01.30.16
Posted in News Roundup at 7:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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One year ago, I switched to Linux operating system from windows and I realized how much I’ve been missing so much of the customization that is offered by Linux. So Why you should move to Linux? There are a number of advantages and there are some downsides too.
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In all, 449 of you voted, and a whopping 48.8 percent of you, that would be 219 votes, said that when it comes to considering what to run on your desktop Linux box, the choice of distro and desktop get equal weight, or thereabouts.
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Server
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The answer to this question depends on what you need. Zentyal is an amazing server that does a great job running your SMB network. If you need a bit more, such as groupware, your best bet is to go with ClearOS. If you don’t need groupware, either server will do an outstanding job.
I highly recommend installing both of these all-in-one servers to see which will best serve your small company needs.
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The group hopes its reference software platform will help accelerate the adoption of ARM-based systems in the data center to challenge Intel.
When talking about ARM-based processors running in servers and other data center systems, the challenge has been as much getting the necessary software and ecosystem support together as it has ensuring the chips can handle the workloads.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation recently announced a new partnership with Linux Academy on discounted Linux training for SysAdmins.
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Graphics Stack
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Dutch software firm StreamComputing has launched an educational project aiming to get more developers using OpenCL and as part of this initiative they will try to port as many GEGL operations to OpenCL as possible.
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While the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver right now exposes support for AMD GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer, like Carrizo, Fiji, and Tonga, it is possible to get GCN 1.1 Sea Islands hardware working with this driver if jumping through a few hoops. In this article are some tests of a Radeon R9 290 “Hawaii” when using the proprietary Catalyst driver, Radeon DRM driver as is the default for this card on open-source, and then using the experimental AMDGPU DRM open-source support.
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Applications
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gThumb is not a popular app, and that’s a real shame. Even if it has been around for almost 15 years, people don’t know about it. With the GNOME stack integrating so many apps, who’s going to notice one more? Yet, users should give it a try, regardless of their running Ubuntu with its old repos or something more up to date.
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Varnish is distributed as both source and binary packages. Please choose the appropriate version for your platform.
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HDR images are intended to capture more than this number of stops. (Depending on your patience, significantly more in some cases).
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Kovid Goyal has proudly announced today, January 29, the release of an important milestone in the development of the world’s most popular free ebook library management tool, Calibre 2.50.
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Kodi 16 “Jarvis” has received a second RC, and the developers have managed to close a few problems that have been reported since the first RC.
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Kodi 16.0 “Jarvis” is quite close to being released with today marking the availability of their second release candidate.
Kodi 16.0 RC2 fixes some crashes, increases time-outs when searching for audio devices on Windows, and fixes on saving settings when switching between different profiles.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The creator of Gary’s Mod and Rust, one of the most successful titles on Steam, has said that if he could do it all again, he wouldn’t have supported the Linux platform
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SNOW is incredibly interesting, mainly as it’s our first proper winter sports type game to have on Linux & SteamOS, it’s a bit buggy though. It’s free, so no big loss right now if it’s a bit iffy.
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The reason we talk about Croteam in the Linux section is because they were also among the first major studios to port one of their games to Linux when Steam for Linux was still in diapers. Serious Sam 3 was the only triple A game on Steam for Linux for a long time, and they continued to update it and to improve the user experience.
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A few websites are reporting that Steam for Linux has hit 1900 games after only hitting 1800 around nine days ago, this is false. We are currently on 1820.
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Right now 1,913 Linux games are being listed on Steam while there are 2,913 listed Mac OS X games on Steam and 7,587 listed Windows titles available on this digital distribution service. It will certainly be interesting to see what the rest of the year looks like for Linux gaming with how quickly Vulkan-powered games are released, what happens to SteamOS and Steam Machines throughout the year, what unexpected AAA Linux games get released, and if the Linux desktop manages to become more widely adopted by Steam gamers while right now the listed Steam Linux market-share is about 1%.
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Bundle Stars has released an awesome bundle, featuring 8 excellent games with Linux support. Time to grab some cheap games.
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I’ve been waiting for this for many months, and Valve has finally fixed their Steam store filters to allow you to view only Upcoming games on SteamOS & Linux.
It’s insane how long it actually took them to fix this. It was reported to them in March of last year on github, and it wasn’t working for quite a while before then from what I remember.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I answered that KMail and KDEPIM are still alive and they still continue to be maintain[ed].
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Today I made my first talk in a big event, I talked about Qt and C++, and on this talk a 100 people show up, but only 6 people on that group knew about Qt. I remembered when I started to study Qt, and it’s really hard to find Qt programmers on Brazil, until I met the people from KDE Brazil. So my talk was about how to create user interfaces with Qt. What modules we should use to make an app. If is better use QtWidgets or QtQuick. And I think that I made a impression. =D
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Qt 5.6 brings improved high-DPI support, in the form of better support for the devicePixelRatio scaling mode. In this blog we’ll look at how to configure and enable it, from the perspective of a Qt application user and a Qt application developer.
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There are still some things that needs fixing. The current installer is built from git master and not from released packages so the translation stuff hat you usually get with the release packages are missing. So only partially translated. Another feature that I’m still missing is the spell-check. I need to still add a/hspell and language dictionaries to get that to work.
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A few month ago I reported that Snorenotify is becoming a KDE project.
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The Qt 5.7 release is running slightly behind schedule due to the recent licensing changes with open-sourcing some new components and other reasons, but upstream Qt developers are now planning for the feature freeze to happen next week.
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Jonathan Riddell, the former Kubuntu release manager that was ousted from the project, will be announcing a “KDE Neon” incubator project this weekend at FOSDEM.
Riddell posted a quick blog post on his personal site about there being a KDE Neon launch party on Saturday night in Brussels followed by a talk on Sunday about the new project.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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It looks like the GTK+ developers are working hard not only on the upcoming GTK+ 3.20 release but also on the stable branch, the one used for the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment.
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The developers of the GNOME Builder application, an open-source piece of software that lets skilled developers build the most awesome GNOME software, have announced their participation in the development cycle for GNOME 3.20.
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I was really pleased to see Endless, the little company with big plans, initiate a GNOME Design hackfest in Rio.
The ground team in Rio arranged a visit to two locations where we met with the users that Endless is targeting. While not strictly a user testing session, it helped to better understand the context of their product and get a glimpse of the lives in Rocinha, one of the Rio famous favelas or a more remote rural Magé. Probably wouldn’t have a chance to visit Brazil that way.
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Wondering which is the best operating system for ethical hacking and pen testing purposes? Trying to solve this problem, fossBytes has prepared a list of the most efficient Linux distros for hacking purposes that you need to check out in 2016.
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Glen McArthur has just posted a preview video of what will become the next release of AV Linux. The upcoming release will be based on a carefully put together version of Debian testing, optimised for use with audio production.
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Reviews
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And so, up to the final bit, Manjaro 15.12 Xfce gets a very nice 8.5/10. It’s improved a lot, and it’s become an interesting choice for home use. However, with the Windows problem and kernel crash taken into account, the grade goes down to zero, because we have a system that simply cannot be used. Food for thought and debug. Maybe the next version.
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New Releases
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We are proud to announce Neptune 4.5 the 5th service release to the Neptune 4.x series.
This version comes with some core updates to the system including LTS Kernel 3.18.25, Systemd 227,
libc6 2.19, Mesa 10.5.9, Alsa 1.0.27 and more. For the first time we also offer a testing version
of our Plasma 5 version based on Plasma 5.5.3 as seperate ISO download.
The usual software Updates like Chromium updated to version 46 and Icedove to 38.5 are also included.
We replaced TrueCrypt with VeraCrypt which is compatible with TrueCrypt Containers.
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Neptune is a Linux operating system fully based upon Debian 7.0 (‘Wheezy’), has been updated once more by its developers.
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The IPFire development team announced last evening the immediate availability for download or update of the IPFire 2.17 Core Update 97 Linux kernel-based firewall distribution.
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As you probably understood URIX OS is a general purpose OS. URIX is a live OS runnable from USB and ISO.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Red Hat Family
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BofA/Merrill has issued rating on RED HAT INC COM in the latest move. Company shares are now Downgraded by BofA/Merrill to ” Neutral”. The firm had an earlier rating of “Buy ” on RED HAT INC COM. The rating information was released on Jan 26, 2016 by BofA/Merrill.
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Bank of America lowered shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) from a buy rating to a neutral rating in a research report report published on Tuesday, The Fly reports. Bank of America currently has $80.00 price target on the open-source software company’s stock, down from their prior price target of $90.00.
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As it reflects the theoretical cost of buying the company’s shares, the market cap of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) is currently rolling at 12306.76, making it one of the key stocks in today’s market. Hence, the existing market cap indicates a preferable measure in comprehending the size of the company rather than its worth.
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Red Hat Inc is a provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to develop and offer reliable and high-performing operating system, middleware, virtualization, storage and cloud technologies.
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The origin-artwork that inspired Overpass (Highway Gothic) is public domain.
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Fedora
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The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the 2016 Flock conference, coming August 2-5, 2016 in Krakow, Poland. At Flock, Fedora contributors gather to promote and discuss ideas to improve our distro, community, and userbase, and promote our core values: Freedom, Friends, Features, First.
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Debian Family
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We reported a couple of days ago that the Tor Project announced the release of the Firefox-based Tor Browser 5.5 anonymous web browser for all supported platforms, but they’ve also published details about the first Alpha build of the next major release.
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Derivatives
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Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) version 2.0 has been released. It is a Debian-based security-focused Linux distribution, and it is designed to increase privacy and anonymity online. This release fixes many security issues, and users should upgrade as soon as possible.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It seems like a whole lot of Mark Shuttleworth interviews are starting to pile up these days, and today we would like to inform our readers about a recent one, where the Ubuntu founder talks about the latest cloud technologies coming from Canonical.
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Like most mobile carriers across the globe, AT&T has embraced Linux — in fact, the Linux kernel powers the Android platform. But AT&T recently surprised a lot of people by turning its back on Microsoft and adopting Ubuntu as its cloud, enterprise, and application solution provider. In addition, Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) will provide support for these platforms/solutions.
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Canonical, through Łukasz Zemczak, informs us today about the latest work done by the developers of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system in preparation for the upcoming OTA-9.5 hotfix update.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Chinese developers behind the deepin Linux kernel-based operating system have announced the immediate availability for download of the first point release of deepin 15.
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The Ubuntu Kylin developers have just released today, January 28, 2016, the second Alpha build of the upcoming Ubuntu Kylin 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) computer operating system.
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Ubuntu MATE 16.04 Alpha 2 has finally landed, and its developers are saying that it’s the biggest update so far.
The Ubuntu MATE developers are spoiling its users with bigger and bigger changelog with each new edition. From the looks of it, the upcoming Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS is going to be a really big upgrade, and that’s easy to notice form the changelog that’s been posted. Besides the large number of fixes and other improvements, there are quite a few package upgrades.
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We’re preparing Lubuntu 16.04, Xenial Xerus, for distribution in April 2016. 16.04 will be an LTS. As 16.04 is an LTS, the focus is on looking out for and fixing bugs.
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As expected, Lubuntu is one of the opt-in flavors for the two Alpha and one Beta build of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system from Canonical, and Lubuntu 16.04 LTS Alpha 2 just arrived earlier for testing.
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Shenzhen Xunlong launched a $10, Linux- and Android-friendly “Orange Pi One” hacker board with a quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC and a Pi-compatible expansion port.
Even with competition from the $9 Chip and $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, 2015’s biggest price/performance breakthrough among open-spec SBCs was arguably the $15 Orange Pi PC. Unlike the single-core Chip and Zero, the Orange Pi PC delivered the performance goods with a quad-core Cortex-A7 Allwinner H3 SoC, while offering more ports, including HDMI, Ethernet, quad USB, and Pi-compatible expansion. Now Shenzhen Xunlong has spun a similar, stripped down Orange Pi One variant for only $10 — or $13.77 if you want it shipped to the U.S.
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Element14 has spun an industrial version of the BeagleBone Black with -20 to 85°C support, while BeagleBoard.org is prepping a “BeagleBone Blue” for robots.
The Raspberry Pi single board computer has seen numerous spin-offs in recent years, from official Raspberry Pi Foundation models like the Zero to competitive, third-party lookalikes like the Banana Pi and new, $10 Orange Pi One. Yet, the BeagleBone Black, which is widely considered to be the second most popular Linux hacker board, has remained stubbornly set its ways. In recent months, however, there’s been a flurry of spinoffs, including the BeagleBone Green, BeagleBone Enhanced, and a COM version called the BeagleCore BCM1 (see farther below).
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The new platform, called Cayenne, provides a user-friendly toolset for connecting Raspberry Pi hardware to the Internet and configuring it to communicate with other devices and sensors. myDevices is pitching Cayenne as a solution for businesses to build IoT devices based on Raspberry Pi hardware quickly without investing in Pi-specific programming expertise.
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IoT devices for the smart home appeal strongly to consumers, but the software that drives them has a long way to go to please users. That’s according to a new report from Argus Insights, which studied IoT products from ADT, Comcast, Vivint, Honeywell and other vendors.
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Phones
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With Lumia sales on the decline and Microsoft’s plan to not produce a large amount of handsets, it’s clear we’re witnessing the end of Windows Phone. Rumors suggest Microsoft is developing a Surface Phone, but it has to make it to the market first. Windows Phone has long been in decline and its app situation is only getting worse. With a lack of hardware, lack of sales, and less than 2 percent market share, it’s time to call it: Windows Phone is dead. Real Windows on phones might become a thing with Continuum eventually, but Windows Phone as we know it is done. It won’t stop Microsoft producing a few handsets every year as a vanity project, but for everyone else it’s the end of the line. Farewell, Windows Phone.
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Android
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For those familiar with AirConsole, it looks like they have now released a dedicated app for Android TV. For Those unfamiliar with AirConsole, in short, it allows you to use your smartphone as a controller to play a bunch of games on your desktop. Back in December, they also partnered with OnePlus to release a small selection of exclusive games for the OnePlus 2, OnePlus One and OnePlus X. With the release of the Android TV dedicated app this week, this is now essentially what you can do with your home TV.
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Consider this article a list of ways that Android outshines the iPhone 6s. But also consider this to be a wish list for the iPhone 7. As I’ve made clear, I have no intention of switching to Android anytime soon and these are all compromises that I’m willing to make. Why? Because the positive tradeoffs far outweigh the negatives.
I wish Apple would address all of my wants in its next-generation smartphone, though I’m certain that won’t be the case. But hey, there’s always the iPhone 8…
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BlackBerry might soon give up making devices running on its BB10 OS and switch to Google’s Android OS fully. The Canadian firm’s hardware business is going pathetically, and such a move could help revive it, which generates the majority of its global revenue.
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If you’re developing Android-based games or complex apps with extensive cloud integration, you’ll probably want to seek out native application development tools. These range from the Java-oriented Android SDK and Android Development Tools (ADT) Eclipse plugin to game-oriented engines like Corona to commercial enterprise platforms like the cloud-oriented Monaca toolsuite.
Most mobile apps, however, are simpler affairs with tight deadlines and budgets and the need to support both Android and iOS. For most app developers, especially those converting web apps to mobile, cross-platform mobile app frameworks are a better choice. And the latest mobile frameworks promise some native-like performance and functionality while still hewing to a basic “write once, run anywhere” development approach.
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Now consider that Alphabet’s share of the global smartphone OS market is five times that of iOS, and it’s easy to see why Oracle’s Android revenue numbers aren’t shocking. Now if only someone would shed some light on the impact YouTube has on revenue and profit growth — that would really be intriguing.
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If you’ve spent any time shopping for digital signs for your small business, you might be a tad discouraged at the cost and complexity. But thanks to Linux and Android, you can enjoy a whole new generation of software, services, and devices that range from free to inexpensive, and that offer all kinds of great features.
Amazingly flexible, digital signs can display simple images, slideshows, movies, Web pages, and dynamic content pulled in from the Internet, or whatever sources you want to use. Anything you can do on a computer you can put into digital signage.
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Companies are building new applications everyday – whether it is to meet their own requirements or to serve their customers. Open source platforms are increasingly being used to support these applications, moving from initial development and experimentation into production.
For example, Apache Hadoop provides support for storage of huge volumes of data and companies are now looking at how to get more from their ‘data lakes.’ Meanwhile, new stacks of tools are being developed to help developers build their applications faster.
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There was no supercomputing magic involved in at least most of the video interceptions. As part of an operation codenamed “Anarchist,” NSA and GCHQ analysts used Image Magick (an open source image manipulation tool) and other open source software developed to defeat commercial satellite signal encryption. One of the tools, called antisky, was developed by Dr. Markus Kuhn of the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. The tools could be used by anyone able to intercept satellite signal feeds then exhibit the patience and skill to sort through the pixels. However, the conversion to digital video feeds on some drones has apparently made video interception more difficult.
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A new open source plugin designed to prevent the creation of dead content links online – so called “link rot” – has launched.
Amber has been designed by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and it provides what it calls a “persistent route” to information on the internet by automatically taking and retaining a snapshot of every page on a website and storing it on the same website’s server.
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Will Gorman, VP of Pentaho Labs, explains how the new Python integration will benefit data scientists and what’s coming next.
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In this video, Jono Bacon describes a singular passion that motivates his career in open source: “Figuring out how we can build strong, inclusive, effective communities that build really cool things.”
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If you’re a network or systems administrator, you’re likely familiar with the concept of a load balancer. It’s a hardware device or software stack that distributes network application load across all the machines and servers connected to it in order to help mitigate network congestion. Google’s software solution, called Seesaw, was created in 2012 in response to a lack of adequate load balancing software for Google’s own use. Coded in Google’s own Go language, the software boasted a flexible Linux backbone and was used to manage Google’s own network needs, which entailed things like automated deployment and ease of use and maintenance.
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Google announced today that it is open-sourcing Seesaw — a Linux-based load balancing system. The code for the project, which is written in Google’s Go language, is now available on GitHub under the Apache license.
As Google Site Reliability Engineer Joel Sing, who works on the company’s corporate infrastructure, writes in today’s announcement, Google used to use two different load balancing systems back in 2012. Both, however, “presented different sets of management and stability challenges.” So to fix this, he and his team set out to find a new solution and because the ones available at the time didn’t meet Google’s needs, they started writing their own.
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Thank goodness this week is over. After our Larry Cafiero spent last week “putting out fires,” as he puts it, at SCALE 14x, I’ve spent the last couple of days doing the same here at FOSS Force. It seems our article on Slashdot’s sale attracted some unruly types to the comments, forcing us to put the shields up on our comments site-wide for the first time in our nearly six year history. You can still comment, but you might have to wait a while for us to notice it and approve it for publication. We’ll take the shields down as soon as we determine it’s safe to do so.
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Events
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The Southern California Linux Expo 14x (SCaLE 14x) concluded on January 24 with a keynote from open source developer Sarah Sharp, who made waves in October, 2015 with a blog post explaining why she stepped down as a Linux kernel developer. Here are some highlights from her presentation.
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I am excited to be joining the conference. The last time I made the trip was sadly way back in 2007 and I had an absolutely tremendous time. Wonderful people, great topics, and well worth the trip. Typically I have struggled to get out with my schedule, but I am delighted to be joining this year.
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Is a unikernel an impenetrable black box, resistant to profilers, tracers, fire, and poison? At SCaLE14x this weekend there was a full day track on unikernels, after which I was asked about unikernel profiling and tracing. I’m not an expert on the topic, and wasn’t able to answer these questions at the time, however, I’ve since taken a quick look using MirageOS and Xen.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Today, however, MySQL in particular has evolved into a serious contender as an enterprise-capable database engine, powering many websites and commercial applications. Aided in large part by Oracle’s acquisition of the company behind MySQL, we have seen over the past several years the growth of a number of very interesting and viable MySQL derivatives.
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Many third parties create rich applications to facilitate database management, database development and database administration. Here are ten outstanding graphical interfaces for MySQL.
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CenturyLink’s new MySQL-compatible DBaaS platform, Relational DB Service, highlights the company’s growing investment in managed cloud solutions.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Walmart on Tuesday announced that it has posted the code for its OneOps cloud application life cycle management platform on GitHub. The company developed the OneOps platform for building and launching cloud-based applications across varied storage environments that change frequently. It lets e-commerce vendors deploy apps on platforms from Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and CenturyLink public clouds to private or hybrid environments built with OpenStack.
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Funding
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is huge: the opening keynote for LibrePlanet 2016: Fork the System is a conversation with National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Technologist Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
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Licensing
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The introduction of the new 451 HTTP Error Status Code for blocked websites is a big step forward in cataloguing online censorship, especially in a country like India where access to information is routinely restricted.
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It seems the definition of censorship becomes more fluid and convenient with each new use. If free speech groups feel the need to cry censorship about editorial decisions, there are many, many stories of slavery that don’t feature smiling enslaved people or white saviours in the rejected folders of the 79% white publishing industry that they could start with. They could look into the even wider array of stories about our anger, our resistance, our power, that have never made it out of the slush pile, let alone to the shelves of major bookstores.
But the free speech advocates haven’t devoted much energy to the alarmingly un-diverse publishing industry and its very real effect on literature. (Pen American, of which I’m a relatively new and usually proud member, has been doing more recently and hosted an excellent series of panels on the subject last year.)
What we’re left with is a palpable sense of selective outrage. Pulling a book because it’s historically inaccurate and carries on the very American tradition of whitewashing slavery is classified as “censorship”, while maintaining an ongoing majority white industry that systematically excludes narratives of color is just business as usual.
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The automotive industry is moving toward the use of Free and Open Source software (FOSS) in vehicles. GPLv3 is currently presenting a roadblock to greater adoption. Specifically the Installation Information requirement in GPLv3 Section 6 (sometimes called the “Anti-Tivoization” clause) is causing some car makers to fear GPLv3. These car-makers want to lock down all software installed on their cars against user modifications, but fear that using GPLv3 software will prevent them from doing so. Although there may be good reasons to lock down some software on cars, car-makers should not fear GPLv3. One solution the industry may wish to consider to allay concerns about the Installation Information requirement in GPLv3 is to adopt and advocate for use of an “Additional Permission” that excepts users from having to comply with that requirement.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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It now can be revealed that “Just Solutions International” – the Ministry of Justice commercial venture promoted by former Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Chris Grayling – caused an overall £1.1 million LOSS to the MoJ.
JSI was closed by Grayling’s successor Michael Gove last October.
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It’s an outrage — I think it would outrage anyone. You go out in the street you don’t expect people to look under your clothes. It’s such a basic expectation that any court in the country would find that this violates that right.
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In the 70s and 80s people used text command line interfaces at the computers and mainly black and white or green CRT monitors. This CRT monitors had a problem. If they show the same interface for a long time like for example Wordstar or Visicalc then the interface is burned into the screen and the screen is basically damaged. This was not good.
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Last week the UK government ripped up a public consultation into the future of the BBC because almost all the responses came from one source, the pressure group 38 Degrees.
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If you used Windows Media Center only for playing DVD movies and music, you can find alternatives if you upgrade to Windows 10 and do not have a serious loyalty to the old software. For example, VideoLAN’s VLC media player can play many types of video and audio files. If you want more of a “media center” experience, programs like Kodi, MediaPortal or Plex may offer a range of functions similar to the old, discontinued Microsoft software.
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Science
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Thirty years ago I was at mission control at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center for the launch of the Challenger. I was working data communications. My job was making sure all the telemetry links between the space shuttle and NASA’s ground communications system (NASCOM) were working. Everything was green on my board, the shuttle launched, and a few seconds later everything went to hell. I stared at my controls, tried to get things to reconnect, and then I finallly looked up at the TV display.
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Health/Nutrition
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It is possible to trace every drop of toxic water spewed from Flint, Michigan back to two terrible decisions. The second was switching the city’s supply from treated Lake Huron water to the corrosive broth in the Flint River. Left untreated, that water unleashed the disaster stored in the walls of the city’s first bad decision: its lead pipes.
In the past few weeks, the nation’s attention has increasingly focused on Flint’s public health disaster. At least 15 percent of the city’s homes have water with lead levels exceeding the safe limit established by the federal government. Several of those homes had water with lead levels 900 times above the safe limit. Poor political decisions caused the crisis, but it wouldn’t have happened at all if the lead pipes weren’t there to begin with. The current solution is a stopgap—spiking the water supply with an anticorrosive chemical. But if the powers that be want to eliminate the risk completely, they will ultimately have to replace all the lead plumbing. A September estimate, only recently released by Michigan governor Rick Snyder, puts the cost of replacing all the lead pipes in Flint at $60 million. And the project will take 15 years.
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Quayana Towns’s 2-month-old daughter wriggled on an exam table last week as her pediatrician ticked off questions that have become essential for every parent of young children here.
“So what are you guys doing for water — what are you drinking?” asked the doctor, Mona Hanna-Attisha.
“I have a whole bunch of bottled water that I picked up,” said Ms. Towns, 26, assuring the doctor that the family had been drinking it for a few months, since the gravity of Flint’s water crisis came to light.
“And before that you were using tap water?”
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News of the poisoned water crisis in Flint has reached a wide audience around the world. The basics are now known: the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, nullified the free elections in Flint, deposed the mayor and city council, then appointed his own man to run the city. To save money, they decided to unhook the people of Flint from their fresh water drinking source, Lake Huron, and instead, make the public drink from the toxic Flint River. When the governor’s office discovered just how toxic the water was, they decided to keep quiet about it and covered up the extent of the damage being done to Flint’s residents, most notably the lead affecting the children, causing irreversible and permanent brain damage. Citizen activists uncovered these actions, and the governor now faces growing cries to resign or be arrested.
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James Warren, chief media writer for Poynter, wrote a column Friday that suggests news media bears a share of the responsibility for the lead poisoning scandal that has afflicted the city of Flint and engulfed the state government that caused it to happen.
And he quotes two sources — one of them is a former, longtime environmental writer for our company — who suggest local journalists were lax in following the story, or too inexperienced to know how to handle it, due in part to cuts in staffing in newsrooms.
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Following release of new document and emails, Gov. Snyder told he must ‘explain to the people of Flint why his administration trucked water into a state building while allowing residents to drink unsafe water’
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The same four mistakes that led to tragedy in Flint are repeated in other cities and, dangerously, in the realm of global climate policy. To create a just and sustainable world we must learn to recognize and rectify each of them.
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The World Health Organization Executive Board this week noted a number of reports on communicable diseases, such as poliomyelitis, and vaccines. Developing countries underlined the affordability and accessibility of treatments. The board also agreed on the setting up of an open-ended intergovernmental meeting to come to agreement on the organisation’s governance reform.
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“Things seem very abstract,” the representative said, citing the high prices of drugs, such as cancer drugs. It is important, he said, that local generic manufacture of drug be supported.
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This week, a Houston grand jury returned a surprise indictment. It was tasked with investigating videos that purported to expose Planned Parenthood for selling the body parts of aborted fetuses. The grand jury found no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood, but instead charged the video producers David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt from the anti-abortion group The Center for Medical Progress, with tampering with a government record, a felony.
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This week on CounterSpin: The consensus of Beltway media seems to be that a single-payer healthcare system, similar to those in other industrialized countries is “excellent in theory,” but “dead on arrival” in Washington, making its proponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, naive at best. Americans make life-altering healthcare choices, in which worry over cost plays a big part, every day, but serious public discussion about how to address that crisis is a sometimes thing. So we should care what media are saying about single payer—as a lesson in policing possibilities, even apart from what it means for the presidential race.
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Security
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While organization like the Linux Foundation, through its Automotive Grade Linux platform and GENIVI, have pushed for an open-source approach to in-car infotainment, the same principles could be applied to vehicle code at large to help prevent hacking. And given the rapid pace of self-driving technology and the lines of code that will be required—100 million or more for a modern vehicle, compared to 60 million in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider—perhaps it’s time for automotive software to become more transparent and therefore more tamper-proof.
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All versions of OpenSSL are vulnerable to CVE-2014-0195, but this vulnerability only affects DTLS clients or servers (look for SSL VPNs… not so much HTTPS).
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The Linux trojan that spied on users by taking screenshots of their desktop has now a Windows variant, as Kaspersky’s security team has found out.
The trojan, first discovered by Dr.Web and named Linux.Ekocms, and later also identified by Sophos as Linux/Mokes-A, and then by Kaspersky as Backdoor.Linux.Mokes.a, has caused some stir in the Linux community because it was one of the first spyware threats detected in the wild on the platform.
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I’ve also tried to make stress-ng portable, so it can build fine on GNU/Hurd and Debian kFreeBSD (with Linux specific tests not built-in of course). It also contains some architecture specific features, such as handling the data and instruction cache as well as the x86 rdrand instruction and cache line locking. If there are any ARM specific features than can be stressed I’d like to know and perhaps implement stressors for them.
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Unused code is untested code, which probably means that it harbors bugs—sometimes significant security bugs. That lesson has been reinforced by the recent OpenSSH “roaming” vulnerability. Leaving a half-finished feature only in the client side of the equation might seem harmless on a cursory glance but, of course, is not. Those who mean harm can run servers that “implement” the feature to tickle the unused code. Given that the OpenSSH project has a strong security focus (and track record), it is truly surprising that a blunder like this could slip through—and keep slipping through for roughly six years.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A leaked report by a UN panel of experts is calling for a formal inquiry into Saudi human rights abuses, saying the nation is “deliberately starving” Yemeni civilians in its war, and targeting civilians in airstrikes in a “widespread and systematic manner.”
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Qarwash Mohsn Awad was already aboard his flight to Jordan at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in May 2015 when he was pulled off and escorted to a small room by two individuals – a man and a woman.
The agents questioned him – asking him for his documents, how much money he had, how many bags he had. Every time Awad answered, they responded, “You are lying, you are lying.” Agitated, Awad had no idea what was going on, he says. He was accused of having fake paperwork and told he would be locked up.
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Sopko’s office has unleashed critical reports about Pentagon spending in Afghanistan — especially TFBSO, which was finally disbanded in a mercy killing last year. Financial records show that the task force spent $43 million on a compressed natural gas filling station that has been widely mocked as the world’s most expensive. It also spent upwards of $150 million on private villas and associated security, bankrolled a multi-million dollar Afghan start-up incubator that is now defunct, and even paid to import Italian goats in order to jumpstart the country’s cashmere industry.
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In Baghdadi, five suicide bombers attacked a guesthouse belonging to a town councilman; they killed a tribal fighter acting as a guard and wounded 10 other people. Two more suicide bombers attacked first responders, killing the police chief and two policemen. In a second attack on the outskirts of twon, a dozen suicide bombers attacked a barracks and killed 25 security personnel.
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To any informed observer, the motivation for the increased frequency of these attacks, and their growth into new countries, is abundantly clear. Western imperial ambitions, especially those in Islamic-majority countries, lead to a perceived lack of self determination on the part of the body politic of those people living under dictators friendly to Western governments. When attempts to resist authoritarian leaders beholden first to foreign interests fail, frustration within the social order builds among members of that nation’s populace. This, in turn, validates the narratives of the most violent groups opposing Western rule, and attracts the young, the restless, and often the jobless elements of society most hungry for change and willing to take the most dramatic steps to initiate it. This is a phenomenon that Chalmers Johnson labeled”blowback” in a now-famous article published in The Nation in late September of 2001. Its existence has become an accepted fact in the realm of military planning, and Hillary Clinton herself warned of its possibility in March of 2011. More important to her, however, were her political ambitions, a chance to grease the palms of friendly arms dealers, and a good deed done for the domestic politics of the Clinton Foundation’s gulf supporters. If there is any action an American Secretary of State ought to take in attempting to quell violence aimed at Western targets, it is to facilitate peace talks rather than engage in fruitless military escapades overseas to intervene in conflicts about which American bureaucrats understand nothing. And, even then, such enterprises carry with them the threat of backfire. In tracing the footsteps of unrest across the whole of North and West Africa, one finds that all roads lead to Hillary Clinton and her Libyan regime-change operation. The best of all solutions is the complete withdrawal of Western military forces from the foreign lands they occupy. Only under these conditions will peace in the Sahel become an achievable outcome; and until then, the peaceful citizens of the tiny nation of Burkina Faso will be asked to foot her bill.
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The FBI says Finicum appeared to be reaching for a gun in his jacket when he was killed. The video is aerial footage, and the distance and high angle of the shot make it hard to speak conclusively about what it shows. But at the very least, Finicum did raise and lower his hands repeatedly, and had his hands lowered and near his torso when he was killed.
The agency has released both the full 26-minute aerial video of the stops, and a briefer clip showing Finicum’s attempt to run a barricade and subsequent death. Greg Bretzing, the top FBI official in Oregon, told reporters that they’re limited in discussing the encounter because of an ongoing outside review of the shooting by the Deschutes County Sheriff’s office.
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The majority state-owned company has been granted an export license despite the UAE’s involvement in the Yemeni conflict, and its own series of corruption scandals.
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Transparency Reporting
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Documents related to a US police association have been dumped online, as well as a database of personal information and member-only forum backup.
The affected organisation is the “Fraternal Order of Police” (FOP), which describes itself as “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers, with more than 325,000 members in more than 2,100 lodges.”
“We have learned today that our data system has been hacked by the Group known as Anonymous,” said a statement posted on Facebook by the FOP national president Chuck Canterbury on Thursday. The attack “appears to have originated outside of the United States,” the statement continued.
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Two days after this announcement, EPIC filed expedited FOIA requests on both sides of the pond for the text of this agreement, arguing (logically) that the people this would affect had a right to know what their governments were agreeing to. EPIC specifically had concerns that the US would offer less protection to foreign citizens’ data than to its own citizens, given that it has historically refused to extend these niceties to those residing elsewhere on the planet.
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Ashkan Soltani is a well known privacy expert who (among other things) worked with Barton Gellman at the Washington Post to analyze the Snowden documents for story worthy information — an effort that won that series a Pulitzer Prize. Soltani has been hugely instrumental in reporting on other privacy-related issues as well, including being a part of the team that also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the Wall Street Journal’s excellent What They Know series on digital privacy issues. Basically he has a long history of doing great journalism around privacy. For most of the last year, he was also the Chief Technology Officer at the FTC. Back in December, it was announced that he had moved over to work for the federal government CTO, Megan Smith, in the White House as a senior advisor. The CTO’s office has been collecting some fairly amazing tech talent recently.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The Senate rejected the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change, days after NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2014 the hottest year ever recorded on Earth.
The Republican-controlled Senate defeated a measure Wednesday stating that climate change is real and that human activity significantly contributes to it. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, offered the measure as the Senate debated the Keystone XL pipeline, which would tap the carbon-intensive oil sands in the Canadian province of Alberta.
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Finance
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Over in Japan, there’s been a big political scandal brewing over the last few days, leading the country’s economy minister Akira Amari to resign amid charges that he received significant bribes from a construction company. What makes that relevant to us here is that Amari was also Japan’s leading negotiator on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, and his resignation and the bribery charges are raising additional (and fairly serious) questions about whether or not Japan really should support the TPP. So far, the bribery that’s been discussed does not appear to directly impact that TPP, but it at least raises other questions about whether or not the TPP itself was compromised by similar corruption (of course, some may argue that the entire process, in which big companies basically helped write the thing, is itself corrupt). Amari had been expected to travel to New Zealand in the next few days for the TPP signing ceremony, but obviously someone else will now have to go.
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Japan’s Economy Minister Akira Amari has said he is resigning amid corruption allegations.
Mr Amari unexpectedly made the announcement at a press conference in Tokyo on Thursday.
But he again denied personally receiving bribes from a construction company, as had been alleged by a Japanese magazine.
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Krugman’s latest column suggests that such establishment media figures are leveraging this climate to launch spurious attacks against the left and progressive movements.
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It’s not surprising that the Washington Post (owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos) would be unhappy with a presidential candidate running on a platform of taking back the country from the millionaires and billionaires. Therefore the trashing of Sen. Bernie Sanders in an editorial, “Bernie Sanders’ Fiction-Filled Campaign” (1/27/16), was about as predictable as the sun rising.
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Last year, Ars provided an extensive introduction to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement currently being negotiated between the EU and the US. This massive deal—it involves half the world’s GDP and a third of its trade—was launched back in 2013, largely on the basis that it would provide a significant fillip to both economies. The previous EU commissioner responsible for trade, Karel de Gucht, claimed it would be “the cheapest stimulus package you can imagine.” A study published in 2013 by the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) on behalf of the European Commission predicted that the EU’s economy would be boosted by €119 billion, and the US’s by €95 billion.
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Three days before the Iowa caucuses, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released what might have been her closing argument had she been a candidate in the presidential race.
It’s a thorough indictment of a rigged system in Washington that allows corporate criminals to go free while those without the same power and influence get severely punished.
The report — a 12-page booklet titled “Rigged Justice: How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy” — cites 20 well-documented civil and criminal cases from 2015 “in which the federal government failed to require meaningful accountability.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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There’s a telling paragraph in this post from Ezra Klein, one of a series of posts written lately by self-described “wonks” defending the electoral and political approach Hillary Clinton embraces.
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With just a few days to go until the Iowa caucus, Bernie Sanders spoke to an evening rally in Burlington, Iowa on Thursday and made some of his boldest statements yet criticizing Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s political track record and Wall Street ties.
Sanders, who has faced an escalation of establishment ire in recent weeks, made a sharp contrast between his principles and his rival’s—such as his early and consistent opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Keystone XL pipeline, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton.
“Check the record, find out where my opponent was on all of these issues,” Sanders said. “It is great to be against the war after you vote for the war. It is great to be for gay rights after you insult the entire gay community by supporting DOMA.”
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A year and a half ago, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo barbarically choked my father, Eric Garner, on a Staten Island sidewalk in broad daylight. My father died that day. His death was ruled a homicide. Despite viral video footage of the incident, international media attention and widespread protests, our justice system failed to find Officer Pantaleo guilty of any crime. In fact, until a few weeks ago, the only person indicted in relation to the case was Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed it all.
As a daughter, I was devastated. As a citizen, I remain outraged — my father’s death was an absolute injustice, but not an uncommon one. By now, we know many of the other names all too well: Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Rekia Boyd. But it’s only thanks to the tireless work of organizers and protesters, who take to the streets and disrupt business as usual, that we know their names at all.
[...]
I trusted establishment Democrats who claimed to represent me, only to later watch them ignore and explain away the injustice of my father’s death. I trusted the system; then I watched as politicians on both sides of the aisle — from Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel to Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder — disregard the will of the people they were elected to represent and abdicate their responsibility to protect them. I’ve watched as our system criminalizes blackness while allowing Wall Street to bilk the American people with impunity.
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Six months ago, I was a Bernie Sanders skeptic. In July, I wrote about how Sanders had bungled his outreach to the black base. Though he spent a lot of time talking about economic inequality, his message seemed aimed at the thousands of white liberals who attended his rallies. A month later, I accused his white online supporters of condescending to black people who weren’t sold on his civil rights record.
[...]
But now, I’m beginning to rethink my position. That’s thanks, largely, to Sanders’s black women supporters. Over the last week, I’ve spoken with people like Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, Trayvon Martin family lawyer Natalie Jackson and several black female Sanders staffers, like Tezlyn Figaro. No one shaped my thinking more than Erica Garner. She’s the daughter of Eric Garner, an unarmed African American who died after being put in a choke hold by an NYPD officer in 2014.
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I’ve been a critic of Sanders. I think his main problem is a lack of radicalness, especially on foreign policy.
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New FEC filings show that all of the $417,250 in monetary donations to a Super PAC called “Black Americans for a Better Future” comes from conservative white businessmen — including $400,000, or 96 percent of the total, from white billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer.
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Censorship
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His latest movie, Long Long Time Ago, to be released on Feb 4, follows the struggles of a Chinese family living in a kampung in post-independence Singapore. It may sound heavy, but Neo assures audiences that it’s a comedy with a message.
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Privacy
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Denmark scrapped the practice in 2014 and the European Court of Justice has previously ruled that the blanket retention of internet usage is illegal, but the ministry not only plans to bring back session logging, it will go even further than before.
Jakob Willer, the director of the Telecom Industry Association, told news agency Ritzau that the government plans to carry out total surveillance on all online activities by every single internet user.
“We are actually a bit shocked that such a massive expansion has been suggested,” he said.
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I come from a meeting in the Danish ministry of Justice this afternoon,
They plan to reintroduce the data retention of Internet sessions.
It was scrapped in 2014 after the European Data Retention Directive was declared invalid by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
But now Denmark plans to require data retention much more invasive than both the old directive and the pre 2014 danish implementation of.
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One revelation was that TAO is very patient: they will monitor adversaries’ systems as a matter of course, waiting for an opportunity — such as when a system malfunctions and the vendor asks the administrators to temporarily turn off password protection for a few moments.
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Dear Microsoft, it’s never about technology. It’s about basic human respect and choice. Just let the user feel like they count. And then, you will have willing participants in your cloud experiments and online and social integration and all that. The alternative is, you are slowly but surely alienating yourself. I was the first to defend you when the keylogger nonsense cropped up, and I still think you have better privacy than your rivals. But you are testing my limits, and even though I don’t care what you think you want to achieve with all that pointless user data, forcing my hand only makes me write articles like this. Out of pure spite. It’s my basic human need to resist attempts to curtail my freedom of choice. Repeat after me. Freedom, of, choice. That’s all. Nothing more.
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Of the countries represented, the US led the encryption adoption with 54%, while Australia, Canada, and India all followed close behind with almost 50%.
In terms of what the respondents were encrypting, general customer data and customer payment data led the responses with more than three-fourths of respondents saying they always encrypt that data. Company financial information and employee bank details were also highly encrypted with roughly 70% of respondents saying that they always encrypt those types of data.
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Google is in the process of adding a new anti-malware detection program in its online malware detection tool VirusTotal. It will be used for scanning BIOS for the legitimate programs installed on it. VirusTotal will also use machine learning to learn from the program behavior and hence finding out the malware.
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CyberGhost has released its transparency report that tells us a wide range of facts regarding the usage of its VPN service all around the world. Due to the increased surveillance measures used by government, a hike in the VPN usage has been observed. The report mentions that a large number of requests to disclose the identity of VPN users are made different entities like law enforcement agencies, website owners, law firms, and police offices.
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The new Data Protection Regulation has taken four years to go through Brussels, in a convoluted process that has seen the original proposal from the European Commission utterly transformed through unprecedented levels of lobbying by companies and governments. The US was particularly aggressive, but in the end EU member states such as Germany managed to do a lot of damage with their demands for carve outs and exceptions.
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The UK government is signing off on the sales of advanced surveillance technologies to repressive regimes that it has admonished for human rights abuses, the Independent exclusively reported Wednesday.
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So we recently reported on a claim that ISIS had been spotted making use of their very own encrypted messaging app, and highlighting how totally useless US laws requiring tech companies to backdoor encryption would be in that situation. However, it turns out that we should have been a lot more skeptical of the original report, coming from a single sourced security company. Over the years, we’ve learned that single-sourced security company claims are often highly suspect, and designed much more to get attention or increase FUD, than based on any real issue. The good folks over at Daily Dot are now reporting that this encrypted messaging app doesn’t really appear to exist, and their investigation is pretty thorough and fairly convincing. Just like the claims that ISIS had a “training manual for encryption,” this claim appears to be false.
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Harrison Ford and Anthony Hopkins have joined the cast of Official Secrets, the long-mooted film about the Observer’s reporting of the GCHQ bugging scandal in 2003, it has been announced.
In the latest film to cover the activities of whistleblowers and the journalists who report their revelations, Official Secrets will tell the story of Katharine Gun, an officer at the Cheltenham-based government eavesdropping agency. She leaked an email that contained a request by America’s NSA to illegally bug the United Nations offices of six key countries in the run-up to the UN’s vote on whether to authorise the Iraq war.
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Civil Rights
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Parents have every right to send their children to a religious school, but not on the public dime.
Opportunity in education. Effective education options for every child. Stimulating educational environments. Every year at the end of January, the proponents of National School Choice Week emphasize these ideals as reasons that parents, educators, and policymakers should support school voucher and tax credit programs.
By appealing to the core aspirations for reform desired among the education community, the school choice movement masks the fact that these programs do not actually offer the benefits their supporters tout. Instead, voucher and tax credit programs typically funnel taxpayer funds into private and often religious schools that are free to discriminate against students on a variety of grounds and are exempt from meeting the same educational requirements as public schools.
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In a display of cooperation across ethnic lines, Tibetan and Muslim students and their parents came together this week in a public protest to demand better funding for the education of minority groups in northwestern China’s Qinghai province, Tibetan sources said.
Gathering on Jan. 24 outside government offices in the provincial capital Xining, protesters called especially for an investigation into the activities of the education department head of the Bayan Khar (in Chinese, Hualong) Hui Autonomous County in Qinghai’s Tsoshar (Haidong) prefecture, a local source told RFA’s Tibetan Service.
“The protesters were parents and students of Tibetan and Muslim origin belonging to a local school called the Gangjong School,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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A Georgia state representative has triggered anger on social media after he made several statements that appear to defend the actions of the Ku Klux Klan, a group he insists “was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order.”
“It made a lot of people straighten up,” Republican State Rep. Tommy Benton said, according to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. “I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were.”
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In Aladdin, female characters speak only 10 per cent. While in Mulan, despite the eponymous character saving China, female characters utter 23 per cent of the dialogue.
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The Obama administration will entirely withhold 22 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server because they have been classified as “top secret,” the State Department said on Friday.
The existence of multiple top secret emails in the Democratic presidential front-runner’s inbox will only increase public scrutiny on the former secretary of State’s unusual email arrangement, mere days before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest on Monday.
The 37 pages of emails are the first time the Obama administration has confirmed that messages within Clinton’s server while she was at State merit one of the highest levels of classification. Although the State Department has previously classified more than 1,300 of Clinton’s emails upon release, the vast majority of those were at lower classification levels.
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The State Department on Friday will release roughly 2,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails but will delay the final batch of messages until after voters go to the polls in the first several primary states.
In a court filing late on Thursday evening, the department insisted that it “regrets” its inability to publish the final 7,000 pages on Friday, as a federal court ordered it to do last year.
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Hillary Clinton’s nightmare is not the sudden resurgence of Bernie Sanders. It is the fidelity to the rule of law of the FBI.
The recent revelations of the receipt by Clinton of a Special Access Program email, as well as cut and pasted summaries of state secrets on her server and on her BlackBerry nearly guarantee that the FBI will recommend that the Department of Justice convene a grand jury and seek her indictment for espionage. Here is the backstory.
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The Obama administration confirmed for the first time Friday that Hillary Clinton’s home server contained closely guarded government secrets, censoring 22 emails that contained material requiring one of the highest levels of classification. The revelation comes three days before Clinton competes in the Iowa presidential caucuses.
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Social networking giant Facebook announced Friday that it would ban the private sale of guns on its site, and on its photo-sharing platform Instagram.
Although the site itself does not act as a retailer of firearms, it has allowed users to sell guns on Facebook pages or in Instagram posts. The new prohibitions will affect only private and person-to-person sales, and not licensed gun sellers.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick, one of the leading scholars on net neutrality, has filed a report with the FCC detailing how T-Mobile’s Binge On clearly violates net neutrality. As we’ve been highlighting, Binge On has numerous problems when it comes to net neutrality, and appears to clearly violate some of the FCC’s rules. There’s also the fact that T-Mobile flat out lied about it and claimed that it was “optimization” when it’s really throttling.
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One of President Barack Obama’s selling points for the TPP has been claims that it helps preserve “an open and free Internet.” The references to an open and free Internet, which is closely linked to net neutrality, may strike a chord with those concerned with digital issues. However, the Trouble with the TPP is that a close examination of the text and a comparison with existing net neutrality rules in many TPP countries reveals that it doesn’t advance the issue. In fact, the standards are so weak and unenforceable that at least half of the TPP countries already far exceed them.
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Back in October 2015, an admin error caused the ownership of its main domain “google.com” to lapse and a lucky fellow managed to snap it up.
Sanmay Ved, a researcher managed to buy google.com through Google domains for a brief moment, which led to Google having to buy it back for around $12,000 USD.
Although this was seemingly done as a moment of opportunity rather than a means to get quick rich. Google paid the sum for the domain which Sanmay went onto donate to charity.
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The debate over whether or not Binge On violates Net Neutrality has been raging ever since the service was announced in November. The latest party to weigh in is Barbara van Schewick, law professor at Stanford University.
In a new report published today — and filed to the FCC, as well — van Schewick says that Binge on “violates key net neutrality principles” and “is likely to violate the FCC’s general conduct rule.” She goes on to make several arguments against Binge On, saying that services in Binge On distorts competition because they’re zero-rated and because video creators are more likely to use those providers for their content, as the zero-rated content is more attractive to consumers.
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Key elements for their Internet are optical white boxes and bare metal optical switches. Bare metal switches use merchant chips rather than custom silicon, and can be cheaper and easier to use. Open source software can be used.
Data Centers are embracing these cheaper open switches that can be programmed like Linux computers, explains Computerworld in a 2015 article.
I wrote about merchant chips in April 2015 in ‘Open source a driver for merchant chips.’
[...]
Add to this the idea of a special network virtualization mechanism that lets multiple networks use the same infrastructure, plus the aforementioned open source elements and high-speed light-based networks, and the Internet will be able to move forward with exciting new applications a la Google and iOS, they reckon.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Not too surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has been a big booster of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement over the past year, repeatedly praising the deal and claiming it will save the world in all sorts of ways. Most of that is based on the faulty belief that the TPP is actually a “free trade” deal (it’s actually the opposite), with some of it just being the standard WSJ faith-based belief that “if big businesses like it, it must be good.”
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Copyrights
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However, as we’ve explained time and time again (much to the chagrin of David Slater, the photographer whose camera was used to take the photo), the photo is clearly in the public domain, as it’s long been held that the Copyright Act only applies to human authors. In court a few weeks ago, the judge made it clear he didn’t believe PETA had any case at all, but Judge William Orrick has now come out with his written opinion in the case explaining his reasoning why. Not surprisingly, it more or less tracks with what he said in court: there is no evidence that the Copyright Act applies to monkeys, and thus, case dismissed — with leave to amend.
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The US Copyright Act should be amended to become more favourable towards fair use and change the way that damages are awarded in cases, a report from the US Department of Commerce has argued.
In a white paper released yesterday, January 28, the Internet Policy Task Force (IPTF) at the department outlined ways judges and juries could be given more guidance when assessing damages.
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The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force has released a set of copyright reform proposals. The Government recommends Congress to implement various changes to avoid excessive damages awards and stresses that copyright trolling should not be tolerated.
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Yeah, it was taken down by EMI. But why, you ask? While many of us would thank anyone or anything that could tear the existence of this horror show away from wherever unsuspecting innocents might happen across it, what stake does EMI Music have in this song sung by The USA Freedom Kids?
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A couple of years ago, the Commerce Department put out a somewhat problematic “Green Paper” on copyright, that at times seemed to have been pretty heavily influenced by the maximalist view of the world, without recognition of how widely copyright is abused. Lots of people responded to it with their concerns — including an excellent response from (believe it or not) Hollywood screenwriters who actually pointed out the problems of copyright maximalism, statutory damages, abusive takedowns and attacks on fair use. I don’t know if it was that letter that really influenced things, but the Commerce Department has now come out with its follow up “White Paper” and it’s really quite good. It basically says that copyright’s statutory damages are a huge mess and need to be fixed.
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In a real-world fairytale story this week, the discovery was announced of a previously unpublished work by beloved mycologist (also children’s author) Beatrix Potter, 150 years after her birth.
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Send this to a friend
01.29.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Battistelli’s vision of the EPO is extremely grim
Photo credit: Gizmodo
Summary: A look back (about a dozen years) to the days of Benoît Battistelli walking around with bodyguards whilst only a French officer at INPI
THERE are a lot of things that EPO staff does not know. The flow of information is impeded by an atmosphere of terror, which is a top-down thing (imposed from the above, i.e. from the management).
“I noticed some references to Battistelli’s bodyguards in your articles on TechRights,” one reader told us. “It seems that Battistelli’s penchant for bodyguards pre-dates his current job at the EPO.”
Battistelli had every window frame in EPO buildings screwed shut.”
–AnonymousOur reader continued: “I recently came across a humourous French blog post from 2004 which reports on Battistelli’s public debut as Director-General of the French Institut Nationale de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI) at the “Enjeux Press Preview” which took place on Monday, July 5, 2004. At the end of the report, it is mentioned that on that occasion Battistelli was accompanied by two bodyguards.
“The French blog post by Jean-Bernard Condat [from Paris] can be found here. I add an English translation [PDF]
which attempts to capture the whimsical humour of the original. Feel free to share it with your readers!”
Under Battistelli, the EPO looks rather reminiscent of a war zone. He even uses war-type language to keep the staff under control, as if he is fighting a large legion of terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. His staff's representatives he simply called "Mafia". Well, it sure seems like if there’s a combative element inside the EPO, this is something that Battistelli brought into the EPO rather than inherited from Brimelow, his predecessor. This isn’t leadership; it’s monarchy; it’s repressive. To quote parts of the PDF (which incorporates pictures and more):
Benoît Battistelli, the new Director-General of the INPI, makes his public debut
[...]
BATTISTELLI remains unperturbed and replies that “he is not personally an ayatollah of IP rights for SMEs”.
[...]
BATTISTELLI rises to depart and his two bodyguards follow him. The concert is over.
“Battistelli had every window frame in EPO buildings screwed shut,” one person told us recently. “That is how he “prevents” further on-site suicides. No more jumping out of windows. But colleagues mutilate themselves in their offices now. Battistelli dislikes the bloody mess they leave behind. He decided to silence them by starting an investigation procedure against them. Once the procedure started, employees do not have the right to talk about any detail. He must know better – this is a time bomb.”
It’s like those anti-suicide nets in Foxconn (China). “They are not actually solving the issue,” as my wife put it when I asked her about it, they’re just “implementing a workaround.” █
“Never murder a man who is committing suicide.”
–Woodrow Wilson
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Internally known as Meany Minnoye
Photo of the protest at The Hague courtesy of Marieke Manschot
Summary: As the ‘damage control’ person for EPO management, which is extremely unpopular these days, Guillaume Minnoye ended up just insulting the Dutch legal system and reinforcing workers’ negative perception of their management
YESTERDAY we published 5 articles about the protest at The Hague (see this Wiki for a complete list or check this couple of later articles). All the articles we found were in Dutch, except for one article from Dutch News (which writes in English). This means that we are still waiting and hoping to find some translations. Here is yet another article about the protest or related/surrounding events, titled “Medewerkers Europese Octrooi Organisatie zijn tirannie beu en gaan de straat op. By our rough count, there are now at least 10 different Dutch articles about the latest developments. That’s not even counting blogs! This probably means that the protest had the desired outcome. Despite having nothing to do with football or celebrities (e.g. FIFA or David Bowie), the matter is now mainstream news, at least in Holland.
“SUEPO has called for independent mediation between it and the EPO several times to no avail. In the meantime, Union officials are sacked, demoted, subjected to secret investigations and made sick.”
–AnonymousYesterday we posted a video of VP1 Minnoye (a better video is now available though Twitter). Minnoye was mentioned here several times before, e.g. in [1, 2, 3, 4] (he’s no friend of Techrights, which he reportedly moans about).
By agreeing to speak for the EPO (maybe it was the default choice for language-related/lingual reasons) Guillaume Minnoye put himself in the firing line. We’d like to share just a sample of (the more polite) responses to his appearance on Dutch TV.
One person wrote that this “pathetic VP1 [is] stating “his door is always open” when he is one of the most aggressive ones towards SUEPO officials is an absolute must see” and the response was this: “Does the revelation by SUEPO in October that VP1 met a journalist of the Financiele Dagblad shortly before the latter published confidential information relating to a disciplinary procedure against a judge to discredit him (http://techrights.org/2015/10/19/benoit-battistelli-smears/) perhaps explain the sudden mad hunt then triggered against the Union?”
We wrote about this at the time. A Dutch article probably defamed an EPO/board judge. If Minnoye was behind it, then maybe some time in the future Minnoye can be sued for defamation. See the hypocrisy here?
“EPO VP Minnoye seems to be singing from the same hymn-sheet as the Dutch government.”
–Anonymous“This is a bit weird,” another person wrote. “The Dutch government seems to deliberately show a Janus-face regarding this issue. On one hand they now start an independent investigation into working conditions and are publicly negative about EPO management, but on the other hand they are extremely dismissive of the decision reached by the The Hague Court of Appeal (and in my view disrespectful regarding the judiciary) in SUEPO v EPO last year. They formally were allowed to join the proceedings in appeal at the Hoge Raad (supreme court) last year on the side of EPO. According Volkskrant in that case, oral arguments are heard today (Friday 29).
“I wonder if these are two fully separate processes, or whether it is a deliberate attempt to act socially but at the same time maintaining the image of an international organization friendly privileges respecting nation….”
Regarding the investigation to be launched into the EPO’s practices, one person noted that “no social study will be performed by the Netherlands. They “just” refer to the study of the Administrative Council as Tweedy Chambers mentions….”
The following comment agrees:
Yes, the “social study” is not being done by the Dutch government, but was something forced on the President by the AC in what someone correctly called its “hand-wringing” mode. If I remember rightly BB announced that it would be done in “close co-operation” with himself. Whatever about the study’s so-called independence after this statement the AC is simply kicking the ball down the road.
SUEPO has called for independent mediation between it and the EPO several times to no avail. In the meantime, Union officials are sacked, demoted, subjected to secret investigations and made sick.
For Merpel’s information about the sick Union official: in the “good old days” if the EPO’s doctor disagreed with a treating physician about an employee’s sickness, there was a dispute resolution mechanism involving one of a panel of third specialists to which they could jointly refer the case. This worked well, too well for it to be allowed to continue under BB. I do not know if he bothered to send an office doctor in this case, but rather formed his own opinion. It would not be the first time that he has ignored medical opinion, even from a doctor of the office, when it has suited him.
“The literal translation,” noted another commenter about a related matter, “is: The government worries on the social situation within the Patent Office, but remarks that it is irrelevant for the question whether or not an international organisation has immunity if it is accused of violations of human rights or other violations of international law.”
“Did you hear that, excellent judges of the Supreme Court? Don’t even BOTHER to render a decision! Because “the Rule of Law and Human Rights will never apply at the European Patent Office!”
–AnonymousAnonymous then wrote: “Congratulations to my management. Have just watched the National News on Dutch TV. EPO and this sordid story – news item number 5 (and the apparent wonderful production figures over the last few years didn’t feature once in the item – we were even the item before Iranian President’s visit to France !). All this when there are an awful lot more important things going on in the world. Rather sad. Some say that there is “no such thing as bad press”, some also say that “what goes around, comes around”,, all we know he’s managed to make a mountain out of a molehill by trying to use a hammer to crack a nut,,,”
One person had written that “Minnoye declaring to the NL TV that should the Cassation case be lost for the EPO they will simply disregard its application ….” (we don’t have a translation of what he said, but let’s assume he did say so).
“Did you hear that,” joked one commenter, “excellent judges of the Supreme Court? Don’t even BOTHER to render a decision! Because “the Rule of Law and Human Rights will never apply at the European Patent Office! NEVER! Mwuhahahahaha!!”
If this is the sort of mentality that Minnoye brings to the EPO, what does that say about Minnoye?
Here is another new take on it:
EPO VP Minnoye seems to be singing from the same hymn-sheet as the Dutch government.
I’m not 100% sure whether I correctly understood this article from NOS but the last line seems to say that the Dutch government takes the position that immunity of an IO has to be accorded precedence over alleged violations of human rights and other international law:
“De regering maakt zich weliswaar zorgen over de sociale situatie bij het Octrooibureau, maar stelt: “voor de vraag of een internationale organisatie immuniteit toekomt (is) niet van belang of haar mensenrechtenschendingen of andere schendingen van internationaal recht verweten worden.”
http://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2083389-hoe-ver-gaat-de-immuniteit-van-het-europees-octrooibureau.html
Maybe a Dutch native speaker can clarify ???
The Hague is probably best known (or internationally-renowned) for international justice, but the EPO has made a laughing stock out of it. Instead of the The Hague being synonymous with criminal justice (e.g. war crimes) it may soon become synonymous with docility and complicity for the betterment of corporate power. As this one comment put it:
Really? Are they not thinking about the consequences? Do the really want to have a decision that would discredit the whole system of International Organizations in the Netherland?
What credibility wold be left e.g. for
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
International Court of Justice
International Criminal Court
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
Permanent Court of International Justice
Special Court for Sierra Leone
Special Tribunal for Lebanon
“Oh, but wait: we are allowed to violate human rights and international law in order to enforce human rights and international law”?
Would it not be easier to dump Battistelli?
Whatever is happening in The Hague right now (politically or otherwise), this is an embarrassment to the Dutch and it’s the EPO’s fault. Dutch politicians ought to get more actively involved in order to salvage what’s left of this city’s courts’/tribunals’ reputation, especially after last year’s ruling, which Battistelli simply snubbed and disregarded. Earlier today I exchanged a few words with John Kerstens. He is one among several Dutch politicians who should be commended for having the courage to confront the out-of-control EPO management, which even threatens politicians and delegates. █
“It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.”
–Thomas Jefferson
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
How to get there (in Brussels)…
Summary: Current leader of the FFII, Benjamin Henrion, will deliver a talk about software patents and their relation to the Unitary Patent Court this Sunday in Brussels, Belgium
AFTER his previous talk at CCC (we gave a headsup at the time), Benjamin Henrion now prepares to deliver a talk not too far from European Parliament. Previously he spoke about it near the EPO in Berlin/Munich. What will he speak about? The UPC, or “Software Patents v3.0″ as he calls it. From the abstract:
The Unitary Patent is the third major attempt to legalize software patents in Europe. The European Patent Court will become the Eastern District of Texas when it comes to software patent disputes in Europe. As happened in America, the concentration of power will force up legal costs, punish small European innovators, and benefit large patent holders.
The second attempt to codify EPO software patents failed in 2005, after many years of debate, the directive was rejected under the request of large multinational corporations, that prefered the creation of a central patent court over the debate on software patents.
The Unitary Patent Court is a deeply flawed project, as it is based on dubious economic studies, a rogue patent office (the EPO), a court stuffed with biased patent specialists, and is out of parliamentary control. It will participate to global patent warming, rubberstamp software patents, multiply the number of patent trolls, and increase the entry cost for defendants, which is already out of reach for many of us.
This talk is on Sunday at 10 AM (Room UD2.218A). We hope to publish a video recording of the talk once it’s done.
Speaking of Brussels, the EPO wants some lobbying muscle over there. This would include UPC lobbying for sure. Can actual programmers and engineers (like Henrion) beat the lobbyists? █
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Posted in EFF, Patents at 9:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Electronic Frontier Foundation looks like it may be returning to direct criticism of software patents rather than particular groups of actors that exploit them, e.g. patent trolls
OVER the years (since 2006 when Novell paid a lip service to the EFF with some money) we have been both supportive and critical of the EFF’s approach towards software patents. We last wrote about it a few days ago. Other articles on such matters include:
Based on this new article from the EFF (published very recently), not only is the EFF capable of naming software patents explicitly (it was always about “stupid” patents and “trolls” as of late); it’s also prepared to slam them. To quote some relevant paragraphs:
In December, over 3,000 of you rallied in support in support of a proposed Department of Education (ED) policy that would make ED-funded educational resources a lot more accessible to educators and students around the world.
You weren’t the only ones: the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and numerous other pro-user groups spoke up. Together, we all sent a loud message: Team Internet is on the side of open education.
Browsing through all 147 comments, a pattern quickly emerges. Open web advocates, open education groups, and many education professionals all support the idea of ED-funded resources being shared widely under open licenses (though we might quibble on a few specific details). One group kept confusing us, though: universities. Why were some universities opposing a rule that would directly benefit their students and faculty?
When you dig a bit deeper, it looks like universities’ opposition to open licensing has nothing to do with students’ access to educational resources. What’s really playing out is a longstanding fight over how universities use patents—more specifically, software patents. Open education just happens to be caught in the crossfire.
[...]
Software Patents Ruin Everything
The AAU statement questions “whether the Department has the legal authority under 35 USC 212 to issue a requirement to openly license all computer software source code developed with grant funds.” This is a reference to a law enacted in 1980, commonly known as the Bayh-Dole Act. Before Bayh-Dole, universities couldn’t apply for patents for inventions created using federal funding; instead, the government itself was responsible for patenting federally funded inventions [.pdf]; when it did so, it would only let others use them under nonexclusive licenses.
After Bayh-Dole, a whole industry of university tech transfer offices began to appear. Each tech transfer program has its own policies—some are more flexible and friendly to the inventors’ wishes than others—but they all ostensibly exist to sell or license faculty inventions to third parties. Some of them also assert their patents directly, as the University of Wisconsin-Madison did in its recent suit against Apple.
It’s important to note here that the ED proposal doesn’t touch patents at all. Since the proposal covers software, it’s possible that grantees might want to apply for patents for a few of the works covered under the policy. But there’s nothing in the proposal to stop them from doing that: not every open source license that would comply with the policy requires that creators give up patent assertion rights.
Remember that software patents are fueling trolls, so any discussion about patent trolls often evades the core issue and instead deals with symptoms (much to the chagrin of large corporations). The EPO-funded IAM 'magazine', which often grooms patent trolls, accepts payments from trolls, and even organises events for them, is openwashing patents right now (“open innovation”) and demonstrates what happens when patent profiteers speak to other patent profiteers. IAM has become like some sort of think tank for trolls and maximalists. Here it is going soft on trolls and so-called patent assertion entities. On the other hand there are sites like IP Troll Tracker, which is now congratulating Florian Müller for criticising the US patent system. All in all, it’s nice to see that the EFF now speaks a little more about software patents, not just trolls. We encourage the EFF to do more of that. █
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Posted in America, Apple, Patents, Samsung at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Original/English
Publicado en America, Apple, Patents, Samsung at 7:29 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Esta reciente foto de Rick Frenkel (del Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng) nos muestra y recuerda que Frenkel todavía esta combatiendo a los troles de patentes.
Sumario: Eventos reciéntes en el mundo de los trolles de patentes, incluyendo los relacionados a Apple y Linux/Android, donde las batallas de patentes de software persisten y se han convertido en un factor considerable.
La decadencia de Apple puede ser explicada en muchas maneras (Android/Linux tiene mucho que ver con ello). Pero estamos particularmente interesados en la asquerosa estrategia de litigación de patentes de Apple, que motivo nuestro llamado a un BOYCOTT hace media decada (el que seguimos motivando), despues de sus primeros ataques (contra una menos armada HTC). La OEP comparte la culpa aquí como que facilitó muchos de esos ataques por erróneamente otorgar patentes que más tarde fueron encontrada ser invalidas.
Los más vocales proponentes de patentes de software nos han hecho recordar que ¨Samsung va a pagar a Apple aproximadamente $546 millones en daños como parte de una continua disputa de infingimiento de patentes entre los dos gigantes.¨
“La OEP comparte la culpa aquí como que facilitó muchos de esos ataques por erróneamente otorgar patentes que más tarde fueron encontrada ser invalidas.”Esto es acerca de patentes de software. Apple las esta usando para sacar ganancias de productos rivales pero también para prohibirlos. Pero es una espada de doble filo por que Apple también ha sido demandada por un monto similar (medio millón de dolares) por un trol de patentes. Esta vez, como siempre, son patentes de software (los trolles de patentes rarámente usan otra clase de patentes). El desgraciado troll de patentes VirnetX quiere que ej jurado le dé medio millón de dólares de Apple. Hay algo poético acerca de esto, dada las noticias de arriba. Cuando un troll de patentes ataca a Apple, como este nuevo artículo de Joe Mullin ayuda a mostrar, grandes cantidades de dinero son exigidas. ¨Un juicio reciéntemente empezó en el lugar perferido de las patentes: East Texas,¨ escribió Mullin, ¨ y es uno grande. VirtnetX, una compañía poseedora de patentes que dice ser dueña un buen número de ellas relatadas a Networks Privados Virtuales (VPNs), se está enfrentando a Apple.
¨VirnetX dice que la VPN tecnología usada por Apple, así como su mensajero reconocedor de caras, infringen patentes de la compañía. Un jucio comenzó hoy, y VirnetX busca $532 millones en daños.¨
“Esto es acerca de patentes de software. Apple las esta usando para sacar ganancias de productos rivales pero también para prohibirlos.”Hemos escrito mucho acerca de VirnetX y East Texas en el pasado. Esto es un gran ejemplo de lo que las patentes de software hacen a los trolles de patentes.
Hablando de East Texas, parece que el rastreador de trolles de patentes (Rick Frenkel) esta ocupadísimo ahora mismo. Escribió bastante acerca de Fish & Richardson PC, especialmente cuando el padre de trolles de patentes, Sr. Niro los enjuició (antes que Frenkel y su empleador Cisco fueran enjuiciados). Recuerden que lo que trajo problemas al rastreador de trolles de patentes (muchos articulos acerca de esto aquí). Fish & Richardson tuviero que ver mucho con ello directa o indirectamente. Fish & Richardson es una compañía que trabajo por multinacionales como Samsung y Nokia en patentes. Ahora expresa amor de la UPC (hace menos de un día en medios de abogados). La publicación de ellos ayer dice: ¨el próximo gran paso por la UPC sera la selección de jueces. Aproximadamente 1,300 personas han expresado su interés, incluyendo muchos jueces altamente calificados, abogados de leyes y abogados de patentes. El comite preparatorio es esperado adoptar una selección de procedimiento en su reunión de Febrero 24-25, 2016 y comenzar el proceso inmediatamente despues.
“Resulta que el Rastreador de Trolles de Patentes Todavía los esta combatiendo.”Fish & Richardson en sí es una firma de abogados de patentes, y una que representa clientes que les puede traer muchísimo dinero cuando una compañía como Apple, por no hablar de algunos pequeños trolles de patentes, tomen ventaja de la UPC por juicios de gran escala sin fronteras. Tengan esto en mente; ven que podrida esta la UPC; MUESTRA QUIÉN SE BENEFICIARÍA DE ELLA. Por supuesto no las PYMEs europeas.
Suficientemente interesado, Joe Mullin ha escrito esta pieza acerca de trolles de patentes que atacaron Newegg y rápidamente se lamentaron. Resulta que el Rastreador de Trolles de Patentes Todavía los esta combatiendo. Los juicios de difamación en su contra de parte de los trolles no lo han detenido. Ante lo cual nos sacamos el sombrero delante de tan magnífico caballero. Para citar de la de arriba: “Latham & Watkins socio Rick Frenkel, quien representa a Newegg en algunos de sus casos de patentes. Frenkel y Cheng hicieron una parada para barbacoa y pasteles fritos en un reciente viaje a la zona activa de patente de este de Texas “. Buen provecho Señores. █
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Posted in America, Deception, Patents at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Publicado in America, Deception, Patents at 6:45 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Ayudando a los trolles de patentes cuya arma preferida son las patentes de software
Robert L. Stoll habla en un evento de la Chemical Heritage Foundation, no confundiral por la AVARA, socia de Koch Industries, anti-ciencia extremista de derecha grupo llamado la Heritage Foundation (photo source)
Sumario: El último ejemplo de covertura parcializada e incompleta acerca de patentes, donde la gente que hace sus ganancias de ellas pretenden hablar de los intereses de los Estados Unidos en vez de ellos mismos y las GIGANTES CORPORACIONES DE DONDE PROVIENEN.
Los reportajes de los medios en materias como patentes son pobres sino completamente terribles. A los medios de comunicación les gusta hablar con los abogados de patentes en vez de hacerlo con la gente que actualmente son impactadas por las patentes. Estos medios también conversan con los oficiales del systema de patentes, como el trístemente celebre David Kappos, empleado de IBM que lideró la Oficina de Patentes y Marcas de los Estados Unidos (USPTO) y ahora HACE DINERO DEL MÁXIMALISMO DE PATENTES DENTRO DE UNA FIRMA PATENTE-CENTRICA (de oficina pública a buitre privado, o puertas giratorias). El promueve patentes de software estos días bajo la dirección de sun no so encubiertos amos.
“A los medios de comunicación les gusta hablar con los abogados de patentes en vez de hacerlo con la gente que actualmente son impactadas por las patentes.”Hablando de IBM, como notamos aquí el otro día, Forbes continúa incentivando a la acumulación de patentes (¨¿Porqué las Ganancias de la Propiedad Intelectual de IBM continúa declinando?¨) por razones que tienen que ver con la propiedad (de los medios). Mientras las grandes corporaciones dominen los medios, la parcialidad estará impregnada y mucha gente lo tomará por establecido, a menos que lean medios alternativos o blogs como este.
La propaganda persiste hoy dia, cortesía de lo que The Hill engañosamente titula ¨contribuyente¨ (suena inocentemente suficiente); apoyado por LOS ABOGADOS DE PATENTES QUIENES AMAN LAS PATENTES DE SOFTWARE. El chacal Robert L. Stoll reciéntemente ha publicado en los medios de los cabildeadores un ataque en los tests relacionados con Alice. El titular dice: ¨La nueva materia selectiva de patentes hiere la competitidad en los Estados Unidos¨. Que tal TONTERÍA. De nuevo la USPTO o algun abogado de patentes PRETENDE QUE LAS PATENTES DE SOFTARE SON BUENAS PARA LA ECONOMÍA DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS (tal vez sólo es buena para su propia ocupación parasitaria, al contrario de la economía real). ¨Por esta razón,¨ concluye, nuestras cortes deben reexaminar el criterio de ¨dos puntas¨ en materia de elegibilidad de patentes. La economía innovadora de los Estados Unidos y los trabajos que ella crea no puede sobrevivir por mucho tiempo el abandono de la amplia materia subjetiva para la elegibilidad de patentes, que nos ha hecho lideres en innovación el último siglo. -Pueden creerlo la economía de todo un país o solo de las grandes coporaciones. Ellos pretenden ser los Estados Unidos (tal vez sean sus dueños) pero que decir de las pequeñas y medianas empresas que son las más perjudicadas por este injusto systema-.
“Las políticas por las que ellos abogan también AYUDAN A LOS TROLES DE PATENTES Y PROPONENTES DE LAS PATENTES DE SOFTWARE COMO IBM (de donde proviene Kappos).”¿Qué trabajos ha tenido Stoll que actualmente hayan producido algo? ¿Ha escrito Stoll alguna vez una simple línea de códig en su vida? ¿Quién es Stoll de todas maneras? Por su propia descripción, ¨Stol es socio y co-presidente del grupo de propiedad intelectual Drinker Biddle & Reath así como anterior comisionado por patentes en la Oficina de Patentes y Marcas de los Estados Unidos.¨ De acuerdo a su perfil de trabajo: ¨Gano su grado en Leyes de la Universidad Católica mientras trabajaba por la USPTO. Recibió su bachiller en Ingeniería Química de la Universidad de Maryland,¨ Nada que ver con software entonces.
Es triste que aquellos leyendo medios corporativos/corriente principal son expuestos a los puntos de vista de aquellos símilares a Stoll y Kappos. A ellos NO LES IMPORTA la ¨Innovación de la economía de América y los trabajos¨ como sostienen. Les IMPORTA SÓLO SUS TRABAJOS, que envuelve chantaje económico (´impuesto´ de patentes) a aquellos que realmente crean cosas. Las políticas por las que ellos abogan también AYUDAN A LOS TROLES DE PATENTES Y PROPONENTES DE LAS PATENTES DE SOFTWARE COMO IBM (de donde proviene Kappos). █
“Si quieres persuadir, debe apelar al interés más que el intelecto.”
–Benjamin Franklin
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you’re new or relatively new to Linux, you may be looking around for good educational resources and perhaps some tutorials. Whether you’re new to Linux or looking to become a more advanced user, there are a lot of free online books and tutorials that can give you guidance. In this post, you’ll find our newly updated collection of many good Linux reference guides and tools online–all available at no cost.
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Desktop
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Most people throw away their old computers when they get new ones. Don’t be one of those people. Instead, turn your old PC into a Linux file server, a smart TV hub, a web caching proxy, Network Attached Storage, or even your own private cloud solution. With Linux, the possibilities are endless.
Here are 8 things you can do with an old PC and Linux. Keep in mind that these are just eight picks. It’s not the be-all-end-all list. There is no doubt that there are other things that can be done on Linux that simply didn’t make the list.
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Server
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IBM has revealed new technology features and collaborations for its LinuxONE family of Linux systems, with a particular focus on hybrid cloud capabilities.
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IBM invested a billion dollars in Linux in 2002. Some things remain the same. Last year, IBM introduced LinuxONE, a new pair of IBM mainframes along with Linux and open-source software and services. These new systems are the LinuxONE Emperor, which built on the IBM z13 mainframe and its z13 CPU, and its little brother, Rockhopper, which is now moving from the older z12 processor to the z13.
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Recognizing that challenge, standards organization Linaro is pushing a new open-source software reference platform that will provide easy access to firmware and common software tools for easier integration of ARM servers in data centers.
Linaro is a major player in the development of Linux and Android software for ARM-based devices and servers. The organization is handling the development of Android for Google’s Project Ara custom smartphone, and has adapted the Chrome browser for mobile devices.
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Linux containers are an operating system level virtualization technology for providing multiple isolated Linux environments on a single Linux host. Unlike virtual machines (VMs), containers do not run dedicated guest operating systems. Rather, they share the host operating system kernel and make use of the guest operating system system libraries for providing the required OS capabilities. Since there is no dedicated operating system, containers start much faster than VMs.
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Up your computing power with an upgraded or brand new server that you can build yourself
While big business and big data may be utilising mainframes more of late, the concept of servers is not going away any time soon. Servers are an integral part of any system, however large your IT infrastructure is. Whether it’s inside the data centre or tucked away in your (well-ventilated!) cupboard at home, there are still a lot of uses for servers in 2015.
For the office you may want to save a bit of money and create something perfect for your needs that you know exactly how to maintain. For home you may just want to enhance your setup and make the entire network more efficient. For both it’s a great way to separate certain aspects of your network to control it in a more efficient way.
There are many components of a server that you need to keep in mind, but it boils down to an appropriate hardware selection and a good distro for the task at hand. In this tutorial, we are going to concentrate on file and web servers, two base server systems that can be expanded and modified in multiple ways to best fit the situation you are in.
As we’re teaching you how to build a better web server, we will first take a quick detour to tell you what you should know if you want to upgrade your current server so that it can compete with the new tech.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Good news from Qt and bad news for 32 bit Google Chrome users. The Linux Foundation ditches individual membership and Microsoft MITs more code. Plus loads of Finds, Neurons, Voices, Competition Prizes and An Important Announcement.
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Kernel Space
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With the first test release out this week for the Linux 4.5 kernel I have carried out some fresh benchmarks on different AMD Radeon graphics cards for comparing the very latest open-source driver performance against that of the proprietary AMD Linux driver. Here are how the competing AMD OpenGL Linux stacks are comparing to one another for starting off 2016.
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After the release of the Linux 4.3.4, 4.1.16 LTS, 3.14.59 LTS and 3.10.95 LTS kernels, today we would like to inform our readers about the immediate availability for download of the long-term supported Linux kernel 3.18.26.
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Meanwhile, the comments on Garrett’s blog suggest that, whatever else happens, Garrett has tapped into a general perception. For instance, the community site FOSS Force discussed the issue under the headline “Linux Foundation Sells Out.”
Clearly, to many, the Linux Foundation represents the community poorly. However, the accuracy of that perception seems more mixed that either side seems willing to acknowledge.
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Some heralded Docker’s acquisition of UK-based Unikernel Systems last week as the golden dawn of a post-container era. Others showed healthy skepticism.
One person firmly in the latter camp is Bryan Cantrill, who typed up a long blog post on why he believes unikernels are “unfit” for production. Cantrill is chief technology officer of San Francisco-based Joyent, which builds software to manage containers across whole data centers.
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Linux has seen more than its fair share of controversy through the years. And, that’s not so surprising. For one thing, the operating system flies in the teeth of deeply entrenched multinational companies. The fact that it stands for users instead of vested interests has drawn more than a little ire as well.
And, let’s be honest. Sometimes the controversy comes from within our own camp. Although the Open Source community is generally very welcoming and accepting, there always will be conflicts when a large group of people works together on a big project. It happens in offices. It happens in universities. And it has certainly happened on the Linux Kernel Mailing list.
It shouldn’t be so surprising that tempers occasionally flare. People may come to the Open Source world with rose-tinted spectacles, expecting to join a utopia. I guess it can be disappointing to realize that we’re human after all (yes, even Linus Torvalds).
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Jumping Bean today announced it is partnering with The Linux Foundation to deliver the nonprofit organisation’s sought after, vendor-neutral Linux training and certification courses in Southern Africa. The demand for the Linux training has seen unprecedented growth in recent years as companies scramble to move their businesses to the Linux dominated cloud.
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Linux kernel developer Jiri Slaby informs us all about the immediate availability for download of the fifty-third maintenance version for the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series.
Linux kernel 3.12.53 LTS is an important milestone, and according to the appended shortlog, it changes a total of 45 files, with 197 insertions and 138 deletions. Among the most important improvements, we can mention bugfixes for the x86, m68k, Blackfin, m32r, and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures, along with updates to the networking stack, especially for things like IPv6, IPv4, and SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol).
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Graphics Stack
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The xf86-video-intel 3.0 DDX driver has been in development the past two and a half years without seeing an official release.
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Intel has released their first new versions of XenGT and KVMGT for 2016 for GPU virtualization solutions for Xen and KVM, respectively.
These Intel GPU virtualization solutions provide media pass-through of Haswell graphics cores and newer. A virtual GPU instance is exposed to each KVM/Xen VM for “a good balance among performance, feature, and sharing.”
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Benchmarks
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Our latest Intel Skylake processor to benchmark is a Xeon E3-1270 v5 processor that boasts a boost speed of 4.0GHz.
A new server was commissioned this week for the new OpenBenchmarking.org. Prior to transitioning the OpenBenchmarking.org infrastructure to it this weekend, I ran some benchmarks on it since it has a shiny new Xeon E3-1270 v5 Skylake processor. This new server has the Xeon E3-1270 v5 processor, Supermicro X11SSL-F motherboard, 64GB of memory (4 x 16GB Kingston DDR4-2133MHz), and 240GB Micron M510DC solid-state drive. Its running CentOS 7 with the Linux 3.10 kernel and XFS file-system.
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Applications
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Sylpheed, an open-source, free and cross-platform email client that is currently used in numerous lightweight GNU/Linux operating systems, has been updated to version 3.5, a release that introduces cool new features.
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Tor Browser 5.5, the first stable release in the 5.5 series, is now available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.
This release features important security updates to Firefox.
On the privacy front we finally provide a defense against font enumeration attacks which we developed over the last weeks and months. While there is still room for improvement, it closes an important gap in our fingerprinting defenses. Additionally, we isolate Shared Workers to the first-party domain now and further improved our keyboard fingerprinting defense.
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Qtractor, an open-source, free, and cross-platform audio and MIDI multi-track sequencer software, has been updated to version 0.7.4, and it is now available for download for all GNU/Linux operating system.
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The Tor Project has proudly announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first stable Tor Browser 5.5 web browser for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
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Tor Browser 5.5 is the first stable release in the 5.5 series of Tor. It is released for all the supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It is now available for download from the Tor Browser Project page along with many new features.
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Proprietary
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The new Community Edition of Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric is aimed at accelerating the adoption of Big Switch’s SDN offerings.
Big Switch Networks officials are looking to accelerate the adoption of the company’s software-defined network products by offering free versions of its software products.
The company on Jan. 26 introduced the Community Edition of its Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric software offerings that officials said will give businesses a taste of what Big Switch’s products can do and hopefully enticement them to buy the more robust commercial versions.
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Opera Software, through Aneta Reluga, today announced the release of yet another developer build for the upcoming Opera 36.0 web browser for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.
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The Vivaldi development team, through Atle Mo, has been happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of yet another snapshot build for the upcoming Vivaldi 1.0 web browser.
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Instructionals/Technical
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It’s time to pull together the last three series that I have been writing – How to customize your Linux desktop, Experiments with the i3 Window Manager, and Kali Linux. I had originally planned to create an i3 desktop for the Raspberry Pi, but I decided against that (see below for an explanation). I hope that it will be more interesting and more useful to install i3 on Kali Linux.
Warning! Geek Alert! The following “How-to” post is long on technical details and short on pretty pictures and graphics. It even includes manual editing of a configuration text file (gasp!) rather than a point-and-click GUI. If that kind of thing makes you uncomfortable, bail out now!
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Wine or Emulation
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The development team behind the Stella open-source, free and cross-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator software have announced the release of Stella 4.7, a major version that adds several new features and many under-the-hood improvements.
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Games
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You won’t believe this (we don’t believe it either), but there are now over 1,900 games available for the Linux and SteamOS platforms on Valve’s Steam gaming distribution platform.
Why don’t we believe it? Because only a week ago, we wrote an article about Steam for Linux just passing the 1,800 mark for SteamOS and Linux games. On January 21, 2016, there were exactly 1,801 titles when browsing Steam’s game catalogue with the SteamOS + Linux filter active.
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There are a few platforms in our survey that are either on the way out or much smaller than the others, but are still actively being developed for. Linux, for example, is many developers’ platform of choice. But how many developers? Turns out this year only 6.3% of developers are currently making a game for Linux, compared to 7.8% last year. And only 5.8% plan for their next game to target Linux.
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Valve and the SteamOS developers have announced earlier, January 28, 2016, that they’ve promoted the SteamOS Brewmaster 2.61 update to the brewmaster_beta channel.
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Debuting in 2006, Medieval II: Total War, and its Kingdoms expansion, were the final Total War game to use the second version of the Total War Engine. It is also, arguably, the last game in a generation for the series. The follow-up to this game was Empire: Total War (also available on Linux), which changed the game engine, user-interface, as well as several of the gameplay mechanics– such as adding naval battles.
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Sad news today, Arcen Games who support Linux rather nicely with their games is laying off almost all staff members. I like how honest the owner is in that blog post, it’s refreshing to see people own up to their failures.
Arcen Games did something for Linux that few other developers do, they ported their entire game catalogue over to Linux, so it’s really sad to see this.
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Feral Interactive certainly don’t stop, Company of Heroes 2 has an impressive patch alongside The Western Front Armies expansion release on Linux.
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Hopefully, everyone who was able to attend enjoyed SCALE 14x this past weekend, especially the Game Night which went off without a hitch, thanks to the SCALE staff and the efforts of a certain FOSS Force gaming writer. There were a few presenters with interesting Gaming information, and others with plans later down the pipeline that can be expanded upon later
To start the conference off on Thursday morning, Jorge Castro gave a speech regarding “Gaming on Ubuntu” as part of UbuCon. In only 15 minutes he was able to deliver a State of the Union address on gaming on Linux distros, particularly Ubuntu. He covered the pros and cons, and talked about Steam and Linux getting next gen titles. Most helpful was a reference to multiple Personal Package Archives for the Linux gamer for controllers and new drivers, as well as the proper hardware to use to complement Linux gaming. This was followed by a presentation by Didiers Roche discussing Ubuntu Make, a command line tool for developers of many kinds.
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Now I am excited, I absolutely adore Master of Orion 2 (let’s not talk about MoO3).
No word on release yet, as it hasn’t launched on any platform yet.
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This is exactly the kinda of shooter I have been missing on Linux, and I am ever so happy it’s coming to our platform.
You earn items and customization bits as you play that seem to come in cases you open, but it will also be featuring microtransactions.
I am torn on this issue as always. I don’t agree that a single player and co-op game should feature microtransactions at all, especially since you’re going to be paying likely £30-40 for the game in the first place. As long as they don’t get in the way, I won’t really care though if the gameplay is good.
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Black Mesa is a remake of the original Half-Life with modern technology, and it’s been in the works for a long time. Developers are promising that Linux and Mac OS X versions are planned.
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This is an editorial, this is obviously my opinion. I own Garry’s Mod and Rust, and I am speaking as an annoyed customer.
Garry Newman’s latest lovely remark is that if he could do it again, he would never support Linux. It joins the list of lovely quotes from him about the platform.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KmPlot has important advantages, importantly it’s open source with the opportunity to participate in development. If you have ideas for development – join the community and improve it! It has an easy and intuitive UI so you can start work with it quickly and easily.
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The Kubuntu team has just announced that the both the Plasma 5.5.3 desktop and KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 have been backported to Kubuntu 15.10.
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Packages for the release of KDE’s desktop suite Plasma 5.5.3 and KDE’s Frameworks 5.18.0 are available for Kubuntu 15.10. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.
Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.
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As you know I decided to fix and improve Akregator for the next release (16.04 in april).
So this week I continued to improve QtWebKit support.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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This screenshot is of a trace of the buffered-input-stream test from GIO, showing I/O callbacks being made across threads as idle source callbacks.
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Now that Builder has integrated Template-GLib, I started working on creating projects from templates. Today, this is only supported from the command line. Obviously the goal is to have it in the UI side-by-side with other project creation methods.
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Reviews
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Raspbian is really unsuited to your HTPC needs. It’s not designed to either, but it was interesting to see if the extra UX considerations that were added this year made it more suitable for the task. Unfortunately, they didn’t.
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New Releases
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The developers of the Arch Linux-based Apricity OS computer operating system announced a few minutes ago, January 28, 2016, that the first Beta build of Apricity OS for 2016 is now available for download and ready for testing.
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Welcome back!
No, we would not say it was easy getting here, but booting into 16.1 for the first time sure is as relieving (and exciting) as it could get for our project growing beyond what we had ever imagined. It has been more than a year since OPNsense first came out. Back then it was FreeBSD 10.0. Not even two months after, 10.1 was introduced along with the opnsense-update utility. Today is the day for FreeBSD 10.2, the latest and greatest release currently available for broader driver support and stability improvements.
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OPNsense, the open-source firewall project powered by FreeBSD that began as a fork of pfSense, is out with a new release.
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The release of BackBox Linux 4.5 has been announced by the developers of the BackBox Linux operating system, which assures to bring a new kernel and lots of upgraded packages, plus it is also immediately available for download.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The OpenMandriva Lx camp has released their 2015 Beta release in time for this weekend’s FOSDEM conference happening this weekend in Brussels.
While we are now into 2016 and its been a number of months (April of 2015 since the alpha release, OpenMandriva Lx 2015 Beta was finally made public today. The latest stable release of OpenMandriva remains at 2014.2.
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Arch Family
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I’m happy to announce our fifth update of Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)!
Most work went into preparations for Manjaro 16.03 (Daniella) release. Particularly we are working on some settings packages, so it would be possible to install our desktop-configurations on your already running system. This will also reduce the files the overlays of our manjaro-iso-profiles.
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The Manjaro developers have pushed out the door yet another update for Manjaro 15.12 (Capella), and it brings a lot of important fixes.
This is the fifth update for Manjaro 15.12 (Capella), and it looks like the developers will continue to provide this packs for the coming months. If the past is any indication, we’ll probably get about 5 or 6 update packages if everything goes according to plan.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Once again, we come to the end just when the party is really starting. It costs nothing but time to try out SUSE Studio, and the excellent documentation will help you over rough spots and show you advanced features.
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Last week’s updates to Tumbleweed brought several new packages to openSUSE’s rolling release like Kmail 5, KDE Framework 5.18.0 and updates to Perl and YaST.
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The openSUSE build service becomes more and more a victim of his success: building constantly more than 300,000 packages for more than 43,000 developers needs really a lot of build power!
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openSUSE Tumbleweed users are being informed today, January 28, by Mr. Douglas DeMaio of openSUSE Project about the availability of multiple updates for their beloved operating systems.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is the rolling edition of the acclaimed openSUSE Linux operating system, and it would appear that it received a bunch of new updates lately, for various KDE technologies, as well as for some of the most prominent software applications that are preinstalled in the distribution.
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Red Hat Family
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Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer of Red Hat Inc., will give the talk, The Power of Openness, at 1:30 p.m. Feb. 4 in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121. A book signing will follow at 2:30 p.m. in the nearby Venture Café. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is a part of the Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series.
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And what if Oracle stopped optimizing every product for maximum revenue, instead flooding the market with affordable database tools of unbeatable quality? And maybe the remnants of that near-forgotten Sun Microsystems buyout could come up with another Solaris-branded operating system that puts Red Hat’s best efforts to shame?
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) traded negative at $71.3. On an intraday basis, the price dropped -0.44 points or -0.61%. The composite uptick value was $15.81 million while the combined downtick value was $15.22. The net money flow was $0.59 million while the up/down ratio was not very comforting at 1.04. The shares on a weekly note has seen a change in share price of -1.6%.According to the trading data, the shares saw a block trade with $3.57 million in upticks and $2.86 million in downticks. The up/down ratio for the block was calculated to be 1.25. The net money flow for the block trade was 0.71.
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Zacks Research gets the recommendation of multiple brokerage firms to reach a consensus rating on the stock. Following the same methodology, which measures a stock on a scale of 1-5, the stock of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)’s has been given a mean rating of 1.5 compared to an ABR of 1.5 three months ago. A rating between 1 and 2 highlights a Buy, 3 suggests a Hold while a reading of 4 and 5 typically implies a Sell call by the analysts.
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Red Hat Inc. is centered in Raleigh, NC, and has 7,300 employees.
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Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) was downgraded by equities research analysts at Bank of America from a “buy” rating to a “neutral” rating in a research report issued on Tuesday, The Fly reports. They currently have a $80.00 target price on the open-source software company’s stock, down from their previous target price of $90.00. Bank of America’s price objective indicates a potential upside of 18.71% from the stock’s current price.
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Fedora
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One of the major features of the Fedora Server Edition is the Cockpit administrative console. This web-based interface provides administrators with a powerful set of tools for controlling their system. Cockpit relies upon low-level tools like polkit and sudo to make authorization decisions to determine what a user is permitted to do. By default, most operations on a Fedora system are granted to users in the ‘wheel’ group. People granted administrator access to Cockpit (and other tools through shell access) are generally added to the wheel group in the /etc/group file.
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This past week, the Community Operations (CommOps) team wrote a report on the Fedora Community Blog about some of Fedora’s most recent activities working towards improving outreach and increasing the diversity of the Project. Over the past year, there have been increased movements and activism towards improving the presence of women in computer science fields. Free and open source software is no exception to the rule, with FOSS being one of the areas with the least participation of women. In 2009, 28% of proprietary software development was done by women, but only 1.5% of contributions in free and open source software projects were made by women. While a lot has changed since 2009 and many great advancements have been made, the numbers are still low, and Fedora is helping give back to the world of free and open source software by working to improve its own diversity and outreach.
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Hi folks! Just a quick note for anyone who might be wondering – I’ll be at DevConf 2016 in Brno next week. (I’ll also be at the mostly-Red Hat-only-I-think QEcamp event before that). I’m expecting to spend most of the time running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to talk to people about the pending move to Pungi 4 for Fedora composes and the consequences / opportunities for release validation and so on. There will probably be quite a bit of change, hopefully for the better!
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The Mono SIG (Special Interest Group) is a group of Fedora contributors that maintain Mono (and related) packages in Fedora. The goal of the Mono SIG is to provide high-quality and usable Mono software packages to Fedora users and developers and to support others in creating and maintaining Mono packages.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Publicity team is planning to hold a memorial for founder Ian Murdock who tragically took his own life December 28 after altercations with police. The event will take place during FOSDEM this coming weekend. The team has been collecting pictures, stories, and video in order to compile a short video for the event in Brussels, Belgium Saturday.
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Over the past two months or so I have become a contributor to the Debian Project. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while. Firstly, just because I’ve got so much out of Debian over the last five or six years—both as a day-to-day operating system and a place to learn about computing—and I wanted to contribute something back. And secondly, in following the work of Joey Hess for the past three or four years I’ve come to share various technical and social values with Debian. Of course, I’ve long valued the project of making it possible for people to run their computers entirely on Free Software, but more recently I’ve come to appreciate how Debian’s mature technical and social infrastructure makes it possible for a large number of people to work together to produce and maintain high quality packages. The end result is that the work of making a powerful software package work well with other packages on a Debian system is carried out by one person or a small team, and then as many users who want to make use of that software need only apt-get it. It’s hard to get the systems and processes to make this possible right, especially without a team being paid full-time to set it all up. Debian has managed it on the backs of volunteers. That’s something I want to be a part of.
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Derivatives
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Tails 2.0 is one of the most popular Linux distributions based on Debian. Tails is Live CD/USB that aims to provide freedom by making its users anonymous on the web. All the applications’ traffic such as Internet browser, email client, IM etc. is sent through the Tor network that is very hard to trace. Recently Tails team released Tails 2.0 with some major changes, some security fixes and lots of other improvements.
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Edward Snowden’s favorite secure operating system just got a major upgrade. Version 2.0 of the Amnesic Incognito Live System, better known as Tails, rolled out recently. Tails 2.0 brings a new desktop environment, sandboxing for services via the always controversial systemd, and a new build of the Tor Browser.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 has finally arrived, and users should start to get the new update in the next 24 hours, in a phased manner.
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Canonical, through Łukasz Zemczak, today announced that the highly anticipated Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 update for Ubuntu Phone devices has been officially released and that the phased upgrades kicked in.
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Canonical today announced that it is working with Oracle to provide enterprises with greater flexibility in the way they develop and deploy large-scale workloads on Oracle Cloud. Certified Ubuntu images are now available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, providing Oracle enterprise customers with increased choice, velocity – a true “grab and go” approach – and new and innovative ways to manage and scale their enterprise workloads, using the number one cloud operating system.
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CANONICAL and Oracle have announced a joint venture aimed at speeding up cloud adoption.
The companies have made an agreement to provide enterprises with greater flexibility in the way they develop and deploy large-scale workloads on Oracle Cloud.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has announced a collaboration with Oracle to make Ubuntu images available on Oracle Cloud.
Under the deal, Certified Ubuntu images will be available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, providing Oracle enterprise customers with increased choice and new and innovative ways to manage and scale their enterprise workloads, using the number one cloud operating system.
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Ubuntu developer Canonical has disclosed that certified Ubuntu Linux images are now available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace for customers to access.
The move is part of a collaboration between the two firms to provide greater flexibility for companies developing and deploying large-scale workloads on Oracle Cloud.
Ubuntu Linux has become a popular choice for scale-out workloads in the cloud thanks to its performance, stability and regular updates, according to Canonical. The firm has in fact tied its refresh cycle to that of the OpenStack cloud computing framework, which is now included with Ubuntu as standard.
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Since we “failed” to show you guys a live video stream or even a recording of Mark Shuttleworth’s opening keynote at UbuCon Summit 2016 during SCALE 14x, we’re continuing our “Watch” series of articles today with an interview of Canonical and Ubuntu founder at the said event.
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The second Alpha for Ubuntu 16.04 flavors is landing tomorrow, and it looks like most of the important names are missing, with a few exceptions.
The Ubuntu developers have been discussing for the past few days about this latest Alpha, and it took some convincing to get the thing rolling. The thing is that most of the distros chose not to participate in this Alpha release, and there is a good chance that things are going to change in the next cycle.
Canonical dropped intermediary releases a couple of years ago for Ubuntu, and they only cover the final Beta version. They still offer daily builds for most of the six months interval between two releases, so naming something Alpha 2 is somewhat arbitrary. The only advantage for an Alpha is that developers freeze the process for a couple of days and make sure that the OS is booting and can be used.
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The UbuCon Summit 2016 has ended and now the Ubuntu developers have returned to their workspaces to continue working on their great projects. Didier Roche informs us today, January 28, about the release of a new version of his awesome Ubuntu Make tool.
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We have just been informed by Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the forthcoming OTA-9.5 hotfix update for Ubuntu Phones devices.
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It seems like a whole lot of Mark Shuttleworth interviews are starting to pile up these days, and today we would like to inform our readers about a recent one where the Ubuntu founder talks about the latest cloud technologies coming from Canonical.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint project is about to get a lot more interesting because, with the 18.x branch, the developers are going to introduce the so-called X-Apps, which are designed to work across Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce.
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Clement Lefebvre today added some additional tidbits from early Mint 18 planning in his monthly newsletter. A few weeks ago he’d said version 18 would finally feature a new theme and today he said they would be developing new applications as well. In addition, a new mini PC featuring Mint was introduced.
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Hello everyone! Before I start with the news, I’d like to share a few words about the donations we received in December. You sent us an unprecedented number of donations for an all-time high total of $16,736! We had to check the stats twice to make sure this wasn’t a mistake. This follows the release of Linux Mint 17.3, so not only does it help our funding, it’s also extremely gratifying and motivating for us. Many many thanks to the 714 people who supported us, and to our partners and sponsors for being here for us.
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BeagleCore will launch a COM version of the BeagleBone Black in April, via Conrad Electronic. The “BeagleCore BCM1” will be supported by an optional carrier board.
Last summer, German startup BeagleCore failed to fund its eponymous BeagleBone-based module on Kickstarter. Yet, the open source computer-on-module will be reborn in April as the similar BeagleCore BCM1. BeagleCore announced an exclusive worldwide distribution partnership with Germany’s Conrad Electronic to sell the module starting at $55, as well as a starter kit version with carrier board starting at $129.
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The Finish company Jolla seemed to have found a solution for its Jolla Tablet, but now confirmation has arrived that the project is officially dead.
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The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is all about physical objects being able to communicate with each other. It may be that your home mailbox can tell you that new mail has arrived, windows know that it is raining and close themselves, or your washing machine knows that somebody just got in the shower and pauses itself temporarily. The MQ Telemetry Transport MQTT is an open protocol that allows devices to publish and subscribe to messages.
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Intrinsyc has launched its first SBC: a $165 Open-Q 600 that runs Android 5.1 or Linux on a Snapdragon 600 with 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, GbE, WiFi, BT, and GPS.
Intrinsyc Technologies has spun a number of Open-Q branded, Qualcomm Snapdragon based computer-on-modules and sandwich-style carrier board starter kits, and now it has launched its first fully pre-integrated Open-Q single board computer. Applications for the 90 x 85mm SBC are said to include robotics, medical devices, and industrial applications.
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The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly changing the way we interact with the world around us. A whole host of devices are becoming smarter, more connected, and better able to anticipate our needs. Whether in the form of wearables, home automation, connected cars, or business asset tracking, every day we are seeing a greater level of engagement between the physical world and the digital.
While this enormous growth in IoT may seem inevitable, like any emerging technology, there are issues which have not yet fully sorted themselves out yet. How can we be sure that all of the devices we own can speak to one another in a language which they all understand, regardless of who manufactured them? How can we be sure we always have access to our data even if we end our relationship with the product’s vendor? And how can we know that our data, which by its nature is often quite personal, is always safe and secure?
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Phones
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Tizen
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Audio Trimmer, an app for the Samsung Z3, is an entertainment app which allows you to trim your songs down to your favorite parts, just like the name suggests.
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Android
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Canadian smartphone manufacturer Blackberry has launched its first android device Blackberry Priv. Priv stands for Privacy and Privilege. Once among the top smartphone manufacturers in the niche segment, the company is going through significant transition and dropping their own OS for Android. This can be seen as one of their bravest moves so far justifying the analysts who believe the company could save $266 million every year if they dropped their own OS.
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BlackBerry is likely to abandon its BlackBerry 10 (BB10) operating system and switch to Google’s Android for its mobile phones in the future, a move aimed at reviving its ailing hardware business, which contributes a majority of its revenue globally.
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Google has announced a partnership with chip maker Movidius in a bid to bring better image recognition to our smartphones.
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The Android letter-mill keeps on churning, and while Marshmallow is barely out of the gate, eyes are now turning to the next update: Android N. While that update isn’t likely to be officially launched until the Google I/O conference in May, details are beginning to surface. Here are all the latest news and rumours about Android 7.0.
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But here’s the dirty little secret security software vendors don’t want you to know: There’s really no reason to be scared.
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Android is more of a natural fit for me. I’m more efficient on my Android device and I love the deep Google integration. I also like that I can make my device look and feel unique with custom icons, launchers, widgets and home screens.
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Tesla, everyone’s favorite electric car manufacturer, has a beautiful 17-inch touchscreen in the center console of their Model S. At one point, Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk had planned on releasing a SDK for developers to create apps to use that center console display. However, Musk and his team have given it a bit more thought and decided it might be a better idea to allow app mirroring on Android and iPhones to the center console. Tesla still does not want to budge on their stance when it comes to Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, and leaving both systems out of their cars. While Musk didn’t necessarily confirm that is what they are doing, he did say that is likely what they are planning to do.
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The Android-x86-based Remix OS was launched a couple of weeks ago to great acclaim, and now it’s receiving the first update.
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Every Android phone maker has a different approach to software. Some, like Samsung, go all out with a highly customized interface that touches every corner of the way Android looks and works. Others, like Motorola, stay true to the visual style of “vanilla” Android. Then, somewhere in between, you’ve got companies like Sony.
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App discovery company ironSource has released its Q4 2015 Fastest Growing Apps insights, which highlight the fastest growing Android app categories, as well as the fastest growing individual Android apps with more than 500,000 downloads.
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The Amazon Fire phone was a flop. Launched in 2014, Amazon’s first smartphone handset sold for $650 unlocked. The Fire Phone never caught on for multiple reasons and soon could be had for as little as $130 just a year later.
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Last week Jide, a company formed by three former Google engineers officially released the alpha builds of their “Android for PC” operating system, Remix OS for PC.
Remis OS is built on the Android-x86 project, an open source initiative to port the Android operating system to devices powered by processors using the x86 instruction set).
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Who knows? One could imagine a situation in which an organization with a kiosk type device later discovers they have a vandalism problem. It would be easy enough to turn on the camera and record everything in a loop, or even use the built-in accelerometer to tell when someone is attempting to damage the unit, then turn on the camera and/or notify someone over the network interface. It is far nicer to have it there already than to try to add such capability to a preexisting product. And if you never need it? You didn’t pay anything for it, since you based your purchasing decision on only the processor and the touchscreen.
Repurposing an off-the-shelf Android tablet is clearly not a suitable solution for every embedded system designer’s user interface. But with a clear understanding of the trade-offs, you might find one to be a welcome addition to your toolbox for your next design.
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GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs Softpedia today about the immediate availability for download of a new build of his custom Android-x86 KitKat 4.4.4 computer operating system.
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Once again, Apple CEO Tim Cook told investors the secret of iPhone’s sales success was “Android switchers.”
But stats from Apple’s earnings call, and data from independent market researchers, shows another story: One of the reasons iPhone is running out of steam — Cook said sales would decline next quarter — is because Alphabet’s Android phone system has been surprisingly resilient as iPhone’s franchise has weakened.
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One would think that in the aftermath of poor sales of its Fire Phone handsets, Amazon may have given up on its Android smartphone dreams. But that is not the case, it appears. On the contrary, Amazon is reportedly working on stirring up Google’s mobile platform. The world’s largest e-commerce retailer is in talks with Android device manufacturers to either convince them to part ways with Google or facilitate a deeper integration with Amazon services into their handsets.
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Android-x86 4.4-r4 was just released a few days ago as the latest stable release while Android-x86 5.1 is still in a release candidate state. In early December was a test release of Android-x86 6.0 while out today is a new 6.0 release to succeed it.
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Your next Android phone might be able to see like a real human being.
Google has announced that it is to integrated deep learning into its phone operating system, allowing the phones to use algorithms to recognise what is in pictures and think about it like a person.
The company has begun a tie-up with Movidius, a company that makes chips that help with “machine vision”. The two companies have already worked together on Google’s Project Tango, which uses a series of cameras to allow computers to be able to see spaces in 3D.
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I’ve tried to keep these tips as universal as possible. But to get at some of the cool things that many, but not all Android users can do on their phones, I’ve also included some more specific tips at the bottom of the list that you all have sent in over the past week.
Thanks to everyone who sent me a message. Now onto the tips.
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BlackBerry Priv is an interesting smartphone and is a good option for people who miss their touch and type days as it also has a physical QWERTY keyboard. It is also a good device in terms of specifications but is priced too high. However, for a more accurate opinion stay tuned for its complete review.
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It’s hard to fault the pedigree of Google’s Kubernetes container management tool, and it seems many of the world’s cloud-forward enterprises agree.
Inspired by Borg – Google’s internal container management software, which manages the two billion-plus containers the web giant starts each week – Kubernetes has scale in its DNA.
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To help navigate your first open source contribution, I’ve put together a list of what I think are the most beginner-friendly open source starting points, as well as, a few other helpful resources. To make sure the list contains well-maintained projects, I’ve only included projects with over 1,000 stars on GitHub (unless otherwise stated).
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Whatever the reason, economic rationality won’t illuminate it. But open leaders need to discover it. And they can turn once again to open source communities for insight. Yet again, they likely have something important to teach us about the reasons we organize today.
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Privacy on the Internet is… well, let’s just say it’s complicated. In this article, I’ll analyze a few open source tools and concepts that you might use to increase privacy on the Internet for yourself. It will not be an exhaustive list of all possible avenues, nor does it pretend to ensure complete privacy even in the fact of a concentrated, personal attack. Some of the tips you will find useful, others you will discard, and still others you might use in conjunction with other policies to construct your own privacy model.
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Since being open sourced by creator Facebook, React Native has garnered more than 26,000 “stars” on GitHub — making it No. 23 in the all-time rankings — and has been forked more than 4,600 times. Clearly, it’s taking the mobile app dev arena by storm.
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It stung—but she learned from it. Proponents of agile “have failed to deliver the message in a way the open source community understands,” she tells her audience in this video. So Krieger took to the stage to dispel four common myths about agile and “get to the truth of what it’s intended to be.”
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Vulnerability assessment tools are an essential part of enterprise security strategies, as scanning applications for known vulnerabilities is a key best practice. Using open source vulnerability assessment technologies can help organizations save money and customize software to suit their needs.
Many open source vulnerability assessment tools are conveniently bundled in security distributions such as Offensive Security’s Kali Linux. Here is a selection of 10 useful open source vulnerability assessment tools, including general vulnerability assessment tools, Web server and application vulnerability scanners, analysis tools and fuzzers.
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Yesterday I wrote of how Adblock Plus isn’t necessarily the best, and certainly isn’t the most ethical of all possible open-source adblocking solutions; but rather that it predominates because it grew a massive user-base in a time of diversity and transition. And so it is with its opposite number – the ad-serving industry whose domains form the basis of adblockers’ blacklists and whitelists.
It’s a rotten, but established solution. It’s just ‘what people do’.
To boot, the ad-serving industry as it stands has billions in turnover to spend defaming or undermining any alternative system, should one arise.
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Customers do not want to click on UI controls. Nor do they want to browse a web site, or “log in,” or “manage” anything, or for that matter interact with your product in any way. Those aren’t goals people have when they wake up in the morning. They’re more like tedious tasks they discover later.
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The “UI team” has “UI” right there in the name (sounds user-friendly doesn’t it?). But this is a bottom-up, implementation-driven way to define a team. You’ve defined the team by solution rather than by problem.
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According to Cardenas, the development of open source switching has proved challenging given Broadcom’s dominance in the market. Obtaining the vendor’s software development kit (SDK) isn’t necessarily easy nor does receipt of it guarantee that a vendor’s subsequent product will be as full-featured as it should be, Cardenas said. He suggests that to make open source switching a reality, developers and competitors should escalate the pressure. Cardenas cites Mellanox’s Linux kernel derived project, switchdev, as an example of what can be done. Bottom line, writes Cardenas: “Without an open source framework to drive merchant silicon, we won’t truly have an open source NOS.”
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This past year, I enrolled as a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. For me, this is quite a distance from my hometown just outside of Atlanta, GA. Part of the motivation that led me to choose RIT as my university of choice was its participation in Free and Open Source Software education and communities. RIT is one of the few schools in the United States to offer a minor in Free and Open Source Software.
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Slashdot Media, which owns the popular websites SourceForge and Slashdot, has been sold to SourceForge Media, LLC, a subsidiary of web publisher BIZX, LLC. Financial terms of the sale were not revealed in the press release announcing the sale, which was published today on the website EIN News.
This afternoon I exchanged a few emails with Logan Abbott who is one of the owners of BIZX and the president of the SourceForge Media subsidiary which he said “was formed for the purposes of this transaction.”
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Whether you’re a novice programmer, a seasoned veteran, or not an engineer at all, there are many ways to contribute to open source projects beyond coding.
Compared to proprietary software, open source projects tend to be relatively short-handed when it comes to non-engineering contributions, so don’t shy away from open source just because you’re not a coder. Your blog post or design skills could be much more meaningful to the right project than just another line of code.
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After covering openSUSE and KDE booths at SCALE in my previous blog, let’s talk ownCloud. Note that, despite the awesomeness of this blog post, our biggest news right now is probably the announcement that ownCloud has an estimated 8 million users!
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Events
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It was a historical meetup of LibreOffice Community in India indeed! It was the first LibreOffice meetup in India. We ideated for starting LibreOffice activities in India during my Red Hat days. Last year, few of us participated in LibreOffice Conference, Aarhus, Denmark. We saw the level of real volunteer participation from all over the world for LibreOffice and no doubt several of us were inspired much. I discussed with Chandrakant and decided that it is already late and we should start as soon as possible on our own level. And this small meetup is the output of what we discussed. We have planned for much more in this year.
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Open source software contributions often spring from passion—the passion to give back to the community, or simply the burning desire to create something new. The same passion that drives individual contributors also drives the team behind IndiaHacks to help develop the skills and networks of those individual contributors.
From January 30 to March 2, the Open Source Track of IndiaHacks challenges contributors from all over the world to make the most of their efforts. Originally focused on algorithmic programming, IndiaHacks added eight more tracks for this year. The open source track follows the model of Hacktoberfest and other similar events: Contributions are measured by accepted pull requests and commits to open source software projects.
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This Friday (2016-01-29) there will be a great CentOS dojo in Brussels Belgium. I am going mostly to help out run the cameras and announce different talks. I will also be wanting to listen to people use who use EPEL about what they use it for and what they are wanting to see in growth. This will help me prepare for the talk on Sunday at FOSDEM which I will be moderating.
If you have questions please try and find me. I will probably be the one fellow in a tie and sports coat. [And because I am from the desert.. no rain coat which sounds like a minus currently in Belgium].
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If you are going to FOSDEM 2016 and use CentOS, Scientific Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or even Oracle Enterprise Linux.. you should be interested in a round-table talk we are having on Sunday to talk about the Fedora Project’s Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) . EPEL is a repository which has a curated set of Fedora packages rebuilt for EL-5, EL-6, and EL-7.
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The Linux Foundation announced its 2016 event calendar, and issued a CFP for the Apr. 4-6 Embedded Linux Conference, which features an OpenIoT Summit.
It’s once again time to check your calendar to see if you can carve out a few days to network with your geeky peers — the Linux Foundation has revealed its extensive lineup of 2016 events. In 2015, LF events attracted “nearly 15,000 developers, maintainers, sysadmins, thought leaders, business executives and other industry professionals from more than 3,100 organizations across 85 countries,” says the nonprofit Linux advocacy organization.
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As I may have mentioned during the SCALE 14x coverage, one of the disadvantages of the glorious burden of working for a great event such as SCALE is that I don’t get out of the media room enough. The fact is, I can’t — herding the cats known as the tech media and processing various social media posts around the event keeps me in the room.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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If you’re reading the news lately, you would know by now that Mozilla has pushed the Firefox 44.0 web browser to the stable channel for all supported operating systems, including Linux, Mac and Windows.
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Today is International Data Privacy Day. What can we all do to help ourselves and each other improve privacy on the Web? We have something for everyone:
Users can greatly improve their own data privacy by simply updating their software.
Companies can increase user trust in their products and user privacy by implementing Lean Data Practices that increase transparency and offer user control.
By taking action on these two simple ideas, we can create a better Web together.
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The official launch announcement for Firefox 44.0 has finally landed, and it details the changes and improvements that have landed in this latest release.
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SaaS/Big Data
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If you want evidence of just how different Internet retail and brick-and-mortar retail are, you just have to look at what’s going on with the world’s largest retailer. In the same week that Walmart announced the closing of over 100 physical stores, the company’s e-commerce unit announced that it is releasing a piece of its cloud-management infrastructure as open source—publishing the OneOps platform on Github. The company’s internal e-commerce development unit, @Walmartlabs, has released OneOps under the Apache 2.0 license.
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Over the past year, machine learning has gone mainstream in an unprecedented way. The trend isn’t fueled by cheap cloud environments and ever more powerful GPU hardware alone; it’s also the explosion of frameworks now available for machine learning. All are open source, but even more important is how they are being designed to abstract away the hardest parts of machine learning, and make its techniques available to a broad class of developers.
Here’s a baker’s dozen machine learning frameworks, either freshly minted or newly revised within the past year. All caught our attention for being a product of a major presence in IT, for attempting to bring a novel simplicity to their problem domain, or for targeting a specific challenge associated with machine learning.
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Web site and application development is becoming in reach for nearly everyone, thanks to easier and better tools. Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are increasingly either employing open source or are built entirely on it. And all of this adds up to an increasing need for web development toolsets focused on the open source community. The good news is that there are many open source tools to help you with your web project, and given the costs of web development environments and the like, they can save you a lot of money. Here are many good examples of tools and tutorials, with a few that we’ve covered before appended at the end, in case you missed them.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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For anyone still relying upon Java web-plugins in their browser, they are going to be deprecated with the upcoming Java 9.
Oracle announced today in a blog post that they will be moving to a plugin-free Java by deprecating the once common Java web plug-in in Java 9. The plug-in support will then be dropped in a later Oracle JDK/JRE release.
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Java browser plugin, just like Adobe Flash has contributed heavily to making the web an insecure place. Both these technologies have compromised billions of PCs and Macs around the globe.
The good news is that Oracle is finally pulling the plugs on Java, the browser plugin. Many people are freaking out, confusing it with Oracle’s Java language, which Linus Torvalds believes is a horrible language either way. Folks, this is about the Java browser plugin!
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Oracle has announced that it’s removing the Java browser plugin from its future releases. In its whitepaper, the company said that the rise of web usage on mobile devices has inspired the browser vendors to look for plugin-free technologies. This plugin has been repeatedly exploited to install malware and attack users during its lifetime.
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CMS
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Then inevitable happened: my server died, so I have to rebuild my site. My colleagues from work shared rented VPS so I joined them and pointed my domain to it. However, when I started to work on installing WP, I was caught again by my suspicions about WP. Do I really want to fight with pulverized HTML, zillion upgrades, comment spam, etc., when all I want from the server is to render my posts to HTML? So, I started to look for static web generators. After a brief affair with Hexo (Server-side JavaScript looks like such a good idea, but it still so immature and unuseable!) I ended up with pelican.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Funding
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Google Code-in 2015 is over. As a co-admin and mentor for Wikimedia (one of the 14 organizations who took part and provided mentors and tasks) I can say it’s been crazy as usual.
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When it comes to automating the containerization, configuration and deployment of services the right tools for the job go a long way, which is what Wercker BV’s business is all about. Today the company announced that it has raised $4.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Inkef Capital with participation from existing investor Notion Capital. The company also announced that it will open source its flagship command line interface (CLI) developer tool that facilitates the containerization and deployment of applications and microservices on the desktop.
This investment led by Amsterdam-based Inkef Capital brings the company’s total funding to $7.5 million.
“We’re excited to join the Inkef Capital portfolio and continue to bridge the gap between the innovative communities in Amsterdam and Silicon Valley,” said Micha Hernández van Leuffen, founder and CEO at wercker. “We’re fortunate to have a passionate developer community behind us: a community that will only continue to grow and improve with access to our open sourced CLI technology.”
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BSD
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The Qt5 (meta-)port and all its dependent ports have been updated to Qt 5.5.1 in FreeBSD. Special thanks to Yuri Victorovich, who did an independent Qt 5.5.1 port and whose work has been gratefully incorporated into this update. Thanks also to Ralf Nolden for pushing for better upgrade-paths and co-installability.
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Last week I had plans to run some fresh FreeBSD vs. Linux gaming benchmarks using the FreeBSD’s Linux software binary compatibility layer.
For those that don’t know, FreeBSD boasts a Linux binary compatibility initiative. Five years ago I did some Linux gaming tests on FreeBSD within FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux?. I wanted to do some modern tests atop the latest FreeBSD/PC-BSD code and the latest NVIDIA driver.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The annual free software conference will kick off at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the morning of Saturday, March 19th with “The last lighthouse: Free software in dark times”, in which Snowden (who will appear via a free software live video stream) and Daniel Kahn Gillmor will discuss free software, surveillance, power, and control of the future.
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GNU Binutils 2.26 has been released as the first major release in more than one year since Binutils 2.25.
This collection of binary tools was updated this week and the release announcement sent out this morning. In digging through the Git change-log and then the Bintutils NEWS, libmpx is now enabled by default, more patches from GCC mainline were imported, some new configure switches added, there is now support for the ARC EM/HS and ARC600/ARC700 architectures, objcopy improvements, and more.
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Mike Saunders and Graham Morrison popped by the FSFE head office in Berlin to see how the organisation is spreading the word about FOSS.
You’ve almost certainly heard of the Free Software Foundation before. This is a US-based non-profit organisation set up by Richard Stallman, the creator of GNU, in 1985. Originally it was established to fund programmers, but over the years it has moved into other realms, handling legal issues and promoting Free Software.
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This week, StreamComputing launches an educational initiative that aims to get more developers to study and use OpenCL in their projects. Within this project, up to 20 collaborators will port as many GEGL operations to OpenCL as possible.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of Galicia (Spain) has made available conference videos, presentation slides and training material that focus on the use of free and open source software by Non-Governmental Organisations.
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Three teachers and a handful of volunteers working on the decade-old project that introduces schools in the Italian province of South Tyrol (Alto Adige) to free and open source software, are starting a campaign to get new teachers involved.
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When it comes to government agencies at all levels, and things like the voting process, I am a hardcore believer in open source being necessary. To truly know that votes are being counted correctly by machines, only open source would allow independent auditing. It will also help to prevent unknown backdoors in secure government computer systems.
Closed source technologies from companies like Microsoft could, in theory, contain backdoors or vulnerabilities that hackers and evildoers could exploit. Even worse, Microsoft or its employees could purposely alter voting software to influence outcomes. Am I saying the company is doing this? Not at all. But with closed source software, there is no way to know for sure. Now, Bernie Sanders’ campaign is questioning Microsoft’s technologies being used in Iowa Caucuses. You know what? They have a point.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open data portals in Italy, Sweden and Belgium are working on validators for the EC’s DCAT-AP. Data portals that use the World Wide Web Consortium’s Data Catalog Vocabulary make it easier for others to search and use their datasets, including across borders.
By methodologically listing where datasets can be downloaded and what formats are available, W3C’s DCAT instructions make its easier for others to discover these data collections. Instead of stockpiling data, DCAT-enabled repositories can be federated, with search results pointing to data available on other web sites.
The DCAT-Application Profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) describes datasets created by European public administrations. Work on the DCAT-AP began in 2013. Initiated by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology (DG Connect), the EU Publications Office and the EC’s ISA Programme, the creation of this specification involved representatives from 16 European Member States.
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Open Hardware
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Now, a new wave of companies aims to push this movement even further. This morning, four big-name telecoms— AT&T, Verizon, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, and South Korea’s SK Telecom—agreed to join the Open Compute Project. Through a sub-project dedicated to the needs of telecoms, they too will explore open source servers and networking equipment that can boost efficiency and reduce costs. “Everyone is looking for that same synergy and agility,” Gagan Puranik, a director of architecture planning at Verizon, says of his company and others who have joined Facebook’s experiment in open source hardware. “The learning and the sharing will go both ways.”
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According to Facebook’s published guidelines, the new OCP Telco Project will advance the following objectives: 1) communicating telco technical requirements effectively to the OCP community; 2) strengthening the OCP ecosystem to address the deployment and operational needs of telcos; and 3) bringing OCP innovations to telco data center infrastructure for increased cost-savings and agility.
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Programming
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Pagure is a new, full featured git repository service for the web, written in Python. It is similar to other popular git forges like Github and Gitlab, allowing open source contributors to share and collaborate on code and content. By the way, pagure is French for “hermit crab,” as reflected in the logo on the project documentation.
Pagure is the brainchild of Pierre-Yves Chibon, a member of the Fedora Engineering team. The Fedora Engineering team focuses on Python based solutions because the language is easy to learn and thus presents less barrier to entry for contributors. Pagure is therefore a perfect fit not just for hosting projects, but for encouraging contribution to the service itself.
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For too long, computer programming has seemed like a secret world, sealed off from all but the geekiest of maths geniuses. Normal people never needed to know what went on inside their mysterious black boxes: it might have well as been voodoo. That’s changing now though. Because computers are essential to the way we live now, computer programmers are essential too. Kids growing up today need to have at least an idea of how computers work to make them useful (and well paid) members of the workforce of tomorrow.
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FORTRAN (it dropped the caps in 1990) is the oldest high-level language still written today. It’s now over 55 years old and still in widespread use in the sciences, in high-performance computing, and in supercomputers. Its real strength is in numerical computation and complicated mathematical models (making it also popular in finance); and its position is hard to assail given the vast Fortran code library of numerical computation routines that’s available. There are even people still using fixed-format F77 (see below), although most modern users have shifted to the easier free-format. It’s probably not your language of choice for shiny Web 2.0 development, but it’s fascinating to have a look at something with such a venerable and successful history.
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Updated Popular and widely used source-code hosting service GitHub is, for the moment, no longer a widely used source-code hosting service. It has fallen offline.
Since 1632 PT (0032 UTC, 1132 AEDT), the website has been down. Right now, the San Francisco-headquartered upstart reports: “We’re investigating a significant network disruption affecting all github.com services.”
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Standards/Consortia
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The Video Electronics Standards Association announced Display Stream Compression 1.2 today as the newest DSC standard.
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There are some domestic issues on which men and women will never agree: the ideal ambient temperature of the sitting room, why it’s more important to remember the date of your wedding anniversary than the Battle of Agincourt, the pressing need for your daughter to have her phone in her bedroom after 9pm.
In a week when parents have been told in no certain terms that “night texting” is not only A Thing, but a thing that is damaging our children’s exam performance, school grades and life chances, I must hold up my hands and admit I am drowning, not waving, or even signalling to the invigilator that I need more paper. I wish.
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Science
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That’s the bet Nick Horbaczewski is making by starting the Drone Racing League, with the backing of investors who include Stephen Ross, owner of the National Football League team Miami Dolphins, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures, a New York venture capital firm. Horbaczewski expects most fans to watch races online, much as they do competitive gaming in the U.S., using their phones, computers—eventually even virtual-reality headsets. Ultimately, he has ambitions of becoming a digital Nascar for drones.
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Health/Nutrition
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After complying with a federal judge’s order on Wednesday, the city of Berkeley, California, will now be allowed to go forward with its cell phone radiation warning law, as it has cut out one controversial line. It is not clear when the new notice will go into effect.
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If you’re reading this from the civilized world, most of your insect encounters boil down to emotionally scarring spider cameos and annoying flies. But in roughly 80 percent of the countries on Earth, people eat insects. Cracked sat down with one man who has made it his life’s work to get Americans to eat more bugs; Kevin Bachhuber, cricket farmer, told us …
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Schools in Sebring, Ohio were closed for a third day on Tuesday and pregnant women and children have been advised not to drink the water, after tests showed elevated levels of lead in the local water supply.
Though the village of about 4,300 in northeastern Ohio is much smaller than Flint, Michigan, the drinking water crises in the neighboring states share troubling aspects.
According to local news station WKBN: “Correspondence from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the Village of Sebring show concerns with water testing, beginning in late September. Elevated lead levels were noted by the EPA in November, but customers didn’t learn of the issues until Thursday, meaning that some people could have been drinking water containing lead for months.” WKBN has a full timeline of events here.
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In this week’s episode of teleSUR’s “Days of Revolt,” Chris Hedges and two Detroit activists, Darryl “Waistline” Mitchell and Roshaun Harris, trace Detroit’s socio-economic apocalypse, which has taken forms specific to that city but also mirrors other communities around the country.
In his opening comments, Hedges refers to “the sacrifice zone that Detroit has become” and calls the catastrophic changes there “a consequence of unfettered, unregulated capitalism.”
Mitchell traces the arc of Detroit’s fate along his own life line, remembering when it was possible to make a living wage in the auto industry there. He also points to the many ways in which the systemic racism corroding the city is connected to America’s economic history.
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Melissa Mays realized Flint’s water was toxic long before Michigan declared a state of emergency earlier this month.
“After the water switch, I ran the kitchen tap and it came out just yellow, just disgusting yellow,” said Mays, a mother of three who is now becoming an activist and a plaintiff in lawsuits against the state.
Her first sight of foul water happened in the summer of 2014 — some two months after the economically challenged city switched its water supply as a cost saving measure. Months of calls and inquires followed. All the while, city officials told residents like Mays that their water was safe.
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Flint, Michigan, the city portrayed as the embodiment of a rust belt city abandoned by deindustrialization in Michael Moore’s allegorical documentary, Roger & Me, has recently become a morality play of a different sort as it captures national headlines highlighting a controversial series of decisions creating a major public health crisis that threatens the health of Flint’s children.
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But now, if you’re a poor kid growing up in Flint today, forget economic mobility—you don’t even deserve clean water.
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Why MPs must oppose the NHS and Social Care Commission Bill.
As grassroots campaigners, we care about the NHS and we know that our friends, families and the general public are fast becoming aware of the profit-seeking private companies operating behind the blue logo that we all trust as a standard of excellence, equality and world class care.
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Security
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Software security breaches often happen because attackers exploit known vulnerabilities in open-source code built into programs. That is why new startup Snyk Ltd. is releasing developer tools in hopes that programmers would write more secure software from the get-go, Yuliya Chernova reports for Dow Jones VentureWire. Snyk started offering tools that find known vulnerabilities in a client’s code free. The company hopes to then sell monitoring tools that would scan a client’s code to identify holes that become known, as well as tools to fix and isolate the faulty code.
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As a security conscious user who follows the best practices—using unique passwords, two-factor authentication, only using a secure computer, and being able to spot phishing attacks from a mile away—I thought my accounts and details would be pretty safe. I was wrong.
That’s because when someone went after me, all those precautions were for nothing. That’s because most systems come with a backdoor called customer support. In this post I’m going to focus on the most grievous offender: Amazon.com. Amazon.com was one of the few companies I trusted with my personal information. I shop there, I am a heavy AWS user (raking up well over $600/month), and I used to work there as a software developer.
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The report did not reveal a great deal of new trends in password creation. “123456″ and “password” remained the most popular passwords, retaining their positions from last year.
SplashData reports, however, that users are now creating slightly longer passwords. “1234567890″ and “qwertyuiop” debuted on the list of the top twenty-five most common passwords in this year’s report.
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Maintainers of the OpenSSL cryptographic code library have fixed a high-severity vulnerability that made it possible for attackers to obtain the key that decrypts communications secured in HTTPS and other transport layer security channels.
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The OpenSSL 1.0.2 releases suffer from a Key Recovery Attack on DH small subgroups. This issue got assigned CVE-2016-0701 with a severity of High and OpenSSL 1.0.2 users should upgrade to 1.0.2f. If an application is using DH configured with parameters based on primes that are not “safe” or not Lim-Lee (as the one in RFC 5114) and either Static DH ciphersuites are used or DHE ciphersuites with the default OpenSSL configuration (in particular SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE is not set) then is vulnerable to this attack. It is believed that many popular applications (e.g. Apache mod_ssl) do set the SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE option and would therefore not be at risk (for DHE ciphersuites), they still might be for Static DH ciphersuites.
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We have released LibreSSL 2.2.5 and 2.1.9, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Civil resistance to foreign military occupation is not viewed as illegal in international law.
Killing random civilians, on the other hand, is always condemnable.
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Americans, raised on action movies, seem to think the nation will be seen as weak internationally if it is not constantly bombing someone, leading presidential candidates, in a democracy, to give the public what it demands – macho hot air. Of course, this disease among the people leads the nation to an exhausting state of perpetual war for no good reason. Many other empires have gone into the graveyard of history because of such exhaustion – both financial and psychological – all the while believing that they were special and that it could never happen to them. Unfortunately, with a nearly $19 trillion national debt, promises to defend many nations all over the world, a costly far-flung worldwide military apparatus, and ubiquitous armed interventions in unimportant places such as Syria, the American Empire, without a major retraction and renewal, will likely travel down the same road to ruin.
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What did you get for Christmas these last six years?
The U.S. government was nice enough to gift our loyal friends the Afghans $17 billion of your tax money, and, in the true spirit of giving, asked nothing in return for itself.
What that means in actual dollars and nonsense is that the U.S. government wasted $17 billion in taxpayer money in Afghanistan on various projects that never made it off the ground or were doomed to fail because of incompetence or lack of maintenance, according to a new report.
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The 28-year-old suspect is said to have been known to local police for having driven without a license. He reportedly surrendered without resistance and, per BFM TV, said he was carrying the weapons out of fear for his own security.
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Transparency Reporting
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The terrible tale of the missing comma and the damage done may soon come to an end. The EFF is calling on Congress to legislate this apparently missing punctuation back into its list of FOIA exemptions.
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The UK government is backing away from its original plans to weaken the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Financial Times reports. Last year, the government set up a commission to review the law, composed mostly of people who had expressed scepticism or concern about the scope of the FOIA, and with a clear brief to add restrictions to its workings. It was widely expected that their report would recommend weakening the UK public’s right to access government information by imposing charges for requests, and making it easier for them to be refused.
But according to an article in the Financial Times, strong media and political opposition has led to the changes being dropped or postponed: “Mr Cameron is likely to back off from making substantial changes to the FOI Act, settling instead for some minor technical amendments to protect government advisers, two ministers have told the Financial Times.”
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The Defend Trade Secrets Act (S. 1890) passed out of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary today, but not before it was amended to address a number of concerns that were voiced by opponents over the past two years.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Noam Chomsky, the noted radical and MIT professor emeritus, said the Republican Party has become so extreme in its rhetoric and policies that it poses a “serious danger to human survival.”
“Today, the Republican Party has drifted off the rails,” Chomsky, a frequent critic of both parties, said in an interview Monday with The Huffington Post. “It’s become what the respected conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call ‘a radical insurgency’ that has pretty much abandoned parliamentary politics.”
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Within the sustainability sector, finance is increasingly being seen as a powerful lever to help companies “green” their operations. In response to NGO and consumer pressure, a growing number of corporate banks and investors over the past few years have begun using both positive and negative screening methods to improve the sustainability of their portfolios and client companies. Positive screening methods preferentially provide capital to sustainably-run companies, and include socially responsible investment (SRI) funds and green bonds that are dedicated to responsible companies. On the other hand, negative screening methods focus on weeding out unsustainable companies, generally by using environmental, social and governance (ESG) screens that grade companies on a number of metrics, such as carbon footprint and fair labor policy.
Sustainable finance is still regarded as a niche market, but its share of the financial industry continues to grow. According to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance, from 2012 to 2014, the global sustainable investment market expanded from $13.3 trillion to $21.4 trillion.[1] Reflecting this trend, consortiums such as the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) are attracting an increasing number of signatories.[2] Much of this demand for sustainable investment is being driven by millennials[3] and institutional clients.[4] Some of these institutional clients, such as the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), may be ethically or religiously obligated to pay attention to such concerns when making investing decisions.[5]
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Out of the blue in the fall of 2010, a blogger asked Jane Mayer, a writer with The New Yorker, how she felt about the private investigator who was digging into her background. Ms. Mayer thought the idea was a joke, she said this week. At a Christmas party a few months later, she ran into a former reporter who had been asked about helping with an investigation into another reporter on behalf of two conservative billionaires.
“The reporter had written a story they disliked,” Ms. Mayer recounts in “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” out this month from Doubleday. Her acquaintance told her, “‘It occurred to me afterward that the reporter they wanted to investigate might be you.’”
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Finance
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Today’s populist revolt mimics an earlier one that reached its peak in the US in the 1890s. Then it was all about challenging Wall Street, reclaiming the government’s power to create money, curing rampant deflation with US Notes (Greenbacks) or silver coins (then considered the money of the people), nationalizing the banks, and establishing a central bank that actually responded to the will of the people.
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Let us now praise “Lord Zuckerberg, The Magnificent!”
Mark Zuckerberg, the wunderkind of Silicon Valley who co-founded Facebook and amassed roughly a gabillion dollars in personal wealth, is now being hailed as a new giant of American altruism.
This started after the tech titan and his wife Priscilla Chan announced the birth of their first child. While delivering what could have been routine news, they announced that in honor of baby Maxima’s birth, they intend to donate $45 billion — 99 percent of their Facebook wealth — to charity.
The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other media outlets swooned at Zuckerberg’s selfless act: “Philanthropy Pledge Sets New Giving Standard,” gushed Bloomberg. Lost in the fog of media adulation are two important facts: (1) the $45 billion didn’t actually go to charity, and (2) it wasn’t really a donation.
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It’s striking that from a situation where there were very few studies of the likely effects of the TPP agreement, we’ve moved to one where they are appearing almost every week. Recently Techdirt wrote about a World Bank study, and one from Tufts University; now we have one from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which calls itself “a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution devoted to the study of international economic policy.”
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Five female garment workers, one of them pregnant, were killed and 68 others injured yesterday morning after a truck overloaded with garment workers plunged into a ditch. The accident raises questions yet again about the perilous state of the Kingdom’s transportation system for more than 700,000 labourers in its clothing industry.
The accident happened at 6:45am on the border of the Kong Pisei and Samrong Tong districts in Kampong Speu province, according to Touch Phearith, Kong Pisei district police chief in charge of traffic.
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At first glance, it appears that Microsoft is making far more on its cloud services than Amazon, which made $2.41 billion last quarter from its Amazon Web Services division. The problem is that, in reporting its results, Microsoft bundles its Azure line of cloud services with Windows Server and other traditional enterprise software sales together under the label “Intelligent Cloud” without revealing what percentage of that total actually comes from Azure. That makes an apples to apples comparison with Amazon Web Services impossible.
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At Intel’s corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, California, the highly paid engineers and developers directly employed by the computer chip company wear blue identification badges.
Janitors, electricians, gardeners, security guards and cafeteria workers employed by various subcontractors wear green badges.
It’s an important distinction for Nahima Aguiniga, 34, who works as a cashier and dishwasher at a cafe on the Intel campus. Blue badges get free coffee, soda and fruit; green badges have to pay.
Free food is just one of the perks Intel’s blue badge employees enjoy. Like other Silicon Valley tech firms, the company competes for employees with perks like ping-pong tables, on-site spa services, dry cleaning and gyms with personal trainers.
“The way they treat green badges, it’s like we’re second-class citizens,” said Aguiniga. A single mother of two, Aguiniga earns just $13.50 per hour. She can’t afford her own apartment in an area that has such a high cost of living that even highly paid tech employees and venture capitalists are balking. For the past 10 weeks, she and her children have been sharing a single room in her ex-mother-in-law’s house.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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This last election cycle has revealed an increasing divide over how segments of the population understand political issues. According to Pew, “Partisan polarization — the vast and growing gap between Republicans and Democrats — is a defining feature of politics today.” The problem is not simply connected to opposing ideologies, though. Today polarization is the defining feature of Tea Party politics. From the Bundy gang to Donald Trump’s rallies, we are witnessing a rise in aggressive and divisive politics.
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Onion staffers may think twice before they produce more stories like Hillary Clinton Tries To Woo Voters By Rescinding Candidacy, Hillary Clinton To Nation: ‘Do Not Fuck This Up For Me’, Hillary Clinton: The Merciless, Unrelenting March To The Presidency, or the signed Hillary Clinton editorial titled I’m Weighing Whether Or Not I Want To Go Through The Hell Of Appealing To You Idiotic, Uninformed Oafs.
Many news outlets covered Univision Communications’ purchase last week of a stake in The Onion, the world’s leading news publication. According to NPR, Univision bought a 40 percent controlling interest in the company, and also acquired the option to buy the remainder of The Onion in the future.
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During a January 26 press conference GOP presidential front runner Donald Trump announced that he will not participate in Thursday night’s Fox News-hosted GOP presidential primary debate, because of alleged bias against him by Fox News host and debate moderator, Megyn Kelly.
Fox has given Trump over 24 hours of free airtime since May, significantly more than his fellow GOP candidates and has furnished several of the talking points Trump uses on the campaign trail. However, the network has stood by Kelly and several Fox News figures have attacked Trump over his decision to pull out of the debate.
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On “The Kelly File” Tuesday, host Megyn Kelly welcomed in liberal documentarian Michael Moore for what turned out to be a surprisingly cordial chat about President Barack Obama’s legacy, as well as her ongoing feud with Donald Trump — which resulted yesterday in the GOP front-runner pulling out of the Fox News/Google debate, which she will be moderating.
Moore began by offering genuine praise for the Fox News host, asking her “What does this [Trump fiasco] feel like to you? Because you don’t want to be the story — you’re a journalist.”
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Hillary Clinton’s campaign has recently turned to a new tactic to convince Iowa Democrats that they should caucus for her over Sen. Bernie Sanders: Republicans, the campaign says, want Sanders to win.
Clinton and her surrogates have taken to pointing out that Republican super-PACs and donors have started to air ads that appear intended to boost Sanders’ campaign. “The best evidence that I have the best plan is that the Republicans and their billionaire allies are running ads against me,” Clinton told a crowd at a middle school in Marshalltown, Iowa, on Tuesday night. Clinton was referring to the news that Joe Ricketts, a major Republican donor, is funding a super-PAC to air ads in Iowa that could serve to bolster Sanders’ caucus bid by describing him as “too liberal.”
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Despite being dogged with questions about her ties to Wall Street, Hillary Clinton will take a detour from the campaign trail in Iowa to do back-to-back finance industry fundraisers in other states later this week.
Clinton will appear in Philadelphia at a “gala” fund-raiser hosted by executives at Franklin Square Capital Partners, a $17 billion investment fund. Rocker Bon Jovi will reportedly play an acoustic set for “friends” who pledge $1,000 and hosts who bundle up to $27,000.
The Philadelphia Inquirer notes that “Franklin Square employs Ivy League-educated money managers and salespeople with experience at big Wall Street firms – plus four personal trainers and a dietitian to keep staff happy and productive amid the gym, yoga and nap rooms, Sol LeWitt art installations, and fancy cafeteria.”
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Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has campaigned as an ardent advocate of expanding gun rights, but in the past he called for banning assault weapons and a longer waiting period for gun purchases.
Trump’s new gun plan calls for a national right to concealed carry and criticizes “opponents of gun rights” for coming “up with scary sounding phrases like ‘assault weapons,’ ‘military-style weapons,’ and ‘high capacity magazines’ to confuse people.” He has vowed to undo President Obama’s modest gun executive orders and even called for the elimination of all “gun-free zones” at schools.
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Censorship
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In the 659-page World Report 2016, its 26th edition, Human Rights Watch reviews human rights practices in more than 90 countries. In his introductory essay, Executive Director Kenneth Roth writes that the spread of terrorist attacks beyond the Middle East and the huge flows of refugees spawned by repression and conflict led many governments to curtail rights in misguided efforts to protect their security. At the same time, authoritarian governments throughout the world, fearful of peaceful dissent that is often magnified by social media, embarked on the most intense crackdown on independent groups in recent times.
The People’s Action Party (PAP), which has ruled Singapore since 1959, won 83 out of 89 parliamentary seats in the September general elections. The PAP government uses vague and overly broad legal provisions on public order, morality, security, and racial and religious harmony to sharply limit what its citizens can express and to prosecute those who earn the government’s displeasure.
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‘Yes, we should mock these little tyrants who fantasize that their feelings should trump other people’s freedom. But we must go further.’
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Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong has spoken out about censorship after Enfield High School in Connecticut said it will no longer put on an adaptation of the Broadway hit “American Idiot.”
Based on the band’s 2004 album, the musical apparently contains more profanity, sex and drug use than the school’s staff (and certain parents) could stomach.
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A decision by officials at a Connecticut high school to drop a student production of the Green Day rock opera American Idiot drew an online rebuke from the band’s frontman.
Enfield High School’s drama club posted fliers at the school announcing auditions.
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Idaho must answer for its speech-chilling statute
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Last year, Oxford student Jacob Williams decided he had had enough of debate-dodging campus politicos. He founded No Offence, a student mag which would air the views that students are no longer allowed to. The campus authorities weren’t happy. Watch Jacob discuss the rise of illiberal liberals and the importance of questioning your assumptions.
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If there’s one thing that really gets on my nerves, it’s the idea that students today are uniquely intolerant. The explosion of campus censorship in recent years has made bashing campus politicos a kind of commentariat pastime, with fortysomething columnists wheeling the little blue-haired pillocks out each week to give them a good kicking. But while the students’ union censors deserve everything they get, all too often campus censorship has been painted as a generational phenomena – as if undergraduates appeared from the womb with a Safe Space policy in hand.
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Warwick student George Lawlor made international headlines when he spoke out against compulsory consent classes.
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A team of unfortunate BBFC censors was recently forced watch paint dry for ten hours. The unusual movie, crowdfunded by filmmaker Charlie Lyne, was a protest against alleged censorship by the classification board.
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We’ve seen an increasing effort by governments around the globe to censor content they don’t like. This takes many different forms, but one fairly typical one is for governments to send official looking documents to websites and webhosts demanding that certain content be taken down. Many smaller companies, often with no official policy in place on how to handle such requests, will cave and just take the content down to avoid the hassle. However, recently we’ve seen a growing number of sites reject such requests, unless they’re accompanied by a valid court order. The latest is Medium, the increasingly popular content publishing platform.
In this case, the issue involves the government of Malaysia and the investigative journalism site Sarawak Report, which has been writing a bunch of stories, many based on apparently leaked documents, exposing corruption in Malaysia. Last summer, the website was blocked in Malaysia after a series of reports related to claims of $700 million magically appearing in the Malaysian Prime Minister’s personal bank account. After having its own website blocked, Sarawak also started republishing all its articles on Medium.
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Blogging platform Medium is now blocked in Malaysia, apparently in an effort to censor an investigative news outlet critical of the government. The Sarawak Report has mirrored its articles on Medium at least since its own site was blocked in mid-2015, when it published allegations of corruption.
Medium’s legal team has done an admirable job keeping the relevant post online in the face of government demands. It’s published an account saying the company “stand[s] by investigative journalists” and that the post will stay up until it “receive[s] an order from a court of competent jurisdiction.” But this story also demonstrates the censorship-resistant properties of online encryption like HTTPS, which Medium has enabled across its entire site.
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A few years ago, we highlighted an absolutely ridiculous claim by a pro-copyright expansion think tank, arguing that it was a myth that copyright could ever be used for censorship. In that article, we listed out a number of examples of copyright being used absolutely for reasons of censorship, including a few by government actors. But, by far, one of the worst abusers of copyright law (and US copyright law specifically) to censor critical speech is the government of Ecuador. We’ve written a few times about Ares Rights, a Spanish company that was regularly sending DMCA notices in the US to try to suppress any kind of criticism of Ecuador’s government (and also on criticism of Ares Rights).
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Pakistan is reportedly preparing to launch a major crackdown on internet pornography and the country’s telecoms regulator has ordered internet providers to block 400,000 adult websites.
The action follows a recent order passed down by the Supreme Court in Pakistan requiring the telecom sector to “take remedial steps to quantify the nefarious phenomenon of obscenity and pornography that has an imminent role to corrupt and vitiate the youth of Pakistan”.
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AS online censorship concerns mount in Thailand, activists in the country released a document Wednesday that purportedly details a meeting in which government officials urged Google staff to comply with content removal requests without waiting for court orders.
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Thai officials asked Google to make an exception and remove content without a court order, according to leaked details of a meeting this past Friday with top executives from the U.S.-based search giant.
The second meeting between Google legal reps and a junta censorship committee was detailed in a document leaked by Thai net freedom advocates hours before Anonymous-aligned hacktivists shut down 20 Department of Corrections websites Thursday morning.
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A college at Oxford University says it has decided not to remove a statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes.
Campaigners want the statue torn down, arguing that Rhodes, a 19th Century businessman and politician in southern Africa, represented white supremacy.
Oriel College began a consultation last month and said the “overwhelming” response was that Rhodes should stay.
It said the statue was a reminder of the complexity of history and of the legacies of colonialism.
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Journalists must refrain from self-censorship, despite the restrictions on media freedom imposed by the ruling junta, an activist-turned-media regulator said Thursday.
Supinya Klangnarong, a member of the state-run National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, said the media was obliged to “dare to cross the line” on public interest issues, especially in a society with limited freedom of expression.
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Earlier this week, the Musei Capitolini in Rome found itself at the center of a controversy as news spread worldwide of the censorship of some of its famous nude statues in anticipation of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s visit to the institution. While widely reported as a means to avoid offending the dignitary, the measure has stirred trouble of another kind in the Italian capital, with — unsurprisingly — all parties denying responsibility for it and an internal investigation now underway.
According to The Local, both Rouhani and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi denied knowing about the seemingly Minimalism-inspired transformation, in which someone ordered that the marble sculptures be hidden beneath white boxes during Rouhani’s tour. Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini labelled the deed “incomprehensible,” and attempted to distance Renzi’s office from the matter.
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Privacy
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Thursday, January 28, is Data Privacy Day—a day dedicated to promoting and raising awareness of privacy and data protection around the globe. It commemorates the January 28, 1981 signing of Convention 108, the first legally binding international treaty dealing with privacy and data protection. And it’s a great day to take charge of not only your own privacy, but also the privacy of any school children in your life.
We recently launched Spying on Students—an online resource dedicated to helping students, parents, teachers, and school administrators learn more about the privacy issues surrounding school-issued devices and cloud services. The website—part of our new campaign to promote student privacy—provides useful guides for adjusting privacy settings on mobile devices. It also answers common questions about the legal and technological landscape regarding student privacy and offers suggestions on how you can connect with other concerned parents.
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The House Judiciary Committee has plans for a “members only” meeting next week to discuss Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Acts, the law the NSA relies on to operate its notorious PRISM surveillance program and to tap into the backbone of the Internet, also known as “upstream” collection.
While we wish that “members only” meant that Congressional watchdogs would all don vintage jackets from the 1980s while reining in the NSA, the sad truth is that our elected representatives are once again cutting out the public from an important debate over mass surveillance.
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Black motorists in Florida almost two times more likely to be ticketed for seat belt violations than white motorists.
Sam Dubose. Walter Scott. Sandra Bland. 2015 showed in terrible and vivid detail how even routine police traffic stops carry the risk of escalating to arrest or the use of force — even lethal force. Traffic stops are not simply innocuous encounters. They can be deadly, particularly for Black people.
When evidence suggests that certain communities are targeted for traffic stops because of their race or ethnicity, we need to take heed. Today the ACLU is releasing a report providing just that. “Racial Disparities in Florida Safety Belt Law Enforcement” is the first report to analyze publicly available seat belt citation data reported by law enforcement agencies across the state to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles in 2014 and 2011.
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The House Judiciary Committee will hold its first hearing next week on two of the NSA spying programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden that vacuum up domestic content despite being ostensibly targeted at foreigners: PRISM and Upstream.
But, to the great consternation of 26 government accountability groups who wrote an angry letter to committee leaders on Wednesday, the public is not invited. The entire hearing is classified, and closed.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008, which has been cited as the legal authority for those two programs, lapses next year.
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They won’t tell us what it means, but the Canadian government has confirmed that its spy agencies have a real problem with mass-collecting its citizens’ metadata.
They won’t say how many Canadians were affected, what processes led to the mass-spying, how many information was shared with international intelligence agencies like the NSA, or even how they define “metadata.” But they’re confident everything will be okay.
After news broke that untold number of Canadians had their private information collected by a top-secret intelligence agency, Minister of National Defence Harjit Singh Sajjan told reporters even he didn’t know how far it went.
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Of course, by now you know about the “Five Eyes” coalition of the signals intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all sharing certain intelligence information between them. Some of the Snowden docs have made clear that this collaboration helps the various countries get around restrictions on “domestic” surveillance by effectively offshoring it to other “friendly” electronic spy agencies. Well, at least for now, it appears that that the Five Eyes effort has lost an Eye.
Canada’s signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), has stopped sharing data with the other Four Eyes after realizing that it hadn’t done a particularly good job of protecting the metadata it collected on Canadians.
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The multi-billion dollar private surveillance industry does some of the U.S. government’s most critical electronic snooping. From “deep packet inspection” — that includes tracking and filtering emails — to phone taps, private contractors play a key role for law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
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Ever since the Snowden revelations, more and more people have been educating themselves on how to use encryption. One of the first programs people might turn to is Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, a version of which was thrust further into the public consciousness when it was explicitly credited in Citizen Four, Laura Poitras’ documentary on the National Security Agency and her meeting with Snowden.
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As has been discussed here before, turning law enforcement agencies into revenue-focused entities is a bad idea. Case in point: asset forfeiture. Further case in point: speed trap towns. Improper incentives lead to improper behavior. Agencies may like the idea of a “free” license plate reader, but the price still has to be paid by someone — and that “someone” is going to be the general public.
As priorities shift towards ensuring ongoing use of the “free” ALPRs, other criminal activity is likely to receive less law enforcement attention. Unpaid fines and fees are in law enforcement’s wheelhouse, but should never become its raison d’etre. Once it does, the whole community suffers. Anything that could be implemented to lower crime rates would also serve to lower revenue, making it far less likely to be implemented. Fewer infractions mean fewer opportunities to collect court fees. And while the legislators pushing the new law Vigilant is leveraging talked a good game about sending fewer people to overcrowded jails, the governments overseeing these agencies still have budgets to meet and law enforcement to lean on to ensure this happens. Actually achieving the bill’s stated aims would mean a steady reduction in court fees, which would lead to the loss of “free” plate readers. And no one wants that, at least not on the government side of things.
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The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is a notoriously secretive organization, but the head of its elite Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking team has appeared at Usenix’s Enigma conference to tell the assembled security experts how to make his life difficult.
Rob Joyce has spent over a quarter of a century at No Such Agency and in 2013 he became head of TAO, with responsibility for breaking into non-US computer networks run by overseas companies and governments. Joyce’s presentation on network security at the event boiled down to one piece of advice.
“If you really want to protect your network you have to know your network, including all the devices and technology in it,” he said. “In many cases we know networks better than the people who designed and run them.”
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The leader of the National Security Agency’s hackers says that putting industrial control systems online has made America less secure.
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A private company has captured 2.2 billion photos of license plates in cities throughout America. It stores them in a database, tagged with the location where they were taken. And it is selling that data.
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Your status updates, your uploaded photos, your videos, all of it is going to be inaccessible sometime in the future. Not just by you, but by your descendants as well.
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Facebook signalled its increasing power and influence with an emphatic set of financial results that showed quarterly revenue passing $5bn for the first time, and putting it in a position to challenge Google’s dominance of Silicon Valley.
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The court’s ruling contained some English words — like cookie, homepage and browser — which could violate a Belgian law that says all rulings must be in the official languages of the country: French, Dutch and German. Facebook has said this means the whole ruling must be annulled.
Privacy lawyers not associated with the case told POLITICO this is a “desperate, petty and last-ditch” attempt to avoid Belgian justice. Previously, Facebook tried to fight the verdict by claiming the Belgian data protection authority did not have jurisdiction because the company’s European headquarters is in Ireland.
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Despite widespread media reports to the contrary, an app created for Islamic State militants to send private encrypted messages does not exist, a Daily Dot investigation found.
On Jan. 12, Defense One reported that the Islamic State allegedly built a new Android app called Alrawi for exchanging encrypted messages, based on claims from self-proclaimed online counter-terrorism outfit Ghost Security Group (GSG). The claim was quickly reprinted by Newsweek, Fortune, TechCrunch, and the Times of India—the largest English-language newspaper in the world—among many others.
However, it seems as though hype and fear, rather than concrete evidence of a genuine tool for orchestrating terrorists attacks, played the primary role in propagating word of its existence.
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Of all the NSA surveillance documents Edward Snowden leaked, some of the most important exposed the spy agency’s so-called XKEYSCORE program, a massive system for vacuuming up and sifting through emails, chats, images, online search activity, usernames and passwords, and other private digital data from core fiber optics cables around the world.
XKEYSCORE, which the NSA calls its “widest reaching” surveillance program, was established around 2008 and consists of more than 700 servers that store data sucked from the internet’s backbone and mine this data for patterns and connections.
Only a well-resourced party like the NSA could deploy such a grandiose surveillance program. But if your spy needs are more modest, there are a number of existing tools available that offer similar surveillance capabilities, albeit at a smaller scale, says Nicholas Weaver.
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GCHQ’s information security arm and the UK’s National Technical Authority for Information Assurance has appointed an accredited laboratory in the UK to perform Tempest first-of-type platform testing.
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MIKKEY-SAKKE is currently being promoted by GCHQ for both government and industry as the gold standard.
In fact, they have said they will only certify encryption products that implement MIKKEY-SAKKE, and are also pushing to implement it on the public’s mobile phones.
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Usenix Enigma Although the cops and Feds wont stop banging on and on about encryption – the spies have a different take on the use of crypto.
To be brutally blunt, they love it. Why? Because using detectable encryption technology like PGP, Tor, VPNs and so on, lights you up on the intelligence agencies’ dashboards. Agents and analysts don’t even have to see the contents of the communications – the metadata is enough for g-men to start making your life difficult.
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Exposed is a welcome addition to the current spate of books about technology and surveillance. While it covers familiar ground — it opens with brief accounts of Facebook’s methods of tracking users, USAID’s establishment of ZunZuneo (a Twitter-like social network) in Cuba, and Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s PRISM program — Harcourt’s contribution is uniquely indebted to critical theory. Riffing on the work of another French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and his evocative 1992 fragment “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Harcourt settles upon the phrase “Expository Society” to describe our current situation, one in which we “have become dulled to the perils of digital transparence” and enamored of exposure. This new form of expository power, Harcourt explains, “embeds punitive transparence into our hedonist indulgences and inserts the power to punish in our daily pleasures.”
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Civil Rights
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His reforms treat solitary as an inherently dangerous practice that should only be used as a last resort.
The American people got a wake-up call yesterday from President Barack Obama about solitary confinement, a barbaric practice that’s routine in our country’s prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers. The White House delivered a new report on solitary from the Department of Justice and a simultaneous pledge in an op-ed by the president to sharply reduce federal prisons’ reliance on this inhumane practice.
For state and local jails and prisons across the country, the Justice Department presents its first-ever guide to cutting back on solitary — principles the president endorsed.
On any given day, as many as 100,000 people in U.S. prisons are held in solitary, where they are deprived of almost all human interaction, often sustaining permanent psychological damage. Many solitary survivors — like Reginald Dwayne Betts, Anthony Graves, and James Burns — left prison long ago but remain haunted by their days, months, and years in the hole.
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The most corrupt government on earth, a government so utterly corrupt that it allows former executives of a handful of corrupt mega-banks to run the economic policy of the US solely in the interest of their banks, denying tens of millions of American retirees any interest income on their savings for 7 years and denying hard-pressed Social Security recipients any cost-of-living adjustments by falsifying inflation measures, a government so totally corrupt that it has destroyed seven countries and millions of Muslims solely on the basis of lies, this irredeemably corrupt government has accused the most admired political leader on earth of corruption.
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The Guantánamo parole board approved the release of a Yemeni “forever prisoner,” dismissing intelligence that imprisoned the man for 13 years without trial. And if that level of evil and scorn for justice doesn’t radicalize a 100 people to join ISIS, then nothing can.
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The DNA will not be used for medical purposes, such as checking for genetic markers of disease, which will avoid issues of whether people should be told about their predisposition to possibly serious illnesses. Nor will the DNA database be used for “lineage or genealogical reasons.” That’s an important point: a complete nation’s DNA would throw up many unexpected paternity and maternity results, which could have massive negative effects on the families concerned. It’s precisely those kinds of practical and ethical issues that advocates of wider DNA sampling and testing need to address, but rarely do.
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Please note that if a classmate had sent a photo of his penis to this 16-year-old girl, he might be facing child pornography charges and a lifetime on the sex offender registry, rather than “annoying and accosting,” which would net Guzman a maximum $200 fine and 6 months in jail.
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Law enforcement agencies commit criminal acts while conducting criminal investigations. It happens all the time. With the blessing of their handlers, confidential informants routinely engage in criminal activity. Investigators act as co-conspirators in the planning of terrorist attacks and the robbing of imaginary “stash houses.”
But many people are taking issue with the FBI’s decision to use seized servers loaded with child pornography as honeypots rather than immediately shut them down. For some, this is the one unforgivable criminal act — the possession and distribution of child porn.
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As you may have heard, from February 20 to March 4, 2015, the FBI was operating the world’s largest kiddie porn site, during which point it hacked the site and thereby IDed the IP address of up to 1,500 users, both in the US and abroad.
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Sgt. Edwin Guzman is accused of sending sexually explicit Facebook messages to a minor.
Guzman was promoted to sergeant in August 2014, around the same time he allegedly sent the messages to the teenager who says she considered Guzman a family friend and father figure.
“It started off we regularly chat and it’s mostly about school and how life is,” the teenager who was 16 at the time told 5 Investigates’ Mike Beaudet.
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Network registers complaint at World Bank arbitration court accusing Egypt of targeting its journalists and offices.
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Another whistleblower is facing charges brought by this administration — one that has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined. Thomas Tamm, a DOJ lawyer during the Bush era, exposed the NSA’s super-secret domestic surveillance program, whose authorization ran directly from the Attorney General to the Chief Judge of the FISA Court.
His whistleblowing led to a Pulitzer for the New York Times. The information Tamm gave to NYT reporters detailed something referred to only as “the program.” The two-person approval process eliminated much of the paper trail and allowed the NSA to perform warrantless domestic surveillance. Colleagues of Tamm’s at the DOJ’s Office of Intelligence Programs and Review even told Tamm this was “probably illegal.”
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Thomas Tamm exposed the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Fellow Justice Department whistleblower Jesselyn Radack, right, waited a decade for a misconduct complaint against her to be dismissed.
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The NYPD is once again in the middle of a transparency/accountability controversy. The law enforcement agency has achieved the dubious distinction of being more difficult to obtain public records from than federal three-letter agencies like the CIA and NSA. The latest news does nothing to improve its reputation.
Some of this is due to its in-house classification system, which allows it to arbitrarily declare potentially-responsive documents “secret” — something it does quite often with no apparent oversight. Some of it is due to the department’s general antagonism towards transparency and openness, which keeps documents not marked secret out of the public’s hands just because. Its steadfast belief that the only entity truly entitled to information is the NYPD has seen this attitude carried over to discovery requests in civil lawsuits and criminal cases, much to the general disgruntlement of presiding judges.
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As the old English proverb has it “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Such thoughts spring to mind with the launch of the report Secure Voting by campaigning group WebRoots Democracy. WebRoots are volunteers who ‘campaign for the introduction of online voting in Local and General Elections’. We know where they stand on this issue, but how informed is their argument that online voting can be secure?
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Asylum seekers in Cardiff are being issued with brightly coloured wristbands that they must wear at all times, in a move which echoes the “red door” controversy in Middlesbrough and has resulted in their harassment and abuse by members of the public.
Newly arrived asylum seekers in the Welsh capital who are housed by Clearsprings Ready Homes, a private firm contracted by the Home Office, are being told that they must wear the wristbands all the time otherwise they will not be fed. The wristbands entitle the asylum seekers, who cannot work and are not given money, to three meals a day.
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So much for those “inalienable rights.” The Sixth Amendment — among other things — guarantees representation for criminal defendants. This guarantee has been declared null and void in two states: Utah and Pennsylvania.
The problem isn’t that these states aren’t willing to comply with both the Sixth Amendment and the Supreme Court’s Gideon v. Wainwright decision. It’s just that they’re not going to spend any of their money doing it. In these states, funding for indigent defense is left up to local governments, with no additional support coming from the state level.
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As reported by Zoe Tillman, Thomas Tamm, the first whistleblower to go to Eric Lichtblau with reports of Stellar Wind, is being investigated for ethical violations by the DC Bar. The complaint alleges he failed to report that people within DOJ were violating their legal obligations to superiors, up to and including the Attorney General, and that he took confidences of his client (which the complaint defines as DOJ) to the press.
The question, of course, is why the Bar is pursuing this now, years after Tamm’s actions became public. Tillman describes the complaint as having had some kind of virgin birth, from Bar members reading the news accounts rather than someone complaining.
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In the spring of 2015, before I decided to run for President, two things were clear to me. First, the need to focus America on the failure of its democracy was as urgent as ever. Second, no plausible candidate for President was going to do that.
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I decided to raise the money contingently. We set a target that we thought would be large enough to make the campaign credible, but not so large as to be impossible to hit in a short period. If we hit the target, I’d run. If we didn’t, we’d return the money we had raised.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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This is the first part of a series of posts about a project we have been working with for a while now that we call SIR (SDN Internet Router). To give some context to this we will first introduce how the Internet route packets, what peering is and how Spotify connects to the rest of the Internet. Feel free to skip this post if you feel you know these topics already.
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Unfortunately, I have been connected to the internet only through the the Varadero airport and the WiFi of a “full included” resort near Jibacoa. I have to come to assume that this network is likely to be on a segregated, uncensored internet while the rest of the country suffers the wrath of the Internet censorship in Cuba I have seen documented elsewhere.
Through my research, I couldn’t find any sort of direct censorship. The Netalyzr tool couldn’t find anything significantly wrong with the connection, other than the obvious performance problems related both to the overloaded uplinks of the Cuban internet. I ran an incomplete OONI probe as well, and it seems there was no obvious censorship detected there as well, at least according to folks in the helpful #ooni IRC channel. Tor also works fine, and could be a great way to avoid the global surveillance system described later in this article.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The World Health Organization routinely works with a number of outside actors, such as non-governmental groups, philanthropic organisations, industry and academics. Member states have been trying to establish a framework to regulate such engagement and are still working to produce a consensus document. This week they are trying to extend the mandate of an intergovernmental meeting in the hope that an ultimate meeting in April can solve remaining issues.
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In an article that’s actually a bit (but just a bit) more thoughtful than the headline applied to it (“How Corporations Profit From Black Teens’ Viral Content”), Fader writer Doreen St. Felix tackles the cultural appropriation of creative works. Sort of.
While the article does quote from a 2008 essay about the historical cultural appropriation of black artists’ works by record labels, etc., the article does not point out any specific appropriation occurring here — at least not in terms of the two creators St. Felix has chosen to write about. And it has nothing to say about how these corporations are “profiting” from this supposed appropriation.
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During the Executive Board meeting at the World Health Organization this week, member states agreed on committing to the health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. The consensus reached by member states was that direct health development goals such as the continuous effort to rid the world of malaria, HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C are at the forefront of pressing issues. But goals for health and those for related issues should be worked on together as they are mutually beneficial, they said.
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Trademarks
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Louis Vuitton is facing a potential $400,000 legal bill after lawyers representing parody bag company My Other Bag filed a motion at a US court asking it to rule that the case is “exceptional”.
Earlier this month, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected the luxury brand’s complaint that MOB infringed its intellectual property rights.
California-based MOB sells tote bags that on one side state “My Other Bag …” and on the other have a Louis Vuitton design. The company also sells bags that have other luxury brands’ designs on them.
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I’m not certain why people think this will work, but there seems to be an idea floating around a few of our fellow citizens that they can simply force their favorite sports teams to do what they want by filing trademarks for things they never intend to use. You may recall the story about a jackass in North Dakota who wanted to prevent the University of North Dakota from changing its name from The Fighting Sioux to, well, anything else that had been suggested by filing for trademarks on all the other things that had been suggested. Such a strategy was doomed to fail from the beginning for any number of reasons, but mostly because you actually have to be using what you’re trying to trademark in commerce in order to get it approved, and trolling isn’t a commercial enterprise as far as I know.
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Copyrights
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Last month President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law, making $1 billion dollars available for educational technology spending. In addition, the new law ensures that educators are aware of the piracy harms new technologies introduce.
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Remember Roca Labs? The somewhat shady manufacturer of some goop that the company claimed was an “alternative to gastric bypass surgery.” This was the company that initially sued the site PissedConsumer.com because it was hosting negative reviews of Roca’s product — and Roca claimed that because it pressured buyers into a gag clause saying they wouldn’t say anything bad about the product, that PissedConsumer was engaged in tortious interference. There was a lot more as well, including threatening to sue us at Techdirt (more than once!) for reporting on the case, suing Pissed Consumer’s lawyer Marc Randazza for defamation and a variety of other shenanigans (even including some bizarre side stories on Nevada politics, despite it being a Florida company). Anyway, late last year the FTC smacked down Roca for its misleading marketing and its non-disparagement clauses. Roca is still fighting that fight, but soon after it also lost the case against PissedConsumer.
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The United States Copyright Act should be amended in a “very careful” way to change the way statutory damages are awarded to successful copyright owners against infringing individuals and online services, Shira Perlmutter, US Patent and Trademark Office chief policy officer and international affairs director, said today.
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After winning a $25 million judgment last month, music publisher BMG has requested a permanent injunction against Cox Communications, requiring the Internet provider to expose the personal details of pirating subscribers. For its part, Cox has asked the court to reconsider the guilty verdict or grant a new trial.
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A person can undo the damage of a particularly stupid assertion by acting quickly and contritely. Too bad far too many people opt for making the situation much, much worse.
David Paxton included a screenshot of Forbes contributor Frances Coppola touting her own personal conspiracy theory about the rash of sexual assaults by immigrants in Cologne, Germany, in his article for Quillette.
[...]
There’s nothing “personal” about a Twitter account. Any tweet viewable by the public can be screencapped or quoted without permission of the account owner. If a Twitter account holder doesn’t care to have their tweets quoted or posted elsewhere in any form, they can always lock their account, making it only viewable by their followers. Coppola’s account was public then and — after briefly taking it private — it is public once again.
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