● 09.05.15

● Links 5/9/2015: Elive 2.6.10 Beta, Mozilla’s Bugzilla Issue

Posted in News Roundup at 5:44 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Yes, Wintel barely has a chance in the current market of India. Yesterday, 43% of Internet-pageviews were from Android/Linux. Even GNU/Linux had > 1% share including mobile. Then there was “Unknown”, probably some Linux OS at 6.69%. M$’s most popular OS, “7” only had 19.68% share, according to StatCounter. If you restrict data to desktop only, GNU/Linux reaches 2% and “Unknown” is also 2%.

Server

• Linux started to take off in the mid-1990s, primarily in the supercomputing community, which saw it as a way of replacing their expensive machines with clusters of Linux-based commodity servers.

• Each of the following control panels can be installed on your Linux distribution of choice. Some of the offerings are completely free to use (some even open source), whereas others offer inexpensive premium versions. Read on and see if one of these tools is what you’re looking for.

• DevOps is often touted as the next big thing in software development, and rightly so. DevOps encourages collaboration among different teams working on the product, aims to reduce products’ time to market, and much more. But what if you are not developing software, per se? Do you have to miss this new wave of innovation? Of course not!

• Application containers have been around for a while in the Linux world, but now Microsoft is moving them into the mainstream. Here’s what you need to know about this evolution of server virtualization.

Kernel Space

• Linux audio driver developers are still working on Skylake-related support, but all of that initial code is now present for Linux 4.3 in conjunction with the latest Intel processors.

• Besides Skylake, the Linux 4.3 sound updates also have a new STI controller driver and new Cirrus CS4349, GTM601, InvenSense ICS43432, and Realtek RT298 drivers. There’s also machine drivers for Rockchip systems with MAX98090, RT5645, and RT5650 SoCs.

• Boot times can become slow on systems with many CPUs, partly because of the time it takes to crank up all the RAM chips. Mel Gorman recently submitted some patches to start up RAM chips in parallel instead of one after the other. One of the main problems with trying to implement such a feature—and one of the main reasons such patches haven’t made it into the kernel before—is the need to avoid slowing things down for smaller systems.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• Sometimes in life, you run into situations where turning a voice recording into a text document is necessary. Perhaps this is from an interview for a news publication or perhaps you need to transcribe a verbal lecture from school. On Windows and OS X, there are a number of software programs that can help with this. Yet for Linux users, the options feel a bit sparse by comparison.

• After pushing the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Kodi 15.2 maintenance version of Isengard (Kodi 15) to testers worldwide on the last day of August, the developers of the popular media center software formerly known as XBMC have the pleasure of informing us all about the codename and features of Kodi 16.

• Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.

• Kovid Goyal has had the pleasure of announcing a new version of his popular open-source and cross-platform Calibre e-book library management, reader, and converter software, which introduces several new features and addresses multiple issues.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.51 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): - XAudio2 implementation using OpenAL Soft. - Support for the new Universal C Runtime DLL. - Dropdown menu support in the standard Open Dialog. - Grayscale rendering mode in DirectWrite. - Various bug fixes.

• The source is available from the following locations:

• http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.7.51.tar.bz2

• http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.7/wine-1.7.51.tar.bz2

• Just a few minutes ago, September 4, Alexandre Julliard, maintainer of the Wine project, had the pleasure of announcing the release of a new milestone towards Wine 1.8, version 1.7.51, which brings new features and adds better support for many Windows apps and games.

Games

• Statistics published by Valve show Steam’s Linux usage still at under 1%.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This year I will participate at the Randa Meetings for the second time. The last year was a great experience and I am really grateful that there was this opportunity to get in touch with the KDE community as a new developer of the recently incubated QtQuick port of the GCompris project.

• Plasma 5.4, the feature release for August, has landed in Kubuntu Wily.

• Over the last few days I decided to help Martin a bit with the ongoing effort on Wayland, since there are still many parts of work missing in order to have a full Plasma Wayland session to just work, but it’s impressive how fast it’s getting there.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• So these 3 weeks has been crazy of work. Basically because we had a roadmap, and we wanted to complete all that was marked as a target. The UI freeze was the first deadline, and Georges (Gsoc student for Nautilus and Gtk+ that I was mentoring) and me managed to get merged the Other Locations view, as Georges did for Gtk+ previously. Was a overworked week and a half, but the result came in!

Distributions

• This goes for the Romanian Group for the Development of Gentoo-Derivative Technologies too. Gentoo is an operating system based on Linux or FreeBSD, which can be automatically optimized or personalized for almost any application or need. Last week the Cluj-based team launched in Bucharest and Cluj two PC operating systems that are one hundred per cent Romanian, which could be used by regular users or within public administration, the education system or defence institutions.

• While the original Raspberry Pi was initially restricted to the custom-built Raspbian build of Debian, several operating systems are already available for the Raspberry Pi 2, among them versions of Linux that could not be run on the original.

• Forget running Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi 2 – the real news is that more Linux distros are available for the second iteration of this fantastic little computer!

Ballnux/SUSE

• The openSUSE Project, through Douglas DeMaio, has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Milestone build towards the openSUSE 42.1 Leap operating system.

• The second milestone for openSUSE’s newest distribution Leap was released today and it’s filled with packages that will interest open-source users everywhere and Linux professionals looking for a long-term, stable Linux system.

Red Hat Family

• As mentioned in the beta release notes, the kernel in RHEL 7.2 contains a rebased LIO kernel target, to the equivalent of the Linux 4.0.stable series.

• This is a big update. LIO has improved greatly since 3.10. It has added support for SCSI features that enable VMWare VAAI support, as well as data integrity (DIF), and significant iSER work, for those of you using Infiniband. (SRP is also supported, as well as iSCSI and FCoE, of course.)

Debian Family

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the ninth update of its oldstable distribution Debian 7 (codename “wheezy”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were published separately and are referenced where applicable.

• Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian 7 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old “wheezy” CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

• You may remember the auto-decrufter, which I added to dak. As a safety measure, it bails out when in doubt about which removal breaks what package. Turns out it was often in doubt, because the code had a bug. Of course, nothing that could not be solved with a patch.

• We have enough debate about are things required by policy in Debian that, in my opinion we sometimes lose track of why things are a good idea to begin with. I just had a conversation via GitHub with a potential upstream developer (I’m looking into packaging something he developed) that reminded me about some of the reasons some of the non-code we try to ship are a good idea.

• Debconf 15 was a great opportunity to meet some of the other LTS contributors in person and to work on some of my packages:

Derivatives

• The developers of the Debian-based Q4OS Linux distribution sent an email to Softpedia earlier today to inform us about the release and immediate availability for download of the Q4OS 1.4.1 operating system.

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.6.10

• The developers of the SparkyLinux distribution have announced on September 3, 2015, the availability for download and testing of a new edition for their Linux kernel-based operating system, SparkyLinux Rescue.

• In a brief announcement posted on September 3, the developers of the Debian- and Enlightenment-based Elive Linux distribution have announced the immediate availability for download and testing of a new Beta build.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On September 3, Canonical informed its users about new Linux kernel updates for its Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems, patching two critical issues, one for each of the aforementioned distributions.

• We first reported on MJ Technology back in December and were excited at the prospect of an OEM bringing Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch operating system to a mobile device. It seems the dream is finally a reality, and Ubuntu users can now look forward to a tablet with some serious performance sporting the OS.

• Ubuntu developers are closing in on the next major release, with the Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf set to debut on October 22. Ubuntu 15.10 is in many respects an incremental release ahead of the 16.04 Long Term Support release in 2016.

• Among the key innovations in 15.10 is wider use of the Snappy technology for packaging, though it won’t replace the core .deb packaging system anytime soon, if ever.

• Canonical’s James Page posted an interesting message on the Ubuntu mailing list, informing all Ubuntu developers about the steps they need to take in order to update the OpenStack cloud software to version 2015.2.0 (Liberty) in Ubuntu 15.10.

• As Łukasz Zemczak is currently in a two-week holiday, Canonical’s Timo Jyrinki sent the usual report to inform us all about the good and bad things that happened in the Ubuntu Touch world.

• You probably don’t need to build your own distribution of Linux. There are already so many to choose from and with a bit of research, I bet you can find one all prepackaged and ready to download that will do what you want it to. Right? Then again, why shouldn’t you? Even well seasoned Linux users tend to forget just how modular Desktop Linux really is. People also tend to think that the only folks who can put together their own distros are natural-born hackers who live in a terminal all day. Not true at all! Anyone who has a good basic understanding of what a Linux Desktop is made of and can execute a few simple commands in the right order can build their own Ubuntu based Linux Desktop. It’s easier than you think and it can be a great learning experience too.

Flavours and Variants

• Riddell has had his fair share of run-ins with Canonical over the years, the most recent of which had him expelled from the Ubuntu Community Council. They also demanded he be removed as the Kubuntu community leader, something, by the way, they have no authority to require.

• Elementary OS steps up: Not quite four months after the release of version 0.3.0 Freya, the folks at elementary have announced the release of 0.3.1. Although this is officially a minor point release, it does come packed with changes that should make it a must-install for elementary users. Included in the update: Version 14.04.3 of Ubuntu’s Hardware Enablement stack, improvements to the interface in Files, and the latest and greatest version 0.5.11 of the Midori browser.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung Electronics Co have released the Tizen Software Development Kit (SDK) for the recently unveiled Samsung Gear S2 wearable device. Thanks to the early access program, over a thousand applications for the Samsung Gear S2 are expected to be available to users at launch. This is in addition to the five thousand apps already available to Samsung Gear users. Samsung has also opened the Gear S2 seller site on August 18th so developers and partners to start registering their Gear S2 applications.

Android

• Google may finally bring the Play Store and Android Wear to the world’s most populous country.

• A report from The Information says the Internet giant is close to a deal with the Chinese government that would finally give Google more equal footing with Apple in the battle over mobile devices and content.

• In most AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile stores, it takes a while to find the ZTE phones, buried in the back, past the latest from Apple and Samsung. But they’re there. In AT&T stores it’s the ZTE Maven, which has a screen, speakers, and a processor with capabilities somewhere between the iPhone 5 and 6. As Tony Greco, ZTE’s head of U.S. retail marketing, puts it, “These were state-of-the-art features two years ago.” The Maven’s draw, really, is price. Without any subsidies from a wireless carrier, the phone costs just $60. And it’s not even one of the company’s cheaper models.

• If you’re looking for a cost-effective, mobile POS solution for your restaurant, Jack Wallen thinks Free POS Project might be the answer.

• Alcatel OneTouch, a division of the Chinese electronics company TCL, has announced the Xess 17.3″ Android tablet at the IFA consumer electronics event in Berlin.

• The TCL/Alcatel OneTouch Xess is a 17.3” Android L 5.1 tablet with 10-point multi-touch, stylus, 8-core ARM 1.5Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM, 32GB Flash storage, MicroSD slot and 2 USB ports.

• The unusual aspect of the above is its size, and that it is designed to be used primarily on a desk or tabletop like a PC, not in the hands like a mobile tablet.

• Android 6.0 M was unveiled sometime back by Google at the 2015 I/O Conference. Just like the naming of the previous versions of the Android operating system, the latest version M stands for Marshmallow.

• Alcatel wants its new 17.3-inch Xess tablet to be a multipurpose hub for the family, providing recipes in the kitchen, films in the living room, and a digital whiteboard for to-do lists and upcoming events. However, the severely underpowered Android device doesn’t seem to be capable of entertaining even a single individual, let alone a whole household. The device has a fine 1920 x 1080 display, but an unspecified 1.5 GHz processor and 2GB of RAM mean that even swiping through pages of apps becomes a chore as icons are dragged slowly across the screen. Alcatel has stressed that the Xess is still a prototype at this stage, but it’s in need of some serious upgrades.

• There’s good news in store for future Android-running BlackBerry users. The smartphone maker that now figures maybe it likes the taste of Lollipops and Marshmallows after all has announced its acquisition of Good. Good.

• Good develops a suite of decidedly un-fun Android apps intended for enterprise users. There’s a pretty good number of them out there too. The Play Store has apps for accessing intranet, managing contacts, and handling email. There’s also Salesforce integration. Over 6,000 organizations already use Good apps.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source technology can be particularly useful in the financial and banking sectors, says Matthew Lee, regional manager for Africa at SUSE.

• In the fields of banking and stock trading, agility is of critical importance, as is maintaining top performance and around-the-clock availability for the business systems that underpin trading and banking activity, Lee says.

• LinkedIn today announced that it is open-sourcing an internal tool called FeatureFu. The FeatureFu toolkit is meant to make it easier for developers to build their machine learning models around statistical modeling and decision engines.

• The idea here is to take LinkedIn’s knowledge around “feature engineering” and make it accessible to developers outside of the company. In machine learning, feature engineering is basically using your detailed knowledge of the phenomenon you are looking at and then using that to build machine learning models.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Openness, transparency, and security are all central to the Mozilla mission. That’s why we publish security bugs once they’re no longer dangerous, and it’s why we’re writing a blog post about unauthorized access to our infrastructure. We have notified the relevant law enforcement authorities about this incident, and may take additional steps based on the results of any further investigations.

• An attacker stole security-sensitive vulnerability information from the Mozilla’s Bugzilla bug tracking system and probably used it to attack Firefox users, the maker of the open-source Firefox browser warned Friday.

• Mozilla admitted today that its Bugzilla bug tracking system was breached by an attacker, who was then able to get access to information about unpatched zero-day bugs.

• While Mozilla doesn’t have finite timelines on when the breach occurred, it may well have happened as far back as September 2013. According to Mozilla, the attacker was able to breach a user’s account that had privileged access to Bugzilla, including the non-public zero-day flaw information.

• Apple’s iOS has been around for well over half a decade now and Mozilla in its usual style has been a bit too relaxed in getting itself onto the platform, that coupled with Apple’s unwillingness to allow competing browsers onto its platform for so many years has meant Firefox is only just arriving on iOS. Today, Mozilla have announced that those residing in New Zealand can get their hands on the first public preview of Firefox for iOS.

SaaS/Big Data

Databases

• Today 78% of organizations run part or all of their operations on open source software, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2010. And according to ranking site DB-Engines, six of the top 10 databases are open source, and the top eight non-relational technologies are all open source.

• So why do so many organizations standardize on open source? Why do 66% of organizations look to open source before considering proprietary software alternatives? When it comes to databases, it turns out that the most important criteria are likely to be better addressed by an open source product.

Education

• Teachers across the globe have answered the call to code. “Yes,” they say, “we will teach our kids to program, even if we don’t know how ourselves.” They’ve delivered lessons on Scratch; they’ve celebrated the Hour of Code. Perhaps they’ve even dabbled in Codecademy’s offerings to familiarize themselves with this newly popular, suddenly ubiquitous competency called “coding.”

• People of all ages are heading back to school now. For the next couple of weeks, Opensource.com is highlighting a range of open source software, hardware, and tools for students and educators. We’ll also sprinkle in open education stories for good measure.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Don’t be afraid to say that more than $1,000 a year is too much to spend on textbooks. Encourage your professors to consider these alternatives to expensive textbooks, and with the dedicated work of ASUI, we will be able to ensure that all students are able to afford the education we deserve.

Open Hardware

• Back in January Razer lifted the lid on its highly customizable “Hacker Dev Kit” VR headset and OSVR (Open-Source Virtual Reality) platform, both designed “to set an open standard for virtual reality input devices.”

• Now the company has revealed that the consumer version of its headset, the HDK v1.3, will be available for pre-order on October 1, and that its OSVR content discovery platform has launched and can be accessed right away.

• The Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) headset will get a significant upgrade soon. Gaming peripheral company Razer announced the OSVR program back in January, but the first prototype headset was an underwhelming affair with uncomfortable ergonomics and a so-so display. That wasn’t really the point, though. Rather than a single company aiming to dominate the VR market, OSVR is a loose band of hardware and software companies hoping to do for virtual reality “what Android did for mobile.”

• As the Virtual Reality gaming market grows, there are some growing efforts that are seeking to be less proprietary, and more inclusive about the process. Open Source Virtual Reality, or OSVR, is a movement that involves not just Razer, but over 230 companies that support the cause.

Programming

Leftovers

• It’s still an employee’s market for IT jobs. But as always, the right skills are commanding the most pay. Over the 12-month period that ended in July, premium pay for both certified and noncertified skills soared by 9 percent, according to the latest survey of pay in the IT industry by Foote Partners.

• Not surprisingly, hot sectors such as security, application development, big data, and the cloud experienced the most gains. But the new report contains a surprising bit of information: Noncertified job skills are increasing most rapidly as some employers question the value of certifications. “They [noncertified skills] are less immune to manipulation,” says David Foote, the research firm’s chief analyst.

Security

• MONEY PROCESSING OUTFIT PayPal has a hidden feature: a stored XSS vulnerability that could hand users to hackers who are hell bent on havoc.

• Say what you like about PayPal – a lot of people do – you would expect it to have its security act together. Well, you would if you had just crawled out of the sea and been told what PayPal is, what it does and where it does it.

• Over the past four years, Tarsnap’s bug bounties have received quite a bit of attention. Most of it has been very useful — almost 400 mistakes (most either cosmetic or harmless, but some of them significant) have been reported and fixed — but it does also get some unwanted attention: Despite my clear statement that Tarsnap’s bug bounties are for problems in tarsnap code, not for problems in the website, I regularly see people running automated vulnerability scanners… which invariably yield a selection of absurd non-vulnerability “vulnerabilities”.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Jeremy Corbyn, the frontrunner in the Labour leadership contest, has said he cannot currently envisage circumstances in which he would agree to deploy Britain’s armed forces on overseas military operations.

• In the last hustings before the ballot closes on 10 September, the leftwinger questioned if the UK could maintain a “global reach”, and said that any armed intervention by British forces should be approved by the UN.

• Corbyn also marked himself out from his more mainstream rivals by launching a strong attack on the EU for “increasingly operating like a free market across Europe”.

• Reports of civilian deaths in US airstrikes against ISIS started pretty much the same day the strikes did, and over a year into the war, the US is accused of killing hundreds of civilians over the course of 71 different incidents.

• Jeremy Corbyn scored an overwhelming lead over his rivals during the Sky News Labour debate, according to an unofficial poll of viewers using Sky Pulse.

• About 80.7% of those surveyed immediately afterwards believed Mr Corbyn had won the final hustings.

• Liz Kendall was a distant second on 8.5%, with Yvette Cooper on 6.1% and Andy Burnham on 4.7%.

• Mr Corbyn, who is the frontrunner to be the next Labour leader according to opinion polls, seemed to gain momentum during the debate.

• Before it began, 66.5% of Sky Pulse users believed he would outperform the other contenders.

• Parents appear to be arming their newborn babies with intimidating names in a tough-guy take on giving them the best start in life.

• Images are a powerful tool in the hands of propagandists. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. If a powerful image can be manipulated to tell a tale even if false, it can persuade more viscerally than can a thousand reasoned arguments.

• So it is with the tragic photograph making the mainstream media rounds yesterday of a lone Syrian child drowned on a Turkish shore. Reams of articles can be written about the current refugee crisis but particularly in the US they will go relatively unnoticed by those not directly affected. There may be some video clips on the nightly news but overall the story – and particularly the context – will go unexplained.

• But the powerful image of a dead child, abandoned by the world on the capricious sway of the tide, is putty in the hands of propagandists.

• And proponents of the four-year US policy of Syrian destabilization and regime change are lining up to make their case that the current refuge crisis – now swamping Europe with Syrians desperate for something approaching a normal life – is one hundred percent the fault of both Syrian president Assad and the western non-interventionists who objected to plans in 2013 for the US and UK to begin bombing Syria.

• Call to detain PM for ‘war crimes’ can now be discussed by MPs after garnering 100,000 signatures on Parliament website; senior MP dismisses ‘completely absurd’ petition

• A ship built by the CIA for a secret Cold War mission in 1974 to raise a sunken Soviet sub is heading to the scrap yard, a victim of the slide in oil prices.

• A ship built by the CIA for a secret Cold War mission in 1974 to raise a sunken Soviet sub is heading to the scrap yard, a victim of the slide in oil prices.

• Christened the Hughes Glomar Explorer, after billionaire Howard Hughes was brought in on the CIA’s deception, the 619-foot vessel eventually became part of the fleet of ships used by Swiss company Transocean to drill for oil.

• Prior and during the Pakistan visit by American National Security Advisor Ms Susan Rice a salvo of reports were dripping out of American, Indian and some Pakistani writers apropos Pakistan becoming third largest nuclear stockpiling country in the world. These writers mostly referred Toby Dalton and Michael Krepon, two renowned think tanks of the US for estimating more than one hundred nuclear warheads possessed by Pakistan. Selection of the occasion of American NSA’s visit to Pakistan, for demonising the country on nuclear issue appeared to be for creating a coercive background favouring both American NSA and India.

Transparency Reporting

• Hillary Clinton on Friday declined on two occasions to apologize for using a personal email account and server while serving as secretary of State.

• In a rare national interview, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Clinton if she was sorry that she had bucked traditional protocol and routed her work email through a private email account and server.

• Clinton responded by acknowledging that “it wasn’t the best choice,” and said that she “should have had two accounts.” But she also continued to defend the decision as “above board” and something that was “allowed by the State Department.”

• “People in the government knew I was using a personal account,” Clinton said. “But it would have been better if I had two separate accounts to begin with, and I’m doing all I can now to be transparent about what I had on my work related emails. They will be coming out. I wish it was faster. I’m frustrated it’s taking a while, but there’s a process that needs to be followed.”

• The US strategically schemed to cause unrest in Syria against the incumbent Bashar al-Assad government. Faced with the rise of ISIS, which the US was not only aware of but also encouraged, the US slides deeper into a complicated war it helped escalate in the first place, recently involving the once reluctant Turkey and clandestinely including 80 British personnel as well.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange warned Edward Snowden to escape to Russia or risk being “kidnapped or possibly killed”. Assange told the former NSA contractor Snowden to flee to Moscow after he leaked information about the US government’s mass surveillance programme to the media in 2013.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• At the end of this month, the UN will launch its new 2030 Sustainable Development agenda for “people, planet and prosperity” in New York, where it will be formally adopted by over 150 world leaders.

• The culmination of years of consultations between governments, communities and businesses all over the world, there is no doubt that the agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer an unprecedented vision of the interdependence of global social, economic and environmental issues.

• But records from the SDG process reveal that insiders at the heart of the UN’s intergovernment engagement negotiations have criticised the international body for pandering to the interests of big business and ignoring recommendations from grassroots stakeholders representing the world’s poor.

• President Barack Obama arrived in Alaska on Monday for a three-day tour during which he will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Alaska Arctic. On Monday, Obama highlighted the dangers posed by climate change in the region. “Arctic temperatures are rising about twice as fast as the global average,” Obama said. “Over the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed about twice as fast as the rest of the United States.” As the Arctic region warms, the geopolitical significance of the region is growing as new areas become reachable, spurring maritime traffic and oil drilling. Resources below the Arctic ice cap are worth over $17 trillion, the rough equivalent of the entire U.S. economy. According to investigative journalist James Bamford, the region has become the “crossroads of technical espionage” as the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark battle for control of those resources. Bamford joins us to talk about his recent piece, “Frozen Assets: The Newest Front in Global Espionage is One of the Least Habitable Locales on Earth—the Arctic.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• “Report: More Than Half of Immigrants on Welfare,” USA Today titled a recent story (9/2/15). Not mentioned in the headline is that this report was conducted by an anti-immigration think tank with ties to white supremacist groups.

• Citing a study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), USA Today‘s Alan Gomez claims that roughly 51 percent of immigrant-led households receive welfare, compared to 30 percent for “native”-led households. (By “native,” the paper does not mean indigenous Americans, but rather US citizens.)

• CIS Attempts To Promote Anti-Immigration Agenda By Connecting Immigration To Welfare

• Mainstream media are calling out conservative outlets such as Fox News for connecting the Black Lives Matter movement to the deaths of police officers and increases in crime, writing that such claims “have a lack of evidence” and are based on “junk science and political opportunism.”

• National Rifle Association (NRA) web series host Colion Noir cited the “theatrics” and the loud sound guns make as the reason people want to restrict firearms after a high-profile shooting occurs. Noir made the comment during an appearance on a conservative news show where he also defended his recent, controversial advice to the parents of two murdered Virginia journalists.

• What does it say about the people who run the news media that they don’t want to report news?

• If you read on, you probably expect this lede to be revealed as hyperbole. Sorry, no. I mean it: newspaper editors and TV producers routinely come across delicious slices of news, and then decide not to publish it or put it on the air.

• Yet nobody calls them what they are: censors.

• Or crazy people.

• News businesses constantly refuse to serve news to eager news consumers. Because censorship is normative, it rarely makes the news itself.

Censorship

• The Canadian launch of Mr Robot scheduled for Friday evening has been dealt an early blow. Showcase in Canada is currently offering the pilot episode on its website to tempt users in advance, but NBCUniversal in the U.S. has reported Showcase as pirates and Google has taken the search link down.

• Senior figures at Arts Council England, the UK’s main arts funding body, raised concerns that the controversial cancellation of a play about radicalisation amounted to censorship and discussed whether they should step in to “help find a way to get this play shown,” newly released emails have revealed.

• Last month, 112 students were getting ready to perform an exciting, controversial new play called Homegrown.

• The 14-25 year olds had spend six months rehearsing the play, which tackled the complex topic of young people being radicalised in Britain.

• An email sent by the artistic director of the National Youth Theater, that has been made public offers insight into why his company abruptly canceled its production of “Homegrown” — a play about young Islamic State recruits — before its planned opening in August.

• An immersive production set to feature over 100 youth actors, the play was canceled in late July, about two weeks before it had been scheduled to open. The decision drew intense media scrutiny and some public accusations of censorship.

• This summer, Wikipedia switched to encrypted HTTPS for all users, preventing ISPs from seeing which pages a user was visiting or injecting traffic into the stream. But while the change offered new security for visitors, it also offended Chinese censorship authorities, which had grown accustomed to blocking individual pages on the site. Wikipedia was blocked in mainland China following the changes and has remained blocked for more than two months now, a result that has been controversial among a number of anti-censorship groups and drawn significant opposition from Chinese editors of the site. But today, Wales pushed back against the criticism, publicly defending this summer’s decision and the organization’s general policy toward China in a long interview with the anti-censorship group Great Fire.

• One of China’s leading independent writers, Murong Xuecun, will today warn that Chinese censorship is becoming so pervasive that it is threatening free speech across the world, including in Australia.

• He will urge concern about “hearing Australian academics and media loudly singing the praises of the authoritarian Chinese system … backed by China’s economic power”.

• The engineered limpidity was meant to be the perfect backdrop for a display of seven types of missiles, stealth fighter jets, a new bomber, aircraft carrier-killing munitions, tanks rolling by Tiananmen Square, and wave upon wave of uniformed men and women marching in step. It was meant to be a mark of achievement for the Chinese government and its military. And maybe a new source for calendar revenues.

• The ongoing efforts of the Russian government to curtail its citizens’ access to information that hasn’t been preapproved by the Kremlin is now reaching into the past, according to a group that monitors the IP addresses of websites that have been blocked by censors in Russia. One of the latest victims is the site archive.org, which hosts the “Wayback Machine.”

• A valuable tool for journalists and researchers, the Wayback Machine is an archive of websites that preserves them as they looked on various days in their history. Among its many functions is making it difficult for governments, businesses and other entities to retroactively remove content, change data or otherwise falsify the past.

• Lately, there has been a great deal of debate amongst liberals on the sudden return of political correctness to academia. The Atlantic has published multiple pieces — such as “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and “That’s Not Funny” — discussing what seems to be a kind of infantilization of millennials in college. Some students are even having trouble reading literary classics, as described in this Columbia Spectator piece (don’t even try to assign “Naked Lunch”), and laughing at jokes (warning, George Carlin and Richard Pryor are full of triggers).

• Some of Crandall’s research efforts involve studying Facebook censorship in certain countries, but his team is currently taking on a much bigger project: measuring Internet use daily over three years and attempting to log almost every instance of censorship on the Web.

• [...]

• “A bigger issue for the U.S., though, is surveillance. Surveillance is difficult to measure. If someone censors your chat session, you’ll know it because your message to your friend will never arrive. But surveillance happens silently. If you’re a journalism institution in the United States (e.g., the New York Times) and you have a network in your company and an Internet gateway connection so your employees can use the Internet, how do you know if things that could compromise sources or otherwise violate privacy rights are being sent out over the Internet by your employees or the software that they use? This is a problem we’re starting to look at: combining reverse engineering with network monitoring technologies to help organizations understand what’s getting put out there via their Internet gateways.”

• The UK government should look to what is happening to free expression in Egypt and Turkey before broadening terrorist laws to include those who “spread hate”.

• Two British reporters with Vice News charged with “deliberately aiding an armed organization” in Turkey, because their Iraqi colleague allegedly downloaded encryption software on his computer, were released from jail Thursday after a week in custody, a Vice spokesman told Al Jazeera.

• VICE News’ team of three journalists — who remain detained in Turkey for entirely baseless and absurd charges — have now been transported to a high-security “F-type” prison facility more than five hours away from where their legal representation is based, and from the court where they are due to appear, said Kevin Sutcliffe, VICE’s Head of News Programming in Europe.

• Two British journalists and a local fixer working for Vice News were charged on Monday 31 August in Turkey with “working on behalf of a terrorist organisation”. They will remain in detention until their trial, the date of which has not yet been announced.

• An Israeli-sponsored exhibition in Cardiff, Wales showing photographs of Jews and Arabs playing soccer together was taken down on Friday, the Guardian reported, sparking accusations of censorship and capitulation to anti-Israel pressure but winning applause from at least one pro-Palestinian group.

• A council has been criticised for withdrawing a photography exhibition intended to show that football can bring diverse together communities in Israel.

• Cardiff city council was accused on Friday of censorship, buckling to pressure from anti-Israel activists and failing to keep sport and politics separate, following its decision.

• The Israeli football team arrives in the city to play Wales in a European Championship qualifier on Sunday, when anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrations are planned.

Privacy

• At long last, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced a slew of much-needed policy changes regarding the use of cell-site simulators. Most importantly, starting today all federal law enforcement agencies—and all state and local agencies working with the federal government—will be required to obtain a search warrant supported by probable cause before they are allowed to use cell-site simulators. EFF welcomes these policy changes as long overdue.

• If you’ve ever tried to learn how to send an encrypted email, you know it’s a painful, easy-to-fuck-up process. To use a popular buzzword in Silicon Valley-speak, it’s anything but “frictionless.”

• So much so that even Phil Zimmermann, the person who invented what is still probably the most famous technology for encrypted communication—PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy—doesn’t use his own brainchild.

• On Tuesday, in an email to security researcher Joseph Bonneau, Zimmermann said he couldn’t decrypt the original message because he didn’t “have a version of PGP that runs on any of my devices.”

• It should be no surprise that libraries and bookstores—the places where you can go pick up a copy of 1984 or Darkness at Noon—are privacy hipsters. They’ve been fighting overbroad government surveillance since before it was cool. That’s why we’re proud to have filed an amicus brief on behalf of a coalition of associations of libraries and booksellers in Wikimedia v. NSA, a case challenging the government’s warrantless surveillance of the Internet backbone.

• Germany’s Ministry of the Interior on 31 August opened De-Mail, offering citizens a central mailbox, with users verified by the ministry, and end-to-end encryption.

• A federal decide, whose ruling towards the Nationwide Safety Company’s bulk assortment of phone knowledge was overturned by an appeals courtroom final week, maintained Wednesday that he believed the surveillance program violated the constitutional rights of “tens of hundreds of thousands of individuals each single day.”

• Essentially, we gave up liberty in exchange for a sense of security, which is a terrible trade to make for a multitude of reasons. As Benjamin Franklin said, according to ushistory.org, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

• History is littered with examples of societies giving up essential liberties and then ultimately paying the price, because once a government — any government — gets an additional taste of power, it won’t let go without a fight.

• The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fired a second shot at the FBI over its demand for backdoors in encryption systems.

• In recent months, we’ve seen calls from multiple government officials to roll back encryption protections and create backdoors in software. At certain points, the debate over these issues has reached a fever pitch, with New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr telling Congress that Apple’s decision to include strong encryption in iOS 8 was basically intended to please criminals, child pornographers, and murderers. Now, two FTC commissioners have weighed in on the topic — and their own views couldn’t be more different.

• Homeless in Vancouver: Does Big Brother really know where I am?

• Although grassroots activism has dealt it a blow, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) keeps shambling along like the zombie it is. In July, Senator McConnell vowed to hold a final vote on the bill before Congress left for its six-week long summer vacation. In response, EFF and over 20 other privacy groups ran a successful Week of Action, including over 6 million faxes opposing CISA, causing the Senate to postpone the vote until late September.

• Senators submitted many amendments to the bill before going on vacation. The amendments, like the original language of the bill, fail to address key issues like the deep link between these government “cybersecurity” authorities and surveillance, as well as the new spying powers the bill would grant to companies.

• Supporters of a controversial cyberthreat information-sharing bill will push for the U.S. Senate to pass it this fall, even as some security experts question whether it would be effective.

• Backers of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) will resume efforts to get the bill passed when Congress returns from a month-long recess next week, although Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has not yet put CISA on the Senate floor schedule, a spokesman said.

• Backers of CISA and similar bills say the sharing of cyberthreat information is necessary for businesses and government agencies to respond to ongoing attacks. But cyberthreat information-sharing may not have prevented several recent, high-profile attacks on government agencies, said Ryan Kalember, senior vice president of cybersecurity strategy at Proofpoint, a cloud-based security vendor.

• Although grass-roots activism has dealt it a blow, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) keeps shambling along like the zombie it is. In July, Sen. Mitch McConnell vowed to hold a final vote on the bill before Congress left for its six-week long summer vacation. In response, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and more than 20 other privacy groups ran a successful Week of Action, including more than 6 million faxes opposing CISA, causing the Senate to postpone the vote until late September.

• The US National Security Agency (NSA) has run a summer program with the goal of recruiting the next generation of cyber specialists. The agency is at the center of a controversy over the extent of its surveillance.

• Documents from fugitive former government contractor Edward Snowden spell out new details of AT&T’s cooperation with National Security Agency spying and an NSA operation with teams of elite hackers in San Antonio breaking into computers around the world.

• The US is playing games with public trust by passing different versions of the same intrusive surveillance system, a modern day Panopticon. Any alleged changes to the bulk collection program are purely cosmetic, according to ex-MI5 agent Annie Machon.

• The recently passed USA Freedom Act was hailed as a stepping stone on the way to renewed public trust after the highly controversial Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which expired in May. Under the new law, the practice of bulk data collection on US citizens will be entrusted to telecom companies, and the NSA will be able to obtain the records through seeking a warrant from the FISA court.

• So what does this recent decision mean with regards to the NSA’s bulk collection program, and can Americans feel more at ease about the security of their phone data with the introduction of the new Freedom Act? RT asked the former MI5 agent-turned-whistleblower for her take.

• Newly disclosed documents unveiling the close relationship between the National Security Agency and AT&T could breathe new life into a long-running legal dispute about the NSA’s controversial method of tapping the Internet backbone on U.S. soil.

• This program, according to documents provided by Edward Snowden, is largely enabled by telecom giant AT&T, which filters Internet traffic, based on NSA instructions. AT&T then forwards the “take” to the spy agency’s storage facilities for further review and analysis.

• “AT&T needs to reassess whether it wants to serve its customers or the government.”

• Don’t look now, but digital privacy rights are making a major comeback in the United States. Thursday saw the latest in a series of recent victories for those who are against secret and unconstitutional surveillance.

• After years of dogged investigations by journalists and relentless pressure by lawyers and advocates, the Justice Department abruptly changed its policy around stingray mass surveillance devices – roving, fake cell phone towers that the FBI and other government agencies use to force all the phones in their vicinity to connect to and feed your personal data. Finally, federal law enforcement will be required to get a judge-signed warrant before using the tool. They’ll have have to delete the data of innocent people immediately, and clearly explain to judges what they’re doing.

• The extreme secrecy surrounding the government’s use of the tools has been controversial for years, not only since stringrays can vacuum up information on whole neighborhoods at a time, but because the government has been concealing their use from even prosecutors and judges.

• In a Friday interview with Al-Jazeera, exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden responded to two of his critics: presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

• Mehdi Hasan, the host of Al-Jazeera’s “Upfront,” played audio of Trump talking about Snowden to the whistleblower: “This guy’s a bad guy. There is still a thing called execution.”

• Hasan asked Snowden, who joined the show from Russia via video chat, “Are you worried about what a president trump might do to you?”

• Edward Snowden argues in an interview scheduled to air Friday that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state jeopardized national security secrets, and calls Clinton’s claims to the contrary “completely ridiculous.”

• “When the unclassified systems of the United States government, which has a full-time information security staff, regularly gets hacked, the idea that someone keeping a private server in the renovated bathroom of a server farm in Colorado is more secure is completely ridiculous,” the National Security Agency whistleblower told Mehdi Hasan in an interview that will air Friday on the debut episode of UpFront, Hasan’s new weekly talk show on Al Jazeera English.

• Edward Snowden admits a possibility to come back to the US only if he is guaranteed a fair trial.

• On Thursday, Al Jazeera released a preview of an interview with former NSA contractor and whistle-blower Edward Snowden, in which he addressed some of his more high-profile critics — namely, U.S. presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

• Snowden, who has been called a “traitor,” someone who has aided terrorists, and a “dangerous person” by critics in both major parties, commented on the Clinton email scandal.

• Snowden’s father was a career Coast Guard officer and his mother was a clerk at the district court.

• However, Snowden is following the current US President in one interesting category– he has a new species named after him.

• Most Americans have, at best, a hazy understanding of what the National Security Agency can and can’t see through its many surveillance programs. That idea is what an unconventionally informative segment of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight sought to address in April, framing each complex program in the simple terms of “Can they see my dick?”

• Meanwhile, even fewer Americans are familiar with Edward Snowden—the man who defied the world’s most powerful government and exposed those NSA surveillance programs. That’s what political cartoonist Ted Rall attempts to tackle in his new graphic novel, Snowden, out August 25.

• Through comically drawn figures and thorough yet uncomplicated blocks of text, Rall chronicles former NSA contractor Snowden’s early life, work experience, personality and political evolution. The unabashedly pro-Snowden deep-dive serves to help answer the questions: Of the countless government employees who knew of these programs, why was Snowden the one to risk everything to uncover them? And would we have done the same had we been in his position?

• Before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden fled to Russia, the FBI demanded the immediate arrest – and extradition – of Snowden if he went to any Scandinavian nations. Snowden applied for asylum in Norway, but once FBI officials heard he would try to head to a Scandinavian country, they began pressuring Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Trying to leave Moscow, however, wouldn’t be an easy task…

• The window for former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to reach a plea agreement with the U.S. Justice Department is closing quickly.

• That’s what senior U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials tell us about the man whose leaks they call the worst in U.S. history. These officials say any momentum for these negotiations is gone; his lawyers have not even had conversations about such a deal for nearly a year with the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case. The officials say the chance that Snowden will be offered a plea deal in exchange for cooperation is now close to non-existent.

• News outlets like The Guardian, The Intercept, and The New Yorker all host dark web drop sites for anonymously leaked tips and documents. So does WikiLeaks, which popularized the concept and recently relaunched its own submission system.

• NEW YORKER: strngbxhwyuu37a3.onion

• GUARDIAN: 33y6fjyhs3phzfjj.onion

• INTERCEPT: y6xjgkgwj47us5ca.onion

• WIKILEAKS: wlupld3ptjvsgwqw.onion

• To date, there have been no mass protest marches anywhere in the nation about this program and most certainly nothing near the level of outrage seen and heard when Cecil the Lion was killed by an American dentist in a far off land.

• Indeed Americans appear meekly resigned to the fact that their government can “own them”, in the words of whistle blower Ed Snowden.

• Edward Snowden crocked the cloud for everyone, says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

• Speaking at VMworld 2015 today in San Francisco, Gelsinger said he once assumed that organizations would decide to work with an infrastructure-as-a-service company, a platform-as-a-service supplier, and some software-as-a-service outfits, and then get on with things.

• Art Coviello, the longtime head of security company RSA, in February stepped down from his role as executive chairman of RSA and executive vice president at parent company EMC due to undisclosed health reasons. The former executive took about a month off and since then has quietly returned to the security industry.

• Coviello and RSA were under fire in late 2013 in the wake of a Reuters report that the NSA in 2006 had paid RSA $10 million in a secret contract to use the Dual EC DRBG random-number generator algorithm in RSA’s Bsafe software in order to facilitate the NSA’s spying programs. The encryption algorithm reportedly was one that the NSA was able to crack.

• In spite of revelations of mass surveillance and a backlash against government spying, a senior European Commission official has said that big data is here to stay and that it is “utopian” to suggest further restrictions on data privacy protection.

• Outspoken journalist and privacy advocate Glenn Greenwald squared off against retired Gen. Keith Alexander, formerly a longtime NSA director and first head of the U.S. Cyber Command, at the HP Protect conference Sept. 2 in National Harbor, Md.

• The easiest targets for ECHELON are unencrypted data streams.

• There is no reason to believe that the German intelligence service BND and American NSA spied on Dutch communications cables, according to justice minister Ronald Plasterk. In a response to parliament, he said there was also no ruling out that it did actually happen. Earlier this year the Austrian MP Peter Pilz published a number of documents suggesting that in 2005 German authorities tapped cables used for IP transit, a number of which were used by KPN.

• A British spy who was found dead trapped inside a bag in his apartment five years ago illegally hacked into secret information pertaining to former President Bill Clinton as a favor to a friend, UK media outlets first reported over the weekend.

• According to The Sun and the Daily Mail, 34-year-old Gareth Williams, a Welsh MI6 operative and mathematician, was discovered in large gym bag in the bathtub of his London home. While one probe determined that his death was “unnatural” and potentially “criminally mediated”, the exact circumstances surrounding his demise have long remained a mystery.

• Approximately one year after that investigation, Scotland Yard officials said that a review of the matter led them to conclude that it was likely Williams had simply locked himself in the bag and that nobody else was involved, even though there were no traces of his DNA on the lock used to seal the bag he was found in, and no palm prints were found on the bathtub either.

• Scotiabank and First Caribbean International Bank have an inane policy of asking/telling you, the client, to remove your sunglasses before entering the bank. It’s been years now, but, lately, they have become more extreme. Here’s the latest. I walked into Scotiabank several weeks back, with my shades on. I passed by the security guard, in plain view, with my shades on. He seemed to want to tell me something but he did not. I waited on the line, got to the teller, where a very young man, not long ago a boy, asked me to take off my shades. Here we go again.

Civil Rights

• I am delighted by the apparent sea-change in media opinion on the treatment of refugees, but concerned that in modern society compassion only seems able to operate in a wave of emotional hysteria rather than as a fundamental, underlying everyday principle. There is also a danger that those arriving in the Mediterranean and Balkans are viewed, quite wrongly, as in some way different from those in the awful camps at Calais, who have been demonised all summer, reaching its peak when a child being killed by a train led to vicious media headlines about delays to British passengers.

• Cameron and May’s apparent willingness to budge at least minimally in admitting more from Syria must be matched by a willingness to admit those from the Calais camps who are genuine refugees. I still have a home in Ramsgate from which you can actually see France. I for one am willing to make accommodation available at no charge to help out in the crisis.

• Not for the first time, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is at the centre of a storm of controversy. On Thursday, 3 September the leader of the anti-immigration Fidesz party drew criticism for declaring the immigration crisis facing Europe a “German problem” as that is where those arriving in the EU “would like to go”.

• In Budapest, there has been a two day stand-off between police and thousands of refugees, with authorities refusing to let unregistered immigrants leave the country, and immigrants determined to reach Germany, where authorities have accepted tens of thousands of asylum applications.

• The head of Russia’s Chechen Republic claims the current asylum seeker crisis in European countries originated in the aggressive policies of the United States and the EU. He also called upon all Muslim nations to jointly fight the root of the problem.

• Also on the show: When Obama, headed to Alaska to talk about climate change, approved officially renaming what the federal government called “Mt. McKinley” to what Alaska Natives have always called it, Denali, the New York Times called it an effort to “improve relations between the federal government and the nation’s Native American tribes, an important political constituency that has a long history of grievances against the government.” Do media really see indigenous people as an important constituency?

• Later this month, a North Carolina high school student will appear in a state court and face five child pornography-related charges for engaging in consensual sexting with his girlfriend.

• What’s strange is that of the five charges he faces, four of them are for taking and possessing nude photos of himself on his own phone—the final charge is for possessing one nude photo his girlfriend took for him. There is no evidence of coercion or further distribution of the images anywhere beyond the two teenagers’ phones.

• The plaintiffs are former NSA employees Thomas Drake, Ed Loomis, J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, and former congressional staffer Diane Roark. They seek “punitive damages in excess of $100 million because of Defendants [sic] callous and reckless indifference and malicious acts …” as well as well as an additional $15 million for lost wages and to cover costs.

• National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden on Saturday criticized Russia for limiting online and human rights.

• “It’s wrong in Russia, and it would be wrong anywhere,” Snowden said, according to The Express Tribune. Snowden, who was accepting a Norwegian award via a video conference from Russia, added that Moscow’s stance on human rights is “disappointing. It’s frustrating.”

DRM/Wi-Fi

• Last month, the axe seemingly came down on Adobe Flash: three undiscovered vulnerabilities in Flash were leaked and exploited. In response, Mozilla’s Firefox blocked Flash by default until Adobe issued a patch. You should know by now that installing Flash equals a security risk. But are you aware of how badly your PC can slow down as well?

• The Federal Communications Commission is considering new restrictions that would make it harder for users to modify Wi-Fi routers, sparking controversy and an apparent misunderstanding over the FCC’s intentions.

• The FCC’s stated goal is to make sure routers and other devices only operate within their licensed parameters. Manufacturers release products that are certified to operate at particular frequencies, types of modulation, and power levels but which may actually be capable of operating outside of what they’ve been certified and tested to do.

• I bought 3 Ubiquiti UniFi access points (at enormous cost) to try to deliver reliable wifi to all points of my oddly shaped home (long and thin with some thick brick walls that mask all radio signals).

• America’s broadband watchdog is suffering a backlash over plans to control software updates to Wi-Fi routers, smartphones, and even laptops.

• In a proposed update [PDF] to the regulator’s rules over radiofrequency equipment, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would oblige manufacturers to “specify which parties will be authorized to make software changes.”

• In addition, it proposes that “modifications by third parties should not be permitted unless the third party receives its own certification.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A few weeks ago, Brian Krebs published a fantastic article entitled how not to start an encryption company, which detailed the rather questionable claims of a company called Secure Channels Inc (SCI). The post is long and detailed and suggests strongly that (1) SCI was selling snake oil pretending to be an “unbreakable” security solution and (2) that its top execs had pretty thin skins (and in the case of the CEO, a criminal record for running an investment ponzi scheme). The company also set up a bullshit “unwinnable” hacking challenge, and then openly mocked people who criticized it.

• Piracy monetization firm Rightscorp has launched a new service which targets Popcorn Time users with legal threats and settlement demands. With their “Popcorn Time Protection” service the company hopes to lure new clients, but in reality there’s nothing new under the sun.

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