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06.24.15

Links 25/6/2015: Docker Focus, NVIDIA Opening Slightly

Posted in News Roundup at 6:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Different Types of Open Source End Users

    The use of open source software has become more and more commonplace as the technological world advances. It powers millions of devices many of which we depend on every single day. In fact this very web page you are reading this post on is powered by bits of open source code.

    Software would be useless if there were not people there to use it and there are many different types of people who use open source software every day.

  • Arno, the first open source platform for NFV

    The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform for accelerating the introduction of new Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) products and services. We recently issued our first community-led software release, OPNFV Arno. This foundational release is intended for anyone exploring NFV deployments, developing Virtual Network Functions (VNF) applications, or interested in NFV performance and use case-based testing. With developers in mind, Arno provides an initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of the ETSI NFV architecture.

  • Facebook open-sources Nuclide source code for Atom
  • Facebook Open Sources Nuclide, the Company’s Internal Code Editor
  • Facebook Nuclide Is Now Open Source
  • Facebook open-sources IDE based on GitHub Atom

    Facebook has begun opening up source code for its Nuclide IDE, which is designed to offer a unified experience for Web and native mobile development.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Cinder: Block storage on the open-source cloud platform

      The OpenStack platform is an open-source collaboration to develop a private cloud ecosystem, delivering IT services at web scale.

      OpenStack is divided into a number of discrete projects, each with a code name with parallels to the purpose of the project itself.

  • Education

    • 8 open source platforms for IT consideration

      Usually, the higher-ed industry has a reputation as being one of the slowest adopters of new technology. But when it comes to open source software (OSS), campus IT departments are ahead of other industry and consumer tech adoption curves, says Scott Wilson, service manager of OSS Watch at the University of Oxford.

      “On the face of it, higher education has been relatively quick to realize the benefits, notes Wilson. “Over 50 percent of higher education institutions use open source, both on the server and on the desktop. And one of the great open source success stories in higher education is the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).”

  • Funding

    • Massive open source email & collaboration platform Roundcube beats Indiegogo funding goal

      Simply put, Roundcube is the unsung work horse of web mail.

      But a decade is an eternity in technology. When Roundcube started, mobile devices were large, clunky affairs used by the few. Today they are the most commonly used communication device. Roundcube Next is today’s answer to that radical change. Instead of once more embarking alone on that ten year journey, Roundcube Next is about building a strong, healthy and diverse Open Source community to achieve that task within 12 to 18 months.

Leftovers

  • [OT] Manchester Storm reform and replace Hull in Elite League

    Manchester Storm are to reform and make a return to ice hockey’s Elite League next season.

    The will replace Hull Stingrays in the league following their liquidation.

  • No joke: Iceland’s Pirate Party surges into first place in the polls

    Iceland has long been one of the more right-leaning Nordic countries. In contrast to Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all have a long tradition of electing Social Democratic governments, Iceland’s parliament has been dominated by right-of-center parties for all but four years since World War II. The only break in that streak came in 2009, when the left won for the first time ever—and elected the world’s first openly gay head of state. The unusual result came about because the global financial meltdown hit Iceland with particular ferocity, but tradition seemingly reasserted itself four years later when the right-leaning Independence and Progressive parties regained power in a landslide.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • GCHQ documents raise fresh questions over UK complicity in US drone strikes

      British intelligence agency GCHQ is facing fresh calls to reveal the extent of its involvement in the US targeted killing programme after details of a fatal drone strike in Yemen were included in a top secret memo circulated to agency staff.

      A leading barrister asked by the Guardian to review a number of classified GCHQ documents said they raised questions about British complicity in US strikes outside recognised war zones and demonstrated the need for the government to come clean about the UK’s role.

      The documents, provided to the Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times, discuss how a joint US, UK and Australian programme codenamed Overhead supported the strike in Yemen in 2012.

      The files also show GCHQ and Overhead developed their ability to track the location of individuals – essential for the targeted killing programme – in both Yemen and Pakistan. The legality of the US’s lethal operations in both countries has been questioned by international lawyers and human rights groups.

    • WaPo: Don’t Say ‘Terrorist’ About ‘White People Like Ourselves’

      Corporate media are demonstrably reluctant to use the word “terrorist” with regards to Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Roof–even though the massacre would seem to meet the legal definition of terrorism, as violent crimes that “appear to be intended…to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”

      Generally, news outlets don’t explain why they aren’t calling Roof a terrorist suspect; they just rarely use the word. But the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump gave it a shot in a piece headlined “Why We Shouldn’t Call Dylann Roof a Terrorist” (6/19/15), and his rationale is worth taking a look at.

    • How One Outlet Covered the Charleston Massacre Right

      Yet there was at least one news item that ran the day after the shooting that was not afraid to refer to it as a terrorist attack: “US State Senator Killed by Terrorist With White Supremacist Sympathies, 8 Others Dead,” reads the headline of a news item that appeared on Sahara Reporters, a New York City-based news website that primarily covers government corruption in Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria.

      The Sahara Reporters piece uses the word “terrorist” six times to describe Roof and his alleged action, including in the headline, the subhead and a photo caption. The words “mental illness,” “troubled” and “loner” do not appear — in fact, no speculation whatsoever is made regarding Roof’s mental state or stability. Instead, South Carolina’s “known hate groups” are mentioned to provide context for Roof’s alleged actions, and Roof’s white supremacist activities and the historic allusions made by the patches on his jacket are front and center in the piece. And the massacre is clearly contextualized as occurring at “a time where the persecution of black ethnic minorities in the United States has been making world headlines.”

    • For Media Factcheckers, It’s ‘Mostly False’ to Say Mass Violence Is More Frequent in US

      In theory, factchecking is one of the most important functions of journalism. In practice, systematic efforts by corporate media to “factcheck” political statements are often worse than useless.

      Take PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Tribune, and its recent offering “Is Barack Obama Correct That Mass Killings Don’t Happen in Other Countries?”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Netherlands loses landmark global warming case, ordered to cut emissions

      In a landmark case that may set a very important precedent for other countries around the world, especially within Europe, the Dutch government has been ordered by the courts to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent.

      The ruling came from a class-action lawsuit that was brought before the Dutch courts by Urgenda in 2012. The case, rather magnificently, was based on human rights laws. Specifically, Urgenda asked the courts to “declare that global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius will lead to a violation of fundamental human rights worldwide,” and that the Dutch government is “acting unlawfully by not contributing its proportional share to preventing a global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius.”

    • Royal Navy bomb explosions caused mass whale deaths, report concludes

      Four large bombs exploded underwater by the Royal Navy were to blame for a mass stranding which killed 19 pilot whales on the north coast of Scotland in 2011, government scientists have concluded.

      A long-delayed report released on Wednesday by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs says that the noise from the explosions could have damaged the hearing and navigational abilities of the whales, causing them to beach and die.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Coalitions of the willing are latest lobbying trend

      The single-minded groups are popping up on all manner of issues, including to lobby on rules regulating commercial drones that weigh less than 55 pounds, to rewrite the nation’s patent laws and to engage in the big legislative fight over the Export-Import Bank.

      Coalitions offer lobbyists a big advantage by allowing firms to collect combined fees from a number of corporations and interest groups that may not otherwise engage on an issue. For instance, a company may not consider an issue pressing enough on which to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the idea of spending a few thousand dollars — that’s then combined with similarly smaller fees from other coalition members — is more enticing.

    • Scott Walker’s Unprecedented Voucher Expansion

      In crafting the budget, Walker is taking his cues from the American Federation for Children (AFC), a major force for school privatization nationwide. It is funded and chaired by billionaire Betsy DeVos, and pushes its privatization agenda in the states with high-dollar lobbying and attack ads.

  • Censorship

    • Australia’s own Immortan Joe turns off the water, I mean, Internet

      In the documentary Mad Max: Fury Road, we learned how Australia is controlled by a psychotic strongman who believes in traditional gender roles, strict limits on immigration, and social control through imposed scarcity. This is why Tony Abbott, current Prime Minister of Australia, announced his new Internet censorship plan by warning Aussies, “Do not, my friends, become addicted to the Web.”

  • Privacy

    • Is the Council Selling Our Personal Data to Private Companies?

      Finally, no measures were agreed on on the anonymisation of data. Only the pseudonymisation is considered, which is totally insufficient to preserve the anonymity of a person. Pseudonymisation within the processing of personal data is not protection at all and is only another gift for private companies which will allow them to work, with complete impunity, on data whose the origin can be easily found. This gift is re-enforced by the will to authorise profiling person with their explicit agreement. Such an authorisation is necessary but insufficient if there is not a strict framework on the finalities of the profiling. The absence of a regulation of the issue of Safe Harbor in spite of the adoption of the Moraes 2014 report is making the breaches in the protection of personal data every time wider.

    • France in the Era of Mass Surveillance! We must resist!

      It’s a sad day for freedom! French representatives just adopted the French Surveillance Law. As an ironic echo to the recent WikiLeaks revelations about NSA spying on French political authorities, this vote calls for a new type of resistance for citizens.

    • François Hollande holds emergency meeting after WikiLeaks claims US spied on three French presidents

      The French president, François Hollande, is holding an emergency meeting of his country’s defence council after claims that American agents spied on three successive French presidents between 2006 and 2012. According to WikiLeaks documents published late on Tuesday, even the French leaders’ mobile phone conversations were listened to and recorded.

      The leaked US documents, marked “top secret”, were based on phone taps and filed in an NSA document labelled “Espionnage Elysée” (Elysée Spy), according to the newspaper Libération and investigative news website Mediapart. The US was listening to the conversations of centre-right president Jacques Chirac, his successor Nicolas Sarkozy, and the current French leader, Socialist François Hollande, elected in 2012.

    • French president holds emergency meeting over NSA intercepts
    • Revealed: how US tapped phones of three French presidents

      The United States has eavesdropped on at least three French presidents and a whole raft of senior officials and politicians in France for at least six years, according to secret documents obtained by WikiLeaks and revealed here by Mediapart. The top secret reports from America’s National Security Agency (NSA) show that the phones of presidents François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac were all tapped. But they also show that the espionage carried out on a supposedly key ally of Washington’s went even further and deeper, and that senior diplomats, top civil servants and politicians also routinely had their phones tapped. The documents seen by Mediapart reveal proof of the spying on the French state that took place from 2006 to 2012 but there is no reason to suggest that this espionage did not start before 2006 and has not continued since. The revelations are certain to spark a major diplomatic row and highlight once again the uncontrolled and aggressive nature of American spying on friends and foes alike, as first revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Mediapart’s Fabrice Arfi and Jérôme Hourdeaux and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks report.

    • Espionnage Élysée

      Today, 23 June 2015, WikiLeaks began publishing “Espionnage Élysée”, a collection of TOP SECRET intelligence reports and technical documents from the US National Security Agency (NSA) concerning targeting and signals intelligence intercepts of the communications of high-level officials from successive French governments over the last ten years.

    • French president: Obama promises to stop US spying tactics

      Hollande said in a statement that the two spoke by telephone Wednesday after the release of WikiLeaks documents about NSA intercepts of conversations involving Hollande and his two predecessors between 2006 and 2012.

    • US embassy in Paris is ‘home to secret spy nest’

      Reports in France suggest the US spied on French presidents from a secret spy nest on the roof of its embassy in Paris, which stands just a stone’s throw from the Elysée palace.

    • The NSA, and America’s madness

      It’s hard to pretend to be surprised. Since Edward Snowden revealed, in June 2013, the planetary scope of the electronic surveillance and data collection programs carried out by American intelligence agencies, we have gone from surprise to surprise. We discovered, amongst other things, that this mass surveillance went as far as eavesdropping on the German chancellor’s phone conversations. It also enabled Airbus to be spied on by the German secret services on behalf of the American agencies. Nothing, therefore, should surprise us any more. Sooner or later, we were bound to have a confirmation that the French presidents and top-ranking officials were also spied on by the United States. We now have the proof, according to the WikiLeaks documents published, on June 23rd, by the French daily newspaper Libération and and the Mediapart investigative website

      Knowing is one thing, accepting is another. Such practices are obviously unacceptable! Nevertheless, we must not be naive. Intelligence is a crucial tool in the struggle against terrorism. The French parliament has recently approved a far ranging bill to reinforce its interception capabilities. Some provisions of the text have been vividly criticised by civil liberties campaigners, who point out French intelligence services could use them to bypass the right to privacy of French citizens – and even more so, the right to privacy of foreign nationals. In this fight, intelligence services across Europe do need to cooperate with the US, and they have to be able to keep doing so… But only within the framework of the law.

    • Obama reassures France after ‘unacceptable’ NSA spying

      U.S. President Barack Obama reaffirmed in a phone call with his French counterpart Francois Hollande on Wednesday Washington’s commitment to end spying practices deemed “unacceptable” by its allies.

      The presidents’ conversation, announced by Hollande’s office, came after transparency lobby group WikiLeaks revealed on Tuesday that U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on the last three French presidents.

    • Uniquely Nasty: J. Edgar Hoover’s war on gays

      The directive was stern and uncompromising. In the depths of the Cold War, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agents to undertake a new mission: Identify every gay and suspected gay working for the federal government.

      Only Hoover didn’t describe his targets as gays. He called them “sex deviates.”

    • GCHQ’s surveillance of two human rights groups ruled illegal by tribunal

      GCHQ’s covert surveillance of two international human rights groups was illegal, the judicial tribunal responsible for handling complaints against the intelligence services has ruled.

      The UK government monitoring agency retained emails for longer than it should have and violated its own internal procedures, according to a judgment by the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT). But it ruled that the initial interception was lawful in both cases.

    • Spies Hacked Computers Thanks to Sweeping Secret Warrants, Aggressively Stretching U.K. Law

      British spies have received government permission to intensively study software programs for ways to infiltrate and take control of computers. The GCHQ spy agency was vulnerable to legal action for the hacking efforts, known as “reverse engineering,” since such activity could have violated copyright law. But GCHQ sought and obtained a legally questionable warrant from the Foreign Secretary in an attempt to immunize itself from legal liability.

      GCHQ’s reverse engineering targeted a wide range of popular software products for compromise, including online bulletin board systems, commercial encryption software and anti-virus programs. Reverse engineering “is essential in order to be able to exploit such software and prevent detection of our activities,” the electronic spy agency said in a warrant renewal application.

    • GCHQ psychological operations squad targeted Britons for manipulation

      The once-secretive, now-notorious Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group ran its online propaganda and manipulation operations at home as well as abroad.

      JTRIG’s domestic operations used fake accounts to “deter,” “promote distrust” and “discredit” in political discussions on social media, uploaded fake book/magazine articles with “incorrect information,” hacked websites, set up ecommerce sites that were fraudulent operations designed to rip off their adversaries and so on. They relied on psychological research on inspiring “obedience” and “conformity” to inform their work.

    • Controversial GCHQ Unit Engaged in Domestic Law Enforcement, Online Propaganda, Psychology Research

      The spy unit responsible for some of the United Kingdom’s most controversial tactics of surveillance, online propaganda and deceit focuses extensively on traditional law enforcement and domestic activities — even though officials typically justify its activities by emphasizing foreign intelligence and counterterrorism operations.

      Documents published today by The Intercept demonstrate how the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a unit of the signals intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), is involved in efforts against political groups it considers “extremist,” Islamist activity in schools, the drug trade, online fraud and financial scams.

    • DoJ’s Gag Order On Reason Has Been Lifted — But The Real Story Is More Outrageous Than We Thought

      Last Friday the folks at Reason confirmed what I suggested on Thursday — that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, after hitting Reason with a federal grand jury subpoena to unmask anonymous hyperbolic commenters, secured a gag order that prevented them from writing about it.

      Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch describe how it all went down. Read it.

      So, the truth is out — and it’s more outrageous than you thought, even more outrageous than it appears at first glance.

      What, you might ask, could be more outrageous than the United States Department of Justice issuing a questionable subpoena targeting speech protected by the First Amendment, and then abusing the courts to prohibit journalists from writing about it?

      The answer lies in the everyday arrogance of unchecked power.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality in Europe in danger

      Net neutrality is the principle that Internet Service Providers should treat all data on the Internet equally. It’s about minimising the restrictions on which parts of the Internet you can access. And it’s about allowing startups to compete with big Internet firms and supporting innovation in the digital economy.

    • Letter to S&D and ALDE MEPs: Stand Up for Net Neutrality

      Negotiations on Net Neutrality between the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union (trialogue) started on 11 March in order to settle an agreement on the final regulation. Political groups send few representatives to the trialogue but political groups do not necessarily adopt it and compromise with a text that does not respect main democratic values. Citizens shall urgently call all S&D and ALDE Members of European Parliament (MEPs), who are about to decide, in the next days, of their group positions, and urge them to resist against a text that would infringe fundamental rights and liberties of any European citizen. La Quadrature has sent MEPs the following letter.

The Lie or the Fiction of Microsoft Tolerating GNU/Linux

Posted in Site News at 9:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Vladimir Putin loves puppies!

Vladimir Putin

Summary: The ‘Microsoft loves Linux’ nonsense cannot be put to rest, as that tired old lie keeps resurfacing in the media

Linking to a rather poor article from Matt Weinberger (saying that “Microsoft is working with its most bitter enemies”), iophk, our reader, called it “entryism.”

“Also,” he wrote, “can any normal person or team even build one of the containers from source? I thought not. Between stuff like systemd and certain containers, we’re seeing a new kind of closed, proprietary software.”

“Between stuff like systemd and certain containers, we’re seeing a new kind of closed, proprietary software.”
      –iophkWeinberger wrote another article a short moment ago. It’s the latest Microsoft puff piece with the “Microsoft loves Linux” mythology. After Russinovich glorification (the man who pretends there is a “new Microsoft” and also openwashes Windows) we inevitably see this rather bizarre new article in which Microsoft wants to sell us the illusion that it stopped attacking Linux, despite attacking it on many ways, e.g. UEFI ‘secure’ boot, patent lawsuits, bribes etc. As a reminder, see these posts (a series of six) from a few months ago:

Microsoft hates GNU/Linux. When it participates it’s in order to make Linux Windows-dependent (see Hyper-V for instance) or devour the platform in various other ways so as to make Microsoft’s non-Windows cash cows take over, in due course. This has nothing to do with Free/libre software as trying to make it proprietary software-dependent is not a contribution. It’s derailment. █

Microsoft is Again Demonstrating That It is Not Interested in Making Windows Secure

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 9:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”

–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive

Michael S. Rogers
“I don’t want a back door. I want a front door.” — Director of the NSA (2015)

Summary: Microsoft decides to leave Windows with flaws in it, claiming that fixing the flaws would not be worth Microsoft’s resources

FOR A LONG period of time (3 months or more) Microsoft refused to fix a serious flaw in Windows. It only did something about it when it was too late because the public had found out. Microsoft blamed the messenger.

This is not the exception, it’s pretty much the norm. Some Windows flaws exist for as long as 15 years, but they have no "branding" like a name or a logo.

“People with access to the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons still use Windows XP.”“Dustin Childs says the company couldn’t get Microsoft to patch an IE exploit,” says this new report, pointing to HP’s Web site. “Since Microsoft feels these issues do not impact a default configuration of IE,” Childs wrote, “it is in their judgment not worth their resources and the potential regression risk” (a lot more damning information can be found in the HP Security Research Blog).

Given Microsoft’s cooperation with the NSA on back door access, this hardly surprises us. Even more sad than this is a new report about the US Navy wasting millions in taxpayers’ money to run an operating system initially released in 2001. People with access to the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons still use Windows XP. As IDG put it:

The U.S. Navy is paying Microsoft millions of dollars to keep up to 100,000 computers afloat because it has yet to transition away from Windows XP.

After the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) disaster (Windows involved), we oughtn’t be too shocked about some nuclear disaster happening because of dependence of ancient Windows. █

Not Only is Vista 10 Not Free, It is Getting More Expensive, According to the Taiwanese Press

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 9:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft is hiding the price tag

Price tag

Summary: More proof that Microsoft charges quite a lot for Vista 10 (at OEM level), despite the perpetual deception about costs

“NOT FREE” is the only way to describe Vista 10, despite repeated lies from Microsoft and its boosters [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Vista 10 not just nonfree (proprietary) but also not free (non-gratis) and exceedingly expensive. There is no other way to put it.

We gradually see (or start seeing) Vista 10 puff pieces that promise us everything and make this yet-unreleased piece of software sound like the best thing to ever reach planet Earth. We caution our readers and ask them to remember that Microsoft bribes bloggers, journalists, etc. who review the latest Windows before anyone else gains access to it. In addition, we saw Microsoft shamefully blacklist ‘unwanted’ voices, then ask the media to claim that reviews (bribed for at approximately $1000 a pop) are largely positive. It’s intended to shape consensus before the release. It’s trend-setting by gross manipulation.

Regarding the cost of Vista 10 (hidden in OEM contracts, under NDA), now we have a clue. According to the media in Taiwan, “Microsoft has been talking to notebook brand vendors about the licensing of Windows 10 recently and is planning to charge extra fees for notebook models with high-end hardware such as Core i7 processors or Full HD display.”

So Microsoft is quietly raising the price of Windows. There’s nothing “free” about it. “Expect GNU/Linux to have a really great year,” writes Robert Pogson. Microsoft hopes to bamboozle people into the false belief that Windows and GNU/Linux are the same price. It’s all about perception, even if by repeatedly lying. █

“There’s no company called Linux, there’s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free.”

–Steve Ballmer

EPO Protest in Munich and Growing Unpopularity of EPO Management, Media Manipulation by the Management

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 8:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Endowing/bribing the media not a wise policy

A stack of newspapers

Summary: Poll shows that the European Patent Office (EPO) comes under fire for its media strategy which involves wasting taxpayers’ money on fake/organic media coverage that glorifies the EPO

PROTESTS are said to have just taken place in Munich. EPO abuse was the cause. Although there are no reports (yet) about the gathering, not even about the scale or number of people in attendance, it is the principle that counts. Maybe the protesters too should ape their managers and hire ‘media partners’ such as Les Echos? Probably not. Only Benoît Battistelli would be desperate enough to do that.

We are meanwhile learning that patent lawyers in Europe, who are the target audience of this blog, don’t have a positive opinion of the EPO. As a recap:

A few weeks ago, the IPKat asked whether the EPO ought to be organising and funding the European Inventor of the Year award. His concerns were twofold: the resources that are devoted to this event, and the fundamental question of whether the EPO ought to be seen to be ranking different inventions in terms of their merits.

As it turns out, “43% (296 votes) were also unsupportive of the EPO involvement: “It lies outside the powers and duties of the EPO.””

As we explained before, this is misuse of public funds. The EPO wastes public money on paid placements ('articles') and 'media partners', hoping to bury or pro-actively suppress any potentially negative publicity (even when it is very much deserved).

“The IPKat wonders whether the EPO should now review its involvement with and funding of this event,” says the above blog post, “in the light of these concerns which appear to be shared by much of the IP community (or of this blog’s readership, at least)?” █

Links 24/6/2015: Meizu MX4, Red Hat and Samsung Partner, Women in Open Source Awards

Posted in News Roundup at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • How I got eviscerated in front of the entire company (and why it was good)

  • Health/Nutrition

    • 7 reasons you should throw your chicken dinner in the garbage

      Could there be anything worse for the chicken industry than this month’s outbreak of an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella that hospitalized 42 percent of everyone who got it—almost 300 in 18 states?

      Yes. The government also announced that China has been cleared to process chickens for the US dinner plate and that all but one of arsenic compounds no one even knew they were eating have been removed from US poultry production. Thanks for that. Also this month, some food researchers have revealed the true recipe for chicken “nuggets”…just in time for Halloween.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • “EPIC” fail—how OPM hackers tapped the mother lode of espionage data

      Government officials have been vague in their testimony about the data breaches—there was apparently more than one—at the Office of Personnel Management. But on Thursday, officials from OPM, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of the Interior revealed new information that indicates at least two separate systems were compromised by attackers within OPM’s and Interior’s networks.

    • How encryption keys could be stolen by your lunch

      Israel-based researchers said they’ve developed a cheaper and faster method to pull the encryption keys stored on a computer using an unlikely accomplice: pita bread.

    • OS Security: Windows and Linux/UNIX

      For those new to Linux/UNIX command line interfaces, there are lots of Internet sources that provide cheat sheets for the most common commands you’ll need to navigate and perform actions. Here’s another option we like because it’s particularly handy.

    • Why are there still so many website vulnerabilities?

      The larger the site, the greater its functionality and visibility, and the more it uses third-party software, the more that the process of reducing inherent vulnerabilities in the site will be costly.

    • Breach Defense Playbook: Open Source Intelligence

      The Internet allows for information to be readily available at your fingertips. However, it also allows for the same information to be accessed by malicious threat actors who are targeting your organization with cyberattacks. The recent explosion of social media has only increased the information available, and with it the risks to your corporate data, intellectual property, and brand. Some organizations call the awareness of this risk “threat intelligence,” but we have found that organizations need to focus on more than just current threats. Organizations can leverage an emerging intelligence-gathering capability to determine data leakage, employee misbehavior, or negative brand exposure at a higher level than threat intelligence using Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT.

  • Finance

  • Privacy

    • Software companies are leaving the UK because of government’s surveillance plans

      The company behind the open-source blogging platform Ghost is moving its paid-for service out of the UK because of government plans to weaken protection for privacy and freedom of expression. Ghost’s founder, John O’Nolan, wrote in a blog post: “we’ve elected to move the default location for all customer data from the UK to DigitalOcean’s [Amsterdam] data centre. The Netherlands is ranked #2 in the world for Freedom of Press, and has a long history of liberal institutions, laws and funds designed to support and defend independent journalism.”

      O’Nolan was particularly worried by the UK government’s plans to scrap the Human Rights Act, which he said enshrines key rights such as “respect for your private and family life” and “freedom of expression.” The Netherlands, by contrast, has “some of the strongest privacy laws in the world, with real precedents of hosting companies successfully rejecting government requests for data without full and legal paperwork,” he writes.

  • Civil Rights

    • Cop accused of exposing himself faces jail time for dashcam tampering

      A 37-year-old New Jersey cop accused of exposing his genitalia to the young male motorists he pulled over has accepted a plea deal in which the officer loses his job in exchange for pleading guilty to tampering with his patrol car’s dashcam “to conceal unprofessional and inappropriate conduct.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ISPs Dump VPN After Legal Threats From Big Media

        Providers who defied TV company demands to switch off their VPN services have caved in following legal threats. CallPlus and Bypass Network Services faced action from media giants including Sky and TVNZ for allowing their customers to access geo-restricted content. Their ‘Global Mode’ services will be terminated by September 1.

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