● 09.11.15

● Links 11/9/2015: Rackspace Liaising With Canonical, Amarok 3.0 on the Way

Posted in News Roundup at 6:55 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• One cyber-café owner spoke to us on conditions of anonymity. He said, “These days most people have internet on phone so no one visits cyber café for genuine work. A huge chunk of people coming to cyber-café’s are actually sex-deprived couples who get inside the private cubicles and make out. And in most of the cases the boy who gets the girl records the make-out session on webcam and sells on internet as XYZ desi scandal. All these requirements can easily be satisfied on Red Hat or Fedora, why do we need Windows for that? So we are playing safe in line with future government regulations and uninstalling windows from all our computers,” he concluded.

• Since that glorious day, my dad has been running Linux operating systems. Right now he is running Fedora 22 and told me he likes it, so I am hoping to upgrade to it soon as well. I might even take a stab at doing the upload myself (another post?). For Mr. B, his home business is still running, and nowadays he’s doing a lot of volunteer work teaching other people how to make the switch to Linux, or salvaging virus-infected machines that people have given up on.

• Particularly, he likes running Linux Mint on these salvaged machines, and giving them to people who can’t afford a new computer.

• Linux seems very technical. When people think about it, they think about servers and terminal screens. It doesn’t seem very user-friendly. But I know that it is friendly. I run a site called My Linux Rig. One of the features is interviews with people about their Linux setups. While it does skew coder/developer/sysadmin heavy, there are lots of interviews with people from outside of those worlds. So non-technical users are open to the idea of Linux. But too many don’t even know Linux exists as a viable day-to-day operating system.

Desktop

• The truth of the matter is, thanks to legal issues, video playback in Linux (especially with DVD/Blu-ray media) isn’t exactly where it should be. Yes, you can play all the local, YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix videos you want. But considering the amount of hoops one has to jump through to get a simple DVD to play, video playback on Linux has a way to go.

Server

• IBM Power Systems servers are not something that you’d think to find helping a Ph.D. candidate fight cancer, but that’s just the case. Also, the fact that they are running Ubuntu should not surprise anyone.

Kernel Space

• One of the late pull requests in for the Linux 4.3 merge window is the thermal driver updates.

• Zhang Rui sent in the Linux 4.3 thermal updates this morning to the LKML.

• Additions include the PowerClamp driver supporting now Skylake H/S/U/Y processors as well as the existing Intel “Denlow” server platform. The PowerClamp driver is used for limiting the system’s power consumption at runtime to provide support for forced and controllable C-state residency. With Linux 4.3, power-clamping should work for the latest Skylake processors.

• It was just a week ago that the big DRM pull request was mailed in for the Linux 4.3 kernel and now some fixes for the DRM drivers have already been sent in.

• DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie sent in “a bunch of fixes to squeeze in before -rc1.” There are three Nouveau driver regressions, a QXL regression fix, a number of Intel i915 DRM fixes, and core DisplayPort / atomic mode-setting fixes.

Graphics Stack

• Earlier this week we took a look at the AMD Radeon R600 Gallium3D performance over two years by benchmarking every Ubuntu Linux release since early 2013 with a Radeon HD 6000 series graphics card. Today up for your viewing pleasure are the results from a similar test but using a Radeon Rx 200 series graphics card with the newer RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for open-source AMD GCN GPUs.

• While for many Phoronix readers it’s been many years since being required to fiddle around with the X.Org Server’s xorg.conf in order to configure your graphics adapter / monitor to get the X Server up and running, for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) a manual configuration may still be needed.

• Red Hat’s Marcin Juszkiewicz, a developer specializing in ARM Linux systems, wrote about small changes needed to get an X.Org Server running on 64-bit ARM. In this case, an APM Mustang.

• At the end of August AMD paper-launched the Radeon R9 Nano with a $650+ USD price-tag for this high-performance graphics card aimed at mini-ITX owners. The review embargo lifted this morning on the R9 Nano so there’s a lot of people talking about it this morning, under Windows.

• Thomas Wood at Intel has announced intel-gpu-tools 1.12 as this quarter’s update to this open-source project comprised of various test cases and developer tools for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver.

• The Intel GPU Tools 1.12 release has new tests and tools, new statistical analysis functions, a new aubdump tool, Cherryview / Broadwell / Skylake support additions to different tests, and support for running the core DRM tests on any platform.

Applications

• This is KDE-based, and comes with features such as time shifting, splitting and joining subtitle lines, error checking, movie preview and a bunch of configuration options. Other functions include the ability to split or join lines depending on the | separator, insert new subtitle lines, modify times, and a spell-checker. Subtitle Composer is pretty feature-complete and will allow to modify and manipulate a good range of formats with ease. The latest version is 0.5.3, using Qt4 and blending well in KDE. The video backends that can be used for previewing videos include GStreamer, MPlayer, Xine and Phonon, however, subtitles showed in the video preview widget are not displayed correctly.

• FFmpeg 2.8 is now available as the latest major update to this important open-source multimedia project. This is also the first major release since the longtime FFmpeg leader resigned this summer.

• Calibre is a powerful application that can be used to read, convert, and edit eBooks, among many other functions. The developer has just released a new update for it, and a new version is now available for download.

• The Git developers have announced the release of the second maintenance version for the stable 2.5 branch of Git, an open-source and cross-platform distributed version control system for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• The Limba project does not only have the goal to allow developers to deploy their applications directly on multiple Linux distributions while reducing duplication of shared resources, it should also make it easy for developers to build software for Limba.

• The first updated in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R this morning, and I will push a Debian package. This follows the 0.12.0 release from late July which started to some serious new features.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Cross of the Dutchman, an action adventure developed and published on Steam by Triangle Studios, has also received a Linux version.

• XCOM 2, the successor of the famous XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: Enemy Unknown, is coming to Linux and users who pre-purchase it now will get the Resistance Warrior Pack for free.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• After two long years of hard work, the Amarok developers were more than happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the anticipated Amarok 2.9 open-source music player software.

• KDE developers part of the Visual Design Group (VDG) who are meeting in Randa, Switzerland right now have made more progress on beautifying the KDE desktop.

• The KDE VDG members at Randa have now made all Oxygen icons available in the Breeze theme in time for Plasma 5.4.2, a Human Interface Guideline for KDE mobile applications will be available soon for Plasma Mobile, the KCM for desktop search was reworked, and there are now fixes for all icon-related bugs. Plasma 5.4.2 should be a good monthly point release from the icon perspective.

• We arrived here on wednesday, and started discussions about our plans in the train. Here is a short resume of what happened during these first days:

• We decided to work on bug tracking during the first day, since the Kdenlive 15.08.1 release was imminent. We fixed quite a few bugs that will improve stability of the 15.08 branch.

• With the upcoming 5.14 release of the KDE Frameworks, KPasswordDialog gets the ability to change the visibility of the password being typed by the user. This is a common and useful feature, especially when the password is hard to type and error prone. Screenshots follow:

• The Randa Meetings are happening now in the Swiss Alps. More than 50 people are giving their time to improve KDE software and innovate new value for users. The theme of this sixth edition of the Randa Meetings is Bring Touch to KDE, and the KDE Visual Design Group (VDG) is making their contributions to the look and feel of KDE technology. Visual appearance has been a primary consideration for KDE from the beginning—”users [should be able to] expect things to look, feel, and work consistently”.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Hello all,

• We would like to inform you about the following: * GNOME 3.17.92 rc tarballs due * Hard Code Freeze

• Tarballs are due on 2015-09-14 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.17.92 rc release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.17.92. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!

• Google still hasn’t launched Google Drive for Linux, despite repeated promises many years ago and leaked images from early this year showing a functioning Google Drive client on Ubuntu. Some third-party apps implement support for Google’s cloud storage service, but it’s about to get better for Linux users—at least those who use GNOME.

Distributions

• Gaming on Linux has gotten more and more popular in the last few years. And now Linux gamers can download the Ultimate Edition 4.6 Gamers distro. Ultimate Edition 4.6 Gamers comes packed with many Linux games and can even run Windows games via Wine and PlayOnLinux. This comes at a price, however, since the ISO file weighs in at a chunky 4 GB.

New Releases

• The Solus operating system is coming along and it seems that the October 1 launch date is set in stone. Users will be happy to know that they have a lot of options when it comes to choosing the Internet browser.

• OpenWrt is a GNU/Linux distribution for embedded devices that has been designed to work on routers and a few other platforms. This is a new maintenance release, and it’s available for download.

• Version 15.05 of OpenWRT, the Linux distribution popular with network routers and other embedded devices, has been officially released. OpenWRT 15.05 is codenamed after the Chaos Calmer cocktail.

Screenshots/Screencasts

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• As you may know, our policy is to support stable releases for 18 months; Mageia 4 was released on February 1st, 2014, so it should have been supported until August 1st, 2015.

• However, due to the delayed release of Mageia 5, we chose to extend the support period of our previous release to give you more time to upgrade your systems.

• That brought the new end-of-life (EOL) date for Mageia 4 to September 19th, 2015, i.e. 3 months after the release of Mageia 5.

• The Mageia Project, through Rémi Verschelde, has announced earlier today, September 10, that the Mageia 4 Linux distribution will reach end of life next week, on September 19, 2015.

Red Hat Family

• Today we’re releasing a significant update to the CentOS Atomic Host (version 7.20150908), a lean operating system designed to run Docker containers, built from standard CentOS 7 RPMs, and tracking the component versions included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.

• CentOS Atomic Host is available as a VirtualBox or libvirt-formatted Vagrant box, as an installable ISO image, as a qcow2 image, or as an Amazon Machine Image. These images are available for download at cloud.centos.org. The backing ostree repo is published to mirror.centos.org.

• The CentOS Project, through Jason Brooks, has had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and upgrade of a new maintenance version of the CentOS Atomic Host operating system.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced at Red Hat Summit 2015 that Avianca Holdings, the oldest and one of the largest airlines in Latin America, has won the prestigious 2015 Red Hat Innovator of the Year award. The company was recognized at Red Hat Summit 2015.

Fedora

• A number of Fedora developers have been spending the past several months working on the Fedora Developer Portal.

• The Fedora Developer Portal aims to be a place where developers can learn about new Fedora packages, related tools and tech, and other features of using Fedora Linux as a development platform. The Fedora Developer Portal not only wants to target new/potential developers into choosing Fedora as their Linux distribution but to also assist existing and veteran Fedora developers by learning about new Fedora development packages and changes. The site is focused on helping developers explore, build, and deploy.

• Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for September 11th, 2015:

• It has been some time since I wrote about micro-webapps, so I think I should post what’s new in this project and how the development continues.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The Proxmox VE development team, through Martin Maurer, has announced earlier today, September 10, 2015, the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta build of the upcoming Proxmox Virtual Environment 4.0 OS.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu, the world’s most popular cloud operating system, has gained additional traction with Rackspace, a managed cloud leader. Rackspace and Canonical are excited to announce that Rackspace is joining the Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud (CPC) program.

• When you use Ubuntu images distributed by our Certified Public Cloud Partners, you know that Ubuntu will work as designed. The Ubuntu experts here at Canonical will be supporting Rackspace, as a CPC partner, to help ensure they are regularly provided with the latest images – built, patched, and maintained regularly. Rackspace, of course, will continue to provide Fanatical Support® directly to its customers.

• Rackspace has joined Canonical’s Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud (CPC) program. Rackspace will now offer Ubuntu across their platform, including public and private clouds, OnMetal, as well as dedicated and hybrid environments. Rackspace will also offer Fanatical Support to the customers running Ubuntu on its platforms.

• The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is no longer available in Europe after the company has exhausted the inventory for this part of the world.

Flavours and Variants

• Kubuntu Council member Philip Muškovac today announced three new council members replacing three recent losses including Jonathan Riddell. Mageia 4 is reaching end-of-life and Jamie Watson is back reporting if other Linux variants can handle his new Acer Aspire netbook. Elsewhere, John Grogan spoke with SUSE VP Michael Miller at LinuxCon about the future of SUSE and Linux.

• Following the departure of a few Kubuntu Council members Philip (yofel) launched a new election for people to fill the chairs left on the council. The results of that election[1] are three brand new members! Welcome in myself (Aaron Honeycutt/ahoneybun), Ovidiu-Florin Bogdan(ovidiu-florin), Clay Weber(claydoh).

Devices/Embedded

• Axiomtek tipped a 120x120mm motherboard with up to a quad-core 1.9GHz Atom SoC, three display outputs, dual GbE, dual mini-PCIe, and -40 to 85°C operation.

• Intel’s two-year-old “Baytrail-I” Atom and Celeron SoCs keep popping up on new products aimed at embedded, industrial, and IoT applications, as evidenced by Axiomtek’s new Nano-ITX form factor “NANO840″ and “NANO842″ motherboards. The NANO840 and NANO842 appear to be based on a single design, with minimal — if any — differences other than their choice of Intel processors, ranging from a 1.5GHz dual-core Celeron to a 1.91GHz quad-core Atom. An SODIMM socket located on the bottom of the board can be populated with up to 8GB of DDR3L memory.

• Lots of people embed a Raspberry Pi into their projects—whether it’s an arcade machine, a robot, a photo booth, or a weather station. You can develop your application with the Pi like it’s a desktop, then disconnect your mouse, keyboard, and monitor and embed it into your project, short-term or long-term.

• Freescale unveiled a Linux-based 10Gbps, residential WiFi gateway reference design based on its quad-core QorIQ LS1043A SoC and a Quantenna 802.11ac router.

• The Linux-based QorIQ LS1043A residential gateway is “the industry’s first 10Gbps Internet plus 10Gbps Wi-Fi enabled home gateway solution,” claims Freescale Semiconductor. The design was co-developed with Quantenna Communications, which is supplying its QSR10G 10G Wave 3 802.11ac WiFi router, announced on Sept. 9, the same day the Freescale gateway was revealed. Back in June Quantana demonstrated an early version of the gateway, without revealing many details.

Phones

Tizen

• The device is listed as SM-Z300F_CIS_SER, which could indicate it as being part of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which is also known as the Russian common wealth. The Russians, with Samsung’s collaboration, are looking at adopting Tizen as a secure operating system for the Government. Tizen is seen as a better OS for this purpose as Samsung has already provided the Russians with the full source code and target devices that they will be using. This is one way to know if your software has any back-doors for third-parties to Intercept your secret communications.

• With the Starter kit you are able to connect to multi sensors, motion sensor, presence sensor, power outlet, moisture sensor, car, door locks, lighting, alarms and much much more.

Android

• Android Marshmallow is almost ready following its Google I/O 2015 Developer Preview debut, with Google expected to unveil the final version of the OS before the end of the month. Here we reveal exactly what to expect from Android 6.0 Marshmallow including release date and new features.

• From the demos and the presence of Microsoft touting its productivity applications like Office 360 and Adobe with Photoshop, it was clear that Apple’s big iPad Pro announcement was about business users. Thus far, the iPad was seen as a content consumption device, but Apple clearly wants to transform it into a content creation device and a possible laptop replacement.

• The iPad Pro will cost $799 (approximately Rs 53,500, though with taxes and customs levies, actual India pricing may be much higher). It comes with the stylus called Apple Pencil (which is sold separately at $99 — approximately Rs 6,600) and a dedicated Smart keyboard for $169 (approximately Rs 11,300). When combined with the keyboard and the Apple Pencil, the iPad Pro can cost more than the MacBook Air in some cases.

• Apple will tell you it implemented these features when the time felt right, and that’s probably something any other company would say about its own products – just ask China’s Apple about it. The fact remains that these firms are always looking for inspiration from rivals.

• There are so many Android smartphones, but not many can offer a serious differentiator. While custom UI and hardware specs have been the game for most manufacturers, it is still tough to figure out a clear distinguishing factor.

• This is where Robin comes in. Firstly, Robin is not a conventionally designed $400 Android smartphone. It is tall, square and striking in mint and midnight black colour options. It has cloud in its DNA with Android as the base.

• Today, Google has posted the first of those monthly security updates for Nexus device owners. The Nexus system image page added Android 5.1.1 build “LMY48M” for the Nexus 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10, along with build “LMY48N” for the Android TV-based Nexus Player. LMY48M hit Google’s public AOSP repository yesterday (September 9).

• But the way the capitalist economy – especially the superheated consumer tech sector – works, no innovation or product stays unique for long.

• Jobs’ golden egg now has to compete with a veritable cornucopia of Android-powered handsets. With diversity of manufacturers comes diversity of features. And this is the reality – there is almost nothing the iPhone can do that has not been done, often better, by another handset. Let’s go to the list.

Free Software/Open Source

• The IIT Bombay team, which earlier this year developed a $100 (Rs 6,647) netbook computer that it claimed could be the world’s cheapest, is in talks with several colleges across the country, including Christ University in Bengaluru, to roll out the devices for students and is also working with early-stage opensource technology firms to make the project commercially viable in the near term.

• There’s a lot of articles from community managers about how you can attract student volunteers to your open source project. This time, I’m going to write about the same thing, but from a student’s perspective. Here’s how you can attract me to your open source project.

• Once upon a time in IT, using open source simply meant Linux instead of Windows, or maybe MySQL instead of Oracle. Now, there is such a huge diversity of open source tools, and almost every leading digital business and tech startup is making extensive use of them. Open source is driving the further commoditisation of software capabilities, and as such is driving the move to greater in-house software development resource and more collaborative approaches.

• Google released the second version of their Cardboard VR viewer back in May. Sticking to their commitment to make the design of the handheld HMD completely open for third-party manufacturers, the company has now released the complete design specification for Cardboard v2.

• Because of these features, it makes sense that Google and Twitter are reportedly developing these tools as an open-source project, which could soon be adopted and used by other tech companies.

• One big difference between those efforts and this one: Google and Twitter are creating their publishing tools as an open source project, and hope to convince multiple tech companies to adopt it.

• Many have a wide array of open source applications and code in use already, both at the infrastructure and application layers and in development frameworks and GitHub repositories.

• The second annual Open Source Mentorship Program for women, run by Code for Philly and Girl Develop It, wrapped late last month.

• The program aims to tackle the gender gap in open source technology. Other cities are taking note.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Managing time has become so important these days. You have a meeting at 10 am, then lunch at 2 pm, and a lot of things in between. It is hard to manage so many things in one day. Thankfully, these days we have so many time management apps that it is barely a hassle anymore. As humans, we should be grateful to the wonderful technology we have at our disposal.

Mozilla

SaaS/Big Data

• Hortonworks, the company focused on Big Data-crunching open source platform Hadoop, has a number of partners and customers who have helped to illustrate that Hadoop’s capabilities can be thrown at all kinds of new tasks.

• In the latest example of that trend, Hortonworks announced it has expanded its European customer base with the addition of Open Energi, a company focused on delivering a much smarter energy grid in Europe.

• Back in July, Rackspace and Intel announced that they had teamed up on what could be a far reaching partnership focused on accelerating enterprise OpenStack deployments and feature adoption. The companies agreed to collaborate on an OpenStack Innovation Center targeted to significantly add to the number of developers contributing to upstream OpenStack code.

Education

• Norway’s national open source foundation Friprogforeningen will soon be switching its Frikomport services platform to the Moodle learning management system. Depending on the final tests, the LMS will become the foundation’s main service platform later this month.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Software Foundation will be celebrating its 30th anniversary on Oct. 3rd. Recently, you had a chance to ask its founder Richard Stallman about GNU/Linux, free software, and other issues of public concern. Below you’ll find his answers to your questions. Learn more about how you can join the FSF here, and help fight the good fight.

• The GnuPG Project, through Werner Koch, has announced the immediate availability for download of the eight maintenance release of the GnuPG 2.1 software, an open-source, free, and complete implementation of the OpenPGP standard.

• Free software projects often fly under the radar: they rarely have a marketing budget, so word of a great project often relies on word-of-mouth within the free software community, especially in a project’s early years. Yet we all know there are some truly amazing free software projects out there. That’s why the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project have presented the Free Software Awards for nearly two decades, honoring people and projects who have advanced the movement or created free software programs that serve crucial societal needs.

Public Services/Government

• Only marginal parts of governmental IT services can be moved to public cloud services, rather than the whole of government IT, warns Jaques Marzin, the French government Chief Information Officer. “Nobody wants us to put tax records or criminal records in the public cloud. But those are government operations that amount to terabytes of data”, he said.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• The government of Portugal has unveiled’ Simplificar’, an online portal to help modernise and simplify public administration. The project is inviting citizens and enterprises to point out excessive bureaucracy and suggest remedies.

• The Polish towns of Bydgoszcz and Sosnowiec are the first two to host a public access point for eGovernment services, Poland’s Ministry of Administration and Digitization (MAC) has announced. The access points are placed in the town’s post offices, offering citizens access to various services, such as requesting an ID card, getting a copy of a marriage certificate or setting-up a new businesses.

Open Hardware

• The market of desktop 3D printers seems to be ever expanding, but quite a few new additions seem to add very little in terms of functionality or affordability. Fortunately, new gems are still appearing, such as a very exciting machine by Canadian startup and 3D printing supplies provider ISG3D. Called the Eleven 3D printer, this very promising machine seems to be the real deal, but for an affordable price and with an open source character. It is expected to launch on Kickstarter later this month.

• The researchers from the Vertical Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently announced at the Hot Chips Event in Cupertino, Calif, that they have designed the first ever open source general-purpose graphics processor (GPGPU). It is titled as Many-Core Integrated Accelerator Of The Waterdeep abbreviated as MIAOW.

Programming

• Just one month after the gigantic release of Go 1.5, the first minor point release is now available.

Leftovers

• Maybe that enormo-slab stylus wasn’t such a hot idea?

• Yesterday all eyes were on Apple’s product launch.

• This is because Apple has become a bellwether for the stock market as a whole.

• Legendary short seller Jim Chanos spoke candidly to CNBC, explaining that institutional investors and hedge funds are treating Apple stock as a “hedge fund hotel” where they can buy a single name and ride it upwards as opposed to concocting complex trading systems as they did in the past. Indeed, SEC filings by hedge funds bear this out, and so the product launch attracted a huge audience, generating play-by-play reporting on CNBC and Yahoo Finance.

• By the end of trading, Apple stock declined nearly 2%, indicating that investors were not impressed.

• To paraphrase poet Horace, the mountain shuddered and gave birth to a ridiculous mouse.

• Skype is a regular tool in my journalist toolkit. It’s far and away the easiest method by which to record phone interviews (using the Call Recorder plug-in). I prefer it over Google Voice or Google Hangouts because it’s a much simpler tool to deal with, and damn near everyone already has a Skype account anyway. For about $60 a year, Skype gives me a phone number in my area code and the ability to make unlimited calls to and from it, and I’ve been paying that $60 a year and using Skype for six years without incident.

Security

• A controversy has erupted today at London security conference 44CON as details emerge of U.S. security company FireEye’s attempts to stifle any public disclosure of a major series of vulnerabilities in its suite – all of which have now been patched.

• The vulnerabilities are said to have included the default use of the ‘root’ account on a significant number of the Apache servers providing services to FireEye’s clients.

• When a pair of security researchers showed they could hack a Jeep over the Internet earlier this summer to hijack its brakes and transmission, the impact was swift and explosive: Chrysler issued a software fix before the research was even made public. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration launched an investigation. Within days Chrysler issued a 1.4 million vehicle recall.

• The last few days have been amazing. I am humbled by the outpouring of support and encouragement that I have received. I did 27 interviews yesterday and today looks to be about the same. I have found that the issues we are bringing up are resonating. America cares about these things. Officially, my complete presidential platform is forthcoming, but I wanted to share on Digital Trends a number of reasons why I am running for president and founding a party.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Runaway favourite in election will offer collegiate leadership, but criticism from right of the party is already growing

• Tessa Jowell claimed she did not read the mortgage documents before signing them or know where the money was coming from. David Mills was eventually acquitted on a technicality by the Italian legal system, but it is not in dispute that the money came from Berlusconi or that he lied in court. Jowell claimed she did not read the documents and had no idea where the money came from or what her husband was doing. She then “left” him and went through a sham “separation” which the whole London establishment knew was a fake, (but the media obligingly did not publish), until the heat died down and the couple could get together again.

• On Friday morning, less than 48 hours after President Obama delivered a speech in Estonia warning that Russian aggression against Estonia could trigger war with the US and NATO, Russian security forces have seized an officer with Estonia’s state security bureau at gunpoint and taken him into Russia.

• Estonia says the officer was kidnapped (or “abducted”) on Estonian soil and taken across by force. Moscow says the Estonian officer was on Russian soil and detained with a gun, 5,000 euros and “materials that have the character of an intelligence mission.” Nearby Estonian police radios were reportedly jammed during the incident.

• Culiacán, the western Mexico city, has the highest death rate from gun-related crime and violence in the country.

• Creative activist Pedro Reyes felt that something positive could be done with the city’s weapons. He addressed the issue of gun violence by turning them into more productive tools, like shovels for planting trees in the local botanical garden.

• Reyes started a campaign for residents to hand over their guns in exchange for a coupon. They could use those coupons to buy electronics or household appliances later on.

• There are two 9/11’s: one that we all know of and a second, older and neglected aerial assault that took place on Santiago, Chile, when Air Force jets bombed the La Moneda presidential palace and replaced an elected president with a military dictatorship that lasted close to two decades.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• California has dropped plans to halve petroleum use in vehicles by 2030, after intense oil industry lobbying.

• Governor Jerry Brown and other senior lawmakers had included the proposal in a climate change bill, but were forced to retreat amid growing opposition.

• State senate leader Kevin de Leon, who supported the cut, accused oil firms of deploying “scare tactics”.

• The leaders have vowed to push ahead with other reforms, including boosting renewable electricity use.

• “I’d say oil has won the skirmish, but they’ve lost the bigger battle,” Mr Brown said.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Censorship

• We like to think about the history of copyright as a grand sweep from control over publication by the sovereign, aided by the guild as the beneficiary of monopoly rights, to the current reconfiguration, which emphasizes the author and the arrangements by which incentives to create are put into place for the ultimate benefit of the public. Censorship as a system for regulating what gets published is anathema to our fundamental values of what copyright is all about. That is true, as far it is goes. But what about the role of private censorship and the willingness of the creator or the commercializer of the creative work to self-impose restrictions on the content of a work, having regard to possible considerations regarding third parties?

Privacy

• The developers at Ashley Madison created their first artificial woman sometime in early 2002. Her nickname was Sensuous Kitten, and she is listed as the tenth member of Ashley Madison in the company’s leaked user database. On her profile, she announces: “I’m having trouble with my computer … send a message!”

• Sensuous Kitten was the vanguard of a robot army. As I reported last week, Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fembots to lure men into paying for credits on the “have an affair” site. When men signed up for a free account, they would immediately be shown profiles of what internal documents call “Angels,” or fake women whose details and photos had been batch-generated using specially designed software. To bring the fake women to life, the company’s developers also created software bots to animate these Angels, sending email and chat messages on their behalf.

• [...]

• Emails in Biderman’s inbox from November 2012 contain evidence that the company knew very well that most of their money came from bots flirting with men. Security researcher Alejandro Ramos found these emails, which contain an internal presentation that was passed around to many of the company managers. One slide (reproduced below) reveals that 80% of the men who “convert,” or make a purchase on Ashley Madison, are doing it as a result of engagers.

• It’s somewhat amazing how much important news doesn’t reach us via the mainstream press. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see photos or film on Facebook of massive demonstrations that somehow never make it to the six o’clock news. For example, I’m willing to bet that very few people here in the U.S. know of the protests in Berlin outside the still-under-construction new headquarters of Ger­many’s for­eign in­tel­li­gence agency, the Bundesna­chrichten­di­enst (BND).

• This looks like important news to me. Many are saying that the BND is getting ready to go NSA on us. Indeed, the spooks at the BND already cooperate with the NSA to an extent that isn’t known, according to a report yesterday from NationalJournal’s Dustin Volz.

• This news is somewhat, but not completely, surprising given Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s spying on Germany that included listening in on German Chan­cel­lor An­gela Merkel’s phone calls. But there are reports that the BND, at the request of the NSA, is spying on German and European companies — Airbus and Siemens are mentioned — and politicians.

• It’s not. The rumor I am hearing is not about access to a particular user and his communications. It is about general access to iOS data and communications. And it’s in the FISA court, which means that it’s not a domestic criminal matter.

• It’s this detail that exposes the real weakness of iMessage. To make key distribution ‘simple’, Apple takes responsibility for handing out your friends’ public keys. It does this using a proprietary key server that Apple owns and operates. Your iPhone requests keys from Apple using a connection that’s TLS-encrypted, and employs some fancy cryptographic tokens. But fundamentally, it relies on the assumption that Apple is good, and is really going to give you you the right keys for the person you want to talk to.

• But this honesty is just an assumption. Since the key lookup is completely invisible to the user, there’s nothing that forces Apple to be honest. They could, if inspired, give you a public key of their choosing, one that they hold the decryption key for. They could give you the FBI’s key. They could give you Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s key, though The Rock would presumably be very non-plussed by this.

• Indeed it gets worse. Because iMessage is designed to support several devices attached to the same account, each query to the directory server can bring back many keys — one for each of your devices. An attacker can simply add a device (or a fake ‘ghost device’) to Apple’s key server, and senders will encrypt messages to that key along with the legitimate ones. This enables wiretapping, provided you can get Apple to help you out.

• Barack Obama’s intelligence chief is said to be in frequent and unusual contact with a military intelligence officer at the center of a growing scandal over rosy portrayals of the war against the Islamic State, the Guardian has learned.

• James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is said to talk nearly every day with the head of US Central Command’s intelligence wing, Army Brigadier General Steven Grove – “which is highly, highly unusual”, according to a former intelligence official.

• Grove is said to be implicated in a Pentagon inquiry into manipulated war intelligence.

• Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.

• But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts — a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous Internet surfing — to run up against opposition from law enforcement.

• In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

• Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

• On a stage in a ballroom in the Walter Washington Convention Center on September 10, the heads of the United States’ intelligence community gathered to talk about the work their agencies perform and the challenges they face—or at least as much as they could in an unclassified environment. But the directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency also had one particular mission in mind as they took the stage at the Intelligence & National Security Summit, an industry event largely attended by government officials and contractors: stopping the poisoning of the public debate around their missions, and especially around the issue of encryption, by unreasonable haters.

• CIA Director John Brennan suggested that negative public opinion and “misunderstanding” about the US intelligence community is in part “because of people who are trying to undermine” the mission of the NSA, CIA, FBI and other agencies. These people “may be fueled by our adversaries,” he said.

Civil Rights

• People around the world have been riveted by heartbreaking images of refugees fleeing Syria, as well as heartening ones of European citizens offering help and hospice. But if the pictures drive you to want to know more, don’t expect much help from US media, who are not that interested to get at the roots of the situation. We’ll talk about the Syrian refugee crisis with Raed Jarrar from the American Friends Service Committee.

• Saudi Arabia has reportedly responded to the growing number of people fleeing the Middle East for western Europe – by offering to build 200 mosques in Germany.

• Syria’s richer Gulf neighbours have been accused of not doing their fair share in the humanitarian crisis, with Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the UAE also keeping their doors firmly shut to asylum-seekers.

• According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which quoted a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al Diyar, Saudi Arabia would build one mosque for every 100 refugees who entered Germany in extraordinary numbers last weekend.

• Conservative media have consistently worked to undermine and smear the Black Lives Matter movement by blaming them for the recent deaths of police officers in Illinois and Texas, even labeling the movement a hate group that inspires violence against police.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Hargreaves review teaches us several things. First of all: Progress is possible.

• But the fact that it is surprising that the government listened to academic evidence on copyright also tells us that in many other instances, simply producing evidence has not been enough. We’ve seen this on a European level in the case of the term extension for phonograms, where independent academic evidence was largely ignored.

• The man behind Popcorn Time, the popular and free BitTorrent-based video streaming platform, has decided to reveal his true identity in an interview with Norwegian website DN.no.

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