● 11.24.14

● Links 24/11/2014: Linux 3.18-rc6, Qualcomm Eyes GNU/Linux Servers

Posted in News Roundup at 5:06 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• It doesn’t mean that you get all the gui configuration bits that you want. It doesn’t mean that you without any problems can switch out any component. But it does mean that you can get it exactly your way. But it might require you to edit some source code and compile some stuff.

Server

• While Qualcomm is still dominating in the mobile phone chip world as the largest supplier of SoCs for smartphones, the company has ambitions of getting into the server market.

• Overnight, at the SC14 conference in New Orleans, the twice-yearly Top500 list was revealed with probably the fewest changes in the top 10 we’ve ever seen.

• The only new entry in the top 10 was the 10th-ranked unnamed machine which began operating at an undisclosed US government location.

Kernel Space

• 300K. That’s how many folks have taken the Intro to Linux course offered by The Linux Foundation.

• For those wondering whether there will be any exciting improvements with the Intel DRM graphics driver in the Linux 3.18 kernel, here’s some OpenGL performance benchmarks.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a new version of the Linux kernel, 3.17.4, and this is now the most advanced release available for download. It will remain like this for a few more week, at least until the new 3.18 branch will be made available.

• Of the RAID 0/1/5/6/1+0 levels supported natively by the Btrfs file-system, it’s been the RAID 5 and RAID 6 implementations that have been deemed experimental and not yet production ready. Fortunately, that may soon be changing with some fresh Btrfs tool patches.

Graphics Stack

• As a continuation of the Is The Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Fast Enough For Steam On Linux Gaming? article from earlier this week, here’s the results of the latest NVIDIA Linux proprietary graphics driver compared to the Linux 3.18 + Mesa 10.4-devel graphics driver stack when running two of Valve’s most popular Steam on Linux gamers.

• So lately I’ve been devoting my time in Igalia around the GNU/Linux graphics stack focusing, more specifically, in Mesa, the most popular open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification.

• Alex Deucher of AMD has put out new Radeon DPM patches that add SMC fan control support for SI/CI GPUs. These new patches should reduce the graphics card’s fan noise on systems with a higher default fan profile speed.

Benchmarks

• For those wondering whether there will be any exciting improvements with the Intel DRM graphics driver in the Linux 3.18 kernel, here’s some OpenGL performance benchmarks.

• With the Linux 3.18 development settling down, here’s our usual benchmarks of the new kernel when comparing the file-system performance against the previous stable version (Linux 3.17) for EXT4, F2FS, XFS, and Btrfs.

Applications

• Calibre is a complete application to edit, view, and convert eBook files, and the developer has released a new version with an important feature and a lot of fixes and various improvements.

• ClamAV, an open source antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware, and all kinds of threats, has been updated to version 0.98.5 and is now available for download.

Proprietary

• A new dev version of the Opera Internet browser has been released and Linux users can now get this latest iteration, although it brings nothing out of the ordinary, with the exception of a fix that should have landed.

• As promised, Pushbullet is back with an update to their Chrome and Firefox extensions, finally bringing universal copy/paste to Mac and Linux computers. Once enabled (in both the extension and Android app), you’ll be able to copy text from your computer and paste it on your Android device (or vice versa). It may not sound like much, but it’s yet another feather in the hat of one of the best Android apps on the market. Pushbullet is also promising iOS support in the near future so be on the lookout for that if you’re a multi-platform user.

Instructionals/Technical

• Starting from kernel 2.6.24, Linux supports 6 different types of namespaces. Namespaces are useful in creating processes that are more isolated from the rest of the system, without needing to use full low level virtualization technology.

Games

• The Linux version of Civilization: Beyond Earth is still in the process of being ported to Linux.

• You might find this hard to believe, but I have another week’s worth — at least — of games prepped for discussion. I know we just finished a huge 10-day block of games last month, but it seems that if you mention a console game, people are quite eager to suggest another.

• Gold Rush! takes you back to the year 1849, when gold was discovered in California. It was certainly one of the most exciting times in American history. Gold Rush! includes the three routes tens of thousands took to the gold regions. Become Jerrod Wilson and experience each trek as you travel from New York to California.

• The Battle for Wesnoth is free, turn-based tactical strategy game that features both single-player and online/hotseat multiplayer combat. The developers have just updated it after a long hiatus.

• Freeciv is a free turn-based multiplayer strategy game that is inspired by the Civilziation series. It’s still maintained and developed to this day, not to mention the fact that it’s the only completely free game of this type.

• It has been a bumpy ride, and that’s putting it nicely, but 7 Days To Die is finally on Linux for us to enjoy some zombie smashing.

• Pocket Rumble is a fun looking 2D fighting game currently on Kickstarter that promises a Linux port if they hit a stretch goal, I know what you’re thinking, but look past that for a minute.

• Feral Interactive are being sneaky, as they have given a little hint towards their next game, and it’s quite obvious it’s for Linux.

• Particulars, an arcade game with puzzle elements developed by SeeThrough Studios and published by Surprise Attack, has just landed on Steam for Linux.

• It seems Valve have no plans to attend CES next year, but they did confirm they are planning a large presence at GDC. Looks like there will be a lot of Steam Machine news next year!

• Soul Axiom, an FPS adventure game developed and published by Wales Interactive, has arrived on Steam for Linux, along with all the other supported platforms.

• This was tested on Linux Mint 17 64bit, with an Nvidia 560ti graphics card. Sadly the initial launch of the game came with loading issues, but as it has been patched the game now runs perfectly well. Hell, even alt+tab works beautifully, so they delivered a pretty decent experience for me.

• Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is the next in line of the crazy neon coloured action game. The new version has been confirmed for Linux too!

• This was one of Aspyr Media’s secret ports, so we have them to thank yet again! We should also thank the developers for being so open about it on twitter.

• I have been really looking forward to playing Legend of Grimrock 2 soon. Unfortunately, the game is not available for Linux yet, and as it seems it’s not certain whether we will see it on Linux at all.

• This War of Mine, a beautifully rendered 2D action game inspired by real-life events and developed by 11 bit studios, has been released on Steam for Linux.

• Famous studio Frozenbyte has announced that Linux users can now play the Trine Enchanted Edition, one of the best 2D adventure games made in the past few years.

• Leszek Godlewski announced on Twitter that he will be leaving the Linux porting business, but the news isn’t that bad. One of the original coders is taking over the Linux port of Darksiders.

• Daedalic Entertainment have released the third and final standalone part of the Deponia Trilogy which have seen Linux releases over the last few months. This is not to be confused with Deponia: The Complete Journey which was released back in July for Linux and is essentially the three games bundled together in one game with a few extra goodies.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It’s a scary moment, that time when you reach the conclusion of something which has taken up a considerable chunk of your life for months. Not a bad kind of scary, really, more a sort of exciting, i-wonder-what-others-think kind of scary. For me, this is a moment i’ve reached now that Calligra Gemini has been merged into the master branch of Calligra, and is scheduled to be shipped with Calligra 2.9. Another reason it’s scary is that, given this is sort of my baby, and have found it’s something i use actively pretty much every day now, i am now also the official maintainer of that application, which is kind of a new thing for me. If you’re wondering what this whole thing is about, there’s a rundown of the news over on the Dot.

• This blog post is about another possibility to contribute to KDE. It’s about taking work off Ben’s shoulders and about fixing the bus factor for our great CI (Continuous Integration) system.

• KDE Connect is a tool which allows you integrate the KDE Plasma Workspace with your smartphone (Android only for now), via WiFi.

• The continuous integration system is a piece of KDE.org infrastructure which compiles KDE software, executes tests included with the software and performs software quality tests. This is done when developers make commits to git.kde.org, and is used to ensure our software is in a releasable state and to detect regressions which are accidentally introduced from time to time. It can be found at build.kde.org. As part of this project you will be revamping the system to allow us to expand it to cover additional operating systems in the future, standardize the configuration of jobs and to improve the flexibility of the builds we perform. In addition you’ll also be responsible for setting up a new foundation for our Linux builds as the current one is running on a distribution which will soon be out of date.

• Even though I criticized Mozilla in the past on my blog, in the end I always returned to Firefox as my main browser, as it the most customizable browser while also (nowadays) very fast and stable.

• Today I want to talk about how to marry to KDE Connect, one of the most awesome pieces of technology to come from KDE in recent years.

• digiKam Software Collection, the digital photo management application for the KDE desktop and not only, which includes an image editor for photo corrections and manipulation, is now at version 4.5.0.

Distributions

• Google introduced a new design language with Android 5.0 called Material Design. It relies on vivid colors, a lot of white space, and animations designed to make different on-screen elements feel like real materials.

• For instance, switching between two screens in an app is meant to feel like sliding one sheet of paper over another.

• Let’s be honest, we all mostly love what Google’s doing with Android 5.0 Lollipop. So, how about having a little Material Design on your desktop? That’s what Quantum OS (formerly Quartz OS) aims to do, and it looks awesome.

• Quantum OS is trying to bring together Material Design and Linux, while using the powerful JavaScript-based language QML. It’s not nearly ready for distribution to the masses quite yet, though Quantum OS will likely leverage an existing Linux distro like Ubuntu. The source code is available on GitHub right now, but it sounds like we still have awhile to wait.

• Google ushered in a new design language called Material Design as one of the biggest new elements of Android Lollipop, and an upcoming Linux distribution called Quartz OS aims to bring the clean and simplistic user interface to the desktop. Quartz OS is essentially the marriage of Material Design and Linux, aiming to harness the flexibility and power of the JavaScript-based markup language QML.

• Welcome to Quantum OS! We are working on developing an operating system based upon Linux which conforms to Google’s Material Design guidelines. The focus will be on creating a stable and easy-to-use operating system with a heavy emphasis on well-thought-out design.

New Releases

• Parted Magic is a Linux distribution that features numerous tools for disk management, such as GParted and Parted. It’s one of the best distros of its kind, but also a commercial OS.

• Black Lab Linux, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS “Trusty Tahr” that features a modified GNOME desktop environment, has received a sizable update pack that brings a lot of new stuff.

• Foresight Linux 3 was planned to be built on fedora, but various issues and sometimes too bleeding edge. we decided to have centos as core and go from there.

Screenshots

Ballnux/SUSE

• SUSE, the enterprise Linux company, is working on its own storage solution using open-source Ceph: SUSE Storage.

• According to OpenSUSE 13. official announcement, KDE 4.14, dedicated to the memory of Volker Lanz, provides a familiar look, feel and functionality with the rock-solid stability of the latest version of the long-term support Plasma Workspace (4.11.12) and the applications from latest Software Compilation (4.14.2). The KDE Telepathy stack offers features as off-the-record (OTR) encryption for instant messaging, multi-protocol support and a set of applets for the Plasma Workspace. KDE applications requiring multimedia are now based on the 1.0 version of the GStreamer multimedia framework, allowing a noticeable reduction in dependencies.

• Live kernel patching is now officially available on SUSE Linux Enterprise. SUSE announced the availability today of SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, a means of performing kernel patching without the need for reboots. The SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching is based on their kGraft technology.

Red Hat Family

• Cirrascale will provide the RM1905D chassis for the HPC cluster. The chassis delivers twice the density over standard 1U rackmount implementations, Applied Micro said in a statement.

Fedora

• Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The elections starts on November 18th and closes promptly at 00:00 UTC on November 26th.

• Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The elections starts on November 18th and closes promptly at 00:00 UTC on November 26th.

• Voting is open to all Fedora contributors.

• I’ve reviewed a ton of Fedora packages over the years.

• As you are all aware that Phnom Penh is the first country who had kicked off F21 Release Party and it was the first for us to organize it.

• Fedora is the primary development platform for OpenLMI. OpenLMI support has been included in Fedora starting with Fedora 18. We strongly recommend using Fedora 20 or the upcoming Fedora 21 release when using Fedora with OpenLMI, as these include the latest versions of OpenLMI. Fedora includes all OpenLMI capabilities: the CIMOM, all Providers, the client tools and all client scripts.

Debian Family

• The vote on a general resolution on the status of systemd in the next release of Debian GNU/Linux has gone in favour of one of the options – that there is no general resolution needed in this situation. Hence the decision of the technical committee, made in February, will stand.

• Debian developers voted down a proposal that would have weakened the Linux distribution’s integration with a controversial system software package on Tuesday, in a victory for systemd supporters.

• Most of our first morning was taken up with the last pieces of architecture qualification, and that was largely the yes/no decision we had to make about kFreeBSD. And you know what? I don’t recall us talking about systemd in that context at all. Don’t forget kFreeBSD already had a waiver for a reduced scope in Jessie because of the difficulty in porting systemd to it.

Derivatives

• Elive is a Linux distribution that uses Debian as a base and Enlightenment as the default desktop environment. It provides a different experience from what users might get in other operating systems and the developers have just updated the OS yet again.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu Community Appreciation DayToday is Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day and I wanted to quickly recognize the following people, but before doing so, I want to thank all the contributors that make the Ubuntu Community what it is.

• Given the recent crowdfunding success around the Jolla Tablet, there’s talk again about crowdfunding a truly open-source laptop that’s running Ubuntu and would be priced around $500 USD.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• The end of the year is coming and we’ve seen pretty much all devices that will be unveiled this year. Let’s go back in time with Counterclockwise, our (almost) weekly trip back memory lane, and see what announcements late November has seen over the years.

• What’s left of Nokia after selling off their phone/device divison to Microsoft, the Finnish company has unveiled their first new piece of hardware: the N1 Android tablet.

Android

• Devices shipped from the factory are encrypted by default, but what about the devices you upgrade from a previous version of Android? We have the answer.

• I just released my Galaxy Zoo android app to the Google Play store. The Zooniverse team have adopted it as their official Galazy Zoo app for Android.

• Intrinsyc unveiled an Android 5.0 dev platform for the Snapdragon 810 SoC in phone, tablet, SBC, and COM versions that debut DDR4 and TransferJet tech.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Finnish manufacturer Jolla has announced plans for a tablet funded entirely by online donations as it looks to follow up on the success of its smartphone device.

Free Software/Open Source

• Research suggests that software developed using open source code contains fewer defects than that built with proprietary code. The catch is that open source code rarely benefits from security teams specifically tasked with looking for bugs.

• The open-source movement has produced some of the most widely utilized software in the world, a huge economic value driven by a widely dispersed community who believe contributing good work is often its own reward. Outside of the world of computer science, however, these strategies are still relatively niche. A San Francisco startup called Assembly is trying to change all that, by evolving the open-source model to easily incorporate disciplines outside coding and to include a shared profit motive as well. Today the company is announcing a $2.9 million round of funding it will use to help expand its platform.

Events

• Last release of Lohit Devanagari we did in Feb 19, 2014. During the time number of improvements happened in Lohit Devanagari. Today releasing its next version with all the improvements. [1]

• Over the weekend the NetSurf developers met to make a concentrated effort on improving the browser. This time we were kindly hosted by Codethink in their Manchester office in a pleasant environment with plenty of refreshments.

• An awesome BSP just took place in München where teams from Kubuntu, Kolab, KDE PIM, Debian and LibreOffice came and planned the future and fixed bugs.

Web Browsers

• A group of developers have started writing their own open-source web browser that primarily is designed to increase web privacy and greater security.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The new BankID uses HTML5, CSS and Javascript, supported by all modern web browsers. For the time being, DIFI will support the use of older web browsers that cannot handle the new version of BankID.

• The folly? Instead of beating a path to LibreOffice ASAP, they meekly paid for a new set of licences thus increasing their lock-in and delaying progress. This still exposes them to further audits, further rounds of licence-upgrading, and the longer they use M$’s stuff the harder it will become to escape. Already it’s tough because many of their other applications depend on M$’s office suite. You don’t solve a problem you created by continuing to make the same mistakes. They do have the future possibility of migrating to FLOSS like LibreOffice in the future but this is a missed opportunity and will raise the cost of future migrations to FLOSS.

CMS

• New security updates released for the WordPress content management system and one of its popular plug-ins fix cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to take control of websites.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Four years ago when Pentaho first released Hadoop support, Dixon coined the term ‘Data Lake’ to describe a vessel for holding data from a single source. When selecting it, he thought very carefully about its suitability as both an analogy and a metaphor.

Funding

• Open source is everywhere, but the term is often applied loosely. Free and open source software is attractive to hardware and software companies because it seems to be the cheap and efficient option and gives access to communities of users and developers who bring cost reductions and opportunities for high quality input from a variety of sources. Corporate involvement in open source software development works for developers as it pays their wages and, if properly managed, allows them the freedom to work on the code. But open source’s success is not without its drawbacks.

BSD

• JAN KOUM, the founder and CEO of recent Facebook acquisition WhatsApp, has hurled $1m at the FreeBSD Foundation and told it to go and treat itself, or something to that effect.

• An interview with Matthew Dillon about the upcoming 4.0 release of DragonFly BSD.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This is to announce grep-2.21, a stable release.

• There have been 94 commits by 3 people in the 25 weeks since 2.20.

Project Releases

• Since the version 2.4.0 release, Pulp is working to adhere to semantic versioning. Semantic versioning is important so that users can upgrade to a given version and have a correct expectation about what is in that new version ie: bugfix, features, or backwards incompatible changes. There are new features that are ready to be included in a release, so the next release planned will be 2.6.0.

• Version 0.10 of the HandBrake open-source video transcoder has been released.

Openness/Sharing

• MusicBrainz, the not-for-profit project that maintains an assortment of “open content” music metadata databases, has announced a new effort named AcousticBrainz. AcousticBrainz is designed to be an open, crowd-sourced database cataloging various “audio features” of music, including “low-level spectral information such as tempo, and additional high level descriptors for genres, moods, keys, scales and much more.”

Standards/Consortia

• As you will probably have noticed, open data is pretty hot these days. The EU has noticed, too, and is making some serious funds available for this area, as announced by the UK’s Open Data Institute:

• A product of OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, UBL was developed in a transparent standards-setting process over a period of 13 years by hundreds of leading business experts. OASIS is the same organization that created ODF, the Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300), a widely used International Standard for word processing.

• Hackathons in Toulouse (France), Munich (Germany), Woerden (the Netherlands) and Bologna (Italy) involving software developers and public administrations, are providing input for the ODF Plugfest taking place in London on 8 and 9 December. The first four meetings involve developers working on the Open Document Format ODF and the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools. The ODF Plugfest brings together multiple implementers and stakeholders of this document standard. The plugfest is aimed at increasing interoperability, tests implementations and discuss new features.

Leftovers

• SOFTWARE AND DESIGN COMPANY Apple has made a change to the way it displays applications on the App Store and is no longer labelling items as Free.

• The UK is “unlikely” to meet its target for reducing immigration, Home Secretary Theresa May has said.

• EU migration has “blown us off course” from cutting net migration to the tens of thousands before the general election, Mrs May told the Andrew Marr show.

• Mrs May said Britain’s strengthening economy had continued to attract people from across Europe.

• Yesterday, Jacob (age 8) asked to help me put together a 30-year-old computer from parts in my basement. Meanwhile, Oliver (age 5) asked Laura to help him learn cursive. Somehow, this doesn’t seem odd for a Saturday at our place.

Hardware

• First off, storage performance tends to be one of the main bottlenecks in a typical PC, although the situation has vastly improved with the advent of solid state drives. (Yes, it’s probably your hard drive holding back your high-end PC from even greater glory.) Second, drive failure can lead to the loss of valuable data, and no one wants that.

Health/Nutrition

• An outbreak of the plague has killed 40 people out of 119 confirmed cases in Madagascar since late August and there is a risk of the disease spreading rapidly in the capital, the World Health Organisation has said.

• The CIA is behind rap’s obsession with drugs. Rick Ross says so. No, not the rapper, but the actual cocaine kingpin whose artist name and persona was hijacked by Rick Ross the rapper. He should know.

• “They were the guys who were behind me when I was selling drugs,” Ross said of the CIA. “And now they’re behind hip hop and rock ‘n’ roll.”

• The CIA has been documented making enormous profits from the international drug trade, including the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.

• Take the trade of opium for instance. The drug that is used to make heroin was almost nonexistent in Afghanistan before the U.S. invaded it in 2001. By 2006 the country’s opium trade had increased 3200% and was supplying 92% of the world’s supply according to www.globalresearch.ca.

• That’s right: Monsanto is making a big move into big data. At stake is an opportunity to adapt to climate change by using computer science alongside the controversial genetic science that has been the company’s signature for a generation. Data stands to benefit Monsanto’s bottom line, too: In its 2013 annual report, the company blamed lost profits on knowledge gaps about both the climate and its customers’ farming practices. And information services could even help Monsanto get its foot (and its seeds) in the door of untapped global markets from Africa to South America.

Security

• Data watchdogs across the world have drawn attention to the Russian-based site, which broadcasts footage from systems using either default passwords or no log-in codes at all.

• E-cigarettes may be better for your health than normal ones, but spare a thought for your poor computer – electronic cigarettes have become the latest vector for malicious software, according to online reports.

• Many e-cigarettes can be charged over USB, either with a special cable, or by plugging the cigarette itself directly into a USB port. That might be a USB port plugged into a wall socket or the port on a computer – but, if so, that means that a cheap e-cigarette from an untrustworthy supplier gains physical access to a device.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Still, this is a report endorsed by top Republicans that basically rebuts practically every Republican bit of hysteria over Benghazi spanning the past two years. Is it really good news judgment for editors to treat this the same way they would a dull study on the aging of America from the Brookings Institution?

• We’re going to have to go over this again: if your drills to prevent school tragedy actually leave school children traumatized, then don’t do those damned drills. What began with terrorism drills on school buses and then devolved into unannounced school-shooting drills is getting to be so full-on crazy that I sort of can’t believe that anyone thinks any of this is a good idea. The latest story involves police running an unannounced “active shooter drill” at a local middle school while classes were in session. As a part of this insane exercise, police officers went around bursting into classrooms filled with terrified students, weapons out, as they acted out their fun little thespian experience of horror. And, to add insult to injury, school officials notified parents of the drill long after unknowing students were informing their parents that an actual shooting was taking place at the school.

• Former US President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley said stated that US should provide lethal military assistance to the Ukrainian government.

• News organizations should stop reporting that “militants” were killed when they can confirm no such thing.

• But what bothered even some intelligence officials at the agency carrying out the strikes seemed of no concern whatsoever to most major media outlets. As I documented days after the Times article, most large western media outlets continued to describe completely unknown victims of U.S. drone attacks as “militants”—even though they (a) had no idea who those victims were or what they had done and (b) were well-aware by that point that the term had been “re-defined” by the Obama administration into Alice in Wonderland-level nonsense.

• A number of ideas have been put forward to mediate the amount of innocent victims. Technology philosopher Christine Boshuijzen cites technologically impaired military officials as a reason for civilian deaths. Doctoral student Dieuwertje Kuijpers calls for more democratic accountability for the CIA. Artificial intelligence professor Gustzi Eiben wants to improve drones’ face recognition and tracking software. Computer scientist Arnoud Visser claims the remedy is to fully automate the whole killing process by programming drones with algorithms governing the acceptable margins of error. These changes might very well reduce innocent deaths. Drone warfare would be far more efficient. But is efficiency really the goal?

• Washington says the targets of the drones are “terrorists,” however locals and some international agencies report that civilians are the main victims of these raids.

• The most consistent and era-defining tactic of America’s post-9/11 counterterrorism strategies has been the targeted killing of suspected terrorists and militants outside of defined battlefields. As one senior Bush administration official explained in October 2001, “The president has given the [CIA] the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations that were unthinkable pre-September 11 are now underway.” Shortly thereafter, a former CIA official told the New Yorker, “There are five hundred guys out there you have to kill.” It is quaint to recall that such a position was considered extremist and even morally unthinkable. Today, these strikes are broadly popular with the public and totally uncontroversial in Washington, both within the executive branch and on Capitol Hill. Therefore, it is easy to forget that this tactic, envisioned to be rare and used exclusively for senior al-Qaeda leaders thirteen years ago, has become a completely accepted and routine foreign policy activity.

• How the U.S. Department of Justice Makes Murder Respectable, Kills the Innocent and Jails their Defenders

• The US anti-ISIS policy only helps them recruit more people, while the only way to fight ISIS is to secure borders and re-examine immigration policies both in America and Europe, retired US Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor told RT.

• Glenn Greenwald notes the blizzard of bellicose propaganda pieces pouring from the High Media lately concerning the Peace Laureate’s latest flurry of drone killings. In story after story, headline after headline, we hear of “militants” slaughtered by the dead-eyed machinery that floats above the distant villages of the “recalcitrant tribes” who bedevil the Empire with their disobedience — or, in the case of the drone campaign, which overwhelmingly kills innocent civilians, with their mere existence.

• [...]

• That’s nice, isn’t it? Noble, worthy, honorable, isn’t it? Again, these are the mafia thug values being embraced, lauded, supported and reinforced at every turn by the most respectable figures throughout American politics and media, including of course the popular media, where TV shows and movies abound with tough guys “doing whatever it takes” to kill the dehumanized “enemy” and “keep us safe.” …

• In modern Western society, says Karen Armstrong, “the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted.” As a writer and speaker on religion, she says that she constantly hears from a wide swath of society that “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.”

• Yemeni president’s adviser Saleh Samad stated that US used the presence of al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist cells in Yemen to blackmail the government in Sanaa.

• The hostage rescue was just one chapter, albeit the most dramatic, of a little-known five-year CIA effort to shore up the pro-Western government of the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was under attack by guerrilla movements backed by China and the Soviet Union.

• A spy drone commander from Israel has admitted he had made some ‘wrong calls’ when it came to dropping bombs on targets in Gaza.

• Major Yair, one of the country’s most experienced unmanned drones commanders, said he had made mistakes but had ‘learnt to live’ with them.

• A year before he was the first pilot to ever unleash a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone in combat, airman Scott Swanson said he was at the controls of another Predator back in 2000 when a man believed to be Osama bin Laden was directly in his crosshairs.

Transparency Reporting

• Stockholm’s appeal court has rejected a demand by Julian Assange’s lawyers to lift the arrest warrant against him, leaving the WikiLeaks founder still facing extradition to Sweden should he renounce his asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.

• “In making this assessment, account must be taken of the fact that Julian Assange is suspected of crimes of a relatively serious nature,” the court said in a statement on Thursday. A Swedish prosecutor first sought Assange’s arrest four years ago following sexual assault and rape allegations, which he denies.

• A Stockholm court has upheld an arrest order for Julian Assange who is wanted for questioning over alleged sex crimes in Sweden. His lawyer has told The Local that he now plans to take the case to Sweden’s Supreme Court.

• The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated, costly police presence around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state.

• Their quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee from gross injustice whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• From 2011, Skeptical Science’s excellent Debunking Handbook, a short guide for having discussions about climate change denial that tries to signpost the common errors that advocates of the reality of anthropogenic global warming make when talking to people who disbelieve.

• Fox News provided American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Jonah Goldberg a platform to attack climate scientists as profiteers who are “financially incentivized” to advocate climate change action, without disclosing AEI’s own financial incentive to undercut action on climate change. AEI has taken over $3 million from ExxonMobil, and once offered money to scientists to write articles criticizing a UN climate change report.

Finance

• Swarmops is approaching launch. This is the back-end software that allowed the Swedish Pirate Party to beat its competition using less than one percent of their budget, but now generalized for any organization’s use – business or nonprofit. It’s also the only software in existence to do bitcoin-native automated accounting and cashflow.

• They are among the least trusted professions in the world and with good reason, according to new research. It seems people working for banks are more dishonest than employees from other sectors – though, to be fair, only when they are reminded whom they working for. The findings lend weight to arguments that the culture at the heart of the financial industry is rotten and needs to be drastically overhauled.

• Royal Bank of Scotland faces a fine of tens of millions of pounds as early as this week over the collapse of its IT systems that locked millions of customers out of their accounts for days.

• In the United States, a new kind of socialism may also be emerging. It is based on an insistence that the macro-dimensions of traditional socialism – an emphasis on ownership of the means of production and economic planning – be grounded on and interdependent with a micro-level reorganization of enterprises. Enterprises are to be democratized, ending the typical top-down hierarchical capitalist organization (major shareholders select the board of directors that hires the managers and mass of laborers and makes all the key enterprise decisions). Workers self-directed enterprises (WSDEs) would become the mass social and economic base where wealth is generated and revenues are provided to the state. Conjointly with democratically organized residential communities that are interdependent with the WSDEs, local decisions would be co-determined and all state actions held accountable. The state would facilitate economic, political and cultural coordination among WSDEs and residential communities, but the state power arising from that facilitation function would be ultimately determined by, accountable to and balanced by the economic and political power organized horizontally at the base of society.

Censorship

• Norwegian writer Mette Newth once wrote that: “censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history.” As we develop new means to gather and create information, new means to control, erase and censor that information evolve alongside it. Today that means access to information through the internet, which motivates us to study internet censorship.

• Norwegian writer Mette Newth once wrote that: “censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history.” As we develop new means to gather and create information, new means to control, erase and censor that information evolve alongside it. Today that means access to information through the internet, which motivates us to study internet censorship.

• China has blocked access to HSBC’s banking portal and possibly thousands of other websites in what appears to be a new censorship campaign days before it hosts a major internet industry conference.

• Last week, Jessica Ennis-Hill took the brave step of saying she would have her name removed from a stand at Bramall Lane if Sheffield United re-signed convicted rapist Ched Evans. The inevitable consequence was a blurt of rape threats from members of Evans’ fanbase. One prize specimen, @RickieLambert07, replied to criticism by saying: “Freedom of speech mate… I’ll say what I want when I want!” I cannot say for sure that @RickieLambert07 isn’t a lawyer but he certainly has a shaky grasp of Article 10 of the Human Rights Act.

• The Coalition’s cuts to the ABC and SBS are “ripping at the heart” of vital public institutions, federal opposition leader, Bill Shorten, says.

• He also told a Save Our ABC rally at Melbourne’s Federation Square on Sunday that Australians are rightly angered by the budget cuts in breach of Tony Abbott’s pre-election promise.

• China laid out its reasons for controlling online content at the first government-sponsored Internet conference, saying it is crucial to thwart terrorist attacks in the country.

• The senior editorial staff, myself included, reluctantly agreed to the orders, which came from the CEO, because our jobs were on the line. Media groups in Pakistan are family-owned and make all decisions unilaterally — regardless of whether they concern marketing and finance or editorial content and policy — advancing their personal agendas through the influential mainstream outlets at their disposal. A majority of the CEOs and media house owners are businessmen, with no background (or interest) in the ethics of journalism. The owners and publishers make it very clear to their newsrooms and staff — including the editor — that any tilt or gloss they proscribe is non-negotiable. As a result, serious concerns persist about violence against and the intimidation of members of the media. In fact, Pakistan ranks 158 out of 180 countries in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index.

• An Ivy League student says that America “has gone too far in allowing people to say whatever they want,” and asserts that the country needs to censor free speech.

• A Spanish company — Ares Rights — has been targeting the social media accounts of critics of the Ecuadorean government.

Privacy

• One of the many bits of technology that attracts paranoia in a post-Snowden era is random number generation, and a New Zealand developer hopes to help solve that with an all-open entropy generator.

• Just because Congress can’t even pass minimal NSA reform, it doesn’t mean that privacy is dead: American tech companies are NSA-proofing their services because customers are demanding it.

• Glenn Greenwald’s editorial in The Intercept cites Whatsapp’s integration of Textsecure’s end-to-end crypto, Apple’s move to encrypt Ios devices by default, and Google’s similar moves for Android as a counter to the farcical deference of Congress to America’s spy-services, and the absurd “debate” that Congress engages in on the subject, in which elected officials basically just repeat “ISIS” and “terrorism” and “9/11″ until they run out of time.

• A bill to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone records failed on a procedural vote in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday after senior Republicans said it would benefit enemies of the United States, including Islamic State militants.

• The NSA was one of the first organizations to describe a Bitcoin-like system. About twelve years before Satoshi Nakamoto published his legendary white paper to the Metzdowd.com cryptography mailing list, a group of NSA information security researchers published a paper entitled How to Make a Mint: the Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash in two prominent places, the first being an MIT mailing list and the second being much more prominent, The American Law Review (Vol. 46, Issue 4 ).

• Lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water spigot to the massive data center operated by the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah.

• A Utah lawmaker concerned about government spying on its citizens wants to cut the water supply to a National Security Agency data storage facility outside Salt Lake City.

• Utah lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water supply to the National Security Agency’s data collection center in Bluffdale, Utah.

• Stunned and dejected by the death of a bill to restrain National Security Agency surveillance, civil libertarian groups vowed to return to the daunting effort in the next Congress.

• On Friday, Ready for Hillary, a super PAC that has been described as “a make-work program for former Clinton hands,” and that is busy building a database of donors and volunteers that the group will eventually sell or rent to an official Clinton campaign, held an all-day meeting at the Sheraton on Fifty-third Street, in New York.

• Hoping to assuage growing fears that vehicle data won’t be abused, nineteen automakers recently got together and agreed to a set of voluntary principles they insist will protect consumer privacy in the new smart car age. Automakers promise that the principles, delivered in a letter to the FTC (pdf), require that they “implement reasonable measures” to protect collected consumer data, both now and as the industry works toward car-to-car communications. The principles “demonstrate the industry’s commitment to its customers” and “reflect a major step in protecting consumer information” insists the industry.

• The Daily Mail has revealed that people could be being watched in their own homes or at work as hackers are targeting webcams and uploading the live footage to the internet. The warning comes from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which is urging people to upgrade their passwords from the default setting.

• It’s looking like we might be on the brink of another crypto war. The first one, in the 90s, was a misguided attempt to limit the public’s access to strong, secure cryptography. And since then, the reasons we need the good security provided by strong crypto have only multiplied. That’s why EFF has joined 20 civil society organizations and companies in sending a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to “re-emphasize the importance of creating a process for establishing secure and resilient encryption standards, free from back doors or other known vulnerabilities.”

• Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “It is perfectly reasonable that powers to provide the police with the ability to match an IP address to the person using that service is investigated. However, if such a power is required, then it should be subject to the widespread consultation and comprehensive scrutiny that has been sorely lacking to date with industry, civil society and the wider public when it comes to introducing new surveillance powers.

• When the Communications Data Bill was scrapped in 2013, one of the issues that appeared to have full political consensus was the ‘resolution of IP addresses’ – particularly where mobile phone operators may have millions of customers using just a few hundred IP addresses.

• “God forbid we wake up tomorrow and [Islamic State] is in the United States,” Sen. Marco Rubio said as the USA Freedom Act, considered a “gift to terrorists” by critics, was rejected by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. Despite the fact that the mass collection of Americans’ phone data that the bill attempted to restrict has likely not prevented a single terrorist attack, somehow terrorism is still being used as a justification for the National Security Agency’s violation of U.S. citizens’ privacy rights.

• The National Security Agency (NSA) has destroyed the right to be let alone —the most cherished right among civilized people.

• Civil liberties advocates who usually view Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as an ally are frustrated with his vote Tuesday against an intelligence reform bill.

• Paul voted against a procedural motion for the USA Freedom Act, which would have enacted the most sweeping changes to American intelligence agencies in more than a decade, on the grounds that it reauthorized some portions of the Patriot Act.

• The world lives in fear of zero-day exploits although the average person does not even know it. A zero-day exploit is a bug or a flaw that has not been discovered by the developers yet, but is known to someone outside. This can be good guys, bad guys or other, but it is still a flaw that can be used to do harm to a computer system and no one has a patch for it yet. When the good guys (security researchers) know about them they work with companies to patch them. When the bad guys know about these things get very ugly indeed. But what happens if someone knows about one (or a bunch of them) and does not tell anyone at all?

• No single issue has caused greater damage to the trust between the United States and its allies than the sweeping revelations of the National Security Agency’s global surveillance programs. This story continues to fuel the perception that we no longer care to uphold our values at home or abroad. Our credibility has suffered by failing to sufficiently justify our actions even to ourselves. It is finally time to undo the damage.

• Recent presidential and congressional measures concerning espionage and data privacy have the potential to bolster our credibility, counter these misperceptions and restore trust with our allies. Congress failed to vote on the USA Freedom Act last week, but the bill itself demonstrates our resolve to protect the privacy of all U.S. citizens and end bulk data collection. The NSA is also taking unprecedented steps to protect the rights of those at home and abroad. It is imperative that we explain and advance these evolving norms, particularly with our allies across the Atlantic.

• In 2009, a major debate was going on behind the scenes at the NSA. A number of officials, including an unnamed top member of the agency, were warning that if the truth about their mass surveillance went public, it could cause a major backlash.

• The Senate charade this week allowing the National Security Agency to continue spying on Americans’ phone records would be laughable if it didn’t have such dangerous implications for both the tech industry and consumer privacy.

• It has been a week since the lame duck Congress reconvened in Washington, and two major bills have already seen defeat.

• Senate Republicans flexed their muscles Tuesday, voting not to advance the USA Freedom Act, which would have scaled back the reach of surveillance by the National Security Agency and the FBI.

• Darktrace, a cybersecurity company comprised of ex-spooks from NSA and GCHQ, has revealed details of its new behavioural analytics software.

• The worst, most specious, most dishonest piece of poorly constructed propaganda in this particular bill’s debate, though, came in the form of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by twin terror titans Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey entitled—prepare yourself for this—”NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love.” How indicative of the sober, journalistic quality of discussion surrounding this issue!

• Alongside the disturbing revelations of indiscriminate, global surveillance carried out by the NSA and its Five Eyes friends, leaked documents have shown another side of modern spying: the high-tech gadgets created for the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations group, discussed by Techdirt at the end of last year. As its name suggests, these are targeted operations, and with many of the serious concerns about the use of blanket surveillance removed, it is hard not to be impressed by the ingenuity of the devices. Of course, a natural question is: could the rest of us have them too? According to a detailed and fascinating article in Vice’s Motherboard, the answer turns out to be “yes”.

• After the defeat of NSA reform in the Senate Tuesday, expectation for a change in government surveillance powers shifted to next year when the PATRIOT Act expires, taking bulk spying authority with it unless the Obama administration exploits a legal loophole that could expand the collection of Americans’ phone records far into the future.

• “Data handshakes,” call records, and the NSA’s back door into telecom companies reveal that the Senate’s plan to protect Americans’ privacy would have done no such thing.

• What happened on the Senate floor On Tuesday night is what often happens on the Senate floor: Senate surveillance hawks rounded up just enough votes to procedurally kill a bill that should have been brought up under a genuinely open process. As my Cato colleague Julian Sanchez noted, the bill–if it had been enacted in its current form–really wouldn’t have changed much as far as how the National Security Agency (NSA) operates its signals intelligence (SIGINT) programs. Therein lies both the problem and the opportunity.

• Have you complained about Uber? Ever done anything shady? Then there’s a good chance that an Uber executive thinks it’s a good idea to go after you and your family, with “fair game” practices straight out of the Scientology playbook.

• A recently declassified NSA house magazine, CryptoLog, reveals some interesting attitudes between the redactions. What is the NSA take on cryptography?

• The fact that a 1994 issue of CryptoLog, an NSA internal newsletter, existed as a declassified document has come to light. Intially it reached the attnetion of specialists Shtetl-Optimized, the blog of everyone’s favourite quantum computer expert, Scott Aaronson. But it is too good not to publicise more widely.

• Dissenters within the National Security Agency, led by a senior agency executive, warned in 2009 that the program to secretly collect American phone records wasn’t providing enough intelligence to justify the backlash it would cause if revealed, current and former intelligence officials say.

• The NSA took the concerns seriously, and many senior officials shared them. But after an internal debate that has not been previously reported, NSA leaders, White House officials and key lawmakers opted to continue the collection and storage of American calling records, a domestic surveillance program without parallel in the agency’s recent history.

• The NSA’s snooping programs aren’t just controversial to the public, it seems: we’re reminded other staff at the US agency also objected to prying into Americans’ phone records.

• Snowden haters may have blocked the USA Freedom Act, but the clock is ticking before the law that justifies vacuuming your phone records blows up in the face of newly conservative Washington

• A new study finds that a vast majority of Americans trust neither the government nor tech companies with their personal data.

• Stingray docs unsealed by North Carolina judge could prompt wave of new appeals.

Civil Rights

• A newly surfaced video shot on Thursday evening around 8 p.m. depicts a horrible case of police brutality. When 20-year-old Donovan Lawson allegedly attempted to jump over a Brooklyn subway turnstile (a practice called fare-beating, which is, while illegal, fairly common in New York City), he was approached by a police officer who asked him for identification.

• When Lawson refused to show his ID, the cop attempted to put him in handcuffs. Lawson resisted that as well, and the cop responded by hitting him repeatedly with a nightstick. According to the man who shot the video, the officer also sprayed Lawson with pepper spray (before he began filming).

• Police have made 11 arrests after thousands of students marched through London protesting against education cuts, tuition fees and student debt.

• Warren and Paul may point toward a better political future. But a doomed anti-Hillary crusade won’t save democracy

• A fifth grade student in Milford was suspended because according to school officials he made his hand into the shape of a gun and pointed it at other students.

• However, Hayden’s assertion that the CIA obtained important information through its interrogations is reportedly at odds with the findings of the torture report. According to leaks, the report is believed to be highly critical of the agency, stating that no significant counter-terror information was gained through its techniques. It is also believed that the report states the CIA claimed greater, more beneficial results than the evidence supports.

• “CIA may revamp how it is organized” announced a front-page Washington Post headline leading into an article based on remarks by unnamed “U.S intelligence officials” to the Post’s Greg Miller. The anonymous officials were authorized to share some of the contents of a Sept. 24 letter from CIA Director John Brennan to CIA staff, in which Brennan says, “The time has come to take a fresh look at how we are organized as an agency.”

• The CIA wants to erase tens of thousands of internal emails sent by most covert and counterterror officers after they leave the agency, leading US senators and transparency advocates to fear the plan would mean the loss of vital government records.

• A CIA plan to erase tens of thousands of its internal emails — including those sent by virtually all covert and counterterrorism officers after they leave the agency — is drawing fire from Senate Intelligence Committee members concerned that it would wipe out key records of some of the agency’s most controversial operations.

• Members of Intelligence Committee say White House is stalling release of torture report as high-level disagreement over what American people can know about abuses by CIA reaches boiling point; Transparency advocates tell lawmakers with access to report, ‘Just read it into the record.’

• CIA Director John Brennan and top agency officers are considering organizational restructuring that could mesh long-separate spying and analysis divisions into hybrid units tasked with following individual regions and US security threats.

• You want a serious congressional shitstorm-haboob-tsunami-twister-hurricane? This would be it. The folks at Bill Moyers’s shop sent this along today, and you may recall that we discussed the possibility of Udall’s doing this very thing a week or so ago.

• On the floor of House of Representatives on November 17, Virginia Democratic Representative Jim Moran put forward a stinging rebuke of the “selective prosecution” of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou. He asked President Barack Obama to pardon Kiriakou and called the fifteen-year CIA veteran “an American hero.”

• Kiriakou was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under President George W. Bush’s administration. He was convicted in October 2012 after he pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA). He was sentenced to two and a half years in jail in January 2013, and reported to Federal Correctional Institution Loretto in Pennsylvania on February 28, 2013, where he has been serving his sentence. (Firedoglake has been publishing Kiriakou’s letters from prison written as “Letters from Loretto”.)

• Israeli mercenary Yair Klein, convicted in Colombia of training paramilitary forces, has claimed he was contracted by the CIA to train Colombians for a coup d’etat in Panama, according the El Espectador newspaper.

• Klein, who was tried in absentia in 2001 and sentenced to ten years for providing military training to paramilitary group AUC, claims that the CIA hired him to train Colombians on the Caribbean island of Antigua in the 1980s to overthrow the Panamanian government.

• Police in Seattle are just weeks away from implementing pilot program in which 12 officers will test different types of body cameras. It’s a first step in a plan to put body cameras on the department’s more than 1,000 officers by the year 2016.

• Former CIA Director Michael Hayden claims that the US public should consider all sides of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on enhanced interrogation techniques, before coming to conclusions about the program.

• Before White House chief of staff Denis McDonough came to brief Senate Democrats on Thursday afternoon, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had a little pep talk with his flock. Every Tuesday, during the weekly caucus lunches, he said, you all gripe and moan about the White House. But then when the White House comes by, there’s never a peep.

• Negotiations between the Obama administration and the Senate over how much of the upper chamber’s CIA torture report can be released have hit a major snag, less than a day after the talks appeared to be wrapping up.

• Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee pressed White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on Thursday to allow pseudonyms to be released in a summary of a panel report on CIA interrogation abuses.

• “The report would be a pseudo report if we didn’t allow the pseudonyms,” said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., who is on the panel.

• Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein expects her panel’s long-delayed report on the CIA’s use of torture to be released before Republicans take over the chamber, signaling to reporters there’s one sticking point left.

• Malcolm X was probably closer to the mark than he realized when he commented on the assassination that ‘the chickens had come home to roost’. He was referring to the climate of hate in the US at the time. Actually, it is Kennedy policy in Cuba which is most pertinent. Kennedy inherited the Cuban Project from the Eisenhower-Nixon administration. The young and inexperienced President only agreed reluctantly, at the last minute, to go ahead with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which ended in the failed coup to overthrow Castro. Publicly, Kennedy accepted responsibility but privately blamed the CIA for misleading him. The CIA conversely blamed JFK for withholding air cover critical to the success of the operation.

• Many of the same CIA operatives – among them David Attlee Phillips, E Howard Hunt and David Sanchez Morales – had successfully instituted regime change elsewhere. The trio were all veterans of the Guatemala campaign of 1954. This saw a CIA-backed operation remove the democratically elected leftist leader Jacobo Árbenz, leading to 40 years of brutal military dictatorship and the estimated deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans. Similarly, in Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown with the aid of US and British intelligence after he had nationalized Iranian oil.

• A rookie cop working the most dangerous beat in the city killed a man in an unlit housing-project stairwell in Brooklyn — firing off an “accidental” shot that hit a young father in the chest, authorities said Friday.

• The security services are facing questions over the cover-up of a Westminster paedophile ring as it emerged that files relating to official requests for media blackouts in the early 1980s were destroyed.

• Two newspaper executives have told the Observer that their publications were issued with D-notices – warnings not to publish intelligence that might damage national security – when they sought to report on allegations of a powerful group of men engaging in child sex abuse in 1984. One executive said he had been accosted in his office by 15 uniformed and two non-uniformed police over a dossier on Westminster paedophiles passed to him by the former Labour cabinet minister Barbara Castle.

• The other said that his newspaper had received a D-notice when a reporter sought to write about a police investigation into Elm Guest House, in southwest London, where a group of high-profile paedophiles was said to have operated and may have killed a child. Now it has emerged that these claims are impossible to verify or discount because the D-notice archives for that period “are not complete”.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The comparison, so stupid on so many levels that it isn’t worth debunking, is not just an isolated example of partisan idiocy. In recent weeks, Republican operatives have trotted out a steaming heap of similar malarkey in an effort to ward off a popular revolt against the cable industry, which wants to charge big companies such as Google or Netflix for faster internet service while slowing it down for the rest of us. Here are four other ludicrous conservative arguments for why the Federal Communications Commission shouldn’t prevent this from happening:

• U.S. communications regulators are expected to vote Dec. 11 on whether to boost funding for the largest U.S. educational technology subsidy program, E-Rate, by 62 percent to help connect more schools and libraries to high-speed Internet.

• European Union governments are considering less stringent rules on how internet service providers manage traffic on their networks, according to a draft seen by Reuters, a move that could be welcomed by Europe’s large telecoms operators.

• On 14 November 2014, the Italian Presidency presented amendments to the Telecommunications package for comment by the Member State delegations. We are hereby making the document and its annexes publicly available (Note and addendum). These documents show that the Italian Presidency is now back-pedalling on meaningful net neutrality protections – having previously made some much more meaningful and positive suggestions. It presented a “principles-based approach” to the Member States “in order not to inhibit innovation and to avoid” having an outdated regulation in the future. In reality, all the text would do is add confusion for freedom of communication and online innovation.

Intellectual Monopolies

• If you missed our live teach-in yesterday on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and its restrictive, anti-user provisions, you can still check out the video of our discussion. It’s embedded below. We invited experts from digital rights groups from several TPP countries—all members of the Fair Deal Coalition—and we discussed the various ways this massive, secret trade deal threatens our rights on the Internet and over our digital devices.

• The problem of data flows, and why CETA’s ISDS is a disaster

Copyrights

• The fundamental problem that “traditional media” is having is that its business was structured around expensive, resource-intensive undertakings and paying large dividends to investors. Newspapers bought purpose-built buildings in central New York and Tokyo; radio networks took over enormous towers next door to them; record labels built multimillion-dollar studios and employed titanic numbers of administrators, talent scouts, managers, and so forth.

• The net makes it possible to do things more cheaply. For one thing, the actual production costs for media have fallen drastically. It’s not easy to do professional typesetting, but if you know how to do it, you can make it happen with the computer under your arm, and you can pocket the difference between the cost of a computer you already own and the cost of a huge typesetting shop full of specialized equipment that cost a million dollars twenty years ago. The hyperexpensive shots that George Lucas stuck into “Star Wars” in 1977 can be rendered cheerfully and without complaint by a used PC that your local high school is throwing away. That doesn’t mean you, personally, know how to make it produce something as cool or lucrative as Lucas did, of course—but if you can, you have a lot more options than Lucas did back then for making money from it, because the cost is so low.

• On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice told a Virginia federal judge that Kim Dotcom and cohorts have no business challenging the seizure of an estimated $67 million in assets because the Megaupload founder is evading prosecution.

• The U.S. Government is trying to get its hands on the assets of Kim Dotcom and his fellow defendants through a civil lawsuit, with the DoJ branding them fugitives and asking the court to dismiss their claims . The new filing further reveals that law enforcement continued to tap conversations of some defendants months after the raids.

• This week the Center for Copyright Information released a new external review of its evidence gathering procedures. Overall the six-strikes Copyright Alert System gets a positive evaluation. However, more can be done to prevent false positives and protect the collected evidence from internal threats such as rogue employees.

• Swedish authorities say a case they are preparing against a so-called piracy ‘scene’ member will be their biggest prosecution to date. The man is accused of infringing copyright on more than 2,200 mainly Hollywood movies, with each carrying potential damages of up to $2.69m per movie.

• New data published by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that BitTorrent can be credited for one-third of all Internet traffic in the Asia-Pacific region during peak hours. That’s an increase of more than 50% compared to the previous year.

• The Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies has launched a new lawsuit targeting Chrysler for allowing car owners to rip CDs without paying royalties. The lawsuit follows a similar class action suit against Ford and General Motors, which is still ongoing.

• In a case before the High Court, UK ISPs have raised concerns that ‘innocent’ sites might be taken offline due to them sharing IP addresses with other sites detailed in blocking orders. While sites will get a chance to complain, those operating illegally will get no sympathy from the High Court.

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