-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to gemini.techrights.org:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini;lang=en-GB
Posted in News Roundup at 5:47 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux
Microsoft continues to irritate its customers with its latest operating system Windows 10.
Switch to Debian GNU/Linux, the OS that works for you not against you. If you switch to “enterprise”, how long will it be before they start chasing you there? Next month? Next year? What other schemes will their salesmen develop to make you miserable? Come on. You know they’re out to get you and they will as long as you run their OS.
Last month, while we were all distracted by iPhone hacking and Jay-Z’s web fiasco, Microsoft silently bumped off the ability for IT administrators to easily take the Windows Store off Windows 10 Pro PCs.
Removing the software store, along with other bundled apps, from work machines is normally a good idea to prevent users from installing crap, breaking things and calling the help desk, and generally wasting time at their desks.
“Open source is not just at the bottom of the networking stack, it now goes from layer 2 all the way up to network and security services,” Casemore said. “It’s significant fact in the market landscape and vendors have to give it due consideration.”
In this episode: Bitcoin scandal. RMS wins an award. Savers and rich people can buy the DragonBox Prya (thanks Canseco!) and Devuan reaches beta. Plus loads of Finds, Neurons and a long-stewing Voice of the Masses.
Bufferbloat is the excess buffering of packets resulting in high latency, jitter, and lower network throughput. There’s been efforts to battle bufferbloat within the Linux kernel going back a long time while this week another new patch has surfaced.
A Phoronix reader pointed out to us a patch that’s now been queued up in net-next for Linux 4.7 and could end up being back-ported to Linux stable releases.
Linux is said to be only answer to the Microsoft’s hegemony in the operating system world. We have already explained why Linux is better than Microsoft’s Windows 10. That being said, Windows 10 or Windows continues to remain the top operating system in the world fueling more career options for young graduates.
Open source can help you make money, especially if you have skills in programming or DevOps, which is emerging as one of the hottest areas of interest for hiring managers seeking open source admins and developers. That’s according to the latest Open Source Jobs Report from the Linux Foundation, which is out this week.
The 2016 Open Source Jobs Report, released today by The Linux Foundation and Dice, a career site for technology professionals, paints a picture of a corporate and government landscape desperate for open source talent. Fully 87 percent of hiring managers surveyed report difficulty in finding the right skills and expertise; 65 percent say open source hiring will increase more than any other part of their business over the next six months; and 79 percent have increased incentives to hold on to their current open source professionals.
After introducing yesterday the release of Linux kernel 4.5.3 and Linux kernel 4.4.9 LTS, renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman also published details about Linux kernel 3.14.68 LTS.
According to the appended shortlog, Linux kernel 3.14.68 LTS appears to be a quite small maintenance release, which changes a total of 45 files, with 345 insertions and 143 deletions. Linux kernel 3.14.68 LTS comes two weeks after the release of Linux kernel 3.14.67 LTS, which contained even fewer bug fixes and improvements. Check out the diff if you want to see the exact changes that have been made.
NVIDIA wants you to spend your Friday night with them, at least virtually. There’s an exciting unveil tomorrow.
A second Armadillo release 6.700.6 came out in the 6.700 series, and we uploaded RcppArmadillo 0.6.700.6.0 to CRAN and Debian. This followed the usual thorough reverse-dependecy checking of by now 220 packages using.
We’ve been informed by Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard about the availability of a new snapshot build of the proprietary Vivaldi web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
Vivaldi Snapshot 1.2.470.11 is now live for those who want to get an early taste of what’s coming in the next stable update of the cross-platform web browser, which it looks like it gets a lot of attention lately, especially from those who want to migrate from Chromium-based browsers like Google Chrome or Opera. And today’s snapshot introduces editable mouse gestures.
Frozenbyte has announced their latest game, Shadwen, is coming to PC, Mac, Linux, and PlayStation 4 this month.
The stealth-action adventure will launch for all the aforementioned platforms on May 17th. The game will cost $14.55 / €14.55 on PC, after which the week-long launch discount will raise the price back to $16.99 / €16.99 for all platforms.
Players take up the role of an assassin named Shadwen whose mission is to kill the king. Along the way you run into an orphaned girl named Lily, further endangering your mission – the entire game has you balancing killing your enemies and putting trust in this young girl.
The developer Frozenbyte has announced that Shadwen will be available for Sony Playstation 4, Windows PC, OSX and Linux starting this May 17, 2016. On PC, the title will cost EUR 14.55 during the launch period, while later will go to €16.99 for all platforms.
While I am not usually a fan of point and click adventure games, STASIS is exactly the setting that will hook me in! It looks fantastic.
I finally managed to get The Culling to play nicely and recorded a video of me butchering someone, wondering around and making an awesome shot with the bow on Linux.
↺ Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun looks like a fantastic real-time tactics game coming to Linux
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun certainly reminds me of the old Commandos game I played a lot when I was younger and who doesn’t like ninjas?
Guild Software today, May 5, 2016, announced the availability of a new maintenance release of its Vendetta Online 3D space combat MMORPG game, version 1.8.378, for all supported operating systems.
While Vendetta Online 1.8.378 appears to be a pretty small update to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, it packs some interesting changes, among which we can mention better detection of Sony DualShock 4 controllers when they are connected via the Bluetooth technology, as well as support for voice chat on Android, which failed work on previous versions of the game due to some bugs.
Ex-Kubuntu leader Jonathan Riddell announced the availability of daily build ISO images for the rolling KDE Neon Linux operating system, which early adopters can get and test drive as we speak.
Hello all,
Tarballs are due on 2016-05-09 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.20.2 stable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.20.2. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!
At various points in GNOME’s history the Nautilus file manager has been less than maintained, but these days the situation is much brighter.
GNOME developer Carlos Soriano has come out to write about how great the Nautilus situation is these days. Soriano wrote in a new blog post, “as far as I can see the development status of Nautilus it’s in its best moment since it was created, and part of that is thanks of the status of gtk+ development and the values and vision of GNOME as a project.”
SparkyLinux 4.3 “Tyche” was officially launched last week with the KDE, MATE, Xfce, LXDE, and LXQt flavors, and now the team behind this lightweight Debian-based desktop-oriented operating system announced the release of three more editions.
SparkyLinux 4.3 GameOver, Multimedia, and Rescue editions are now available for download, as officially announced by the project’s maintainer a few minutes ago, May 6, 2016, incorporating all the core components that have been made available in the previous flavors.
Neptune 4.5.1 ISOs are available for download now and update the system since the Neptune 4.5 release to the state of 3. May 2016.
The biggest issue fixed in this release is the usb booting from USB 3 ports. Besides that this new maintainance release features KDE SC 4.14.16 as desktop.
Neptune developer Leszek Lesner announced the release and general availability of a new Live ISO image for his Neptune Linux rolling operating system, version 4.5.1.
The new Neptune Linux 4.5.1 ISO is now ready for download and includes all the updated packages and security patches released in the distribution’s main software repositories since Neptune 4.5.
Red Hat Release Engineering is hiring in Europe.
Red Hat Canada has unveiled a new approach to reach the lower end of the enterprise and the upper midmarket in partnership with Keating Technologies and Tech Data Canada.
Under the program, Keating will work with the vendor to uncover and qualify leads in the $500 million to $1.0 billion market. Once fully developed, those leads will be handed over to existing Red Hat Canada partners to close the deal, and will be fulfilled through Tech Data.
Bahrain’s national carrier is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and Red Hat Storage as a platform for its Arabic Sentiment Analysis system, which monitors people’s comments through their social media posts.
Today, May 5, 2016, Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced in a press release the availability of Red Hat Software Collection 2.2 Beta and Red Hat Developer Toolset 4.1 Beta.
Clifton’s Red Hat Angels team will be hosting a Happy Birthday bunco game fundraiser on May 15 at the BPOE Elk’s Lodge at 775 Clifton Ave. Doors open at 1 p.m. Bunco playing begins at 2 p.m. and also includes prizes and dessert.
Finalists include: Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst; Brandon Evans, CEO of Clintrax Global; Van Isley, CEO of Professional Builders Supply, and Brian Hamilton, co-founder and chairman of Sageworks. There are 29 finalists total from the Southeast this year.
While cloud is still top of mind for many chief information officers, Red Hat office of technology vice president and chief technologist Chris Wright believes an increasing area of focus for businesses today is trying to figure out how to automate their infrastructure stack.
The GNOME Project announced recently that Red Hat Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has donated two new highly performant servers.
According to the GNOME representatives, Red Hat’s server donation is part of a broader plan whose main goal is to centralize the location of the several GNOME servers around the world into a single datacenter.
Fedora 24 is currently in heavy development with the Beta release knocking at the door, and it looks like the Fedora Project developers are already planning on the next major release of the GNU/Linux operating system.
I actually never even announced the April meetup, but we had in total 13 people showing up for the meet. We moved the meet to my office from our usual space as I wanted to use the white board. At beginning I showed some example code about how to write unittests, and how are we using Python3 unittests in our Fedora Cloud/Atomic images automatically. Anwesha arranged some soft drinks, and snacks for everyone.
Over on Flickr, fosco_ submitted this simple Ubuntu desktop, with just a few things tweaked for a cleaner experience. Like we’ve said, sometimes less is more, and this desktop makes good use of a few widgets to make a great UI even better.
The team of developers behind the HPLIP (short for HP Linux Imaging and Printing) project, announced a few moments ago the availability of the fifth maintenance build in the 3.16 stable series of the software.
For those of you who are not in the loop, HP Linux Imaging and Printing is an open-source initiative to bring the latest HP (Hewlett-Packard) printer drivers to GNU/Linux operating systems. The software has a pretty active development team working behind it, releasing maintenance builds at least once a month.
Canonical’s vision of convergence—a single, highly adaptive environment that spans mobile and desktop uses—has been delayed yet again. The Unity 8 desktop and Mir display server, which are key to that vision, won’t be used by default in Ubuntu 16.10, according to discussion in the Ubuntu Online Summit.
After Jack Wallen’s recent review of the bq Aquaris M10 tablet, he was hit with a number of questions about the tablet. Jack addresses some of those questions to help you decide if the Ubuntu tablet is a worthy investment.
It has been a while since we discussed here something about the development of the next major Ubuntu Touch OTA update, the OTA-11, and at the request of many of you, we’ll post the following information to keep you guys up to date.
Thibaut Rouffineau, an IoT & Ubuntu Core evangelist, has announced today the availability of Canonical’s Ubuntu Core operating system for Samsung ARTIK 5 and 10 IoT (Internet of Things) platforms.
At the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco last week, Samsung was all about the Internet of Things, and its Artik IoT modules got lots of love.
From this version on, m23 offers support for m23 clients using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus. A set of desktop environments is, of course, included for the new Ubuntu. Friends of the Univention Corporate Servers will be happy to hear that the m23 app is now available in the Univention App Center. As always, several small improvements have also been made to various parts of the software.
Today, May 5, 2016, is the last day of the Ubuntu Online Summit 2016, and we’ve just attended a very exciting session where the Ubuntu developers have discussed the future of the Ubuntu Desktop after Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak).
You can watch the entire session below if you don’t want to read the next paragraphs, but as usual, we’ll try to detail and explain a few things for you so that you know now what to expect from future versions of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, on the desktop, of course.
Chip maker Movidius has unveiled “the world’s first embedded neural network accelerator”. Known as the Fathom Neural Compute Stick, this device could be plugged into a Linux device to allow it to perform functions like image recognition, language comprehension, and pattern detection.
A “Linux Embedded Development Environment” (LEDE) fork of the lightweight, router-oriented OpenWrt Linux distribution vows greater transparency and inclusiveness.
Some core developers of the OpenWrt community has forked off into a Linux Embedded Development Environment (LEDE) group. LEDE is billed as both a “reboot” and “spinoff” of the lightweight, router-focused distribution that aims to build an open source embedded Linux distro that “makes it easy for developers, system administrators or other Linux enthusiasts to build and customize software for embedded devices, especially wireless routers.”
A split seems to have emerged in the Linux-router-OS community, with a breakaway group splitting from OpenWRT.
OpenWRT is the chief open router firmware implementation, but it has run into headwinds of late. For example, downtime for the group earlier this year was traced back to the small organisation running a single, small, server without redundancy.
Samsung is one of those big guns from the consumer electronics market who has been betting huge on Virtual Reality. After partnering with Oculus for the Gear VR headset which has set its own benchmark for the best untethered VR solution one can buy, now that the headset has been in good shape, Samsung is working out ways to deliver content on it. Samsung have joined hands with multiple partners to provide VR experiences on its Milk VR platform and had also unveiled its own 360 degree camera at Unpacked 2016 event back in february- Gear 360 to let almost anyone to produce 360 degree content that can be viewed on the Gear VR.
Google reached out to us and clarified that Android One will continue to function as a platform, with the search giant working with its global partners to roll out affordable hardware with a stock Android user interface.
Even if a jury orders Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google to pay the full $8.8 billion sought by Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) in an upcoming San Francisco copyright trial over the Android operating system, shareholders and analysts say it will likely have little impact on the search giant’s bottom line.
Free Software/Open Source
The Open Platform for NFV can accelerate NFV deployment while unlocking the door to multiple processing architecture.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence have quickly gained traction with the public through applications such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. The true promise of these disciplines, though, extends far beyond simple speech recognition performed on our smartphones. New, open source tools are arriving that can run on affordable hardware and allow individuals and small organizations to perform prodigious data crunching and predictive tasks.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a decision to create a new subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence to look for ways to use the technology as American citizens interact with the federal government.
“The Federal Government also is working to leverage AI for public good and toward a more effective government,” Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ed Felten in a statement.
For fans of ReactOS as a project long working on providing an open-source, drop-in-replacement for Windows, a new release is being prepared.
Building off the recent ReactOS 0.4 release is the v0.4.1 point release in development. A few hours ago, ReactOS 0.4.1 RC1 was released for those wishing to test this open-source OS implementation of Windows.
The DMCA doesn’t just make it illegal for you to circumvent DRM to rip and burn a DVD of ‘War Games’ or to install a pirated copy of Windows. It also can make it illegal for you to repair or modify things you own.
Public television and radio in the United States have been surprisingly shy about covering the open source movement, but this video by Mike Rugnetta at PBS Digital Studios shows that they may be waking up.
Pulp 2.9.0 is still in development, but since langpacks support has been merged, here is a video highlighting this up-and-coming feature.
After taking a break in 2015, Tracing is back at Plumbers this year! Tracing is heavily used throughout the Linux ecosystem, and provides an essential method for extracting information about the underlying code that is running on the system. Although tracing is simple in concept, effective usage and implementation can be quite involved.
There’s a fundamental difference between conferences for community-driven projects and closed-source commercial software. While Microsoft, Apple and other large companies hold regular meetings to keep developers updated, the information almost always flows in one direction. They (the software owners) tell us (the software users) what they are working on and what they are about to release. These releases almost always come out of the blue often leave the developer community scrabbling to catch up.
We’re progressing with the organization of LibreOffice Conference 2016 in Brno. Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation visited Brno last month, we showed him the venue and also places where we could hold a party, have a hacknight etc.
While innovators in the HPC and hyperscale arenas usually have the talent and often have the desire to get into the code for the tools that they use to create their infrastructure, most enterprises want their software with a bit more fit and finish, and if they can get it so it is easy to operate and yet still in some ways open, they are willing to pay a decent amount of cash to get commercial-grade support.
Mention the words “open source” and all kinds ideas probably come to mind such as “free”, “agility”, and “speed”. However, with any IT project, it is important to look at business benefits vs. costs in a manner that goes beyond generalizations. One method for benefit-cost analysis for open source big data projects is Net Present Value (NPV).
Basho today released its Riak TS NoSQL database as an open source product to help developers create apps for the Internet of Things (IoT).
Basho Technologies CEO Adam Wray is convinced the developer ecosystem around the Internet of Things is “yearning” to find its open source database of choice — and he’s convinced that Basho’s Riak TS is it.
“Twelve months from now, any time someone goes to build an IoT app… they’ll say naturally we should use Riak TS,” Wray said.
We were informed just a few minutes ago by The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli about the immediate availability for download of the LibreOffice 5.0.6 “Still” open-source office suite.
The Global Learning XPRIZE was first announced during the UN General Assembly week in 2014: as the Closing Keynote session of the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting with XPRIZE founder and executive chairman Peter Diamandis and President Clinton, and at a special ceremony with Keller and the UN’s Special Envoy for Global Education, former UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
PC-BSD’s Ken Moore today, May 5, 2016, announced the release of the Lumina Desktop 0.9.0 environment for his FreeBSD-based, desktop-oriented PC-BSD operating system.
The BSD-focused Lumina Desktop Environment has released version 0.9 of their open-source, Qt-powered desktop while version 1.0 is expected later this year in step with PC-BSD/FreeBSD 11.0.
Lumina 0.9 still lacks its own window manager, but they have added compositing window manager support via xcompmgr. For systems without xcompmgr or not being able to run a composited desktop, Lumina will still fall back to not using any compositing effects with the Fluxbox window manager. Lumina’s own window manager is now delayed until after their 1.0 desktop release.
Here are some more compiler performance metrics to share of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for a complex program.
The latest GCC benchmarks I have to share are of Open Porous Media, the initiative providing software for modeling and simulations around porous media processes. Long story short, software for areas like enhanced oil recovery along with other scientific and industrial fields. With the particular OPM benchmark component being used today, a reservoir simulator for three-phase black-oil problems.
There’s a new version of LibreJS – version 6.0.13.
LibreJS is a Mozilla add-on that prevents nonfree JavaScript programs from running in your web browser.
Originally this release was going to be 6.0.11, but I had some trouble registering this add-on with Mozilla which required me to increment the version to 6.0.13.
Free Software communities produce tons of great software. This software drives innovation and enables everybody to access and use computers, whether or not they can afford new hardware or commercial software. So that’s that, the benefit to society is obvious. Everybody should just get behind it and support it. Right? Well, it is not that easy. Especially when it comes to principles of individual freedom or trade-offs between self-determination and convenience, it is difficult to communicate the message in a way that it reaches and activates a wider audience. How can we explain the difference between Free Software and services available at no cost (except them spying at you) best? Campaigning for software freedom is not easy. However, it is part of the Free Software Foundation Europe’s mission. The FSFE teamed up with Peng! Collective to learn how to run influential campaigns to promote the cause of Free Software. The Peng Collective is a Berlin based group of activists who are known for their successful and quite subversive campaigns for political causes. And Endocode? Endocode is a sponsor of the Free Software Foundation Europe. We are a sponsor because free software is essential to us, both as a company and as members of society. And so here we are.
Using Private Cloud and Drupal as a starting point together with small expert partners and agile management the new platform for the European UPC has been shaped to the exact requirements and quickly adapted while more needs surfaced. The only ready to use Open Source tool used has been Zarafa Collaboration Platform which integrated with the Case Management System will provide secure email, instant messaging, file sharing and video conferencing to the platform’s users.
The result is that, thanks to Open Source based platform and by working with SMEs, the UK IPO team has been able to deliver to the Unified Patent Court team the project earlier than planned and under budget.
The complex and fragmented legal arena could use some standardization, at least according to 35-year veteran lawyer, Jim Hazard, the founder of blockchain smart contracts startup, CommonAccord.
CommonAccord, which was recently selected by BNP Paribas’ new FinTech accelerator, L’Atelier, is developing global text codes for transferring legal documents via distributed ledgers.
Leftovers
Today marks the 154th anniversary of Cinco de Mayo, a bicultural celebration that has become synonymous with margaritas, cervezas (beer) and the occasional controversy. But we found most people don’t know the real story behind this holiday.
Forbes, an organization with a website presumably built on the value of its content, also has made the unfortunate decision recently to try to block off access to anyone using adblocker software, apparently so that it could successfully allow malicious “ads” to infect its readers’ machines. This set of circumstances would seem to be one that would have Forbes re-thinking its adblocker policy, assuming it wishes to retain the trust of its readership. And it turns out that Forbes is doing so. And then not! Or maybe? Allow me to explain.
Rob Leathern recently noticed that going to Forbes.com and refreshing the screen after being told that he should disable his adblocker suddenly offered up a new option: becoming a member. That membership would allow the viewing of the content for free. And, hey, all it wanted in return was the ability to manage his social media contacts for him.
As the active ingredient in Monsanto’s branded Roundup weed killer, along with hundreds of other weed-killing products, the chemical called glyphosate spells billions of dollars in sales for Monsanto and other companies each year as farmers around the world use it in their fields and orchards. Ubiquitous in food production, glyphosate is used not just with row crops like corn, soybeans and wheat but also a range of fruits, nuts and veggies. Even spinach growers use glyphosate.
Despite limited advances provided by the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. healthcare system remains “uniquely wasteful” and profit-driven, leaving tens of millions without any insurance and even more underinsured.
As a result, say leading physicians, “the right to medical care remains a dream deferred.”
What Sanders didn’t explain is why that a drive would take you from one of the poorest locales in America to one of the richest.
McDowell County has long been one of the epicenters of America’s failure to end intergenerational poverty. John Kennedy campaigned there in the ’60s, citing the region’s poverty as an affront in the face of the country’s wealth. Its coal-dependent economy remained stagnant and between 1980 and 1990 it had a net population loss of 42 percent. The decline of American steel and coal has left the county with few economic engines; the New York Times reported in 2014 that almost 47 percent of the income in the county was generated by federal safety net programs like Social Security and food stamps.
Fairfax, Virginia, too, is reliant on federal aid to generate income — but a far more lucrative kind. Last year, the Northern Virginia Regional Commission conducted a comprehensive study to examine the impact of federal contracting — both defense-related and non-defense related — on the economy of the region.
A new report puts the spotlight on the widespread use of toxic chemicals known as phthalates, finding them in products from paints to shoelaces to greeting cards.
The report, What Stinks? Toxic Phthalates in Your Home (pdf), used data submitted to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, as the New England state requires manufacturers to disclose their use of four kinds phthalates.
“This data provides new examples of products that are letting these hormone-assaulting chemicals infiltrate our bathrooms, kitchens, schools–and, ultimately, our bodies,” said Mike Belliveau, executive director of the Maine-based Environmental Health Strategy Center and Prevent Harm, lead sponsors of the new report.
“Because of the breadth of reporting that Maine requires,” according to the report, “the data reported includes never- before available information.”
The reports lays out what’s at stake from exposure thusly: “Strong science shows that even at very low levels of exposure, phthalates—a class of more than 40 closely related chemicals–are linked to reproductive harm, learning disabilities, and asthma and allergies.”
Fourteen manufacturers reported the use of the four phthalates in 130 products, the report states. The chemicals are often used to soften vinyl plastic–that was the case in over one-third of the products reported—but for over half of the products, phthalates were used as fragrance.
When I went in for my annual physical in 2011, I knew something was up when the physician’s assistant who usually dealt with me deferred to the actual doctor. It was up to him to take on more serious issues, and as he soon explained, I had one. My blood work had come back showing I was infected with the hepatitis C virus. Hep C is a serious, life-threatening illness that attacks the liver and can result in fatty liver, cirrhotic liver and liver cancer. One out of five people carrying the hep C virus will die of liver disease within 20 years. And a lot of people have it—at least 3 million, and perhaps as many as 7 million, in the United States alone.
OpenSSL has released versions 1.0.2h and 1.0.1t of its open source cryptographic library, fixing multiple security vulnerabilities that can lead to traffic being decrypted, denial-of-service attacks, and arbitrary code execution. One of the high-severity vulnerabilities is actually a hybrid of two low-risk bugs and can cause OpenSSL to crash.
The Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative’s badging program matures, as the first projects to achieve security badges are announced.
FOSS Force has just learned from Wordfence, a security company that focuses on the open source WordPress content management platform, that a popular plugin used by over 500,000 sites, Ninja Forms, contains serious security vulnerabilities.
While there is no denying that IP-based connectivity continues to become more and more pervasive, this is not a fundamentally new thing. What is new is the target audience is changing and connectivity is becoming much more personal. It’s no longer limited to high end technology consumers (watches and drones) but rather, it is showing up in nearly everything from children’s toys to kitchen appliances (yes again) and media devices. The purchasers of these new technology-enabled products are far from security experts, or even security aware. Their primary purchasing requirements are ease of use.
Yesterday I jumped the gun committing some patches to LibreSSL. We receive advance copies of the advisory and patches so that when the new OpenSSL ships, we’re ready to ship as well. Between the time we receive advance notice and the public release, we’re supposed to keep this information confidential. This is the embargo. During the embargo time we get patches lined up and a source tree for each cvs branch in a precommit state. Then we wait with our fingers on the trigger.
What happened yesterday was I woke up to a couple OpenBSD developers talking about the EBCDIC CVE. Oh, it’s public already? Check the OpenSSL git repo and sure enough, there are a bunch of commits for embargoed issues. Pull the trigger! Pull the trigger! Launch the missiles! Alas, we didn’t look closely enough at the exact issues fixed and had missed the fact that only low severity issues had been made public. The high severity issues were still secret. We were too hasty.
A critical medical equipment crashed during a heart procedure due to a timely scan triggered by the antivirus software installed on the PC to which the said device was sending data for logging and monitoring.
Since 2014, things have become a lot more serious with a cross section of mostly US hotels suffering major breaches during Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals. Panda Security lists a string of attacks on big brands including on Trump Hotels, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt, Starwood, Rosen Hotels & Resorts as well two separate attacks on hotel management outfit White Lodging and another on non-US hotel Mandarin Oriental.
75 Doctors Without Borders hospitals around the world were bombed last year.
The Pentagon just made it official: No war crime was committed when a U.S. plane attacked the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last year, killing 42 patients and health workers and injuring many more.
At least, that’s the conclusion of its own investigation — nearly all of which remains classified.
No war crime, despite the U.S. military having full knowledge of the hospital’s location before the bombing. No war crime, despite desperate hospital staffers calling military liaison officers while the rampage was underway. No war crime, despite their calls being routed without response through layers of lethal bureaucracy for an hour or more as the deadly bombing continued.
No war crime, says the Pentagon.
It’s late in the afternoon and we are stuck behind a school bus in Northern Croatia as we drive through the what the GPS says is the miserable little town of Apatija, which my Croatian friend Juraj says literally translates to “apathy” in Croatian.
We are following Balkan Route in the footsteps of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa who are fleeing the Syrian Civil War, ISIS, Al-Shabbab, the Taliban, African despots and America’s drone war.
I’m impressed with how the school bus can navigate the dirt and gravel roads that crisscross this Croatian nowhere. Before the Croatian government set up transit camps to provide people with food, shelter, medical care bus and train rides to Western Europe, refugees without the money to pay for their own transportation had to walk these roads.
The U.S. government defined events in Ukraine as a “pro-democracy” revolution battling “Russian aggression” — at least as far as the world’s mainstream media was concerned. But what if the script were flipped, asks Joe Lauria.
There’s just one problem with this narrative: none of it actually happened. Today, Trump may indeed hold all of these views, but at the time, he held none of them, at least as far as the public record shows. And by obscuring the difference between judgments in real-time and in retrospect, we risk allowing unaccountable Monday-morning quarterbacking to pass for an ability to make tough calls from inside the huddle.
The State Department says it won’t release any documents relating to Hillary Clinton’s email security procedures and protocol until after the November presidential election.
In March 2015, soon after Clinton’s secret personal email account was reported by the New York Times, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the State Department asking for “communications, presentations, and procedures created by the State Department to secure Hillary Clinton’s email from electronic threats.” I filed a separate FOIA asking for emails sent to her personal @clintonemail.com account.
The images emerging out of forest-fire ravaged Fort McMurray are devastating. The skeletons of smoldering homes and charred metal truck carcasses conjure the image of some post-apocalyptic wasteland in what was, just the day before, a residential neighbourhood. As of Thursday, more than 80,000 people had been evacuated from the burning town. A province-wide state of emergency has been declared, and neighbouring communities are now under threat.
There has been tremendous concern over the ways climate change will affect human rights, but little attention to how human rights abuse affects our global climate.
Fifty years ago, Indonesia went through a genocide. The massacres may be relatively unknown, but in a terrible way the destruction continues, and threatens us all. In 1965, the Indonesian army organised paramilitary death squads and exterminated between 500,000 and 1 million people who had hastily been identified as enemies of General Suharto’s new military dictatorship. Today, the killers and their protégés are comfortable establishment figures whose impunity, political power and capacity for intimidation endure.
A coalition of environmental organizations is suing the Environmental Protection Agency, claiming federal regulators have for three decades failed to update rules for disposing of fracking and drilling wastes that may threaten public health and the environment.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asks the court to set deadlines for the EPA to update its disposal rules.
Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, Prince may have had a drug problem and a record-breaking 88,000 people have been evacuated from Fort McMurray, Canada.
If you’ve turned on a corporate 24-hour news network in the last couple of days, those are three things that you have definitely heard about.
But what you didn’t hear from the mainstream media is that the wildfires in Alberta, and in Alaska, are directly related to climate change.
Global warming is the biggest problem we’ve ever faced as a civilisation — certainly you want to act to slow it down, but perhaps you’ve been waiting for just the right moment.
The moment when, oh, marine biologists across the Pacific begin weeping in their scuba masks as they dive on reefs bleached of life in a matter of days. The moment when drought in India gets deep enough that there are armed guards on dams to prevent the theft of water. The moment when we record the hottest month ever measured on the planet, and then smash that record the next month, and then smash that record the next month? The moment when scientists reassessing the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet have what one calls an ‘OMG moment’ and start talking about massive sea level rise in the next 30 years?
Buddenberg will soon begin a two year prison sentence after accepting a plea deal, rather than face trial, over conspiracy charges brought under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). Kissane also accepted a plea deal, and will be sentenced in June. It should be noted that, as with most AETA cases, defendants are offered opportunities to rat out fellow activists or become informants in exchange for lighter sentences. Buddenberg and Kissane declined to do so, and they deserve praise for this. Their non-cooperation will allow others like them to continue saving lives, while risking their own.
North America’s great forests could change in dramatic ways by the end of the century, according to new research.
Subtropical species may colonise the forests of the Cascade mountain range straddling the US-Canada border, the woodlands of the US Gulf Coast may end up looking more like Cuba, and parts of Texas might become home to the hot, dry forests now found in Mexico.
Scientists from Washington State University in Vancouver, Canada, have made a mathematical model of how forests might respond to climate change.
The dentist who shot Cecil the Lion can rest easy. Animal lovers have a new villain in Zimbabwe — climate change.
This week, Zimbabwe put its wildlife up for sale in an effort save the animals from a devastating drought, Reuters reports. The state Parks and Wildlife Management Authority reached out to buyers “with the capacity to acquire and manage wildlife” and enough land to house the beasts. The agency did not specify exactly which animals would be sold, their cost, or whether they could be exported to foreign countries. Large mammals, including elephants, rhinos, and lions, are plentiful in Zimbabwe’s parks.
The drought has strained the resources of the parks authority, which receives meager government funding and limited income from hunting and tourism. Facing water shortages and financial hardship, Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park has turned to donors to pay the cost of pumping underground wells to provide water for wildlife, including elephants.
A state of emergency has been declared in the Canadian province of Alberta, where a massive wildfire has grown to five times its initial size and continues to rage.
An estimated 1,600 destroyed homes and businesses had been destroyed, and a mandatory evacuation order was expanded late Wednesday to encompass additional communities in and around the tar sands capital of Fort McMurray. Between 80,000 and 90,000 people have fled since the fire intensified on Tuesday.
Officials ordered people to leave Anzac, Gregoire Lake Estates, and Fort McMurray First Nation late Wednesday. Anzac’s recreational centre, which is nearly 50 kilometres southeast of Fort Mac, was housing hundreds of evacuees from the embattled city prior to the most recent evacuation order.
By some accounts, the Dakota Access oil pipeline seems like done deal. Iowa, the last state out of the four the pipeline would cut through to grant a permit, approved the pipeline in March, leaving the project with just one federal approval to gain. And the company in charge of the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, appears to not be waiting until that federal permit is granted: It’s already started construction on the 1,154-mile pipeline.
Authorities in Honduras have arrested four men allegedly connected to the murder of Berta Cáceres, the country’s most recognized activist. While the president celebrated the arrests as evidence of progress on the case, Cáceres’ family continues to demand an independent investigation by international experts. Shannon Young has more.
This week the Colorado Supreme Court ruled unanimously against two cities’ bans on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as it’s also known. The Colorado Oil and Gas Association, the group which brought the original lawsuits against the cities of Fort Collins and Longmont, is hailing the decisions as “a win for the energy industry.”
The Colorado Supreme Court framed its rulings not as a decision on the safety of fracking but as an assertion of state law’s authority over local legislation — even if that legislation was formed following successful ballot initiatives.
Environmental advocates on Thursday delivered a giant voided check for $15 billion to TransCanada’s office in Washington, D.C., in a symbolic rejection of the “frivolous investment lawsuits authorized by trade agreements” like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and NAFTA.
TransCanada announced earlier this year its plans to sue the United States under NAFTA provisions for $15 billion in damages over the Obama administration’s rejection of the company’s Keystone XL pipeline project.
The big win for financial institutions and other businesses in requiring binding arbitration is that consumers who have the same problem can’t come together to file a class action suit. It means that companies can commit the same injustice millions of times, but can proceed with impunity knowing that only a handful of people will challenge it – and not under the purview of a judge with the power to order the company to stop the unjust practice.
Arrests in Albuquerque as protesters converge on Verizon shareholder meeting to deliver petition asking for reforms to corporate governance
The last time the mayor of Cupertino walked into Apple – the largest company in his small Californian town and, it so happens, the most valuable company in the world – he hoped to have a meeting to talk about traffic congestion.
Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple’s security team asked him to leave, he said.
“They said ‘you cannot come in, you’re not invited’. After that I left and have not gone back,” said an exasperated Chang, who’s been mayor since December 2015 and had approached the computing firm when he was serving on the city council three years ago.
Speaking to The Guardian in a wide-ranging interview published on Thursday, Cupertino mayor Barry Chang argued that Apple isn’t doing enough for the city where its headquarters lives, adding that he believes the company is abusing its hometown.
After being proclaimed close to politically dead, Bernie Sanders resurrected his campaign with an upset victory over Hillary Clinton. Despite this win – many in the mainstream continue to portray Sanders and his allies as bordering on delusional. “Sanders declares war on reality” blared the headline of at least one major newspaper.
American elites don’t have to go to Panama to hide their money — they can go to Delaware.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is in financial dire straits. Since the plunge in oil prices, the kingdom has been hemorrhaging money left, right and center. It has provided billions of dollars to shore up counter-revolutionary governments around the Middle East, especially Egypt, it is heavily involved in the Syrian conflict, and is burning through some $6 billion a month waging war on impoverished Yemen. The country needs oil to be $104.6 a barrel, according to the Institute of International Finance, for its budget to break-even; the current price is around $45.
At the root, the Milken conference is an investor conference. Attendees want to know about national politics and global military campaigns, but only insofar as that intelligence produces new opportunities to make money. A panel called “Value in Turmoil” was as packed as any that I attended. “Opportunities in distress” was a recurring theme.
“There’s a lot more hope in emerging markets,” said Steve Tananbaum, a vulture fund investor with GoldenTree Asset Management during a panel in the International Ballroom, the same place where they hold the Golden Globes. “Argentina and Brazil, there’s a reaction that’s a positive, pro-market reaction,” he added, referring to the attempted coup on Dilma Roussef. Discussion of the effect on people living in these countries was outside the frame of reference.
At a different panel, Jim McCaughan of Principal Global Investors pronounced himself “a heretic on infrastructure,” because Uber and driverless cars were so efficient that we didn’t need to spend as much on building roads anymore.
Even former Vice President Al Gore, who gave a version of his famed climate change PowerPoint, pitched it as an investment opportunity. “We are facing not just a moral imperative, but a financial imperative,” Gore said, noting that investors have a unique ability to drive change.
Becoming the presumptive Republican presidential nominee seems to have changed Donald Trump.
Shortly after his opponents Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich dropped out of the race, Trump revealed that he has flipped on one of his key policy positions: the minimum wage.
In November, Trump said unequivocally that he “would not” raise wages if elected president. But he told CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that he is now “open to doing something with it.”
“I’m actually looking at that because I am very different from most Republicans,” Trump said. “You have to have something that you can live on.”
There’s a pile of money hiding offshore. It’s true that jobs are also leaving the United States because American companies find it convenient to cut labor costs by moving manufacturing abroad, the economic issue you’re hearing most about in this election season. But the stunning amount of money that continues to flow across American borders (and those of other countries), and eventually disappears into the pockets of the corporate and political elite, ultimately causes even more damage to our finances and our lives.
To become relevant to my students, to the millions of Americans who are swimming in debt and decimated by low wages, unaffordable health care, and rising housing costs the Democratic Party must unequivocally reclaim the mantle of the Second Bill of Rights.
The growth in the economy’s capacity to produce since the 1930s, or even the 1960s, has been extraordinary, much as these economists anticipated. If the experts we used as counsel for this chapter are anywhere near accurate, the next four or five decades could make the twentieth century look like the twelfth century.
In popular economic theory, such revolutionary increases in productive capacity are supposed to translate into higher living standards, much shorter workweeks, richer public infrastructure, and a greater overall social security. Society should have the resources to tackle vexing environmental problems with the least amount of pain possible. In fact, however, nothing on the horizon suggests that this is in the offing. As automation and computerization take productive capacity to undreamed-of heights, jobs grow more scarce and are de-skilled, many people are poorer, and all the talk is of austerity and seemingly endless cutbacks in social services. There is growing wealth for the few combined with greater insecurity for the many. Washington, we’ve got a problem.
The opposition in Venezuela has stepped up its campaign to remove President Nicolás Maduro from office, having announced — in accordance with its numerous divisions — that it would pursue a three-pronged strategy: a constitutional amendment to shorten the president’s term of office; a recall referendum, as permitted under the constitution; and “protests.” The first tactic was struck down by Venezuela’s Supreme Court, as it would be in any country — you can’t change the legal term of a president who was already elected for a certain number of years. For the recall referendum, the process of gathering signatures is under way.
The government, meanwhile, clearly needs to fix the economy if it is to regain popularity. The opposition, which has a large majority in the national legislature, has made it clear that it will not cooperate in any such efforts. On the contrary, it has acted to block the government from spending money.
THE BIGGEST U.S. strike in years has entered its third week, with 39,000 Verizon workers walking the picket lines and holding fiery protests across the Northeast U.S.
Involving the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), the Verizon strike is the nation’s largest since the last walkout at Verizon almost five years ago. And the stakes couldn’t be higher–not only for Verizon employees, but all workers.
For those of us who want societies run in the interests of the majority rather than unaccountable corporate interests, this era can be best defined as an uphill struggle. So when victories occur, they should be loudly trumpeted to encourage us in a wider fight against a powerful elite of big businesses, media organisations, politicians, bureaucrats and corporate-funded thinktanks.
Today is one such moment. The Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP) – that notorious proposed trade agreement that hands even more sweeping powers to corporate titans – lies wounded, perhaps fatally. It isn’t dead yet, but TTIP is a tangled wreckage that will be difficult to reassemble.
Attacked and ridiculued, the leak of 243 pages of TTIP negotiations concerning climate, environment and public health prove that civil society organisations were right all along.
“Free trade” is nowadays used to further the globalist agenda, which seeks to substitute supra-national “standards” enforced by international “commissions” for the rule of law at home. NAFTA’s numerous “side agreements” set up a whole raft of rules, regulations, and enforcement mechanisms to “harmonize” environmental and labor regulations, taking them out of our hands and giving ultimate authority to unaccountable international bureaucracies. TPP follows the same centralizing, supranational statist pattern.
As expected, in the wake of this week’s important leak of the US negotiating position for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) talks, many European politicians are starting to distance themselves from the deal.
The UK prime minister, David Cameron, however, told the House of Commons that TTIP was not dead, but admitted it would take “political courage to get it over the line.”
As Ars reported earlier in the week, the chairman of the European Parliament’s important trade committee, Bernd Lange, indicated that he thought the negotiations would probably fail. Although the official European Commission line is that everything is fine, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that there are doubts at the highest levels of the Commission that TTIP will ever be agreed.
As I have previously written, Washington believes that it is easier to control one government, the EU, than to control many separate European governments. As Washington has a long term investment in orchestrating the European Union, Washington is totally opposed to any country exiting the arrangement. That is why President Obama recently went to London to tell his lapdog, the British Prime Minister, that there could be no British exit.
A new proposal from the U.S. financial watchdog for consumers has been applauded for its ability to help prevent big banks from evading liability for wrongdoing.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposal, unveiled Thursday, curtails mandatory arbitration clauses in financial products like credit cards, bank accounts, and student loans, thereby affording consumers the power to join together in class action lawsuits to sue a financial company.
A new study offers more confirmation that the so-called bailout packages the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) delivered to Greece primarily served European banks rather than the Greek people.
The study released Wednesday by the Berlin-based European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) analyzed where funds from the two aid bailout deals—received on the condition of imposing harsh austerity measures—since 2010 went.
“Contrary to widely held beliefs,” ESMT states, of the €215.9 billion (roughly $246 billion), less than 5 percent went to the Greek fiscal budget. The other 95 percent of the funds “disbursed to Greece since the start of the financial crisis as loans from the bailout mechanism has been directed toward saving the European banks,” Ekathimerini reports.
They can quickly get behind the Jill Stein campaign for the Green Party nomination while she fights to not only eliminate college tuition but has called for eliminating all current college debt. She has been a leader in the fight for a $15 an hour minimum wage, and she loudly supports universal healthcare.
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky said. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”
Choosing the playlist for political campaign rallies is a tricky business. First and foremost, candidates need to make sure their musical picks inspire feelings of patriotism, optimism and positivity. They also need to make sure the artist behind the song doesn’t disavow their campaign entirely.
Trump has used corporate TV news networks to stoke right-wing voters’ fears, anger and racism.
The Democratic front-runner says she’s raising big checks to help state committees, but they’ve gotten to keep only 1 percent of the $60 million raised.
“Some people think they can lie and get away with it,” said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with feigned outrage. And, of course, he has never been held accountable for his lies, proving his dictum true.
The question today is: Will former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Teflon coat be as impermeable to deep scratches as Rumsfeld’s has proven to be?
Donald Trump’s Republican primary triumph means that this cannot be a normal election. Americans who see our country as a model of tolerance, inclusion, rationality and liberty must come together across party lines to defeat him decisively.
Many forces will be at work in the coming weeks to normalize Trump—and, yes, the media will play a big role in this. On both the right and the left, there will be strong temptations to go along.
Refusing to fall into line behind Trump will ask more of conservatives. Beating Trump means electing Hillary Clinton, the last thing most conservatives want to do. It would likely lead to a liberal majority on the Supreme Court and the ratification of the achievements of President Obama’s administration, including the Affordable Care Act. Conservative opposition could deepen a popular revulsion against Trump that in turn could help Democrats take over the Senate and gain House seats.
The Intelligence Community evidently gave some incoming members of the Obama administration a star-spangled welcome briefing — complete with a stern warning.
In a newly disclosed document titled “Unlocking the Secrets: How to Use The Intelligence Community,” intelligence officials told incoming officials that foreign intelligence services had been extensively spying on the 2008 political campaigns.
“Foreign intelligence services have been tracking this election cycle like no other,” the authors from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote.
Even against Trump, attracting both moderate Republicans and Sanders supporters will not be easy for Clinton.
Many people in the U.S. are confused regarding the Mexican Cinco de Mayo celebration. They believe it’s Mexico’s Independence Day, which is actually Sept. 15 and 16.
Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Battle of Puebla when the Mexican army defeated the better-equipped French army in 1862. While it isn’t a widely celebrated holiday in Mexico, in the U.S. Cinco de Mayo has grown in popularity in the period after the height of the Chicano movement in the 60s and 70s. For the past thirty years, marketers have latched onto the holiday to promote alcohol, Mexican food products, and pretty much anything that can be marketed to the masses. Cinco de Mayo has also given politicians in the U.S. an opportunity to pander to Mexican American voters.
As Donald Trump is declared the presumptive Republican nominee for president, members of the neoconservative establishment, disgusted by the prospect of Trump in the White House, appear to be heading into the welcoming arms of someone more sympathetic to their imperial worldview: Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Bravo to fearless Afro-Swedish activist Tess Asplund, 42, and the photographer who caught the moment Asplund ferociously, instinctively charged a march of over 300 anti-immigrant neo-Nazis with her head and fist held high, and Nelson Mandela in her mind. Asplund, a longtime anti-racism activist, was returning from another protest when she came upon an International Workers’ Day rally in Borlange, Dalarna, in central Sweden, by the violent white supremacist Nordic Resistance Movement. Marching stiffly in homemade uniforms of white shirts and dark green ties, their members are part of an alarming resurgence in Sweden and across Europe of right-wing racist groups fuelled by an influx of refugees. In an odd twist of fate and timing, the rally came days before a top Israeli military official caused an uproar when, during a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, he seemed to compare Israel’s similar rising nationalism to the “abhorrent processes” in Germany that led to the Holocaust, warning, “Nothing could be easier than hating the other.”
New research has shown that a controversial 1970s experiment aimed at inserting communist propaganda into Finnish teaching syllabuses was much more widespread than originally thought. The researcher says that this experiment in Pirkkala was the result of systematic attempts by left social democrats to get Marxist material into Finnish school books.
On World Press Freedom Day journalists from across the world attended the Difference Day conference in Brussels to celebrate and debate press freedom
The crisis began on Sunday, when dozens of police officers raided the syndicate building to arrest two journalists, Amr Badr and Mahmoud al-Sakka, on charges of “plotting to overthrow the regime” and “spreading false news,” for their coverage of anti-government protests last month. The union headquarters was a central location for the protests in April, the first in more than two years, over President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s decision to give King Salman of Saudi Arabia two uninhabited islands, Tiran and Sanafir, as a gift.
The clash between the press union and the authorities took on an Orwellian cast when the police issued a statement denying that the raid had taken place at all, and the main state prosecutor then issued a gag order, banning any reporting on the case.
On Tuesday, the editors of Al Ahram, the flagship of Egypt’s state-run media empire, denounced “the disgraceful act of storming the Journalists Syndicate” as an “unprecedented and unacceptable” act. “The interior ministry,” the editors added, “won’t succeed in its malicious aim of gagging mouths and stifling the freedoms of opinion and expression, rights stated in the constitution which the security leaders are yet to read.”
According to a list of demands published by the newspaper’s English-language site, the union plans to take further action — like blacking-out the front pages of newspapers this weekend and possibly going on strike — unless the president apologizes for the raid on its premises, releases the detained journalists and fires Interior Minister Magdy Abdel Ghaffar. Until their demands are met, the newspapers also agreed that they will not print the minister’s name.
A freelance cartoonist says he was fired for drawing an editorial cartoon that bemoaned Iowa farmers’ dwindling profits while CEOs at large agricultural corporations earn millions of dollars.
Rick Friday of Lorimor said on his Facebook page that Farm News, a weekly publication of The Fort Dodge Messenger, dropped him as the publication’s editorial cartoonist after a company affiliated with one of three large corporations he portrayed in his cartoon complained, pulling its advertising.
Sci-Hub is facing millions of dollars in damages in a lawsuit filed by Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. As a result of the legal battle the site just lost one of its latest domain names. However, the site has no intentions of backing down, and will continue its fight to keep access to scientific knowledge free and open.
Since winning the November 2015 elections, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP party have taken extreme measures to silence anyone who raises their voice to criticize government policy, going so far as to claim that the definition of a terrorist should be changed to include “supporters” like MPs, civil activists, artists, academics, and journalists. In public, some topics have become totally censored, including the Armenian genocide after WWI and the ongoing persecution of Kurds in the southeast of the country, where Amnesty International estimates that there remain 200,000 people under 24-hour curfew and scores more who have been killed by Turkish security forces, who have been waging a near-constant battle with the Kurdish minority since 1978. As the country comes to terms with its seventh major terrorist attack in less than a year, which saw four people killed and dozens more injured, it appears less and less likely that any de-escalation of this conflict is on the horizon.
With the country’s largest state prison system becoming the latest jurisdiction to ban inmates from having a social media presence, censorship of prisoner’s digital speech is expected to increase substantially in the weeks and months to come.
A big problem with policies like the ban implemented by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice—beyond the violation of people’s free speech rights—is that the public has no idea how common it is for social media platforms to take down inmate profiles. While Google has reported takedown requests, companies such as Facebook so far have not included inmate-related takedowns in their transparency reports.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has abruptly announced that he will step down, leaving the door open for Turkey’s controversial President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to continue consolidating power. The resignation could spell further trouble between Turkey, which is crucial to managing the Syrian refugee crisis and the fight against ISIS, and its relations with the United States and Europe.
The decision came after an hour and a half meeting between Davutoglu and Erdogan, who have had increasingly public spats for weeks. Chief among their differences is the fate of Turkey’s constitution.
A standoff this week between Egyptian authorities and the country’s influential Journalists Syndicate could mark a turning point in the fight for media control that has raged since before President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took office.
On Wednesday, thousands of Egyptian journalists responded to syndicate leaders’ call for an emergency general assembly at the group’s downtown Cairo headquarters, a rare show of unity which came despite personal risk of legal harassment and physical assault. According to news reports and video footage posted to YouTube, police surrounded the building, looking on while government supporters hurled rocks, insults, and threats at the journalists, including “Butcher them, Sisi!” News reports said the counter-protesters assaulted some journalists and tore their clothes.
The woman has a big secret: unknown to her family, she’s running a phone-sex business from home. Only her best friend knows the truth.
It sounds like the plot of a good soap. But this woman is one of 61 participants in a study looking at the way we cover up secrets in our emails. The results suggest we’re not as good at hiding them as we think.
Yla Tausczik at the University of Maryland in College Park and her colleagues recruited people who admitted to having had an “enormous secret” in the last seven years. They posted flyers in major cities, sent out emails and posted ads on Amazon Mechanical Turk and Craig’s List. The response was pretty high: 1133 people completed an initial questionnaire. Of these, 179 met the researchers’ requirements and 61 ultimately took part.
Studying secrets is tough, says Tausczik. “You can’t bring people with secrets into the lab, you can’t bring in their friends without raising suspicion.” To get round this, the team decided to look at people’s emails.
A recently disclosed document shows the FBI telling a local police department that the bureau’s covert cell-phone tracking equipment is so secret that any evidence acquired through its use needs to be recreated in some other way before being introduced at trial.
“Information obtained through the use of the equipment is FOR LEAD PURPOSES ONLY,” FBI special agent James E. Finch wrote to Chief Bill Citty of the Oklahoma City Police Department.
The official notice, dated September 2014, said such information “may not be used as primary evidence in any affidavits, hearings or trials. This equipment provides general location information about a cellular device, and your agency understands it is required to use additional and independent investigative means and methods, such as historical cellular analysis, that would be admissible at trial to corroborate information concerning the location of the target obtained through the use of this equipment.”
This will likely be the most spectacular flame out of the Baltimore Police Department’s long history of warrantless Stingray use. The Maryland Special Appeals Court recently found that tracking people’s location using Stingrays is a search under the Fourth Amendment, meaning law enforcement will need to obtain warrants before using the devices. The fact that this finding doesn’t affect use previous to this decision (and there was a LOT of it) doesn’t mean other judges won’t arrive at the same conclusion independently.
The Baltimore Sun reports a suspected murder will likely walk away from charges after the suppression of “key evidence” obtained with Stingray.
The National Security Agency announced it would destroy internal records concerning issues surrounding workplace conflicts, causing a stir that the agency may be suppressing information about retaliation against whistleblowers within the organization.
↺ Unsealed Yahoo/FISA Documents Show NSA Expected Company, FISC Judge To Operate On Zero Information
Late last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a stack of documents from Yahoo’s challenge of the NSA’s internet dragnet. The new declassified and unsealed documents have been dumped into one, 309-page PDF along with everything the ODNI has already released — one of the small things the office routinely does to slow the dissemination of previously-unseen information.
She’s (reasonably) worried that whatever the FBI is planning to ask her about or serve her with comes with a gag order and she won’t be able to speak about it. She also notes that she’s got a personal warrant canary, which might be worth watching for obvious reasons.
But, honestly, the part that struck me as most interesting about all of this is the incredible amount of stress that this obviously caused for her. It doesn’t matter if the FBI says she’s “not a target,” having the FBI come looking for you can really shake you up.
[...]
That, right there, is a clear description of the chilling effects that this kind of thing can cause. And that’s a shame. As she later notes, her paychecks for working on Tor come from the US government. She’s not a spy or a criminal. She’s working on software that makes everyone safer. And no matter what the reason for the FBI’s interest, it’s ridiculous that someone should have to go through this kind of process.
San Francisco – The “sharing” or “gig” economy is booming—you can get rides with companies like Uber, hire people to run errands with services like Taskrabbit, or find a places to stay on websites like Airbnb. These companies connect people offering services to people purchasing them, and in the process they have access to vast amounts of personal data. But how well do these companies protect your information from the government? The sixth annual “Who Has Your Back” report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) surveyed the biggest providers in the gig economy to find out.
“These companies collect information on what you buy, where you sleep, and where you travel—whether you are offering services, or purchasing them,” said EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman. “Often they go even further, collecting contents of communications and geolocation information from your cell phone. But are these companies respecting their users’ rights when the government comes knocking? For much of the gig economy, the answer is no.”
Espionage works like this: identify a target who has the info you need. Determine what he wants to cooperate (usually money.) Be sure to appeal to his vanity and/or patriotism. Create a situation where he can never go back to his old life, and give him a path forward where it favors his ongoing cooperation in a new life. Recruit him, because you own him.
The FBI appears to have run a very successful, very classic, textbook recruitment on the guy above, Matt Edman, to use his insider-knowledge to defeat one of the best encryption/privacy software tools available. Aloha, privacy, and f*ck you, Fourth Amendment rights against unwarranted search and seizure.
Edman is a former Tor Project developer who created malware for the FBI that allows agents to unmask users of the anonymity software.
By collecting all the data on everybody on the planet the NSA is just buried; they have too much data to be able to sort out and detect threats in advance, NSA veteran and whistleblower William Binney told RT.
The report says 4,672 surveillance queries were made on citizens, a two-fold increase since the 2013 report.
The estimated number of search terms “concerning a known U.S. person” to get contents of communications within what is known as the 702 database was 4,672 — more than double the 2013 figure.
“The number of backdoor searches doubling since last reported shows that warrantless Section 702 surveillance is a significant and growing problem for Americans,” Jake Laperruque, privacy fellow at The Constitution Project, recently told The Intercept in an interview.
What a boring contest the local elections in London have produced. Like many loyal Labour party members, I will be voting for Sadiq Khan for mayor. He seems like a decent enough candidate. But I wish he had stood on a platform which came close to addressing London’s fundamental problems.
Glenn Ford spent 30 years on Louisiana’s death row for a murder he didn’t commit, only to die of cancer a year after being exonerated and released from prison in 2014.
The prosecutor who put him there, A.M. “Marty” Stroud III, has apologized for relying on “junk science” during the trial and for pursuing a court victory at all costs, at the expense of justice. Stroud even went so far as to admit that knowing what he knows now, Ford should never have even been arrested, since the hardest evidence against him was a statement from a witness who later recanted.
Yet, somehow, members of the Louisiana legal establishment still insist on questioning Ford’s innocence and even accuse him of things which were either never proven or proven to be false, all to protect the state from having to bear the modest financial cost of paying for the life they stole.
“The degree of civilization in a society,” wrote the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, “can be judged by entering its prisons.” As a frequent visitor to Nevada in recent years, I have often been surprised by the cultural diversity and spiritual richness that can be found in Las Vegas. Still, I think that Dostoyevsky was right. A more accurate assessment of the degree of civilization in Las Vegas and for the broader society that the city claims to be “The Entertainment Capital” of can be made by entering the cells of the Clark County Correctional Center than by going to the top of the Stratosphere, cruising the Strip or even by taking in a Cirque du Soleil show.
↺ Former Death Row Prisoner Moreese Bickham Dies at 98: He Served 37 Years for Killing Klansmen Cops
We spend the hour with Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, the award-winning national oral history project. In a 1989 radio documentary, Tossing Away the Keys, he chronicled the case of Moreese Bickham, a former death row prisoner who recently died at the age of 98. In 1958, Bickham, an African American, was sentenced to death for shooting and killing two police officers in Mandeville, Louisiana, even though Bickham said the officers were Klansmen who had come to kill him and shot him on the front porch of his own home. Many other people in the community also said the officers worked with the Ku Klux Klan, which was a common practice in small Southern towns. Moreese Bickham served 37 years at Angola State Penitentiary, in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. He won seven stays of execution, but Louisiana’s governors repeatedly denied him clemency until, under enormous pressure, he was finally released in 1996. Days after he was released, he traveled to New York, where he was interviewed on WBAI’s “Wake-Up Call” by Amy Goodman, Bernard White and others. “Wake-Up Call” had closely followed Bickham’s case and helped give it national attention. We play an excerpt from the interview for Isay and discuss Bickham’s life and legacy.
FBI Director James Comey is still complaining about encryption but it doesn’t seem to be preventing law enforcement from accessing devices. To date, law enforcement has paid hackers to break into a phone, had an iPhone owner suddenly “remember” his password, seen a person jailed for 7 months (so far) for refusing to provide a password and, now, a law enforcement agency has used a warrant to force a suspect to unlock an iPhone using a fingerprint.
Drug dogs are permission slips for warrantless searches. That’s it. They may have been legitimate when they first became part of law enforcement work, but they’ve devolved into malleable props in the ongoing farce that is the the Drug War. Despite these failures, they’re heralded by law enforcement as superpowered miracle workers who can do things like sniff out hidden people in moving vehicles full of other (non-hidden) people.
Across the world and especially in the West, it is widely considered to be highly offensive to suggest that there are similarities between the State of Israel and Nazi Germany, the racist regime responsible for the murder of millions of Jews. But after seven years of a succession of arguably the most right-wing governments in the country’s history, Israelis themselves are beginning to make the shocking comparison with ever-increasing frequency.
On Wednesday night, as Israelis marked Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day – the country’s second-highest-ranking military officer courted controversy when he publicly compared contemporary Israeli racists with anti-semitic attackers in Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.
“Unrestrained power may be many things, but it’s not American,” writes Edward Snowden. “It is in this sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of political resistance.”
Who better to explain these moral and legal intricacies than Snowden? The ex-CIA whistleblower, who exposed the secret surveillance programs of the NSA in 2013, recently published an opinion piece at The Intercept in which he delves into the political and moral responsibilities of whistleblowers.
A new report published by Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding has documented an upsurge in violence against Muslims in the United States coinciding with the 2016 election campaign.
A 16-year-old girl in rural Pakistan was drugged, strangled and burned alive on the orders of village elders for helping a couple elope.
Pakistani police arrested 15 members of a tribal council in in Makol in northwest Pakistan accused ofordering the killing of the teenager – including her mother and brother.
The murder of the girl has been labelled an ‘honour killing’, with her family members present at her ‘trial’ and allegedly supporting her death sentence.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Thursday that Donald Trump “certainly deserves our respect” for winning the Republican presidential nomination, but refused to apologize for calling the billionaire showman’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States “divisive, stupid and wrong.”
As abuses in Australia’s detention centres become increasingly stark, there are growing calls for the boycott of a global system of inhumane, but profitable, mistreatment of refugees.
In England, for the first time in my entire life I find myself wishing well to the Labour Party. This is because the Blairites are self-evidently hoping their own party crashes and burns so they can launch a coup. I hope Labour does well in England because the media campaign against Corbyn has been absolutely disgusting – and because I hate the blue Tories. But even in England, I could never actually vote Labour myself until they expel all the Blairite and Brownite war criminals.
Correct the Record, headed by Media Matters’ David Brock, has posted dozens of videos targeting Sanders online, and spent upwards of a million dollars to run a network of Twitter and Reddit personas saying negative things about the Vermont senator on social media. They issue negative press releases, graphics and talking points—some of which the Clinton campaign’s Twitter account tweets out.
Women should not be allowed to go on long journeys without a male chaperone a British Muslim group has advised followers.
Justine Greening, the International Development Secretary, condemned the advice from Blackburn Muslim Association as “disgraceful” and said such views had “no place” in modern Britain.
Instructions from the association’s “Department of Theology” insist that it is “not permissible” for a woman to go more than 48 miles – deemed to be the equivalent of three days walk – without her husband or a close male relative.
Israel’s notoriously militant Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, equated criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism on Wednesday, in light of rising European support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS).
While the date didn’t receive much fanfare in the media, net neutrality rules formally took effect in the European Union as of April 30. The full rules were approved after a vote last October (pdf), though as we noted at the time, the rules don’t actually do much of anything. That’s quite by design; European ISP lobbyists spent years ensuring that while the rules sound great in a press release, they’re so filled with loopholes as to be largely useless. In that sense they’re much like the awful rules the U.S. (with help from AT&T, Verizon and Google) crafted in 2010, ultimately forcing the States to revisit the ugly political skirmish down the line.
Prompted by AT&T, Missouri passed a state law in 1997 that hamstrings towns and cities looking to build local networks to shore up broadband coverage gaps. Since then, AT&T has made repeated attempts to expand those restrictions further, fearing a growing rise in public/private partnerships from the likes of Google Fiber, Ting, or the countless towns and cities tired of AT&T’s pricey, slow broadband service. After a failed attempt last year, AT&T this year introduced protectionist bill HB 2078, shortly after shoveling $62,000 in campaign contributions to state leaders.
Dozens of civil society organisations this week sent a letter urging European telecommunications regulators to preserve internet neutrality in their current negotiations about the future of the internet in Europe.
The vulnerability is a grave one. These DVRs are designed to be connected to whole networks of security cameras. By compromising them, thieves can spy on their targets using the targets’ own cameras. In fact, Kerner was part of a team at RSA who published a report in 2014 that showed that thieves were using these vulnerable system to locate and target cash-registers for robberies.
In the two years since the initial report, Kerner tracked down the original manufacturer, a Chinese company called TVT, and repeatedly notified them about the problems with their system. Not receiving any reply, and alarmed that the vulnerable system was showing up in the product offerings of companies all over the world–more than 70 of them!–Kerner came forward, hoping to at least warn the owners of these systems that they were relying on defective products for their security.
I had just explained to Amber that 122 GB of music files were missing from my laptop. I’d already visited the online forum, I said, and they were no help. Although several people had described problems similar to mine, they were all dismissed by condescending “gurus” who simply said that we had mislocated our files (I had the free drive space to prove that wasn’t the case) or that we must have accidentally deleted the files ourselves (we hadn’t). Amber explained that I should blow off these dismissive “solutions” offered online because Apple employees don’t officially use the forums—evidently, that honor is reserved for lost, frustrated people like me, and (at least in this case) know-it-alls who would rather believe we were incompetent, or lying, than face the ugly truth that Apple has vastly overstepped its boundaries.
The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA)—arguably the most sweeping change to the nation’s intellectual property laws in a generation or more—is about to become law. The bill recently passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. President Obama is certain to sign the bill into law.
A recent report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) is calling for faster establishment of a Pan-African Intellectual Property Organisation (PAIPO) to bring about what it sees as badly needed IP policy coherence on the continent.
The report, Innovation, Competitiveness and Regional Integration [pdf], was authored in collaboration with the African Union (AU) and the African Development Bank (AfDB). It found that two regional IP bodies in Africa, the anglophone Africa Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) and the francophone Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle (OAPI), do not help countries to exercise their patent rights and counter intellectual property “mercantilism,” nor do they have links to free trade and bilateral investment agreements with external partners.
With copyright reform a big topic again these days, we’ve been talking about some worthwhile books to read in thinking about the topic. The last couple weeks we wrote about some important books by Bill Patry in thinking about how to reform copyright, and this week I’m going to recommend No Law: Intellectual Property in the Image of an Absolute First Amendment by David Lange and H. Jefferson Powell. I had actually just mentioned this book a few weeks ago in discussing copyright’s free speech problem, and I’ll recommend it again. I’m not sure why the book never seemed to get that much attention, even in copyright circles, because it’s really worth reading.
The IPKat never likes to miss a gathering of IP experts, particularly when the experts are as renowned as the group who congregated together last week to talk about design law following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Trunki case (reported here).
The event was a seminar held by ITMA (the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys) on 27 April at the offices of Gowling WLG. The IPKat was delighted to receive the following report from Lydia Birch and John Coldham (who chaired the seminar), both of Gowlings, who write as follows.
Verizon is taking a stand against the millions of invalid DMCA notices it receives for allegedly pirating subscribers. At one point the ISP received two million piracy warnings in one day from anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp, which effectively crashed one of Verizon’s mail servers.
The outcome, well-documented around the world, is distress for all except celebrity academics. In terms of publications, the distress is engendered by a fundamental narrowing of author rights. While Open Access is one answer, it nonetheless fails to address the issues of copyright and the overriding concern of Moral Rights – irreducibly the right to determine how one’s work is exploited. While it is all but impossible to return to Common Law, that does not preclude the fortification of Moral Rights on behalf of authors on the brink of losing all rights – including long-standing economic rights – through a change in statutory law. The alternative is further atomization in the Knowledge Commons with individual authors fighting to protect their own works from abject exploitation.
The award-winning Australian author Jackie French is wrong. In her open letter, she blasts the Productivity Commission’s report on intellectual property, released last month.
What if I told you that there exist few numbers that will get you arrested in America if your write them down or publish them on some website? Well, this isn’t some kind of April Fools’ Day joke and even some casual affair with these number could get you in trouble in States.
If your knowledge extends deep into the waters of security and cryptography, you might be knowing that prime numbers are really important in the field of encryption. Earlier this year in January, cryptographers were elated when a new world’s largest prime number was discovered.
Coming back to our illegal prime numbers, this weirdness deals with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that prohibits people from circumventing copyright protected measures and dissemination of tools.
In a video, YouTube channel Wendoverproductions has told these complex things in a simpler manner and told about the intricate relation between the prime numbers and cryptography. “There are an infinite number of primes as there is an infinite number of numbers, but it just takes an enormous amount of computing power to find these primes,” the video explains.
Paramount Pictures, which is embroiled in an expansive copyright lawsuit against Axanar Productions over the latter’s Star Trek fan film, has filed an objection to the Language Creation Society (LCS) filing an amicus brief regarding the copyrightability of the Klingon language.
Unsurprisingly, there is a wide range of copyright matter defined in Paramount’s complaint. Faced with an enterprise seen to be profiting from its own famous franchise, they did not hold back: as amended, the brief claims more than 50 copyright infringements, pleaded in full Technicolor®. That’s one infringement for every 20 seconds that Prelude to Axanar runs.
Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink Send this to a friend
----------
➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.
-- Response ended
-- Page fetched on Mon Jun 17 13:27:10 2024