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11.07.15

Links 7/11/2015: Croatia’s GNU/Linux/LibreOffice Manual, LibreOffice Big in Italy

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Locked Up with Linux

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

  • The Future of the Bloomberg Terminal is Open Source

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

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

  • Croatia publishes Linux & LibreOffice manual

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

  • Kernel Space

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

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

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

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

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

    • Btrfs In Linux 4.4 Has Many Improvements/Fixes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Open APIs, Microsoft Loves Red Hat & More…

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

    • The Washington Post questions the security of the Linux kernel

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

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

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

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

    • Trinity 1.6

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

    • Graphics Stack

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

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

    • Benchmarks

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

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

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

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • October Plasma on Wayland Update: all about geometry

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

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

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

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

      • Handling Screen Management With KDE’s Plasma Wayland

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

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

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

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

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

  • Distributions

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • The November 2015 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

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

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • Mom & Me Grows Its Business With SUSE Linux

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

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Given Buy Rating at Mizuho (RHT)

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

      • Red Hat (RHT): Moving Average Crossover Alert

      • Fedora

        • Lenovo Yoga 900 and Fedora Review

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

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

        • Fedora 23: In The Ocean Again

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

        • Fedora 23 – Mate Desktop – Sticky Windows

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

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

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

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

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

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

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

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • How a better understanding of open source can lower the risks

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

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

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

    [...]

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

  • Leadership in Software Development Part 1
  • Leadership in Software Development Part 2
  • Leadership in Software Development Part 3
  • Leadership in Software Development Part 4

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Building a Developer Story for Mitaka

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

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

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

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

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

  • Databases

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

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

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

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

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

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Bitnami Helps to Enable Oracle’s Cloud Aspirations

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

  • Business

  • BSD

    • pfSense 2.2.5-RELEASE Now Available!

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

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

    • OpenBGPd and route filters

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

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

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

    • Open Data

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

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

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

  • Programming

Leftovers

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

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

  • Sepp Blatter under medical evaluation after suffering from stress

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

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

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

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

  • Health/Nutrition

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

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

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

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

    • End the DEA

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

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • ProtonMail Pays Crooks $6,000 In Bitcoin To Cease DDoS Bombardment

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

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

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

    • Ransomware Found Targeting Linux Servers and Coding Repositories

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

    • Linux Ransomware Is Now Attacking Webmasters

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

    • Auto-Hacking Class Action Likely to Die

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

    • Volkswagen and the Real Insider Threat

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

    • Encrypted resistance: from digital security to dual power

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

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • US Should Offer Assistance to Russia in A321 Crash Probe – Keith Alexander
    • Morell: U.K. “overstating” likelihood of bomb on Russian jet
    • What we know and don’t know about downed Russian jetliner
    • Cameron’s comments on Egypt crash ‘un-British’ – ex-CIA boss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Washington prepares for World War III

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • There’s tyranny aplenty

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

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Ford Revealed as Funder of Climate Denial Group ALEC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Illegally planted palm oil already growing on burnt land in Indonesia
    • Indonesia fires are a world crisis

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

  • Finance

    • Bitcoin: Discussing Code Changes Is Half The Battle

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

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

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

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

    • Internet Freedom? Singapore’s Not Faring Too Well

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

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

    • Singapore sees slight dip in Internet freedom: Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      How much is that illegal, warrantless surveillance worth?

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

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

    • CIA Email Hackers Return With Major Law Enforcement Breach

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

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

    • Teenage ‘Cracka’ Hackers Hit FBI Deputy Director
    • Teens Who Hacked CIA Chief’s AOL Email Now Allege Breaching FBI Systems
    • Teen Hackers Who Doxed CIA Chief Are Targeting More Government Officials

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

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

    • ‘Smokescreen’ allegations over rendition flights probe

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

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

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

    • Former CIA Directors Disagree On Torture

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

    • The CIA Is an Ethics-Free Zone

      I joined the CIA in January 1990.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Hackers have infiltrated the US arrest records database

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

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

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

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

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

      That wasn’t OK with her.

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

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

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

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

    • Spy Watchdog Launches Probe Into New Zealand’s Links to CIA Torture
    • Government report investigates intelligence agency links to US torture
    • Head of SIS unlikely to go
    • Security Intelligence Service ‘broke the law’
    • David Fisher: Just how bad were our spies?
    • Inspector’s questions restore confidence in spy agencies
    • Spying watchdog ‘opened a can of worms’
    • An Ex-CIA Officer Speaks Out: The Italian Job

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

    • Maryland is the most militarized university in America, says VICE News
    • UVA is 19th most militarized university in the U.S.
    • 4th Amendment for me, but not for thee

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

      [...]

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

    • A Government Both More Secretive and More Open

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

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

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

    • Ari Berman on Voting Rights, Joanne Doroshow on Forced Arbitration
    • ‘If this was a test, nearly everyone failed’: how tech giants deny your digital rights

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

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

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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

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

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

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

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

    • Obama Signs Official Letter of Intent to Join the TPP

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

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

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

    • Copyrights

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

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

11.06.15

Links 6/11/2015: CAINE 7, Tiny Core 6.4.1

Posted in News Roundup at 1:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Why improving kernel security is important

      This reactive approach is fine for a world where it’s possible to push out software updates without having to perform extensive testing first, a world where the only people hunting for interesting kernel vulnerabilities are nice people. This isn’t that world, and this approach isn’t fine.

      Just as features like SELinux allow us to reduce the harm that can occur if a new userspace vulnerability is found, we can add features to the kernel that make it more difficult (or impossible) for attackers to turn a kernel bug into an exploitable vulnerability. The number of people using Linux systems is increasing every day, and many of these users depend on the security of these systems in critical ways. It’s vital that we do what we can to avoid their trust being misplaced.

    • Toshiba Laptops To See Some Improvements With Linux 4.4

      Intel’s Darren Hart has sent in the x86 platform driver updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.

    • Kernel Self Protection Project

      Between the companies that recognize the critical nature of this work, and with Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative happy to start funding specific work in this area, I think we can really make a dent.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Tablet Protocol & Weston Support Is Back To Being Baked

        Peter Hutterer is back to working on tablet protocol and support for Wayland/Weston. In this context, it’s for drawing tablets like the popular Wacom hardware.

        There’s been some work done before on a tablet protocol while published today was a largely redone version of this protocol. The protocol is largely new, Peter noted, “Too many changes from the last version (a year ago or so), so I won’t detail them, best to look at it with fresh eyes.”

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • MATE 1.12 Brings GTK3 & Systemd Improvements, But No Wayland Yet
    • MATE 1.12 Has Arrived, Here’s What’s New

      The MATE desktop environment has been updated to version 1.12, and the new iteration brings quite a few improvements, the most notable being the support for GTK 3.18.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Screen management in Wayland

        One of the bigger things that is in the works in Plasma’s Wayland support is screen management. In most cases, that is reasonably easy, there’s one screen and it has a certain resolution and refresh rate set. For mobile devices, this is almost always good enough. Only once we starting thinking about convergence and using the same codebase on different devices, we need to be able to configure the screens used for rendering. Especially on desktops and laptops, where we often find multi-monitor setups or connected projectors is where the user should be able to decide a bunch of things, relative position of the screens, resolution (“mode”) for each, etc.. Another thing that we haven’t touched yet is scaling of the rendering per display, which becomes increasingly important with a wider range of displays connected, just imagine a 4K laptop running north of 300 pixels per inch (PPI) connected to a projector which throws 1024*768 pixels on a wall sized 4x3m.

      • A Minuet for KDE

        A Minuet is a musical form (occasionally with an accompanying social dance for two people) originated in the 17th-century France, initially introduced to opera but later also to suites such some of those from Johann Sebastian Bach. Although composing a minuet for KDE wouldn’t be bad at all :), my musical skills don’t make me feel like doing so by no means and, therefore, this post is gonna be about – you know – software and KDE! But software for music :)

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME 3.18.2 stable tarballs due

        Hello all,

        Tarballs are due on 2015-11-09 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.18.2
        stable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which
        were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule
        so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will
        be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that
        will probably be too late to get in 3.18.2. If you are not able to
        make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late,
        please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll
        the tarball for you!

  • Distributions

    • CAINE 7 released: Screenshots

      CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is a Linux distribution specifically designed for digital forensics. It is based on Ubuntu.

      The latest edition is CAINE 7, code-named DeepSpace. It is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and, therefore, UEFI and Secure Boot ready.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • SUSE Looks To Mainline The AMD HSA Support In GCC

        Martin Jambor at SUSE is looking to begin mainlining the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support within the GCC compiler.

      • Uptime Funk: Using SUSE’s kGraft Live Kernel Patching For Linux

        Last year SUSE announced KGraft as a new form of live Linux kernel patching to reduce downtime by avoiding reboots when applying kernel security updates, etc. The initial combined infrastructure work of kGraft and Red Hat’s Kpatch was merged in Linux 4.0. Here’s how SUSE is showing off their live kernel patching method.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Five Years of Bodhi Linux

              I can hardly believe that this month marks the fifth year I have been working on Bodhi Linux stuff. What started as a project to save me from having to compile EFL + E updates on six different Ubuntu computers every month has become so much more than that. I would just like to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to Bodhi Linux over the years. Without your code, forums posts, documentation, monetary donations, translations, and many other things I am sure I am forgetting – we would not still be here today. The power of the open source community continually impresses me and I am honored to be a part of it – giving back in whatever way I can.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why your manager loves technical debt (and what to do about it)

    Do you think that open source projects are less prone to accumulating technical debt? Or do they suffer from the same problems?

    That’s a tricky question. Any project is capable of becoming burdened with technical debt. The difference is that it’s rare for an open source project to accumulate much debt once set into the wild. It’s only when you have a population of captive developers that are tasked with adding features to a code base with no choice in their participation that you can achieve the truly abysmal levels of code quality that is out there. When a project is open source, developers simply move on when it becomes too much to deal with and the project dies.

  • Pursuing an Internet of Things strategy for the right reasons
  • Alchemy for the 21st century: Open source according to Cloudsoft CEO

    LinuxCon 2015 brings together some of the brightest minds in technology today. What makes Linux attractive to such talent? Duncan Johnston-Watt, founder and CEO of Cloudsoft Corp., feels that Linux is playing a key role in the community’s ability to collaborate.

    Johnston-Watt stopped by theCUBE, from SiliconANGLE Media, to speak with host Jeff Frick about the role Cloudsoft is playing within the community.

  • Databases

    • A look at how MongoDB plans to make open source profitable

      Open source products in the enterprise are becoming increasingly common. Five or six years ago they were seen as a nice idea in theory, but unrealistic in a world that requires strict SLAs and support to make things work. But times have changed and thanks to the likes of Facebook, Google and eBay publicly praising the benefits of adopting open source technologies at scale, everybody wants a piece of them.

  • Education

    • Education is key to Basque free software policy

      Raising awareness and training users bolster the free software policy of the Basque Country (Spain). The government of the autonomous region continues to expand its use of free software, according to SALE, the Basque Country’s free software resource centre.

      The SALE resource centre is advising Basque government organisations such as IVAP, the Institute of Public Administration and SPRI, the Business Development Agency. It is also helping to other organizations providing free software courses to citizens and companies, and is involved in training the users of publicly accessible Internet access points across the Basque Country – all running free software.

      Over 2,300 PCs in the network of 270 public Internet access points, KZgunea, are running KZnux, based on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. KZgunea is providing training for free software to the about 100 KZgunea staff members. These centre’s are used by some 400,000 citizens per year.

  • FUD/Openwashing

  • BSD

    • less less and more less

      Nicholas Marriott (nicm@) has replaced the aging version of less(1) in the OpenBSD base system with a more modern fork from illumos founder Garrett D’Amore.

  • Licensing

    • TPP will ban rules that require source-code disclosure

      As we pick through the secret, 2,000-page treaty, we’re learning an awful lot of awfulness, but this one is particularly terrible.

      As software becomes more tightly integrated into cars and buildings and medical devices (and everything else), many governments have enacted procurement policies requiring contractors to disclose and/or publish the sourcecode of the products they supply to public bodies. For example, if Volkswagen were to supply a fleet of diesels to the National Parks Service, the government might tell them that they have to turn over their source-code so that it can be audited for “defeat devices,” or Chrysler might have to disclose source on their jeeps before they’re sold to the Army, which could result in them being made secure against over-the-Internet attacks on steering and brakes.

      [...]

      The article in question could well have been written by a Microsoft lobbyist.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Department of Education seeks comments on open licensing requirements

        One of the more effective ways to advance an agenda is to attach requirements to grant funding. The U.S. Department of Education has an interest in broadening the impact of its grants, so it announced a notice of proposed rule making (NPRM) on October 29. The proposed rule would require intellectual property created with Department of Education grant funding to be openly licensed to the public. This includes both software and instructional materials.

        Under current regulations, creators of grant-funded work retain unlimited copyright and rights to royalty income. The Department of Education is granted a royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable right to publish, use, and reproduce the work. This means that the public can request copies from the Department, however practice has shown that this rarely happens.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers

      I’m commiserating with a friend who recently left the technology industry to return to entertainment. “I’m not a programmer,” he begins, explaining some of the frustrations of his former workplace, before correcting himself, “—oh, engineer, in tech-bro speak. Though to me, engineers are people who build bridges and follow pretty rigid processes for a reason.”

      His indictment touches a nerve. In the Silicon Valley technology scene, it’s common to use the bare term “engineer” to describe technical workers. Somehow, everybody who isn’t in sales, marketing, or design became an engineer. “We’re hiring engineers,” read startup websites, which could mean anything from Javascript programmers to roboticists.

    • ATLAS: the UK’s supercomputer

      Atlas, in Manchester, was one of the first supercomputers; it was said that when Atlas went down, the UK’s computing capacity was reduced by half. Today supercomputers are massively parallel and run at many, many times the speed of Atlas. (The fastest in the world is currently Tianhe-2, in Guangzhou, China, running at 33 petaflops, or over a thousand million times faster than Atlas.) But some of the basics of modern computers still owe something to the decisions made by the Atlas team when they were trying to build their ‘microsecond engine’.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Welsh MP’s bid to free up low-cost drugs for cancer, Parkinson’s and MS

      A Welsh MP will try to change the law today to allow doctors to prescribe life-saving and low-cost drugs that are currently unavailable but which could help a range of conditions such as breast cancer and MS.

      The treatments known as ‘off-patent’ would be inexpensive to the NHS because their original patent has expired and which could be used to treat new conditions. But new treatments require new licenses that drugs companies are unwilling to apply for.

    • The War on Drugs isn’t working, says Christian Aid

      The war on drugs is simply not working, according to a new report by Christian Aid.

      Where old approaches to drugs treat the issue like a “malignant tumour”, apart from the whole body, the reality today is that this tumour “has become an almost necessary part of the whole body, rendering conventional treatments ineffective. Removal could cause certain organs to fail,” according to Eric Gutierrez, a senior advisor at Christian Aid.

      The reality in many countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, Mali and Tajikstan, is that the drugs trade is not a sub-sector of the economy that can be identified and retracted without huge implications for other parts of the economy and society.

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The water wars are coming: Civilization will never survive climate calamity

      At the end of November, delegations from nearly 200 countries will convene in Paris for what is billed as the most important climate meeting ever held. Officially known as the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the 1992 treaty that designated that phenomenon a threat to planetary health and human survival), the Paris summit will be focused on the adoption of measures that would limit global warming to less than catastrophic levels. If it fails, world temperatures in the coming decades are likely to exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit), the maximum amount most scientists believe the Earth can endure without experiencing irreversible climate shocks, including soaring temperatures and a substantial rise in global sea levels.

      A failure to cap carbon emissions guarantees another result as well, though one far less discussed. It will, in the long run, bring on not just climate shocks, but also worldwide instability, insurrection, and warfare. In this sense, COP-21 should be considered not just a climate summit but a peace conference — perhaps the most significant peace convocation in history.

    • Significant Layoffs At National Geographic Magazine

      In the opening days of the month when National Geographic magazine is scheduled to be turned over to 21st Century Fox, the magazine’s employees were told to stand by their phones to wait for calls – one by one – to come to Human Resources to learn the fate of their jobs.

      A memo sent to all staff on Monday from CEO Gary Knell told the magazine’s employees to return to Washington to Geographic’s headquarters if possible to wait for an eMail on Tuesday which would give them more information about their employment status.

    • Rupert Murdoch Takes Over National Geographic, Then Lays Off Award-Winning Staff

      The memo went out, and November 3rd 2015 came to the National Geographic office. This was the day in which Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox took over National Geographic. The management of National Geographic sent out an email telling its staff, all of its staff, all to report to their headquarters, and wait by their phones. This pulled back every person who was in the field, every photographer, every reporter, even those on vacation had to show up on this fateful day.

      As these phones rang, one by one National Geographic let go the award-winning staff, and the venerable institution was no more.

      The name now belongs to Rupert Murdoch, and he has plans for it. The CEO of National Geographic Society, Greg Knell, tried to claim back in September that there “there won’t be an [editorial] turn in a direction that is different form the National Geographic heritage.” Murdoch’s move today only served to prove Knell’s words hollow, with hundreds of talented people now served their pink slips. And with the recognition that Murdoch’s other enterprises do not reflect the standards held by National Geographic, and with Murdoch’s history of changing the editorial direction of purchased properties, today’s move indicates that we can expect a similar shift for National Geographic.

    • Ahead of Fox close, National Geographic starts cutting staff

      Ahead of its acquisition by 21st Century Fox, National Geographic is beginning to eliminate staff through a mix of voluntary buyouts and layoffs, POLITICO has learned.

      About 180 employees, or nine percent of the total workforce, were subject to “involuntary separation” (i.e. layoffs) and an unspecified number of additional employees have been offered “voluntary separation agreements,” a spokesperson for the company confirmed.

      The Fox acquisition, announced in September, is expected to close on Nov. 16.

      Gary Knell, the president and CEO of National Geographic Society, sent an email to employees yesterday instructing them to be available today for individual consultations with human resources.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • As Jobs Flee WI, Legislators Lock-Down Their Own With Unlimited Dark Money

      This week, two major Wisconsin employers sent shockwaves through the state when they announced plant closures and layoffs that could affect thousands of jobs.

      The Republicans who control the Wisconsin state senate called an “extraordinary session” for Friday–not to address the loss of family-supporting jobs in Wisconsin, but to allow out-of-state billionaires to secretly pour even more money into state elections.

      Rep. Terese Berceau, a Democrat, calls the bills nothing short of “an effort to create a permanent one-party state,” helping give job security to Republicans for years to come.

      [...]

      The press managed to connect political donations to WEDC grants because those donations were disclosed. Yet one of the bills being voted on this week would make it harder to connect those dots. Under the bill, a CEO seeking a WEDC grant could make a contribution to a politician’s dark money political operation with no requirement that it be publicly reported. The politician will know where their support comes from, but the public and press will not, making it impossible to determine whether those supporters later receive special treatment or taxpayer-funded loans or grants.

  • Censorship

    • Kremlin slams Charlie Hebdo cartoons on Egypt crash as ‘sacrilege’

      The Kremlin on Friday angrily condemned France’s Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine for publishing political cartoons on the Egypt plane crash in which 224 people died, most of them Russian tourists.

      “In our country we can sum this up in a single word: sacrilege,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

  • Privacy

    • MI5 ‘secretly collected phone data’ for decade

      The programme has been running for 10 years under a law described as “vague” by the government’s terror watchdog.

      It emerged as Home Secretary Theresa May unveiled a draft bill governing spying on communications by the authorities.

    • ProtonMail recovers from DDoS punch after being extorted

      The last few days have not been easy for ProtonMail, the Geneva-based encrypted email service that launched last year.

      The last few days have not been easy for ProtonMail, the Geneva-based encrypted email service that launched last year.

      Earlier this week, the service was extorted by one group of attackers, then taken offline in a large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by a second group that it suspects may be state sponsored.

      ProtonMail offers a full, end-to-end encrypted email service. It raised more than US$500,000 last year after a blockbuster crowdfunding campaign that sought just $100,000.

    • After TalkTalk, should government re-think storing citizens’ internet records?

      On Wednesday 4 November, the government published a draft of its Investigatory Powers Bill.

      Amongst the many controversial measures announced in the bill were plans to require web and phone companies to store records of websites visited by every citizen for 12 months for access by police, security services and other public bodies.

      The publication of the bill comes just weeks after the TalkTalk hack, which was simply the latest in a long line of high profile losses of personal information.

    • Five hours with Edward Snowden

      Suddenly he opens the door. DN’s Lena Sundström and Lotta Härdelin had a unique meeting with the whistleblower who has fans all over the world but risks lifetime imprisonment in the home country he once tried to save.

  • Civil Rights

    • Quentin Tarantino: The police would rather start fights with celebrities than examine why the public has lost trust in them

      Quentin Tarantino appeared on “All In With Chris Hayes” Wednesday night to defend himself against allegations that he’s “anti-police.”

      Police unions across the country have called for a boycott of the director’s work after he spoke at an anti-police brutality rally in New York last week. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “I’m doing here [sic] because I am a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”

      After being criticized by the presidents of the police unions in Philadelphia and New York City, Tarantino told The Los Angeles Times that he “never said” all cops are murderers. “I never said that. I never even implied that.”

      “What they’re doing is pretty obvious,” he added. “Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out.”

    • NYPD Wants $42,000 To Turn Over Documents Related To Discharges Of Officers’ Firearms

      The NYPD is jerking around FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) requesters again. Usually, the NYPD just pretends it’s the CIA (somewhat justified, considering its hiring of former government spooks) and claims everything is so very SECRET it couldn’t possibly be edged out between the multiple exemptions it cites in its refusals.

    • Fox Host Says Violence Against Police Officers Increasing, But Data Show The Exact Opposite

      Fox News co-host Eric Bolling dubiously claimed violence against police officers has been increasing, and attributed the supposed increase to the Black Lives Matter movement and criticism of police.

      On the November 5 edition of Fox News’ The Five, the show’s hosts discussed recent comments from film director Quentin Tarantino regarding police officers and Drug Enforcement Administration head Chuck Rosenberg speculating that the “Ferguson effect” — the idea that increased scrutiny and criticism of police brutality is leading to increased violence, especially against police officers against police officers — was real and recent criticism of the police was leading to more violence.

    • ‘Reliance on Police Cannot Be Consistent With What We Want to Happen in Public Schools’

      Condemnation came quickly when video surfaced on social media of a South Carolina police officer assaulting a female high school student in class in the process of arresting her for, according to reports, either not participating or refusing to put away a cell phone. But while demands to fire school resource officer Ben Fields, who had a history of racialized brutality, were answered, we still haven’t had a deep-going conversation as to why he was in the room in the first place.

      The incident at Spring Valley High School is sadly reflective, too, of ways that black women and girls in particular encounter state violence on a daily basis. That’s the problem explored in the report Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, produced by the African American Policy Forum, on whose board I serve.

    • Watch A Congressman Demolish Fox Business Host’s Defense Of Donald Trump’s Racist Comments About Mexican Immigrants

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TPPA: Last chance for Labor to gain some cred

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement may have been signed by the 12 countries involved but that doesn’t mean it is a done deal.

      The parliaments of all 12 countries — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam — still have to ratify the deal in its entirety; there is no question of picking and choosing.

      And that means there is still a role for the Labor Party to play. The big question is whether Labor wants to protect the interests of the people or not.

    • Release of the Full TPP Text After Five Years of Secrecy Confirms Threats to Users’ Rights

      Trade offices involved in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have finally released all 30 chapters of the trade deal today, a month after announcing the conclusion of the deal in Atlanta. Some of the more dangerous threats to the public’s rights to free expression, access to knowledge, and privacy online are contained in the copyright provisions in the Intellectual Property (IP) chapter, which we analyzed based on the final version leaked by Wikileaks two weeks ago and which are unchanged in the final release. Now that the entire agreement is published, we can see how other chapters of the agreement contain further harmful rules that undermine our rights online and over our digital devices and content.

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

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

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

    • Reviewing the TPP: Trudeau’s best-case scenario

      In the final days of the federal election, with the Liberals leapfrogging over the NDP on an ostensibly progressive platform, one question dogged Trudeau to the end: what was his position on the recently completed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP)? We still don’t quite know the answer, though we may soon enough.

    • Trademarks

      • University Of Kentucky Battles Kentucky Mist Moonshine Maker Over Hats And T-Shirts

        We’ve already established that the University of Kentucky is sort of insane when it comes to overly restrictive trademark practices. We’ve also established that many other educational institutions are equally asshat-ish when it comes to trademark issues, in particular, for some reason, on any matter that in any way has to do with alcohol brands. The beer and liquor industries are dealing with their own trademark issues resulting from the explosion in craft brewing, but this is the story of how the University of Kentucky has managed to convince itself and, apparently, the USPTO that it has sole ownership of the very name of the state in which it is located for use on apparel.

    • Copyrights

      • Stretching to its Limits: Can You Protect Yoga Poses through Copyright?

        Felines can often demonstrate great feats of stretchiness and overall flexibility, which can only be attributed to hard work at all-important cat yoga sessions. Whether you partake in yoga or any similar types of new age forms of exercise (in popularity, less so in origin), you cannot have been unaware of their growing popularity, especially among us Millennials. The classes aim to train the body and mind, each style of yoga doing so through different means and various poses. With this variety of styles, could one protect yoga poses through copyright?

      • YTS / YIFY Signs Unprecedented Settlement With MPAA

        For several years YTS/YIFY has been one of Hollywood’s biggest arch-rivals but both sides came to an unprecedented agreement in recent weeks. Instead of going to trial over the alleged widespread piracy facilitated by the site, the MPAA signed a deal with its operator, ending a multi-million dollar lawsuit before it really got started.

      • U.S. Asks Judge to Rule Kim Dotcom’s Evidence Inadmissible

        As Kim Dotcom’s extradition hearing defense continues, the U.S. government has just asked the presiding judge to rule all of the Megaupload founder’s evidence inadmissible. However, Dotcom informs TorrentFreak that the effort failed. “The Judge has said he wants a fair extradition,” he said.

      • U.S. Judge Explores Return of Megaupload Data

        There’s a chance that after four years Megaupload users may be reunited with their lost files. U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady has asked several stakeholders to chime in on the possible return of the Megaupload servers, which also holds crucial evidence for Kim Dotcom’s defense.

11.05.15

Links 5/11/2015: Framing Linus Torvalds, NetBeans IDE 8.1

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Xiaomi Will Start Selling Two Linux Laptops In 2016

      According to a press release by Inventec, their company is currently in collaboration with Xiaomi Corp. to produce two new laptops. Xiaomi will start selling two Linux laptops early next year, according to a report. Both will be introduced under the Xiaomi name brand and are reported for a scheduled release date in the early part of 2016.

    • DDoS, botnet, and fiber cut fail to stop Twitchers crowd-installing Linux

      The Twitch in the Shell project has successfully installed Arch Linux using hundreds of people simultaneously hammering keys in a terminal. One of the organizers has explained to The Reg how it was done.

  • Server

    • Unikernels: The Next Generation of Cloud Technology

      Most technologists have heard about software containers (or simply “containers”) – a technology that became popularized by Docker, which is an open platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications through containers. Containers use shared operating systems to create a capsule, of sorts, to contain your application.

      They are increasingly popular, but are not the panacea able to solve all the new challenges cloud computing presents. Problems mainly pertaining to security tend to hinder this technology. However, a new technology on the rise — unikernels — holds great promise for the next generation of cloud infrastructure.

    • Juniper Goes All in for SDN

      Disaggregated Junos software is part of Juniper’s effort to extract that software value in a more meaningful way, while providing more choice to customers. With the disaggregated model, instead of simply just putting Junos on top of hardware, now there will be a thin Linux kernel with containers into which Junos, services and other third party tools and apps can be deployed.

    • ISG Cloud Comparison Index™: Cost of Public Cloud Linux Highly Competitive with Internal IT

      The October ISG Cloud Comparison Index™ shows configurations that are run on a public cloud version of the Linux operating system can be highly cost competitive with those run on internal information technology. However, when deciding between options, buyers need to consider the significant price differences between cloud providers and the added costs of running enterprise-class operating systems on the public cloud, the report said.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • LXQt 0.10 Release Fixes Over 400 Issues
    • LXQt 0.10 Released!

      This release, we focused on cleanup, polishing and quality-of-life improvements, with over 400 issues fixed and dozens of new translations. We have also gained two new frameworks: Solid, which replaces liblxqt-mount and some custom power management code and libkscreen, which replaces system xrandr calls and is wayland forward-compatible.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • LISA 2015 – Washington DC, November 11 and 12

        KDE will have an exhibit in the Expo at the upcoming LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference. The full conference takes place November 8 ‒ 13 in Washington D.C. The Expo is open on the 11th and 12th. There is no charge to attend the Expo.

      • Qt on Android Webinar slides

        It’s hard to believe that more than a year has gone by since BogDan and I did our Qt on Android webinar! Like all good things that come to an end, so has the hosting for the archived version of the webinar. We hate to deprive anyone of still useful content, so here’s a link to the slides from the webinar for anyone who’s looking for them.

      • Tips from the Experts

        We’re looking forward to exposing some gems hidden in the KDAB knowledge base. And we’d love feedback too—tell us if you find these tips useful, or what dramatic results you’ve achieved. We love to help, and we love hearing stories about how we helped. Your feedback helps us know that we’re on the right track.

      • Kubuntu: KDE 4.14.3 Bugfix release for Trusty is now available.

        I have been hard at work to bring to you 4.14.3 Bugfix release for Trusty!

      • A pager for activities

        One of the new useful tiny plasmoids that will be available in Plasma 5.5 is one called Activity Pager: you can find it in the kdeplasma-addons package of the release.

      • Call for new Plasma wallpapers contribution

        We’re all excited for the new release of Plasma coming in less than a month and we at the Visual Design Group want to make it more exciting for our users too.

        Every other release we try to change the extra wallpapers that we’re shipping with Plasma to our users and now it’s time the refresh the collection again.

      • Upgrading libhybris

        One of the most important dependencies for our phone project is libhybris. Libhybris is a neat technology to allow interfacing with Android drivers allowing for example to bring Wayland to a device where all we have are Android drivers.

        Given that KWin provides a hwcomposer backend which uses libhybris to create an OpenGL context. All other applications need libhybris indirectly to have the Wayland OpenGL buffer exchange work automatically.

        [...]

        As we now use upstream libhybris I hope to see distributions to pick up the work and provide a Plasma phone spin. I’d love to see an openSUSE phone or a Fedora phone (or any other distribution).

      • QRegExp + QStringLiteral = crash at exit
      • Latinoware 2015

        Having Six talks on the event, whe managed to talk about beginner stuff to advanced ones without leaving anyone behind.
        Our talks this year
        – KDE Sysadmin: You can help even if you don’t progam (speaker Gomex)
        – KDE and Linus: Living Dangerously – my adventures in Programming (speaker Tomaz Canabrava)
        – KDE: First Steps to Contribute (speaker Icaro (Igor) Jerry Santana)
        – KDE Plasma Mobile (speaker Helio Castro)
        – KDE Plasma 5: Full of Resources (speaker Henrique Sant’Anna)
        – KDE: The structure behind it (speaker Helio Castro)

      • Calligra 2.9.9 Released

        We are happy to announce the release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active 2.9.9. It is recommended update for the 2.9 series of the applications and underlying development frameworks.

      • Krita 2.9.9 Released

        The ninth semi-monthly bug fix release of Krita is out!

      • Krita 2.9.9 (Open-Source Photo Manipulation Software) Brings A Lot Of Changes

        As you may know, Krita is an open-source image manipulation software, allowing the user to either create pictures from scratch or edit existing images. It is good because it supports most graphics tablets very well.

      • Where have I been?

        And this is the reason behind my disappearance, my job at BlueSystems was not fun anymore and every project I mantained at KDE felt more like a chore than anything else. After a month of not jumping out of the bed to head to work it was time to move on. So I passed maintainership to the people that were actually doing the job (special mention to David) and I quit my job as a full time KDE hacker.

      • Embedding QML: Why, Where, and How

        KDAB believes that it is critical for our business to invest into Qt3D and Qt, in general, to keep pushing the technology forward and to ensure it remains competitive.

      • Winners Selected from Giveaway

        And the giveaway is over! I want to thank everyone for entering and showing your support for Krita.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • MATE 1.12 released

        After 5 months of development the MATE Desktop team are proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.12. We’d like to thank every MATE contributor and user.

      • Welcome to Alexandre Franke, new board member

        As many of you will be aware, Christian Hergert recently stepped down from the GNOME Foundation Board. As a result, we’ve had a place on the board to fill. In these situations, the bylaws [1] state that the Board of Directors may choose a replacement of their choosing [2].

      • Native file choosers in Gtk+

        Ideally something like this would be completely hidden by the toolkit, and the application would just use the regular file chooser APIs. However, the Gtk+ filechooser APIs expose too much details about the file chooser dialog, which means it has to be a regular in-process widget. Unfortunately this means we can’t replace it by an out-of-process dialog.

  • Distributions

    • CoreOS Debuts Tectonic, a Commercial Kubernetes Distro

      CoreOS has taken the wraps off Tectonic, a commercial distribution of the Kubernetes container manager, one focused for enterprise usage.

      Tectonic can be used to run container-based workloads across a variety of cloud services, or within an organization’s own data center, or it could be used to shuffle containers across these environments.

    • The Decline of Linux Diversity

      Eleven months later, the decline seems to be continuing at about the same rate, with the number of active distributions down to 276, and the decline is starting to seem an actual trend.

      Critics might argue that the apparent trend might not be a trend at all. It could be a reflection of Distrowatch’s criteria for listing a distribution, or how quickly Distrowatch posts new distributions. However, given that the site regularly posts announcements of new releases for both new and established distros, there seems no reason for either to be a factor. Admittedly, Distro Hunt, a newer, similar site, includes listings that Distrowatch does not. But since projects can add their own descriptions to Distro Hunt, it’s possible that some of its entries have never had a release or disappeared without taking down their descriptions. Moreover, unlike Distrowatch, Distro Hunt provides no easy way of counting the total. The best available (if tentative) evidence, then, is that the trend exists.

    • Reviews

      • GALPon MiniNo Makes Kid-Friendly Lightweight Linux

        The GALPon MiniNo distro is akin to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It will rival any of the leading Linux communities for performance.

        Widespread acceptance in the educational and consumer markets with non-Spanish-speaking users is at risk. The developers have to improve on the language localization issues.

        Critical packages like the system update launchers display in Spanish only. Others software titles have the same problem. Others suffer from bits and pieces of vocabulary crossover

    • New Releases

      • Vinux 5.0 released

        This release features not just the Unity Desktop, but Gnome-shell and the ever popular Gnome 2 fork called Mate, though we primarily will support Unity only.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Ballnux/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • SteamOS Is Now Ready for Launch with Updates to Linux Kernel 4.1 and New Drivers

          Valve is getting really close to the launch of the Steam Machines, and the developers are preparing the SteamOS distro. They have just released a new stable update, and it comes with a ton of updates.

        • What happened to Mepis?

          My Linux migration story started in 2009, when I bought a tiny Asus Eee pc netbook pre-installed with Linux, a version of Xandros that I did not like much.

          In trying to replace it, I had my first encounter with Xubuntu (no wi-fi support), Debian (minimal shell), and Mandriva, which I installed because it supported wi-fi out of the box.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Software Centre To Be Replaced in 16.04 LTS

            Users of the Xenial Xerus desktop will find that the familiar (and somewhat cumbersome) Ubuntu Software Centre is no longer available.

            GNOME’s Software application will – according to current plans – take its place as the default and package management utility on the Unity 7-based desktop.

          • Prototype: A GUI-friendly Snappy

            So this is the week of the Ubuntu Online Summit, and many of the sessions are discussing Snappy. As you may know, Snappy is currently pretty geared toward embedded, headless devices. However, it is the successor to Click, and eventually the phones will be based upon it. To drive that effort forward, a few colleagues and I had a session (you can watch the video) where we discussed the path forward for supporting snaps on other devices, specifically the phone and the desktop.

          • The Ubuntu Online Summit Begins Tomorrow For The Xenial Xerus

            The Ubuntu Online Summit for developers and contributors to Ubuntu Linux begins tomorrow and runs through Thursday as planning gets underway for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, a.k.a. the Xenial Xerus.

            The Ubuntu Online Summit runs from 3 November to 5 November and can be monitored via summit.ubuntu.com.

          • Mark Shuttleworth Kicks Off Ubuntu 16.04 Development Discussions

            The video is embedded below for those interested in detail what Mark had to say during his nearly hour-long talk. Among the focuses were reiterating that Ubuntu 16.04 is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, work is ongoing towards the Ubuntu convergence goals and they are making progress, and also talk of Ubuntu in other areas like drones.

          • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Try To Be Python-3-Only, No Python 2 By Default

            For years Ubuntu developers have been working on moving from Python 2 to Python 3 and for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS next April that goal will hopefully be finally realized.

            There were some dreams that the Python 2 to Python 3 migration would happen for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so that Python 3 would be the default, now two years later, it looks like it might finally happen for the Xenial Xerus. A session was held today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for migrating over to Python 3 by default and to no longer ship Python 2 as part of the default package-set.

          • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to Drop Ubuntu Software Center for GNOME Software

            Canonical is looking to make some substantial changes to the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), and the developers are preparing to drop Ubuntu Software Center and replace it with GNOME Software.

          • Firefox 42 Arrives in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

            Canonical just revealed that the latest Firefox 42.0 is now in the official repositories for the users of Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

          • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Unity 7 to Support Snappy Packages

            Canonical has invested a lot of time and resources in the new Snappy packages, so it’s only natural that the developers want to make sure that people will be able to use it in the regular deb-based Ubuntu system.

          • Ubuntu 16.04 Drops Brasero and Empathy, GNOME Calendar to Be Adopted

            Ubuntu developers have a lot of plans for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and it already seems like it’s going to be a fascinating release. They have just announced that the Brasero and Empathy apps will no longer be included by default, and GNOME Calendar will be implemented.

          • New USB Startup Creator Is Being Made for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

            The application used in Ubuntu systems to write ISOs to USB disks, the Startup Creator, is being redesigned and rebuilt for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

          • Mark Shuttleworth Thinks That Using Ubuntu Touch On More Phones Would Be A Mistake Right Now

            As you may know, Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch is used by default on Meizu MX4, BQ Aquaris E4.5 and BQ Aquaris E5 and officially supported on the LG Nexus 4. While the BQ phones are mid-range, Meizu is among the most popular phone vendors in China, the MX4 being a premium headset.

          • Various Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Decisions From This Week’s Summit

            Aside from trying to make Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Python-3-only, Kubuntu developers planning for Xenial, and Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, there’s also been a lot of other interesting sessions to happen over the first two days of this week’s Ubuntu Online Summit.

          • Firefox 42 Has Been Added To The Default Repositories Of All The Supported Ubuntu Systems
          • Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) Desktop Screenshots Tour

            Ubuntu 15.10 will be supported for 9 months for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin along with all other flavours.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Wind blows Helix Cloud, Pulsar Linux, Rocket RTOS toward IoT

      Wind River unveiled a “Helix Cloud” platform for IoT development and management, plus two small-footprint OSes: a “Rocket” RTOS and “Pulsar Linux.”

      Intel subsidiary Wind River has released Wind River Pulsar Linux, an IoT-oriented version of its commercial Wind River Linux distribution, as well as a new Wind River Rocket RTOS. Both of these embedded OSes are designed to work with a newly unveiled Wind River Helix Cloud platform for developing, testing, monitoring, and analyzing cloud-connected IoT applications. Wind River Helix Cloud is available in App, Lab, and Device versions, and is said to provide “anytime, anywhere access to development tools, virtual labs, and deployed devices.” (see farther below).

    • DAQ SBC runs Linux on Zynq, offers FMC expansion

      Innovative Integration’s “Cardsharp” SBC is an XMC form-factor board that runs Linux on a Zynq-Z7045, and provides an FMC slot compatible with FMC modules.

      Innovative Integration has launched a “turnkey embedded instrument” called the Cardsharp designed for embedded and mobile instrumentation, remote autonomous I/O, and distributed data acquisition applications. The Linux-based, 149 x 74mm XMC form-factor single-board computer is also said to be “perfect for portable or vehicle-based data loggers or handheld field equipment use.”

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Move over FireFox OS and BlackBerry, Tizen is now the Fourth Largest Smartphone OS in Q3 2015

          Earlier this year, Tizen overtook the Firefox Operating System (OS) and became the world’s No.5 Smartphone OS in Q2 2015. That was an Important step for the Linux based OS to gain wider recognition. Now, according to a published report, Tizen has overtaken Blackberry to become the Fourth largest OS shipping in Q3 2015. Android saw a slight Increase in market share whilst Apple gained momentum with their new iPhone models and Microsoft, Blackberry and firefox all drilled down.

        • Video: TIZEN – The OS of Everything

          Tizen the OS of Everything. That was the slogan that the Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) 2015 in Shenzhen this year. Tizen was Introduced to devs as a versatile OS that is light on CPU, Battery and Memory. You can develop WebApps using HTML5 / CSS3 / JS and also Native apps using Native – C / EFL. There are also Hybrid Apps, but as the name suggests are a mix between Web and Native apps.

      • Android

        • Android for Work now in more than 19,000 organisations
        • What it’s like to switch to Android after using only iPhones for 6 years
        • Google Android Update Includes Fix for New Stagefright Flaw
        • The best smartwatch for Android

          Smartwatches really only came onto the scene in a major way in the past two years — Google, Apple, and Samsung are all hoping it’ll be the next big computing platform. Since then, we’ve seen lots of manufacturers try different strategies for strapping a computer on your wrist, but they were all pretty bad experiences — until right around now. More importantly, smartwatches have stopped looking like hideous wrist gadgets and more like, well, watches.

        • Is Google spinning a merged Chrome/Android OS for laptops?

          So far, most of the signs for a potential merger have occurred on the Chrome OS side rather than Android. In April of this year Google opened up its App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), enabling the porting of Android apps to Chrome OS. In addition, the Chrome OS Chrome Launcher 2.0 features a more Android-like Material Design, and integrates Android’s Google Now personal assistant.

          There was not much evidence of a Chrome OS infusion in the most recent Android 6.0 “Marshmallow” release. However, Google recently furthered its vision of Android on the desktop with the Pixel C, a keyboard-convertible tablet developed by Google’s Chromebook team.

        • Why an iPhone user switched to Android after six years

          A user switches to Android after six years of iPhones

          There’s been quite a lot of stories in the media about Android users switching to the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. But there are also some iPhone users who have gone the other way and switched to Android.

        • An Android Phone After 6 Years of iPhones

          Before I switched to Android I googled like crazy for similar articles. I was interested in the most common experience of former iPhone users on Android phones. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find too much. So I want to share my notes to help fill this gap a little bit.

        • Mossberg: It’s time for Google to make its own hardware

          It’s Nexus time again, the time each year when Google ships its hero devices in the Nexus line. That’s a brand of phones and tablets commissioned by the company starting in 2010 — not to be huge sellers, but to show the world the best of its Android operating system.

          Nexus phones are meant to present the latest versions of Android, in pure form, unadulterated by the software overlays and bloatware apps added by the hundreds of Android phone makers. They also give Google a chance to showcase its own latest apps and services, which are sometimes missing entirely from Android phones, especially in emerging markets. And, unlike most other Android devices, they get updated almost as soon as Google releases patches.

        • Sony Open Device Program Interview: Opening Much More Than Just Software

          At the Big Android Barbecue 2015, we had the honor of interviewing Alin Jerpelea from Sony, after his great talk on Sony’s plans to open up the hardware of their devices as well as future plans for their developer programs. You can find the full, highly recommendable talk here.

        • Google tries to woo enterprises with new Android for Work initiatives

Free Software/Open Source

  • Myth-busting the open-source cloud

    The Linux Foundation report states that in 2013, many cloud projects were still working out their core enterprise features and building in functionality, and companies were still very much in the early stages of planning and testing their public, private or hybrid clouds.

  • Neo Technology Releases openCypher Query Language to Open Source

    openCypher promises to accelerate a quickly expanding graph data space because it offers new benefits for users, tooling providers, organizations and end users.

  • Kustodian goes open-source only after success with BlueScope SOC

    The decision represents a market shift for Kustodian, a multinational provider of penetration-testing and other security services that has worked extensively with commercial SIEM platforms in the past. However, CEO Chris Rock told CSO Australia, it recently became clear that open-source solutions – in particular, the ELK stack from Elasticsearch – offered a significant new opportunity to democratise the delivery of SOCs that often weighed in north of $1m using conventional commercial products and services.

  • Is open source overtaking Splunk?

    Trying to understand open source adoption is a challenging task. In contrast to public companies, the metrics of open-source projects mostly rely on the number of GitHub stars (which is public) or the number of downloads (which is often unknowable).

    As a co-founder and CEO of Logz.io, I’ve been heavily involved in the open source log analytics domain through working with with the community and focusing on the ELK Stack.

    The background: The ELK Stack is the combination of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana that is used specifically in log analytics. Logstash ships log data to Elasticsearch, which indexes the information in a searchable datastore. Kibana then takes the datastore and shows the information in graphical format for log analysis.

  • Open Source Initiative launches free webinar series

    As you might expect the Open Source Initiative (OSI) uses quite a few open source tools to support our work in promoting and protecting open source software, development, and communities—things like content management systems (Drupal), wikis (XWiki), issue tracking/bug reporting (Redmine), desktop sharing (BigBlueButton), membership management (CiviCRM), etc.

  • Video: No more open source foundations, please!

    Not every new open source project needs a new foundation. In fact, the rise of all these new foundations could be hurting the open source cause

  • The new collaboration model for open source | #LinuxCon2015

    Cross-community collaboration is developing and thriving inside the walls of this year’s LinuxCon 2015, and people like Diane Mueller, director of community development at Red Hat OpenShift, are leading the charge.

  • Open source software gains depth

    The ability to scale up and stronger security has seen a pervasive proliferation of open source software (OSS) although these don’t have as many competitive features as proprietary software, according to the Ninth Annual Future of Open Source Survey conducted by Black Duck Software, a company that facilitates the adoption of OSS.

  • Logz.io Introduces ELK Apps — a Free App Store for Open Source Log Analytics
  • The 100:10:1 method: my approach to open source

    The first step was to find a notebook and a pen and just write down 100 ideas for interesting open source projects. These project ideas ranged across all manner of topics, depth, and quality. I thought of wild language ideas, new features in existing projects, system designs, protocols, missing documentation, interesting forks, golfing code, games, prototypes, implementations of paper ideas, second-systems, whatever.

  • Polishing cars wasn’t in my job description

    My advice for anyone starting out in open source is simple: Be humble, but bold. The great thing about open source is that you can make a great impact, but you have to do it within the confines of a community, and learning how to bring your best while working in sometimes challenging interpersonal situations is a skill that you can only acquire through practice.

  • Proprietary tools for FOSS projects

    My position on free and open source software is somewhere in the spectrum between hard-core FSF/GNU position on Free Software, and the corporate open source pragmatism that looks at open source as being great for some things but really not a goal in and of itself. I don’t eschew all proprietary software, and I’m not going to knock people for using tools and devices that fit their needs rather than sticking only to FOSS.

    At the same time, I think it’s important that we trend towards everything being open, and I find myself troubled by the increasing acceptance of proprietary tools and services by FOSS developers/projects. It shouldn’t be the end of the world for a FOSS developer, advocate, project, or company to use proprietary tools if necessary. Sometimes the FOSS tools aren’t a good fit, and the need for something right now overrides the luxury of choosing a tool just based on licensing preference. And, of course, there’s a big difference between having that discussion for a project like Fedora, or an Apache podling/TLP, or a company that works with open source.

  • OOSMOS goes open source
  • 8 tips for creating cultural change in your organization

    To foster engagement and keep people posted, publish and share both individually and as a team. Setting a schedule is difficult, but you should try to publish at least one reflective post per month (I do one a week). Pre-populate tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite during meetings. Utilize tools like IFTTT, Zapier, Buffer, etc. There are easy ways to share ideas around the Web. Use them!

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Metis to Offer Intensive Hadoop, Spark Training
    • How Will the Big Data Craze Play Out?

      I was in the buzz-making business long before I learned how it was done. That happened here, at Linux Journal. Some of it I learned by watching kernel developers make Linux so useful that it became irresponsible for anybody doing serious development not to consider it—and, eventually, not to use it. Some I learned just by doing my job here. But most of it I learned by watching the term “open source” get adopted by the world, and participating as a journalist in the process.

  • Databases

    • Open Source MongoDB Updated with Enterprise Features

      MongoDB Inc. announced a new version of its open source-based NoSQL database with features designed to make it more attractive for enterprise use.

      MongoDB 3.2 can handle a wider range of mission-critical applications, its parent company said, and has been extended to handle new enterprise-oriented tasks “by deeply integrating with the modern CIO’s technology stack.”

  • Oracle/Java

    • NetBeans IDE 8.1 Information

      NetBeans IDE 8.1 provides out-of-the-box code analyzers and editors for working with the latest Java 8 technologies–Java SE 8, Java SE Embedded 8, and Java ME Embedded 8. The IDE also has a range of new tools for HTML5/JavaScript, in particular for Node.js, KnockoutJS, and AngularJS; enhancements that further improve its support for Maven and Java EE with PrimeFaces; and improvements to PHP and C/C++ support.

    • NetBeans 8.1 IDE Released With Java Enhancements, HTML5/JS/Node.js Goodies

      The NetBeans 8.1 IDE continues to be focused around the latest Java 8 technologies from Oracle, but there’s also a number of new tools for HTML5, JavaScript, Node.js, KnockoutJS, and AngularJS. NetBeans 8.1 has a number of additions for easing development with Node.js, adds/enhances support for a wide variety of HTML5 and other JavaScript technologies, also advances some PHP and C/C++ language handling, and the NetBeans profiler has been redesigned while adding new features. There’s also better Git support with NetBeans 8.1.

  • CMS

    • OctoberCMS RSS Feed

      October is a content management system (CMS) based on the Laravel framework. Many of my readers will already know that I am a huge fan of Laravel. The framework makes development workflow a breeze and takes care of a lot of the mundane tasks. Linuxphile is, in fact, built on Laravel. I had also developed http://twistedtastes.com using Laravel. After the development of Twisted Tastes my wife and I came across October.

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Vanderbilt’s medical capsule robots’ hardware, software goes open-source

      Researchers around the globe who want to customize medical capsule robots won’t have to start from scratch – a team from Vanderbilt University School of Engineering did the preliminary work for them and is ready to share.

      Through a website and a paper revealed at a pair of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conferences, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Pietro Valdastri, Associate Professor of Computer Engineering Akos Ledeczi and their team made the capsule hardware and software open-source.

      The paper, titled “Systematic Design of Medical Capsule Robots,” ran in a special issue of IEEE Design & Test magazine dedicated to cyber-physical systems for medical applications. Within years, Vanderbilt’s capsule robots, made small enough to be swallowed, could be used for preventative screenings and to diagnose and treat a number of internal diseases.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Not Just Academics Fed Up With Elsevier: Entire Editorial Staff Resigns En Masse To Start Open Access Journal

        It’s really somewhat astounding just how absolutely hated journal publishing giant Elsevier has become in certain academic circles. The company seems to have perfected its role of being about as evil as possible in trying to lock up knowledge and making it expensive and difficult to access. A few years ago, we noted that a bunch of academics were banding together to boycott journals published by the company, as more and more people were looking at open access journals, allowing them to more freely share their research, rather than locking it up. Elsevier’s response has been to basically crack down on efforts to share knowledge. The company has been known to charge for open access research — sometimes even buying up journals and ignoring the open licenses on the works. The company has also been demanding professors takedown copies of their own research. Because how dare anyone actually benefit from knowledge without paying Elsevier its toll. And that’s not even mentioning Elsevier’s history of publishing fake journals as a way to help giant pharmaceutical companies pretend their treatments were effective.

      • Open source textbooks not flunking out

        Finally, a bit of good news on the college costs front: A study out of Brigham Young University finds that free open source textbooks do the job pretty darn well.

        The study of nearly 17,000 students at 9 colleges found that open source textbooks (or open educational resources — OERs in academic lingo) found that students learn the same amount or more from the free books across many subjects. (Here’s a sampling of the sorts of texts available, via a University of Minnesota site.)

        What’s more, 85% of students and instructors said open textbooks were actually better than the commercial ones. The research focused its results based on measurements such as course completion, final grade, final grade of C- or higher, enrollment intensity, and enrollment intensity in the following semester.

  • Programming

    • Pyston 0.4 Released With Even Better Performance
    • Pyston 0.4 released

      A lot has happened in the eight months since the 0.3 release: the 0.4 release contains 2000 commits, three times as many commits as either the 0.2 or 0.3 release. Moving forward, our plan is to release every four months, but for now please enjoy a double-sized release.

Leftovers

  • Is the world ready for a bare-metal OS/2 rebirth?

    A US software company has signed on with IBM to release a new native build of Big Blue’s OS/2.

    Arca Noae said its “Blue Lion” build of OS/2 will run on the bare metal of PCs without the need for an emulator or hypervisor.

    Those still using the 28-year-old operating system and its applications typically run the stack in a virtualized environment on modern reliable hardware. The bare-metal OS will be freed from its virtual prison, and released to the world, in the third quarter of next year, we’re told.

  • J-Day: Denmark’s start to the holiday season

    The nation’s bars, pubs and discos will be jam-packed with drunken partiers decked out in Santa hats and elf costumes on Friday. Welcome to the strange Danish ‘holiday’ known as J-Day.

  • Hardware

    • New MCU-like Intel Quarks sip power, but skip the Linux

      Unlike the current, 400MHz Quark X1000, found on the Intel Galileo hacker SBC and numerous IoT gateway products, these new microcontroller-like Quarks run at only 32MHz, and support bare-metal code and real-time operating systems (RTOSes), but not Linux.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Some Use Chalabi’s Death to Lay Blame for Iraq War at His Feet

      Bush’s own Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told 60 Minutes in 2004 that Bush “sought a way to invade Iraq.” Recent emails show Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair planning the Iraq war a whole year before 9/11. Put simply, the Bush administration didn’t need “convincing”—what it needed was fodder to convince the American public (not all of whom, of course, were ever convinced). These are two entirely different readings of history that have, in the past 48 hours, become dangerously conflated by some.

    • Caught On Tape: U.S. Army Jeep Rear-Ends A Nuke

      With helicopters hovering overhead, and surrounded by an army of security forces, this is how America transports its nuclear weapons. However, as this onlooker captures, amid police harrassment for filming, it appears one of the military trucks was just a little too close and rear-ends a truck carrying a nuclear missile.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • NASA Scientist Warned Deniers Would Distort His Antarctic Ice Study — That’s Exactly What They Did

      A new NASA study found that there has been a net increase in land ice in Antarctica in recent years, despite a decline in some parts of the continent. The study’s lead author astutely predicted that climate science deniers would distort the study, even though it does nothing to contradict the scientific consensus on climate change or the fact that sea levels will continue to rise.

    • Climate change missing from full Trans-Pacific Partnership text

      The final text of a huge 12-country trade agreement has confirmed the “worst nightmares” of environmental groups, with no mention of climate change in its lone environment chapter and weak enforcement mechanisms, Australian academics say.

      The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement was finally released on Thursday, with Trade Minister Andrew Robb saying the deal will deliver “substantial benefits for Australia” in the rapidly growing Asia Pacific.

      The TPP is the biggest global trade deal in 20 years, involving 12 countries in the Pacific region which collectively represent over 40 per cent of world GDP.

  • Finance

    • Chevron’s Star Witness In $9.5 Billion Corporate Sovereignty Case Admits He Lied

      One of Techdirt’s earliest posts on corporate sovereignty was back in October 2013, when we wrote about the incredible case of Chevron. It used the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism to suspend the enforcement of a historic $18 billion judgment against the oil corporation made by Ecuador’s courts because of the company’s responsibility for mass contamination of the Amazonian rain forest. Given the huge sums involved, it’s no surprise that things didn’t end there.

    • 5 things that wouldn’t be happening if America were a functioning democracy

      We Americans have been deceived by the notion that individual desires preempt the needs of society; by the Ayn-Rand/Reagan/Thatcher aversion to government regulation; by the distorted image of “freedom” as winner-take-all capitalism; by the assurance that the benefits of greed will spread downward to everyone.

      Our current capitalist-driven inequalities will only be rectified when people realize that a strong community makes successful individuals, not the other way around.

      Here are a few of the ways we would benefit with a social democracy.

      [...]

      Nationally, we spend over $1 trillion per year on defense. Not just the half-trillion Pentagon budget, but another half-trillion for veterans affairs, homeland security, “contingency operations,” and a variety of other miscellaneous military “necessities.”

      But that’s not enough for the relative few at the top of our outrageously unequal society. The richest Americans build private fortresses to protect themselves from the rest of us, as they scoff at the notion of a 1950s-like progressive tax structure that would provide infrastructure funding for all of us.

      [...]

      In the extreme capitalist mind, Steve Jobs started with boxes of silicon and wires in a garage and fashioned the first iPhone. The reality is explained by Mariana Mazzucato: “Everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system— all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA.”

    • “Your little brother is not the ultimate authority”: How Jeb Bush cheated America & helped deliver the presidency to W

      When some of us hear Jeb Bush’s new slogan, “Jeb can fix it,” we don’t think of a mechanic getting under the hood and fixing the nation’s problems. We don’t even think of Jimmy Savile, the notorious British pedophile, whose show was called “Jim’ll fix it,” although some people sure will. No, we think about Election 2000 and the Florida recount, where Jeb proved that his slogan isn’t all hot air. Whatever else he did as Governor of Florida, when it came to that election, Jeb fixed it.

      Anyone old enough to remember that election night, which was 15 years ago today, will remember that the outcome of the electoral college depended on that one state. And what came next is exactly what anyone would have predicted would happen when an election is so close it triggers a recount in a state in which the levers of power and the electoral machinery are run by one of the candidates’ brothers. That candidate was the one who became president.

    • China Regulator Probes Competition Claims Against Alibaba

      China’s commerce regulator will investigate accusations by JD.com Inc. that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is unfairly pressuring merchants to shun competing platforms, JD said, ratcheting up a battle between the nation’s two biggest online retailers.

      The State Administration for Industry & Commerce accepted JD’s request to look into Alibaba’s attempts to lock in merchants ahead of the crucial “Singles’ Day” promotion next week, JD said in an online post Thursday. China’s second-largest Web retailer has accused its larger rival of forcing merchants to choose between the two, which it said hampers competition and violates regulations.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Copyright As Censorship: Sketchy Food Scanning Company Abuses DMCA To Censor Critical Reporting

      Another day, another example of copyright being used to censor. A few weeks ago, we wrote about a sketchy crowdfunded “food scanning device” company called TellSpec, which had ridiculously threatened the online publication Pando Daily with laughably ridiculous defamation claims. The threats were ridiculous for any number of reasons, including the fact that the statute of limitations had expired and the commentary wasn’t even remotely defamatory. There were also some weird (and stupid) threats about suing in the UK, despite TellSpec being based in Toronto and Pando in the US. At some point, TellSpec then denied having made the threats, but that appeared to be pure damage control.

    • Copyright Terms And How Historical Journalism Is Disappearing

      The National Endowment for the Humanities announced last Wednesday the “Chronicling America” contest to create projects out of historical newspaper data. The contest is supposed to showcase the history of the United States through the lens of a popular (and somewhat ephemeral) news format. But looking at the limits of the archival data, another story emerges: the dark cloud of copyright’s legal uncertainty is threatening the ability of amateur and even professional historians to explore the last century as they might explore the ones before it.

      Consider that the National Digital Newspaper Program holds the history of American newspapers only up until 1922. (It originally focused on material from 1900-1910 and gradually expanded outwards to cover material from as early as 1836.) Those years may seem arbitrary—and it makes sense that there would be some cut-off date for a historical archive—but for copyright nerds 1922 rings some bells: it’s the latest date from which people can confidently declare a published work is in the public domain. Thanks to the arcane and byzantine rules created by 11 copyright term extensions in the years between 1962 and 1998, determining whether a work from any later requires consulting a flow chart from hell—the simple version of which, published by the Samuelson Clinic last year, runs to 50 pages.

  • Privacy

    • Surveillance bill: broad support gives way to alarm over detail

      The total redrafting of UK surveillance laws was under growing challenge last night after an initially broad political welcome gave way to alarm at the detail of the proposed sweeping powers for spies.

      MPs and privacy groups raised concerns about the proposed judicial oversight regime set out by Theresa May – while the home secretary also revealed that since 2001 ministers have issued secret directions to internet and phone companies to hand over the communications data of British citizens in bulk.

    • ORG’s 10th Birthday Party!
    • Investigatory Powers Bill published and now the fight is on

      The Government’s just published the draft Investigatory Powers Bill. It will decide the surveillance powers that the police and intelligence have for years to come.

    • ORG response to the draft Investigatory Powers Bill

      “This Bill will redefine the relationship between the state and the public for a generation. The government needs to get it right and made sure that the UK’s law enforcement and security agencies can fight serious crime while upholding all of our human rights.”

      “However, at first glance, it appears that this Bill is an attempt to grab even more intrusive surveillance powers and does not do enough to restrain the bulk collection of our personal data by the secret services. It proposes an increase in the blanket retention of our personal communications data, giving the police the power to access web logs. It also gives the state intrusive hacking powers that can carry risks for everyone’s Internet security.”

    • The surveillance bill is as big a threat to state security as to individual liberty

      The past week has seen the most bizarre spinning. The BBC and the Times suddenly “managed to secure” exclusive stories about the wonderful world of secret intelligence, shamelessly pegged to the premiere of the film. The Times offered a gushing prospectus of work inside GCHQ. The BBC’s Frank Gardner sat, obsequious, in a darkened room and asked faceless voices what it was like being “the real James Bond”. It was like a spoof promotion video for the Stasi.

      [...]

      Despite the fearmongers, Britain faces no threat to its territory or political stability, nothing that remotely justifies the massive intrusion into privacy originally sought by GCHQ and the police. Today’s threat is from fanatics and criminals who want to shoot people and explode bombs – extremely dangerous but not a state threat. The question is, does this require Britons to have their every phone call, email and browser record stored, scanned, registered and, inevitably, shared with spies, the police and – whatever anyone says – a wide range of public officials?

    • Surveillance, privacy, and the British press

      So why is the majority of the British press so relaxed about mass surveillance? Why do they not associate this threat with the ‘300 years of press freedom’, which they hold so dear? Have they not read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which explicitly links the death of freedom with the death of privacy? Even the United Nations (not always first off the mark where human rights are concerned) is able to see the danger here, as evidenced by the creation this year of a new special rapporteur on ‘the right to privacy in the digital age’.

    • The Investigatory Powers bill: will it work in practice?

      The intention is that the draft Bill will be the basis of consultation, with a revised Bill being published in 2016. This revised Bill will need to be enacted by the end of next year, as the current Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act expires on 31 December 2016 and one section of it has been quashed by the High Court as from March 2016.

      Publication is therefore the start of what may be a year-long legislative process. On the face of it, the government intends to take the legislative process seriously. The Bill has been published with extensive explanatory materials, fact sheets and impact assessments. The page count of those documents is higher than that of the bill itself — the government wishes to give the impression this process is to be done properly and thoroughly.

      Of course, what the government brings to parliament next year may not correspond to this draft, and it may be that the government pushes measures through at speed next year which are not in this version. So it is too early to say that this draft Bill puts “parliament in charge” as the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation said on Wednesday.

    • Interception, Authorisation and Redress in the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill

      The Government has published a draft Bill on Investigatory Powers that it hopes to see through Parliament within a year. If it becomes law, the Investigatory Powers Bill will replace much, but not all, of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, as well as the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014.

      It is the Government’s response to the Edward Snowden revelations, and to three different reports that made almost 200 reform recommendations between them.There will be much debate about the powers set out in the draft Bill. It proposes to give certain powers of the intelligence and security services a (new) legal basis in statute and will consolidate much of the law in this field. While the nature and extent of these powers is open to disputation, if there are to be such powers, it is surely better that there is avowal and regulation, rather than secrecy and denial.

    • Surveillance bill triggers alarm over sweeping powers for spies

      The total redrafting of UK surveillance laws was under growing challenge on Wednesday night after an initially broad political welcome gave way to alarm at the detail of the proposed sweeping powers for spies.

      MPs and privacy groups raised concerns about the proposed judicial oversight regime set out by the home secretary, Theresa May, who made the dramatic admission that ministers had issued secret directions since 2001 to internet and phone companies to hand over the communications data of British citizens in bulk.

    • Wikipedia founder urges Apple to stop selling iPhones in UK if government bans encryption

      Jimmy Wales has suggested that Apple should stop selling iPhones in the UK, if the government passes a new law that would prevent technology firms and service providers from using end-to-end encryption to protect private communications.

    • Encryption ban banished from draft UK surveillance bill

      Britons could soon have their web surfing recorded for later police consultation, but the government has reportedly backed off plans to order companies like Apple to unlock encrypted phones and messages

      A threatened ban on encryption has been banished from a draft bill on surveillance powers in the U.K. — but the government plans to explicitly allow bulk surveillance of Internet traffic by security and intelligence agencies.

      U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May began by listing the things the draft bill did not contain as she introduced it in Parliament on Wednesday.

    • Microsoft Didn’t Know You’d Take OneDrive’s ‘Unlimited’ Storage This Far

      A year after its launch, Microsoft is making some changes to its OneDrive cloud storage plans—including eliminating the unlimited storage offered to Office 365 subscribers, because according to Microsoft, some people got greedy.

      In a post to the OneDrive blog, Microsoft wrote: “Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.”

    • Microsoft confirms Windows 10 is harvesting more data than ever

      MICROSOFT HAS ADMITTED that Windows 10 is collecting more data than any of its predecessors, and there’s not much you can do about it.

      In an interview with PC World, Microsoft corporate vice president Joe Belfiore defended the collection of what the company refers to as “basic telemetry”, explaining that it is a necessary part of improving Windows’ functionality.

      Windows has always collected information like this. Every blue screen of death creates an error report which is uploaded to Microsoft. But so much more is collected now and, yes, this does mean that search terms that you enter into Windows as well as anonymous machine gibberish is going up to the cloud.

    • First take on the Investigatory Powers Bill

      The long-awaited Investigatory Powers Bill has been published at last. The draft Bill is almost 300 pages long so it is going to take us a while to go through the detail but here is our first take on what it contains.

  • Civil Rights

    • US Presidential Candidate Jill Stein: I Want to Be President to Save the World

      The United States is governed at the national level by two major parties: the right-wing Republicans and the center-left Democrats.. It has been 165 years since someone was elected president who did not come from this political duopoly, which does not represent the full range of views held by the U.S. electorate but has worked hard to ensure that the candidates it puts forward are often the only ones from which voters can choose.

    • House Passes DHS ‘Insider Threat’ Program Bill That Could Impact Whistleblowers

      The United States House of Representatives passed legislation to establish an “insider threat” program at the Department of Homeland Security, which would permit the continuous monitoring of credit, criminal, and social media activities of DHS employees and would potentially impact national security whistleblowers.

    • California Cops Are Using These Biometric Gadgets in the Field

      Law enforcement agencies around the country are increasingly embracing biometric technology, which uses intrinsic physical or behavioral characteristics—such as fingerprints, facial features, irises, tattoos, or DNA—to identify people, sometimes even instantly. Just as the technology that powers your cell phone has shrunk both in size and cost, mobile biometric technologies are now being deployed more widely and cheaply than ever before—and with less oversight.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

      The text of the TPP was released by TPP Parties on 5 November 2015 and can be accessed by Chapter below. Legal verification of the text will continue in the coming weeks. The Agreement will also be translated into French and Spanish language versions.

    • Statement on the Release of the Trans Pacific Partnership Text

      Instead of combatting the ability to bring cases such as Eli Lilly’s, the TPP’s investment chapter invites them. Any time a national court – including in the U.S. – invalidates a wrongfully granted patent or other intellectual property right, the affected company could appeal that revocation to foreign arbitrators. The new language would also make clear that private companies are empowered by the treaty to challenge limitations and exceptions like the U.S. fair use doctrine, or individual applications of it. Adoption of this set of rules in the largest regional trade agreement of its kind would upset the international intellectual property legal system and should be subject to the most rigorous and open debate in every country where it is being considered.

    • Copyrights

11.04.15

Links 4/11/2015: Linux-Based Parcel Delivery, OpenSUSE Leap 42.1

Posted in News Roundup at 2:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Durham-based development firm Caktus Group open sources voter registration software

    “With the Libyan High National Elections Commission (HNEC) and consultative support from the United Nations Support Mission to Libya, we have open sourced their elections management platform today under a permissive Apache 2.0 license,” read a blog post published by Caktus Group. “Open sourcing means other governments and organizations can freely adopt and adapt the elections tools which cover nine functional areas. The tools range from SMS voter registration, the first of its kind, to bulk alerts to voters and call center support software,” read the statement.

  • US Consulting Firm Builds Open Source Mobile Voter Registration System For Libya

    A timetable for those negotiations has not been set. But election officials are starting to prepare. Libyans can now register to vote and receive election updates from their homes thanks to a new text messaging system created by a digital consultancy group in the United States. Smart Elect, designed by Caktus Group, a technology firm based in Durham, North Carolina, is a free open source platform that can be used by anyone to build an SMS [short message service] voter registration system as well as the tools needed before, during and after an election to support it.

  • Solving clients’ problems with open source technology

    Then, five years later, at 24, I founded TuxWeb with a mission to solve clients’ problems using open source technology. Creating a startup has been fun (even here in Italy where funding does not come so easily), and in 2011 I cofounded a second startup with Luca Garulli, the creator of OrientDB, called NuvolaBase.

  • Distributed Ledger Group Eyes Open Source

    Blockchain consortium The Distributed Ledger Group (DLG), which is managed by R3CEV expects to license its technology as open sourced by early next year, according to R3CEV officials.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Version 42.0

        Check out “What’s New” and “Known Issues” for this version of Firefox below. As always, you’re encouraged to tell us what you think, or file a bug in Bugzilla. If interested, please see the complete list of changes in this release.

        We’d also like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox!

      • A More Private Browsing Experience: Mozilla Ships Tracking Protection for Firefox

        As we wrote previously, we think it’s important for users to be able to protect themselves from non-consensual online tracking. That’s why we created Privacy Badger, which enforces Do Not Track around the Web. But it’s also important for browser vendors to join in the fight to protect user privacy. Mozilla has done just that with today’s announcement.

      • Firefox Now Offers a More Private Browsing Experience

        We’re releasing a powerful new feature in Firefox Private Browsing called Tracking Protection. We created this feature because we believe in giving you more choice and control over your Web experience. With the release of Tracking Protection in Firefox Private Browsing we are leading the industry by giving you control over the data that third parties receive from you online. No other browser’s Private Browsing mode protects you the way Firefox does—not Chrome, not Safari, not Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Gnocchi 1.3.0 release

      Finally, Gnocchi 1.3.0 is out. This is our final release, more or less matching the OpenStack 6 months schedule, that concludes the Liberty development cycle.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Fresh LibreOffice Updates, Fedora 23 Released

      The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli today announced two LibreOffice updates. These two minor number bug fix updates cover the Fresh and Still branches of LibreOffice and user are advised to upgrade. Fedora 23 was officially released to the general public today and folks have been talking about that. Phoronix reported today that Debian had moved to rootless X server instances and Mozilla announced a new privacy feature for Firefox.

  • Business

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD comes to 64-bit ARM

      Want to run something other than Linux on a ARM 64-bit server? Soon you can: a small software company has shown FreeBSD running on a 96-core server.

      Semihalf, which is based in Poland, demonstrated a beta version of FreeBSD running on a server board built with Cavium’s ThunderX processors. That’s the first hardware based on ARM’s 64-bit processors to run FreeBSD.

    • starting from scratch bugs

      Or everything I didn’t know about unix. The OpenBSD source tree has lots of example code for solving any number of problems, but I like to do things my own way. Occasionally this means something gets overlooked. A few examples. Previous thoughts on rewrites and reuse: out with the old, in with the less and hoarding and reuse.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • European rural schools rely on open source

      A group of 15 schools in rural areas in Denmark, Italy, Greece, Macedonia (FYROM), Spain, and the United Kingdom are using open source software solutions for learning, teaching and working together. An EU-funded consortium of research institutes and public administrations has developed and trialled software specifically for rural schools.

    • Andalucia’s IT management tool ‘ready for reuse’

      The management tools for Andalucia’s standard corporate desktop, GECOS – Guadalinex Escritorio COrporativo eStandar, is ready for reuse by others, companies and public administrations alike, says Juan Conde, head of the free software promotion project of the Andalusian Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. “The potential user base outside of the Junta de Andalucía is huge.”

      [...]

      The software was designed to run on the Debian and Ubuntu free software distribution, but can be adapted to other distro’s such as Redhat and CentOS with little effort, he says. At the moment, GECOS is of limited use for managing proprietary desktops, says Conde, “until someone adds the equivalent management policies.”

    • Collabora and Cabinet agree open source deal

      An agreement has been reached between the Cabinet Office and software firm Collabora Productivity, for the provision of a new range of open source applications for desktop, mobile and cloud.

Leftovers

  • DailyDirt: Dealing With Zero (Or Negative) Population Growth

    Pessimistic economists have predicted overpopulation problems based on exponential growth trends, but statistics point to lower birth rates as countries become more industrialized. So now, there’s a different kind of problem — aging populations and minimal population growth in certain countries. How will we deal with people living longer and having fewer and fewer kids?

  • Security

    • The sorry state of certificate revocation
    • FreeIPA PKI: current plans and a future vision

      FreeIPA’s X.509 PKI features (based on Dogtag Certificate System) continue to be an area of interest for users and customers. In this post I summarise recently-added PKI features in FreeIPA, work in progress, and what we plan to do in future releases. Then I will outline my personal vision for what the future of PKI in FreeIPA should look like, noting how it will address pain points and limitations of the existing architecture.

    • CVE-2015-5602 and SELinux?

      That is one of the most common questions that we get when a new CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) appears. We explain SELinux as a technology for process isolation to mitigate attacks via privilege escalation.

    • Risk report update: April to October 2015

      In April 2015 we took a look at a years worth of branded vulnerabilities, separating out those that mattered from those that didn’t. Six months have passed so let’s take this opportunity to update the report with the new vulnerabilities that mattered across all Red Hat products.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • As Indonesia’s Annual Fires Rage, Plenty Of Blame But No Responsibility

      The onset of the rainy season in Indonesia brings hope of extinguishing forest fires that have raged for weeks, spawning both an environmental and political crisis in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

    • Conservative Media Rally Around House Committee Chairman’s Baseless Attacks On NOAA

      Conservative media outlets are wrongly claiming that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is hiding data related to a recent study that challenged the so-called “pause” in global warming, and echoing Republican House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith’s baseless accusation that NOAA manipulated temperature records to show a warming trend. In reality, the NOAA study’s data is publicly available online, and NOAA routinely makes adjustments to historical temperature records that are peer-reviewed and necessary to account for changes to measuring instruments and other factors.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The New Yorker Doesn’t Factcheck What ‘Everyone Knows’ Is True

      Filkins apparently intended to write a journalistic portrait of Nisman and the disputed circumstances in which he died of a gunshot wound last January, rather than to explore the case itself. But in order to write such a portrait, Filkins had to deal with the evidence Nisman used in his AMIA indictment, and Filkins stumbled badly in writing about those issues.

      Filkins’ failure goes to the root of a systemic problem of news media coverage of Iran and many other issues. Certain narratives about episodes and issues in recent history have become so unanimously accepted among political and media elites as to be virtually unchallengeable in media reporting. Such narratives have been repeated in one form or another for so many years that reporters simply would not think to question them for a moment, much less actually investigate their truth.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • FBI Unveils Anti-Terrorist Edutainment Program For Schools

      The FBI wants to deputize the nation’s schools into its anti-terrorism posse. At this point, it’s unclear whether the program will escalate to the elaborate Rube Goldberg machinations the FBI currently employs to generate terrorism suspects (putting the “rube” back in “Rube Goldberg machinations”), but for now, it appears to be “edutainment” that applies a ridiculous metaphor with blunt force precision.

    • Consumer Review Freedom Act Would Protect Customers’ Right to Post Reviews

      Are there limits to what a company can put in a standard form contract, like a click-through agreement? Can a company take away its customers’ freedom of speech?

      The Consumer Review Freedom Act, now pending in Congress (S.2044, H.R.2110), would limit several ways that companies attempt to keep their customers from criticizing them on the Internet.

    • O’Reilly Suggests US Hang Drug Offenders
    • CIA: covert experiments

      In August 1951, inhabitants of the picturesque French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit were suddenly tormented by terrifying hallucinations. People imagined lions and tigers were coming to eat them. A man jumped out of a window, thinking he was a dragonfly. At least seven people died, dozens were taken to the local asylum in straitjackets and hundreds were affected.

    • IDF warns soldiers: Beware of CIA recruitment

      Channel 2 reported Sunday that the information security department, part of the IDF’s intelligence force, issued a call to its officers and soldiers to beware of recruitment attempts by the CIA.

    • CIA Recruiting Israeli Military? Israel Intelligence Officers Warned About Disclosing Classified Information

      The militarily intelligence services of Israel have reportedly warned members of the country’s defense forces about being recruited by CIA officials. Soldiers and officers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) were warned last week not to divulge important security information about plans for possible military action in the Middle East region.

    • Spy watchdog looks at possible NZ-CIA link

      The details of the inquiry are outlined in the 2015 annual report of the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.

      The United States Senate Committee Report documented instances of torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the period between 2001 and 2009.

      In her annual report, Ms Gwyn said there were a number of other countries involved with the programme – but the names were redacted.

      “My decision… does not suggest or presuppose that New Zealand agencies or personnel were in any way connected with those activities.

    • Seattle Voters Approve First-in-the-Nation ‘Democracy Vouchers’

      Voters in Seattle, Washington on Tuesday approved a first-in-the-nation “democracy voucher” ballot initiative that could serve as a national model on campaign finance reform.

      Initiative 122 (I-122), which was endorsed by nearly every Seattle City Council candidate and enjoyed the support of dozens of local and national progressive groups, passed 60-40, according to the King County Elections Office.

      Supporters say the innovative public campaign financing program could give everyday voters more control over the city’s elections while limiting the power of corporate and special interests.

      The initiative states that for each city election cycle, or every two years, the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC) will mail four $25 vouchers to each voter. They can only be used in Seattle campaigns for mayor, city council and city attorney. The SEEC will release money to the candidates that agree to follow I-122′s rules, which include participating in three debates and accepting lower contribution and spending limits.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Kim Dotcom Is Building His Own Private Internet Called Meganet

      Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is building his own internet alternative called Meganet. With Meganet, he promises to offer you a way to communicate with the world without any fear of censorship and away from the continuous surveillance.

      Kim Dotcom aims to do this by making a P2P-based internet service that won’t need an IP address and all the communications will be encrypted. On Thursday, in New Zealand, the Hollywood foe Kim Dotcom revealed this vision of a more secure Meganet. It should be noted that Kim is wanted in the U.S. under criminal copyright violation charges.

    • Law Professor Pens Ridiculous, Nearly Fact-Free, Misleading Attack On The Most Important Law On The Internet

      For the last few years, we’ve noted a worrying trend of a few law professors, who have decided that the best way to make people nice on the internet is to do away with Section 230 of the CDA. As we’ve noted repeatedly, Section 230 of the CDA is without a doubt the most important law on the internet. The internet would be a massively different (and worse) place without it. Almost every site or service you use would be very different, and the internet would be a much more bland and sterile place. Section 230 is fairly simple. There are two key elements to it:

      People cannot blame service providers for content posted by users.

      Service providers who decide to moderate/delete content cannot be held liable for the content they choose not to moderate (or the content they choose to moderate).

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Why DMCA Rulemaking Is an Unsustainable Garbage Train

        Jay Radcliffe is a security researcher with diabetes. In 2011, he gave a talk at Black Hat, showing how his personal insulin pump could be hacked—with potentially deadly consequences.

        As a result of his 2011 presentation, he worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the Food and Drug Administration to address security vulnerabilities in insulin pumps.

        “The specific technical details of that research have never been published in order to protect patients using those devices,” he wrote in his testimony to the Librarian of Congress and the US Copyright Office.

      • MPAA: We Shut Down YTS/YIFY and Popcorn Time

        The major movie studios of the MPAA are behind the recent shutdown of the torrent site YTS, the associated release group YIFY, and the main Popcorn Time fork, PopcornTime.io. In an international effort spanning Canada and New Zealand, visits were carried out at the premises of at least two key suspects

      • Dotcom: Copyright Charges Not Enough For Extradition

        As Kim Dotcom’s extradition defense enters its second day, the court has heard that none of the 13 charges against the Megaupload founder are enough to extradite him to the United States. The U.S. is characterizing the alleged offenses as extraditable fraud but Dotcom’s team believes that copyright violations can not be prosecuted as such.

11.03.15

Links 3/11/2015: Tails 1.7, Fedora 23

Posted in News Roundup at 6:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet

    The Harvard Law professor and internet pioneer launched his campaign just after Labor Day, and from the start, it was clear that to call his bid quixotic was to sell Cervantes’ protagonist short. Lessig said he was running to win the Democratic nomination, but of course it was clear that his candidacy was more of a classic protest run. Having focused strongly on campaign-finance reform in recent years—including in a string of Atlantic articles—he made passing the Citizens Equality Act of 2017, which would enact universal voting registration, campaign-finance limits, and anti-gerrymandering provisions, the single issue of his candidacy.

  • Democrats Screw Over Larry Lessig To Keep Him Out Of The Debates; Forces Lessig To Drop His Campaign

    Ever since Larry Lessig announced his campaign for the Presidency a few months ago, we noted that it wasn’t just a long shot, but seemed more like a gimmick to get the (very real) issue of political corruption into the debates. I like Larry quite a bit and support many of his efforts, but this one did seem kind of crazy. I’m glad that he’s willing to take on crazy ideas to see if they’ll work, because that’s how real change eventually comes about, but the whole thing did seem a bit quixotic. That said, the last thing I expected was that the Democratic Party would be so scared of him as to flat out lie and change the rules to keep his ideas from reaching the public. Yet, that’s what it did, and because of that, Lessig has dropped his campaign for the Presidency.

  • Our Campaign Finance Frankenstein

    How the Supreme Court built a monster out of America’s campaign finance law.

  • Farewell to BorisWatch

    At the time social media offered a way for new political voices to be heard, and BorisWatch was one of those new voices: informed, focused, critical, often witty, and always happy to engage.

  • Science

    • Who is George Boole and why is he important? Today’s Google Doodle explained

      George Boole was a British mathematician whose work on logic laid many of the foundations for the digital revolution. The Lincolnshire-born academic is widely heralded as one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th century, devising a system of logic that aimed to condense complex thoughts into simple equations. His development of ‘Boolean logic’ paved the way for the computer age.

  • Security

    • The Rise of Political Doxing

      Last week, CIA director John O. Brennan became the latest victim of what’s become a popular way to embarrass and harass people on the Internet. A hacker allegedly broke into his AOL account and published e-mails and documents found inside, many of them personal and sensitive.

      It’s called doxing­ — sometimes doxxing­ — from the word “documents.” It emerged in the 1990s as a hacker revenge tactic, and has since been as a tool to harass and intimidate people on the Internet. Someone would threaten a woman with physical harm, or try to incite others to harm her, and publish her personal information as a way of saying “I know a lot about you­ — like where you live and work.” Victims of doxing talk about the fear that this tactic instills. It’s very effective, by which I mean that it’s horrible.

    • TalkTalk hack: Third suspect bailed as extent of the hack is outlined

      A THIRD SUSPECT in the TalkTalk hack has been released on police bail, as the telco provides more information about the scale of the attack, claiming that it was smaller than first thought.

      A 27-year-old man was arrested and released in Staffordshire under the Computer Misuse Act, as officers from several forces continue to close the net on the cyber criminals responsible.

    • Online Vigilantes: Hacking Sony for a Cause?

      And yeah, Heartbleed and Shellshock turned out to be much less of a threat than the tech world predicted. However, in various forums and other places where tech folks choose to hang out, Windows folks had a field day with all variants of “told-ya-so.” I pictured server admins running in circles with their hands flailing in the air, shouting that Armageddon was indeed here.

      [...]

      Fortunately, that rootkit was discovered fairly soon by Mark Russinovich, co-founder of Winternals. After the disclosure, Microsoft didn’t waste any time moving toward the acquisition of Russinovich’s company, although for complete disclosure, Russinovich had been offered a job by Microsoft years before. It is suggested in some circles that Microsoft purchased the company so quickly in order to quell the entire Microsoft/Sony duplicity rumors, as some believe that Microsoft would have to know about the rootkit, given how deeply it burrowed into Redmond’s proprietary code.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • “Terming these as ‘isolated incidents’ will only embolden the terrorists”

      One after another, our citizens are being killed, but we are yet to see a proactive approach from the government. Maybe they don’t realise that the blogger killings are damaging the country’s stability. What the government must understand is that by killing the bloggers and publishers, the extremists are actually killing freedom of speech and freedom of expression. The question is: why is the government unable to look at this in a broader perspective? They should be looking at it in a much more strategic way.

      Terming these as“isolated incidents” is one way of depoliticising them. Such statements will only embolden the terrorists to carry out more attacks. This government was involved in the Liberation War, so they must know how guerrilla tactics work. Terrorist attacks are always isolated incidents. The main point is whether or not the government is willing to take anti-terrorist strategies.

    • Bangladesh: Please Stop It

      The horrific cycle of killing of secular bloggers in Bangladesh, which has already claimed at least four lives this year, and the fresh murder of publisher Faisal Arefin Dipon, in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, on October 31, is deeply disconcerting. The Ansar al-Islam, an Islamic extremist group, which identifies as the local affiliate of al-Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for the attack.

    • 2 Men Who Published Writings Critical of Extremism Are Stabbed in Bangladesh

      Two businessmen who had published the works of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism, were stabbed on Saturday by groups of men in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, the police said. The attack came eight months after Mr. Roy was himself stabbed to death with machetes.

      One of the publishers, Faisal Arefin Dipan, died of his wounds immediately, the police said. The other, Ahmed Rahim Tutul, was in critical condition late Saturday.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • South-East Asia is choking on Indonesia’s forest fires

      THE annual haze that blankets swathes of South-East Asia usually begins to recede in October. This year however the smoggy conditions—caused by fires set to clear farmland in rural Indonesia—only got worse. On October 26th Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, cut short a state visit to America to handle the crisis, which has become one of the worst in memory. With the onset of this year’s rainy season delayed by the “El Niño” weather cycle, it could be a month or more before all flames are doused.

    • NPR Executive Editor: “NPR Should Have Reported On” What Exxon Knew About Climate Change

      NPR executive editor Edith Chapin and ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen agree it is “unfortunate” that NPR has thus far failed to cover groundbreaking reports documenting that ExxonMobil funded efforts to sow doubt about climate science for decades after confirming that burning fossil fuels causes climate change.

    • 10 Of The Worst Moments From Morning Joe’s Fawning Koch Brothers Interview

      Morning Joe’s interview “exclusive, first-ever joint interview” with industrialists Charles and David Koch was full of softball questions and worshipful praise. They also gave the Koch brothers a pass for claiming they oversee one of “the safest and environmentally protective” companies. The fawning interview follows months of pro-Koch coverage by the MSNBC hosts.

  • Finance

    • People in Sweden are hiding cash in their microwaves because of a fascinating — and terrifying — economic experiment

      Sweden is shaping up to be the first country to plunge its citizens into a fascinating — and terrifying — economic experiment: negative interest rates in a cashless society.

      The Swedish central bank held its benchmark interest rate at -0.35% today, the level it has been at since July.

      Although retail banks have yet to pass on that negative to rate to Swedish consumers, the longer it’s held there the more financial pressure there is for banks to pass the costs onto their customers. That’s a problem because Sweden is the closest country on the planet to becoming an all-electronic cashless society.

  • Privacy

    • So Google Records All The Microphone Audio All The Time, After All?

      It seems Google does record audio from microphones all the time, despite attempts to play down the situation. The “hotword” searching – when you initiate a search by saying “Ok Google” – has been criticized before, when it was downloaded to open-source browsers running Chromium. However, major privacy concerns remain as Google doesn’t start recording when you say “Ok Google”; it was recording before you said the hotword.

    • Letter from Facebook’s Alex Schultz

      We require people to use the name on Facebook that their friends and family know them by, and we’ll continue to do so.

    • UK government (apparently) backs down on Snooper’s Charter: Gracious or mendacious?

      Proposals in the UK’s imminent Snooper’s Charter, which would allow police and security forces access to everyone’s Web browsing history, have been dropped, according to The Guardian. In a statement, “senior sources” in the UK government apparently said that “rather than increasing intrusive surveillance, the [Investigatory Powers] bill would bar police and security services from accessing people’s browsing histories,” and that “any access to internet connection records will be strictly limited and targeted.” The Guardian also claims that other controversial options for the Investigatory Powers Bill, due to be published on Wednesday, have been shelved.

      These include the suggestion that companies would be restricted or perhaps banned from using encryption, and the requirement that UK telecoms would have to capture and store Internet traffic originating from US companies in order to allow UK intelligence agencies to access them even if the companies refused to hand over the data.

      However, as many experts have pointed out, neither idea was feasible: online business would become impossible without encryption, and end-to-end encryption means that storing traffic from US-based companies would be largely useless anyway.

      These facts raise the possibility that the UK government’s latest “climbdown” is actually nothing of the sort; rather, it would appear that the UK government has been feeding journalists exaggerated stories of what might be the Snooper’s Charter, so that it could then appear to back down graciously in the face of the inevitable outrage those ideas generated.

    • Internet firms to be banned from offering unbreakable encryption under new laws

      Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to under the Investigatory Powers Bill

    • Collect it all

      The bulk collection of communications data without targeted suspicion is mass surveillance. The bulk collection of global communications data should end. Surveillance should be targeted, necessary and proportionate.

    • EU Parliament Clears a Path to Give Snowden Asylum

  • Civil Rights

    • A Billionaire Sued Us. We Won. But We Still Have Big Legal Bills to Pay.

      It was a huge victory. We were up against a powerful billionaire and we won. But it came at a great cost: at least $2.5 million for us and our insurer, and $650,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for Mother Jones, to be precise. Everyone’s been asking whether we can recoup our attorney’s fees from VanderSloot, but unfortunately the answer is no.

      The win means a lot to me, personally, too. As someone who writes about rich and powerful people, it’s good to know that the First Amendment is alive and well. And it makes me beyond proud to write for Mother Jones: Not too many other shops would have had the guts to fight back, but we knew you’d expect us to, and that you’d have our back if we took a stand.

    • Qwasie Reid: US paramedic suspended without pay for helping child who was choking

      A US paramedic has reportedly been suspended without pay for making an “unauthorised” stop to try to save the life of a choking little girl.

      Qwasie Reid, an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in New York City, was transporting a nursing home patient to a doctor’s appointment in an ambulance last week when he was flagged down by a “frantic man” near a Brooklyn school who said a student was choking.

    • The Judicial System May Be Bad, But The Privatized Judicial System Of Arbitration Is Worse

      Back in 2011, we wrote about a troubling ruling in the Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the case which basically said that it’s perfectly fine for businesses to put in place “binding arbitration” clauses, that take away people’s rights to take a company to court over some sort of wrongdoing. As I noted at the time, ever since taking a series of classes on arbitration in college, I’ve been fascinated with the process, which sounds like a good idea. But it’s yet another case where theory and reality don’t necessarily match up.

    • Black Lives Matter? Not in an NYT Graphic

      Quick–who’s missing from this New York Times chart (11/2/15)?

      The point of the chart, based on one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that US non-Hispanic whites aged 45-54 have a rising mortality rate, unlike the similarly aged groups included for comparison purposes: Hispanics in the US, and people in France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia and Sweden.

      The most obvious omission is African-Americans, who make up about 12 percent of the US population. They are left out of the chart not because they don’t support the point—they, too, have a falling death rate in the 45-54 demographic, unlike US whites—but presumably because they would require a larger graph, since the black mortality rate is still well above whites in this age group: 582 vs. 415 per 100,000.

    • How the F.B.I. Can Detain, Render and Threaten Without Risk

      AT exactly 5 p.m. on March 13, 2007, just as I was preparing to leave my cubicle in Washington for the day, I got a phone call from the journalist Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers. To this day, I remember his exact words.

      “One of your congressman’s constituents is being held in an Ethiopian intelligence service prison, and I think your former employer is neck-deep in this.”

      The congressman was Rush Holt, then a Democratic representative from New Jersey, for whom I worked for 10 years starting in 2004. The constituent was Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J., who alleges that he was illegally taken to Ethiopia, where he was threatened with torture by American officials. My “former employer” was the Central Intelligence Agency, but it soon became apparent that the agency “neck-deep in this” was the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Facebook’s Free Basics isn’t good for India and Zuckerberg still doesn’t understand why

      Facebook has been trying to get India to fall in love with its Free Basics service for several months since it launched in February. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even visited the capital of New Delhi last week and attempted to address concerns about it during a Townhall Q&A session.

      But he still doesn’t get why Indians are opposed to the social network’s zero-rating service.

      More than 330,000 people signed a petition to oppose zero-rating and uphold net neutrality principles in the country and numerous Web and media companies dropped off Facebook’s offering in support of the initiative.

      Zuckerberg still thinks that Free Basics will serve India well, and believes that campaigns against it don’t factor in the benefits it brings to those who are still offline.

    • Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?

      In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices. Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail journal – “postjournal” in Norwegian) is public information and thanks to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal – OEP) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting journal entries .

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WTO Decision on Least Developed Country (LDC) Drug Patent Waiver

      The World Trade Organization is poised to announce this Friday its approval of a limited 17-year extension of a 2001 waiver of obligations in the TRIPS Agreement, set to expire at the end of this year, the terms of which exempt Least Developed Countries (LDCs) from requirements to grant patents or related intellectual property rights on pharmaceutical products.

      The decision to grant the 17-year waiver represents a compromise between the United States, which had asked for a ten-year waiver, and Least Developed Countries, which wanted an indefinite extension of the waiver that would have lasted for as long as a country remained least developed per UN classification. An indefinite waiver would have been a clear victory for LDCs, as it would have recognized their needs above the United States’ continuing promotion of more restrictive intellectual property rules.

    • Copyrights

      • The Latest Twist in the Megaupload Case Hinges on a German Translation

        Lawyers for Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom accused the United States of misrepresenting evidence and of trying to “contort the law” in a bid to persecute their client.

        This is do-or-die time for Dotcom and three other former Megaupload execs at the now defunct Megaupload. On Monday, their attorneys began arguments at an extradition hearing in Auckland on why the New Zealand government should not hand them over to the United States on criminal copyright violations.

        The US Department of Justice claimed in a 2012 indictment that Megaupload’s leadership generated $175 million by helping users pirate movies, and wants them brought to the US to stand trial.

        The hearing began with at least one serious allegation made by Dotcom’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield. The way Mansfield tells it, either DOJ attorneys speak very poor German or they intentionally misrepresented the meaning of Dotcom’s internal communications to blacken his image before the public and the court.

        Throughout the six-week hearing, New Zealand prosecutors, arguing on behalf of the United States, have told presiding Judge Nevin Dawson that Dotcom referred to himself and several other former Megaupload managers as “evil.”

      • Kim Dotcom Finally Launches Extradition Defense

        After proceedings began in September, Kim Dotcom began his extradition hearing defense in New Zealand today. His legal team argued that U.S. prosecutors cherry-picked evidence, intentionally mis-translated discussions to make the entrepreneur look bad, and created criminal liability for service providers where none exists.

      • RIAA Wants $17 Million Damages From ‘New’ Grooveshark

        The RIAA is asking a New York federal court to issue a default judgment against the ‘reincarnation’ of the defunct Grooveshark music service. The record labels are demanding more than $13 million in piracy damages plus another $4 million for willful counterfeiting.

      • US gov’t grants limited right to revive games behind “abandoned” servers [Updated]

        After nearly a year of debate and deliberation, the Library of Congress (LoC) has granted gamers and preservationists a limited legal method to restore access to games that are rendered unplayable thanks to defunct, abandoned authentication servers.

        In new guidelines published today, the Librarian of Congress said that gamers deserve the right to continued access to “local play” on games that they paid for, even if the centralized authentication servers required for that play have been taken down. So if Blizzard, for instance, decides to take down the authentication servers required to verify a new copy of StarCraft II online, players will now be legally allowed to craft a workaround that allows the game to work on their PCs.

Links 3/11/2015: Linux 4.3, OpenELEC 6.0

Posted in News Roundup at 4:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Varoufakis: Why Corbyn Is Like Thatcher

    Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has said new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a “conviction politician” like Margaret Thatcher was.

    He said anti-austerity and anti-war MP Mr Corbyn is someone viewed as extreme but who could shift the political scenery like the former Conservative prime minister.

    Speaking to Sky News, Mr Varoufakis admitted he was “one of those strange left-wingers who missed” the late Tory leader.

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Climate change could have a significant impact on our economy

      Climate change may have many economic impacts, including loss of crops, changes in water supply, increased incidence of natural disaster, and spikes in health care costs related to infectious diseases and temperature-related illnesses. However, hard evidence about the effects of climate change on economic activity has been inconsistent.

      A new paper published in Nature takes on the ambitious task of connecting micro- and macro-level estimates of climate costs. The study finds that climate change can be expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23 percent by the year 2100. This study is important because it solves a problem that has existed in prior models of climate change effects on economics: discrepancies between macro- and micro-level observations. This study presents the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled in some way to global climate. The study also sets up a new empirical paradigm for modeling economic loss in response to climate change.

    • Down From the Mountain

      Climate change deniers should come to Ghana

    • Ignoring Planetary Reality in the Name of Global Commerce

      Freed from the physical reality that places the United States in the temperate zone of a tilted planet, Schrager is free to reorganize regional schedules in the name of “economic efficiency” without regard to what this would actually do to people’s lives. She wisely declines to describe the results of her scheme, maybe realizing that the idea of putting the West Coast permanently on what is now Central Standard Time would have limited appeal had she spelled out that in mid-December, the Sun would set at 2:43 pm in Los Angeles, 2:27 pm in Portland and 2:18 pm in Seattle.

    • Fred Thompson’s Legacy Includes Giving the Kochs a Free Pass

      Reverse mortgage pitchman and former Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) passed away on November 1, 2015, at the age of 73, but his legacy of giving the Koch Brothers a pass on one of their first major forays into funneling money into mysterious groups to try to win elections continues unabated.

  • Finance

  • Privacy

    • Internet firms to be banned from offering unbreakable encryption under new laws

      Internet and social media companies will be banned from putting customer communications beyond their own reach under new laws to be unveiled on Wednesday.

      Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

      Measures in the Investigatory Powers Bill will place in law a requirement on tech firms and service providers to be able to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through a warrant.

    • The new Investigatory Powers Bill and the politics of ‘nodding along’
    • The All Writs Act, Software Licenses, and Why Judges Should Ask More Questions

      Pending before federal magistrate judge James Orenstein is the government’s request for an order obligating Apple, Inc. to unlock an iPhone and thereby assist prosecutors in decrypting data the government has seized and is authorized to search pursuant to a warrant. In an order questioning the government’s purported legal basis for this request, the All Writs Act of 1789 (AWA), Judge Orenstein asked Apple for a brief informing the court whether the request would be technically feasible and/or burdensome. After Apple filed, the court asked it to file a brief discussing whether the government had legal grounds under the AWA to compel Apple’s assistance. Apple filed that brief and the government filed a reply brief last week in the lead-up to a hearing this morning.

    • Section 215 and “Fruitless” (?!?) Constitutional Adjudication

      Hopefully, it won’t take a lot of convincing for folks to understand just how wrong-headed this is. For starters, if the plaintiffs are correct, they are currently being subjected to unconstitutional government surveillance for which they are entitled to a remedy. The fact that this surveillance has a limited shelf-life (and/or that Congress was complicit in it) doesn’t in any way ameliorate the constitutional violation — which is exactly why the Supreme Court has, for generations, recognized an exception to mootness doctrine for constitutional violations that, owing to their short duration, are “capable of repetition, yet evading review.” Indeed, in this very same opinion, the Second Circuit first held that the ACLU’s challenge isn’t moot, only to then invokes mootness-like principles to justify not resolving the constitutional claim. It can’t be both; either the constitutional challenge is moot, or it isn’t.

    • Martin Rowson on Theresa May’s snooper’s charter

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • NDRC Seeks Comment On Draft Anti-Monopoly Guidelines Against IPR Abuse

      On October 23, the Anti-Monopoly Guidelines Regulating Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights(Draft for Comments) were made available to USITO by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) for review and comment.

      The five-part draft provides guidance on how to regulate IPR-related monopoly agreements, abuse of market dominant position, monopoly involving standards-essential patents, and concentration of undertakings.

    • Copyrights

      • US judge denies copyright over 3-word phrase ‘Everyday I’m Hustlin’’

        Is there copyright in very short phrases?

        As copyright enthusiasts know, this invariably proves to be one of the thorniest issues to determine when it comes to specific cases. Just a couple of days ago it was reported that Taylor Swift has been sued for copyright infringement over inclusion of ‘haters gone hate’ and ‘playas gone play’ in her song Shake It Off.

10.31.15

Links 31/10/2015: Twitch’s Arch Linux Challenge, GNOME 3.19.1

Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Using open source in the enterprise – 11 CIOs embracing free and open source software

    Open source enterprise use cases appear to be on the rise, at least anecdotally, with an increasing number of CIOs, IT directors and Chief Technology Officers telling CIO UK about investigating and adopting free and open source alternatives to proprietary software as they seek to gain freedom and flexibility, cut costs, increase agility, improve code quality and avoid vendor lock-in.

    UK businesses it seems have also finally conquered their “irrational fears” of open source and security fears are also on the wane, reports have suggested.

    The most recent studies by the non-profit Linux Foundation in its Enterprise End User Trends reports have revealed year on year increases in Linux deployments over the last four years, with the open operating system seeing particular growth as a platform for cloud computing.

  • Neo4j Launches Open Source Graph Query Language openCypher

    Neo4j graph NoSQL database team launches open source graph query language called openCypher. Neo Technology, the company behind the graph database, announced last week at GraphConnect Conference, the launch of the open source project that will be available to technology providers as a common language for querying graph data.

  • Tor Project launches encrypted anonymous chat app to the public

    The Tor Project has launched the beta version of Tor Messenger, an easy-to-use encrypted message client for those concerned about their privacy and potential surveillance.

  • Keeping Open Source Code Safe: 5 Tips for the Enterprise

    Many organizations use static analysis security testing (SAST) and dynamic analysis security testing (DAST) for monitoring, but while these tools are excellent for finding bugs in code written by internal developers, they are not effective in detecting known open source vulnerabilities in application code. In fact, open source vulnerabilities are far too complex to be found by these automated tools.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Why Contributing to OpenStack Makes Sense for Vendors

      At the OpenStack Summit here, there have been a number of common themes and questions that keep surfacing. Time and again panels are discussing why contributions matter and how Amazon is or isn’t the competition.

      One such panel session was titled “The OpenStack Orchestra: The Next Wave of OpenStack Specialist Startups,” and included executives from Mirantis, Tesora, SwiftStack and PLUMgrid.

    • OpenStack Tokyo: The Ascendance of Cloud Networking

      Networking has always been a part of the open source OpenStack cloud platform, but it has never been more popular, or as exciting as it is now. At the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, one of the hottest topics is networking, as organizations of all sizes turn to the cloud for Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization capabilities.

    • Why HP Helion public cloud went down for the count

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.1 to launch bug hunting session

      LibreOffice 5.1 Alpha has launched, ready for the weekend. Enthusiasts and community members will be able to grab the software and partake in the first Bug Hunting Session from Friday October 30th to Sunday November 1st. The final build of LibreOffice 5.1 is expected to launch in February next year.

  • BSD

    • Deweloperzy OpenBSD: Henning Brauer

      I’m Henning, not 20 any more, OpenBSD developer since 2002. I architected & wrote large parts of pf, started, architected and wrote large parts of bgpd and ntpd. The imsg & privsep framework I wrote for bgpd is in almost all newer OpenBSD daemons. I also worked a lot in the network stack, including many redesigns. One of the last bigger projects I did was the replacement of the queueing subsystem.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Hurd 0.7 & GNU Mach 1.6 Released

      Stepping ahead of the Linux 4.3 release is a Halloween release of GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, and GNU MIG 1.6.

      GNU Hurd 0.7 improves the node cache for the EXT2 file-system code (ext2fs), improves the native fakeroot tool, provides a new rpcscan utility, fixes a long-standing synchronization issue with the file-system translators and other components, and the Hurd code has been ported to work with newer GCC versions and libc.

    • Library of Congress issues limited exemptions to DMCA anti-circumvention provisions but leaves users without full control over their own computing

      The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) contains provisions penalizing the circumvention of “technological protection measures”. These measures are digital jails denying users access to the software and other digital works they possess, preventing them from examining or changing the software on their devices. While such measures are nominally meant to protect copyrighted works, in reality they function as unacceptable restrictions on computer user freedom. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) opposes such Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) systems. The FSF further opposes the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, and demands that Congress repeal those provisions. Other countries with similar laws should follow suit.

      Every three years, the Library of Congress reviews proposals granting limited exemptions from the DMCA’s broad ban on users controlling the software and data on devices encumbered with DRM. This flawed process is meant to lessen the DMCA’s harm by giving user rights advocates an opportunity to request exemptions allowing circumvention in particular cases. Even when such petitions succeed, the resulting exemptions last only three years, meaning that advocates must repeatedly fight to retain the limited ground they won.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • PHP 7.0 RC6 Released Ahead Of PHP 7.0 Final On 12 November

      PHP 7.0 RC6 was released today for what may be the final release candidate ahead of PHP 7.0.0′s official premiere in two weeks.

    • Ceylon 1.2 Brings New Language Features

      Ceylon, the programming language based on Java and developed at Red Hat, is out with a new version of this programming language that can be lowered down into JavaScript.

    • PyPy 4.0.0 Released – A Jit with SIMD Vectorization and More

      We’re pleased and proud to unleash PyPy 4.0.0, a major update of the PyPy python 2.7.10 compatible interpreter with a Just In Time compiler. We have improved warmup time and memory overhead used for tracing, added vectorization for numpy and general loops where possible on x86 hardware (disabled by default), refactored rough edges in rpython, and increased functionality of numpy.

    • PyPy 4.0 Released For Speedy Python

      PyPy 4.0.0 was released today as a major update for this Python 2.7 interpreter and JIT compiler.

Leftovers

10.30.15

Links 30/10/2015: System76 Sells Oryx Pro, Plasma 5.5 Looks for Wallpapers

Posted in News Roundup at 11:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The new era of community

    The new Director of Community at GitHub, Jono Bacon, delivered a keynote at All Things Open this year titled: The new era of community. His talk was largely a call action to do better job of leading, guiding, and engaging in open source communities. Here’s how.

  • The Race to Develop an Open-Source Voting System Is On

    The City and County of San Francisco joined Los Angeles County and Travis County, Texas, in their pursuit of open source voting systems, where the public can review the software code for evidence of ballot tampering.

    The Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) adopted a report titled “Study on Open Source Voting Systems” on Friday, recommending how the county can build its own in San Francisco.

  • Look at that nice looking FreedomBox!

    I’m rebuilding one my home server and decided to take a look at the FreedomBox project as the base for it.

    The 0.6 version was recently released and I wasn’t aware of how advanced the project is already!

    They have a virtualbox image ready for some quick test. It took me longer to download it than to start using it.

  • Tor Messenger chat client beta available

    Messaging is generally thought to be safer than PGP encrypted email because there aren’t emails sitting around for interested parties to decrypt at their leisure. Once a messaging session is over, the messages, if not logged, disappear.

  • Greenplum goes open source — and a new cloud analytics star is born

    Greenplum Database, Pivotal’s data warehouse solution, has come full circle. Once derived from the open source PostgreSQL, Greenplum is open source once again.

    Greenplum could be used to yank the rug out from under the stagnant legacy players in data warehousing and analytic RDBMSes, but Oracle, Impala, and Teradata alone aren’t the competition. Rather, cloud leaders are also at risk.

  • What good is open source nobody knows about?

    Here’s a pet peeve of mine, because I see it time and time again: Folks work on software or projects, put in a ton of effort, and then do nothing to promote the project or release. (And, for bonus points, complain that they don’t understand why the project isn’t getting more attention!)

    [...]

    This isn’t necessarily intuitive for folks, I understand. But it is absolutely, vitally, necessary. Maybe, occasionally, a project is just so darn awesome that somebody happens to stumble on it via GitHub or whatever and word of mouth makes it a success – but typically, things get out into the world via consistent updates and communications to the right channels to get the word out.

  • Tor Just Launched the Easiest App Yet for Anonymous, Encrypted IM

    The anonymity network Tor has long been the paranoid standard for privacy online, and the Tor Browser that runs on it remains the best way to use the web while revealing the least identifying data. Now the non-profit Tor Project has officially released another piece of software that could bring that same level of privacy to instant messaging: a seamless and simple app that both encrypts the content of IMs and also makes it very difficult for an eavesdropper to identify the person sending them.

    On Thursday the Tor Project launched its first beta version of Tor Messenger, its long-in-the-works, open source instant messenger client. The app, perhaps more than any other desktop instant messaging program, is designed for both simplicity and privacy by default: It integrates the “Off-the-Record” (OTR) protocol to encrypt messages and routes them over Tor just as seamlessly as the Tor Browser does for web data. It’s also compatible with the same XMPP or “Jabber” chat protocol used by millions of Facebook and Google accounts, as well as desktop clients like Adium for Mac and Pidgin for Windows. The result is that anyone can download the software and in seconds start sending messages to their pre-existing contacts that are not only strongly encrypted, but tunneled through Tor’s maze of volunteer computers around the world to hide the sender’s IP address.

  • Tor Messenger Beta: Chat over Tor, Easily

    Tor Messenger is a cross-platform chat program that aims to be secure by default and sends all of its traffic over Tor. It supports a wide variety of transport networks, including Jabber (XMPP), IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, Yahoo, and others; enables Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging automatically; and has an easy-to-use graphical user interface localized into multiple languages.

  • Events

    • OpenStack Summit Tokyo 2015

      Yesterday I conducted my presentation about “99.999% available OpenStack Cloud – A builder’s guide”. The room was full. If you could not join, you can find the slide deck on slideshare and the video is also already available online.

    • How to keep a technical conference relevant for decades

      LISA is an annual technical conference for IT operations professionals, organized by The USENIX Association. The first LISA was held back in 1986, and the event still has a reputation for delivering top-notch technical content and an exceptional hallway track. This year, Amy Rich (Mozilla Corporation) and Cory Lueninghoener (Los Alamos National Laboratory) co-chaired the conference.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Sharing Work Is Easier With An Open Document Format

      The Open Document Format (ODF) is one such format. ODF was specified by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), an industry consortium which aims to produce standards for e-business.

      Key players in OASIS include the tech giants Sun Microsystems (now part of the Oracle) and IBM. Sun has been one of the main drivers of the format as it grew out of the format used by its free OpenOffice application. In 2006 the Open Document Format was approved jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as an international standard for office software.

      Sun promised not to enforce any of its patents against implementations using the OpenDocument standard, although there can be much uncertainty associated with patents.

    • LibreOffice 5.1 to Start Twice as Fast, Has MS Office 2016 Interoperability

      The first major point release for LibreOffice, the 5.1 branch, is being worked on this weekend during the 1st Bug Hunting Session. This promises to be an important upgrade that should really make a difference.

    • LibreOffice Hackfest at Hamburg

      Thanks to CIB, who sponsored the event with their office location, drinks and food, we again had a LibreOffice Hackfest at Hamburg on Saturday/Sunday October 24/25, and a get-together on Friday evening with the opportunity to meat also some long time colleagues from Sun and Star.

  • Education

    • Lawrence school district joins open source initiative

      The Lawrence school district is taking part in a new U.S. Department of Education campaign, #GoOpen, to encourage states, school districts and educators to use openly licensed educational materials.

      The Lawrence school district is one of 10 districts nationwide that have taken up the #GoOpen challenge to replace at least one textbook with openly licensed educational resources within the next year.

  • Electronic Payments

  • BSD

    • Deweloperzy OpenBSD: joshua stein

      I started using OpenBSD in 1998 (version 2.3 or 2.4) to host a BBS that I was running. I switched from Slackware Linux to OpenBSD because of its focus on security and eventually stuck with it because of its simple design and ease of administration. The ports system was a big draw for me as well.

    • Deweloperzy OpenBSD: Stefan Sperling

      I’m currently self-employed, with a focus on open source development and consulting for companies interacting with open source projects.

      Besides OpenBSD, I have been contributing to Apache Subversion since 2007. One of my main jobs is to provide support, workshops, and consulting for Subversion, plus fixing bugs and working on new features. I am somewhat involved in the Apache Software Foundation as a whole, but at this point in time my contributions there are more symbolic in nature, mostly because of lack of time and focus.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • A road trip into the Free Software Foundation’s early days

      On my 21st birthday in 1998, I received a phone call from Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation (FSF), to tell me the root password of the GNU Project’s web server.

      I’d learned about something called UNIX a great many years prior, and in 1993, on a two-week language course in Swansea, Wales, I managed to up my storage quota on the university’s Pyramid system from 2MB to 4MB, enough to download Slackware from the University of Vaasa’s FTP server and bring it back home with me.

  • Licensing

    • Christoph Hellwig Continues VMware GPL Enforcement Suit in Germany

      The lawsuit continues to progress. VMware has filed a statement of defense, in which they assert arguments for the dismissal of the action. Christoph, with the assistance of his lawyer Till Jaeger, has filed his response to these arguments. Unfortunately, VMware has explicitly asked for the filings not to be published and, accordingly, Conservancy has not been able to review either document. With the guidance of counsel, Christoph was able to provide Conservancy with a high-level summary of the filings from which we are able to provide this update. VMware’s statement of defense primarily focuses on two issues. First, VMware questions Christoph’s copyright interest in the Linux kernel and his right to bring this action. Second, VMware claims vmklinux is an “interoperability module” which communicates through a stable interface called VMK API.

    • VMware vs German kernel dev: Filings flung in Linux-lifting lawsuit

      Software Freedom Conservancy has spat out a “high level” update on the GPL enforcement case it is backing against VMware, ahead of an expected first hearing next year.

      SFC said that VMware had filed its defence against the suit brought by German kernel developer Christoph Hellwig back in March, which alleges VMware’s proprietary ESXi hypervisor products use portions of the code that Hellwig wrote for the Linux kernel, in violation of the terms of version 2 of the GPL.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Romania prepares its second Action Plan

      “Creating an open governance process requires a larger commitment and a more engaged dialogue between the government, civil society, citizens and the private sector. Having an efficient administration can drive a better communication between public institutions, civil servants, and other stakeholders,” according to an evaluation report published by the Romanian government, which will form the basis of its second OGP Action Plan (2014-2016).

    • Can Greenpeace become an open organization?

      I’m fascinated by what the open community takes for granted. Outside FOSS, free and open source software, the idea that work needs to have a solid foundation before being released is deeply seeded. But, in open source communities we say, “Release early, release often,” a phrase I regularly substitute now for: “Throw it into the world as soon as you can formulate words around it.” Heck, even if you aren’t coherent, someone might still understand you. Go ahead and share!

    • Open Hardware

      • Novena: A Laptop With No Secrets

        Our next choice had social repercussions. When you adopt a CPU/operating-system combination, you also adopt its developers. We decided against Google Android because it’s optimized for phones and tablets, its graphical display typically shows only one application at a time, and its touch-screen paradigm is too imprecise for computer-aided design work. Therefore, in order to create a system that our target market of developers and creators could use, we decided to run on our ARM chip a version of Linux called GNU/Linux. GNU, which authored both the OS libraries and the license that the Linux kernel uses, is a coder’s organization, right down to the self-referential acronym itself (it stands for “Gnu’s Not Unix”).

      • Open Source Laptop

        Andrew “bunnie” Huang & Sean Cross tell, in great detail, how they created the Novena laptop, using solely open source software and hardware. For anyone familiar with or even interested in how computers really work, it’s quite a gripping tale. I believe their work could have lasting beneficial effects on the hobbyist computing and open source communities.

      • Open-Source Robotic Arm Exceeds 1200% of Initial Crowdfunding Goal

        The open-source robotic arm called Dobot that can be used by everyday consumers and experience makers alike has now raised over $430,000 on crowdfunding website, Kickstarter, with funds still rising.

  • Programming

    • Top 3 open source Python IDEs

      Python is everywhere. These days, it seems it powers everything from major websites to desktop utilities to enterprise software. Python has been used to write all, or parts of, popular software projects like dnf/yum, OpenStack, OpenShot, Blender, Calibre, and even the original BitTorrent client.

    • Azul’s Open Source JVM Supports Java 9 a Year Before Release

      While DZone was at JavaOne 2015 this week, Azul Systems released an early access version of Zulu, which is a certified OpenJDK build / JVM, that supports the latest JDK 9 features.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Oracle ships first Sparc M7 systems with security in silicon

      ORACLE HAS STARTED SHIPPING systems based on its latest Sparc M7 processor, which the firm said will go a long way to solving the world’s online security problems by building protection into the silicon.

      The Sparc M7 chip was originally unveiled at last year’s Openworld show in San Francisco, and was touted at the time as a Heartbleed-prevention tool.

      A year on, and Oracle announced the Oracle SuperCluster M7, along with Sparc T7 and M7 servers, at the show. The servers are all based on the 32-core, 256-thread M7 microprocessor, which offers Security in Silicon for better intrusion protection and encryption, and SQL in Silicon for improved database efficiency.

  • Security

    • Intel x86 considered harmful (new paper)

      Back in summer I have read a new book published by one of the core Intel architects about the Management Engine (ME). I didn’t quite like what I read there. In fact I even found this a bit depressing, even though Intel ME wasn’t particular news to me as we, at the ITL, have already studied this topic quite in-depth, so to say, back in 2008… But, as you can see in the linked article, I believed we could use VT-d to protect the host OS from the potentially malicious ME-based rootkits (which we demonstrated back then).

    • MySQL Windows servers come under malware attack

      Researchers at Symantec say they have discovered a form of malware that attacks MySQL on Windows servers, using them to launch distributed denial of service attacks.

    • Sustaining Digital Certificate Security

      Following our notification, Symantec published a report in response to our inquiries and disclosed that 23 test certificates had been issued without the domain owner’s knowledge covering five organizations, including Google and Opera.

      However, we were still able to find several more questionable certificates using only the Certificate Transparency logs and a few minutes of work. We shared these results with other root store operators on October 6th, to allow them to independently assess and verify our research.

      Symantec performed another audit and, on October 12th, announced that they had found an additional 164 certificates over 76 domains and 2,458 certificates issued for domains that were never registered.

    • British Gas leak sees 2,400 customer passwords posted online

      COOKING AND HEATING ENABLER British Gas has confessed to a data loss that has seen the details of many of its customers released online.

      British Gas has written to affected customers to tell them that, while it may not have been hacked, the effect is the same. It has somehow managed to leak information that has found its way onto the internet and in the direction of ne-er-do-wells.

      Reports have it that 2,399 email addresses and passwords have been leaked online. A package of emails and passwords is a pretty good haul for an online exploiter, particularly if the same details are used for access on other sites and services.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Britain’s Poppy Fascism

      Some brave television figures refuse to go along with the established “norm”. It was Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow who coined the phrase “poppy fascism” a few years ago when he was publicly berated by BBC journalists and other media outlets for refusing to don the flower during his nightly broadcasts. It remains to be seen if the Channel 4 news anchor will this year cave to public pressure – a pressure which seems to be growing every year.

    • Over 16,000 Alleged Terrorists Believed Dead, Yet Many Remain Watchlisted

      EVEN DEATH WON’T GET YOU OFF the U.S. terrorism watchlist. As of last July, over 3,500 suspected terrorists included in the U.S. government’s central terror database were “confirmed dead” and another 13,000 were “reportedly dead,” yet many of their names continued to be actively monitored in databases like the no-fly list, according to an intelligence assessment prepared by the Department of Homeland Security in August of this year.

    • Israel only country at UN to join US in supporting Cuba embargo

      The UN General Assembly on Tuesday called for an end to the decades-long US embargo on Cuba in a resolution adopted by a near-unanimous vote, three months after US-Cuba diplomatic ties were restored.

      The United States and Israel voted against the non-binding resolution, but a resounding 191 countries supported the measure in the 193-member assembly, the highest number ever.

    • We are lifelong Zionists. Here’s why we’ve chosen to boycott Israel.

      But we must face reality: The occupation has become permanent. Nearly half a century after the Six-Day War, Israel is settling into the apartheid-like regime against which many of its former leaders warned. The settler population in the West Bank has grown 30-fold, from about 12,000 in 1980 to 389,000 today. The West Bank is increasingly treated as part of Israel, with the green line demarcating the occupied territories erased from many maps. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin declared recently that control over the West Bank is “not a matter of political debate. It is a basic fact of modern Zionism.”

    • Sentenced to Be Crucified

      Any day now, our Saudi Arabian allies may behead and crucify a young man named Ali al-Nimr.

    • Exclusive: Saudi Arabia Admits Bombing MSF Hospital in Yemen — But Faults MSF

      Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the UN has admitted a “mistake” was made when Riyadh-led coalition jets bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Yemen, but says the medical charity provided incorrect geographic coordinates for the facility, leading to the incident.

      MSF, as the organization is known by its French acronym, reported on Tuesday that a hospital they supported in Haydan district in the northern Saada province was hit by several airstrikes starting at around 10:30PM local time on Monday. Initial blasts occurred outside the building, and all staff and patients were able to flee before it was destroyed by subsequent airstrikes. One MSF employee suffered minor injuries.

      In a statement, MSF said that the hospital’s GPS coordinates “were shared with Coalition forces. They are sent every week to the Coalition operations room, and the last time they were shared was on October 24.” The organization also said that it’s logo had been painted on the facility’s roof and was visible from the air.

    • Yemen: MSF Hospital Destroyed by Airstrikes

      Airstrikes carried out late last night by the Saudi-led coalition in northern Yemen destroyed a hospital supported by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), MSF announced today.

      The small hospital, in the Haydan District in Saada Province, was hit by several airstrikes beginning at 10:30 p.m. last night. Hospital staff and two patients managed to escape before subsequent airstrikes occurred over a two-hour period. One staff member was slightly injured while escaping. With the hospital destroyed, at least 200,000 people now have no access to lifesaving medical care.

    • Saudi prince arrested on private plane with 2 tons of drugs – reports

      Lebanese security forces are interrogating a Saudi prince on charges of carrying drugs on his private plane after they allegedly retrieved 2 tons of narcotics from the aircraft, local media reported.

      Abd al-Muhsen bin Walid bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud was detained on Monday in Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport.

      The prince was about to conduct a flight on his private plane to Saudi Arabia.

    • Saudi Arabia executes people over drugs while its princes are caught with tons of drugs at the airport

      Saudi prince Abdel Mohsen bin Walid bin Abdulaziz was caught in an airport in Lebanon on Monday with over two tons of drugs.

      Lebanese security found 40 suitcases full of more than 4,000 pounds of amphetamine pills and cocaine on the prince’s private plane, which was on its way to Saudi capital city Riyadh. A security source told AFP that this was the largest smuggling operation ever foiled by Beirut International Airport security.

      While this may seem like just another case of rich and powerful aristocrats going wild, the implications of this drug bust are much more insidious: In Saudi Arabia, people are executed over drugs. And not rarely — several times a month, on average.

    • The Pentagon’s Missionary Spies: U.S. Military Used Christian NGO as Front for North Korea Espionage

      Hiramine’s NGO, Humanitarian International Services Group, or HISG, won special praise from the president for having demonstrated how a private charity could step in quickly in response to a crisis. “In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” read Hiramine’s citation, “HISG’s team launched a private sector operation center in Houston that mobilized over 1,500 volunteers into the disaster zone within one month after the hurricane.”

      But as the evangelical Christian Hiramine crossed the stage to shake hands with President Bush and receive his award, he was hiding a key fact from those in attendance: He was a Pentagon spy whose NGO was funded through a highly classified Defense Department program.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Obama Bypassed OLC on Bin Laden Killing

      This means that on the OBL raid, Donilon excluded the Attorney General in the same way Dick Cheney excluded John Ashcroft from key information about torture and wiretapping. I find that interesting enough, given hints that Holder raised concerns about the legal authority to kill Anwar al-Awlaki in the weeks after we missed him on December 24, 2009, which led to OLC writing two crappy memos authorizing that killing in ways that have never been all that convincing.

      But Savage provides no explanation for why Krass was excluded, which is particularly interesting given that the month after OBL’s killing, Savage revealed that President Obama had blown off Krass’ advice on Libya (as I read it, the decision to blow off her advice would have happened after the OBL killing, though I am not certain on that point). The silence about Krass is also remarkable given that she was looped in on the initial Libya decision — and asked to write a really bizarre memo memorializing advice purportedly given after the fact.

    • WikiLeaks emails from head of CIA reveal he ‘consulted a mental health expert’, suggested US spying on own citizens may be illegal and that his own security firm had been ‘disingenuous’ to win contract

      Highly sensitive personal details about the head of the CIA from his hacked emails have been leaked, including his phone number, home address, passport number and how he once consulted a mental health expert.

      The emails, obtained by WikiLeaks, show that John Brennan had concerns about the US spying on its own citizens and called for ‘firm criteria’, warning that the activities ‘must be consistent with our laws and reflect the democratic principles and values of our Nation’.

      The files also show how a security firm he established was accused of ‘disingenuous’ behavior by the CIA in its bid to win a government contract for a terrorist watch list.

      In a further memo released by the anti-secrecy agency, Brennan takes a swipe at former President George W. Bush for his ‘gratuitous’ labeling of Iran as part of a worldwide ‘axis of evil’.

    • European Parliament Urges Protection for Edward Snowden

      On Twitter, Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked millions of documents about electronic surveillance by the United States government, called the vote a “game-changer.” But the resolution has no legal force and limited practical effect for Mr. Snowden, who is living in Russia on a three-year residency permit.

    • EU Parliament Calls On EU Countries To Drop All Charges Against Snowden, Protect Him From Extradition

      The EU Parliament has just approved a measure (by a narrow 285 to 281 vote) telling EU member states to “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender.” That’s pretty huge. Of course, as a resolution, it’s more symbolic than actually meaningful, because the member states may not follow through on the request. But it is an important step in the right direction.

      At the same time, the EU Parliament reviewed some other issues concerning mass surveillance, including the whole EU-US safe harbor setup. As we noted, the EU Court of Justice recently tossed out that agreement, which is really creating a huge mess for the internet right now. The EU Parliament “welcomed” the ruling, and pushed for alternatives to the safe harbor agreement. As we noted, the safe harbor agreement was a bit of a mess, but it’s important to have something in place to allow the internet to function — and the real problem was the NSA surveillance program.

    • European Parliament Says Snowden Should Be Welcomed in Europe

      The European Parliament voted on Thursday to call on its member states to welcome “human rights defender” Edward Snowden to Europe with open arms.

      The member states should “drop any criminal charges against Edwards Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as a whistle-blower and international human rights defender,” read the resolution.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Lions Declining in Africa

      A predictive population model suggests that lion populations in West, Central, and East Africa are likely to be halved in the next 20 years.

    • 22 more elephants killed by cyanide in Zimbabwe

      National park officials say 22 more elephants have been killed by cyanide in Zimbabwe, adding to a worrying poaching trend.

      A source with knowledge of an investigation of the killings says 78 elephants have been poisoned in the country this month.

      The elephants were found in the remote Sinamatella area of Hwange National Park on Monday, Zimbabwe national park officials say. The park received international attention in July as the site where American dentist Walter Palmer shot and killed Cecil the lion.

    • Joseph Stiglitz: Under TPP, Polluters Could Sue U.S. for Setting Carbon Emissions Limits

      Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz warns about the dangers of the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “We know we’re going to need regulations to restrict the emissions of carbon,” Stiglitz said. “But under these provisions, corporations can sue the government, including the American government, by the way, so it’s all the governments in the TPP can be sued for the loss of profits as a result of the regulations that restrict their ability to emit carbon emissions that lead to global warming.”

    • The African lion: what faster decline of apex predator means for ecosystems

      There is nothing as awe-inspiring as watching the brutal power of a lion capturing its prey. At close range, their throaty roars thump through your body, raising a cold sweat triggered by the fear of what these animals are capable of doing now, and what they once did to our ancestors. They are the most majestic animals left on our planet, and yet we are currently faced with the very real possibility that they will be functionally extinct within our lifetime.

      In fact, lion populations throughout much of Africa are heading towards extinction more rapidly than previously thought, according to new research by Oxford biologist Hans Bauer and colleagues, published in PNAS. The team looked at 47 sites with credible and repeated lion surveys since 1990, and found they were declining everywhere in Africa aside from four countries: Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

    • Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away?

      I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work. What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.

      [...]

      At the climate summit in Paris in December the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?

    • NASA warns of worst ever forest fires, environmental disaster, as smoke blankets six countries

      IT’S the biggest environmental disaster in our region and Australia cannot avoid being affected by its enormous reach.

      A sickening haze that has spread across southeast Asia is being described as a “crime against humanity” and has NASA warning of a disaster of its kind never before seen.

      For more than two months, raging forest fires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra have released vast plumes of smoke that has spread across neighbouring countries including Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • AdBlock Plus accuses Axel Springer of censorship after ad-block move

      Axel Springer’s war with ad-blocking firm Eyeo’s Adblock Plus continues to rage.

      According to AdBlock Plus, the German publisher has tried to quash conversations about how to get around the wall that Axel Springer erected to keep ad block users from accessing its tabloid site Bild. Adblock Plus is claiming Axel Springer’s approach smacks of censorship.

    • Anti-Israel Activism Criminalized in the Land of Charlie Hebdo and “Free Speech“

      Worst of all, the march took place in a country that is one of the most hostile to free speech rights in the West, as France quickly demonstrated in the days after the march by rounding up and prosecuting Muslims and other anti-Israel activists for the political views they expressed. A great, best-selling book by French philosopher Emmanuel Todd released this year argues that these “free speech” marches were a “sham,” driven by many political sentiments — nativism, nationalism, anti-Muslim bigotry — that had nothing to do with free speech.

    • ORG response to David Cameron’s call for web filter law

      ORG has responded to the Prime Minister’s calls for legislation that will implement filters for adult content. This follows the European’s Parliament vote for net neutrality regulations, which will ban the current voluntary agreement made between ISPs and the government to provide filters, which some providers switch on by default.

    • UK Prime Minister Apparently Last To Realize New EU Net Neutrality Rules Mean No Porn Filtering

      The EU’s new net neutrality “protections” are largely deserving of the scare quotes, what with their myriad loopholes and built-in provisions that allow ISPs to throttle/manipulate traffic to prevent “congestion” — something that has yet to be the actual source of any ISP’s “traffic $haping” efforts.

      But what the rules did do is throw off David Cameron’s ongoing plans for a porn-free UK. And, of course — considering Cameron has no idea how ISP-level filters work, much less aware of numerous logical fallacies “supporting” his claims this will actually prevent porn consumption by minors — the Prime Minister was the last to know.

    • ‘Soft’ Censorship Threatens Serbian Press Freedom

      The Serbian government’s use of “soft” censorship remains a threat to press freedom, a report issued on Thursday by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, WAN-IFRA, and the Center for International Media Assistance, CIMA, in Washington says.

      The report, “Media reform stalled in the slow lane: Soft censorship in Serbia”, was published with the support of the Open Society Foundation while BIRN Serbia was a research partner.

      The report noted that Serbia lacks a functional, vital and competitive media market.

      “Taxpayers’ funds are now one of the most important sources for survival of media outlets. However, public monies are deployed with partisan intent,” the report said.

    • Censorship at Ubud writers’ festival proves a creeping menace

      The censorship of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival has spread from sessions discussing the 1965 anti-communist massacres to other politically sensitive topics on the resort island.

      A panel has now been scratched on the controversial reclamation of land in Benoa Bay in southern Bali for a massive luxury development that critics say will devastate the environment.

    • Ubud festival kicks off amid censorship pressure

      Last week, the UWRF organizer, however, was forced to drop all sessions that were to look at the massacre of communists in Indonesia in the 1960s following pressure from local authorities.

    • Bali Nine lawyer joins Indonesians warning against return to Suharto censorship

      Panel sessions and a film on the 1965 anti-communist massacres in Indonesia were prohibited at an international literary festival in Bali due to a 1966 government regulation banning communism and Marxism-Leninism, according to a Balinese police chief.

      Gianyar police chief Farman told Fairfax Media there was also a 1999 criminal code which made the spreading of communism, Marxism and Leninism in public a punishable offence with a maximum sentence of 12 years’ jail.

    • Ubud Writers Fest Censorship Pressure: Indonesians can’t freely talk about 1965 killings

      The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF) has cancelled events discussing the 1965 Indonesian massacres, after police threatened to revoke the festival permit.

      I research and write about the massacres’ impact on Indonesia. I was to moderate one of the five events that were dropped from this week’s festival.

    • Censorship is returning to Indonesia in the name of the 1965 purges

      A week ago I received a message from Janet DeNeefe, director of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

      “I just wanted to let you know that the UWRF is being censored this year, and we have been told to remove all programs to do with ‘1965’,” she wrote. “Or else next year they will not give us a permit to hold the festival.”

    • Report: Global internet surveillance, censorship on rise

      Governments around the world are expanding censorship and surveillance of the internet as overall online freedom declined for the fifth consecutive year, according to a report from a group that tracks democracy and human rights.

      Nearly half of 65 countries examined have seen online freedom weaken since June 2014, Freedom House said in an annual survey released on Wednesday.

      One of the steepest declines occurred in France, which passed a law that many observers likened to the US Patriot Act in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks earlier this year, according to the report.

      Ukraine, mired in a territorial conflict with Russia, and Libya also experienced sharp drops.

      The report highlighted China as the country with the most severe restrictions on internet freedom, followed by Syria and Iran.

      Sri Lanka and Zambia, both of which recently underwent changes in government leadership, were credited with making the biggest improvements in overall online freedom.

    • Internet freedom falls for fifth year in row: survey

      The annual report by non-government watchdog Freedom House said the setbacks were especially noticeable in the Middle East, reversing gains seen in the Arab Spring.

      Freedom House found declines in online freedom of expression in 32 of the 65 countries assessed since June 2014, with “notable declines” in Libya, France and Ukraine.

      The researchers found 61 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where criticism of the government, military or ruling family has been subject to censorship.

      And 58 percent live in countries where bloggers or others were jailed for sharing content online on political, social and religious issues, according to the “Freedom on the Net 2015″ report.

    • Porn filters: Cameron vows to protect internet censorship from EU law

      Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to counter a European Union ruling that branded his internet porn filters illegal. He reiterated his stance that children must be protected from adult material online.

      The EU ruling states that information must be allowed to travel through the internet “without discrimination, restriction or interference.” The measures are intended to allow data companies to reduce roaming charges.

      The British government says it will protect internet companies from the EU laws and make it a legal right for the firms to use porn filters.

      Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Cameron said parents should be able to control the materials their children are exposed to.

    • UK.gov plans to legislate on smut filters after EU net neutrality ruling

      Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed today that the Tory government planned to legislate on smut filters, following yesterday’s net neutrality ruling in the European Union.

      Cameron told MPs during PMQs that he had “spluttered over my cornflakes” when he read this morning that the EU measures would fail to think of the children by protecting their prying eyes from “indecent images”.

      “I think it’s absolutely vitally important that we enable parents to have that protection for their children from this material on the internet,” he told the Palace of Westminster.

      “We worked so hard to put in place these filters,” the PM added. “But I can reassure her [Conservative MP for Derby North, Amanda Solloway] because we actually secured an opt-out yesterday so we can keep our family-friendly filters to protect children.”

    • EU Unbans Occult Websites Banned By David Cameron

      This rather shows the bias inherent in the Independent’s editorial style, for these filters applied not just to porn sites, but to websites that dealt with topics and lifestyles that somehow made David Cameron and his government uncomfortable — such as those dealing with the Occult.

    • Porn Under Attack Once Again By Clueless British Government

      Sometimes politicians make me mad enough to scream at my computer. Today is a great example of that as the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has restated his claim that he will block internet-based porn and adult content to “protect children”.

      But this isn’t about protecting children at all, it’s about controlling the internet and stopping British people’s freedom to browse as they wish without having to subject themselves to a registration process in order to watch adult material. The whole idea of blocking porn to protect “children” is a fiction, you can’t protect children from porn – it’s impossible. And anyway “children” don’t watch porn, young adults do. Getting the government to understand the difference between a child and an adolescent is impossible though.

    • Shadow-Censorship on Social Media Sparks New Concerns for Open-Internet Advocates

      The future of information suppression may be much harder to detect—and thus enormously more difficult to counteract. The digital censors of tomorrow will not require intimidation or force; instead, they can exploit the dark art of “shadow-censorship.”

      Shadow-censorship is a way to control information by secretly limiting or obscuring the ways that people can access it. Rather than outright banning or removing problematic communications, shadow-censors can instead wall off social-media posts or users in inaccessible obscurity without the target’s knowledge. To an individual user, it just looks like no one is interested in his or her content. But behind the scenes, sharing algorithms are being covertly manipulated so that it’s extremely difficult for other users to view the blacklisted information.

      In theory, there are a variety of ways that shadow-censorship could be applied on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Users may be automatically unsubscribed from blacklisted feeds without notice. Social media analytics can be selectively edited after the fact to make some posts look more or less popular than they really were. Individual posts or users can be flagged so that they are shown in as few feeds as possible by default. Or provocative content that originally escaped selective filtering may be memory-holed after the fact, retrievable only by the eagle-eyed few who notice and care to draw attention to such curious antics.

    • Putin’s New Censorship Rules Will Weaken Russian Science

      In a surprising development this past week, Russia has notified all scientists at Moscow State University (MSU) that they must submit their research papers to the state security service before they will be permitted to publish them. Nature News reports that Russia is imposing this policy on universities and research institutes throughout the country.

    • Smooth censorship in Russia

      The history of censorship in Russian media runs for pages and pages. There’s little point dealing with Soviet censorship here, but the 1990s, which many people remember as a time when press freedom prevailed, are different. Journalists of the time reminisce about how they used to push bureaucrats’ doors open, the public officials scared of them: bureaucrats and politicians had never been so vulnerable.

      The media, however, was another part of the country’s terrain of political conflict—just as articles could be pulled, so could journalists. Take Dmitry Kholodov, for instance, a journalist for Moskovsky komsomolets who died as he collected a booby-trapped suitcase in 1994. Ministry of Defence officials weren’t pleased with Kholodov’s coverage of army corruption and, having asked their subordinates to ‘shut him up’, their subordinates took the order literally.

    • S. Korean journalists criticize MoU for failing to prevent censorship

      South Korean journalists released a statement on Tuesday urging that the Ministry of Unification (MoU) demand that North Korea not interfere in their reporting during family reunions.

      The journalists from 38 media outlets criticized North Korea for interfering in their reporting during the family reunions that finished Monday at Mount Kumgang, North Korea. North Korea examined the journalists’ computers and USB drives, they said, returning the devices a day later despite the journalists’ complaints.

    • Zimbabwe: Censorship board should be abolished, says workshop group

      Zimbabwe should abolish the censorship board and other bodies censoring or regulating artistic expressions in order to comply with Zimbabwe’s new constitution. Instead a new classification board should be mandated to issue age recommendations to protect children. This was a recommendation made by arts practitioners, artists, journalists and human rights lawyers at a workshop on artistic freedom, held on 23-24 October 2015 in Harare, Zimbabwe.

      [...]

      It says the effects of art censorship or unjustified restrictions of the right to freedom of artistic expression and creativity deprive artists of means of expression and livelihood and generate important cultural, social and economic losses to society.

    • Lego refuses to supply bricks for Weiwei installation at National Gallery of Victoria because of ‘political context’

      Part of a major international exhibition planned for Melbourne has been thrown into doubt after toymaker, Lego, refused to supply building blocks for the project.
      External Link: Ai Weiwei instagram

      Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei said Lego refused his studio’s request for a bulk order of Lego to create an artwork to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria.

    • Chinese activist Ai Weiwei accuses Lego of ‘censorship’

      Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei says Lego refused to sell him toy bricks for his artwork, calling it an “an act of censorship and discrimination.”

    • Australia gallery collects Lego for Ai Weiwei

      An Australian gallery has set up a collection point for Lego for a work by artist Ai Weiwei, after the Danish company refused a bulk order from him.

      The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) wants Australians to donate the toy bricks by pouring them through the sunroof of a car parked at the gallery.

    • Chinese artist Ai Weiwei fights Lego Group ‘censorship’

      Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has begun gathering the building blocks for his next artwork, asking fans from all over the world to donate their Lego pieces for use in his next project.

    • Video showing censorship plan by Erdoğan’s chief advisor sparks outrage

      There has been a recent development concerning the removal of critical channels from TV streaming platforms in which newly emerged video footage provides evidence that such movements are politically motivated, as the chief advisor of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is featured urging a minister to drop critical TV channels from the state-owned Turkish Satellite Communications Company (Türksat) — a move that has attracted widespread criticism.

    • US says Turkey not keeping with democratic values after media takeover

      The United States has reiterated its concern over the hostile takeover of five media outlets in Turkey, saying that Turkey is not keeping with its own democratic values.

    • Turkish Police Storm TV Channels Linked to Erdogan Foe Gulen

      Cops sprayed water cannon to disperse crowds in front of the offices of Kanalturk and Bugun TV in Istanbul, a live broadcast on Bugun’s website showed.

      The media groups are owned by Koza Ipek Holding, which has links to Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen. The authorities on Tuesday took over 22 companies owned by Koza Ipek in an investigation of alleged financial irregularities, including whether it funded Gulen. The company denies wrongdoing.

    • International press rights groups slam growing censorship in Turkey
    • Shutting down online comments: Censorship or sanity?

      Vile comments and phenomena such as trolling are simply a small part of the avalanche of electronic detritus that we have to learn to cope with as the internet revolution progresses. Dubious and unethical practices have proliferated and yet, the only sustained attempt to moderate the internet, in China, is notable for its failures as Chinese internet users have quickly learnt how to dodge censors and spread news and opinions in flash comments reaching hundreds of millions.

      Racist and violent comments can easily be identified, and then simply ignored. Many websites urge users “not to feed the trolls”, even with traffic signs. In Brazil, trolls are called pombos enxadristas (chess player pigeons), and the advice is not to play them, since all they can do is defecate on the board and knock over the pieces.

    • Malaysian cartoonist facing 43 years in prison

      Malaysian cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Haque, aka Zunar, is facing nine simultaneous charges under the country’s Sedition Act and will appear in court on 6 November. He could be sentenced to 43 years in prison for drawing cartoons that mock Malaysia’s corrupt government officials.

      Ahead of his court appearance, Zunar is coming to the UK to display a small selection of his work as part of the permanent exhibition at the Cartoon Museum and several other events.

    • Government Censorship Of Internet Speech

      Repressive regimes have sought to quell the speech of dissidents throughout history, and long before the advent of the Internet. It therefore is not entirely surprising that attempted censorship by governments will continue in the online world. But, hopefully, the Internet will help to foster free speech and communication, and will not be a means of governmental surveillance on citizens.

    • Quentin Tarantino, the NYPD and the First Amendment

      Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino exercised his First Amendment rights by speaking at a New York City protest against police brutality. At the October 24 event, he denounced “police terror,” and reportedly said this: “I have to call a murder a murder, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”

      In response, Patrick Lynch, the head of New York’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association union, called Tarantino a “cop-hater” and said that it was “time for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films.” A union affiliated with the Los Angeles Police Department has reportedly endorsed the boycott as well.

    • Arpat uproar points to censorship flaws

      The hullabaloo around the Thai film Arpat, which features a misbehaving young monk, is the latest example of problems caused by what some people in the film industry perceive as flaws in the Film and Video Act 2008.

      Some of the controversial aspects of the law, which was passed by the coup-appointed National Legislative Assembly, include the composition of the censor committees, and the measure that allows a film to be banned for national security reasons.

      Also criticised were a conservative interpretation of the rules, and most importantly strict state control over film, compared to lighter regulation of other cheaper and more accessible media such as television and print.

    • Bollywood Directors and TVF Comedians Troll Censorship in New Video

      Kanu Behl, the debutant director of Titli which releases this Friday, October 30, along with producer Dibakar Banerjee, teamed up with TVF to make an episode on censorship in India. The fun video Censor Qtiyapa which released online on October 26, has gone viral and got more than two lakh views in less than 24 hours.

      The video featuring eminent filmmakers Mahesh Bhatt, Sudhir Mishra, Hansal Mehta, Kamal Swaroop, Ajay Bahl, producer Guneet Monga, Vasan Bala along with the Titli director and producer is directed by Shlok Sharma (director of Haramkhor).

      Excited about the tremendous response, the director Kanu Behl says, “The response to the video has been overwhelming. Close to 2 lakh hits in less than 24 hours, as we write this. It’s interesting to know that the audience across the board can bite in to the humour and get all the nuances of a film maker’s labour pains!”

    • Google Asked to Remove One Billion “Pirate” Search Results

      Copyright holders have asked Google to remove more than 1,000,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine in recent years. The remarkable milestone, reached this week, is at the center of an ongoing debate over how search engines are expected to deal with pirate sites.

    • How The EU’s Proposed New ‘Privacy’ Rules Will Be A Tool For Massive Censorship

      We recently wrote about some concerns about the new Data Protection Directive that is being set up in Europe. The law is driven by people with good intentions: looking to better protect the privacy of European citizens. Privacy protection is an important concept — but the current plans appear to be so focused on privacy protection that it gives very little regard for the unintended consequences of the way it’s been set up. As we wrote in our last post, Daphne Keller at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society is writing a series of blog posts raising concerns about how the new rules clash with basic concepts of free speech. She’s now written one about the immensely troubling setup of the “notice and takedown” rules included in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For years, we’ve been concerned by problematic notice and takedown procedures — we’ve seen the DMCA frequently abused to stifle speech, rather than for genuine copyright challenges. But, for some reason, people often immediately leap to “notice and takedown solutions” for any kind of content they don’t like, they and the drafters of the GDPR are no different.

  • Privacy

    • JLENS blimp returns to Earth in Central Pennsylvania; military recovery ‘in progress’

      The military surveillance blimp that broke free of its mooring at Aberdeen Proving Ground Wednesday morning has returned to Earth after a four-hour, 160-mile, power line-snapping odyssey, authorities said.

      NORAD spokesman Michael Kucharek said the runaway aircraft was on the ground near Moreland Township, Pa. — 160 miles north of its mooring in Edgewood — and was deflating. The blimp had slowly been losing helium, he said, and appears to have drifted to the ground.

    • Runaway Military Surveillance Blimp Drifts From Maryland to Pennsylvania

      Military officials scrambled Wednesday to retrieve an unmanned Army surveillance blimp that detached from its moorings in Maryland and drifted north over Pennsylvania.

      Two American fighter jets tracked the blimp, military officials said, that had been tethered at Aberdeen Proving Ground and broke free around noon.

    • Billion Dollar Surveillance Blimp to Launch over Maryland

      In just a few days, the Army will launch the first of two massive blimps over Maryland, the last gasp of an 18-year-long $2.8-billion Army project intended to use giant airships to defend against cruise missiles.

      And while the blimps may never stave off a barrage of enemy missiles, their ability to spot and track cars, trucks and boats hundreds of miles away is raising serious privacy concerns.

    • Did Your Senator Vote for CISA?

      The most outspoken group opposing the bill, Fight For the Future, noted in a scathing statement that the vote would be one we one day look back at as being formative for the internet.

      “This vote will go down in history as the moment that lawmakers decided not only what sort of Internet our children and our children’s children will have, but what sort of world they will live in,” the group wrote in an emailed statement. “Every Senator who voted for CISA has voted for a world without freedom of expression, a world without true democracy, a world without basic human rights.”

      It may not be that simple, but then again, maybe it is. So here’s a list of who voted for CISA, who voted against it, and who abstained. Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Lindsey Graham are all in Denver for Wednesday’s debate. Paul is anti-CISA but didn’t think it was worth sticking around in Washington for the vote.

    • U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 114th Congress – 1st Session
    • Mark Zuckerberg Courts China With Speech on People and Perseverance
    • Mark Zuckerberg, in India, Defends Facebook’s Plan to Expand Internet Access [Ed: zero-rating]

      Despite the promising, if difficult to verify, statistics, the program has not gone without complaints in India, the world’s largest democracy. Critics argue that by controlling which companies and individuals can offer services on Internet.org, Facebook is creating a walled-off kingdom in which it decides the beneficiaries of its initiative.

    • Email Encryption Is Broken

      Email was never designed to be private. When the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was first invented, it didn’t come with protections or ways to check that a message really came from where it claimed to. Those came later, with the addition of extensions like STARTTLS for encrypting communications and others for authenticating messages.

    • Turns Out Police Stingray Spy Tools Can Indeed Record Calls

      The federal government has been fighting hard for years hide details about its use of so-called stingray surveillance technology from the public.

      The surveillance devices simulate cell phone towers in order to trick nearby mobile phones into connecting to them and revealing the phones’ locations.

      Now newly released documents confirm long-held suspicions that the controversial devices are also capable of recording numbers for a mobile phone’s incoming and outgoing calls, as well as intercepting the content of voice and text communications. The documents also discuss the possibility of flashing a phone’s firmware “so that you can intercept conversations using a suspect’s cell phone as a bug.”

    • Low-cost IMSI catcher for 4G/LTE networks tracks phones’ precise locations

      Researchers have devised a low-cost way to discover the precise location of smartphones using the latest LTE standard for mobile networks, a feat that shatters widely held perceptions that the standard is immune to the types of attacks that targeted earlier specifications.

      The attacks target the LTE specification, which is expected to have a user base of about 1.37 billion people by the end of the year, and require about $1,400 worth of hardware that run freely available open source software. The equipment can cause all LTE-compliant phones to leak their location to within a 32- to 64-foot (about 10 to 20 meter) radius and in some cases their GPS coordinates, although such attacks may be detected by savvy phone users. A separate method that’s almost impossible to detect teases out locations to within an area of roughly one square mile in an urban setting.

    • Europe wants a fresh data transfer pact with the US

      The European Union said on Monday it agreed in principle with the US on a new trans-Atlantic data transfer pact that’s still in the works, reports The Wall Street Journal.

      Earlier this month, a European court invalidated Safe Harbor, a 15-year old agreement that included laws which allowed technology companies to move user data between data centers if they guaranteed it would receive an “adequate level” of protection.

      The ruling came after Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems brought a case against Facebook in Ireland claiming that his privacy had been violated by the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. Following the court’s decision, Irish authorities said last week that they plan to investigate the social network’s data transfers under the act.

    • U.S. sees new EU data-sharing pact within reach

      A new transatlantic data-sharing agreement is within reach after the “Safe Harbour” deal used by thousands of companies to comply with EU privacy law was struck down by the highest EU court this month, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker said.

      The so-called “Safe Harbour 2.0″ agreement currently being negotiated would meet European concerns about the transfer of data to the United States, Pritzker told journalists in Frankfurt on Thursday during a visit to Germany.

    • Safe Harbor 2.0: Judges to keep NSA spying in check – EU justice boss

      The NSA’s blanket surveillance of Europeans will be subject to judicial review, according to EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourová.

      At a committee meeting of the European Parliament this week, Jourová provided details of the replacement to the struck-down safe harbor framework, which until this month allowed people’s personal information to flow across the Atlantic and into American servers.

      She told the hearing the new agreement would move away from the previous self-regulatory approach to one that allows for “pro-active” enforcement and sanctions.

    • EU Round-UP: Safe Harbor 2.0 And Upcoming National Challenges
    • Germany to investigate Google, Facebook data transfers to US

      Data protection authorities in Germany have announced that they will review the legality of internet giants’ data transfers from the EU to the US, after the European Court of Justice ruled that Europeans’ data isn’t safe from intelligence services on US-based servers.

    • Germany investigates claims of NSA-backed malware spying

      When word got out that both the US’ NSA and the UK’s GCHQ were likely using purpose-built Regin malware for their spying campaigns, that raised more than a few alarm bells… including in the German government, apparently. The country’s prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into a report that Regin infected (and thus monitored) the laptop of a Chancellery division leader. Officials aren’t jumping to conclusions yet, but it’s easy to guess where their suspicions lie — the concern is that allies are hacking into the devices of multiple German higher-ups, not just its Chancellor. If the evidence holds up, it could worsen political relationships that have already turned a bit sour.

    • Top German official infected by highly advanced spy trojan with NSA ties

      German Chancellor Angela Merkel may not be the only high-ranking leader from that country to be spied on by the National Security Agency. According to a report published over the weekend, German authorities are investigating whether the head of the German Federal Chancellery unit had his laptop infected with Regin, a highly sophisticated suite of malware programs that has been linked to the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters.

    • The Economic Consequences Of State Surveillance Programs

      State surveillance programs spell serious consequences for business — could Canada be next?

    • Anti-Surveillance Campaign Urges NSA Employees to Quit their Posts

      As part of the campaign, which is called Intelexit, the group have sought to place billboards as close as possible to the intelligence agency’s buildings across the world.

      A billboard posted near the NSA outpost and military base in Darmstadt, Germany, for example, said: “listen to your heart, not to private phone calls.”

      The group is planning to place a billboard outside GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham, UK. It is expected to read “the intelligence community needs a backdoor,” in a jibe at the UK and US governments, who are attempting to push through legislation allowing them to de-crypt all encrypted digital communications between their citizens.

    • The Senate’s New ‘Give the NSA All Your Private Info’ Bill Would Make George Orwell Blush

      While nobody was watching, the Senate a couple of days ago passed something called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), which passed at least partly because if you say “Cyber warfare, boogedy-boogedy!” around nervous legislators these days, they’ll pass a bill agreeing to have the NSA plant microchips in their spleens. The bill passed by one of those bipartisan majorities so beloved by Beltway pundits, 74-21. Now it goes to conference, and its final passage may be stalled because of the currently fluid state of the House Republican leadership.

    • These Senators Voted “Yes” on CISA, But There’s Still Time to Change Their Minds

      As a cybersecurity bill, CISA is a joke: It doesn’t address the security problems that create the conditions for hacks. What it will create a streamlined information pipeline for the NSA.

    • Is the NSA trying to warn us that cryptography is dead?

      Back in August, the NSA released an updated advisory that was at once interesting and expected: It said that the world had to prepare for the oncoming impact of quantum computers, and the possibility that these devices could render existing computer cryptography almost completely obsolete. They called for the cryptographic community to invest heavily in developing so-called post-quantum cryptographic solutions that could survive this hypothetical watershed invention. And, as you might imagine, this advisory has very nearly driven the internet insane. Now, two security researchers have published a paper compiling all the various theories surrounding this advisory, and trying to make sense of the situation.

    • Online freedom hit as governments ramp up surveillance

      Global online freedom declined for a fifth consecutive year as governments around the world stepped up surveillance and censorship efforts, a study showed Wednesday.

      The annual report by non-government watchdog Freedom House said the setbacks were especially noticeable in the Middle East, reversing gains seen in the Arab Spring.

      Freedom House found declines in online freedom of expression in 32 of the 65 countries assessed since June 2014, with “notable declines” in Libya, France and Ukraine.

    • Mass surveillance: EU citizens’ rights still in danger, says Parliament

      Too little has been done to safeguard citizens’ fundamental rights following revelations of electronic mass surveillance, say MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. They urge the EU Commission to ensure that all data transfers to the US are subject to an “effective level of protection” and ask EU member states to grant protection to Edward Snowden, as a “human rights defender”. Parliament also raises concerns about surveillance laws in several EU countries.

    • UK government: We don’t want backdoors, just access to all communications

      The UK government has said that it recognises the “essential role that strong encryption plays in enabling the protection of sensitive personal data and securing online communications and transactions,” and does not “advocate or require the provision of a back-door key or support arbitrarily weakening the security of internet applications and services.” However, speaking in the House of Lords, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Baroness Shields, went on to say: “This is not about creating back doors; this is about companies being able to access communications on their network when presented with a warrant.”

      Shields singled out “an alarming movement towards end-to-end encrypted application” for criticism. She said that David Cameron “expressed concern that many companies are building end-to-end encrypted applications and services and not retaining the keys. The Prime Minister has repeatedly said that there cannot be a safe place for terrorists, criminals and paedophiles to operate freely, with impunity and beyond the reach of law.” For this reason, she claimed, “It is absolutely essential that these companies which understand and build those stacks of technology are able to decrypt that information and provide it to law enforcement in extremis.”

    • UK police push for powers to access your Web browsing history for the last year

      UK police are lobbying the government to be given access to every UK Internet user’s Web browsing history as part of the new Snooper’s Charter—the Investigatory Powers Bill—which is expected to be published next week. According to The Guardian, the police want to revive the controversial plan for ISPs to store details about every website visited by customers for 12 months, an idea first mooted in the original Communications Data Bill, which was dropped after opposition from the Liberal Democrats when they were part of the previous coalition government.

      Richard Berry, the National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman for data communications, is quoted as saying: “We essentially need the ‘who, where, when and what’ of any communication”—who initiated it, where were they and when did it happened. And a little bit of the ‘what’, were they on Facebook, or a banking site, or an illegal child-abuse image-sharing website?”

    • Police to be granted powers to view your internet history

      Police are to get the power to view the web browsing history of everyone in the country.

      Home Secretary Theresa May will announce the plans when she introduces the Government’s new surveillance bill in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

      The Telegraph understands the new powers for the police will form part of the new bill.

    • Michigan State Police Used Forfeiture Funds To Upgrade Its Stingray

      There are a few ways law enforcement agencies acquire cell tower spoofers. Very rarely do agencies pay for these expensive devices themselves. (Meaning with their funds drawn from their own departments. Obviously, no government agency is self-funded.) In most cases, funding in whole or in part is obtained from the DHS — something nearly any agency can obtain simply by checking [X] BECAUSE TERRORISM when applying for a Homeland Security grant.

    • Open source intelligence techniques and the Dark Web

      Techniques like Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering and a proper understanding of the Dark Web is the first step in combating the Internet’s dark places. With an understanding of how to use open source encrypted anonymity services safely, organisations can explore OSINT sources – which include web-based communities, user-generated content, social-networking sites, wikis, blogs and news sources – to investigate potential threats or analyse relevant information for business purposes.

      Whether that’s using Deep and Dark web sites and directories to support intelligence gathering for investigation purposes, manage incidents or to combat cyber crime.

    • Court says it’s legal for NSA to spy on you because Congress says it’s OK

      You gotta love this twisted logic.

      In May, a federal appeals court declared the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program illegal because it wasn’t authorized under the Patriot Act, as the Obama administration and its predecessor administration had maintained.

      Then, in June, Congress semi-dismantled the program with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which President Obama signed on June 2. As part of the new act, Congress authorized a spying transition period of sorts where the old tactics could continue until new laws were in place.

    • Ex-NSA Cybersecurity Leader’s Startup Secures $32.5M

      IronNet, a cybersecurity company founded by the former director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, secured $32.5 million in a Series A funding round.

    • IronNet, Founded by Ex-NSA Boss, Gains Funding
    • Ex-NSA head’s start-up raises $32.5m

      Former US National Security Agency (NSA) director Keith Alexander’s cyber security start-up, IronNet Cybersecurity, said yesterday it had raised $32.5 million in a “Series A” funding round led by Trident Capital Cybersecurity.

    • Former NSA Subcontractor Pleads Guilty To Filing False Time Sheets

      A former National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor from Augusta has pleaded guilty to charges that he filed falsified time sheets.

    • NSA-Proof Wallpaper? Utah Company Invents Material to Keep Spies Out
    • The IRS Has Some of the Same Spy Tech As the NSA and FBI

      Previous investigations by the ACLU have shown that Stingrays are used by many government agencies—including the DEA, FBI, NSA, and local and state police​—across many states. Their use is so widespread in part because they only require a relatively low-level court order for use, which makes them an enticing alternative to attempting to get actual cell tower records with a warrant.

    • More on Standing As a Barrier to Surveillance Challenges: Bug or Feature?
    • United States judge dismisses Wikimedia lawsuit over NSA mass spying
    • Two ACLU Defeats Highlight Judiciary’s Lopsided Deference to Executive Branch Secrecy

      The American Civil Liberties Union suffered major defeats on Friday, when two of its cases involving clear violations of civil rights and civil liberties were dismissed, both undone by the judiciary’s deference to executive-branch secrecy.

    • Federal judge dismisses challenge to NSA surveillance

      The court modeled its opinion on the US Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International [JURIST report] that on matters of unconstitutionality surrounding intelligence gathering, the court is to be particularly rigorous.

  • Civil Rights

    • Newsnight journalist’s laptop seized by UK police under Terrorism Act

      Police have used special powers from the counter-terrorism laws in order to seize a laptop that belongs to a journalist from BBC Newsnight, it has emerged.

      The BBC and Secunder Kermani, who joined the broadcaster’s flagship current affairs programme last year and has reported extensively on UK-born jihadis, were the target of an order officers obtained from a judge under the Terrorism Act.

      Police sought the order to read communications between Kermani and a man in Syria who had publicly identified himself as a member of Islamic State and who had featured in Newsnight reports.

    • Police use terror powers to seize BBC Newsnight journalist’s laptop

      Police have used powers under the Terrorism Act to seize the laptop of a young Newsnight journalist in a case that has shocked BBC colleagues and alarmed freedom of speech campaigners, The Independent can disclose.

      Officers obtained an order from a judge that was served on the BBC and Secunder Kermani, who joined the flagship BBC2 news show early last year and has produced a series of reports on British-born jihadis.

      The development has caused alarm among BBC journalists. The editor of Newsnight, Ian Katz said: “While we would not seek to obstruct any police investigation we are concerned that the use of the Terrorism Act to obtain communication between journalists and sources will make it very difficult for reporters to cover this issue of critical public interest.”

    • Media Figures Blame Student After She Is Slammed To The Ground By Police Officer

      Media figures defended a school resource officer who was seen on video violently “slamm[ing] to the ground” a student in South Carolina, and blamed the student for not showing the officer and her teachers respect.

    • Student Arrested Says She Was Standing Up for Classmate

      Niya Kenny, 18, is speaking out after she was taken into custody in her Spring Valley High School math class. She says she was standing up for her classmate who was being arrested by Student Resource Officer Ben Fields.

    • Second student arrested for filming classroom takedown describes officer’s reputation: “He’s known as Officer Slam around our school”

      Officer Ben Fields, the South Carolina deputy who slammed and then threw a female high school student across a classroom this week, has been fired after video of his physical assault went viral. While the young girl recovers from injuries she sustained from the attack, according to her lawyer, officials have refused to drop criminal charges of disrupting a classroom against her and now one of the few students who protested against her violent arrest is speaking out about the fired deputy’s longstanding reputation at Spring Valley High.

    • Police clash with Kosovo Albanian protesters

      United Nations police fired tear gas during clashes with ethnic Albanians protesting in the Kosovo capital yesterday against a UN plan on the fate of the breakaway Serbian province.

    • Europe Union Risks ‘Tectonic Changes’ as Migrant Flow Swells to Over 700,000

      Europe’s worst migration crisis since World War II risks triggering “tectonic changes”, a top EU official warned Tuesday, as figures showed more than 700,000 newcomers have reached the continent’s Mediterranean shores this year.

    • Court: Your Fourth And Fifth Amendment Rights No Longer Exist If You Leave The Country

      The DC Appeals Court has just come to an unfortunate conclusion: because terrorism exists, your rights as a citizen will not be upheld if you travel outside of the United States. This summary of the case is from Lawfare’s David Ryan, whose article claims this is a “victory” for the DOJ, rather than a loss for the American public.

    • Victory for DOJ in Bivens Suit Related to Overseas Terrorism Investigation

      The Department of Justice won a significant victory yesterday when the D.C. Circuit held in Meshal v. Higgenbotham that a plaintiff cannot state a cause of action under Bivens for alleged constitutional violations that occur during a terrorism investigation in a foreign country.

    • Marking One Year in Prison for Alaa Abd El Fattah

      Alaa is currently serving a five-year sentence for his role in a protest just two days after the passing of Egypt’s 2013 anti-protest law. While many others involved in the protest were pardoned after serving their first year, Alaa, along with Ahmed Abdel Rahman, has remained imprisoned. Since January 2011, when Egypt rose up against Hosni Mubarak, Alaa has spent more than 500 days in prison. His first arrest after the revolution coincided with his second trip to the United States, to attend RightsCon. He left San Francisco to fly directly back to Cairo, where he immediately faced a military prosecutor and a set of trumped-up charges that kept him in jail for 55 days. He has since been in and out of prison several times. He missed the birth of his first child, Khaled, and the death of his father last summer. He has undoubtedly missed so much more.

    • “With ‘free’ services, you are the product”: Censorship, the internet — and why fighting back works

      I am a free speech absolutist. Free speech, however, does not protect criminality, or threats of violence.

      Threats of violence must be taken seriously and prosecuted by law enforcement.

      That’s why — like The Rebel — I’m watching the case of “Israel vs Facebook” very closely.

      There’s no reason why companies such as Twitter or Facebook should be protected from legal actions when clear and present threats are being uploaded and circulated on their networks. As private companies, they can decide who is allowed to have an account or not, but they have a responsibility to existing criminal laws regarding threats of violence against general or specific targets.

    • USDA whistleblower claims censorship of pesticide research

      A senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture filed a whistleblower complaint on Wednesday accusing the federal agency of suppressing research findings that could call into question the use of a popular pesticide class that is a revenue powerhouse for the agrichemical industry.

      Jonathan Lundgren, a senior research entomologist with the USDA’s Agriculture Research Service who has spent 11 years with the agency based in Brookings, S.D., said that retaliation and harassment from inside USDA started in April 2014, following media interviews he gave in March of that year regarding some of his research conclusions.

      Lundgren’s work has included extensive examination of a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids, or neonics, which are widely used by U.S. farmers to control pest damage to corn and other crops, helping protect production. The insecticides are sold in forms that both are sprayed on plants or coated on seeds before they are planted. They are also used on plants sold by lawns and garden retailers.

    • DEA Agents Caught Soliciting Prostitutes Rewarded With Light Punishments, Bonus Checks

      At the end of September, Brad Heath and Meghan Hoyer of USA Today published a DEA disciplinary log they’d obtained through an FOIA request. The document was obviously misnamed, as it showed plenty of misconduct by DEA agents, but not much in the way of discipline.

    • VICTORY: State Department Decides Not to Classify “Cyber Products” as “Munitions”

      This week, the U.S. Department of State’s Defense Trade Advisory Group (DTAG) met to decide whether to classify “cyber products” as munitions, placing them in the same export control regime as hand grenades and fighter planes. Thankfully, common sense won out and the DTAG recommended that “cyber products” not be added to the control list. EFF and Access Now filed a brief joint statement with the DTAG urging this outcome and we applaud the DTAG’s decision.

      There were a number of problems with the proposal to place “cyber products” on the U.S. Munitions List, but most importantly, no one knows how “cyber products” would be defined. As we’ve long argued in other contexts, trying to draw definitions around “defensive” and “offensive” tools is essentially impossible and any vagueness would have significant chilling effects on the security community. In essence, we think that the threshold problem of defining which “cyber products” are subject to control is likely an insurmountable obstacle to effective regulation.

    • An Award for a Jailed Saudi Blogger

      Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced last year to a decade in prison and 50 lashes a week for 20 weeks—a punishment that has been carried out once so far—for the crime of insulting Islam on his website. On Thursday, the European Parliament awarded Badawi the Sakharov Prize, its human-rights award.

      “The conference of Presidents decided that the Sakharov Prize will go to Saudi blogger Raif Badawi,” Martin Schulz, the parliament’s president, said. “This man, who is an extremely good man and an exemplary good man, has had imposed on him one of the most gruesome penalties that exist in this country which can only be described as brutal torture.”

      Schulz called on Saudi King Salman to release Badawi, who was arrested in 2012 and initially sentenced to 600 lashes and seven years in prison—a punishment that was increased to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison after an appeal. Badawi was accused of insulting Islam on his website Free Saudi Liberals, which served as a forum for debate.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EU Parliament adopts highly ambiguous Net Neutrality legislation

      Unfortunately, MEPs have created large loopholes and left ambiguity in much of the legislation. Net neutrality is the principle whereby Internet access providers treat internet traffic equally. Because of the vagueness of the new regulations, telecoms regulators in EU Member States will now have to decide whether telecoms companies in their country will be able to prioritise different categories of data.

    • Wi-Fi was no accident

      Wi-Fi is an incredible success story– carrying the majority of Internet traffic, responsible for over $90 billion in economic value for the United States in 2013 and a powerful force in closing the digital divide. The success of Wi-Fi demonstrates the power of unlicensed spectrum. But how did we get here? The story of how technologies like Wi-Fi have come to have such a significant impact on our lives will help us think about the future of unlicensed spectrum.

    • The FCC Has To Remind ISPs Not To Spend Taxpayer Subsidies On Booze, Trips To Disney World

      For many years now, the General Accounting Office has warned the FCC that if it’s going to throw billions of dollars at giant ISPs, it might just want to track how that money is spent. GAO reports like this one from 2009 (pdf) noted that not only has the FCC historically done a dismal job at tracking subsidy spending, most government broadband policies have been based on flawed, incomplete or downright hallucinated data (just check out our $300 million US broadband map). In other words, for the better part of fifteen years our government not only didn’t really know where broadband funding was needed, it couldn’t be bothered to track if it was actually going there.

    • Mark Zuckerberg: net neutrality is a first-world problem

      Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has hit out at net neutrality advocates who claim that zero-rating – the practice of offering access to certain popular online services for free – should be prohibited.

    • Telekom will put a cash till on Internet video/gaming/coms and monetize it from start-ups
    • A multi-speed Europe

      INTERNET providers will be barred from charging online businesses for “fast lanes”—that is, giving priority to their traffic—except for certain specialised services, such as videoconferencing or telesurgery. They also must not block or slow traffic other than reasonably to manage their networks, such as to avoid congestion.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Lego Tells Political Artist To Hit The Bricks, Refusing To Sell Him Legos

      LEGOs. Yes, the basic building block of our youthful imagination also holds a rather ugly over-protective side, in which it uses whatever tool happens to be nearest by to smash up any use of its products that it doesn’t fully endorse. Which, when you think about it, is really weird for a company that makes products that are essentially all about imaginative uses. Children building their own colorful castle? Awesome! But an adult using LEGOs to create political art? Oh, no, no, no.

    • 3D printing may not be for every home–and that is a good thing for IP

      Will IP matter? The question seems to arise in the wake of every new disruptive technology. It is no surprise, therefore, that it is being asked in connection with 3D printing, where digital content, easily distributed over the network, is married to the potential for making a myriad of objects in any location where a 3D printer can be operated (think: your home). If the concern a decade ago was how to regulate the downloading of a movie or a song, today it is how to regulate the downloading of a digital file containing all the instructions to make a perfect copy of a product, down to its trade mark. Recalling the discussion a decade or two ago regarding the downloading of digital songs and movies, suggestions are made for various technological solutions. More generally, calls are made for a cultural make-over, where the consumer will habitually come to prefer the genuine product, e.g., using authorized digital instructions and the correct product materials, within the context of 3D printing.

    • Copyrights

      • Dotcom’s Bid to Halt Extradition Hearing Fails, Defense Begins

        Efforts by Kim Dotcom’s legal team to have his extradition hearing thrown out have failed today. As a result the Megaupload founder will begin his defense next week, presenting legal argument that he hopes will stop New Zealand authorities sending him to the United States. Defiant, Dotcom insists that he “won’t be silenced by bullies!”

      • Academics have found a way to access insanely expensive research papers—for free

        Most academic journals charge expensive subscriptions and, for those without a login, fees of $30 or more per article. Now academics are using the hashtag #icanhazpdf to freely share copyrighted papers.

        Scientists are tweeting a link of the paywalled article along with their email address in the hashtag—a riff on the infamous meme of a fluffy cat’s “I Can Has Cheezburger?” line. Someone else who does have access to the article downloads a pdf of the paper and emails the file to the person requesting it. The initial tweet is then deleted as soon as the requester receives the file.

      • Copyright Fail: ‘Pirating’ Academic Papers Not Only Commonplace, But Now Seen As Mainstream

        Techdirt has been writing about open access for many years. The idea and practice are certainly spreading, but they’re spreading more slowly than many in the academic world had hoped. That’s particularly frustrating when you’re a researcher who can’t find a particular academic paper freely available as open access, and you really need it now. So it’s no surprise that people resort to other methods, like asking around if anyone has a copy they could send. The Internet being the Internet, it’s also no surprise that this ad-hoc practice has evolved into a formalized system, using Twitter and the hashtag #icanhazpdf to ask other researchers if they have a copy of the article in question. But what is surprising is that recently there have been two articles on mainstream sites that treat the approach as if it’s really quite a reasonable thing to do.

      • Spotify reduces piracy, but also cuts into digital track sales

        New research from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows that Spotify has helped to reduce the level of piracy in the countries where it is available. The work also reveals that Spotify reduces the number of digital track sales, but that those losses are cancelled out by the licensing fees paid by Spotify.

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