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01.09.17

Links 9/1/2017: Civilization VI Coming to GNU/Linux, digiKam 5.4.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Game’s changed in 6 years: open source ecosystem thrives

    Chen Bo, a 37-year-old software developer with Beijing-based Cheetah Mobile, remembers clearly how isolated and closed China’s software environment was in 2010. That was a time when the mobile internet revolution was taking hold of the world’s most populous country.

    “Every app developer saw his or her software codes as the most precious assets and would never share them with others. You could say the scene was equivalent to people securing their family jewelry in plastic wraps and locking it in burglar-resistant safes,” Chen said.

    That was also a time when even employees were allowed access to only a part of the codes they were working on, to pre-empt information leaks to competitors.

    But the scene has changed over the last six years. China has blossomed into one of the world’s most dynamic hubs for software developers.

  • Open source server simplifies HTTPS, security certificates

    For administrators seeking an easier method to turn on HTTPS for their websites, there is Caddy, an open source web server that automatically sets up security certificates and serves sites over HTTPS by default.

    Built on Go 1.7.4, Caddy is a lightweight web server that supports HTTP/2 out of the box and automatically integrates with any ACME-enabled certificate authority such as Let’s Encrypt. HTTP/2 is enabled by default when the site is served over HTTPS, and administrators using Caddy will never have to deal with expired TLS certificates for their websites, as Caddy handles the process of obtaining and deploying certificates.

  • Communities Over Code: How to Build a Successful Project by Joe Brockmeier, Red Hat
  • Communities Over Code: How to Build a Successful Software Project

    Healthy productive FOSS projects don’t just happen, but are built, and the secret ingredient is Community over code. Purpose and details are everything: If you build it will they come, and then how do you keep it going and growing? How do you set direction, attract and retain contributors, what do you do when there are conflicts, and especially conflicts with valuable contributors? Joe Brockmeier (Red Hat) shares a wealth of practical wisdom at LinuxCon North America.

  • Open technology for land rights documentation

    Technology is only one part of the solution, but at Cadasta we believe it is a key component. While many governments had modern technology systems put in place to manage land records, often these were expensive to maintain, required highly trained staff, were not transparent, and were otherwise too complicated. Many of these systems, created at great expense by donor governments, are already outdated and no longer accurately reflect existing land and property rights.

  • Web Browsers

    • Min Browser Muffles the Web’s Noise

      Min is a Web browser with a minimal design that provides speedy operation with simple features.

      When it comes to software design, “minimal” does not mean low functionality or undeveloped potential. If you like minimal distraction tools for your text editor and note-taking applications, that same comfort appeal is evident in the Min browser.

      I mostly use Google Chrome, Chromium and Firefox on my desktops and laptop computers. I am well invested in their add-on functionality, so I can access all the specialty services that get me through my long sessions in researching and working online.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Servo Begins Firming Up 2017 Goals

        Among their proposed goals for Servo in 2017 are finishing Stylo (Servo’s CSS style system into Gecko), extending WebRender as the GPU accelerated back-end, experimenting with initial layout integration in other products, exploring Flexbox, extending and better supporting embedding APIs, and implementing other high priority DOM APIs. Among the research proposed for this year is a magic DOM and JavaScript optimizations along with software transactional memory.

      • Mozilla Calls for “Responsible IoT”

        As the Internet of Things (IoT) gains momentum, there is a need for collaboration, open and interoperable tools, and governance. In fact, all the way back in 2015, Philip DesAutels, the AllSeen Alliance’s leader, told us that: “In five years, I think all of this will be around us everywhere, in everything. The next phase is going to be the really transformational phase. “Systems around you will have a whole lot more information. They’ll be able to deliver a lot more value.”

        Now, Mozilla, which has been keeping track of the convergence of open source and the Internet of Things, is out with a new report calling for “responsible IoT.”

  • SaaS/Back End

    • What is DataOps?

      DataOps describes the creation & curation of a central data hub, repository and management zone designed to collect, collate and then onwardly distribute data such that data analytics can be more widely democratised across an entire organisation and, subsequently, more sophisticated layers of analytics can be brought to bear such as built-for-purpose analytics engines.

    • Essentials of OpenStack Administration Part 5: OpenStack Releases and Use Cases

      OpenStack has come a long way since 2010 when NASA approached Rackspace for a project. With 1,600 individual contributors to OpenStack and a six-month release cycle, there are a lot of changes and progress. This amount of change and progress is not without its drawbacks. In the Juno release, there were something like 10,000 bugs. In the next release, Kilo, there were 13,000 bugs. But as OpenStack is deployed in more environments, and more people are interested in it, the community grows both in users and developers.

    • How to find your first OpenStack job

      We’ve covered the growth of OpenStack jobs and how you can become involved in the community. Maybe that even inspired you to search for OpenStack jobs and explore the professional opportunities for Stackers. You probably have questions, so we’re here to answer the frequent questions about working on OpenStack professionally.

    • OpenStack becomes ‘de facto’ private cloud

      A mixed year for OpenStack with HPE and Cisco seeming to step away from the community.

    • OpenStack under the radar
    • Angel Diaz talks about OpenStack Interop

      At the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, 16 vendors stood on stage and demonstrated interoperability. This was a major breakthrough for OpenStack. It marked a significant departure from just 18 months earlier when the OpenStack Foundation had chided vendors for creating lots of proprietary solutions. Enterprise Times sat down with Angel Diaz, IBM Vice President, Cloud Architecture and Technology to talk about this achievement.

    • How to take a leadership role in OpenStack

      On top of her job as a system architect at Nokia, Afek has taken an active role in the OpenStack community as the project team lead (PTL) of Vitrage and a voice in gender equality in the technology field with the Women of OpenStack. You may have also seen her taking center stage at the recent OpenStack Summit Barcelona, where she took part in a daredevil demo.

    • Landing a job, becoming the de facto private cloud, and more OpenStack news

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Top LibreOffice Alternatives

      More people than ever are enjoying the benefits of LibreOffice. It’s free to use and open source. But what about LibreOffice alternatives? Are there any good LibreOffice Alternative sand should you try them for yourself? This article is going to share some of the best LibreOffice alternatives and provide links where you can learn more about each of them.

    • Ubuntu Tablet – quick test LibreOffice

      Ubuntu Tablet – quick test Libre Office in desktop mode tablet Bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition running Unity 8 bluetooth mouse + keyboard

  • CMS

    • WordPress, Silverstripe, TYPO3 & More: Keeping Up With Open Source CMS

      December is a traditionally quiet month across most industries, but the world of open source CMS never truly rests.

      Sure, open source vendors (and their contributing communities alike) cooled their jets a little as the new year approached — but there was still plenty going on.

      If you happened to miss any of it, here are the latest open source CMS headlines.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • NetBSD 7.1_RC1 available

      Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-7 branch or use the netbsd-7-1-RC1 tag.

    • NetBSD 7.1 RC1 Released

      The first release candidate of the upcoming NetBSD 7.1 is now available for testing.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 7 Getting Closer To Release, But Running Behind On Regressions

      Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat has provided the latest status report concerning the state of the GNU Compiler Collection 7 code compiler.

      GCC 7 has been in “stage three” for a while now meaning only bug/general fixes landing, but they are planning to enter stage four on 19 January. When stage four begins, only wrong-code fixes, bug fixes, and documentation fixes will be accepted.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open source tool for wave and tidal arrays

        Wave and tidal energy design tool DTOcean has been launched as an open source software package. The tool’s developers say it will assist project developers to design wave and tidal energy arrays by identifying optimal layouts, components and procedures.

        An active but growing user community is emerging around DTOcean, which industry and research communities are encouraged to join.

      • CES 2017: ARM gets an assist in Renault’s open-source electric vehicle, Twizy

        The open source movement has had a profound impact on the tech sector over the last two decades, and now those notions are moving beyond software and operating systems to form the basis for flexible yet standardized complete systems – including automobiles.

      • Open Source Reaches Processor Core

        Whether for budgetary, philosophical, or other reasons, an increasing number of embedded systems are being designed using open source elements. For the most part, these elements are software based, although there are some open source board designs in use as well. Now, the microcontroller that empowers a PCB design is available as an open source design.

      • 3D Printing Market to More Than Double by 2020

  • Programming/Development

    • How to get started as an open source programmer

      Looking out at the world of technology is exciting. It has a lot of moving parts, and it seems the further you dig into it, the deeper it gets, and then it’s turtles all the way down. For that very reason, technology is also overwhelming. Where do you start if you’re keen to join in and help shape the way the modern world functions? What’s the first step? What’s the twentieth step?

    • RcppCCTZ 0.2.0

      A new version, now at 0.2.0, of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN. And it brings a significant change: windows builds! Thanks to Dan Dillon who dug deep enough into the libc++ sources from LLVM to port the std::get_time() function that is missing from the 4.* series of g++. And with Rtools being fixed at g++-4.9.3 this was missing for us here. Now we can parse dates for use by RcppCCTZ on Windows as well. That is important not only for RcppCCTZ but also particularly for the one package (so far) depending on it: nanotime.

Leftovers

  • The Couple Who Saved China’s Ancient Architectural Treasures Before They Were Lost Forever

    Architectural preservation is rarely so thrilling as it was in 1930s China. As the country teetered on the edge of war and revolution, a handful of obsessive scholars were making adventurous expeditions into the country’s vast rural hinterland, searching for the forgotten treasures of ancient Chinese architecture. At the time, there were no official records of historic structures that survived in the provinces. The semi-feudal countryside had become a dangerous and unpredictable place: Travelers venturing only a few miles from major cities had to brave muddy roads, lice-infested inns, dubious food and the risk of meeting bandits, rebels and warlord armies. But although these intellectuals traveled by mule cart, rickshaw or even on foot, their rewards were great. Within the remotest valleys of China lay exquisitely carved temples staffed by shaven-headed monks much as they had been for centuries, their roofs filled with bats, their candlelit corridors lined with dust-covered masterpieces.

  • Photos: Some of the earliest color images of life around the world

    The fantastic ambitions of rich men should never be underestimated. Throw enough cash at something and even a failure can have staying power.

    When Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and philanthropist, decided he wanted to commission a photographic “archive of the planet” he wasn’t joking. And though the idea of cataloging the earth seems whimsical in scope today, the pictures he helped create between 1909 and 1931 hold our attention like few others from the era.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Trump Has to Rescue Obamacare or Admit He’s a Liar

      It didn’t take long. During the first week of 2017, the new Republican Congress has begun efforts to dismantle America’s health-care system. Their long-standing goal, consistent with their right-wing ideology, is to take away health insurance from tens of millions of Americans, privatize Medicare, make massive cuts to Medicaid and defund Planned Parenthood. At the same time, in the midst of grotesque and growing income and wealth inequality, they’re preparing to allow pharmaceutical companies to increase drug prices and to hand out obscene tax breaks for the top one-tenth of 1 percent.

    • Forest Service OKs land swap for proposed PolyMet mine

      A proposed copper-nickel mine for northeastern Minnesota has passed another milestone.

      The U.S. Forest Service on Monday signed off on a proposed land swap with PolyMet Mining. The deal exchanges 6,650 acres of federal land in the Superior National Forest that PolyMet needs for about the same amount of privately owned land within the forest.

      • Now what? PolyMet applied to open its copper-nickel mine

      PolyMet CEO Jon Cherry calls it “a win for both parties,” giving Superior National Forest lands with better public access.

      But Executive Director Paul Danicic of the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness says no exchange of land “can undo the damage” that PolyMet would do to the area.

    • Expensive Medicines Increase The Pressure

      When Gilead brought its new antiviral medicine – Sovaldi – for the treatment of Hepatitis C to the US market for USD 84,000, it triggered a storm of protest. Demand for this revolutionary treatment was so high that the price (despite reductions) became an enormous burden on the American healthcare system. Although the product is cheaper in Switzerland at CHF 48 307, treatment is rationed for reasons of cost.

    • Could Amgen’s Patent Victory Be Bad For Medicine?

  • Security

    • Stolen NSA Windows hacking tools now for sale

      The Shadow Brokers, the hacker or hackers who stole and are now claiming to sell NSA surveillance software, are now selling the agency’s package of Windows hacking tools.

      Like all Shadow Brokers wares, the tools are at least three years old. But codes used to pass through security that were released by the Shadow Brokers in August worked when tested at that time, sparking concerns.

    • New CloudLinux 5 Kernel Released to Patch Important Use-After-Free Vulnerability

      CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi is informing users of the CloudLinux 5 series of server-oriented operating systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 about the availability of a new kernel update that patches an important security vulnerability.

    • MongoDB Apocalypse Is Here as Ransom Attacks Hit 10,000 Servers [Ed: due to misconfiguration, not a flaw]
    • MongoDB Ransomware Impacts Over 10,000 Databases
    • How to secure MongoDB on Linux or Unix production server

      MongoDB is a free and open-source NoSQL document database server. It is used by web application for storing data on a public facing server. Securing MongoDB is critical. Crackers and hackers are accessing insecure MongoDB for stealing data and deleting data from unpatched or badly-configured databases. In this tutorial you will learn about how to secure a MongoDB instance or server running cloud server.

    • MongoDB Ransomware Attacks Grow in Number

      Last week when the news started hitting the net about ransomware attacks focusing on unprotected instances of MongoDB, it seemed to me to be a story that would have a short life. After all, the attacks weren’t leveraging some unpatched vulnerabilities in the database, but databases that were misconfigured in a way that left them reachable via the Internet, and with no controls — like a password other than the default — over who had privileges. All that was necessary to get this attack vector under control was for admins to be aware of the situation and to be ready and able to reconfigure and password protect.

    • FTC will pay you to build an IoT security checker

      The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wants the public to take a crack at developing tools to improve security around Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

      Specifically, the FTC is hosting a competition challenging the public to create a technical solution that would, at a minimum, help protect consumers from security vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date software. Contestants have the option of adding features, such as those that would address hard-coded, factory default or easy-to-guess passwords.

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Security Advice: Bad, Terrible, or Awful

      As an industry, we suck at giving advice. I don’t mean this in some negative hateful way, it’s just the way it is. It’s human nature really. As a species most of us aren’t very good at giving or receiving advice. There’s always that vision of the wise old person dropping wisdom on the youth like it’s candy. But in reality they don’t like the young people much more than the young people like them. Ever notice the contempt the young and old have for each other? It’s just sort of how things work. If you find someone older and wiser than you who is willing to hand out good advice, stick close to that person. You won’t find many more like that.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • When Fear Comes

      When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq, reporters and editors lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be touched by the same career-killing contagion. They wanted to protect their status at the institution. Retreat into rabbit holes is the most common attempt at self-protection.

      [...]

      This kind of valor, he knew as a combat veteran, requires a moral courage that is more difficult than the physical courage encountered on the battlefield.

      “This unanimous quiet defiance of a power which never forgave, this obstinate, painfully protracted insubordination, was somehow more frightening than running and yelling as the bullets fly,” he says.

      The coming arrests mean that a wide range of Americans will experience the violations that poor people of color have long endured. Self-interest alone should have generated sweeping protest, should have made the nation as a whole more conscious. We should have understood: Once rights become privileges that the state can revoke, they will eventually be taken away from everyone. Now those who had been spared will get a taste of what complicity in oppression means.

    • As Families In Charleston Share Stories and Pain, Dylann Roof Shows No Remorse

      Mrs. Pinckney was the first in a long line of witnesses called by federal prosecutors in the sentencing trial of Dylann Roof last week. The avowed white supremacist was convicted in December for gunning down Reverend Pinckney and eight parishioners during a Bible study at the historic Emanuel AME Church on June 17, 2015. The crime shook the country. President Obama gave a stirring eulogy at Rev. Pinckney’s televised memorial service, singing Amazing Grace. The next day, in a brazen act of civil disobedience, activist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole at the state capitol to take down the Confederate flag; soon after, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley signed legislation to remove the flag from the statehouse, in dedication to the Emanuel Nine. Across the country, Americans marveled at the expressions of forgiveness shown by grieving relatives who spoke at a bond hearing for Roof within days of the crime. But in Charleston, others remained torn, overwhelmed by grief and anger. A year and a half later, many struggle to define what justice would mean.

    • Politicizing Victimhood: Human Rights as a Propaganda Weapon in Aleppo and Mosul

      Despite continued clashes between the government and rebel forces, the ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia appears to have significantly reduced the violence in Syria. Following the fall of Aleppo to Assad’s forces, we should be reflecting upon what lessons can be drawn from Syria. I would offer a few. First, in wars that involve officially designated enemies of state, such as Syria and Russia, there is little reason to think that one will be exposed to reasoned, sensible discourse in the U.S. media. Similarly, on “the other side” – Russia in this case – one sees a similar effort to exonerate the government from responsibility for human rights violations. A second, broader lesson from Syria is that “human rights” inevitably serve as a rhetorical weapon, used on “both sides” by powerful societal actors, including officialdom and the press, to advance their own strategic interests.

    • On Whitewashing Russia: Power-worshippers Only See Black-and-White

      The trouble with this latest fairy tale is that the media has swallowed the state-sponsored story without demanding a scintilla of evidence, and has turned the entire factitious endeavor into a witch hunt aimed at alternative media. The binary constructs of the Bush era are being reanimated for another Halloween of imbecilic fearmongering. So those that apply the withering lens of the scientific method to this latest mythmaking program are quickly labeled as pro-Russian, anti-Democratic, or worse, traitors.

    • Those Diplomatic Expulsions

      There is a fascinating precedent for Putin’s refusal to retaliate for the expulsion of 32 Russian diplomats by Obama, an easy diplomatic win on the international stage. In 1985, my first year in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Margaret Thatcher expelled 25 Soviet diplomats identified as spies by a defector (from memory Gordievsky), and later a further six.

    • The Russians, Trump and the Deep State (Rising)

      People talk of the Deep State, a kind of shorthand to refer to the entrenched parts of the government, particularly inside the military, intelligence, and security communities, who don’t come and go with election cycles. The information they hold, and their longevity, allows them to significantly influence, perhaps control, the big picture decisions that change the way America works on a global scale. Who the enemies are, where the power needs to be applied, which wars will start and what governments should fall.

      One of the features of the Deep State is that it prefers to work behind the scenes, in the shadows if you like. The big name politicians are out front, smiling for the cameras, and the lesser pols have to tend to the day-to-day stuff of government. The Deep State doesn’t trouble itself with regulating agriculture or deciding which infrastructure bill to fund. That is in large part why there will never be a full-on coup; why would the Deep State want to take on responsibility for the Department of Transportation?

      When the Deep State does accidentally expose itself, it is often by accident, such as in the panic right after 9/11 when the president was sitting around reading a children’s book while Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld were calling the shots. Same for in the 1980s when a set of cock-ups exposed U.S. arms sales to Iran to pay for U.S. proxy forces in Central America while with U.S. support the Saudis paid for jihadists to fight in Afghanistan, laying the early groundwork for what would become the War on Terror.

    • Meryl Streep calls out Trump: Having Bully-in-Chief Coarsens whole Culture

      Michael Moore denounced the Iraq War.

      So we now have another such moment, as Meryl Streep tearfully addressed the stars assembled at the Golden Globes about her anxieties and distress at the advent of the Trump era in the United States.

    • Donald Trump calls Meryl Streep ‘overrated’ after Golden Globes speech

      US President-elect Donald Trump has hit back at Meryl Streep’s criticism of him as she received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes.

      He tweeted: “Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes.

      “She is a Hillary flunky who lost big,” Mr Trump added of the three-time Oscar-winning actress.

      She said: “When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”

    • Hollywood Gets a Clue About Inclusion, Meryl Streep Gets Political at 2017 Golden Globes (Video)

      Remember last year’s hashtag-fueled protest—#OscarsSoWhite – decrying the lack of diversity at Hollywood’s most hyped awards event?

      On Sunday night, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association showed up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by rewarding a wider range of talent at the 2017 Golden Globes. Stories by and about African-Americans were recognized at the HFPA’s annual awards-fest, and the night’s biggest honor, the best drama statue, went to a coming-of-age film about a young gay black man growing up in Miami.

    • The Age of Great Expectations and the Great Void

      The third theme was all about rethinking the concept of personal freedom as commonly understood and pursued by most Americans. During the protracted emergency of the Cold War, reaching an accommodation between freedom and the putative imperatives of national security had not come easily. Cold War-style patriotism seemingly prioritized the interests of the state at the expense of the individual. Yet even as thrillingly expressed by John F. Kennedy — “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — this was never an easy sell, especially if it meant wading through rice paddies and getting shot at.

      Once the Cold War ended, however, the tension between individual freedom and national security momentarily dissipated. Reigning conceptions of what freedom could or should entail underwent a radical transformation. Emphasizing the removal of restraints and inhibitions, the shift made itself felt everywhere, from patterns of consumption and modes of cultural expression to sexuality and the definition of the family. Norms that had prevailed for decades if not generations — marriage as a union between a man and a woman, gender identity as fixed at birth — became passé. The concept of a transcendent common good, which during the Cold War had taken a backseat to national security, now took a backseat to maximizing individual choice and autonomy.

    • Trump must slay the ‘sacred cow’ of the budget: Defense spending

      The Pentagon is filled to the gills with cronies and crony capitalism. And Republicans have encouraged this “waste and abuse” – this is the kind way of saying it, and it is on a massive scale – for too long. Do the right thing for once Congress. CUT SPENDING especially on the military civilian bureaucracy which is a taxpayer funded gravy train if there ever was one.

    • The Real Purpose of the U.S. Government’s Report on Alleged Hacking by Russia

      The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails. I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war—is the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media, to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment.

      The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in the corporate media.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • China raises its low carbon ambitions in new 2020 targets

      China’s 13th Five-Year-Plan on Energy Development (Energy 13FYP) might be one of the most anticipated energy blueprints in the world for its far-reaching implications for the carbon trajectory of the planet’s largest emitter.

      On Jan 5, 2017, the National Energy Administration finally unveiled the plan to reporters, with a set of 2020 targets covering everything from total energy consumption to installed wind energy capacity. Before we delve into details of the plan, one thing is worth noting: with the Energy 13FYP, China might have once again raised ambitions for its low-carbon future, highlighting the urgency that this smog-ridden country attaches to moving away from fossil fuels.

    • A Sushi Boss Bought a Single Tuna for $632,000

      A single bluefin tuna sold for $632,000 on Thursday, the second highest amount ever paid for such a fish, according to a report.

      The sale of the 470-pound fish, reported by the Associated Press, was made to sushi chain owner Kiyoshi Kimura.

    • Of Grizzly Bears and Bureaucrats: The Quest for Survival

      The last known grizzly in So Cal was shot in 1916 by Cornelius Birket Johnson, an industrious farmer living at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in north Los Angeles. The hungry bear trampled the man’s newly planted vineyard, chomping on his young grapes for three straight nights. Ol’ Johnson wasn’t about to let the pesky bear get away with such thievery and destruction, so one night he lured the grizzly with a slab of beef and snagged him in a trap, but like all feisty grizzlies, this young guy wouldn’t go down easy. Johnson later shot the bear dead after finding it gravely injured, exhausted, bloodied and suffering, having dragged the metal trap far from where it was originally set. Thus, at the hands of Johnson, the extinction of the So Cal grizzly was complete.

    • Radioactive Waste is Good for You, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rick Perry as Energy Secretary

      But Perry had a similar relationship with another Texas billionaire, Harold Simmons, owner of WCS. And in return, under Gov. Perry, WCS’s lucrative radioactive waste dumping activities underwent major expansion.

    • California floods, America burns, irony explodes

      The bloated orange president-elect is in love with dumb-thug Russians, tweets about himself in the third person and is readying his murder of conspiracy-minded billionaire-idiots to lead the nation into the darkest, most shamelessly corrupt period in our short history, all undertaken with a sexual predator’s shrug and an engraved gold pinky ring that spells out #-l-o-s-e-r.

      Meanwhile, the 7th-largest economy in the world just underwent truly biblical flooding – and not necessarily the helpful kind – following a half-decade of being parched to the bone, thanks to weather extremes wrought, unstoppably, of climate change.

      Cars are going driverless, homes are going Big Brother, women are being slammed back to 1950, immigrants are in mourning, Democrats are going underground and stunned Millennials are moving back in with their wary parents as the planet records yet another year as the hottest on human record, shuddering and sighing and girding for much – and with Trump, we do mean much – worse to come.

  • Finance

    • Pound hit by Brexit fears as FTSE 100 touches fresh record high – business live

      Brexit uncertainty hasn’t hit the UK housing market, according to new figures from the Halifax today.

      Halifax reports that house prices jumped by 1.7% in December, surprising economists who only forecast a 0.2% rise. On a annual basis, prices were 6.5% higher.

    • Trump’s Cabinet, the Church of Neoliberal Evangelicals

      Professor Henry Giroux says Trump’s appointments signal a future of more war, violent military interventions, and an embrace of Islamophobia

    • Ohio communities, counties have nearly $1.2B less in aid for 2017 because of state cuts

      Cuts in local government funds and tax changes made at the state level will cost Ohio counties and communities nearly $1.2 billion in 2017, as compared to 2010, a new report shows.

      Chief among those cuts were elimination of the state’s estate tax, the halving of local government funds and accelerated phase-outs of local business taxes, a report from the liberal leaning think tank Policy Matters Ohio found.

      But the report drew criticism from Gov. John Kasich’s administration, which argues that focusing solely on cuts tells only part of the story. Growth in income and sales tax revenues as Ohio’s economy recovers from the recession have helped offset the cuts, a spokeswoman said, citing alternative research.

    • Assuring EU citizens of right to stay ‘would lose UK negotiating capital’

      The UK would lose “negotiating capital” in Europe if it unilaterally granted EU citizens the right to remain after Brexit, the government has said.

      In a letter to a group of EU citizens from the office of the home secretary, Amber Rudd, the government said it “recognises that EU nationals make an invaluable contribution to our economy and society”.

      However, in an apparent hardening of the official position, the letter warned that the government cannot do anything to address their position after Brexit until it has assurances that British citizens in Europe will receive reciprocal protection in the country where they have settled.

      “Agreeing a unilateral position in advance of these negotiations would lose negotiating capital with respect to British citizens in EU member states and place the UK at an immediate disadvantage,” said the letter signed by Peter Grant, an official in the free movement policy team of the immigration and border policy directorate of the Home Office.

    • Politico Is Mistaken, It Would Be Fun and Easy for Donald Trump to Divest

      Politico badly misled readers this morning in an article that said Trump “can’t simply divest from his businesses.” The article cited a number of experts who explained how difficult and complicated it would be for Trump to sell off his various businesses, many of which have complex ownership arrangements, along with debts and other legal obligations.

      While selling Trump’s business enterprises in short order would be complicated, as I explained shortly after the election, this is not what is necessary for Donald Trump to avoid conflicts of interest. The key to the process I outline in that piece is that Trump arrange to get independent teams of auditors to provide assessments of the property. I suggested he go with the middle assessment provided by three teams of auditors. This would limit the likelihood of a major error in the assessment.

      Trump would then buy an insurance policy that would guarantee him the estimate from this middle audit. The enterprises would then be turned over to an executor who would run and offload the businesses with the goal of maximizing the value. When the businesses are sold off the proceeds would be placed in a blind trust. If the cumulative value from the sales exceeds the estimate, then the proceeds go to a charity of Trump’s choosing, but not under his control. If the proceeds from the sales are less than the value of the estimate he collects on the insurance policy.

    • A horrifying prospect for public schools

      Betsy DeVos has never gone to public schools. Her children have never attended public schools. She has never taught or served as an administrator in public schools. She has made a career out of funding schemes to cripple or destroy public schools. And now Donald Trump has a new way to put Betsy DeVos and public schools in the same sentence: Let Betsy DeVos help shape the future of public schools as head of the Education Department.

      Is it any wonder why a public school teacher like me — someone who knows the value of this institution both as educator and as student — finds this idea nothing short of horrifying?

    • Americans can’t afford to lose Richard Cordray or the CFPB

      At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, an estimated one out of every 54 homeowners lost their homes. Workers and seniors lost lifetimes’ worth of savings or retirement accounts, small businesses went under, and vulnerable consumers fell victim to toxic and manipulative financial products offered by Wall Street and the big banks.

      [...]

      At the helm of the bureau is Director Richard Cordray, who has proven to be a tireless and effective leader. Under his watch, the CFPB has cracked down on the tricks and traps of payday lenders, credit cards companies, debt collectors and bad actors in the industry from taking advantage of unsuspecting Americans.

      In its five years as an agency, the CFPB has recovered more than $11 billion for 27 million consumers harmed by illegal practices of financial institutions. The bureau has secured relief in more than 100 cases, directly putting money back in the pockets of American consumers who have been victimized by companies that refuse to follow the law.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Assange Criticizes U.S. Effort To Conflate WikiLeaks Publications With Russian Hacking

      Editor-in-chief Julian Assange called the report “embarrassing to the reputation” of U.S. intelligence services because it more resembled a “press release” than an actual intelligence report. “It is clearly designed for political effect,” which has happened in the past with the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam War as well as intelligence reports claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

      “Critical question here is whether the allegation is that Russian intelligence services themselves or people under their direction hacked the Democratic National Party and [Clinton campaign chairman] John Podesta with the intent of favoring Donald Trump,” Assange suggested.

      “Even if you accept that the Russian intelligence services hacked Democratic Party institutions, as it is normal for the major intelligence services to hack each others’ major political parties on a constant basis to obtain intelligence,” you have to ask, “what was the intent of those Russian hacks? And do they connect to our publications? Or is it simply incidental?”

      Assange accused U.S. intelligence agencies of deliberately obscuring the timeline. He said they do not know when the DNC was hacked.

    • The ‘Post-Truth’ Mainstream Media

      Once East Aleppo fell to government forces, it turned out that there were less than 90,000 people there, about what the Syrian government estimated but only a fraction of the much higher numbers confidently repeated ad nauseam by Western officials and media.

      Part of the reason for this misreporting was that Syrian rebels had publicly killed Western and independent journalists to secure a monopoly on information coming out of rebel-controlled areas. Given the West’s disdain for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and sympathy for his opponents, the mainstream Western media then became reliant on anti-government rebels and allied activists for what was going on in those parts of Syria.

    • Pity the sad legacy of Barack Obama

      Eight years ago the world was on the brink of a grand celebration: the inauguration of a brilliant and charismatic black president of the United States of America. Today we are on the edge of an abyss: the installation of a mendacious and cathartic white president who will replace him.

      This is a depressing decline in the highest office of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. It could easily produce a pervasive cynicism and poisonous nihilism. Is there really any hope for truth and justice in this decadent time? Does America even have the capacity to be honest about itself and come to terms with its self-destructive addiction to money-worship and cowardly xenophobia?

      Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville – the two great public intellectuals of 19th-century America – wrestled with similar questions and reached the same conclusion as Heraclitus: character is destiny (“sow a character and you reap a destiny”).

    • Why Has Israeli Spy Shai Masot Not Been Expelled?

      There is no starker proof of the golden chains in which Israel has entangled the British political class, than the incredible fact that “diplomat” Shai Masot has not been expelled for secretly conspiring to influence British politics by attacking Britain’s Deputy Foreign Minister, suggesting that he might be brought down by “a little scandal”. It is incredible by any normal standards of diplomatic behaviour that immediate action was not taken against Masot for actions which when revealed any professional diplomat would normally expect to result in being “PNG’d” – declared persona non grata.

      Obama has just expelled 35 Russian diplomats for precisely the same offence, with the exception that in the Russian case there is absolutely zero hard evidence, whereas in the Masot case there is irrefutable evidence on which to act.

      [...]

      The two stories – Russian interference in US politics, Israeli interference in UK politics – also link because the New York Times claims that it was the British that first suggested to the Obama administration that Russian cyber activity was targeting Clinton. Director of Cyber Security and Information Assurance in the British Cabinet Office is Matthew Gould, the UK’s former openly and strongly pro-Zionist Ambassador to Israel and friend of the current Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev. While Private Secretary to David Miliband and William Hague, and then while Ambassador to Israel, Regev held eight secret meetings with Adam Werritty, on at least one occasion with Mossad present and on most occasions also with now minister Liam Fox. My Freedom of Information requests for minutes of these meetings brought the reply that they were not minuted, and my Freedom of Information request for the diary entries for these meetings brought me three pages each containing only the date, with everything else redacted.

    • Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election

      Registered voters who didn’t vote on Election Day in November were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out, according to a post-election poll from SurveyMonkey, shared with FiveThirtyEight. In fact, Donald Trump probably would have lost to Hillary Clinton had Republican- and Democratic-leaning registered voters cast ballots at equal rates.

      Election-year polls understandably focus on likely voters. Then, after the election, the attention turns to actual voters, mainly using exit polls. But getting good data on Americans who didn’t vote is more difficult. That’s why the SurveyMonkey poll, which interviewed about 100,000 registered voters just after Election Day, including more than 3,600 registered voters who didn’t vote, is so useful.1 It’s still just one poll, and so its findings aren’t gospel, but with such a big sample we can drill down to subgroups and measure the demographic makeup of nonvoters to an extent we couldn’t with a smaller dataset.

    • The Left’s Challenge in Age of Trump

      Left activists plan to take on President Donald Trump from Day One, with tens of thousands of protesters promising to show up in Washington to protest his inauguration on Jan. 20 and a major women’s march scheduled the next day.

      But the challenge for the Left goes deeper than protesting Trump and some of his policies. The difficulty also involves how to build a progressive agenda that is not compromised by corporate Democrats at election time. I discussed these questions with Norman Solomon, media activist, author, former delegate for Bernie Sanders Delegate and Rootsaction co-founder.

      Dennis Bernstein: Norman Solomon, welcome back. […] Say a little bit about your background. I want people to know where you’re coming from and, if I’ve got it right, you sort of came in the activists door.

    • Thinking About Fascism

      The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power. I’ve known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people’s fears, could take control of the levers of power.

      I just read Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler’s and Mussolini’s rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.

      His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.

    • Democrats Who Oppose Betsy DeVos Have Nothing To Lose

      In “an unprecedented break” from tradition, Democrats in the US Senate are expected to challenge as many as eight of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, including Betsy DeVos for US Secretary of Education, according to a report by the Washington Post.

      The opposition to DeVos, Politico reports, comes from “more than a dozen Democratic senators from all wings of the party” who “will portray DeVos’ views as being outside the education mainstream.”

    • Trump, the Banks and the Bomb

      When pro-nuclear disarmament organisations last October cheered the United Nations decision to start in 2017 negotiations on a global treaty banning these weapons, they probably did not expect that shortly after the US would elect Republican businessman Donald Trump as their 45th president. Much less that he would rush to advocate for increasing the US nuclear power.

      The United Nations on Oct. 27, 2016 adopted a resolution to launch negotiations in 2017 on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons, putting an end to two decades of paralysis in world nuclear disarmament efforts.

      [...]

      The global ani-nuke movment, however, soon saw its joy being frustrated by the US president-elect Donald Trump, who in a tweet on Dec. 22, 2016, wrote:

      Donald J. Trump Verified account ‏@realDonaldTrump : “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

      Trump’s announcement, if materialised, would imply one of the most insourmountable hardles facing the world anti-nuclear movement.

    • GOP Tries to ‘Jam’ Through Nominees Not Yet Vetted, Ethics Office Warns

      The head of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) sent a letter to Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Chuck Schumer (NY) on Saturday expressing “great concern” over the fact that the hearings are set to begin on Tuesday and his office had not yet received financial disclosure reports for some of the scheduled nominees.

      “As OGE’s director, the announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me,” wrote Walter Shaub, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013. wrote in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

      The current confirmation schedule, which has six nominees scheduled for the same days as well as a Trump press conference and a Senate ‘vote-o-rama,’ he wrote, “has created undue pressure on OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews.”

    • What The US Intelligence ‘Russia Hacked Our Election’ Report Could Have Said… But Didn’t

      By now it’s quite clear that many in the US intelligence community believe strongly that Russia tried to influence the US election, and part of that included hacks into the DNC’s computer systems, a spearphishing attack on Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails and some exploratory surveillance hacking into the computer systems of state election systems (but not into the voting machines themselves). The US intelligence services said it back in October. And they said it again last month. And, they said it again on Friday with the release of an unclassified “incident attribution” report.

      Because the debate over this issue has gotten quite silly in some places — and ridiculously political as well — let’s start with a few basic points: It is absolutely entirely possible that the Russians hacked into all these systems and that it was trying (and perhaps succeeding?) to influence the election. Nothing in what I’m saying here is suggesting that’s not true. What I am concerned about is the evidence that’s presented to support that claim — mainly because I think we should all be terrified when we escalate situations based on secret info where the government just tells us to “trust us, we know.” And, yes, governments (including the US) have done this going back throughout history. That doesn’t make it right.

    • Allegations Against Russia Less Credible Every Day

      The U.S. government has now generated numerous news stories and released multiple “reports” aimed at persuading us that Vladimir Putin is to blame for Donald Trump becoming president. U.S. media has dutifully informed us that the case has been made. What has been made is the case for writing your own news coverage. The “reports” from the “intelligence community” are no lengthier than the New York Times and Washington Post articles about them. Why not just read the reports and cut out the middle-person?

      The New York Times calls the latest report “damning and surprisingly detailed” before later admitting in the same “news” article that the report “contained no information about how the agencies had collected their data or had come to their conclusions.” A quick glance at the report itself would have made clear to you that it did not pretend to present a shred of evidence that Russia hacked emails or served as a source for WikiLeaks. Yet Congresswoman Barbara Lee declared the evidence in this evidence-free report “overwhelming.” What should progressives believe, the best Congresswoman we’ve got or our own lying eyes?

    • Europe’s Mixed Feelings About Trump

      European governments are nervous about a Trump presidency, but – for economic and other reasons – many on the Continent would welcome a friendlier approach toward Russia, reports Andrew Spannaus.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Congressman Appoints Himself Censor, Removes Painting Critical Of Cops From Congressional Halls

      Can’t get legislators off their asses to pass a budget in a timely manner or, I don’t know, step up to do anything about the DOJ’s Rule 41 changes, but you can count on them to apply long-dormant self-motivation to personal agendas.

      Rep. Hunter, offended on behalf of an entire nation unions offended on behalf of their members, saw to it that painting, which the police unions bitched at length about, was removed from the public eye. Not that there was any outrage shown by a majority of constituents, who most likely first heard about this painting after it was removed. Here’s the most offending part of the painting, as captured by the Independent Journal Review.

    • Freedom of expression and censorship

      “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” These are the dramatic opening lines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s immensely powerful treatise “The Social Contract.” Freedom is the most fundamental pillar of democracy: in its absence democracy turns into autocracy.

      The French Revolution of 1789 made Liberty, Equality and Fraternity the most sacrosanct values of humanity. Any ruler or government that ensnared man away to a life of bondage has always met with perdition eventually. Their lives and reigns have been written in blood in the annals of history for posterity to remember them with derision and disdain.

    • Milo Yiannopoulos peddles hate. It’s not censorship to refuse to publish it

      A coalition of free speech organisations rallied together last week to defend Simon & Schuster’s choice to publish professional irritant Milo Yiannopoulos’s autobiography, Dangerous, saying that boycotting the book, as so many people have called for, would have “a chilling effect” on free speech.

      I’m sure that having his book (which hit the No 1 spot on Amazon’s pre-sale charts the day after it was announced) pulled from shelves or dropped from S&S would catapult it to even greater success at another publisher, but never mind. It’s clear that this coalition of organisations are standing up for what they believe in, and feel it is important to defend Yiannopoulos’ well-rehearsed right to speak his mind.

      Defending free speech often means finding yourself in the difficult position of having to defend people who say disgusting things. People who make jokes about rape; Holocaust deniers; straight-up racists. Though we might not like what these people say, it’s important that they’re allowed to say it. You can’t go around censoring people just because you don’t agree with them. If we can’t all express what we think, then we can’t talk to each other about our ideas. We can’t have a discussion; we can’t improve; we can’t function as a society.

    • From graphic live-streams to breast bans: A look back at Facebook’s problematic relationship with censorship

      As calls come for Facebook to crackdown on how it moderates Live posts, The Drum looks back at some of the challenges the social network has faced over the past year when it comes to self-censorship.

      At the end of last week Facebook faced mounting pressure to impose stricter measures on its Live video feature after allowing a disturbing video depicting torture to resurface on the site.

      Just days after being removed for violating the platform’s community standards, the video showing the attack of a young man with disabilities in Chicago resurfaced again within Facebook’s walls having been repackaged and re-uploaded by right wing news site the Daily Caller, attracting millions of new viewers.

    • Censorship in America: NYC Removes Birth Index Books from the Public Library

      New York City. The Statue of Liberty glistens in its harbor. The ultimate symbol of what this country stands for. Ellis Island is just a stone’s throw away – the gateway to America. The Freedom Tower, the Empire State Building, the hustle and bustle of busy, free New Yorkers and visitors from around the world. It’s the last place you would expect censorship. But that’s just what we got this past year when the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) decided to pull its Birth Index Books that were on loan to the New York Public Library (NYPL) in order to keep the public from viewing their contents.

      Genealogists lost a valuable resource that day. Adoptees who were born in New York City lost even more. The Birth Index Books contain information that may be key to their identities, something that most people take for granted, but what many adoptees yearn for and live painfully without. When I found my given name listed in the 1971 book a few years ago, I felt a sense of joy. There it was – a record of my truth. Something most people take for granted.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Russia gets LinkedIn banned on Android and iOS

      THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT is continuing to make it difficult for locals to use LinkedIn and has now ensured that the application is not available through either the Apple or the Google app stores.

      This is bad news for anyone in the country that hasn’t decided that they do not want to sign up to LinkedIn yet, but must be reassuring to a government that likes to stop people from communicating at times, and is really not keen on the business social network with more leaks than a colander.

    • FBI Releases A Stack Of Redactions In Response To FOIA Request For Info On Its Purchased iPhone Hack

      As the result of an FOIA lawsuit brought by the Associated Press, USA Today, and Vice, the FBI has finally released documents about the one-time iPhone exploit/hack it purchased from an unknown foreign vendor. Well, more accurately, the FBI released a bunch of paper with nearly nothing left unredacted, as USA Today’s Brad Heath pointed out multiple times on Twitter.

    • Why the UK is unlikely to get an adequacy determination post Brexit

      This article adds two reasons to why I think a post-Brexit UK is very unlikely to offer an adequate level of protection in terms of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

      One reason relates to recent comments made by Prime Minister Theresa May about human rights. The other relates to the non-compliance of the national security agencies with their existing data protection obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA).

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Riyadh, strike against non-payment of salaries: immigrants arrested and flogged

      A Saudi court has sentenced dozens of migrant workers to imprisonment and flogging, employees of the construction giant Binladin Group, for having gone on strike against non-payment of back wages.

      The Saudi press has not yet specified the nationality of the workers who were on strike over arrears in monthly salaries; the protests eventually escalated into street violence, which led to the arrests.

      The first to report the incident was Arab newspaper Al-Watan et Arab News, which, however, it did not clarify the nationality of migrant workers. Some diplomats contacted by AFP were unable (or unwilling) to clarify the affair, claiming to not know the details.

    • Work: it’s time for a new year’s revolution

      Feeling burned out in your work for peace and social justice? A new book provides essential guidance.

    • Young Black Men Still Predominant Victims of Police Violence

      Despite the protests, media scrutiny, and all around heightened national attention, young black men in 2016 continued to be the predominant victims of police violence in the United States.

      According to year-end figures published Sunday by the Guardian database The Counted, “[b]lack males aged 15-34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers last year,” and were “killed at four times the rate of young white men.”

      Overall, the number police killings fell slightly—1,091 last year, according to the Guardian tally, from 1,146 in 2015—but the pattern of brutality has remained consistent.

    • Future Crimes

      There was a jaw dropping but not unexpected article at The Guardian this week. It was actually part of a series of pieces at that paper that have sought to manufacture a legacy for Obama, the outgoing president, since his actual legacy is one of imperialist foreign policy, CIA support of jihadists, right wing coups, and most acutely, perhaps, a massive subverting of free speech and civil liberties. What Robert Parry has called a ‘war on dissent’. The Guardian piece took the form of asking novelists, public intellectuals {sic} and TV hacks what they perceived to be Obama’s legacy — and even the use of that word, *legacy* is a loaded indicator of the direction this piece was headed. What struck me most was not the predictable support for Obama policy (more on that later) but the utter banality of the writing. There were writers in this group who I have admired (Richard Ford for one, Marilynne Robinson, as well) but the sentiments were so stupefyingly superficial, so fatuous and fawning that it was hard not to see this as a kind of mini referendum on the state of Western culture.

    • Obama Pardons: How Many Has Obama Made In 2016 And Since Taking Office? Will Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning Be Next?

      With less than two weeks remaining in his eight-year administration, President Barack Obama will be under heavy pressure from public advocacy groups to grant high-profile pardon decisions. But Obama has not been shy about granting pardons and commuting prison sentences, particularly as a lame duck president.

      Obama pardoned 78 people and commuted the sentences of 153 others Dec. 19, further cementing his legacy as the most generous grantor of clemency in modern presidential history.

      The Department of Justice official website says Obama has granted 148 presidential pardons in his time in office, a number that exceeds the combined total of the last six presidents. In 2016, he pardoned 82 federal inmates, more than his seven previous years combined. Most of the pardons have been for drug offenders.

    • The FBI Is Apparently Paying Geek Squad Members To Dig Around In Computers For Evidence Of Criminal Activity

      Law enforcement has a number of informants working for it and the companies that already pay their paychecks, like UPS, for example. It also has a number of government employees working for the TSA, keeping their eyes peeled for “suspicious” amounts of cash it can swoop in and seize.

      Unsurprisingly, the FBI also has a number of paid informants. Some of these informants apparently work at Best Buy — Geek Squad by day, government informants by… well, also by day.

    • National Police Union President Says Asset Forfeiture Abuse Is A ‘Fake Issue’ Generated By The Media

      Chuck Canterbury, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, has been given an editorial megaphone over at the Daily Caller. Canterbury’s using this platform to defend the pretty much indefensible: civil asset forfeiture.

      Colloquially known as “cops going shopping for things they want,” asset forfeiture supposedly is used to take funds and property away from criminal organizations. In reality, it’s become an easy way for law enforcement to take the property of others without having to put much effort into justifying the seizures. In most states, convictions are not required, meaning supposed criminal suspects are free to go… but their property isn’t.

    • Prosecutors Looking Into $2 Field Drug Tests After Investigation, Figure Defense Attorneys Should Do All The Work

      The fallout from cheap field drug tests continues. The lab that does actual testing of seized substances for the Las Vegas PD had previously expressed its doubts about the field tests’ reliability, but nothing changed. Officers continued to use the tests and defendants continued to enter into plea bargains based on questionable evidence.

      The Las Vegas PD knew the tests were highly fallible. After all, the department had signed off on a report saying as much and handed it into the DOJ in exchange for federal grant money. But cops still used them and prosecutors still relied on them when pursuing convictions.

    • Parliamentary report: immigrants ‘should be made to learn English’ before arriving in the UK

      Following last month’s controversial report by Dame Louise Casey warning of “worrying” levels of segregation in the UK, an interim report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration has gone further to say that all immigrants should have either learnt English before coming to the UK, or be required to sign up to classes when they arrive.

      The All Party group described speaking English as a “prerequisite for meaningful engagement with most British people”. Labour MP, and chair of the group, Chuka Umunna has defended the report arguing that integration is a “two-way” street. He said that whilst there is a role for migrants there is also an obligation on Britain to fund English language classes.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality Hating, SOPA-Loving Marsha Blackburn Pegged To Chair Key Technology & Telecom Subcommittee

      If you were to sit down and consciously select a politician that best represents the stranglehold giant telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have over the legislative process, you probably couldn’t find a better candidate than Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn. From her endless assault on net neutrality, to her defense of awful state protectionist laws written by ISP lobbyists, there has never been a moment when Ms. Blackburn hasn’t prioritized the rights of giant incumbent duopolists over the public she professes to serve.

      Blackburn has been fairly awful on technology policy in general, from her breathless support of SOPA to her claim that fair use is just a “buzzword” obscuring our desperate need for tougher copyright laws. As such, there should be little surprise that Blackburn has been selected to head the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. The subcommittee tackles most of the pressing internet-related issues, with Blackburn replacing Oregon Representative Greg Walden.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Links 9/1/2017: Dell’s Latest XPS 13, GPD Pocket With GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Mac’s share falls to five-year low

    Net Applications pegged Linux’s user share at 2.2% in December, slightly off the 2.3% peak of November.

  • A 2016 retrospective

    In 2012, your editor predicted that LibreOffice would leave OpenOffice (which had been recently dumped into the Apache Software Foundation) in the dust. That prediction was accounted as a failure at the end of the year. Four years later, though, it has become clear that that is exactly what has happened. Your editor happily takes credit for having been a bit ahead of his time, while pointing to something shiny to distract you all from the fact that he didn’t see the issue coming to a head in 2016.

  • Desktop

    • Dell’s latest XPS 13 DE still delivers Linux in a svelte package

      Over the course of its four-year lifespan, Dell’s extremely popular XPS 13 Developer Edition line has become known for one thing—bringing a “just works” Linux experience to the company’s Ultrabooks.

      Of course, today Dell is just one of many manufacturers producing great Linux machines. System76 makes the Oryx Pro (still my top pick for anyone who needs massive power), and companies like Purism and ZaReason produce solid offerings that also work with Linux out of the box. Even hardware not explicitly made for Linux tends to work out of the box these days. I recently installed Fedora on a Sony Vaio and was shocked that the only problem I encountered was that the default trackpad configuration was terribly slow.

    • Meet the GPD Pocket, a 7-inch Ubuntu Laptop

      The GPD Pocket is a 7-inch laptop that’s small enough to fit in to a pocket — and it will apparently be available with Ubuntu!

      As reported on Liliputing, GPD (the company) is currently only showing off a few fancy renders right now, but as they have form for releasing other (similar) devices, like the GPD Win, and Android gaming portables, this is unlikely to be outright vapourware.

  • Kernel Space

    • SipHash Is Being Worked On For Further Security In The Linux Kernel

      Jason Donenfeld who has been working on the WireGuard secure network tunnel for Linux has also been working on another security enhancement: adding the SipHash PRF to the Linux kernel.

      Donenfeld is now up to his third version of patches for integrating the SipHash pseudorandom functions into the Linux kernel. For those wanting some background about SipHash, there is an explanation via Wikipedia while a lot more technical information can be found via this SipHash page.

    • Linux 4.10-rc3

      So after that very small rc2 due to the xmas break, we seem to be back
      to fairly normal. After a quiet period like that, I tend to expect a
      bigger chunk just because of pent up work, but I guess the short break
      there really was vacation for everybody, and so instead we’re just
      seeing normal rc behavior. It still feels a bit smaller than a usual
      rc3, but for the first real rc after the merge window (ie I’d compare
      it to a regular rc2), it’s fairly normal.

      The stats look textbook for the kernel: just under 2/3rds drivers,
      with almost half of the rest arch updates, and the rest being “misc”
      (mainly filesystems and networking).

      So nothing in particular stands out. You can get a flavor of the
      details from the appended shortlog, but even more importantly – you
      can go out and test.

      Thanks,

      Linus

    • Linux 4.10-rc3 Kernel Released

      Linux 4.10-rc3 is now available as the latest weekly update to the Linux 4.10 kernel.

    • Linus Torvalds Announces a Fairly Normal Third Linux 4.10 Release Candidate

      A few moments ago, Linus Torvalds made his Sunday evening announcement to inform us about the general availability of the third RC (Release Candidate) snapshot of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel.

      According to Linus Torvalds, things appear to be back to their normal state, and it looks like Linux kernel 4.10 RC3 is a fairly normal development release that consists of two-thirds updated drivers, and half of the remaining patch are improvements to various hardware architectures. There are also some minor networking and filesystems fixes.

    • Linux Kernel 4.9 Gets Its First Point Released, Updates Drivers and Filesystems

      We’ve been waiting for it, and it’s finally here! The first point release of the Linux 4.9 kernel was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman this past weekend, which means that most modern GNU/Linux distribution can finally start migrating to the series.

      Yes, we’re talking about Linux kernel 4.9.1, the first of many maintenance updates to the Linux 4.9 kernel branch, which is now officially declared stable and ready for production. It’s also a major release that changes a total of 103 files, with 813 insertions and 400 deletions, according to the appended shortlog.

    • Benchmarks

      • Open-Source Nouveau Linux 4.10 + NvBoost vs. NVIDIA Proprietary Linux Driver Performance

        Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks showing the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver performance on Linux 4.10 with the new NvBoost capability for finally being able to hit the “boost” clock frequencies with Kepler graphics cards when using this reverse-engineered driver. While the manual re-clocking and enabling NvBoost is able to increase the Nouveau driver’s performance, how do these results compare to using the closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver? These benchmarks answer that question.

      • 26-Way Intel/AMD CPU System Comparison With Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 Kernel

        In preparation for Intel Kaby Lake socketed CPU benchmark results soon on Phoronix, the past number of days I have been re-tested many of the systems in our benchmark server room for comparing to the performance of the new Kaby Lake hardware. For those wanting to see how existing Intel and AMD systems compare when using Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 and the latest Linux 4.10 Git kernel, here are those benchmarks ahead of our Kaby Lake Linux CPU reviews.

      • Xeon HD Graphics P530 With OpenGL & Vulkan On Mesa 13.1-dev + Linux 4.10

        It’s been quite a number of months since last trying out the HD Graphics P530 and thus while having a Xeon E3-1245 v5 running Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 for some fresh benchmarks after changing out the motherboard, I figured I would see how the graphics performance for this Xeon CPU compares to the Core IVB / HSW / BDW / SKL results from yesterday.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Latest Cinnamon Release Lands in Antergos, but Read This Before Updating Python

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Krita 3.1.x Best Alternative To Photoshop for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

        Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, although it has image processing capabilities, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters. Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering. Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with a snappy response.

        Krita is the full-featured free digital painting studio for artists who want to create professional work from start to end. Krita is used by comic book artists, illustrators, concept artists, matte and texture painters and in the digital VFX industry. Krita is free software, licensed under the GNU Public License, version 2 or later.

      • KDE neon Now Available on Docker

        Our mission statement above is what we try to do and having continuous integration of KDE development and continuous deployment of packages is great, if you have KDE neon installed. You can test our code while it’s in development and get hold of it as soon as it’s out. But wait, what if you want to do both? You would need to install it twice on a virtual machine or dual boot, quite slow and cumbersome. Maybe you don’t want to use neon but you still want to test if that bug fix really worked.

        So today I’m announcing a beta of KDE neon on Docker. Docker containers are a lightweight way to create a virtual system running on top of your normal Linux install but with its own filesystem and other rules to stop it getting in the way of your OS. They are insanely popular now for server deployment but I think they work just as well for checking out desktop and other UI setups.

      • KDE Neon Goes Docker, Lets People Test Drive the Latest KDE Software Releases

        Ex-Kubuntu maintainer and renowned KDE developer Jonathan Riddell was proud to announce the availability of the KDE Neon operating system on Docker, the open-source application container engine.

        KDE Neon is currently the only GNU/Linux distribution allowing users to enjoy the newest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, as well as KDE Frameworks and Applications software suite as soon as they’re out. If you’re a bleeding-edge user and love KDE, then KDE Neon is the distro you need to use in 2017.

      • More focused Planet KDE posts

        My blog has been syndicated on Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu for a long time, but sometimes topics I want to write about are not really relevant to these aggregators, so I either refrain from writing, or write anyway and end up feeling a bit guilty for spamming.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME, Wayland, and environment variables

        Your editor, who is normally not overly worried about operating-system upgrades, approached the Fedora 25 transition on his laptop with a fair amount of trepidation. This is the release that switches to using Wayland by default, pushing aside the X.org server we have been using for decades. Such a transition is bound to bring surprises, but the biggest surprise this time around was just how little breakage there is. There is one exception, though, that brings back some old questions about how GNOME is developed.

        The problematic change is simple enough to understand. While X sessions are started by way of a login shell in Fedora (even though the user never sees that shell directly), Wayland sessions do not involve a shell at all. As a result, the user’s .bash_profile and .bashrc files (or whichever initialization files their shell uses) are not read. The place where this omission is most readily noticed is in the definition of environment variables. Many applications will change their behavior based on configuration stored in the environment; all of that configuration vanishes under Wayland. It also seems that some users (xterm holdouts, for example) still run applications that use the old X resources configuration mechanism. Resources are normally set by running xrdb at login time; once again, that doesn’t happen if no login shell is run.

  • Distributions

    • What’s the best Linux distro for you?

      When it comes to desktop operating systems, there are three main camps into which people fall: Windows, Mac and Linux. In the case of the latter camp things can be confusing because there are endless distros to choose from — but which is best?

      The beauty of Linux is that it can be tweaked and tailored in so many ways. This means that while the plethora of choice can seem overwhelming, it is also possible to find the perfect distro for just about any scenario. To help you make the right choice, here’s a helpful list of the best distros to look out for in 2017.

    • What’s New in BlankOn X Tambora

      BlankOn X operating system finally launched at January 1st 2017 as the 10th release codenamed “Tambora”. BlankOn is a GNU/Linux distribution from Indonesia, a low-resource operating system with ultimate aim for desktop end-users. In this Tambora release, BlankOn brings the latest Manokwari desktop with improvements, along with its own BlankOn system installer, and some other stuffs. This Tambora release is a continuation of the BlankOn 9 release in 2014 named Suroboyo. This article sums up what’s new for BlankOn in this Tambora version.

    • This Year In Solus (2016 Edition)

      2016 was an incredible year for Solus. We went from having our first release in December of 2015, to completely switching to a rolling release model. We had multiple Solus releases, multiple Budgie releases, several rewrites of different components of Solus, ranging from the Installer to the Software Center. We introduced our native Steam runtime and improved both our state of statelessness as well as optimizations.

      When I first started talking about Solus at the beginning of 2016, I used the analogy that what we were building was the engine for our vehicle, one to deliver us to our goals for Solus. While we’re still building that engine, we’re in a drastically better shape than we were in 2016, and we’re more confident, and bolder, than ever.

    • Reviews

      • Maui Linux 2.1 Blue Tang – Aloha!

        Maui Linux 2.1 Blue Tang is a surprisingly and yet expectedly good Plasma system, using some of that Mint-like approach to home computing. It’s what Kubuntu should have been or should be, and it delivers a practical, out-of-the-box experience with a fine blend of software, fun and stability. That’s a very sensible approach.

        Not everything was perfect. Plasma has its bugs, the printer and the web cam issues need to be looked into, and on the aesthetics side, a few things can be polished and improved. The installer can benefit from having some extra safety mechanisms. But I guess that is the sum of my complaints. On the happy side, you get all the goodies from the start, the application collection is rich, the distro did not crash, and the performance is really decent for a Plasma beastling. A fine formula, and probably the best one we’ve seen in the last eighteen months or so. Good news if you like KDE. And indeed, this is definitely one of the distros you should try. 9/10. I’m quite pleased. Have a maui day.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Linux receives update for new year.

        Manajro Linux recently released a new version of operating system but they also keep their package updated. So some time ago Manjaro team updated some packages and introduced new features to main distribution. According to official announcement new feature called Brisk-menu is introduced in MATE edition of Manajro which is actually developed by Solus team. Thunderbird received some security update, linux48 will soon upgrade to linux49. Broadcom-wl, calamares, fightgear and few Ruby packages are updated.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat releases latest version of CloudForms 4.2

        According to the vendor, the new Red Hat CloudForms will enable IT teams to increase service delivery while focusing on critical, business-impacting issues. The Red Hat CloudForms, based on the open source ManageIQ project, provides an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual and cloud IT environments, including Linux containers. CloudForms helps IT organisations offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the service lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. It can also define and enforce advanced compliance policies for new and existing IT environments, better enabling operators to optimise the costs of a given environment and system.

      • ​Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 beta out now

        Yes, Red Hat’s forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.9 will come with stability and security improvements. That’s not the real news. The big story is it supports the next generation of cloud-native applications through an updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 base image.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Kernel 4.8.7 & Realtek Wireless – Fedora report

          A handful of weeks and hundreds of GB down the road, my Lenovo G50 machine is in a much better shape when spinning the kernel 4.8.7 than anything else before, but there are still situations where the network might drop down. This means I will need to reserve my previous observation, from the original report. Good but not perfect. Part of that Nirvana has gone back to Valhalla. Fedora 25 is the salvation you seek, though.

          Under ordinary circumstances, most people will probably not hit the issue, unless they have hundreds of idle HTTP connections that are slowly being closed, causing the driver to get a little confused. This could happen if you download like mad from the Web and then go calm. That’s why I said ordinary users, then again, Fedora and Manjaro folks aren’t really the Riders of the Gaussian. Still, something to look forward to being fixed eventually. Now that we have this 99% fix, the rest should be easy. More to come.

        • Fedora/EPEL Mirrormanager problems in Asia Pacific countries.

          We have been getting a lot of reports of people unable to get updates for EPEL or Fedora at various times. What people are seeing is that they will do a ‘yum update’ and it will give a long list of failures and quit. At this moment we seem to have pinpointed that most of the people having this problem are in various Asia Pacific nations (primarily Australia and Japan). The problem for both of these seems to be a lack of cross connects between networks.

          In the US, if you are on Comcast in say New Mexico and going to a server on Time Warner in North Carolina, your route is usually pretty direct. You will go from one network to various third party providers who will then send the packets the quickest path to the eventual server. If you use a visual grapher of locations, you even find that the path usually follows a linear path. [You might end up going to say California or Seattle first but that is only when Texas and Colorado cross connects are full.] Similarly in most European countries you also see a similar routing algorithm.

    • Debian Family

      • My Debian Activities in December 2016

        This month I marked 367 packages for accept and rejected 45 packages. This time I only sent 10 emails to maintainers asking questions.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The move to snap
          • TedPage: Snapping Unity8

            For the last little while we’ve been working to snap up Unity8. This is all part of the conversion from a system image based device to one that is entirely based on snaps. For the Ubuntu Phones we basically had a package layout with a system image and then Click packages on top of it.

          • We Never Said Ubuntu Phone Is Dead. Here’s What We Actually Wrote Line-by-Line

            I didn’t want to write this post but a lot of people are raging at us for writing an article we didn’t. So, join me as I go through we actually wrote, line-by-line.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Cinnamon 3.2.8 Desktop Out Now for Linux Mint 18.1 with Menu Applet Improvements

              Clement Lefebvre has published a new update of the beautiful, modern and responsive Cinnamon desktop environment, for the latest 3.2 stable series, of course, versioned 3.2.8.

              It’s been a little over two weeks since the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment received an update, and Cinnamon 3.2.8 is here to add many improvements to the Menu applet, which have all been contributed by Michael Webster. Among these, we can notice that the Menu applet is now capable of constructing only one context menu for recent files.

              Of course, this context menu can be re-used for other files as required, and we can’t help but notice that the Menu applet will no longer reconstruct recent files, just re-order, remove, or add them, if necessary. When refreshing the installed applications, the Menu applet won’t be very destructive.

            • Redesigning Bluetooth Settings

              At elementary, redesigns don’t necessarily happen purely as sketches or mockups and they may not even happen all at one time. Many times, we design iteratively in code, solving a single problem at a time. Recently we built out a new, native bluetooth settings pane to replace the one we inherited from GNOME. We took this time to review some of the problems we had with the design of this pane and see how we could do better. Pictured below is the bluetooth settings pane as available today in elementary OS Loki…

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Transpile And Run Python Code Into Go Program With Google’s Open Source ‘Grumpy’
  • Yelp Open-Sources Latest in Data Pipeline Project, Data Pipeline Client Library

    Services consume from the pipeline via the client library, and at Yelp feed into targets like Salesforce, RedShift and Marketo. The library reportedly handles Kafka topic names, encryption, and consumer partitioning. Centralizing service communications through a message broker while enforcing immutable schema versioning helps protect downstream consumers and is also a primary motivation behind the broader data pipeline initiative.

  • The importance of the press kit

    I’d like to share a few lessons I’ve learned about creating a press kit. This helped us spread the word about our recent FreeDOS 1.2 release, and it can help your open source software project to get more attention.

  • Events

    • Vault CFP deadline approaching

      The Vault Storage and Filesystems conference will be held March 22 and 23 in Cambridge, MA, USA, immediately after the Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit. The call for presentations expires on January 14, and the conference organizers would really like to get a few more proposals in before then. Developers interested in speaking at a technical Linux event are encourage to sign up.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox “Reader Mode” and NoScript

        A couple of days ago I blogged about using Firefox’s “Delete Node” to make web pages more readable. In a subsequent Twitter discussion someone pointed out that if the goal is to make a web page’s content clearer, Firefox’s relatively new “Reader Mode” might be a better way.

  • BSD

    • Get your name in the relayd book

      There’s a long tradition amongst science fiction writers of selling bit parts in books in exchange for charity donations. It’s called tuckerization.

      I see no reason why science fiction writers should have all the fun.

      I need a sample user for the forthcoming book on OpenBSD’s httpd and relayd. This user gets referred to in the user authentication sections as well as on having users manage web sites. They will also get randomly called out whenever it makes sense to me.

      That sample user could be you.

      All it would cost is a donation to the OpenBSD Foundation.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • Rcpp now used by 900 CRAN packages

      Today, Rcpp passed another milestone as 900 packages on CRAN now depend on it (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo declarations). The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage over time.

Leftovers

  • This Wand Remote makes couch surfing magical again

    I’ve seen the Kymera Magic Wand selling for as low as $60.00 on ebay and as much as $100.00 Amazon and I have to say it’s a treat every time I can avoid picking up my old remotes.

  • Science

    • The Death Of Expertise

      I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.

      I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.

      [...]

      Universities, without doubt, have to own some of this mess. The idea of telling students that professors run the show and know better than they do strikes many students as something like uppity lip from the help, and so many profs don’t do it. (One of the greatest teachers I ever had, James Schall, once wrote many years ago that “students have obligations to teachers,” including “trust, docility, effort, and thinking,” an assertion that would produce howls of outrage from the entitled generations roaming campuses today.) As a result, many academic departments are boutiques, in which the professors are expected to be something like intellectual valets. This produces nothing but a delusion of intellectual adequacy in children who should be instructed, not catered to.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Almost No One Likes the GOP’s ‘Repeal and Delay’ Plan for Obamacare

      Since June 2009—before the Affordable Care Act even became law—congressional Republicans have promised to be weeks away from proposing their own blueprint for health-care reform. More than seven years later, House Speaker Paul Ryan still seems confused about whether his party does or does not have a plan ready to replace the ACA. “We already know what we’re replacing with. We’ve been extremely clear with what replace looks like,” Ryan insisted in an interview on Wednesday. The following day found him pleading with a reporter for more time. “We’re just beginning to put this together,” Ryan admitted.

      Regardless, Republicans are moving quickly to gut the ACA. Repeal will be the “first order of business” for the new administration, vice president–elect Mike Pence said on Wednesday after speaking to GOP lawmakers on the hill. That same day Senate Republicans began laying the groundwork for a budget maneuver that would allow them to roll back parts of the law with a simple 51-vote majority, thus skirting a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Despite the fast pace, the plan is remarkably shaky—not just in detail but also for the lack of political support behind it. Almost no one outside Congress thinks the GOP’s current strategy is a good idea, and even a few Republican lawmakers are getting skittish.

    • The Three Big Reasons Republicans Can’t Replace Obamacare

      Republicans are preparing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and have promised to replace it with something that doesn’t leave more than 20 million Americans stranded without health insurance.

      But they still haven’t come up with a replacement. “We haven’t coalesced around a solution for six years,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton admitted last week. “Kicking the can down the road for a year or two years isn’t going to make it any easier to solve.“

      They won’t solve it. They can’t and won’t replace Obamacare, for three big reasons.

    • True British Values and the #NHScrisis

      The total amount thrown at the banks by the taxpayer to enable their casino banking scams and cocaine fuelled lifestyles to continue, was £1.16 trillion, courtesy of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. By one of life’s more meaningful coincidences, that is precisely ten times the annual budget of the NHS for the whole UK. Equally neatly, the latest contingency for quantitative easing announced by Mark Carney – money given directly to financial institutions by the central bank in exchange for junk – is £250 billion, which is precisely ten times the total hamstringing debts of the NHS.

    • A learning experience

      openDemocracy is a political discussion site so how could I end this contribution without some discussion of politics. Very shortly after I returned home I became involved in an interchange of emails with some American friends about the election of Trump and what has become known as Obama Care. Here is my response:

      When I discuss American politics and get to Obama care I often end up kind of dumbfounded like someone who has just been told that the moon is actually made of green cheese. I get the same feeling when watching Fox news on the same topic. Where do obviously intelligent people get such crazy ideas? And what do you say to them in reply? Well this is my reply now.

    • As more Southerners benefit from it, Medicaid expansion faces congressional death threats

      Date on which North Carolina’s newly sworn-in Gov. Roy Cooper (D) announced he’d take executive action to expand Medicaid, the public health insurance program for the poor, under the Affordable Care Act: 1/4/2017

      Year in which North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law barring the executive branch from expanding Medicaid under ACA, complicating Cooper’s efforts: 2013

      Number of North Carolinians who could benefit from expansion of Medicaid, which in that state is currently available only to children, people with small children, or those who are pregnant, disabled, or in a nursing home: up to 600,000

      Amount of investment Medicaid expansion would bring to North Carolina: $2 billion to $4 billion

    • NY Nuke Plant to be Shuttered, But Will Cuomo Turn to Dirty Gas Instead?

      New York’s “dangerously decrepit” Indian Point nuclear power plant will officially shut down by April 2021, according to an agreement reached this week between the state and Entergy utility company.

      A source “with direct knowledge of the deal” told the New York Times that one reactor will “cease operations by April 2020, while the other must be closed by April 2021,” the paper reported on Friday.

      In recent years, radioactive tritium-contaminated water had been leaking from the aging Westchester County facility, which sits on the bank of the Hudson River, just 25 miles north of New York City, spurring calls for its closure from activists and concerned residents.

      Recognizing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s history of supporting New York’s upstate nuclear facilities, including a $7.6 billion bailout this August for four other plants, anti-nuclear campaigners reacted to the news with caution.

  • Security

    • 6 ways to secure air-gapped computers from data breaches

      How do you avoid this? Depending upon the nature of the data contained within the air-gapped system, you should only allow certain staff members access to the machine. This might require the machine to be locked away in your data center or in a secured room on the premises. If you don’t have a data center or a dedicated room that can be locked, house the computer in the office of a high-ranking employee.

    • Possibly Smart, Possibly Stupid, Idea Regarding Tor & Linux Distributions

      I will admit that I have not fully thought this through yet, so I am
      writing this in the hope that other folk will follow up, share their
      experiences and thoughts.

      So: I have installed a bunch of Tor systems in the past few months -
      CentOS, Ubuntu, Raspbian, Debian, OSX-via-Homebrew – and my abiding
      impression of the process is one of “friction”.

      Before getting down to details, I hate to have to cite this but I have been
      a coder and paid Unix sysadmin on/off since 1988, and I have worked on
      machines with “five nines” SLAs, and occasionally on boxes with uptimes of
      more than three years; have also built datacentres for Telcos, ISPs and
      built/setup dynamic provisioning solutions for huge cluster computing. The
      reason I mention this is not to brag, but to forestall

    • [Older] Introducing rkt’s ability to automatically detect privilege escalation attacks on containers

      Intel’s Clear Containers technology allows admins to benefit from the ease of container-based deployment without giving up the security of virtualization. For more than a year, rkt’s KVM stage1 has supported VM-based container isolation, but we can build more advanced security features atop it. Using introspection technology, we can automatically detect a wide range of privilege escalation attacks on containers and provide appropriate remediation, making it significantly more difficult for attackers to make a single compromised container the beachhead for an infrastructure-wide assault.

    • Diving back into coreboot development

      Let me first introduce myself: I’m Youness Alaoui, mostly known as KaKaRoTo, and I’m a Free/Libre Software enthusiast and developer. I’ve been hired by Purism to work on porting coreboot to the Librem laptops, as well as to try and tackle the Intel ME issue afterwards.

      I know many of you are very excited about the prospect of having coreboot running on your Librem and finally dropping the proprietary AMI BIOS that came with it. That’s why I’ll be posting reports here about progress I’m making—what I’ve done so far, and what is left to be done.

    • Web databases hit in ransom attacks

      Gigabytes of medical, payroll and other data held in MongoDB databases have been taken by attackers, say security researchers.

    • Why HTTPS for Everything?

      HTTPS enables privacy and integrity by default. It is going to be next big thing. The internet’s standards bodies, web browsers, major tech companies, and the internet community of practice have all come to understand that HTTPS should be the baseline for all web traffic. Ultimately, the goal of the internet community is to establish encryption as the norm, and to phase out unencrypted connections. Investing in HTTPS makes it faster, cheaper, and easier for everyone.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Those Times the NSA Hacked America’s Allies

      The hysteria about Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee servers and the phishing scam run on Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is short on evidence and high in self-righteousness. Much of the report issued Friday was old boilerplate about the Russia Today cable channel, which proves nothing.

      My complaint is that American television news reports all this as if it is The First Time in History Anyone has Acted like This. But the head of the Republican Party in the early 1970s hired burglars to do the same thing– break into the Watergate building and get access to DNC documents in hopes of throwing an election. Dick Nixon even ordered a second break-in. And it took a long time for Republican members of Congress to come around to the idea that a crime had been committed; if it hadn’t been for the Supreme Court, Nixon might have served out his term.

    • Former CIA & NSA Officials Team Up To Debunk “Russian Hacking” Conspiracy Theory

      Two former high-ranking intelligence officers teamed in an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun that ripped apart the Obama administration’s unproven claim that The Russians interfered with the U.S. election by way of hacking systems of the Democratic establishment to lock in Donald Trump’s win.

    • ‘US intel community lost professional discipline’: Ex-NSA tech director on ‘Russia hacking’ report

      The undisguised and clearly politically motivated report on the alleged 2016 US “election hack” displays a severe lack of “professional discipline” in the intelligence community, former NSA technical director and whistleblower William Edward Binney told RT.

    • The Same Officials Who Pushed the Iraq War Are Now Stirring Up Anti-Russia Hysteria

      The main U.S. intelligence official pushing claims that Russia hacked the Democratic party is James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.

    • Senate Hearing on Russian Election Mischief Again Fails to Prove Anything

      The Russian hacking hysteria in the US media, and among parts of the public — especially liberal Democrats — is becoming increasingly embarrassing.

      Over and over we have been told that the government, whether in the form of the departing President Obama or unidentified “intelligence sources” cited in news reports, or statements by private security contractors with their vested interest in trying to show how vulnerable America’s (and the Democratic Party’s!) servers are, that they have solid evidence that the Russians hacked DNC emails and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, only for it to turn out to be more of the same innuendos, circumstantial “evidence,” suspicions, and inevitably ridiculous and embarrassing errors (like the Washington Post’s breathless and false story that the Russians had hacked the Vermont power grid and could shut off the heat during a cold snap).

    • Truck ramming kills 4 in Jerusalem

      A truck rammed into a group of Israeli soldiers who were disembarking from a bus in Jerusalem Sunday, killing four people and wounding 15 others, Israeli police and rescue services said.

      Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the truck veered off course and rammed into the group. She said the attacker was shot dead.

      The attack comes amid a more than yearlong wave of Palestinian shooting, stabbing and vehicular attacks against Israelis that has slowed of late. Sunday’s incident marks the first Israeli casualties in three months.

    • The Declassified Report on Russia’s Election Hacking Says Nothing New

      If you were on the edge of your seat, waiting for the US government to drop its much-anticipated report on Russian hacking operations against American targets and particularly targeting the 2016 presidential election, I’m really sorry to say, you’ll be truly disappointed.

    • It’s official: US election systems designated as critical

      The designation came the same day that US intelligence officials published an unclassified version of a report concluding that Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin directly ordered intelligence agencies to collect data from the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and other organizations. The agencies then oversaw an effort to discredit Clinton, the Democratic party, and the US democratic political process through “information operations,” according to the report, which was jointly written by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the FBI.

    • Fear and Misunderstanding of Russia

      Much of America’s recent demonization of Russia relates to deep cultural and even religious differences between the two countries, requiring a deeper understanding of the other’s strengths and weaknesses, writes Paul Grenier.

    • Pushing for a Lucrative New Cold War

      The New Cold War promises untold riches for the Military-Industrial Complex, causing hawks inside the Obama administration to push for more hostilities with Russia, as in a Syrian case study dissected by Gareth Porter for Truthdig.

      [...]

      When Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, spoke to reporters at a press briefing outside a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the U.S. attack on Syrian troops, he asked rhetorically, “Who is in charge in Washington? The White House or the Pentagon?”

    • Hillary Clinton and the Installation of Authoritarian Right-Wing Regimes in the Americas

      Seven years after the Hillary-backed Honduran coup, Mrs. Clinton and the capitalist-imperial U.S. Deep State she has long served helped place the thin-skinned megalomaniac and right-wing quasi-fascist Donald Trump atop the executive branch of the world’s most powerful state.

      [...]

      But what pre-existing “democracy” is Trump “taki[ng] control” of, exactly? It is well known and established that the United States’ political order is an abject corporate and financial plutocracy – an oligarchy of and for Wealthy Few. You don’t have to be a supposedly wild-eyed leftist radical to know this. Just ask the establishment liberal political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern). Over the past three plus decades, these leading academic researchers have determined, the U.S. political system has functioned as “an oligarchy,” where wealthy elites and their corporations “rule.” Examining data from more than 1,800 different policy initiatives in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Gilens and Page found that wealthy and well-connected elites consistently steer the direction of the country, regardless of and against the will of the U.S. majority and irrespective of which major party holds the White House and/or Congress. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” Gilens and Page write, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” As Gilens explained to the liberal online journal Talking Points Memo two years ago, “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.” Such is the harsh reality of “really existing capitalist democracy” in the U.S., what Noam Chomsky has called “RECD, pronounced as ‘wrecked.’”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Finance

    • UK at risk of Brexit ‘catastrophe’ warns Canadian trade expert

      Britain risks a “catastrophic” Brexit because the government is so dismissive of the concerns of trade experts, according to one of the figures behind the EU-Canada trade deal which took a decade to negotiate.

    • Koch Astroturf Army Cheers Union Busting in Kentucky

      On the first day that the Kentucky legislature got underway with a newly elected Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican governor, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity group blew the whistle and legislators jumped to do their bidding.

      This week, the Speaker of the House Jeff Hoover rammed through the legislature three bills to break the back of unions and lower wages for highly-skilled construction workers.

      It was bare-knuckled partisan politics. “We can pretty much do whatever we want now!” crowed GOP Kentucky Rep. Jim DeCesare behind closed doors.

      You have only to look at Trump’s narrow victory in Rust Belt states to understand why the GOP is desperate to get rid of the Democratic Party’s boots on the ground.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • WikiLeaks, D.N.C. Hacks and Julian Assange’s Years-Old Vision

      At first blush, there’s a baffling, inside-out quality to Julian Assange’s latest star turn in our shambolic national story.

      He belongs in jail for “waging his war” against the United States by exposing its secrets, the conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity has said of him. An “anti-American operative with blood on his hands,” Sarah Palin once called him.

      Yet last week brought the sight of Mr. Hannity speaking with Mr. Assange in glowing terms about “what drives him to expose government and media corruption” through Clinton campaign hacks that American intelligence has attributed to Russia. And Ms. Palin hailed him as a great truth teller, even apologizing for previous unpleasantries. (Cue sound of needle sliding across record album.)

    • Federal Judge Doesn’t Let Debate Commission Off Easy

      The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. heard oral arguments today in the lawsuit filed by Level the Playing Field (LPF) challenging the nonprofit status of the Commission on Presidential Debates, just under two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn into office.

      LPF’s lead attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, provided extensive evidence, analysis, and historical background to support the plaintiffs’ claim that the Commission on Presidential Debates uses unfair criteria to keep competitive voices outside the two major parties out of presidential debates.

      Specifically, LPF takes issue with the 15% rule that requires candidates outside the Republican and Democratic Parties to poll at 15% in 5 national polls selected by the debate commission to gain entry into the debates.

      “The two parties have rigged the system… CPD board members are big funders to candidates and campaigns… and the 15% is an impossible threshold,” Shapiro said.

    • Trump mentioned Wikileaks 164 times in last month of election, now claims it didn’t impact one voter

      President-elect Trump says that information published by Wikileaks, which the U.S. intelligence community says was hacked by Russia, had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” This was not the view of candidate Trump, who talked about Wikileaks and the content of the emails it released at least 164 times in last month of the campaign.

      ThinkProgress calculated the number by reviewing transcripts of Trump’s speeches, media appearances and debates over the last 30 days of the campaign.

      Trump talked extensively about Wikileaks in the final days of a campaign that was ultimately decided by just 100,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania combined.

    • How RT became the star of CIA, FBI & NSA’s anticlimactic ‘big reveal’

      The eagerly awaited Director Of National Intelligence’s (DNI) report “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” didn’t need such a long winded title. They could have just called it: “We Really Don’t Like RT.”

      Almost every major western news outlet splashed this story. But it was probably the New York Times’ report which was the most amusing. America’s “paper of record” hailed the DNI’s homework as “damning and surprisingly detailed.” Then a few paragraphs later admitted the analysis contained no actual evidence.

    • CIA and NSA Veterans on Russia, Trump and Obama

      ABC reports: “Showdown at Trump Tower as President-Elect Set to Receive Intel Briefing.” Politico reports: “Pompeo’s confirmation hearing for CIA director set for Jan. 11.”

      [...]

      Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president’s daily brief one-on-one to President Reagan’s most senior national security officials from 1981-85.

    • Algorithm and Blues: Why Hillary’s Moneyball Strategy Failed

      When I wrote on election night that the Clinton campaign had forsaken class politics for “politics by algorithm,” I had no idea that they really had such an “app” or that they had named it after Lord Byron’s daughter, the brilliant Ada Lovelace, the real brains behind the first computer. (Ada would have run a better campaign.) Apparently, Clinton campaign gameboy Robbie Mook ran 500,000 simulations of the election on his Xbox. How many of them had 90,000 Michigan voters leaving their choice for president blank? How many results showed her losing the white women vote by 10 percent? How many showed the vote in union households split nearly 50-50?

      As we know from the Wikileaks dumps, Clintonian paranoia extended far beyond her decision to set up a private email server and began to infect the campaign itself. Nargiza Gafurova was an analytics specialist for one of the database companies doing contract work for the Clinton campaign. “Our company worked with her campaign on their data needs – they’ve been extremely secretive about the data and algorithms they use,” Gafurova told me. “Secrecy was so deep that we couldn’t help them effectively as they didn’t even tell us who they want to target.”

    • Barack Obama’s Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward Drift and Donald Trump

      In a parting shot near the end of his depressing, center-right presidency, Barack Obama wants the world to know that he would have defeated Donald Trump if the U.S. Constitution didn’t prevent him from running for a third term. It was a stab at Hillary Clinton as well as the president-elect.

      I suspect Obama is right. Like Bill Clinton, Obama is a much better fake-progressive, populism-manipulating campaigner than Hillary. Also like Bill, he has more outward charm, wit, charisma, and common touch than Mrs. Clinton. Plus, he’s a male in a still-sexist nation, and he would have had some very sharp election strategists on his side.

    • Resisting the Congressional Watchdog

      Not that political corruption doesn’t happen with divided government, but with Republicans controlling all three branches, the prospects for more Abramoff-type scandals rise, warn Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.

    • The Dubious Case on Russian ‘Hacking’

      Mr. Trump’s skepticism is warranted not only by technical realities, but also by human ones, including the dramatis personae involved. Mr. Clapper has admitted giving Congress on March 12, 2013, false testimony regarding the extent of the National Security Agency’s collection of data on Americans. Four months later, after the Edward Snowden revelations, Mr. Clapper apologized to the Senate for testimony he admitted was “clearly erroneous.” That he is a survivor was already apparent by the way he landed on his feet after the intelligence debacle on Iraq.

      Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for pinpointing the location of weapons of mass destruction — if any.

      [...]

      Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA’s formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and all data crossing the network.

      Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic trace.

      Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any “hacked” emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.

      Lastly, the CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in this electronic arena. Given Mr. Clapper’s checkered record for accuracy in describing NSA activities, it is to be hoped that the director of NSA will join him for the briefing with Mr. Trump.

    • US Report Still Lacks Proof on Russia ‘Hack’

      Repeating an accusation over and over again is not evidence that the accused is guilty, no matter how much “confidence” the accuser asserts about the conclusion. Nor is it evidence just to suggest that someone has a motive for doing something. Many conspiracy theories are built on the notion of “cui bono” – who benefits – without following up the supposed motive with facts.

    • The Trump Bubble

      Donald Trump has a plan for dealing with the stock market bubble. Make it bigger.

      Before the election candidate Trump blasted Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen for keeping interest rates too low for too long to keep the economy humming along while Obama was still in office. The president elect accused Yellen of being politically motivated suggesting that the Fed’s policies had put the country at risk of another stock market Crash like 2008.

      “If rates go up, you’re going to see something that’s not pretty,” Trump told Fox News in an interview in September. “It’s all a big bubble.”

      Yellen of course denied Trump’s claims saying, “We do not discuss politics at our meetings, and we do not take politics into account in our decisions.”

      As we shall see later in this article, Yellen was lying about the political role the Fed plays in setting policy, in fact, last week’s FOMC statement clearly establishes the Fed as basically a political institution that implements an agenda that serves a very small group of powerful constituents, the 1 percent. If serving the interests of one group over all of the others is not politics, than what is it?

      [...]

      First of all, slashing taxes for the wealthy does not boost growth. We know that. It doesn’t work. Period.

      [...]

      Trump’s tax plan will increase inequality by making the rich richer. He wants to reduce the top tax rate from 39.6% to 33% which means that people “making $3.7 million or more in a year, would receive $1 million in annual tax savings.” (USA Today) The plan is bad for the economy, bad for the deficits and bad for working people who will see more aggressive attacks on Social Security to make up for the losses in revenue.

    • Beyond ‘post-truth’: confronting the new reality

      We are told we are living in a “post truth” world in which fake news proliferates and the established news media, once a bastion of civil society and a pillar of democracy, has lost its influence. As we should expect, alarmist statements such as these, have one foot in fact and the other resting on a shifting foundation of clicks, likes and shares. Alarming headlines work better on social media but they also reduce complex ideas to a series of half understood slogans.

      Much is changing in the way in which we find and share news stories but these changes are a product of many factors. Some rest in national media systems, others are a product of technical changes and all are influenced by, or have an influence upon, the shifting geopolitical situation. Fake news is not responsible for the rise of right wing populism in Europe and America but it has certainly fed the fire.

      The decline of trust in the mainstream media is genuine but it is not global. In the Northern European countries, where commercialisation has been tempered by firm statutory intervention and clear professional conventions, trust is still relatively high. In the rampantly commercial systems of the UK and the USA trust has plummeted. The UK press has the lowest level of public trust of any European country (with higher levels for TV) while the US media has low levels of trust for both TV news and the press (Aarts, Fladmoe, & Strömbäck 2012).

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Snowden: “Right and Wrong is a very different standard from Legal and Illegal”

      There are times when you have tons of historical research lined up for a column about legal structures making bad assumptions based on facts that are no longer true, and then something just comes along that makes you wipe your desk and say “no. scrap all of this work. This. I need to post this, and I need to post this now.”

      Right now is such a time. The topic of cost structures of publishing in the 1800s will wait for another day (it’s already waited for over 200 years, after all).

      In this interview (cut courtesy of Fight for the Future), Edward Snowden does one of the things he excels at – he summarizes very complex topics in such an accessible way that he practically turns long legal debates into one soundbite.

    • Interview 1240 – Rick Falkvinge on Rule 41 and the New Online Order

      Rick Falkvinge, founder of the original pirate party and head of privacy at PrivateInternetAccess.com, joins us to discuss his recent article, “Today, the FBI becomes the enemy of every computer user and every IT security professional worldwide.” We dissect the new “Rule 41” that gives American law enforcement unprecedented leeway to break into any computer in the world, the implications this has for a world in which privacy is increasingly a thing of the past, and what people can do to protect themselves from the New Online Order of global FBI operations.

    • FBI Releases Documents Related to San Bernardino iPhone

      The FBI on Friday released 100 pages of heavily censored documents related to its agreement with an unidentified vendor to hack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters, but it did not identify whom it paid to perform the work or how much it cost.

      The records were provided in response to a federal lawsuit filed against the FBI by The Associated Press, Vice Media and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today.

      The media organizations sued in September to learn how much the FBI paid and who it hired to break into the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people at a holiday gathering of county workers in December 2015. The FBI for weeks had maintained that only Apple Inc. could access the information on its phone, which was protected by encryption, but ultimately broke or bypassed Apple’s digital locks with the help of an unnamed third party.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Alleged Crackas With Attitude associate Justin Liverman signs plea deal

      Computer science student Justin Liverman, who was arrested by the FBI in September on suspicion of involvement with Crackas with Attitude (CWA), has signed a plea agreement. CWA claimed to have accessed emails from the AOL account of CIA Director John Brennan in late 2015, which were later published by WikiLeaks as the Brennan emails.

    • Malek Fahd: Islamic Council refuses to hand over land to school

      Australia’s peak administrative Islamic body is refusing to relinquish land being used by one of the state’s largest schools despite the potential for it to save the school from being shut down.

      The Administrative Appeals Tribunal upheld the federal Department of Education’s decision to strip funding from the 2400 student school on Thursday after it found the school was operating for a profit through millions of dollars in inflated rent payments and loans made to the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.

    • Indigenous children at risk of forced religious conversion

      There is an alarming presence of forced religious conversion of indigenous children at the hands of radicals in Bandarban.

      Muslim fanatics seduce underprivileged families with scopes of a better education and lifestyle for their children, and forcefully convert the children in madrasas in Dhaka without their parents’ knowledge.

      Over the past seven years, police have rescued 72 children from this crime ring.

    • Trump and Sessions: Great for the Private Prison Industry, Terrible for Civil Rights

      Donald Trump’s victory has been nothing but good news for the private prison industry.

      The day after the election, shares of the two biggest private prison corporations — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — jumped 43 and 21 percent, respectively.

    • In Statehouses Won By Republicans, the First Move Is to Consolidate Power By Weakening Unions

      Republicans stormed to power in state elections across the country in November on a promise to take on the establishment and return government to the average citizen.

      But in state capitals where they gained control, they moved quickly to do something else entirely: They’ve consolidated their newfound power — and rewarded their corporate donors — by delivering death blows to a longtime enemy: organized labor.

      In Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire, three states that flipped to unified Republican control, legislators have prioritized passing Right to Work, a law that quickly diminishes union power by allowing workers in unionized workplaces to withhold fees used to organize and advocate on their behalf.

      That might seem odd to voters who heard promises to “drain the swamp,” but its what Republican partisans and business lobbyists have been demanding for years.

    • Donald Trump’s Pick for Spy Chief Took Hard Line on Snowden, Guantanamo, and Torture

      In 2013, just one week after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden came forward as the source of documents revealing the global extent of the NSA’s mammoth surveillance regime, Coats penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal lambasting the disclosures and the ensuing media coverage.

      “Unfortunately, the Obama administration — especially of late — has fueled people’s distrust of government, which has made the reaction to Mr. Snowden’s leak far worse,” he wrote, pleading with his colleagues in Congress to stop “mischaracterizing” the surveillance programs Snowden exposed.

      Coats said the NSA’s programs, including its bulk collection of American telephone records, were “legal, constitutional and used under the strict oversight of all three branches of government” — though courts later disagreed, and Congress amended the law to end the American records collection program, as Snowden pointed out on Twitter on Thursday.

    • Pain and torture: state violence in Egypt

      After the coup of 2013, the practice of torture in Egypt has taken a qualitative shift to the worse.

      The use of torture and violence by the police is nothing new to Egypt; to the contrary, Mubarak was regularly condemned by various international human rights organizations for the use of torture and violence against political opponents and regular citizens who were unlucky enough to be arrested for petty crimes.

      However, after the coup of 2013 and the inauguration of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, this practice has taken new forms. There has been a proliferation of sexual violence against detainees including children, as well as an alarming increase in forced disappearances and torture.

      Some of the kidnapped reappear after a few months, others meet an unknown fate. The most prominent, and international example was the murder of Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge PhD student who was tortured to death and subjected to “animal like” violence for conducting research on the Egyptian labor movement. It is believed that the Egyptian security services were behind this heinous crime.

    • Alabama NAACP Not Backing Down After Jeff Sessions’ Office Lashes Out

      “We are trying to stop Jeff Sessions from becoming the Attorney General of the United States,” Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, told AlterNet over the phone. “We are not backing down at all.”

      Just days ago, Simelton was one of dozens who staged a sit-in at Sessions’ Mobile, Alabama office, an action timed to coincide with the onset of the 115th Congress. Media attention and support from across the country poured in.

      [...]

      Sessions was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1986 as a federal judge, but rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee—some of them Republicans—on the grounds that he was too racist to serve.

    • Some initial thoughts before a Trump presidency

      The youth in the United States don’t support Trump; people of color in in the US don’t support Trump; the majority of women don’t support Trump. Those, like Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who now hail Trump as “their” President whom they do not want to see fail, are normalizing a stolen election. They are abdicating their responsibility as stewards of representative democracy.

    • Faux Real: What’s in Your Worldview?

      We had to know this was coming. It was always here, but now it can be seen more clearly through the unvarnished lens of protofascism. Retrenchment and revanchism arrive with a new pitchman, selling rollbacks disguised as opportunities and promising to reclaim that which has been lost after decades of social progress and cultural liberalization. This isn’t a “new normal” but rather an old one reemerging, and the only sort of normality it represents is that which is perversely defined by a type of mass insanity.

      Things have been heading in this direction for a long time now, but the pace obviously has accelerated in the digital age. The lamentations about the demise of truth and the advent of bogus “news” are legion, as are the observations about the omnipresence of technology and the implications thereof. But all this hasn’t happened to us — it has veritably been demanded. Obscured by the handwringing and finger-pointing is the deeper reality of a culture obsessed with on-demand indulgences, no matter the cost.

      This is a manifestation of convenient compartmentalization, as if what happens in one realm has no bearing on another. Mass consumption of artificial foods, infotainment tidbits, contrived “reality” fare, and “brain candy” is seen as innocuous or just a guilty pleasure if it’s even thought about at all. Yet when politics are shown to be dominated by artifice, and when sensationalism trumps responsible journalism, suddenly there are waves of consternation and disbelief. How could this happen? Well, how could it not.

    • Obama’s Propaganda Gift to Trump

      On December 23, 2016 Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a federal law that is passed every year. NDAA authorizes defense appropriations but it is also used as a Trojan horse to hide attacks on civil liberties. In 2011 the NDAA authorized indefinite detention of anyone deemed a terrorism suspect. Tucked inside this year’s NDAA was the passage of the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act which establishes the little known or discussed Global Engagement Center.

      The title seems benign enough until one reads its mission. “The purpose of the Center shall be to lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.”

      In plain English, this act establishes an official propaganda arm of the United States government. Of course there has always been governmental coordination used to spread lies about American foreign policy. The government doesn’t even have to work very hard because the corporate media usually march in lock step and repeat their every claim uncritically. But these are dangerous times for the American hegemon. Its ability to continue exercising imperial control has been damaged by foreign governments successfully resisting its efforts and by the election of Donald Trump.

01.07.17

Links 7/1/2017: Linux 4.9.1, Wine 2.0 RC4

Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 2017 And The FUD Still Flows

    Well, here it is 2017 and folks are still trotting out the arguments against GNU/Linux they were using fifteen years ago.

  • Do People Really Use That? 15 Weird Linux Operating System Names

    When you see the word Windows capitalized, do you even think about the glass panes that let you see outside your house? How often does the “mac” in macOS make you think of burgers? Once a name gets popular enough, we all collectively disregard how peculiar it is.

    Linux isn’t that popular, so it doesn’t get this pass. For those of you unfamiliar with the open source operating system, you don’t install Linux itself — you install one of its many versions, which are known as distributions (“distros”). Many of these distros have odd names.

    I’ve put together a list of 15 distros with odd or comical names, in no particular order. Some of them are relatively popular in the Linux world. Others, even if they were mainstream, would still sound downright silly. Tell me if you agree.

  • These Linux myths need to die

    A Reddit user recently started a thread in which they asked which myths and misconceptions about Linux annoy users the most.

    The post spawned a lively discussion with points being raised for and against Linux.

    The prominent myths raised in the Reddit thread, along with several which have been doing the rounds for a while, are listed below.

  • Linux Marketshare Up To 3% According To One Popular Website

    According to one popular NSFW web-site, the 53rd most popular web-site in the world ranked by Alexa, their Linux traffic went up 14% in 2016.

  • Desktop

    • $89 Pinebook Linux Laptop Expected to Launch in February

      If you’ve heard the name Pine64 before, it’s most likely in relation to the Pine A64 single-board computer sold by the company as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi$40.99 at Amazon. However, Pine64 is branching out and will launch a couple of extremely cheap laptops next month.

      The so-called Pinebook laptop will ship in two forms, both offering the same internal components while one has an 11.6-inch screen and the other a larger 14-inch panel. Inside you’ll find a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex A53 processor running at 1.2GHz coupled with 2GB DDR3 RAM. Graphics will be handled by the embedded dual-core Mali 400 MP2 GPU, and storage, as with most cheap laptops, is limited to a 16GB eMMC flash drive. According to OMG!Ubuntu!, power is provided by a 10,000mAh LiPo battery and there will be two USB 2.0 ports, a MicroSD card slot, headphone jack, and mini HDMI out.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 4.9.1

      I’m announcing the release of the 4.9.1 kernel.

      All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.

      The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at:
      git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y
      and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

      http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

    • Linux 4.8.16
    • Linux 4.4.40
    • Heterogeneous Memory Management v15 For The Linux Kernel

      Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has published his first set of Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) revisions for 2017.

      This long-in-development work for the Linux kernel to implement Heterogeneous Memory Management allows device memory to be used inside any process transparently and without modification. The HMM patches also allow mirring a process address space on a device. NVIDIA is one of the vendors working on support for their binary NVIDIA Linux driver and Nouveau open-source to make use of HMM with their latest GPUs.

    • VMware joins Open-O project targeting NFV, SDN orchestration

      The Linux Foundation-based open source group Open-O snares VMware as “premier” member joining the likes of China Mobile, Huawei.

      The Open-O Project recently welcomed new member VMware to the open source organization hosted by The Linux Foundation.

    • 10 years with util-linux project!

      Yes, we had util-linux before (and many thanks to Adrian Bunk and Andries E. Brouwer), but I believe that with git and close collaboration between Linux distributions and Linux kernel community it better now :-)

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD Kaveri vs. Intel Skylake With The Latest Linux/Mesa Open-Source Drivers

        I’m in the process of testing a lot of my different CPUs/APUs in preparation for some Kaby Lake Linux benchmarks next week with the Core i5 7600K and Core i7 7700K. Along the way with the different CPU benchmarks I’ve also been running some fresh integrated Linux graphics tests on the newer and interesting hardware.

        The integrated graphics tests are still early on and will have much more data when the weekend is through. But so far with numbers from an AMD A10-7850K “Kaveri” APU compared to Skylake-based Core i5 6500 and Core i5 6600K, those numbers alone were interested so I figured I’d share those early numbers this morning.

      • How AMD Kaveri’s Graphics Performance Has Evolved Under Linux

        As mentioned earlier when posting some fresh AMD Kaveri vs. Intel Linux graphics benchmarks, I have some fresh AMD A10-7850K “Kaveri” APU numbers with running the latest Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 + Mesa 13.1-dev stack on many of my benchmarking systems in the basement server room. With having an A10-7850K Kaveri system running with the latest Linux open-source driver code, I figured I’d compare it to some of my older Kaveri results.

        [...]

        Following these initial results in this article are some more numbers going back further to then look at the Ubuntu 14.10 and fglrx 14.20/14.50 performance. All of these OpenGL benchmarks were done in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

      • AMD Developer Posts X.Org Modesetting “MS_ALL_IN_ONE” Patches
      • PlayStation 4 Running Linux Can Now Use AMDGPU-PRO With Vulkan

        The work to run Linux on the PlayStation 4 continues to advance and previously we reported on those behind it managing to exploit the Radeon graphics found on the AMD APU powering the PS4. The latest milestone is they now have Vulkan running on the PS4.

      • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided On Linux With Latest RadeonSI – Up To 2~3x Faster

        With Marek’s latest set of RadeonSI Gallium3D patches, which are said to improve the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performance by around 70%, having landed in Mesa Git, here are some fresh benchmarks with a Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury.

        The “before” results were from the Christmas-timed 31-Way NVIDIA GeForce / AMD Radeon Linux OpenGL Comparison – End-Of-Year 2016 and then the “new” results are using Linux 4.10 and Mesa 13.1-dev Git as of today. The RX 480 and R9 Fury were used for benchmarking.

      • There Are A Few More Performance Changes With RadeonSI From Mesa Git

        With Marek’s optimizations having landed in Mesa Git that targeted Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I ran benchmarks and found Deus Ex: MD is generally much faster and can be 2~3x faster, much more than the 70% originally thought by Marek. Now that more time has passed, I have carried out some more Linux gaming tests.

      • Polaris 12 Support Being Sent In To Linux 4.10 Kernel

        AMD is looking to land initial support for upcoming “Polaris 12″ graphics processors into the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel.

        AMD published initial Polaris 12 open-source Linux driver support back in December. This new revision of Polaris is expected to be for lower-end GPUs while waiting for Vega on the high-end. Details on Polaris 12 remain scarce. But in terms of the Linux driver support, it’s basically adding in the new PCI IDs and sharing the existing code-paths with Polaris 10/11.

      • RADV Vulkan Driver Gets Its First Fix From A Valve Developer

        It appears Valve Linux developers are doing a bit more tinkering with the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma 5.8.5 and Applications 16.12 by KDE now available in Chakra

        The latest updates for KDE’s Plasma and Applications series are now available to all Chakra users, together with other important package upgrades.

        Plasma 5.8.5 provides another round of bugfixes and translation to the 5.8 release, with changes found mostly in the plasma-desktop, plasma-workspace and kscreen packages.

        Applications 16.12.0 is the first release of a new series and comes with several changes. kdelibs has been updated to 4.14.27.

      • KaOS 2017.01 released as new year’s gift

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Weather updates with OpenWeather GNOME Shell extension

        If you have ever wanted weather updates on your Desktop, one of the easiest and neatest ways with the OpenWeather GNOME Shell extension. This nifty extension provides an always-visible display of the current weather status and temperature in the top bar of Fedora Workstation. If you open up the weather status monitor, it will also provide you with more details on the current weather, including a forcast for upcoming days, wind, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and sunrise & sunset times for the current location.

  • Distributions

    • The Best Linux Distros for 2017

      The new year is upon us, and it’s time to look toward what the next 365 days have in store. As we are wont to do, Linux.com looks at what might well be the best Linux distributions to be found from the ever-expanding crop of possibilities.

      Of course, we cannot just create a list of operating systems and say “these are the best,” not when so often Linux can be very task-oriented. To that end, I’m going to list which distros will rise to the top of their respective heaps…according to task.

      With that said, let’s get to the list!

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Release update: Soft freeze for stretch
      • Debian Stretch Enters Its Soft Freeze, Full Freeze In One Month

        The soft freeze is now upon us for Debian 9.0 “Stretch” while the full freeze will happen in February.

        The soft-freeze means that no new source packages will enter Stretch. The full freeze will then happen on 5 February, after which point all changes will require approval to land.

      • RFH: screen that hurts my eyes

        Two years ago, I bought myself a new fancy motherboard (a Asus B85M-G C2) with a new fancy Intel-based processor with built-in graphics (an Intel Core i7-4770) and memory to go with it. I installed it in the place of my old AMD-based motherboard, keeping everything else (my hoard of hard drives and such) excepted the graphics card, which was not needed anymore. I immediately noticed my eyes were aching when using the computer. I was quite surprised since I had been using the screen very heavily for almost 10 years before that, without any problems. I attributed that to Intel Graphics, so I tried putting back the old graphics card, but it did not help. The situation was very frustrating, since working on the computer for an hour or so was making my eyes hurt for several days. This problem was specific to this computer, I could keep on using my computer at work and my laptop without problems.

      • Getting to know diffoscope better

        Let me just say that I was a Debian user for years when I discovered it is taking part in Outreachy as one of organisations. Their Reproducible Builds effort has a noble goal and a bunch of great people behind it – I had no chances not to get excited by it. Looking for a place where my skills could be of any use, I discovered diffoscope – the tool for in-depth comparassion of files, archives etc. My mentor, Mattia Rizzolo, supported my decision to work on it, so now I am concentrating my efforts on improving diffoscope.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Mint 18.1 Xfce Nearing, Weird Names, Die Linux Myths

              Clement Lefebvre today announced a beta release of Mint 18.1 Xfce with updated software, refinements, and “many new features.” MakeUseOf chuckled at some of the crazy names folks pin on Linux distributions and Jan Vermeulen picked up on a Reddit conversation discussing Linux myths that “need to die.” Elsewhere in Linux news, Bruce Byfield compared and contrasted Debian and Ubuntu while Mark Shuttleworth discussed Snappy vs. Flatpak.

            • Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Xfce – BETA Release

              This is the BETA release for Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Xfce Edition.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • What is Open Source Software and How Can You Use it For Business?

    Small businesses are always looking for ways to save time and cut the operating costs of their business. One way to do this is by using open source software (OSS) to run their business.

  • AT&T now an open source believer

    Networked data traffic will only grow moving forward, said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, and making ECOMP open-source will allow the network to adjust.

    For many of those giants looking to modernize, open source has been the answer, as it allows for flexibility and a vast trove of material to draw from.

    Other legacy companies like GM and GE have also been working hard to reinvent themselves for the digital age, recognizing that they must evolve or face potential extinction. GE CEO Jeff Immelt wants to make GE a leading software company by 2020, while General Motors CEO Mary Barra is working to shift that company to become more of a tech innovator and incubator.

  • The impact of Open Source on operators, systems integrators and vendors

    Open source refers to the ability to access and modify source code, develop derived works, and sell or distribute software. Open source does not imply free of charge. In the context of telecom networks, open source builds on Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). While open source refers traditionally to software, it can apply to hardware in which case a reference design is shared in an open community. The construct of open source leads to collaborative communities, and a product development philosophy that is based on a relatively fast iterative process. This contrasts with the relatively slow ‘waterfall’ process used in the development of telecom network equipment and services.

  • Hyperledger Blockchain Project Announces ‘Technical Working Group China’ Following Strong Interest

    The Hyperledger Project, a cross-industry collaborative effort to study, develop and implement open-source blockchain solutions and standards has set up a working group as an extended arm in China.

  • In the 2017 Tech Job Pool, Open Source Skills Rule

    Here it is: 2017. As the year gets going, the cloud computing and Big Data scenes are absolutely flooded with talk of shortages in people with deployment and management expertise. There just are not enough skilled workers to go around. The OpenStack Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and other organizations are now taking some important steps to address the situation.

    Here are some of the best ways to start the new year by getting certified for the open source cloud and Big Data tools that are makng a difference.

    As part of its efforts to grow the OpenStack talent pool and global community, the OpenStack Foundation has announced professional certification programs that are meant to provide a baseline assessment of knowledge and be accessible to OpenStack professionals around the world. Some of the first steps in advancing the program are taking place now, and Red Hat is also advancing OpenStack certification plans..

  • Ford, Toyota to challenge Apple CarPlay, Android Auto

    Wednesday’s announcement establishes the SmartDeviceLink Consortium, a non-profit group that will manage the open source software in SmartDeviceLink. Ford’s AppLink, a part of Ford Sync, is the underlying software in SmartDeviceLink. Ford deeded AppLink to the open source community in 2013. The idea is individual automakers can then build their own center stack display interfaces that look and feel different, while still retaining the voice and instrument panel controls already created by SDL. Right now, Apple CarPlay looks about the same on a $25,000 Chevrolet Cruze (image above) and a $60,000 Audi, to the annoyance of all automakers.

  • Riot: An open team collaboration tool for everyone

    How many times have you wished you had a quick access to a collaboration tool in the palm of your hands? And how many times have you wished that same tool could not only reach out to a team of your choosing, but to a community of similar users?

    Such is the way of Riot. This particular open source take on collaboration (available on Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and Linux) makes working with others on ideas and issues as easy as possible. Not only can you join the myriad available rooms, you can create your own rooms and make them either public or private. Riot even allows for room encryption, to ensure security.

  • CyanogenMod’s death and rebirth, new open source automotive group, and more news

    In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Cyanogen Inc. pulling the plug on CyanogenMod, Toyota and Ford forming the SmartDeviceLink Consortium, and more.

  • Haiku OS Gaining Ground On UEFI, FreeBSD Compatibility Layer, Remote Debugging

    For those interested in the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system, they have issued their latest monthly progress report to end out 2016.

  • Events

    • Crossing the AI chasm

      I recently presented those learnings at ApacheCon, and in this article I’ll share my top four lessons for overcoming both the technical and product chasms that stand in your path.

    • Call for Presentations at LinuxFest NorthWest, May 6-7, 2017

      Freedom, Friends, Features, First. The theme of this years LinuxFest NorthWest is ‘The Mechanics of Freedom’.

      Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things are becoming even more integrated in the lives of regular citizens. Along with these changes comes concern over the trade-offs between convenience and privacy. For example: Privacy in the age of relentless online tracking, How bots can help you onboard new community members, Training driverless vehicles, How the Internet of Things took down DNS.

  • Web Browsers

    • 2016 sees Internet Explorer usage collapse, Chrome surge

      At the start of 2016, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was still the most commonly used browser on the Web; it finished 2015 being used by about 46 percent of Web users, with 32 percent preferring Chrome, and 12 percent using Firefox. But Explorer’s days have been numbered ever since Microsoft essentially ended its development. While the venerable browser is still supported and still gets security updates, its features and standard support have been frozen since 2015. Instead, Microsoft shifted active development to Edge, its new browser. While Edge is faster, more secure, and boasts much better support for Web standards, it’s only available for Windows 10, which greatly limits its audience.

  • CMS

    • Launching a Site or Blog? Open Source Creation Tools Give You Many Choices

      Late last year, Datamation came out with an extensive evaluation of which open source content management systems (CMS) really stand out, which is a topic near and dear to us here at OStatic. Our site runs on Drupal, which is an open source platform that powers many sites around the web, but there are key differences between CMS offerings, and if you’re looking for the right solution, we have some good resources for you.

      The Datamation story provides a nice overview of the open CMS space, but here are some of our newly updated, favorite ways to go about evaluating which is the right CMS for you.

      Marking a true renaissance for tools that can help anyone run a top-notch website or manage content in the cloud, open source content management systems (CMS) have come of age. You’re probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue.

  • Microsoft Cuts

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Officially Boots Libreboot

      FSF and GNU decide to grant Libreboot lead developer Leah Rowe’s wishes. The project is no longer a part of GNU says RMS.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • SiFive rolls out fully open source chip for IoT devices

        SiFive has also released an Arduino based software development board called HiFive1, along with the FE310 chip. In addition to that, the company has also released the RTL (register-transfer level) code for FE310 under an open source license that will allow chip designers to customize their own SoC on top of the base FE310.

        I talked with Jack Kang, VP of Product and Business Development at SiFive, to understand the chip’s impact on IoT world.

      • CES 2017 – Renault create world’s first open-source mass market vehicle

        The new vehicle POM, based on Renault’s popular Twizy, will be available to start-ups, independent laboratories, private customers and researchers, allowing them to customise the software and driving experience.

  • Programming/Development

    • Top 50 Developer Tools of 2016

      It took a bit of time to comb through the data, but there are some killer insights in here. To piece this list together, we aggregated usage from 40K+ tech stacks, over a million unique visits, and thousands of developer comments, reviews, and votes across all of 2016 (more on methodology below). Through it, we found some of the top tech trends coming into 2017 and what should be on your bucket list. Let’s get started!

    • Keynote: State of the Union: node.js by Rod Vagg, NodeSource

      During his keynote at Node.js Interactive in November, Rod Vagg, Technical Steering Committee Director at the Node.js Foundation talked about the progress that the project made during 2016.

    • Node.js: The State of the Union

      By all metrics, it has been a good year for Node.js. During his keynote at Node.js Interactive in November, Rod Vagg, Technical Steering Committee Director at the Node.js Foundation talked about the progress that the project made during 2016.

    • RcppTOML 0.1.0

      Big news: RcppTOML now works on Windows too!

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Finnish brain drain picks up speed, entire research groups now moving abroad

      Cuts to universities and state-funded research centres are contributing to growing brain drain from Finland and increasing unemployment among the highly educated, says Petri Koikkalainen, the head of the Finnish Union of University Researchers and Teachers.

      The incidence of highly-educated people moving abroad has increased by one-third in the last few years, while the increase in the number of researchers leaving Finland behind is only slightly behind this percentage. According to Statistics Finland, 2,223 individuals with top academic degrees moved abroad in 2016.

      This brain drain has grown steadily since 2011, the researcher and teacher’s union president Koikkalainen said in a Radio Suomi interview on January 5.

      “The problem is not that people are moving abroad from Finland; the problem is that they never come back. We can’t attract highly-educated international experts to Finland, either,” Koikkalainen said.

      “There’s no use debating whether the shrinking university resources are contributing to the growing brain drain. At this point, we should just concede the obvious.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • China’s Airpocalypse Paves a Path for New Cancer Medicines

      The thick haze of pollution blanketing northern China this winter is a grim reminder of the nation’s new growth industry: lung cancer drugs.

      China logged more than 700,000 new cases of the disease in 2015, the product of a surge in air pollution, high smoking rates and unhealthy lifestyles as China has prospered in recent decades. Lung cancer is now the most common type of cancer in the country and its spread has spawned new listings as well as billion-dollar market values for Chinese companies like Betta Pharmaceuticals Co. and Hutchison China MediTech Ltd., which are attempting to build blockbuster treatments.

      Zhejiang, Hangzhou-based Betta Pharma, which sells just one lung cancer drug called Conmana, shot up to as much as $5.6 billion in market value late last year after raising about $110 million in a public offering on the Shenzhen exchange in November. Hutchison China MediTech, whose pipeline of experimental therapies is also heavily focused on lung cancer, also attracted $110 million in a new listing on the Nasdaq in March.

    • ‘Elephants are not the only victims’: the lament of China’s ivory lovers

      In a tiny workshop at his home in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong, 84-year-old Au Yue-Shung shows me an ivory carving he has been working on for months. Measuring just 5×10 inches, Nine Sages in Mount Xiang depicts the 9th-century poet Bai Juyi and eight of his peers in full creative flow in Henan province, far from the imperial court that Bai once served. The point of the story is that the sages tried to maintain their integrity by staying close to nature and art, and away from the ugly politics of the time. This is a piece that Au created for himself rather than a client. It is his statement about life after going through many ups and downs.

      Born during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s, Au joined Guangzhou’s Daxin ivory carving factory at the age of 13 as an apprentice. With only one year’s formal education and with no one caring to teach him, he taught himself drawing and carving in his spare time. Unable to afford drawing paper, he drew on toilet paper. His gift was soon recognised and by the late 1960s he had become a key carving artist at Daxin. Later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he decided that he had had enough of the political and artistic repression.

    • State cannot shut people out when it comes to Flint water crisis

      How many more insults can the state lob at the city of Flint?

      The latest came this week when the state Michigan Department of Environmental Quality tried to sneak through an invitation-only town hall meeting on the condition of Flint water.

      In a city where no one can safely drink the water without a filter, the state apparently thought it was perfectly acceptable to hold a public session with a handpicked selection of people.

      A city spokeswoman said the state dropped the invite-only rule Tuesday, Jan. 3, at Flint Mayor Karen Weaver’s urging after city and state officials were asked about the program by MLive-The Flint Journal.

    • 2016 was the worst year in NHS history – we must fight for its survival

      The last 12 months have been the worst in the history of the NHS. Our health system is under pressure like never before. The moment of crisis many warned of has arrived, and it is not clear that the NHS can be retrieved from this state of affairs.

      We used to say that flailing A&Es represented an early warning sign that the health service was under pressure. And so that has proven to be. England’s major A&Es are under record strain with black alerts being regularly sounded, and in some instances wards turning patients away. Last year the A&E crisis spread to other sectors.

    • The Breakthrough: The $2 Drug Test

      We’re calling it The Breakthrough. We’re kicking things off today with two ProPublica reporters, Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders, talking about how they discovered police departments nationwide use a $2 test for detecting drugs that can send innocent people to jail.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • FBI dispute with DNC over hacked servers may fuel doubt on Russia role

      The FBI may have been forced into a misstep when investigating whether Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee — the agency never directly examined the DNC servers that were breached.

      Instead, the FBI had to rely on forensic evidence provided by third-party cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which the DNC hired to mitigate the breach.

      “The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed,” the agency said on Thursday in a statement.

      [...]

      CrowdStrike didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But it wasn’t the only private security firm to examine the breach. Fidelis Cybersecurity was brought in to look at the malware samples, and concluded that suspected elite Russian hackers were behind the intrusion.

      Nevertheless, the FBI should have conducted its own review of the hacked servers, Bambenek said. “This is a highly political case, and perception matters,” he said. “In this situation, they need to be building credibility.”

      Critics might now question if the FBI missed pieces of evidence in its investigation or if U.S. intelligence agencies rushed to blame Russia for the hack.

    • Fort Lauderdale shooting leaves ‘mutiple people’ dead, eight hospitalized: authorities

      As many as five people may have been killed and eight people wounded following a shooting by a reported lone gunman at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood Airport on Friday afternoon, according to law enforcement authorities, social media, and local and national media reports.

      The suspected gunman, who has not been identified, is in custody, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office. It confirmed via Twitter that “multiple people are dead” and that “eight people were injured and transported to an area hospital.”

      BSO officials said they received a call around 12:55 p.m. about shots fired at the airport. Airport officials tweeted that “there is an ongoing incident in Terminal 2, Baggage Claim,” but gave no other details.

    • The Ft. Lauderdale Airport Shooter And How TSA Dumbthink Makes Us Less Safe

      And then there’s the photo of him making that one-fingered salute that’s the sign of the tawhid — “the absolute unity of the godhead.”

      If we actually had real security — security that was meaningful in any way — the guy wouldn’t be running around with a gun…checking his gun in at the airport, no less.

      So, we have this expensive, huge bureaucracy, and people being put on the no-fly list because they have the same name as some terrorist, but nobody thinks to put any little notiepoo in the TSA files about a guy who’s reportedly hearing voices from ISIS?

      Think about that, the next time some repurposed mall food court worker is (screw probable cause!) batting at your balls or sticking her hand up your hoohoo.

    • Alleged Target of Drone Strike That Killed American Teenager Is Alive, According to State Department

      The U.S. State Department confirmed on January 5 that the man the U.S. government once claimed was the target of the drone strike that killed American teenager Abdulrahman Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen is alive. The department announced that it has designated Ibrahim al Banna “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) under Executive Order (E.O.) 13224.” The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to al Banna’s killing or capture.

      Al Banna’s name was floated by anonymous U.S. officials as the target of the October 14, 2011, drone strike that killed Awlaki, a 16-year-old U.S. citizen born in Colorado. Awlaki’s family insists he was having dinner with his teenage cousin and some others in Shebwah, Yemen, when they were killed in the strike. The Obama administration has never explained why Awlaki was killed, other than anonymous officials implying he was with a terror target at the time or that it was a lethal mistake. Awlaki’s estranged father, Anwar al Awlaki, was a radical pro-al Qaeda imam whose sermons influenced and inspired many terrorists in the English speaking world. The elder Awlaki, who was also a U.S. citizen, was an enigmatic figure who supported George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign, spoke at the Pentagon shortly after 9-11, and went on to become an important propaganda figure for the growing radical Islamist movement after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike two weeks before his son was killed.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • ‘Hannity’ Exclusive: Wikileaks’ Assange: Governments ‘Hate Transparency. They Loathe It’

      “We’re in the business of publishing information about power,” Assange said. “Why are we in the business of publishing information about power? Because people can do things with power, they can do very bad things with power. If they’re incompetent, they can do dangerous things. If they’re evil, they can do wicked things.”

    • WikiLeaks or US Intelligence?: CNBC journalist trolled for asking ‘who Americans believe’

      CNBC Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood, whose cosy relationship with the Clinton campaign was exposed in the Podesta Leaks, asked which source Americans believe regarding the hacking of the Democratic National Committee – WikiLeaks or US Intelligence.

      The Twitter poll comes as President-elect Donald Trump’s refusal to accept US Intelligence reports that claim Russia is behind the DNC hacking escalated tensions between the incoming and outgoing White House administrations.

    • Christmas tale from CIA, NSA and FBI: Elusive ‘Russian hacker’ is Putin
    • WikiLeaks Is What It Is Today Because Of U.S. Government And Media

      If a report from the United States intelligence community is to be believed and WikiLeaks knows the Kremlin used their organization to undermine a United States election, then the U.S. government and press bear some responsibility for the organization’s lack of concern about it.

      The U.S. government launched a grand jury investigation into the media organization and held the grand jury’s first session in 2011. According to a “Manhunting Timeline,” it encouraged Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries to file criminal charges against the organization’s editor-in-chief, Julian Assange.

      WikiLeaks’ most prominent and arguably important source in the organization’s history, Chelsea Manning, was abused by the Marines in pretrial confinement and zealously prosecuted by the U.S. military as if she were a spy, who aided al Qaida terrorists. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison for Espionage Act-related offenses. Her disclosures were motivated by whistleblowing and yet, as her legal team argues, she received “far and away the most severe sentence ever adjudged.”

      For the most part, U.S. establishment media outlets went along with the U.S. government’s commitment to criminalizing and isolating WikiLeaks. Even with the revelation of Google search warrants against WikiLeaks staff, editorial boards and journalists remained largely silent about an investigation that could have profound implications for freedom of the press, particularly now that someone like Trump will be president for the next four years.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • London breaches annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days

      London has breached its annual air pollution limits just five days into 2017, a “shameful reminder of the severity of London’s air pollution”, according to campaigners.

      By law, hourly levels of toxic nitrogen dioxide must not be more than 200 micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m3) more than 18 times in a whole year, but late on Thursday this limit was broken on Brixton Road in Lambeth.

      Many other sites across the capital will go on to break the annual limit and Putney High Street exceeded the hourly limit over 1,200 times in 2016. Oxford Street, Kings Road in Chelsea and the Strand are other known pollution hotspots.

      NO2 pollution, which is produced largely by diesel vehicles, causes 9,500 early deaths every year in London. Most air quality zones across the country break legal limits and the crisis was called a “public health emergency” by MPs in April. This week scientists said that one in 10 cases of Alzheimer’s in people living near busy roads could be linked to air pollution.

    • US energy analysis sees renewable electricity passing coal by 2030

      Yesterday, the US Energy Information Administration released its energy outlook for 2017. These annual reports provide projections of current energy trends out to 2040, and they provide policymakers with a sense of where the country could be decades from now, should things continue as they have been.

      Anyone who’s up on current trends wouldn’t be surprised by many of the EIA’s results. With coal’s continued decline, natural gas becomes the dominant source of energy in the US, followed by renewable generation. Most of the scenarios the report considers see the continued growth in US energy production far outstripping a sluggish growth in demand. This pattern will transform the country into a net exporter of energy by the 2030s.

      But EIA reports are notoriously conservative in their projections, and this can lead to completely unrealistic results. In the past, for example, the EIA’s projections didn’t foresee the radical drop in photovoltaic prices, and so the organization had solar playing little role in US energy markets. This year’s version is no exception, as it suggests installation of wind power in the US will essentially stop once tax incentives run out in the early 2020s.

    • Giant iceberg poised to break off from Antarctic shelf

      A thread of just 20km of ice is now preventing the 5,000 sq km mass from floating away, following the sudden expansion last month of a rift that has been steadily growing for more than a decade.

      The iceberg, which is positioned on the most northern major ice shelf in Antarctica, known as Larsen C, is predicted to be one of the largest 10 break-offs ever recorded.

    • The Stuff You Buy Is Destroying Animals Around the World

      There are certain products that everyone knows are directly destructive to wildlife. As such, most people and countries around the world generally try to avoid them. Using ivory for trinkets causes elephant slaughter; eating shark fins—you guessed it—is not good for sharks. But those are easy to give up, because a.) we don’t need any of them, and b.) they very blatantly come from certain wild animals.

      Much of the things we use in daily life, however, from iPhones, to jeans, to Ikea furniture, also have negative impacts on endangered wildlife around the globe. But how can you tell? In an attempt to answer that question, scientists from Norway and Japan used a global trade model to trace consumer demands around the world to threats on endangered wildlife. They’ve created a series of maps based on their findings that show the threat “hotspots” around the world and what countries are endangering them. The rationale is that if you know where in the supply chain you’re doing the most damage, you can take steps to alleviate it. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

    • Warmer Winters
    • Another pipeline through Indian land – this time in Mexico

      The Yaqui community is less that pleased about the Agua Prieta pipeline’s projected route, which goes straight through their territory. Things went from bad to worse on October 21, when the pipeline’s supporters attacked a group of protesters, killing one, wounding eight, and causing substantial property damage.

      The Yaqui tribe, which has endured a long history of repression, has also a history of resistance. Like other indigenous communities in Mexico, several members of the Yaqui tribe have lost their lives fighting against invasive private companies and non-indigenous authorities. Just two years ago, before the conflict over the Agua Prieta pipeline, the Yaquis protested against a large-scale aqueduct that would have diverted what was left of their sacred river to the city of Hermosillo.

    • Exxon predicts 25% rise in energy demand

      The world’s biggest oil conglomerate says it expects global energy demand to increase by a quarter in the next 23 years.

      ExxonMobil is the largest of the world’s big oil companies, the supermajors. Up to the end of 2016, Rex Tillerson, who has been nominated by US President-elect Donald Trump as his Secretary of State, was Exxon’s chairman and CEO.

      In this year’s annual Outlook for Energy, a look-ahead to 2040, Exxon says: “Over the next 25 years, growing economies and an expanding middle class will mean better living standards for billions, through increased access to better education and health care as well as new homes, appliances and cars. This means the world will need more energy, even with significant efficiency gains.”

      With world population expected to grow by 1.8 billion people to a total of 9bn by 2040, the company believes global energy demand will increase by 25% – and that India and China together will account for 45% of that increase.

  • Finance

    • Farmers could ‘reap a post-Brexit bonus when Britain leaves the EU’

      Farmers will reap a post-Brexit bonus as Britain is liberated from “over-bureaucratic” European Union rules on agriculture, according to a new report.

      It argued that departure from the bloc will enable the government to better target financial help at the farmers who need it most.

      The report from the Centre for PolicyStudies (CPS) said that Theresa May has a “strong hand” to deploy in Brexit negotiations because of the UK’s £16.7bn annual deficit in food and drink with the EU.

    • Finland Will Give 2000 Unemployed People $590 Every Month, No Strings Attached, Even After They Get A Job

      As that indicates, this isn’t a universal basic wage, since it’s aimed at just a few of those receiving unemployment benefit, and the money will replace existing financial support. On the other hand, it isn’t just some kind of creative accounting, because they will continue to receive the monthly sum even if they find work. There are already plans to roll it out more widely.

      As the Guardian notes, other parts of the world, including Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Scotland, are also looking to try out the idea. At a time when there are fears that automation may well reduce the total number of workers needed in industry, it’s great to see these experiments exploring an approach that could help to alleviate social problems arising from this shift.

    • Sir Ivan Rogers, UK’s ambassador to the EU quits

      Sir Ivan, the man who would play a main role in the negotiations with the EU during the UKs extraction has resigned, sending a 1400-word thank you letter to his staff setting out his problems with why he felt his position was untenable and the current Governments position with regards to leaving the EU.

    • Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank

      Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged The Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation.

      “It’s a decision my office made,” she said, in response to questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator.

      “We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • NYT Makes the Case for Trump Via Racialized Rural Mythology

      Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi wrote a piece last month (12/9/16) reporting that “major newspapers, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months.” Perhaps that explains why some of the Trump-sympathizing columns they do manage to turn up—like a piece that ran today in the Times (1/5/17)—leave a lot to be desired in terms of logic and accuracy.

      To be fair, the Times op-ed wasn’t written by a self-professed Trump fan, but by Robert Leonard, the news director for an Iowa country music station, who says, “I consider myself fairly liberal,” and confesses that he has “struggled to understand how these conservative friends and neighbors I respect—and at times admire—can think so differently from me.”

      [...]

      Voting for Trump, though, with the idea that he will do something about the hospitals-too-far-away problem would be childish. If op-ed pages can’t find writers who can make a grown-up case for Trump, perhaps they should be willing to allow the case to go unmade.

    • Speaker Paul Ryan, After Passing Regulatory Rollback, Parties With Lobbyists at Fundraiser

      Just hours after passing the very first bill of the new Congress on Wednesday — one designed to roll back a range of environmental and consumer regulations — House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., celebrated with a corporate lobbying firm at a fundraiser for his campaign committee.

      The vote on the Midnight Rules Relief Act of 2017 took place at 4:48 p.m. on Wednesday. The fundraiser, at the offices of the BGR Group, a major lobbying firm, started at 7 p.m.

      The bill would amend existing law to allow Congress to repeal en masse multiple regulations finalized since the end of May last year. The law is believed to be aimed at rolling back a rule designed to deter mining companies from polluting drinking water sources, rules designed to curb hazardous methane emissions from fracking sites, and a rule that extends the threshold for overtime pay to workers, among others.

    • Clinton quite effective at discrediting herself’ Ex-CIA analyst blasts hacking claims

      Larry C Johnson branded the newly declassified US intelligence report “as a farce and a charade”, adding Russian attempts to discredit the Democrat candidate Hilary Clinton were unnecessary because “she was quite effective at it herself”.

      On Friday, intelligence officials published their findings into alleged Russian hacking during November’s US election.

      The report claimed the Russian president personally ordered an online campaign to influence the outcome of the ballot in Trump’s favour.

      It said Mr Putin’s goal was to undermine the democratic process and denigrate Mrs Clinton, by using intermediaries such as DCLeaks.com, Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks to publicly expose private emails acquired from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and top level Democrats.

    • Trump Already Demanding Leak Investigation and He’s Not Even President Yet

      President-elect Donald Trump isn’t waiting until his inauguration to push for investigations of leaks to the press — an indication that he’ll emulate and possibly surpass President Obama’s practice of criminalizing disclosures to the media.

    • Underwhelming Intel Report Shows Need for Congressional Investigation of DNC Hack

      After President Obama and Donald Trump were briefed on a classified report explaining the United States Intelligence Community’s belief that Russia hacked the Democratic Party, the public has received its own, declassified version. Unfortunately for us, it appears virtually anything new and interesting was removed in the redaction process, leaving us without the conclusive, technical evidence we were hoping for — and that the American people are owed. Failing a last minute change of heart, the next best (and perhaps last) hope for the government to show us its work would be a formal, bipartisan probe.

    • Conservatives Plot Their Course on the Rising ‘Sea of Red’ in State Capitals

      The American Legislative Exchange Council — a nonprofit better known as ALEC — briefed its members and allied groups on the bright future for its agenda now that Republicans will effectively control 68 of the nation’s 99 state legislative bodies, as well as 33 governor’s mansions. Among other things, group members said they would push bills to reduce corporate taxes, weaken unions, privatize schooling and influence the ideological debate on college campuses.

    • Glenn Greenwald: Democrats Eager to Blame “Everybody But Themselves” for Collapse of Their Party

      As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifies at a Senate hearing on Russian cyberthreats ahead of a highly classified briefing today with President-elect Donald Trump, we speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has faced an onslaught of criticism for questioning the premise of Russian hacking of the U.S. election. “Because Democrats are so desperate to put the blame on everybody but themselves for the complete collapse of their party, they’re particularly furious at anybody who vocally challenges this narrative,” Greenwald says. “And since I’ve been one of the people most vocally doing so, the smear campaign has been like none that I have ever encountered. I have been accused of being a member of the alt-right, of being an admirer of Breitbart, of being supportive of Donald Trump, of helping him get elected and, of course, of being a Kremlin operative.”

    • Facebook’s New Head of News Partnerships, Campbell Brown, Has Deep Ties to Trump Nominee

      Facebook announced Friday that former CNN host and education reform activist Campbell Brown will be leading its news partnership team.

      Brown wrote in a statement on her Facebook page that she will “help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook. I will be working directly with our partners to help them understand how Facebook can expand the reach of their journalism, and contribute value to their businesses.”

      Brown’s hiring should raise eyebrows given her close ties to Betsy DeVos, the president-elect’s nominee to lead the Education Department. DeVos is a Michigan-based billionaire heiress who has poured millions of dollars into organizations supporting school vouchers and charter schools.

    • Donald Trump Demonstrating How Much Of Our Political System Is Based On Tradition & Custom, Not Rules

      And… that’s really quite interesting, because of how little many people — especially policy experts — have really stopped to consider how much of the way we do things is based on custom, and not actual rules. There are two ways of looking at this. First, there absolutely are serious problems with “the way things have always been done.” So there’s potential value in having someone who doesn’t feel hamstrung by traditions and customs that might not make sense. But, the flip side of that is that there are often really good reasons for the way many of these things are done. And, so far, the customs and traditions that Trump has been indicating he’ll ignore, are ones that do seem to be based on solid reasoning, rather than just silly legacy reasons. Intelligence reports, secret service protection, and anti-nepotism rules make sense.

    • The Internet Archive is building up a Trump presidential library — of everything he’s ever said, on video

      The Internet Archive launched Thursday a huge Trump Archive dedicated to housing videos of everything Trump’s said on video: in everything from broadcast speeches, debates, interviews, and newscasts about the President-elect. The archive currently contains more than 700 videos — that’s more than 520 hours of Trump — compiled by way of the TV News Archive, the Internet Archive’s broadcast tracking resource, and currently dates back to December 2009 (Trump formally announced his candidacy June of 2015).

    • Ignoring anti-Trumpers: Why we can expect media blackout of protests against Trump’s inauguration

      On Jan. 20 — 16 years ago — thousands of protesters lined the inauguration parade route of the incoming Republican president. “Not my president,” they chanted. But despite the enormity of the rally, it was largely ignored. Instead, pundits marveled over how George W. Bush “filled out the suit” and confirmed authority.

      “The inauguration of George W. Bush was certainly a spectacle on Inauguration Day,” marvels Robin Andersen, the director of Peace and Justice studies at Fordham University, in the 2001 short documentary “Not My President: Voices From the Counter Coup.”

      It’s nearly impossible not to anticipate the eerie parallels between George W. Bush’s inauguration and that of Donald Trump.

    • Drunk tweets? Foul-mouthed Vicente Fox challenges Trump, ‘I’m not paying for that f**kin’ wall’

      Fox tweeted: “I am not paying for that f*cken wall. Be clear with US taxpayers. They will pay for it.”

    • Betraying Campaign Promise, Trump Now Says US Taxpayers Will Pay for Wall

      Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), congressional liaison for the Trump transition team, doubled down on Trump’s position in comments to CNN: “When you understand that Mexico’s economy is dependent upon U.S. consumers, Donald Trump has all the cards he needs to play,” Collins said. “On the trade negotiation side, I don’t think it’s that difficult for Donald Trump to convince Mexico that it’s in their best interest to reimburse us for building the wall.”

      However, Mexico’s president has vociferously and repeatedly said that the country will not pay for Trump’s promised wall. “We’re not going to pay for that fucking wall,” former president Vicente Fox added last March, as Common Dreams reported.

    • ‘US intel community lost professional discipline’: Ex-NSA tech director on ‘Russia hacking’ report

      The undisguised and clearly politically motivated report on the alleged 2016 US “election hack” displays a severe lack of “professional discipline” in the intelligence community, former NSA technical director and whistleblower William Edward Binney told RT.

    • Poor People, Don’t You Know You Have Jobs?

      It’s not Trump you have to worry about. You’re thinking short-term.

      As people struggle to find third-parties to blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat (pick one or more: Putin, Bernie Bros, Comey, The Media, Electoral Collegians, the Racist/Misogynist Hordes), an amorphous group has emerged as a popular domestic target: stupid poor white people who do not understand how much better they have had it over the last eight years.

      These slack-jawed yokels just can’t seem to grasp that they have great jobs in a growing economy. The numbers prove it: the U.S stock market is at record highs and unemployment at its lowest level since the Great Recession.

    • Circus of Liars: How Trump & GOP are Twisted into Pretzels over Putin Hack

      The US NSA hacked the whole world for many years until Ed Snowden blew the whistle on them.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Court Says 791 Days Of Warrantless Location Tracking ‘Unreasonable,” But Refuses To Toss Evidence

      A confusing and disturbing conclusion has been reached by a New York federal court. The court has decided that 791 days of location tracking with a GPS ankle bracelet is unreasonable, but somehow not worthy of evidence suppression. (via FourthAmendment.com)

      Kemal Lambus — the defendant challenging the evidence — was granted parole, but with certain conditions. One of those was imposed a few months after his release: wearing an ankle bracelet to ensure he abided by his curfew. This was in addition to the normal amount of diminished privacy afforded parolees, which includes any number of warrantless searches by parole officers.

    • Michael Rogers: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

      Another reason that Rogers has drawn criticism is that he failed to prevent further security breaches in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.

      In August 2016, for example, the FBI arrested an NSA contractor named Harold T. Martin III who they believed had stolen and disclosed 50 terabytes of data, according to The New York Times.

    • NSA seeks pay bump for its ‘high-end, exquisite civilian talent’ [Ed: due to brain drain]

      NSA Director Michael Rogers recently authorized the introduction of a specially tailored compensation package for the spy agency’s “high-end” cybersecurity workers.

    • Belgium Wants EU Nations To Collect And Store Personal Data Of Train, Bus And Boat Passengers

      It’s become pretty common for the authorities to collect personal information about passengers from airlines, supposedly to ensure security. It’s a sensitive area, though, as shown by the many years of fraught US-EU negotiations that were required in order to come up with a legal framework for transferring this data to the US when EU citizens were involved. However, not all EU countries are so concerned about that privacy thing. Belgium, for example, thinks that the current approach doesn’t go far enough, and that it should be extended to include all forms of mass transport. As this EurActiv article notes, the Belgian parliament has already voted to bring in a national system for trains, buses and boats by May 2018, and the country is calling for the rest of the EU to follow suit…

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • FBI Dismisses Child Porn Prosecution After Refusing To Hand Over Details On Its Hacking Tool

      The FBI has decided to let one of its Playpen defendants walk rather than turn over information on its Network Investigative Technique. The NIT, deployed all over the world on the back of a single warrant obtained in Virginia, unmasked Tor users by dropping code on Playpen visitors’ computers that sent back IP addresses and other information about the user’s computer.

      The warrant itself has been ruled invalid by a number of judges presiding over Playpen prosecutions, although not all of them have determined that the evidence obtained by the NIT should be suppressed. The FBI not only sent malware to site visitors, but it also ran (and possibly improved) the child porn website for two weeks while pursuing its investigation.

      Michaud’s lawyer asked the court to force the FBI to hand over information on the NIT. The FBI countered, saying it wouldn’t turn over the information even if ordered to do so. Judge Bryan, after an in camera session with the agency, agreed with the government that there was a law enforcement need to keep the details of the tool secret. But he also made it clear the government couldn’t have both its secrecy and its evidence. He ordered all evidence suppressed.

    • Judge Tells DOJ It Can’t Un-Suppress Evidence By Starting The Indictment Process All Over Again

      Sure, we like the DOJ when it’s handing down scathing reviews of local law enforcement agencies and belatedly issuing warrant requirements for IMSI catchers, but we’re not nearly as thrilled when it argues against warrant requirements for cell phone searches, demands backdoors in phone encryption, or beats mild miscreants over the head with the CFAA.

      In fact, there’s very little to like about the DOJ outside of its civil rights division. Here’s yet another reason why the Department of Justice often seems like a misnomer. (h/t Brad Heath)

      A decision [PDF] has been handed down by a federal court in Puerto Rico, presumably with an eyeroll and an exasperated sigh.

      In 2014, Homeland Security agents searched Jose Silva-Rentas without reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or a warrant. Silva happened to be next to somebody HSI agents did search with probable cause. Rentas moved to suppress the evidence and the court agreed that the government’s theory of probable cause osmosis wasn’t enough to salvage the search.

    • Jenna Jameson, newly Jewish, launches anti-Islam rant: ‘I don’t care about your false prophet’

      Jenna Jameson launched into an anti-Islam rant on Twitter this week, slamming the religion as one that “promotes child rape, female genital mutilation, butchering non believers and polygamy.”

      The former porn legend, who converted to Judaism last year ahead of her upcoming marriage to Israeli boyfriend Lior Bitton, spent the better part of the week defending her attacks against Islam and “spending all [her] free time” watching YouTube videos about the Quran by Christian apologist David Wood.

    • Briton ‘jailed for adultery in Bahrain’ released from prison

      A British woman jailed in Bahrain after being accused of adultery has been released amid a fundraising appeal by her mother to bring her home.

      Hannah James, said to originally be from Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, moved to the country with husband Jassim Alhaddar and their young son, but her mother, Shelley James, claims she was a victim of domestic abuse and wanted to leave Bahrain.

    • Six essays on media, technology and politics from Data & Society

      danah boyd writes, “Yesterday, a group of us at Data & Society put out six essays on ‘media, technology, politics.’ Taken together, these pieces address different facets of the current public conversation surrounding propaganda, hate speech, and the US election. Although we only allude to specifics, we have been witnessing mis/disinformation campaigns for quite some time as different networks seek to manipulate both old and new media, shape political discourse, and undermine trust in institutions and information intermediaries. In short, we are concerned about the rise of a new form of propaganda that is networked, decentralized, and internet-savvy. We are also concerned about the ongoing development of harassment techniques and gaslighting, the vulnerability of old and new media to propagate fear and disinformation, and the various ways in which well-intended interventions get misappropriated. We believe that we’re watching a systematic attack on democracy, equality, and freedom. There is no silver bullet to address the issues we’re seeing. Instead, a healthy response is going to require engagement by many different constituencies. We see our role in this as to help inform and ground the conversation. These essays are our first attempt to address the interwoven issues we’re seeing.

    • Obama Picks Up the Pace on Commutations, But Pardon Changes Still in Limbo

      Near the start of his second term, President Obama had granted clemency at a lower rate than any president in recent history. He had pardoned 39 people and denied 1,333 requests. He had used his power to commute a prisoner’s sentence just once.

      But as Obama enters the final days of his administration, he has dramatically picked up the pace. He’s now issued commutations to 1,176 people since entering office — more than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan put together. In December, Obama commuted the sentences of 231 people in a single day.

      Much of Obama’s increased activity can be attributed to an initiative begun in 2014 to shorten sentences of non-violent offenders who would likely have received less time for their crimes under current law and who had already served at least 10 years of their prison sentences. Low-level drug offenders have received most of the commutations, part of a broader push by the administration to reform sentencing guidelines.

    • Alleged Chicago Assault Reignites Issue of Hate Crimes Against Whites

      The meaning and enforcement of the Illinois hate-crimes statute seems destined for intense scrutiny with the arrest this week of four young black adults in Chicago in connection with the assault of a mentally disabled white man. The arrests by the Chicago Police Department resulted in part from what appeared to a livestreamed video of the disabled man being abused while bound and gagged. The recording captures one or more of the attackers making references to Donald Trump and white people.

    • Ellen Schrecker on the New McCarthyism

      This week on CounterSpin: The “what could possibly go wrong?” meme might be overused, but it’s hard not to think it, watching the government create new tools and powers for countering “disinformation” that will be handed to a president-elect who calls journalists “the lowest form of life.” Donald Trump didn’t create the present terrain, however, and pretending that fearmongering and watchlists and looking the other way are all newly minted will not serve us. In fact, we can look to history to help us understand what’s happening, and what we can do to resist it.

    • Signs Look Grim for Media Picking the Side of Liberty and Dissent

      This is a kind of “which side are you on?” moment for journalists. Will they defend the rights and liberties of the many communities under threat—Muslims, women, those reliant on government assistance? Will they keep alive a space for dissent and critical questioning in the face of a White House that declares itself indifferent to rules about conflicts of interest, among many other things, and that threatens revenge on those it calls “enemies”?

      [...]

      USA Today solved the problem, we’re told, by getting Trump and Pence themselves to write for them. Maybe the New York Times will adopt that strategy, given its editor’s statement that his paper “could have done better.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Canadian Regulators Declare 50 Mbps To Be The New Broadband Standard

      A few years back, the FCC here in the States bumped the base definition of broadband from 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream, to 25 Mbps downstream, 4 Mbps upstream. This was done in large part to highlight the lack of competition (two-thirds lack access to speeds of 25 Mbps from more than one provider) at faster speeds, largely thanks to telcos that no longer really want to be in the residential broadband business and are refusing to upgrade their networks at any scale. Needless to say, neither ISPs — nor the politicians paid to love them — were happy with the new standard.

      Recently the Canadian government took things further, announcing new rules that make 50 Mbps downstream, 10 Mbps upstream the new industry standard. In addition to declaring that this 50 Mbps option should be considered “basic telecom service” moving forward, the CRTC announced that it’s requiring that Canadian ISPs at least offer users the ability to purchase an uncapped, unlimited broadband connection.

    • Utterly Tone Deaf To Cord Cutting, Cable Contract Feuds And Blackouts Skyrocket

      We’ve noted for years that as broadcasters and cable companies bicker over new programming contracts, already-annoyed customers are left in a lurch. Usually these feuds go something like this: a broadcaster demands a huge rate increase for the exact same content. The cable company balks, and the content is usually pulled out of the cable lineup. Customers aren’t given any sort of refund for this missing content, they’re just inundated with PR pitches from both sides trying to get them pissed at the other guy. Ultimately a new, confidential contract is struck, and the rate hikes are then passed on to the consumer.

      In short, consumers are repeatedly punished with blackouts and petty PR bitching between companies incapable of responsibly signing new contracts, after which they get a lovely new price hike. It’s no wonder that 2016 was a record year for cord cutting.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • UN Establishes Technology Bank For Least-Developed Countries, Including An IP Bank [Ed: poor countries don’t need “IP”]

      The United Nations has established a “technology bank” for least-developed countries that aims to strengthen the science, technology and innovation capacity of LDCs that includes better management of intellectual property rights.

    • Trademarks

      • Bushy’s Brewery, Isle Of Man Govt. Have Trademark Hissy Fit Over Two Letters: TT

        If there is one lesson you take away from writing about trademark law and disputes, it’s how simple it would be to avoid a massive percentage of the conflicts by holding trademark applications to a far higher standard then they often are. If the world’s many trademark offices kept in mind that the entire point of this form of intellectual property is supposed to be keeping the public confident in their ability to determine the source of a given product or service by its trademarked branding, then it would be obvious that approved trademarks should be unique and distinct.

        As a counterexample to that line of thinking, consider the current dispute going on between Bushy’s Brewery, located on the Isle of Man, and the Manx government, all over the government’s trademark for exactly two letters: TT.

    • Copyrights

      • FACT Lawyer Reveals Challenges of Kodi Box Seller Prosecutions

        A lawyer who has worked on piracy cases for the Federation Against Copyright Theft has revealed the challenges posed by Kodi and IPTV box prosecutions. Ari Alabhai says that copyright can be complicated for a jury to understand, so prosecutions under the Fraud Act may be preferred. Even that has its complications, however.

      • Pirates across Europe… What can we expect in 2017?

        There are good reasons to keep an eye on the performance of the Pirates across Europe – as we know from the Icelandic experiance, strong showings in other countries can help support the UK Pirate Party as it brings knowledge of Pirate Politics to new people. There are also opportunities to ‘Pirate’ each others ideas and bring the best of what works in campaigns to the UK.

      • Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government

        The Pirate party, whose platform includes direct democracy, greater government transparency, a new national constitution and asylum for US whistleblower Edward Snowden, will field candidates in every constituency and has been at or near the top of every opinion poll for over a year.

        As befits a movement dedicated to reinventing democracy through new technology, it also aims to boost the youth vote by persuading the company developing Pokémon Go in Iceland to turn polling stations into Pokéstops.

        “It’s gradually dawning on us, what’s happening,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir, leader of the Pirates’ parliamentary group, told the Guardian. “It’s strange and very exciting. But we are well prepared now. This is about change driven not by fear but by courage and hope. We are popular, not populist.”

        The election, likely to be held on 29 October, follows the resignation of Iceland’s former prime minister Sigmundur Davið Gunnlaugsson, who became the first major victim of the Panama Papers in April after the leaked legal documents revealed he had millions of pounds of family money offshore.

01.06.17

Links 6/1/2017: Irssi 1.0.0, KaOS 2017.01 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • There’s a Linux-powered car in your future

    Linux is everywhere. And, I mean everywhere. You name it, home electronics, smartphones, and, of course, computers. But, one place you probably didn’t think of Linux living is sitting in your driveway right now: Your car.

  • Watercooler won’t dispense until it finishes updating Windows

    Intel Director of Incident Response Jackie Stokes has captured the entirety of 2017 in a single image: a watercooler that won’t dispense water until it has installed a Windows upgrade (caption: “I just wanted some water…”).

  • Well, It’s One For The Money, Two For The Show….

    I was already a Linux user. My business and my home computers were both running Linux. So why did I bother to deploy these 15 XP machines? I did so on the advice of someone I respect greatly, and still do. His argument was, since the world ran on Microsoft Windows, I would be doing these kids a great disservice by putting Linux on their computers. They would have to fight with teachers and other students because the various formats and applications within Linux would not meld in with the Windows World.

    [...]

    What is important to know is that the computers which are being given to Reglue Kids today are powered by the sheer will of a Global Community. The Linux and Open Source Communities drive these machines. The machines that will guide today’s kids into tomorrow’s Chemical, nuclear and aerospace engineering and physics positions. These kids will bring back the Thorium-based nuclear power plants. They will not only fuel our nation’s energy needs at a fraction of today’s cost, they will push us farther out into space, and at speeds that seem almost impossible today.

  • Desktop

    • Samsung’s new Chromebooks are Google’s answer to the iPad Pro and Surface Pro

      Following months of leaks, Samsung is today making its latest Chromebook official. The new computer is actually two models — the Chromebook Plus and Chromebook Pro — and is the first one built from the ground up with support for Android apps. It’s also the first Chromebook to come with a stylus and support on-screen inking. The Chromebook Plus will be available starting this February for $449; the virtually-identical-save-for-a-different-processor Chromebook Pro will arrive later this year for a to-be-determined-but-definitely-higher price.

  • Server

    • Understanding Open vSwitch, an OpenStack SDN component

      Open vSwitch is an open-source project that allows hypervisors to virtualize the networking layer. This caters for the large number of virtual machines running on one or more physical nodes. The virtual machines connect to virtual ports on virtual bridges (inside the virtualized network layer.)

      This is very similar to a physical server connecting to physical ports on a Layer 2 networking switch. These virtual bridges then allow the virtual machines to communicate with each other on the same physical node. These bridges also connect these virtual machines to the physical network for communication outside the hypervisor node.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • KaOS 2017.01

        Starting the New Year with a fresh new look. All parts of the Midna artwork have been updated, most notably a new sddm theme that uses a layered QML model. This makes selecting between the default regular Plasma session or optional Wayland much clearer. New is also a move to a right vertical panel as default.

        As always with this rolling distribution, you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.29.0, Plasma 5.8.5, KDE Applications 16.12.0 & not yet released ports of KDE Applications. All built on Qt 5.7.1.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Not a OpenMandriva Review, Integrated Steam, Endless Linux PCs

        Neil Rickert today shared his experiences with OpenMandriva Lx 3.01 leading to another account indicating 3.01 wasn’t quite soup yet. Elsewhere, Rajat Kabade reported that “Intel is all set to integrate Steam into its Clear Linux to make the existing gaming experience even better.” Endless Computers is bringing its Mission One and Mini Linux boxes to the US market and Michael Larabel reported today on the latest on DRM moving to user space.

      • OpenMandriva Lx 3.01 — not really a review

        Hmm, I have been neglecting this blog. It’s time to catch up. I’ve still been doing stuff, but have not recently blogged about it.

        There’s not much to report here, so this will be a short post.

        I saw the recent announcement from the OpenMandriva folk, and thought that I would give it a try. According to the announcement, this release comes with Plasma 5 with Wayland support.

    • Arch Family

      • Arch Linux 2017.01.01 Released, ISO Files And Torrents Available For Download

        Thanks to the hard-working Arch Linux developers, the first Arch Linux ISO images of 2017 are available for download. The latest release, i.e., Arch Linux 2017.01.01, is powered by Linux kernel 4.8.13. While the first time users can grab the ISO images and torrents from Arch’s website, the existing users can update their systems using `pacman -Syu.’

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian vs. Ubuntu

        For the last four years, Debian and Ubuntu have been in the top three Linux distributions on Distrowatch. Since 2005, neither has been out of the top six. But which Linux distro is right for you? You can’t go seriously wrong either way, but a useful answer depends upon what you want in a distribution.

        You may have heard that Debian is a distribution for experts, and Ubuntu for beginners. That is true, so far as it goes. However, that distinction is more historic than contemporary.

        It is true that after Ubuntu burst on to the scene in late 2004, it spent several years making the desktop easier to use, especially for non-English speakers. However, thanks to free licenses, Ubuntu’s improvements have spread to most desktop environments.

        Moreover, Ubuntu’s days of interface innovations are largely in the past. Today, Ubuntu development is focused largely on convergence — the development of its Unity desktop into a common interface for phones, tablets, and desktops. But since Ubuntu phones and tablets have limited availability, convergence is largely irrelevant to many users. Similarly, Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, seems more focused on its successful OpenStack division than on desktop development.

      • Derivatives

        • Debian-Based BlankOn 10.0 Released for Indonesian Linux Users After Three Years

          Today, January 5, 2017, Ahmad Haris, the release manager of BlankOn, a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution developed by and for the Indonesian Linux community, proudly announced the release of BlankOn Linux 10.0.

          Dubbed “Tambora,” BlankOn Linux 10.0 is here in its final, production-ready state approximately three years after the February 2014 release of BlankOn 9.0. As expected, there are numerous improvements, but the biggest new feature of BlankOn 10.0 is the in-house built Manokwari desktop environment, which is based on the GNOME 3 shell.

        • BlankOn 10.0 Tambora released

          Some time ago developers behind BlankOn Linux team released a new version 10.0 codenamed Tambora. BlankOn is based on Debian and originated in Indonesia. This is the tenth release of BlankOn which includes lots of changes and improvements.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Clarifies Ubuntu Phone State: Nothing Really Until Snap-Based Image Ready

            For those that shared your hopes for Ubuntu Phones in 2017, some of you were right: those that guessed nothing or very little. There isn’t going to be any new Ubuntu Phone releases or major OTA updates until there is a Snap-based image down the road.

            From all the frustrated Ubuntu Phone users begging for answers on the Ubuntu-Phone mailing list, Canonical’s Pat McGowan has responded to some of the comments.

            Pat shares that the Click-based Ubuntu Phone images are indeed on the way out, there will be no new Ubuntu Phone models until there is a “Snap image”, and they don’t plan to do an OTA-15 feature release. Canonical doesn’t plan to land any new features to the current stable PPA, but they will be providing security updates for important components.

          • Canonical Clarifies the Current State of Ubuntu Phones and Ubuntu Touch Updates

            In December 2016, a bunch of worried folks using various Ubuntu-based devices started an “Ubuntu Crickets” riot to force Canonical to reveal its upcoming plans for new Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Touch models/versions.

            It didn’t take long, and Canonical’s Pat McGowan joined the discussion earlier to inform the concerned community about general progress. Long story short, as many have already guessed, it would appear that there are no plans for an OTA-15 update of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, for now.

            “We do not plan to land any features to the current stable PPA, although we will provide security updates as they are available for example for the webrowser/oxide,” said Pat McGowan in the mailing list statement, where he also confirmed the fact that there won’t be any new Ubuntu Phone models released until there’s a Snap image.

          • No New Ubuntu Phones on the Horizon, And No Major Updates for Existing Ones, Either

            If you were hoping to see a new Ubuntu phone released sometime soon, we’ve some bad news for you.

            And if you already own an Ubuntu phone and were hoping to see a new update released soon, we’ve some bad news for you too.

            Bad news for everybody, it seems — or is there some silver lining in the grey clouds casting over the project?

          • uNav 0.64 Turn-by-Turn GPS Navigation App Now Available for Ubuntu Phones

            Marcos Costales, the developer of the very popular uNav map viewer and turn-by-turn GPS navigator for Ubuntu Phone devices, released a new version of his application, uNav 0.64.

            uNav 0.64 comes four months after version 0.63, which was a minor update improving the simulator, adding support for skipping confirmation of routes, rounding off the distance to the nearest turn in guidance mode, fixing the ‘¿¿¿’ string in POI names, adding CartoDB layers, as well as a bash script to generate translations.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 18.1 Xfce Edition Enters Beta, Based on Ubuntu 16.04 and Xfce 4.12

              A few moments ago, the Linux Mint team happily announced the release and general availability of the Beta milestone of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Xfce operating system for personal computers.

            • Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ Xfce Edition Beta operating system available for download

              Another day, and yet another version of Linux Mint with a different desktop environment. The operating system uses Mate and Cinnamon environments by default, but also offers KDE and Xfce editions as well.

              While some people — such as yours truly — think the project should redirect its focus by supporting fewer desktop environments, that apparently won’t be happening any time soon. Case in point, today, Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ Xfce Edition reaches Beta status. Will you download it?

            • Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 Daily Builds Are Now Available to Download, Screenshot Tour

              The Ubuntu Budgie devs are back from the Christmas and New Year’s break with a vengeance, and they’ve just announced the availability of daily build ISO images for the upcoming Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system.

              At the end of 2016, they promised us that we’d be able to get our hands on the daily build ISO images of Ubuntu Budgie 17.04, and here they are, available for download as we speak for 64- and 32-bit hardware architectures from Canonical’s download servers, along with all the other official flavors.

              For your viewing pleasure, and ours, we downloaded the latest 64-bit Live ISO image to make a quick screenshot tour of the distribution, which is built around the lightweight Budgie desktop environment developed by the Solus Project (yes, the people behind the popular Solus distro).

            • Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 to Be Based on the GNOME 3.22 Stack, Now Ships Linux 4.9

              While the first Alpha development release of the upcoming Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system was skipped, we’d like to tell you a little bit about what you should expect from the next Alpha build.

              First things first, we recommend reading our initial report if you want to familiarize yourself with the new or upcoming features of Ubuntu 17.04, but in this article we’d like to tell you all about the Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 flavor, which is now proudly based on the GNOME 3.22 Stack.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Five Ways Open Source Software Can Benefit MSPs

    You know open source software, like Linux, is popular with geeks and enterprises. But do you know how it can help your managed services business? Here are five ways open source benefits MSPs.

    For the uninitiated, here’s a quick definition of open source: Open source software means programs whose source code is freely shared and can be viewed by anyone. Access to source code facilitates modification of the programs and provides users with other freedoms not available from closed-source software.

  • New in Open Source: Python-to-Go, Atom in Orbit, DeepMind Lab, More
  • Google, FCA Test-Drive New Open Source Infotainment System

    Google and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles this week showcased a new in-auto infotainment platform at CES in Las Vegas. The open source system combines Uconnect with Android Auto.

    The companies demonstrated their concept design inside a Chrysler 300 sedan at the show. The new system is built around Android 7.0, or Nougat, and an 8.4-inch Uconnect system.

    The integration of Android and Uconnect enables a system built for connectivity and compatibility with the universe of popular Android applications. The demo highlighted integration with Google Assistant, Google Maps, and popular Android apps including Pandora, Spotify, NPR One and Pocket Casts.

  • Apache Geode Spawns ‘All Sorts of In-Memory Things’

    Apache Geode is kind of like the six blind men describing an elephant. It’s all in how you use it, Nitin Lamba, product manager at Ampool, told a meetup group earlier this year.

    Geode is a distributed, in-memory compute and data-management platform that elastically scales to provide high throughput and low latency for big data applications. It pools memory, CPU, and network resources — with the option to also use local disk storage — across multiple processes to manage application objects and behavior.

  • Google’s Python Runtime Environment Goes Open Source

    Lots of organizations run Python code, but few run as much of it as Google does. The company runs millions of lines of Python code. The front-end server that drives youtube.com and YouTube’s APIs is primarily written in Python, and it serves millions of requests per second, according to Google engineers.

    Now, the company has open sourced Grumpy, the Python runtime environment for Go that was developed in-house to improve the performance of YouTube.

  • Voxeliens, a game I covered back in 2012 has gone open source

    The source is under the MIT license and hosted on bitbucket. The developers say it may be difficult to compile on Linux, as it was originally a commercial game and they haven’t really put much effort into compiling it on other platforms.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Developer Edition for Flatpak

        Our team maintains Firefox RPMs for Fedora and RHEL and a lot of people have been asking us to provide Firefox for Flatpak as well. I’m finally happy to announce Firefox Developer Edition for Flatpak.

      • Firefox Developer Edition Now Available as a Flatpak for Fedora 25, Ubuntu 16.10

        Red Hat’s desktop engineering manager Jiří Eischmann proudly announced today, January 5, 2017, the general availability of Mozilla’s Firefox Developer Edition web browser as a Flatpak package for various Linux distros supporting the technology.

      • Firefox Developer Edition Gets Flatpak’d

        Some great news for fans of distro-agnostic app distribution: Firefox Developer Edition is now available to install as a Flatpak! Yup, the dev-friendly flavour of the venerable open-source browser is available to install messing around with installers, RPMs or unpacking zip files to double-click on binaries tucked up inside.

      • Living Inside the Computer: Building Responsible IoT

        Today, we live online. The Internet intersects with everything from commerce and journalism to art and civic participation.

        But more and more, living online doesn’t mean sitting in front of a screen, mouse in hand. The Internet of Things — the networked computing environment that spans the globe — allows the web to permeate our clothes, our homes, our healthcare. The web is now made up of billions of connected devices and zettabytes of data. It’s pervasive.

        [...]

        What do we do? Philanthropies like Mozilla, Ford, Knight, MacArthur and Open Society are on the front lines of building a better Internet. And IoT will be the first big battle of 2017. In our paper, we share six guiding principles for better IoT. We’re also planning research, grantmaking and salons to further chart the future. And NetGain is seeking more technologists, activists and entrepreneurs for the movement.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Kubernetes tool saves eBay from its OpenStack woes

      Ebay’s work with OpenStack has yielded fruit: A new container administration tool that makes better use of Docker and Kubernetes.

      This is yet another thumbs-up for containers finding a place as as useful units of work within an organization, and for Kubernetes managing those workloads. But it’s also a sign that even the biggest and most engineer-heavy IT organizations that can bend OpenStack to their will are favoring other solutions out of developer convenience.

    • Open Source, Big Data, and the Governance Challenge

      Recently, John Schroeder, executive chairman and founder of MapR Technologies, Inc., one of the top players in the Big Data arena, was kind enough to give us his predictions on open source anb Big Data topics for 2017. He noted the following: “In 2017, the governance vs. data value tug of war will be front and center.”

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Richard Stallman: Goodbye to GNU Libreboot

      When Leah Rowe decided last year she wanted to withdraw Libreboot from being a GNU project, there was the ability for GNU to keep the project and appoint a new maintainer. There was a lot of fighting and rumors about what actually happened, but now Richard Stallman has written an email saying they are indeed going to drop Libreboot from the project.

    • Goodbye to GNU Libreboot

      When a program becomes a GNU package, in principle that relationship is permanent. The program’s maintainers undertake the responsibility to develop it on behalf of the GNU Project. Usually the initial maintainers are the developers that brought it into the GNU Project.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Open-source plant database confirms top US bioenergy crop

        Scientists have confirmed that Miscanthus, long speculated to be the top biofuel producer, yields more than twice as much as switchgrass in the U.S. using an open-source bioenergy crop database gaining traction in plant science, climate change, and ecology research.

        “To understand yield trends and variation across the country for our major food crops, extensive databases are available—notably those provided by the USDA Statistical Service,” said lead author Stephen Long, Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. “But there was nowhere to go if you wanted to know about biomass crops, particularly those that have no food value such as Miscanthus, switchgrass, willow trees, etc.”

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Pow! Renault Creates Twizy-Based Open-Source POM (It’s a Car, Sort Of)

        Renault is claiming that it has created the “world’s first open-source mass-market vehicle.” That sort of stretches the definition of mass market—the car, named POM (for Platform Open Mind), is based on the not-for-the-U.S. Twizy ultracompact EV—but the more pressing question is what Renault means when it calls this vehicle open source.

        Turns out the vehicle itself, which Renault introduced at the CES technology show, is not open source, but the software it runs on is. Renault partnered with software specialist OSVehicle and processor maker ARM to crack open the POM’s operating system and will offer the car to “startups, independent laboratories, private customers, and researchers.” The move allows “third parties to copy and modify existing software to create a totally customizable electric vehicle.” Sounds to us like any vehicle could be made to be open source—just take all the security measures off the software and declare it so! But maybe it’s not that simple.

      • Hands On With The First Open Source Microcontroller

        2016 was a great year for Open Hardware. The Open Source Hardware Association released their certification program, and late in the year, a few silicon wizards met in Mountain View to show off the latest happenings in the RISC-V instruction set architecture.

  • Programming/Development

    • Using Clang-format to ensure clean, consistent code

      Too often programmers underestimate the importance a consistent coding style can have on the success of a project. It makes the code base easier to read, reduces nonfunctional changes to fix inconsistent style, and outlines expectations for code submissions. Most large projects have a coding style, and once you have been working on code for a while you come to appreciate the consistency of a style. Some examples of specified style are where to place braces, whether tabs or spaces are used for indentation, how many spaces to indent by, and how to break up long lines.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Users Can Now Access Files in OpenDocument Formats from Android Versions of Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets

      Google has announced that it will be enhancing its documents applications that are available on Android. With the enhancements in place, importing and exporting files will be easy for users.

      Google Docs will now support importing of files in the OpenDocument Text (.odt) format as well as export the files later in the same format. In a similar fashion, OpenDocument Spreadsheets (.ods) files and OpenDocument Presentations (.odp) files will from now on be supported for importation and exportation on the Android versions of Google Sheets and Google Slides, respectively.

Leftovers

  • Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Says He’s No Longer an Atheist

    The pivot occurs the same year Mark Zuckerberg met with the Pope. In the past Zuckerberg has posted a photo of himself praying at a Buddhist pagoda and praised that religion. His wife, Priscilla Chan, practices Buddhism.

  • Is Mark Zuckerberg Eyeing the White House?

    Donald Trump may be the first U.S. president with no prior political or military experience, but clues from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggest he might not be the last.

  • Zuckerberg could run Facebook while serving in government forever

    Mark Zuckerberg is not limited to just two years working in the government while still controlling Facebook, as has been widely misreported. A closer examination of SEC documents reveals Zuck only needs to still own enough Facebook stock or have the board’s approval to be allowed to serve in government indefinitely.

    Combined with Zuckerberg’s announcement yesterday that his 2017 personal challenge is to meet and listen to people in all 50 states, this fact lends weight to the idea that Zuckerberg may be serious about diving into politics.

    Without the limit, Zuckerberg has the opportunity to be appointed or elected to a more significant office and have as much time as he wants to make an impact, rather than just dipping in potentially as a cabinet member whose terms typically last less than two years.

  • Twitter Co-Founder Ev Williams’ Medium Cuts One-Third of Staff

    Medium, the online publishing company started by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, is changing its business model and cutting a third of its staff.

    The company, which has raised $132 million in venture capital from investors including Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, relied on the same model as other media companies to make money: placing ads on articles. In a blog post Wednesday, Williams called that model “broken,” because it serves the goals of corporations and not the readers of content.

  • Twitter confirms that Vine will shut down on 17 January

    SOCIAL NETWORK Twitter has confirmed that its Vine video service will close on 17 January.

    The plan to close the video-looping service was announced last year, but this is the first time a set date for the closure has been confirmed.

    “On January 17 the Vine app will become the Vine Camera. We will notify you through the app before this happens,” Twitter said.

    The ‘Vine Camera’ that will still allow you to make videos of up to 6.5 seconds in length that can then be saved to the camera roll or posted to Twitter.

  • WhatsApp block about to stop older iPhones and Android handsets working with popular chat app

    Many WhatsApp users are about to find themselves cut off from using the hugely popular chat app.

    Users of older iPhones and Android handsets are to find the app has stopped working after it said it would stop support from the end of the 2016.

    WhatsApp said that the move had been made to ensure that the app could continue to introduce new features and stay secure, which relies on the app being used on newer operating systems. But it has been criticised by many users, particularly those in developing markets where both the app and older handsets are popular.

  • Fired Snap Employee Sues, Saying Company Inflated Growth Stats

    Snap Inc. was sued by a former employee who says the company, parent of the Snapchat social-media app, was inflating growth metrics ahead of a planned initial public offering.

    Anthony Pompliano, who was hired from Facebook Inc. in 2015 to focus on user growth and engagement, said he was fired after he refused to go along with the figures that made the company look better than it actually was, according to a complaint filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The court document redacts information about the disputed metrics.

  • Science

    • Noam Chomsky: You can’t educate yourself by looking things up online

      Fake news has been around long before Facebook, but it was the tech company’s goal to appear like a newspaper that eventually misled its users far more than ever before.

      “Technology is basically neutral,” author Noam Chomsky explained. “It’s kinda like a hammer . . . the hammer doesn’t care whether you use it to build a house or a torturer uses it to crush somebody’s skull . . . same with modern technology [like] the internet. The internet is extremely valuable if you know what you’re looking for.”

      Unfortunately, that’s almost the antithesis of Facebook. And while Paper, the ad-free Facebook news feed app ultimately failed, the social media network had by then successfully developed tools like Smart Publishing. The latter tool for publishers aimed to boost stories on Facebook that were popular with the user’s own network, amplifying the performance of fake news in a scandal-obsessed hyperpartisan era. But until five weeks after the election, there was little distinction on the platform between “news” published by conspiracy theorists and actual trusted news sources.

  • Hardware

    • COM Express modules build on Intel’s Kaby Lake

      MSC announced a pair of Linux-ready COM Express Compact and Basic modules built around Intel’s 7th Gen “Kaby Lake” U and EQ/E series, respectively.

    • Qualcomm Says It Shipped More Than A Billion IoT Chips

      To this date, Qualcomm has shipped over a billion of Internet of Things (IoT) chipsets, the San Diego-based semiconductor manufacturer revealed on Tuesday. While speaking at the CES Unveiled press event yesterday, the company’s Senior Vice President of Product Management Raj Talluri said that the firm is already serving all segments of the IoT industry, from smart TVs and thermostats to connected speakers, wearables, and home assistants. Talluri specifically pointed out that smartphones and tablets aren’t included in the one billion figure.

    • Apple’s 2016 in review

      This has been the winter of our discontent. 2016 was the year the tone changed. There’s always been a lot of criticism and griping about anything Apple does (and doesn’t do — it can’t win) but in 2016 I feel like the tone of the chatter about Apple changed and got a lot more negative.

      This is worrisome on a number of levels and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m used to watching people kvetch about the company, but this seems — different. One reason: a lot of the criticisms are correct.

      Apple, for the first time in over a decade, simply isn’t firing on all cylinders. Please don’t interpret that as “Apple is doomed” because it’s not, but there are things it’s doing a lot less well than it could — and has. Apple’s out of sync with itself.

      Here are a few of the things I think indicate Apple has gotten itself out of kilter and is in need of some course correction.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • GOP will strip Planned Parenthood of funding while repealing ACA

      As Republican lawmakers eagerly prepare to scrap President Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, the Affordable Care Act, they’ve announced that while doing so, they’ll also strip funding from Planned Parenthood.

      In a press conference Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) confirmed that “Planned Parenthood legislation would be in our reconciliation bill” when asked about potential defunding. The reconciliation bill is the budgetary tool that Republicans plan to use to dismantle the ACA with a simple majority and without the potential for a filibuster. A straight repeal would require a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, which the Republicans don’t have. A straight repeal would also open the possibility of a filibuster. (For more on how that process would work, check out Ars’ previous coverage on this matter.)

  • Security

    • KillDisk Ransomware Now Targets Linux, Prevents Boot-Up, Has Faulty Encryption
    • KillDisk now targeting Linux: Demands $250K ransom, but can’t decrypt
    • lecture: What could possibly go wrong with (insert x86 instruction here)? [Ed: video]

      Hardware is often considered as an abstract layer that behaves correctly, just executing instructions and outputting a result. However, the internal state of the hardware leaks information about the programs that are executing. In this talk, we focus on how to extract information from the execution of simple x86 instructions that do not require any privileges. Beyond classical cache-based side-channel attacks, we demonstrate how to perform cache attacks without a single memory access, as well as how to bypass kernel ASLR. This talk does not require any knowledge about assembly. We promise.

      When hunting for bugs, the focus is mostly on the software layer. On the other hand, hardware is often considered as an abstract layer that behaves correctly, just executing instructions and outputing a result. However, the internal state of the hardware leaks information about the programs that are running. Unlike software bugs, these bugs are not easy to patch on current hardware, and manufacturers are also reluctant to fix them in future generations, as they are tightly tied with performance optimizations.

    • 8 Docker security rules to live by

      Odds are, software (or virtual) containers are in use right now somewhere within your organization, probably by isolated developers or development teams to rapidly create new applications. They might even be running in production. Unfortunately, many security teams don’t yet understand the security implications of containers or know if they are running in their companies.

      In a nutshell, Linux container technologies such as Docker and CoreOS Rkt virtualize applications instead of entire servers. Containers are superlightweight compared with virtual machines, with no need for replicating the guest operating system. They are flexible, scalable, and easy to use, and they can pack a lot more applications into a given physical infrastructure than is possible with VMs. And because they share the host operating system, rather than relying on a guest OS, containers can be spun up instantly (in seconds versus the minutes VMs require).

    • Zigbee Writes a Universal Language for IoT

      The nonprofit Zigbee Alliance today unveiled dotdot, a universal language for the Internet of Things (IoT).

      The group says dotdot takes the IoT language at Zigbee’s application layer and enables it to work across different networking technologies.

    • $25,000 Prize Offered in FTC IoT Security Challenge

      It appears as if the Federal Trade Commission is getting serious about Internet of Things security issues — and it wants the public to help find a solution. The FTC has announced a contest it’s calling the “IoT Home Inspector Challenge.” What’s more, there’s a big payoff for the winners, with the Top Prize Winner receiving up to $25,000 and each of a possible three “honorable Mentions” getting $3,000. Better yet, winners don’t have to fork over their intellectual property rights, and will retain right to their submissions.

      Of course, the FTC is a federal agency, and with a change of administrations coming up in a couple of weeks, it hedges its bet a bit with a caveat: “The Sponsor retains the right to make a Prize substitution (including a non-monetary award) in the event that funding for the Prize or any portion thereof becomes unavailable.” In other words, Obama has evidently given the go-ahead, but they’re not sure how Trump will follow through.

    • LG threatens to put Wi-Fi in every appliance it releases in 2017

      In the past few years, products at CES have increasingly focused on putting the Internet in everything, no matter how “dumb” the device in question is by nature. It’s how we’ve ended up with stuff like this smart hairbrush, this smart air freshener, these smart ceiling fans, or this $100 pet food bowl that can order things from Amazon.

    • Ex-MI6 Boss: When It Comes To Voting, Pencil And Paper Are ‘Much More Secure’ Than Electronic Systems

      Techdirt has been worried by problems of e-voting systems for a long time now. Before, that was just one of our quaint interests, but over the last few months, the issue of e-voting, and how secure it is from hacking, specifically hacking by foreign powers, has become a rather hot topic. It’s great that the world has finally caught up with Techdirt, and realized that e-voting is not just some neat technology, and now sees that democracy itself is at play. The downside is that because the stakes are so high, the level of noise is too, and it’s really hard to work out how worried we should be about recent allegations, and what’s the best thing to do on the e-voting front.

    • Five things that got broken at the oldest hacking event in the world

      Chaos Communications Congress is the world’s oldest hacker conference, and Europe’s largest. Every year, thousands of hackers gather in Hamburg to share stories, trade tips and discuss the political, social and cultural ramifications of technology.

      As computer security is a big part of the hacker world, they also like to break things. Here are five of the most important, interesting, and impressive things broken this time.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Gunshot wounds are contagious; bullets spread like the flu, study finds

      With our news reports speaking of gunfire epidemics, outbreaks, and plagues, firearm violence often sounds like a disease. But according to a new study, it often acts like one, too. In fact, catching a bullet may be a little like catching a cold—albeit a really bad one.

      Gun violence can ripple through social networks and communities just like an infectious germ, Harvard and Yale researchers reported Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. This may not seem surprising, because earlier work has found that gun violence often clusters in certain areas and groups, particularly those steeped in gangs and drugs. But this study is the first to show that gun violence spreads directly from person to person after shootings—it’s not just about growing up in the same rough neighborhood or having the same risk factors.

      The finding is good news, because, after decades of research, scientists are pretty good at predicting how infections cascade through populations. Applying disease-based theories and simulations to gun violence could help health workers get ahead of bullets and intervene before violence spreads. A more informed strategy could also cut down on intervention tactics that “rest largely on geographic or group-based policing efforts that tend to disproportionately affect disadvantaged minority communities,” the authors argue.

    • US Special Operations Forces Deploy to 138 Nations, 70 Percent of the World’s Countries

      They could be found on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya, supporting local militia fighters, and in Mukalla, Yemen, backing troops from the United Arab Emirates. At Saakow, a remote outpost in southern Somalia, they assisted local commandos in killing several members of the terror group al-Shabab. Around the cities of Jarabulus and Al-Rai in northern Syria, they partnered with both Turkish soldiers and Syrian militias, while also embedding with Kurdish YPG fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Across the border in Iraq, still others joined the fight to liberate the city of Mosul. And in Afghanistan, they assisted indigenous forces in various missions, just as they have every year since 2001.

      For America, 2016 may have been the year of the commando. In one conflict zone after another across the northern tier of Africa and the Greater Middle East, US Special Operations forces (SOF) waged their particular brand of low-profile warfare. “Winning the current fight, including against the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other areas where SOF is engaged in conflict and instability, is an immediate challenge,” the chief of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), General Raymond Thomas, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last year.

    • Potential New FCC Boss Blames Obama For The Washington Post’s Botched Russian Utility Hacking Story

      We’ve noted how one of Trump’s top telecom advisors is Jeffrey Eisenach, a long-time Verizon consultant and aggressive opponent of net neutrality. Eisenach’s one of three Trump advisors who have made it clear their top priority in the new administration will be to not only gut net neutrality, but to defang and defund the FCC as a consumer watchdog on telecom issues. Eisenach isn’t just an advisor, he’s also on the shortlist to be the next head of an agency he doesn’t believe in.

      But when Eisenach isn’t busy dreaming about dismantling net neutrality, he can apparently be found writing logically incoherent op-eds over at the Wall Street Journal. In a strange little tirade posted on January 3, Eisenach quite correctly ridicules the Washington Post’s recent false claim that Russians were busy hacking U.S. utilities. In short, a piece of common malware was found on one PC, and because the Washington Post couldn’t be bothered to even call the company in question, the paper created a bogus narrative, based entirely on anonymous sources, that casually pushed the country closer to war.

    • ‘Jihad! Jihad!’ Migrant gang turns Swedish city into war zone

      Photographer Freddy Mardell was planning on enjoying an evening out on Saturday when the mob launched their rampage in Malmo.

      Describing scenes of horror, the Swede said one thug was calling for “jihad” while standing on top of a car in the city centre.

      Mr Mardell told Friatider: “An Arab jumped on the roof of a car and yelled ‘Jihad! Jihad!’ repeatedly.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Emails were leaked, not hacked

      It has been several weeks since the New York Times reported that “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” led the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers” to help Donald Trump win the election. But the evidence released so far has been far from overwhelming.

      The long anticipated Joint Analysis Report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI on Dec. 29 met widespread criticism in the technical community. Worse still, some of the advice it offered led to a very alarmist false alarm about supposed Russian hacking into a Vermont electric power station.

      Advertised in advance as providing proof of Russian hacking, the report fell embarrassingly short of that goal. The thin gruel that it did contain was watered down further by the following unusual warning atop page 1: “DISCLAIMER: This report is provided ‘as is’ for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.”

    • Sputnik, RT – Grave Concern of Infamous Liar James Clapper

  • Finance

    • Fat Cat Wednesday: Top executives have already earned the average worker’s entire annual salary

      Senior executives have already made more money in 2017 than the average British worker will earn all year, new research shows.

      The High Pay Centre has dubbed today “Fat Cat Wednesday”, after finding that bosses will rake in the median salary of £28,200 by midday.

      With average hourly salaries of £1,000 an hour it has taken less than three days to out-earn the typical worker. Meanwhile the national living wage stands at £7.20 per hour.

    • EU’s Brexit strategy: Grab the popcorn

      Why should the European Union jump into the Brexit fight, when the United Kingdom is doing such a great job of fighting itself?

      For Brussels, the surprise resignation Tuesday of Sir Ivan Rogers, the U.K.’s seasoned and well-respected ambassador to the EU, provided the most dramatic and forceful validation yet of the bloc’s discipline in insisting that negotiations would not begin until the formal triggering of Article 50.

      Over the half-year since the vote in favor of Brexit, leaders of the remaining EU27 have watched, with dismay, and no small amount of disbelief, as Britain battled itself: the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron; the messy in-fighting among Tories to replace him; the disintegration of the UKIP leadership, which led to a physical altercation in the European Parliament; and every manner of dispute and disagreement over whether Brexit should be hard or soft, quick or gradual, blah, blah, blah.

    • Corporations Prepare to Gorge on Tax Cuts Trump Claims Will Create Jobs

      The official line from U.S.-based multinational corporations is that if they get a huge tax break, they’ll bring home the trillions of dollars in profits they’ve stashed overseas and use it to hire tons of Americans. (Nearly 3 million, says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce!)

      But now that Donald Trump’s election means it might really happen, corporate executives are telling Wall Street analysts what they’ll actually use that money for: enriching their shareholders and buying other companies.

      The Intercept’s examination of dozens of earnings calls and investor conference talks since Trump won the presidential election finds that many executives are telling analysts at large banks that they are eager to take the money to increase dividends and stock buybacks as well as snap up competitors. They demonstrate considerably less if any enthusiasm for going on a domestic hiring spree.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Bernie Sanders Brings Giant Printout of a Donald Trump Tweet to Senate Floor

      Bernie Sanders spoke on the Senate floor on Wednesday to urge Donald Trump to veto any cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid—and used one of the President-elect’s own tweets to prove his point.

      As lawmakers debated the repeal of Obamacare, Sanders pointed out that Trump had previously said he would not cut the services through a giant printout of a tweet dating to May 2015.

      “I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid,” Trump claimed at the time. “Huckabee copied me.”

    • GOP-style obstruction won’t work for Democrats: Column

      On Inauguration Day in 2009, top Republican leaders and strategists gathered for a private dinner at the Caucus Room restaurant to discuss how they were going to obstruct and derail Barack Obama’s presidency. It wasn’t a policy dinner about their ideological concerns, Robert Draper wrote in his 2012 book about the GOP-run House. It was a political dinner about obstruction as a tactic.

      Today, many Democrats — myself included — are asking whether our party leaders need to have a similar dinner on Jan. 20 to discuss how we can obstruct and oppose every move by the Trump administration.

      The theory goes that Republican obstruction was successful at stymieing the Obama administration, and that the strategy led to the GOP’s electoral successes. Some feel we should take it straight from their playbook and use it against them. I get the feeling. It’s partially an emotional reaction to this election and to eight years of unmitigated and unjustified obstruction.

    • The Confirmation Process Is an Opportunity to Expose Trump’s Big Lie

      Donald Trump’s reign of ruin began even before his inauguration, when the GOP House caucus voted to geld the independent Office of Congressional Ethics before its members were even sworn in, only to retreat in the face of public outcry and (ironically) Trump tweets. Once Congress convenes, the first order of business will be a reconciliation bill that would begin the repeal of the Affordable Care Act without a plan to replace it. The first skirmishes will come as Senate committees commence hearings on the billionaires, generals, and ideologues that Trump has chosen for his cabinet.

      Trump’s choices—economist Simon Johnson characterizes them as rule by “extreme oligarchy”—personify the president-elect’s own bait-and-switch, from the fake populist of the campaign trail to country-club reactionary. Their shared priorities include deep top-end tax cuts, wholesale deregulation of public protections, and the privatization of public services. They claim these measures will spark growth and generate jobs. In fact, they’ll open up a new era of predation, with CEOs salivating at the chance to gorge themselves on the public dime. At risk are the essential public services and protections on which Americans depend.

    • Glenn Greenwald on “Dearth of Evidence” Linking Russia to WikiLeaks Release of DNC Emails

      We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Glenn Greenwald as the Senate Armed Services Committee holds a hearing on alleged Russian cyber-attacks and top intelligence officials are briefing President Obama on a review of evidence that Russia hacked the email servers of the Democratic National Committee. President-elect Trump will be briefed on Friday. This comes as he is supporting statements by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that Russia was not the source for the mass leak of emails from the Democratic Party.

    • Debugging Democracy

      I began writing this column on November 9, 2016, on the balcony of a hotel in Istanbul, while a call to prayer echoed through the streets below. I took that as good advice, because a few hours earlier my country elected an Internet troll, Donald Trump, as its president Perhaps by now we’re calling this day 11/9, in the mold of 9/11. I’m an optimistic guy, but color me pessimistic about where my country is now heading, led by a world-class narcissist.

      And forgive me for obsessing not only about where this is going, but how we got here. Our country has been hacked, and that matters.

      Disclosure: I’m a political independent, and not a fan of Hillary Clinton, though I thought she was the only sensible choice, given Trump’s shortcomings, many of which should have disqualified him, flat out. But he won. Why?

    • The agony and the ecstasy of Kurt Eichenwald

      Amid the uproar of Donald Trump’s seemingly impossible rise to the highest office in the land, liberals hungered for an authoritative voice. They found it in Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald, a former Republican who regularly deals in histrionics, bombast, and questionable ethics. Eichenwald, whose self-hyped pieces have nary broken news, has become infamous both for his wrongness and for his regular Twitter meltdowns. And yet, he has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter, a legion of influential fans, and is a frequent guest on cable news. Why has a bad and possibly corrupt journalist become a voice of the left? In all of his essence, Kurt Eichenwald is the journalist that the left deserves, and maybe it’s time for his wild media ride to end.

      Eichenwald had a strong start as a newsman. He worked at The New York Times for more than 20 years, where he had a decorated career covering Wall Street, malpractice in kidney dialysis facilities, for-profit hospitals, and the fall of Enron. His run might have been remembered as a triumph of solid journalism, with Eichenwald cast as a modern Upton Sinclair. But, much like H. L. Mencken’s reporting on the Scopes Trial was later tarnished by his anti-Semitism, Eichenwald’s mainstream success led to a dramatic and tawdry fall that served to reduce his accomplishments to little more than a footnote.

    • FBI says Democrats refused access to hacked email servers

      The Democratic National Committee rebuffed requests by federal agents to inspect computer servers that had been breached last year during the presidential campaign, forcing them to rely on third-party cybersecurity data to investigate the hack, the FBI said.

      The revelation came hours before U.S. intelligence chiefs are set to brief President-elect Donald Trump on their assessment that Russia was behind the attack. On Capitol Hill Thursday, they rejected Trump’s repeated skepticism about their findings that senior Russian officials were to blame for the hacking and leaks of emails from Democratic officials and organizations backing Hillary Clinton.

    • Assange: Governments Lie & WikiLeaks Wants to Expose the Truth

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that governments, including here in the U.S., regularly lie and use propaganda to manipulate the minds of their citizens.

      In a “Hannity” exclusive interview, Assange said the goal of WikiLeaks is to expose that truth to people, without any political agenda.

      Assange explained that the media failed to do that during the U.S. election process because the majority of them felt like they were part of the same system as the Washington establishment.

    • Assange’s Advice for Trump: Learn From Democrats’ Mistakes

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange believes that the Democratic Party must have a “reformation” after a disastrous showing in the 2016 election.

      In an exclusive interview with Sean Hannity, Assange said that Democrats still haven’t come to terms with why they did so poorly.

      He said they must accept that they alienated voters by “rigging” the presidential primary process and not picking the strongest candidate.

    • The Coming State of Fear

      Despite not even being installed in office yet, the soon-to-be-leader of the United States brazenly deployed the platform to carry out government contracting cronyism, call for the imprisonment of flag-burners, and get death-threats rained down upon a unionist who contradicted one of the incoming administration’s best narratives.

      Trump, somehow, has managed to now top all these by using Twitter to announce the advent of a new nuclear arms race – a Cold War 2.0 against, oddly enough, Vladimir Putin.

      Every step Trump has taken since election day has confirmed many of the worst fears of anarchists and libertarians. This latest maneuver is a continuation, for nuclear arms build-up is one of the gravest threats to the possibility of a stateless society. It not only casts long-term doubts on the survivability of the human civilization (or even the species, for that matter); in the short-term it reinforces all the worst and repressive elements of the state. This stems from the undeniable fact that the mere presence of the nuclear weapon is little more than an act of state-sponsored terrorism. It exists solely to provoke fear, anxiety, existential dread. The crude and atrocious actions committed by the United States at the end of the Second World War hang like a pall over any arms build-up. To create a single nuclear weapon is to spell out a warning to the world: we will flatten your cities and incinerate your countryside. We will turn your citizens into dust.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • The End of Democracy in Turkey

      Following the New Year’s Eve attack in Istanbul, democracy in Turkey is likely to enter a death spiral. The issue isn’t the attack itself, terrible as it was. On New Year’s Eve, a lone gunman made his way into the Reina dance club, which was jammed with revellers, and opened fire with an assault rifle, killing thirty-nine people and wounding dozens. The shooter has not yet been identified, but, in an Internet posting, the Islamic State claimed that one of its soldiers had done the job. In its typical deranged language, the group said that it had happily struck the revellers, “turning their joy into sorrows.” The attack, the group said, was in retaliation for air strikes and other military operations carried out by the “Turkish apostate government” against ISIS in Syria.

      If the shooting were an isolated event, the effect on Turkish society would probably be minimal. But it was the latest in a series of violent attacks against the Turkish state, which has prompted sweeping retaliatory measures that have seriously undermined Turkish democracy. Sunday morning’s massacre will no doubt trigger another wave of detentions and arrests.

    • Italy Urges Europe To Begin Censoring Free Speech On The Internet

      First it was the US, then Germany blamed much of what is wrong in society on “fake news”, and not, say, a series of terrible decisions made by politicians. Now it is Italy’s turn to call for an end to “fake news”, which in itself would not be troubling, however, the way Giovanni Pitruzzella, head of the Italian competition body, demands the European Union “cracks down” on what it would dub “fake news” is nothing short of a total crackdown on all free speech, and would give local governments free reign to silence any outlet that did not comply with the establishment propaganda.

      In an interview with the FT, Pitruzzella said the regulation of false information on the internet was best done by the state rather than by social media companies such as Facebook, an approach taken previously by Germany, which has demanded that Facebook end “hate speech” and has threatened to find the social network as much as €500K per “fake” post.

      Pitruzzella, head of the Italian competition body since 2011, said “EU countries should set up independent bodies — co-ordinated by Brussels and modeled on the system of antitrust agencies — which could quickly label fake news, remove it from circulation and impose fines if necessary.”

      In other words, a series of unelected bureaucrats, unaccountable to anyone, would sit down and between themselves decide what is and what isn’t “fake news”, and then, drumroll, “remove it from circulation.” On the other hand, coming one week after Obama give Europe the green light to engage in any form of censorship and halt of free speech that it desires, when the outgoing US president voted into law the “Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act”, it should come as no surprise that a suddenly emboldened Europe is resorting to such chilling measures.

    • Apple bows to government demands and removes the New York Times from Chinese App Store

      APPLE HAS bowed to the demands of Chinese authorities and removed the New York Times from its Chinese App Store.

      According to a report at, er, the New York Times, Apple removed both the English-language and Chinese-language apps from the App Store in China on 23 December, and said the move came as part of a wider attempt by the Chinese government to prevent readers in the country from accessing independent news coverage.

      “The request by the Chinese authorities to remove our apps is part of their wider attempt to prevent readers in China from accessing independent news coverage by the New York Times of that country, coverage which is no different from the journalism we do about every other country in the world,” a spokesperson for the newspaper said.

      Apple said they had been informed the app violated Chinese regulations but did not say what rules had been broken.

    • China Internet Censorship: New York Times Apps Removed
    • Apple removes New York Times app in China
    • New York Times App Removed From App Store in China
    • Apple pulls NYT apps from China’s App Store to comply with “local regulations”
    • Single Choke Point Problems: Apple Removes NY Times App From Chinese App Store After Chinese Gov’t Complains
    • Censorship tool built as Facebook eyes China: report
    • Self-Proclaimed Inventor of Email Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Techdirt’s Mike Masnick

      Techdirt founder Mike Masnick will be going toe-to-toe in court with Charles Harder, the Hollywood attorney who famously represented Hulk Hogan in the sex tape lawsuit that brought down Gawker.

      On Wednesday, Harder’s client Shiva Ayyadurai filed a $15 million libel lawsuit in Massachusetts against Masnick, Leigh Beadon and Techdirt parent company Floor64 Inc. over articles that doubted Ayyadurai’s claim to have invented email.

      Ayyadurai previously sued Gawker in a lawsuit that many suspected was funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Ayyadurai recently settled the claim for $750,000. He and Harder now have a new legal target.

      For Techdirt, Masnick writes a wonky tech policy blog that has earned a loyal following for taking strong stances on issues like copyright, net neutrality, security issues and other topics. His name provokes eye-rolling among many studio lawyers thanks to his frequently hostile attitude toward aggressive intellectual property actions. He was one of the noisiest antagonists toward the Stop Online Piracy Act a few years ago. He’s also credited with coining the term, “The Streisand Effect,” to describe the phenomenon of how attempts to censor information often lead to more awareness of the very information someone is trying to hide. The phrase came after entertainer Barbara Streisand aimed more than a decade ago to suppress photographic images of her Malibu, Calif., residence.

    • ‘Inventor of Email’ Slaps Tech Site With $15M Libel Suit for Mocking His Claim

      A self-proclaimed inventor of email, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, has taken exception to doubts about his accomplishment by a website called TechDirt, and chosen to file a $15 million defamation suit against the site and its founder, Mike Masnick.

      The case is likely to raise alarm in media circles because Ayyadurai is being represented by Charles Harder, a Beverly Hills attorney. Harder became famous by directing a stealth legal campaign—bankrolled by billionaire Peter Thiel—against Gawker Media that ultimately drove the website into bankruptcy with a $140 million Florida jury verdict.

      In the new lawsuit filed on Wednesday in Boston, Ayyadurai claims that a series of posts on TechDirt amount to libel—in part because the posts call Ayyadurai a “fake email inventor” and a “fraudster” and calls his claims to have invented the technology “bogus.”

    • Free Speech in 2017: Is the Town Square Model of Democracy Dead?

      A year ago, preparing to teach my undergraduate free speech class I found myself questioning free speech fundamentalism. Struck by the unseemly reality of free expression and the unsettling insights of Kelefah Sanneh in The Hell You Say, the simple comforting notion that more speech is always better than less speech seemed suspect.

      Now, one must question the very assumptions of U.S. First Amendment (1A) jurisprudence, which have been laid bare by “post-truth” politics, in which the very concepts of truth and reality have been trumped. In 2016, volume prevailed over reason, and feelings over facts (for more, see here). A cynical carnival barker hoodwinked the citizenry, begging the question: Is the town square model of democracy dead?

    • IMDb Asks Court to Prohibit Enforcement of Actor Age Censorship Law

      Internet movie hub IMDb is asking the court to prohibit the enforcement of a new law that bars it from displaying an actor’s age on its site if the actor doesn’t want it posted.

      The controversial law was signed by California Gov. Jerry Brown in September. Its goal is to mitigate age discrimination in a youth-obsessed Hollywood, but since its passing it has been widely criticized as unconstitutional. IMDb sued California Attorney General Kamala Harris in November, arguing that the law chills free speech rather than addressing the root causes of age discrimination.

    • Sen. Tom Cotton Slams Apple Over China Censorship And FBI Dispute
    • When Facebook nixed a naughty Neptune
    • Facebook bans image of 16th-century statue’s buttocks for being “explicitly sexual”
    • Shoddy Facebook censorship strikes again as an image of sea god Neptune is deemed innapropriate

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • FTC takes D-Link to court citing lax product security, privacy perils

      The FTC, in a complaint filed in the Northern District of California charged that “D-Link failed to take reasonable steps to secure its routers and Internet Protocol (IP) cameras, potentially compromising sensitive consumer information, including live video and audio feeds from D-Link IP cameras.”

      For its part, D-Link Systems said it “is aware of the complaint filed by the FTC. D-Link denies the allegations outlined in the complaint and is taking steps to defend the action. The security of our products and protection of our customers private data is always our top priority.”

    • WikiLeaks data reveals close cooperation between German intelligence and NSA

      The German foreign secret service (BND) has not only delivered data to the US intelligence services on a massive scale, it has also worked directly with the NSA in developing detection software. This has been confirmed by extensive data published by the WikiLeaks platform at the beginning of December. It documents the close cooperation between German and American intelligence agencies and reveals new details.

      The data contains about 90 gigabytes of information. It consists of a total of 2,420 files, which were forwarded in 2015 to the German parliamentary committee that is currently investigating the activities of the intelligence services. According to WikiLeaks, the data originates from several German federal authorities, including the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the Federal Office for Constitutional Protection (BfV) and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

    • Top NSA defender departs agency

      Curtis Dukes, the top cyber defender at the National Security Agency, is leaving the agency for a leadership post at the Center for Internet Security, a not-for-profit cybersecurity organization.

      Dukes, who headed up the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate, was bumped down the NSA org chart a bit during a recent reorganization – one of the biggest in its history – that combined the agency’s offensive and defensive capabilities and personnel.

    • NSA: Russia Is the Top U.S. Competitor in Cyberspace
    • It’s Now Clearer Than Ever That Snowden’s No Hero and Deserves No Pardon From Obama
    • Snowden and Vanunu: Spies, Whistleblowers, Movies and Books
    • Why President Obama Can’t Pardon Edward Snowden

      On September 14, 2016, days before the premiere of Oliver Stone’s hagiographic movie Snowden, Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International launched a well-funded campaign, with full-page ads in The New York Times, imploring President Barack Obama to pardon Edward Snowden, a former contract worker at the National Security Agency, for stealing a vast number of secret documents. “I think Oliver will do more for Snowden in two hours than his lawyers have been able to do in three years,” said Snowden’s ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner.

    • 29 Percent Of Americans Say Snowden Should Be Prosecuted

      A poll by the Economist indicated Wednesday only 29 percent of Americans want to see National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden prosecuted for stealing secrets, and 30 percent would support pardoning him.

      Snowden has been in Russian exile since 2013 when he leaked hundreds of classified documents published by the Guardian, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, the New York Times and WikiLeaks. He faces two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

    • End-to-End Encrypted group chats via XMPP

      It’s been over a year since my colleagues and I at the Progressive Technology Project abandoned Skype, first for IRC and soon after for XMPP. Thanks to the talented folks maintaining conversations.im it’s been a breeze to get everyone setup with accounts (8 Euros/year is quite worth it) and a group chat going.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Open letter to the European Parliament on Oettinger hearing

      Next week, you are asked to reply to European Commission President Juncker’s proposal to put Commissioner Günther Oettinger in charge of supervising the EU budget and managing the Human Resources of the European Commission.

      As organisations working towards equality, non-discrimination and campaigning for transparency and ethics, we do not think that Commissioner Oettinger is suitable to oversee Human Resources at the European Commission.

      Commissioner Oettinger has made racist, sexist and homophobic remarks on several occasions in the past, most recently at a speech he gave in an official capacity in Hamburg on 26 October.

      At this crucial moment for the EU, it is more vital than ever to have a strong and credible commitment from the European Commission to counter discrimination and act for equality for all. The Commissioner in charge of human resources must lead by example. He or she should have clear plans for action to make equality for all a reality and speak out against racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. How else would they be expected to inspire others to do the same? In our view, Commissioner Oettinger is not the right person for this task.

    • Man killed in Malmö shooting

      Police were called to the Docentgatan street in the southern Swedish city at around 8.30pm on Tuesday after residents in the area reported hearing the sound of gunshots.

    • Woman, 18, found with gunshot wounds in Malmö

      An 18-year-old woman has been taken to hospital after she was found with gunshot wounds in the Rosengård district of Malmö in the early hours of Tuesday.

      Police were called to a shooting at around 3.30am at a falafel restaurant at Västra Kattarpsvägen road in Malmö. When they arrived at the scene they found a woman with gunshot wounds.

    • Image insulting Islam not uploaded on Facebook using Hindu fisherman’s phone: PBI

      The image which led to the attacks on Hindus at Nasirnagar was not uploaded on Facebook from the phone used by a Hindu fisherman accused of ‘insulting Islam’, an investigation has revealed.

      The image was edited on the computer used by one Jahangir Alam, a cyber cafe owner in Harinberh Bazar, according to the Police of Bureau of Investigation.

      But the detectives were not sure if the same computer was used to upload it on the social media site.

    • Jakarta governor lambasts hardliner at blasphemy trial

      Jakarta’s Christian governor today shouted at an Islamic hardliner testifying against him in dramatic scenes at his blasphemy trial, seen as a test of religious tolerance in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.

      Hundreds of supporters and opponents of governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama rowdily traded insults as they rallied outside the hearing in the Indonesian capital, with thousands of police deployed to prevent clashes.

      The first Christian to govern the capital in more than 50 years, Purnama is on trial accused of blasphemy over remarks he made about the Quran while campaigning ahead of February elections for the Jakarta governorship.

      Hundreds of thousands of conservative Muslims have protested against the leader, known by his nickname Ahok, in recent months in the largest demonstrations in Indonesia in years, but he denies insulting Islam and his supporters say the case is politically motivated.

    • Bosnia’s main university suspends classes during Muslim prayers

      Bosnia’s main university will not hold classes during Muslim Friday prayers, prompting criticism from some that it represents a step towards Islamisation.

      The University of Sarajevo this week adopted a plan to halt activities for about an-hour-and-a-half each Friday during Muslim prayers.

    • Bahrain NSA powers limited to terror crimes
    • Bahrain, reversing reform, restores arrest powers to spies
    • Bahrain suspends, investigates 3 officials over prison break
    • Japan to recall envoy from South Korea over ‘comfort women’ statue

      Japan said on Friday it was temporarily recalling its ambassador to South Korea over a statue commemorating Korean women forced to work in Japanese military brothels during World War Two which it said violated an agreement to resolve the issue.

      The two nations agreed in 2015 that the issue of “comfort women”, which has long plagued ties between the two Asian neighbors, would be “finally and irreversibly resolved” if all conditions of the accord – which included a Japanese apology and a fund to help the victims – were met.

      The statue, which depicts a young, barefoot woman sitting in a chair, was erected near the Japanese consulate in the southern South Korean city of Busan at the end of last year.

    • Obama, Deporter in Chief, Should Pardon the Undocumented

      Donald Trump will soon sweep into the office of the U.S. presidency, buttressed by both houses of Congress firmly in Republican control. A wave of regressive executive orders and legislation are already being prepared to ensure that Trump’s first 100 days effectively erase the Obama presidency. Where Trump was once the most prominent “birther,” attempting to deny President Barack Obama’s legitimacy with a racist campaign accusing him of being born in Kenya, Trump now will wield a pen to legally undermine Obama’s legacy. But Barack Obama is still the president of the United States until Jan. 20, and retains the enormous executive powers that the office bestows. That is why a swelling grass-roots movement is now urging Obama to use executive clemency and the presidential pardon to protect the nation’s millions of undocumented immigrants from the mass deportations Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail.

    • In the Best Interest of Justice: Former Peltier Prosecutor Joins Urgent Activist Calls For Clemency

      In a “truly extraordinary” and evidently unprecedented act, a former prosecutor of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, now 72, ill, and in his 41st year in prison for a shooting he has unceasingly denied committing, has joined the decades-long demands of legal experts, indigenous leaders and rights advocates to free one of this country’s most high-profile political prisoners. Peltier’s conviction stems from the American Indian Movement’s 1973 siege at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, site of the Wounded Knee massacre of Lakota in 1890. After a long occupation protesting the federal government’s unjust treatment and broken treaties, two FBI agents and one Native American were killed. Peltier was eventually found guilty of shooting the agents, and sentenced to two life sentences.

      Peltier remains in prison despite years of legal battles and repeated claims that federal agents lied, coerced witnesses and withheld evidence at his trial; ultimately, the prosecution admitted they couldn’t prove who shot the agents. Peltier attorney and former federal prosecutor Cynthia Dunne calls the FBI’s case “yesterday’s equivalent of a Trump tweet that has lasted for 40 years.” Calling his ongoing imprisonment “one of the greatest injustices in the American justice system,” Dunne and other attorneys filed a clemency request last year to President Obama in hopes he will include Peltier in a final flurry of pardons. Their plea was one of many on behalf of Peltier, from Amnesty International to Standing Rock Sioux Chief Dave Archambault. If Obama fails to act, his attorneys say Peltier will die in prison.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T Already Backing Off Its Biggest Time Warner Merger Promise: Cheaper TV

      AT&T has spent the last few months fending off critics of its planned $100 million acquisition of Time Warner. Most critics say the company’s ownership of Time Warner will make it harder for streaming competitors to license the content they need to compete. Others warn that AT&T’s decision to zero rate (cap exempt) its own content gives the company’s new DirecTV Now streaming TV service an unfair advantage in the market. That’s before you get to the fundamental fact that letting a company with the endless ethical issues AT&T enjoys get significantly larger likely only benefits AT&T.

    • Ad Industry Wants New FCC Broadband Privacy Rules Gutted Because, Uh, Free Speech!

      We’ve noted repeatedly how Trump’s incoming telecom advisors have made it very clear they not only want to gut net neutrality, but defund and defang the FCC. That means rolling back all manner of other recent FCC policies, like the agency’s recently approved broadband privacy rules. While ISPs and advertisers threw a collective hissy fit about the rules, they really were relatively fundamental; simply requiring that ISPs not only make it clear what’s being collected and who it’s being sold to, but requiring they provide working opt-out tools to broadband subscribers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Trademark Dispute Between Coffee Companies Over ‘Detroit’ Trademark Demonstrates The USPTO’s Carelessness

        It bears repeating: far too many of the trademark disputes we cover here at Techdirt are in large part the fault of a USPTO all too willing to grant trademarks on terms that are overtly either broad or based on geography. One would hope that it went without saying that trademarks, designed to inform the public as to the source of the products they buy, cannot work to that end if the identifying marks are not specific or original within the marketplace. Yet the Trademark Office too often doesn’t seem to consider this when rubber-stamping applications.

    • Copyrights

      • Indian High Court Blocks Rent-Seeking Collection Societies From Seeking Any More Rent

        Once again, we have an entity supposedly looking out for artists doing what it can to prevent artists from earning a living. This is what they won’t be able to do now, thanks to a change in the nation’s copyright law.

        Blocking these societies from collecting performance royalties won’t do much for the artists signed to them. But then again, the collection societies weren’t doing much for artists in the first place. IPRS has been particularly shady. Many royalty collection societies are known for their extremely limited distribution of funds. Those that do pay out more regularly still tend to hand the bulk of it to charting artists, no matter who actually earned it.

      • Court: Fan-Funded Star Trek Film is Not ‘Fair Use’

        The lawsuit between Paramount Pictures and the crowdfunded Star Trek spin-off “Prelude to Axanar” is gearing up for a trial. This week the court ruled on motions for summary judgment from both parties. While the case could still go both ways, the court has decided that the fan-film is not entitled to a fair use defense.

      • What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2017?

        Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1960 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2017, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2056.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.

01.05.17

Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3

Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Torturing Tech Support Phone Scammers With Linux

    Darn Linux! I have Windows, too, but I obviously don’t use it nearly enough. When I tell people like Paul I run Linux, they can’t get away from me fast enough. Obviously, if I ran Windows more often, they’d want to keep talking with me and I wouldn’t be so lonely.

    I guess that’s my 2017 New Year’s resolution: to run more Windows so I can make lots of friends who are in the business of supplying bogus computer tech support.

    Or maybe I’ll just go on using Linux most of the time, and if I want to make new friends I’ll go have a drink or two at the Drift Inn, where nobody really cares what operating system I like best. One or the other, anyway.

  • Desktop

    • Snappy vs. Flatpak: Unified Linux Packaging Systems

      Getting Linux applications to run on servers is not always as easy as it should be, thanks to the myriad software packaging formats that various Linux distributions use. Over the course of 2016, two efforts really ramped up to help solve that challenge in the form of Snappy and Flatpak.

      The promise of both Snappy and Flatpak is to deliver an approach that enables software developers to build software once and then have it bundled in a package that can run on multiple distributions. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux, is a big advocate of Snappy.

    • $89 Pinebook Linux Laptop To Go On Sale Next Month

      New details about the $89 Linux ARM laptop have emerged, including a tentative shipping date and warranty details.

    • Endless is bringing its cheap, user-friendly Linux PCs to the US

      The dream of a Linux computer for normal humans is relatively dead. Sure, Google put Linux in billions of hands and homes with Android and Chrome OS, but neither OS is very much like the desktop Linux flavors well-meaning open-source developers have been crafting for decades.

    • Endless introduces Linux mini desktop PCs for American market

      For the past few years Endless Computers has been making inexpensive Linux-based computers designed for use in emerging markets. Last summer the company also started working with PC makers to load its Endless OS software on some computers.

      Now Endless is launching its first products designed specifically for the United States.

    • Endless Unveils Mission Mini and Mission One Computers as the Endless Experience Comes to America
    • Endless expands into the U.S. with $129 Mission Mini and $249 Mission One computers

      Computers have become an important part of our world, especially in the classrooms and at home, but while many can afford these devices — often costing hundreds, if not thousands of dollars — there are still those left behind. Endless Mobile was founded five years ago with the mission to make computing universally accessible, creating an operating system initially targeted toward emerging markets.

    • Closer look at the Mission line of mini PCs from Endless Computers

      The Endless Mission One and Mission Mini desktop computers will be available for pre-order in the US starting January 16th.

      They’re both small, fanless desktop computers that ship with Endless OS, a Linux-based operating system that’s designed to be easy to use, and which comes with tools to help kids (or adults) learn to write code.

    • Endless has a mission: Bring its charmingly cheap Mission One computers to the US

      You and I have a nearly limitless array of computer choices, from massive desktops to slim laptops to entire computers build into something the same size as a USB stick. But in emerging markets, the options are much more limited, both in the hardware available and even in the availability of internet access.

      That’s why I liked the Endless Mini desktop PC we reviewed last year. It was a $79 (approximately £54 or AU$110) desktop in a charming spherical red plastic case, running a custom Linux-based OS. More importantly, it included a ton of educational content pre-loaded, making it a useful tool for students, even without reliable or fast internet access.

    • 2016 The Year Of GNU/Linux On Many Desktops

      It’s not as spectacular as I would like but GNU/Linux has been growing steadily and particularly on weekends at home, I presume, all over 2016. Chrome OS GNU/Linux has really taken share globally. Yes, those are global numbers to the right.

  • Server

    • The DevOps Engineer Is An Optical Illusion

      Developers aren’t the same as operations staff. Financial analysts aren’t engineers, and salespeople aren’t accountants. Transparent communication, the ability to fail safely, and a structure that drives cross-team cooperation will bring everyone together to support the ultimate outcome: happy customers.

    • Keynote: Backstage with Kubernetes by Chen Goldberg, Google
    • How the Kubernetes Community Drives The Project’s Success

      Kubernetes is a hugely popular open source project, one that is in the top percentile on GitHub and that has spawned more than 3,000 other projects. And although the distributed application cluster technology is incredibly powerful in its own right, that’s not the sole reason for its success.

      “We think it’s not just the technology, we think that what makes it special is the community that builds the technology,” said Chen Goldberg, Director of Engineering, Container Engine and Kubernetes at Google, during her keynote at CloudNativeCon in Seattle last November.

    • Does the Container Ecosystem Need a Map?

      At last month’s KubeCon in Seattle, members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation put forth a chart depicting the various projects, both commercial and open source, that either individually or collectively contributed to its perception of the “cloud native” ecosystem. You might call it, for lack of a more original phrase, a new stack.

    • 6 Container Themes to Track in 2017

      The container craze will turn four next year. Yes, Linux containers have been around longer than that, but the rise of Docker—first released to the public on March 20, 2013—has sparked the surge of interest we’re riding right now.

      It’s a fascinating adolescent phase, as containers not only roll into production but also get acclimated to enterprise needs and bigger-money investors. Here’s a glance at the major themes that surrounded containers in 2016 and are likely to continue into 2017.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • FLOSS Weekly 416: FreeDOS

      Jim has been involved in free software / open source software since 1993, when he was still an undergraduate physics student. His first experience was with GNU Emacs, and later he contributed a few patches for GNU Emacs on Apollo/DOMAIN. In 1994, Jim created the FreeDOS Project, and wrote many of the early FreeDOS utilities, extensions, and libraries – including the Cats/Kitten library that provides international language support for many FreeDOS programs. (Cats is short for the Unix Catgets library, and Kitten is an even smaller version of Cats. Get it?)

  • Kernel Space

    • Automotive Grade Linux Moves to UCB 3.0

      The Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project has released version 3.0 of its open source Unified Code Base (UCB) for automotive infotainment development. Unlike AGL’s UCB 2.0, which was released in July, UCB 3.0 is already being used to develop in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) products, some of which will ship in cars this year.

      The AGL is not saying which companies will ship products first, but notes that UCB 3.0 “has several strong supporters and contributors including Toyota, Mazda, Aisin AW, Continental, Denso, Harman, Panasonic, Qualcomm Technologies, Renesas and many others.” More than 40 new companies have joined AGL in the past year, bringing the member total to more than 80. In addition to Toyota and Mazda, AGL automotive manufacturer members include Ford, Honda, Jaguar Land Rover, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan, Subaru, and as of last month, Suzuki.

    • Daimler Advances Connected Car Technology through Open Source and Automotive Grade Linux
    • CES 2017: Automotive Grade Linux OTA Solution Ready for Renesas R-Car platform
    • Linux 4.10′s ath9k Driver Should Have Lower Latency & Less Bufferbloat

      As part of the ongoing battle with bufferbloat are some improvements to the ath9k WiFi driver with the Linux 4.10 kernel.

      Bufferbloat is the excess buffering of packets resulting in high latency, jitter, and lower network throughput. We’ve been looking forward to some more bufferbloat improvements with the Linux kernel and its network drivers while there were some ath9k improvements I hadn’t noticed until being pointed out this week by a Phoronix reader.

    • ‘Hackable’ hypervisor provides lightweight virtualization for Windows and Linux

      Linux kernel developer Ahmed Samy has released an open source hypervisor project that aims to be “simple and lightweight.” Thus, he presents KSM, an option for Linux and Windows developers to create everything from software sandboxing tools to more full-blown hypervisor applications.

      In a brief announcement on the Linux kernel development email list, Samy stated that KSM’s purpose “is not to run other kernels” (typically the case with hypervisors), “but more of researching (or whatever) the running kernel, some ideas would be sandboxing, debugging perhaps.”

    • KSM: A Hackable x86_64 Hypervisor For Linux/Windows

      Being announced today on the kernel mailing list is the KSM hypervisor, what’s self-described as “a hackable x86-64 hypervisor.”

      KSM is an out-of-tree x86_64 VT-x hypervisor. The developer Ahmed Samy announced of the project, “KSM’s purpose is not to run other kernels, but more of researching (or whatsoever) the running kernel, some ideas would be sandboxing, debugging perhaps.”

    • A New Proposal For Supporting DRM Linux Drivers In User-Space

      The discussion has come up before about supporting Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers in user-space rather than having to be tied within the Linux kernel while that outlook was reignited today with a new patch series wiring in said support.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Lumina 1.20 Desktop Released

      Lightweight Qt-based Lumina desktop environment is kickstarting its new year in style with a brand new release. We look at what’s new and improved.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GTK’s Vulkan Renderer Now Working On Wayland

        The GTK toolkit’s Vulkan renderer continues making quick progress.

        Besides already being faster than their OpenGL renderer, supporting this Vulkan renderer on Windows too, and other improvements, the latest now is that GTK4 with the Vulkan back-end works on Wayland.

      • Librsvg 2.41.0 is released

        This is the first version to have Rust code in it. The public API remains unchanged. Apologies in advance to distros who will have to adjust their build systems for Rust – it’s like taking a one-time vaccine; you’ll be better off in the end for it.

      • GNOME’s SVG Rendering Library Migrating To Rust

        The librsvg library for SVG rendering is up to version 2.41.0 and with this milestone it’s their first release to port some code to Rust while maintaining the same public API.

        The GNOME project’s Librsvg 2.41.0 implements some parts of the library in the Rust programming language rather than C. The developers decided to do this partial Rust migration for better memory safety, nicer built-in abstractions, and easier for unit testing.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • SystemRescueCd 4.9.1 Rescue & Recovery Live CD Lands in 2017 with Linux 4.8.15

        SystemRescueCd creator François Dupoux is also kicking off the new year with a brand-new release of his popular live system developed for system recovery and rescue operations.

        SystemRescueCd 4.9.1 is the first point release to the 4.9 series, which was initially announced at the end of October 2016, and it ships with new kernels. While the standard one was updated to the long-term supported Linux 4.4.39 kernel for both rescue32 and rescue64 editions, the alternative kernel is now Linux 4.8.15.

      • BusyBox 1.26.1 Swiss Army Knife of Linux Hits the Streets as New Stable Series

        When the BusyBox 1.26.0 unstable release launched last month, just before the Christmas holidays, we told you that it would hit the stable channel as soon as the first point release is announced.

        And it happened! BusyBox 1.26.1 was unveiled on January 2, 2017, and it’s now the newest stable series of the Swiss army knife for embedded systems and GNU/Linux distributions. But don’t get too excited because this release is just a formality to inform OS vendors that they can finally update the BusyBox packages, and it looks like it only adds various tweaks to defconfig and addresses issues with single-applet builds.

      • Solus Devs to Focus on Linux Driver Management and Budgie 11 Desktop for Q1 2017

        Now that they’ve launched the long anticipated first ISO snapshot of the Linux-based Solus operating system, which brought many enhancements and updated technologies, the Solus devs announce the roadmap for 2017.

        After reviewing everything they’ve accomplished in 2016, which appears to have been a great year for them, the development team announces that their efforts will be invested in the development of the Linux Driver Management tool with a focus on Nvidia hybrid laptops, as well as the upcoming Budgie 11 desktop environment.

    • Arch Family

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • Life, the universe & openSUSE Leap 42.2

        In the wake of a handful of Linux projects pushing ever closer to consumer desktop adoption (think Ubuntu, Mint Cinnamon, Solus, Arch and Chrome OS)… members of the openSUSE Project have announced the next minor version of Leap — a professional Linux distribution for developers, system administrators… oh and yes, users too.

    • Slackware Family

      • Linux Calculated, Faint Shadow of OpenMandriva, Big Bother Absolutely

        Today in Linux news Blogger DarkDuck said that OpenMandriva has become a faint shadow of its namesake. That was despite getting it to work fairly well. Elsewhere, Techphylum offered a brief overview of Calculate Linux and Jack Germain said Absolute Linux was “the equivalent of driving a stick shift automobile with a crank-to-start mechanism.” OMG!Ubuntu! reported on that 13 foot robot, that was said to be the “soldier of the future” somewhere, is programmed using Ubuntu and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols warned Linux will become more and more a target of hackers.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • My Free Software Activities in December 2016

        My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Overcoming Ubuntu Wi-Fi Not Working

            One of the biggest issues I still see cropping up for Ubuntu (and other distributions) are challenges connecting to Wi-Fi networks. This article will provide actionable solutions to overcome common Ubuntu Wi-Fi issues.

          • Open Source Pioneer Mark Shuttleworth Says Smart “Edge’ Devices Spawn Business Models

            Ubuntu, a version of the Linux computer operating system, runs on many of the servers that power cloud computing. Ubuntu pioneer Mark Shuttleworth founded Canonical Ltd. to sell support for Ubuntu, which is open source software that anyone can use for free. Given the popular use of Ubuntu, Mr. Shuttleworth is in good position to […]

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Redesigned Bluetooth Settings Pane Coming Soon to elementary OS Linux Distro

              elementary OS founder and developer Daniel Foré reports today, January 4, 2017, on the upcoming availability of a revamped, native Bluetooth settings pane that’ll land as a drop-in replacement for GNOME Control Center’s one in the Ubuntu-based distro.

              elementary OS always innovates itself and offers its users all brand-new technologies and a beautiful graphical user interface for various tools. Lately, it would appear that the development team has been working on redesigning the Bluetooth settings pane that can be accessed through the built-in Control Panel inherited from the GNOME Stack. After more than 20 revisions, the new Bluetooth settings pane looks pretty sleek.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Toyota and Ford Create Automaker Group to Promote Open Source Smartphone Interfaces

    Ford and Toyota have formed a four-automaker consortium to speed up the deployment of open source software for connected in-car systems, according to a report by Bloomberg on Wednesday.

  • Strange Appfellows: Ford and Toyota Form Open-Source Software Consortium
  • Ford and Toyota release open source tools for in-car apps
  • Ford, Toyota back open-source platform for in-car apps
  • A consortium forms for “open source” vehicle software
  • What storytellers can teach open leaders
  • 5 Ways to Be Successful with Open-Source Software: Hadoop Creator Doug Cutting’s Advice for 2017

    Because of my long-standing association with the Apache Software Foundation, I’m often asked the question, “What’s next for open source technology?” My typical response is variations of “I don’t know” to “the possibilities are endless.”

    Over the past year, we’ve seen open source technology make strong inroads into the mainstream of enterprise technology. Who would have thought that my work on Hadoop ten years ago would impact so many industries – from manufacturing to telecom to finance. They have all taken hold of the powers of the open source ecosystem not only to improve the customer experience, become more innovative and grow the bottom line, but also to support work toward the greater good of society through genomic research, precision medicine and programs to stop human trafficking, as just a few examples.

    Below I’ve listed five tips for folks who are curious about how to begin working with open source and what to expect from the ever-changing ecosystem.

  • 10 steps to innersource in your organization in 2017

    In recent years, an increasing number of organizations, often non-technology companies, have kept a keen eye on open source. Although they may be unable to use open source to the fullest extent in their products and services, they are interested in bringing the principles of open source within the walls of their organization. This “innersource” concept can provide a number of organizational benefits.

    As a consultant who helps build both internal and external communities in companies, I find the major challenge facing organizations is how to put an innersource program in place, deploy resources effectively, and build growth in the program.

  • The 10 Coolest Open Source Products Of 2016

    In 2016, open source products were front-and-center. A number of new offerings in containers, networking, storage and other major areas were among those that debuted during the year.

    During the Red Hat Summit in June – where the theme was “The Power of Participation” – Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst described the open source movement this way: “Our ability to harness and distill the best ideas will determine human progress for the next century … Our future depends on participation.”

    Here are the 10 coolest open-source products we’ve tracked in 2016.

  • Open Source is Helping to Drive the Artificial Intelligence Renaissance

    We’re only a few days into 2017, and it’s already clear that one of the biggest tech categories of this year will be artificial intelligence. The good news is that open source AI tools are proliferating and making it easy for organizations to leverage them. AI is also driving acquisitions. As Computerworld is reporting, in the past year, at least 20 artificial intelligence companies have been acquired, according to CB Insights, a market analysis firm.

    MIT Technology Review is out with its five big predictions for AI this year. Here is a bit on what they expect, and some of the open source AI tools that you should know about.

  • Is Blockchain the Ultimate Open Source Disruptive Technology?

    Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures has been talking a lot about the blockchain recently, so I decided to learn more about it. I read the Marketing the Blockchain e-book, watched The Grand Vision of a Crypto-Tech Economy video and the video keynote of Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne at the Bitcoin 2014 conference, and did some more research on my own. While far from an expert, I do see some interesting similarities to the adoption of open source software. Here’s what I’ve learned — please comment and tell me if I’m wrong:

  • Events

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • 9 reasons to certify your products as open source hardware

        The Open Source Hardware Association Certification was created in response to an overwhelming demand for a clearer and more transparent method of identifying and marketing open source hardware products. The purpose of this certification is to provide an easy and straightforward way for producers to indicate that their products meet a uniform and well-defined standard for open source compliance, benefiting both creators and users of these products.

  • Programming/Development

    • Hot Functions for IronFunctions
    • Google Develops Experimental Python Runtime In Golang

      Google’s open-source team today announced Grumpy, a Python runtime written in the Go programming language.

      Google makes use of Python extensively and with concurrent workloads not being a strong suit for CPython and other Python runtimes having their own shortcomings, Google decided to develop the “Grumpy” runtime.

    • Grumpy: Go running Python!

      Google runs millions of lines of Python code. The front-end server that drives youtube.com and YouTube’s APIs is primarily written in Python, and it serves millions of requests per second! YouTube’s front-end runs on CPython 2.7, so we’ve put a ton of work into improving the runtime and adapting our application to work optimally within it. These efforts have borne a lot of fruit over the years, but we always run up against the same issue: it’s very difficult to make concurrent workloads perform well on CPython.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Why Machine Learning Is Hard to Apply to Networking

      Machine learning is becoming a buzzword—arguably an overused one—among companies that deal with networking. Recent announcements have touted machine learning capabilities at Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Nokia, for instance.

    • Expect Deeper and Cheaper Machine Learning

      Last March, Google’s computers roundly beat the world-class Go champion Lee Sedol, marking a milestone in artificial intelligence. The winning computer program, created by researchers at Google DeepMind in London, used an artificial neural network that took advantage of what’s known as deep learning, a strategy by which neural networks involving many layers of processing are configured in an automated fashion to solve the problem at hand.

      Unknown to the public at the time was that Google had an ace up its sleeve. You see, the computers Google used to defeat Sedol contained special-purpose hardware—a computer card Google calls its Tensor Processing Unit.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Bluefin tuna sells for £500,000 at Japan auction amid overfishing concerns

      A bluefin tuna has fetched 74.2m yen (£517,000) at the first auction of the year at Tsukiji market in Tokyo, amid warnings that decades of overfishing by Japan and other countries is taking the species to the brink of extinction.

      The 212kg fish, caught off the coast of Oma in northern Japan, was bought by Kiyomura, the operator of the Sushi Zanmai restaurant chain, after its president, Kiyoshi Kimura, outbid rivals for the sixth year in a row.

  • Security

    • 50 ways to avoid getting hacked in 2017

      “You don’t need to be coy, Roy”

    • Nextcloud 11 Cloud Server Bolsters Security

      NCC Group, a global expert in cyber security and risk mitigation, reviewed the addition of Nextcloud’s new features and noted they “enrich the security layers with minimum impact on the user” and are developed using industry standard security processes (assessed against ISO27001 clause 14 controls). You can read more and download their independent security assurance online and learn more details about the new features in Nextcloud’s blog on security in Nextcloud 11.

    • Android January Security Update Rolling Out Now
    • Android, Debian Linux and Ubuntu Linux top 2016 list of most vulnerable product charts
    • Data: More vulnerabilities found in Google Android than any other program in 2016 [Ed: what about secret patching?]
    • Report Reveals Android had the Most Security Vulnerabilities in 2016
    • Man Has To Beg LG To Uncripple His ‘Smart’ TV After Ransomware Attack

      We’ve noted repeatedly how “smart” television sets have the same security issues plaguing the rest of the internet of broken things: namely there often isn’t any security to speak of. The net result has been TVs that spy on you by recording in-home audio, and in some cases transmitting that data unencrypted around the internet. But we’ve also noted how these TVs — like the rest of the Internet of Things — can be compromised in a matter of moments by some rather rudimentary hacking, then incorporated into the historically unprecedented DDoS attacks we’re now seeing around the world.

      As an added bonus, your smart TV can now be infected by ransomware, too. Software engineer Darren Cauthon found this out the hard way when he awoke on Christmas Day to find that his family’s LG 50GA6400 had been infected with a version of the Cyber.Police ransomware — aka FLocker, Dogspectus, or Frantic Locker. That particular ransomware posts an image to the screen of the television pretending to originate with the FBI, and claiming that users must pay a $500 penalty to return full functionality to the television.

    • Security updates for Wednesday
    • MongoDB Data Being Held For Ransom

      If you’re using MongoDB, you might want to check to make sure you have it configured properly — or better yet, that you’re running the latest and greatest — to avoid finding it wiped and your data being held for ransom.

      A hacker who goes by the name Harak1r1 is attacking unprotected MongoDB installations, wiping their content and installing a ransom note in place of the the stolen data. The cost to get the data returned is 0.2 bitcoin, which comes to about $203. If that sounds cheap, it isn’t. Not if you’re deploying multiple Mongo databases and they all get hit — which has been happening.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • In Syria, Western Media Cheer Al Qaeda

      The Syrian government—a dictatorship known for imprisoning, torturing and disappearing dissidents—is easy to vilify. And over the last five years of Syria’s civil war, it has committed its share of atrocities. But there is more than one side to every story, and US media coverage has mainly reflected one side—that of the rebels—without regard for accuracy or basic context.

      As the Syrian government recaptured East Aleppo from rebels in recent weeks, media outlets from across the political spectrum became rebel mouthpieces, unquestioningly relaying rebel claims while omitting crucial details about who the rebels were.

      Almost always overlooked in the US (and UK) media narrative is the fact that the rebels in East Aleppo were a patchwork of Western- and Gulf-backed jihadist groups dominated by Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra)—Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria—along with its ally, Ahrar al-Sham (Daily Beast, 8/8/16; Foreign Policy, 9/1/16). These groups are explicitly anti-democratic and have been implicated in human rights violations, from mass execution and child beheadings to using caged religious minorities as human shields.

    • Danger in Democrats Demonizing Putin

      With the Clintons’ corporate money machine floundering after a devastating election defeat, Democrats are desperate to find someone to blame and have dangerously settled on Vladimir Putin, writes Norman Solomon.

    • Requiem for a UN ‘Yes Man’

      Even as much of the world bridled at the U.S. pretensions of “unipolar” power, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon toed Washington’s line and further undercut the U.N.’s supposed evenhandedness, writes Joe Lauria.

    • Netanyahu Wants Pardon for IDF Soldier Who Shot Defenseless, Wounded Palestinian in the Head

      Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday called for the pardon of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier who had just been convicted of manslaughter for fatally shooting a wounded Palestinian man last year in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.

      “Sgt Elor Azaria, 20, shot Abdul Fatah al-Sharif, 21, in the head while he was lying immobile on a road,” as BBC News writes. Al-Sharif was allegedly involved in a knife attack against another Israeli soldier and had already been shot, though he remained alive.

    • Obama’s Deadly Afghan Acquiescence

      From his first days, President Obama showed a lack of guts when confronted by powerful insiders. He backed down even when that meant squandering U.S. soldiers in the futile Afghan War “surges,” says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

    • The U.S. Government Thinks Thousands of Russian Hackers May Be Reading My Blog. They Aren’t.

      After the U.S. government published a report on Russia’s cyber attacks against the U.S. election system, and included a list of computers that were allegedly used by Russian hackers, I became curious if any of these hackers had visited my personal blog. The U.S. report, which boasted of including “technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services,” came with a list of 876 suspicious IP addresses used by the hackers, and these addresses were the clues I needed to, in the end, understand a gaping weakness in the report.

      An IP address is a set of numbers that identifies a computer, or a network of computers, on the internet. Each time someone loads my website, it logs their IP address. So I searched my web server logs for the suspicious IP addresses, and I was shocked to discover over 80,000 web requests from IPs used by the Russian hackers in the last 14 months! Digging further, I found that some of these Russian hackers had even posted comments (mostly innocuous technical questions)! Even today, several days after publication of the report (which used a codename for the Russian attack, Grizzly Steppe), I’m still finding these suspicious IP addresses in my logs — although I would expect the Russians to stop using them after the U.S. government exposed them.

    • Senators Threaten to Cut Worldwide Embassy Security If U.S. Doesn’t Move Its Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem

      A trio of GOP senators have introduced legislation that would cut security, construction, and maintenance funds for U.S. embassies around the world in half until the president moves the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

      In 1995, Congress passed a law requiring the federal government to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all campaigned on relocating the embassy and executing this law. But once in office, every one of them invoked a waiver in the law that allows them to hold off on the move if they deem it necessary to the national security interests of the United States to do so.

      Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem would be seen as a green light to some Israeli government officials, such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who seek to make Jerusalem the undivided capital of the state of Israel. That, in turn, would preclude the Palestinians from establishing a state that includes East Jerusalem. Most international observers believe that this would render the two-state solution impossible and thus be damaging to peace.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • SEE IT: CNN apologizes to Julian Assange after commentator calls him ‘a pedophile’

      CNN issued an apology after one of its paid commentators called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “a pedophile” during a live broadcast Wednesday morning.

      Phil Mudd, a counterterrorism analyst for the network, slipped out the incorrect accusation while discussing Assange’s controversial anti-secrecy site on the network’s “New Day” show.

      “I think there’s an effort to protect WikiLeaks (and) a pedophile who lives in the Ecuadorian embassy in London — this guy is not credible,” Mudd said, referring to Assange.

    • Ex-CIA spokesman: Trump believes Julian Assange over the CIA

      A former Pentagon and CIA spokesman on Wednesday slammed Donald Trump for giving credit to WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange and warned that America will be less safe when the President-elect takes office later this month.
      “Let’s stare this reality square in the face: PEOTUS is pro-Putin and believes Julian Assange over the @CIA. On Jan. 20 we will be less safe,” tweeted George Little, who served under former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.

    • Sarah Palin Apologizes to Julian Assange for Comparing Him to Terrorists

      Late Tuesday night, former Alaska Governor turned 2008 Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin made a rare apology on her Facebook page, the intended audience of which was Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Over six years ago in December 2010, Palin took to her Facebook page to castigate Assange for publishing her emails, which were obtained illegally by hackers, even going so far as to compare him to terrorists. Having changed her tune in light of the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, Palin did an about-face, going back to Facebook to issue an olive branch to the controversial Wikileaks founder.

    • In a U-turn, some Republicans now see WikiLeaks’ Assange in positive light

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, once considered a traitor by conservatives, is suddenly finding some love in important corners of the Republican Party.

      Assange, who sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London in 2012 and has remained there since, gave a high-profile interview Tuesday night to Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News commentator. The accolades then started pouring in.

      Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008, took back her previous suggestions that the U.S. military should hunt down and kill Assange, whose group published tens of thousands of secret U.S. war and diplomatic documents in 2010.

    • The FBI Never Asked For Access To Hacked Computer Servers

      The FBI did not examine the servers of the Democratic National Committee before issuing a report attributing the sweeping cyberintrusion to Russia-backed hackers, BuzzFeed News has learned.

      Six months after the FBI first said it was investigating the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, the bureau has still not requested access to the hacked servers, a DNC spokesman said. No US government entity has run an independent forensic analysis on the system, one US intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.

      “The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers,” Eric Walker, the DNC’s deputy communications director, told BuzzFeed News in an email.

    • Trump and Julian Assange, an Unlikely Pair, Unite to Sow Hacking Doubts

      Just a year ago, they might have seemed the oddest of couples. But now President-elect Donald J. Trump and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, have formed a united front against the conclusion of American intelligence agencies that Russian intelligence used hacked emails to interfere in the presidential election.

      Mr. Assange, long reviled by many Republicans as an anarchist lawbreaker out to damage the United States, has won new respect from conservatives who appreciated his site’s release of Democratic emails widely perceived to have hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And Mr. Trump has been eager to undercut the conclusion of the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and other agencies that those emails were provided to WikiLeaks courtesy of Russian government hackers.

    • New Analysis of Swedish Police Report Confirms Julian Assange’s Version in Sweden’s case

      Author and investigative reporter Celia Farber has prepared for publication in The Indicter, an updated analysis of the Swedish Assange case. The in-depth analysis concludes that the police reports confirm Julian Assange’s testimony, as given to the prosecutor in her questioning conducted at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It has also been established that the crucial allegations against Mr Julian Assange, as have appeared in the Swedish and international media, in fact were constructed by the police and were not what the complainants really said or wished to achieve.

      It has been discovered that it was the police, or the prosecutor’s office, which unlawfully and/or unethically leaked the “allegations” to the evening paper “Expressen”, which is clearly known for its declared NATO sympathies. Regrettably, but also predictably, this was an opportunity for Western mainstream media to create a scandal around the founder of WikiLeaks. Likewise, it was an occasion used by the MSM to insidiously attack the organization that had partly exposed the corruption of the governments they represent, and partly surpassed them in journalistic efficacy and objectivity.

      But it was more than purely vendetta-time; it was a well-articulated campaign which started that day in August 2010 when –according to the Snowden documents– the US government asked the countries participating in the military occupation of Afghanistan under US command to prosecute Julian Assange. Sweden obeyed; others cooperated.

      Nevertheless, the Afghan Logs and the Iraq Logs exposed by WikiLeaks remained published. The WikiLeaks founder did not surrender. The Assange case, already politically in its origins, turned into a spiral of increasing geopolitical dimensions.

      Our position has always been that the above-described political aspect has always been present in the ‘Assange case’ and we could hardly be –in principle– interested in furthering a discussion on details pertaining the intimacy of Mr Assange or of other people around the constructed ‘legal case’.

      However, we regard this analysis of Ms Celia Farber –A Swedish-born and America-based journalist familiar with the intricacies of the Swedish culture and language– as important material, which we hope will help to end the overblown discussion on the ‘suspicions’ or ‘allegations’ against Mr Assange. These allegations have constituted the essence of the artificial debate that the Swedish prosecutors periodically orchestrate, through press releases or erratic press conferences of the type “we have nothing new to communicate”.

      We have also published – in the same spirit of clarification– the statement of Mr Julian Assange given to the Swedish prosecutor during the interview in London. In the context of this new analysis by Celia Farber, we also recommend the reading of “The answer given by Julian Assange to the Swedish prosecutor in the London questioning of 14-15 November 2016.”

    • Donald Trump backs Julian Assange over Russia hacking claim
    • US obtained evidence that Russia leaked emails, say officials

      The officials declined to describe the intelligence obtained about the involvement of a third-party in passing on leaked material to WikiLeaks, saying they did not want to reveal how the US government had obtained the information.

      In an interview with Fox News, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said he did not receive emails stolen from the DNC and top Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta from “a state party.” Assange did not rule out the possibility that he got the material from a third party.

      Trump on Wednesday sided with Assange and again questioned the US intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia tried to help his candidacy and hurt Clinton’s.

    • CIA Director Brennan Casts Doubt on Assange’s Credibility

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange insists that Russia was not his source for hacked election-related emails, but CIA Director John Brennan isn’t so sure.

      During a PBS NewsHour interview, Brennan said that those who doubt the connection between Russia and the hacking of Democratic Party email accounts should withhold judgment until they read the forthcoming intelligence report.

      He also said that Assange is “not exactly a bastion of truth and integrity.”

    • Assange Is Vastly More Reliable Than The Elite U.S. Media

      In January 2011, the people of Tunisia effectuated an uprising which led to the ouster of Ben Ali, who had ruled the country for 23 years. Many Tunisians were well aware that the regime was autocratic and corrupt, but they were provided additional gory details about its decadent opulence by none other than WikiLeaks, the organization whose founder and editor is currently being slimed by self-important U.S. liberals. In the aftermath of the revolution, WikiLeaks was widely hailed for its role in supplying previously-concealed information to Tunisian dissidents, and with that Assange cemented for himself a place in the pantheon of great journalistic trailblazers.

    • Sarah Palin Now Thinks Julian Assange Is A Really Nifty Guy

      While many support the idea of Wikileaks, many now worry that the organization’s supposed goal of total transparency often plays second fiddle to Julian Assange’s ego and the group’s often inconsistent behavior. But whatever you think of Assange as a human being, it’s important to remember that the group wouldn’t be necessary if the established media actually did its job. Groups like Wikileaks are just symptoms of a broader disease: the larger media’s shift to banal infotainment, and the failure of these giant media conglomerates to hold companies and governments accountable to the truth.

      That said, it’s becoming downright comedic to watch Assange, Wikileaks and whistleblowers become increasingly vilified or deified — depending entirely on what’s being said, who it’s being said about, or what color-coded partisan jumpsuit you’re wearing.

      For example, Assange was a hero to Democrats after exposing government misdeeds during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but was demonized incessantly in the wake of the DNC hack (to the point where the actual data revealed was thoroughly ignored). Similarly, Assange was derided by Republicans as the very worst sort of scoundrel for the better part of the last decade, a position that has, well, softened in the wake of the Clinton campaign-crippling DNC hack. After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, for now, right?

      In fact Assange has bizarrely become a temporary folk hero to many of the same folks that wanted his head on a pike just a few months ago. Sarah Palin, for example, in 2010 got very close to advocating that Assange be hunted down and killed, likening him to an “anti-American operative with blood on his hands.” That position was forged, in part, after Wikileaks leaked Palin’s Yahoo e-mails back in 2008 after a hacker gained access to the Alaskan government documents Palin had been storing on a private server.

      [...]

      And while this positional flip flop on a certain front is incredibly entertaining in a David Lynch sort of way, transparency and truth don’t work that way. While leaking organizations and whistleblowers themselves are certainly fallible, the truths they reveal are non-negotiable, and don’t care about partisan patty cake. In other words, these same folks suddenly lavishing praise on whistleblowers now because it’s tactically convenient, will be back arguing for assassination by drone strike the moment the next whistleblower reveals truths they’d prefer remain hidden.

    • Julian Assange’s claim that there was no Russian involvement in WikiLeaks emails

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Record-breaking extreme weather in Australia in 2016 devastates ecosystems

      Australia’s weather was extreme in 2016, driven by humankind’s burning of fossil fuels as well as a strong El Niño, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s annual climate statement.

      That extreme weather led to devastated ecosystems both on land and in the sea, with unprecedented bushfires in regions that don’t usually burn, the worst coral bleaching on record, and has been attributed as the cause of damage to vast tracts of crucial kelp forests, oyster farms and salmon stocks across southern Australia.

    • Rick Perry’s Texas Giveaways

      The soon-to-be U.S. energy secretary doled out billions in grants and tax incentives for corporations while governor of Texas. One $30 million grant went to an energy group that turned out to be a phantom.

    • Endangered Species Under GOP? Climate Change Information on the Web

      James Rowen, a longtime Wisconsin journalist and environmental blogger, recently discovered a stark remaking of a state Department of Natural Resources web page on climate change and the Great Lakes.

      Until December, the page, dating from the Democratic administration of former Gov. James Doyle, had this headline — “Climate Change and Wisconsin’s Great Lakes” — and a clear description of the state of the science, including this line reflecting the latest federal and international research assessments: “Earth’s climate is changing. Human activities that increase heat-trapping (“green house”) gases are the main cause.”

      The page described a variety of possible impacts on the lakes and concluded, “The good news is that we can all work to slow climate change and lessen its effects.” Nine hyperlinks led readers to other resources.

    • James Delingpole article calling ocean acidification ‘alarmism’ cleared by press watchdog

      A magazine article claiming “marine life has nothing whatsoever to fear from ocean acidification” has been deemed neither misleading nor inaccurate by the UK’s press regulator.

      The feature, written by journalist and climate-change sceptic James Delingpole, appeared in the Spectator under the headline “Ocean acidification: yet another wobbly pillar of climate alarmism”.

      Seawater is becoming more acidic as the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where rising concentrations are the cause of global warming. Many scientists are concerned about the impact of acidification on marine life.

  • Finance

    • Margrethe Vestager’s top 10 cases in 2017

      Standing too long under the spotlights can get uncomfortable and this year Margrethe Vestager may begin to feel the heat.

      The European commissioner for competition shot to international fame in 2015 with back-to-back charges against Google and Gazprom. In 2016 she cemented her reputation as the world’s foremost corporate policewoman with the stunning order that Apple reimburse some €13 billion of alleged illegal state aid to Ireland’s taxman.

    • CETA Costs Jobs, Worsens Inequality, Social Tensions: EU Committee

      The trade deal that Canada and the EU signed in October will cause a loss of jobs and threaten to increase already high social tensions in Europe, a European Parliament committee has concluded.

      The Committee on Employment and Social Affairs voted against CETA in December, meaning it is recommending that the European Parliament vote down the deal. It’s one of many committees that have to vote on a recommendation to parliament.

      The full EU parliament is slated to vote on CETA in early February.

    • Great: Now Wall Street Is Funding Speculative Corporate Sovereignty Claims For A Share Of The Spoils

      Techdirt first wrote about corporate sovereignty four years ago — although we only came up with that name about a year later. Since then, a hitherto obscure aspect of trade deals has become one of the most contentious issues in international relations. Indeed, the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) measures in both TPP and TTIP played an important part in galvanizing resistance to these so-called “trade” deals, and thus in their defeat, at least for the moment (never say “never”.)

      [...]

      This is a crucially-important point about corporate sovereignty: governments never win ISDS cases; at best, they just don’t lose them. All the upside is with the corporates that bring the claim, and all the downside with nations that are defending their actions and regulations. The new wave of third-party funding will accentuate that skewed nature, and make corporate sovereignty even more of a scourge than it is today, regardless of whether it is ever included again in any new deal.

    • Venezuela on the Brink

      The crisis engulfing Venezuela appears to have reached the point of no return. Inflation is heading for 1000% while shortages of food and other essentials are now widespread. It has prompted many to speculate that it is just a matter of time before President Maduro is forced from office and Chavism is consigned to the dustbin of history.

    • Treasury Nominee Steve Mnuchin’s Bank Accused of “Widespread Misconduct” in Leaked Memo

      OneWest Bank, which Donald Trump’s nominee for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, ran from 2009 to 2015, repeatedly broke California’s foreclosure laws during that period, according to a previously undisclosed 2013 memo from top prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office.

      The memo obtained by The Intercept alleges that OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.

      In the memo, the leaders of the state attorney general’s Consumer Law Section said they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” in a yearlong investigation. In a detailed 22-page request, they identified over a thousand legal violations in the small subsection of OneWest loans they were able to examine, and they recommended that Attorney General Kamala Harris file a civil enforcement action against the Pasadena-based bank. They even wrote up a sample legal complaint, seeking injunctive relief and millions of dollars in penalties.

    • For Head of SEC, Trump Taps Another Fox to Guard Wall Street Henhouse

      Wall Street lawyer Jay Clayton, who defended big banks against regulators during the financial crisis, is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the federal agency charged with policing Wall Street.

      Clayton, a partner with the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, is Trump’s nominee for chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In that role, the Washington Post reports, Clayton “would play a key role in Trump’s efforts to usher in a period of deregulation, including undoing parts of 2010′s financial reform legislation, known as the Dodd-Frank Act.”

    • UK’s lack of negotiating experience may lead to ‘very hard Brexit’

      Britain’s four-decade membership of the EU has left it lacking experience in international negotiations, which will hamper it in trade talks and may lead to “a very hard Brexit”, Norway’s prime minister has said.

      “We do feel that sometimes when we are discussing with Britain, that their speed is limited by the fact that it is such a long time since they have negotiated” on their own, Erna Solberg told Reuters at a meeting of Bavaria’s centre-right CSU party in Germany.

      Solberg said she hoped the UK would be able to negotiate an agreement that kept it close to the EU, but it would not be easy. “I fear a very hard Brexit, but I hope we will find a better solution.”

      The remarks reinforce those made by Sir Ivan Rogers, who resigned as Britain’s EU ambassador this week.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Trump’s Neo-Fascism will be built on Neo-Fascism of Obama and Democrat Party

      Late on the evening of December 23, when the attention of the public was fixed on the consumerist excesses of the holiday season, President Obama signed into law the Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Like the other NDAAs that President Obama signed into law during his administration, this one further strengthened the repressive capacities of the state.

      Buried deep in the provisions of the NDAA was language from a bill introduced by Sen. Rob Portman ostensibly to protect the public from the effects of “foreign propaganda.” As previously reported by Black Agenda Report, the bill, originally introduced last March, was passed by the Senate on December 8 as the “Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act” and then inserted into the NDAA.

    • The Dark Side of Obama’s Legacy

      The administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama tilted too far in the direction of the military, which already plays far too large a role in the policy process and the intelligence cycle. Strategic intelligence has suffered from the Pentagon’s domination of a process that is now geared primarily to support the warfighter in an era of permanent war. The strategic intelligence failures during the Obama administration include the absence of warning regarding events in Crimea and the Ukraine; the “Arab Spring;” the emergence of the Islamic State; and Russian recklessness in Syria.

    • Donald Trump’s Debt to Willie Horton

      A precursor of Donald Trump’s race-messaging campaign can be found in George H.W. Bush’s exploitation of the Willie Horton case in 1988, an ugly reminder of America’s racist heritage, writes JP Sottile.

    • Risks of Trump’s ‘Winning’ Obsession

      Donald Trump’s more pragmatic approach to foreign policy may be an improvement over the recent ideological obsessions but his own obsession with “winning” could cause trouble, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Never Trust a Man without a Waistcoat

      Contrary to the usual mainstream media inaccuracy, Sir Ivan Rogers has not resigned from the FCO as he was a Treasury civil servant. The clue is in the phrase “resigned on principle”. FCO people are not big on principles.

    • NAACP Sit-In at Sen. Sessions’ Office Puts AG Pick’s Worrisome History in Crosshairs

      Since his nomination in November, Sessions has been criticized by advocacy groups as “one more way the Trump administration shows its racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynist colors,” and his nomination described as “a direct attack against” the nation’s minorities. Democratic lawmakers are also gearing up to show their opposition to Sessions’ leading the Justice Department.

      Outlining its opposition to Sessions, the NAACP in an earlier statement pointed to the senator’s “record on voting rights that is unreliable at best and hostile at worse; a failing record on other civil rights; a record of racially offensive remarks and behavior; and dismal record on criminal justice reform issues.”

      Speaking to CNN from Sessions’ office on Tuesday, Brooks said the senator should withdraw his name from the nomination or be prepared to arrest the group.

      Explaining the motivations for the action, Brooks said that “in the midst of rampant voter suppression, this nominee has failed to acknowledge the reality of voter suppression while pretending to believe in the myth of voter fraud, and we need at the helm of the Department of Justice somebody who acknowledges the reality of voter suppression, someone who is going to stand at the side of people who need the defense of the attorney general, and a Justice Department that works for everyone.”

    • WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived

      In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.

    • Civil rights activists arrested protesting Trump’s Attorney General pick

      Police in Alabama arrested six civil rights activists staging a sit-in at Senator Jeff Sessions’ office on Tuesday to protest his nomination for U.S. Attorney General, criticizing his record on voting rights and race relations.

      Sessions, 70, has a history of controversial positions on race, immigration and criminal justice reform.

      Members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had vowed to occupy Sessions’ Mobile, Alabama office until the conservative Republican lawmaker either withdrew as a candidate or they were arrested.

      In the end, Cornell Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, and Stephen Green, national director of the youth division of the NAACP, were among those arrested, according to a post on the Twitter page of the civil rights organization.

    • Year of the cock

      It’s not the first time that PEOTUS Trump has been compared to a fowl in China. Back in mid-November, he literally became the pheasant-elect as photos of him juxtaposed to a golden pheasant (Wikipedia article in Chinese) went viral on the Chinese internet.

    • End of the World, Progressive Article Edition

      For those who would like to become a progressive columnist in the world of Trump, here’s a guide for your first and every subsequent article…

      [...]

      First of all, points for the “bang and whimper” cliche, followed by the happy bullsh*t about how wonderful America was last month as described by phony Hamilton the musical lyrics. I bet the show’s cast could make values, morals, compassion, tolerance, decency, common purpose, and identity rhyme.

      Dude, we are a helluva people! Exceptional!

      Because prior to the election results we weren’t a nation founded on a slave economy, which 250 years later still has its cops imprison and murder Blacks, who doesn’t have the highest incarceration rate in the world, mostly for small amounts of weed that has been long legalized in other western nations. Our compassion is set to full, except if you are different than me in your race, religion, or views on guns, gays or abortions. Of course we don’t really do much for women, and unlike say India, Israel, the UK, Burma, and a whole mess of other places, have never had a female chief executive.

      Yeah, whatever, all that.

      And lovely, that bit about American becoming an international pariah. Could happen. Luckily the world has overlooked so far that we are the only nation to have used atomic weapons (twice, on civilians), stayed at war, spied and overthrown governments in their countries pretty steadily for 70 years, set the Middle Easton on fire over fake WMDs, drone kill wherever we like, torture people, and run an offshore penal colony right out of Les Miserables. Man, Trump, amiright?

    • WaPo Spreading Own Falsehoods Shows Real Power of Fake News

      The putative scourge of “fake news” has been one of the most pervasive post-election media narratives. The general thrust goes like this: A torrent of fake news swept the internet, damaging Hillary Clinton and possibly leading to a Donald Trump victory.

      A primary problem with this convenient-to-some narrative is that “fake news” has yet to be clearly defined by anyone. Vaguely conceptualized as misleading or outright fabricated stories, it can mean anything—as FAIR has noted previously (12/1/16)—from outlets that align with “Russian viewpoints” to foreign spam.

      [...]

      After FAIR and others pointed out the error, Rampell’s article was changed, but this episode shows how quickly an entirely bogus premise—that Russia had hacked, or even attempted to hack, an American public utility—can spread without an ounce of skepticism. At the time her column was published, the only “evidence” of an “attempted” Russian hack was some malware code that could have been used by anybody. Rampell, likely influenced by the initial erroneous reporting by her colleagues, made an assumption that this was evidence of an “attempted hack,” a false assumption debunked by the Post itself (1/2/16) two hours after she published. In all cases, everything is rounded up to the most sensational, most Cold War–panic inducing conclusion. “Mistakes” rarely, if ever, happen in favor of less hysteria.

    • Beyond Anti-Trump

      Let’s be careful about the phrase “anti-Trump coalition.” The phrase leaves the door open for everything being about the Big Bad Donald and for progressives to get sucked/suckered once again into the ruling class politics of the Democrats. We need to take on the unelected deep state dictatorships of money, class, race, empire, militarism, sexism, and ecocide – the reigning oppression structures that have ruled under Barack Obama as under previous presidents. As the activist-artist Brian Carlson recently wrote me from Buenos Aires, Donald Trump is the latest “bobble head doll on the dashboard of real [U.S.] power.” The thin-skinned tyrant Trump is the most terrifying and noxious such doll yet, perhaps, but the point stands.

      And dreary corporate-Democratic presidents like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Obama are no small part of the explanation for the ever more right-wing Republican presidencies of the long neoliberal era. Their serial populism-manipulating betrayals of the working-class majority in service to the wealthy Few open the door for Republicans to sweep in and take over for a term or two (2001-2009) or three (1981-1993). (Please see my forthcoming Truthdig essay “Obama’s Neoliberal Legacy”) for a discussion of how Obama begat Trump.)

    • Anti-Trump Coalition Shows Cracks

      Somewhat surprisingly, a genuine grassroots, broad-based movement has emerged to oppose the incoming Trump administration, but perhaps less surprisingly – given the American left’s self-marginalizing tendencies – the nascent efforts may already be descending into sectarianism, finger-pointing and divisive identity-based politics.

    • Battlelines Drawn as GOP Readies ‘To Make America Sick Again’

      Republicans, “beside themselves” with excitement over their new power in Congress and, in less than three weeks, the White House, announced on Wednesday their plans for a swift attack on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare.

      Repealing the ACA, said Vice President-elect Mike Pence after meeting with House Republicans, will be the incoming administration’s “first order of business,” with a goal of getting legislation to President-elect Donald Trump by Feb. 20. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) also spoke at the news conference, and said that the program, which allowed over 20 million Americans to gain health insurance coverage, “is a story of broken promise after broken promise after broken promise.”

      The Senate on Wednesday also voted “to take the first official step toward repealing President Barack Obama’s signature health care law,” as CNN reports. The chamber “voted 51-48 Wednesday to begin debating a budget that, once approved, will prevent Democrats from using a filibuster to block future Republican legislation to scuttle the healthcare law,” the Associated Press adds.

    • New McCarthyism Targets Trump

      Official Washington’s New McCarthyism is painting President-elect Trump as almost a “traitor” for seeking détente with Russia, a moment when peace-oriented Americans face a complex choice, says John V. Walsh.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Activist who aided Amos Yee’s bid for political asylum in USA being reported to Department of Homeland Security

      Melissa Chen, a US-based Singaporean civil activist involved in Amos Yee’s asylum bid said in her Facebook that she has been reported to the United States’ (US) Department of Homeland Security for the ‘crime’ of abetting the teen blogger seeking refuge in that country. They are hoping the activist would be deported.

      [...]

      In the exchange between them they discussed making arrangements for Amos’ bid for political asylum in the United States of America. Amos was therefore compelled to tell the truth. Amos is unlikely to be released from detention until a hearing is convened.

      Amos has said that the he has no intention of returning to Singapore as he does not want to do National Service.

    • New Chinese Law on Cybersecurity Will Increase Censorship & Data Surveillance

      The Chinese government passed a new set of regulations that will tighten existing policies on censorship and data surveillance. From June 1 and onward, outflow of any kind of personal and important data will be restricted and censored by key information infrastructure operators (KILO).

      Network operators and internet service providers also fall under the newly proposed regulatory regime, and as a result are obligated to impose new security and data protection systems.

    • Confirmed Horrible Person James Woods Continues Being Horrible In ‘Winning’ Awful Lawsuit To Unmask Deceased Online Critic

      So… Hollywood actor James Woods continues to make it clear that he’s a complete and total asshole. As you may or may not recall, last year, Woods sued an anonymous Twitter user who went by the name Abe List, for mocking Woods on twitter. Specifically, List called Woods “clownboy” and later tweeted: “cocaine addict James Woods still sniffing and spouting.” Woods sued Abe List claiming that the “cocaine addict” statement was defamatory, and (the important part) demanding the name and identity of Abe List. The fact that Woods, himself, has a long (long, long, long) history of spouting off similarly incendiary claims to people on Twitter apparently wasn’t important.

    • Google Apparently No Longer Humoring Court Orders To Delist Defamatory Content

      That timing seems to coincide with Paul Alan Levy/Public Citizen’s intervention in a case where an order to delist traced back to a dentist unhappy with an online review. The eventual delisting by Google came as the result of a bogus lawsuit — filed with or without the knowledge of the dentist Mitul Patel — against a bogus defendant. The fake “Matthew Chan” signed a document agreeing to remove his review and the court ordered Google to take it down.

    • Putin’s Adviser Says Russia Must Be Ready To Disconnect Itself From The Global Internet

      Klimenko’s comments were made before the US announced its response to claims of Russian interference in the presidential election process. His analysis of “tectonic shifts” in US-Russia relations now looks rather prescient, although US threats to hack back made it a relatively easy prediction. And even though his call for Russia to ensure its critical infrastructure cannot be “turned off” by anyone — in particular by the US — may be grandstanding to a certain extent, it is not infeasible.

      The Chinese have consciously made their own segment of the Internet quite independent, with strict controls on how data enters or leaves the country. Techdirt reported earlier that Russia was increasingly looking to China for both inspiration and technological assistance; maybe Klimenko’s comments are another sign of an alignment between the two countries in the digital realm.

    • Facebook Censors Art Historian’s Photo Of Neptune’s Statue-Penis
    • Facebook under fire after it censors ‘explicitly sexual’ statue of Neptune

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NSA’s top cyber-defender leaves after reorganization

      Curtis Dukes, the NSA official who headed up its cyber-defenders, the famed Information Assurance Directorate, has left the agency — a few months after IAD was merged with the offensive, eavesdropping side of the house, the Signals Intelligence Directorate.

    • NSA Director to Head Up CIS Controls Group
    • Someone bid $9,000 worth of bitcoin for supposed NSA exploits

      In August, a group of supposed hackers calling themselves the Shadow Brokers leaked a trove of outdated NSA-linked cyber-weapons and encouraged observers to bid on software exploits they had stolen. On Wednesday, someone paid the group $9,000 worth of bitcoin, based on publicly visible transaction records. The mysterious payment represents the single largest deposit made to a bitcoin wallet previously listed by the Shadow Brokers.

      While the aforementioned bitcoin wallet had seen past activity in the form of small deposits ranging from just a few cents to several hundreds of dollars, Wednesday’s payment is by far the largest contribution. Bitcoin is an anonymous digital currency that is sold, traded, accepted and tracked online.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Even Leonard Peltier’s Prosecutor Calls for Clemency

      The former prosecutor of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier joins thousands calling for clemency saying it is “in the best interests of justice.”

      The former Iowa United States attorney in charge of the widely-condemned prosecution and conviction of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier wrote to President Obama saying granting clemency to the 72-year-old, considered by many the longest-held political prisoner in the U.S., would be “in the best interests of justice.”

    • Defense Department Oversight Finds More Evidence Of Retaliation Against Whistleblowers

      More evidence has surfaced showing the US government really doesn’t care for whistleblowers. A Defense Department Inspector General’s report [PDF] obtained by MuckRock contains details of Air Force supervisors turning against a civilian employee who reported time card abuse.

    • Inside the Scorpion: a Journalist’s Ordeal in Egypt’s Most Notorious Prison

      To interview a jihadi is one thing, to live among jihadis quite another. To share their prison cells and their jail trucks on the way to a dictatorship’s trials is both a journalist’s dream and a journalist’s nightmare. Which makes Mohamed Fahmy a unique figure: in a prison bus, he hears his fellow inmates rejoicing at the beheading of a captured journalist in Syria. “They won’t let us out,” a voice shouts at Fahmy in Egypt’s ghastly Tora prison complex. “We haven’t seen the sun for weeks.” And he hears the rhythmic voices of prisoners reciting the Koran.

      Fahmy, who is an Egyptian with Canadian citizenship, is the Al Jazeera English TV reporter who spent almost two years in his native country’s ferocious prison system, as a guest of President al-Sisi, locked up with two colleagues for being a pro-Muslim Brotherhood “terrorist”, fabricating news and endangering the “security” of the state.

    • Planes and ships hampering road transport’s climate efforts

      The extent to which transport is falling behind in reducing its CO2 emissions is highlighted in a new report by the Dutch consultancy CE Delft. It shows that emission reductions from land-based transport are still significantly behind what they need to be, and nearly half of the forecast reductions are set to be wiped out by the growth in emissions from aviation and shipping.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Chicago Field Museum Decides To Embrace Cross-Promotion Instead Of Trademark Protectionism With Brewery

        When it comes to trademark issues, we tend to keep our pages filled with stories about disputes, bullying, and over-protectionism. While we try to highlight good-actors on matters of trademark, those stories are too few and far between for our tastes. With that in mind, why not start off the new year with one such example?

        Toppling Goliath is a brewery in Iowa with a number of regular and seasonal beers. One of those is PseudoSue, an ale with a label that features a roaring Tyrannosaurus rex. Anyone from the Chicago area is likely already thinking of our beloved Field Museum and the enormous T. rex fossil skeleton of Sue, who the museum tends to dress up like some kind of prehistoric barbie doll whenever one of our local sports teams has themselves a particularly good season. The museum has a trademark registration for Sue that covers all kinds of mechandise and initially reacted as readers of this site will have come to expect.

    • Copyrights

      • RIAA Still Pushing Its Bogus Message Of A ‘Value Gap’ And ‘Fair Compensation’

        The “value gap” is a completely made up concept by the RIAA and friends, arguing that internet platforms aren’t paying the record labels (not the artists) enough. It’s based on a series of out and out lies, including the simply false claim that artists make more from vinyl record sales than from online streaming.

        The “value gap” is the RIAA cherry picking misleading numbers to argue that internet platforms aren’t paying them enough. Note that they don’t make any effort to improve what they’re doing — they’re just demanding more money from platforms… just because.

01.04.17

Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Fail0verflow Demos Linux & Steam Running on PlayStation 4 Firmware 4.05 at 33C3

    2016 ended in big style for hackers and security researchers from all over the world, who gathered together at the well-known Chaos Communication Congress (33c3) annual event organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) of Germany

  • Linux 2017: With great power comes great responsibility

    Even the one exception, the end-user, is moving to Linux. Android is now the most popular end-user opearating system. In addition, Chromebooks are becoming more popular. Indeed, even traditional Linux desktops such as Fedora, openSUSE, Mint, and Ubuntu are finally gaining traction. Heck, my TechRepublic Linux buddy Jack Wallen even predicts that “Linux [desktop] market share will finally breach the 5-percent mark”.

  • Desktop

    • Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

      This is a team that values the same things I do. The interface is clean and refined. The pre-installed application selection is minimal and each one feels like a perfect piece of the system.

      The main drawback of Elementary to me is that it’s built on top of Ubuntu LTS. As time goes on all the packages get further from the current versions published upstream. I’d much rather a regular release like Fedora (6 months) or a rolling release like Arch.

    • Kreative Mediabook Pro A156 Open Source Laptop Running ARTISTX 2.0 (video)

      For more information on the new Kreative Mediabook Pro jump over to the Kickstarter website for details and to make a pledge from $460 by following the link below.

    • Your stupidest mistake when running Linux?

      Linux has much to offer any computer user, but we’re all human and everybody makes mistakes. A user in a recent thread on the Linux subreddit asked folks what their dumbest mistake was when using Linux, and he got some funny answers.

  • Server

    • eBay builds its own tool to integrate Kubernetes and OpenStack

      Intent on keeping its developers happy, the e-commerce company has developed a framework for deploying containers on its large-scale OpenStack cloud.

    • Guide to the Open Cloud: The State of Micro OSes

      What are micro operating systems and why should individuals and organizations focused on the cloud care about them? In the cloud, performance, elasticity, and security are all paramount. A lean operating system that facilitates simple server workloads and allows for containers to run optimally can serve each of these purposes. Unlike standard desktop or server operating systems, the micro OS has a narrow, targeted focus on server workloads and optimizing containers while eschewing the applications and graphical subsystems that cause bloat and latency.

      In fact, these tiny platforms are often called “container operating systems.” Containers are key to the modern data center and central to many smart cloud deployments. According to Cloud Foundry’s report “Containers in 2016,” 53 percent of organizations are either investigating or using containers in development and production. The micro OS can function as optimal bedrock for technology stacks incorporating tools such as Docker and Kubernetes.

    • In-Memory Computing for HPC

      To achieve high performance, modern computer systems rely on two basic methodologies to scale resources. Each design attempts to bring more processors (cores) and memory to the user. A scale-up design that allows multiple cores to share a large global pool of memory is the most flexible and allows large data sets to take advantage of full in-memory computing. A scale-out design distributes data sets across the memory on separate host systems in a computing cluster. Although the scale-out cluster often has a lower hardware acquisition cost, the scale-up in-memory system provides a much better total cost of ownership (TCO) based on the following advantages:

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • 7 Awesome Open Source Analytics Software For Linux and Unix-like Systems

      Google Analytics is the most widely used cloud-based web analytics service. However, your data is locked into Google Eco-system. If you want 100% data ownership, try the following open source web analytics software to get information about the number of visitors to your website and the number of page views. The information is useful for market research and understanding popularity trends on your website.

    • Cutelyst 1.2.0 released

      Cutelyst the C++/Qt web framework has a new release.

    • Ubuntu Podcast App Podbird Celebrates Birthday With New Release

      Ubuntu podcast app Podbird has marked its 2nd birthday with an all-new release.

      Podbird 0.8 is said to bring a number of “major improvements” to the fore, chief among them the ability to queue podcasts so that they play one after another.

      Elsewhere, the update sees the episodes page gain a “downloaded” tab, which groups together all previously downloaded episodes (and any in progress) from one page, and a new setting allows cached podcast artwork to be refreshed.

    • digest 0.6.11

      A new minor release with version number 0.6.11 of the digest package is now on CRAN and in Debian.

    • By Jove! It’s a lightweight alternative to Vim

      Some people like Vim as a text editor, and other people like Emacs. Having such different opinions are the way of the UNIX world.

      I’m an Emacs user through and through. Sure, I spent a few obligatory years in my early days of UNIX using Vim, but once I learned Emacs properly, there was no going back. The thing about Vi(m) is that it’s on nearly every UNIX box because it’s been around forever, and it’s pretty small. It’s the obvious choice for a default editor that people can use in a pinch.

    • DVDStyler 3.0.3 Free DVD Authoring Tool Disables Copy Option on Non-MPEG2 Videos

      It looks like many open-source software developers kicked off 2017 with new releases of their applications. DVDStyler, the cross-platform, free, and open-source DVD authoring tool was updated to version 3.0.3.

      DVDStyler is quite a popular application amongst nostalgics who still adore to watch movies or create their own with the DVD-Video format. Besides the fact that it makes it possible for these DVD-Video enthusiasts to create professional-looking DVDs, DVDStyler works on all major platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

    • darktable 2.2.1 Open-Source RAW Image Editor Adds Support for Canon EOS M5

      On Christmas Day 2016, the developers of the popular, open-source and multiplatform darktable RAW image editor proudly unveiled the major 2.2 release, which just got its first point release the other day.

      Yes, you’re reading it right, darktable 2.2.1 is already here, one week after the release of the 2.2 series, which brought countless improvements, but it’s a small maintenance update adding a couple of new features, such as the ability to display a dialog window that informs the user when locking of the library and database fails.

    • LFTP 4.7.5 Linux CLI FTP Client Recognizes Apache Listings with ISO Date & Time

      LFTP, the free, open-source, and sophisticated command-line file transfer program (FTP) supporting a wide range of network protocols, including FTP, SFTP, HTTP, FISH, and Torrent, was updated on the first day of 2017 to version 4.7.5.

      LFTP 4.7.5 arrives one and a half months after the release of version 4.7.4 on November 16, 2016, and promises to add detection of Apache listings with ISO date and time to the HTTP protocol support, implements a new setting for logging, namely log:prefix-{recv,send,note,error}, and improves the help manual and documentation a bit.

    • Opera 12 Clone Otter Browser Beta 12 Improves KDE Plasma 5 and Unity Integration

      Lots of open-source software developers were busy to announce new versions of their applications on GNU/Linux distributions on the first day of 2017, and today we’d like to tell you a little bit about the latest release of the Otter Browser.

      For those unfamiliar with Otter Browser, it’s a cross-platform and open-source clone of the old-school Opera 12.x web browser series beloved by most of you out there. The project’s aim is to recreate the best aspects of Opera 12′s user interface using the newest Qt 5 technologies, and works on Linux, macOS and Windows platforms.

    • Portainer – An Easiest Way To Manage Docker

      Portainer is a lightweight, cross-platform, and open source management UI for Docker. Portainer provides a detailed overview of Docker and allows you to manage containers, images, networks and volumes via simple web-abed dashboard. It was originally the fork of Docker UI. However, the developer has rewritten pretty much all of the Docker UI original code now. Also, he changed the UX completely and added some more functionality in the recent version. As of now, It caught the user attention tremendously and it has now had over 1 million downloads and counting! It will support GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Version 1.2.0 Released

      Happy New Year! 2016 was a really big year for Lumina with the release of version 1.0.0, TrueOS adopting Lumina as it’s only supported desktop environment, the newfound availability of Lumina in many Linux distributions, and so much more. By the same token, 2017 is already shaping up to be another big year for Lumina with things like the new window manager on the horizon. So let’s start this year on the right foot with another release!

    • Lumina 1.2 Desktop Lets You Transform It into an Xfce, MATE, OSX or Windows UI

      Ken Moore, the creator of the TrueOS BSD-based distribution that was formerly known as PC-BSD, kicks off 2017 with a new stable release of his lightweight Lumina desktop environment.

      Primarily an enhancement release, Lumina 1.2.0 desktop environment is here a little over two months after the release of version 1.1.0, and promises to bring a whole lot of goodies, including new plugins, a brand-new utility, as well as various under-the-hood improvements that users might find useful if they use Lumina on their OS.

    • Lumina 1.2 Desktop Environment Released

      A new release of Lumina is now available to ring in 2017, the BSD-first Qt-powered open-source desktop environment.

      With today’s Lumina 1.2 desktop environment, the libLuminaUtils.so library is no longer used/needed, the internal Lumina Theme engine has been separated from all utilities, there are new panel and menu plug-ins and a new Lumina Archiver utility as a Qt5 front to Tar. The new plug-ins are an audio player, JSON menu, and a lock desktop menu plugin for locking the current session.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE’s Kirigami 2.0 Framework for Convergent UIs Enters Beta with New Features

        2017 kicked off for KDE user with the first Beta release of the upcoming Kirigami 2.0 UI framework for building convergent user interfaces that work on mobile and desktop platforms, as announced by Thomas Pfeiffer.

        While the first public preview of the Kirigami UI framework hit the streets at the beginning of August 2016, and reached the 1.1 milestone two months later, at the end of September, it looks like the Beta of the major 2.0 release is ready for developers interesting in test driving it to produce convergent UIs.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • 4MLinux 20.2 Distro Out Now with Linux Kernel 4.4.39, New Broadcom Wi-Fi Drivers

        4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki is yet another GNU/Linux distribution maintainer that kicked off 2017 in style, with the release of the second maintenance update to the 4MLinux 20 operating system.

        That’s right, 4MLinux 20.2 has landed, as the latest and most advanced ISO respin of the 4MLinux 20.0 stable series of the independently-developed Linux distro, shipping with the long-term supported Linux 4.4.39 kernel, as well as up-to-date software applications and the proprietary Broadcom Wi-Fi driver called “wl driver.”

        “This is a minor maintenance release in the 4MLinux STABLE channel. The release ships with the Linux kernel 4.4.39,” said Zbigniew Konojacki in the release announcement. “This is the first 4MLinux live CD that includes the Broadcom proprietary WiFi driver (aka ‘wl driver’).”

    • Gentoo Family

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Slackware Family

      • Absolute Linux Caters to the Slackware Crowd

        Absolute Linux is a distro that raises the question: Is it really worth the bother?

        Any version of this Slackware-based Linux OS is just that — a really big bother — unless you love Unix-like systems that give you total control. It likely would be especially bothersome for less experienced users and for folks comfortable with Debian distros such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint and such.

        Some Slackware-based distros are easier than others to use — but the text-based installation and mostly manual operating routine makes using Absolute Linux a challenge. Once you get beyond the configuration steps, you still face a considerable learning curve to keep it running smoothly.

        Clearly, I am not overly impressed with the Absolute flavor of Slackware Linux. I see it as the equivalent of driving a stick shift automobile with a crank-to-start mechanism instead of an automatic model with keyless ignition. That said, once you have the engine purring, it drives fast and furious along the highway.

        I like to offer unique computing options in these weekly Linux Picks and Pans reviews, so I set my comfort zone aside and rolled up my sleeves to get my hands a little scraped reaching under Absolute Linux’s hood.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Debian-Based Neptune 4.5.3 Linux OS Rebases the Graphics Stack on Mesa 13.0.2

          The Neptune team was proud to announce the release of Neptune 4.5.3 on the first day of the year, which appears to be a minor maintenance update bringing various updated applications and a newer Linux kernel version.

          Neptune is a GNU/Linux distribution developed for desktop computers and fully based on the Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 “Wheezy” operating system and KDE Plasma 5. Neptune 4.5 is currently the latest stable release of the Linux OS, but from time to time, it gets up-to-date ISO snapshots featuring recent technologies and updated packages.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Watch This Terrifying 13ft Robot Walk, Thanks To Ubuntu [Ed: many say it's fake]

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu-Based Exton|OS Distro Now Ships with MATE 1.16 Desktop & Linux Kernel 4.9

              Our dearest Arne Exton ended 2016 in big style with the release of a new build of his Ubuntu-based Exton|OS computer operating system running the latest MATE desktop environment and Linux 4.9 kernel.

              Exton|OS Build 161231 launched on December 31, 2016, based on the stable Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system and MATE 1.16 desktop environment. However, the most exciting thing about the new release is the implementation of a custom and fully patched Linux kernel 4.9.0-11-exton build.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Software’s Top Five Challenges for 2017

    It’s a new year, and open source software is more popular than ever. But the open source community is also confronting a new set of challenges. Here’s what open source programmers and companies will need to do to keep thriving in 2017.

  • Open Source: 2017′s impetus

    Contrary to popular belief, open source is neither a company nor a product. It is a way of innovating and collaborating to create ground breaking ideas. Today’s most innovative technologies, from the Internet of Things (IoT) to machine learning, are all being driven by open source. All across Asia Pacific, we’re seeing exceptionally strong growth in the open source movement, as the open source ecosystem increasingly plays a key role in offering customers broader choice.

    Open source has the potential to impact people from all strata of society, and significantly enrich the way we live. Growing from just a coding method to a value philosophy, open source is currently being used to drive innovation and solve big national questions in emerging economies across the region. For example, open source has greatly benefited the development of smart city initiatives, such as Singapore’s Smart Nation vision. Without open source, these projects will become beholden to proprietary technology which can potentially hold back progress.

    Aside from that, we have also witnessed many organizations in Singapore being receptive to the idea of embarking on a digital transformation journey by using new ways of developing, delivering and integrating applications as a response to digital disruptions we are seeing across industries.

  • Can Automation Simplify Open Source for the Enterprise?

    An open source environment has long been enticing in theory to the enterprise but rather difficult to implement in practice.

    The idea of compiling your own data environment from legions of low-cost, interoperable components is indeed compelling, particularly when support is lacking from a proprietary vendor. But integration issues and the fairly substantial in-house expertise required to support an open environment are not to be dismissed.

    But that might not be the case for much longer. Along with the increased prevalence of open source solutions in the IT market today, there is also an accelerated trend toward greater automation and intelligent management that just might remove many of the headaches that accompany open architectures.

  • DronePan: An app that captures panorama views with your aircraft

    DronePan is a mobile-based autopilot app for DJI drones that automates the process of shooting aerial imagery for spherical panoramas. Users fly their aircraft to the desired panorama location and then launch DronePan, which temporarily takes control of the aircraft heading and camera angle. After a simple tap or two, DronePan begins shooting 15 to 25 photos automatically with the proper overlap required for an aerial spherical panorama. When the panorama is complete, users resume manual control and can fly to other locations to shoot more panoramas.

    DronePan started as an experiment in early 2015, and it has since gone through countless iterations based on constant testing by the now 30,000-strong user base. It is compatible with most DJI drones, and the most recent project added support for the newly released and ultra-portable drone known as the DJI Mavic.

  • OpenAi and Alphabet Open Up New Artificial Intelligence Tools

    DeepMind, Alphabet’s artificial intelligence group, announced announced recently that it is open sourcing DeepMind Lab, its 3D gameified platform for agent-based AI research.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Microsoft’s browsers may have hit rock bottom

      Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge browsers may be near the bottom of their unprecedented crash in user share, measurements published Sunday show.

      Analytics vendor Net Applications reported that the user share of IE and Edge — an estimate of the proportion of the world’s personal computer owners who ran those browsers — dropped by seven-tenths of a percentage point in December, falling to a combined 26.2%.

      That seven-tenths of a point decline was notable because it was less than half that of the browsers’ average monthly reductions over the last 12, six and three months, which were 1.9, 1.8 and 1.5 points, respectively. The slowly-shrinking averages over the three different spans supported the idea that IE and Edge may be reaching rock bottom.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Welcomes Ashley Boyd, VP of Advocacy

        Ashley was most recently Vice President & Chief Field Officer for MomsRising, a national grassroots organization in the U.S. As a founding staff member, she was instrumental in building MomsRising into an organization of one million grassroots supporters, 200 partner organizations and over 20 funding partners.

      • Mozilla Gets Strong Early Marks for Firefox Focus Privacy Protection

        Are you concerned about the amount of tracking you seem to experience online? Mozilla knows that a lot of people are, and we recently reported on a potential solution to the issue for iPhone users. Mozilla has launched a browser for iOS users that offers security features that block unwanted trackers.The new browser, called Firefox Focus, secures the users’ privacy by blocking web trackers, including analytics, social, and advertising trackers.

        Mozilla is taking the stance that many users are losing control of their digital lives and seeing their privacy compromised. Now, early reviews of Firefox Focus are rolling in, and they are quite positive.

      • Jamey Sharp On Whether You Should Translate Your Code To Rust

        Often times whenever mentioning a new security vulnerability in any piece of open-source/Linux software, it generally gets brought up in our forums “they should write that software in Rust” or similar comments about how XYZ project should see a rewrite in Rust for its memory-safety features. But is it really worthwhile porting your codebase to Rust?

        Jamey Sharp, the long-time open-source developer known for his X.Org contributions and recently developing Corrode as a way to translate C code into Rust code, has written a lengthy blog post about the subject of whether it’s worth it to translate — and hopefully with somewhat automated assistance of Corrode — push your project into Rustlang.

  • Public Services/Government

    • GDS pushes open source code to software stage

      Programme will involve selecting code to develop to software in effort to promote reusability

      The Government Digital Service (GDS) has begun to shift its work on open source towards producing more software rather than simply releasing code.

      [...]

      The Government recently stepped up its involvement in the international open source community in signing up to the Paris Declaration as part of the Open Government Partnership. This commits it to promoting the transparency and accountability of the relevant code and algorithms “wherever possible and appropriate”.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Are ‘open source’ seeds necessary for a resilient food system?

      Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space.

      For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on.

      But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding. The patents weren’t just for types of lettuce, but specific traits such as resistance to a disease, a particular shade of red or green, or curliness of the leaf.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • RooBee One Open Source SLA/DLP 3D Printer

        Aldric Negrier, a Portuguese Maker and owner of RepRap Algarve, has unveiled a new SLA/DLP 3D printer he has created in the form of the RooBee One.

        Watch the demonstration video below to learn more about the new 3D printer which has been constructed using an aluminium frame that offers an adjustable build volume from 80 x 60 x 200 mm up to a maximum 150 x 105 x 200mm

  • Standards/Consortia

    • ZigBee’s Dotdot language is the latest bid for IoT harmony

      As consumers watch another wave of home IoT devices emerge from CES this week, they’ll still be waiting for one technology that can make all those products work together.

      The ZigBee Alliance, a group of more than 400 companies that make things with the ZigBee wireless protocol, made a bid to provide that unifying technology right before the annual consumer electronics gathering kicks off.

      On Tuesday, ZigBee announced Dotdot, which it calls a universal language for IoT. Even though ZigBee is best known as an open wireless communications protocol used in many home IoT products, Dotdot is intended for use with any wireless technology. It defines things like how devices tell each other what they are and what they can do, which is important for making different objects around a home do things together.

Leftovers

  • Family Sues Apple for Not Making Thing It Patented

    A lawsuit filed against Apple this week argues that, by not actually making a product that it patented, the company is partly responsible for an automobile accident. According to Jalopnik, James and Bethany Modisette are suing the tech company after a car crash two years ago that killed one of their daughters and injured the rest of the family. The driver of the car who hit them had been using Apple’s FaceTime video chat at the time.

    The patent in question was first applied for in 2008, and describes “a lock-out mechanism to prevent operation of one or more functions of handheld computing devices by drivers when operating vehicles,” such as texting or video chatting.

  • Apple’s FaceTime blamed for girl’s highway crash death in new lawsuit

    Apple, maker of the ever-popular iPhone, is being sued on allegations that its FaceTime app contributed to the highway death of a 5-year-old girl named Moriah Modisette. In Denton County, Texas, on Christmas Eve 2014, a man smashed into the Modisette family’s Toyota Camry as it stopped in traffic on southbound Interstate 35W. Police say that the driver was using the FaceTime application and never saw the brake lights ahead of him. In addition to the tragedy, father James, mother Bethany, and daughter Isabella all suffered non-fatal injuries during the crash two years ago.

  • A Christmas Wish (List) Gone Wrong

    My wife’s family are nice people. They’ve kind of gotten used to me hanging around. It’s been over a quarter century, I guess you can eventually get used to anything.

    My sister-in-law, DR, and her family always get me a gift at Christmas. It’s usually something practical and clearly well-intended, if not something I’d pick out for myself.

    This year, DR’s seven-year-old twins are really excited about the present I’m getting this year. It’s a big box. It’s heavy. And they tell me I’m going to love it. They’re quite sure of this. I’ve had a few more Christmases than those two, so I’m not quite as excited. But they’ve gone into this frenzy of anticipation, so I let them help me rip the paper off.

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Japan Copes with the Disappearing Eel

      One hot evening last July, I visited the Michelin-starred unagi, or eel, restaurant Nodaiwa, which sits in a quiet basement beneath Tokyo’s glamorous Ginza shopping district. Next door is the world’s most famous sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, which was the subject of a documentary from 2012 called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” The restaurant is now so famous that a sign, written in English, sits outside its entrance, asking visitors not to take photographs.

      In recent years, less benign developments have forced Nodaiwa to place a sign at its entrance as well. Whenever I visit, I count myself lucky to find the following message written on it, in Japanese: “Today we have natural Japanese eel.”

  • Security

    • Android, Debian & Ubuntu Top List Of CVE Vulnerabilities In 2016[Ed: while Microsoft lies]

      On a CVE basis for the number of distinct vulnerabilities, Android is ranked as having the most vulnerability of any piece of software for 2016 followed by Debian and Ubuntu Linux while coming in behind them is the Adobe Flash Player.

      The CVEDetails.com tracking service has compiled a list of software with the most active CVEs. The list isn’t limited to just operating systems but all software with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures.

    • Using systemd for more secure services in Fedora

      The AF_PACKET local privilege escalation (also known as CVE-2016-8655) has been fixed by most distributions at this point; stable kernels addressing the problem were released on December 10. But, as a discussion on the fedora-devel mailing list shows, systemd now provides options that could help mitigate CVE-2016-8655 and, more importantly, other vulnerabilities that remain undiscovered or have yet to be introduced. The genesis for the discussion was a blog post from Lennart Poettering about the RestrictAddressFamilies directive, but recent systemd versions have other sandboxing features that could be used to head off the next vulnerability.

      Fedora project leader Matthew Miller noted the blog post and wondered if the RestrictAddressFamilies directive could be more widely applied in Fedora. That directive allows administrators to restrict access to the network address families a service can use. For example, most services do not require the raw packet access that AF_PACKET provides, so turning off access to that will harden those services to some extent. But Miller was also curious if there were other systemd security features that the distribution should be taking advantage of.

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • Musl 1.1.16 Released, Fixes CVE Integer Overflow, s390x Support

      A new version of the musl libc standard library is available for those interested in this lightweight alternative to glibc and others.

      Musl 1.1.16 was released to fix CVE-2016-8859, an under-allocation bug in regexec with an integer overflow. Besides this CVE, Musl 1.1.16 improves overflow handling as part of it and has also made other noteworthy bug fixes.

    • musl 1.1.16 release
    • Looks like you have a bad case of embedded libraries

      A long time ago pretty much every application and library carried around its own copy of zlib. zlib is a library that does really fast and really good compression and decompression. If you’re storing data or transmitting data, it’s very likely this library is in use. It’s easy to use and is public domain. It’s no surprise it became the industry standard.

    • Deprecation of Insecure Algorithms and Protocols in RHEL 6.9

      Cryptographic protocols and algorithms have a limited lifetime—much like everything else in technology. Algorithms that provide cryptographic hashes and encryption as well as cryptographic protocols have a lifetime after which they are considered either too risky to use or plain insecure. In this post, we will describe the changes planned for the 6.9 release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, which is already on Production Phase 2.

    • lecture: Million Dollar Dissidents and the Rest of Us [Ed: video]

      In August 2016, Apple issued updates to iOS and macOS that patched three zero-day vulnerabilities that were being exploited in the wild to remotely install persistent malcode on a target’s device if they tapped on a specially crafted link. We linked the vulnerabilities and malcode to US-owned, Israel-based NSO Group, a government-exclusive surveillance vendor described by one of its founders as “a complete ghost”.

      Apple’s updates were the latest chapter in a yearlong investigation by Citizen Lab into a UAE-based threat actor targeting critics of the UAE at home and around the world. In this talk, we will explain how Citizen Lab discovered and tracked this threat actor, and uncovered the first publicly-reported iOS remote jailbreak used in the wild for mobile espionage. Using the NSO case, we will detail some of the tools and techniques we use to track these groups, and how they try to avoid detection and scrutiny. This investigation is Citizen Lab’s latest expose into the abuse of commercial “lawful intercept” malcode.

    • Class Breaks

      There’s a concept from computer security known as a class break. It’s a particular security vulnerability that breaks not just one system, but an entire class of systems. Examples might be a vulnerability in a particular operating system that allows an attacker to take remote control of every computer that runs on that system’s software. Or a vulnerability in Internet-enabled digital video recorders and webcams that allow an attacker to recruit those devices into a massive botnet.

      It’s a particular way computer systems can fail, exacerbated by the characteristics of computers and software. It only takes one smart person to figure out how to attack the system. Once he does that, he can write software that automates his attack. He can do it over the Internet, so he doesn’t have to be near his victim. He can automate his attack so it works while he sleeps. And then he can pass the ability to someone­ — or to lots of people — ­without the skill. This changes the nature of security failures, and completely upends how we need to defend against them.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Far-right Israeli minister plans bill to annex one of biggest settlements

      The far-right Israeli education minister, Naftali Bennett, has vowed to introduce a bill this month to formally annex Maale Adumim, one of Israel’s largest settlement blocks in the occupied Palestinian territories.

      In remarks made at a museum in the city of 40,000 located outside Jerusalem, Bennett said: “After being here for 50 years, the time has come to end military rule.”

      The hardline leader of the Jewish Home party also made clear that he saw the annexation of Maale Adumim as a first step in annexing all of “area C”, the part of the occupied territories still under full Israeli control.

      “For this reason,” said Bennett, “by the end of the month, we will submit the bill for applying [Israeli] law to Judea and Samaria [the name used by Israelis for the occupied territories] and will embark on a new path. We will present to the cabinet a bill for applying Israeli law in Maale Adumim.”

    • Whether Or Not You Believe Russia Interfered In The Election, We Should All Be Worried About Escalation Based On Secret Info

      So, we just wrote about Obama administration’s tepid response to claims that Russians “interfered” with the Presidential election. In that post, we noted our concerns about the fact that we seem to be escalating a situation based on claims where we’re not allowed to see any of the actual evidence. I’ve seen a bunch of people arguing that anyone who won’t automatically accept that Russia interfered in the election should be dubbed either Putin supporters or, at the very least, “useful idiots” but we should be very, very careful about where this leads. I certainly think that there’s a tremendous possibility that Russian forces did intend to interfere with our election, but I’d certainly like to see some actual evidence — and the “evidence” provided so far shows no such thing.

      And this should scare you. Not because it means that anyone is lying, but because it’s setting the stage for very dangerous things. If we’re setting the precedent that the US government can escalate situations based on purely secret knowledge, what’s to stop them from doing so over and over again? Put another way: for those who dislike Trump, but are happy about the White House calling out and sanctioning Russia, how will you feel when President Trump makes similar claims about some other country (perhaps one blocking a new Trump hotel?), and proceeds to issue US government sanctions on that country — but without releasing any actual evidence of wrongdoing beyond “government agencies say they did bad things.” Won’t that be concerning too?

      Matt Taibbi, over at Rolling Stone, has an excellent article comparing this to when we started the war in Iraq — noting the similarities, in that the government (and the press) kept insisting that because certain government agencies said something (“Iraq has WMDs”), it must be true…

    • Leaked audio: Obama wanted ISIS to grow

      As President Obama reflects on his legacy, a recording of Secretary of State John Kerry conversing with leaders of Syrian opposition groups is casting more light on his approach to ISIS, indicating his administration believed that allowing the Islamic State to grow would serve the White House’s objective of ousting Syrian President Bashar Assad.

    • Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility, say people close to investigation

      As federal officials investigate suspicious Internet activity found last week on a Vermont utility computer, they are finding evidence that the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility, according to experts and officials close to the investigation.

      An employee at Burlington Electric Department was checking his Yahoo email account Friday and triggered an alert indicating that his computer had connected to a suspicious IP address associated by authorities with the Russian hacking operation that infiltrated the Democratic Party. Officials told the company that traffic with this particular address is found elsewhere in the country and is not unique to Burlington Electric, suggesting the company wasn’t being targeted by the Russians. Indeed, officials say it is possible that the traffic is benign, since this particular IP address is not always connected to malicious activity.

    • Washington Post Falsely Claims Russia Hacked Vermont Utility, Because OMG RUSSIANS!

      When a mainstream press that isn’t always good at what it does meets technology it doesn’t understand, the end result is often frustrating, if not comedic. Hacking is certainly no exception, given it’s a realm where perpetrators are difficult to identify, hard proof is often impossible to come by, and hackers worth their salt either leave false footprints — or no footprints at all. Throw in a press that’s incapable of identifying and avoiding its own nationalism, and often all-too-gullible to intelligence industry influence, and you’ve got a fairly solid recipe for dysfunction when it comes to hacking-related news coverage.

      Some of the resulting coverage has been highly entertaining — such as CNN using a screen shot from the popular game Fallout 4 in a story about hacking and hoping nobody would notice. Other examples have been decidedly more troubling, such as the Washington Post’s epic face plant over the holiday break.

  • Finance

    • Finland trials basic income for unemployed

      Finland has become the first country in Europe to pay its unemployed citizens a basic monthly income, amounting to €560 (£477/US$587), in a unique social experiment that is hoped to cut government red tape, reduce poverty and boost employment.

      Olli Kangas from the Finnish government agency KELA, which is responsible for the country’s social benefits, said on Monday that the two-year trial with 2,000 randomly picked citizens receiving unemployment benefits began on 1 January.

    • Trump Still Falsely Taking Credit For Sprint Jobs He Had Nothing To Do With

      Last month, we noted how Donald Trump proudly implied he was single-handedly responsible for Japan’s Softbank bringing 50,000 jobs and $50 billion in investment to the United States. The problem, of course, is that it’s not clear those numbers are entirely real, and there’s absolutely no evidence suggesting they had anything to do with Donald Trump. The jobs were first unveiled back in October as part of a somewhat ambiguous $100 billion global investment investment fund between Softbank and Saudi Arabia aimed at boosting technology spending worldwide.

    • Ambassador to EU quits and warns staff over ‘muddled thinking’

      Britain’s ambassador to the European Union Sir Ivan Rogers dealt a blow to the UK’s Brexit negotiations by quitting and urging his fellow British civil servants in Brussels to assert their independence by challenging “ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking”.

      Sir Ivan Rogers said, in an email explaining his reasons for his abrupt departure to the UK’s Brussels diplomatic staff at UKRep, that he was leaving now to give time for his successor to take charge of the lengthy negotiations process which starts in March. But he also made it clear that he had been frustrated by politicians who disliked his warnings about the potential pitfalls in the Brexit process.

      He also revealed that the basic structure of the UK Brexit negotiating team had not yet been resolved, let alone a negotiating strategy.

    • The meaning of Brexit

      “Brexit means Brexit” has quickly passed from a convenient political slogan to something approaching a national joke.

      Any discussion of the meaning of Brexit is haunted by what is now a stock catchphrase.

      Like a game show host, one only has to ask what Brexit means to get the Pavlovian, chucklesome response of “Brexit means Brexit”.

    • The resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers

      The announcement today of the resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers as the UK’s ambassador to the EU is significant.

      Coming just weeks before the planned Article 50 notification, the resignation is a setback on any sensible view.

      During the run up to the notification, when the government (we are told) is finalising its negotiation strategy, the UK is likely not to have a lead negotiator in place in Brussels, let alone one helping shape the Brexit strategy.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • WikiLeaks’ Assange: Our Source Is Not the Russian Gov’t — They Are Trying to Delegitimize Trump

      In an interview with Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity, WikLeaks founder Julian Assange doubled down on a claim he had made last month on Hannity’s radio show, which was the Russian government nor any state party of Russia were the source of hacks that exposed thousands of confidential Democratic Party emails.

      “We can say – we have said repeatedly over the last two months, our source is not the Russian government and it is not the state party,” Assange said.

    • Congressman Goodlatte Decides To Refill The Swamp By Gutting Congressional Ethics Office… But Drops It After Bad Publicity

      Well, we’re into a new year, and the promised “swamp draining” in Washington DC continues to move in the other direction. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (whose name you may remember from the fact that he’s leading the charge on copyright reform (but who has a history of being terrible on copyright), or perhaps from the fact that he’s also bad on surveillance) has made the surprise move of completely gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics, and basically taking away its independence from Congress.

    • Ex-MI6 boss warns over electronic voting risk

      The former head of MI6 has warned against adopting electronic voting systems owing to fears about international cyber warfare.

      Sir John Sawers told the BBC that casting a ballot with pencil and paper was “actually much more secure”.

      He warned: “The more things that go online, the more susceptible you are to cyber attacks.”

      But campaigners for electronic voting said there was “no evidence” it was more open to fraud.

      Electronic voting allows people to make their choices via a computer or smartphone, instead of people having to go to a polling station.

    • Ford’s US Expansion Is a Victory for Trump’s Trolling Tactics

      President-elect Trump and green jobs advocates rarely find themselves on the same side. Today is an exception. All it seems to have taken was a little trolling.

      Ford Motor Company said this morning that it’s spending $700 million to expand its Flat Rock, Michigan, plant to develop a new generation of electric and autonomous vehicles. The expansion will add 700 production jobs, according to the company’s official announcement.

    • Schumer: Trump ‘really dumb’ for attacking intelligence agencies

      New Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the Intelligence Community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.

      “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

      “So even for a practical supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

    • House GOP scraps plan to gut ethics watchdog after emergency meeting

      House Republicans abruptly withdrew a proposal to weaken an independent ethics watchdog on Tuesday, in a rocky start to the new Congress.

      The 115th session hadn’t even formally gaveled in before House GOP leaders held an emergency conference meeting to discuss blowback against the party’s vote to gut the chamber’s independent ethics watchdog.

      The reversal of course came hours after President-elect Donald Trump issued a series of tweets questioning the timing of the changes, which would put the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) under oversight of the House Ethics Committee.

      Even before Trump weighed in, a barrage of negative headlines and public outcry made it difficult for Republicans to stand by the measure, especially given that the Republican president-elect had campaigned on a promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C., of corruption.

      “We shot ourselves in the foot,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) told reporters after the conference meeting.

    • Welcome to the One-Party State

      Republicans control the House, Senate, and presidency. It’s time we start calling this what it is.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • New year, same old censorship issues for Facebook

      Just a couple of days into the new year, Facebook has already apologized for censorship — it blocked a photo of a nude statue of Neptune, the sea god.

      It was a mistake for the social network to tell an Italian art historian that the image of the statue was “explicitly sexual” and “excessively shows the body or unnecessarily concentrates on body parts,” the company said in a statement to Mashable.

    • Tackle Internet censorship directly — not through antitrust law

      Sewlyn Duke’s recent op-ed for The Hill, “Antitrust should be used to break up partisan tech giants like Facebook, Google,” addresses the serious problem of how a few privately owned internet companies have unprecedented control over the distribution of information.

      As Jeffrey Rosen has noted, “lawyers at Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twit­ter have more power over who can speak and who can be heard than any president, judge, or monarch.”

      However, using antitrust laws to address this would be ineffective and likely illegal without new legislation.

    • Facebook Is Sorry for Taking Down a Photo of a Nude Neptune Statue

      Facebook has apologized for mistakenly blocking a photo of a famous statue for being “sexually explicit.”

      The social media giant flagged a photograph of a 16th-century statue of the sea god Neptune in the Italian city of Bologna, Mashable reported. The picture of the sculpture—which was created in the 1560s—was featured on the Facebook page of local writer and art historian Elisa Barbari called “Stories, curiosities and view of Bologna.”

    • Delete Everything! Torch Your Facebook Account and Walk Away

      Hoo, boy. It’s a world-eating tech company that arguably threatens a free press and a democratic society in the U.S. and wants to fly laser drones over developing countries. Run by a founder who is at turns both ruthless and clueless in a way that would be funny if it weren’t also terrifying. Gave shit-poster supporter Palmer Luckey $2 billion. Many, very bad media companies wouldn’t exist without it. Jokes about it being the place where all your racist classmates from high school hang out are well-trodden territory, but, you know, also true? Changing the color of your profile pic to support [FILL IN THE BLANK]. “Maybe” attending events. Trending topics. Untagging yourself.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Mark Zuckerberg’s 2017 plan to visit all US states hints at political ambitions

      Mark Zuckerberg has given more weight to the idea that he could move into politics with the announcement of a statesmanly personal challenge for 2017.

      In previous years the Facebook CEO has learned Mandarin, pledged to run at least a mile each day and built a virtual assistant called Jarvis to control his home. This year he wants to have visited and met people in every state in the US. He’s already visited about 20 states, which means he has to travel to about 30 states by the end of the year.

      “After a tumultuous last year, my hope for this challenge is to get out and talk to more people about how they’re living, working and thinking about the future,” he said in a Facebook post announcing the challenge.

      “For decades, technology and globalization have made us more productive and connected. This has created many benefits, but for a lot of people it has also made life more challenging. This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime. We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.”

    • The Real Name Fallacy

      People often say that online behavior would improve if every comment system forced people to use their real names. It sounds like it should be true – surely nobody would say mean things if they faced consequences for their actions?

      Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case. Not only would removing anonymity fail to consistently improve online community behavior – forcing real names in online communities could also increase discrimination and worsen harassment.

      We need to change our entire approach to the question. Our concerns about anonymity are overly-simplistic; system design can’t solve social problems without actual social change.

    • Facebook buys data on users’ offline habits for better ads

      At this point, it’s well-known that Facebook is as much an advertising company as it is a social network. The company is probably second only to Google in the data it collects on users, but the info we all share on the Facebook site just isn’t enough. A report from ProPublica published this week digs into the vast network of third-party data that Facebook can purchase to fill out what it knows about its users. The fact that Facebook is buying data on its users isn’t new — the company first signed a deal with data broker Datalogix in 2012 — but ProPublica’s report nonetheless contains a lot of info on the visibility Facebook may have into your life.

      Currently, Facebook works with six data partners in the US: Acxiom, Epsilon, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud, TransUnion and WPP. For the most part, these providers deal in financial info; ProPublica notes that the categories coming from these sources include things like “total liquid investible assets $1-$24,999,” “People in households that have an estimated household income of between $100K and $125K and “Individuals that are frequent transactor at lower cost department or dollar stores.” Specifically, the report notes that this data is focused on Facebook users’ offline behavior, not just what they do online.

    • Build your own NSA [Ed: video]

      When thinking about surveillance, everyone worries about government agencies like the NSA and big corporations like Google and Facebook. But actually there are hundreds of companies that have also discovered data collection as a revenue source. We decided to do an experiment: Using simple social engineering techniques, we tried to get the most personal you may have in your procession.

      When thinking about surveillance, everyone worries about government agencies like the NSA and big corporations like Google and Facebook. But actually there are hundreds of companies that have also discovered data collection as a revenue source. Companies which are quite big, with thousands of employees but names you maybe never heard of. They all try to get their hands on your personal data, often with illegal methods. Most of them keep their data to themselves, some exchange it, but a few sell it to anyone who’s willing to pay.

    • Malcolm Gladwell’s Ridiculous Attack On Ed Snowden Based On Weird Prejudice About How A Whistleblower Should Look

      There was a time when I was a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. He’s an astoundingly good story teller, and a great writer. But he’s also got a pretty long history of… just being wrong. Over the years, Gladwell’s willingness to go for the good story over the facts has become increasingly clear. Famously, Steven Pinker ripped Gladwell’s serial problems many years ago, but it hasn’t really stopped Gladwell since then. If you’ve ever quoted “the 10,000 hour rule” or suggested that someone can become an expert in something if they just spend 10,000 hours doing it, you’ve been fooled by Gladwell. Even the guy whose one study Gladwell based the idea on loudly debunked the claim, and just this past year put out his own book that is basically trying to rectify the false beliefs that have spread around the globe from people believing Gladwell’s incorrect spin.

      So, suffice it to say I was already skeptical of Gladwell’s recent piece attacking Ed Snowden as not being a “real” whistleblower. But the piece is much, much worse than even I expected. The short, Gladwellian-style summary of it might be: real whistleblowers have to look the part, and they need to be part of an Ivy League elite, with clear, noble reasons behind what they did. Here’s how Gladwell describes Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and to whom Gladwell has given his stamp of approval as a “Real Whistleblower™”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • UN expert on extreme poverty and human rights to visit Saudi Arabia

      United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, will undertake an official visit to Saudi Arabia from 8 to 19 January 2017 to consider the Saudi Government’s efforts to eradicate poverty and how such efforts relate to its international human rights obligations.

      “Saudi Arabia is a rich country in many respects, but as in all countries, challenges relating to poverty still exist,” noted the independent expert designated by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor, report and advise on extreme poverty and human rights.

    • The Unbelievers: Muslims who leave Islam

      When Sadia left her faith at 15, she faced abandonment, now she lives a life completely detached from her childhood. Jessica Langton reports

    • Most imams in France (and Belgium) forbid greetings at Christmas and New Year

      Most imams in France (and Belgium) forbid the faithful from celebrating Christmas and the New Year and call on Muslims not to extend holidays greetings. This is what French imam Hocine Drouiche wrote on his Facebook page. He is one of the most open-minded French Muslim clerics opposed to extremism. A tireless promoter and supporter of dialogue between different faiths, he condemns those who repeat the “mantra” that Islam is a religion of peace but then consider expressing season’s greetings “as an insult” because “this is not our religion.”

      For him, the Islam professed by these imams, who are the majority in France, in Belgium, and in many other countries, “is not a true Islam of peace and shared life”. Qurʾānic schools in the West are places that extol political Islam based on jihad and hatred of the “enemies.” Fortunately, there are also “open-minded Muslims, who greet you with a big smile and wish you a Happy New Year.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • CloudFlare Gets Caught Out By 2016 Leap Second

      The leap second caused CloudFlare’s RRDNS software to “panic,” but the error was quickly identified

      The extra leap second added on to the end of 2016 may not have had an effect on most people, but it did catch out a few web companies who failed to factor it in.

      Web services and security firm CloudFlare was one such example. A small number of its servers went down at midnight UTC on New Year’s Day due to an error in its RRDNS software, a domain name service (DNS) proxy that was written to help scale CloudFlare’s DNS infrastructure, which limited web access for some of its customers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Our Unfortunate Annual Tradition: A Look At What Should Have Entered The Public Domain, But Didn’t

        Each year, at the beginning of January, we have the unfortunate job of highlighting the works that were supposed to be entering the public domain on January 1st, but didn’t (in the US at least) thanks to retroactive copyright term extension. As we’ve noted, copyright term extension makes absolutely no sense if you understand the supposed purpose of copyright. Remember, the idea behind copyright is that it is supposed to be an important incentive to get people to create a work. And the deal is that in exchange for creating the work, the copyright holder (who may not be the creator…) is given an exclusive monopoly on certain elements of that work for a set period of time, after which it goes into the public domain. That means that any work created under an old regime had enough incentive to be created. Retroactively extending the copyright makes no sense. The work was already created. It needs no greater incentive. The only thing it serves to do is to take away works from the public domain that the public was promised in exchange for the original copyright holder’s monopoly. It’s a disgrace.

      • Rightscorp Rings In The New Year By Vowing To Find New Ways To Lose Money In 2017

        Rightscorp is doing some aggressive whistling in the dark. The company that thought it could tackle piracy with threatening letters, threatening robocalls, and suing ISPs for contributory infringement has been bleeding money since its inception.

        By the middle of 2015, Rightscorp’s letter-writing campaign to torrenters had led to nothing resembling a viable business model.

      • Research: Piracy ‘Warnings’ Fail to Boost Box Office Revenues

        A new academic study shows that graduated response policies against file-sharers fail to boost box office revenues. The empirical research, which looked at the effects in various countries including the United States, suggests that these anti-piracy measures are not as effective as the movie studios had hoped.

01.03.17

Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 9:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 4 hot skills for Linux pros in 2017

    One of the problems with becoming a Linux expert is the definition is constantly changing. When I started in the Linux world, to be considered a Linux professional, you had to be able to compile your own kernel. Heck, if you wanted to use Linux on a laptop, you had to compile a custom kernel to even be a user. These days, compiling your own kernel is usually a waste of time. That’s not to say it isn’t important, but in the open source world we build on the successes of others, and Linux distributions provide us with kernels that work well. Although not always that drastic, the demands on IT professionals change every year.

  • Kernel Space

    • Ridiculously small Linux build lands with ridiculously few swears

      The latest Linux 4.10-rc2 build nearly didn’t happen because L-triptophaniac developers were Christmassing, but Linux Torvalds decided to set it free as a New Year treat.

      Explaining the build, Torvalds wrote that “rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody”.

    • Linus Torvalds Announces Ridiculously Small Second Linux 4.10 Release Candidate

      The first day of 2017 starts off for Linux users with the release of the second RC (Release Candidate) development version of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel, as announced by Linus Torvalds himself.

      As expected, Linux kernel 4.10 entered development two weeks after the release of Linux kernel 4.9, on Christmas Day (December 25, 2016), but don’t expect to see any major improvements or any other exciting things in RC2, which comes one week after the release of the first RC, because most of the developers were busy partying.

    • TPM2 and Linux

      Recently Microsoft started mandating TPM2 as a hardware requirement for all platforms running recent versions of windows. This means that eventually all shipping systems (starting with laptops first) will have a TPM2 chip. The reason this impacts Linux is that TPM2 is radically different from its predecessor TPM1.2; so different, in fact, that none of the existing TPM1.2 software on Linux (trousers, the libtpm.so plug in for openssl, even my gnome keyring enhancements) will work with TPM2. The purpose of this blog is to explore the differences and how we can make ready for the transition.

    • The definitive guide to synclient

      This post describes the synclient tool, part of the xf86-input-synaptics package. It does not describe the various options, that’s what the synclient(1) and synaptics(4) man pages are for. This post describes what synclient is, where it came from and how it works on a high level. Think of it as a anti-bus-factor post.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Kirigami UI 2.0 Beta Released: Better Android Integration, QQC2 Focus

        Kirigami is KDE’s set of UI components and philosophy / patterns announced last year for developing “intuitive and consistent apps that provide a great user experience” and do have convergence applications in mind. Now ringing in 2017, the first beta of Kirigami 2.0 is now available.

      • KDevelop 5.1 Beta 1 released

        We are happy to announce the release of KDevelop 5.1 Beta! Tons of new stuff entered KDevelop 5.1, a bigger blog post show-casing all the features in 5.1 will follow when we release the final version. Here’s a brief summary of what’s new in this version:

      • KDevelop 5.1 Beta 1 Released With LLDB Debugger Support
      • Interview with Ismail Tarchoun

        There are some features I want to see in Krita, for example: a small preview window: it’s essential to get a feeling of the painting in general, otherwise it might turn out weird. I also wish Krita could import more brushes from other programs. But nothing is really that bothersome about Krita, there are some bugs, but they are constantly being fixed by the awesome devs.

        [...]

        First, I made a rough sketch, then I started laying in some general colors using a large soft brush (deevad 4a airbrush by David Revoy) without caring about the details, only basic colors and a basic idea of how the painting is lit. Then I started going into details using a smaller sized brush (deevad 1f draw brush). I usually paint new details in a separate layer, then merge it down if I’m happy with the results, if not I, I delete the layer and paint a new one. I use the liquify tool a lot to fix the proportions or any anomaly. For the hair I used the brush (deevad 2d flat old) and the hair brush (vb3BE by Vasco Alexander Basque) which I also used for the hat. When the painting is done I use filters to adjust the colors and contrast, I then make a new layer for final and minor tweaks here and there.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • OpenMandriva Lx 3.01 review

        OpenMandriva is a Linux distribution whose roots and traditions date back to the Mandrake/Mandriva Linux era, what it has in common with with ROSA Linux and Mageia. The latest edition of the desktop distribution – OpenMandriva Lx 3.01, was released on December 25 2016, so it was a nice Christmas present to OpenMandriva fans.

      • OpenMandriva Lx 3.0: a faint shadow of name

        The general feel of OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 was fast and solid.

        However, that was only on the surface. As soon as you start to look just a little bit deeper, issues go out here and there. High memory usage, keyboard layout glitch, inadequate size of notification area icons, problems with updates – all of that leave a bad taste after the Live Run of OpenMandriva Lx 3.0.

        Will it ever gain the popularity its parent had just few years ago? I have a very big doubt.

      • The January 2017 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

    • Arch Family

      • Arch-based Bluestar Linux Makes Plasma 5 Usable

        Last week I mentioned that I liked Bluestar Linux very much and was probably going to go ahead and take the leap to it and Plasma 5. I had been testing Plasma 5 on various distributions in 2016 with poor results until I tested Arch-based Bluestar 4.8.13. Preliminary tests indicated it might be possible to migrate. So, I learned a bit more about Bluestar this passed weekend and thought I’d share. I’ve also rounded up the best Linux tidbits from today’s headlines as well.

        First up, yes there is a graphical package manager. PacmanXG to be exact. I’d run into PacmanXG a few times over the years, but it appears it too has matured and seems to work rather well. The sort by groups could be better, but otherwise it’s quite capable complete with history, log, and the command-line outputs. Updates come fairly routinely in Bluestar, although most are from Arch. I’ve been applying the recommended updates without any negative side-effects as of yet.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Avoid echo chambers and make open decisions

        The Open Decision Framework (a model for applying open source principles to business decisions) is nuanced. On the one hand, it’s a set of guidelines you can use to operate in a more open manner when you’re making decisions that affect others. On the other hand, more holistically, it represents the essence of the culture described in Jim Whitehurst’s The Open Organization. Usually, making open decisions isn’t as easy as following a recipe. Every situation is unique, and given the pace of activity in a typical, busy work day, it takes a concerted effort to check your actions against a set of principles–even if you are well steeped in them.

      • Industry Spotlight: Red Hat Powers the API Economy

        APIs are the building blocks of today’s digital economy. Businesses are using them to fuel innovation between departments and to share company data and content with customers or partners at scale. They’re also using APIs to drive new revenue streams and to enable cross-enterprise agility. Although more organizations are building APIs with the goal of driving more value from their digital assets, many of those companies have trouble managing their APIs effectively, especially at scale. Red Hat brings order to API chaos so software teams can spend more time creating tangible business value.

        “You can’t just create an API and think you’re done with it,” said Sameer Parulkar, product marketing manager, Enterprise Middleware, at Red Hat, Inc. “You may create an API for a particular purpose today, but what about when requirements change tomorrow? How will you manage and secure that API? You need a scalable, enterprise-class way of doing all that.”

      • Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 now available

        Red Hat, Inc. has announced the availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10, the company’s massively-scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution.

        Based on the upstream OpenStack ‘Newton’ release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 drives new features that increase system-wide scalability, ease infrastructure management, and improve orchestration, while also enhancing network performance and platform security.

      • Finance

    • Debian Family

      • ScreenLock on Jessie’s systemd

        Something I was used to and which came as standard on wheezy if you installed acpi-support was screen locking when you where suspending, hibernating, …

        This is something that I still haven’t found on Jessie and which somebody had point me to solve via /lib/systemd/system-sleep/whatever hacking, but that didn’t seem quite right, so I gave it a look again and this time I was able to add some config files at /etc/systemd and then a script which does what acpi-support used to do before

      • Happy New Year – My Free Software activities in December 2016

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 17.04 Skips First Alpha for Opt-In Flavors, GCC 6.3.0 Hits the Repository

            You should know that we’re always monitoring the development cycle of every new Ubuntu Linux release, as well as that Ubuntu 17.04 is open for development as of October 20, 2016, when the toolchain got uploaded.

            Daily build images were published a few days later after that date and were initially based on the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) repository, but as Canonical’s engineers never rest, they manage to bring all the latest Open Source software applications and GNU/Linux technologies to Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus).

            These include Linux kernel 4.9.0, Mesa 13.0.2 3D Graphics Library, systemd 232, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6.3.0, support for IPP Everywhere Apple AirPrint compatible printers a.k.a. driverless printing, various improvements to the Unity 8 interface, which is still available as a preview, and some packages from the GNOME 3.22 Stack.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Distro Review Of The Week – Ubuntu MATE 16.10

              Ubuntu has been the focus of Linux world for a long time. But, it received a lot of criticism when it shifted to Unity interface. The interface came kind of a shock to many devoted users of the old Ubuntu. This caused many users either to shift to other distributions or flavors of Ubuntu itself. Now, there is a similar story which many new users don’t know about.

            • What Are The Differences Between Ubuntu Official Flavors?

              For most new users, the fact that there are more than 8 official “editions” of one Ubuntu operating system is hard to understand. It’s particularly similar with Microsoft having some editions for Windows XP, and the users would ask “what are the differences?”. This article mentions the differences of nine Ubuntu official “editions” (called flavors) based on the desktop interface, specific purpose, and LTS duration. This article also provides more information such as Wikipedia entries and other important resources to make it simpler to understand. I write this article in January 2017 and the number of flavors can be increased or decreased later.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny COM runs Android Nougat on a Snapdragon 820

      Intrinsyc’s 50 x 25mm “Open-Q 820 µSOM” expands upon the Snapdragon 820 with Android 7.0, 3GB LPDDR4, 32GB UFS storage, WiFi, BT, and extended temps.

      Intrinsyc has launched the smallest Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 based computer-on-module to date for $239, as well as an Open-Q µ820 Development Kit selling for $579. The Open-Q 820 µSOM module measures 50 x 25mm compared to Intrinsyc’s year-old, 82 x 42mm Open-Q 820 module. It also edges out other contenders we’ve seen in the Snapdragon 820 COM market, at least as far as size is concerned. These include the 53 x 25mm eInfochips Eragon 820 SOM and 50 x 28mm Inforce 6601 Micro SOM.

    • Ringing in 2017 with 90 hacker-friendly single board computers

      Our New Year’s guide to hacker-friendly single board computers turned up 90 boards, ranging from powerful media playing rigs to power-sipping IoT platforms.

      Community backed, open spec single board computers running Linux and Android sit at the intersection between the commercial embedded market and the open source maker community. Hacker boards also play a key role in developing the Internet of Things devices that will increasingly dominate our technology economy in the coming years, from home automation devices to industrial equipment to drones.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Tapitoo OpenCart: An open source e-commerce mobile app

    Tapitoo OpenCart is an open source online store app designed to help online stores increase their visibility and make a greater impact in their most competitive markets. We decided to develop and app that can make the integration with the biggest e-commerce backend solutions, as well as with custom stores, as seamless as possible.

    CyberMonday and CyberWeek aside, millions rely on the mobile purchasing channel, a preference that has revolutionized online commerce. Currently, mobile accounts for 40% of all e-commerce revenue and industry experts expect it to grow to 70% in just a few years. Today mobile apps are not just recommended for any e-commerce effort, but they are required for a retailer’s survival. According to Google, “Not having a mobile optimized site is like closing your store one day each week.”

  • Open Source Enterprise Trends for 2017

    Nothing ever goes completely according to plan. That being said, it’s both tempting and necessary at the beginning of the year to look ahead to where things are going. Here’s a short list of things to consider as we look at the road ahead for Linux, open source and the enterprise.

  • Events

    • Circo loco 2017

      Due to popular demand I’m sharing my plans for the upcoming conference season. Here is a list of events I plan to visit and speak at (hopefully). The list will be updated throughout the year so please subscribe to the comments section to receive a notification when that happens! I’m open to meeting new people so ping me for a beer if you are attending some of these events!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox’s “Delete Node” eliminates pesky content-hiding banners

        It’s trendy among web designers today — the kind who care more about showing ads than about the people reading their pages — to use fixed banner elements that hide part of the page. In other words, you have a header, some content, and maybe a footer; and when you scroll the content to get to the next page, the header and footer stay in place, meaning that you can only read the few lines sandwiched in between them. But at least you can see the name of the site no matter how far you scroll down in the article! Wouldn’t want to forget the site name!

        Worse, many of these sites don’t scroll properly. If you Page Down, the content moves a full page up, which means that the top of the new page is now hidden under that fixed banner and you have to scroll back up a few lines to continue reading where you left off. David Pogue wrote about that problem recently and it got a lot of play when Slashdot picked it up: These 18 big websites fail the space-bar scrolling test.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Programming/Development

    • What does cross stitch have to do with programming? More than you think

      Arts and crafts. Creativity and diligence. Taking the mundane and adding that touch of genius and individuality. A needleworker spends hours creating artwork with simple threads of many colors, and programming is the same—words and numbers woven over hours to create something with a purpose.

      Recently, I’ve started learning JavaScript, and around the same time I also started teaching myself cross stitching. As I’ve learned both I’ve experienced the parallels between learning a traditional craft like cross stitching and a modern craft like programming. Learning traditional crafts can teach us new ways for learning coding efficiently as the techniques and skills acquired when learning traditional crafts are easily transferable to modern crafts like programming.

    • Dawn-CC: Automatically Adding OpenACC/OpenMP Directives To Programs

      The DawnCC project is out of the UFMG University and aims to provide automatic parallelization of code for mobile devices and other supported software/hardware of OpenACC and OpenMP.

      DawnCC attempts to automatically add OpenACC and OpenMP directives to C and C++ code-bases. The Dawn compiler makes use of LLVM IR to analyze memory chunks, dependencies within loops, etc, in order to be able to automatically produce code that makes use of OpenMP and OpenACC where relevant.

Leftovers

  • One Pig Of A Year

    The latest ugly online tantrum by our sociopathic toddler-elect – Best concise response: “You’re an awful human being” – marks the perfect end to a perfect shitstorm of a year, from Aleppo to electoral carnage to Bowie/Cohen/Fisher/et al to Istanbul. Alas, given what might be coming, any mindful welcome to a new year has to encompass some dread with hope. So we have both, as do many others. Among some brilliant, brutal, occasionally sanguine videos summarizing the year is Friend Dog Studio’s “trailer” for the horror movie of the year, “2016: The Movie,” and Tom and Hubert’s portrait of an oblivious guy who slept through it. Somehow it all brought to mind Michael Jackson’s extraordinary gathering of artists for “We Are The World.” A middling song but a buoyant spirit, which is needed now. And those faces! Peace to all. May we stand together.

  • 2016 What Have You Wrought?

    Holy shit, what a year, huh? A friend keeps reminding me she knew it was going to be a bad one when David Bowie died in the first few days. Even if one wasn’t a fan, the impact of his death was felt across the planet, especially in the imperial zones. It’s hard to argue that things improved from that news. Musically and politically, there was plenty more bad news to come. The death of Fidel Castro, one of the world’s oldest revolutionaries, saddened the hearts of millions while providing his ideological enemies a moment of delight. The future of one of the world’s most successful revolutions is now uncertain. Capitalists are salivating at the opportunity to make a buck while various fascist and other right-wing elements look forward to exacting some kind of revenge. Their sanguinary lust is barely concealed. Fidel’s social conscience and fearlessness will be missed. His revolutionary determination must be replicated a billion fold.

  • The Land of Smiling Children

    “Kom ins Land der lachelenden Kinder,” “Come to the land of smiling children,” intones a voiceover to the tune of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” at the beginning of a popular German YouTube video. The video is a montage of some of the most grotesque elements of American culture: a smiling JonBenét Ramsey in full beauty queen regalia, children using firearms, police beatings and shootings of unarmed citizens, celebrations of conspicuous consumption and contempt for the environment juxtaposed with videos of street people combing trash cans, an execution chamber, a row of Klansmen, and, finally, a man accidentally shooting himself in the leg.

    “Alles spitz in Amerika!” “Everything’s great in America,” the refrain announces over and over again as one horrific scene after another assaults the viewer. The video, “Ein Leid für die USA,” or “A Song for the USA” begins and ends with someone accidentally shooting himself. One could argue that it’s heavy handed, but it makes a devastating point: We are destroying ourselves.

    We have arguably always lacked the veneer of civility that typically characterizes older cultures, and yet it seems that public discourse has recently taken a particularly savage turn. The left is as responsible for that as the right. Trump didn’t become “evil” until he ran for office. Before that, he was merely a buffoon. Now, suddenly, he’s “Hitler” and his supporters are uniformly denounced as “racists” and “fascists.” Don’t get me wrong, Trump was not my candidate. He’s not who I want to see in the White House, but he’s not Hitler. Obama said himself that Trump’s a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Democrats dismissed well-reasoned arguments against Clinton’s candidacy, or her positions on various issues, not with similarly well-reasoned counter arguments, but with charges of “mansplaining.” Nothing shuts down dialogue so quickly as hurling invectives at your opponents. British comedian Tom Walker makes this point brilliantly in the viral video of his alter ego U.K. newsman Jonathan Pie’s commentary on the election.

  • Netanyahu Questioned by Police Over Gifts; AG: Evidence Has Mounted Over Last Month

    Police found enough evidence to support the questioning of Netanyahu under caution, attorney general says. ‘Don’t celebrate yet,’ Netanyahu said earlier.

  • Science

    • Virginia Politicians and the Slow Strangulation of Its Famous State University

      After 3 weeks of inconclusive toing and froing on Sullivan’s resignation, the then Republican governor Bob McDonnell, with his own corruption scandal looming on the horizon, said he would use his gubernatorial prerogative and replace the entire board if the matter was not resolved forthwith.

      Sullivan was reinstated. Dragas remained on the Board and was appointed by McDonnell for a second term, this fiasco notwithstanding. Her reprieve was attributed to her high-level political connections.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • All Women Deserve Access to Tampons, Period

      In the supposedly enlightened United States, millions of women lack proper access to menstrual supplies.

    • Canada-China FTA talks to begin in February 2017 could have massive implications on water use

      CBC reports, “International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland says Canada is tentatively booked to begin talks with China in February as the two countries explore a free trade agreement.”

      While the Harper government expressed support for a free trade agreement with China in 2007, there is a new momentum behind these talks. In December 2015, China’s ambassador to Canada, Luo Zhaohui, stated, “At the policy level, we need to start the negotiation and conclusion of a free trade agreement sooner rather than later.” In June 2016, The Globe and Mail reported, “[Trudeau] has made re-engagement with China a key foreign policy initiative as his government presses for a free-trade deal with the world’s second-largest economy.” And in August 2016, the Canadian Press reported, “After meeting with Trudeau, [Chinese premier Li Keqiang stated] that Canada and China will launch a feasibility study on an eventual free-trade deal.”

    • For our food system’s sake, let’s say “no” to corporate consolidation

      The food system is one of the largest forces impacting our planet’s environment and people’s health. The choices about what crops are grown, where and how they are produced, who gets access to that food and who makes those decisions all have global consequences.

      One of the challenges to achieving a more sustainable and fair food system is cor­porate consolidation in the food sector. Consider the latest proposed merger be­tween global giants Bayer and Monsanto pending antitrust approval. And remem­ber, DuPont-Dow, Syngenta–Chem China and Monsanto-Bayer (if the mergers go through) aren’t agriculture companies first — they’re chemical companies.

    • How Trump can help working-class Americans: Keep funding Planned Parenthood

      Can Congress stop harassing Planned Parenthood? That would be my wish for the new year. Unfortunately, the harassment may increase in a Trump administration. But it doesn’t have to. It is within President-elect Donald Trump’s power to put a stop to it.

      Past congressional attempts to defund Planned Parenthood have failed because President Obama has vetoed them. This is all part of a congressional effort to punish the healthcare provider for also providing legal abortions. Of course, no federal funds that Planned Parenthood receives go to abortion, anyway. By law, no federal money can be spent on abortion. (Which is unfair — but that’s another story.)

    • The Cory Booker Dilemma for Progressive Animal Activists

      During the 2016 Democratic primary, I was very much a Bernie Sanders partisan. The candidate was so much on my mind, that when I was writing my biography of Ronnie Lee, founder of the Animal Liberation Front, my subject emailed me on more than one occasion to say I’d accidentally substituted his name with that of the Vermont senator’s in the manuscript draft!

      Now, there was a period during the primary in which it seemed that the animal activist group Direct Action Everywhere was only protesting at Sanders’ rallies. This made me very angry! It made me even more angry when the group was challenged on this and essentially said — a pox on both the Clinton and Sanders; vote for Cory Booker in 2020. While the New Jersey senator is vegan, he’s very much aligned with the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. As Frederik deBoer pointed out, Booker has “criticized unions, pushed for lower corporate taxes and undermined public schools.”

    • Jeremy Hunt accused of compromising weekday hospital care

      The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has been accused of compromising the care patients receive during the week by not taking forward his pledge to hire more junior doctors to help deliver a seven-day NHS.

      The Liberal Democrats’ health spokesman, Norman Lamb, said that with juniors now having to work more at weekends, already under-staffed hospitals had fewer medics on duty on weekdays.

      He said Hunt had done little to make good on the hiring pledge he made in parliament during the year-long dispute over junior doctors’ contracts.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking Parrot Security OS 3.4.1 Includes GNUnet

      The ParrotSec project kicked off 2017 with the release of Parrot Security OS 3.4 on the first day of the year, followed the next day by a point release that brought improvements to the installer.

      Launched on January 1, 2016, Parrot Security OS 3.4 shipped with various updated packages and new features, among which we can mention the addition of the GNUNet open-source framework for secure peer-to-peer (P2P) networking, an early preview of the Freenet installer, as well as brand-new mirror servers for the netboot images.

    • Future Proof Security

      Are there times we should never make a tradeoff between “right” and “now”? Yes, yes there are. The single most important is verify data correctness. Especially if you think it’s trusted input. Today’s trusted input is tomorrow’s SQL injection. Let’s use a few examples (these are actual examples I saw in the past with the names of the innocent changed).

    • Linux Journal January 2017

      There have been epic battles over whether “insecure” or “unsecure” should be used when referring to computer security. Granted, those epic battles usually take place in really nerdy forums, but still, one sounds funny and the other seems to personify computers. Whichever grammatical construct you choose, the need for security is greater now than ever. As Linux users, we need to make sure we’re not overconfident in the inherent security of our systems. Remember, they all have a weak link: us.

    • Lockpicking in the IoT

      “Smart” devices using BTLE, a mobile phone and the Internet are becoming more and more popular. We will be using mechanical and electronic hardware attacks, TLS MitM, BTLE sniffing and App decompilation to show why those devices and their manufacturers aren’t always that smart after all. And that even AES128 on top of the BTLE layer doesn’t have to mean “unbreakable”. Our main target will be electronic locks, but the methods shown apply to many other smart devices as well…

    • Photocopier Security

      A modern photocopier is basically a computer with a scanner and printer attached. This computer has a hard drive, and scans of images are regularly stored on that drive. This means that when a photocopier is thrown away, that hard drive is filled with pages that the machine copied over its lifetime. As you might expect, some of those pages will contain sensitive information.

    • OpenPGP really works

      After a day of analysis, PGP is used and significantly at various layers of my day-to-day activities. I can clearly said “PGP works”. Indeed, it’s not perfect (that’s the reality of a lot of cryptosystems) but PGP needs some love at the IETF, for the implementations or even some financial support.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Russian Hacking Report: All Hat, No Cattle

      How long can we expect to wait for the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center to admit that its report, “GRIZZLY STEPPE — Russian Malicious Cyber Activity” — pre- hyped as providing “evidence” of Russian government interference in the 2016 US presidential election — is a reprise of Powell’s UN speech?

    • Dylann Roof Himself Rejects Best Defense Against Execution

      Twenty-two pages into the hand-scribbled journal found in Dylann S. Roof’s car — after the assertions of black inferiority, the lamentations over white powerlessness, the longing for a race war — comes an incongruous declaration.

      “I want state that I am morally opposed to psychology,” wrote the young white supremacist who would murder nine black worshipers at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015. “It is a Jewish invention, and does nothing but invent diseases and tell people they have problems when they dont.”

      Mr. Roof, who plans to represent himself when the penalty phase of his federal capital trial begins on Tuesday, apparently is devoted enough to that proposition (or delusion, as some maintain) to stake his life on it. Although a defense based on his psychological capacity might be his best opportunity to avoid execution, he seems steadfastly committed to preventing any public examination of his mental state or background.

    • Fantasies About Russia Could Doom Opposition to Trump

      The same Democrats who found the one nominee who could lose to Trump will find the one argument for impeachment that can explode in their own faces.

      To many Democrats for whom killing a million people in Iraq just didn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense, and who considered Obama’s bombing of eight nations and the creation of the drone murder program to be praiseworthy, Trump will be impeachable on Day 1.

      Indeed Trump should be impeached on Day 1, but the same Democrats who found the one nominee who could lose to Trump will find the one argument for impeachment that can explode in their own faces. Here’s a “progressive” Democrat:

    • Michigan Bans Banning Plastic Bags Because Plastic Bag Bans Are Bad For Business

      As communities across the country explore new ways to curb single-use plastics, including all-out bans on plastic shopping bags, Michigan has taken a step that ensures it continues to add to plastic pollution.

      This week, with Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder out of town, Lt. Gov. Brian Calley signed into law a prohibition on local governments banning plastic bags and other food and retail containers. That’s right, a ban on bans.

      Introduced by state Sen. Jim Stamas, a Republican, the measure preempts local ordinances from “regulating the use, disposition, or sale of, prohibiting or restricting, or imposing any fee, charge, or tax on certain containers,” including those made of plastics. It effectively kills a measure passed in Washtenaw County, in southeastern Michigan, that would have imposed a 10-cent tax on both plastic and paper grocery bags beginning in April 2017.

    • The Global Assassination Grid

      Cian has spent a great deal of time thinking about the issues of responsibility in, and how communications technology has been used to distance people from the act of killing. Rising superpowers around the world are working day and night to build the next stealth drone that can penetrate air defense systems. The automation of target selection processes, navigation and control are incentivized by the vulnerability posed by the signals drones rely upon to operate.

    • [Video] The Global Assassination Grid
    • Arms Trade Treaty Falling Down in Yemen

      Two years after the UN Arms Trade Treaty entered into force many of the governments which championed the treaty are failing to uphold it, especially when it comes to the conflict in Yemen.

      “In terms of implementation, the big disappointment is Yemen,” Anna Macdonald, Director of Control Arms, a civil society organisation dedicated to the treaty, told IPS.

      “The big disappointment is the countries that were in the forefront of calling for the treaty – and indeed who still champion it as a great achievement in international disarmament and security – are now prepared to violate it by persisting in their arms sales to Saudi Arabia,” she added.

      The Saudi-led international coalition has been responsible for thousands of civilian deaths in Yemen, and Saudi Arabia is known to have violated humanitarian law by bombing civilian targets, including hospitals.

    • If you thought 2016 was bad in the Middle East – brace yourself for 2017

      It is difficult to be optimistic about the Middle East in 2017.

      With the bloodshed in Aleppo, Mosul, Yemen and elsewhere in the region, the anger, hatred and sectarian divides have only grown deeper.

      Indeed, while some point to Tehran celebrating its victory in Aleppo, success on the battlefield is coupled with even deeper divisions between Iran and some of its Arab or Sunni neighbours, paving a path towards greater conflict rather than reconciliation.

    • Crosses Marking Chicago Death Toll

      Gang violence has fueled a staggering death toll in Chicago, much as military violence has spread death and chaos over large swaths of the world, reminding Kathy Kelly of the need for an “eternal hostility” toward killing.

    • Israel’s Above-the-Law Behavior

      Despite stern warnings from the U.N. and even the U.S., Israel continues its steady march toward becoming an apartheid state that relies on anti-Arab racism to justify its behavior, as Lawrence Davidson describes.

    • Kerry’s Belated Israel Truth-telling
    • A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity
    • ACLU & CAIR Use Gold Star Father to Claim War on Iraq Was for Bill of Rights

      Are you old enough to remember when liberal groups openly admitted that the war on Iraq was illegal and fraudulent, based on oil and profit and sadism?

      Well, can you recall when the proponents of the war claimed it was a defense against nonexistent ties to terrorists and nonexistent weapons?

      Even if you’ve wiped those memories, let me assure you, NOBODY ever claimed that attacking and destroying Iraq was necessary to protect civil liberties in the United States (which have been seriously eroded during the course of the war).

      Yet, in recent months the generic defense of murdering large numbers of people far away has taken over as the explanation for the war on Iraq.

      The ACLU on Friday used the voice of my fellow Charlottesvillian Khizr Khan to claim that attacking Iraq was done “in defense of our country’s ideals.”

      Also on Friday, CAIR — which I can recall supporting Dennis Kucinich for president because he opposed the war — claimed (also through the voice of Khan) that Iraq was destroyed “to continue to have the freedoms guaranteed in the pages of our Constitution.” CAIR even suggests that participating in such activities as attacking Iraq — killing over a million people — is a duty of American Muslims.

    • America’s Major Challenges in Middle East Policy, 2017

      The incoming Trump administration is riven by a profound division between those determined to avoid deep entanglements in the Middle East, such as Donald J. Trump himself, and the hawks he is putting in key positions, who desperately want to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran. This division is made more difficult to interpret by Trump’s own erratic pronouncements, such that he sometimes speaks of, e.g., putting 30,000 US troops into the fight against Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). It is impossible to know whether Trump will disengage even more than President Obama did, or whether the hawks will win out and intervene with covert operations or perhaps more explicitly against Iran. Yet another complication is that Moscow now views Iran as a Russian client in the region, and would really mind if the US did interfere in Iran. Trump is obviously close to President Vladimir Putin, but his cabinet is full of saber-rattlers against the Russian Federation.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Video: The Guardian faces claims it distorted Assange interview
    • Consigned to the memory hole: the content of the DNC leaks

      Amidst the blame Russia hysteria, the actual content of the the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hacks has been consigned to the memory hole. In a veritable tidal wave of false narratives, the mainstream media has succeeded in drowning the legacy of the leaks in (not terribly convincing) accusations of Russian culpability. Erased from this narrative is the fact that the highest levels of the Democratic Party—supposedly neutral arbiters of the candidate selection process—sabotaged the Bernie Sanders campaign, and detest vast swaths of the Democratic Party constituency.

      The first leaks appeared on July 22nd, when WikiLeaks released a collection of emails from the accounts of seven top DNC officials. The initial leaks confirmed what Sanders supporters had alleged for months, which was that the DNC was conspiring to sabotage the Sanders campaign. Emails implicated top officials such as DNC CFO Brad Marshall, who discussed planting a media story about Sanders’ religious beliefs in an effort to undermine his campaign.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Dieselgate – A year later

      At 32C3 we gave an overview on the organizational and technical aspects of Dieselgate that had just broken public three months before. In the last year we have learned a lot and spoken to hundreds of people. Daniel gives an update on what is known and what is still to be revealed.

    • How much would it cost to geoengineer thicker Arctic sea ice?

      There are a couple different ways to come at the problem of climate change—you can focus on eliminating the cause, or on mitigating the symptoms. The latter approach includes obvious things like preventing flooding from rising sea levels. But it also ranges into “geoengineering” schemes as radical as injecting sunlight-reflecting aerosol droplets into the stratosphere. Such schemes are band-aids rather than cures, but band-aids have their uses.

      One worrying change driven by the climate is the loss of Arctic sea ice. The late-summer Arctic Ocean is on track to become ice-free around the 2030s. The rapid warming of the Arctic has serious implications for local ecosystems, but it also influences climate elsewhere in ways we’re still working to fully understand. One frequently mentioned effect is the increased absorption of sunlight in the Arctic as reflective snow and ice disappears—a positive feedback that amplifies warming.

      What if we could slap a sea ice band-aid on the Arctic? In a recent paper, a group of Arizona State researchers led by astrophysicist Steven Desch sketch out one hypothetical band-aid—a geoengineering scheme to freeze more ice during the Arctic winter.

    • Dakota Access Opponents Stage Dramatic Protest Against U.S. Bank

      Continuing a strategy to target the project’s financial backers, a small team of Dakota Access Pipeline opponents on Sunday pulled off a dramatic banner-drop from the rafters of the U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis as the Minnesota Vikings played the Chicago Bears.

      Above the crowded stadium, which can hold nearly 70,000 attendees at capacity, the two individuals—later identified as Karl Zimmerman, 32, and Sen Holiday, 26—rappelled from large steel girders during the second quarter of the game alongside an expansive banner reading, “US Bank, DIVEST, #NoDAPL.”

    • PHOTOS: Louisiana’s Oil and Gas Industry Continues Growing Along the Coast It’s Helping Shrink

      The Louisiana coast loses a football field’s worth of land every 38 minutes. This staggering rate of land loss has been brought on by climate change and coastal erosion accelerated by human activities, including water diversion projects and damage done by the oil and gas industry.

      It is also a problem that is best seen from the sky. Thanks to the nonprofit conservation organization SouthWings, I was able to photograph the state’s troubled coast for DeSmog during a flight on November 15, 2016.

      “Flying out along the Louisiana coast and seeing the tattered wetlands from above with your own eyes make the scale of the threat posed by coastal land loss feel strikingly real and immediate,” Meredith Dowling, SouthWings associate executive director, told me while discussing the group’s work.

    • “Green” Governor Jerry Brown Appoints Oil Industry Loyalist to Public Utilities Commission

      While many mainstream media outlets have fawningly depicted Governor Jerry Brown as “the Resistance” to incoming President Donald Trump, an appointment of a Big Oil-friendly regulator to the California Public Utilities Commission today appears to further taint the Governor’s already controversial environmental legacy.

      Governor Jerry Brown today appointed two Brown administration staffers, Clifford Rechtschaffen and Martha Guzman Aceves, to the scandal-ridden California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). They will replace Catherine Sandoval and Michael Florio, whose six-year terms expire on January 1, 2017.

    • Indian firm makes carbon capture breakthrough

      A breakthrough in the race to make useful products out of planet-heating CO2 emissions has been made in southern India.

      A plant at the industrial port of Tuticorin is capturing CO2 from its own coal-powered boiler and using it to make soda ash – aka baking powder.

      Crucially, the technology is running without subsidy, which is a major advance for carbon capture technology as for decades it has languished under high costs and lukewarm government support.

    • Standing Rock protesters unfurl banner over field at Minneapolis NFL game

      In Minneapolis on Sunday protesters unfurled a banner protesting the Dakota Access oil pipeline, high above the field during an NFL game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears.

    • World’s Fastest Land Animal is Now Racing Extinction

      Cheetahs are the fastest land animal on earth, but conservationists are raising serious concerns about a threat they can’t outrun: extinction.

      While the plight of big cats around the world has gained growing awareness, it’s been mostly focused on lions and tigers. Now cheetahs are taking the spotlight, but it’s unfortunately over concerns that these amazingly fast animals are going to disappear forever unless urgent action is taken.

      According to a new study just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which was led by a team from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), Panthera and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), there are only an estimated 7,100 cheetahs left in existence in the wild globally – and they’re all in trouble.

  • Finance

    • Let’s Make a Deal: Donald Trump and the Monte Hall Problem

      How should compassionate and rational people respond to the fact that a narcissistic, racist, misogynist, sociopathic, mindless, scapegoating demagogue will soon have his finger on the button of a nuclear arsenal that could put an end to the struggle of every one of our selfish genes to pass copies of themselves on to succeeding generations?

      No Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

      In the film the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, played by 16-year-old Judy Garland and her dog, Toto, are picked up by a tornado and dropped in a land ruled by a wicked witch. Then with the help of the Munchkins she sets out along a yellow brick road in search of a Wizard who can show her the way home. Along the way she meets a scarecrow (Ray Bolger) that complains he hasn’t got a brain.

      “How can you talk if you haven’t got a brain?” Dorothy asks him.

      “I don’t know,” the scarecrow replies, “but some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.” And we might add today, twittering. Ergo Donald Trump.

      Well until recently we westerners were on our own yellow brick road in search of a wizard who could show us the way home to a world based on the enlightenment values we cherish: a world of democratically ruled social welfare states governed by international laws. But unfortunately Donald Trump together with his demagogic clones in Europe has knocked us way off course.

    • UK ambassador to EU quits amid Brexit row

      Britain’s ambassador to the EU is reported to have quit his post less than a month after it was revealed that he said a post-Brexit trade deal with the bloc could take up to a decade to achieve.

      Government sources confirmed that Sir Ivan Rogers, one of the UK’s most experienced EU diplomats, told staff on Tuesday that he was stepping down early from his role, just a few months before Britain begins its formal exit negotiations with the EU. His resignation, first reported by the Financial Times, came almost a year before his scheduled departure in November.

    • False Unities: Brexit in the New Year

      As for broader sentiments of unity, very little of that liquor is available for consumption, especially with May behind the bar. ‘This is the year’, suggested William Keegan rather grumpily in The Guardian, ‘when our politicians and the so-called “people” – all 28 percent of the population who voted to leave the European Union – will reap what they have sown.’

      So, as the booze inflicted headaches wear off this morning, Britain remains fractured and disillusioned, marked by a government of enormous confusion and inconsistencies. As this continues, the biggest barker in favour Brexit, Nigel Farage, continues to draw an EU salary. A most compromised political attack dog, if ever there was one.

    • China Gets Strict on Forex Transactions to Stop Money Exiting Abroad

      At risk of capital flight, China marked the new year with extra requirements for citizens converting yuan into foreign currencies.

      The State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the currency regulator, said in a statement Dec. 31 that it wanted to close loopholes exploited for purposes such as money laundering and illegally channeling money into overseas property.

      While the regulator left unchanged quotas of $50,000 of foreign currency per person a year, citizens faced extra disclosure requirements from Jan. 1.

      The annual limits for individuals’ currency conversions reset at the start of each year, potentially aggravating outflow pressures that intensified in 2016 as the yuan suffered its steepest annual slump in more than two decades. An estimated $762 billion flowed out of the country in the first 11 months of last year, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence gauge, pumping up residential property markets from Vancouver to Sydney. Some money also spilled across the border into Hong Kong insurance products.

    • Chinese investment in the US skyrocketed last year

      Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in the US rocketed to $45.6 billion in 2016, triple that of 2015, although that surge and future investment faces a “major downside risk” under a Donald Trump presidency, a new report by the research firm Rhodium Group predicts.

    • ‘This is the biggest issue in Australia’: Centrelink debacle gets worse

      THE Centrelink debacle is getting worse, with more Australians each day revealing they have been slugged with demands to pay back tens of thousands of dollars they don’t owe.

      Furious Aussies, many of whom were on the dole for only a brief period years ago, are demanding action from the Government, which is denying a problem exists.

      Michael Griffin, a filmmaker from Brisbane, told news.com.au he would go so far as to call what is happening “extortion”.

    • Reports round-up: Bullying Royal Mail boss gets the boot after walkouts in Accrington

      Striking postal workers in Accrington, Lancashire, forced Royal Mail bosses onto the back foot in the run-up to Christmas.

      Members of the CWU union at the Accrington delivery office struck against bosses’ refusal to remove a bullying manager.

      A change of manager had been recommended in August, but nothing had been done.

      Martin Berry, branch secretary of the CWU’s East Lancs Amal branch told Socialist Worker, “There’s a manager who’s been bullying the staff for some time. Now they’ve had enough.

      “The manager was using foul and abusive language, and there’s also instances of non-payment of overtime.”

    • Royal Mail workers stop strike action after ‘bullying and harassment’ claims

      WORKERS at the Accrington Royal Mail delivery office have agreed to call off strikes over ‘bullying and harassment’ claims.

      Members of the Communications Workers Union have returned to work after Royal Mail confirmed that the ‘management situation’ will be resolved in the New Year.

      Staff had previously taken industrial action at the Infant Street office on Saturday, December 10, and Saturday, December 17.

    • Royal Mail predicts ‘Take-Back Tuesday’ will see biggest jump in returns

      Royal Mail has predicted that today, coined ‘Take-back Tuesday’, will be the busiest day for online shopping returns through the post, as shoppers rush to send back unwanted Christmas gifts.

      Today (Tuesday 3rd January), returns of online purchases are predicted to jump by more than 50 per cent in a single day, versus the average number of return parcels per day in December. The prediction is based on the number of returns parcels handled by Royal Mail through its Tracked Returns service, which is used by more than 1000 e-retailers for the return of unwanted online purchases. Last year, the month of January saw the highest returns volumes of the financial year.

    • Bitcoin breaks $1,000 level, highest in more than 3 years

      The price of bitcoin has breached the $1,000 mark, hitting a more than three-year high on Monday.

      The cryptocurrency was trading at $1,021 at the time of publication, according to CoinDesk data, at level not seen since November 2013, with its market capitalization exceeding $16 billion.

      Bitcoin has been on a steady march higher for the past few months, driven by a number of factors such as the devaluation of the yuan, geopolitical uncertainty and an increase in professional investors taking an interest in the asset class.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The right is emboldened, yes. But it’s not in the ascendancy

      Britain did back Brexit – no sugarcoating that. But voters didn’t reject the case for the EU because it was never really made. Nor was it a rejection of the case for immigration, because that was never made either. I don’t know whether remain would have prevailed if those cases had been made. Probably not. But since they weren’t made they could hardly have been defeated. Instead people were fed a diet of fear of the unknown from a political class that has failed them and gagged.

    • My New Year’s Wish for Donald Trump

      Donald Trump issued the following tweet on the last day of 2016: “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”

      The man who is about to become President of the United States continues to exhibit a mean-spirited, thin-skinned, narcissistic and vindictive character.

      Trump sees the world in terms of personal wins or losses, enemies or friends, supporters or critics.

    • Resistance Mobilizes as GOP Licks Chops Over Regressive Agenda

      From slowing President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet confirmations to hampering GOP attempts to repeal Obamacare or defund Planned Parenthood, Democrats and allied progressive forces stand ready to resist the looming Republican agenda.

      Ahead of Congress reconvening on Tuesday, news publications outlined what’s in store—and at stake.

    • Preparing for the Normalization of a Neofascist White House

      It is 2017, and shortly the White House will be inhabited by an unscrupulous, corrupt narcissist who has shamelessly mobilized the Neo-Nazi fringe of the Republican Party to get into power.

      Despite all the cries of ‘no’ to normalization on the left, Trump will be normalized by the same corporate media that virtually boycotted Bernie Sanders. He will be respectfully called “the president” and his wishes and goals will be praised on cable news, and not just on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Fake News. He’ll flash a smile and be friendly and anchors will treat him like a buddy (despite his having threatened their colleagues with bodily harm at his rallies and despite his having pledged to weaken the first amendment and sue reporters for libel). Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is already pledging never to call Trump out when he is obviously lying. Since Trump is, like Dick Nixon, a pathological liar, this is like pledging not to cover his presidency.

    • Noam Chomsky: With Trump Election, We Are Now Facing Threats to the Survival of the Human Species

      On December 5, over 2,300 people packed into the historic Riverside Church here in Manhattan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Democracy Now! Speakers included Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We now face are the most severe that have ever arisen in human history. They are literal threats to survival: nuclear war, environmental catastrophe. These are very urgent concerns,” Chomsky said. “They cannot be delayed. They became more urgent on November 8th, for the reasons you know and that I mentioned. They have to be faced directly, and soon, if the human experiment is not to prove to be a disastrous failure.”

    • Henry A. Giroux on Trump’s Cabinet, the Church of Neoliberal Evangelicals

      In this interview with The Real News Network, I argue that while it may seem hard to believe that Trump has appointed to high government positions a number of religious fundamentalists, conspiracy-theory advocates, billionaires, misogynists, climate-change deniers and retrograde anti-communists, this should come as no surprise given the anti-democratic conditions that produced Trump in the first place. Not only do these individuals uniformly lack the experience to take on the jobs for which they were nominated, they are unapologetic about destroying the government agencies in which they have been put in charge.

    • What Does Trump’s Proposed Cabinet Tell Us About The Next Four Years?

      Donald Trump will not be sworn in as President until January 20, 2017 (although you wouldn’t know it from his tweets). But his choice of staff and cabinet members gives us insight into the shape of his policies for the next four years.

    • How Do Republicans Get Away With Voter Suppression?

      From busted voting machines intentionally placed in precincts where people of color vote to fraudulent interstate purging of likely non-Republican voters through a process called “caging,” Greg Palast has been sleuthing down the details of GOP voter suppression for more than 15 years. He’s an investigative reporter who is not easily deterred, because it’s often a lonely beat — given that the mainstream corporate media is more interested in the final vote count, not who was intentionally not allowed to vote due to discrimination. Truthout recently interviewed Palast about this expanding scam that often has more impact on electoral outcomes than the actual vote tabulation margin of victory.

    • Cyber security takes on new urgency for groups targeted by Trump

      With under a month to go until Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, activists from the grassroots to large organizations like the ACLU are working to fortify their digital platforms against potential government intrusions. Many fear that a Trump presidency will usher in an age of greater government surveillance and the suppression of civil rights.

      “We can’t trust Trump with the NSA,” argued John Napier Tye, who served in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from 2011 to 2014. “There are simply not enough safeguards in place to protect Americans from our own National Security Agency.”

    • Don’t Blame Jon Stewart for Donald Trump: Comedy Central Didn’t Make America Fall For ‘Fake News’ And ‘Post-Truth’

      Well before the results of the presidential election were clear, the blame game was in full gear. If Hillary Clinton didn’t win, it was the Bernie supporters and the misogynists who were at fault. Or it was the narcissistic and clueless millennials and the stupid and desperate white working class. Then and now the Russians were at the top of the list. After the election, there were the pollsters. And, of course, who couldn’t resist blaming the fake news? But in the latest twist on the blame game, we now have a new set of culprits: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

    • Democrats Aim to Slam Brakes on Key Members of Trump’s “Rigged Cabinet”

      Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been warned that Senate Democrats are planning to “aggressively target” eight of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees, aiming to delay as long as possible the confirmation hearings slated to start next week.

      “President-elect Trump is attempting to fill his rigged cabinet with nominees that would break key campaign promises and have made billions off the industries they’d be tasked with regulating,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement Sunday reported by the Washington Post.

      “Any attempt by Republicans to have a series of rushed, truncated hearings before Inauguration Day and before the Congress and public have adequate information on all of them is something Democrats will vehemently resist,” Schumer said. “If Republicans think they can quickly jam through a whole slate of nominees without a fair hearing process, they’re sorely mistaken.”

    • Majority of Americans Unconvinced Trump Can Handle Nation’s Top Job

      With his inauguration now less than three weeks away, a new survey shows a majority of the American people are far from confident that Donald Trump, a former reality television star who won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, is up to the major tasks entrusted to the President of the United States.

      According to results released by Gallup on Monday, “less than half of Americans are confident in [Trump's] ability to handle an international crisis (46%), to use military force wisely (47%) or to prevent major scandals in his administration (44%).”

    • Trump ‘knows things’ others don’t about Russian hacking

      If Russian hackers are fiddling around with America’s electricity grid, then that would be extremely alarming. It is also what was reported by the Washington Post on the heels of the Obama Administration announcing sanctions against Russia for interfering in a US election.

      The original headline read, “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.” The Washington Post reported, “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials.”

    • U.S. Attributes Election Hacks to Russian Threat Groups

      While some industry experts applauded the GRIZZLY STEPPE indicators provided by the U.S. Government, some experts urged caution for those quickly integrating them into their cyber defense measures.

      “Be careful using the DHS/FBI GRIZZLY STEPPE indicators. Many are VPS, TOR relays, proxies, etc. which will generate lots of false positives,” Robert M. Lee, founder and CEO of Dragos Security and a former member of the intelligence community, Tweeted.

      Via a series of tweets, FireEye’s Chris Sanders also cautioned those eager to quickly implement the list of IPs into network security defenses. “If you try to make an IDS rule out of all those IP’s you’re gonna generate a TON of alerts and have a bad time,” he tweeted. “Don’t build IDS rules from lists of IPs w/o context. This is # of matches for a group of avg size networks over ~30 days for DHS report IPs. “That said, if you want to practice some hunting, go wild. This is a good opportunity to practice your mass triage/search workflow,” he added in a separate tweet.

    • Fake news of Russians hacking our election

      The mainstream media narrative regarding “fake news” is awash with duplicity, and frankly, they seem to be the main purveyors of it. Case in point, fully half of Hillary Clinton voters have been deceptively convinced by the media, that Russia “tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President,” according to a poll conducted by YouGov and The Economist last week.

    • Proof that Russia didn’t hack DNC ignored by Obama

      “For one, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – whose hacktivist organization released the thousands of emails that shed damaging light on Hillary Clinton and her allies – denied the Russians were the source,” WND reported. “In addition, the Obama administration has developed a reputation for manipulating intelligence for political purposes.”

    • WPost’s New ‘Fake News’ on Russian ‘Hack’

      The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has been hacked – cue a national American trauma, allegations of dirty tricks, fears that democracy has been subverted, all leading to what the next U.S. president would call “our long national nightmare.”

    • Oliver Stone Accuses Mainstream Media Of Reporting Fake News About Russia

      Oliver Stone claims that “disgraceful” mainstream media Cold War-style “groupthink” is behind news reports that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election and the “hysteria” could lead to war between our two countries.

      Stone urged his readers to “stay calm” and consult the alternative news sources that he provided on his social media page.

      President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats last week as part of sanctions for alleged interference in the election. President-elect Trump has expressed some degree of skepticism that the Russians played a role in Hilary Clinton’s loss on November 8, an outcome that came as a complete shock to poll-driven news outlets and political pundits.

    • So, did Russia help Obama win in 2012?

      Obama’s hissy fits are as petulant and selective as they are pathetic. His latest charade of a “leader” came when he announced sanctions against Russia for supposedly influencing the 2016 presidential election. The translation is that Russia worked to rig the election so that Donald Trump would win.

      He used an executive order to carry out his schizophrenic temper tantrum, which also included declaring 35 Russian diplomats persona non grata, giving them 72 hours to leave the country with their families. This in addition to shuttering two Russian compounds in Maryland and New York.

    • ‘Tis the season for whining

      They should really stop whining about Russia allegedly hacking the emails that proved Hillary was colluding with the Democratic National Committee to defeat Bernie Sanders, her team colluded with major media to, ironically, promote Trump as the Republican candidate, and her foundation colluded with colossal colluders internationally to enrich herself.

    • Politics on the Cheap: The Russians Hijacked the Election Part I
    • Politics on the Cheap: The Russians Hijacked the Election II
    • Another attack on U.S. freedoms

      Russia waged a major attack against the United States in the past year. The attack came as a cyber attack, the newest weapon in the war chests, with the explicit purpose of interfering with our elections and our democratic process. The attack was direct hit, with Russia gaining and then releasing information meant to confuse, embarrass and discredit one candidate over another.

    • Rebecca Ferguson Invited To Play Trump’s Inauguration

      Rebecca Ferguson has turned down the chance to play Donald Trump’s Presidential inauguration.

    • House Republicans vote to rein in independent ethics office

      Defying the wishes of their top leaders, House Republicans voted behind closed doors Monday night to rein in the independent ethics office created eight years ago in the wake of a series of embarrassing congressional scandals.

      The 119-to-74 vote during a GOP conference meeting means that the House rules package expected to be adopted Tuesday, the first day of the 115th Congress, would rename the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) as the Office of Congressional Complaint Review and place it under the oversight of the House Ethics Committee.

      Under the proposed new rules, the office could not employ a spokesperson, investigate anonymous tips or refer criminal wrongdoing to prosecutors without the express consent of the Ethics Committee, which would gain the power to summarily end any OCE probe.

    • With No Warning, House Republicans Vote to Gut Independent Ethics Office

      House Republicans, overriding their top leaders, voted on Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

      The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure.

    • NPR’s Michele Norris: ‘Make a America Great Again’ Is Deeply Encoded ‘Promise of White Prosperity’

      NPR host Michele Norris pointed out over the weekend that President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is a “deeply encoded” message that troubles minorities while promising prosperity to white Americans.

      During a Face the Nation panel discussion on resisting Trump’s agenda, conservative columnist David Frum offered a sobering assessment about how the new president would impact the country.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The State of Crypto Law: 2016 in Review

      This year was one of the busiest in recent memory when it comes to cryptography law in the United States and around the world. But for all the Sturm und Drang, surprisingly little actually changed in the U.S. In this post, we’ll run down the list of things that happened, how they could have gone wrong (but didn’t), how they could yet go wrong (especially in the U.K.), and what we might see in 2017.

    • Surveillance in Latin America: 2016 in Review

      Throughout 2016, EFF and our civil society partners have been closely following digital rights developments throughout Latin America. You can see some of the results in Unblinking Eyes, our exhaustive survey of surveillance law and practice across the Americas, as well as multiple countries’ localized versions of Who Has Your Back (Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil), our guide to how companies respond to government data requests. Both projects were led by an increasingly strong network of local digital rights groups in Latin America, who, together with some investigative work by the region’s incredibly brave journalists, have been keeping up the fight against mass surveillance.

    • In science fiction, robot witnesses to crime are seen as normal. Nobody considered the privacy implications for present day.

      The Police wants the cooperation of a robotic witness to a murder case, requesting Amazon’s help in recalling what the domestic robot “Echo” heard in the room. Robotic witnesses have been a theme in science fiction for a long time — and yet, we forgot to ask the most obvious and the most important questions. Maybe we just haven’t realized that we’re in science fiction territory, as far as robotic agents go, and explored the consequences of it: what robot has agency and who can be coerced?

      People were outraged that the Police would consider asking a robot – the Amazon Echo – what happened in the recent murder case, effectively activating retroactive surveillance. Evenmoreso, people were outraged that the Police tried to coerce the robot’s manufacturer to provide the data, coercing a third party to command the robot it manufactured, and denying agency to the people searched.

      In Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, a human detective is sent off to faraway Solaris to investigate a murder, and has to interview a whole range of robot servants, each with their own perspective, to gradually piece together how the murder took place. A cooking robot knows about the last dinner of the victim, and can provide details only of that, and so on. Still, each and every robot have a perfect recollection of their particular perspective.

    • Snowden document suggests NSA could have proof of Russian hack

      The FBI, CIA and President Barack Obama all agree that Russia hacked the DNC and asserted its will on the US presidential election — but the winner of that contest isn’t so sure. “It could be somebody else.” Donald Trump told reporters over New Years. “Hacking is a hard thing to prove.” Except, as it turns out, US intelligence has a pretty good track record of tracing security breaches back to the Kremlin. According to a new document leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA has successfully traced a hack back to Russian intelligence at least once before.

    • GOP Congressman’s Tweet Suggests Election Hacks Were Actually ‘Insider Leaks’

      The eight-term Iowa congressman seemed to suggest in his tweet that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) “leaked” information about the involvement of Russian hackers in the 2016 election. The tweet included a link to a story headlined “US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims” from an obscure website called consortiumnews.com. Founded in 1995 by journalist Robert Parry, the website claims to be an independent online investigative journalism magazine “meant to be a home for important, well-reported stories and a challenge to the inept but dominant mainstream news media of the day.”

    • GOP rep suggests CIA, NSA leaked info on Russian hacking

      Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) suggested Monday that the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) leaked information about Russia interfering in the U.S. election.

      “Russian hackers controlling our election? We ‘know’ this because the CIA & NSA leaked it, right?” King wrote on Twitter, including a link to a website called Consortiumnews.com.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Mexico’s war on crime: A decade of (militarized) failure

      On December 11, 2006, days after being sworn in, Mexico’s then-President Felipe Calderón announced that his administration was deploying thousands of federal troops to combat organized crime in his home state of Michoacán.

      Interior Minister Francisco Javier Ramírez Acuña said at the time that “the battle against organized crime is only just beginning, and it will be a fight that will take time.”

      Ten years later, Michoacán remains one of Mexico’s most violent states.

      Vigilante groups — which have long posed a dilemma for local authorities — continue to operate in the area. Several such groups are suspected of participating in criminal activities, rather than combating them.

    • NSA Whistleblower Reveals U.S. Torture Horrors

      We know a lot about the torture policies of the US government during the Iraq War, but there’s still a lot that we don’t know. Luckily, a new book by a former NSA expert shines an even brighter spotlight on just how bad the torture was during those years. The issue of torture has also been covered extensively by The Intercept, and Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins talks to Cora Currier from The Intercept about it.

    • Mohammad Kaif faces fire on Twitter for doing Surya Namaskar

      However, this attracted a barrage of tweets from some who said that the yoga pose was “not Islamic”.

      However, Kaif’s response to the tweets would have stumped even the staunchest of critics.

      Kaif said: “In all 4pics,I had Allah in my heart. Cant understand what doing any exercise, Surya Namaskar or Gym has to do with religion.It benefits ALL. (sic)”

    • British woman jailed in Iran released from solitary confinement

      A British-Iranian woman being held in an Iranian prison has been released from solitary confinement, her husband has said.

      Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 37, was sentenced in September to five years in prison on secret charges related to a “soft overthrow” of the country’s government that were not revealed in open court.

      She had been restricted from any contact with fellow inmates at Tehran’s Evin prison until a week ago, when she was moved to a general ward, Richard Ratcliffe, her husband, told the BBC.

      However, Ratcliffe also criticised the lack of action from the British government, which has never publicly called for his wife to be released. Insisting his wife is innocent, he accused officials of allowing his family to be “caught up as a bargaining chip in international politics”.

    • French workers win ‘right to disconnect’

      French companies will be required to guarantee a “right to disconnect” to their employees from Sunday as the country seeks to tackle the modern-day scourge of compulsive out-of-hours email checking.

      From January 1, a new employment law will enter into force that obliges organisations with more than 50 workers to start negotiations to define the rights of employees to ignore their smartphones.

      Overuse of digital devices has been blamed for everything from burnout to sleeplessness as well as relationship problems, with many employees uncertain of when they can switch off.

    • Orange Crush: The Rise of Tactical Teams in Prison

      Since Ferguson, there has been a public outcry over militarized police who shoot down African Americans on the streets of our cities, but less is known beyond prison walls about guards who regularly brutalize those incarcerated. In Illinois, there is a notorious band of guards called the “Orange Crush” who don orange jumpsuits, body armor and riot helmets to conceal their identity. They carry large clubs and canisters of pepper spray, which they use liberally. A recent lawsuit names a list of horrific abuses that includes strip searches, beatings and mass shakedowns of cells.

      In the decades since the 1971 prison rebellion at Attica in New York, there has been a gradual build-up of these “tactical teams,” also known as “tac teams” or Special Operations Response Teams (SORTs). Today, they are routinely used for anything from fights to reports of contraband. Only within the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) have they earned the infamous name of “Orange Crush.” Anyone who has been incarcerated in the men’s state prison system has a story about these abusive guards.

    • “I Don’t Think We’re Free in America” – An Interview with Bryan Stevenson

      Although the United States has just elected a new president whose promise to make America great “again” evoked an unspecified, presumably more glorious past, Americans’ appreciation of their own history, and particularly its most damning chapters, is limited at best.

      The country’s long history of racial violence can hardly be denied, but that history is regularly erased from public commemoration. Some civil rights victories are celebrated, but the violence that preceded them is seldom acknowledged.

      Aiming to confront and reclaim that history, the Equal Justice Initiative, led by civil rights attorney and author Bryan Stevenson, launched its “Lynching in America” initiative, a years-long effort to compile the most comprehensive record of racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. The project includes a detailed report of more than 4,000 lynchings in 12 states in the South, including 800 that were previously unreported, as well as plans for a museum in Montgomery, and an effort to erect markers in the places where lynchings took place.

    • Welcome to another year of transformation

      On a winter’s night in 1955, a young preacher named Martin Luther King climbed into the pulpit of the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Once there, he delivered a speech that would eventually lead to his own assassination, while breathing new life into the struggle to transform the world in the image of love and social justice.

      If his words are remembered at all these days it’s because of what they helped to launch—the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which heralded a decisive turn in the movement for civil rights. What King said has largely been forgotten, yet the content of his speech was revolutionary in ways that stretch far beyond the context in which it was delivered.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • This Is the Year Donald Trump Kills Net Neutrality

      2015 was the year the Federal Communications Commission grew a spine. And 2017 could be the year that spine gets ripped out.

      Over the past two years, the FCC has passed new regulations to protect net neutrality by banning so-called “slow lanes” on the internet, created new rules to protect internet subscriber privacy, and levied record fines against companies like AT&T and Comcast. But this more aggressive FCC has never sat well with Republican lawmakers.

      Soon, these lawmakers may not only repeal the FCC’s recent decisions, but effectively neuter the agency as well. And even if the FCC does survive with its authority intact, experts warn, it could end up serving a darker purpose under President-elect Donald Trump.

  • DRM

    • The Year We Went on Offense Against DRM: 2016 in Review

      A decade ago, DRM seemed like it was on the ropes: it had disappeared from music, most video was being served DRM-free by YouTube and its competitors, and gamers were united in their hatred of the technology. But by 2016, DRM had come roaring back, finding its way into voting machines, insulin pumps, and car engines.

      Like all invasive species, DRM is hardy, and in the years since the mid-2000s, it has gone on to colonize nearly every category of software-enabled device, from thermostats to voting machines to cars and tractors to insulin pumps. Companies have worked out that since section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides penalties for breaking DRM, they can simply design their products so that using them in ways that the manufacturer dislikes requires breaking DRM first, and then they can claim that using your property in ways that displease the company that made it is a literal felony.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • RightsAlliance Forces Ten-Year-Old Site to Delete All Torrents

        A private tracker that has been plagued with all kinds of legal trouble over a decade has finally succumbed to copyright holder pressure. The Internationals weathered the storm of its owner being arrested four years ago but has just been forced to delete all of its torrents.

      • North American Box Office Hits Record $11.4 Billion

        The North American box office closed out the year with $11.4 billion in ticket sales, ComScore said Sunday. That marks a new record for the industry, bypassing the previous high-water mark of $11.1 billion that was established in 2015.

01.02.17

Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop

    It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back.

    On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system.

    On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled.

  • The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016

    Last year I had written about the The Open-Source Linux Letdowns of 2015 and then Other Letdowns For Linux / Open-Source Users From 2015, which ended up being among the most viewed articles of 2016. So I figured I’d once again share a list of what personally was disappointing not to see happen in 2016 within the Linux/open-source space.

  • Desktop

    • Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop For Development

      After several years with my Dell Latitude E6400 I was searching for a new, more powerful Linux machine for my coding and performance tweaking tasks. And although the Dell XPS line sounded interesting due to the “native” Linux support, it was also expensive with 16GB RAM (>2200€) and several users reported problems with CPU whining. I didn’t want to risc this and also reviews of the Lenovo T460 suggested a more silent and longer lasting experience. So I finally bought the T460 and was just hoping to get a good Linux support. Here are my experiences after a usage for a few months. Keep in mind that everyone has different requirements so maybe the title should be “a good Linux laptop for a certain subset of development tasks”. E.g. I’ve not yet tested 3D suff / hardware acceleration.

  • Kernel Space

    • WireGuard Secure Network Tunnel Is Eyeing Mainline, Running On Android

      Back in June we reported on WireGuard as a next-generation secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel. We haven’t heard much on WireGuard in recent months, but this New Year’s morning we received a message from their lead developer with a status update.

      WireGuard creator Jason Donenfeld emailed into Phoronix an update on the WireGuard project with their accomplishments for 2016 and a look ahead to 2017.

    • A Look Back At Some Of The Best Features Added To The Linux Kernel In 2016
    • Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017

      Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.

    • Linux 4.10-rc2

      Hey, it’s been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years
      Day, and I am not complaining at all.

      It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I
      almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless
      release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is.

      The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that
      really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on
      stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that.
      Even that wasn’t big, and the rest is trivial small fixes.

      I’m expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover
      from the holidays.

      Linus

    • Graphics Stack

      • GLSL Copy Propagation Optimizations For Mesa

        A developer has published a set of 14 patches providing copy propagation optimizations for Mesa’s GLSL/Nir code.

        Thomas Helland on Sunday sent out the set of optimizations to lower the overhead of the copy propagation pass in GLSL. This code isn’t yet ready to be merged but is at a “request for comments” stage.

    • Benchmarks

      • Intel Iris Pro OpenGL Benchmarks On Debian 9 Testing

        Debian Testing is currently making use of the Linux 4.8 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.22.2 as the default desktop environment, xf86-video-modesetting as the DDX over xf86-video-intel, X.Org Server 1.19.0, and Mesa 13.0.1.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Elementary icons for kde

        in my last post I’ll present two new icon themes La Capitaine and Papirus icon they are really sexy and work very well with Plasma and KDE Applications. As this two icon set’s are sort of monochrome icon set’s I’d like to resent you an non monochrome icon set like oxygen.

      • Summary of 2016

        So, 2016 has been a great year to me. Interesting in many aspects, but most has turned out to be for the better. I’ve gotten to know a bunch of awesome new people, I spoken about open source, Qt and Linux in Europe and USA, I’ve helped hosting an open source conference in Gothenburg, I’ve learned so much more professionally and as a person, and I’ve really enjoyed myself the whole time.

      • KDE releases beta of Kirigami UI 2.0

        Soon after the initial release of Kirigami UI, KDE’s framework for convergent (mobile and desktop) user interfaces, its main developer Marco Martin started porting it from Qt Quick Controls 1 to Qt Quick Controls 2, the next generation of Qt’s ready-made standard controls for Qt Quick-based user interfaces. Since QQC 2 offers a much more extended range of controls than QQC 1, the port allowed the reduction of Kirigami’s own code, while improving stability and performance. Kirigami 2 is kept as close to QQC 2′s API as possible in order to extend it seamlessly.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • A Look At The GTK4 Development In Early 2017

        Prolific GNOME developer Matthias Clasen has written a blog post about recent and ongoing work for GTK4 at the start of 2017.

      • GTK+ Happenings

        I said that I would post regular updates on what is happening in GTK+ 4 land. This was a while ago, so an update is overdue.

  • Distributions

    • Some of the smallest Linux distributions

      A lot of time and digital ink is dedicated to talking about features, new capabilities and ease of use. This week I want to go in another direction and talk about minimal Linux distributions, projects with low resource requirements and small (less than 100MB) installation media. Some people have limited Internet connections and/or lower-end equipment and this week I want to explore some of the distributions which are designed to require as few resources as possible.

    • New Releases

      • Neptune 4.5.3 Release

        We are proud to announce the third Neptune 4.5 service release.

        This version comes with the newest updates like Chromium 55 & Icedove 45.5 aswell as an upgraded graphicsstack based on Mesa 13.0.2. Besides that this version comes by default with the LTS Kernel 3.18.45. (Newer 4.4 based kernel releases can be found in our repository)

      • Netrunner Desktop 17.01 released

        The Netrunner Team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Netrunner Desktop 17.01 – 64bit ISO.

        Netrunner Desktop adds the usual selection of software applications like KDEnlive, Gimp, VLC, Libreoffice, Audacious, Steam, Skype, Transmission, Virtualbox, Krita, Inkscape and many more.

      • Solus Releases ISO Snapshot 2017.01.01.0

        We’re happy to be kicking off the new year with the release of our first ISO snapshot, 2017.01.01.0, across our Budgie and MATE editions.

      • OpenELEC 7.0 Linux OS Released Based On Kodi 16 Media Center

        This week a new and stable version of OpenELEC 7.0 Linux operating system has been released by its development team which is based on the Kodi 16 Media Center.

        OpenELEC 7.0 is a lightweight distro that is capable of running on older and lower specification PC systems breathing life into them once again and supports Intel, AMD, or ARM chips.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Progress Report

        After a lot of effort, I made significant progress with the Epson XP 231 in PCLinuxOS. Today, I managed to get it to work as it should. Some people are reporting my same problem with Steam on that OS, though…

        OpenMandriva Lx 3.1 pretty much does everything, except that Insync, which I believed was running, must be reinstalled every time to get it to work. You close the session and it’s gone. Bad.

        Mageia 5.1′s problem is the scanner. XSane reports that the usb port where it is found fails to open the device. I originally thought it was the file epwoka.conf at /etc/sane.d, but it does not seem to be the problem.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • !$##@%%%!!! UBUNTU!!!

        A notebook that TLW uses was the last machine in our house to run Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

        [...]

        The solution was simple. I installed Debian GNU/Linux over top of the crapware. The only real problem with that was I could not find a USB-drive anywhere. I had “loaned” them all out to various ladies who come and go here so they could do “this and that”. Finally, I remembered that the MP3 player I often used while hiking or working in my classroom up North also functioned as a USB-drive. I copied onto it as root (dd if=debian-8.6.0-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sd.. bs=1024k) a “net-install” image of the Debian-installer and booted the notebook from that. I also verified the download against its SHA512SUM (sha512sum debian-8.6.0-amd64-netinst.iso and grep … SHA512SUM). Worked like a charm. Further, there was a means to extricate the backup files from the notebook via a scripted web-server built in to Debian-installer. Cute.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 3 tips for effectively using wikis for documentation

    Using a wiki for documentation isn’t a new idea. Countless open source projects do. If you’re looking for a way to write and publish documentation quickly, a wiki can be a viable alternative to the many technical writing tools out there.

  • What is your open source New Year’s resolution?

  • Databases

    • SQLite 3.16 Released, Uses Less CPU Cycles & Adds Experimental PRAGMA Support

      SQLite 3.16.0 was released today and it’s quite a feature-packed release for being the first update of 2017.

      SQLite 3.16.0 now uses about 9% fewer CPU cycles, adds experimental support for PRAGMA functions, enhancements to date and time functions, changes to the look-aside memory allocator, faster LIKE and GLOB when using multiple wildcards, and various other changes.

  • Licensing/Legal

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Hungary government withdrawing from OGP

      This month, the government of Hungary has sent the Steering Committee of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) a letter announcing its immediate withdrawal from the partnership. The move was a response to an invitation by the OGP Criteria and Standards Subcommittee to discuss concerns regarding the deterioration of civil space in Hungary at the OGP Global Summit that took place earlier this month in Paris.

    • Open Data

      • Survey: open data already a reality for scientific researchers

        Open data is already a reality for scientific researchers, especially for those in Social Sciences. Researchers are making data openly available and — in turn — are re-using open data from others in their research. For a lot of researchers, a data citation has a much value as an article citation. These are some of the conclusions of a survey of over 2,000 researchers about their attitude and experiences in working with data, sharing it and making it open. The results were published this fall in the Figshare Digital Science Report ‘The State of Open Data’.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • RooBee One, an open-source SLA/DLP 3D printer

        [Aldric Negrier] is no stranger to the 3D printing world. Having built a few already, he designed and built an SLA/DLP 3D printer, named RooBee One, sharing the plans on Instructables. He also published tons of other stuff, like a 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack and a 3D Scanning Rig And DIY Turntable. It’s really worth while going through his whole Instructables repository.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Languages still a major barrier to global science, new research finds

      English is now considered the common language, or ‘lingua franca’, of global science. All major scientific journals seemingly publish in English, despite the fact that their pages contain research from across the globe.

      However, a new study suggests that over a third of new scientific reports are published in languages other than English, which can result in these findings being overlooked – contributing to biases in our understanding.

    • Open sourcing Lucy, the world’s most famous fossil

      Forty years after she was discovered, Lucy, the world’s most famous fossil australopithecine, just might have a cause of death. In August of this year, a team of paleoanthropologists led by John Kappelman argued in Nature that Lucy died 3.2 million years ago by falling out of a tree. Their conclusion has been met with skepticism among fellow researchers, and Lucy’s death-by-tree-fall hypothesis has generated no shortage of debate within the scientific community of paleoanthropology.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Quietly, Trump and Republicans Are Gunning to Destroy Medicaid

      Medicaid, the nation’s healthcare program for the poor and disabled, is on the chopping block under President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress—and it will take “intense focus by progressives” to ensure it doesn’t meet a dire fate.

      In fact, former National Economic Council director Gene B. Sperling wrote Sunday in a New York Times op-ed, “if Democrats focus too much of their attention on Medicare, they may inadvertently assist the quieter war on Medicaid—one that could deny health benefits to millions of children, seniors, working families, and people with disabilities.”

      As Democrats prepare for battles over the two programs, “the Republican effort to dismantle Medicaid is more certain,” Sperling warned—a prediction echoed this week by multiple news outlets.

    • The Sled Dogs that Stopped an Outbreak

      On a dawnless morning in the winter of 1925, a sled dog named Balto became an American hero. Nome, an Alaskan mining town past its heyday, teetered on the brink of a diphtheria outbreak. Children had begun to succumb to the disease, a bacterial infection that coats the esophagus in a suffocating layer of necrotic tissue. The city’s meager supply of antitoxin serum had passed its expiration date. Desperate, the only doctor in town placed sick children into quarantine and radioed for help.

    • France introduces opt-out policy on organ donation

      France has reversed its policy on organ donations so that all people could become donors on their death unless they join an official register to opt out.

      The new law presumes consent for organs to be removed, even if it goes against the wishes of the family.

  • Security

    • Smart electricity meters can be dangerously insecure, warns expert

      Smart electricity meters, of which there are more than 100m installed around the world, are frequently “dangerously insecure”, a security expert has said.

      The lack of security in the smart utilities raises the prospect of a single line of malicious code cutting power to a home or even causing a catastrophic overload leading to exploding meters or house fires, according to Netanel Rubin, co-founder of the security firm Vaultra.

      “Reclaim your home,” Rubin told a conference of hackers and security experts, “or someone else will.”

      If a hacker took control of a smart meter they would be able to know “exactly when and how much electricity you’re using”, Rubin told the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. An attacker could also see whether a home had any expensive electronics.

    • London Ambulance Service hit by ‘computer system crash’ on New Year’s Eve

      Officials confirmed there was a systems fault in the early hours, though staff are trained for such situations, and they continued to prioritise responses as normal.

      Calls were reportedly logged manually between 12.30am GMT and 5:15am.

    • 33c3 notes

      Some notes and highlights from #33c3. In particular, some talks I found worth watching. I intentionally don’t mention any of the much interesting self-organized sessions and workshops I participated since these are not recorded. I’m just listing some interesting projects at the bottom. I wrote these notes quickly, so I’m certainly missing some stuff.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Five Dead After ‘Terror Attack,’ Explosion in China’s Xinjiang

      Chinese police have shot dead three suspects who they said killed two people in a “terrorist” attack on a branch office of the ruling Chinese Communist Party in the troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang, official media reported on Thursday.

      The “rioters” detonated an explosive device during the attack on Wednesday afternoon, as well as launching a knife attack, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

      “At around 4:50 p.m. Wednesday … rioters entered the yard of Moyu County Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in a vehicle, attacked workers with knives and detonated an explosive device,” it cited the ministry of public security as saying.

      The attack killed an official and a security worker and injured three others, the report said, adding that three people were shot dead at the scene and that the case is now under investigation.

    • The Lauded Russian Hacker Whose Company Landed on the U.S. Blacklist

      The blacklist includes two people suspected of cybercrimes, and four others who are military intelligence officers. All are the kinds of figures one might expect to be on a list of people targeted by the Obama administration in retaliation for Russia’s malfeasance, including efforts to influence the 2016 election.

      Then there is the one who calls herself “mishacker,” a globe-trotter with a rebellious online persona who is perhaps the most intriguing of the newly revealed Russian spies.

      On what appears to be her personal website, called “Hello, stranger,” that person, Alisa Shevchenko, introduces herself and expounds on some of her digital accomplishments, including setting up a work space for hackers in Moscow.

    • Make Russia great again? Aleppo and a plea from another world

      During the last days of December, Russia will host a round of diplomatic talks with Iran and Turkey to try and find a definitive solution to the Syrian civil war. If Putin wants to “make Russia great again,” he should endeavor to honor that tradition. By doing so at least Russia will more probably err on the side of hypocrisy rather than on that of cynicism, and people who suffer the consequences of war would still have a chance to find solace behind the aegis of international law.

    • Trump and Israel’s Anti-Semitic Zionists

      Zioinism was supposed to liberate Israel from these old Jewish complexes. We were supposed to become a normal nation, Israelis instead of “exile” Jews, admired by other nations. Seems we have not quite succeeded.

      But there is a great hope. Actually, a giant hope. It has a name: Donald Trump.

      He has already tweeted that after he assumes power, everything regarding the UN will change.

      But will it? Does anyone – including himself – really know what he has in mind? Can Netanyahu be quite sure?

      True, he is sending a rabid Jewish-American ultra-right Zionist as his ambassador to Tel Aviv (or to Jerusalem, we shall see.) A person so right-wing that he makes Netanyahu himself almost look like a leftist.

      [...]

      Some time after the war, in Israeli captivity, Eichmann wrote down his memories. He stated that he believed that the Zionists were the “biologically positive” element of the Jewish race.

      Mahmood Abbas, by the way, as a student at Moscow University, wrote his doctoral thesis on Nazi-Zionist cooperation.

      Can Trump’s assistants now include rabid Zionists and rabid anti-Semites at the same time?

      Of course they can.

    • Thanks to Congress, Trump Will Have Nearly Unlimited Power to Wage War

      The failure of U.S. Congress to pass a formal authorization for the war against the Islamic State (ISIS) means incoming President Donald Trump—whose brash and impulsive approach to foreign policy has raised alarms—will have effectively unlimited war powers, Politico reported Thursday.

      In the absence of such a resolution, President Barack Obama has relied on the existing Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as justification for military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Attempts to replace or rein in the AUMF have failed.

    • Putin’s Real Long Game

      A little over a year ago, on a pleasant late fall evening, I was sitting on my front porch with a friend best described as a Ukrainian freedom fighter. He was smoking a cigarette while we watched Southeast DC hipsters bustle by and talked about ‘the war’ — the big war, being waged by Russia against all of us, which from this porch felt very far away. I can’t remember what prompted it — some discussion of whether the government in Kyiv was doing something that would piss off the EU — but he took a long drag off his cigarette and said, offhand: “Russia. The EU. It’s all just more Molotov-Ribbentrop shit.”

      His casual reference to the Hitler-Stalin pact dividing Eastern Europe before WWII was meant as a reminder that Ukraine must decide its future for itself, rather than let it be negotiated between great powers. But it haunted me, this idea that modern revolutionaries no longer felt some special affinity with the West. Was it the belief in collective defense that was weakening, or the underlying certitude that Western values would prevail?

    • We Are Still Alive (Non-Hacked Russian Stooge and Terrorism Edition)

      This is a version of last year’s January 1 article, updated to reflect the new fears of the World’s Most Frightened Nation.

      I survived. America, and the world, and you, survived. We awoke the first day of 2017 to find that once again, using the extraordinary power of fear, we again held off the terrorists. And Putin. And Trump, nationalists, racists, hackers, alt-Right fascists, CNN, persons of all colors, genders, shapes, sizes, and goddamn religions.

    • What is the Obama Regime Up To?

      Obama has announced new sanctions on Russia based on unsubstantiated charges by the CIA that the Russian government influenced the outcome of the US presidential election with “malicious cyber-enabled activities.”

      The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a report “related to the declaration of 35 Russian officials persona non grata for malicious cyber activity and harassment.”

      The report is a description of “tools and infrastructure used by Russian intelligence services to compromise and exploit networks and infrastructure associated with the recent U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. government, political and private sector entities.”

      The report does not provide any evidence that the tools and infrastructure were used to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. The report is simply a description of what is said to be Russian capabilities.

    • Istanbul new year Reina nightclub attack ‘leaves 39 dead’

      At least 39 people, including at least 15 foreigners, have been killed in an attack on a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey’s interior minister says.

      A gunman opened fire in Reina nightclub at about 01:30 local time (22:30 GMT), as revellers marked the new year.

      Suleyman Soylu said efforts were continuing to find the attacker, who was believed to have acted alone.

      At least 69 people were being treated in hospital, the minister added. Four were said to be in a serious condition.

    • Reliving Agent Orange: What if casualties don’t end on the battlefield, but extend to future generations?

      There are many ways to measure the cost of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War: in bombs (7 million tons), in dollars ($760 billion in today’s dollars) and in bodies (58,220).

      Then there’s the price of caring for those who survived: Each year, the Department of Veterans Affairs spends more than $23 billion compensating Vietnam-era veterans for disabilities linked to their military service — a repayment of a debt that’s supported by most Americans.

    • ISIS Will Lose the Battle of Mosul, But Not Much Will Remain

      Winners and losers are beginning to emerge in the wars that have engulfed the wider Middle East since the US and UK invaded Iraq in 2003. The most striking signs of this are the sieges of east Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, which have much in common though they were given vastly different coverage by the Western media. In both cities, Salafi-jihadi Sunni Arab insurgents were defending their last big urban strongholds against the Iraqi Army, in the case of Mosul, and the Syrian Army, in the case of east Aleppo.

      The capture of east Aleppo means that President Bashar al-Assad has essentially won the war and will stay in power. The Syrian security forces advanced and the armed resistance collapsed more swiftly than had been expected. Some 8,000 to 10,000 rebel fighters, pounded by artillery and air strikes and divided among themselves, were unable to stage a last stand in the ruins of the enclave, as happened in Homs three years ago, and is happening in Mosul now.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Online calculator cuts farms’ emissions

      It’s called the Cool Farm Tool (CFT) – an easy-to-use online calculator that helps farmers monitor their emissions of greenhouse gases.

      Agriculture accounts for about 15% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, though when fertiliser manufacture and use and the overall food processing sector are included in calculations, that figure is considerably higher.

      The land can also act as a vital carbon sink, soaking up or sequestering vast amounts of carbon: when soils are disturbed the carbon is released, adding to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

    • Thin Green Line: 20 Groups Standing Between You and Doom

      Finally, Sanders snapped back: “You know what? Hillary Clinton has been around there for a very, very long time. Some of these groups are, in fact, part of the establishment.”

      These groups responded with mock outrage, clustering before the cameras of MSDNC to denounce Bernie. How could Sanders possibly call us part of the “Establishment”! It’s ridiculous! He should be ashamed of himself!! He must apologize!!!

      But Sanders was absolutely right, of course. The Beltway network of liberal NGOS–from the Sierra Club to NOW–have become little more than dutiful subsidiaries of the Democratic Party. Many of them have enabled and abetted the party’s wholesale lurch toward neoliberalism without so much as a bleat, while howling against almost every minor infraction made by a Republican politician.

    • Top climate stories to watch in 2017

      2016 was something of a mixed bag for the global climate. On the one hand, renewable energy use has never been higher — but on the other hand, 2016 brought with it news of record fossil fuel consumption, as well.

      Meanwhile, the Paris Climate Agreement went into force on November 4, far sooner than anyone ever expected, signaling a new era of international climate action — but just a few days later, the U.S., the second-largest emitter in the world, elected a new president who has called global warming a hoax and pledged to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement as soon as possible.

    • Record 3.5 tons of pangolin scales seized in China

      Pangolin scales, like rhinoceros horns, are just made of keratin, but that doesn’t stop traditional medicine practitioners from claiming they cure cancer and what-not. It’s why pangolins are the most trafficked animals in the world. China stopped a shipment worth around $2 million that required killing around 7,500 of the cure little anteaters.

    • The Fires of Standing Rock: How a New Resistance Movement was Ignited

      On Sunday, November 6, in Redwood Valley, California several hundred people gathered to listen to activists report back from Standing Rock where they had stood in solidarity with Native American Tribes, known as Water Protectors, opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline.

      One such speaker was Jassen Rodriguez, a Mishewal Wappo tribal member whose ancestral landbase includes much of Sonoma, Napa, and southern Lake counties. He had just returned from a three-week sojourn to North Dakota, where had had stayed at Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires, an encampment named for the seven bands of the Sioux people where a ceremonial fire has remained burning for many months.

  • Finance

    • Jean-Claude Juncker blocked EU curbs on tax avoidance, cables show

      The president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, spent years in his previous role as Luxembourg’s prime minister secretly blocking EU efforts to tackle tax avoidance by multinational corporations, leaked documents reveal.

      Years’ worth of confidential German diplomatic cables provide a candid account of Luxembourg’s obstructive manoeuvres inside one of Brussels’ most secretive committees.

      The code of conduct group on business taxation was set up almost 19 years ago to prevent member states from being played off against one another by increasingly powerful multinational businesses, eager to shift profits across borders and avoid tax.

    • Reducing Inequality in the Trump Era

      With Washington looking hopeless, it’s up to local communities to close the gap between the richest and the rest.

      [...]

      So if we can’t expect the Trump administration to work to stem rising inequality, how will we move forward?

      The victories of 2016, which involved organizing at the state and local levels to lift up workers and expand opportunities for all, show the type of innovative campaigns we’ll need. There are no illusions that change will come from Washington — the new team in town has made clear they’re not interested.

      That’s no reason to sit back and wait for another election. Progress can come from working within our own communities to push forward smart ideas that don’t need a sign-off from Congress or Trump.

      That work should start now. It remains, after all, the defining challenge of our time.

    • Trump Takes Credit for New Sprint Jobs He Had Nothing To Do With

      President-elect Donald Trump wasted no time taking credit for the thousands of new and returning American jobs announced by Sprint on Wednesday—opportunities which, as many are pointing out, the real estate mogul had very little to do with.

      Speaking to reporters from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump said Wednesday: “Because of what’s happening and the spirit and the hope I was just called by the head people at Sprint and they’re going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States.”

      “Also,” he continued, “OneWeb, a new company is going to be hiring 3,000 people so that is very exciting.”

      Later, he doubled down on that claim saying: “Because of me they’re doing 5,000 jobs in this country.”

    • What U.S. Tech Giants Face in Europe in 2017

      For American tech behemoths like Google and Facebook, Europe can be both a blessing and a curse.

      The region and its 500 million consumers are one of the companies’ most important overseas markets. And in cities from Lisbon to Ljubljana, people often can’t get enough YouTube videos, Amazon purchases and Twitter messages.

      Yet policy makers in the 28-member European Union have also become some of the most ardent critics of how Silicon Valley companies dominate much of the digital world. The criticisms include the companies’ perceived failure to pay local taxes and their collection of reams of personal information.

    • Defying Donald Trump’s Kleptocracy

      The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx predicted, would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would begin to consume the government along with the physical and social structures that sustained them. Democracy, social welfare, electoral participation, the common good and investment in public transportation, roads, bridges, utilities, industry, education, ecosystem protection and health care would be sacrificed to feed the mania for short-term profit. These assaults would destroy the host. This is the stage of late capitalism that Donald Trump represents.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • We Do Not Live in “Post Truth” World, We Live in a World of Lies and We Always Have

      We do not live in a “post-truth” world, neither in the Middle East nor in the West – nor in Russia, for that matter. We live in a world of lies. And we always have lived in a world of lies.

      Just take a look at the wreckage of the Middle East with its history of people’s popular republics and its hateful dictators. They feast on dishonesty, although they all – bar the late Muammar al-Gaddafi – demand regular elections to make-believe their way back to power.

      Now, I suppose, it is we who have regular elections based on lies. So maybe Trump and the Arab autocrats will get on rather well. Trump already likes Field Marshal/President al-Sissi of Egypt, and he’s already got a golf course in Dubai. That he deals in lies, that he manufactures facts, should make him quite at home in the Middle East. Misogyny, bullying, threats to political opponents, authoritarianism, tyranny, torture, sneers at minorities: it’s part and parcel of the Arab world.

      And look at Israel. The new US ambassador-to-be – who might as well be the Israeli ambassador to the US – can’t wait to move the American embassy to Jerusalem. He seems to feel more antagonism towards the Jewish left in America than the Palestinians who claim East Jerusalem as a capital and whose state he has no interest in. Will Trump enrage the Arabs? Or will he get away with a little domestic rearrangement of the Israel embassy on the grounds that the Gulf Arabs, at least, know that Israel’s anti-Shiism – against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah – fits in rather well with the Sunni potentates who’ve been funding Isis and Jabhat al-Nusrah and all the other jolly jihadis?

    • Trump’s Tweets Take a Turn for the Worse

      That Donald Trump is erratic, emotionally immature, and stunningly ignorant is hardly news. Neither is his fondness for communicating with the world via Twitter. What could be more fitting? One hundred forty characters are all that he can string together, and all his thoughts deserve.

      Lately, though, there is news about the Donald — not just because everything a President-elect does is newsworthy, but also because his tweets have taken a turn for the worse: from merely worrisome to downright alarming.

      Even the fools who voted for the Donald “to make America great again” must be noticing.

      All they ever wanted was the level of social and economic security of the years before the neoliberal (Clintonite) turn. They wanted to live in a world in which a man (always a man) could earn a family wage and in which “the American dream,” whatever that means (it seems to have something to do with upward social and economic mobility) is within every good (white) American’s reach; and in which troops, marching under the banner of Old Glory, always win the wars they fight. USA, Number One!

      Sore losers say Hillary lost because Trump voters were xenophobic and racist. Many of them were concerned about immigration — for dubious, but not entirely “deplorable,” reasons. Only a few were overtly racist, however. They weren’t even all white.

    • A Sour Holiday Season for Neocons

      Regarding Clinton’s defeat, her embrace of the neocon/liberal-hawk “regime change” obsessions siphoned off enthusiasm among the peace faction of the Democratic Party, a significant and activist part of the progressive movement.

      Clinton’s alignment with the neocon/liberal hawks may have helped her with the mainstream media, but the MSM has lost much of its credibility by making itself a handmaiden in leading the nation to wars and more wars.

      Average Americans also could feel the contempt that these elites had for the rest of us. The neocons and liberal hawks had come to believe in the CIA’s concept of “perception management,” feeling that the American people were items to be controlled, not the nation’s sovereigns to be informed and respected. Instead of “We the People,” Official Washington’s elites treated us like “Us the Sheep.”

    • Obama’s Support for International Law Draws Bipartisan Ire

      Here’s one way to look at it: The United States was the only country in the fifteen-member U.N. Security Council that did not support a resolution passed last week criticizing Israel for continuing to expand illegal settlements in the occupied territories.

      On the other hand, the Obama administration refused to veto the resolution—for which it is now drawing fire from both Republicans and Democrats. This opposition has come despite the resolution also calling on both the Israeli and Palestinian governments to prevent violence against civilians, condemn and combat terrorism, refrain from incitement, and comply with their obligations under international law.

    • Donald Trump victory sparks global women’s rights marches

      After a year of seismic shocks comes the protest and fightback. At least that is what activists plan with the first major demonstration of the year – the women’s march – planned for 30 cities around the world on 21 January, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the US.

      The women’s march on Washington has been given permission by state authorities to go ahead. Tens of thousands of women (and men, who are also welcome to join it) have already pledged to take part and plans for a sister rally in London are gaining support from writers, musicians and politicians.

      Organisers say the US election proved a “catalyst for a grassroots movement of women to assert the positive values that the politics of fear denies”.

    • Could It Have Been Different?

      Trump’s grandest promise — to “Make America Great Again” — is a resurrection of Ronald Reagan’s original 1980 campaign slogan and, remarkably, it worked yet again nearly four decades later. Little acknowledged, Reagan – along with the millions who voted for him – knew back then that the U.S. was no longer “great.” In the years separating the Reagan and Trump campaigns, the nine intervening administrations – Reagan (2 terms), Bush I (1 term), Clinton (2 terms), Bush II (2 terms) and Obama (2 terms) – failed to address the reasons for the nation’s loss of “greatness.” More troubling, each contributed to ending this alleged greatness.

      Trump won the election promising to break with the old – and failed – domestic and international policies of the inside-the-Beltway establishment symbolized by Hillary Clinton. His Cabinet picks suggest he plans to take the nation — and its people — in a new direction, one based on shortsightedness and self-serving opportunism. The nation faces enormous and radical challenges; Trump can be expected to significantly falter after an initial period of spectacular misdirection.

    • The War Against Alternative Information

      The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total domination. Thus we now have the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017, setting aside $160 million to combat any “propaganda” that challenges Official Washington’s version of reality.

    • Days of Moderate Democratic Party ‘Are Over,’ Analyst Declares

      According to political commentator Van Jones, it’s a moment when the progressive wing of the party is going to rise.

      Speaking on Sunday to CNN, Jones told host Jake Tapper that the future stars of the party may be surprising, and pointed to Senator-elect for California Kamala Harris as an example.

      Harris, Jones, said, “is unreal.”

      “She’s going to be out there defending those DREAMer kids because they’re a big part of her constituency, but she’s got African-American roots. She’s got Asian roots. She’s female. She’s tough. She’s smart. She’s going to become a big deal,” he said.

      Indeed, The Hill described Harris, currently the state’s attorney general, as among the “10 incoming lawmakers to watch.”

    • As a Trump Administration Fast Approaches, Cities and Towns Gear Up for Political Resistance

      Back in March, when Donald Trump was facing off with two now-forgotten candidates for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, the small town of Barnstead, New Hampshire, was quietly protecting its citizens. At their annual town hall, residents voted unanimously for a city ordinance establishing the right to freedom from forced religious identification.

    • Fascism can’t be stopped by fact-checking

      Arendt, a German-born Jewish philosopher, wrote these words trying to make sense of Hitler’s Germany. The ways in which they resonate in today’s U.S. context is chilling. Arendt’s analysis here reminds me why fascism—including nascent neo-fascist forms—can’t be fact-checked.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Community Voices: On art and censorship, Junauda Petrus’ open letter to the city of Minneapolis

      I give thanks to the sacred, indigenous ancestors to this land and the ways they are influencing spirits in these times as we continue the journey to light and justice. I gives thanks to the ancestors of my blood, who guide my heart and have paved the way for my life as a healer through the realm of art. May I honor their memory by living into my truth.

    • 2016’s Assault On The Internet Was Brutal. Will 2017 Be Worse?

      Nothing may have had as bad of a year as the Internet.

      The Internet has been hit with an onslaught of criticism and suffered several setbacks in 2016: from relinquishment of American control over web address management, introduced surveillance measures in the United Kingdom, social media backlash for users’ hate speech and terrorist affiliations, to censorship and fake news.

      [...]

      The U.K. passed a surveillance bill in November that significantly expands the government’s spying powers, namely over the Internet. The Investigatory Powers Bill is considered so expansive, it’s informally called the “snoopers’ charter.” The European Union’s top court ruled the measure was illegal because it calls for the “general and indiscriminate” retention of people’s online web traffic, but it remains to be seen if the ruling will ultimately matter.

    • Press freedom organisation condemns tough censorship in Venezuela

      The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has expressed regret that the old year ended with the toughest censorship and restriction of the Venezuelan press following the announcement by the South American country’s oldest newspaper, El Impulso, that in 2017 it will no longer circulate in its print edition.

      The paper, founded in January 1904, announced in an editorial on its website that it would be circulating only until December 31 due to the lack of newsprint. It blamed the state-owned Alfredo Maneiro Editorial Corporation, which has a monopoly in the distribution of newsprint.

      The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Roberto Rock, condemned “the insolence with which the Venezuelan government is applying censorship in a manner that is as subtle as it is gross.”

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Pirates: You Can Click But You Can Hide

      In a big publicity campaign targeting all types of media and even paying cinema-goers, in 2004 the MPAA warned torrent users that being anonymous online wasn’t possible. You Can Click But You Can’t Hide, their famous slogan read. Now, coming up for an unlucky 13 years later, nothing could be further from the truth.

    • Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy
    • lecture: Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy

      Today virtually everything we do is monitored in some way. The collection, analysis and utilization of digital information about our clicks, swipes, likes, purchases, movements, behaviors and interests have become part of everyday life. While individuals become increasingly transparent, companies take control of the recorded data.

    • Privacy showdown: divorce lawyers could see your web history

      Australia’s new mandatory data retention scheme is headed for a big confrontation, as the Turnbull government moves to allow civil litigation lawyers access to the web, phone and email sessions of every private user.

      Since October 13, 2015, all telephony and internet service providers have been required by law to retain for two years all their clients’ metadata, including voice, text and email communications, time, date and device locations and internet sessions.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Not Working for Us

      The benefits extended to the personal as well. Jake invited me to sex parties, and I enthusiastically attended, and made friendships there that persist to this day. Some of those parties didn’t have any problems (that I noticed). But sometimes I saw interactions that made me uncomfortable. Sometimes I participated in questionable activities. Everybody in the room said “yes” in the moment — sometimes after discussion, sometimes with their body language screaming “no”. Jake and I never talked about those situations.

      Benefits accrued to organizations as well. It became routine for CCC to be mentioned above the fold in the NYT each Congress season. Noisebridge (co-founded by Jake) attained a certain fame, then a notoriety. It was exciting, but we saw the problems. We even called them out occasionally, but for years I said to myself, “he’s problematic but he does good work and his negative behavior is part and parcel of the special gift that makes him so effective.” Many others excused what they saw with a similar calculus.

      Being friends with Jake had worked for me. But “Works For Me” isn’t good enough. I’d privately warned women not to date him, but I wasn’t confronting the problems. I was covering them, hiding from them.

    • Rare Track Record: NYPD’s History Chronicling Hate Crimes

      As of Dec. 18, 2016, there had been 373 hate crimes reported to the New York Police Department. Crimes against Muslims were up 50 percent from the same time last year, rising to 33 from 22. Crimes involving sexual orientation were also up — to 101 from last year’s 74. Whites have been victims, too, the source of 16 reported crimes.

      The numbers reflect a distinctive effort by a law enforcement agency to track crimes driven by intolerance, for hate crimes are notoriously poorly reported across the country. Since 1980, however, the New York Police Department has operated a hate crime task force, and since 1994 it has diligently sent off its data on such crimes to the FBI.

    • Why ‘White Genocide’ is Key to the Earth’s Survival: White Genocide From Baldwin to Ciccariello-Maher

      White genocide would not only be good, it is necessary and even unavoidable; that is, if we are interested in the survival of the planet, humanity, and all life forms – though to be clear the phrase ‘white genocide’ is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps most accurate would be the concept of collective mass “white” ontological suicide or more simply put: the end of white supremacy. To clarify, a 140-character tweet cannot do justice to a necessary and timely analysis, so my intent is to do so here…. “White genocide” has little to do with violence or the physical death of actual living “white” people – or as renowned poet James Baldwin preferred to call them since 1979: “people who think they’re white” – but rather with the collective disinvestment amongst “people who think they’re white” from all forms of racial thinking and their own holding on to the benefits accrued directly and indirectly through a persistent global structure of white supremacy over the last 500 years.

      In the 1984 essay, “On Being White,” James Baldwin also stated (as others before and after him have as well) that “no one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” That coercion was twofold: wreaked upon the bodies of indigenous inhabitants of these lands and the souls kidnapped, transported and enslaved through the Atlantic slave trade, on the one hand; but also through the legal and extralegal sanctioning and expectation that eastern and southern Europeans and Jews who were not initially

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