● 01.10.15

● Links 10/1/2015: Mirantis OpenStack 6.0, Linux Mint 17.1 KDE, Linux Leap Second

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Two years ago, TrackingPoint made a major stir at CES with its Precision-Guided Firearm, or “Linux gun.” The weapon integrated a smart scope that displayed weather conditions, wind speeds, and other target information, and only fired the gun when the crosshairs were lined up properly on the target. Fast-forward to today, and the companyhas unveiled another milestone. It’s new Mile Maker is a custom weapon that’s capable of firing a round up to 1800 yards at a target moving at up to 30 miles per hour.

• Sony may have started a revolution with Walkman, prior to the Apple days when revolution was not the most overused adjective. However the device witnessed mass extinction upon the arrival of the mighty iPod. Sony has been trying hard to revive the brand with new and smarter Walkmans.

• At CES Sony announced ZX2 which is targeted at really high-end audiophiles. What got my attention is the fact that the device is powered by the Linux-based Android operating system.

• Microsoft has finally embraced Linux — with a bit of passion. Jack Wallen reports why he believes the makers of Windows have finally come around to sidling up to the open-source platform.

• The latest copy of North Korea’s in-house Red Star Linux has leaked to the internet and it looks a lot like OS X, computer science graduate Will Scott says.

• An unnamed source contacted Scott ahead of his talk on Red Star and North Korea computing at the Chaos Communications Congress last month and shortly after published the distro online.

• It’s that time again! We’ve already made issue 1 freely available, and now we’re releasing issue 2 of Linux Voice under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. So you can modify and share all content from the magazine (apart from adverts), even for commercial purposes, providing you credit Linux Voice as the original source, and retain the same license.

Kernel Space

• The leap second is the rare and obscure practice of occasionally adding a second to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) system that most of us use to set our watches. It’s necessary, but not exactly computer friendly. In 2012 it crashed websites such as Reddit and Yelp and snarled up airline departures in Australia, so you’d think most computer experts would really hate them. After all, we have perfectly accurate timekeeping systems, such as the one used by GPS, that don’t futz with leap seconds.

• Two larger publications today featured Linux and the effect of the upcoming leap second. The Register today said that the leap second effects of the past are no longer an issue. Coincidently, Wired talked to Linus Torvalds about the same issue today as well.

• There’s a reason space missions don’t launch on the day a leap second is added to international clocks.

• Scientists don’t want to run the risk that the computer systems running things might hiccup on the new time and then malfunction, sending their multi-million dollar lifetime’s investment into a fatal nose dive.

• Drones, the Internet of Things (IoT) and software-defined networking (SDN) are all on the agenda for the Linux Foundation’s upcoming Collaboration Summit, which will help set the tone for open source development in the new year. Read on for a look at the highlights of the event.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has released four new stable kernels: 3.10.64, 3.14.28, 3.17.8, and 3.18.2. Each contains important updates and fixes. The 3.17.8 release is also noteworthy because it will be the last release in the 3.17 series. 3.17 users need to move to the 3.18 series as soon as possible.

• Former Red Hat employee Dave Jones has provided some closure to that Linux 3.18 kernel bug that was initially viewed as a “worrisome regression” and turned out to be very difficult to track with no official fix within the mainline Linux kernel.

• The bug wasn’t fixed for Linux 3.18 final but various other bugs / potentially bad code was cleaned-up in the process of tracking down and isolating this lock-up issue that Dave Jones first reported on one of his systems. The bug went unresolved and at the end of December is when Dave Jones left Red Hat and had to return his hardware — including the affected system.

Benchmarks

• This comparison is similar to the three-way NVIDIA GeForce graphics card comparison from Monday but just testing the Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 graphics cards while running the latest binary drivers on Windows and Linux. As with the other end-of-2014 Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, Windows 7 Pro x64 with all available system updates was used and on the Linux side was Ubuntu 14.10. The latest NVIDIA Linux driver is the 346.22 driver version while the latest Windows version at the time of testing was the 347.09 driver release.

Applications

• The Blender Foundation, the developer of Blender, an integrated 3D creation software suite, has just announced that a new version of the application, 2.73, has been released and it’s packed with a lot of interesting new features.

• Variety is a wallpaper changer app for Linux and it can be used in a number of ways, including to download new wallpapers from online sources. A new versions has recently been released and it’s actually a very interesting application to test and to have.

• I was never a huge believer in the so-called distraction-free writing environment. These are text editors or word processors that only show text, with limited formatting and configuration options. The idea behind these tools is that you should focus on your writing and not on tweaking kerning or changing fonts. That’s not a huge issue for me, especially since I try and write in gedit or MarkdownPad as much as possible. However, a few weeks ago I was working from a library on my Asus. I needed an actual word processor and the Asus had AbiWord installed but not LibreOffice. The WiFi wasn’t super strong and I knew LibreOffice could wind up taking weeks to download, so on a whim (and trying to avoid writing), I Googled around for distraction-free text editors for Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.34 is now available.

• Wine development team was able to produce a new experimental release today. 1.7.34 bringing many new features and as many as 63 bugfixes.

Games

• Ride your music. Use your own music to create your own experience on a roller-coaster-like track. The shape, the speed, and the mood of each ride is determined by the song you choose. We take a look at the new Linux release.

• Warhammer Quest is a new mix of strategy and RPG action based on the tabletop board-game. It comes with Linux support, but sadly the reception so far isn’t the best.

• If you are searching for a new adventure experience, look no further. Warhammer Quest, the great mobile title, has found a new home on Steam today for PC, Mac and Linux users.

• Although the point and click adventure genre doesn’t get as much love as it once used to, it has seen a renaissance as of late. Games like Jazzpunk and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter have done well to bring point-and-clicks to the forefront, but it’s really Double Fine’s Broken Age that has garnered most of the attention.

• Valve has been talking about their Steam OS platform since 2013, we discussed it at length here. At CES 2014, it was the talk of the town, with many OEMs promising to release Steam Machines (defined as gaming PCs designed for living room use running Steam OS and utilizing the as yet unreleased Steam Controller) within the coming months after CES.

• If you missed Dev Days last year, know Valve posted video presentations from the conference online a month after the event that include talks featuring notable Valve and non-Valve developers like Oculus VR’s Michael Abrash, Klei Entertainment’s Jamie Cheng and Dejobaan Games’ Ichiro Lambe.

• Valve has once again released a statement concerning its planned presentations at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015 event in March, now confirming that the Steam Machines will be “front and center.”

• Valve has released a new update for the Linux-based SteamOS operating system and they have added a number of packages that were requested by the community, among other changes and improvements.

• GOG.com has attempted to explain why RAR archives inside installers for its games were password protected and also revealed that it would remove them. GOG.com made its statement today following complaints from Linux users who discovered that the innoextract tool could no longer handle the archives. Some saw this as a form of digital rights management, which is a dirty word around GOG.com (the company takes pride in the fact that it offers DRM-free content to its customers).

• GOG has announced that it will remove password-protected RAR archives located inside some of its game installers. The move comes in response to complaints from Linux users who discovered that the innoextract tool could no longer handle the archives, which some of them equated to a form of DRM.

• Wadjet Eye Games have announced Technobabylon, a point-and-click, cyberpunk adventure. And according to bluesnews it will be available for Linux after the Windows release.

• Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders is a reasonable looking air combat sim that has recently released for Linux, so we decided to take a look and see how many times we get fragged.

• X Rebirth, a space-trading and space combat game developed by Egosoft, will be getting a Linux released soon, although it’s not yet clear when that will happen.

• Planetary Annihilation is an RTS developed and published by Uber Entertainment on Steam and now the Linux players can buy it with a ridiculous 80% price cut set to expire on January 12.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Frameworks 5.6.0 has been announced by the KDE Community, and as usual, it lands with a ton of improvements that should make this a very interesting release.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• With this release I’ve now moved the source to git.gnome.org and will do future releases to ftp.gnome.org like all the other GNOME modules. If you see something obviously broken and you have GNOME commit access, please just jump in and fix it. The translators have done a wonderful job using transifex, but now I’m leaving the just-as-awesome GNOME translator teams handle localisation.

• I’m a long time contributor to Free Software. In particular GNOME. I’ve also contributed to projects such as Mono and more recently MongoDB. I’ve been writing software on GNU/Linux for more than half of my life. I’ve never been particularly happy with the status quo.

• When you do a search in GNOME Software it returns any result of any application with AppStream metadata and with a package name it can resolve in any remote repository. This works really well for software you’re installing from the main distribution repos, but less well for some other common cases.

• I would like to try getting started contributing to GNOME Apps. I want to try using Builder and I want try GNOME Developer Center. In the process I’ll take note of my experience and make observations. If there are other ways you think I can contribute at this hackfest, do come with suggestions.

Distributions

• North Korea is a technological island in many ways. Almost all of the country’s “Internet” is run as a private network, with all connections to the greater global Internet through a collection of proxies. And the majority of the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea who have access to that network rely on the country’s official operating system: a Linux variant called Red Star OS.

• 4MPlayer is a very interesting Linux distribution that has only one particular function, to become a player for your CD / DVD drive. It might not seem like much, but there isn’t anything actually quite like it.

Reviews

• Well, here we are. Zorin OS 9 is a nice distribution. It’s visually pleasing, it comes with lots of goodies out of the box, and it is newb friendly. Perhaps some people dislike its image, or the fact it’s trying a little too hard, or that you can choose between free and premium option, like Mandriva used to do, and this has never sat well with the community.

• But if we ignore the gimmicks and marketing, as a product, Zorin OS is a balanced, aesthetic distribution that caters to a wide range of users. Old bugs have been fixed, there are no new outstanding problems, and you have the needed functionality and software to enjoy yourself from the start. I’d try to downplay the focus on mobile a bit further, but overall, it’s looking good. I like this one. 9.41/10. Not bad at all.

New Releases

• Alpine Linux, a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and Busybox, which make up the terminal, has just been updated by its developers and it now sits at version 3.1.1.

• Linux Mint 17.1 drew mostly rave reviews when the Cinnamon and MATE versions were released. Now the KDE version of Linux Mint 17.1 is available to download.

• The year 2014 proved wonderful for Linux; however, it was not the fabled ‘Year of the Linux Desktop”. Quite frankly, that year may never come, but that is OK. The open-source kernel is dominating the mobile space with Android, and that is arguably more important anyway.

• Linux Mint in particular shone brightly last year, with wonderful releases and updates. Today, the distribution is continuing that trend in 2015 with the all-new Linux Mint 17.1 ‘Rebecca’ KDE Edition. If you are a fan of KDE, your time is now — get downloading!

Arch Family

• Today’s cornucopia of Linux news includes the release of Mint 17.1 KDE. Jamie Watson is back with a review of Manjaro Linux 0.8.11 and Bruce Byfield looks at “coming attractions for 2015.” Debian got some iron from Marvell and Ryan Lerch announced Fedora 19 end of support.

• The Manjaro Linux developers have released a new update pack for the 0.8.11 branch of the operating system and they have implemented a number of important updates just days after a previous major upgrade.

Ballnux/SUSE

• As Linux distributions rapidly become more cloud compatible, network configurations gain complexity and flexibility. SUSE introduced the wicked network management tool to handle cloud and cloud-ready networking.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) : Volatility spiked in the counter of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) but the bulls managed to end the day with appreciating gains. The share price opened at $69.16 and hit an intraday high of $70.28; however, hefty profit booking made the counter give up most of its gains and the shares ended the day positively at $69.03, with a gain of 0.33% or 0.23 points. The shares had previously closed at $68.8. The heightened volatility saw the trading volume jump to 2,634,863 shares. The 52-week high of the share price is $71.77 and the company has a market cap of $12,965 million.

Fedora

• When Fedora 21 finally hit release last month, I was excited and ready to go. By the end of the day, I had every desktop machine I own up and running on the new version, and I was enjoying playing with the latest version of some of my favorite open source software which was packaged inside. But what next?

• The desktop edition of Fedora 21 was just one of three “flavors” of Fedora. What do the other two hold, and what do they mean for Fedora outside of the workstation?

• As of this Tuesday, 6th January 2015 there will be no more updates provided for Fedora 19 (aka End Of Life). This includes all security, bugfix and enhancement updates, so it is highly recommended to upgrade your Fedora installations to one of the versions of Fedora that the Fedora Community is still providing updates for (Fedora 20 or Fedora 21)

• Right now Fedora allows for SSH log-ins as root, which is the default behavior as currently shipped by sshd. However, for Fedora 22 there is a proposal that the packaged sshd will default the option of PermitRootLogin to no so that root log-ins wouldn’t be permitted into Fedora SSH servers. This change is being proposed to try to avoid brute-force attacks against root passwords of Fedora servers.

• At yesterday’s Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, the release schedule for Fedora 22 was firmed up.

• With the shiny new Fedora 21 Cloud Atomic Host released, we needed a way to continuously update the OSTree during the Fedora updates process. The rawhide & branched nightly tree composes are triggered by cron jobs, but we needed to somehow tie it into the Bodhi push process for F21.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is just one of the many official Ubuntu flavors and its developers have been working to implement the latest version of GNOME 3.14.

• Canonical has published details in a security notice about an NSS vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems. This problem has been corrected and an update has been issued.

• Details about a cgmanager vulnerability in its Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating systems have been revealed by Canonical. This is not a serious issue, but users should upgrade their systems as soon as possible.

• The first event I’m anticipating is the release of the first Ubuntu phone. What interests me is not so much the technology — although I wouldn’t mind tinkering with it — as the fact that the phone is rapidly becoming a test of Canonical Software’s credibility. Canonical has put most of its attention in the last two Ubuntu releases on developing a single desktop for all devices, but has been so over-optimistic but release dates that it is getting a reputation for vaporware. After several delays, people are even wondering if an Ubuntu phone will ever be released.

• Lightworks and Canonical have teamed up and they are looking for people who use the application suite for their projects. Those sending their work will be getting voucher codes for Lightworks Pro.

Devices/Embedded

• Energous demoed a Linux-based “WattUp” device that uses WiFi-like beam forming technology to wirelessly charge compatible mobile devices at up to 15 feet.

• Energous received a lot attention for its WattUp long-distance wireless charging hub at this week’s CES show in Las Vegas. Now, a rep from the startup has confirmed to LinuxGizmos our suspicions that the device runs an embedded Linux OS.

• PC Partner has introduced a small form-factor computer with a fanless case that measures 5″ x 5″ x 1.8″. It’s called the N2581N1-F, it supports Linux, and it doesn’t have an Intel or AMD processor.

• GE and FirstBuild announced a “ChillHub” fridge with Linux-based WiFi and USB connectivity, and an SDK for community-designed, 3D-printable accessories.

• We’ve seen some high-tech refrigerators and washing machines over the years including a Tizen-based Samsung fridge that did not seem to make the trip to CES this year. As with Dacor’s Android-based Discovery iQ oven shown this week at CES, the high-tech functionality typically centers around touchscreen interfaces that make it easier to master the advanced settings found on the latest consumer electronics.

• One of my Raspberry Pi’s would not boot up after a reboot. The SD card was corrupted, sadly beyond repair. This article walks you through the steps I took to try to fix the SD card, including fsck, badblocks and other filesystem utilities. It also has tips to reduce the writing on the Raspberry Pi, this to save SD cards from some amount of wear and thus possible corruption.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung has been spoiling us with their Tizen based Smart watches of late, and all of them have been sporting a square face, well that is upto now, as Sammobile reports that there is a Round face Tizen based Smart watch in the works. The upcoming Smart watch has the codename ‘Orbis’ and a model number SM-R720. Orbis does sound a bit orbital / round to me.

• Tizen Common is a baseline Operating system that other profile / devices can be targeted off like mobile, wearable , IVI (In-Vehicle-Infortainment). Leon Anavi has been working on porting Tizen Common 3.0 to the Firefly-RK3288 development board.

Android

• Earlier this year, a company called Blocks Wearables announced intentions to build its own modular smartwatch called Blocks. Here at CES, the company is showing off some very early prototypes and mock-ups of what Blocks might eventually look like and how it could work.

• Blocks Wearables was exhibiting at Intel’s massive booth on the CES show floor as one of the participants in the company’s “Make it Wearable” competition — and while we couldn’t actually get a sense for what using the Block will be like, we did get a good idea of how the whole modular smartwatch concept could play out.

• Android TV, in case you’ve had your ears plugged lately, is Google’s latest effort at getting its software into your home entertainment setup. At CES this week, Google announced that Sony, Sharp, and Philips all had Android TV-powered televisions in the works for this spring. A set-top Android TV gaming console is supposed to launch next month, meanwhile, and at least one standalone streaming media player is scheduled to arrive later this year.

• Google’s Android TV ambitions are big. Google doesn’t just want you using the Nexus Player or other Android TV devices as a glorified Chromecast, streaming content from your phone (though you can certainly do that). It wants to build a big ecosystem of apps and games on your TV.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source code security has been in the spotlight since the Heartbleed bug infected the Canada Revenue Agency website last year. Found embedded in OpenSSL, one of the Web’s most common security systems, Heartbleed sent public-sector IT personnel scrambling to test their agencies’ websites to make sure they were clean and protected.

• Google was the biggest supporter of open-source organizations by our count, appearing on the sponsor lists of eight of the 36 groups we analyzed. Four companies – Canonical, SUSE, HP and VMware – supported five groups each, and seven others supported four. (Nokia, Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Dell, Intel and NEC.) For its part, Red Hat supports three groups – the Linux Foundation, Creative Commons and the Open Virtualization Alliance.

• Last year Apigee created an Apigee 127 open source project to make production-grade APIs using Node.js and Swagger documentation tools a whole lot easier to develop. In 2015, Jeff West, a product manager for Apigee, says the company plans to extend the reach of that project to include Java and, by extension, a wider range of platforms in and out of the cloud.

• The Matchstick is a small device that you can plug into your TV to play videos, stream internet content, or run apps… all while using your phones, tablet, or other device as a controller.

• The StreamFlow software launched on hosting service GitHub and is designed to work with the Apache Storm open source computation system, Lockheed said Thursday.

Events

• Join EFF at the premier Free and Open Source Software conference in Southern California! Stop by our booth in the expo to learn about the latest in the online freedom movement. You can even donate to get some great swag or become an official member at special reduced levels while you’re there! There has never been a more important time to ensure that our rights have a defender. We hope to see you there.

• At PyCon, after the main conference, the next four days many developers and contributors sit together in different rooms. They work on their projects, they submit patches to other projects. Lots of discussions happen over lunch, or in the corridors.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The Google Chrome browser sits now at version 40.0.2214.69 and that might look like a weird number, but Google is showing no sign that it intends to modify the versioning policy. It’s been quite a while since the previous update for the browser was released and it looks like things are back on track.

Mozilla

• Mozilla recently switched the default search engine in its Firefox browser to Yahoo from Google, and it appears that the switch may have caused a significant drop in Google’s share of search users. Google’s share of the US search market fell about four percent from last year, according to a story by Bloomberg.

• Today, we’re excited to release the alpha version of Rust 1.0, a systems programming language with a focus on safety, performance and concurrency.

• Firefox’s jump from Web browser to smartphone platform in the form of Firefox OS was surprising enough. But soon, Mozilla’s open source, Linux-based operating system will be powering TVs as well, Panasonic announced at CES 2015.

SaaS/Big Data

• Mirantis today released its OpenStack 6.0 cloud platform, providing new capabilities for cloud server administrators to rapidly deploy clouds with new services. Among the key enhancements are improvements to Mirantis’ Fuel system for plugin deployment.

• Plugins for cloud automation are the headline feature in Mirantis OpenStack 6.0, the latest version of flagship platform from “pure-play” OpenStack vendor Mirantis, which debuted Jan. 8.

Databases

• MongoDB took the number one spot, as it has before, and Redis, used for managing data, and Elasticsearch, which helps developers build their own search engines, are runners up. If you think the Big Data trend begins and ends with Hadoop, think again.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• With the beginning of 2015, a new year packed with exciting projects and ideas around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, we continue our behind-the-scenes series, to share achievements in 2014 with our community and our generous donours, to whom we’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and thanks for their incredible and wonderful support and their invaluable contributions!

Funding

• GraphLab, a provider of analytics software based on open source code, is changing its name to Dato as it aims to tackle the growing demand for predictive applications that can leverage machine learning.

BSD

• DragonFly 4.0.2 has been tagged. I’m building the release images now. If you’re already running 4.0.1 it’ll be easy enough to upgrade to; you will want to catch up to this commit fixing a quiet memory issue.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The most important feature instead is DataBasin ability to parse the SOQL query and thus rearrange the output fields in CSV files not as Salesforce returns them but as the user requested them. The same feature allows related objects (. notation) to be null and retain the correct columns in the CSV file.

• We want you to be able share our new video, User Lib, with your friends, family and colleagues no matter what language they speak. Since we released our new animated video introducing the concept and importance of free software, requests for subtitles and offers to translate have poured in.

Project Releases

• Following the in-fighting over the future of Compiz that happened back in November, Scott Moreau has proclaimed the release this week of Compiz v0.8.10.

• Scott previously declared himself the maintainer of Compiz 0.8 while other developers have been working on their own Compiz 0.8 based code. Compiz 0.8 is preferred by some over the newer Compiz 0.9 code used in Ubuntu as it has more features and the stability should be comparable. Compiz 0.9 was the rewrite in C++ that brought a new API and many other changes.

• It took a bit of setup and cook time but compiz 0.8.10 tarballs are ready now including addons-experimental plugin package.

Public Services/Government

• Since yesterday, and until next week Wednesday, students in Athens can attend five courses that introduce open source geographic information solutions. A second aim of the training is to get schools to combine GIS solutions, OpenStreetMap and open government data.

• Free and open software services has the potential to radically alter the use of proprietary software such as Microsoft products into which regional governments are locked into partnership agreements and which cost taxpayers millions of dollars annually.

• This, according to Gary Campbell, the director of technology in the Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining and doctoral student at the Mona School of Business and Management (MSBM) at the University of the West Indies (UWI), who is conducting research to help guide public policy on software use.

Openness/Sharing

• Openwords mines massive, preexisting public data resources (like Wiktionary or Apertium) to rapidly provide language learning mobile software for the world’s population, particularly for under-served languages.

Open Hardware

• Ari Alvarez has created a new Arduino open source robot development board which he has designed to be used by managers, developers and hobbyists or to provide an educational platform to teach robotics and electronics.

• Spanish brothers based in Madrid have unveiled a new open source, printed circuit board printer they have built that is powered by an Atmel-based Arduino Uno (ATmega328) development board.

• The awesome printed circuit board printer has been named Diyouware, and was inspired by the RepRap 3D printer. Diyouware has been developed over the last few years and the team of brothers are already working on the next project, the DiyouPCB MKII.

• Makers, developers and hobbyists that enjoy tinkering with Arduino wearable open source electronic hardware and creating projects using Bluetooth connectivity, may be interested in a new tiny button sized Bluetooth device called the TOG.

Programming

• The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency debuted a new website dedicated to sharing open-source data and publications today, calling it the DARPA Open Catalog.

• There are a number of different aims for the Open Catalog. By sharing open-source code freely, DARPA says it hopes to create a community of developers who are experts in software for government use. Program manager Chris White said that the collaborative nature of open-source was another incentive for the project.

Leftovers

Science

• The WarkaWater tower produces water by harvesting rain, fog and dew from the air.

Security

• OpenSSL has been updated to new versions as its maintainer repaired a set of eight security glitches, most of them graded with low severity.

• NCR notes that black box attacks are one of two “logical” attacks seen so far against ATMs. The other type of logical attack uses malicious software that similarly “jackpots” the cash machine, forcing it to spit out cash. In both cases, the attacks are made possible because thieves are able to physically access the top part of the ATMs where the USB ports are located.

• You may have heard that the NSA can decrypt SSH at least some of the time. If you have not, then read the latest batch of Snowden documents now. All of it. This post will still be here when you finish. My goal with this post here is to make NSA analysts sad.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus may face felony charges for giving his former mistress access to classified documents.

• Former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus may have told his alleged mistress Paula Broadwell what really happened in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 when terrorists murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

• Apparently there are rules about leaking classified information and President Obama’s Administration is more aggressive about enforcing those rules than any administration ever.

• Arabic-language excerpts from the statement are being circulated widely on Twitter. AQAP has not made any claims of responsibility through its official communication channels. A prominent AQAP cleric released an audio recording today praising the attack, but made no reference to AQAP playing an operational role.

• Boko Haram razed at least 16 towns and villages in northern Nigeria and may have killed up to 2,000 people since the weekend, officials said Thursday.

• Rupert Murdoch has been heavily criticised for claiming Muslims must “recognise and destroy their growing jihadist cancer” or be “held responsible” after the Paris shootings at Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket.

• The News Corp boss took to Twitter at 2am on Saturday morning to claim Muslims “must be held responsible” hours after French police killed three Islamist hostage-takers at a Jewish supermarket and printing warehouse.

• Christian life in the Sinai Peninsula has become fragile due to the poor security situation. Religious holidays have been reduced from lavish public gatherings to hasty, private ones. The Police Club in al-Arish, once a frequent home to Christian services and celebrations, has since become a military barracks that civilians avoid for fear of being attacked by militants. Christians can no longer openly wear religious symbols, such as the cross, in North Sinai, and Christian women have taken to wearing the hijab in order to conceal their religious identity.

Censorship

• Defending free speech and free press rights, which typically means defending the right to disseminate the very ideas society finds most repellent, has been one of my principal passions for the last 20 years: previously as a lawyer and now as a journalist. So I consider it positive when large numbers of people loudly invoke this principle, as has been happening over the last 48 hours in response to the horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

• Leaked information, such as WikiLeaks’ Cablegate, constitutes a unique and valuable data source for researchers interested in a wide variety of policy-oriented topics. Yet political scientists have avoided using leaked information in their research. This article argues that we can and should use leaked information as a data source in scholarly research. First, I consider the methodological, ethical, and legal challenges related to the use of leaked information in research, concluding that none of these present serious obstacles. Second, I show how political scientists can use leaked information to generate novel and unique insights about political phenomena using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods. Specifically, I demonstrate how leaked documents reveal important details about the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, and how leaked diplomatic cables highlight a significant disparity between the U.S. government’s public attitude towards traditional knowledge and its private behavior.

• Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech—as so many commentators have done—it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.’s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.

• For many years we’ve seen DMCA takedowns that were clearly based on little more than quick keyword searches. There are so many of these cases that it’s difficult to keep track of them, but a few examples: Fox demanded a takedown of an article on the SF Chronicle’s website… because Fox owns the rights to the movie Chronicle. Some companies, like LeakID seemed to specialize in sketchy takedowns based on just keywords and not actually looking at the content. A story getting attention on Headline News (with followup from TorrentFreak) details just the latest example.

• The police are evacuating the Gare du Nord station in Paris as my train from Brussels arrives; a suspicious package, I learned later. The rain is coming down quite hard. I resist the urge to interview my taxi driver about the current mood.

• [...]

• I wish President Obama had not said this, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Holocaust is an historical fact, and church desecrations are physical crimes against property; neither vandalism nor the denial of historical reality compare to the mocking of unprovable religious beliefs. (And yes, I find attacks on the principles of my faith painful, but I would defend the right of people to make such attacks; I’m opposed, for instance, to the criminalization of Holocaust denial.)

• Mainly, Obama’s statement is troubling because it should be the role of the president of the United States, who swears an oath to defend the Constitution, to explain to the world the principle that free speech is sacred—painful, sometimes, but sacred. If the future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam—in other words, to people who speak freely and offensively—then it belongs to those who would suppress by force any criticism of religion. This is not an American idea, and it certainly isn’t Charlie.

• Terrorism isn’t just performing a terrifying act. It’s provoking society’s immune system into attacking itself, making its defense systems attack the values and people they are supposed to be defending. Terrorism is like an autoimmune disorder of democracy. When we focus on the violence instead of the subtlety of the infection, it is easy to succumb as it seeks to provoke us into destroying ourselves.

• In a newly-aired documentary, leaders of the Grimhøj Mosque said that they want to see Isis win, that a Danish suicide bomber is a hero and that they do not believe in democracy.

• Just two days after issuing a condemnation of the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, the government of Saudi Arabia began carrying out a public flogging against blogger Raif Badawi, who in May was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam.

• The horrifying murders of cartoonists at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris have been a grim start to the new year. In our connected world we hear of atrocities all the time. But the thought that people are willing to deliberately target freedom of speech has been particularly chilling. This is at the heart of our society – the freedom to debate, criticise, laugh, disagree, be angry, fall out and make up again.

• [...]

• To me if the attack was about destroying freedom of speech our response has to be really acting to protect it. Stop default web blocking. Encourage democratic debate. Question regimes that oppose freedom even if they happen to be allies like Saudi Arabia. Stop casual police monitoring of social media. Resist knee jerk reactions to tabloid fear headlines.

Privacy

• After a series of moves that include introducing copyright laws that threaten the digital commons and open access, as well as criminalizing online calls for street demonstrations, Spain is fast emerging as a serious rival to Russia when it comes to grinding down the digital world. Unfortunately, it seems that lack of understanding extends to the judiciary too, as shown by recent events reported by Rise Up, an “autonomous body based in Seattle”, which aims to provide secure and private email accounts for “people and groups working on liberatory social change”.

• What’s especially sickening about this is that this argument “works” for surveillance state opportunists whether they succeed or fail. If they actually do stop terrorist threats (and in the same speech Parker claims they have stopped a few planned attacks in “recent months” but fails to provide any details), they use that to claim that the surveillance works and they need to do more. Yet when they fail to stop an attack — as in the Charlie Hebdo case — they don’t say it’s because the surveillance failed, instead, it’s because they didn’t have enough data or enough powers to collect more data. In other words, succeed or fail, the argument is always the same: give us more access to more private data.

• PEN America published a report this week summarizing the findings from a recent survey of 772 writers around the world on questions of surveillance and self-censorship. The report, entitled “Global Chilling: The Impact of Mass Surveillance on International Writers,” builds upon a late 2013 survey of more than 500 US-based writers conducted by the organization.

• The January 2015 Netskope Cloud Report shows an increasing use of cloud applications by enterprises.

• The race to the cloud is continuing to accelerate, with more cloud apps than ever now being used by enterprises, according to the January 2015 Netskope Cloud Report.

• “They talk about Russia like it’s the worst place on earth. Russia’s great,” the former NSA contractor told journalist James Bamford during an interview in Moscow for the PBS program “NOVA,” which released a transcript of the conversation Thursday.

• Whenever I say the word “privacy” to many of the presenters at International CES, there’s a little sigh before they answer. The thing to get excited about at this year’s show, after all, is the connection of everything to the internet, so you can track how much energy your lightbulbs use or how you hold your toothbrush.

Civil Rights

• Indeed, as the study explains, “Representatives of human rights groups and experts on international law were notable for their absence.” Out of the 104 guests surveyed in the study, only two lawyers who represented torture victims–Joseph Margulies (12/9/14) and Meg Satterthwaite (12/14/14)–appeared as part of the torture discussion. This was perhaps the closest the media got to emphasizing human rights.

• This was without doubt intended as an act of terrorism. But I refuse to be terrorised and decline the opportunity to hate. What does that mean practically? Terrorism is like a pernicious auto-immune disease to which it is easy to succumb. It seeks to provoke us into destroying ourselves.

• Soon after the unfortunate suicide of Aaron Swartz, a lot of anger was directed at Carmen Ortiz, the US Attorney who was the key figure behind the ridiculous prosecution of Swartz for daring to download too many documents (that he had legal access to, as did anyone connecting to MIT’s network). Ortiz showed no concern at all that either she or her office had done anything improper in threatening Swartz with over 30 years in jail for downloading (legally) some academic papers. As a result some people set up one of those “We the People” White House petitions, asking the Obama administration to remove Ortiz from her job.

• Cleveland city officials have released a video showing police officers tackling the 14-year-old sister of Tamir Rice in the moments after officer Timothy Loehmann fatally shot her 12-year-old brother. In the footage, Rice’s sister can be seen running to the scene. As she approaches, an officer forcefully brings her to the ground. Another officer approaches and continues to hold her down. She’s handcuffed and put into the back seat of the patrol car. Loehmann, meanwhile, stands idly nearby Rice’s bleeding, dying body.

• Without even waiting for the end of investigations on the despicable attack against Charlie Hebdo on January 7th, the government is set on increasing counter-terrorist arsenal, first by notifying Brussels the decree implementing “terrorists” or child pornography websites blockade but also by announcing new counter-terrorism measures. La Quadrature du Net calls on citizens to reject this absurd escalation and show determination in defending the freedom of expression and information.

• As he has in matters of environmental protection, immigration reform, and normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba, Obama can take significant steps under his executive authority, without the need for legislation. These would include allowing criminal investigation of the officials who authorized the CIA’s torture, shutting Guantánamo, ending the military commissions, announcing clear rules for drone use, and embracing effective limits on intrusions into privacy by electronic surveillance. With his legacy at stake, it is still not too late for Obama to demonstrate that our security indeed does not depend on abandoning our rights.

• “Do you have any positive or negative beliefs or opinions regarding the term ‘whistleblower’ or individuals who act in the role of a ‘whistleblower’?” the government wants to have Judge Leonie Brinkema ask potential jurors in CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s trial next week. “Do you have any opinion, favorable or unfavorable, about organizations or individuals who release to the public government documents and information without authorization, including the news media, government employees, or private persons?” the government offered as another proposed question for jurors.

• Sterling, meanwhile, is more interested in what potential jurors think of Condoleezza Rice. As National Security Adviser, she convinced the New York Times not to publish James Risen’s story on Operation Merlin, the dubious plot to deal Iran flawed nuclear blueprints. Prosecutors had wanted to submit the talking points she used to do so, without calling her to testify, but Judge Brinkema ruled that Rice would have to take the stand to enter those talking points. The government objects to questions specifically directed to opinions about Rice, finding it “inflammatory.”

• I saw the gravity of the whole situation. The huge amount of trust that Edward had to make towards Glenn Greenwald and Laura to be able to get the information out in a right way by adhering to the CHARACTERS that Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras have consistently portrayed with immense integrity. More so the fact that Glenn and Laura had no idea who Mr. Snowden was or if he was even telling the truth. In typical spy-novel fashion, Ed could have been the bait to trap some journalists being thorns in somebody’s side.

• I noted the other day how centrally James Clapper foregrounded his recent trip to North Korea in his discussion of the alleged North Korean hack of Sony. Now that the transcript is up, I see the trip was even more central in his discussion than reports had indicated. After noting that Jim Comey (whom he called “the senior expert on the investigative side of cybersecurity”) and Admiral Mike Rogers (whom he called “the senior expert on how cybersecurity ops actually happen”) would say more in following speeches, Clapper launched into a description of his trip, as if it were central to the discussion of the hack.

• Australian Special Forces in Iraq are working with an elite Iraqi security force accused of killing prisoners and other human rights violations.

• Prime Minister Tony Abbott has confirmed that the 200-strong Australian Special Operations Task Group in Iraq has begun providing “training and assistance” for the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) in its battle against Islamic State.

• Military experts regard the service as the most capable and resilient element of the Iraqi security forces. However, former Australian defence intelligence officers say the service has “unquestionably been responsible for major war crimes and unnecessary civilian casualties”.

• The Chinese government has imprisoned the three brothers of a Washington-based reporter for Radio Free Asia, apparently intensifying its suppression of free speech and coverage of the troubled province of Xinjiang.

• Ethnic Uighur journalist Shohret Hoshur left China in 1994, after he ran into trouble with the authorities for his reporting. He has since become a U.S. citizen and a mainstay of Radio Free Asia’s coverage of Xinjiang, offering one of the only independent sources of information about events in the province.

• Federal prosecutors won’t call New York Times reporter James Risen as a witness at a leak trial set to get underway next week for one of his alleged confidential sources, several people close to the situation said.

• The decision appears to bring to an end a six-year battle to get him to provide testimony against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who is facing ten felony charges in connection with alleged disclosures to Risen about an operation aimed at undermining Iran’s nuclear program.

• The forced disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college in Mexico has catapulted the security crisis that the US’s southern neighbors are living into northern headlines. However, the majority of English-language news accounts have failed to provide a deeper context concerning the failed war on drugs and the use of forced disappearances as a repressive state tactic, and employ language that often criminalizes the disappeared students.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler reverses course, makes a strong statement in support of Title II regulation and against fast lanes

• FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler today is proposing to raise the definition of broadband from 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up.

• As part of the Annual Broadband Progress Report mandated by Congress, the Federal Communications Commission has to determine whether broadband “is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” The FCC’s latest report, circulated by Wheeler in draft form to fellow commissioners, “finds that broadband is not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, especially in rural areas, on Tribal lands, and in US Territories,” according to a fact sheet the FCC provided to Ars.

• This isn’t a huge surprise, but Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the NSA’s personal Rep in Congress (NSA HQ is in his district), has announced that he’s bringing back CISPA, the cybersecurity bill designed to make it easier for the NSA to access data from tech companies (that’s not how the bill’s supporters frame it, but that’s the core issue in the bill). In the past, Ruppersberger had a teammate in this effort, Rep. Mike Rogers, but Rogers has moved onto his new career as a radio and TV pundit (CNN just proudly announced hiring him), so Ruppersberger is going it alone this time around.

• House Dem revives major cyber bill. The Hill reports: “The measure — known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) — has been a top legislative priority for industry groups and intelligence officials, who argue the country cannot properly defend critical infrastructure without it.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• As long-suffering readers of this column will have noticed, the dominant theme of the discussions around TTIP so far has been the investor-state dispute settlement provisions (ISDS). We are still waiting for the European Commission’s analysis of the massive response to its consultation on the subject – it will be fascinating to see how it tries to put a positive spin on the overwhelming public refusal of ISDS in TTIP.

• The issue that crops up most often after ISDS is probably transparency – or rather the almost complete lack of it. Yes, it’s true that there have been some token releases of documents: initial position papers in 2013, and some more in 2014; but these don’t really tell us much that we didn’t already know, or could guess. The main obstacle to greater openness was Karel De Gucht, the European Commissioner for Trade when TTIP was launched. As he showed time and again during the ACTA fiasco, he had little but contempt for the European public and its unconscionable desire to know what the politicians whose salaries it pays are up to in Brussels. That made his retirement at the end of last year an important opportunity to bring more openness to trade negotiations.

Copyrights

• Back in June we wrote about how the Second Circuit appeals court totally demolished the Authors Guild’s arguments against a bunch of university libraries for scanning their book collections digitally, in order to enable better searching of the contents. The lawsuit was against Hathitrust, an organization set up to manage the book scanning program for a group of university libraries. In 2012, a district court said that what the libraries/Hathitrust were doing was obviously fair use and the appeals court re-enforced that strongly. The Authors Guild is basically giving up in this case, saying that should the libraries change their practices, it may want to revisit the issue. But for now, it’s giving up the case while “reserving” its position.

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