● 06.05.15

● Links 5/6/2015: Linux on ATMs, TISA Agreement Leak

Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Badley wishes there was more of a focus on getting Linux to support AR/VR out of the box in an intuitive way. “It would have to happen fast considering how far Microsoft and Magic Leap and others are moving into the space,” he says. “Linux could power all this, and moving towards open sourcing everything would be awesome.”

• In order for Linux to achieve the “World Domination” it cried out for in the nineties, each and every member of the community is going to have to accept the fact that, at some point, Linux will have to be treated as a business. This means that one or more distribution will have to follow Ubuntu’s lead and make some hard decisions. Some community members might be relieved of duty. Some software may get jettisoned from the stack. Change and evolution will happen.

• Earlier this week I was pondering the state of HP’s “The Machine” and Linux++ with the Linux++ software platform supposed to come in June of 2015. Not much information has been heard on these experimental projects, but now there’s some new information coming out.

Desktop

• Recently a mother walked into the computer center where I work and commented, “I just came down down to the library to see what kind of learning resources there are down here.” I gave the mom a quick tour of the 28 public Linux stations our library offers for free seven days a week. As a casual afterthought, the mom says, “By the way, here are my two kids. I adopted them two weeks ago.” Standing before me were two beautiful children, ages 12 and 8, looking slightly scared but also curious at their new surroundings.

Server

• According to the 2015 Linux Jobs Report, 50% of the managers said they will hire more Linux professionals than in 2014.

• A recent Linux Foundation survey revealed that more than 9 in 10 hiring managers are planning to bring Linux talent on board this year, and 50 percent report they will hire more Linux professionals than in 2014.

Kernel Space

• This new VirtIO DRM driver that amounts to about 3,600 lines of code targets the VirtIO GPU and enables the xf86-video-modesetting to be used with this virtual device. Outside of the kernel work there’s QEMU patches for supporting this VirtIO GPU setup.

• According to a recent tweet from the Linux Foundation’s LinuxLTSI account, it appears that the next LTS (Long Term Support) version of the Linux kernel will be 4.1, which is currently in development.

• The Linux Long-Term Support Initative has announced that the 4.1 kernel will be the LTS version of 2015. Those unfamiliar with the LTSI can visit its LinuxFoundation.org project page.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman, has announced that Kernel 4.1 will become the LTS version of 2015, meaning that it will still receive updates, despite the fact that newer Kernel 4.x versions will be released.

• For now, Kernel 4.1 available only as a RC (Release Candidate) version, the stable version being scheduled for release in the few next weeks.

Benchmarks

• Last year Imagination launched a MIPS development board that went on sale at the end of last year. In not seeing any significant benchmarks or performance coverage from this MIPS Creator CI20 over the past few months, I finally got around to buying one of these MIPS development boards from Imagination Technology. While the CI20 seemed promising at first, so far I’m very unhappy with this board and it’s been even less stable than the Imagination PowerVR drivers on Linux going back to the Poulsbo days.

Applications

• Shotcut is a powerful video editor that happens to be open source and free. It’s full of cool features, and the developers are constantly updating it. The latest version that was made available, 15.06, is not a big one, but it does feature a few worthy changes.

• Systemtray Unity Indicator, Sticky Notes Indicator and SysMonitor Indicator were updated recently. Read on to see what’s new.

Instructionals/Technical

• In a previous post, I gave 5 reasons wikis rock for documentation. It was a great deceit. In truth, I’m not a big fan of wikis in most cases. So today I present 5 reasons to use a rendered language to publish your documentation.

Games

• Valve, along with its hardware partners Alienware and Cyberpower, plans to release the first Steam Machines starting Oct. 16. That’s when people who preorder should start receiving the first units. Retailers, however, won’t start stocking Valve’s SteamOS-powered PCs until Nov. 10. The PC gaming boxes start at $450. That is also when the Steam Controller and Steam Link in-house game-streaming device debut. After this first wave, other Valve hardware partners should start releasing their take on the Steam Machine. This is all part of Valve’s attempt to create a viable ecosystem for gaming that stands apart from Microsoft’s Windows while simultaneously giving consumers an easy-to-understand alternative to buying a console or building a PC.

• As you may know, Valve has big plans regarding Linux gaming and is engaged in ambitious projects: SteamOS, a Linux based system for gaming, Steam Machine, gaming consoles that runs SteamOS and Steam Controller, a gaming controller for SteamOS and Steam Machine.

• GOG has launched its massive 2015 DRM-Free Summer Sale, and it’s full of Linux games that can now be purchased at some ridiculous prices.

• PlayOnLinux developers have shared that PlayOnLinux 5 development has begun and it will be a complete rewrite of this software used by Linux gamers. Rather than being written in Python, it will now be based in Java.

• Dota 2 is one of the most played games on Steam, and Valve makes it. The developers are now considering moving to the Source 2 engine if we’re to believe the entries in the Steam database.

• If you have a Linux or Mac PC and have been wondering what of the upcoming crop of CRPGs you’ll be able to play, if any, then you can add n-Space’s Sword Coast Legends to that list…since it has been revealed that A Linux as well as a Mac version will be released simultaneously with the Windows one.

Distributions

New Releases

• On June 2, Steven Shiau announced the immediate availability for download and testing of yet another milestone towards the next major version of his popular Clonezilla Live CD that helps you with disk cloning/imaging operations.

• It’s been a long time since we last wrote something about Ryan Finnie’s unique Linux distribution, Finnix, but it would appear that it is pretty much alive and kicking as version 111 is now available for download.

• Calculate Linux Desktop, featuring either the KDE (CLD) or the XFCE (CLDX) environment, Calculate Directory Server (CDS), Calculate Media Center (CMC), Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS), Calculate Scratch Server (CSS) are all available for download.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The company hasn’t released a new version of Mandriva Linux since 2011 and laid off most of its developers years ago, but it’s now been completely liquidated. That doesn’t mean Mandriva’s vision for Linux is dead, however—the Mageia project, founded by former Mandriva developers, picked up the torch years ago and has been carrying it ever since. It’s not the only successor to Mandriva, either.

• The promise of open-source is that code is open and there is less risk of vendor lock-in. Such is the case with Mandriva the Linux vendor that went out of business in May. Though Mandriva is gone, the code, and forks of its code remain open-source and can be picked up by those that wish to extend it.

Gentoo Family

• Sabayon 15.06 is a modern and easy to use Linux distributionbased on Gentoo, following an extreme, yet reliable, rolling release model.

• This is a monthly release generated, tested and published to mirrors by ourbuild servers containing the latest and greatest collection of softwareavailable in the Entropy repositories.

Slackware Family

• Of course, Linux is open source. Most people mistakenly equate open source with “free,” as in pay nothing. Experienced Linux users know, however, that the open source concept separates the price of the software from the cost of obtaining enterprise-level modifications and support.

Red Hat Family

• Embedded in Whitehurst’s argument is that while public cloud can work for disparate workloads, nonvarying workloads are best “hard-wired” in a private cloud. If you know the compute/storage requirements, why not run those workloads on dedicated local resources? A modest capital investment ends up being a lot cheaper than long, drawn-out, public cloud operating costs.

• Johnny Hughes had the great pleasure of informing CentOS users that the famous, open-source Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now available for 32-bit (i686) hardware architectures.

• With a more frequent release cadence, Red Hat Software Collections 2 expedites the creation of production-ready, modern applications, including those built with Linux container deployments in mind.

Fedora

• Have you ever had an awesome song on your phone, and want to listen to it on your desktop without moving the file over? Or want to easily listen to your preferred streaming music service easily on your computer? Fedora Workstation has a neat little feature that allows you to easily stream music from your phone via bluetooth, and it is a breeze to get working.

• Fedora Project announced the release of the highly anticipated Fedora 22 Linux operating system on May 26, 2015, an improved version that brings a significant amount of new features, but also numerous under-the-hood improvements.

• After making several interesting proposals for the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, including the Cinnamon and Netizen Spins, Jan Kurik announced earlier a new one, this time for adding the ability to perform firmware updates on UEFI machines.

• Paul Frields, the manager of Fedora Engineering and former Fedora Project Leader, has written a blog post today about how “PulseAudio is still awesome.” While this common Linux sound server has a bit of a bad reputation, he wanted to share how great it’s been doing and working out for his needs.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.6.6

• On June 4, the Elive development team announced the immediate availability for download and testing of version 2.6.6 Beta of the Debian-based Elive Linux distribution built around the Enlightenment desktop environment.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I have been watching the evolution of the Ubuntu Software Center for quite a while now. I had doubts about its interface and its speed, but I liked the fact that it offered an easy, down-to-earth interface that allowed users to install software easily.

• On June 3, Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, proudly announced that it would collaborate with Cisco, the worldwide leader in IT, to implement application policy on OpenStack clouds.

• Canonical has revealed details about an OpenSSL feature that has been disabled in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

• The Ubuntu Touch operating system from Canonical also comes with its own Internet browser, developed internally, and the application is still improved. A new batch of features is about to land very soon, including an incognito mode.

• Udi Nachmany, director of Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud at Canonical, has announced the release of a new version of Juju, an open-source, solution-driven orchestration tool for Ubuntu Linux.

• We reported last month that Martin Pitt, a renowned Ubuntu and Debian developer, came with the idea to enable stateless persistent network interface names by default in the next major version of the Ubuntu and Debian operating systems.

• Canonical and Ubuntu announced a while ago the they have partnered with the 7digital Group Plc media company to offer access to over 30 million songs to users on Ubuntu phones.

• Only four months after the original Aquaris E4.5 UE was released to the public, Canonical, the mind behind the Ubuntu operating system, is at it yet again with the Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition.

• Other than having a longer name than the original, the E5 HD now packs a 5-inch 1,280 x 720 pixel display, which is quite the upgrade from the original’s underwhelming 4.5-inch 960 x 540 pixel display. In addition, you’ll now find a 13-megapixel camera on the back and a 5-megapixel shooter on the front, with the rear camera a nice upgrade from the 8-megapixel snapper found on the E4.5.

• As you may know, Canonical is not focusing only on Ubuntu Touch, convergence and Ubuntu Desktop.

• Also, the Ubuntu Snappy Core, developed to be the most advanced Internet of Things (ioT) OS, is important for Mark Shuttleworth.

Flavours and Variants

• The developers behind that well-known Chromixium distribution derived from the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu, and designed from the ground up to look like Google’s Chrome OS reached version 1.1 today, June 4.

Devices/Embedded

• The ATM Industry Association or ATMIA has released a white paper today in which they recommend the use of Windows 10 on ATMs, skipping any intermediary steps, and for the first time they are considering Linux as a viable option.

• By supporting Linux Ubuntu, users of PixeLINK’s USB 3.0 CMOS camera line can use the PixeLINK software development kit in both the Linux Ubuntu and Microsoft Windows operating environments.

• A paper from the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) warns that ATMs need to be updated “without delay” with 2020 in mind, because Windows 7 will reach end of life at this time. But the ATMIA has also hinted that the future may not lie with Windows at all.

Phones

Android

• The Android M developer preview was posted during I/O, and now that I’ve actually gotten home and had a full night of sleep, I’m cognizant enough to seriously dig into the system images. Back when I worked at Android Police, I would do “APK Teardowns”—basically decompile the APKs that Google puts out, compare the new version against the old version, and see what new things stick out. Often Google would leave work-in-progress features in the code, I’d find them and write them up. Eventually Google caught on and started leaving Easter Eggs for us to find, and I’ve been told Google now audits code for unreleased features.

• Your tablet can be a great productivity tool on its own, but using it as a second screen for your computer makes it even better. For Android tablets, Splashtop is our favorite way to do this. It’s cheap, touch-friendly, and uses Wi-Fi, so you can pick it up and go.

• Earlier this year the LG G2 was finally updated to Google’s latest Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update after months of waiting and a few missed deadlines, and now the next major update owners are anxiously awaiting is the LG G2 Android 5.1 update. And while we don’t have any exact release details from LG, here’s what users can expect.

• We’re anxiously awaiting Android 5.1 on our Samsung Galaxy S6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. To us it’s the real version of Lollipop, the one that fixed bugs and polished things up a bit. While we already know the basic, stock Android 5.1 features headed to the Galaxy S6, the boys at SamMobile are providing a few extra details on what Samsung has in store with their custom software.

• The Pebble Time is a smartwatch focused on doing notifications on the wrist and telling the time, but when paired with an Android smartphone it’s a lot more capable than with an iPhone.

• That’s because the way Google has designed notifications on Android and integrated them into its Android Wear watches has left the door open for third-parties.

Free Software/Open Source

• Speaking at the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas this week, CTO Martin Fink said open source will be central to how HP’s enterprise incarnation conducts its business.

• “We have taken this very, very seriously and we are all-in on the notion of open source,” Fink said, adding that even game-changing big bets like the Machine will be backed by open source software.

• [...]

• To prove it, on Wednesday HP announced Grommet, a new user interface framework that’s specifically tailored for enterprise applications and that HP has released under the Apache License.

• The problem: As mobile devices continue to proliferate, the Internet of Things keeps growing immensely, and more users and new data are pushed across telecom networks every day, network operators must invest in expanded facilities. The revenue from mobile applications is tied to number of devices/consumers not amount of data consumed. As time goes on, average revenue per user will remain flat or even decrease as data demand will increase significantly over time.

• Now, this is nowhere near complete — it is “bracketed text” which is still being negotiated, and Colombia already opposes the text. Also, some may argue that the second bullet point, which says it only applies to “mass market” software and not “critical infrastructure” software solves some of these issues. Finally, some might argue that this is reasonable if looked at from the standpoint of a commercial provider of proprietary software, who doesn’t want to have to cough up its source code to a government just to win a grant.

• But, if that language stays, it seems likely that any government that ratifies the agreement could not then do something like mandate governments use open source office products. And that should be a choice those governments can make, if they feel that open source software is worth promoting and provides better security, reliability and/or cost effectiveness when compared to proprietary software. That seems tremendously problematic, unless you’re Microsoft.

• The new tool, announced at Airbnb’s 2015 OpenAir developer conference in San Francisco, powers new pricing tips for hosts, which was also announced today. Written mostly in the Java and Scala programming languages, Aerosolve can also more intelligently rank and order things like images.

• Martin Fink, HP’s chief technology officer, revealed Grommet in a keynote speech at HP’s Discover conference in Las Vegas, explaining the framework will be available to everyone looking to create consistent user experiences in enterprise apps.

• DataTorrent will be making it RTS core engine available under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

• The firm is a player in the real-time big data analytics market.

• It is also the creator of a unified ‘stream and batch processing’ platform.

• SourceForge has been in the news a lot lately, and not for positive reasons. Angry redditors are rallying to encourage the mirror providers of SourceForge to stop supporting the site.

SaaS/Big Data

• Why were two OpenStack companies acquired on the same day, and what does that mean for the future of OpenStack? June 3 was a busy day for OpenStack news, as not one, but two vendors were acquired: First, Piston Cloud Computing was bought by Cisco, and then Blue Box Cloud was picked up by IBM.

• Juniper CEO Rami Rahim discusses why OpenStack is important to his business and why he’s doubling down on security.

• As technology fits into our lives and onto our wrists, demands increase for intelligent and real-time mobile applications. These applications need to deliver information and services that are relevant and immediate. To keep up with the flow of information coming in, applications must stream data with a real-time infrastructure to capture, process, analyze and serve massive amounts of data to millions and sometimes billions of users.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Following yesterday’s LibreOffice report for 2014, comes another interesting report from Document Foundation members Barend Jonkers and Cor Nouws comparing the features of LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The 60-page report “focuses on areas as feasibility, smart use, quality and improvements, localization and more.” It makes clear that LibreOffice has undergone massive improvements as compared to OpenOffice.

BSD

• DragonFlyBSD and other BSD distributions porting the Linux DRM drivers are still several major releases behind the upstream kernel state, but at least they’re making progress for those wishing to use the open-source drivers as an alternative to the prominent BSD display driver: the NVIDIA BSD proprietary driver that’s of high quality and on par with the Windows and Linux NVIDIA drivers.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Octave developers are pleased to announce a major new release of GNU Octave, version 4.0.0.

• We’re excited to announce that MediaGoblin 0.8.0, “A Gallery of Fine Creatures”, has been released! The biggest news is that the client to server API (making use of the future federation API) is much improved! That means that users no longer have to depend on a browser to access MediaGoblin.

• First, let’s run through what actually happened. When Richard Stallman started the GNU project in 1984, he intended from the beginning to write a clone of the Unix operating system. He explicitly rejected the notion that GNU might instead aim to copy an operating system like MS-DOS. As he wrote in the February 1986 GNU newsletter, platforms like DOS, although “more widely used” than Unix, were “very weak systems, designed for tiny machines.”

• Deb Nicholson has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of a major new release of the open-source media server software MediaGoblin.

Public Services/Government

• The Ministry of Defence has launched a competition to build an ‘evolutionary’ new open source analytics platform to help it better understand its data.

• France’s public administrations are encouraged to increase their use of free software, announces DISIC, the inter-ministerial Directorate for IT. Public administrations should become active participants in free software development communities, for example by allowing their software engineers to work on free software.

• The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is dipping its toe into the waters of unstructured data with a competition for the development of prototypes for an open source analytics platform.

• The Ministry of Defence has launched a competition to build an ‘evolutionary’ new open source analytics platform to help it better understand its data, as CIO Mike Stone announced the MoD needs to drop its cautious approach and embrace open source.

Licensing

• Establishing an Open Source Review Board is one key way that companies can help ensure compliance with open source licenses, community norms and requirements (see the previous article, Why Companies That Use Open Source Need a Compliance Program, for more details.) In larger companies, a typical board is made of representatives from engineering, product teams and legal resources in addition to a Compliance Officer (sometimes called Director of Open Source).

• While FOSS compliance is more of an operational challenge related to execution and scaling than a legal challenge, legal counsel is an essential component of any review board and compliance program. Companies may choose to use internal legal counsel, or utilize external counsel on a fee basis. Regardless of how it’s achieved, there are five essential duties of an open source lawyer to ensure that a company observes all of the copyright notices and satisfies all the license obligations for the FOSS they use in their commercial products.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• In its plan, Finland has committed to making online services more consumer-friendly and is focused on youth participation in government and Open Data.

Programming

• Time and time again, we hear of companies achieving rapid acceleration with DevOps. Companies are touting success with the metric of deploys per day, sharing new baselines of 10, 50, or even 100 deploys a day. In more mature organizations, like LinkedIn, Netflix, Etsy, Facebook, and others, this number is a startling 1,000+ number. But, what does this even mean?

Leftovers

Security

• Hmmm. Yeah, it’s smirk-inducing to see them finally want to join the rest of the world in the SSH department after all these years. But after reading Christine Hall’s article yesterday about our friends in Redmond and their “fox guarding the henhouse” security teams and their affinity for backdoors, you have to wonder, on a privacy level, if this is a good idea. I guess we’ll just have to see.

• The keys, which allow authorized users to log into public repository accounts belonging to the likes of Spotify, Yandex, and UK government developers, were generated using a buggy pseudo random number generator originally contained in the Debian distribution of Linux. During a 20-month span from 2006 to 2008, the pool of numbers available was so small that it made cracking the secret keys trivial. Almost seven years after Debian maintainers patched the bug and implored users to revoke old keys and regenerate new ones, London-based developer Ben Cartwright-Cox said he discovered the weakness still resided in a statistically significant number of keys used to gain secure shell (SSH) access to GitHub accounts.

• Nortek didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. Another major brand of garage door opener, Genie, didn’t respond to to a request for comment either, but says on its website that its devices use rolling codes. A spokesperson for Chamberlain, the owner of the Liftmaster brand and one of the biggest sellers of garage door openers, initially told WIRED the company hasn’t sold fixed code doors since 1992. But when Kamkar dug up a 2007 manual for a Liftmaster device that seemed to use fixed codes, Chamberlain marketing executive Corey Sorice added that the company has supported and serviced older garage door openers until much more recently. “To the extent there are still operators in the market begin serviced by replacement parts, part of the objective is to get to safer and more secure products,” he said in a phone interview. “We’d love to see people check the safety and security of their [devices] and move forward.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• There is much more. I was not in any sense considering poetry as a theme when I started research, but have been struck by the way that poetry was interwoven into daily life, and a poetic sensibility was part of the world view of the administrators of the British imperium in India in the 1820s and 1830s. I did not expect that at all. How their world views were reconciled with imperial aggression, exploitation and even atrocity (and individual reactions were very different) is a major part of the study.

• An article in the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) “official journal” attacked survivors of the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech for using the tragedy to advocate for stronger gun laws.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The media dismiss any argument outwith the bounds of their narrow, manufactured corporate consensus as marginal and irrelevant. For example, never mind the fact that a clear majority in the UK has for years supported renationalisation of the railways. The very fact of its popular support makes it imperative to the BBC and other corporate media that it must not be voiced. Jeremy is very likely to voice it. Watch as he is carefully marginalised, patronised and excluded.

Privacy

• The morning after final passage of the USA Freedom Act, while some foes of mass surveillance were celebrating, Thomas Drake sounded decidedly glum. The new law, he told me, is “a new spy program.” It restarts some of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act and further codifies systematic violations of Fourth Amendment rights.

• Later on Wednesday, here in Oslo as part of a “Stand Up For Truth” tour, Drake warned at a public forum that “national security” has become “the new state religion.” Meanwhile, his Twitter messages were calling the USA Freedom Act an “itty-bitty step” — and a “stop/restart kabuki shell game” that “starts w/ restarting bulk collection of phone records.”

• That downbeat appraisal of the USA Freedom Act should give pause to its celebrants. Drake is a former senior executive of the National Security Agency — and a whistleblower who endured prosecution and faced decades in prison for daring to speak truthfully about NSA activities. He ran afoul of vindictive authorities because he refused to go along with the NSA’s massive surveillance program after 9/11.

• The U.S. government has secretly expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless Internet surveillance to search for evidence of what it called “malicious cyberactivity,” The New York Times reported Thursday, citing classified documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

• U.S. Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos in mid-2012 granting its secret approval for the NSA to begin hunting on Internet cables for data allegedly linked to computer intrusions originating abroad, including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the report said.

• The FBI has again waded into the debate around encryption, with the bureau’s assistant director of counterterrorism telling the US congress that tech companies should “prevent encryption above all else”.

• The debate over encryption erupted on Capitol Hill again Wednesday, with an FBI official testifying that law enforcement’s challenge is working with tech companies “to build technological solutions to prevent encryption above all else.”

• At first glance the comment from Michael B. Steinbach, assistant director in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, might appear to go further than FBI Director James B. Comey. Encryption, a technology widely used to secure digital information by scrambling data so only authorized users can decode it, is “a good thing,” Comey has said, even if he wants the government to have the ability get around it.

• This afternoon, the Paraguayan Senate voted against a bill that would have mandated internet service providers (ISPs) to store internet communications metadata for one year, thus rejecting the “Pyrawebs” initiative for good. The House of Representatives in Paraguay previously voted against the bill in March before sending it to the Senate for a final decision.

• Like any modern zero-day sold on the black market, the Enigma compromise had value only if it remained secret. The stakes were higher, but the basic template of the game—secret compromise, secret exploitation, doom on discovery—continues to be one basic form of the computer security game to this day. The allies went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their compromise of the Enigma, including traps like Operation Mincemeat (planting false papers on a corpse masquerading as a drowned British military officer). The Snowden revelations and other work has revealed the degree to which this game continues, with many millions of taxpayer dollars being spent keeping illicit access to software compromises available to the NSA, GCHQ and all the rest. The first rule is not to reveal success in breaking your enemy’s security by careless action; the compromise efforts that Snowden revealed had, after all, been running for many years before the public became aware of them.

• I recently conducted a wide-ranging Q+A with the ACLU’s chief technologist, Chris Soghoian, on a range of topics, from the “fraudulent” nature of the recent debate over Section 215 of the Patriot Act to the dire need for more technological expertise among those tasked with overseeing the Intelligence Community in the 21st Century. Another part of our conversation was particularly relevant to those who worry that the end of bulk telephony metadata collection is the high-water mark for intelligence reform. Our topic: The lack of attention to the fact that much of the US’s massive surveillance infrastructure is used for top secret purposes only loosely related to national security. While US intelligence agencies portray themselves as using their dark talents against ne’er-do-wells, the reality is far different, argues Soghoian. He took particular issue with the NSA and its foreign partners like Britain’s GCHQ, doing things like snooping on the employees of technology businesses in order to exploit their products for espionage purposes.

• There’s been a fair share of leaked trade deals raising hackles in recent memory, but the latest could have some big repercussions for your data privacy. WikiLeaks has slipped out details of the in-progress Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), and one of its clauses would prevent the US, European Union and 23 other nations from controlling both where your data is stored as well as whether or not it’s accessible from outside of the country. Germany, for example, couldn’t demand that Facebook and Google store residents’ account information on local servers.

• The French Council of State published today its decision to refer of the Question Prioritaire de Constitutionalité (Prioritary Question of Constitutionality1) brought by the FDN Federation, French Data Network and La Quadrature du Net against the article 20 of the 2014-2019 Military Planning Act voted in 2013. This decision is fundamental in the fight against generalised surveillance and the access to connection data by French intelligence services. It takes an important place in the current debates on the French Intelligence Bill.

Civil Rights

• One of the most damaging and intense attacks on the US government ever took place this year. And nobody, even those that had been hit, knew.

• The US government said last night that it had lost control of data held by the Office of Personal Management, which holds information about all of the staff employed by the US government. Nobody knows why, or who, stole it — but that is the reality of modern warfare.

• In 2012, Walker repealed Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which put teeth in the state’s anti- wage discrimination laws by allowing women to seek damages in state court. The law was opposed by business lobbies like the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, and by the state senator who drove the law’s repeal, now-Congressman Glenn Grothman, who said the gender wage gap can be explained because “money is more important for men.”

• That the Tories and Unionist establishment would attempt to land a sexist smear on Alex Salmond for calling a woman a, err, woman, is unsurprising. That they are joined by a number of ludicrous feminists is unsurprising too.

DRM

• That’s the same strategy Microsoft employed when it knocked WordPerfect and Lotus out of their preferred positions thirty years ago, making it possible to seamlessly import documents created under those programs, but making sure that exporting them back again met with less than perfect results. For the last ten years, Microsoft has fought an ongoing battle against the OpenDocument Format (ODF) to try and keep it that way, something I’ve written hundreds of blog posts about here.

• Also like Microsoft, which dramatically reduced updating Office after it wiped out the competition (as it also did with Internet Explorer, after it wiped out Netscape, until it was once again challenged by Firefox), Amazon continues to provide an extremely mediocre presentation of actual books on devices. Only recently has it announced something as basic as new fonts, many years after the initial release of the Kindle. It has, however innovated vigorously and successfully on its family of Kindle devices, in order to win over as many customers as possible to its proprietary platform.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The new boss of Canadian telecoms giant Bell Media has confessed that her own daughter is a “thief”. Speaking at the Canadian Telecom Summit, Mary Ann Turcke says her 15-year-old was using a VPN to access Netflix’s superior U.S. service but she quickly put a stop to it. Netflix could’ve done so earlier, she added, but chose not to.

• New research from Carnegie Mellon University shows that the UK Pirate Bay blockade had no affect on legal consumption. Instead, visitors switched to alternative sites, Pirate Bay mirrors, or started using VPNs. However, the same research also reveals that blocking several major pirate sites at once does boost the use of paid legal services such as Netflix.

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