooms to smash up hard drives next…

• UK introduces law to ban civilian encryption, but government policies recommend its use

• Encrypt voice calls, says GCHQ’s CESG team … using CESG encryption

  While the world was distracted by the UK Pry Minister’s ban-working-encryption, log-everything-online Investigatory Powers Bill, the civil service was urging government and enterprises to adopt better cryptography for voice calls.

  CESG, “the information security arm of GCHQ, and the national technical authority for information assurance”, dropped new guidance (called “Secure voice at OFFICIAL”) about protecting voice calls, noting that the PSTN has been considered insecure (“suitable for UNCLASSIFIED calls only”) for some years.

• UK Government Works on Restricting Encryption, Urges Staff to Use It

  Today, the UK government will announce details of the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, a piece of legislation that will propose sweeping surveillance powers for law enforcement. These are expected to include the retention of citizens’ internet browsing history, and restrictions on encryption.

  The Telegraph reports the legislation will ban companies such as Apple from offering customers robust end-to-end encryption which results in communications not being accessible to law enforcement even when they have a warrant. Other reports suggest the idea of a ban will be walked back.

• Security and Privacy Experts Slam ‘Snooper’s Charter II’

  “You can’t just uninvent encryption, so if this government stops innocent people using unbreakable encryption via legitimate businesses, the only people left using it will be the criminals.”

• Snooper’s Charter puts data at risk even with encryption

  The Investigatory Powers Bill could leave UK citizens at risk of data theft even though end-to-end encryption has not been banned.

  Home Secretary Theresa May presented the proposed legislation, known colloquially as the Snooper’s Charter, to Parliament today, and if passed, it would require ISPs to store Internet Connection Records (ICRs – which domains people visit) for up to 12 months.

  This includes details of which services a device has connected through, such as a website or instant messaging (IM) platform.

• May wrong to say surveillance bill creates judicial authorisation for interception, says Liberty – live

  Shami Chakrabarti, the Liberty director, has just been on BBC News making the same point David David Davis has been making. (See 4.20pm.) She said:

  I’m hugely disappointed with this bill … I have to tell you there is no judicial authorisation for interception in this bill. At most, there is a very, very limited role for judges in a rubber-stamping exercise. It is not judicial sign-off, it is not acceptable in a modern democracy …

  They have spun it as a double lock, but the second person, the judge, does not actually have a key.

• UK government started online mass surveillance after 9/11 — but few politicians knew

  On Wednesday, the Investigatory Powers Bill was published in draft form, but it was in the wake of 9/11 that the UK government started its mass surveillance programs, spying on the online activities of British citizens. Under the guise of the 1984 Telecommunications Act, this surveillance was moved up a gear in 2005. Former deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg says that very few politicians knew about it.

• Investigatory Powers Bill: questions that must be answered

  Hacking powers, known officially as computer network exploitation, can involve anything from remotely hacking into servers, to localised systems like keyboard loggers, that record every key pressed.

• Investigatory Powers Bill: A Closer Look at the Plans to Monitor Your Online History

  Perhaps the most profound change is that it requires all internet service providers (ISP) to retain a log of all customers’ internet usage for one year. So under the new rules, everything you do online will be accessible by the security services or the police should they want to take a look.

• New Bill Bans Internet Companies From Offering Unbreakable Encryption

• Theresa May promises strong oversight in surveillance bill

• Spying or security? British government presents new legislation to give authorities ‘licence to operate’

• Surveillance law will force companies to retain customers’ web surfing history

• Snooper’s Charter explained: Would you use an Apple or Google service with bad encryption?

• A New U.K. Bill Would Legalize Government Surveillance of Browsing History

• ISPs to be forced to store users’ browsing history for a year

• New UK spy powers will force companies to remove encryption

• The UK government is trying to legalize mass surveillance this week

• Britain Unveils Plan for Sweeping New Surveillance Powers

• UK government to present spying bill to parliament

• The UK Plans to Retain All Citizens’ Web History

• ‘Snooper’s Charter’ unveiled: Internet firms ordered to store browser history

• What websites have you visited? Spy agencies could find out under proposed law

• UK surveillance laws will keep citizens’ internet history on file for 12 months

• United Kingdom to launch new bill for online surveillance

• Actually, British voters quite like spies and snoopers [Ed: Torygraph. Enough said.]

• Comment: The Investigatory Powers Bill will repress legitimate political opposition

• Snowden slams UK new surveillance bill

• UK cyber-spy law takes Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance – and sets them in stone

• Will UK spy bill risk exposing people’s porn habits?

• Snowden condemns Britain’s new surveillance bill

• Theresa May’s investigatory powers bill is a step in the right direction [Ed: Watch the infamous false dichotomy: “tension between security and privacy.”]

• Theresa May unveils UK surveillance measures in wake of Snowden claims

• Edward Snowden attacks UK government over investigatory powers bill

• UK proposes laws to track website visits, allow police bugging

• Snowden surveillance revelations drive UK and US policy in opposite directions

  While in the US modest attempts have been made to curb the NSA’s powers in the wake of the Edward Snowden surveillance revelations, the UK is going the other way.

  The British government on Wednesday published draft legislation on surveillance, its response to the documents disclosed by Snowden to the Guardian two and a half years ago revealing the scale of snooping by the NSA and its British sister agency, GCHQ.

  The UK’s draft bill not only consolidates in law bulk data collection but it adds even more intrusive powers. Privacy, according to polls, is less of a concern for the British than security.

• New NSA domestic spy program too clumsy to use: U.S. senator

  A new, more limited system for monitoring Americans’ phone calls for signs of terrorist intent is so slow and cumbersome that the U.S. National Security Agency will likely never use it, a senior Senate Republican said.

  Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opposed the new system when it was mandated earlier this year. He said this week he was not concerned by how the NSA will transition to it because it will probably not be used.

• US senator: The new NSA spying program is so clumsy the NSA won’t bother using it

  A new, more limited system for monitoring Americans’ phone calls for signs of terrorist intent is so slow and cumbersome that the U.S. National Security Agency will likely never use it, a senior Senate Republican said.

  Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opposed the new system when it was mandated earlier this year. He said this week he was not concerned by how the NSA will transition to it because it will probably not be used.

• Help CrypTech (and Me) Make the Internet More Secure

  A group of engineers — myself among them — decided to create and fund open source hardware engine designs capable of strong and reliable encryption and decryption for email, plus public-private key encryption for digital signatures, DNSSEC, files and other uses.

• Power Wars Symposium: Surveillance, Individual Rights, and the Obama Administration

  For the Bush-Cheney administration, the introduction of warrantless wiretapping outside the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) brought to fruition the aspirations that Vice President Dick Cheney had harbored from his time in the Ford administration. Savage explains that Cheney “wanted to refight the battles of the 1970s, reducing the power of Congress and the courts and restoring the power of the presidency” (page 43). The architects of the Bush-Cheney era shared a common goal — to leave the Presidency stronger than when they found it. The point was not whether the President already had the authority. To the contrary, the administration “was in the business of creating executive-power precedents” (page 46).

• Fierce battle ahead for new web surveillance law

• D.C. Judge Keeps Spy Court Ruling Secret

  Disclosing a ruling showing how the government proposed using data that the National Security Agency tapped from the “Internet’s backbone” could “reasonably be expected to cause grave damage to national security,” a federal judge ruled.

• Data Privacy: 5 Lessons Learned from Safe Harbor’s Demise

  In October, the European Union’s highest court struck down the “Safe Harbor” Privacy Principles, a provision that allowed for the sharing of European personal data between the EU and U.S. The verdict is meant to preserve EU citizens’ inherent right to privacy given the reality of U.S. national security laws, specifically The Patriot Act, which provide the NSA nearly unilateral access to data managed by U.S. companies.

• Safe Harbor 2.0 Data Rules May Be Coming Soon

• Big Data refusal: the nuclear disarmament movement of the 21st century

  James Bridle’s new essay (adapted from a speech at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes event in Toronto last month) draws a connection between the terror of life in the nuclear shadow and the days we live in now, when we know that huge privacy disasters are looming, but are seemingly powerless to stop the proliferation of surveillance.

• Power Wars: How Obama Continued Bush’s National Security State After Campaigning Against It

  With just over a year left in office, President Obama is running out of time to fulfill his longstanding promise to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. The imprisonment of foreigners at Guantánamo is one of several Bush-era policies that continue under Obama’s presidency. While Obama has shut down the CIA’s secret prisons and banned the harshest of Bush’s torture methods, many others—the drone war, presidential secrecy, jailing whistleblowers and mass surveillance—either continue or have even grown. The story of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism legacy is told in the new book, “Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Charlie Savage.

• Experts Call on Senate to Regulate Data Brokers

  The Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law heard testimony on the security risks posed by the multibillion-dollar data-broker industry that mines, analyzes and sells consumer information.

• EU votes to drop charges against Edward Snowden

  The European Parliament voted on October 29 to drop all criminal charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and offer him asylum and protection from rendition from third parties, The Independent said that day.

• The Rise of Europe: By Protecting Snowden EU Confronts US Dominance

  By urging EU members to stop the persecution of Edward Snowden, the European Parliament showed its independence from the United States, the chairman of the independent non-profit organization Workshop of Eurasian Ideas told Radio Sputnik.

• Rasmussen rules out offering asylum to Snowden

  The EU Parliament has adopted a non-binding resolution calling on member states to give Edward Snowden asylum.

  And Alternativet and Enhedslisten have drafted a resolution encouraging a vote to give Snowden residence.

  PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen begs to differ.

• It’s Time to Reclaim Trolling

  Reading news online, you could be forgiven for thinking that trolling is a synonym for “doing something on the internet.” Gamergaters are “trolling” women. Edward Snowden is “trolling” the NSA. President Obama is “trolling” Republicans — with a “hilarious ‘grumpy cat’ meme,” no less. You don’t even need to be online to troll: The Walking Dead is, apparently, “trolling” its audience.

• Tor Messenger: Anonymous instant messaging beta released

  Anyone who values their privacy will be aware of Tor, the distributed “onion routing” network that makes it possible to avoid surveillance (though it is thought that even the sophistication of the Tor system may not be enough to avoid NSA scrutiny if they really want to get the login for your Ashley Madison account).

• Tor Messenger Makes It Possible to Chat Privately Using Other Instant Messaging Clients

  The web most of us use isn’t one built for privacy — the NSA aside, advertising is what makes the World Wide Web go ’round, and advertising often means marketers getting to know you better than you’d like. While most of us probably aren’t getting actively snooped on, maintaining high standards for privacy is good practice in general, and there are many activists worldwide who have good reason to think they’re being spied on. That’s why Tor exists — a system of web browsing that bounces server requests along several nodes to obscure the source of the request (that’s you). Until now, Tor has been used mostly for secure web browsing, but that technology has finally been extended to instant messaging, and it’s going to work for some services not exactly known for their sterling privacy records.

• FCC: We Can’t Force Google and Facebook to Stop Tracking You Online

  The Federal Communications Commission said Friday that it can’t force Internet companies like Google, Facebook and ad providers from tracking users online. The commission had been petitioned by the privacy advocacy group Consumer Watchdog to make the “Do Not Track” setting in many browsers illegal to ignore.

  “Do Not Track” was created by researchers as a standard signal browsers can send along with other data when visiting a website. When detected, it is supposed to limit the amount of data advertisers and other online tracking companies collect. That reduced collection, however, must be voluntary: The setting merely indicates a preference, it doesn’t obscure the user’s data the way encryption does.

• Same Rhetoric Permeates Going Dark Encryption Debate

  The Going Dark encryption debate surfaced again on Wednesday at a small security conference here, and as in previous iterations before larger technical audiences and even Congress, the issue continues to spin on a hamster wheel going nowhere.

Civil Rights

• FBI agent guilty of assault after shoving teen to ground, threatening him with gun: ‘If I have to shoot you, I will’ (VIDEO)

  A veteran FBI agent who was caught on camera shoving a 15-year-old boy to the ground and threatening the teen with his gun has been found guilty of assault.

  Gerald John Rogero, 45, was off-duty last December when he meddled into a Maryland family’s dispute over a child custody drop-off.

  The agent, who knew one of the family members involved, was rebuking a man for being late to drop off his child when a teenager confronted him for intruding.

• Judge tried to bribe FBI agent with beer to get family’s text messages

  “[S]ee what you can do without drawing attention. This involves family so I don’t want anyone to know.”

  That’s what a North Carolina local judge told an FBI official in seeking the agent’s cooperation to get the text messages of two different phone numbers, according to the federal indictment (PDF) lodged against Wayne County Superior Court Judge Arnold Ogden Jones.

  How much is that illegal, warrantless surveillance worth?

• Teens who hacked the CIA are now going after the FBI

  About three weeks ago, a team of teenage hackers managed to hack into the personal AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan. In the process, they were not only able to access Brennan’s personal correspondence, but also sensitive security information regarding top-secret Intelligence matters.

• CIA Email Hackers Return With Major Law Enforcement Breach

  Hackers who broke into the personal email account of CIA Director John Brennan have struck again.

  This time the group, which goes by the name Crackas With Attitude, says it gained access to an even more important target—a portal for law enforcement that grants access to arrest records and other sensitive data, including what appears to be a tool for sharing information about active shooters and terrorist events, and a system for real-time chats between law enforcement agents.

• Teenage ‘Cracka’ Hackers Hit FBI Deputy Director

• Teens Who Hacked CIA Chief’s AOL Email Now Allege Breaching FBI Systems

• Teen Hackers Who Doxed CIA Chief Are Targeting More Government Officials

  A cybersecurity expert once told me something I’ll never forget: “don’t underestimate what bored teenagers can do.”

  A group teenagers that call themselves “Crackas With Attitude” reminded me of those words when they were able to hack into the personal AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan. The teenagers, who described themselves as “stoners,” even had the guts to give multiple media interviews, boasting about their feats.

• ‘Smokescreen’ allegations over rendition flights probe

  A human rights group has criticised the “smokescreen” surrounding the ongoing probe into CIA rendition flights landing at Scottish airports.

  Amnesty International’s Naomi McAuliffe said “excessive secrecy” was “fuelling the national security threat”.

  Police Scotland is investigating claims airports were used as stop-offs for planes transferring suspected terrorists to secret jails overseas.

• Former CIA Directors Disagree On Torture

  A sneak peek of a soon-to-be-released documentary reveals mixed sentiments among former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency on the United States’ use of torture.

• The CIA Is an Ethics-Free Zone

  I joined the CIA in January 1990.

  The CIA was vastly different back then from the agency that emerged in the days after the 9/11 attacks. And it was a far cry from the flawed and confused organization it is today.

  One reason for those flaws — and for the convulsions the agency has experienced over the past decade and a half — is its utter lack of ethics in intelligence operations.

  It’s no secret that the CIA has gone through periods where violating U.S. law and basic ethics were standard operating procedure. During the Cold War, the agency assassinated foreign leaders, toppled governments, spied on American citizens, and conducted operations with no legal authority to do so. That’s an historical fact.

  I liked to think that things had changed by the time I worked there. CIA officers, I believed, were taught about legal limits to their operations — they learned what was and wasn’t permitted by law.

• Rights Groups Call on U.S. Agencies to Appoint Human Rights Contact

  More than two dozen civic groups groups are asking why government agencies haven’t found somebody to respond to possible human rights violations within the agencies’ areas of responsibility — as required by a 1998 executive order.

  The groups sent letters to six agencies on Wednesday — the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — echoing their past request for a point of contact who can respond to violations of international human rights treaties.

  The authors of the letter, including government accountability, civil rights, and consumer advocate organizations, pointed to the recent decision by the EU Court of Justice — invalidating a free-flowing data-sharing pact between the U.S. and Europe out of privacy concerns — as a reason for urgency in filling the role.

• Fisa courts stifle the due process they were supposed to protect. End them

  The US intelligence community is in a very poor position to be trusted with protecting civil liberties while engaging in intelligence work. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you’re a skilled intelligence professional, everything looks like a vital source for collection.

  Members of the intelligence community are, it’s true, under immense stress to prevent a devastating national catastrophe. I understand a little of how that feels: while working as an analyst in Iraq, thousands of military personnel, contractors and local civilians were dependent on our ability to effectively understand the threats we were facing, and to explain them to US military commanders, the commanders of Iraqi forces and the civilian leadership of both nations.

  General Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security, frequently pushed very hard to “collect it all”; during my time as an intelligence analyst, I completely agreed with his mantra. So it’s not surprising that today’s intelligence community – as well as law enforcement at all levels of government – aggressively pursue an increasingly large and sophisticated wish list of intelligence tools regardless of whether appropriate oversight mechanisms are in place.

• Giving Intelligence Contractors Whistleblower Protections Doesn’t Have to Be “Complicated”

  The intelligence community’s top lawyer said Thursday that giving contractors whistleblower protection is “complicated.”

  Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, said a contractor “isn’t working for the government,” and as a result, under current law: “The government doesn’t straight out have the authority to say whether that person can be fired; that’s up to the contractor.”

  The lack of whistleblower protection for intelligence community contractors has become a central issue in the debate over whether Edward Snowden, then working at the National Security Agency as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, did the right thing in taking his concerns about surveillance programs — and a trove of documents — to journalists. Public figures including Hillary Clinton have incorrectly asserted that Snowden would have been protected from reprisal had he gone through proper channels.

  Litt was correct in saying that whistleblowers who work as contractors for intelligence agencies can be fired, silenced, or otherwise retaliated against for blowing the whistle with almost no legal protections.

• Hackers have infiltrated the US arrest records database

  Earlier this year, a hacking group broke into the personal email account of CIA director John Brenner and published a host of sensitive attachments that it got its hands on (yes, Brenner should not have been using his AOL email address for CIA business). Now, Wired reports the group has hit a much more sensitive and presumably secure target: a law enforcement portal that contains arrest records as well as tools for sharing info around terrorist events and active shooters. There’s even a real-time chat system built in for the FBI to communicate with other law enforcement groups around the US.

  The group has since published a portion the data it collected to Pastebin and Cryptobin; apparently it released government, military, and police names, emails, and phone numbers. But the portal the hackers accessed held much more info. All told, they got their hands on a dozen different law enforcement tools, and Wired verified that a screenshot of the Joint Automated Booking System (JABS) provided by the hackers was legitimate. The JABS vulnerability is noteworthy because it means the hackers can view arrest records as they’re entered into the database — regardless of whether or not the arrests were under court seal. Typically, those arrests might not be made public for long periods of time as a way of keeping big investigations secret.

• New Zealand Spy Watchdog Investigating Country’s Ties to CIA Torture

  New Zealand’s spy watchdog has launched an inquiry into her country’s links to the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

  Cheryl Gwyn, the inspector general for intelligence and security, said the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released in December 2014 named a number of countries that were involved in the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees — “but the names of those countries have been redacted.”

  That wasn’t OK with her.

• Govt rubbishes calls for spy agency reform as CIA links probed

  The government has rubbished calls for changes to the oversight of the country’s spy agencies as the Inspector General investigates any links between them and the CIA’s torture programmes.

  A report revealed the SIS failed to provide the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Cheryl Gwyn with copies of visual surveillance warrants as required by law.

  Instead, the Inspector General discovered them during a warrant review process.

• Spy Watchdog Launches Probe Into New Zealand’s Links to CIA Torture

• Government report investigates intelligence agency links to US torture

• Head of SIS unlikely to go

• Security Intelligence Service ‘broke the law’

• David Fisher: Just how bad were our spies?

• Inspector’s questions restore confidence in spy agencies

• Spying watchdog ‘opened a can of worms’

• An Ex-CIA Officer Speaks Out: The Italian Job

  Sabrina De Sousa is one of nearly two-dozen CIA officers who was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced by Italian courts in absentia in 2009 for the role she allegedly played in the rendition of a radical cleric named Abu Omar. It was the first and only criminal prosecution that has ever taken place related to the CIA’s rendition program, which involved more than 100 suspected terrorists and the assistance of dozens of European countries.

• Maryland is the most militarized university in America, says VICE News

• UVA is 19th most militarized university in the U.S.

• 4th Amendment for me, but not for thee

  Last week, it was written here that federal bureaucrats issued a burdensome judge-less subpoena to McDonald’s after the company took a position on the minimum wage contrary to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’s. McDonald’s had already spent a million dollars to produce documents complying with a judge-less subpoena from the SEIU’s “partner” in government, the National Labor Relations Board, and the NLRB still wanted the emails of McDonald’s employees.

  [...]

  The 4th Amendment’s protections of the security of papers and effects were designed to prevent the political abuses now found in the use of administrative subpoenas. Administrative subpoenas, which are issued without approval by judges, are impossible to reconcile with the 4th Amendment. They are a bigger threat to liberty than the NSA’s warrantless collection of phone call metadata precisely because they are used to intimidate and silence political opponents.

• A Government Both More Secretive and More Open

  The same decades that saw the growth of national-security secrecy saw the rise of the public’s “right to know.”

• Iranian actress who posted photos online not wearing a hijab forced to flee country

  An actress from Iran has gone on the run after igniting a backlash by posting photos of herself on social media showing her not wearing a hijab, the traditional Muslim head cover. Sadaf Taherian began posting the controversial photos on Facebook and Instagram over the last two weeks and the response from Iranians was as swift as it was extreme. In an interview with Masih Alinejad, a journalist who runs a Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom,” which features photos and videos of Iranian women walking in public with their heads uncovered, Taherian reportedly said she was initially “nervous” about the reaction the images might trigger. Indeed, many Iranians lashed out at Taherian with insults and called her “immoral.”

• Ari Berman on Voting Rights, Joanne Doroshow on Forced Arbitration

• ‘If this was a test, nearly everyone failed’: how tech giants deny your digital rights

  No one reads those interminable terms of service agreements on Instagram, WhatsApp and their like. But they could make the difference between life and death, according to Rebecca MacKinnon.

  “It may be about whether you get tortured for what you wrote on Facebook or not, or whether you get tried based on some of the stuff you had in your text messages or something you uploaded. They’re worth a lot to human beings,” said MacKinnon, the leader of a new project that hopes to show people just what they are signing away when they blindly click “agree”.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Despite assurances to contrary, intellectual property covered asset for TPP ISDS mechanism

  The assertions by Australia and USTR that the ISDS provisions do not apply to intellectual property were efforts to spin and exaggerate the importance of several limited exceptions to the ISDS, most of which do not actually remove key decisions and policy from ISDS arbitration.

  There is, as in earlier drafts, a limited exception for compulsory licenses or the “issuance, revocation, limitation or creation” of intellectual property rights, but only ” to the extent that the issuance, revocation, limitation or creation is consistent with Chapter 18 (Intellectual Property) and the TRIPS Agreement.” This means private investors will have the right to use the ISDS mechanism to interpret the IP chapter of the TPP and also the TRIPS agreement itself.

• TPP: ‘Scary’ US-Pacific trade deal published – you’re going to freak out when you read it

  The deal is long and complex: it stretches to 2,000 pages and is written in largely technical and legal language, making quick analysis difficult.

• Obama Signs Official Letter of Intent to Join the TPP

  President Barack Obama announced on Thursday that he intends to agree to the massively controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in a letter to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate.

  The letter, released just hours after the full text of the agreement became public after years of secret negotiations, is basically a formality. Still, it shows that Obama is serious about signing the TPP, and highlights the fight ahead.

  Even if Obama is gung-ho on the deal, prominent fellow Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have strongly opposed the TPP as it currently stands. There’s no guarantee that Congress will approve of the agreement.

• Copyrights

  • Aurous Gets Beaten Up By the RIAA But Peace is Near

    The RIAA is demanding a preliminary injunction to bring the downed Aurous music service to its knees. While Aurous is fighting back, the RIAA’s lawyers are giving their adversaries a legal beat down, using developer Andrew Sampson’s words against him and giving his legal team a mountain to climb. But with all that said, peace is now on the horizon.