● 11.10.14

● Links 10/11/2014: 2015 GNU/Linux Forecasts, Debian Shakeup

Posted in News Roundup at 3:41 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Hmmm… Maybe they’ve taken my advice and gloried in the increased profits with GNU/Linux.

Desktop

• Lenovo reportedly will launch Chromebook models targeting the sub-US$170 segment in early 2015, a move which will further drag down profits for notebook vendors, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.

• I’m always a bit on the disinterested side when someone brings up the market share of desktop Linux. Yeah, it’s fun to kick around numbers and speculate about how doing this or that would increase the desktop market share of Linux. But in the end I don’t think it really matters much and it’s also a bit of a distraction from what really matters with Linux: making it better for the people who are already using it.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Today in Linux news, Debian 8 is frozen and Canonical confirms an Ubuntu tablet is in the works. Two reviews landed yesterday on the Kano Linux computer, one today on Ubuntu, and another on openSUSE 13.2. Linux Australia is now censoring its mailing list and Jack Wallen says Ubuntu 14.10 was a boring release because they are in a holding pattern.

• After more than seven years of Linux Outlaws, my co-host Dan and myself have decided to end the show. This decision has been a while in the making and it is with a heavy heart that I am commiting to finally announce it.

Kernel Space

• There were many inspiring talks alongside the great technical content at LinuxCon, CloudOpen and Embedded Linux Conference Euorpe in Dusseldorf last month. To give you a taste, I’ve chosen a quote from each keynote that I think will get your blood pumping or pique your interest. You can watch each keynote in full, below, or on the Linux Foundation’s YouTube channel.

• Is it possible to run Linux device drivers in the user space? In the past, user space drivers were mostly used to make graphics run faster while avoiding the kernel. They increasingly became more important and the kernel is now seen as an obstacle to high server connection capacity. This is why hardware companies started to provide solutions for user space drivers.

• Back in February SUSE unveiled a new means of live Linux kernel patching, kGraft, compared to the existing Ksplice. One month later, Red Hat unveiled their own solution that happened to be under development at the same time, Kpatch. Since both of them have been out, both have pursued mainline interests but neither one accepted upstream yet. Now a new live kernel patching solution is out that tries to take the best of both worlds.

• Jon Masters informs us of the kernel’s role in the latest Shellshock security vulnerability, and summarises the work in the kernel community towards a final 3.17 release

• As CTO at open source Business Intelligence (BI) products company Pentaho, James Dixon is responsible for the firm’s architecture and technology roadmap.

Applications

• YouTube is a video-sharing website, created in February 2005, and purchased by Google in November 2006. The web service lets billions of people find, watch, and share originally-created videos. It makes use of Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. It also offers a forum for people to communicate with others around the world, and acts as a distribution platform. Mainstream media corporations such as CBS, Vevo, Hulu and the BBC publish some of their catalog via YouTube, as part of the YouTube partnership program.

• Calibre, the free e-book reader and manager available for multiple platforms, including Linux, has been updated today and ships with bug fixes and several new features.

• Yarock is a Qt-based music player with a compact and simple interface, with support for music collections using SQLite, album covers, smart playlists, Internet radio, Last.fm integration.

• Kid3 is a powerful audio tag editor for KDE, with support for popular formats like Ogg Vorbis, MP3, MP4, FLAC or WAV, features like multiple file tag editing (to edit fields which are the same for a batch of files), exporting to various online services, lyrics fetching, id3v1 and id3v2 MP3 tag editing, plugins, tag removal functionality, filters, next and previous buttons to quickly cycle through music files. I believe Kid3 to a gem for audiophiles who work often upon their music collection.

• Calibre, the free e-book reader and manager available for multiple platforms, including Linux, has been updated today and ships with bug fixes and several new features.

• I personally use this software to manage backup and recovery across a network of computers including Linux, OSX and Windows. You can configure it via a CLI, GUI or web interface.

• Most of the file managers included in distributions have an interface which usually provides a left panel and a main widget to display files and folders, and some even have an option to split the view left/right, like Nautilus in GNOME or Dolphin in KDE. But they don’t follow this view mode by default, and usually they can’t save this choice so it will be displayed like this the next time the application starts (there are exceptions – see Konqueror who will use profiles and will be able to save interface changes). On the other hand, there are the twin-panel based file managers like Krusader, Tux Commander or EmelFM2, from which GNOME Commander is also a part of, with the twin-panel mode enabled by default.

• SimpleAudioPlayer is a KDE music player with a simplistic interface which provides two components: a player and a file browser. The latest release is a small incremental update which features a new find function.

• I don’t listen to music very often, but when I do, my tastes tend to be across the board. That’s one of the reasons I really like Pandora, because the music selection is incredible (in fact, I can’t recommend the Pithos client for Pandora enough—I’ve written about it in past issues). Unfortunately, with Pandora, you don’t get to pick specific songs. That’s usually okay for me, but sometimes I want to hear a particular song by a particular artist. Even worse, sometimes I want to hear a particular version of a song. I’ve purchased 3–4 different versions of a song, only to discover none of them were what I wanted.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• War Thunder gives players access to hundreds of real life WWII models of planes and tanks to battle it out on land and in the air

• Supergiant Games second wildly popular title Transistor is now available on Linux and Mac, thanks to the porting efforts of Ethan ‘flibitijibibo’ Lee, porter extraordinaire. Naturally it comes with Steamplay support, as it requires Steam to run, but interestingly it also comes with support for the DualShock 4 Light Bar, which syncs with the Transistor’s speech in game the same way it does in the PlayStation 4 version.

• Football Manager is a popular series of football management simulation games, which allow you to have pretty much total control over your team’s tactics, finances, training and performance.

• Trine for Linux has been missing on GOG and Steam since the Linux release, but fear not, as the Linux version is still coming for the revamped Trine Enchanted Edition.

• Since I was talking yesterday about the launch of three more Linux games on Steam, two more titles have made appearance on the Steam for Linux list: Dragon and A Bird Story.

• Insurgency is a tactical FPS built with Valve’s Source engine, and it originally stated it would come to Linux, but now their plans aren’t so clear thanks to Valve.

• The games for Linux on Steam have been enriched today with the launch of three more titles: Pirate Hell, a shooter game set in the age of pirates, Crowntakers, a combination of strategy and role-play, and Winged Sakura, an anime-themed strategy defense game. All three games are for single-player only.

• I know it’s possible for Linux ports to equal or outperform their Windows counterparts, but it’s hard. At Valve we had all the driver devs at our beck and call and it was still very difficult to get the Source engine’s perf. and stability to where it needed to be relative to Windows. (And this was with a ~8 year old engine – it must be even harder with more modern engines.) These devs are probably glad to just release anything at all given how alien it can be for Windows/Xbox devs to develop, debug, and ship stuff under Linux+OpenGL.

• Double Action is a new action shooter game based on the Source engine and distributed freely on Steam. It is pretty fun to play and incorporates some movement tricks that you can do while playing, like sliding or diving with simple key/mouse combinations.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Some months ago, I visited a Microsoft site to see if it could identify my OS correctly. I am a Linux user and the site identified my computer as a device running Windows 8.

• [...]

• Anyway, after all this time, I visited the MS site again and, to my surprise, it can now see me as a “non-windows user” Wow! I call that improvement!

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Franklin is a 39 year old FOSS activist based in Taipei. He has coordinated KDE’s zh_TW translation team since 2006, and is the core developer of ezgo (Chinese), a compilation of educational software used by schools all over Taiwan. ezgo, which in its Linux installation uses KDE by default, blends more than 100 free software applications into one localized, easy to use package.

• Today in Linux news Chris Hoffman looks at the “hidden dark side of Linux software repositories” using Ubuntu and ownCloud as examples. Jack M. Germain test drives Black Lab Linux, an Ubuntu compatible distribution aiming for ease of use. Jos Poortvliet answers “Where is KDE 5 and when can I use it?” Phoronix is reporting on the Fedora project’s ambition to include AppData in its software and Charlene Begley has been appointed to Red Hat’s Board of Directors.

• The vast majority of users, when talking about “using KDE”, are talking about the desktop. Plasma, that is. So when you ask “when will KDE 5 be ready?”, your answer will be that our brand new desktop is already at version 5.1 and making swift progress! Stability is quite good, but there’s work to do in the feature area. Distributions don’t ship it as default yet.

• Kalzium is a periodic table application for KDE which not only displays detailed information about elements and allows you to view the periodic table using different schemes, but also allows you to perform various calculations, plot data depending on various factors, or balance chemical equations. It is a useful educational tool which can be of great aid learning about chemical elements.

• Although there are many image viewers for Linux, most of them are GTK-based and KDE is left behind with not so many options. Of course, there are applications like Krita or Kolourpaint, but these are image editors, not just simple viewers. Gwenview is the default image viewer in KDE, and it does its job very well. Not only it has enough features to accommodate the more demanding users (like ratings, file browser or thumbnail view), but its functionality can be extended using the KIPI plugins, a KDE set of image plugins used by applications like DigiKam as well, besides Gwenview.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Ubuntu GNOME is an official flavour of Ubuntu, featuring the GNOME desktop environment. Ubuntu GNOME is a mostly pure GNOME desktop experience built from the Ubuntu repositories. Two years ago, Ubuntu GNOME has started as unofficial flavour to Ubuntu – see the release notes of 12.10 – and 6 months after that, Ubuntu GNOME has become an official flavour. So, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04 LTS and today, this is our 5th version and the 4th official one. Let’s find out more about Ubuntu GNOME 14.10

Distributions

Reviews

• Black Lab Linux is a general purpose free distribution for home users and small-to-mid-sized businesses. This particular segment of the Linux OS tries to bridge free OS and preconfigured commercial hardware/software with a flexible set of options.

• Xubuntu is an elegant Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, which uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment to work, instead of the Unity desktop. Xubuntu is designed for computers with low computing resource, always guaranteeing the best performance.

New Releases

• Parsix GNU/Linux is a live and installation DVD based on Debian. Our goal is to provide a ready to use and easy to install desktop and laptop optimized operating system based on Debian’s testing branch and the latest stable release of GNOME desktop environment. Users can easily install extra software packages from Parsix APT repositories. Our annual release cycle consists of two major and four minor versions. We have our own software repositories and build servers to build and provide all the necessary updates and missing features in Debian stable branch.

Screenshots

Ballnux/SUSE

• The great green gecko-wielding distro has undergone a major update with its latest release, openSUSE 13.2.

• This edition comes on the heels of some major changes for how openSUSE releases are structured.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Charlene Begley, a former executive at General Electric Company, has been appointed to the company’s Board of Directors.

• Since 2013, we’ve seen Red Hat embrace CentOS, the previously community-supported, open source equivalent of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and we’ve seen the release of RHEL 7 and its hard push to systemd exclusivity. Now we’re seeing the new road map for Fedora, which will come in three different flavors with Fedora 21. These are all major steps in a very short time period, and frankly, some of these moves seem awkward at best.

Fedora

• If your packaged Fedora application is to be included in Fedora 22′s “Software Center”, it almost certainly is going to need to be supplying AppData.

• Tomorrow (November 7th) we’ll be hosting a testday for the Server Product.

Debian Family

• Debian developers have announced that the Debian 8.0 “Jessie” development cycle has been frozen and all the updates that will land from on now will consist only of bug fixes.

• Perhaps it’s time that Debian reform it’s social contract/internal procedures to deal with dissent by better means than personal attacks on the lists or departures of key people. Democracy/fairness works but sometimes gets off the rails when conflicting groups try to have their way at the expense of others. It’s not enough just to have a mechanism to break deadlocks. It’s important to respect minorities of users as it is to respect the majority of developers. One only needs to see the USAian government to see how extremism and disrespect can go way overboard. We don’t want Debian to go that way.

• The ruckus over the adoption of systemd as the default init system for Debian appears to have claimed a victim, with veteran developer Joey Hess announcing that he is leaving the project.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The version of ownCloud in Ubuntu’s Universe repositories is old and full of “multiple critical security vulnerabilities.” It’s no secret. The ownCloud project itself asked Ubuntu to remove it so users wouldn’t have vulnerable server software. Ubuntu suggested to ownCloud they should take over maintaining it instead. OwnCloud thought that was ridiculous—they just want to write software and not maintain it in every distribution’s repositories.

• I am willing to extend the slight benefit of doubt to the Ubuntu family and retest on different hardware sometime in the future, as well as give Kubuntu and Xubuntu their due spin and such. But if this turns out to be legacy hardware issues so to speak, then we will be having an essay in expletives. Anyhow, skip this. Stay with Trusty, it’s awesome and stable and fun. And let’s see what the rest of the pack can do. For now, Unicorn, 0/10.

• Details continue to emerge on the UT One, the tablet with an Intel processor that will run on Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system. Here are the latest revelations on what will very possibly be one of the first x86-based mobile devices powered by an open source Linux distribution (yeah, Android is not really a Linux distribution).

• Rumors regarding the UT One, whose developers say they will have the hardware ready to ship by the end of this calendar year, first appeared about a week ago. Since then Canonical’s role has become clearer, even if the details of the relationship between the company and the UT One developers remain to be determined.

• Docker is making waves again. Just this week, Google Inc. launched its cloud-based Docker-as-a-service called “Container Engine”, which is now available on its Google Compute Engine platform. And now, not to be outdone, Canonical Ltd. is trying to put an entirely new spin on the container concept with the release of its new Linux Container Demon (LXD) project.

• Ubuntu 14.10 ‘Utopic Unicorn’ went public two weeks ago, giving the mainstream tech press ample time to cast a critical once over.

• As one might expect for this release, the coverage receiving it has been overwhelmingly ambivalent.

• Jack Wallen walks you through the process of upgrading your Ubuntu 14.04 release to 14.10.

Flavours and Variants

• Kubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn was released and announced by Kubuntu team, as official ubuntu flavor based on Ubuntu 14.10 that uses the KDE desktop environment bring with new features and updates. it now ready to download and install on your computer.

• On this release Kubuntu team announce Kubuntu 14.10 with two varian, the stable KDE 4.14 (Plasma 4) running the desktop we know from ubuntu previous releases, and a tech preview of the next generation KDE Plasma 5 for early adopters.

• Lubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn is an linux distribution derived from Ubuntu 14.10. As official ubuntu flavor that uses the lightweight LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) window manager has been released with new features and bug fixes.

Devices/Embedded

• Ixxat’s ruggedized “Econ 100″ DIN rail computer runs Linux on an ARM/FPGA Xilinx Zynq SoC, and supports multiple industrial Ethernet and fieldbus protocols.

• Advantech’s rugged, industrial gateway computer runs Linux on a Sitara AM3352, and features dual gigabit Ethernet ports, WiFi, CAN, and five serial ports.

• Previous UBC-branded box computers have offered the Freescale i.MX6 system-on-chips, but for the Linux-ready “UBC-FA30,” Advantech has turned to the Texas Instruments Sitara AM3352. This low-end, Cortex-A8 Sitara AM355x SoC lacks the 3D graphics and PRU subsystems of some the other Sitara models, but can still crank it up to 1GHz, the maximum clock rate available on the UBC-FA30.

• BeagleBoard.org is prepping a “BeagleBoard-X15″ SBC that will ship in February with 2GB of RAM, dual GbE ports, eSATA, and TI’s dual-core Sitara AM5728 SoC.

• So I’d seen The Matrix and also a BBC programme called Supernatural: The Unseen Powers Of Animals, where they shot dolphins jumping out of the water and they could just freeze time, and then spin round so you saw the water drops, and I thought that was a really amazing effect. And reading how it was done, it was with a whole array of cameras and it seemed quite simple. So I had the Raspberry Pi and a couple of cameras sat on my desk, and it was sort of like, ‘Well, if it seems that simple, then surely if we just got a whole load of Raspberry Pis and cameras – and they’re not that expensive – why shouldn’t we just be able to build it?’ It was one of those moments where you think it should work but you don’t actually know. So what I did was buy four cameras and I tried it, and that looked like it would work – it gave us a tantalising glimpse that we could do it.

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched a Model A+ with a $20 price, and a tiny 65 x 56mm footprint, 23g weight, and compact 40-pin expansion header.

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled its latest computer today, the A+, a smaller version of its previous release that costs only $20.

• Home-baked computing just got a little cheaper: The next-generation Raspberry Pi A+ data processor is available now for $20.

• A step up from the original Model A, this low-cost variant comes after the summer release of the $35 Raspberry Pi B+.

Phones

Tizen

• Our friend Leon Anavi is at it again !!!! What I mean by that vague statement is that he is porting Tizen onto another Development Board, in this case the Radxa Rock dev board that supports the Rockchip RK3188 SoC, which is a 28nm 1.8Ghz quad core ARM Cortex A9 and quad core Mali 400-mp4 GPU. It has 2GB DDR3 RAM and 8GB internal storage

Android

• So yeah no change here. Its a two-horse race that Android is totally dominating. Now for the next quarter expect the traditional ‘first full quarter of new iPhone model sales surge’ but then it again settles down. On an annual basis Android OS outsells iPhones by more than 5 to 1. Windows is dead. Blackberry is now a miniscule niche. None of the new OS platforms has yet caught on fire or behaved like a fox.

• [...]

• Yeah, nothing new here either. Android keeps growing, iOS has a higher market share in installed base than new sales primarily as iPhones have a far longer use often being passed down than most smartphones but still Android installed base is well more than 3 times larger than iOS

Free Software/Open Source

• Joyent and Canonical are the latest cloud firms to open source their container technologies.

• Joyent, which recently raised $15m in funding, announced a container-based cloud-hosting platform that could be used as the basis for running large-scale, big-data tasks.

• When I introduced Taiga on Opensource.com, the article was well received. It seemed like people were looking for a new project management system and Taiga satisfied some of the requirements in mind. As evidenced, in the first month of its existence, Taiga gained approximately 12,000 registered members, 10,000 projects, and 1000 GitHub clones. They are also seeing considerable traffic from Fortune 500 companies starting projects!

• Rackspace has produced a suite of free software templates for firms to use to deploy some of the most widely used open source applications available.

• In a panel at the OpenStack Summit here, executives from HP, Piston Cloud Computing and SwiftStack answered questions about the ROI (Return on Investment) from OpenStack.

• eNcade is a portable Raspberry Pi-powered gaming tablet that is currently in the works. Its makers are looking for funding on Kickstarter and they are hoping to get enough money so that they can properly start this project.

• For the time being, we are using the term community software for the reasons Rob talked about in his original article on the subject. An important way to think about community software is that if free software represents the ethics and open source concerns represents the technology, then community software represents the business. This is important because we need to acknowledge that business provides the resources we need to develop our communities. This is not limited to financial resources but also knowledge sharing across a broad range of disciplines including marketing, legal matters, and technical expertise. Community software is a way for those of us engaged in these activities to have a voice alongside developers and engineers.

• What may be new is a willingness to actually engage in open source, rather than simply use it. While there is value in simply using open-source software, there’s far more value in participating in it.

• If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about an emoji? The official stance: Free. Twitter has announced that after a project to make their emojis more readable on the web, it’s now making them completely open source — which means you can expect to see them in all the varied nooks and crannies of this here internet.

Events

• Alan Clark, chairman of the board at the OpenStack Foundation, explains how the technical definition of what is considered the core of OpenStack is now evolving.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has officially launched Firefox Developer Edition, billing it as “the first browser created specifically for developers.” If developers sound like a very narrowcasted audience to aim a browser at, remember that many of them complain about having to work across numerous platforms and environments and aim for disparate app stores. There are also a lot of them who work in Firefox via tools such as Firebug.

Databases

• About an hour or so after Jeffrey Hammond from Forrester Research gave his keynote address at All Things Open, in which he spoke of a survey which found that three out of four programmers use open source development tools, I had the opportunity to talk with an entrepreneur developer who’s definitely sold on FOSS. “The days of closed source software are kind of over,” he says, “except for special cases.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation role is to support and grow the LibreOffice & Document Liberation project and promote Free Software and Open Standards. You will notice in this statement two key points; first, it is not directly the role of the Document Foundation to develop the LibreOffice code: the community of volunteers is in charge of that and second, the actual role of the foundation is actually to protect and cater to the community’s needs and logistics.

• A new version of LibreOffice’s Calc program has broken many spreadsheets, users say, and a perceived unwillingness by developers to address the problem has sparked an ill-tempered argument.

Education

• So, what is Penn Manor doing differently? First, they’re doing everything with open source. They use Koha, Moodle, Linux, WordPress, Ubuntu, OwnCloud, SIPfoundry, and VirtualBox.

BSD

• I saw on Undeadly a note that OpenBSD’s Ted was patching the ancient bcd program, which converts text into ASCII-art representations of punch cards. Punch cards were a technology from the 1960s and 1970s (?) that stored code or data on cardstock, with holes punched out of them. Each card held a line of text. If I recall correctly, each character was a column on the card, with as many as seven holes punched out of set of 12 possible locations. There were 40 to 80 columns on the card, according to the brand and the decade.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This new site will not only provide a venue for those who constantly update and improve the Comprehensive Tutorial, but is also now home to a collaborative community to share and improve information about copyleft licenses, especially the GNU General Public License (GPL), and best compliance practices.

• The “We Fix the Net” assembly” is to be the perfect place at 31c3 for all hackers to do something about replacing today’s broken Internet with secure alternatives. We hope to have some talks and panels like last year. Details will be posted here closer to the congress, for now, please contact us at wefixthenet@gnunet.org if you are interested to present your work or organize something practical.

Licensing

• Earlier this week, cloud provider Joyent did a surprising thing: It shared its finely tuned cloud software, SmartDataCenter, under an open-source license.

• But while it might seem like the company is giving away its high-value intellectual property at a time when Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have made the public cloud market ultra-competitive, Bryan Cantrill, the company’s chief technology officer, actually has some very smart justifications for the move, which he spelled out in a blog post.

• All software developers should add a copyright license. Why? Because open source licensing is all about granting permission in advance

Openness/Sharing

• At Era7 Bioinformatics, we are a bioinformatics company specializing in sequence analysis, knowledge management, and sequencing data interpretation. Our mission is to help our customers obtain the maximum value from their Next Generation Sequencing projects. And, Bio4j is our high-performance, cloud-enabled, graph-based, and open source bioinformatics data platform, integrating the data available in the most representative open data sources around protein information. It integrates the data available in UniProt KB (SwissProt + Trembl), Gene Ontology (GO), UniRef (50, 90, 100), RefSeq, NCBI taxonomy, and Expasy Enzyme DB. The current version has more than 2,000,000,000 relationships, 400,000,000 nodes and 1,000,000,000 properties. Bio4j provides a completely new and powerful framework for protein related information querying and management. Since it relies on a high-performance graph engine, data is stored in a way that semantically represents its own structure. On the contrary, traditional relational databases must flatten the data they represent into tables, creating artificial ids in order to connect the different tuples; which can in some cases eventually lead to domain models that have almost nothing to do with the actual structure of data.

Open Data

• The technical implausibility and unintended consequences of digital locks are big problems for digital-lock makers. But we’re more interested in what digital locks do to creators and their investors, and there’s one important harm we need to discuss before we move on. Digital locks turn paying customers into pirates.

Leftovers

Security

• This year has been an unusual one for free software in that two popular projects have been hit by vulnerabilities that have had wide ramifications for all classes of software. And that is one good reason why the big proprietary software firms should look to support such projects financially.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The corporate board chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the software company SAP America, has quit the group, telling CMD that it has made the decision to “immediately disassociate itself from ALEC” because of the group’s position on climate change, opposition to renewable energy, its position on gun safety and its attacks on voter rights.

• Climate deniers won big in the midterms. So where do green groups go from here?

• Most people know about atmospheric ozone, but not many people have heard of ground level ozone. The American Geophysical Union reports that ground level ozone pollution in India has devastated “millions of tons of the country’s major crops, causing losses of more than a billion dollars and destroying enough food to feed tens of millions of people living below the poverty line.”

• The new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sounds the usual alarms, but that doesn’t mean it got much attention from TV news.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• In Richmond, CA, three seats on the City Council were up for election; the city also stood to elect a new mayor. Nothing unusual in this, perhaps, was it not for Chevron’s $3.1 million dollar campaign to highjack the elections, which was first revealed by journalism student and former Center for Media and Democracy reporter, Harriet Rowan in the Berkeley publication Richmond Confidential.

• America, meet Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin’s newly-elected, weekend-hating Congressman who has a beef with Kwanzaa and his own explanation for the gender pay gap.

• According to Grothman, “money is more important for men.”

• The Republican state senator was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives Tuesday, winning handily in Wisconsin’s gerrymandered 6th Congressional District.

• “Glenn Grothman doesn’t just drink the crazy right-wing Kool-Aid,” said Congressman Mark Pocan in 2011, when he was a state representative. “He is the one making it.”

Privacy

• Last week’s takedown of Silk Road 2.0 wasn’t the only law enforcement strike on “darknet” illicit websites being concealed by the Tor Project’s network of anonymizing routers. A total of 410 .onion pages on at least 27 different sites, some of which sell everything from drugs to murder-for-hire assassins, were shut down as part of Operation Onymous—a joint operation between16 member nations of Europol, the FBI, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

• Over the last 48 hours the alleged owner of Silk Road 2.0 has been arrested in San Francisco and named as Blake Benthall, a former SpaceX employee who left the firm in February. I got alerted to this event via the Tor subreddit where an eastern European (he didn’t disclose what country) said his house had been raided, two computers seized and told he is an ‘international suspect of fraud and money laundering’ and could face a maximum sentence of fourteen years in prison although no charges have been pressed at this point.

• Coordinated raids by law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and 16 European countries have closed hundreds of underground websites, including dozens dealing in weapons and drugs, and led to the arrest of 17 people.

• As part of an exceptional event, the Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival and La Quadrature du Net partner for a symposium on mass surveillance. The largest gathering of thinkers, activists and artists – since Edward Snowden’s revelations – will take place in Portugal on the 14th, 15th and 16th of November 2014, in the Cultural Center of Belem.

• British spies have been granted the authority to secretly eavesdrop on legally privileged attorney-client communications, according to newly released documents.

• On Thursday, a series of previously classified policies confirmed for the first time that the U.K.’s top surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters (pictured above) has advised its employees: “You may in principle target the communications of lawyers.”

• Sharyl Attkisson was hacked. The computers used by the former CBS News investigative reporter were found to have been remotely accessed and tampered with, according to both a CBS-hired forensics expert and a reputable information security firm that did an analysis commissioned by Attkisson herself. Those are the facts as we know them.

• As this Fifth of November gathered more people than ever, demanding an end to surveillance and censorship and calling for civil liberties such as freedom of speech to be restored, it is adequate to reflect a bit, just as V originally did.

• This week, and our first place comment for insightful scored pretty high on the funny side too (though not quite enough to break the top two). After it was discovered that Islamic extremists were using the YouTube copyright dispute process to get personal data on critics, Jon Renaut noted that technically this fulfills an old fearmonger prophecy:

• EFF recently began a new Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto, with the aim of encouraging the creation and use of tools and protocols that not only offer genuinely secure messaging, but are also usable in practice by the humans who are most vulnerable to dangerous surveillance, including those who are not necessarily sophisticated computer users. The first phase of this campaign is the Secure Messaging Scorecard, which aims to identify messaging systems that are on the right track from a security perspective. In subsequent phases of the campaign, we plan to delve deeper into the usability and security properties of the tools that are doing best in the Scorecard. One crucial aspect of the Scorecard and the campaign is and will be code auditing. We’ve gotten a lot of questions about the auditing column in the Scorecard, so we thought it would be good to expand on it here.

• With its strict privacy laws, Germany is the refuge of choice for those hounded by the security services. Carole Cadwalladr visits Berlin to meet Laura Poitras, the director of Edward Snowden film Citizenfour, and a growing community of surveillance refuseniks

Civil Rights

• “The video speaks for itself, doesn’t it?” Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson said Wednesday about a brief video recording that led to two New York Police Department cops being charged in connection to the pistol-whipping assault of a 16-year-old Brooklyn boy. The boy, who was arrested for marijuana possession, ended up with broken teeth and bruises.

• The officers charged in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Wednesday are David Afanador, 33, and Tyrane Isaac, 36, both nine-year veterans.

• The 82-second video of the teen’s August 29 beating—widely available on the Internet—was captured by a local Crown Heights business. The tape shows the boy running before eventually stopping and raising his hands, after which he is pummeled and taken to the ground.

• A Saratoga County sheriff’s sergeant was suspended after a video posted on the Internet Friday captured him allegedly slapping a young man as the deputy insisted on searching his vehicle, which had a rifle on the back seat.

• Sheriff Michael Zurlo on Saturday said he was “very disturbed” by what he saw on the video.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• In the same week that the United Nations finally gave up trying to grab control of the internet, a group of three organizations led by domain-name overseer ICANN have launched an effort to become the internet’s UN.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Documents leaked in October 2014 reveal that the upcoming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal potentially threatens public safety by reducing the ability of the European Union (EU) to enforce safety requirements on dangerous carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting chemicals. As Nadia Prupis reports for Common Dreams, this agreement would establish a cooperative front on the part of the two powers to create common regulations under the banner of decreasing trade barriers.

Copyrights

• YouTube’s infringement reporting system is — like many others around the web — fundamentally broken. Making bogus copyright claims is still an easy way to get channels shut down or to siphon ad revenue from existing videos. It can also be used as a censor — a cheap and dirty way to shut up critics or remove compromising video.

• Anti-virus software can be a great help to keep viruses and malware at bay, but AVG takes its responsibilities a bit further. Avid BitTorrent users who download files at near-maximum speeds get a friendly reminder from AVG explaining that they may want to pause their downloads to improve web browsing.

• Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde is a free man again. After more than five months he was released from prison this morning. Peter is expected to take some time off to spend with family and loved ones before he continues working on making the Internet a better place.

• BitTorrent Inc, the parent company of the popular file-sharing applications uTorrent and BitTorrent, has won $2.3 million in damages from its German namesake Bittorrent Marketing GMBH. A federal court in California branded the German company a cybersquatter and ruled that it misled BitTorrent users for financial gain.

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