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08.11.13

UEFI Sucks, Suggests a Growing Consensus

Posted in Antitrust, Hardware, Microsoft at 2:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

EFI

Summary: Resistance to bogus (to most users) novelty which gives corporations rather than users power over computers all around the world

Some prominent operating system developers already complain about what they perceive to be an anticompetitive measure. Intel, which spearheads UEFI advocacy, needs Windows right now, especially because the best-selling devices, which run Linux, are based on non-x86 chipsets. We oughtn’t let Intel, a criminal company with a long track record at that, get its way.

Richard WM Jones mentioned UEFI/EFI the other day, alluding to problems it was causing him. He wants to bring back the BIOS and concludes as follows:

Anyhow, this explains how I’ve gone from 3 working Fedora ARM systems to 0 in the space of two days. This is also the reason I think EFI is a terrible mistake.

Now that we know of back doors for the NSA we know that with UEFI some motherboards can be bricked remotely (the US was concerned that the Chinese would do such things). UEFI is also a patent trap and a facilitator of antitrust abuses that merit it a boycott, Why again does an ordinary user need UEFI? Benefits do not outweigh the dangers, so we need to shun UEFI for now. █

Microsoft Windows is Defacing the World Wide Web and Raising Costs

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 1:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

PRISM Edition
Found circulating in JoinDiaspora

Summary: Everyone is paying the high price of a honeypot OS (with back doors for the NSA) being widely used

There appears to have been a sharp rise in SPAM recently (on numerous accounts, it’s not a coincidence). The vast amounts of it get spewed from Windows — the world’s leader in NSA back doors.

As long as there are back doors, this whole menace will persist and botnets made of Windows zombies [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] will bombard the Web, causing damage to everyone’s life. Based on this article from the other day, there is a new Windows botnet and it is being used to damage Web sites:

There’s a new Windows-powered botnet, Fort Disco, slowly building up strength and cracking into PHP-based blog and content management system Web sites.

To quote one key part, “Matthew Bing, an Arbor Security Engineering & Response Team (ASERT) research analyst, wrote, “Arbor ASERT has been tracking a campaign we are calling Fort Disco which began in late May 2013 and is continuing. We’ve identified six related command-and-control (C&C) sites that control a botnet of over 25,000 infected Windows machines. To date, over 6,000 Joomla, WordPress, and Datalife Engine installations have been the victims of password guessing.””

Putting the vast amounts of SPAM I have been getting in my 22 accounts aside (this year it is far worse than ever before), I have been observing attempts to crack my CMS-powered pages and it is costing a lot in bandwidth (an additional twelve pounds or so per month in schestowitz.com alone, as it gets over a million hit per month, most of which seem to originate in botnets as they target login/posting pages). In order words, those botnets cost a lot of money and make it less financially/technically viable to run some Web sites. Thank you, Microsoft!

People who don’t like Windows may actually be paying the price for its existence even if they never use it. Sadly, it is going to take a while before Windows is completely extinct and, in the age of fibre, crackers needn’t access more than a few millions of boxes to totally pollute the Web. Here is one new bit of commentary which has gloomy predictions:

What do you do when your business relies on your charging a hefty premium for something that no one is willing to pay for? That’s the essential problem facing Microsoft with Windows.

It is actually not the important point. Those who choose Windows deserve the suffering, but those who suffer from other people’s choice of Windows deserve a voice too. █

Links 11/8/2013: Fedora Flock, Qualcomm Changes Course on Blobs

Posted in News Roundup at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.1.1 RC1 Arrives with New Features

      The Document Foundation has announced that the first Release Candidate version for LibreOffice 4.1.1 is now available for the Linux platform, bringing a lot of bug fixes and improvements.

  • BSD

    • FreeNAS 9.1 Screenshots, and Some Suggestions

      freenas-ixsystems-new-logoFreeNAS 9.1 has been released. We have read the blog posts, the press releases, and we probably all agree that this FreeBSD based NAS is becoming better and better with each release. FreeNAS is still ‘growing up’ and new features are added to each new version.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • gNewSense 3.0 released

      Most notably, gNewSense 3.0, codenamed “Parkes,” is now based on Debian rather than Ubuntu. gNewSense is a fully free GNU/Linux distro and one of the growing number of GNU/Linux distributions that are endorsed by the FSF for providing and recommending only free software. gNewSense now runs on three architectures: i386, amd64 and MIPS.

    • Video: You broke the Internet. We’re making ourselves a GNU one.

      This is the video from the talks given by Christian Grothoff, Carlo von Lynx, Jacob Appelbaum and Richard Stallman in Berlin on August 1st. The talks are in English, even though the welcoming words are in German.

  • Programming

    • Open Line on GitHub

      Felix Geisendörfer recently wrote Vim Trick: Open current line on GitHub. The idea is to open a repository with GitHub in a browser for the current file and line number in Vim.

Leftovers

  • YouTube founders take on Vine and Instagram with MixBit video app
  • Hot Startups Tap Google’s Legal Talent

    The attorneys atop six hot tech ventures have at least one thing in common: They’ve Googled it.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Finance

    • The legal jujitsu of Goldman Sachs

      Vanity Fair has timed the publication of its latest 11,000-word Michael Lewis opus perfectly to coincide with Fabrice Tourre being found liable on six counts of misleading investors while he worked at Goldman Sachs. Lewis also profiles a former Goldman employee charged with serious misdeeds; in his case, it’s Sergei Aleynikov. And in both cases — Aleynikov and Tourre — the government ended up in a position of overstretch.

  • Privacy

    • NSA revelations remind me of Cold War Romania: Column

      For Marcel Proust, a madeleine cookie triggered a flood of childhood memories. For me, cookies usually signify less about memories of childhood and more about information collection, often surreptitious, through bits of code inserted on unsuspecting users’ computers. Recently, though, revelations about the NSA’s information-collection efforts have brought together thoughts about surveillance and memories of my childhood.

    • ‘Nobody is listening to your calls’: Obama’s evolution on NSA surveillance

      Barack Obama insisted on Friday that the NSA reforms he has proposed would have happened all along and that his views on surveillance programs had “not evolved”. But since the president first responded to Edward Snowden’s revelations in June he has rejected any suggestion that more safeguards were required.

    • Four Ways To Escape The NSA Dragnet

      Start by switching to an alternative search engine, using an alias on Facebook, and supporting allied nonprofits. This article was written by Nick Pearson, the CEO of IVPN. IVPN is a privacy platform, and Electronic Frontier Foundation member, committed to protecting online freedoms and online privacy.

    • EU among priority spy targets for NSA: report

      The European Union is ranked as a key priority in a list of spying targets for the US National Security Agency, German weekly Der Spiegel said Saturday, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

      The classified document, dated April 2013, states that the US secret services are especially interested in gathering intelligence concerning the 28-member bloc’s foreign policy, international trade, and economic stability, the magazine reported.

    • What the Chomsky-Žižek debate tells us about Snowden’s NSA revelations

      Rather than backing one or the other thinker, why not embrace both to inform a leftist critique of the surveillance scandal?

      [...]

      In light of the recent NSA surveillance scandal, Chomsky and Žižek offer us very different approaches, both of which are helpful for leftist critique. For Chomsky, the path ahead is clear. Faced with new revelations about the surveillance state, Chomsky might engage in data mining, juxtaposing our politicians’ lofty statements about freedom against their secretive actions, thereby revealing their utter hypocrisy. Indeed, Chomsky is a master at this form of argumentation, and he does it beautifully in Hegemony or Survival when he contrasts the democratic statements of Bush regime officials against their anti-democratic actions. He might also demonstrate how NSA surveillance is not a strange historical aberration but a continuation of past policies, including, most infamously, the FBI’s counter intelligence programme in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s.

    • NSA FISA Surveillance: Attention Shifts To Email Surveillance
    • LIVE: Lavabit Closing – The Beginning of an NSA Coverup?
    • Two email providers close rather than comply with NSA data requests

      Two encrypted email providers closed down Thursday to avoid being forced to turn over user data to the federal government, The New York Times is reporting.

    • The guys that fight dodgy megacorps and surveillance-happy governments

      Our freedom to share information, speak our minds, come up with new ideas and keep our lives private is being threatened. Governments are continually seeking new ways to monitor what we’re doing, while big businesses are constantly trying to lock us into their products. Bit by bit, our freedoms are being eroded.

    • N.S.A. Said to Search Content of Messages to and From U.S.

      The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.

    • Edward Snowden, the Espionage Act and First Amendment Concerns

      Last month, Edward Snowden, a former government employee and contractor, disclosed to newspaper reporters information about US intelligence activities that he obtained during the course of his work. Specifically, he revealed that the NSA engaged in widespread, warrantless surveillance of domestic and international telephone and Internet communications and also engaged in cyber spying on other governments, including allies. The revelations caused a public stir, especially given the questionable constitutionality of the NSA’s domestic surveillance. But far more press, much of it hyperbolic, has focused on Snowden himself. Many officials and observers have called him a traitor while others labeled him a hero and a whistleblower who exposed massive government wrongdoing. The federal government recently brought criminal charges against him for theft of government property and violations of sections 793(d) and 798(a)(3) of the Espionage Act. These crimes carry possible prison sentences of up to thirty years and signal that the government does not view Snowden as a whistleblower. What are the implications of these particular charges for Snowden, especially in light of the First Amendment, which exists largely to protect public criticism of government and serve as a check against government wrongdoing?

    • Constitution Check: Is the Chief Justice’s power to pick judges of the secret wiretap court a bad idea?

      Lyle Denniston looks at a growing debate about Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ power to select judges who sit on a top-secret court – a power assigned to him by Congress.

    • If Bruce Schneier ran the NSA, he’d ask a basic question: “Does it do any good?”

      For the last two months, we’ve all watched the news about the National Security Agency and its friends over at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which approves secret orders on behalf of the NSA and other spy agencies. But more often than not, a lot of these articles take the same basic structure: documents provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden show X, and then privacy advocates and civil libertarians decry X for Y reason.

    • NSA Surveillance: Obama is Using Loophole to Conduct Domestic Spying

      Ever since Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s wiretapping to the world, President Obama have been trying to assuage Americans’ fears and apprehensions over domestic spying — and much to no avail. Obama’s latest effort came on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where Obama made clear that America does not have a domestic spying program. Unfortunately, the facts show otherwise.

    • The president is wrong: The NSA debate wouldn’t have happened without Snowden

      At Friday’s news conference, President Obama was asked by Chuck Todd whether the debate that has arisen in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations made Snowden a patriot. Obama disagreed.

    • Assange blasts Obama for denying Snowden’s role in NSA reforms

      While praising US President Barack Obama’s Friday surveillance reforms as a “victory of sorts for Edward Snowden,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange delivered a written blow to the administration for its “hypocritical” treatment of the subject.

    • Snowden Who? U.S. and Russian Officials Say NSA Leaker Not Part of ‘2+2’ Meetings

      A canceled summit and the rogue NSA contractor’s asylum had some expecting fireworks at the bilateral talks with Kerry and Hagel. Somehow, it was business as usual.

  • Civil Rights

    • Why Your Cell Phone’s Location Isn’t Protected by the Fourth Amendment

      In a major decision last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the location of your cell phone when you place a call is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guards against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

    • FLOSS after Prism: Anonymity by default

      In my last blog post I discussed that we have to protect the user’s privacy better by giving the user the choice to decide which data gets submitted to services. In this blog post I want to share some thoughts about the case that the data is submitted and how to protect the user in such a case.

  • DRM

    • Publishers object to Department of Justice’s punishment for Apple in eBooks case

      Five publishers have filed objections with the US Department of Justice regarding the DOJ’s choice of punishment in a recent anti-trust ruling against the Cupertino company. The ruling found Apple guilty of conspiring to fix e-book prices, forcing customers to pay a higher price. The proposed punishment would require them to cut off their current agreements with the five publishers in question and avoid entering new agreements for five years that could prohibit competitiveness in the market.

    • Apple faces major day in court on patents and e-books

      It’s a big day for Apple in court today, as the Cupertino-based company remains entangled in a massive web of litigation that seems to have ensnared the entire tech sector.

      First, the company will be squaring off against the Justice Department in a hearing about possible remedies for the company’s practices in developing its e-book business, which a judge recently ruled were in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Ambry hits back at Myriad’s “bad faith enforcement” of breast cancer gene patents

      For many years, all testing of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in the US was under control of one company: Myriad Genetics of Utah. But many expected that monopoly to be over when the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Myriad can’t claim patent rights to those genes. In fact, the court ruled, such “isolated” DNA sequences can’t get patents at all—although a lab-made form of the gene called the cDNA version still can.

08.10.13

Links 10/8/2013: Debian Celebrates 20 Years, Android Blobs Debated

Posted in News Roundup at 5:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • NSA Responds To Insecurity By Cutting System Administrator Count By 90 %

      Chuckle. They must run a lot of GNU/Linux. There’s no way that other OS can be secure with such cuts because of the layers of cruft that M$ imposes. With GNU/Linux otoh, one guy can control an indefinite number of machines with SSH and package managers. Even in my home, I activate one script and it updates all the machines on my LAN in a few seconds.

    • IBM Opens Up POWER Architecture For Licensing

      IBM is now following in the steps of ARM Holdings and has decided to allow for licensing of their CPU architecture. IBM and a group of other companies wanting a stake in IBM’s POWER architecture have also founded the OpenPOWER Consortium group.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • TLLTS Episode 517 Aug 7
    • Opsview

      Opsview is a global IT Systems Management software business. Our flagship product, Opsview Enterprise was released in 2009, based on the original Opsview open source project launched in 2003, and is in use in over 35,000 companies in 160 countries.

  • Kernel Space

    • Reiser File System (Reiser3 and Reiser4)

      The Reiser File System (Reiser3) was created by Namesys in 2001 and added to the Linux Kernel in version 2.4.1. Reiser3 was the first Journaling file system included in the Linux Kernel.

    • Journaled File System(JFS)
    • Queueing in the Linux Network Stack
    • Linux 3.11 Power Consumption Results Are Mixed

      Separate from the important Radeon DPM support in Linux 3.11 that can sharply lower system power usage when using this forthcoming kernel update, there’s been other power-related changes in recent Linux kernel releases.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Reverse PRIME Committed To AMD X.Org Driver
      • OpenMP 4.0 Majorly Advances Parallel Programming

        The OpenMP 4.0 specification has been unveiled as a major new specification for programming of accelerators, SIMD programming, and better optimization using thread affinity.

      • NVIDIA 325.15 Driver Brings Fixes, New GPU Support
      • The What Why and How of Wayland and Weston on Linux

        Let’s start from the beginning, because even though Wayland has been in development for over five years there is still a lot of misunderstanding of what it is. Wayland is a display server protocol that is intended to replace the X Window System. We’ve had X for 27 years, and computing has changed a wee bit in that time. Back in the olden days we had text terminals and every little pixel was precious. Now we have great honking graphics cards with more processing power than the servers and workstations of yesteryear, multiple displays, smartphones and tablets, embedded devices, and users who are not going to settle for colorful ANSI displays, but want complex 3D graphics. And why shouldn’t Linux lead the way in graphics rendering? Are we not overdue for holodecks? And who would ever want to leave their holodeck? Though, as figure 1 shows, you can make some cool color images with ANSI.

      • Orbital: A New Shell For Wayland’s Weston

        Orbital is a plugin/client for Wayland’s Weston compositor that provides a custom shell for the next-generation display server. Orbital is made using Qt 5 and Qt Quick 2.

        Giulio Camuffo announced his custom Wayland/Weston shell today on the Wayland development mailing list. He’s been working on this shell for a while that’s written using the Qt 5 tool-kit with Qt Quick 2. It’s now in a comfortable state so he’s decided to publicly announce Orbital.

      • Nvidia Optimus on Linux
      • Nouveau NVC0 Fermi Compute Support Committed

        The patches published one month ago for Nouveau NVIDIA Fermi Compute Support on the open-source driver have now been committed to master for the next Mesa release. More importantly this is the base work for implementing NVIDIA performance counters.

      • AMD/ATI X.Org Driver Brings New GPU Support

        Version 7.2.0 of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver was released this morning. While the X.Org drivers aren’t too exciting these days with most of the really great work happening within the DRM or Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, there’s still an interesting number of changes to xf86-video-ati 7.2.0 for Radeon GPU hardware support.

      • Intel Linux GPU Driver Patches For 4K HDMI Support

        The set of new patches were written by Intel’s Damien Lespiau and allow for parsing a dark corner of the EDID information for being able to expose the 4K x 2K resolution modes to user-space. These ultra high-resolution modes are supported by the HDMI 1.4 specification.

      • “Mega Drivers” Being Proposed For A Faster Mesa

        Eric Anholt of Intel is currently working on some experimental Mesa code for shipping “Mega drivers”, or building all of the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers together as a single shared object library file. There’s some promise to this mega drivers concept in enhancing performance due to compiler/linker optimizations.

      • RadeonSI Gallium3D Receives MSAA Support

        Marek Olšák, the well known Radeon Gallium3D contributor and AMD’s newest open-source employee, has implemented multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support for the “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver plus made other changes.

      • X.Org/Mesa Topics To Be Discussed Next Month

        The X.Org Developers’ Conference is already coming up next month and there’s a lot of interesting topics to be discussed from DRM security to Mesa to reverse-engineering NVIDIA GPUs.

      • Google Chrome OS Developers Working On DRM Code

        There doesn’t appear to be much to get excited about right now, but it appears some Google developers working on Chrome/Chromium OS have begun working on some improvements to the Linux DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) kernel graphics drivers.

      • The State Of GSoC 2013 X.Org/Mesa/DRM Projects

        For this year’s Google Summer of Code with the X.Org Foundation, three of the developers working on interesting X.Org/Mesa/DRM are on track while one student developer already dropped out.

        At this week’s X.Org Board of Directors IRC meeting there was an update on the GSoC projects. The meeting minutes in full can be found via the X.Org Wiki. Of the four projects, three are on track while one of the student developers has already quit/failed.

      • Radeon Driver On XMir Still Is Messy Experience

        Going back to June on Phoronix there have been Ubuntu Mir/XMir performance benchmarks. Up to this point these benchmarks have only been done with Intel and Nouveau graphics drivers, since the AMD Radeon driver has been rather problematic with XMir. Sadly, this still appears to be the case.

      • XMir-Based Xubuntu Images Now Available

        Xubuntu, the Xfce-based flavor of Xubuntu, is presently evaluating the use of Canonical’s Mir display server via the XMir X11 transition layer. For helping in the process and testing, the Ubuntu derivative has made public some Xubuntu XMir images.

      • Coreboot Gains Haswell Graphics Firmware Support

        Just days after the exciting news of Coreboot supporting the AMD “Kabini” APU, there’s more good news for this open-source project… There’s now Intel “Haswell” graphics firmware support!

      • Linux 3.11 Benchmarks For Nouveau Graphics

        We now know that the Linux 3.11 kernel has a heck of a lot of AMD Radeon performance potential through the new dynamic power management (DPM) support in its DRM kernel driver, but how’s the Nouveau performance? Here’s some new benchmarks.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt5, KDE Frameworks 5 Testing On OpenSUSE

        Using the openSUSE Build Servive it’s now easy to test the very latest Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 advancements from the openSUSE Linux distribution.

        Following in the steps of Project Neon, the initiative for providing daily packages on Kubuntu of KDE Frameworks 5, a similar push is underway in the openSUSE world.

      • Curry all over the C++11
      • New in kdepim 4.12: mboximporter

        I know 4.11 is still not released (will release today), but kde master is open.

        So I started to add new feature in KDEPIM.

      • Cycling (with a few bits of KDE)

        So while y’alls were frolicking at Akademy (with Dot coverage), I was on vacation. The choice between vacationing with my family or attending Akademy was a tough one: we also spent some time looking into getting the whole family to the conference, but the price tag and “what will the kids do there” tipped the scales. Maybe next year Akademy will be somewhere that fits in my summer vacation and is amenable to cycling.

      • Meet Coyau!
      • KDE Telepathy 0.6.3 Released

        We have just released version 0.6.3 of KDE Telepathy, the instant-messaging client for KDE.

      • A Nepomuk Integration Plugin for Konqueror

        Last week, I presented an idea about indexing messages from webmails in Nepomuk. The summary of this idea is to implement a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome and Konqueror. This extension parses the DOM tree of every page visited by the user that belongs to a webmail. When e-mails are found, they are extracted and stored in a temporary file. Nepomukfileindexer then quicks in and indexes these e-mails in the Nepomuk database.

      • An information kiosk in QML

        Back in May I had to travel to Bariloche, my hometown, due to family issues. While there, I met Javier Barcenas, a local FLOSS advocate and developer.

      • Season of KDE 2013 Applications Open

        Season of KDE is a community outreach program, much like Google Summer of Code that has been hosted by the KDE community for five years straight.

      • FolderView update

        Well I think it’s time for a small update on porting the FolderView applet to QML.

        First of all, I’ve dubbed it QuickFolder for now, this is the name under which it exists in the kde-baseapps repo. The reason is that both codebases need to coexist for a while for me to carry over the old (existing) code to the new applet.

      • Organizing the next KDE PIM sprint!

        It’s that time of the year again for a new PIM sprint. I’ve been there the last two times now and it’s just one amazing bunch of people coming together and making massive progression in what they like doing most.

      • Season of KDE 2013 Applications Open
      • KDE Commit-Digest for 7th July 2013

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GeoClue rises again

        The free software world has been at risk of getting left behind. GeoClue, the location framework designed for these environments was in a state of flux for a long time with very little happening to it. But now we have GeoClue2, a rewritten implementation of the original idea.

      • GNOME Photos 3.9.x

        After being released as a preview for GNOME 3.8, Photos has seen some progress in the 3.9.x cycle. Some highlights so far:

        Flickr support.
        The ability to push to digital media renderers (or DMRs) using dLeyna.
        A new selection pattern and title bar.

      • GNOME 2 Fork MATE Desktop Aims For Wayland

        The MATE Desktop, one of the popular forks of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, is seeking to support the Wayland Display Server as well as systemd — two popular Linux technologies that have only been a focus for GNOME3.

      • Vinagre 3.9.5 Implements New APIs

        Vinagre, an open source remote desktop connection and VCN client for the GNOME desktop environment, reached development version 3.9.5 a few days ago.

        Vinagre 3.9.5 fixes credential access with libsecret, improves credential description, fixes a logic bug in utils.show_many_errors(), adds the recognize_file() API to VinagreProtocol interface, and uses the new recognize_file() API for parsing files.

      • GNOME’s GTK+ 3.10 Irons Out HiDPI, Wayland Support

        At GUADEC last week besides drafting Wayland plans for GNOME, there was a BoF session for GNOME’s toolkit. Here’s some of the stuff that’s upcoming for the GTK+ 3.10 tool-kit.

        For end-users, GTK+ 3.10 is significant in that it should have near-complete HiDPI support — the tool-kit playing nicely with retina-like displays. There’s been a lot of work in recent months by GNOME on their HiDPI support throughout the desktop. The HiDPI blocker right now is just waiting on a new Cairo release.

      • GTK+ meeting notes

        We had a GTK+ meeting during the Guadec BoF days. It was a long and good discussion touching on many issues.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • OpenMandriva Lx Release Schedule, Sort of

        Last week when I wrote about the OpenMandriva Lx Beta delay I was a bit frustrated because I couldn’t find any kind of release schedule for OpenMandriva Lx. Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one because a long time contributor asked the technical committee for one. The answer was a bit disappointing I’m sure.

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Those unexpected regressions…

        A while ago, I read Ken Stark’s delicious rant because of a kernel regression.

        Ah, those regressions can be real bothersome in the world of FLOSS. Even so, I had never experienced one. Therefore, the whole thing remained pretty much an abstraction to me… until two days ago, when I found my original thesis presentation and understood the frustration of those regressions.

        Let me explain. When I was a student, computers were not as popular as they are today, let alone laptops. Thus, delivering a presentation meant that you had to borrow somebody else’s laptop.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Gluster will transform storage market, IDC analyst predicts
      • Red Hat signs distribution agreement with Avnet Embedded

        Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has announced that it is expanding the reach of its embedded software program through a new partnership with Avnet Embedded, a business group of Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc.

      • Red Hat Doubles Down on its Cloud Focus

        Red Hat is known to many people as the only U.S.-based public company that is exclusively focused on open source, and it has proven that its Linux-focused strategy is very profitable. But as I noted in a recent post, the cloud beckons for Red Hat. June was a big month for Red Hat in terms of advancing its cloud computing strategy, which the whole company is aligning around as an engine for future growth. The company unveiled the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure. It also introduced the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network and Red Hat Certified Solution Marketplace.

      • Fedora

        • This week in rawhide, the mass rebuild edition…
        • Fedora from Scratch

          ok so you have a shiny new Fedora 19 installation, you’ve just installed it onto your computer/laptop, what’s next. Ok well here’s what I’ve done.

        • Flock 2013 (and stuff)

          Well hi there, strangers. I’m sitting in Robyn’s keynote at Flock 2013, so obviously I need to do something other than listen to what happened to her this one time at band camp (yep, really)! Also, I need to write a blog post so Fedora Badges will pick it up. Fedora Badges is the awesome new gamification thing for Fedora which I told everyone who’d listen I was way too cool to get sucked into, so of course as soon as it went up I started refreshing the leaderboard every three seconds…

        • Fedora 19 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

          This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Fedora 19 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Let the 1st annual Open SBC Games begin!

      Scarcely a week after the Intel-backed Minnowboard.org project began shipping its $199 open-hardware single board computer, the AMD-backed GizmoSphere.org project released an unrestricted version of its $189 Gizmo SBC’s schematic and electronics distributor Digi-Key added Wandboard.org’s open, Freescale-based $83-144 boardset to its online catalog.

    • SF Muni LED Sign at Home with Raspberry Pi

      My android phone wakes me up with its stock alarm clock into a cold San Francisco summer morning. I lie around a bit, but eventually get up to enjoy yet another day. An hour later, I’m running in my dress shoes, tie waving in the wind like that of an anime superhero schoolboy, towards a light rail train stop. Twenty seconds before I get there, the train leaves, right before an unanticipated 20-minute break in the service. I eat a bagel I don’t want in a cafe nearby to sit there and work while waiting; my day, having barely started, is already ruined.

    • Building Rapiro – interview highlights with Shota Ishiwatari

      We spoke to the creator of Rapiro, the Raspberry Pi robot, about open source, Kickstarter and the future

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Amazon may be revving up its own Android game console

          Amazon could dive into the video game arena with its own Android-based gaming console, according to the folks at Game Informer.

          Citing information from sources with “knowledge of the in-development hardware,” Game Informer said on Thursday that the console could reach consumers by the end of the year, mostly likely by Black Friday. The console would come with its own dedicated controller, say the sources, and would serve as a platform for the digital games already offered by Amazon through its Web site.

        • Sony Posts Open Source Files For The Upcoming Xperia M

          It’s okay to love kernel source – you can admit it. Sony is pretty good to the open source community, and in keeping with that reputation, it has posted the open source files for the Sony Xperia M. Yay.

        • Sony Xperia Z Ultra Open Source Stock ROM Released

          Continuing its commitment to open source software, Sony has taken to its developer portal to upload version 14.1.B.0.461 of its upcoming (yes, not even released yet) Sony Xperia Z Ultra. The embracing of the open source community by Sony is very much a welcome habit of theirs, and consequently it’s little wonder that last year they were voted best OEM.

        • Samsung gains as Apple display supplier, says researcher

      • Android

        • Hey, you know Android apps can ‘access ALL’ of your Google account?

          One-click login hands over keys to Gmail, Google Drive et al, says researcher

        • BlackBerry slides crown jewels into Samsung: BBM Android app touted

          BlackBerry is sharing its crown jewels – BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) – with non-BlackBerry devices for the first time: and the lucky punters are Samsung fandroids in Africa.

        • This Watchdog Is Android’s Best Friend

          If your Android smartphone is performing at a grindingly slow pace, it could be due to apps running in the background that are chewing up available memory. Task killers aren’t really sufficient — these background apps don’t stay dead for long. However, Watchdog Task Manager lets you see exactly which apps are gumming up the works, letting you decide whether to kill — or perhaps delete them.

        • Google Android roundup: Why did JBQ leave AOSP?

          Android news/rumors: The end of an era, plus giant robots annoyed as LG removes “optimus” title from latest release, Android’s continued domination and why people think it’s doomed, and a Moto X engineer hates back on critics

        • Is Android Really Open Source?

          You see, there is Google Android, the project that Google builds and shares with its handset partners, then there is the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The two are not exactly the same. One of them includes proprietary technologies that are not available as open source (guess which one?).

          Jean-Baptiste Quéru, the maintainer of AOSP abruptly quit his post this week, throwing into question the viability of Android as an open-source effort.

          “There’s no point being the maintainer of an Operating System that can’t boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support,” Queru stated in a G+ post.

          The challenge that Queru is referring to is the ability of AOSP to boot on the Nexus 4 and 7 devices. Apparently there are some proprietary bits that silicon vendor Qualcomm is not making available as open source, without which AOSP will not boot.

        • Jean-Baptiste Quéru, Post-Nexus 7 Factory Image Debacle: “I’m Quitting AOSP”
        • Acer to Expand Android, Chromebook Offerings

          Taiwanese personal computer maker Acer Inc. said it plans to offer fewer Microsoft Inc. products and more Chromebooks and Android-based mobile devices, after it posted a surprise second-quarter loss on lower sales and rising expenses.

        • The smallest and best new Android phones you can buy aren’t small at all

          You can have any kind of flagship phone, so long as it’s 4.7 inches or larger.

        • Are Android phones too large?

          Today in Open Source: Giant Android phones. Plus: Strike Suit Zero released for Linux, and is Apache the most important open source project?

        • Android AOSP Leader Quits Over Binary GPU Drivers

          Google’s maintainer of the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP), has quit the project out of being frustrated with the lack of open-source ARM GPU drivers. In particular, Google’s flagship devices not working with the Android open-source project over no vendor-backed open-source graphics drivers.

        • Open Source and Hardware Have Transformed Google

          A year ago, BusinessWeek published a story called “It’s Official: Google Is Now a Hardware Company.” And since then, Google’s involvement with hardware has been transformative. Chromebooks (portable computers running Chrome OS) are one of the few bright spots in the portable computing market, Google is spreading out with its Motorola Mobility phone strategy, and the company is getting buzz around its new Chromecast dongle for streaming video content to TVs.

        • Why Google’s Chromecast is a hit with consumers
        • NVIDIA Opens Up SHIELD Gaming Operating System

          The NVIDIA SHIELD portable gaming device/console was released at the end of July and now NVIDIA has come forward with the source-code to the whole operating system in hopes of encouraging enthusiasts to modify and improve the platform.

        • Radeon DPM Power Management Gets Fixed Up Again

          Another round of bug-fixes for the Radeon Dynamic Power Management code has been submitted for the Linux 3.11 kernel.

        • Moto X review: hands-on customization, hands-off use

          Motorola has designed a phone meant to be customized, even to your voice. It’s imperfect, but could return the company to its former glory

        • A day with Moto X: The anti-Droid made for everyone, not just geeks (hands-on)

          That the Moto X doesn’t feature the absolute fastest mobile processor doesn’t matter much. It’s all about simplicity, comfort, and some forward-thinking features. It’s a friendlier Android phone for people who would typically go for an iPhone.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Intel launches Android-powered Education Tablets in 7-inch, 10-inch sizes

        The new devices run on Atom chips, include customized educational software, and offer a number of learning accessories.

      • Asus-made Nexus 10 tablet reportedly coming soon

        Asus is responsible for both the original Nexus 7 and the refreshed edition, so it’s clear the Taiwanese manufacturer has a good working relationship with Google. The refreshed Nexus 10 will reportedly be available “in time for the holiday season” through both Google Play store and Best Buy. Although he’s unsure of the exact announce date, Holly tells us that Best Buy is already preparing for the tablet internally.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Google open sources two Web Lab experiments ahead of shutdown this Sunday (video)

    Google’s Web Lab exhibition has had a decent run at London’s Science Museum, but all of that web-linked hardware is being packed up for good after the doors are closed this Sunday. Google’s hoping that at least some of it will live on, though, and has teamed up with research and design firm Tellart to open source two of its most popular experiments.

  • Boffin Releases Its First List Of Open Source Web Design Software
  • FLOSS after Prism: Privacy by Default

    The disclosures by Edward Snowden will have a huge impact on our society and by that also on free software. I do not think that we can continue as we used to do, but that we have to adjust our software to fit the new reality, to make our software a true opponent to the surveillance state we live in and to return to 1983.

  • Using Open Source Tools For Malware Detection

    I started my technology career in the late ’80s working as a bench tech at a small computer repair shop. The first major malware infection I remember was a virus called ‘stoned,’ which spread by sharing floppy disks between computers and replicating itself. It was hidden in the master boot record but not terrible difficult to find and repair. A computer infected by stoned simply displayed the message, “Your computer is now stoned, Legalise (sic) Marijuana.”

  • The Race Is Over, Open Source Has Won. Sorta.

    Philosophies on how to approach things in life, for example Open Source Versus Closed, run in cycles. In the 1970s hobbyists would be carefully typing BASIC code from there enthusiast magazine. Commodore, Apple or the highest podge of C/PM machines.

  • Events

    • Watch the Movie Trailer for LinuxCon/CloudOpen and Win VIP Gift

      What’s been your summer blockbuster favorite? Wolverine? Lone Ranger? Pacific Rim?

      You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Our favorite summer blockbuster comes out September 16 with an exclusive showing only in New Orleans: LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America taking place September 16-18, 2013 at the Hyatt New Orleans.

      This is the largest gathering of Linux and cloud professionals in North America. Deeply technical content has been produced in partnership with the Linux Plumbers Conference to extend the opportunities for learning and collaborating unlike ever before. We hope you will join us.

    • Announcing winners of the Opensource.com caption contest

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Jeff Hawkins: Where open source and machine learning meet big data

      The Palm pioneer has turned to neuroscience and big data to create a path to truly intelligent machines — a path open to the community’s contributions

    • Yes, the Open Cloud Does Matter

      Last week, I covered some comments from a couple of tech industry heavyweights having to do with the OpenStack cloud computing platform. Specifically, former Microsoftie and noted tech blogger Robert Scoble put up a Google+ post saying that OpenStack would be sidetracked by any attempt to build in API compatibility with Amazon Web Services (AWS). And, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said that his company’s strategy is to “support OpenStack” despite the fact that the platform is “immature.”

  • Databases

  • CMS

    • Drupal 7.23 released

      Drupal 7.23, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.23 release notes for a full listing.

    • ITX Design Announces phpBB Open Source Bulletin Board Software With All Small Business Hosting Packages

      Late Thursday afternoon, premier hosting provider and domain registrar ITX Design announced the upcoming launch of complimentary phpBB open source forum software with all new hosting and VPS accounts. The Virginia based company now guarantees the service where the customer won’t ever need to purchase an additional server or pay for web hosting.

  • Education

    • Open education ideals from the past and present

      This year Arianna Huffington delivered the commencement address at Smith College and dared the female graduates (it’s still a female college) to change how society has been defining success for women from money and power to wonder, wisdom, giving back, and community.

  • Business

  • BSD

    • ZFS Boot Environments

      Issue_contents

      Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who will guard the guards themselves)?

      Apache THRIFT: A much needed tutorial

      A closer look at the changes in PC-BSD/TrueOS 9.2 – Part 1 – ZFS Boot Environments

      An email gateway with FreeBSD to prevent malware and undesirable messages

      The Service Spawner

      FreeBSD Programming Primer – Part 7

      PKGNG: The future of packages on FreeBSD and PC-BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

    • Open Source License Trivia

      The world of open source licenses is really quite interesting if you give it a chance. The premise of taking the restrictive presumption of copyright law and using it to do the opposite, that is, grant a broad range of rights creates some interesting license language, to say the least. Although legal concerns around may be new to many people still, some of the licenses have storied pasts. Here’s a sampler of open source license trivia to memorize for your next local pub quiz night.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • GS1 takes a look at opening product data following open source projects

        In February, CivSource reported on an effort by engineer Philippe Plagnol to open up the tracking and supply chain data contained in the barcodes on consumer products. Since then, Product Open Data (POD) has garnered the attention of the French government, private sector partners and the GS1, the organization responsible for creating and housing data on each unique barcode. In this interview, we talk to Dr. Mark Harrison, Director of the Auto-ID Lab at the University of Cambridge, who works with the GS1 and recently started looking at projects like POD in an effort to bring more openness to GS1.

    • Open Access/Content

      • 2013 University of California Open Access Policy

        The Academic Senate of the University of California passed an Open Access Policy on July 24, 2013, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge.

    • Open Hardware

      • Space: ISS poised to launch open-source satellites
      • Open source ‘Cubesat’ set to soar

        Arduino-powered satellites arrive at International Space Station on Saturday

      • Weekly wrap-up: First open-source satellite goes to space, 3D-printed keys and more
      • Top open-source PCs

        Open-source PCs like the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard are finding interesting uses

      • Top 4 open-source PCs

        Single board or “open-source” PCs have become a hot market, with the Raspberry Pi selling in the millions and competitors getting in on the act, including Intel’s recently announced MinnowBoard (shown above).

      • Modular Laptops

        The video above shows how this laptop with a very modular design can be quickly disassembled without the use of tools. If you’ve ever taken apart a laptop, you know the pain and frustration that comes from trying to find and keep track of the nigh infinite number and variety of screws that hold these things together. As these students demonstrate, it just does not have to be this way. Interestingly, there may not be much of a need for a modular designed laptop as long as the components themselves were sufficiently modular. This is the kind of thing I’ve come to expect to be uploaded to Thingiverse.

  • Programming

    • Kids Can’t Use Computers… And This Is Why It Should Worry You

      The truth is, kids can’t use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know. There’s a narrow range of individuals whom, at school, I consider technically savvy. These are roughly the thirty to fifty year-olds that have owned a computer for much of their adult lives. There are of course exceptions amongst the staff and students. There are always one or two kids in every cohort that have already picked up programming or web development or can strip a computer down to the bare bones, replace a motherboard, and reinstall an operating system. There are usually a couple of tech-savvy teachers outside the age range I’ve stated, often from the Maths and Science departments who are only ever defeated by their school laptops because they don’t have administrator privileges, but these individuals are rare.

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Breaking: Monsanto Teams Up With US Military to Target GMO Activists
    • Obamacare Opens For Business, Shuts Out Labor

      When the Obama administration announced July 2 that it would give a breather to employers affected by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), angry unionists noticed a pattern.

      Even before this delay, “every corporate interest that’s asked for regulatory relief has gotten it,” said Mark Dudzic, chair of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, “but the concerns of union plans have been overridden.”

    • African Food Alliance Meets in Ethiopia to Oppose GM Products

      The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) will next week meet in Ethiopia to discuss strategies for resistance against genetically modified (GM) seeds.

      AFSA is a Pan African platform comprising networks and farmer organisations working in Africa including the African Biodiversity network, Coalition for the Protection of African Genetic Heritage, Comparing and Supporting Endogenous Development Africa, Friends of the Earth- Africa, Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee and Participatory Ecological Land Use Management Association.

      The rest are Eastern and Southern African Small Scale Farmers Forum, La Via Campesina Africa, World Neighbours, Network of Farmers’ and Agricultural Producers’ Organisations of West Africa, Community Knowledge Systems, Plate forme Sous Régionale des Organisations Paysannes d’Afrique Centrale and African Centre for Biosafety.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • CIA sued over top secret leakage which served to promote Obama

      Judicial Watch has filed a law suit against the CIA, claiming that during his speech at a June 2011 awards ceremony the former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed “top secret” information in the presence of Zero Dark Thirty filmmaker Mark Boal. The conservative watchdog group seeks to investigate whether the White House put the national security at risk only to provide Hollywood directors with facts to make a “pro-Obama” film.

    • Iran Has Space Program–Some See Crisis!

      But if you go and read the Jane’s report you might wonder what exactly is going on here. The report clearly puts almost no stock in the idea that this facility has anything to with a desire to launch missiles armed with nuclear warheads–that would make sense only to “those who believe Iran’s rulers are messianic fanatics who are intent on destroying Israel as soon as possible with no regard for the consequences.”

    • U.S. Drones Kill More Than 30 in Yemen; School Targeted in One Attack

      In fewer than two weeks, Hellfire missiles launched by U.S. drones have killed at least 31 people in Yemen. At least 14 of the victims were believed by President Obama — the launcher-in-chief — to be al-Qaeda militants.

    • Rohrabacher backs Obama policy on drone strikes

      A senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Friday praised the Obama administration’s policy of using of drones in the evolving war on terrorism, saying he has no problem with the precedent being set by the legally controversial policy and would not be bothered if other world powers — specifically Russia — began using drones to kill terrorists.

    • Israeli Drone Strike In Egypt’s Sinai Kills 5

      An Israeli drone strike killed five suspected Islamic militants and destroyed a rocket launcher in Egypt’s largely lawless Sinai Peninsula on Friday, two senior Egyptian security officials said, describing a rare Israeli operation carried out in its Arab neighbor’s territory.

    • CIA Gun-running: Qatar-Libya-Syria

      A report from CNN’s Jake Tapper has reintroduced “Benghazi-Gate” to the US media spotlight. The report claims that “dozens” of CIA operatives were on the ground in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and the CIA is going to great lengths to suppress details of them and their whereabouts being released. The report alleges that the CIA is engaged in “unprecedented” attempts to stifle employee leaks, and “intimidation” to keep the secrets of Benghazi hidden, allegedly going as far as changing the names of CIA operatives and “dispersing” them around the country.

    • Al-Qaeda replacing Assad is the biggest threat to US security – CIA deputy director

      The second-in-command of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) says that the toppling of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria is the largest threat to United States national security and may help al-Qaeda acquire chemical weapons.

    • Katherine Heigl Returning To TV? ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Star Reportedly Eyeing New CIA Drama

      The online magazine speculates that the mom of two will be returning to the small screen as the lead of a new CIA drama written by Alexi Hawley, the supervising producer of Fox’s “The Following.”

    • Katherine Heigl Looking to Make TV Comeback With CIA Drama

      Heigl would reportedly take on the role of an adviser or communications liaison for the United States president, while the storylines would focus around CIA operations around the world.

    • Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, you have been manipulated, war was staged – Former CIA officer

      Baer said at the beginning of the interview he arrived in Sarajevo by helicopter with three other agents on January 12 1991. He said that their jobs had been to keep an eye on the supposed Serbian terrorists, suspected of preparing an attack on Sarajevo.

      He said that they had information about a group called “Serbian Supreme” and their plans to attack key buildings in Sarajevo with the aim to make Bosnia leave Yugoslavia.

      However, he said, such group has never existed and he and other agents were tricked by their central command. They were actually given the task to warn people and raise panic amongst the politicians in Bosnia. They, as he said, basically just filled their heads with the idea that Serbs will attack. Eventually they realized they were spreading stories and fear about a group that did not exist.

      The operation was called “Istina” (The Truth) which is exactly what it had not been, he said. He was given another task and left Sarajevo after two weeks for Slovenia on another job. The operation in Bosnia continued for another month or two.

    • Jury clears police of using excessive force against Occupy Portland protester

      A jury has cleared the city of Portland, Oregon and two police officers of using excessive force during an Occupy protest in November 2011, when a demonstrator was struck in the throat with a baton and sprayed with pepper spray into her open mouth.

      The case of Elizabeth Nichols came to an end on Friday when a lawsuit against the city and police was thrown out of court. Nichols took part in an Occupy Portland protest several years ago and ended up becoming one of the highest profile instances of alleged police brutality against the Occupy movement.

    • The Murder of Tomas Garcia by the Honduran Military

      Tomas Garcia was a father of seven who would have turned 50 this December. He was a husband, father, brother, and community leader, serving as an auxiliar and on his community’s Indigenous Council. On Monday, July 15, his life was brutally taken away by the Honduran military when a soldier shot and killed him at close range in broad daylight in front of 200-300 people. He did not have a gun, he did not hurt anyone. His crime? Opposing the construction of a hydroelectric dam being constructed in his Indigenous Lenca community’s territory against their will, in violation of ILO Convention 169 and the Honduran government’s promises to consult Indigenous communities about projects in their territory. Why Tomas? He was one of the first to arrive, leading the delegation that had come to deliver a message to the companies constructing the dam at their installations in Rio Blanco. A soldier fired at him not once, not twice, at least three times from only 6 or so feet away, according to eyewitnesses.

    • Inside the Tor exploit

      Some of the people who were most concerned about Internet privacy, and were using the Tor anonymous Internet service to protect it, may have been the most exposed.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Was George W. Bush Aiding Al Qaeda?

      So the potentially most damaging part of Manning’s disclosures was that the war kills civilians–and that U.S. enemies could use that fact to recruit others.

      If that’s the standard– that the killing of civilians might rally people behind the cause of Al Qaeda–then shouldn’t someone be talking to George W. Bush about ordering the invasion that caused all the killing? Of course not–the only person facing punishment is the person who thought the rest of the world should know about it.

      We–and certainly many others–have made the point that the prosecution of Manning should be treated seriously by journalists and press freedom advocates– especially now that the government is laying out its case about what it considers to be the harm done by WikiLeaks.

    • New York Times Dangerously Ignores Its Own Words In Calling For Extradition of Edward Snowden

      It should go without saying that Putin’s treatment of whistleblowers and journalists in his own country is deplorable, but that does not delegitimize Snowden’s asylum claim in any way. Right now, he is walking around a free man, able to contribute to the ongoing debate in the US if he so wishes. That almost certainly “feels safer” than being locked in a cage, held incommunicado, possibly surrounded by violent criminals, and facing life in prison, as he would be if he came home.

    • The Government Has Made Its Point

      http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/07/31/ripples-of-the-bradley-manning-verdict/the-bradley-manning-prosecution-sends-an-antidemocratic-message

    • The Bradley Manning Verdict and the Dangerous “Hacker Madness” Prosecution Strategy
    • Court Rulings Blur the Line Between a Spy and a Leaker

      The federal government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists, calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail. In its failed effort to persuade Russia to return another leaker, Edward J. Snowden, it felt compelled to say that he would not be tortured or executed.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • ‘Citizen Koch’ Rescued By Small Donors As Documentary Outraises Funds Pulled By PBS

      “Citizen Koch,” a highly regarded documentary about the billionaire Koch brothers and the growing influence of money in politics after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, suffered a major setback earlier this year when PBS pulled the film and the $150,000 in funding that had been promised. Scrambling to find a way to distribute their film, Academy Award-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin turned to Kickstarter in a highly successful move that recently surpassed the funds they had previously expected to receive from public television.

      As of Thursday, the “Citizen Koch” crowdfunding effort had attracted around $170,000 from nearly 3,400 donors. The average donation was just over $50, with contributions ranging from $1 to $5,000. The campaign — which catapulted past its initial $75,000 goal after just three days last month — has quickly become one of Kickstarter’s most successful.

      Producers say the funds raised on Kickstarter will be used to pay for the final sound mix, the film’s score and graphics, color correction, creating mastered elements for distribution, licensing archival footage and music rights and other post-production and distribution costs.

    • Tomgram: Michael Klare, How to Fry a Planet

      Look at it any way you want, and if you’re not a booster of fossil fuels on this overheating planet of ours, it doesn’t look good. Hardly a month passes, it seems, without news about the development of some previously unimaginable way to extract fossil fuels from some thoroughly unexpected place. The latest bit of “good” news: the Japanese government’s announcement that natural gas has been successfully extracted from undersea methane hydrates. (Yippee!) Natural gas is gleefully touted as the “clean” fossil-fuel path to a green future, but evidence is mounting that the newest process for producing it also leaks unexpected amounts of methane, a devastating greenhouse gas. The U.S. cheers and is cheered because the amount of carbon dioxide it is putting into the atmosphere is actually falling. Then Duncan Clark at the British Guardian does the figures and discovers that “there has been no decline in the amount of carbon the U.S. is taking out of the ground. In fact, the trend is upwards. The latest year for which full data is available — 2011 — is the highest level on record.” It’s just that some of it (coal, in particular) was exported abroad to be burned elsewhere.

    • ZCBlog: What would banning petrol cars actually look like?
    • PHOTOS: Oil Spill in Thailand’s Samet Island

      About 50,000 liters of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Thailand on July 27 from a pipeline operated by PTT Global Chemical Plc. The oil spill reached Samet island off Rayong province which is a popular tourist destination.

    • Legislators Are Freaking Out About Oil Companies’ Offshore Fracking: ‘We Are In The Dark’

      Oil companies have quietly brought the controversial practice of fracking to the coast of California, causing some state legislators to wig out. They’re now asking for a federal probe of an issue that hasn’t gotten the same amount of attention as the fracking that takes place on land.

  • Finance

    • How The Financial Crisis Helped Turn Big Banks Into Global Commodities Kings

      Wall Street’s biggest banks are currently under the gun for their massive role in global commodities markets. But what many don’t realize is the vast expansion of that role was, in large part, an unintended consequence of the chaos of the financial crisis.

      Should we be shocked that the ramifications of the financial crises are still reverberating years later with unexpected repercussions? Not in the slightest.

    • The Origins of the Neoliberal War on the Poor

      Where there is no social program, there’s always a violence program. For the Clinton/Gore administration welfare reform and expansion of the police state were not only means to trump the Republicans; they were also essential to economic policy. Intense competition for jobs at the lowest rungs would depress wages, pit poor and working-class people against each other and, where workfare recipients displace municipal workers, weaken labor unions. The spectre and reality of incarceration would have the traditional effect of suppressing the dangerous classes, at a time when the wage gap between the rich and the poor grew wider than at any time in recent history.

    • Court officially declares Bitcoin a real currency

      A federal judge has for the first time ruled that Bitcoin is a legitimate currency, opening up the possibility for the digital crypto-cash to soon be regulated by governmental overseers.

      United States Magistrate Judge Amos Mazzant for the Eastern District of Texas ruled Tuesday that the US Securities and Exchange Commission can proceed with a lawsuit against the operator of a Bitcoin-based hedge fund because, despite existing only on the digital realm, “Bitcoin is a currency or form of money.”

    • Australia Has $16 Minimum Wage and is the Only Rich Country to Dodge the Global Recession

      Australia has twice the minimum wage as the US and Big Macs cost roughly the same.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • How Technology Companies Lobby the Federal Government

      The top lobbying issue for both Apple and Amazon is reforming the tax code. Unlike Apple and Facebook, however, Amazon is playing a major role in lobbying for vendor collection of Internet sales taxes. Apple’s second and third major focus areas are telecommunications and copyright, patent, and trademark – likely because its lawsuit with Samsung, with which Google is also involved.

  • Censorship

    • Website blocking measures lead to inadvertent censorship

      A technical decision made by Sky in implementing website blocking has lead to the blocking of news site TorrentFreak

    • Sky’s Court Ordered Piracy Filter Blocks TorrentFreak

      Website blocking has become a hot topic in the UK in recent weeks. Opponents of both voluntary and court-ordered blockades have warned about the potential collateral damage these blocking systems may cause, and they have now been proven right. As it turns out blocked sites can easily exploit the system and add new IP-addresses to Sky’s blocklist. As a result TorrentFreak has been rendered inaccessible to the ISP’s four million customers.

    • DOD Slapping Fort Hood Survivors With Gag Orders

      Autumn Manning, wife of one of the survivors, Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning, is claiming via Twitter that the Defense Department is “slapping victims with gag orders” along the lines of this: Don’t talk to the press following testimony in the Hasan trial.

  • Privacy

    • Your medical data – on sale for a pound

      The arbitrary resetting of people’s ‘privacy settings’ is a behaviour one might expect of Facebook, not the NHS.

    • Don’t worry, NSA says—we only “touch” 1.6% of daily global Internet traffic
    • At press conference, Obama denounces Snowden—and promises reforms

      During a Friday afternoon press conference, President Barack Obama said that he would work with Congress to declassify more information about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) secret surveillance programs.

      At the same time, Obama denied that it was disclosures by Edward Snowden that moved this issue to the forefront. The reforms were already in the works, he insisted; Snowden’s revelations were made in “the most sensationalized manner possible” and unduly scared people.

    • Obama Administration Releases Previously Secret Legal Opinion on NSA’s Associational Tracking Program

      The Administration released a White Paper on Friday that summarized its claimed legal basis for the bulk collection of telephony metadata, also known as the Associational Tracking Program under section 215 of the Patriot Act, codified as 50 U.S.C. section 1861. While we’ll certainly be saying more about this analysis in the future, the paper makes one central point clear:

    • 9/11 Commission Chairs: NSA Spying Is “Out of Control”

      The NSA’s metadata program was put into place with virtually no public debate, a worrisome precedent made worse by erecting unnecessary barriers to public understanding via denials and misleading statements from senior administration officials.

    • NSA ‘secret backdoor’ paved way to U.S. phone, e-mail snooping

      The National Security Agency created a “secret backdoor” so its massive databases could be searched for the contents of U.S. citizens’ confidential phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant, according to the latest classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

    • NSA able to query U.S. citizens’ names in its FISA database

      The National Security Agency can search for U.S. citizens’ names and other information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according a document Edward Snowden leaked to The Guardian.

    • NSA Tries To Justify Its Surveillance Programs With Ridiculous Assertions

      As President Obama was laying out his “plan” in response to the public’s concerns over NSA spying, both the DOJ and the NSA released some documents defending the various programs. I would imagine it will surprise none of you that these documents are chock full of hilarious and misleading claims. Let’s highlight a few, starting with the NSA’s document, which is shorter, more general and covers all the various programs more broadly. It’s also a complete joke. We’ll get to the DOJ one in another post.

      [...]

      The NSA has absolutely no credibility on this subject, and the claims in this document are simply laughable.

    • Obama Announces Website For NSA Transparency, 3 More Reforms

      President Obama announced a series of new reforms to increase public confidence in the National Security Agency’s controversial Internet and telephone surveillance program. The press conference (live at whitehouse.gov/live) is still on-going. Here are the 4 reforms he’s proposed.

    • Obama NSA reforms still allow metadata collection
    • Senator vows review of NSA programs

      Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Friday said the Intelligence Committee will hold a series of hearings in the fall to examine National Security Agency surveillance programs.

    • The N.S.A.’s Dirty Dishes: Obama’s Press Conference
    • Barack Obama pledges ‘reforms’ to NSA surveillance programme

      President Barack Obama says US “can and must be more transparent” about surveillance programmes and promised to work with Congress to put constraints on government spying.

    • Making You “Comfortable” with Spying Is Obama’s Big NSA Fix
    • Exposure Of NSA Spying Programmes Could Damage The US Cloud Industry
    • NSA surveillance: the long fight to close backdoor into US communications

      For more than a year, two US senators on the intelligence committee have fought a lonely, unsuccessful battle to prevent the National Security Agency from combing through its vast email and phone records databases for Americans – a battle waged almost entirely in the shadows.

    • Germany Thumbs Nose at the NSA

      The global backlash against the National Security Agency’s cyber spying picked up a notch on Friday as Germany’s leading telecom company announced that all email flowing among three of the nation’s email services will remain on German servers at all times. The move reflects powerful differences in the way that Americans and Europeans view privacy—and just happens to coincide quite nicely with the commercial interests of European Internet companies, who have yet to achieve anything close to the scale of Google Inc. or Amazon.com Inc.

    • NSA spying chronicles, umpteenth episode: ‘Metadata, schmetadata’
    • NSA funds UK’s spying operations

      Material provided to the Guardian by US whistleblower Edward Snowden and released last week includes the fact that the US National Security Agency (NSA) paid the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at least £100 million over the past three years.

      In 2009 the NSA gave GCHQ £22.9 million, increasing that figure to £39.9 million the following year—including £4 million for GCHQ’s work for NATO forces in Afghanistan.

    • New Snowden leak shows how the NSA gets away with domestic spying

      Newly leaked National Security Agency documents published by the Guardian reveal that the NSA can scour vast databases of personal information by searching for the names, email addresses and other identifiers of United States citizens.

    • Verizon entry could allow U.S. NSA to spy on Canadians, union warns

      Canadians’ personal data could end up in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies if American telecom giant Verizon is allowed to operate here, warns the union representing communications workers.

      The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada charged Friday that Verizon’s recently revealed co-operation with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in its clandestine collection of telephone records of millions of U.S. customers could extend north under a federal policy that eases the sector’s foreign ownership restrictions.

    • Tens of thousands virtually thank Edward Snowden for his ‘patriotism’

      A website launched to allow the public to thank Prism whistleblower Edward Snowden for his actions gained 10,000 posts within just a few hours of going live.

      The website was launched by digital rights group Fight for the Future on 7 August, shortly before it was announced President Obama would cancel a meeting with President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s approval of Snowden’s asylum. Thousands of messages poured in in those first few hours, reaching 10,000 by the time a statement was released from the White House over the Putin meeting.

    • CIA Vet: Obama Administration ‘Most Irresponsible Ever’ on Leaks
    • Will it work? German email companies adopt new encryption to foil NSA
    • Venezuela and Mercosur Meet with UN’s Ban Ki-moon to Reject US Spying

      On Monday the foreign ministers of Mercosur, including Venezuela’s Elias Jaua, met with the general secretary of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, in New York, to express their rejection of “global spying” by the United States.

      The Mercosur ministers from Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, were referring to information about the US government’s PRISM global spying program revealed by Edward Snowden in June.

      The US government’s spying “absolutely violates international law, countries’ sovereignty, and the fundamental human rights of the citizens of the world,” Jaua said.

      He also told Ban that Mercosur countries are concerned about the “attempt to put pressure and conditions on countries who have offered asylum to Mr Snowden”.

    • Press Corps Fails To Ask Any NSA Questions At Obama’s NSA Press Conference

      The White House Press Corps just completely botched the one opportunity we had to learn details about the National Security Agency’s spying program, and the rationale for sweeping government surveillance. During the hour-long press conference President Obama held specifically to answer questions about the NSA, not a single journalist asked him details about the NSA. As a result, we learned precisely zero information from something slated to be critically informative.

    • Obama touts NSA surveillance reforms to quell growing unease over programs

      President to work with Congress to reform NSA’s Fisa court and Patriot Act but made clear that mass surveillance would continue

    • NSA Reading Content of Americans’ International Communications

      Thursday saw yet another revelation in the ongoing exposure of a cluster of unconstitutional surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies of the US government. In a front page article, theNew York Times revealed that vast quantities of emails sent and received by Americans communicating with people abroad are swept up, “cloned,” and combed through by NSA analysts, on the basis that the messages contain certain words or phrases deemed suspicious by the government.

    • Obama Promises Reform of NSA Spying, But the Devil Will Be in the Details

      Earlier today, President Obama held a press conference to address the growing public concern over the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices. We are glad to see that the Administration has been forced to address the matter publicly as a result of the sustained public pressure from concerned voters as well as the ongoing press coverage of this issue. Obama acknowledged that Americans were uncomfortable with the surveillance that has been leaked to the media (and noted that he would be as well, if he weren’t in the government). He made four commitments to transparency and reform during the press conference, and also published a whitepaper describing the legal interpretation of the PATRIOT Act that is used to attempt to justify bulk surveillance.

    • Crypto experts blast German e-mail providers’ “secure data storage” claim

      In the wake of the shutdown of two secure e-mail providers in the United States, three major German e-mail providers have banded together to say that they’re stepping forward to fill the gap. There’s just one problem: the three companies only provide security for e-mail in transit (in the form of SMTP TLS) and not actual secure data storage.

    • ‘Broad standard’ OKs NSA snooping

      ‘Relevance’ cited in surveillance of Americans’ calls

    • NSA loophole allows warrantless surveillance, targeting U.S. citizens

      The leaks continue to pour forth revealing the totalized surveillance of American communications by the National Security Agency. Now, it appears that the communications of individual U.S. citizens can be specifically targeted, not just swept up in the spy dragnet. On Friday, the Guardian published the latest revelation, based on information gleaned by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, namely that a legal loophole enables the NSA to search through the vast hoards of data it keeps on communications within and going out of the U.S., and can search for U.S. citizens’ emails and phone calls. The findings stand at odds with claims in recent weeks by government officials that Americans are not targeted by the NSA’s vast surveillance programs.

    • First Step of NSA Transparency: Come Clean About Access To Fiber Optic Cables of Telecom Companies

      Prior to President Obama’s press conference on potential surveillance reform today, two important stories were published showing National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance has gone farther than government officials have admitted publicly. Now that the President has promised transparency on NSA surveillance, it’s time for the NSA to come completely clean to the American public. They can start by explaining—in detail—how and why they are obtaining the content of communications transiting telecom networks, which then go into the databases behind NSA programs.

    • NSA Reportedly Changing Section 702 Of The FISA Amendments Act To Search US Citizens’ Communications

      Today the Guardian reported that a change to section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) appears set to allow for the searching of communication information of United States citizens. Previously, section 702 was restricted to communications of foreign individuals who were located outside of the United States at the, to quote the Guardian, “point of collection.”

      United States citizens were outside the scope of section 702 authorization. However, that appears now to be potentially changed.

    • EU among priority spy targets for NSA — Germany’s Der Spiegel

      The European Union is ranked as a key priority in a list of spying targets for the US National Security Agency, German weekly Der Spiegel said Saturday, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

    • The NSA-DEA police state tango

      This week’s DEA bombshell shows us how the drug war and the terror war have poisoned our justice system

    • Report: EU monitoring – top priority of NSA

      According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, the American National Security Agency placed monitoring of the European Union as one of the top priorities of the organization’s activities. The report is based on documents that were allegedly leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

    • ‘Spy Rings’ in Germany: A Baker’s Ode to the NSA and Snowden
    • Spy access to NZ used as bargaining tool

      The ability for US intelligence agencies to access internet data was used as a bargaining tool by a Telecom-owned company trying to keep down the cost of the undersea cable from New Zealand.

      Lawyers acting for Southern Cross Cable quoted a former CIA and NSA director who urged the Senate to “exploit” access to data for an intelligence edge.

    • WikiLeaks founder: Obama surveillance changes vindicate Edward Snowden

      The founder of the WikiLeaks website said on Saturday that President Obama’s announcement of changes to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance program this week vindicated Edward Snowden’s release of information about the program.

    • Google, Microsoft claim proposed NZ spy law threatens IT industry

      Google and Microsoft have slammed a proposed bill that would compel United States providers to assist New Zealand agencies with interception as potentially harmful to the country’s IT industry and incompatible with international privacy laws.

    • Someone Using A US Senate IP Address Edits Wiki Entry To Change Ed Snowden From ‘Dissident’ To ‘Traitor’

      Government employees editorializing entries isn’t uncommon. In fact, there’s an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to the subject. But editorializing by editors using government IP addresses rarely goes unnoticed. Now, whoever did this may feel Snowden is a traitor but the verdict is still out (quite literally) on that. He’s been charged with espionage but until there’s actual court proceedings, he’s nothing more than a “dissident” (although that term has its problems as well), albeit one the government would like to have back in the US as soon as possible.

    • Surveillance scandal rips through hacker community
    • Letter to Obama to stop the prosecution of Snowden

      We are writing to you as free speech and media freedom organisations from around the world to express our strong concern over the response of the US government to the actions of whistleblower Edward Snowden. We urge you to take immediate action to protect whistleblowers and journalists. – See more at: http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/37194/en/letter-to-obama-to-stop-the-prosecution-of-snowden#sthash.d0xebm8X.dpuf

    • Contribution from members of international civil society to the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board

      We are concerned that surveillance conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) under Section 702 of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and other legal authorities is inconsistent with international human rights norms and U.S. international commitments, as embodied in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)[1] and resolution 20/8 of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) [2]. We are particularly concerned about the human rights and civil liberties of non-U.S. persons, as defined under FISA, and urge you to give full consideration to the rights of non-U.S. persons in your findings and recommendations. Human rights are universal and must be guaranteed to all persons. We strongly advocate that current and future legal provisions and practices take this principle into consideration.

    • NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’ emails and phone calls
    • U.S. openness, restraint could lessen fallout from NSA surveillance

      Clear restrictions on electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency is the best way to avoid economic damage to U.S. tech companies tainted by revelations of massive data collection on U.S. and foreign citizens, experts say.

    • No easy way to stop BREACH from plucking secrets from HTTPS pages, feds say

      Less than 24 hours after researchers disclosed a new attack that can pluck secrets from webpages protected by the widely used HTTPS encryption scheme, the US Department of Homeland Security is advising website operators to investigate whether they’re susceptible.

    • Gone in 30 seconds: New attack plucks secrets from HTTPS-protected pages

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Department of Justice Proposes Remedy to Address Apple’s Price Fixing
    • Apple proposes new terms in e-books battle

      Hours after the Department of Justice and 33 U.S. states proposed a set of remedies for Apple following its July loss in the e-books price-fixing case, the company came back with its own set of terms and called the government’s proposals vague, overreaching, and unwarranted.

      [...]

      A federal judge last month ruled that Apple violated antitrust laws, following a trial in the Southern District of New York. Judge Denise Cote said the Justice Department proved that publishers conspired together to eliminate price competition for e-books, and that Apple played a central role in that conspiracy. Apple has said it plans to appeal the decision.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • PUBPAT Asks Supreme Court to Rule Part of Leahy-Smith America Invents Act Unconstitutional

      The Public Patent Foundation today asked the Supreme Court to rule part of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011 unconstitutional. Specifically, PUBPAT filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court in Public Patent Foundation v McNeil-PPC, a case brought by PUBPAT in June 2009 against the manufacturer of Tylenol for falsely marking and advertising its acetaminophen products as patented, challenging the provision of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, passed in September 2011, that retroactively eliminated PUBPAT’s standing to bring the case against McNeil. PUBPAT asked the Supreme Court to answer the following question, “Does the retroactive application of the AIA’s changes to the false marking statute to this case violate Petitioner’s Due Process under the Fifth Amendment?”

    • Copyrights

      • The Pirate Bay Turns 10 Years Old: The History

        Today The Pirate Bay celebrates its 10th anniversary. Founded in 2003 by a collective of hackers and activists, the small Swedish BitTorrent tracker grew to become a global icon for online piracy. We’ll take a look at how it all came to be, from a tiny community running on a 1.3GHz machine with 256MB RAM, to Hollywood’s arch rival serving millions of users from a cloud-hosted hydra.

      • Pirate Bay celebrates tenth birthday with Stockholm party
      • Are we done with copyright?

        There has been lots of talk about copyright reform in Washington over the past few months, as evidenced by the announcement from the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee that that panel would undertake a comprehensive review of the copyright law. The first hearing for that review was held back in May. As Mike Masnick from TechDirt noted, the Registrar of Copyrights is supportive of the effort but “still focused on bad ideas.” More recently, the Department of Commerce Task Force on Internet policy issued a “Green Paper” last month that helps us see what is right and what is wrong with the current attention in D.C. on copyright reform.

        The Task Force recommended three broad categories of reform: updating the balance of rights and exceptions, better enforcement of rights on the Internet, and improving the Internet as a marketplace for IP through licensing. These last two are straight out of the legacy entertainment industries’ wish list, of course, and they would do nothing at all to better realize the fundamental purpose of copyright to promote creativity and innovation. As for the first, it all depends, of course, on where one thinks the balance has gone wrong. The Task Force includes as a priority the reform of the library exception in section 108, which is a favorite goal of the Copyright Office right now, but it is not at all likely that anything the Office cooks up would be better than leaving the current 108 alone. The Green Paper also seeks “input” about digital first sale and remixes; note that input is a much weaker commitment than the task Force is willing to make to such things as online enforcement, reform of 108, or — another industry favorite — the extension of the public performance right for sound recordings.

      • Dotcom: Surveillance and Copyright Extremism Will Cost United States Dearly

        In response to growing fears of government spying, yesterday Kim Dotcom announced that parts of his company will relocate to Iceland if that means keeping customers’ data secure. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Dotcom says that continued broad surveillance will have serious financial consequences. “Mass surveillance and copyright extremism will cost the US economy more than any terrorist attack or piracy,” he predicts.

      • How the fashion industry thrives without IP protection

        High-IP industries are far smaller than those that have low copyright protection.

      • Prenda officially dissolves as Steele agrees to pay $5,400 penalty

        Records at the Illinois Secretary of State show that Prenda Law was “voluntarily dissolved” on July 26. The move isn’t surprising and is largely a formality. A key lawyer for the embattled “porn troll” had already said it was “winding down” its operations.

Windows XP Getting No More Security Patches Not the Big Issue Because It Already Has Back Doors

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 1:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Debating the rails on a house’s windows while a door at the back is unlocked

A stairway to heaven

Summary: IDG focuses on security aspects of an operating system where digital back doors exist (for the NSA) and also a habit of widespread espionage by the NSA

THE rise of GNU/Linux is very evident, so the NSA’s dependence on back doors for the CIA-secured global empire is a growing issue. According to Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, there are already some back doors (intentional or not) in Android phones/tablets, which are being used by the FBI to remotely access the built-in microphones, maybe the cameras too. This is why we must ensure Android stays free and regularly audited, with devices rooted to run independently-developed builds of GNU and Linux.

Windows is growing rusty on hardware which is getting older. Even Rupert Murdoch’s Fox ‘News’ acknowledges the end of the PR era.

“Back doors are a very big deal and they show why proprietary software is simply not acceptable.”Windows Vista, the operating system better known to be serving Hollywood with DRM (like it serves the NSA with back doors), is no longer heard about. It got buried quietly, but all its malicious features got carried forward . To ‘upgrade’ to Vista (or later) from XP would make no sense and the same may be true for Vista 8‘s successors. There may as well be a label on products saying “Vista or hire” (not higher) because it’s a choice between spending money on Microsoft mess (with security issues due to holes) or hiring more staff. Many are still using Windows XP simply because in Microsoft’s world using an operating system from 2001 may mean more output/higher productivity than the latest.

China, as expected, does not rush to pay Microsoft, so a lot of people there still use Windows XP. Here is one way to put it:

China has a lot of PCs but not as many as USA so far, so the numbers don’t compare straight up. A lot of Chinese share PCs, for instance in Internet cafes. Still, a lot of working PCs are going to have problems when updates cease. Since many are illegal copies that may already have happened. That’s not the real problem. The real problem is that hundreds of millions of working PCs are not going to be scrapped simply because the OS no longer works on them.

Gregg Keizer (IDG) framed this as a problem of security when he said:

The Chinese are going to have a very, very hard time kicking the Windows XP habit.

The deadline for the retirement of Microsoft’s most successful operating system ever is eight months from tomorrow: April 8, 2014. That’s the day when the Redmond, Wash. company is to deliver the last XP security update.

Given Microsoft’s de facto back doors for the NSA it may not matter much. We already know that the US government is strategically cracking PCs with Windows in China. It is espionage. The numbers in the UK are intriguing and here too the government is letting the US government have back doors, even into a lot of army workstations (showing what the ruling empire, with numerous surveillance outposts inside the UK, actually is).

Back doors are a very big deal and they show why proprietary software is simply not acceptable. It’s a huge risk. █

Entryism at Work: Microsoft Nick Grooms Bill Gates at Slashdot

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 12:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Seeding the PR at the wrong places to drive away longtime readers

Slashdot

Summary: How the Gates propaganda machine has spread as far as Slashdot, which was originally known and even renowned for its geeks-oriented focus

Microsoft moles and boosters are being used for PR even in less expected sites, such as Slashdot. As is often the case with those people, they serve a dual role of grooming Microsoft and also the Gates Foundation, which they try to charitywash Microsoft with.

The Microsoft plant in Slashdot [1, 2] is at it again this week. “Microsoft Nick is active promoting His Billness,” told us iophk, basing his statement on the alias seen here (he uses known aliases now). It’s always just PR, never any reporting. He did the same thing for years in a site called “Microsoft Watch” (which was a misnomer because it was nonstop Microsoft promotion after he had taken over).

“The site is now run by people who deem it their duty to make Microsoft stronger.”How about Microsoft Nick doing some real reporting for a change? Maybe he can comment on the money Gates was funnelling to ALEC [1, 2], which is now denying global warming (Gates does it yet again) and attacking the working class. No, that would not be a good story, would it? It’s not Nick’s job. He may think he is a journalist, but his profession is more like a mole for Microsoft in various sites, tugging along the official party line.

What can one do to restore Slashdot, bringing it back to its roots? There is not much that can be done, as it increasingly looks like entryism. The site is now run by people who deem it their duty to make Microsoft stronger.

Those who favour FOSS-oriented sites are running low on options, as good sites are shutting down or becoming less active (we covered several examples recently), leaving a lot more room for fake journalism or marketing. █

Microsoft Enters the Bricks Business and Beams Users’ Passwords

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 12:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Primitive, bogus security

Security

Summary: Microsoft’s platforms for phones are just about as bad as a phone platform can get

KIN and SideKick were horrible, not to mention Windows Mobile. But Microsoft can make things worse,

The NSA’s big ally (perhaps biggest ally) Microsoft is proving its faithfulness again, not just by providing Windows back doors and real-time audio/video Skype access but also by making self-bricking phones (a back door lets it be converted into a listening device and more).

According to this, Windows phones now brick themselves:

BLOG: What’s With The Bricked Windows Phones?

There’s no sense in beating around the bush: the Windows Phone is having a hard time of it. It’s certainly not a bad OS by any means; it is, after all, still around. But there’s no denying that it’s having a very difficult time gaining any traction in the mobile market, which is dominated by iOS and Android.

Here is where it gets worse, maybe by design:

Microsoft is warning users that their Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 7.8 devices could be easily tricked into revealing login credentials for corporate Wi-Fi access points secured with WPA2 protection. The vulnerability appears to build on a known security weakness in a Microsoft authentication protocol as well as the way Windows Phones connect to WPA2 networks.

This type of thing should get Microsoft banned, but the CIA/NSA would treat it like a feature. According to new reports, the CIA is now preparing TV propaganda with which to advertise and defend its abduction of wireless networks around the world (no, not just Google) and it is possible that flaws like the above are not an accident. Back doors in phones, for example, are now part of the specification/requirements.

“Nokia should know how it’s done because many of its phones have back doors.”By the way, the ongoing death of Nokia is not going to be mitigated following the reports above. There are “possibly as many as 8,500 more layoffs, according to reports.”

Maybe they can find a new job. The NSA is recruiting; not systems administrators, just people who code to spy, crack, and infiltrate. Nokia should know how it’s done because many of its phones have back doors. █

08.09.13

Links 9/8/2013: Linux/Android Share in Tablets Soars

Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Konnect: control your KDE devices from your phone

        Today we are surrounded by ‘smart’ devices all around us – smartphones, tablets, TVs, PCs and many more. These devices naturally don’t interact with each other. There are some device specific apps developed by some companies but those work within the device spectrum of that company, for example Samsung All Share comes only for Samsung Android devices and work only with Samsung smart TVs.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Maintenance Release: PCLinuxOS-KDE-FullMonty 2013.08

        PCLinuxOS KDE FullMonty 2013.08 (32/64 bit) is now available for download.

      • Porteus 2.1 final and Porteus Kiosk Edition 2.1 are out!

        The Porteus Community is pleased to announce the distribution release of Porteus 2.1 (Standard Desktop Edition), as well as Porteus Kiosk Edition 2.1! Major additions since our 2.0 release include restructuring our layout to have standalone iso’s for five desktop environments (KDE4, RazorQT, Mate, Xfce and LXDE) and adding optional prepackaged modules for Google-Chrome, Opera, Libreoffice, Abiword, print/scan support and development software, all available through a new download interface that allows users to build and download customized ISO’s at http://build.porteus.org.

    • Debian Family

      • 20 Years of Debian GNU/Linux

        Debian GNU/Linux celebrates its 20th birthday anniversary this month. I have been using Debian GNU/Linux only a few years and I regret not having known Debian earlier. The growth, vitality, and quality of the project has been amazing. With Debian GNU/Linux I have been able to do a lot with a tiny investment in IT. It is a force-multiplier for good Free Software.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Edge Passes $9 Million, Smashes Crowd-Funding Record

            Over $9 million has now been pledged to the Ubuntu Edge campaign on IndieGoGo, helping it smash yet another crowd-funding record.

            This figure, whilst $23 million short of the required $32 million goal, makes Ubuntu Edge the second largest crowd-funding campaign in history. It shunts the Ouya games console, which raised $8.5 million over a 30 day period, into 3rd place.

          • Canonical Pushes Linux to the Edge With Bloomberg Backing

            The goal is to raise $32 million in 30 days to build 40,000 Ubuntu Edge next-generation smartphones.

          • Canonical lowers Edge pricing, launches app contest

            Canonical dropped the Indiegogo price for its Ubuntu Edge phone from $775 to $695. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project launched an Ubuntu App Showdown contest for the best Ubuntu for Phones app that can be developed between now and Sept. 15.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Mysterious countdown appears on elementary OS website

              It would appear that either yesterday, or the day before yesterday, a mysterious countdown was added to the elementary OS website. Or rather, the whole website was replaced by a countdown. So far, I haven’t found any definite indications of what exactly we’re counting down to.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Some Xerox Scanners Can Alter Documents by Accident

    On the scale of things too horrible to contemplate, “document-altering scanner” is right up there with “flesh-eating bacteria.” This week Xerox (XRX) acknowledged that some of its scanners can, with certain settings, change the numbers in scanned documents. On Wednesday it announced a fix for the problem, which a spokesman called “really an anomaly.”

    The problem came to light when David Kriesel, a German computer scientist, scanned a construction plan on a Xerox machine and noticed that the document that came out wasn’t identical to the one that went in: Numbers for some room measurements had changed. Kriesel alerted Xerox, wrote about the problem on his blog and began to investigate how widespread the problem is.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Drone Warfare Makes Killing a Spectator Sport

      Oh, the serious news! I read it with ever-fresh incredulity. It’s written for gamers. It reduces us to gamers as it updates us on the latest bends and twists in the geopolitical scene. We’re still playing War on Terror, the aim of which is to kill as many insurgents as possible; when they’re all dead, we win (apparently). The trick is to avoid inflaming the locals, who then transition out of passive irrelevance and join the insurgency. They get inflamed when we kill civilians, such as their children.

    • Redefining Security and Intelligence in an independent Scotland

      Military and intelligence stories have been all over the news recently. Be it indiscriminate eavesdropping programs, WMD infrastructure, or our impending doom at the hands of terrorists if we vote “yes”, there is a common denominator in the statements of the high heid yins: these are issue for the big boys, the role set out for the rest of us is to cower in fear and not to hurt our wee brains trying to understand. In the independence debate, we are warned that an independent Scotland is going to be overrun by terrorists, disastrously cyber-attacked, or run out of money trying to prevent these disasters from happening. The catalyst of the recent wave of scare stories is a report by a bunch of military and intelligence insiders, the crowd treated in the mainstream media as holding an exclusive grasp of the serious issue of our national security. But this deference is exactly the type of elitist approach that led us into the intelligence SNAFU we are in at the moment – with the agencies at odds with the democratic process and public control. The independence debate is a chance for us to crack open the debate on intelligence and the military, and imagine what a security apparatus actually subservient to democracy might look like.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Finance

    • ‘We Won’t Pay’: Greek activists reconnect power to poverty-stricken homes

      With a Eurozone record of 27 percent of Greeks unemployed, people are taking a pro-active approach to the crisis. Activists from the ‘We Won’t Pay’ movement, which boasts 10,000 members, are illegally reconnecting power to hundreds of homes.

      Tough austerity measures have left many people in Greece unable to pay their electricity bills. The ‘We Don’t Pay’ movement which has over 10,000 members helps many of those by illegally reconnecting power to their homes, despite legal action against them.

    • Greece becoming new Kosovo as youth jobless hits 65pc

      Greek youth unemployment has soared to a record 64.9pc as the country’s downward spiral continues almost unchecked.

    • Watch as plutocrats mold us into a New America, a nation more pleasing to their sight

      Increasing wealth creates positive feedback, much like a hurricane moving over warm water. A more powerful 1% allows them to command the political and economic high ground of America, so that they can gain further wealth — and shape a New America more to their liking. This process has run for several generations; now the results are plain to see — for all that wish to look. Today we have first of three tales of New America.

    • Greg Palast: Why Are the Greek People Agreeing to Their Own Destruction?

      In his career as an investigative journalist, economist, and bestselling author – Vultures’ Picnic, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy – Greg Palast has not been afraid to tackle some of the most powerful names in politics and finance. From uncovering Katherine Harris’ purge of African-American voters from Florida’s voter rolls in the year 2000 to revealing the truth behind the “assistance” provided by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to ailing economies, Palast has not held back in revealing the corruption and criminal actions of the wealthy and powerful. In a recent interview on Dialogos Radio, Palast turned his attention to Greece and to the austerity policies that have been imposed on the country by the IMF, the European Union, and the European Central Bank.

  • Censorship

    • Microsoft’s Bing Removes Several Hundred Thousand “Pirate” Search Results

      Over the past month copyright holders and Google have clashed over infringing search results and how they should be dealt with. Due to its smaller market share Microsoft’s Bing has rarely been mentioned, but the company informs TorrentFreak that they also remove hundreds of thousands of infringing URLs each month. Interestingly enough, Microsoft itself is one of the most active senders of DMCA notices to Bing.

    • Pirate Party Reports IT Minister to the Police for Copyright Infringement

      As the crackdown on copyright infringement in Sweden continues, the local Pirate Party has today held up a mirror to the politicians who support the tough enforcement regime. Marking the ten-year anniversary of The Pirate Bay, the Pirate Party have reported Sweden’s IT Minister to the police after she was spotted infringing copyright online on a number of occasions.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Feds Instruct Law Enforcement to Cover Up Investigations of Americans

      Agencies of the federal government are sharing the massive database of personal information being obtained by surveillance, and police are being taught how to hide the details from judges and lawyers, a Reuters report reveals.

    • Sen. Feinstein During ‘Shield’ Law Debate: ‘Real’ Journalists Draw Salaries

      I can see this stipulation working against whoever the government feels is worthy of the title “journalist.” News develops. It seldom has a distinct starting point. Of course, if someone is a journalist, it stands to reason that they’re always “planning” to publish their findings. But that might be a lot harder to prove when the government starts slinging subpoenas.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Cable and TV Networks Fee Fight Fallout— Who Pays? The Public

        Public Knowledge has a couple of pieces up on the fight between CBS and Time Warner Cable over TWC’s payment for the right to rebroadcast broadcasts and then charge the public link here and link here. CBS has already been amply rewarded through advertising on its over the air broadcasts free use of the public airwaves. But in the current fight, it wants still more money. Congress set this up in 1992 legislation which allowed the networks to charge for retransmission permission of its broadcasts.

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