11.05.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Desktop
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According to a press release by Inventec, their company is currently in collaboration with Xiaomi Corp. to produce two new laptops. Xiaomi will start selling two Linux laptops early next year, according to a report. Both will be introduced under the Xiaomi name brand and are reported for a scheduled release date in the early part of 2016.
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The Twitch in the Shell project has successfully installed Arch Linux using hundreds of people simultaneously hammering keys in a terminal. One of the organizers has explained to The Reg how it was done.
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Server
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Most technologists have heard about software containers (or simply “containers”) – a technology that became popularized by Docker, which is an open platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications through containers. Containers use shared operating systems to create a capsule, of sorts, to contain your application.
They are increasingly popular, but are not the panacea able to solve all the new challenges cloud computing presents. Problems mainly pertaining to security tend to hinder this technology. However, a new technology on the rise — unikernels — holds great promise for the next generation of cloud infrastructure.
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Disaggregated Junos software is part of Juniper’s effort to extract that software value in a more meaningful way, while providing more choice to customers. With the disaggregated model, instead of simply just putting Junos on top of hardware, now there will be a thin Linux kernel with containers into which Junos, services and other third party tools and apps can be deployed.
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The October ISG Cloud Comparison Index™ shows configurations that are run on a public cloud version of the Linux operating system can be highly cost competitive with those run on internal information technology. However, when deciding between options, buyers need to consider the significant price differences between cloud providers and the added costs of running enterprise-class operating systems on the public cloud, the report said.
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Kernel Space
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Besides landing the LightNVM / Open-Channel SSD supprot, another pull request by Jens Axboe is adding another new feature for Linux 4.4.
Axboe sent in generic block reservation support. This pull adds support at the block level for persistent reservations and implements it at the core level as well as for the SCSI and NVMe drivers.
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Exhausting travel aside, kernel summit in Seoul was a good use of time.
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Feminists in tech have been staging attempted “honey traps” to frame prominent male software developers for sexual assault, according to explosive claims on the blog of Eric S. Raymond, a pioneer of the open source movement. In allegations that will rock the world of software development, prominent targets included Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.
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The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.
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According to well-known open-source contributor Eric S Raymond, various “feminists” are trying to frame Linus Trovalds for sexual harassment.
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Many 64-bit ARM (ARM64) changes are inbound for the Linux 4.4 kernel.
First up with the Xen feature pull there is support for 64 KiB guest pages on 64-bit ARM along with CPU hot-plug support on ARM.
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While the DRM-Next pull request hasn’t even been issued yet for the Linux 4.4 merge window, AMD’s Alex Deucher has already sent in some extra fixes for the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver.
AMD already sent in their Stoney APU support and various other improvements last month for their Radeon and AMDGPU DRM kernel graphics drivers. Sent in today by Alex are some fixes.
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Linus Torvalds attacks the work of Kernel developer with strong language, again
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With the Open API Initiative, the Linux Foundation and its partners — including IBM — plan to make the next generation of APIs easier to find, use, document, and transform
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Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in his staging driver patches for the Linux 4.4 kernel on Wednesday.
He commented on the pull request, “Here’s the big staging driver update for 4.4-rc1. If you were disappointed for 4.3-rc1 that we didn’t contribute enough changesets, you should be happy with this pull request of over 2400 patches. But overall we removed more lines of code than we added, which is nice to see.”
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Red Hat’s Paolo Bonzini sent out the KVM updates today for the Linux 4.4 kernel.
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine updates for Linux 4.4 include a number of fixes for s390 and PowerPC systems, along with many ARM fixes and improvements, but the x86 KVM changes dominate this pull request. The x86 KVM code updates for Linux 4.4 include support for VT-d posted interrupts, more Microsoft Hyper-V functionality has been implemented, nested virtualization now supports VPID, NVDIMM support improvements, and various other x86-specific KVM virtualization advancements.
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Even more broadly, the battle over Linux security is a battle over the future of the online world. At a time when leading computer scientists are debating whether the Internet is so broken that it needs to be replaced, the network is expanding faster than ever, layering flaw upon flaw in an ever-expanding web of insecurity. Perhaps the best hope for fixing this, some experts argue, lies in changing the operating system that — more than any other — controls these machines.
But first, they have to change the mind of Linus Torvalds.
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Most of the F2FS patches for Linux 4.4 are for enhancing the stability and performance of the file-system’s in-memory extent caches feature. There’s also new ioctls to test behavior during power failures and checkpoints, a new background_gc=sync option to do garbage collection synchronously, periodic checkpoints support, and a number of bug-fixes.
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Graphics Stack
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Prolific Mesa contributor Ilia Mirkin has taken initial steps towards working on parallel shader compiles in Mesa.
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One month after the release of the Enlightenment 0.20 Alpha with much better Wayland support that led to the Wayland support from Enlightenment 0.19 being removed, the support continues to mature.
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Intel’s Mesa driver is finally seeing work done to support 16x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA).
With a series of commits since last night, the 16x MSAA support is being implemented. Up to now the Intel driver just supported MSAA sample counts of up to eight.
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Applications
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The fourth alpha release for Kodi 16 “Jarvis” is available this Sunday for testing.
Kodi 16 Alpha 4 brings Android Surface Rendering support to improve the display output for Android devices, drops libstagefright in favor of Android’s maturing MediaCodec implementation, changes to the add-on manager, drops support for the karaoke mode, and adds multi-touch support on Linux.
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Kubernetes and Docker Swarm are probably two most commonly used tools to deploy containers inside a cluster. Both are created as helper tools that can be used to manage a cluster of containers and treat all servers as a single unit. However, they differ greatly in their approach.
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Today we’re releasing Docker 1.9 – and it’s a big one. Docker Swarm and multi-host networking are production-ready, Docker Engine has a new volume management system, and Docker Compose has much better support for multiple environments. These in combination establish the foundation for scaling your distributed apps in production.
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Telegram Desktop is an open-source and cross-platform Telegram client for Linux. The client has support for notifications, sending messages and media files, and inserting emoji.
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As you may know, DrawPile is an open source drawing program, used for creating sketches. Among others, it enables the users to share the drawing live and draw simultaneously on the same picture.
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As you may know, Terminology is the terminal emulator from the Enlightenment desktop environment, having the main functions of any terminal emulator: support for backgrounds, themes for the layout and design, support for both X11 and Wayland, multiple tabs, support for block text selection and link handling and path and email address detection.
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Like a lot of people involved in the open source movement, though I use a variety of different tools for real time communications, I just can’t seem to get away from IRC. While IRC isn’t perfect, and I don’t love some of its quirks, it’s here to stay for at least the foreseeable future as its low barrier to entry and wide selection of open source clients make IRC, and particularly Freenode, the go-to place for open source projects to collaborate.
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So the work on lumail2 is going well, and already I can see that it is a good idea. The main reason for (re)writing it is to unify a lot of the previous ad-hoc primitives (i.e. lua functions) and to try and push as much of the code into Lua, and out of C++, as possible. This work is already paying off with the introduction of new display-modes and simpler implementation.
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As you may know, Guake is an open-source drop-down terminal emulator, inspired by the Quake console and written in Python and C. The users can open and hide it, by pressing a single keystroke only, which was configured to do such a thing.
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I have just released version 1.18 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Rising Star Games has announced the launch of Poncho, an new pixel art platformer for the PlayStation 4 computer entertainment system, PC, Mac and Linux.
A robot finds himself waking with no memory in a strange and desolate world, with nothing on his person but a strange and ancient artifact from a bygone era – a red poncho.
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One month after Trine 3 went into beta on Linux, this action role-playing game has been officially release for SteamOS / Linux.
Frozenbyte’s Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power was released for Windows in August as the sequel to Trine 2. One month after being in beta, Trine 3 is now ready for its official Linux debut and just in time for the shipping of Steam Machines with SteamOS.
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We know how terrible Larian has been at over-promising Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition for Linux, but with the game now listing Linux on SteamDB they are actually working on it.
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As you may know, Hedgewars is a clone of the popular Worms game, but it uses hogs, not worms. The users can choose from a lot of 2D maps, use different weapons or punches to kill the hogs from the rival teams.
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While Epic Games is still hard at work on their Unreal Tournament game powered by Unreal Engine 4, this afternoon they surprisingly announced a new game: Paragon.
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Rising Star Games have announced that their pixel-art platformer Poncho is now available on PlayStation, PC, Mac and Linux. They also discussed plans to release the game on PlayStation Vita as well as Wii U in the coming months.
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Grow Home from Ubisoft owned studio “Reflections” looks like it will come to Linux, the game looks pretty damn interesting too.
I shot off a message to my Ubisoft PR guy who has yet to respond, but why else would they add a Linux depot to Steam if they weren’t at least toying with the idea eh?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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This release, we focused on cleanup, polishing and quality-of-life improvements, with over 400 issues fixed and dozens of new translations. We have also gained two new frameworks: Solid, which replaces liblxqt-mount and some custom power management code and libkscreen, which replaces system xrandr calls and is wayland forward-compatible.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE will have an exhibit in the Expo at the upcoming LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference. The full conference takes place November 8 ‒ 13 in Washington D.C. The Expo is open on the 11th and 12th. There is no charge to attend the Expo.
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It’s hard to believe that more than a year has gone by since BogDan and I did our Qt on Android webinar! Like all good things that come to an end, so has the hosting for the archived version of the webinar. We hate to deprive anyone of still useful content, so here’s a link to the slides from the webinar for anyone who’s looking for them.
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We’re looking forward to exposing some gems hidden in the KDAB knowledge base. And we’d love feedback too—tell us if you find these tips useful, or what dramatic results you’ve achieved. We love to help, and we love hearing stories about how we helped. Your feedback helps us know that we’re on the right track.
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I have been hard at work to bring to you 4.14.3 Bugfix release for Trusty!
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One of the new useful tiny plasmoids that will be available in Plasma 5.5 is one called Activity Pager: you can find it in the kdeplasma-addons package of the release.
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We’re all excited for the new release of Plasma coming in less than a month and we at the Visual Design Group want to make it more exciting for our users too.
Every other release we try to change the extra wallpapers that we’re shipping with Plasma to our users and now it’s time the refresh the collection again.
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One of the most important dependencies for our phone project is libhybris. Libhybris is a neat technology to allow interfacing with Android drivers allowing for example to bring Wayland to a device where all we have are Android drivers.
Given that KWin provides a hwcomposer backend which uses libhybris to create an OpenGL context. All other applications need libhybris indirectly to have the Wayland OpenGL buffer exchange work automatically.
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As we now use upstream libhybris I hope to see distributions to pick up the work and provide a Plasma phone spin. I’d love to see an openSUSE phone or a Fedora phone (or any other distribution).
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Having Six talks on the event, whe managed to talk about beginner stuff to advanced ones without leaving anyone behind.
Our talks this year
– KDE Sysadmin: You can help even if you don’t progam (speaker Gomex)
– KDE and Linus: Living Dangerously – my adventures in Programming (speaker Tomaz Canabrava)
– KDE: First Steps to Contribute (speaker Icaro (Igor) Jerry Santana)
– KDE Plasma Mobile (speaker Helio Castro)
– KDE Plasma 5: Full of Resources (speaker Henrique Sant’Anna)
– KDE: The structure behind it (speaker Helio Castro)
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We are happy to announce the release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active 2.9.9. It is recommended update for the 2.9 series of the applications and underlying development frameworks.
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The ninth semi-monthly bug fix release of Krita is out!
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As you may know, Krita is an open-source image manipulation software, allowing the user to either create pictures from scratch or edit existing images. It is good because it supports most graphics tablets very well.
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And this is the reason behind my disappearance, my job at BlueSystems was not fun anymore and every project I mantained at KDE felt more like a chore than anything else. After a month of not jumping out of the bed to head to work it was time to move on. So I passed maintainership to the people that were actually doing the job (special mention to David) and I quit my job as a full time KDE hacker.
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KDAB believes that it is critical for our business to invest into Qt3D and Qt, in general, to keep pushing the technology forward and to ensure it remains competitive.
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And the giveaway is over! I want to thank everyone for entering and showing your support for Krita.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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After 5 months of development the MATE Desktop team are proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.12. We’d like to thank every MATE contributor and user.
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As many of you will be aware, Christian Hergert recently stepped down from the GNOME Foundation Board. As a result, we’ve had a place on the board to fill. In these situations, the bylaws [1] state that the Board of Directors may choose a replacement of their choosing [2].
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Ideally something like this would be completely hidden by the toolkit, and the application would just use the regular file chooser APIs. However, the Gtk+ filechooser APIs expose too much details about the file chooser dialog, which means it has to be a regular in-process widget. Unfortunately this means we can’t replace it by an out-of-process dialog.
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CoreOS has taken the wraps off Tectonic, a commercial distribution of the Kubernetes container manager, one focused for enterprise usage.
Tectonic can be used to run container-based workloads across a variety of cloud services, or within an organization’s own data center, or it could be used to shuffle containers across these environments.
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Eleven months later, the decline seems to be continuing at about the same rate, with the number of active distributions down to 276, and the decline is starting to seem an actual trend.
Critics might argue that the apparent trend might not be a trend at all. It could be a reflection of Distrowatch’s criteria for listing a distribution, or how quickly Distrowatch posts new distributions. However, given that the site regularly posts announcements of new releases for both new and established distros, there seems no reason for either to be a factor. Admittedly, Distro Hunt, a newer, similar site, includes listings that Distrowatch does not. But since projects can add their own descriptions to Distro Hunt, it’s possible that some of its entries have never had a release or disappeared without taking down their descriptions. Moreover, unlike Distrowatch, Distro Hunt provides no easy way of counting the total. The best available (if tentative) evidence, then, is that the trend exists.
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Reviews
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The GALPon MiniNo distro is akin to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It will rival any of the leading Linux communities for performance.
Widespread acceptance in the educational and consumer markets with non-Spanish-speaking users is at risk. The developers have to improve on the language localization issues.
Critical packages like the system update launchers display in Spanish only. Others software titles have the same problem. Others suffer from bits and pieces of vocabulary crossover
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New Releases
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This release features not just the Unity Desktop, but Gnome-shell and the ever popular Gnome 2 fork called Mate, though we primarily will support Unity only.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Following yesterday’s article about openSUSE 42.1 Leap being tweaked for better out-of-the-box performance, I ran some benchmarks on the officially-released openSUSE 42.1 to compare it to the older benchmarks I did when Leap was still under development.
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PhillipOS is a linux distro I developed that is based on OpenSUSE 13.2. I first started developing operating systems in 2005 when I started to develop Ingos Linux build one, based on Ubuntu 4.10. When I finished it, I sent to a few of my friends via email, and they all liked it.
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The latest version of the openSUSE operating system is the first to combine community-developed software with professionally-developed source code from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE).
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If you are a more advanced user, or you are interested in learning more in depth about Linux, then you might be a bit happier with Fedora. But that really is a gross simplification of their overall state, and with a small amount of effort either of these could be made just as suitable for any task as the other one.
So pick one, install it, and give it a try! Or do as I have, and install them both in a dual-boot configuration, and compare them for yourself to see which you like the best.
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Red Hat Family
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The SME Server development team is pleased to announce the release of SME Server 8.2 which is based on CentOS 5.11.
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Most executives will say you are what you read, and that’s no different for Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
The former chief operating officer of Delta and the author of “The Open Organization” oversees more than 8,000 employees in 80 countries at the open-source software company. His unique views on corporate culture — including the importance of killing terminally nice cultures and his belief that employees who cry are good hires — have been shaped by several thought leaders along the way.
To find out what most influenced his career and leadership style, we asked him to share the business books that have been his biggest sources of inspiration. Read on to see his top recommendations.
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Fedora
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Fedora 23 is the latest edition of the Fedora Linux distribution, released just this week.
The first screenshots from a Fedora 23 test installation that I posted are from the Cinnamon Spin, which you may view here.
In this post are screenshots from a test installation of Fedora 23 KDE, the most popular of the Fedora Spins.
Fedora 23 KDE features the latest KDE Plasma 5. Figure 1 shows the login window.
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The marketing group was a bit disorganized in the F23 cycle, and we can do much better. I hope to do more in the F24 cycle, but I can’t do it alone, and don’t really want to! So if you want to see Fedora succeed wildly, I hope you’ll find a way to join our efforts. Read the full piece on Fedora Magazine, and feel free to ask if you need help jumping in!
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Valve is getting really close to the launch of the Steam Machines, and the developers are preparing the SteamOS distro. They have just released a new stable update, and it comes with a ton of updates.
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My Linux migration story started in 2009, when I bought a tiny Asus Eee pc netbook pre-installed with Linux, a version of Xandros that I did not like much.
In trying to replace it, I had my first encounter with Xubuntu (no wi-fi support), Debian (minimal shell), and Mandriva, which I installed because it supported wi-fi out of the box.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Users of the Xenial Xerus desktop will find that the familiar (and somewhat cumbersome) Ubuntu Software Centre is no longer available.
GNOME’s Software application will – according to current plans – take its place as the default and package management utility on the Unity 7-based desktop.
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So this is the week of the Ubuntu Online Summit, and many of the sessions are discussing Snappy. As you may know, Snappy is currently pretty geared toward embedded, headless devices. However, it is the successor to Click, and eventually the phones will be based upon it. To drive that effort forward, a few colleagues and I had a session (you can watch the video) where we discussed the path forward for supporting snaps on other devices, specifically the phone and the desktop.
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The Ubuntu Online Summit for developers and contributors to Ubuntu Linux begins tomorrow and runs through Thursday as planning gets underway for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, a.k.a. the Xenial Xerus.
The Ubuntu Online Summit runs from 3 November to 5 November and can be monitored via summit.ubuntu.com.
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The video is embedded below for those interested in detail what Mark had to say during his nearly hour-long talk. Among the focuses were reiterating that Ubuntu 16.04 is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, work is ongoing towards the Ubuntu convergence goals and they are making progress, and also talk of Ubuntu in other areas like drones.
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For years Ubuntu developers have been working on moving from Python 2 to Python 3 and for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS next April that goal will hopefully be finally realized.
There were some dreams that the Python 2 to Python 3 migration would happen for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so that Python 3 would be the default, now two years later, it looks like it might finally happen for the Xenial Xerus. A session was held today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for migrating over to Python 3 by default and to no longer ship Python 2 as part of the default package-set.
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Canonical is looking to make some substantial changes to the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), and the developers are preparing to drop Ubuntu Software Center and replace it with GNOME Software.
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Canonical just revealed that the latest Firefox 42.0 is now in the official repositories for the users of Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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Canonical has invested a lot of time and resources in the new Snappy packages, so it’s only natural that the developers want to make sure that people will be able to use it in the regular deb-based Ubuntu system.
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Ubuntu developers have a lot of plans for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and it already seems like it’s going to be a fascinating release. They have just announced that the Brasero and Empathy apps will no longer be included by default, and GNOME Calendar will be implemented.
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The application used in Ubuntu systems to write ISOs to USB disks, the Startup Creator, is being redesigned and rebuilt for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
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As you may know, Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch is used by default on Meizu MX4, BQ Aquaris E4.5 and BQ Aquaris E5 and officially supported on the LG Nexus 4. While the BQ phones are mid-range, Meizu is among the most popular phone vendors in China, the MX4 being a premium headset.
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Aside from trying to make Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Python-3-only, Kubuntu developers planning for Xenial, and Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, there’s also been a lot of other interesting sessions to happen over the first two days of this week’s Ubuntu Online Summit.
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Ubuntu 15.10 will be supported for 9 months for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin along with all other flavours.
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Wind River unveiled a “Helix Cloud” platform for IoT development and management, plus two small-footprint OSes: a “Rocket” RTOS and “Pulsar Linux.”
Intel subsidiary Wind River has released Wind River Pulsar Linux, an IoT-oriented version of its commercial Wind River Linux distribution, as well as a new Wind River Rocket RTOS. Both of these embedded OSes are designed to work with a newly unveiled Wind River Helix Cloud platform for developing, testing, monitoring, and analyzing cloud-connected IoT applications. Wind River Helix Cloud is available in App, Lab, and Device versions, and is said to provide “anytime, anywhere access to development tools, virtual labs, and deployed devices.” (see farther below).
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Innovative Integration’s “Cardsharp” SBC is an XMC form-factor board that runs Linux on a Zynq-Z7045, and provides an FMC slot compatible with FMC modules.
Innovative Integration has launched a “turnkey embedded instrument” called the Cardsharp designed for embedded and mobile instrumentation, remote autonomous I/O, and distributed data acquisition applications. The Linux-based, 149 x 74mm XMC form-factor single-board computer is also said to be “perfect for portable or vehicle-based data loggers or handheld field equipment use.”
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Phones
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Tizen
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Earlier this year, Tizen overtook the Firefox Operating System (OS) and became the world’s No.5 Smartphone OS in Q2 2015. That was an Important step for the Linux based OS to gain wider recognition. Now, according to a published report, Tizen has overtaken Blackberry to become the Fourth largest OS shipping in Q3 2015. Android saw a slight Increase in market share whilst Apple gained momentum with their new iPhone models and Microsoft, Blackberry and firefox all drilled down.
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Tizen the OS of Everything. That was the slogan that the Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) 2015 in Shenzhen this year. Tizen was Introduced to devs as a versatile OS that is light on CPU, Battery and Memory. You can develop WebApps using HTML5 / CSS3 / JS and also Native apps using Native – C / EFL. There are also Hybrid Apps, but as the name suggests are a mix between Web and Native apps.
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Android
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Smartwatches really only came onto the scene in a major way in the past two years — Google, Apple, and Samsung are all hoping it’ll be the next big computing platform. Since then, we’ve seen lots of manufacturers try different strategies for strapping a computer on your wrist, but they were all pretty bad experiences — until right around now. More importantly, smartwatches have stopped looking like hideous wrist gadgets and more like, well, watches.
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So far, most of the signs for a potential merger have occurred on the Chrome OS side rather than Android. In April of this year Google opened up its App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), enabling the porting of Android apps to Chrome OS. In addition, the Chrome OS Chrome Launcher 2.0 features a more Android-like Material Design, and integrates Android’s Google Now personal assistant.
There was not much evidence of a Chrome OS infusion in the most recent Android 6.0 “Marshmallow” release. However, Google recently furthered its vision of Android on the desktop with the Pixel C, a keyboard-convertible tablet developed by Google’s Chromebook team.
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A user switches to Android after six years of iPhones
There’s been quite a lot of stories in the media about Android users switching to the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. But there are also some iPhone users who have gone the other way and switched to Android.
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Before I switched to Android I googled like crazy for similar articles. I was interested in the most common experience of former iPhone users on Android phones. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find too much. So I want to share my notes to help fill this gap a little bit.
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It’s Nexus time again, the time each year when Google ships its hero devices in the Nexus line. That’s a brand of phones and tablets commissioned by the company starting in 2010 — not to be huge sellers, but to show the world the best of its Android operating system.
Nexus phones are meant to present the latest versions of Android, in pure form, unadulterated by the software overlays and bloatware apps added by the hundreds of Android phone makers. They also give Google a chance to showcase its own latest apps and services, which are sometimes missing entirely from Android phones, especially in emerging markets. And, unlike most other Android devices, they get updated almost as soon as Google releases patches.
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At the Big Android Barbecue 2015, we had the honor of interviewing Alin Jerpelea from Sony, after his great talk on Sony’s plans to open up the hardware of their devices as well as future plans for their developer programs. You can find the full, highly recommendable talk here.
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The Linux Foundation report states that in 2013, many cloud projects were still working out their core enterprise features and building in functionality, and companies were still very much in the early stages of planning and testing their public, private or hybrid clouds.
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openCypher promises to accelerate a quickly expanding graph data space because it offers new benefits for users, tooling providers, organizations and end users.
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The decision represents a market shift for Kustodian, a multinational provider of penetration-testing and other security services that has worked extensively with commercial SIEM platforms in the past. However, CEO Chris Rock told CSO Australia, it recently became clear that open-source solutions – in particular, the ELK stack from Elasticsearch – offered a significant new opportunity to democratise the delivery of SOCs that often weighed in north of $1m using conventional commercial products and services.
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Trying to understand open source adoption is a challenging task. In contrast to public companies, the metrics of open-source projects mostly rely on the number of GitHub stars (which is public) or the number of downloads (which is often unknowable).
As a co-founder and CEO of Logz.io, I’ve been heavily involved in the open source log analytics domain through working with with the community and focusing on the ELK Stack.
The background: The ELK Stack is the combination of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana that is used specifically in log analytics. Logstash ships log data to Elasticsearch, which indexes the information in a searchable datastore. Kibana then takes the datastore and shows the information in graphical format for log analysis.
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As you might expect the Open Source Initiative (OSI) uses quite a few open source tools to support our work in promoting and protecting open source software, development, and communities—things like content management systems (Drupal), wikis (XWiki), issue tracking/bug reporting (Redmine), desktop sharing (BigBlueButton), membership management (CiviCRM), etc.
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Not every new open source project needs a new foundation. In fact, the rise of all these new foundations could be hurting the open source cause
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Cross-community collaboration is developing and thriving inside the walls of this year’s LinuxCon 2015, and people like Diane Mueller, director of community development at Red Hat OpenShift, are leading the charge.
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The ability to scale up and stronger security has seen a pervasive proliferation of open source software (OSS) although these don’t have as many competitive features as proprietary software, according to the Ninth Annual Future of Open Source Survey conducted by Black Duck Software, a company that facilitates the adoption of OSS.
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The first step was to find a notebook and a pen and just write down 100 ideas for interesting open source projects. These project ideas ranged across all manner of topics, depth, and quality. I thought of wild language ideas, new features in existing projects, system designs, protocols, missing documentation, interesting forks, golfing code, games, prototypes, implementations of paper ideas, second-systems, whatever.
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My advice for anyone starting out in open source is simple: Be humble, but bold. The great thing about open source is that you can make a great impact, but you have to do it within the confines of a community, and learning how to bring your best while working in sometimes challenging interpersonal situations is a skill that you can only acquire through practice.
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My position on free and open source software is somewhere in the spectrum between hard-core FSF/GNU position on Free Software, and the corporate open source pragmatism that looks at open source as being great for some things but really not a goal in and of itself. I don’t eschew all proprietary software, and I’m not going to knock people for using tools and devices that fit their needs rather than sticking only to FOSS.
At the same time, I think it’s important that we trend towards everything being open, and I find myself troubled by the increasing acceptance of proprietary tools and services by FOSS developers/projects. It shouldn’t be the end of the world for a FOSS developer, advocate, project, or company to use proprietary tools if necessary. Sometimes the FOSS tools aren’t a good fit, and the need for something right now overrides the luxury of choosing a tool just based on licensing preference. And, of course, there’s a big difference between having that discussion for a project like Fedora, or an Apache podling/TLP, or a company that works with open source.
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To foster engagement and keep people posted, publish and share both individually and as a team. Setting a schedule is difficult, but you should try to publish at least one reflective post per month (I do one a week). Pre-populate tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite during meetings. Utilize tools like IFTTT, Zapier, Buffer, etc. There are easy ways to share ideas around the Web. Use them!
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla published Firefox 42.0 as the newest version of their cross-platform web browser.
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With the Firefox 42 debut, Mozilla introduces a new tracking protection feature and provides patches for 17 security advisories.
Mozilla’s today released the Firefox 42 browser, which provides users with improved privacy and security capabilities.
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SaaS/Big Data
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I was in the buzz-making business long before I learned how it was done. That happened here, at Linux Journal. Some of it I learned by watching kernel developers make Linux so useful that it became irresponsible for anybody doing serious development not to consider it—and, eventually, not to use it. Some I learned just by doing my job here. But most of it I learned by watching the term “open source” get adopted by the world, and participating as a journalist in the process.
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Databases
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MongoDB Inc. announced a new version of its open source-based NoSQL database with features designed to make it more attractive for enterprise use.
MongoDB 3.2 can handle a wider range of mission-critical applications, its parent company said, and has been extended to handle new enterprise-oriented tasks “by deeply integrating with the modern CIO’s technology stack.”
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Oracle/Java
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NetBeans IDE 8.1 provides out-of-the-box code analyzers and editors for working with the latest Java 8 technologies–Java SE 8, Java SE Embedded 8, and Java ME Embedded 8. The IDE also has a range of new tools for HTML5/JavaScript, in particular for Node.js, KnockoutJS, and AngularJS; enhancements that further improve its support for Maven and Java EE with PrimeFaces; and improvements to PHP and C/C++ support.
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The NetBeans 8.1 IDE continues to be focused around the latest Java 8 technologies from Oracle, but there’s also a number of new tools for HTML5, JavaScript, Node.js, KnockoutJS, and AngularJS. NetBeans 8.1 has a number of additions for easing development with Node.js, adds/enhances support for a wide variety of HTML5 and other JavaScript technologies, also advances some PHP and C/C++ language handling, and the NetBeans profiler has been redesigned while adding new features. There’s also better Git support with NetBeans 8.1.
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CMS
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October is a content management system (CMS) based on the Laravel framework. Many of my readers will already know that I am a huge fan of Laravel. The framework makes development workflow a breeze and takes care of a lot of the mundane tasks. Linuxphile is, in fact, built on Laravel. I had also developed http://twistedtastes.com using Laravel. After the development of Twisted Tastes my wife and I came across October.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source/Openwashing
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We are pleased to announce GNU Guile release 2.1.1. This is the first pre-release of what will eventually become the 2.2 release series. It provides many improvements, most notably in speed: it starts up faster than Guile 2.0, runs your programs faster, and uses less memory; see below for full details. We encourage you to test this release and provide feedback to address@hidden
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We are pleased to announce the next alpha release of GNU Guix, version 0.9.0.
The release comes with USB installation images to install the standalone GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of a running GNU/Linux system, either from source or from binaries.
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Licensing
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The TPP E-Commerce chapter has a provision banning requirements to transfer or provide access to software source code. This applies to “mass market software.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Researchers around the globe who want to customize medical capsule robots won’t have to start from scratch – a team from Vanderbilt University School of Engineering did the preliminary work for them and is ready to share.
Through a website and a paper revealed at a pair of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conferences, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Pietro Valdastri, Associate Professor of Computer Engineering Akos Ledeczi and their team made the capsule hardware and software open-source.
The paper, titled “Systematic Design of Medical Capsule Robots,” ran in a special issue of IEEE Design & Test magazine dedicated to cyber-physical systems for medical applications. Within years, Vanderbilt’s capsule robots, made small enough to be swallowed, could be used for preventative screenings and to diagnose and treat a number of internal diseases.
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Open Access/Content
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It’s really somewhat astounding just how absolutely hated journal publishing giant Elsevier has become in certain academic circles. The company seems to have perfected its role of being about as evil as possible in trying to lock up knowledge and making it expensive and difficult to access. A few years ago, we noted that a bunch of academics were banding together to boycott journals published by the company, as more and more people were looking at open access journals, allowing them to more freely share their research, rather than locking it up. Elsevier’s response has been to basically crack down on efforts to share knowledge. The company has been known to charge for open access research — sometimes even buying up journals and ignoring the open licenses on the works. The company has also been demanding professors takedown copies of their own research. Because how dare anyone actually benefit from knowledge without paying Elsevier its toll. And that’s not even mentioning Elsevier’s history of publishing fake journals as a way to help giant pharmaceutical companies pretend their treatments were effective.
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Finally, a bit of good news on the college costs front: A study out of Brigham Young University finds that free open source textbooks do the job pretty darn well.
The study of nearly 17,000 students at 9 colleges found that open source textbooks (or open educational resources — OERs in academic lingo) found that students learn the same amount or more from the free books across many subjects. (Here’s a sampling of the sorts of texts available, via a University of Minnesota site.)
What’s more, 85% of students and instructors said open textbooks were actually better than the commercial ones. The research focused its results based on measurements such as course completion, final grade, final grade of C- or higher, enrollment intensity, and enrollment intensity in the following semester.
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Programming
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A lot has happened in the eight months since the 0.3 release: the 0.4 release contains 2000 commits, three times as many commits as either the 0.2 or 0.3 release. Moving forward, our plan is to release every four months, but for now please enjoy a double-sized release.
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A US software company has signed on with IBM to release a new native build of Big Blue’s OS/2.
Arca Noae said its “Blue Lion” build of OS/2 will run on the bare metal of PCs without the need for an emulator or hypervisor.
Those still using the 28-year-old operating system and its applications typically run the stack in a virtualized environment on modern reliable hardware. The bare-metal OS will be freed from its virtual prison, and released to the world, in the third quarter of next year, we’re told.
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The nation’s bars, pubs and discos will be jam-packed with drunken partiers decked out in Santa hats and elf costumes on Friday. Welcome to the strange Danish ‘holiday’ known as J-Day.
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Hardware
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Unlike the current, 400MHz Quark X1000, found on the Intel Galileo hacker SBC and numerous IoT gateway products, these new microcontroller-like Quarks run at only 32MHz, and support bare-metal code and real-time operating systems (RTOSes), but not Linux.
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Security
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Hackers are exploiting SQL injection flaws to infect MySQL database servers with a malware program that’s used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Security researchers from Symantec found MySQL servers in different countries infected with a malware program dubbed Chikdos that has variants for both Windows and Linux.
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Kaspersky says that 45.6% of all recorded DDoS attacks were launched from Linux computers.
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RAT stands for Remote Access Trojan (some use the term Tool as well) and refers to a particular piece of malware that infects user computers via a client component, which then starts communicating with a server counterpart. This allows an attacker to steal data from a target, spy on the user, and even take control of the victim’s device.
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Many of the recently developed security features for containers, such as per-container ulimit, capability reduction, device access restrictions, improved handling of Linux Security Modules (SELinux, AppArmor), improved user namespaces and others are all examples of defense-in-depth (multiple layers of protection).
Despite these efforts, the fundamental problem with containers compared to hypervisors still persists as they have an exceedingly large “attack surface” making them inherently vulnerable, despite efforts to use minimal Linux distros. This is why technologies that try to combine virtualization with containers — such as Hyper, Clear Containers and Xen Containers — are starting to build momentum.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Bush’s own Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told 60 Minutes in 2004 that Bush “sought a way to invade Iraq.” Recent emails show Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair planning the Iraq war a whole year before 9/11. Put simply, the Bush administration didn’t need “convincing”—what it needed was fodder to convince the American public (not all of whom, of course, were ever convinced). These are two entirely different readings of history that have, in the past 48 hours, become dangerously conflated by some.
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With helicopters hovering overhead, and surrounded by an army of security forces, this is how America transports its nuclear weapons. However, as this onlooker captures, amid police harrassment for filming, it appears one of the military trucks was just a little too close and rear-ends a truck carrying a nuclear missile.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A new NASA study found that there has been a net increase in land ice in Antarctica in recent years, despite a decline in some parts of the continent. The study’s lead author astutely predicted that climate science deniers would distort the study, even though it does nothing to contradict the scientific consensus on climate change or the fact that sea levels will continue to rise.
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The final text of a huge 12-country trade agreement has confirmed the “worst nightmares” of environmental groups, with no mention of climate change in its lone environment chapter and weak enforcement mechanisms, Australian academics say.
The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement was finally released on Thursday, with Trade Minister Andrew Robb saying the deal will deliver “substantial benefits for Australia” in the rapidly growing Asia Pacific.
The TPP is the biggest global trade deal in 20 years, involving 12 countries in the Pacific region which collectively represent over 40 per cent of world GDP.
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Finance
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One of Techdirt’s earliest posts on corporate sovereignty was back in October 2013, when we wrote about the incredible case of Chevron. It used the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism to suspend the enforcement of a historic $18 billion judgment against the oil corporation made by Ecuador’s courts because of the company’s responsibility for mass contamination of the Amazonian rain forest. Given the huge sums involved, it’s no surprise that things didn’t end there.
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We Americans have been deceived by the notion that individual desires preempt the needs of society; by the Ayn-Rand/Reagan/Thatcher aversion to government regulation; by the distorted image of “freedom” as winner-take-all capitalism; by the assurance that the benefits of greed will spread downward to everyone.
Our current capitalist-driven inequalities will only be rectified when people realize that a strong community makes successful individuals, not the other way around.
Here are a few of the ways we would benefit with a social democracy.
[...]
Nationally, we spend over $1 trillion per year on defense. Not just the half-trillion Pentagon budget, but another half-trillion for veterans affairs, homeland security, “contingency operations,” and a variety of other miscellaneous military “necessities.”
But that’s not enough for the relative few at the top of our outrageously unequal society. The richest Americans build private fortresses to protect themselves from the rest of us, as they scoff at the notion of a 1950s-like progressive tax structure that would provide infrastructure funding for all of us.
[...]
In the extreme capitalist mind, Steve Jobs started with boxes of silicon and wires in a garage and fashioned the first iPhone. The reality is explained by Mariana Mazzucato: “Everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system— all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA.”
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When some of us hear Jeb Bush’s new slogan, “Jeb can fix it,” we don’t think of a mechanic getting under the hood and fixing the nation’s problems. We don’t even think of Jimmy Savile, the notorious British pedophile, whose show was called “Jim’ll fix it,” although some people sure will. No, we think about Election 2000 and the Florida recount, where Jeb proved that his slogan isn’t all hot air. Whatever else he did as Governor of Florida, when it came to that election, Jeb fixed it.
Anyone old enough to remember that election night, which was 15 years ago today, will remember that the outcome of the electoral college depended on that one state. And what came next is exactly what anyone would have predicted would happen when an election is so close it triggers a recount in a state in which the levers of power and the electoral machinery are run by one of the candidates’ brothers. That candidate was the one who became president.
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China’s commerce regulator will investigate accusations by JD.com Inc. that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is unfairly pressuring merchants to shun competing platforms, JD said, ratcheting up a battle between the nation’s two biggest online retailers.
The State Administration for Industry & Commerce accepted JD’s request to look into Alibaba’s attempts to lock in merchants ahead of the crucial “Singles’ Day” promotion next week, JD said in an online post Thursday. China’s second-largest Web retailer has accused its larger rival of forcing merchants to choose between the two, which it said hampers competition and violates regulations.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Billionaire mega-donor Charles Koch admitted that the handful of billionaires who bankroll political campaigns are doing it because they expect something in return.
Yet the outsized influence of the .00001% doesn’t threaten democracy, he said, as long as a fellow billionaire thinks those big donors have the right intentions.
Koch appeared with his brother David on MSNBC”s “Morning Joe” this week as part of a PR blitz to soften the Koch brothers’ image ahead of the 2016 elections, where the Koch network plans to spend $250 million on direct electoral activities and a total of nearly $1 billion on broader political work.
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Censorship
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Another day, another example of copyright being used to censor. A few weeks ago, we wrote about a sketchy crowdfunded “food scanning device” company called TellSpec, which had ridiculously threatened the online publication Pando Daily with laughably ridiculous defamation claims. The threats were ridiculous for any number of reasons, including the fact that the statute of limitations had expired and the commentary wasn’t even remotely defamatory. There were also some weird (and stupid) threats about suing in the UK, despite TellSpec being based in Toronto and Pando in the US. At some point, TellSpec then denied having made the threats, but that appeared to be pure damage control.
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The National Endowment for the Humanities announced last Wednesday the “Chronicling America” contest to create projects out of historical newspaper data. The contest is supposed to showcase the history of the United States through the lens of a popular (and somewhat ephemeral) news format. But looking at the limits of the archival data, another story emerges: the dark cloud of copyright’s legal uncertainty is threatening the ability of amateur and even professional historians to explore the last century as they might explore the ones before it.
Consider that the National Digital Newspaper Program holds the history of American newspapers only up until 1922. (It originally focused on material from 1900-1910 and gradually expanded outwards to cover material from as early as 1836.) Those years may seem arbitrary—and it makes sense that there would be some cut-off date for a historical archive—but for copyright nerds 1922 rings some bells: it’s the latest date from which people can confidently declare a published work is in the public domain. Thanks to the arcane and byzantine rules created by 11 copyright term extensions in the years between 1962 and 1998, determining whether a work from any later requires consulting a flow chart from hell—the simple version of which, published by the Samuelson Clinic last year, runs to 50 pages.
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Privacy
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The total redrafting of UK surveillance laws was under growing challenge last night after an initially broad political welcome gave way to alarm at the detail of the proposed sweeping powers for spies.
MPs and privacy groups raised concerns about the proposed judicial oversight regime set out by Theresa May – while the home secretary also revealed that since 2001 ministers have issued secret directions to internet and phone companies to hand over the communications data of British citizens in bulk.
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The Government’s just published the draft Investigatory Powers Bill. It will decide the surveillance powers that the police and intelligence have for years to come.
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“This Bill will redefine the relationship between the state and the public for a generation. The government needs to get it right and made sure that the UK’s law enforcement and security agencies can fight serious crime while upholding all of our human rights.”
“However, at first glance, it appears that this Bill is an attempt to grab even more intrusive surveillance powers and does not do enough to restrain the bulk collection of our personal data by the secret services. It proposes an increase in the blanket retention of our personal communications data, giving the police the power to access web logs. It also gives the state intrusive hacking powers that can carry risks for everyone’s Internet security.”
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The past week has seen the most bizarre spinning. The BBC and the Times suddenly “managed to secure” exclusive stories about the wonderful world of secret intelligence, shamelessly pegged to the premiere of the film. The Times offered a gushing prospectus of work inside GCHQ. The BBC’s Frank Gardner sat, obsequious, in a darkened room and asked faceless voices what it was like being “the real James Bond”. It was like a spoof promotion video for the Stasi.
[...]
Despite the fearmongers, Britain faces no threat to its territory or political stability, nothing that remotely justifies the massive intrusion into privacy originally sought by GCHQ and the police. Today’s threat is from fanatics and criminals who want to shoot people and explode bombs – extremely dangerous but not a state threat. The question is, does this require Britons to have their every phone call, email and browser record stored, scanned, registered and, inevitably, shared with spies, the police and – whatever anyone says – a wide range of public officials?
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So why is the majority of the British press so relaxed about mass surveillance? Why do they not associate this threat with the ‘300 years of press freedom’, which they hold so dear? Have they not read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which explicitly links the death of freedom with the death of privacy? Even the United Nations (not always first off the mark where human rights are concerned) is able to see the danger here, as evidenced by the creation this year of a new special rapporteur on ‘the right to privacy in the digital age’.
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The intention is that the draft Bill will be the basis of consultation, with a revised Bill being published in 2016. This revised Bill will need to be enacted by the end of next year, as the current Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act expires on 31 December 2016 and one section of it has been quashed by the High Court as from March 2016.
Publication is therefore the start of what may be a year-long legislative process. On the face of it, the government intends to take the legislative process seriously. The Bill has been published with extensive explanatory materials, fact sheets and impact assessments. The page count of those documents is higher than that of the bill itself — the government wishes to give the impression this process is to be done properly and thoroughly.
Of course, what the government brings to parliament next year may not correspond to this draft, and it may be that the government pushes measures through at speed next year which are not in this version. So it is too early to say that this draft Bill puts “parliament in charge” as the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation said on Wednesday.
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The Government has published a draft Bill on Investigatory Powers that it hopes to see through Parliament within a year. If it becomes law, the Investigatory Powers Bill will replace much, but not all, of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, as well as the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014.
It is the Government’s response to the Edward Snowden revelations, and to three different reports that made almost 200 reform recommendations between them.There will be much debate about the powers set out in the draft Bill. It proposes to give certain powers of the intelligence and security services a (new) legal basis in statute and will consolidate much of the law in this field. While the nature and extent of these powers is open to disputation, if there are to be such powers, it is surely better that there is avowal and regulation, rather than secrecy and denial.
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The total redrafting of UK surveillance laws was under growing challenge on Wednesday night after an initially broad political welcome gave way to alarm at the detail of the proposed sweeping powers for spies.
MPs and privacy groups raised concerns about the proposed judicial oversight regime set out by the home secretary, Theresa May, who made the dramatic admission that ministers had issued secret directions since 2001 to internet and phone companies to hand over the communications data of British citizens in bulk.
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Jimmy Wales has suggested that Apple should stop selling iPhones in the UK, if the government passes a new law that would prevent technology firms and service providers from using end-to-end encryption to protect private communications.
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Britons could soon have their web surfing recorded for later police consultation, but the government has reportedly backed off plans to order companies like Apple to unlock encrypted phones and messages
A threatened ban on encryption has been banished from a draft bill on surveillance powers in the U.K. — but the government plans to explicitly allow bulk surveillance of Internet traffic by security and intelligence agencies.
U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May began by listing the things the draft bill did not contain as she introduced it in Parliament on Wednesday.
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A year after its launch, Microsoft is making some changes to its OneDrive cloud storage plans—including eliminating the unlimited storage offered to Office 365 subscribers, because according to Microsoft, some people got greedy.
In a post to the OneDrive blog, Microsoft wrote: “Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.”
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MICROSOFT HAS ADMITTED that Windows 10 is collecting more data than any of its predecessors, and there’s not much you can do about it.
In an interview with PC World, Microsoft corporate vice president Joe Belfiore defended the collection of what the company refers to as “basic telemetry”, explaining that it is a necessary part of improving Windows’ functionality.
Windows has always collected information like this. Every blue screen of death creates an error report which is uploaded to Microsoft. But so much more is collected now and, yes, this does mean that search terms that you enter into Windows as well as anonymous machine gibberish is going up to the cloud.
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The long-awaited Investigatory Powers Bill has been published at last. The draft Bill is almost 300 pages long so it is going to take us a while to go through the detail but here is our first take on what it contains.
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Civil Rights
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The United States is governed at the national level by two major parties: the right-wing Republicans and the center-left Democrats.. It has been 165 years since someone was elected president who did not come from this political duopoly, which does not represent the full range of views held by the U.S. electorate but has worked hard to ensure that the candidates it puts forward are often the only ones from which voters can choose.
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The United States House of Representatives passed legislation to establish an “insider threat” program at the Department of Homeland Security, which would permit the continuous monitoring of credit, criminal, and social media activities of DHS employees and would potentially impact national security whistleblowers.
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Law enforcement agencies around the country are increasingly embracing biometric technology, which uses intrinsic physical or behavioral characteristics—such as fingerprints, facial features, irises, tattoos, or DNA—to identify people, sometimes even instantly. Just as the technology that powers your cell phone has shrunk both in size and cost, mobile biometric technologies are now being deployed more widely and cheaply than ever before—and with less oversight.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The text of the TPP was released by TPP Parties on 5 November 2015 and can be accessed by Chapter below. Legal verification of the text will continue in the coming weeks. The Agreement will also be translated into French and Spanish language versions.
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Instead of combatting the ability to bring cases such as Eli Lilly’s, the TPP’s investment chapter invites them. Any time a national court – including in the U.S. – invalidates a wrongfully granted patent or other intellectual property right, the affected company could appeal that revocation to foreign arbitrators. The new language would also make clear that private companies are empowered by the treaty to challenge limitations and exceptions like the U.S. fair use doctrine, or individual applications of it. Adoption of this set of rules in the largest regional trade agreement of its kind would upset the international intellectual property legal system and should be subject to the most rigorous and open debate in every country where it is being considered.
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Copyrights
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As IPKat readers will promptly recall, last May the EU Commission issued its Digital Single Market Strategy (DSMS) [here and here]. In this document this EU institution promised policy and legislative action in a number of areas, including copyright.
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The site that provides much of the content for illegal movies shown on the “Popcorn Time” app, PopcornTime.io, has been shut down after the Motion Picture Association of America won court orders in Canada and New Zealand.
“Popcorn Time and YTS are illegal platforms that exist for one clear reason: to distribute stolen copies of the latest motion pictures and television shows without compensating the people who worked so hard to make them,” said MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd in a statement (PDF).
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An interim injunction handed down by a judge in Canada has granted forensic experts under MPAA supervision access to hosting accounts and domains operated by Popcorn Time, including VPN.ht, its official VPN service. Nevertheless, VPN.ht remains defiant, insisting that its service exists outside Canada and has not been compromised.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.04.15
Posted in News Roundup at 2:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“Twitch Installs Arch Linux”—billed as a “cooperative text-based horror game”—began on Halloween. After beating both Pokemon and Dark Souls earlier this year, thousands of people are now trying to do something even geekier: collectively install Arch Linux. The stream is now back up after a botnet took over and partially installed Gentoo, another Linux distribution.
You can tune into the stream at Twitch Installs Arch Linux. It works just like Twitch Plays Pokemon and Twitch Plays Dark Souls. Viewers vote on which key press to send to the terminal. Every ten seconds, the most popular key press is sent to the terminal. Arch Linux is a particularly good candidate for this, as it’s not the kind of Linux distribution you can install with a few clicks—it requires some terminal commands. You have to know what you’re doing, or at least be able to follow an installation guide.
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Kernel Space
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In looking for any EXT4/Btrfs/XFS/F2FS file-system performance changes, I tested the three latest kernel series atop a PNY 120GB SSD. Ubuntu 15.10 64-bit was running on the system.
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The GNU Linux-libre maintainers also cautioned against Intel and Qualcomm/Atheros Bluetooth hardware and now Intel Skylake sound support too. Skylake sound support was added to Linux 4.3 but apparently there too the code isn’t “free” enough for GNU Linux-libre.
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Herbert Xu mailed in the crypto subsystem updates this morning for the Linux 4.4 merge window.
The Linux 4.4 Crypto update brings a new wrap algorithm, a few API changes, alterations to the akcipher interfacem Intel SHA Extension SHA1 and SHA256 optimized functions, support for the ST and STM32 RNGs, support for the mxs-dcp crypto device, and other crypto driver improvements.
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Trusted Platform Module 2.0 support has been around for a few kernel cycles now and with the forthcoming Linux 4.4 kernel it will be in much better shape.
Last month I wrote about how with the code lined up the developer was saying TPM 2.0 is ready for distributions and that code is now set to land as part of the sent out security subsystem pull request.
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LWN’s 2015 Kernel Summit page now has coverage from the open day of the event, which focused primarily on technical topics. Subscribers are invited to have a look. Coverage from the final day is in the works and will be posted within the next day or so.
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Linus Torvalds’s latest rant underscores the high expectations the Linux developer places on open source programmers—as well the importance of security for Linux kernel code.
Torvalds is the unofficial “benevolent dictator” of the Linux kernel project. That means he gets to decide which code contributions go into the kernel, and which ones land in the reject pile.
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Octavian Purdila of Intel has announced today the Linux Kernel Library, a.k.a. LKL, for re-using kernel code more easily in user-space.
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Jens Axboe sent in the patches today for landing support for LightNVM and Open-Channel SSDs within the mainline Linux kernel!
The developer at Facebook wrote, “This first one adds support for lightnvm, and adds support to NVMe as well. This is pretty exciting, in that it enables new and interesting use cases for compatible flash devices.”
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Applications
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There is no single technology hotter today than Docker containers. Today the open-source Docker project released version 1.9.0 of Docker engine, providing an important milestone update.
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Kakoune is a command-line code editor that’s inspired by Vim and its advertised features are support for multiple selections, many customization possibilities, a client/server architecture so many clients can collaboratively edit the contents of a file, and advanced text manipulation primitives.
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Hello all! I’m excited to announce v0.1 of Activipy. This is a new library targeting ActivityStreams 2.0.
If you’re interested in building and expressing the information of a web application which contains social networking features, Activipy may be a great place to start.
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Proprietary
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The new browser by Opera founder and ex-CEO Jon von Tetzchner is available as a beta today, after ten months in preview. You can grab it for Windows, Mac and Linux – and he’s promised that a mobile version will follow.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Coming in just a few days after the Wine 1.7.54 release is the experimental Wine-Staging 1.7.54 release with a few extra features.
New to the Wine-Staging patch-set are multiple improvements and fixes to the Wine IDL (WIDL) compiler that reads data from Microsoft’s Interface Definition Language and converts them into alternate formats, which in turn are used by scripting languages wanting to communicate with COM objects.
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Games
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Although Windows is still the most-used operating system for PC gaming, Linux has seen an impressive rise in the gaming scene. A few years ago, Linux had virtually no games available for it, aside from some oft-mentioned open source ones. Fast forward to today, and Linux now has more than 1,500 games available on Steam alone, with a few AAA titles littered among those 1,500.
If you’ve become interested in gaming on Linux, using SteamOS as your Linux distribution of choice is a good idea. But how do you get SteamOS on your computer so you can start playing on it? Here’s a detailed guide that will cover every step and possible question you may have along the way.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Me, Carlos and others has been working on improving the newcomer experience. GNOME is a 15 years old project. Our community conventions and infrastructure which newcomers have to learn all bear signs of this. Over time such project in the size of GNOME build up vast amount of information, historial baggage and complex navigation structure. To me this is all a natural healthy sign of a large project swiftly advancing the Linux desktop.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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SUSECon 2015 kicked off today in Amsterdam. One of the biggest highlights of the keynote was SUSE’s entry into the platform as a service (PaaS) landscape: the company is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
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The wait is over and a new era begins for openSUSE releases. Contributors, friends and fans can now download the first Linux hybrid distro openSUSE Leap 42.1. Since the last release, exactly one year ago, openSUSE transformed its development process to create an entirely new type of hybrid Linux distribution called openSUSE Leap.
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SUSE has announced its Enterprise Storage 2 product.
This is the latest version of its self-managing, self-healing, distributed software-based storage solution for enterprise.
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We reviewed OpenSUSE 13.2 and we still believe it is an excellent release. It will be supported for a long time still. According to our OpenSUSE source, probably until the first quarter of 2017.
So how does the new release OpenSUSE 42.1 Leap rate? Let’s take a look.
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Red Hat has CentOS. Canonical has Ubuntu. Both these operating systems can be installed at no cost, and they are enterprise grade operating systems running on servers and cloud. However, SUSE doesn’t have any such distro; The openSUSE codebase is way too diverged from the SUSE codebase.
But that’s changing. The openSUSE community is taking a big leap, dropping the old regular release cycles of openSUSE and moving to openSUSE Leap. The community has released the first version of openSUSE Leap today at SUSECon 2015.
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Red Hat Family
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Deutsche Bank upgraded Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from Hold to Buy with a price target of $90.00 (from $75.00). Analyst Karl Keirstead noted the company’s cloud opportunity.
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Following the recent BusyBox 1.24 release, the developers behind this “Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux” have decided to drop systemd support.
BusyBox developer Denys Vlasenko pushed this commit where he explained, “systemd people are not willing to play nice with the rest of the world. Therefore there is no reason for the rest of the world to cooperate with them.”
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The first task any accomplished technical writer has to do is write for the audience. This task may sound simple, but when I thought about people living all over the world, I wondered: Can they read our documentation? Readability is something that has been studied for years, and what follows is a brief summary of what research shows.
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Red Hat, Inc. provides open source software solutions to enterprise customers worldwide. It develops and offers operating system, virtualization, middleware, storage, and cloud technologies. RHT has a PE ratio of 76. Currently there are 14 analysts that rate Red Hat a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 4 rate it a hold.
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Fedora
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Fedora 23, the latest edition of the Fedora Linux distribution, was released earlier today.
It is the first edition of Fedora that features a Cinnamon Spin. That means it comes with its own Live installation image, making it easier to install a Fedora Cinnamon desktop without having to use a netinstall image or the Everything image.
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Fedora 23 has rolled out this week after six months (give or take) of hard work by the Fedora Project. Job done, right? Not exactly–we still need to tell the world that Fedora 23 exists, and why they should be giving it a try.
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Welcome back for another installment of the systemd series. Throughout this series, we discuss ways to use systemd to understand and manage your system. This article focuses on how to convert legacy scripts you may have customized on your system.
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Debian Family
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My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.
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Distributions have been working on it for years to let the X.Org Server run without root privileges. This feat has now been accomplished for Debian testing users where if using systemd and a DRM/KMS graphics driver, you can run the xorg-server as a user.
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Derivatives
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Tails, a Live operating system that is built with the declared purpose of keeping users safe and anonymous while going online, has been updated to version 1.7. This is a major upgrade and users have been advised to make the switch as soon as possible.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The next Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update is scheduled to arrive in about two weeks and the developers are now putting the final touches. There is a certain number of bug-fixes still left to be added, but they are slowly getting implemented.
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1-Net today announced that its public cloud service, Alchemy, has officially joined Canonical to be the Southeast Asia’s first Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud Service Provider. Alchemy is a high performance and secure IaaS platform, which enables users to build and manage scalable infrastructures on demand.
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Flavours and Variants
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While Jonathan Riddell stepped down as the Kubuntu release manager immediately following the Kubuntu 15.10 release and Kubuntu’s post-15.10 future was portrayed as uncertain, the developers still with the project are focusing on making a great 16.04 “Xenial Xerus” release.
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Gumstix has opened up its quick-turn expansion board design service to third-party COMs and SBCs like the BeagleBone Black, with Raspberry Pi coming soon.
Gumstix launched its web-based Geppetto custom design-to-order (D2O) platform for embedded boards back in 2013. Later that year, the company added new crowd-funding features to the drag-and-drop embedded board design service, and released version 2.0 last December. Previously, the service has been limited to a few Gumstix computer-on-modules such as the company’s TI Sitara AM3354-based Overo modules, as well as its dual-core, Cortex-A9 OMAP4430-based DuoVero modules. Today, however, Gumstix is extending Geppetto’s support to expansion board designs for use with other companies’ TI Sitara AM335x-based COMs and single-board computers (SBCs). The company also plans to soon add support for COMs and SBCs that use SoCs beyond TI’s, notably including the Broadcom BCM2835-based Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Compute Module.
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A London-based startup called “Starship,” launched by Skype co-founders, is developing a wheeled, Linux-based robot and service for package delivery.
Former Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis announced the formation of a London-based robotics services company called Starship Technologies, “which aims to fundamentally improve local delivery of goods and groceries, making it almost free.” The 30-employee company, which also has offices in Estonia, showed off some images and a few specs for a prototype delivery robot that will enter trials in 2016. The robot runs on a Linux operating system, according to a Starship rep.
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Phones
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Tizen
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October has come to an end and it’s time to have a look at last month’s Top 20 Best Tizen Apps. WhatsApp still remains as the number one downloaded app for the Tizen Store and it just shows you how many people actually use this application. At number two we have the new comer Truedialer phone & contacts app.
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Android
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Of course, not every young person grows up with an Apple device in hand. As a group, Android-powered devices far outsell iPhones. That’s in part because they’re often cheaper than Apple’s premium handsets. So it’s safe to assume lots of young Americans grew up not with an iPhone, but with an Android device. Would they prefer a more powerful Android device to take with them into the business world?
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These rival platforms are updated every year, when their creators are bringing new devices running on them. The latest Android version is 6.0 Marshmallow, while Apple launched iOS 9 and a few updates in the meantime. In order to get to know these platforms better and to find out what new features they brought, check out this article.
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The Android 6.0 Marshmallow update is yet to be available for non-Nexus devices. Various smartphone manufacturers like Samsung, Sony and Motorola have announced the list of smartphones from the respective companies that will receive the Android 6.0 upgrade. Motorola is likely to make the upgrade available first to its 2015 devices such as Moto X Pure Edition (Moto X Style), Moto X Play, Moto G (Gen 3) and Moto E.
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Google today announced that over 19,000 organizations are now either testing, deploying or using its Android for Work service.
Android for Work makes it easier and safer for businesses to allow their employees to bring their own Android devices to work. It separates business apps from personal apps. Thanks to this, the IT department still retains control of its data and apps, while the employee can still play Angry Birds on the device, too. This program, which Google first previewed at its I/O developer conference in 2014, officially launched in February of this year.
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“With the Libyan High National Elections Commission (HNEC) and consultative support from the United Nations Support Mission to Libya, we have open sourced their elections management platform today under a permissive Apache 2.0 license,” read a blog post published by Caktus Group. “Open sourcing means other governments and organizations can freely adopt and adapt the elections tools which cover nine functional areas. The tools range from SMS voter registration, the first of its kind, to bulk alerts to voters and call center support software,” read the statement.
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A timetable for those negotiations has not been set. But election officials are starting to prepare. Libyans can now register to vote and receive election updates from their homes thanks to a new text messaging system created by a digital consultancy group in the United States. Smart Elect, designed by Caktus Group, a technology firm based in Durham, North Carolina, is a free open source platform that can be used by anyone to build an SMS [short message service] voter registration system as well as the tools needed before, during and after an election to support it.
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Then, five years later, at 24, I founded TuxWeb with a mission to solve clients’ problems using open source technology. Creating a startup has been fun (even here in Italy where funding does not come so easily), and in 2011 I cofounded a second startup with Luca Garulli, the creator of OrientDB, called NuvolaBase.
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Blockchain consortium The Distributed Ledger Group (DLG), which is managed by R3CEV expects to license its technology as open sourced by early next year, according to R3CEV officials.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Check out “What’s New” and “Known Issues” for this version of Firefox below. As always, you’re encouraged to tell us what you think, or file a bug in Bugzilla. If interested, please see the complete list of changes in this release.
We’d also like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox!
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As we wrote previously, we think it’s important for users to be able to protect themselves from non-consensual online tracking. That’s why we created Privacy Badger, which enforces Do Not Track around the Web. But it’s also important for browser vendors to join in the fight to protect user privacy. Mozilla has done just that with today’s announcement.
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We’re releasing a powerful new feature in Firefox Private Browsing called Tracking Protection. We created this feature because we believe in giving you more choice and control over your Web experience. With the release of Tracking Protection in Firefox Private Browsing we are leading the industry by giving you control over the data that third parties receive from you online. No other browser’s Private Browsing mode protects you the way Firefox does—not Chrome, not Safari, not Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Finally, Gnocchi 1.3.0 is out. This is our final release, more or less matching the OpenStack 6 months schedule, that concludes the Liberty development cycle.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli today announced two LibreOffice updates. These two minor number bug fix updates cover the Fresh and Still branches of LibreOffice and user are advised to upgrade. Fedora 23 was officially released to the general public today and folks have been talking about that. Phoronix reported today that Debian had moved to rootless X server instances and Mozilla announced a new privacy feature for Firefox.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source/Openwashing
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BSD
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Want to run something other than Linux on a ARM 64-bit server? Soon you can: a small software company has shown FreeBSD running on a 96-core server.
Semihalf, which is based in Poland, demonstrated a beta version of FreeBSD running on a server board built with Cavium’s ThunderX processors. That’s the first hardware based on ARM’s 64-bit processors to run FreeBSD.
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Or everything I didn’t know about unix. The OpenBSD source tree has lots of example code for solving any number of problems, but I like to do things my own way. Occasionally this means something gets overlooked. A few examples. Previous thoughts on rewrites and reuse: out with the old, in with the less and hoarding and reuse.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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A group of 15 schools in rural areas in Denmark, Italy, Greece, Macedonia (FYROM), Spain, and the United Kingdom are using open source software solutions for learning, teaching and working together. An EU-funded consortium of research institutes and public administrations has developed and trialled software specifically for rural schools.
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The management tools for Andalucia’s standard corporate desktop, GECOS – Guadalinex Escritorio COrporativo eStandar, is ready for reuse by others, companies and public administrations alike, says Juan Conde, head of the free software promotion project of the Andalusian Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. “The potential user base outside of the Junta de Andalucía is huge.”
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The software was designed to run on the Debian and Ubuntu free software distribution, but can be adapted to other distro’s such as Redhat and CentOS with little effort, he says. At the moment, GECOS is of limited use for managing proprietary desktops, says Conde, “until someone adds the equivalent management policies.”
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An agreement has been reached between the Cabinet Office and software firm Collabora Productivity, for the provision of a new range of open source applications for desktop, mobile and cloud.
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Pessimistic economists have predicted overpopulation problems based on exponential growth trends, but statistics point to lower birth rates as countries become more industrialized. So now, there’s a different kind of problem — aging populations and minimal population growth in certain countries. How will we deal with people living longer and having fewer and fewer kids?
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Security
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FreeIPA’s X.509 PKI features (based on Dogtag Certificate System) continue to be an area of interest for users and customers. In this post I summarise recently-added PKI features in FreeIPA, work in progress, and what we plan to do in future releases. Then I will outline my personal vision for what the future of PKI in FreeIPA should look like, noting how it will address pain points and limitations of the existing architecture.
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That is one of the most common questions that we get when a new CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) appears. We explain SELinux as a technology for process isolation to mitigate attacks via privilege escalation.
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In April 2015 we took a look at a years worth of branded vulnerabilities, separating out those that mattered from those that didn’t. Six months have passed so let’s take this opportunity to update the report with the new vulnerabilities that mattered across all Red Hat products.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The onset of the rainy season in Indonesia brings hope of extinguishing forest fires that have raged for weeks, spawning both an environmental and political crisis in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.
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Conservative media outlets are wrongly claiming that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is hiding data related to a recent study that challenged the so-called “pause” in global warming, and echoing Republican House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith’s baseless accusation that NOAA manipulated temperature records to show a warming trend. In reality, the NOAA study’s data is publicly available online, and NOAA routinely makes adjustments to historical temperature records that are peer-reviewed and necessary to account for changes to measuring instruments and other factors.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Filkins apparently intended to write a journalistic portrait of Nisman and the disputed circumstances in which he died of a gunshot wound last January, rather than to explore the case itself. But in order to write such a portrait, Filkins had to deal with the evidence Nisman used in his AMIA indictment, and Filkins stumbled badly in writing about those issues.
Filkins’ failure goes to the root of a systemic problem of news media coverage of Iran and many other issues. Certain narratives about episodes and issues in recent history have become so unanimously accepted among political and media elites as to be virtually unchallengeable in media reporting. Such narratives have been repeated in one form or another for so many years that reporters simply would not think to question them for a moment, much less actually investigate their truth.
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Privacy
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If it was good enough for them… it’s pretty ridiculous that we’re still having this debate now. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve heard from a few different folks who have insisted that there are bills sitting in drawers ready to go to “ban encryption” (not just backdoor it), and that’s so ridiculous in a world where encryption is used all the time and is a key driver of how we all live. But it’s even more ridiculous when you understand how often it’s been used throughout history.
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It’s been a rough few weeks for legal challenges to NSA surveillance. First, a federal district court in Maryland dismissed a lawsuit brought by the ACLU challenging the NSA’s Upstream surveillance of the Internet backbone. Then, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant the ACLU a preliminary injunction against the NSA’s bulk telephone records program, despite having previously found that the program was illegal. Essentially washing its hands of the case, the court refused to even consider the ACLU’s arguments that the phone records program is unconstitutional because the program will stop in its current form at the end of November.
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Communications companies will be required to store records of customers’ phone and internet use for 12 months in long-awaited measures overhauling the laws on surveillance by the state being published today.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has dropped several measures from legislation – dubbed the “Snooper’s Charter” – which was blocked by the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition government.
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Protecting members of Parliament from mass surveillance by bulk collection is “exceedingly simple”, according to the US co-inventor of the high technology devices and programs now used by GCHQ to intercept optical fibre cables carrying Internet data in and out of Britain.
Bill Binney, formerly Technical Director of the NSA’s Operations Directorate, dismissed as “absolute horseshit” claims by government lawyers to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), reported in an adjudication last month, that “there is so much data flowing along the pipe” that “it isn’t intelligible at the point of interception”.
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Theresa May is to propose a major extension of the surveillance state when she publishes legislation requiring internet companies to store details of every website visited by customers over the previous year.
The home secretary will try to sweeten the pill of her revived snooper’s charter on Wednesday by announcing that the police will need to get judicial authorisation before they can access the internet connection records of an individual – something that is currently banned in the US and every European country, including Britain.
She will also try to strengthen the oversight of Britain’s surveillance by replacing the current fragmented system of three separate commissioners with an investigatory powers commissioner who will be a senior judge appointed by the prime minister on the recommendation of the lord chief justice.
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The smallest member of the Five Eyes spying alliance is rolling out a “protected disclosures” policy to enable would-be Edward Snowdens to safely blow the whistle on suspected wrongdoing by security agencies.
New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Cheryl Gwyn, said a formal internal policy for handling protected disclosures, or “whistleblowing”, has been developed by her office in liaison with security agencies.
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The UK home secretary, Theresa May, confirmed today that the UK government will seek to force all ISPs to retain a record of your Web browsing history for the previous year, even though the existence of tools like Tor and VPNs can make such data useless. This “Internet Connection Record” will be “a record of the internet services a specific device has connected to, such as a website or instant messaging application,” and does not include details of individual Web pages visited.
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A former college math professor at James Madison University has been charged with the brutal murder of his wife in their Maryland home.
Jason Martin, 41, bludgeoned his wife, 42-year-old Carla Dee Martin, with a dumbbell while their three children slept upstairs, according to Howard County Police.
Martin was a mathematician with the National Security Agency, PEOPLE reports.
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A Maryland man has been charged with murdering his wife by allegedly bludgeoning her with a dumbbell, police say.
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A onetime division chief for the National Security Agency is expected to plead guilty this month to child abuse resulting in death, according to records filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
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Brian Patrick O’Callaghan had been charged in February of 2014 with first-degree murder of little Hyunsu. The boy died just several months after he was adopted by O’Callaghan and his wife, who lived in Damascus, Md.
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A former division chief within the National Security Agency is slated to plead guilty beating his three-year-old son to death, according to records filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
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Bad news for Apple users. A firm which describes itself as “a premium exploit acquisition platform” has just paid $1 million to undisclosed hackers to remotely jailbreaking the latest iPhone operating system – which potentially opens way for spy agencies abusing it too.
The French cybersecurity company Zerodium’s modus operandi is largely the collection of so-called zero-day vulnerabilities – holes in software unknown to the vendor which can be exploited by hackers without fear that they would be patched up.
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Hacking Apple’s iOS isn’t easy. But in the world of cybersecurity, even the hardest target isn’t impossible—only expensive. And the price of a working attack that can compromise the latest iPhone is apparently somewhere around $1 million.
On Monday, the security startup Zerodium announced that it’s agreed to pay out that seven-figure sum to a team of hackers who have successfully developed a technique that can hack any iPhone or iPad that can be tricked into visiting a carefully crafted web site. Zerodium describes that technique as a “jailbreak”—a term used by iPhone owners to hack their own phones to install unauthorized apps. But make no mistake: Zerodium and its founder Chaouki Bekrar have made clear that its customers include governments who no doubt use such “zero-day” hacking techniques on unwitting surveillance targets.
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Bamford then suggests the super-fast computers are part of the High Productivity Computing Systems program located in Oakridge, Tenn. (of Manhattan Project fame), specifically in Building 5300 according to a former senior intelligence official involved in the project interviewed by Bamford.
The official mentions that security intensified in a big way when the Building 5300 team made a huge breakthrough, adding, “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”
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A federal appeals court has denied a request to immediately halt the National Security Agency’s collection of data on Americans’ phone calls, ruling that Congress intended it to be allowed through November.
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Unsurprisingly, the Pennsylvania lawyer who tried to single-handedly challenge the Obama Administration’s surveillance infrastructure has had his case dismissed. Like similar cases, it was tossed for lack of standing.
While Elliott Schuchardt talked tough, US District Judge Cathy Bissoon found that he could not prove that he himself had been surveilled by the federal government, according to her 11-page opinion handed down in late September 2015.
Just a few weeks ago, the divorce lawyer appealed the decision to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
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In 2013, the world learned that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government. Amid the outrage, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter thought: Well, if they’re listening … let’s talk to them. With antennas mounted on the roof of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin’s government district, they set up an open network that let the world send messages to US and UK spies listening nearby. It’s one of three bold, often funny, and frankly subversive works detailed in this talk, which highlights the world’s growing discontent with surveillance and closed networks.
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New legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives aims to prohibit federal, state and local government agencies from using without a warrant so-called stingrays or cell-site simulators often used to intercept mobile communications.
New legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives aims to prohibit federal, state and local government agencies from using without a warrant so-called stingrays or cell-site simulators often used to intercept mobile communications.
Stingrays or “IMSI catchers” track the location of mobile phones by mimicking cellphone towers
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Many people are guilty of over-sharing on Facebook — whether they realize it or not — and the potential consequences of what people post on social media are getting even worse.
There once was a time when the only thing at stake was your reputation, but those days are long gone. Most people are well aware of the potential risks of social media these days, and it’s no secret that a Facebook post can get you fired from a job or prevent you from getting a job in the future.
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Civil Rights
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The FBI wants to deputize the nation’s schools into its anti-terrorism posse. At this point, it’s unclear whether the program will escalate to the elaborate Rube Goldberg machinations the FBI currently employs to generate terrorism suspects (putting the “rube” back in “Rube Goldberg machinations”), but for now, it appears to be “edutainment” that applies a ridiculous metaphor with blunt force precision.
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Are there limits to what a company can put in a standard form contract, like a click-through agreement? Can a company take away its customers’ freedom of speech?
The Consumer Review Freedom Act, now pending in Congress (S.2044, H.R.2110), would limit several ways that companies attempt to keep their customers from criticizing them on the Internet.
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In August 1951, inhabitants of the picturesque French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit were suddenly tormented by terrifying hallucinations. People imagined lions and tigers were coming to eat them. A man jumped out of a window, thinking he was a dragonfly. At least seven people died, dozens were taken to the local asylum in straitjackets and hundreds were affected.
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Channel 2 reported Sunday that the information security department, part of the IDF’s intelligence force, issued a call to its officers and soldiers to beware of recruitment attempts by the CIA.
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The militarily intelligence services of Israel have reportedly warned members of the country’s defense forces about being recruited by CIA officials. Soldiers and officers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) were warned last week not to divulge important security information about plans for possible military action in the Middle East region.
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The details of the inquiry are outlined in the 2015 annual report of the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.
The United States Senate Committee Report documented instances of torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the period between 2001 and 2009.
In her annual report, Ms Gwyn said there were a number of other countries involved with the programme – but the names were redacted.
“My decision… does not suggest or presuppose that New Zealand agencies or personnel were in any way connected with those activities.
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Voters in Seattle, Washington on Tuesday approved a first-in-the-nation “democracy voucher” ballot initiative that could serve as a national model on campaign finance reform.
Initiative 122 (I-122), which was endorsed by nearly every Seattle City Council candidate and enjoyed the support of dozens of local and national progressive groups, passed 60-40, according to the King County Elections Office.
Supporters say the innovative public campaign financing program could give everyday voters more control over the city’s elections while limiting the power of corporate and special interests.
The initiative states that for each city election cycle, or every two years, the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC) will mail four $25 vouchers to each voter. They can only be used in Seattle campaigns for mayor, city council and city attorney. The SEEC will release money to the candidates that agree to follow I-122′s rules, which include participating in three debates and accepting lower contribution and spending limits.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is building his own internet alternative called Meganet. With Meganet, he promises to offer you a way to communicate with the world without any fear of censorship and away from the continuous surveillance.
Kim Dotcom aims to do this by making a P2P-based internet service that won’t need an IP address and all the communications will be encrypted. On Thursday, in New Zealand, the Hollywood foe Kim Dotcom revealed this vision of a more secure Meganet. It should be noted that Kim is wanted in the U.S. under criminal copyright violation charges.
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For the last few years, we’ve noted a worrying trend of a few law professors, who have decided that the best way to make people nice on the internet is to do away with Section 230 of the CDA. As we’ve noted repeatedly, Section 230 of the CDA is without a doubt the most important law on the internet. The internet would be a massively different (and worse) place without it. Almost every site or service you use would be very different, and the internet would be a much more bland and sterile place. Section 230 is fairly simple. There are two key elements to it:
People cannot blame service providers for content posted by users.
Service providers who decide to moderate/delete content cannot be held liable for the content they choose not to moderate (or the content they choose to moderate).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Jay Radcliffe is a security researcher with diabetes. In 2011, he gave a talk at Black Hat, showing how his personal insulin pump could be hacked—with potentially deadly consequences.
As a result of his 2011 presentation, he worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the Food and Drug Administration to address security vulnerabilities in insulin pumps.
“The specific technical details of that research have never been published in order to protect patients using those devices,” he wrote in his testimony to the Librarian of Congress and the US Copyright Office.
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The major movie studios of the MPAA are behind the recent shutdown of the torrent site YTS, the associated release group YIFY, and the main Popcorn Time fork, PopcornTime.io. In an international effort spanning Canada and New Zealand, visits were carried out at the premises of at least two key suspects
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As Kim Dotcom’s extradition defense enters its second day, the court has heard that none of the 13 charges against the Megaupload founder are enough to extradite him to the United States. The U.S. is characterizing the alleged offenses as extraditable fraud but Dotcom’s team believes that copyright violations can not be prosecuted as such.
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Send this to a friend
11.03.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Linux Torvalds announced the release of Linux 4.3 yesterday with some new and improved features. Eclipsing the new kernel release was another salty post by the famous Linux founder beginning, “Christ people. This is just s**t.” In other news, a couple more Ubuntu reviews were posted and Adam Williamson has an important Fedora 23 public service announcement.
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Enrique Sevillano (age 42) is a recipient in the Sys Admin Superstar category and works as an IT manager at an energy utility company in the United States. He recently decided to move the company’s architecture to Linux. By doing so, he says, they have optimized services on old servers that otherwise would have been cost prohibitive. Enrique says Linux and open source have allowed him to deploy a high-availability virtualization infrastructure as well as affordable storage and cloud solutions.
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The new stable Linux kernel is out there supporting Intel’s Skylake and a reworked open source support platform for Nvidia graphics cards.
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Applications
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Fotoxx is an open source photo editing program, working on Linux. It has support for the most important image formats, including JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and RAW. Fotoxx is mostly used for cropping, resizing or retouching photos, without using layers, like Photoshop.
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As part of my job at the Université Catholique de Louvain, one of my projects is to develop gCSVedit, a small and simple text editor to edit CSV files.
gCSVedit is now a free/libre software (GPLv3+ license) and is currently hosted on GitHub.
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As you may know, PhotoFlow is an open-source, non-destructive photo editing software for adjusting photos from RAW images to high-quality printing.
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As you may know, Simple Screen Recorder is a screen recorder application, with support for X11 and OpenGL. Having a simple and intuitive GUI built by using the Qt libraries, it enables the users to easily record both the entire screen (having multi-monitor support also) or parts of it only, or OpenGL applications.
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Containerbuddy is a shim written in Go to help make it easier to containerize existing applications. It can act as PID1 in the container and fork/exec the application. If the application exits then so does Containerbuddy.
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This release of Mejiro is all about fixing minor problems and annoyances. As you may know, in order to display photos, Mejiro must generate thumbnails for all uploaded photos. Depending on the number of photos and hardware, this task can take considerable time during which the entire app “stalls.” This may give the impression that the app is either unreachable or non-functional. To avoid this, the new version of the app displays notifications when it is generating thumbnails.
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To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, I feature below 5 excellent open source web proxy tools. Some of the them are full-featured; a couple of them have very modest resource needs.
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Proprietary
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Bomgar, a leader in secure remote support and access management solutions, today released Bomgar Remote Support 15.2, the latest version of its enterprise-leading remote support software.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I know it’s an advert, but sometimes adverts really are quite nice. ZOTAC now seems to be stepping up their SteamOS Steam Machine hype with a trailer for their NEN unit.
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I have to hand it to Alienware as they really are trying to do a push for their Steam Machine units, we have another video to show off, this time from Trisha Hershberger.
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Euro Fishing immerses you deep into the adrenaline-packed action, fun and beauty of Europe’s most famous lakes. Sounds okay, and the graphics look quite nice too.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Cinnamon is a relatively new desktop environment from the same developers responsible for Linux Mint, a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, and Linux Mint Debian Edition, also a desktop distribution based on Debian.
Cinnamon 2.8 is the latest edition, just released yesterday November 2 2015.
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The Linux Mint developers have finally released the stable version of the Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment. It’s a huge release, and all users of this desktop environment are in for a treat.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Back in 4.x we provided two binaries for KWin: one compiled against OpenGL (kwin) and one compiled against OpenGL ES (kwin_gles). The reason for that is that one can only reasonably link either OpenGL or OpenGL ES and OpenGL ES is only a subset of OpenGL, so one needs to hide the OpenGL calls (especially the OpenGL 1 calls).
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I can’t say that she was a close friend, but we knew each other since way back in time. She was a constant companion in search of good food and during several free software conferences, she and I took the lead of a group of hackers, finding them nourishment for the night and day ahead. So I was saddened today to learn that Telsa Gwynne has passed away.
My first exchange with Telsa was around Christmas of 1998. We were talking about Christmas gifts, and whether Alan Cox, her husband, wouldn’t like to get a nice printout of RFC-1149, the “Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers”. Little did we know at the time that Alan would later support a group of Norwegian hackers in actually implementing that very specification!
Telsa never had an easy time in the free software community. From the very early days when we started talking, she was frequently and repeatedly abused by people trying to use her to get to her husband. Over the years, she withstood harassment and abuse of almost any sort from people in the free software community. She got to witness first hand the darkest corners of our community and the worst kind of people anyone can ever imagine.
Some of Telsa’s contribution to the free software community before that included a lot of work on explaining GNOME to people. She served on the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, contributed translations and wrote comprehensive FAQs about both GNOME and the GNOME Foundation.
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On 2015-10-04 it was announced that the governing body of the GNOME Foundation, the Board, has a vacant seat. That body was elected about 15 weeks earlier. The elections are very democratic, they use an STV system to make as many votes as possible count. So far, no replacement has been officially announced. The question of what strategy to use in order to find the replacement has been left unanswered. Let me summarise the facts and comment on the strategy I wish the GNOME project to follow.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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The Manjaro Community announced, through the voice of Stefano Capitani, the maintainer of Manjaro-Budgie, that a new version of the Budgie flavor has been released and is now ready for download.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Opensuse Leap 42.1 should be available on Wednesday Nov. 4th. So here are a few notes that some readers might find useful.
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Red Hat Family
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Deutsche Bank’s Karl Keirstead upgraded the rating on the company from Hold to Buy, while raising the price target from $75 to $90.
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Deutsche Bank upgraded Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) from Hold to Buy. Red Hat shares closed at $80.14 on Monday.
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Fedora
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As of today, the Fedora Project is proud to announce the new Fedora Developer Portal. The Developer Portal supports developers working on software projects with Fedora as their primary operating system or inside a virtual machine. It helps them install essential development tools, language runtimes, and databases. It also introduces distribution and deployment options using COPR and OpenShift.
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It’s (approximately) Halloween, so you know what that means — new Fedora! The Fedora 23 release is here, and it’s better than ever before. We’re pleased to bring you the latest incarnations of the three main Fedora editions — Fedora Workstation, Fedora Cloud, and Fedora Server, each built with love by the Fedora community to custom-fit your needs in different areas. Fedora 23 is also available in alternate desktop Spins, curated software Labs, and special images for the ARM processor architecture.
If that’s all you need to hear, download from https://getfedora.org/, or if you already use Fedora, follow the simple upgrade steps. Otherwise, read on for details.
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Fedora 23 Workstation is now released. It’s a reliable, user-friendly, and powerful operating system aimed at home users, hobbyists, students, and software developers. Fedora 23 Workstation features the latest GNOME 3.18 release courtesy of the GNOME community. This release of GNOME includes updates to the Files browser, and the new Calendar and Todo applications. Fedora 23 Workstation is the first release of Fedora to include LibreOffice 5.
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Not all Linux distributions are created equal. The focus of its maintainers can vary wildly, leading to very different experiences. I still insist that there are too many distros, leading to confusion and resources being spread too thin, but c’est la vie.
Today, my favorite Linux distro, Fedora — which is also the operating system of choice for Linus Torvalds — reaches a new milestone. Yes, Fedora 23 is finally here and it comes with Linux kernel 4.2. If you are a fan of open source, security, frequently updated packages and free-software ideology, this is the Linux-based operating system for you.
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Fedora 23 is now hitting the streets and has been officially released. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system. If you’ve upgraded from past Fedora releases, you’re likely familiar with the fedup tool. However, Fedora 23 features a new release method using some of the perks provided by the dnf package manager introduced in Fedora 21. To upgrade to Fedora 23, you will use the DNF system upgrade plugin. Using this plugin will make your upgrade to Fedora 23 simple and easy.
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Dunno how many of you know but Just in time was invented in Japan. Same way FAD day 1 started just in time as planned 
Everyone was at meeting points at the time. Information about G11N FAD available at Wiki.
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To win new users and later on new contributors, you have to go locally and that means also to translate Fedora to the local language. For Cambodia and his language khmer we had no translation since Fedora Core 6. We planned since last year to re-initiate the translation for this language, it took as some time to arrange everything, getting the mailing list setup, making the wiki pages and so on.
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Debian Family
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The work is not yet entirely over us for Roland and I, since we’re now busy updating the French translation of the book. It should be available in the upcoming weeks. Keep posted!
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Derivatives
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This release fixes numerous security issues. All users must upgrade as soon as possible.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Distro time! After a quiet distro slayin’ period here in Dedowood, we embark on the great hunt once more, and we pay an excessive amount of time to Ubuntu and its derivatives, starting with the original beast. If you’ve followed my reviews lately, you know that I found Trusty to be excellent, and Vivid was also rather cool.
Let’s see what the latest in the series can do. Our test machine will be Lenovo G50, which comes with the modern obstacles of multi-boot, Windows 10, UEFI, Secure Boot, and other things that make Linux folks raise a skeptical brow. Let us.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu comes with a couple of different flavors which are largely defined by the desktop environment that’s included in the each flavor, and by the default set of software applications included, to some extent.
While there are about nine flavors (official), targeting various kinds of end-users, I thought making a comparison of the three major flavors, specifically concerning their performance (since I’m more of a technically oriented individual, plus you can easily find their various new features on most other websites anyway), namely Ubuntu 15.10 (Unity desktop 7.3.2), Kubuntu 15.10 (KDE Plasma 5.4.0) and Ubuntu Gnome 15.10 (GNOME Shell 3.16) would come in handy for someone who’s trying to decide which to use.
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Aaeon’s rugged, Linux-ready “Boxer-6404” industrial controller offers quad- or dual-core Bay Trail SoCs, plus four GbE ports and -20 to 60°C operation.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The IoTivity project has recently reached an important milestone – its 1.0.0 release, which includes Getting Started instructions for Tizen.
IoTivity is the reference implementation for the work of the Open Interconnect Consortium, who are defining a standard and a certification program for the device-to-device connectivity needs of the Internet of Things (IOT).
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Android
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Sundar Pichai, the new CEO of Google under Larry Page’s Alphabet, even dropped a hint about Chrome OS and Android’s future during Google’s last earnings call. Pichai said that “mobile as a computing paradigm is eventually going to blend with what we think of as desktop today.”
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Since it first appeared in Apple’s App Store last year, the free encrypted calling and texting app Signal has become the darling of the privacy community, recommended—and apparently used daily—by no less than Edward Snowden himself. Now its creator is bringing that same form of ultra-simple smartphone encryption to Android.
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These days we’re spending more time than ever on our smartphones. Despite this trend, there is still a lot of work that gets done on our desktop PCs. In this article, I’ll share some Android applications that you can use to remotely access your desktop computer.
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Following Android Alpha and Android Beta, Google has always named its Android OS updates after sweet treats, and in alphabetical order. So far we’ve had Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop and Marshmallow.
Next in line is Android ‘N’, sure to be a sweet treat, but Google won’t reveal the operating system’s full name until the second half of 2016.
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The Huawei Watch is the best Android Wear smartwatch yet and one of the best cross-platform smartwatches. It easily passes as a traditional watch while providing access to information and notifications on your wrist.
It isn’t a standout “look at me” piece of technology, which is good if you’re more interested in function and classic design than showing off, and is comfortable to wear. The higher resolution sapphire screen is the best available at the moment and the battery lasted two days in my testing with the screen on all the time.
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Slack is a popular team communications application for organizations that offers group chat and direct messaging for mobile, web, and desktop platforms. While Slack offers many benefits to customers, there are also downsides to using the platform, including high subscription fees and the risk of a massive leak of private data if Slack’s servers are ever breached (again).
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I’ve noticed that more and more projects are using things like Slack as the chat medium for their open source projects. In the past couple of days alone, I’ve been directed to Slack for Babel and Bootstrap. I’d like to try and curb this phenomenon before it takes off any more.
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Business problems today are too big for any one person to solve. Agile teams are much more effective at solving problems than are lone geniuses. So why do we still reward the smartest people in the room more so than those who excel at working with others? You know who I’m talking about: the people who brazenly take over meetings by showing off how much they know or how witty they can be at the expense of any other voice in the room—and who often end up getting all of the boss’s attention.
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This article provides an overview of free and open source software (FOSS) that may be of use to students and researchers in academia, based on my own experience in psychology studies.
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Open source software is being seen increasingly as a viable option for CIOs seeking to drive innovation, build platforms, increase agility and cut costs in the enterprise, but barriers to adopting open source remain to IT executives seeking to put together a business case to using open source applications.
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Will your car be controlled by open source software one day? Ericsson Research is taking this question seriously, with the help of the open source Restlet Framework project, where a simple text message can turn on the air conditioning before you walk back to your car.
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Are you a mentor? Or, maybe you’re someone who identifies as a bridge builder, just looking for the right opportunity to help someone out—because working in tech can, well, be hard sometimes.
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Chef, the workflow automation tool company, has announced the general availability of its DevOps tool Chef Delivery. The product was initially launched in April.
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Over on PaulGraham News, there’s an ongoing discussion about using Slack for FOSS projects. It’s interesting but almost entirely focuses on the technical and UX aspects of why IRC has failed, while ignoring what is in my opinion the most important aspects of a chat platform: The social aspects.
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Events
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Back from OpenStack Summit in Tokyo. It was really a interesting conference with many interesting meetings, a lot interesting talks and also events.
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The Creative Commons Summit, a bi-annual meeting of members of the CC network and friends of the Commons, took place in mid-October in Seoul, South Korea. One of the event’s tracks was devoted to copyright reform advocacy. The track was organised by member organisations of Communia, including Creative Commons.
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MINIX has been around now for about 30 years so it is (finally) time for the MINIXers to have a conference to get together, just as Linuxers and BSDers have been doing for a long time. The idea is to exchange ideas and experiences among MINIX 3 developers and users as well as discussing possible paths forward now that the ERC funding is over. Future developments will now be done like in any other volunteer-based open-source project. Increasing community involvement is a key issue here. Attend or give a presentation.
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I’m quite excited by this event as it is the first time two succesful and longstanding events in Paris have merged: Linux Solutions on the one hand and the well known Open World Forum. The venue is worth a look as well: the Docks are the rehabilitated industrial area just north of Paris and close to the Stade de France.
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OpenStack summit Tokyo anyone? I’ve been there and thought it was a very well organized event, in a nice location. Every minute together with peers seemed worth it to me. This said, let’s talk about the actual sessions. I spent most of my time at the TripleO and Heat sessions, with a little detour on Magnum. Plus some booth crawling.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The OpenStack community gathered in Tokyo to learn about the latest developments in the open-source cloud world, including the upcoming Mitaka release.
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Software Defined Networking (SDN) vendor Midokura first open-sourced its MidoNet technology in 2014 and hasn’t looked back since. At the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo last week, the company announced an update to its Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) platform and participated actively in Summit sessions.
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IBM acquired privately-held managed OpenStack vendor Blue Box in June of this year. Now barely six months later, Blue Box is out with a new solution and the company’s founder is aggressively hiring major talent in the OpenStack developer space. Proudman has managed to attract 55 people to help IBM build out its OpenStack cloud efforts.
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I’ve attended the summit mainly to discuss and follow-up new developments on Ceilometer, Gnocchi, Aodh and Oslo. It has been a pretty good week and we were able to discuss and plan a few interesting things. Below are what I found remarkable during this summit concerning those projects.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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28 October 2015 – The Apache OpenOffice project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of OpenOffice 4.1.2. You can download it from the official website http://www.openoffice.org/download
Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 brings stability fixes, bug fixes and enhancements. All users of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.1 or earlier are advised to upgrade.
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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.0.3 “fresh”, the 4th release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, and LibreOffice 4.4.6, the 7th release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family. So far, the LibreOffice 5.0 family is the most popular LibreOffice ever, based on feedback from journalists and end users.
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Business
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For any business or enterprise, objective is to improve revenue, cost efficiency, business processes, and create more agile organizations. Gartner predicts that by 2016, 99% of Global 2000 Enterprises will have incorporated Open Source Software (OSS) into their technology portfolios and half of the leading non-IT organizations would have embraced OSS.
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Semi-Open Source//Openwashing
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BSD
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Oct 2015 is the 20th anniversary of the OpenBSD source tree!
This episode is brought to you by the id utility, which returns the user identity. id appeared in 4.4 BSD.
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Public Services/Government
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The application will be published using the European Union’s public software licence, EUPL.
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Licensing
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The signers respectfully request that the commission carefully balance the important work of protecting the radio spectrum with the immeasurable value in experimentation, innovation, and freedom for law-abiding users. Additionally, the signers invite the commission and other regulatory agencies to collaborate with industry; free, open source, and proprietary software developers; and device users on developing wireless device policies and recommendations that meet the needs of regulatory agencies and protect the ability of users to inspect, modify and improve their devices.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The entire editorial staff of the prestigious academic title Lingua have resigned in protest over the high cost of subscribing to the journal, and the refusal of the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, to convert the title completely to open access. The open access model allows anyone, whether an academic or not, to read a journal online for free. Currently, most academic journals are funded by subscriber payments; with open access journals, the model is flipped around, with institutions paying to publish their papers.
As Inside Higher Ed reports, the academics who have made Lingua into one of the top journals in its field through their editorial work all gave up their roles after telling Elsevier of the “frustrations of libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn’t even figure out what it would cost to subscribe.”
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Open Hardware
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Once again Aleph Objects finds themselves being honored by Make: by taking home the “Best Overall” award for the LulzBot TAZ 5, as well as the “Outstanding Open Source” award. According to Make: editors, the TAZ 5 was selected Best Overall because the latest iteration of the TAZ is an example of LulzBot’s ongoing “commitment to excellent engineering.” TAZ 5 was selected as Outstanding Open Source because LulzBot continues “holding true to its open source roots.”
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Programming
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If you thought Fortran and Cold War-era assembly language programming is pointless and purely for old-timers, guess again. NASA has found an engineer comfortable with the software to keep its old space-race-age systems ticking over.
In an interview with Popular Mechanics this month, the manager of NASA’s Voyager program Suzanne Dodd said the retirement of the project’s last original engineer left the space agency with a shortage of people capable of communicating with the 40-year-old craft.
Launched in 1977, the two Voyager crafts rely on mid-1970s hardware controlled by purpose-built General Electric interrupt-driven processors. After 38 years in space, the two probes are on the outer fringes of the Sun’s influence, heading into interstellar space.
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Standards/Consortia
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The German Federal Office for Information Security (‘Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik’, BSI) has joined the FIDO Alliance, an industry consortium working on open standards for easier and secure online authentication technologies, the two organisations announced in early October.
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The Harvard Law professor and internet pioneer launched his campaign just after Labor Day, and from the start, it was clear that to call his bid quixotic was to sell Cervantes’ protagonist short. Lessig said he was running to win the Democratic nomination, but of course it was clear that his candidacy was more of a classic protest run. Having focused strongly on campaign-finance reform in recent years—including in a string of Atlantic articles—he made passing the Citizens Equality Act of 2017, which would enact universal voting registration, campaign-finance limits, and anti-gerrymandering provisions, the single issue of his candidacy.
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Ever since Larry Lessig announced his campaign for the Presidency a few months ago, we noted that it wasn’t just a long shot, but seemed more like a gimmick to get the (very real) issue of political corruption into the debates. I like Larry quite a bit and support many of his efforts, but this one did seem kind of crazy. I’m glad that he’s willing to take on crazy ideas to see if they’ll work, because that’s how real change eventually comes about, but the whole thing did seem a bit quixotic. That said, the last thing I expected was that the Democratic Party would be so scared of him as to flat out lie and change the rules to keep his ideas from reaching the public. Yet, that’s what it did, and because of that, Lessig has dropped his campaign for the Presidency.
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How the Supreme Court built a monster out of America’s campaign finance law.
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At the time social media offered a way for new political voices to be heard, and BorisWatch was one of those new voices: informed, focused, critical, often witty, and always happy to engage.
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Science
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George Boole was a British mathematician whose work on logic laid many of the foundations for the digital revolution. The Lincolnshire-born academic is widely heralded as one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th century, devising a system of logic that aimed to condense complex thoughts into simple equations. His development of ‘Boolean logic’ paved the way for the computer age.
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Security
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Last week, CIA director John O. Brennan became the latest victim of what’s become a popular way to embarrass and harass people on the Internet. A hacker allegedly broke into his AOL account and published e-mails and documents found inside, many of them personal and sensitive.
It’s called doxing — sometimes doxxing — from the word “documents.” It emerged in the 1990s as a hacker revenge tactic, and has since been as a tool to harass and intimidate people on the Internet. Someone would threaten a woman with physical harm, or try to incite others to harm her, and publish her personal information as a way of saying “I know a lot about you — like where you live and work.” Victims of doxing talk about the fear that this tactic instills. It’s very effective, by which I mean that it’s horrible.
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A THIRD SUSPECT in the TalkTalk hack has been released on police bail, as the telco provides more information about the scale of the attack, claiming that it was smaller than first thought.
A 27-year-old man was arrested and released in Staffordshire under the Computer Misuse Act, as officers from several forces continue to close the net on the cyber criminals responsible.
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And yeah, Heartbleed and Shellshock turned out to be much less of a threat than the tech world predicted. However, in various forums and other places where tech folks choose to hang out, Windows folks had a field day with all variants of “told-ya-so.” I pictured server admins running in circles with their hands flailing in the air, shouting that Armageddon was indeed here.
[...]
Fortunately, that rootkit was discovered fairly soon by Mark Russinovich, co-founder of Winternals. After the disclosure, Microsoft didn’t waste any time moving toward the acquisition of Russinovich’s company, although for complete disclosure, Russinovich had been offered a job by Microsoft years before. It is suggested in some circles that Microsoft purchased the company so quickly in order to quell the entire Microsoft/Sony duplicity rumors, as some believe that Microsoft would have to know about the rootkit, given how deeply it burrowed into Redmond’s proprietary code.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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One after another, our citizens are being killed, but we are yet to see a proactive approach from the government. Maybe they don’t realise that the blogger killings are damaging the country’s stability. What the government must understand is that by killing the bloggers and publishers, the extremists are actually killing freedom of speech and freedom of expression. The question is: why is the government unable to look at this in a broader perspective? They should be looking at it in a much more strategic way.
Terming these as“isolated incidents” is one way of depoliticising them. Such statements will only embolden the terrorists to carry out more attacks. This government was involved in the Liberation War, so they must know how guerrilla tactics work. Terrorist attacks are always isolated incidents. The main point is whether or not the government is willing to take anti-terrorist strategies.
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The horrific cycle of killing of secular bloggers in Bangladesh, which has already claimed at least four lives this year, and the fresh murder of publisher Faisal Arefin Dipon, in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, on October 31, is deeply disconcerting. The Ansar al-Islam, an Islamic extremist group, which identifies as the local affiliate of al-Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
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Two businessmen who had published the works of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism, were stabbed on Saturday by groups of men in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, the police said. The attack came eight months after Mr. Roy was himself stabbed to death with machetes.
One of the publishers, Faisal Arefin Dipan, died of his wounds immediately, the police said. The other, Ahmed Rahim Tutul, was in critical condition late Saturday.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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THE annual haze that blankets swathes of South-East Asia usually begins to recede in October. This year however the smoggy conditions—caused by fires set to clear farmland in rural Indonesia—only got worse. On October 26th Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, cut short a state visit to America to handle the crisis, which has become one of the worst in memory. With the onset of this year’s rainy season delayed by the “El Niño” weather cycle, it could be a month or more before all flames are doused.
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NPR executive editor Edith Chapin and ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen agree it is “unfortunate” that NPR has thus far failed to cover groundbreaking reports documenting that ExxonMobil funded efforts to sow doubt about climate science for decades after confirming that burning fossil fuels causes climate change.
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Morning Joe’s interview “exclusive, first-ever joint interview” with industrialists Charles and David Koch was full of softball questions and worshipful praise. They also gave the Koch brothers a pass for claiming they oversee one of “the safest and environmentally protective” companies. The fawning interview follows months of pro-Koch coverage by the MSNBC hosts.
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Finance
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Sweden is shaping up to be the first country to plunge its citizens into a fascinating — and terrifying — economic experiment: negative interest rates in a cashless society.
The Swedish central bank held its benchmark interest rate at -0.35% today, the level it has been at since July.
Although retail banks have yet to pass on that negative to rate to Swedish consumers, the longer it’s held there the more financial pressure there is for banks to pass the costs onto their customers. That’s a problem because Sweden is the closest country on the planet to becoming an all-electronic cashless society.
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Privacy
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It seems Google does record audio from microphones all the time, despite attempts to play down the situation. The “hotword” searching – when you initiate a search by saying “Ok Google” – has been criticized before, when it was downloaded to open-source browsers running Chromium. However, major privacy concerns remain as Google doesn’t start recording when you say “Ok Google”; it was recording before you said the hotword.
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We require people to use the name on Facebook that their friends and family know them by, and we’ll continue to do so.
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Proposals in the UK’s imminent Snooper’s Charter, which would allow police and security forces access to everyone’s Web browsing history, have been dropped, according to The Guardian. In a statement, “senior sources” in the UK government apparently said that “rather than increasing intrusive surveillance, the [Investigatory Powers] bill would bar police and security services from accessing people’s browsing histories,” and that “any access to internet connection records will be strictly limited and targeted.” The Guardian also claims that other controversial options for the Investigatory Powers Bill, due to be published on Wednesday, have been shelved.
These include the suggestion that companies would be restricted or perhaps banned from using encryption, and the requirement that UK telecoms would have to capture and store Internet traffic originating from US companies in order to allow UK intelligence agencies to access them even if the companies refused to hand over the data.
However, as many experts have pointed out, neither idea was feasible: online business would become impossible without encryption, and end-to-end encryption means that storing traffic from US-based companies would be largely useless anyway.
These facts raise the possibility that the UK government’s latest “climbdown” is actually nothing of the sort; rather, it would appear that the UK government has been feeding journalists exaggerated stories of what might be the Snooper’s Charter, so that it could then appear to back down graciously in the face of the inevitable outrage those ideas generated.
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Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to under the Investigatory Powers Bill
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The bulk collection of communications data without targeted suspicion is mass surveillance. The bulk collection of global communications data should end. Surveillance should be targeted, necessary and proportionate.
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Civil Rights
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It was a huge victory. We were up against a powerful billionaire and we won. But it came at a great cost: at least $2.5 million for us and our insurer, and $650,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for Mother Jones, to be precise. Everyone’s been asking whether we can recoup our attorney’s fees from VanderSloot, but unfortunately the answer is no.
The win means a lot to me, personally, too. As someone who writes about rich and powerful people, it’s good to know that the First Amendment is alive and well. And it makes me beyond proud to write for Mother Jones: Not too many other shops would have had the guts to fight back, but we knew you’d expect us to, and that you’d have our back if we took a stand.
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A US paramedic has reportedly been suspended without pay for making an “unauthorised” stop to try to save the life of a choking little girl.
Qwasie Reid, an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in New York City, was transporting a nursing home patient to a doctor’s appointment in an ambulance last week when he was flagged down by a “frantic man” near a Brooklyn school who said a student was choking.
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Back in 2011, we wrote about a troubling ruling in the Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the case which basically said that it’s perfectly fine for businesses to put in place “binding arbitration” clauses, that take away people’s rights to take a company to court over some sort of wrongdoing. As I noted at the time, ever since taking a series of classes on arbitration in college, I’ve been fascinated with the process, which sounds like a good idea. But it’s yet another case where theory and reality don’t necessarily match up.
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Quick–who’s missing from this New York Times chart (11/2/15)?
The point of the chart, based on one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that US non-Hispanic whites aged 45-54 have a rising mortality rate, unlike the similarly aged groups included for comparison purposes: Hispanics in the US, and people in France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia and Sweden.
The most obvious omission is African-Americans, who make up about 12 percent of the US population. They are left out of the chart not because they don’t support the point—they, too, have a falling death rate in the 45-54 demographic, unlike US whites—but presumably because they would require a larger graph, since the black mortality rate is still well above whites in this age group: 582 vs. 415 per 100,000.
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AT exactly 5 p.m. on March 13, 2007, just as I was preparing to leave my cubicle in Washington for the day, I got a phone call from the journalist Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers. To this day, I remember his exact words.
“One of your congressman’s constituents is being held in an Ethiopian intelligence service prison, and I think your former employer is neck-deep in this.”
The congressman was Rush Holt, then a Democratic representative from New Jersey, for whom I worked for 10 years starting in 2004. The constituent was Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J., who alleges that he was illegally taken to Ethiopia, where he was threatened with torture by American officials. My “former employer” was the Central Intelligence Agency, but it soon became apparent that the agency “neck-deep in this” was the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Facebook has been trying to get India to fall in love with its Free Basics service for several months since it launched in February. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even visited the capital of New Delhi last week and attempted to address concerns about it during a Townhall Q&A session.
But he still doesn’t get why Indians are opposed to the social network’s zero-rating service.
More than 330,000 people signed a petition to oppose zero-rating and uphold net neutrality principles in the country and numerous Web and media companies dropped off Facebook’s offering in support of the initiative.
Zuckerberg still thinks that Free Basics will serve India well, and believes that campaigns against it don’t factor in the benefits it brings to those who are still offline.
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In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices. Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail journal – “postjournal” in Norwegian) is public information and thanks to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal – OEP) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting journal entries .
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The World Trade Organization is poised to announce this Friday its approval of a limited 17-year extension of a 2001 waiver of obligations in the TRIPS Agreement, set to expire at the end of this year, the terms of which exempt Least Developed Countries (LDCs) from requirements to grant patents or related intellectual property rights on pharmaceutical products.
The decision to grant the 17-year waiver represents a compromise between the United States, which had asked for a ten-year waiver, and Least Developed Countries, which wanted an indefinite extension of the waiver that would have lasted for as long as a country remained least developed per UN classification. An indefinite waiver would have been a clear victory for LDCs, as it would have recognized their needs above the United States’ continuing promotion of more restrictive intellectual property rules.
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Copyrights
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Lawyers for Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom accused the United States of misrepresenting evidence and of trying to “contort the law” in a bid to persecute their client.
This is do-or-die time for Dotcom and three other former Megaupload execs at the now defunct Megaupload. On Monday, their attorneys began arguments at an extradition hearing in Auckland on why the New Zealand government should not hand them over to the United States on criminal copyright violations.
The US Department of Justice claimed in a 2012 indictment that Megaupload’s leadership generated $175 million by helping users pirate movies, and wants them brought to the US to stand trial.
The hearing began with at least one serious allegation made by Dotcom’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield. The way Mansfield tells it, either DOJ attorneys speak very poor German or they intentionally misrepresented the meaning of Dotcom’s internal communications to blacken his image before the public and the court.
Throughout the six-week hearing, New Zealand prosecutors, arguing on behalf of the United States, have told presiding Judge Nevin Dawson that Dotcom referred to himself and several other former Megaupload managers as “evil.”
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After proceedings began in September, Kim Dotcom began his extradition hearing defense in New Zealand today. His legal team argued that U.S. prosecutors cherry-picked evidence, intentionally mis-translated discussions to make the entrepreneur look bad, and created criminal liability for service providers where none exists.
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The RIAA is asking a New York federal court to issue a default judgment against the ‘reincarnation’ of the defunct Grooveshark music service. The record labels are demanding more than $13 million in piracy damages plus another $4 million for willful counterfeiting.
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After nearly a year of debate and deliberation, the Library of Congress (LoC) has granted gamers and preservationists a limited legal method to restore access to games that are rendered unplayable thanks to defunct, abandoned authentication servers.
In new guidelines published today, the Librarian of Congress said that gamers deserve the right to continued access to “local play” on games that they paid for, even if the centralized authentication servers required for that play have been taken down. So if Blizzard, for instance, decides to take down the authentication servers required to verify a new copy of StarCraft II online, players will now be legally allowed to craft a workaround that allows the game to work on their PCs.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It is hard to remember that IBM was not exactly sitting on the sidelines when Linux swept over the datacenter in the early 2000s in the wake of the dot-com bust. Big Blue saw the rise of Linux early on, among its supercomputer customers, and it was unsure how to preserve its revenue streams from AIX and OS/400 systems while at the same time embracing Linux. Here we are 15 years later, and it looks like IBM finally has its Linux act together on Power.
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Today I have in my possession several hundred CDs, several hundred more LPs, a few 7″ 45s, a few more cassettes, and a growing number of music downloads.
I am going to focus on music in digital formats, stored somewhere on a hard drive, whether ripped from CD or purchased as downloads. Moreover, since I am a Linux kind of guy, I’m going to take a Linux kind of perspective on this topic.
But before I get into the details of digital formats, I’m going to cover some introductory material.
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IBM midrange shops have a distinction and a notoriety for being do-it-yourselfers. They like to invent, construct, and organize according to the individual characteristics of their business environments. They prefer tailor-made to off the rack. That’s why it seems open source development is well suited for the IBM i community. That and the fact that open source allows pilot testing without a purchase approval process. That’s important, too.
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I hope you all rolled your eyes a bit, because although there’s a kernel of truth there, everyone knows it takes a lot more than using Linux to be successful in IT. It takes hard work, planning, strategizing, maintaining and a thousand other things system administrators, developers and other tech folks do on a daily basis. Thankfully, Linux makes that work a little easier and a lot more fun!
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Desktop
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It isn’t just Windows and Apple Mac PCs that get new versions of their operating systems, Linux does too. Yesterday Ubuntu 15.10 was released, which saw me immediately downloading the update and installing it.
Linux is free, which means you can try it out for yourself on an old PC (or a new one if you are brave enough) and not have to worry about breaking the bank.
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If you want to try a Chromebook without spending any money, a free method from Neverware makes this easy.
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Server
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IBM introduced several significant new elements for its Linux server stack last month: support for KVM on its z Systems mainframes, Linux-only models in both the z Systems and Power Systems ranges, and a new purchasing model.
The most technically interesting new development is mainframe support for KVM, the Linux kernel’s built-in hypervisor. Although this is just a new way to access facilities that existing IBM products offer, it may help drive migration of x86 workloads onto IBM’s highest-end kit.
Big Blue’s big iron already has rich virtualisation offerings. At the lowest level, the PR/SM facility splits each machine’s resources into multiple logical partitions (LPARs), each appearing as a separate machine with a portion of the host’s processing and storage capacity. Even if the machine’s configured as a single unit, it’s really one LPAR.
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In this article, we will address some of the questions we asked in the previous story: Is IaaS or OpenStack right for every enterprise? Are there cases where you don’t need IaaS? How does it affect the cost? What things should you consider before moving to IaaS? What are the tools available?
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has detailed the launch of the Linux 4.3 kernel, a new release with significant security enhancements.
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Applications
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The new Kodi 16.0 Alpha 4 has been released today by its developers, and it looks like things are progressing nicely on all fronts.
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As you may know, KKEdit is a text editor combining Mac’s BBEdit, Gedit and Leafpad. While it has interesting features like: jump to function declaration, search and replace via regular expressions, options for saving and restoring sessions, support for multiple bookmarks and source code highlighting, it is not an IDE.
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Pascal Brachet released version 4.5 of Texmaker and I have now updated the Fedora package (for F22 and F23) to this latest version.
A new feature that is available in this new release is the ability to count the number of words in the open PDF and in the current page (using internal viewer).
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As you may know, Deluge is an open-source, multi-platform, multi-interface (GTK+, web and command-line) BitTorrent client based on libtorrent-rasterbar. The Deluge daemon can run on headless machines with the user-interfaces being able to connect remotely.
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Yet another monthly upstream Armadillo update gets us the first changes to the new the 6.* series. This was preceded by two uploads of test released to GitHub-only. These two were tested both against all reverse-dependencies as usual. A matching upload to Debian will follow shortly.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve has published the new Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October, and it looks like the Linux platform is continuing its rise, although it’s still not above 1.0%.
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Voxel Blast certainly caught my interest recently, as it reminds me of some really old 3D space shooter games I played as a teen, and the music is pretty damn cool too.
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With the advent of Linux powered console gaming upon us, we’ve seen a massive increase in games releasing with day-one support for Linux and more and more older games getting Linux ports. What is perhaps more surprising is how prevalent Linux support has become in crowdfunding, and lately we have even seen biggies like The Dwarves, Indivisible and First Wonder go out of their way to provide Linux versions of their games. These are games hinging on tight funding margins, so what is it that makes our small platform worth the extra effort during a busy crowdfunding campaign? We know a couple of key reasons that developers often decide to support Linux even with our small numbers.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Krita contributor Scott Petrovic has released his new book Digital Painting with Krita 2.9. This is the first book on Krita in English! At over 230 pages long, the book is packed with useful information on how Krita works!
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To view analysis results you need to be a member of KDE Coverity project. If you are not yet then please send an appropriate request in Coverity describing your role in KDE and one of KDE Coverity project admins will approve it.
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We often get confuse which Linux distribution we are going to use. We think about it a lot. It mainly depends for which purpose you are going to use Linux. Depending on your purpose, you need to select the right Linux Distribution.
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New Releases
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The Solus developers have had a very busy week, and they’ve pushed quite a few updates out the door, not to mention the first Release Candidate for the project.
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OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run the Kodi (XBMC) media player hub, has been upgraded to version 6.0 and is now ready for download.
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Manjaro 15.09 (Bellatrix) is getting a new update, and this is an important one. The developers have finally managed to get the Catalyst drivers working for Linux kernel 4.2.
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If you want to watch media in your living room or bedroom, there are many options nowadays. The easiest, of course, is to buy a box like Roku, Amazon Fire TV or the popular AppleTV. Some “smart” televisions even have this capability built in.
The more hands-on alternative, however, is to build a HTPC (home theater PC). The problem with that? Windows 10 no longer supports Media Center. While this is a huge pain-point for the HTPC community, the good news is that Linux is — once again — here to save the day. Whether you choose to build a computer, or buy a compatible device like the low-cost Raspberry Pi, the mature OpenELEC Linux distribution will give you an amazing media experience.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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Hundreds of people are trying to install Arch Linux on a machine at the same time in the same terminal, using a voting system to decide the next keypress.
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Red Hat Family
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Over the past few weeks, enterprise tech giant Red Hat has made announcements which makes clear the path in which the firm is travelling. The company recently acquired IT automation provider Ansible, as well as announcing membership of the Node.js Foundation as a platinum member, alongside companies such as IBM, Intel, and Microsoft among others.
The former represents a continued move towards providing DevOps capabilities for its customers, accelerating application development and smoothing out problems for the line of business. The latter is attacking a similar goal through a different method, optimising application throughput for the real-time web.
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Fedora
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All the repositories have been updated for Fedora 23, so if you trigger an update, everything should update properly. CUDA enabled programs are still building.
A few notes:
HandBrake has been updated to a pre-release of 1.0 for Fedora 23. Updated x264/x265/FFmpeg libraries should give a speed bost to all encoding operations.
The Spotify 0.9.x repository has been removed. It will never receive updates anymore, and now the 1.x builds are on feature parity, including 32 bit support. If you haven’t upgraded, just do it now.
Nvidia drivers version 358.09 do not yet support X.org driver ABI 20, so you’re probably going to have some lock ups or random issues.
The SteamOS and X-Box replacement driver have been updated to the latest upstream.
Please let me know if you have any upgrade issue.
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Over the last week or two, several folks in the wider FOSS realm have taken the Fedora Project to task, mostly if not entirely on social media, for not releasing Fedora 23 on time.
Actually, the release of the next Fedora release is on time — tomorrow, if you want to go over to the Fedora Project site and give it a download — but even if it was released “late,” the standard by which a distribution is released on time depends on one thing and one thing only.
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Hi, folks. Just wanted to get an important word out there: if you have a Fedora system running as a FreeIPA server, do NOT upgrade it to Fedora 23 yet! There are several bugs in the upgrade process and you will wind up with a broken server which requires some tricky manual fixing.
So for now, do not upgrade. Subscribe to this bug to follow progress on fixing the upgrade process.
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After a one week delay, the final release of Fedora 23 should be available tomorrow.
I have done walk-throughs of the installers for Manjaro, openSuSE, and Ubuntu recently, and I have been looking forward to continuing this with Anaconda, which is by far my favorite of the installers. While the other installers seem to be a simple linear walk through all of the steps which may be required to perform an installation, I think Anaconnda is very nicely designed and engineered to provide a logical view of the necessary tasks and easy access to those which are required, without forcing you to go through every single one whether you really need to or not.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Think Canonical and you’ll think Ubuntu – the free operating system that perhaps doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Sure, it’s barely nibbled at the edges of Windows’ market share on the desktop, and it’s not even flavour of the month among the Linux community any more, but household names such as Amazon, Netflix and Uber have built their cloud businesses on Ubuntu.
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I had mixed feelings from my time with Ubuntu. On the one hand, the distribution feels fairly polished and the installer, applications and system tools all worked well. My desktop’s hardware was properly detected and utilized and this release offers us updated versions of popular software. However, in a virtual machine, Ubuntu performed poorly and this surprised me since the previous release worked quite smoothly in a VirtualBox instance. Not only that, but this version of Ubuntu used quite a bit more memory than the last version did on the same test equipment.
What really stood out most about Ubuntu 15.10 though was this release felt virtually identical in every way to Ubuntu 15.04 and very similar to 14.10. One of the few changes I noticed was that this version of Ubuntu appears to no longer support both the Upstart and systemd init programs, as the previous version did. I see this as an unfortunate (though expected) change as Canonical moves to support just one init package. On the one hand, this lack of adjustments in 15.10 is good news for people who do not want to experience a lot of change. The development team appears to have been working almost exclusively over the past year to fix bugs and keep things working as they have been. This makes Ubuntu feel like a more stable platform.
On the other hand, having a platform that does not boast any new features makes me wonder if there is a point to pushing out a new release. The minor package updates presented probably could have been handled by a backports repository for Ubuntu 15.04. While projects like openSUSE and Fedora are experimenting with new system admin tools, file system snapshots, Wayland and boot environments, Ubuntu appears to be sitting idle. I know there are behind-the-scenes changes planned (such as Snappy packages, Mir and a new version of Unity), but those items keep getting pushed back. In short, I feel this release of Ubuntu was good, but it isn’t bringing anything new to the table over the previous version.
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Mentor Automotive has launched a Linux-based, GENIVI compliant “Connected OS” that improves upon its ATP automotive stack with ADAS, eAVB, and CE support.
The Mentor Automotive division of Mentor Graphics announced the availability of a Mentor Automotive Connected OS stack that appears to replace its Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP), moving beyond in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) to add support for driver information, consumer electronics device integration, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) functionality, among other features. Like ATP, Connected OS is said to be compliant with the open source GENIVI automotive spec, and run on Linux. Connected OS is supported with AXSB hardware reference platform.
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They say the first step of coming to terms with addiction is admitting you have a problem… I have a problem with collecting ARM devices… there I said it! How big is this problem you ask? How about I list them out and let you decide!
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Samsung Z3, the companies second Tizen smartphone, has been released In India and will be coming to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka soon. Previously we reported on the Z3 coming to Europe and today, according to Insiders, there are 11 European countries that the Z3 is currently being tested for launch in.
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Android
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Facebook’s chief product officer is reportedly requiring a number of team members to switch from iPhones to Android phones so they can experience how most people interact with the social network.
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An earlier report by Matt Weinberger of Business Insider UK noted that Sony had initially offered Craig $5 million to carry around its Xperia Z4 phone in the movie.
Discussions involved an $18 million marketing commitment from Sony, escalating to a $50 million marketing and promotional package from Samsung as well as a $5 million product placement for Bond to be seen using an Android phone with Samsung’s brand on it.
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There’s never been a better time to buy an Android smartphone. Not only is there a huge array of different handsets from a multitude of manufacturers to choose from, but what you get for your money is simply incredible.
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2015 was (and still continues to be) the year of innovation in mobile technology. Android phones as well as iPhones and Windows Phones have advanced to another level, one which some expected, others didn’t. We got releases that blew our minds this year, as well as devices that aren’t as impressive as others. Some companies failed to get out of the rut they were in while others made huge progress in the industry. IoT got a big boost this year and mobile development is headed for new frontiers. Windows 10 has introduced universal Windows apps and Android will be doing the same – as soon as it becomes a cross-platform OS like Google recently announced.
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Once the mobile maker to beat, BlackBerry is fighting for survival. Its secret weapon: the first-ever BlackBerry phone powered by Google’s Android software.
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It’s still unclear what form this new operating system would take. Would it look like Chrome OS with access to the Google Play Store? Or will it look more like Android does now, but redesigned to look and work like a desktop operating system?
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Where do the developers in my FOSS community live? For large open source communities where personal contact with developers is impossible, answering this simple question may be difficult.
In some projects, developers have the option of registering personal geographical information such as a country or city of residence or GPS coordinates. For example, this is the case with Debian (shown below). In other projects, IP addresses—on which geolocation analysis can be performed later—are collected. This information permits tracking different kinds of access (to the development repositories, to the download area, to the forums, etc). But most projects don’t have these tracking capabilities.
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In a move that Pivotal says will make massively scalable, high-performance big data processing much more accessible, the company has turned its Greenplum data analytics platform into an open source product.
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If you attend LISA15 in Washington D.C. this month, you’ll want to catch James Mickens’ closing keynote, It Was Never Going to Work, So Let’s Have Some Tea. James Mickens has a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, and he is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard. In the past, he worked in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research. And he’s hilarious.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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As you may know, Pale Moon is an open-source, cross-platform browser based on Mozilla Firefox, being up to 25% faster then the original.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Crown Commercial Service has announced a new Open Source desktop suite as an alternative to Microsoft.
The new offering, Collabora GovOffice is based on LibreOffice from vendor Collabora Productivity, and is compatible with Google Docs and Microsoft Office (including Office 365).
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CMS
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IoT
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The world of smart devices talking to each other—and to us—is well underway and here to stay. To connect to the Internet of Things opportunity, it’s key to design and build networking infrastructures that can handle massive amounts of new data. Read more in this whitepaper.
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Devices are being connected to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) at an increasingly rapid rate — this we already know to be true.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source//Openwashing
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Netflix is taking steps to make its collaboration with open source developers easier by overhauling the Netflix Open Source program. Among other changes, the company will now release open products as Docker containers to simplify access.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Hi!
Please see
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Text-only version:
GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, GNU MIG 1.6 released.
We’re pleased to announce new releases!
GNU Hurd 0.7, NEWS:
Version 0.7 (2015-10-31)
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Public Services/Government
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The European Parliament calls upon the Commission “for the systematic replacement of proprietary software by auditable and verifiable open-source software in all the EU institutions, and for the introduction of a mandatory open-source-selection criterion in all future ICT procurement procedures”.
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The association of Italian municipalities (ANCI) is working on an interoperability manifesto to improve the information exchange between public administrations. The association is proposing standards and guidelines to make computer systems and database systems able talk to one another.
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Openness/Sharing
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Wikipedia is one of the great success stories of the Information Age: a free, open-source encyclopedia with over 37 million articles in 250 languages, all compiled by anonymous volunteer editors. There are no managers, no pay, and anyone can be an editor. It is one of the first results on any search engine and is the most common source of information for anyone first learning about a topic. These topics are generally objective and educational, and Wikipedia reports that its reliability rating approaches the Encyclopedia Britannica. While systemic bias admittedly exists on Wikipedia, it is supposedly limited to a few minor articles.
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Open Hardware
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One of the many advantages of inventing something is that you get to name it. Even better if your name and the thing you have created have some sort of phonetic connection – it just seems right then that the creators of an entirely 3D printed violin, Matt and Kaitlyn Hova, combined their name with their instrument and have released the Hovalin.
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Programming
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The R Consortium and the Linux Foundation are investing in a new code-hosting platform that will help streamline the development and distribution of software packages for R, the popular statistical programming language.
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Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has said new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a “conviction politician” like Margaret Thatcher was.
He said anti-austerity and anti-war MP Mr Corbyn is someone viewed as extreme but who could shift the political scenery like the former Conservative prime minister.
Speaking to Sky News, Mr Varoufakis admitted he was “one of those strange left-wingers who missed” the late Tory leader.
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Security
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For some time infosec pros have known that plugins for WordPress, Joomla and other content management systems are being leveraged by attackers.
More evidence of that has come in a report from Akamai’s Security Intelligence Research Team (SIRT), which discovered a widely distributed botnet that leverages CMS systems to launch co-ordinated brute-force spamming campaigns.
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How do you get high-end security-monitoring skills without the high-end price? Industrial giant BlueScope recently found out after its CSO worked with a key service provider to build a robust, global security operations centre (SOC) using open-source components.
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Over 14,000 keys used to unlock files encrypted by CoinVault and Bitcryptor have been released, signaling the death of the ransomware variants.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Climate change may have many economic impacts, including loss of crops, changes in water supply, increased incidence of natural disaster, and spikes in health care costs related to infectious diseases and temperature-related illnesses. However, hard evidence about the effects of climate change on economic activity has been inconsistent.
A new paper published in Nature takes on the ambitious task of connecting micro- and macro-level estimates of climate costs. The study finds that climate change can be expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23 percent by the year 2100. This study is important because it solves a problem that has existed in prior models of climate change effects on economics: discrepancies between macro- and micro-level observations. This study presents the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled in some way to global climate. The study also sets up a new empirical paradigm for modeling economic loss in response to climate change.
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Climate change deniers should come to Ghana
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Freed from the physical reality that places the United States in the temperate zone of a tilted planet, Schrager is free to reorganize regional schedules in the name of “economic efficiency” without regard to what this would actually do to people’s lives. She wisely declines to describe the results of her scheme, maybe realizing that the idea of putting the West Coast permanently on what is now Central Standard Time would have limited appeal had she spelled out that in mid-December, the Sun would set at 2:43 pm in Los Angeles, 2:27 pm in Portland and 2:18 pm in Seattle.
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Reverse mortgage pitchman and former Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) passed away on November 1, 2015, at the age of 73, but his legacy of giving the Koch Brothers a pass on one of their first major forays into funneling money into mysterious groups to try to win elections continues unabated.
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Finance
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Millions face ever deeper income and wealth inequalities, ecological dangers, politics corrupted by money.
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Privacy
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Internet and social media companies will be banned from putting customer communications beyond their own reach under new laws to be unveiled on Wednesday.
Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.
Measures in the Investigatory Powers Bill will place in law a requirement on tech firms and service providers to be able to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through a warrant.
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Pending before federal magistrate judge James Orenstein is the government’s request for an order obligating Apple, Inc. to unlock an iPhone and thereby assist prosecutors in decrypting data the government has seized and is authorized to search pursuant to a warrant. In an order questioning the government’s purported legal basis for this request, the All Writs Act of 1789 (AWA), Judge Orenstein asked Apple for a brief informing the court whether the request would be technically feasible and/or burdensome. After Apple filed, the court asked it to file a brief discussing whether the government had legal grounds under the AWA to compel Apple’s assistance. Apple filed that brief and the government filed a reply brief last week in the lead-up to a hearing this morning.
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Hopefully, it won’t take a lot of convincing for folks to understand just how wrong-headed this is. For starters, if the plaintiffs are correct, they are currently being subjected to unconstitutional government surveillance for which they are entitled to a remedy. The fact that this surveillance has a limited shelf-life (and/or that Congress was complicit in it) doesn’t in any way ameliorate the constitutional violation — which is exactly why the Supreme Court has, for generations, recognized an exception to mootness doctrine for constitutional violations that, owing to their short duration, are “capable of repetition, yet evading review.” Indeed, in this very same opinion, the Second Circuit first held that the ACLU’s challenge isn’t moot, only to then invokes mootness-like principles to justify not resolving the constitutional claim. It can’t be both; either the constitutional challenge is moot, or it isn’t.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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On October 23, the Anti-Monopoly Guidelines Regulating Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights(Draft for Comments) were made available to USITO by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) for review and comment.
The five-part draft provides guidance on how to regulate IPR-related monopoly agreements, abuse of market dominant position, monopoly involving standards-essential patents, and concentration of undertakings.
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Copyrights
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Is there copyright in very short phrases?
As copyright enthusiasts know, this invariably proves to be one of the thorniest issues to determine when it comes to specific cases. Just a couple of days ago it was reported that Taylor Swift has been sued for copyright infringement over inclusion of ‘haters gone hate’ and ‘playas gone play’ in her song Shake It Off.
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Send this to a friend
10.31.15
Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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You feel safe, wrapped in that comforting blanket of Linux. It soothes you and protects you from the lumbering monsters that hide within your server closet. That innocent penguin has always been there to ward away the evil…it’s glowing red eyes peering through the Windows of a house made of glass. And you stand tall, knowing the open source platform will always have your back. Or, will it?
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Desktop
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Psst, want a cheap laptop? Philadelphia’s Nonprofit Technology Resources wants to save a pile of laptops from the scrapyard. So Ed Cummings, the president of the organization, said the organization is having a “Linux Laptop Pizza Party” on Saturday in the City of Brotherly Love, according to Juliana Reyes writing in Technical.ly.
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Server
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Kernel Space
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With recently having picked up four Western Digital Black HDDs, I decided to run some fresh hard drive benchmarks with the most common Linux file-systems to see how the performance compares atop Ubuntu 15.10.
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While there was still a fair amount of code churn this week, if Linus remains comfortable with the state of the kernel, Linux 4.3 will be released this weekend.
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Alex Deucher sent in another pull request of new AMDGPU/Radeon DRM material for landing in DRM-Next to in turn make it into Linux 4.4.
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Intel has published a new set of patches fpr speeding up AES-CBC encryption for processors having the AVX2 instruction set extension.
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Graphics Stack
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Martin Peres at Intel has sent out the latest revised patches for supporting Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 (DRI3) with EGL.
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Alex Goins of NVIDIA posted the patches yesterday evening as version two of PRIME synchronization for the i915 DRM. The patches aren’t big but will hopefully fix tearing for those using PRIME on dual GPU systems.
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Maxime Ripard of Free Electrons published a set of nineteen patches yesterday for adding Allwinner A10 display engine support via a new DRM driver for the Linux kernel.
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The Mesa i965 DRI driver enables ARB_shader_clock support for Intel Ivy Bridge “Gen 7″ graphics and newer. This work will be part of Mesa 11.1.
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Complementing yesterday’s Are The Open-Source Graphics Drivers Good Enough For Steam Linux Gaming? article is a look at the Steam Linux gaming performance for three different Intel Linux systems running Ubuntu 15.10 and firing up the latest Steam client. This is the last of the planned series that began one week ago with the a 22-way comparison of NVIDIA/AMD GPUs on SteamOS.
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Following the 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux and 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA/AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming articles, a few Phoronix readers were inquiring about the CPU and GPU utilization metrics during testing.
So I started work on some follow-up tests to look at the CPU/GPU utilization during testing to try to answer that question. The Phoronix Test Suite is able to do so by simply setting MONITOR=cpu.usage,gpu.usage as an environment variable prior to running any benchmarks (or see phoronix-test-suite system-sensors or MONITOR=all for the other system sensors supported through Phodevi – The Phoronix Device Interface).
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As there’s been some discussion lately about the “size” of the different open-source Linux graphics drivers, here are some fresh looks at the rough code size of each of the main DRM/KMS kernel drivers as well as the Mesa/Gallium3D user-space drivers.
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Over the past week on Phoronix have been several featured articles looking at the performance of SteamOS with the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers: 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA/AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS, 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS, and Is SteamOS Any Faster Than Ubuntu 15.10 Linux? One of the frequent questions that have come up since then is how the open-source driver performance compares to that of the binary blobs on SteamOS, so here are some of those benchmarks.
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Applications
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Furius ISO Mount is an application that allows users to mount a large number of images in their operating systems with minimal effort. It’s designed to be used by beginners and experts alike, although the need for such apps has diminished.
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In Cockpit we run thousands of integration tests per day against pull requests and git master. Each test brings up up Cockpit in a full operating system VM, and hammers on it in some way. Without these tests it’s impossible to validate that Cockpit actually works.
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Thanks to everyone who contributed with bug reports and testing. What isn’t generally visible is that a lot of this happens behind the scenes downstream on distribution bug trackers, IRC, and so forth.
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PyRoom is the kind of application that you don’t ever hear people talking about, but that is completely surprising once you open it. It’s a distraction-free text editor that allows writers to focus on the writing and less on anything else.
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Arun Raghavan from the PulseAudio project has had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the first point release of the PulseAudio 7 open-source sound server.
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The developers of the open source GStreamer multimedia framework have announced a few hours ago the release and immediate availability for download of the first maintenance version of the GStreamer 1.6 series.
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The developers of the open source, MPlayer-based MPV video player software have announced the release and immediate availability for download of version 0.12.0.
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Proprietary
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If you are a systems administrator and you are tasked with ensuring your systems have a backup and replication process, Veeam is likely in your arsenal of tools.
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The Vivaldi developers, through Olafur Arnason and Ruarí Ødegaard, have announced the release of two consecutive Snapshots of the upcoming Vivaldi web browser for all supported operating systems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Implementation of the TransmitFile function.
– More implementation of the Web Services DLL.
– Improved video decoding.
– Alternative for the deprecated prelink tool.
– Major Turkish translation update.
– Various bug fixes.
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Alexandre Julliard announced earlier today, October 30, the immediate availability for download and testing of a new development version of the Wine software that lets users run Windows apps and games on any GNU/Linux operating system.
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Wine 1.7.54 was released this morning as the latest bi-weekly Wine development release.
Wine 1.7.54 offers improved video decoding, an implementation of the TransmitFile function, more of the Web Services DLL has been implemented, and more.
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Games
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For Linux gamers, you can now set extra mouse buttons to do things, which is apparently a big thing (I never use mine).
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A new Humble Weekly Bundle has been released, and it’s called Day of the Devs. With one exception, all the games that have been made available also come with Linux support.
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Not the news I expected to hit my inbox this week. Fishing Planet an online fishing game aimed at realism is heading to Linux.
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The game was ported to Linux in time for the Halloween sale on Steam and is a bargain for fans of puzzle platformers.
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Guild Software thought that it will be nice for its Vendetta Online players to receive a new double update of the game, so that they don’t get bored on Halloween night.
Guild Software thought that it will be nice for its Vendetta Online players to receive a new double update of the game, so that they don’t get bored on Halloween night.
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One of the things I do here is contact developers who promised a Linux version of a game which hasn’t yet surfaced, and the latest user request for me to check was Moebius: Empire Rising. It took a while to get a response on it, but they did kindly reply and allow me to publish their answer.
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On the flip-side, there are companies like Valve (with Steam) and Nvidia (with their Shield line) that are enabling some amazing, but proprietary, games to come to Linux (I still haven’t managed to make myself write it as “GNU/Linux”… I still think that looks goofy as a name). All of which lets me feel a bit better about playing these closed games.
By buying games written for, and running on, a Free Software platform… I am helping to encourage further development, testing, and usage of that platform. Which is good.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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After introducing the first maintenance version of the soon-to-be-released Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment, the most anticipated release of Cinnamon, Clement Lefebvre presents the second point release.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Some time ago KDE project bet on the separation of base libs, on somehing called frameworks, that create a set of libraries to be capable to be used for any other software project.
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This month began with a super KDE Sprint for KDevelop and Kate. I’ve mentioned the things I did and learned in my previous blog post.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Hi GNOMErs!
The development of the next GNOME release, 3.20, has started, and the
first development release, 3.19.1, is now available.
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The GNOME developers are working around the clock to implement the most awesome GNU/Linux technologies in their highly acclaimed open-source desktop environment used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems by default.
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Christian Hergert has shared a blog post with some of his plans for what he hopes to accomplish during the GNOME 3.20 cycle with regard to his GNOME Builder integrated development environment.
GNOME Builder continues to be to GNOME as KDevelop is to KDE. GNOME Builder so far has supported features like extensive inline code completion, quick file access, code assistance, integrated GNOME/GTK document viewing, live markdown previews, and many other features. If you are not familiar with the current state of GNOME Builder, see the GNOME Wiki.
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Javier Jardón announced the release of GNOME 3.19.1 today as the first development release aiming toward GNOME 3.20.
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I’ve been busy working on the plumbing for what will become Builder 3.20. We have a really ambitious cycle ahead of us, so getting these core changes in place as soon as possible will help give us time to stabilize.
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Reviews
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You can use BackBox as your main Linux distro and do nothing more involved that run its security envelop to harden your immediate computing environment and surf the Web with anonymity.
You can use BackBox more productively to dig deep into your network to sniff out security risks and lock down your connectivity and data. BackBox’s security tools are professional class.
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Pinguy Builder is a very useful app that can be used by anyone to create an Ubuntu Live CD from scratch or to back up an existing Ubuntu installation. The process should work with all the other Ubuntu-based distributions.
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New Releases
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Suman Chakravartula has had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the Fedora-based Rockstor 3.8-9 Linux operating system, known as an open-source, powerful and smart NAS (Network-attached storage) solution.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon 15.11 is a modern and easy to use Linux distribution based on Gentoo, following an extreme, yet reliable, rolling release model.
This is a monthly release generated, tested and published to mirrors by our build-servers containing the latest and greatest collection of software available in the Entropy repositories.
The Change-log files related to this release are available on our mirrors.
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The Sabayon developers are happy to announce the release of their monthly rolling ISO images, dubbed Sabayon 15.11, which include all the updates that have been released during the month of October 2015.
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Arch Family
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Twitch playing Pokémon was easy mode. Tomorrow, Twitch viewers will be invited to do something altogether more challenging: install Arch Linux. Using the same Twitch chat-driven concept as the collaborative Pokémon playthrough, anyone will be able to enter commands and control the installation process.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Now that the Release Candidate of the forthcoming openSUSE Leap 42.1 GNU/Linux operating system was made available for download and testing during the last two weeks, the time has come to take a look at Leap’s most prominent features.
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Red Hat Family
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I met Alison Chaiken at LinuxCon 2010 in Boston, not long after she joined Nokia as a Meego technical consultant. A few months later, I interviewed her about her role at Nokia and her predictions about where open source technology was headed in 2011. She predicted an increasing role for cameras and microphones in mobile. “Cameras and microphones are used deliberately to take photos and record voice commands, but in the future they will be always on, gathering ambient data about the environment of users on the go,” she said.
These days Alison works on automotive Linux systems programming at Mentor Graphics’ Embedded Software Division, and she spends a lot of time working with, contributing to, and speaking about systemd. She’ll be leading a training session, systemd, the Next-Generation Linux System Manager, at LISA15 in Washington D.C. on November 9. In this interview, she makes another prediction—that sys admins will enjoy using systemd.
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Multinational software company, Citrix, has partnered with open source company, Red Hat, on new product integrations for building OpenStack Clouds. As part of the collaboration, Citrix unveiled the integration and certification of its application delivery controller, NetScaler, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
Citrix said, in a statement, that this partnership will enable customers to assemble their Cloud infrastructure using components from Citrix and Red Hat for the first time.
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Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, Inc., a provider of powerful IT automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT.
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Wall Street brokerages expect that Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) will post $0.31 earnings per share for the current quarter, according to Zacks Investment Research. Nine analysts have provided estimates for Red Hat’s earnings. The highest EPS estimate is $0.32 and the lowest is $0.30. Red Hat posted earnings of $0.30 per share in the same quarter last year, which suggests a positive year-over-year growth rate of 3.3%. The firm is expected to issue its next earnings results on Thursday, December 17th.
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The Ceph Community, an open-source object and file cloud storage stack, has formed an advisory board that will work in governance with the community.
The Ceph Advisory Board will assist the community in driving open-source software-defined storage technology, and in collaborating with the community’s technical and user committees.
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Fedora
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In somewhat of an embarrassing move and indicating that KDBUS likely won’t be proposed for Linux 4.4, this in-kernel IPC mechanism is being temporarily stripped out of Fedora.
Fedora developers added KDBUS to their Rawhide kernel this summer at the request of the systemd developers involved in KDBUS development. With systemd 221, the upstream developers also encouraged Linux distributions to begin shipping KDBUS even though it wasn’t part of the mainline kernel. This turned out to be a mistake.
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You might have heard of the C.H.I.P., the 9$ computer. After contributing to their Kickstarter, and with no intent on hacking on more kernel code than is absolutely necessary, I requested the “final” devices, when chumps like me can read loads of docs and get accessories for it easily.
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While Fedora 23 failed its Go/No-Go meeting yesterday, at today’s meeting this next installment of Red Hat’s Fedora Linux was cleared to be released next week.
Fedora 23 RC10 has been promoted to final at today’s meeting, per the notes.
Fedora 23 will now be officially released next Tuesday, 3 November. Fedora 23 is in exceptional shape and comes with a variety of new features. I personally look forward to upgrading to Fedora 23 on my main production system once switching over to a Skylake ultrabook.
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The Fedora KDE community has been dealt a blow today with one of the co-maintainers of the Fedora KDE packages resigning from those duties along with his roles relating to the Fedora KDE special interest group.
Kevin Kofler, who has long been involved in KDE packaging for Fedora and advancing KDE on Fedora, he is stepping down from their KDE SIG and from co-maintaining all of the Qt/KDE packages he maintains for the distribution — except for the few packages he is the upstream maintainer of in the KDE world.
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Jan Kurik tonight announced that Fedora 23 is GO for release. An internal RC10 will be created and tested and if no major issues arise, it will be released as Fedora 23 next week. For KDE users it may not be a day for celebration, as Phoronix.com’s Michael Larabel reported today that a co-maintainer for KDE in Fedora said that upcoming version 23 is “easily the worse KDE spin we have ever released.” Yikes.
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Linux Voice magazine periodically releases older issues of their magazine under a CC-BY-SA license so the entire Linux community can read, share and use the articles they publish (they also donate 50% of their profits to the Free Software community).Today, they released Issue 12 of Linux Voice under the CC-BY-SA license, nine months after the release of the magazine back in February.
Of particular interest to Fedora users is at the end of their Distro Hopper segment, they take a look at our first ever release — Fedora Core 1. While obviously a little dated, with the release of Fedora 23 so close, there is also a review of Fedora 21. The issue also features an interview with systemd developer Lennart Poettering.
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The Red Hat developers have finally greenlit the launch of Fedora 23 and it looks like the new version will finally arrive on November 3, the date that was previously tracked.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov announced the release of the fourth maintenance build of the snapcraft utility that can be used by anyone to easily create Snappy packages for the Ubuntu Snappy Core operating system.
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On the last day of October, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily email to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-8 software update.
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Canonical’s David Planella sent in his bi-monthly report to inform us all about the last things that happened in the Ubuntu world. The report includes information about the work done by the Ubuntu Community Team during the last two weeks.
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Solu Machines recently launched a Kickstarter campaign with the hopes of releasing a completely new class of device. Dubbed the Solu, the company has prototyped a 4.5-inch cloud-powered computer with a peculiar square form factor. Its touchscreen display allows users to navigate the device with their fingers, like they would a smartphone or tablet.
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Solu Machines recently launched a Kickstarter campaign with the hopes of releasing a completely new class of device. Dubbed the Solu, the company has prototyped a 4.5-inch cloud-powered computer with a peculiar square form factor. Its touchscreen display allows users to navigate the device with their fingers, like they would a smartphone or tablet.
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Solu Machines is running a Kickstarter campaign for an unusual type of computer. The Solu is a mini PC that measures about 4.5 inches square and has a touchscreen display, so you can use it sort of like a mobile phone or tablet. But connect it to a monitor and keyboard and the Solu becomes a touchpad that you can use to interact with desktop on a bigger screen.
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VIA’s “EPIA-E900” SBC uses VIA’s own Eden X4 processor, and debuts a reincarnated “Pico-ITXe” form-factor featuring MXM-based PCIe and multi-I/O expansion.
VIA’s new EPIA-E900 single-board computer introduces a second generation of the Pico-ITXe form-factor that VIA demoed at an Embedded Systems Conference back in October 2008. Although this Pico-ITXe re-spin has the same name, it bears little resemblance to the now-defunct Pico-ITXe v1.0. While the original Pico-ITXe footprint measured 100 x 72mm and included self-stacking SUMIT expansion, today’s Pico-ITXe is 38mm longer and expands with a coplanar MXM slot that carries a collection of I/O interfaces plus PCI Express.
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Phones
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Tizen
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VLC is a cross platform open source media player that is created by the VideoLAN Project. It supports many different audio and video compression methods and file formats and Is regarded as one of the best and most versatile media players out there.
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Android
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Back in March I was given an LG G Watch R, the first Android Wear smartwatch to have a full round display (the Moto 360 was earlier, but has a bit cut off the bottom of the actual display). I’d promised I’d get round to making some comments about it once I’d had it for a while and have failed to do so until now. Note that this is very much comments on the watch from a user point of view; I haven’t got to the point of trying to do any development or other hacking of it.
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That’s where people like GM’s Phil Abram come into play. Abram — who has stints at Sonos and Sony on his résumé — led the company’s adoption of CarPlay and Android Auto, which will eventually reach just about every vehicle GM sells in the US. He’s also coming off a connected car deployment in China after rolling out in Europe and North America, where LTE currently ships on 16 models.
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ChromeOS is a stripped-down Gentoo-derived GNU/Linux operating system built using Chromium OS. At its simplest, it’s a browser as operating system.
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Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: there’s no practical application for the apps demonstrated below, at least not in the way they’re being used. You can’t seriously play a game meant for a 20-button controller on a screen smaller than two inches across, even if your fingers are tiny enough to hit the virtual buttons. This is the work of an enthusiast gamer and Android fan. It doesn’t have to make sense.
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Two Android devices, using the very same build of the OS, can be quite different in reality if they’re made by different manufacturers. So much so that it’s not rare for (uninitiated) friends and family members to ask us whether a heavily skinned device is an Android device. It’s kind of weird.
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This week, the Nexus 6P and 5X received a substantial new feature: Factory images. Factory images are a great failsafe to have with a Nexus device, just in case you need to restore it back to its original state if catastrophe strikes.
This update was one of the few highlights in a rather slow week of updates in Android Land. Of course, if Android really does swallow up Chrome, we can’t wait to add a whole list of Android-powered PCs to this weekly compilation.
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Back at Google I/O in 2014, Google announced Android Auto. Their first step into the car – well other than their self-driving cars. The idea was to provide a seamless experience in terms of infotainment systems in our cars. Because let’s face it, the car makers suck at making infotainment systems. However, Google also wanted that data (reports have stated that Google wants basically an OBD-II dump, while others have stated that it’s just whether the car is in park, what the headlights are doing, etc). After all, Google collects data about everything.
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Root. It’s a word we’re mostly familiar with here. Despite the ever-increasing attempts by Google to make it harder to achieve and use (and most likely this will continue, with the predicted convergence of the heavily locked-down ChromeOS and Android platforms), rooting remains incredibly popular on XDA.
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Open source enterprise use cases appear to be on the rise, at least anecdotally, with an increasing number of CIOs, IT directors and Chief Technology Officers telling CIO UK about investigating and adopting free and open source alternatives to proprietary software as they seek to gain freedom and flexibility, cut costs, increase agility, improve code quality and avoid vendor lock-in.
UK businesses it seems have also finally conquered their “irrational fears” of open source and security fears are also on the wane, reports have suggested.
The most recent studies by the non-profit Linux Foundation in its Enterprise End User Trends reports have revealed year on year increases in Linux deployments over the last four years, with the open operating system seeing particular growth as a platform for cloud computing.
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Neo4j graph NoSQL database team launches open source graph query language called openCypher. Neo Technology, the company behind the graph database, announced last week at GraphConnect Conference, the launch of the open source project that will be available to technology providers as a common language for querying graph data.
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The Tor Project has launched the beta version of Tor Messenger, an easy-to-use encrypted message client for those concerned about their privacy and potential surveillance.
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Many organizations use static analysis security testing (SAST) and dynamic analysis security testing (DAST) for monitoring, but while these tools are excellent for finding bugs in code written by internal developers, they are not effective in detecting known open source vulnerabilities in application code. In fact, open source vulnerabilities are far too complex to be found by these automated tools.
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Events
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Alan Clark, chairman of the board at the OpenStack Foundation, discusses the progress made at the OpenStack Summit this week.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Earlier this year Samsung’s Julien Isorce posted VA-API support for Nouveau to better video acceleration for this open-source NVIDIA driver. Since then he’s been working on some Gallium3D VA improvements to benefit the use-case of Chromium’s GStreamer back-end.
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SaaS/Big Data
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At the OpenStack Summit here, there have been a number of common themes and questions that keep surfacing. Time and again panels are discussing why contributions matter and how Amazon is or isn’t the competition.
One such panel session was titled “The OpenStack Orchestra: The Next Wave of OpenStack Specialist Startups,” and included executives from Mirantis, Tesora, SwiftStack and PLUMgrid.
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Networking has always been a part of the open source OpenStack cloud platform, but it has never been more popular, or as exciting as it is now. At the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, one of the hottest topics is networking, as organizations of all sizes turn to the cloud for Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization capabilities.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice 5.1 Alpha has launched, ready for the weekend. Enthusiasts and community members will be able to grab the software and partake in the first Bug Hunting Session from Friday October 30th to Sunday November 1st. The final build of LibreOffice 5.1 is expected to launch in February next year.
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BSD
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I’m Henning, not 20 any more, OpenBSD developer since 2002. I architected & wrote large parts of pf, started, architected and wrote large parts of bgpd and ntpd. The imsg & privsep framework I wrote for bgpd is in almost all newer OpenBSD daemons. I also worked a lot in the network stack, including many redesigns. One of the last bigger projects I did was the replacement of the queueing subsystem.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Stepping ahead of the Linux 4.3 release is a Halloween release of GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, and GNU MIG 1.6.
GNU Hurd 0.7 improves the node cache for the EXT2 file-system code (ext2fs), improves the native fakeroot tool, provides a new rpcscan utility, fixes a long-standing synchronization issue with the file-system translators and other components, and the Hurd code has been ported to work with newer GCC versions and libc.
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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) contains provisions penalizing the circumvention of “technological protection measures”. These measures are digital jails denying users access to the software and other digital works they possess, preventing them from examining or changing the software on their devices. While such measures are nominally meant to protect copyrighted works, in reality they function as unacceptable restrictions on computer user freedom. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) opposes such Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) systems. The FSF further opposes the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, and demands that Congress repeal those provisions. Other countries with similar laws should follow suit.
Every three years, the Library of Congress reviews proposals granting limited exemptions from the DMCA’s broad ban on users controlling the software and data on devices encumbered with DRM. This flawed process is meant to lessen the DMCA’s harm by giving user rights advocates an opportunity to request exemptions allowing circumvention in particular cases. Even when such petitions succeed, the resulting exemptions last only three years, meaning that advocates must repeatedly fight to retain the limited ground they won.
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Licensing
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Each approach strikes a different balance between your costs, benefits and PCI risks and workload. The table sums up the highlights, the details of which I’ll explain further.
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Openness/Sharing
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Croatia’s e-Građani (eCitizens) project was declared the best European eGovernment services project, in an awards ceremony at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit 2015 in Mexico on Wednesday.
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Open Access/Content
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On Thursday, Harvard Law School announced its Free the Law project, teaming up with a company called Ravel to scan all federal court decisions and all state court decisions, and then place them all online for free. This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton — and the public is left out.
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The Department of Education has launched #GoOpen, a campaign to encourage schools to use open educational resources (OER). To add force to the hashtag, the Department proposed new regulation that any tool developed with its federal grant funds will be required to have an open license, would which allow schools to use and modify those resources for free.
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Open Hardware
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A pair of engineers in Singapore, Andrew “Bunny” Huang and Sean Cross, have developed a working laptop which was designed to be completely open sourced, with no proprietary drivers or software of any kind. The Novena laptop is powered by a Cortex A9 and an FPGA and runs Debian, even communications are handled by a software-defined radio board. This is more of a proof of concept than a marketable machine but the links at The Register will take you to the details on how you could build one yourself. Even the bezel is open source and modifiable, it is a laptop with an upgradable screen!
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Programming
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PHP 7.0 RC6 was released today for what may be the final release candidate ahead of PHP 7.0.0′s official premiere in two weeks.
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Ceylon, the programming language based on Java and developed at Red Hat, is out with a new version of this programming language that can be lowered down into JavaScript.
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We’re pleased and proud to unleash PyPy 4.0.0, a major update of the PyPy python 2.7.10 compatible interpreter with a Just In Time compiler. We have improved warmup time and memory overhead used for tracing, added vectorization for numpy and general loops where possible on x86 hardware (disabled by default), refactored rough edges in rpython, and increased functionality of numpy.
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PyPy 4.0.0 was released today as a major update for this Python 2.7 interpreter and JIT compiler.
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CAIRO: Egypt confirmed on Saturday that a Russian passenger plan had crashed in central Sinai.
A statement from the prime minister’s office said Sherif Ismail had formed a cabinet level crisis committee to deal with the crash.
The plane, travelling from the Egyptian resort Sharm el-Sheikh to the Russian city of St Petersburg, disappeared from radar screens in Cypriot airspace, Russia’s RIA news agency reported, citing a Russian aviation authority source.
The source said the aircraft was an Airbus A-321 jet, had 224 passengers and crew on board, and was operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia.
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Sunday, October 16 was declared Steve Jobs Day by California’s Governor Brown. I admire Brown for taking a step to recognize Jobs’ extraordinary contributions, but I couldn’t help be struck by Rob Pike’s comments on the death of Dennis Ritchie a few weeks after Steve Jobs.
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I’ve been lamenting the demise of the Unix philosophy: tools should do one thing, and do it well.
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It takes a little longer, but it’s so much nicer if you can read an email thread from top to bottom rather than having to scroll to the bottom, read, scroll backward, read, scroll backward, read, etc. Yes, it’s the easiest way to reply to a message, but it’s an enemy of comprehension for recipients.
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Security
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Lauri Love made an appearance on the BBC flagship current affairs programme Newsnight on Friday 23 October, explaining the significance of a widely publicised hack of telecoms provider TalkTalk, which has led to the disclosure of personal information of millions of subscribers.
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Free website hosting service 000webhost has suffered a data breach which has placed the service’s security practices under scrutiny.
000webhost is a free web hosting service which supports both PHP and MySQL, catering for millions of users worldwide. On Wednesday, the firm told users in a Facebook message that the company had suffered a databreach on its main server.
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Google has given Symantec an offer it can’t refuse: give a thorough accounting of its ailing certificate authority process or risk having the world’s most popular browser—Chrome—issue scary warnings when end users visit HTTPS-protected websites that use Symantec credentials.
The ultimatum, made in a blog post published Wednesday afternoon, came five weeks after Symantec fired an undisclosed number of employees caught issuing unauthorized transport layer security certificates. The mis-issued certificates made it possible for the holders to impersonate HTTPS-protected Google webpages.
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Conjecture on cracked primes for the Diffie-Hellman asymmetric algorithm is in recent news, suggesting that several nations have broken primes in common use and can read all traffic…
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While the software was designed to be run on an Intel NUC using Linux (or similar device), it could conceivably be run on other platforms and setups. The code is open, after all, and there for the taking. In any case, here are the specs described by the company:
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Syrian rebels wielding US-made anti-tank missiles have become YouTube war heroes after a surge in successful attacks on forces loyal to dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Use of the BGM-71 TOW missiles – which cost $50,000 a piece – is up over 850% in October with the American-made weapons responsible for the destruction of scores of Syrian army tanks. Charles Lister, a Syrian expert at the Brookings Institute, said there had been 82 uses of the missiles as of 20 October up from 13 in September.
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It’s been 43 years since the CIA cut off support to the Tibetan guerillas that the agency trained and armed to fight a covert war against China. Yet, a monument to the CIA’s secret war in Tibet is still standing in Pokhara, Nepal.
The former Hotel Mount Annapurna building sits on a quiet side street off the Pokhara airport. Established in 1972 with CIA funds, the hotel was meant to give former Tibetan resistance fighters based in Nepal’s nearby Mustang region a livelihood and a future as they laid down their arms and transitioned to life as refugees.
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In particular, it is becoming more common for countries to punish people who express sensitive opinions on social media and in other forums. Perhaps the most high-profile example of the past year occurred in March, following the death of Singapore’s first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Five days after Lee died, a sixteen-year-old named Amos Yee tweeted mild criticism of the former Prime Minister and linked to an eight-and-a-half-minute YouTube clip in which he condemned Lee as a “horrible person” whose legacy was to make people afraid to criticize him. Yee appears to have had a point, because, days later, the police arrested him, charging him with having violated Singapore’s Harassment Act, which restricts “threatening, abusive, or insulting communication.”
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According to a Brazilian lawmaker, US Central Intelligence Agency is active in several Latin American countries, trying to destabilize the situation there.
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The runaway military surveillance blimp that came loose from an Army base in Maryland on Wednesday dragged its torn tether through power lines in two Pennsylvania counties before crashing into the woods.
But at least no one died.
The same can’t be said of a recent accident involving a U.S. military blimp in Kabul that constantly hovers over the Afghan capital. (See The Above, a short documentary from The Intercept’s Field of Vision project, also embedded below.)
On Oct. 11, a British military helicopter was coming in for a landing at NATO headquarters, where the blimp is moored. According to an eyewitness who spoke to the BBC, the helicopter hit the tether, which then wrapped itself around the rotors. The helicopter crashed, killing five people — two U.S. service members, two British service members, and a French contract civilian — and injuring five more.
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WESTERN NATIONS, primarily the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, and Russia, have helped increase corruption among Middle Eastern and North African states by selling them vast quantities of weapons with little oversight, according to a new report by Transparency International. The resultant corruption, the report says, has worsened the region’s many conflicts, weakened military coherency, boosted extremism, and “formed a narrative for violent extremist groups.”
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Donald Trump has claimed many, many times—on TV, at campaign stops and at candidate debates—that he opposed the 2003 US invasion of Iraq in real time. “You know, I was the one, and I said it very strongly, and you know this, and it was reported by everybody, because unfortunately I get a disproportionate amount of publicity,” Trump told CNN‘s Chris Cuomo (10/6/15). At the September debate (9/18/15), he said he could point to “25 different stories” about him being against the war before it started.
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A couple points before dissecting the journalistic efficacy of disseminating these vague, half-assed threats. Firstly, it’s odd that the New York Post is and continues to be the sole source of this bulletin. The FBI typically posts major threats on its website, but this one, according to the FBI press officer FAIR contacted, was “meant for law enforcement and not to be disseminated.”
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Transparency Reporting
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President Barack Obama found himself drawn into Hillary Clinton’s email controversy Friday as the White House acknowledged the State Department is withholding a set of messages Obama and Clinton exchanged during her four years as secretary of state.
As the State Department made public a new batch of more than 7,200 pages of Clinton’s emails, officials stressed that the White House was not asserting executive privilege over the Obama-Clinton exchanges but insisting that they be treated as presidential records, which are normally not available to the public until between five and 12 years after a president leaves office.
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Finance
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We all know how hard it is for folks like New York Times columnist David Brooks, living in a remote corner of Washington, to find out about changes in public policy. Therefore it wasn’t surprising to see him praise Marco Rubio, Brooks’ favored candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, for a welfare reform proposal that was put in place almost 20 years ago.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The CIA’s internal watchdog has criticized the spy agency for introducing Hollywood representatives to undercover officers and allegedly being careless in talking to them about agency secrets.
In a 20-page report prepared in 2012 and stamped “secret,” the spy agency’s Inspector General said that CIA employees who had contact with Hollywood representatives had “not always complied” with agency regulations intended to stop leaks of classified information.
The report was made public on Wednesday by Judicial Watch, a conservative group which said it obtained the document under the Freedom of Information Act.
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If Europe is serious about regulating the car industry and protecting public health and the climate, it needs to stand up to the car lobby rather than allowing those resisting regulation to write it.
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I am sorry to have to do this, but as a representative of the mainstream media, I hereby declare war on GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz.
In the media’s defense, Cruz started it. Literally.
I received a fundraising email from him today that said, “I am declaring war on the liberal media.” Liberal media and mainstream media are synonymous, generally defined by Republicans as “any media outlet that presents facts that prove we’re lying.”
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The Koch-backed measures to eviscerate Wisconsin’s limits on money in elections and neuter the state’s election watchdog hit a stumbling block in the state senate this week, with a handful of Republican senators expressing concern that the measures go too far.
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Censorship
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Last week the UK’s Cabinet Office sought silently to remove the reference to “international law” from the Ministerial Code.
The text had stated that there was an “overarching duty on ministers to comply with the law including international law and treaty obligations and to uphold the administration of justice and to protect the integrity of public life”. The new version states that there is an “overarching duty on ministers to comply with the law and to protect the integrity of public life”.
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In debates about freedom of expression in the UK, a common refrain is ‘well, at least we’re not as bad as Over There’. Whether it’s France banning burqas, Poland prosecuting those who ‘insult Poland’, or half of Europe prosecuting Holocaust denial, we’ve usually been able to point to some more authoritarian, European neighbour to reassurre ourselves that we’re not as bad as all that. Well, it’s time we snapped out of it, and realised we’re no longer in a position to do this. The list of countries that are worse than us on free expression is rapidly diminishing.
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A new chat tool has been launched in an effort to improve the security of online messaging.
Tor Messenger allows users to chat over the Tor (The Onion Router) network in a way which hides the location of participants.
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China’s leaders have drafted the country’s first film law, which would ease the censorship process and be intended to boost movie production in the world’s second biggest movie market.
China’s film market is heavy regulated, but, with no clear published guidelines, filmmakers are unsure what can pass censors or not.
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China’s heavy censorship of Hollywood films is not only affecting Chinese moviegoers, but also how American studios produce their films, and Beijing’s Internet censorship was ranked the world’s worst, according to a U.S. watchdog organization.
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A new report co-authored by Bates Dean of Faculty Matthew Auer in this fall’s issue of the journal Index on Censorship pulls back the veil for the first time on the social media censorship surrounding Under the Dome.
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A number of circumvention tools designed to bypass the Firewall have been shut down in the past year, including projects such as Shadowsocks, whose developer was visited by the police. Outside of China, anti-censorship activists and developers have also been hit, with groups such as GreatFire.org suffering major DDoS attacks attributed to the Chinese government. Currently, China is in the process of finalizing a new Internet security law that will bolster Internet censorship and further strengthen information control within the country.
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While the British press were speculating as to the cause of Peng’s powdery complexion, netizens saw their photos vanish from the internet as censors stepped in to maintain the illusion of a gaffe free state visit.
The photos were taken at a banquet held by the Lord Mayor of London in Xi Jinping’s honor which took place at Guildhall, London on Wednesday. The usually rather stylish Peng was seen with powdery white smears around her forehead, nose and upper lip.
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According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were at least 311 reported challenges in 2014, with many going unreported. Some of the books on the list may serve as a surprise: “And Tango Makes Three” by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, a picture book about a zookeeper’s account of two male penguins caring for a baby penguin; “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, written from a teenager’s perspective and covering such topics as substance abuse and sex; “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, which chronicles the friendship of two boys from Afghanistan, yet has violence and offensive language.
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In an authoritarian regime, nothing gets published or broadcast without state approval. I watched the inner workings of direct government control of the press during a visit to Turkmenistan. Every magazine and newspaper was run out of the same office. Many were edited by the same people, all wearing the same lapel pins, an image of the country’s then-dictator, Sapamurat “Turkmenbashi” Niyazov.
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If NPR’s “Marketplace” has ever interviewed a communist about why capitalism sucks and should be replaced, I missed it. Biased? You betcha. Always. Inevitably.
Here in the United States, censorship is usually self-directed. No one from the State Ministry of Propaganda calls The New York Times to tell them what’s fit to print. They make those decisions on their own. But those calls are informed by who those editors are — the elite schools from which they graduated (Columbia Journalism School), their class background (parents rich enough to send them to Columbia J-School), input from their friends and colleagues (other people whose parents are rich enough to send them to Columbia J-School). Who they are determines what makes it into print.
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Some 150 film professionals and institutions from Turkey, including documentary directors, critics and festival organizers, have announced that they will not be attending the Antalya International Film Festival until the festival’s management lifts its censorship of domestically produced documentaries.
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Mobilizing for Digital Freedom has sent an open letter to the Prime Minister’s Office of Turkey to express their concerns about the censorship and restrictions being imposed on Turkish journalists and websites, calling on the Prime Ministry to end this censorship ahead of the Nov. 1 snap election.
The letter includes the signatures of various human rights, media, and political organizations in Turkey and around the world. In the letter, Access states that they sent the letter to “request the cessation of online censorship of independent news organizations and journalists. We demand authorities refrain from imposing limitations on access to the Internet or specific online services and remind the government of its duty to protect the rights of people in Turkey to freely seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
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We are writing to you before the November 1, 2015 general elections, to request the cessation of online censorship of independent news organizations and citizen journalists. We demand authorities refrain from imposing limitations on access to the Internet or specific online services and remind the government of its duty to protect the right of people in Turkey to freely seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
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The UK Prime Minister has doubled down on his Great Firewall of Cameron, which is an arrangement whereby the UK ISPs “voluntarily” agreed to block websites that had been secretly ruled to be pornographic, unless customers specifically asked them not tp.
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The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival has cancelled events discussing the 1965 Indonesian massacres, after police threatened to revoke the festival permit.
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Over 300 radio and TV stations in Ecuador could disappear overnight, according to a warning issued by Ecuadorian NGO Fundamedios on Wednesday, October 21.
The Agency for Regulation and Control of Telecommunications (Arcotel) is currently reviewing hundreds of network licenses, and claims that the government agency that originally issued them was “not authorized” to do so.
Arcotel’s list includes media outlets whose licenses were automatically renewed by the Telecommunications Superintendency, formerly known as Supertel, between 1995 and 1997.
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Internet censorship will inevitably impact Malaysia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and discourage businesses from operating here, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) said today.
HRW Asia Director Brad Adams added that research from China, known for its multiple bans on many popular websites like Facebook and Twitter, has shown that the move to stifle Internet freedom has affected the country’s monetary gains.
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A top scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) filed a whistleblower complaint Wednesday that accuses the agency of harassment and retaliation for his work showing harmful effects on monarch butterflies from a class of widely used insecticides know as neonicotinoids, or neonics.
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Since late March, I have been subjected to a sudden but escalating pattern of impediments and disruption of my scientific work, restraints on my ability to communicate with scientific colleagues, as well as the media and a growing professional toll that is making further scientific work in ARS untenable. This abrupt onset of actions undoubtedly appears to have been prompted by the scientific activities that are supposed to be specifically safeguarded and encouraged under the USDA Scientific Integrity Policy.
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This follows the European Parliament vote on net-neutrality regulations, which will ban the current voluntary agreement that the Government pressured Internet Service Providers into accepting, where they provide filters for the Internet and encourage customers to use them. Some of these filters are now switched on by default.
We’ve said it before, and we will keep saying it: filters are flawed. They block lots of “good” websites and let through many “bad” ones (and anyway, who gets to decide the difference?) They apply equally to your seven-year old and your 17 year-old despite their different needs. They affect many more people than just children, and most housholds switch them off, as they just get in the way.
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Privacy
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Edward Snowden’s efforts to inform the American public just how far the NSA tick is dug in to the American information streams revealed that while the United States, with that pesky 1st Amendment, does not yet have something like China’s “Great Firewall” actively blocking access and dissemination of information that the government doesn’t like, what the US government does have is a pervasive, never-sleeping information Panopticon where everything every American (and as much of the entire world as they can reach) does online, or with their cell phone, is saved, supposedly “just in case”, and saved forever, while also being sifted for “key words” or phrases, you know, “just in case”.
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The future just got a bit brighter for Edward Snowden.
The European Union called on its member states to protect the former NSA contractor, recommending in a close vote Thursday that states drop charges against the fugitive whistleblower and reject U.S. extradition requests.
The 285-281 vote in the European Parliament suggested that states “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistleblower and international human rights defender.”
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Police are to be given the power to view everyone’s entire internet history in a new surveillance bill to be published next week, according to reports.
The proposed legislation will make it a legal requirement for telecoms and internet service providers to retain all of the web browsing history for all customers for a period of 12 months, according to the Daily Telegraph.
Authorities such as the police, intelligence services and the National Crime Agency would be able to access specific web addresses people had visited, but would need approval from a judge to view the content of websites, emails and social media messages.
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Theresa May will next week refuse to allow judges to sign off spying warrants after the government’s top lawyer warned they could paralyse the intelligence agencies.
The major reform has been called for by civil liberty campaigners and backed by a top QC’s independent report.
But The Sun can reveal that the Home Secretary has been told by the Attorney General that all judges’ spying decisions could be judicially reviewed under controversial human rights laws.
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The director of the FBI confirmed to Congress last week that the agency flew surveillance aircraft over Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore during the protests following the police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. Today the ACLU is releasing FBI and FAA documents with new details about the Baltimore surveillance flights.
The new internal documents, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, reveal that the government was doing more than just monitoring the situation with regular cameras. The FBI was using advanced technology like infrared and night-vision cameras, and it is holding on to surveillance video it recorded from the sky.
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Today, the 100,000th person signed our petition calling on President Obama to reject compelled backdoors in our communications.
The campaign, hosted at SaveCrypto.org, uses the White House’s We the People API to feed signatures into a petition hosted on Obama’s preferred petition platform. The campaign was the work of over 40 nonprofits and tech companies, including Access Now, Fight for the Future, OpenMedia, Mozilla, Sum of Us, Twitter, Google, and DropBox. President Obama has promised to respond to any petition that gets 100,000 signatures within 30 days.
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Peers are preparing for a fresh showdown with the Government over plans to allow police to examine people’s online browsing histories. They are also concerned that the Government has rejected calls for judges, rather than ministers, to issue eavesdropping warrants.
The moves, which come days after the House of Lords torpedoed George Osborne’s tax credit plans, reflect growing anxiety over the impact of a wide-ranging surveillance Bill to be published next week.
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Is there a tear in the spy fiction continuum? On Monday, the new James Bond movie Spectre premiered to the sort of five-star reviews normally reserved for subtitled documentaries about extraordinary rendition. On Wednesday the Times was given unprecedented access to GCHQ, which it ran, tie-in style, beneath the splash headline “For your eyes only”. And in a further coup for state-of-the-art news planning technology, next week sees the publication of the draft investigatory powers bill, with senior police officers demanding the right to view the web-browsing history of every internet user in the country.
I don’t know who’s running this mutually masturbatorial PR campaign – my guess is a slightly disappointing nuclear publicist in the mould of Jonathan Pryce’s media baron in Tomorrow Never Dies. But I will of course withdraw that remark if they can produce a fourth nipple or a properly shaggable concubine with a sledgehammer single entendre name. Something like Snowden Asfaka.
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SNOOPERS’ CHARTER VERSION 2.0, otherwise known as the Investigatory Powers Bill, could allow police to view the web browsing history of everyone in Britain.
A report at The Times (paywalled) said that senior police officials have lobbied the government to force telecoms companies to retain data for 12 months that would reveal specific web addresses visited by customers.
This could mean that, under the Investigatory Powers Bill that is expected to be introduced by home secretary Theresa May next week, ISPs will be required to retain customers’ web browsing histories for a year.
Access to this data would then be granted to police, the National Crime Agency, intelligence agencies and HM Revenue and Customs, according to the report. However, approval from a judge would be required to view the content of websites, emails and social media messages.
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Want to travel from anywhere to anywhere in the United States without being hassled by law enforcement officers? Good luck with that, citizen.
USA Today’s Brad Heath pointed out an interesting footnote in an asset forfeiture filing that made the assertion that traveling from Chicago to Los Angeles is inherently suspicious. (One presumes the opposite is also true.)
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French socialists have, once again, betrayed liberties to strenghen surveillance! Claude Moraes’ report has been adopted today by the European Parliament. This report was condemning mass surveillance and calling for an investigation of French surveillance laws. But thanks to the pressure exerted by French Socialist MEPs on their party, any mention of investigation into French laws has been erased.
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Federal prosecutors have said that they are moving forward in their attempt to compel Apple to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7, even after the defendant in a felony drug case has now pleaded guilty.
The judge in the case, United States Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, said in a Friday court filing that he is confused.
The defendant, Jun Feng, whose trial was scheduled for next month, was originally charged with three counts of possessing and distributing methamphetamine.
On Thursday, Feng pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine.
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Edward Snowden said the United States spies on ally South Korea as part of its massive surveillance network called “Five Eyes.”
Speaking from Moscow via video, Snowden made the remarks after a screening of the 2014 documentary Citizen Four, which is to be released in Korea on Nov. 19. Snowden said South Korea is one of 38 countries under National Security Agency surveillance, a list that includes close U.S. partners France and Germany, South Korean newspaper Kyunghyang Sinmun reported.
The former NSA contractor told reporters that Seoul and Washington already share a significant amount of classified military information to track North Korea movements, but added that he didn’t see anything wrong with the sharing of information.
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The public defender representing 41-year-old Martin told the judge he has no criminal record, he works for the National Security Agency as a mathematician and he is pursuing his Ph.D. at Cornell University in math, according to the statement. The attorney also said Martin taught math at James Madison University.
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Adam Fuchs and his small team labored for years inside the National Security Agency on a system that would enable analysts to access vast troves of intelligence data and spot hidden patterns.
“We very much had a startup feel,” Fuchs said of the team’s office at Fort Meade with whiteboards and old furniture.
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Experts in the cybersecurity space have called into question how effective CISA will actually be in the ongoing blitz of cyberattacks.
“In theory it is a great idea, but when we take the legislation from theory into practice it breaks into two areas. Information sharing is positive with synergistic benefits to the companies under attack. However, forcing engagement rules will slow the process down,” Shlomo Touboul, CEO of cybersecurity company Illusive Networks, said. “Cyber attackers are organized like malicious, agile start-ups that don’t require consensus for success, while government legislation and consortiums don’t move at the same speed as a cyberattackers.”
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Symantec CEO Michael Brown voiced concerns about the act and says that — in its current form — it does not go far enough to protect privacy.
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The largest tech companies in the world, from Google and Apple, to Reddit and Twitter, issued statements condemning the cyber-security bill called CISA, but to no avail. CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015) easily passed through the U.S. Senate’s vote on Tuesday, creating a new avenue for consumer data sharing that benefits anti-privacy entities like the NSA, reports The Guardian.
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A US appeals court on Thursday refused to immediately halt the government’s bulk collection of millions of Americans’ phone records during a “transition” period to a new federal scheme that bans the controversial anti-terrorism surveillance.
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A lawyer who won a federal judge’s determination that the National Security Agency’s spy-on-Americans program is “Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional is encouraging the judge to maintain his stance after a federal appeals court ruled the collection of phone metadata can continue.
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Germany’s hard line on the transfer of its citizens’ personal data to the U.S. has come in for criticism from an influential European association of global digital businesses, which argues that severely limiting such transfers would cause market volatility.
Germany’s federal and regional data-protection authorities this week said they wouldn’t approve any new transfers of data to the U.S. — even for transfers based on arrangements different from the trans-Atlantic data-transfer pact knocked down by the European Union’s highest court.
The European Court of Justice this month invalidated a 15-year old agreement, known as Safe Harbor, which allowed businesses to move Europeans’ data, such as employee information, to servers in the U.S. The court ruled that Europeans’ data was insufficiently protected when transferred to the U.S., where it could be accessed by national intelligence services.
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U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker on Thursday pressed European Union officials to put in place a new “safe harbor” data transfer agreement to replace one struck down earlier this month by the European Court of Justice.
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As a leader in the VPN industry, Khan warns there are mixed opinions on the subject of protection and privacy, “There are those who believe every internet user should have the right to privacy irrespective of the circumstances. On the other hand, many believe that privacy is a right but should not infer complete anonymity.”
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CISA significantly weakens the Freedom of Information Act and puts decision-making power on FOIA requests into the hands of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the same body where current CISA legislation originated.
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Under the guise of “cybersecurity,” the Senate on Tuesday passed a spying bill that “carves a giant hole in all our privacy laws and allows tech and telecom companies to hand over all sorts of private information to intelligence agencies without any court process whatsoever,” writes Trevor Timm at The Guardian.
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In the UK, David Cameron’s administration has all but declared war on encryption. In the US, 63 percent of Americans approve of backdoors for the government to monitor encrypted business communications in response to a national security threat, according to a recent Vormetric survey.
But in Germany, the government openly advocates that all citizens use encryption and has even pushed forward a De-Mail service to help make that a reality.
In the country’s Digital Agenda, the German government made it clear that it aspired to be “one of the most secure digital locations” on the planet: “We support the use of more and better encryption and aim to be the world’s leading country in this area. To achieve this goal, the encryption of private communication must be adopted as standard across the board.”
It’s no secret that Germans value privacy, and Rik Turner, a British senior analyst with the IT and telecoms consulting firm Ovum, argued that the country’s embrace of encryption has geopolitical roots extending back to World War II.
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Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy are investigating why the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is using a cellphone tracking system in its investigations. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has already admitted they are using this technology but did not say in what capacity. The technology, known as cell-site simulators, send out a signal similar to a cell tower which could fool your cellphone into connecting to it. The technology does not monitor phone conversations but it does gather information (including text messages) about the device and can track the devices location as it moves.
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Germany on Friday announced new measures to curb the activities of its foreign intelligence agency after a damning official report revealed improper collusion with the US National Security Agency.
Berlin will in future implement stricter guidelines governing cooperation between the BND foreign intelligence service and the NSA, deputy government spokeswoman Christiane Wirtz said in a statement.
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An NSA catchword surveillance list contains numerous European and German targets, according to a German news magazine. According to its report, a German federal investigator has concluded that US spying was widespread.
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A special investigation into the extent of mass surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA) within Germany has unveiled a huge list of targets wanted by the US agency, including many European governments and companies.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) overstepped an intelligence-sharing agreement with Germany by requesting German technicians to snoop on allied governments‘ emails, a top-level inquiry has concluded.
Media obtained Friday the 300-page report by Kurt Graulich, a judge appointed to investigate how the BND, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, intercepted data streams from satellite links, fishing out messages by spotting email addresses, telephone numbers and words of interest.
Graulich is the only non-intelligence official to have been shown 40,000 of these so-called selectors which the BND challenged.
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A German government-sanctioned special investigation has exposed a “clear breach” of intelligence-sharing agreements—including illegal surveillance of European authorities—between the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its German counterpart, known as the BND.
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When it was revealed in 2013 that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter came up with a plan.
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In the face of Obama administration opposition, AT&T customers asked the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday to rule that a government mass surveillance program is unconstitutional.
Five people sued the National Security Agency seven years ago in Federal Court seeking a court order to dismantle a “digital dragnet” that allows the agency to tap into the fiber optic cables of U.S. telecommunications companies to intercept emails, text messages, phone records and other communications.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been busy lately, especially with all of the revelations coming from Edward Snowden. The organization has been busy taking on the NSA, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have time for other causes.
Now the EFF is taking on the California Supreme Court, urging an end to the gathering of personal prescription information by law enforcement and done without a warrant.
Prescriptions in question cover things such as pain, anxiety, attention disorder, insomnia and the like. Up until now, this was a treasure trove of information being gathered, though reasons for that netting of data are unclear.
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Once you get in your car, get ready to be tracked, no matter how well your face is disguised. Law enforcement agencies all over the country use ALPRs (automated license plate readers) to track drivers’ locations and activities. ALPRs are cameras—mounted on police cars or placed in stationary locations like light poles—that detect when a car passes, capture a picture of that car, and record its license plate number. Accumulated location data creates a history of drivers’ movements that can provide private and intimate details on people’s lives, like where they work, where they live, where they worship, where they go throughout their day, and who they associate with. Law enforcement agencies like the NYPD have used ALPRs in exactly this way, trying to map out the entire Arab and Muslim community of New York and Newark. The Los Angeles Police Department and the LA County Sheriff’s Department scan three million plates every week.
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John Miller reckons he can get into pretty much any safe. A court order to the owner is one option, another is a team he has with blow torches.
The reason John Miller has such a team is because he is Deputy Commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) for intelligence and counter-terrorism.
Getting into safety deposit boxes and bank vaults has not been a challenge. But he says NYPD is now faced with a new problem.
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The Pentagon’s principal spy agency is appointing a British Air Force officer as its first deputy director in charge of improving “integration” between U.S. intelligence units and spy agencies of other English-speaking countries.
U.S. intelligence agencies have long had close relationships with their British counterparts, but former and current U.S. intelligence officials said this is the first time they knew of a U.S. spy agency naming a foreigner to a top executive position.
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The UK government wants backdoor access to communications for “everything people actually use”, Edward Snowden has claimed.
The former NSA contractor took to Twitter to criticise comments from Baroness Shields, the UK minister for internet safety and security, over her position on encrypted data.
Shields said the government didn’t want to introduce backdoors that allow security services to access encrypted information, but Snowden argued proposed warrants for access to data were in effect a backdoor.
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The UK surveillance agency GCHQ had only a small public relations team up until June 2013. As the most secretive of the intelligence agencies, it did not really need anything more. The duties were not arduous, with inquiries from the national media invariably met with a blunt refusal to comment.
That attitude has not survived the shock of former CIA and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who leaked tens of thousands of documents exposing GCHQ’s innermost secrets. Today, GCHQ’s new and expanding PR team is increasingly sophisticated, open to engagement with journalists in ways that were inconceivable before Snowden.
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It seems that many organisations are now wanting to shift their data out of the UK and the US, thanks to concerns about surveillance and privacy.
This news comes courtesy of Artmotion (a data hosting provider), which questioned 1000 IT decision-makers in this country and the States, subsequently producing a report entitled Defending Data Privacy.
The headline figure is that 76 per cent of respondents said they would move their company’s data to another country, away from the UK or US, due to privacy concerns.
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Over the last year, law enforcement officials around the world have been pressing hard on the notion that without a magical “backdoor” to access the content of any and all encrypted communications by ordinary people, they’ll be totally incapable of fulfilling their duties to investigate crime and protect the public. EFF and many others have pushed back—including launching a petition with our friends to SaveCrypto, which this week reached 100,000 signatures, forcing a response from President Obama.
This is in addition to multiple findings that the government’s “going dark” concern has proven completely unfounded in the past, along with former national security officers disavowing the concern all together. And given law enforcement’s continuing attacks on the public’s use of encryption, we think it’s time for a quick look at the long tradition of encryption use by some ordinary, and some not so ordinary, Americans.
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In a return to what is being called ‘Cold War level’ tension, the New York Times reported on Sunday that Russia could be developing plans to sever key global internet communications – undersea data cables – “that carry almost all global internet communications” during possible “future wars”.
The Times report claims that there is “aggressive” movement near vital undersea cables, raising concern among several US military and intelligence officers.
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Millennials are rather careless when it comes to using technology and sharing information online. We don’t think twice about entering personal information into an online form or telling the world where we are at any given moment and who we are with. So when we are told that the government is collecting this data, a common reaction is—Why should I care? I have nothing to hide. But how many of us understand the implications of having so much personal information up for grabs?
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Hillary Clinton is wrong about Edward Snowden. Again.
The presidential candidate and former secretary of state insisted during the recent Democratic debate that Snowden should have remained in the United States to voice his concerns about government spying on U.S. citizens. Instead, she claimed, he “endangered U.S. secrets by fleeing to Russia.”
After accusing Snowden of stealing “very important information that has fallen into the wrong hands,” she added: “He should not be brought home without facing the music.”
Clinton should stop rooting for Snowden’s incarceration and get her facts straight.
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New York Times reporter Eric Licthblau is returning to cover the Justice Department, a beat he left in 2009 amid threat of subpoena over a Pulitzer Prize-winning story on the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Lichtblau, who was most recently covering 2016 campaign finance issues, drew the ire of the Bush administration early on for his reporting, leading to his Justice Department press credentials being temporarily revoked in 2003. Tensions only increased after The Times published Lichtblau and James Risen’s 2005 report on NSA surveillance, a story the paper initially held for 13 months under pressure from the White House.
Lichtblau told The Huffington Post that the Bush administration aggressively investigated the NSA leak and there were vague threats of subpoena in 2006 and 2007. But it wasn’t until Dec. 16, 2008 — after President Barack Obama won the presidential election but before the Bush administration left off — that Lichtblau received a letter threatening a subpoena if he didn’t provide the source information by Inauguration Day a month later. He did not comply. Still, the threat didn’t go away when Obama took office, and in early 2009, Lichtblau and Times editors decided it was best he leave the beat.
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The tech sector is an ever-growing force in politics. No longer just a bunch of scrappy startups struggling for their place at the bargaining table, Silicon Valley’s top companies—Google, Facebook, Apple, and others—now spend millions of dollars a year lobbying for their industry’s interests.
Politicians like tech companies, not only because they paint a rosy picture of the future, but because they’re among the top job creators in the country. Plus, their idealistic, largely white-collar workforce tends to have deep pockets, turning the tech sector into a bigger source of campaign funding than other politically powerful and entrenched industries like defense and big pharma in recent years. Candidates are all too aware of this shift, so they make frequent stops at tech startups and carve out time on the campaign trail for fundraising trips to Silicon Valley.
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Civil Rights
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The propensity of the Saudis to use barbaric physical punishments is blithely passed off as a local tradition and custom, as if tying someone to a pole and flogging them nearly to death is somehow comparable to having a pole on a village green for dancing around on May mornings.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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We’ve discussed many times now how zero rating, or the carrier act of letting some apps or services bypass a user’s broadband usage cap, sets a horrible, dangerous precedent. By its very nature, letting one company or service bypass usage caps immediately puts non-whitelisted services, small businesses or non profits at a disadvantage, tilting the entire playing field and distorting the entire democratic nature of the Internet. For some reason, this is a very difficult concept for some consumers to understand, so lathered up they are by the initial lure of getting something for “free.”
Of course you’re not getting something for free. Usage caps are entirely arbitrary, untethered from financial or network performance necessity. They’re an artificial construct, and allowing some services to bypass them (for a fee or otherwise) puts the ISP in the powerful position of picking winners and losers, instead of just doing its job (the delivery of bits). When it comes to net neutrality, the battlefield is no longer focused on ham-fisted throttling or blocking of services, it has shifted to more nuanced and clever abuses of gatekeeper power including interconnection, usage caps, and zero rating.
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10.30.15
Posted in News Roundup at 11:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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After 10 years of development, Melbourne open source company Cyber IT now has a fully mature prisoner interactive learning solution that is in use by four correctional institutions in the country.
Cyber IT chief executive Con Zymaris told iTWire that while the take-up so far had been only by public institutions, his company was speaking to private operators of prisons as well.
“But given the complex nature of each system, it will take at least three years to meet individual needs,” he said.
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Nonprofit Technology Resources wants to save a pile of laptops from the scrapyard.
The digital access nonprofit is leaving its headquarters near the Community College of Philadelphia because it’s too big for their needs, and they can’t bring all the hundreds of donated laptops they’ve collected over the years, said president Ed Cummings, who also goes by “bernieS” in hacker circles. So the group is having a “Linux Laptop Pizza Party,” where they’ll be selling the laptops for as cheap as $20 and helping people install Linux on them. NTR is also looking for volunteers to help get laptops ready to use and donate.
“Lots of Linux hackers will be on hand to answer questions and help participants choose an older laptop and a Linux distro that will run well on it,” Cummings wrote in an email.
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Desktop
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Buying a laptop can be a confusing affair. Of course you want something powerful, but looks matter too. In other words, the entire experience makes a difference; consumers want the entire package to be well-thought out in both design and execution.
System76 now has such a laptop; the all-new Ubuntu-powered Oryx Pro is absolutely gorgeous, featuring a black aluminum chassis. Inside, however, is is equally beautiful, with Skylake processors (Core i7 only), DDR4 memory and NVIDIA graphics by default. You can even opt for a cutting-edge G-SYNC display. Yes, keeping true to its Oryx name (a type of antelope) this laptop is a Linux beast!
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Xiaomi is best known for selling iPhone clones in the Chinese market. But now the company is getting ready to sell two models of Linux laptops.
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Xiaomi likes to dabble in pretty much anything tech-related. This China-based smartphone OEM has released a number of interesting gadgets this year, and quite a few smartphones as well. That being said, rumors have been saying that the company is getting ready to announce a laptop for quite some time now, and Inventec has basically confirmed that fact recently. The company has said that the first Xiaomi-branded laptop will arrive early next year, which, of course, meant that we’ll see a ton more rumors along the way.
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Google’s Chromebook Pixel is the ultimate Chromebook. It’s easily the most powerful, capable, and beautiful Chromebook. But at $999, it’s also an impractical product. Even if you’ve got the cash to burn, spending so much on a laptop that lives and dies by the web browser is a hard sell. I’ve got great news, though: other Chromebook makers are starting to approach the Pixel’s premium feel, and they’re doing it for way less money.
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Just days after Google added “Chell” to Coreboot as the new mainboard for some forthcoming Skylake-powered Chrome OS device, Google engineers have added another new Skylake product.
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System76, the American hardware manufacturer known for delivering the coolest and most powerful Ubuntu computers, is proud to announce the availability for a new laptop, called Oryx Pro.
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Server
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With last year’s September release of Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux, Oracle determined that only one release of a singular product was necessary, because updates every three months can be overwhelming for the market. Oracle recently announced the Kilo release, and OpenStack 2 will be based on Kilo. Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and visualization at Oracle, divulged that OpenStack 2 will also be released as a Docker container for ease of access.
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With vulnerabilities like last year’s Heartbleed and more recently VENOM, software that runs the modern Internet and cloud systems has never been more at risk and less secure. Many assume that to keep a system as secure as possible, you must eliminate any entry for an attacker. However, this is simply not the case. The key here is that IT teams really need to determine the probability that an attacker knows of an exploitable vulnerability.
Let’s examine this idea a little more closely through understanding the nature of risk as it relates to virtual and cloud environments. Once we have this framework, we’ll dive into putting this philosophy into practice.
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Kernel Space
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Renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman revealed earlier the fact that the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel branch would be an LTS (Long-Term Support) one, maintained for a couple of years.
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I did my bachelor’s in Electronics Engineering, and embedded systems interested me a lot. Linux runs on millions of embedded devices and is a huge collaborative project — thanks to Linus Torvalds and the Linux community. I started following Linux in my college days.
When I actually started working on the Linux kernel, I saw some memory leaks in kernel code and observed that every contributor has a voice in the open source community. Therefore, I started sending small patches on LKML. I got great support from maintainers and, because of that, my interest was boosted.
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If you’ve ever wondered what a World Without Linux would mean to you, you know it’s a ridiculous notion. That’s what the current World Without Linux video series attempts to illustrate in a fun and entertaining way that also gives gratitude to the thousands of developers and companies that support the operating system.
Included in the series are hidden easter eggs that require some level of Linux expertise to identify; though, if you’re a newbie, the clues and easter eggs are done in such a way that you can also surface the answers, putting you in the spotlight among Linux aficionados. It’s also a chance to win fun prizes – t-shirts, tattoos, pins – but perhaps most importantly, street cred among fellow Linux history buffs.
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We’ve seen AMD already pushing open-source compiler patches for Zen and it seems they are ready to begin pushing Linux kernel changes too for their next-generation CPU architecture.
Aravind Gopalakrishnan of AMD posted two patches for Family 17h, a.k.a. Zen. The new feature patches can be found on the kernel mailing list until being mainlined. The patches are adding the CLZERO instruction so that it can be exposed via /proc/cpuinfo and adding the Scalable MCA cpuid bit.
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Applications
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Just a few moments ago, Kovid Goyal had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of Calibre 2.42 for all supported operating systems.
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Subsurface 4.5 (and Subsurface 4.5.1) just got released
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Proprietary
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Veeam’s new Backup for Linux is coming soon to deliver availability for Linux Servers in the Cloud and On Premises, and it’ll be free.
Veeam Software, the enterprise availability company, has announced Veeam Backup for Linux, a free standalone agent that delivers backup and recovery for Linux servers running in the public cloud, as well as for a few remaining physical Linux servers running on premises.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is the direct sequel to the excellent Sid Meier’s Civilization V and much more than that. We now take a closer look at the Linux version ported by Aspyr Media, along with the latest DLC, Rising Tide.
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Bundle Stars ( http://www.bundlestars.com ) has launched an all-encompassing new bundle that includes ten incredible Steam games that can played across Windows, Mac and Linux.
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The game has been through a bit of an iffy time, but hopefully all this extra time to polish it up will be worth it. I’ve seen one of the previous Batman games like this played, and it looked genuinely good to play, so I’m hopeful this will be a good one too.
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Batman: Arkham Knight was announced for SteamOS and Linux platforms a while back, with the promise of a fall release. As you would expect, that release of the game for these platforms has been delayed.
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GOG have launched a bunch of new (classic/retro) Dungeons & Dragons games, and they support Linux too which is great.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Acting like QGroupBox it allows you to hide some of the more advanced options out the way till the user expands the header revealing the rest. A common web pattern, but lacking in Qt or KF5.
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In three weeks the Plasma 5.5 freezes. So, time for a wallpaper contest. Most people love the default plasma wallpapers from Ken Vermette, but there are still some users how want to have more than one wallpaper available in plasma.
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This KDE bug is a WONTFIX, so no hope from KDE upstream.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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David King, maintainer of the GNOME Logs software, an open-source project that provides users with a graphical tool for viewing systemd journal logs, has announced the release of the first milestone towards version 3.20.
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New Releases
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The Solus Project is happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate of the Solus operating system.
We would like to thank all of our community members for helping make this release possible. Together we have discovered and resolved a plethora of bugs, improved software, and ensured that the user experience under Solus is better than it has ever been before.
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Now that the 0.24.0 version of the popular GParted partition editor software has been released, the time has come for various GParted-based Live CDs to integrate it and announce new stable builds.
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RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.
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The guys over Solus, the independent OS that aims to change the way you think about GNU/Linux distributions, have just announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Solus 1.0 release.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Jos Poortvliet wrote at the home of the Geeko today that some major KDE updates have landed in Tumbleweed. Leap nears ever closer to release as the wiki is populated. Elsewhere, Italo Vignoli said upcoming LibreOffice 5.1 will start twice as fast as its predecessor and Hunter Banks has solved the mystery of the vanishing Linux games on Steam.
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Jos Poortvliet informs us that the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed GNU/Linux operating system has received a new snapshot that adds some of the hottest KDE technologies available to date.
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Slackware Family
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The ChangeLog.txt entry of “Thu Oct 29 20:12:14 UTC 2015” counts 448lines, and a little less than half of that number consists of updates to packages; the rest is rebuilds. A massive package recompilation occured because several core libraries got updated and Pat is quite conscientious in getting all the library dependency issues resolved properly.
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Red Hat Family
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The open source community has centralized its support for Ceph by forming an advisory board to guide the development of the popular software-defined storage platform.
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Instead of chasing venture capital dollars, companies competing around open source projects should instead take a more measured approach to earning customer dollars by selling enterprise value. It’s boring but, if Red Hat is any indication, it works.
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Red Hat Inc (RHT) Discloses Insider Transaction. James M Whitehurst , CEO & President of Red Hat Inc sold 3,930 shares on Oct 19, 2015. The Insider selling transaction was disclosed on Oct 20, 2015 to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The shares were sold at $77.25 per share for a total value of $303,592.50.
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Cowen and Company lowered shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) from an outperform rating to a market perform rating in a research report sent to investors on Thursday morning, The Fly reports. Cowen and Company currently has $82.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock.
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Fedora
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So as we quickly approach the Fedora Workstation 23 release I been running Wayland exclusively for over a week now. Despite a few glitches it now works well enough for me to not have to switch back into the X11 session anymore.
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Fedora will be finishing up their System V to systemd unit migration in the months ahead.
When Fedora 24 is branched from Rawhide in February, any packages still relying upon System V init scripts rather than systemd unit files will be retired. Packagers who maintain packages still needing sysVinit scripts need to apply for delays now if you can’t migrate off System V before February.
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Red Hat’s Christian Schaller has written another status update concerning the state of Fedora Workstation 23 while also looking ahead to Fedora Workstation 24.
In regards to Fedora Workstation 23, Christian shares the GNOME Wayland experience is going well (he’s been running Wayland exclusively now for days), the system firmware update support is working its way out there, Google Drive support is present in GNOME’s Nautilus, ambient light sensor support is saving battery life for laptops, and XDG-APP is available in a tech preview form.
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At tonight’s Fedora 23 Final Go/No-Go meeting number two, it was decided that several proposed blockers wouldn’t delay the release, but one other issue did. Christian Schaller wrote of some of new and improved features coming in Fedora 23 and Matt Asay today said, “Red Hat is boring.” The Ubuntu 16.04 release schedule was posted and Sam Varghese reported today on Linux distribution PrisonPC.
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Debian Family
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Debian has switched to FFmpeg in testing in July but the work on the package did not stop at that point. After careful testing we can now provide official packages for Jessie users through jessie-backports. See installation instructions here. FFmpeg becoming available in jessie-backports also enabled us to provide Kodi from Debian in the same official repository.
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Derivatives
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Choosing between Ubuntu and Debian for building your business strategy depends on your using preferences regarding the platform support, level of user control, ease of use, and some other key issues.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The desktop edition of Ubuntu 15.10 now available to download and use, it was released on October 22. This update certainly has a very fresh desktop interface and excellent developer tools.
The update also comes with a preview of the combined smartphone, tablet and desktop experience that is very popular these day in the tech community. Here are some of the things that are new in Ubuntu 15.10.
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Midokura, the global innovator in software network virtualization, today announced the integration of its flagship Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) technology with Ubuntu OpenStack. Now, users can benefit from the power of an integrated cloud solution that combines industry-leading technology from Midokura with one of the most widely deployed commercial distributions of OpenStack.
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Ubuntu 15.10 has been out for a little while now, and the reviews have started to come in from various sites. But what are the critics saying about Ubuntu 15.10? Is it worth installing on your system?
I’ve included snippets from reviews from around the web below that should give you an idea of what Ubuntu 15.10 has to offer, and if it’s worth upgrading to on your Ubuntu system.
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The Ubuntu team is busy working on the OTA-8 update for mobile devices, and they are also preparing the terrain for an eventual rebase on the new Xenial Xerus.
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Remember when we told you, guys, that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu Linux, the world’s most popular free operating system, said that Snappy Ubuntu Core 16.04 LTS would support private snaps?
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Canonical has announced the first commercial endorsement of Snappy Ubuntu Core, the transactionally updated open source OS for the cloud and embedded devices. The platform will soon power network-control hardware from several vendors.
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After the short-term support release Ubuntu 15.10, the next long-term support release Ubuntu 16.04 has been opened for development. The release that is named “Xenial Xerus” has received initials packages. The final release of Ubuntu 16.04 is expected to come out in 30, April, 2016.
Ubuntu release cycle is pretty simple. There are two releases, short-term support and long-term support. The long-term support release comes after two years. LTS releases are announced with the support of five years so users can switch from one LTS to another LTS before their support of five years ends.
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The latest Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update is coming along, and some users are already testing the changes by using the RC proposed channel. The developers have also announced that they are targeting November 18 for the launch, but that hasn’t been decided just yet.
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Since PM Narendra Modi announced his Make in India initiative, a large number of smartphone companies have announced their plans to manufacture their products in the country. Joining this list is Canonical, which made its debut in India in August.
Canonical is the company behind the Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu. It launched two smartphones in India earlier this year – the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and the Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Edition.
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Canonical has announced that they’ll be sponsoring the upcoming TechCrunch Beijing 2015 Hackathon event that will take place next week, between November 2 and 3 in Beijing, China, held at Beijing Hi-Park.
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Flavours and Variants
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Roberto J. Dohnert from Black Lab Software, the company behind the well-known Black Lab Linux computer operating system, was happy to inform Softpedia earlier about the immediate availability for download and testing of Black Lab Linux 2015.10 RC4.
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Linux Mint was mainly developed and released by Clement Lefebvre in France in 2006. Clement is one of the software developers who are notoriously reluctant and reclusive to give interviews but at the same time, he has stressed repeatedly that he has an aim to modify Ubuntu and achieve elegance to it. Practically, that meant focusing on incorporating user feedback, ease of use, and also choosing pleasant color layouts and schemes.
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The subscription fee will give users unlimited, automatic cloud storage of their all of their Solu data. If a device is lost or broken, it’s OK, because everything is saved.
Solu runs on a Linux-based operating system called Solu OS.
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Element14 on Tuesday revealed an exclusive agreement to offer OEM customers bespoke designs based on the Raspberry Pi platform.
Raspberry Pi — which has seen success in the educational and maker fields — is targeting commercial manufacturers and the Internet of Things, signing up Premier Farnell through the latter’s element14 brand to customize its boards.
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Solu Machines will soon surpass its Kickstarter funding goal for a smartphone-like mini-PC with a Linux based, cloud oriented OS and a novel UI stack.
Kickstarter funding packages start at $388 for the Solu, which would join a fairly short list of mini-PCs with pre-installed Linux, and an even smaller group of ARM-based Linux mini-PCs. Solu is much more singular than that, however, in that it’s a battery-powered touchscreen device that can also drive a 4K display. It is not only replacing standard PC and phone paradigms with a fully cloud-based platform, but is also reinventing the user interface.
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CompuLab’s SODIMM-style “CL-SOM-iMX6UL” COM runs Linux on an i.MX6 UltraLite SoC, and offers up to 32GB eMMC, WiFi/BT, and industrial temperature operation.
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Axiomtek’s fanless “CAPA848” SBC runs Linux on an Intel Bay Trail Celeron N2807 processor, and offers up to 8GB of onboard RAM and -20 to 70°C operation.
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Aaeon’s first SMARC module features quad- or dual-core Bay Trail SoCs, soldered RAM, eMMC, dual display outputs, PCIe expansion, and -40 to 80°C operation.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Samsung Electronics is planning to merge its in-house developed operating system Tizen with its Internet of Things (IoT) platform IoTivity, looking to enhance the platform’s competitiveness, according to a Korean-language ChosunBiz report.
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Samsung, the Korean giant, has launched another Tizen powered smartphone in the Indian market. The Samsung Z3 is priced at INR 8490 and will be available in India from October in Gold, Black and Silver.
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Android
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Earlier this week, Verizon introduced what it calls the world’s first shatterproof phone with the Droid Turbo 2. What looked like a Verizon exclusive no longer is; at least outside of the U.S. where the rest of the world will get the same phone under the Moto X Force name.
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We also get a convenient rule of thumb now. iOS to Android installed base is now 1:4. So for every iPhone in use worldwide there now are 4 Android smartphones (this excluded tablets obviously where also Android leads but I don’t study such tiny markets as tablets or PCs, haha, mobile consumes all of my time in tech). Oh, if you want the ratio to include Windows? Then its 1:10:40 for every 1 Windows smartphone there are ten iPhones and for every 1 Windows smartphone owner you might find, there are 40 Android owners. Nobody makes Windows apps anymore…
Other than Android won these wars, iOS is a healthy niche market for wealthy customers, Tizen is hoping to pass Blackberry and Blackberry is switching to Android, there is one more obvious refrain for us all .Say it with me, readers: Windows Phone continues to remain dead (and Lumia unit shut-down watch is now to 18 months of life left) That the Q3 report. Tune in, in three months, for the Q4 and full year 2015 report.
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The OnePlus X is many things. It’s a 5-inch phone that feels like it should be $500, but costs only $249. It’s a device with the aesthetic quality you might expect from an established tech brand, but it’s made by a Chinese startup less than two years old. It’s also a shameless tribute to the design of older iPhones you can only buy with an invitation.
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BlackBerry is aiming to drum up more interest in its upcoming Android phone with a couple of new video ads.
Released Wednesday, the first ad is more technical as it spotlights a few of the key features in the Priv. The second one shoots for a kinder, gentler approach with a series of dreamlike images designed to convey the security built into the new phone.
The Priv represents a dramatic move for a company that once was king of the corporate smartphone market, but whose market share has dwindled to a fraction of a percent. It traditionally touted its BlackBerry software as the standard in security, but it’s now embracing Google’s Android software in an effort to give its customers wider access to apps and services.
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You probably want that shiny new Nexus 6P, and I can’t blame you — it’s an amazing phone. Just don’t think you’ll be doing any repairs on it yourself.
The teardown experts at iFixit — which previously awarded the new Nexus 5X a score of 7 out of 10 — have given the Nexus 6P a score of 2. If you’re not familiar with the scoring system, low scores are bad.
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It wasn’t too long ago that we put the major mobile operating systems head to head, but with big updates from both Google and Apple in the meantime, we think it’s worth another look at where they both stand. Is there a clear winner? Or are they barely distinguishable any more?
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Google’s two operating systems will soon be one. Chrome OS is going to be combined with Android, and the combined OS could be revealed as soon as next year, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports that Chrome is essentially being folded into Android, because Android has emerged as the dominant operating system by quite a long stretch. Combining the two operating systems means setting up Android to run on laptops and desktop computers, which would require big changes, as well as supporting the Google Play Store. Chromebooks will reportedly receive a new name to reflect the new OS.
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The new Director of Community at GitHub, Jono Bacon, delivered a keynote at All Things Open this year titled: The new era of community. His talk was largely a call action to do better job of leading, guiding, and engaging in open source communities. Here’s how.
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The City and County of San Francisco joined Los Angeles County and Travis County, Texas, in their pursuit of open source voting systems, where the public can review the software code for evidence of ballot tampering.
The Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) adopted a report titled “Study on Open Source Voting Systems” on Friday, recommending how the county can build its own in San Francisco.
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I’m rebuilding one my home server and decided to take a look at the FreedomBox project as the base for it.
The 0.6 version was recently released and I wasn’t aware of how advanced the project is already!
They have a virtualbox image ready for some quick test. It took me longer to download it than to start using it.
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Messaging is generally thought to be safer than PGP encrypted email because there aren’t emails sitting around for interested parties to decrypt at their leisure. Once a messaging session is over, the messages, if not logged, disappear.
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Greenplum Database, Pivotal’s data warehouse solution, has come full circle. Once derived from the open source PostgreSQL, Greenplum is open source once again.
Greenplum could be used to yank the rug out from under the stagnant legacy players in data warehousing and analytic RDBMSes, but Oracle, Impala, and Teradata alone aren’t the competition. Rather, cloud leaders are also at risk.
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Here’s a pet peeve of mine, because I see it time and time again: Folks work on software or projects, put in a ton of effort, and then do nothing to promote the project or release. (And, for bonus points, complain that they don’t understand why the project isn’t getting more attention!)
[...]
This isn’t necessarily intuitive for folks, I understand. But it is absolutely, vitally, necessary. Maybe, occasionally, a project is just so darn awesome that somebody happens to stumble on it via GitHub or whatever and word of mouth makes it a success – but typically, things get out into the world via consistent updates and communications to the right channels to get the word out.
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The anonymity network Tor has long been the paranoid standard for privacy online, and the Tor Browser that runs on it remains the best way to use the web while revealing the least identifying data. Now the non-profit Tor Project has officially released another piece of software that could bring that same level of privacy to instant messaging: a seamless and simple app that both encrypts the content of IMs and also makes it very difficult for an eavesdropper to identify the person sending them.
On Thursday the Tor Project launched its first beta version of Tor Messenger, its long-in-the-works, open source instant messenger client. The app, perhaps more than any other desktop instant messaging program, is designed for both simplicity and privacy by default: It integrates the “Off-the-Record” (OTR) protocol to encrypt messages and routes them over Tor just as seamlessly as the Tor Browser does for web data. It’s also compatible with the same XMPP or “Jabber” chat protocol used by millions of Facebook and Google accounts, as well as desktop clients like Adium for Mac and Pidgin for Windows. The result is that anyone can download the software and in seconds start sending messages to their pre-existing contacts that are not only strongly encrypted, but tunneled through Tor’s maze of volunteer computers around the world to hide the sender’s IP address.
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Tor Messenger is a cross-platform chat program that aims to be secure by default and sends all of its traffic over Tor. It supports a wide variety of transport networks, including Jabber (XMPP), IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, Yahoo, and others; enables Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging automatically; and has an easy-to-use graphical user interface localized into multiple languages.
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Events
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Yesterday I conducted my presentation about “99.999% available OpenStack Cloud – A builder’s guide”. The room was full. If you could not join, you can find the slide deck on slideshare and the video is also already available online.
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LISA is an annual technical conference for IT operations professionals, organized by The USENIX Association. The first LISA was held back in 1986, and the event still has a reputation for delivering top-notch technical content and an exceptional hallway track. This year, Amy Rich (Mozilla Corporation) and Cory Lueninghoener (Los Alamos National Laboratory) co-chaired the conference.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Sets up internal platform as a service in partnership with systems integrator, NTT Data
Japanese brewer and drinks producer Kirin has built a platform as a service (Paas) using OpenStack as its private cloud platform, reducing operational IT costs by automating server test and deployment.
Kirin, which has almost 40,000 employees, is headquartered in Tokyo, and does around half of its business overseas.
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Crunchy announces that open source software pioneer Tom Lane has joined its team of elite PostgreSQL developers.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Open Document Format (ODF) is one such format. ODF was specified by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), an industry consortium which aims to produce standards for e-business.
Key players in OASIS include the tech giants Sun Microsystems (now part of the Oracle) and IBM. Sun has been one of the main drivers of the format as it grew out of the format used by its free OpenOffice application. In 2006 the Open Document Format was approved jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as an international standard for office software.
Sun promised not to enforce any of its patents against implementations using the OpenDocument standard, although there can be much uncertainty associated with patents.
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The first major point release for LibreOffice, the 5.1 branch, is being worked on this weekend during the 1st Bug Hunting Session. This promises to be an important upgrade that should really make a difference.
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Thanks to CIB, who sponsored the event with their office location, drinks and food, we again had a LibreOffice Hackfest at Hamburg on Saturday/Sunday October 24/25, and a get-together on Friday evening with the opportunity to meat also some long time colleagues from Sun and Star.
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Education
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The Lawrence school district is taking part in a new U.S. Department of Education campaign, #GoOpen, to encourage states, school districts and educators to use openly licensed educational materials.
The Lawrence school district is one of 10 districts nationwide that have taken up the #GoOpen challenge to replace at least one textbook with openly licensed educational resources within the next year.
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Electronic Payments
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On October 28th, 2015, BitGo, a digital asset security platform, is set to launch the first-of-its kind automated, open source Key Recovery Service (KRS) software for provisioning cold backup keys. BitGo has stated that this new KRS offering is part of their commitment to providing the most secure digital asset vault in the world while also ensuring wallet users maintain control of their digital assets.
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Semi-Open Source//Openwashing
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Video-streamer and junior filmed entertainment production house Netflix has updated its open source policies, with a notable change being a decision to release code pre-packaged in Docker’s container formats.
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BSD
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I started using OpenBSD in 1998 (version 2.3 or 2.4) to host a BBS that I was running. I switched from Slackware Linux to OpenBSD because of its focus on security and eventually stuck with it because of its simple design and ease of administration. The ports system was a big draw for me as well.
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I’m currently self-employed, with a focus on open source development and consulting for companies interacting with open source projects.
Besides OpenBSD, I have been contributing to Apache Subversion since 2007. One of my main jobs is to provide support, workshops, and consulting for Subversion, plus fixing bugs and working on new features. I am somewhat involved in the Apache Software Foundation as a whole, but at this point in time my contributions there are more symbolic in nature, mostly because of lack of time and focus.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On my 21st birthday in 1998, I received a phone call from Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation (FSF), to tell me the root password of the GNU Project’s web server.
I’d learned about something called UNIX a great many years prior, and in 1993, on a two-week language course in Swansea, Wales, I managed to up my storage quota on the university’s Pyramid system from 2MB to 4MB, enough to download Slackware from the University of Vaasa’s FTP server and bring it back home with me.
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Licensing
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The lawsuit continues to progress. VMware has filed a statement of defense, in which they assert arguments for the dismissal of the action. Christoph, with the assistance of his lawyer Till Jaeger, has filed his response to these arguments. Unfortunately, VMware has explicitly asked for the filings not to be published and, accordingly, Conservancy has not been able to review either document. With the guidance of counsel, Christoph was able to provide Conservancy with a high-level summary of the filings from which we are able to provide this update. VMware’s statement of defense primarily focuses on two issues. First, VMware questions Christoph’s copyright interest in the Linux kernel and his right to bring this action. Second, VMware claims vmklinux is an “interoperability module” which communicates through a stable interface called VMK API.
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Software Freedom Conservancy has spat out a “high level” update on the GPL enforcement case it is backing against VMware, ahead of an expected first hearing next year.
SFC said that VMware had filed its defence against the suit brought by German kernel developer Christoph Hellwig back in March, which alleges VMware’s proprietary ESXi hypervisor products use portions of the code that Hellwig wrote for the Linux kernel, in violation of the terms of version 2 of the GPL.
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Openness/Sharing
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“Creating an open governance process requires a larger commitment and a more engaged dialogue between the government, civil society, citizens and the private sector. Having an efficient administration can drive a better communication between public institutions, civil servants, and other stakeholders,” according to an evaluation report published by the Romanian government, which will form the basis of its second OGP Action Plan (2014-2016).
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I’m fascinated by what the open community takes for granted. Outside FOSS, free and open source software, the idea that work needs to have a solid foundation before being released is deeply seeded. But, in open source communities we say, “Release early, release often,” a phrase I regularly substitute now for: “Throw it into the world as soon as you can formulate words around it.” Heck, even if you aren’t coherent, someone might still understand you. Go ahead and share!
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Open Hardware
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Our next choice had social repercussions. When you adopt a CPU/operating-system combination, you also adopt its developers. We decided against Google Android because it’s optimized for phones and tablets, its graphical display typically shows only one application at a time, and its touch-screen paradigm is too imprecise for computer-aided design work. Therefore, in order to create a system that our target market of developers and creators could use, we decided to run on our ARM chip a version of Linux called GNU/Linux. GNU, which authored both the OS libraries and the license that the Linux kernel uses, is a coder’s organization, right down to the self-referential acronym itself (it stands for “Gnu’s Not Unix”).
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Andrew “bunnie” Huang & Sean Cross tell, in great detail, how they created the Novena laptop, using solely open source software and hardware. For anyone familiar with or even interested in how computers really work, it’s quite a gripping tale. I believe their work could have lasting beneficial effects on the hobbyist computing and open source communities.
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The open-source robotic arm called Dobot that can be used by everyday consumers and experience makers alike has now raised over $430,000 on crowdfunding website, Kickstarter, with funds still rising.
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Programming
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Python is everywhere. These days, it seems it powers everything from major websites to desktop utilities to enterprise software. Python has been used to write all, or parts of, popular software projects like dnf/yum, OpenStack, OpenShot, Blender, Calibre, and even the original BitTorrent client.
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While DZone was at JavaOne 2015 this week, Azul Systems released an early access version of Zulu, which is a certified OpenJDK build / JVM, that supports the latest JDK 9 features.
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Hardware
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ORACLE HAS STARTED SHIPPING systems based on its latest Sparc M7 processor, which the firm said will go a long way to solving the world’s online security problems by building protection into the silicon.
The Sparc M7 chip was originally unveiled at last year’s Openworld show in San Francisco, and was touted at the time as a Heartbleed-prevention tool.
A year on, and Oracle announced the Oracle SuperCluster M7, along with Sparc T7 and M7 servers, at the show. The servers are all based on the 32-core, 256-thread M7 microprocessor, which offers Security in Silicon for better intrusion protection and encryption, and SQL in Silicon for improved database efficiency.
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Security
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Back in summer I have read a new book published by one of the core Intel architects about the Management Engine (ME). I didn’t quite like what I read there. In fact I even found this a bit depressing, even though Intel ME wasn’t particular news to me as we, at the ITL, have already studied this topic quite in-depth, so to say, back in 2008… But, as you can see in the linked article, I believed we could use VT-d to protect the host OS from the potentially malicious ME-based rootkits (which we demonstrated back then).
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Researchers at Symantec say they have discovered a form of malware that attacks MySQL on Windows servers, using them to launch distributed denial of service attacks.
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Following our notification, Symantec published a report in response to our inquiries and disclosed that 23 test certificates had been issued without the domain owner’s knowledge covering five organizations, including Google and Opera.
However, we were still able to find several more questionable certificates using only the Certificate Transparency logs and a few minutes of work. We shared these results with other root store operators on October 6th, to allow them to independently assess and verify our research.
Symantec performed another audit and, on October 12th, announced that they had found an additional 164 certificates over 76 domains and 2,458 certificates issued for domains that were never registered.
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COOKING AND HEATING ENABLER British Gas has confessed to a data loss that has seen the details of many of its customers released online.
British Gas has written to affected customers to tell them that, while it may not have been hacked, the effect is the same. It has somehow managed to leak information that has found its way onto the internet and in the direction of ne-er-do-wells.
Reports have it that 2,399 email addresses and passwords have been leaked online. A package of emails and passwords is a pretty good haul for an online exploiter, particularly if the same details are used for access on other sites and services.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Some brave television figures refuse to go along with the established “norm”. It was Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow who coined the phrase “poppy fascism” a few years ago when he was publicly berated by BBC journalists and other media outlets for refusing to don the flower during his nightly broadcasts. It remains to be seen if the Channel 4 news anchor will this year cave to public pressure – a pressure which seems to be growing every year.
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EVEN DEATH WON’T GET YOU OFF the U.S. terrorism watchlist. As of last July, over 3,500 suspected terrorists included in the U.S. government’s central terror database were “confirmed dead” and another 13,000 were “reportedly dead,” yet many of their names continued to be actively monitored in databases like the no-fly list, according to an intelligence assessment prepared by the Department of Homeland Security in August of this year.
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The UN General Assembly on Tuesday called for an end to the decades-long US embargo on Cuba in a resolution adopted by a near-unanimous vote, three months after US-Cuba diplomatic ties were restored.
The United States and Israel voted against the non-binding resolution, but a resounding 191 countries supported the measure in the 193-member assembly, the highest number ever.
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But we must face reality: The occupation has become permanent. Nearly half a century after the Six-Day War, Israel is settling into the apartheid-like regime against which many of its former leaders warned. The settler population in the West Bank has grown 30-fold, from about 12,000 in 1980 to 389,000 today. The West Bank is increasingly treated as part of Israel, with the green line demarcating the occupied territories erased from many maps. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin declared recently that control over the West Bank is “not a matter of political debate. It is a basic fact of modern Zionism.”
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Any day now, our Saudi Arabian allies may behead and crucify a young man named Ali al-Nimr.
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Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the UN has admitted a “mistake” was made when Riyadh-led coalition jets bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Yemen, but says the medical charity provided incorrect geographic coordinates for the facility, leading to the incident.
MSF, as the organization is known by its French acronym, reported on Tuesday that a hospital they supported in Haydan district in the northern Saada province was hit by several airstrikes starting at around 10:30PM local time on Monday. Initial blasts occurred outside the building, and all staff and patients were able to flee before it was destroyed by subsequent airstrikes. One MSF employee suffered minor injuries.
In a statement, MSF said that the hospital’s GPS coordinates “were shared with Coalition forces. They are sent every week to the Coalition operations room, and the last time they were shared was on October 24.” The organization also said that it’s logo had been painted on the facility’s roof and was visible from the air.
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Airstrikes carried out late last night by the Saudi-led coalition in northern Yemen destroyed a hospital supported by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), MSF announced today.
The small hospital, in the Haydan District in Saada Province, was hit by several airstrikes beginning at 10:30 p.m. last night. Hospital staff and two patients managed to escape before subsequent airstrikes occurred over a two-hour period. One staff member was slightly injured while escaping. With the hospital destroyed, at least 200,000 people now have no access to lifesaving medical care.
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Lebanese security forces are interrogating a Saudi prince on charges of carrying drugs on his private plane after they allegedly retrieved 2 tons of narcotics from the aircraft, local media reported.
Abd al-Muhsen bin Walid bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud was detained on Monday in Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport.
The prince was about to conduct a flight on his private plane to Saudi Arabia.
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Saudi prince Abdel Mohsen bin Walid bin Abdulaziz was caught in an airport in Lebanon on Monday with over two tons of drugs.
Lebanese security found 40 suitcases full of more than 4,000 pounds of amphetamine pills and cocaine on the prince’s private plane, which was on its way to Saudi capital city Riyadh. A security source told AFP that this was the largest smuggling operation ever foiled by Beirut International Airport security.
While this may seem like just another case of rich and powerful aristocrats going wild, the implications of this drug bust are much more insidious: In Saudi Arabia, people are executed over drugs. And not rarely — several times a month, on average.
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Hiramine’s NGO, Humanitarian International Services Group, or HISG, won special praise from the president for having demonstrated how a private charity could step in quickly in response to a crisis. “In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” read Hiramine’s citation, “HISG’s team launched a private sector operation center in Houston that mobilized over 1,500 volunteers into the disaster zone within one month after the hurricane.”
But as the evangelical Christian Hiramine crossed the stage to shake hands with President Bush and receive his award, he was hiding a key fact from those in attendance: He was a Pentagon spy whose NGO was funded through a highly classified Defense Department program.
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Transparency Reporting
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This means that on the OBL raid, Donilon excluded the Attorney General in the same way Dick Cheney excluded John Ashcroft from key information about torture and wiretapping. I find that interesting enough, given hints that Holder raised concerns about the legal authority to kill Anwar al-Awlaki in the weeks after we missed him on December 24, 2009, which led to OLC writing two crappy memos authorizing that killing in ways that have never been all that convincing.
But Savage provides no explanation for why Krass was excluded, which is particularly interesting given that the month after OBL’s killing, Savage revealed that President Obama had blown off Krass’ advice on Libya (as I read it, the decision to blow off her advice would have happened after the OBL killing, though I am not certain on that point). The silence about Krass is also remarkable given that she was looped in on the initial Libya decision — and asked to write a really bizarre memo memorializing advice purportedly given after the fact.
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Highly sensitive personal details about the head of the CIA from his hacked emails have been leaked, including his phone number, home address, passport number and how he once consulted a mental health expert.
The emails, obtained by WikiLeaks, show that John Brennan had concerns about the US spying on its own citizens and called for ‘firm criteria’, warning that the activities ‘must be consistent with our laws and reflect the democratic principles and values of our Nation’.
The files also show how a security firm he established was accused of ‘disingenuous’ behavior by the CIA in its bid to win a government contract for a terrorist watch list.
In a further memo released by the anti-secrecy agency, Brennan takes a swipe at former President George W. Bush for his ‘gratuitous’ labeling of Iran as part of a worldwide ‘axis of evil’.
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On Twitter, Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked millions of documents about electronic surveillance by the United States government, called the vote a “game-changer.” But the resolution has no legal force and limited practical effect for Mr. Snowden, who is living in Russia on a three-year residency permit.
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The EU Parliament has just approved a measure (by a narrow 285 to 281 vote) telling EU member states to “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender.” That’s pretty huge. Of course, as a resolution, it’s more symbolic than actually meaningful, because the member states may not follow through on the request. But it is an important step in the right direction.
At the same time, the EU Parliament reviewed some other issues concerning mass surveillance, including the whole EU-US safe harbor setup. As we noted, the EU Court of Justice recently tossed out that agreement, which is really creating a huge mess for the internet right now. The EU Parliament “welcomed” the ruling, and pushed for alternatives to the safe harbor agreement. As we noted, the safe harbor agreement was a bit of a mess, but it’s important to have something in place to allow the internet to function — and the real problem was the NSA surveillance program.
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The European Parliament voted on Thursday to call on its member states to welcome “human rights defender” Edward Snowden to Europe with open arms.
The member states should “drop any criminal charges against Edwards Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as a whistle-blower and international human rights defender,” read the resolution.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A predictive population model suggests that lion populations in West, Central, and East Africa are likely to be halved in the next 20 years.
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National park officials say 22 more elephants have been killed by cyanide in Zimbabwe, adding to a worrying poaching trend.
A source with knowledge of an investigation of the killings says 78 elephants have been poisoned in the country this month.
The elephants were found in the remote Sinamatella area of Hwange National Park on Monday, Zimbabwe national park officials say. The park received international attention in July as the site where American dentist Walter Palmer shot and killed Cecil the lion.
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Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz warns about the dangers of the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “We know we’re going to need regulations to restrict the emissions of carbon,” Stiglitz said. “But under these provisions, corporations can sue the government, including the American government, by the way, so it’s all the governments in the TPP can be sued for the loss of profits as a result of the regulations that restrict their ability to emit carbon emissions that lead to global warming.”
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There is nothing as awe-inspiring as watching the brutal power of a lion capturing its prey. At close range, their throaty roars thump through your body, raising a cold sweat triggered by the fear of what these animals are capable of doing now, and what they once did to our ancestors. They are the most majestic animals left on our planet, and yet we are currently faced with the very real possibility that they will be functionally extinct within our lifetime.
In fact, lion populations throughout much of Africa are heading towards extinction more rapidly than previously thought, according to new research by Oxford biologist Hans Bauer and colleagues, published in PNAS. The team looked at 47 sites with credible and repeated lion surveys since 1990, and found they were declining everywhere in Africa aside from four countries: Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
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I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work. What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.
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At the climate summit in Paris in December the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?
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IT’S the biggest environmental disaster in our region and Australia cannot avoid being affected by its enormous reach.
A sickening haze that has spread across southeast Asia is being described as a “crime against humanity” and has NASA warning of a disaster of its kind never before seen.
For more than two months, raging forest fires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra have released vast plumes of smoke that has spread across neighbouring countries including Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Axel Springer’s war with ad-blocking firm Eyeo’s Adblock Plus continues to rage.
According to AdBlock Plus, the German publisher has tried to quash conversations about how to get around the wall that Axel Springer erected to keep ad block users from accessing its tabloid site Bild. Adblock Plus is claiming Axel Springer’s approach smacks of censorship.
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Worst of all, the march took place in a country that is one of the most hostile to free speech rights in the West, as France quickly demonstrated in the days after the march by rounding up and prosecuting Muslims and other anti-Israel activists for the political views they expressed. A great, best-selling book by French philosopher Emmanuel Todd released this year argues that these “free speech” marches were a “sham,” driven by many political sentiments — nativism, nationalism, anti-Muslim bigotry — that had nothing to do with free speech.
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ORG has responded to the Prime Minister’s calls for legislation that will implement filters for adult content. This follows the European’s Parliament vote for net neutrality regulations, which will ban the current voluntary agreement made between ISPs and the government to provide filters, which some providers switch on by default.
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The EU’s new net neutrality “protections” are largely deserving of the scare quotes, what with their myriad loopholes and built-in provisions that allow ISPs to throttle/manipulate traffic to prevent “congestion” — something that has yet to be the actual source of any ISP’s “traffic $haping” efforts.
But what the rules did do is throw off David Cameron’s ongoing plans for a porn-free UK. And, of course — considering Cameron has no idea how ISP-level filters work, much less aware of numerous logical fallacies “supporting” his claims this will actually prevent porn consumption by minors — the Prime Minister was the last to know.
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The Serbian government’s use of “soft” censorship remains a threat to press freedom, a report issued on Thursday by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, WAN-IFRA, and the Center for International Media Assistance, CIMA, in Washington says.
The report, “Media reform stalled in the slow lane: Soft censorship in Serbia”, was published with the support of the Open Society Foundation while BIRN Serbia was a research partner.
The report noted that Serbia lacks a functional, vital and competitive media market.
“Taxpayers’ funds are now one of the most important sources for survival of media outlets. However, public monies are deployed with partisan intent,” the report said.
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The censorship of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival has spread from sessions discussing the 1965 anti-communist massacres to other politically sensitive topics on the resort island.
A panel has now been scratched on the controversial reclamation of land in Benoa Bay in southern Bali for a massive luxury development that critics say will devastate the environment.
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Last week, the UWRF organizer, however, was forced to drop all sessions that were to look at the massacre of communists in Indonesia in the 1960s following pressure from local authorities.
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Panel sessions and a film on the 1965 anti-communist massacres in Indonesia were prohibited at an international literary festival in Bali due to a 1966 government regulation banning communism and Marxism-Leninism, according to a Balinese police chief.
Gianyar police chief Farman told Fairfax Media there was also a 1999 criminal code which made the spreading of communism, Marxism and Leninism in public a punishable offence with a maximum sentence of 12 years’ jail.
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The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF) has cancelled events discussing the 1965 Indonesian massacres, after police threatened to revoke the festival permit.
I research and write about the massacres’ impact on Indonesia. I was to moderate one of the five events that were dropped from this week’s festival.
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A week ago I received a message from Janet DeNeefe, director of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.
“I just wanted to let you know that the UWRF is being censored this year, and we have been told to remove all programs to do with ‘1965’,” she wrote. “Or else next year they will not give us a permit to hold the festival.”
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Governments around the world are expanding censorship and surveillance of the internet as overall online freedom declined for the fifth consecutive year, according to a report from a group that tracks democracy and human rights.
Nearly half of 65 countries examined have seen online freedom weaken since June 2014, Freedom House said in an annual survey released on Wednesday.
One of the steepest declines occurred in France, which passed a law that many observers likened to the US Patriot Act in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks earlier this year, according to the report.
Ukraine, mired in a territorial conflict with Russia, and Libya also experienced sharp drops.
The report highlighted China as the country with the most severe restrictions on internet freedom, followed by Syria and Iran.
Sri Lanka and Zambia, both of which recently underwent changes in government leadership, were credited with making the biggest improvements in overall online freedom.
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The annual report by non-government watchdog Freedom House said the setbacks were especially noticeable in the Middle East, reversing gains seen in the Arab Spring.
Freedom House found declines in online freedom of expression in 32 of the 65 countries assessed since June 2014, with “notable declines” in Libya, France and Ukraine.
The researchers found 61 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where criticism of the government, military or ruling family has been subject to censorship.
And 58 percent live in countries where bloggers or others were jailed for sharing content online on political, social and religious issues, according to the “Freedom on the Net 2015″ report.
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Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to counter a European Union ruling that branded his internet porn filters illegal. He reiterated his stance that children must be protected from adult material online.
The EU ruling states that information must be allowed to travel through the internet “without discrimination, restriction or interference.” The measures are intended to allow data companies to reduce roaming charges.
The British government says it will protect internet companies from the EU laws and make it a legal right for the firms to use porn filters.
Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Cameron said parents should be able to control the materials their children are exposed to.
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Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed today that the Tory government planned to legislate on smut filters, following yesterday’s net neutrality ruling in the European Union.
Cameron told MPs during PMQs that he had “spluttered over my cornflakes” when he read this morning that the EU measures would fail to think of the children by protecting their prying eyes from “indecent images”.
“I think it’s absolutely vitally important that we enable parents to have that protection for their children from this material on the internet,” he told the Palace of Westminster.
“We worked so hard to put in place these filters,” the PM added. “But I can reassure her [Conservative MP for Derby North, Amanda Solloway] because we actually secured an opt-out yesterday so we can keep our family-friendly filters to protect children.”
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This rather shows the bias inherent in the Independent’s editorial style, for these filters applied not just to porn sites, but to websites that dealt with topics and lifestyles that somehow made David Cameron and his government uncomfortable — such as those dealing with the Occult.
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Sometimes politicians make me mad enough to scream at my computer. Today is a great example of that as the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has restated his claim that he will block internet-based porn and adult content to “protect children”.
But this isn’t about protecting children at all, it’s about controlling the internet and stopping British people’s freedom to browse as they wish without having to subject themselves to a registration process in order to watch adult material. The whole idea of blocking porn to protect “children” is a fiction, you can’t protect children from porn – it’s impossible. And anyway “children” don’t watch porn, young adults do. Getting the government to understand the difference between a child and an adolescent is impossible though.
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The future of information suppression may be much harder to detect—and thus enormously more difficult to counteract. The digital censors of tomorrow will not require intimidation or force; instead, they can exploit the dark art of “shadow-censorship.”
Shadow-censorship is a way to control information by secretly limiting or obscuring the ways that people can access it. Rather than outright banning or removing problematic communications, shadow-censors can instead wall off social-media posts or users in inaccessible obscurity without the target’s knowledge. To an individual user, it just looks like no one is interested in his or her content. But behind the scenes, sharing algorithms are being covertly manipulated so that it’s extremely difficult for other users to view the blacklisted information.
In theory, there are a variety of ways that shadow-censorship could be applied on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Users may be automatically unsubscribed from blacklisted feeds without notice. Social media analytics can be selectively edited after the fact to make some posts look more or less popular than they really were. Individual posts or users can be flagged so that they are shown in as few feeds as possible by default. Or provocative content that originally escaped selective filtering may be memory-holed after the fact, retrievable only by the eagle-eyed few who notice and care to draw attention to such curious antics.
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In a surprising development this past week, Russia has notified all scientists at Moscow State University (MSU) that they must submit their research papers to the state security service before they will be permitted to publish them. Nature News reports that Russia is imposing this policy on universities and research institutes throughout the country.
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The history of censorship in Russian media runs for pages and pages. There’s little point dealing with Soviet censorship here, but the 1990s, which many people remember as a time when press freedom prevailed, are different. Journalists of the time reminisce about how they used to push bureaucrats’ doors open, the public officials scared of them: bureaucrats and politicians had never been so vulnerable.
The media, however, was another part of the country’s terrain of political conflict—just as articles could be pulled, so could journalists. Take Dmitry Kholodov, for instance, a journalist for Moskovsky komsomolets who died as he collected a booby-trapped suitcase in 1994. Ministry of Defence officials weren’t pleased with Kholodov’s coverage of army corruption and, having asked their subordinates to ‘shut him up’, their subordinates took the order literally.
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South Korean journalists released a statement on Tuesday urging that the Ministry of Unification (MoU) demand that North Korea not interfere in their reporting during family reunions.
The journalists from 38 media outlets criticized North Korea for interfering in their reporting during the family reunions that finished Monday at Mount Kumgang, North Korea. North Korea examined the journalists’ computers and USB drives, they said, returning the devices a day later despite the journalists’ complaints.
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Zimbabwe should abolish the censorship board and other bodies censoring or regulating artistic expressions in order to comply with Zimbabwe’s new constitution. Instead a new classification board should be mandated to issue age recommendations to protect children. This was a recommendation made by arts practitioners, artists, journalists and human rights lawyers at a workshop on artistic freedom, held on 23-24 October 2015 in Harare, Zimbabwe.
[...]
It says the effects of art censorship or unjustified restrictions of the right to freedom of artistic expression and creativity deprive artists of means of expression and livelihood and generate important cultural, social and economic losses to society.
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Part of a major international exhibition planned for Melbourne has been thrown into doubt after toymaker, Lego, refused to supply building blocks for the project.
External Link: Ai Weiwei instagram
Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei said Lego refused his studio’s request for a bulk order of Lego to create an artwork to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria.
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Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei says Lego refused to sell him toy bricks for his artwork, calling it an “an act of censorship and discrimination.”
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An Australian gallery has set up a collection point for Lego for a work by artist Ai Weiwei, after the Danish company refused a bulk order from him.
The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) wants Australians to donate the toy bricks by pouring them through the sunroof of a car parked at the gallery.
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Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has begun gathering the building blocks for his next artwork, asking fans from all over the world to donate their Lego pieces for use in his next project.
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There has been a recent development concerning the removal of critical channels from TV streaming platforms in which newly emerged video footage provides evidence that such movements are politically motivated, as the chief advisor of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is featured urging a minister to drop critical TV channels from the state-owned Turkish Satellite Communications Company (Türksat) — a move that has attracted widespread criticism.
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The United States has reiterated its concern over the hostile takeover of five media outlets in Turkey, saying that Turkey is not keeping with its own democratic values.
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Cops sprayed water cannon to disperse crowds in front of the offices of Kanalturk and Bugun TV in Istanbul, a live broadcast on Bugun’s website showed.
The media groups are owned by Koza Ipek Holding, which has links to Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen. The authorities on Tuesday took over 22 companies owned by Koza Ipek in an investigation of alleged financial irregularities, including whether it funded Gulen. The company denies wrongdoing.
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Vile comments and phenomena such as trolling are simply a small part of the avalanche of electronic detritus that we have to learn to cope with as the internet revolution progresses. Dubious and unethical practices have proliferated and yet, the only sustained attempt to moderate the internet, in China, is notable for its failures as Chinese internet users have quickly learnt how to dodge censors and spread news and opinions in flash comments reaching hundreds of millions.
Racist and violent comments can easily be identified, and then simply ignored. Many websites urge users “not to feed the trolls”, even with traffic signs. In Brazil, trolls are called pombos enxadristas (chess player pigeons), and the advice is not to play them, since all they can do is defecate on the board and knock over the pieces.
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Malaysian cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Haque, aka Zunar, is facing nine simultaneous charges under the country’s Sedition Act and will appear in court on 6 November. He could be sentenced to 43 years in prison for drawing cartoons that mock Malaysia’s corrupt government officials.
Ahead of his court appearance, Zunar is coming to the UK to display a small selection of his work as part of the permanent exhibition at the Cartoon Museum and several other events.
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Repressive regimes have sought to quell the speech of dissidents throughout history, and long before the advent of the Internet. It therefore is not entirely surprising that attempted censorship by governments will continue in the online world. But, hopefully, the Internet will help to foster free speech and communication, and will not be a means of governmental surveillance on citizens.
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Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino exercised his First Amendment rights by speaking at a New York City protest against police brutality. At the October 24 event, he denounced “police terror,” and reportedly said this: “I have to call a murder a murder, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”
In response, Patrick Lynch, the head of New York’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association union, called Tarantino a “cop-hater” and said that it was “time for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films.” A union affiliated with the Los Angeles Police Department has reportedly endorsed the boycott as well.
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The hullabaloo around the Thai film Arpat, which features a misbehaving young monk, is the latest example of problems caused by what some people in the film industry perceive as flaws in the Film and Video Act 2008.
Some of the controversial aspects of the law, which was passed by the coup-appointed National Legislative Assembly, include the composition of the censor committees, and the measure that allows a film to be banned for national security reasons.
Also criticised were a conservative interpretation of the rules, and most importantly strict state control over film, compared to lighter regulation of other cheaper and more accessible media such as television and print.
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Kanu Behl, the debutant director of Titli which releases this Friday, October 30, along with producer Dibakar Banerjee, teamed up with TVF to make an episode on censorship in India. The fun video Censor Qtiyapa which released online on October 26, has gone viral and got more than two lakh views in less than 24 hours.
The video featuring eminent filmmakers Mahesh Bhatt, Sudhir Mishra, Hansal Mehta, Kamal Swaroop, Ajay Bahl, producer Guneet Monga, Vasan Bala along with the Titli director and producer is directed by Shlok Sharma (director of Haramkhor).
Excited about the tremendous response, the director Kanu Behl says, “The response to the video has been overwhelming. Close to 2 lakh hits in less than 24 hours, as we write this. It’s interesting to know that the audience across the board can bite in to the humour and get all the nuances of a film maker’s labour pains!”
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Copyright holders have asked Google to remove more than 1,000,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine in recent years. The remarkable milestone, reached this week, is at the center of an ongoing debate over how search engines are expected to deal with pirate sites.
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We recently wrote about some concerns about the new Data Protection Directive that is being set up in Europe. The law is driven by people with good intentions: looking to better protect the privacy of European citizens. Privacy protection is an important concept — but the current plans appear to be so focused on privacy protection that it gives very little regard for the unintended consequences of the way it’s been set up. As we wrote in our last post, Daphne Keller at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society is writing a series of blog posts raising concerns about how the new rules clash with basic concepts of free speech. She’s now written one about the immensely troubling setup of the “notice and takedown” rules included in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For years, we’ve been concerned by problematic notice and takedown procedures — we’ve seen the DMCA frequently abused to stifle speech, rather than for genuine copyright challenges. But, for some reason, people often immediately leap to “notice and takedown solutions” for any kind of content they don’t like, they and the drafters of the GDPR are no different.
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Privacy
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The military surveillance blimp that broke free of its mooring at Aberdeen Proving Ground Wednesday morning has returned to Earth after a four-hour, 160-mile, power line-snapping odyssey, authorities said.
NORAD spokesman Michael Kucharek said the runaway aircraft was on the ground near Moreland Township, Pa. — 160 miles north of its mooring in Edgewood — and was deflating. The blimp had slowly been losing helium, he said, and appears to have drifted to the ground.
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Military officials scrambled Wednesday to retrieve an unmanned Army surveillance blimp that detached from its moorings in Maryland and drifted north over Pennsylvania.
Two American fighter jets tracked the blimp, military officials said, that had been tethered at Aberdeen Proving Ground and broke free around noon.
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In just a few days, the Army will launch the first of two massive blimps over Maryland, the last gasp of an 18-year-long $2.8-billion Army project intended to use giant airships to defend against cruise missiles.
And while the blimps may never stave off a barrage of enemy missiles, their ability to spot and track cars, trucks and boats hundreds of miles away is raising serious privacy concerns.
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The most outspoken group opposing the bill, Fight For the Future, noted in a scathing statement that the vote would be one we one day look back at as being formative for the internet.
“This vote will go down in history as the moment that lawmakers decided not only what sort of Internet our children and our children’s children will have, but what sort of world they will live in,” the group wrote in an emailed statement. “Every Senator who voted for CISA has voted for a world without freedom of expression, a world without true democracy, a world without basic human rights.”
It may not be that simple, but then again, maybe it is. So here’s a list of who voted for CISA, who voted against it, and who abstained. Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Lindsey Graham are all in Denver for Wednesday’s debate. Paul is anti-CISA but didn’t think it was worth sticking around in Washington for the vote.
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Despite the promising, if difficult to verify, statistics, the program has not gone without complaints in India, the world’s largest democracy. Critics argue that by controlling which companies and individuals can offer services on Internet.org, Facebook is creating a walled-off kingdom in which it decides the beneficiaries of its initiative.
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Email was never designed to be private. When the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was first invented, it didn’t come with protections or ways to check that a message really came from where it claimed to. Those came later, with the addition of extensions like STARTTLS for encrypting communications and others for authenticating messages.
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The federal government has been fighting hard for years hide details about its use of so-called stingray surveillance technology from the public.
The surveillance devices simulate cell phone towers in order to trick nearby mobile phones into connecting to them and revealing the phones’ locations.
Now newly released documents confirm long-held suspicions that the controversial devices are also capable of recording numbers for a mobile phone’s incoming and outgoing calls, as well as intercepting the content of voice and text communications. The documents also discuss the possibility of flashing a phone’s firmware “so that you can intercept conversations using a suspect’s cell phone as a bug.”
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Researchers have devised a low-cost way to discover the precise location of smartphones using the latest LTE standard for mobile networks, a feat that shatters widely held perceptions that the standard is immune to the types of attacks that targeted earlier specifications.
The attacks target the LTE specification, which is expected to have a user base of about 1.37 billion people by the end of the year, and require about $1,400 worth of hardware that run freely available open source software. The equipment can cause all LTE-compliant phones to leak their location to within a 32- to 64-foot (about 10 to 20 meter) radius and in some cases their GPS coordinates, although such attacks may be detected by savvy phone users. A separate method that’s almost impossible to detect teases out locations to within an area of roughly one square mile in an urban setting.
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The European Union said on Monday it agreed in principle with the US on a new trans-Atlantic data transfer pact that’s still in the works, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this month, a European court invalidated Safe Harbor, a 15-year old agreement that included laws which allowed technology companies to move user data between data centers if they guaranteed it would receive an “adequate level” of protection.
The ruling came after Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems brought a case against Facebook in Ireland claiming that his privacy had been violated by the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. Following the court’s decision, Irish authorities said last week that they plan to investigate the social network’s data transfers under the act.
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A new transatlantic data-sharing agreement is within reach after the “Safe Harbour” deal used by thousands of companies to comply with EU privacy law was struck down by the highest EU court this month, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker said.
The so-called “Safe Harbour 2.0″ agreement currently being negotiated would meet European concerns about the transfer of data to the United States, Pritzker told journalists in Frankfurt on Thursday during a visit to Germany.
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The NSA’s blanket surveillance of Europeans will be subject to judicial review, according to EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourová.
At a committee meeting of the European Parliament this week, Jourová provided details of the replacement to the struck-down safe harbor framework, which until this month allowed people’s personal information to flow across the Atlantic and into American servers.
She told the hearing the new agreement would move away from the previous self-regulatory approach to one that allows for “pro-active” enforcement and sanctions.
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Data protection authorities in Germany have announced that they will review the legality of internet giants’ data transfers from the EU to the US, after the European Court of Justice ruled that Europeans’ data isn’t safe from intelligence services on US-based servers.
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When word got out that both the US’ NSA and the UK’s GCHQ were likely using purpose-built Regin malware for their spying campaigns, that raised more than a few alarm bells… including in the German government, apparently. The country’s prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into a report that Regin infected (and thus monitored) the laptop of a Chancellery division leader. Officials aren’t jumping to conclusions yet, but it’s easy to guess where their suspicions lie — the concern is that allies are hacking into the devices of multiple German higher-ups, not just its Chancellor. If the evidence holds up, it could worsen political relationships that have already turned a bit sour.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel may not be the only high-ranking leader from that country to be spied on by the National Security Agency. According to a report published over the weekend, German authorities are investigating whether the head of the German Federal Chancellery unit had his laptop infected with Regin, a highly sophisticated suite of malware programs that has been linked to the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters.
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State surveillance programs spell serious consequences for business — could Canada be next?
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As part of the campaign, which is called Intelexit, the group have sought to place billboards as close as possible to the intelligence agency’s buildings across the world.
A billboard posted near the NSA outpost and military base in Darmstadt, Germany, for example, said: “listen to your heart, not to private phone calls.”
The group is planning to place a billboard outside GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham, UK. It is expected to read “the intelligence community needs a backdoor,” in a jibe at the UK and US governments, who are attempting to push through legislation allowing them to de-crypt all encrypted digital communications between their citizens.
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While nobody was watching, the Senate a couple of days ago passed something called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), which passed at least partly because if you say “Cyber warfare, boogedy-boogedy!” around nervous legislators these days, they’ll pass a bill agreeing to have the NSA plant microchips in their spleens. The bill passed by one of those bipartisan majorities so beloved by Beltway pundits, 74-21. Now it goes to conference, and its final passage may be stalled because of the currently fluid state of the House Republican leadership.
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As a cybersecurity bill, CISA is a joke: It doesn’t address the security problems that create the conditions for hacks. What it will create a streamlined information pipeline for the NSA.
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Back in August, the NSA released an updated advisory that was at once interesting and expected: It said that the world had to prepare for the oncoming impact of quantum computers, and the possibility that these devices could render existing computer cryptography almost completely obsolete. They called for the cryptographic community to invest heavily in developing so-called post-quantum cryptographic solutions that could survive this hypothetical watershed invention. And, as you might imagine, this advisory has very nearly driven the internet insane. Now, two security researchers have published a paper compiling all the various theories surrounding this advisory, and trying to make sense of the situation.
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Global online freedom declined for a fifth consecutive year as governments around the world stepped up surveillance and censorship efforts, a study showed Wednesday.
The annual report by non-government watchdog Freedom House said the setbacks were especially noticeable in the Middle East, reversing gains seen in the Arab Spring.
Freedom House found declines in online freedom of expression in 32 of the 65 countries assessed since June 2014, with “notable declines” in Libya, France and Ukraine.
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Too little has been done to safeguard citizens’ fundamental rights following revelations of electronic mass surveillance, say MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. They urge the EU Commission to ensure that all data transfers to the US are subject to an “effective level of protection” and ask EU member states to grant protection to Edward Snowden, as a “human rights defender”. Parliament also raises concerns about surveillance laws in several EU countries.
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The UK government has said that it recognises the “essential role that strong encryption plays in enabling the protection of sensitive personal data and securing online communications and transactions,” and does not “advocate or require the provision of a back-door key or support arbitrarily weakening the security of internet applications and services.” However, speaking in the House of Lords, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Baroness Shields, went on to say: “This is not about creating back doors; this is about companies being able to access communications on their network when presented with a warrant.”
Shields singled out “an alarming movement towards end-to-end encrypted application” for criticism. She said that David Cameron “expressed concern that many companies are building end-to-end encrypted applications and services and not retaining the keys. The Prime Minister has repeatedly said that there cannot be a safe place for terrorists, criminals and paedophiles to operate freely, with impunity and beyond the reach of law.” For this reason, she claimed, “It is absolutely essential that these companies which understand and build those stacks of technology are able to decrypt that information and provide it to law enforcement in extremis.”
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UK police are lobbying the government to be given access to every UK Internet user’s Web browsing history as part of the new Snooper’s Charter—the Investigatory Powers Bill—which is expected to be published next week. According to The Guardian, the police want to revive the controversial plan for ISPs to store details about every website visited by customers for 12 months, an idea first mooted in the original Communications Data Bill, which was dropped after opposition from the Liberal Democrats when they were part of the previous coalition government.
Richard Berry, the National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman for data communications, is quoted as saying: “We essentially need the ‘who, where, when and what’ of any communication”—who initiated it, where were they and when did it happened. And a little bit of the ‘what’, were they on Facebook, or a banking site, or an illegal child-abuse image-sharing website?”
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Police are to get the power to view the web browsing history of everyone in the country.
Home Secretary Theresa May will announce the plans when she introduces the Government’s new surveillance bill in the House of Commons on Wednesday.
The Telegraph understands the new powers for the police will form part of the new bill.
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There are a few ways law enforcement agencies acquire cell tower spoofers. Very rarely do agencies pay for these expensive devices themselves. (Meaning with their funds drawn from their own departments. Obviously, no government agency is self-funded.) In most cases, funding in whole or in part is obtained from the DHS — something nearly any agency can obtain simply by checking [X] BECAUSE TERRORISM when applying for a Homeland Security grant.
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Techniques like Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering and a proper understanding of the Dark Web is the first step in combating the Internet’s dark places. With an understanding of how to use open source encrypted anonymity services safely, organisations can explore OSINT sources – which include web-based communities, user-generated content, social-networking sites, wikis, blogs and news sources – to investigate potential threats or analyse relevant information for business purposes.
Whether that’s using Deep and Dark web sites and directories to support intelligence gathering for investigation purposes, manage incidents or to combat cyber crime.
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You gotta love this twisted logic.
In May, a federal appeals court declared the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program illegal because it wasn’t authorized under the Patriot Act, as the Obama administration and its predecessor administration had maintained.
Then, in June, Congress semi-dismantled the program with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which President Obama signed on June 2. As part of the new act, Congress authorized a spying transition period of sorts where the old tactics could continue until new laws were in place.
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IronNet, a cybersecurity company founded by the former director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, secured $32.5 million in a Series A funding round.
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Former US National Security Agency (NSA) director Keith Alexander’s cyber security start-up, IronNet Cybersecurity, said yesterday it had raised $32.5 million in a “Series A” funding round led by Trident Capital Cybersecurity.
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A former National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor from Augusta has pleaded guilty to charges that he filed falsified time sheets.
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Previous investigations by the ACLU have shown that Stingrays are used by many government agencies—including the DEA, FBI, NSA, and local and state police—across many states. Their use is so widespread in part because they only require a relatively low-level court order for use, which makes them an enticing alternative to attempting to get actual cell tower records with a warrant.
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The American Civil Liberties Union suffered major defeats on Friday, when two of its cases involving clear violations of civil rights and civil liberties were dismissed, both undone by the judiciary’s deference to executive-branch secrecy.
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The court modeled its opinion on the US Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International [JURIST report] that on matters of unconstitutionality surrounding intelligence gathering, the court is to be particularly rigorous.
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Civil Rights
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Police have used special powers from the counter-terrorism laws in order to seize a laptop that belongs to a journalist from BBC Newsnight, it has emerged.
The BBC and Secunder Kermani, who joined the broadcaster’s flagship current affairs programme last year and has reported extensively on UK-born jihadis, were the target of an order officers obtained from a judge under the Terrorism Act.
Police sought the order to read communications between Kermani and a man in Syria who had publicly identified himself as a member of Islamic State and who had featured in Newsnight reports.
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Police have used powers under the Terrorism Act to seize the laptop of a young Newsnight journalist in a case that has shocked BBC colleagues and alarmed freedom of speech campaigners, The Independent can disclose.
Officers obtained an order from a judge that was served on the BBC and Secunder Kermani, who joined the flagship BBC2 news show early last year and has produced a series of reports on British-born jihadis.
The development has caused alarm among BBC journalists. The editor of Newsnight, Ian Katz said: “While we would not seek to obstruct any police investigation we are concerned that the use of the Terrorism Act to obtain communication between journalists and sources will make it very difficult for reporters to cover this issue of critical public interest.”
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Media figures defended a school resource officer who was seen on video violently “slamm[ing] to the ground” a student in South Carolina, and blamed the student for not showing the officer and her teachers respect.
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Niya Kenny, 18, is speaking out after she was taken into custody in her Spring Valley High School math class. She says she was standing up for her classmate who was being arrested by Student Resource Officer Ben Fields.
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Officer Ben Fields, the South Carolina deputy who slammed and then threw a female high school student across a classroom this week, has been fired after video of his physical assault went viral. While the young girl recovers from injuries she sustained from the attack, according to her lawyer, officials have refused to drop criminal charges of disrupting a classroom against her and now one of the few students who protested against her violent arrest is speaking out about the fired deputy’s longstanding reputation at Spring Valley High.
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United Nations police fired tear gas during clashes with ethnic Albanians protesting in the Kosovo capital yesterday against a UN plan on the fate of the breakaway Serbian province.
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Europe’s worst migration crisis since World War II risks triggering “tectonic changes”, a top EU official warned Tuesday, as figures showed more than 700,000 newcomers have reached the continent’s Mediterranean shores this year.
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The DC Appeals Court has just come to an unfortunate conclusion: because terrorism exists, your rights as a citizen will not be upheld if you travel outside of the United States. This summary of the case is from Lawfare’s David Ryan, whose article claims this is a “victory” for the DOJ, rather than a loss for the American public.
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The Department of Justice won a significant victory yesterday when the D.C. Circuit held in Meshal v. Higgenbotham that a plaintiff cannot state a cause of action under Bivens for alleged constitutional violations that occur during a terrorism investigation in a foreign country.
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Alaa is currently serving a five-year sentence for his role in a protest just two days after the passing of Egypt’s 2013 anti-protest law. While many others involved in the protest were pardoned after serving their first year, Alaa, along with Ahmed Abdel Rahman, has remained imprisoned. Since January 2011, when Egypt rose up against Hosni Mubarak, Alaa has spent more than 500 days in prison. His first arrest after the revolution coincided with his second trip to the United States, to attend RightsCon. He left San Francisco to fly directly back to Cairo, where he immediately faced a military prosecutor and a set of trumped-up charges that kept him in jail for 55 days. He has since been in and out of prison several times. He missed the birth of his first child, Khaled, and the death of his father last summer. He has undoubtedly missed so much more.
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I am a free speech absolutist. Free speech, however, does not protect criminality, or threats of violence.
Threats of violence must be taken seriously and prosecuted by law enforcement.
That’s why — like The Rebel — I’m watching the case of “Israel vs Facebook” very closely.
There’s no reason why companies such as Twitter or Facebook should be protected from legal actions when clear and present threats are being uploaded and circulated on their networks. As private companies, they can decide who is allowed to have an account or not, but they have a responsibility to existing criminal laws regarding threats of violence against general or specific targets.
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A senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture filed a whistleblower complaint on Wednesday accusing the federal agency of suppressing research findings that could call into question the use of a popular pesticide class that is a revenue powerhouse for the agrichemical industry.
Jonathan Lundgren, a senior research entomologist with the USDA’s Agriculture Research Service who has spent 11 years with the agency based in Brookings, S.D., said that retaliation and harassment from inside USDA started in April 2014, following media interviews he gave in March of that year regarding some of his research conclusions.
Lundgren’s work has included extensive examination of a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids, or neonics, which are widely used by U.S. farmers to control pest damage to corn and other crops, helping protect production. The insecticides are sold in forms that both are sprayed on plants or coated on seeds before they are planted. They are also used on plants sold by lawns and garden retailers.
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At the end of September, Brad Heath and Meghan Hoyer of USA Today published a DEA disciplinary log they’d obtained through an FOIA request. The document was obviously misnamed, as it showed plenty of misconduct by DEA agents, but not much in the way of discipline.
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This week, the U.S. Department of State’s Defense Trade Advisory Group (DTAG) met to decide whether to classify “cyber products” as munitions, placing them in the same export control regime as hand grenades and fighter planes. Thankfully, common sense won out and the DTAG recommended that “cyber products” not be added to the control list. EFF and Access Now filed a brief joint statement with the DTAG urging this outcome and we applaud the DTAG’s decision.
There were a number of problems with the proposal to place “cyber products” on the U.S. Munitions List, but most importantly, no one knows how “cyber products” would be defined. As we’ve long argued in other contexts, trying to draw definitions around “defensive” and “offensive” tools is essentially impossible and any vagueness would have significant chilling effects on the security community. In essence, we think that the threshold problem of defining which “cyber products” are subject to control is likely an insurmountable obstacle to effective regulation.
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Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced last year to a decade in prison and 50 lashes a week for 20 weeks—a punishment that has been carried out once so far—for the crime of insulting Islam on his website. On Thursday, the European Parliament awarded Badawi the Sakharov Prize, its human-rights award.
“The conference of Presidents decided that the Sakharov Prize will go to Saudi blogger Raif Badawi,” Martin Schulz, the parliament’s president, said. “This man, who is an extremely good man and an exemplary good man, has had imposed on him one of the most gruesome penalties that exist in this country which can only be described as brutal torture.”
Schulz called on Saudi King Salman to release Badawi, who was arrested in 2012 and initially sentenced to 600 lashes and seven years in prison—a punishment that was increased to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison after an appeal. Badawi was accused of insulting Islam on his website Free Saudi Liberals, which served as a forum for debate.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Unfortunately, MEPs have created large loopholes and left ambiguity in much of the legislation. Net neutrality is the principle whereby Internet access providers treat internet traffic equally. Because of the vagueness of the new regulations, telecoms regulators in EU Member States will now have to decide whether telecoms companies in their country will be able to prioritise different categories of data.
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Wi-Fi is an incredible success story– carrying the majority of Internet traffic, responsible for over $90 billion in economic value for the United States in 2013 and a powerful force in closing the digital divide. The success of Wi-Fi demonstrates the power of unlicensed spectrum. But how did we get here? The story of how technologies like Wi-Fi have come to have such a significant impact on our lives will help us think about the future of unlicensed spectrum.
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For many years now, the General Accounting Office has warned the FCC that if it’s going to throw billions of dollars at giant ISPs, it might just want to track how that money is spent. GAO reports like this one from 2009 (pdf) noted that not only has the FCC historically done a dismal job at tracking subsidy spending, most government broadband policies have been based on flawed, incomplete or downright hallucinated data (just check out our $300 million US broadband map). In other words, for the better part of fifteen years our government not only didn’t really know where broadband funding was needed, it couldn’t be bothered to track if it was actually going there.
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has hit out at net neutrality advocates who claim that zero-rating – the practice of offering access to certain popular online services for free – should be prohibited.
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INTERNET providers will be barred from charging online businesses for “fast lanes”—that is, giving priority to their traffic—except for certain specialised services, such as videoconferencing or telesurgery. They also must not block or slow traffic other than reasonably to manage their networks, such as to avoid congestion.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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LEGOs. Yes, the basic building block of our youthful imagination also holds a rather ugly over-protective side, in which it uses whatever tool happens to be nearest by to smash up any use of its products that it doesn’t fully endorse. Which, when you think about it, is really weird for a company that makes products that are essentially all about imaginative uses. Children building their own colorful castle? Awesome! But an adult using LEGOs to create political art? Oh, no, no, no.
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Will IP matter? The question seems to arise in the wake of every new disruptive technology. It is no surprise, therefore, that it is being asked in connection with 3D printing, where digital content, easily distributed over the network, is married to the potential for making a myriad of objects in any location where a 3D printer can be operated (think: your home). If the concern a decade ago was how to regulate the downloading of a movie or a song, today it is how to regulate the downloading of a digital file containing all the instructions to make a perfect copy of a product, down to its trade mark. Recalling the discussion a decade or two ago regarding the downloading of digital songs and movies, suggestions are made for various technological solutions. More generally, calls are made for a cultural make-over, where the consumer will habitually come to prefer the genuine product, e.g., using authorized digital instructions and the correct product materials, within the context of 3D printing.
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Copyrights
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Efforts by Kim Dotcom’s legal team to have his extradition hearing thrown out have failed today. As a result the Megaupload founder will begin his defense next week, presenting legal argument that he hopes will stop New Zealand authorities sending him to the United States. Defiant, Dotcom insists that he “won’t be silenced by bullies!”
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Most academic journals charge expensive subscriptions and, for those without a login, fees of $30 or more per article. Now academics are using the hashtag #icanhazpdf to freely share copyrighted papers.
Scientists are tweeting a link of the paywalled article along with their email address in the hashtag—a riff on the infamous meme of a fluffy cat’s “I Can Has Cheezburger?” line. Someone else who does have access to the article downloads a pdf of the paper and emails the file to the person requesting it. The initial tweet is then deleted as soon as the requester receives the file.
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Techdirt has been writing about open access for many years. The idea and practice are certainly spreading, but they’re spreading more slowly than many in the academic world had hoped. That’s particularly frustrating when you’re a researcher who can’t find a particular academic paper freely available as open access, and you really need it now. So it’s no surprise that people resort to other methods, like asking around if anyone has a copy they could send. The Internet being the Internet, it’s also no surprise that this ad-hoc practice has evolved into a formalized system, using Twitter and the hashtag #icanhazpdf to ask other researchers if they have a copy of the article in question. But what is surprising is that recently there have been two articles on mainstream sites that treat the approach as if it’s really quite a reasonable thing to do.
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New research from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows that Spotify has helped to reduce the level of piracy in the countries where it is available. The work also reveals that Spotify reduces the number of digital track sales, but that those losses are cancelled out by the licensing fees paid by Spotify.
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10.28.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In 1997 I left Tandem (Compaq) and found an ISP. Two years later, I was heading the IT department of Univates, a university center in the South of Brasil. There we developed several free software systems, such as SAGU (an academic ERP) and GNUteca (a library loan and administrative system). In 2003, I helped found Solis, the first free software co-op in the world. I told the Solis story in Linux Journal in 2004, and the co-op is still very active and has generated several spin-offs.
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The Mycroft developers have been working to adapt the speech recognition system for the Linux desktop, and they have already taken the first steps.
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Desktop
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According to a press release by Inventec, it is currently collaborating with Xiaomi to produce two laptops, which would be introduced under the Xiaomi brand. The laptops are reportedly scheduled for an early 2016 release.
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Pumped up by a (claimed) $1bn in profit in 2015, Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi will start selling Linux laptops early next year, according to a report.
DigiTimes suggests that two models will be built by contract manufacturers, Inventec and Compal, and feature 12.5 inch and 13.3 inch displays.
According to the trade paper, Xiaomi has been tapping up Lenovo executives “aggressively” to manage the new laptop venture.
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I definitely think you’re on the right path for getting more life out of the old Mac. I recently did some testing with a 2010 Macbook Pro (6,2 version) and Ubuntu MATE. It’s more involved than simply installing Linux onto a PC, but it’s totally possible. Unlike Macbook Pro laptops however, the process should be a bit easier with the iMac.
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Server
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Running Linux in the enterprise often meant little more than an experiment that was sequestered in a lab environment, far away from the production side. But this former interloper is now inching across networks, as it has matured and has become more accepted due to its prominence in established cloud platforms and emerging container technologies. Even Microsoft has dropped its campaign against the open source operating system and has gone so far as to develop its own version of Linux to run part of the Azure cloud platform.
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The digital nature of our world has created a need for more adaptable network operating systems (NOS’s). Networks handle large amounts of data every day, which has created a need for on-demand scalability. As such, HP has teamed up with a variety of supporters, including Arista, Broadcom and Intel, to address this problem and create OpenSwitch, an open source NOS. With OpenSwitch, developers can now collaborate, test new theories and innovate to develop higher-quality networks for organizations. Furthermore, these networks can be customized to accommodate specific business needs.
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OpenStack can be an enigma. We have open source purists who profess by the virtues of OpenStack, even as a multitude of enterprise aficionados wonder if OpenStack is right for them. Fortunately we have cloud practice leader Vijay Chebolu and cloud architect Vinny Valdez to cut the clutter. In their roles at Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice, Vijay and Vinny deliver Open Stack solutions to customers.
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Kernel Space
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After announcing the release and immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 4.2.5, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed Linux users about the debut of the twelfth maintenance version of Linux kernel 4.1 LTS.
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After the announcements of the Linux kernel 4.2.5 and Linux kernel 4.1.12 LTS updates, renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.14.56 LTS.
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If all goes well, Linux 4.3 will be released this weekend followed by the opening of the merge window for Linux 4.4.
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Graphics Stack
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While Ubuntu 15.10 launched last week, the AMD Catalyst driver hasn’t been working but that’s in the process of changing.
While there’s been patches for letting AMD Catalyst work on Ubuntu up through the Linux 4.2 kernel, the binary driver has ended up failing to work on Ubuntu’s 4.2 kernel as found in Ubuntu 15.10. So even right now with a sudo apt-get install fglrx on Ubuntu 15.10, the driver will not work.
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Kabylake (or Kaby Lake) is the interim successor to Skylake. While Skylake was initially planned to be succeeded by Cannonlake, a few months back is when Intel confirmed that Kabylake will come in between and that Cannonlake isn’t coming until H2’2017. Kabylake is expected in 2016 as an update over Skylake with improved performance, native USB 3.1 and HDCP 2.2, and graphics performance improvements.
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Marek Olšák has landed support for OpenGL 4.3′s ARB_copy_image extension, which is used by several modern Steam Linux games.
The Intel Mesa driver had already supported this extension while now RadeonSI is the first Gallium3D driver to do so. BioShock Infinite is one of the games making use of ARB_copy_image support on Linux.
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Applications
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Curtis Gedak has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the GParted 0.24.0 open-source partition editor software for GNU/Linux operating systems.
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gImageReader is an open source tool for OCR (optical character recognition) scanning, available on both Linux and Windows, enabling the users to scan JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIFF or PDF files or files directly imported from the scanner, and recognize the characters.
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Proprietary
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Opera Software has launched Opera 33 for desktops with new features and bug fixes. Alongside the update, the company has brought its recently unveiled new product logo to the browser interface as well. It is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.
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Veeam Software yesterday Introduced Veeam Backup for Linux, at VeeamON 2015, in Las Vegas.
The free standalone agent delivers backup and recovery for Linux servers running in the public cloud, as well as physical Linux servers running on-premises.
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Instructionals/Technical
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When I saw that Tanglu had announced an Alpha release of their next version (4.0 Dasyatis kuhlii) I decided to take a look at it, specifically to see how they are doing with UEFI firmware support. They have been struggling with UEFI until now, with preliminary support showing up in one of the previous releases, but never working quite right and then disappearing again.
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Games
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While Batman: Arkham Knight was promoted as coming to SteamOS, Linux, and Mac in “Fall 2015″, it turns out that this game won’t be out in time for the Steam Machines. Batman: Arkham Knight has been delayed.
Feral Interactive announced today that Batman: Arkham Knight will be available now for Mac, Linux, and SteamOS in “Spring 2016″ rather than this year.
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While I was looking forward to yesterday’s Alien: Isolation for Linux release, that has all changed now. Besides the game failing with open-source drivers, not all functionality from the Windows game is there in the Linux build.
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To the excitement of many Linux gamers, Feral Interactive announced today the release of Alien: Isolation. However, for now you’re best off using the NVIDIA proprietary driver followed by AMD Catalyst while the open-source drivers aren’t yet ready.
Feral recommends the proprietary NVIDIA driver as best for supporting this popular strategy game first released for Windows in 2014. While AMD Catalyst isn’t officially supported right now, Phoronix readers have reported that the game does work… However, like many Linux games currently, the performance is slow. A Phoronix reader for instance reported a Radeon R9 390 with Catalyst 15.9 (the latest) yielding, “all video settings at max: usually 20 or 30 FPS, 15 FPS in complex scenes, all cutscenes at 60 FPS, loading screens at 1-2 FPS.”
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I’m a bit behind due to all the fun tonight, but Insurgency is now fully available on Linux with a big update. It’s also available dirt cheap in the latest Humble Bundle offering.
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With yesterday’s Insurgency first-person-shooter game update, SteamOS and Linux are now officially supported after it became available in beta earlier this month. Insurgency is an interesting FPS powered by Valve’s Source Engine. Here are some benchmarks of this game under Linux.
The benchmarks are only for some NVIDIA GPUs this time around since while AMD Catalyst should run fine for this game considering it’s using the Source Engine, the Catalyst driver is having issues. The game runs fine with the NVIDIA proprietary driver but on this Ubuntu 15.10 system when launching the game with Catalyst 15.9, the screen appears only briefly before returning to the desktop while the Insurgency game process remains alive. Due to that issue blocking the benchmarks from happening, it was just a NVIDIA comparison today.
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Over the last week, many Linux users on Steam were left in a state of confusion when noticing that some Linux games have had their SteamOS icon removed. For those unaware, the SteamOS icon certifies that a title is playable on Linux, including SteamOS, and soon, on Steam Machines.
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Alien: Isolation – The Collection has been released by Sega and Feral Interactive for the Linux and Mac OS X platforms after a short delay.
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SEGA and Creative Assembly have today launched Alien: Isolation – The Collection for Steam (PC/Mac/Linux), PlayStation 4, and Xbox One as a digital download. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One version of ‘ The Collection’ will be $39.99 at launch, with Steam users able to take advantage of a 50% discount of the $59.99 price in an exclusive 24 hour launch day promotion. Additionally, the cost of the digital version of Alien: Isolation on all consoles (PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360) will be reduced to $29.99, beginning today.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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We reported a few days ago on the Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment and the massive amount of features it includes, but it looks like the first point release is already available for download.
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If you don’t have much need for a full desktop environment, i3 is a great option. And the beauty of Linux is that if I do need something more robust, desktop-wise, Unity is just a login session a way. But aside from going into it for screenshots and for some odd trackpad configurations I couldn’t figure out in i3 (I’ve since discovered the joy of gsynaptics, which works just fine from i3), it’s really been a pleasure to use.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Now that the GNOME 3.18 is out the door and many GNU/Linux users are enjoying its cool new technologies, the GNOME Project begins work on the next major release of the acclaimed desktop environment, GNOME 3.20.
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Neofytos Kolokotronis was more than happy to announce that his Arch Linux-based Chakra GNU/Linux distribution will finally make the switch from the old-school KDE4 desktop environment to KDE Plasma 5.
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Reviews
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Xfce Smooth is an interesting distribution. It shows you what you can do yourself using the [very] good distribution as a start and playing with themes, icon sets and fonts. You can change your system’s look very much to your own taste.
The question is still whether you need to download a distribution that someone has already created for you, or start it yourself from scratch. The benefit of using of Xfce Smooth in this case is that it already has a lot of icon sets, fonts, themes to choose from. You do not need to search, download and install them. Just start playing with your selection!
In terms of performance, I had almost no issues with Xfce Smooth at all. It felt very snappy, fast, responsive and… really smooth! The only small issue was with the Keyring password request that appeared several times.
Would I use this distribution myself? Probably not. I am not a fancier of different fonts, icon and mouse pointer styles to play with them. I would rather stick to something more classic.
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Okay, so that wasn’t the final note. While I doubt any of my three readers work for major laptop vendors, I really want to see a push for physical kill switches on things like the camera and the microphone, such as on the Librem 15. I considered getting one of those but they are a little sketchy on what “PureOS” actually is, and so I’ll wait to see what others think of it first.
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ReactOS is built with the primary purpose of providing full binary compatibility with applications (and device drivers) written for Windows Server 2003. That means you can literally take a piece of software built for Windows and run it on ReactOS, without too much trouble
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New Releases
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Today we are releasing RC4. Release Candidate 4 is a major bug and application fix that plagued users of the RC2 and RC3 series. With that we also have some changes that came along and landed in RC4. Some visual changes and some application changes.
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This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.17 – Core Update 94 which is a release with smaller security fixes and a maintenance release in general.
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Michael Tremer, one of the developers for the ipfire.org team, has just announced that IPFire 2.17 Core 94, a new build of the popular Linux-based firewall distribution, is now available for download.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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I also gave the OpenMandriva Games page a try and found the proposal interesting despite that the games there are not the ones I play. I guess it would be great to be able to play Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation again, but Steam is doing a wonderful job to satisfy my occasional gaming needs.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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If you’re a Tumbleweed and KDE aficionado, this is a good day. You’ll see some major updates:
Plasma 5.4.2
Frameworks 5.15
Applications 15.08.2
Qt 5.5.1
Now, yes, that’s all minor versions but stability is a big deal!
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The rolling-release openSUSE Tumblewed distribution has landed a number of significant KDE package updates.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s Ceph is a popular software-defined object and file cloud storage stack. While the code is open source, Red Hat has directed the project’s strategic direction. Until now. At the Toyko OpenStack Summit, Red Hat announced Ceph’s overall direction will be put into the hands of the newly formed Ceph Advisory Board.
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To be truly successful as an IT organization, you must bring new ideas to drive revenue or reduce cost for the business as a whole. If you don’t, they’ll do it without you where there is a critical need and they have a budget. Then, you’ll end up with a non-integrated set of solutions and potentially security exposures.
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We’ve been at this dance before with Linux. People have been asking if Red Hat was going to be like Microsoft, and I told everyone: nope. We’re transfering the wealth that the proprietary lock-in vendors were collecting back to the users. That was the whole idea. In the process, we’re collecting less – a more reasonable amount, necessary to put stuff together and make it run. Therefore, we’re not going to be as wealthy off users’ backs. But the society as a whole benefits.
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Wall Street brokerages predict that Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) will report earnings per share (EPS) of $0.31 for the current fiscal quarter, according to Zacks. Nine analysts have provided estimates for Red Hat’s earnings, with the lowest EPS estimate coming in at $0.30 and the highest estimate coming in at $0.32. Red Hat reported earnings per share of $0.30 during the same quarter last year, which indicates a positive year over year growth rate of 3.3%. The business is expected to issue its next earnings results on Thursday, December 17th.
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The overall rating for the company is 1.59. The rating is an average of the various different ratings given by analysts and brokers to Red Hat Incorporated, and then averaged into one rating by a team of analysts at Zacks in Chicago, Illinois.
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Lenovo on October 27 announced an extended strategic collaboration with Red Hat to deliver powerful IT infrastructure, automation and management capabilities including Red Hat Enterprise Linux Openstack Platform and CloudForms.
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While not all open source solutions are better than the closed source alternatives, opting for the former for underlying infrastructure is generally a good idea. This will provide a business with flexibility and stability while sometimes saving money too.
A Singapore school, the Yale-NUS College, had some needs revolving around the cloud, so it wisely chose two open source friendly companies to help — Dell and Red Hat. The OpenStack cloud solution, a product that was co-created by the two aforementioned companies, has been a huge success for the college.
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Fedora
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There are three USA internship positions open at Red Hat on the Fedora Engineering team. These internships are all available this coming summer (2016).
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All too often, I see people opting to go for the least-public list when opening discussions. Part of this, I think, is just human laziness. You get into a routine, and stick with it. This is doubly hard to overcome when an initiative starts “behind the firewall” and then moves into the public.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu project recently announced the release of Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) and its official flavors such as Kubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, etc. Different ‘Ubuntus’ come with different desktop environments that have different sets of applications pre-packaged. But there are certain things that any Ubuntu user should do to get most out of the distro, regardless of the flavor. Here are a few of things I recommend you do after installing Ubuntu… any Ubuntu, for that matter.
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With Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) out the door, the Ubuntu developers are not wasting any time, and they’ve already started to work on the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
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The development of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) has started, and we even know the launch date for it. We can now begin to track the Linux kernels that will be implemented in the daily builds.
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Ubuntu developers have been busy with the next OTA update that is planned for Ubuntu Touch, and it looks like they are now clearing the way for the next release. A feature freeze is now in effect for the new OTA update.
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The government’s open source policy has given a tremendous push to Microsoft Windows alternatives. Canonical, maker of popular Linux-based operating system Ubuntu, has been piggybacking on this opportunity to penetrate into the government and education sector in the country.
Ubuntu is now eyeing the mobile and Internet of Things markets in India as its next growth driver. The company recently launched its two smartphones in India through Snapdeal. The two handsets, which are available globally, are manufactured by Spanish manufacturer Aquaris. However, Ubuntu is in talks with local handset makers for possible ‘Make in India’ deal.
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Canonical is launching yet another app store for Ubuntu Linux. Unlike its great, late desktop-oriented predecessor, however, this one is focused on the OpenStack cloud, with apps delivered via Juju.
Ubuntu founder and former CEO Mark Shuttleworth announced the new app store at the OpenStack Summit this week in Tokyo. The platform will provide a way for people running Ubuntu-based OpenStack clouds to install cloud applications via Juju and Horizon, the web-based management interface for OpenStack.
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Flavours and Variants
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A new Opera Web browser has landed for Linux users bring new features and improved multimedia support. Jonathan Riddell posted a short response to Ubuntu’s statement on the community councils and a couple of reviews deserve mentioning. For Chakra users, a switch to Plasma 5 was announced.
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Jonathan Riddell—who founded Kubuntu a decade ago—has stepped down as release manager and will be headed upstream to KDE. This comes after a lengthy period of spats between Riddell and the Ubuntu Community Council. On Reddit, Riddell punctuated his resignation by once again accusing Canonical—the company behind Ubuntu—of defrauding donors and violating copyrights.
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We’ve been informed earlier today, October 28, by Arne Exton that there’s a new version of his RaspEX GNU/Linux distribution, updated to the recently released Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Today, Samsung Tizen TV SDK 2.0 has been released and is immediately available to download. By using the SDK, developers get the tools they need to begin developing Tizen TV apps. The tool set includes an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a light-weight TV Simulator for testing web apps, and a TV Emulator.
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Samsung the leading Android player has launched yet another Linux powered smartphone, Samsung Z3, in India. The phone is powered by Tizen, a Linux-based operating system being developed by Samsung and partners under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.
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Hey Devs, Do you want to learn about the Tizen Operating System? Yes, that is good as there is a Tizen development workshop that is will be held in Kochi, India on Saturday 31 October 2015. The event will be from 10am – 3pm at MP Hall Thapasya, Infopark, Kochi.
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Android
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Even though I’m now using an iPhone 6s as my primary smartphone, I’m still a huge fan of Google’s mobile app ecosystem. In fact, while I like the overall user experience of the iPhone better than any Android phone I’ve used so far, I still think Android is a great mobile OS that has a lot to recommend. Thankfully, switching over to iOS hasn’t meant giving up the best parts of Android since most of the best Google mobile apps are also available on Apple’s smartphone as well.
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Google launched developer access to its lightweight, Android based “Brillo” OS for IoT, which initially supports a trio of ARM, Intel, and MIPS hacker SBCs.
Google today launched a Brillo developer portal where code, development tools, and documentation for the Android-based Brillo embedded OS for Internet of Things devices can obtained. For now, gaining access to the portal’s goodies requires completing a short registration form and waiting for an email invitation.
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We’ve known for several years that Android/Linux smartphones were very popular in Asia. One could choose any of the last few years to declare its year, but 2015 is special.
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At its promotional price of $399 In the United States, the HTC One A9 is an easy phone to recommend. Its refined aluminum design is much more lovable than Google’s plastic Nexus 5X, and the simple pleasure of using a phone is important when you’re considering a thing you’ll be spending most of your waking time with. But when the price jumps to $499 in a week’s time — as well as for all other regions across the world — the One A9’s value diminishes greatly. It then matches straight up against Google’s Nexus 6P, the best Android smartphone to date. The winner of that contest is always going to be Google’s handset, which also comes with the long-term assurance of receiving updates faster and for a longer time than any other device.
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We definitely saw a lot of powerful new smartphones from Android OEMs in 2015, but that doesn’t mean Samsung, LG, Xiaomi and other makers are not upping their game for 2016.
With this year’s most awaited flagships already unveiled, companies are turning their attention to their next-generation phones for the coming year. And for those of you who are willing to wait out another few months before shelling out your hard-earned money for a new smartphone, these new devices rumored to be in the works might just be worth the wait.
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This is a very important step forward in preventing OEMs and carriers from adding bloatware to devices, which is a practice that needs to be curtailed completely. No, this doesn’t empower the user to remove bloatware, but it does give them control over whether those pesky apps can do anything of significance. So if you “accidentally” run one of those apps, they won’t get a chance to dive into and mine your data.
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After using an iPhone 6 Plus for six months, I’ve spent the past six months with Android devices. I expected it to be a learning experience. I didn’t expect to find an Android device that is so much better than the iPhone for my needs that I can’t imagine going back.
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Your sleek little Android tablet is easy to carry, so why not make it your travel computer?
I love my Thinkpad, but my go-anywhere travel companion is an Android tablet. I could spend a giant pile of money on something sleek and lightweight like a MacBook Air, Dell XPS 13, or Lenovo’s X1 Carbon, which includes a proper trackpoint. These have screen sizes from 11″ to 14″, good battery life, and enough memory and CPU to do real work.
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While many consider the tablet to be an extension of the smartphone or a computer that’s more portable than a laptop, Samsung believes it can also replace your television. The company’s newest device, the Galaxy View, promises to do just that.
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Needles to say that the interface was as ugly as sin, slower than molasses, and as bugged as an old mattress… but it worked, and moreover, it was free.
I immediately released the code on Github, and posted a link with a brief introduction on XDA.
I had no idea that those tiny steps would turn my life around, in just a few years.
The project literally exploded, the next day my inbox was clogged with replies to my XDA thread. People asking for more information, wanting to know how to compile the code, but most of all, people comparing it with that other app, the semi-free thing that had “ruined” my idea.
I started working on it like a dog. During the day, I kept up with my job as a PHP programmer for a company in Rome, at night and during my summer break, I wrote miles of code, considered new concepts, new functions, things those “other people” hadn’t even thought of.
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The recent VW emissions scandal has led many to suggest that such software should be open source to prevent car makers getting away with this sort of thing.
The argument is that if the code was public, then anyone would see that VW had tinkered with it to foil emissions testing.
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It’s an immensely exciting time for mobile communications as open source 2G technology matures and starts to make inroads, while multiple 4G implementations are under active development. This is perhaps one of the few areas in tech that has thus far not enjoyed the many and substantial benefits that open source brings. But, all that is set to change.
Adoption of open source mobile technology will likely continue in lower income and remote areas, where proprietary solutions are simply not economically viable. This is vitally important as a large section of the global population remains without access to mobile communications.
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The Tor Project’s .onion (hidden services) addresses have been formally
approved as a Special Use Domain Name by the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF), a body that sets standards for the Internet.
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Mention the year of the Linux desktop, and you are guaranteed to get a laugh. The six words have become a catchphrase, with the implication that it will never happen. But, even more importantly, the laughter indicates a change in attitude.
Where once Linux advocates were out to change the world, for many today, using free software has become no more than a convenience, or at most a matter of identity. Around the turn of the millennium, a book called Revolution OS or a monthly publication subtitled “the magazine of the revolution” sounded perfectly reasonable, yet few today would ever talk about Linux and revolution in the same sentence without being ironic. What was once revolutionary has settled down to being a minority choice, with very few being concerned about the situation.
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Pivotal today released its Greenplum data warehouse software under an Apache 2 open-source license. The source code is available now on GitHub.
“The Greenplum Database (GPDB) is an advanced, fully featured, open source data warehouse. It provides powerful and rapid analytics on petabyte scale data volumes,” Pivotal writes in the description of the Greenplum software on GitHub. “Uniquely geared toward big data analytics, Greenplum Database is powered by the world’s most advanced cost-based query optimizer delivering high analytical query performance on large data volumes.”
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Pivotal Software Inc. followed through on its February promise to open source core components of its Big Data platform, placing the Greenplum data warehouse software on GitHub with an Apache 2 license.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Wael Elrifai, EMEA director of enterprise solutions at Pentaho, said in an interview with V3 ahead of the V3 Big Data Summit that the evolution of software tools used for data analytics will have open source frameworks and code at their core.
The reason for this is down to the speed at which data analytics are evolving, which makes it difficult for companies working on their own tools, based on siloed technology, to provide cutting-edge software.
“In terms of evolution the tools are moving fast and the changing landscape makes it difficult for different tools to keep up, which is actually where it becomes very important to have this open source ecosystem not just for underlying Hadoop infrastructure but for the data integration infrastructure,” he said.
Elrifai explained that creating tools that use open source frameworks allows companies to tap into a vast global community of coders and developers adding functionality and capabilities to the base frameworks.
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At the OpenStack Summit here, Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, delivered the opening keynote address detailing the successes of the past six months. While OpenStack is growing, in the media and analyst question and answer session that followed the keynote, the question was asked how OpenStack compares against Amazon.
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Until its probable general availability next year, the beta version of the Carina container service unveiled today by Rackspace will be free.
It offers developers, data scientists, and operators what the web-hosting firm says is a quick way to create and deploy a cluster for containerised apps.
Demonstrated at this week’s OpenStack Summit conference in Tokyo, Carina is designed to widen the use of container clusters, employing the native Docker API and tooling, such as Swarm for orchestration, to move applications between dev, test, and production environments.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice 5.1 has officially entered the final stage of development with the release of the Alpha version, which is available to technology enthusiasts and community members for the 1st Bug Hunting Session organized from Friday, October 30, to Sunday, November 1.
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LibreOffice 5.1 entered its final development stage now following the release of the 5.1 Alpha.
LibreOffice 5.1 is working on many new features and is planned for release in early February.
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IBM
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Business
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Semi-Open Source//Openwashing
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Blackboard today announced that during 2015 more than 110 new customers have chosen one of its Moodle-based solutions to deliver a superior learning experience for their learners. Active in the open source industry since 2012, Blackboard’s open source solutions, which include Moodlerooms, NetSpot, Remote-Learner UK and Nivel Siete, support more than four million users and over 1400 schools, government organizations, and private businesses worldwide.
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When we started our Netflix Open Source (aka NetflixOSS) Program several years ago, we didn’t know how it would turn out. We did not know whether our OSS contributions would be used, improved, or ignored; whether we’d have a community of companies and developers sending us feedback; and whether middle-tier vendors would integrate our solutions into theirs. The reasons for starting the OSS Programs were shared previously here.
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BitGo®, the leading digital asset security platform, is excited to launch the first-of-its-kind automated, open source Key Recovery Service (KRS) software for provisioning cold backup keys. BitGo’s new KRS offering is part of their relentless commitment to providing the most secure digital asset vault in the world while also ensuring wallet users maintain control of their digital assets.
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BSD
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I always loved „playing” with different operating systems so it was just a matter of time that I run into OpenBSD…
I first came to it because of its security reputation. „Security” is a very challenging aspect of modern IT and I was glad to find an operating system that made it its priority. I trust these guys much more than I trust myself in that regard 😉
What made me stick though was totally different. I really fell in love with the system design and simplicity. There’s a huge effort to provide applications that just work out-of-the-box (as much as possible), bundling safe and sane defaults without the need to fiddle with dozains of knobs. Everything is made to be idiot-proof and simple. Just have a look at the recent work with the auto-installer/upgrader. It’s so simple that it’s just beautiful.
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The developers of the PC-BSD operating system have had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the Lumina Desktop 0.8.7 desktop environment.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is a minor release introducing additional features for classes and
traits.
This release succeeds v0.2.6, which was released 14 August, 2015. There are
no backwards-incompatible changes; support continues for ECMAScript 3+.
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In case you hadn’t noticed, I8C 0.0.1 was released last week. As well as the note compiler, this package contains I8X, an interpreter for unit testing compiled notes.
In case you had noticed and you’ve been working with it, please note there’s some compatibility-breaking source language and note format changes in the pipeline.
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Public Services/Government
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That’s refreshing. It also puts GNU/Linux on the inside track because almost everything that runs on GNU/Linux will be able to follow such open standards. With That Other OS, one would always have doubts. I like IT you can count on to work for you and not against you.
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We’ve been listening news of adopting Open-source by several countries, organisations and companies. This time it’s UK. The UK Government announced the deal with an open source company Collabora Office provides LibreOffice based Office suit “GovOffice”.
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Openness/Sharing
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France and Germany are to encourage companies to use eInvoicing an the two countries will continue to work together on the development of common technical standards to facilitate this, according to a joint statement made at the “Accelerate the digital transformation of our economies” conference in Paris on 27 October.
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Health/Nutrition
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Obese children who cut back on their sugar intake see improvements in their blood pressure, cholesterol readings and other markers of health after just 10 days, a rigorous new study found.
The new research may help shed light on a question scientists have long debated: Is sugar itself harming health, or is the weight gain that comes from consuming sugary drinks and foods mainly what contributes to illness over the long term?
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A new study by the NPD group shows that 29% of Americans are now trying to cut gluten out of their diets, most of them just cause. Every time another person makes this foolish decision, my life gets harder.
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In an age of shrinking newspaper budgets, it’s common for editors to rely on freelance writers–and for freelancers to add to their incomes with side projects. But is it a conflict of interest for a columnist who covers food and agriculture to take money from agrichemical industry interest groups?
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Security
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GENTLEMEN ADJUST YOUR PC threat league tables. Apple has usurped Oracle as the top blight, according to security firm Secunia.
The picture is bleak across the board, and the firm found that a huge whack of PCs are are running old, beleaguered, unpatched and end-of-life versions of software. This presents a problem to the user and computers in general.
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The United States Department of Defense is still issuing SHA-1 signed certificates for use by military agencies, despite this practice being banned by NIST for security reasons nearly two years ago. These certificates are used to protect sensitive communication across the public internet, keeping the transmitted information secret from eavesdroppers and impersonators. The security level provided by these DoD certificates is now below the standard Google considers acceptable for consumer use on the web.
The Missile Defense Agency, the eventual successor to the “Star Wars” programme, uses one of these SHA-1 certificates on a Juniper Networks remote access device. The SHA-1 certificate was issued by the Department of Defense in February 2015, long after NIST declared this practice to be unacceptable.
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Transparency Reporting
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Member of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake (ALDE/D66) wants furthering transparency around trade negotiations to be a priority for the EU. Today the European Parliament voted in favour of a proposal by Schaake to make more money available to make information about EU trade policy more accessible and to bring it to the attention of people, the proposal would cover 300,000 euros. Schaake: “I am glad that the Parliament has supported this initiative, even if it concerns a relatively small amount of money. It is clear that people increasingly want more explanation about EU trade policy, in the first place in the context of negotiations with the United States, but also more broadly. I want to make sure that the Commission does not only put texts online, which is already being done, but also actively engages with citizens and stakeholders, for example by organising meetings and information sharing events, European member states and the Trade ministers must play a much larger role here, too.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Climate activists are calling on National Geographic to hire a public editor to keep tabs on its editorial approach following the magazine’s purchase by a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Murdoch has repeatedly made scientifically inaccurate comments about climate change, and recently lamented “alarmist nonsense” on the issue.
The National Geographic Society and 21st Century Fox announced last month an expansion of their current partnership to include National Geographic’s cable channels, its flagship magazine, and other digital and social media.
As National Geographic explained, “Under the $725-million deal, Fox, which currently holds a majority stake in National Geographic’s cable channels, will own 73 percent of the new media company, called National Geographic Partners. The National Geographic Society will own 27 percent.”
“We will now have the scale and reach to fulfill our mission long into the future,” National Geographic Society CEO Gary E. Knell said at the time. “The Society’s work will be the engine that feeds our content creation efforts, enabling us to share that work with even larger audiences and achieve more impact. It’s a virtuous cycle.”
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Finance
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In April, Dan Price, CEO of the credit card payment processor Gravity Payments, announced that he will eventually raise minimum pay for all employees to at least $70,000 a year.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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It’s a problem when presidential candidates from a major political party are getting their information about the world from a news outlet that evidently can’t tell the difference between a sub-Onion hoax site and actual news. It’s an even bigger problem when those candidates bring those bogus claims onto supposedly reputable network TV—and the real journalists aren’t able to recognize that the politicians they’re interviewing are parroting garbage factoids from Fox‘s land of make-believe.
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Censorship
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However, not everyone is happy about the appearance of the billboard. The Anti-Defamation League’s Heidi Budaj understood that the advertisement was trying to “drive a wedge between the American people and the State of Israel,” a fact she was less than pleased about.
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Privacy
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President Obama will now be forced to publicly describe the extent of his commitment to protecting strong encryption, after nearly 50 major technology companies, human rights groups, and civil liberties collectives—including Twitter, the ACLU, and Reddit — succeeded in getting over 100,000 signatures on a White House petition on Tuesday.
The government’s “We the People” platform, created in 2011, was designed as “a clear and easy way for the American people to petition their government.” Once a petition gains 100,000 signatures, it is guaranteed a response.
The savecrypto.org petition demands that Obama “publicly affirm your support for strong encryption” and “reject any law, policy, or mandate that would undermine our security.”
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CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (S. 754), will allow private companies to share cyber-threat data with the federal government, including personal user data, in an effort to prevent cyberattacks, such as those on the scale of Target, Home Depot, and Sony. Companies that share data with federal agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA), will be given legal and liability protections from lawsuits relating to data sharing.
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The US Senate overwhelmingly passed a controversial cybersecurity bill critics say will allow the government to collect sensitive personal data unchecked, over the objections of civil liberties groups and many of the biggest names in the tech sector.
The vote on Tuesday was 74 to 21 in support of the legislation. Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders voted against the bill. None of the Republican presidential candidates (except Lindsey Graham, who voted in favor) were present to cast a vote, including Rand Paul, who has made privacy from surveillance a major plank of his campaign platform.
Ahead of the vote a group of university professors specializing in tech law, many from the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, sent an open letter to the Senate, urging them not to pass the bill. The bill, they wrote, would fatally undermine the Freedom of Information Act (Foia).
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After rejecting all the good privacy amendments to CISA, the Senate has now officially passed the legislation by a 74 to 21 vote. About the only “good” news is that the vote is lower than the 83 Senators who voted for cloture on it last week. Either way, the Senate basically just passed a bill that will almost certainly be used mainly for warrantless domestic surveillance, rather than any actual cybersecurity concern.
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The problem, of course, is that with immunity protection, companies may feel no qualms about revealing far more personal information about customers and partners than they ever did before. Immunity has powerful consequences.
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CISA passed the Senate today in a 74-21 vote. The bill is fundamentally flawed due to its broad immunity clauses, vague definitions, and aggressive spying authorities. The bill now moves to a conference committee despite its inability to address problems that caused recent highly publicized computer data breaches, like unencrypted files, poor computer architecture, un-updated servers, and employees (or contractors) clicking malware links.
The conference committee between the House of Representatives and the Senate will determine the bill’s final language. But no amount of changes in conference could fix the fact that CISA doesn’t address the real cybersecurity problems that caused computer data breaches like Target and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
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Oracle has revealed that it is now keeping all data regarding EU citizens within the European Union. This allows it to comply in a straightforward way with the ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that is likely to result in EU-US data transfers made using the Safe Harbour framework being deemed illegal.
According to The Irish Times, Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle, said at Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco: “All of our data centres in Europe have European operators. They have local production and, within the same European legislative region, disaster recovery. No data is sent across the geographical boundaries to any other legislative boundary.” As a result, Kurian added: “we are very comfortable with where we are with our cloud offerings and the new regulatory framework around data governance.”
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Here’s a metaphor: a remote-controlled, tremendously expensive, basically useless JLENS aerial surveillance blimp has detached from its tether at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. If you see it, call the authorities. Do NOT try to get it down yourself.
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The DNI Open Source Center has been redesignated the Open Source Enterprise and incorporated in CIA’s new Directorate of Digital Innovation.
The Open Source Center, established in 2005, was tasked to collect and analyze open source information of intelligence value across all media – – print, broadcast and online. The OSC was the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which gathered and translated world news coverage and other open source information for half a century.
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Indeed, much of what we know about Stingrays comes from Rigmaiden’s years-long effort to demand details of how they used the Stingray to find him, and since he got released for time served, he has continued his efforts to uncover how they’ve been used.
What’s interesting about the Guardian report, then, is that the IRS itself owned a Stingray, which they were updating in 2009 and 2012, even as the government was being exposed for improperly using Stingrays without a warrant to prosecute tax fraud. Reports on Rigmaiden had suggested an FBI Stingray was used to catch him — and that may well be the case — but we now learn that they owned one before 2009 (so early enough to capture him with, presumably).
In Rigmaiden’s case, IRS was clearly partnering with FBI, so could have (and may have) used their Stingray. That would seem to be the case for all proper uses of the technology. So, among all the other things we should demand on Stingray use, one of them should be to limit their use to the FBI, which will increase the likelihood they’ll get properly noticed in any prosecution.
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The Internal Revenue Service is the latest in a growing list of US federal agencies known to have possessed the sophisticated cellphone dragnet equipment known as Stingray, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.
Invoices obtained following a request under the Freedom of Information Act show purchases made in 2009 and 2012 by the federal tax agency with Harris Corporation, one of a number of companies that manufacture the devices. Privacy advocates said the revelation “shows the wide proliferation of this very invasive surveillance technology”.
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French Senate has approved last night the bill on international surveillance (fr), legalising mass surveillance beyond French borders, incidentally affecting numerous French people. La Quadrature Du Net salutes French consistency in terms of serious violations of Human Rights.
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Civil Rights
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In highly anticipated remarks Tuesday, President Barack Obama took his push for gun control and criminal justice overhauls to a room full of the country’s top police brass — who enthusiastically backed his calls for comprehensive background checks, assault weapons bans, and reductions in the incarceration rate.
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Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, criticized the ban in response to a question from New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C. Ayotte and two other GOP senators visited the prison Friday, and said they met with female guards upset by the restriction.
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Last month, the European Commission proposed reforms to the controversial investor-state dispute mechanism (ISDS), part of the EU-US trade deal known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). ISDS mechanisms, including the Commission’s ‘reformed’ ISDS proposal, let foreign investors sue the EU and Member State governments. These cases take place in front of specialised courts only open to foreign investors, where claims for compensation can run to billions of euros.
ISDS has important implications for the daily lives of people in the EU. ISDS, for example, can be used by foreign investors to challenge the revocation of a fracking permit following protests and new environmental studies. This is a disconcerting development, especially because a US trade agreement containing ISDS would expose Europe to law suits from the country that uses ISDS the most.
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An attorney for the accused 9/11 plotter who has complained about strange overnight noises and vibrations in his prison cell for years told a military judge Sunday that the problem was back, and that it may be caused by a covert Pentagon program disclosed to the court just last week.
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The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law that’s been at the heart of almost every controversial hacking case of the past decade, is in the news again this month.
Prosecutors recently used the law to convict journalist Matthew Keys on felony hacking charges, drawing rounds of condemnation on the web. Edward Snowden, for one, derided the harsh penalty Keys now faces—a maximum possible sentence of 25 years.
But charging Keys with felonies for his role in a crime that critics say should have been considered a misdemeanor—the minor defacement of a Los Angeles Times article—is not an anomaly for the feds. It’s just one among a growing list of contentious cases that critics say illustrate how prosecutors have been overstepping in their use of the CFAA.
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Videos of a white sheriff’s deputy throwing a black high school girl to the floor of a classroom thrust this community into an unsettling national discussion Tuesday about whether black students are disproportionately punished.
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President Obama made his case on Tuesday for an overhaul of the nation’s sentencing laws, telling a gathering of top law enforcement officials here that putting large numbers of nonviolent drug offenders in prison was neither fair nor an effective way of combating crime.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Europe has a very different idea from the U.S. as to what constitutes “net neutrality.”
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New rules requiring internet traffic to be treated equally are voted through by MEPs but amendments aimed at closing a series of exemptions are defeated
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With support of a majority the rules were passed, as expected. This means that the new rules will become law, replacing existing network neutrality laws in member states of the EU.
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The European Parliament has voted to approve new rules for Internet providers in major legislation that is nevertheless being slammed by net neutrality advocates who say the regulation is filled with loopholes.
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Net neutrality is when different types of internet traffic cannot be valued over one another. So, an ISP might want to charge people more for playing multiplayer video games online, or perhaps streaming high quality video content. In essence, in a world without net neutrality, ISPs would get to decide what sort of content wins and loses. But when it is in place, all traffic is on an equal playing field.
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Global cloud traffic is expected to hit 8.6 zettabytes by the end of 2019, up from 2.1 ZB in 2014; data created by the Internet of things will hit 507.5 ZB by 2019; and public cloud workloads will grow at a 44 percent compound annual growth rate, according to Cisco’s Cloud Index.
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DRM
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The US Library of Congress today issued a set of exemptions to an infamous provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), establishing a victory for consumers who like to tinker with devices without running afoul of copyright law. The exemptions were far-reaching, extending from movie and television files used in an educational context for criticism to installing third-party software — in other words jailbreaking — tablets and smart TVs.They will however only last for three years.
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Another positive from the change is that smartphone users will be able to jailbreak their phone and finally enjoy running operating systems and applications from any source, not just those approved by the manufacturer.
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The new rules for exemptions to copyright’s DRM-circumvention laws were issued today, and the Librarian of Congress has granted much of what EFF asked for over the course of months of extensive briefs and hearings. The exemptions we requested—ripping DVDs and Blurays for making fair use remixes and analysis; preserving video games and running multiplayer servers after publishers have abandoned them; jailbreaking cell phones, tablets, and other portable computing devices to run third party software; and security research and modification and repairs on cars—have each been accepted, subject to some important caveats.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.27.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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An entertained home is a happy home, with the digital dream a real one, most homes have turned into a digital entertainment heaven. My home’s daily routine often revolves around keeping the tiny humans entertained streaming music, video and photos from a home Linux server (plus online services) around the home to a variety of devices. From the traditional TV with a Raspberry Pi media centre to Android tablets and Chromebooks, or through the Pi-powered projector for cinema-style fun.
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As software improves we like to take advantage of new features. For a while we’ve been putting up with the closed-source Plex, but finally Emby has appeared and we’re basing our new home media heaven on this fully open source solution. So from a base Ubuntu server, you’ll be able to dish out transcoded video, music and photos around your home with the option of recorded TV without the hassle of MythTV. It’s a slick solution and one I’m sure you’ll love when you read about it.
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I talked to church heads about this and open about open source alternative software getting their responses that they are not aware that there are available free open source sofware that they can use as an alternative to commercial software.
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A Finnish startup called Solu Machines is closing in on its Kickstarter funding for a smartphone-like mini-PC with a Linux-based, cloud-oriented operating system and a novel UI stack. Funding packages start at $388 for the Solu, which would join a fairly short list of mini-PCs with pre-installed Linux, and an even smaller group of ARM-based Linux mini-PCs. Solu is much more singular than that, however, in that it’s a battery-powered touchscreen device that can also drive a 4K display. It is not only replacing standard PC and phone paradigms with a fully cloud-based platform, but is also reinventing the user interface.
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Desktop
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Google engineers have landed a bunch of new code this morning into Coreboot.
Perhaps most interesting out of today’s Coreboot commits by Google is the addition of a Chell mainboard. Chell is based on the “Glados” Chromebook but with some minor changes. This “Chell” codenamed device will use an Intel Skylake SoC. Details beyond that are scarce at the moment.
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I work in an office which utilities many different devices and operating system, yet I only know of two places we use linux, and that’s not including embedded.
When I started my current role as a PHP Developer, I was given a laptop and the general accessories, but was given the choice of what OS I wanted to use. From a linux background I wanted linux, but as the other developers used windows I went with windows.
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Xiaomi’s long-rumoured Linux laptop will enter production in the first part of 2016, a new report claims.
Industry watcher Digitimes’ sources also reveal that China’s Xiaomi plans to launch two notebooks: one sporting a 12.5-inch display and another with a 13.3-inch display.
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Server
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rkt v0.10.0 is here and marks another important milestone on our path to creating the most secure and composable container runtime. This release includes an improved user interface and a preview of the rkt service API, making it even easier to experiment with rkt in your microservices architectures.
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Rausch Netzwerktechnik is a distributor of individual and standard server and storage systems for the data center. The company is also developing one of the first solutions around the Kinetic Open Storage Project. We talked to Rausch Netzwerktechnik CEO Sebastian Nölting to learn more about the company and their involvement with open source.
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Traditionally, Devs get frustrated when they want to release, but Ops won’t accept it. Ops thinks there will be problems, but it is difficult to back this feeling with hard data. This fuels resentment and distrust, and management is never pleased. Using error budgets based on already established SLAs means there is nobody to get upset at: SRE does not need to play bad cop, and SWE is free to innovate as much as they want, as long as things don’t break.
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Kernel Space
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If you are developing code for embedded hardware then often there is no operating system to get in the way and you are in complete control of the processor. This is simple and its often cheap but it suffers from a number of drawbacks. If you want your device to join the Internet of Things IoT then you generally need sophisticated services like WiFi and Bluetooth not to mention a file system.
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Graphics Stack
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For the past few years, all patches flowing into the X.Org Server code-base had to be landed by Keith Packard. Keith was working for Intel on open-source graphics, but now he’s been employed by HP since the beginning of the year and seems to have less day-to-day focus on Linux graphics / X.Org. So now he’s opened it up to having sub-maintainers with commit rights to xorg-server Git.
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VESA has just announced the latest version of their Embedded DisplayPort specification, eDP 1.4b, which marks Embedded DisplayPort 1.4 as now being under a “production-ready” status with this standard being in development for over two years.
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If you are an Intel Haswell ultrabook user and curious whether the Iris Graphics are any faster when switching to one of the newer versions of the Linux kernel, here are some benchmarks.
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Applications
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So where does that leave the email client? It’s still a crucial part of everyday business. Yet, when fewer and fewer are depending upon the email client…how do we trust that those precious apps will continue to be developed and/or released?
This gave me pause to wonder about the state of email clients on Linux. After giving it much thought, I came to realize the situation is, sadly enough, lamentable.
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Double Commander is an cross-platform, open-source file manager, inspired by Total Commander.
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If you were following VLC development status (hey, you should follow the awesome Jean-Baptiste Kempf’s weekly updates!), you might have noticed some recent improvements on how VLC handles subtitle text rendering. In May 2015, the freetype module was improved to use Harfbuzz for text shaping. On the week of August 4, it was mentioned that the internals of VLC subtitle handling were completely rewritten . And in last week’s (October 26) update it mentioned Salah-Eddin added support for font fallback in the freetype module; which would mean that there is no need to set a specific font to display particular script/language.
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500 user packages is very humbling, a staggering number and a big responsibility. We will out best try to keep Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been so that the next set of packages can rely on it—just like these 500 do.
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As you may know, PhotoFlow is an open-source, non-destructive photo editing software for adjusting photos from RAW images to high-quality printing.
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Proprietary
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The Opera developers have pushed a new stable version out the door, bringing the version number up to 33. Quite a few improvements have been made in this iteration, but the most interesting thing in this release is about the contributions made by the Opera team to the Chromium project.
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Opera is a popular web browser, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Last year, Opera has adopted Google’s forked WebKit engine, the new versions of the browser being based on Chromium.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Alien: Isolation has officially been released for Linux, and continues our trend of great AAA games. I would recommend playing this from behind a pillow, with emergency pants nearby.
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As a big fan of the XCOM games, I was really excited to see what the original designer could do with his next game. Chaos Reborn is an interesting take on the fantasy turn based strategy genre.
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Alien: Isolation was supposed to be released for Linux in late September with the porting done by Feral Interactive but they ended up delaying the release. Today though Alien: Isolation is now available for Steam on Linux!
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Ashes of the Singularity looks like an awesome RTS game to try, and the developers have confirmed again they want to do Linux, but they are waiting for Vulkan.
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Ashes of the Singularity is a new RTS game from a studio named Oxide Games with Stardock as its publisher. As it stands right now, this is the first game to be developed to take advantage of DirectX 12, but the makers of the game are also involved with the Vulkan API.
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The Long Dark is a survival game I’ve been excited to play for over a year now, as the style is fantastic, and it has some really great reviews.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KaOS has a few known issues, but these mostly affect specific hardware configurations. For example, to use a GUID Partition Table, or GPT, on a BIOS system, make sure you set it up following a guide available on the KaOS website. The installer’s partitioner can only handle GPT correctly for the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.
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We are excited to announce that in a couple of days Chakra will be switching to Plasma 5 developed by KDE for the default desktop environment. The restructuring of the repositories is almost done, we just need to test it for a while before making it available to everyone.
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Hello all,
I’m very glad to finally announce the first beta of KDevelop 5.0.0, based on Qt 5, KF 5 and Clang: https://www.kdevelop.org/news/first-beta-release-kdevelop-500-available
Like I’ve said previously, I’m very thankful of the tons of contributors that made this step possible. From the early testers, over the many new KDevelop contributors who helped a lot in porting our code base to Qt 5 and KF5, to the people that worked on improving kdev-clang and all the other areas. It’s a great feeling to finally release this beast. A year ago, just after we started in this process, I still wasn’t too sure we can pull it all off. Now, look where we are Smile “Just” a few more weeks of polishing and I’m positively sure KDevelop 5.0.0 will be a really good milestone.
That said, I also want to express my thanks towards the KDE e.V. which graciously sponsored our recent KDevelop/Kate sprint in Berlin. We rented a flat for the 8 hackers that visited Berlin and had a productive five days directly after the Qt World Summit. Personally, I worked on kdev-clang and polished it a bit more in the preparation of the first beta release. One handy feature I added is the display of size information about classes and member variables, displayed in the image to the right.
If you want to give back to the KDevelop community, please consider a donation to the KDE e.v., which is used for our yearly developer sprints and the Akademy conference.
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KDE e.V. yesterday released their last quarterly report to end out 2014, which offer a look at their finances for the past year. I’ve also taken the liberty to do a cursory comparison against the GNOME Foundation’s finances for 2014.
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The first beta of KDevelop 5.0 is now available. This huge update comes after more than a year of hard work and its code-base has been ported over to using Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.
Besides the big step-up in using Qt5 and KF5, KDevelop has replaced its legacy C++ parser and semantic analysis plug-in with a more powerful one derived from LLVM’s Clang compiler and its extensive code analysis tools.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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For those using GParted as GUI-driven Linux disk partitioning, the GParted 0.24 release is now available with new features.
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It is with pleasure that the GNOME Foundation is announcing that Karlsruhe, Germany, will host GUADEC in the summer of 2016.
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After the GSoC, I’ve done some work related to the open source community in China. We have a organization called kaiyuanshe and they did some work to help promote open source. Last weekend they organized the Apache Roadshow in Beijing and I was one of the volunteers. Also, I gave a speech about my experience in GSoC on the conference. Although it’s not the GNOME community, but I think sometimes we should contribute to the open source world as a whole without caring which one it is. Hope our effort would enlarge the open source force in China.
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Arch Family
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The Manjaro community has just announced that a second iteration of the GNOME Edition is out, bringing some of the updates that have recently been made to this particular version.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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SUSE® has launched beta testing of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6, giving customers an early look at the latest enterprise-ready technology for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. Based on the OpenStack release Liberty, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 delivers high availability enhancements and non-disruptive upgrades along with Docker and IBM z Systems mainframe support to ease the transition of business-critical applications and data to the cloud. The Liberty-based beta will be demonstrated during this week’s OpenStack Summit in Tokyo and at SUSECon in Amsterdam Nov. 2-6.
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To give its customers an early look of what’s cooking in SUSE’s OpenStack Cloud 6, the company has released a beta preview of its IaaS offering.
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The upgrade comes ahead of an analyst day at the SUSE base in Germany next week, and UBS analyst Michael Briest highlights that more info about the unit’s profitability could also come in December when group financial results are released.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Some time ago, I announced the ‘Getting Started with Fedora’ handbook which we had published in Czech. I also announced the plan to translate it to English, so that it can be translated to other languages. I asked around who could help me with that, especially to figure out the whole system how to get a translated print PDF from a document written in English. A couple of native speakers offered that they would help with proof reading, thank them for that, but first we need to figure out the whole system.
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One of the most exciting projects I’m getting to work with these days is Project Atomic. It touches on the full stack–from OS development to storage, to networking, containers, application development, and pretty much everything in between. Red Hat is working hard on the tools to develop, deploy, and manage containerized applications.
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For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks comparing the out-of-the-box performance of Fedora 20, Fedora 21, Fedora 22, and Fedora 23 RC3 out-of-the-box on an Intel Xeon system with AMD R600g graphics. Here’s a look at the Fedora Linux performance and that of the upstream Linux kernel / Mesa / GCC over the past two years.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Over the past few days have been a number of SteamOS Linux gaming benchmarks, namely published so far are the 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming and 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux. When seeing all of those SteamOS results, you may have started wondering: is SteamOS any faster/slower than say Ubuntu Linux? In this article are some benchmarks comparing SteamOS to Ubuntu 15.10.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu developers have already started to work on the 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and the first packages are beginning to land. It’s a long way to go until the stable launch in April 2016, but this is how it starts.
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One of the latest updates for Ubuntu Touch has brought a most coveted feature that was still missing, the mouse cursor. This will most likely land with OTA-8, which is scheduled to arrive in about five weeks.
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There are 9 members of the ‘Ubuntu family’ that are recognized as official flavors (i.e., Linux distributions that use the same operating system base but feature different desktop environments).
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Ubuntu, Linux operating system is now built to provide the Linux server to desktops, phones, tablets and TV operating systems. Demand of Ubuntu phones in India is already increase by Linux system fans.
The new phones released last month, which based on Linux operating system. And now in India Aquaris E4.5 and Aquaris E5 are available to purchase. Costumer can buy it from online website like Snapdeal.
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The Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 software update, slated for a November 18 release date, is only a few weeks away and Cononical’s Lukasz Zemczak promised it would bring with it lots of new features and changes especially when it comes to Unity 8.
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Flavours and Variants
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A post on the Fridge today claims “both councils collaborated and resolved any tensions together”. The Ubuntu Community Council bullied me for asking questions that made Canonical feel uncomfortable and this is the only response to that. That bullying someone until they leave a project is the UCC way of resolving tensions leaves me speachless. That nobody else has commented in the Ubuntu project in public (I’ve had people in private tell me they’re wanting to leave Ubuntu and/or Canonical) confirms to me the project has a culture of fear.
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Acrosser’s latest rugged vehicle-PC runs Linux on a 5th Gen Intel Core Broadwell-U processor, offering sufficient power to run multiple, simultaneous apps.
The Acrosser “AVI-QM97V1FL” vehicle-PC is aimed at systems integration projects like telematics, data recording and fleet and logistics management. A pair of DDR3-1333/1600 SO-DIMM sockets hold up to 16GB of non-ECC RAM. Supported 14nm 5th Gen Intel Core Broadwell-U processor models range from the Core i3 5010U, up through the Core i5 5350U, to the Core i7 5650U at the upper end.
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Raspberry Pi, the family of tiny, inexpensive computers popular for educational and embedded computing, could soon become more Ubuntu-friendly. That’s thanks to new tools that make it easier to port certain versions of Canonical’s operating systems to Raspberry Pi devices.
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The Raspberry Pi microcomputer — which was designed as a cheap educational tool to get kids interested in coding — stole the hearts of many geeks when it first arrived back in 2012, offering a low-cost, bare-bones computer module that could be hacked into all manner of fun DIY gadgets.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way for web sites to get their web feed out to users. So to help Samsung Z1 users keep up to date with all the news we have two RSS apps for you.
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Android
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Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the latest iteration of Google’s popular mobile operating system, has some cool new features. But it’s the hidden tips and tricks that often let us really get the hang of a new thing and make it our own.
This roundup of eight Android Marshmallow tips and tricks will let you enjoy your Android update that much more but don’t keep them to yourself – share the love and impress your friends.
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Going by the AnTuTu benchmark test results for the third quarter of 2015, the brand new flagship smartphone “Meizu Pro 5” powered by Samsung’s Exynos 7420 has beaten other counterparts to take the top rank. This device features 1080p screen resolution, unlike the other top 5 handsets that come with 1440p QHD resolution. The brilliant Meizu Pro 5 reportedly scored a whopping 76,852 points in AnTuTu testing.
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You can use FullContact as your phone’s main address book too. It allows you to call or email right from the app, and see the person you’re about to call’s recent social posts. That might help you understand why they’re not answering calls if they’re at a conference, or you can use it as an icebreaker to reprimand them if they’ve recently told a particularly bad joke (a favourite tactic of mine).
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Of all the big companies that were selling mobile phones before the iPhone, every one has now either moved to making Android phones or left the market. BlackBerry was the last remaining holdout, but now it too has an Android handset in the offing, and if that goes sour, it too could be departing the hardware business altogether.
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Motorola and Verizon on Tuesday unveiled their newest additions to the Droid lineup: The Android-powered Droid Turbo 2 and the Droid Maxx 2. Motorola claims the Droid Turbo 2 is shatterproof, meaning you can drop it face down on the ground without cracking its screen.
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I finally broke down and bought an iPhone 6s last week after years of using nothing but Android. I found a lot to like about the device and am very happy with my decision to go with Apple’s latest smartphone so far. That said, nothing is perfect and so far there are three things about the iPhone 6s that have left me feeling disappointed. Let’s go through them below.
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Apple’s neat 3D Touch tricks rely on a touchscreen that has integrated pressure sensors to determine between a ‘peek’ and a ‘pop’. But give a cunning Android hacker a waterproof phone and a barometer, and you can get a similar sort of effect.
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San Francisco wants voting to be open source. That’s the goal of a new initiative by the city government aimed at studying the development of a balloting system based on open source software, which would be the first of its kind in the United States.
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The Librarian of Congress has granted security researchers and others the right to inspect and modify the software in their cars and other vehicles, despite protests from vehicle manufacturers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed the request for software access as part of the complex, triennial rulemaking process that determines exemptions from Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Because Section 1201 prohibits unlocking “access controls” on the software, car companies have been able to threaten legal action against anyone who needs to get around those restrictions, no matter how legitimate the reason. While the copyright office removed this legal cloud from much car software research, it also delayed implementation of the exemption for one year.
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Events
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South Korea’s top tech firm Samsung Electronics Co. kicked off a conference on Tuesday to promote an open source ecosystem, with local programmers and technology experts sharing ideas and experiences.
Samsung Open Source Conference, which first started in 2014, falls in line with the tech giant’s efforts to forge deeper ties with local developers to pave the way for the creation of new services and devices.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Mozilla Foundation has announced it is launching an award programme, to support open source and free software groups.
The initial allocation for the awards will be US$1 million, initially to groups which Mozilla depends on, and later to other groups which help to make the community better.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Business
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Semi-Open Source//Openwashing
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The mission for day two will be to confirm the possibility that IBM will open source its analytic engine, Watson, while maintaining other components as proprietary. Another area of interest is the rest of the open-source strategy.
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Ritika Gunnar, VP of information integration and governance for IBM’s $30 billion analytics business, said that her focus within the division isn’t nearly as complicated as her lengthy job title makes it out to be. Managing an organization’s data effectively boils down to merging the disparate metrics into a usable form and ensuring the combined whole is handled properly from there onward.
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BSD
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It is my great pleasure to announce the release of version 0.8.7 of the Lumina Desktop Environment! This version includes a massive number of changes from the previous version. Here are some of the highlights.
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The PC-BSD developers working on their Lumina Desktop Environment have released Lumina 0.8.7 on Monday.
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I really enjoyed the experience when I first tried OpenBSD. Someone suggested it to me because I said I was concerned about security. The installation was painless and what was being advertised in the documentation is what was there. I really have grown to appreciate accurate documentation. It’s a very good indicator of a projects overall health. If their guides are wrong, you can imaging how terrible the rest is. My first install was around 1999 when I was in college. At the time I was studying engineering, but my roommate was a computer science major so I had a ton of exposure to other stuff.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The upcoming release of GNU Guix will feature an implementation of Linux containers named, following Scheme conventions, call-with-container. Containers are a lightweight virtualization technique used to isolate processes sharing the same host machine. A container has its own separate global kernel resources such as mount points, networking interfaces, users, hostname, and processes.
Containers are a hot topic, and there are many implementations available, but Guix containers are built differently. Compared to other container implementations such as Docker, the most notable difference is that disk images and layered file systems are not used. Instead, the necessary software packages are inserted into containers via simple bind mounts. A pleasant consequence of this structure is that software is deduplicated system-wide. A package used in any number of containers is only on disk in a single place. Additionally, some containers may be created by unprivileged users, allowing any Guix user to create isolated sandboxes for their applications to play in.
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Openness/Sharing
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A marine technology group has begun a crowd funding campaign for an on board data sharing device that will allow users to connect to mobile devices and the cloud.
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Programming
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Guido van Rossum, best known as the Python programming language author, was born 31 January 1956 in Netherlands. In Python community, Van Rossum is known as a BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life), which means that he continues to oversee Python development process, and always making decisions where necessary. He worked at Google from 2005 till 7 2012, where he spent half of his time developing Python programming language. In 2013, Guido started working for Dropbox.
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Standards/Consortia
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Portugal has launched a public consultation to gather feedback on the revision of the country’s digital interoperability regulation. This is the first revision of the 2012 regulation, itself one of the outcomes of a 2011 law on the adoption of open standards in government IT systems.
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Hardware
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Earlier this month, Sony announced that it was dropping the price of its PlayStation 4 game console by $50 to $349.99. The move put the PlayStation 4’s price in line with Microsoft’s Xbox One. The decision made clear what the price cut was desired to do: get gamers who have not yet moved to the company’s latest console to take the plunge this holiday season.
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Security
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The last of the Zone 9 Bloggers are finally free from jail, after nearly 18 months of detention for simply speaking out online. All the bloggers were acquitted of terrorism charges by the Ethiopian courts; one blogger, Befeqadu Hailu was found guilty of a single charge of “inciting violence” as a result of a confession made during his detention. He was released on bail last Wednesday. Given the time he has already served, he is unlikely to return to jail.
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The credibility of the TrueCrypt encryption application is in tatters following the discovery of two serious flaws in the code.
Its anonymous developers abandoned the open source TrueCrypt project in May 2014, and since then no updates to the code have been released. At the time the developers advised users to switch to an alternative encryption program such as Microsoft’s BitLocker. Although TrueCrypt is still available for download, the developers suggest it should only be used to migrate data off TrueCrypt encrypted drives.
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W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the regulatory body that oversees the creation of Web standards, has announced plans to set up a special group tasked with the responsibility of putting together a standardized API that will simplify the payment and check-out process, but also improve its overall security.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Hmm. The “unrivaled leader” leads her closest rival, Bernie Sanders, by 7 percentage points in an average of recent polls in the first caucus state, Iowa. In the first primary state, New Hampshire, she trails Sanders by 2 points; it’s been two months since she had a clear lead over him there. (In an accompanying graphic, the Times ranks Clinton as No. 1 in New Hampshire polls—based on a different polling average that has her ahead by 0.2 percentage points.)
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board used sharply revised government estimates on the number of Americans expected to purchase health insurance through federal marketplaces to claim that Obamacare is failing and hype so-called Republican “alternatives” to the landmark health care reform legislation. The Journal’s fearmongering about the long-term viability of Obamacare failed to acknowledge that while enrollment via federal marketplaces is less than expected, millions of Americans are still gaining access to affordable health insurance coverage.
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Censorship
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Earlier this year, the Newseum Institute asked 1,000 Americans to name their rights under the First Amendment. A clear majority listed freedom of speech first — before freedom of religion, assembly, and other core civil liberties.
And that makes sense. Protecting free speech is essential to the health of any functioning democracy.
Free speech matters to the hundreds of millions of Internet users who exercise this right every time they connect with others online. But if you ask some of the lawyers working for the companies that sell you Internet access, they’ll insist that it’s more important to protect the free speech rights of phone and cable giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.
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Politwoops, the site that saved and republished tweets first published and later deleted by politicians, may get back its access to the Twitter API. After disabling Politwoops’ developer accounts this summer, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last week hinted that the company might restore access to the Twitter streams.
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The post-Charlie Hebdo “free speech” march in Paris was a fraud for multiple reasons, as I wrote at the time. It was led by dozens of world leaders, many of whom imprison or even kill people for expressing prohibited views. It was cheered by many Westerners who feign upset only when free speech abridgments are perpetrated by Muslims, but not — as is far more common — by their own governments against Muslims.
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Privacy
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Microsoft has joined forces with Taser to combine the Azure cloud platform with law enforcement management tools.
[..]
In order to ensure Taser maintains a monopoly on police body cameras, the corporation acquired contracts with police departments all across the nation for the purchase of body cameras through dubious ties to certain chiefs of police.
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Civil Rights
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The British constitution is appallingly undemocratic. The fact that an undemocratic chamber has fended off a proposal from an undemocratic executive which gained the votes of only 34% of the voting electors, is not a blow struck for democracy. It is however a temporary victory for human decency in mitigating an attack on the poor.
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This week’s program addresses the Black Lives Matter movement, and other efforts to challenge police brutality. Devonte Jackson, organizer with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) speaks about uniting Black communities against abuses by police and other agencies of government. Attorney Izaak Schwaiger summarizes a pending civil rights lawsuit on behalf of inmates at the Sonoma County, CA jail, who were subjected to a systematic beating by guards. Philosophy Professor Glen Martin of Radford University shares his ideas on how to build a world without police violence. And there’s a live call-in from police-brutality protestors in New York.
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Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes in Yemen, conducted with U.S. assistance,
are alleged to have killed at least 1,500 civilians, dividing members of the Obama administration over whether the U.S. risks being accused of abetting war crimes in a bombing campaign that could ultimately strengthen Islamist militants.
Sources inside the administration say they are struggling to keep in check
the opposing sides in Yemen, one of the clearest examples of the intensifying Saudi-Iran proxy war in the Middle East. But even as reports of civilian suffering and terrorist gains pile up, U.S. officials believe that reducing American support for the Saudis could make the situation even worse.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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FATHER OF the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee has issued a stark warning to the European Union ahead of a crucial vote on net neutrality due to take place tomorrow.
After the historic win for net neutrality supporters in the US earlier this year, tomorrow will see MEPs looking at plans for internet fast lanes in the UK and mainland Europe.
Berners-Lee said in a blog post on the World Wide Web Foundation website: “When I designed the World Wide Web, I built it as an open platform to foster collaboration and innovation. The web evolved into a powerful and ubiquitous platform because I was able to build it on an open network that treated all packets of information equally. This principle of net neutrality has kept the internet a free and open space since its inception.”
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The European Parliament is scheduled to vote on net neutrality rules on Tuesday, and at first glance the proposed regulations appear very similar to ones already in place in the United States.
Both the European proposal and the US rules prevent Internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic, and they impose a ban on “paid prioritization.”
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Today, members of the European Parliament voted on a proposal (PDF) for rules affecting how Internet traffic is managed, following the European Commission’s release of a draft agreement for regulation back in June. And Europe’s lawmakers have decided Europe doesn’t need a truly open, free Internet.
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The European Parliament has passed the flawed compromise text on net neutrality without including any of the amendments that would have closed serious loopholes. The vote, with 500 in favour, and 163 against, took place in a plenary session a few hours after a rather lacklustre debate this morning, which was attended by only 50 MEPs out of the European Parliament’s total of 751, indicating little interest in this key topic among most European politicians. The Greens MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht called the final result a “dirty deal.”
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“Today’s vote on the Telecoms Single Market package in the European Parliament constitutes a broken promise both on the end of roaming surcharges and the establishment of net neutrality”, says Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party and shadow rapporteur for the Greens/EFA group in the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee.
“The European Parliament’s first reading position in April 2014 proposed far-reaching provisions for the introduction of net neutrality in Europe. In the end, not even the words ‘net neutrality’ survived the closed-door negotiations with the Commission and the Council. The text leaves open critical loopholes. Today, the Parliament decided not to adopt opposition amendments that could have fixed these shortcomings.
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After months of negotiations (read: ISP lawyer and lobbyist rewrites), the European Union has voted to approve new net neutrality rules (pdf) that for many nation states may be worse than having no net neutrality protections at all. As we’ve noted, the rules ignore zero rating, carve out massive loopholes for “specialized services,” “class-based discrimination,” and even include provisions allowing ISP throttling and discrimination provided it’s addressing phantom congestion that hasn’t even happened yet. In short, these rules effectively protect ISPs looking to creatively violate net neutrality, not European consumers.
European Parliament members completely ignored last-minute suggested amendments that would have closed these loopholes. They also completely ignored opposition to the rules by the likes of BitTorrent, EyeEm, Foursquare, Kickstarter, WordPress, Netflix, Reddit, Transferwise, Vimeo, the EFF and Tim Berners-Lee (who penned a lengthy blog post outlining his opposition to the rules). Similarly, only 50 MEPs out of the European Parliament’s total of 751 could be bothered to even attend a superficial “debate” preceding the approval vote.
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The EU has rejected legal amendments that would firmly protect the concept of net neutrality in Europe. The European Parliament voted in favor of new regulations which proponents say establish an internet “without discrimination,” but advocates for net neutrality say the laws contain a number of loopholes which could lead to the creation of a tiered internet service. The legislation also includes an end to roaming charges in Europe, although some critics say those laws are also less robust than they appear.
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Today, the European Parliament voted the Telecommunication Single Market regulation text by 500 votes against 163, hereby ending the negotiations on this matter. Despite numerous citizen’s calls, despite repeated international calls to support the amendments, including Tim Berners-Lee’s, this ambiguous text leaves important loopholes and cannot ensure Net Neutrality1. Worst, it allows commercial discrimination. It is a profound disillusion for all those who, throughout the years, battled to ensure Net Neutrality in Europe.
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The European Parliament has voted to adopt the Telecoms Single Market (TSM) regulation. The regulation was supposed to guarantee net neutrality in Europe.
Unfortunately, MEPs have created large loopholes and left ambiguity in much of the legislation. Net neutrality is the principle whereby Internet access providers treat internet traffic equally. Because of the vagueness of the new regulations, telecoms regulators in EU Member States will now have to decide whether telecoms companies in their country will be able to prioritise different categories of data.
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The internet is a global network. That means if one part of the world decides to start pulling the wrong levers, we could be dealing with the consequences. And the European parliament just pulled a very big lever by voting down amendments to net neutrality rules that include dangerous loopholes.
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European Parliament has voted for a package of EU internet traffic regulations, rejecting all amendments on net neutrality. The move was slammed by activists and companies alike, who say it will allow some to have faster internet access than others.
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DRM
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Siri, the digital assistant found on Apple’s iOS devices, has become a familiar presence for many, and a prompt (sometimes even mischievous) answer to questions you ask it has always been forthcoming. But it seems Siri is now holding back some answers, only providing certain information to those users who pay for Apple Music.
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