● 10.07.15

● Links 8/10/2015: KDE Plasma 5.4.2 Released, Linux Drama Queens

Posted in News Roundup at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• System76, the computer manufacturer that ships PCs, laptops, and servers powered only by Ubuntu, is preparing for Intel Skylake and is now organizing a competition to find a superfan in the community.

Server

• The Power Systems LC line was introduced by Dr Stefanie Chiras, director and business line executive of IBM scale-out Power Systems, as part of her keynote on the subject of ‘waitless computing’.

• IBM, as a patron of the OpenPower Foundation, has been a staunch supporter of Linux and OpenStack, and this represents a logical step for the company, as it has been building its Power line following the sale of its x86 server business to Lenovo in 2014.

• Univention’s Maren Abatielos has been very happy to inform Softpedia earlier today, October 6, about the general availability of the first milestone of the upcoming Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.1 Linux kernel-based operating system.

• Big Switch Networks, Facebook and NTT, announced today that they have come together to create a unified operating system for the Open Compute Project‘s (OCP) open source networking switch called Open Network Linux.

• The project is designed to help companies, whether web scale-type companies like Facebook or others looking to take advantage of the Open Compute Project’s open source switches, to use the platform as a base to configure the switches in a way that makes sense to them.

• Rackspace is expanding beyond the confines of its own cloud to support Amazon’s cloud. It’s a move that will see Rackspace expand its Fanatical Support and Managed Security offerings to Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.

• Rackspace is primarily known as a hosting and cloud vendor, with its own infrastructure. In the last five years, Rackspace has expanded outward with the open-source OpenStack cloud, as a rival to AWS. For most of AWS’ history, Rackspace executives have been competitively positioning Rackspace as the supported alternative to AWS. But that is now changing as Rackspace is now positioning itself a the place where cloud customers, regardless of whether they run on OpenStack or in AWS, can come for a managed support experience.

• The vendor reportedly is rolling out new servers that run on Power 8 processors and also include Nvidia’s Tesla K80 graphics products. IBM officials for the past few years have been working with Nvidia to bring GPU accelerators to some of Big Blue’s Power-based servers used by enterprises and supercomputing organizations, and earlier this year said Nvidia’s Tesla K80 GPUs would be used in bare-metal server in its SoftLayer cloud environment.

• Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud, will discuss this very topic at the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit. We caught up with him to find out what CIOs need to know about microservices and DevOps. Read on for Wallgren’s three DevOps “rookie mistakes,” and a special discount code at the bottom of this article.

Kernel Space

• A day after Sarah Sharp formally announced she’s stepping away from Linux kernel development due to the arguably toxic community, well known kernel developer Matthew Garrett announced he too is planning to cease his personal contributions to the upstream Linux kernel.

• Just like Sarah Sharp, Linux developer Matthew Garrett has gotten fed up with the unprofessional development culture surrounding the kernel. “I remember having to deal with interminable arguments over the naming of an interface because Linus has an undying hatred of BSD securelevel, or having my name forever associated with the deepthroating of Microsoft because Linus couldn’t be bothered asking questions about the reasoning behind a design before trashing it,” Garrett writes. He has chosen to go his own way, and has forked the Linux kernel and added patches that implement a BSD-style securelevel interface. Over time it is expected to pick up some of the power management code that Garrett is working on, and we shall see where it goes from there.

• Matthew Garrett, noted developers and self-proclaimed social justice warrior, today announced solidarity with Sarah Sharp’s resignation in protest of rude behavior and the “way [Linus Torvalds] behaves” by providing a Linux kernel with changes rejected by Torvalds. Elsewhere, Jack M. Germain said Slackel offers advantages over Slackware but it’s still not for new users and DarkDuck found most Linux users still use Windows or Mac as well.

• A Game of Thrones style war has broken out amongst the weirdie beardies of Open Source Land which has now split the Linux kingdom just as “Winter is a Coming.”

• Now, another Linux kernel developer has decided to move away from the project. Matthew Garrett has been in the news a lot this past year, but surprisingly, not for the Linux kernel. He’s been a constant critic of Canonical IP policy, and he has criticized the company more than once. In fact, he’s a rather well-known kernel developer, and he had his fair share of disputes with Linus Torvalds. Unlike Sarah, he made his reasons a lot more clear.

• Open source code is supposed to reduce redundancy by saving developers from reinventing the wheel. To help it do a better job of that, the Linux Foundation this week announced a new OpenChain Workgroup, a new initiative that aims to standardize common practices to make open source more efficient.

• Linux is a surprisingly successful operating system. Despite many of its distros having no graphical interface and/or not running with popular applications like Microsoft Office or the Adobe creative suite, it’s still managed to gather more than 80 million users by some estimates, and Linux support alone pulls in more than $1 billion in revenue each year. (That’s pretty impressive for an open-source system!) All of this leads to one important question …

• In a culture that celebrates freedom and resists conformity, establishing rules and regulations isn’t always easy. So when LinuxCon introduced its Code of Conduct in 2010, it became one of the first open source conferences to outline an anti-harassment policy and act on reports of misconduct. Today, similar codes of conduct are in place at hundreds of conferences and events worldwide — and this year’s LinuxCon continues to see more women on panels and at the podium than ever before.

• It all came about thanks to work between Valerie Aurora, former kernel developer and open source diversity champion, and leaders at the Linux Foundation. But they didn’t stop with the Code of Conduct. In the past year, LinuxCon has also hosted the Ally Skills Workshop, which teaches men simple, everyday ways to support women in their workplaces and at events like LinuxCon.

• Today I want to talk a bit about some cool features of systemd, the default Debian init system since the release of Jessie. Ubuntu has also adopted systemd in 15.04, meaning that you are going to find it literally everywhere.

• For many LinuxCon attendees, one of the biggest event highlights is the opportunity to rub elbows with the people who actually write the Linux code. The only thing that can top that? Hearing from Linus Torvalds himself, the man who created it 24 years ago and still writes the code to this day.

• Daniel Vetter sent in a fresh intel-drm-next pull request today for landing more changes into DRM-Next as preparations for the Linux 4.4 kernel.

• The elections for five of the ten members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) are held every year[1]. This year the election will be at the 2015 Kernel Summit in Seoul, South Korea (probably on the Monday, 26 October) and will be open to all attendees of both Kernel Summit and Korea Linux Forum.

Graphics Stack

• While there’s just a handful of names that Phoronix readers are familiar with when it comes to AMD’s open-source Linux driver developers and those from AMD who communicate with the community in our forums, it turns out there are many more developers at AMD becoming involved as part of their new AMDGPU driver stack.

• A few weeks ago at IDF, Displaylink released drivers for USB monitors on Linux. This has been something SemiAccurate has been asking them about since, well it has been years now.

• The idea is simple, transfer video data over USB rather than a dedicated video port. This requires a bit of compression, CPU load, and of course their proprietary hardware on the monitor side. That isn’t a big deal, the chips are fairly inexpensive and since you are buying a USB monitor or dock, it comes with the device out of the box. On the plus side it means your monitor will work everywhere, or at least it will now.

KVM

Applications

• A little more than a week ago at Linaro Connect SFO15 in Burlingame Jim Perrin of the CentOS project publicly announced the availability of the Xen hypervisor in CentOS 7 for ARM64 (also known as aarch64). Jim and I have been working closely with George Dunlap, maintainer of Xen in CentOS for the x86 architecture, to produce high quality Xen binaries for 64-bit ARM servers. As a result you can setup an ARM64 virtualization host with just a couple of yum commands.

• Stefano Stabellini of the Xen project has informed us today, on October 5, that the Xen open-source hypervisor is now available for CentOS 7 for ARM64 (AArch64) Linux operating systems.

• Go For It! is a simple, yet very useful 2 in 1 productivity app which includes to-do list management as well as a timer, available for Linux and Windows.

• The developers of the world’s most popular free, cross-platform and open-source distributed version control system, Git, have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first point release of Git 2.6 for all supported platforms.

• We’re proud to announce that today we’ve released NetworkManager 1.0.6, a latest update in the NetworkManager 1.0.x stable series.

• Audacious 3.7 beta 1 was released recently and is available in the WebUpd8 Unrelease/Backports PPA. The new beta version brings various new features such as playlist shuffle by album, record Internet streams and more, along with Qt interface improvements and bug fixes.

• For those not familiar with Audacious, this is a fast, lightweight audio player that’s focused on high audio quality and low system resource usage.

• The somewhat regular monthly upstream Armadillo update brings us a first release of the 6.* series. This follows an earlier test release announced on the list, and released to the Rcpp drat. And as version 6.100.0 was released on Friday by Conrad, we rolled it into RcppArmadillo release 0.6.100.0.0 yesterday. Following yet another full test against all reverse dependencies, got uploaded to CRAN which has now accepted it. A matching upload to Debian will follow shortly.

Instructionals/Technical

• This is an area where xdg-app shines, because it allows you to create binary builds of desktop applications that work on any distribution. In order to demonstrate this I set up an automated build system that builds Gimp and Inkscape from the development branch every day and produces a new binary that you can easily install and run:

• Finally it has been done – to remove the DRM of a Kobo eBook one does not need to switch to Windows or Mac anymore, deal with the brain-dead Kobo Desktop app, etc etc. The only thing you need is a Kobo device! DRM is evil, we know that, please read up on DRM protection here.

• I was recently in a discussion about meta-packages, and realized many users don’t know what they are or what they do. So, let’s see if we can clear-up the mystery.

Games

• Valve has updated SteamOS Brewmaster to use Debian 8.2 and with that also comes a Linux kernel update.

• The developer’s first game Expeditions: Conquistador is on Linux and if you haven’t checked it out yet, you definitely should – it’s outstanding. However, citing poor Linux sales, distro fragmentation and troubles with middleware on that game, one of the developers stated in November of last year that a Linux port seemed unlikely for the time being:

• The Linux version is fantastic, and has worked well for a long time which has kept me pretty happy with the developers.

• The developers of the cross-platform and open-source Unvanquished first-person shooter game announced earlier today that immediate availability for download of the Alpha 44 build.

• Valve is making SteamOS 2.0 the official version supported by the company, and it looks like it might ship with the Steam Machines after all.

• Valve is working on SteamOS, and the newest version of this Linux distro is now based on Debian 8.2. The developers have also added some new features and packages, and it looks like things are in place for the November launch of the Steam Machines.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.4.2.

• Plasma 5.4 was released in August with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

• This year, in March 2015, we started the port of Calligra from Qt4/kdelibs4 to Qt5/KF5. Both, because Qt4/kdelibs4 is running out of support and because of the promised lands of better portability and more granular dependencies with Qt5/KF5.

• I haven’t been to any KDE events and I can assure that the first experience of the KDE event is mind blowing.

• The latest monthly point release to Plasma 5.4 is now available.

• Plasma 5.4.2 finishes up the Breeze icons and has many fixes throughout the Plasma desktop stack.

• KDE, through its legal body KDE e.V., is one of the launch partners and initial signatories of the User Data Manifesto 2.0. The User Data Manifesto defines basic rights for people to control their own data in the internet age:

• Control over user data access Knowledge of how the data is stored Freedom to choose a platform

Distributions

New Releases

• Even if Solus is running a little late, it doesn’t mean that its developers are not actively working on it. In fact, quite a lot of interesting stuff has been happening with Solus and all the planned changes will be available in the stable version.

Screenshots/Screencasts

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

Ballnux/SUSE

• Earlier this week I posted a number of openSUSE Leap benchmarks of their different kernels: debug, default, desktop, and vanilla. Here’s some follow-up tests with more results from comparing the openSUSE 42.1 Leap Beta kernel builds.

• The tests are very similar to the article earlier this week, just with many more data-points now after seeing the performance differences from the initial test suite.

• The python-suseapi 0.22 has been released last week. The version number shows nothing special, but one important change has happened – the development repository has been moved.

Slackware Family

• You might think of the Slackel distro as a better Slackware derivative. Slackware dates back to 1992. By comparison, well-known and well-used distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora and Linux Mint were introduced in the mid-2000s. So Slackware is among the oldest actively maintained Linux distros. Despite its longevity, it has not joined more modern Linux offspring in terms of user friendliness.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, the world’s leading mobile application platform provider, says it will create an unprecedented partnership model with Samsung, a move it has been pushing to provide converged mobile systems at the enterprise level.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that nominations are open for the 2016 Red Hat Innovation Awards. 2016 will mark the 10th anniversary of the awards, which recognize the innovative ways that individuals, companies and partners worldwide are implementing Red Hat’s technologies.

• The developers of the CentOS-based NethServer open-source server-oriented operating system have announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming NethServer 6.7 OS.

• Azul Systems, the provider of Java runtime solutions, has announced that Zing, it’s Java Virtual Machine, is now available as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Web Services.

• Red Hat, the undisputed king of Linux, has joined the the Node.js Foundation as a Platinum member. Node.js is a popular open source, server-side JavaScript runtime environment which is enjoying exponential growth in the enterprise.

• Snow Software, the market-leading developer of hosted and on-premised Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions, today announced a collaboration with Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, to bring Snow’s SAM capabilities to organisations that use open source software.

• SoftNAS®, the #1 best-selling software-based NAS in the cloud, today announced SoftNAS has completed certification on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to offer global enterprises access to SoftNAS Cloud for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the AWS Marketplace. SoftNAS Cloud, which continues to gain popularity on AWS Marketplace, now offers customers reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, and the cost-effectiveness scalability and flexibility of Amazon EC2.

• Today Omnibond announced the release of CloudyCluster running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the AWS Marketplace, establishing a new level of HPC research and discovery available to everyone.

• I don’t read many management books, but I was very curious to read Jim Whitehurst’s The Open Organization because there’s a lot corporate America (and academia) can learn from free and open source projects. The fact that Red Hat, where Whitehurst serves as CEO, is a wildly successful business adds weight to his methodology (since presumably anyone can lose money with free software, but it’s quite a trick to make money with it).

Fedora

• So p2 Droplets have been in Rawhide for a little while now, and since then we’ve converted most Eclipse plugins to build using the new format. With the exception of some cases that will be done manually, pretty much everything building with the XMvn macros (%mvn_build, %mvn_install) is guaranteed to be a p2 Droplet after a rebuild. We still support the old format (Dropins), and an installation on rawhide can detect both types, but the goal is to switch completely to Droplets.

• I’ve been using the tool to generate exploded trees for the past week or so. It seems to be working well, and I’ve published them at https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/jwboyer/fedora.git/ once again. There is a history gap there as the tree fell into disrepair for a while, but it should be kept current going forward.

Debian Family

• Debcamp was great, I got to hack on some of my Python related packages that were in need of love for a long time and also got to spend a lot of time tinkering with VLC for the Video Team. Even better than that, I caught up with a lot of great people I haven’t seen in ages (and met new ones) and stayed up waaaaay too late drinking beer, playing Mao and watching meteor showers.

Derivatives

• Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, through Martin Maurer, has had the great pleasure of announcing the final release of their commercial Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) 4.0 operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A very interesting discussion started earlier today, October 6, on the Ubuntu Snappy Core mailing list about a method of adding kernel modules to a Snappy-based operating system.

• Continuum for Windows 10 is Microsoft’s idea of convergence, and it looks like they got things going. The Windows 10 Devices event that happened yesterday saw the official launch of this feature, albeit it’s a little bit more complicated than you might suspect, and it’s not really all that similar to what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu.

• A recent rumor has sparked waves of fear and outrage throughout the Linux community. The word is that Microsoft is in secret negotiations to purchase Canonical, the Ubuntu company.

• With Ubuntu and its derivatives installed on millions of home computers and Web servers, the takeover would be disruptive to say the least. After all, in a world where most people think that Windows is “just how computers work”, not using Microsoft products is a deliberate choice. If Microsoft bought Canonical, millions of users would have to jump ship or accept life under the Microsoft banner.

• Ever since the new CEO, Satya Nadella, has taken the place of the Linux-hater Steve Balmer, the change in Microsoft’s rhetoric regarding Linux has been clear. Now, Microsoft is officially recommending Linux on Twitter.

• The winners of the UbuContest 2015 have been announced and it’s not really a huge surprise that the game “Falldown” has been mentioned first.

• Canonical last week announced plans to launch the Internet of Toys, an open source initiative calling on toy makers, hackers, Internet of Things fans and innovators to build the next generation of Web-accessing toys. Participants will build the next generation of toys around open source tools such as Cylon JS, Gobot, Snappy Ubuntu Core, Snapcraft, ROS and Erle-Spider. “The idea is that any toy, for kids and not-so-kids, can be app-enabled and have an app store and, potentially, peripherals,” said Maarten Ectors, a vice president at Canonical.

Flavours and Variants

• Black Lab Software’s Roberto J. Dohnert has had the pleasure of informing Softpedia earlier today about the immediate availability for download and testing of the final RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Black Lab Linux 7 operating system.

• The Linux Mint developers are polling the Linux community to find out how many people are playing games and what they can do to improve the things on their side.

Devices/Embedded

• Media streaming pioneer Roku has unveiled its 4th-gen media streaming player, featuring 4K resolution, 802.11ac WiFi, a larger footprint, and a $130 price.

• Over the years, we’ve watched Roku evolve from being one of the first companies to offer Internet radios with its SoundBridge, to challenging Apple’s early dominance in the streaming media player market with its “Netflix box”, to pioneering HDMI-stick media players with its Streaming Stick, to becoming the “smart” in smart TVs. All these media player incarnations have run on Roku’s internally developed, Linux-based “Roku OS.”

• Though there are multiple Linux distributions for the Rapsberry Pi, the default choice for many has long been Raspbian. Raspbian is Raspberry Pi’s purpose built Debian distro and now at long last it is being updated for Debian 8, aka ‘Jessie’.

• Back in 2006, Linus Torvalds said, “Controlling a laser with Linux is crazy, but everyone in this room is crazy in his own way. So if you want to use Linux to control an industrial welding laser, I have no problem with your using PREEMPT_RT.” The debate on whether Linux should be a real-time operating system was on.

• For electric and remote control vehicles – from quadcopters to electric longboards – the brains of the outfit is the Electronic Speed Controller (ESC). The ESC is just a device that drives a brushless motor in response to a servo signal, but in that simplicity is a lot of technology. For the last few months, [Ben] has been working on a completely open source ESC, and now he’s riding around on an electric longboard that’s powered by drivers created with his own hands.

• [...]

• The firmware is based on ChibiOS…

• Linux and open source software have always cost very little. Now, thanks to the $9 thin-client, ARM-based Chip PC, the hardware you need to run an open source operating system is next to free, too. Read on for more about the device, which began shipping a few days ago.

• Five million Raspberry Pis have been manufactured by Sony UK Technology Centre in Wales since the educational computer was launched three years ago.

Phones

Android

• Although not every Android user makes full use of them on a regular basis, the home screen widgets that are natively supported by Google’s OS are one of its fundamental functionality features. In general, widgets are “miniature application views that can be embedded in other applications (such as the home screen) and receive periodic updates”, and are usually regarded highly by the Android community.

• Google’s Android operating system may be open source software, but some of the most popular Android apps including YouTube, Google Maps, and the Chrome web browser are not. Neither is Google Play Services, which is a framework that many apps from Google and other developers tap into.

• Single player games are usually more appealing because you can play them anytime, but a multiplayer game is more interactive and fulfilling. Android multiplayer games are better because you can either join forces with other players or fight against your friends, which brings out a certain type of joy when you manage to destroy your friend, but it’s all in good fun. Here are the Top 5 Best Multiplayer games that are free for Android and considered the best in 2015:

• Can you believe it? After months of waiting and anticipation, Google’s Android 6.0 Marshmallow release is finally on its way into the world.

• I’ll have a detailed overview of what’s different with Marshmallow and why it all matters for regular users soon. First, I wanted to take an up-close look at one of Android 6.0′s most interesting features: Google Now on Tap. As I mused when Google gave us our first glimpse at Now on Tap this summer, this feature really seems like the future of Android — like something that has the potential to change the way we interact with our mobile devices.

• It may seem like a big decision, but something tells me the service arms race is going to be a lot like the feature race. Google has the nose on Apple with Google Now on Tap until… Apple figures out a way to borrow it.

• The developers behind the Android-x86 project, a Linux kernel-based operating system that aims to deliver the latest Android mobile OS to your PC, have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Android-x86 5.1 release.

• Google’s Android 6.0 Marshmallow release is full of fresh new features and flavors. This detailed FAQ has everything you need to know.

Free Software/Open Source

• Previously, customers had no way to understand what type of data was stored and what kind of things were done to it; they had no control or say in it. And that makes Unomi one of the most important projects in the modern world.

• “Unomi is the first project where companies can aggregate data while respecting the data privacy of people, because we have to allow people to understand and decide what they want to be done with that data and anonymize it as they want,” said Auvray.

• [...]

• Unomi was recently accepted as an Apache Software Foundation Incubator project, which is not easy to do. ASF looks at many factors: sustainability of a project, for example, is extremely important, and an open source project can be sustainable if there are several entities backing that project, instead of just one player. In addition, there should be enough support for the project from within the ASF so that it’s solid for a long run.

• Would the Internet exist if Linux did not? A video out this week from the Linux Foundation, which has launched a new campaign to promote open source, says no. History says yes.

• The minute-long video is the first in a new series the Linux Foundation has created called “A World Without Linux.” The series “flips reality on its head to illustrate in an entertaining fashion just how pervasive Linux is today,” according to a Linux Foundation representative.

• The intersection of those two concepts is the sweet spot to success (in my mind) in open source. Everyone wants to be a +1 in their interactions in open source, but sometimes you have to settle for being a 0 for a while until you build up enough expertise in a project. You don’t want to be a -1, where you are actively hampering work from being done.

• However, you should be bold and inquisitive when figuring out what you want to work on in open source. People will generally help you in open source communities if they see you’re passionate and willing to learn.

• This is something that most people don’t realize when they hear words “open source”. And I feel it is important to understand that open source doesn’t include just programming, though it originated in the context of computer software development. But is also about the way of life and what is called the open source way. Which means that to contribute to open source projects you do not have to code! (You might if you want to Wink ). Just remember that it is important to share and sharing is caring.

• Car manufacturers should be obliged to make their motor management software available for review, Paul Tang, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the Labour Party, requested in questions to the European Commission. Such a measure should prevent the manipulation of the emissions tests, in which Volkswagen was recently caught by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

• It’s been a rough year for the Internet of Things. Security researchers uncovered terrifying vulnerabilities in products ranging from cars to garage doors to skateboards. Outages at smart home services Wink and Google’s Nest rendered customers’ gadgets temporarily useless. And the Volkswagen emissions scandal, though not precisely an Internet of Things issue, has exposed yet another issue with “smart” physical goods: the possibility of manufacturers embedding software in their products designed to skirt regulations.

• Ripple is a peer-to-peer digital payment network, similar to Bitcoin in many ways, but with a number of distinguishing features. First of all, and most importantly, Ripple allows users to use Bitcoin-like cryptographically signed transactions to store and transfer almost anything – US dollars, euros, Swiss francs, gold and silver and even potentially company shares can all be handled on the network. The way that Ripple manages this is by storing all assets as debts between parties that trust each other. If someone wants to send some quantity of an asset to someone that they do not trust, then the Ripple network finds a path between the two such that every link is between two people that do trust each other. In practice, the social network is still not nearly dense enough to make this fully decentralized vision work, so Ripple has given rise to a secondary industry of “gateways” that everyone can trust because they are publicly visible entities. Second, Ripple includes a built-in “decentralized exchange” functionality, allowing people to exchange on Ripple asset for another without trusting either the person they’re trading with or any third parties. Finally, Ripple uses a mechanism known as “consensus” instead of Bitcoin’s mining, theoretically allowing the network to maintain stability without being vulnerable to 51% attacks or consuming any electricity beyond the minimum required to verify transactions and maintain network connections.

• Simon Mitchell, CEO at LinuxIT, explains how to get the most out of your Open Source monitoring tools.

• ZenHub, a Vancouver-based provider of GitHub-embedded project management and collaboration, announced a new tier for students and the open source community using its product.

• The Meteor JavaScript application platform has announced the release of version 1.2, its biggest release to date, one that officially adds support for ECMAScript 6, the latest version of the JavaScript language, along with AngularJS and React.js, two top-of-the-line JavaScript frameworks developed by Google and Facebook respectively.

• Van Staden is confident that while OS remains invisible to many, its use is growing steadily in SA, and awareness around it will build with time.

• Operations Research(OR) is the use of advanced analytical methods to make better decisions. It is a subfield of mathematics. Operations Research(OR) is the science and technology in running complicated systems efficiently. For instance, OR would be used in managing the logistics of Supply Chain Management.

• Are you working on a Bitcoin project? The latest open-source Bitcoin project, Bitcore has been launched to make it easier than ever to develop apps that interact with the real Bitcoin network. Bitcore is a complete, native interface to the Bitcoin network, providing a pure and powerful core for your Bitcoin project.

• ManTech International, Hortonworks and B23 have partnered to promote an open-source analytics technology designed to help enterprise customers detect and manage sophisticated cybersecurity threats.

• The OpenSOC platform is built to analyze more than a million network packets per second, recognize threats in real time and deliver computer network security alerts, Hortonworks said Tuesday

• Hortonworks and Cisco built the technology, which is available on Github under an Apache software license.http://blog.executivebiz.com/2015/09/mantech-hortonworks-b23-alliance-seeks-to-drive-adoption-of-open-source-cyber-analytics-tech/

• The Defense Information Systems Agency said last week that its open source repository was upgraded with more integrated collaboration tools to enhance user experience and provide greater access.

• The agency said in a Sept. 24 press release that it adopted CollabNet Team Forge 7.2 to power the open-source platform Forge.mil. It’s hosted on DISA’s milCloud, which offers integrated capabilities to help develop, deploy and maintain secure applications.

• Open source is well understood in the software world, as it has helped accelerate IT and bring business advantages by accelerating new solutions and lowering costs—especially around cloud computing. Open networking and software-defined networking (SDN) both promise to bring the benefits of open source to the world of networking, but is this something that your company can benefit from now? When we talk to customers (and even those in the industry), there is a general sense of confusion about what “open” means in terms of networking. There is of course open source in the world of networking, along with an explicit open networking movement that is about opening up the solutions, but not necessarily giving them away as open source does. Then to add one more ingredient to the idea of “open” in networking, software-defined networking (SDN) comes along to “open up networking”. Great, now most customers are confused.

• The partnership will allow Leidos to use Boundless’ OpenGeo Suite geospatial platform to update its proprietary systems with open-source applications and support its integration initiatives that seek to address intelligence and national security efforts, Leidos said Tuesday.

• It was just a couple of days before a meeting with a customer that a builder in Chennai felt the need for an app. He approached Instellar Tech, a Chennai-based mobile application development company for builders, with limited time in his hands. But the client wasn’t disappointed. The app was developed and delivered in two days.

• That’s not a value judgement. It’s certainly not a criticism of your competence. I can say with almost complete confidence that every non-trivial piece of software I have written contains at least one bug. You might have written small libraries that are essentially bug free, but the chances of you having written whole programs which are are tantamount to zero.

• [....]

• Obviously I think Hypothesis is an example of this, but it’s neither the only one nor the only one you need. Better monitoring is another. Code review processes. Static analysis. Improved communication. There are many more.

• The email client is currently available for Linux and Mac systems and its creators are currently working on a Windows version that will soon be made available.

• You’d have to be looking hoard to find this… but deep inside a PDF white paper written by KPMG, the firm has justified its reasons for using, adopting, developing and subsequently releasing open source software.

Events

• For the last two years, we had only lightning talks and workshops at the ownCloud Contributor Conference. As chair of the paper committee at Akademy, I introduced a single morning track of lightning talks that turned out to be an exceptionally good model for creation-type events like ours. Your event might benefit from lightning talks too—here’s why and how to plan them.

• This year’s EuroBSDCon in Stockholm, Sweden was a quite successful conference with approximately 250 attendees and a fairly strong showing of OpenBSD developers presenting…

• Digital Ocean and GitHub are sponsoring “Hacktoberfest” to encourage developer contributions to open source projects on GitHub.

• Mindtrek Openmind, an international forum about the future of open source and open data, began on Tuesday in Tampere, Finland.

• The three-day event sees professionals from more than 15 countries discuss how businesses, governments and individuals can benefit from open solutions, software and data freely available to everyone.

• The conference comes as open source solutions and open data are gaining ground around the world, including in Europe and in Asia. Companies and public organizations hope these can help lower costs, create new business opportunities and increase transparency.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today, we are pleased to announce that Ari Jaaksi will be joining the Mozilla leadership team next month as our new Senior Vice President of Connected Devices.

• In this role, Ari will be responsible for Firefox OS and broader exploration of opportunities to advance our mission across the ever-increasing range of connection points of the modern Internet, i.e. phones, TVs, IoT, etc.

• Mozilla Firefox 41, the newest version of the open source web browser, features a built-in instant messenger and more. Is Firefox still just a browser, or is trying to be much more?

• [...]

• The fact that Firefox is growing up so quickly is striking. After all, it now comes with its very own instant messenger, of all things, not to mention something approaching a full-featured IDE for Web developers.

SaaS/Big Data

• Amazon’s (AMZN) recent announcement of a Amazon Elasticsearch Search creates another way to analyze big data in the cloud. But is the offering redundant? And what does it say about the role of open source cloud-based technologies that third parties can “resell” through the cloud without actually redistributing?

• The firm has announced the addition of native JSON support to MapR-DB, its NoSQL database.

• IBM is actively embracing a new software framework called Apache Spark as the core engine powering predictive analytics application going forward. The big data world has gone absolutely gaga over Spark, and Big Blue has even put Spark on the venerable z/OS mainframe. But where does that leave its little brother, the IBM i platform?

• Open source container specialist Docker Inc. has updated its Docker Hub cloud service designed to speed up application delivery by development teams through automated workflows.

• The Apache Spark project became the darling of the open source Big Data movement by addressing the shortcomings of original Hadoop ecosystem components such as MapReduce. Now, DataTorrent Inc. is touting its open sourced technology, Project Apex, to fill in what it sees as weaknesses inherent in Spark.

• As Steve Holder, national practice lead for analytics for SAS Canada explains the points on his “open source integration” slide, he notes he selected a starry background after being inspired by the lunar eclipse event earlier in the week.

• For many in Toronto, the eclipse was obscured by an impenetrable layer of cloud. The night sky was blacker than usual for star gazers that hoped to catch the rare celestial event. Perhaps as Holder looked up at those clouds blocking his view, they reminded him of the way a non-flexible data archive can obscure information from a business. Open source integration however, would clear the proverbial skies and reveal the objective.

• Like other large software development efforts, OpenStack is divided into project teams. There is a marketing team, engineering which is in turn composed of sub-teams, leadership, systems engineering, event coordination and so on.

Databases

• EnterpriseDB has signed up for the Coalition for Enterprise Open Source Software for Government to help educate Congress and administration officials on the value of open source systems.

• Version 10.1 offers users the ability to fully encrypt their databases, with the company stating that this can be achieved without any changes to applications and won’t result in performance degradation.

• The self-styled KVM kings have turned their attention to creating a new database designed to improve on the Apache Cassandra wide column store.

• Among the news coming out of this week’s Cassandra Summit was ScyllaDB, a rewrite of the NoSQL database that claims 10x more data processing speed via new-age C++ techniques that take advantage of the multiple cores in modern hardware.

• Pivotal Software Inc. has made good on a promise it made earlier this year to open-source its HAWQ SQL engine for Hadoop, and it’s also done the same for its MADlib machine learning technology.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation has revealed that the first Release Candidate for LibreOffice 4.4.6 has been released, and it packs quite a lot of changes and improvements.

• Governments across Europe are steadily moving away from vendor-locked, non standard technologies towards open standard and vendor neutral technologies. One such example is the adoption of Open Document Format (ODF) across European government agencies.

CMS

• After four years of development and refinement, they will get their wish. On Oct. 5, Jon Dugan of ESnet’s Tool Team will give a presentation on “ESnet’s Network Visualization Toolkit” at the 2015 Technology Exchange conference in Cleveland, Ohio. About 500 network experts from around the world are expected to attend the meeting.

• When ESnet, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Sciences Network, unveiled its online interactive network portal called MyESnet in July of 2011, the reaction was strongly positive — other research and education networks liked it so much, they wanted the code to create their own portals.

Business

• Jay Reeder, CEO of VoiceNation, will be a special guest speaker for the Digium Webinar Series – Innovating with Asterisk “What Can Asterisk Do For Me?” on September 29, 2015.

Openwashing

• The Launchpad is useful as a MIDI input device, but that’s about all it used to do. But now, Novation has released an open source API for the Novation Pro. This makes it possible to write your own code to run on the controller, which can be flashed using a USB bootloader. An API gives you access to the hardware, and example code is provided.

Funding

• The Linux Foundation released a white paper titled “A $5 Billion Value: Estimating the Total Development Cost of Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects,” which estimates the value of the open source Linux code (and its collaborations) to be worth US$5 billion.

• The LF issued a report estimating the worth of its Linux and open-source projects to be about $5 billion, and launched a “World without Linux” video series.

• This week at the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon + CloudOpen + Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Dublin, the not-for-profit Linux advocacy group launched the first in a video series called “A World Without Linux,” following last week’s release of a report that attempts to quantify the worth of its Linux and other open source Collaborative Projects.

BSD

• At many a BSD conference, there’s a keynote from somebody involved in the early development of BSD. They get up and talk about the history of some program they contributed, and explain how some of the strange quirks it has came to be. This is usually a good opportunity to then go into the source and review it to see if it can perhaps be simplified.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GnuCash development team humbly announces GnuCash 2.6.9, the eighth maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series, a snap release to repair a serious bug on Microsoft Windows. Please take the tour of all the new features.

• On Oct. 3, the FSF will hold what it calls a “birthday party” for itself in Boston, featuring an address by Stallman. Earlier in the day, the FSF plans a “mini-conference” at which “the free software community will share lessons from its first 30 years and plan for the future.”

• Vision & Objectives

• 1 To celebrate software freedom and the people behind it 2 To foster a general understanding of software freedom, and encourage adoption of free software and open standards 3 To create more equal access to opportunities through the use of participatory technologies 4 To promote constructive dialogue on responsibilities and rights in the information society 5 To be inclusive of organisations and individuals that share our Vision 6 To be pragmatic, transparent, and responsible as an organisation

Public Services/Government

• This week’s 4th International Conference on Free Software and Open Source Code in Montevideo brings together developers and users who see open source as a “guarantee of sovereignty,” one of the organizers told EFE.

• The stated aim of the conference is to strengthen the links between the educational, cultural and tech communities and explore the virtues of open source software, which users are free to copy, distribute or modify without incurring fees.

Openness/Sharing

• If you’re reading this, you’re likely familiar with the terms open government, open data and open source. You probably understand how civic engagement is being radically transformed through these movements.

Open Data

• Russian internet company Mail.ru Group has announced that its Maps.me mapping app has been open-sourced, making it available for developers to freely embed maps in their own apps.

• MAPS.ME’s code will also be available under the Apache 2.0 license, which means free usage for users, even when being used for commercial purposes. Additionally, MAPS.ME will be used by humanitarian groups, activists and volunteers in rural areas of disaster zones and political crises. Typically in these areas there is no sustainable internet, and other mapping services do not provide necessary geographical data.

• Last week, a coalition of Dutch and international civil society organisations published the manifesto ‘Onze Overheid, Onze Informatie!’ (Our Government, Our Information!). In the document, the authors argue that, by paying and voting for the government, tax payers have the right to know how their votes are used and their money is spent. “An open government is required from a perspective of democracy, engagement and accountability. Transparency contributes to the efficiency of government spending. Furthermore, an open government can — via open data, for example — result in new services and products.”

• “It may be an idea too hot to handle for some groups wedded to IP,” says Jaykumar Menon, explaining the creation of the Open Source Pharma Foundation.

Open Access/Content

• A major U.S. university’s undergraduate courses went 100 percent textbook-free this semester, generating millions in estimated savings for its more than 80,000 students worldwide — all with no drop-off in learning outcomes, to hear the university’s administrators tell it.

• Two years ago, a federal judge ruled that Google’s sweeping book project did not infringe U.S. copyright law. The project, which includes more than 20 million scanned copies of library books, is now the largest digital library in the world. However, the preeminent status of Google’s project is being challenged by a Chinese company named CzurTek, which is developing a book scanner it plans to sell for only $169.

Open Hardware

• Dobot has been created by a team of six engineers based in San Francisco California and has been designed to provide a 4-axis high accuracy, high repeat precision, stepper motor, Arduino-based, desktop robotic arm for makers, educators and anyone else there would like to learn more about robotics and have their very own precision desktop programmable robotic arm.

• Open source hardware initiatives have emerged to fulfil educational needs. Arduino is maybe the most well-known example. It has been very successful so far, but its reach has been mainly limited to DIYers, teachers and students, or engineers who want to “play with,” discover or showcase a technology. However, truly open source hardware has not been widely used in the industry. But a new kind of open source hardware is now emerging.

• It’s an entirely modular phone – in other words, you build it yourself. But you won’t need a degree in computer science to do so. Instead, you just put together the modules, get to grips with the software and attach the customisable phone enclosures. Couldn’t be simpler.

• Tablets are wonderful things. A flat, compact computer that’s easily slipped into a bag or purse? Very convenient. However, they’re annoyingly fragile, and, if you’re like me, that makes them very dangerous to travel with. I try to avoid putting anything breakable into my bag or purse, because chances are it will end up in pieces, no matter how careful I try to be. Carrying a tablet by hand is inconvenient, though, and also dangerous – someone bumps into you on the bus, and there it goes.

• Back in May of this year Google released a second version of their Cardboard virtual reality smartphone viewer, that they said would follow with the release of the open source plans for the Cardboard v2.

Programming

• The first thing he did was thank Craigslist “for sponsoring me these last few years”. On October 5th, 2015 Larry Wall addressed a crowd of geeks at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, saying he couldn’t properly express his gratitude to Craigslist. Then he acknowledged how long the development arc had been for Perl 6. “As the old joke goes, Perl 6 is coming out this Christmas.” Only this time, he meant it.

• The process of deploying a piece of software to run on a computer is, perhaps surprisingly, not trivial. An application is a complicated creature that, when deployed, may find itself in unfamiliar environments where it interacts with different hardware, different infrastructure software, and other neighboring programs. Ensuring that an application survives and thrives is the responsibility of both its code and its deployment process. The balance between the two often depends on the languages, runtime and tools used to construct the program, and therefore, different deployment tools may be appropriate for different technology stacks.

• The method for educating developers in Europe comes to American shores, via the new Holberton School, which uses project-based methods to train developers.

• A month out from the launch of PHP 7, Rogue Wave Software has announced they’ve acquired Zend Technologies, the main company behind PHP for the enterprise.

• Kenneth Thompson, or as they call him “Ken”, the creator of UNIX and co-inventor of the “C” language. He was born in February 1943, New Orleans, Louisiana. Ken is a computer scientist and co-winner of the A.M. Turing Award with Dennis Richie in 1983, this award is the highest honor in computer science. Thompson and Ritchie were jointly cited for development of generic operating systems theories and specifically for implementation of UNIX operating system which they invented at Bell Laboratories. Ken earned the Bachelor’s degree in 1965 and the Master’s degree in 1966 in electrical engineering field from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). He went to work at Bell Labs after graduation, where he worked first on the Multics project.

• Earlier this month, ProgrammableWeb published an article featuring several standalone RAML API mocking tools that have surfaced on GitHub. Open source RAML Parsers for various languages have also recently turned up on GitHub such as PHP RAML Parser, RamlParser, RAML Ruby, and Pyraml-Parser. These RAML parsers are in addition to the Java, JavaScript, and .Net parsers created by RAML sponsor MuleSoft.

• The results of RedMonk’s bi-annual programming language study provides some clues as to the answers they need. Since 2010, the developer research company has been rating and ranking the myriad languages that developers use on a regular basis, and the latest survey has actually thrown a few curve balls into the mix.

Standards/Consortia

• Nintendo has quietly joined the Khronos Group which is a not-for-profit consortium of academics and media companies dedicated to managing open-standard graphics APIs like OpenGL and its successor, Vulkan.

• A NeoGaf post, noted that Nintendo’s name was added to the list of Khronos Group contributing members earlier this month.

Leftovers

• Thus the no fly list was established. It is estimated to have around 1 million names but nobody knows for sure. Keeping the list secret is a matter of national security, so the only way to find out if you’re on it is to be detained in the airport. Or in the air. For instance, in 2005 a 747 flight from Amsterdam to Mexico was turned back before it could reach its destination. The reason? Two of the plane’s passengers were on the no fly list and the flight crossed over US airspace. Well, better safe than sorry, right?

• Even if you don’t enjoy writing and have no intentions of becoming a professional tech writer, chances are you’ll have to draft reports, mailing list updates, or technical articles at some point in your career. With a few practical tips in mind—along with solid writing advice from Stephen King—you can improve your writing before you start writing. And, with proper planning, you can easily repurpose your content for multiple audiences.

• Outside a taco shop on Flint’s Fifth Street, Estella Walker balances a gallon jug of water on top of the stroller that holds her 3-month-old son, DeWayne. She’s mixing bottles of formula for DeWayne and his 19-month-old sister Vanessa.

• Nadene Strickland sits outside her home on the city’s north side, watching her grandsons play basketball. She still drinks the water. She can’t afford bottled.

• Shopping at the local farmers market with five of her seven children, Tena Fransioli says she hasn’t used tap water in a long time.

Security

• Dublin native James Joyce famously wrote that “mistakes are the portals of discovery.” LinuxCon 2015 keynote speaker Leigh Honeywell grabbed hold of the same theme here in Dublin, reminding hundreds of open source professionals that “you’re going to make mistakes; you’re going to introduce security bugs.” The goal, said Honeywell, who works as a senior security engineer at Slack Technologies, shouldn’t be the all-out elimination of these mistakes. Instead, security engineers should strive to make different mistakes next time around.

• The current certificate is not cross-signed, so loading the page over HTTPS will give visitors an untrusted warning. The warning goes away once the ISRG root is added to the trust store. ISRG expects the certificate to be cross-signed by IdenTrusts’s root in about a month, at which point the certificates will work nearly anywhere. The project also submitted initial applications to the root programs for Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple so that Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari would recognize Let’s Encrypt certificates.

• Team InvizBox have unveiled a new pocket sized device which has been created to provide an open source solution to online privacy and security.

• The small InvizBox box is capable of offering users a broad range of privacy options, allowing secure connectivity to the Internet from both desktop and mobile devices.

• DevSecCon is a newly formed, non-profit conference for DevOps and SecOps practitioners, run by practitioners. By creating a neutral platform, it will exchange and create new ideas on how to leverage the best of both worlds and adopt a new mind-set of inclusiveness and collaboration.

• Cisco notes that Linux servers were being managed remotely via SSH using root, adding that they were likely compromised systems in Europe and Asia.

• The Linux.Wifatch malware, also dubbed as the “vigilante malware” has been going around the Internet, infecting IoT devices, cleaning out malware infections, and boosting the devices’ security.

• Today’s topics include how vigilante malware is protecting unpatched routers, HP launches its Open-Source Network OS, Twitter locks in Jack Dorsey as its permanent CEO, and Cisco is driving its investments in network chip startup Aquantia.

• Countless numbers of routers and Internet-connected devices around the world are not properly updated, leaving the devices, their owners and the Internet at large at risk. A new code infection, however, dubbed Linux.Wifatch, is taking unpatched routers and devices a different route, protecting them, rather than exploiting them.

• SECURITY RESEARCHERS FROM Cybereason have sounded a klaxon over a problem with the Microsoft Outlook Web Application (OWA) that could let attackers swoop in and tag and bag data and documents through the use of APT techniques.

• Cybereason discovered the bug when a customer with some 19,000 endpoints suspected that it was the victim of infection.

• Backdoor in Outlook Web Application operates inside target’s firewall.

• When the ILOVEYOU worm struck on May 4, 2000, it thrust the reality of computer vulnerabilities into the public consciousness in a very big way.

• Sure, computer worms had spread before, but some estimates pegged this particular worm as causing billions of dollars in damage. Entire government departments were crippled. The nature of its spread was unprecedented in scale.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Bolivia says it is launching a thorough investigation into revelations made public by a WikiLeaks report.

• The U.S. has refuted reports that it planned to topple the government of Bolivia.

• The controversy started after a report surfaced on WikiLeaks that the U.S. government had plotted an assassination attempt against President Evo Morales in 2008.

• A representative described the WikiLeaks accusations as “absolutely false and absurd.”

• The New York Times followed up its euphemistic and equivocal coverage (FAIR Blog, 10/5/15) of the US bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, with an article (10/6/15) that continued to downplay the US’s responsibility for the deaths of 12 hospital staffers and 10 patients.

• FAIR has noted before how America’s well-documented clandestine activities in Syria have been routinely ignored when the corporate media discuss the Obama administration’s “hands-off” approach to the four-and-a-half-year-long conflict. This past week, two pieces—one in the New York Times detailing the “finger pointing” over Obama’s “failed” Syria policy, and a Vox “explainer” of the Syrian civil war—did one better: They didn’t just omit the fact that the CIA has been arming, training and funding rebels since 2012, they heavily implied they had never done so.

• First, let’s establish what we do know. Based on multiple reports over the past three-and-a-half years, we know that the Central Intelligence Agency set up a secret program of arming, funding and training anti-Assad forces. This has been reported by major outlets, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and, most recently, the Washington Post, which—partly thanks to the Snowden revelations—detailed a program that trained approximately 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year, or roughly 1/15th of the CIA’s official annual budget.

• Janine Jackson: A recent CNN report said that the worsening Syrian refugee crisis highlights the differences among countries that welcome what they called “desperate migrants” and those that don’t; but if US audiences think that the crisis, some 11 million people now displaced, reflects only on the action or inaction of countries “over there,” they’re misunderstanding the situation. What more do we need to know about this crisis, its roots and possible ways forward? Raed Jarrar is government relations manager at the American Friends Service Committee. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Raed Jarrar.

• 9/11 and the Rise of Neoconservative Foreign Policy. For this 14th anniversary 9/11 special program, co-hosts Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips speak with Media Roots journalist and filmmaker Robbie Martin about his new film “A Very Heavy Agenda.” The film looks in depth at the Kagan family and the rise of neoconservative foreign policy prior to and since the events of 9/11. Tune in for a detailed discussion about the development of the US policy driving American Empire.

Finance

• The Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations concluded early this morning in Atlanta with the 12 countries reaching agreement on the remaining outstanding issues. The U.S. quickly posted a summary of the TPP and the Canadian government has followed with its own package on the deal. At a just-concluded ministerial press conference, the ministers noted that this is one step in a longer process. The text itself must still be finalized and then each country will have its own rules before signing onto it. In the U.S., there is a review period with the full text, so this will be a 2016 issue. In Canada, new treaties must be tabled for review in the House of Commons, so there will be a Parliamentary review.

• Trade ministers from the Asia-Pacific region have reached a deal on the Pacific trade pact that is intended to cut trade barriers and establish common standards for 12 countries, This is the largest trade pact in 20 years and has been a long-term goal of the Obama administration.

• Trade negotiators from the U.S. and its 11 Pacific Rim partners announced their agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) today, concluding the final round of closed negotiations in Atlanta and marking the culmination of seven years of secrecy. Throughout all that time, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has acted as a de facto representative of the Hollywood big media lobbies in pushing other countries to adopt the most punitive aspects of U.S. copyright policies—such as our over-the-top civil and criminal penalties—while at best giving lip service to pro-user aspects such as fair use.

• It is amazing how the elite media can be dragged along by their noses into accepting that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) can have a big impact on trade and growth. If I had a dollar for every time the deal was described as “massive,” or that we were told what share of world trade will be covered by the TPP, I would be richer than Bill Gates.

• A key aspect of Bitcoin’s value proposition is that it’s an open source protocol independent of any particular corporation or government.

• Similar to other open source initiatives, the software that runs the Bitcoin network is managed and improved upon by a group of volunteer developers.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson says a nonprofit Islamic advocacy group broke the law by calling for him to drop out of the presidential race.

• “The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) held a public press conference demanding that I withdraw from the presidential race,” Carson said in an email to supporters Saturday.

• “Here’s the catch – CAIR is a tax-exempt nonprofit, and the IRS rules explicitly prohibit such groups from intervening in political campaigns on behalf of – or in opposition to – a candidate,” the email continues.

Censorship

• The Appeals Court of Kansas has upheld a lower court’s decision finding it beyond the reach of a university to expel a student for off-campus behavior.

• Beneath this logical conclusion are some not-so-pretty facts. The origin of the lawsuit is a “bad breakup” that resulted in criminal charges for the former boyfriend, Navid Yeasin.

• Add Motherboard to the quickly growing list of news websites killing their comment section because they’re so breathlessly in love with reader interaction and visitor conversation. Like The Verge, Recode, Popular Science, The Daily Beast and numerous other websites before it, Motherboard has decided that there’s simply no value whatsoever to having a healthy, on-site local community.

• I witnessed something genuinely disturbing at Trinity College Dublin last night: trendy, middle-class, liberal students cheering and whooping a man who had just given the closest thing I have yet heard to a justification for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.

• It was as part of a debate on the right to offend. I was on the side of people having the right to say whatever the hell they want, no matter whose panties it bunches. The man on the other side who implied that Charlie Hebdo got what it deserved, and that the right to offend is a poisonous, dangerous notion, was one Asghar Bukhari of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee.

• On September 24 I gave a keynote presentation at Purdue University about the NSA, Edward Snowden, and national security journalism in the age of surveillance. It was part of the excellent Dawn or Doom colloquium, which I greatly enjoyed. The organizers live-streamed my talk and promised to provide me with a permalink to share.

• After unexplained delays, I received a terse email from the university last week. Upon advice of counsel, it said, Purdue “will not be able to publish your particular video” and will not be sending me a copy. The conference hosts, once warm and hospitable, stopped replying to my emails and telephone calls. I don’t hold it against them. Very likely they are under lockdown by spokesmen and lawyers.

Privacy

• Europe’s highest court today ruled that Facebook cannot send personal information on European users to data centers in the US, invalidating a 15-year trans-Atlantic data transfer agreement. In a decision that could have far-reaching implications for many US tech companies, the European Court of Justice said that the EU’s Safe Harbor agreement with the US is “invalid” because the country does not guarantee adequate privacy protections. The agreement allows technology companies to transfer data from Europe to the US, provided that certain privacy requirements are met. According to The Wall Street Journal, today’s ruling could impact around 4,500 companies that currently rely on the laws to transfer data to the US.

• The European Court of Justice (CJEU) handed down a decision declaring EU-US safe harbour for personal data invalid this morning. It has far-reaching implications for cloud services in particular and may presage increased opportunity for open source solutions from non-US suppliers. Looks like a real gift to companies like Kolab.

• Kirsten Johnson talks with Eric Hynes about her new film, which documents a military surveillance blimp over Kabul and its impact on the Afghans living beneath it.

• The company behind the internet’s most popular advert-blocking plug-in has pledged to open up its controversial “whitelist” to outside scrutiny.

• Poor Verizon. Telco executives for years have sat in their board rooms bored by the billions to be made on telecom and transit, jealously eyeing Facebook and Google ad revenue, and desperately dreaming of being seen as more than just a dull old phone company. That’s why the telecom giant recently paid $4.4 billion to acquire AOL, and is now throwing tens of millions at a new Internet video service aimed squarely at Millennials (hey kids, why get Internet video right from the source or a disruptive content company when you can get it from the phone company?).

• Facebook, Google and thousands of other US companies can be barred from transferring private information about European citizens across the Atlantic after Europe’s highest court struck down a 15-year-old data sharing treaty.

• The European Court of Justice has declared that the “Safe Harbour” agreement, which gives more than 4,400 US businesses free reign to send data about Europeans to American servers, is invalid.

• Ireland has said it plans to investigate the transfer of data on Facebook users in Europe to the United States after an EU court invalidated the “safe harbour” provisions under which it took place.

• It follows a request by Austrian citizen Max Schrems to the Irish data protection commissioner to investigate if there was adequate protection of his data transferred to the US by Facebook, which has its European headquarters in Dublin.

• If you live in Europe, your online life changed this morning. The European Union’s highest court, the EU Court of Justice, has invalidated the legal agreement by which personal data can be moved from the EU to the US for processing.

• The ruling against the 15-year-old law, known as Safe Harbour, threatens the business models of more than 3000 companies that use it to ship data to the US, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.

• If you think using secure HTTP would be enough to protect your privacy when checking webmail, think again. When users connect to their Microsoft user account page, Outlook.com, or OneDrive.com even when using HTTPS, the connection leaks a unique identifier that can be used to retrieve their name and profile photo in plaintext.

• A unique identifier called a CID is exposed because it’s sent as part of a Domain Name Service lookup for the address of the storage server containing profile data and as part of the initiation of an encrypted connection. As a result, it could be used to track users when they connect to services from both computers and mobile devices, possibly even identifying users as their requests leave the Tor anonymizing network.

• Facebook has come under heavy criticism for its real names (or ‘authentic identities’ as they are known to the social network) policy. Over the last year, all manner of rights groups and advocates have tried to convince Facebook to allow users to drop their real name in favor of a pseudonym if they want.

• Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation is part of the 74-member strong Nameless Coalition and has written to Facebook demanding a rethink on the ground of safety, privacy, and equality. This is far from being the first time Facebook has been called on to allow the use of ‘fake names’, and the latest letter is signed by LGBT groups, freedom advocates, privacy supporters, and feminist organizations.

• BitTorrent is a very efficient way to share large files, but not a very private one. It’s commonly known that anti-piracy outfits monitor users through public trackers. However, new research reveals that BitTorrent’s DHT is also full of “spies” who actively harvest IP-addresses.

• [...]

• Through DHT, BitTorrent users share IP-addresses with other peers. Thus far, little was known about the volume of monitoring through DHT, but research from Peersm’s Aymeric Vitte shows that it’s rampant.

• Through various experiments Vitte consistently ran into hundreds of thousands of IP-addresses that show clear signs of spying behavior.

• The spies are not hard to find and many monitor pretty much all torrents hashes they can find. Blocking them is not straightforward though, as they frequently rotate IP-addresses and pollute swarms.

• Open Rights Group welcomes today’s decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that the Safe Harbor agreement is invalid.

• In 2013, Austrian law student, Max Schrems brought a case against Facebook in Ireland, where the company has its European headquarters. He argued that revelations by NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, showed that the NSA were accessing data held by companies like Facebook. As US law did not offer enough protection against this surveillance, his privacy was being violated.

• The Irish Data Protection Commissioner rejected Schrems’ case because the Safe Harbor agreement governed the transfer of data. The case was then referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

• [...]

• The ruling places greater obligations on data protection authorities – such as the UK’s Information Commissioner – as it says that they must ensure that fundamental rights are respected in data transfer arrangements to the US by private companies. It also limits the ability of the Commission to claim everything is OK and persuade European regulators to look away.

• By a decision published this morning, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the highest European jurisdiction, repealed the Safe Harbor agreement. This agreement in effect since 2000, allows data transfers between Europe and the United States under different versions, authorised the processing of European citizens’ data by US companies, with fewer guarantees than those existing in Europe. Max Schrems, an Austrian citizen, has put Facebook on trial since the monitoring by the NSA of his data hosted by Facebook had an impact on his freedom and privacy. The CJEU today confirmed his viewpoint by invalidating the Safe Harbor and held that the European Commission abused its power by approving it. The CJEU also affirmed that a local data protection authority may dissent a European agreement if guarantees granted to citizens were modified.

Civil Rights

• A Valencia woman has sued the city of Carlsbad and several of its officers over allegations that she was pinned to the ground and punched by police in 2013.

• Cindy Hahn said the incident on July 31 – a day she calls the worst one of her life – was caught on cellphone video.

• EVIL-DOING HAS HAD A BOOST. Google is no longer opposing it in its official company code of conduct for new and improved big brother company Alphabet, where employees will be expected to ‘do the right thing’.

• According to the campaign group Reprieve, “Dawoud al-Marhoon was 17 when he was arrested without a warrant by Saudi security forces in May 2012, at the height of protests in the country’s Eastern Province.”

• The campaign group claims that al-Marhoon signed a “confession”, which was used to convict him, after he was tortured. In a press release the group said: “He has been held in solitary confinement, and has been barred from speaking to his lawyer.

• Indeed, the BBC has decided that, given the accusations against Assange are so risible, it would be wrong for any detail at all of the accusations to be given out. Therefore the BBC has never reported the fact that the allegation they describe as “rape” is that, during the act of consensual sex, Assange allegedly tore a condom with his fingers whilst wearing it (of which I doubt the physical possibility). The second sexual molestation accusation is that again consensual sex took place, but after they fell asleep in each others arms, Assange awoke and initiated a repeat of the sex act without requesting permission again.

• Despite the fact that Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen have given press conferences in Sweden promoting their allegations, the BBC has made no attempt to interview them. The BBC has not reported that, the day after the condom splitting “rape”, Anna Ardin hosted a crayfish party for Assange and tweeted her friends from it that she was with the coolest man in the world. The BBC has not reported that Anna Ardin had invited Assange to share her flat and her bed. The BBC has not reported that Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen only made accusations after the two of them got together and cooked up the story. The BBC has not reported that Stockholm’s chief prosecutor dismissed it as no case to answer, and that Ardin then took it, as Swedish law allows, to another prosecutor, Marianne Ny who has a campaigning feminist agenda.

• The BBC has not reported any of that because it would be quite wrong to doubt the word of victims of sexual abuse. It would be wrong to put them under pressure, or look sceptically at the evidence for their stories, both direct and circumstantial. It would be quite wrong to prejudice possible legal proceedings.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Before and after the FCC imposed new net neutrality rules, you’ll recall there was no limit of hand-wringing from major ISPs and net neutrality opponents about how these “draconian regulations from a bygone era” would utterly decimate the Internet. We were told investment would freeze, innovation would dry up like dehydrated jerky, and in no time at all net neutrality would have us all collectively crying over our busted, congested, tubes.

• And, of course, shockingly, absolutely none of that is happening. Because what the ISPs feared about net neutrality rules wasn’t that it would senselessly hurt their ability to invest, but that it would harm their ability to take aggressive and punitive advantage of the lack of competition in last mile broadband networks. Obviously ISPs can’t just come out and admit that, so what we get instead is oodles of nonsense, including bogus claims that net neutrality violates ISPs’ First Amendment rights.

• Africa’s current state of Internet access is stark: the lowest levels of broadband connectivity, according to the United Nation’s State of Broadband report, are mostly found in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the UN, Internet availability reaches less than 2% of the populations in Guinea, Somalia, Burundi and Eritrea.

DRM

• A few weeks ago, we covered news that the FCC was considering rules that could ban the use of third-party router firmware. The FCC has issued new draft rules that would prevent customers from making changes to certain radio settings that would allow for operation outside of certain parameters. Typically these restrictions are designed to prevent multiple devices in the same geographical area from overlapping and conflicting with each other.

• The FCC has now revealed more details on these new policies, which could theoretically be read to prevent the installation of all third-party router firmware. The FCC’s initial order specifies, for example, that programs like DD-WRT should not be allowed, which is part of why people have been concerned about new restrictions in the first place. According to the FCC, manufacturers don’t need to lock out third-party firmware — they just need to prevent the third party firmware from changing settings the FCC doesn’t allow consumers to modify.

• Craig Mod has a fascinating article for Aeon, talking about the unfortunate stagnation in digital books. He spent years reading books almost exclusively in ebook form, but has gradually moved back to physical books, and the article is a long and detailed exploration into the limits of ebooks today — nearly all of which are not due to actual limitations of the medium, but deliberate choices by the platform providers (mainly Amazon, obviously) to create closed, limited, DRM-laden platforms for ebooks.

• If you haven’t heard, Apple has locked out root from various file system paths and core functions in Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The new sheriff here is System Integrity Protection (SIP), which reduces root privileges in an attempt to increase security.

• The gist is that no user — not even root — can write to /usr, /bin, /System, and /sbin or debug protected processes. Apple has also removed the ability to use unsigned kernel extensions through boot-time flags. It’s important to note that SIP can be disabled, through the recovery partition, but this will typically be done only for development and testing purposes.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• For two weeks, Kim Dotcom and three other former Megaupload staffers accused of criminal copyright infringement were bombarded by accusations from New Zealand prosecutors.

• To hear prosecutors tell it, Dotcom is the Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman of illegal file sharing. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that the defendants operated Megaupload as a criminal enterprise designed to profit from the illegal swapping of movies, music and software by users. A hearing is underway to determine whether New Zealand will extradite Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk, and Finn Batato to the US. Much is at stake for the four, who may eventually face lengthy prison sentences.

• After the United States were given several days to state their case against Kim Dotcom and his former business associates, this morning lawyers for the Megaupload four stated why their clients should not be extradited to the United States. The U.S. has used unfair tactics to gain an advantage so the hearing should be brought to an end, the Court heard.

• Google has to hand over the personal details of a user who published pirated eBooks online, a Dutch court has ruled. The information was requested by anti-piracy group BREIN, working on behalf of a local book publishers’ organization.

• A few weeks ago, we wrote about the big ruling by Judge George King in a district court in California that Warner/Chappell does not hold a valid copyright in the song “Happy Birthday.” The press ran with the story, with nearly all of the coverage falsely stating that the judge had declared Happy Birthday to be in the public domain. As we noted in our post, however, that was not the case. While the plaintiffs had urged just such a finding, Judge King noted that there were issues related to this that a jury would need to answer, and he would not go that far. Instead, he merely stated that Warner did not hold a valid copyright. Many people assume that this is good enough. The likelihood of some third party magically showing up after all of these years and not just claiming the copyright, but having enough evidence to prove it seems very slim. Glenn Fleishman has done a nice job writing up a detailed explanation of this copyright mess for Fast Company, in which he notes the “uncertainty is maddening.”

• Amongst the very old school and traditionalist judgments here in the UK, it is always refreshing to read ones that step outside of that dusty judicial demeanor, and often our friends across the pond in the US show us that even judges remember their youth with fondness.

• [...]

• In applying the test judge Ikuta quickly saw that, as the Batmobile has appeared in many renditions in a variety of forms, it has conceptual and physical qualities. The vehicle has also maintained a sufficient amount of distinct features over the years, even with minor (or more major) difference in some iterations, along with its specific characteristics and features in equipment and technology, making it sufficiently delineated to be recognizable as the same vehicle. Finally, judge Ikuta saw that the vehicle was especially distinctive, containing unique elements of expression through its status as a key part of Batman’s crime-fighting repertoire, along with its very distinctive name. The Batmobile therefore was deemed to be protectable under copyright.

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