● 08.27.15

● Links 27/8/2015: ownCloud Desktop Client 2.0, Red Hat Downgraded

Posted in News Roundup at 8:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux’s hardware support is better than ever, but you still can’t take it for granted. Not every laptop and desktop you see at your local computer store (or, more realistically, on Amazon) will work perfectly with Linux. Whether you’re buying a PC for Linux or just want to ensure you can dual-boot at some point in the future, thinking about this ahead of time will pay off.

• These days, I rarely give unsolicited technical advice. However, if people ask me how to explore and install Linux, I urge them to be systematic. To the average computer user, installing a Linux operating system is an unfamiliar procedure — to say nothing of an exercise in unprecedented diversity.

Desktop

• I think it’s time to clarify the matter of “too many Linux distributions” once and for all. For a Linux veteran like myself, it is getting annoying to see all sorts of comments on the Internet from people complaining that there are way too many distributions of Linux.

• Just found these two (both from early 1996) and thought we could have a little fun. The member who posts a genuine picture of the oldest Linux installation CD they have in their possession by September 4th will be upgraded to a contributing member and will be able to pick one item out of the LQ Merchandise Store paid for by me.

Server

• Intel Capital’s investment, its third in BlueData since 2012, is part of a $20 million funding round led by the chip maker’s strategic investment arm and announced today. Doug Fisher, senior vice president of Intel and general manager of its Software and Services Group, will also join BlueData’s board of directors.

• About 10 months since it first announced the managed version of Kubernetes, its open source Linux container management system, Google has launched the cloud service, called Google Container Engine, into production today, announcing the service is now production-ready.

• Cloud is not virtualization, nor is it a computer sitting in a remote data center; it is a wide range of disciplines that enable the third platform era, spanning from software-defined infrastructure to the API economy to new service acquisition models. Cloud even redefines relationships between those who use services and those who provide services—between, for example, lines of business and the IT organization, or between developers and system administrators—in what is commonly known as DevOps.

Kernel Space

• “The badging system seems too rooted in video games and social media,” said Raytheon | Websense engineer Tom O’Connor. “Building secure software is not really a game, and I worry that a badge system reduces security to checklists. That said, I can certainly see value in having some sort of rudimentary assessments of open source projects to see that they meet some minimal standards.”

• The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a collaborative project run by the Linux Foundation, is aiming to develop a free security best practices program for open source software.

• It isn’t an overstatement to say that the modern world runs on Linux. If you look around you, almost everything is running on Linux — from your home router to stock exchanges. Thanks to Linux, open source has become a phenomenon that is fast becoming a norm in the enterprise and consumer segments. Fierce competitors like Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, Red Hat, SUSE are all working together to make open source software even better.

• The twenty-fourth birthday of the Linux kernel was the top story today. Linux’ birthday is widely celebrated on August 25, the day of Linus’ original post, while others mark the birthdate as October 5, the day of the first public release. Lots of sites paid homage with several running through the time-line of its life. Elsewhere, a couple articles sang Open Source praises today and DarkDuck seemed confused by Knoppix.

• The gurus behind the popular and respected Linux kernel hardening service Grsecurity have decided to stop providing support for its stable offering.

• Patches will be ceased in the next two weeks in response to an expensive and lengthy court case between the small outfit and a “multi-billion dollar” corporation which it says flagrantly infringed its trademark.

• It’s been two years since I last tested / reported on the Liquorix kernel, which advertises itself as “the better distro kernel” with optimizations for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads.

• The Liquorix kernel has Zen interactive tuning, hard kernel preemption, utilizes Budget Fair Queue (BFQ), Vegas TCP congestion control, smaller TX net queues, AuFS support, etc.

• Linux is a very functional operating system. It “led to the collapse of the infrastructure decision debates of many IT shops,” said Guy Smith, chief strategist for Silicon Strategies Marketing. “Before Linux, long-term choices concerning the OS, database, development language, and more divided IT shops — and the resulting incompatibilities led to dysfunctional applications.”

• Overstreet further explains that Bcachefs is a modern Copy-on-Write (COW) file system “with checksumming, compression, multiple devices, caching, and eventually snapshots and all kinds of other nifty features.”

Graphics Stack

• At long last, libinput 1.0 has been released. Libinput is the input handling library commonly used by Wayland compositors and is optionally used in the X.Org world via the xf86-input-libinput driver and is starting to be used by the Ubuntu Mir display server.

Applications

• The latest version available is RedNotebook 1.10.2, which has been released recently, coming with changes.

• Qmmp is a popular open-source, cross-platform multimedia player, similar to Winamp and written in Qt. It has support for popular multimedia file formats, including MPEG1 layer 2/3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus, Native FLAC/Ogg FLAC, Musepack, WavePack, WMA, Midi.

• ownCloud, a software company known for developing and deploying the most popular self-hosting cloud server solution on the market, announced today, August 25, the immediate availability for download of ownCloud Desktop Client 2.0.

• Especially useful to broadcast news through a network of Twitter accounts, Retweet was improved to bump Python version to 3.4 and to improve pep8 compliance (work in progress).

• Penguin Subtitle Player is a simple open source Qt5 subtitle player which can be used to display SRT subtitles on top of online video streaming websites that don’t support subtitles or don’t allow using custom subtitles.

• Tomato App is a time management application based on the Pomodoro technique, specially developed for the Elementary OS 0.3 Freya and Elementary OS 0.2 Luna systems.

• The hard-working team of developers behind the powerful GStreamer open-source multimedia backend, used by numerous audio/video tools and deployed by default in dozens of GNU/Linux distribution published details about the new features coming to GStreamer 1.6, a major release of the acclaimed software.

Proprietary

• VMware, a software company, known for some of the most acclaimed virtualization solutions on the market, announced the release of the VMware Workstation 12.0 and VMware Player 12.0 apps.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• If you’ve played Baldur’s Gate any time in the past decade, chances are you’ve also (whether you knew it or not) played through its 1999 expansion, Tales of the Sword Coast. The two have been packaged together for years now, and for good reason—there’s no reason not to play Tales of the Sword Coast. It’s thirty hours of side content, integrated so seamlessly into the base game it’s hard to tell where Baldur’s Gate ends and Sword Coast begins.

• The amazing Pillars of Eternity party-based RPG developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Paradox Interactive is now discounted on Steam for Linux with 33%.

• Feral Interactive are awesome, that’s not exactly news, but they did send out an interesting tweet earlier showing off some new kit.

• Teeworlds is a great little 2D battle game, and while it has been around for a while it’s now just become available on Steam.

• Ubuntu app developer and Open Source enthusiast Riccardo Padovani had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia about his upcoming game for Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used on Ubuntu phone devices.

• The Steam for Linux platform is expanding, and it’s now home to more than 1,400 games and applications. The number of new titles, ported or released natively, has been increasing in the past year or so, and there is no sign that it’s slowing down.

• The Humble PC & Android Bundle 13 collection was released just a few days ago, and a few games have been added. Users who paid above the average price will get these new titles for free.

• Unity, the popular indie gaming engine, will arrive on Linux after being created for Mac OS X first and then ported to Windows in 2009.

• Unity Technologies announced a while back that they intend to launch the Unity game engine tools on Linux as well. Today we just received the first experimental build and it looks like developers are testing the waters.

• A little warning announcement for you, it seems the latest update for Dying Light has broken the game for Linux gamers.

• It’s not often I tell you to outright avoid a game, but Pump-Action Captain is a game you really need to just walk away from.

• I really don’t like to put a downer on anything, but this is something that I feel needs highlighting.

• I decided on a whim to pick up Pump-Action Captain with my own personal money to test it out, and to see if it’s worthy of covering at all. What I found was pretty shocking, and something that needed to be mentioned here. This is the first Leadwerks game that I’ve tried, and so far it’s not leaving a good impression.

• The game doesn’t really work, at all. The executable is named incorrectly, so it won’t even load up. This is a simple case sensitivity issue, which could be forgiven. When I re-named the executable it worked, so that was okay. It wouldn’t be so bad if that was the only issue, but that alone tells you enough—it wasn’t even tested, not once.

• Hearthlands is a cute city-builder I haven’t really touched since December last year, so I decided to pick it up again today and the progress is amazing.

• The dungeon crawler rogue-like was released for Linux last week. It brings a few twists to the familiar formula that might interest fans of the genre. A free version is available for those curious to try the game out.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• First, we have a number of default namespaces which digiKam was using before. Default namespaces can’t be deleted or edited. They can only be disabled. These entries are essential for digiKam, so I decided that users might delete it by accident and then will be very hard to recover without a reset to default. Some namespaces hold special parameters designed for particular cases, so editing them is a bad idea, hence, the disabled edit.

• This September a bunch of KDE developers, me included, will gather for a week in Randa, Switzerland, to work on awesome new ideas for KDE. The theme of the sprint is around mobile apps, so KDE Connect will be one of the focus of attention.

• My work over the summer was to port the Amarok code-base to use Qt5/KF5 as much as possible because it was tough to port the entire base under the GSoC time-frame. I have ported a considerable portion of the code-base and now I will be continuing the project along with the community to see it to the end

• Even Free software needs to be funded. Apart from being nice to have, money is really useful: it can buy transportation so contributors can meet, accommodation so they can sleep, time so they can code, write documentation, create icons and other graphics, hardware to test and develop the software on.

• Kronometer 2.0, the next major version of Kronometer, is now publicly available. This is the result of the port to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, started one year ago.

• There is something interesting going on desktop computers — the UI is becoming heavily influenced by mobile operating systems. From Windows to Gnome you can see heavy influence of mobile OSes. KDE’s Plasma desktop, which I consider to be the most advanced desktop environment is, however, an exception. The KDE community just released Plasma 5.4, a major update to their desktop environment and it continues to shows the prowess of this ‘leaderless’ community.

• The difference surprised me. I think it gives a strong indication that Plasma 5 is being used more for work than as a hobby, with people more likely to encounter an area needing to improvement during the normal office week.

• ksuperkey is a small utility that allows you to use your Super key (sometimes called Meta or Windows key) to open your application menu, while keeping the functionality to use Super in keyboard shortcuts. In other words, ksuperkey won’t interfere with any of your existing shortcuts. It achieves this by letting Super act as a normal modifier key when pressed in combination with other keys, but generating a different keyboard combination (Alt+F1 by default) when the Super key is pressed and released on its own.

• Last year, I wrote a blog entry about the iminent release of Calligra 2.9 and the Calligra Gemini application which became a fully fletched member of the suite. In the latter half of that entry, I touched on what the future might potentially hold, and I mentioned the possibility of extending the concept from the application level to the complete system.

• This Free Software Office is well known in Spain for managing the biggest KDE deployment in Spain with 3k computers spread in several computer labs, laboratories and libraries, among other internal projects.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME Video Arcade software, an open-source app that acts as a front-end to the well-known and cross-platform MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) emulator, has been updated to version 0.8.4.

• Boston Summit is GNOME’s annual event in North America. It is held every year on the Columbus Day weekend, and is an informal opportunity for contributors, enthusiasts and newcomers to get together. Previous summits have included planning meetings, tutorials for newcomers, hacking sessions, hardware testing, and more. There is also typically a social event in the evening.

Distributions

New Releases

• Barry Kauler, the creator of the Puppy Linux project, announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first point release of Quirky Linux, a sister project of the Puppy Linux operating system.

• The developers of the popular OpenELEC Linux kernel-based operating system for embedded devices have announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the forth Beta build of the upcoming OpenELEC 6.0 OS.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The Linux AIO project has spent all summer creating new ISOs for various popular GNU/Linux distributions that have multiple editions, so they have had the great pleasure, as always, of informing us about some of them.

Arch Family

• Manjaro developers have just released the tenth update for the Manjaro 0.8.13 version of the operating system and they have upgraded quite a few packages.

Ballnux/SUSE

• SUSE® today announced Teradata, the big data analytics and marketing applications company, has renewed and extended its commitment to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the strategic platform across Teradata’s entire product portfolio. The new agreement extends the two companies’ original seven-year partnership an additional seven years.

Red Hat Family

• The Scientific Linux team, through Pat Riehecky, has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the Scientific Linux 6.7 computer operating system.

• Looking to keep its options open when it comes to networking in virtualization environments, Red Hat has certified Midokura Enterprise MidoNet network virtualization software for use on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Version 7. The announcement comes before the kick-off of the OpenStack Silicon Valley event later this week.

• The Triangle’s biggest public companies, Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) and Quintiles (NYSE: Q), performed the best. They actually surpassed their valuation from Friday, though in neither case touched a 52-week high. Although the other Triangle-area companies bounced back from Monday and Tuesday, they mostly finished below their market value set Friday, leaving investors to hope that the remainder of this week looks more like Wednesday and less like Monday.

• Raleigh open-source tech giant Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has landed on Forbes’ latest list of ” The World’s Most Innovative Companies.”

• Diversity has a new full-time ally. Marina Zhurakhinskaya (zhoo-ra-HEEN-ska-ya) recently won an O’Reilly award for her work in diversity for free and open source software (FOSS), and she just successfully created a new position for diversity at Red Hat. Oh, and, she’s a new mom.

Fedora

• The alpha release for Fedora 23 was released two weeks ago while today it’s been released for the non-primary AArch64 (64-bit ARM) and POWER architectures.

• Peter Robinson announced the Fedora 23 Alpha release today for AArch64 and POWER. Those wishing to learn more about these AArch64 and POWER builds can read the release announcement.

• The Fedora Project, through Peter Robinson, has announced the release of the Server edition of the Fedora 23 Alpha operating system for ARM 64-bit (AArch64) and POWER (PPC64 and PPC64le) hardware architectures.

• The slides are a little different from the slides at Fedora Flock, but they’re mainly the same…

Debian Family

• Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get “reproducible builds” part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian.

• A natively hidden service is more secure than accessing a non-hidden service via Tor because there is no way for a third-party exit node to mess with your traffic

• Debian/sid is going through a big restructuring with the switch to a new gcc and libstc++. Furthermore, libcec3 is now the default. So I have updated my PHT builds for Debian/sid to build and install on the current status, both for amd64 and i386.

Derivatives

• I faced no particular issue when working with Knoppix 7.4.2 in Live session. It was responsive, quick and more or less reliable.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury has informed us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Kernel Team for the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, during the meeting that took place earlier today, August 25, 2015.

• On August 25, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report informing all Ubuntu Phone owners about the progress made on the soon-to-be-released OTA-6 software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

• Sable is a superb all-in-one PC from System76, and you can now purchase one at a $50 discount. It ships with the latest Ubuntu OS, and you can customize it to better fit your needs.

• A vulnerability that would allow users to crash GDK-PixBuf with specially crafted file has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

• As we reported the other day, the Ubuntu Touch developers were hard at work to release the OTA-6 software update for Ubuntu for phones today, Wednesday, August 26, 2015, for Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, Nexus 4, and Nexus 7 devices.

• As we reported the other day, the Ubuntu Touch developers were hard at work to release the OTA-6 software update for Ubuntu for phones today, Wednesday, August 26, 2015, for Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, Nexus 4, and Nexus 7 devices.

• Canonical, through April Wang, had the great pleasure of announcing the winners of the “And your Dream come true” innovation contest for its Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system created in collaboration with China Mobile.

• Joel Leclerc, an independent Ubuntu developer, known for various apps, hacks, tweaks, tips, and tutorials for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, has posted an interesting article on his blog about the proposal of a non-windowing display server.

• Immediately after announcing the release of the OTA-6 software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform us all about the next major update for Ubuntu for phones, OTA-7.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint’s Clement Lefebvre has recently announced that Cinnamon 2.8 will bring better box pointers and information about the laptop’s model and manufacturer.

Devices/Embedded

• A Raspberry Pi 2 is going to space, but for that it need to undergo some serious testing. It’s going to use the most awesome case you’ve ever seen, and it’s all happening very soon.

• Cloud Media has launched a dual-boot Linux and Android “Popcorn Hour A-500 Pro” media player with 3840 x 2160 video, high-quality analog audio, and XLR out.

• Formerly known as Syabas, Cloud Media has been selling Linux-based Popcorn Hour and Popbox media players for years. Last year, Cloud Media found Kickstarter success with its Linux-based Stack Box home automation box. This week it achieved its $50K Kickstarter funding goal for the new top-of-the-line Popcorn Hour A-500 Pro media player and music system, which adds high fidelity stereo analog audio to its usual media player and home theater functions.

• When the Raspberry Pi shipped to a planet excited geeks in the middle of 2012, it changed the way we taught IT. That had always been the intention of creator Eben Upton. Give the kids the goods and they’ll do the rest.

• At first, it seemed as though the grownups were more excited than the kids, creating all sorts of wacky Pi-based projects. Fortunately, those grownups – eager for the respect of their peers – shared everything they learned, posting to blogs, StackOverflow, and thousands of other websites. Want to know how to blink an LED? Drive a motor? Read a sensor? Set up a web server? Within the first year, all of that was out there, all of it indexed, searchable, and useful to kids.

• Accelerated is excited to announce the availability of its Embedded Linux Distribution for the Internet of Things (IoT). With the unprecedented growth of the IoT and reliance on a new generation of connected devices pushing organizations to use even more data, businesses need to be prepared today for the connectivity and security challenges of tomorrow. Linux is in a prime position to be leveraged to overcome those challenges and shorten time to market.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• Any sub-$200 smartphone worth its salt must come from a Chinese company, right? Former Apple CEO John Sculley is trying to change that perspective by co-founding Obi, a Silicon Valley-based company that has just announced a couple devices that will definitely turn heads and keep wallets healthy. These new handsets are the Obi Worldphone SF1 and SJ1.5.

• Samsung has been facing competition not just from Apple but also from Android manufacturers such as Motorola and Xiaomi, which offer good-enough features while keeping prices low. Consumers will have to decide whether the premium features in the latest Samsung devices will be worth the premium price tags.

• The Galaxy S6 Edge Plus and Note 5 phones arrived last week, while the Galaxy Tab S2 tablets come out next Thursday.

• John Sculley — now there’s a name you may not have heard in a while.

• The former Apple CEO is back, and is teaming with a top San Francisco design firm on a $199 Android smartphone designed to bring high-end features and looks to the low-end smartphones increasingly popular in much of the world.

• It’s been a dry year for high-end Android tablets, something Samsung aims to change with the new Galaxy Tab S2. Directly taking on the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 2 with both 9.7-inch and 8-inch screen sizes, each running at a crisp 2048 x 1536, the two slates come in WiFi-only and WiFi+LTE form.

• The Galaxy Note has been through five years of changes. Better screens, better processors, better software. And like any new smartphone, the Note 5 represents the very best of what’s come before. But despite being a fantastic phone—even foreseeing the big smartphone way of life—the Note 5 is mired in the overpriced premium past. You’ll definitely be shelling out for the very best.

• In short: Even as previous Android-heavy markets mature, new ones will continue to grow across the globe. As tens of millions of people in emerging markets start buying smartphones, the ongoing Android price war will make the platform more attractive than ever — securing Google’s lead for years to come.

• Back in 2002, Rubin launched the the Sidekick, one of the first devices to merge threaded messaging, e-mail and the full Web into a phone. Then, of course, he built a little startup called Android, which was bought in 2005 by Google and under Rubin’s continued leadership became the biggest smartphone operating system in the world.

• With the smartphone now ubiquitous and mobile heading in new directions, we are thrilled to have Rubin joining us on stage at Code/Mobile. This year, we’ll be asking what comes next, now that we all have the smartphones he helped pioneer. For instance, we’ve noticed that technology that debuted in the smartphone is expanding into lots of places, including cars and wearables.

• Following in the footsteps of OnePlus, UK startup Wileyfox has released two low-cost, but decently specced, smartphones running on Cyanogen OS.

• The more expensive of the two, Storm, will cost £199 and features a 5.5-inch full HD display, 20-megapixel auto-focus main camera from Sony and an eight-megapixel front shooter. The device runs on Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz Snapdragon 615 processor with integrated LTE, and offers 32GB onboard storage, 3GB RAM, as well as expandable memory up to 128GB.

• For those who still remember, it’s been well over a year since China’s Smartisan launched the T1, which turned out to be a surprisingly good effort from the teacher-turned-entrepreneur, Luo Yonghao. Today, the startup has finally launched its second Android device, the U1 aka JianGuo (which means “nuts” in Chinese), to cater to the younger audience with an 899 yuan (about $140) base price. That’s about the same as the Redmi Note 2, though some may find this to be a more fun design with what’s arguably a more intuitive interface, as we first saw back in April 2013.

• Sure, I could use my Android phone to keep an eye on Twitter for leads for a story, download images using Chrome, and write and publish my post in WordPress — but can you imagine switching between those apps to get it all done?

• Amazon just announced a new Android app with everything you can find in the normal Amazon app as well as a revamped store for Android apps and games. While the company already had the Amazon Appstore, Amazon Underground is a brand new app that can potentially replace both the Amazon app as well as the Appstore. In particular, the new app lets you download premium apps for free. Here’s how it works.

• Smartphones can be used to control computers remotely with the right apps installed on both devices, but there may be cases where you want to do the opposite – control a smartphone from a computer. One new app for Android allows users to do exactly that, manage the Android device from a computer. The app, however, is only available for Android devices, which means it can’t be used to operate an iPhone or any other iOS devices.

• Even with iPhone sales continuing to be strong, Apple is unlikely to make deeper inroads into Android’s global marketshare in the near future, according to projections from an IDC research report released on Tuesday.

• Vodafone UK wants to sell Android phones which are as close to stock (as Google intended) as possible, and the red company’s favourite device for this is the Moto G.

• Writing on the Vodafone company blog, Motorola senior marketing director Marcus Frost unsurprisingly extoled the virtues of the new phone – but he’s not just trying to flog more smartphones.

• The post points to two future directions, which can only be seen as an endorsement from both the handset company and the mobile network.

Free Software/Open Source

• Instead, Google expects that becoming more open — and releasing more open-source software — will create a path for the company to make inroads into the enterprise. “Google has recognized that open is a better way of building,” McLuckie also noted. “We’ve come to admire the ability of the open-source community to drive innovation.”

• He argued that building out in the open not only allows it to build a better product for its customers, but also to enable faster integration cycles. In addition, having an open-source project that involves other companies also allows it to absorb the DNA of these companies into the product.

• Instead, we chose to partner with Harvard Business Review (HBR) Press. In many ways, HBR does for books what Red Hat does for open source software; it collaborates with creators and adds value to the products of these collaborations. Like any piece of open source software (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example), a book is far more than the content it contains. Like a software application, a book is a project with multiple stakeholders. It involves an agent that works to put the book on publishers’ radars. It involves an editorial team that reviews manuscripts and suggests improvements. And it involves a marketing team that decides how best to develop and target potential audiences.

• A few days ago, I aligned Republican presidential hopefuls with open source Linux-based operating systems. Now, it’s the Democrats’ turn: If Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders et al. ran Linux, which distribution would they use? Read on for some perspective.

• Organisations that can effectively harness people’s innate tendency to make their lives easier will be more likely to successfully develop software and applications that genuinely disrupt, or protect against disruption, as business needs dictate.

• The application development technology of the future must provide a framework for users to develop software quickly and get it to market fast.

• That’s according to Red Hat, who says open source technology is the answer.

• Red Hat says organisations that can effectively harness people’s innate tendency to make their lives easier will be more likely to successfully develop software and applications that genuinely disrupt, or protect against disruption, as business needs dictate.

• In the last few years, open source software platforms such as Android have established themselves as essential catalysts for technology advances.

• It was recently reported that the Colorado-based startup SlamData is working on creating an enterprise version of its open source analytics platform. Their solution allows users to see and understand NoSQL data and this will now enable larger businesses to visualize data more effectively. The platform will enable large businesses to visualize semi-structured NoSQL data by adding proprietary security and management features to the main open source platform.

• FCC Chairman Tim Wheeler addressed the biannual meeting of the Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. (TDI) Conference in Baltimore on Thursday, with news of interest to anyone who works in assistive technologies.

• But scientists know they can manipulate those kinases to combat the disease. And chemical biologists at the University of North Carolina are leading an open source effort to unlock the secrets of kinase activity—secrets they say could pioneer a new generation of drug discovery.

• With open source technology already powering business like Facebook, Google and Booking.com – and 70% of new apps – will it be the backbone of the next wave of unicorns?

• Now we’re making Pinrepo open source on GitHub. There you can find all of the configuration stanzas and instructions to recreate it for yourself. It also includes a pypi release tool to release and maintain pypi packages. Check it out and let us know what you think! And, feel free to contribute back with your customizations and improvements.

• Currently, you’ll need a Windows machine to use ACAT. In the future, though, it would seem like this is exactly the kind of app that should be running on a smartphone, which is already bristling with cameras and sensors.

• When I ended my Doc Dish article about why you should use a rendered language for documentation, I told you that selecting a language was a matter for another day.

• Well another day has finally arrived.

• There’s no shortage of languages you can use for formatting and publishing your documentation, and your choice of language will depend on your project’s needs. In this article I’ll look at several different language options, ranging from the simplest to the most complex. It’s hardly an exhaustive list, so make the case for your favorite (or most hated) language in the comments.

• Many words have been written on community building, engagement, and retention. The discussion around community management is alive and kicking, with articles and blog posts everywhere about how to grow, support, and not mess up open source communities.

Events

• Linux Plumbers 2015 finished up last Friday. Another great conference. The focus of Plumbers is supposed to be more problem solving/discussion and less talking/lecturing. To really get the most out of Plumbers, you need to be an active participant and asking questions or giving input. Plumbers was co-located with the group of conferences now run by the Linux Foundation. The fist day of Plumbers overlapped with the last day of Linux Con. This day was as bit more lecture focused like a regular conference. Even if Plumbers is typically a discussion conference, the talks I went to were all great.

• The Tizen Developer Conference 2015 has been moved this year from San Francisco to Shenzhen, China, from September 17 to 18. This is the annual event that brings together open source and app developers who are interested in contributing to the growth of the Tizen ecosystem worldwide.

• We are happy to announce the first round of systemd.conf 2015 sponsors!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• An anonymous person complaining about “social justice bullies” at Mozilla will be fired if the person is discovered to be an employee, the company’s CEO said today. Speaking at Mozilla’s weekly public meeting, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard said Reddit user aioyama had “crossed the line” in a series of postings about women at the company, including recently departed community organizer Christie Koehler. In a series of tweets earlier this month, Koehler complained about Mozilla’s lack of diversity in the workplace and its failure to address accessibility issues.

• For the last two months, I’ve been interning at Mozilla Research, working on improving the state of SIMD parallelism in Rust: exposing more CPU instructions in the compiler, and an in-progress library that provides a mostly-safe but low-level interface to that core functionality.

• A new SIMD scheme is now available in the latest nightly versions of the Rust programming language.

• Mozilla Research has been working on improving SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) parallelism in Rust that’s simple to use.

SaaS/Big Data

• On the heels of its introduction as a hot new publlic company a few months ago, Hortonworks, which focuses on the open source Big Data platform Hadoop, is expanding its reach. The company announced that it has acquired Onyara, a young startup whose staffers created Apache NiFi, which is open source software that has been used by the National Security Agency (NSA).

• Last month I wrote about Apache Ni-Fi, a project borne of (non-shady) work at the US National Security Agency, and now a top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation. NiFi is all about building data flow orchestrations, and features a browser-based “boxes and lines” graphical user interface for getting the work done.

• Open source cloud infrastructure platforms like OpenStack offer many benefits to an enterprise — but first, IT must clear these five adoption hurdles.

• When dealing with open source cloud computing, there are many factors to consider, ranging from support to hidden costs. Make informed decisions with these five quick links.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Viewing LibreOffice documents inside GNOME Documents (the Evince Viewer) will soon yield a better experience thanks to work accomplished this year as part of Google’s Summer of Code.

• Second-time GSoC student developer Pranav Kant focused this year on improving the LibreOffice support within GNOME Documents. His GSoC project summary explained, “Integrate gtktiledviewer into GNOME-Documents – Today, GNOME Documents spawns LibreOffice via a rather unreliable unoconv command-line that converts documents to PDF. It is not only unreliable but also the results are not good, for example, spreadsheet rendering results are quite bad. With this project, we would be improving the existing libreofficekit based gtk tiled renderer, which would, then, be a very good replacement of the unreliable unoconv command in gnome-documents.”

• We reported a couple of months ago that a group of Ubuntu Touch developers started developing a new core app for Canonical’s mobile operating system, a viewer for documents created with the open-source LibreOffice office suite.

• The Document Foundation has just released the second Release Candidate for the LibreOffice 5.0.1 branch and the developers have fixed quite a few issues that have been spotted by the community.

• Collabora, through Sam Tuke, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.4 office suite, a modified, commercial version of the open-source LibreOffice software.

CMS

Business

Semi-Open Source

Funding

• The Eclipse Foundation, best known for its Eclipse IDE, is moving into funding its open source projects via donations.

• Previously, all Eclipse development was done by individuals and organizations contributing their time. “Today, we are significantly lowering the barriers for companies and individuals to actively invest in the ongoing development of the Eclipse platform,” Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said in a recent blog post.

BSD

• I have been keeping an eye on NextBSD for some time, when it was initially just openlaunchd, an effort initially started by R. Tyler as a GSoC student in 2005 to, unsurprisingly, port the launchd system and service manager to FreeBSD. It was stalled for a long time until its revival in late 2013, but again moving very slowly.

• Around November of 2014 at the MeetBSD conference, Jordan Hubbard delivered a talk entitled “FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years,” which outlined a general desire for a more “event-driven” and unified configuration approach to FreeBSD, strongly implying the use of launchd as system bootstrap and service daemon, as well as other parts of the OS X low-level userspace.

• The LLVM 3.7 release is imminent so here’s our usual look at the new features/improvements for this open-source compiler stack. Complete OpenMP 3 support is a big one but there’s also many other big ticket items to find in this major compiler update.

• The release of LLVM 3.7 is imminent.

• Days after preparing the 3.7-RC3 release, Hans Wennborg of Google has announced the release of 3.7-RC3.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Some more shinny code and a lot of bug fixes are coming.

• GNU Press announces the release of Emacs Manual Version 24.5, which contains approximately 2.5 more years of Emacs documentation than version 24.2. Each manual comes with an Emacs Reference Card Version 24.5, which can also be purchased separately. Also, there are a few copies of Emacs Manual Version 24.2, which has now been reduced to $35.

Public Services/Government

• The Academic Computer Club at the Umeå University in Sweden is a major supporter of open source projects. ACC UMU hosts one of the popular free software mirrors, and is one of the official sponsors of the Debian open source software distribution, maintaining a few of the project’s servers. The club supports two more well-known projects, the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) and Freenode. Both projects provide communication facilities that benefit free software communities.s

• One of the key lies out out in last years referendum was that we couldn’t exist securely without the British Security Services (the ones that brought you extraordinary rendition).

• Citizens and businesses should have to provide basic information only once, eGovernment services should be user-friendly and intuitive, and users should be digitally literate in order to use online (public) services. These are the most important digital rights for citizens and businesses when interacting with public agencies, as identified by panellists and the audience at the workshop ‘Promoting e-society’.

Openness/Sharing

• The code was developed by Open Knowledge and the Swedish company Metasolutions on behalf of the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova for the Swedish open data portal. The graphical design of the portal was not overhauled in the latest update but it now automatically provides a consistent user interface for all visitors, independent of the device they are using.

• Intel has concentrated all its internal and externally acquired expertise in networking to create what it believes is a multi-generational interconnection fabric scalable to any sized data-center or supercomputer array. Called Omni-Path Architecture (OPA), the fabric, announced today (Aug. 26) at the IEEE’s Hot Interconnects Symposium 2015 (Santa Clara, Calif.), is an open-source architecture designed specifically for both high-performance computing (HPC) and servers.

• An open-source design for a flat-pack timber home that can be erected by four people in around two days with no more than a drill and a mallet will be prototyped on the Gold Coast later this year.

Open Data

• Data is immensely powerful. The trick lies in organizing the stuff. The good news is that so many organizations are now offering tools that help with this—and so many of these tools are open source.

• As part of its global digital strategy, the government of La Rioja region in Spain has organised an open data contest, the goal of which is to promote the use and exploitation of data published on the regional open data portal.

Open Hardware

• Over the past five years, 3D printers have gotten cheaper, hardware has gotten smaller, and tinkerer communities have boomed. All of that has spurred a renaissance of prosthetic design, bolstered by an open source ethos and crowdfunded budgets.

Programming

• Hack is Facebook’s spinoff of the PHP language, working with the HHVM virtual machine. The library, meanwhile, generates code that is written into signed files to prevent undesired modifications. “The idea behind writing code that writes code is to raise the level of abstraction and reduce coupling,” Facebook said on its GitHub page for Hack Codegen.

Standards/Consortia

• The Internet’s foundational documents are called “requests for comments” or “RFCs.” Published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the organization whose stated goal is “to make the Internet work better,” RFCs define and explain the operational standards by which our worldwide network of networks functions. In other words, they specify the rules everyone should follow when building and implementing new Internet technologies. Engineers working on the Internet discuss potential RFCs, debate their merits, then post their decisions online for anyone to read.

• For example, when saving ODF with LibreOffice, the unit that is used for storage depends on the user preferences. This can lead to inconveniences and rounding errors. If I specify a margin of 1.25cm and send it to someone who has the preferences set to use inches, the margin will be stored as 0.4925in. When that number is converted back to centimeters, the value is 1.25095cm which is 1‰ more than the original value.

Leftovers

• Finland’s Rovio, maker of mobile phone game Angry Birds, forecast its earnings would fall for a third consecutive year and said it planned to slash up to 39 percent of its workforce to try to improve its prospects.

• Rovio has failed to create new hit games since the 2009 launch of Angry Birds, the top paid mobile app of all time, though it has tried to capitalise on its most successful brand by licensing its use on string of consumer products.

• On Friday afternoon, 151 warehouse and shipping workers for Google Express, the search engine’s delivery service, voted in favor of joining a union. Last month, workers at the Palo Alto, Calif., facility agreed to join Teamsters Local 853, which has unionized shuttle drivers for eBay, Apple, Yahoo and other companies.

Science

• IT’S A SITUATION that will be familiar to most computer users. Your computer crashes, and when you manage to get it back up and running the disk has corrupted some data. Probably the bit that was vital and so new that it hadn’t been backed up yet.

Health/Nutrition

• Is rejecting climate science, though, really like having believed that unchecked population growth would lead to food shortages? Contrary to Leonhardt’s glib “it hasn’t,” food shortages are a serious problem in the world right now. According to the UN World Food Programme, “Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life…about one in nine people on Earth.” The WFP notes that about 3.1 million children die from malnutrition a year–and that one in four children on Earth are stunted by lack of food. That seems fairly widespread.

• Unlike climate change denial, which if anything has exacerbated the problem of global warming, warnings about overpopulation may have had the intended effect of curbing population growth. China’s draconian one-child policy was directly inspired by the warnings of limits-to-growth advocates like the Club of Rome, along with numerous less coercive family planning initiatives. Partially as a result of these programs, the global population growth rate declined from above 2 percent in the 1960s and early ’70s to close to 1 percent and falling today. Without this reduction in growth, the population would be about 2 billion higher today than its current 7.3 billion.

Security

• The Third Circuit US Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has ruled that the Federal Trade Commission does have the right to prosecute firms who mishandle their customers’ data.

• Between 2008 and 2009, hotel chain Wyndham Worldwide – which runs hotels under the Days Inn, Howard Johnson, Ramada, Super 8, and Travelodge brands – suffered three computer intrusions. The hackers stole the personal information and credit card numbers of over 619,000 customers, causing at least $10.6m in thefts.

• Yet, despite the frequent complaints about the unrealistic demands of security, today the problem is just as likely to be the insistence on convenience. With the rise of desktop Linux and the popularity of Android, the pressure to be as easy to use as Windows is almost irresistible. As a result, there is no question that the average distribution is less secure than those of a decade ago. That is the price we pay for automounting external devices and giving new users automatic access to printers and scanners — and will continue to pay.

• At the time, the code repository said the cyberattack involved “a wide combination of attack vectors,” as well as new techniques including the hijacking of unsuspecting user traffic to flood GitHub, killing the service.

• Virtualization is nothing new, and depending how fundamentalist you define “virtualized environment” one can point to the earliest of timesharing systems as the origin.

• IBM’s mainframe hardware, the 360 machine series, introduced hardware virtualization, so that it was possible to run several of IBMs different and incompatible operating systems on the same computer at the same time.

• It’s more than a little bit ironic that a platform which have lasted 50 years now, were beset by backwards-compatibility issues almost from the start, and even more so that IBMs patents on this area of technology prevented anybody else from repeating their mistake for that long.

• Everybody else did software virtualization.

• During Positive Hack Days V, I made a fast track presentation about eCryptfs and password cracking. The idea came to me after using one feature of Ubuntu which consists in encrypting the home folder directory. This option can be selected during installation or activated later.

• While traveling through Dulles Airport last week, I noticed an Internet oddity. The nearby AT&T hotspot was fairly fast—that was a pleasant surprise.

• But the web had sprouted ads. Lots of them, in places they didn’t belong.

• Ad networks have been hit with a string of compromises in recent months, and according to a new report, many of the infections are making it through to consumers. A study published today by Cyphort found that instances of malware served by ad networks more than tripled between June 2014 and February 2015, based on monthly samples taken during the period. Dubbed “malvertising,” the attacks typically sneaking malicious ads onto far-reaching ad networks. The networks deliver those malware-seeded ads to popular websites, which pass them along to a portion of the visitors to the site. The attacks typically infect computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash, typically triggered as soon as an ad is successfully loaded.

• The most important central concept is the memory address. Every individual byte of memory has a corresponding numeric address. When the processor loads and stores data from main memory (RAM), it uses the memory address of the location it wants to read and write from. System memory isn’t just used for data; it’s also used for the executable code that makes up our software. This means that every function of a running program also has an address.

• When hackers released password data for more than 36 million Ashley Madison accounts last week, big-league cracking expert Jeremi Gosney didn’t bother running them through one of his massive computer clusters built for the sole purpose of password cracking. The reason: the passwords were protected by bcrypt, a cryptographic hashing algorithm so strong Gosney estimated it would take years using a highly specialized computer cluster just to check the dump for the top 10,000 most commonly used passwords.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• With a staggering four in five Yemenis now in need of immediate humanitarian aid, 1.5 million people displaced and a death toll that has surpassed 4,000 in just five months, a United Nations official told the Security Council on August 19 that the scale of human suffering is “almost incomprehensible”.

• Briefing the 15-member body upon his return from the embattled Arab nation on Aug. 19, Under-Secretary-General for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Stephen O’Brien stressed that the civilian population is bearing the brunt of the conflict and warned that unless warring parties came to the negotiating table there would soon be “nothing left to fight for”.

• An August assessment report by Save the Children-Yemen on the humanitarian situation in the country of 26 million noted that over 21 million people, or 80 percent of the population, require urgent relief in the form of food, fuel, medicines, sanitation and shelter.

• There is no dearth of rumors about the Iran nuclear deal. In the latest scare, two allegations have filled the media: the first, that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran made “secret side deals”; the second, that the IAEA, in those negotiations, put the Iranian government in charge of investigating alleged nuclear research at its Parchin military base.

• The latter supposed exposé comes from a now-debunked story by Associated Press (8/19/15). The piece, in its first draft, was full of errors and distortions (Vox, 8/20/15; War on the Rocks, 8/24/15). But its supposed revelations filled the airwaves.

• A war with Iran would be a catastrophe, yet by opposing diplomacy, hundreds of members of Congress may be blundering into just such a conflict. The Iran nuclear deal, as the complex diplomatic arrangement is popularly called, was agreed upon on July 14 by a consortium of key powerful countries, the European Union and Iran. The goal of the agreement is to limit Iran’s nuclear activities to peaceful purposes, and to block Iran’s ability to construct a nuclear bomb. Despite what its critics say, this agreement is not based on trust. It grants the International Atomic Energy Agency the power to conduct widespread, intrusive inspections to ensure that Iran keeps its many pledges. In return, many, but not all, of the sanctions on Iran, which have been crippling its economy, will be lifted.

• The alternative to diplomacy is to pour gasoline on a region of the world already on fire with intense, complex military conflicts. Iran’s military has more than half a million soldiers, no doubt with many more who could be mobilized if threatened with invasion. Iran shares a vast border to its west with Iraq, and to its east with Afghanistan, two nations with ongoing military and humanitarian disasters that have consumed the U.S. military since 2001, costing trillions of dollars and untold lives.

• Tragedy struck Bedford County, Virginia this morning when two journalists, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, were shot to death on live TV.

• The people viewing the broadcast at home had no choice but to watch the horror unfold, and neither did many social media users. Video of the shooting autoplayed on Twitter, Facebook (despite a content warning feature reportedly implemented in January), and other sites that support autoplay video.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Mashable reports that the following note was left by a guest at Yellowstone and then posted on Reddit by a friend of someone who works at the park. The note was left upon checkout by someone who does not understand how wild bears work (they don’t fuck with you unless you’ve got a pool) but is nonetheless quite polite; it’s refreshing that they were so kind about their disappointment, unlike the woman who threatened to shit herself in anger at Town Hall when Disneyland didn’t have fireworks the last time I went.

• Apparently the president cares more about Big Oil than the environment, endangered animals, indigenous people — even his own climate legacy.

• [...]

• “This is a disaster,” said Kristin Brown, director of digital strategy at the League of Conservation Voters, in an email. “Shell has an awful safety track record — even the Interior Department says there’s a 75 percent risk of a large oil spill if these leases are developed, and in the unpredictable Arctic Ocean, cleanup would be next-to-impossible.”

• Water access is going to be one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century. As climate change dries out the already dry areas and makes the wet ones wetter, we’re poised to see some radical civilizational shifts. For one, a number of densely populated areas will come under serious water stress—which analysts fear will lead to strife, thirst, and even violent conflict. With that in mind, the World Resource Institute has assembled a new report projecting which nations are most likely to be hardest hit by water stress in coming decades.

Finance

• “If it was a car industry, our ministers would be out championing it overseas, trying to win contracts, boasting of the British jobs that would bring. And if the BBC were a weapons system, half the Cabinet would be on a plane to Saudi Arabia to tell them how brilliant it was,” he said.

• New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) disproves allegations promoted by Fox News that the 2015 increase in Seattle’s minimum wage has destroyed restaurant jobs.

• That’s because fewer people are invested in the stock market today than at any time in nearly the last two decades — the product of dogged wage stagnation and a dramatic loss of faith in markets.

• Prof. Wolff talks to The Big Picture’s Thom Hartmann about Monday’s historic lows in the financial markets. Prof. Wolff breaks down China’s economy and if the devaluation of the yuan is the root to this market meltdown. Then Prof. Wolff and Thom take a look at the U.S. economy and review wage growth, inequality, and pensions.

• We are seeing the usual hysteria over the sharp drop in the markets in Asia, Europe, and perhaps the US. (Wall Street seems to be rallying as I write.) There are a few items worth noting as we enjoy the panic.

• First and most importantly, the stock market is not the economy. The stock market has fluctuations all the time that have nothing to do with the real economy. The most famous was the 1987 crash, which did not correspond to any real-world bad event that anyone could identify.

• On August 24, major stock markets in the United States opened their trading sessions with significant declines and sustained losses of 3 to 5 percent throughout much of the morning. Fox News used the event to advocate on behalf of numerous failed Republican policy demands, such as major tax cuts for the wealthy and a significant roll back of federal regulations.

• GUIDELINES on how to deal with suicidal benefits claimants have been handed out by the Department for Work and Pensions to Scots workers tasked with rolling out the UK Government’s controversial welfare reforms.

• As part of a six-point plan for dealing with suicidal claimants who have been denied welfare payments, call-centre staff in Glasgow have been told to wave the guidance, printed on a laminated pink card, above their head.

• The guidance is meant to help staff dealing with unsuccessful applicants for Universal Credit who are threatening to self-harm or take their own life.

• A manager is then meant to rush over to listen in to the call and workers – who insist they have had no formal training in the procedure – must “make some assessment on the degree of risk” by asking a series of questions.

• One section of the six-point plan, titled “gather information”, demands that staff allow claimants to talk about their intention to commit suicide.

• The call-centre workers, who earn between £15,000 and £17,000 a year, must “find out specifically what is planned, when it is planned for, and whether the customer has the means-to-hand”, according to the guidance seen by the Sunday Herald.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The problem with Education Matters’ promise to create “independent journalism,” however, is that several of the organizations funding it have a direct stake in a very specific education reform agenda. Education reform, as a project, is far from value-neutral: Reformers promote specific policies, ranging from firing teachers based on their students’ test scores to replacing public schools with privately run charter schools. Their rhetoric often directly attacks teachers unions and even public education as an institution, in favor of “market-driven” “school choice” solutions. And the organizations funding the LA Times’ new project are no exception.

• The Broad Foundation, in particular, has a prodigious record. According to its website, Broad currently invests in organizations that invest in charter-school expansion, including Aspire Public Schools (whose goal is to “expand its network of public charter schools in the Los Angeles area”), the California Charter School Association, the Charter School Growth Fund, charter loan provider Excellent Education Development, Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, Green Dot Public Schools (a charter network), the KIPP Foundation, New Schools Venture Fund, Pacific Charter School Development, Silicon Valley-based charter management organization Rocketship Education, Success Charter Network and Uncommon Schools. It funded the popular pro-charter documentary Waiting for Superman. It also invests in the US Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” grant program.

• Bear with me for a second, because this is going to sound like a #Slatepitch or a hot take at first, I know. But after catching up on the latest from U.S. senator and presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders, who “delighted” a crowd of roughly 3,000 South Carolinians at a campaign rally this weekend, according to the Associated Press, I feel compelled to register a mild criticism. And it’s probably one of the last you’d expect to be leveled against this longtime, unapologetic democratic socialist.

• I wish, although without much hope, that this theory would spread and become accepted. The reason is simple: it could help break the deadlock in Washington that has cursed us for the last four years. And from a more self-interested point of view, I’m not sure that my own genes can survive another election year like the last one.

Censorship

• The Austrian branch of T-Mobile is refusing to block access to The Pirate Bay and several other popular torrent sites. T-Mobile was asked to do so by a local music rights group, who want the ISP to voluntarily follow a court order that was issued against rival Internet provider A1.

• In a remarkable case study of censorship, author and political cartoonist Ted Rall recounts how he was dropped from the Los Angeles Times, purportedly for giving an untrue account of a 2001 encounter with an LAPD officer, who cited Rall for jaywalking.

Privacy

• As the Ashley Madison hack demonstrated, Web companies can’t guarantee privacy.

• When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.

• As someone said to me in one of the comments on my blog, trying to remove your data from the web is “like trying to remove pee from a swimming pool”. I added the DMCA comment in there as well because this has come up many times in the press. There’s a good piece on it in an article that emerged after news of the attack first broke last month (paradoxically, stating that DMCA is the reason the full data hadn’t been leaked), do read Parker Higgins’ comment about the “fraudulent” use of the act in terms of its’ use for removing data breaches. Regardless, a US law will in no way stop the mass distribution of this data, particularly via a decentralised mechanism like torrents.

• The first UN privacy chief has said the world needs a Geneva convention style law for the internet to safeguard data and combat the threat of massive clandestine digital surveillance.

• Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.

• He added that he doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter, and said it was regrettable that vast numbers of people sign away their digital rights without thinking about it.

• Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, Canadian cops need a warrant before they can get subscriber information from telecommunication companies—which is why police are now lobbying for a legal workaround so they can access that same information without court approval.

• In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that subscriber information such as names and addresses carries with it a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that accessing such information without a warrant constitutes an unlawful search. The ruling has caused “substantial resource and workload challenges for law enforcement,” according to a resolution adopted by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) at its annual convention in August.

• According to a study from HP Security Research, 70 percent of the most widely used Internet of Things devices have notable security vulnerabilities.

• Facebook has promoted Stephen Scheeler to the role of managing director of its Australia and New Zealand region business.

• The default state of Internet privacy is a travesty. But if you’re willing to work hard, you can experience the next best thing to absolute Internet anonymity

• It’s official: using your cell phone during a family dinner is frowned upon by pretty much everybody.

• A new survey by Pew Research Center found that 88% of respondents believe it’s “generally” not OK to use a cell phone during dinner. An even larger percentage, 94%, say cell phone use is inappropriate during meetings, while 95% say they shouldn’t be used at theaters and 96% say they shouldn’t be used during religious services.

• Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday asked U.S. President Barack Obama to investigate alleged spying by the National Security Agency on the Japanese government and companies, Mr. Abe’s spokesman said.

• Tor is increasingly being used to scan organisations for vulnerabilities and to launch attacks

• The Tor anonymisation network is increasingly used as the point of origin of attacks on public- and private-sector organisations, according to a new report by IBM, which recommends administrators ban access to the network.

• The report also noted increases in SQL injection and distributed denial-of-service attacks and of “ransomware” incidents that encrypt data belonging to an individual or an organisation, and then charge a fee to decrypt it.

• UN PRIVACY RAPPORTEUR Joseph Cannataci has suggested – and he is not the first – that citizens need better data protection from technology companies, governments, the internet, heck the 21st century.

• Cannataci, who assumed the position last month after a 29-person battle royal/interview process, has made it clear that, as a representative for privacy, he will represent privacy.

• After a breach of the site’s database, people combing through the information found that Ashley Madison, and other properties owned by parent company Avid Life Media (ALM), had retained quite a bit of information pertaining to users who purchased a “full delete” of their profile for £15, including GPS coordinates, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, weight, height, among other details. Although e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and descriptions written by users who sought “full deletes” were eliminated by the time the hackers accessed the database, the incidental data that Ashley Madison kept on those users could still paint quite a picture. The Register has a table that nicely illustrates what information Ashley Madison kept on “deleted” users and what it actually deleted.

• In addition, when Ars investigated the “full delete” option on Ashley Madison a year ago, we found that there was little difference between a “full delete” and the “hiding your profile” option, except that messages that a user sent to another user would be deleted if exiting users paid the fee.

Civil Rights

• Generals, decorated war heroes, grieving families and politicians last night urged soldiers and members of the public to sign a petition to save Afghan interpreters from the Taliban.

• General Sir Richard Dannatt, former head of the Army, led the calls as he pledged to sign a petition asking David Cameron to give all translators a safe haven in Britain.

• He praised the Daily Mail for its Betrayal of the Brave series of articles highlighting the plight of frontline Afghans who risked their lives for UK troops in the battlefield.

• He said: ‘We have a moral obligation to look after these people and if they feel once we have left that they cannot assume their normal lives because of fear having worked for us, then it is our obligation to have them in this country.

• On average, one person every two days was put to death in kingdom, says new report, with figures for 2015 already ahead of those for whole of last year [...] on average one person every two days [...] Saudi courts allow for people to be executed for adultery, apostasy and witchcraft.

• A former police captain recently signed an affidavit affirming that several formal reprimands are missing from the personnel file of the officer who killed a 19-year-old during a marijuana bust. Although the police chief claims that no disciplinary actions have been taken against the officer, his former supervisor lists multiple performance issues resulting from the officer’s negligence. In an attempt to improve public relations, city officials have hired a PR firm at the expense of taxpayers’ dollars instead of releasing the dash cam videos of the shooting.

• A woman reportedly downed a £120 bottle of cognac after airport security officials attempted to confiscate the liquid – only to be denied boarding as she was “too drunk to fly”.

• The woman, who is being identified only by her surname of Zhao, was allegedly seen rolling about on the floor of Beijing Capitol International Airport, according to the Beijing Times.

• In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, five former New Orleans police officers were sentenced to six to 65 years in prison in connection to on-the-job deadly shootings of unarmed civilians. But recently, these five officers had their convictions set aside by a federal appeals court. Why? Federal prosecutors’ anonymous online comments posted underneath local news accounts of the officers’ ongoing 2011 trial “contributed to the mob mentality potentially inherent in instantaneous, unbridled, passionate online discourse,” the court said. In light of that, the appellate court found a fair trial wasn’t possible.

• The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week (PDF) that the prosecutors’ behavior, unearthed by the same forensic expert who helped identify the Unabomber, created an “air of bullying” that federal prosecutors were “sworn to respect.”

• …apparently two BBC reporters who were covering the police pursuit of the apparent shooter (who then shot himself) were forced by police to delete their own camera footage. This is illegal. I don’t know how many times it needs to be repeated. Even the DOJ has somewhat forcefully reminded police that they have no right to stop anyone from photographing or videotaping things, so long as they’re not interfering with an investigation.

• Some 23% of Americans think it’s not OK to use your phone while walking down the street, but that’s nothing compared to how they feel about the cinema or church

• The very upscale New Yorker magazine marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a celebration of the benefits that supposedly accrued to the 100,000 mostly Black and poor people forced into exile from New Orleans. “Starting Over,” by magazine staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, a biracial Canadian who made his bones promoting the hyper-aggressive “broken windows” police strategy, concludes that involuntary displacement is a good thing for people who are stuck in “bad” neighborhoods or bad cities where poverty is high and chances for upward mobility are low. Since every heavily Black city in the country fits that description, the logic is that Black people should be dispersed to the four winds and prevented from forming concentrated populations.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• While Google is still seen as (and proclaims to be) a net neutrality advocate, evidence continues to mount that this is simply no longer the case. Back in 2010 you might recall that Google helped co-write the FCC’s original, flimsy net neutrality rules with the help of folks like AT&T and Verizon — ensuring ample loopholes and making sure the rules didn’t cover wireless at all. When the FCC moved to finally enact notably-tougher neutrality rules for wired and wireless networks earlier this year, Google was publicly mute but privately active in making sure the FCC didn’t seriously address the problems with usage caps and zero-rated (cap exempt) content.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In 1987, Norberto Colón Lorenzana had what we can all agree is a pretty unremarkable idea. Colón, who had just started working at a fast food joint called Church’s Chicken in Puerto Rico, suggested to his employer that they try adding a basic fried chicken sandwich to a menu that was mostly chicken-by-the-piece.

• Data obtained through a Freedom of Information request reveals that City of London Police have targeted the ad revenue of 251 suspected pirate sites, replacing their banners with anti-piracy messaging. The police won’t reveal the domain names as that would raise their profiles, but the most prominent pirate sites are believed to be included.

• Megaupload’s legal team is asking the court to preserve essential evidence hosted on its seized servers. The data is at risk of being destroyed and Kim Dotcom’s lawyers argue that the authorities should buy the servers and transfer them to a safe facility where they can be preserved at the Government’s cost.

• John Deere would not talk on tape, but in an emailed statement the company said ownership does not include the right to modify computer code embedded in that equipment.

• We write frequently about those who abuse the DMCA either directly for the sake of censorship or, more commonly, because some are in such a rush to take down anything and everything that they don’t bother (or care) to check to see if what they’re taking down is actually infringing. The latter, while common, could potentially expose those issuing the takedowns to serious legal liability, though the courts are still figuring out to what extent.

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